Torch of Freedom

by David Weber

  He saw the surprise—and alarm—in all three of his listeners' eyes, and shrugged.

  "I don't know how they arranged it, but everything I've seen from the operational side stresses that they're confident they've built in a control mechanism to keep it from getting away from them. And that they need a DNA sample of the intended 'host' before they can design the weapon for a given mission."

  "And what does it do?" Anton asked almost softly.

  "It basically builds its own dispersed architecture, bio-based computer," McBryde replied levelly. "It taps into its host's neural system, but it's totally passive until the host encounters whatever triggering event was preprogrammed into it. At that point, it . . . takes over." He waved one hand vaguely, clearly frustrated by his inability to describe the process more clearly. "As I understand it, it can only be programmed to carry out fairly simple, short term operations. It does have some limited AI function, apparently, but not very much. And it can't override the host's own efforts to reassert control of his voluntary muscles indefinitely. No longer than four or five minutes, apparently."

  "Which is long enough, obviously," Victor said grimly. He regarded McBryde for several silent seconds, then tapped the chip on the table between them. "And this is?"

  "Well, let's just say that when I started thinking about how well I could explain this thing to you, I realized the answer was 'Not Too Damned Well,' " McBryde replied with a slight smile. "So it occurred to me it might be as well for me to provide any supporting evidence I could. That"—he indicated the chip—"is the best version of that supporting evidence I was able to get my hands on without tripping too many internal lines. It's the report of the field agent who supervised the Webster assassination. It includes names, places, and dates . . . and also describes the hack of the bank records he used to implicate the Havenite ambassador's driver. Plus the elimination of the hacker who carried it out. I imagine there's more than enough in there that can be corroborated from the Old Earth investigation, once you know where to look."

  "I imagine there is," Anton agreed. He picked up the chip and tossed it into the air, then caught it and tucked it into a pocket. McBryde was almost certainly correct about that, he thought, and glanced at Cachat, one eyebrow arched. The Havenite nodded ever so slightly, and Anton looked back at McBryde.

  "The day after tomorrow suit you?"

  Jack shook his head. "I can't. Well, I could, but it'll take at least another day to get Herlander ready and, besides, I can put the extra time to good use by covering our tracks on the way out." He smiled thinly. "Of course, I imagine you've already done the same—and please note that I'm not asking what or how—so I figure between your schemes and mine not even Bardasano will be able to figure out how we got off the planet."

  Chapter Fifty

  "I hate waiting for the sound of a second shoe's hitting the floor," Admiral Osiris Trajan grumbled. None of his three dinner guests responded. First, because he hadn't directed the comment specifically to one of them, but, secondly, because they'd both been with the admiral long enough to recognize a rhetorical statement when they heard one.

  Apparently, though, it wasn't quite as rhetorical this time as they'd thought it was, and he looked across the table at the auburn-haired, gray-green-eyed woman in the captain's uniform sitting opposite him.

  "How about you, Addie?" he asked. "Are you feeling a bit less than perfectly cheerful about this whole thing?"

  "Ours not to reason why, Sir," Captain Adelaide Granger, the commanding officer of Trajan's dreadnought flagship, replied with a wry grin. She wiped her lips with her snow-white napkin and arched one eyebrow quizzically at the admiral. "Might I respectfully inquire what has aroused the Admiral's ire at this particular moment?" she asked.

  Trajan gave something which sounded suspiciously like a snort and wagged his head at his flag captain.

  "You'll come to no good end, Addie," he warned her. "Trust me, you're not irreplaceable, you know."

  "No, Sir," she agreed equitably. "But—again, with the utmost respect—given the Admiral's own . . . foibles, finding a replacement and beating her into shape would probably take longer than the Admiral would care to invest in the project."

  This time, the other two officers seated at the table noted with relief, there was no doubt about Trajan's amusement. All three of his subordinates admired and respected Trajan—he wouldn't have been selected as Task Force Four's commanding officer if he hadn't been widely regarded as one of the Mannerheim System-Defense Force's two or three best flag officers. Normally, he was also an excellent boss. But there was no denying that he had his moods, and frustration tended to make him more than a little . . . prickly. Fortunately, Captain Granger had been something of a personal protégé of his for quite some time, and she'd developed a deft touch for defusing any serious irritation on his part. That would have been enough to make her presence welcome to Trajan's staff even if she hadn't been such a clearly superior officer in her own right.

