Torch of Freedom

by David Weber

  "I don't doubt that," said Garner. "But 'smart' can only take you so far, when you have a guard detachment of the Queen's Own Regiment watching you at all times. And don't kid yourself, Brice. They may be Ruth's bodyguards, and they may have been with her for a year and a half now—but they'll take their orders from the Queen herself. Or the Queen's brother."

  "Oh."

  "Cheer up, boys," said Haruka. "There was never a chance they'd let her come, once they found out what she had in mind. A member of the royal family? She's already been taken hostage once—at least, the criminals thought they had her—and the first thing that would have crossed the minds of her family was that if they let her run loose, somebody else would do the same."

  "But how did they know what she was planning to do?" asked Ed. "I'm sure the princess didn't tell them."

  Garner discovered that the screen in front of her—who would have thought it, of engineering data?—was deeply engrossing. Judging from the sudden silence, a similar fascination had seized the other members of the crew.

  * * *

  "You did it!" accused Ruth. Her forefinger was shaking right under Hugh's nose. "Don't even try to deny it! You're the one who told them!"

  Watching them, Berry couldn't help but be amused. Given the size disparity between Ruth and Hugh, the situation was a bit like a chipmunk—well, being fair, a pretty good sized dog—trying to chastise a bear.

  Fortunately, Hugh was generally quite phlegmatic. That was one of the things—one of the many things—Berry liked about him. So he didn't snarl back at the Manticoran princess, nor huff and puff that he was being put upon.

  "Why would I try to deny it?" he said calmly. "I readily agree that I'm guilty as charged. Which, in turn, simply means that unlike one person in this room—female, about one hundred and sixty-seven centimeters tall, weight somewhere in the range of sixty-five kilograms, of Masadan ancestry—I'm not crazy. Face it, Ruth. Whether you like it or not, your ability to operate as a field agent is now and will forevermore be tightly constrained by the fact that on the scale of 'Hostage, Value Thereof,' you rank ten out of ten. Or at the very least, nine point nine nine unto the two thousandth decimal point out of ten."

  Her glare hadn't faded in the least. "It's sixty kilos, thank you very much. I exercise regularly."

  He accepted the correction with a solemn nod.

  Berry decided that Ruth's temper had probably crested and was now on the downslope. Time to intervene.

  "I'm really glad you'll be staying here on Torch, Ruth. It'd be awfully lonely without you—"

  She summoned her very best glare—which was pretty feeble, being honest—and bestowed it upon Hugh. "—given the living arrangements that this paranoiac insists I have to maintain from now on."

  "Just for the duration of the emergency situation," Hugh said.

  " 'Duration of the emergency situation,' " Ruth jeered. "And what would that situation be, O Paranoid-in-Chief? The all out war to the death between Berry's star nation and Manpower, which has now been in existence for, oh, somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred years. That one?"

  Hugh chuckled. "Yes. That one."

  "A life sentence, in other words," said Berry unhappily.

  "Maybe not, Your Majesty. If we can—"

  "Don't call me that!"

  Hugh took a slow deep breath. "I don't have any choice, Berry—and that's the last time you'll hear me use your given name so long as I have this assignment." For a moment, he looked distinctly unhappy. "One of the basic rules concerning security work is that security agents need to keep their personal distance from the person or persons they're providing security for. In this case . . . that's not going to be easy for me. Informality would make it impossible."

  Berry didn't know if she was delighted or chagrined to hear that. Probably both. "I'll kill Jeremy, I swear I will. The first guy who comes along since they put this stupid crown on my head who's not intimated by going out on a date with me—and he makes him my security chief!"

  "You can't kill Jeremy," said Ruth. "Sorry, girl—but you were the one who specifically refused his offer to give you the right to exercise the death penalty once a year, at your whim and discretion." The princess beamed up at Hugh. "Been me, I would have taken it. And you'd be for the high jump, right about now."

