by David Weber
"And even assuming you're right, just what the hell do you expectme to do about it?" she demanded, her voice suddenly harsh with mingled anger, frustration, and fear. Not just fear for the consequences to her career, either. Not anymore.
"At this particular moment?" He looked at her levelly for a heartbeat or two, then his nostrils flared. "At this particular moment, I don't expect you to do anything except what you've been doing. Hell, for that matter I don't propose to make the full extent of my 'alarmist conclusions' part of my official report. Even if I did, it would never get past Cheng. And if it miraculously got past him somehow, you know damned well that Thimár would kill it. Or Kingsford himself, for that matter. It's too far outside the received wisdom. I'm going to go ahead and raise the question of exactly what sort of platform could have gathered the data, but I'm not going to offer any conclusions about it. If someone decides to ask me about it, I'll tell them what I think, but, frankly, I hope they won't. Because without a lot more to go on than the inferences I've been able to draw, I'll never convince the powers that be that I'm not crazy. And if they decide I'm crazy, they'll shit-can my arse so fast my head will spin, which means I'll be able to accomplish exactly nothing if the wheels do come off.
"But what I do want you to do is to keep your eyes and your mind open. I've got a strong suspicion that there are even more of those system-defense observer reports out there than ever made it to us in the first place. Unless I'm mistaken, they've been being tossed as 'obvious nonsense' somewhere between their originators and us. But if you and I both start very quietly looking around, maybe we'll be able to turn some of them up. And maybe, if we manage that, we'll be able to start drawing at least some of the conclusions we're going to need if the shitstorm hits."
"Surely the Manties aren't that stupid," she said softly, in the tone of someone trying to convince herself. "I mean, no matter how many technological advantages they may have, they have to know they can't fight the entire Solarian League and win. Not in the long term. They're just plain not big enough—not even if they make this annexation of Talbott stand up!"
"Maybe they are that stupid, and maybe they aren't," al-Fanudahi replied. "Frankly, though, if they really did send this Admiral Gold Peak off to New Tuscany to press the demands they say they did, I'm not so sure they aren't ready to go nose-to-nose with us, however stupid that might be. And even if you're right, even if they can't possibly win in the end—and I'm inclined to think youare right about that—God only knows how many thousands of our own people are going to get killed before they lose. Somehow, I don't think that either you or I will sleep too soundly at night if we just sit back and watch it happen. Nobody's going to take any warnings from me seriously at this point, but you and I need to start pulling the truth together now, because if this blows up in our faces, somebody is going to need the closest thing to accurate information we can give them. And, who knows? Whoever that 'somebody' is, he may even realize he does."
* * *
"We're coming up on the deployment point now, Commodore."
"Thank you, Captain Jacobi," Commodore Karol Østby replied, nodding to the woman on his com display.
Captain Rachel Jacobi looked like any other merchant service officer, although she might have been just a little young for her current rank. Appearances could be deceiving, however, and not just because of prolong. Rachel Jacobi was even younger for her actual rank than she seemed, not to mention an officer in a navy the rest of the galaxy didn't even know existed . . . yet.
"Bay doors are opening, Sir," another voice said, and Østby turned from his com to look across the cramped bridge at Captain Eric Masters. If Jacobi looked young for her rank, then Masters looked far too senior to be commanding a ship little larger than an old-fashioned frigate, but, again, appearances could be deceiving. Despite her tiny size (she had no flag bridge, and Østby couldn't even fit all of his abbreviated staff onto her command deck) MANSChameleon, Østby's flagship, was something entirely new in the history of galactic warfare. Whether or not she was going to live up to her name and the expectations invested in her remained to be seen . . . and was going to depend very heavily on the actions of Østby and Masters and the rest of Chameleon's small crew.
"My panel shows doors fully open, Commodore," Jacobi said. "Do you confirm?"
"Confirm, Sir," Masters said, and Østby nodded, then looked back at Jacobi.
"We confirm doors fully open, Captain," he said formally.
"In that case, Sir, good hunting."
