Tier Three acceleration on a starship. The strange ship had been built to get where it needed to go in a hurry—and had, until a month before, been utterly obsolete.
“We have courier ships?” MacGinnis asked, leaning over her tech’s shoulder. “I figured we were going to be using freighters for messages for the foreseeable future.”
“That’s going to be most of it,” James agreed. “We have four. They’re intended for delivering physical delegations in speed and comfort, not carrying all of the dictates and messages of an interstellar government.”
“And they sent one to us,” his operations officer said softly. “Well, it’s nice to know we’re still important, right, boss?”
“Ask me that again in”—James checked his sensor feed—“two hours after I’ve reviewed their messages.”
This had to have been the first courier to have left Sol. That…probably wasn’t a good sign.
The courier waited until they were within one light-minute of the fleet base to start sending the complicated electronic challenge-and-response necessary for James to be able to access the confidential messages.
With most of a minute of delay on every transmission, it took over thirty minutes to process the challenges and allow James to open up the official mail.
The very first, urgent, “Marshal’s Eyes Only” message was from the Committee on Unification. It was a recorded video and he linked it directly to his implants.
The video put him standing in front of the long table the Committee used for their meetings, and something in how they were looking at the pickup suggested the feeling like he was on trial was not unintentional.
“Admiral Walkingstick,” the man closest to the camera—not, James noted, Michael Burns, the Committee’s acknowledged unofficial leader—greeted him. The speaker was the Senator for Tau Ceti, a chubby albino man named Giorgio Mhasalkar.
“By now, we presume you have realized that the Commonwealth quantum communication network is down. We know, with certainty, that every station in the Sol System has been destroyed—including the supposedly secret continuity-of-government facility at Uranus.
“We have sufficient information prior to the destruction of facilities in other star systems to be quite certain what happened,” Mhasalkar concluded. “A series of deep strikes by the so-called Alliance of Free Stars was launched with the specific intent of destroying our communications capability.”
He paused, glancing at the other Senators and Assembly Members around him.
“They have succeeded,” he said bluntly. “The courier carrying this message also carries a delegation empowered by the Star Chamber to negotiate with the Alliance. We intend to offer a cease-fire in place, returning control of all occupied Alliance systems and recognizing their de facto control of the Via Somnia and Presley Systems.
“That will be used as a starting point for a permanent peace treaty. Your efforts to annex the Rimward Marches, Marshal Walkingstick, are now at an end. You have failed us.”
Arguably, they were cutting any chance of victory out from under his feet. James wouldn’t exactly call this situation a failure on his part, after all. If they’d done what he’d suggested, the Alliance would have been crushed a year or more earlier.
“A similar delegation has been sent to the Stellar League,” Mhasalkar noted. “Until we have secured the unity of our own systems, we cannot afford continued external threats and conflicts. We will be forced to negotiate, to make recompense.
“We are being forced to humiliate ourselves,” the Senator said bluntly, “but the Star Chamber recognizes that we cannot save the Commonwealth from the consequences of your war with the Alliance without turning our focus inwards.”
Your war. Not our war. Roberts’s words about where the Alliance put the blame were suddenly echoing with chilling weight in the back of James’s mind.
He wondered what the delegation the Star Chamber had sent would do if the Alliance asked for one Marshal Walkingstick’s head—hopefully figuratively, but he wouldn’t put literally past the Imperator of the Coraline Imperium—as a condition of permanent peace.
“This will no longer be your concern,” Mhasalkar told him. “You are to return to Sol aboard your flagship immediately to surrender your Marshal’s mace. Since the Rimward Marches were the origin of this attack, we will need to debrief you on this enemy.
“We may need to pull back for now, but, believe me, Admiral Walkingstick, there will be consequences for this!”
The message ended and James opened his eyes to study his flag deck again. He’d need to go over what information they’d provided. If nothing else, the courier’s sensors would tell him how the Battle of Sol had gone after the Central Nexus had been destroyed.
His guess was “not well”, though the fact that the Senate was in a position to be sending delegations meant it couldn’t have gone as badly as he feared.
The Alliance, after all, was apparently not dictating surrender terms from Earth orbit. They were still well short of his worst-case scenario!
The real surprise came when the courier ship reached orbit, and a short-range transmission from the captain asked James to come aboard in person.
He’d been wondering why the courier ship, designed to drop into a system, launch a data pulse, and be on its way to the next as soon as it got a responding pulse, had come all the way into Ontario orbit.
Apparently, it had been to speak with him.
A shuttle delivered him to the nameless courier ship, where a pair of Marines were waiting for him to escort him deeper into its plushly appointed VIP section.
“What is this about, Sergeant?” he asked the senior Marine quietly.
“I honestly don’t know, sir,” the blonde Sergeant replied quickly, her gaze refusing to meet his. “The Ambassador wanted to speak to you in person. I don’t know why.”
James grunted. The Marine clearly knew something—and was under strict orders to say nothing. So far, no one had even told him who the Ambassador was.
