—Report filed by Agent "Clarity" to Commonwealth Intelligence, Cathandra, Source: Classified: Most Secret
The High Side Bar served food as well as drink. Caius Elliot had rejoined Morganen in the lounge across the passageway from the High Side and suggested that they have their talk there, over dinner.
The bar's interior was dimly lit, and its transparent ceiling gave a view into space across the curve of Alba's horizon. The night hemisphere lay below, black and brooding, touched moment to moment in different areas by the gold flicker of lightning among thunderclouds.
Most of the light in the place came from a wall-sized holoview screen at one end of the main room. It was given over to news at the moment, and Morganen was mildly surprised to see scenes, obviously only a few hours old, of his own Gael Warrior docking with Alba Port.
How beautiful she is, he thought. Shimmerheat made her gleam like precious metal, and it cast an eerie play of silver light across the metallic canyon walls of the station's docking facilities. He glanced down at his hands and noted that the poor lighting revealed the faint luminosity of his own Cherenkov shimmertau. The voyage back from Trothas had taken twenty-six days, all of it in T-space, leaving Morganen with a considerable charge of his own to burn off.
The bar was crowded and noisy. Most of the patrons were either starmen from the Gael ships or Imperial Marines recently arrived in the Cluster. Elliot led the way to a table partially hidden from the rest of the room by a potted tangleleaf tree. They both ordered Alban scotch from the table's voice pick-up and paid for it by inserting Morganen's perscomp credit disk into the reader slot.
"I'm sorry to make you pick up the tab," Elliot said carefully. "Especially since it was I who invited you. But the IS might be able to track me through this." He tapped the perscomp strapped to his own wrist. "I'd just as soon they not know I was talking to you."
"IS?"
"TOG Internal Security." He looked around the darkened room carefully, then let his eyes stray to the HV on the far wall. "This is a good place to talk," he added. "They'll have some trouble picking us up here. Assuming we've been followed, it will be difficult to separate our conversations from the noise of the HV and the crowd." As if to emphasize his point, a barking chorus of laughs sounded from a nearby table, where Imperial Marines were drinking one another's health. Elliot worked at the switch of the table's intercom, making sure it was off. "They could listen in through these things, of course, but it's not likely. Unless they know exactly where we are and are watching us at this moment, they'd have to record and listen to the conversations at every table in the place, and I don't think they 're that close to me yet. Just to make certain..." He punched a combination of numerals into his perscomp, then casually rested the device, still strapped to his left wrist, close by the voice pick-up for the table. "It's broadcasting white noise now. If anyone does listen in, they' 11 hear what sounds like ocean waves and assume the circuit is broken. But keep your voice low, please. A shotgun mike or parabolic antennae could still pick our voices out from across the room."
Morganen felt a prickling at the back of his neck. Damn the man, he was making him imagine things now. What did he have to do with TOG's security forces?
When a pretty, scantily clad waitress arrived with their drinks, Morganen took the time to admire her legs. He had not seen a woman in several months now, and the realization that certain biological drives were distracting him added to his frustration with Elliot.
"Well, what is it you want to talk about?" he said in a gruff voice to mask his discomfort, as soon as the woman had gone. "Something
about Captain Fraser, you said."
Elliot nodded, taking up his drink. "The court-martial was a sham. He was set up to take that fall."
Morganen's eyebrow arched higher. "This is news? The court was a closed session and neither the charges nor the results were publicized, but the story had spread throughout the fleet by the time we boosted for T-space. He was convicted of mutiny for disobeying that Overlord's order to bombard Trothas, wasn't he?"
"And for seizing the ship after he had been relieved...and for threatening you with a weapon...and several other particulars."
"I don't recall filing charges in the matter," Morganen said softly. "Hell, I tried to support him when they questioned me about it, but they wouldn't ask the right questions. Said I was out of order when I tried to tell them the way it was. At the end of it all, they wouldn't even tell me what the verdict was."
"You're lucky they didn't enlarge the charges to include you, my friend. Fortunately, all they wanted was Fraser."