  "Fine. I can have him banished." Berry cocked her head, studying Hugh for a few seconds. "But it wouldn't do me any good, would it? You're one of those people with an overdeveloped sense of duty. Even with Jeremy gone, you'd keep soldiering on."

  "Well. Yes. But to get back to what I was saying, the main reason for this admittedly extreme precaution"—he waved his hand, indicating the operations chamber buried far below the surface—"is because somebody is using some sort of assassination method that we don't understand yet. Once we learn how to counter it . . ."

  He looked at the bed that had been crammed into the largest available space in the chamber. "Then you can start living somewhere else again."

  Ruth's temper was now rapidly subsiding, as was usually true when she got angry. "Look on the bright side, Berry. At least the bathroom down here is up to snuff. State of the art, in fact."

  "You'd better hope so," Berry said. "Seeing as how you'll be sharing it with me. There's room down here—barely—for another bed."

  "Berry!"

  The queen ignored her and looked up at her security chief. "I'm sure the Queen's Own would agree, aren't you?"

  "They'll sing hosannas."

  "Berry!"

  * * *

  But Ruth's displeasure at being banished along with Berry to what she called The Netherworld—her Queen's Own guard detachment did indeed sing hosannas—lasted less than twenty hours. The next day Anton and Victor returned from their visit to Trevor's Star, just two hours after a courier ship brought a detailed report on the recent Battle of Monica.

  However much Ruth might daydream of being a dashing field agent, the truth was that her great love was analysis. There was enough meat on the bones of that report concerning Monica to keep her down in the operations chamber for four days straight, not even coming up for meals but having them delivered. To her great pleasure, she'd discovered that the computer equipment in the chamber was every bit as state of the art as the toilet and bathing facilities.

  Anton spent a great deal of his own time with her, although he did go up to the surface for meals—and, of course, he didn't sleep down there. There would hardly have been room for a third bed, anyway.

  Victor Cachat divided his time during that four-day stretch about evenly. Half of the time he spent with Thandi—a good part of that, in their bedroom—and the other half he spent helping Anton and Ruth analyze the data from Monica.

  The decision that he and Anton would take the risk of trying to penetrate Mesa still hadn't been made yet. But that was just a formality, now. The information they were getting from the Monica reports were confirming all the suspicions they'd ever had.

  * * *

  Princess Ruth brushed back her hair. "There's no doubt about it, any longer. Anton and I crunched those figures till they're flat as pancakes. So you can put your fears about any 'hall of mirrors' effect to rest, Jeremy. We weren't looking at images, we were looking at hard cold facts."

  "What facts are you referring to in particular?" asked Web Du Havel. He was sitting next to Queen Berry at the conference table in the center of the operations chamber. Victor was sitting next to him, and Thandi and Anton more or less across from him. Jeremy X was standing. As was usually the case, Jeremy preferred to stand at business meetings rather than sit down.

  "The data concerning Manpower's financial flows," said Ruth. "There's no way an operation as huge as the one mounted at Monica can keep its costs hidden. And here's what comes out of it. They dropped a bundle on this little fiasco—or someone did, anyway. Sort of. That many battlecruisers don't come cheap, you know, and I think some of the analysts back home in Landing are suffering sticker shock from just looking at the tonnage they
threw at us. But—but, Jeremy—I think they're missing something."

  "Indeed?" Jeremy gave her one of his patented quizzical smiles. "By all means, dazzle us once again with your legerdemain, O Princess!"

  Ruth stuck out her tongue at him, then shrugged.

  "I think I can make a pretty good case that they figured out how to cover their costs (assuming it all worked, of course) in such a way that they'd at least break even on the Monica project, especially with Technodyne thrown into the mix. If Technodyne's part of the deal was to provide the battlecruisers from the ships they were supposed to be scrapping, costs come way down . . . on an out-of-pocket basis, anyway. Oh, they still had to pay for all the munitions they were planning on using, not to mention getting the technicians they needed all the way out to Monica. So, yeah, there were some pretty hefty damn expenditures involved here. But hefty as they were, they weren't as hefty as it might look at first glance. And if you factor in the possible future revenues from the Lynx Terminus—which was clearly their long-term target—Manpower could still have wound up coming out of the whole thing smelling like a rose."

