“Daphne has a point, Sir,” Brigman said, and Hajdu nodded. Not only did she have a point, but she had the intellectual courage to admit that Manty technology might actually be as good as it was reputed to be.
“Yes, Sir, she does,” Adenauer conceded, nodding respectfully across the table at the ops officer. “But when I said we ‘haven’t heard a word’ about them, that’s exactly what I meant. We been monitoring their news channels ever since we got here, and I pulled up the ’faxes and the board archives for the last solid T-month. I’m pretty sure we got clean copies, without any editing from the locals, and I plugged in a data search after Major Latimer’s message came in. There are some references to Senators and—rumors and ‘unidentified sources,’ only, for this one—at least one Cabinet Secretary suggesting the Manties or Beowulf might be called upon for naval support. In response to every single newsie question about that, though, Vangelis’s responded by reiterating his promise that ‘there will be no foreign warships in Hypatia orbit’ until after the referendum. It’s possible he was lying when he said that, but that doesn’t match his record. And there’s been exactly zero reference to any ‘foreign warships’ actually arriving. Having a squadron or two of wallers drop in on your star system’s the kind of thing it’s not real easy to hide, Sir.”
“Not easy, but not impossible, either,” Hajdu replied. It was clear he wasn’t rejecting the intelligence officer’s analysis. He was simply expanding upon it, and Adenauer nodded again.
“No, not impossible, Sir.”
“But it’s your sense that if the Manties haven’t arrived yet, they may not be delayed much longer?” Yang-O’Grady pressed, and there was something different about her tone. A harder, sharper edge, Hajdu thought. Something…hotter.
“If Major Latimer’s correct about the locals’ intentions—and I’m pretty sure she is—I can’t rule that out, Ma’am.” Adenauer shrugged. “The exact timing is another unanswerable question, though. If they asked for help as soon as Latimer’s suggesting they might have, it could’ve been here already. Should’ve been here, really. So, assuming she’s right about that, they could come over the hyper wall from Beowulf in the next fifteen minutes. Assuming they waited until after the vote was taken, as Vangelis’s promises suggest they did, we’ve got five T-days, until sometime Thursday ‘first-half.’ That’s absolutely the best assessment I can give you, Ms. Yang-O’Grady, Admiral.” He shook his head, his expression taut. “With all possible respect, and no intention of being humorous at all, this is one time I’m just as happy someone farther up the chain of command than me has to make the call.”
“Thank you for not waffling.” Yang-O’Grady managed a tight smile. “And, by the way, I’ve sat in on enough intelligence briefings to know the difference between waffling to cover your arse and making a clear distinction between what you know and what you can only speculate upon.”
Adenauer inclined his head at the compliment, and Yang-O’Grady sat silently for almost a full minute, gazing at the blank display in front of her. Then her nostrils flared, and she raised her eyes to Hajdu.
“Admiral,” she said in formal, measured tones, “on the basis of this intelligence, I am certifying that the diplomatic aspect of our mission to Hypatia has failed. I think it’s obvious we now know why Vangelis is playing for time. I think it’s also obvious from what Captain Adenauer’s just so capably laid out for us, that we don’t know how much time we have. I am therefore authorizing you to proceed with Buccaneer.”
“Yes, Ma’am.” Hajdu replied. “May I ask if you have any suggestions about the timing of my actions?”
Her green eyes flickered just a bit when he asked for “suggestions” rather than “directives,” but he met her gaze steadily. From the instant she’d authorized him to proceed, he was the one in command and she was the one who’d just become an advisor.
“No, Admiral,” she replied. “None at all. Except,” she added, and he suddenly realized he’d misunderstood why those eyes had seemed to flicker, for her voice was suddenly much harder and harsher than it had been, “that the sooner you teach these people what happens to traitors, the better.”
HMS Phantom
Alexandria Belt
Hypatia System
“I do hate surprises,” Rear Admiral Kotouč said, gazing around the faces in the windows in his day cabin’s smart wall.