"But why? For God's sake, why do they want to destroy him?" Morganen shook his head, baffled. "And who the hell are 'they,' anyway? TOG Internal Security?"
Elliot leaned back in his chair, his lips pursed. "The question is a bit complicated. Um...how much do you know of the Treaty of Kinkaid?"
It was Morganen's turn to shrug. "As much as any Gael, I suppose. We become provisional citizens of your Empire if we build and man a battleship squadron for you."
"You don't approve?"
"Why shouldn't I?"
"I don't know. But your face suggests you don't care for the idea. Or is it TOG you don't approve of?"
"I'm not sure I see the sense of galactic empires, Citizen Elliot. Space is...very, very large." He suppressed a shudder. So much dark. "Too large for any one world to be able to rule effectively."
"Ah, but you're wrong, Commander. Terra has been ruling most of the Galaxy now for a very long time. It was our Empire that let us defeat the Ssora and the KessRith, that made it possible for Man to assume his destiny among the stars."
"Yeah, well..." Morganen took a swallow of his drink. "Look, what's your point, Citizen?"
In the dim light, Morganen could just make out Elliot's eyes closing. "The point is that Terra is expanding her empire here, tonight ...and she is using Kendric Fraser as her instrument to do so."
"Huh? How?"
He nodded toward the HV screen, where the announcer was discussing the arrival of a contingent of Imperial Legionnaires on Alba to assist the local militia in case of civil disturbance. There had been a near riot in the capital, it seemed, when news that negotiations over full Imperial citizenship for all Albans had been suspended.
"I've been watching the news, waiting for them to say something about Kendric's court-martial. They haven't yet. They may wait a day or two before letting it out."
Morganen shook his head. "Citizen Elliot, I don't understand you at all."
Elliot lifted his drink, then stared into the glass, swirling the amber liquid thoughtfully. "Commander, as a military man, give me your assessment. What would happen if your Gael Cluster got into a war with TOG? How long could your Navy hold out?"
The question was so unexpected and so absurd that Morganen burst out laughing. "Oh, I don't know. How long would it take you to muster your fleet here? Maybe twenty seconds after that. Maybe."
"But you do have a substantial navy."
"You know as well as I do what we have, Citizen. A handful of militia patrol vessels. Strictly insystem, sublight stuff. A couple of T-space-capable explorers and patrol ships. And one solitary Battleship Squadron, consisting of ten ships, which we have just given to you. Just about everything we had went into that squadron for TOG."
"Ten ships against a Galactic empire."
"Last I heard, Citizen, TOG had something like 100,000 battleship squadrons alone. Not good odds."
"In a head-to-head, stand-up fight, no. But even a single battleship squadron could cause serious trouble for the Empire, if it were competently led, carefully handled. Oh, sooner or later, it would be hunted down and trapped, but it could cause a great deal of damage in the meantime. Perhaps the greatest damage would be to the Empire's. . .um.. .call it her invulnerability. People would learn that someone was fighting TOG, that TOG was having trouble bringing you to bay. If you managed to knock out a TOG battleship squadron—or two —word would spread that TOG could
be beaten. Other potential rebels would be encouraged to try the same thing."
"But...why bring all this up? Alba isn't fighting TOG. Ha! After what happened to Trothas? We're not about to! Hell, the whole damn Cluster is overjoyed that it's going to become a part of TOG! Did you hear the news a few minutes ago? Riots because the citizenship talks were suspended!"
"I heard," Elliot said. "Still, wouldn't you say that there are basically two ways of taking over someone else's government? You can beat him in open war or you can maneuver so cleverly that he just hands you what you want."
"Are you talking about the Gael Squadron?"
"Among other things. Consider this. If TOG had come along and ordered the Gaels to become part of the Empire, you might have resisted. Fought. You're a warrior culture, after all, with a long, tough history of surviving among these stars. And that heritage is still in your blood. Don't get me wrong! You'd have died if you' d fought, but TOG would have lost ships and men and time. Those are not things the Empire can afford to lose if it is to continue its wars with the KessRith and the Commonwealth on the far side of the Galaxy.
