by David Weber
“How can we respond?” Elizabeth demanded. “Unless we want to start breaking up Grand Fleet, at least!”
“Mycroft will be completely up and running in Beowulf by early next month,” Honor replied. “It’s already up here in the home system, and Nouveau Paris will be covered in another couple of months. That’ll let us free up at least a half-dozen additional squadrons of wallers, if we need to. But, frankly, superdreadnoughts aren’t what we need. Oh,” she waved one hand as Elizabeth’s eyebrows rose, “they’d do the job, all right, but deploying superdreadnought divisions for area coverage would be like using a sledgehammer to crack walnuts. It works, but there’s a certain degree of overkill involved. Besides, if the Sollies see two or three podnoughts waiting for them, that’ll almost certainly trigger ‘Parthian.’ And even with Mycroft, we don’t begin to have enough SD(P)s to be spreading them broadcast around the galaxy. We probably have enough to cover the most strategically important neutral systems, the ones whose trade with us makes them obvious Buccaneer targets. That may be what we need to do, however little I like the thought, but I’m going to fight tooth and nail against any more diversions from Grand Fleet than we absolutely have to make.”
“Why?”
Elizabeth’s tone was honestly curious, and Honor gave a short, sharp laugh.
“Well, whatever Hamish may say when he’s feeling feisty, it’s not because they’re ‘my’ superdreadnoughts and I don’t want to share!”
“He would say something like that, wouldn’t he?”
“Only to me—thank God!” Honor shook her head. “However, I do have several reasons for resisting dispersal. One is the need to maintain a concentrated striking force—we’ve already sent a substantial chunk of fighting power off with Tourville to reinforce Mike and the Talbott Quadrant, and I’d just as soon not get into the habit of frittering away our ‘mailed fist.’ But that’s secondary, really. My main objection is more psychological than anything else, to be honest.”
“Psychological?” Elizabeth seemed surprised.
“I don’t want the Mandarins to think they’ve succeeded in compelling us to significantly redistribute our battle fleet, Elizabeth. That’s the primary objective of a strategy like this one. I don’t believe for a moment that they have the technological and tactical wherewithal to take advantage of our response if we were to weaken ourselves here by redistributing Grand Fleet. And absent some new hardware we don’t know about yet, I’d be surprised if anyone on their side’s stupid enough to think they do—now that Rajampet’s dead, at any rate.
“But if they believe they’re compelling us to dance to their piping, it’s likely to give them a greater sense of self-confidence. There was a general back on Old Earth who was a great proponent of maintaining what we call ‘psychological dominance’ these days. He called it ‘putting the scare’ into the other side, and when we’re up against something the size of the Solarian League, we need them as scared of us as possible. What we don’t need is them convincing themselves they don’t need to fear us. Or even simply that they don’t need to fear us as much as they did. Because if they decide that’s the case, they’re likely to start thinking in terms of more operations as stupid as Raging Justice, at which point the death toll—most of it Solly—will skyrocket again.”
“I can see that,” Elizabeth said thoughtfully. “But, Honor, if we don’t find a way to keep them from ‘Buccaneering’ one system after another, won’t that have the same effect? Which doesn’t even consider the impact on billions of innocent bystanders!”
“When word of what happened at Hypatia gets home, Old Chicago may rethink the whole concept. I don’t really expect it, but it’s possible. In the meantime, I think there may be a better solution than scattering SD(P)s hither and yon, though. Given what Phantom and three Saganami-Bs accomplished in Hypatia, I’m more convinced than ever that the Mark 16 can handle about anything the Sollies throw at us. So I’m going to propose we redeploy the Agamemnons. I’d really prefer to use Nikes, if we had them, but we don’t, and given what Kotouč’s people accomplished with no pods at all, I think a division or two of Agamemnons should be plenty to rain on any Solly’s parade. We’ve only got a hundred or so of them, and only the Flight IIs have Keyhole, so they couldn’t duplicate Phantom’s tactics—not fully. On the other hand, the Demonic Duo may have come up with a stopgap solution to that particular problem.”
