by David Weber
“So do we all,” Winterfall said with a commiserating nod. “Breakwater locked horns many times with Burgundy, but always considered him an exceedingly worthy opponent.”
“Indeed,” Tarleton said again. “I wish I could help you, My Lord. Unfortunately I have no way to access His Grace’s files or documents.”
“But Prime Minister Harwich is still using that same computer, isn’t he?” Winterfall asked, frowning. “Surely Duke Burgundy’s private records were merely partitioned out of reach of standard access.”
“Of course,” Tarleton said patiently. “But those areas can only be reached via His Grace’s passwords. I don’t have those.”
“There’s no backdoor or universal access?” Winterfall pressed, crossing his mental fingers a little harder. Tarleton was his very last chance. “I understood that every computer in the Lords had something like that for use in emergencies.”
“Of course there are universals, My Lord,” Tarleton said. “But they require an order from the Queen’s Bench.” Her eyebrows went up, making her look now more like an owl than a hawk. “Do you have such an order?”
“No, though I’m sure we could get one,” Winterfall said, putting a note of frustration into his voice. “It’s Breakwater’s own document, after all, just with the Prime Minister’s notes and comments. But the Chancellor was hoping we could get those notes today, so that we could incorporate them into the final version of the proposal before tomorrow.” He shook his head. “He is not going to be happy.”
Tarleton pursed her lips. “Breakwater sent you personally?”
“He did,” Winterfall confirmed.
“And he really needs the document by tomorrow?”
“It would make our presentation that much more complete and balanced.”
Tarleton’s lip might have twitched on the word our. “If you’ll wait here a moment, My Lord, I’ll see what I can do,” she said, pushing back her chair and standing up. “It’s possible Prime Minister Harwich has some access codes that will work. Do you have a copy of the original so he can do a search for Duke Burgundy’s version?”
“Yes,” Winterfall said, handing her a data chip.
“Let me see what he can do.” She crossed to the side door leading into the Prime Minister’s office, knocked once, and opened the door. “My Lord?” she called, stepping through the opening and closing the door behind her.
Leaving Winterfall alone with his thoughts and fears.
And, maybe, some hope.
Everything else he’d tried had led to a dead-end. Over the past six weeks he’d investigated the members of the Palace’s household staff, as many as he could get to without attracting the attention and ire of the Queen’s Own. He’d looked at the Cabinet support staff. He’d checked out the technicians who kept the Lords’ computer systems running. He’d even delved into the life and history of Burgundy’s still-forlorn personal secretary, Louisa Geary. None of them had shown any signs of being Breakwater’s private information source.
Winterfall had nearly given up when he’d suddenly thought about Tarleton.
She had worked beside Burgundy for over fifteen T-years. He’d had far too much work to do; she’d had far too little. Just as Breakwater had shifted some of his background work load to Winterfall, it seemed possible, even likely, that Burgundy might have done the same with Tarleton.
And if he had, Breakwater would certainly have sniffed out that connection and done his best to exploit it.
Not that any such exploitation was obvious. Tarleton’s finances didn’t show any mysterious influxes during the years she’d worked beside Burgundy. Nor were there extra bonuses, free vacations, or any of the payoffs that traditionally accompanied such espionage.
Still, the lack of a smoke trail didn’t mean anything. Surely Tarleton was smart enough to avoid leaving such evidence behind her. And if she wasn’t that smart, Breakwater certainly was.
Winterfall was gazing at the wall behind Tarleton’s desk, idly mapping out the locations on Manticore and Sphinx represented by the various trip mementos lined up on the display shelf there, wondering if any of them was too costly for her salary, when the door opened and Tarleton returned.
“Any luck?” he asked.
“Yes and no,” Tarleton said, walking over to him and holding out his data chip. “Baron Harwich was able to find His Grace’s copy of your document. But there were no notes or comments attached.”
