"I understand your thinking, Ma'am," Ou-yang said. "And I agree we need to move quickly. But it's one of my responsibilities to see to it that we don't get hurt any worse than we can help while we pin their ears back the way they've got coming. And just between you and me, I'm not all that fond of surprises, even from neobarbs."
She rolled her almond eyes drolly with the last phrase, and Crandall chuckled. At least, that was what Shavarshyan thought the sound was. It was difficult, sometimes, to differentiate between the admiral's snorts of contempt and snorts of amusement. In fact, the commander wasn't certain there was a difference.
At the same time, he had to admire Ou-yang's technique. The operations officer was the closest thing to an ally he had on Crandall's staff, and he rather thought she shared some of the suspicions which kept him awake at night. For example, there was that nagging question of exactly how someone like Josef Byng, a Battle Fleet officer with limitless contempt for Frontier Fleet, had ended up in command of the Frontier Fleet task force he'd led so disastrously to New Tuscany. Given the involvement of Manpower and Technodyne in what had happened in Monica, and knowing some of the dirty little secrets he wasn't supposed to know about Commissioner Verrochio and Vice Commissioner Hongbo, Shavarshyan had a pretty fair idea of who'd been pulling strings behind the scenes to bring that about.
Which brought him to the even more nagging question of exactly how Admiral Crandall had chosen the remote hinterlands of the Madras Sector for her "Exercise Winter Forage." He was willing to admit the distance from any of Battle Fleet's lavish bases in the Core and Shell made the sector a reasonable place to evaluate the logistic train's ability to sustain a force of Battle Fleet wallers for the duration of an extended campaign. On the other hand, they could have done the same thing within a couple of dozen light-years of the Sol System itself, if they'd wanted to pick one of the thoroughly useless, unsettled star systems in the vicinity and just park there.
But even granting that Battle Fleet had decided it just had to actually deploy its evaluation fleet hundreds of light-years from anywhere in particular in the first Battle Fleet deployment to the Verge in more than division strength in the better part of a century, it still struck him as peculiar that Sandra Crandall should have chosen this particular spot, at this particular time, to carry out an exercise which had been discussed off and on for decades. And one possible explanation for the peculiarity lay in the fact that someone had obviously had the juice to get Byng assigned out here and get him to agree to the assignment. If they could accomplish that outright impossibility, Hago Shavarshyan didn't see any reason they couldn't accomplish the mere implausibility of getting Crandall out here for "Winter Forage."
He didn't care for that explanation at all, which unfortunately made it no less likely. But it did leave him with another burning question.
How deep inside Manpower's pocket was Sandra Crandall? Shavarshyan hadn't been a Frontier Fleet intelligence officer for the last fifteen T-years without learning how things happened here in the Verge. So the fact that Manpower had an "understanding" with Verrochio and Hongbo had come as no surprise. He was surprised by Manpower's apparent reach inside Battle Fleet and the SLN in general, but it wasn't that much of a stretch from the arrangements he'd already known about. So he could more or less handle the concept of individual Battle Fleet admirals taking marching orders from Manpower.
He'd come to the conclusion that Byng, at least, had been more in the nature of a ballistic projectile than a guided missile, however. Certainly no one with any sense would have relied upon his competence to accomplish any task more complicated than robbing a candy store. If he'd been running an operation that sent Josef Byng out here, it would have been only because he anticipated that the man's sheer stupidity and bigotry would steer him into doing pretty much exactly what he'd actually done. He certainly wouldn't have taken the chance of explaining his real objectives to him, and he would never have relied upon the man's nonexistent competence when it came to achieving those objectives.
At first, Shavarshyan had assumed Manpower had been as confident of Byng's ability to smash the Manties as Byng himself had been. On that basis, his initial conclusion had been that New Tuscany represented the failure of their plans. But then he'd started thinking about Crandall's presence. If they'd been confident Byng could handle the job, why go to the undoubted expense (and probably the risk) of getting seventy -plus ships-of-the-wall assigned for backup? That sounded more as if they'd expected Byng to get reamed . . . which, after all, was precisely what had happened.
