Rogue Powers (50 page)

Not only
Zeus,
but the entire ring of bases and ships around Capital went on alert. There might be more of these invisible ships out there.

The fighters made the personnel pick-up without incident, reporting that there was only one person aboard the strange ship. The fighters hurried home, and their passenger was taken aboard
Zeus
and hustled straight into the Intelligence section. Captain Phillips himself decided to interrogate this one. There was only one place that ship could have come from. And to get a voluntary defection, flying such an advanced ship—it could be the sort of Intelligence bonanza that changed the course of a war. Captain Phillips took a look at his visitor—tired, frightened, worried. He decided this one required gentle handling.

"All right, son. You gave us a quite a start there for a moment, but now here you are. Who are you, and why did you come here?"

"I came to warn you of the Nihilists' plans," the visitor said. "They'll betray you. They're going to launch a plague attack that could wipe out every person on Capital. My name is George Prigot, and I'm a native of Capital."

After a four-hour interrogation, Phillips was forced to conclude that he had a credible witness. A check with Central Military Records matched this fellow's fingerprints and retinal patterns with one George Prigot, listed as Missing and Presumed Dead on New Finland. And this Prigot knew too many things, his story fit together too well.

"You realize, Mr. Prigot, that by coming here, you place yourself in grave danger. Whatever your reasons for coming here, by your own admission you are a deserter from the Guardian Army, and by your own admission, you have repeatedly committed acts of high treason against Capital. When your case is brought before the proper authorities, the only question left open to debate would be whether to shoot you as a spy or hang you as a traitor."

"I realize all that, sir," George said, his voice steady, only his eyes betraying his agitation. "But whatever my feelings about the government of Capital, I couldn't just sit back and allow the Nihilists to wipe out every human being on the planet. I decided I couldn't live with myself if I didn't try to stop them."

"And you are convinced that the Nihilists mean to turn on us?"

"Yes sir."

"But your only reason for so thinking is the report of this Calder woman, who in turn based her conclusions on what one single Outposter, a member of a Group that opposes the Nihilists, had to say."

“Sir. I don't have to tell you that the truth isn't determined by majority rule. The truth is just as true if
no one
believes it. And that's
not
my only reason for distrusting the Nihilists. I saw the tapes of what their foam worms did to the
Impervious.
Whoever invented
those
had no love for humanity. And why should they care about us? Their philosophy says intelligent life is an abomination. Alien intelligent life must be a double abomination. They kill their own kind. Why not us, too? And if they wipe us out, they get Capital. A whole world, and all our technology. Think of all the power that would represent, and tell me that wouldn't tempt them.”

"Hang me as a traitor if you like, but listen to me first.
Stop the Nihilists,
before it's too late."

It was not until this George Prigot character had been led off to a fairly comfortable cell, not until Captain Phillips had befouled the station's air conditioning system with two pipefulls of the most hideously expensive and malodorous out-system tobacco, not until Phillips had sat there in thought for a solid hour, that the Intelligence chief came to the conclusion that he believed Prigot. Not only that, Prigot was telling a story and voicing a warning that he, Prigot, thought was honest. Phillips decided that the story and the warning themselves were legitimate. The Nihilists
were
going to attack Capital. He had never really trusted them in the first place. The bioweapons deal had been too rushed, too rashly and hurriedly considered.

But Mr. George Prigot, late of both the Britannic and the Guardian armed forces, had sent other messages by coming here, though such had not been his intention.

With Prigot flown the coop, the League forces would be forced to assume that all their plans had been exposed, all their schemes revealed, all their traps turned around. That meant they would be forced to change their plans.

And that meant the enemy would lose time, would be somewhat more vulnerable for a while.

Even though he had not brought a scrap of tactical planning material with him, Prigot, by his very presence, had wrecked all the League's schemes and forced them to start over. Captain Phillips could see the advantages in that great but fleeting advantages. He powered up his terminal, and rattled off a priority preliminary assessment to flag HQ.

But there was another point, a more private one. Prigot had never mentioned the name, never mentioned any Guardian Navy officer involved in the plans that had gotten Calder to the League fleet. But there had to have been one. Phillips
knew
that. Johnson Gustav, Phillip's former aide in Naval Intelligence, was assigned to
Ariadne
station. Gustav had dealt with Calder; Phillips had seen action summaries written by Gustav that mentioned her by name.

The connections were tenuous enough, but Phillips knew Gustav, knew what he would do in a given situation. And Phillips had read the report that Gustav had written so long ago. The one that had flatly stated that Capital would lose the war, suffering greater and greater loss of life and political freedom the longer the war was allowed to drag on. The report that had cost Gustav a step in rank, gotten him thrown out of the Intelligence Service, and nearly gotten him shot.

Yes, Gustav's fingerprints were all over the place. He was mixed up in this scheme.

There was only one last important fact that Phillips had kept secret from everyone until now. But now, at last, it was time to act on. For the fact was, Phillips had agreed with every word of that report.

It was time to contact Gustav, privately, over a secure channel. Phillips had a lot to talk about with him.

Captain Robinson poured himself another cup of coffee and shoved his untouched-and-now-cold breakfast away. Hot, black, strong coffee—his morning repast was down to that. He was losing weight, he knew that without getting on a scale. He always stopped eating properly when he was nervous, on edge. Tension made his appetite vanish. Robinson had never been more tense and on edge than he was now.

