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CHAPTER ONE

“Herr Major?”

Major Kau-jung Kleinberg looked up from the report on his pad and cocked an eyebrow at Oberbootsmann Taschner. “Yes?”

“We’ve just picked up something a little odd, mein Herr,” Taschner said, gesturing at her display. “It may be nothing, but…”

“One moment.” Kleinberg put away his pad and gave himself a push in the petty officer’s direction. It wasn’t much of a trip, given the Komet-class attack shuttle’s diminutive size, but it gave him a good excuse to get out of his chair for a bit. He caught the handgrip on the back of Taschner’s flight couch and peered over her shoulder. “Show me.”

“As I say, mein Herr, it may be nothing,” Taschner said, “but we’re picking up what looks like a location transponder.”

“Out here?”

Ja, mein Herr.” She craned her neck to look up at him. “You see my concern.”

He nodded, frowning at Tashner’s displays. At the moment the shuttle was fifty-four million kilometers from the battleship Preussen, finishing up a Raumbatallion training exercise in The Cloud and awaiting pickup.

It wasn’t like there wasn’t anything out here that might need a location transponder, of course. The Tomlinson System’s asteroid extraction industry was concentrated in The Cloud, which meant scores of platforms located throughout its volume, some tiny, some impressively large, and with the simmering unrest in the system, Potsdam had wanted to establish an on-going presence among them. The Komet’s current search-and-rescue exercise was one of the Imperial Andermani Navy’s points of presence, this one in particular halfway around The Cloud from the system’s sole inhabited planet and Preussen.

Except that the transponder Taschner had spotted, positioned at one-zero-seven, zero-one-three and approximately twenty thousand kilometers away, didn’t seem to connect to any of the known platforms or currently active vessels.

“As you can see, mein Herr, it’s closing on us,” Taschner continued. “Actually, it’s crossing our track. Velocity relative to the primary is approximately seventy-one thousand KPS. Track is one-niner-seven, relative, which means it will pass well astern of us.”

And given their relative positions and vectors, an interception was out of the question. If they’d been in a proper ship with a proper impeller drive…but if wishes were horses… “Shindler?” Kleinberg called to the shuttle’s pilot. “Can anyone intercept it before it enters The Cloud?”

“Negative, Herr Major,Hauptbootsmann Ning Schindler said, shaking her head.

Kleinberg grimaced. The fact that he’d expected the answer made it no more palatable. “Get me the flagship,” he ordered.

Ja, mein Herr,” Taschner replied. She tapped keys, then spoke into her mic. “Preussen, Shuttle Alpha.” She waited a moment, then looked up over her shoulder at Kleinberg. “Hot mic, Herr Major.

Preussen, Major Kleinberg,” he said into his throat mic. “I need to speak to the officer of the watch, please.”

* * *

“I think Kleinberg is right, meine Kapitänin,Fregattenkapitän Syin-ba Greuner said, looking at the icons in SMS Preussen’s main plot.

“It would explain quite a lot,” Kapitänin der Sterne Florence Hansen agreed, frowning at the same icons. She looked up at her superior, Flotillenadmiral von Jachmann. “We knew they were getting matériel past us, mein Herr. We just hadn’t figured out how.”

Someone certainly should have,” Baron von Jachmann said, looking pointedly across at Korvettenkapitän Simon Bajer, Hansen’s Assistant Tactical Officer. Bajer, Hansen noted, kept his own eyes firmly on his console.

Not surprisingly, and undoubtedly not for the first time. Native-born Tomlinsons were a rarity aboard Preussen, continually performing balancing acts with the rest of the ship’s company. But Bajer was a highly intelligent officer, the sort who thought things through, and if he was willing to put up with the pressure, Hansen was glad to have him aboard.

She certainly had no interest in contributing to that pressure. “If by someone you mean me, Herr Flotillenadmiral, then you’re correct,” she said. “It is a classic smuggling ploy, after all.”

“I didn’t mean you, meine Kapitänin,” Jachmann assured her.

“Whether you did or not, the responsibility for such lapses ultimately rests with me,” she said firmly.

And really, just because the ploy was classic didn’t mean it was used very often anymore. Most smugglers simply hid their contraband aboard incoming ships where customs agents weren’t likely to find it, or else used false manifests. Once through customs, the cargo would be transferred to a warehouse and either wait for someone to claim it or be passed on by friendly stevedores.

