Storm From the Shadows

Chapter Forty-Three

Aldona Anisimovna reclined in a comfortable chair, eyes closed, while haunting strains of music filled the small, luxuriously appointed compartment. She didn't simply listen to the music; she absorbed it, as if all the skin on her body were one enormous receptor.

It was odd, a corner of her mind reflected dreamily. Of all the composers in the entire galaxy, it was a Manticoran who was her favorite. A Sphinxian, in fact. She'd never really understood why Hammerwell's skeins of melody spoke to her so strongly, yet they did, and there were times she needed that. Needed to let herself simply float upon the music, to empty herself of thoughts, of schemes and plans.

Of guilt.

Don't be silly, the part of her which hadn't been filled with woodwinds and the subtle interplay of brasses and strings scolded yet again. You're here as part of a strategy to provoke a war that's going to kill millions—probably billions—and you're agonizing over killing forty thousand people? You're coming a little late to that particular party, aren't you, Aldona? It certainly didn't seem to bother you very much during the planning stages.

No, it hadn't. But that had been when she was considering it as an abstract strategy, part of a carefully crafted piece of superlative manipulation, of the grand design which was going to have the greatest, most powerful political entity in the history of mankind dancing to the Mesan Alignment's piping. From that perspective, it had been . . . exciting. Enthralling. The sheer intoxication of playing the Great Game at such stratospheric heights and for such unimaginable stakes was like some powerful drug. There was a compulsion to it, a sense of reaching out near-godlike hands to take the entire universe by the throat and force it to do her bidding.

No wonder Albrecht is so fascinated with ancient mythology, she thought. I know he says it's to remind him of how many blunders all those ancient gods made because they were so convinced of their own power and so jealous of their own prerogatives. So petty and capricious. So unwilling to work together. Given what we're trying to accomplish, I suppose he's right, we really do need to remember the dangers of convincing ourselves that we're gods. I'm sure all of that's true . . . but it's really about Prometheus for him. About daring to steal the forbidden fire, to raise his hand—our hand—against all the established power of the galaxy and make it change.

Seen on that scale, the men, women, and children who had died aboard Giselle were literally insignificant. Such a small casualty total would be lost to the simple rounding process when the statisticians began counting up the cost of the Alignment's magnificent vision.

But that would only be after the Alignment had won, and this was now. This was when those deaths were fresh and immediate . . . and hers. Not a consequence of one of her strategies at a dozen removes, but deaths which she had personally ordered, personally contrived. It wasn't a Nordbrandt being provided with weapons through deniable cutouts and conduits. It was Aldona Anisimovna personally giving the order.

She'd get over it. She already knew that, although a part of her wanted to pretend she didn't. Pretend there truly was some inner core of innocence that would resist the next time something like this came along. But she knew herself too well to fool herself for long, and so she didn't even try. She simply sat back in her chair aboard the palatially furnished, streak drive-equipped "yacht" which had delivered her to New Tuscany, and let the music fill her.

"This just keeps getting better and better," Lorcan Verrochio said moodily.

He sat with his elbows on the balcony table, looking out across Pine Mountain. A half-drained beer stein sat in front of him, accompanied by the remnants of a Reuben sandwich, an order of fries, and a tossed salad. Hongbo Junyan had just arrived, but he'd already eaten lunch, and he sat nursing a glass of iced tea.

"It's not exactly as if this should be coming as a great surprise, Lorcan," the vice-commissioner pointed out. "Something like this happening at a . . . convenient moment's been an inherent underpinning of everything we've done so far."

Verrochio gave him a moderately dirty look, but Hongbo only shrugged. Discussing something like this on an open balcony, without the protection of the anti-snooping systems installed in Verrochio's office, might constitute a moderate security risk. Unless the wheels came off, though, that wouldn't matter; and if the wheels did come off, there was already so much incriminating crap lying around in various files for any moderately competent investigator to dig up that any recordings of this conversation weren't going to matter.

Verrochio continued to eye him disapprovingly for several seconds, then seemed to think better of it himself, and reached for his beer. He took another healthy swallow, set the stein back on the table, and regarded Hongbo a touch less sourly.

"How much of this exploding freighter do you think is real?" he asked.

"About as much as you do," Hongbo returned with a humorless grin.

"That's what I thought you thought." Verrochio grimaced. "You know, this all seemed like a much better idea when this kind of crap was still somewhere off in the future."

"Whatever happens from here on out, our hands are clean." Hongbo gestured with his glass of tea. "Byng is off safely in someone else's hands, and all we have to do at this point is respond to whatever requests he makes. After all, he's the man on the scene now, isn't he? And he's a full admiral in Battle Fleet, as well. Given his attitude, I don't think Anisimovna will find it particularly difficult to manipulate him into committing the actions and making the reinforcement requests she wants. All we have to do is give him what he asks for, then stand back while the Manties take the fall."

"So you think it's Anisimovna out in New Tuscany?"

"No one's specifically said so," Hongbo admitted, "but I imagine it is. She certainly seemed more than enough hands-on where Monica was concerned, and if I were looking for someone to send, I'd probably pick someone who was reasonably familiar with the Cluster."

"Your friend Ottweiler hasn't said one way or the other?"

"You know him as well as I do, Lorcan," Hongbo said mildly, if not entirely accurately. "And I already said no one has specifically confirmed that she's handling the other end of this. I'd just be surprised if she wasn't. Although I suppose it could be Bardasano."

