by David Weber
"Well, Willard," he told MaCuill, keeping his tone as light as possible, "I suppose I'd better view the message, hadn't I?"
This time he did seat himself in his command chair. He let it adjust comfortably under him, then nodded to MaCuill.
"Go ahead, Willard."
"Yes, Sir."
The communications officer pressed a button, and a face appeared on Byng's display. It was a face he'd seen before, and his lips tightened as he recognized Vice Admiral Gold Peak from their exchange at Monica.
"Good morning, Admiral Byng," she said coldly from his display. "I'm sure you remember me, but for the official record, I am Vice Admiral Gold Peak, Royal Manticoran Navy, commanding officer Tenth Fleet, and I am here in response to your unprovoked attack upon units of the Royal Navy in this star system on October twenty-fifth. Specifically, I am referring to your destruction of the destroyers Roland, Lancelot, and Galahad, under the overall command of Commodore Ray Chatterjee, which had been sent to New Tuscany for the express purpose of conveying a diplomatic note from my Queen's government to that of New Tuscany. We have detailed sensor records of the event. As such, Admiral, we know our vessels were not even at battle readiness. Their impeller wedges were down, their side walls were inactive, and their broadside weapons had not been cleared away. In short, they posed absolutely no threat whatsoever to your command, and their personnel weren't even in skinsuits, at the moment you cold-bloodedly opened fire on them and completely destroyed them.
"This, as I'm sure you must be aware, constitutes not merely a cowardly act of murder, but also an act of war."
That cold, precise voice paused, and Byng felt his facial muscles congeal. If they truly did have sensor records showing what Gold Peak claimed, then they'd be able to make a damnably good argument—at least to anyone who hadn't been here, who didn't have the experience to set events into a proper context—that his response had been . . . unjustified. But for any so-called flag officer of a pissant little neobarb navy to accuse the Solarian League Navy of committing an act of war—!
"Neither Prime Minister Alquezar nor Governor General Medusa desire additional bloodshed," Gold Peak continued. "However, they would be derelict in their duties and in their responsibilities to my Queen if they did not take the strongest measures to clearly establish responsibility for these actions, and if they did not demand accountability of those who are, in fact, responsible for them. Accordingly, I am instructed to require you to stand down your vessels. I am not demanding their permanent surrender to the Royal Manticoran Navy. I am, however, informing you that you will stand them down; you will make arrangements with the New Tuscan government to transfer all but a skeleton anchor watch of your personnel to the surface of the planet; you will stand by to be boarded by parties of Royal Marines and Royal Navy personnel, who will take temporary possession of your vessels and custody of your tactical data; and you will not delete any tactical information relevant to this incident from your computers. Your vessels will remain in this star system, under Manticoran control, until a Manticoran board of inquiry has determined precisely what happened here and who bears the responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of Manticoran personnel."
Despite himself, Byng felt his eyes flaring impossibly wide in disbelief as Gold Peak rolled out that litany of arrogant, intolerable demands.
"Special Minister Bernardus Van Dort is here aboard my flagship as the direct representative of the the Talbott Quadrant's Prime Minister, Governor, and Cabinet. He will present a formal note to you, recapitulating the points I've just made. He will also present a similar note to the New Tuscan government, informing them that the Star Empire of Manticore requires its cooperation in this investigation, that none of our requirements are negotiable, and that, should New Tuscany prove wholly or partially responsible for what happened here, it, too, will be held to account by the Star Empire."
She paused once more, her eyes as unyielding as her face, and her voice was harder still when she continued.
"I will reach New Tuscany orbit approximately one hour and thirty-five minutes after your receipt of this message. I require a response from you, accepting my requirements, within the half-hour. Should you choose to reject my government's requirements, I am authorized to use deadly force to compel you to change your mind. I have no more desire to kill Solarian personnel than anyone else, Admiral Byng, but Manticoran personnel have already been killed in this star system. I will not hesitate, should you choose to resist, to employ whatever force is necessary and inflict whatever casualties are required to compel your compliance. I will expect to hear from you within thirty standard minutes of now.
