Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Jalal Station

Jalal System

Terran Federation

December 13, 2552


“I have to say, I didn’t expect this to turn up quite this soon,” Harrison O’Hanraghty said.

“This soon?” Callum repeated.

“Oh, it was inevitable,” O’Hanraghty said. “Maybe not from Bellerophon, but from somewhere, Callum. Assuming Prime Minister Schleibaum—and the rest of the Five Hundred, of course—were as frigging stupid as usual, that is. The one way they could have possibly headed it off was to show even a trace of willingness to admit the Fringe’s grievances and get the word out that they had. Which, of course, was the one thing in the universe they could be absolutely counted upon not to do.”

“Harry’s right, I’m afraid, son,” Murphy said sadly. “I never wanted this to spread beyond Concordia, but from the momentNew Dublin went ‘out of compliance,’ other Fringe Worlds were bound to follow suit. But, like Harry says, I thought we’d have more time. Probably months more time. I certainly never anticipated someone as far away as Bellerophon might find out about it this quickly.”

“So what do we do about it now that they have?” Callum asked after a moment.

“Admiral, with all due respect, I don’t see any choice but to back President Dewar,” Esteban Tremblay said from the far end of the briefing room table.

Murphy raised an eyebrow at him, and Tremblay snorted harshly.

“Trust me, Sir, I know exactly how surprised you must be to hear me saying that. And a few months ago, you wouldn’t have heard me saying it. But you were right, that first day in New Dublin. The last thing the Federation needs is a civil war brought about by the way the Fringe’s been used and abused, and that was exactly what would’ve happened sooner or later—probably sooner—even if you’d never been sent out to Concordia. I knew that even before you rubbed my nose in it, whether I wanted to admit it or not. Now?” He shrugged. “I don’t know if the Federation can be saved. Frankly, there are nights I’m pretty sure it can’t, and that someday the history books will look at you and the rest of us and decide we’re the ones who flushed it down the tubes. But it’s headed that way anyhow. You rubbed my nose in that, too. And if there’s anyone in the entire rotten system who might be able to stop that, you’re that man.”

O’Hanraghty’s eyebrows rose far higher than Murphy’s had, and Tremblay barked a laugh.

“Don’t think for a moment that I enjoy agreeing with you about anything, Harry! You have been such a prick for so damned long that it comes really, really hard to admit you might have had even a scintilla of accuracy on your side. Unfortunately, that doesn’t change anything. And I’m not saying I think the Admiral has a good chance of pulling this off. I’m just saying that I know for certain no one else does, and I can’t just sit by and watch the shipwreck without at least trying.”

“Commodore—Steve, that means a lot,” Murphy said quietly. “Not listening to you polish up my halo, because God knows if there are any halos around here, they’re not mine! But because that’s why all of us”—a wave of his hand took in the starships beyond Ishtar’s hull—“are out here. To at least try to stop the shipwreck. And there’s nothing I can ever say or do to thank all of you for helping me try.”

“Believe me, Sir, if I thought there was any other option, any other way to do it, I wouldn’t be here,” Tremblay said frankly. “As it is…?”

He raised both hands, palm uppermost, and shrugged, and Murphy nodded back to him, then looked at Callum.

“As the Commodore’s just pointed out, I don’t see any option but to back Dewar and the Council, either,” he told his son. “And the good news is that with your uncle headed back to Sol, it will be a while—probably a pretty long while—before Fokaides and Schleibaum send any new task forces off to retake Jalal. Especially after Rajenda tells Fokaides about the Casúrs.”

“In some ways, I hate that we had to let that little surprise out of the bag, Terry,” O’Hanraghty said. “Oh, it’s not like we had any choice, and no ‘secret weapon’ stays secret forever. Not if it’s going to do you any good, anyway! But the next time, they’ll have a clue it’s coming.”

“Worse than that, they’re not idiots,” Callum pointed out. “Well, maybe politically, but not in most other ways. And it’s not like figuring out how the Casúrs work will take a bunch of geniuses.”