But here in Tomlinson all customs inspections were under Imperial Andermani Navy control. That meant all incoming cargo had to pass through a single authorized platform, and the Empire’s severe penalties for smuggling loomed over any would-be smugglers. Under the circumstances, dropping a pod or two on a ballistic course for pickup was the smarter and safer choice.

“Maybe that means they’re getting desperate,” Greuner offered.

Jachmann grunted. “Maybe it means they’re about to launch something big.”

For a moment no one spoke. Because Jachmann was probably right.

The uptick in violent rebel activity in Tomlinson had come as a bit of a surprise. Up to about eighteen T-months ago local resentment of and resistance to the system’s involuntary integration into the Andermani Empire had been gradually fading, and Tomlinson had seemed to be on track to finally accepting that integration peacefully. But then, for no obvious reason, violent incidents had spiked sharply. Vandalism, attacks on infrastructure, even assassinations had spiraled upward.

Emperor Gustav had deployed Preussen, the transport Kriegsmädchen, and a small, rotating screen of lighter units to Tomlinson as it became obvious that the Free Tomlinson Front—known somewhat sarcastically to everyone else as the Freets—were unusually well-armed. The division of Imperial Army troops aboard Kriegsmädchen, supported by Preussen’s embarked Raumsbatallion and the entire squadron’s light craft had made their presence felt quickly in hopes of stamping out this rekindling of armed resentment.

But the rebellion had stubbornly refused to gutter out. The fact that it could persist even with so many of its weapons being seized showed clearly that arms shipments were somehow being smuggled in.

More worrisome was the fact that, while many of the small arms appeared to have been manufactured somewhere in the Tomlinson System, an even larger percentage were of Solarian manufacture. But no one had been able to pinpoint how the Freets were sneaking them in.

Until now.

“Do we have anyone in position to intercept the beacons?” Hansen asked.

“No, meine Kapitänin,” Greuner admitted. “Not short of The Cloud, at any rate. They’re traveling at just over seventy thousand KPS. Rotte is on the way to pick up the Alpha Shuttle, but won’t reach position in time.”

“We may not be able to catch it before it crosses the perimeter of The Cloud,” Bajer said, “but at its present velocity, it would require almost a full T-day to completely transit The Cloud, and we have a solid track on it. Rotte will reach the inner belt in six and a half hours, and tracking it won’t be a problem.”

“Tracking it without being detected by whoever is waiting for it may be,” Hansen pointed out.

“True, meine Kapitänin,” Bajer conceded. “But The Cloud is a very large volume, and very little of it is actually exploited. We don’t know how large this consignment might be, but it’s unlikely they’d be smuggling in any smaller shipments than they had to. There isn’t that much traffic to Tomlinson, so they need to deliver as many weapons as possible in each drop. That means whoever is waiting for them has to have the power to grapple with and decelerate cargo containers or be large enough to rendezvous with them and trans-ship their contents.”

“Or both, meine Kapitänin,” Greuner agreed. “It shouldn’t be difficult to follow the beacon through and identify any ship that’s close enough—and large enough—to be the receiver.”

“And Tracking is confident about this identification?” Hansen asked, waving a hand toward the blinking crimson icon on the display.

“Jawohl, meine Kapitänin,” Greuner replied. “Periwinkle is the only ship that could have jettisoned cargo pods on that vector.”

“I see.” Hansen studied the numbers. Judging from Periwinkle’s low deceleration numbers—she was slowing at barely eighty gravities—she was exactly the sort of down-at-the-heels tramp someone would choose for a clandestine delivery like this.

And now that her need to release her contraband on a precise vector was known, the sloppiness of her approach to Tomlinson finally had an explanation.

She’d made her alpha translation well outside the hyper-limit, and she’d obviously been in the wrong place when she did. That wasn’t uncommon, given the difficulties in making a precise n-space translation after any lengthy voyage in hyper, but her error had been larger than most, bringing her into n-space halfway around the hyper-limit’s circumference from the planet.

She’d followed up that translation with some fairly incompetent astrogation, crossing the limit with more velocity than she should have, especially on a heading that would have taken her nowhere near Tomlinson. And then, to ice the cake, she’d taken the better part of an hour to realize how badly off course she was and begin correcting.

Only now it was clear to everyone that she’d spent that hour getting into position to release her cargo pods on the proper heading. She must have dropped the pods just before she made her course correction.