"TOG also might have lost your worlds. Despite what happened at Trothas, the Empire is not eager to squander something as precious as a Terranlike world, Commander. The Imperials want Trothas to be a lesson to other would-be rebel worlds, especially those that might profit by cooperating with the KessRith...but it will be a long, long time before Trothas is of use to anyone again."
"A lesson to rebels? The people on Trothas had already surrendered!"
"Perhaps the Admiral at the scene felt the surrender couldn't be trusted. In any case, if you had defended your five systems against us, we might have brought five scorched, radioactive cinders into TOG instead of five useful, viable, pleasant worlds."
Morganen smiled in spite of himself. "We Gaels are known to be a stiff-necked bunch, Citizen."
"How much better for TOG then if it could assimilate the Gael Confederation peacefully."
"But we've petitioned you to let us join TOG! The Treaty of Kinkaid was signed over twenty years ago! Just how much assimilation did you have in mind?"
Elliot took another sip of his drink, and grimaced. "Mmm. Good question. Consider this also. The Gael Cluster spends years building a battleship squadron. They pour resources into the project but consider it money well-spent, because they gain considerable new knowledge from TOG—shipbuilding plans, weaponry, power systems, and much more, I should imagine."
Morganen nodded. "We've been rebuilding every fusion plant on the Five Worlds since we learned how you do it. We found we had some catching up to do after our few thousand years in the Dark."
"I'm sure. Next, TOG invites your best young men to crew the squadron, offers them the chance to explore the Galaxy, to become a part of the Empire...to help defend the Empire against her enemies. Some of the Cluster's young men get the chance to attend Imperial military academies."
"Go on."
"Imperial policy does not allow any one part of the Empire to operate its own fleet, Commander."
"I'd heard there was a special dispensation in our case."
"You heard right. But why should that dispensation have been grantee^?"
"If it hadn't, I don't suppose our young men would have volunteered to crew the squadron. They wouldn't have been anxious to serve on crews mixed in with total strangers—foreigners, so to speak."
"Exactly. So they're given their chance to show what they can do. The Captain of the battleship is one of their own, trained at Grelfhaven. He's also a carefully selected Imperial officer, one of five thousand children once taken from the Cluster for schooling elsewhere, and with Imperial Academy training. Better than that, he's a hero in his own right, victor in a desperate battle against the KessRith, and hailed by the Cluster press as the Hero of Tallifiero, the greatest fighter of the age."
"Sounds familiar. Then what?"
"The squadron is assembled and deployed. It is defeated."
"Huh? But that..."
"It is defeated, suffers serious losses, particularly among its fighter pilots, who are often among the best and bravest officers in the fleet."
"But we weren't defeated."
"No. Somehow, that part of the plan went wrong."
"You...you mean, the Empire wanted to lose at Trothas?"
"Not the whole fleet, no. There was a real rebellion going on at Trothas V. It had to be put down and quickly, lest it spread elsewhere. But the Gael squadron was to have been badly bloodied...deployed alone against a heavily defended rebel world guarded by a large number of KessRith warships."
"The Gael Squadron could have been wiped out. You wanted that!"
"Not me, personally, no. I didn't even learn of it until a few days ago. What certain parties wanted was a chance to put Kendric Fraser on trial for incompetence."
"Incompetence! Fraser?"
"Yes, Fraser! Think how it would look. The Cluster's best, their hero, the Lion of Tallifiero, leads the Gael Squadron into battle and nearly loses it all. Or maybe he disobeys orders or simply doesn't handle his ship to suit the Commodore. Maybe the Commodore finds some other fault with the other Captains because Flag Captain Fraser can't keep them in line. Whatever the pretext, they would have broken him."
"And they did, after all!"
