A Rising Thunder-ARC (50 page)

“Convenient or not, he’s for the long drop,” Abruzzi said flatly. MacArtney looked as if he wanted to argue, but the permanent senior undersceretary of education and information went straight on. “No matter how we try to spin this one, someone’s got to take it in the neck. You don’t have
this
kind of disaster without determining who’s responsible for it and giving him the ax, Nathan, and you know it. He’s the senior uniformed officer of the Navy. That makes him the logical choice. For that matter, he’s the one who really
is
responsible for it!”

“That’s going to touch off a firestorm in the Fleet,” MacArtney said after a moment. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, I’m just saying the Navy’s going to see it as a bunch of civilians stabbing the uniforms in the back to cover their own backsides.”

“Of course they are!” Agatá Wodoslawski snorted. “If they don’t see it that way, they’ll have to admit their precious Navy couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse!”

More than one other person attending the high-security electronic conference winced. That sort of language was rare out of Wodoslawski, but it did capture the gist of their collective opinion rather neatly.

“What I want to know is what the
hell
Filareta thought he was doing,” Kolokoltsov said flatly.

He’d replayed the recordings the Manties had sent along with Eleventh Fleet’s preliminary casualty reports again and again, seen the exchange between that cold-blooded bitch Harrington and Filareta. Kolokoltsov was no trained naval officer, but it had been obvious even to him that unless Harrington was lying—and she hadn’t been; that much should certainly have been clear to Filareta—Eleventh Fleet had stood the proverbial chance of a snowball in hell. She’d
had
him—had him dead to rights—and she’d given him the option of surrendering, but the maniac had chosen to fire instead!

“I don’t know what he was thinking,” MacArtney admitted bitterly. “And nobody ever will, now.”

“And Rajani still hasn’t managed to get Imogene Tsang to Old Chicago where we could ask her exactly what her orders in
Beowulf
were, either, has he?” Quartermain observed. She glanced at Kolokoltsov from the corner of one eye. “She was a hell of a lot more confrontational than she was supposed to be. I can’t help wondering if maybe her instructions—and Filareta’s—might not have included a couple of clauses we didn’t know about.”

“I can see where you’d wonder that,” MacArtney acknowledged, “but I don’t think that’s what happened. Not in Filareta’s case, anyway. I don’t know what the hell
did
happen, but I have—had, I suppose—met him, and he wasn’t the kind to commit suicide on someone else’s orders, no matter who the someone who gave them might be.”

“Even if that is exactly what he did.” Abruzzi shook his head when MacArtney stabbed another sharp look in his direction. “I’m not arguing with your analysis of his character, Nathan. I’m just saying
something
caused him to commit suicide.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Malachai!” Quartermain said disgustedly. “
Please
don’t climb on the Manties’ mind-control nanotech bandwagon!”

“I have no intention of doing anything of the sort, Omosupe,” Abruzzi replied coldly. “First, because the entire notion is ridiculous. But, second, because even suggesting there might be something to the Manties’ claims in that regard would be the first step in legitimizing all their other claims about this ‘Mesan Alignment’ and the way we’ve been allowing it to manipulate us.”

“Well, we’re going to have to issue
some
kind of statement,” Wodoslawski pointed out. “The Manties’ recordings of Harrington’s conversation with Filareta are already hitting the news channels, and they make it pretty damn clear she gave him every opportunity to surrender, and he chose to fire on her instead. I hate to say it, but that’s pretty damning evidence of who’s to blame for this massacre.”

“And it’s only a matter of time before Felicia Hadley starts screaming about it in the Assembly,” Kolokoltsov agreed. “She’s been justifying Beowulf’s opposition to Tsang’s passage on the argument that Beowulf’s refusal actually saved the lives of Tsang’s crews. What happened to Filareta’s only going to strengthen her position in that regard.”

“The hell with Hadley!” MacArtney said harshly. “The newsies are going to be all over this. Even some of our ‘special friends’ in the media are going to find it hard not to join the pack on this one, because, frankly, they’ll lose a hell of a lot of credibility if they don’t. And that doesn’t even consider someone like that incredible pain in the ass O’Hanrahan.
She’ll
be all over this like stink on… Well, you get the idea.”

