The Shadow of Cincinnatus (23 page)

There was a pause, then the holographic image blinked out of existence.

“Traitor,” General Standerton Thorne growled. “She was a Senator.”

“Not the most promising of recommendations,” Tully agreed. “I...”

“It gets worse,” Commodore Arunika said. She cut Tully off with practiced ease. “We have analyzed the recordings from the Battle of Athena and the data packet sent back to us by a covert agent. The news is not good.”

She paused for dramatic effect. “We’re not just fighting humans,” she said. “The Outsider Federation – interesting choice of name, by the way – includes at least two alien races.”

Marius fought to keep his face under control. Protecting humanity from aliens was one of the prime reasons for the Federation’s existence. Even now, it was a rare alien who was allowed to leave his homeworld – or the colony world his race might have settled, before they encountered the human race. Aliens were
alien
. They could not be trusted, let alone honored with the full rights and obligations of humans. And the Outsiders were turning them into
soldiers
? Giving them access to human weapons and training? It could not be borne.

“Apparently, the aliens have been promised equality with humans, once the war is won,” Arunika continued. “In hindsight, this may explain some of the rumors from beyond the Rim prior to the Justinian War. The Outsiders were working with the aliens and convincing them to unite against us.”

“Never mind that now,” Thorne growled. “The real question is simple. Can we win the war?”

“Unknown,” Arunika said. She looked directly at Marius. “We have no real way of deducing just how strong the Outsiders actually
are
, sir. The only way we can guess at anything is by tracking their actions – and the actions they
didn’t
take.”

Marius frowned, then saw what she meant. “They didn’t attack us while we were distracted by Admiral Justinian,” he said, slowly. “They couldn’t have been ready to take the offensive then.”

There was no way to be
sure
, he knew, but it made sense. Admiral Justinian and the other warlords had come alarmingly close to winning the war. If the Outsiders had attacked, with the fleet they’d shown in the attack on Athena, they might well have successfully cracked the Federation into several smaller states. Or they could have quietly supplied the warlords with enough material to keep them going for much longer, without needing to show themselves...

They couldn’t have been ready to move
, he thought. And that led to another thought.
They might not have wanted to jump now either
.

It made sense, he decided. They’d known him – Chang Li had
definitely
known him. She’d known he wouldn’t leave the Rim alone, not when he’d been so driven to eliminate the scourge of piracy. Commodore Garibaldi had been just the first step in a plan to eventually exterminate the pirates, which would – naturally – have revealed the Outsiders too. They might have been forced to mount their offensive before they were ready to move.

“It may be more hopeful than we believe,” he said, and outlined his reasoning. “How many shipyards could they have produced in the time they had?”

“Unknown,” Arunika said. “There are just too many variables. Did they start from scratch or did they have some pre-existing infrastructure in place already? How much trained manpower did they have? How much were they able to obtain from the Federation...?”

Marius raised a hand, silencing her.

“I know,” he said. He turned to look at Professor Kratman. “Did the Brotherhood know anything about this?”

“The Brotherhood would not have looked kindly upon any friendly human-alien interaction,” Kratman pointed out. “Our whole cause is to prevent aliens from ever threatening humanity again.”

Marius nodded, keeping his face impassive. Even now, he had no idea just how large the Brotherhood actually was – or, for that matter, why the Grand Senate had even tolerated its existence. They might well have seen the Brotherhood as competition. But then, the Brotherhood
did
provide unbending support for anything that kept aliens under firm control, something that would have suited the Grand Senate very well.

“Then we fight,” Marius said, shortly. “There’s no alternative.”

Tully cleared his throat. “The economic situation is not good,” he said. “We may be unable to fight the war.”

Marius turned to face him. “Explain.”

The bureaucrat didn’t look intimidated. If anything, he looked bored.

“Our economy has been badly damaged,” he said. “We have suffered a number of blows to our industries, which have created new and unanticipated bottlenecks in production. My staff is currently working to devise plans to expand those bottlenecks, but it will be years before we have a workable action plan. There are just too many glitches in the system the Grand Senate left us.”

Marius met his eyes. “Are you saying that we cannot win?”

“I’m saying it will be years before we can restore our production levels back to the pre-war rate, let alone increase it,” Tully said. “There are just too many shortages. We need more trained manpower, for example, yet training people up to the required levels will take at least five years – and that assumes we are starting from a decent educational level.”

“A dangerous assumption,” Kratman observed. “Even now, Earth’s schools are still very weak.”

“Because they didn’t want to teach the kids how to question,” Marius snapped. Earth had been the only place the Grand Senate could have been challenged, politically. It hadn’t taken long for the Grand Senators to ensure that the population became dependent on their handouts. And the population had rioted when their handouts had been cut. “But we’re short on options.”

“The war will be far more costly than you suppose,” Tully said. “Even victory might break us. Their terms are not unreasonable, sir. They should be accepted.”

“So will defeat,” Marius said. He felt a surge of sudden hatred he had to fight to keep under control. “And if we accept their terms, Tully, humanity’s unity will be shattered forever.”

He glared down at the table. There could be no illusions about the Federation’s popularity outside the Core Worlds. Any reasonably fair referendum would see almost all of the outer worlds either going to the Outsider Federation or demanding independence for themselves, which would leave the Federation badly crippled. Who knew what would become of it then?

And the Core Worlds were economically dependent on the outer worlds. What would happen if they lost the ability to extort resources at will? There would be a massive economic crash, further threatening the Federation’s integrity. Marius privately doubted the rump Federation would survive a year, once it had lost control of the outer worlds. And it would fall all the way down into civil war.

He’d intended to solve the problem, he knew. The Core Worlds couldn’t parasite on the outer worlds indefinitely. It was, if nothing else, grossly immoral. And, more importantly, it sparked countless uprisings against the Federation’s authority. But it seemed he had run out of time.

