March 1923 Post Diaspora
“A petty detail. We’re both Marines. Once a Marine, always a Marine.
We’re bound to get along famously.”
—Major Bryce Tarkovsky, Solarian Marines
Courier Boat Charles Davenport,
Galton System.
The streak drive courier boat decelerated steadily towards the heart of the Galton System.
The system primary was a K5v, with six planets and two asteroid belts. Its innermost three planets were of no particular interest to anyone, but Galton-IV, known as Tschermak to its inhabitants, was an Earthlike world. Its surface gravity was about twenty percent greater than Old Terra’s, which produced an atmosphere a bit thicker than humanity’s birthplace, and it was only about six light-minutes from the primary, which gave it a year only half a T-year long. Its size and slow rotational speed, on the other hand, produced a “day” that was over sixty-seven hours long. That was…inconveniently lengthy, so the Tschermakians divided it into two somewhat more manageable thirty-three-hour “day-halves” divided by a seventy-seven-minute Compensate.
The combination of that long day and heavy gravity explained why many of the system’s inhabitants preferred to live elsewhere, although Tschermak did have some spectacular scenery, and the surf and sailing to be found among the Leonard Ocean’s Sanger Islands had to be experienced to be believed.
Of course, ninety-nine percent of all Tschermakians were barred from ever setting foot on those islands…except in menial and closely supervised positions.
The inner asteroid belt, between Galton-IV and Galton-V, was well within the system’s 15.4 LM hyper limit, but not particularly rich in resources. The outer belt, however, was quite another matter. Once upon a time, Galton had boasted nine planets, but that had been before its current outermost planet, Galton-VI, had arrived. Between them, Galton-V and the “nomad” gas giant—a superjovian so massive it fell just short of brown star status—had wreaked havoc on what had been the system’s outermost planets. The astrographic models for what had happened were…confused, but all of them agreed that the nomad’s arrival had knocked the previous outermost planet out of its orbit. Exactly what had happened then was less clear, but evidence suggested a collision—or at least a very, very near miss—between the displaced planet and the next planet in. After that, all bets were off. Everyone agreed it must have been lively as hell, at least on the time scale of a star system, but it had all happened long enough ago that the murdered planets’ broken bones had long since settled into a stable, extraordinarily wide, and even more extraordinarily valuable asteroid belt.
Benjamin Detweiler sat in the small but palatial craft’s main lounge, watching the viewscreen as Galton’s brighter and steadily growing pinprick of brilliance emerged from the starfield. It wasn’t his first visit here, by a long chalk, although only a handful of people in the system knew who he truly was. And, as always, the Charles Davenport’s approach could have served any dictionary as an example of “extreme caution,” because Galton was not a welcoming star system.
The courier boat had emerged well outside the hyper-limit, on a least-time vector for Tschermak. At that range, not even a superdreadnought could have posed a threat to the system, but the diminutive courier’s crew had been only too well aware of the multiply redundant sensor platforms watching their approach. And of the ranks of multidrive missile pods poised to obliterate them if those sensor platforms saw anything they didn’t like.
By the standards of the Grand Alliance, the sensor net was big and clunky, because the Alignment’s FTL communications technology still lagged well behind its adversaries’…and because weapons refits took first place just now and there were only so many things even a system like Galton could upgrade at the same time. As a result, Galton’s current FTL net required a far larger transmitter and a much higher power budget, both of which drove up the size of the platform in which it was mounted, and its bandwidth was far narrower. But it worked, which was what really mattered. And the Alignment’s stealth technology was at least as good as the Grand Alliance’s, which made the passive sensor platforms themselves—and the whisker lasers which connected them to their control platforms—almost impossible to detect.
The control platforms, on the other hand, were almost impossible to hide once they brought their FTL transmitters online; the Alignment’s inability to generate directional grav pulses was another aspect in which its capabilities lagged the Grand Alliance’s. That was why each cluster of sensor platforms was linked to a total of three widely separated control platforms. Only one of them at a time would transmit data to Tschermak and the enormous habitats in orbit around it. The other two provided redundancy, standing ready to replace the first if an enemy managed to localize and destroy it.
Galton’s multidrive missiles were also big and a bit crude by the Grand Alliance’s standards. The Alignment remained unable to match the capabilities of even the Republic of Haven Navy’s current-generation MDMs, far less those of the Royal Manticoran Navy’s FTL-commanded Mark 23. On the other hand, the Alignment had been able to engineer its graserhead down to something that could be stuffed into a really, really big MDM. Those graserheads couldn’t match the multi-targeting capacity of a conventional laserhead, but each hit they did achieve would be devastating.
And all of that concentrated lethality stood ready to blow Charles Davenport out of space if it strayed a single kilometer from its designated vector.
Detweiler wasn’t particularly worried about that, though. It was the job of Davenport’s crew to sweat the details of their approach, and the courier’s recognition code had been transmitted and acknowledged the better part of two hours ago.
No, what worried Detweiler was the reason he’d come and the message he had to deliver. That, and the fact that he was about to find himself admitting—and apologizing for—a rare and potentially painful error. An error whose cost could be high, indeed. He wasn’t looking forward to delivering either of those, but neither would he flinch from the task. Avoiding things like that had never really been an option for him or his clone brothers, and that was even truer now. With their parents’ deaths, leadership of the entire Alignment had devolved onto Benjamin Detweiler’s shoulders, and he would not shirk his responsibilities…or fail the memories of Albrecht or Evelina Detweiler.
GSNSS Francis Crick,
Tschermak Orbit,
Galton System.
Detweiler amused himself, as he followed Hauptmann Chou through the labyrinthine interior of Galton’s largest orbital habitat, by imagining the breadcrumbs he would have had to leave behind to find his way out again. Of course, in reality, he wouldn’t have needed to do any such thing, even if he hadn’t had an officer showing him the way. That was what location monitors and uni-link apps were for. Still, it was a challenging mental exercise.
And one that helped divert him just a bit longer from the true reason for his visit.
He thought he’d written every twist, turn, lift shaft, and interior airlock to memory. Like all of the Detweiler clones, he had a near photographic memory. But he wouldn’t have wanted to stake his life on it, because Crick was huge. True, it was on the small side by the standards of habitats for systems like Sol or Beowulf. For that matter, it was far from the biggest platform in Tschermak orbit. Several other habitats were considerably larger, and the orbital industrial platforms dwarfed the station. But at somewhere north of 48,000,000 tons, it was certainly the largest mobile structure ever built.
On the other hand, Crick hadn’t been built primarily as an industrial node or to provide space for population expansion, like those other habitats had been. Oh, there were close to two billion people in the Galton System, counting both its orbital habitats and the genetic slaves who lived on Tschermak, at the bottom of the planetary gravity well, and it was true that almost a million of those people did live aboard Crick. But the true reason the station was so immense was because it was really a fortress, not what people usually meant by the term “habitat,” at all.
There were many ways to defend a vessel or an installation. Armor, obviously, as well as defensive weapons, like counter-missiles, point defense lasers, ECM, gravity sidewalls, fitting even something Crick’s size with impellers to generate a wedge…The list was a long one. But one of the surest ways to strengthen something was, and probably always would be, the most straightforward method: make it massive. There was an old saying that quantity has a quality all its own. That wasn’t quite as true of fortresses as it was of other things, given the destructiveness of modern weaponry, but it was still true enough to be going on with.
And the other way to defend a vessel or an installation was to provide it with the most potent possible offensive weapons, as well. To pack it with the sort of horrific firepower that would destroy any adversary before he got into his own range of it.
Orbital habitats seldom mounted weapons at all. Since the best way to insure one would be shot at was to have the ability to shoot at someone else, habitat designers normally incorporated only defensive systems of the sort unlikely to turn their handiwork into magnets for incoming fire. Galton wasn’t like other star systems, however, and Crick’s designers had incorporated both approaches into not just Crick, but many of the other platforms. Although few of those designers had known that every human being, every orbital weapons platform, every shipyard here in Galton was its own defense for something else entirely.
Every time he visited the system, Detweiler thought of the peculiar logic that had led to Galton’s creation. No, not to its creation, but to its…repurposing. It was simultaneously the crudest—and yet, perhaps, the most cunning—of the Alignment’s strategies. Build one of the most powerfully fortified star systems in the human-occupied galaxy, make it the Alignment’s primary industrial and command node outside the Mesa System itself, central to all of its goals and purpose…
And all with the final purpose—if need be—to be sacrificed.
Hopefully, it would never come to that. But in the end, Galton had become a disguise—an illusion. His brother Collin called it a cloak for destiny, but Collin, despite his pragmatic mindset as the Alignment’s spy chief, was given to occasional bouts of what their undutiful youngest brother Gervais called “artsy-fartsy” language. And it wasn’t as if that had always been Galton’s purpose. But if the day came that the Alignment ever found its back to the wall, Galton would take the fall to conceal the existence of the Alignment’s true final redoubt.
When Galton was first selected as the Alignment’s ultimate off-Mesa operational base, no one had even considered that sort of a requirement. The Detweiler Plan had always called for the secret colonization and massive industrialization of the Alignment’s own star system, for a multitude of reasons. One huge consideration had been the unavoidable need for the sort of base that could build and crew the level of firepower the plan would eventually require. And another had been as a bolthole, an escape hatch down which the Alignment could disappear in the eventuality that it was forced to flee the Mesa System.
Galton’s discovery had been a happy and unexpected bit of serendipity. Star density was sparse in the system’s region, and the majority of those stars were typical, useless red dwarfs. Long-range observation had suggested that the K5v listed as ACR-1773-16 might possess both significant asteroids and a planet in the liquid-water zone. The odds had been at best marginal, however, and there’d been very little pressure to expand into the region two hundred and sixty years ago. Indeed, there was little reason to do so even today…although that owed a little something to the Alignment’s intervention.
But despite the lack of pressure those two and a half T-centuries ago, the Qaisrani Consortium, a barely profitable exploration group based on Larkana in the Istvan System, had decided to give it a look anyway, since one of its vessels would be passing within a half dozen light-years on its way to survey a much more promising star. The Anoosheh Kashani’s skipper had never expected to stumble across a system with both a habitable planet and the orbital cornucopia of ACR-1773-16’s asteroid belts. The outermost belt, especially, would have made it exceptionally valuable to any industrial base, even without the world that ultimately became Tschermak. Indeed, the entire star system would have proved the sort of treasure trove that might come along once in the corporate lifetime of a hardscrabble consortium like Qaisrani…except that it had never learned of it.
Qaisrani was one of dozens—scores, really—of small, independent freight and exploration concerns which served as local carriers and agents of the Jessyk Combine, the Mesa System’s largest single shipping company. Jessyk’s reputation was no better than that of most Mesan transstellars, but neither was it any worse, and its clandestine connections to Manpower were a well-hidden secret. But its web of contacts had proved invaluable to the Alignment on more than one occasion, and Galton was a sterling case in point. Indeed, it and the system known as Darius were the crown jewels of Jessyk’s gifts.
Anoosheh Kashani’s captain, one of the Qaisrani Consortium’s skippers who’d done business directly with Jessyk in the past, had been selling survey data to Jessyk on the side for years. Most of it had been fairly penny-ante, given the fact that Qaisrani scarcely stood at the pinnacle of the exploration industry. But she’d strongly suspected that for this sort of system, Jessyk would be able—and willing—to pay her much more than the finder’s commission payable under her contract with Qaisrani. The fact that Qaisrani legally owned any survey data Anoosheh Kashani turned up had been a minor problem for that plan, but she’d convinced the rest of her nine-person crew (whose shares of the finders’ commission would have been even smaller than her own) to conceal the data until they’d had a chance to…discuss it with the Jessyk agent in Istvan.
Fortunately for the Alignment, the agent in question had seen interesting possibilities, despite the system’s remote location. He’d agreed to pay Captain Zardari and her crew ten times what Qaisrani would have paid them…and he’d still been able to take it out of petty cash. In return, they’d submitted an official survey report showing no habitable planets and substantially understating the number—and, especially, the richness—of ACR-1773-16’s asteroid belts. There were plenty of other, more conveniently located systems with resource bases at least as rich as the one Anoosheh Kashani had reported, so the agent had expected the falsified report to head off any interest in the system until Jessyk decided what it wanted to do with it.
It was unfortunate for him that his report to the home office had come to a senior manager who’d happened to be a member in good standing of the Alignment…and who had decided that Jessyk didn’t need to know about it, either. Instead, he’d handed it to the Alignment’s leadership, who’d known exactly what they wanted to do with it and taken steps to be sure they could.
Anoosheh Kashani had, tragically, failed to return from her next survey mission. And, equally tragically, the Jessyk agent in Istvan had suffered a fatal air car accident about the time the ship should have returned, thus eliminating anyone who might have disputed the survey report Zardari had filed.
It had been the perfect sleight of hand, Detweiler thought now. One of the potential problems for any “secret colony” was that stars with habitable planets might attract hopeful survey crews or even entire colony expeditions who weren’t aware those stars already belonged to someone else, and who would then have to be “disappeared” lest the secret be lost. But ACR-1773-16 had already been surveyed—the official survey record on was on file to prove it…and confirmed there was zero reason for anyone else ever to visit it.
And so Galton had come into existence.
The Alignment’s presence in the system had been small, initially, but it had always been intended to grow to at least its present numbers. And it was remarkable how rapidly population could be produced using the cloning technology Manpower—and the Alignment—had refined to a pinnacle of efficiency. The initial startup cost had been a little steep, but it had also been well within the Alignment’s capabilities. And once a modest industrial base had been established, Galton had become a self-sustaining, self-replicating entity that no longer really required much in the way of outside funding or imported parts.
Of course, at the time, no one in the Alignment had expected to turn up a previously unknown wormhole in the Felix System, less than thirty years later. The wormhole in question connected Felix to the even more remote Darius System, the next best thing to a thousand light-years from Mesa. Despite which, transit time from Mesa to Darius was enormously shorter than from Mesa to Galton—less than two weeks—thanks to the Warner-Mannerheim hyper bridge.
It had been something of an embarrassment of riches, but the possibilities for maximum concealment had been too good to pass up. There’d been some thought of moving the Galton project to Darius, instead, but from the beginning, the Detweiler Plan had thought in terms of concentric security. And so the Alignment had launched a second secret colony system, with its own industrial infrastructure and its own shipyards, but without any known connection to Galton.
Galton had become precisely what it had initially been intended to be: the Mesan Alignment’s personal industrial complex and private shipyard and the primary point of contact through which the leadership in the Mesa System communicated with its out-system infrastructure.
For all of its many virtues, however, Galton was poorly placed for rapid communication with the rest of the human-occupied galaxy. From the viewpoint of concealment, that was a good thing. From the viewpoint of coordinating networks of agents and multiple field operations, it was…less desirable. That was the reason—so far as Galton knew—why the Alignment’s uppermost echelons had chosen to remain in place, hidden away on Mesa, rather than simply relocate to Galton.
The Alignment had, however, used Galton as the site for its military command structure, the location of its vital industrial structure, the home of its cutting-edge research and development, and the repository for its most sensitive records. Almost all of the entire Alignment’s actual organizational structure—the staff and hierarchy which formed its true skeleton, its most critical physical assets—had been moved entirely to Galton.
That was what Galton believed, at any rate…and it was largely true.
It simply wasn’t the only truth.
There was an entire hidden network of Alignment bases tucked away around the galaxy. Most operated clandestinely, in inhabited star systems whose citizens never suspected the Alignment’s presence, although others were in uninhabited systems chosen as strategically located support bases for the Alignment’s black ops. And all of them truly were administered through Galton. Its inconvenient location meant there was always provision for direct communication of orders and directives from Mesa in time-sensitive situations, but those were rare and always attended with a certain degree of risk. The critical strategic decisions were always made on Mesa, but most operational planning to implement those decisions originated in Galton, and any message traffic that wasn’t time-critical went from Mesa, via a single secure channel, to Galton, which saw that it was distributed to its recipients.
Because of its location and function, Galton also housed the Alignment’s equivalent of its general staff college and the offices—and staffs—of its army’s chief of staff and her naval counterpart. The Office of Strategic Planning, responsible for overseeing the entire Detweiler Plan’s operations on a day-by-day basis, was located in Galton, as well, although like the Navy and Army, it received its ultimate direction from Mesa.
In short, Galton was the very heart—and the soul—of the Alignment. It simply wasn’t the Alignment’s brain. Or, at least, not its entire brain. The temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes, yes, and the brain stem, as well. But not the frontal lobe, where the executive functions resided. That remained on Mesa, although it communicated with the rest of the Alignment’s body through Galton.
But what only a tiny handful of people in Galton knew was that even though all of that was true, it was simultaneously a lie. Only they knew that a system named Darius existed. Only they knew that every single record, every single bit of research, every single plan created in Galton was transmitted to Darius, as well, where it was tucked away in the Alignment’s true secret archives. Only they knew that other researchers, other military planners, pursued their own R&D programs and evolved their own operational plans based upon and integrated with the ones coming out of Galton, but separate from them. And only they knew about the secret communications channels which let Darius insert its own contributions into Galton’s research programs and operational planning.
And only that tiny handful knew that Galton was the Alignment’s queen, not its king.
Which was just as well, because that meant that only that tiny handful understood that the Alignment was prepared, if it must, to sacrifice its queen to avoid checkmate.
No one had really expected to need to do anything of the sort, but the Alignment hadn’t survived this long by preparing only for problems it expected to arise.
Of course, sometimes it still got bitten on the ass by one of those unexpected problems, Detweiler reflected sourly. Some of those could hurt—badly, and that was particularly true for the unintended consequences of its own actions. Like the consequences of the war the Alignment had done all in its power to keep alive between Manticore and Haven. The weapons technology the combatants had developed was ultimately at the root of the Alignment’s currently…precarious position. Both because its threat had forced the Alignment to act precipitously—and much more openly than was its wont—in an effort to neutralize Manticore, and because those actions had, indirectly, led to the formation of the Grand Alliance. And that had led not simply to the invasion and conquest of the Mesa System, but to the utter and ignominious defeat of the vaunted Solarian League in only a fraction of the time the Alignment’s strategy had allowed for…and depended upon.
