Chapter Fifty

"I hate waiting for the sound of a second shoe's hitting the floor," Admiral Osiris Trajan grumbled. None of his three dinner guests responded. First, because he hadn't directed the comment specifically to one of them, but, secondly, because they'd both been with the admiral long enough to recognize a rhetorical statement when they heard one.

Apparently, though, it wasn't quite as rhetorical this time as they'd thought it was, and he looked across the table at the auburn-haired, gray-green-eyed woman in the captain's uniform sitting opposite him.

"How about you, Addie?" he asked. "Are you feeling a bit less than perfectly cheerful about this whole thing?"

"Ours not to reason why, Sir," Captain Adelaide Granger, the commanding officer of Trajan's dreadnought flagship, replied with a wry grin. She wiped her lips with her snow-white napkin and arched one eyebrow quizzically at the admiral. "Might I respectfully inquire what has aroused the Admiral's ire at this particular moment?" she asked.

Trajan gave something which sounded suspiciously like a snort and wagged his head at his flag captain.

"You'll come to no good end, Addie," he warned her. "Trust me, you're not irreplaceable, you know."

"No, Sir," she agreed equitably. "But—again, with the utmost respect—given the Admiral's own . . . foibles, finding a replacement and beating her into shape would probably take longer than the Admiral would care to invest in the project."

This time, the other two officers seated at the table noted with relief, there was no doubt about Trajan's amusement. All three of his subordinates admired and respected Trajan—he wouldn't have been selected as Task Force Four's commanding officer if he hadn't been widely regarded as one of the Mannerheim System-Defense Force's two or three best flag officers. Normally, he was also an excellent boss. But there was no denying that he had his moods, and frustration tended to make him more than a little . . . prickly. Fortunately, Captain Granger had been something of a personal prot'eg'e of his for quite some time, and she'd developed a deft touch for defusing any serious irritation on his part. That would have been enough to make her presence welcome to Trajan's staff even if she hadn't been such a clearly superior officer in her own right.

"You're probably right about that," Trajan agreed with his flag captain now, and tossed his own crumpled napkin onto the table beside his empty plate. "About how long it would take, that is, of course," he added. "That bit about 'foibles' is scarcely applicable in my own case, however."

"Of course not, Sir," Granger said gravely. "I must have misspoken somehow."

"That happens sometimes to lesser mortals, or so I hear," Trajan observed, and it was Granger's turn to chuckle.

"Nonetheless," Trajan went on a moment later, in a considerably more serious tone, "I'm not happy about this entire op. I never have been, and I haven't gotten any happier in the last four or five T-months, either."

There was no doubt in any of his listeners' minds what operation he was speaking about. Task Force Four had no direct involvement in it—for which all of them were privately grateful—but they'd been briefed on "Operation Ferret". . . and about its objectives, given its implications for the MSDF's future operations.

"I don't think anyone's really happy about the notion of relying on Luff and his collection of paranoiacs, Sir," Commander Niklas Hasselberg said now. Trajan looked at his fair-haired chief of staff, and Hasselberg shrugged. "Sometimes deniability comes at a price in reliability, Sir."

"I realize that, Niklas," Trajan said. "In this particular instance, though, I'm not really convinced deniability is an important enough reason to rely on them. For that matter, I'm not really convinced the operation itself is a wonderful idea—or even necessary, at this point. Especially when we've gone to so much effort to keep this end of the bridge so completely black for so long."

"My understanding is that the decision was made at the highest levels, Sir," Commander Ildik'o Nyborg, Trajan's operations officer, pointed out in a diplomatic tone, and Trajan snorted yet again, this time harshly.

"It was certainly that," he agreed.

All three of his subordinates understood. Although Hasselberg was the only other person present who knew the identity of the actual individual behind that decision, all of them represented star-line genomes. Star-lines were a minority in the MSDF's officer corps as a whole, of course, but they were heavily concentrated in the more senior ranks, and for duties as sensitive as their own current assignment there'd been some judicious personnel shuffling. As a result of which, Task Force Four's command structure was undeniably top-heavy in alpha-lines, beta-lines, and gamma-lines.

Which meant that, unlike the majority of their fellow officers, they knew the Mannerheim System-Defense Force was actually an adjunct of the Mesan Alignment Navy no one else knew even existed. So the term "higher up" had a very different meaning for them than it would have had for any of those non-Mesan officers.

