by David Weber
“But I’m very much afraid that what’s happened in Mesa and the way it’s being reported, even by—or maybe even especially by—genuinely responsible journalists like Audrey O’Hanrahan, will be seen as just that: an existential threat. Maybe not to the League itself, but if we’re lunatic enough to kill millions of people in one star system in pursuit of a non-existent interstellar conspiracy, God only knows how many millions of people we’ll kill in other star systems for equally insane reasons. Under those circumstances, I think it’s possible—even probable—they’ll find a way to tap those other revenue streams. And if they do, time won’t be on our side any longer. If they’ve got the funding to stay solvent, all they have to do is wait us out. If they aren’t going to collapse under their own weight, and if we don’t take the war to them when they don’t, eventually their research and development people will come up with weapons that match our own and they’ll have the funding to put those weapons into production in numbers not even the Grand Alliance can match.”
She sat back, and a cold, still silence enveloped the conference room.
“I hate to say it, but from the perspective of the Alignment—the real Alignment, not the one we’re finding on Mesa—it was a master stroke.” Langtry’s heavy voice finally broke that silence. “I don’t even want to think about the kind of mentality that could kill that many people as a diplomatic ploy, but it was sure as hell effective. And if we can’t even point to an Alignment that bears some resemblance to the one we’ve been telling the galaxy about, I don’t see any way to dig ourselves out of this hole.”
“That’s one reason I brought Mister Zilwicki and Mister Harahap this afternoon, Tony,” Honor said. The foreign secretary looked at her, one eyebrow raised, and she smiled humorlessly. “I don’t think—they don’t think—what happened was just ‘a diplomatic ploy.’ Mister Zilwicki’s done some very interesting analysis of data he gathered while he was on Mesa. Since Mister Harahap has…joined the side of the angels, shall we say, he and Mister Zilwicki have been working together on that analysis and combining it with certain of Mister Harahap’s observations from inside the onion, one might say. They’ve reached some tentative conclusions I think we need to share with all of you, and if they’re remotely on the right track, I think it’s incumbent upon us to get the two of them—and Fire Watch, of course—to Mesa as quickly as we can. The people we’re really after have done a lot better job of disappearing down the rabbit hole than I think any of us would have believed was possible, but Nimitz taught me something a long time ago.”
“And that is—?” Elizabeth asked when Honor paused.
“It doesn’t matter how fast and elusive the rabbit is if the right hunter’s on its trail,” Honor Alexander-Harrington said coldly. “So I think it’s time we sent our own hunting party after this rabbit.”
Hillary Indrakashi Enkateshwara Tower
City of Old Chicago
Sol System
Solarian League
“Now that’s very interesting,” Natsuko Okiku murmured as the video clip finished playing. She frowned at the frozen display for several seconds, fingers drumming on the corner of her desk as she thought about it. Then she looked up across the display at Bryce Tarkovsky. “Doesn’t prove anything,” she pointed out, “but it is interesting.”
“With all due respect, Natsuko, you’re damned right it doesn’t prove anything,” Lupe Blanton said. She sat on the other corner of Okiku’s desk, where she’d just watched the video along with the Gendarmerie colonel. “All we’ve got is a senior naval officer meeting with his fiancée in a public restaurant.” She grimaced. “Hardly the sort of thing anybody’s going to take to a prosecutor.”
“No,” Major Tarkovsky acknowledged. “But from what Daud and Irene have picked up about the analysis Gweon’s handing Kingsford, I’d say there’s a very strong probability he’s working for the Other Guys. And that’s what makes the fact that Ms. Pelletier ‘spontaneously’ invited him to dinner right after leaving her financial adviser’s offices. Especially since her adviser worked for Nuñez, Poldak, Bolton, and Hwang.”
“Which has about three bazillion and twelve other clients, the last time I looked,” Blanton pointed out sardonically. “That’s what’s made it so damnably hard to identify reasonable suspects even after we figured out Bolton was dirty.”
“Granted. But we have agreed Bolton’s dirty, haven’t we?”
“I’d say we’ve decided there’s at least a ninety-nine-point-nine percent chance.”
“Okay. Then here’s what I find really interesting. Bolton isn’t in charge of Pelletier’s accounts. In fact, she’s never handled a single transaction for her. But according to the very discreet eye we’re keeping on Ms. Bolton—and the Outcasts ever-handy data-crunching—the two of them have happened to be sitting at the same table in the sidewalk café on Nuñez, Poldak, Bolton, and Hwang’s air car landing at lunchtime no less than eight times. And so far as our surveillance people have been able to determine, they’ve never struck up a single conversation beyond ‘Nice weather, isn’t it?’”
The Marine shrugged.
