by Дэвид Вебер
The people seated around the table looked right at home in the understated elegance and clean beauty of the conference room's decor, and for very good reason. Every one of the others was actually rather more physically attractive than Detweiler himself, offering a level of physical beauty that was really quite remarkable. In fact, it was even more remarkable when one saw them all gathered in one place, but that was inevitable. The advantage which physical attractiveness bestowed upon any politician, regardless of the political system in which he worked, appeared to be one of the unchanging verities of the human condition.
Counting Detweiler himself, there were an even dozen people seated at the table and, extraordinarily unusual though it was, none of the others was accompanied by a single attendant or aide. It was probably the first time that had been true for most of them in at least twenty T-years, Detweiler thought, which was fairly amusing. He himself had always been as hands-on as possible, and he actually treasured solitude in which to get on with his current project. Most of the others had succumbed, to one extent or another, to the desire to underscore their importance (if only to themselves) by surrounding themselves with at least a small core of assistants. Yet this time around, he was flanked by three of his sons—Benjamin, Collin, and Daniel—while the others sat unaccompanied.
On the other hand, it wasn't as if his sons were there to bolster his importance. There was no need for that, not in this room on this day, and all the others knew the younger Detweilers were present as working members of their council, not mere aides or go-fors. In fact, they were effectively cabinet officers in an extraordinarily powerful star nation . . . even if none of the rest of the galaxy happened to have heard of it.
Although that, of course, would be subject to change . . . at the right moment.
Which was approaching rapidly, he thought, and cleared his throat.
It wasn't a very loud sound, but the conference room's acoustics were as phenomenal as the rest of its design. Various small, quiet-voiced side conversations came to an abrupt end, and heads turned as their owners looked in his direction.
"Well," he said in a deliberately understated tone, "I suppose it's time we get down to business, isn't it?"
Every one of the nine men and two women seated around that table with him was the head of state of a star system-wide government, whereas Albrecht Detweiler had no official title. For that matter, the number of people who even knew he existed was minute. But there was no question, as they nodded in response to his comment, who was in charge in that conference room.
"I know all of you have heard preliminary reports on the success of Oyster Bay," he continued. "Benjamin here"—he nodded sideways at his oldest son—"will give you the official report in a few minutes. I can tell you already, however, that the preliminary accounts have actually understated the damage we did to the Manties and the Graysons. I'm not prepared to call it a total success, but that's more because I always want that little bit higher level of accomplishment than because of any failure or shortcoming in the way this operation was planned and executed.
"Benjamin and Collin will also be briefing you on Kolokoltsov and the rest of the Quintet's decision to sign off on Rajampet's attack on the Manticoran home system." He smiled thinly. "Needless to say, that operation's going to be somewhat less successful than our own was."
A quiet chuckle ran around the table, and his smile grew broader for a moment. Then his expression sobered.
"What all this means, of course, is that it's time. I'm sure none of you are surprised to hear me say that I'm formally activating the Alignment's constitutional agreements today."
It was very, very quiet in the conference room, and he let the quiet linger. There was no need for any theatrical emphasis with these people. Every single one of them was the product of an alpha line—most of them of lines almost as old and highly developed as the Detweiler genotype itself—and they'd been aware for the better part of two decades that the end towards which they and their ancestors had worked was almost certain to come in their own lifetimes.
He considered them one at a time.
Stanley Hurskainen, the president of the Republic of Mannerheim, sat to Albrecht's right. He was a reassuringly solid presence, a hundred and ninety centimeters tall, with powerful shoulders, intense brown eyes, and dark, straight hair. No one could have been more cosmopolitan than he, yet he wore his hair in a wrist-thick braid that fell below his shoulders, like a throwback to some barbarian warrior ancestor. It should have struck the eye as anachronistic; instead, it suited him just as much—and just as inevitably, somehow—as his exquisite tailoring and perfect manicure. Which was probably appropriate, given that the Mannerheim System-Defense Force was far and away the most powerful of the Alignment's component navies.
Chancellor Walter Ford, who headed the most colorfully named of the alignment's political units—the Second Chance Republic of the Matagorda System—sat on the other side of Hurskanien. Ford was the oldest person in the room, a good twenty-five T-years older than Albrecht himself, and his seniority often made him a sort of unofficial spokesman for the others. He'd allowed his dark brown hair to go silver which, coupled with his warm brown eyes and pleasantly worn-looking face, made him someone any HD director would cheerfully have cast as anyone's favorite uncle, but there was a deadly quick brain behind that comfortable, low-key faзade.
Clinton Thompson, King Clinton III of the Kingdom of New Madagascar, sat to Ford's right. The king was a dynamic-looking, striking man, with auburn hair, coal-black eyes, and an intense, focused face. He sat with a curiously catlike relaxation which was both total and yet seemed poised for instant motion, and he had the powerful wrists of the champion-grade fencer he'd been before he ascended to the throne.
Board Chairman Joan Kubrick, one of the only two women in the current generation of the Alignment's heads of state, sat between the king and Anton Polanski. Kubrick was the smallest person in the room. In fact, at just under a hundred and fifty-five centimeters, she was downright tiny, extraordinarily petite and delicate looking. Which was deceiving. With her chestnut hair, blue eyes, and dark complexion, she looked almost childlike, belying the enhancement of her musculature and skeleton.