"And aren't they a pair," Verrochio muttered, then managed a rather off-center smile. "They played me like a violin before Monica. I guess I should go ahead and admit that much. So if one of them—or even both of them, God help us all!—is the other end of this operation, I imagine you're right about Byng's doing whatever they want him to. Which means we ought to be thinking about what we're likely to need to do, I guess."

"I've already been thinking about that, as a matter of fact," Hongbo said, without mentioning the fact that a lot of his thoughts on the subject had centered around Valery Ottweiler's directives. "It seems to me that the most reasonable thing for us to do, from all perspectives, is to pass this message along to McIntosh for Admiral Crandall's information. She's not remotely under your command, of course, but given the fact that Admiral Byng has already headed off for New Tuscany—on his own authority, of course, although as the local Frontier Security governor you obviously agreed that we ought to defer to his judgment—it would be only prudent and courteous of you to inform another Battle Fleet officer who just happens to be in the vicinity about his movements and the continuing deterioration of Manticoran-New Tuscan relations."

"And what do you think she'll do when we pass along this little tidbit?"

"That depends on her, I suppose," Hongbo said. And on what herinstructions from Manpower might be, he very carefully did not say out loud. "It's remotely possible she might head off immediately for New Tuscany herself, although I don't really see it as at all likely. You want my best guess?"

"That's the reason I asked the question," Verrochio said just a bit sarcastically.

"Well, I think her most likely course of action would be to move her command from McIntosh to Meyers. We don't have the facilities to support her task force here, but we're no worse off in that regard than McIntosh is, and the whole reason for her deployment is supposed to be a test of the Navy's ability to sustain itself without local support. And this is our administrative hub for the area, so she could rely on the best communications here. This is where any fresh messages from Byng would be directed, and it's where Admiral Nelson is supposed to hold the rest of Byng's battlecruisers. Bearing all of that in mind, I can't really see any other logical location for her."

"Wonderful." Verrochio drank some more beer, then twitched his shoulders. "I'm beginning to feel decidedly excess to requirements, but I suppose you're right. Go ahead and have the communications center relay the information to her."

"Any last-minute thoughts, anyone?" Michelle Henke asked quietly, looking around the cool, quiet, dimly lit expanse of HMS Artemis' flag deck. "Any last-minute suggestions?"

Cynthia Lecter did her own once-over examination of the rest of the staff, one eyebrow raised, then turned back to Michelle and shook her head.

"No, Ma'am," she said for all of them, and Michelle nodded.

She hadn't really expected any, although that hadn't kept her from spending last night fretting and worrying on her own. She'd often wondered how Honor could appear so calm just before some enormously important operation kicked off. Michelle had done her own worrying before each of Eighth Fleet's rear-area attacks, but she'd always been one of the subordinate commanders. And that, she realized now, was another of the reasons she'd resisted playing the patronage game to reach flag rank sooner. Her hatred for that sort of nepotism really had been the major component of her resistance, but she knew now that there'd been another factor, as well. One that was almost—but not quite—its own form of cowardice.

Michelle Henke admired Honor Harrington enormously, but she wasn't Honor, and she knew it. She knew hers was in many ways a less complex personality, and she'd never been plagued by the soul-searching that was so much a part of Honor. When it came down to it, she'd always been more . . . direct. More black-and-white, less inclined to empathize with an enemy or agonize over the consequences to an enemy. She was comfortable with the notion of "us" and "them," and she didn't like ambiguities that could cloud and confuse her decisions.

As a captain, or even a junior flag officer, that had worked just fine for her. She'd been concerned only with the part her ship or her squadron was supposed to play in an operation planned by, coordinated by, and the ultimate responsibility of someone else. But that wasn't true this time. No, this time that ultimate responsibility was hers and hers alone, and this time, despite the relatively small size of the forces involved, the stakes were probably—no, certainly—as high as any for which Honor had ever played.

Be honest, girl, she told herself tartly. That's what's really scaring the crap out of you. You're not afraid of getting killed. Well, not terrified of it, at any rate. What you're really afraid of is that you personally—you, Michelle Henke, not just the Royal Navy—are going to screw this one up. That this isn't really the right job for a woman who'd rather kill them all and let God sort them out, no matter how much an asshole like Byng deserves it. That the Star Kingdom is going to find itself fighting for its life against the Solarian League because the wrong woman was in the wrong spot and you screwed the pooch.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm scared of, she replied to herself,and no wonder! I signed on to chase pirates, to fight battles, to defend my star nation. I never expected to have something like this dumped on my shoulders!

Well, you've got it now, the first voice told her, even more tartly. Last time I looked, it came with that black beret sitting on your head. So unless you want to admit this is all to much for itty-bitty you and give the nice hat back, I guess all you can really do is suck it up and get to it. And while you're at it, let's at least try to keep the body count within limits, shall we?

"Well, in that case, seeing as how no one seems to have spotted any t's we've left uncrossed or any i's we've left undotted," the Countess of Gold Peak said calmly, "I suppose we'd best be about it."

For the first time in his naval career, Josef Byng made his appearance on his flag bridge without his uniform tunic. He felt acutely out of place in just his shirt sleeves, but that thought was distant and unimportant as he came through the flag deck door at something just short of a run and slid to a halt, staring at the master plot.

