by David Weber
“Beowulf?!” Tarkovsky said sharply. “I thought Daud said they’d dropped that piece of insanity!”
“Bryce, nobody tells us what Bernard and Strategy and Planning are actually thinking about! It’s not like Operational Analysis needs to know what they’re currently planning to give them the best analysis, after all.” Teague rolled her eyes. “Besides, even now, nobody really wants to admit Daud was right when none of them could tell their arses from their elbows. They want him to answer specific questions and otherwise keep his mouth shut and stop reminding them—and their superiors—what clueless idiots they were. That mindset flows straight down from Admiral Cheng, and nobody between us and him’s going to buck it. So, no, nobody’s told us what they’re contemplating, and no one’s likely to start telling us anytime soon. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make some guesses from the questions they choose to ask.”
“You’re suggesting they’re seriously thinking about attacking Beowulf?” Okiku asked in the tone of a woman who very much hoped she’d misunderstood what she’d just been told.
“I’m suggesting they’re asking for analysis that only makes sense in terms of some sort of operation against Beowulf,” Teague replied. “And I’m saying that after the shit they tried to pull in the Hypatia and everything else that’s gone down in the sacred name of Operation Buccaneer,” the last two words were a snarled obscenity, “there’s not a frigging thing I would put past these people. Beyond that, I’ve got nothing.”
“Jesus.” Tarkovsky shook his head. “I thought what might be going down in Maya was bad. But if you’re right about what Bernard and her trolls are cooking up, that’s the least of our worries!”
“Except,” Weng pointed out, “for the resonance effect.” Tarkovsky looked at her, and she shrugged. “If Barregos and the Maya Sector go up in flames, it’s likely to push them over the edge. And if they’re already thinking that way…”
Her voice trailed off, and it was very, very quiet in Hillary Indrakashi Enkateshwara Tower.
HMS Imperator
Trevor’s Star Terminus
Trevor’s Star System
Star Empire of Manticore
“Mister Zilwicki is here, Your Grace,” Lieutenant Commander Tümmel annunced, and Honor turned from the spectacular starscape outside HMS Imperator’s domed dorsal observation lounge.
“Thank you, Waldemar,” she said, and extended her hand to Zilwicki. “And thank you for coming so promptly, Anton.”
“You’re welcome, as always, Your Grace,” Zilwicki replied, and she looked over his shoulder at Tümmel.
“That’ll be all, Waldemar. But do me a favor. Screen Commander Brantley and Captain Stefano. Make certain Admiral L’anglais knows about the briefing. I’m not sure if she was planning on personally participating in that task group maneuver she’d laid on. If she did, though, she’s probably halfway to San Martin right now. Find out. And if there are any scheduling issues involved in getting her—her personally, not a deputy—here for the briefing, get with Commodore Brigham and work them out. Tell the Commodore she’s authorized to set the timing on it however she has to to make it work.”
“Yes, Your Grace. Understood,” Tümmel said, rather more soberly than usual. He braced briefly to attention. “With your permission, Your Grace?”
Honor nodded permission for him to withdraw and returned her attention to Zilwicki.
The Highlander looked back at her, one eyebrow arched. He’d been a bit surprised when Tümmel led him straight into the lounge, because Major Hawke had been standing outside the hatch with Corporal Atkins, not inside it where he could make sure his Steadholder wasn’t kidnapped by space elves when he wasn’t looking. That was an unusual departure from his standard paranoia, and there was something unusual about her, as well, now that he thought about it. She seemed more…focused than usual, and Nimitz’s body language seemed tenser as the treecat gazed intently at him.
“Your Grace?” he said, and she smiled at him.
“I need to make sure there aren’t any conflicts with your schedule for that briefing, either,” she told him. “I think your input’s likely to be pretty significant.”
“My input?”
“Yours,” she replied, then astonished him by reaching out to lay her hands on his shoulders and squeeze tightly. “We just got word from Admiral Gold Peak. Tenth Fleet reached Mesa nine days ago.”