“Exactly,” his father said with a grimly approving nod. “That’s been part of my thinking all along, and, frankly, that’s the worst part of Bellerophon’s timing. It would be so much better from our perspective if we could force the pace on Schleibaum, make her negotiate with us now. I didn’t have any choice but to send Rajenda back with a request that she send representatives out here to meet with us—not if there’s going to be any chance of convincing Heart World public opinion that I’m truly not some crazed, megalomaniac warlord. We have no choice but to look as much like the voice of reason as a batch of mutinous rebels possibly can. And that means being the voice of reason. Of approaching this without bloodthirsty threats and promises of retribution in hopes they’ll read the writing on the wall and meet us at least part way. Show at least a scrap of willingness to listen and do something to repair the damage.”

“And how much chance of that was there ever, really?” O’Hanraghty asked gently.

“Not much,” Murphy conceded. “And that’s why my thinking was that if we hadn’t heard back from them by the deadline I gave Rajenda, we’d move on Sol itself.”

The other people around the briefing room table stiffened, and he shook his head.

“I have no more intention of attacking Sol than I’ve ever had. But if they reject every offer to actually sit down and talk, our only option is to take it to the next level, and they gave us an opening when they pulled Rajenda’s units out of the Reserve. They can’t have much left to back up Home Fleet. In fact, unless they’ve got a lot more in the pipeline coming back from Beta Cygni than anything in Rajenda’s databases indicated, we’ve got at least parity with Home Fleet and anything of the Reserve they may have called in to help cover Sol. So if we turn up—especially with the Casúr Cogaidhs, before they have time to ‘figure out’ how they work and put their own version into production—it’ll come as an enormous shock to the public’s system. I’m sure the Five Hundred’s pet news channels have painted all of us as bloodthirsty, barbarous, mutinous monsters, but there’s a downside to that, because if we turn up at Sol, there’s no way they could possibly jam or block our own transmissions without completely shutting down the system datanet. Once we’re in near-Sol space and they can’t drive us out of broadcast range of the planets, we can hammer the news channels. We’ve got enough power to burn through anything they could put up to stop us, and for all their wealth and power, the Five Hundred is only a minute slice of the total population, and most Heart Worlders are already cynical as hell about the accuracy and honesty of the news they receive. If we saturate the news channels, 24-7, with the truth against that background, the Five Hundred’s credibility will nosedive. And if that happens, their ability to control events will erode in a hurry. I don’t really want to do that, either, because the truth is that the Fringers aren’t the only people the Five Hundred’s been abusing for so long, and if it goes as ugly as it has the potential to turn—as ugly, frankly, as the Five Hundred deserves for it to go—then it’s likely to be messy—and bloody—as hell.”

He shook his head sadly.

“That’s another reason I hoped so hard that Schleibaum would listen to us before it reached this point. On the basis of everything we’ve seen so far, though, that’s not going to happen. Or, at least, neither she nor the rest of them are going to listen until they realize we really can get the word directly out to all those proles they’ve been controlling for so long and they can’t stop us from doing it. Maybe, I figured, if I put it to them in those terms, they’d finally recognize the Sword of Damocles hanging over them and grow a working IQ. I didn’t expect it, but I figured it was our last shot short of that.

“So, what I was planning to do, was to leave by mid-May with a big enough detachment to make that point to them. But I can’t do that now. Not with this.” He tapped the slate lying on the table with Dewar’s messages.

“In fairness,” O’Hanraghty began, “Bellerophon isn’t—”

“Yes, it is, Harry.” Murphy’s tone was quiet, but firm. “If everything went the way Xeneas hoped, then he’s got all of the Cyclops pickets and nobody in the Heart knows a thing about it yet. But when was the last time anyone’s plans worked out exactly the way he’d hoped? Or did you and I expect to be sitting here at Jalal with a mutinous fleet going eyeball-to-eyeball with the entire rest of the Federation?”

“Point,” O’Hanraghty conceded.

