Elizabeth Moon - Once a Hero

Esmay had not known any of this until she read Heris Serrano’s brief—concise, but hardly brief in the usual terms—to the admiral. She had found it easy to follow, because Altiplano and Xavier had many similarities.

“The government enlisted Commander Serrano, then acting as a civilian captain of a private yacht—but a very well-armed one—in defense against just such a raider. As you might expect—” she allowed herself a brief smile “—the unsuspecting raider didn’t have a chance.”

“How big was it?” came from the back of the room.

“According to scan reports at the time, it was an Aethar’s World raider—” Esmay flashed the hull specifications on the display. “Commander Serrano anticipated its attack course, and was able to surprise it.”

“But that wasn’t the whole battle, was it? One lousy little raider?”

“No, of course not.” Esmay changed displays again, to show the location of Xavier relative to Benignity and Familias territory. “Commander Serrano’s scan techs noticed another ship in system, which appeared to be an observer . . . she suspected that the raider’s attack was merely a probe for a larger invasion force. She transmitted that concern to the nearest Fleet headquarters.”

“And got a bunch of traitors,” came a mutter from midway back.

“Not a ‘bunch,’ ” Esmay said. “Most of the officers and crew of all three ships were loyal, or things would have turned out very differently. Fleet dispatched a small force, under the command of Dekan Garrivay. Two patrol ships, one cruiser. The captains of all three ships were prepared to cooperate with the Benignity, but that is not true of others.”

“Exactly how many traitors were there, and how do we know they were all discovered?”

“I don’t know the answer to either question,” Esmay said. “Some died fairly quickly—it’s impossible to determine their alliance. And it’s possible—though unlikely—that some traitors did not reveal themselves during the fighting on each ship. The last estimate I saw was that five to ten percent of each crew was actually traitorous—that includes both officers and enlisted.”

She watched the sideways looks, as the young officers estimated how many of the people in the room that would be.

“Naturally, most of them were in fairly senior, critical posts. Five traitorous ensigns wouldn’t do the enemy as much good as one captain and the senior scan tech. The problem for the Benignity, as I understand it, is that the sort of thing they planned at Xavier required their long-standing agents to identify themselves to each other—a very risky affair. This need to confer was their undoing.”

Esmay skipped rapidly past the still-classified methods by which Koutsoudas had overheard the conspirators in the midst of their plotting.

“Commander Serrano had to prevent Garrivay from destroying Xavier’s orbital station, and she needed those ships to defend from the expected invasion. That meant she had to relieve Garrivay and the other traitorous captain of their commands, identify any other traitors, and rally the loyal crews.”

“Well, but she’s Admiral Serrano’s niece,” someone said. “She could just say so—”

Esmay almost grinned. Had she ever been that naive, even before she went into Fleet?

“Commander Serrano, remember, was operating as a civilian, whose resignation from Fleet had been highly publicized. There is some evidence that Commander Garrivay worried about what she might do, especially the influence she might have on the Xavieran government. He was trying to discredit her there. But consider: you are a civilian—at least apparently civilian—and you are on a space station where two Fleet vessels are docked. Another one is on picket at a distance. How are you going to gain access to the docked ships? We don’t let civilians just wander in. And once in, how are you going to convince an ignorant crew that their captain is a traitor, and you should be allowed to take over? Would you, for instance, readily believe that your captain was a traitor, just because someone told you so?”

She saw comprehension of the difficulties on most faces.

“I didn’t,” she said, fighting down the tension of that confession. “All I knew of the situation—as a jig on Despite , under Kiansa Hearne—was that we were on patrol, while the rest of the group was docked. I knew nothing about an invasion; we thought we had come to Xavier to babysit some paranoid colonists who had panicked over a perfectly ordinary random raid. A lot of us were annoyed that we’d missed the chance to compete in the annual Sector war games . . . we felt our gunnery was outstanding.”

“But surely you suspected—”

Esmay snorted. “Suspected? Listen—my real concern was stuff disappearing out of personnel lockers. Minor theft. I didn’t worry about the captain . . . the captain was the captain, doing her job of commanding the ship. I was a mere jig, doing my assigned job, which was servicing the automatic internal scanners and trying to find out who was getting into the lockers, and how. When the . . . mutiny started on Despite , I was so surprised I nearly got shot before I caught on.” She waited for the nervous giggles to die down.

“Yeah—like that. It was ridiculous . . . I couldn’t believe it. Nor could most of us. That’s why conspirators are always a step ahead of the people who get real work done . . . they can count on that surprise.”

“But how did Serrano get command?” someone asked.

“I can only tell you what I heard,” Esmay said. “Apparently, she and some of her former crew got aboard by some ruse, asked to talk to Garrivay in his office. By good fortune—or perhaps she had some way of knowing—some of the other conspirators were there. She and her crew . . . killed them.”

“Right away? You mean they didn’t try to talk them out of it?”

Esmay let that lie in a stillness that was as scornful as her own. When the stirring began, she ended it by speaking. “When someone has determined on treason—is commanding a ship, and planning to deliver helpless civilians to the enemy—I doubt any moral homilies would change his mind. Commander Serrano made a command decision; she eliminated the most senior conspirators as quickly as possible. Even then it wasn’t easy.”

Esmay put up new displays. “Now—Captain Hearne took Despite —with me, and the rest of the crew—quickly out of Xavier system. Our exec was also involved, but the next junior officer was both loyal, and on the bridge to hear Commander Serrano’s transmission to Captain Hearne, requesting her return to station and her assistance in defending Xavier. He actually began the mutiny, appealing to the bridge crew . . .” She stopped, flooded in memories of the next few hours. The contradictory orders on the ship’s internal communications, the total confusion, the time it took—which now seemed inexplicable—for the loyalists to realize that a mutiny was necessary, and that they’d have to use deadly force on their crewmates.

“From the tactical point of view,” she said, forcing all that back down, “Commander Serrano faced a very difficult task. The Benignity force arrived almost simultaneously with her assumption of command. Had she waited even a few more hours, it would have been impossible. The Benignity force—” Esmay outlined its specifications, reminding her audience of the usual tactics used by Benignity strike forces. Now, describing decisions and actions she had not personally witnessed, she found it easier to be calm and logical. This ship here, these over there, expected and unexpected choices of maneuver . . . results, neatly tabulated without reference to the people whose lives had just been changed forever.