by David Weber
That explains what we were thinking, he told himself now, grimly. It sure as hell doesn’t excuse it!
Well, maybe what he was here to look at today might be a step in the direction of fixing things.
He hoped to hell so, anyway.
* * *
“Admiral Kingsford. Good to see you, Sir!” the slim, brown-haired admiral said as the commander escorted the CNO and his chief of staff into the largest tactical simulator of the Solarian League Navy.
The vastness of the simulator made her look almost tiny—and she truly was sixteen centimeters shorter than Kingsford’s own 183 centimeters—but she was solidly muscled and anything but fragile. She was also very young for her rank; even to someone accustomed to third-generation prolong, she looked like someone’s teenage daughter, with a deceptively sweet looking face. In fact, Tory Kindrick was about the farthest thing from “a sweet young thing” imaginable, which was why Kingsford had chosen her to replace Polydorou as the head of Systems Development Command. She was young for flag rank in the SLN—only fifty-one T-years old—but she was also smart, ruthlessly efficient, and not too worried about making waves, which was why he’d jumped her straight from commodore to vice admiral to give her the rank for her new assignment. She’d hit SysDev like a long overdue typhoon, but she’d also been in place for little more than two T-months and the task she’d inherited was similar to Hercules stable-cleaning assignment, only worse.
“And it’s good to see you, too, Tory,” he said, shaking her hand. “Is this trip going to be as interesting as your reports have suggested?”
“I actually think it may, Sir. For a change,” she said, and Kingsford chuckled.
If there was a flag officer in the Solarian League Navy who had a lower opinion of Technodyne’s management team and philosophy than Kindrick, Kingsford couldn’t imagine who it might be. That was another of the reasons he’d chosen her for SysDev. She had a lot of respect for Technodyne’s technical capabilities, and he wasn’t afraid her attitude towards management would prejudice her against any good ideas the R&D teams threw up, but she was clearly disinclined to cut the transstellar any more slack than she absolutely had to. That made her a highly critical audience whenever the corporate offices sent a glowing prospectus her way.
“I’m still wading through about six or seven pentabytes of reports and analyses,” she went on as Kingsford released her hand and she shook Jennings’s in turn. “This one was marked urgent, though, and I’m inclined to think they got it right for once.”
“You said you thought this one might be even more important than Cataphract.”
Kingsford’s tone made the sentence a question, and she nodded.
“It’s not going to be as…tactically flexible, let’s say, as Cataphract, especially not if they keep tweaking the Cataphract booster stage’s performance.”
She waved politely for Kingsford and Jennings to proceed her towards the tactical crew waiting for them on one of the simulator’s command decks. At the moment it was configured as the bridge of a Scientist-class superdreadnought, and she escorted them across to the tactical section. The tac stations were up and manned, Kingsford noted, glancing at the waiting master display. At the moment, it was configured on the system scale, and he saw what looked like a squadron of superdreadnoughts sitting almost motionless at a range of just over three light-minutes.
“But I don’t think we should really consider this as much a tactical system as a strategic one,” she continued as they walked. “Deploying it won’t be anything I’d call simple or logistically efficient, but if it works as well in the field as it has in the sims and the test program, it’ll be worth the complications.”
“Really?” Kingsford crooked one eyebrow, allowing a carefully metered skepticism into his tone, but she nodded firmly.
“Really, Sir. I had my doubts when I skimmed the initial proposal, but the thing is, it actually works, and we didn’t have to invent a single new piece of hardware—well, we did tweak a few subsystems we already had—to put it together. The software’s a radical departure from anything we ever deployed before, and we’ve upgraded the computer’s core processors to make it work, but we’ve been through over forty live-fire tests of actual prototype weapons without a single failure. That doesn’t mean everything will work as effectively in action, since we’ve got such piss-poor evaluations of the tech it’ll be going up against, but from a systems reliability perspective, it’s probably on a par with a Javelin or Trebuchet.”
Kingsford felt his other eyebrow rising. For Kindrick, especially where Technodyne was concerned, that constituted not simply a ringing endorsement but giddy enthusiasm!
“So it’s a mature technology?” Jennings asked.
“Its current components are, Sir,” Kindrick replied. “That’s not to say it can’t be improved upon. I’m looking at ways to upgrade laserheads and final-phase penetration aids, for example. At the moment, we’re fitting the Cataphract-B’s final stage and Mod-Eleven laserhead, but I don’t see any reason we can’t improve on that. We ought to be able to replace the current terminal stage with a bigger one; probably as big as the Cataphract-C’s, or even a little larger, I’d guesstimate. It’d mean redesigning the base stage’s fuselage—might be more accurate to call it a ‘hull,’ really, given the dimensions we’re talking about—but the basic drive and support systems wouldn’t even have to be scaled up. Only the physical dimensions of the structure they’re mounted in.”
“That all sounds good,” Kingsford said. “Assuming it really does work. And that it performs as advertised.”
