At that point, however, Buccaneer came into play. From his staff’s analysis, there was no way that wasn’t going to happen in the end, and a part of the admiral wanted to simply get on with it. If Hypatia had chosen to betray its eight hundred-T-years of loyalty and mutual obligations to its fellow League member systems, then it was time Hypatians were shown the error of their ways. Hopefully, their experience would make other potential traitors wise, and if he had to do it, he wanted it over and done as quickly as possible. The sooner Hypatia’s experience became general knowledge, the less likely other traitors were to arise.
Besides, mixing politics and military policy was never a good idea. The result was usually an abortion, and the best one could normally hope for was that it wouldn’t be a total abortion. To this point, he was cautiously tempted to believe their current mission might prove an exception to the rule, but it was early days yet.
For now, however, Yang-O’Grady was senior to him, which was why he’d waved her into the briefing room in front of him. It was her responsibility to determine the moment at which their mission transitioned from political to military. Until that moment, he was at her orders. After that moment, she became a passenger.
“Attention on deck,” Commodore Fred Brigman, TF 1030’s chief of staff, said as Yang-O’Grady and his admiral arrived. Under more usual circumstances, the staff would simply have risen respectfully until Hajdu was seated. With “guests” present, Brigman was being a bit more formal, and Hajdu walked across to his chair, waited until Yang-O’Grady had seated herself, then sat down and nodded to the commodore.
“Carry on,” he said.
“Thank you, Sir.”
The rest of the staff resumed their seats, but Brigman remained standing and keyed up the elevated display in front of him.
“As the Admiral already knows, Ms. Yang-O’Grady,” he said courteously to the Foreign Ministry representative, “this is basically just a final readiness report. We completed our last scheduled exercise fifteen hours ago, and on the basis of that, Commodore Koopman—” he nodded to Daphne Koopman, TF 1030’s staff operations officer “—and I have added a few tiny tweaks. The main purpose of this briefing is to apprise both Admiral Hajdu and you of our readiness estimate, based on the exercises we’ve conducted, and to examine our mission orders one last time in light of that estimate. The Admiral’s made it clear to us that you need the most complete possible picture of our capabilities and the elements of Buccaneer and how they would play out in the unhappy eventuality of their becoming necessary. In addition, this briefing offers an opportunity for you—or the Admiral—to reconsider or more fully define any of those elements. From my own reading of the intelligence reports, unfortunately, I believe it’s likely the Hypatians will have voted in favor of secession by the time we get there. If that’s happened, the Task Force’s primary mission is to enable you to accomplish your mission without a shot being fired, and the Admiral feels that makes it essential that you be as hands-on as possible with our planning process and operational options.”
“I see,” Yang-O’Grady said, when he paused. She glanced at the admiral sitting beside her. “And I appreciate it, Admiral.” She grimaced. “Before I joined the Foreign Ministry, I spent quite some time with Interior and cut my teeth in Frontier Security. During those years, I had ample opportunity to watch what should have been coordinated military and diplomatic operations turn into fiascoes. I doubt you can fully imagine just what a relief it is to know that whatever happens in Hypatia, it won’t be because your people and my people weren’t on the same page going in.”
HMS Phantom
Alexandria Belt
Hypatia System
“Talk to me, Jim!” Jan Kotouč said as he strode into flag bridge.
“Yes, Sir!” Captain Clarke turned from an intense discussion with Commander Ilkova. “We’re still getting the details, but it doesn’t look good. So far, CIC is reporting a minimum of a hundred and fifty hyper footprints.”
“And we don’t have a single Ghost Rider platform out there to keep an eye on them, do we?” Kotouč observed sourly.
“No, Sir. Sorry, Sir,” Ilkova said, and Kotouč waved a hand at her.
“That wasn’t a criticism, Markéta. Or, if it was, it was a self-criticism, not directed at you. I should have deployed a shell as soon as we made our hyper translation.”
“My job to remind you, Sir,” she said loyally, and Kotouč shook his head.