"I'm not saying the Verdant Vista terminus isn't important, because it is," Trajan continued. "And I realize that using obvious Manpower proxies is about as deniable as it gets, given who's in charge of the system these days. From that perspective, I don't have any qualms about Ferret. The problem is that I think the operation itself is unnecessary. Worse, it's a complication we don't need. We could put a force through the bridge any time we wanted to that would be more than big enough to overwhelm anything the 'Kingdom of Torch' could possibly put in our way. We don't really have to take the system to exercise effective control of the terminus, and if it were my call, we'd go ahead and wait until we actually needed to use the thing. In which case we wouldn't have to rely on Luff's rejects at all."

There was silence for a moment. Osiris Trajan had a well-deserved reputation for openness with subordinates he trusted. "Everybody knows everything" about any current operation, at least at the level of his own staff, was practically a mantra of his, because he regarded it as the only way to get their best thoughts—and prevent competent people from making ignorance-based mistakes. But his comments about the operation against Torch were unusually blunt, even for him, given the fact that TF 4 wasn't even assigned to the MSDF covering force on the other end of the Verdant Vista wormhole bridge.

Captain Granger cocked her head to one side, clearly considering what he'd said. She stayed that way for two or three seconds, then shrugged.

"From a purely military perspective, I agree with you completely, Sir. And I suppose it's always possible someone somewhere's gotten her nose out of joint over what happened in Verdant Vista when we lost control of the system in the first place. I think, though, that the operative factor here, in many ways, is a concern about what the Manties may eventually figure out about the wormhole bridge."

"They aren't going to figure out anything about it that's going to do them any good, Addie," Trajan countered. "Besides, they've already figured out just about anything that could be deduced from their end, or they never would have gotten their survey ship through to SGC-902 in the first place. For all the good that did them."

He grimaced, and so did Granger and Nyborg. Hasselberg, on the other hand, only shrugged.

"I admit that was . . . unpleasant, Sir," the chief of staff said. "It was clearly within policy and Commodore Ganneau's instructions, though."

"I'm fully aware of both those points, Niklas." Trajan's voice was considerably frostier than normally came Hasselberg's direction. "I'm also aware, however, that it was a single cruiser—and one that was the next best thing to totally obsolescent, at that—and Ganneau had an entire battlecruiser squadron sitting there, with two of them already at action stations and knowing exactly where anything from the other end had to come out. Do you really think a Manty skipper would have been stupid enough to fight with eight battlecruisers sitting there ready to turn his ship into plasma? Ganneau had the option of ordering him to surrender; he just refused to take it."

"I'm not defending his decision, Sir," Hasselberg pointed out. "I'm saying what he did was covered. And it probably wouldn't hurt to remember who his sister-in-law is."

Trajan frowned at the reminder. It was just like Hasselberg to bring it up, though, he reflected. The man was as tough-minded—not to say ornery—as they came. And he definitely believed in calling a spade a shovel, even if it wasn't very diplomatic to remind his admiral that Commodore J'er^ome Ganneau's wife, Assuntina, was the youngest sister of Fleet Admiral Chiara Otis, the Mannerheim System-Defense Force's chief of naval operations.

Diplomatic or not, it was also an indication of just how much Hasselberg trusted the other officers seated around the table. It was highly unlikely that his observation would have evoked any anger from Fleet Admiral Otis, but that wasn't really the point.

"He may be Admiral Otis' brother-in-law," Captain Granger said, "but that's not who's watching his ass for him, Niklas."

"Of course not, Ma'am," Hasselberg agreed. "But Admiral Kafkaloudes is. And, unfortunately, that's almost the same thing."

"I think we should probably turn this conversation in another direction," Trajan said calmly. The others looked at him, and he shrugged. "Oh, I don't disagree with anything that's been said. On the other hand, there's not much point in discussing something everyone already agrees about, and discussing the CNO's and her chief of staff's—or her chief of staff's, at least—little . . . foibles"—he smiled quickly at Granger as he used her own earlier terminology—"even among friends is neither productive, diplomatic, wise, nor supportive of good discipline."

Granger looked back at him for a moment, gray-green eyes stubborn. Then she inhaled deeply, nodded, and sat back in her chair, reaching for her wine glass.

The truth, Trajan thought, was that Kafkaloudes' empire building tendencies were well known throughout the MSDF. In fact, they were so well known that Fleet Admiral Otis' willingness to put up with them was widely regarded as her single true weakness. She was smart, competent, experienced, and dedicated to her duty, yet it was impossible for Trajan to believe she was unaware of Kafkaloudes' vendettas against anyone who ever made the mistake of rousing his ire. And it was an ire which roused with remarkable ease.