In point of fact, the Detweiler Plan had gone well and truly off the rails it had followed so smoothly for so many centuries. The situation wasn’t irretrievable, but it was going to require a lot of rethinking…which was, ultimately, what brought him here today.
They needed time—a minimum of twenty or thirty T-years, and preferably at least twice that—to recoup their losses and go so deeply to ground that even those pestiferous Manticorans and Havenites would decide the Alignment no longer existed.
Twenty or thirty T-years that could prove very expensive.
Fortunately, Galton was a treasure.
“Here we are, Sir,” Hauptmann Chou said, as they reached the command deck hatch.
Like that of the Andermani Empire, Galton’s military system had derived from an ancient German model, rather than the Anglo-French system adopted by the Solarian League and the military forces of most star nations descended from it.
That, too, was part of the deception.
Darius’s military used the more customary system. So did Mesa’s. Galton’s use of the German variant was simply another of the Alignment’s many deceptive maneuvers. The ancient Russians had called such maneuvers maskirovka—disguise. That had always seemed fitting to Detweiler, since a large portion of his family’s genetic line had a Russian origin. He’d wondered, occasionally, if that was why they were such masters of the art of maskirovka.
Galton’s underlying structure had been deliberately crafted to be as different from Darius’s as possible. Or perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that Darius, the younger child, had been deliberately designed to differ from Galton. And as part of that deliberate differentiation, Galton was a harsher, harder, and far more militant entity than Darius had ever been. It was also the reason that even though Galton’s cloned workforce might not be called slaves they were still indentured servants—workers indentured for a lifetime and, at best, a step below Mesa’s seccies. Galton never treated them with the brutality of Manpower, their physical standard of living was actually quite good, and the perversions routinely practiced upon “pleasure slaves” were strictly prohibited, but they remained noncitizens, with no voice in their governance, their employment, the place they lived…
Darius’s cloned workforce had never been slaves, never been indentured. Like every Dariusan, their lives were more regimented than they might have been elsewhere, but that was because of the great cause in which they, just as much as any alpha- or beta-line member of the Alignment, were fully invested. And that, too, was part of the plan.
Ultimately, both Galton and Darius must emerge from the shadows, and there would be no way to hide the fact that both were systems secretly colonized from Mesa, both deeply committed to overturning the Beowulf Code’s prohibitions on targeted genetic uplift. But if only a tiny handful of Galtonians knew about Darius, the number of Dariusans who knew of Galton’s existence was almost equally small.
Not quite as small, but nearly, and there was a reason for that, as well, because Darius had been colonized by a faction within the Alignment which had learned of Galton and been horrified by it.
When the time came to step into the light, Galton would be the lair of the dark, ruthless warrior of the Detweiler Plan, while Darius would be the refuge of the compassionate, caring heart of a Mesan Alignment which would never have dreamed of imposing its views upon the galaxy by force. Indeed, the historical record Darius presented to the galaxy—a record which consisted of contemporaneous documents, the validity of which could be conclusively substantiated by internal dating—would prove that its founders had subscribed to the Detweiler Plan but been deeply disturbed by the level of militancy—and, especially, the Manpower-like denial of full rights to its cloned workers—implicit in the early plans for the Galton colony.
They’d realized they would never be able to accomplish their goals—peaceful, beneficent goals—operating in semi-secrecy on Mesa or in the militant, authoritarian environment Galton was intended to become. And so they’d taken a page from the same playbook but rejected that book’s willingness to impose its views upon others by force. Their response had only been possible because of the serendipitous discovery of Darius by their friends in Mannerheim, but when the opportunity to create a haven divorced from the dark strands they saw weaving their way into Galton presented itself, they had seized it eagerly.
The timing had worked well. Given the later date of Darius’s discovery, it had been simple to create a proper paper trail from the very beginning, with no need to go back and doctor existing records. It had even been early enough to begin pushing Galton into a far greater militancy than the original plans for the colony had envisioned, enhancing the differences between Leonard Detweiler’s estranged stepdaughters. And when the time came, the people of Darius would be horrified by the excesses Galton had committed, just as their own colony’s founders had feared it might. But the fact that Galton had resorted to such criminal, malignant tactics would not sway the Dariusans’ adherence to the purpose for which their own star system had been settled—the genetic uplift of all humanity.
Hopefully, that would still be the way things worked out.
But if it didn’t…
Two guards flanked the hatch leading into Crick’s command deck. “Command deck” took in rather more territory, in this instance, than the term usually suggested, since this section of the station contained not only Crick’s tactical command center but also, two decks above that, the primary central command nexus for the entire system. That nexus was backed up aboard three other orbital installations, but the one aboard Crick was the one that really mattered.
The one where the secrets no one else in Galton could be allowed to know were hidden safely away.
The sentries flanking the hatch were alert. They also weren’t given to cutting corners, so it took Detweiler more than a minute to pass their security scrutiny.
He found that a little amusing. Every time he visited Galton he wondered if they’d insist on taking urine and blood samples on top of all the other techniques they used to make sure he was really who he claimed to be. So far they hadn’t—which was fortunate, since he would have refused to give them any genetic material.
There was some information the Alignment didn’t allow into anyone’s database, even the one in Crick. And first and foremost among that information was the fact that the Detweiler genome still survived. Galtonians understood that operational security—the god in whose name their entire star system had been settled—meant the identities of its leadership on Mesa must be and remain an incredibly closely held secret. Benjamin had been here many times, but all anyone in Galton knew—well, almost anyone in Galton knew—was that he was a senior courier for the Mesa-based leadership.
His Iridium Level ID, which did contain biometric data that matched the security file assigned to the (false) name it bore, sufficed once again, however. Although, to their credit, the guards didn’t seem all that impressed by the towering seniority an Iridium ID indicated. Detweiler didn’t mind that one bit. Galton’s culture had been deliberately shaped to be as militaristic as possible. One could hardly complain if people one had spent two centuries turning into Prussians insisted on behaving like Prussians.
The atmosphere lightened quite a bit once he entered the command deck. Most of the officers stationed there were part of the onion’s penultimate core. Only two of them were part of the true center, what he thought of as Detweiler Territory. So most of them were unaware of Galton’s possible final destiny. But they knew almost everything else concerning the Alignment’s goals, strategies, and methods.
A very tall, uniformed woman wearing the insignia of an oberst came toward him, her hand outstretched.
“Welcome aboard, Benjamin,” she said as they shook hands.
“Chuntao. Nice to see you again.”
Oberst Xú Chuntao gestured toward a hatch on the other side of the compartment.
“Generalfeldmarshall Adebayo’s waiting for you,” she said. “So is Grossadmiral Montalván.”
That pair were the two—the only two—permanently stationed in the Galton System who lived in Detweiler territory, and Adebayo must have deduced that he hadn’t come on a routine visit. Normally, she and Montalván maintained a certain distance from each other—not because of any actual friction between them, but because of the public friction between their services’ competing needs—as a simple safety precaution. As a last resort, the Alamo Contingency was supposed to trigger automatically, but even the best automatic plans could fail, and it would be far better to have at least one of them in charge all the way to the end.
As he followed the oberst across the compartment, Detweiler reminded himself not to use the term “Detweiler Territory” in front of the two people he was about to meet. That was merely a label he and his brothers used in private. The Detweiler line was the final authority in the Alignment, true—and it had been, going all the way back to the beginning. But there were around a dozen other lines that were also very influential…including the Adebayo and Montalván lines.
From the outside, someone might have characterized the Alignment’s power structure as dynastic rule. But it wasn’t, at least…not quite.
That same outside observer could have been excused, had he been allowed to delve a little deeper, for deciding the Alignment’s system was very like that used on Erewhon, and there were definite similarities. In some ways, Detweiler and his brothers had joked among themselves, it could be argued that the Detweilers (as a group, not individually) were the capo di tutti capi of the Alignment’s central genetic lines, but their authority went deeper than that.
Both the Alignment and Erewhon’s system were sternly, even harshly, meritocratic, but the Erewhonese system lacked the scientific precision that characterized the Alignment. They paid no attention to anyone’s genetic background; they simply used the catch-as-catch-can methods of extreme pragmatists.
To the Erewhonese, a person was simply as she or he was. The Alignment understood that what lay beneath was a coherent evolutionary logic…which the Alignment had been created to guide.
Where the process would lead over time, no one—outside the Alignment—yet knew. But that was the entire point of the Detweiler Plan. Evolution was too important, too fundamental to the human condition, to be left to chance. Oh, there would always be chance mutations, unplanned genetic combinations, and the variety those introduced would be of inestimable value to the final process. But they would be variations on the central theme, and that theme would be firmly under the control of conductors who understood the score.
Conductors best suited by both evolution and training to provide the necessary guidance, to decide what chance mutation should be conserved, which lines it should be adapted to, and which mutations should be pruned. And that was why the Detweiler Line was not simply “first among equals.” The other central lines might be advisors, strategists, analysts. They were, in many ways, the people who trained and educated each generation of Detweilers, who formed the true heart of the Alignment’s collective memory. But they were the peers of the realm, not its princes. All of their lines held chairs around the Round Table which had been created by Leonard Detweiler’s true heirs so long before, but only one of those lines bore Excalibur.
The Detweiler Plan’s original intent had been quite similar in some ways, really, to that of Plato in The Republic: the evolution of a collective version of his philosopher-kings. But it had become evident as time passed and understanding deepened that something more…fundamental was required. That producing a collective version of any one ideal human race, even one of philosopher-kings, was a suboptimal outcome.
No, what was needed was another speciation of humanity—one that was planned and coordinated, this time, and resulted in the emergence of a cluster of closely related species. Specialization had great benefits, after all. Each species would have its own strengths and abilities, and its proper place in the structure of intelligent life.
With one species to rule them all, of course.
It was too bad he wouldn’t live to see the final outcome. Not even the most optimistic projections for saw a final triumph of the Detweiler Plan for several more centuries. And while Detweilers were long-lived, even by prolong standards, no one was that long-lived.
Yet.
* * *
Oberst Xú ushered Detweiler to the hatch of Generalfeldmarshall Karoline Adebayo’s working office and tapped the admittance button lightly. The door slid open almost instantly, and the oberst braced to attention, nodded to him, and withdrew as he stepped through the door.
“Welcome, Benjamin,” Adebayo said, rising from an armchair and nodding for him to join her and Grossadmiral Montalván in the office’s comfortably appointed conversational nook. “Come have a seat. Rest your weary bones.”
Given Galton’s militant nature, it was inevitable that its governor would be a military officer, and Adebayo made a very good one. She was a striking figure, not just because of her height but because of the combination of her very dark skin with an aquiline nose and light green eyes. The contrast with Guenther Montalván was so great it was almost comical. He was short and squat—muscle, not fat—with very pale eyes, hair, and skin.
Detweiler smiled and lowered himself into a facing chair.
“I’m not all that creaky, Karoline,” he protested, as she sank back into her own chair, and she issued a little snort.
“If your bones aren’t weary from muscular tension, I’m going to have some harsh words for my orbital commanders. Anyone who goes through the sort of gauntlet you had to pass through to get here should damn well be exhausted. In spirit, if not in body.”
“So, what’s up, Benjamin?” Montalván asked. “We weren’t expecting to see you again this soon.”
“Basically—” He drew a slow, deep breath. “Basically, I came to apologize. Well, that and to give you a qui vive.”
Adebayo and Montalván’s postures stiffened. They glanced at one another, then back at Detweiler, eyebrows rising.
“Apologize for what?” Adebayo asked.
“Now that some time’s passed, my brothers and I have come to realize that we screwed up with the Beowulf strike.” He shifted in his chair, uncomfortably. “I’m afraid we let our tempers get the better of us. We were very close to our parents, you know. And we lost them when Albrecht blew the island because the damned Grand Alliance arrived early.”
“Ah.”
Adebayo settled back in her own chair with a nod of understanding.
For self-evident reasons, she and Montalván had known the organizational framework of Houdini from the beginning. And almost eighty percent of everyone Houdini had extracted had ended up in Galton, so the fact that Houdini had been activated was general knowledge here in the system.
What had not yet become generally known was Houdini’s end game. Beyond Adebayo and Montalván, no more than half a dozen people knew how many of the Alignment’s own had died in the final stage of the operation, and of that half-dozen, only Adebayo and Montalván had known the Detweiler genome existed…or that Benjamin’s parents had sacrificed themselves to make Houdini work.
“Exactly.” Benjamin’s nostrils flared. “We let our anger—and our pain, but anger was the real driver—dictate our plans, not logic. Not…rational thought.”
“And you think we showed our hand a little too much,” Adebayo said.
“More than a little, and that wasn’t the only…miscalculation we made,” Detweiler replied grimly. “We shouldn’t have given the order at all, we shouldn’t have supported it with tech the Solarian League didn’t have, and we should have aborted it when the original attack failed, not pressed on. And—” his nostrils flared “—we should have seen where that kind of casualty total was going to lead.”
She nodded and crooked her fingers in a silent invitation to continue.
“The support we provided might have been ascribed to the Sollies,” Detweiler told them. “If that bitch Harrington hadn’t taken Ganymede station and gotten her hands on every single SLN tech file and R and D program, that is.” He shrugged. “We didn’t anticipate that happening. Once it did, there was no way anyone could believe the Sollies were behind it—or not without one hell of a lot of outside help, anyway.
“And—” he looked at them squarely “—we should have been smart enough to instruct our agent in-system to abort if the Sollies had been driven off by the time he was in position to transmit the detonation command.
“It was the casualty totals that drove the Alliance to send Harrington to the Sol System in the first place. All of our intelligence indicates that she—and Elizabeth, Pritchart, and Mayhew—all knew who’d actually orchestrated it.” He grimaced. “Truth to tell, we wanted to ‘send a message.’ That’s why we sequenced the explosions the way we did. Which was angry—and incredibly stupid—of us. I think that’s pretty evident from what happened to the League. The Grand Alliance knew the Sollies hadn’t actually planted those bombs, but they didn’t really care. They knew we were using the League as a catspaw, even if they didn’t have a clue why we’d maneuvered them into conflict in the first place, and they decided to end it. That was…unfortunate enough, but one of the reasons they decided that was to free their hands to look for us. And the way we did it is likely to lend more credence than we’d like to their insistence to the rest of the galaxy that the entire war was the work of some long-standing, deeply hidden conspiracy.”
Montalván shrugged.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about it, Benjamin. After what’s happened over the past T-year, there’s so much confusion and rumormongering in what still passes for the Solarian League that the Beowulf Strike will sink out of sight fairly quickly, at least as far as the Solly public is concerned. Oh, they’ll remember that the casualties were horrific, but it happened during a war, you know. And they’re so busy trying to put the actual war behind them that any impact the death toll might have had on Solly thinking will fade soon enough. That won’t happen in Beowulf, of course. Or in the Grand Alliance. But they already believed the worst of us.”
“And I think you may be overlooking a benefit,” Adebayo added.
“Benefit?”
Detweiler arched both eyebrows at her, and she smiled thinly.
“You don’t live here in Galton, the way Guenther and I do. Sometimes, I think, even you don’t fully appreciate the differences between here and Darius. Galton is a warrior society, Benjamin. When word hit that Beowulf’s three largest orbital habitats had been destroyed, there were celebrations all over the system. Almost as big as the ones after Oyster Bay!”
She shook her head.
“Nobody in Galton knows how Oyster Bay was actually staged, but they think they do, and they see the Beowulf Strike the same way.”
Detweiler nodded. The Oyster Bay strike on the Manticore System had, of necessity, been launched from Darius and not Galton because Galton didn’t know about the spider drive. That had sprung from R&D conducted here in Galton, but it had been developed in Darius. As a result, the Galton Space Navy had no equivalent of the graser torpedo or of the Sharks which had deployed them for the strike. But Galton’s industrial base had shipped off over a thousand of its graserhead MDMs well before Oyster Bay, and Adebayo’s files—files which were replicated on the backup command stations, not stored solely on Crick—contained the operational plan for those MDMs to be deployed by “conventional”—but highly stealthy—freighters for the attack. And there were equally official files detailing the post-strike damage assessments…and how the specialized graser platforms which had plowed the road for the Beowulf Strike had been deployed from Galton, not Darius. The MDM conversions described in the Galton files (and built and shipped off) were far less capable than the platforms which had actually been used, but since those platforms had destroyed themselves in the moment they fired, no one would ever know that.
But if they ever had the chance to capture Adebayo’s files, they would know neither strike had come from Darius.
“I understand that,” he said. “It’s just—”
“Don’t worry about it,” she told him even more firmly. “Yes, there could be a downside. I understand that. I’m just saying that there’s a hell of an upside, as well, in terms of morale and purpose here in Galton. Guenther and I couldn’t have stifled those celebrations even if we’d tried.”
“Which we didn’t,” Montalván said. “Karoline is right about the way our people here reacted, and she’d right about the long-term advantages, at least here in Galton. Are there going to be negative consequences down the road? Maybe. But we don’t know that…and there’s no point borrowing trouble before it comes on its own.” He smiled crookedly at Detweiler. “Look, let’s be blunt about this, Benjamin. The reason you came to apologize was because you think you probably brought the Alamo Contingency closer and that makes you feel guilty. Well, maybe you did, but maybe you didn’t, either. And if it turns out you did, so what? Karoline and I knew—and accepted—that possibility when we took this assignment. I won’t say I’m looking forward to it, but if it happens, it happens. I’m good with that.”
“I’m good with it, too, Benjamin.” Adebayo rose and headed toward a sidetable. “Apology accepted—and now that the formalities are over, what would you like to drink?”
Hadcliffe Residential Tower,
City of Mendel.
Planet Mesa,
Mesa System.
The young woman who answered the door was familiar to Anton Zilwicki. Not because he’d ever met her before, but because he’d been studying her from a distance lately.
She looked like her oldest brother Jack, he thought, allowing for being ten years younger and female…and for her hair color. Jack’s hair had been red; hers was blond. But she had the same blue eyes and a more feminine version of the same chin, coupled with a slim and athletic figure. Pretty, in a low-keyed sort of way.
Allowing for the scowl on her face, anyway.