  "You're probably right about that," Trajan agreed with his flag captain now, and tossed his own crumpled napkin onto the table beside his empty plate. "About how long it would take, that is, of course," he added. "That bit about 'foibles' is scarcely applicable in my own case, however."

  "Of course not, Sir," Granger said gravely. "I must have misspoken somehow."

  "That happens sometimes to lesser mortals, or so I hear," Trajan observed, and it was Granger's turn to chuckle.

  "Nonetheless," Trajan went on a moment later, in a considerably more serious tone, "I'm not happy about this entire op. I never have been, and I haven't gotten any happier in the last four or five T-months, either."

  There was no doubt in any of his listeners' minds what operation he was speaking about. Task Force Four had no direct involvement in it—for which all of them were privately grateful—but they'd been briefed on "Operation Ferret". . . and about its objectives, given its implications for the MSDF's future operations.

  "I don't think anyone's really happy about the notion of relying on Luff and his collection of paranoiacs, Sir," Commander Niklas Hasselberg said now. Trajan looked at his fair-haired chief of staff, and Hasselberg shrugged. "Sometimes deniability comes at a price in reliability, Sir."

  "I realize that, Niklas," Trajan said. "In this particular instance, though, I'm not really convinced deniability is an important enough reason to rely on them. For that matter, I'm not really convinced the operation itself is a wonderful idea—or even necessary, at this point. Especially when we've gone to so much effort to keep this end of the bridge so completely black for so long."

  "My understanding is that the decision was made at the highest levels, Sir," Commander Ildikó Nyborg, Trajan's operations officer, pointed out in a diplomatic tone, and Trajan snorted yet again, this time harshly.

  "It was certainly that," he agreed.

  All three of his subordinates understood. Although Hasselberg was the only other person present who knew the identity of the actual individual behind that decision, all of them represented star-line genomes. Star-lines were a minority in the MSDF's officer corps as a whole, of course, but they were heavily concentrated in the more senior ranks, and for duties as sensitive as their own current assignment there'd been some judicious personnel shuffling. As a result of which, Task Force Four's command structure was undeniably top-heavy in alpha-lines, beta-lines, and gamma-lines.

  Which meant that, unlike the majority of their fellow officers, they knew the Mannerheim System-Defense Force was actually an adjunct of the Mesan Alignment Navy no one else knew even existed. So the term "higher up" had a very different meaning for them than it would have had for any of those non-Mesan officers.

  "I'm not saying the Verdant Vista terminus isn't important, because it is," Trajan continued. "And I realize that using obvious Manpower proxies is about as deniable as it gets, given who's in charge of the system these days. From that perspective, I don't have any qualms about Ferret. The problem is that I think the operation itself is
unnecessary. Worse, it's a complication we don't need. We could put a force through the bridge any time we wanted to that would be more than big enough to overwhelm anything the 'Kingdom of Torch' could possibly put in our way. We don't really have to take the system to exercise effective control of the terminus, and if it were my call, we'd go ahead and wait until we actually needed to use the thing. In which case we wouldn't have to rely on Luff's rejects at all."

  There was silence for a moment. Osiris Trajan had a well-deserved reputation for openness with subordinates he trusted. "Everybody knows everything" about any current operation, at least at the level of his own staff, was practically a mantra of his, because he regarded it as the only way to get their best thoughts—and prevent competent people from making ignorance-based mistakes. But his comments about the operation against Torch were unusually blunt, even for him, given the fact that TF 4 wasn't even assigned to the MSDF covering force on the other end of the Verdant Vista wormhole bridge.

  Captain Granger cocked her head to one side, clearly considering what he'd said. She stayed that way for two or three seconds, then shrugged.

