The Romulan War_ Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Book 1) - Michael A. Martin [105]
Black nodded. “Or the one from the news media. The top war correspondents have sent half the planet into hiding and convinced the other half that all we need to defeat the Romulans is grit and clean living.”
“Gannet Brooks,” Gardner said. He refilled his glass, then gestured with the bottle toward the window. “I’d bet my admiral’s pips that most of the people out there watch her reports from the Romulan front every day.”
“At least Brooks is on the correct side of the issue,” Casey said. “She knows that appeasement only gets you dead. Or worse. I think she’s telling Earth the story it needs to hear right now. Not like that other one, the yellow rose of journalism.”
Keisha Naquase, Gardner thought. It seemed to him that Naquase’s message of fatalistic passivity wasn’t doing Earth any favors either.
Apparently the topic of pain-in-the-ass journalists had begun giving Black an old-fashioned bellyache; before Casey could raise Black’s discarded Ganymedan whiskey to his lips, the admiral took it, muttering something about needing a drink after all.
“Brooks’s heart might be in the right place,” Black said after he’d downed the drink. “But her expectations about Starfleet’s capabilities and timetables strikes me as unrealistic. And if enough people buy into those expectations—particularly among the civilian leadership— they can become a damned menace.”
Casey clearly wasn’t impressed. Standing ramrod straight, he said, “We’re MACOs. We can do anything.”
Gardner chuckled as he refilled all three glasses. “Semper Invictus,” he said. Always Invincible, the Latin motto of the Military Assault Command Organization.
“Boo-ya,” Casey said, then downed his second whiskey.
“You sharks might be invincible superheroes, George,” Gardner said, raising a glass. “But we squids have to take on the politics of war, on top of the war itself.”
“And Starfleet just might find itself in the position of having to try to... influence some of our opinion makers,” Black said. As an apparent afterthought, he added, “Within the framework of the UE Constitution and the Coalition Compact, of course.”
Casey scowled silently.
Sam Gardner found himself agreeing with his fellow admiral, though he hoped it was merely a reaction to the potent Ganymedan whiskey.
TWENTY-NINE
Wednesday, November 26, 2155
Columbia, Altair system
ERIKA HERNANDEZ LEANED TOWARD her command chair’s intercom pickup and opened a channel to engineering. “How much longer do your people need to get this job finished, Karl?”
The German-accented reply of Chief Engineer Karl Graylock came without hesitation. “It’s been going sehr schnell, Captain. Much more quickly than I thought it would.”
Standing to the immediate right of Hernandez’s chair, Commander Veronica Fletcher said, “We probably have that cadre of government engineers we picked up on Altair VI to thank for that.” Leaning toward the chair mic, she added, “No offense to you and yours, Karl.”
“None taken, Herr Executive Officer,” Graylock said. Hernandez didn’t even have to glance at her XO to know her back teeth were grinding; she hated being addressed as “Herr” even more than she disliked Starfleet’s traditional one-sex-fits-all use of the naval honorific “Mister.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised that Altair VI would make this mission a huge priority,” Hernandez said. “They have an even bigger stake in reinforcing their system’s warp-field detection grid than we do.”
“There’s about sixteen thousand very nervous civilians on Altair VI right now, more than half of them clustered in one place,” Fletcher said. “And there’ll be about as many crossed fingers down there until the new, improved defense grid proves itself.”
But Hernandez knew that Starfleet was not detached from Altair’s problems; it shared them to an increasingly uncomfortable extent. Starfleet had an urgent need to stem the recent rash of Romulan penetrations of the early-warning