Ephialtes (Ephialtes Trilogy Book 1) (42 page)

Sherman had
already considered this probability.  He had been exceptionally careful to
maintain distance between himself and his contacts so that should it come to
this he would have plausible denial.  There was no way he would be able to
assure White of that.  As far as White was concerned the only thing
linking him to any of this was Sherman himself.  Sherman had always
thought of White as being something of a weakling, but he knew that in extremes
people were capable of extraordinary acts.  If White felt threatened
enough, and he knew that the only thing connecting him to the attack on
Otus
was Sherman, what was there to stop him from
breaking the link?

“If they get
me they get you,” said Sherman.  “But they’re not going to get me. 
You need to relax.  I’ve told you before, I only use the very best. 
They’re not amateurs.”

“Not
amateurs?  Seems to me like they can’t even follow simple instructions.”

“Hey,” said
Sherman, “you make a deal with the devil don’t be surprised if he comes around
and bites you in the ass.”

“I didn’t
make a deal with the devil, I made a deal with you and you screwed up.”

“I know you
made a deal with me,” said Sherman, “I documented it extensively.  In
fact, the only thing that stops it being published on my site is the fact that
I’m still alive.  There are places, dates, times and very detailed notes
about our conversations.  All the times and places will, of course, tally
with your diary and the electronic logs of your movements held by the Secret
Service.  But you needn’t worry.  None of that stuff will ever go
public.  I log into my site every twelve hours and reset the auto
publishing.  So it will never go live, so long as I’m around to keep doing
that.”

“You son of a
bitch.  You really think I’d have you killed?  What sort of person do
you think I am?”

Sherman
shrugged.  “I don’t know.  The sort of person who would authorise an
attack on his own military to further his political ends?”

White stared
at him.  “You know that isn’t true.  I never asked for
that, that
is not what I wanted.”

“You say that
now,” said Sherman.  “There’s some very interesting stuff on my website
that details exactly what you asked for and the lengths you ordered me to go to
in order to achieve it.  It’s unpublished as yet.  Maybe one day
you’ll get the chance to read it.”

“Your people
screwed up.  This is all on your head.  All I asked for was
interference, not this.”

“Was
it?  How are you going to prove that?  Even just being in a position
where you needed to prove it would mean you were screwed.  You wanted to
play tough guys.  Well you did, and here’s where it got you.  Deal
with it.”  Sherman angrily left the car, the sound of the slam slowly
fading in White’s ears.  White simply stared forward, mulling over his
options.  Sherman had told him that he was insulated, that there was no
way anything could be linked back to him.  White didn’t believe him, but
he had no other option.  He hated meeting in car parks; cameras everywhere
and only one way out.

White spent
the night with Zelman.  He found it difficult to sleep, though for periods
just listening to Madeline’s rising and falling breaths gave him some
comfort.  He had always known that with high office came great
responsibilities, and during the war at many points he had been a part of
meetings that lead directly to deaths on the battlefield.  With modern
fighting methods - drones and remote warfare - this
seldom meant the deaths of USAN soldiers, but with the Commander Program it had
happened.  There had been other decisions which had led to civilian
fatalities, deaths which may not have occurred had the decisions made in those
meetings gone a different way.  It wasn’t the first time that he had
initiated something that had gone on to lead to losses of life.

It had always
been abstract before.  It had been a collegiate process, like being part
of a firing squad.  No one person would be able to claim the fatal shot
was the result of them pulling the trigger.  Each individual took a
portion of the responsibility, and if they needed to they could tell themselves
that it was the others who were responsible.

This was
different.

There was
scant consolation in telling himself that this was not his intention. 
Sherman had been right, to a degree, that when you go off-piste there are
no rules anymore, and certainly no guarantees.  He alone had initiated
this action that had resulted in many deaths.  The commanders who had died
on
Otus
had volunteered to put their lives on
the line fighting for the USAN and all it stood for and now, however
unintentionally, he had sent them to their fate.

He felt
guilty too about his own anxieties.  He couldn’t be sure whether he was
worried about being found out for his own sake, or whether he was worried that
he was the last person who was in a position to put a brake on Cortes’ mad
careening toward a new conflict.  If he were taken out of the picture
Cortes would have free rein, not only to attack the Martian colony but to
continue his diminution of liberty at home.

Maybe, he
told himself, it was necessary to destroy
Otus
. 
Maybe the only problem here was that
Ephialtes
hadn’t been taken down,
too.  After all, he was playing in a high-stakes game and the long-term
goals maybe justified these sacrifices.

