I promised the Earc is coming. In the meantime, though —
___________________________________________________
Office of the Second Space Lord
Admiralty House
City of Landing
Manticore
Star Empire of Manticore
“Sorry it took me so long, Pat,” Hamish Alexander-Harrington, Earl White Haven and First Lord of Admiralty, said, as he followed Commander Terry Lassaline Admiral Patricia Givens's new chief of staff, through Givens’s office door. Tobias Stimson, his personal armsman peeled off outside the door. “We were in transit when your message came in. So what’s this all about? I assume there’s a reason I’m here instead of talking to the Select Committee, where I’m supposed to be?”
“Actually, Hamish,” a familiar soprano said from the office’s smart wall, “I’m the one who’s messed up your schedule. Sorry about that. I’m sure you’re looking forward to talking to the Committee almost as enthusiastically as I’m looking forward to that state dinner tonight.”
“Honor!” White Haven’s incipient frown disappeared as he turned to face the smart wall. “If you needed to talk to me, there are simpler ways to do it.”
“I’m aware.” His wife shook her head with a certain resignation as Lassaline touched White Haven’s elbow and pointed at one of the armchairs facing the smart wall. “Unfortunately, this call isn’t a social occasion. There’s something you need to see.”
“Me as in First Space Lord, I presume?” he asked, settling into the indicated chair with a nod of thanks to the commander. Lassaline smiled, then raised an eyebrow at Givens.
“We’re good, Terry,” the second space lord said. “But grab a seat. You should hear this, too.”
“Yes, Ma’am.” Lassaline took a seat of her own, and White Haven turned his attention back to the smart wall.
Honor stood at one end of her desk aboard Imperator, and he recognized Mercedes Brigham, her chief of staff; Andrea Jaruwalski, her ops officer; and George Reynolds, her intelligence officer, behind her. Captain Rafe Cardones, Imperator’s CO stood with them, and White Haven’s eyebrows twitched slightly. That quartet represented the most trusted core of Honor’s staff, and their expressions were a strange mix of eagerness and . . . trepidation? No, that wasn’t quite the right word, but it was headed in the right direction.
“Absolutely. One of our forensic teams pulled something very interesting out of a Solly superdreadnought’s com records. It may shed a little light on Filareta’s actions. Of course,” she grimaced, “I think it probably poses as many new questions as it answers.”
“Wonderful.” He shook his head, then glanced at Givens. “Seems to work that way more often than not in intelligence matters, doesn’t it?”
Givens, who commanded the Office of Naval Intelligence in addition to her other duties, snorted, and he looked back at Honor.
“Show me,” he said simply, and Honor looked at Reynolds.
“George?”
“Yes, Your Grace.” The newly promoted captain faced White Haven from the smart wall. “My Lord, what you’re about to see was pulled out of a personal com exchange between Admiral Filareta’s communications officer and the com officer aboard Leonhard Euler. We’ve abstracted the relevant material, stripped away the rest of the message, and enhanced what we kept. I’d like to recommend Midshipman — I’m sorry, it’s Ensign now; Her Grace’s authority — Elijah Dimas for some well-deserved recognition for spotting it, too. I’m not sure it would have popped the filters before we scrubbed and enhanced it.”
White Haven nodded his understanding.
“We don’t have any visual of the critical speakers,” Reynolds continued. “They were outside the pickup’s field of view, but the voice recognition software is ninety-nine-point-nine percent confident in its IDs.”
“That could be a problem down the road, Hamish,” Givens put in, then shrugged when he looked at her. “If we go public with this, there are going to be plenty of Sollies ready to point out how ‘convenient’ for us it is that all we have are disembodied voices.”
“Maybe yes, and maybe no, Pat.” Honor’s voice drew Givens and White Haven’s eyes back to her. “We’ve got all the rest of the message with this embedded in it. Anybody who wants to can do her own forensics on it. Not,” she grimaced, “that anyone in Old Chicago’s likely to be interested in determining whether or not it’s genuine.”
“You’re probably right,” White Haven said. “So why don’t you go ahead and show it to me?”