Of course, thanks to her original “error” she’d had an additional four light-minutes to travel, and a lot of negative velocity to kill, once she got herself turned around and pointed toward Tomlinson.

She was currently just over sixteen light-minutes out and had just made turnover and started her deceleration. At her eighty gravities max, she’d need another seven and a half hours for her zero/zero insertion into Tomlinson orbit.

Hansen gazed at those numbers, then smiled a thin, cold smile.

“I believe Korvettenkapitän Bajer has analyzed these people’s operational plan correctly, Herr Flotillenadmiral,” she said, nodding acknowledgment to Bajer before turning to Jachmann. “That means Periwinkle will be continuing to Tomlinson orbit to deliver her legitimate cargo. And that means that Preussen is the spider at the heart of the web. We don’t have to pursue them at all. Simply wait until they deliver themselves to us.”

“Understood, meine Kapitänin,” Jachmann said. “I’ll order Rotte to intercept the contraband.”

“I’d recommend not doing that just yet, Herr Flotillenadmiral,” Hansen said. “We don’t want them worrying that they’ve been discovered. Not yet.”

“A good point,” Jachmann said. “Very well. We wait.”

“In which case, meine Herren,” Hansen said, letting her eyes sweep over the bridge, “we have several hours of waiting ahead of us. Fregattenkapitän Greuner, you’ll bring the ship to Readiness Two in five hours. In the meantime, continue to monitor the targets.” She smiled thinly. “And all of you might want to make sure your current paperwork and other minutia is in order. Once we raise our wedge, there will be precious little time for anything routine.”

* * *

A com chimed softly in a dimly lit office aboard Station Beta, Tomlinson’s secondary orbital platform. The door plaque read Intra-System Communications Center, and once upon a time it had been an important communications node.

Now, ever since the Imperial Andermani Navy had descended upon Tomlinson in force, it was only marginally manned. The bulk of the system’s important communications went through Preussen and the Army’s communications center aboard Kriegsmädchen. ISCC Beta had been reduced to managing the important but boring and routine communications of the asteroid extraction platforms and the ships that served them.

The com chimed again, and the watch manager punched the acceptance button. “ISCC Beta,” he growled in acknowledgment.

“Fred?” the voice on the other end replied.

The watch manager stiffened. “There’s nobody here with that name.”

“Oh, damn! I’m sorry, I’ve punched the wrong combination.”

“Not a problem,” the watch manager assured him. “You’d best try again.”

“Right. A thousand apologies.” There was the soft tone of a disconnect.

For a long moment the manager gazed at the com, pondering the code phrase which had just been passed, mentally running through his instructions as to what he was supposed to do next. Fortunately, there were enough com relays built into the system to make it very unlikely anyone would ever be able to identify either end of the message he was about to send.

Turning to his console, he began tapping keys.

* * *

Herr Leutnant—status change on Target Alpha,” Stabsgefreiter Mei-chau Thörnrich said sharply. “Target is altering course and acceleration.”

“On the board,” Leutnant der Sterne Kevin Selavko ordered, spinning his chair to face the senior tactical petty officer of the watch. The data was coming up…

Selavko felt his teeth clench. The smuggler’s freighter, which had been puttering along at an eighty-gee deceleration, had altered course by 130 degrees, shifting away from the distant planet and heading for the hyper limit.

And she had run her acceleration up to two-point-three-seven KPS squared. Two hundred forty-two gravities.

Two hundred forty-two.

For a brief moment Selavko and Thörnrich exchanged disbelieving looks. Then, Selavko jabbed a combination into his com.

Kapitänin’s quarters, Oberbootsmann Pang,” a voice replied.

“I need to speak to the Kapitänin immediately,” Selavko said.

“Einen Moment, bitte,” Kapitänin der Sterne Hansen’s steward said, and a second or two later, Hansen’s voice spoke in Selavko’s earbug.

“Yes, Leutnant?”

Meine Kapitänin, Target Alpha has just altered course. Significantly.”

There was a moment of silence as Hansen checked her repeater displays. “I’ll be right there,” she said.

“Shall I raise the wedge, meine Kapitänin?”

“No,” Hansen said, and he heard a hint of a frustrated sigh. “There’s no point.”

“Of course, meine Kapitänin,” Selavko acknowledged. His earbud clicked, and he turned back to the bridge tactical displays.

Watching their quarry make its escape.

