David Weber - Mission of Honor

“It makes sense, doesn’t it?” she pressed. “They played us— me— by having Arnold doctor the diplomatic correspondence. Hell, they may’ve had someone at the other end doing the same thing for High Ridge! No one’s seen hide nor hair of Descroix ever since the wheels came off, now have they? And then, when we figured out what Arnold had done, they played Elizabeth by convincing her we’d killed Webster and tried to kill her niece exactly the same way the Legislaturalists killed her father and Saint-Just tried to kill her! God only knows how many millions of civilians and spacers—ours and the Manties’—these… people have gotten killed over the past eighty T-years or so, and Elizabeth—and I—both walked straight into it when it was our turn!”

The president’s rage was a bare-fanged, bristling presence in the office now. Then Theisman raised one hand in a cautionary gesture.

“Assuming a single word of what McBryde told Cachat and Zilwicki is true, you may well be right, Eloise,” he said quietly. “In fact, assuming there’s any truth to it, I think you almost certainly are right. But at the same time, it may not be true. I don’t know about you, but there’s a part of me that would really, really like to be able to blame all the people we’ve killed—and the people we’ve had killed on our own side—on someone else’s evil machinations instead of our own inherent ability to screw up. It may be that that’s what happened. But before we start operating on that assumption, we’ve got to find some way to test whether or not it is.”

“Oh, I agree with you entirely, Tom,” Pritchart said. “At the same time, though, I think we’ve already got enough, what with the records Cachat and Zilwicki brought home of the Green Pines explosions and how they don’t match the Mesa version, what Simões can tell us, what our own scientists can tell us about his new drive claims, to justify very quietly reaching out to Congress.”

Theisman looked distinctly alarmed, as did LePic. Trenis and Lewis, on the other hand, were obviously trying very hard not to look alarmed. In fact, they were trying so hard—and failing so completely—that the president chuckled much more naturally.

“I’m not planning on talking to anyone unless Leslie, Kevin Usher, and probably you, Tom, all agree that, whoever it is, she’s at least her own woman. And, trust me, I’m thinking in terms of a preliminary security vetting God might not pass! And I’m certainly not going to bring anyone like McGwire or Younger in on this until and unless we feel absolutely certain McBryde’s and Simões’s information is credible. But if we do come to that conclusion, this is going to change every single one of our foreign policy assumptions. That being the case, I think we need to start doing a little very careful, very circumspect spadework as soon as possible.”

“Good morning,” Albrecht Detweiler said, looking into the camera. “I know it’s only been a couple of weeks since we last met, but since then, we’ve received confirmation the Sollies are going to employ Filareta as we’d hoped.”

He paused, reflecting on just how disastrous it could be if the message he was recording fell into someone else’s hands. The odds of that happening were literally too minute even to be calculated, or he would never have recorded it in the first place, of course. Only eleven copies of it would be made—one for each of the “Renaissance Factor’s” heads of state, on high-security, DNA-coded chips—and each of them would be transported by streak boat in locked, dead-man’s switch-controlled, self-destruct-equipped cases for hand-delivery by the Alignment’s most trusted couriers. Every precaution for transporting secure information which had been developed during six centuries of successful conspiracy and covert operations had been integrated into the conduits connecting his office to the message’s recipients. If anyone had managed to compromise one of those conduits, the entire strategy was doomed anyway, so there really wasn’t much point resorting to circumlocution to keep any unauthorized souls who might hypothetically see it from figuring out what he was saying.

“Assuming he manages to meet the specified movement schedule,” he went on after a moment, “he should reach Manticore almost exactly three T-weeks from today. Although he’s probably clever enough to have at least a few suspicions about how Crandall came to be placed where she was, which means he’s probably cherishing a few second thoughts about his own relationship with Manpower, there’s not much wiggle room in the orders Rajampet and the Security Board have cut for him. And it’s clear from those orders that they’ve bought into the theory that Manticore’s ‘mysterious attackers’ must have pretty thoroughly gutted the home system’s defenses.”

Profound satisfaction glittered in his eyes with the last sentence. Getting that particular “conclusion” into the SLN’s thought processes had been simpler than he’d expected, although the latest reports from both Collin and Franklin indicated that was going to get harder in the next few months. Well, it wasn’t as if that hadn’t been anticipated all along. As the catastrophic scope of ONI’s threat appreciation failures was driven home in gutted starships and dead spacers, even Solly admirals were bound to realize a thorough housecleaning of their intelligence services was in order. It would be interesting to see if the present senior officers at ONI and OpAn were publicly scapegoated or simply shuffled out to pasture, but it was inevitable that more competent successors (after all, there couldn’t be any less competent successors) would replace them.

“So, unless something totally unanticipated happens—which, of course, is always possible, unfortunately,” he continued. “Filareta will follow his orders and demand Manticore’s surrender. At which point, the Manties will refuse and he and most of his superdreadnoughts will get exactly the same treatment Crandall got at Spindle. And if it should happen that restraint seems likely to rear its ugly head at the critical moment, we’ve taken a few precautions to… help the situation along, let’s say. “

He paused again, smiling thinly.

“Frankly, it seems most likely to us from our sources in Old Chicago that if, in fact, Filareta gets himself as thoroughly smashed as Crandall did, the follow-up wave Rajampet is currently planning will get put on indefinite hold. There has to be a limit to how many superdreadnoughts even the SLN is willing to pour down a rat hole, after all.

“Even if that happens, however, we have… arrangements in place to see to it that at least a dozen members of the Assembly will demand explanations. There’s even a possibility—which, to be honest, I find particularly delicious—that Beowulf will be leading the pack. At the same time, we’ll be sending the execute order to our first wave of ‘spontaneous uprisings’ against Frontier Security and its tyrannical ways. When that happens, it will be time for the Factor to come out into the open.”

His expression turned much more intent, and he leaned slightly forward, towards the camera.

“The groundwork is all in place, and, so far, things have gone very much as planned. There’s always room for that to change, though, and it’s critical the next stage be properly handled. With only one or two exceptions, all of your first wave ‘annexations’ should be programmed to welcome the Faction’s protection, but those exceptions—if they arise—are going to have to be very carefully approached. I know we’ve talked about this, but let me re-emphasize that even though we’ve picked all of these systems because of their potential industrial and economic contributions, it’s absolutely essential that the Faction be seen as a beneficial, voluntary association. So, if it turns out any of your targets are unwilling to voluntarily join, accept that. There’ll be time to add them later, and for the immediate future, it’s much more important that all of you are self-evidently acting solely in self-defense in the face of the chaos and anarchy spreading steadily through the Shell and Verge.”