He paused, his exhausted face gaunt and bleak, and his nostrils flared. Then he continued, speaking slowly and distinctly.
"I fully realize the seriousness of what I am about to say, and I very much hope that a more thorough and complete analysis of the limited data I have been able to include with this report will prove that my suspicions are in error. However, it is my considered opinion that the destruction of Hélène Blondeau was the result of a careful, skillfully planned, and well executed act of sabotage. I can think of no other explanation for the observed pattern of destruction. I am not prepared at this time in a formal report to speculate upon who might have been responsible for that act of sabotage. I am not a trained investigator, and I do not believe it would be proper for me to make any formal charges or allegations before a more detailed analysis can be performed. However, if, in fact, this was an act of sabotage, whoever may have been responsible for it clearly does not have the best interests of the Star Empire at heart. Given that Captain Séguin, Camille, and all other New Tuscan shipping in the system have been withdrawn, I believe the potential for some sort of additional and unfortunate incident is high. I must, therefore, respectfully request that this star system be promptly and strongly reinforced."
Chapter Forty
"They're gone."
Valery Ottweiler looked up from the report he'd been reading and quirked one eyebrow at the man standing in his office doorway. Damien Harahap, late of the Solarian League Gendarmerie, was an eminently forgettable-looking man—a quality of which had served him well during his time with his former employer—but Ottweiler had discovered that there was an extremely capable brain behind that unremarkable façade.
There was also someone who had an inordinate amount of good luck. Everything taken together, Harahap was extraordinarily fortunate to be alive, but Ottweiler knew he'd proved very useful to Aldona Anisimovna and Isabel Bardasano. Despite how spectacularly the Monica operation had crashed and burned, Harahap had performed his role in it almost flawlessly, and he'd been as ruthlessly honest in critiquing his own performance as he had when critiquing that of anyone else. He wasn't Mesan, but operatives of his professionalism and ability—and intelligence—were rare, and Bardasano, who had never had any prejudices against employing "outside talent" if it proved itself valuable and reliable, had hired him away from the Gendarmerie almost before the wreckage in Monica had finished glowing.
The fact that Harahap knew where all the bodies in the Madras Sector were buried had suggested he might be of particular value to Ottweiler, which was how he'd come to be a member of Ottweiler's staff here in Meyers. Of course, there were a few downsides to having him openly working for Ottweiler here on the capital world of his old stomping grounds. In fact, Hongbo Junyan had looked just a little askance at the relationship, but Ottweiler had already demonstrated who was in charge in that particular relationship, and any objections the vice-commissioner might have cherished had remained unspoken.
"I take it you're referring to the departure of the intrepid Admiral Byng?" Ottweiler said now, and Harahap nodded.
"Just translated out for New Tuscany," he said.
"And about time, too," Ottweiler muttered. Harahap didn't seem to notice, which was fresh proof of both his intelligence and his discretion, Ottweiler thought. Then the Mesan inhaled deeply and shrugged.
"Thank you, Damien," he said.
"Is there anything else you need me to do this afternoon?" Harahap asked.
"No, thank you. Well, not here, anyway. But, on second thought, it would probably be a good idea if you went and hit your Gendarmerie contacts again. Try to get a read on how the Sollies see what's going on in New Tuscany."
"Not a problem," Harahap replied, then left, closing the door quietly behind him.
Ottweiler gazed at that closed door for a moment, thinking of the man who had just passed through it and all he represented.
Damien Harahap had been one of the best field men the Solarian Gendarmerie had ever recruited and trained, but he'd never felt any intrinsic loyalty to the League. Born in the Verge himself, he'd managed to claw his way off of one of the planets Frontier Security had handed over to one of its multi-stellar corporate patrons to be squeezed and exploited. He'd done it by taking service with the very people who had stripped his home world of its freedom and its dignity, and Ottweiler suspected that that still ate at him at times. If so, it hadn't kept him from doing his job superlatively, but that stemmed more from his own pride of workmanship and refusal to perform at less than his best than from any vestige of devotion to his employers. He'd always seen himself—with good reason, in Ottweiler's opinion—much more as a foreign mercenary than as a citizen of the League.
And that was ultimately going to prove the Solarian League's Achilles' heel, Valery Ottweiler suspected. Too many of the people doing what had to be done to keep the machine up and running were like Damien Harahap. Skilled, capable, ambitious, often ruthless . . . and with no sense of loyalty to the League at all. They were simply playing the best game available to them, and if someone came along and offered to change the rules . . .
Ottweiler looked back at the report he'd been reading, but he didn't really see it. His mind was too busy with other things.
He was glad Byng had finally gotten underway, even if it had taken almost an entire T-month. That was longer than his instructions had specified as the maximum acceptable interval, but only by a day or two. Unless the people who'd written those instructions were far stupider than Ottweiler expected, they would have allowed for some slippage even in their "maximum acceptable" timing delays. And whether they had or not, it was the best Ottweiler had been able to do without coming a lot further into the open and squeezing Lorcan Verrochio a lot harder—and a lot more obviously—than his instructions from Isabel Bardasano permitted.