“I think we all do, Sir,” Captain Ellis Rupp, commanding the Saganami-B-class heavy cruiser HMS Cinqueda agreed. Rupp was Kotouč’s senior ship commander, followed by Květa Tonová, Phantom’s captain, then Captain Jackson Ortega-Burns of HMS Shikomizue and Captain Ching-yan Lewis of HMS Talwar. Commander Megan Petersen, commanding the Roland-class destroyer Arngrim, was his junior CO, and he thought she looked surprisingly calm, given her youth and the circumstances.
“I think we all do,” Rupp repeated, “but Jayson and I—” he twitched his head at Commander Jayson Stob, his executive officer, sitting beside him “—have been trying to figure out what kind of bee this Hajdu’s gotten up his ass to do something like this. It can’t be because he figured out we’re here, or he’d be moving a lot faster even then this.”
“An excellent point,” Kotouč said and glanced at Lieutenant Commander Vyhnálek. “Any thoughts on that, Štěpán?”
“Aside from the fact that I wish whatever the hell it was had left him alone, Sir?” TG 110.2’s intelligence officer shook his head. “I’m guessing—and it’s only a guess—that somebody in-system finally got around to telling them the Hypatians had asked for a naval presence. Maybe somebody’s been counting on his fingers and toes and realized that since we obviously aren’t here yet, we may be getting here Sometime Real Soon Now, as they say on Grayson.”
“Until the smoke clears, that’s probably the best almost-answer we’re going to get, Sir,” Captain Clarke said, running the fingers of his right hand through his sandy hair.
And what makes you think that when “the smoke clears” we’ll be around to find any answers, Jim? Kotouč wondered.
But that wasn’t something he could say out loud.
“In the meantime, we have some decisions to make,” he said out loud, although everyone in his audience knew “we” didn’t have to decide a damned thing. He did.
He leaned back in his chair, and as he did, his mind ran back to another time and place—to Saganami Island, almost exactly two T-years earlier. He’d been there to celebrate his nephew Ondře’s snotty cruise at the traditional pre-deployment family dinner. But he’d gotten there a day early, and because he had, and because Vice Admiral Alb’s brother John was one of his close friends, the baroness had invited him to attend Ondře’s Last View.
It had been thirty T-years since his own Last View, on the eve of his own snotty cruise, but he hadn’t forgotten what it was like. Hadn’t forgotten the chill down his spine, the ball of ice in his belly as he thought about what he was seeing, ingested what might be expected of him someday. But Ondře’s Last View had been different. It had been different because the youngsters about to depart on the training and evaluation cruise which completed their Academy education were sailing not in time of peace, as he had, but straight into a renewed war with the Republic of Haven. And different because Baroness Alb had invited a very special guest speaker. Someone who’d known the full, grim reality of what the Last View merely promised the graduating middies might come to them. Who’d met that challenge not once, but repeatedly. Someone who was already spoken of as Edward Saganami’s spiritual heir.
Lady Dame Honor Alexander-Harrington, the Salamander herself, had stood in that huge, darkened lecture hall, the treecat who’d shared and endured so much with her on her shoulder, and her soprano voice had rung out across the endless rows of midshipmen as she told them what they were about to see. And he remembered the lump in his throat, the bright, unshed—and unashamed—tears in his eyes, as the image of that very first Parliamentary Medal of Valor floated before him and that soprano sword of a voice had come out of the d
arkness, repeated the words, the oath—the vow—to which every graduating class for four hundred and ten T-years had dedicated itself.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” the Salamander had said, “the tradition lives!”
And so, in the end, he already knew what his decision had to be, didn’t he?
Proedrikḗ Katoikía
Hypatia System
“And I’m telling you, Admiral, that we can’t possibly evacuate our entire orbital infrastructure in thirty-six hours!” Adam Vangelis snapped. “I’m not trying to stall you, damn it—it’s physically impossible!”
“That’s regrettable, Mister President,” Hajdu Gyôzô said from the com display above the conference table, his voice like interstellar space. “I advise you to evacuate as many people as possible, however, because I will execute my orders at the time I’ve given you.”
