Graham Paul: The battle of Devastation reef

Pantini’s response died stillborn, his protests drowned out by a chorus of less than friendly encouragement to sit down and shut up, which Pantini did with petulant bad grace.

“As I was saying,” Shavetz said, “for reasons of operational security, we cannot release our report in its entirety, and I hope you will bear with us on that. But I can assure you we have released all we can. More important, we have held back nothing that compromises the overall thrust of that report in any way. I would like to start with a summary of the key events drawn from the board’s findings of fact. Lieutenant Commander Grivaz?”

“Thank you, sir. If you would turn your attention to the holovid behind me, I will start at the point where Opera was in its initial planning stages. In late January, the chief of the defense force, Admiral Kefu, hosted a planning conference. The objectives of this meeting were several, but the most important of them was …”

His voice calm and dispassionate throughout, Grivaz took more than two hours to map out the tortuous, tangled paths leading to the destruction of the Hammer’s antimatter plant. Utterly absorbed, Michael followed his every word, scrutinizing everything the man said for some clue, some hint to the board’s thinking. But Grivaz was either a consummate professional or well rehearsed-probably both, Michael decided on reflection-so by the time he finished, Michael knew a lot more about Opera and nothing more about his prospects. He did not enjoy Grivaz’s dispassionate reconstruction of his clash with Perkins. As presented, it sounded utterly damning. Michael was not surprised. Grivaz could talk until the cows came home, and nothing he ever said would convey to the people in the room the raw terror of that awful moment when he realized he had to defy Perkins’s order, that he risked the entire Federated Worlds. Even those who knew what it was like to be in combat, to be one bad decision-or one bad break-away from death, would never understand what he had gone through.

“Thank you, Commander,” Shavetz said when Grivaz finished. “We’ll pause for lunch now. We will start again at 13:00 sharp, so please be back here promptly. I will not wait for anyone. Not even you, Mister Pantini.”

Pantini scowled when the room erupted in laughter.

Michael had no intention of joining the crowd heading for lunch: too many people asking too many questions he did not want to answer. He waited, content to hang back before slipping out to get something to eat.

He did not get the chance. To his dismay, Giorgio Pantini cut his way through the throng toward him, holocam operator close behind. For a moment, Michael toyed with the idea of making a quick break for it before common sense told him that would just make him look guilty. Stitching a look of polite interest onto his face, he waited for Pantini, sending out an urgent com for one of Fleet’s PR hacks to come save him.

“Mister Pantini. Good afternoon. Can I help you?” he said, his voice loaded with confidence he did not feel, the apprehension busy turning his stomach over well concealed.

“Yes, you can,” Pantini said, his tone openly belligerent. “Tell me this, Lieutenant Helfort. This morning, we saw clear evidence, unarguable evidence, that you disobeyed the direct order of a flag officer during combat. Do you agree you disobeyed Rear Admiral Perkins’s order?”

“Yes, Mister Pantini,” Michael said, “of course I agree. How could I not? It is a matter of record.”

“So how can you live with yourself knowing that that one act of willful insubordination condemned hundreds, maybe even thousands, of good spacers and marines to death?”

In a flash, anger replaced Michael’s anxiety; he struggled to keep control. The problem was that Pantini was not all wrong. By ignoring Perkins, by leaving Assault Group to take its chances, by focusing on the antimatter plant, he had condemned good spacers and marines. But if he admitted that to a scum sucker like Pantini, he would be forever damned in the eyes of the Fed public. Clinging to the last shreds of his self-control, he stared confidently right into the holocam’s lens. “Well, Mister Pantini,” he said, “I don’t see it that way. Operation Opera had a single objective, the destruction of the Hammer antimatter plant. I did what any Fleet officer-”

“Any officer? So you’re saying that Fleet officers make a habit of disobeying orders, of needlessly sacrificing the lives of their spacers?”

Michael shook his head. “What I am saying is that I did what any Fleet officer would-”

“So you admit it? You admit sending good spacers to their deaths unnecessarily?”

A hairbreadth away from leaping out of his seat and beating Pantini to death with his own holocam, Michael kept his cool. How he did not know, but he did. He stared Pantini right in the eye. “I think, Mister Pantini, that this would be a much better interview if you actually let me finish. If you don’t want me to answer your questions, if you’d prefer to do all the talking, that’s fine. I’ll save us all a lot of time, and I’ll sit here saying nothing while you tell me-and the rest of the world-what you think.”

“Please continue,” Pantini said tetchily.

“Thank you,” Michael said, all sweetness and light. “Here’s the point. Destroying the Hammer plant was the reason-the only reason-the ships of Battle Fleet Lima were in Hammer space, and I’m sure I don’t have to remind you why doing that was so important. Or weren’t you here when the Hammers fired antimatter missiles at the home planets? I’d-”

“I thought you wanted to answer the question, Lieutenant.”

Furious with himself for trying to score points off Pantini-he sensed Mitesh wagging his finger at him, a look of profound disappointment on his face-Michael forced himself to concentrate. “I am answering your question, Mister Pantini, if you’d let me,” he said, recovering his equilibrium. “I followed my orders, and those orders were to destroy the Hammer plant. If I hadn’t, that plant would still be operational, still be producing antimatter, and your home planet and mine would still be living under the threat of imminent destruction.”

“Rear Admiral Perkins does not share that view with you. What will you say when the board of inquiry agrees with him?”

“We don’t know that it will, Mister Pantini. I’ve not seen their report yet, and neither have you, so I think we should wait to see what they actually say.”

And so on and on it went, around and around in circles, frustrating in all its pointless futility. By the time Michael finally rid himself of Pantini-nobody from Fleet PR bothered to turn up to help him out-it was too late to step out to grab lunch; ignoring an outraged stomach, he sat and waited for the board to reconvene.

At 13:00 promptly, Captain Shavetz brought the conference to order. When silence fell, he peered around the packed room. “Welcome back. This is what is going to happen. I will present a short summary of the board’s key conclusions, absent those that are classified for the reasons I have already outlined. Then I will present our recommendations. After that, the unclassified version of our report will be available from the Fleet public relations office in the normal way. Together with the chief of the defense force and the commander in chief, I will be available for questions at a press conference at 17:00. Right, let’s get on. The conclusions of the board of inquiry are these …”

Michael’s heart started to thump when Shavetz recited the first of what would inevitably be a long list of conclusions, a process made even longer by the man’s florid turn of phrase. Come on, come on, he urged Shavetz silently.

Finally Michael’s moment of truth arrived.