He sat back with an ugly smile, and Daniel nodded in understanding. Slowly, at first, and then harder and faster.
“I agree,” Benjamin said, and there was cold, bleak satisfaction in his tone. “And you’re right, Collin. That has to be exactly what Dad was thinking. So the question before us is how we try to shape the Sollies’ reaction to all this.” He bared his teeth in a smile that was even uglier and far, far colder than his brother’s had been. “Assuming Gold Peak wasn’t smart enough—or fast enough—to shut down the terminus before word of her Eridani Edict violation got out, they’ll be finding out about this in Old Chicago sometime within the next thirty-six to forty-eight hours. With the streak drive, we can get word to our people on Old Terra via Warner within six T-days after that. We won’t be able to affect how Kolokoltsov and the others react initially, but we’re damned well in a position to help…direct their subsequent thinking. And just right this moment, I don’t really think moderation is the direction we want to go, now is it?”
George Benton Tower
City of Old Chicago
Old Terra
Sol System
“—and then I think we need to ask Admiral Kingsford for another update,” Innokentiy Kolokoltsov said, tipped back in his chair as Arnold Kilpatrick-Schuster, his senior aide took notes. “I doubt he’s got any new earthshattering revelations, but given Hypatia’s announcement that it’s following through on that merger with Beowulf—and the rumors we’re hearing that they’re both going to seek admission to the damned ‘Star Empire’—I want to be positive we know exactly where the Navy is on Fabius.”
“Yes sir,” Kilpatrick-Schuster said, jotting jotting the reminder into his pad.
“And that, unless I’m mistaken, actually gets us to the end of the to-do list.” Kolokoltsov shook his head. “Hard to believe it.”
“What was that you told me about never saying ‘we’re done,” Sir?” Kilpatrick-Schuster said. “Something about tempting fate, I think?”
“I’m sure I did,” Kolokoltsov acknowledged with a rueful shrug. “On the other hand, the one thing I’ve discovered over the last year or so is that fate doesn’t need any tempting. We’re going to get hammered by something no matter what we do, Arnold!”
Kilpatrick-Schuster grimaced, but Kolokoltsov noted that he didn’t disagree. After all—
The com chimed. He glanced at the display, and his jaw tightened as he saw the flashing urgency of a priority com request.
Maybe he shouldn’t have been so cavalier about fate, after all.
* * *
“My God,” Omosupe Quartermain said softly. “My God. And this is confirmed?”
“If you’re asking if it’s an official Manty announcement, then no,” Kolokoltsov replied harshly. “If you’re asking if we’re sure it’s accurate, then the answer is hell yes.”
“But why?” Agatá Wodoslawski said almost plaintively. The other Mandarins looked at her incredulously, and she shook her head quickly. “I don’t mean why did they do it—though I do think that’s an appropriate question. I mean, why did they let the news out at all? Innokentiy, you said they let our legation come home by way of Visigoth, over the hyper bridge. If they’d closed the terminus, our people would still be sixty days out! Why give us the gift of that much time? Surely they could have used two more months to work on some kind of cover story!”
“That’s what I’d’ve done,” Malachai Abruzzi agreed. “But they probably figured nobody was going to believe them whatever the hell they said.” He shook his head, but if he seemed as stunned by the news as anyone, his was the bright, fierce astonishment of someone who couldn’t believe the weapon his adversary had just handed him. “Christ. Gold Peak must be an even bigger lunatic than Harrington! There’s no way they can clean this one up, Agatá. Somebody probably convinced her it would only look even worse if they were obviously trying to keep the news from getting out. She probably hopes this will convince some particularly credulous idiots they really, really didn’t do it. After all, if they had, they’d try to cover it up, wouldn’t they?” He shook his head again, this time with the contempt of someone who’d done a lot of “covering up” in his career. “Problem is, they’ve got twelve-point-six billion witnesses who know exactly what they did. No, they’ve screwed the pooch by the numbers this time.”
