Shadow of Victory - eARC (90 page)

“How often do you think we’ve sat here, Albrecht?” she asked whimsically, her soft voice almost lost in the background murmur of the surf.

“I don’t know,” he said after a moment. “A lot. I remember the first time we had Benjamin out here, and that was—what? Forty T-years ago? And you and I had been picnicking out here for at least ten or twelve T-years before we even built the house!”

“I know.” She reached across to his lounger and patted his forearm gently. “I’m glad we got to sit here together one more time, though dear.”

“I’m sorry.” His voice was even softer than hers had been, but she heard the sorrow hovering in it like unshed tears. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I told everyone we were running on a short count, but I truly thought there’d be more time. Long enough to at least get you out.”

“And what makes you think you could have sent me anywhere without you?” She shook her head. “I’m trying to remember a single time you ever made me to a single thing I didn’t choose to do. Right off the top of my head, I can’t remember one.”

“Neither can I,” he acknowledged with a small laugh. It was a sad laugh, but genuine, and he reached out and gathered up her hand. “But this time, I’d’ve had them drag you aboard ship if I’d realized how the window was closing.”

“Then I’m just as glad you didn’t realize,” she said gently, turning to let him see the truth in her eyes. “This has been my cause just as much as it’s ever been yours, but however important it’s been to me as a cause, you’re the one who’s been my life, Albrecht. If it’s time for that life to end here, with you, then so be it. I’m not complaining—look at me, and see that I’m telling you the truth.”

He stared into her face for what seemed an eternity, and he did see it.

“I don’t know what I did to deserve you,” he said very softly, leaning close to her, cupping her face in his hands before he kissed her gently.

“Well, as far as that goes, you couldn’t possibly have deserved me,” she told him with a gurgle of laughter. “I suppose you were just lucky!”

“Yes, right up to the end.” He shook his head.

“All luck ends eventually, Albrecht, and the boys and the grandchildren are all out there in Darius. You got them out, and you were smart enough to get all of them involved practically from the time they could walk. You and I may not see it, but you know they’ll keep right on going, exactly the way you would have. And if the end game’s not working out exactly as planned, well, your projections always allowed for the possibility that it wouldn’t. The main elements are in place, Albrecht. They’re out there, building strength. It may take a little longer than we thought it would a few years ago, but the end result’s going to be the same, and that’s the result of your work. Yours, Albrecht.”

He listened to the sincerity in her voice, and he knew she was right. Or, at least, he amended scrupulously, she was being completely honest with him. And that was important. They’d always been honest with one another, no matter how many masks they’d been forced to wear with others.

He leaned back in the lounger, listening to wind and wave, to the distant cries of Mesa’s seabird analogs, and felt something oddly like…contentment. Or relief, possibly. The awareness that his race was run, that the baton had been passed fully to their sons and that he could leave the execution of the final stages in their capable hands.

And he supposed he hadn’t done all that badly, here in his final gambit. All but one of the disguised passenger liners in Mesa had departed for Darius well before Gold Peak’s arrival. The last one wasn’t going to make it, and he regretted that, because there were over four thousand valuable members of the onion aboard it. Some of them were personal friends, although only a handful had ever known his true identity, ever guessed he was Alpha One. Indeed, none of them had ever known his and Evelina’s true last name. That had been one of the prices of his heritage and the ruthless demands of operational security to which he and his family had sacrificed so much.

At least it would be quick, he thought with bittersweet regret. The Gauls aboard the ship would see to that.

But he’d expected to get at least two more liners into Mesa and out again. Almost six thousand other members of the onion—six thousand who hadn’t been on Janice Marinescu’s “cull list,” who’d been supposed to live…and wouldn’t. But at least the evacuation sites were completely isolated from the planetary datanet as a security measure, so it was unlikely anyone had heard about Gold Peak’s arrival just yet. That was good. It was better not to know some things.

He thought about the parents who were undoubtedly playing with their kids at this very moment. The lovers, stealing a moment of privacy. The teachers, the doctors. All of them, going about their lives, waiting to be evacuated.

“I really do love you,” he said quietly, moving from his lounger to hers. She scooted over, making room for him, and he stretched out with her, wrapping his left arm around her as she rested her head on his shoulder and nestled her cheek against his neck. “So much,” he told her, stroking her hair with his left hand. “So very much.”

