Graham Paul: The battle of Devastation reef

His heart raced. The first message was from the Red Cross. With a silent prayer, he opened it. It was a vidmail, and it was from Anna. He breathed in sharply to steady himself and opened it.

After the usual Red Cross preamble-name, rank, serial number, followed by a certificate from the Hammers asserting the authenticity of the vidmail and giving her prisoner identity number-Anna’s face popped into his neuronics. For a moment she said nothing. She seemed tired: skin washed out to a dull beige, gray bags under her eyes, her face stretched taut across high cheekbones no longer dusted with pink. But her eyes were pure Anna: an extraordinary green, alive and alert. Michael forced himself to relax. Anna was as well as any Fed could be in Hammer captivity.

“You can start,” a disembodied voice said. “You have one minute.”

A shiver ran up Michael’s spine. The accent was pure unadulterated Hammer. The flattened vowels, chopped syllables, and staccato delivery triggered a feeling of sick dread and a flood of memories he had worked long and hard to bury.

Anna stared directly into the holocam. “Michael,” she said, her voice steady and controlled, “I don’t have long. As you can see, I’m okay. I had some splinter damage to my right leg, but nothing serious. The Hammer medics did a good job, it’s healing well, and I now have a wound stripe. I’m not allowed to tell you where we are, but we are all safe. The loss of the ship was heartbreaking and probably the most … uh”-blinking, Anna’s eyes filled with tears-“ah, shit … it was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever been through. I really didn’t think I’d make it. Now I know how you felt when your ship went. It was horrible. Anyway, we did the interrogation thing, I told the bastar-”

“Watch it,” the unseen Hammer growled.

“Sorry,” Anna said, sounding anything but. “We’re in a prison camp; I can’t say where. It’s basic but enough to get by. We’re out of the rain, we get fed, and the Hammers have done the right thing by us so far. There are prisoners from other ships in this camp, so there is no shortage of advice on how to survive. The senior officer is a four-ringer. She doesn’t take any shit from anyone, so discipline is tight. If I behave, I’m allowed one of these messages a month, so I’ll talk to you again. You can vidmail me whenever you like. Haven’t had any from you yet, so I don’t know if we’ll get them, but don’t let that stop you from trying. Okay, have to go. Love you. Bye.”

Anna’s face vanished, and that was it. Michael did not know what to think; his mind seethed, a mess of mixed emotions: relief, anger, longing, and frustration, all overlaid by a blanket of raw hatred of all things Hammer. The rush of emotion triggered by Anna’s vidmail was so strong, he had to force himself to push her out of his mind.

Ten minutes later, he was back in control enough to open the second message. “About bloody time,” he said as he scanned it a second time to make sure he had read it right. After waiting what seemed like a lifetime, he was to get his chance to present his account of Operation Opera to the board of inquiry.

Back in his cabin that evening, Michael watched Anna’s vidmail so many times that he could recite it word for word. He could not get enough of her. He watched it one more time; something nagged at him, and for the life of him, he could not put a finger on it. Becoming more and more frustrated, he watched it over and over again. He still did not get it, but there was something there. Problem was, his subconscious knew what it was but refused to let it out into the open. Michael gave up.

He would have another go at it after he had taken a shower and grabbed something to eat.

Shortly before midnight, it came to him. When it did, Anna’s ingenuity left him stunned. Throughout her vidmail she blinked, but never both eyes at once. It took him a long time to understand what she was saying, but once he worked it out, it turned out to be simple. An almost imperceptible twitch of her left eyelid meant 0, a twitch of her right meant 1, generating numbers between 0 and 9. Reversing things produced numbers between 0 and 15, which wasn’t helpful; Anna was always one to keep things simple.

So, thirty-two twitches gave him a sequence of binary numbers: 0001 0000 0101 0000 0101 0010 0000 1001. He shook his head in disbelief. Only a love-struck idiot would have picked it, and he was one of those; Michael was sure he was the one person in all of humanspace who would have spotted what she was doing. One of the fancier pattern recognition AIs might have cracked it, but who would have bothered?

He had a new problem. Converting the string of binary numbers to base 10 was the obvious next step; that gave him 10505209. But the longer he looked at it, the less sense it made. He was baffled. What the hell did it mean? After hours of trying, he gave up. He was getting nowhere. It was time to get some expert help, he decided.

He commed the duty intelligence officer.

Conference Room 10, Space Fleet headquarters

Foundation, Terranova

The president of the board of inquiry, Captain Shavetz, a warfare officer with a combat record a kilometer long and medals to match, sat flanked by officers from every major specialization in the Fleet. He watched Michael take his seat.

“Lieutenant Helfort. Do I need to remind you that the oath you swore on accepting your commission as an officer in the Federated Worlds Space Fleet requires you to tell the truth at all times?”

“No, sir,” Michael said, “you do not.”

“Thank you. The board has studied your report of proceedings carefully. It has reviewed your report in light of statements from the Reckless ’s crew and those of spacers from other ships together with the reports of proceedings and datalogs from the ships of the dreadnought force and the rest of Battle Fleet Lima. I have to say that your report is entirely consistent with those latter sources of information, a view that is supported by the AIs analyzing the evidence”-get on with it, for chrissakes, Michael said to himself, fuming; the way the man talked, no wonder the board of inquiry took so long-“but we have a number of issues which require some clarification.”

“Yes, sir.” Michael replied woodenly.

“Good,” Shavetz said. He turned to a young warfare officer sitting to his left, the junior member of the board. Michael knew him only by reputation: a hotshot navigator, massively ambitious, and probably no friend of dreadnoughts. “Lieutenant Commander Grivaz?”

“Thank you, sir. Lieutenant Helfort, I have two questions. First, when Reckless deployed for Operation Opera, what did you understand that operation’s primary military objective to be? Second, and please be precise when answering, why did you think that?”

“Well, sir …”

Late into the evening of a long day, Captain Shavetz glanced at each of the members of the board in turn. “Are there any more questions for Lieutenant Helfort … no? Good.”

He turned to Michael. “Lieutenant Helfort. I think that is all. Thank you. The board secretary will advise you if we need to talk to you again. You are dismissed.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Michael struggled out of his seat. It had been a tough day, one of searching examination interrupted only by a short lunch break. The process had wrung him out. One after another the questions came. They never stopped, the pressure intense, the pace relentless. Not that any of that bothered him; telling things the way they happened was easy. What bothered him was the fact that even after hours of unremitting scrutiny, he had no idea what the board was really thinking.

Michael hoped they saw things his way. His future depended on it. When he limped out of the room, a chief petty officer stood in his way.