by David Weber
And at least we don’t have any more of the damned drone-in-a-boxes on board if the customs people get curious, he reminded himself. No reason they should, come to that. But they’re damned Beowulfers. If anyone’s likely to do something just to screw us up, without even realizing they’re doing it—!
His smile grew even thinner, then disappeared completely, and he admitted the real reason for Chernitskaya’s tension. And his own, for that matter.
It was roughly thirty-five days’ hyper travel from Warner to Beowulf, twenty-eight subjective for a starship’s crew, but Star Galleon was thirty-seven days, twenty-nine subjective, out of Warner. As their mission orders had required, they’d dropped out of hyper at BS-712-19-6, a planetless red dwarf just over twenty-one light-years short of their ultimate destination on the line from Warner to Beowulf.
The rendezvous had been set up in case their orders required some last-minute modification, and Russo hadn’t really expected to find anyone waiting there. He’d been wrong, however. And he’d been equally wrong in his initial assumption that the operation had been scrubbed for some reason. The streak drive-equipped vessel had been considerably larger than most of the Alignment’s courier vessels, but it had still been effectively four times as fast as Star Galleon’s plodding best speed. There’d been time for his superiors to brief him on the disaster in Mesa and transship the additional items. That briefing hadn’t told him how many people had actually died, but from the nature of his changed instructions, he was pretty sure he’d like neither the numbers nor the identities of the dead when and if he finally had that information.
And speaking of those changed instructions—
“Contact Beowulf Near-Planet Traffic Control,” he told his com officer. “Transmit our manifest to them and ask them if we can expedite unloading. After all,” he showed his teeth for just an instant, “we’re behind schedule, aren’t we?”
Admiralty Building
City of Old Chicago
Sol System
Solarian League
“So it looks like both BatCruRon 312 and BatCruRon 960 will be available to Admiral Capriotti, after all, Sir,” Vice Admiral Simpson said.
Simpson, recently promoted from rear admiral despite her failure as Rajampet Rajani’s messenger to Beowulf before the Raging Justice debacle, had a compact build and brown hair. She was also Winston Kingsford’s staff operations officer, and despite what had been a less than spectacular career for someone with her family’s connections, she was…solid. That was the best word for her, he thought again: solid. She wasn’t as smart as Willis Jennings, his chief of staff, but she was methodical and organized. Even better, she made it a point to temper the sometimes extravagant optimism of Fleet Admiral Bernard and the rest of Strategy and Planning’s personnel.
Most of whom, he reminded himself now, sourly, have never seen a shot fired in anger. Or not one that was fired at them, anyway.
“That’s good, Marge,” he said out loud. “Mind you, I’m sure Vincent and Vice Admiral Helland would like us to find anyone else we can. How’s that looking?”
“Beyond the units we’ve already firmly assigned—and BatCruRon 312 and 960, of course—I’m afraid the cupboard’s bare, Sir,” Simpson admitted. She didn’t look happy about it, but she didn’t try to blow any smoke, either. “If we had another month, even another couple of weeks, we could probably scrape up at least two more squadrons—possibly three. That’s about it, though, after all the diversions to the Fringe.”
She was careful about her tone with that last sentence, Kingsford noted with a certain bitter amusement. Well, that was fair. He wasn’t particularly pleased by those diversions, either. His move to swap out single superdreadnoughts for divisions of battlecruisers had freed up quite a few of the lighter ships, even if it was a ludicrously expensive way to “show the flag,” at least by prewar standards. Unfortunately, it hadn’t freed up enough to give him a sense of confidence for Operation Fabius.
Which is probably because you don’t want to carry the damned thing out in the first place, Winston. He hid a mental grimace before it ever reached his expression. There are so many ways this thing can go south on us. And if it does, and if the Grand Alliance reacts the way I’d react, things’ll get even uglier. Jesus. If someone had used those two words—“even uglier”—to me about something like the “Mesa Atrocity” even a month ago, I’d’ve told him he was a frigging idiot! How could anything be “uglier” than that?
He didn’t know, and he didn’t want to find out. That was one of several reasons he’d tapped Vincent Capriotti to command Task Force 790. He’d done well with TF 783 and managed to avoid killing any civilians in Cachalot along the way. It was obvious from his post-up reports that he’d realized why he shouldn’t be killing them, too. Given that track record, he’d been the obvious man for Operation Fabius.
Although he’s probably not planning to send me any thank-you notes anytime soon. I damned sure wouldn’t be, in his place!
“We’ll just have to do the best we can, despite the diversions,” he said out loud. “Stay on it, though, Marge. If anything does turn up, I want it transferred to Capriotti’s command immediately.”
“Understood, Sir.”
“Are there any updates on Technodyne’s delivery schedule, Turner?” Kingsford continued, turning to Captain Turner Rabindra, his staff logistics officer, who glanced at Simmons from the corner of one eye.
Technically, Rabindra reported first to Admiral Jennings and then to Kingsford himself, not to Simmons, but Jennings had been unable to attend today’s meeting and he and Simmons had been working closely together even before the modified Fabius was ordered. Clearly, he wanted to make sure he didn’t step on the pecking order, but Simmons only nodded to him and he returned his gaze to Kingsford.
