Rogue Powers (34 page)

"The devil you say. Jolly good! You did right to wake me, Timility. Let me jump into my pants and I'll be there straight away."

Sir George showed up in his pants, but not much else. He had thrown on a disreputable dressing gown, a long, threadbare thing of indeterminate color that might have looked smart twenty years ago. Sir George was bare-chested, and a sparse thatch of gray peeped through when the gown slipped a bit. Ensign Timility could smell the port on the admiral's breath, but Sir George seemed nothing if not sober and in control.

The admiral grabbed at the hard copy as it plopped out of the printer and riffled through the pages, growling to himself "By damn, they've got it. Dimity, I want everyone in tactics and planning roused out of bed and to work on this
now.
I want enough copies of this report to paper every wall in the base. My God, they actually found it. This calls for a bit of celebrating." Sir George stuck the report under one arm, dug an enormous black cigar out of his dressing gown pocket, and bit the end off it. "I've been saving this for the right moment. Imported it straight from old Cuba." He fussed about, trying to light it for a minute before it began drawing properly, and then stood, puffing smoke like a dragon, reading the
Far Shores
report. He looked up and noticed that Timility hadn't moved a mus
cle. "Well, get on it, Dimity. Rouse em! We've finally got some work to do."

Timility started working the intercom system, bringing the experts in. It was going to be a long night.

Second Lieutenant George Prigot, Royal Britannic Navy (Naval Intelligence) got one of the first calls. George had never been much good after a sudden awakening, and it took him a while to get his bearings. The call, a rather peremptory call to the comm center without explanation, didn't help. For that matter, his bearing had been a little off ever since Admiral Thomas had breezed into the Survey base.

As usual, no one had figured out what to
do
with George at Survey base, and he was apologetically packed into some broom closet they called guest quarters. Then Admiral Thomas had noticed George Prigot's card going past, somehow—and that was that. The admiral didn't like anomalies, and Mr. Prigot was one. Lieutenant Prigot would not be one. The Royal Navy permitted non-British persons to enlist, and Naval Intelligence was an odd barrel offish that wouldn't mind one more. Therefore . . . George had gone along with it. It would be nice to belong to something.

Intelligence. Why was it that every bureaucrat and brass hat in the League thought George Prigot belonged in Intelligence? He was an engineer, not a spy. Okay, so he was a native of Capital, and he knew which end of a Guardian screwdriver to hold. What good did that do them in Intelligence? George had used his brand-new clearance to peek at his own file, and the words there explained a lot about the cold shoulder he got from the rest of the Britannic Intelligence staff. All of them, right up and down, had urged that he was a bad security risk and should not be allowed to take up a commission. But Thomas had overruled them all. "There are times," the admiral's comment read, "when you have to have a little faith in people. Clearance approved."

George pulled on his brand-new uniform and staggered
his way down the corridor to the head. He automatically went through the motions of trying to make himself look presentable and made his way to the comm center. Comm was crowded and confused, and getting more so by the minute. There must have been a couple of dozen people jammed into the tiny room and more coming all the time. A harried rating handed George a copy of the printout from
Far Shore,
and he found a quiet corner to sit down and start reading it.

Before he could get a fair start, the section chief of the comm center ordered everyone to get the hell out of her radio room and move into the auditorium on the next level down. The section chief then grabbed Timility's arm and gave him a royal chewing out for taking the admiral's order too literally and mobbing her command with a lot of unauthorized personnel.

George followed the rest of the herd down to the auditorium and took a seat in the back row. There were about fifty pages to get through. Like any good engineer, he wanted to read all the specs and have all the data before he reached any conclusions.

Others around him were of a different opinion. By now, there were thirty or forty standing around in the aisle or perched in chairs, yammering on, arguing over what it all meant and what should be done about it.

Finally, Driscoll jumped up on the small stage, grabbed a mike and shouted into it. "PIPE DOWN OUT THERE."

The hubbub slowly died out.

"All right," Driscoll went on in a quieter voice. "Everyone take a seat and we'll go over this together."

The murmur of voices rose up again for a moment as people sat down. George spotted Mac and Joslyn sitting near the front of the house. He waved, and Joslyn waved back. Mac was too busy reading to notice anything else.

"TEN-SHUN!" Everybody got to their feet as Admiral Thomas came in a side door and took the three steps up to the stage. He had gone back to his quarters and taken his time to get into his uniform and shave, but he was still smoking that big Cuban cigar, and looked more cheerful and alert than anyone had a right to be at this hour.

"At ease, all of you. Take your seats and let's get on with it. As you have all seen,
Far Shore
has found the little spot our Guardian friends call home. The big surprise is that planets of
both
star systems seem to be inhabited. At least
Far Shore
picked up radio traffic from both sources. One of the two planets was definitely identified as Capital, and the other planet seemed to be called Outpost.
Far Shore
picked up numerous radio calls in clear referring to the planet names. Captain Toshiro and his crew did an excellent job—not only did they find our quarry, but they also managed to sift through the radio traffic and come up with some rough figures on numbers of ships and how and where they are based. Most of their Navy seems to be stationed in omit about Outpost.

"Another bit of information. The anti-ship missile systems the Guards are so good at. There are no less than
three
of them in the system. One deployed around Nova Sol A, and so protecting Capital. A second deployed about Nova Sol B, shielding Outpost.

"And a third is being built around the barycenter. Toshiro's crew listened in on the chatter of the construction tugs, and Toshiro's best estimate is that the barycenter system is less than a third complete. Which sounds like an engraved invitation—though we haven't much time to exploit it.

