Shadow of Freedom

Chapter Twenty-One

“Well, this is an interestin’ development,” Rear Admiral Michael Oversteegen drawled.

Michelle Henke restrained an urge to hit him over the head. It was difficult.

“I realize we aristocrats have a certain image to uphold, Michael, but is this really the best time to be displaying the depth of your sang-froid?”

“Um?” Oversteegen blinked, then gave himself a shake and actually smiled apologetically at her. “Sorry about that, M’Lady. Didn’t even realize I was doin’ it. This time, anyway.”

He smiled again, more like his old self, and Michelle shook her own head.

Glory be, something’s finally knocked Michael’s aristocratic, nothing-surprises-me superiority on its ass! Too bad it took something like this to do it.

“To be fair, Milady, I don’t think Admiral Oversteegen’s the only person this has…taken by surprise, let’s say,” Cynthia Lecter observed. “It’s going to take some getting used to.”

“Really?” Michelle cocked her head and pursed her lips judiciously. “Let’s see. President Pritchart just decided to turn up in Manticore last month and offer a peace treaty. Followed by the offer of a military alliance. And it turns out the reason for this is that according to Anton Zilwicki and the notorious Victor Cachat something called the ‘Mesan Alignment’ has been plotting against both the Star Kingdom and Haven—among other people—for the last five or six T-centuries. You think we’re not going to be able to take those minor changes in stride, Cindy?”

“Excuse me, Milady, but what was that you were just sayin’ about aristocratic sang-froid?” Oversteegen inquired.

“Point,” Michelle admitted. “On the other hand, I’m the admiral, and you’re the rear admiral. Rank hath its privileges. Or so I’ve heard, anyway.”

“Actually, the thing I’m wondering is how accurate this intelligence really is, Ma’am,” Sir Aivars Terekhov said. All eyes turned towards him, and he shrugged. “I’m not saying I don’t believe it. For one thing, it makes a whole lot of things that have been happening out here suddenly fit together a lot more neatly. My only concern is that it may make them fit together too neatly. Well, that and the fact that we don’t really know anything at all.”

As usual, Michelle reflected, Terekhov had a damned good point.

She tipped back in her own chair, contemplating the deckhead. The fact that Tenth Fleet was only now learning about what was almost certainly the most momentous political development in the entire history of the Star Empire—or Star Kingdom—of Manticore was a stark comment on the information lags built into interstellar distances. And that was with the Lynx Terminus factored into the equation!

The dispatch from Baroness Medusa and Admiral Khumalo had arrived here in the Montana System less than six hours ago. The duplicate dispatch to Vice Admiral Theodore Bennington, commanding the other half of Tenth Fleet’s heavy units at Tillerman, wouldn’t reach its destination for another ten T-days or so. It was obvious Medusa and Khumalo had wanted to get the initial flash message to her and Bennington as quickly as possible, and she could understand that. All the same, she could also wish they’d waited long enough to get at least a few additional details before banging it off to her.

“I admit it would be nice to have at least some idea what kind of treaty proposals Pritchart has in mind,” she said after a moment. “And I suppose I really would like a little more detail than ‘Captain Zilwicki, Ballroom buddy and general all-round Manpower-hater extraordinaire, and his friend Victor Cachat, well known Havenite spy, assassin, godfather to Torch, and saboteur of our alliance with Erewhon, both promise Mesa is really at the bottom of all this.’ But I think we have to take it as a given—for now, at least—that they’re basically telling the truth, Aivars. Arielle and Nimitz would know if someone was lying, and I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume the Empress wouldn’t be taking a Havenite’s word for anything without one hell of a lot of corroboration from someone she totally trusts. These people may be wrong, but they’re notlying.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest they were, Ma’am,” Terekhov replied. “I’m just wondering how much responding to this we want to do before we get some kind of amplification?”

“That’s a very sensible question, Milady,” Vice Admiral Aploloniá Munming said. Like Oversteegen, the tallish, brown-haired, brown-eyed admiral was a native of the Star Empire’s capital planet, but her accent was about as far removed from Oversteegen’s aristocratic drawl as a Manticoran accent could be. She was not only of lower class origin, but of immigrant lower-class origin (her family had fled the People’s Republic of Haven eighty T-years before), and as proud of her commoner birth as Klaus Hauptman himself. Despite which, she and Oversteegen got along well.

She was also the commander of Battle Squadron 16, the superdreadnought core of the force Michelle had led to Montana as part of her redeployment plan.

“This is something we’re going to have to factor into all our planning,” Munming went on, “but until we have more information, we’re going to have to be very cautious about how we factor it in, I think.”

