Shadow of Victory

by David Weber

  Vice Admiral Oliver Diamato, who commanded Task Force 23, was probably even younger than Bellefeuille, but Michelle liked what she saw. His record was certainly solid—he’d survived at Hancock Station against no less an opponent than Alice Truman, as a junior officer on one of the first Peep battleships to ever encounter a Shrike-class LAC—and he exuded a calm competence officers twice his age might have envied.

  They sent me the Havenite first team, she thought. They’re solid, really solid, and they’ve more than doubled my platforms. The Mesans are going to suffer a very embarrassing sphincter failure when we come over the hyper wall with more than fifty wallers.

  She smiled inwardly, feeling in that moment very much like Nimitz must feel as he waited outside a chipmunk’s burrow. The only thing Second Fleet was short on was carriers, but even with the detachments she’d been forced to make, Tenth Fleet still had twelve of them, which would be more than adequate. And Augustus Khumalo had surpassed his own best estimate; the transports and freighters which had accompanied Tourville from Montana had just over 1.2 million troops—and their planetary combat equipment—embarked.

  “I don’t think I’d like to be CEO Ward in a few days’ time, Milady,” Tourville said from his side of the table. Clearly his thoughts had been following the same pattern as hers.

  “Somehow,” she said thoughtfully, “I can’t find it in my heart of hearts to feel too broken up over Mr. Ward’s tender sensibilities. I tried, you understand, but apparently I lack sufficient empathy.”

  Several people chuckled, and Tourville shook his head.

  “I understand there’s a lot of that going around where Mesans are involved these days,” he said. His tone was amused, but it carried a harsh undercurrent, and she nodded more soberly.

  “Yes, there is. And if I’m going to be honest, there’s a nasty, vindictive part of me that almost regrets the way you’ve reinforced us.”

  “I could see where you might want to make it an all-Manticore show, after Oyster Bay and the way they accused the Star Empire of ordering the Green Pines attack,” he said.

  “Oh, no, Admiral! You misunderstood me. I’m delighted to see you here, and I’d say that given how many people we’ve killed dancing to their piping over the years, we both have more than sufficient bones to pick with them. No, what I find myself regretting is that even a Mesan fleet commander’s going to be smart enough to strike her wedge in a heartbeat when she sees this much weight of metal coming at her.” She showed her teeth in a grin which would have done any treecat proud. “Like I said, it’s the nasty, vindictive part of me that regrets that. I’d been rather looking forward to…convincing Mr. Ward to see reason by blowing his entire damned fleet out of space.”

  * * *

  Captain Scott Akers paused with his coffee cup in midair as the admittance chime sounded. He glanced at the clock, but it was purely automatic. That chime had sounded at exactly the same time—give or take fifteen seconds—every day for the last six months.

  He smiled wryly and keyed the cabin door, then watched as Commander Gerald Ortega stepped through it.

  “Good morning, Sir,” he said…as he’d said every day for the last half T-year, and—

  “Morning, Gerald,” Akers replied…as he’d replied every day for the last half T-year. He truly liked his executive officer, and Ortega was one of the most reliable and conscientious officers he’d ever known, yet he sometimes suspected that one of the Ortega ancestors had managed to get molycircs inserted into his genome. There were people who were orderly, there were people who were precise, there were people who were meticulous, and then there was Ortega. When Akers had told him at the start of the commission that he liked to start the day with a brief meeting with his XO at around 8:30, he hadn’t realized what he was about to unleash.

  “Have a seat,” Akers continued, pointing at the unoccupied chair on the other side of the small table.

  “Thank you, Sir.” Ortega settled into the chair and laid his minicomp on the table where it would be handy. As always, Akers offered him a cup of coffee. And, as always, Ortega declined.

  “Anything particularly pressing we need to consider today?” the captain asked once that part of the ritual had been faithfully discharged.

  “Commander O’Simpson mentioned that the Admiral would like to convene an all-captains com conference this afternoon, Sir. I suggested sixteen hundred hours, if that would be convenient for you.”