“Oh, so far it has, Sir. In fact, you should see proof of that in about—” she checked a digital time display Kingsford hadn’t noticed in the corner of the tactical display, counting steadily downward “—another nine minutes.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m afraid we’ve arranged a little surprise for you, Sir.” Kindrick smiled suddenly, making herself look even younger. “The birds are already in flight. The Commander here—” she twitched her head at the tactical officer on the simulator command deck “—was under orders to initiate launch while I was walking you across. They’re on their way in right now.”
Kingsford looked at her for a moment, then turned to the display. It looked back at him with bland innocence.
“You’ve got actual live birds out there, on their way in—under power—right this instant?” he demanded, never looking away.
“Yes, Sir. They are.”
“And how far out are your RDs?”
“Thirty million kilometers, Sir. Halfway to the launch platforms.”
Kingsford shook his head. That was hard to believe, even after studying the précis she’d sent him.
Jennings stepped up beside him, then moved to look over the tac officer’s shoulder.
“According to this, they’re up to thirty-seven thousand KPS and less than five million klicks from the RDs…with almost four minutes left on the clock, Sir,” he said.
The chief of staff sounded almost awed, and Kingsford didn’t blame him.
“I think, Sir,” Kindrick said, and when Kingsford turned back to her, her thin, hard smile looked neither young nor sweet, “that this is one the Manties will never see coming. In every sense of the word.”
Board of Directors Room
Executive Building
City of Columbia
Beowulf System
“Well, thank God that’s over!” System Chairman Chyang Benton-Ramirez tipped back in his chair and raised a stein of beer at the holograph floating above it, where the final tally had just been posted. It was not, perhaps, the most Chairman-like posture he might have adopted, but it had been a very long night and none of his fellows on the Republic of Beowulf System Board of Directors seemed offended.
“What’s that phrase your niece is so fond of, Jacques?” Director of Defense Caddell-Markham said, looking at the small, almond-eyed man sitting across the table from him. “Something about the end of the b
eginning?”
“She does have a taste for ancient quotations,” Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou acknowledged. “Can’t imagine where she got it. But you’ve got a point, Gabriel. Except that I’m not sure this is even as far down the road as ending the beginning. Seems to me it’s more a case of ratifying the beginning.”
“A point,” Caddell-Markham acknowledged.
“A very good point, in fact,” a tallish, blond-haired woman said. “I hope no one will be offended if I say, speaking as the Republic’s chief attorney, how deeply relieved I am to be out of what I suppose we might charitably call a legally ambiguous situation.”
Although Devorah Ophir-Giacconi was only sixty-eight, which was very young for a Beowulfan Director, she’d headed the Beowulfan Directorate of Justice for almost nine T-years now. She was smart, a highly respected member of the Beowulf Bar and a stubborn defender of the integrity of the legal process. Which, Benton-Ramirez y Chou reflected, undoubtedly explained her utter disdain for the Solarian League’s current state.
“Oh?” He smiled at her. “You mean now that we’re all officially traitors?”
A chorus of chuckles, some with a slight edge of nervousness, perhaps, ran around the conference room, and Ophir-Giacconi snorted.
“Actually, Jacques, I mean now that we aren’t traitors anymore. Arguably, at least.”
“Excuse me?” Konstantin Brulé-Chou raised both shaggy eyebrows. The Director of Human Affairs was almost eight centimeters taller than Ophir-Giacconi, but his legs were actually shorter than hers, and he was very broad shouldered and powerfully built. That probably helped explain his nickname of “Bear,” but his heavy eyebrows, low hairline, and big, powerful hands had contributed their bit to its inevitability. “I’d think the fact that we just supervised a vote to secede from the Solarian League definitely makes us traitors, at least in Old Chicago!”
“No,” Ophir-Giacconi said. “We were traitors while, as a member of the Solarian League, we were actively aiding and comforting a star nation—arguably, three star nations, really—who are in a state of war against the League. Now we’re either an independent star nation or we’re rebels, not traitors. There is a legal distinction. Our own judiciary’s interpretation is that we just became an independent star nation again for the first time in seven hundred and seventy T-years through the legitimate exercise of our constitutional rights as a member system of the Solarian League. That means that—like any independent star nation—our foreign policy, including any military alliances we choose to make, is our affair and no one else’s, so no one can accuse us of treason for whatever we decide. I doubt anyone in Old Chicago’s interested in our interpretation, but it is a matter of public record. And as a nitpicking attorney, I’m glad to get out of the moral and legal middleground.”
She probably had a point there, Benton-Ramirez y Chou acknowledged. There was a certain legal and moral…murkiness to the Republic of Beowulf’s actions over the last seven months or so—starting with the decision to warn both Landing and Neaubeau Paris about Filareta’s impending attack—regardless of how justified its position might be.
It was still difficult for him to realize Beowulf, the primary mover behind the creation of the Solarian League, really, was in the process of destroying it. The grief he felt, sometimes, when he contemplated that, was almost overpowering. But there’d never been an alternative once Innokentiy Kolokoltsov and his fellows refused to acknowledge even the possibility of the Alignment’s existence and doubled down on their conflict with Manticore and her allies, instead. The Mandarins’ effort to scapegoat Beowulf for the disastrous outcome of Operation Raging Justice had only underscored his star system’s lack of options, and the decision to call a plebiscite to consider secession had made itself. Nor had anyone been surprised by the results flashing in the hologram above the conference table, either—except, perhaps, that the margin in favor of secession had been even wider than anticipated.
