David Weber - Hell Hath No Fury

curiosity, mul Gurthak would have been under no legal obligation to answer their possible questions.

The two thousand found that deliciously ironic, since it was the Ransaran insistence on a citizen's right to privacy which had deprived military and law enforcement agencies of the police power to legally demand access to private encryption spellware or the personal messages it protected.

"As I've already reported," he continued, refocusing his thoughts and attention on the task in hand, "the sudden appearance of these 'Sharonians' and Olderhan's involvement in the first contact, not to mention the incredible ineptitude of Bok vos Hoven, left me with no option but to improvise."

He might, he reflected, be taking a not-insignificant risk in his characterization of vos Hoven. The incompetent idiot's family connections were just as exalted as he'd claimed, and making enemies that highly placed could be … prejudicial to a man's life expectancy. By the same token, though, mul Gurthak had amply demonstrated his own competence, judgment, and value in the Council's service over the past twenty-plus years. He had patrons of his own, at least as highly placed as vos Hoven's relatives, and even if he hadn't had them, the recognition, identification, and repair of flaws in the Great Task's execution was a critical component of the mission he'd been assigned. Any attempt to sugarcoat vos Hoven's shortcomings would have been a betrayal of his duty to the caste.

"I believe that, so far at least, events are transpiring much as I had hoped they might. It was fortunate the members of the Council had seen fit to arrange to provide me with significant assets in my area of responsibility, despite its distance from Arcana. This gave me far more influence at critical points than would have been the case without them. By the same token, however, I've been required to commit all of them, and I fear that few of them will survive. Indeed, it seems increasingly likely that their continued survival beyond the end of their immediate usefulness would, in itself, pose a considerable threat to the Great Task.

"According to my most recent dispatches from Two Thousand Harshu, Rithmar Skirvon has disappeared. Either he was killed in the otherwise successful Special Operations mission which clearly managed to kill the Sharonians' Voice at Fallen Timbers, or else he was captured and is currently the prisoner of the handful of Sharonians who appear to have so far evaded capture themselves. I have little doubt that he will have told them anything he knows by now. Fortunately, his actual knowledge is strictly limited, and the possibility that his captors will be in any position to utilize what he may have told them is slight. Nonetheless, it would be prudent, in my judgment, to make arrangements for his elimination as soon as possible after his recovery by our own forces. Indeed, the best resolution would be for him to be killed in the crossfire when our troops attempt to rescue him, and I am cautiously exploring possible avenues for arranging that outcome.

"Thousand Carthos, on the other hand, has now been placed in command of an independent advance up a second line of universes. While this deprives him of further opportunity to shape the main thrust to our liking, it also means he no longer has Harshu or Toralk looking over his shoulder, and his natural attitude towards these Sharonians is much closer to our own than either Harshu's or Toralk's. I feel confident that we could have relied upon him to generate a significant number of 'atrocities' in his own command area even without my … instructions to him.

"Thousand Harshu is proving rather more … problematical than I'd originally hoped," mul Gurthak admitted. "Unfortunately, his seniority made him the only choice, other than myself, to command the expeditionary force. The good news is that he's reacted very much as I anticipated to the 'discretionary instructions' I sent him. I believe you will have discovered by now, from the copy of my instructions to him which I appended to my last report, that it must be crystal clear to any impartial reading that I never ordered him to launch this attack. Indeed, I intend in the next few days to send him dispatches admonishing him for having taken too much upon himself in launching any offensive beyond the Hell's Gate universe itself. I will also be sending copies of those dispatches up the official communications pipeline to the High Commandery. Of course, now that he's committed us to actual operations, I have no option but to support him to the very best of my ability in order to ensure that those operations succeed."

Mul Gurthak paused the recording and leaned back in his chair, interlacing his fingers across his chest while he considered what he'd already recorded. He thought about it for several seconds, then straightened and resumed.

"The bad news is that Harshu is clearly up to something. At this time, I'm not certain exactly what, but I suspect he's more of a throwback to the old Andaran honor code than I'd believed. If my suspicions are accurate, he's deliberately engineering a situation in which any blame for atrocities and excesses committed in the course of this expedition will be seen as his, and only his, personal responsibility.

Should he succeed in doing so, it will almost certainly result in at least some mitigation of the consequences of those excesses upon public opinion.

"Despite that, I believe the basic objectives will still be attained. Five Hundred Neshok, in particular, is working out very well. His personality is just as sociopathic as our evaluating spellware suggested, and his violations of the Kerellian Accords continue to mount steadily. No matter what Harshu may want, Neshok's actions are going to have a huge impact on public opinion in the home universe. The Ransarans' repugnance will be impossible to overstate, and the more traditional elements of Andara will be equally horrified. The fact that Neshok, Carthos, and Harshu are all Andarans themselves will, of course, fasten responsibility for this entire fiasco upon Andara and the Andaran officer corps. It was an Andaran-Harshu-who launched the attack in an excess of militarism and personal ambition which far exceeded my instructions to him. And it was two other Andarans-Neshok and Carthos-who proved themselves to be merciless butchers and sadists.

"I was unable to be too explicit in my suggestions to Neshok about the best way to use the traitor vos Dulainah's death to further our objectives. It's become clear, though, that he understood the concept quite well. He's also been rather more subtle than I anticipated by insisting that his briefings on vos Dulainah's death are a 'best guess reconstruction of events' based on 'reports which cannot be substantiated at this time.' That gives him-and, indrectly, me-a certain degree of insulation. Despite those qualifications, however, they've spawned dozens of independent atrocities-all of which appear to have been committed either by Andarans or by runaway garthan-which will further blacken Andara's reputation, especially in Ransaran eyes."

He paused once more, his face carefully expressionless despite the malicious glee that bubbled deep inside at the thought of using the traitor Halathyn vos Dulainah's death to finally smash Andara's grip upon the High Commandery. The fact that the atrocities his supposed murder at Sharonian hands was spawning among the Andarans and fugitive garthan who had idolized the senile old lunatic would hammer a wedge between the components of the Andaran-Ransaran political alliance which had always frustrated Mythal's objectives, as well, only made it even sweeter to contemplate.

"The fact that I was forced to improvise with so little warning has forced me to run certain risks," he continued after a moment. "The connection between us-specifically, between myself and the Central Bank-and Carthos is particularly worrisome. In addition, both Neshok and Five Hundred Klian represent lesser risks.