* * *

“How did they guess?” Flotillenadmiral Jachmann demanded, floating stiffly beside Hansen in the relatively spacious CIC that only Andermani battleships could provide. Behind them, keeping a respectful distance and an even more prudent silence, were Bajer and Greuner.

“I hardly think they guessed,” Hansen growled. “It’s far more likely they were warned.”

“But how?” Jachmann asked, fighting back his anger and bewilderment. “Kleinberg reported directly to us, and we haven’t reported it to anyone else.”

“Are you suggesting there might be a traitor aboard Preussen?” Hansen countered.

Jachmann winced. It was a question he’d been trying not to think about. But now that his Kapitänin der Sterne had brought it up, there was no avoiding it.

“There may be another explanation, Herr Flotillenadmiral,” Bajer spoke up hesitantly from behind them.

“What sort of explanation?”

“At three light-minutes distance there was a lot of spread on Major Kleinberg’s com laser, mein Herr,” Bajer said, “Anyone within a cone thirty kilometers across at Preussen’s position could have received it. And his transmission was encrypted but not coded.”

“And your point, Korvettenkapitän?” Hansen asked.

“I’m wondering about the coms that were stored in the Isle City Army depot during that Freet attack last week,” Bajer said.

“What about them?” Jachmann demanded. “The attackers were after weapons. The coms were in a locked cabinet that wasn’t touched.”

“We assumed the cabinet and coms weren’t touched,” Bajer pointed out. He was wilting a little under the heat from his superiors’ glares, but his voice was steady. “If they were—if someone got in and either swapped out one for a lookalike or else just downloaded the encryption—”

“Then they could just sit back and listen in on our conversations,” Hansen interrupted acidly. Bajer winced, but it was quickly clear that her anger wasn’t directed at him. “All they needed to do was get the stolen com close enough to Preussen to pick up the edge of Major Kleinberg’s transmission.”

Jachmann swore under his breath. “I would say, Kapitänin der Sterne Hansen, that this is not our day for demonstrating Andermani glory.”

“Or even marginal Andermani competence,” Hansen said sourly. “I recommend we send out an immediate order for all units to reset their coms to the Zeta-17 encryption protocol.”

“So noted,” Jachmann said, making a note on his tablet. “After that I suppose there will be nothing else but to write up our formal reports.”

“I suppose we will, Herr Flotillenadmiral,” Hansen agreed.

“Excuse me, meine Kapitänin,” Bajer spoke up again. “But if I may, I don’t think the day has been a total loss.”

“How do you conclude that, Korvettenkapitän?” Jachmann asked.

“It’s true that we failed to intercept Periwinkle,” Bajer said, “and we must assume that the Freets were also able to alert whoever would have rendezvoused with the contraband. That makes it unlikely that we’ll intercept anyone at that end of the loop, either.”

“Unlikely in the extreme,” Hansen agreed stolidly. “Still waiting for the not a total loss part.”

“I say that because this—” he gestured at the display “—tells us a great deal about the sophistication of whoever is supplying the Freets.”

They all turned to look a the icon moving across the display. The previously anemic freighter and pushed its acceleration up a notch and was now heading toward the hyper limit at a preposterous 244 gravities, thirty-eight gees higher than Preussen could have produced at her standard eighty percent impeller setting. In fact, even with a zero safety margin, the battleship’s maximum acceleration was only 252.7 gravities.

Which meant Periwinkle was a purpose-built and very expensive vessel whose operators had taken pains to make appear as dilapidated as possible. Factoring in the Solarian weapons pipeline, the inescapable conclusion was that whoever was out there stirring the Tomlinson pot had some very interesting connections indeed.

On one level that was worrisome. But on another, it offered a small glimmer of hope. Someone that connected could hardly throw money and influence around this way without leaving a few fingerprints somewhere. Hopefully, once this was handed off to the Intelligence experts in Abteilung III, they could start hunting for those fingerprints.

“Certainly an interesting enemy we seem to have made,” Hansen commented into the silence. “Let us hope we can draw him out of the shadows soon so we can see exactly what he’s made of.”

“Most definitely,” Jachmann agreed. “Two other points occur to me. First, even if Preussen’s impeller nodes had already been hot, we still couldn’t have generated an intercept. Nor could any of our other ships. If Periwinkle had held her course for Tomlinson only twenty or thirty minutes longer, perhaps. But as it was…” He shook his head.