That was Hypatia, he thought grimly. My God, what were those idiots thinking? Creating something like “Parthian Shot” is like passing out pulsers to angry children! It’s a miracle Kotouč and Petersen were able to prevent Hajdu and Gogunov from killing six or seven million people in an afternoon. And how much longer can we go on dodging that pulser dart?
“I suppose you’ve got a point, Devorah,” he said after a moment. “I doubt if anyone in Old Chicago’s going to bother his head a lot about whether we’re traitors or ‘just’ rebels, should the opportunity for any legal unpleasantness arise, but it is sort of nice to be out of the shadows.”
“Definitely.” Caddell-Markham nodded vigorously. “And not just because now everyone knows where we stand. Ninety-two percent in favor?” He shook his head. “I know some of the eight percent will refuse to accept the result, and as someone who always thought of himself as a citizen of the League, I can’t say I don’t understand. But nobody will ever be able to say there wasn’t what you might call ‘broad support’ for our actions. And one of the other things I’m grateful we can do now is let Manticore and Haven park some of their wallers close enough in to cover the inner system, not just the terminus.”
“Is that really necessary?” Board Secretary Joshua Pinder-Swun asked. Caddell-Markham looked at him, and Pinder-Swun shrugged. “I was under the impression we didn’t really need a bunch of capital ships to do that now that Mycroft’s operational.”
He looked a little nervous, and Benton-Ramirez y Chou wasn’t surprised. Mycroft’s capabilities as a defensive umbrella were fundamental to almost all of the Grand Alliance’s planning. If those capabilities were less than advertised…
“We may not need ‘a bunch of capital ships,’ but that’s not the same as saying they wouldn’t be good to have,” the Director of Defense said. “It’s sort of like checking your backup grav pack before you get on your grav ski, Josh. Odds are, you’ll never need it. If you do, though, I believe the operable adverb becomes that you’ll need it badly.”
“I agree with Gabriel,” Director of Technology Saana-Lebel said. The grandson of a Havenite refugee who’d fled the People’s Republic, Saana-Lebel had been one of the strongest supporters of the Republic of Beowulf’s current foreign policy. “Mycroft is a really extraordinary achievement,” he went on, “and I’m more impressed than ever by what both Manticore and Haven—especially Haven, given the state of its prewar educational system—have accomplished. But it’s not guaranteed to be leakproof.”
“Even if it were, nobody’s told the SLN about it,” Caddell-Markham pointed out. “It’s sort of hard to be deterred by something you don’t know exists.”
“True.” Benton-Ramirez y Chou nodded. “And let’s face it. Even if they did know about it, they’ve shown an unwavering ability to walk straight into one buzz saw after another. I have to think even the Mandarins and the SLN can learn if they get enough people killed along the way, but I don’t think it’s possible to underestimate just how big a stop sign these people really need.”
“Agreed,” Caddell-Markham said. “Which is why I’m so happy we can move them farther in-system. By this time, even the geniuses in Old Chicago have to’ve figured out they don’t want to tangle with Manticoran or Havenite ships-of-the-wall. They might be more willing to take a chance against our ships, though, especially if they think they can stack the odds heavily enough in their favor. That’s why what they threw at Hypatia—especially the number of missile pods they brought along—scares me. Less for what they could actually accomplish against us than for what I’m afraid they may think they could. So if there’s a chance it’ll convince them discretion really is the better part of valor before we kill another million or two of their spacers, I’m all in favor of waving the biggest stick they know we have at them just as threateningly as we can!”
George Benton Tower
City of Old Chicago
Old Earth
Sol System
Innokentiy Kolokoltsov leaned back in the self-adjusting comfort of his chair, pinched the br
idge of his nose, and blinked weary eyes at the ceiling. It was late—very late—and he felt the midnight stillness in his bones. The outer wall of his office was configured to transparency, looking out over the gorgeous, magical lights of the largest city in human history. Old Chicago’s monumental towers marched out into the waters of Lake Michigan like Titans, their flanks glittering with constellations of earthbound stars, and a full moon gazed serenely down like an ancient silver coin.
He couldn’t hear the never-sleeping city’s voice from the soundproofed sanctuary of his office. Sometimes he could. Sometimes he configured the sound system to feed from the microphones mounted on George Benton’s flanks. Usually, though, it was soft music that floated in the background while he worked. Sometimes ancient Pre-Diaspora composers, but more often more modern works. He even had a secret taste for the new Zerschmetterte Musik his wife’s nephew had introduced him to, although he’d never admit that by listening to it here in the office.
But there was no music tonight. There was only silence, broken only by the soft bubbling of the meter-and-a-half waterfall tumbling into the koi pond in one corner of the office. It was, admittedly, a soothing noise, but it was so soft it seemed to perfect the silence, rather than break it. He thought about turning on the microphones, or telling the office AI to pick something random from his music library, but he didn’t.