“If I recall my Academy classes correctly, the responsibility rests with the commanding officer.”
His tone was almost whimsical, but his staff knew him well enough to recognize the intense self-anger buried within it. And Ilkova was correct; it was her job to “remind” her admiral about such things. But Hypatia was a friendly system with its own sensor net already in place. Kotouč had allowed himself to forget how unexpectedly things could change, and with him as an example, it was hardly surprising even a staff as good as his had done the same thing.
You told Vangelis Navy officers hate surprises, he thought acidly. Maybe it would’ve been a good idea for you to do a little something to minimize this one?
“All right,” he said. “We screwed up—I’ll grant you we both dropped the ball on this one, Markéta—so let’s do something about it. Get the recon shell deployed now. Complete stealth. That many footprints can only mean this is the Sollies, and I don’t want them to have even a sniff of our presence in-system.”
“Yes, Sir.” Ilkova turned to begin giving orders, and Kotouč moved his attention to Commander Jason Kindrick, his staff astrogator.
Kindrick was a bookish sort—his nose was usually buried in his reader or an old-fashioned hardcopy book whenever he was off duty—who rejoiced, for some reason Kotouč had never discovered, in the nickname of “Vulture.” It was hard for him to think of a name less suited to someone’s physical appearance, but Kindrick only smiled whenever he heard it. And wherever it had come from, or however fond of the printed page he might be, he was also one of the best astrogators Kotouč had ever served with.
“While Markéta’s seeing to that, Jason,” he said now, “I think we need to move—very cautiously—to a point farther from Hypatia. We’ve got a lot of room to hide in where we are, but we’re also under a light-minute from the capital. If I were these people, I’d be looking that volume over very carefully, so I want to be somewhere outside it by the time they’re close enough to start looking. Pick us a good spot to hide at least fifty or sixty million klicks from here.”
“Yes, Sir,” Kindrick replied, and Kotouč nodded and crossed to the master display, twitching his head to invite Clarke to join him there.
“You think this is some kind of armed attempt to suppress the referendum, Sir?” the captain asked quietly.
“Well, it’s not a convoy of ice cream tankers,” Kotouč replied tartly, then shook his head. “You know, the entire time we were rushing to get here, I never imagined anything this size coming over the hyper wall. This is a lot more escalation than I ever anticipated, especially in a Core System like Hypatia.”
“I suppose it’s at least theoretically possible they’re only staging through Hypatia en route to somewhere else,” Clarke said.
“No, you don’t suppose anything of the sort.” Kotouč shook his head. “You’re just trying to find a silver lining. Best case scenario, whatever genius in Old Chicago sent these people out here is hoping a force this size will overawe Hypatia into backing down on their referendum. In that case, they’re probably under orders just to be as visible and intimidating as possible, and I have to concede that a couple of hundred warships could do a pretty fair job of intimidating just about anybody. On the other hand, they’re only forty-four light-years from Beowulf, and they know what Admiral Truman has sitting on the Beowulf Terminus. So if they’re here to do any intimidating, they’re probably under orders to do it pretty damned fast.”
“And if that isn’t why they’re here, Sir?”
“About the only
other reason they could be here is to…take steps if President Vangelis and his administration refuse to back down,” the admiral said, flat-voiced.
Clarke started to ask another question, then visibly changed his mind, and Kotouč smiled grimly. His chief of staff was as capable of doing the math as he was, and neither of them liked the answers they were coming up with.
Nobody ever expected us to stand off a full-scale invasion, damn it, he thought harshly. Nobody ever expected it, and we didn’t come prepared to do it, either. No pods, no CLACs, no Mycroft. Just Phantom, three Bravos, and Arngrim and only what we have in the magazines.
“Have Markéta make sure we have a Hermes buoy on the approach vector from Beowulf,” he said. Clarke looked at him, and he showed his teeth. “Give us another seventy-two hours, maybe even only forty-eight, and the force balance in Hypatia will change rather significantly,” he pointed out.
