Shadow of Victory - eARC (33 page)

But that didn’t mean he was wrong now.

She looked around their meeting place, at the bare stone walls and dirt floor. Any physical meeting between the leaders of the Loomis Liberation League was incredibly dangerous, but so were electronic conferences, and some meeting places were less dangerous than others. Like this one. The long-abandoned cellar was a relic of the very first wave of colonization, and the house above it had burned to the ground over two T-centuries ago. It wasn’t on MacLean’s land—this parcel actually belonged to one of Nessa MacRuer’s clients, but it was being managed with no intention of selling it. And it was close enough to Elgin for any of the LLL’s leaders who lived in the capital to reach without too much difficulty, yet far enough away to be outside the intense scrutiny the UPS maintained in Elgin and Halkirk’s other cities and towns. Better still, the land had gone back to forest after the house burned. By now, some of the trees growing around and over it were more than a T-century old, and that dense canopy could conceal a lot of private air cars and foot traffic.

So she wasn’t worried about their present physical security. It was where she saw this meeting leading that frightened her.

“Burgess and Tammas are right, Nessa.” Tad Ogilvy was looking at MacRuer, but MacLean knew he was actually speaking at least as much to her. “Some things can’t be allowed to stand. If we let them, we surrender the very thing that brought us together in the first place! And on a more practical note, we don’t have time to get ‘ready.’ MacQuarie’s turning the damned planet inside out looking for Luíseach and Gavin. If she finds them—if they go the same way her father went—they cut the heart right out of popular resistance.”

“Don’t get too carried away, Tad,” Fenella MacKail said a little sharply. Ogilvy and McPhee both glared at her; Stirling’s expression went considerably beyond that, and MacKail waved one hand in a frustrated gesture. “I agree public opinion’s hugely in the MacRorys’ favor now, but do we really think that’s the foundation we want to build an armed revolution on?”

MacKail was a high school teacher, and it was her fury at the way in which the schools had been turned into an arm of indoctrination by the LPP which had driven her to rebellion. She was, however, much more urban than most of the Liberation League’s other leadership, and her opinion of her rural fellows wasn’t incredibly high. And the one Prosperity Party policy with which she’d actually agreed was the abolition of Loomis’ constitutional monarchy. In her opinion, monarchy was an incredibly stupid form of government, and Tavis III’s performance during and after the LPP coup was her primary example of that. In a lot of ways, MacLean agreed with her, but…

“Successful revolutions depend even more on emotion and commitment than on firepower,” she said now. “There has to be something—someone—who can carry that commitment, be the focus of it. And at this moment, Burgess and Tad are right. All that passion and anger’s focused on the MacRorys and, especially, Luíseach. And given the strength of that anger, whether or not we want to move may be completely beside the point.”

Agreement rumbled around the cellar, and she wondered if she was glad, because MacRuer was absolutely correct. They needed more weapons—and heavier ones—before they mounted any move against the UPS and SEIU’s armed security force. A couple of more months, another shipment or two, and they’d be in a far stronger position.

But they didn’t have a couple of more months.

No one knew exactly how Luíseach MacRory’s air car had evaded the strike on Caisteal Òrach. Personally, MacLean suspected it was the incredible fury with which Raghnall MacRory and his militia had fought back. No one was going to confirm the Uppies’ losses—for that matter, official spokesman continued to insist their casualties had been extraordinarily light—but the firefight had raged for better than fifteen hours, and Senga MacQuarie had been forced to call in UPS units from as far away as Conerock. In the end, they’d killed Raghnall and almost every single one of his supporters, but they hadn’t died easily, and the way MacQuarie’s tactical commanders had focused on them had to be the primary reason Luíseach had successfully squirmed through their grasp and disappeared.

She and her husband Gavin were in hiding. No one knew where, and they had no intention of telling anyone, but they’d managed to get out half a dozen communiqués, including proof both of them were alive. And at the moment, with the murder of her parents and her children, Luíseach MacRory was not simply the only living heir of Tavis III, but the living, breathing personification of all of Halkirk’s blazing fury.

And there could not conceivably be a single person in the entire Loomis System more bitterly determined to crush the current regime than the woman who’d begun styling herself Queen Luíseach II.

I don’t blame her, I sympathize with her entirely, but God has she ever upped the ante for all of us! MacLean thought.

Well, maybe it was time someone did just that.