Karlotte Thimár and Ingeborg Aberu were bent over the more detailed information CIC was channeling to the operations officer's console. The rest of Byng's staff was also present, aside from Captain Vladislava Jenkins, his logistics officer. Jenkins was aboard SLNSResourceful, where she'd gone to confer with Captain Sharon Yang about some problems with the battlecruiser's spares.

"What do we have on them?" he asked, eyes locked to the icons sweeping inward from the system's hyper limit.

"Not very much yet, Sir," Aberu acknowledged more than a bit unhappily, straightening and turning to face him. "All we really know is that we've got nineteen point sources. It looks like five of them are considerably smaller than the others—probably destroyers or light cruisers. We're tracking their impeller signatures now, Sir, and I'm assuming that the larger contacts are probably battlecruisers. Under the circumstances, I think we have to assume they're Manties."

Byng nodded almost absently, but Aberu wasn't quite through. She cleared her throat quietly to attract his attention.

"Their current velocity relative to the primary is approximately six thousand KPS, Sir," she said when she knew she had his attention. "But their acceleration is right on six KPS squared."

"What was that acceleration?" he asked sharply.

"Six KPS squared, Sir," Aberu said even more unhappily. "That's one-point-three KPS more than they showed us at Monica. Call it a twenty-eight percent difference."

"They must be running at maximum military power, Sir," Thimár said, and Byng turned sharply to look at her. "That's over six hundred gravities," the chief of staff continued. "They've got to be redlining their compensators to crank that much accel!"

Byng only looked at her for several seconds, then he nodded. She had to be right. He couldn't think of any reason for the Manties to have gone to their maximum possible acceleration, with the attendant risk of someone's suffering compensator failure and the death of every man and woman aboard the ship involved. But a Solarian ship of that tonnage would have a maximum acceleration of less than four hundred and fifty gravities. For that matter, his own ships' maximum acceleration was less than four hundred and ninety gravities, despite the fact that they were less than half as massive. And if the Manties hadn't maxed out their compensators, if they had still more acceleration in reserve . . .

The ghost of that insufferable little lieutenant's ridiculous memos flickered through the back of his mind for just an instant, but he shook it off irritably to concentrate on the concrete details that mattered.

"Well, it seems they're a little faster than we thought," he observed as calmly as possible, and returned his attention to Aberu. "And what travel agenda do you project for our speedy friends, Ingeborg?"

"On their current heading and at that acceleration rate, assuming a zero-zero intercept with New Tuscany, they'll be here in about two hours and fifty-five minutes, Sir. That's about all we've got."

"I see." Byng nodded again, commanding his expression to be merely thoughtful, then glanced at his communications officer.

"How long until we could hear something from them, Willard?"

"They made translation just over six minutes ago, Sir," Captain MaCuill replied. "Current range is ten-point-six light-minutes, so it's going to be another three or four minutes, minimum."

"I see."

Byng folded his hands behind him and made himself take a deep, calming breath. Like Aberu, there wasn't much question in his mind as to who those icons belonged to, although he couldn't imagine what they were doing here this quickly. And, he admitted very privately, the acceleration they were displaying was . . . worrisome. It implied that they truly could have other surprises in store, and he didn't care for that possibility at all.

Especially, a tiny voice whispered,not if it gives Mizawa any more ammunition.

He shoved that thought aside, although it wasn't as easy as he would have liked it to be, and refocused his attention on the problem at hand. Even if they were Manties, there was no reason for all this unseemly haste on his own part, he told himself severely, suffused by a sense of chagrin as he realized just how thoroughly his rush to the bridge had underscored his own tension.

"Have someone drop by my quarters and collect my tunic from my steward, please, Karlotte." He made his voice come out drolly, as if amused by his own precipitousness, and he gave the chief of staff a smile. "If we've got a few minutes before we can talk to them anyway, I suppose I should be certain I'm properly dressed for the occasion."

"Oh, shit," Maxime Vézien said with soft, heartfelt intensity as he stared at Nicholas Pélisard's com image. He'd anticipated a forceful reaction out of Manticore, but he'd never expected a force the size of the one which had just been detected. Nor had anyone in New Tuscany expected that it could possibly arrive so promptly.

"How the hell did they get here so quickly?" Alesta Cardot demanded. "For that matter, why are they here at all?It's been barely three weeks, and no one's left the system except a couple of merchantships, not dispatch boats. So how could they even know anything happened here?"

Vézien's eyes slipped to the foreign minister's quadrant of the conference call display as she put his own question into words. Then he looked back at Pélisard.

"That's an excellent question, Nicholas," he pointed out. "Does anyone at the War Ministry have any suggestions about that?"

Pélisard's face tightened. He started to answer quickly, defensively—and angrily, Vézien suspected. But then he stopped and visibly got a grip on himself.

"Judging by the elapsed time," he said flatly, "their Commodore Chatterjee must have deployed at least one more ship. Obviously, we didn't pick up an extra hyper footprint when they translated into normal-space, or we would have mentioned it by now. As you may recall, I've been saying for some time that our system arrays need upgrading."

He paused for just an instant, and Vézien managed not to grimace. He supposed that a certain degree of ass-covering was inevitable, even at a moment like this one, and so he simply nodded in acknowledgment of Pélisard's point, and the Minister of War continued.

"Having said that, I think it's the only explanation. They know exactly what happened, and they must have turned this task force around from Spindle the instant they found out."

Which, Maxime Vézien reflected unhappily, doesn't suggest they're here just to say hello. You don't kick a force this size loose that quickly unless you're ready to go to the mat. And if that's the way the Manties are thinking . . .

