A Rising Thunder-ARC (12 page)

Unbelievable
, Kolokoltsov thought for far from the first time.
Unbelievable that the monumental stupidity of just
two
people could set something like this in motion!

Of course, a small corner of his brain reminded him, not even Josef Byng and Sandra Crandall could have brought the League to such a pass without the help of Kolokoltsov and his fellow Mandarins.

Damn it, now
I’m
starting to use the word!
he thought disgustedly.

“So you’re telling us we’re in a position to lose up to thirty percent of the entire League’s gross product?!” Abruzzi asked incredulously.

“We’re telling you we’re already
losing
a big chunk of that
thirty-five
percent,” Quartermain replied. “Exactly how big a chunk we won’t know until the dust settles and we see how much damage the Manties have actually done us. But I don’t want anyone thinking that’s all that’s going to happen. There’ll be a ripple effect across our entire economy, one that’s going to lead to a
significant
drop in activity in almost every sector if it lasts more than a very short time. And, as Agatá’s just pointed out, even in a best case scenario, this is going to
hammer
federal revenues. Most of the
system
governments won’t be hurt all that badly at first, thank God, but if this goes on for two or three quarters, that’s going to change.”

“
Shit
,” Abruzzi muttered.

“There are a couple of brighter spots buried in all this,” Quartermain said after a moment. “As Rajampet’s pointed out often enough, what’s going to hurt us badly will hurt the Manties themselves worse. In a lot of ways, this really is a case of their having cut off their noses to spite their faces, as my momma used to say. And that’s just looking at the
immediate
economic and financial impact. If they throw us back on our own shipping resources, and if they close the wormholes so that we need more shipping than ever to meet our requirements, it’s got to lead to a huge upsurge in our own shipbuilding. Eventually, our merchant marine will have to expand to fill the vacuum, and once that happens, it’ll be difficult for Manticore to ever maneuver itself into a similar stranglehold position again.”

“Assuming there’s still a Manticore to
do
any maneuvering,” Wodoslawski added.

“Exactly,” Kolokoltsov said bleakly. He surveyed his colleagues’ faces for several moments, then sighed.

“Assuming Rajani’s strategy with Filareta works, all of this becomes a moot point. Assuming it
doesn’t
work, things are going to get a lot uglier before they get any better. In fact, my greatest concern right now is that if the Manties basically tell Filareta to pound sand—and, worse, if it turns out Rajani was wrong about their ability to make that stick—we’re going to find it difficult to revert to that ‘short of war’ diplomatic stance.”

Heads nodded in glum agreement, and Kolokoltsov castigated himself again for allowing Rajampet’s opportunism to seduce him into accepting the CNO’s strategy. He should have known better than to listen! Yet given what had happened to the Manties’ home system, the temptation to double down had been overwhelming. Surely their morale had to crack under the one-two punch of such a devastating assault and the realization that the League wasn’t going to back off! It
had
to be that way, didn’t it?

And it still
may
be
.
Sure, they’re recalling their freighters and closing their termini, but they’re doing all that with no idea Filareta’s close enough to hit them this quickly. When he turns up in their own backyard, things could change in a hurry
.

Unfortunately…

“If the Manties don’t cave, and if we’re looking at this kind of nosedive in revenues, can we go back to that position at all?” Abruzzi’s question put Kolokoltsov’s own thoughts into words.

“I don’t know,” the permanent senior undersecretary of state said frankly, and Abruzzi scowled.

Kolokoltsov didn’t blame him.
He
still wasn’t positive his own proposed strategy—buying time by negotiating “more in sorrow than in anger” until the Navy acquired weapons capable of offsetting the Manties’ tactical advantages—would have worked, when all was said. Patience was not a Solarian virtue, especially where “neobarbs” were concerned. That was one reason he’d been convinced to back Rajampet’s new strategy, despite its potential to restrict his future options. But until this moment, he hadn’t fully realized how
badly
a failure by Filareta would restrict them.

