David Weber - Insurrection

"Yes, sir. It's on the tape."

"Good. Send it standard civil service code, no scramble."

"Yes, sir."

"Thank you, Doris." Forsythe switched off the communicator and turned back to Enwright and Samsonov. "And now, gentlemen, let us give some thought to our circumstances." He smiled his bleak smile again. "Somehow I feel certain even my delicate touch will not suffice to make them any worse."

Vice Admiral Analiese Ashigara, slim and severe in her black and silver uniform, sat on the flag bridge of TFNS Basilisk and watched the bright dot of the mail packet on her display. She glanced at a com rating.

"Anything from the patrols, Ashworth?"

"No, sir. They're a hundred and fifty light-seconds out, and they report nothing detectable in scanner range."

"Thank you." She glanced at her operations officer. If the recon fighters' exquisitely sensitive instruments weren't picking up anything, then there was nothing to pick up. "Recall them, Commander Dancing."

"Aye, aye, sir."

"Communications, raise Rising Moon. "

"Aye, aye, sir."

There was silence on the bridge-the silence of a professional team aware of the dangers of unnecessary chatter-as Admiral Ashigara leaned back in her command chair and waited. Suddenly the main screen filled with the image of a dark, lean face wreathed in a huge smile of relief.

"Captain Stiegman, I am Vice Admiral Analiese Ashigara. I assume you have a reason for declaring a Priority One message condition?"

"I wish to hell I didn't," Stiegman said in a rich New Antwerp accent. "All hell's broken loose out here, ma'am, and no mistake. If you don't mind my asking, where's Admiral Forsythe?"

"He is following with the battle-line, Captain." Ashigara said. "I expect him in approximately six hours.'

" Battle-line?! Thank God!" Stiegman seemed to sag towards the pickup. "You don't know what's going on out here, Admiral! They're crazy! They-"

"Captain Stiegman," Ashigara cut him off, "I appreciate the strain you're obviously under. I would request, however, that you say nothing more over an open channel. I will, with your permission, send my cutter for you so that you can deliver your message to me in person. And confidentially."

"Yes." Stiegman inhaled deeply. "Certainly, Admiral. Send your cutter at once. The sooner I can tell someone else, the better, by God!"

"Well, Captain Stiegman," Admiral Forsythe said as he handed the man a drink. "I have the essentials of your story from Admiral Ashigara." He sounded too calm, he thought. The Galaxy was collapsing around his ears, and he sounded too calm about it all. "I don't yet have all the details, however, and I'd appreciate it if you'd summarize for my staff, as well."

"Summarize, Admiral?" Stiegman drained half the glass in a single gulp. "Gladly. In fact, I'll be delighted to let someone else worry about it for a while."

His slowly easing tension wasn't lost on his listeners, and they hunched closer to him as he began.

"It started about a month ago," he said slowly. "I put into Bigelow with a mail consignment-they break it down on Hasdruble for transshipment to the rest of the cluster-and they told me my departure clearance and return cargo would be delayed a day or two." He shrugged. "Two days is a long layover, but I've had longer, so I didn't think much about it.

"But a few hours later, the port master called me up again-something about a viral infection and they couldn't find one of the people who'd been exposed. He agreed the odds were against their plague carrier being on board, but SOP required a search of the ship. Well, I wasn't too pleased, but nobody wants to chance another plague outbreak, so I agreed."

He paused and stared down into his drink. When he looked back up, his eyes were hot.

"But it wasn't any damned medical inspection party they sent aboard my ship," he grated. "It was an entire platoon of Marines-or they wore Marine combat zoots, anyway." He relaxed his muscles with a visible effort. "But they were already aboard before I realized they weren't medics, and no one in his right mind argues with a platoon of zoots, whoever's inside 'em."

He shook his head slowly, remembering.

"They were polite as hell-I'll give the bastards that! But they posted two men in each drive room and two more on the bridge, and they told me- me , the skipper of a Federation mail packet, damn 'em!-that they had to 'detain' me." His lips twisted. "Wouldn't say why or for how long. Wouldn't say anything else. Just stood there and waited for their reliefs."

He growled something under his breath and finished his drink. Forsythe personally refilled the glass, to his obvious relief, and he sipped again, more slowly.

"Anyway, they had us. I tried getting a message out when I saw a Frontier Fleet cruiser on my screens, but they were on top of me in seconds. No nastiness, you understand-just another guard suddenly appeared in the com section and they stripped off our drones in case I got any smart ideas about using them.

"At first, I thought it was some kind of mistake, but then I figured out the whole orbit port was in on it-whatever 'it' was. And at least some of those 'Marines' really were Marines. I'm sure of it. I considered piracy, a real medical emergency-hell, even a port-wide outbreak of mass insanity! But I never once considered what was really happening."

"And that was, Captain?" Willis Enwright prompted when Stiegman paused once more.

"Treason, Captain," the mail packet captain said harshly. "Goddamned, old-fashioned, dyed-in-the-fucking-wool treason! The whole damned system's decided to 'secede' from the Federation!"

The blood drained from Lieutenant Qwan's face. Enwright's features only tightened slowly, but Samsonov looked as if he'd been punched in the stomach and Rivera looked murderous. Only Forsythe seemed unaffected-but, then, only he had seen Admiral Ashigara's scrambled transmission.

"I see, Captain Stiegman," he said quietly. "And their objective, obviously, was to keep Rising Moon from letting the cat out of the bag?"

"Exactly. Took us a while to put it together, Admiral, but there had to be some contact between my tech crews and the port service personnel.

"Near as we can figure it, it all began a month or so after Ladislaus Skjorning got home. Nobody's sure whether it was his idea or whether it was his whole damned planet's notion, but Beaufort's where it started, and whoever planned it must've had one hell of an organization! Given the way the warp lines run, Beaufort's at the bottom of a sack; all the rest of the cluster sort of drains down to 'em. They knew what that meant, too, because they didn't start on Beaufort; they started from Beaufort."

" 'From Beaufort'?" Enwright repeated.

"They sent out 'emissaries,' Captain. God only knows what kind of underground's been cooking away out here, but they sure as hell knew who to talk to where, and they sent out people like Stanislaus Skjorning and Dame MacTaggart. Hell, no wonder people listened! I'm a Fringer myself; I know how hot tempers are running out here since the MacTaggart murder. But goddamn it to hell, there's no excuse for a full-scale civil war!"

"A war, Captain?" Rivera did not-quite-sniff. "What do they plan to use for a navy?"

"Damned if I know," Stiegman said frankly, "but it's going to take a fleet-and I mean a fleet -to change their minds."

"How so, Captain?" Samsonov asked.

"Because they're not stupid, however crazy they are. They stage-managed it perfectly. Just one day everything is peaceful and fine; the next, Killiman Skywatch is in mutinous hands."

" Killiman Skywatch? " Rivera half-rose. "Good God, man, do you know what you're saying ?"

"Damn right I do." Stiegman seemed almost gloomily satisfied by Rivera's reaction. "I don't know how they did it, but I know they had Killiman, and I'm pretty sure they had Beaufort. Don't know about Bigelow-they were playing it mighty close to their chests in Bigelow, which could mean they didn't have Bigelow Skywatch-but Bigelow's the only way into the cluster, so it could just mean they were being careful in case of visitors."