A Rising Thunder

  “If it was Rajampet’s idea, why not push it himself?” Okiku asked.

  “Doesn’t work that way, Natsuko,” Tarkovsky said. “It’s called deniability. I hope Daud and Irene won’t get too pissed with me for pointing this out, but the Navy’s a hell of a lot more of a bureaucracy than a fighting machine these days, and creating the right paper trail’s more important than formulating the best strategy. If Rajampet could get Bernard to push the Raging Justice concept from below, he could ‘endorse’ it without owning responsibility for it. He was simply listening to his subordinates—the subordinates who were supposed to be making strategy recommendations, giving him a menu of options, for that matter—like a good officer. And in a way, Bernard was protected, too. She’d recommended the strategy, but she had no authority to implement it. The decision to adopt her recommendation lay with the operational commanders—who always had the option of not adopting it—so once Rajampet signed off on it, she didn’t own it, either. That meant responsibility could be dropped somewhere between her desk and his, without splashing on the career of either of them, if it went sour.”

  Okiku looked at him for a moment, as if she suspected he was pulling her leg. Then she shrugged and turned back to al-Fanudahi.

  “I’ll accept it works the way Bryce has just explained, Captain. But I don’t think you arranged this thoroughly clandestine and conspiratorial meeting just to complain about having your advice ignored.”

  “No, I didn’t,” al-Fanudahi agreed grimly.

  “The thing is, Colonel, that it’s part of a pattern. Oh, I keep reminding myself never to ascribe to malice—or enemy action—what can be explained by good old-fashioned incompetence and bureaucratic inertia. And when you crank in Navy nepotism, cronyism, corruption, graft, and careerism, you can explain pretty much anything without requiring some kind of malign outside influence. But there’s more to it this time.”

  He paused, clearly hesitating, and Okiku smiled thinly.

  “Let me guess, Captain al-Fanudahi. You’re about to suggest to me that the Manties’ allegations of ‘malign outside influence’ in the form of this Mesan Alignment of theirs was responsible for it?”

  “To some extent, yes,” he said, and paused again, watching her expression closely.

  “I hope you realize how thoroughly insane that sounds,” she said after a moment. “And despite the strictly limited faith I normally put in Education and Information’s version of galactic events, the notion that Manticore’s fabricated all of this to cover its own actions and ambitions actually seems more likely than that anyone could have carried off some kind of interstellar conspiracy for so many T-centuries without anyone catching them at it. Permanent Senior Undersecretary Abruzzi’s argument that the Manties’ claims would only be expected out of someone who actually was responsible for at least enabling the Ballroom to carry out the Green Pines bombing hangs together pretty well, too.”

  “I see,” al-Fanudahi said flatly.

  “My problem here, Captain,” Okiku continued, “is that I have a naturally suspicious mind. It’s the reason I went into the Criminal Investigation Division. Well, that and the fact that I was never particularly interested in breaking heads out in the Protectorates for the greater glory of the Office of Frontier Security.” She grimaced impatently. “I have the sort of brain that gets suspicious when things hang together too well. It’s a useful sort of mindset when you start picking apart suspects’ alibis. And I’ve discovered that if it hangs together too perfectly to be true, it probably isn’t. True, I mean. Real life tends to be sloppy, not neat and tidy.”

  “I see,” al-Fanudahi repeated in a rather different tone, and she gave him a quick, fleeting smile.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” she cautioned. “I’m not about to buy any magic beans from you, Captain. If you want to bring me onboard, you’re going to have to do better than offering me some unsubstantiated suspicions. On the other hand, Bryce here”—she twitched her head in Tarkovsky’s direction—“vouches for you, and I consider him a pretty good character witness. So that’s going to buy you at least some credibility.”

  “I’ll try not to abuse Bryce’s confidence,” al-Fanudahi promised.

  “Good. And now, you were saying…?”