His eyes flicked to Damien Dusserre's quadrant of the display. The Security Minister hadn't said a single word, but Vézien knew exactly what he was thinking.

And he's right, the Prime Minister thought. It's a damned good thing we still haven't gotten around to faking up that "missile trace" for Byng's consumption. The Manties are going to be unhappy enough with us already, but if they decide we're that deeply in bed with the Sollies . . .

"I think you're probably right about that," he said out loud, returning his attention to Pélisard. "And I also think that whatever the Manties may have to say to the Sollies, we're staying out of it. I want you to immediately stand down every military unit we have, Nicholas. Do it on my authority, and do it now. I'll get the official presidential directive to you from Alain ASAP, but let's not do anything to even suggest to the Manties that they should considerus a target."

Pélisard nodded, his expression an inextricable mix of agreement, chagrin, anger, fear, and humiliation at the helplessness of his own utterly outclassed ships and personnel in the face of such an impending clash of titans.

"And while Nicholas is doing that, Alesta," Vézien continued, turning to the Foreign Minister, "I think you'd better be thinking about the best possible way for us to reassure the Manties that all we want to do is get to the bottom of what happened here. And how to make it very, very clear to them that we didn't have one damned thing to do with that idiot Byng's decision to open fire!"

"What do we have, Dominica?" Michelle asked. "Anything?"

"As a matter of fact, Ma'am, we do," Commander Adenauer replied with a smile, and twitched her head at the lieutenant commander sitting at the console beside hers. "Max here is actually picking up the platforms Commander Kaplan left behind."

"Outstanding." Michelle smiled back at the operations officer, then turned to Maxwell Tersteeg. "So tell me what you know, Max," she said.

"Yes, Ma'am."

The EWO input a string of commands, and a detailed schematic of the New Tuscany System's inner planets and the space about them appeared on the master plot. The schematic swelled dramatically as he zoomed in on the planet of New Tuscany itself. The planet's two moons dominated the space about it, but that same volume was dotted with the icons of merchant ships in parking orbits, industrial shuttles plying back and forth between orbiting space stations, and the bright icons of warships, color-coded by class and all circled by the blood-red rings that indicated hostiles.

"Basically, Ma'am," Tersteeg continued, "there's been no change. We have these three destroyers here"—a green sighting ring enclosed three of the icons—"that have shifted orbits. They're about eleven hundred klicks outside and well ahead of the rest of their formation. It looks like they were probably moved out towards where Commodore Chatterjee's ships were destroyed, maybe for search-and-rescue. Aside from that, they haven't moved as far as I can tell."

"Do you have Byng's flagship IDed?"

"Yes, Ma'am. I got a good read on her emissions signature at Monica. Unless he's shifted his flag to another ship, this is her, right here."

A green carat indicated the gold-edged orange icon of a battlecruiser. There was a total of three matching symbols, each indicating an identified battlecruiser flagship, but Tersteeg's confidence that he'd picked out the right one was obvious.

"Good." Michelle nodded. "What about the status of their impellers?"

"Hard to be absolutely certain about that, Ma'am," Tersteeg admitted. "Commander Kaplan didn't want to get the platforms too close when she left them behind, so we're a bit far out for definitive readings. From what I can see, though, they aren't hot."

"Good," Michelle repeated, and patted him on the shoulder. "Keep me advised of any changes."

"Of course, Ma'am."

Michelle nodded and walked slowly across to her own command chair and settled into it. Naomi Kaplan's decision to leave the stealthy Ghost Rider platforms behind had just been amply justified, although Michelle had felt a certain undeniable concern over that decision when she'd first learned of it. Ghost Rider was one of the RMN's greatest advantages, and the thought of the Solarian League getting its hands on one of the platforms and figuring out how to reverse-engineer the technology hadn't been particularly comforting. But even then, she'd felt Kaplan's decision had been the right one. They were designed with every self-destruct device and security fail-safe R&D could figure out how to build into them, which probably meant the Navy in general, and one Michelle Henke in particular, worried more than they had to about their being compromised by simple capture, and even if that hadn't been true, the things had been designed to be used. Right off the top of her head, Michelle hadn't been able to think of a more important place to have used them, and the chances of anyone's managing to localize one of them, far less snag it for study without its on-board suicide charge destroying it first, had been minuscule. So any concern she had felt had been far too small a thing to prevent her from firmly endorsing Kaplan's decision in her own pre-departure dispatches to the Admiralty.

And as it happened, that decision was turning out to have been just as good as Michelle had thought it was. In powered-down passive mode, the way Kaplan had left them, their endurance had been good for far longer than the twenty-three T-days since the destruction of Commodore Chatterjee's destroyers. Now, in response to the properly authenticated command codes, they were fully awake once more, faithfully reporting everything they'd seen over those three T-weeks via grav-pulse, which amounted to real-time reporting at this range.

So I know where you are, Admiral Byng, she thought coldly. That's nice. If I have to kill people anyway, I'd like to make sure the idiot asshole responsible for it is on my little list when I do.

"What do you make of it, Ma'am?" Gladys Molyneux asked very quietly, and Abigail Hearns glanced at her. The junior-grade lieutenant's battle station was missile-defense, which put her at Abigail's elbow. Despite the quiet, waiting hush of Tristram's bridge, Abigail doubted anyone could possibly have overheard the nervous question.