“Ms. McBryde?” he said. “My name is—”
“I know who you are, Zilwicki. What do you want?”
“I was wondering if you might give me a bit of your time. There’s something I’d like to discuss with—”
“No.”
She started to close the door, but Zilwicki stopped that with a palm placed on it.
“Fine!” she snapped, reaching for something on the inside of the doorframe. Zilwicki couldn’t see it, but he was quite sure it was a control panel. Once she touched it, not even someone with his strength would be able to keep the door open. And if he tried to force his way through, the door would pin him in place, allowing her to summon the police.
He dropped his hand, and the door closed.
“I know what happened to your brothers, Ms. McBryde,” he said through the shrinking gap. The door closed completely right after “brothers.”
Three seconds later, it slid back open.
“Both of them,” he added. “I know exactly what happened to Jack, and I have a general idea of what happened to Zach.”
Her face was noticeably paler than it had been when she opened the door. The scowl was gone, too.
“How do you know?” she asked. It was almost a whisper.
“I was in touch with Jack when he died, and I’ve been able to trace where Zach went after he left Mesa—up to a point, at least.”
“Zach’s still alive?” That was said in a whisper.
“Probably,” Zilwicki said. “I can’t be positive, but he was at the last point I tracked him—which was days after he was supposed to have been killed in a so-called terrorist incident.”
She put her hand on the doorframe, leaned her head against it, and closed her eyes.
“Why should I believe you’re telling the truth? You—all of you—have been slandering us ever since you conquered Mesa. Besides, Planetary Security told us the Ballroom killed Jack. And that you and your friend Cachat were responsible for it!”
She opened her eyes, without removing her head from her hand, and gave him an accusing look.
“Victor and I were on Mesa when Jack died,” Zilwicki confirmed. “However, if you’ll think about it, the same people who said we were responsible for his death are undoubtedly the people who announced that we’d been blown up in a nuclear explosion of our own making. Which, obviously, we weren’t. So I think it could be argued that what they told you might be just a tiny bit inaccurate.”
Her accusing eyes narrowed slightly, and he shrugged.
“Apropos your other point, about people slandering the Alignment, I’ve come to believe that you’re right about that. It’s…a bit more complicated than that, though, because until recently, we didn’t think we were. Slandering you, I mean. And we had our reasons to call the people who really caused all of this the ‘Mesan Alignment.’ For that matter, we still do.”
He paused for a moment, returning her stare with a calm gaze.
“Ms. McBryde, I really do think you should talk to me.” Moving a bit slowly, so as not to alarm her, he pulled a chip from his pocket. “This is the final record we’ve found of Zach’s whereabouts. It’s also a recording of my last meeting with Jack, which happened shortly before he died.”
She stood up straight and seemed to brace herself. Her shoulders squared, her hands at her side.
“So he met with you? You’re telling me he was a traitor?”
“The Alignment would certainly think so. Not your people, but what I think—now—is a different Alignment. One that used you exactly the same way it’s used a lot of people over the years. Including the Star Empire, the Republic of Haven, and the entire Solarian League.”
“You’re a lunatic,” she said flatly.
“No, I’m not.” Zilwicki shook his head. “And Jack really did work for Alignment Security, not Planetary Security. That was just his ‘day job.’”
“Of course he worked for Alignment Security! We all knew that. But if you’d paid any attention at all to what we’ve been telling you ever since you got here, you’d know that ‘Alignment Security’s’ entire job was just to help us stay under the radar! Jack worked with Planetary Security because it gave him the tools and the access he needed for that, not for some horrible, sinister fabrication of your own sick imagination.”
“No,” Zilwicki said gently. “Oh, there was an Alignment Security that did just that, and Jack was a member of it. But that different Alignment I’m talking about used your Alignment’s ‘Security’ just the way it used all the rest of you. As a cover and a mask. Ms. McBryde, Planetary Security knew all about your Alignment. So it made perfect sense for the other Alignment to plant its people in Planetary Security under the cover of working for a harmless, idealistic organization. Especially people like Jack, who were very, very good at their jobs. In fact, he was so good that none of you—none of the people who loved him, and who he loved, because, believe me, he did love you—ever suspected the truth any more than Planetary Security did.”
She stared at him, her lips trembling, and he shook his head.
“He deceived you because that was his job. His responsibility. And to keep all of you safe, because he knew the stakes he was playing for. He didn’t want that side of his life to splash onto you, endanger you. But he did work for that other Alignment…until he truly realized where it was headed. That’s when he realized he couldn’t do that anymore. Ms. McBryde, that’s why he contacted me…and why he was the one who set off the explosion that destroyed the Androcles Tower.”
Her face was now almost as pale as the proverbial sheet. Androcles Tower’s destruction had been the first blast of the Green Pines “terrorist attack.”
“W-why would he do that?”
“Because he was one of the bravest men I ever met,” Zilwicki said quietly. “Because he’d been discovered by that other Alignment attempting to smuggle a dissident scientist off-planet, and there was no way he could escape. So instead of surrendering, which would have amounted to a death sentence anyway—those people are utterly ruthless—he chose to take a lot of them out with him. That also had the effect of covering the escape of the scientist—his friend. And my escape, as well, since I was helping him.”
Arianne was silent for a while staring at him.
“But why Androcles?” She shook her head. “I never understood that. It didn’t make any more sense than the explosion in Buenaventura Tower!”
“The explosion wasn’t in Androcles Tower; it was under it, in something called the Gamma Center.”
“Gamma Center,” she repeated, her voice almost numb, and Zilwicki nodded.
“As nearly as we’ve been able to figure out, it was the central security installation for the Align—oh, for the moment, let’s call them the ‘Malign Alignment.’” He shook his head again. It was a minimal sort of headshake. “Personally, I consider your brother a hero, and I think the whole galaxy will agree with me once the truth comes out. ‘Betraying’ the Malign Alignment is like accusing someone of betraying Satan. Good for him.”
Her shoulders sagged. But she also stepped away from the door, opening it wide.
“Come in. I’ll listen to what you have to say.”
* * *
After the chip’s recordings ended—she’d played them on her living room smartwall—Arianne’s hands were clasped tightly in her lap.
“How do I know these recordings aren’t faked? You have a reputation—I don’t know if you deserve it, but you’ve got it—of being a wizard when it comes to manipulating electronic data.”
“I do have a certain reputation,” Zilwicki acknowledged. “And, sure, I could have created every single thing I’ve just shown you. But simply creating imagery can only take you so far.”
“Explain,” she said, and he pointed at the now-dark screen.
“First, I’d have to have already had extensive recordings of your brothers. Now, admittedly, I have access to most of the planetary database at this point, so, yes. I could have gotten my hands on those recordings—now. But even the best CGI is going to contain teeny tiny flaws that can be picked out of it by sufficiently careful analysis. Especially if it was created by combining imagery from different sources. I don’t say it would be easy, but it would certainly be possible using tech right here on Mesa.
“More to the point, though, I’ve never met Zach, and I didn’t meet Jack until shortly before that recording of him was made. You’re their sister. You know their mannerisms. The way they talk, the words they’d choose, their expressions. Their body language. There’s no way I could have built a ‘Jack’ that would deceive you if you looked at it as suspiciously as I know you just looked at this one. There’d be holes, false notes.
“As for Zach, that imagery was taken from an original Traffic Control Service database. It’s still there. if you want to look at it. So are the TCS personnel who were in possession of that database when we rescued them. A database that has all of the original embedded security codes and date/time stamps, and you are entirely welcome to examine the source files yourself. Or to have anyone you care to nominate evaluate them for you.”
“Really?” It was her turn to wave at the inactive screen. “Maybe that’s all true, and maybe it isn’t. And maybe I’ll take you up on that offer to examine the source files. But whatever that says about Zach, it doesn’t say anything about the original imagery of Jack.”
“No, it doesn’t. I’m afraid you’ll just have to take my word for that one, because I recorded it after Jack initially approached us.”
“Approached you where?”
“At a diner in a seccy district. I was a waiter there. I was there with—ah, my partner—”
“Why don’t you just name him Victor Cachat, so we can skip the bullshit? You think I haven’t seen the program that aired on that Manticoran so-called ‘news discussion show’? And if you studied me as intensively as you’re suggesting, then you know I was one of CEO Ward’s senior scientific advisors to the old General Board. You think I didn’t have a pretty damned high security clearance?”
“Yes, Victor. We were here to investigate Manpower when Jack spotted me on an intercepted bit of security footage and approached us.”
She closed her eyes again. Then she shook her head. It was a sharp, abrupt gesture, as if she were trying to shake water out of her hair. Or mud.
“All right,” she said. “I figure you wouldn’t offer me the opportunity to look at the original data files if they wouldn’t tell me what you’re saying they would. And you’re right about individual mannerisms, too. There’s not enough of Zach for me to recognize any of his personal quirks, but that’s Jack. I recognize him. I couldn’t tell you exactly how, but I do. So I believe you didn’t fake any of it. Still…”
She looked away. She sat gazing at the window that covered an entire wall of the apartment and looked out over the city, but Zilwicki didn’t think she was actually looking at anything. Her eyes were tearing up.
She sat that way for several seconds. And then, abruptly, she reached up, wiped her face, and looked at Zilwicki.
“What about Zach? From what I gather you’re saying, he’s still loyal to—” She waved her hand in an angry gesture. “Whoever those fucking people are.”
Zilwicki opened his mouth, but before he could reply—
“And don’t call them ‘the Alignment’!” Her tone was as angry as the gesture had been. “The Alignment—the real one—is what I belong to.”
He spread his hands.
“Ms. McBryde—”
“Call me Arianne. For this, ‘Ms. McBryde’ is idiotic.”
“Arianne. Look, I myself have come to the conclusion that we’re dealing with two different ‘Alignments’ here. So have a number of other people.”
“Who?”
“Victor Cachat, for one. Catherine Montaigne, for another. She’s now the effective head of Manticore’s Liberal Party. Then there’s Torch’s Queen Berry.”
“Well, sure.” Arianne sniffed. “Cachat’s your partner, Montaigne’s your girlfriend, and Queen Berry’s your daughter. You’re even better connected than I am.”
Zilwicki put his hands back on his chair’s armrests and smiled.
“It’s not just Berry. Pretty much the entire government of Torch—the top echelons, anyway—have come to the same conclusion. Web Du Havel, General Palane, and Jeremy X all have.”
That caused her eyes to widen again.
“Jeremy X thinks that?”
“The man is anything but stupid, Arianne. Yes, Jeremy thinks that.”
She looked to the window again. This time her eyes seemed to be focused. Zilwicki thought she was looking in the direction of Hancock Tower. She couldn’t have seen it, because taller buildings would have blocked her sight—and there wouldn’t have been anything except rubble to look at, anyway.
“What about Jurgen Dusek? The other seccy bosses?”
“That, I don’t know. But I’d be surprised if Dusek doesn’t come around once I lay it out for him.”
“Lay out what?”
“Well, to begin with, there’s the fact that every single member of the…Benign Alignment we’ve talked to has indignantly denied membership in an organization which would do the things we know our Alignment has done. And the reason that’s significant is that they’ve done it in front of treecats.”
“Treecats. You’re telling me that treecats really can read minds?” Arianne said skeptically.
“No. They are telepaths, but only between one another. What they can read are human emotions…including the triggers that indicate whether or not someone is lying.” Zilwicki shrugged. “That’s not exactly something we want to get into discussing with the rest of the galaxy just now, but, trust me, it carries a lot of weight with Manticorans and the Grand Alliance in general.
“But there are some other factors in play, as well. To begin with—”
It took Zilwicki several minutes to explain his reasoning. After he was finished, Arianne’s expression had gone from angry skepticism into one that combined ruefulness and…something else. He thought she was appalled.
“So you’re telling me one reason you trust my Alignment is that so many of us got killed by this other Alignment of yours?”
“That’s one way to put it.” Zilwicki nodded. “Of course, another aspect is that despite the overall casualties the Benign Alignment took, very few of your senior leadership cadre were among them. If your Alignment was the primary mover in everything the Malign Alignment’s done, then logically it should have been your senior leadership that was being gotten off-planet, and it wasn’t. On the other hand, if we’re right in our suspicion that the Malign Alignment was using your organization as a front, hiding behind it, then that would explain why so many known scientists, technocrats of all sorts, political and civic figures associated with your organization but not in official leadership roles disappeared. And—” his expression turned grim “—the reason that so many of your friends and relatives really were killed, Arianne. Because the Malign Alignment couldn’t leave that many loose ends. Couldn’t afford to have that many smart, capable people trying to figure out what the hell happened. And because they were totally willing to kill as many Mesans—as many of you—as it took for them to disappear down the rabbit hole.”
She looked at him, her eyes dark. Then stood and headed towards her kitchen.
“I’m going to make some coffee. Would you like some?”
“Please. Flat white.”
She programmed the robochef. As he had many times before, Zilwicki found himself amused by the stubbornness with which human beings retained obsolete terminology. “Making coffee” now meant ordering a robot to do it; the “robot” was a complex console, dispensing all manner of food and drink; and the alcove in which this was done was still called a “kitchen,” even though the number of people who actually cooked was small.
Foodie fanatics, Cachat called them, with his usual distaste for what he considered silliness—especially silliness that required a great deal of wealth. More recently settled planets inclined toward more basic facilities, at least until the planetary technology and wealth level caught up with the rest of the galaxy, and kitchens there tended to be fully functional places where actual people prepared food. On more developed worlds, renovating an apartment’s “kitchen” to actually be a kitchen was expensive. Sometimes very expensive.
You’d never see a Havenite super spook stoop so high!
Arianne came back with the coffee herself. A lot of people would have let another robot do that task. Zilwicki wasn’t positive, but he thought that personal gesture was a sign that she was shedding her previous hostility. Some of it, at least.
She handed him his cup, settled back into her chair, and raised her own cup to sip. Then she lowered it a few centimeters, gazing at him through its wispy tendril of steam.
“Why did you come here?” she asked. “And don’t bother telling me it was because you wanted to console the grieving sister.”
“Not much consolation, anyway,” Zilwicki said. “One brother dead for sure, the other vanished into an unknown fate. And it is an ‘unknown’ fate, Arianne. There’s some evidence that not all of the people who were shipped off planet were what you might call totally willing.”
He took a sip of his coffee. It was just as good as he’d expected.
“I will say that I think you were owed the truth about Jack, and that I owed it to him to tell it to you. He’s undoubtedly one of the reasons I’m still alive right now, and, ultimately, we owe virtually everything we’ve learned or suspect about the Malign Alignment to him…including the mere fact that it exists. But, no, you’re right. That’s not the main reason I came here. The truth is, I came in hope of recruiting you.”
“Recruiting me? To what? Or should I ask to whom?”
“What, for now.” He set down the cup. “Arianne, I think you believe me by now that there’s another ‘Alignment’ out there that’s been using you and your Alignment as…Well, not catspaws, since I don’t think you’ve actually done anything for the bastards. You’ve been a veil for them, though. And I’d think you have to be angry as hell at the thought of how many of your friends, how many members of your Alignment, got slaughtered just to conceal the other Alignment’s withdrawal. They didn’t care how many of you they killed. Hell, they were willing to kill every one of their own that they couldn’t get offworld in time! But that’s the way they operate. They’re masters of the art of concealment, and one of the techniques they use—often—is to cloak themselves, exactly the way they did by hiding in and behind your Alignment. And then they place another cloak, another mask, over that one. And then another. And another. Duchess Harrington calls what we’re doing ‘peeling an onion,’ and the truth is that’s a pretty good analogy. So the reason I’m here is that I’d like you to help me—help us—hunt them down. Help us peel that onion right down to the core.”
“Who is ‘us’?” Never mind. We can get into that later.” She sipped from her own cup. It was quite a long one, this time. When she set the cup down, her voice was very quiet, almost soft.
“‘Angry’ doesn’t begin to describe how I feel, Captain Zilwicki. I’m not sure there’s any word that does. ‘Rage,’ maybe—but it’s too cold for that.”
“Are you familiar with ancient mythology?”
“Yes, as it happens. I was fascinated by the subject for a couple of years.”
“Do you recall the Erinyes?”
“The Greek Furies? Oh, yes. There were three of them…I’m trying to remember…hold on.” She raised her uni-link. “Names of the Greek Furies,” she said.
“Alecto, Megaira, and Tisiphone,” the uni-link replied. “Alecto represents endless anger, Megaira jealous rage, and Tisiphone—”
“Is vengeful destruction,” she said. “Yes, I remember now.”
She lowered the uni-link and looked at Zilwicki.
“That one, I think. What would I be jealous of? And I don’t have any interest in an endless hunt. But vengeful destruction, now…”
Zilwicki smiled as he picked up his coffee cup once more.
“Can I call you ‘Tisi’ for short?” he asked, and she laughed.
“Yes, you can.”
Joint Intelligence Sharing and Distribution Command Center,
Smith Tower,
City of Old Chicago,
Old Earth,
Sol System.
“This is just…wrong.” Daud Ibn Mamoun al-Fanudahi eyes were sour as he looked around the huge towers—the many huge towers—that surrounded them. “I feel naked up here. No, out here. We’re supposed to be a clandestine outfit, remember?”
Lieutenant Colonel Natsuko Okiku looked up at her far taller companion and shook her head. They stood together at the railing of the observation deck that provided them with a spectacular view of the capital city of the Solarian League from the four hundred and fifty-second floor of Smith Tower. Unlike al-Fanudahi, Okiku wore a smile.
“Look at it this way, Daud. It could be worse. Brigadier Gaddis might have suggested we set up in George Benton when he planted his own headquarters there.”
George Benton Tower had been the headquarters and personal kingdom of “the Mandarins,” the top bureaucrats of the Solarian League. They were the people—the unelected people—who’d really ruled the League, in practice if not in theory.
Until just under two months ago, anyway.
