by David Weber
"The thought had crossed my mind. So since we're being so civilized and all, just what is it you do want?"
"I want to talk," McBryde replied, expression and tone both suddenly dead serious. "I'd prefer to talk to both you and Agent Cachat simultaneously, but I'd be very surprised if the two of you were willing to run that sort of risk. I'd also like to talk to you now, if possible, but no matter how good your security is—and, by the way, it's actually pretty damned good—I don't think we need to be seen having a tête-à-tête right here in front of everybody."
Zilwicki considered him thoughtfully for a moment or two, then slid the order pad back into his pocket. To McBryde's considerable relief, when his hand came back out of the pocket it didn't bring a lethal weapon with it. On the other hand, Anton Zilwicki didn't exactly need artificial lethal instruments to deal with most problems likely to come his way.
"Two minutes," he said. "Drink some more coffee, then amble down the hallway. Outside the men's room, turn left. Take the 'Employees Only' door."
He nodded, turned, and walked calmly away.
* * *
McBryde pushed open the old-fashioned, unpowered swinging door and stepped through it. He'd fully expected to be looking down the muzzle of a pulser when he did, but instead he found himself in what clearly passed for a staff break room. At the moment, it was empty, aside from the single massively built man seated at its single battered table with a cup of coffee.
"Sit," Anton Zilwicki invited, pointing at the chair opposite him across the table. McBryde obeyed the one-word command, and Zilwicki slid a second cup of coffee across to him.
"This is better than the crap we have to serve out there," he said, this time making no effort to hide his Gryphon accent. "Of course, it could be laced with all sorts of deadly poisons. Would you like me to take a sip first?"
"Why?" McBryde smiled crookedly. "If I were going to poison me, I'd've taken the antidote first myself, then put the poison in both cups."
He accepted the coffee and—not without an internal qualm or two, despite his own words—sipped. It really was much better than the brew served to the diner's patrons.
Assuming of course that it wasn't poisoned, after all.
"All right," Zilwicki said, leaning back in a chair which creaked alarmingly under his weight, "now that we've both established our professionalism, suppose you tell me what it is you wanted to talk about."
"First, let me point out a couple of things," McBryde said. "As I already mentioned, if all I wanted was to get my hands on you and Cachat, I wouldn't need any elaborate tricks to pull that off. Or, rather, my chances of success would probably be higher just going straight after you and the diner in a brute force kind of way. Or, for that matter, waiting until you return to your quarters this evening and pouncing then. In other words, it will save both of us a lot of time and wasted effort if we just start out assuming that I really do want to talk, and that I'm not baiting some kind of incredibly devious trap by coming here."
"Speaking purely theoretically, I can more or less accept that," Zilwicki replied. "Of course, there's no telling what kind of devious strategy—other than getting your hands on me and my associates, that is—you might have in mind."
"Of course," McBryde acknowledged. "And, as it happens, I do have a strategy in mind. I don't know that I'd call it 'devious,' but I do rather suspect that it's going to come as a surprise to you."
"I'm not especially fond of surprises." There was an undeniable note of warning in Zilwicki's deep voice, McBryde noticed.
"This one might be the exception to your rule, Captain," he replied calmly. "You see, I want to defect."
Chapter Forty-Eight
"Well, I guess that's about the best we're going to be able to do," Luiz Rozsak said. He leaned back in his chair to arch his spine and rubbed his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand while his right hand cradled his coffee cup. "It's not perfect, but then again, nothing ever is, is it?"
He lowered his left hand to grin crookedly at Edie Habib, Dirk-Steven Kamstra, Laura Raycraft, David Carte, J.T. Cullingford, Melanie Stensrud, and Anne Warwick.
"I believe this is the point where my loyal minions are supposed to say 'Nothing except your brilliant battle plans, Sir!' "
"Well, Admiral," Habib replied for the others, "given our keen awareness of the aforesaid brilliance, we realize full well that, despite our best efforts to conceal it—so as to avoid embarrassing you, you understand—you must already be aware of the veneration, awe, and near idolatrous reverence with which we regard our fearless leader."
