A Rising Thunder-ARC (54 page)

He didn’t give a single good goddamn whether the Manties actually had any imperial ambitions. He admitted that in the privacy of his own mind, because it didn’t matter. He remembered one of his long dead father’s favorite sayings: ‘When you fuck with the bull, you get the horns.’ Well, it was time the Manties got the goring they deserved, and if he could do well for himself out of the process, so much the better.

Yeah, all well and good, but it’s not going to make tomorrow any more fun, despite the fact that you knew something like this was coming sooner or later
, he reflected.
But at least you
did
see it coming, unlike those other cretins. That’s the reason you buried your tracks as well as you did. And—
he smiled thinly—
if the wheels
come off anyway, you’ve got enough little tidbits tucked away to convince your esteemed civilian colleagues they’d better cover your back. Doesn’t matter how good Abruzzi is. If
your
insurance files ever hit the news channels, they’re all dead meat
.

There was actually a part of him that hoped they’d push him into making that very point to them. It would be so…
satisfying
to see the looks on their faces when they realized he had them all by the short hairs. It would be the equivalent of a nuclear exchange, of course; no way there’d be any bridges back from that kind of confrontation. But he was pretty sure they planned on stuffing him out the airlock as the sacrificial goat anyway, so he might as well get his full credit’s worth out of it first.

Besides—

A ripple of musical notes, the first few bars of the overture from
Adonis of Canis Major
, his favorite opera, announced a com call on his private, priority combination. He scowled out at the city panorama, then sighed and pushed himself to his feet. He’d never felt any inclination to surround himself with the bevies of personal attendants altogether too many of the Solarian elite seemed to require. They were less efficient than properly programmed electronic servants, they chattered and pestered, they always had their noses in their employers’ affairs, and every one of them was a potential security breach waiting to happen. Besides, he didn’t like being fussed over in the privacy of his own home. There was enough of that in the Service!

He walked across to the living room communications terminal and frowned as he looked at the display. He didn’t recognize the caller’s combination, and there weren’t that many people who had
his
combination—not on this line, anyway.

He shrugged and pressed the audio-only acceptance key.

“Rajampet,” he announced gruffly.

“Sid?” a voice he’d never heard before said. “Is that you, Sid?”

“No, it isn’t!” Rajampet replied sharply. “Who
is
this?”

“What?” The other voice sounded confused. “I’m sorry, I was trying to reach Sid Castleman. Isn’t this his combination?”

“No, it isn’t,” Rajampet repeated. “In fact, it’s a secure government combination!”

“Oh, Lord! I’m so sorry!” the other voice said quickly. “I must’ve punched in the wrong combination.”

“I guess you did,” Rajampet agreed a bit nastily.

“Well, sorry,” the other voice repeated. “Clear.”

The connection went dead, and Rajampet snorted as he hit the termination key at his end. But then his eyes opened wide as the hand which had just hit the key went right on moving. It opened the drawer in the com console, the one where he’d kept a loaded pulser for the last fifteen or twenty T-years. It reached into the drawer, and Rajampet’s face erupted in sweat as he watched his own fingers wrap around the pulser’s butt. He fought frantically to stop his hand…without any success at all. He tried to raise his voice, shout the code to activate the penthouse’s security systems…but his jaw refused to move and his vocal cords were still.

His mind raced as the pulser rose, his thoughts gibbering like rats in a trap, and then, to his horror, his jaw
did
move. It dropped so that his own hand could shove the weapon’s muzzle between his teeth.

God, God!
he thought, calling out frantically to the deity he’d never really believed in.
Help me!
Help
me!

There was no answer, and alloy and plastic were cold and hard as his teeth closed on the pulser’s barrel.

They were right. The frigging Manties were right all along
, a tiny corner of his brain realized, like a last pocket of rationality in a hurricane of terror.
The bastards
do
have some kind of nan—

His finger squeezed the trigger.

Chapter Thirty

It was very quiet in the file room.

