Shadow of Freedom

Chapter Twenty-Six

.“Well, it just keeps getting better and better, doesn’t it?” Albrecht Detweiler observed sourly. He tossed the document reader onto the small table beside his armchair and reached for his beer stein. He took a hefty swallow and shook his head. “I suppose we should at least be grateful we found out about it before that loose warhead Gold Peak!”

“It could be a lot worse, dear,” his wife, Evelina, pointed out, looking up from her own viewer and the analysis of the pros and cons of the weaponization of mutagenic nanotech she’d been studying. Her busy crocheting needles went right on working, and her expression was calm. She always had been more philosophical about bumps in the plan than he’d been, he reflected. “At least the battle itself worked out the way you had in mind.”

There was a certain satisfaction in her tone, Albrecht noted. Evelina had always personally despised Massimo Filareta. She’d been willing to admit the man’s competence, but she’d never been able to detach herself properly from the less savory ways in which Manpower’s endless supply of disposable slaves could be used to manipulate individuals like him. Despite which, she had a point. Filareta’s defeat had been as complete, total, and humiliating as Albrecht could have desired. Unfortunately…

“You’re right, of course,” he replied. “The problem is it could have been a lot better, too. We always counted on Beowulf supporting Manticore—as long as the Manties lasted, anyway—and that was part of our calculus for the League’s disintegration. But we’d hoped the Sollies would be able to at least give the Manties a run for their money. In fact, they were supposed to weaken Manticore to a point that let the Havenites plow it under at last. Nouveau Paris certainly wasn’t supposed to end up deciding to help the Manties kick the crap out of the League, instead! And by the time Beowulf started to figure out what was going on and began actively looking for military allies against us, Manticore wasn’t supposed to be around for them to ally with, much less the damned Havenites! Which doesn’t even consider the fact that no one was supposed to know about the Alignment’s existence until we were well into Phase Three, and we’re not even out of Phase One yet.”

“I know.” She nodded. “But like you’ve always said, we’ve known from the beginning that we were going to have to adapt and improvise, and you and the boys are pretty good at that.” She smiled reflectively. “They were always good at improvising to get out of trouble as kids, anyway!”

“Yes they were,” he agreed fervently, smiling himself. But then his smile faded. “They were, and they still are. But I can’t say I’m happy about accelerating Houdini as much as we’re going to have to.” He shook his head. “Ben and Collin and I have looked at this from every angle we could come up with, and we really don’t see any alternative to the Ballroom Option.”

Evelina’s face tightened unhappily. She started to say something, then paused and looked back down at her crocheting, visibly rethinking before she opened her mouth again.

“That’s…likely to cause problems,” she said.

“Oh, don’t I just know it!” His own expression was grim. “And I don’t blame the people who’re going to have problems with it. I just don’t see another way to go, now that those bastards Simões and McBryde have blown the secret.”

“They still don’t have any proof,” Evelina pointed out. “If they did have any, I’m sure they’d have trotted it out by now.”

“In a way, that only restricts our options further,” Albrecht said gently. “If they don’t have proof, then they’re going to be under a lot more pressure to find proof. And there aren’t a lot of places they can go looking for evidence…except right here. Which is the reason I’m glad Gold Peak doesn’t know about this yet.”

He tapped the document reader, and she nodded unhappily.

“I suppose you’re right,” she sighed. “I can’t help thinking it’s likely to cost us some…collateral damage, though. Besides the obvious, I mean.”

“I know what you meant,” Albrecht agreed. “And that’s why Ben, Collin, and I have scheduled a meeting with all of the inner onion section heads tomorrow. Well, everyone but Daniel’s section, since he’s still stuck out at Darius. We’re going to tell them what we have in mind—and why we don’t have a choice—and ask them to be thinking about any weak spots we need to look at. I’m going to have Psych start a prescreen for potential trouble spots, too.” He shrugged. “Frankly, I think those sorts of problems will be handleable. I don’t expect to like it very much, but I think we can get through it. What worries me more from a pragmatic perspective is that the more we have to rush Houdini, the more likely our cleanup teams are to miss something. Which, when you come down to it, is another reason to consider the Ballroom Option. Nobody’s going to vacuum anything out of a computer that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Evelina nodded again, thoughtfully.

“All right, dear. I can see you’ve thought it through. And however little I may like the conclusion you’ve reached, I can’t really argue with it. Sometimes, though, I wish your father hadn’t put all of his eggs in one basket the way he did.”