If the Manties defeated Filareta—and especially if they also turned the economic screws Wodoslawski and Quartermain were describing—it would be impossible to convince the public that a return to diplomacy stemmed from anything but fear of still worse to come. It would be seen as an admission of impotence. Of ineffectuality. And that was the kiss of death. If the people running the League couldn’t demonstrate they were doing something
effective
, the electorate might start listening to loose warheads like Hadley and demanding changes. Even completely leaving aside personal consequences, the potential for political and constitutional disaster
that
represented was terrifying.

“I don’t know,” he repeated. “I do know that if Rajani’s brainstorm turns into a spectacular failure—
another
spectacular failure, I should say—the situation isn’t going to
improve!
In fact, we may find ourselves essentially forced to do what Rajani wanted to do in the first place.”

“Whoa!” Wodoslawski stared at him. “I thought we were all in agreement that just serving up the Navy as target practice for Manty missiles was what they call a losing proposition, Innokentiy!”

“We still are. But whatever else may have happened, the Manties have to’ve lost a lot of their missile manufacturing capacity. Rajani has to be right about that, even if he’s wrong about everything else! So the odds are that they’d have to stand on the defensive, rather than coming after us
,
at least until they’re able to regenerate their industrial base. And as we’ve just been saying, they’ll be trying to do that at a time when they’ve cut off the lion’s share of their own interstellar cash flow.”

“And this helps us exactly how?” Abruzzi asked.

“It means they can’t reach just down our throats and rip out our lungs,” Kolokoltsov said flatly. “Not right away, at least. It gives us time to work on ways to negate their combat advantages. For that matter, it gives us time to see if
their
economy can survive, especially after so much of their home system got clearcut. And, if we spin it right, we can use what they’ve done to our shipping routes to explain why we’re not yet in a position to take the war to them. Why we have to ‘hold the line’ until our economy and naval logistics recover from their ‘treacherous blow.’ And—”

“And at the same time we focus the anger over the economic meltdown on
them
, not us!” Abruzzi interjected, and Kolokoltsov nodded.

“That’s still going to be tough to pull off,” Quartermain pointed out, blue eyes narrow.

“No question,” Kolokoltsov acknowledged. “And I can think of a few of our member systems who won’t do a thing to make it any easier.”

Quartermain’s mouth tightened, her eyes glittering with more than a hint of anger, and Kolokoltsov snorted.

“We always knew that was at least a possibility, Omosupe. And I’ve been thinking about ways to, ah,
rectify
the situation.”

“Oh?” Quartermain cocked her head. “And have any solutions suggested themselves to you?”

“As a matter of fact, one or two
have
reared their heads,” Kolokoltsov said. “In fact, one of them came from Rajani, although I rather doubt he’s been thinking about it the same way I have. Let me explain…”

Chapter Seven

“Excuse me, Sir, but an Admiral Simpson is on the com. She’s asking for a priority appointment with you.”

“Admiral Simpson?”

Gabriel Caddell-Markham, the Director of Defense for the Beowulf Planetary Board of Directors, arched an eyebrow at Timothy Sung, his personal aide, whose holo image floated above the director’s desktop com. It had taken Caddell-Markham years to master the art of moving only one eyebrow while the other remained motionless. Despite his wife Joanna’s more or less tolerant amusement at the affectation (the acquisition of which she ascribed to his many, many years in starship commands with no
useful
skills to spend his time mastering), he’d actually found it quite handy since he’d resigned from the Beowulf System Defense Force to pursue a political career.

“Yes, Sir,” Sung replied in answer to his question.

The dark-haired, brown-eyed Sung’s rather pale complexion contrasted sharply with his boss’s very black skin, yet there was an oddly familial resemblance between them. Probably because the defense director’s aide had been with him for the better part of eleven T-years. Given that Sung was only forty, that meant he’d been young and malleable enough to be influenced by older, more evil examples. That was Sung’s own explanation, anyway. Some senior government officials might have taken that explanation amiss, but given that the theory had originally been propounded by Joanna Markham-Caddell, Caddell-Markham wasn’t in the best of positions to do that. Besides, the younger man’s insouciance was one of the main reasons the director had chosen him as an aide in the first place. Sung had performed his own military service in the Biological Survey Corps, which was scarcely renowned for its spit-and-polish attitude, and the arched eyebrow was usually good for a snort when Caddell-Markham used it on him. Today, he seemed not even to have noticed.