“Yes, I’d already soothed my professional conscience on that one,” Hansen said. “Your other point?”

“That the Freets’ communications capability is highly efficient,” Jachmann said. “Not only did they intercept Major Kleinberg’s transmission, but they then got the information to their own communications node promptly enough to alert Periwinkle.”

And while Periwinkle was still almost five light-minutes out from Tomlinson orbit,” Bajer added. “Not only are their communications efficient, but also impressively powerful.”

“Yes,” Hansen said, her voice thoughtful. “Well, meine Herren. Information gained; opportunities lost. Gains, and losses.”

She fixed each of them with a long, cool look. “I trust that we will emerge from our next encounter with our mysterious enemy with our balance sheet showing only gains. Do I make myself clear?”

“Very clear, meine Kapitänin,” Bajer replied for all of them.

“Good,” Hansen said. “Return to your posts. I expect to have your individual reports on this incident on my desk within the hour.”

* * *

Deep inside Queen Elizabeth, the baby kicked. Those kicks had been getting harder lately as the due date came closer, paradoxically moving both too quickly and too slowly.

For once, though, Elizabeth hardly noticed the fluttering in her abdomen. The report she was currently reading held every single iota of her attention.

Finally, feeling an odd mix of anticipation and dread, she looked up at the two men standing motionless in front of her desk. “She’s here, you said?” she asked.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Prime Minister Julian Mulholland, Baron Harwich, said, his nod as stiff as his posture.

“She’s waiting in the anteroom,” Defense Minister James Mantegna, Earl Dapplelake, added. “I’ll warn Your Majesty that she’s a bit nervous.”

“As well she should be,” Elizabeth said, waving a hand at the report on her tablet. With her other hand she touched her intercom. “Send in Dr. Tolochko, please.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

Elizabeth looked past Harwich and Dapplelake as the door opened and a youngish looking woman with a surprising amount of gray in her hair stepped tentatively inside. “Your Majesty,” she said, her voice shaking noticeably as she ducked her head in an abbreviated bow.

“Dr. Tolochko,” Elizabeth greeted her gravely in return. “I’ve just read your report. It’s quite interesting.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Tolochko said. “I mean, thank you, Your Majesty.”

Dapplelake made a small sound in the back of his throat. “Perhaps you could lay out the full story for Her Majesty,” he suggested.

“Oh.” Tolochko’s eyes flicked to him, back to Elizabeth. “It’s…rather technical.”

“That’s all right,” Elizabeth assured her. “Your report had your conclusions, but I’d like to know the reasoning that led up to them.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” Tolochko took a deep breath. “It’s been known for a long time that the Manticore System has some serious navigational hazards. The worst is the major disruption zone that covers nearly half of the Manticore-B hyper limit. That one has required a permanent astrogators’ warning for incoming traffic to stay clear of the danger zone. Fortunately, there’s not much activity into that system, and practically none from outside the Star Kingdom. There’s a similar hazard at the Manticore-A hyper limit, much milder and not nearly as dangerous. It can produce translation scatter—”

“Her Majesty is familiar with those details,” Harwich interrupted, a bit tartly.

“That’s all right, My Lord,” Elizabeth said before Tolochko could respond. “I did ask Dr. Tolochko for her thought process.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Tolochko breathed. Her nervousness, which had been fading while she was talking science, now came rushing back full force. “I—as I was saying, it can produce translation scatter and tends to wear down impeller nodes. Normally not fatal, though. Fortunately.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said, giving the young woman her best encouraging smile. She vaguely remembered most of this from her school days, but Tolochko’s impromptu refresher course was doing a good job of clearing out the cobwebs. “Please continue.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” Another deep breath. “When these were plotted many years ago, they were put down as evidence of a gravitic fault. Gravitic faults are areas where grav waves fold tightly together in hyper and—well, and create just this sort of hazard. They’re not all that common, but they are a well-known phenomenon. The people who studied the Manticore hazards assumed that was what was causing them, mapped them for travel purposes, and then never gave it another thought.”

“Until you came along?” Elizabeth prompted.

Tolochko seemed to brace herself. “Yes, Your Majesty. We’ve known for awhile that the intensity and danger associated with the fault in Manticore-A has been growing, and my preliminary analysis of recent survey data indicates that both regions may be shifting position as well. That analysis, plus my earlier research, has convinced me.” She drew herself up, her posture and expression taking on a mix of trepidation and defiance. “I don’t think they’re a set of gravitic faults at all. I think they’re the resonance zones associated with a wormhole junction.”