“Oh?” Albrecht straightened in his chair and lowered his brows ferociously. “I happen to think he came up with a pretty damned good basket, myself!”

“Stop fishing for compliments!” she scolded. “I think he did, too.” She smiled warmly at him. “But your decision to…diversify with the boys—and go ahead and bring them all in at the highest level early—was a good one. All of them know exactly what’s going on, and they’re not afraid to argue with you. But despite that, you’re still all alone in a lot of ways.” Her smile faded into a look of sadness. “I wish you’d had someone else to help carry the full responsibility when you were the boys’ age. In fact, I wish you had someone else to carry it with you now. Because I think you’re right about the need to push Houdini harder, and I think the decision is going to haunt you.”

Albrecht reached across from his chair to touch her hand gently.

“It is,” he agreed with a crooked smile. “Of course, that’s true of a lot of decisions I’ve had to make, and it’s going to be true of a lot more before this is over. But you’re wrong in one respect. I may not have anyone else to carry the ultimate responsibility, but as you say, at least I’ve got you—and the boys—to help me deal with the hard jobs…and the ghosts. And that helps, Evie. It helps a lot.”

* * *

Michelle Henke scowled at her display, then flipped her chair to a semi-reclining position and transferred her scowl to the inoffensive, indirectly lit deckhead of her sleeping cabin.

She wore her favorite set of academy sweats and her fuzzy purple treecat slippers, and Billingsley had left her an entire extra doughnut. She appreciated his solicitude, his effort to pamper her while she dealt with this particular can of snakes, but she made a mental memo to remind him she didn’t have Honor Alexander-Harrington’s metabolism and ask him to find something with a few less calories. Carrot sticks perhaps, or maybe celery, even if she wasn’t a treecat. Dietitians had been producing calorie-neutral “foods” for centuries now, but Michelle was old-fashioned. If she was going to eat food, she wanted it to be food, not just a space filler. At least she wasn’t one of those people who used nanotech to scavenge calories, sugars, and fats out of her digestive system so she could gorge on whatever she wanted, although there were times…

No, she told herself firmly. Carrot sticks. It was definitely going to be carrot sticks. She felt quite virtuous and ever so decisive, and she made a firm resolution to start her new régimen the very next day. In the meantime, however, being a person of deplorably weak will, she was already halfway through doughnut number two.

Thought being mother to the deed, she reached for the doughnut again, only to pause as a pair of soup spoon-sized paws reached up to knead her thigh gently. She looked down into the desperately appealing eyes of an obviously starving waif of a Maine Coon cat who looked like he could take out a Pekingese with one whack of a paw…and then eat it in fifteen seconds flat, hair and all.

“No,” she told Dicey firmly. “If you want a doughnut, go catch your own, you rotten feline! Or at least go pester Chris for one. This one’s mine, calories and all!”

Dicey only kneaded her thigh harder, purring insistently. It sounded like a shuttle turbine that needed alignment, she thought, wondering how even a cat his size could produce such a volume.

“No!” she said even more firmly, shaking the doughnut at him for emphasis. “Mine, not yours!”

Dicey’s eyes followed the doughnut as millions of years of his ancestors’ eyes had followed small prey animals and birds, and the tip of his tail lashed. Then his purr stopped. That was all the warning Michelle had, and it wasn’t enough. With an agility that ought to have been impossible for a creature of his bulk, Dicey launched himself vertically. The paws which had been patting her thigh pleadingly struck with unerring accuracy, and he thumped back to the deck with a third of her remaining doughnut firmly in his possession.

“Come back here!” she said, starting to jump out of her chair. “I swear, I’m going to turn you into a vest, no matter what Chris says!”

Dicey paid her command no attention. He was too busy emulating a streak of light as he shot triumphantly out of her sleeping cabin and disappeared under one of her day cabin armchairs with his prize.

Michelle stopped halfway out of the chair and regarded the shard of doughnut she still retained. Then she shook her head, settled back, replaced the surviving fragment on its plate, and reached for her coffee instead.

Somehow it doesn’t strike me as a good omen when a damned cat’s tactics are better than the fleet CO’s, she thought. Probably something I should keep to myself. Wouldn’t want the troops to come to the same conclusion. Or for Beth to decide Dicey’d make a better admiral than I do!