"All this begs the question—what are we going to do? What is our plan? What are our war aims? Now we're all military here, and war aims are more properly a question for the politicians.

"So we drop the question of what to do in their laps. And when they come back with the answer we will be ready, because you lot here are going to break off into separate planning groups, each to plan for a different contingency. You will have your specific assignments within the hour, and some of you will stick with the jobs you
have now and simply be expected to keep informed and assist.

"But we are going to plan for:

"A peaceful and open arrival—a show of strength that will scare the pants off the Central Guards and convince them to give up. Then I suppose we go around and hand out flowers to the people who attacked us without the barest hint of a provocation and then murdered our allies and friends using the most barbaric weapons imaginable, invaded our star systems and came bloody close to wiping out my fleet, and who have probably been kidnapping our kith and kin and enslaving them since before any of us were born. As you might have gathered, I rate the sweetness-and-light approach as not likely to work, and not bloody likely to be tried.

"Second, choosing among the various military options to find the one most likely to gain us a military victory with the greatest cost to the Guards and the least hurt to ourselves. In parallel with this, we will want to look at ways and means of rescuing any and all League-member citizens kidnapped by the Guards. I am certain that we
can
defeat the Guards, even in their home system, even against their loathsome bioweapons."

Admiral Thomas paused for a moment, and something in his ice-cold tone of voice horrified George Prigot before the new Intelligence officer understood what the admiral was saying. "The third option is simple. And since the Battle of Britannica, I must admit that it is more likely than it once was. Personally, I would oppose it strenuously. However: That third option is extermination. We wipe them out, down to the last. Bomb every city, every satellite, every ship, sterilize the planets of Nova Sol, and ensure that the damned worms are wiped out along with their masters.

"This, too, I am certain we could do."

Have they forgotten us?

No one asked that question anymore, at least not out loud. But all the CIs asked it of themselves, every time they saw the stars or thought of home. "Home" was gradually becoming a mythic place for each of them, an ideal that would never be seen again.

It had been a year and a half and more that they had been here, cooped up on
Ariadne.
The former members of the Survey Service's first class didn't think of themselves as being with the Survey or the League, or as citizens of their own nations anymore. It was a feat of selective memory, defense against pain. To forget what they had been helped resign them to what they were. But that made it easier for them to think of themselves as CIs—and Conscripted Immigrant was a polite term for slave. Yet that defense of forgetfulness, acceptance, surrender to the situation, was only skin deep. Every now and again, a certain look would pass across someone's face. The look of sorrow, the look of loss—the look
of being
lost. The outside universe thought they were dead, had given up on them. The CIs had lost hope.

Other things had been lost as well; the main strike fleet had never been seen again.
Leviathan
had launched long months before. None of the ships had ever come back, and rumors swept the station that the Guards had suffered a grave defeat. That had helped morale for a while, and the CIs watched the screens and monitors, waiting for the great League fleet that would come to chase the Guards back to their home system.

But Sam Schiller, the CIs' best astronomer, had been pessimistic then, and he had been right. The League had to
find
the Guards first, and whatever else had happened with the main strike fleet, the Guardians at least had kept their home system hidden. No great League fleet ever appeared, and morale slumped lower than ever.

The CIs had no solid information about the outside world at all, beyond what they could see and hear for themselves, and what they picked up from the more talkative Guards as rumor. The CIs joked the time of day was a state secret, and Security was trying to track down who kept leaking the information.

At least there were the Outposters. Officially, they too were a secret. In reality, of course, everyone knew about them. Hiding their existence from the CIs was an obvious impossibility when it was the CIs themselves who manned the communications and traffic control consoles. Starting with Lucy's first trip to the surface, pictures and words had been bootlegged onto every screen and speaker in the station. Tremendous amounts of cargo and any number of personnel had moved through
Ariadne
en route to the Contact Camp. Everyone knew about the 'Posters, and everyone was fascinated by them.

And there was Lucy herself, and the strange truce that had developed between Gustav and the CIs. Only Cynthia Wu and Sam Schiller knew for certain that Lucy had escaped to the surface of Outpost—and even they had no idea why. Rumors swept the station, and it was hard to miss the connection between Lucy vanishing, a lander vanishing, a drugged doctor, one dead Guard and one badly wounded. But only Cynthia knew for certain that
Lucy was still alive, or at least that the beacon still moved. ... On the time-honored principle that you can't tell what you don't know, Cynthia chose not to risk either the knowledge or her friends' safety by telling them what was going on, not even Sam. The two of them never discussed what had happened that night.

And Cynthia had yet to figure out Gustav's motives. Cynthia was ready to bet that Lucy and Gustav were up to something. What, why, and how she had no idea. Neither Gustav nor Lucy had told Cynthia anything, either. All she knew was that Lucy had to be made to disappear, and that she had a hunch that Gustav knew why. His arrival back at
Ariadne
just after her escape was too interesting a coincidence.

And so now the XO was running the show on
Ariadne.
He seemed to have his own ideas about what sort of game he wanted to play. Twenty hours after he got back aboard, Gremloid vanished from the computers without a trace. In fact,
every
supposedly covert computer operation went missing, without explanation, without reprimand or arrest. Gustav, the former Intelligence officer, must have known about the underground files long ago. For a time, it scared the CIs. They waited for the other shoe to drop. It never did. Gustav didn't touch them.