by David Weber
Helland nodded with what might have been a bit more enthusiasm.
“All right,” Capriotti stood. “I think we could all use some supper of our own. Why don’t the three of you join me in my dining cabin?”
“Of course, Sir. Thank you,” Helland said, and the three staffers followed him from the briefing room.
Angelica has a point about Buccaneer’s premises, Capriotti thought, as they headed for the lift shaft. She’s not the only person who’s going to make it, either. For that matter, it’s a virtual certainty that sooner or later somebody is going to execute Parthian, whatever I do.
He hid a mental grimace. Parthian was the one part of the detailed ops plan with which he’d totally disagreed from the instant he read it.
The new, improved Cataphracts in the pods which had been delivered along with TF 783’s instructions, had effectively unlimited range. Well, all missiles had effectively unlimited range, really, but the Cataphract’s second stage meant it was capable of terminal maneuvers at the end of its run as opposed to a purely ballistic weapon coasting helplessly through space after its impellers burned out. That meant, in theory, that missiles launched from well outside the 15.84 LM hyper-limit of the Cachalot System’s K4 primary were fully capable of hitting targets in the vicinity of Orca, the system’s inhabited planet, despite the fact that Orca’s orbital radius was less than three light-minutes. For that matter, Orca’s orbital infrastructure wasn’t what one might call an elusive target. Capriotti had no doubt that Lyang-tau Rutgers and his tactical officers would be capable of taking out every bit of it without ever crossing the limit inbound.
But there were two things no tac officer could possibly guarantee if Capriotti ordered them to do that. First, they couldn’t guarantee Orca wouldn’t suffer exactly the same sort of collateral catastrophe which had destroyed the Manticoran city of Yawata Crossing. And, second, and even worse, if he executed Parthian—essentially a hit-and-run strike from extreme range to avoid entering the Manties’ missile envelope—there would be no time for an orderly evacuation. They’d probably save more lives than the Manties had managed to save in the Yawata Strike, but almost a billion of the Cachalot System’s 6.9 billion citizens lived and worked in that infrastructure.
In the course of his career, Vincent Capriotti had done more things he hadn’t liked than he cared to contemplate. Committing mass murder wasn’t going to be one of them, whatever Operation Buccaneer called for.
But sooner or later, someone will, Vincent, he thought. It’s the next best damned thing to an Eridani violation, but someone will. And what the hell do we do when the Solarian League starts violating the Edict?
He didn’t like that thought.
He didn’t like it at all.
SLNS Leonhard Euler
Unicorn Belt
Manticore B
Star Empire of Manticore
“Sir, I think I’ve got something here you need to look at,” Midshipman Dimas said.
“That would make a nice change.”
Commander Bill Knight sounded more than a little sour, although that was scarcely Dimas’s fault. In fact, Knight liked Dimas quite a bit more than an evaluating officer was supposed to admit to a midshipman on his snotty cruise. Dimas was smart and competent…and so bouncy he reminded Knight irresistibly of a labradour retriever he’d had when he was a kid himself. That dog had been smart, too…and despite what some people might think was possible, he’d definitely had a sense of humor. One that had gotten both him and his youthful master into what his mom had always referred to as “a heap of trouble” more than once. Dimas’s humor never got him into trouble—or not, at least, with his superiors; his fellow snotties might have disputed that value judgment—but he loved practical jokes and he was an accomplished amateur ventriloquist. His ability to mimic sounds and throw his voice into unlikely places had kept Midshipman Styles running around the compartment looking for his “lost” unilink for almost fifteen minutes a couple of days ago.
Young Dimas had also won the Lester Allen Kovalenko Prize as the top math graduate in his senior class, however. He’d been the starting goalie on the Saganami lacrosse team during his junior and senior forms, as well, and he took the team’s motto—“Live life fearlessly!”—to heart. In short, he was an outstanding young man who was going to be an outstanding officer.
None of which made Bill Knight any happier about their current duty.
There were a lot of things he’d rather be doing than sitting on the command deck of yet another hulked Solly superdreadnought. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t be doing any of them for the immediately foreseeable future.
He grimaced at the thought and shoved up out of the captain’s chair at the center of Leonhard Euler’s bridge. He wasn’t certain who Euler had been—a mathematician, he thought—but his namesake had seen better days. Less damaged than a lot of her consorts, she’d still suffered over four hundred casualties, and lucky it hadn’t been worse. Not that anyone looking around her pristine bridge and smelling its cool, fresh air, would have imagined how severely damaged she was.
He crossed to the communications officer’s station, where Dimas was ensconced. Knight had been forced to concede that young Dimas had a better touch with Solly computers than he did. He hoped that didn’t say anything about unfortunate, hidden character flaws on the young man’s part. But what had started with Dimas “riding shotgun,” shadowing the older and more experienced Knight while he learned his way around, had segued into something a lot more like a partnership, and the boy had more than held up his end. Along the way, they’d discovered that the com system actually had the best reach into the ship’s computer net, although no one was quite certain why the com officer had needed more access than, say, the tactical officer or the astrogator.