  “The question, Gerald, is whether or not sixteen hundred would be convenient for Admiral Siminetti,” Akers pointed out gently. Ortega looked at him for a moment, then nodded. He actually seemed to blush a little.

  “Yes, Sir. In my defense, Commander O’Simpson asked me to recommend a time without indicating any preference on the Admiral’s part.”

  “I see,” Akers said gravely, sipping coffee to hide the smile he couldn’t quite totally suppress. “And in that case,” he continued, lowering the cup, “I suppose you can go ahead and tell Jasmine to set it up now.”

  “Of course, Sir.” Ortega made a note on his minicomp, although so far as Akers knew, no one had ever actually seen him need to consult one of his memos.

  “Anything else earthshaking we need to deal with?” the captain went on.

  “Not really, Sir. I understand that Commander Ushikov and Commander MacKelvey have discovered some issues with the extended range fire control on the new Technodyne missiles. They’ve scheduled a com conference at eleven hundred hours with Technodyne’s local Missile Division to discuss that. Hopefully, they’ll have something to report by the time Admiral Siminetti’s conference goes online.”

  Akers nodded. Charlotte MacKelvey was MSNS Vanguard’s tactical officer and Jacqueline Ushikov was Josephine Siminetti’s ops officer. If there was a problem with the new missiles, he could trust them to get to the bottom of it. And if there was one, they’d better do just that, he thought more grimly. Not that the capabilities of the new missiles were likely to help a great deal if the Manties came calling. Assuming the reports from Spindle and Manticore—and Saltash, for that matter—were remotely accurate, the RMN wouldn’t even work up a sweat dealing with the Mesa System Navy.

  Well, fair’s fair, he told himself. Our grand and glorious navy consists of eighty-five ships, none of them heavier than a battlecruiser. A single squadron of wallers—anybody’s wallers, not just the Manties’—could polish us off in an afternoon.

  Up until fairly recently, that thought wouldn’t have bothered Akers. The only people who had superdreadnoughts were the Manticorans and Havenites—who were half the galaxy away and busy killing each other—and the Solarian League, which was the Mesa System’s de facto protector. By the standards of the galaxy at large, the MSN was actually a very potent fighting force. It was simply Mesa’s misfortune that it wasn’t “the galaxy at large” it had to worry about.

  “Sit in on that conference yourself, Gerald,” he said. “Charlotte’s good about keeping me in the loop, but I want as many eyes as possible on this one. We need to hunt down any bugs and exterminate them ASAP.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Akers nodded again, this time in satisfaction. With Gerald Ortega plugged into the problem, he could be positive that anything he needed to know would be flagged to his attention. Which brought him to another point.

  “And what do we hear from groundside?” he asked in a considerably grimmer tone.

  “Nothing’s changed from yesterday, really, Sir” Ortega said. “According to the official channels, the Peaceforce is about to launch the final offensive into Neue Rostock.”

  His eyes met Akers’ across the table, and the captain snorted harshly.

  Of course the Peacies are “about to launch the final offensive.” According to Lackland’s talking heads at Culture and Information, they been about to do that since day one! Frigging idiots, the lot of them. What the fuck did they think they were doing?!

  In some ways, he really would have preferred to blame the nightmare situation in Mend
el on Gillian Drescher, but the truth was that she was probably the one person who wasn’t to blame! Not that he expected that to save her career in the fullness of time. Personally, the two he’d send to the wall were Selig and Howell. And he’d have McGillicuddy standing right between them when the firing squad took aim.

  On the one hand, he could actually sympathize with them, at least to some extent. He’d felt the same sense of helplessness as any other member of the Mesa System’s police and military forces as the Ballroom lunatics wreaked havoc on their homeworld. He’d also wondered what the hell the Ballroom thought it was doing. For all its gleeful bloodthirstiness where Manpower was concerned, Ballroom operations had always—always—sought to minimize civilian collateral damage. Not because they loved Mesan civilians, but because however hard Culture and Information sought to portray them as maniacs, they were actually about as rational as any terrorist ever came.

