by David Weber
"And as if I were determined to confirm the validity of his opinions, I brought Ineka Vaandrager on board. I justified it then on the grounds that time was getting short, that Frontier Security was beginning to look more hungrily in our direction, and it was. That's the worst of it; I can still justify everything I did on that basis and know it was true. But I can never run away from the suspicion that I would've turned to Ineka anyway. That I just didn't care. I'm sure Westman's bone-deep resentment and distrust of the RTU stems from that period, the five or ten T-years after Suzanne's death. And that's why I understand why Montanans might not be particularly fond of me.
"It's also the reason I turned so eagerly to the possibility of building support for a Cluster-wide annexation plebiscite when Harvest Joy came out of the Lynx Terminus. It was like my last chance for salvation. To prove—to Suzanne, I think, more than anyone else—that the RTU wasn't just a money machine for Rembrandt and for me personally. That it really was intended to stop Frontier Security, and that I was willing to abandon it entirely, even after all these years, if the possibility of protecting all of the Cluster offered itself."
He stopped and looked up from the stylus in his hands. He met Helen's gaze, and he smiled sadly.
"I've never explained all of that to anyone before. Joachim Alquezar knows, I think. And a few others probably suspect. But that's the true story of how the plebiscite came to be, and why. And also the reason Montana is special to me in so many ways. And why Steve Westman's doing what he's doing."
He shook his head, his smile sadder than ever.
"Ridiculous, isn't it? All of this springing from the mistakes of one man who was too stupid to tell the woman he loved the truth before he asked her to marry him?"
"Mr. Van Dort," Helen said, after a moment, "it may not be my place to say this, but I think you're being too hard on yourself. Yes, you should've told her about the prolong. But not telling her wasn't an act of betrayal—she certainly didn't see it that way, or she wouldn't have stayed. And it sounds to me like the two of you had a marriage which was a genuine partnership. My father and mother had that sort of marriage, I think. I never knew Mom well enough to really know, but I do know Daddy and Cathy Montaigne are like that, and I like to think that someday I may find someone I can have that kind of relationship—that kind of life—with. And whatever might've happened someday because you had prolong and she didn't, that wasn't why you lost her and your daughters. You lost them because of circumstances beyond your control. Beyond anyone's control. It could've happened to anyone. It happened to happen to you and to them. I lost my mother because of circumstances beyond anyone's control, and even with all the love my father's given me, there were times I wanted to strike out at the universe. Wanted to take it by the throat and strangle it for stealing my mother from me. And unlike you, I knew precisely how she died, knew it was her choice, as well as her duty.
"So don't blame yourself for their deaths. And don't blame yourself for being bitter because they died. That's called being a human being.
"As for Westman and Chief Marshal Bannister and their attitudes towards the Trade Union and even the annexation, all you can do is all you can do. Maybe you weren't exactly the nicest person in the world while you were trying to build up the RTU, but that doesn't mean it's tainted or poisoned somehow. And if the annexation goes through, I can't think of a better possible memorial for your wife and daughters."
"I've tried to tell myself that," he half-whispered.
"Good," Helen said more briskly. "Because it's true. And now that I know about Suzanne, and your daughters, and all the rest of your deep, dark secrets, be warned! The next time I see you sinking into a slough of despond or starting to feel overly sorry for yourself, I'm going to kick you—with infinite respect, of course!—right in the ass."
He blinked, both eyebrows flying up. And then, to her relief, he began to laugh. He laughed for quite a long time, with a deep, full-throated amusement she'd never really expected to see from him. But finally, the laughter eased into chuckles, and he shook his head at her.
"You're even more like Suzanne than I thought. That's exactly what she would've told me under the same circumstances."
"I thought she sounded like a smart lady," Helen said in a satisfied tone.
"Oh, yes. Very like Suzanne . . . and that," he added in a softer voice, "is probably the greatest compliment I could ever pay anyone."
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The dispatch boat from Spindle began uploading its message queue well before it reached Montana planetary orbit. Lieutenant Hansen McGraw, the com officer of the watch, watched the message headers scroll up on his display. Most were protected by multilevel encryption, and he waited patiently while the computers sorted through the traffic. Half a dozen of the larger message files, he noted, were personal-only for Captain Terekhov and Bernardus Van Dort. One of them, however, carried a lower security classification and a higher priority rating. He downloaded that one to a message board, and handed it to Senior Chief Harris.