“They did shut down the Visigoth Terminus to all traffic for five days,” Quartermain pointed out.
“Sure they did. And if I was Gold Peak, it’d damned well still be shut down,” Abruzzi acknowledged. “They’ve obviously decided to go a different way, but they can get away with calling those five days a legitimate security concern, making sure none of these ‘Mesan Alignment’ bogeymen they claim are behind all of this could sneak out of the system. Once they’d taken over Astro Control and instigated ship-by-ship search procedures, that pretext went out the window, though. At that point, they had to start worrying about how keeping it shut down could only reinforce everybody’s suspicions, so they had to revert to letting at least as much ‘essental’ traffic through as they’re letting through all the others they’ve seized.”
“I think Malachai’s probably right,” MacArtney said. “The question is what we do about it. Or with it, at any rate.”
Kolokoltsov nodded. It wasn’t often he found himself in agreement with anything that came out of MacArtney’s mouth these days, but this time Nathan had a point.
“Malachai?” he said. “Obviously, you and I have to coordinate closely on this, but you’re our information specialist.”
“I think it would be impossible to exaggerate how valuable this is from our perspective,” Abruzzi replied. “My poll numbers indicate we’ve been taking a hammering over Hypatia. Maybe not the rest of Buccaneer, but the Manties’ version of what happened there’s been gaining traction—a lot of traction, frankly—even inside the Kuiper. Everything we’ve heard from nearby core systems suggests even more skepticism about our version there than here in Sol. The people who buy the Manties’ story are still a distinct minority, but that minority’s been growing, and there’s been a slow, steady swing towards viewing us as the heavies. I don’t have any kind of reliable numbers on the Shell, but I expect they’re worse than here in the Core, and I know they’re worse in the Verge.
“But, even taking the Manties’ version of Hypatia, we’re talking about destroying only space infrastructure, and there’s no proof Gogunov really would have destroyed any of the habitats before they were evacuated. Now we’ve got the high-and-mighty, oh-so-noble Manties—those paragons of interstellar law and guardians of interstellar morality—killing at least six million innocent civilians on a planetary surface in what can only be construed as terror tactics. Unlike Hajdu or Gogunov, no one was threatening their control of the Mesa System, so they can’t even claim they needed to take out critical targets before they were pushed out of the system by a counterattack, the way our admirals could. And what kind of ‘critical target’ is a ski resort in the middle of the mountains or a frigging beach resort?”
He shook his head, his eyes glittering.
“Believe me, my people won’t even have to massage the message. The Manties have just lost any vestige of a claim to the moral high ground. From this point out, at absolute worst, from our perspective, every time they start yammering about how we’ve ‘abused and mistreated’ the Protectorates, all we have to do is point at Mesa and we win the debate. And the other thing this does, is to justify anything we do from this point forward—short of nuking an inhabited planet ourselves—to stop them. We may have to do some things we regret, take some actions we deplore, but the Manties have just shown exactly what it is we’re trying to stop.”
He smiled thinly.
“I hate to say it, because I hate the reason I’m saying it, but I think Malachai’s right,” Wodoslawski said. “In fact, I think it may go even farther.”
The others looked at her. MacArtney and Abruzzi seemed puzzled, but Quartermain nodded slowly, and so did Kolok
oltsov. The permanent senior undersecretary for foreign affairs flicked his fingers, indicating that Wodoslawski should explain her remark, and she turned to the other two.
“We’re bankrupt,” she said simply. “In fact, the end is coming even sooner than Omosupe and I thought it would. We’ve got maybe three more months—four, at the outside—before we’re officially insolvent.”
Alarm flickered in MacArtney’s eyes, and she smiled even more thinly and coldly than Abruzzi had.
“Don’t look so surprised, Nathan. It’s not like we haven’t been telling you this was coming!”