"Thank you, Captain Jacobi."
Østby nodded to her once more, then turned his command chair to face Masters.
"Anytime you're ready, Captain Masters."
"Yes, Sir." Masters looked at his astrogator and helmsman. "Take us out," he said simply, and Chameleon twitched ever so gently as the web of tractor and pressor beams which had held her exactly centered in the freighterWallaby's cavernous Number Two hold were switched off at last.
A gentle puff of compressed air from the specially modified thruster packs strapped to her bow sent her drifting backward, without the pyrotechnics of her normal fusion-powered thrusters. That would have been . . . contraindicated inside a ship, Østby thought dryly while he watched the visual display as the hold's bulkheads went sliding by.
It was the first time they'd made an actual combat deployment, but Østby's captains and crews had practiced this same maneuver dozens of times before ever leaving the Mesa System. He had no concern at all about this part of the mission, and his mind strayed ahead to the rest of the mission.
No point worrying about any of that yet, he told himself firmly. Not even if you and Topolev did draw the harder target. But at least you didn't have quite as far to go as Colenso and Sung just to get to your objective. Sung won't even be deploying for another week!
The deployment maneuver took quite a while, but no one was in a tearing hurry, and no one wanted to risk a last-minute, potentially catastrophic accident.Wallaby had made her alpha translation thirty minutes ago, and she was still several hours away from the wormhole junction she'd ostensibly come here to transit. At this range, even a fully conventional shipChameleon's size would almost certainly have been invisible even to Manticoran sensor arrays (assuming its skipper was smart enough not to bring up his wedge, at any rate). Not that anyone intended to take any chances.
Chameleon slid completely free ofWallaby, like an Old Earth shark sliding tail-first from its mother's womb, and the modified packs fell away as the jettisoning charges blew. They disappeared quickly into the Stygian gloom—this far out from the system primary, even the star gleam on Chameleon's own flanks was scarcely visible—and Østby continued to watch the visual display as the running light constellations bejeweling the clifflike immensity of the freighter's mammoth hull drew steadily away from them.
"Confirm clean separation, Sir," Masters' astrogator announced.
"Very good. Communications, do we have contact with the rest of the squadron?"
"Yes, Sir.Ghost just plugged into the net. Telemetry is up and nominal."
"Very good," Masters repeated, and looked at his executive officer. "Take us into stealth and bring up the spider, Chris," he said.
"Aye, aye, Sir." Commander Christopher Delvecchio punched in a string of commands, then nodded to the astrogator. "Stealth is up and operating. The ship is yours, Astro."
"Aye, aye, Sir. I have the ship," the astrogator responded, and MANSChameleon and her consorts reoriented themselves and began to slowly accelerate, invisible within the concealing cocoon of their stealth fields, towards the primary component of the star system known as Manticore.
Chapter Forty-Nine
"Well, it would appear that our good friends in Chicago aren't in any tearing hurry after all, wouldn't it?"
Elizabeth Winton's tone was caustic enough to make an excellent substitute for lye, Baron Grantville thought.
Not that she didn't have an excellent point.
"They've only had our note for about te
n days, Your Majesty," Sir Anthony Langtry pointed out.
He and Grantville sat in comfortable armchairs in Elizabeth's personal office, flanking her deck. They'd both eaten earlier, although each of them had a coffee cup, but the remains of Elizabeth's lunch had just been removed, and she continued to nurse a tankard of beer.
"Sure they have, Tony," she agreed, waving her tankard. "And just how long would it have taken us to respond to an official note alleging that we'd killed somebody's spacers with absolutely no provocation? Especially if they'd sent along detailed sensor data of the event . . . and informed us that they were sending a major naval force to find out what the hell happened?"
"Point taken, Your Majesty." Langtry sighed, and Grantville grimaced.