“And no one believes you?” Elizabeth suggested.

Tolochko blinked, some of her defiance evaporating. Apparently, she’d expected the same scorn and outright dismissal from her sovereign as she’d received for the past ten years from the Star Kingdom’s scientific community. “Well…no, Your Majesty, they don’t. I’ve written four papers—well, that doesn’t matter. But I’m sure I’m right. If you’d like, I can go through the details—”

“That’s all right,” Elizabeth said, keeping her voice neutral. “I think I’ve heard enough. Thank you for your time, Dr. Tolochko; please wait outside.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Tolochko gulped. With another bow, she hurried from the office.

Elizabeth waited until the door closed behind her, then looked back at Harwich and Dapplelake. “I take it you believe her?” she asked.

“I don’t know if I personally do,” Dapplelake said. “But someone out there apparently does.”

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Harwich agreed heavily. “There’s no other reason to hire Gensonne and his mercenaries to attack us unless there was something valuable here. A wormhole junction certainly fits the bill.”

“And no one but Tolochko has thought about that possibility?” Elizabeth asked.

“In all fairness, it does violate all known wormhole theory,” Dapplelake said. “I’m hardly an expert, but I did check out some of the objections to Tolochko’s theory before I brought her and her report here. Among other things, the problems in Manticore-B are more powerful than anything associated with any known wormhole.”

“Not to mention that current theory says you can’t have a wormhole in a multiple star system,” Harwich added. “I’ve had Lady Calvingdell and SIS sifting through the Volsung data files for any hints, but it doesn’t look like Gensonne knew why he’d been brought in to attack us.”

“Not surprising,” Elizabeth said. “If someone suspected the Manticore System was playing host to a wormhole, they would certainly keep that information to themselves. I assume you came prepared with a recommendation?”

“Yes, Your Majesty, we have two,” Harwich said.

“Neither of which is exactly a show-stopper,” Dapplelake said under his breath.

“First would be for us to hire a survey ship and take a look for ourselves,” Harwich said, throwing a sideways look at Dapplelake. “Unfortunately, those are quite rare, horrendously expensive, and generally booked years in advance. Second would be to bring in some experts from the League and try to pick their brains.”

“Without telling them what we think they’re looking for?” Elizabeth asked.

“Yes, that’s the problem with that one,” Harwich conceded. “If they have the intelligence and expertise we need, someone in the group is bound to figure it out.”

Elizabeth pursed her lips. “Would that necessarily be a bad thing?”

The two men looked at each other. “It would rather paste a target on the Star Kingdom’s back, Your Majesty,” Dapplelake said after a moment.

“Of course it would,” Elizabeth agreed. “But the people behind the Volsungs already know about it. Or it certainly appears they do, unless we want to postulate that our modest little star system is home to two unsuspected, incredibly valuable prizes. Perhaps telling the rest of the galaxy about it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. There aren’t very many star nations out there who’d try to take it away from us—not openly—when they could expect the Solarian League to take a dim view of it. And Haven and the Andermani have to be aware of the strategic implications of a wormhole this close to them.”

“Though close is of course a purely relative term,” Harwich murmured. “Especially for the Empire.”

“Granted,” Elizabeth said. “Regardless, I think we could expect both of them to take an even dimmer view of anyone who did try. So in some ways, telling everyone we can about it might be out best protection.”

Dapplelake and Harwich frowned thoughtfully at one another. Then Harwich nodded.

“There might very well be something to that, Your Majesty,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to depend on the notion that anyone who’d be willing to seize it by force in the first place would be deterred by the threat of Haven or Gustav, but it’s certainly possible. My concern is that if whoever hired Gensonne realizes we’ve figured out what they’re after, they might accelerate their timetable.”

“Though there’s a limit to how much they can accelerate it, given the distances and communication times involved,” Dapplelake pointed out. “Even if word of our suspicions gets out—and it’ll take months for them to even hear about it, most likely—they’d probably need quite some time to rearrange their plans in any significant way.”

“Which doesn’t mean they couldn’t do it, though,” Harwich warned.

“Agreed,” Dapplelake said. “And if they recognize the potential upsides for us of our making the existence of any wormhole public as clearly as you do, Your Majesty, they probably would decide to throw the dice—if they can get everything moving—as quickly as possible. They’d want to take us over before any of those positive factors could get in their way.”

