Shadow of Victory - eARC (28 page)

“I see,” Harahap said again, filing away the additional evidence that whoever had hit the Alignment had done it from inside.

“For whatever it’s worth,” he went on, “I have the complete data set she gave me as part of my initial mission brief in the computers aboard ship.”

“Really?” The other man straightened. “What sort of data set?”

“As far as I know, the complete raw data and a complete file of her people’s analysis of it.” The other’s eyebrows rose, and Harahap shrugged. “I asked her for it because I wanted to make my own analysis. And from what I saw in the field, I think she really did give me all of it.”

“That will be very welcome,” the other man said. “I’m confident we can reconstitute all of it, ultimately, given how many places its bits and pieces were stored, but getting that big a chunk back intact will help a lot.”

He sounded a bit less certain of his people’s ability to do all that reconstituting than he probably wanted to, but that wasn’t Harahap’s problem.

“It was delivered to me originally hand-carried on chips, not transmitted,” the ex-gendarme said. “I presume that was because of its sensitivity. I can go back up and bring it down myself, or I can give you the security codes to retrieve it without whoever you send wiping it…or blowing himself up.”

“I think enough things have blown up already.” The other man smiled thinly. “We’ll probably send you back up in person. But first, tell me about your conclusions.”

“Of course.” Harahap settled back in his chair. “From this trip, the two that stand out to me as having potential for Janus are Włocławek and Swallow. Wonder’s pretty much useless from Janus’ perspective, but it has potential value as a place outside Swallow where our people can meet with one of the locals who’s involved in the Cripple Mountain Movement up to his neck. He’s got a legitimate business interest that takes him to Wonder on a semiregular basis.

“As I say, I don’t see much point in looking for revolutionaries in Wonder. There is a lot of general unhappiness, but it’s basically the same situation I found in Any Port. There’s a lot of talk and any number of people who’re willing to complain and play at rebellious attitudes—even turn out for protest marches—but that’s as far as it’s likely to go. I have a complete report on the system, including the analysis behind my conclusions. I brought that much down with me—” he opened his briefcase and extracted a data chip “—for someone else to crosscheck, but I really think any additional effort there would simply waste time and resources.”

His debriefer took the chip with a nod, and Harahap sat back once more.

“Now, Swallow’s an entirely different situation,” he said. “First, what’s going on in that system’s been brewing for years, and there’s deep, personal involvement by a significant segment of the population. It’s not the biggest segment, but it has a disproportionate amount of influence, and the people in it are about as bloody-minded as it comes. I spoke to one of them, and—”

* * *

“He’s good, Father,” Collin Detweiler said several hours later. He and his father sat on the veranda of Albrecht Detweiler’s island mansion, cold drinks in hand while they listened to the surf and enjoyed the sea breeze. “In fact, he’s very good. Just as good as Isabel said he was.”

“In that case, I have to wonder what conclusions he’s drawn about Green Pines,” his father said.

“I didn’t ask him, and I don’t intend to.” Collin sipped whiskey, then set his glass down carefully. “For one thing, he knows damned well that the Gamma Center was under Suvorov.”

“He knows about the Gamma Center?” Albrecht Detweiler’s expression tightened ominously. “Just why the fuck does he know anything about the Gamma Center?!”

“He doesn’t know how big it was, he doesn’t know what we were doing down there, and he sure as hell doesn’t have a clue about how important it was,” Collin said soothingly. “Isabel was really rushed when she had him prepped, though. You know the suicide-protocol nannies have to be genetically coded and programmed before they can be injected. If she was going to get that done before she sent him out, the Gamma Center clinic was the best place to do it. But I don’t think you have to worry about anything he may have seen there. Among other things, she had Chernyshev personally escort him.”

His father glared at him for another handful of seconds, then—slowly—relaxed back into his chair.

“All right…I suppose,” he growled, then wagged an index finger. “I don’t like it, though. We’re getting way too close to be bringing any outsiders that deep into the onion.”

