Страница 93 из 207
The Star Kingdom had attempted to deal with the problem locally, without raising it to the level of a major diplomatic incident, but Byng had flatly refused even to discuss the matter with the local Manticoran trade and legal attachés. The terms in which he had expressed his refusal had been . . . less than diplomatic, and the second time around, the legal attaché, without Byng's knowledge, had recorded the entire conversation. Which had then been presented formally to the Solarian Foreign Minister by the Manticoran ambassador to the Solarian League—who'd happened to be an admiral himself—with a polite but pointed request that the minister look into the problem. Soon.
Unfortunately for Captain Byng, the Star Kingdom of Manticore carried far more clout than the "neobarbs" he was accustomed to browbeating. Faced with the politely veiled suggestion that failure to return the impounded vessels—and to free the imprisoned crewmen, with apologies and reparations—might very well result in higher junction transit fees for all Solarian merchantmen, the League's bureaucracy had sprung ponderously into action. It had taken another six T-months, but eventually, the ships and the imprisoned crewmen had been released, the League had paid a sizable damages award, and Captain Byng had been required to apologize formally for "exceeding his authority." Despite that, he'd gotten off incredibly lightly for someone whose actions—and stupidity—had embarrassed an entire star nation, Michelle thought. He'd been allowed to make his apology in written form, rather than in person, and any Manticoran officer who'd acted in the same fashion would undoubtedly have been dismissed from the Queen's service. In Byng's case, however, there'd never really been any possibility of that outcome. In fact, it was astonishing he'd even been moved back on the promotion lists.
It would appear from his subsequent record that he held everyone but himself responsible for that outcome, however. It had undoubtedly delayed his promotion to flag rank by several T-years, and it seemed evident that he blamed Manticore for his misfortunes.
Michelle would have found all of that sufficiently unhappy reading under any circumstances, but the fact that he was out here commanding a Frontier Fleet task force—and what looked, despite the fact that it was far larger than one normally saw in the Verge, to be a rather small one, for an officer of his seniority—made her even more unhappy.
Battle Fleet and Frontier Fleet were not fond of one another. Battle Fleet, despite the fact that none of its capital ships had fired a shot in anger in over two T-centuries, received the lion's share of the SLN's funding and was by far the more prestigious of the two organizations. Its officer corps was populated almost exclusively with officers whose family backgrounds were similar to Byng's, making it virtually a closed caste. Whereas the RMN had a surprisingly high percentage of "mustangs"—officers who had risen from the enlisted ranks to obtain commissions—there were none at all of them in Battle Fleet. That helped contribute to an incredible (by Manticoran standards) narrowness of focus and interest on the part of the vast majority of Battle Fleet officers. Who not only tended to look down particularly long and snobbish noses at all non-Solarian navies—and even the planetary defense forces of major Solarian planets—but even looked down upon their Frontier Fleet counterparts as little more than jumped up policeman, customs agents and neobarb-bashers who obviously hadn't been able to make the cut for service in a real navy.
Frontier Fleet, for its part, regarded Battle Fleet officers as overbred, under-brained drones whose obsolescent capital ships—as outmoded and useless as they were themselves—soaked up enormous amounts of funding Frontier Fleet desperately needed. Personally, Michelle would have been even more incensed by the fact that so much of the funding officially spent on those same capital ships actually disappeared into the pockets of various Battle Fleet officers and their friends and families, but she supposed it would have been unrealistic to expect Frontier Fleet to feel the same way. After all, graft and "family interest" were as deeply ingrained a part of Frontier Fleet's institutional culture as they were for Battle Fleet. And to be fair, Frontier Fleet was also dominated by its hereditary officer caste, which resented the hell out of the juicier opportunities for peculation which came the way of its Battle Fleet counterpart. Still, its commissioned ranks contained a significantly higher percentage of "outsiders," and even a relatively tiny handful of mustangs of its own.
Bearing all of that in mind, no Battle Fleet admiral would have been happy to find herself assigned to command a mere Frontier Fleet task force. And no Frontier Fleet task force would have been happy to find her assigned to command it, either. Under any circumstances Michelle could think of, a Battle Fleet officer of Byng's seniority would have to regard a command like this as a demotion, probably even a professional insult, and he damned well ought to have had the family co
If, of course, he'd wanted to avoid it.
Oh, I don't like this at all, she thought. This bastard must have "I hate Manticore" embroidered on his underwear, which means the situation out here just got one hell of a lot more . . . delicate. I wonder if it was all his idea? In fact, I hope it was. Because if it wasn't, if someone elsepulled strings to get him assigned to this particular task force and he went along with it willingly, I think we can all be damned sure it's not going to be for a reason we're going to like. On the other hand, I doubt anything I could say to him is going to make him like us any better, so I suppose I can just go ahead and be my normal, infinitely tactful sort.
"Well," she said finally, "I suppose I'd better go ahead and talk to him. Give me a minute to get my happy face put back on, Bill, then go on and hail him."
Chapter Twenty-Four
"Sir, the Manty admiral is on the com," Captain Willard MaCuill said. "It's a Vice Admiral Gold Peak. She's asking to speak to you."
"Oh, she is, is she?" Admiral Josef Byng smiled sardonically as he turned his command chair to face his staff communications officer. "Took her long enough to get around to it, didn't it? I wonder why that was?"
"Probably took her that long to get back out of the head after she changed her underwear, Sir," Rear Admiral Karlotte Thimár, Byng's chief of staff, replied with a nasty chuckle. "Not quite like the last time one of their ships was here, after all."
"No, it isn't," Byng agreed, and glanced at the tactical display on SLNS Jean Bart's flag bridge.
He didn't quite curl his lip as he considered the flag bridge's old-fashioned instrumentation and cramped size. He understood that Frontier Fleet had a lower priority for the Fleet 2000 upgrades, after all, so he'd also known from the begi
Not that anyone on either side of that particular division was actually likely to fool anyone very much, he supposed.
Still, even though they were only battlecruisers—and Frontier Fleet battlecruisers, at that—rather than the superdreadnought squadrons he should have had under command, Karlotte was undoubtedly correct about the Manties' reaction when they found seventeen Solarian League warships sitting here to greet them. Indeed, Byng's only real regret was that the Manty ships which had previously occupied the system had already withdrawn before his own command came over the hyper wall. He would've loved to see their reaction to his arrival. Or, for that matter, how they would respond when his third battlecruiser squadron arrived in a couple of T-weeks.