“George?” Honor said again, and Reynolds nodded. Then he pressed a button, and another voice spoke against a background the admiral in Hamish Alexander-Harrington recognized only too well: the clipped, disciplined voices of a flag bridge at battle stations.
“Very well,” it said. It sounded flat, wooden, and a caption on the smart wall identified it as Fleet Admiral Massimo Filareta. “Strike our wedges and send the pod self-destruct command, Bill.”
White Haven’s eyebrows shot up and he turned to dart an astonished glance at Givens. The admiral only shook her head and held up an index finger.
“Yes, Sir,” another voice said, and the caption identified this one as that of Admiral William Daniels, Eleventh Fleet’s operations officer.
“I suppose you should go ahead and get Harrington back, Reuben,” Filareta’s voice continued. “She’ll want —”
There was another sound, one White Haven couldn’t quite make out. It sounded almost like a muffled cry of protest. Then —
“What the fuck d’you think you’re do —?!” Filareta’s voice shouted.
It cut off in mid-syllable, and White Haven’s gaze moved from Givens back to Honor.
“That’s all we’ve got,” she said softly, “but the time chop’s a perfect match. Filareta’s last words synchronize exactly with Eleventh Fleet’s pod launch. We’ve always known the launch order came from Filareta’s flag bridge —the launch codes and sequence confirmed that — but nobody on his staff said a word to anyone outside Oppenheimer afterward. Oppenheimer was destroyed in our first-wave launch, of course, but time of flight was a hundred and sixty seconds, so there was ample time for them to have talked to somebody outside the flagship. And I’m particularly struck by how it breaks off so suddenly. Leonhard Euler’s com officer is the only person we know of who was in contact with Filareta’s flag bridge at that moment, and she tried for almost three minutes to reestablish contact while her captain tried to find out what the heck was going on when those missiles launched. She couldn’t, and that matches with everything we’ve heard from all of Eleventh Fleet’s survivors. No one could raise Filareta’s flag bridge. I’m inclined to wonder if that’s because something happened to it right after they launched.”
“But, if that’s really Filareta, it sounds like he did decide to surrender!” White Haven said.
“I think that’s exactly what he did,” Honor said, and her voice was grim, her dark brown eyes cold. “I think he understood precisely what we wanted him to understand: that his only option was to surrender. And I think the bastards on the other side of this took precautions to prevent him from doing anything of the sort.”
“You’re saying this was another example of that killer nanotech of theirs?” It was technically a question, but it didn’t sound like one.
“I’m saying that’s exactly what it was, and that the people who planted it on him used me and my people to kill another quarter million Solarian spacers,” his wife said harshly. “Nobody on Old Terra who wasn’t already prepared to believe us will believe a word of it, but we know now, and these people — whoever they are — are running up quite a bill with me.”
She smiled a hexapuma smile.
“I’m looking forward to presenting it.”
******************************************
Forge One
Refuge System
“I’m impressed, Admiral,” Sonja Hemphill said as she and Admiral Shannon Foraker stepped out of the lift car and walked down a short passageway. Foraker’s yeoman popped to attention as they entered the admiral’s outer office. She waved a casual hand at him, but he held the position and cut his eyes briefly sideways to his superior’s guest.
The pause in Foraker’s stride was barely perceptible, but then she cleared her throat.
“At ease, Jean-Louis,” she said.
He dropped into something rather more like parade rest, and Hemphill stifled an inappropriate urge to giggle.
Her own career was checkered with . . . occasional lapses in military punctilio. In her own case, she acknowledged, they usually had something to do with losing her temper with someone who seemed to have become part of the problem instead of the solution. She’d been forced to admit — indeed, she’d recognized at the time — that tantrums were often counterproductive, and she’d worked on her temper for decades. Really she had! And it helped that so many — not all, but many — of the causes she’d championed since King Roger had instituted Project Gram had paid off handsomely in the war against the People’s Republic. Partly, that was because people tended to argue with her less, which she’d discovered wasn’t always a good thing. More of it, though, she’d come to realize, was because she no longer had to prove herself to herself. The truth, she’d discovered, was that quite a lot of her more youthful anger had been directed at the fact that she hadn’t been certain she was on the right track, herself. She’d known exactly how badly the Star Kingdom needed some sort of technological equalizer against the stupendous People’s Republic. It had been her job to find one, and her anger had been directed as much at her own never-admitted uncertainty as it had been at the obstinacy of those arguing with her.
