Mission of Honor

Chapter Forty

"Yes, Denis?"

Eloise Pritchart tried—tried hard— not to sound irritated as Denis LePic's face appeared on her com display, but LePic had known her too long and too well for her to fool him. Besides, even a saint (which Eloise Pritchart had never pretended to be) would have been irritated by a call which came in exactly one hour and seventeen minutes after she'd finally gotten to bed.

"I'm very sorry to disturb you, Madam President," he said, rather more formally than he normally addressed her when the others weren't present, "but I thought about it very carefully, first. Technically, there's no reason I had to screen you right this moment, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that you'd never forgive me if I waited till morning."

"I beg your pardon?" Pritchart's topaz eyes had narrowed intently.

"You may remember that we've all been concerned about a certain intelligence operative who'd dropped out of sight?"

He paused, and the eyes which had just narrowed flared wide.

"Yes," she said rather more slowly, "as a matter of fact, I do remember. Why?"

"Because he's just reappeared," LePic said. "And he has a friend with him. And the two of them have a new friend—one I think you're going to want to talk to yourself."

"And is Sheila going to be willing to let me into the same room with this 'new friend' of his?"

"As a matter of fact, I think she's likely to pitch five kinds of fit at the mere prospect," LePic said a bit wryly. "But since I'm quite positive Kevin is going to want to be there, as well—not to mention Tom, Wilhelm, and Linda Trenis—I feel fairly confident about your security."

"I see." Pritchart gazed at him for several seconds, her her mind accelerating to full speed as it brushed off the remnants of sleep. "Tell me," she said, "did our friend find his new friend where we thought he might?"

"Oh, I think you could say that, Madam President. Not only that, but he's a very impressive new friend. I've only managed to skim the report our wandering lad finally got around to delivering, but based just on what I've seen so far, I think I can safely you're about to discover that just about everything we thought we knew we don't. Know, I mean."

Pritchart inhaled deeply as LePic's expression finally penetrated fully. What she'd mistaken for humor, possibly even amusement at having awakened her, was something else entirely. A mask. Or perhaps not so much a mask as a thin surface veneer of calm, a fragile shield for the shocked echoes of a universe turned upside down still rumbling around somewhere deep inside him.

"Well, in that case," she heard her own voice saying calmly, "I think you'd better go ahead and start waking up a few other people."

* * *

"So, our is wandering boy returns, I see," Eloise Pritchart murmured, an hour later, as Victor Cachat, a troll-like man who looked suspiciously like the officially deceased Anton Zilwicki, and a sandy-haired, hazel-eyed man were escorted into the Octagon briefing room. "Welcome home, Officer Cachat. We'd been wondering why you hadn't written."

Somewhat to her surprise, Cachat actually colored with what looked a lot like embarrassment. It probably wasn't, she told herself—that would be too much to hope for, although she couldn't think of anything else it might have been—and turned her attention to the young man's companions."And this, I take it, is the redoubtable Captain Zilwicki?"

If Cachat might have looked a little embarrassed—or harried, at least—Zilwicki, despite the fact that (as a Manticoran) he was in the very presence of his enemies, didn't. In fact, he didn't really look like a troll, either, she admitted. He actually looked more like a granite boulder, or perhaps an artist's model for a mountain dwarf. The grim, dangerous sort of mountain dwarf. If he felt any emotion at this moment, it was probably amusement, she decided. Well, that and something else. An odd fusion of emotions that were almost like grim triumph coupled with singing anxiety, all under the control of iron self-discipline. It was the first time she'd ever actually laid eyes on the Manticoran, and he was even more impressive in person than she'd expected. No wonder he and Cachat made such a formidable combination.

"I'm afraid the galaxy at large thinks you're, well, dead , Captain Ziliwicki," she said. "I'm pleased to see the reports were in error. Although I'm sure quite a few people in Manticore are going to be just as curious to know where you've been for the last several months as we are about Officer Cachat's whereabouts."

"I'm sure there are, too, Madam President." Zilwicki's voice was exactly the deep, rolling one she would have expected out of his physique. "Unfortunately, we had a little, um, engine trouble on the way home. It took us several months to make repairs." He grimaced. "We played a lot of cards," he added.

"I imagine so." The president cocked her head. "And I imagine you've also discovered there have been a few developments since whatever happened—and I do trust you're going to tell us what it was that did happen—in Green Pines?"

"I'm sure that will be covered, Ma'am," Zilwicki said, and there was more than a trace of grimness in his tone. "It wasn't much like the 'official version' I've heard, but it was bad enough."

