Mission of Honor-ARC (85 page)

"Maybe—eventually," Pritchart replied. "On the other hand, I'm no hyper physicist, obviously, but I'd be surprised if they could confirm or disprove what he's got to say very quickly." She grimaced. "To be honest, the Manties could probably do that faster than we could, given how far ahead of us they are in compensators and grav-pulse bandwidth."

"For that matter," Theisman said with a crooked smile, "it's a pity Duchess Harrington's not around anymore. I'll bet Nimitz could tell us whether or not he's lying. Or whether he's lying to us knowingly, at least."

Pritchart nodded, but she also leaned back in her own chair, her lips pursed, her expression intent. Trenis started to say something more, only to stop as Theisman raised his hand and shook his head. He, LePic, and the two admirals sat silently, watching the president think, while endless seconds ticked past. Then, finally, she looked back at Theisman, and there was something at the backs of her topaz eyes. Something that made the secretary of war distinctly uneasy.

"I think we have to assume at least the possibility that McBryde and Simões were both genuine defectors and both of them were telling the truth," she said. "As Denis has pointed out, nuking one of your own towns—even a small one, if it happens to be a luxury satellite suburb for your own elite and their families—is an awful steep price to pay just to sell a lie to someone light-centuries away from you. Especially what could only be a
pointless
lie, since, like Admiral Lewis, I can't see any way having us believe all this would
help
Manpower."

No one else said anything, and she smiled wryly. The expression went oddly with that bleak, hard fire behind her eyes.

"It's going to take a while for me to get my mind wrapped around the concept that for the last five or six centuries a bunch of would-be genetic supermen have been plotting to impose their own view of the future on the human race. In one way, it's actually easier for me because it includes those Manpower bastards. I'm so used to thinking of them as the scum of the galaxy, capable of anything as long as it suits their purposes, that I can actually see them as the villains of any piece. But this master plan of theirs, this 'Alignment,' is something else."

"If McBryde was right about the Alignment having been involved with the Legislaturalists—and especially with DuQuesne—then it may be possible for us to turn up evidence of it," LePic said thoughtfully. "I know we'd be going back a long way," he continued when the others looked at him, "but we never had any reason to suspect outside influence before. That puts a whole new perspective on how we got stuck with the 'People's Republic' in the first place, and if we look at the records from that angle, we may spot something no one even had a reason to look for at the time."

"You really think they could 've played any significant role in that, Sir?" Trenis asked. He raised an eyebrow at her, and she grimaced. "To be honest, that was one of the bells and whistles that most strongly suggested disinformation to me. I mean," she turned to Pritchart, "I'm always up for a good conspiracy theory, Madam President—God knows the history of the People's Republic's left all of us ready for that! But managing to overthrow someone else's constitution without leaving a single fingerprint—?"

The admiral waved her own hands in a baffled gesture, but Pritchart shook her head.

"Actually, I'm inclined to see that as a point in McBryde's favor," she replied, and snorted harshly at Trenis' surprised expression. "If there's anything to this at all, these people obviously think in terms of century-long operational frameworks, Admiral. For that matter, think of the chutzpah involved in anyone's thinking they could actually overthrow something as big and powerful as the Solarian League! Anybody willing to take
that
on would look at destabilizing something as small as the Old Republic as an exercise in light lifting. For that matter, they may even've seen it as a setting up exercise—a chance to practice their technique before the main event!"

"Assuming someone's actually managed to put something like this together, the fact that they've taken such a long view would make them extraordinarily dangerous," Theisman said thoughtfully. LePic, Trenis, and Lewis looked at him interrogatively, but Pritchart only nodded with an odd blend of curtness and grim approval, as if he was following her own chain of logic.

"Think about it," he told the others. "If they're willing to approach something like this on a
generational
basis—if their strategists at any given moment have been willing to work towards something that's not going to happen until their grandchildren's or their great-grandchildren's time—think about the kinds of covers they could build for their agents. We could be looking at twenty or thirty
generations
of sleepers, for God's sake! There could be people right here in Nouveau Paris, people whose families have been solid citizens of the Republic for three or four hundred years, who are actually part of this Alignment. Think about the kind of intelligence penetration that implies. Or about how long and subtly they could work on influencing political trends and policies. Or the media."

