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CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

City of Kórinthos

Planet Odysseus

Bellerophon System

Free Worlds Alliance

February 6, 2553


The conference room was filled with sunlight. The thick, yellow honey poured down through the skylight that both roofed the room and provided just enough polarization to moderate that brilliant tide’s heat and kill any glare. The contrast between that bright warmth, that sense of light and life, and what Odysseus had endured at Taskin Alaimo’s hands could not have been more profound.

Nor was it accidental, Terrence Murphy thought, as he strode into the conference room, flanked by Harrison O’Hanraghty and Joseph Lowe, while Callum followed at his back. Konstantinos Xeneas had chosen the venue for this meeting, and he’d wanted one that would let everyone step back at least a pace or two from the hatred, fury, and despair that had been so much a part of their lives.

He and his officers were the last to arrive, and all the other attendees rose as he walked to the place waiting for him at the head of the enormous conference table. A part of him wanted to wave them back into their chairs, but he suppressed the urge until he reached his own chair. Then he seated himself, and movement rustled around the table as the others all followed suit.

He looked around, then down the table’s length at Xeneas. Their eyes met, and the system president rapped his knuckles gently on the tabletop. The sound wasn’t loud, but it carried clearly in the sunlit silence, and all eyes turned attentively to him.

“Thank you for coming, Admiral,” he said. “I know you’re scheduled to depart in four hours, and I think all of us appreciate this opportunity to express our enormous gratitude at least once more before you go. On the other hand, I’m reasonably certain you didn’t request this meeting just so we could polish up your halo for you. So, with no further ado—”

He raised his right hand, palm-up in an invitation to Murphy, and the admiral allowed himself a brief, harsh chuckle.

“Thank you, Mr. President. I don’t think there are too many halos in this room, and if there are, mine doesn’t deserve any more polish than anyone else’s. But there are some things I think it’s important to say before we depart for Jalal.”

He looked around the table again, letting his eyes linger on Mollie Ramsay, who sat at Xeneas’s right shoulder. There were shadows in her eyes, but she looked immensely better than she had when Brigadier Atkins’s Marines pulled her out of the cell in which she’d been tortured, and she returned his gaze levelly, her chin high.

“Some of the people in this room,” he continued, never looking away from Ramsay, “have had that their attitudes…clarified over the last couple of weeks.

“I’m one of them.”

He paused again, letting that settle in, then leaned forward and folded his hands on the tabletop in front of him.

“I believe in the Terran Federation,” he said quietly. “I believe in its Constitution, its institutions, its laws. I believe in the ideals, the rights, it was designed and built to protect. When the Concordia Sector went out of compliance, when its member star systems formed the Free Worlds Alliance, I recognized it as a legitimate protest group. As a legitimate association of individual star systems with every right to petition as a group for redress and to defend its people. But even though I recognized that, I was an officer of the Terran Federation Navy. I’d sworn an oath to the Constitution—and to God—to protect and defend the Federation against all enemies, domestic or foreign. So I was willing speak for the FWA, to represent it, even to defend it, but I couldn’t join it.”

He paused once more, then took one hand from the table to touch O’Hanraghty’s shoulder.

“When Captain O’Hanraghty and I deployed to New Dublin, it was never my intent to provoke or enable a rebellion against the Federation. We suspected certain things, hoped to find evidence to prove or disprove those suspicions, and I fully intended to do my damnedest to actually protect the star system I was assigned to govern. We never anticipated what’s actually happened, and, to be honest, in a lot of ways I’ve just been trying to stay on the back of the tiger. To at least steer things towards some sort of resolution that we could reach at something besides gunpoint. When I headed to Jalal, all I wanted to do was establish communications with Sol, make them listen to the proof of the things Captain O’Hanraghty and I had suspected for so long. I never intended to take over Jalal Station, and to be honest, I wouldn’t have if the Fringers who mutinied against Admiral Portier’s orders hadn’t forced my hand. But they did, and I did…and I still hoped to make the Federation listen.

“But then the Oval, and the Schleibaum Government—and the Five Hundred—sent my own brother-in-law to kill or capture me and crush any potential ‘rebellion’ in the Fringe. And when he refused to stand down, I opened fire in self-defense, and killed over a hundred thousand other members of the same Navy I’d joined straight out of the Academy. And then I got the word about your secession—your rebellion—here in Cyclops. I tried hard to get here before any response from the Heart, tried to get in front of it, keep a handle on it, prevent what I was afraid Olympia would order done. And, again, I failed. Commodore Carson and your own people smashed three quarters of Ninth Fleet, but their sacrifice didn’t prevent Alaimo from reaching Odysseus, didn’t prevent him from butchering the millions of Odyssians who died in the space of only a few days.

