Shadow of Freedom

  Well, that information’s in the pipeline on its way to you by now, too, girl. And it’s not like they didn’t send along enough other things for you to be worrying about in the meantime!

  The good news was that she now had a much more complete explanation of just what Anton Zilwicki and Victor Cachat had brought home from Mesa. She also had a personal message from Honor, confirming her and Nimitz’s confidence that Simões was telling them the truth. The bad news was that it was easy enough to understand why a hell of a lot of Sollies were going to demand ironclad proof of such “preposterous” Manticoran claims, and there was still no way to independently confirm a single thing he’d said. And the worse news, as far as Michelle was concerned, was that all anyone could tell her about the “Mesan Alignment’s” possible intentions in her own command area was “We don’t have a clue in hell what they’re going to do next, but we don’t expect you to like it.”

  Very useful that was.

  She grimaced. Her first inclination was to start kicking in doors on Mesa and drag the Alignment out into the open by the scruff of its misbegotten neck. Unfortunately, she still didn’t have enough information to know whether or not that was justified or even where to look for the Alignment after she got to Mesa. And while her opinion had been steadily hardening towards the desirability of taking the war to the League, whether she was in a position to go after Mesa or not, she needed to know what had happened to Filareta, first. If he’d been smart enough to surrender the way Honor wanted him to, this whole war might be in a way towards being settled. In that case, invading and conquering a half dozen or so Solarian-claimed star systems might not be the very best way to help the peace process along.

  Maybe not, but the chance of the League actually backing down, whatever happened to Filareta, is—what? Maybe one in a thousand? And even that’s assuming somebody shoots Kolokoltsov and puts someone remotely rational into his place!

  She grimaced some more, remembering that old aphorism about asking for anything but time. In her own mind, she was certain the confrontation with the League was far from over. It was possible her own experiences with people like Josef Byng, Sandra Crandall, and Damián Dueñas were prejudicing her thinking. She admitted that, but the admission didn’t change her analysis. And if she was right, if more and worse hostilities were still to come, she hated the thought of not moving as quickly and decisively as possible while she had the opportunity to do so effectively unopposed.

  Calm down, she told herself yet again. Unless something changes radically, you’re going to be effectively unopposed for a long time to come, given the tech imbalance. Hell, just look what Zavala did in Saltash!

  Which was probably true, but—

  But it doesn’t mean they’re not going to try to oppose you—just like they did in Saltash, damn it—and if they do, you’re going to have to kill a hell of a lot more Sollies to take your objectives. And that’s what sticks in your craw, isn’t it?

  She sighed, took another sip of coffee, and commanded herself to stop fretting over things she couldn’t change.

  Besides, you may not have heard anything about what happened to Filareta yet, but you are going to hear about it a hell of a lot more quickly than any of the Sollies in the vicinity! You’ll still have the advantage of a shorter communication loop, better intel, and the strategic initiative when the time comes, unless those bastards in Mesa figure out some way to bollix everything up again.

  For that matter—

  The soft buzz of her terminal interrupted her thought, and she brought the chair upright and reached for the accept key.

  “Yes? What is it, Gwen?” she asked as Gervais Archer’s image appeared on the display.

  “Sorry to disturb you this late, Milady,” Archer said, “but something’s come up that I think you may need to deal with.”

  “What?” she asked, eyes narrowing.

  “Another ship’s just arrived in-system from Mobius, Ma’am. It’s a Trifecta freighter. According to what her master told the port authorities, he’s here to see whether or not Mr. Ankenbrandt was able to find a supplier for that meat-buying contract.”

  “But—?” she prompted when he paused.

  “But her purser’s transmitted one of the code words Ankenbrandt supplied, Ma’am. I think she wants to talk to you.”

  * * *

  “You know,” Michelle said three hours later as she regarded the com images of her senior officers, “when we were discussing the situation in Mobius, I’d really hoped we’d have a little more time—like, say, maybe even a whole week—before we actually had to decide what we’re going to do about it. Silly of me, I suppose.”