Probably because there’s a right way, a wrong way, and the Solly way to do just about anything, he reflected as he came to a halt at Dimas’s shoulder. Although, come to think of it, “wrong way” and “Solly way” is probably redundant.
“So, what’ve you got, Elijah?” he asked.
“I’ve got the standalones running the deep core analysis, Sir,” the middy said, looking back and up at him, and Knight nodded.
The reason he and Dimas were currently parked aboard Leonhard Euler was that—for their sins—they were among the better of the Royal Manticoran Navy’s cyberneticists. In fact, both of them had been assigned to HMSS Weyland prior to the Yawata Strike. Knight had been aboard the spacestation for almost two T-years before the strike, assigned to the R&D side of its complement because of his expertise. Dimas had been sent aboard for his snotty cruise deployment to give him the hands-on, real world experience his Academy instructors had been unable to provide, and he’d ended up under Knight’s mentorship. They were alive today only because Vice Admiral Faraday, Weyland’s CO, had called an emergency evacuation drill which had left the entire R&D staff planet-side when the deadly sneak attack tore the spacestation apart.
Technically, Dimas’s snotty cruise had ended five days ago, but things were still badly unsettled following what had been dubbed the Second Battle of Manticore. The lad had been left where he was, assigned to Knight’s team, for the forensic examination of the wreckage. The commander hadn’t told him he’d specifically asked to be allowed to keep “his” midshipman a little longer because he was so good at his job. Nor did young Elijah know about the glowing efficiency report Knight had already composed. But the same gift for computers and—especially—for deep-diving into the cyber depths which had made Dimas so useful aboard Weyland made him even more valuable aboard a hulk like Euler.
One of the conditions upon which Massimo Filareta’s survivors had been allowed to surrender had been the preservation of their computer cores. Several commanding officers had scrubbed their computers anyway, which was why those particular COs were spending their current confinement in somewhat less than palatial conditions. Most, however, had honored their promise. A lot of them had figured—quite reasonably, in
Knight’s opinion—that after what the RMN had done to Sandra Crandall it already had plenty of classified computer banks to play with. There were unlikely to be any shattering new intelligence landfalls in Eleventh Fleet’s memory.
At the moment, Knight and Dimas were busy probing the memory of their twelfth superdreadnought, and they weren’t the only team involved in the effort. And, so far, no shattering new intelligence had come to light, which tended to suggest those captains had had a point.
Dimas’s “standalones” were designed to carry out a point by point comparison between Leonhard Euler’s memory and the computers they’d already stripped. There was far too much data for any mere human to sort through, and—in theory, at least—the standalones would make sure anything that wasn’t already in the database would be added.
The communications logs were another matter, however. Even there there was far too much information for organic brains to keep track of, but it also tended to be more chaotic than the other data. Computers did a wonderful job of searching for things they were told to look for, and they were doing just that with all of the com traffic. But in something that tended to be as…free-form as inter-human communication, telling them where to look could sometimes be a nontrivial challenge. That was why he and Dimas had made it a point to at least skim the traffic for the last couple of hours before the Solarian surrender. The computers were looking at the same timeframe, but it was entirely possible they’d miss something.
“Should I take it the standalones have found something earthshattering?” Knight asked now, with a smile.
“Actually, Sir,” the middy said seriously, “I think I really may have found something.”
“Like what?”
“A fragment of a com conversation between Leonhard Euler and Philip Oppenheimer from about the time the Sollies opened fire. From her flag bridge.” Knight’s eyebrows rose, and Dimas nodded.
“You’re kidding,” the commander said.
“No, Sir.” Dimas shook his head, and Knight’s eyes widened.
They’d been searching for some window into whatever insanity had led Filareta to open fire in an absolutely hopeless situation. Unfortunately, none of Eleventh Fleet’s surviving units had been in direct communication with Admiral Filareta or his staff at the critical moment, and Philip Oppenheimer herself was not among the survivors. They’d found a few megs of recorded com traffic between Oppenheimer’s CO and other units of the fleet from that time window, but nothing that came from her flag bridge…or that shed any light on his decisions. So if his middy—
“Somebody on this ship was actually in communication with Filareta when everything went to hell?” he demanded.
“Not quite, Sir.” Dimas shrugged. “What I’ve got here is part of a conversation between Leonhard Euler’s com officer and one of her cousins, Captain Sedgewick.”
Knight’s eyes narrowed. Captain Reuben Sedgewick had been Filareta’s staff com officer.
“It’s from the com officer’s private files, not part of the official logs,” Dimas continued. “Maybe that’s because there wasn’t time to worry about anything like that before everything hit the fan. Or it might be because they were violating regs tying up bandwidth on personal matters at a moment like that.”
“I could see that.” Knight nodded, trying to imagine what would have happened to a Manticoran communications officer who’d been gabbing away with her cousin at “a moment like that.”
“It’s not quite as bad as you may be thinking, Sir,” Dimas said. “They weren’t on any of the active command net channels; they were talking on one of the redundancy sidebands.”