"The ironic part of it is that when Kendric all but won the Battle of Trothas for TOG, he'd beaten the people who were trying to break him! He couldn't have known about the plot, of course, but he'd beaten them, nonetheless! With Severno dead and him a hero, there was no one to discredit him! But then he turned around and walked right back into the trap by refusing a direct order from an Overlord who happened to be there. He escaped one trap, then neatly about-faced and trapped himself."
"Considerate of him." Morganen's fingers drummed against the table. He was thinking of the log entry he had destroyed. That had been how they had originally planned to ruin Kendric Fraser.
"And foolish. His decision to disobey could not have saved Trothas."
"So? Why are you telling me all of this? Your mysterious 'they' has discredited him. Now what?"
"It will be announced soon. Any day now, I should imagine. The great experiment... a local government organizing and crewing a naval squadron on its own... will be discredited by Fraser's mutiny. The Gael Squadron will be broken up, those ten ships distributed through the Fleet. Within a few months, the individual crewmen will be transferred from ship to ship until they're swallowed up among a hundred thousand other squadrons."
"The Squadron will be disbanded?"
"That's right. TOG will have ten new ships for free. And they'll have the excuse they need to take over a bigger and bigger share of the Gael Cluster's own government as well."
"They couldn't!"
"Why not? All it takes is one small faction in the government to invite the Empire in. Oh, there might be a protest raised, but TOG will have the moral authority of a benevolent parent. 'Now, then, we tried to do it your way and it didn't work, see? If it hadn't been for Fraser, maybe things would have been different,' and so on."
"So Captain Fraser becomes the scapegoat for those of us who don't like it."
"Exactly. Within ten or twenty years, there will be plans afoot to move the entire native population of this Cluster."
"What?" Morganen's shout caused heads in the bar to turn, and it was an uncomfortable couple of seconds before the noise in the place
resumed its former level. Morganen leaned forward and added in a harsh whisper, "You can't mean that!"
"The Empire cannot afford to have enclaves like the Gael Cluster, my friend. Places where people have grown up for centuries with no larger loyalty than to their own small planet. You people didn't even know the outside universe existed until a few years ago. I imagine you'll be dispersed to other worlds gradually."
"My God, how could such a thing be done? There are billions of Gaels..."
"Oh, I saw a report on one of your local HV broadcasts a few days ago
about the inevitability of supernovae occurring here in the Gael Cluster. The commentator talked about how an exploding star could destroy all life in the Cluster and about how lucky it was that you'd discovered TOG when you had, because TOG would certainly be willing to move you to other worlds throughout the Galaxy."
Morganen felt a chill along his spine. He knew that what he was hearing in such distressing detail were plans for the end, not only of his Navy career, but of his entire culture, his way of life. He felt a yawning inner emptiness that he'd not known since Cara died. "They can't do that."
"It has already begun."
"Why...why are you telling me all this?"
"You seem to think of me as the Empire, Commander. I suppose that's because you can see me, hear me. I give voice to something that is so large, no one man can see or hear all of it.
"But I am not TOG." Elliot glanced to the left and right, as though checking for unseen listeners. "Not anymore. Not for some time, in fact, though I've kept my position and continued to work in the Governor's administration here. I suppose I thought I might be able to do some good."
"What changed you?"
"Lots of things. Little things, mostly. Realizing how a Galaxy full of worlds and cultures is being forced into a single, narrow, thick-walled mold by TOG. Seeing what TOG has been doing to people.. .to good people."
"Like Kendric?"
Elliot nodded. "Kendric was like a son. His father was my friend... and my supporter in...certain political battles, back when TOG first came to your Cluster. Ramsay saved my life once—he died doing it— and I've owed him that debt ever since. I don't know. Maybe back in those days, twenty-some years ago, I thought there really was a chance I for free peoples to find a measure of autonomy and freedom within
TOG. I don't believe that anymore. And I certainly can't be party to something as foul as what they've done to young Fraser."
"So you're telling me. What can I do?"
"I was hoping you could tell me."
"Eh?"
"I can tell you where they sent Kendric. Maybe even give you computer plans of the facility where he's being held."
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