“No, but—”
“We’ve been working on contingency plans,” she interrupted him. “There weren’t any really viable options, but we kept looking anyway. The problem’s the Constitution, of course. We need more cash flow, and the League’s potential tax base is huge. So the cash is there, we just can’t get it, because if we tried to tap it, it’s for damn sure somebody in the Assembly would point out that Article One specifically prohibits any direct Federal taxation. There are people out there who don’t care what happens to us or even to the League as a whole. Whatever happens to the League, their star systems will still be intact at the end, and no way do they want any precedent that lets us dip into their systems’ personal piggy banks. The bottom line is that they’re fine with whatever happens, as long as their rice bowls don’t get kicked over in the process.”
MacArtney nodded with a harsh, condemnatory expression which Kolokoltsov, for one, found bitterly ironic. After all, the Mandarins and their predecessors had used that very political fact of life to their own advantage for centuries now.
“Obviously, we’ve had Constitutional Compliance and Conformity working overtime at Justice, but this time not even Illalangi’s been able to find us a loophole. And there’s no existing Federal mechanism we could use to collect the taxes even if we tried to impose them by fiat. We’d need the local system authorities to play cashier for us, and if any of them refused and we tried to force them, we’d probably create even more Beowulfs—especially when the military situation looks so bad that a lot of those system authorities aren’t so sure we’re the ones who’re going to win in the end.
“But I think the Manties just changed that for us. If we go to the Assembly now, and if we point out that what may be the most powerful naval alliance in the entire galaxy has embarked on a policy of deliberate Eridani Edict violations, we’re in one hell of a lot stronger position. For all the Assembly members know, their star systems may be next, and if the Manties are willing to kill millions of people in Mesa, even assuming they genuinely believe this lunacy about sinister interstellar conspiracies, who knows where they’ll stop? For that matter, if they really do believe it, they’re obviously unhinged, which makes it even harder to predict who they’ll decide is out to get them next! And what Navy is responsible for preventing Eridani violations?”
She looked around the conference room, and MacArtney sat back in his chair, nodding, his eyes beginning to gleam as brightly as Abruzzi’s.
“We go to the Assembly,” Kolokoltsov said into the silence that followed her explanation. “We tell them this is a situation—an emergency—the Constitution never contemplated. We argue that a Constitution isn’t a suicide pact. That when not simply the survival of the Solarian League as a government but of millions—possibly even billions—of Solarian citizens are at stake, we have to have the wherewithal to protect them. And that means we have to be able to levy direct taxation on those citizens. And if we have to, we argue that the individual system veto right simply cannot be permitted to stand in the way of saving lives on such a scale. We put a motion to amend the Constitution to permit direct taxation before the Assembly and tell them we need an immediate decision. That there’s no time to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s of the amendment process the Constitution mandates. Hell, all of them know as well as we do that the Founders deliberately designed that process to insure any amendment took years to approve, at the very best. That’s why there’ve been so damned few of them! But extraordinary circumstances demand extraordinary measures and there’s no time for the individual system governments to be consulted and hold their own constitutional conventions. We have to act now—and if anyone doubts that, we just point at Mesa.”
It was his turn to sit back, and he looked around the conference table slowly.
“I wish to hell they hadn’t killed all those people,” he said, and he meant it. “But they just handed us the keys to the kingdom. I’ll guarantee you that within forty-eight hours after we ask for it—ninety-six, at the most—the Assembly will give us the super majority for the amendment. And Agatá and I have already considered the text very carefully. Trust me—” he smiled very, very thinly “—in all the rush and confusion no one’s likely to notice just how broadly it can be interpreted. When this is all over, we won’t need the Protectorates, people.”
Chez Raimond
City of Old Chicago
Sol System
Solarian League
Caswell Gweon followed the maître d’ across the restaurant, nodding in passing to two or three other regulars. He’d been dining at Chez Raimond for several T-years now, and as a newly minted rear admiral, he was clearly among the rising stars of the Solarian League’s bureaucracy. That meant he never had trouble getting a reservation whenever he wanted one, and Chez Raimond’s security measures were superb. That made the counterintelligence agents of Rear Admiral Yau Kwang-tung’s Section Four happy, since it meant they could spend less time worrying about his accidentally spilling confidential information where unfriendly ears might hear.