“Really?” Winterfall asked, frowning as he took the chip. “That’s very strange. His Grace made it clear at the time—I remember him mentioning it in two separate conversations—that he would be delivering a number of far-ranging thoughts to Breakwater.”
“Baron Harwich’s search was very thorough,” Tarleton said. “Perhaps His Grace did that work at home.”
“Maybe,” Winterfall said heavily. “In that case, we’ll just have to go with what we have tomorrow. Thank you for your time, Ms. Tarleton, and please thank the Prime Minister for me.”
“I will,” Tarleton said. “Have a good day, My Lord.”
“And you.”
It had been very nicely done, Winterfall decided as he headed down the hallway toward his own office. Nice, neat, and really pretty defensible. Harwich was notorious for not sticking to any particular work or lunch schedule, so a normal visitor would have no way of knowing whether the Prime Minister was in or not. A little judicious fuzzing of the computer’s timestamp for the search, and no one would be able to prove without a doubt that it had been Tarleton, not Harwich, who had just cracked into the Prime Minister’s computer and dug out the old document Winterfall had chosen for his test.
It was just Tarleton’s bad luck that Winterfall had spent the previous hour and a half staking out the Lords’ dining hall, waiting specifically for Harwich to appear before hurrying to the Foreign Secretary’s office for his test.
Winterfall had laid his trap carefully. And Tarleton had fallen into it.
He scowled to himself. He had Tarleton dead to rights, with enough evidence that she had Burgundy’s access codes to at least open up an official investigation. But that didn’t mean he could prove a connection between her and Breakwater, or even that an investigation would find such proof. He certainly couldn’t prove that Tarleton was the one who’d passed Breakwater the late Prime Minister’s list of possible Royal Consorts.
No, Winterfall’s work wasn’t yet done. Not by a long shot.
And he was running out of time.
The rumors and gossip continued to circle, but there had been silence from the Palace and an even deeper silence—some commentators called it ominous—from the Lords. Breakwater had said he would deliver his outrageous ultimatum to the Queen in four or five weeks. It had already been six.
And once that message was delivered, the clock would start an inexorable countdown.
Winterfall hoped the scheme would backfire, that the Lords and Commons would rally behind their Queen and against the Chancellor. But he didn’t dare risk it. However such a confrontation ended, it carried the potential to sully reputations, ruin careers, bloody all the participants, and create a blot on the Star Kingdom’s history that future generations would read about with incredulity and contempt.
The Star Kingdom didn’t deserve that. The Queen didn’t deserve that. And Winterfall was determined that it wouldn’t happen.
He just didn’t have the faintest idea how he was going to stop it.
But he would find one. Somewhere, he would find one.
And quickly.
* * *
“I trust you realize,” Chomps commented into the silence, “that this whole thing is your fault.”
Travis turned his head, being careful not to bump his chin on the collar ring of his vac suit. “Excuse me?”
“The logic’s impeccable,” Chomps said. “You’re the one who trotted out Special Order Seven and pissed her off. You’re the one who made all those promises to the Andermani and pissed her off. You’re the one who burgled the V
olsung offices and stole their files.”
“How did that one piss her off?”
“I don’t know,” Chomps admitted. “But it got us out here in the middle of nowhere, so I’m going to count it.”
“Fair enough.” Travis waved toward all the empty space pressing against the shuttle cockpit’s viewports. “Interesting, isn’t it, how this can simultaneously be the most boring spot in the universe and the least boring spot?”
“Ooh—existentials,” Chomps said. “Great. Just the thing to break up the monotony.”
“Let’s just hope the monotony continues for—how much longer?”
“To closest approach?” Chomps leaned forward from the pilot’s couch. “At our current massive velocity, I make it…four hours and two minutes.”
Travis nodded. Current massive velocity. Chomps’s pointedly casual way of suggesting Travis should have fought this particular battle a little harder.
Ironically, perhaps, of all of Travis’s recent battles with Captain Clegg, this was the one he’d been the most content to lose.