“I suspect Harahap’s figured out there is an onion, Father.” Collin shrugged. “I don’t think there’s any way he could have a clue as to exactly what it is, though. And if we’re going to make use of him—which I really think we should—we’re just going to have to accept that when you use a man this smart, he’s bound to figure out at least a few things you’d rather he didn’t. The only way to avoid that would be to use people too stupid to do the figuring out…which would be a really, really good way to shoot ourselves in both feet.”

“Granted. Granted!” Albrecht waved one hand. “And if you agree with Isabel that we need to use him, then I suppose I’m willing to sign off on it.”

“I don’t think we have a lot of choice, really.” Collin shrugged again. “We’re still trying to get ourselves reorganized after that cyber attack, and we lost both of Isabel’s deputies—not to mention Jack McBryde—along with the Gamma Center. That means we’re stretched thin for ‘upper management’ people all the way inside the onion, and that means we need to draft senior field operatives to fill the gaps. Frankly, I’m thinking we’re going to have to pull Chernyshev in and give him Isabel’s job.”

“Are you sure about that?” Albrecht frowned. “He’s been awfully effective in the field for a long time.”

“Which is why we need Harahap to replace him—or at least partially replace him. Unfortunately, I can’t think of anyone else we still have who (a) has the ‘hands-on’ field ops experience Isabel had, (b) is as fully briefed on her various ops as he is—you know she was using him virtually as a third deputy—and (c) is just as smart and capable as she was. And while it was never really a problem, he’s also quite a bit more stable than she was. For that matter, his entire geno’s more stable than the Bardasano line, and you know it.”

Albrecht frowned some more, then nodded.

“Point taken,” he said. “So how is Harahap going to replace him?”

“I’m going to give him primary responsibility for Włocławek and Swallow. I’ll be sending him back to Mobius first, though. He made the initial contact there, so I want him to make the introductions for whoever replaces Chernyshev in that system. It’s too far from the others for him to take it over permanently, though.”

“I can see that.” Albrecht nodded again. “The only thing that bothers me is that if he’s as smart as you say, then the information we’ll have to give him to steer things along properly is also going to give him a much better look inside than I’m really comfortable with.”

“He may not get as deep a look as you’re afraid he will, Father,” Collin said, reaching for his whiskey glass once more. “And even if he does,” he paused to sip from the glass, then smiled coldly, “he did make that trip to the Gamma Center clinic, didn’t he?”

Chapter Twenty-Four

“Well, it’s certainly impressive, Luiz,” Oravil Barregos, the Office of Frontier Security’s governor for the Maya Sector, said.

“Please, Oravil.” Admiral Luiz Roszak winced. “We’re traditionalists around here. A ship—even one that hasn’t quite been completed yet—is she, not it.”

“Really?” Barregos looked at the slightly shorter admiral, dark eyes innocent, and Roszak snorted.

“All right, you got me.” He shook his head and beckoned the governor through the open door into the very large, very comfortably furnished cabin—small suite, really—on the other side. “Am I really that predictable?”

“Only in some ways, Luiz. Only in some ways.”

Barregos walked to the middle of the spacious flag officer’s day cabin and turned to look at the smart wall which covered one entire bulkhead. The cabin itself was buried deep at the heart of the armored core hull of what would someday soon be the battlecruiser SLNS Sharpshooter. Its—no, her, he corrected himself with a mental grin—originally assigned name had been Defiance, which he still thought would have been a perfectly splendid name, given the reason she’d been laid down. On the other hand, Sharpshooter was even better…and one hell of a lot more meaningful after the Battle of Torch.

The governor’s mouth tightened, mental grins forgotten, as he thought once again of the losses, including Sharpshooter’s cruiser predecessor, Roszak and his men and women had suffered defending the Kingdom of Torch and its ex-genetic slave citizens. He deeply regretted those deaths. He couldn’t possibly regret what they’d died doing, but all those people, all those ships…

He shook his head sadly, eyes on the smart wall, gazing at the sun-burnished images of the other ships taking shape in the dispersed orbital yards of Erewhon. There were a lot of those ships, and construction on several of them was as advanced as it was in the case of Roszak’s flagship-to-be.