  Of course, that was a pretty low bar, Akers admitted, but they’d always seemed to realize that massacring civilians in job lots would cost them even the limited amount of acceptance they’d achieved. Not only that, he was pretty sure—or he had been, until lately—that they were smart enough to realize what sort of reprisals the Mesan security forces would take against the seccy communities if they thought for an instant anyone on the planet was complicit in nuclear attacks on civilian targets.

  Hell, the Ballroom must’ve realized people like McGillicuddy would turn the Safeties and Misties loose on the seccies to make examples. And I’m sure Snyder was cheering them on the whole way. That bitch…

  He made himself draw a deep breath and sipped more coffee. There was no point dwelling on Regan Snyder, however much he would have liked to invite Manpower’s representative to the General Board for a short spacewalk. The same sort of spacewalk manpower’s captains had arranged for so many slaves over the years. Scott Akers was no bleeding heart, and the institution of genetic slavery per se hadn’t cost him very much sleep over the years. But the brutality of it, the way Manpower practiced and promoted it…that bothered him. It bothered him a lot, and not just because he could see the way that brutalizing the slaves coarsened and brutalized the people responsible for keeping them in line, as well. That did worry him, but even leaving that aside, Mesa’s support for Manpower—the fact that the system government didn’t simply tolerate Manpower’s presence but was largely controlled by Manpower and its close allies—was enough to turn the entire star system into a pariah, and deservedly so, and that pariah status had coldly pragmatic, potentially deadly consequences.

  Thanks to Manpower, Frontier Security and the SLN would need one hell of a fig leaf to justify intervention on Mesa’s behalf to the Solly public at large, even under the best conceivable circumstances. Normally, that might not have mattered a great deal. Most of the time, the bureaucrats who actually ran the League didn’t give much more of a damn about public opinion than their transstellar patrons did. But that had been when everyone knew the Solarian League Navy was the most powerful fleet in space and that any reverses it might suffer would be both brief and quickly repaired. Given what had happened to it at places like Spindle and Manticore, it wasn’t too surprising the Solarian public was beginning to question the SLN’s invincibility. OFS’ actions and policies—and the use of naval units to support them—were actually beginning to be openly questioned in the public forums, where negative opinion was growing steadily stronger. And that meant it would be a cold day in hell before a Solarian Battle Fleet task force came sailing over the hyper wall to rescue Mesa from the Manties.

  And now this shit. He took another swallow of coffee. His eyes bitter. God only knew how many thousands of people—full citizens, seccies, and even slaves—the tsunami of nuclear attacks had killed. Scott Akers certainly didn’t know, and neither Culture and Information nor his own uniformed superiors were telling him, either. Which probably meant they’d killed a lot of thousands. And however many they’d killed, the Misties had racked up at least twenty or thirty thousand of their own counting “just” dead seccies when that idiot Howell called in a megaton-range KEW in the middle of Mendel to avenge the troopers he’d managed to get ambushed and massacred inside Hancock Tower. Culture and Information could try to pass that off as yet another “Ballroom terrorist event” if it wanted to, but nobody over the age of three was going to believe it.

  Well, that’s not really true, Scott, and you know it, he told himself. There really are people out there who are either stupid enough—or desperate enough—to take Lackland’s word for it. What’s that old saying about a sucker being born every minute? But there’s no way that any—and I mean any—Navy or Peaceforce officer could look at that hole and think it was anything but a kinetic strike. And the Ballroom might have been able to smuggle in or cobble up nuclear devices, but no way in hell could it de-orbit an atmospheric penetrator to hit a seccy tower with that kind of precision.

  He set the coffee cup down, cradling it between his hands and gazing down into the murky dregs, as that thought went through him. Because, however little he wanted to admit it even to himself, the authorities’ claim that the Ballroom was behind the Hancock Tower strike made him wonder if the Ballroom had truly been behind any of the recent wave of attacks. He couldn’t for the life of him think of anyone else who might have wanted to wreak havoc on that sort of scale, but the argument that the Ballroom had managed to smuggle that many nuclear devices through Mesan security strained his credulity well past the breaking point. And the notion that having smuggled them through they would hit targets which could have been specifically designed to provoke exactly what had happened to Hancock—and what was in the process of happening to Neue Rostock—was even more impossible for him to swallow. In fact, the only thing harder for him to believe was the argument that the Star Empire of Manticore had engineered and supported the strikes as retaliation for the attack on their own home system.

