by David Weber
“Cynthia?”
“What the Admiral means,” Lecter said somberly, “is that so far we’ve identified literally scores of people who belong to the Alignment. People who readily admit they do, for that matter. And not one of them knows a single damned thing about the Yawata Strike, false flag operations in places like Mobius, political manipulation in the Republic or the Star Empire, or anything else actively hostile to the interests of the Grand Alliance or any of its members.”
She paused to let that sink in.
“Well, of course no one would admit to that, Milady,” Onassis pointed out after several seconds.
“Maybe not, Ma’am,” Lecter acknowledged. “But it’s not just a case of their not admitting it. They’re positively denying it…in front of lie detectors and even in front of the handful of treecats we have with us.
“And the problem is that they’re telling the truth when they do.”
“Operational security.” Onassis shrugged. “We wouldn’t disseminate that kind of information outside the smallest possible ‘need-to-know’ bubble, either.”
“The details of something like the Yawata Strike, no,” Lecter said respectfully. “But that’s not what we’re talking about here. Oh, nobody does know anything about the Yawata Strike—or at least nobody we’ve talked to so far, at any rate. But nobody seems to know anything about any of the Alignment operations we’ve identified, either. Every one of them agrees there’s a Mesan Alignment, and every one of them despises Manpower and the Mesa System government in general. They belong to a ‘secret organization’ whose sole purpose is to evade the Beowulf Code’s prohibitions on the voluntary designed genetic uplift of the species in their own cases, not the involuntary redesign of humanity in general, and they don’t give a damn about Sollie or Manticoran politics, except that until we started ‘lying’ about them, they admired our stance against genetic slavery. They’re organized and working ‘underground’ solely because of the opposition they know they’d face from those of us so benighted that we still oppose any thought of designed genetic improvement, and they wouldn’t dream of imposing their solution on anyone else. And the reason they despise Manpower—aside from the same philosophical objections any reasonably moral human being would share—is that genetic slavery is what they believe sustains the negative image of genetic design and thus poses an additional barrier to what they and their parents and their grandparents have been trying to accomplish in secrecy here on Mesa for generations.”
“I’d like t’ think you were jokin’ about that, Cynthia,” Oversteegen said slowly after a long. still moment. “You’re not, though, are you?”
“No, Sir, I’m not.” Lecter shook her head. “We’re seeing a lot of anger—fury, really—out of those members of the Alignment we’ve identified because of the way in which we’ve vilified them. Not just because they feel we’ve accused them personally—and falsely—of having murdered everyone killed in the Yawata Strike, but because if anyone believes us, the way in which we’ve condemned them, painted them as monsters, can only set back everything they’ve been trying to do. Worse, by every single test we can apply, they’re absolutely sincere when they say that. We certainly can’t prove they aren’t, at any rate, and if we can’t—especially with the ’cats to help out—then I can’t think of anyone else who could. Or who’d even want to, for that matter.”
“My God,” someone murmured, and Gold Peak chuckled harshly.
“Exactly,” she said. Every eye turned to her, and her smile was bleak.
“Let me cut to the chase here,” she told them.
“First, we’ve been accused of nuking a surrendered planet in a blatant violation of the Eridani Edict, and we’re going to find it damned hard to prove we didn’t do it. As Admiral Tourville says, even if we manage to find evidence that would convince an impartial judge, we’re not going to find any impartial judges to prove it to. For that matter, we haven’t managed to convince most Sollies we didn’t deliberately enable the Green Pine bomb!
“Second, our belief in the sinister, vile, murderous ‘Mesan Alignment’ which killed millions of Manticorans—and was directly responsible for all the bloodshed after we resumed hostilities—explains exactly why we nuked Mesa in revenge the instant we had the chance. At best, we’re so criminally stupid we’ve convinced ourselves that this inherently benign ‘secret organization’ is actually a vast, evil, centuries-old conspiracy—one aimed at destroying all known interstellar order, for some reason known only to itself—and set out to conquer and then nuke an innocent planet in some sort of deluded ‘self defense.’ At worst, we never actually believed anything of the sort, all our allegations have been nothing more than a pretext to justify the raw imperialism of which the Mandarins have been accusing us from the beginning, and we were cynically willing to murder millions of Mesans to create yet another crime against humanity for which we could accuse our version of the Mesan Alignment to justify what we’ve already done and the fact that we intend to continue doing it.”
