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"I'm not defending his decision, Sir," Hasselberg pointed out. "I'm saying what he did was covered. And it probably wouldn't hurt to remember who his sister-in-law is."
Trajan frowned at the reminder. It was just like Hasselberg to bring it up, though, he reflected. The man was as tough-minded—not to say ornery—as they came. And he definitely believed in calling a spade a shovel, even if it wasn't very diplomatic to remind his admiral that Commodore Jérôme Ga
Diplomatic or not, it was also an indication of just how much Hasselberg trusted the other officers seated around the table. It was highly unlikely that his observation would have evoked any anger from Fleet Admiral Otis, but that wasn't really the point.
"He may be Admiral Otis' brother-in-law," Captain Granger said, "but that's not who's watching his ass for him, Niklas."
"Of course not, Ma'am," Hasselberg agreed. "But Admiral Kafkaloudes is. And, unfortunately, that's almost the same thing."
"I think we should probably turn this conversation in another direction," Trajan said calmly. The others looked at him, and he shrugged. "Oh, I don't disagree with anything that's been said. On the other hand, there's not much point in discussing something everyone already agrees about, and discussing the CNO's and her chief of staff's—or her chief of staff's, at least—little . . . foibles"—he smiled quickly at Granger as he used her own earlier terminology—"even among friends is neither productive, diplomatic, wise, nor supportive of good discipline."
Granger looked back at him for a moment, gray-green eyes stubborn. Then she inhaled deeply, nodded, and sat back in her chair, reaching for her wine glass.
The truth, Trajan thought, was that Kafkaloudes' empire building tendencies were well known throughout the MSDF. In fact, they were so well known that Fleet Admiral Otis' willingness to put up with them was widely regarded as her single true weakness. She was smart, competent, experienced, and dedicated to her duty, yet it was impossible for Trajan to believe she was unaware of Kafkaloudes' vendettas against anyone who ever made the mistake of rousing his ire. And it was an ire which roused with remarkable ease.
The problem was that, personality shortcomings aside, he really was very good at his job. And, to give the devil his due, part of his job clearly was to protect Otis, because in protecting her, he also protected her effectiveness. That was why Granger and Hasselberg were almost certainly correct where Ga
And Hasselberg had a perfectly valid point about Ga
All of that's true enough, Trajan thought, but they wouldn't have had to be brought into Ma
"Leaving aside any discussions of our senior officers," Hasselberg said after a moment, "there's still your own point, Admiral. The Manties can't possibly realize what they're dealing with from their end of the bridge."
He glanced at the smart wall bulkhead of Trajan's dining cabin as he spoke, and the others followed his gaze to it. The wall was configured at the moment to show not the Felix System, where Vivie
It was centered on a single star which looked slightly brighter than any of the others in their field of view. In fact, the only reason for its apparent brightness was that it had been considerably closer to the recording pickup than any of the others. It was actually only a lowly M8 dwarf, without a single planet to its name. Or, rather, to its number, for it had never achieved the dignity of the name all its own. It was simply SGC-902-36-G, a dim little star just this side of a "brown dwarf," of absolutely no particular interest to anyone and over forty light-years from the nearest inhabited star system.
It was also, however, home to a never before observed hyper-space phenomenon: a pair of wormhole termini, less than two light-minutes from one another and less than ten light-minutes from SGC-902-36-G itself. In fact, they were precisely 9.24 light-minutes from the star, which put them exactly on its hyper limit, and made them the only wormhole termini in the explored galaxy which were less than thirty light-minutes from a star.
No one had ever encountered anything like it before, and even all these years after its discovery, the Mesan Alignment's hyper-physicists were still trying to come up with an explanation for how the "SGC-902-36-G Wormhole Anomaly" (also known as "The Twins ") had happened when all generally accepted wormhole theory said it couldn't have. There were currently, Trajan had been told, at least six competing "main" hypotheses.
Obviously, no one had ever predicted that any such thing was possible. In fact, the Alignment had literally stumbled across it in the course of surveying the wormhole junction associated with the Felix System, where Trajan's task force was currently exercising. Not that the galaxy at large had any idea of that junction's existence, either. It had been discovered initially by a "Jessyk Combine"–backed survey expedition operating (very surreptitiously) out of Ma
Felix was an uninhabited star system little more than ten light-years from Ma