"Gold Peak, clear."
"Oh, fuck!"
"My own thoughts exactly," Alesta Cardot told Maxime Vézien tartly, despite the fact that the foreign minister, who was something of a bluenose, would normally have found his language offensive. At the moment, however, she had other things on her mind, and she'd just finished playing Bernardus Van Dort's transmission—which had been remarkably like Michelle Henke's message to Admiral Byng, aside from one small variation—for the Prime Minister.
"They know we're fronting for Manpower," Vézien said bitterly.
"That isn't exactly what they said, Max," Cardot disagreed. "What they said is that they know Manpower was behind what happened last year, and that it was using Monica as a front. The implication is certainly that they believe we're doing the same thing, but they didn't say they know we are."
Vézien's expression must have betrayed his opinion of such semantic hairsplitting, but Cardot shook her head.
"Think about it, Max. They were very specific about what they know about what happened here three weeks ago. They told us they have sensor data, they told us they know the Sollies fired on them, and they told us the exact status of their own ships at the moment they were destroyed. Those are facts, and they presented them as facts. If they had solid evidence that we were in Manpower's back pocket, they would have said so."
"All right, so they don't know—yet," Vézien said. "But they obviously suspect very strongly. And if we give in to these demands of theirs, any investigation is probably going to come up with the proof you've just said they don't have. In which case, we're fucked."
It was a sign of her own tension that Cardot didn't even turn a hair at his choice of verbs. What she did do was to shake her head again.
"Look, you told me to be thinking about ways to convince the Manties we didn't have anything to do with Byng's decision to kill their destroyers, right? Well, I think this is probably the best shot at that we're going to have."
"And I think it's the best way to hand them the proof that we damned well helped set it up, whether we meant to or not!" Vézien shot back.
"You're probably right about their finding the proof," Cardot acknowledged. "But I think you may be missing the most critical point of their linking us with Monica."
"Which is?" Vézien asked skeptically.
"Which is that given everything that happened in the Cluster and at Monica, they were actually very restrained in the terms they imposed on Monica. Had the Monicans surrendered those Solly battlecruisers to Terekhov when he initially demanded that, I doubt a shot would have been fired. I doubt Tyler would've been allowed to keep his battlecruisers, but nobody would have been killed on either side, and his navy wouldn't have been totally demolished. I think one of the points of this message from Van Dort is to signal us that they aren't interested in kicking us any harder than they have to. I don't think they like us very much, and I don't think we'll be getting out of this without some serious repercussions, and probably some painful reparations, but I doubt very much that they want to impose destructive sanctions against us if they can avoid it. If nothing else, I don't think they want to be responsible for what's likely to happen on this planet if they punch us so hard the government collapses. And I know they don't want to be seen as the imperialistic conquerors of New Tuscany—not after how hard they've worked on demonstrating to the galaxy tha
t the annexation was the result of a voluntary, spontaneous request from within the Cluster. And you just put your finger on the most critical point of all a moment ago."
"I did?" He looked at her blankly, and she shrugged.
"You said that we've helped to set up what happened here 'whether we meant to or not.' I submit that the best we can possibly hope for at this point is to prove that we didn't mean for that to happen. Whether we admit it, or they find proof of it, or not, they already know we were fronting for Manpower. That's a given, Max, and they're eventually going to take action against us on that basis, whether we cooperate right now or not. If we want to have any control over what they do to us, we'd better start distancing ourselves from any intentional shedding of Manticoran blood just as fast as we possibly can. However restrained they may want to be, for whatever reasons, if we can't distance ourselves from that, they won't have any choice but to up the ante all around."
"So you're suggesting we should tell them we intend to accept their conditions? Is that what you're saying?"
