by David Weber
They’re not getting that genie back into the bottle, he thought coldly. No matter what they do.
* * *
Fleet Admiral Rajampet Kaushal Rajani sat in his private penthouse apartment gazing out his three-hundredth-floor window at the glittering jewel box of Old Chicago. Other towers rose as high as or even higher than his own, caparisoned in glowing windows and flashing aircraft-warning lights, and gemlike bubbles drifted across the heavens as air cars moved sedately in and around them. More of the stupendous structures rose from pylons sunk deep into the bedrock underneath Lake Michigan, and their mirrored reflections gleamed up at them from night-black water swarming with the Christmas tree glow of pleasure boats. The pedestrian slide-walks so far below his window were a steady stream of late-night moving humanity amid a forest of HD billboards, subliminal advertising messages, chatter, and the frothing ferment of Old Terra’s largest city. If he looked up, he could see the gleaming pearls of orbital freight stations and solar-power collection satellites, but the overpowering impression was of the incredible size, power, and wealth of the city that stretched as far as the eye could see and lit high, thin wisps of cloud with its own sleepless glow.
Rajampet loved that view. He loved looking out over it, knowing he was one of the movers and shakers who controlled the destiny of all those antlike people swarming about so far below him. He loved the taste of power—he admitted it—and for almost a hundred T-years, he’d wielded it well. But the panorama from his window was less reassuring tonight, because tomorrow he was going to have to face Kolokoltsov and the others. He didn’t expect to enjoy that session. For that matter, he wasn’t at all sure his position was going to survive it, and without his position, what did he truly have?
Well, he thought dryly, you might think about that 3.6 billion credits in your private account, Rajani. Not a bad paycheck, all things considered. And you can’t pretend you didn’t know you were supping with the devil, although maybe you might have wanted to use a spoon that was a bit longer, now that the fucking Manties’ve finally tumbled onto the truth. Or part of the truth, anyway. God knows where the wilder parts of their hallucinations are coming from! Something in the water or the air out there? Talk about paranoia!
He shook his head.
Of course, the fact that you’re paranoid doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t really have enemies … even if they aren’t the three-meter monsters you think they are. Like that nanotech crap. Ha! Why believe in fairy tales like that instead of simpler explanations? Crandall was so deep in Mesa’s pocket she’d’ve picked any spot they wanted for her frigging exercise, and they could count on her stupidity to make the rest of it work out the way they wanted. Same thing with Byng, except that they probably didn’t have to promise him a thing except an opportunity to put one in the Manties’ eye. And Filareta—! If that taste of his for sick games with little girls and boys had ever made it to the public eye, he—or his career, at least—would’ve been dead, even in the League. So getting him on board wasn’t all that hard, either. And it didn’t take any “mind-control nanotech” to convince you to help hit the bastards where it hurt, now, did it? Even if things are turning out a bit … dicier than you expected.
He snorted in harsh amusement, yet the truth was that he hadn’t counted on the completeness of the defeat waiting for Sandra Crandall and Massimo Filareta. He wasn’t going to shed any tears for either of the admirals involved, and he wasn’t going to pretend about that even with himself. But he hadn’t contemplated the sheer number of other people who were going to get killed. For that matter, he’d genuinely believed the new missiles would go a long way towards leveling the playing field when Filareta reached Manticore. And he’d never thought for a moment Filareta would have been stupid enough to open fire after that bitch Harrington had mousetrapped him so completely.
Never thought Haven would be willing to side with the Manties, either, did you? he asked himself derisively. God, who could’ve seen that one coming?!
He’d asked himself, since the reports of the Second Battle of Manticore had reached Old Terra, why he’d really done it. Oh, the money was the easy answer. And so was his resentment of the way he’d been denied his proper place at the table with Kolokoltsov and the rest of those parasitic civilian leeches. Their very survival had depended on Rajampet’s Navy to do the dirty jobs it took to keep them where they were, yet he couldn’t even count how many times one of those arrogant “Mandarins” had shown his—or her, he thought, thinking of Omosupe Quartermain—condescension for the uniformed men and women who carried the League’s mandate out to the fucking neobarbs on the backside of nowhere.
