“We’re starting to get some questions—more of them than I anticipated, really—about just what the hell happened at Torch,” Barregos said. “I know we managed to keep the real extent of your losses out of the news channels, thanks to how many of your units were ‘off the books,’ but it sounds like there’s been some information leakage and the rumors about casualties are prompting a certain degree of interest. Or it could just be that for once Ukhtomskoy’s actually done his job, instead.”
“That’s not really fair,” Rozsak said mildly. “Ukhtomskoy’s actually a competent fellow. He knows certain people don’t want to hear any contrarian opinions, and he’s damned careful not to give them any, once he’s figured out who they are. But don’t ever make the mistake of assuming he’s too stupid to do his job. Jiri and I have both met him, you know, and he’s a hell of a lot smarter than Karl-Heinz Thimár!”
Barregos nodded, albeit a bit unwillingly. The truth was that Adão Ukhtomskoy, the CO of OFS’ Intelligence Branch was smarter—and considerably more imaginative—than Admiral Thimár, the head of the SLN’s Office of Naval Intelligence. And it was also true that Rozsak and Commander Jiri Watanapongse, his staff intelligence officer, had met both men.
“All right, I suppose I should’ve said that it’s possible that for once Ukhtomskoy’s field people have done their job,” he conceded. “At any rate, I’ve gotten a formal request for a ‘more detailed and complete’ report.”
“But only from Intelligence Branch, not from ONI,” Rozsak said thoughtfully. “Interesting. I wonder if that means Frontier Security and the Navy aren’t talking to each other about it. Or about us, either.”
“I certainly hope they aren’t talking to each other about us!” Barregos shook his head. “That would be about the last thing we need at the moment.”
“Ever the master of understatement.” Rozsak’s voice was desert dry. “Fortunately, I’ve had Jiri and Edie working on that.”
“Ah?” Barregos arched an eyebrow. Commander Edie Habib (although she was now Captain Habib, even if no one outside the Maya Sector knew it) was Rozsak’s chief of staff. She was also quite probably the smartest single member of the cadre of outstanding officers Rozsak had attached to himself over the years.
“I’ll give you a copy of their craftsmanship before you head back to Smoking Frog,” the admiral said. “It’s really nice, if I do say so myself. Queen Berry and her people did a really good job of requesting our assistance for the sequences where I’m discussing our force availability with them. Gave me an excellent chance to substantially…understate our force numbers for the record, let’s say. And once the two of them—and Ruth Winton—got done playing with the actual data, they’d built us a really exciting and totally bogus tactical log of the entire battle. I doubt it would stand up to any sort of intensive analysis, but I also don’t think anyone in Ukhtomskoy’s shop has the expertise to realize that on their own. They’d have to farm it out to someone at ONI, and you know how much they all hate sharing data with each other. Especially if one of them thinks there’s a chance to catch the other one’s service branch with its fingers in the cookie jar.”
“That’s probably true.” Barregos nodded with an undeniable sense of relief. “Dare I assume your minions dealt with the diplomatic traffic and your formal reports to me equally creatively?”
“That they did. With all the proper date and time stamps, too. Can Jeremy and Julie get that inserted into the official files instead of the originals?”
“I’m pretty sure they can,” Barregos said. Jeremy Frank, his senior aide, was twenty years younger than Rozsak, but he’d been with Barregos almost as long. And Julie Magilen, his personal secretary, office manager, and general keeper was Barregos’ own age…and had been with him for better than half a T-century. They were at least as central to his and Rozsak’s plans as Habib or Watanapongse, and just as loyal. In addition, Frank—his staff IT specialist as well as his aide—had built himself traceless backdoors in the strangest places.
“And what do these reports show?” the governor asked, and Rozsak shrugged.
“Everybody in Sol—from Bernard, over at Strategy and Planning, to Kingsford and Rajampet and even, God help us all, Thimár—knows we’ve been building ships out of the sector’s own resources. God knows they’ve been just delighted at the notion that they wouldn’t have to send any of their own hulls out here with the situation heating up with the Manties! So Edie sat down with Alex Chapman and Glenn Horton and actually designed the destroyers and cruisers we’re supposedly buying from Erewhon.”
