CHAPTER FOUR
Murphy sat at the helm as the small shuttle rose through clouds. In the copilot’s seat, Harrison O’Hanraghty kept his green eyes glued to an altimeter. Light wavered across his close-cropped auburn hair until the shuttle cleared the thermosphere and they saw the thin blue line of the horizon.
O’Hanraghty snapped a small device into a data port and one corner of his mouth frowned. He drew a metal-cased pen from a slot on his uniform coveralls and jabbed the tip into one side of the control panel.
There was a hiss and a brief shower of sparks.
“One of the microphones was still on,” O’Hanraghty said. “Completely by accident, I’m sure. But we can speak freely, at any rate.”
“If someone was trying to listen in,” Murphy said, “and that wasn’t some innocent glitch, then you’re kind of tipping your hand, no?”
“Letting them get away with it would be even worse, assuming they’ve got a gram of competence,” O’Hanraghty said. “If it was a glitch, then I’ve given our techs something to do. If they think they can catch me on an open mic after four decades in uniform, much of that in the intelligence directorate, then it’s an insult to my competence. They’d be a hell of a lot more surprised if I let them get away with it.”
He shook his head.
“And how about our esteemed political lords and masters?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Everything’s holding up,” Murphy said.
“Yeah? How was your soiree with the rich and powerful? They anoint you with rose water and oil, or is that only after you become a patriarch in the Five Hundred?”
“Overpriced champagne and a lot of posturing,” Murphy said. “I’m the son-in-law to a wealthy scion on his way to punch his career ticket. Social functions like that grease the wheels of the Heart Worlds.”
“And here I thought it was the blood of spacers that turned the cogs,” O’Hanraghty said. “You weren’t invited into a smoke-filled room for a lecture on ‘how things really are’?”
“This deployment is my audition.” Murphy crossed his arms over his chest. “Just have to keep up appearances and then…”
“Then Thakore uses you like a sock puppet when he has to keep everything in line.”
“Then I’m in a position to make some real change,” Murphy said. “We’re so close, Harrison. If the network can deliver, we can finally end this war.”
“You mean ‘win,’ don’t you?”
“Focus on the real threat, Harrison. Fifty-six years of killing League warships—and spacers—and the Federation’s gained nine systems. More than a dozen habitable planets virtually depopulated—thank God no one’s been stupid enough to bring out the world-burners…yet!—and six billion lives lost. So far. With the right push we can end it all. That’s winning to me.”
“Even after what the League did to your father?”
Murphy’s jaw worked slightly.
“Eye-for-an-eye makes every man blind, old friend. We can punish the true monsters in the League and leave the rank and file alone.”
“I remember the interim,” O’Hanraghty said. “Six months of peace talks. Almost believed it would work, but then the League had a coup and hit Naha with enough k-strikes to send the planet into an ice age. No one’s been real interested in peace since then. On either side.”
“That coup…Sure was convenient, wasn’t it?” Murphy observed. “All the senior members of the League government just so happened to be on the same ship when the life-support systems had a sudden and total catastrophic failure. Then the hawks seized power, set up a coalition government, and declared themselves ‘The Accord.’ Just like that. Why, you’d almost think they’d seen it coming or something.”
“Now now.” O’Hanraghty wagged a finger. “Even the truest of true believers in the network won’t go that far. It’s the League. They’re descended from a batch of holdouts who never even wanted to join the old Federated Government back on Earth! They don’t have the sort of robust traditional of peaceful transitions of government we do.”
“Certainly not.” Murphy smirked and adopted a sarcastic tone. “The Federation is the direct heir or the longest tradition of self-rule in human history.”
“And that’s what we let the people believe.” O’Hanraghty leaned forward slightly and tapped a code into a smart screen. “Coming up on the Ishtar now.”
The stupendous Marduk-class FTL carrier’s flanks gleamed with reflected sunlight. She wasn’t the biggest FTLC in the Federation Navy’s inventory—that distinction belonged to the appropriately named Titans, which were eighteen percent longer—but she was still enormous, stretching over four kilometers from the face of her bulbous Fasset drive fan to her autocannon-studded stern. The parasite racks standing out from her core hull like grooved flanges could have accommodated up to six sublight battleships and six cruisers, but they carried only two Canada-class battleships, two Bastogne-class heavy cruisers, and a quintet of Culvern-class destroyers. Unlike their mothership, the parasites were sublight vessels, with neither the drive fan nor the long, tapering hull extension which connected it to Ishtar’s core hull. Compared to the carrier, they seemed almost squat. Even the battleships were barely eight hundred meters long, but they were far more heavily armed than Ishtar. She was accompanied by her sisters, Ereshkigal and Gilgamesh, the rest of Task Force 1705’s carrier group, but the other two ships carried only a single Engineer-class repair tender and a pair of Dromedary-class logistics ships. The rest of the task force’s parasites awaited them at Jalal Station, one of the TFN’s nodal bases in the Fringe.
“How’s Callum?” O’Hanraghty asked.
“Why do you ask?”
“Sir, please. I’m your chief of staff. I exist to keep you out of trouble…and to do everything command related you don’t want to do. I keep Callum out of trouble and that keeps you out of trouble.”
“You know.”
“The head of security at the Spring Mountain owed me a favor.”
“This is my last chance with him.” Murphy sighed. “He’ll end this tour with his head on straight or on his way to being another kid connected to the Five Hundred who’s too rich to fail…and won’t ever succeed at a single thing.”
“I’ll let you know when he needs some fixing,” O’Hanraghty said. “Did he mention the roulette wheel?”
“I heard.”
“And the fish?”
“Fish?”
“Forget I said anything.”
The two watched as they neared the carrier. The glowing void of an open hangar bay grew steadily before them, more than large enough to admit even one of the suborbital passenger transports that plied between continents, yet tiny against the FTLC’s hull. Both of them were accustomed to the scale on which spacrcraft and orbital installations were built, but Ishtar’s sheer enormity dwarfed their shuttle into an insignificant mote.
“Quite the mission,” O’Hanraghty said.
“It will end with total success or complete failure. There’s no room in the middle. We keep our masks on until we can’t keep up the charade, understood?”
“I’ve been mum for years, Sir. You’re the one who has to keep up appearances.”
“Appearances…yes.” Murphy unstrapped as the shuttle slid into the cavernous landing bay. He drifted up out of his seat and used one polished bulkhead for a mirror as he adjusted his gig line to make it crooked and twisted a noncombat medal off kilter.