And he was also relieved that Byng had, indeed, settled for taking only two of his three battlecruiser squadrons with him.
He tipped back in his chair, lips pursed while he whistled tunelessly. He wasn't supposed to know what was really going on. That much was obvious from the way his instructions had been written, the way Bardasano's directives had been phrased. But, like Damien Harahap, it was Valery Ottweiler's intelligence which made him so useful to his own employers. And that intelligence had been suggesting things lately which he had been very careful to keep discreetly to himself. Things which had given added point to his thoughts about the fundamental loyalty of people like Harahap.
And his own.
Nobody had told him exactly what was supposed to happen in New Tuscany, but it didn't take a hyper physicist to figure out that it wasn't what the New Tuscans—or Admiral Byng—were expecting to happen. Especially after what had happened in Monica, and what that had demonstrated about Manticoran military capabilities, the only possibility Ottweiler could see was that someone wanted to reprise the Battle of Monica, but with Josef Byng in the role of the Monican Navy. No one as smart as Isabel Bardasano or Aldona Anisimovna could expect any other outcome, which meant that was the one they wanted. Which led inevitably to the question of why they wanted it.
Ottweiler had asked himself that very question, and as he'd pondered it, a very disturbing thought had come to him. One which made him look at the actions of someone like Governor Barregos in the Maya Sector quite differently. One which made him wonder how someone as bright as he was could have missed the signs he saw so clearly now.
Which made him consider exactly what it was to which he'd truly given his own loyalty all these years and how much further it might turn out that the ambitions of his own employers extended than he'd ever guessed before.
And one which made him wonder how the Solarian League was going to react when it discovered the true disadvantage to hiring mercenaries to protect its life.
"You know, Father, when you first came up this brainstorm of yours, I actually found myself wondering about your contact with reality. In fact, I started to say just that, actually. But now . . . "
&n
bsp; Benjamin Detweiler shook his head as he stood beside his father in the salon of a luxuriously furnished private yacht, gazing at the needle-sharp view screen.
"Really?" Albrecht gave his son a humorous glance. "Changed your mind, did you? You do remember that one of your responsibilities is to warn me if you think I'm going off the deep end, don't you?"
"Oh, certainly." Benjamin chuckled. "The problem is that no one else really knows all of the labyrinthine—not to say Machiavellian—details rolling around inside your brain. Sometimes it's sort of hard for those of us on the outside to tell the difference between strokes of genius and wild hairs."
"Your filial respect overwhelms me," Albrecht said dryly, and Benjamin chuckled again. Although, Albrecht reflected, there was at least a tiny kernel of truth buried in his son's comments. There usually was, where Benjamin was concerned. Out of all of his "sons," Benjamin probably was the most likely to tell him if he thought he was going off at a dangerous tangent.
Probably because Benjamin's the most like me, when you come right down to it, Albrecht thought. Which is why I picked him to run the military side of things, after all. And—Albrecht's eyes refocused on the view screen—so far, he's done us all proud. Well, he and Daniel and Daniel's little shop of wonders.
Truth to tell, the view screen's images weren't all that exciting . . . unless, of course, one realized what one was seeing. There was no pressing need for Albrecht to be out here aboard Benjamin's yacht, watching it from such short range, either. He could have viewed exactly the same imagery from the security of his own office. But Albrecht did realize what he was seeing, and six hundred T-years of planning and effort, of sweat and toil, of enormous investment and even more enormous patience on the part of entire generations who couldn't be here with him, were rumbling through the marrow of his bones as he watched. He couldn't possibly have stayed away. He needed to be as physically close to the units of Oyster Bay as he could possibly be, and if that was illogical, he didn't really much care.
He watched the stupendous freighters getting underway. They weren't the largest freighters in the galaxy, by any stretch of the imagination, but they were still big, solid ships, all of them of at least four million tons, and they'd been carefully modified for their current role. Their cargo doors were considerably larger than usual, and the cargo holds behind those doors had been configured to provide secure nests for the roughly frigate-sized Ghost-class scout ships they concealed.
They were something entirely new in the annals of interstellar warfare, those scout ships, and he wished they had more of them—hundreds of them. But they didn't. Their total inventory of the new spider-drive ships was extremely limited, and he'd committed virtually all of them to this operation. If they'd only had a few more months—another T-year or two—to prepare, he would have been much happier.
But we've got enough of them for this, he told himself almost fiercely, and let his eyes sweep across to the other half of Oyster Bay.
The Shark-class strike ships were much larger than Commodore Østby's and Commodore Sung's scouts. Any pod-layer had to be, although these were still essentially prototype units in many ways, and they had only twenty-eight of them, divided between Admiral Topolev's Task Force One and Admiral Colenso's much smaller Task Force Two. Substantially larger units with far more magazine space were on the drawing board, designs based in no small part on the experience Benjamin and his crews had acquired working with the ships currently under Topolev's and Colenso's command. Some of those larger units were already entering the first phases of construction, for that matter. And, again, Albrecht wished they'd been able to wait until those larger ships were available in greater numbers. But the key to everything was timing, and the two admirals had enough combat power for their assigned mission.
