Shadow of Victory - eARC (38 page)
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Authors: David Weber
“I know our own beloved political leadership makes it hard to believe that sort of thing, but do try to remember that not even Włocławekan politics were always corrupt. For that matter, if you really believe all politicians are automatically and irrevocably corrupt, just what exactly do you think is going to happen to you if we actually pull this off, Tomasz?”
“Don’t think I don’t spend the occasional night worrying about exactly that.” Szponder looked down into his vodka, then raised his eyes to Kotarski’s. “I think about Włodzimierz a lot, sometimes. If it weren’t for Grażyna, I’d probably worry about it even more than I do.”
“As long as you do worry about it, it won’t happen,” Kotarski said almost gently. “But my point is that there really are political leaders who prefer doing the right thing whenever that’s feasible. Most of them realize—or at least I hope to God they do—that it won’t always be feasible, but that doesn’t mean the right thing isn’t their default setting. And what’s impressed me most from the research I’ve done since Tomek’s first conversation with Mister Mwenge is that Manticore seems to recognize the pragmatic advantage of doing ‘the right thing.’”
“Advantage?” Szponder cocked his head.
“People trust Manticore to keep its word because they have historical evidence Manticore does keep its word,” Kotarski said simply. “I’d say Manticore thinks carefully about the pros and cons before it gives its word, however. In the cases of both Marsh and Grayson, they needed military bases in the region, and in each case both sides recognized it was a matter of mutual self-interest and advantage for all parties involved. But also in both cases, Manticore went far beyond the minimum it had to do. It was building allies, not just bases from which to operate. They poured enormous amounts of their own resources into those systems, and over the course of their relationship, both Marsh and Grayson—especially Grayson—have made huge economic and industrial progress…and paid Manticore back two or three times over.” He shook his head. “Don’t think for a minute that the Manticorans didn’t have their eye on that potential return on their investment’ from the outset, either. I think the Manticorans seek that sort of relationship not simply because of that ‘default setting’ of theirs, but because those relationships have paid off so powerfully for them over the T-centuries. Whatever their bottom-line motive, though, any star system they approach only has to look at Grayson to see how the Star Kingdom of Manticore interacts with its friends and allies. That’s the reason all those systems in the Talbott Sector voted to join this new ‘Star Empire of Manticore,’ Tomasz.
“And what I see when I look at Mister Mwenge’s offer is the pragmatic military advantage to Manticore in helping us if at the same time that distracts the Solarian League from concentrating on the Star Kingdom. That’s on the one hand. What I see on the other hand is the damage Manticore could do to literally T-centuries of reputation if it turned around and threw us to the wolves. If it comes down to a life-or-death decision, one in which their own survival or a truly vital core interest would be threatened if they didn’t let us drown, then they probably would. Anything short of that, Manticore won’t do that.”
“I think Jarosław’s right,” Nowak said quietly. Szponder looked at him, and he shrugged. “We’re all agreed the lid is blowing off here in Włocławek, one way or the other, sometime soon, but I think Mazur genuinely believes Pokriefke and the czarne kurtki can keep it clamped down forever.
“He’s wrong, and we all know what’ll happen if he finds that out and there’s no one to take effective control when people finally go into the streets and just don’t care how many of them get killed this time around.” Nowak’s expression was somber, his voice grim. “It’ll be bloody, it’ll be messy, it’ll be destructive as hell, and what Mazur and the other bastards in the Oligarchia will do when they realize they can’t stop it is call in Frontier Security to hammer the lid back down, no matter who they have to kill or how much of Włocławek’s future the Sollies demand as their thirty pieces of silver.
“That’s what all of this is about, Tomasz. I know how important it is to you that we get back to what
Włodzimierz
Ziomkowski stood for, and I agree with you a hundred percent. But I’ll be honest. What matters more to me immediately, what keeps me awake at night worrying about my wife and my kids, is what happens if the explosion comes and there’s no one to take the controls and steer. No one with the organization and the firepower to impose control and kick hell out of the Oligarchia, Krzywicka, Pokriefke and the goddamned BPP before they have time to whistle up Frontier Security and Frontier Fleet. And right now, we can’t do that. We just can’t, and all of us know it. That’s why we had to use the Krucjata to tamp down the riots after SEOM shot down that airbus.”
“And you think Mwenge—the Manticorans—will give us the firepower we need?” Szponder said, and it wasn’t really a question.
“What I think is that no one else will,” Nowak said unflinchingly.
“Tomek has a point,” Kotarski said. “And while we’re making points, don’t forget they’re offering us naval support, too. That implies interstellar recognition of us as the legitimate Włocławekan government by one of the most militarily and economically powerful star nations in the galaxy. And on the purely military side, it also suggests that the
łowcy trufli
will have a hell of a problem convincing OFS and Frontier Fleet that crushing us would be another low-cost operation.”