  "From a purely military perspective, I agree with you completely, Sir. And I suppose it's always possible someone somewhere's gotten her nose out of joint over what happened in Verdant Vista when we lost control of the system in the first place. I think, though, that the operative factor here, in many ways, is a concern about what the Manties may eventually figure out about the wormhole bridge."

  "They aren't going to figure out anything about it that's going to do them any good, Addie," Trajan countered. "Besides, they've already figured out just about anything that could be deduced from their end, or they never would have gotten their survey ship through to SGC-902 in the first place. For all the good that did them."

  He grimaced, and so did Granger and Nyborg. Hasselberg, on the other hand, only shrugged.

  "I admit that was . . . unpleasant, Sir," the chief of staff said. "It was clearly within policy and Commodore Ganneau's instructions, though."

  "I'm fully aware of both those points, Niklas." Trajan's voice was considerably frostier than normally came Hasselberg's direction. "I'm also aware, however, that it was a single cruiser—and one that was the next best thing to totally obsolescent, at that—and Ganneau had an entire battlecruiser squadron sitting there, with two of them already at action stations and knowing exactly where anything from the other end had to come out. Do you really think a Manty skipper would have been stupid enough to fight with eight battlecruisers sitting there ready to turn his ship into plasma? Ganneau had the option of ordering him to surrender; he just refused to take it."

  "I'm not defending his decision, Sir," Hasselberg pointed out. "I'm saying what he did was covered. And it probably wouldn't hurt to remember who his sister-in-law is."

  Trajan frowned at the reminder. It was just like Hasselberg to bring it up, though, he reflected. The man was as tough-minded—not to say ornery—as they came. And he definitely believed in calling a spade a shovel, even if it wasn't very diplomatic to remind his admiral that Commodore Jérôme Ganneau's wife, Assuntina, was the youngest sister of Fleet Admiral Chiara Otis, the Mannerheim System-Defense Force's chief of naval operations.

  Diplomatic or not, it was also an indication of just how much Hasselberg trusted the other officers seated around the table. It was highly unlikely that his observation would have evoked any anger from Fleet Admiral Otis, but that wasn't really the point.

  "He may be Admiral Otis' brother-in-law," Captain Granger said, "but that's not who's watching his ass for him, Niklas."

  "Of course not, Ma'am," Hasselberg agreed. "But Admiral Kafkaloudes is. And, unfortunately, that's almost the same thing."

  "I think we should probably turn this conversation in another direction," Trajan said calmly. The others looked at him, and he shrugged. "Oh, I don't disagree with anything that's been said. On the other hand, there's not much point in discussing something everyone already agrees about, and discussing the CNO's and her chief of staff's—or her chief of staff's, at least—little . . . foibles"—he smiled quickly at Granger as he used her own earlier terminology—"even among friends is neither productive, diplomatic, wise, nor supportive of good discipline."

  Granger looked back at him for a moment, gray-green eyes stubborn. Then she inhaled deeply, nodded, and sat back in her chair, reaching for her wine glass.

  The truth, Trajan thought, was that Kafkaloudes' empire-building tendencies were well known throughout the MSDF. In fact, they were so well known that Fleet Admiral Otis' willingness to put up with them was widely regarded as her single true weakness. She was smart, competent, experienced, and dedicated to her duty, yet it was impossible for Trajan to believe she was unaware of Kafkaloudes' vendettas against anyone who ever made the mistake of rousing his ire. And it was an ire which roused with remarkable ease.

  The problem was that, personality shortcomings aside, he really was very good at his job. And, to give the devil his due, part of his job clearly was to protect Otis, because in protecting her, he also protected her effectiveness. That was why Granger and Hasselberg were almost certainly correct where Ganneau was concerned. Otis might not protect him just because he was her brother-in-law—in fact, Trajan, who knew the fleet admiral quite well, was pretty damn sure she wouldn't—but she didn't have to. The commodore could rely on Kafkaloudes to quietly suppress any personal criticism of him. After all, it wouldn't do to have that criticism splash on the CNO! Or that, at any rate, was how Kafkaloudes could be counted upon to see things.