Barregos nodded again. Admiral Alexander Chapman was the Erewhon Space Navy’s senior uniformed officer, and Glenn Horton was his and Rozsak’s local interface with the Erewhonese yards building the Maya Sector Defense Force. Of course, the MSDF didn’t officially exist, but that was perfectly all right with Oravil Barregos, since the ships in it didn’t officially exist yet, either.
And, he reminded himself, it won’t be so very long before the Maya Sector Defense Force becomes the Mayan Navy. And won’t that frost some chops in Old Chicago?
Assuming, of course, that he and Luiz Rozsak survived long enough for that to happen. Which wasn’t precisely a given.
“The ships they came up with are going to raise a few eyebrows back home,” Rozsak continued. “We kicked it around and decided even Thimár must be starting to get a clue that the Manties and the Havenites are building ships a lot more capable than anything the Navy has. We think it’s unlikely anyone on Thimár or Kingsford’s staff has even the remotest idea how much more capable, but the ships we designed for them are probably twenty or thirty percent more effective than anything in Frontier Fleet or Battle Fleet’s inventory.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Barregos’ tone made it clear he was simply asking a question, and Rozsak nodded.
“We have to show a qualitative edge to explain what we did to Manpower’s mercenaries. Trust me, we knocked their order of battle down a lot in those new ‘official’ reports, but we still needed something to explain how the hell we beat them. Our options were either to have a lot more ships than we’d told them we’re building, or else for the individual units to be more capable than anything in the rest of the Navy’s inventory. And the whole reason we gave for using Erewhon to build them was to woo Erewhon back into the League’s arms and away from its relationship with the Manties and Haven. It’ll make sense to them that Erewhon had access to the Manties’ war-fighting technology and agreed to part with some of it in our favor. And if I know Thimár, he’s going to immediately assume the new goodies we tucked into our ship designs are all the Manties have.”
“And if they want us to send some of those new ships back to Sol for examination and evaluation?”
“Unfortunately, our losses at Torch were heavily concentrated in our new construction,” Rozsak replied. “I’m afraid most of our surviving new-construction units were so badly damaged they’ll either be in yard hands for months or else weren’t worth repairing at all.” He shrugged again. “Obviously, if they ask us to send some of them back, we will…as soon as they’re available.”
“How long do you think we can stall them that way?”
“Oravil, unless I miss my guess, we won’t have to stall them a lot longer.” Rozsak shook his head. “You’ve seen the same reports and news coverage I have. And Jiri passed along that movement order on Sandra Crandall’s maneuvers. With Joseph Byng already in the Madras Sector and Sandra Crandall right next door with an entire damned fleet, what exactly do you expect to happen?”
“I expect them to lock horns with the Manties in a big way,” Barregos said.
“Absolutely. And when they do, the Manties will hand them their heads.”
“Really? From what Jiri had to say, Crandall’s got an awful lot of firepower, Luiz.”
“And she’s almost as big a frigging idiot as Byng,” Rozsak said caustically. “Not to mention the fact that I will absolutely guarantee you she hasn’t
got a clue about Manty missile capabilities. I could hand her the schematics on those big-ass multidrive missiles of theirs if we had them—hell, I could give her a working model!—and she still wouldn’t believe it. She’s got enough ships that even she should be able to get out with her force more or less intact, but only if she’s smart enough to recognize the truth and pull back quickly enough. And there’s no way in hell she’s taking any of their star systems away from them.”
“If that’s what she’s there to do, of course,” Barregos pointed out.
“Of course it’s what she’s there to do. I’m not sure whether Manpower and Mesa are manipulating Rajampet and Kingsford or if Rajampet’s using Manpower and Mesa to cover some devious end of his own. But there’s no way in the galaxy that much of Battle Fleet got deployed way the hell and gone out to Madras unless someone intended it to accomplish something once it got there.”