Zilwicki stiffened, his face suddenly pale, his eyes huge and dark, and she shook her head quickly.
“Mike got there in time, Anton!” she told him quickly. “She got there in time.”
She shook him, and despite his massive physique, she had the strength to do it.
“The final assault on Neue Rostock was just about to roll in when she and Lester Tourville turned up.” She smiled into his incredulous eyes, the eyes of a man who hadn’t truly allowed himself to hope, whatever he might have told the rest of the universe…or himself. “The tower’s basically rubble, some of your people are banged up—I understand Ms. Tretiakovna’s going to need substantial regen—and casualties among the seccies were brutal. But they held, Anton.” Tears filled his eyes, and her own weren’t completely dry. “They held their ground against every damned thing they threw at them, and Thandi Palane—and the seccies—made the bastards pay in blood for every centimeter. They broke Internal Security’s back and damned well gutted the Peaceforce, and every seccy on the planet knows they did, by God! And I understand your friend Mister Cachat had prepared a little going away present for the moment they were finally overrun. Something involving explosions, I believe.” She bared her teeth. “Lots of explosions.”
“Sounds—”
Zilwicki stopped. He had to, and he realized he’d reached up, covered the hand on his right shoulder with his own hand while he felt the tears flow down his face. He didn’t care about the tears, but he had to clear his throat twice before he could continue.
“Sounds like Victor,” he husked then, and cleared his throat a third time. “Man always has liked dramatic gestures.”
“So I understand.”
She smiled, gave his shoulders a final squeeze, and stood back while he scrubbed the tears from his face. He understood Hawke’s absence now, he thought as she turned back to the dome, giving him a little more privacy, and he scrubbed again. Then he drew a deep breath and stepped up beside her, looking out at the stars.
“They’re really okay, Your Grace?” He hated asking redundant questions, but just this once, he couldn’t help it. “Really okay?”
“I told you, they’re banged up. Frankly, I’m astonished the breakage wasn’t a lot worse, given what they managed to pull off and the odds against them. And from Mike’s—I mean Countess Gold Peak’s—initial reports, they accomplished exactly what you set out to do. I have to say, after listening to your descriptions of him, it’s a little difficult to recognize Jurgen Dusek in the heroic, freedom-loving, father-of-his-star-nation-scale revolutionary Admiral Gold Peak describes, but at the moment, he and General Palane have to be the two most popular people on the entire planet, at least in the seccies’ and slaves’ eyes. Not so much, in the establishment’s view of things.”
“I imagine not!” Zilwicki surprised himself with a deep, rolling laugh. “I guess they have to be the most hated people in Mesa where the ‘establishment’ is concerned!”
“No.”
Her voice had changed, and he heard a sound out of Nimitz. A dark sound, somehow, he thought. He looked at her quickly, and his eyes narrowed, for her expression had changed completely. It had turned bitter, that odd focus he’d seen in her was far more pronounced than it had been, and her eyes had gone very, very cold.
“No, the most hated person in Mesa right this moment is Countess Gold Peak,” she said flatly. “Because Tenth Fleet carried out an unprovoked nuclear strike—a series of nuclear strikes—on the planet after it had surrendered.”
Anton Zilwicki was a very fast thinker. Anyone who knew him knew better than to let his mas
sive, undeniably heavy-looking physique deceive them about the lightning speed of his brain. Despite which, it took a second or two for what she’d said to register.
“What?!” he demanded then.
“I’m sure that’s going to be the conclusion of everyone in Old Chicago.” Honor said grimly. “It already is in Mesa. Certainly where the establishment’s concerned, and I imagine even quite a few of the seccies have bought into it, as well. Hard to blame them, I suppose. There we are, orbiting the planet, every ship they’ve got’s surrendered, the ground forces have laid down their weapons, and then somebody hits the planet with over thirty nuclear strikes.”
Zilwicki had paled. Now his face went absolutely white, and she gave him the savage smile of a wolf.
