Storm From the Shadows

by David Weber

  Unless some bleeding heart, or some Manty apologist, got his hands on a recording of Byng's own flag captain questioning whether or not it had been the consequence of a hostile attack at all before the order to fire was ever given.

  I never should have kept him on after they gave me the task force, Byng thought darkly. I should've beached him, gotten myself a reliable Battle Fleet captain to take his place. Someone whose competence—and loyalty—I could have relied on. The bastard's resented having someone from Battle Fleet brought in from the very beginning. He's been waiting to stick a dagger in my back all along—that's what those damned memos by what's-his-name were really all about—and now the frigging Manties and the New Tuscans have handed him the knife!

  He realized his jaw muscles were squeezing too tightly when his teeth began to ache again, and he forced himself to relax. Or to come as close to it as he could, at any rate. And, as he did, he wondered yet again just what the hell really had happened. He'd already written the rough draft of his official report, explaining what had to have happened, but that wasn't the same thing as what had actually happened.

  Much as he'd come to hate Warden Mizawa, he'd been forced to admit that the flag captain had made at least one valid point. Whatever had happened to Giselle, the damage hadn't been inflicted by a warship's broadside energy weapons, nor had it been inflicted by a laser head. It had been an old-fashioned, contact nuke, and there was absolutely no indication of how it had been delivered to the station.

  Mizawa, Byng knew, inclined to the theory that it had been an act of sabotage. The reason, according to him, that no one had been able to detect or track the delivery vector was that it had probably been hidden in a cargo container somewhere and smuggled aboard for either timed or command detonation.

  Byng could follow his reasoning, but even Mizawa had no explanation for who might have done the smuggling, or why. Byng had no doubt that the New Tuscans might well have exaggerated the provocation the Manties had been offering. If he'd had to deal with those arrogant, neobarb pricks the way the New Tuscans had, he wouldn't exactly have wasted any effort trying to find the fairest possible light in which to view their actions when he reported them to someone else, either. But exaggerating things was a far cry from blowing things up, and he simply couldn't conceive of a planetary government which would be willing to murder forty-two thousand of its own citizens just to blacken the reputation of the other side in a trade war. He'd seen some cold, calculating cynicism in his time, but that was too much.

  Yet if it hadn't been the New Tuscans themselves, who had it been? That was the question he couldn't answer . . . unless, of course, it had been the Manties all along. There was no reason why they couldn't have chosen to smuggle the warhead aboard. For that matter, the space station had been a completely non-evading target, with neither sidewalls nor an impeller wedge to protect it. They could have launched a small, purely ballistic missile at any point during their approach to the planet. If it had come in without power, with no impeller signature to give it away, it could easily have struck the space station without anyone—including the oh-so-perfect Captain Mizawa's ham-fisted sensor techs—picking it up at all. For that matter, anyone in the entire star system could have done the same thing!

  Assuming they had a motive, at any rate.

  He shook himself. This was accomplishing nothing, and he couldn't afford to accomplish nothing. If he wanted to preserve his own career—and to get to the bottom of what had really happened, while he was at it—he was going to have to figure out some way to turn the screws on Mizawa. Either that, or at least convince the New Tuscans to give him whatever domestic terrorist group might have been responsible for smuggling a weapon aboard the space station or launching his hypothetical ballistic missile.

  Personally, he preferred the notion of squeezing Mizawa. An intense, mutual, and profound hatred would have been reason enough, he supposed, but there was also the precedent to be considered. Frontier Fleet captains could not be encouraged to go around screwing over Battle Fleet admirals. Even more importantly, however, if not for that whole inconvenient business about the failure to detect missile traces or weapons fire from the Manties, there was no doubt in his mind about how the conclusions of the board of inquiry would have been shaped. The best interests of the service would have played a part, of course, as would the natural desire of a panel of senior flag officers to protect the reputation and good name of a brother officer against undeserved slander and accusations. But most importantly of all, even if the Manties hadn't actually fired the missile or planted the smuggled nuke, all of this was still their fault. They were the ones who'd been systematically harassing the New Tuscans after extending their infernal, meddling interference with free trade into yet another volume of space where they had no legitimate business. If it hadn't been for the confrontation between their so-called Star Empire and New Tuscany, Commissioner Verrochio would never have suggested Byng's visit to New Tuscany, which would have deprived the perpetrators of this heinous act (whoever they were) of the charged circumstances which had led Byng to engage the Manticorans. So, ultimately, they were the ones to blame for what had happened to them.