  “It does bring to mind the old cliché about raining and pouring, Ma’am,” Munming agreed.

  “I suppose it could be argued you still don’t have t’ rush t’ a decision, Ma’am,” Oversteegen pointed out. “I mean, even if we’d really been the ones they were talkin’ to all along, this is still a good two or three months sooner than Ankenbrandt told us they were supposed t’ be callin’ us in.”

  “I realize that, Michael. But this”—she tapped a hardcopy summary of her Alfredo-verified interview with Yolanda Summers, the new messenger from the Mobius Liberation Front—“puts a different complexion on things. It’s pretty clear the situation’s gone to crap faster than Ankenbrandt ever expected when he was sent out. In fact, that’s the entire reason this Summers turned up so soon, and I don’t blame the MLF leadership one bit for sending her out so quickly after Ankenbrandt. If even half of what’s in here is accurate, things are getting ready to drop straight into the crapper in that star system, and it’s going to be ugly when they do. Especially given this information that Lombroso’s expecting intervention battalions to arrive shortly. I’m going to assume that if he thinks they’re coming, the odds are they’re already in the pipeline, which means that even if we send someone immediately, Frontier Security’s likely to be in-system and boots-on-the-ground by the time anything of ours can get there.”

  “With all due respect, Ma’am, that might be an argument against reacting quickly,” Rear Admiral Ruddick suggested. She looked at him, and he shrugged. “Assuming you’re right about that, we probably can’t get there in time to prevent a bloodbath in the first place. If that’s the case, all our ‘intrusion into the star system’—and that’s how we all know the League is going to describe it—will achieve is to pump extra hydrogen into our face-off with the Sollies without preventing whatever’s already happened to Ankenbrandt’s resistance movement by the time we do get there.”

  “I understand your argument, Mickaël, but I’m not going to pussyfoot around the League in the name of expediency. People’ve been doing that for centuries, and look how well that’s worked out!” She shook her head. “No. If they want to go on playing this kind of game, this time they’re going to have to show me their cards or fold, because I am damned well going to call them on it! Having said that, though, I’m not just shooting from the hip, either. There’s a genuine method to my madness on this one.

  “First, Mobius isn’t a member of the Solarian League, and it’s not an official protectorate, either. It doesn’t even have an officially sanctioned OFS presence like Saltash. Technically and legally, it’s an independent star nation, even if the Lombroso Administration is as corrupt and tyrannical as they come, not to mention being in Frontier Security’s hip pocket. So it’ll be a bit difficult for the Sollies to call us on intruding into their space. They’ll do it anyway, of course, but we’ll have plenty of opportunities to attack their claims.

  “Second, even if their arrangement was really with someone else, the people in Mobius think it was with us, and that’s what everyone else is going to think. That hasn’t changed; the timetable’s simply been moved up a bit. And if we were going to respond by supporting them when they rebelled ‘on schedule,’ all the same arguments for doing that apply to getting in there now.

  “And, third, I’m sick and fucking tired of watching Frontier Sec
urity and its bastard friends grind their heels into people’s faces. According to this”—she never raised her voice, but her expression could have been carved out of battle steel as the tapped the report again—“Lombroso’s resorted to mass arrests, ‘stringent interrogations,’ and shutting down all nongovernment channels of public communication. Not to mention the fact that a lot of his opponents have started mysteriously disappearing.” She shook her head, brown eyes grim. “I’m not going to find any more of those people in unmarked graves than I can help, Mickaël. Not when they went there thinking my Star Empire got them into Lombroso’s line of fire in the first place.”

  There was silence for a moment. Then Aivars Terekhov cleared his throat.

  “I think you have a point, Ma’am,” he said.

  “Only a point?” Michelle smiled humorlessly.

