Wheels whirred behind the steadholder's eyes. He was too wily a conspirator not to recognize the skill with which Baird had trolled the hook before him. But his initial confidence that Baird was overstating both the numbers and power of his "organization" had just taken a severe blow. It would take an organization of considerable size to produce that sort of money from its members' contributions, especially if, as Baird was suggesting, they came from the middle and lower-middle classes.
What was most tempting was Baird's suggestion that the contributions would be slipped to him secretly. There was no legal ban on contributions from any source—any such ban would have been considered a restriction of free speech—but there was a very strong tradition of full disclosure of donors. In fact, the Sword required such disclosure for any election which crossed the borders of more than one steading, which meant for any race for the Conclave of Steaders, the planetary government's lower house.
And therefrom hung a large part of the emerging Opposition's problems. They were strongest in the Keys, where the defense of power and privilege against the Sword's encroachments naturally strengthened opposition born of principle. In the Conclave of Steaders, the reverse was true. The lower house had been reduced to total irrelevance before the power of the great Keys prior to the Mayhew Restoration. Now it had reemerged as the full equal of the upper house, and the majority of its members, even many uncomfortable with Benjamin's reforms, were staunch Mayhew loyalists. It was there that the Opposition most needed to make electoral gains . . . and also where open campaign contributions from conservative sources would do a candidate the most harm.
But if no one needed to know where the money for those contributions had come from in the first place . . .
"That's a most interesting proposition, Mr. Baird," Mueller said after a moment. "It's sad but true that even the Lord's work requires frequent infusions of capital. Any contributions would be most gratefully accepted, and, as you, I feel sure we could find an unobtrusive way for us to accept your generous support. But I believe you also mentioned information sources and campaign organizations?" Baird nodded, and Mueller leaned back in his chair.
"In that case, gentlemen, let's take this discussion just a little further. For example, what about . . ."
Several hours later, Sergeant Samuel Hughes, Mueller Steadholder's Guard, ushered Baird and Kennedy from his steadholder's office and showed them back out of the sprawling, ancient stone pile of Mueller House. He'd said nothing while he stood post in Mueller's office, and he said nothing now—a taciturn fellow, Sergeant Hughes—but the teeny-tiny camera whose lens was hidden in the uppermost button of his tunic had caught the two visitors and their earnest discussions with Lord Mueller.
Lord Mueller didn't know that, however. Nor would he . . . until the proper time.
Unfortunately, nothing which had been discussed this morning was—quite—illegal. Not yet, at any rate. Once campaign money actually changed hands without disclosure of its sources a crime would have been committed. The best that anyone could hope for out of what had been said in Mueller's office was a conspiracy conviction, and even with the camera footage, convicting a man like Mueller in open court of conspiracy would be extremely difficult.
That was disappointing, or should have been. Yet Hughes felt no disappointment, for he sensed an opening. For the first time of which he was aware, an outside organization, not just an individual nut or a small cluster of them, had reached out to initiate contact with Mueller. Always before it had been the other way around, with Mueller very carefully approaching allies of his own selection. That had been one of the steadholder's greatest strengths, for he'd built his own contacts and alliances as a spider built its web, weaving the strands cautiously and artfully and always making certain they would bear the weight he chose to put upon them.
But if he accepted the offers Baird and Kennedy had made, and it looked very much as if he would, then he would have allowed an unknown into his web, and it would begin to generate strands of its own, whether it meant to or not. The steadholder's entire organization would become more porous and easily penetrated, and the number of potential witnesses against him would go up geometrically.
And that, Sergeant Hughes thought fervently, was a consummation greatly to be desired. Because Sergeant Hughes, who was also Captain Hughes, of the Office of Planetary Security, had spent the better part of five years worming his way into Mueller's confidence, and he still had very little to show for it. But if this morning's meeting was headed where he thought it was, that was about to change.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"Well it's about time . . . I think," Citizen Vice Admiral Lester Tourville observed. He'd tilted back his chair at the briefing-room table, and his eyes glittered as he studied the star-spangled hologram above it. He'd seen it before, many times, during the preliminary planning stages, but then a plan was all it had been. Now it was an actual operation, waiting only for the proper concentration of assigned forces to become reality.
