“Oh! I mean, of course! I only—”
“Ma’am, I have President Lombroso for you,” her com officer interrupted politely.
“I’m afraid I have to go now, Mr. Frolov. I’ll keep you informed.” Yucel killed the connection before Frolov could respond and turned to the com officer. “Put him through.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
An instant later, President Svein Lombroso appeared on her display. He looked far less spruce and well-groomed than his official file imagery, she noted, and the same was true of the crowd of men and women in the conference room with him. She recognized Angeliki Xydis, Frontier Security’s representative in Mobius; General Olivia Yardley, the Presidential Guard’s commander; and Friedmann Mátáys, the CO of the Mobius Security Police. She didn’t have a clue who any of the others were, and they didn’t matter anyway.
“President Lombroso, I’m Brigadier Francisca Yucel,” she introduced herself crisply. “I’m here on behalf of the Office of Frontier Security in response to your request for support with a full intervention battalion. In addition, I’m accompanied by four Navy destroyers and the light cruiser Oceanus. How may the Solarian League assist you, Sir?”
* * *
“Yes, Augustus?”
Estelle Matsuko, Baroness Medusa and Her Imperial Majesty’s Governor for the Talbott Quadrant, set down her teacup with a smile as Augustus Khumalo appeared on her com display. Early morning sunlight spilled into her spacious office, and the remnant of a small omelette and accompanying croissant sat on the blotter in front of her. Her staff had given up attempting to break her of her habit, acquired during her days on the planet Medusa, of eating breakfast at her desk. She was far too set in her ways to change…especially when she could gaze out of her office window across such a gorgeous stretch of ocean.
“You’re up early,” she observed, and he smiled back in acknowledgment. He was not what some deplorably perky people persisted in calling “a morning person.”
“Yes, Milady, I am,” he said. “I’ve spent quite some time over the last couple of days thinking about Lady Gold Peak’s report and our interview with Mr. Ankenbrandt. And about her request for additional ground forces from the Quadrant Guard.”
“I’m sure we all have,” Medusa’s smile faded. “In fact, when I haven’t been ‘thinking about it,’ I’ve been having nightmares about it. Should I assume some new aspect of it’s occurred to you?”
“Not precisely, no. I suppose what I actually should’ve said was that I’ve been thinking about your authorization for her to respond to any more messages she receives by providing the promised support just as if it had really been us talking to them in the first place.”
“You’re not having second thoughts about the policy, though,” Medusa said, studying his expression thoughtfully. “So that means you’ve had some additional thoughts about how best to implement it?”
“That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking about.” He nodded. “And Captain Grierson’s stop on his way forward to Lady Gold Peak with the reinforcements from home is responsible for the notion I’ve had.”
“And what notion would that be?”
“Well, before we forward-deployed Tenth Fleet, when Admiral Gold Peak and I proposed organizing the Quadrant Guard to support our Marine strength by combining the planetary combat forces here in Talbott, we didn’t really have hard numbers on the size and availability of those forces.”
He paused, one eyebrow raised, and she nodded.
“Since then,” he resumed, “Mr. Krietzmann’s office has been compiling those figures. I have his preliminary numbers—and I stress they’re only preliminary at this point—and if they’re accurate, I think it might be possible to dispatch a much larger reinforcement than she probably thought we could when she sent us her request. None of the pre-annexation planetary armed forces were all that huge for entire star systems, but they weren’t exactly tiny, either, and there were a lot of them. That gives us some pretty impressive absolute numbers from which to slice off manpower for her. Integrating them into a single force with a single operational doctrine’s going to take time, so at the moment we’re retaining ‘national units’ as individual formations when we start putting the building blocks together. Eventually we’ll get beyond the ‘allied units’ state of affairs to a truly integrated force; we just aren’t there yet. There’s more commonality of equipment than we’d expected, though—most of the local star systems bought Solarian hardware before the annexation—and we’re converting the units that didn’t buy from the Sollies to Manticoran equipment first. We’ll switch the others over later.