“She’s not one of our officers,” Sung continued. “In fact, I understand she’s on Admiral Kingsford’s staff.”

Caddell-Markham’s eyebrow came down and his face tightened ever so slightly. It would have taken someone who knew him as well as Sung did to notice, but his aide nodded.

“Yes, Sir. She obviously doesn’t want to get specific with me, but from her attitude, I think she has to be here about Filareta.”

Timothy Sung was thoroughly briefed in on a vast assortment of highly classified information, which was why he knew about the plan to send Massimo Filareta to attack the Manticore Binary System, despite the plan’s Utter-Top-Secret, Burn-Before-Reading-and-Then-Self-Terminate Classification. And, like his boss, he thought it was the stupidest, most arrogant excuse for a strategy he’d ever heard of.

What Sung
wasn’t
aware of—yet—was that the Beowulf system government had very quietly used an extremely “black” communications channel to warn Manticore Filareta was coming.

“Since you say you
think
she’s here about Filareta, I assume she hasn’t said anything specific about the reason she wants to see me?”

“No, Sir. As I said, she obviously doesn’t want to get specific with an underling.” Sung grimaced. “She was pretty emphatic about the urgency of her need to speak to you as soon as possible, though. And she
did
say it was something she didn’t want to discuss—with you, presumably, since she was ‘discussing’ damn-all with
me
—over the com.”

“I see.”

Caddell-Markham pursed his lips, then shrugged.

“I further assume that as the skilled bureaucrat and politician-minder you’ve become, you haven’t told her I’m
immediately
available?”

“No, Sir.” This time, Sung smiled slightly. “In fact, I told her you were out of the office and that I’d see if I could contact you. I’m afraid I may have implied you were closeted with some of the other Directors at the moment and it might not be possible to ‘disturb you.’”

“So sad to see a stalwart military officer descending to such depths of chicanery,” Caddell-Markham observed with a smile of his own. Then the smile vanished, and he shrugged. “In that case, tell her I’m afraid I won’t be able to see her until sometime fairly late this afternoon. Go ahead and feel free to ‘imply’ that I’m out of the city at the moment—I’m probably in Grendel, in fact, now that I think about it. At any rate, I’ll be happy to meet with her absolutely as soon as I can get back to Columbia. And as soon as you’ve finished ‘implying’ that to her and scheduling the meeting, please be good enough to get the CEO, Secretary Pinder-Swun, Director Longacre, and Director Mikulin on a secure conference link.”

* * *

“So has anyone ever actually met this Admiral Simpson?”

Chyang Benton-Ramirez, the Chairman and CEO of the Planetary Board of Directors, was about eight centimeters taller than Caddell-Markham’s hundred and seventy-five centimeters. He also had dark hair which was turning white, despite the fact that he was barely seventy-five T-years old. Personally, Caddell-Markham suspected Benton-Ramirez preferred things that way, on the theory that it gave him an interestingly distinguished look in a society accustomed to prolong’s extended youthfulness. And the snowiness of his hair made a nicely distinctive visual contrast with the darkness of his bushy mustache. The political cartoonists just loved it, regardless of their own political persuasions, at any rate.

His Board colleagues looked around at one another’s images, then turned back to him with various combinations of shrugs and head shakes.

“Marvelous,” he said dryly.

“I’ve never met her, Chyang,” Director at Large Fedosei Demianovich Mikulin said, “but I did have a chance to give her dossier a quick once over before the conference.”

Despite the fact that he was the Board of Directors’ oldest member by the better part of two decades, the blond-haired, blue-eyed Mikulin actually looked younger than Benton-Ramirez. He was almost thirteen centimeters taller, as well. A physician by training, he’d been a member of the Board for over thirty T-years, always as a director at large rather than heading any specific planetary directorate. His colleagues in the Chamber of Shareholders and Chamber of Professions had returned him so persistently to the Board because of his demonstrated ability as an all-around troubleshooter, and Benton-Ramirez, like his last two predecessors, had learned to rely on Mikulin’s advice…especially in intelligence matters.