The others weren't looking confused anymore. In fact, all three of them were rather pale as Theisman's implications sank home.

"You're right," Pritchart agreed. "On the other hand, let's not get too carried away.
They
may think they're superwomen, but I don't see why we should start thinking of them that way. I don't doubt they could do exactly what you're describing, Tom. In fact, that may well be what they did to the Old Republic. But however long they've been planning, they've still got to hold themselves to a manageable level of complexity. They've got to be able to
coordinate
everything, and we've had enough experience trying to coordinate the Republic to know how tall an order that can be even when we don't have to worry about keeping communications lines covert. Which has particular point in a case like this, I suspect, since I tend to doubt they could bury their sleepers quite as deeply as you've just suggested. There's got to be at least some contact somewhere if they aren't going to lose their assets simply because someone dies before she gets around to telling her son or daughter 'Oh, by the way. We're actually secret agents for the Mesan Alignment. Here's your secret decoder kit. Be ready to be contacted by the Galactic Evil Overlord on Frequency X with orders to betray the society you've been raised all your life to think of as your own.'"

"Granted." Theisman nodded. "But that contact could be damned well hidden, especially when no one's had any reason to look for it in the first place."

"I agree, Sir," Victor Lewis said. "Still, the President just made another excellent point. For them to make this work, they have to have an almost fanatical respect for the KISS principle." LePic laughed harshly, and the admiral smiled—briefly—at him. "I'm not talking about their overall strategy, Sir. Obviously, they haven't been afraid to think big where
that's
concerned! But if they've genuinely managed to keep all this under wraps for so long, and if they've actually gotten far enough along they're really ready to pull the trigger, then they have got to be some of the best covert operators in the history of humanity. And from our own experience, I can tell you that for them to have managed that, they have to have been pretty damned ruthless about prioritizing and assessing risks. They're probably willing to be as complicated as they have to be to accomplish anything they feel is genuinely critical, and they're probably operating on a huge scale, but they're not going to operate on any
huger
scale than they think they absolutely have to."

"That actually fits in with what we've seen so far, assuming what's been happening to the Manties is actually part of this strategy McBryde described to Cachat and Zilwicki," LePic acknowledged with a thoughtful expression. "They've got pieces in motion all over the board, but when you come right down to it, aside from the actual attack on the Manties' home system, none of it's required a lot of manpower"—he winced at his own unintentional double entendre but continued gamely—"or military muscle of their
own
. In fact, almost all the movement we've seen could have been produced very economically. Get to Byng and Crandall, and maybe one or two of the Kolokoltsov group, then add somebody around
your
level in the military, Tom, and you get the fleet movements that brought the Manties into conflict with the Sollies. And then momentum—Solly arrogance, the inherent corruption of the League's system, the lack of meaningful political control, the competition between Frontier Security satrapies, the desire for revenge because of the way the Manties had humiliated them militarily—pushes things along with very little additional effort on your part. Meanwhile, you concentrate your intensive efforts somewhere else—organizing whatever was in some of those 'bargaining points' McBryde was hanging on to to encourage Cachat to get him out—where
informed
cooperation is critical to your final strategy."

"Which brings us back to Nouveau Paris," Pritchart said grimly.

The others looked at her, and she barked a metallic, snarling laugh.

"Of course it does! For that matter, Tom, you and I have already discussed this, in a way. If McBryde was telling the truth about the existence of this 'assassination nanotech' of theirs, I think we finally know what happened to Yves Grosclaude, don't we?" She showed her teeth, and this time the glare at the backs of her eyes burned like a topaz balefire. "Frankly, it ties in rather neatly with the only bits and pieces of forensic evidence Kevin and Inspector Abrioux managed to come up with at the time. And just why, do you think, was this 'Mesan Alignment' kind enough to provide Arnold with one of its most closely held, top secret toys? Remember what you were just saying about sleepers, Tom? And that little comment of yours, Denis, about producing movement economically?"

