"What I hope we can do," he said, "is put a big fleet in Old Earth's sky before they know we're coming, leaving them no choice but to surrender. When that's taken care of, we can handle the Exotics and the Dorsai at our leisure." His smile this time was a little sad. "I may be indulging in fantasy."
"You're giving up on using the political approach to Old Earth?"
"It may have some value as an adjunct to military moves," he said, "but I can't stake my mission on it."
"Pre-emption would certainly save a lot of lives," she said.
"It would also keep Old Earth's assets and resources whole," he said. "That'll be important when we move there and cut off contact with the Younger Worlds—but Hal Mayne will have something to say about it, too, unless I can show him there's no hope for his side."
He stopped, seeing that Toni's attention had shifted inward. Messages from the staff were relayed to her ears by bone conduction from her wristpad, and she sometimes appeared distracted as she listened to a report.
"The Marshal's on his way up," she said.
Bleys rose, heading for the door.
"No," Toni said. "I know you're eager to get started, but you should follow protocol—you're still the First Elder, and he should come to you."
"I know, I know," Bleys said. "Sometimes the rules—well, anyway, what do you suggest? I want to see him quickly."
"Go into the room beyond the conference room," she said. "I'll meet him and bring his party there, and you can come in right after they sit down . . . you fret too much; having to wait for superiors is part of their lives, and they'll feel more comfortable if you don't blur the lines of authority they've always lived by."
"All right," Bleys said. "I'll come in from the far door as soon as he arrives, then—he's a good man and I don't want to make him wait."
"You don't want to make yourself wait, either," she said. He left.
The Marshal, a middle-aged man in the black uniform of the Friendly Worlds' professional military force, was still on his feet when Bleys entered the conference room. Beside him, Toni silently raised an eyebrow as she traded glances with Bleys.
"Marshal, it's good to see you again," Bleys said. "I thought you were bringing some of your staff?"
"They're waiting outside," the Marshal said. He looked tired, Bleys thought; his normally round, calm face seemed to be lined and pale.
"I have something I wanted to report to the First Elder in private," the Marshal went on, not looking at Toni.
"Proceed, please," Bleys said, looking directly into the Marshal's pale blue eyes.
"It shames me," the Marshal said, "but I must report that our security has been breached."
"Details, please, Marshal," Bleys said. The officer reached into a small pocket below the waistline of his uniform tunic, to pull out a small case. He handed it to Bleys.
"Details are on this chip," he said. "Shall I summarize?"
"Please."
"It appears that a small, fast vessel managed to enter New Earth's space without being observed," the Marshal said. "I have to report we didn't notice it until it left—which it did by shifting out while still in atmosphere. We were unable to stop it."
"Shifting in the atmosphere?" Bleys said. "That suggests a Dorsai vessel, does it not?"
"I think so, First Elder." The Marshal's face displayed pain.
"Have you any idea what it was doing here?"
"Analyses of the sensors at four training facilities, the Colon shipyard, and seven armament manufactories have revealed anomalous readings," the Marshal said. "Our technician-analysts say the readings are the sort of traces one might get if someone were using personal suppressor fields while infiltrating the facilities."
"So someone came in," Bleys said. "And presumably out. To look? Was there any sabotage?"
"None."
"What's the time frame?"
"The twelve incursions occurred over a sixteen-day period," the Marshal said. "We're still checking the sensor logs from other installations."
"What's your personal reading on this, Marshal?" Bleys asked. The skin around the older man's eyes relaxed a little, and his face regained its normal calmness.
"An intelligence mission, First Elder," he said. "I agree," Bleys said, nodding. The room was quiet for a moment, as Bleys thought. Then he nodded. "Thank you, Marshal," he said.
"I wish to apologize, First Elder—" the Marshal began; but Bleys cut him off.
"Accepted, Marshal," he said. "I'm sure your people will be more alert in the future." "You may count on it."
"I'll review your data later," Bleys continued, handing the chip to Toni. "For the moment, shall we proceed with more routine matters?"
The Marshal agreed, and turned as if about to summon his staff from outside.
"Make it a priority to keep me informed of any further developments," Bleys added. "Let me know immediately about any developments, even if I'm off-planet."
"I'll have courier ships standing by at all times," the Marshal said.
"I have an idea," Bleys said, "that may allow faster communications between us."
"First Elder?"
"We'll go through the details when your staff are here," Bleys said. "The basic idea is to set up a line of ships—a sort of chain— that will maintain station at points between New Earth and Association, each with a pre-calculated shift already set up to take it to the position of the next vessel in the chain."
"I believe I see," the Marshal said, his face interested. "Each ship can jump and pass its message to the ship waiting at its arrival point—which can then jump as soon as it gets the message." He paused, thinking. "It could get a report from me to you in a day or less.
"Yes," Bleys said. "It'll take a lot of ships and men, but if it works it'll be worth setting up similar chains between all the worlds."