Now the Mandarins were ensconced elsewhere—in a Manticoran prison, in fact—awaiting trial for an entire panoply of war crimes, including violation of the League’s own Eridani Edict against mass-casualty attacks and the wholesale murder of civilians. One might have expected those trials to have already begun, but the Grand Alliance had decreed otherwise. They would be tried only after the League’s new constitution had been confirmed and its new government could participate directly in that investigation and trial. “We will do nothing in the dark,” Empress Elizabeth had declared, speaking for the Grand Alliance, and al-Fanudahi had to admit that was very wise of them. Unlike all too many Solarians, he knew what the Mandarins had done, how they had systematically lied to their own star nation. Letting the new Solarian government find the proof of that in its own archives might well go a long way toward damping down Solarian revanchist sentiment.
Which didn’t make him any happier about the subject of their current discussion.
“‘Planted his heaquarters.’” he grunted. “That’s a good term for it. As in ‘he planted his boot on their necks.’”
Okiku’s shrug emphasized her slight build. With her sandalwood complexion, almond-shaped eyes, midnight black hair, and diminutive size—just under a hundred and fifty-six centimeters and a bare forty-two kilograms—the colonel was the stereotypical image of a delicate Oriental girl. And she truly was young enough, for a prolong society—just past forty, which made her look like a pre-prolong teenager—to fit snugly into the frame. Of course, the Gendarmerie uniform and severely short, military-style haircut might have suggested to the acute observer that surface impressions could be misleading.
Which they were. Very, very misleading. The “delicate Oriental girl” in question was actually one of the Criminal Investigation Division’s most capable, tenacious, and ruthless investigators. There was a reason she’d been Brigadier Simeon Gaddis’s personal protégé. The CID’s commander had considered—still did consider—her one of his top half dozen subordinates, and no one who’d ever worked with her would have disputed his judgment.
“You know exactly why the Brigadier did that, Daud,” she chided, still smiling. “Intimidation is a fine art.”
“And just who does he need to intimidate?” al-Fanudahi demanded. “The Mandarins are in prison, the Grand Alliance’s fleet is still in orbit, and the ‘Provisional Government’ isn’t about to turn into another exercise in empire building!”
“I’ll grant all of that,” Okiku said. “But the Provisional Assembly’s just a little preoccupied with that whole Constitutional Convention thing just now. Besides, there’s that old saying about the spirit being willing but the flesh being weak.” She shook her head. “I think most of the Provisional Assembly’s members are reasonably honest, at least by Solarian politician standards, but the Mandarins have only been gone for two months—hell, not quite two months. They’re making all this up as they go along, really, and none of them have a lot of experience in genuine representative government. Not on the Federal level, at least. That’s not something we’ve seen a lot of here on Old Terra lately, if you’ll recall.”
She arched an eyebrow and held it there until al-Fanudahi nodded.
“We’re luckier than hell that whatever may have been happening on the Federal level, at least the Assembly had the good sense to choose delegates who had a lot of political experience in their home star systems when they set up the Provisional Government and chose Yon Sung-Jin as Acting Prime Minister! That doesn’t mean he or any of the other ‘acting’ ministers—or the Provisional Assembly—don’t have a bazillion things they have to do on the run, including how to get some kind of handle on bureaucracies that’ve run without anything remotely like legislative oversight for literally centuries. And on top of that, they really are preoccupied with getting the Constitutional Convention organized. Which makes sense. The courier boats haven’t even reached a bunch of the League’s systems to tell them what happened here or that there’s going to be a Constitutional Convention. It’ll be months yet before the convention delegates can be selected and actually assemble here, but with that damned fleet in orbit looking over their shoulders, this wouldn’t be a good time to let any grass grow under their feet.
“And, just to add to the mix, virtually all of the lower-level bureaucrats and apparatchiks in all those regulatory agencies they’re trying to get a bridle on—and, I might add, your own, beloved Navy, as well as civilian administration—are still in place. They have to be, because nobody else knows how to run the bureaucracies in question, and if those bureaucracies just suddenly stop, the wheels really will come off. But a lot of them, especially the senior ones, were just as corrupt as the Mandarins, if on a lesser scale, so they have to be worried about their…futures in public service, let’s say. And any of them who already had secret bank accounts—which couldn’t possibly be more than, oh, ninety-seven percent of them, you think?—are worried about what happens when the new management really does take over and they get audited. So a bunch of them have to be thinking in terms of how much more they can…acquire before they disappear into the Verge somewhere. And, on top of all that, there are always going to be career politicians hunting for personal advantage, apparatchiks too stupid to realize the old empire-building days truly are a thing of the past, and any number of ambitious outsiders, outraged ‘patriots,’ conspiracy theorists, revolutionaries, anarchists, and assorted political nut jobs.” She paused. “Did I leave anybody out?”
“Only any operatives still working for the Other Guys that we don’t have a clue where to find, I suppose.”
Al-Fanudahi’s tone was even more sour than it had been.
“Well, then!” Okiku spread her arms in a gesture which encompassed the entire city around them. “I’d say there are quite a few people who need intimidating. And the Brigadier’s right about its being a fine art—especially now.
“The last thing any of us can allow this to become, or to allow the Grand Alliance to be afraid it may become, is a military dictatorship.” Her own tone was dead serious now. “The Grand Alliance won’t stand for it, not for a heartbeat, and if they decide that’s what the Brigadier and Admiral Kingsford are doing, they’ll…make their displeasure known. Firmly.
“And if the citizens of the Sol System—or, worse, of the League in general—decide that whatever new constitution gets written was imposed upon them by some sort of junta, its legitimacy will be a lot harder to establish. Probably even for a lot of the people who have to admit the Grand Alliance was right about what an unmitigated shit storm the League’s supposed government had turned into. That’s the real reason the Brigadier and the Admiral refused places in Prime Minister Yon’s cabinet.” She smiled suddenly. “I don’t know about Kingsford, but I do know the Brigadier’s spent a lot of time recently studying Thomas Theisman and how he went about restoring the old Havenite constitution.
“But if they can’t afford to look like a military dictatorship, they still have to be able to…to loom ominously in the background. The Brigadier likes to quote some pre-space politician. He says they need to walk softly but carry a big stick.
“Right this moment, no one in the Navy’s going to even think about bucking Kingsford’s authority, which turns what’s left of the Navy and the Marines into the his big stick. As for the Brigadier, every honest cop in the Gendarmerie—and, contrary to prevalent pre-conquest belief, that was probably a good seventy or even eighty percent of the total force, here in the Sol System, at least—has recognized him as the most honest cop in the Gendarmerie. He was the guy who was willing to take down anybody he could prove was dirty, even before the war, and they know it. That gives him a pretty big stick of his own. When General Mabley ‘took early retirement,’ he was the only real choice to replace her as the Gendarmerie’s CO, even if his position is still officially ‘acting’ and he didn’t get the promotion that would normally go with the job. And he’s also the one who personally arrested the Mandarins.”
“No, he didn’t. You did,” al-Fanudahi pointed out with the air of a man set upon picking nits. “You and Bryce.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Daud!” Okiku rolled her eyes, but she also chuckled. “Okay, I’ll grant you that Bryce and I actually slapped on the manacles—” in fact, they’d been very sophisticated, quite comfortable restraints, but she liked manacles better “—but the Brigadier was the officer in charge of the arrest. He had Admiral Kingsford’s total support, and he knew it, but the two of them only acted on Attorney General Rorendaal’s—well, assistant attorney general, at the time—authority, with a warrant duly issued by a judge right here in Old Chicago. Sure, the judge had the Brigadier, me, and three other armed Gendarmes in her office when Rorendaal screened to, ah, discuss the warrant in question, but she signed it, and that means the Mandarins’ arrest was completely legal.”
“And the point of all of this?” al-Fanudahi asked, although his more resigned tone suggested he knew exactly where she was headed.
“The point is that both the Brigadier and the Admiral need to be…highly visible, but without going overboard about it. They need everyone to know they stand behind the Provisional Government—fully—and that they’re in a position to step in, as quickly and as hard as necessary, if any of those various factions decide to screw the pooch. That’s the best way to make sure none of them do. But at the same time, they need everyone to know that the last thing they are is a military dictatorship.
“That’s the entire reason they got that warrant, to prove this isn’t just some sort of coup. But it’s also why the Brigadier has his office in George Benton. He’s visible, he’s right there if the Provisional Assembly wants to ‘consult’ with him, and everyone in the entire star system knows he’s ready to arrest anyone he needs to arrest to maintain public order and keep this whole constitution-writing process moving forward to both the Grand Alliance’s and domestic public opinion’s satisfaction.”
“But do we really have to be part of his ‘stick’?” al-Fanudahi asked, almost plaintively.
He shoved his hands into his pockets, which were capacious, given the jacket he was wearing. It was a mild day…for the first week of March in Old Chicago. But that was by right-off-lake-Michigan standards of “mild.” Al-Fanudahi was a history buff, which made him one of very few people in the universe who knew that the ancient nickname Windy City had actually been a reference to Chicago’s notoriously verbose city council. Originally, it had been called the White City, because of its distinctive architecture and—for the time—extensive use of street lighting.
None of which changed the fact that, this time of year, Chicago was still all too often cold and windy, especially when you stood on an open deck a kilometer and a half in the air.
He looked around again, still a bit pickle faced.
“Damn it, Natsuko, I spent years being ignored by my pig-ignorant superiors and working as far out of sight as I could manage. I miss our old haunts in the Hillary Enkateshwara basement!”
“Oh, come on. It wasn’t in the tower’s basement. I’ll grant you that the office was…pretty hard to find, though.”
“It might as well have been in the basement. I liked being in the middle of a warehouse for stuff nobody wanted. Just our own little rogue operation. No official organizational charts. Out of sight, out of mind. Nice, quiet, no incompetent superiors sticking their noses into our business, nobody likely to come looking to assassinate us…I was a contented mouse in a world of apparatchik cats. Now—”
He jerked his head to indicate the tower upon whose balcony they stood.
“Now we’ve got an office. No, a bunch of offices; big ones, too—right smack in the official headquarters of the Joint Intelligence Sharing and Distribution Command Center. Which, I might add, is another thing the two of them have cooked up out of nowhere!”
“Damned straight and damned well time, and you know it,” she shot back. “The JISDC, I mean. You just finished pointing out how your superiors ignored you every time you warned them the Manties and Havenites were about to hand us our heads, and none of this would’ve happened if they’d listened to you. So, yeah, I think creating a new command where people at your level—our level—share information and the people at the top have to read—or at least sign receipts for—our output is a damned good idea. At least the bastards know they’ll get shot at sunrise, professionally speaking, if they ignore the info anyway and we were right.”
“Yeah, but why include us—the Ghost Hunters—in something that public?” It wasn’t the least bit “public,” of course, except within the Solarian intelligence community, but she understood his perhaps somewhat petulant point. “You just pointed out that there are plenty of apparatchiks still out there, and most of ’em don’t like us very much. Especially since we committed the unforgivable sin of being right when all of them were wrong. And then there are the Other Guys. I’ll guarantee you some of those still-in-place apparatchiks have really been working for them for years…at least. While we were hiding out over in Enkateshwara they couldn’t find us to do anything about us…even if they’d realized we were sharing notes in the first place. But now—” He glowered afresh. “They know about us now…and we’ve got everything but spotlights pointed at us!”
“Who cares? These days, in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re the ones with fangs and claws and the oh-so-formerly-feline bureaucrats and apparatchiks are the ones tiptoeing around us. Not to mention—”
“Time!” a voice called out from behind them.
It was exactly the sort of voice you’d expect from an overly large male Marine who wasn’t one bit shy about resorting to intimidation when it seemed the handiest way to break an impasse. Or an arm or two.
Granted, Major Bryce Tarkovsky was a personal friend, very smart, and a really, really nice guy.
As a rule.
“And here we go,” al-Fanudahi muttered.
* * *
It was just as bad as al-Fanudahi had feared it would be. In fact, it was worse. Lots worse. Because it would appear they weren’t destined for desks in JISDIC, after all. Oh, no! Not them!
Brigadier Gaddis presented his proposal in a calm, reasonable, and utterly inflexible tone of voice. When he was finished, everyone in the room—well, except Bryce Tarkovsky, of course—looked apprehensive. Al-Fanudahi truly did like Tarkovsky, a lot, although there were times he thought the major might as well have had “Born to Raise Hell” tattooed on his biceps. But this time, even Okiku’s usually imperturbable self-confidence looked a bit wobbly.
So they were field agents, now. Gaddis had even suggested this was some sort of promotion—or at least a recognition of services rendered.
It was a truth al-Fanudahi was quite sure went back to prehistoric times. No good deed shall go unpunished.
He tried not to glower at Tarkovsky and Okiku. At least they’d both held plenty of field assignments before! Just one more notch on their guns for them. But he was an analyst, damn it. He was the one field agents reported to, not the fellow who went out there digging the data up in the first place! What did he know about—?
His inner indignation paused as he saw the expression on Irene Teague’s face. In fact, he had to struggle not to laugh. Teague was twenty years younger than he, not even out of her thirties yet, and she was third-generation prolong, which made her look younger still. At the moment, in fact, she looked like a ten-year-old introvert who’d just been told she’d been tapped to perform in Shakespeare’s King Lear…cast in the thankless role of Cordelia. Also known as exit, corpse.
“Me?” she didn’t—quite—squeak.
Unlike al-Fanudahi, who was a Battle Fleet officer, Teague was an officer in Frontier Fleet. Up until the recent unpleasantness with the Grand Alliance, Battle Fleet had seen very little in the way of combat, whereas Frontier Fleet had been almost constantly engaged on active operations of one sort or another, policing the Solarian League’s borders…and all too often helping Frontier Security break heads (and necks) on planets whose citizens got “uppity.” But Teague had spent her entire career in Intelligence, all but two years of it right here on Old Terra. And the two years she’d spent off the motherworld had been at the Frontier Fleet nodal base on the planet Bergusia in the long-settled Kenniac System, barely eighty-two light-years from Sol. The planet had been named after the Celtic goddess of prosperity, which was quite a fair description of it.
“Me?” she repeated. Her brown eyes moved around the room. It was unclear whether they were searching for rhyme, reason, or an escape route. “Why me? I’m just an analyst.”
“Which is exactly what we need on Mesa.” Gaddis sat up straight in his chair, which, given that he was almost two meters tall, made him loom over the conference table—and Teague—like a frowning deity. “Especially because you, like Captain al-Fanudahi, have been assigned to ONI’s Operational Analysis for years. We’ll need that expertise. Besides, he’s Battle Fleet, you’re Frontier Fleet. That may give us some balance in the Grand Alliance’s eyes.”
Al-Fanudahi snorted.
“As if they’re likely to care, Sir,” he said. “I figure by now the GA’s assessment of any of the Solarian League Navy’s intelligence branches—Battle or Frontier Fleet—is about as distinguishable as mud, mire, and morass.”
Gaddis glowered at him, but Tarkovsky spoke up before the brigadier’s glower could build to full Force 10 glare status.
“You might be surprised, Daud. The one thing their own intelligence people aren’t is dimwitted. They know the Navy’s top officers were about as alert to changes as well-fed dinosaurs. But they’ll also realize that somewhere in the bowels of a huge military organization like the Solarian League Navy, there had to be at least some dissidents who were paying attention to the real universe. I mean, we couldn’t all have been as stupid as Admiral Cheng!” Al-Fanudahi’s eyes rolled at the mention of his thankfully ex-CO, and Tarkovsky shrugged. “Well, right now, they have every reason to want to hook up with people like that—like us—in hopes that we can be persuaded that the GA’s theories about the Alignment are correct.”
“We haven’t come to any such conclusion,” Teague said stoutly.
Tarkovsky and Gaddis swiveled matching hawklike gazes onto the fair-haired Frontier Fleet captain, but al-Fanudahi decided to come to the rescue. He’d had time enough to absorb another new reality. Whether or not he or Irene liked it, they were bring reassigned to Mesa.
“No, we haven’t ‘concluded’ that,” he agreed. “But by now that’s only because good analysts demand strict standards of proof before they ‘conclude’ anything, and you know it. Oh, we never get definitive proof until the war’s over and we get to go through the other side’s archives, but we at least need a clear preponderance of the evidence before we offer up any propositions as facts. And even then, we qualify them. But having said that,” he glanced around the table, “there isn’t anyone in this room—including; no, even especially you, Irene—who isn’t firmly convinced the Other Guys are out there and up to no good. We may still question whether or not the GA’s theory of the Alignment is the one that best fits the bill, and it’ll still take a ton of evidence to convince me it is, really. But somebody’s out there; they’re just as cunning and vicious as the Manties and Havenites think they are; and we have to find them. Because if they’ve been doing this for remotely as long as it seems they have, they aren’t going to stop until someone stops them, and we can’t do that when we don’t even know who the hell they are.”
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Besides,” he told her, “having you on Mesa would be a comfort to me.”
“Well…” She drew a deep breath of her own. “Well, okay. I guess. But Ghulam and the kids—”
“Oh, come off it! Your beloved husband’s been crabbing for years that you never get to travel anywhere because of your blasted job. As for your kids—we’re talking about George and Tahmina, right? They’ll love it.”
“Mesa? The evil slaver planet, with the rubble and ruin of nuclear strikes scattered around the entire globe? My kids—”
She paused, then grimaced.
“Well, yeah. They’ll be hopping up and down with glee when I tell them. Especially George. What is it with eight-year-old boys’ infatuation with pirates and gangsters?”
Gaddis settled back into his normal seated posture. He was still imposing—the man was really tall—but he no longer looked Jovian.
“All right, then. We’re all agreed. We’ll send a delegation to Mesa—an informal one, to start—that will try to get the GA to agree to let us participate in an investigation into what really happened after Gold Peak’s fleet seized the system.”
He, too, looked around at everyone seated at the table. “Two people from OpAn, one Battle Fleet and one Frontier Fleet; Natsuko, to represent the Gendarmerie’s CID; and Bryce, for the Marines.”
Weng Zhing-hwan cleared her throat. Like Okiku, she was a lieutenant colonel in the Gendarmerie, but the patch on her shoulder indicated that she belonged to Intelligence, rather than the Criminal Investigation Division.
“I have no objection at all to Bryce going, Sir. But I’m curious. Why someone from Marine Intelligence?”
“Think of me as a goodwill ambassador,” Tarkovsky said.
The look Weng gave him was to “skepticism” what a glacier was to “icy.”