Barregos nodded slowly. Rozsak’s analysis matched very closely with his own, and that might well mean…
“How soon will Sharpshooter actually be ready for service?” he asked. “I mean really ready, Luiz. Worked up and ready for combat.”
“The entire first tranche should be out of the yards within the next two months,” Rozsak replied. “For that matter, Sharpshooter should run her builder’s trials within the next three or four T-weeks. Given the quality of the Erewhonese’s workmanship, I expect we’ll run official acceptance trials no more than a week or two after that. We can probably have all twelve in commission by, oh, late January. It’ll be at least a couple of T-months after that before I’d feel comfortable taking them into combat, though. Actually, I’d want at least four T-months—call it the end of April—before I’d feel comfortable about committing them to action, and the wallers are a good ten T-months behind them.”
“And what kind of missiles will they carry?”
“We’ve already taken delivery of full loadouts of Mk 17s from Chapman and Horton,” Rozsak said. “On the other hand, it’s also been suggested we might want to hold off on loading them into our magazines.”
Their eyes met, and Barregos nodded ever so slightly. The political situation remained…convoluted, given the fact that Erewhon had deserted Manticore—with plentiful provocation, but still deserted—and delivered much of the Manties’ war-fighting technology to the Republic of Haven just in time for the war between the Star Kingdom and the Republic to revive. As a result, Erewhon was in what might conservatively be called “bad odor” with Manticore at the moment, and the ESN had been frozen out of the new, improved, far more lethal current-generation Manty tech. But Rozsak’s sacrificial defense of the Kingdom of Torch might be going to change that somewhat in Maya’s case.
“Just how firm was that ‘suggestion,’ Luiz?” the governor asked now. “I’ve viewed your reports, but if you’ve heard something more substantial since you sent them in, I really need to know it now.”
“It’s not cast in ceramacrete yet,” Rozsak admitted, “but it came directly to Jiri from Delvecchio.”
Barregos sat back, his dark eyes thoughtful. Captain Rebecca Delvecchio, Royal Manticoran Navy, was the Manticoran naval attaché in Erewhon. She was also, as everyone including—especially—the Erewhonese were perfectly well aware, the head of the Manticoran naval intelligence operation in the system. In the absence of the full ambassador who’d been recalled from Erewhon following Erewhon’s departure from the Manticoran Alliance, Delvecchio was also carrying much of the diplomatic weight. After all, even when two star nations were royally pissed with one another, there still had to be some communication interface. As the Erewhonese put it, business was business.
“I don’t think she’s talking about all up, first-line MDMs even now,” Rozsak cautioned. “For that matter, I’m not sure the Defiants could handle all up MDMs without some significant modification. But these are all pod-layer designs, and from what she’s said, I think we may be looking at some of their older dual-drive missiles. It sounds like she’s talking about—well, hinting about—older models of their Mark 16. Apparently they’ve still got a bunch in storage and the Manties don’t consider them fully up to snuff against first-line Havenite opposition. Against Sollies, though…”
His expression was an odd mix of satisfaction, anticipation, and something almost like chagrin, Barregos thought. No Solarian flag officer, even one taking advantage of his own service’s backwardness to become something else, was likely to do handsprings of delight over the conclusion that the mighty SLN had just become a third-power fleet. Things like that weren’t supposed to happen.
“That’s interesting,” the governor said slowly. “That the Manties really may be willing to hand us something like that.”
“Don’t forget that we’re basically talking outdated hardware—by Manty standards, at least,” Rozsak cautioned him. “It’s better than anything we could get anywhere else, and giving us actual examples will probably let us bootstrap the tech. But they’re not giving us the keys to the Star Kingdom just yet.”
“No, but it makes me wonder what else might be going on…and how it might factor into our own plans. For example, something funny’s happening in Kondratii.”
“Kondratii?” Rozsak’s eyebrows arched.