“I know,” she said simply. “I’ve always known.”

“I’m glad,” he said…and pushed the button on the device in his right hand.

* * *

“Admiral Gold Peak!”

The sheer shock in Dominica Adenauer’s voice whipped Michelle Henke around towards her flag deck’s tactical section.

“What?” she asked urgently.

“The sensors.” For the first time, ever, Dominica Adenauer seemed unable to find the words she wanted. Or needed, at any rate. “It’s…it’s—”

Adenauer made herself stop, made herself draw a deep breath, then squared her shoulders and looked across the top of her display at Michelle.

“We’ve just picked up a series of nuclear detonations, Ma’am,” she said in a voice of flattened iron.

“A series?” Michelle heard her own voice repeat.

“Yes, Ma’am. Most of them’re on the planet, but we have at least four in-space detonations, as well. One of them—” She stopped for a moment, drew another of those steadying breath. “Three of them were in fairly small installations. One of them was a single ship, really. But the fourth…the fourth took out Lagrange One.”

Michelle felt the blood draining from her own face. Lagrange One was one of Mesa’s major orbital habitats. According to the information in their databanks, it’s permanent population was just over two and a half million.

“Sweet Jesus,” someone whispered behind her, but her own eyes stayed fixed on Adenauer.

“You said ‘most of them’ were on the planet,” she said steadily. “How many are we talking about?”

“I don’t have a hard number yet, Ma’am. At least thirty, though.”

“Thirty?” Cynthia Lecter repeated very carefully. Michelle turned her head. The golden haired chief of staff stood at her side, the crown of her head just level with Michelle’s shoulder. “Thirty, Dominica?”

“At least,” Adenauer confirmed grimly.

“Where?” Michelle asked. Adenauer looked at her, and she shrugged. “I mean, is there a pattern? A distribution?”

“Not an immediately obvious one.”

Commander Adenauer sounded closer to normal, as if she were coming back on balance, and Michelle felt a pang of sympathy as she realized how what Dominica had just seen must resonate with what had happened to her native Sphinx in the Yawata Strike.

“Quite a few of them seem to be…random,” the ops officer continued, looking back down at her displays as the uncaring computer steadily massaged the data, looking for patterns and correlations. “This one, for example—the biggest one of all. Looks like it was probably at least a couple of megatons.” She tapped the location on her display. “It’s an island in the middle of the ocean—a nature preserve, completely closed to development or even camping. Why in God’s name would somebody blow up an island?”

“I don’t have the least damned idea,” Michelle grated, “but if they—whoever the hell ‘they’ are—wanted to waste one of their fucking bombs on an empty island, I’m sure as hell not going to complain! What about the others?”

“The data’s still coming in, Ma’am. I can tell you that at least some of them were in urban centers, though. Not as big as the one on the island, but big enough. I can’t even begin to guess what the casualties are going to be like. But there are others scattered across small mountain resorts, or isolated manufacturing complexes in the middle of the prairie. There’s even one in what the computers are calling a meteorological research station near Mesa’s south pole!” She shook her head. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”

“You’re wrong,” Michelle said so flatly Adenauer’s eyes snapped back up to her. Michelle shook her head, her expression forged from frozen iron. “It does make sense…to someone. I don’t know who, and I don’t know why, but I know it does. And whoever the hell it is, it’s the same someone who’s been setting off bombs on this frigging planet for the last three months. There was something down there—something where every single one of those bombs just went off—that someone thought was worth blowing the hell up. And we’re going to find out who it was and what the hell they thought they were doing. Because I can tell you one thing that’s going to happen right now, Dominica.”

The ops officer looked at her, and Michelle turned her head, letting her flinty eyes sweep the stunned expressions on her flag bridge.

“Whoever set those things off knew we were in orbit when she did it,” she told her staff. “They waited until we were in orbit. And if the people on this planet were ready to blame us for having sent ‘Ballroom fanatics’ to wage nuclear terrorism against them, then who do you think they’re going to blame for what just happened?”