  “What I meant, Ma’am, is that whatever we do or don’t do, the perception is still going to be that we fomented the situation in Mobius. I happen to agree with you that keeping people from being killed by a corrupt government is worthwhile in its own right, but even from a purely pragmatic political viewpoint, I don’t see that we have any choice. If we had engineered it, we’d have a moral responsibility to the people who’re being arrested and ‘disappeared,’ and that’s the standard we’re going to be held to, whoever actually set this in motion. For that matter, even if it later comes out—even if we’re later able to prove—that we weren’t the ones stirring the pot, intervention on the resistance’s side is still going to work out in our favor with everyone except the Sollies.” He shrugged. “I’m not trying to be cold-blooded or calculating about it, but if the independent star systems out this way realize we’re willing to stand by them when they think they have our word, even when that means facing the Solarian League and even when we weren’t actually involved from the beginning, it can only improve their perception of us.”

  “Somethin’ to that, Ma’am,” Oversteegen remarked. “Quite a lot, really.”

  “I agree,” Munming said firmly.

  “Good.” Michelle smiled a bit more naturally. “It’s always nice to know my loyal subordinates approve of what I’m going to do anyway.”

  One or two of the others smiled back, and she returned her attention to Terekhov.

  “I’m especially glad to hear you feel that way, Aivars. For a lot of reasons, I don’t want to look like I’m…overreacting, let’s say. At the same time, I think a big enough force to make a firm statement—and hopefully to provide any Solly Frontier Fleet commander with a sufficiently overpowering threat that he can back down without losing face and touching off another Saltash—is in order. And, given the delicate questions of interstellar policy and diplomacy involved, I think it would be as well for us to send along a senior officer with Foreign Office experience. Someone like you.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.” If Terekhov was dismayed—or surprised—he showed no sign of it.

  “I’m thinking that I’m going to send one division of your cruiser squadron, a destroyer squadron, and one of Admiral Culbertson’s CLACs. The carrier’ll have plenty of life-support to carry a battalion or so of Marines, as well. That should give you a ground combat component if you need one. I’m hoping you won’t, but better safe than sorry.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “I’ll want you underway within twelve hours,” she continued. “In the meantime, I’ll be leaving your other division and Scotty Tremaine’s division here in Montana, along with the rest of Culbertson’s CLACs, and the rest of our destroyers, all under Culbertson. I’ll leave him detailed instructions about what to do if any interesting little messages should happen to arrive from other resistance movements we didn’t realize we were supporting.”

  “Pardon me, Ma’am,” Munming said, “but that seems to suggest you don’t plan on staying here yourself?”

  “No, I don’t plan on that. And you won’t be staying either, Aploloniá. I’m taking your squadron, Michael’s battlecruisers, and Admiral Menadue’s carriers to join Admiral Bennington at Tillerman.”

  More than one set of eyebrows rose this time, and she shrugged.

  “By this time, Filareta’s either been blown to dustbunnies, surrendered, or run like hell,” she said. “When Admiral Khumalo and Baroness Medusa find out which it was, they’ll be sending dispatches both here and to Tillerman. I’d find out about it a bit sooner if I stayed here, but I’d still have to move to Tillerman—or waste time ordering Bennington to join us here—to concentrate our wall before we make any moves of our own. And I’ve come to the conclusion that if things have fallen still further into the crapper, we are going to be making some moves. Specifically, as I see it, our first step has to be to cover our backs before we do anything else. Which means taking out the Madras Sector.”

  The assembled officers sat very still.