  “I have no idea at this point how much of what the Manties are selling is accurate,” al-Fanudahi said. “I do know I haven’t been able to come up with any reason the Star Kingdom—or the Star Empire, I suppose, now—should deliberately pick a fight with the League, though. I also know Josef Byng was an anti-Manty bigot who couldn’t have poured piss out of a boot if it had the instructions printed on the heel, and when it came to finding her ass with both hands, Sandra Crandall was even worse, assuming that was humanly possible. I can’t conceive of a more disastrous choice of commanders for an area where tensions were running high, yet somehow they both ended up out in the Talbott Quadrant. And I’ve gone back and looked at Crandall’s deployment plan. She was scheduled for her ‘training exercise’ before the Battle of Monica. I haven’t been able to verify whether or not Byng had already been selected for his command at that point, as well. I suspect he had been, although I’m trying to keep an open mind on that point, but it was definitely true for her. So supposing there was any truth to my suspicions that someone besides Manticore was stirring the pot out in Talbott, it was obvious it had to be someone with a lot of juice.

  “Then there was Filareta’s fortuitous deployment to Tasmania. You probably don’t realize how unusual concentrations of ships-of-the-wall that big really are, Colonel. I, on the other hand, went back and checked the records. There have been exactly five deployments of seventy or more wallers—including Crandall’s and Filareta’s—in the last two hundred and forty-three T-years, and we have both of them taking place simultaneously.”

  “Suggestive, yes,” Okiku said thoughtfully, “but still only speculative.”

  “Agreed.” Al-Fanudahi nodded. “But that’s where Bryce comes in.”

  “Bryce?” Okiku sounded a bit surprised and cocked her head at the Marine.

  “I know you’re aware Marine Intelligence is under the ONI umbrella, Natsuko,” he said. “What you may not be aware of, since we don’t exactly advertise it, is that we’re a pretty independent outfit. There are a lot of reasons for that, but, frankly, the main one is that we got dropped in the crapper once too often by faulty Navy intelligence. We got tired of taking it in the neck because a bunch of Navy pukes—no offense, Daud and Irene—didn’t know their asses from their elbows where ground operations were concerned. Things work a lot better with us handling our own intel functions, and Frontier Fleet got behind us and supported us because they’re the ones who usually have to carry the can from the Navy side when something goes wrong in a joint operation.”

  It was his turn to pause, one eyebrow crooked, and she nodded a bit impatiently to show she understood.

  “Well, there’s another side to it, too,” he said, his tone considerably flatter. “I know you’re aware of the kind of shit the Gendarmerie gets involved in out in the Protectorates. Trust me, what the Corps gets handed can be even worse, and sometimes the poor SOB theoretically in command of the ground op doesn’t have any idea what kind of snake pit he’s about to drop his Marines into. What with transstellars in bed with OFS, local collaborators eager to sell out for the best price they can get, and poor damned bastards too dumb to realize they can’t fight, it can turn into a cluster fuck in nothing flat. Because of that, one of the things we try to do is keep track of as many players as possible. In fact, for the last fifteen or twenty T-years, Brigadier Osterhaut’s been keeping track of as many Navy players as possible. An awful lot of senior flag officers have crawled into bed with the rest of the bottom feeders, and she likes to be able to give our Marine expeditionary force COs at least an unofficial, ‘we-never-had-this-conversation’ heads-up if one of the senior Navy officers involved in his operation has irons of his own in the fire.”

  He paused again, waiting until sh
e nodded once more. It was a slower nod, this time—a thoughtful, considering one.

  “I’ve been the Brigadier’s point man on the garbage detail for several T-years,” Tarkovsky told her. “As a matter of fact, that’s how I first met Daud. And we’ve got some interesting dossiers in our burn-before-reading files. For example, we had dossiers on both Sandra Crandall and Admiral Filareta.” His expression twisted in distaste. “Neither of them was any great prize, and some of the things we found out about Filareta are enough to make your stomach crawl. But the other thing we found out about them is that both of them had close connections—primarily financial in Crandall’s case; a bit more…complicated in Filareta’s—with Manpower of Mesa.”