  He simply had to find a way to make that self-evident fact clear to people who hadn't been here at the time.

  "All right, Karlotte," he said, still looking out through the viewport, "I think we may have to take the offensive with Prime Minister Vézien and Mr. Dusserre. I don't want to make it an official confrontation or sound like I'm issuing any ultimatums, so what I want you to do is to contact Mr. Dusserre. Do it yourself. And when you do, tell him—as one chief of staff to another, as it were—that you think I'm getting impatient. Remind them of how important to New Tuscany the Navy's and OFS' friendship really is, and then ask them if they don't have some local batch of dissidents who might have deliberately set out to provoke what happened by sabotaging the space station."

  "Yes, Sir," Thimár said, but her unhappiness was evident, and Byng snorted.

  "I don't say it's the ideal solution, Karlotte. And we need to go on working on Mizawa, as well. I'm sure we can finally find a suitable crowbar if we just keep looking long enough. But if it turns out that we can't get him to see the light, we're going to need a fallback position."

  "Understood, Sir," Rear Admiral Thimár said.

  Maitland Askew sat in his cramped, cubbyhole of a cabin aboard SLNS Restitution and worried. He'd been doing a lot of that over the last two or three weeks.

  His exile to Restitution had been just as unpleasant as he'd anticipated. Admiral Sigbee had been distantly kind to him, although she'd also managed to make it clear (without saying so in so many words) that while she was prepared to do an old friend like Captain Mizawa a favor, she had no desire to get caught in the crossfire of any disputes between Mizawa and a Battle Fleet admiral. Askew wasn't even certain if she'd seen either of the memos he'd produced. He rather doubted that she would have told him, even if she had.

  As far as the other officers on her staff—or assigned to Restitution's ship's company—were concerned, he must have screwed up in some truly monumental fashion to have been so summarily reassigned to his present duties. Captain Breshnikov, Restitution's CO, appeared to share that view of things, as well. That hurt, since Askew was aware that Adolf Breshnikov and Captain Mizawa had been friends for many years. Although Breshnikov hadn't gone out of his way to personally step on Askew, it was apparent that he took a particularly dim view of an officer who could so thoroughly have pissed off someone like Mizawa as to be kicked off of Mizawa's ship.

  Yet bad as all that was, it wasn't the worst. No, the worst was the fact that he was the only person aboard Restitution who knew that the idiot wearing an admiral's uniform—the one who'd murdered the entire companies of three Manticoran destroyers in a fit of unreasoning panic—not only didn't know but didn't want to know just how nasty a surprise the Manties might have for him when they came sailing over the hyper limit with blood in their eyes.

  "I'm
telling you, Max, it was that crazy bitch Anisimovna!"

  "Calm down, Damien!" Prime Minister Vézien said sharply.

  " 'Calm down?' " Damien Dusserre repeated incredulously. "I'm telling you that our so-called good friend and ally killed forty-two thousand-plus of our citizens, including President Boutin's second cousin, and you're telling me to 'calm down'?"

  "Yes," Vézien said flatly. "And stop pacing around like some kind of wild animal and sit down, too," he added.

  Dusserre stared at him for a moment, then obeyed, settling into an armchair. Actually, he settled onto it, and he seemed to be crouched there, ready to launch himself back to his feet on an instant's notice.

  "Now," Vézien said, "take a deep breath, count to fifty, and tell me if you really want me to inform Admiral Byng that the Manpower operative we've been using to maneuver the Solarian League into attacking the Manticorans—which, I might add, he's just finished doing—was responsible for blowing up Giselle and getting him to do it in the first place?"