“But my point is that it looks very much to me as if we’ve got a lot more combat power we could deploy forward a lot more quickly than we thought we could. The biggest problem’s likely to be transport because, at the moment, Tenth Fleet—the entire Quadrant—is shorter on troop lift than warships. When Captain Grierson reaches Montana, Lady Gold Peak will have a lot more light units that can respond to assistance requests. But she’s still going to be very short on both planetary combat elements and on the lift to move the ones she does have around, and that could get ugly if more Mobiuses turn up. I doubt the home system’s going to be able to send us much in the way of additional troop strength, but I’ve sent the Admiralty an urgent request for additional troop transports. She’s going to need at least some of those, whatever happens, and I don’t know how many of them I’ll be able to get, but I’d like your permission to begin organizing for the biggest troop lift to Montana the Guard can support.”
There was silence for a moment, and then Baroness Medusa nodded.
“For a bluff, unimaginative naval officer, you do have some knacky notions from time to time, don’t you Augustus?” she said with a smile.
Chapter Fifty
Rufino Chernyshev’s com chimed softly. He glanced at the time display and grimaced. In fact, his expression was rather stronger than a mere grimace—“scowl” would probably have been too strong a noun, although it came close—and only partly because so many things in the galaxy seemed determined to go wrong at the same moment. He’d discovered that he hated office work just as much as he’d expected to, but at least there was a sense of satisfaction in getting it right…usually. Sometimes, though, there was no “right.” And some of the people involved in those not-right outcomes—one of whom was undoubtedly here for her scheduled appointment—were not his favorite people in the universe.
There was no point in putting this off, though, so he keyed the com.
“Yes?”
“Ms. Marinescu is here, Sir,” Samuel Hairston, the secretary he’d inherited from Isabel Bardasano along with this office, confirmed. His voice was as pleasant and professional as ever, but Chernyshev had discovered that Hairston was even smarter than he was good-looking. And when they’d discussed his calendar for the day, it had been evident to him that Hairston liked Janet Marinescu as little as his new boss did.
Well, that’s fair enough, Chernyshev thought now. Only very strange people do like scorpions, after all.
“Send her in, Samuel,” he said out loud, making no effort to hide the resignation in his tone, since only Hairston could hear him over his earbug.
“Of course, Sir.”
The office door opened almost instantly and a tall, square-faced woman with striking features and dark hair and eyes came through it. Chernyshev remained seated rather than rising to greet her, and something flickered briefly in those dark eyes. It might have been irritation, or it might have been anger, and Chernyshev could live with either of those. Janice Marinescu was ten or fifteen T-years older than he was, and she was good at her job, but she was also the sort who pushed the limits of anyone else’s authority, and until Isabel Bardasano’s death, she’d technically been senior to Chernyshev. They’d been in different chains of command, fortunately, but he suspected she was one of several people who thought they would have been a far better fit than one Rufino Chernyshev for Bardasano’s suddenly vacat
ed position, and he had a pretty shrewd notion of what would happen if she sensed anything remotely like an opening to test the limits of his authority.
“Janice,” he said with a brief nod towards the chair in front of his desk.
“Rufino,” she acknowledged as she sat. There might have been just an edge of challenge—or possibly of simple testing—in her use of his first name. On the other hand, there might not have been, and he reminded himself not to let how much he disliked her color his perceptions.
Not exactly falling all over herself to congratulate me on my “promotion,” though, is she?
“I had a conversation with Albrecht and Collin yesterday,” he told her.
“Let me guess,” she responded sardonically. “About recent events in Manticore, by any chance?”
He nodded. He wasn’t surprised by the accuracy of her prediction; he’d never thought she was stupid.