“In addition to the strikes on the planet, they blew the Lagrange One orbital habitat, as well. According to the Mesans, that killed the next best thing to three million people all by itself, and we don’t have any kind of number yet on the dirt-side casualties. Mostly because the strikes on the planet were scattered all over the place—some of them in urban centers, some of them in the middle of prairies or on top of mountain towns. One of them on an uninhabited island, for God’s sake!”
“But why…”
He broke off, and then he put that wolf’s smile together with what she’d said about his attending the briefing.
“It’s the ‘terrorist campaign’ writ large, isn’t it Your Grace?” he said softly.
“I think that’s exactly what it is.” Honor’s voice was hard as Sphinxian granite. “The dispersal suggests to me that whoever pushed that button was deleting that hard evidence of the Alignment you and Terry Lassaline and Pat Givens and I have talked about. Oh, she didn’t overlook the way this is going to play so perfectly into the Mandarins’ narrative, either, especially after the Green Pines Incident. I can’t even begin to imagine what effect it’s going to have on Core World public opinion, but I’m pretty sure that was her secondary goal. The primary was to fill in the rabbit hole behind her.”
“That’s what you want me at the briefing to talk about?”
“Among other things.” She nodded. “More immediately, you’ve been on Mesa itself more recently than anyone else in the entire Star Empire. You can give all of us a better context for Mike’s report, and that’s particularly important because this is a preliminary report. There’s bound to be a lot more detail coming along behind, but—for what I imagine are pretty obvious reasons—she needed to inform us about what happened after the surrender as quickly as possible.”
Zilwicki nodded in grim understanding. God only knew how the galaxy in general would react to an atrocity like this, but it damned well wasn’t going to be good. No wonder Gold Peak had given Manticore as much warning as possible!
“So I want you available to fill in background for all of us,” Honor continued. “But, in some ways, I especially want you there for Admiral L’anglais’s benefit.”
Zilwicki frowned in confusion, and she snorted.
“I’ve gotten to know Admiral L’anglais a lot better over the last few weeks. I respect her deeply. But she has…reservations about her star nation’s alliance with someone it’s been shooting at for so long. Admiral Tourville’s endorsed Admiral Gold Peak’s report. For that matter, he’s sent along one of his own, which corroborates hers in every detail. I know Admiral L’anglais will try to view those reports with an open, unbiased mind; what I don’t know is whether or not she’ll succeed. I’m sure Admiral Tourville’s input will help with that, but, frankly, carnage on this level as part of nothing more than a deception measure—as something that amounts to a psychological warfare ploy—is hard for me to wrap my mind around. I expect it to be harder for her.”
Zilwicki nodded.
“I want you to share everything with her—and I mean everything, Anton; I’m authorizing you to pull out all the stops—that you and Harahap have been able to put together about the reason for those ‘terrorist attacks’ and what they may have been concealing. To show her the reasons—the other reasons—someone might have done something like this. I’m not sure how much faith L’anglais puts in the existence of the Alignment. I think she accepts that it’s real, but I also think she has doubts about its reach and our analysis of its ultimate objectives. I need you to put our case to her.”
“Of course, Your Grace. But she must’ve seen the reports we’ve already generated.”
Zilwicki made the statement a question, and Honor nodded.
“In that case, I don’t know how much I can add. We haven’t written up my suspicions about any evacuations—not in any official reports, yet—but she’ll have seen everything else already.”
“You’re right.” Honor conceded, but then she surprised him with a smile. “On the other hand, there’s Sun Catcher.”
“Sun Catcher?”
“Sun Catcher’s the ’cat who’s agreed to help keep her alive.” Honor’s smile broadened. “They’ve only been together for a few weeks, but they’re already what you might call close. It tends to work that way with ’cats. And L’anglais has figured out that Sun Catcher can—and will—tell her if anyone’s lying to her. So while she may have doubts about the honesty of all the anonymous, faceless spooks and policy wonks recording those reports she’s viewed, she won’t have any about your veracity.”
Honor shrugged and her smile disappeared.