"It's a little too early to be making anything of it, Gladys," she replied, equally quietly but with a slight smile. She saw confidence seeping back into Molyneux as the smile registered, then shook her head.

"The one thing I can tell you," she continued, "is that if those people over there"—a flick of her head indicated the icons of the orbiting Solarian battlecruisers—"have even a clue about what this task force can do, then they're a lot more nervous than we are right this moment."

She smiled again, and this time it was a cold, cruel smile.

Mother Church says vengeance is the Tester's, she reminded herself, and I believe that. But I also believe He can use anyone He wants as the instrumentof His vengeance. And right this minute, I'm not feeling very forgiving, Gladys.

"Sir, Captain Mizawa would like to speak to you."

Josef Byng paused in the act of slipping into the tunic someone had fetched for him and looked at the bridge communications rating who'd spoken. He managed not to scowl, although it wasn't easy.

"Did the Captain say why?" he asked, sliding the tunic the rest of the way on and sealing it.

"No, Sir," the rating replied. His careful tone only emphasized the fact that everyone aboardJean Bart knew all about the hostility between Byng and his flag captain.

"Very well." Byng tried to keep his own voice coolly professional as he acknowledged the rating's message, then took the two steps to his command chair. Rather than seat himself, he swiveled the com display around to face him and punched the acceptance key.

"Captain Mizawa," he said as the Frontier Fleet officer's face appeared.

"Admiral," Mizawa replied.

"I'm just a trifle busy at the moment, Captain," Byng said as pleasantly as he could. "What can I do for you?"

"Sir, I don't know if CIC has reported it to you, but Commander Zeiss is picking up a sudden cascade of gravitic pulses."

"Gravitic pulses?" Byng repeated just a bit blankly.

"Sir, according to the latest intelligence reports, the Manties have an effective FTL communications ability over relatively short ranges. One that's based on grav pulses."

"I'm aware of that fact, Captain." A hint of frost crept into Byng's tone in response to the patience edging Mizawa's voice, as if the Frontier Fleet officer were trying to explain Newtonian physics to a village idiot. Especially since those never-to-be-sufficiently-damned memos had touched upon the same point.

Now the bastard's going to pretend that he personally warned me all about it, isn't he? the admiral thought bitterly.

"Yes, Sir. I'm sure you are," the flag captain agreed. "But what concerns me are the reports that they've built the same capability into their reconnaissance drones. I think that's what Commander Zeiss is picking up."

"Reconnaissance drones," Byng repeated carefully.

"Yes, Sir. I think the Manty destroyers probably deployed them on their way in. Now these new Manties have tapped into them, and they're receiving real-time reconnaissance reports on us."

"I see."

Byng couldn't quite keep his incredulity out of his expression, although he managed to keep it out of his voice. But really! He was willing to concede that the Manties had at least some sort of ship-to-ship FTL communications ability—ONI had tentatively confirmed that much—but to build the same capability into something the size of a recon drone? Not even that stupid lieutenant of Mizawa's had suggested that! Or, at least, Byng didn't think he had, and he suddenly found himself wondering if perhaps he ought to have read those memos for himself rather than simply accepting Thimár's summary of their content.

He brushed that thought firmly aside. There'd be time enough to worry about it later; right now he needed to concentrate on the matter at hand, and he tried—really tried—to consider Mizawa's preposterous notion dispassionately. But no matter how hard he tried, it remained just that: preposterous.

R&D was beginning to experiment with the same FTL technology back home, and unlike many of his fellows, Byng had made it a point to follow at least the unclassified aspects of their efforts. According to them, just the power storage any grav-pulse installation would have required would have been impossible to fit into any drone-sized platform. And that completely ignored the fact that actually generating the pulse in the first place took the equivalent of an all-up impeller node, many times the size of any recon drone ever built!

"I appreciate the warning, Captain," he said after a few moments, choosing his words with some care as he spoke for the benefit of the flag bridge recorders, "but I strongly suspect that the reports about faster-than-light recon drone transmissions have . . . grown in the telling, let's say. As you may know, our own research people"—by which, of course, he meant Battle Fleet's researchers—"have been looking into this alleged capability of the Manties. Our own R and D indicates that it probably is possible, at least on the level of gross communication, but the sort of bandwidth which would be required for any useful reports from something like a recon drone is highly unlikely. And even if it were possible, the energy budget and the sheer mass of the hardware would almost certainly limit it to something the size of a starship."

"Sir, I haven't had access to the reports you have on the research side," Mizawa said, "but I have had access to other reports, including . . . Commodore Thurgood's. According to them, the Manties do have that capability."

White-hot anger flashed through Byng at Mizawa's obvious reference to his lieutenant's memos. He started to snap back quickly, but then he made himself pause. This had to be handled cautiously, and his chose his words with care.

"I'm familiar with the reports to which you refer, Captain." He allowed his voice to get a bit crisper, a bit more brisk. "I'm convinced that they're exaggerated, at the very least."

He and his flag captain locked eyes on the com, and he saw Mizawa's jaw muscles tighten briefly. Then the captain's nostrils flared, and he shook his head.

"I'm aware that many people feel those reports are exaggerated, Sir," he said then. "As a matter of fact, that was my own opinion before we were ordered to New Tuscany. But that was my opinion where the acceleration rates ascribed to Manty warships were concerned, as well." He looked at Byng levelly, challenging the admiral, but Byng said nothing, and the captain continued. "Whether the reports about their FTL capability are exaggerated or not, Sir, something is producing the pulses Commander Zeiss is picking up, and whatever it is, it's stealthy enough that we can't find it, even with the pulses giving us an exact bearing to it. To me, that spells a very capable reconnaissance platform."

