Poor Man's Fight (9 page)

“Are they serious?” Aguirre fumed. It was a rhetorical question, of course—the Kingdom was always serious—but his exasperation was sincere. “Their ‘frontier’ is twice the size of ours and their navy outmatches us four to one.”

“Three point five, sir,” Admiral Yeoh corrected quietly.

“Still. This is ridiculous. If anyone should be responsible for preventing violence on the Kingdom’s frontier, it should be them, not us.”

“They have stated that they intend to shift their fleet’s strength toward us, but that we should not see this as an act of war.”

“Is this what you were handling while I was giving that speech just now? Why didn’t anyone tell me this before?” Aguirre tapped his fingers on the table. “That’s just what we need. The Hashemites deciding it’s time for our once-every-century shooting wars again. Is that everything?”

“At the moment, yes, sir,” Yeoh said. Kiribati concurred with a nod.

Aguirre looked around at the other ministers and advisors present. “I want to talk about the long term. Does anyone have anything else they need covered before we can move on?”

Andrea sat up straighter. “Admiral, I got a question at the media briefing about children among the dead. Do you have anything on that?”

Yeoh scowled. “I would appreciate it if you could tamp down on that for now, but between us I can confirm it. At least twenty-six of various ages, maybe more.”

“Do you know how that got out?”

“It came from the skipper of
St. Jude
,” Yeoh answered, and her scowl only deepened. “That was a violation of protocol. It’ll be dealt with. Again, if you could minimize that for now as best you can, it would be better all around. I don’t want the media to smell an accurate leak and start trying to encourage more.”

“No, I understand and agree,” Andrea nodded.

“Anything else you need to know, Andrea?” the president asked.

“Well, you wanted to talk about the long term. Anything I can offer up as concrete steps to deal with piracy will certainly help,” she shrugged. “Numbers and action play better than rhetoric.”

Aguirre glanced from Kiribati to Yeoh, receiving nods from both. “The defense minister should really be the one to brief you,” he said, “but Admiral Yeoh certainly knows what’s going on. Admiral, tell her the solid stuff. We’ll leave out the maybes for another time.”

Andrea sat up in her seat, ready to take more mental notes. Military expansion had been quietly discussed for some time. So far, it had been mostly theoretical. There had been nothing to tell the public. She suspected that planning had pushed beyond theory without her knowing, but wasn’t sure. Yeoh didn’t care for leaks.

“We’ve recently finalized the purchase of three destroyers and contracted domestic shipyards to produce sixteen more corvettes,” Yeoh said evenly. The admiral was neither surprised nor distracted by the way Andrea’s eyes bulged. “The destroyers come from different sources. They may be a bit old or behind in maintenance, but all of them stand to have a good, long service life once they’re rehabilitated. A few of the corvettes will be put into service within the next few months. I’ve already spoken with defense minister about accelerating delivery of the rest. We should start seeing them in the yards within the week. We’re also in negotiations for a cruiser, and things look promising.”

Still trying to decide which of her multitude of questions should get out first, Andrea found herself stammering. “But when...I’m...how did we pay for that?”

Most of the men seated around her grunted uncomfortably. Yeoh waited serenely for someone else to answer. “We’re going to be a bit late on a couple of interest payments to our corporate creditors,” Shadid said, shifting in his seat. “And maybe our Union dues.”

“And our security contract payments after today,” grunted Aguirre.

“How late?” Andrea asked.

“We can go over the numbers later,” Shadid answered. “Nothing catastrophic, but we’re going to catch some heat for it outside the system.”

“Outside the system? What about domestically?”

“Well, it wasn’t exactly hard to get approval from some of the opposition leaders in the senate,” Victor shrugged. “I might have, um, promised we’d all attend church a lot more along the way, though.”

“You have fun with that,” Shadid snorted.

“The point is,” Aguirre broke in, “we’re going to get support from enough of the conservative opposition parties that nobody will want to make a real fight over this.”

“And our own party?” Andrea pressed.

“Our own party wants to be reelected next year and knows they’d better play along with us on this,” Aguirre answered. “We’ll lose a few on principle. I’ll talk about how I respect their principles. They’ll win or they’ll lose and we’ll be okay either way.”

“You really think Lambert and his people will hold their fire over this?”

“I do.”

“They aren’t just going to give up on the next election.”

“No, they aren’t,” Aguirre conceded, “but they want the military expansion
and
they want to see me fall down on my ass trying to pay for it so they can claim that I’m incompetent.”

“And how are we going to fight that?”

“By not letting me fall down on my ass trying to pay for all this. That’s why I have all you smart people around me.”

Unsatisfied but not wanting to get into an argument, Andrea bit her lip and turned back to the admiral. Yeoh simply remained where she stood, watching passively. “This is a huge increase in fleet strength, isn’t it?” Andrea asked.

“It is. Fifty percent more destroyers, almost as much in light patrol craft with the corvettes. There are a few support craft, too. I’ll have one of my aides brief you on the ship purchases.”

“Isn’t this going to require a big increase in manpower?”

“Significant, yes, but we’ve done well with recruiting since the school payoff-matching deal. We have several retention incentives lined up for our more experienced personnel that we’ll be implementing over the coming months.

“We’re also effectively doubling the time and intensity of enlisted recruit training,” Yeoh added. “The pilot program begins next week.”

Once more, Andrea was taken aback. She wasn’t familiar with the intricacies of the military’s budget, but doubling anything had to mean increasing its expense. “What does that mean?” she asked. “Are their funds for that? Isn’t that a massive change?”

“The training reforms aren’t entirely a matter of financial logistics,” Yeoh said. “I’ve been involved in planning for all of this personally. Many of our current instructors at our training centers are rather creative people. They can get a lot done once we let them think outside the box.”