“Whatever we think of the timing,” she said, making eye contact with each of the other men and women around that table, “this is a moment and an opportunity when we have to act. All of you know how much I would’ve preferred to settle this at the ballot box, or at least with peaceful demonstrations. But if I’d ever really believed we could do that, the MacRory Massacre would have changed my mind. So as I see it, the question isn’t whether or not we begin our revolution now; it’s how we begin it. We’ve looked at a dozen models for that, including at least three where our hand is forced by events beyond our control. I think we’re all agreed that that’s what just happened…which means it’s time we dusted those off and decided exactly where to begin.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“Hey, Jess! Did you hear who caught your sensor ghost?”

Lieutenant Commander Jessica Epstein glanced over her shoulder but never stopped running. Commander Francis Drescher was her immediate superior in Perimeter Security Command, the command charged with maintaining and operating the exquisitely sensitive long-range sensor platforms which watched over the Component A of the Manticore Binary System. He was also, like her, one of the RMN officers who liked to actually run—not simply run in place on a treadmill—for exercise, and one of the perks of serving aboard HMSS Hephaestus, the Star Kingdom’s primary industrial platform, was that there was actually room in which to do that. In fact, this entire three-kilometer long tube had been converted for that very purpose.

The one thing that Lieutenant Commander Epstein truly resented about Commander Drescher (aside from the fact that romantic involvement between officers in the chain of command was strictly forbidden by the Articles of War…damn it) was that he was the next best thing to five centimeters taller than she was, with much longer legs. At the moment, those longer legs were bringing him up rapidly from behind, and she knew that she’d soon have a clear view of his remarkably attractive posterior as he passed her and left her—figuratively—in his dust. But he could damned well catch up with her first, if he wanted to talk!

Which he proceeded to do with irritating promptness.

“No,” she said as he drew even with her shoulder and slowed down—damn him!—to keep pace with her. “I was off-watch by the time they sent anybody.”

“Well, I think you’re gonna hear about it,” Drescher said with a grin. “It was the Cepheids. And the really good part? Looks like it really was a ghost. And a little birdie told me Bridget has one of her SCA meetings coming up Sometime Real Soon Now.”

“Oh, crap.” Epstein shook her head, her expression chagrined.

Lieutenant Commander Bridget Landry was the CO of HMS Dagger, and Dagger was a unit of DesDiv 265.2, commanded by Commander Michael Carus and known as the Silver Cepheids because of its scouting expertise. Landry also happened to be one of Epstein’s close friends—they’d been at Saganami Island together—and a member of the Society for Creative Anachronisms. A member who reveled in the painstakingly accurate recreation of costumes from societies the rest of the galaxy had forgotten about seven or eight hundred T-years ago.

At the moment, courtesy of the very faint hyper signature picked up by one Lieutenant Commander Epstein’s section and kicked up the chain by that same Lieutenant Commander Epstein, DesDiv 265.2 was approximately one light-month from Hephaestus. And from Drescher’s broad grin—it would never have done to call it a smirk, of course—they damned well hadn’t found anything when they reached the signature’s locus. Which meant it truly had been a sensor ghost…and that SOP required Cepheids to maintain and overwatch on the location for the next two T-weeks.

“She going to miss her meeting?” Epstein asked with a certain resignation.

“Dunno,” Drescher said cheerfully. “I only know she has one coming up because she’s supposed to partner with Hammond over in Maintenance. I don’t know about Bridget, but Hammond’s royally pissed over the possibility that she’ll miss it. Sounds like the two of them had something special planned.”

“Wonderful.” Epstein rolled her eyes. “She is so going to give me hell if she does miss it!”

“Nah.” Drescher shook his head. “She won’t give you hell; she’ll just make your life a living hell. But don’t worry. She’ll forget all about it in a year or two.”

“Oh, thank you so much, Frank!”

Epstein threw an elbow, but he danced nimbly aside without even breaking stride and grinned at her. Then his expression sobered…a bit, at least.

“Kidding aside, Jess, it’s probably not a bad thing. We’re all still kinda on edge after what the Peeps pulled. Having something to do besides brood on who got killed can’t be a bad thing. Besides, if the Admiralty’s gonna let Bridget play with a destroyer all her own, every so often they’re likely to insist she do what they want her to with it. I’m sure she’ll understand that. Of course, whether or not she’ll admit she does…”

“Remind me to leave an old pair of gym socks in your skinsuit to reward you for making me feel so much better, Frank.”

“What I’m here for.” He gave her another grin, then t turned on the hydrogen and sped up the passageway ahead of her.

