by David Weber
"Crap," she said very, very softly, looking down at her lobster bisque and suddenly not feeling very hungry after all.
"Listen, Irene," he said equally quietly, "I know you've been being careful to keep your mouth shut, but I also know you have a working brain, unlike altogether too many of our esteemed colleagues. You've had your own suspicions about all of those 'ridiculous' reports from the SDF observers, haven't you?"
She looked back at him, unwilling to confirm his suspicions even now, but she knew he saw the truth in her eyes, and he nodded.
"What I thought," he said. Then he smiled crookedly. "Don't worry. I'm not about to invite you to commit professional suicide by suddenly announcing that you, too, believe that every spacer in the Manticoran Navy is three meters tall, impervious to pulser fire, and able to snatch speeding missiles out of space in his bare teeth. I've had a little experience myself with the consequences of being 'overly credulous' and 'alarmist.' In fact, Admiral Thimár himself saw fit to 'counsel me' on my obviously distorted pet theories. But look at this data. No, it's not a smoking gun, not conclusive proof, but the implications are there, aren't they? The Manties have to have a significantly more capable level of technology than anyone here on Old Terra is willing to even consider. For that matter, I'm coming to the suspicion that at least some of their toys aren't just better than most people think they have but actually are better than ours are, as well. When you couple that with some of the reports about their missile ranges at Monica, or the ridiculous salvo sizes some of the system-defense force observers say they can generate . . ."
He shook his head, and his eyes were dark. Worried.
"They can't all be true," she protested quietly. "The rumors, I mean. Manticore's only one tiny little star system, Daud! All right, so it's a rich little star system, and it's got a hell of a lot bigger navy than anybody else its size. But it's still one star system, however many other systems it may be in the process of annexing. Are you seriously suggesting that they've managed somehow to put together a better, more effective R and D establishment than the entire Solarian League?"
"They don't have to have done that," he said flatly. "The League could be ahead of them clear across the board, but that doesn't mean the Navy is. These people have been fighting a war for better than twenty T-years, and they started their military buildup way the hell before that. You think maybe they could have been working really hard on weapons R and D in the process? That maybe, unlike us, they've been looking at real combat reports, instead of analyses of training simulations where the 'secret details' get leaked to all the senior participants before they even begin the exercise? That, unlike us, the people building their weapons and evaluating their combat doctrines might once have heard of a gentleman named Charles Darwin? Compared to someone who's been fighting for his life for two decades, we're soft, Irene—soft, underprepared, and complacent."
"And even assuming you're right, just what the hell do you expect me 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 you are 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) MANS Chameleon, 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 freighter Wallaby'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 norma
l 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 ship Chameleon'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 of Wallaby, 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 MANS Chameleon 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 ten 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 the
y 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.