The problem was that, personality shortcomings aside, he really was very good at his job. And, to give the devil his due, part of his job clearly was to protect Otis, because in protecting her, he also protected her effectiveness. That was why Granger and Hasselberg were almost certainly correct where Ganneau was concerned. Otis might not protect him just because he was her brother-in-law—in fact, Trajan, who knew the fleet admiral quite well, was pretty damn sure she wouldn't—but she didn't have to. The commodore could rely on Kafkaloudes to quietly suppress any personal criticism of him. After all, it wouldn't do to have that criticism splash on the CNO! Or that, at any rate, was how Kafkaloudes could be counted upon to see things.

And Hasselberg had a perfectly valid point about Ganneau's actions. They were covered by his orders, even though Trajan knew Ganneau had been expected to use his own discretion about employing lethal force. And there were arguments in favor of exactly what the commodore had done. Trajan might not like them very much, but he couldn't deny their existence. The reason Ganneau's squadron had drawn the duty of watching the Alignment's end of the Verdant Vista Bridge in the first place was that judicious personnel assignments similar to those which had been tweaked in Task Force Four's favor had led—purely coincidentally, of course—to the Sixth Battlecruiser Squadron's being exclusively officered and manned by what happened to be Mesan star-lines. None of them were going to mention what had happened to anyone else, but if a Manticoran survey vessel had been brought in by vessels of the Mannerheim System-Defense Force . . .

All of that's true enough, Trajan thought, but they wouldn't have had to be brought into Mannerheim in the first place. The Alignment could've squirreled them away somewhere. Hell, we've managed to "squirrel away" the entire frigging Darius System for two hundred damned years! But Ganneau didn't want to mess with the "inconvenience," so he just casually went ahead and blew away an entire ship full of people, instead.

"Leaving aside any discussions of our senior officers," Hasselberg said after a moment, "there's still your own point, Admiral. The Manties can't possibly realize what they're dealing with from their end of the bridge."

He glanced at the smart wall bulkhead of Trajan's dining cabin as he spoke, and the others followed his gaze to it. The wall was configured at the moment to show not the Felix System, where Vivienne and the rest of TF 4 were currently conducting "routine training exercises," but what lay at the other end of the Verdant Vista Wormhole Bridge.

It was centered on a single star which looked slightly brighter than any of the others in their field of view. In fact, the only reason for its apparent brightness was that it had been considerably closer to the recording pickup than any of the others. It was actually only a lowly M8 dwarf, without a single planet to its name. Or, rather, to its number, for it had never achieved the dignity of the name all its own. It was simply SGC-902-36-G, a dim little star just this side of a "brown dwarf," of absolutely no particular interest to anyone and over forty light-years from the nearest inhabited star system.

It was also, however, home to a never before observed hyper-space phenomenon: a pair of wormhole termini, less than two light-minutes from one another and less than ten light-minutes from SGC-902-36-G itself. In fact, they were precisely 9.24 light-minutes from the star, which put them exactly on its hyper limit, and made them the only wormhole termini in the explored galaxy which were less than thirty light-minutes from a star.

No one had ever encountered anything like it before, and even all these years after its discovery, the Mesan Alignment's hyper-physicists were still trying to come up with an explanation for how the "SGC-902-36-G Wormhole Anomaly" (also known as "The Twins ") had happened when all generally accepted wormhole theory said it couldn't have. There were currently, Trajan had been told, at least six competing "main" hypotheses.

Obviously, no one had ever predicted that any such thing was possible. In fact, the Alignment had literally stumbled across it in the course of surveying the wormhole junction associated with the Felix System, where Trajan's task force was currently exercising. Not that the galaxy at large had any idea of that junction's existence, either. It had been discovered initially by a "Jessyk Combine"–backed survey expedition operating (very surreptitiously) out of Mannerheim under direct orders from the Alignment. Jessyk never shared survey information with anyone unless there was an excellent reason for it to do so, and in this case the Alignment had decided there was an excellent reason not to broadcast the Combine's discovery.