“I miss them too,” Roszak said quietly. He’d stepped up beside Barregos while the governor drifted in his own thoughts. Now Barregos glanced sideways at him, and the dark, trim admiral shrugged. “I know what you were thinking. I think the same thing a lot when I look at this.” He jutted his chin at the smart wall. “I think about how Commander Carte and the rest of them never got a chance to see it. And about exactly how they’d look forward to those bastards in Old Chicago finding out about it.”

“I know.”

Barregos rested a hand on Roszak’s shoulder for a moment. Then he turned and seated himself in one of the day cabin’s chairs and pointed at the identical chair facing it across a coffee table which looked like hammered copper.

“I realize this is actually your cabin, not mine,” the governor said in a considerably lighter tone, “but seeing as how I’m the Governor and you’re only the Admiral…”

“And so becomingly modest, too,” Roszak marveled, sinking into the indicated chair, and Barregos chuckled, wondering how certain members of his staff might have reacted at the admiral’s flagrant lese majesty. No doubt many of them, especially in the outer circle, what have been outraged. Oravil Barregos wasn’t. There might have been as many as three human beings in the entire galaxy he trusted as totally as he did Luiz Roszak; there damned well weren’t four of them, though.

“All of us would-be, megalomaniac, tinpot dictators are modest,” he said in reply. “We only think we’re half as godlike as we really are.”

“One of the things I like most about you,” Roszak agreed affably.

“In addition to becomingly modest, however, I’m also a bit pressed for time,” Barregos went on, his expression more serious, “and there are a few things we need to discuss under four eyes before we sit down with anyone else.”

Roszak nodded, his own expression attentive. “Under four eyes” was an Erewhonese idiom he and Barregos had adopted long since. It described a discussion between only two people—one secure from any eavesdropping and totally unrecorded. Which, given the nature of their discussions and the Solarian League’s penalties for treason and mutiny, seemed like a very good idea to him.

“We’re starting to get some questions—more of them than I anticipated, really—about just what the hell happened at Torch,” Barregos said. “I know we managed to keep the real extent of your losses out of the news channels, thanks to how many of your units were ‘off the books,’ but it sounds like there’s been some information leakage and the rumors about casualties are prompting a certain degree of interest. Or it could just be that for once Ukhtomskoy’s actually done his job, instead.”

“That’s not really fair,” Roszak said mildly. “Ukhtomskoy’s actually a competent fellow. He knows certain people don’t want to hear any contrarian opinions, and he’s damned careful not to give them any, once he’s figured out who they are. But don’t ever make the mistake of assuming he’s too stupid to do his job. Jiri and I have both met him, you know, and he’s a hell of a lot smarter than Karl-Heinz Thimár!”

Barregos nodded, albeit a bit unwillingly. The truth was that Adão Ukhtomskoy, the CO of OFS’ Intelligence Branch was smarter—and considerably more imaginative—than Admiral Thimár, the head of the SLN’s Office of Naval Intelligence. And it was also true that Roszak and Commander Jiri Watanapongse, his staff intelligence officer, had met both men.

“All right, I suppose I should've said that it’s possible that for once Ukhtomskoy’s field people have done their job,” he conceded. “At any rate, I’ve gotten a formal request for a ‘more detailed and complete’ report.”

“But only from Intelligence Branch, not from ONI,” Roszak said thoughtfully. “Interesting. I wonder if that means Frontier Security and the Navy aren’t talking to each other about it. Or about us, either.”

“I certainly hope they aren’t talking to each other about us!” Barregos shook his head. “That would be about the last thing we need at the moment.”

