A Rising Thunder

Chapter Twenty-Five

“Tell me again how maneuvering Beowulf into a false position was supposed to help us, Innokentiy. I seem to be having a little trouble following the logic.”

Omosupe Quartermain’s voice was uncharacteristically harsh, and her blue eyes were hard as she glowered at Innokentiy Kolokoltsov across the table. The two of them sat in a high security conference room in an unusual private, face-to-face meeting with neither their colleagues nor a single aide present, and the permanent senior undersecretary of commerce was not a happy woman.

“I think it still is going to help us in the long run,” Kolokoltsov replied patiently. “I don’t say it worked as well as I hoped it would, because it sure as hell didn’t. And I don’t know if it’s going to help us enough, either, but please remember that I never said it was a good option in the first place. I only said it was the best one available to us.”

“But look what those two bitches had to say!” Quartermain snapped. “You’ve seen what Beowulf’s dumped to the media, Innokentiy, and Holmon-Sanders is bad enough all by herself! The newsies are going to eat up that business about violating the Constitution, and ‘unelected bureaucrats’, and federal overreach, and you know it. God help us once O’Hanrahan gets hold of it! But that Manty admiral, that Truman—” She shook her head. “The contempt that bitch showed! She was daring Tsang to cross the line, and she didn’t show a trace of doubt that she could hammer our ships into wreckage any time she wanted. Worse, she didn’t pull any punches about dumping full responsibility on us—on us, personally — any more than Holmon-Sanders did, Innokentiy! That’s going to resonate with the woman-in-the-street in a way no ‘principled response’ of ours is ever going to match, and you know that, too.”

“Admittedly, it never occurred to me Beowulf might be so far gone as to actually invite Manty wallers through into Beowulf space to threaten the League Navy,” Kolokoltsov conceded. “On the other hand, I never expected Admiral Tsang to be so frigging stupid as to actually try to fight her way through when Beowulf told her no, either!” It was his turn to shake his head, his expression disgusted. “She was supposed to back off ‘in deference to Beowulf’s expressed wishes’—to let the Beowulfers stand on their ‘constitutional rights’ so we got the credit for showing restraint in the face of their irrationality!”

“Well, she didn’t get that part of it right, did she?”

“No, she didn’t. And I find it interesting that Rajani’s still so busy debriefing her.”

“What do you mean?” Quartermain’s eyes narrowed, and Kolokoltsov shrugged.

“I mean I want to talk to the good admiral personally,” he said in a flat, hard voice. “I want to find out exactly what her instructions from Rajani actually were. God knows, after Crandall’s performance I’m willing to accept that every serving flag officer in the Navy is a frigging idiot, but were her actions all her own idea? Or did somebody over at the Admiralty cut her a set of orders we didn’t know anything about?”

“Why the hell would Rajani have done something like that?” Quartermain frowned, her expression intent. “He knew what we were after as well as we did!”

“I certainly explained it to him using nice, short, simple words,” Kolokoltsov said bitingly. “But he’s been pushing this confrontational stance against the Manties from day one, and he never has explained why Crandall picked the Madras Sector, of all damned places, for her training exercise. Or exactly why he failed to mention her presence in the vicinity to us after what happened at New Tuscany. Or even how Filareta just ‘came to be’ so conveniently placed at Tasmania when he came up with Raging Justice in the first place. I know he’s an arrogant prick who despises every neobarb ever born, and I know he takes the Manties’ attitude as a personal affront to his Navy, but I’m starting to wonder if there might not be more to it even than that.”

“Please don’t tell me you’re buying into this grand conspiracy nonsense the Manties are spouting!”

“I’m not,” Kolokoltsov said, yet his tone lacked a little something, Quartermain thought.

“Centuries-long conspiracies?” She threw up both hands. “Fleets of invisible starships? Plans to replace us all with genetically engineered super-Scrags of some sort? Some kind of mind-controlling nanotech? And the entire institution of genetic slavery’s only a front for all of this ‘Alignment’s’ evil plans? We’re supposed to believe the nasty Mesans managed to keep all of this completely secret for six hundred years when all the ‘proof’ the Manties can provide is the unsupported testimony of a single lunatic scientist? One who actually threatened to kill one of Mesa’s leading geneticists — not one of Manpower’s hacks, but the Chairwoman of Maternal and Fetal Genetics at one of the finest hospitals on Mesa! — over his daughter’s death?”