She smiled slightly at the thought, but then the smile faded as she contemplated the report she’d just finished viewing.

The dispatch had been forwarded to her by Augustus Khumalo the same day it reached Spindle from Manticore. That made it the very latest news…and seventeen days out of date from the moment it arrived. By now Massimo Filareta had certainly reached the Manticore Binary System, and while Michelle had no doubt the defenders had handled the threat, especially with Honor Alexander-Harrington in tactical command, she really would have liked to know just how bad things had gotten first.

Well, that information’s in the pipeline on its way to you by now, too, girl. And it’s not like they didn’t send along enough other things for you to be worrying about in the meantime!

The good news was that she now had a much more complete explanation of just what Anton Zilwicki and Victor Cachat had brought home from Mesa. She also had a personal message from Honor, confirming her and Nimitz’s confidence that Simões was telling them the truth. The bad news was that it was easy enough to understand why a hell of a lot of Sollies were going to demand ironclad proof of such “preposterous” Manticoran claims, and there was still no way to independently confirm a single thing he’d said. And the worse news, as far as Michelle was concerned, was that all anyone could tell her about the “Mesan Alignment’s” possible intentions in her own command area was “We don’t have a clue in hell what they’re going to do next, but we don’t expect you to like it.”

Very useful that was.

She grimaced. Her first inclination was to start kicking in doors on Mesa and drag the Alignment out into the open by the scruff of its misbegotten neck. Unfortunately, she still didn’t have enough information to know whether or not that was justified or even where to look for the Alignment after she got to Mesa. And while her opinion had been steadily hardening towards the desirability of taking the war to the League, whether she was in a position to go after Mesa or not, she needed to know what had happened to Filareta, first. If he’d been smart enough to surrender the way Honor wanted him to, this whole war might be in a way towards being settled. In that case, invading and conquering a half dozen or so Solarian-claimed star systems might not be the very best way to help the peace process along.

Maybe not, but the chance of the League actually backing down, whatever happened to Filareta, is—what? Maybe one in a thousand? And even that’s assuming somebody shoots Kolokoltsov and puts someone remotely rational into his place!

She grimaced some more, remembering that old aphorism about asking for anything but time. In her own mind, she was certain the confrontation with the League was far from over. It was possible her own experiences with people like Josef Byng, Sandra Crandall, and Damián Dueñas were prejudicing her thinking. She admitted that, but the admission didn’t change her analysis. And if she was right, if more and worse hostilities were still to come, she hated the thought of not moving as quickly and decisively as possible while she had the opportunity to do so effectively unopposed.

Calm down, she told herself yet again. Unless something changes radically, you’re going to be effectively unopposed for a long time to come, given the tech imbalance. Hell, just look what Zavala did in Saltash!

Which was probably true, but—

But it doesn’t mean they’re not going to try to oppose you—just like they did in Saltash, damn it—and if they do, you’re going to have to kill a hell of a lot more Sollies to take your objectives. And that’s what sticks in your craw, isn’t it?

She sighed, took another sip of coffee, and commanded herself to stop fretting over things she couldn’t change.

Besides, you may not have heard anything about what happened to Filareta yet, but you are going to hear about it a hell of a lot more quickly than any of the Sollies in the vicinity! You’ll still have the advantage of a shorter communication loop, better intel, and the strategic initiative when the time comes, unless those bastards in Mesa figure out some way to bollix everything up again.

For that matter—

The soft buzz of her terminal interrupted her thought, and she brought the chair upright and reached for the accept key.

“Yes? What is it, Gwen?” she asked as Gervais Archer’s image appeared on the display.

“Sorry to disturb you this late, Milady,” Archer said, “but something’s come up that I think you may need to deal with.”

“What?” she asked, eyes narrowing.

“Another ship’s just arrived in-system from Mobius, Ma’am. It’s a Trifecta freighter. According to what her master told the port authorities, he’s here to see whether or not Mr. Ankenbrandt was able to find a supplier for that meat-buying contract.”

“But—?” she prompted when he paused.

“But her purser’s transmitted one of the code words Ankenbrandt supplied, Ma’am. I think she wants to talk to you.”

* * *

“You know,” Michelle said three hours later as she regarded the com images of her senior officers, “when we were discussing the situation in Mobius, I’d really hoped we’d have a little more time—like, say, maybe even a whole week—before we actually had to decide what we’re going to do about it. Silly of me, I suppose.”