“We’ve got plenty of footage now of Bolton in social situations,” he continued, “and she’s really, really good at striking up the sort of conversations that lead to potential client relationships. Pelletier, on the other hand, is obviously well-heeled and she’s both intelligent and gregarious. I find it just a little odd that these two intelligent, articulate people, neither of whom has an existing professional relationship, have ‘just happened’ to run into each other no less than eight times—that we know of—and never had any sort of extended conversation. I don’t know about you, but that strikes me as statistically improbable, let’s say. And now, after Pelletier gets a call from her adviser, asking her to personally come by the office, and after she has lunch number nine at which Bolton ‘just happens’ to share her table, she gets on her uni-link in the taxi as soon as she leaves the café and invites her fiancée to an unscheduled dinner at a restaurant where we’ve already determined she and Gweon routinely upgrade the existing security systems at least seventy percent—but only seventy percent; not one hundred precent—of the times they dine there.”
He looked at Blanton, one eyebrow arched.
“You don’t find any of that interesting?”
“Um.” Blanton frowned thoughtfully. “Okay,” she said. “I still don’t think it proves anything, but it’s certainly suggestive.”
“I find it even more suggestive in light of…recent events,” Okiku put in, her expression much grimmer than it had been, and Blanton inhaled deeply.
“You could have a very good point there, Natsuko,” she conceded. “Of course, if you are, then one has to wonder what Pelletier and Bolton didn’t talk about.”
“I think it was a message pass—that that’s what all these lunchtime encounters have been,” Tarkovsky said flatly. “Not hard to pass an encrypted chip without anyone’s noticing. And, as you say, Lupe, I have to wonder what was on this one.”
“Nothing good,” Okiku said even more grimly, and Blanton nodded.
Unless the Ghost Hunters missed their guess, things were about to get very ugly, very quickly. The blows had come hard and fast, although the Solarian public hadn’t learned about all of them just yet.
The Solarian woman-in-the-street knew about the Mayan Autonomous Regional Sector’s declaration of independence now, and she’d heard Oravil Barregos’s allegations about provocateurs pretending to be Manticorans. The jury of public opinion inside the Kuiper was very much still out on that issue, though. There were those who believed it validated the Manties’ claims about the mysterious “Mesan Alignment.” Unfortunately for the Grand Alliance, those people represented a distinct minority, so far as the Ghost Hunters, could determine. A much larger chunk of public opinion was more cynical, regarding Barregos’s allegations as payback to the Manties, who’d obviously agreed to back him against the League in his campaign to make himself dictator of the Maya S
ector. Obviously, his public support for their ludicrous allegations was the price he’d paid for their military support. And a third opinion held that Barregos might be completely sincere, but that the Manties had deceived him so they could use him as their duped talking head to conceal the truth. There were countless variants between those exytemes, but those three summed up the more serious contenders.
What struck Blanton as ominous was that the Mandarins had yet to take an official position on which possibility was correct. That suggested something else was in play while they formulated their ultimate stance, and if there was any truth in the trickle of rumors that had leaked to Daud al-Fanudahi and Irene Teague, she was very much afraid she knew what that “something else” was.
“Do you really think it could have been the Manties?” she asked, looking at the other two. “At Mesa, I mean. If the rumors are accurate.”
“No.” Tarkovsky’s reply was instant and unqualified. Both women looked at him, eyes questioning, and he shrugged. “First, if the Manties had wanted to take out targets on the surface of Mesa, they’d never have used nukes. They’d have used KEWs. I can’t believe there was a target down there—especially on an ‘uninhabited island’—that needed megaton-range warheads, and if the rumors Daud’s picked up are accurate, that’s exactly what someone used. The Manties could’ve done the same job, assuming there’d been any reason they wanted to, with a kinetic strike that was a hell of a lot smaller, a hell of a lot cleaner, and a hell of a lot less likely to be construed as an Eridani violation.”
“And if they used nukes specifically so they could make that argument?” Blanton’s question was challenging; her tone was not.
“Lupe, this is the Manties. I don’t give a flying fuck—pardon my language—how Public Information’s painting them; they’re Manties. They just dealt with catastrophic damage and millions of deaths in their own star system as the result of what clearly was an Eridani violation. Hundreds of their spacers just died stopping us from committing one in Hypatia. And they did it largely because this sort of thing would be complete and total moral anathema to the Star Empire. Again, I don’t give a damn what Abruzzi has to say about them. I know at least a dozen Manties personally, and all of us have had everything they or the Grand Alliance as a whole have ever done under a microscope for months now trying to figure out what the hell is going on. We know they wouldn’t have done it. And even if they wouldn’t have refused to do it on moral grounds, they aren’t that frigging stupid.
“First, they came into the system as liberators. That’s how at least seventy-five percent of the population had to view them. Now they—or somebody—has killed millions of people, a lot of whom had to be the very same seccies and slaves who were so happy to see them. You think Gold Peak and her ground force commanders aren’t bright enough to recognize how that’s going to generate at least passive, and more probably active, resistance from the very people who should be supporting them?
“Second, that’s just inside the Mesa System. Outside Mesa, it’s likely to be even worse! They’ve had the moral high ground—outside the Kuiper, at any rate—ever since this started, and that only redoubled after Hypatia and after Buccaneer became public knowledge. Are you ready to suggest Elizabeth Winton and Eloise Pritchart, who have to be two of the smartest heads of state in the entire galaxy, have suddenly turned so stupid they’re willing to throw all of that away? For what? What possible tactical objective in a star system they’d already conquered could have inspired them to do something this…this incalculably unwise?”