“‘Demonic duo’?” Elizabeth repeated.
“Sorry. My personal nickname for the firm of Hemphill and Foraker, Inc.,” Honor said. “Either of them alone was bad enough. The two of them together are scary!”
“And what have they come up with now?”
It was obvious Elizabeth was trying not to laugh, and Honor grinned at her. Then her expression sobered…a bit, at any rate.
“I suspect the initial concept came from Foraker,” she said, “but the final proposal has Sonja’s fingerprints all over it, too. Basically, they took a good look at the way our Saganami-Cs and Rolands have been integrating Ghost Rider into their fire control loops, and they’ve come up with a refinement. For all intents and purposes, their suggestion is that we use Hermes buoys in conjunction with Ghost Rider. The Agamemnons have plenty of telemetry links; their links just don’t have an FTL capability. So the idea is that we strap Hermes buoys onto Ghost Rider recon drones and then tractor four or five more buoys just outside an Agamemnon’s wedge perimeter and let them talk to each other. Hermes has a lot more bandwidth—and more channels—than the standard shipboard grav com, Elizabeth. So if we pair buoys between those tractored to the ship and the ones mounted on the recon platforms then feed the telemetry links through the buoy channels and use the ones on the recon platforms to talk to the missiles…”
She raised an eyebrow as her voice trailed off. Elizabeth looked at her for several seconds, then began to nod—slowly, at first, but with increasing enthusiasm.
“Don’t get too excited,” Honor warned. “Like I say, it’s a stopgap. Neither Ghost Rider drones nor buoys are what you might call tiny, which means they’ll displace a lot of missiles. And the entire system’s on the…ramshackle side. It won’t have Keyhole’s bandwidth, even with all the buoys an Agamemnon can handle, and it won’t provide the additional missile-defense Keyhole’s laser clusters offer, either. But it will help a lot, and from the shipboard end, most of the refit will consist of software changes, so we should be able to put it into service quickly.”
“I understand about getting too excited,” the Empress said, “but I like what I understand about the idea, Honor. I like it a lot!”
“Well, so do I, actually,” Honor admitted. “But even granting that it’s mostly software, it’ll take time to exterminate the bugs and get it up and running. And while we’re doing that, I’m sure we’ll find out where else the Sollies have been blowing away innocent bystanders’ infrastructure. And that means we’ll still have to come up with a way to…reshape their thinking. This ‘strap-on Keyhole’ will help, but it’s primarily defensive. We need something more proactive.”
“Are you starting to lean towards the idea of reprisals after all?” Elizabeth asked carefully, and Honor shrugged.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know. All the arguments against invading the League still apply, but there’s a point where worrying about future Solarian revanchism comes in what Hamish calls a ‘piss-poor second’ compared to the need to prevent more Hypatias. Because somewhere, Elizabeth—we don’t know where…yet, but somewhere, just as sure as we’re sitting here—there’s another Hajdu or Gogunov with no Kotouč and Petersen to stop her.”
Hillary Indrakashi Enkateshwara Tower
City of Old Chicago
Sol System
Solarian League
“I don’t think there’s any doubt now,” Daud al-Fanudahi said just a bit indistinctly around a mouthful of bagel. He shook his head apologetically, sipped coffee from a disposable cup, and swallowed.
“As I say, I don’t think
there’s any doubt now,” he repeated, wiping crumbs from his tunic. “We still may not be able to prove what they’re conspiring about, but the correlations are too damned convincing for them not to be conspiring about something.”
“I’ll agree with that,” Simeon Gaddis said. The Gendarmerie brigadier had made one of his rare visits to the Ghost Hunters’ lair to participate in today’s strategy session. “The problem is that we still can’t prove what that ‘something’ is. We have a shit pot of circumstantial evidence, and the fact that Lawton, Nye, and Salazar are all providing the same slant on their intel and that their recommendations are universally to slam the Manties harder ought to make any honest spook—I realize that’s something of an oxymoron, in this town—suspicious as hell. Under normal circumstances, I’d be willing to go to an honest prosecutor—another oxymoron, but I do know a handful of them—with what we have. Under the present circumstances, I’m afraid we’d just get whoever we went to killed. We don’t have anything concrete enough for me to jump the queue, which means any submission would go up the normal chain at Justice.”