"This could revolutionize everything," the Marshal said. He was smiling, clearly beyond his earlier embarrassment.
"Shall we bring your staff in, then?"
The Marshal turned, but Toni was already moving to the door.
After the Marshal left, Bleys and Toni returned to the lounge, where Bleys activated a security bubble. Toni watched the bubble expand about them without commenting.
"We'll have to try to use the bubble more," Bleys said. "I should have expected an intelligence-gathering effort."
"You're pretty sure it's the Dorsai, aren't you?" Toni said. "You wanted to know what they were up to, and this may be it."
"Only part of it," Bleys said thoughtfully. "I wonder..." His words trailed off into silence.
"What?" she said at last.
"There's no way to tell," he said, "but I can't help wondering if Hal Mayne might be out there."
"Mayne himself?" she said. "That doesn't seem likely, does it? He's not a Dorsai and doesn't have either the espionage experience or the ship-handling skills the Marshal described—and besides, it's a dangerous job; would he risk his loss to his side, that way?"
"He's not averse to risk if the reward is there," Bleys said. "He's important to his side, yes, but I'm sure he believes it can and will continue without him. And you're forgetting he's allied with the Dorsai—he doesn't have to be the one doing the driving."
"That's true," she said.
"Forget that for the moment," Bleys said. "We need to get alarms off right away to all our people, warning them to expect similar espionage; so while I draft the messages, would you please line up ships to carry them?"
"I already started that while we were in the meeting," she said. "I'll get back on that right now."
"One more thing," he said: "we need to send a message to Old Earth, too—to Dahno. If you're willing, I'd like it to be a note directly from you."
"Are you asking me to be an intermediary?"
"Yes," Bleys said. "He's always respected you; I'm hoping he'll be open enough to you to enter into regular contact."
"What do you want me to say?"
"Let me explain the situation as I see it, and
then you decide how you'd approach it," Bleys said. "Whether Mayne himself is out there, or not, we're not going to be able to prevent the information that we're mobilizing from getting back to the Final Encyclopedia. That might just tip Old Earth against us. So I'd like you to find a way to tell Dahno that war is now inevitable, and he has to decide which side he's on."
"You'll have to have a meeting, won't you?" "I'd prefer the idea come from him."
"Maybe I can plant the idea somehow," she said. "But then he'll have to get back to us about it, won't he?"
"Yes," Bleys said, "and probably more than once; he won't come around to this all at once. What I'm going to suggest is that you go to Cassida—it's the closest of the Younger Worlds to Old Earth— and stay available to negotiate with him, using as many back-and-forth ships as it takes, until he comes around."
"Where will you be?"
"Out on the other Worlds again," he said. "There's still work to be done, and I want to check in on how each of our groups reacts to that intelligence ship—I can't let the mention of Dorsai affect their thinking."
"Where do you want to meet Dahno?"
"He'll understand I won't be willing to come to Old Earth," Bleys said, "and he'll fall into a comfortable pattern of trying to find a compromise."
"He won't be willing to come back to the Younger Worlds," she said.
"That's right," he said. "Mars might be a compromise he could accept."
"Won't he be suspicious if I suggest that?"
"That's why you won't suggest it. When he brings up the idea of a meeting, you veto Old Earth and suggest Holmstead." "On Venus?"
"Yes," Bleys said. "No one in their right mind wants to spend time there, so it's sparsely populated; he'll believe I'm interested in it as a place we can be relatively unobserved."
"He won't want to go there, and will offer an alternative location."
"I think so," Bleys said. "In fact, I'd guess he'll suggest Luna— Old Earth's moon—which of course I'll refuse; and so we'll settle on Mars." He smiled a little.
"That brings up another thing we need to do," he said. "By the time you start negotiating about a location for a meeting, he'll already have decided where he wants to go, and he'll be sending people in ahead of time to set up his security. We need to do the same, and if we move soon, we'll be there first."
"We need to speak with Henry, then," Toni said.
"Yes," Bleys said. "In fact, I think I want him to lead this group personally."
"Will he be willing to be so far away from you?" "I think I can bring him around," Bleys said. "Particularly when I point out he'd be ensuring my safety."
"I believe I understand," Henry said. The three of them were huddled within the security bubble again, and Bleys had laid out the security problems a meeting with Dahno on Mars would entail.
"I suggest you take only Soldiers who are new to our service since Dahno left," Bleys said. "He won't recognize them if he happens to see them."
"While true," Henry said, "I don't think that's a good idea."
"Oh?"
"Will he not find it suspicious if he arrives and sees no Soldiers?" Henry asked. He shook his head. "It might well scare him away. I'll take some Soldiers he'll know, along with some he won't know. The ones he knows can be out in the open, while the others will remain in the deeper background."
"Do you have people among the new Soldiers who can be trusted with a mission like this?"