But most of all, he’d come to realize, it had been his hatred for the Star Empire of Manticore. His resentment of its merchant marine’s reach and power and wealth. Of Manticore’s refusal to bend to the League’s demands, to show the Solarian League Navy the respect and deference it was due. For the sheer arrogance of a ten-for-a-centicredit neobarb so-called star nation—one which had laid claim to only a single star system as little as twenty T-years ago!—which had dared to use the unfair advantage of its damned Junction to actually tell the Solarian League what it could and couldn’t do. In that respect, much as he hated to acknowledge the comparison, he and Josef Byng had actually had at least one thing in common.
He didn’t give a single good goddamn whether the Manties actually had any imperial ambitions. He admitted that in the privacy of his own mind, because it didn’t matter. He remembered one of his long-dead father’s favorite sayings: “When you fuck with the bull, you get the horns.” Well, it was time the Manties got the goring they deserved, and if he could do well for himself out of the process, so much the better.
Yeah, all well and good, but it’s not going to make tomorrow any more fun, despite the fact that you knew something like this was coming sooner or later, he reflected. But at least you did see it coming, unlike those other cretins. That’s the reason you buried your tracks as well as you did. And—he smiled thinly—if the wheels come off anyway, you’ve got enough little tidbits tucked away to convince your esteemed civilian colleagues they’d better cover your back. Doesn’t matter how good Abruzzi is. If your insurance files ever hit the news channels, they’re all dead meat.
There was actually a part of him that hoped they’d push him into making that very point to them. It would be so … satisfying to see the looks on their faces when they realized he had them all by the short hairs. It would be the equivalent of a nuclear exchange, of course; no way there’d be any bridges back from that kind of confrontation. But he was pretty sure they planned on stuffing him out the airlock as the sacrificial goat anyway, so he might as well get his full credit’s worth out of it first.
Besides—
A ripple of musical notes, the first few bars of the overture from Adonis of Canis Major, his favorite opera, announced a com call on his private, priority combination. He scowled out at the city panorama, then sighed and pushed himself to his feet. He’d never felt any inclination to surround himself with the bevies of personal attendants altogether too many of the Solarian elite seemed to require. They were less efficient than properly programmed electronic servants, they chattered and pestered, they always had their noses in their employers’ affairs, and every one of them was a potential security breach waiting to happen. Besides, he didn’t like being fussed over in the privacy of his own home. There was enough of that in the Service!
He walked across to the living room communications terminal and frowned as he looked at the display. He didn’t recognize the caller’s combination, and there weren’t that many people who had his combination—not on this line, anyway.
He shrugged and pressed the audio-only acceptance key.
“Rajampet,” he announced gruffly.
“Sid?” a voice he’d never heard before said. “Is that you, Sid?”
“No, it isn’t!” Rajampet replied sharply. “Who is this?”
“What?” The other voice sounded confused. �
��I’m sorry, I was trying to reach Sid Castleman. Isn’t this his combination?”
“No, it isn’t,” Rajampet repeated. “In fact, it’s a secure government combination!”
“Oh, Lord! I’m so sorry!” the other voice said quickly. “I must’ve punched in the wrong combination.”
“I guess you did,” Rajampet agreed a bit nastily.
“Well, sorry,” the other voice repeated. “Clear.”
The connection went dead, and Rajampet snorted as he hit the termination key at his end. But then his eyes opened wide as the hand which had just hit the key went right on moving. It opened the drawer in the com console, the one where he’d kept a loaded pulser for the last fifteen or twenty T-years. It reached into the drawer, and Rajampet’s face erupted in sweat as he watched his own fingers wrap around the pulser’s butt. He fought frantically to stop his hand … without any success at all. He tried to raise his voice, shout the code to activate the penthouse’s security systems … but his jaw refused to move, and his vocal cords were still.
