A Rising Thunder-ARC (47 page)

“Some of them are going to see your actions as real treason, Mr. Director,” Yu pointed out. “They’re not going to worry about constitutional niceties, and they
are
going to be looking for someone to blame, especially when they find out what happened to Filareta. If there’s any justice in the galaxy, they’ll blame Kolokoltsov and Rajampet, but it’s been my observation that justice is conspicuous by its absence when it comes to politics and entrenched, self-serving regimes.”

“We have had just a little experience of our own with that, haven’t we?” Pritchart said wryly, but she was looking at Theisman, not Yu. “On the other hand, Tom, I remember something you said about Kolokoltsov and Frontier Security.”

“Something
I
said?” Theisman’s eyebrows arched.

“Yes. It was while we were discussing the implications of the Battle of Spindle and how the Sollies might react. I said something about how little impact Solarian public opinion ever has on the League’s decisions. Do you remember what you said to me?”

“Not exactly, no.”

“I think this is pretty nearly a direct quote, actually,” she told him. “As I recall, you said, ‘The citizens of the People’s Republic didn’t have any real political oversight over its bureaucracies, either. A situation which changed rather abruptly when the Manties’ Eighth Fleet came calling and Saint-Just got distracted dealing with that minor threat.’”

There was silence for a moment, then Benton-Ramirez y Chou nodded.

“That’s becoming a steadily more likely scenario,” he said grimly. “And that’s hard.” He shook his head, his expression sad. “I’ve known the League was rotten at the core for almost my entire life, but it was still the
Solarian League
. It was still the heir of all Mankind’s greatness, and for all its warts, it was still
my
star nation. And now this.” He shook his head again. “Now it looks like I ‘m going to be directly party to the actions which bring the whole tottering edifice crashing down. And I can’t be sure we’re not doing exactly what those Mesan bastards
want
us to be doing.”

“The last thing we can afford to do is allow ourselves to be paralyzed for fear we might be doing what they want, Uncle Jacques,” Honor said quietly, almost gently. “Judah’s right about that. And I know you. For that matter, I know
Beowulfers
. If it comes down to doing what you think is right or sacrificing your most basic principles to preserve a system as corrupt as the League’s proving it is, I know what you’re going to decide.”

“Always so black-and-white for you Manties,” her uncle teased her gently, and Elizabeth chuckled.

“And you decadent Beowulfers always trying to convince us that you see
only
shades of gray,” she riposted.

“Well, usually, that’s what it is.” Benton-Ramirez y Chou’s tone was suddenly much more serious. “But sometimes, it isn’t, and my long, tall niece here has a point.” He smiled a little sadly at Honor. “Comfortable or not, when those ‘sometimes’ come along, the only coinage history seems willing to accept is our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

“Tell me again how maneuvering Beowulf into a false position was supposed to
help
us, Innokentiy. I seem to be having a little trouble following the logic.”

Omosupe Quartermain’s voice was uncharacteristically harsh, and her blue eyes were hard as she glowered at Innokentiy Kolokoltsov across the table. The two of them sat in a high security conference room in an unusual private, face-to-face meeting with neither their colleagues nor a single aide present, and the permanent senior undersecretary of commerce was not a happy woman.

“I think it still is going to help us in the long run,” Kolokoltsov replied patiently. “I don’t say it worked as well as I hoped it would, because it sure as hell didn’t. And I don’t know if it’s going to help us
enough
, either, but please remember that I never said it was a
good
option in the first place. I only said it was the best one available to us.”

“But look what those two bitches had to say!” Quartermain snapped. “You’ve seen what Beowulf’s dumped to the media, Innokentiy, and Holmon-Sanders is bad enough all by herself! The newsies are going to eat up that business about violating the Constitution, and ‘unelected bureaucrats’, and federal overreach, and you know it. God help us once
O’Hanrahan
gets hold of it! But that Manty admiral, that Truman—” She shook her head. “The
contempt
that bitch showed! She was
daring
Tsang to cross the line, and she didn’t show a trace of doubt that she could hammer our ships into wreckage any time she wanted. Worse, she didn’t pull any punches about dumping full responsibility on
us
—on us, personally—any more than Holmon-Sanders did, Innokentiy! That’s going to resonate with the woman-in-the-street in a way no ‘principled response’ of ours is ever going to match, and you know
that
, too.”