The treecat on her shoulder made a soft sound and patted her right cheek with a gentle true-hand, and her eyes softened.
Hunts Silently had assigned himself as her bodyguard when Sphinx’s treecat population decided it was time to provide the “two-legs” fighting to protect Sphinx and all the rest of the Star Empire’s planets against the enemies behind the Yawata Strike. That attack had massacred an entire treecat clan, and as the ’cats themselves had put it, they knew how to deal with “evildoers.” The telempathic treecats also knew about the way in which humans had been turned into programmed assassins, and their ability to sense the unwilling killers’ horror and panic when the programming took control made them the only defense against them anyone had yet discovered.
Quite a lot of the Grand Alliance’s leadership, Sonja Hemphill among them, had acquired furry, adorable, highly intelligent, and very, very deadly protectors as a consequence of the ’cats decision. What she hadn’t fully appreciated was the speed with which Hunts Silently would become perhaps the closest friend she’d ever had. And she was pretty sure he’d had more than a little to do with her ability to understand the roots of the anger which had been so much a part of her for so long, too.
Shannon Foraker’s lapses in military formality, on the other hand, stemmed from very different causes. In certain key aspects of her life, Admiral Foraker was the most focused, intense individual Hemphill had ever met, herself included. Outside those key aspects, however, she often seemed to inhabit a different universe. Despite that — or because of it, perhaps — her staff and subordinates were utterly devoted to her. It was rather touching to see the determination of people like Senior Chief Jean-Louis Jackson to protect her against the sort of lapses in formality which might embarrass her in front of her no doubt supercilious, judgmental Manticoran guests.
Hemphill’s thoughts carried her through the hatch into Foraker’s inner office aboard Forge One, the oldest — and largest — of the four major spacestations orbiting the planet of Sanctuary. They’d just completed a guided tour of the enormous platform, and she’d been deeply impressed by what the Republic of Haven and the Sanctuarians had accomplished. Individually, Forge One and its three consorts were little more than a quarter as large as Manticore’s Hephaestus or Vulcan had once been, but the four of them together exceeded even Hephaestus’s solo output. In many ways, that was what Hemphill found most impressive about Project Bolthole, because Haven had managed to build that capacity — from scratch — with a substantially less capable tech base . . . and in only four decades.
Of course, the woman whose office they’d just entered had spent the last several T-years working to make that tech base one hell of a lot more capable than she’d found it.
Foraker waved at the comfortable conversational area in one corner of the spacious compartment. The chairs, coffee table, and couch were arranged in a semicircle, facing a waterfall that poured down across a cascade of natural stone into an oval 3.5-meter pool. A flash of color caught Hemphill’s eye as a spectacularly striped and banded fish with long, feather-like fins — she wondered if the species was native to Haven or to Sanctuary — leapt briefly above the pool’s rippling surface.
“Sit down, please . . . Baroness,” Foraker almost managed to conceal her grimace at having almost forgotten to add Hemphill’s aristocratic title, and the Manticoran chuckled. Foraker looked at her as they sat, and she shook her head.
“Don’t worry about any ‘Baronesses’ or ‘Miladies,’ Admiral Foraker,” she said as Hunts Silently flowed down to curl in her lap. “They’re not necessary, and I don’t usually use my title back home, anyway.”
“You don’t?” Foraker sounded a bit relieved, and Hemphill chuckled again.
“I suppose I really should, but I’ve been plain old ‘Sonja Hemphill’ for a lot of years. I don’t have time for much of a social life and I’m not that interested in politics, so I’ve never taken my seat in the Lords. I let one of my cousins sit there with my proxy.” She shrugged. “Besides, Low Delhi’s basically just a one percent arc of the Gorgon Belt in Manticore-B. That comes to about three-point-one quadrillion cubic kilometers, but those kilometers contain an awful lot of empty space. Mind you, some of the rocks floating around in it are pretty valuable, but I think its total population was nine hundred and twenty — or maybe it was twenty-one — the last time I looked. And most of my ‘subjects’ are asteroid miners who could give treecats stubborn lessons.” She gave another shrug, then smiled. “Besides, I think the two of us will be working closely enough it should probably be ‘Sonja’ and ‘Shannon,’ at least in private.”