“No,” he said. He had not fought Admiral Justinian for six years just to see the Federation shatter anyway, even though the rogue warlord was dead. “We will not accept these terms.”

Marius took a breath. “Humanity’s unity is at stake, but so is it’s very survival,” he warned. “If the Outsiders get their wish, the human race will be grossly weakened. And if they grant aliens rights, what happens to the human race then? This cannot be allowed.”

“There may be room for negotiation,” Tully said. “I...”

Marius spoke over him. “There is no room for negotiation,” he said. “We pledged that we would reform the Federation, not surrender to naked force and accept division, a division that would eventually lead to a second war or humanity’s destruction. I will not concede anything to rebels who believe they can intimidate us into conceding to them.”

He took a breath, assembling all parts of his argument in his mind. “We will go to war,” he said. “We will conscript educated manpower from wherever we can get it – and we will start educating as many people as possible, pushing them into the pipeline so they can join the production ranks as soon as possible. We will train new spacers, new soldiers, new engineers...everything we need to fight the war. We will tap every last resources of the Federation and bend it to the cause of victory.”

“There will be resistance,” Thorne mused.

“We will deal with it,” Marius said.

He turned his gaze to General Yusuf Maringa, Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “How do we stand, militarily speaking?”

Maringa’s dark face looked worried. Marius had originally intended to keep the post for himself, as Commander-in-Chief of the Federation’s military. Maringa had only been a temporary expedient, someone who could handle the paperwork. He had never been intended to serve as a commander during a war. It was partly why the Grand Senate had largely left him alone, even when they’d been relieving – or removing – countless other military officers.

“Well, we have two fleets ready for dispatch to the front,” Maringa said, after a moment to consult his terminal. “Home Fleet itself remains untouched, now we have purged the handful of affected datanodes and other problematic spots. Our prime weakness lies with Boston, sir; if we lose control of the junction there, the Outsiders will have control of five separate Asimov Points that would allow them to attack deeper into the Federation.”

“And we couldn’t have that, could we?” Marius asked, dryly. But Boston was still three months away, even through the Asimov Point network. The system might already have fallen, leaving the path to Earth wide open. “Move reinforcements up to the system, then start looking around for other deployable forces we can add to the roster. We’ll try to hold Boston, but I also want to mount counterattacks as soon as possible. Find a few aggressive commanders and send them into the enemy’s rear.”

He took a breath. “And dispatch as many survey ships as you can,” he added. “I want them scouting out the Beyond, looking for enemy bases. I want them found and prepped for destruction.”

“Aye, sir,” Maringa said.

He didn’t look pleased, Marius noted. It was hard to blame him. Searching for enemy bases was a huge task, without any real guarantee of success, but it had to be done. Short of capturing an Outsider vessel with its database intact, which wasn’t particularly likely unless the enemy screwed up by the numbers, there was no other way to locate the enemy homeworlds. The only real advantage the Federation had was its reasonable certainty that the alien homeworlds would be harder to hide than an Outsider base.

Marius, once again, cursed the Grand Senate under his breath. The Survey Service had been reduced to a handful of ships, left updating navigational charts of the outer worlds rather than exploring beyond the Rim. And then it had been absorbed into the Federation Navy in hopes of finding an unexplored Asimov Point that led into the rear of warlord territory. They certainly hadn’t been doing their job of probing unexplored space...

But that might have caused political problems
, he thought, bitterly.
Who in their right mind would want another Blue Star War
?

He cleared his throat. “We have a colossal advantage, if we have time to use it,” he said. “And I will not stand for
anything
that gets in our way. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir,” Maringa said. The others echoed him quickly. “We won’t fail you.”

“Good,” Marius said. “Dismissed.”

Professor Kratman lingered until the others had gone, leaving him alone with Marius. “You do realize that we might win the war, but lose the peace?”

Marius glowered at his former commanding officer. “Do
you
realize that we would lose everything if we accepted their terms?”

“I do,” Kratman said. “And I understand what’s driving you. But I think you need to understand that the Federation is alarmingly fragile at the moment. A push in the wrong direction might shatter it.”

He nodded politely to Marius, then turned and walked out of the room. Marius glared at his retreating back, then looked down at the intelligence reports on his terminal. None of them made comforting reading. He was far from the only military officer to suspect that trouble was gathering itself in the Beyond, but the analysts were now trying to make up for their failure to predict the offensive by competing to come up with the most hair-raising predictions and projections of enemy strength. And, if they’d been sending memos to the Grand Senate, they might well have succeeded in alarming them into making peace.

But Marius was an experienced officer. He’d read enough intelligence reports to know when officers were doing their best to predict the enemy’s capabilities – and when they were trying to cover their asses by writing down the worst possible projection, then presenting it as absolute truth.

“Bastards,” he muttered.

There was no way they could accept the peace terms – and the treacherous bitch of a senator had to know it. He’d thought well of her, hadn’t he? The one senator in the room who’d actually given a damn about her people. And now...the more he looked at it, the more he wondered if the Outsiders had been behind the pirates. Senator Chang Li might have been backing the people who were ravaging her worlds! It was no surprise – Governor Barany had done the same – but it was still disappointing. He wasn’t sure why.

“Record,” he ordered. The automated system clicked on at once. “From Emperor Marius to Commodore Garibaldi. Congratulations on maintaining your fleet in an intact state. You are hereby promoted to Vice Admiral – paperwork and other formalities to come.”

He sighed. There would be other commanding officers heading to Boston – and some of them would outrank his protégée. Normally, that would be acceptable, but Garibaldi had shown an astonishing talent for coming out on top. It was worth trying to press that talent into service. Besides, he had no doubt of Garibaldi’s loyalty. The others were more questionable.