“As of this morning, Sir, they hadn’t reported any glitches.”
Rabindra’s tone was very careful. He was almost as tall as Kingsford, with broad shoulders and an athletic build honed by hours on the null-grav basketball court. Despite that, he somehow managed to project a stereotypical, “supply clerk” mentality, and he hated being pressured for hard delivery dates. It was an attitude which could drive Kingsford to frothing madness, but he tolerated the man because for all of his irritating traits—and despite the rank which had stalled at captain almost twenty T-years ago—he was probably the best logistician the CNO had ever met.
“They’re actually projecting slightly better production numbers on the Hastas,” the captain continued. “I don’t have a hard estimate from them for you yet. They’ve promised me one before close of business at Ganymede, today. We’re going to have slightly lower numbers than originally projected on the latest Cataphracts, though.”
“How ‘lower’ are we talking about?” Kingsford frowned. “We’re already adding three more battlecruiser squadrons to the original Fabius OB. I’m hoping we won’t need Cataphracts at all, but if we do, I don’t want our magazines shorted.”
“All they’ve told me so far is ‘slightly,’” Rabindra said unhappily. “I sent back a query as soon as they did, but they haven’t replied yet. I’ll give them another kick as soon as this meeting is over, Sir.”
“Good.” Kingsford nodded sharply. “We’ve probably got more than enough early-mark birds to fill any empty spots, but our people are operating at enough of a disadvantage. I don’t want them sent out with anything less than the very best we can give them.”
“Understood, Sir.”
Both staffers nodded soberly, and well they should, Kingsford thought. He’d hammered that point hard enough and often enough, anyway!
“All right, in that case, let’s look at our latest projections on the Manty and Havenite ship strengths on the terminus. I know our numbers have to be tentative, but is there any possibility of firming them up by—”
Silver Bullet Q-12
Beowulf System
The drone slid silently through the concealing dark.
Silver Bullet Q-12 was
far larger than most people’s drones, larger even than one of the Royal Manticoran Navy’s Ghost Rider platforms. It was, however, at least as stealthy as Ghost Rider as it swept slowly along on its spider drive. In the time since its initial deployment, it had traveled clear across the system without anyone’s so much as noticing it.
SBQ-12 was, in fact, one of the last units of the constellation Star Galleon had deployed to reach its assigned position. It got there at last, however, and decelerated smoothly to a halt relative to the system’s G2 primary. Panels in its radar-absorbent skin slid open, deploying the solar panels designed to sustain the charge in its plasma capacitors as long as possible. They would make it considerably less stealthy, but it was unlikely—to say the least—that anyone would notice it now that it was no longer moving. Once they were in place, reaction thrusters burned briefly, sending the drone into an end-for-end rotation in place, sweeping the exquisitely sensitive gravitic sensors in its carefully designed nose section across its assigned volume of space.
Somewhere in that volume lay the control platforms which made Mycroft possible. The people who’d emplaced those platforms understood their importance, and they hadn’t gone out of their way to make them easy to detect. The grav-pulses which made FTL communication possible were difficult to hide, especially from something inside their transmission paths, but the Grand Alliance had deployed a dense shell of Ghost Rider platforms and sensor buoys well outside Mycroft’s sphere. They provided the information Mycroft would require if it was ever called to action, but their constant stream of FTL transmissions also provided a background into which the control platforms disappeared.
From outside the sphere, at any rate. From inside it…
The holy Grail of true artificial sentience continued to evade humanity. After so long, only a handful of researchers continued to pursue it at all, but the capabilities of current generation “brilliant software” were more than good enough to convince most people outside that select community that computers truly could think.
They couldn’t, and perhaps that was just as well in SBQ-12’s case. Its AI wasn’t worried about the fact that it had been dispatched upon what ultimately had to be a suicide mission. Nor was it likely to get bored as it listened patiently, patiently, for the signals its designers knew had to be out there somewhere. Mycroft was far too vital to the Grand Alliance for its admirals to take any chances with its availability. If they ever needed it, they would need it on very short notice, and so the system stayed up continuously—watching, waiting, ready to defend the star systems sheltering under Mycroft’s wings. And that meant there was a constant stream of readiness signals and scheduled system tests, all of which required FTL pulses. They might be very brief, they might come on irregular schedules, but they had to be there.
And because they did, SBQ-12 floated in the darkness, listening with infinite patience…and waiting.
Storage Room 212-05-632
Bramlett Tower
City of Old Chicago
Sol System
Solarian League
Colonel Timothy Laughton’s head hurt and his mouth tasted incredibly foul.
That was his first realization. Then he realized he was in a room he’d never seen before, seated in a heavy chair with his wrists and ankles secured to it. It was—or had been—a storeroom, he thought, with dust on the floor. Aside from the chair in which he sat, the only furnishings were another chair, this one empty, which faced it.
Not good, he thought, blinking his eyes as he tried to clear his sluggish mind and decide which of the several possible prople with reason to be unfond of him had put him here. Not good at all.
“Hello, Tim,” a voice said from behind him.
