by David Weber
“If their intent was solely to prevent the annexation, yes,” White Haven replied. “Unfortunately, we don’t think that was the only thing they had in mind. And neither, if you’ll forgive my saying so, do you, judging from your reports.”
“I wouldn’t say it was so much that I don’t think that was the only thing they had in mind, My Lord.” Terekhov shook his head. “It’s more a matter of instinct—more a feeling than any kind of reasoned conclusion. But, no. I don’t think we’ve seen the last of whoever it was, either.”
“Well, whether we’re all right about that or not,” Caparelli said, “there’s still that little eight-hundred-kilo hexapuma known as the Solarian League in the mix. Between the three of you, you, Admiral Khumalo, and Amanda Corvisart have handed OFS and the League their first real diplomatic black eye—the first one that really counts and can’t just be swept under the carpet—in decades. All three of the admirals in this room fully supported Her Majesty’s decision to approve your actions in Monica. That was incredibly well done in a very difficult position, and all of us know how easy it would’ve been for you to punt it back up the line and let some senior and better paid officer make the hard choices.”
Terekhov felt his cheeks warm, but he looked back at the First Space Lord steadily, and Caparelli continued in the same level tone.
“You and your people did exactly the right thing, but Frontier Security isn’t going to forgive and forget anytime soon, and it’s a virtual certainty that the SLN’s going to beef up its presence in Talbott’s vicinity. I’d like to think even Sollies are smart enough not to push things at this point, but experience suggests otherwise. In fact, it’s a lot more likely some Solly officer will decide to push back hard to restore Solarian prestige in the Verge.”
Terekhov nodded slowly. Given the fact that Monica had been a long-standing Solarian ally—not to mention a fertile source of mercenaries to break other people’s legs for Frontier Security—Caparelli was almost certainly correct. And if Manpower and whoever else had been involved in the attempt to kill the annexation decided to give the fire another kick or two…
“At the moment, it looks like the situation with the Peeps is in fairly good shape,” White Haven took up the thread of conversation again. His deep voice was as calm as ever, yet Terekhov had an odd feeling that he was less happy about the Peeps than he wanted to sound. Which was odd, given Eighth Fleet’s crushing victory at the Battle of Lovat…which had, after all, been won by his own wife.
“I’m sure we all would’ve preferred for President Pritchart’s offer of negotiations to have been made in good faith,” the First Lord continued. “It’s unfortunate that that doesn’t seem to be what happened, but I’m pretty sure Lovat has to’ve set them back on their heels. On the other hand—and this is classified, Captain—we don’t yet have the new missile control systems as broadly deployed as we’d like. There’s still a window of vulnerability, and we can’t divert large numbers of wallers to Talbott as a show of force until it closes. We will be strengthening Tenth Fleet, and as soon as the situation vis-à-vis the Peeps permits, additional ships of the wall will be added to that list, but we simply can’t do that yet.
“Because we can’t, we’ll be relying on lighter combatants, instead, and ONI’s analysis—backed up in no small part by our examination of the hardware you captured intact at Monica—suggests those lighter combatants have an even bigger edge on any SLN units, especially with the new Mark Sixteen warheads, than we’ve ever been willing to assume. In other words, our more modern cruisers and destroyers should be able to hold their own against about anything the Sollies have below the wall. The problem is that the Sollies may not realize that.”
“The problem,” Caparelli amplified bluntly, “is that the Sollies damned well wouldn’t admit that even if they did.”
“Probably not,” White Haven conceded. “And that, Captain, is the real reason we’ve sent Admiral Henke off to command Tenth Fleet for Admiral Khumalo. Well, that and the fact that she gave her parole when Pritchart sent her home. We can’t deploy her against the Peeps until she’s released from that parole, which happens to make her available someplace we need her even worse.”
Terekhov nodded. He hadn’t learned about Michelle Henke’s survival until his return from Talbott, but from what he knew of her, she’d been an excellent choice for the senior fleet commander on Talbott Station. Much as he’d come to like and even admire Augustus Khumalo, he simply lacked the combat experience—and possibly what people still called the “fire in the belly”—Henke would bring to the job. She’d free Khumalo for the vital administrative duties of a station commander, which was where his true strengths lay, anyway.
