Empire Of Man 3 - March to the Stars (48 page)

“What did he do?” O'Casey asked, looking over his shoulder at an indecipherable schematic. After a moment, it resolved itself into a map of the port.

“Well, he set up an intelligence network in all the satraps of Krath,” Julian said. He touched a control and brought up a picture of the continent, with data scrolling along the sides and political boundaries mapped in. “That much isn't dumb. But he has all these reports coming in, and he didn't want the spies just walking through his front gates. So he set up cleared lanes in the defenses!”

O'Casey grinned again, this time at his expression. Disbelief mingled with professional outrage on the sergeant's face, until he ended up looking just plain disgusted.

“That's Mountmarch all over,” she said. “He's a brilliant media manipulator, and thinks his brilliance at that extends to everything. There's nothing in the world for which he doesn't have a better, and much more brilliant, plan. Of course, the reality is that the vast majority of them backfire—often badly.”

“Who is he?” Julian asked. “Other than the governor of the colony, that is?”

“He used to be a power at court,” O'Casey said as she leaned back. She hadn't bothered to store her files on the Earl of Mountmarch in her toot, so they'd been lost along with most of her reference works and papers when DeGlopper was destroyed. Now she delved deep into plain old, biochemical memory for as much as she could recall about the earl and frowned thoughtfully.

“That was back in Roger's grandfather's later days,” she went on. “There's not much question that he really was a brilliant example of a 'spin merchant,' and the old Emperor was very fixated on public opinion. Even though he wasn't elected, he felt that the will of the people should be observed. Which is all well and good, but ruling based on opinion polls, especially ones pushed by narrow agendas, is never a great idea. It's one of the reasons that the Empress is still having so many problems. Or was, before the coup, at any rate.”

Their eyes met grimly for a moment. Then she gave herself a shake and resumed once more.

“The approach of the Imperial bureaucracy—that it's either completely untouchable, or that its function is solely to act in accordance with the will of opinion polls (which actually means at the will of skilled manipulators like Mountmarch who shape those polls)—is a tremendous drag on getting anything fixed,” she said. "It's that holdover of bureaucratic and senior policy officer inertia, coupled with the iron triangle of senatorial interests, the interests of the bureaucracies, and the special interest groups and polls that combine to drive the senatorial agenda, that have made it nearly impossible for the Empress to get any real change enacted or to replace the worst of the bureaucrats with more proactive people.

“But I digress,” she said, pausing to inhale, then cocked her head as Julian broke out in laughter. “What?”

“Well, to tell you the truth, I don't think I've heard you say that much about the situation back home this entire trip.”

O'Casey sighed and shook her head.

“I'm familiar with preindustrial societies, and plots and plotters seem to be the same on Earth as on Marduk. But it's modern Imperial politics that are my real forte.”

“I can tell,” Julian said with another chuckle. “But you were saying about Mountmarch?”

“Mountmarch,” she repeated. "Well, he excelled at taking the interests that were brought to him—whatever they were, but they tended to be on the 'Saints' end of the political spectrum—and turning molehills into mountains. He knew just about everyone in the media, and no matter who paid him, or for what, before you could say 'it's for the children,' whatever was going to end the universe this time would be the number one headline on all the e-casts and mags. And suddenly, with remarkable speed, there'd be committees, and blue ribbon panels, and legislation, and opinion polls, and nongovernmental charity organizations—all of them with lists of contacts and almost identical talking points, sprouting up like mushrooms. It really was quite an industry.

"And the leaks! He had access to everyone in the upper echelons of His Majesty's Government, either because they were afraid of him, or else because they wanted him to do the same thing for them. And whenever there was a tidbit of information that worked for the interest he was pushing at the moment, it would be major news the day he got it. Then along came Alexandra.

“Roger's mother had been watching him basically push her father around for years, and she didn't care for it one bit. In general, Alexandra tends towards the socialistic and environmentalist side of the political spectrum herself, but she's also aware of the dangers to society of going too far. So when the newest item Mountmarch was pushing was over the Lorthan Cluster, she pushed back—hard.”