  And Hasselberg had a perfectly valid point about Ganneau's actions. They were covered by his orders, even though Trajan knew Ganneau had been expected to use his own discretion about employing lethal force. And there were arguments in favor of exactly what the commodore had done. Trajan might not like them very much, but he couldn't deny their existence. The reason Ganneau's squadron had drawn the duty of watching the Alignment's end of the Verdant Vista Bridge in the first place was that judicious personnel assignments similar to those which had been tweaked in Task Force Four's favor had led—purely coincidentally, of course—to the Sixth Battlecruiser Squadron's being exclusively officered and manned by what happened to be Mesan star-lines. None of them were going to mention what had happened to anyone else, but if a Manticoran survey vessel had been brought in by vessels of the Mannerheim System-Defense Force . . .

  All of that's true enough, Trajan thought, but they wouldn't have had to be brought into Mannerheim in the first place. The Alignment could've squirreled them away somewhere. Hell, we've managed to "squirrel away" the entire frigging Darius System for two hundred damned years! But Ganneau didn't want to mess with the "inconvenience," so he just casually went ahead and blew away an entire ship full of people, instead.

  "Leaving aside any discussions of our senior officers," Hasselberg said after a moment, "there's still your own point, Admiral. The Manties can't possibly realize what they're dealing with from their end of the bridge."

  He glanced at the smart wall bulkhead of Trajan's dining cabin as he spoke, and the others followed his gaze to it. The wall was configured at the moment to show not the Felix System, where Vivienne and the rest of TF 4 were currently conducting "routine training exercises," but what lay at the other end of the Verdant Vista Wormhole Bridge.

  It was centered on a single star which looked slightly brighter than any of the others in their field of view. In fact, the only reason for its apparent brightness was that it had been considerably closer to the recording pickup than any of the others. It was actually only a lowly M8 dwarf, without a single planet to its name. Or, rather, to its number, for it had never achieved the dignity of the name all its own. It was simply SGC-902-36-G, a dim little star just this side of a "brown dwarf," of absolutely no particular interest to anyone and over forty light-years from the nearest inhabited star system.

  It was also, however, home to a never before observed hyper-space phenomenon: a pair of wormhole t
ermini, less than two light-minutes from one another and less than ten light-minutes from SGC-902-36-G itself. In fact, they were precisely 9.24 light-minutes from the star, which put them exactly on its hyper limit, and made them the only wormhole termini in the explored galaxy which were less than thirty light-minutes from a star.

  No one had ever encountered anything like it before, and even all these years after its discovery, the Mesan Alignment's hyper-physicists were still trying to come up with an explanation for how the "SGC-902-36-G Wormhole Anomaly" (also known as "The Twins") had happened when all generally accepted wormhole theory said it couldn't have. There were currently, Trajan had been told, at least six competing "main" hypotheses.

  Obviously, no one had ever predicted that any such thing was possible. In fact, the Alignment had literally stumbled across it in the course of surveying the wormhole junction associated with the Felix System, where Trajan's task force was currently exercising. Not that the galaxy at large had any idea of that junction's existence, either. It had been discovered initially by a survey expedition backed by the "Jessyk Combine" and operating (very surreptitiously) out of Mannerheim under direct orders from the Alignment. Jessyk never shared survey information with anyone unless there was an excellent reason for it to do so, and in this case the Alignment had decided there was an excellent reason not to broadcast the Combine's discovery.

  Felix was an uninhabited star system little more than ten light-years from Mannerheim. The dim K2-class star was brighter than SGC-902-36-G, and it did have one marginally habitable planet, although that was about the best anyone was ever likely to say about it. The planet itself, which had never been assigned any better name than "Felix Beta," was a fairly miserable piece of real estate, with a gravity 1.4 times that of Old Earth, an axial inclination of thirty-one degrees, and a miserly hydrosphere of barely thirty-three percent. With an average orbital radius of right on six light-minutes, it was a cold, arid, dusty, windstorm-lashed, thoroughly wretched lump of dirt, but the Alignment had been considering it as a potential site for further development anyway, because of its proximity to Mannerheim.