“I’m serious!” he insisted. “The Manties and Havenites may have a dim opinion of the SLN, but that doesn’t extend to the Solarian Marines. Oh, no, not at all. They know the kind of crap we’ve been ordered to do from time to time,” his expression dimmed—briefly—“but they also know it wasn’t our idea…and we did it damned well, anyway. Usually with as little brutality as possible. And that high opinion certainly hasn’t been lowered by recent events on Mesa, where—” he buffed his nails on his tunic and blew on them “—the brilliantly planned and led seccy rebellion had for its military commander one Thandi Palane, formerly of the Solarian Marine Corps.”
His smile became an outright grin.
“You could say we’re old friends.”
“You’ve never met the woman in your life, Bryce!” Weng accused, and he shrugged.
“A petty detail. We’re both Marines. Once a Marine, always a Marine. We’re bound to get along famously.”
Captain Daud al-Fanudahi cherished a few minor reservations on that point, but he said nothing. What was there to say? For the first time in his career, he was about to become a field agent, investigating what was probably the most malignant force in the human-settled galaxy. And he was going to do it on what was probably the most notorious planet in the human-settled galaxy…and had been even before it was ravaged by war and indiscriminate bombardment. A mission that would depend at least in part on gaining the goodwill of a woman who’d just led what was already being recognized by military analysts as a masterpiece of defensive tactics. Brutally effective ones, to boot.
And for their goodwill ambassador, they were relying on a Marine officer who’d once kidnapped a fellow officer he suspected of wrongdoing. He’d then subjected the fellow to an interrogation that might not have come up to Torquemada standards but was still way outside any official channel…and still enough that the interrogated individual had dropped dead as a result. From an implanted nanotech suicide protocol, granted, not anything Bryce had done directly.
Still…
Suddenly, for the first time that day, Daud Ibn Mamoun al-Fanudahi found himself feeling rather cheerful.
CNO’s Office,
Admiralty Building,
City of Old Chicago,
Sol System.
Dr. Charles E. Gannon leaned back in his seat and crossed his legs as the chair reconfigured to support his weight in perfect comfort. It was an exceptionally tasteful—and expensive—armchair. As you’d expect of a piece of furniture in the inner sanctum of the Solarian League Navy’s commanding officer.
Once he was settled, Gannon gestured with his forefinger in the way he’d captured an audience’s attention over decades of university instruction.
“I have a theory about this,” he said.
“Of course you do.” Admiral Winston Kingsford smiled. “Chuck, you have a theory about everything.”
“I’m hurt! And the accusation’s false, anyway. I think I’m fairly restrained in my conjectures. I’ve made it a point, for instance, never to develop any theories about my wife.”
“That’s not restraint.” Kingsford sniffed. “That’s just self-preservation. No husband in his right mind hypothesizes about his spouse. I don’t develop any theories regarding Samantha, either. Not out loud, anyway.”
“Okay, point. How is Sam, by the way? I haven’t seen her since…” Gannon furrowed his brow. “Eight months? That ‘gala affair’—” he shuddered “—at the new Art Institute?”
“I’m afraid she’s a bit irked with me, at the moment. We were supposed to have been on vacation this month.” Kingsford twirled his own forefinger in a manner which indicated…pretty much everything in the universe. “The situation got in the way.”
“Surely she doesn’t blame you for everything that’s happened lately? Minor things like foreign invasion and occupation will tend to upset personal plans, especially when you’re the Chief of Naval operations. Pesky of them, I know, but there it is.”
“No, of course she doesn’t. But she was really looking forward to relaxing on Grand Anse Beach in Grenada. So was I, for that matter.”
The admiral smiled crookedly—and briefly, then leaned forward, planting his forearms on the big desk in front of him.
“All right. Let’s hear this new theory of yours about the Mesa Massacre.”
“Is that what they’re calling it now?”
“Don’t you follow the news?”
“As little as possible. It’s mostly twaddle.”
“Well,” Kingsford sighed and wiped his face with one hand, “yes, that’s what they’re calling it. Stupid turn of phrase. A ‘massacre’ is something that has an up-close and personal character. And it’s usually targeted on a specific group of some sort. What happened on Mesa after Gold Peak seized the system was way too indiscriminate to deserve the term.”
Gannon peered at him for a moment, all traces of humor gone from his face.
“Actually,” he said, “that’s the theory I was going to present to you. I’ve come to the conclusion that the slaughter on Mesa wasn’t indiscriminate at all. Nor was it a massacre. It was cold-blooded, first-degree murder, and it did have clear and specific targets and goals.”
“Millions of targets?”
Kingsford’s tone was dubious, and Gannon’s light brown eyes, normally a close match in color to his hair, seemed to darken. That was an optical illusion, of course, produced by his now-grim expression. Unlike the style currently favored by most male academics, Gannon was clean-shaven, so it was impossible to miss the tight set of his jaw.
“The targeting wasn’t ‘indiscriminate,’ Winston. You can’t even call it collateral damage. That mass murder was planned and deliberate.”
“You’re serious.”
“As death.” Gannon nodded grimly. “You know how closely I’ve been following the developments on Mesa. What you may not know is that I have my own pipeline into Manticoran intelligence.” He waved his hand in a dismissive gesture, “Don’t ask; I won’t tell you. I don’t get everything, of course, but I’ve gotten enough to know the parameters of the killings, and there was absolutely no logical or coherent pattern to that so-called bombardment. It just looks insane.”
“Insane?” Kingsford snorted. “I guess you could call nuking an uninhabited island that!”
“There were more absurdities than just one island.” Gannon waved a hand. “I think we’d have to accept, for the sake of argument, that if the Mesan version of what happened is remotely accurate, then the Grand Alliance carried out this ‘indiscriminate bombardment’ as soon as it was in orbit and that it was probably in support of the ‘terrorist campaign’ which it had fomented preceding Gold Peak’s arrival. Correct? I mean, I find that entire argument ludicrous, but that was the official line.”
Kingsford looked skeptical. Obviously, he found the “official line” as unlikely as Gannon did, but he nodded.
“As I say,” the professor continued, “I found that argument…suspect, let’s say. But the more I looked at it, the more I came to the conclusion that, however ridiculous it looked at first glance, the ‘terrorist campaign’ and the ‘indiscriminate bombardment’ actually were linked, really were part of a coherent strategy.
“It just wasn’t the Grand Alliance’s strategy.”
Kingsford’s skeptical expression went into overdrive, and Gannon snorted.
“Let me lay out my thinking before you jump in,” he said, and Kingsford settled back again with another nod. It wasn’t quite the sort of nod one used to humor a lunatic, but that was only because of how long he’d known Gannon.
The professor quirked a brief grin at the CNO, but then he sobered.
“First,” he said, holding up an index finger, “let’s look at the ‘terrorist’ targets. Especially at four of them: two amusement parks, and two sports stadiums, all attacked with weapons of mass destruction in the same two-day window, weeks before Gold Peak arrived.”
“Those sound like exactly the sort of targets terrorists would have been looking for,” Kingsford pointed out.
“Not logical ones, if what they were looking for was just to rack up a body count, which appears to have been the terrorist’s objective, at least according to the Mesan system authorities. Those four bombings happened during the middle of the day, on a Tuesday and a Thursday, respectively, Winston. A workday and a schoolday, the both of them. Which means the amusement parks were way below capacity, and the same was true of the sports stadiums. If they’d wanted to just rack up the bodies, they’d have struck at bigger urban centers, caught all those people at home, or at work…or in school. They’d at least have waited for the evening crowds. They didn’t. Why?”
Kingsford frowned and ran the fingers of his right hand through his dark hair.
“My head’s starting to hurt, Chuck. I don’t see the big difference between killing a lot of people at work or at home versus killing them in amusement parks and sports centers.”
“Ah, but there is a difference. A big one. Because it’s easy to reconstruct who was at school, or at their workplace, when the blasts went off. There are plenty of records for that. Whereas anybody could have said they were going to an amusement park or sporting event.” He leaned forward, his face intent. “And how would you know if they did or didn’t? Nobody keeps a record of such things. There might be camera footage from the arrival gates, or security cams on the grounds, but if you’re going to blow them up, too…”
“But why—? Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh. Nuclear explosions and fuel-air bombs eliminate the evidence. Ursula Unknown tells her friends or family or coworkers she’s taking the day off to go to an amusement park, or sports event, or whatever other place of entertainment. Her body is never found, of course, because it’s been vaporized. But was she actually there?”
Gannon’s middle finger came up.
“Another ‘terrorist attack’ took out a big park on the edge of the plateau Mendel sits on. It was the equivalent of a beach. You couldn’t swim, but you could paraglide, grav ski, and sunbathe. Same thing. ‘I think I’ll go to Overlook Park today.’ How do you know if they did or didn’t? The bomb ‘just happened’ to be directly adjacent to the park admin offices…which means the repository for all the imagery from its security cams. And the explosion was so powerful it collapsed a vast stretch of the cliff. People were buried, as well as vaporized.”
He lowered his hand.
“The same pattern crops up over and over again when you look at the attacks ascribed to terrorists. Concerts. Business and professional symposiums. Places where people would logically gather, but no one would be keeping official records of who was actually there as opposed to simply said they’d be there. And every time, any security cameras covering the place stored their data on-site. Some of them sent it to a central site eventually, but even they’d have at least their last several days imagery only on their on-site servers, and those were taken out in the blast, as well. An awful lot of that could have been sheer coincidence, especially given the power of the explosions, but all of them?”
He shook his head.
“At first, the fact that they were all public gatherings or public places inclined me to accept that they could have been terrorist attacks. Some of the information from that Manticoran pipeline I mentioned to you was telling me the exact opposite, you understand, but misinformation is an ancient and respected intelligence tool, and even the good guys have been known to use it to…shape their allies’ positions. Still, it did strike me as odd that terrorists who could get their devices into position for attacks like that couldn’t get them into position for real mega-casualty attacks.
“And then there was the Grand Alliance’s ‘indiscriminate bombardment.’ A bombardment that took out uninhabited islands. Resort towns in the middle of the mountains, far away from any major population center or industrial center. Completely empty spots in the middle of a prairie. Orbital platforms—some habitats, with hundreds of thousands of citizens; some freight platforms with no more than a few dozen employees aboard. But a bombardment which somehow missed the major industrial platforms; the orbital smelters; the Mesan military’s remaining infrastructure, planetside or orbital; urban and industrial centers on the planet. As I said, it made no sense. Militarily, the targets were pointless from any tactical or strategic perspective. From the perspective of a ‘terror strike,’ they made even less sense, given how easy it would have been to drive the casualty totals up into the hundreds of millions, if that was what they’d wanted.
“In fact, it made as little sense as the terrorists’ targeting made before Gold Peak ever got there.”
It was very quiet in Kingsford’s office, and Gannon settled farther back into his comfortable chair.
“Since both sets of explosions seemed equally…irrational, I decided to look at them as if they were, in fact, part of a single set of events, but not events set into motion by the Grand Alliance or the Ballroom. And what I found was that with only two exceptions, the population centers taken out by the ‘bombardment’ were not only very small, by the standards of something like Mendel, but also rather like those stadiums and amusement parks. They were resort towns, which customarily had sizeable floating populations. Places Ursula Unknown’s cousins could have told people they were going for a few days, or possibly a week or two. I couldn’t come up with any reason for blowing up uninhabited islands or empty spots on the prairie…unless, of course, the islands weren’t uninhabited and those particular bits of prairie weren’t empty.
“I’d already realized that a disproportionate—completely disproportionate—percentage of the mass-casualty ‘terrorist’ sites were places where no records could be checked on who was or wasn’t actually present. When I combined that with the relatively few mass-casualty sites of the ‘bombardment,’ I realized why that was. I’m convinced the pattern of the terrorist strikes was designed to conceal as many survivors as possible—and do so in the middle of such a monstrous butchery that it wouldn’t occur to anyone that its real purpose was to keep some people alive. The right people—so they could disappear without a trace.”
“Wait a minute.” It was Kingsford’s turn wave a hand. “Just how in hell did you get to that conclusion because of the sites the bombardment hit? The terrorist attacks, okay. I’ll give you that one, at least as a workable hypothesis. But no one got snuck out of any of the bombardment sites, Chuck, and nobody got off-planet after the explosions, either. Not without being totally documented by the GA, anyway!”
“All true. But think about this—the one thing that more than any other casts doubt on the Grand Alliance’s claim that the Alignment they talk about was responsible for the ‘bombardment’ is simple. If their ‘Alignment’ did it, it had to have killed thousands, maybe even millions, of its own people. What possible reason could it have had to do something like that? If I’m right about the reason it ‘disappeared’ so many people so tracelessly, it’s because it had already used the ‘terrorists’ as a cover to extract key people from the planet and the system. I think it was still in the process of doing that. That it had concentrated additional evacuees in those resort towns the ‘bombardment’ destroyed. And that Gold Peak’s arrival took it by surprise.
“So it executed its fallback plan.”
“My God, Chuck.” Kingsford stared at him. “Do you realize what you’re saying?”
“Of course I do.” Gannon’s expression was grimmer than ever. “Winston, your own analysts are telling you that at least a dozen of the ‘bombardment’ sites where they’ve been able to look at the available evidence were obviously surface explosions. And they were nukes, not kinetic strikes. That’s enough to rule out Tenth Fleet’s responsibility, right there, as far as I’m concerned! But when I put all the rest of it together, I realized that this Alignment of the Grand Alliance’s—whether it’s actually what they think it is or not—had to be behind what happened. That it was pulling people off the planet. And that it had gathered the other people it needed—or who might have been breadcrumbs leading to those people—into discrete, concentrated locations. Locations from which they could be evacuated under cover of more ‘terrorist’ attacks, or—”
“Or eliminated, if it wasn’t possible to get them out,” Kingsford finished harshly, and Gannon nodded.
“My God,” the CNO said again. He sat there for several seconds, frowning in thought. “Assuming somebody cold-blooded and vicious enough to entertain a strategy like that, your argument makes sense. It’s disgusting, and terrifying, and while it may be purposeful, it really is insane, when you think about the mindset behind it. But—”
“But how could they get that many people off the planet without leaving records of suspicious passenger and departures?” Gannon smiled thinly, and quite savagely. “Well, guess what? One of the orbital targets that the ‘bombardment’ obliterated was—”
“Station Delta!” Kingsford slapped a large, powerful hand on his desk. “Mesa System Traffic Control’s headquarters.”
“Along with all the current records of ship travel.” Gannon nodded. “Of the previous eight or nine T-months, at least. They would have backed up the records on-planet at the end of the current quarter…assuming the entire station hadn’t been taken out by another ‘terrorist bomb’ first, of course. You see how well that fits my theory? Everything about those terrorist attacks and the supposed bombardment makes sense if you look at it from the angle I’m suggesting.”
“Not the uninhabited island—and that was one of the biggest explosions, if I remember correctly.”
“Yes, it was. But I’m willing to bet that island wasn’t what it was said to be. I’m damned near certain there was an installation of some sort on it—and one that was so important that they used a huge blast to destroy all traces of it.”
Kingsford tapped his desktop and the expensive-looking “wooden” surface turned translucent. He tapped again, on one of the touchscreens which had appeared, and entered a brief command. Then he stood.
“Come here,” he invited as one wall of his office disappeared behind a three-dimensional hologram.
Gannon climbed out of his own chair and walked across to it. By the time he got there, it had stabilized, and he folded his arms as he gazed at a display of the human-settled portion of the galaxy—which sounded more majestic than it really was. Even two millennia after the beginning of the Diaspora, humans still hadn’t penetrated all that far into the immensity called the Milky Way. The star systems humanity had settled—or even visited—were a ragged-fringed bubble no more than thirteen hundred light-years across in the Orion Arm…which was ten thousand light years in length and thirty-five hundred wide. And the Orion Arm itself was just a minor spiral arm, dwarfed by the Perseus and Scutum-Centaurus arms.
That small a section of the arm could be displayed on a large enough scale that the locations of humanity’s major political divisions could be indicated with a combination of color coding and outlines. The Solarian League was far bigger than any of the others, of course. But Gannon was interested to see that Kingsford had programmed the display to delineate subdivisions of the League whose allegiance was getting what one might have called shaky.
Apparently, the degree of shakiness was represented on a scale from green to yellow, to various, steadily deeper shades of orange.
And then there were the handful of individual star systems—like Beowulf—which blazed a brilliant, bloody red. And the equally crimson stars of the recently declared Mayan Autonomous Regional Sector. What an appropriate color for an entity with the acronym MARS, he thought. Red like the proverbial “red planet.” He wondered if Oravil Barregos had thought about that when he chose the name for the first Office of Frontier Security sector to ever declare its independence of the Solarian League? Had he deliberately named it for the ancient god of war?
There was no room in the office for the sort of holo tank one might find on the bridge of the ship, so it was impossible to walk around the holograph to view it from different angles. But another command from Kingsford, entered over his uni-link, started it rotating slowly.
“In one sentence, tell me what you see,” he said.
“A very imposing Solarian League that’s in the process of disintegrating,” Gannon replied.
“Well, that was certainly succinct. Now elaborate.”
“All right.” Gannon unfolded one arm and pointed into the display. “Beowulf was only the first Core System to secede. There are going to be others—like Hypatia, not exactly a Core System, but still a charter member of the League. Beowulf’s obviously going to be looking at some kind of political union with the Star Empire; they’re already joined at the hip economically, commercially, and by blood, thanks to the Manticoran Junction, so that’s inevitable. I expect quite a few additional ex-Solarian systems will seek membership in the Star Empire, too, assuming they’re close enough to make it practical. A lot of the other single star systems, especially in the Shell and inner Verge, will simply announce their independence and strike out on their own. But there are others that are…more interesting. Like MARS.”
His forefinger indicated the bloody icon of the Maya System and the web of equally red star systems radiating from it. There were almost a dozen of them.
“It looks to me like MARS will attract at least another half-dozen of the local star systems,” he said. “Erewhon’s decision to sign on with Barregos makes that even more likely, given the way it’s going to up their industrial potential and give them the Erewhon Wormhole Junction.” He shook his head slowly. “With that base to build on, an at least friendly relationship with the GA, and somebody like Barregos in charge, MARS is going to stand up, Winston. We’re looking at another independent multi-system star nation. And one that’ll be respectably large when the dust finally settles.”