  Dusserre glowered and opened his mouth, but then he closed it again, and the Prime Minister nodded.

  "That's what I thought."

  "Maybe telling Byng about Anisimovna isn't the best idea in the entire galaxy," Dusserre said stubbornly, "but sooner or later we're going to have to tell him and the newsies something, Max."

  "Of course we are . . . sooner or later. But in the meantime, there are a couple of things I'd like you to consider. First, are you any closer to demonstrating how Anisimovna—or anyone else—might have done it?"

  "No," Dusserre growled. "We're still looking, but however she did it, and whatever conduit she used for it, it's buried deep. Really deep. To be honest, given that we haven't found anything more than we have in the first ten days, I don't think we'll ever be able to prove any of it."

  "All right, that brings me to my second point. Can you think of anyone besides Anisimovna who might have done it?"

  "No," Dusserre said again, but there was less certainty in his tone this time, and Vézien chuckled harshly.

  "No?" the Prime Minister shook his head. "Weren't you the one in here just a few months ago presenting that beautifully detailed briefing on our home grown 'liberation fronts' and general insurrectionary lunatics?"

  "Yes, but—"

  "Ah-ah!" Vézien waved an admonishing index finger. "I'm simply making the point that there are possible suspects other than Ms. Anisimovna. And, to be honest, the fact that you had all of her communications links tapped both before and during the Manties' visit actually gives her a better alibi."

  "Maybe it does, but that still doesn't change the fact that I'm positive, and so are a solid majority of my top analysts, that she and Manpower did it to force exactly the response she actually got out of that idiot Byng."

  "To be completely honest with you, I'm inclined to the same conclusion," Vézien admitted finally, his expression bleak.

  "What?" Dusserre blinked at him, then shook himself angrily. "If that's what you think, then why the hell have you been putting me through this whole dog and pony show for the last three weeks?!"

  "Because it doesn't matter," Vézien said heavily. Dusserre looked at him in disbelief, and the Prime Minister shrugged.

  "Look, Damien," he said. "We can't bring back the people who are dead, and we can't undo the destruction of those three Manty warships. Those are the two ugly points we're stuck with and can't change, however hard we try. So whatever we do from this point on, it has to take those two things as givens.

  "Now, we can push for a big, fancy investigation if we want to. In the end, it's going to have to conclude one of two things, though. Either Giselle was blown up by 'parties unknown,' who we still haven't been able to identify, or else it was blown up on Anisimovna's orders. If we name some domestic group as the culprits, then we're also admitting a bunch of our home grown lunatics managed to blow up an entire space station and kill the next best thing to fifty thousand New Tuscans. Do you really want to give the lunatic fringe that kind of encouragement? Personally, I'd just as soon not have our own Nordbrandt running around blowing the planet up.

  "But if we conclude it was Anisimovna, and if we go public with that, then we have to explain just why she might have wanted to do such a thing. I don't think we'd have a lot of success painting her as some sort of psychotic serial mass murderer who simply picked New Tuscany at random as the place to slaughter her next few thousand victims. In fact, the most likely scenario I can come up with would be that we wind up blowing the whistle on ourselves, expose all the sordid little details of our agreement with her and with Manpower, and end up becoming at least indirectly responsible for all of those deaths in the public's eye. And in Manticore's eyes, as well. Somehow, I don't think that would be conducive to domestic tranquility, either, and you know as well as I do what the standard Manty response to attacks on Manticoran warships has been for the last T-century. I don't think a visit from a squadron or two of Manty wallers would do a whole lot to help our system infrastructure recover from Giselle's loss, and it for damned sure wouldn't do anything for your career, or mine."

  "So what are you suggesting, instead?" Dusserre was watching the Prime Minister very closely. He was pretty sure he already knew exactly where Vézien was going with this, but some things had to be explicitly spoken.