“You’d be killing hundreds of thousands—millions—of innocent civilians!”
“On the contrary, Mister President. I may be the one giving the order; you—and your government—are the ones who have forced my hand. I’m simply obeying the orders of my legally constituted chain of command. You and your star system are the people who committed treason against the Solarian League, leaving me no option but to execute my contingency orders in the time window available to me.”
“That’s an utterly meaningless and specious attempt to evade the blood guilt for anyone who dies in this star system thirty-six hours from now.” Vangelis’s voice had turned even colder than Hajdu’s. “Believe me in this, Admiral. This war—the war your ‘legally constituted chain of command’ began with an unprovoked attack on a sovereign star nation in time of peace—will end one day, and unless you’re a lot stupider than I think you are, you know as well as I do that the Star Empire of Manticore and the Republic of Haven are way too big a mouthful for your navy to chew. So, when the inevitable day comes that a peace treaty is signed between the Solarian League and the Grand Alliance, be certain that your name, and the demand that you be extradited to an Allied court to face trial for premeditated mass murder, will be part of those terms. Even if, by some unimaginable turn of luck, the current clique running the League should survive in office, don’t think they’ll hesitate for one single instant before throwing you under the air lorry to save their own contemptible arses.”
“My statement is neither meaningless nor specious, Mister President, and I’ve already told you where the ‘blood guilt’ resides in this instance. As for the conclusion of hostilities,” the admiral permitted himself a snort of contempt, “I’ll take my chances on your neobarb friends’ ability to force the Solarian League to do anything it chooses not to do. For the present, however, further discussion is pointless. I will be back in contact in twenty-four hours. I advise you to expedite your efforts in order to save as many lives as possible from the consequences of your star system’s actions. Hajdu, clear.”
The display went dark, and Vangelis turned to the men and women seated around the table in the Proedrikḗ Katoikía’s Situation Room. His gaze circled the table, his eyes fiery, but his desperation was as obvious as his fury.
“My God, Adam.” Kyrene Morris, the System Vice President was white-faced, her eyes shocked. “My God, he’s really going to…to murder all those people?!”
“That’s what he says, and I doubt he would’ve said it for the official record if he didn’t mean it,” Vangelis replied harshly.
“What if we were to renounce the referendum result?” Frederica Saraphis, the Senate Majority Leader sounded a bit hesitant. She raised her right hand, palm uppermost. “I know we don’t have the legal authority to set it aside, but we could certainly delay—even suspend—its execution, under the circumstances!”
As the chairwoman of the Liberal Centrists, with a thirty-seat majority, Saraphis had shepherded the referendum—formally sponsored by the LibCents and all but one of the other major Hypatian political parties—through the Senate. She’d been one of its staunchest supporters, and her expression showed how little she liked making that suggestion.
“We can’t, Freddie,” Makiko Allerton said, her voice flat and hard. She sat beside Saraphis. Her Independent Democrats had been the only major party to oppose secession, and she’d fought her old friends Saraphis and Vangelis tooth and nail the entire way. But now she shook her head, her violet eyes dark and bitter.
“You’re right that we can’t set the referendum aside,” she continued after a moment. “Even suspending its implementation would get us into all sorts of questionable waters, legally speaking.”
She glanced at Attorney General Boyagis, who jerked his head in a single, curt nod, then looked back at Saraphis, and now her expression held an edge of what could almost have been compassion.
“Completely aside from the legal aspects, though, there are the moral ones,” she said. “I opposed secession. I thought that was the right decision. But I lost, and I happen to believe in the legal and political systems of Hypatia. I lost,” she repeated, “…and if this man—this monster—is going to come into my star system and murder hundreds of thousands of my fellow citizens, of my people, and tell me his actions have been approved by the Solarian League, then thank God I did.”
She looked around the table again, her eyes like iron.