“Agreed.” Kingsford nodded. “And just between you and me, I don’t really blame Barregos or Rozsak. Mind you, it’s a bit embarrassing to admit they played us so well, but I think they take their responsibilities to their citizens seriously. I even think that was a major part of why they played us. I don’t see any way they come back to the League, but we’re already getting feelers from them about maintaining economic and military ties.”
“Better than I’d expected, really,” Gannon said.
“Assuming it happens, anyway.” Kingsford snorted. Then—“What else, O Sage?”
“Well, there’s this section down here.”
Gannon’s finger swooped over five hundred light-years “down” from Maya to the Mannerheim System, the center of the ten-star “Renaissance Factor.” The Factor’s systems had never belonged to the League, and they formed a two hundred-light-year bubble of surprisingly affluent sovereign systems in the Fringe. All of them were independent polities, but the chaos and uncertainty of the League’s war with the Grand Alliance had drawn them together in a defensive association that was busy transitioning into an actual star nation.
“You can kiss at least another dozen or so star systems goodbye to the Renaissance Factor within another two to five years,” he continued. “Then—”
His finger started toward another portion of display, but Kingsford stopped him.
“Never mind,” the admiral said. “You’ve proved my point for me.”
He headed back to his desk, waving Gannon back to his armchair as he went.
“And what point did I prove this time?” the professor asked with a chuckle as he resumed his seat.
Kingsford didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he leaned over his desk and planted his elbows again, then brought his hands up in a steeple, with the fingertips covering his mouth.
Gannon’s jocular mood vanished instantly. He recognized that posture, and it wasn’t that of an old friend. It was the way the Solarian League Navy’s Chief of Naval operations paused before making a weighty decision.
A moment passed. Then Kingsford lowered his steepled hands enough to clear his mouth.
“I want you to resign your post at the University,” he said.
Gannon’s eyebrows rose. Not far. Maybe half a centimeter.
“And do what, instead?” he asked. “I’m not old enough to retire.”
“Not hardly.” The admiral smiled. “What I want you to do instead is become the Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence.”
Gannon’s eyebrows went up farther. Quite a bit farther.
“You want me to head up ONI? You’ve got to be kidding.”
“No.” Kingsford lowered his hands to rest on the deck, still in a steeple. “I’m not kidding. Chuck, I need an outsider to step in and shake that damn somnolescent bureaucracy by the scruff of the neck until it wakes up and finally gets its head out of its ass.”
“Winston, somnolescent or not—and I certainly won’t argue that it isn’t—it’s still a military bureaucracy. In case you hadn’t noticed, this—” he flicked fingers across the jacket he was wearing “—isn’t a uniform. That’s because I’m what people call a ‘civilian.’”
“You’ve been in the Navy.”
“Yes, I have. Decades ago, when I signed up in order to get away from home as soon as I turned legal age. I was still a kid, Winston. I only served a decade or so, and entirely as a rating. A rating who got busted twice, clear back to spacer third.” He smiled. “I’ve always taken a certain perverse pride in that. Busted twice—but they promoted me back to petty officer twice, too. I was damn good at my job, if I say so myself. Just…ah, young. Only thirty-four when I left the service.”
“So you were still a baby when you deserted to the civvy side,” Kingsford said. “You were still in the Navy. That’s plenty good enough for me to beat down any opposition. And the fact you were a rating works in your favor, as far as I’m concerned. Especially because I know what you were busted for. It wasn’t the usual AWOL or drunk and disorderly. You got busted—both times—because you lipped off to superior officers and told them they were numbskulls who didn’t know what they were doing.”
“They were numbskulls.” Gannon shook his head. The gesture wasn’t so much one of disagreement or negation as it was of simple disbelief. “You have got to be kidding,” he repeated. “For Pete’s sake, Winston—I’m not just a university professor, I teach intellectual history. That’s about as relevant to naval intelligence as…as…Hell, I don’t know. Music appreciation, maybe.”
“Cut it out. You’re a polymath, and you know it as well as I do. You teach so-called ‘intellectual history’ because it’s a catchall term that lets you teach anything you want. Since you won the Banerjee Award, the University doesn’t even argue with you anymore.”
He un-steepled his hands and leaned back. His arms were now firmly planted on his chair’s armrests, like a helmsman at his post.
“I need you, Chuck. I need somebody who can think. And—just as important—who won’t hesitate to tell me what he thinks. The last time you gave a damn whether someone agreed with you or not was when you signed with your mother about doing chores. And, like you said, you left that off the day you turned eighteen.”
Gannon looked at him, then drew a deep breath.
“That’s not quite true,” he said. “I give a damn what Andrea thinks—and I don’t think she’s going to like this one bit.”
“Be a raise in pay.”
“Big deal. The money from the Banerjee could carry both of us for a half-century. She makes twice what I do, anyway. It’s not money, it’s…” He sighed. “It’s the aggravation. I can get cranky, you know, and some of it’s bound to spill onto her a bit. Even in the ivory tower, I get peeved now and then. As head of ONI? Oh, dear Lord.”
“I need an answer, Chuck. And I need it now. In case you hadn’t noticed, all hell is breaking loose.”
“Bit of an overstatement, Winston. It stopped ‘breaking loose’ the moment Harrington crossed the hyper wall. Now it’s just coming apart.”
“Yes or no?”
“Yes, damn you.” Gannon glared at the admiral. “You knew I’d agree, didn’t you?”
“Yep. I’ve known you a long time. Since the day you told an ensign he was full of shit and didn’t know his ass from his elbow.”
“And you were the one officer who didn’t bust me.” Gannon smiled reluctantly. “You even listened.” He shook his head. “Okay, maybe this’ll work out.”
General Board Boardroom,
Madison Grant Tower,
City of Mendel,
Planet Mesa,
Mesa System.
The table was oval-shaped, with seats for up to twenty-five and room behind them for chairs to seat whatever staff their occupants might bring to the meeting. It was also luxuriously furnished, as one would have anticipated for the meeting place of the General Board of the Mesa System.
At the moment, however, someone else occupied the General Board’s meeting place, and Captain Cynthia Lecter felt a combination of deep satisfaction and trepidation as she looked around the almost fully populated table. The rest of the conference room was empty. The meeting she was about to convene was not the sort in which one wanted any participants who weren’t absolutely necessary.
General Susan Hibson, present as the CO of the Mesan Military Administration, sat to Lecter’s right. Hibson really ought to have chaired this meeting, in many ways, but Michelle Henke had chosen to send Tenth Fleet’s chief of staff to discharge that role, instead. Tenth Fleet was the actual power in the Mesa System, and Lecter’s position as Henke’s chief of staff provided all the authority she needed for their purposes today—the main one of which was to begin the process of transitioning away from the MMA and back to civilian Mesan government. Hibson obviously had to be a part of that conversation, but there were definite arguments for putting someone else in charge of it.
The others around that table…
Only two were from what had once been the General Board: Brianna Pearson, formerly Vice President of Operations (Mesa) for Technodyne Industries, and the Vice President of Research and Development for the Mesan Genetic Consultancy, a man named Jackson Chicherin.
Chicherin still held his position with MGC, which was a locally based firm. Lecter didn’t know if Pearson still held hers with Technodyne. Pearson herself might not even know yet if she remained their employee. Transstellar corporations were notorious for cutting the throats (figuratively speaking…as a rule) of executives who foundered on reefs.
For the purposes of the moment, however, it didn’t matter whether or not Pearson was still a Technodyne employee. She had been, which had made her a prominent member of the General Board. Which, in turn, meant she still held a certain degree of authority among Mesa’s full citizens. And, perhaps more to the point, she was one of the tiny number of former Board members who would be—very grudgingly—accepted by Mesa’s seccies and ex-slaves.
“Tiny number,” as in two: her and Chicherin. Every other former member of the General Board would have been flatly rejected, and a fair number would’ve taken their lives in their hands if they’d dared to show up.
None of the other people sitting at the conference actually approved of either Pearson or Chicherin. But they all understood the necessity of including some prominent representatives of Mesa’s former full citizens in the process of constructing a new government, and these were the only two all of them—any of them, really—could stomach. Chicherin had always been far in the background, and Pearson was known to have objected on several occasions to the brutal tactics of the previous government in dealing with seccies and ex-slaves.
The commander of the Mesan Planetary Peaceforce, General Gillian Drescher, was there, as well. It would have been impossible to have the meeting without her, since she commanded the only more or less intact armed force on the planet, other than the occupation troops supporting Hibson’s MMA.
The seccies were the best-represented at the table, by far. Along with Jurgen Dusek, the recognized “Head Boss” of Mesa’s seccy bosses, six other bosses were there as well: Andrea Nur, from Potosi District; Hyndryk Abbas, of the Jewel District; Anibal Eisenberg, from Kelly District; Jacelyn Amsterdam, from Watson; Theodora Moreau, from Crick City; and Cáo Li-Qiang, from Franklin. The cities of Watson, Crick City, and Franklin had the largest seccy populations on Mesa, after Mendel itself. The capital city was far larger than any other, of course, and the only one whose seccies had been organized by the Bosses into districts.
Seven seccies out of twenty-one people, total—out of nineteen, if one subtracted Lecter and Hibson from the equation. Seccies were only ten percent of the Mesan population, but at the moment they held more than thirty-six percent of the positions in what amounted to a provisional government. Very provisional, to be sure—but it was still the body out of which the planet’s new government would emerge.
Former full citizens, on the other hand, held a little over twenty percent of the seats, despite constituting thirty percent of the population. And as for the majority of Mesa’s inhabitants, the former slaves…
Well, that was a problem. Except for the Audubon Ballroom, Mesa’s slaves had had no political or even social organizations at all, other than their religious ones—and most of the denominations tolerated by Mesa’s authorities had embraced a form of pietism that emphasized personal, individual relationships with God, a sense of duty and order…but definitely not social activism. For the moment, at least, the ex-slaves’ religious organizations were not well suited to playing a role in organizing a political movement. And those on the planet who’d been members of the Ballroom had been few in number. More importantly, because of their underground existence, they were unknown to all but a few of the ex-slave population, which gave them zero name recognition, and had little political experience, in any event.
Given that material, how could representatives of Mesa’s ex-slaves be catapulted overnight into important positions of the new government?
The answer was that they couldn’t—not for now, at least. Ex-slaves—ex-slaves native to Mesa, at least—with the capacity to fill that role simply didn’t exist yet. So, willy-nilly, the ex-slaves who constituted sixty percent of Mesa’s population were “represented” at the table by people who had either made their names in the Ballroom off Mesa or held a high status among the ex-slaves for other reasons. Of those eight people, only two had ever lived on Mesa—Lakshmi X and Saburo X—and neither of them had been born here. Like Saburo and Lakshmi, Jeremy X, Donald Toussaint, and Web Du Havel had been born into slavery, but off-planet. And three of the “representatives of ex-slaves” had never been slaves at all, and neither had any of their ancestors. Queen Berry of Torch, Thandi Palane from Ndebele, and Catherine Montaigne—who was here as a prominent figure in the antislavery League, not as a Manticoran politician—were also present and could be expected to speak for the ex-slaves, but they were scarcely Mesans.
To make things still more difficult, all of them, except for Thandi Palane, had arrived on Mesa only a short time before—Donald Toussaint and Lakshmi X had landed just the day before—and all but three would be leaving Mesa, some sooner than others.
Berry and Web Du Havel really ought to be leaving for the six-week return voyage to Congo as soon as possible, since they were the heart of the system’s government. They wouldn’t be, however. Not immediately, at least. Their insight and advice—especially Du Havel’s—would be far too valuable on Mesa. And Berry Zilwicki, the Queen of Torch, the planet where the victims of genetic slavery had finally found a voice and a place of their own, was far too valuable as a sign of what slaves and ex-slaves could achieve. So, yes, they had to be leaving soon…and, no, they wouldn’t be.
Catherine Montaigne, on the other hand, truly did need to leave soon, because the Mesa System wasn’t the only one building a new government for itself. She was bound and determined to arrive on Terra before the formal start of the Constitutional Convention that would create a new government for the Solarian League. Assembling that Constitutional Convention was taking, literally, months, if only because of travel times, so she didn’t actually have to race directly off to Old Chicago, but she was also determined to return to both Manticore and Beowulf on her way. Manticore, because as the leader of the Manticoran Liberal party she needed to consult with Prime Minister Alexander first. Whatever else, she would be seen as an official representative of Empress Elizabeth, so it would probably be a good idea to know the Alexander Government’s latest views. And Beowulf, because she needed to consult with the Antislavery League’s central committee, since the ASL was planning the largest convocation in its history.
Which would just happen to take place in Old Chicago.
Jeremy X and Thandi Palane would be staying on Mesa rather longer even than Berry and Du Havel, although no one knew exactly how much longer just yet. They couldn’t stay indefinitely, since they were the leaders of Torch’s military. But given that Torch had just won its declared war with Mesa hands down—granted, it was the Grand Alliance that had actually done it—everyone agreed that it would be more important for them to help stabilize the situation on Mesa before returning. For the moment, Torch’s military forces had nothing to do except train.
That left the last person sitting at the table, whose status was…complicated. Kevin Olonga was—had been, rather—a full citizen of Mesa, but he’d occupied no government position and had never been a prominent figure. Not for the population at large, at least. He was there because he was a member of the Mesan Alignment’s central committee…and the only one who’d been willing to accept the offer to participate.
He’d gotten the invitation only because Admiral Gold Peak had insisted. “We have to have one of them at the table,” she’d said. “That’s the only way we’ll be able to start untangling the mess of who is and who isn’t part of the ‘Alignment.’”
As Web Du Havel had put it many more times than once: “Nobody ever said slave rebellions didn’t have lots of problems.”
* * *
The first hour went smoothly enough. But the tension mounted quickly when the issue of creating new police agencies for Mesa was brought up.
Actually, it mounted the instant that issue was brought up.
“Are you out of your mind?” Brianna Pearson demanded before Web Du Havel even finished with his proposal.
“You want to—” here she glared at Saburo—“put a known terrorist in charge of Mesa’s police agencies? Absolutely not!”
“Excuse me, Ms. Pearson,” Susan Hibson said, before Lecter could speak. “Are you under the impression you have a choice about this?”
The two women locked eyes. Hibson was much the smaller of them, but despite her current exalted rank, she carried herself with the hard-trained, muscular grace of a treecat. Her hair and complexion were darker than the fair-haired Mesan’s…and her eyes were much, much harder.
Pearson started to reply, but General Drescher raised a hand before she could.
“Brianna, you’re being foolish,” she said. “General Hibson’s right. You—we—don’t have any choice in the matter.”
Pearson’s eyes swiveled to her in what might have been betrayal, but Drescher was looking at Lecter.
“We don’t, do we, Captain?” It wasn’t an actual question; it was a way to rub Pearson’s nose in reality.
“No, you don’t,” Lecter said. “This is an issue Admiral Gold Peak discussed at length with the parties involved, and she’s made a firm decision. The reasoning—”
“I think I understand the reasoning,” Drescher interrupted. “What I really need to know, from my perspective, is if you intend to place Mesa’s military under the Ballroom’s command, too.”
“No. You’ll remain the MPP’s commander—under General Hibson’s orders—” Lecter twitched her head at Hibson “—just as you’ve been under the Military Administration. The MMA isn’t going away tomorrow. Not until we know this new arrangement will be workable.” She let her own eyes sweep the former full citizens at the table. “Bottom line, the Grand Alliance knows it’s going to be here for a while, no matter what. And General Hibson’s troops are the ultimate guarantee to all parties that no one will be allowed to victimize anyone else. But we need to move her as far into the background—in reality, not just appearances—as we can, and do it as quickly as we can without destabilizing the situation. And part of the way we’re going to do that is to let everyone see your people and the new provisional government stepping into your responsibilities as Mesans. The only thing we might need less than the appearance that you’re our puppets would be for us to think we could make you our puppets.”
“Captain Lecter—and Admiral Gold Peak—are right about that, General.” It was Jeremy, this time. “And an army is quite different from the police force we’re talking about here. General Hibson will have to maintain oversight until everyone concerned is convinced this transition has worked, of course, but I’m sure she’ll be keeping only a light hand on the reins. Provided, of course that the MPP remains strictly nonpartisan in political terms. For which purpose—”
He pointed, with a very thin smile, at another person sitting at the table.
“May I introduce you to Donald Toussaint? Until very recently, he was a colonel in Torch’s military, but he’s resigned his position in order to become a citizen of Mesa and serve as your People’s Commissioner. If you’re not familiar with the title, it—”
“I know what it means.” Drescher studied Toussaint for a moment with a quirky half-smile. “Am I right in assuming that Commissioner Toussaint’s previous surname had only one letter?” she asked, and Jeremy grinned.
“You’re very astute—as, of course, one would expect of an army’s top commanding officer.”
“What about my personnel? Are you planning to dismiss them and replace them with…others, let’s call them?”
“That would be extraordinarily stupid,” Web Du Havel replied. “Demobilizing an army is a tricky proposition under any circumstances. Even if you do it only to return the troops to civilian life after winning a war, you’ve suddenly made lots of people unemployed where there may not be enough jobs to absorb them. If you do it in the middle of a period of political turmoil, or—especially—in a society that’s just lost a war, you compound the problem by an order of magnitude. In that case, you have many thousands—perhaps millions—of angry and very possibly desperate people on your hands, all of whom are familiar with military-grade weapons. It’s what we political scientists call Dereliction of Demobilization. After too many drinks at a faculty party, that slides into the Freikorps Fuck-Up.”
The tension in Drescher’s shoulders eased a bit.
“All right,” she said. “What about new recruits?”
“Any citizen of Mesa is eligible to enlist in the MPP, assuming they are of age and meet the minimum physical and educational requirements,” Du Havel replied. “Regardless of their previous status. We expect a number of former slaves and seccies to do so.”
He didn’t add and we will damned well see to it that happens, but Drescher was anything but dense.
“A lot of my current troops will find that hard to accept,” she said, although her tone indicated that it was simply an observation, not a protest.