The Queen did have a point. In fact, she had a damned good one, he thought glumly. Assuming the League had decided to respond immediately, they could have had a reply back to Manticore at least four T-days ago. And even if they hadn't wanted to make a formal response that quickly, at the very least they could have acknowledged receipt of the note! The Foreign Office had Lyman Carmichael's confirmation of his meeting with Roelas y Valiente, and a memo summarizing the essentially meaningless verbal exchange which had accompanied it. But that was all they had. So far, the Solarian League's government had simply ignored the communication entirely. That could be construed—no doubt with total accuracy, in this case—as a deliberate insult.
"Obviously they're trying to tell us something by their silence," he said, his tone almost as acid as Elizabeth's had been. "Let me see now, what could it possibly be . . . ? That we're too insignificant for them to take seriously? That they'll get around to us in their own good time? That we shouldn't get our hopes up about any willingness on their part to acknowledge Byng's culpability? That it'll be a cold day in hell before they admit to any wrongdoing?"
"Try 'all of the above,' " Langtry suggested sourly.
"Well, it's stupid of them, but we can't exactly pretend it's unexpected, can we?" Elizabeth asked.
"No," Grantville sighed.
"Then I think it's probably time we thought about turning up the wick," Elizabeth told him just a bit grimly. He looked at her, and she shrugged. "Don't get me wrong, Willie. This isn't just the famous Winton temper talking, and I'm not eager to be sending them any fresh notes until we've heard back from Mike again. The last thing we need to do is sound like anxious little kids pestering an adult for a response! Besides, I've got a pretty strong suspicion that when we do hear from Mike, we're going to have all the justification in the world for sending them an even stiffer follow-up note. But it might just be time to consider going public with this."
"I think Her Majesty has a point, Willie," Langtry said quietly. Grantville switched his gaze to the Foreign Secretary, and Langtry snorted. "I'm no more eager to 'inflame public opinion' than the next man, Willie, but let's face it. As you just said yourself, four days is too long for a simple 'delayed in the mail' explanation. What it is is a calculated insult, for whatever reason they decided to deliver it, and you know how big a part perceptions play in any effective diplomacy." He shook his head. "We can't allow something like this to pass unanswered without convincing them they were right in their obvious belief that they can ignore us until they get around to bullying us into accepting their resolution of the problem."
"Agreed," Grantville said after a moment or two of silence. "At the same time, I'm still more than a little anxious over how the Solly media is going to react when they find out about this. Especially if they find out about it as 'unconfirmed allegations' from a bunch of neobarbs they already despise."
"That's going to happen in the end, anyway, Willie," Elizabeth pointed out.
"I know."
Grantville sipped coffee, then put his cup back on the saucer and rubbed an eyebrow in thought. Elizabeth was certainly right about that, he reflected. The first Manticoran reporters had been briefed by the Foreign Office and the Admiralty after they and their editors had agreed to abide by the government's confidentiality request. Legally, Grantville could have invoked the Defense of the Kingdom Act and slapped them with a formal order to keep silent until he told them differently, but that particular clause of the DKA hadn't been invoked by any prime minister in the last sixty T-years. It hadn't had to be, because the Star Kingdom's press knew it had been official policy over almost all of those T-years to be as open as possible in return for reasonable self-restraint on the 'faxes' part. He had no intention of squandering that tradition of goodwill without a damned good reason.
And, so far, the members of the media here in the Star Kingdom who knew anything about it were clearly living up to their end of the bargain. In the meantime, the first of their correspondents would have reached Spindle yesterday aboard an Admiralty dispatch boat. In another couple of weeks, those correspondents' reports would be coming back through the Junction to their editors, and it would be both pointless and wrong to expect their 'faxes not to publish at that point. So . . .
"You're both right," he acknowledged. "I'd like to hold off for a little longer, though. For two reasons. One is that they may actually have sent us a response that just hasn't gotten here yet. But the other, to be frank, has more to do with whacking them harder when we do turn it loose."
"Really?" Elizabeth cocked an eyebrow, and Ariel raised his head on his perch behind her chair. "I think I'm in favor of that," the Queen admitted after a moment, "but I'm not sure I see exactly how we're going to do it."