Assuming all of that was true, the question which had taken on a certain burning significance for Hago Shavarshyan since his unexpected staff reassignment was what they expected to happen to Crandall's command. Was Byng supposed to provide the pretext while Crandall provided the club? Or was Crandall simply Byng written larger? Was she supposed to get reamed, as well? And was she aware of how her—call them 'patrons'—expected and wanted things to turn out? Or was she another ballistic projectile, launched on her way in the confident expectation that she would follow her preordained trajectory to whatever end they had in mind?
If, in fact, Crandall was intentionally cooperating with Manpower, it seemed pretty clear Ou-yang Zhing-wei wasn't part of the program. Bautista was basically another Byng, as far as Shavarshyan could tell, but Ou-yang obviously had functioning synapses and a forebrain larger than an olive. In fact, it was the operations officer who'd convinced Crandall that she had to at least attempt a negotiated outcome instead of simply opening fire the minute she crossed the hyper limit. Bautista had all but accused Ou-yang of cowardice, and Crandall clearly hadn't cared for the note of moderation, but Ou-yang was at least as good at managing her admiral as she was at carrying out training simulations.
And the fact that it took this fat-assed task force a solid week to get underway probably helped, the commander thought sourly from behind his expressionless face. Not even Crandall can argue that we're going to have the advantage of surprise when we arrive!
He'd heard about Crandall's tirade in Verrochio's office, complete with its vow to be underway for Spindle within forty-eight hours. Unfortunately, the real life lethargy of Battle Fleet's stimulus-and-response cycle had gotten in her way.
Welcome to reality, Admiral Crandall, he thought even more sourly. I hope it doesn't bite your ass as hard as I'm afraid it will, given that my ass is likely to get bitten right along with yours.
Chapter Nineteen
"All right, Darryl," Sandra Crandall said grimly. "I suppose it's time. Let's go ahead and talk to these people."
"Yes, Ma'am," Captain Darryl Chatfield, her staff communications officer replied, and turned to the attention light at his flag deck station which had been blinking for a studiously ignored forty-five minutes.
Task Force 496, Solarian League Navy, lay just outside the twenty-two light-minute hyper limit of the G0 star known as Spindle. The planet of Flax—the capital of both the star system and the Talbott Quadant itself—lay nine light-minutes inside the limit, well beyond the range of any shipboard weapon. Which didn't change the fact that TF 496 was in flagrant violation of the territorial limit recognized by centuries of interstellar law. No government could have expected to actually police every cubic light-second of a sphere twelve light-hours across, yet warships were still legally required to repond to the challenges and requests for identification of any star nation once they crossed its "twelve-hour" limit. They were also legally required to acknowledge and obey any lawful instructions they received from that star nation, even if the star nation in question were some dinky little single-system neobarb in the back of beyond. They were normally granted at least some leeway in exactly how quickly they responded, but they were still supposed to honor their legal obligations in a reasonably timely fashion.
Which was precisely the reason Sandra Crandall had waited a carefully considered three-quarters of an hour before deigning to respond to the Manticorans' challenges, Commander Shavarshyan reflecte
d. Not to mention the reason she'd decided to conduct her first contact with them from such an extended range. She could say all she wanted in her official report about remaining far enough out to respect the Spindle hyper limit in order to preclude any avoidable incidents, but the real reason was to make the Manties sweat during the nine-minute transmission lag each way. Conducting any sort of official conversation with that kind of delay built in between exchanges came under the heading of calculated insult—additional calculated insult, given her refusal even to identify herself as legally required—and she hadn't bothered to hide her enjoyment of the thought, at least in her private meetings with her senior staffers.