“Of course they will.” Du Havel nodded. “Indeed, we expect a large number of the existing MPP’s personnel to resign rather quickly. But that will be as a result of their choice, not something that was forced upon them by the new government. That makes a big difference.”
“You’re still talking about a lot of very unhappy people.”
“We are,” Susan Hibson agreed. Her tone was much warmer than the one she’d used with Pearson. “And it can’t be helped. But your people who don’t resign will just have to make sure they don’t act on that unhappiness. Believe me, the last thing we want is for my people to have to do that. If they do…”
She shrugged, and Jeremy nodded.
“Yes, you will. And they’re already very unhappy, General,” he said. “As slaveowners usually are when slaves upset the order of things.”
“Most of us weren’t slaveowners!” Pearson protested, but Jeremy only shrugged.
“With a few exceptions, you all stood by and made no serious effort to abolish slavery—and reaped the side benefits, as full citizens of Mesa. That’s not much of a difference, from my point of view. But I’m not trying to pick a fight here.” He leaned forward with a small, dismissive gesture.
“Ms. Pearson,” Du Havel said, “please accept our judgment on this matter. I’ve spent decades studying this problem—along with all the others involving the abolition of slavery. Not just genetic slavery, either. I’ve looked at the institution of slavery clear back past African slavery in the last three centuries Ante-Diaspora to the days of the ancient Roman Empire and even earlier. And I’ve devoted more than a little attention to how states and societies rebuild themselves—or don’t—in the wake of crushing military defeats, as well. So believe me when I tell you that unless we keep stirring up animosity, most of the full citizens will try to make an accommodation with the new regime. Regardless of their political views, people have lives to get on with. All of the former full citizens are going to have to make adjustments. They won’t be all that sympathetic to a soldier who quit of his own volition because he couldn’t stand the idea of being in the same outfit as former slaves and seccies. For most former full citizens, the attitude will be along the lines of: Get over it. Things are tough for everybody.”
“Just drop it, Brianna,” Drescher advised. “I think they’re probably right. Besides, I’ve coped pretty well under General Hibson, I think. I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to manage under the new dispensation, too.” She eyed Donald Toussaint. “Depending.”
“We’ll get along famously, General,” he said with a grin, and Pearson scowled.
“Fine. I’ll drop that issue. But what about this nonsense of having him—” she jabbed her chin in Saburo’s direction “—be the new head of all police agencies? Talk about creating a unified opposition!”
“You interrupted Webb before he could finish,” Saburo said. “He didn’t say anything about my taking over all the police forces on Mesa. That was your assumption. It’d be impossible, for practical reasons, if nothing else. What Webb was going to say was that we’d be dissolving the Office of Public Safety and replacing it with a new police agency specifically tasked with maintaining social order. That’s what I’ll be heading up.”
“But—” She stared at him, then shifted her gaze to Du Havel. “But you just got through saying that disbanding an army was a bad idea.”
“That applies to a military force.” Du Havel shook his head. “First, the OPS was never truly a military force. At best, it was a paramilitary force, with every single vice to which such forces are too often heir. But more importantly, neither it nor its major subdivision, the Mesan Internal Security Directorate, ever had any purpose for existence beyond grinding under the planet’s slaves and seccies. How in the world do you think we could possibly not dissolve them? We don’t want to demobilize the MPP precisely because we don’t want to trigger off a rebellion among the ex-full citizens. What the hell do you think would happen if we kept OPS intact? There’d be an even bigger and more ferocious rebellion—on the part of the ex-slaves and seccies.”
“You bet your sweet ass,” Jacelyn Amsterdam hissed. “We’ve already put out the word that any Safety or Misty who comes into Watson goes out in a body bag. That’s if there’s enough left of them to bother bagging.”
“Same for Creek City,” Theodora Moreau said.
“And Franklin,” Cáo Li-Qiang added, and Jason Dusek slapped the table with a meaty hand.
“And the same goes for every seccy district in Mendel. Forget it, Pearson. The OPS and MISD are in history’s trash can. They’re gone—and we’re more than willing to upgrade that to ‘dead and gone,’ if that’s what they prefer.”
“And here I always thought you were brighter than Regan Snyder, Brianna.” Jackson Chicherin spoke up for the first time since the meeting had begun. “What the hell’s gotten into you? The dissolution of OPS was a given. I took that for granted from the outset. What I was worried about was the possibility of mass reprisals and ‘war crime’ trials against those so-called ‘agents of the law’ after they were dissolved.”
“Oh, trust me, we’d love to try some of those bastards—and hang them,” Susan Hibson said flatly. “And if were up to me, they’d be decorating a lot of light standards in downtown Mendel. Unfortunately, what they did was covered under what passed for laws where slaves and seccies were concerned.” She showed her teeth. “So they get a pass…for past actions. You may have noticed what happened to the handful of them stupid enough to try anything after my people hit the streets, though.”
“And one of the conditions of transitioning to the provisional government is a commitment to continue that policy,” Lecter said with a firm nod. “So any would-be vigilantism will be strictly freelance…and punished by the Mesan police and courts.”
“That’s fair enough,” Chicherin said. “Better than I expected, really.”
Pearson glared at him, but he ignored her and looked at Saburo, instead.
“If I understand what you’re saying correctly, you intend to leave the existing local police forces in place. And the same with the Office of Investigation.”
“Yes—except that those police agencies will be part of a consolidated hierarchy, with my people looking over their shoulders. We’ll be the central coordinator as far as policy and accountability are concerned, so they’ll have to deal with that. As far as what they do—their function—is concerned, I’ll make absolutely as few changes as possible. Stability is what we need here, after all. But that said, all of the existing forces will have to begin accepting applicants from outside the full citizenry. The former full citizenry, I should say. Not only will they have to accept ex-slave and seccy applicants, but I’ll see to it that those applicants get prioritized.”
Chicherin winced.
“I think…getting local police forces to accept…”
“I don’t care about the street cops,” Saburo said. “Not for now, anyway; that will change down the road, but we can ease into it. What I damned well will see now, though, is that the Office of Investigation gets leavened with ex-slaves and seccies. That’s going to happen fast. Very fast. There’s no way in hell I’m going to allow Mesa’s planetary police to remain a preserve of former full citizens.”
“Ah.” Chicherin breathed a little sigh of relief and leaned back in his chair. “That’s…okay.”
Du Havel had watched Pearson throughout that exchange.
“You have to face reality, Ms. Pearson,” he said now. “More than half of Mesa’s people were slaves until a short while ago. The only thing that will settle them down and help avoid violence is the knowledge that the OPS has been dismantled and that the recognized top law enforcement agency on the planet now has a former Ballroom member in charge. That will go a long way to calm their fears.”
“Not the fears of the full—ex-full—citizens!” Pearson snapped.
“Actually, I think you’re wrong about that,” Drescher said. “If the former full citizens also see that I’m still in command of the MPP and that OPS has been dissolved, what armed force could threaten them—even assuming General Hibson wasn’t still here to step in? It’s a hell of a lot better than seeing OPS under new management operating against them, don’t you think? And don’t forget that if they come under attack this time, they’ll be the ones who enjoy all the advantages of defending themselves from within huge ceramacrete towers.” She grimaced. “I can tell you from experience that that’s one hell of a defensive position. So, who could really come after them? The Office of Investigation really is a police agency. It’s not a military or paramilitary outfit.”
Pearson looked around, then let out her breath and slumped a bit in her chair. After a few seconds, she nodded.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll let it go.”
“All right, then,” Captain Lecter said. “Now that we’ve addressed that issue, I want to move on to reconstruction. Boss Dusek, why don’t you kick off the discussion.”
“Just a moment before you do, Jurgen,” Saburo interrupted, raising one hand slightly. “I think I should make an announcement at this point.”
“Yeah, sure,” Dusek grunted. “What is it?”
“I’m dropping my surname of ‘X.’ As Donald—” he nodded toward Toussaint, sitting next to him “—has already done. It’s been a Ballroom tradition—well, a very recent one—that the new surname chosen be that of some historical champion of slaves. Hence, in his case, Toussaint.
“But I’ve chosen to do otherwise.” He smiled. There was no humor at all in the expression. “My name is henceforth and forever more, Saburo Lara.”
* * *
Jackson Chicherin made it a point to speak to Berry at the break. Like almost every other human being who’d encountered her, he found the young monarch of Torch to be a friendly and comforting sort of person.
They began with cordial, idle chitchat. Then Chicherin said: “I have to say I’m relieved that Saburo has decided to change his surname.” He shrugged. “I do have to say I was a little surprised he chose that particular moment to make the announcement, but I think it’ll be reassuring to quite a few of the ex-full citizens. It’s a break with his Ballroom past…and ‘Lara’ sounds so much less harsh than ‘X.’”
Berry’s lips tightened.
“It is…and it isn’t. and he didn’t just happen to choose that particular moment to announce it. Lara is the name of the woman he loved. She died saving me from an assassination attempt launched by the Alignment. So, yes, you can take a little reassurance from Saburo’s new last name. But I wouldn’t take it too far, if I were you.”
* * *
Later in the break, Chicherin sidled up to Kevin Olonga.
“We have got to start calling ourselves something else,” he said quietly.
“What?” Olonga frowned. We’ve gone by the name of the Alignment for—”
“It’s over, Kevin. And that name is an albatross around our neck.”
“What’s an albatross? Some kind of necklace?”
Forge One,
Sanctuary Orbit,
Refuge System.
Sonja Hemphill propped one shoulder against the bulkhead and raised the coffee cup in both hands to inhale its rich, deep perfume. She’d never been much of a coffee drinker back on Manticore. She’d preferred tea, actually. But that had been before she met Havenite coffee. She didn’t know what had happened to the coffee trees imported by Haven’s original settlers, but whatever it was, it had imparted a deeper, richer, and more mellow taste to the coffee brewed from it, and she thought about the woman who had introduced her to it as she gazed out through the crystoplast of her office’s deck-to-overhead viewport.
She’d expected to respect Admiral Shannon Foraker when they finally met. How could she not respect the woman who’d been her own counterpart for the Republic of Haven’s navy? And who’d come up with so many pragmatic, sometimes crude, but almost always workable counters for the Manticoran weapons her less capable industrial base had been unable to duplicate?
What Hemphill hadn’t expected was how much they were going to like one another. For all the differences between them, they were also very much alike, and each of them recognized in the other a kindred soul—a sister, under the skin.
The treecat sprawled comfortably on the deck beside her, sharing her view of the planet called Sanctuary, rolled over onto his back and stretched all six limbs in a prodigious yawn. Hunts Silently was her self-assigned bodyguard against the Mesan Alignment’s assassination nanotech, not her bonded companion, but he’d also become the closest friend she’d ever had. Closer than she’d ever dreamed she could have, really. Yet he did have his occasionally…inelegant moments, she thought, glancing down at him with a smile. And there were times when it was even easier than usual to see why Stephanie Harrington had called his kind “treecats” when she first encountered them all those centuries ago. In fact, he looked about as ridiculous as any Old Terran cat, just at the moment.
Hunts Silently gave one last, spine-arched stretch, then rolled up into a sitting position and his true-hands flicked signs at her.
<There is nothing wrong in being comfortable,> he told her. <And two-foots are much sillier looking than the People.>
She chuckled as his cupped true-hands swept emphatically apart in the sign for “much.” Not that he didn’t have a point. Sometimes, at least.
“The wisdom of treecats is not to be despised,” she told him solemnly, and chuckled again, louder, when he nodded in undeniably complacent agreement.
She took one hand from her cup, reached down, and rubbed his tufted ears. He buzzed a purr and leaned his head against the side of her knee as she returned her gaze to the planet below them.
Sanctuary. Perhaps the most fitting name for a planet that she’d ever heard, and yet simultaneously how bitterly, bitterly ironic. It was nothing short of a miracle that the generation ship Calvin’s Hope had managed somehow—no one would ever know how, because those records had vanished—to reach this cool K8 star, almost ten light-years from her original destination. And the planet her crew had found here, hidden from the rest of the galaxy by the heavy concentrations of dust that obscured the KCR-126-06 system, was a gorgeous emerald-and-sapphire gem. A bit on the chilly side, perhaps, especially for Hemphill’s sensibilities. She’d grown up on the Star Kingdom’s capital world, and Manticore was warmest of all the Star Kingdom’s habitable planets, so even Sanctuary’s high summer seemed cool to her. But eighty-three percent of its surface was water and it had very little axial tilt, which combined to produce extraordinarily mild seasonal variations. If it was cooler than Manticore, it was far warmer than Sphinx, and its climate could have been specifically designed as the antithesis of tempestuous Gryphon’s.
Her mood turned more somber as she thought about what Calvin’s Hope’s passengers must have felt, how they must have reacted when they found this beautiful, perfect jewel at the end of their impossible voyage. The joy with which they must have stripped their vessel, shuttled themselves and their children down to the surface, settled into the rich, mountain valley they’d christened Paradise Valley and built the settlement they called Home on the banks of the river they’d named Hope.
Only to discover that that beautiful, fertile valley was the mouth of Hell itself when the snowcapped mountain above Paradise Valley—the snowcapped volcano above Paradise Valley—erupted with a fury that dwarfed Old Terra’s Krakatoa. Indeed, that eruption had approached that of Thera, the most devastating eruption and earthquake in the history of Old Terra’s humanity. Dust and lava had annihilated Home, wiped out the colonists’ imported technology, and driven the terrified survivors back to an almost hunter-gatherer level of existence. How they had clawed out a living, preserved any of the terrestrial food plants they’d brought with them, managed to not simply survive but fight their way back to a steam-age level of technology, in the thirteen centuries between that cataclysm and their discovery by the People’s Republic of Haven was more than she could begin to imagine. But they had.
Somehow they had.
Of course, it helped that in most ways Sanctuary truly was the welcoming haven it appeared to be. As if in partial compensation for its high level of tectonic and volcanic activity, its mild climate and fertile soil offered effectively year-round growing seasons, and human physiology was immune to every disease native to its ecology. Its population had increased to almost two billion by the time they were discovered, and that number had climbed steadily—and sharply—in the forty T-years since. One thing the Legislaturalists of the People’s Republic of Haven had done right—Hemphill couldn’t think of a second thing, not right off hand—was to bring modern medicine, including prolong, to Sanctuary.
Well, they had educated the people of Sanctuary, as well. To a rather higher level than their own Dolists, in fact. But not out of the goodness of their heart.
One day, and not so very far in the future, this obscure star system about which most of the galaxy knew absolutely nothing would be wealthier and more heavily industrialized than ninety percent of the Solarian League’s core worlds. It was the next best thing to inevitable for a planet whose system primary boasted no less than five massive asteroid belts…and which lay within fifteen light-hours of six additional asteroid belts. The Epsilon Belt, fifteen light-minutes beyond the Refuge hyper-limit, was especially resource rich, the broken bones of an entire shattered planet, torn apart when the A-class central component of the system captured Refuge and added it to its original pair of red dwarf companions.
The industrial possibilities of Refuge had not been lost upon the Legislaturalists, who’d turned Sanctuary into a top-secret shipbuilding complex code-named “Bolthole.” That process had begun even before the outbreak of hostilities between the People’s Republic and the Star Kingdom. In many ways, Hemphill supposed, Bolthole was the Havenite equivalent of Roger Winton’s Project Gram. Which made it even more ironic that this was where Sonja Hemphill, who’d grown up in Project Gram, had ultimately found herself.
She gazed down at the planet, watching the terminator line creep steadily toward her as Forge One approached the dawn. Darkness lay heavily across the planetary surface directly below the geostationary industrial platform, but she saw the red glare of fiery clouds, lit from beneath as one of the volcanoes in the Avarshal Chain spilled lava into the Eastwind Sea. She wondered how much area this eruption would add to the islands. Not that anyone would be settling there anytime soon. The Avarshal Chain was the most active of Sanctuary’s several volcanic chains. She wondered if—
A soft, musical chime interrupted her thoughts, and she turned from the viewport, crossed to her desk, and pressed the com button.
“Yes, Rafe?”
“Good morning, Milady.” The voice belonged to Senior Chief Yeoman Rafael Biggs, who ran Hemphill’s office with an iron hand. “Admiral Foraker is here.”
“Oh, she is, is she?” Hemphill shook her head with another, broader smile.
“Yes, Milady. And Commander Gharsul is with her.”
Hemphill’s eyebrows rose slightly at that. One of the more endearing things about Shannon Foraker was her…obliviousness, probably wasn’t the exact word, but it came close, to all of the protocol—what Hamish Alexander-Harrington was fond of referring to as “fuss and feathers”—which went with her towering seniority. Hemphill suspected that outside the bounds of the R&D and logistical management of her position, Foraker still thought of herself as the naval commander she’d been before Thomas Theisman overthrew the Committee of Public Safety. Nor did she understand how the fact that she genuinely didn’t see why anyone might think she was in any way “special” produced such near idolatrous devotion from her staff.
And it was also why she so often forgot to go through “channels” when she needed to speak to Hemphill.
On the other hand, she didn’t usually bring Gharsul with her unless she had something serious on her mind, and Hemphill’s smile faded as she wondered what that “something serious” might be this time. They were scheduled for their regular joint morning brief in less than three hours—Forge One synchronized its clocks with the city of Mountain Fort, the Sanctuarian capital, almost directly below its equatorial orbit—so why hadn’t Foraker waited? Admittedly, the Havenite was a night bird who apparently thrived on about a third of the sleep a normal human required, but this was early, even for her.
“Well,” Hemphill said, “in that case, Senior Chief, please ask them to step into my lair.”
“Of course, Milady.”
Hemphill turned toward the hatch as it slid open and a slender admiral in the gray and green uniform of the Republic of Haven navy, as blond as Hemphill herself, stepped through it.
“Good morning, Admiral.” In light of Gharsul’s presence, Hemphill greeted her a bit more formally than had become their wont. She held her coffee in her left hand and extended her right. “I didn’t expect to see you quite this bright and early.”
“Oh, damn.” Foraker grimaced as she shook the offered hand. “I forgot to tell you I was coming. Again.”