“So both of you advise accepting the offer?”
Szponder looked back and forth between his two senior lieutenants—his theoretician and his tactician—and it was obvious he was asking for advice. That he intended to make the decision himself in the end.
Kotarski and Nowak glanced at one another, then turned back to him and nodded firmly.
“It’s a risk,” Kotarski said, his tone as unflinching as Nowak’s had been moments earlier. “And if we’re wrong about trusting the Manticorans, it could be disastrous. But if we’re not wrong, it’s the best opportunity God’s ever going to offer for stopping everything we’re all dedicated to stopping.”
Silence hovered, and then Kotarski chuckled. It was so sudden both of the others looked at him in astonishment, and he waved one hand at them.
“Sorry! It’s just that I actually liked Mister Mwenge. Quite a lot, really. I’ve been working on preventing that from affecting my thinking, but I can’t help it. And at least he has a sense of humor!”
“I don’t recall him cracking any jokes while we talked,” Nowak pointed out, and Kotarski snorted.
“Oh, but he did! In fact, it’s been a running joke since the moment he…introduced himself to you in that park, Tomek.”
“What kind of joke?” Nowak demanded. He seemed a little affronted, Szponder noted, which probably had something to do with his own jealously guarded reputation as a practical joker. “I didn’t hear any jokes!”
“Yes you did, you just didn’t know it. I didn’t limit my research only to Manticore and its foreign policy. I took a look at Mister ‘Mwenge’ as well. The name struck me as a little odd, so I went into the University’s library banks.”
He paused, and Nowak nodded. When the Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika Department of History was ordered to terminate Kotarski’s teaching position, the department had somehow forgotten to terminate his access to its computers. His colleagues’ “oversight” had warmed Kotarski’s heart, but it had also proven extremely useful to the Krucjata Wolności Myśli. And as an ex-professor turned hobbyist, he made a point of puttering around in the library banks on a regular basis, doing research on the most disparate topics he could think of, as a cover for his occasional, deadly serious forays for information the KWM truly needed.
“Well, it turns out that ‘Mwenge’ is a word in a very ancient language, one called Swahili,” Kotarski said now. “And what it translates as is ‘Firebrand.’ I haven’t run down ‘Dupong’ yet, and I don’t intend to, since I’d just as soon not draw any attention to him if someone’s monitoring my data searches, but I’m willing to bet it means the same thing—or something very like it—in yet another ancient language.”
“You mean—?” Szponder said, his own eyes lighting with amusement.
“Exactly. He’s literally told Pokriefke and Mazur and all those aparatczycy over at KWSS that he’s here to burn their house of cards down around their ears, and they’re too damn stupid to realize it!” He shook his head with another chuckle. “How can I not like someone with that sense of humor?”
February 1922 Post Diaspora
“Excuse me, Mister Frinkelo, but this is exactly what the Eridani Edict is intended to prevent, and the Constitution obligates the League to enforce the Eridani Edict, not violate it!”
—Commander Bryson Neng,
Solarian League Navy,
XO, SLNS Hoplite
Chapter Thirty-Four
“All right, Paul.”
Innis MacLay rested one powerful hand on his son’s shoulder. What he really wanted to do was to ruffle the boy’s hair the way he had when Paul had been much younger. But fourteen-year-old adolescent pride got in the way of that sort of open display of affection these days. And if that was true under normal circumstances, it was even truer today, Innis thought.
“I’m counting on you,” he continued instead, looking into Paul’s eyes. They were the same hazel as his mother’s, and they met his father’s gaze steadily. “I’ve no doubt there are still a few Uppies about the countryside, and I’ll expect you to keep your mother and the girls safe. You’ll do that for me, aye?”
“I will, Da.”
Paul’s voice was deeper than it had been, Innis realized. It hadn’t truly broken yet, but it was closer than it had been. Had it truly changed that much in the two months since the Rising had begun?
His eyes burned for just a moment at the thought, and his grip tightened on his son’s shoulder. Then he turned and knelt to sweep the eleven-year-old twins into a huge hug.
“And you’ll be minding your mother, too, the pair of you!” he told Jennifer and Keeley sternly, his voice a bit gruffer than it had been with Paul. They looked back at him—Keeley with a demure, obedient expression that went poorly with the devilish gleam in her eye and Jennifer with darker, softer eyes, shadowed with anxiety. “I said mind her,” Innis told Keeley giving her a little shake, and squeezed Jennifer tighter with his other arm.
“Like always, Dadaidh,” Keeley promised.
“Lord save your màthair, then!” he sighed, and stood, holding out his arms to his wife.
She burrowed into them, more worried than either of her daughters but determined not to show it, and he hugged her close.
“And when will you be home again?” she asked, hugging him back.