His mind raced as the pulser rose, his thoughts gibbering like rats in a trap, and then, to his horror, his jaw did move. It dropped so that his own hand could shove the weapon’s muzzle between his teeth.
God, God! he thought, calling out frantically to the deity he’d never really believed in. Help me! Help me!
There was no answer, and alloy and plastic were cold and hard as his teeth closed on the pulser’s barrel.
They were right. The frigging Manties were right all along, a tiny corner of his brain realized, like a last pocket of rationality in a hurricane of terror. The bastards do have some kind of nan—
His finger squeezed the trigger.
Chapter Thirty
______________________________
It was very quiet in the file room.
People seldom came here, which was hardly surprising. The huge, cool chamber buried deep under the Solarian League Navy’s primary headquarters building was only one of several dozen given over to storage of backup records of critical files. Theoretically critical, at any rate. Although this particular storage chamber—Records Room 7-191-002-A—was carried on the Navy’s Facilities List as an active records repository, it was actually an archive. The “youngest” record in it was over eighty T-years old, which made it of purely historical interest even for something with the SLN’s elephantine bureaucracy and ponderous, nitpicking mentality.
Despite the age of the data stored in its files, the fact that it was listed as an active records repository meant not just anybody could come wandering in. Admittance required a certain level of clearance, which the four people who’d gathered there all happened to possess. Not that any of their superiors would have approved of their visit if they’d known about it.
Hopefully, none of them ever would.
“Damn,” one of the intruders said mildly, looking around at row after row of computer-chip storage drawers. There were even what looked like filing cabinets for paper copies towards the rear of the room, and he shook his head. “This looks like a thoroughly useless pile of Navy crap, Daud. And a big one, too. Don’t you people ever throw anything out?”
The speaker was a tallish fellow in the uniform of the Solarian Marine Corps. He had wheat-colored hair, green eyes, and the collar insignia of a major. His right shoulder carried the flash of Marine Intelligence, technically a component command of the Office of Naval Intelligence, since the Navy was the Solarian League’s senior service. In fact, Marine Intelligence had gone its own way long ago, operating in its own specialized world—one the Navy had never understood … and one where reasonably accurate intelligence was critical.
“Very funny, Bryce,” Captain Daud al-Fanudahi said dryly. He was several centimeters shorter than the Marine and as dark as the major was fair. “And, yes, we do occasionally throw things out. Usually when keeping them might cause embarrassment for a senior officer. Wouldn’t want to have any unfortunate evidence lying around for the court-martial, after all.”
Captain Irene Teague, twenty T-years younger than al-Fanudahi and Frontier Fleet to his Battle Fleet, winced visibly. She also shook her head, brown eyes more than a little worried.
“Do you think it might be possible for you to indulge in witticisms that didn’t make me even more nervous, Daud?” she asked testily.
“Sorry about that,” al-Fanudahi said with a trace of genuine apology. “I thought it was funny, but I can see where not everyone might share my sense of humor in this case.”
“If there’s a word of truth to your suspicions, I don’t think anyone’s going to think it’s funny at all,” the fourth member of their group said. She was easily the smallest of the foursome and only a very little older than Teague. She wore the uniform of the Solarian Gendarmerie with lieutenant colonel’s insignia, and she had a sandalwood complexion, almond-shaped eyes, and close-cropped hair dark as midnight.
“Frankly, what I’m hoping is that you’re going to turn out to be a totally off-the-wall, lunatic nutcase, despite Major Tarkovsky’s having vouched for you,” she went on, waving one hand at the Marine major, and her voice was hard. “Unfortunately, I don’t think you are. Not totally off-the-wall, at any rate.”
“I’d like to be wrong myself, Colonel Okiku,” al-Fanudahi said somberly. “I’m not, though. Mind you, I’m nowhere close to having all the answers—or even most of the answers—but I think I’ve least figured out the questions we need to be asking ourselves.”
“All of the questions?” Major Tarkovsky asked, opening his eyes wide. “Gosh, Daud! I thought we were just getting started!”