Felix was an uninhabited star system little more than ten light-years from Mannerheim. The dim K2-class star was brighter than SGC-902-36-G, and it did have one marginally habitable planet, although that was about the best anyone was ever likely to say about it. The planet itself, which had never been assigned any better name than "Felix Beta," was a fairly miserable piece of real estate, with a gravity 1.4 times that of Old Earth, an axial inclination of thirty-one degrees, and a miserly hydrosphere of barely thirty-three percent. With an average orbital radius of right on six light-minutes, it was a cold, arid, dusty, windstorm-lashed, thoroughly wretched lump of dirt, but the Alignment had been considering it as a potential site for further development anyway, because of its proximity to Mannerheim.

The Republic of Mannerheim openly abhorred and despised the genetic slave trade and the outlaw Mesan transstellars which promoted it . . . which was one of the things that made it so valuable to the Mesan Alignment. The fact that Mannerheim's system-defense force was one of the most powerful of the entire Solarian League, and that there was absolutely nothing to associate it with Manpower or the Mesa System's government, didn't hurt, either. As such, it would have been handy, the Alignment had thought, to tuck its secret arsenal away someplace everyone knew was absolutely useless yet was simultaneously close enough to Mannerheim for the MSDF to keep a protective eye on it. Of course, there had been downsides to the proposition, the worst of which was that it would also have been close enough to Mannerheim for someone to innocently stumble across things the Alignment didn't want anyone stumbling over. The chance of someone actually doing that had been remote, to say the least, of course. When it came to concealing things, ten light-years might as well be ten thousand, unless there was something to prompt some busybody into making the trip in the first place.

What no one had expected—until the survey team the Alignment had sent to Felix under cover of the Jessyk expedition completed a thorough analysis of the system primary's emissions—was that there would have been plenty of reason to make the trip, if only anyone had known that Felix was associated with a major wormhole junction. Not on anything like the scale of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, perhaps, but still considerably larger than most, with no less than four secondary termini.

They led to several interesting places (including the Darius System, which actually had been chosen as the site for the MAN's arsenal), and the Alignment had kept the Felix Junction's existence as "black" as they had the entire colony in Darius.

In fact, although the Alignment had known about it for better than two T-centuries, the MSDF had first become aware of it less than ten years ago. Officially, at least; many of the senior MSDF officers who knew about the Alignment had also known about the Felix Junction from the very beginning. As far as the bulk of the MSDF was concerned, however, Mannerheim had discovered the junction only eight and a half T-years ago, and the decision had been taken to keep its existence a secret because it had only two secondary termini . . . and because the Republic intended to make sure that when its existence became generally known, it was also firmly established as belonging to Mannerheim.

Fortuitously, from the Alignment's perspective, establishing that ownership was going to be complicated and (even better) time-consuming. Useless as the Felix System had turned out to be, colonization rights to it had been purchased by a Solarian corporation better than five hundred T-years ago. Since then, they had passed through the hands of at least a dozen levels of speculators—always trading downward, once the newest owner discovered how difficult it would have been to attract colonists to the system when there were so many other, more attractive potential destinations. By now, there were actually four separate corporations which claimed ownership, and none of them were likely to relinquish their claims without seeking at least some compensation to write off against their bad debt.

If Mannerheim suddenly showed an interest in the system, someone was going to wonder why. Aside from the Jessyk survey (which had been poaching on someone else's property, not that one would have expected that consideration to weigh heavily with Jessyk, of course), no one had ever bothered to update the original survey of the system. But if Mannerheim started offering to acquire the colonization rights, that was almost inevitably going to change, since the contending "owners" would certainly suspect (correctly) that Mannerheim knew something about it that they didn't. So they'd go and take a look for themselves, in the course of which they would discover the junction for themselves. At which point all manner of litigation, claims, counterclaims, and demands for immense compensation would come frothing to the surface.

So Mannerheim had the perfect cover for keeping the junction's existence under wraps while it very carefully and quietly, through a web of agents and arm's-length associations, sought to acquire ownership of Felix for itself without anyone's noticing. Those members of the MSDF who were not themselves Mesans but who were aware of the Felix Junction's existence knew exactly why they were supposed to keep their mouths shut about it. And they didn't know that the "official" survey information which had been shared with them didn't include the Darius Terminus . . . or the SGC-902-36-G Terminus.

"To be honest, Sir," Captain Granger's voice was very serious, almost somber, "that's only part of the reason for my own reservations about this operation. We're not planning on moving in on Verdant Vista, anyway. Not until we need a back door into the Haven Quadrant, at any rate, and we've waited around for two hundred years without doing that. I know that's probably going to change in the not too distant future, but the decision about when to finally use it is going to lie with us, and not anyone else, as long as no one figures out what's going on, at least. And we're all pretty much in agreement that the Manties aren't really likely to be able to do that. I'm damned sure they're not going to keep feeding survey ships into a terminus nothing ever comes back from, at any rate! So there's no need for the attack or any of its . . . collateral damage."