"I'm giving you what I believe would be the consequences of our accepting them," Cardot replied. "Whether or not those consequences are acceptable isn't my decision. You're Prime Minister. I think this falls into your lap, not mine."
"Oh, dear," Aldona Anisimovna murmured as she finished replaying the two messages her taps into the New Tuscan communications system had relayed to her yacht. "This is looking unpleasant, isn't it?"
The excitement of playing the Great Game was upon her once more, and her eyes gleamed with malicious satisfaction as she contemplated the Manticoran demands. This wasn't working out exactly according to her playbook, but then, things seldom did. And even if it wasn't perfect, she was confident it was close enough to get the job done.
Her own analysis of the players suggested there was a better than even chance the New Tuscans would choose to comply with the demands levied against them. That was unfortunate, but the speed of the Manticoran response made it much more probable than she really cared to admit. On the other hand, it didn't come as a total surprise, either. She'd hoped to have more time in hand, more time to work at binding New Tuscany firmly enough into the Alignment's web to make it impossible for Vézien to bolt. But the space station's destruction had put the New Tuscans' backs up more than the mission planners had hoped, and she'd always estimated that the Manties were going to respond more quickly than either the New Tuscans or Byng anticipated. Unlike either of them, she'd assumed from the beginning that the Manties would be intelligent enough to leave a watchdog out near the hyper limit, and the fact that no one in New Tuscany had detected any such watchdog hadn't shaken that assumption.
That was one reason she'd moved out to her yacht this early. Keeping herself safely out of the New Tuscan authorities' reach in the event of a premature Manticoran arrival (and any messy little details associated therewith) had seemed only prudent. And she'd always intended to be safely aboard when the Manties really did arrive, since it was no part of her plan to be stuck in New Tuscany when Manticore finished kicking Byng's ass and took possession of the system.
The only real question in her mind at this point was whether or not Byng was going to have his posterior kicked as soundly as the Alignment hoped before he surrendered to Gold Peak's demands. The idiot clearly still had no idea of what he was up against. Given his disposition and his attitude towards Manties in general, that meant he was unlikely to give in until he'd been properly . . . convinced. Which she felt quite confident Gold Peak would be simply delighted to do.
"I think it's time to go, Kyrillos," she told her bodyguard.
"Yes, Ma'am," Taliadoros replied. "I'll tell the captain immediately."
"Thank you," Anisimovna said, and leaned back, contemplating the possibilities once again.
Her yacht was scarcely the only vessel departing New Tuscany orbit. The word had already gone out over the public information channels, and no civilian vessel wanted to be anywhere in the vicinity if it was possible warships were going to be firing missiles at each other. In fact, New Tuscan traffic control had actually ordered all civilians to clear the volume of space around the planet as a precautionary measure. That was another reason Anisimovna had made certain she was already aboard ship. And it was why the "yacht's" impeller nodes had been kept permanently hot. It meant they could get underway immediately yet be safely hidden in the underbrush of the other evacuees, which was precisely what she intended to do.
I wonder if we'll still be in our sensor range of the planet when the first missile flies? she thought. In a way, I'll be sorry to miss it if we're not. But I don't suppose anyone can have everything.
Chapter Forty-Four
The silence in the conference room deep inside Mount Royal Palace was profound as the report from Augustus Khumalo and Estelle Matsuko ended and the holo display blanked. Simultaneity normally had very little meaning over interstellar distances, especially given how long it took simply to send dispatch boats back and forth, but this time that concept had a very real meaning. Given the distances involved, all of the watchers knew, Michelle Henke and Aivars Terekhov must even then be preparing for their alpha translation back into normal-space just outside the New Tuscany hyper limit. And that meant that even as they sat here, the Star Empire of Manticore might be firing its very first shots in the war no sane star nation could ever want to fight.
No one said anything for several seconds, and then, predictably, Queen Elizabeth III cleared her throat.