  Okiku’s eyes widened, and he nodded.

  “Both of them, Natsuko. And both of them just happened to find themselves in command of major fleet deployments within striking distance of Manty territory when Mesa started getting nervous about Manty expansion in its direction. We’re not sure about Byng. We know he had connections with some of the transstellars, but we haven’t been able to find a direct link between him and Mesa. On the other hand, given his attitude towards Manties, it wouldn’t have taken very much to convince him to go out and make trouble for them.”

  “And speaking as someone who’s spent a few T-weeks pulling the records and analyzing Byng’s career—and his performance in exercises—” al-Fanudahi put in, “he would have been the perfect choice to do exactly what Mesa wanted even without having knowingly signed on for it. He hated the Manties with a passion and he had even more contempt for them than most Battle Fleet officers. Get him into the vicinity of any of their naval forces, and he could be absolutely relied upon to provoke an incident—almost certainly a disastrous incident, from our perspective, given his towering incompetence—right on schedule. Especially if someone was manipulating the situation the way the Manties claim Mesa was.”

  “With Crandall parked close enough at hand to sweep up the pieces after he got himself reamed,” Okiku said slowly, her eyes intently narrowed.

  “Or to get herself reamed as a way to pump extra hydrogen into the fire,” Irene Teague suggested softly. Okiku looked at her sharply, and the Frontier Fleet captain shrugged. “I thought Daud was out of his mind when he first suggested that possibility, Colonel. But the more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed. And then this brilliant idea of sending Eleventh Fleet out to repeat Crandall’s experience on a grander scale came along.”

  “You’re suggesting someone deliberately got all those spacers killed by maneuvering the Navy into battles it couldn’t win? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “That’s what I’ve started to think, at any rate,” al-Fanudahi admitted somberly. “It didn’t make any sense to me at first, though. Why would Manpower, which has always hated the Manties—and vice versa—arrange an anti-Manty strategy that wasn’t going to work? Anybody willing to make a fortune off something as disgusting as the genetic slave trade probably isn’t going to lose any sleep over getting a few million Solarian spacers killed, but what was the point? Manticore basically only had to reload between engagements. We were that outclassed, and I couldn’t convince myself that anybody able to arrange something like this could have had such piss-poor intelligence they wouldn’t realize what was going to happen.”

  “From what you’re saying, we didn’t realize it,” Okiku pointed out.

  “No, but if my suspicions were correct, we didn’t arrange it, either,” he retorted. “And then, after Spindle, there was that ‘mystery attack’ on the Manties’ home system. Trust me, Colonel, that wasn’t us. We don’t have a clue how whoever it was pulled it off, and there’s no way in hell we could’ve done the same thing. One thing that’s just become pretty damned painfully obvious, however, is that Admiral Thimár’s theory that whoever did it had to have crippled the Manties’ defenses on his way in was out to lunch. But the salient point that occurred to me was that if it wasn’t us, it was almost certainly Manpower, unless I wanted to assume there was yet another third-party out there who had it in for Manticore. Only if Manpower had that sort of resources, then it hadn’t needed us in the first place.”

  “You’re making my head hurt, Captain,” Okiku complained, and he snorted.

  “I had my own share of headaches trying to work my way through all of this in the first place, Colonel Okiku,” he assured her.

  “So where is all of it going?” she asked.

  “Until the Manties and the Havenites dropped their little bombshell about this ‘Mesan Alignment,’ I really only had what I suppose you’d have to call a gut feeling,” he said. “The only thing I could come up with was that for some reason whoever was really orchestrating all of this wanted the League involved. And the truth is we’ve become so frigging corrupt it wouldn’t have been all that hard to arrange, especially when no one had any reason to see this coming. Just three or four senior flag officers could have put the whole thing together, if they were the right senior officers. A half-dozen would’ve been more than enough.