“It does bring to mind the old cliché about raining and pouring, Ma’am,” Munming agreed.

“I suppose it could be argued you still don’t have t’ rush t’ a decision, Ma’am,” Oversteegen pointed out. “I mean, even if we’d really been the ones they were talkin’ to all along, this is still a good two or three months sooner than Ankenbrandt told us they were supposed t’ be callin’ us in.”

“I realize that, Michael. But this”—she tapped a hardcopy summary of her Alfredo-verified interview with Yolanda Summers, the new messenger from the Mobius Liberation Front—“puts a different complexion on things. It’s pretty clear the situation’s gone to crap faster than Ankenbrandt ever expected when he was sent out. In fact, that’s the entire reason this Summers turned up so soon, and I don’t blame the MLF leadership one bit for sending her out so quickly after Ankenbrandt. If even half of what’s in here is accurate, things are getting ready to drop straight into the crapper in that star system, and it’s going to be ugly when they do. Especially given this information that Lombroso’s expecting intervention battalions to arrive shortly. I’m going to assume that if he thinks they’re coming, the odds are they’re already in the pipeline, which means that even if we send someone immediately, Frontier Security’s likely to be in-system and boots-on-the-ground by the time anything of ours can get there.”

“With all due respect, Ma’am, that might be an argument against reacting quickly,” Rear Admiral Ruddick suggested. She looked at him, and he shrugged. “Assuming you’re right about that, we probably can’t get there in time to prevent a bloodbath in the first place. If that’s the case, all our ‘intrusion into the star system’—and that’s how we all know the League is going to describe it—will achieve is to pump extra hydrogen into our face-off with the Sollies without preventing whatever’s already happened to Ankenbrandt’s resistance movement by the time we do get there.”

“I understand your argument, Mickaël, but I’m not going to pussyfoot around the League in the name of expediency. People’ve been doing that for centuries, and look how well that’s worked out!” She shook her head. “No. If they want to go on playing this kind of game, this time they’re going to have to show me their cards or fold, because I am damned well going to call them on it! Having said that, though, I’m not just shooting from the hip, either. There’s a genuine method to my madness on this one.

“First, Mobius isn’t a member of the Solarian League, and it’s not an official protectorate, either. It doesn’t even have an officially sanctioned OFS presence like Saltash. Technically and legally, it’s an independent star nation, even if the Lombroso Administration is as corrupt and tyrannical as they come, not to mention being in Frontier Security’s hip pocket. So it’ll be a bit difficult for the Sollies to call us on intruding into their space. They’ll do it anyway, of course, but we’ll have plenty of opportunities to attack their claims.

“Second, even if their arrangement was really with someone else, the people in Mobius thinkit was with us, and that’s what everyone else is going to think. That hasn’t changed; the timetable’s simply been moved up a bit. And if we were going to respond by supporting them when they rebelled ‘on schedule,’ all the same arguments for doing that apply to getting in there now.

“And, third, I’m sick and fucking tired of watching Frontier Security and its bastard friends grind their heels into people’s faces. According to this”—she never raised her voice, but her expression could have been carved out of battle steel as the tapped the report again—“Lombroso’s resorted to mass arrests, ‘stringent interrogations,’ and shutting down all nongovernment channels of public communication. Not to mention the fact that a lot of his opponents have started mysteriously disappearing.” She shook her head, brown eyes grim. “I’m not going to find any more of those people in unmarked graves than I can help, Mickaël. Not when they went there thinking my Star Empire got them into Lombroso’s line of fire in the first place.”

There was silence for a moment. Then Aivars Terekhov cleared his throat.

“I think you have a point, Ma’am,” he said.

“Only a point?” Michelle smiled humorlessly.

“What I meant, Ma’am, is that whatever we do or don’t do, the perception is still going to be that we fomented the situation in Mobius. I happen to agree with you that keeping people from being killed by a corrupt government is worthwhile in its own right, but even from a purely pragmatic political viewpoint, I don’t see that we have any choice. If we had engineered it, we’d have a moral responsibility to the people who’re being arrested and ‘disappeared,’ and that’s the standard we’re going to be held to, whoever actually set this in motion. For that matter, even if it later comes out—even if we’re later able to prove—that we weren’t the ones stirring the pot, intervention on the resistance’s side is still going to work out in our favor with everyone except the Sollies.” He shrugged. “I’m not trying to be cold-blooded or calculating about it, but if the independent star systems out this way realize we’re willing to stand by them when they think they have our word, even when that means facing the Solarian League and even when we weren’t actually involved from the beginning, it can only improve their perception of us.”