"Your concerns are noted, Captain. Thank you for calling them to my attention. Now, if you'll excuse me, I believe I'm needed elsewhere. Byng, out."

The admiral cut the circuit before his temper betrayed him into giving Mizawa the tongue-lashing his irritating insistence deserved. Reconnaissance drones! Granted, the Manties' acceleration rates were a little higher than Intelligence had believed. And granted that they might have a few other minor tricks up their sleeves, but even so—! The Solarian League was the most technically advanced star nation in the history of mankind. Did Mizawa honestly believe that a pinhead-sized "star kingdom" consisting of only a single star system up until only a very few years before could produce an R&D establishment that could actually outperform the League's? God only knew what the man was going to come up with to worry about next! Invasions of brain-devouring hordes from Andromeda, perhaps? Or possibly a deadly revolt by the galaxy's cocker spaniels, intent on devouring their masters one toe at a time?

Byng grimaced at his own thought, but, really, what else could he expect out of a Frontier Fleet captain? Especially one who already knew he'd made a mortal enemy of a Battle Fleet admiral? In fact, Mizawa probably didn't believe his own doom-saying predictions, but whether he believed them or not was really beside the point, in many ways, wasn't it? The captain was going to do anything he could at this point—including predicting disaster—to rattle Byng into mishandling the situation. Making the admiral look bad would be one of the most effective ways of making the captain look good, after all! Unfortunately for Mizawa, Byng knew all about playing that game.

"You know, Sir," Aberu spoke slowly, as if she didn't much care for what she heard herself saying, "it's just possible Mizawa is onto something."

"Good God, Ingeborg!" Byng looked at her in disbelief. "Are you going to climb onto the same paranoid bandwagon?"

"No, Sir," Aberu said quickly. "But CIC's relayed the same grav-pulse detection to me." A tip of her head indicated her console. "I agree with you that the idea of putting some kind of FTL transmitter into something the size of a drone is ridiculous, but we are picking up pulses from something, and we can't seem to find whatever it is, however hard we look for it. That's what I meant when I said Mizawa might be onto something."

"Well, whatever it is, it isn't any 'reconnaissance drone,' " Byng retorted testily. "Even assuming for the moment that they'd managed to come up with a way to meet the energy requirements, and then that they'd managed to develop something that could produce a worthwhile bandwidth, and then that they'd managed to squeeze it down into something that could be crammed into a drone's body, where the hell would the things have come from? Those Manty destroyers wouldn't have had any need to deploy them this close to us, and they sure as hell didn't have time to deploy any after we opened fire on them! And these Manties have been in-system for less than ten minutes! Whatever kind of transmitter technology they might have, they couldn't possibly have gotten reconnaissance drones this close to us this quickly. Not without producing some kind of FTL drive technology, as well, anyway, and I'd like to know what kind of stealth systems could hide that kind of energy signature at this short a range!"

"No, Sir. Of course not," Aberu said, and returned her attention to her own station.

"They should be receiving your initial transmission just about now, Ma'am," Commander Edwards told Michelle.

"Thank you, Bill," she replied, looking up from a quiet conversation with Lecter and Adenauer. She smiled at the com officer, then returned her attention to the chief of staff and ops officer.

"Uh, Admiral, we've . . . received a burst transmission from the bogeys. It's addressed to you, Sir."

"By name?" Byng asked.

"Yes, Sir." Captain MaCuill confirmed.

The communications officer didn't sound any happier than Byng felt, and the admiral glanced across at Thimár . . . whose expression was as troubled as his own. There was no way the Manticorans could possibly know he was in New Tuscany. For that matter, there was no way they could know any Solarian unit was in New Tuscany. Unless . . .

A sudden chill touched his heart as the logic chain Nicholas Pélisard had already followed flowed through his own brain.

There was only one way the Manties could have put together a force this size and sent it to New Tuscany this soon after the destruction of their destroyers, especially a force which knew to ask specifically for him when it arrived. There hadn't been three Manty ships that day; there'd been four. That was the only possible explanation. There'd been just enough time for another ship, probably another destroyer, to make the trip to their central base at Spindle and for this force to have been dispatched to New Tuscany in response. Even so, the Manty authorities must have made the decision within hours of receiving their surviving unit's report, and for anyone accustomed to the glacial pace with which the Solarian League formulated policy, that speed of decision was almost as frightening as anything else.

And maybe Mizawa and Ingeborg have a point after all, he thought icily. I still don't see how anybody could have squeezed something like that into a reconnaissance drone. It just doesn't seem possible . . . unless they're using some sort of dispersed architecture? Multiple platforms, each containing only a small portion of the total system? Could that be it? But even if it is, how the hell are they poweringthe things?

His mind raced, trying to consider the possibilities, but it didn't really matter how they'd done it. What mattered was that they actually could have done it, in which case any drones out there wouldn't have been deployed by these newcomers. No, they would have been there all along. In fact, they'd have been deployed by Commodore Chatterjee on his way in. And if they had a standard light-speed communications link as a backup for their FTL systems, then they could have been reporting every single thing that happened via laser to that fourth ship, hiding out there in the dark, without anyone in-system suspecting or detecting a thing. Which would mean the Manties knew precisely what had happened three weeks ago. . . .

