Mission of Honor

The good news was that a Nike -class battlecruiser carried a three hundred-man Marine detachment, twice the size of a Saganami-C 's. The bad news was that that still gave HMS Rigel only two companies. And the even worse news, as far as he was concerned, was that he'd been tasked to provide Marine support for two separate naval boarding parties.

Which wouldn't be all that bad, I suppose, if we weren't going to be outnumbered ten-to-one by the Sollies still aboard the damned ships .

He glanced at lieutenant Sebastiбn Fariсas, Admiral Oversteegen's San Martin-born flag lieutenant, standing at his shoulder, then across the pi

Of course, the fact that he'd assigned himself to Alpha Company also meant that Alpha Company had been assigned to board SLNS Anton von Leeuwenhoek , which happened to be the flagship of one Admiral Keeley O'Cleary. Which also explained Fariсas' presence.

At the moment, Ingebrigtsen was involved in a quiet conversation with Master Sergeant Clifton Palmarocchi, Alpha Company's senior noncom. Palmarocchi had been around the block and back again, and the chunky, muscular master sergeant, with his thi

There was a reason, the major suspected, Ingebrigtsen and Palmarocchi had both ended up accompanying First Platoon instead of either of her other platoons. And, he admitted to himself, if he'd thought about it, he would have picked this pi

Well, Markiewicz decided, glancing at his armor's HUD, where the pi

* * *

"Good seal, Ma'am," Petty Officer 2/c John Pettigrew a

"Thank you, PO," Abigail acknowledged, then glanced at Gutierrez.

"Let's get them moving, Lieutenant," she said far more formally than she normally spoke to him.

"Yes, Ma'am."

Gutierrez took time to salute before sealing his helmet, which, Abigail knew, was his equivalent, under the circumstances, of pitching a tantrum. He hadn't liked the decision to place him in tactical command of the boarding party instead of staying where he was supposed to be, watching her back, one little bit. Unfortunately the fact thatTristram carried no Marine detachment made ex-Sergeant Gutierrez the closest thing to a Marine CO Naomi Kaplan had available. That, coupled with the fact that Abigail was the only one of her Navy officers with any experience in ground combat was what had determined who would command Tristram 's boarding party.

Everyone, including (perhaps even especially) Lieutenant Abigail Hearns hoped combat experience would be completely irrelevant to their present mission. The entire reason Tristram had been assigned responsibility for Charles Babbage was the sheer extent of the superdreadnought's devastating damage. Although Abigail's little command was technically a boarding party, their real function was search and rescue, and any Solly with a functional brain was going to be simply delighted to see them.

Unfortunately, as she'd pointed out to Corbett, they couldn't rely on the functionality of any survivors' brains. In fact, it was entirely possible that what they'd been through could have thoroughly unhinged some of them, in which case all bets were off and all of Matteo Gutierrez's experience might be required, after all.

He understood that as well as she did, but he also understood that it meant he was going to be concentrating on ru

Well, you're just going to have to deal with it, Matteo , she thought, smiling affectionately at his broad back.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Evgeny Markiewicz had never thought much of officers who fretted over details which should have been left in the hands of their noncoms. He'd seen entirely too many examples of that from the noncom's perspective, which meant he knew exactly how much it pissed off the noncoms in question. What was worse, it represented a misuse of the officer's time and attention. He was supposed to be in charge of managing his command, however big or small it might be, not allowing himself to become absorbed in the sorts of details which could all too easily distract him from that management function.

At the moment, he found that somewhat more difficult than usual to remember.

The boat bay aboard SLNS Anton von Leeuwenhoek , Admiral Keeley O'Cleary's flagship, was larger than it would have been the aboard a Manticoran superdreadnought. Partly that was because Solarian ships carried greater numbers of small craft. That had been true even before Manticoran crews had been downsized, although the difference was even more marked these days. For another thing, Solarian small craft tended to be larger than their Manticoran counterparts. According to his briefing, they didn't carry any more perso

At the moment, all those small craft, aside from two purely reaction-drive cutters, were absent, however. By this time, they were sitting obediently in orbit around Flax, under the watchful eyes—and weapons—of Commodore Terekhov's cruisers, and the boat bay was a huge, gaping cavern in their absence. A cavern which looked even larger with only a trio of Manticoran pi