Section Four’s agents were fond of anything that made their jobs easier. Probably because they weren’t very good at those jobs.
That thought carried Gweon across the restaurant to the privacy-screened booth in the corner farthest from the door.
“I hope this is satisfactory, Admiral,” the maître d’ said. “Ms. Pelletier’s already here.”
“This will be perfect,” Gweon said with a smile. Then the smile turned a bit impish. “And could you see to it that we have at least, say, ten or fifteen minutes before someone comes to take our order? I haven’t seen Ms. Pelletier all day.”
“Oh, I think that could be arranged, Sir,” the maître d’ said with an answering smile. It wasn’t the first time Gweon and his fiancée had spent a little time “catching up on the day” before placing their orders.
“Thank you,” Gweon said, and the maître d’ disappeared into the dimly lit, intimate restaurant as the rear admiral stepped through the privacy screen.
The very attractive red-haired, gray-eyed woman waiting for him looked up. For someone’s fiancée, those gray eyes showed remarkably little joy at his arrival, and she nodded her head rather brusquely at the chair opposite hers. One of his eyebrows rose at her expression, but he settled into the indicated chair without asking any questions and took a small device from his tunic pocket. He switched it on, laid it on the table between them, and checked the telltale to be sure it was operating properly, buttressing Chez Raimond’s in-house anti-snooping systems. Then he nodded in satisfaction and looked back up at the woman.
“I trust your expression doesn’t mean I’m going to spend tonight sleeping on the couch, Erzi.” His tone was dry, and a small smile tweaked one corner of her mouth, despite her focused countenance.
“No, you’re not,” she said. “But I don’t know that either of us is going to feel like doing anything much more energetic than that. I just got our latest instructions.”
“Oh?”
Gweon sat back. He’d figured something like this was coming when Erzébet screened him and suggested Chez Raimond for dinner. Their apartment was theoretically protected by Section Four’s countersurveillance systems. Actually, those countersurveillance systems leaked like a sieve, however. Worse, from their perspective, Section Four itself monitored everything that went on in or around it. So another venue was strongly indicated
anytime the two of them needed to talk about their actual employers or instructions from them. He looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, then cocked his head.
“There’ve been rumors flying around the office since this morning,” he said. “Rumors are all I’ve heard, though. That suggests to me that either rumors are all there are, or else whatever the hell’s sparked them is critical enough that even I haven’t been briefed in on them yet.”
“You can forget about its being just rumors,” Erzébet told him grimly. “Frankly, I’m surprised you haven’t heard more. There must’ve been some delay in getting the information to Old Chicago.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because they should’ve heard about it almost a week ago. Alpha Prime’s already heard about and sent us instructions about what to do about it.”
Gweon’s eyes narrowed. Neither he nor Erzébet knew where “Alpha Prime” was. For that matter, neither of them knew for certain that it actually existed as a specific physical location. But wherever it was, it was also the central nexus of the Alignment—outside the Mesa System, at least.
“Instructions about what?” he asked a bit sharply.
“The Manties hit Mesa eighteen days ago,” she said flatly. “It was ugly. At least several million people were killed in a series of nuclear explosions on the planet, in planetary orbit, and in deep space. Alpha Prime’s sent us instructions on how they want you to weigh in when Kingsford finally brings you into the loop.”
“Several million people?” he repeated, his narrowed eyes going wide in shock.
“At least.” Her own eyes were bleak. “Alpha Prime either doesn’t have a better casualty count or they don’t see any reason to share it with us. Actually,” she said a bit grudgingly, “I can see some logic to that. They don’t want to give us any more details than they have to because that way nobody’s going to notice that we have details we shouldn’t have.”