A chorus of chuckles ran around the table in Kamstra's flag bridge briefing room, and, for just a moment, Rozsak's grin would have looked quite at home on any urchin's face. And not just because he was amused, either. It was also a beaming smile (or as close to one as he ever permitted himself to come) of pure delight. He treasured those chuckles—and their proof of his subordinates' confidence and morale—like a miser might cherish diamonds or rubies.
Especially since every one of them knew that, in almost every way that counted, any defense of the Torch System they might mount would represent their own personal Rubicon. They might—might—get away with no one back on Old Earth noticing anything this time, but that wouldn't really matter in the longer term.
He took a sip of coffee, then let himself come back upright and regarded all of them with a considerably more serious expression.
"I genuinely do think this is the best we're going to be able to nail things down," he said. "If any one has any reservations at all—or if there's something you think we should revisit—this is the time to bring it up."
The others looked at one another, and then all of the ship commanders looked at Habib. Several eyebrows were raised, as if inviting the chief of staff to bring up anything they might have forgotten, but she only looked back and shook her head. Then she turned to Rozsak.
"I'm not saying something won't come up during the exercises, Sir. With that proviso and sheet anchor, though, I'd have to say I agree with your assessment. It's not perfect, but the tactical problem's got too many nasty pointy things growing out of it for 'perfect.' We've done our best to disaster-proof things, though, and I think it'll get the job done."
She was right about the thorniness of the situation, Rozsak reflected. It wasn't that any single one of his objectives here in Torch was all that complicated. It was simply that some of them were fundamentally incompatible.
First and foremost, there was the need to protect the planet itself. And it was entirely too likely—indeed, a virtual certainty as far as he, Habib, and Watanapongse were concerned—that the StateSec outlaws Manpower had recruited had no interest at all in putting "boots on the ground."
Manpower didn't want its ex-slaves back, especially after they'd enjoyed such a taste of freedom and vengeance. No, what Manpower wanted was to see Torch erased from the face of the galaxy, preferably in a way which would thoroughly discourage any future, similarly uppity thoughts on the part of its property. And the Eridani Edict's prohibition of deliberate, genocidal attacks on planetary populations was aimed at star nations—which knew the Solarian League Navy would come to call on them if they violated its restrictions. Since Manpower wasn't a star nation, and there was no legal mechanism for the Solarian League Navy to go after a non-Solarian corporation, the Edict was a moot point as far as it was concerned. And since its mercenaries represented a force which no longer had a star nation to call its own, the actual officers and crews carrying out the operations wouldn't be particularly concerned by the Edict, either. All of which meant the attackers would probably settle for pasting the planet with a few "accidental" cee-fractional missile strikes. A half-dozen hundred-ton missiles hitting the planet at sixty percent or so of light-speed should pretty much pasteurize its ecosystem and anyone living in it. Forty-gigaton-range fireballs tended to have that effect.
Which, in turn, meant providing enough missile defense close to the planet to keep that from happ
ening.
Rozsak's second objective was, while accomplishing the first one, to suffer as few casualties of his own as possible. That meant using his range and maneuver advantages to the full. Unfortunately, units placed to provide missile defense around the planet would be effectively anchored to Torch. They wouldn't be able to maneuver freely without exposing the planet.
His third objective was to accomplish the first two without revealing his new weapons' capabilities to anyone outside the Torch System. Frankly, he didn't want anyone else to find out about them, even the Torches. That wasn't going to happen, of course, but it was particularly important to keep anyone in the Solarian League from finding out if at all possible.
Fourth, the best way to accomplish that third objective, was to see to it that no one who might be interested in sharing his discoveries with people Rozsak didn't want finding out about them just yet—which was to say, no one at all from the attacking force—escaped.
Individually, each problem was relatively straightforward; in combination, they demanded a tricky judgment of capabilities, possibilities, and threats. And, try as they might, neither he nor any of his staff had been able to come up with a solution to their problems which didn't violate the principle of concentration of force. To make this work was going to require the division of his forces, and that was a notion Luiz Rozsak hated with every tactician's bone in his body.
