TGoaW-115

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==Chapter 115 - The Glow of a Worm inside a Child's Eye==
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The hearings were coming in the...
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...morning. A select committee from the Estates General mixed with a panel of AFFC's senior officers. Ostensibly, this was a quarterly review of nationally sponsored programs. that's the official boilerplate.
Unofficially, Victor Steiner-Davion was making sure the I's were dotted and the T's crossed in preparation for the coronation ceremony. The Heir would be sitting in on the review process.
"...Elizabeth is still legally a minor, Madam Chairman." Patrick scowled as he spoke. "As a minor, she isn't qualified to testify-"
"Yes or no, Duke Patrick, you have allowed this 'minor' to command combat units, in combat, no less, on not one, but two occasions. I think the Committee can either dispense with your suggested age restriction, or begin hearings on possible violations of Article Seventeen, subsection three, barring the employment of child soldiers, don't you?" Cecily Marsden was one of several delegates from Donegal itself.
"Yes." Patrick scowled as he answered truthfully.
"Then can we dispense with the fiction that your sister is a child?" Cecily asked, "or should we open an investigation into actions that not only comprise a war-crime under the Ares Conventions, but also constitute an aggravated case of abuse AND neglect?"
"I withdraw my objection." he surrendered the point.
a page was dispatched outside. Several minutes later, Elizabeth limped in, leaning on her cane, in her Cadet Grays (freshly laundered-they'd been warned ahead of time.)
"Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, within the limits of your knowledge and abilities, Baroness Ngo?"
"I do." she hobbled to the witness chair in the middle of the room. "What do you want to know?"
"Last January, you engaged in combat with Clan forces in the Kowloon system, is this true?"
"Yes, Sir." she answered.
"Can you describe the nature of this combat for the Panel?"
"It was a Trial Exercise to establish diplomatic relations with a foreign power." Elizabeth stated, "Also it was worth three certification stamps to my Navigation logbook under the rules of the Spacer's Guild subchapter Eight-One-One, which put me just two complex jumps shy of getting my Senior Journeyman Navigator certification per guild rules."
One of the Officers raised a hand, "You're certified?"
"Only at Junior Journeyman status, General sir." she clarified, "I have to pass the Senior Journeyman rating and conduct at least one long-range jump mission into uncharted territory to get my Pathfinder patch. I'm two short on Senior Journeyman rating right now, hopefully by the time We head Home I'll pick up my Senior cert and I'll be eligible to make a Pathfinder run at the next opportunity, which is WAY cooler than just getting a Master's ticket by itself."
A few of the politicians looked deeply confused, a few of the officers also looked puzzled. The Chairperson spoke up, "What relevance-"
"You asked about the nature of the military exercises we conducted against Clan Snow Raven." Liz said innocently, "For Them it was a trial for territory, but for me it was logbook stamps. The success of the defense can be attributed to the Cutter officers technically in my service-I couldn't have won the fight without their input...and I made a bunch of mistakes they had to cover for...Madame Chair."
"Let me clarify, Miss Ngo...what the hell is a 'pathfinder patch'? some kind of merit badge?"
Elizabeth almost groaned, "How can you not know that, this committee is overseeing the Navy, right??" she blurted out. "Pathfinder's THE patch!! It means you're qualified to run an exploration mission!! It involves astrocartography, charting of hyperspace routes and points, planetary survey...how do you sit here overseeing the Navy and not understand the value of knowing all the best routes between stars??"
A couple of Generals looked embarrassed, one looked mildly irritated, and one looked like he was distracted. The Politicians from the Estates General, for their part, mostly looked confused. "but it's all mapped..."
Elizabeth rolled her eyes-"SO, you're saying we already know where the Clans were hiding for the last two hundred eighty-something years? Last time I checked we still didn't have the location of their homeworlds. did something change in the last forty hours since I logged onto the database?"
General Luvon-Trask spoke up, "No, Baroness Ngo...we still do not have the 'home address' of the Clans."
"Then, General, we ought to know that, right?" she asked, "If they aren't likely to tell us, and LIC hasn't dug it up, we need to have a Naval effort to find it, don't you think? that's what Pathfinders do. they go out looking."
"...and you have such people..?"
"Not currently," she said firmly, "but we're working on it, my great aunt Mai won her Pathfinder out past the Outworlds before I was born. If she were available...but she's not, so we gotta do it the hard way, right? unless you've found a way to talk The Folk into signing on?"
"We have not-you're the one under examination, Baroness."
"Of course, Madame Chair." Liz leaned back in her seat, and gently tapped her cane. "Was my answer useful?"
"Somewhat."
"Okay. can I go now??"
"We have more questions." General Luvon-Trask said. "I am afraid your answers actually opened a lot of additional paths of inquiry we need to chase down here."
"Sorry." she said innocently.
"Baroness, your upbringing was...atypical. You spent a year in your early teens working for the Exchequer..."
"Interning." Liz pointed out, "Her Majesty put me in the internship while we explored some experimental treatments for a medical condition I was born with, you've got my file there in front of you."
"Yes...you wrote your own waiver."