“I don’t know if it’ll help, Anton, but I know darned well it can’t hurt. No matter what we do or say, an awful lot of people will never believe we’re not the ones behind those explosions. I know that. But at this particular moment, I can’t begin to tell you how much we don’t need Grand Fleet’s second-in-command to be one of the people wondering if we’re the ones lying to her.”
HMS Artemis
Mesa planetary orbit
Mesa System
“Atennnn-hut!”
Captain Cynthia Lecter, chief of staff, Tenth Fleet, was not a particularly large woman, but her voice was crisp and sharp, and the men and women packed into the large briefing room rose as Michelle Henke, Countess Gold Peak and Tenth Fleet’s commanding officer, entered the compartment with her second-in-command at her side.
That briefing room was unusually crowded and its inhabitants’ expressions were much grimmer than one might have expected from people who had just conquered an entire star system without firing a single shot.
Of course, that was rather the point, Gold Peak reflected as she and Lester Tourville crossed to the table at the center of the compartment. She settled into the chair at its head, Tourville took the one to her right, and she nodded.
“Be seated, Ladies and Gentlemen,” she invited, and her husky contralto was bleaker than usual.
A rustling sound answered as the assembled squadron and divisional commanders, Manticorans and Havenites interspersed around the table, obeyed the command. She let them all settle, then squared her shoulders and looked around those grim faces.
“I know all of us wish we were somewhere else this morning,” she said. “Unfortunately, this bag of snakes wouldn’t get any better wherever we were. It looks like we’re going to get bitten however we reach into it, but I don’t want any rumors or misinformation running around the Fleet if we can prevent it. God knows we won’t be able to stop or control whatever’s said by the Mesans and the Sollies. I’d at least like to minimize the wilder versions among our own people. However we proceed from this point, there’s going to be a lot of contact—there already is a lot of contact, and that can only increase—between our people and the Mesans, and I don’t want anything from our end making that contact any more contentious than it has to be. And to be honest, I’m less worried about our naval personnel than I am about our ground forces, in that respect.”
She looked down the table’s length to where two of the few people present who weren’t in naval uniform sat side by side.
General Susan Hibson commanded the ground forces under Tenth Fleet’s control. Her complexion was dark�
�much lighter than Gold Peak’s, but darker than most of the others in the compartment—and at just over a meter and a half, she was the shortest person present. Although she might be accurately described as “small”—possibly even “tiny,” by some particularly foolhardy souls—no one would ever make the mistake of applying the adjective “fragile” to her solidly muscled physique. She was just as tough mentally as she was physically, and despite her current, horrendous task, she looked back to meet her admiral’s eyes levelly.
General Saartje van Heemskerck, her own second in command, sat beside her. Van Heemskerck was twenty centimeters taller and twenty T-years older than Hibson and a native of the Rembrandt System. In fact, she was Bernardus van Dort’s third or fourth cousin, with red hair lightly stranded with silver and gray eyes. She was also the senior officer of the Talbot Quadrant Guard planetary combat forces which had been forwarded to Tenth Fleet’s support by Governor Medusa and Quadrant Prime Minister Alquezar. Gold Peak had peeled off a hefty chunk of that troop strength to serve as backup for the new government forming in the Meyers System and the naval forces responding to the Mesan Alignment’s false flag operations. She’d hung on to the majority of it, which meant van Heemskerck’s current roster strength amounted to just over three quarters of a million men and women.
That was a lot of combat power, and someone van Heemskerck’s age and with that many men and women under her direct command might reasonably have found her nose out of joint at the notion of serving under someone who’d never commanded a force larger than a couple of battalions in her entire career. In fact, Gold Peak probably would have reversed her and Hibson’s roles under normal circumstances, despite her own deep respect for the Marine. Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending upon one’s viewpoint—Henri Krietzmann, the Talbott Quadrant’s Minister of War, had raised the Talbot Quadrant Guard Expeditionary Force specifically to serve under the command of the Royal Manticoran Navy and Marine Corps.