His head snapped around, eyes narrowing, but he felt an undeniable surge of relief as he recognized that voice. Unlike several other people who’d been running through his brain, he was pretty sure Major Bryce Tarkovsky was unlikely to put a pulser dart behind his ear in the very near future.
“Br—” He had to stop and clear his throat. “Bryce.” The name sounded almost natural the second time, and he smiled. “I thought our poker game wasn’t until Wednesday.”
“It’s not.” Tarkovsky smiled back, although his green eyes were very cool.
“I promise I wasn’t planning on palming any aces, if that’s what this is all about.”
“I’m afraid it’s not.” Tarkovsky strolled around and seated himself in the second chair. “This is more in the nature of a quiet conversation to help me decide whether or not I should turn your sorry arse in.”
“Turn it in for what?” Laughton asked. “I mean,” he smiled again, tugging against the wrist restraints, “I’m sure there are any number of things. Nobody can keep all the Regs straight. Right off the top of my head, though, I can’t really think of anything I’ve done that requires this sort of response.” He tugged at the restraints harder.
“I’m not talking about Regs, Tim. This goes a little deeper than that.”
“Where?” Laughton looked back at him with a puzzled expression.
“Tim, I’ve seen the raw data coming in to you, and I’ve also seen the analysis going out from you. You’ve been drawing some very strange conclusions. Or perhaps I should say some very confident conclusions from very scanty—one might almost say nonexistent—evidence. I’m curious as to why you’ve been doing that.”
“Which conclusions would those be?” Laughton asked, his tone touched by a thin edge of wariness.
“The ones that say the Manties are behind all the unrest in the Protectorates. You know, the ones Oravil Barregos pretty much debunked. The ones which’ve been contributing so handily to the Mandarins’ official line.”
“Hell, Bryce!” Laughton laughed. “The Manties have been behind it! Isn’t what happened in Mesa clear enough proof?!”
“Even assuming that really was the Manties—and you’re a Marine, Tim; would you have used nukes instead of KEWs?—that isn’t the same thing as this false-flag operation you’ve been saying so confidently had to be them. And you started saying it at almost exactly the same time Rajmund Nyhus started saying it, which is interesting, because I know damned well he’s lying out his arse. Like I say, I’ve gone back and looked at the same raw take you’ve seen, and unless you have some secret private com link to someone in the Manticore System, there’s not one damned thing in it—until less than two months ago, at least—that fingers the Manties for it. But nobody reading your analyses would ever guess that.”
“I disagree.”
“I figured you’d say that.” Tarkovsky leaned back and folded his arms. “But this is a bit too egregious to be a simple matter of interpretation. You’ve been deliberately cooking your analysis, Tim. Not only that, you’ve been doing it for months, while a hell of a lot of people have been getting killed. I want to know why, and I want to know who.”
Laughton considered him thoughtfully. Technically, the deliberate falsification of intelligence reports was a felony, punishable by a minimum of five T-years in prison. That was the peacetime penalty. In time of war the consequences got considerably stiffer and decidedly unpleasant. On the other hand—
“Bryce, you’ve been stuck in Old Chicago even longer than I have. You know how the game’s played. Everybody ‘shapes the narrative’ in his analysis! For that matter, you do the same thing. Oh, I know you’re the squeaky-clean Marine, but tell me you haven’t…shaded a report or two to favor the Corps’s position! Everybody’s got a rice bowl he’s trying to protect somewhere.”
“There’s a lot of truth to that,” Tarkovsky conceded. “But this is different, Tim. This time you’ve been part of something that’s getting millions of people killed, and the people behind it want them killed.” He shook his head, his expression grim. “I think it’s time you stopped helping with that.”
“Nobody wants anybody killed!” Laughton shook his head incredulously, then cocked it for a second and shrugged. “Okay, maybe the people you’re talking about—if they ex
isted—wouldn’t care if people they didn’t know got killed, but nobody’s trying to stack the bodies any higher than they’d get stacked anyway.”
“That’s an interesting way to put it. Suppose you tell me who the people I’m talking about—if they exist—might be and let me decide about the rest?”
“You do realize any evidence obtained under duress is inadmissible?” Laughton raised an eyebrow and tugged at his wrists once more. “I only mention it as a point of information, you understand.”
“Right now I’m more interested in who they are than in what happens to you.” Tarkovsky gave him a fleeting grin. “Truth is, before this, I always liked you, and I’d hate to lose the income stream our poker games represent. But I’m dead serious, Tim.” His smile disappeared and his eyes bored into the colonel. “I want to know who you’re working for.”
Laughton gazed at him for several seconds, considering carefully. He didn’t know why Tarkovsky had gotten this sudden bee in his bonnet but, as he’d just said, everybody in Old Chicago was in someone’s pocket. Timothy Laughton had spent too long seconded to Frontier Security to be unaware of the League’s endemic corruption, and it was even worse, in many ways, inside the Kuiper than out in the Protectorates. It was less…bare-fanged, perhaps. Less openly acknowledged. But the very fact that no one ever so much as commented on it—certainly no one was willing to undertake the Sisyphean task of doing anything about it—only underscored its omni-pervasiveness.