"Qualifications from you always make me nervous," People's Commissioner Everard Honeker replied dryly, and Tourville chuckled. The citizen vice admiral often wondered what StateSec thought it was doing leaving Honeker as his political watchdog. It seemed too much to hope that none of the citizen commissioner's SS superiors had realized that a certain strain of corruption through association had crept into their relationship. Since that entire disgraceful business with the decision to execute Honor Harrington on what everyone knew had been trumped up charges, Honeker's corruption had increased apace. By now, it had come perilously close to outright disaffection, and Tourville was willing to bet that the citizen commissioner's reports to Oscar Saint-Just bore only a passing acquaintance with reality.
For a time, both Tourville and Honeker had tried very hard to pretend nothing had changed between them. It had seemed safer that way, especially since they could never know when some other informer might be in a position to see or guess what was actually happening. But things had changed since Operation Icarus. Indeed, Tourville had noticed without comment, even to Honeker, that there seemed to have been a general thawing of the relationships between the people's commissioners and the Twelfth Fleet officers whose political reliability they oversaw. He doubted that it was anything remotely universal, but Twelfth Fleet had accomplished something none of the rest of the People's Navy, with the possible exception of Thomas Theisman's Barnett command, had managed to achieve: it had defeated the Manties in battle. More than simply defeated them. Twelfth Fleet had humiliated the Royal Manticoran Navy and it allies. In the process, it had obviously shaken the entire Manticoran Alliance—a man only had to look at the Allies' current total lack of offensive action to realize that—and simultaneously given the Republic's civilian morale its first real boost since the war began.
And the men and women of Twelfth Fleet, Navy and people's commissioners alike, knew precisely what they'd achieved. The pride and solidarity which came from something like that, especially after so many years of defeat and humiliation of their own, was impossible to overestimate. A man like Honeker, who'd been fundamentally decent to begin with, almost had to succumb to it . . . and not even a cold fish like Eloise Pritchart, Citizen Admiral Giscard's commissioner, was completely immune to it.
Surely the people back at StateSec GHQ had to realize something like that was inevitable. But they seemed not to have. Or, at least, they weren't reacting as they would have reacted to such a realization earlier in the war. Saint-Just's minions had made a few changes, but not the ones Tourville would have anticipated. Oh, he was more than slightly suspicious about StateSec's sudden generosity in reinforcing Twelfth Fleet with units of its private navy, but none of the citizen commissioners had been relieved or removed. And so far as Tourville could tell, no new watchdogs had been appointed to keep an eye on the commissioners, as well as the admirals . . . which he would have considered the most rudimentary of precautions in Saint-Just's place.
Of course, the fact that he'd seen no evi
dence of new watchdogs proved nothing. StateSec had effectively unlimited manpower, and Saint-Just had been setting up domestic spy networks for decades, first for Internal Security and the Legislaturalists and now for StateSec and Rob Pierre. No doubt he could manage to avoid detection while he set one up here if he put his mind to it. But Tourville genuinely believed he hadn't, and he wondered how many other people realized what a monumental realignment in the power balance between Saint-Just and Esther McQueen that represented.
But one of the more mundane and enjoyable side effects of the changes had been a general loosening of the frigid formality and distance the people's commissioners had previously maintained. Honeker had begun loosening up sooner than most, but a year ago, not even he would have joked about the possible risks of an ops plan. Not when it had been his job to ensure that the officer with whom he shared his jest drove the plan through to unflinching success despite any risks it might entail.