The only thing that concerned him was her reputation for aggressiveness—the possibility that she might actually have too much fire in her belly. He supposed an unbiased soul might have made the same observation about him with a fair degree of accuracy, but Henke had made her name in cruisers and battlecruisers. From all accounts, she had a battlecruiser mentality, and from other accounts, she also had an ample share of the famed Winton temper. She was unlikely to tread lightly on any Solarian toes that got in her way, and the fact that she was the Queen’s first cousin—and fifth in the succession, should anything happen to Elizabeth—could make any toe-stamping she did especially painful. Or especially…politically fraught, at least.
“What we have in mind is to send you back to Talbott.” White Haven’s expression was as unflinching as his tone. “It’s not fair. If anybody deserves time at home, it’s you. Unfortunately, sometimes Her Majesty’s Navy can’t afford to worry about ‘fair,’ and you’re an especially valuable resource at this moment for several reasons. First, because you’re a proven combat commander who’s demonstrated he’s willing to act on his own initiative. Second, because at this moment I very much doubt there’s anyone in Manticoran uniform with a more formidable reputation in Solarian eyes. In that sense, we’re sending you back out to be Admiral Henke’s big stick, if it turns out she needs one. In addition to that, your Foreign Office background’s going to be at least as valuable to her as it was to Admiral Khumalo. And, finally, it’s clear from our correspondence with Prime Minister Alquezar and Baroness Medusa that no one has a better reputation—or better personal contacts—in the Quadrant than you do.” He shook his head, his expression regretful. “The truth is, we can’t afford to leave you on the beach, however much you might deserve it.”
“I understand what you’re saying, My Lord.” Terekhov tried very hard not to sound like a man looking for an argument to convince his superiors not to send him. “But Hexapuma still hasn’t been assigned a repair berth. And even after we get her docked and formally slotted into the queue, she’s going to be in yard hands for months. Probably longer.”
“Yes, she is, Captain.” Terekhov’s heart fell at the sympathy in Caparelli’s voice. “That’s why we’re going to give her to Commander FitzGerald—along with his overdue promotion to captain.”
Terekhov’s felt his jaw tighten. It wasn’t a surprise, not really. From the moment they’d told him they were sending him back out, he’d known they wouldn’t be sending him in Hexapuma. And if he had to lose her, she couldn’t possibly be in better hands than Ansten’s. He knew that. And it didn’t make it hurt one bit less.
“And I’m afraid that’s not the worst of it, Captain,” White Haven said quietly, and nodded to Admiral Cortez. Terekhov looked at him, and the Fifth Space Lord touched a key at his station. A holo appeared above the table—the holo of another Saganami-C-class heavy cruiser, sister to his own Hexapuma.
“HMS Quentin Saint-James,” Cortez said. “She’s the flagship of a new heavy cruiser squadron—the Ninety-Fourth—we’ve just stood up.”
Terekhov nodded. Deep inside, a familiar sense of challenge warred with his grief at leaving Hexapuma behind. There was always that edge of excitement when it came time to assume a new command and turn it into a perfectly tempered weapon. It would take months, but
the sheer satisfaction would—
But then his thoughts broke off as Cortez continued.
“The bad news, Captain, is that CruRon Ninety-Four leaves for Talbott tomorrow.”
Terekhov stopped nodding and stared at him in shock. Tomorrow? He’d only gotten back from Talbott less than forty hours ago! How could he go home and tell Sinead he was leaving again tomorrow? Besides, he’d already taken command of Hexapuma on virtually no notice. Now they wanted him to take command of a brand-new heavy cruiser without even one full day’s warning?!
“I know it seems insane,” Cortez said, “but I’m afraid the decision to redeploy you—and the need to get CruRon Ninety-Four out to Tenth Fleet absolutely ASAP—doesn’t leave us much choice.”