“Marginally better, I suppose,” Knight allowed grudgingly. “But if this wasn’t part of the official fleet traffic, why do you think anyone’s going to want to see it?”
“Well, I sort of doubt that Captain Clarence—she was Leonhard Euler’s com officer—has any idea there was anything significant in what she had here, Sir. For that matter, I’m not even certain she realized she’d recorded it in the first place. If she did, though, I can see why she’s kept her mouth shut since we started beating the bushes trying to figure out why Filareta opened fire.”
“What are you talking about?” Knight demanded a bit more impatiently, and Dimas gave him a crooked smile.
“Let me show you, Sir,” he said, and hit the playback button.
HMS Imperator
Manticore A
Star Empire of Manticore
“—and after that, Your Grace, you’re scheduled for the state dinner at Mount Royal,” Lieutenant Luca Tomei said. “Under the circumstances, I think it might be better if you attended as Steadholder Harrington rather than Duchess Harrington.”
Honor Alexander-Harrington tried very hard—and almost successfully—not to roll her eyes. It wasn’t Tomei’s fault, but she’d managed her entire career without a dedicated public information officer. Partly, she acknowledged, that was because she’d avoided the limelight as much as possible. More of it was that she’d held primarily combat commands, where providing public information had not been high on her list of priorities. And still more of it was the fact that, unlike some officers she could have named, she vastly preferred to get on with whatever the current job in hand might be and let other people worry about who got public credit for it.
And not just because I’m such a naturally modest and self-effacing type, either, she thought, remembering the bitter political infighting after the Battle of Hancock and following Paul Tankersley’s death and her own duel with Pavel Young. Then there’d been all the vicious innuendo about her and Hamish during the High Ridge premiership. And that didn’t even count the Meuller dome collapse back on Grayson!
If there was anyone in the entire Star Empire of Manticore who wanted the spotlight less than she did, she’d never met her.
Unfortunately, she’d had to accept years ago that she couldn’t avoid it, and she had to admit Tomei made it a less excruciating experience. A year and a half younger than Waldemar Tümmel, he was far more comfortable than the flag lieutenant when it came to social events, like tonight’s state dinner to bid Benjamin Mayhew an official farewell. He was less adroit than Tümmel on the purely military side, but between the two of them—with prodigious assistance from James MacGuiness—they got her most everywhere she needed to be almost on schedule.
And in between dinners, meetings, interviews, baby-kissings, ribbon cuttings, and photo sessions, I actually get to spend a little time thinking about how to fight the Solarian League! she thought wryly.
“I think you’re probably right about that, Luca,” she said now. “Of course,” she gave him an amused look, “there’s still the question of whether I go in uniform or civilian dress, isn’t there?”
“I suppose there is, Your Grace, but—”
A soft chime interrupted him, and Honor touched the stud on her desk.
“Yes?” she said.
“I hate to interrupt you when I know you’re so deeply involved in something you enjoy so much, My Lady,” Major Spencer Hawke, Honor’s senior armsman, said over the intercom, “but Captain Reynolds would appreciate a moment of your time.”
“Gosh,” she said, giving Tomei a wicked look, “I really hate to break this off, but if Captain Reynolds needs to talk to me, by all means send him in!”
“You do realize I’ll be back as soon as the Captain leaves, Your Grace?”
“But if I’m quick enough, I can sneak out the back way before you get here!” she said, and Nimitz bleeked a laugh from his bulkhead perch.
“There isn’t a back way, Your Grace.” Tomei’s lips twitched, but his tone was admirably grave.
“You just think there isn’t,” she told him, then looked up as the cabin door opened and George Reynolds, her staff intelligence officer, stepped through it.
“George! Just the man I wanted to see!” she said enthusiastically.
Reynolds smiled, but it was a brief and fleeting expression, and her own eyes narrowed.
“What is it?” she asked in a rather different tone.
“Your Grace, I’ve got something you need to hear.”
Office of the Second Space Lord
Admiralty House
City of Landing
Manticore
Star Empire of Manticore
“Sorry it took me so long, Pat,” Hamish Alexander-Harrington, Earl White Haven and First Lord of Admiralty, said, as he followed Commander Terry Lassaline Admiral Patricia Givens’s new chief of staff, through Givens’s office door. Tobias Stimson, his personal armsman peeled off outside the door. “We were in transit when your message came in. So what’s this all about? I assume there’s a reason I’m here instead of talking to the Select Committee, where I’m supposed to be?”
“Actually, Hamish,” a familiar soprano said from the office’s smart wall, “I’m the one who’s messed up your schedule. Sorry about that. I’m sure you’re looking forward to talking to the Committee almost as enthusiastically as I’m looking forward to that state dinner tonight.”
“Honor!” White Haven’s incipient frown disappeared as he turned to face the smart wall. “If you needed to talk to me, there are simpler ways to do it.”
“I’m aware.” His wife shook her head with a certain resignation as Lassaline touched White Haven’s elbow and pointed at one of the armchairs facing the smart wall. “Unfortunately, this call isn’t a social occasion. There’s something you need to see.”