Pritchart gazed at him for a moment, then nodded slowly. So, he and Cachat had been involved, at least peripherally. Of course, when it turned out he was still alive, it was going to be a nasty blow to Mesa's version of events. She found that notion appealing.

"But I don't believe I know who this gentleman is," she continued, looking at the third member of the ill-assorted trio her security detail was watching like a bevy of particularly ill-tempered hawks.

The stranger's expression was the most interesting of the three, actually, she thought. He was obviously nervous as a cat at a dog show, and not just because of the way Shiela Thiessen and her cohorts were watching him. Yet there was something else, as well . . . something that seemed to mingle determination as grim and purposful as Anton Zilwicki's with something very like . . . guilt?

"No, Madam President, you don't—yet." If Cachat had, in fact, felt anything approaching embarrassment, there was no sign of it in his reply. "This is Dr.Herlander Simхes. Of the planet Mesa."

Pritchart felt her eyes narrowing again. She, Theisman, LePic, Linda Trenis, and Victor Lewis sat side by side across a conference table from the three chairs waiting for Cachat, Zilwicki, and Simхes. Of them all, only LePic had had the opportunity to even skim Cachat's preliminary report, however, and the fact that the attorney general hadn't even wasted any time personally debriefing Cachat and his companions before bringing them straight to her said a great deal about how he'd reacted to whatever it was they'd discovered.

Or thought they'd discovered, at least, she reminded herself.

"I see." She gazed speculatively at the Mesan, then cocked her head. "May I assume Dr. Simхes is the reason you've been . . . out of touch, let's say, for the last, oh, six or seven T-months?" she asked after a moment.

"He's one of the reasons, Ma'am," Cachat replied.

"Then, by all means, be seated," she invited, waving a hand at the empty chairs, "and let's hear what you—and Dr. Simхes, of course—have to tell us."

* * *

"My God," a visibly shaken Eloise Pritchart said several hours later. "My dear sweet God, Tom. Do you think this could possibly be true ?"

Thomas Theisman hadn't seen the president's face that pale since Genevieve Chin and her battered survivors crawled home from the Battle of Manticore. In fact, he hadn't seen her this close to being literally stunned since he'd personally brought her the news of Javier Giscard's death. Not that he blamed her, since he was fairly certain his own expression was pretty much an exact mirror of hers.

"I . . . don't know," he admitted slowly, leaning back in his chair and shaking his head. "I don't know. But—"

He paused and closed his eyes for a moment, his mind running back over Dr. Simхes' incredible rolling barrage of revelations. And the even more incredible—and maddeningly incomplete—hints of still more of them which a Mesan named Jack McBryde had doled out to prove the value of allowing him to defect to the Republic. At the time, he'd been able to do little more than sit there and listen, just trying to absorb the devastating series of blows to his understanding of how the galaxy was organized. Of course it couldn't possibly be true! And yet . . . .

"As a matter of fact," he said, opening his eyes and bringing his chair back fully upright again, "I think it could be. True, I mean."

"It's got to be some kind of organized disinformation operation, Madam President," Linda Trenis argued. Yet even as she spoke, her tone said that, like Theisman, she thought it might just possibly be true. That it was her job to be skeptical, and so she would, even though, deep down inside, where instinct took over from trained intellect . . . .

"I think Admiral Theisman may be right, Linda," Victor Lewis disagreed. "In fact, I think I actually believe it."

The CO of Operational Research sounded as if he were surprised to hear himself saying it, but his expression was probably closer to normal than that of anyone else in the president's office. Where the others' faces still looked rather like Pritchart had always assumed a poleaxed steer must look, his was intensely thoughtful.

"But—" Pritchart began.

"Think about it, Eloise," Theisman interrupted. She looked at him, and he shrugged. "Think about what Simхes said—and what Cachat and Zilwicki both agree this McBryde had to say, as well. Crazy as it all sounds, it all hangs together, too."

Pritchart started to protest again, then made herself stop. Insane as it all seemed, Theisman was right. It did hang together. Of course, if Trenis was right about its being some sort of disinformation effort, it would hang together. On the other hand, she thought, there probably wouldn't be quite so many gaps in their information, either. If someone had wanted to sell the Republic a bill of goods, they would have come up with plausible excuses and lies to plug more of those holes.

And they would have known Zilwicki was alive, since they needed him to get the disinformation home. So they'd hardly have announced he was dead! Except, of course, that according to McBryde's story, the system government in Mesa doesn't even realize how riddled it is with agents of this 'Alignment,' so the government might've put the Green Pines story together without any orders from its . . . puppet masters.

Oh, lord! Did I really just think all that? She shook her head. My brain hurts already, and it's not even dawn yet.