“Admittedly, it never occurred to me Beowulf might be so far gone as to actually invite Manty wallers through into Beowulf space to threaten the League Navy,” Kolokoltsov conceded. “On the other hand, I never expected Admiral Tsang to be so frigging stupid as to actually try to fight her way through when Beowulf told her no, either!” It was his turn to shake his head, his expression disgusted. “She was
supposed
to back off ‘in deference to Beowulf’s expressed wishes’—to
let
the Beowulfers stand on their ‘constitutional rights’ so we got the credit for showing restraint in the face of their irrationality!”

“Well, she didn’t get
that
part of it right, did she?”

“No, she didn’t. And I find it interesting that Rajani’s still so busy debriefing her.”

“What do you mean?” Quartermain’s eyes narrowed, and Kolokoltsov shrugged.

“I mean I want to talk to the good admiral personally,” he said in a flat, hard voice. “I want to find out exactly what her instructions from Rajani actually were. God knows, after Crandall’s performance I’m willing to accept that every serving flag officer in the Navy is a frigging idiot, but were her actions all her own idea? Or did somebody over at the Admiralty cut her a set of orders we didn’t know anything about?”

“Why the hell would Rajani have done something like that?” Quartermain frowned, her expression intent. “He knew what we were after as well as we did!”

“I certainly explained it to him using nice, short, simple words,” Kolokoltsov said bitingly. “But he’s been pushing this confrontational stance against the Manties from day one, and he never has explained why Crandall picked the Madras Sector, of all damned places, for her training exercise. Or exactly why he failed to mention her presence in the vicinity to us after what happened at New Tuscany. Or even how Filareta just ‘came to be’ so conveniently placed at Tasmania when he came up with Raging Justice in the first place. I know he’s an arrogant prick who despises every neobarb ever born, and I know he takes the Manties’ attitude as a personal affront to
his
Navy, but I’m starting to wonder if there might not be more to it even than that.”

“
Please
don’t tell me you’re buying into this grand conspiracy nonsense the Manties are spouting!”

“I’m not,” Kolokoltsov said, yet his tone lacked a little something, Quartermain thought.

“Centuries-long conspiracies?” She threw up both hands. “Fleets of invisible starships? Plans to replace us all with genetically engineered super-Scrags of some sort? Some kind of mind-controlling nanotech? And the entire institution of genetic slavery’s only a front for all of this ‘Alignment’s’ evil plans? We’re supposed to believe the nasty Mesans managed to keep all of this completely secret for six hundred
years
when all the ‘proof’ the Manties can provide is the unsupported testimony of a single lunatic scientist? One who actually threatened to
kill
one of Mesa’s leading geneticists—not one of Manpower’s hacks, but the Chairwoman of Maternal and Fetal Genetics at one of the finest hospitals on Mesa!—over his daughter’s death?”

“I agree it sounds insane,” Kolokoltsov replied. “But parts of it are going to make people wonder, if they really stop and think about it. Like the fact that the Republic of Haven of all people believes it, too. That Haven actually brought the entire story to Manticore in the first place!”

“That’s what the Manties are
telling
us happened,” Quartermain shot back. “And if I were them, I’d have damned well been telling us anything I could think of that might have convinced us to go ahead and send somebody to Manticore to order Filareta to stand down the way Carmichael kept demanding!”

“You think they’re lying?”

“Actually, I think it’s possible as hell,” Quartermain said flatly. “If Carmichael could’ve sold us on their version and gotten us to whistle Filareta off, wouldn’t it have been worth it? I mean even if we later found out they’d lied to us, we’d already have recalled him. We’re going to send him all the way back out there just because we’re pissed off that they
lied
to us? We’d look like complete clueless bunglers—first for letting them bluff us to begin with, and then for sending him back to kick their ass, like a playground bully in a temper tantrum, just because they outsmarted us the first time!”

“What about Pritchart?” Kolokoltsov challenged.

