Chapter 21: Board of Inquiry

Pearson Island was enjoying another wonderful tropical day. A cooling breeze was washing over the place, the palm tree fronds were gently swaying, and children's laughter rang as they played in the swimming pool by the residential quarters.

The adults were not distracted. Their thoughts were deep in the inky cool of space, with the events of the week previously being dissected and analyzed.

The Board of Inquiry had decided to interview several passengers of the SS Bucyrus. As a result, there were a few families — and Mike had decided to both get in his wife's good graces and shamelessly use his family. She'd been upset that he had been in the tropical paradise that was Pearson Island when the President was visiting, and she and the kids had been stuck in the Capitol. This time, his family was temporarily resident in one of the cottages usually reserved for visiting dignitaries. Their "job" was to keep the families from going too bananas, and to keep their ears open and report what they heard back to him.

In addition, the Board itself was there. Corinne had hoped to get her naked butt back up to SFS Uganda, but that proved not to be. Neither had her new friend Wendy managed to return to her usual uniform: the Vice-Admiral had the Board transported down that Sunday afternoon. Wendy and Corinne were sharing a cottage with Mike's aide Yuki Kawamori and Kurt Meier's secretary.

The Admiralty Board of Inquiry consisted of the Vice-Admiral as Chair, the Captain of the SS Oswald Captain Peter Allandale, Captain of the SFS Rhododendron Lieutenant Patricia Semmes, Spican Supreme Court Chief Justice Joanne Windemere and to his utter astonishment, Ambassador Mike Miller. They sat on a raised dais on one side of the reception hall that straddled the middle of the figure-8 shaped island.

Kurt Meier's secretary acted as recording secretary, and Corinne was appointed researcher. Yuki was survivor liaison, and Wendy Tran, feeling much like a fifth wheel with no reason to fly the SFS Uganda's shuttle anywhere until the Admiral was finished, was drafted to act as lifeguard for the children by the pool.

The first two accounts were from the captain of FSF Firespike, Lieutenant Peter DiPaulo and some of his crewmen. They described getting the SOS, setting a course for the beacon, and finding the forward half of Bucyrus tumbling along its line of flight, a corona of destruction expanding from the engineering section far enough behind that the forward section and its inhabitants could survive. They used tractors to slow the forward section, grappled on, and removed the survivors through a connecting tube. Their main issues with the rescue: their own ship's ageing life-support equipment meant the trip back was more hazardous than it should have been. Firespike's medic, Jane Crowley, submitted a recommendation that corvettes' medical supplies be increased; the Firespike had on board more than the levels recommended by the Fleet Office of Medical Standards, and it was nowhere near enough. She'd had to improvise. Not just Lieutenant DiPaulo's fellow officers but the ship's non-commissioned complement all agreed that their Captain had made all the right decisions based on the information available at the time, and in fact with the information they'd had subsequently there wasn't a great deal they could change.

The afternoon they began with the Captain of the Bucyrus, Oleg Gustafson.

"How many crew did the Bucyrus have? I'm not clear on that point," asked Mike.

"An astrogator/helmsman, two helmsmen, three Engineers, an Executive Officer, a ship's purser and myself. Nine in all, and all of us are ticketed ship's trades." He shrugged. "We civilian ships are lightly crewed compared to military vessels."

"And are you all citizens or residents of Arcturus?"

"No, none of us are. Oh, except the junior engineer — he was a last minute addition at Arcturus, as our original junior engineer came down with appendicitis and had to be hospitalized past our departure date. The rest of us are from Deneb Algenib, which is where the ship is registered."

Mike broke in at this point. "I was under the impression this was an Arcturus-flagged vessel?"

"It's hired by the Government of Arcturus, they have no merchant fleet of their own. We typically take their agricultural products to other planets, and return with machinery — they don't have much light industry themselves, and no heavy industry."

"Then would you be in a position to tell the Court why Arcturus has contracted to replace Bucyrus with a new ship?"

"They have to replace it if it gets destroyed performing its duties. It's part of the standard Deneb Algenib contract."

The Admiral resumed questioning the witness. "And it was your engineering officers you lost? Both of the two senior?"

"That's correct. They were good men, they knew what they were doing, and they'd been with Bucyrus for years."

"How old was Bucyrus?"

"About 40 years. Not that old though, the engines were five years' old and still had another five years' expected life on them."

"Can you, in your own words, describe the voyage from the loading at Arcturus to the point where you experienced the casualty of SS Bucyrus?" asked Vice-Admiral Delacroix, in a deceptively mild voice.

"Yes, if it please the Board. We arrived at Arcturus Station and loaded up with the

passengers and their luggage. They were wanting to get away from Arcturus, and fast, too. They were ... ah ... not wanted on their home colony. They hoped to join one that wasn't so, shall we say, smothering."

"Smothering?" Mike asked.

"Yes, seems to have something to do with a local religion that had taken over the government. It's practically a theocracy at the moment, from what I understand."