David Weber - The Shadow of Saganami

He felt physically ill at the thought, but as he looked into those hard, flat hazel eyes, he could no longer deny the truth.

She really is exactly what Nordbrandt claims to be fighting.

The thought sent a chill through him, and, for just a moment, he felt inexpressibly weary. Was this what he and Suzanne had once dreamed of? What he'd spent fifty T-years of his life building?

He wanted to reach across the desk and throttle her. Yet, even then, he realized that in many ways, on a personal level, Vaandrager simply represented what he'd been trying to do on a star system's level.

"I'm not going to argue with you about this any longer, Ineka," he said. "I thought you might be reassuring to the Board when I resigned. That they'd see you as a promise that whatever else happened, we wouldn't simply abandon our current advantages until we were certain the annexation would make them unnecessary. That's why I didn't oppose your campaign for the -Chairwomanship-because I wanted to avoid as much instability as we could while the Constitution was drafted. But I see now that that was a mistake."

"Are you threatening me?" she demanded tautly. "Because, if you are, you're making a serious error."

"You worked for me for thirty T-years," he told her levelly. "In all that time, did I ever make a threat I couldn't back up?"

He met her furious glare coldly, and something flickered at the backs of her hot eyes. Something like fear.

"You may believe," he continued, "that I've been unaware of your efforts to sew up proxies while I've been off-planet. If so, you're wrong. I know exactly how many votes you have in your pocket. Can you say the same about me?"

Her fists clenched on the desktop, and her expression was a mask.

"I spoke with Joachim at some length before I left Flax," he went on. "We were both… disturbed by reports we were receiving. Which was why I took the precaution of getting his signature on a request to convene a special meeting of the Board."

The color flowed out of her set face as he watched.

"As you may be aware, the Van Dort family-which is to say, me-controls forty-two percent of the Union's voting shares outright. The Alquezar family controls another twelve percent. There are no proxies involved, Ineka. Unlike you, Joachim and I control our votes directly, and I remind you that according to the bylaws, a special meeting must be convened upon the request of fifty-one percent of the voting stockholders. I'd hoped I might convince you to see reason. I see now that I can't. Fortunately, there are other remedies."

"Now, just a minute, Bernardus," she began. "I know tempers are running high. And you're right about how my ego sometimes gets involved in these things. But there's no need to destabilize the entire Union just because you and I disagree on policy and tactics."

"Spare me, Ineka," he said wearily. "You were my mistake. Now I'm going to fix it. Don't waste your time or mine pretending you and I can come to some sort of meeting of the minds. What's happening in Thimble right now is far more important than anything happening here, and I'm not going to have you standing in the way."

"You arrogant prick!" Vaandrager lurched to her feet, leaning both hands on the desk, her eyes flaming with hate. "You sanctimonious, holier-than-thou bastard ! Who the hell d'you think you are to come into my office and lecture me on morality and social responsibility?!"

"I think I'm the one who gave you an opportunity to convince me to leave you in the Chairwomanship," he said softly.

She closed her mouth, and it was his turn to stand, looming over her with a height advantage of over thirty-five centimeters.

"You've never understood that with power comes responsibility," he told her. "Maybe I'm foolishly romantic-maybe I am -sanctimonious-to believe that. But I do. That's why you'll be out of this office within six days, one way or the other. I'm posting the request for the special meeting this afternoon. If you choose to resign rather than force me to take it to the Board, I'll settle for that. If you choose to fight me, I'll make it my personal business to break you. When we lock horns, you'll lose, and not just the Chairwomanship. When the dust settles, you'll find yourself out on the street without-as you so quaintly put it-a pot to piss in, wondering what lorry just ran over you." He smiled thinly, without a single trace of humor. "Believe me, Ineka."

He held her gaze once more, and tension crackled between them like poisoned lightning.

Then he turned and walked out of the office which had once been his without another word.

"Sir, if the Nuncians and Lieutenant Hearns are still on profile and Bogey Three hasn't moved, they'll be coming up on crossover in approximately twenty-seven minutes."

Lieutenant Commander Kaplan's tone was crisply professional, and Aivars Terekhov nodded in acknowledgment of her warning. And also of what she hadn't said; assuming the conditions she'd described, Abigail Hearns' pinnaces were two minutes from the point of furthest advance at which they might have decelerated to a zero/zero intercept at Bogey Three's current position. The LACs, with their lower acceleration rate, were already past that point, and the joint force was about 2.86 million kilometers-a little over ninety-five light-seconds-from Bogey Three. Of course, they'd never really anticipated that the pinnaces would decelerate until after executing their attack run, but they were still getting dangerously close, against even a freighter's sensors, if Bogey Three's crew was on its toes. Theoretically, he could wait twenty-six minutes before transmitting the attack order, since the transmission time would be effectively zero for the grav-pulse com. Except for the minor problem that the moment Hexapuma 's FTL com opened up, Bogey One and Two were going to know about it.

He tilted his command chair back slightly, steepling his fingers under his chin, and contemplated the master tactical plot.

As he'd anticipated, Bogey One and Bogey Two had continued in-system at their creeping velocity of eighty-six hundred kilometers per second for thirteen hours and twenty-two minutes, headed straight for the position Pontifex would have occupied when they arrived. Given that absolutely undeviating approach, it had been even simpler than he'd expected for Kaplan and Midshipwoman Zilwicki to track them, and the Nuncian LAC Grizzly had been duly vectored into position to "detect" the intruders and sound the alert. The bogeys had responded by cracking on a few dozen gravities of acceleration, accelerating along the same heading and trying to get far enough from Grizzly to drop back off her sensors… again, just as he'd anticipated, and he conscientiously kept reminding himself not to get overconfident.

It wasn't an easy thing to remember, at least where the two lead bogeys were concerned. For the last hour and thirty-four minutes Bogey One and Bogey Two-now identified as a Desforge -class destroyer, one of the Havenites' older classes, but still a powerful unit for her type-had been chasing the terrified Rembrandt freighter Nijmegen (so identified by Hexapuma 's transponder code) which had broken from planetary orbit in a foolish, panicky bid to evade them. Only a totally terrified merchant skipper would have fled deeper into Nuncio-B's gravity well, especially starting with a velocity disadvantage of more than eighty-five hundred kilometers per second and a ship whose best possible acceleration was no more than a hundred and seventy KPS.

They'd reacted to their juicy, unanticipated target by going in pursuit at five hundred and thirty-one gravities. The recon drones he'd more than half-feared, despite Bagwell's inspiration, hadn't materialized. Probably because Commander Lewis had cooperated so completely with the EWO's suggestions. No engineer was ever really happy about deliberately overstressing the systems under his care, but Ginger Lewis had seemed to find an unholy delight in the notion.