The others were staring at her in shock, and she wondered why. From the instant she'd heard about McBryde's description of the new Mesan nanotechnology, she'd realized what had happened to Grosclaude. And if one of this 'Alignment's' critical objectives was the destruction of both the Star Empire of Manticore and the Republic of Haven, what better, more elegant way to go about it than to send them back to war with one another?

"It makes sense, doesn't it?" she pressed. "They played us—
me—
by having Arnold doctor the diplomatic correspondence. Hell, they may've had someone at the other end doing the same thing for High Ridge! No one's seen hide nor hair of Descroix ever since the wheels came off, now have they? And then, when we figured out what Arnold had done, they played
Elizabeth
by convincing her we'd killed Webster and tried to kill her niece exactly the same way the Legislaturalists killed her father and Saint-Just tried to kill
her!
God only knows how many millions of civilians and spacers—ours and the Manties'—these . . .
people
have gotten killed over the past eighty T-years or so, and Elizabeth—and I—both walked straight into it when it was
our
turn!"

The president's rage was a bare-fanged, bristling presence in the office now. Then Theisman raised one hand in a cautionary gesture.

"Assuming a single word of what McBryde told Cachat and Zilwicki is true, you may well be right, Eloise," he said quietly. "In fact, assuming there's any truth to it, I think you almost certainly
are
right. But at the same time, it may
not
be true. I don't know about you, but there's a part of
me
that would really, really like to be able to blame all the people we've killed—and the people we've had killed on our own side—on someone else's evil machinations instead of our own inherent ability to screw up. It may be that that's what happened. But before we start operating on that assumption, we've got to find some way to test whether or not it is."

"Oh, I agree with you entirely, Tom," Pritchart said. "At the same time, though, I think we've already got enough, what with the records Cachat and Zilwicki brought home of the Green Pines explosions and how they
don't
match the Mesa version, what Simões can tell us, what our own scientists can tell us about his new drive claims, to justify very quietly reaching out to Congress."

Theisman looked distinctly alarmed, as did LePic. Trenis and Lewis, on the other hand, were obviously trying very hard
not
to look alarmed. In fact, they were trying so hard—and failing so completely—that the president chuckled much more naturally.

"I'm not planning on talking to anyone unless Leslie, Kevin Usher, and probably you, Tom, all agree that, whoever it is, she's at least her own woman. And, trust me, I'm thinking in terms of a preliminary security vetting
God
might not pass! And I'm certainly not going to bring anyone like McGwire or Younger in on this until and unless we feel absolutely certain McBryde's and Simões's information is credible. But if we
do
come to that conclusion, this is going to change every single one of our foreign policy assumptions. That being the case, I think we need to start doing a little very careful, very circumspect spadework as soon as possible."

"If the Solarian League wants a war, the Solarian League will
have
one."

—Queen Elizabeth III of Manticore

"Good morning," Albrecht Detweiler said, looking into the camera. "I know it's only been a couple of weeks since we last met, but since then, we've received confirmation the Sollies are going to employ Filareta as we'd hoped."

He paused, reflecting on just how disastrous it could be if the message he was recording fell into someone else's hands. The odds of that happening were literally too minute even to be calculated, or he would never have recorded it in the first place, of course. Only eleven copies of it would be made—one for each of the "Renaissance Factor's" heads of state, on high-security, DNA-coded chips—and each of them would be transported by streak boat in locked, dead-man's switch-controlled, self-destruct-equipped cases for hand-delivery by the Alignment's most trusted couriers. Every precaution for transporting secure information which had been developed during six centuries of successful conspiracy and covert operations had been integrated into the conduits connecting his office to the message's recipients. If anyone had managed to compromise one of those conduits, the entire strategy was doomed anyway, so there really wasn't much point resorting to circumlocution to keep any unauthorized souls who might hypothetically see it from figuring out what he was saying.