"I was thinking about that passage from St. Paul, but instead of doing good unto them in order to 'heap coals of fire upon their heads,' I'm in favor of using obvious restraint," Grantville said with a nasty smile. "What I suggest is that we hold off for another four days. That will just happen to have given the Sollies exactly twice as long as they really needed to acknowledge the receipt of our note, and we make exactly that point in our official news release. We explain that we'd delayed making the news public both to give us time to notify the next of kin of Commodore Chatterjee's personnel and to be sure that the Solarian League government had been given ample time to respond to our concerns. Now that they've had twice as long as needed for that, however, we feel no further point can be served by failing to make the news public."
"And waiting that long makes the point that we had a specific delay interval in mind all along," Langtry mused. "We're not just going ahead and calling in the newsies because were getting nervous about the Sollies' failure to respond."
"Exactly." Grantville nodded with a nasty smile. "Not to mention the fact that, as the real adults of the piece, we gave the petulant, spoiled children of the piece extra time before we blew the whistle on them. But, equally as the real adults of the piece, we are not going to allow the spoiled brats to hunker down forever in the corner with their lips poked out while they sulk."
"I like it," Elizabeth said after considering for a moment or two, and her answering smile was even nastier than Grantville's had been.
She sat for a moment longer, then took another sip from her tankard and tipped her chair back.
"All right. Now that we've got that out of the way, what do we want to do about Cathy Montaigne's suggestion that we beef up Torch's security? To be honest, I think there's a lot of merit to the idea, and not just because Barregos and Rozsak got hammered so hard. There're some good PR possibilities here, not to mention the possibility of easing into a closer relationship with the Maya Sector's navy, and it can't hurt where Erewhon's concerned, either. So—"
"I can't say your report is very cheerful reading, Michelle," Augustus Khumalo said heavily. "On the other hand, I completely endorse all of your actions."
"I'm glad to hear that, Sir," Michelle Henke said sincerely. She and Khumalo sat facing one another in comfortable armchairs in his day cabin aboardHercules, nursing large snifters of excellent brandy. At the moment, Michelle was far more grateful than usual for the way the brandy's comforting warmth slid down her throat like thick, honeyed fire.
And
I damned well deserve it, too, she thought, allowing herself another sip. Maybe not for what happened at New Tuscany, but definitely for putting up with Baroness Medusa's tame newsies!
Actually, she knew, the newsies in question—Marguerite Attunga of the Manticoran News Service, Incorporated; Efron Imbar of Star Kingdom News; and Consuela Redondo of the Sphinx News Association—had been remarkably gentle with her. None of them had been gauche enough to say so, but it was obvious to her that they and their editors back home had been very carefully briefed before they were allowed in on what promised to be one of the biggest news stories in the Star Kingdom's history.
Especially now that things had just finished going so badly south in New Tuscany.
Unfortunately, they were still newsies, they still had their job to do, however nonadversarial about it they'd been this time, and she still hated sitting in front of their cameras and knowing that the entire Star Kingdom would be seeing and hearing her responses to their questions. It wasn't nervousness—or she didn't think it was, at least. Or maybe it was, just not on a personal level. What really worried her, she admitted finally, was that she'd say or do something wrong, and the combination of her naval rank and her proximity to the throne would elevate whatever mistake she made to the level of catastrophe.
"I agree that there's nothing particularly cheerful about the situation, Sir," she continued out loud after a moment, shaking off—mostly—her reflections about potential media disasters with her name on them. "In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if it was such a good idea to sendReprise off to Meyers before we knew exactly what was going to happen at New Tuscany. Especially since I didn't manage to keep the Sollies from getting a dispatch boat out."
"That decision was Baroness Medusa's . . . and mine," Khumalo told her. "As I recall, you were against it at the time, too."
"Yes, Sir, but not for exactly the same reasons I'm regretting it now. I didn't want to telegraph anything to Frontier Security and Frontier Fleet. I wasn't worried about one of our ships sailing into a broadside of missiles the instant she showed her face!"