"I agree with Admiral Theisman," Lewis said quietly but firmly. "And, no offense, Linda, but if it's a case of disinformation, I don't see what the hell—pardon me, Madam President—it's supposed to be disinforming us about ! Try as I might, I can't think of any conceivable reason for anyone on Mesa to try to convince the Republic of Haven we're on some centuries-long interstellar hit list right along with the Manties. Can anyone else in this office come up with a reason any Mesan would be doing anything that could so radically shake up our relations with the Star Empire? Something which might convince us we actually have an enemy in common and point both of us directly at them? "

"Admiral Lewis has a point there, Madam President," Denis LePic agreed, his own eyes narrowing in thought. "And there's another point, too. Cachat and Zilwicki independently confirmed the explosion that took out this 'Gamma Center' of Simхes'. While I'm willing to concede that a good disinformation operation requires enough capital investment to make it convincing, somehow I find it a bit difficult to believe that even someone like Manpower would set off a high-kiloton-range nuke right on top of one of their own top management's bedroom communities just to sell us on it."

"And assuming McBryde knew what he was talking about, it makes at least a little sense out of the fact that Manpower—or this 'Mesan Alignment,' at least—has been acting so much like a belligerent star nation," Theisman pointed out. "It is a belligerent star nation; it's just that no one else realized it."

"Oh, how I wish they'd been able to get McBryde out, too," Pritchard said with soft, terrible passion, then waved both hands contritely when Theisman gave her a speaking glance.

"I know—I know!" she said. "If this is true, we're incredibly lucky to have even a clue of it, much less Simхes. I'm sure he's going to turn out to be incredibly valuable—if this is true—in the long run, but he's a tech geek." Theisman's lips twitched at the president's choice of noun, and she shook a finger at him. "Don't you dare smile at that, Tom Theisman! Instead, think of him as Shannon Foraker." Theisman's nascent smile disappeared, and she nodded. "Right. That's exactly the kinds of holes we're going to have in any political or strategic military information he can give us, no matter how good the debrief is."

"And assuming there's any way to verify that what he's telling us is the truth," Trenis observed. They all looked at her, and she shrugged. "All our critical naval personnel are supplied with anti-interrogation protection. It's effective against every drug therapy we know about, but we've always recognized there are likely to be therapies we don't know about. I think we have to assume the Mesans are at least as aware of that as we are—I mean, let's remember where all their traditional expertise is focused. And given anyone as ruthless as McBryde and Simхes have described, and anyone whose security's been good enough to keep all of this black literally for centuries, I have to think they've probably included some kind of suicide protocol to keep anyone from pumping someone as critical as Simхes sounds like being."

"Or, for that matter, if McBryde was telling the truth about this new nanotech of theirs, God only knows what he might be programmed to do under, um, rigorous interrogation," LePic said.

"Well, so far, at least, they don't appear to have installed anything to keep him from voluntarily spilling the beans when he's not under duress," Lewis pointed out. "If we sit him down with our own hyper physicists and let them start going over what he can tell them about this 'streak drive' of theirs, we should at least be able to tell whether or not the math holds together. Which would tend to verify—or disprove—one large chunk of what he's already told us."

"Maybe—eventually," Pritchart replied. "On the other hand, I'm no hyper physicist, obviously, but I'd be surprised if they could confirm or disprove what he's got to say very quickly." She grimaced. "To be honest, the Manties could probably do that faster than we could, given how far ahead of us they are in compensators and grav-pulse bandwidth."

"For that matter," Theisman said with a crooked smile, "it's a pity Duchess Harrington's not around anymore. I'll bet Nimitz could tell us whether or not he's lying. Or whether he's lying to us knowingly, at least."

Pritchart nodded, but she also leaned back in her own chair, her lips pursed, her expression intent. Trenis started to say something more, only to stop as Theisman raised his hand and shook his head. He, LePic, and the two admirals sat silently, watching the president think, while endless seconds ticked past. Then, finally, she looked back at Theisman, and there was something at the backs of her topaz eyes. Something that made the secretary of war distinctly uneasy.

"I think we have to assume at least the possibility that McBryde and Simхes were both genuine defectors and both of them were telling the truth," she said. "As Denis has pointed out, nuking one of your own towns—even a small one, if it happens to be a luxury satellite suburb for your own elite and their families—is an awful steep price to pay just to sell a lie to someone light-centuries away from you. Especially what could only be a pointless lie, since, like Admiral Lewis, I can't see any way having us believe all this would help Manpower."

No one else said anything, and she smiled wryly. The expression went oddly with that bleak, hard fire behind her eyes.