"Deliver this to the Exec, please, Senior Chief."
"Aye, aye, Sir," Harris said, and tucked the message board under his arm. He carried it across the bridge to the lift, down one deck, and along a passage to the wardroom, where he stepped through the open hatch and cleared his throat politely.
"Yes, Senior Chief?" Lieutenant Frances Olivetti, Hexapuma's third astrogator, happened to be sitting closest to the hatch.
"Message for the XO, Ma'am."
"Bring it on over, please, Senior Chief," Ansten FitzGerald said from where he sat in the midst of a pinochle game with Ginger Lewis, Lieutenant Commander Nagchaudhuri, and Lieutenant Jefferson Kobe.
"Yes, Sir." Harris crossed to the executive officer. He handed over the message board, then stood waiting, hands clasped behind him, while FitzGerald opened the message file and scanned it. His eyes narrowed and he frowned slightly, obviously thinking hard. Then he looked back up at Harris.
"Who has the standby pinnace?"
"Ms. Pavletic, Sir," the senior chief replied.
"In that case, please inform her that I anticipate she'll be leaving the ship to collect the Captain and his party within the next few minutes, Senior Chief."
"Aye, aye, Sir." Harris came briefly to attention, then headed back out through the hatch while FitzGerald plugged his personal com into the shipboard system and punched in a combination.
"Bridge, Officer of the Watch speaking," Tobias Wright's voice replied.
"Toby, it's the Exec. I need to speak to Hansen, please."
"Yes, Sir. Wait one, please."
There was a very brief pause; then Lieutenant McGraw answered.
"You wanted me, Sir?"
"Yes, I did, Hansen. Please make a general signal to all work and shore parties to return on board."
"Yes, Sir. Should I indicate immediate priority?"
"No," FitzGerald said after a brief consideration. "Instruct them to return directly, but to expedite any extended tasks."
"Aye, aye, Sir."
"Thank you. FitzGerald, clear," the executive officer said.
He switched off his com and returned his attention to his cards. Several people looked as if they'd have liked to ask him questions, but none of them did. Aikawa Kagiyama, who was in the process of suffering abject annihilation across a chessboard at Abigail Hearns's hands, found it even more difficult to concentrate on his game. There was only one logical reason for the instructions the XO had issued: Hexapuma had just received new orders which required her to go someplace else.
He frowned, part of his mind trying to decide whether to sacrifice a knight or his single remaining bishop in an effort to briefly stave off the lieutenant's merciless attack, while the rest of his mind considered the implications of new orders. Hexapuma had been in Montana for just under eleven T-days, and it had been nine days since the Captain and Van Dort's first meeting with Westman. Aikawa didn't know how well that effort had been going. He knew Van Dort had met with Westman a s
econd time, but he couldn't pick up a single hint about what they might have discussed. It was deeply frustrating for someone who prided himself on always knowing what was going on. And the fact that Helen really did know but refused to tell him was even more frustrating. He respected her refusal to gossip about the details to which she might be privy, but all the respect in the galaxy wasn't going to make him feel any less curious.
"Are you planning to move sometime soon?" Lieutenant Hearns asked pleasantly, and he gave himself a shake.
"Sorry, Ma'am. I guess I was woolgathering."
He looked back down at the board and interposed his king's knight. Lieutenant Hearns' castle swooped down and took it instantly.
"Mate in four moves," she informed him with a smile.
Aikawa grunted in exasperation as he realized she was right. He started to tip over his king, then stopped himself. It might just be possible, he thought, studying the board carefully, that he could at least make her take an additional two or three moves to finish him off. Which was about the best any of the midshipmen, with the sole exception of Ragnhild Pavletic, had so far managed.
He shelved consideration of what their new orders might be and gave himself over to the intense examination of the board.
* * *
"Flight Ops, this is Hawk-Papa-One, requesting clearance for a direct transit to Hexapuma Alpha's current location," Ragnhild Pavletic said into her boom mike.
