Rogue Powers (10 page)

Tsung knew when to quit. "Thank you, Commander. No further questions."

Pete popped up again. "The defense rest its case at this time, your honors. By prior agreement with opposing counsel, we will waive our concluding statement. The prosecution may now proceed with its case if it so chooses."
In other words, we're quitting while we're ahead.
Pete thought.

Tsung had the sense to request a recess for lunch after Mac's testimony. He needed time to collect his thoughts and get his notes in order, time to relax and plan, and he

needed to give the judges time to forget a bit of Mac's impressive bearing. So far nothing had gone his way, and he was determined that would change.

After lunch, Tsung began his case by quoting Mac's statements and showing a recording of one of his interviews. The message was the same one, but put in far less respectful tones.

Mac and Pete watched the screen impassively as Mac's image spoke. "The carriers are deathtraps. They are sitting ducks. We are told that these ships were built 'to interpose powerful forces across the spacelanes in times of crisis.' Those ships were never needed for that, in all the years they were on active duty. They were mothballed because modern weapons and tactics—and the absence of a major war—made them useless.

"Their true purpose, the true reason that these ships were built, the true reason that they are now being re-commissioned, is that admirals like to have big impressive ships to fly around in. Every cost-effectiveness calculation, every war game, every strategic plan, has shown that these ships are as much liabilities and targets as they are advantages and weapons."

Tsung stopped the recording. "That, your honors, is what Commander Larson had to say to the public last week. That statement was carried on Kennedy's largest video network. It was widely quoted. Commander Larson has said the alleged peril these carriers face is a secret— but that peril is no secret, thanks to him. Fortunately, none of his statements have gotten into the off-planet press as yet, though that is but a matter of time. No doubt ships are carrying copies of our war hero's opinions to every major world in the League.

"And what effect will that have on the war effort? Commander Larson gave up his efforts to discuss his views through normal military channels and instead went public. How will it serve morale, fighting spirit? Can it serve but to discourage the men aboard those ships? Can it but give aid and comfort to the enemy for him to hear that we

regard our own ships as admirals' toys, sitting ducks, deathtraps?

"Your honors, I will present no witnesses. I could exhaust us all with a stream of experts on strategy and tactics who would confirm what I have said, and then the defense would dredge up its own experts to refute me. I could call Captain Josiah Robinson, the commander of the
Eagle,
and he would be happy to tell you the high state of readiness his ship is in, and how his men are reacting to Commander Larson's statements. But you are all naval officers, and you know all these things.

"The one witness I would call, if I could, would be a naval commander—a
Guardian
naval commander. We must assume they have their spies here on Kennedy, watching us. The Guardians, on their hidden planet, Capital, perhaps have already viewed the recording we have just seen. If I could put a Guardian naval officer on the stand, under oath, I would ask him: Did Commander Larson's statements reveal weaknesses of which the Guardians were unaware? Did he make
their
forces more confident? Was what he said good for
their
morale?

"We have heard a great deal about duty today. We have been told that Commander Larson felt it his duty to speak, a higher duty than that he had to Navy regulations. Was it not a higher duty still to keep silent? He has hurt our perception of our strength, our morale—and aided that of the enemy? He has told us of a danger that it seems only he can see. Assuming the danger exists at all, has he not made that danger greater by pointing it out to the enemy? But speaking out on this 'danger,' has he not increased all our other dangers?

"This man has displayed courage, enormous courage, both in battle and in coming forward to say what he has said. But has he displayed good judgment? I think not. Your honors, I ask you to demonstrate your own judgment and find for the prosecution. In the old days, the wet navy days, they said that 'loose lips sink ships.' In our present day,
 
loose lips might serve to
vaporize
ships.
 
Do not encourage the practice of loose talk by letting this man go free. Yes, he is a hero. But heroism is no excuse for making a terrible mistake of judgment.

"Your honors, the prosecution rests."

Leventhal banged down his gavel. "Very well. This court-martial is adjourned. The court will withdraw to reach a verdict. This court-martial will reconvene at 0900 hours tomorrow morning."

Mac might have been confined to quarters in the Navy Castle, but at least he was confined to comfortable, if not downright imposing quarters on a high floor of the Tower. The rough-hewn walls of the semi-circular room were hung with paintings of great ships and admirals, the furniture was from the captain's cabin of an old U.S. wet Navy battle cruiser, the floor was covered in a rich, solemn burgundy carpet. Pete was pleased by the room. They only put high-class prisoners here.

The Navy Castle had not been built by some romantic architect to look like a fortress—it
was
a fortress, with stone walls three meters thick at the base, internally reinforced with steel and modern graphite composites. The walls would defend against mobs and most conventional attacks, and the bomb shelters drilled into bedrock a kilometer below could hold out long after the Castle proper had been vaporized. The Castle was designed to do more than just survive an attack, of course. It could fight back, with an armory full of rifles and side arms and supplies for a siege. There were other weapons tucked away inside the great building, which no one talked about much.

The Navy Castle had been built seventy-five years before, in quiet and peaceful days—at least they had been peaceful days on Kennedy. The ROK Navy was busy back then, as it was now, frequently being dispatched in answer to League requests: police actions, rescue missions, and even the transportation of riot police from one star system to another. The League had been formed largely in reaction to the economic and political disarray on far too many

of the settled worlds, and it fell to the navies of the strongest powers to effect and enforce the League's decisions. The ROK Navy had been there in the evacuation of New Antarctica, literally on day one of the League's existence. The Navy had flown relief supplies, bombed one side or another in the midst of revolts, arrested arms runners and drug smugglers, done too many dangerous things to trust much to days of peace. Only now, in the fight against the Guardians, did the ROK Navy find itself in its first war, but it had experience enough of fighting.