“But Gold Peak does have a reputation,” Okiku pointed out.
“So does Harrington!” Tarkovsky shot back. “And I think we’re pretty much in agreement that ninety percent of the stories about her hot-headedness and vindictiveness are crap, aren’t we? So there’s some reason we shouldn’t think the same thing about what Gold Peak’s enemies say about her? And whatever else she may be, she’s Empress Elizabeth’ first cousin and third in the line of succession. I don’t care how big a lunatic she is, somebody on her staff would have pointed out to her what you might call the ‘political downside’ of branding her dynasty—personally—with responsibility for violating the Eridani Edict. So, taking everything into consideration, it’s not just a case of ‘No, she didn’t do it’; it’s a case of ‘Hell no—she damned well didn’t do it!’”
Blanton was forced to nod. Unfortunately, she doubted Solarian public opinion would see things quite as clearly as Bryce Tarkovsky did. Or as she did. She still tried to remind herself they hadn’t proved the “Other Guys” weren’t really the Grand Alliance, because that was her job. But deep inside, she knew the truth. Or at least a truth.
“If it wasn’t her, who was it?” she asked out loud. “I know Daud and Irene have hardened in favor of its really being this ‘Alignment,’ and there are times I find myself agreeing with them. But if this really was the ‘Mesan Alignment,’ why in God’s name would they kill this many million of their own people?”
“I don’t know,” Tarkovsky acknowledged. “In fact, I don’t have the least damned idea.” He was one of the Ghost Hunters who’d accepted the Alignment’s existence early on, and his expression was frustrated. “I know one thing, though. This will fit perfectly into the Mandarins’ playbook, and I don’t think the Other Guys—whoever they are—can have been…unaware of that fact. That has to be a huge part of why they did it.”
“Granted,” Okiku said. She’d remained solidly on the fence about the existence or nonexistence of the Mesan Alignment, but at the moment she looked like an agnostic inclining towards outright atheism. “Actually, though,” she went on, confirming the impression, “I think Lupe’s question’s pretty damned valid, Bryce. That’s an enormous number of people, assuming the casualty counts Daud and Irene are hearing about are remotely close to accurate. If this ‘Alignment’ is operating out of Mesa, then those explosions have to have just killed bunches of people who were friends or family members of people involved in it. I find it awfully difficult to believe that somebody who’s operated clandestinely this successfully for as long as the Manties claim they have—or even just long enough to manage everything we’ve found right here on Old Terra—could have failed to see the danger that represents to their security. If you just killed my grandmother, or a dozen of my cousins, my loyalty’s likely to become just a bit strained.”
“There’s certainly something to be said for that,” Tarkovsky granted. “But until we know more about who actually got killed, we’re groping in the dark in that respect. Mind you, I can’t imagine any way they could’ve killed that many people without killing those friends and family members of yours. On the other hand, I don’t pretend to have an accurate map of what the Other Guys are really after or what they might be prepared to pay to get there.”
“I can see that, but Natsuko’s got a really good point,” Blanton said. “And if the Other Guys aren’t the ‘Mesan Alignment,’ then they wouldn’t be worrying about the collateral damage punching holes in their own security.”
Tarkovsky nodded, his frustration more obvious than ever.
“Agreed. But the bottom line is that, as far as the Manties and the Mandarins are concerned, it doesn’t matter who the Other Guys are. What matters is that the Manties are going to be blamed for it, and that makes me really, really nervous about this meeting between Pelletier and Bolton. If the official courier boat from Mesa was delayed five days before it was allowed to leave but somebody else got out the same day—and you know somebody else had to get out—that’s five days in which Bolton’s bosses could have sent her new instructions. And I think we’re pretty much in agreement that no matter who the Other Guys are, that’s who she’s working for. So they may have had those ‘new instructions’ in the pipeline and waiting to drop the instant they heard about this. For that matter, Bolton could’ve had them for weeks or months, waiting to deliver them until word of what happened on Mesa reached Old Terra. So if she met with Pelletier to pass those instructi
ons on, that means Kingsford’s going to be hearing something from Gweon sometime very soon now, and somehow I doubt what he hears is going to make the situation any better.”
George Benton Tower
City of Old Chicago
Sol System
“Thank you, Admiral Gweon,” Innokentiy Kolokoltsov said. “I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say we appreciate the clarity of your briefing.” His smile was fleeting. “And I’m equally sure you understand why we weren’t delighted to hear it.”
“I do, believe me, Mister Permanent Senior Undersecretary,” Caswell Gweon replied soberly. “And I wish I’d been able to provide a more optimistic picture.”
“Accuracy is far more important at this stage than optimism.” Kolokoltsov smiled again, a wintry, bleak sort of smile. “We’d had quite enough of that before you came along. Trust me; what we’re getting now is better.”
Gweon bent his head to acknowledge the compliment. Then Kolokoltsov drew a deep breath.