  "I'm suggesting that from our perspective the best possible explanation is still that the Manties did it. We take the readings we got from the sensor platforms on their way in, and we go ahead and massage them to show a possible missile trace from one of the Manties to the station. We were already planning something along those lines, anyway; now we've got no choice but to go ahead and do it right here. You can be pissed off at Anisimovna all you want. In fact, I'll help you be pissed off at her, and if the opportunity should arise a few years down the road, I'd be entirely in favor of your Ministry terminating her with as much prejudice as humanly possible. At the moment, though, she's got the only life pod in sight. We've got Byng sitting right here in the system, and he's got a strong vested interest in the Manties' having been responsible for what happened to Giselle, as well. We work on him—subtly, of course—to make sure we're all still on the same page and he's ready to sign off on our Manty missile trace, and then we announce our findings that the Manties were, in fact, responsible. At that point, the entire plan is back on schedule."

  Dusserre looked like a man who'd bitten into one of his favorite fruits, only to discover half a worm. He opened his mouth, obviously to protest, then closed it again.

  "And if Manpower screws us over again somewhere down the road?" he asked sourly.

  "Then we get screwed again. But at least this time we'll be looking for it, and I don't know about you, but considering the alternatives, my willingness to consider possible screwings by our Mesan friends just got enormously expanded. On the other hand, if we get Byng on board and the League comes in like it's supposed to, gives them what they've wanted out of this all along, I honestly don't see any reason for them to shaft us again."

  Dusserre sat and chewed on that for a while, and the Prime Minister found himself wondering how much of the Security Minister's frustrated anger stemmed from the fact that they'd been out-thought (or at least out-betrayed) by Manpower, and how much stemmed from the massive loss of life aboard Giselle.

  Personally, Vézien wanted nothing more than to strangle Anisimovna with his bare hands. He'd never signed on to have his own citizens slaughtered for mere political window dressing or to force the Sollies' hand, and he'd been dead serious about having her killed later. Indeed, he was rather looking forward to it as a simple act of justice. Yet at the moment, she had them well and truly over the proverbial barrel. They were almost certain they knew who'd done it, yet they couldn't charge her with the mass murder without disastrous political and military consequences, both domestic and foreign.

  "I don't like it," Dusserre said finally, almost conversationally, admitting defeat, and Vézien barked a laugh.

  "You
don't like it? How d'you think I feel about it? If you'll recall, Nicholas and I were Anisimovna's strongest supporters in the Cabinet when she first brought this idea to us. I'll bet you she was thinking about doing something like this if it seemed advisable from the very beginning, and I never even noticed. Trust me, there's nothing I'd like better than to shoot the bitch myself, or just 'disappear' her into one of the reeducation camps up north and let her rot there for a decade or three. But we can't. Right this minute, she's got us by the short and curlies, and there's nothing we can do about it without making matters even worse."

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Aldona Anisimovna reclined in a comfortable chair, eyes closed, while haunting strains of music filled the small, luxuriously appointed compartment. She didn't simply listen to the music; she absorbed it, as if all the skin on her body were one enormous receptor.

  It was odd, a corner of her mind reflected dreamily. Of all the composers in the entire galaxy, it was a Manticoran who was her favorite. A Sphinxian, in fact. She'd never really understood why Hammerwell's skeins of melody spoke to her so strongly, yet they did, and there were times she needed that. Needed to let herself simply float upon the music, to empty herself of thoughts, of schemes and plans.

  Of guilt.

  Don't be silly, the part of her which hadn't been filled with woodwinds and the subtle interplay of brasses and strings scolded yet again. You're here as part of a strategy to provoke a war that's going to kill millions—probably billions—and you're agonizing over killing forty thousand people? You're coming a little late to that particular party, aren't you, Aldona? It certainly didn't seem to bother you very much during the planning stages.

  No, it hadn't. But that had been when she was considering it as an abstract strategy, part of a carefully crafted piece of superlative manipulation, of the grand design which was going to have the greatest, most powerful political entity in the history of mankind dancing to the Mesan Alignment's piping. From that perspective, it had been . . . exciting. Enthralling. The sheer intoxication of playing the Great Game at such stratospheric heights and for such unimaginable stakes was like some powerful drug. There was a compulsion to it, a sense of reaching out near-godlike hands to take the entire universe by the throat and force it to do her bidding.