"Well, Willard," he told MaCuill, keeping his tone as light as possible, "I suppose I'd better view the message, hadn't I?"

This time he did seat himself in his command chair. He let it adjust comfortably under him, then nodded to MaCuill.

"Go ahead, Willard."

"Yes, Sir."

The communications officer pressed a button, and a face appeared on Byng's display. It was a face he'd seen before, and his lips tightened as he recognized Vice Admiral Gold Peak from their exchange at Monica.

"Good morning, Admiral Byng," she said coldly from his display. "I'm sure you remember me, but for the official record, I am Vice Admiral Gold Peak, Royal Manticoran Navy, commanding officer Tenth Fleet, and I am here in response to your unprovoked attack upon units of the Royal Navy in this star system on October twenty-fifth. Specifically, I am referring to your destruction of the destroyers Roland, Lancelot, and Galahad, under the overall command of Commodore Ray Chatterjee, which had been sent to New Tuscany for the express purpose of conveying a diplomatic note from my Queen's government to that of New Tuscany. We have detailed sensor records of the event. As such, Admiral, we know our vessels were not even at battle readiness. Their impeller wedges were down, their side walls were inactive, and their broadside weapons had not been cleared away. In short, they posed absolutely no threat whatsoever to your command, and their personnel weren't even in skinsuits, at the moment you cold-bloodedly opened fire on them and completely destroyed them.

"This, as I'm sure you must be aware, constitutes not merely a cowardly act of murder, but also an act of war."

That cold, precise voice paused, and Byng felt his facial muscles congeal. If they truly did have sensor records showing what Gold Peak claimed, then they'd be able to make a damnably good argument—at least to anyone who hadn't been here, who didn't have the experience to set events into a proper context—that his response had been . . . unjustified. But for any so-called flag officer of a pissant little neobarb navy to accuse the Solarian League Navy of committing an act of war—!

"Neither Prime Minister Alquezar nor Governor General Medusa desire additional bloodshed," Gold Peak continued. "However, they would be derelict in their duties and in their responsibilities to my Queen if they did not take the strongest measures to clearly establish responsibility for these actions, and if they did not demand accountability of those who are, in fact, responsible for them. Accordingly, I am instructed to require you to stand down your vessels. I am not demanding their permanent surrender to the Royal Manticoran Navy. I am, however, informing you that you will stand them down; you will make arrangements with the New Tuscan government to transfer all but a skeleton anchor watch of your personnel to the surface of the planet; you will stand by to be boarded by parties of Royal Marines and Royal Navy personnel, who will take temporary possession of your vessels and custody of your tactical data; and you will not delete any tactical information relevant to this incident from your computers. Your vessels will remain in this star system, under Manticoran control, until a Manticoran board of inquiry has determined precisely what happened here and who bears the responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of Manticoran personnel."

Despite himself, Byng felt his eyes flaring impossibly wide in disbelief as Gold Peak rolled out that litany of arrogant, intolerable demands.

"Special Minister Bernardus Van Dort is here aboard my flagship as the direct representative of the the Talbott Quadrant's Prime Minister, Governor, and Cabinet. He will present a formal note to you, recapitulating the points I've just made. He will also present a similar note to the New Tuscan government, informing them that the Star Empire of Manticore requires its cooperation in this investigation, that none of our requirements are negotiable, and that, should New Tuscany prove wholly or partially responsible for what happened here, it, too, will be held to account by the Star Empire."

She paused once more, her eyes as unyielding as her face, and her voice was harder still when she continued.

"I will reach New Tuscany orbit approximately one hour and thirty-five minutes after your receipt of this message. I require a response from you, accepting my requirements, within the half-hour. Should you choose to reject my government's requirements, I am authorized to use deadly force to compel you to change your mind. I have no more desire to kill Solarian personnel than anyone else, Admiral Byng, but Manticoran personnel have already been killed in this star system. I will not hesitate, should you choose to resist, to employ whatever force is necessary and inflict whatever casualties are required to compel your compliance. I will expect to hear from you within thirty standard minutes of now.

"Gold Peak, clear."

"Oh, fuck!"

"My own thoughts exactly," Alesta Cardot told Maxime Vézien tartly, despite the fact that the foreign minister, who was something of a bluenose, would normally have found his language offensive. At the moment, however, she had other things on her mind, and she'd just finished playing Bernardus Van Dort's transmission—which had been remarkably like Michelle Henke's message to Admiral Byng, aside from one small variation—for the Prime Minister.

"They know we're fronting for Manpower," Vézien said bitterly.

"That isn't exactly what they said, Max," Cardot disagreed. "What they said is that they know Manpower was behind what happened last year, and that it was using Monica as a front. The implication is certainly that they believe we're doing the same thing, but they didn't say they know we are."

Vézien's expression must have betrayed his opinion of such semantic hairsplitting, but Cardot shook her head.

"Think about it, Max. They were very specific about what they know about what happened here three weeks ago. They told us they have sensor data, they told us they know the Sollies fired on them, and they told us the exact status of their own ships at the moment they were destroyed. Those are facts, and they presented them as facts. If they had solid evidence that we were in Manpower's back pocket, they would have said so."

"All right, so they don't know—yet," Vézien said. "But they obviously suspect very strongly. And if we give in to these demands of theirs, any investigation is probably going to come up with the proof you've just said they don't have. In which case, we're fucked."