“I see your point,” Elizabeth said. “I expect it could be argued ether way, but keeping it a secret isn’t likely to hurt us any. Not where whoever already knows about it is concerned, anyway. We’re not going to have any choice about going public in the end, though, so I think we’d all better start thinking about how we handle that if—or rather, when—one of our guests does figure it out. In the meantime, we keep a lid on it. Which brings us back to how we keep any of the smart, well informed people whose brains we need to pick from figuring out why we really invited them. At least for as long as we can.”

“We can certainly start by pitching it as an examination of the Manticore gravitic fault,” Dapplelake suggested. “The fact that it’s stronger than most of the handful of faults that have been discovered and mapped should make it interesting enough to persuade at least some of them to make the journey. Framing it that way would at least start them out looking a different direction.”

“Through probably not for long,” Elizabeth said.

Harwich’s lip twitched. “No, Your Majesty, probably not.”

Elizabeth nodded, running the options through her mind. As Dapplelake had warned, neither of them was leaping off the page at her.

But they had to do something. Someone out there already knew or suspected, and that someone was unlikely to be deterred just because Gensonne had gotten his nose bloodied. “I agree a conference is our best bet,” she said. “As you suggest, My Lord, we’ll tell potential attendees that the gravitic faults are shifting—which appears to be true based on the data analysis Dr. Tolochko has done—and that we need to get a better handle on them before they become a serious navigation hazard.”

“Very good, Your Majesty,” Harwich said. “Shall I start making a list of people and organizations we should invite?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “Get Dr. Tolochko to help with that. In fact, you might as well tell her now that she’s going to be heading up the conference.”

It wasn’t often that she saw two such simultaneous flashes of stunned disbelief. But Harwich and Dapplelake managed it. “Dr. Tolochko?” Dapplelake said. “But she’s—”

“Young?” Elizabeth offered. “Yes, she is. She’s also the only one who spotted this and kept at it. She’s got the credentials and the perseverance, and she speaks the technical language of the people we’re inviting.” She raised her eyebrows. “Unless you’d rather one of those who’ve been ignoring her for the past decade be put in charge.”

“Hardly, Your Majesty,” Harwich said wryly. “Certainly not when you put it that way. Dapplelake?”

Dapplelake waved a hand. “You’re the one who found her. You should be the one to tell her she’s been promoted to this freshly built hot seat.”

“You’re too kind,” Harwich said.

“Good,” Elizabeth said. “And while Tolochko and Lord Harwich build their list, you, Lord Dapplelake, will start organizing the trip itself.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Dapplelake said. “I presume the purpose of the voyage will not be common knowledge?”

“Absolutely not,” Elizabeth said. “We start by downplaying the urgency. Dr. Tolochko’s analysis indicates that the shift has been gradual, and was only noticeable over decades of readings. No rush, no worry, no drama.”

“Hence, a routine little conference,” Harwich murmured, nodding.

“Exactly,” Elizabeth said. “We also downplay the guest list so people won’t realize what a high-powered crew we’re trying to put together.”

“Yes,” Dapplelake said. “Though I doubt anyone outside that specific area of the scientific community would recognize any of the names anyway.”

“True,” Elizabeth agreed. “Anything else?”

“One other question, Your Majesty,” Harwich said, his voice suddenly hesitant. “The rest of the Cabinet. How much of this do we tell them?”

That was, Elizabeth realized, a damn good question. And it spoke to how distracted her pregnancy had made her that she hadn’t even thought about it.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have much choice. There were Cabinet ministers she could trust to keep such an explosive secret through the months and possibly the years until the conference actually began. There were others she couldn’t trust to keep it past dinner time. “We tell them the cover story I just gave you,” she said. “Nothing more.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Harwich said carefully. “You realize that when they do find out…?”

“There will be hell to pay,” Elizabeth said, nodding. “Yes, I know. But better hell to pay tomorrow than hell to pay today. We know someone out there is gunning for us, and if their timetable can be moved up, I’d rather not find out the hard way.”

“Nor would we, Your Majesty,” Harwich said. “Nor would we. Very well. We’ll get on this right away.”

“Thank you, My Lords,” Elizabeth said. “And when you’re finished with that, you might take a few minutes to think about what a wormhole in the system is likely to mean for us. Economically, culturally…and militarily.”


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Framed