“Oh, I agree entirely, Aploloniá.” Michelle nodded vigorously. “Still, in a lot of ways, it only underscores a lot of our existing contingency thinking where Mesa was concerned. We’ve all been worried about them ever since their proxies ran into Aivars at Monica. The main change I think we need to make in our thinking is that if this dispatch is accurate—if the Mesans put together the Yawata Strike out of their own resources—they’ve got one hell of a lot more organic combat strength than we’ve thought. Frankly, most of my thinking where they’re concerned has been concentrated on the possibility of their using more Solly proxies, and I think that’s probably true for pretty much all of us. If they’re the ones who have the ‘invisible starship drives’ and they’re willing to come out into the open, they could be a lot more dangerous—a lot more immediately dangerous, I mean—than we’ve allowed for. I’m sure there’ll be a lot of other changes once we get Sir Aivar’s ‘amplification,’ but that’s going to have to wait until additional information actually gets to us.”

“Another question, if I may?” Oversteegen said.

“Go,” Michelle replied, and he shrugged.

“Another thought that’s occurred t’ me is t’ wonder just how far we might want t’ disseminate this information at this point, Ma’am.”

“According to the header on the dispatch, Sir,” Lecter said before Michelle could reply, “this same basic message was sent to the chief executive of every system government in the Quadrant. Including President Suttles.”

“Makes sense, I suppose,” Oversteegen said. “Did the Governor attach a specific security level t’ the information, Captain?”

“It’s classified top secret, but there’s nothing in the classification to preclude someone like President Suttles sharing the information with any member of his system government. Obviously Baroness Medusa and Prime Minister Alquezar expect them to show discretion, but they are the local civilian authorities, so I don’t really see how she could have restricted it any more tightly than that, Sir.”

From Oversteegen’s expression, it was evident he could have imagined Medusa and Alquezar clamping an airtight lid on something like this quite easily. And, for once, a part of Michelle found itself in grudging agreement with him. Still…

“I don’t think they really had a lot of choice about that,” she observed. “If there’s anything to this ‘Mesan Alignment’ business, then everyone’s got to be on her guard. My feeling is that we took them so badly by surprise with our original expansion into the vicinity that they’re probably still playing catch-up, at least to some extent. I mean, not even a diabolical centuries-old conspiracy could have anticipated our stumbling across the Lynx Terminus! And I don’t think it could have had anything to do with Dueñas’ little brainstorm in Saltash, either. You’ve all read Zavala’s report, and I don’t see how anybody could have counted on him to decide to seize our merchantships.”

Several heads nodded. DesRon 301 had rejoined Tenth Fleet at Montana a month ago, and if one or two of Michelle’s more senior officers could have wished for a less spectacular resolution of the problem, none of them had questioned Zavala’s actions given the situation he’d discovered.

“But if Pat Givens’ guess is right”—Michelle continued, one index finger tapping the message on the display in front of her—“and they not only managed to get Byng and Crandall deployed out this way more or less on the fly—and meant for both of them to get reamed all along, just to put us exactly where we are with the League—then they’re entirely too good for my peace of mind. We need all the eyes we can get looking for what else they may be up to.”

“As long as those eyes don’t start seein’ things that aren’t actually there, Ma’am,” Oversteegen replied with an unusual note of diffidence. He raised one hand in a pacific gesture before anyone could respond. “I’m not tryin’ t’ suggest that th’ Quadrant’s civilian leadership’s a batch of alarmist paranoiacs, because I don’t think it is. And if anyone does think he’s seen anythin’ that could be this Mesan Alignment’s doin’, then I hope t’ hell he tells someone about it! But we’ve got a very finite amount of naval and military strength here in Talbott. We can’t afford t’ waste any of it on somethin’ that turns out not t’ve been hostile action, after all.”

“Agreed.” Michelle nodded. “Trust me, Michael, as the person whose resources are ‘very finite,’ that’s not something I’m likely to forget. All the same, I think we probably need our ’cat whiskers spread as far and as sensitively as we can get them. It’s even more important to be sure we don’t miss something that does turn out to have been hostile action, and we’re just going to have to hope our filtering and evaluation are up to discriminating between real threats and false alarms.”

Oversteegen nodded back soberly.

“One thing I’d like to do, Ma’am,” Munming said, “is to spend some time brainstorming. I know I just said we had to be cautious about how we factor this into our planning, but I don’t think it would hurt a thing for us to start considering what we might do if we were Mesa and it turns out this information about the ‘Alignment’ is accurate after all. Let’s kick out some possibilities—think about worst-case scenarios they might spring on us—and start thinking of ways we might deal with them.”

“I’m in favor of that, Ma’am,” Oversteegen agreed, nodding vigorously. “Th’ only resource that’s likely t’ use up is brainpower, which just happens to be one of th’ few resources I’m familiar with that only reproduces itself th’ more you use it!”

“Well, in that case,” Michelle replied, “does anyone have any ‘worst-cases’ they’d care to throw out before the meeting?”

* * *

“I wish I was more confident this was a good idea,” Sector Governor Verrochio admitted quietly as he stood on the reviewing stand beside Junyan Hongbo.

Hongbo refrained from pointing out that he’d raised that same point when the deployment was first suggested.