“I’m sure you’ve been thinking just as hard as the rest of us about ways this can…impede our plans once it becomes general knowledge,” he said. “The fact that Zilwicki’s alive to dispute our version of Green Pines is bad enough. Thank God we never actually claimed our security people had killed him on-planet!” He shook his head. “There were actually a few people over in Propaganda who thought that would’ve been a good idea. They even wanted to exhibit ‘his’ body to prove we’d gotten him and that he’d definitely been behind the attacks. I understand Collin changed their minds by pointing out what happened to Haven when they claimed to have executed Harrington!”
“It’s nice to avoid shooting yourself in the foot,” Marinescu agreed with a thin smile.
“Or at least limiting yourself to the loss of a single toe when you do.” Chernyshev’s smile was even thinner than hers had been. “It’s bad enough that Manticore’s going to be able to produce him as a counter witness, but we could live with that. Of course the man they sent to execute nuclear terrorism on an independent planet is going to swear up and down that he never did it! The fact that Pritchart obviously believes him, though—believes him enough to proclaim the existence of the Alignment and actually travel to Manticore personally to negotiate peace—is just a little harder to wave away. And the fact that anything about the Alignment’s creeping into the limelight, coupled with Gold Peak’s…proactive stance in Talbott, has the potential to go from really, really bad to disastrous a lot more quickly than anyone wants to think about. Which brings me to the reason for this meeting.”
He let his chair come fully upright, and his expression was somber.
“Albrecht has decided to execute Houdini,” he said flatly. “He’s decided to execute it now, and on an expedited basis.”
“That could be…complicated,” Marinescu replied after a moment.
“Complicated doesn’t begin to describe it.” Chernyshev snorted harshly. “It’s Albrecht’s thought that we can kill two birds with one stone, though.”
“Let me guess,” she said again. “He figures we can use more ‘Ballroom terror attacks’ to cover the accelerated withdrawals. And if we do that spectacularly enough, anything Zilwicki—or Pritchart, for that matter—says about the Manties’ lack of involvement will sound rather less convincing to Solarian public opinion.”
“And to Mesan public opinion, for that matter.” Chernyshev kept his voice level despite his vast personal repugnance for the entire idea. Marinescu, on the other hand, actually smiled in approval…which illustrated the main reason he despised her so. Of course, it was also the main reason she’d been appointed to her current position five T-years ago.
The Bardasano genome carried some unfortunate instabilities, and Chernyshev knew there’d been serious consideration of simply culling it. The proposal had been rejected because it also produced so many highly capable, downright brilliant individuals. Isabel Bardasano had been an outstanding case of the genome’s good points outweighing its bad, in point of fact. So far as Chernyshev was aware, on the other hand, there was no known history of instability in Marinescu’s genome…which hadn’t prevented Janice from being—in his considered opinion—a stone-cold psychopath.
She’d been one of the Mesan Alignment’s most effective “wet work” specialists for decades, because she was smart, she was tough, she was quick-thinking…and she really, really liked killing people. If she hadn’t been so far inside the onion, she’d have fitted in perfectly with Manpower, although her tendency to kill people probably would have cut into even Manpower’s profit margin. He hadn’t doubted for a moment that she’d actually like the notion of setting off nuclear devices in urban settings.
Having his expectation confirmed wasn’t exactly a good thing in this instance, he reflected.
“I know you haven’t had much warning,” he told her, “but I’ll need to see an action plan as soon as possible. Albrecht wants it yesterday. Me, though—I’m willing to let you have until the day after tomorrow to get it right.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“He’s serious about moving this quickly, Janice.” Chernyshev grimaced. “He realizes rushed planning is the best way to screw up, so he’s willing to be reasonable, but we can’t let any grass grow under our feet on this one. And your initial action plan doesn’t have to be perfect. I’m sure Collin will want to review it and tweak it a bit, so think of this mainly as a starting point.”
“What kind of time window do I have?”
“Until the end of October,” he said flatly.