Epilogue

“It’s been confirmed,” Audrey O’Hanrahan said softly into her microphone, looking directly into the lens. Even her superbly trained, always professional voice cracked and wavered about the edges, and her crystal-clear blue eyes gleamed with unshed tears. “The final numbers, the total casualties, are still unknown. The confirmed Lagrange One death toll alone is already almost three million, however, and that number is expected to climb. Casualty estimates from the rest of the brutal attacks are still very preliminary, but sources in the Mesan government tell me it’s virtually certain that they will at least double the Lagrange One total.

“Authorities are baffled by the targets of these savage attacks and their apparently random distribution. So far, no pattern has suggested itself. All we know is that planetary and orbital sensors confirm a total of thirty-nine separate nuclear explosions over the space of less than ninety seconds. Ninety seconds, Ladies and Gentlemen—less than one and a half minutes. That’s how long it took for what will probably be at least six million human beings to be wantonly murdered. Vaporized as they went about their daily lives.”

She shook her head, and those blue eyes had hardened.

“Obviously, I don’t know what happened here, or who was ultimately behind it. My regular viewers will be aware that I’ve always been skeptical about claims of Manticoran responsibility for the Green Valley atrocity just over a year ago here on Mesa. And those who have followed my coverage of the more recent terrorist campaign here will be aware that I’ve never subscribed to the theory that somehow, for some reason, the Star Empire of Manticore, which has always championed freedom of thought, conscience, and speech, had decided to support terrorist attacks on such a scale. It was inconceivable to me that Manticore might have been in some way responsible for the violence and the death here on a planet which has known so much tragedy, so much destruction of human lives, for so very long. I am not now and never have been an apologist for Mesa’s support of the institution of genetic slavery. There is no conceivable excuse for that unconscionable commerce in human beings. But neither is there any conceivable excuse for what has been done to the people of this planet—citizen, seccy, and slave alike—over the past month. Nothing could possibly justify death and violence on such a scale!

“And as I contemplate what’s happened, try to find some underlying pattern, some common thread, I find myself thinking the unthinkable. How does it happen that General Thandi Palane, the military commander in chief of the Kingdom of Torch, ally of both Manticore and Haven, was on Mesa, of all the planets in the galaxy, at this particular moment? How is it possible that second-class citizens, with no military training and under the weight of the most intrusive surveillance system in the explored galley, were able to amass the weapons and acquire the discipline which allowed them to stand off the full-fledged assault of the entire Mesan Peaceforce for a full T-month? How is it conceivable that the Audubon Ballroom could have smuggled so many nuclear devices through a security fence as tight as Mesa’s…without assistance from someone?

“There are rumors—unconfirmed at this time—that the Star Empire has been involved in the deliberate destabilization of system governments across the Verge. I am one of the reporters who have always dismissed the endless stream of similar allegations against the Star Kingdom, but now I am forced to reconsider that dismissal. Countess Gold Peak, the commander of Manticore’s Tenth Fleet, and Admiral Lester Tourville, her Havenite second-in-command, have both flatly denied the involvement of any of their ships or their personnel in this disastrous chain of explosions. I want, more than I can express, to take their word for that. And up until this week, I would have done so unhesitatingly, because the Star Kingdom of Manticore has always enjoyed a well-deserved reputation among serious journalists for transparency and honesty.

“Yet in a time when the entire galaxy seems hell-bent on destroying itself, when allegations and counter allegations, conflicting stories which cannot possibly all be true, obscure all certainty, conceal all truth, where does anyone turn for answers?

“I can’t tell you that, Ladies and Gentlemen. All I can tell you is that at the moment the explosions ripped through the very heart of this planet, Manticoran and Havenite warships were in orbit around it and they are apparently totally unable to offer any explanation at all for how those attacks could have been carried out without any of their sensors observing a single thing.

“I can’t answer that question either…but I intend to. I’ve invested two thirds of my life as a journalist, exposing corruption and always seeking the truth behind the lie, because without truth, there can be no justice. I have no intention of abandoning that search at this time, wherever it may take me, whoever it may lead me to. I truly hope it does not lead me to Manticore, but if it does, so be it.

“I’m Audrey O’Hanrahan, coming to you from Mendel, the capital of the Mesa System, and I ask you to keep the victims of this senseless, savage attack in your hearts and in your prayers.

“Good night.”