It’s too late to change our minds, anyway, he thought. Besides, I’m not sure Yucel didn’t actually have a point this time. It’d be a first, but even unlikely things happen…sometimes.

The black-uniformed Gendarmerie battalions marched past the reviewing stand, body armor gleaming like polished ebony, shouldered flechette guns sloped at precisely the right angle, boot heels crashing on the ceramacrete pavement in perfect unison. They actually looked like soldiers, Hongbo thought. For that matter, whatever her other failings—and God knew they were legion—Francisca Yucel genuinely had instilled a level of discipline and training that was unfortunately rare among Solarian Gendarmes. He never doubted that the megalomaniac in her loved watching them train, sort of like a little girl playing with toys she knew could kill people. That didn’t mean she hadn’t turned them into a far more effective unit along the way, however, and this business of passing in review before the sector governor had been her idea, as well—a way to help promote and support their morale, their esprit de corps, as she put it.

Esprit de corps, right! he snorted mentally. Bunch of thugs and leg-breakers is what they are. This batch just happens to be even better at it than most of the others!

Yet that was precisely what Frontier Security had always wanted, when it came down to it. He knew that as well as Yucel did, but unlike her, he wasn’t convinced it was a good idea, especially in this case. Turning them loose with what amounted to a free license to break heads—or worse—especially in a theoretically independent star system, struck him as an excellent recipe for increasing unrest and hatred in the Protectorates.

And it’s not as if we don’t have enough of that to go around already.

He listened to the steady beat of boot heels and cursed himself for having crawled into bed with Mesa and Manpower all those years ago. It shouldn’t be this way. It was only supposed to be another of the comfortable little arrangements OFS officials formed all the time. But this arrangement was different. Unlike anyone else in the Madras Sector administration, he knew Manticore was right about the Mesans’ involvement in both New Tuscany and Crandall’s attack on Spindle because they’d used him to help set those events in motion, and he wondered what snake was going to crawl out from under a rock next.

As he watched the pair of intervention battalions marching past the reviewing stand, a cold, hard lump in his chest suggested he might just be looking at that next serpent.

* * *

Lorcan Verrochio was unaware of what his vice commissioner was thinking, but Junyan Hongbo might have been surprised by how his nominal superior’s thoughts paralleled his own. Verrochio wished passionately that he hadn’t let Yucel talk him into authorizing this deployment, and he wished even more passionately that she wasn’t commanding it in person. But she’d talked him into that, too, and it was too late to change his mind now.

You said you wanted this whole thing settled fast, he reminded himself, and she’s got a point. No one else in the Sector could settle something like this as quickly as she will. The only question is how many eggs she’s ready to break for her omelette.

That worried him, because he suspected the answer was “a lot,” and that could be disastrous with all the attention being focused on the Madras Sector and the Manties’ Talbott Quadrant. God only knew what some bleeding heart innerworld newsy might do with an “exposé” of OFS “brutality” out in the Protectorates! In fact, the mere thought of what someone like Audrey O’Hanrahan would do with Yucel’s idea of the best way to deal with restive populations was enough to tie Lorcan Verrochio’s stomach in knots.

But what else can I do? I need to get in and out of Mobius, and I need to do it before the situation gets any worse. So far, nobody outside the Sector even seems to’ve noticed—probably because they’re all so busy watching to see what happens between Manticore and the Navy. But if it drags on, if it gets even worse, somebody will pick up on it. After all, this is where the entire confrontation started, isn’t it? Of course the bastards in the media are keeping an eye peeled this way! So if I don’t keep the lid screwed down, GHQ is going to have my ass, because another spectacular fiasco in-sector—or anywhere remotely near it, for that matter!—is sure to draw the newsies’ attention. That’s the last thing the home office wants…except some equally spectacular allegation of “excessive force” or “Gendarme brutality”!

He kept his shoulders back, maintaining a properly attentive, nobly determined expression for the troops’ benefit, but even this review could turn out as a public relations disaster. If the men and women marching past him in their black uniforms and shiny boots turned in the sort of performance intervention battalions had turned in so often before and the newsies did get wind of it, the fact that he’d sent them off with such public fanfare and obvious approval was only going to make things even worse.

It’s all the damned Manties’ fault, he thought bitterly. Until they shoved their noses into Talbott, who the hell cared what happened out here in the armpit of the galaxy? Nobody, that’s who! Now anything that happens has the potential to be another interstellar incident!

He glanced at Hongbo, standing beside him with an equally grave expression. The vice commissioner had covered his own ass quite neatly, Verrochio reflected resentfully. He was on record as opposing the deployment. Of having come around to it only reluctantly, only because all of Verrochio’s security advisers had endorsed it. So if it all blew up in Verrochio’s face, Hongbo could always point out that he’d been opposed to it from the beginning. And if it worked, he got credit for having been open-minded and thoughtful enough to put aside his initial opposition when those security advisers’ reasoned arguments convinced him they had a point.

The universe, Lorcan Verrochio concluded resentfully, wasn’t exactly brimming over with fairness.