"You know," she said almost whimsically, "when you and the Admiralty sent Mike off to Talbott, Hamish, I thought we might be sending her to a relatively quiet little corner of the galaxy while she recuperated."
Hamish Alexander-Harrington, the Earl of White Haven and First Lord of Admiralty, produced a rather sour chuckle.
"We never said it was going to be a 'quiet little corner,' " he told his Queen. "On the other hand, given the way people seemed to be pulling in their horns after Monica, I never thought it was going to get quite this . . . interesting, either."
"No?" White Haven's younger brother, William Alexander, Baron Grantville and Prime Minister of the Star Kingdom of Manticore, clearly wasn't going to be producing any chuckles, sour or otherwise. His expression was profoundly unhappy, and he shook his head. " 'Interesting' isn't the word I'd choose, Ham. It doesn't even come close to what this little vest pocket nuke is going to do to us!"
"No, it doesn't, Willie," Honor Alexander-Harrington told her brother-in-law, and her expression was almost as unhappy as his. She reached up to stroke the ears of the cream and gray treecat stretched across the back of her chair. "In fact, I've got a really bad feeling about all this."
"Other than the fact that we've just lost three destroyers and their entire crews, you mean, I take it, Honor?" Elizabeth asked.
"That's exactly what I mean." Honor's mouth tightened, and she made a small throwing-away gesture with her right hand. "Don't take this wrongly, but after what happened to us—and to the Havenites—in the Battle of Manticore, the loss of life is of less concern to me than the future implications. I don't like saying that, and when I do, I'm not speaking as someone named Honor Alexander-Harrington; I'm speaking as Admiral Alexander-Harrington, the officer in command of Home Fleet."
"I understand," the Queen said, reaching out to lay one hand on Honor's left wrist. "And, to be honest, I agree with you one hundred percent. I think that may be one reason I'm making weak witticisms as a way to keep from looking at it squarely. But I suppose that's exactly what we need to do, isn't it?"
"To put it mildly," Grantville agreed.
He gazed at the backs of the hands folded on the tabletop in front of him for a second or two, then looked up at the other three people seated at the table. Sir Thomas Caparelli, the First Space Lord, sat to White Haven's right. Honor sat to her husband's left, between him and the Queen, and Second Space Lord Patricia Givens sat just to Grantville's immediate left, between him and Caparelli. Sir Anthony Langtry, the Star Kin
gdom's Foreign Secretary, completed the gathering, sitting between Grantville and the Queen.
"Anything new on that business in Torch, Pat?" the Prime Minister asked Givens, whose duties included command of the Office of Naval Intelligence.
"No, not really," she admitted. "All we know for certain at this point is that what looks like it must have been most of the StateSec 'refugee fleet' that had taken service with Manpower was committed to the attack. Rear Admiral Rozsak intercepted it, and it looks like he and Barregos got even more tech transfer from Erewhon than we'd thought. Or got the new stuff into production faster, at any rate. I'm sure that came as a really nasty surprise to the other side, but he still got hammered hard. Frankly, quite a few of my analysts—and I was one of them, for that matter—were surprised when he waded into them that way. I think it's the clearest evidence we've had to date that he and Governor Barregos take their treaty obligations seriously."
"But there's not much question Manpower was behind it?"
"No question at all, really," Givens agreed. "We've been aware ever since Terekhov took out Anhur in Nuncio that Manpower's been picking up every StateSec refugee it could. We never expected it to use them for something like this, but everything we already knew and interrogation of survivors all says Manpower was the mastermind behind the attack."
"I see where you're going with this, Willie," Honor said. "You're wondering if the timing is a coincidence or not, aren't you?"
"Yes, I am." Grantville snorted and shook his head at his sister-in-law. "Mind you, I'm not sure I'm not succumbing to terminal paranoia, but after what happened in the Quadrant and at Monica, having obvious Manpower proxies suddenly busy in our own backyard just at the same time things seem to be going to hell in New Tuscany strikes me as a particularly ominous coincidence."