"Hawk-Papa-One, Flight Ops," Lieutenant Sheets' voice replied in her earbug. "Hold while we clear your flight plan."
"Flight Ops, Hawk-Papa-One copies."
Ragnhild sat back in the pilot's seat and considered her projected trip. As always, the exact location of Captain -Terekhov—-"Hexapuma Alpha"—was monitored whenever he was off the ship. As such, she knew that he, Bernardus Van Dort, and Helen Zilwicki were currently in a restaurant rejoicing in the name of The Rare Sirloin. It was supposed to be one of the better restaurants in Brewster, the Montana capital. Ragnhild didn't know about that personally, of course. Unlike some midshipwomen, she thought, she hadn't been invited to eat there no less than three times in the last week.
On the other hand, I haven't been expected to pull my full watch assignment on board ship as well as going haring off dirt-side every time Van Dort does, either.
She was surprised Helen didn't show more signs of exhaustion. She was spending most of her putative free time assisting Van Dort aboard ship, whenever she wasn't somewhere on the planet with him. She was still finding time—somehow—for regular exercise and sparring sessions, but that was about it, and her bunk time was suffering. Still, there did seem to be the odd half-hour here and there Ragnhild couldn't quite account for. And, interestingly enough, there seemed to be matching holes in Paulo d'Arezzo's known whereabouts.
The thought of Helen spending time with the too-pretty midshipman was fairly preposterous. But not as preposterous as it would once have been, she reminded herself. Something had happened to alter their relationship, and no one else in Snotty Row seemed to have any idea what it might have been. Whatever it was, it didn't seem to have any romantic overtones—thank God—but it was all very odd. And if she and Paulo were sneaking off somewhere, where was it? As big as Hexapuma was, there weren't that many places aboard her where two people could evade observation.
No, she told herself once again, it had to be a simple coincidence.
"Hawk-Papa-One, Flight Ops," Lieutenant Sheets said suddenly.
"Flight Ops, Hawk-Papa-One," Ragnhild acknowledged.
"Hawk-Papa-One, you are cleared to Hexapuma Alpha's current location. Flight path Tango Foxtrot to Brewster Interplanetary, Pad Seven-Two. Contact Brewster Flight Control on Navy Channel Niner-Three at the two hundred klick line for final approach instructions."
"Flight Ops, Hawk-Papa-One copies flight path Tango Foxtrot to Brewster Interplanetary, Pad Seven-Two, contacting Brewster Flight Control on November Charlie Niner-Three at the two-zero-zero klick line for final approach instructions."
"Hawk-Papa-One, Flight Ops. Confirm. You are cleared to separate at your discretion."
"Flight Ops, Hawk-Papa-One separating now." She looked over her shoulder at the pinnace's flight engineer. "Chief, disengage the umbilicals."
"Disengage umbilicals, aye, Ma'am." The flight engineer tapped commands into his console and watched telltales flicker from green, through red, to amber as the pinnace's service connections to the ship were severed.
"Confirm all umbilicals disengaged, Ms. Pavletic."
"Thank you, Chief." Ragnhild glanced over her own displays, doublechecking the umbilicals' status, and nodded in satisfaction. She keyed her mike again. "Flight Ops, Hawk-Papa-One confirms clean separation at zero-niner-thirty-five."
"Hawk-Papa-One, Flight Ops. Confirm. You are cleared to apply thrust."
"Flight Ops, Hawk-Papa-One. Applying thrust now."
The pinnace's bow thrusters flared as Ragnhild backed the sleek craft out of its docking arms. She watched the boat bay bulkhead's smart-painted range marks and numbers glide past as the pinnace moved slowly astern. She came up on the departure mark exactly on the tick and at exactly the correct velocity, she noted with pleasure, and the reaction thrusters gimbaled upward, pushing the pinnace down and out of the bay. Once she had sufficient separation, she dropped the nose, closed the bow thruster ports, and engaged the main thrusters. This flight would be too short to bother with the impeller wedge—they'd already be configuring for atmosphere by the time they were sufficiently clear of the ship to activate the wedge—and she settled back to enjoy a good old-fashioned airfoil flight.