"I'm a Baroness." Liz shrugged, "I wanted to fly, I can exempt myself at my level, I just can't get into a National Academy or serve in the Regular forces. I had to badger Patrick a LOT to get him to consent to the waiver as my Guardian, but I'm very good at nagging." her semi-serious expression and tone triggered a chuckle from a couple of the officers and one of the other politicians, as well as snickers from the witnesses in the hearing room.
"before that, though-you spent much of your childhood aboard ships..."
"It was safer." Liz asserted, "You know, not trapped at the bottom of a gravity well, subject to random diseases, violence and death-and that's before you add the people to the mix." her eyes twinkled with implied humour.
"...so you think you are familiar enough with Naval operations to lead a formation like your 'Coast Guard'?" the General pressed.
"More qualified than a MechWarrior, sir." she said primly. "We beat the Snow Ravens because my officers and crew are Spacers who sometimes have to fight, and the other guys were just warriors who sometimes go into space. Same way we beat the Falcons at Blackjack when I was fourteen-they tried to fight like Warriors, we just solved ballistic math and hyperspace calculus...with a little bit of psychology mixed in-both times the opposition was predictable because they're really just dirtyfeet with nicer gear, sir. Thanks to the officers working under me, we were able to leverage the difference."
"Can you explain how you did that?"
"do you have three years handy for an apprenticeship?" Liz countered, "because if you don't, my skills in presentation aren't there yet and I really can't explain it to you, you don't have the vocabulary and I don't have the vocabulary to explain it to you...maybe you can get someone whose medals, patches and bars include long-term spaceflight? because they might understand it with the language I can use...so no. Probably not."
"Simplify it as far as you can." The offended General spoke up.
"Oh...kay...Everything in space is motion, timing and math." Elizabeth stated, "with the right training and the right survival gear, I can transit the Tharkad system, using nothing but a six liter can of spray paint, a stopwatch, and a sextant. I can tell you now, it'd take a few months, and I'd probably starve to death along the way, but I can reach any point in a solar system with those basic tools and a pressure suit. Space is big, as in really big, you might think it's a long trip from here to Mount Asgard on foot, but that's peanuts to space, and it's three dimensions before you account for Hyperspace. I can bypass every defense in the Tharkad system with a telescope and some time doing the calculations-those defensive stations are useless as anything but merchant traffic control and potential Targets."
and that got a reaction.
It took several minutes to get the arguing, shouts, and chaos under control.
"Explain that!!" the General barked.
"Okay. You have a cluster of defensive stations at the Zenith, and the Nadir, those are the closest approaches for a stable jump to a fixed location, which is good for commerce." Liz began, "but that's closest approach, savvy? and all your detection gear is pointed at that closest approach, which is how everyone has done it since the Terran Alliance days...and I can walk a battlegroup, theoretical battlegroup, since we don't have one handy-into the system at any time and it'll be undetected, follow some basic ballistic burn paths and my battlegroup can bypass every fixed defense you have up, and if we bother using telescopes in addition to charts? we can do it and your roving DropShip patrols will miss them too, I can have an invasion force sitting in Tharkad orbit before the alarm sounds...and anyone who can manage a basic JumpShip calculator and has good charts can do the same."
"...and how do you know that?"
"Because I can do it" she leaned forward, "and I still haven't earned my Master Navigator's ticket yet. If I can do it someone else can do it, and the reason is because the space system defense in the Tharkad system, which is one of the best defended in human space? is laid out with two dimensional thinking...which is why I can't explain adequately how I beat the Clanners, because it's concepts you don't LEARN on a planetary surface. My god, they fought their warships with full atmosphere! it was like...it was like assassinating kittens, it was practically a canned hunt, General sir-they pinned themselves where they couldn't maneuver and...and they burned." she almost strained as she said it, "They were stunned and they burned when we hit the White Aerie...I saw the ones we recovered, the people lucky enough to survive...they burned sir, and that shirtsleeves atmosphere, it crushed them when we hit them." Her amusement was gone, replaced by horror in her eyes, and her tone, "It smelled like...cooked pork and sewage and blood..." she paused, mastering herself.
"Baroness-"
"NO, this is vital!!" she barked, "They Were CRUSHED AND THEY BURNED WHEN THEY DIDN'T HAVE TO!!" she slammed her hand on the chair, "Because they fought like Warriors and not like Spacers!! shirtsleeves, because they trusted their armor and their 'harjel' and forgot about fire and pressure and shockwaves!! if they had fought like spacers that battleship would not have crushed and burned its crew, because they would have vented atmosphere as soon as hostile contact was made, the crew would have worn spacesuits and not relied on beach balls to keep them alive, they would not have been hanging in low orbit, they would have been out from the well where they could maneuver!...and we would have lost, because they had us on firepower and structural integrity. I didn't 'defeat' them at Blackjack, I let them defeat themselves."
"Uh, Baroness...do you need a moment?" Cecily asked.
"Um...no? I'm fine."
"You are clearly not fine...have you seen any psychiatric counseling for your trauma?"
"Ma'am, I'm fine, the nightmares hardly trouble me." Elizabeth stated, "other than the nightmare of wondering if shoddy practices mean kids like me who aren't Nobles might one day be crushed and burned and suffocate because someone wanted to drink their tea from a cup while in a fight, Ma'am."
"We're going to call a recess, please remain nearby."
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