Of course, the fact that Lester Tourville had carefully built a reputation as the the sort of gung-ho, bloodthirsty officer who could hardly wait for his next fight had given Honeker a set of priorities which differed somewhat from those of his fellow watchdogs. All to often, he'd found himself maneuvered into the position of being forced to restrain Tourville's enthusiasm, and as he'd realized long ago, that had given the citizen admiral and Citizen Captain Yuri Bogdanovich, Tourville's chief of staff, a pronounced advantage when it came to maneuvering him into doing things their way.
Which lent a certain added point to his jest. And probably meant it was Honeker's way of posing a sincere question.
"I suppose I'm a little surprised to hear myself adding qualifiers, too, Everard," the citizen vice admiral admitted after a moment. The use of Honeker's first name was something neither of them would have dared contemplate before Icarus; now neither of them turned a hair. "And I'm not at all sorry we're actually getting Scylla organized. I just wish we knew more about whatever buzz saw Jane Kellet walked into at Hancock."
He pulled a cigar from his breast pocket and played with it without unwrapping it while he swung his chair back and forth in minute, thoughtful arcs.
"NavInt is still contradicting itself at regular intervals trying to explain what happened to her," he went on in a musing tone. "I guess I can't blame them for that, given the dearth of hard tactical data and the absolute confusion and trauma of her survivors, but I think its obvious the Manties have something we don't know about."
"Citizen Secretary McQueen's `super LACs'?" Honeker's voice held an ever-so-slight edge of whimsy, but his eyes were somber, and Tourville nodded.
"I read Citizen Commander Diamato's— No, he's a citizen captain now, isn't he?" Tourville shook his head. "Damned hard way to win a promotion, but, by God, the man deserved it! I'm just glad he got out of it alive." The citizen vice admiral shook his head again, then inhaled sharply. "At any rate, I read his report, and I wish he'd been in shape to produce it before McQueen convened the board of inquiry."
"I do too. For the technical data it contained, at any rate." Tourville quirked an eyebrow, and Honeker chuckled humorlessly. "I've read it, too, Lester. And, as I'm sure you did, I rather suspected there'd been a few excisions. He said remarkably little about his task force's command structure, didn't he?"
"Yes, he did," Tourville agreed. Even now, neither he nor Honeker was prepared to comment openly on the fact that the Hancock Board had proved that despite any other changes, Esther McQueen was not fully mistress of the Navy. Citizen Admiral Porter's idiocy was excruciatingly obvious to any observer, yet no one on the Board had commented on his arrant stupidity. His political patrons remained too powerful for that, and nothing could be allowed to taint the reputation of an officer famed for his loyalty to the New Order. Which meant that despite all McQueen could do, the Hancock Report had lost two-thirds of its punch and turned into something suspiciously like a whitewash rather than the hard-hitting, ruthless analysis the Navy had really needed.
"But like you, I was thinking about the hardware side of his report and wishing the Board had been given a chance to see it before it issued its official conclusions," the citizen admiral went on. "Not that it would have convinced the doubters . . . or even me—fully, I mean—I suppose. It just doesn't seem possible that even the Manties could squeeze a fusion plant, and a full set of beta nodes, down into a LAC hull and then find room to cram in a godawful graser like the one Diamato described, as well!"
"I've never really understood that," Honeker said, admitting a degree of technical ignorance no "proper" people's commissioner would display. "I mean, we put fusion plants into pinnaces, and isn't a LAC just a scaled-up pinnace, when all's said and done?"
"Um." Tourville scratched an eyebrow while he considered the best way to explain. "I can see why you might think that," he acknowledged after a moment, "but it's not just a matter of scale. Or, rather, it is a matter of scale, in a way, but one in which the difference is so great as to create a difference in kind, as well.
"A pinnace has a far weaker wedge than any regular warship or merchantman. It's enormously smaller, for one thing, not more than a kilometer in width, and less powerful. The little hip-pocket fusion plants we put into small craft couldn't even begin to power an all-up wedge for a ship the size of a LAC. Which is just as well, because they use old-fashioned mag bottle technology and laser-fired fusing that's not a lot more advanced than they were using back on Old Earth Ante Diaspora. We've made a hell of a lot of advances since then, of course, in order to shoehorn the plants down to fit into pinnaces, but the way they're built puts a low absolute ceiling on their output.