People seldom came here, which was hardly surprising. The huge, cool chamber buried deep under the Solarian League Navy’s primary headquarters building was only one of several dozen given over to storage of backup records of critical files. Theoretically critical, at any rate. Although this particular storage chamber—Records Room 7-191-002-A—was carried on the Navy’s Facilities List as an active records repository, it was actually an archive. The “youngest” record in it was over eighty T-years old, which made it of purely historical interest even for something with the SLN’s elephantine bureaucracy and ponderous, nitpicking mentality.

Despite the age of the data stored in its files, the fact that it was listed as an active records repository meant not just anybody could come wandering in. Admittance required a certain level of clearance, which the four people who’d gathered there all happened to possess. Not that any of their superiors would have approved of their visit if they’d known about it.

Hopefully, none of them ever would.

“Damn,” one of the intruders said mildly, looking around at row after row of computer chip storage drawers. There were even what looked like filing cabinets for paper copies towards the rear of the room, and he shook his head. “This looks like a thoroughly useless pile of Navy crap, Daud. And a big one, too. Don’t you people ever throw
anything
out?”

The speaker was a tallish fellow in the uniform of the Solarian Marine Corps. He had wheat-colored hair, green eyes, and the collar insignia of a major. His right shoulder carried the flash of Marine Intelligence, technically a component command of the Office of Naval Intelligence, since the Navy was the Solarian League’s senior service. In fact, Marine Intelligence had gone its own way long ago, operating in its own specialized world—one the Navy had never understood…and one where reasonably accurate intelligence was critical.

“Very funny, Bryce,” Captain Daud al-Fanudahi said dryly. He was several centimeters shorter than the Marine and as dark as the major was fair. “And, yes, we do occasionally throw things out. Usually when keeping them might cause embarrassment for a senior officer. Wouldn’t want to have any unfortunate evidence lying around for the court-martial, after all.”

Captain Irene Teague, twenty T-years younger than al-Fanudahi and Frontier Fleet to his Battle Fleet, winced visibly. She also shook her head, brown eyes more than a little worried.

“Do you think it might be possible for you to indulge in witticisms that
didn’t
make me even more nervous, Daud?” she asked testily.

“Sorry about that,” al-Fanudahi said with a trace of genuine apology. “
I
thought it was funny, but I can see where not everyone might share my sense of humor in this case.”

“If there’s a word of truth to your suspicions, I don’t think anyone’s going to think it’s funny at all,” the fourth member of their group said. She was easily the smallest of the foursome and only a very little older than Teague. She wore the uniform of the Solarian Gendarmerie with lieutenant colonel’s insignia, and she had a sandalwood complexion, almond-shaped eyes, and close-cropped hair dark as midnight.

“Frankly, what I’m hoping is that you’re going to turn out to be a totally off-the-wall, lunatic nutcase, despite Major Tarkovsky’s having vouched for you,” she went on, waving one hand at the Marine Major, and her voice was hard. “Unfortunately, I don’t think you are. Not
totally
off-the-wall, at any rate.”

“I’d like to be wrong myself, Colonel Okiku,” al-Fanudahi said somberly. “I’m not, though. Mind you, I’m nowhere close to having all the answers—or even
most
of the answers—but I think I’ve least figured out the questions we need to be asking ourselves.”

“
All
of the questions?” Major Tarkovsky asked, opening his eyes wide. “Gosh, Daud! I thought we were just getting started!”

“Oh my God,” Teague muttered just loud enough for the others to hear. “He’s worse than Daud!”

“Oh, no, no!” Tarkovsky shook his head vigorously. “Nobody’s
worse
than Daud, Captain Teague, but I do try to be at least as bad.” He smiled very briefly. “It’s the only thing that’s kept me sane for the last few years.”

His voice was much harsher on the final sentence, and all four of them looked at one another.

“All right,” Lieutenant Colonel Okiku said after a moment. “I’m here at Bryce’s invitation, Captain al-Fanudahi, but I understand this is basically your show. Would you like to start the ball rolling?”

“I can do that,” al-Fanudahi replied, leaning back against one of the tall chip storage cases. “But first, how much do you know about the way ONI is organized?”