“Ever the master of understatement.” Roszak’s voice was desert dry. “Fortunately, I’ve had Jiri and Edie working on that.”

“Ah?” Barregos arched an eyebrow. Commander Edie Habib (although she was now Captain Habib, even if no one outside the Maya Sector knew it) was Roszak’s chief of staff. She was also quite probably the smartest single member of the cadre of outstanding officers Roszak had attached to himself over the years.

“I’ll give you a copy of their craftsmanship before you head back to Burning Frog,” the admiral said. “It’s really nice, if I do say so myself. Queen Berry and her people did a really good job of requesting our assistance for the sequences where I’m discussing our force availability with them. Gave me an excellent chance to substantially…understate our force numbers for the record, let’s say. And once the two of them—and Ruth Winton—got done playing with the actual data, they’d built us a really exciting and totally bogus tactical log of the entire battle. I doubt it would stand up to any sort of intensive analysis, but I also don’t think anyone in Ukhtomskoy’s shop has the expertise to realize that on their own. They’d have to farm it out to someone at ONI, and you know how much they all hate sharing data with each other. Especially if one of them thinks there’s a chance to catch the other one’s service branch with its fingers in the cookie jar.”

“That’s probably true.” Barregos nodded with an undeniable sense of relief. “Dare I assume your minions dealt with the diplomatic traffic and your formal reports to me equally creatively?”

“That they did. With all the proper date and time stamps, too. Can Jeremy and Julie get that inserted into the official files instead of the originals?”

“I’m pretty sure they can,” Barregos said. Jeremy Frank, his senior aide. He was twenty years younger than Roszak, but he’d been with Barregos almost as long. And Julie Magilen, his personal secretary, office manager, and general keeper was Barregos’ own age…and had been with him for better than half a T-century. They were at least as central to his and Roszak’s plans as Habib or Watanapongse, and just as loyal. In addition, Frank—his staff IT specialist as well as his aide—had built himself traceless backdoors in the strangest places.

“And what do these reports show?” the governor asked, and Roszak shrugged.

“Everybody in Sol—from Bernard, over at Strategy and Planning, to Kingsford and Rajampet and even, God help us all, Thimár—knows we’ve been building ships out of the sector’s own resources. God knows they’ve been just delighted at the notion that they wouldn’t have to send any of their own hulls out here with the situation heating up with the Manties! So Edie sat down with Alex Chapman and Glenn Horton and actually designed the destroyers and cruisers we’re supposedly buying from Erewhon.”

Barregos nodded again. Admiral Alexander Chapman was the Erewhon Space Navy’s senior uniformed officer, and Glenn Horton was his and Roszak’s local interface with the Erewhonese yards building the Maya Sector Defense Force. Of course, the MSDF didn’t officially exist, but that was perfectly all right with Orville Barregos, since the ships in it didn’t officially exist yet, either.

And, he reminded himself, it won’t be so very long before the Maya Sector Defense Force becomes the Mayan Navy. And won’t that frost some chops in Old Chicago?

Assuming, of course, that he and Luiz Roszak survived long enough for that to happen. Which wasn’t precisely a given.

“The ships they came up with are going to raise a few eyebrows back home,” Roszak continued. “We kicked it around and decided even Thimár must be starting to get a clue that the Manties and the Havenites are building ships a lot more capable than anything the Navy has. We think it’s unlikely anyone on Thimár or Kingsford’s staff has even the remotest idea how much more capable, but the ships we designed for them are probably twenty or thirty percent more effective than anything in Frontier Fleet or Battle Fleet’s inventory.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Barregos’ tone made it clear he was simply asking a question, and Roszak nodded.