So headquarters was built inconveniently far from town— near but not at the spaceport, in sight of but not on the coast, on the brow of a hill in the middle of a large and carefully tended clearing. It wasn't due to chance that the view from the Tower was superb, nor due to the prestige of the unit that the First Marine Battalion was stationed there.

There had been scoffers who laughed at the egos that needed such a huge building, and a few Army types pointed out that the Castle cost more to build than most of the Navy's ships. Then the Fast Plague fell and madness literally became a contagious disease. When the cure was found, and the riots were over, the Castle was still there, with only a nick or two and a few scorch marks to mar the outer stone facing. The Army's gleaming, modern, downtown HQ Center had to be torn down and rebuilt altogether.

The builders of the Castle were more farsighted than they were optimistic.

The view from Mac's cabin (which Pete insisted on calling a room) was spectacular. Brown and Gesseti joined Mac for breakfast there the next morning. Mac couldn't eat much. He was too drawn by the view, the things to see. The coastline, the skyline of Hyannisport, the broad plain of the spaceport, were laid out in a magnificent panorama. It was the spaceport that Mac stared at. As he watched, a ship, a small winged job, made a horizontal launch into the perfect blue morning sky and rushed for orbit, the dull yellow of its air-breathing engines suddenly

flaring into sun-bright specks as it shifted to fusion power. Mac watched it climb to orbit, to space, to the dark between the suns, and thought of Joslyn, his wife, once again so far away.

"I should be out there, Pete," Mac said at last. "There's work to be done and I'm one of the best qualified to do it, and I'm cooped up here."

"You'll be out there soon, Mac. The judges will pass their verdict, this whole farce will be over, and you'll be back at it. Besides, you're only locked up here because you had a job of talking to do that you thought was pretty damn important. And you were right."

"Maybe," Captain Brown said, carefully refilling his coffee cup, "you even did some good, though I doubt it. And Pete, we gave it our best shot and did pretty well, but I've never had much hope of getting Mac off. The regulations are pretty clear, and I can't see Leventhal and company being thrown by a lot of verbal flourishes."

"Why do you doubt I did any good?" Mac said.

"Because you're a lousy politician and you didn't know the right people. Oh, I don't think you had much choice, and you did get your case heard, but all that accomplishes is getting the brass with their backs to the wall. They can't lose face by admitting you're right. They want to prove
they're
right—"

"And the only way to do that is to deploy the damned carriers. But I had to try, Captain Brown. For all the reasons you talked about in court."

"Yeah." Brown was angry, though he couldn't quite explain at what. But Terrance MacKenzie Larson was not the sort of man who should be hung out to dry. It was only the higher ranks, the admirals who loved their big ships too much, who felt the need to punish him. They left the dirty work to the Tsungs and the Leventhals, honorable officers honorably and reluctantly doing their duty. And Brown felt he never wanted to hear the word duty again.

There was a polite knock at the door and the very respectful white-gloved marine informed them that the court-martial was ready to reconvene.

They descended in the sleek, silent-running elevator, and were led the familiar way to the courtroom by the marine guard.

There was shuffling of papers, and rising for the court, and finally it came, unwilling, from Leventhal's lips.

One word.

"Guilty."

The day dawned as most of them did in this clearing, with a mist-shrouded sun easing its way through the knotted, roiling clouds and the tangled limbs of the surrounding forest. Two camps, one human, one Outposter, stirred and began their morning routines as the sun burned off the mist and the clouds and the dew dripped off the plant life.

C'astille opened her eyes, uncurled her legs from beneath her long body, flexed her tail, and stepped out of her field shelter into the clearing. She sucked in the fresh morning air through her blowhole. The morning air smelled good, invigorating. She stretched her arms and flexed her long fingers. It would be another good day. She went to the camp kitchen in search of breakfast.

On the far side of the clearing, inside one of the humans' pressurized huts, Lucy Calder slapped at the alarm clock with somewhat less enthusiasm for the day. With the dim thought of a shower and coffee, she stumbled out of bed. She had been up late again the night before, working on her notes. And Outpost's day was only nineteen hours long. It took getting used to. And C'astille would beat her to the Crystal Palace, as usual. She had given up trying to be early for their meetings—C'astille would simply be earlier still the next day. Calder liked her counterpart, and even felt in some strange way that she had something in common with her, but a little less enthusiasm for early morning work wouldn't be amiss. Coffee. That was the main thing.

Neither side was consciously aware of it, of course, but each had done the same thing, or had at least arrived at the same result: Young, open-minded, highly intelligent, and quite expendable individuals represented both species.

The Guardians hadn't made any immediate, deliberate decisions to put Johnson Gustav or Lucy Calder on
Ariadne
at the moment of First Contact. However, human traditions of exploration and military service, formed by decisions made and lessons learned over thousands of years, favored the practice of using young, still-flexible personnel, people with few immediate dependents to lead expeditions to the unknown or the unpredictable. It seemed to be what worked best: More explorers and soldiers came back when the leaders were young and smart and had few attachments to the outside world. Given that tradition, persons like Gustav and Calder were the most likely to be thrown into situations where a First Contact might occur: for example, on board a station orbiting a largely unexplored world. If humans had found that older left-handers who lacked a sense of humor did better in hazardous situations, the Outposters would have faced some aged and stern-faced southpaws instead of Gustav and Calder.