The Kondratii System was less than a hundred and twenty light-years from the Maya System itself, and its inhabitants loathed Frontier Security and their transstellar overlords with a pure and burning passion. In fact, it was one of those places an OFS governor might expect to have to send someone like Admiral Luiz Rozsak and the Solarian League Marines to restore order.
Because of that, there was a page or so in Oravil Barregos’ playbook where Kondratii was concerned. When the day came for the Maya Sector to declare its independence of the Solarian League, Kondratii would make an excellent addition to the new Mayan Federation. In fact, Barregos and Rozsak had drawn up a list of several star systems whose common interests would make them a natural fit as members of their new Federation, or at least its close allies and trading partners. And because that was true, Barregos had Renée Guérin, his senior civilian security advisor, and Brigadier Philip Allfrey, his senior Gendarmerie officer, keeping a close eye on the systems on that list.
Including Kondratii.
“According to Renée, something new’s been added. There’s always some lone wolf terrorist ready to squirt a little hydrogen into the fire in Kondratii, but it seems to her that some of the resistance movements are getting themselves better organized than they used to be.”
“Any organization would be an improvement on how they ‘used to be,’ Oravil!”
“I realize that. But it looks to her like whatever’s behind it is coming from outside the local system.”
“Somebody’s trying to destabilize it even further?” Rozsak frowned.
“Either that or they’re trying to stabilize it…under new management.”
“Are you suggesting it could be the Manties?”
“Right off the top of my head, it seems ridiculous,” Barregos conceded. “That doesn’t mean it might strike them the same way, though.”
“For what conceivable motive?” Rozsak’s expression was skeptical.
“To help make more trouble for the League.” Barregos’ expression was much more unhappy than skeptical. “Let’s face it, Luiz. I’m sure they’re genuinely grateful to us—to you—for defending Torch, and the Manties have a reputation for paying their debts. So I’m sure anything Delvecchio’s telling you stems at least partly from that. But the Star Kingdom’s also one of the best practitioners of Realpolitik around. It’s had to be to survive. And while I’m sure they like us a lot,” he smiled sardonically, “somehow I doubt they’d fall all over themselves to give us better weapons if they didn’t figure it would help them as much as it’s likely to help us.”
“You’re saying they not only have a pretty damned good idea of what we have in mind but that they’d like to see us move Sometime Real Soon Now?” Rozsak said slowly. “Sometime soon enough, for
example, to help distract Old Chicago, OFS, and—just maybe—Battle Fleet from the Talbott Quadrant?”
“It’s certainly possible. And if that’s what they’re thinking, then isn’t it possible it would make sense to them to stir up places like Kondratii for the same reason? Especially if doing so encourages us to get off the centicredit?”
“That would be very devious of them,” Rozsak said, with a certain admiration. “Almost as devious as we are.”
“I didn’t say I blamed them for it,” Barregos agreed. “But if that should happen to be what they have in mind, I think it behooves us to find out everything we can about just how they might plan to pull it off.” He shrugged. “And if all of this is pure paranoia on my part, it still won’t hurt to have a better window into the internal dynamics of all the systems on our little list.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
The hot dog, Damien Harahap decided, was one of the best he’d enjoyed in a long time. It was made of mutton, but “mutton” on Mobius was the product of the Mobian mountain sheep, a species unique to Mobius, which he privately thought had the potential to rival Montanan beef among the galaxy’s gourmands. It had a deep, rich taste, and just a trace of onion and a somewhat larger trace of cheddar had been incorporated into this version of one of Mobius’ hallmark specialties. His contact had suggested trying this iteration, and he was looking forward to trying several more before he left for Wonder and his scheduled—or at least potentially scheduled—next meeting with Vincent Frugoni.
He took another bite, then swooped a French fry through the ketchup and popped it into his mouth, then reminded himself to avoid eating too quickly. His contact had an hour-long window in which to meet him, and he’d really prefer not to have completely cleaned his plate and be sitting here, conspicuous among the diners at the other picnic tables, and look like he was waiting for someone.