But, he reflected, as that old proverb Oravil is fond of quoting says, "Needs must when the Devil drives." And the Devil is sure as hell driving this one.
"I think you're right, Edie," he said out loud, then turned to Commander Raycraft and Commander Stensrud. "Still, Laura, you and Melanie are the ones who're going to have the toughest job if anything goes wrong with the interception. I wish we had the four-pod rings aboard Charade. I'd feel a lot more comfortable if we could just go ahead and deploy the pods and pull Melanie back out of the inner system."
Raycraft and Stensrud nodded in unison. The lightweight pods in Charade's bays were simply too stripped down for any sort of extensive independent deployment. They required too much external power supply, just for starters, and the people who'd designed them had deliberately accepted limited—very limited—operational lifetimes for their onboard systems. All of which meant Stensrud couldn't simply stack the things in Torch orbit and then get her ship the hell out of the way.
"I can't say I'm particularly enthralled by the limitations myself, Sir," Raycraft acknowledged. "On the other hand, I'll have a lot more missile defense than you will. And if your jaw of the nutcracker does what it's supposed to, it probably won't matter a lot."
"I know." Rozsak snorted in amusement. "The problem is that I've never been all that enthralled"—he used her own verb deliberately—"by operational planning that includes words like 'probably won't.' "
Someone else chuckled in matching amusement, but then the admiral set his coffee cup firmly aside with an air of finality.
"All right. I think we have a plan. Now let's see how it works out as an exercise. Edie, I want you and Dirk-Steven to set that up ASAP. We don't know how long we have before the bad guys come calling, but it's always best to err on the side of pessimism in a case like this. That means we're not going to be able to spend a lot of time actually working on this in real space, so get the sims loaded to everybody. Hopefully, we'll be able to have at least one run through with everything short of live-fire exercises from the Masquerades, so be ready to tweak the simulations on the basis of anything we discover in the process."
"Yes, Sir," Edie Habib replied in a rather more formal than usual tone. "A lot of this is going to come straight out of the playbook we've been working on," she continued, "so I think we can probably set up the exercise pretty quickly. We can probably be ready to go by . . . what?" She arched an eyebrow at Kamstra as she spoke. "Tomorrow morning, Dirk-Steven?"
"Better make it afternoon," Kamstra advised after a moment's thought. "I've noticed Murphy tends to turn up during the planning process, as well."
"A cogent thought," Habib agreed, and turned back to Rozsak. "Make that tomorrow afternoon, Sir. Right after lunch."
"Good," Rozsak said. "In that case, I think we can adjourn."
* * *
"So how bad is it?" Friede Butry leaned over, peering into the space uncovered by a removed cover plate. The inside of that space was filled with a lot of equipment whose precise purpose she understood only vaguely.
Andrew Artlett straightened up from the piece of machinery he'd been working on, squatted on his heels, and started wiping his hands with a rag. That was rather silly, really. The interior of a hyper generator—even one for a ship as small as a mere million tons—needed to be kept clean at all times. In fact, Andrew had washed his hands before starting to work on it as thoroughly as a surgeon washes his hands before undertaking an operation.
But old habits died hard. Andrew always thought of himself as what he called a "jackleg mechanic," and such stalwart and doughty souls by definition always had dirty hands that needed to be wiped clean.
"Pretty damn bad, Ganny. It could go out at any time."
"Why?" Butry glared at the housing. "Those damned things are supposed to be the next best thing to indestructible!"
"Well, they are . . . mostly," Andrew acknowledged. "Unfortunately, even a hyper generator has some moving parts, and this one"—he tapped a badly worn-looking rotorlike device longer than his arm—"is one of them. Worse, it's an important one of them. In fact, it's the stabilizer for the primary stage. If it goes down, you've got no hyper control at all, Ganny. Zip. And this sucker ought to have been changed out in a routine overhaul at least a hundred thousand hours ago. We really need to replace it, before we try to make another jump."