“Sir, I understand what you’re saying,” Terekhov said again, after a long, ringing fifteen seconds of silence. “I think I do, anyway. But completely aside from the issue of leaving my wife again so quickly, I’m afraid I don’t see any way I could assume command of an entirely new crew on such short notice! If nothing else, it would be totally unfair to them! We managed to get Hexapuma worked up to an acceptable standard on the voyage to Spindle, but we’d had at least a little time to shake down as a crew before we deployed. But less than one day?” He shook his head and looked at all three of the other men seated around the table. “With all due respect, My Lords, I don’t see any way—”
“Excuse me, Captain Terekhov,” Cortez interrupted. “I wasn’t quite done.”
Terekhov shut his mouth, and Cortez grimaced.
“First, you won’t have to work up in Quentin Saint-James. Second, you won’t be her CO; Captain Frederick Carlson’s been with her for the last six months, supervising her completion and working her up. I think you’ll be impressed with how well he’s done that. In fact, every unit of the squadron’s had at least two months’ workup time, although they hadn’t combined as a squadron at the time. In fact, Marconi Williams and Slipstream only joined a week ago.”
Terekhov’s expression was puzzled, and Cortez’s grimace turned into a rueful half-amused and half-apologetic smile.
“We’re not giving you Quentin Saint-James, Captain Terekhov. Or not as your command, anyway. We’re giving you the entire squadron, Commodore Terekhov.”
AUGUST 1921 POST DIASPORA
“If there happened to be a single word of truth in these ‘assumptions’ of yours—which there isn’t, of course—you’d probably be a dead man sometime in the next, oh, thirty seconds.”
—First Sergeant Vincent Frugoni,
Solarian League Marine Corps (retired)
Chapter Fifteen
“Mr. Harahap is here, Ma’am.”
The totally unnecessary—but highly decorative—receptionist stood aside, holding the archaic wooden door open as Damien Harahap stepped past him.
It was odd, Harahap reflected. Isabel Bardasano could have been a poster child for the Mesan “young lodges,” the members of the Mesan corporate hierarchy who disdained the older tradition of blending into the “legitimate” Solarian business community. The ones who chose to flaunt their outlaw status, effectively giving the entire civilized galaxy the finger and daring it to do one damned thing about them. By and large, the members of the young lodges tended to be on the bleeding edge of every contemporary luxury, fashion, and fad, and judging from Bardasano’s spectacular tattoos and body piercings, one would have guessed she shared that bent.
Instead, she chose to surround herself with deliberate archaisms. The office in which she’d initially interviewed him was part of her “public face” at Jessyk. This was her actual office, the space from which she did her real work instead of simply maintaining her cover with the Jessyk Combine, and it was very different from that other office. The unpowered doors, the human receptionist, the old-fashioned hardcopy books lining the shelves in her office…It was almost as if they were a refuge, a place she could withdraw to, away from the reality of who she was and what she did on a daily basis.
The music playing in the background was another example of that. He didn’t recognize the artist or the melody, but he suspected it might actually be a Pre-Diaspora recording which had survived all those centuries.
“Come in,” she said crisply. “Sit.”
He obeyed the command, taking a chair which, he noted, came equipped with the same sorts of sensors as the one he’d occupied for his first interview with her here on Mesa. Well, that was fine with him. As far as he knew, there wasn’t anything he needed to hide this time around.
Of course, he could be wrong about that.
“Coffee?” she asked. “Something stronger?”
“Coffee would be fine,” he replied, and she nodded to the receptionist.
“See to it, Samuel.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
The receptionist disappeared and Bardasano tipped back in the huge chair behind her desk as she regarded the ex-gendarme thoughtfully.
“I could wish the rest of my people had your gift for concision,” she said after a moment, stretching out one arm to tap the memo board lying on her blotter. Like many executives of Harahap’s acquaintance, especially those in the covert operations community, she preferred a handheld to a desk display.
“Your reports and analyses are well organized and quite thorough,” she continued. “There’s even some actual humor tucked away in them, but you still get the basis for your reasoning across quite clearly, and you even manage to get it done without a lot of excess word count. That’s especially welcome around here, to be honest. Some of my other analysts obviously think we’re paying them by the word! And you don’t hesitate to offer firm conclusions, either, even when that might involve going out on a limb. Impressive.”