"It's going to take a while for me to get my mind wrapped around the concept that for the last five or six centuries a bunch of would-be genetic supermen have been plotting to impose their own view of the future on the human race. In one way, it's actually easier for me because it includes those Manpower bastards. I'm so used to thinking of them as the scum of the galaxy, capable of anything as long as it suits their purposes, that I can actually see them as the villains of any piece. But this master plan of theirs, this 'Alignment,' is something else."

"If McBryde was right about the Alignment having been involved with the Legislaturalists—and especially with DuQuesne—then it may be possible for us to turn up evidence of it," LePic said thoughtfully. "I know we'd be going back a long way," he continued when the others looked at him, "but we never had any reason to suspect outside influence before. That puts a whole new perspective on how we got stuck with the 'People's Republic' in the first place, and if we look at the records from that angle, we may spot something no one even had a reason to look for at the time."

"You really think they could 've played any significant role in that, Sir?" Trenis asked. He raised an eyebrow at her, and she grimaced. "To be honest, that was one of the bells and whistles that most strongly suggested disinformation to me. I mean," she turned to Pritchart, "I'm always up for a good conspiracy theory, Madam President—God knows the history of the People's Republic's left all of us ready for that! But managing to overthrow someone else's constitution without leaving a single fingerprint—?"

The admiral waved her own hands in a baffled gesture, but Pritchart shook her head.

"Actually, I'm inclined to see that as a point in McBryde's favor," she replied, and snorted harshly at Trenis' surprised expression. "If there's anything to this at all, these people obviously think in terms of century-long operational frameworks, Admiral. For that matter, think of the chutzpah involved in anyone's thinking they could actually overthrow something as big and powerful as the Solarian League! Anybody willing to take that on would look at destabilizing something as small as the Old Republic as an exercise in light lifting. For that matter, they may even've seen it as a setting up exercise—a chance to practice their technique before the main event!"

"Assuming someone's actually managed to put something like this together, the fact that they've taken such a long view would make them extraordinarily dangerous," Theisman said thoughtfully. LePic, Trenis, and Lewis looked at him interrogatively, but Pritchart only nodded with an odd blend of curtness and grim approval, as if he was following her own chain of logic.

"Think about it," he told the others. "If they're willing to approach something like this on a generational basis—if their strategists at any given moment have been willing to work towards something that's not going to happen until their grandchildren's or their great-grandchildren's time—think about the kinds of covers they could build for their agents. We could be looking at twenty or thirty generations of sleepers, for God's sake! There could be people right here in Nouveau Paris, people whose families have been solid citizens of the Republic for three or four hundred years, who are actually part of this Alignment. Think about the kind of intelligence penetration that implies. Or about how long and subtly they could work on influencing political trends and policies. Or the media."

The others weren't looking confused anymore. In fact, all three of them were rather pale as Theisman's implications sank home.

"You're right," Pritchart agreed. "On the other hand, let's not get too carried away. They may think they're superwomen, but I don't see why we should start thinking of them that way. I don't doubt they could do exactly what you're describing, Tom. In fact, that may well be what they did to the Old Republic. But however long they've been planning, they've still got to hold themselves to a manageable level of complexity. They've got to be able to coordinate everything, and we've had enough experience trying to coordinate the Republic to know how tall an order that can be even when we don't have to worry about keeping communications lines covert. Which has particular point in a case like this, I suspect, since I tend to doubt they could bury their sleepers quite as deeply as you've just suggested. There's got to be at least some contact somewhere if they aren't going to lose their assets simply because someone dies before she gets around to telling her son or daughter 'Oh, by the way. We're actually secret agents for the Mesan Alignment. Here's your secret decoder kit. Be ready to be contacted by the Galactic Evil Overlord on Frequency X with orders to betray the society you've been raised all your life to think of as your own.'"

"Granted." Theisman nodded. "But that contact could be damned well hidden, especially when no one's had any reason to look for it in the first place."

"I agree, Sir," Victor Lewis said. "Still, the President just made another excellent point. For them to make this work, they have to have an almost fanatical respect for the KISS principle." LePic laughed harshly, and the admiral smiled—briefly—at him. "I'm not talking about their overall strategy, Sir. Obviously, they haven't been afraid to think big where that's concerned! But if they've genuinely managed to keep all this under wraps for so long, and if they've actually gotten far enough along they're really ready to pull the trigger, then they have got to be some of the best covert operators in the history of humanity. And from our own experience, I can tell you that for them to have managed that, they have to have been pretty damned ruthless about prioritizing and assessing risks. They're probably willing to be as complicated as they have to be to accomplish anything they feel is genuinely critical, and they're probably operating on a huge scale, but they're not going to operate on any huger scale than they think they absolutely have to."