“The odds are that Xeneas didn’t get away with it clean,” Murphy went on, letting his eyes circle the table. “Maybe one of the FTLCs got away. Maybe he succeeded in taking every unit of the Bellerophon picket but there was a courier boat or a passenger liner or a freighter in the wrong place at the wrong time when ‘his’ carriers went to call on the other pickets. I can’t know that’s happened, but I’m as certain as I’m sitting here that something’s happened, and there are a billion people in the Bellerophon System, alone. If I couldn’t let Xing K-strike Crann Bethadh, how in God’s name can I let the Federation carry out Standing Order Fifteen against Odysseus? And completely leaving aside the moral implications, if I let that happen, how could I possibly expect anyone in the Fringe to believe me when I tell them I’m an honest broker they can trust to at least try to convince the Five Hundred to treat them like human beings again?”

There was silence for a moment, then he inhaled deeply.

“Esteban, I hate to do this to you, but I’m leaving you and your division here at Jalal. With all the sublight parasites and Casúr Cogaidhs to back you, you should be able to handle anything the Oval has left to throw at you, at least in the short term.”

“Does that mean what I think it means?” O’Hanraghty asked.

“If it means you think I’m taking everything else to Bellerophon, yes,” Murphy said flatly.

“That might be just a bit of overkill,” the chief of staff pointed out. Not in the tone of someone disagreeing, so much as in the tone of a chief of staff making certain his CO had considered all the implications.

“It almost certainly will be,” Murphy replied. “And everyone in Bellerophon—and all the rest of the Cyclops sector—will realize that just as well as you do, Harry. Which means they’ll know the Free Worlds Alliance responded just as quickly as it could and just as heavily as it could, even with zero warning we might be needed. Trust me, when word of that spreads through the rest of the Fringe, it’ll be like applying a spark to a jet of hydrogen.”

“But—”

“But I’ve been focused on keeping as tight a handle on this as I could. On trying to prevent it from turning into such an obviously existential threat to the Five Hundred that they automatically reached for the biggest hammer they could find,” Murphy said unflinchingly.

“Pretty much, yes,” O’Hanraghty agreed with a nod.

“Well, old friend, that’s because you and I—or I, at least—were hopelessly overoptimistic when we set out.” Murphy pinched the bridge of his nose. “Maybe if things had gone the way we’d originally hoped, it wouldn’t be quite this bad, but it probably would’ve ended up someplace close to here, anyway. Maybe—maybe—we could’ve still kept it under control if Rajenda had been willing to talk instead of attacking. But the truth is, we probably never had a chance once the Fringers snatched the ball out of our hands exactly the way they had every damned right to do. And Xeneas’s seen that sooner and more clearly than you and I did. Or, maybe not sooner and more clearly than you did.”

He lowered his hand and smiled crookedly at his friend.

“I know you’ve been pushing harder and faster than I wanted to go, Harry. Maybe it was idealism, maybe it was cowardice, an unwillingness to look the truth in the eye, but Xeneas won’t let me do that any longer. He’s right. The Fringe is going up in flames, and there’s no way in the universe anyone—not Schleibaum, not Fokaides, not the Five Hundred, and not you and I—can stop that from happening now.

“So the way I see it, the only option we have now is to stop trying to prevent it from happening and get behind it and push, instead. It’s New Dublin all over again on a bigger scale. The only way we can exert any control over where this goes and how well—or badly—it turns out is to prove to the Fringe that we have its back and prove to the Heart that neither the Fringe nor this fleet is going anywhere until the Fringe’s grievances are addressed…one way or the other.

“I can’t move directly on Sol the way I’d planned, not with Bellerophon and Cyclops at risk behind us. So instead, my only option is to move to Bellerophon’s rescue, instead, and convince Cyclops and all the rest of the Fringe to trust me. Because if I do that, and if I can prove to Schleibaum and Fokaides and the rest that I have, then maybe—just maybe—a big enough hint of sanity will peek through to stop this from turning into an actual civil war that completely destroys the Terran Federation.”



Back | Next
Framed