“And that was what I found when I got here. Another step towards the thing I most desperately wanted to avoid, the destruction of the Federation. It seemed that no matter what I did, events were avalanching towards that outcome. I was desperate to stop it, but how? Like Governor Ramsay—” he nodded to her “—what I wanted most in the galaxy was to minimize the bloodshed, the death, the destruction. Yet no matter how much I wanted that, it seemed to be slipping through my fingers.

“And then we found Alaimo’s orders…and the preemptive pardon he’d been issued. The license to kill he’d been given. The pardon that would protect him no matter what crimes, what atrocities, he’d committed here on Odysseus or anywhere else in the entire sector. The pardon that had been signed by the Prime Minister of the Terran Federation, by every member of her cabinet, by the Chief Justice of the Federation Supreme Court, and by Aristides Fokaides on behalf of the Oval. And when I confronted him with it—when I told him I’d realized it was all intentional, that the people who’d sent him had wanted every single one of those deaths simply as a way to terrorize the remainder of their own citizens in the Fringe—he didn’t even try to deny it. Worse, you’ve seen the imagery of Diana Steinbolt acknowledging that that was exactly the way Alaimo had explained their mission to her. She actually thought that ‘I was covered by my orders and the Five Hundred’s pardon’ would save her from the firing squad. My God, she almost boasted about it.”

He paused again, his gray eyes shadowed despite the sunlight, while the silence and the stillness hovered around him. And then he shook his head, his expression like iron.

“That’s what I found,” he said. “Who I found. And when I did, I knew. Or maybe I just finally admitted something I’d known all along and lacked the courage to face.

“I still want to save the Federation,” he said softly. “I want that, and I’ll fight for that, but I know now that I won’t do it through negotiation. Not with a Federation that could send butchers like Alaimo and Steinbolt out to torture and slaughter anyone who got in their way just to ‘send a message’ to the uppity Fringes that, no, you aren’t our equals.” His voice grew louder. “No, you aren’t full citizens. You don’t have the right to live your lives any way except under our terms. Your children are ours to throw into the meat grinder instead of our own, because just like you, they are our chattel property, and you’d better not forget it!”

His final sentence rolled around the conference room like thunder, and his nostrils flared. He let the silence settle once more, then sat back in his chair.

“By my calculations, Vice Admiral Thakore will reach Sol sometime today or tomorrow with word of the Battle of Jalal,” he said. “I can’t predict exactly how the Five Hundred will react, but based on how they reacted to your secession here in Cyclops—and the fact that they can’t realize how disastrously wrong that reaction’s gone—I don’t expect it to be good. I should reach Jalal no later than March the eighth, and I would really prefer to move directly to Sol from there, but when I sent Vice Admiral Thakore home, I gave the Prime Minister until the second of May to send her own envoy to Jalal in response to my messages to her. If she actually chooses to send that envoy, he’ll discover that the Free Worlds Alliance’s naval strength is now at least as great as anything immediately available to the Sol System. And he’ll also discover that I fully intend to use that naval strength to compel the Five Hundred to meet the just demands of the Fringe and the Free Worlds Alliance.

“Undoubtedly, at this moment we have the strength to compel them to surrender, and if we wait—if we give them that opportunity—we may find that far harder to accomplish afterward. But it’s important from the perspective of history that we give Schleibaum and her Five Hundred masters the opportunity to negotiate, to accept our demands, before we resort to military force. And that’s even more important because our ultimate success—our ability to rebuild something on the ruin corrupt men and women have made of the Federation instead of simply tearing it apart and walking away—depends on convincing at least a majority of the Heart Worlders who aren’t members of the Five Hundred themselves that we did our damnedest to avoid any preventable bloodshed. That we tried the path of reason first and that failure of our efforts was the Five Hundred’s fault, not ours.

“But don’t mistake me. I never wanted to be a rebel. I never wanted to overthrow the Federation. I never wanted to birth a civil war. Yet what happened here in Bellerophon, here on Odysseus—the message the Five Hundred’s Federation chose to send you—tells me that reason will fail.” His voice was hammered iron and his eyes were harder still. “And if violence and sheer brute force is the only language they understand, then as God is my witness, I will speak to them in a way they’ll understand.

“If war is what they want,” Terrence Murphy said, in that iron voice, “then war is what they’ll have, and I promise you they won’t like the way it ends.”


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