“Oh, good!” Foraker sighed, then looked contrite. “Sorry! That didn’t come out just the way I wanted. I suppose they warned you I’m not real good about the social stuff?”
“I think you can assume the odd word or two of . . . caution was dropped into my ear,” Hemphill said wryly. “Should I assume the same sort of words were dropped into your ear about me?”
“Actually, the word Admiral Lewis used in your case was ‘touchy,’ I think.” Foraker’s tone was even drier than Hemphill’s had been, and Hunts Silently laughed as the two of them sat back and smiled broadly at one another.
“To quote a line from one of Duchess Harrington’s favorite ancient entertainment holovids, Shannon, ‘I think this is going to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship,’” the Manticoran said.
* * * * * * * * * *
“— so from our analysts’ perspective, it looks to me like we’re in pretty good shape right now,” Sonja Hemphill said much later that night, sitting across the supper table from Foraker with an after-dinner glass of brandy in hand. “I doubt the Sollies fully appreciate the powered ranges our MDMs can reach — we’ve tried hard enough to keep them from figuring it out, at any rate — and I’m almost positive they can’t really appreciate the accuracy Apollo makes possible at those ranges. That doesn’t mean they don’t feel a desperate need to increase their own ranges, but until they can figure out how to build multiple impeller rings into the same missile body, they won’t be able to match our performance. And as far as we can tell — and we’ve had a really good look inside their current tech, thanks to Filareta — they’re only a little ahead of where we were twenty years ago, at First Yeltsin, on the grav-pulse coms.”
Foraker sipped from the cup of coffee in her own hand and nodded slowly. The two of them had spent the last several hours bringing one another up to speed — in general terms, at least — on Bolthole’s actual capacity and their separate R&D programs’ current projects.
“That’s probably true,” she said now. “And given how long it took us to reverse-engineer the splitter technology even after we ‘acquired’ a few specimens to work from, I doubt they’ll figure it out next week. But I think everyone needs to remember the Solarian League has plenty of really capable scientists and engineers. And the fact that they already know we can do it will give their researchers an enormous leg up.”
“Agreed. Agreed!” Hemphill nodded back, much more vigorously. “Our current estimate is that it ought to take them at least a couple of years — more probably three or four, bearing in mind that we’re pretty sure they haven’t ‘acquired’ any samples — but we’re well aware that it’s only a guesstimate. And that it might be overly optimistic. I think it’s going to take them a lot longer to match Apollo, though.”
“Probably,” Foraker said again. “But I hope you won’t take this wrong way, but it’s always seemed to me that you Manticorans have a tendency to build in what one of my staffers calls ‘all the bells and whistles.’” She smiled wryly. “Mind you, if I had as many whistles and bells as you people do, I’d damned well build them in myself! But that hasn’t been the case for us, which is why Five gave me that a couple of years ago.”
She waved her cup at an old-fashioned frame on the bulkhead. It contained a quotation from “Anonymous,” and Hemphill had smiled as she read it earlier.
“Perfect is the mortal enemy of good enough,” it said.
“That’s what we had to bear in mind for years after the head start you people got on us,” Foraker said very seriously. “If we’d waited until we’d figured out how to duplicate everything you were doing to us, we’d never have gotten anything done. Not in time to do us any good, anyway.”
“We haven’t exactly waited until we were convinced everything was ‘perfect’ before we committed it to action ourselves,” Hemphill pointed out.
“No, I’m sure you haven’t. But my point is really looking from the perspective of the . . . technological underdog, let’s say. We couldn’t do the things you were doing the way you did them, so we had to figure out how to do what was ‘good enough’ to let us at least stay in shouting range. And I’d like to think that, every so often, we handed you a surprise or two of our own.”