“And there’s no way in hell these people aren’t wired in somewhere along that chain,” al-Fanudahi acknowledged rather more glumly. “Or that they wouldn’t do whatever they figured it would take to short-circuit the process.”
“Even if that weren’t true, who could we jump the queue to?” Lupe Blanton asked.
“Rorendaal,” Gaddis replied without hesitation, and Blanton looked suddenly thoughtful.
The Federal Department of Justice was probably the least important department of the Solarian League’s government. Most of the League’s member systems had robust local departments of justice; the League no longer required one. That was what a few T-centuries of bureaucratic fiat and regulatory governance that no longer bothered the legislative branch with little things like passing laws tended to produce. Indeed, Justice was so lacking in stature that none of the deputy attorneys general—Justice’s equivalent of the other departments’ permanent senior undersecretaries—had ever even been considered for membership among the Mandarins.
Of Justice’s three divisions, however, the Criminal Law Division had the most power, greatest independence…and least relevance. It was widely acknowledged as the senior division. In fact, Deputy Attorney General Marie-Claire Rorendaal, who headed Criminal Law, was the closest thing to an effective Attorney General the League possessed, given Attorney General Ronayne’s total lack of competence. Unfortunately, CLD was charged with the prosecution of crimes, which in the Solarian League no longer included malfeasance and corruption. Or, rather, those were still technically crimes, but Criminal Law was prohibited from acting upon them without a referral from the Ethics and Integrity Division. That had a lot to do with why Rorendaal’s opinion of Ludovico Mazarello, who headed Ethics, was somewhere south of unprintable. It would have been difficult to decide whether her contempt for his venality exceeded his contempt for her lack of venality, but it would have been a very close run thing.
After the Monica Incident, Rorendaal had been on something of a roll. The evidence of criminal wrongdoing on a massive scale had been too great to be suppressed even in the Solarian League. Or, rather, the Mandarins had decided to throw Technodyne Industries under the air lorry to keep anyone from looking too closely in their own direction. The consequence had been to allow CLD to actually prosecute criminal actions by a major transstellar for the first time in T-decades, and Rorendaal had hammered Technodyne. In fact, she’d made such headway some of the League’s other transstellars had begun to look nervously in her direction on the theory that in the process of nailing Technodyne to the wall she was likely to turn up evidence of their own wrongdoing. God knew there was plenty of such evidence to be found, and she and her dedicated team of professional prosecutors had been building a dangerous momentum.
Fortunately, from the perspective of both Technodyne and those other nervous transstellars, Rorendaal’s investigation had been abruptly tabled—only “temporarily,” of course—when the confrontation with Manticore turned ugly. She’d protested strenuously, but the crisis had given Technodyne’s friends sufficient cover to shut her down. She and her staff continued to assemble evidence, but they’d been systematically starved of funding, personnel, and computer access because of the “crisis,” and none of the Ghost Hunters expected her investigation to go anywhere even after the crisis ended.
But even though that was true, she was still the AAG for Criminal Law and the team she’d assembled to take down Technodyne was as pissed off as she was over the abrupt termination of their investigation. If Gaddis went directly to her, bypassing his own immediate superiors—and Mazarello—she and her people would probably take their current evidence seriously.
“Would you really be willing to approach her?” Blanton asked after a moment.
“Not with what we have so far.” Gaddis shook his head. Blanton looked a little surprised, and he snorted.
“We just agreed the Other Guys must be keeping a close eye on law enforcement in general, Lupe,” he pointed out. “If you were doing something illegal, immoral, and fattening and you were going to worry about any of the AAGs, which one would it be—her, Mazarello, or Illalangi?”