And his posterior looked just as fine as ever.

* * *

“They never got a sniff of the spider, Sir,” Commander Theresa Coleman said, studying the tactical imagery in the depths of the main tactical display on MANS Mako. “That’s a standard picket formation. If they had a clue where we really are, they’d be headed our way.”

“It looks that way to me too, Theresa.” Admiral Frederick Topolev nodded. “But let’s not get too confident,” he went on, waving an admonishing forefinger in his chief of staff’s direction. “For one thing, they may have seen us just fine and decided not to tell us about it by coming after us. Don’t you think their Home Fleet might like the opportunity to micro-jump a couple of squadrons of their damned podnoughts right on top of us before we could hyper out again?”

“Well, of course, Sir.” Coleman seemed a little taken aback, but she rallied gamely. “They might think that way, but that’d be more like something a batch of Sollies might try. If they really wanted to keep us from hypering out, they’d have to wait until we were inside the hyper limit, and there’s no way Manties would be stupid enough to risk losing track of us in the month or so it’s going to take us to get that far inside.”

“Of course they wouldn’t,” Topolev agreed. “And you’re right, unlike the Sollies the Manties know their ass from their elbow. I’m just suggesting we shouldn’t get too tightly wedded to how dazzling clever we are until we’ve gotten back up to speed, deployed the pods, and pulled out again.” He shrugged ever so slightly. “To be honest, I agree with you pretty much down the line. But we’re getting this—” he gestured at the display’s tactical icons “—on tight laser links from the platforms we left behind. Everything we’ve seen suggests the Manties’ platforms are at least as good as ours, and pretty damned stealthy. I don’t think they could have deployed a sensor shell tight enough to pick up the spider without our catching them at it, but there’s not any proof of that just yet, either.”

Coleman nodded soberly, because the admiral had a point. The Mesan Alignment Navy was one of the youngest fleets in the galaxy. In fact, it was in the process of carrying out its first combat operation…and using what had been supposed to be training ships, prototype test-beds for the actual battle fleet still under construction, to do it. The Royal Manticoran Navy, on the other hand, was hundreds of T-years old, with a peerless tradition of victory, and more than two decades of brutal warfare against the People’s Republic of Haven under its belt.

Probably pretty damned hard to overestimate the bastards, she thought. But if you’ve got to make a mistake, it’s better to do that than to underestimate them. On the other hand, they’re not really ten meters tall and covered with hair. And they can’t have a clue about the spider. We have a hard time tracking it, and we know exactly what we’re looking for. Be a bit hard for them to pick up something they don’t even know exists!

In many ways, the spider drive was the crown jewel of the Alignment’s war-fighting technology, the product of many decades and billions of credits of research, and the deciding factor in making Operation Oyster Bay possible. The primary sensor used by every navy to detect and track hostile vessels under power was the Warshawski, a highly refined version of Adrienne Warshawski’s original gravitic detector. The enormous gravitic footprint of a starship’s impeller wedge, even at relatively low power, was glaringly obvious at enormous ranges, whereas active sensors had strictly limited reach against targets as small (relatively speaking) as a warship. Even with the best stealth fields in existence, the passive detection range against a starship wedge was at least six or seven times the range any active system was going to manage against that starship’s hull. So it made far more sense to use those passive systems to look for impeller signatures and search for electronic emissions.

But Task Force One’s stealth was just as good as the Manties’—probably a little better, actually—so there were no electronic emissions to spot. And the gravitic signature of the spider drive was tiny, compared to any impeller wedge. Mako’s gravitic cross-section was about on a par with an extremely stealthy recon drone, and the Manty destroyers scrambled to investigate the “sensor ghost” of their very cautious, very gradual alpha translation into n-space were a couple of light-hours astern of her. With all due respect to Admiral Topolev, no way in hell were those destroyers going to see the flagship.

And neither is anyone else, she thought grimly. I don’t know that Oyster Bay’s going to work as well as everyone hopes. One thing I do know is that no plan ever works as perfectly as it sounds like it should. But those people behind us don’t have a clue, and the first thing anybody ahead of us should know about it is going to be a cloud of graser torpedoes coming in out of absolutely frigging nowhere.

Which, when she came right down to it, would work just fine for her.

* * *

“Excuse me, My Lord, but Foreign Secretary Langtry’s on the com. He’d like a moment of your time, if that’s convenient.”

Hamish Alexander-Harrington, the Earl of White Haven, looked up from his conversation with Captain Fargo, his Admiralty chief of staff.