"With time to prepare them, yes," Henry said. "On the whole the newer Soldiers tend to be younger and less experienced, and often have the attitude problems of youth, but we weed out those who don't respect their elders. We can do much if we get them to Mars enough ahead of time to settle them into their surroundings and their tasks—and I'll be there, of course."
"But Dahno would recognize you, too," Toni pointed out.
"Of course he will," Henry said. "But he won't think of me as an assassin; my presence will be reassuring to him, which will facilitate your discussions."
"That's a very good point, Uncle," Bleys said.
"Do we know where we should be set up, on Mars?" Henry asked. "We can't bring enough people to have you covered on an entire planet."
"You won't need to," Bleys said. "Dahno won't be willing to go far from his ship, so we can concentrate on areas in the close vicinity of landing pads."
"To cut down on the risk of an ambush," Toni said, "he'll want a place with a lot of people around."
"How many Soldiers can you spare for this duty, Uncle?" Bleys asked.
"I'll want to leave some covering you," Henry said. "Probably under Carl's command. I think I can do that comfortably and still bring about sixty to Mars."
"All right," Bleys said. "That would allow you to spread your people out and get them in place in anywhere from six to ten ports— shall we pick the eleven largest pads and then eliminate the largest one, simply because it's too obvious?"
"That widens the chance that Dahno will pick a place we already have people in," Toni said.
"And one he'll have people in, too," Bleys said.
CHAPTER 41
Centuries after it had become the first planet to undergo a terraforming process, Mars was still not a place most people found comfortable. The planet's small size and distance from its star meant it would always remain colder and darker than any of the worlds that had been terraformed under other stars. The dreariness of the cold darkness was emphasized, for Martians, by the sight, in their night sky, of the light that was their nearest neighbor and the place for which their bodies were best suited, Old Earth.
It was Bleys' first trip to this planet; and now he sat at his desk in Favored of God's lounge, watching a wide-angle view of the Martian twilight as it crept across the pad just outside Mirage. He had never had any reason to make the tedious trip to this out-of-the-way planet—more inaccessible than ever, right now, since Mars was on the opposite side of its star from Old Earth.
Most of humankind felt much the same way.
Mars had loomed large in human imaginations in the days when travel there was impossible; its light was bright in the only night sky mankind had. That time had vanished the day Mars became a place no longer out of reach.
Bleys had read samples of some of the speculations people had written about Mars during that long pre-space flight time. It was no surprise that most of them had been wildly implausible; what surprised him was the amazing variety of dreams human imaginations had been able to craft out of virtually nothing—he continued to find himself disappointed at the human ability to ignore facts in favor of something, anything, that could make one feel good.
He had also been surprised the first time he ran across a reference to Mars as the "Red Planet." The rocks and dust that lent the planet that descriptive name were now largely out of sight, the dust bound by ground cover and the rocks nestling under scraggly variform evergreen bushes and trees.
Still, as he looked across the landing pad he could see occasional eddies of orange dust, that had somehow escaped the clutches of the binding vegetation, swirling in the cold wind of dusk.
A portion of the front facade of the port that serviced Mirage protruded into the left edge of his screen; he could have panned the view to take in more of those buildings, but he had no desire to do so. He preferred to watch the open space where Dahno's ship would soon be landing.
That ship had been waiting in Mars orbit when Favored arrived, something Bleys had insisted on, and once the brothers made contact they had negotiated their way to an agreement to land on this small pad and find a way to have their discussion—a negotiation Bleys suspected succeeded only because both sides had people already in place.
Henry, who had been waiting in Barsoom for the decision on where the meeting would take place, made it to Mirage before Favored touched down. Calling from the port, he had strongly suggested Bleys leave the ship immediately and move into the spaceport buildings, or even into the town. Dahno, Henry pointed out, arriving last and coming down fr
om space, would have an easy shot at destroying Favored of God from above, if he so chose—no one was going to assume that Dahno's ship was unarmed.
"How could he do something like that and hope to get away with it?" Bleys replied. "This is Old Earth's space, and he couldn't hope to go back to that planet without it being known, well before he got there, what he had done."
"There are ways," Toni said; speaking for the first time since their arrival on the surface; she had been somber throughout the trip, but Bleys had no idea what had brought that mood on.
On the screen, Henry nodded. "He could be sending some third ship down," he suggested. "He couldn't be blamed for what happens down here if he's still in orbit at the time."
"That might explain why he's taken so long to follow us down," Toni added.
"I suppose so," Bleys said. "But remember, Dahno is cautious above all else. I can tell you with absolute certainty that when he thought about doing something like that—and I'm sure he thought about it—he also realized I'd be unlikely to remain in Favored waiting for him ... in fact, it's probably the last place he expects me to be, just now. So it's the safest possible place for me."
Antagonist - Childe Cycle 11 Page 40