Sitting back to consider all this, Andrea found that she didn’t know whether to be frustrated at Victor or herself. “None of this sounds like it should’ve been any big secret up until now.”

“The measures themselves, no,” Aguirre told her. “What we didn’t want was a public discussion on how to pay for it all. We didn’t want blowback from NorthStar or Lai Wa or the Union assembly.”

“The new ship purchases bring us right to our militia limits per Union treaty,” Yeoh put in. “We’re taking advantage of some loopholes in the treaty’s language with the corvettes as it is.”

“Better to apologize later than ask permission in advance,” Victor chuckled.

“Exactly,” Aguirre agreed. “Andrea, we were going to bring these changes out to the public slowly, but at this point, I say the hell with it. We need to get ahead of this. Hell, we can show that we’ve
been
ahead of this and that
Aphrodite
is the sort of thing we worried about all along. We’ve already gotten buy-in from Lambert and Waikowski and most of our other opposition heads, too. We can play the multi-partisan card.”

Pondering her options for a moment, Andrea finally nodded. “I think that’ll work. We don’t want to call it a build-up, though. Something less aggressive. Enhancements.”

Aguirre pointed to Yeoh. “Anyone asks you, we’re enhancing, not building.”

“Yes, sir,” Yeoh nodded.

“We’re definitely going to get blowback from the big three about this,” Shadid reminded Andrea. “That’s our real battle.”

Andrea scowled. “Last I checked, the big three didn’t have ships out there picking bodies out of space.”

“Good. Use that. If there are no other questions,” Aguirre went on, “I need to get up to speed on some operational matters going forward. Unfortunately, that means we’re going to have to clear the room of everyone who isn’t actually involved in defense.”

One hundred
seventy-seven recruits stood silently at attention among neatly arranged rectangular tables in Squad Bay Zero.  It was the only squad bay with a numeric designation, as it served solely to house recruits for their first few days at Fort Stalwart, Archangel Navy’s Integrated Training Facility on Raphael.

They were young and healthy, though not all in good shape. Every head, male and female alike, bore only freshly-shaven stubble. The recruits wore simple gray
vac suits with no markings beyond a nametag. Some came as navy enlistees, others as marines. Thus far, such distinctions mattered little. Nobody beyond the other recruits themselves seemed to care what they wanted to be.

On the table before each recruit sat a simple grey canvas bag, a neatly folded dress uniform,
several more vac suits, and an assortment of very plain, cheap toiletries. As with much of their surroundings, a good deal of their new gear went beyond “simple” to the point of being “archaic.”

Up until
now, an odd assortment of unfriendly marines and navy ratings shepherded the recruits through rudimentary orientations, calisthenics, very basic marching and outfitting. Few of their keepers had been around long enough for names to matter. They provided a cursory instruction to military courtesy and traditions, some of them centuries old. Mostly it centered on how to stand at attention properly, whom to address as “sir” or “ma’am,” when to salute and how to read the various rank insignia.

The recruits were told once, in a single hour-long class, the proper naval parlance for a thousand ordinary terms that they had used all their lives and would now have to shed. Walls became bulkheads. Ropes became lines. Left and right were now port and starboard, except when they weren’t, and
no one offered a consistent explanation for which was used or when.

Of an initial pool of two hundred recruits from Archangel’s four inhabited worlds
, moon colonies and space stations, twenty-three had been rejected by the end of the four-day “processing” phase. Several were cut for medical problems caught by Fort Stalwart’s health staff, who were much more diligent than the civilian contractors attached to the local recruitment depots. Two different “couples” caught “fraternizing” in the showers after lights out were promptly expelled. Three recruits were arrested and hauled away for criminal charges back home. Amazingly, six different recruits failed even the most basic educational testing. Three more were caught with recreational drugs. One young woman had even been cut for religious intolerance when she refused to eat at a table with non-Catholics.

Tanner stood straight and silent in front of his table like everyone else. He found the empty table spaces on the far side of the room unsettling. The medical discharges were one thing; those poor souls had received a green light from their recruiters, only to be cut for issues beyond their control and for most completely unknown to them before this week. But as far as he was concerned, the rest of them had been thrown out because they were just
stupid
. He felt no sympathy for them, but he didn’t feel any sense of superiority, either. Instead, he wondered what kind of system would let such morons in to begin with, and how much of a screw-up he must be to have landed here with them.

The company began at twice the number Tanner had expected. He gathered that the other recruit companies on base were larger than normal, too, and wondered if the other recruit training centers saw similar increases. Nobody who actually knew anything showed the slightest interest in discussing the matter with recruits.

Two minutes ago, some electrician’s mate signed off on the last of the recruit inventory checklists and called the squad bay to attention. Then he walked away without another word. Like many of the recruits, Tanner expected this was some sort of test. Some, though, were too curious to stay still. Rather than looking straight ahead like they were supposed to, they craned their heads around to see if anything in the large, featureless room had changed. Tanner winced, hoping they weren’t going to get the whole group into trouble.

He needn’t have worried. They had plenty of warning. Everyone heard the steady click-click-click of approaching footsteps from down the hallway behind Tanner. It was a distinct sound, as if someone had put strips of metal on the bottom of his shoes.

Before Tanner knew it, a tall woman with dark brown skin and the deep blue uniform of Archangel’s marines walked into the squad bay. She strode silently to the front of the room, turned around, and scowled. A similarly tall man with broad shoulders, lightly tanned skin and a completely shaved head followed her. He wore a gray navy uniform and was obviously the one with the clicking heels. The man joined his companion near the front with a more relaxed but still entirely unwelcoming expression on his face.