  He knew damned well that the Manties’ allegations of Mesan involvement were ludicrous, because as the flag captain of Task Force One, he knew exactly what the MSN could and couldn’t do. But even if the Manties believed every word of their insane accusations, they didn’t need any terrorists planting bombs on the surface of the planet. If they wanted Mesa trashed, all they needed to do was to send a couple of squadrons of their damned podnoughts to handle the job. It would be more effective, more efficient, and—above all—it wouldn’t make them moral lepers the way supporting mass-casualty terrorist attacks would.

  I suppose it really is possible the Ballroom could be sufficiently ruthless to have launched a campaign like this to provoke exactly what’s happening now, he thought bitterly. I don’t believe it, but I guess it’s possible. And it doesn’t really matter who did it, or why, because the consequences are going to be the same either way. And there’s not one damned thing I can do about it.

  He didn’t doubt Drescher would take Neue Rostock in the end, but according to the rumors he’d heard, she’d already lost somewhere between a quarter and a third of the entire Peaceforce fighting her way into that hulking, labyrinthine mountain of ceramacrete. Frankly, he was surprised her casualties had been that low! But what mattered was that after the Hancock Tower strike, and after what was about to happen to Neue Rostock’s defenders, Mesa’s seccies—and slaves—could have no illusions about what would happen to them if something set Public Safety off again. And—far worse, in oh, so many ways—they’d had proof the Safeties and Misties weren’t invincible. That they could be beaten. That they could be killed. That knowledge, that awareness, was loose in the seccy and slave communities now, and it was far easier to kill a person than it was to kill an idea.

  After spending all these centuries making our own bed, our own frigging security people had to go and kick in the door, he thought despairingly. And the hell of it is, I absolutely understand why the seccies and the slaves are going to burn the planet down around our ears. I’ll fight them every step of the way, because I won’t have a choice, but if I were them?
I’d do exactly the same damned thing.

  He sighed and shook himself.

  Well, that’s one way to start the day off in a fog of despair, Scott, he told himself tartly. Any other gloomy thoughts you want to think? Morning’s still young, after all!

  “I’m sure General Drescher will retake Neue Rostock…eventually,” he said out loud, looking back up to meet Ortega’s gaze again. “Is there anything else interesting going on?”

  “Well,” Ortega actually smiled, “you know that Solarian newsy—O’Hanrahan?”

  He raised his eyebrows, and Akers nodded. He did, indeed, know Audrey O’Hanrahan, or her work, at least. In fact, his wife was one of O’Hanrahan’s avid followers, although the Solarian newsy’s postings were usually at least a couple of months old by the time they got to Mesa. And Akers had to admit O’Hanrahan’s reputation for dragging all sorts of dark and squirmy things out into the pitiless light of day appeared to be well deserved. It was remarkable to him, in many ways, that she’d lasted so long without someone’s arranging a fatal accident for her, and she hadn’t made any new friends in Mesa over the last few weeks.

  “What about her?” he asked.

  “Well, apparently her mic was live during a brief conversation she had with the public relations idiot assigned to play local guide.”

  “Oh, crap,” Akers said, but his own lips twitched unwillingly. “You mean—?”

  “Yes, Sir. He was busy spinning her the official line, and she damned well eviscerated him. It was pitiful, like fighting a duel with an unarmed man.” The XO shook his head, eyes gleaming with atypical humor. “It’s obvious she didn’t know it was going on the chip any more than he did, and I genuinely think she’s not the one who leaked it afterward, but it was pretty devastating. Among other things, she told him she’d covered lots of ‘police actions’ in her time, and she knew when the troops were out of control. And”—the humor disappeared, and Ortega’s face tightened—“when the troops weren’t out of control. When they were doing exactly what they’d been told to do.”