After all, he thought, it would never do to have these neobarbs thinking we take them seriously, would it? He shook his head mentally. I think she'll take it as a personal failure if she misses a single opportunity to piss one of them off. And if she finds out she has missed one, I'm sure she'll go back and—
His thoughts broke off rather abruptly, and his lips twitched with a sudden and utterly inappropriate desire to grin as a shortish, slender man with thinning gray hair appeared on the master com display. Instead of the cringing, perspiring poor devil Crandall had expected to discover bending anxiously over his com, imploring her to respond to his terrified communications pleas while he waited for the looming Solarian juggernaut to take note of his wretched existence, the man on the display wasn't even looking into his own pickup. Instead, he was angled two-thirds of the way away from his terminal, tipped back in his chair, heels propped on the seat of another chair which had been turned to face him, while he gazed calmly at the book reader in his lap. A book reader which was aligned—not, Shavarshyan suspected, just coincidentally—so that a sharp eyed observer could look over his shoulder and recognize a novel about the psychically gifted detective Garrett Randall by the highly popular Darcy Lord.
The man on the display went right on looking at his book reader, hit the page advance, then twitched as somebody outside the field of his own pickup hissed something in what had to be a carefully audible stage whisper. He glanced over his shoulder at his own display, then straightened, bookmarked his place, turned to face the com, pressed a button to terminate what had obviously been a purely automated repeating challenge, and smiled brightly.
"Well, there you are!" he said cheerfully.
For a moment, Shavarshyan cherished the hope apoplexy might carry Crandall off. Her demise would have to improve the situation. Although, he reminded himself conscientiously, that might be wishful thinking on his part. Admiral Dunichi Lazlo, BatRon 196's CO, her second-in-command, was no great prize . . . and no mental giant, either. Still, watching Crandall froth at the mouth and collapse in convulsions would have afforded the Frontier Fleet commander no end of personal satisfaction.
His hopes were disappointed, however.
"I am Admiral Sandra Crandall, Solarian League Navy," she grated.
"I see." The man on the display nodded politely, eighteen minutes later. "And I'm Gregor O'Shaughnessy, of Governor Medusa's staff. What can I do for you this afternoon, Admiral?"
He asked the question cheerfully enough, but as soon as he had, he nodded equally cheerfully to the pickup, turned back to the other chair, put his feet back up in it, and switched his book reader back on. Which made a sort of sense, if not exactly polite sense, given the two-way lag. After all, he had to do something while he waited. Unfortunately, Crandall didn't seem to feel that way about it. For just a moment she resembled an Old Earth bulldog who couldn't understand why the house cat draped along the sunny window sill was completely unfazed by her own threatening presence on the other side of the crystoplast, and her blood pressure had to be attaining interesting levels as O'Shaughnessy did to her precisely what she'd intended to do to him. Then she gave herself an almost visible mental shake and leaned closer to her own terminal.
"I'm here in response to your Navy's unprovoked aggression against the Solarian League," she told O'Shaughnessy icily.
"There must be some mistake, Admiral," he replied in a calm reasonable tone, looking back up from his novel again after the inevitable delay. Which did not, Shavarshayn thought, add to Admiral Crandall's sunny cheerfulness. "There hasn't been any unprovoked aggression against any Solarian citizens of which I'm aware."
"I'm referring, as you know perfectly well, to the deliberate and unprovoked destruction of the battlecruiser Jean Bart, with all hands, in the New Tuscany System two and a half months ago," she half-snapped, then slashed one finger at Chatfield. The com officer cut the visual from her end, and she turned her chair to face Bautista.
"This bastard's just asking for it, Pépé!" she snarled, still watching the Manticoran perusing his novel.
"Which will only make it even more satisfying when he finally gets it," the chief of staff replied. Crandall grunted and looked at Ou-yang.
"I don't think this brainstorm about 'negotiating' is going to work out very well, Zhing-wei." It wasn't quite a snarl, this time, although it remained closer to that than to a mere growl.
"Probably not, Ma'am," the operations officer acknowledged. "On the other hand, it was never for their benefit, was it?"
"No, but that doesn't make it any more enjoyable."
"Well, Ma'am, at least it's giving us plenty of time to take a look at what they've got in orbit around the planet," Ou-yang pointed out. "That's worthwhile in its own right, I think."