“Not a lot,” Okiku admitted.

“Then I’d better give you at least the high points before I get into all this.

“ONI’s divided into four sections. Section One is Operational Analysis, where Irene and Bryce and I all work, one way or another, under Admiral Cheng. In theory, we’re responsible for analyzing operational data—our own and reports on other navies—in order to identify trends and potential operational problems or shortcomings. We’re also supposed to generate intelligence in response to specific requests or needs—for an operation against a specific opponent or star system, for example—which means we
should
have been the lead analysts for ‘Raging Justice.’

“Section Two is the Office of Technical Analysis, Vice Admiral Hoover’s bailiwick, which is supposed to provide OpAn with current information on tech developments—our own and those of the various system defense forces and other navies—to support our analyses. Section Three is the Office of Economic Analysis, under Captain Gweon, though he’s practically brand new, which is responsible for tracking economic trends and information of specific interest to the Navy. And Section Four is the Office of Counter Intelligence, Rear Admiral Yau’s shop.”

He paused to give her time to digest that, then shrugged.

“Basically, I’ve been pretty much considered the Office of Operational Analysis’ pet paranoiac for the last several T-years. I’ve had this peculiar notion that the Manties might actually be developing something new in the way of war-fighting technology. Ridiculous, of course. Everyone knows the invincible Solarian League Navy’s technology is superior to that of everyone else in the explored galaxy!”

His tone could have eaten holes in an engine room’s deck plates, Okiku noted, and his eyes were more bitter even than his voice.

“I’ll confess that not even I had a clue just how far ahead of us the Manties had actually gotten,” he continued. “And it wasn’t really that I had any brilliant insights about Manticore to prompt my suspicions, either—not when I started. What I did know, was that OpAn, Technical Analysis, and ONI in general didn’t have any damned idea what was really going on
any
where. That wasn’t our job anymore. Our
job
was to come up with the feel-good reports that would tell our superiors they were still masters of the universe.

“Unfortunately, I had this odd idea that since we were the Office of
Operational
Analysis, we might actually try doing some analysis of real operational data. So I started poking my nose into things people probably wished I’d have left well enough alone, and I
really
irritated Vice Admiral Hoover. For some reason, she seemed to feel my interest in such matters suggested Technical Analysis hadn’t been doing its job very well. Go figure.”

He smiled crookedly.

“In the course of my journey into unpopularity, I began to realize reports of new Manticoran and Havenite weapons developments and new tactical and strategic doctrines had been systematically suppressed. They didn’t suit the party line, and our own prejudices—our certainty that we
had
to have the best tech anywhere—created a natural set of blinders. That can happen to anyone, I suppose, but no one was even trying to allow for the problem or get past it to look at what was really happening, and at least some of it was deliberate, coming from people protecting their own little patches of turf. People like Admiral Polydoru over at Systems Development, for example, where any suggestion we might be dropping behind was anathema. Or, for that matter, Vice Admiral Hoover’s people, who seemed more concerned with establishing that they hadn’t
missed
any significant new developments than with figuring out whether or there’d
been
any new developments. And no one was even worried about the implications. It couldn’t really matter what a bunch of neobarbs was up to, after all. Couldn’t have any significance for the
Solarian League
, now could it?”

He shook his head, his expression disgusted.

“I’ll admit it took me years to get to the point of realizing how bad things were myself, and I was at least trying to do my job, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been too surprised at what happened when I started suggesting we might want to look a little more closely at those ridiculous rumors. What
did
happen, of course, was that my career prospects took a sudden turn for the worse. I was already on the Admiralty’s shit list because I’d been making waves at OpAn; the suggestion that there could be anything at all to the stories about new Manticoran missiles or inertial compensators only made it worse. Fortunately, I’d at least been smart enough not to hand over the actual reports I’d collected. As long as I was only suggesting there were vague rumors that should be looked into, I was a nuisance and a crackpot but not an active threat to anyone’s career. They were satisfied to tuck me away in my dead-end little assignment and ignore me.