“Yes, Sir, it will,” Clarke agreed. He nodded respectfully to Kotouč and turned to speak to Ilkova. The admiral watched him go, then clasped his hands behind him, squared his shoulders, and looked down into the plot while he waited out the no-longer-accustomed-to light-speed delay from the Hypatian sensor net.
Yes, the force balance will change, he thought. But unless Vukodlak and a couple of missile colliers turn up—at a minimum—it’s not going to change enough, and you and Jim both know it.
He watched the plot, waiting, and prayed silently that whoever commanded those anonymous hyper footprints wasn’t one of the SLN’s hotheads.
SLNs Camperdown
and
Proedrikḗ Katoikía com center
Hypatia System
“I’m afraid that’s out of the question, Ms. Yang-O’Grady,” the brown-haired man on Madhura Yang-O’Grady’s com display said. “I regret the fact that you came all this way only to have me refuse your…request, but the referendum’s results have been tallied and officially certified. As a consequence, I really have no choice in the matter.”
System President Vangelis didn’t sound very regretful to Yang-O’Grady, but she made herself smile at him. SLNS Camperdown’s parking orbit was low enough that there was no perceptible delay in com transmissions, and she leaned towards her com’s pickup ever so slightly.
“Mister President,” she said as calmly as she could, “I understand the Hypatian System Constitution mandates both the procedure for and the implementation of any referendum and its outcome. I also understand that under the letter of the law, you’re technically correct that you have ‘no choice’ but to abide by the results of your system’s most recent referendum. Obviously, the Federal Government and I differ with your system’s interpretation of the Solarian Constitution, however, and that’s what creates our present problem. The Interior Ministry believes Article Thirty-Nine, the so-called secession clause of the Constitution, is a legal archaism which has lapsed over the seven and a half centuries—” she emphasized the last word deliberately and allowed her eyes to harden just a bit “—since the original Constitution was ratified. I believe the relevant technical term is ‘desuetude.’ I can provide you with the legal definition if you need it.”
She bit her mental tongue the instant the last sentence escaped her. Her tone had been, even to her own ear, what her mother had always called “snippy,’ and what her husband, Jason, called “insufferably bitchy.” The fact that Vangelis was playing word games with her was no excuse for anything that might legitimately put up his back. And lecturing him on arcane legal terminology in which his own attorney general would have schooled him exhaustively before the language of the referendum was ever drafted was a wonderful way to do that.
“I’m familiar with the term, thank you,” Vangelis replied with false amiability. “As I understand it, however, it applies—in the established jurisprudence of the League—to statutes and regulations which have gone unenforced for a sufficiently long period for a new ‘customary usage’ to evolve—one clearly contrary to the original intent and purpose—which presents a bit of a problem for your argument.”
He smiled back at her, showing just an edge of incisor.
“First, a clause of the Constitution is neither a statute nor a regulation; it’s part of the fundamental law of the League, upon which all of those other statutes and regulations rest, and the Founders specifically stated in the preamble that it is alterable only by constitutional amendment.
“Second, Article Thirty-Nine’s never gone ‘unenforced’ because up until the current…unpleasantness, no one ever felt compelled to resort to it.”
His smile turned even thinner. If she’d been male, Yang-O’Grady could have shaved with it.
“And, finally, what the League is confronting today is, I’m afraid, the very reason Article Thirty-Nine was incorporated into the Constitution. And I also seem to recall that a majority—almost two thirds, incuding the Sol System, in fact—of the League’s original member systems refused to ratify the Constitution without Article Thirty-Nine. While I understand Interior’s position on this matter, Attorney General Boyagis and Chief Justice Varkas have concluded that, given the established history and current circumstances I’ve just described, ‘desuetude’ does not—and cannot—be legally applied to Article Thirty-Nine. And as the Hypatia System’s chief magistrate, I have no option but to enforce the laws of this star system as interpreted by the judiciary unless those laws contravene the Federal Constitution or an overriding federal statute—not a regulation, and not a legal theory which hasn’t been sustained by the League Judiciary.”
