He snorted again, this time in exasperation with his masochistic need to believe the Republic might somehow survive despite the lunatics running it, and punched for a fresh file. He might have been handed a dead ship drifting steadily deeper into a gravity well, but that didn't change his responsibility to do the best he could with it until...

The quiet buzz of his com interrupted his thought. He punched the acceptance key, and the neat blocks of alphanumeric characters disappeared from his display as it dropped into split-screen com mode. Raven-haired, brown-eyed Citizen Captain Megan Hathaway, his chief of staff, and Citizen Commander Warner Caslet, his ops officer, looked out of the screen at him, and Theisman hid another grimace, for Caslet was one more bit of evidence that the Committee had decided it could manage without Thomas Theisman.

It wasn't Caslet's fault; in fact, he was an officer of superior quality whose services, under normal circumstances, Theisman would have been delighted to obtain.

But the citizen commander was a man under a cloud. Up until a little over a T-year ago, he'd been one of the rising young stars of the People's Navy, but that was before the results of Citizen Admiral Giscard's commerce raiding campaign in Silesia were reported back home... and before Caslet lost his own ship trying to save a Manticoran merchantman from homegrown Silesian pirates.

Theisman had seen the reports on the pirates in question, and even through the obvious censorship to which they'd been subjected before reaching him, he could understand why any officer worth the uniform he wore would have wanted to save any merchant crew from them. It had simply been Caslet’s misfortune that the freighter he tried to rescue had turned out to be a disguised armed merchant cruiser of the Royal Manticoran Navy which had wound up taking his ship as well as finishing off the pirate vessels Caslet had engaged in order to save it.

Once in Manticoran custody, Caslet, with the approval of his people's commissioner, had shared his data on the pirates with his captors, and that, coupled with his effort to "save" them, had led the Manties to repatriate him and his senior officers rather than clapping them into a POW camp somewhere. Considered all in all, returning Caslet had been a mixed favor, for the only thing which had kept the SS from executing him for losing his ship under such circumstances was the fact that the Admiralty had issued every unit of Giscard’s task force standing orders to come to the assistance of any Andermani merchant vessels threatened by pirates.

The idea, as far as Theisman had been able to discover, had been that by doing so Giscard’s commerce raiders would win enough gratitude from the Andermani Empire for the Imperial Navy to overlook the next-door operations of the People's Navy and the spread of the war with Manticore to its doorstep. If that had been the idea, it certainly hadn't worked, as the Andermani’s ferocious diplomatic protests had made abundantly clear, but those orders were what had saved Caslet's neck, for at the time he'd thought he was coming to the Manty Q-ship's rescue, the Q-ship in question had disguised itself as an Andermani freighter. Which meant, of course, that Caslet had simply been following his orders.

Whatever its other faults (and God knew they were legion), the current leadership at the Admiralty had at least managed to convince StateSec that shooting officers for following orders would have a... negative impact on naval operations. It was bad enough to know you would be shot for failing to execute orders, however impossible the task to which they assigned you, without knowing that you'd also be shot if you did execute them and things turned out badly anyway. Besides, officers who figured they had nothing to lose whatever they did were far more likely to turn upon their political masters, and thank God someone had been able to make the SS see at least that much!

The fact that they hadn't shot Caslet, however, didn't mean that the powers that were intended to forgive and forget, and he'd been denied a new command. Instead, and despite an otherwise brilliant command record, he'd been shuffled off to staff duty... and sent to Barnett, which promised to be even more of a dead end, with emphasis on the "dead", than most backwater staff assignments.

On the other hand, it could represent a chance for him to "redeem" himself by how he performs here, Theisman thought. If he does his job and we actually manage to hold out long enough to please our lords and masters, maybe they'll "rehabilitate" him. Hell, maybe they'll even pull me out in time. Yeah. Sure they will, Tommy.

It was only then that he realized a face was missing. Dennis LePic, Barnett’s senior people's commissioner and Theisman’s personal watchdog, was a relatively decent sort, but he was also inquisitive and assertive and took his responsibilities seriously enough to be a general pain in the ass. He was smart enough to leave operational matters to the professionals upon whom he spied, but he insisted on being kept informed and routinely "shared" conferences between Theisman and his staffers. LePic's absence from the split screen was more than enough to raise Theisman's mental eyebrows, but he kept that, too, from showing. Any prudent officer assumed that any com channel, be it ever so secure, was bugged, and his voice displayed no surprise as he greeted his callers.

"Hello, Megan, Warner. What is it?"

"We've just received the latest ship movement report from the Admiralty, Citizen Admiral," Hathaway replied in exactly the same sort of calm tones. "We're looking at several more ships than we'd anticipated, and Warner and I thought we should bring you up to speed."

"That sounds reasonable," Theisman agreed, tipping his chair back once more, but Hathaway’s response, however reasonable it might seem, obviously wasn't the real reason she'd commed him. They were due for a routine staff meeting in less than two hours, and even word that the Admiralty was sending him the entire Capital Fleet could have waited that long. "So just what sort of good news are we looking at?" he asked.

"For starters, they're sending us the Sixty-Second and Eighty-First Battle Squadrons," Caslet replied, and despite himself, Theisman's eyebrows did rise this time. "The Sixty-Second is twenty-five percent understrength, and the Eighty-First is short one ship, but that's still thirteen more of the wall, Citizen Admiral."

Theisman nodded. That was a much heavier reinforcement than he'd let himself anticipate. In fact, it would increase his wall of battle's strength by almost thirty percent, which might actually indicate that the Republic's rulers intended to make a serious fight for Barnett. They wouldn't be able to hold it even if they did, but if they gave him enough combat power he could at least make his defense buy the rest of the Navy a chunk of time big enough that it might actually mean something. But despite his surprise, he delivered a moderately quelling frown to his ops officer. Caslet had commanded his own ship long enough to know to avoid slips like the one he'd just almost made. Or perhaps it was because he'd commanded his own ship for so long that he had trouble remembering that the only people the Navy was allowed to address as "Sir" or "Ma'am" these days were its people's commissioners.

PNS Vaubon had been a light cruiser, and as light cruisers were wont to do, she'd spent most of her time cruising independently. However much he might have ridden herd on the revolutionary vocabularies of his subordinates, Caslet himself had gone for enormous stretches of time in which he'd had no superior, aside from his own commissioner, to whom to report directly. But whatever the reasons, an officer in his present position simply could not afford anything remotely suggestive of lack of enthusiasm for the new regime.