“We have to show a qualitative edge to explain what we did to Manpower’s mercenaries. Trust me, we knocked their order of battle down a lot in those new ‘official’ reports, but we still needed something to explain how the hell we beat them. Our options were either to have a lot more ships than we’d told them we’re building, or else for the individual units to be more capable than anything in the rest of the Navy’s inventory. And the whole reason we gave for using Erewhon to build them was to woo Erewhon back into the League’s arms and away from its relationship with the Manties and Haven. It’ll make sense to them that Erewhon had access to the Manties’ war-fighting technology and agreed to part with some of it in our favor. And if I know Thimár, he’s going to immediately assume the new goodies we tucked into our ship designs are all the Manties have.”

“And if they want us to send some of those new ships back to Sol for examination and evaluation?”

“Unfortunately, our losses at Torch were heavily concentrated in our new construction,” Roszak replied. “I’m afraid most of our surviving new-construction units were so badly damaged they’ll either be in yard hands for months or else weren’t worth repairing at all.” He shrugged again. “Obviously, if they ask us to send some of them back, we will…as soon as they’re available.”

“How long do you think we can stall them that way?”

“Orville, unless I miss my guess, we won’t have to stall them a lot longer.” Roszak shook his head. “You’ve seen the same reports and news coverage I have. And Jiri passed along that movement order on Sandra Crandall’s maneuvers. With Joseph Byng already in the Madras Sector and Sandra Crandall right next door with an entire damned fleet, what exactly do you expect to happen?”

“I expect them to lock horns with the Manties in a big way,” Barregos said.

“Absolutely. And when they do, the Manties will hand them their heads.”

“Really? From what Jiri had to say, Crandall’s got an awful lot of firepower, Luiz.”

“And she’s almost as big a frigging idiot as Byng,” Roszak said caustically. “Not to mention the fact that I will absolutely guarantee you she hasn’t got a clue about Manty missile capabilities. I could hand her the schematics on those big-ass multidrive missiles of theirs if we had them—hell, I could give her a working model!—and she still wouldn’t believe it. She’s got enough ships that even she should be able to get out with her force more or less intact, but only if she’s smart enough to recognize the truth and pull back quickly enough. And there’s no way in hell she’s taking any of their star systems away from them.”

“If that’s what she’s there to do, of course,” Barregos pointed out.

“Of course it’s what she’s there to do. I’m not sure whether Manpower and Mesa are manipulating Rajampet and Kingsford or if Rajampet’s using Manpower and Mesa to cover some devious end of his own. But there’s no way in the galaxy that much of Battle Fleet got deployed way the hell and gone out to Madras unless someone intended it to accomplish something once it got there.”

Barregos nodded slowly. Roszak’s analysis matched very closely with his own, and that might well mean…

“How soon will Sharpshooter actually be ready for service?” he asked. “I mean really ready, Luiz. Worked up and ready for combat.”

“The entire first tranche should be out of the yards within the next two months,” Roszak replied. “For that matter, Sharpshooter should run her builder’s trials within the next three or four T-weeks. Given the quality of the Erewhonese’s workmanship, I expect we’ll run official acceptance trials no more than a week or two after that. We can probably have all twelve in commission by, oh, late January. It’ll be at least a couple of T-months after that before I’d feel comfortable taking them into combat, though. Actually, I'd want at least four T-months—call it the end of April—before I'd feel comfortable about committing them to action, and the wallers are a good ten T-months behind them.”

“And what kind of missiles will they carry?”

“We’ve already taken delivery of full loadouts of Mk 17s from Chapman and Horton,” Roszak said. “On the other hand, it’s also been suggested we might want to hold off on loading them into our magazines.”

Their eyes met, and Barregos nodded ever so slightly. The political situation was all still…convoluted, given the fact that Erewhon had deserted Manticore—with plentiful provocation, but still deserted—and delivered much of the Manties’ war-fighting technology to the Republic of Haven just in time for the war between the Star Kingdom and the Republic to revive. As a result, Erewhon was in what might conservatively be called “bad odor” with Manticore at the moment, and the ESN had been frozen out of the new, improved, far more lethal current-generation Manty tech. But Roszak’s sacrificial defense of the Kingdom of Torch might be going to change that somewhat in Maya’s case.