"I suppose so," Crandall admitted irritably.
"What do they have, Zhing-wei?" Bautista inquired, and Shavarshyan wondered—briefly—if the chief of staff was deliberately trying to divert Crandall's ire from the Manticorans. But the question flitted through his brain and away again as quickly as it had come. If anyone aboard Joseph Buckley was even more pissed off at the Manties than Crandall, that person was Vice Admiral Pépé Bautista.
"Unless we want to take the remotes in close enough the Manties may pick them up and nail them, we're not going to get really good resolution," Ou-yang replied. "We are picking up a superdreadnought and a squadron—well eight, anyway—of those big heavy cruisers or small battlecruisers or whatever of theirs, but I'm pretty sure that isn't everything they've got."
"Why?" Crandall sounded at least a bit calmer as she focused on Ou-yang's report.
"We've got some fairly persistent 'sensor ghosts,'" the ops officer told her. "They're just a bit too localized and just a shade too strong for me to believe the platforms are manufacturing them. The Manties' EW capabilities are supposed to be quite good, so I'm willing to bet at least some of those 'sensor ghosts' are actually stealthed units."
"Makes sense, Ma'am," Bautista offered. "They probably want to keep us guessing about their actual strength." He snorted harshly. "Maybe they think they can pull off some sort of 'ambush!'"
"On the other hand, they might just be trying to make us worry about where the rest of their ships are," Ou-yang pointed out. The chief of staff frowned, and she shrugged. "Until we actually turned up, they couldn't have been confident about what kind of strength we'd have. They may have expected a considerably smaller force and figured we'd be leery of pressing on when the rest of their fleet might turn up behind us at any moment."
Shavarshyan started to open his mouth, then closed it, then drew a deep breath and opened it again.
"Is it possible," he asked in a carefully neutral tone, "that what they're really trying to do is to convince us they're even weaker than they actually are in order to make us overconfident?"
He knew, even before the question was out of his mouth, that the majority of his audience was going to find the very idea preposterous. For that matter, he didn't really expect it to be true himself. Unfortunately, suggesting possibly overlooked answers to questions was one of an intelligence officer's functions.
Crandall and Bautista, however, didn't seem to appreciate that minor fact. In fact, they both looked at him in obvious disbelief that even a Frontier Fleet officer could have offered such a ludicrous suggestion.
"We've got seventy-one ships-of-the-wall, Commander," the chief of staff said after a moment in an elaborately patient tone. "The last thing these people want to do is actually fight us! They know as well as we do that any 'battle' would be a very short, very unhappy experience for them. Under the circumstances, the last thing they'd want would be to make us even more confident than we already are. Don't you think they'd be more interested in encouraging us to feel cautious?"
Shavarshyan's jaw tightened. It was hardly a surprise, however; he'd known how Bautista would react before he ever spoke. That, unfortunately, hadn't relieved him of his responsibility to do the speaking in question. But then, to his surprise, someone else spoke up.
"Actually, Pépé," Ou-yang Zhing-wei said, "Commander Shavarshyan may have a point." The chief of staff looked at her incredulously, and she shrugged. "Not in the way you're thinking. As you say, they can't want to fight us, but they may have orders to do just that. And I suggest all of us bear in mind that this particular batch of neobarbs has been fighting a war for the better part of twenty T-years."
"And that experience is somehow supposed to make battlecruisers and heavy cruisers capable of taking on superdreadnoughts?" Bautista demanded.
"I didn't say that," Ou-yang replied coolly. "What I'm suggesting is that whether they want to fight us or not, there probably aren't a whole lot of shy and retiring Manty flag officers these days. Hell, look at what this Gold Peak's already done! So if they've got orders to fight, I expect they'll follow them. And in that case, it's entirely possible they'd want us to underestimate their strength. It might not help them a lot, but when the odds are this bad, I'd play for any edge I could find, if I were in their place."
"I see your point, Zhing-wei," Crandall acknowledged, "but—"