It was a sign of her own tension that Cardot didn't even turn a hair at his choice of verbs. What she did do was to shake her head again.

"Look, you told me to be thinking about ways to convince the Manties we didn't have anything to do with Byng's decision to kill their destroyers, right? Well, I think this is probably the best shot at that we're going to have."

"AndI think it's the best way to hand them the proof that we damned well helped set it up, whether we meant to or not!" Vézien shot back.

"You're probably right about their finding the proof," Cardot acknowledged. "But I think you may be missing the most critical point of their linking us with Monica."

"Which is?" Vézien asked skeptically.

"Which is that given everything that happened in the Cluster and at Monica, they were actually very restrained in the terms they imposed on Monica. Had the Monicans surrendered those Solly battlecruisers to Terekhov when he initially demanded that, I doubt a shot would have been fired. I doubt Tyler would've been allowed to keep his battlecruisers, but nobody would have been killed on either side, and his navy wouldn't have been totally demolished. I think one of the points of this message from Van Dort is to signal us that they aren't interested in kicking us any harder than they have to. I don't think they like us very much, and I don't think we'll be getting out of this without some serious repercussions, and probably some painful reparations, but I doubt very much that they want to impose destructive sanctions against us if they can avoid it. If nothing else, I don't think they want to be responsible for what's likely to happen on this planet if they punch us so hard the government collapses. And I know they don't want to be seen as the imperialistic conquerors of New Tuscany—not after how hard they've worked on demonstrating to the galaxy that the annexation was the result of a voluntary, spontaneous request from within the Cluster. And you just put your finger on the most critical point of all a moment ago."

"I did?" He looked at her blankly, and she shrugged.

"You said that we've helped to set up what happened here 'whether we meant to or not.' I submit that the best we can possibly hope for at this point is to prove that we didn't mean for that to happen. Whether we admit it, or they find proof of it, or not, they already know we were fronting for Manpower. That's a given, Max, and they're eventually going to take action against us on that basis, whether we cooperate right now or not. If we want to have any control over what they do to us, we'd better start distancing ourselves from any intentional shedding of Manticoran blood just as fast as we possibly can. However restrained they may want to be, for whatever reasons, if we can't distance ourselves from that, they won't have any choice but to up the ante all around."

"So you're suggesting we should tell them we intend to accept their conditions? Is that what you're saying?"

"I'm giving you what I believe would be the consequences of our accepting them," Cardot replied. "Whether or not those consequences are acceptable isn't my decision. You're Prime Minister. I think this falls into your lap, not mine."

"Oh, dear," Aldona Anisimovna murmured as she finished replaying the two messages her taps into the New Tuscan communications system had relayed to her yacht. "This is looking unpleasant, isn't it?"

The excitement of playing the Great Game was upon her once more, and her eyes gleamed with malicious satisfaction as she contemplated the Manticoran demands. This wasn't working out exactly according to her playbook, but then, things seldom did. And even if it wasn't perfect, she was confident it was close enough to get the job done.

Her own analysis of the players suggested there was a better than even chance the New Tuscans would choose to comply with the demands levied against them. That was unfortunate, but the speed of the Manticoran response made it much more probable than she really cared to admit. On the other hand, it didn't come as a total surprise, either. She'd hoped to have more time in hand, more time to work at binding New Tuscany firmly enough into the Alignment's web to make it impossible for Vézien to bolt. But the space station's destruction had put the New Tuscans' backs up more than the mission planners had hoped, and she'd always estimated that the Manties were going to respond more quickly than either the New Tuscans or Byng anticipated. Unlike either of them, she'd assumed from the beginning that the Manties would be intelligent enough to leave a watchdog out near the hyper limit, and the fact that no one in New Tuscany had detected any such watchdog hadn't shaken that assumption.

That was one reason she'd moved out to her yacht this early. Keeping herself safely out of the New Tuscan authorities' reach in the event of a premature Manticoran arrival (and any messy little details associated therewith) had seemed only prudent. And she'd always intended to be safely aboard when the Manties really did arrive, since it was no part of her plan to be stuck in New Tuscany when Manticore finished kicking Byng's ass and took possession of the system.

The only real question in her mind at this point was whether or not Byng was going to have his posterior kicked as soundly as the Alignment hoped before he surrendered to Gold Peak's demands. The idiot clearly still had no idea of what he was up against. Given his disposition and his attitude towards Manties in general, that meant he was unlikely to give in until he'd been properly . . . convinced. Which she felt quite confident Gold Peak would be simply delighted to do.

"I think it's time to go, Kyrillos," she told her bodyguard.

"Yes, Ma'am," Taliadoros replied. "I'll tell the captain immediately."

"Thank you," Anisimovna said, and leaned back, contemplating the possibilities once again.

Her yacht was scarcely the only vessel departing New Tuscany orbit. The word had already gone out over the public information channels, and no civilian vessel wanted to be anywhere in the vicinity if it was possible warships were going to be firing missiles at each other. In fact, New Tuscan traffic control had actually ordered all civilians to clear the volume of space around the planet as a precautionary measure. That was another reason Anisimovna had made certain she was already aboard ship. And it was why the "yacht's" impeller nodes had been kept permanently hot. It meant they could get underway immediately yet be safely hidden in the underbrush of the other evacuees, which was precisely what she intended to do.

I wonder if we'll still be in our sensor range of the planet when the first missile flies? she thought. In a way, I'll be sorry to miss it if we're not. But I don't suppose anyone can have everything.