“Lorthan?” Julian asked. “You mean the Lorthan Incident?”

“The very same,” she said. “Mountmarch was given the information that a task force had been sent out to lie doggo and try to catch the Saints red-handed raiding the Lorthan colonies. They'd been insisting that it was nothing but pirates, and offering 'military assistance in our need,' but all the indications were that it was a Saint force or forces that were trying to drive humans, and their 'contamination,' off of the Lorthan habitables.”

“So was it Saints, or pirates?”

“Well, officially, no one knows,” O'Casey said. “The task force was the ambushee rather than the ambusher, and officially, there was no information one way or the other on whether it was Saints or pirates. Of course, a pirate fleet that could take on an Imperial task force is pretty unlikely. And then there were the two Muir-class cruisers that were captured nearly intact.”

“I hadn't heard that,” Julian said.

“And you still haven't. But when we get back and I get situated, I'll take you out to Charon Base and you can see them. The point is that the leak cost nearly fourteen hundred Fleet lives, and Alexandra was not pleased.”

“So she pinned it on Mountmarch?”

“He was the most common facilitator of such things. Whether he did it, or someone else, she really didn't care. She used administrative actions to remove most of his titles, but as a sop she must have posted him to Marduk. The most out of the way, barren, forsaken, and useless post in the Empire. And he's under Imperial law, so if he so much as sneezed, he'd be dealing with IO and the IBI, instead of local officers and the IC Authority. He can manipulate those; he still has people who, for some godforsaken reason, think he has a clue. But the Inspectorate and the IBI are another thing entirely.”

“Remind me not to get on her bad side,” Julian said. “Of course, I think that with a little training, Roger's going to be nearly as nasty. Maybe nastier. The tough part will be keeping him from killing anyone who pisses him off. But for right now, at least I can give him some good news—the local commander is an idiot, if a good manipulator of the media, and it looks like the port is going to be a cakewalk.”

“Let's not get cocky,” she said warningly.

“Oh, we won't,” Julian said. “Two of the plasma cannon are listed as off line, but Item Number One will be to take them out anyway, just to be on the safe side. We'll send the armor in first to remove the wire, in case it's really there, then the mines. There's other bits. We'll get it right.”

“And then grab a ship and go home,” she said.

“To what?” Julian asked. “That's not going to be so easy.”

“No,” she admitted. “Everything in this download is hanging together, so I think Temu Jin is on the up and up. All the usual suspects in something like the 'attempted coup' are saying all the usual things. In fact, they're being so 'normal' that I've got the very definite feeling of either excellent information management, or pressure from behind the scenes. Although the Imperial Telegraph has called for a 'full and independent medical review of Her Majesty' with 'all due deference to the Throne.' On the other hand, they're being castigated by most of the major news outlets for 'pressuring her in her grief.' ”

“As if that matters when the safety of the Empire is on the line?” Julian asked.

“Well, it does to some, or at least the polls will say so,” O'Casey said with a thin smile. “Only the Commons can call for a vote of confidence on Her Majesty, and that's what it would take to force an independent medical exam, if our suspicions are correct. And we're not the only ones voicing them; there's a broad rumor that the Empress is being mind-controlled by Roger's father, with Jackson barely even mentioned. The problem is, that its being spun into a 'conspiracy theory' tying back to the death of the Emperor John and everything up to an invasion by implacable alien bugs from the Andromeda Galaxy.”

“Thank goodness for the Andromeda Galaxy!” Julian laughed. “Without it, there'd be no science-fiction at all!”

“Indeed,” she smiled. “Well, one wag does have it as the Andromeda System, but he's probably talking about Rigel.”

“Probably,” Julian agreed. “Another favorite.”

“But if—when it turns out that she is being controlled, we're going to have an uphill climb to convince people that she was. In this case, something which happens to be the absolute truth is being successfully tied to every silly, paranoid fantasy floating around loose. Which means that it's undoubtably in the process of being dismissed by every 'serious-minded' person in the Empire.”

She shook her head.