Somehow, he wasn’t surprised to be escorted into a palatial sitting area and find himself facing the calmly seated form of Hope Burns. The wife of the Senator for Alpha Centauri was one of the Commonwealth’s leading diplomats.
The perfectly composed black woman might be twenty years her husband’s junior, but most people who knew them both suspected that she’d pursued and courted the older man to have a Senatorial trophy husband, rather than the other way around.
James was close enough friends with Michael Burns to know that wasn’t far from the truth, but also that the pair were actually sickeningly in love—in private, at least. It would never do for two of the most powerful figures in the Commonwealth’s government to hold hands where rivals might see them.
The Marines shut the door behind him and Burns rose to wrap James in a tight hug.
“It’s good to see you,” she whispered. “It’s been a hellish few weeks.”
He returned the embrace and stepped back to study her. If Hope Burns had had a bad few weeks, it didn’t show. But then, he suspected his own appearance didn’t reflect the last month either.
“I have the formal notice of my order to return to Earth,” he said quietly. “How bad is it?”
“Bad,” she said flatly. “While I have several tiers of specific offers that Foreign Affairs top people went through as a ground, my authority is functionally unlimited.”
Unlimited. That was a bad word when applied to the woman sent to negotiate peace.
“No one wanted to use the word surrender,” she noted. “But the level of plenipotentiary authority I have been given made it clear that if the Alliance will accept no less, I’m authorized to negotiate a conditional surrender.”
“Or an unconditional one,” James concluded.
“Or an unconditional one,” she agreed. “If that’s the only way to get the Alliance to stop shooting at us while we sort out the wreckage from their destruction of our communications.”
She sighed.
>
“Unification is inevitable,” she murmured. “But…damned if they haven’t managed to produce the one roadblock that’s going to slow it down a lot. It’ll be years before we have even a basic network back up. Decades before we return to what we had.”
“Less, surely, if we focus on it,” James replied.
“Perhaps. But we are crippled, James. Crippled. The Commonwealth may not survive the next few years—systems that secede will be able to buy q-com blocks from the League or the Alliance’s members, but no one will sell them to us.”
He winced.
“That bad?”
“Officially, everyone is happy to be Unified, so of course they’ll stick with the Commonwealth,” Burns said dryly. “In practice, well, Michael and I have always kept a solid finger on the pulse of the truth of the Commonwealth.
“By December, at least one system will have seceded. By February, at least one multi-stellar unit. We won’t even learn about the secessions until it’s too late to do anything. Coordinating forces to end these secessions will be…difficult.”
“But doable,” he pointed out. “We have enough older warships to use as couriers to move the more recent vessels around to put out fires. We can hold the Commonwealth together.”
“And who would command the forces that would do this?” she asked. “Which Admiral would you trust with the knife at the Commonwealth’s throat?”
He blinked. She was right. The civil war to come would require large forces operating with minimal command and control. They would need officers they could trust completely.
“I have several suggestions,” he said levelly. “Officers whose loyalty I would trust completely.”
Burns chuckled softly.
“You aren’t being recalled to ask for your advice, James,” she told him. “They told you, what, you’re being recalled for debriefing?”
“Exactly,” he confirmed, wondering what she was talking about.
“Michael figured they wouldn’t have the gumption to tell you the truth. He couldn’t tell me what they did say, though.”
“The truth?”
“You’re being recalled to face a trial before the Senate for grand treason,” Hope Burns told him quietly. “And the Senate has already made up their mind. If you go home, James Calvin Walkingstick, they will kill you.”
James found himself noting, vaguely, the details of how palatially the room Hope Burns had met him in was furnished. Most starships had plain metal floors and walls, maybe with a rug in people’s quarters. This room was carpeted and the walls had been carefully painted with a mural of one of Earth’s beaches.
The furniture, including the chair was sitting in, was luxuriously comfortable and the room was being kept noticeably warmer than the rest of the ship. The courier ship crew did their best, it seemed, to pamper the VIPs they carried.
All of that was a distraction from what she’d just told him.
“Kill me?” he finally asked. “That’s…extreme. Why?”
“Because they need to blame someone,” Burns said. “Because they can’t blame the Star Chamber for voting for this war, so they’ll blame you for ‘dragging’ the Commonwealth into it. They’ll claim that if you were actually loyal and competent, the war would have been over years ago.
“They’ll blame you for starting the war, they’ll blame you for not finishing the war, and they’ll blame you for ‘allowing’ the Alliance to launch strikes into Commonwealth space,” she concluded.
“It’s all…Voidstuff,” she noted. “But they don’t care. You’re going to be scapegoated for the Alliance’s attacks on us, found publicly guilty of treason, and executed.”
James shivered.
“Even putting aside the fact that I’d rather not be shot, that’s a really bad idea,” he said. “They’ll undermine the loyalty of every flag officer. If we face execution for losing…”
“Then the entire military structure that we need to hold the Commonwealth together will start fracturing,” she agreed. “I wouldn’t be sitting here telling you this if I agreed with them, James. Letting them execute you could destroy the Commonwealth.