“Oh my God,” Teague muttered just loud enough for the others to hear. “He’s worse than Daud!”
“Oh, no, no!” Tarkovsky shook his head vigorously. “Nobody’s worse than Daud, Captain Teague, but I do try to be at least as bad.” He smiled very briefly. “It’s the only thing that’s kept me sane for the last few years.”
His voice was much harsher on the final sentence, and all four of them looked at one another.
“All right,” Lieutenant Colonel Okiku said after a moment. “I’m here at Bryce’s invitation, Captain al-Fanudahi, but I understand this is basically your show. Would you like to start the ball rolling?”
“I can do that,” al-Fanudahi replied, leaning back against one of the tall chip-storage cases. “But first, how much do you know about the way ONI is organized?”
“Not a lot,” Okiku admitted.
“Then I’d better give you at least the high points before I get into all this.
“ONI’s divided into four sections. Section One is Operational Analysis, where Irene and Bryce and I all work, one way or another, under Admiral Cheng. In theory, we’re responsible for analyzing operational data—our own and reports on other navies—in order to identify trends and potential operational problems or shortcomings. We’re also supposed to generate intelligence in response to specific requests or needs—for an operation against a specific opponent or star system, for example—which means we should have been the lead analysts for ‘Raging Justice.’
“Section Two is the Office of Technical Analysis, Vice Admiral Hoover’s bailiwick, which is supposed to provide OpAn with current information on tech developments—our own and those of the various system defense forces and other navies—to support our analyses. Section Three is the Office of Economic Analysis, under Captain Gweon, though he’s practically brand new, which is responsible for tracking economic trends and information of specific interest to the Navy. And Section Four is the Office of Counter Intelligence, Rear Admiral Yau’s shop.”
He paused to give her time to digest that, then shrugged.
“Basically, I’ve been pretty much considered the Office of Operational Analysis’ pet paranoiac for the last several T-years. I’ve had this peculiar notion that the Manties might actually be developing something new in the way of war-fighting technology. Ridiculous, of course. Everyone knows the invincible Solarian League Navy’s technology is
superior to that of everyone else in the explored galaxy!”
His tone could have eaten holes in an engine room’s deck plates, Okiku noted, and his eyes were more bitter even than his voice.
“I’ll confess that not even I had a clue just how far ahead of us the Manties had actually gotten,” he continued. “And it wasn’t really that I had any brilliant insights about Manticore to prompt my suspicions, either—not when I started. What I did know, was that OpAn, Technical Analysis, and ONI in general didn’t have any damned idea what was really going on anywhere. That wasn’t our job anymore. Our job was to come up with the feel-good reports that would tell our superiors they were still masters of the universe.
“Unfortunately, I had this odd idea that since we were the Office of Operational Analysis, we might actually try doing some analysis of real operational data. So I started poking my nose into things people probably wished I’d have left well enough alone, and I really irritated Vice Admiral Hoover. For some reason, she seemed to feel my interest in such matters suggested Technical Analysis hadn’t been doing its job very well. Go figure.”
He smiled crookedly.
“In the course of my journey into unpopularity, I began to realize reports of new Manticoran and Havenite weapons developments and new tactical and strategic doctrines had been systematically suppressed. They didn’t suit the party line, and our own prejudices—our certainty that we had to have the best tech anywhere—created a natural set of blinders. That can happen to anyone, I suppose, but no one was even trying to allow for the problem or get past it to look at what was really happening, and at least some of it was deliberate, coming from people protecting their own little patches of turf. People like Admiral Polydoru over at Systems Development, for example, where any suggestion we might be dropping behind was anathema. Or, for that matter, Vice Admiral Hoover’s people, who seemed more concerned with establishing that they hadn’t missed any significant new developments than with figuring out whether or there’d been any new developments. And no one was even worried about the implications. It couldn’t really matter what a bunch of neobarbs was up to, after all. Couldn’t have any significance for the Solarian League, now, could it?”