Polanski was the system president of the Line System, and if Ford was the oldest person in the room, Polanski was the second-youngest. Only Daniel was younger than he, but Polanski had established himself as a concert-level guitarist before he followed his family tradition and entered politics. He had golden hair, green eyes, a very pale complexion, and fine hands, with long, slender fingers.
Roman Hitchcock, the president of the Visigoth System, was the most rugged looking of the people around the table, at least as far as his features were concerned. He had black hair, dark-gray eyes, and a strong nose, but in comparison to Hurskainen, who could easily have served as an artist's model for a barbarian king, Hitchcock was not only ten centimeters shorter, but built for speed and agility instead of raw power.
Nikomedes Kakadelis, Chief Counsel of the Democratic Republic of Thrace, was the only person there whose appearance really suited the traditional Old Earth ethnicity of his name. He had dark, curly hair, blue eyes, a strong nose and chin, and a slightly olive complexion. He was barely eight centimeters taller than Kubrick, but that was the only physical similarity between them. He had a weight lifter's physique and a wrestler's arms.
Beyond Kakadelis, Director Vincent Stone, who headed the Directorate of New Orkney, was almost too pretty. He had extraordinarily regular features, and a nose just on the masculine side of delicate, liquid brown eyes, a cleft chin, and hair as dark as a raven's wing. In fact, he was so "pretty" people often overlooked his powerful physique. Despite his youthful appearance, he was one of the older people in the room, and he'd also been a highly decorated naval officer before he entered politics . . . which, of course, had been part of the plan for his career from the beginning.
Coming around the end of the table, back toward the Detweilers, was Rebecca Monticelli,
president of the Comstock Republic and the only other woman present. She could have been deliberately designed by the Alignment's geneticists as Kubrick's antithesis, although it had actually just worked out that way. She had black hair, dark eyes, and a skier's tan—not surprisingly, since her favorite recreational pastime was cross-country skiing. She was also a good two centimeters taller than the famous Honor Alexander-Harrington—in fact, she and Hurskanien were the two tallest people in the room—and her genotype included even more musculature enhancement than the Meyerdahl first wave's.
Next was Chancellor Robert Tarantino of the Republic of New Bombay. Personally, Detweiler found Tarantino just a bit on the irritating side. It wasn't really the chancellor's fault, but one of the quirks in the Tarantino genotype had expressed unusually vigorously in his case, with the result that he was one of the most physically restless people Detweiler had ever met. He had platinum hair, brown eyes, and a slightly swarthy complexion, and he was constantly fiddling with something. In fact, Detweiler had once experimented by taking Tarantino's old-fashioned "worry rock" away from him to see what would happen, only to find the chancellor tapping his toes under the table in time with his fingers' drumming on his knees. Despite that, he was an extremely capable political leader, with multiple advanced degrees—in economics and physics—and he enjoyed a League-wide reputation as an economic policymaker.
And, finally, to Albrecht's left, was Reynaldo Lucas—Marquis Reynaldo IV, of the Marquisate of Denver. He was sandy-haired, with hazel eyes and a neatly trimmed beard. Like Hurskainen, he favored long hair, and the Lucas genome shared some of the Polanski genome's musical talent. In Lucas's case, it expressed as a magnificent baritone singing voice rather than an instrumental ability, however.
An extraordinarily capable group of people by any standard, he thought, trying hard not to feel complacent. And they, and their families (and a substantial portion of the rest of their homeworlds' political and economic elites, for that matter), were every one of them part of the Alignment. Part of its strategy, proof of its genetic superiority, recruited—or, in some cases, inserted—generations before. The Hurskainen genome, for example, had been placed in Visigoth over three T-centuries ago. Stanley Hurskainen represented the fifteenth generation of that alpha line, and the Thompson genome on New Madagascar was even older. None were as old and prestigious as the Detweiler genome, yet unlike the Detweilers, they and their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents had been open parts of their homeworlds' societies. Indeed, they'd been put in place for exactly this moment.
"I hope you'll forgive me for saying this, Albrecht," Ford said after a moment, "but I wish you could come into the open at the same time. We all understand why you can't, but it just seems . . . wrong, somehow."
"Thank you, Walt. I appreciate that," Detweiler said, and he did. It wasn't flattery or sycophancy on Ford's part, and he saw agreement in most of the others' faces.
"I appreciate it, but we all know why I can't."
Ford nodded, as did a couple of the others, and Detweiler reminded himself—again—of all the manifold reasons what he'd just said was true.
The last thing they could afford at this critical juncture was for the rest of the galaxy to decide that the corrupt, outlaw corporations of Mesa were secretly pulling the strings behind these men and women. The very thing that made them so critical to the Alignment's ultimate success was the fact that there had never been a single trace of a connection between one of them and Mesa. All of them came from families which had been part of their native societies for so long their bona fides were beyond question. All had well-earned reputations as capable, farsighted, deeply involved heads of state. Each had expressed his or her own condemnation of genetic slavery, and most had been actively involved in stamping it out in their own societies. And unlike the vast majority of Solarian League politicians, there had never been even a hint of corruption or venality attached to any of them.