“Did he say what he wanted to speak about, Eddie?” he asked.

“No, My Lord.” Senior Chief Edward Neukirch shook his head. “He said it would ‘just take a minute,’ though.”

“I see.”

White Haven’s smile might have been the tiniest bit sour. Sir Anthony Langtry was an old and close friend, but in many ways, and despite a lengthy diplomatic career, he was still a colonel of Marines at heart. He was inclined to do things as informally as possible, which, as a general rule, White Haven—who’d dealt with entirely too many bureaucrats—found a breath of fresh air. Sometimes, though, Langtry’s tendency to go straight to his fellow cabinet members rather than through channels could be…counterproductive. Quite often, someone else, lower down the feeding chain, could have answered his current question without pulling someone like, oh, the First Lord of Admiralty, out of a conference with his chief of staff.

“Put him through, Eddie,” White Haven continued after a moment, pushing his counter-grav float chair across his spacious office from the conference table to his desk. Neukirch, who’d had ample opportunity to learn his boss’ ways, timed things almost perfectly. The earl had a wait of no more than ten seconds before the desktop display lit with Langtry’s face.

“Hello, Tony,” he said. “What can I do for you this afternoon?”

“Is there time to catch Honor before she hypers out for Nouveau Paris?” Langtry asked, and White Haven’s eyebrows rose at the lack of any greeting.

“No,” he replied after a moment. “Eighth Fleet made its alpha translation over an hour ago. Why?”

“Damn.” Langtry grimaced, but the word came out almost mildly. “I wanted to get her the information before she talks to Pritchart.”

“And what information would that be?” White Haven inquired affably enough that Langtry snorted in amusement.

“Sorry. Sorry!” He held up a placating hand. “Don’t mean to be mysterious. It’s just that those bastards in Mesa have tossed us another hot potato. According to Lyman Carmichael’s dispatch from Old Chicago, they’ve just handed the League a formal note accusing us of orchestrating a nuclear attack on their citizens.”

“What?!” White Haven twitched upright. His eyes widened in disbelief, but narrowed again almost immediately. “That business in Mendel?”

“Right in one.” Langtry nodded, his expression sour, and White Haven’s swore mentally.

The stories about what certainly sounded like a terrorist incident coming out of the Mesa System had been wildly confused…and confusing. It took time for information to come so far, despite the huge volume of traffic through the Manticoran Junction, and what information they’d received so far had been incomplete, internally inconsistent, and unclear as hell. The one thing they did know was that Mesa had—predictably—immediately insisted the Audubon Ballroom was behind it. Which, given the Ballroom’s savage, extra-legal campaign against Manpower in particular and genetic slavery in general, wasn’t really as unreasonable of them as White Haven would like to think. But this…

“They’re saying we did it?”

“They’re saying we enabled and sponsored it, not that we actually did it ourselves.” Langtry snorted. “They’re also making it pretty damned clear that the only reason they aren’t accusing us of doing it ourselves is because they’re such sophisticated diplomats. If they weren’t, they’d probably be as crass, crude, and direct as, oh, we were after that business with Monica, and come right out and say we did it.”

“On what conceivable evidence?” White Haven demanded, and Langtry’s expression turned more sour than ever.

“Well, that’s the main reason I wanted to talk to Honor before she left. Not just because I don’t want her blindsided in Nouveau Paris if Haven’s ambassador gets a dispatch home to Pritchart before Eighth Fleet gets there. I mean, I don’t want her blindsided, but the real question I wanted to ask her is what she knows about anything Anton Zilwicki may’ve been up to lately.”

“Zilwicki?” White Haven cocked his head.

His wife had a long-standing relationship with the Antislavery League and (some would have said) with the Audubon Ballroom. There were times—many of them—when that relationship became just a tiny bit of a problem where a duchess, steadholder, fleet admiral, and personal confidante of not only Elizabeth III but Protector Benjamin Mayhew was concerned. There was, however, no way in hell Honor Alexander-Harrington was ever going to change her spots in that regard. She’d imbibed her hatred of genetic slavery and Manpower with her mother’s milk—literally—and that hatred burned with a cold and terrible fire. So it wasn’t at all surprising Catherine Montaigne and Anton Zilwicki had become personal friends. Nor was it surprising that Montaigne and Zilwicki’s…involvement with people like Jeremy X, the theoretically retired head of the Audubon Ballroom, should splash over onto her.