“One of my people over at Education and Information
may
have come up with a way we can spin it, at least in the short term,” Malachai Abruzzi said. The others looked at him in disbelief, and he shrugged. “Nobody’s going to be able to spin this one in the
long
term,” he conceded. “The best we can do is try to get out in front and at least slow it down, plant some seeds of doubt to undermine the credibility of the early reports. The problem is that whatever we gain in the short term is likely to turn around and bite us in the long term when the Manties’ version of events is independently verified.”

“Then what’s the point?” MacArtney demanded.

“The point is that if Malachai’s people have come up with a way to buy us some time, even if it’s only a few months, we may be able to pull together some coherent strategy for getting through this more or less intact, after all,” Kolokoltsov replied. “At this point, frankly, I don’t have a clue what that strategy might be, but the critical point is that we’re looking right down the barrel of a constitutional crisis.”

The sudden silence was absolute, and his colleagues looked at him as he finally said the words.

“That’s been the anaconda under the table none of us have wanted to talk about from the very beginning,” he continued unflinchingly. “Unfortunately, Holmon-Sanders brought that front and center when she faced down Tsang, and this is only going to make it worse. For the first time in T-centuries, people may actually be willing to look at the Emperor and admit he’s bare-assed naked.” He looked around their holographic faces. “The Constitution was effectively dead on arrival; we’ve always known it never could have worked as the basis for an effective system of government the way it was written. So we found ways around it. Ways that, frankly, are completely
illegal
under the letter of the Constitution. Now people like Hadley and Holmon-Sanders are saying so openly, and a lot of other people who would’ve been willing to say ‘so what?’ and let us go on with the business of making the League work anyway are going to look at what happened to Filareta as proof we don’t know
how
to make the League work. And if they decide that, and they listen to Hadley and the rest of those crazy Beowulfers, the entire League could go straight down the crapper.
That’s
what this is really about now.”

“That…has to be a little alarmist,” MacArtney said tentatively. He looked around at the others. “Doesn’t it?”

It was obvious to Kolokoltsov that MacArtney had been totally focused on the crisis’ personal implications. That he’d never looked beyond the problem of cuffing the Manties aside so the League in general—and Nathan MacArtney in particular—could get on with business as usual the way they always had. Now, though…

“I don’t think it is, Nathan.” Abruzzi didn’t like MacArtney and never had, but his tone was almost gentle as he shook his head. “I admit it sounds preposterous, but this really could take down the entire League, and when it does, God only knows what’s going to happen out in the Protectorates. Hell, some of the
Core
systems don’t like each other all that much! If they see an opportunity to go their own ways, maybe even get some of their own back against someone who pissed them off centuries ago, they’re likely to take it.”

MacArtney sat silent, his face ashen, and Kolokoltsov returned his attention to Abruzzi.

“Tell us about this time-buying idea, Malachai.”

“It’s actually pretty simple.” Abruzzi shrugged. “In some ways, this is Spindle all over again—all we have really is the Manties’ word for what happened, plus the stories filed by civilian newsies in the system. In other words, the only first-hand information is coming from official Manty sources. So we do what we did then.” He shrugged again. “We lie.”

“How?”

“The sequence is clear from what the Manties have released. Filareta sailed into an ambush; Harrington sprang the trap and gave him the option of surrendering or being destroyed; he opened fire; she handed him his head. Right?”

Heads nodded, and he shrugged again.

“Well, we can’t possibly win if we try to defend his actions. So instead, we change the storyline. Harrington deliberately drew him into the trap; she offered him the option of surrendering as a ploy to get him to scuttle his missile pods; he
did
scuttle his missile pods…and the instant he’d given up the one weapon she was afraid of, she opened fire and cold bloodedly destroyed his fleet. It was never about giving him a chance to surrender; it was always about her intention to destroy him whatever he did.”

“How the hell do you expect to make that stand up?” Wodoslawski demanded. “Especially with the recordings the Manties have already made public!”