Which meant they were absolutely essential. When the Manties hammered the SLN into wreckage yet again—when the carefully primed "spontaneous rebellions" broke out in a dozen places simultaneously in the Verge as the League Navy's reputation crumbled, and when the score of Frontier Security governors who'd been carefully prepared by their own versions of Aldona Anisimovna followed the example of the Maya Sector and unilaterally assumed emergency powers in order to "protect" the citizens of their sectors—the men and women around this table with Albert Detweiler would emerge as the leaders of a new interstellar power.
The Alignment's strategists had picked the name for that power—the Renaissance Factor—decades ago, and the exquisitely orchestrated crescendo of disasters would "force" them into taking steps to protect their own star systems from the tide of anarchy. They wouldn't call themselves a star nation—not immediately—but that was what they would be. And, in the fullness of time, when it was obvious to the entire galaxy that they were simply responding to the catastrophic, totally unanticipated disintegration of the League, they would finally, regretfully, exercise their constitutional right to secede from the League and formally assume their position as a sovereign star nation.
A star nation which had grown solely out of their emergency association to stave off collapse. On which had nothing at all to do with Mesa . . . and which would painstakingly avoid anything that could be even remotely construed as a eugenics policy.
Until, that was, the rest of the galaxy discovered that the Renaissance Factor had become exactly what it called itself—the reinvigorated successor of the Solarian League, at least as big and powerful as the League itself had ever been, and dedicated, indeed, to the rebirth of humanity in a new and glorious future of potential fully realized at last.
Albrecht Detweiler wasn't at all certain he himself, even with prolong and the "natural" longevity engineered into his genes, would live long enough to see that day arrive. But that was all right, for he was seeing something even more important. He was seeing this day, when centuries of sacrifice, planning, and unceasing labor had finally come to fruition and forced the path of human history into the rightful direction from which the sanctimonious Beowulf Code and the human race's hysterical reaction to Old Earth's Final War had diverted it so long ago. None of them would live long enough to see the completion of the journey upon which their entire species had just unknowingly set out, but every one of them knew it would come, and that they —they and their ancestors—were the ones who had made that so.
"We all know why I can't," Albrecht Detweiler repeated softly. "But when the eleven of you stand up and announce the Factor's existence, believe me, I'll be standing right there with you. And I can't think of anyone I could possibly be prouder to have representing all of us."
Chapter Forty
"Yes, Denis?"
Eloise Pritchart tried—tried hard— not to sound irritated as Denis LePic's face appeared on her com display, but LePic had known her too long and too well for her to fool him. Besides, even a saint (which Eloise Pritchart had never pretended to be) would have been irritated by a call which came in exactly one hour and seventeen minutes after she'd finally gotten to bed.
"I'm very sorry to disturb you, Madam President," he said, rather more formally than he normally addressed her when the others weren't present, "but I thought about it very carefully, first. Technically, there's no reason I had to screen you right this moment, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that you'd never forgive me if I waited till morning."
"I beg your pardon?" Pritchart's topaz eyes had narrowed intently.
"You may remember that we've all been concerned about a certain intelligence operative who'd dropped out of sight?"
He paused, and the eyes which had just narrowed flared wide.
"Yes," she said rather more slowly, "as a matter of fact, I do remember. Why?"
"Because he's just reappeared," LePic said. "And he has a friend with him. And the two of them have a new friend—one I think you're going to wan
t to talk to yourself."
"And is Sheila going to be willing to let me into the same room with this 'new friend' of his?"
"As a matter of fact, I think she's likely to pitch five kinds of fit at the mere prospect," LePic said a bit wryly. "But since I'm quite positive Kevin is going to want to be there, as well—not to mention Tom, Wilhelm, and Linda Trenis—I feel fairly confident about your security."
"I see." Pritchart gazed at him for several seconds, her her mind accelerating to full speed as it brushed off the remnants of sleep. "Tell me," she said, "did our friend find his new friend where we thought he might?"
"Oh, I think you could say that, Madam President. Not only that, but he's a very impressive new friend. I've only managed to skim the report our wandering lad finally got around to delivering, but based just on what I've seen so far, I think I can safely you're about to discover that just about everything we thought we knew we don't. Know, I mean."
Pritchart inhaled deeply as LePic's expression finally penetrated fully. What she'd mistaken for humor, possibly even amusement at having awakened her, was something else entirely. A mask. Or perhaps not so much a mask as a thin surface veneer of calm, a fragile shield for the shocked echoes of a universe turned upside down still rumbling around somewhere deep inside him.
"Well, in that case," she heard her own voice saying calmly, "I think you'd better go ahead and start waking up a few other people."
* * *
"So, our is wandering boy returns, I see," Eloise Pritchart murmured, an hour later, as Victor Cachat, a troll-like man who looked suspiciously like the officially deceased Anton Zilwicki, and a sandy-haired, hazel-eyed man were escorted into the Octagon briefing room. "Welcome home, Officer Cachat. We'd been wondering why you hadn't written."