Albrecht wasn't the military specialist Benjamin was, but even he could tell the Sharks looked subtly wrong. They were too far away for the naked eye to see, but the view screen's magnification brought them to what seemed like arm's-length and made it obvious that all of them lacked the traditional "hammerhead" design of a military starship. Indeed, the lines of their hulls were all wrong, in one way or another, as if their designers had been working to a completely different set of constraints from anyone else in the galaxy.
Which was precisely what they had been doing.
The strike ships turned slowly, and then, as one unit, they went loping away into the trackless depths of space. And that, too, was wrong. The light-warping power of a starship's impeller drive made the ship within it impossible to see, except from exactly the right angle. But there was no gravitic distortion around these ships, nothing to bend and blur light waves, because they didn't use impeller wedges.
And isn't that going to come as a nasty surprise for the Manties and their friends? Albrecht thought fiercely.
He watched for several more moments, then shook himself and inhaled deeply.
"Well," he said, "that's that. I'm proud of you, Ben." He reached out to squeeze his son's shoulder. "I sometimes think I forget to tell you—and the other boys, for that matter—that as often as I ought to, but it's true. I know how much pressure I put on you when I decided to move Oyster Bay up this way. But I also knew that if anyone could get it organized and moving in that time frame, you were the one."
"Flattery will get you everywhere, Father," Benjamin said with a grin, but Albrecht could tell that his son recognized the sincerity behind his words. He gave the shoulder under his hand another squeeze, then shook his head.
"And now, I'd better get back to the house. I'm sure something else has crawled out of my in-basket while I was away, and your mom has something special planned for dinner tonight. She didn't tell me what, and I didn't ask. Sometimes I am a little afraid to ask her, actually. I'd hate to think she was getting her cookbooks mixed up with her lab notebooks!"
This time, Benjamin laughed out loud. Evelina Detweiler was one of the Mesan Alignment's top biosciences researchers, with a special expertise in bioweapons, working closely with Benjamin's brother Everett and Renzo Kyprianou. And unlike her husband, who was always sharply focused on the task in hand, Evelina was all too often the epitome of the "absent minded professor."
"Whatever it is she's planning on feeding me, though, you'd better be there too," Albrecht said now, glaring at the laughing Benjamin. "It's a special dinner to celebrate launching Oyster Bay, and I understand it's going to include seafood, somehow or other. So be there. Nineteen-thirty sharp—and no excuses, young man!"
"Yes, Sir," Benjamin said meekly.
"Well," Augustus Khumalo said gloomily, "I could wish we'd been wrong at least this once."
"If it makes you feel better to be wrong, Augustus," Baroness Medusa said with a crooked smile, "don't get too worried. I'm sure we'll be able to make enough mistakes to satisfy you while we try to figure out what to do about it!"
"I know what I'd like to do about it," Henri Krietzmann muttered just loud enough to be heard, and Joachim Alquezar gave him a reproving glance.
"While direct action has a certain primitive appeal, especially at moments like this, it isn't always the best course of action, Henri. Besides, there's a little thing called the Eridani Edict to worry about, so a nice saturation kinetic bombardment of New Tuscany is probably out of the question."
"Spoken like a true effete aristocrat," Krietzmann shot back with a twinkle, despite the tension of the moment, and Alquezar chuckled. But his momentary humor disappeared quickly, and he shook his head and looked at Medusa.
"I have to admit that I'm at a loss to even suggest what it is this was supposed to accomplish," he said, running one fingertip across the hardcopy printout of the diplomatic note lying on the conference table in front of him beside his copy of Commander Denton's report.
"I think at least part of it is fairly obvious, Mr. Prime Minister," Gregor O'Shaughnessy said. "I realize New Tuscany is actually five days closer to Spindle than Pequod is, but the fact that Vézien's nastygram got here less than twenty-four
hours after Commander Denton's report still says quite a lot. Even if this Captain Séguin let the merchies make the trip on their own and went ahead of them in her light cruiser, she still burned the better part of five and a half days just getting home to New Tuscany. Which means they conducted this entire 'investigation' of Vézien's, discussed how to respond, and got his damned note off to us in less than one T-day. How many governments do you know of that could have done that from a standing start?"
"None," Alquezar said grimly. "Or not at least if there really was any sort of an investigation involved."
"I think we can take it as a given that there was no need for any investigations," Michelle Henke put in from her place to Khumalo's right, and her husky contralto was far grimmer than usual.
Medusa glanced at her, and the baroness didn't exactly like what she saw. Michelle had been back in Spindle for less than a T-month, and it was obvious to Medusa that the horrendous casualties the Navy had suffered in the Battle of Manticore had hit her especially hard.