What you mean, Addie, is there's no need to kill everything—and everybody—on the planet, Trajan thought, more than a bit grimly. And if I had the guts to openly admit it, that's really what's bothering me about it, too. We don't have to kill all those people just to use a wormhole terminus that happens to be associated with their star. At this point, there's no way in the galaxy they could possibly put together a force of their own that we couldn't blow out of the way without even working up a sweat. Once we do that, who cares who "owns" the planet? For that matter, we could take it away from them any time we wanted to. Or, at least, if they flatly refused to surrender, we'd be legally justified in sending down the troops or even bombarding them until they saw reason.

He knew the arguments in favor of the operation. Even agreed that the concerns behind them were well taken. The fact that the 'Kingdom of Torch' didn't have a navy now didn't mean it couldn't acquire one. Or, for that matter, even borrow one. There was that treaty Cassetti had negotiated with it, for example. And the Republic of Erewhon had shown clearly enough where its sympathies lay. So, yes, it was always possible a genuine military threat could evolve in Verdant Vista.

From that perspective, it could be argued that creating a situation in which no one lived in Verdant Vista anymore was the most economical way to protect the secret. And the advantage Verdant Vista would offer when the Alignment's military operations inevitably intruded into the Haven Quadrant were huge. A direct wormhole connection to the quadrant from the Alignment's primary military base? Any commander in history would have killed for that kind of an advantage!

But would he have killed an entire planetary population to get it? Or, for that matter, to fend off a "threat" to it that would probably never materialize anyway? One he'd have plenty of time to factor into his plans later if it did look like materializing, come to that? Trajan asked himself. That's what sticks in your craw, Addie . . . and in mine. And it's the reason we're both so damned pissed off with Ganneau, too, isn't it? Because what he did to that Manty survey cruiser is exactly what "Manpower" is planning on doing to the entire damned star system.

Of course it was, and that was the reason he should never have started this conversation in the first place. Task Force Four wasn't going to be involved in it, anyway—not unless something went more massively wrong than Trajan could imagine, at any rate. And dragging his most trusted subordinates into this sort of moral morass with him wasn't what a good commanding officer was supposed to do.

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen, Osiris, he told himself grimly. Either send in your resignation because it's so morally repugnant to you, or else keep your mouth shut instead of contributing to your subordinates' possible uncertainty.

"I take your point, Addie," he said out loud. "And I don't disagree with you. But as you just pointed out," he looked across the table, holding her eyes levelly, his own silently warning, "the actual execution order came from someplace way above my pay grade. So there's not really much point in our kicking it around, is there?"

"No, Sir," she replied after a moment, and he smiled at her.

"In that case, let's kick something else around," he said much more briskly. "In particular, there's that new simulation I understand you and Ildik'o have been tinkering with. Tell me about what you've got in mind."

"Well, Sir," his flag captain glanced at Commander Nyborg, then back to Trajan, "it occurred to us that it might not be a bad idea for us to begin at least playing around with a 'notional dual-drive missile.' I don't want to make it anything too close to current MAN hardware capabilities, but I do think it would be a good idea to start stretching our tac officers' minds in that direction. So, what Ildik'o and I were thinking is that we'd take the position that at least some of the reports about current Manty capabilities may have a stronger basis in fact than the SLN is prepared to admit. On that basis, we could then sketch out the capabilities of something approaching current MAN hardware."

She paused and nodded to Nyborg, clearly inviting the operations officer to jump in, and the commander leaned slightly forward in her chair, her feminine yet undeniably square and sturdy face, alight with interest.

You're relieved we've stopped talking about what's about to happen in Verdant Vista, aren't you, Ildik'o? Trajan thought, and knew it was true.

"What the Captain is suggesting here, Sir," Nyborg said, "is that coming up with this 'notional missile'—that was her idea, Sir, but I think it was a damned good one—will start our tac people thinking in terms of the offensive potentials of that kind of weapon . . . which will also start making them fully aware of the threat potentials. Frankly, it's our ability to stop or seriously degrade, at least, Manty missile strikes that concerns us the most, so starting an open consideration of ways to do that strikes us as making a lot of sense."

"I can't argue with that," Trajan told her. "So tell me about this 'notional missile.' "

"Well, Sir," Nyborg said, "what we started with was—"