“We point out that they’re the recordings the
Manties
have made public,” Abruzzi replied. “They’ve told us they’re clean copies of the actual conversation, but we have no proof of that. We point out that Filareta’s orders gave him the option of standing down or even surrendering if it turned out Admiral Rajampet’s estimate of the tech imbalance turned out to be in error. I don’t know if they did—in fact, I doubt like
hell
they did—but by the time an official transcript of them gets released, they damned well will have! On the basis of those instructions and what appears to have been the tactical situation when Harrington demanded his surrender, we believe that’s what he actually did. At which point Harrington opened fire, and everything after that point in the ‘official record’ they’ve sent us is almost certainly a skillfully edited montage of the actual battle.”

“It’ll never fly,” Wodoslawski said flatly.

“It might,” Kolokoltsov said more slowly, eyes narrowed as he considered the scenario. “It has the advantage of being consistent with what we’ve been saying about Spindle and the other confrontations. Sure, some people are going to see it as the same old line, but for a lot of others that continuity’s going to give it a certain legitimacy. It’ll fit with what those people have already accepted as the truth, and the Manties can’t
disprove
it. They can provide all the sensor recordings and recorded messages they want, but all of them will be coming from official government organs, and any good, cynical Solarian citizen knows government organs routinely lie their asses off when it suits their purposes.”

“Oh, yeah?” Wodoslawski leaned back in her chair. “And what about Haven throwing in with them? Validating the same story?”

“Basically, the Havenites cut a deal with the Manties,” Abruzzi responded. Her gray eyes widened in disbelief, and he chuckled harshly. “I’m sure Innokentiy’s Foreign Ministry sources and analysts can come up with all sorts of straws in the wind to justify it, but what obviously happened was that Manticore offered Haven a bargain. Clearly, Haven’s war-fighting technology has to be roughly on a par with Manticore’s for it to have survived this long. That means they’ve got a major tactical advantage—only a fleeting one, until our own Navy acquires matching weapons, of course—over the League, too. So Manticore’s offer was simple: let’s stop shooting at each other long enough for us both to rip off big, juicy mouthfuls of territory from the League and anyone else who gets in our way while we’ve still got the military edge to get away with it. Think of it as a variation on the old cliché about my enemy’s enemy being my friend. In this case, it’s a case of my enemy’s helpless victim being
my
helpless victim, too. Or that’s how Manticore sold it to Haven, anyway.”

“You’re saying that in this version of reality Haven saw the opportunity to throw in with Manticore for a piece of
our
pie and figured that was a better deal than trying to finish off the Manties and getting nothing out of it except a bunch more losses of their own and—maybe—control of the Junction at the end of it?” Wodoslawski said in a much more thoughtful tone.

“We’ve been explaining that the Manties are cold-blooded, cynical imperialists from the beginning,” Abruzzi pointed out. “This would be just more of the same on their part, wouldn’t it? And the fact that Haven, who’s always hated Manpower as much as Manticore in the first place, is the one who ‘confirmed’ this nonsense about the so-called Mesan Alignment fits in rather nicely.”

“You know, that’s what bothers me the most,” Wodoslawski admitted. “It was Pritchart who brought this to the Manties, not the other way around. I agree it’s nonsense, but if Haven really believes it…”

“I’d just point out to you that according to the fairy tale they’ve been spinning, it was Zilwicki and Victor Cachat who brought this Simões home from Mesa,” Abruzzi said, and rolled his eyes. “I’m sure all of us remember what a loose warhead Zilwicki was right here in Old Chicago when he claimed Manpower had kidnapped his daughter. I don’t think anyone’s going to call him a disinterested witness where anything to do with Mesa is involved! For that matter, if there’s one scrap of truth to Mesa’s version of Green Pines, Zilwicki would have every conceivable reason to come up with some far-fetched story about centuries-long conspiracies as a way to cover up his own guilt! And then there’s Cachat, who’s been spending the last couple of T-years getting further and further into bed with the Audubon Ballroom through his cronies in Verdant Vista, and who appears to have been
with
Zilwicki in Green Pines. Another sterling, utterly trustworthy character witness against Mesa! And, as the cherry on top, it’s the Manties’ treecats’ supposed ability to know when someone is lying that ‘proves’ Simões
isn’t
.