“October?” she repeated, and her expression was much less cheerful than it had been a moment earlier. “To complete the operation?”
“October,” he confirmed. He understood her less than delighted reaction. They were already well past the middle of June, which gave her barely four months to complete an operation which had originally been scheduled to take over two T-years. “I did say we couldn’t let any grass grow, didn’t I?”
“I don’t know if we can do it in four months—physically, I mean.” It wasn’t—quite—a protest, but it came close, and he shrugged.
“We’re not the ones setting the available time, Janice. Zilwicki and Pritchart are doing that. Put yourself inside Elizabeth Winton’s mind for just a moment and think about what they’re telling her. You’ve just gotten confirmation from one of your most trusted operatives that there’s a clandestine organization which helped manipulate you back into a shooting war with the Republic of Haven and which—just incidentally—was almost certainly responsible for the attack on your home star system that killed several million of your citizens. According to the President of the Republic of Haven—with which you’ve been at war, cold or hot, for the better part of a T-century, by the way—she not only believes your agent’s information, but she’s willing to negotiate a peace treaty with you so the two of you can go after the bad guys together. And as coincidence would have it, your first cousin just happens to be in command of a fleet that could easily destroy at least a third of the entire Solarian League Navy in a standup fight and, equally coincidentally, just happens to be less than two hundred light-years from Mesa. Now, from what you know of Elizabeth Winton, how do you think she’s likely to react?”
“Shit,” Marinescu said.
“Exactly. The only things that may work in our favor are Solarian gullibility, the consequences of Oyster Bay, and message time.
“First, the entire idea of this ‘Mesan Alignment’ they’ve come up with is too fantastic for any serious thinker to accept for a minute. I guarantee you that no one in the League, especially in Old Chicago, is likely to believe—or admit they believe—Zilwicki’s version of what happened here on Mesa. I’m pretty sure we can spin this as a desperate Manticoran attempt to evade responsibility for its unprovoked terrorist assault on Mesa, and Malachai Abruzzi’s Ministry of Information’s talking heads will get behind that and push hard.
“Second, despite what I just said about Gold Peak’s combat power, what happened to Manticore’s industrial infrastructure has to leave them a little more cautious about direct
confrontations with the League. Any assault on Mesa would clearly escalate their problems with the Sollies, even if Mesa’s never been a member of the League. It would play too perfectly into the narrative Kolokoltsov and his friends are constructing. They have to know Abruzzi would jump on it as proof of who’s really pushing the confrontation, and there are plenty of Sollies who would eat that up with a spoon.
“And, finally, the communications loop will play into things, too. According to our latest information, Gold Peak’s currently in Montana, and it’ll take quite a while for any message from Manticore to get to her there. But don’t get too comfortable about how much it’ll affect things. Sure, it’ll take time for any orders to attack Mesa to get to her, but once they arrive, she’ll be just delighted to come kick Mesa’s ass right up between its ears. Manticore’s hated Mesa for T-centuries just because of the slave trade, Janice; the discovery of the Alignment’s existence is only going to vindicate that hatred in their eyes. Gold Peak would want Mesa’s scalp under any circumstances; after Oyster Bay, she’ll come a-running just as fast as her little starships—well, her great big, nasty starships, actually—will go. In fact, the only real question’s whether or not she’ll be interested in letting any of the system navy’s ships surrender after she gets here.”
“All right. All right, I can see that.” Marinescu waved one hand, her brow furrowed as she considered all the myriad ways in which her carefully orchestrated plans for Operation Houdini, the systematic, traceless removal of the key personnel of the Alignment’s “onion” from Mesa, had just gone belly up. “And I can see why Albrecht wants to use ‘terrorist incidents’ as cover. In fact, that’s the only thing that could even make it possible! That doesn’t guarantee it’ll work in the end, though. There are going to be…loose ends that have to be tied up, no matter how smoothly everything goes, and there won’t be time to make them disappear quietly. You do realize that?”