“You are the commanding officer of Bolthole,” Hemphill pointed out with a gentle smile. “As such, I think you can pretty much come and go on your own schedule. At least you haven’t woken me up in the middle of the night to discuss our latest project.”
“You mean I haven’t woken you up in the middle of the night yet,” Foraker said with a crooked smile. “You might want to ask Five about the last time I did it to him.”
“I’m sure you had a very good reason,” Hemphill said soothingly, and Foraker chuckled.
“Good morning, Gharsul,” Hemphill continued, smiling at Gharsul.
“Admiral.”
Like all Sanctuarians, the commander used a single name. Their culture used a combined patronymic and matronymic “surname,” but only for legal purposes and on extremely formal occasions. He had the striking combination of dark skin, dark hair, and very light eyes characteristic of the natives of Sanctuary. They were green, in his case, rather than the more common azure or cornflower blue, and he was quite tall.
Like every Sanctuarian young enough to receive it, he’d been given third-generation prolong, but in his case, he was almost as young as he looked. There was a reason for that.
Neither the Legislaturalists nor the Committee of Public Safety had considered Sanctuarians citizens of the People’s Republic. Refuge might be their star system, but the People’s Republic had regarded it as an imperial possession and its inhabitants as subjects, not citizens. They’d been better off than quite a few of the planets the Solarian Office of Frontier Security “administered,’ but that hadn’t been saying all that much. And because they weren’t citizens, they’d been ineligible for service in the Peoples Navy…despite how many of them worked aboard the industrial platforms committed to building the Peoples Navy.
They still weren’t citizens of the Republic, although Hemphill felt confident that would be changing in the not-so-distant future. But from the moment of Eloise Pritchart’s first visit to Refuge, even before Thomas Theisman had finished off the last of the State Security warlords, Sanctuary had been an ally of the restored Republic of Haven. It was no longer an imperial possession, and as allies, its citizens were eligible for service in the Republic of Haven Navy. Indeed, it had been Pritchart and Theisman’s policy to integrate as many Sanctuarians as possible into the RHN to make that new relationship crystal clear to all concerned.
Gharsul’s relatively senior rank, barely seven T-years later, might have led some to conclude that he owed his rapid promotion to “affirmative action.” They would have been wrong. Even if Theisman or Pritchart had been prepared to cut corners (which they weren’t), Shannon Foraker would never have selected Gharsul as her senior intelligence analyst if he hadn’t thoroughly demonstrated his fitness for the position.
“Can I interest either of you in a cup of coffee?” Hemphill continued, raising her own cup slightly.
“You certainly can,” Foraker replied, then snorted. “In fact—”
“I’ve got this,” Hemphill said dryly, and pressed the com key again.
“Yes, Milady?”
“Unless I miss my guess, Senior Chief,” Hemphill said, never taking her amused gaze from Foraker, “the Admiral forgot breakfast again.”
“Croissants, cheese plate, fresh fruit, and coffee already inbound, Milady,” Senior Chief Biggs replied.
“Thank you.” Hemphill released the button and pointed at the comfortable chairs at the small conference table in the corner of her office. “That looks like a good place to perch,” she said.
“Am I really that predictable?” Foraker asked a bit plaintively as the three of them crossed to the table.
“Only in certain aspects of your life, Shannon,” Hemphill reassured her, and Hunts Silently bleeked a laugh as he sprang lightly into one of the chairs. “And to be honest, I had a bit of a hint that you’d probably forgotten unimportant little things like food. You’ve got that ‘Oooh, shiny!’ look again.”
Gharsul raised one hand to hide his smile, and even Foraker’s lips twitched. But then she shook her head as she settled into a chair of her own.
“Takes one to know one,” she said, and Hemphill raised one hand to acknowledge the hit.
They really were much too much alike, she thought.
The office door opened again, and Senior Chief Biggs walked in with a wheeled cart laden with food, plates, and flatware. He pushed it over to the conference table, parked it, and poured coffee into a cup. The cup bore Forge One’s platform number on one side and Foraker’s name on the other, and Hemphill hid a smile as he extended it to the admiral. Biggs kept that cup in his desk drawer for occasions just like this one. He’d come to know Foraker as well as Hemphill had, and like her Havenite subordinates, he regarded her with the affectionate respect any sorceress deserved.
“Thank you, Rafe,” Foraker said, and he bobbed his head.
“My pleasure, Admiral.”
He offered the pot to Gharsul, but the Sanctuarian shook his head.
“I’ve already eaten, Senior Chief,” he said with a slight smile.
Something suspiciously like a chuckle came from Foraker’s direction, and Biggs glanced at Hemphill, eyebrows arched, but she shook her head.
“I’m good,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Of course, Milady.”
He braced briefly to attention, then withdrew, and Foraker reached for a plate and one of the piping hot croissants.
“So,” Hemphill said as the Havenite added smoked salmon, several slices of cheddar, and a small bunch of grapes to her plate, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Just something I wanted to kick around with you before the morning brief,” Foraker replied. “Take a look. See what you can make of this?”
She pulled a chip from her pocket and slotted it into her chair arm’s data port, and the office’s smartwall came alive. It displayed a star map, flanked by two quite different displays, and Hemphill pursed her lips as she regarded them.
The star map was straightforward enough, although she had no clue why four star systems had been highlighted. Congo and the Manticore Binary System glowed green, but the Sol and Yildun systems were a bright, bloody red.
She filed that away and turned to the next display. It showed a comparison of two different—very slightly different—versions of the same missile. Hemphill recognized the Solarian League Navy Cataphract, its answer (of sorts) to the Grand Alliance’s multidrive missiles, but she wouldn’t have noticed the differences if they hadn’t been visually highlighted for her. Even with that assistance, it took her the better part of three minutes to identify the variations between the two, because they were almost identical.
Once she was confident she had the differences nailed down, her eyes moved to the third display. It was a complex chronological graph—that much was obvious—but the numbers meant nothing to her off the top of her head.
“All right, I see them,” she said. “I can’t say they mean all that much to me right at the moment. Some context?”
Foraker grimaced around a mouthful of croissant. She took a quick sip of coffee and used the cup to indicate Gharsul.
“There’s a fascinating discrepancy here—one Gharsul spotted,” she said.
“Really?” Hemphill sat back with her own coffee. “Explain it to me, Commander.”
“Of course, Milady.”
Sanctuarians were much more comfortable with the notion of hereditary aristocracy than most Havenites, and the formal address came more readily to him than it did to some of Foraker’s other subordinates. Not that it mattered one way or the other to Hemphill. If she really needed to waste time worrying about inconsequentials, she could think of at least a dozen that were more pressing.
“First, there are the missiles,” Gharsul continued, using a light wand to indicate the diagram. “The one on the left is an example of the Cataphracts provided to the People’s Navy in Exile for the attack on Torch. The one on the right was captured from the SLN after Admiral Filareta’s attack on the Manticore System. As you can see, they’re almost—not quite, but almost—identical.”
“I don’t suppose that’s too surprising,” Hemphill said. “In fact, I’m not sure I’d call it a ‘discrepancy’ at all. It’s fairly obvious they were still refining the design when Mesa decided to hit Torch. For that matter, they were still refining it right up to the end of the war! So it’s not too odd Filareta had a later mark eight months after ‘Operation Ferret.’”
“I’d tend to agree, if that were the case, Milady,” Gharsul said. “But the discrepancy is that the PNE’s Cataphract is actually a later mod than the one Filareta took to Manticore.”
“Excuse me?” Hemphill sat upright, and Gharsul nodded.
“As I said, the difference is very slight, but we’ve compared both of these to the most recent Cataphract marks, and there’s not much question where they fall in the development sequence. Of course, Filareta was in transit for over two months, so the window between the PNE’s departure for Congo and his departure for Manticore is a little tighter than the actual attack dates indicate. But both sets of missiles had to come from somewhere, and it’s their origin that really has us puzzled, Milady.”
The wand highlighted one of the dates on the chronological display.
“These are the dates we’ve been able to reconstruct for both the PNE’s move on Congo and Filareta’s deployment from Tasmania for the attack on Manticore. And as we looked at them, we realized something odd.
“Technodyne’s never had a manufacturing facility in Mesa, so the Cataphracts used in the Congo attack had to have been produced somewhere else and then mated up with the PNE. But according to the captured data Duchess Harrington brought back from Operation Nemesis, all Cataphract production for the League Navy was at Yildun or Technodyne’s facilities in Sol. That didn’t bother us especially until we realized that the PNE’s missiles were actually the later version. There’s no way they could have reached the PNE from Yildun or Sol before the Congo attack. The timing simply doesn’t allow for it.”
Hemphill sat upright, her eyes sweeping the dates, then moving back to the star chart, while the admiral in her estimated transit times.
“I see your point,” she said then, slowly. “But if they didn’t come from Sol and they didn’t come from Yildun, where did they come from?”
“We don’t have a clue,” Foraker said. “That’s what inspired this ‘oooh, shiny’ moment.
“It certainly looks like Technodyne must have a third production facility we’ve never known about,” Hemphill mused.
“Technodyne or…somebody,” Foraker said. Hemphill looked at her, and she grimaced. “The ships that carried out the Yawata Strike and the graser platforms that plowed the road for the Beowulf attack had to come from somewhere, Sonja. According to all the data Duchess Harrington captured at Ganymede, that ‘somewhere’ doesn’t belong to Technodyne, and it’s not located anywhere in Solarian territory. So the Alignment must have its own Bolthole tucked away in a back pocket. And the fact that the PNE had the upgraded Cataphract when it hit Congo may just give us a maximum volume in which that ‘somewhere’ has to fall.”
“This has to get to Manticore and Nouveau Paris as quickly as possible,” Hemphill said.
“I agree.” Foraker nodded. “I just wanted to bounce the notion off you before I sent the courier boats. I’d like you to read through Gharsul’s report, see if there’s anything you think needs to be modified, before they depart.”
“Of course.” It was Hemphill’s turn to nod. “And I think we probably need to get this to Admiral Gold Peak and Captain Zilwicki in Mesa at the same time.”
L’Ouverture Station,
Torch Planetary Orbit,
Congo System.
Ruth Winton sat back and scrubbed her face with both hands, then stretched hugely. She’d been sitting at her console aboard L’Ouverture Station, the Congo System primary orbital station, for hours now, and her back was beginning to ache a little. Her butt ached a little more than that—although she allowed that the butt-ache was probably psychosomatic. The chair was designed for her backside, and was actually quite comfortable.
The real problem was that her whole life was a pain in the ass.
She lowered her hands and punched for the next screen of data.
“God forbid Princess Ruth Winton should have so much as one hair on her head put in harm’s way,” she muttered. “Evildoers abound everywhere, and the dynasty has to pile care upon vigilance lest I suffer the least misfortune from reckless—or not-so-reckless—adventures.”
She gazed at the data before her. No one could physically read through the mountains of captured data she was currently analyzing, but neither could she depend on even her algorithms to recognize the significance of every correlation they turned up. They were very good at spotting correlations within the parameters she’d provided, but defining the parameters was a major part of the problem. It was, in fact, one of the reasons her tendency to “think outside the box” made her so good at her avocation. For her, the entire universe was one huge data set, and—usually—she took an almost sensual pleasure from running her mental fingers through all that marvelous data. And, she acknowledged, she loved figuring out secrets. Which probably said interesting things about her basic personality.
“Don’t see what all the fuss is about, though,” she muttered as she glared at the output before her. She rather doubted that a close analysis of hydroponics consumption in a Mars-class heavy cruiser’s environmental plant was going to provide any mind-boggling revelations. “I’m—what, only fourth in line for the throne. Oh, wait—no! I’m not in the line of succession at all, because my biological daddy was a Masadan maniac. But does anyone listen when I point that out? No, of course they don’t!”
She scowled at the thoroughly useless analysis before her. Despite her fascination with ferreting secrets out of huge piles of data, she’d gotten to the point where she almost—not quite, but almost—wished Admiral Rozsak had just obliterated the PNE fleet when it attacked Congo. If he’d just blown them out of space, the Torch Navy wouldn’t have been able to salvage so many of their records.
Nothing here. Move on, she thought, and pulled up the next screen of no-doubt fascinating data.
“Bored, bored, bored. How many letters can be prefixed to that? Let’s see…Cored. Doored—no, that’s pushing it. Ford. Gored. Horde—hoard’ll work, too. Lord.”
A fresh analysis popped up before her, and she swallowed a groan. Logistic reports on ammunition were less boring than reports on environmental plants. She couldn’t think of anything else they might be less boring than, however.
“Can I get away with ‘moored’? No, that’d be cheating. Oared’s okay, though. So’s poured and roared. Sword…soared, too. Toward? No…don’t think so. Ward—maybe word. I think that’s—”
She broke off, frowning at a single line of the data.
“What the hell? Now, why was there that much discrepancy…?”
She tapped in an additional query, confirming the raw data, and her frown deepened. The PNE’s possession of the Technodyne-designed Cataphract had cost Admiral Luis Rozsak’s defending task force dearly, but she hadn’t realized that the advanced missiles had been delivered to Citizen Commander Luff quite as late in the game as they had been. Or, rather, she’d known when the Cataphracts had been delivered. What she hadn’t noted—and what the computers had just flagged for her—was how much earlier all of Luff’s other ordnance had been delivered. In fact, that big a discrepancy suggested…
She leaned back, cuddling her brain, her ennui vanished as she hunted down the memory she wanted. Where had she stored—?
Aha! She chuckled in triumph and entered the search string that brought up the astrogation data captured along with everything else in the PNE database. Luff’s people had been meticulous about where they’d gone, but deplorably sloppy about recording why they’d gone some of the places they’d been while awaiting their orders for “Operation Ferret.” One would almost think they hadn’t been interested in helping someone like, oh, Ruth Winton, figure out what they’d been up to. Antisocial of them, perhaps, but then again, they had been unregenerate StateSec holdouts working for Mesa and Manpower and bent upon planetary genocide.
She snorted at the thought, but then her eyes narrowed as she found what she’d been looking for.
“I will be damned,” she murmured to herself. “Why would they have gotten their Cataphracts there? I mean, there’s nothing there. I think, anyway.”
She opened another window, brought up L’Ouverture’s astrographic charts, and entered the coordinates from the PNE database, then grinned as the chart blinked confirmation at her.
“Nope,” she muttered in the far more cheerful tone of a Ruth with a puzzle to solve. “This makes no sense at all. Oh, goody!”
“Are you talking to yourself again, Ruth?” a voice asked from behind her. “Better be careful, or people will start thinking you’re screwy.”
“Not a problem.” She never took her eyes from the display. “When you’re Princess Ruth, and your family’s as stinking rich as mine is, the term is ‘eccentric.’ Not ‘screwy.’ Besides, I’m the best conversationalist I can find.”
She gazed at the star chart a moment longer, tapping the tip of her nose with an index finger to help herself think, then turned her head as the person who’d spoken came forward to stand beside her. Even sitting, Ruth’s head was no lower than the young woman’s shoulder. Cynthia X was so short that, combined with her squat torso, she put Ruth in mind of a mini-Anton Zilwicki, female edition. Antonia Zilwicki, maybe?
A lot of the former Ballroom members had changed their surnames by now, but Cynthia hadn’t, and probably never would. Her experiences at Manpower’s hands had been worse than those of most genetic slaves—which was a very low bar to begin with. After her escape, she’d become one of the Ballroom’s most proficient strikers, as they called themselves. (Manpower—the entire establishment of Mesa—had preferred terms like “murderers” and “terrorists.”)
She’d never said it in so many words, but Ruth had grown to know her well enough by now to realize that Cynthia was almost sorry Manpower had finally been driven under. She wouldn’t be able to kill any more of the scorpions. There were plenty who’d survived the recent unpleasantness, but Jeremy X had placed a ban on revenge killings.
It wasn’t often that anyone applied labels like “spoilsport” to the galaxy’s most deadly assassin.
But however lethal Cynthia might be, and however disappointed the young woman might be at having to turn in her hunting license, she was also very smart and had a natural aptitude for intelligence analysis. That was why she’d become something in the way of Ruth’s understudy over the last few months.
“I want you to look at something.” Ruth rose and gestured for Cynthia to take her chair. “Start with—” She leaned over and brought up the logistics analysis which had initially piqued her interest. “This here.”
“What am I looking for?” Cynthia looked over her shoulder at Ruth, then chuckled at the look the princess gave her. “Okay, okay! I’ll find it,” she said, and started through the data. Then she frowned.
“I feel like I’m cheating. If you hadn’t been looking at star charts, it would’ve taken me a lot longer to find. But—” her eyes narrowed—“‘no sense at all’ is putting it mildly. NZ-127-06? There’s no habitable planet in that system. Nothing even close.”
“No.” Ruth shook her head. “Can’t be. It’s an M4V, both its planets are small and so close they’re tide-locked to the primary, and according to the astro database, it produces even more solar flares than most red dwarfs. So why—”
“—did the PNE get its Cataphracts in that system?” Cynthia finished.
“Exactly.” Ruth nodded. “I mean, part of the answer’s obvious. They had to rendezvous with whoever delivered the missiles to them, and NZ-127-06 made a handy navigation beacon. One with no inhabited planets to notice who might be dropping off or picking up cargo. But what’s really interesting to me is that—”
“—it’s nowhere near Mesa, Sol, or Yildun,” Cynthia said, and Ruth gave her another nod.
“Exactly,” she repeated. “We’d all assumed they had to come from Sol or Yildun, although they could have been transshipped through Mesa. But way out there?” She shook her head. “There are a bunch of equally useless stars that would have been more conveniently placed for a shipment coming from any of those three star systems.”
Cynthia swiveled the chair to face Ruth directly.
“Captain Zilwicki needs this information,” she said.
“So do Manticore and Nouveau Paris,” Ruth agreed. “But you’re right that Anton and Victor need to be brought up to speed as quickly as possible. So I’m thinking maybe I should—”
“Forget it, Princess. If you want to get onto that courier boat, you’d have to shoot your way aboard—and I didn’t sign up for that.”
Ruth glared at her. Then, at the display. Then, at the universe. As much of it as she could see, anyway.
Which wasn’t much, trapped aboard an orbital habitat.