"Even the biggest pinnace or assault shuttle comes in at well under a thousand tons, though, and a worthwhile LAC has to be in the thirty- to fifty-thousand-ton range just to pack in its impellers and any armament at all. Remember that courier boats in the same size range don't carry any weapons or defenses and just barely manage to find someplace to squeeze in a hyper generator. A LAC may be smaller than a starship, but it still has to be able to achieve high acceleration rates (which means a military grade compensator), produce sidewalls, power its weapons—and find places to mount them—and generally act like a serious warship, or else people would simply ignore it. Which means that, like any starship, LACs need modern grav-fusing plants to maintain the power levels they require. And there are limits on how small you can make one of those."
The citizen vice admiral twitched a shrug.
"Of course, the designers can cut some corners when they design a LAC. For one thing, they don't try to build in a power plant which can meet all requirements out of current generating capacity. Ton-for-ton, LACs have enormous capacitor rings, much larger than anything else's, even an SD. They're a lot smaller in absolute terms, naturally, given the difference in size between the ships involved, but most energy-armed LACs rely on the capacitor rings to power their offensive armament, and a lot of them rely on the capacitors even for their point-defense clusters. And not even a superdreadnought has enough onboard power generation to bring its wedge up initially without using its capacitors. Just maintaining it once it is up, even with the energy-siphon effect when it twists over into hyper, requires a huge investment in power, and initiating the impeller bands in the first place raises the power requirement exponentially. So even when they're not doing anything else, most warships tend to have at least one fusion plant on-line to charge up their capacitor rings . . . and, of course, a LAC only has one power plant, and just keeping it up and running requires its own not insubstantial power investment.
"And that's why so many of our own shipyard people will tell you that anything like Diamato's `super LACs' is flatly impossible. Either the damned things have to be bigger than Diamato thought they were, or else there's some serious mistake in his estimate of the destructiveness he claims they were capable of handing out."
"I'm a bit confused, Lester," Honeker admitted. "Are you saying Diamato was right? Or that he must have been wrong?"
"I'm sayin
g that by every logical analysis I can come up with, he must be wrong . . . but that what happened to Jane Kellet argues that he must be right. That's what worries me. Javier Giscard is good, and with all due modesty, I'm not exactly a slouch myself when it comes to tactics. And I've got Yuri and Shannon to help me think about them. But none of us has been able to come up with a way to really defend against the `super LAC,' because none of us can make any rational, useful projections as to what its real capabilities are. And, frankly, I'm almost as worried by what Diamato had to say about the range and acceleration on those damned missiles someone kept shooting up their wakes while the LACs—or whatever—were shooting them from close up and personal. LACs or no LACs, the kind of range advantage that suggests is enough to keep a man from sleeping very soundly at night."
"So you think McQueen is right to be cautious," Honeker said flatly.
"I do," Tourville replied, and his tone was equally flat. Then he shrugged. "On the other hand, I can also understand why some people—" he carefully refrained from mentioning Oscar Saint-Just by name, even now and even with Everard Honeker "—keep asking where the Manty secret weapons are. We've hit them several times since Icarus. Not in any more of their critical systems, granted, but all along their northern frontier, without seeing a sign of anything we didn't already know about. So if they've got them, why haven't they used them? And if they haven't got them, then we ought to be beating up on them as hard and as fast as we can. And if they're in the process of getting them, but don't have them yet, then we really ought to go after them hammer and tongs."
"I see." Honeker regarded the citizen vice admiral speculatively. It must be like pulling teeth for Lester Tourville to even appear to agree with Oscar Saint-Just about anything. Not that Honeker blamed Tourville a bit for that. For that matter, Honeker had come to share a lot of the citizen admiral's reservations about the soundness of StateSec's commanding officer's military judgment.