"I wish I could be convinced that it was just happening to work out this way, but I don't think it is. I think what we're looking at is a carefully organized defense in depth. First, the people really behind the coup are counting on 'sensible people' to reject such crazy rumors out of hand. That will undercut any effort to force an independent exam of the Empress which might prove that she's being controlled, which is bad enough. But even worse, if Roger turns back up and claims he's been framed and that his mother's being mind-controlled, it's going to be really, really hard to convince anyone that he's telling the truth.

“But at the same time, I think Jackson is deliberately setting New Madrid up as the fall guy—the 'evil manipulator' the 'good Regent' can discover and pin all the blame on if the wheels start to come off. He can hammer New Madrid under any time he has to, and look at the other advantage it gives him. New Madrid is Roger's father, whether Roger can stand him or not. So who would be a more natural 'evil manipulator' than the father of that arch traitor, Roger MacClintock? Obviously, father and son thought the whole thing up together!”

She sighed, and shook her head again.

“I'm sure he believes Roger really is dead, so the whole thing is designed to use New Madrid as a scapegoat and a diversion if he needs one. I suppose I could even argue that the fact that he thinks he may need a diversion badly enough to concoct this new story blaming it all on Roger is a sign that his control is a lot shakier than it looks from here. But even though he's setting it up for an entirely different set of reasons, it's only going to make things look even worse for Roger if Jackson 'suddenly discovers' that New Madrid has been controlling the Empress all along. And it's going to be a lot tougher for us to deal with that than it's going to be to get through Mountmarch's defenses here on Marduk.”

“Oh, I'm sure you'll figure something out,” Julian said. “And the good news is that if you can't, it's just as likely we'll all be dead long before the problem crops up.”

“I wish we could use the pocking radios.”

Roger peered through the battlefield smoke and cursed. The Krath army used about one arquebus for every ten soldiers, and between those, the Marines on the right, the Diaspran infantry on the left, and the occasional bombard firing from either side, the fields were covered in a veritable smokescreen. His helmet visor's systems gave him far better vision than any unaided eye could have provided, but that wasn't saying a lot. Worse, the billowing waves of smoke made it impossible to use visual signals in place of the radios. He could punch the occasional communications laser through, but enough gun smoke deprived him even of that.

“Tough, isn't it, Your Highness?” Pahner asked. “The fact is, up until we hit the Krath, you were spoiled as far as emissions discipline is concerned. When you don't have a complete monopoly on it, there are plenty of times when you don't have the luxury of using radio. Doesn't do to let the other side hear you, whether they can understand you or not. Then there's direction-finding. Or the battle could be taking place across lag distances where the turnaround time on transmissions just makes it impractical.” He looked out across the smoke-covered fields between the two citadels and nodded. “At least this time you can almost see what's happening. That gives you at least a chance of judging what's going on.”

Feet pounded on the stone steps behind them, and Roger turned to the runner who'd just arrived from the left wall. The sound in that direction had switched back to regular platoon volleys, he noted.

“How goes it, Orol?”

“Captain Fain says the enemy is off the wall and in retreat,” the runner replied, rubbing blood from a cut at the base of his horns out of his eye.

“Bad?” Roger asked.

“Not really, Your Highness,” the Mardukan said with a grunt of laughter. “They're not much as individual fighters; not a patch on the Boman. They barely got to the top of the wall, and we counterattacked with steel. We had a good killing.”

Roger laughed and slapped him on the shoulder.

“Go get your head looked to, you old coot,” he said. “There's more where those came from.”

“Aye, and they'll be back tomorrow,” the Mardukan replied. Then he saluted and headed back down the stairs, and Roger turned to Pahner.

“It sounds like the action on that side is pretty much the same as what's happening on the right. Time to sally?”

“I think so,” Pahner replied. “Gastan?”

“If you think it wise,” the Shin king said. “They could get bogged down and trapped, though,” he added, looking just a bit dubious.

“Time to find out,” Roger said, and walked to the rear of the wall. His position overlooked the courtyard directly behind the gates, which was currently packed with civan. The aggressive, bipedal omnivores were stamping their great three-toed feet and snapping at each other restlessly. The older of them recognized the conditions and were ready for action; it often led to a really good feed.