  “If we’re going to find ourselves in a genuine war with the League, I’m not going to sit here and let them bring it to us,” she said flatly. “We know, because we’ve demonstrated it against the Havenites and they’ve demonstrated it against us, that the deep strike can be decisive…and that standing on the defensive surrenders the initiative to the other side. From everything we’ve seen out of the Sollies so far, they haven’t figured that out. Oh,” she waved one hand impatiently, “they went straight for Spindle and straight for the home system, but both of those moves were completely in line with their step-by-step approach; it just happened that we didn’t have a lot of depth. But I don’t think there’s much doubt that they’ll be thinking about staging any additional operations against the Quadrant out of Madras or one of the other sectors out this way. They almost have to, in a lot of ways, because their logistics are so short-legged. They don’t have a fleet train organization with the kind of strategic mobility and flexibility we and the Havenites have developed, and I doubt there’s a single Battle Fleet admiral who has the mental flexibility to work around that. Given time, they’ll develop it or find someone—probably from Frontier Fleet—who does have it, but it’s going to take time for that to happen. And that’s why we’re not going to stand on the defensive. If these idiots persist in dancing to Mesa’s piping, then we’re going to take the war to them. I want to eliminate their basing infrastructure out here. them fully on the defensive—psychologically, as well as strategically—from the get-go. That means punching out every sector capital behind us as we advance, so if we do end up pulling the trigger, we’re going into the Meyers System hard and fast and in sufficient strength that nobody’s going to even think about shooting back. I want that system taken with as close to zero bloodshed as humanly possible, and after that, we’re going to punch out the rest of the sector.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Captain Peter Clavell frowned grumpily as he checked his chrono for the third time in the last fifteen minutes. His relief was late—again—and Clavell didn’t like the rumors he’d been hearing. All very well for General Yardley to announce a general offensive against the rabble-rousers and malcontents, but she wasn’t the one out here in command of a checkpoint whose relief was dragging in late…again. And she wasn’t the one wondering if maybe this time his relief was late for a reason nobody would like. Or if some terrorist son-of-a-bitch was going to come along and ruin his entire night when he should have been safely back in his quarters while some other poor bastard took over the checkpoint in question. God knew it had happened to enough other Guardsmen in the last two or three weeks!

  He scowled at the thought and reminded himself that it would be a very bad idea to say anything like that out loud where it might get back to Internal Affairs. “Defeatism” was well on its way to becoming a capital offense, and at least one other field grade officer Clavell knew had been posted to one of the penal battalions for “sedition” when she’d questioned an intelligence appreciation of the general public’s support for the terrorists who’d taken down the White Whore. Against that sort of backdrop, suggesting General Yardley didn’t care diddley about how many Guard
smen she might have to sacrifice to make this particular omelette probably came under the heading of something other than career enhancement.

  And given the sort of welcome a member of the Presidential Guard was likely to receive from the citizens of Mobius this day, it wasn’t as if Captain Clavell could expect much of a career in the civilian sector. Most jobs tended to go to people who were still breathing, after all. Not that he wouldn’t have been simply delighted to embrace some other form of employment if he had been able to find it.

  Clavell sighed heavily, tipped back in the Scorpion’s command chair, and yawned and stretched—hard—before he crossed his ankles and clasped his hands behind his helmeted head.

  It wasn’t that he had any qualms about breaking heads if the President told him to, he reflected. That was his job, after all, and Svein Lombroso understood that men and women of proven loyalty deserved to be rewarded. The perks that went with Clavell’s career choice were fairly awesome, when he came down to it, and it wasn’t as if the work had ever been especially difficult. Break the occasional head, send a few unionists or protesters to the hospital, pull the occasional stint guarding one of the concentration camps, make your own quota on arrested malcontents…all fairly straightforward and routine. If there weren’t enough protesters or genuine malcontents around when you needed them to look good on your annual efficiency reports, it wasn’t too hard to find someone to stand in for them, and it wasn’t as if the courts were going to waste time listening to protestations of innocence, anyway.

  There’d been the occasional—very occasional—moment when Cadet Clavell or even Lieutenant Clavell had questioned the system and his own participation in it. But Captain Clavell, older and wiser than those younger personae, knew someone had to maintain order and public discipline, and if the someone in question was rewarded for his efforts with special privileges, better pay, and the respect which the authority he represented properly deserved, that was no more than he merited for all the sacrifices he’d made. And he’d never much worried himself about the Intelligence pukes’ claims that hundreds of plots against the Presidency simmered perpetually away. He’d never seen any sign of it, at any rate—not on any organized basis. The people who might have made real trouble knew better than to cross swords with the Guard or poke their heads up to be broken.