She paused amid a ringing silence, and her smile turned colder and bleaker still.
“If anyone’s prepared to find a bright spot in any of that, please, share it with me now.”
Gregor Mendel Tower
City of Leonard
Darius System
The silence was as cold as it was complete.
It lingered there, poisoning the conference room’s perfectly conditioned air, sick with grief…and hatred.
“Damn it,” Collin Detweiler said finally, his husky voice thick with pain. “Damn it! I told him to get out earlier! I told him!”
“Of course you did,” his brother Benjamin said heavily. “We all did, Collin. But he was too damn stubborn, too thickheaded, too frigging stupid to take our advice! And then…and then—”
His voice broke and he covered his eyes briefly with his palms.
“And too damned loyal,” he went on after a moment, from behind the shield of his hands. “And too damned determined to do his job.”
“And he felt too guilty over rushing Houdini,” Franklin Detweiler said very, very softly. The others looked at him, and he shrugged. “I didn’t say he was wrong to do it. I said he felt guilty, and you all know he did. Hell, all of us did! And not just because the collateral damage got so much worse when we activated it early.”
No one said anything more for a moment. Then Benjamin inhaled deeply.
“You’re right,” he acknowledged. “Of course you’re right. And that was another reason Mom refused to leave without him.”
The others nodded, except for Collin. Collin didn’t disagree with the others, but his grief—and his inner anger—went even deeper than theirs. He’d been their father’s deputy when Albrecht ordered Houdini brought forward. He’d helped plan its acceleration and implementation.
And he was the one whose timing had come up three T-days—just seventy-two hours—short of getting their parents off Mesa alive.
He’d be a long time forgiving himself for that. It wasn’t his fault. He knew it. And he’d still be a long time forgiving himself.
“None of that would’ve been necessary if not for the fucking Manties.” Gervais’s voice was a snarl. “It’s that goddamned loose warhead Gold Peak’s fault. If she weren’t such a maniac, if we hadn’t known she’d be coming for Mesa as soon as she possibly could, we wouldn’t have had to rush Houdini that way and Mom and Dad would be right here on Darius right now.”
A sort of sub-aural growl answered him, but Collin shook his head.
“Gold Peak may be the one who actually pulled the trigger, but it wasn’t just her. It was her whole damned ‘Star Empire’ and their goddammed friends. All of them. Elizabeth, Mayhew, Pritchart…and that bitch Harrington.”
The growl was anything but sub-aural this time, and Benjamin gave a choppy nod. A hard, honest core of him admitted that everything Manticore and its allies had done was ultimately defensive. That the Alignment itself had set everything leading to Houdini into mo
tion itself. But that didn’t mean Gervais and Collin were wrong. If Manticore and Haven hadn’t turned themselves into roadblocks that had to be removed—or at least neutralized—none of this would have been necessary. And while it might be unfair to blame all their misfortunes on Honor Alexander-Harrington—names like White Haven, Theisman, Tourville, Webster, Terekhov, Caparelli, and Yanakov deserved an honorable mention upon that list—he shared his father’s special ire against Alexander-Harrington.