“What about her?
I’ve
never met the woman, have you? How hard would it be to find an actress to stand in for her? Especially with a little judicial computer enhancement? What—you think the Manties are going to worry about pissing off the head of state of a star nation they’ve been fighting for the last twenty years when she finds out they used her in a psychological warfare operation against us? What’s she going to do? Declare war on them?!”

Omosupe had a point, Kolokoltsov reflected. One he hadn’t actually considered, in fact. He wasn’t convinced she was right—not by a long chalk!—but it was a plausible alternative, and he made a mental note to suggest it to Malachai Abruzzi. It might just come in handy in the not too distant future.

“Well, be that as it may,” he said, pulling the conversation back to its original topic, “and in answer to your earlier question, even with the way Tsang screwed up, we’ve still got Beowulf dead to rights refusing our own ships passage. And however big a mouth that Manty admiral might’ve had, the fact that Beowulf invited her in ahead of time—obviously connived to cover and conceal the movement of her ships through the Beowulf Terminus for the express purpose of killing Solarian spacers if it
had
turned into a shooting exchange—is perfect from our perspective. I’ve already talked to Malachai about it, and he’s priming the pump with ‘unnamed source’ briefings for some of our more reliable newsies. And I’ve got three of our more prominent friends in the Assembly—including Tyrone Reid—ready to move for a formal inquiry into Beowulf’s actions.”

Quartermain looked at him for a moment, eyes thoughtful, and then nodded slowly. Tyrone Reid was a senior Assemblyman from the Sol System itself. A member of the Judiciary Committee, he’d carefully crafted the public image of a senior and thoughtful jurist, and the camera liked him. His photogenic patrician face and the polished perfection of his Old Terran accent made him one of the newsies’ favorite talking heads, and that in turn made him one of the most widely known political figures in the entire League. He’d be perfect for the part, whether he adopted the persona of an infuriated firebrand or the “more in sorrow than in anger” attitude of a regretful constitutional scholar debunking Beowulf’s flawed position.

“And if it turns out Filareta’s screwed up as badly as Tsang did?” she inquired after a moment, and Kolokoltsov grimaced.

Assuming Operation Raging Justice had proceeded as planned—and the dispatch boat which had transited to Beowulf seemed to prove Filareta had reached Manticore at least a week ago, just about on schedule—they should already have heard from him. The fact that they hadn’t didn’t necessarily prove things
hadn’t
gone as planned, however. Battles between fleets the size of Eleventh Fleet and whatever the Manties had scraped up might last days or even weeks as the opponents maneuvered against one another. For that matter, even if Filareta had captured all three of the Manticore Binary System’s inhabited planets, he still would have had to get past the forts at the Manticore end of the Junction—and past the combined BSDF and RMN detachments in Beowulf space at the other end—before he could have gotten a message back to Old Chicago.

None of which kept Kolokoltsov’s nerves from tying themselves tighter and tighter while the silence stretched out.

“That’s one reason Malachai isn’t giving the newsies any ‘official’ position statements,” he admitted out loud. “And the reason I’ve
primed
Reid and the others without turning them loose yet. We’re not going to jump either way until we know what Filareta did, but Malachai and I have discussed our options. Obviously, if he’s pushed ahead and the Manties have collapsed, figuring out how to spin it is no problem. If he’s backed off, on the other hand, we point out that both he and Tsang have demonstrated yet again the Solarian League Navy’s abhorrence for the kind of blood fests the Manties seem perfectly willing to embrace.”

“And if he’s gotten his ass blown off like Crandall?” Quartermain asked grimly.

“My feeling is that he’s smarter than Crandall. I think he’ll have backed off if it looked to him like he was going to get hammered. And I think the Manties will have let him, to be honest.”

“Why?” Quartermain could have sounded incredulous, but her tone was genuinely curious.

“I think they’re crazy, but I don’t really believe they’re the bloodthirsty maniacs we’ve been describing to the newsies, Omosupe, and neither should you. Think about it. They had Tsang dead to rights, and they didn’t even try to engage her. They let her turn around and hyper out. With her tail metaphorically between her legs, perhaps, but they let her
go
. If they were really contemplating pushing a war against the League, would they have let that many of our superdreadnoughts get away from them? ‘Live to fight again another day,’ is the phrase, I believe.”