He thought of his wife, Mildred, back home on Kennedy, and knew how she would worry if she saw him now. She knew the danger signs, the tiny twitches and microscopically small nervous gestures that warned things were not good.

And they weren't. For the first time, Robinson was seriously entertaining the thought that he might not get home to Mildred. He raised the cup to his mouth, sipped at the coffee, and burned his tongue. Too hot.

Prigot. Prigot was the last damn straw. They had mustered the ship's complement the moment
Covert Lander Two
turned up missing, of course. Prigot was the only person unaccounted for. The bloody twice-told traitor. He was competent enough to crack into any data file aboard and make a copy. It had to be assumed the Guards knew exactly where every ship had been—and so all of them had to be moved, or else be sitting ducks. Every plan, every disposition of forces had to be thrown out and reworked, and that was a crippling blow; the League forced into its second-best plans. Time, energy, and fuel chewed up.

Well, maybe not
time
lost due to Prigot. They had been wasting that right along, without any help from traitors. The League forces had simply been sitting astride the barycenter for weeks now, not attacking, not being attacked. Admiral Thomas seemed quite content to wait the Guards out. He did nothing all day, every day, but putter around the bridge, watching this report, talking to that ship's captain. The only thing Thomas really seemed interested in was the exploratory team going over the lump of rock called the baryworld. Robinson couldn't see any great value to a roughly spherical lump of skyrock barely one hundred kilometers across. Certainly nothing to merit such close attention from the Commander-in-Chief. He vanished into his stateroom each night, and early each morning the mess steward brought out an empty bottle of port. Hours later the admiral himself would emerge, looking very bright and chipper, his skin flushed, a twinkle in his eye. He
had
to be constantly drunk, putting away that much booze day after day. But it never showed. He was always sharp, always alert, always in control. But Robinson knew about drinkers and false fronts. Sooner or later the facade would crack, unless something was done.

His great-niece, Joslyn Larson, she seemed to have some effect on him, some ability to keep him from drinking. But she was on Outpost, chatting with the natives. There wasn't even any real way to know that the League's tiny, improvised First Contact crew was still alive. With Guard stations and spacecraft orbiting Outpost, reporting via radio would have been suicide. No, dealing with the company of the
Sick Moose
would have to wait upon the outcome of battle.

There might be some way to contact
Ariadne
Station and Johnson Gustav, but to what point? What could they say to each other that would be worth the risk of communicating?

Robinson's coffee had gotten cold as he sat there, worrying. He drank it down anyway, throwing his head back and downing it in one swallow. He winced at the taste and his stomach kicked up a fuss, but it was time to go to work. In ten minutes the long-range scanning team would be ready with the morning report on the disposition of the Guard fleet.

Robinson didn't know it yet, but that report was going to be badly in need of updating by the time he got it. Outpost and Capital were both many light hours away from the barycenter. The information gathered by the telescopes and other sensors watching from the barycenter was hours old by the time the photons carrying the news were collected by League technicians. The telescopes were limited by the speed of light, but the Guard ships weren't.

Guardian Orbital Command Station
Nike

George Prigot wasn't sure about why he had been brought into the Intelligence section again, but he didn't like being there. He was brought from his cell straight to Phillip's office.

"Prigot," Captain Phillips said. "I thought you'd like to know. Thanks to your arrival, our attack on the barycenter was brought forward by fifty hours. The first craft are already launching. If we move quickly, we should catch the League while it's still repositioning its forces, while their ships are at their most vulnerable. The change in plans should allow us to do a great deal of damage."

"But why are they repositioning their forces? What's that got to do with me?"

"Didn't you work that out when you risked this trip of yours? The League will be forced to assume you betrayed every bit of information you had access to. Every battle
plan. Any other assumption on their part would be risking suicide."

"But I didn't betray any League battle plans. I never
knew
them!"

"But they are forced to assume otherwise. Didn't you realize that? Tell me, Prigot, having betrayed both of them, which side
do
you want to win?'

But George Prigot was too stunned to answer.

"Jesus H. Christ! Bridge, this is Detection! Bogie contacts all of a sudden, all over the place! Repeat, many contacts, presumed bandits and closing last! Bridge, do you copy?'

"Captain here, on the bridge. We've got 'em on the repeater here, too, son. Don't go shouting and bouncing off walls. Get us numbers and vectors."

"Ah, yes sir. Still more blips coming in—tactical plot shows they're all popping out of C
²
on trajectories that track back to Capital-—

"Oh, my God. A whole new family of 'em—at least fifty
more
targets, with track-back at Outpost."

"Damn good break-out pattern, Robinson said. His voice was calm, but his stomach was suddenly twisted into a monstrous knot. "Comm, call battle stations and relay all our information to the fleet. Then call the admiral and inform him that we are under attack."

Klaxons hooted, the usual murmur of background noise on the bridge grew louder as relief crews and specialists rushed in from their quarters. Normally, only a third of the consoles were occupied. Within four minutes, they all were. Within five minutes, every combat station had reported in.

Except one. Robinson shouted out without turning his head. "Comm! Where the hell is Admiral Thomas?"

"No answer in his cabin, sir. It might be an intercom malfunction. I've dispatched a runner already."