"That actually fits in with what we've seen so far, assuming what's been happening to the Manties is actually part of this strategy McBryde described to Cachat and Zilwicki," LePic acknowledged with a thoughtful expression. "They've got pieces in motion all over the board, but when you come right down to it, aside from the actual attack on the Manties' home system, none of it's required a lot of manpower"—he winced at his own unintentional double entendre but continued gamely—"or military muscle of their own . In fact, almost all the movement we've seen could have been produced very economically. Get to Byng and Crandall, and maybe one or two of the Kolokoltsov group, then add somebody around your level in the military, Tom, and you get the fleet movements that brought the Manties into conflict with the Sollies. And then momentum—Solly arrogance, the inherent corruption of the League's system, the lack of meaningful political control, the competition between Frontier Security satrapies, the desire for revenge because of the way the Manties had humiliated them militarily—pushes things along with very little additional effort on your part. Meanwhile, you concentrate your intensive efforts somewhere else—organizing whatever was in some of those 'bargaining points' McBryde was hanging on to to encourage Cachat to get him out—where informed cooperation is critical to your final strategy."

"Which brings us back to Nouveau Paris," Pritchart said grimly.

The others looked at her, and she barked a metallic, snarling laugh.

"Of course it does! For that matter, Tom, you and I have already discussed this, in a way. If McBryde was telling the truth about the existence of this 'assassination nanotech' of theirs, I think we finally know what happened to Yves Grosclaude, don't we?" She showed her teeth, and this time the glare at the backs of her eyes burned like a topaz balefire. "Frankly, it ties in rather neatly with the only bits and pieces of forensic evidence Kevin and Inspector Abrioux managed to come up with at the time. And just why, do you think, was this 'Mesan Alignment' kind enough to provide Arnold with one of its most closely held, top secret toys? Remember what you were just saying about sleepers, Tom? And that little comment of yours, Denis, about producing movement economically?"

The others were staring at her in shock, and she wondered why. From the instant she'd heard about McBryde's description of the new Mesan nanotechnology, she'd realized what had happened to Grosclaude. And if one of this 'Alignment's' critical objectives was the destruction of both the Star Empire of Manticore and the Republic of Haven, what better, more elegant way to go about it than to send them back to war with one another?

"It makes sense, doesn't it?" she pressed. "They played us—me— by having Arnold doctor the diplomatic correspondence. Hell, they may've had someone at the other end doing the same thing for High Ridge! No one's seen hide nor hair of Descroix ever since the wheels came off, now have they? And then, when we figured out what Arnold had done, they played Elizabeth by convincing her we'd killed Webster and tried to kill her niece exactly the same way the Legislaturalists killed her father and Saint-Just tried to kill her! God only knows how many millions of civilians and spacers—ours and the Manties'—these . . . people have gotten killed over the past eighty T-years or so, and Elizabeth—and I—both walked straight into it when it was our turn!"

The president's rage was a bare-fanged, bristling presence in the office now. Then Theisman raised one hand in a cautionary gesture.

"Assuming a single word of what McBryde told Cachat and Zilwicki is true, you may well be right, Eloise," he said quietly. "In fact, assuming there's any truth to it, I think you almost certainly are right. But at the same time, it may not be true. I don't know about you, but there's a part of me that would really, really like to be able to blame all the people we've killed—and the people we've had killed on our own side—on someone else's evil machinations instead of our own inherent ability to screw up. It may be that that's what happened. But before we start operating on that assumption, we've got to find some way to test whether or not it is."

"Oh, I agree with you entirely, Tom," Pritchart said. "At the same time, though, I think we've already got enough, what with the records Cachat and Zilwicki brought home of the Green Pines explosions and how they don't match the Mesa version, what Simхes can tell us, what our own scientists can tell us about his new drive claims, to justify very quietly reaching out to Congress."

Theisman looked distinctly alarmed, as did LePic. Trenis and Lewis, on the other hand, were obviously trying very hard not to look alarmed. In fact, they were trying so hard—and failing so completely—that the president chuckled much more naturally.

"I'm not planning on talking to anyone unless Leslie, Kevin Usher, and probably you, Tom, all agree that, whoever it is, she's at least her own woman. And, trust me, I'm thinking in terms of a preliminary security vetting God might not pass! And I'm certainly not going to bring anyone like McGwire or Younger in on this until and unless we feel absolutely certain McBryde's and Simхes's information is credible. But if we do come to that conclusion, this is going to change every single one of our foreign policy assumptions. That being the case, I think we need to start doing a little very careful, very circumspect spadework as soon as possible."