“Point,” Blanton said, and al-Fanudahi and Natsuko Okiku laughed. It was not an amused laugh, however.
Mazarello was the quintessential corrupt bureaucrat who just happened to possess a law degree. He was a mousy-looking fellow, with brown hair and brown eyes which managed to look myopic despite modern medicine and biosculpt. He was, however, an extraordinarily rich mousy-looking fellow, courtesy of all the corruption his Ethics and Integrity Division somehow managed not to find. And Uwan Illalangi, despite an impressive appearance, including amber, cat-pupilled eyes as a result of significant genetic manipulation of his family line, had been almost as irrelevant as Rorendaal until very recently.
Illalangi headed the Constitutional Compliance and Conformity Division, which was responsible for assessing the constitutionality of any new regulation before it could take effect. That requirement was mandated by the Constitution, and Illangi had sworn a solemn oath to discharge his duty without fear or favor. Which meant, in the modern Solarian League, that he drafted whatever memo the Federal Government required for its current purposes, then found a pet judge to sign off on it, if needed. Most of the time it wasn’t, as he dutifully certified by citing the appropriate precedents. He was the epitome of a reliable apparatchik, and until the Manticore Crisis, his had been a simple, straightforward sort of task. Given the constitutional crisis provoked by Beowulf’s threatened secession, he’d recently acquired a sudden importance—and headaches, not to mention time in the spotlight, he’d certainly never wanted. But it was unlikely, to say the least, that anyone would be worried about his turning over any unfortunate rocks.
No, if the Other Guys were keeping a proactive eye on anyone, Rorendaal was that anyone.
“I’ve known Marie-Claire a long time,” Gaddis went on, his expression somber. “If I took this to her, she’d take it seriously, if only because it came from me. And if she took it seriously, she’d open an investigation of her own, which would be a Very Bad Idea. At the moment, her key prosecutors are pretty damned loyal, but you know there’d be a leak somewhere, and that would get her killed.”
“Simeon, that’s going to be true whenever we take it to her,” Weng Zhing-hwan said quietly. “And you’re right, she is the one we need to talk to about it.”
“I know she is,” Gaddis replied, his expression going still darker. “And I hate it, because, eventually, we won’t have any choice about that. But I don’t want to be painting any targets on her a second before we can give her something conclusive. A genuine smoking gun, not just suspicions that might be supported by all our circumstantial evidence. Something slam-dunk enough she can move so quickly she may actually get the charges in front of a grand jury before they can kill her.”
He did not, the others noticed, mention what
would happen to all of them if Rorendaal was killed before she could impanel a grand jury.
“So we’re right back where we started?” Al-Fanudahi looked around the office.
“We’ve inched farther ahead,” Gaddis demurred. “What we’ve done is build a body of evidence that can point investigators—official investigators, I mean—at people we know are dirty. We need something more conclusive—that smoking gun—to start the process, though. Something compelling enough to draw up the charging document immediately, before the Gendarmerie starts formally beating the bushes looking for more evidence. That’s what we don’t have.”
Al-Fanudahi nodded thoughtfully. Then he inhaled and brought his chair upright.
“In that case, I have another question. Are we at a point now where we go Bryce’s way, grab one of these people we ‘know are dirty,’ and get the truth out of them any damned way we can?” He looked around the office again. “Personally, I’m ready to face prosecution for whatever we have to do to turn this thing off.”
“I think we all are,” Okiku said. “And I’m ready to sign off on Bryce’s suggestion.”
“I’m not. Not yet.” Gaddis shook his head. “The Outcasts are still chewing data, and they think they’ve nailed down at least two more of Ms. Bolton’s ‘clients.’ They’re not ready to confirm that yet, but if they do—when they do—then, yes. I think we drag Bolton in here, we put her through whatever damned wringer we need to, and then we take the entire mess to Marie-Claire. Who, being the hardnose she is, probably will indict us for kidnapping, illegal imprisonment, violation of civil rights, and anything else you can think of. But—” he smiled crookedly “—at least she’ll be very grateful to us!”