"It can't just be fixed?"
"Fixed? How?" He pointed a finger at the rotor's shaft. Even Ganny, whose many fields of expertise and knowledge did not include matters mechanical, could see that it was badly worn.
"I'd have to remove it, first. That could be done, although it'd take a while. That's the easy part. Then I'd have to add metal to it, using welding equipment we don't have, so I'd have to design and build the welding equipment which I could probably do with the odds and ends we have on this rustbucket of a so-called starship but you're looking at weeks of work, Ganny. Might be as much as two or three months. Then I'd have to turn it back down to specs using metal-shaping equipment which we also don't have. The so-called 'machine shop' on this piece of crap is a joke and you can tell that cheapskate Walter Imbesi I said so. There's no way on God's green earth I could possibly build a modern computerized machining center. And even if I could, who'd design the program? You're probably the closest we've got to a real programmer and . . ."
He cocked an inquisitive eye up at her. Ganny shook her head. "I'm not really that good a programmer and what little skill I do have runs entirely toward financial stuff. There's no way I could design a program to do what you want, Andrew."
He nodded. "What I figured. So that means I'd have to build an old-style lathe."
"A . . . what?"
He grinned. "And you claim to be the old-timer here! A 'lathe' is an antique piece of equipment, Ganny, used to cut metal. More or less contemporaneous, I think, to ox-drawn plows. Still, it'd do the trick although it'd take a lot longer than modern equipment. Fortunately, we've got a pretty good suite of measuring instruments so I could probably manage to get the shaft back to specs using a micrometer."
"A . . . what?"
"A micrometer's an ancient type of measuring tool, Ganny. Definitely contemporaneous to ox-drawn plows. Well, yardsticks anyway."
"What's a 'yardstick'?" piped up Ed Hartman. He and his two buddies had been watching the process with great interest from close up. As close up as Andrew would let them come, anyway. He was deeply suspicious of their claims to being crispy clean.
"A stick to measure a yard, what d'you think?"
"So what's a 'yard'?" asked Brice Miller.
Artlett scowled. "Ga
nny, is this a consultation over critical repair issues or a remedial history class?"
She smiled, and made shooing motions at the three teenagers. "Give your uncle some breathing room, kids. I'll explain to you what a yard is later."
She looked back down at Andrew. "And how long would it take to make this . . . 'lathe,' you called it?"
"At least as long as it took me to make the welding equipment. Even though it'll have to be a primitive as they come, since I've got no way to make a lead screw. Fortunately I can probably jury-rig an electromagnetic actuator of some kind."
"What's a 'lead'—never mind. Again, in other words, you're talking about weeks."
"Might even be months. There's really no way to know ahead of time. The bottom line is this, Ganny. Unless we replace the worn out parts now, this equipment is likely to go out completely once we put any real stress on it. At that point, we're dead in the water. We'd still have power, so it wouldn't be immediately life-threatening. We could probably survive for at least a year. But we'd just be drifting in space until I could fix it. And, like I said, that could take anywhere up to half a year."
She nodded. "All right, then. I'll just have to tap into what funds we've got. Write up what you need, Andrew, and I'll transmit it down to the surface as soon as we've been given customs clearance. That shouldn't take long. This is our third visit. The Mesans are being downright gracious now that they figure we're repeat business."
Chapter Forty-Nine
Yana came into the kitchen, brushing a light sprinkling of snow off her shoulders. "I hope your plans for a fast getaway don't include antique wheeled ground vehicles squealing around corners. It's pretty slick out there. And the people who are out don't seem to know a damned thing about how to get around in it."
She shook her head in disgust, and Victor and Anton grinned. Despite the fact that Yana had spent most of her adult life in one city or another, she'd spent her girlhood on the planet of Kilimanjaro. Winters there weren't quite as long as on the Star Kingdom's Sphinx, but they were definitely in the same league. She was inclined to look down her nose at the weather complaints voiced by effete scions of milder planets, and her opinion of Torch's tropical and sub-tropical climate was normally summed up with a snort of magnificent contempt.