“I don’t know about this ‘Mesan Alignment’ the Manticorans and the Havenites are talking about. I don’t know about an awful lot of things, but I just discovered how horribly wrong I’ve been about one thing I thought I did know. I thought I knew the Solarian League was worth saving.”
“I’m sorry, Makiko,” Vangelis said softly. “I know how much saying that had to hurt.”
“So do I,” Saraphis said, reaching across to squeeze Allerton’s hand. “And I agree that Hajdu proves the Mandarins are even more corrupt than we’d thought they were. But think of all the lives we’re talking about! I’m willing to risk the legal consequences of anything that would save that many people, so if suspending the referendum’s execution—even indefinitely—will stop him, I say we have no choice but to do just that.”
“Won’t work, Freddie,” Vangelis sighed. She looked at him, and he shrugged. “I already suggested that to Hajdu.” Some of the others looked shocked, but he only shrugged again, harder. “Of course I did! Frederica’s right. My first responsibility, as a human being and not just to my oath of office, is to save as many lives as I can. The only way I could save anybody today would be to convince Hajdu not to pull the trigger, and I am by God prepared to do anything that might possibly accomplish that! His response was that it’s too late for that.”
“Too late?” Saraphis stared at him. “Too late to save all those lives? That’s what he said?!
“In almost exactly those words,” Vangelis told her. “The conversation was recorded, if you want to view it yourself, but the short version is that by expressing our intent to leave the League and—especially—by even suggesting the possibility of some sort of political union with Beowulf, we’ve demonstrated our fundamental treachery and willingness to trample all over his version of the Constitution. As such, he’s not prepared to delay the execution of his orders even if we promised we’d never secede, regardless of the referendum vote. After all, how could he possibly take the word of a bunch as traitorous as we’ve proved ourselves? No doubt we’d simply change our minds back again as soon as he left the system. Because of that, he has no choice but to carry out ‘Operation Buccaneer’ before he leaves.”
Saraphis sat back in her chair, her face ashen, and this time it was Allerton squeezing her hand comfortingly.
“But why is he so insistent on his time limit?” Mildred Roanoke, the Secretary of Industry asked. “If he’d give us just an additional forty hours—even thirty hours—we could get almost everybody out, even from the Belter habitats!”
“Somebody must’ve told the cowardly bastard we’re expecting Allied warships, Ma’am,” Commodore Franklin Nisyrios, the senior uniformed officer of the Hypatia System Patrol grated. The
red-haired commodore’s gray eyes blazed and his lip twisted in contempt. “He may talk a good fight about how he thinks this war is going to end, but even if he believes that crap, he’s a long way from any peace treaty that might save his sorry arse. And right now, he knows damned well what a squadron or so of Allied wallers would do to his task force. So he’s shitting his skinsuit—pardon my language—to get the hell out of here before those wallers turn up!”
“I think Frank’s right,” Vangelis said. “I think someone must’ve told him—or given him enough information that he could extrapolate for himself—when we originally expected Admiral Kotouč to arrive. So he’s going to execute his orders and run for it before then. Obviously he doesn’t know the exact time we expected Kotouč, or he’d probably have given us the extra time we need. But that’s got to be what’s driving him right now.”
“Speaking of Admiral Kotouč—” Bernard Yale, the Minister of Infrastructure began, but Nisyrios interrupted him.
“Forget it, Mister Yale,” he said. “The Manties are good, and Kotouč’s ships are—well, the only way I can put it is that they’re totally out of the SLN’s class. I had time for a virtual tour of Phantom, and her capabilities…”
He shook his head, gazing off into his memories, his expression almost awed, then pulled his eyes back to focus on Yale’s face again.
“That ship could take any Solarian superdreadnought one-on-one and kick its arse into next week without even working up a sweat,” he said simply. “But Kotouč only has one of her…and Hajdu has ninety-five battlecruisers. Worse, Kotouč told me he doesn’t have any of the missile pods that might help to even the odds. And even if he had them, according to my revenue cutters’ sensors, Hajdu’s deployed several thousand missile pods of his own.”