She nodded slowly to herself, and Harahap allowed himself to nod back. She started to say something else, then paused as the receptionist reappeared with a silver tray holding an empty coffee cup, a large—very large; it had to hold at least two liters—self-heating carafe, and cream and old-fashioned sugar. He set it silently and efficiently at Harahap’s elbow, then vanished once again, closing the door behind him.
“Samuel is sometimes a bit OCD,” Bardasano observed, smiling as Harahap lifted the lid on the carafe and sniffed the aromatic steam, then poured into his cup. “On the other hand, he has a fairly good sense of how long my meetings are likely to run. Better than I do, sometimes. Judging by the size of that carafe, I’d say he expects you to be here a while.”
“I don’t have anything else scheduled for the day,” Harahap replied, pouring cream and spooning sugar. He sat back in the sensor-equipped chair, legs crossed, and regarded her calmly across the cup.
“That’s good, because there are a couple of those potential out-on-a-limb conclusions of yours we probably need to consider pretty carefully. But before we get to that, I’ve come into possession of a tidbit you might find interesting.”
Harahap raised his eyebrows in polite, silent interrogation, and she smiled. That smile held an edge he couldn’t quite identify, but whatever it was twanged the instincts which had made him so effective in the field for so long.
“Our sources in the Talbott Quadrant have been…pruned back rather drastically,” she told him. “On the other hand, as I’m sure you’ve concluded from the nature and content of the briefing materials we provided you with there, we have a lot of sources. I mention this because one of those sources is inside the Manties’ Foreign Office, and his latest infodump makes interesting reading. Among other things, it gives us a better picture of who the hell Aivars Terekhov is than we had before. It’s pretty impressive reading in that respect. But what you might find interesting is the fact that it was the activities of someone called ‘Firebrand’ that flipped Stephen Westman from our side of the equation into the support column for the annexation.”
She paused, and silence filled the office, broken only by the background murmur of the music. She simply sat there, watching him out of those odd silver-irised eyes, her expression completely unreadabl
e even by Harahap. It was obvious she was waiting for a response from him, and he sipped coffee for a moment, then lowered the cup.
“May I ask exactly how that came about?”
“That’s hard to say for certain,” she replied. “Off the top of my head, it looks like you got too fancy and offended his principles.”
Harahap frowned, running back through his conversations with Westman. The Montanan was as stubborn and bullheaded as a human being came, but he definitely had principles. He didn’t bother to think his way through them and all of their implications, sometimes, but he had them—in spades. So it was entirely possible Harahap had offended them in some way, although he couldn’t think of anything. Except…
“Would that have had anything to do with Agnes Nordbrandt?” he asked after a moment, and Bardasano’s eyes narrowed with what might have been a trace of approval.
“I’d say that was a pretty good guess,” she said. “Our source wasn’t able to send us the actual report, only a summary of a general background briefing written from memory. But it does appear you got a bit too fancy by implying your approval for Nordbrandt’s methods to someone like Westman. It seems Mr. Westman had no desire to find himself lumped in with her activities.”
“I could see that,” Harahap acknowledged in a dispassionate tone. “Westman saw himself as some kind of patriotic Robin Hood, and he’s a lot smarter than Nordbrandt. He didn’t have the mindset for terror tactics, but that was at least partly because he recognized how ultimately counterproductive they were, especially on a planet like Montana. Unfortunately, Nordbrandt saw things rather differently, and partly because of the communications lag, I didn’t realize just how far into the terrorist camp she was prepared to go.” He shrugged slightly. “If I wanted to convince him I was a serious player, a coordinator for a sector-wide ‘resistance movement,’ I had to at least drop names with him, and she’d made quite a reputation for her opposition—her legal opposition—to the annexation before she went underground. I have to say I wouldn’t be surprised if he experienced some pretty serious qualms when she went off the rails into mass-casualty operations. If I’d realized she was going to do that, I would’ve tailored my approach to him differently.”