* * *
"Well, this is a fine kettle of fish," Aivars Terekhov commented sourly as he finished reading the last of his personal dispatches from Rear Admiral Khumalo and Baroness Medusa.
"That's certainly one way to put it," Van Dort agreed. His personal dispatches were even more voluminous than Terekhov's, and he was still reading. He looked up from the current message and grimaced.
"Joachim Alquezar commented to me once that Aleksandra Tonkovic, just after the Nemanja bombing, said something to the effect that we wouldn't need a silver bullet to kill Nordbrandt. I'm beginning to wonder about that."
"It does seem she has some sort of evil fairy looking out for her, doesn't it?" Terekhov said sourly.
"So far, at any rate. But what's impressed me even more than her unpleasant propensity for surviving is her sheer malevolence. You do realize that by now she's killed something over thirty-six hundred people, most of them civilians, in her bombing attacks alone?"
"Which doesn't even count the wounded. Or the cops—or the frigging firemen!" Terekhov snarled, and Van Dort looked up quickly.
Even that mild an obscenity was unusual from Terekhov. Van Dort and the Manticoran captain had become quite close over the thirty-five days he'd spent aboard Hexapuma. He liked and admired Terekhov, and he'd come to know the Manticoran well enough to realize that that language indicated far more anger from him than it would have from someone else.
"She's certainly a very different proposition from Westman," the Rembrandter said after a moment. "And the people she's recruited obviously have much more deep-seated grievances than Westman does."
"To put it mildly." Terekhov tipped his chair back behind his desk and cocked his head at Van Dort. "I'm not really familiar with Split," he said, "and the standard briefing on the system was fairly superficial, I'm afraid. My impression, though, is that the system's economy and government is set up quite differently from Montana's."
"They are," Van Dort said. "Economically, Montana's beef and leatherwork command decent prices even in other systems here in the Cluster, and they also ship it Shell-ward. They have some extractive industries in their asteroid belt, also for export, and they don't import all that much. By and large their industry's domestically self-sufficient for the consumer market, although their heavy industry's more limited. They import heavy machine tools, and all their spacecraft are built out-system, for example.
And their self-sufficiency stems in part from the fact that they're willing to settle for technology that's adequate to their needs but hardly cutting edge.
"Montana isn't a wealthy planet by any stretch, but it maintains a marginally favorable trade balance and there isn't actually any widespread poverty. That's an unusual accomplishment in the Verge, and whether Westman and his people want to admit it or not, the RTU's shipping strength is one reason they're able to pull it off.
"The other way Montana differs from Kornati is that it's much easier, relatively speaking, for someone who works his posterior off and enjoys at least a little luck to move from the lowest income brackets to a position of comparative affluence. These people make an absolute fetish out of rugged individualism, and there's still a lot of unclaimed land and free range. Their entire legal code and society are set up to encourage individual enterprise to use those opportunities, and their wealthier citizens look aggressively for investment opportunities.
"Kornati's a much more typical Verge planet. They don't have an attractive export commodity, like Montana's beef. There's not enough wealth in the system to attract imports from outside the Cluster, and although their domestic industry's growing steadily, the rate of increase is low. Since they have nothing to export, but still have to import critical commodities—like off-world computers, trained engineers, and machine tools—if they want to build up their local infrastructure, their balance of trade's . . . unfavorable, to say the very least. That exacerbates the biggest economic problem Kornati faces: lack of investment capital. Since they can't attract it from outside, what they really need is to find some way to pry loose enough domestic investment to at least prime the pump the way other systems have managed.
"The Dresden System, for example, was even poorer than Split thirty T-years ago. By now, Dresden's on the brink of catching up with Split, and even without the possibility of the annexation, Dresden's gross system product would probably pass Split's within the next ten T-years. It's not that Dresden's wealthier than Split—in fact, the system's actually quite a bit poorer. It's just that the Dresdeners've managed to begin a self-sustaining domestic expansion by encouraging entrepreneurship and taking advantage of every opportunity—including energetic cooperation with the RTU—that falls their way. The oligarchs on Kornati, by and large, are more interested in sitting on what they have than in risking their wealth in the sorts of enterprises which might bolster the economy as a whole. They aren't quite a kleptocracy, and that's about the best I can say for them."