He peered out the side viewport. Walther was an unusual system, with two asteroid belts inside the orbit of Walther Prime, its single habitable planet. Their shuttle was currently en route to pass between the outer of those two asteroid belts and Prime, running a hyperbolic path that would take them to within thirty-two light-seconds of the planet.
The planet that, according to their best information, was the base of the Volsung Mercenaries.
Clegg had insisted on getting a closer look at the place before they did anything else. But that was easier said than done.
They could hardly bring Casey in for a visit. All indications were that Walther was officially owned by Telmach’s governor, unofficially occupied by the Volsungs, and almost certainly closed to any traffic that didn’t have business with the mercenaries. That didn’t preclude Clegg from coming in openly at full acceleration, blasting straight across the system, and punching back out before the Volsungs could scramble anything to hit her. But that approach would require them to stay reasonably far from Prime, which would glean them little or no useful information. Even worse, it would alert the mercenaries that there was trouble on the horizon and give them time to bolster their defenses or even abandon the base and relocate elsewhere.
Alternatively, Casey could try the stealthy approach, slipping as close to Prime as she could on a ballistic path with her wedge down. But again, there was only so close that a ship the size of a light cruiser could get before the Volsungs’ sensors picked her up.
A smaller vessel could get in closer. A smaller vessel with its power completely shut off could get closer still. A smaller, unpowered vessel crammed to the gills with sensor equipment and a couple of sets of eyes and hands to ride herd on it and make any last-second adjustments to the shuttle’s attitude to line up those sensors, and they might be in business.
It had taken a day and a half to create, jury-rig, and install the sensor equipment strapped to the shuttle’s belly. Five hours and twenty-one minutes ago, not quite a hundred twelve million kilometers behind Travis’s flight couch, Casey had translated out of hyper, accelerated to five thousand KPS, and then, just short of the hyper-limit, detached the modified shuttle on a ballistic heading which would carry it to within those thirty-two light-seconds of Prime. Even as the shuttle sailed silently away, Casey had ducked back into the alpha bands, micro hopped across the star system, and settled back into n-space on its opposite side to await their arrival at the farther hyper-limit.
Whatever personal problems Travis had with Clegg, he had to admit she was smart and knew her job. She’d had her newly-created remote reconnaissance platform repainted a sooty black which, combined with its already minimal radar signature, should make it as hard as possible to detect. She’d carefully crafted its flight path to carry it to sunward of Prime, where Walther’s torrential radiation would further conceal it, but not directly across the star’s disk, where an alert sensor operator might spot its occultation.
And over Travis’s original objections, she’d limited its initial speed to five thousand KPS instead of the ten thousand he’d originally asked for, turning a ten-hour trip into one that was twice that long.
But again, she’d had solid reasons for the decision. The charged-particle scatter in the shuttle’s shockwave would be noticeably lower at the slower speed, again decreasing the chance that any of the Volsungs would notice them. More importantly, given that he and Chomps would have only the single pass at the planet, the longer they stayed in sensor range the more data they could pull.
Travis appreciated the captain’s logic. He just hoped the sensor package would hold up its end of the bargain. Shoehorning passive and optical sensors with the necessary range and sensitivity into a small enough package—and with only the components available aboard Casey to work with—had been a nontrivial exercise. Commander Norris’s Engineering division had worked round the clock to put the whole thing together, with some unsung genius actually fabricating the electronically-steered tracking system for the optical heads on the fly
Travis had no doubt about the sensor package’s theoretical capabilities. But he really hated trusting a single system, without backup, that had never been fully tested.
But this was what they had, and this was where they were, and they would have to make do.
With the survival of the Star Kingdom very likely resting in their hands.
His stomach growled. “Lunchtime,” he announced, pushing the dark thoughts and concerns away. Reaching behind his couch to the cabinet holding their water bottles and MREs, he pulled out three of the latter and passed two of them to Chomps. “By the way?” he added.
“Yes?”
