Jack Campbell - Perilous Shield

He paused. “We made a deal.”

That actually brought a brief, mocking smile to her lips. “Even you can’t believe that’s your rationale for staying. But, feel free to claim that if you want. Isn’t that what you told me just before we overthrew Syndicate authority here?”

“Something like that,” Drakon conceded. “Even if I bolted right now, getting away wouldn’t be easy or guaranteed. I’d rather not die running away.”

“Having learned what I have about you, that’s a reason I can believe,” Iceni said. “I assume that you have been urged to try to escape anyway?”

“You assume correctly. I think you and I have disappointed some of our subordinates, Gwen.” He let down his guard with that statement, but what the hell. If she was going to betray him, she already had plenty of knowledge of him to use as ammunition.

She smiled again for a moment. “It’s just as well the people who work for us don’t start thinking that they can call the shots, isn’t it?” The smile faded as Iceni pointed at the display with one forefinger. “Where do you think the enigmas will go first?”

“If it were me, I’d head for the hypernet gate. They have to be worried about that now that we know how much damage one of those gates can do when it collapses.” Drakon nodded again, this time slowly. “You know, we do have a secret weapon. Maybe not so secret, but it’s nasty enough that even though we may lose here, we can make sure they don’t win.”

“Collapse the hypernet gate?” Iceni asked as casually as if Drakon had commented on the weather. She raised her hand, tapping one of the bracelets about her wrist. “I can send the command any time I want to.”

“I know.”

“Of course you did. I know that you’re thorough, and finding out whether I could do that would have been an obvious thing to check on before we even started our rebellion.” Iceni lowered her arm. “The command will disable the safe-collapse system and cause a collapse of the gate that generates the maximum-level burst of energy. About point seven nova-scale, I was told by the technicians who did the work.”

There wouldn’t be very much left at Midway if a point seven nova-scale burst of energy rampaged through the star system. The planets might remain, but scoured of their atmospheres and with ravaged surfaces. The star would be badly disrupted. Asteroids and comets would be vaporized or hurled into the darkness between stars.

Nothing human would survive.

But nothing belonging to the enigmas would survive, either.

“Do you think they’d believe us if we threatened them with that?” Drakon asked. “Get out now, or we destroy everything?”

“I’m sure they would believe us capable of carrying out such a threat,” Iceni said. “We are human, after all, and humans do things like that when our backs are to the wall. But the enigmas may be able to stop us from carrying out that threat. The information the Alliance gave us, which implied the gates were originally enigma technology deliberately leaked to us, would mean the enigmas know more about the gates than we do. We’ve learned how to stop the enigmas from collapsing the gates and destroying human-occupied star systems, but they may still have a backdoor means to halt us from doing the same thing.”

It felt odd, Drakon thought. This was a crisis situation. He could see the enigma attack fleet and the Syndicate flotilla as well as the mobile forces under the command of Iceni. Yet the opposing forces were light-hours distant. What he was seeing of the enigmas was what they had been doing four and a half hours ago. And no matter what they were doing now, it would take days for any forces to come into contact. “It can’t hurt to try to bluff the enigmas.” If Iceni was talking about a bluff rather than a cold-blooded plan to ensure mutual destruction if the enigmas were on the verge of wiping out the humans here.

“How far do you think can we trust CEO Boyens?” she asked.

“We both know Boyens.” Drakon held up one hand, the forefinger and thumb barely a centimeter apart. “We can trust him about that far, in my opinion.”

“He does some have some good qualities.”

“And right now those qualities are focused on riding the waves of change rolling across Syndicate-controlled space so that he ends up alive, afloat, and adorned with high rank.”

Iceni cocked her head slightly to one side as she thought. “That leaves room to appeal to his self-interest.”

“It does,” Drakon agreed. “What do we offer him?”

“We will submit this star system to his control without resistance or damage to any facilities as long as he works with us against the enigmas.”

“He’ll never believe it. Boyens knows we’d never keep such an agreement.” Drakon frowned. “But it might be the best offer he can hope for with the enigmas here. Give it a try.”

She made an exasperated sound. “We need more leverage. If only our battleship were operational. If only the battleship we captured at Taroa had been almost completed instead of being under construction.”

“The Free Taroans weren’t happy that we kept it,” Drakon remarked. “Or that we kept the main orbiting docks at Taroa after we took them from the Syndicate.”

“They’ll have to live with it, though they’re dragging their heels on getting us the supplies and workers we need to complete that ship.”

Colonel Malin spoke with careful deference. “Madam President, if I may, what if we gave the battleship and ownership of a significant portion of those orbiting docks to the Free Taroans?”

Iceni had the look of someone who had heard something impossible to understand. “Why would we do that?”

“We need allies. We have Black Jack,” Malin pointed out, “but he is distant, and so his help cannot be counted upon in a crisis. Taroa is close.”

“Do you,” Iceni asked, “have any conception of how much firepower a battleship carries? Of how much military capacity you are suggesting we offer to give away ?”

Malin smiled thinly. “I have been on the receiving end of bombardments from Alliance battleships, Madam President. However, the battleship at Taroa has no military capacity and will not for some time. Its hull isn’t complete. It is still not even able to leave the construction dock. Nor am I suggesting that we not ask for anything in return. The Free Taroans are already grateful for the military assistance our ground forces provided in defeating the Syndicate there. They are quibbling over the wording of mutual-defense agreements, though.”

Drakon narrowed his eyes at Malin. “I imagine the Taroans would agree to just about any wording, to just about anything, in order to get their hands on that battleship.”

“And then, rather than drag their heels, they would bend every effort to get the battleship completed and ready to fight as soon as possible,” Malin agreed.

Iceni eyed them both, her eyes now hooded. “An interesting suggestion. We tie Taroa closer to us by playing on Taroa’s desire for that battleship. Taroa invests the necessary resources into getting the battleship operational, thereby saving us the costs and effort. We gain a nearby ally who is even more grateful to us and committed to providing substantial support with a battleship that will be ready far sooner than if we try to do it all ourselves. A very interesting suggestion, Colonel. What if Taroa decides to betray us?”

Malin smiled. “We have complete access to the ship and will retain some access while it is being finished. There are many safeguards that can be covertly installed in the ship and its systems to ensure that any attempt to use it against us fails.”

Their quiet discussion was interrupted by the subdued chime of an alert from the system display. “There’s a shuttle lifting from this planet,” one of the console operators reported. On the display, a symbol appeared with a graceful arc showing its projected path up into orbit. “It’s not a scheduled lift, and all facilities were informed that lifts are not to occur during this alert period unless authorized from here.”