“I agree it sounds insane,” Kolokoltsov replied. “But parts of it are going to make people wonder, if they really stop and think about it. Like the fact that the Republic of Haven of all people believes it, too. That Haven actually brought the entire story to Manticore in the first place!”

“That’s what the Manties are telling us happened,” Quartermain shot back. “And if I were them, I’d have damned well been telling us anything I could think of that might have convinced us to go ahead and send somebody to Manticore to order Filareta to stand down the way Carmichael kept demanding!”

“You think they’re lying?”

“Actually, I think it’s possible as hell,” Quartermain said flatly. “If Carmichael could’ve sold us on their version and gotten us to whistle Filareta off, wouldn’t it have been worth it? I mean even if we later found out they’d lied to us, we’d already have recalled him. We’re going to send him all the way back out there just because we’re pissed off that they lied to us? We’d look like complete clueless bunglers — first for letting them bluff us to begin with, and then for sending him back to kick their ass, like a playground bully in a temper tantrum, just because they outsmarted us the first time!”

“What about Pritchart?” Kolokoltsov challenged.

“What about her? I’ve never met the woman, have you? How hard would it be to find an actress to stand in for her? Especially with a little judicial computer enhancement? What — you think the Manties are going to worry about pissing off the head of state of a star nation they’ve been fighting for the last twenty years when she finds out they used her in a psychological warfare operation against us? What’s she going to do? Declare war on them?!”

Omosupe had a point, Kolokoltsov reflected. One he hadn’t actually considered, in fact. He wasn’t convinced she was right — not by a long chalk! — but it was a plausible alternative, and he made a mental note to suggest it to Malachai Abruzzi. It might just come in handy in the not too distant future.

“Well, be that as it may,” he said, pulling the conversation back to its original topic, “and in answer to your earlier question, even with the way Tsang screwed up, we’ve still got Beowulf dead to rights refusing our own ships passage. And however big a mouth that Manty admiral might’ve had, the fact that Beowulf invited her in ahead of time — obviously connived to cover and conceal the movement of her ships through the Beowulf Terminus for the express purpose of killing Solarian spacers if it had turned into a shooting exchange — is perfect from our perspective. I’ve already talked to Malachai about it, and he’s priming the pump with ‘unnamed source’ briefings for some of our more reliable newsies. And I’ve got three of our more prominent friends in the Assembly — including Tyrone Reid — ready to move for a formal inquiry into Beowulf’s actions.”

Quartermain looked at him for a moment, eyes thoughtful, and then nodded slowly. Tyrone Reid was a senior Assemblyman from the Sol System itself. A member of the Judiciary Committee, he’d carefully crafted the public image of a senior and thoughtful jurist, and the camera liked him. His photogenic patrician face and the polished perfection of his Old Terran accent made him one of the newsies’ favorite talking heads, and that in turn made him one of the most widely known political figures in the entire League. He’d be perfect for the part, whether he adopted the persona of an infuriated firebrand or the “more in sorrow than in anger” attitude of a regretful constitutional scholar debunking Beowulf’s flawed position.

“And if it turns out Filareta’s screwed up as badly as Tsang did?” she inquired after a moment, and Kolokoltsov grimaced.

Assuming Operation Raging Justice had proceeded as planned — and the dispatch boat which had transited to Beowulf seemed to prove Filareta had reached Manticore at least a week ago, just about on schedule — they should already have heard from him. The fact that they hadn’t didn’t necessarily prove things hadn’t gone as planned, however. Battles between fleets the size of Eleventh Fleet and whatever the Manties had scraped up might last days or even weeks as the opponents maneuvered against one another. For that matter, even if Filareta had captured all three of the Manticore Binary System’s inhabited planets, he still would have had to get past the forts at the Manticore end of the Junction — and past the combined BSDF and RMN detachments in Beowulf space at the other end — before he could have gotten a message back to Old Chicago.