She should’ve been ours, damn it! he thought bitterly. She would’ve been ours if not for that stupid, stupid—
He made himself stop and draw a deep mental breath. The Harrington genome wasn’t the only Alpha line the Alignment had lost over the T-centuries. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been…mislaid if Richard and Marjorie Harrington hadn’t migrated from Meyerdahl to the Star Kingdom all those T-years ago, but it still could have happened. Sometimes a generation simply didn’t produce a suitable candidate for one of the covert lines, and when there were no candidates to nominate and groom for their role in the Detweiler Plan, they simply had to let that line go. The risk of giving themselves away if they chose an unsuitable candidate and didn’t realize it in time to eliminate him before he learned too much was simply not acceptable. Upon occasion—fairly frequently, in fact—it was possible to monitor a “lost line” and identify a candidate who was suitable after another generation or so. But no one could count on that, especially when one of the cadet branches took itself off to the howling wilderness of the Verge…which was exactly what the Star Kingdom of Manticore had been all those T-centuries ago. And so the Harrington genome had simply been written off, although some of its characteristics—the Meyerdahl mods had been an extraordinarily potent starting point—had been incorporated into other alphas. Even the Detweiler genome had profited from it, in fact. But no one had ever imagined the role the Harrington line would play in hampering the Alignment’s operations. It was hard to imagine a single human being—aside from Roger and Elizabeth Winton, at least—who’d done more to obstruct their efforts in the Haven Sector, anyway.
No wonder Dad was always so pissed at the way she kept breaking our kneecaps, he thought bitterly. And now she’s the commander of their goddammed Grand Fleet…and Dad and Mom are dead because of her damned best friend!
“All right,” he said out loud. “Mom and Dad are gone. I wish—how I wish—Captain Abbott had been able to pull them off planet. I know all of you do, too, but I’ll tell you right now there’s not another person in Darius who feels worse about it than Abbott does. She hated it, but she had over two hundred of our other people on board, she was too far from the planet to get Mom and Dad out before Gold Peak was in orbit, and Dad’s orders not to try weren’t discretionary. I want all of you to understand that—to accept that. She’s a good officer, one of my best, and I don’t want any of us taking out our grief on her or any of her crew.”
The others looked back at him. Gervais’s eyes were dark, and Benjamin doubted he’d be able to stop blaming Abbott for what had happened. But that was an emotional reaction; even Gervais’s brain knew better, whatever his heart said, and after a long, stiff moment, the youngest Detweiler brother nodded.
“Good,” Benjamin said, then pinched the bridge of his nose. “And with that said, what do we do next?” He lowered his hand and looked around the polished table. “Suggestions?”
No one spoke for several seconds. It took them that long to disengage their thoughts from their shared grief, but, finally, Franklin stirred.
“I think the most important thing is that we don’t waste this,” he said. “Mom and Dad died as part of Houdini, but we all know how Dad planned to use the Houdini acceleration. How he’d want us to use it now that he’s gone. And I hate to say it, but the way it finally played out will probably make that even more effective.”
Collin and Gervais nodded, but neither of them spoke. Instead, all four of the others looked at Benjamin, and the oldest of Albrecht Detweiler’s sons felt the weight of those eyes. It wasn’t the first time they’d all waited for his response to something. He’d been his father’s senior deputy for close to fifty T-years. But they were no longer looking at him as Albrecht Detweiler’s deputy. Now they were looking at him as Albrecht’s successor, and for the first time he truly understood the burden his father had carried for so long.
“You’re right, Franklin,” he said after a moment. “The question is how we go about making it more effective, and a lot of that’s more up your alley than anyone else’s.”
Franklin nodded soberly. Benjamin might have been Albrecht’s senior deputy and the Alignment’s chief for military affairs, but Franklin had been the Alignment’s chief political strategist. Of all of them, he had the best feel for the tangled currents of Solarian politics.
“I can tell you this,” he said with a certain savage satisfaction, “the Solly newsies will go crazy. Dad’s timing was devastating.”
You’re right about that, Collin thought, eyes prickling with mingled grief and pride. And I’ll guarantee you Dad thought that through, just like he thought everything through, before he pushed the button.