  “But if whoever the plotters were realized how thoroughly we were outclassed by the Manties, then they couldn’t have expected us to take them out. Not quickly or cleanly, anyway. Not without a hell of a lot of losses of our own. So why throw us into the mix at all?

  “I’d already begun to suspect—that ‘gut feeling’ I mentioned—that the Manties weren’t the real target. Or, at least, not the only target. And like I told Irene at the time, the only other target on the range was us. It seemed ridiculous, but it was the only conclusion I could come up with.

  “And then Pritchart announced there was this vast interstellar conspiracy which had targeted both the Star Empire and the Republic of Haven. One which—assuming there was any real basis for her claims—was obviously manipulating the League’s policies. And one which obviously had its own idea of how the galaxy’s power structure should be arranged…which probably didn’t include the conspirators’ playing second fiddle to the League indefinitely.”

  “Are you seriously suggesting that this conspiracy the Manties and the Havenites are talking about not only exists but is also aimed at destroying the Solarian League, as well as the Manties?”

  “I’m not sure it wants to destroy the League,” al-Fanudahi responded. “I do think it wants to cripple us, maybe break us up, though.” He waved both hands in frustration. “Look at what’s happening! The Navy’s taking it in the ear; the Manties’ closure of the wormhole networks means the League’s economy is about to be hammered like it’s never been hammered before; and we’re heading into a full-blown constitutional crisis. For the first time in T-centuries, people are actually talking about the Constitution…and the fact that we haven’t paid any damned attention to it in the last six or seven hundred years. And don’t think for a minute that the beating we’ve taken from the Manties isn’t going to send tidal waves through the Verge and the Protectorates, Colonel Okiku. It is—believe me, it is! And when all hell breaks loose out there, and when the Core Worlds start looking at the worst recession they’ve ever seen and blaming it all on the policy of a bunch of unelected bureaucrats, I think it’s entirely possible we’re going to start shedding member systems. For that matter, I think it’s possible we’re going to see the entire federal government melt down completely. I know that seems preposterous—we’re talking about the Solarian League—but it really could happen.”

  He stopped talking, and silence hovered in the records storage room for long, fragile seconds. Then Okiku shook her head.

  “My God,” she said softly. “No wonder people think you’re a fucking lunatic! But you really could be right.” She shook her head again, her expression an odd mix of wonder and fear. “You could.”

  “Believe me, there’s nothing I’d like better than to be wrong,” he told her equally softly.

  “So why bring me in on it?” she asked after a moment. “Trust me, I’m not going to be thanking you for it. If there’s anything at all to this theory of yo
urs, whoever the conspirators are—‘Mesan Alignment’ or someone else entirely—they sure as hell aren’t shy about killing people. I’d just as soon not give them a reason to add me to their list.”

  “You and me both,” al-Fanudahi said feelingly. Then he shrugged. “The problem is, they have to be tied in at the highest levels, and I don’t have a clue how to find them. I’m an intelligence analyst, not a criminal investigator. I truly think—I’m truly afraid—I’m onto something here, but I don’t have a clue how to go about investigating it, and the Office of Counter Intelligence has been basically a place to park people with more family connections than competence for decades. Rear Admiral Yau’s abilities are…less than stellar, let’s say, and the rest of his section takes its cue from him. For that matter, if I were out to engineer the covert penetration of another navy, the very first place I’d set up shop would be inside that other navy’s counter intelligence service in order to make sure my operatives didn’t get caught. I don’t dare hand this to OCI without at least some idea of who’s in whose pocket, and I can’t just go to Justice or hand it over to the JAG for investigation without going to OCI first. The procedures simply aren’t there, and it would just get kicked back to Yau, probably with a pretty pointed observation that I should have gone through channels in the first place. So I need your expertise, and I need it without anyone else’s knowing we’ve talked.”

  “You are so going to get all of us killed,” Okiku said grimly.

  “It may actually be even worse than you know,” he said, and shrugged as her eyes narrowed once more. “It hasn’t hit the ‘faxes yet, but they’re not going to be able to hold it for long.”