As he lay in
bed staring at the ceiling these thoughts span around and around his
head.  He had no allies in the cabinet.  He had no allies at
all.  As it stood, he was useful to Cortes as he could always be thrown to
the public as the dove to Cortes’ hawk.  He was the spoonful of sugar that
would help the medicine go down.  But his position was weak. 
Cortes’s popularity had grown with his successful conclusion of the war. 
White’s dovish position simply helped to placate the minority who were opposed.

He tried to
remain calm.  He thought maybe a good night’s sleep would help, but sleep
would not come.  He tried to step back and take an objective view of the
situation he found himself in, and the situation his country found itself
in.  The president was extremely popular, so popular that the electorate
was giving up its rights and freedoms without question.  That troubled him
deeply.  But he was at the heart of government and in a position to fight
back for the freedoms the country was initially founded upon.  The
situation he found himself in now was intolerable, but there was nothing he
could do.  Maybe Sherman was right and there was nothing to connect them
with what their agent or agents had done.  All he could do, he realised,
was assume that was the case and carry on.  He had high-level
security clearance; maybe he could keep an eye on the investigation. 
Would that look suspicious?  Probably not.

He rolled
over in bed again and looked at the clock.  It was 04:20.  He tried
to clear his mind of all thought, but the
Otus
incident and Sherman’s threats kept pushing back into his consciousness.

“Try to get
to sleep,
hun
,” Zelman called over her shoulder.

“Are you
awake?” said White.

“No, I’m fast
asleep,” replied Zelman.

“I’m sorry if
I woke you,” said White.

“It’s okay,”
said Zelman, sleepily.  She lazily groped behind herself, eventually
finding White’s hand.  White grasped her hand in his, and gently rubbed
his thumb against her finger.  He remembered holding the hands of his
parents when he was a little boy, and how that made him feel safe and
protected.  He glanced over at Zelman in the half-light.  She
seemed to be sleeping again now.  He looked up at the ceiling and tried to
put all thoughts of
Otus
and Sherman and
Cortes out of his mind.  He tried to concentrate on Zelman’s breathing
beside him and the feel of her hand in his.

He lay like
that for a long while, but still he couldn’t sleep.

Askel knew
she had the software systems on
Ephialtes
locked down.  She also
knew there was a saboteur on board.  Deductive logic told her that
much.  What she didn’t know was what the saboteur might do next.  He
or she might only have the software trick, and that had been taken care
of.  But maybe they were more resourceful than that. 
Ephialtes
was a precision instrument.  Someone with the time or inclination might be
able to, literally or otherwise, throw a spanner in the works.

Askel’s
work took her all over the ship.  She was
constantly engaged with its various systems.  She was vigilant for any
changes.  She had asked Andrews for the psych evaluations of all the
commanders aboard the ship.  Commanders were evaluated every six
months.  She could find no aberrations.  Meades and Steiner had suffered
head traumas but both had been passed fit for duty.  It had been a
stipulation that all commanders on this mission should have combat
experience.  Askel wondered if any had been traumatised by it, or maybe
bore a grudge against the government that had sent them into battle.

She noticed
the maintenance crews were reporting higher than usual instances of mechanical
failures on the command drones.  At least two had leaked coolant, and
another had a faulty gyroscope.  She had been part of the division that
designed the command drones and she knew that failures of this nature should be
exceptionally rare.  Commanders had been given leave to visit the
dropships to run simulations directly from their command drones.  Most
days commanders could be found in their dropships training for the mission
ahead.

Apart from
the commanders the only people who had come to
Ephialtes
via the shuttle
and
Otus
were six
Ephialtes
crewmembers.  None of them were dropship maintenance crew.  To Askel
it seemed there was a strong probability that the saboteur was a
commander.  Any other
Ephialtes
crewmembers would need special
clearance to access the hangar deck.  All the dropship maintenance crews
who had access were already on
Ephialtes
before the shuttle
docked.  The saboteur had to be a commander.

Commanders
did not have designated dropships of their own; they would be assigned ships
for each mission.  Askel looked at the logs for the dropships where faults
had been reported.  It seemed like some commanders had favourites. 
She crossed referenced the command drones that had reported failures with the
commanders who had used them.  That gave her a list of eight
commanders.  These were her prime suspects.  She noted with interest
that amongst the eight were Steiner and Meades.  She decided to read more
deeply into their records.