He and Albrecht had hoped and planned for Houdini’s acceleration to get as many as possible of their key personnel safely out of the Mesa System before its final phase. They’d known they couldn’t get everyone out, but they’d tried like hell, anyway, and they had succeeded in extracting almost everyone on the primary list. They’d gotten out over two thirds of the secondary list, too…but they’d run out of time before they got to the tertiary list at all. Albrecht had feared from the outset that would be the case, and he’d hated it—hated it—which was the real reason he’d stubbornly refused to leave before the last shipload from the secondary list. But even under the original Houdini plan, the onion core’s physical footprint in the star system had to be erased, as well. Given more time, that could have been arranged much less…spectacularly and with little or no collateral damage, but time had been the one thing they didn’t have, and faced by the threat of the Manties’ accelerated imminent arrival, Albrecht had improvised brilliantly. He hadn’t liked the vastly increased body count his improvisation had to cost, but he’d paid the price unflinchingly, and the advantages it had bought would be difficult to overestimate.
“Franklin’s got an excellent point,” he said out loud. “When Dad activated Houdini early, all we really expected was to blame the final explosions on the ‘Ballroom terrorists’ responsible for Green Pines. Since we’d already convinced the Sollies the Manties were behind that—and, hell, Zilwicki was the one who unlocked the nuke’s security protocols for the damned seccy!—it would’ve been easy to blame this ‘fresh campaign of nuclear terrorism’ on the same people. But when the time came, Dad decided to hand us an even sharper sword.”
“How?” Daniel asked. Collin raised an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged. “I know what the original plan was, Collin. I’m just curious about your last sentence. How did Dad make it even ‘sharper’?”
“The timing on the explosions—that’s what you’re thinking about, isn’t it?” Benjamin asked before Collin could reply, and Collin nodded.
“Under our original rethink of Houdini, those explosions would’ve been spread out over a period of about thirty-six hours,” he told Daniel. “The idea was to have a sort of rolling crescendo to the ‘terrorist campaign’—one that really drove home what those Ballroom lunatics were willing to do—with Manticore’s enablement!—to punctuate the entire operation. But what he did instead’s going to be even more effective.”
“How?” Daniel looked puzzled, but it was the puzzlement of a man who realized he almost understood what he was being told.
“The original timing would have made them obviously coordinated but not synchronized ‘terrorist attacks,’” Collin explained. “The sequence he actually used—I’m pretty sure I know which one it was, because we’d discussed a half dozen options for the final phase—was a for a worst-case scenario, one in which the Manti
es had somehow figured out exactly what was going on and launched an immediate all-out search for our facilities. It was designed to take out everything before they could find anything…and also to prevent anyone from realizing the initial detonation command came from the island. The explosion under the house will make people look closely at the island, no matter what, but we didn’t want anyone realizing an ‘uninhabited island’ had actually been the central nexus of the entire Alignment. There weren’t going to be any other explosions within a thousand kiolometers of it, which was likely to make it stand out even more to the Manties’ analysts, and somebody sufficiently paranoid to analyze the explosions’ sequence might have been able to plot the command’s point of origin closely enough to make them really, really curious about just what the hell had blown up in the middle of a nature preserve that was smack in the middle of their plot. Especially since the fact that it was ‘uninhabited’ had to make that particular blast especially suspicious in the first place.
“Under the revised Houdini planning, we were less concerned about that, and before Chernyshev ‘tidied up’ Marinescu and her crew, she’d…already dealt with most of the tertiary list groups we knew we weren’t going to get out. So what we were really worried about were the physical fingerprints, the facilities we’d used where a good forensics team might pull out information we didn’t want shared. Most of them—especially the ones we’d co-opted from the system government or the Peaceforce instead of building them ourselves—would have been legitimate terrorist targets, one way or another. But by going with the timing Dad actually used, it’s obvious the final series of explosions weren’t terrorist attacks at all. No terrorist group could possibly hit that narrow a time window. So the only people who could’ve done it had to be the fleet that controlled space around the planet. The newsies—and don’t forget, we already had O’Hanrahan on-planet to lead the charge against the ‘terrorists’—won’t be blaming Manty proxies now, Daniel. Elizabeth might have been able to deflect at least some of those charges by pointing out that nobody can really control a batch of terrorists crazy enough to use nukes on civilian targets. But it’s not ‘terrorists’ anymore. It’s her own first cousin, third in line for the Manticoran crown. That’s who the newsies will blame for this. I’ll guarantee it. And when that shit hits the fan…”