David Weber - The Shadow of Saganami

"I'm sure they will, Sir. And we'll certainly do everything we can to expedite."

"I know, Isidor. That's one reason I picked you for the command." Bourmont slapped the junior admiral on the shoulder. "And I imagine the thought of actually getting to command them in action has to be what they call an efficiency motivator, doesn't it? I know it certainly would be for me , if I were twenty T-years younger!"

"Yes, Sir. It certainly does," Hegedusic agreed, despite the fact that Bourmont had never commanded anything in action. The closest he'd ever come was escorting transports full of Monican mercenaries from their home system to wherever OFS needed to employ them.

"Good man!" Bourmont slapped his shoulder again. "You and I also need to go over the manning requirements again," he said. "We're going to be short of trained personnel however we go about it, and I think it's important to begin cycling our people through as soon as we can get the first two or three of the new ships back into service. We'll use them as schools and, hopefully, we'll have basically competent cadres to place aboard each successive ship as she leaves the yard."

"Yes, Sir," Hegedusic said, exactly as if he hadn't already written a memo to Bourmont's office proposing exactly the same thing. He watched the docking battlecruiser for a moment longer, then turned his head to look at his superior.

"One question, Sir. Even if we get cadres trained the way you're talking about, we're going to be in an awkward position during the actual transition. We'll have lots of battlecruisers waiting for crews, and lots of personnel training to crew them, but most of our existing ships are going to be undermanned and in the process of being laid up as their people transition to the battlecruisers."

"And your point is?" Bourmont asked when he paused.

"I'm just a little worried about our home security while we're in that position, Sir. It would be embarrassing if an emergency came up and the Navy wasn't able to respond."

"Um." Bourmont frowned, tugging at his lower lip, then shrugged. "Unfortunately, I don't see any way around it, Isidor. Oh, we'll schedule things to keep our more powerful and modern units manned longest, but there's no way to avoid the draw-down you're talking about."

"No, Sir. But I was wondering if we might ask Mr. Levakonic if it would be possible to deploy some of his 'missile pods' to cover our more important installations. As I understand it, they're pretty much suited to indefinite deployment, as long as they can be serviced regularly, so it wouldn't be as if we were actually expending them. And I'd feel a lot better with some additional firepower to back us up."

"Um," Bourmont said again, frowning. "I think you're probably being overly concerned, Isidor," he said finally, "but that doesn't mean you're wrong. And it would be embarrassing to be caught out that way, however unlikely I might think it would be. The missile pods won't be arriving for a couple of months, but I'll discuss the idea with Levakonic. And if it won't throw us behind schedule, I think it's a good one."

"Thank you, Sir. It would make me feel a lot better."

"Me, too, now that you've brought it up," Bourmont conceded, and grimaced. "It's going to be a real strain to pull this one off," he went on. "And I'll be honest, the thought of actually mounting the operation's enough to make me nervous. But I think the planning's fundamentally sound, and the President's convinced the potential gains far outweigh the risks. On the whole, I'm strongly inclined to agree. But it's going to be up to you to actually make all the parts fit together and work, Isidor. Are you ready for the challenge?"

"Yes, Sir," Hegedusic replied, his eyes clinging to the second battlecruiser as she nuzzled into her own space dock. "Yes sir, I am."

Agnes Nordbrandt sat in the safe-house's kitchen, sipping hot tea, and waited.

She liked kitchens, she reflected. Even small, cramped ones like this. It was something about the soothing, sustaining ritual of preparing food. The smells and tastes and textures that wrapped a comforting cocoon around the cook. She got up and crossed to the lower of the two stacked ovens, bending over to peer in through the glass window in its door, and smiled. The Kornatian "turkey" really did rather resemble the Terran species which had given it its name, and the one in the roasting bag had turned a rich, golden brown. It would be ready for the celebratory dinner soon.

She turned away and walked out of the kitchen. The one-sun's narrow hall was dark, even though it was only midafternoon, because her apartment was located at the very back of the building. The lack of sunlight bothered her sometimes, but there were advantages to her apartment's location. Among other things, it had permitted her to cut an emergency escape hatch from her bedroom to an old sewer tunnel which connected with the Karlovac storm drains she and the Movement had used so often and to such good effect. Sooner or later, they were going to lose that mobility advantage-or, at least, have it significantly reduced. But for the moment, they still knew their way around the capital city's underbelly far better than the KNP did.

She climbed the steep, narrow stair at the back of the one-sun. It was supposed to serve as an emergency stair to be used only if the elevators were out. Given that the elevators hadn't worked once in the entire time she'd been in the building, the stairs saw a lot more use than they were supposed to. She grimaced wryly at the thought as she made her steady way upward.

I wonder how Rajkovic and Basaricek are going to feel when they find out I'm alive after all? I'd love to see their faces. Then again, I'd love to see their reaction to the knowledge that I've been hiding right under their noses from the very beginning. They just don't seem to get it. Maybe they figure I have to have some big, elaborate command post to be effective? But that would be stupid. I can handle everything I need to handle with nothing more than one personal com and a couple of trustworthy runners. And that lets me disappear tracelessly into the capital's population-just one more poor, anonymous young widow, struggling to keep a roof over her head on the miserable social support payments the government makes available. And I actually collect the credit drafts, too. She grinned at the thought. Setting that up before I went underground wasn't easy, but it's paid off big time.

She shook her head, still bemused by the opposition's myopia. Maybe it was the fact that the people looking for her knew she'd always been relatively affluent. Her adoptive parents had been well enough off to send her to private schools and pay most of her tuition when she went off to college. Her parliamentary career had paid pretty well, too, not to mention the noneconomic perks that had gone with it. So maybe it simply never occurred to the people looking for her that she would quite cheerfully hide in plain sight simply by becoming poor.

It had been one of her better ideas, she decided yet again as she crossed the one-sun's flat roof to the clothesline. Drawing a regular social support stipend turned her into the purloined letter so far as government agencies were concerned. She was right there, in plain sight, yet hidden and anonymous behind an absolutely legitimate social support account number and case file. They knew exactly who she was, and that she was harmless, so they ignored her completely.

And the same principle applied to her choice of safe-houses. When a woman was poor enough, she became effectively invisible, and the densely populated tenements of the Karlovac slums became an infinitely better hiding place than some camouflaged bunker tucked away in the mountains.

Not to mention the fact that the tenements are much more convenient to my work.