“You have to run, James. Send in your mace and resignation and disappear.”
“I don’t run,” he told her. “I never have. I never will.”
“It’s the only choice you have left, James,” she said. “If you go home, they’ll execute you. There’s no escaping that. If you defy their orders and stay here in command of your fleet, you’ll end up accelerating the disintegration of the Commonwealth.
“You’d end up with your own pocket empire, but I know you, James Walkingstick. You are a loyal son of Terra.”
“For which, it appears my superiors now wish to kill me,” he replied.
“Yes,” she said steadily. “The Star Chamber has betrayed you, James. But they are not the Commonwealth. The best way you can serve now is to disappear. Walk away before they end you.”
There was nothing to say, really. James spent a minute staring at the wall in silence. Burns didn’t say anything, just waiting.
“Damn it,” he finally said. “I appreciate the warning, Hope. But…in some ways, I’d rather have not known until it was too late!”
47
Niagara System
09:00 November 9, 2737 Earth Standard Meridian Date/Time
Ontario Orbit
It was a small meeting room. A quiet space aboard a battleship which had few such spaces. Large enough for the dozen or so people James had summoned aboard Saint Michael for this council.
Lindsey Tasker and Mihai Gabor had barely met each other before, but the stresses of the last few months allowed them to embrace as old friends. It had been a hell of a war, and that the courier was carrying an ambassador to Alliance space to end it was as much a relief as anything else.
Even to James, he had to admit.
Commodore MacGinnis and Commander Messere were also in the room. The last occupant was a woman that James had rarely met in person, even as he sliced up her command to send her troops all over the galaxy.
General Pearle Krizman of the Commonwealth Marine Corps looked like she’d stepped out of a recruiting poster, even in this informal meeting. She was one of the most heavily muscled people James had ever met, even her Marine dress uniform clearly having been modified to allow for her bulk.
If there were any spare grams of fat on the six-foot-tall woman, forty years of Marine physical training hadn’t found them, and if Krizman was perhaps less attractive to most men than other women, she could not care less.
Not least, to James’s knowledge, because she was happily married to an accountant on Earth who took fantastic care of their three children.
The three-star General commanded the two Marine Deployment Groups assigned to his command. Each contained three Marine Expeditionary Groups for a total of twenty-four divisions per MDC and almost half a million Marines per the TOE.
The truth was, most of her divisions were understrength or had been chopped up to a thousand different purposes, sent out by battalion or regiments instead of division—and one of her subordinates had managed to get the last intact MEG shattered in the assault on Midori.
Nonetheless, there were plenty of Marines to hand in Niagara to load aboard the fifteen assault transports they still had.
If one James Calvin Walkingstick decided to do something…spectacular.
“People, you’re here because there are things I need to explain in person,” he told them all. “No encrypted coms. No recordings. No virtual meetings. What we are about to discuss is…”
He sighed.
“What we are about to discuss is arguably treason,” he repeated, finishing the sentence this time.
The five officers in the room were silent, all of them waiting for him to continue.
“I have been advised—by sources that I trust completely—that my recall to Terra is not for a debriefing,” he said slowly. “The Star Chamber intends to put me on trial for treason—and they’ve
already decided on the verdict and the punishment.
“When I return to Terra, I am to be arrested, put to a kangaroo court, and shot.”
He let that hang in the room for a few seconds of silence.
“What has been recommended to me is that I disappear,” he admitted. “I…do not see a reasonable alternative.
“My intention is to take Saint Michael back into Commonwealth space, leave a letter of resignation and my mace aboard her, and leave at a location somewhere between here and there,” he confessed. “I will not use this fleet to set up a private empire, even if you would follow me, but I cannot blithely stick my head into the noose for the Commonwealth, either.”
The shocked silence continued. His officers traded concerned looks, thoughtful glances, a million pieces of nonverbal communication, but no one spoke.
Then General Krizman rose to her feet.
“Fuck that garbage, sir,” she told him. “My Marines will follow your orders to the end. No matter where you send us. If they want to hang you, they’re going to go through us.”
“General, I cannot—”
“No,” Tasker cut him off. “We will not permit this. We will not allow you to be executed or to disappear into obscurity. You are our Marshal.”
“If you go back to Terra, you’re going back with all of us,” Gabor concluded. “Together.”
“If I arrive in Sol with eighty capital ships and a dozen-plus Marine transports, that is treason,” James pointed out. He was touched. He was horrified. Stunned that his people would even offer this.
And he was so, so tempted.
“If the Star Chamber is prepared to execute you, they are prepared to doom the Commonwealth,” Messere, the most junior person in the room, said quietly. “Even if you go into hiding, someone else will be blamed. They will break the contracts and oaths that hold us together, no matter what.
“If you do not challenge them, they will destroy all that we are sworn to defend. What else can we do?”
Operation Medusa Page 30