Commander
Alan Meades had served in the Asian theatre.  He had been on sixteen
combat missions, two of them protracted and bloody affairs.  He had an
exemplary record and was the youngest serving commander in World War IV. 
He had captured a missile base single-handedly, losing five of his drones
in the process and coming very close to being killed himself.  His psych
evaluations were all good.  Even after the missile base incident he had
been assessed positively.  His command drone had taken a small-bore
artillery shell directly to the torso.  He had been knocked unconscious
momentarily but went on to complete his mission.  He sounded like a war
hero, in the mould of Bobby Karjalainen.  Askel found it hard to believe
he might be the saboteur, but she had to keep him on the list.  Everyone
stayed in the frame until they could be absolutely exonerated.

Steiner too
had suffered a head injury on the battlefield.  His occurred as he had
tried to rescue a fallen comrade.  Interesting, Askel thought; more
traumatic.  Is that the sort of thing that would turn a soldier against
his own people?  Seeing a friend die?  Maybe.  Steiner’s
injuries had been more severe, too.  He had been hospitalised and had
required surgery.  But again, he had a blemish free record and no problems
with any of his psych evaluations.

Askel didn’t
know what to make of it.  She felt confident the saboteur was one of her
eight.  Was the head injury thing a red herring?  What about the
others?  All had served on the battlefield and had been a part of the
violence of war.  Most had been in fairly routine battles, with massive
superiority over their enemies.  Maybe that in itself could be
traumatising, thought Askel.  But she still liked Meades or Steiner for the
sab
.  They had been in heavy action close-up,
and had physically suffered for it.

Askel knocked
gingerly on Commodore Lucero’s door.

“Come,” said
the voice from within.  Askel entered.  Lucero was at her terminal
with a stack of papers on the side of her desk.  She looked up. 
“Lund!” she said.  “Sit down.  How are you?”  She gestured
towards her bed.

“I’m good,”
said Askel, sitting down.  “How’d you like the ship we built you?”

“Pretty
good,” said Lucero.

“Everything
alright?”

“I think
so.  Shouldn’t it be?”

“Well,” said
Askel, “she was never designed to be out here.  I just wondered about your
opinion, as a user.”

“A user,”
said Lucero, “I like that.”

Askel looked
embarrassed.  “Well, I mean, as a designer you design things to the best
of your abilities and try to anticipate how things are going to be used. 
But it’s the users who will judge in the end if your designs are
successful.  I’m a designer, and I’m happy with the design of the
ship.  But you’re the commodore.  What do you think?”

“Seems pretty
good to me.  We were floating around Earth for a few months getting used
to her.  In a while we’ll be floating around Mars, which adds up to the
same thing.  And in the meantime, thanks to your fancy engine, we’re
floating between Earth and Mars, which is pretty similar, too.  It’s all
good.”

Askel
nodded.  “Okay.  No problems then, nothing unusual?”

Lucero turned
her chair around from the console to face Askel on the bed.  “What is
this?” she said.  “Is something wrong?”

Lucero hadn’t
been on the shuttle or
Otus
.  Askel was
as close to certain she could trust her.  “Maybe,” she said.

“Maybe
what?  Something may be wrong?”

Askel
hesitated.  “The ship’s fine.  The design is good, the build is
good.  But there may still be a problem.”

“What is it,
Lund?” said Lucero.  “You can tell me straight out.  No riddles,
okay?”

“
It’s .
 . .”  Askel stopped.  Lucero
waited.  “I think there is someone on board trying to sabotage the
mission.”

Lucero looked
at her.  “You
think
?”

“Well, I’m
pretty sure.  Listen,
Otus
was deliberately
destroyed.  It wasn’t an accident.  Whoever did it tried to do the
same thing to
Ephialtes
.  And they’re almost certainly still on
board.”

“Okay,” said
Lucero.  “What are we going to do about it?”

“I don’t
know,” said Askel.  “They got to
Otus
through her software systems.  I’ve locked all that right down on this
ship.  I mean, you can never lock something up one hundred percent
watertight, but as far as possible I think I have secured the software
systems.  But if the person who tampered with the software is still on
board they can continue to hamper the mission by other means.”

“What sort of
other means?”

“Physical
means.  Violence.  Insurrection.  Who knows?  Whoever it
was had no qualms about taking out a capital ship and her entire crew, so who
knows what they might be capable of?”

Lucero
thought.  “And you knew about this before we set off?”

Askel
shrugged.  “I don’t know about it even now, not for sure.  All I’m
saying is don’t trust anyone, and if you notice anything odd, however small or
apparently insignificant, let me know.”

“Okay,” said
Lucero.  “What happens if we don’t find them?”

“I don’t
know,” said Askel.  “Let’s hope we do.”