“Somethin’ to that, Ma’am,” Oversteegen remarked. “Quite a lot, really.”

“I agree,” Munming said firmly.

“Good.” Michelle smiled a bit more naturally. “It’s always nice to know my loyal subordinates approve of what I’m going to do anyway.”

One or two of the others smiled back, and she returned her attention to Terekhov.

“I’m especially glad to hear you feel that way, Aivars. For a lot of reasons, I don’t want to look like I’m…overreacting, let’s say. At the same time, I think a big enough force to make a firm statement—and hopefully to provide any Solly Frontier Fleet commander with a sufficiently overpowering threat that he can back down without losing face and touching off another Saltash—is in order. And, given the delicate questions of interstellar policy and diplomacy involved, I think it would be as well for us to send along a senior officer with Foreign Office experience. Someone like you.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” If Terekhov was dismayed—or surprised—he showed no sign of it.

“I’m thinking that I’m going to send one division of your cruiser squadron, a destroyer squadron, and one of Admiral Culbertson’s CLACs. The carrier’ll have plenty of life-support to carry a battalion or so of Marines, as well. That should give you a ground combat component if you need one. I’m hoping you won’t, but better safe than sorry.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“I’ll want you underway within twelve hours,” she continued. “In the meantime, I’ll be leaving your other division and Scotty Tremaine’s division here in Montana, along with the rest of Culbertson’s CLACs, and the rest of our destroyers, all under Culbertson. I’ll leave him detailed instructions about what to do if any interesting little messages should happen to arrive from other resistance movements we didn’t realize we were supporting.”

“Pardon me, Ma’am,” Munming said, “but that seems to suggest you don’t plan on staying here yourself?”

“No, I don’t plan on that. And you won’t be staying either, Aploloniá. I’m taking your squadron, Michael’s battlecruisers, and Admiral Menadue’s carriers to join Admiral Bennington at Tillerman.”

More than one set of eyebrows rose this time, and she shrugged.

“By this time, Filareta’s either been blown to dustbunnies, surrendered, or run like hell,” she said. “When Admiral Khumalo and Baroness Medusa find out which it was, they’ll be sending dispatches both here and to Tillerman. I’d find out about it a bit sooner if I stayed here, but I’d still have to move to Tillerman—or waste time ordering Bennington to join us here—to concentrate our wall before we make any moves of our own. And I’ve come to the conclusion that if things have fallen still further into the crapper, we are going to be making some moves. Specifically, as I see it, our first step has to be to cover our backs before we do anything else. Which means taking out the Madras Sector.”

The assembled officers sat very still.

“If we’re going to find ourselves in a genuine war with the League, I’m not going to sit here and let them bring it to us,” she said flatly. “We know, because we’ve demonstrated it against the Havenites and they’ve demonstrated it against us, that the deep strike can be decisive…and that standing on the defensive surrenders the initiative to the other side. From everything we’ve seen out of the Sollies so far, they haven’t figured that out. Oh,” she waved one hand impatiently, “they went straight for Spindle and straight for the home system, but both of those moves were completely in line with their step-by-step approach; it just happened that we didn’t have a lot of depth. But I don’t think there’s much doubt that they’ll be thinking about staging any additional operations against the Quadrant out of Madras or one of the other sectors out this way. They almost have to, in a lot of ways, because their logistics are so short-legged. They don’t have a fleet train organization with the kind of strategic mobility and flexibility we and the Havenites have developed, and I doubt there’s a single Battle Fleet admiral who has the mental flexibility to work around that. Given time, they’ll develop it or find someone—probably from Frontier Fleet—who does have it, but it’s going to take time for that to happen. And that’s why we’re not going to stand on the defensive. If these idiots persist in dancing to Mesa’s piping, then we’re going to take the war to them. I want to eliminate their basing infrastructure out here. them fully on the defensive—psychologically, as well as strategically—from the get-go. That means punching out every sector capital behind us as we advance, so if we do end up pulling the trigger, we’re going into the Meyers System hard and fast and in sufficient strength that nobody’s going to even think about shooting back. I want that system taken with as close to zero bloodshed as humanly possible, and after that, we’re going to punch out the rest of the sector.”