  "GIGO," said Jeremy. "Garbage in, garbage out."

  "I know what the acronym means, thank you," Ruth said crossly. "What's your point?"

  Jeremy smiled at her. "Meaning no offense. Still, in the nature of things those figures you fed into your programs were just guesstimates. You have no access to the actual figures. You could be misreading the figures . . . including just how far Technodyne was willing to go to help subsidize this little venture."

  "That's true," said Victor. "In fact, I'd accept a disparity of two-to-one or even three-to-one—conceivably even four-to-one—as a GIGO effect. But it would take something like a full order of magnitude to really alter our conclusions, Jeremy."

  "He's right," Anton said. "Those guesstimates, as you call them, were produced by me and Ruth working independently of each other. Victor provided us with his own estimates, as well, although those were a lot less rigorous. We didn't match the results until all three of us were finished. Then Ruth crunched the numbers every way possible—using nothing but Victor's numbers, then nothing but mine, then nothing but hers, then every possible combination of the three. Not a single one of those calculations produced a result that was off by more than fifty percent from the numbers produced as an overall average. To hell with false modesty, Jeremy. You'd be hard pressed to find two intelligence agents anywhere in the galaxy who are better than Victor and I are at this business, and Ruth is as good an analyst as almost anyone in ONI."

  Jeremy raised a hand pacifically. "I'm not disputing that," he said. "So what you're saying, in essence, is that there's no way you could be misreading the figures?"

  "Oh, I'm sure we are misreading them," said Victor. "As you say, we have no direct access to Manpower's records. But we can't be misreading them enough. We just can't, Jeremy. Whatever the exact figures might be, we're close enough to be certain that Manpower's covert activities over the past period can't possibly be explained as the behavior of a business enterprise using any conceivable business model, no matter how ruthless and unrestrained by morality it might be."

  "But you just said yourself that they'd at least break even—and might wind up making a fortune off the revenues from the Lynx Terminus."

  Ruth got a very self-satisfied look on her face. "Yes—but that's not really the point. Oh, I'll bet the rest of the galaxy's busy looking at it exactly that way right this minute, but there are two other factors I think—Anton and I think—they should be looking at, instead."

  "And those are?"

  "First, no matter who fronted the cash—Manpower or Technodyne—the fact remains that very few corporations in history have ever thrown such huge resources into speculative endeavors as risky as the Monica project. Oh, there've probably been at least a few private venture operations with this kind of price tag, given the scale the big transtellars operate on. All those battlecruisers together didn't cost much more than a couple of superdreadnoughts all by themselves, after all, even if they had to pay full price for them. And when you stack that up against something like, say, TranStar of Terra's infrastructure project in Hiawatha, it starts looking downright picayune. But the risk factor in this case was way outside any standard operation. Especially one that was unsecured. TranStar got a huge chunk of its expenses guaranteed upfront by the League before it ever sent the first survey crew into Hiawatha, and that sure as hell didn't happen here! If everything had worked, they'd have made a fortune. But if anything went wrong—which, after all, it did—they were going to get exactly zilch back on whatever they put into the effort. That's what's so far outside the standard models."

  "Corporations are intrinsically conservative when it comes to things like this, Jeremy," Anton put in. "That's why no long-term, really expensive projects that don't have a definite payoff within a reasonably short and specified time frame are ever undertaken by private corporations—unless they have solid government backing and some pretty hefty government guarantees."

  "Yeah!" Ruth nodded energetically. "And that brings us to the second thing I think everybody should be considering here. If the primary goal was to kick the Star Kingdom off of Mesa's front step—and that's what everything seems to be indicating—then the possible payoff for grabbing the terminus was entirely secondary, right? I mean, we're postulating that profit wasn't the primary motive."