“Oh, you certainly did that!” Hemphill shook her head. “There were quite a few surprises along the way, like Moriarty and those ‘donkey’ missile pods of yours!”
“Exactly.” Foraker set her cup down, folded her hands on the edge of the table, and leaned forward over them, her expression intent. “Exactly,” she repeated. “You had the technological edge, both in weapons already in the pipeline and in terms of your basic infrastructure. We had the edge in sheer numbers and size of infrastructure, but we were well behind you in terms of deployed technology and even further in terms of the educational system which might have let us recoup our disadvantage.
“But the Solarian League is huge, even bigger in relative terms compared to the entire Grand Alliance than the People’s Republic was compared to the original Star Kingdom. It’s got the biggest, most broadly dispersed manufacturing infrastructure in the entire galaxy. Despite the situation on many of the Fringe and Verge planets — and a couple of the Core Worlds; let’s be honest here — it has a first-rate educational system. And outside its warfighting hardware, its applied tech is about as good as it gets. I think you people clearly have the edge in several critical areas, but outside FTL bandwidth, that edge is pretty damned thin, and I’m willing to bet there are areas in which they have the edge, if they just sit down, take a deep breath, and think about it. And when they do that, if they decide to settle for ‘good enough’ instead of holding out for ‘perfect’ . . . .”
“If they do, God only knows what they’ll come up with as an equalizer,” Hemphill finished for her when she allowed her voice to trail away. The Manticoran admiral’s expression was grim as she recalled the Janacek Admiralty’s hubris . . . and what that had cost the Royal Manticoran Navy in dead ships and personnel.
“That’s exactly what I’m worried about,” Shannon Foraker said quietly. “Given their performance to date, it’s tempting to think every Solly’s an idiot. But they aren’t, and if some of those not-idiots convince the Mandarins to listen to them, our current technological edge could disappear a lot sooner than anyone wants to think it could."
**********************************************
[b]The Golden Olive Restaurant
City of Old Chicago
Sol System
Solarian League[/b]
“So what do you think of Rajmund’s latest revelation?” Lupe Blanton asked as she and Weng Zhing-hwan finished punching their orders into the privacy-screened booth’s terminal. “From where I sit, if there’s really anything to it, we may need to rethink our position on who the Other Guys really are. Or if they exist at all, for that matter!”
“First, let’s remember we’re talking about Rajmund,” Weng observed, pouring tea into her cup from the self-warming pot which had been waiting in their booth when they arrived. “That automatically means there’s an agenda behind it. You know that even better than I do, since you, unfortunately, have to work with him — or around him — on an ongoing basis. Second, we know damned well that all of his patrons — or the ones we’ve been able to identify, at least — have strong vested interests in ‘proving’ the Manties are behind anything that goes south in the Fringe. And, third, I don’t believe for one second that Oravil Barregos would be careless or stupid enough to be caught talking to the Manties — or anyone else — if he seriously contemplates anything of which your esteemed superiors might disapprove.”
“A masterly summation.” Blanton smiled thinly. She sat back on her side of the table, playing with a fork, and, despite the smile, her eyes were dark. “What really worries me is that Adão doesn’t have any option but to take his reports seriously. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t trust the . . . disinterested impartiality of what Rajmund’s reporting any farther than I do, but there’s so much of it.”
“And he’s upping the ante if he’s handing over genuine photos of Manticoran naval officers,” Weng agreed. “Especially if they turn out to be genuine Manticoran officers. And I’m assuming from Ukhtomskoy’s reaction that they did?”
“Of course they did,” Blanton said. “Frankly, though, that worries me less than some other aspects of it. Imagery — especially bad imagery that has to be digitally enhanced as much as this did — is easy enough to fake. And there’s no telling who may have slipped file imagery of completely nonexistent Manticorans into Frontier Security’s databases for it to be compared to. I doubt Rajmund did it, because there’d be too much risk of that blowing up in his face if anyone starts fact-checking his reports. He’s been around the block way too many times to leave a trail of breadcrumbs that might lead back to him. But do either of us really think he’s the only mole someone like the Other Guys have in place? Assuming they exist, that is,” she added piously.