“It’s ‘you’re the one who trotted out Special Order Seven and pissed her off, Sir.’”
Chomps grinned. “Right, Sir. I’ll remember that, Sir. Toss me a bottle of water, please, Sir? This time see if you can bank it off the com panel cover. Ten bucks says you can’t.”
“You’re covered, Chief.” Snagging a bottle, Travis held it in front of his right eye and took careful aim.
* * *
“There,” Chomps said, pointing at the monitor on Clegg’s desk as he dropped a cursor into the display. He tapped in a command, and the computer-scrubbed, light-amplified image expanded to fill the screen.
“So,” Clegg said, her voice almost casual as she peered over Chomps’s shoulder. “A station.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Travis confirmed from his position at the other end of her desk. He was trying hard to read Clegg’s face and body language, and as usual he was failing miserably. “Decent size, large spin section. Perfect place for a mercenary force to set up shop.”
“What makes you think it’s Gensonne’s?” Clegg asked. “You said Governor Bilshing owned the system. Why couldn’t it be his?”
“Because of those docks,” Chomps said. “There, there, and two more around there.”
Clegg motioned, and Chomps vacated her chair. She sat down, frowning as she leaned closer to the display. “You’re sure those are docks?” she asked, tapping the images. “They look more like loading berths to me.”
“They’re Silesian MiniBs, Ma’am,” Travis said. “It’s a minimalist type of space dock. Quick and easy to set up, and relatively cheap. We heard a fair amount about them during our investigation.”
“We also got a quick look at the specs,” Chomps nodded. “Pretty ingenious design, though most of the money saving comes from skipping safety redundancies. The point is that when you add that many docks to that big an orbiting station, the setup is too large even for the most pretentious governor’s entourage. More significantly, two of those docks are way too big for anything a governor will likely be flying around in.”
“You’re saying they’re designed for battlecruisers.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Chomps said. “The problem is that there don’t seem to be any ships that size anywhere in the system. At least not within our s
ensor range, and we did a complete three-sixty sweep as we went past the planet. Given how close to the station most of their units were parked, I’m pretty sure we’d have seen any battlecruisers that were present. Problem is, we also know he has at least one battlecruiser left, and it has to be somewhere. It might be that he’s sent his big ship—or ships—on a mission.” He looked at Travis, his face tightening. “We’re hoping that mission wasn’t a second try at Manticore.”
For a moment Clegg remained silent, her expression tight, her eyes on the display and the sidebar listing of the ships Travis and Chomps had spotted around the station during their flyby.
“If the big ships are gone,” the captain said at last, “there’s no way to prove this is Gensonne’s base.”
“I think there is, Ma’am,” Chomps said, tapping the sidebar. “None of the ships had their radars or tracking systems up, but these two are obviously destroyers, and they look a lot like some of our telemetry from the battle.”
Clegg rubbed her cheek. “Fine, let’s say you’re right. What next?”
“Even MiniBs aren’t easy to break down, pack, and transport once they’ve been set up, Ma’am,” Chomps said. “So we’re pretty sure he’s planning on coming back.”
“With one or more battlecruisers,” she added pointedly.
“Presumably,” Travis said. “But they’re not here now, which means we have a window of opportunity.”
“An opportunity for…?”
“As the Chief says, this place represents a lot of money. If we swoop in and wreck everything, that should seriously cramp his warmaking ability.”
“Oh, just wreck it? Just like that?” Clegg jabbed a finger at sidebar. “With three cruisers and eight destroyers ready to take exception?”
“Actually, we think now that it’s just two cruisers and five or six destroyers, in addition to the freighters,” Travis said. “And three of them might be Silesian Ordra-class frigates. But you’re right, of course. No matter what the exact details, there’s still no way we could take all of them on.”
“Succinct analysis, TO,” Clegg said acidly. “So what are you recommending? That we head back to Manticore and ask Admiral Locatelli to loan us a couple of battlecruisers?”