  "Some people are, at any rate," Jeremy replied, then shrugged. "All right, and I'll grant you that all the internal evidence we've seen so far suggests the same thing. But that doesn't mean profit couldn't have been a really important secondary motive!"

  "Sure. But they could've accomplished both of their objectives a lot more cheaply, Jeremy, and without doing something so likely to screw up their relations with the League. All they had to do was keep supplying people like that lunatic Nordbrandt, on Kornati, or even Westman, on Montana. If they'd done that, and managed to find a few other hotspots to keep stirred up, they could have kept us tied up dealing with 'local unrest' for years. And that's assuming it didn't make enough domestic stink back in Manticore to make us just decide it was all a bad idea in the first place and go home again. Might not have gotten us to let go of the terminus, but if it went on long enough, it'd probably have gotten OFS involved, and that was really more or less what they had in mind in the first place. Which doesn't even consider the fact that someone back in the League was eventually going to figure out where Monica's new navy came from. Subsidizing terrorists is one thing, as far as the League is concerned; handing its starships over to a bunch of neobarbs was way too likely to be something else entirely. So it's not just how much they were willing to put up against the possible gains, it's also that they had another, cheaper—and safer—alternative. And it was an alternative they damned well knew about, because they were pursuing it at the very same time!"

  Jeremy still looked skeptical, but Du Havel was nodding. "They're right, Jeremy, as far as it goes—and if I needed to, and had the spare time, I could easily write a book showing how that pattern has been consistent throughout history. To go back to pre-Diaspora times, for instance, railroads and canals—even a lot of toll roads—weren't built unless the companies involved had gotten some sort of backing or incentives from whatever governments were in place at the time. That said, however, before we leap to any conclusions, we should remember Napoleon's dictum."

  "Who's Napoleon?" asked Berry.

  "Bernice Napoleon. She's the minister of system defense for Eta Cassiopeiae," said Ruth. For someone as young as she was, the Manticoran princess's knowledge of astropolitics was phenomenal.

  "I think Web's referring to an ancient conqueror," said Zilwicki. "But the only dictum I can remember associated with him is something about an army marching on its stomach, which seems pretty irrelevant here."

  " 'Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence,' " said Victor. "I first heard it from Kevin Usher. He practically dotes on the qui
p."

  Ruth was looking puzzled again. "And what is that supposed to . . . Oh."

  "Web is raising the possibility that Manpower's behavior might simply be the product of mismanagement," said Anton.

  "Yeah, I figured it out," Ruth said. Her eyes got a bit unfocused. "You know . . . I could probably crunch those numbers, too. Even here on Torch, the data bank we've been able to compile is enormous. There should be enough in there for me to run models using figures from companies that went bankrupt."

  "Don't bother," said Zilwicki. "I've run models close enough to those in the past. Even assuming the worst case variant—a private company run by a single individual with no internal restraints of any kind, which doesn't resemble Manpower at all—you still won't get numbers anything like this. These are the sort of outlays measured against possible gain that you only get from governments. And aggressive governments, at that. The sort led by your Alexander the Great types. Not bean-counters."

  "Why in the world would you have taken the time to develop such models?" asked Cachat. "I can't think of any reason to do so."

  Zilwicki clucked his tongue. "That's because you have the limited horizons and stunted vision of someone who's spent his whole life in the hall of mirrors. I didn't do it for intelligence reasons, Victor. I did it back in my yard dog days, so I'd have a gauge for businesses that submitted bids."

  "And you're certain about this, Anton?" asked Web.

  "Yes. There's simply no way to explain Manpower's recent behavior unless you introduce major non-commercial factors into the equation. The same's probably true for Jessyk and Technodyne, by the way, although we're not sure about that yet. But we don't think there's any question any longer that it's true about Manpower. Especially when you add this latest data concerning Monica to the information we already had. A corporation would no more behave like this than a corporate employee would behave like Ronald Allen."

  Du Havel leaned forward, planted his hands on the table, puffed out his cheeks, and then blew out the air. "Well. I will be damned."