“Mister President, the Judiciary is considering this very issue on an expedited basis. Until the Court’s had time to rule, however, the Federal Government—and, in particular, the Interior Ministry—strongly dispute the interpretation of Article Thirty-Nine which you’ve just cited. And, as is the long-standing legal tradition of the League when constitutional ambiguity impacts on government policy, Interior Minister da Orta e Diadoro has sought and received an injunction against the exercise of Article Thirty-Nine until such time as the Court issues a definitive opinion in this matter.”
She delivered her statement in the measured tone she’d rehearsed many times on the voyage from the Genovese System to Hypatia. She’d debated against inserting Jacinta da Orta e Diadoro’s name into the conversation, despite her instructions from her superiors. Those instructions had been firm on that point, however. Vangelis knew as well as she did that da Orta e Diadoro had no more real authority than any of the League’s other official cabinet ministers, but Innokentiy Kolokoltsov and his senior advisers had determined that every legal fiction must be scrupulously adhered to in this case. No doubt that reflected the Manties’—and the Beowulfers’, damn them!—fiery denunciations of the “corrupt, kleptocratic bureaucracy” which had “usurped all legitimate authority” in the League.
From the flicker in Vangelis’s expression, citing the Interior Ministry’s figurehead had not strengthened her argument.
“Again, with all due respect, Ms. Yang-O’Grady,” the System President said after a moment, “Article Thirty-Nine, by its nature, is exempt from any injunction. If that had not been the intention of the Framers, then the article would have become a dead letter, since any corrupt administration—” his eyes went very hard with the last two words “—could have prevented its ever being executed simply by seeking one spurious injunction after another from an equally corrupt and compliant Judiciary. Or seeking only a single injunction while the Judiciary ‘takes the matter under advisement’…and keeps it there until a time more convenient for the administration in question.”
“Are you implying that that’s what’s happened here, Mister President?” Yang-O’Grady inquired sharply.
“By no means, Ms. Yang-O’Grady. I’m simply suggesting that that could have happened, and that the Framers provided Article Thirty-Nine precisely against circumstances in which it might. The exact nature of the concerns which impelled their decision aren’t really germane to the exercise of their clearly stated
intent, however.”
Yang-O’Grady’s teeth pressed firmly together and she forced herself to pause, berating herself for rising to his bait in an exchange that was clearly being recorded by both parties.
I wish to hell they’d sent Jason or someone else from Interior to deal with this, she thought.
Jason Yang-O’Grady was a senior member of Nathan MacArtney’s ministry, a Regional Commissioner in the Office of Frontier Security, and she knew why sending someone like him had been a total nonstarter. Despite the fact that Interior had to take point in this situation, no one remotely connected with OFS could possibly be sent out as the government’s spokeswoman to a full member system of the League. That would have been true anywhere, but after the hacked conversation between Abruzzi and MacArtney, the logic had become even more pointed in Hypatia. Under the circumstances, anyone attached to Interior in any way would be tarred with the Frontier Security brush by the lunatic hotheads like Vangelis who were ripping the League apart. That was the entire reason this radioactive potato had landed in Foreign Affairs lap, despite all the potentially thorny aspects of sending an envoy from the ministry whose normal charge was dealing with the League’s foreign affairs, not internal issues.
She understood that. Understanding, however, wasn’t the same thing as liking it.
She kept her own expression serious and judicious, stepping down hard on the fury boiling up within her, and part of her wondered how much of that fury stemmed from the fact that she’d known from the outset how unlikely she was to succeed. Failing in a mission like this at a time like this was unlikely to be a career-enhancing accomplishment. That would have been more than enough to frustrate and anger any career Solarian bureaucrat for purely personal reasons. Watching the Solarian League swirl around the drain only made it infinitely worse.
You smiling, arrogant bastard, she thought at Vangelis. Who the hell are you to be telling the Solarian League what it can and can’t do? And what possible justification can you come up with for splitting it in the face of the first really serious threat it’s faced in almost a thousand T-years?