None of which kept Kolokoltsov’s nerves from tying themselves tighter and tighter while the silence stretched out.

“That’s one reason Malachai isn’t giving the newsies any ‘official’ position statements,” he admitted out loud. “And the reason I’ve primed Reid and the others without turning them loose yet. We’re not going to jump either way until we know what Filareta did, but Malachai and I have discussed our options. Obviously, if he’s pushed ahead and the Manties have collapsed, figuring out how to spin it is no problem. If he’s backed off, on the other hand, we point out that both he and Tsang have demonstrated yet again the Solarian League Navy’s abhorrence for the kind of blood fests the Manties seem perfectly willing to embrace.”

“And if he’s gotten his ass blown off like Crandall?” Quartermain asked grimly.

“My feeling is that he’s smarter than Crandall. I think he’ll have backed off if it looked to him like he was going to get hammered. And I think the Manties will have let him, to be honest.”

“Why?” Quartermain could have sounded incredulous, but her tone was genuinely curious.

“I think they’re crazy, but I don’t really believe they’re the bloodthirsty maniacs we’ve been describing to the newsies, Omosupe, and neither should you. Think about it. They had Tsang dead to rights, and they didn’t even try to engage her. They let her turn around and hyper out. With her tail metaphorically between her legs, perhaps, but they let her go. If they were really contemplating pushing a war against the League, would they have let that many of our superdreadnoughts get away from them? ‘Live to fight again another day,’ is the phrase, I believe.”

“I don’t know how much faith I’d care to invest in that particular theory, but it’s not as completely insane as I thought it was going to be before you explained,” Quartermain said. “On the other hand,” her eyes narrowed once more, “that still doesn’t explain why you specifically wanted to see me and none of the others.”

“It wasn’t because I wanted to see you and none of the others,” Kolokoltsov corrected. “I wanted to see you without seeing all of the others. In particular, without seeing Nathan and Rajani. I figure there’s actually a pretty good chance the two of us can stay below their radar horizon, but if I’d started adding others…”

He let his voice trail off, and she nodded. She’d thought that might be it. For that matter, she’d made a mental bet with herself about the topic he wanted to discuss.

“All right,” she said. “We’re here; they aren’t. What is it you want to talk about?”

“This damned Manty blockade,” he said frankly. “One reason I didn’t want Nathan or Rajani here was because the last thing we need right now is more posturing. But having said that, I have to admit the Manties have moved faster and a lot harder than I thought they were going to. Closing their own termini is bad enough; if these reports that they’re closing down other people’s termini are true, they’ve escalated it further than I really expected they were going to.”

Quartermain started to say something sharp and pungent, but she didn’t. At least he was admitting he’d made a mistake. Besides, it wasn’t as if kicking him the way he deserved was going to do any good at this point.

“And?” she said instead.

“And I need to know where we stand as of what we know right now. And where you think it’s going to go in the next few months. Even in a best-case scenario, our economy’s going to get hammered — assuming Filareta hasn’t already solved all our problems, of course. I know that. But I need to know what you and Agatá are planning to do to mitigate the damage. I’m not expecting any kind of miracles,” he added hastily as her blue eyes began to harden once more, “and that’s not why I’m asking. I’m asking because I need to know how to go about positioning us to implement the best patch-up job the two of you can do. I know you and Agatá are working closely together, so I figure talking to you is pretty much the same as talking to both of you, without the problem of talking to Nathan and Rajani at the same time.”

“You’re going to have to talk to them sooner or later,” she cautioned in a slightly mollified tone. “The economic implications for any kind of sustained war effort are going to be painful—incredibly painful, to be honest — in the long run. We’re going to find ourselves needing the protectorate service fees worse than ever, even in the best case I can imagine, and that’s going to be Nathan’s and Frontier Fleet’s bailiwick.”

“I’ve already figured that out, and when I have to bring them in, I will. But before I do that, I want the best briefing I can get. I want to speak to them from a position of strength, and that means knowing what the hell I’m talking about and knowing you, Agatá, and I are all on the same page. Fair?”

“Fair enough,” she conceded, and settled back in her chair.

“First,” she began, “as Agatá and I have already pointed out, the effect on our interstellar commerce is going to—