“Well, that’s not a thing I can tell you, Rùnag,” he told her. “From the looks of things, it’ll not be long, but MacCrimmon and MacQuarie’ve fooled us a time or two. Still and all, I’ll be surprised if it lasts another month.” He squeezed her again, then stood back so that he could smile down into her face. “We’ve friends at the spaceport still, and MacCrimmon’s shuttle’s on thirty-minute notice to lift.” He winked. “I’d say that sounds like a man as might be thinking it’s time to be getting off-planet and maybe even out-system.”
“Pray God it is,” she said much more softly, eyes suspiciously bright as she gazed up at him. “And just you be remembering that a great, towering fùidir such as yourself’s a bigger target than most!”
“Oh, aye, I’ll remember, Rùnag!” he reassured her, laughing as she called him a clown.
But then his smile softened. He gave her one last squeeze and felt his throat trying to close. Perhaps Paul was even more like him than he’d thought, he reflected, because he was damned if he’d say another word and let them hear the crack in his voice.
He picked up his pulse rifle, slung it over his shoulder, smiled at the four most important people in the entire universe, and headed out the door into the bright, breezy morning.
Chattan MacElfrish, not so many years older than young Paul and full of fire, was waiting with the air car. He looked up from his book reader, shoved it into a pocket, and hit the ignition button to fire up the turbine as Innis opened the door and climbed in beside him.
“The family’s good, then?” he asked.
“Aye, they are,” Innis replied.
“Then that’s the way it should be,” the unmarried Chattan told him as he lifted the air car off the ground. “It’s good they’ll be waiting for you when it’s finished, Innis. I envy you that.” He smiled, then checked the time and nodded in satisfaction. “And in the meantime, we’ve some Uppy arses to kick! I’m thinking we should make Elgin by lunchtime.”
* * *
“I don’t suppose there’s any good news?” Tyler MacCrimmon growled as he settled into his chair at the head of the conference table.
The big, tastefully—and expensively—furnished briefing room was well lit, with the presidential seal, inlaid in silver and gold into the enormous, hand-polished silver oak slab of the table. That seal belonged to him now, since he’d exercised the constitutional provision which let him “temporarily” relieve Alisa MacMinn of her office on the grounds of exhaustion. That was a much kinder word than “senility,” and the press releases all assured the Party faithful the Beloved Leader would return to office as soon as she recovered.
Even her most fervent supporters seemed to feel that giving her a little…vacation might be a good idea under the present circumstances.
Crystal decanters of expensive off-world brandy and whiskeys gleamed behind the wet bar at the far end of the room, and burnished silver carafes of coffee or tea sat before each of the people seated around the table. Soft music played, the whisper of the air conditioning sent tiny, almost imperceptible shivers up the hideously expensive spidersilk drapes which concealed the smart wall when it wasn’t in use, and feet were silent in the thick, deep pile of the midnight-blue carpet.
The entire scene reeked of wealth, of power and privilege, and the people in it were as expensively attired and perfectly groomed as the briefing room. Not a hair was out of place. And yet, Frinkelo Osborne thought from his lowly seat, half a dozen places down from MacCrimmon’s, the air seemed heavy and stale. Not in any physical sense, perhaps, but laden with the stink of fear and weighted down by the invisible heaviness of desperation.
MacCrimmon’s question hung in that heavy air, unanswered. None of his cabinet ministers seemed eager to meet his eye, and he glowered at them for several seconds, then swiveled his eyes to Keith Boyle, the Loomis System’s secretary of war.
“Well?” he said flatly.
“There hasn’t been much change since yesterday,” Boyle replied. He twitched his head at the uniformed officer sitting beside him. “General Renwick’s just returned from an inspection of our front-line units. I won’t say his report is hugely optimistic, but we don’t seem to have lost any more ground overnight.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” MacCrimmon growled. “What about taking any ground back?”
“That’s…not going to be easy.” Anger flashed in Boyle’s eyes, although he was careful to keep it out of his voice. “If we had more manpower, we might be able to accomplish something along those lines. As it is, I’ve instructed General Renwick to impress upon his people that we can’t afford to lose anything else before we’re relieved.”
MacCrimmon’s jowls flushed. For an instant, Osborne thought the Acting President was going to lash out at Boyle, but then his nostrils flared and he sat back in his chair, visibly leashing his anger, and gave a single, jerky nod.
That was better than Osborne had really expected. MacCrimmon had always had a tendency to find scapegoats for his own failures and make examples when others failed him, and that tendency had become more pronounced as the LLL closed in on Elgin. Fortunately, even he seemed to realize this disaster was very little of Keith Boyle’s making.
Osborne’s own sources indicated that Boyle probably would have loved to launch a coup that put himself in control, but there’d never been much chance of that. Mostly because the Army had been reduced to a mere eighty thousand men and women over the course of the last several decades as first Lachlan MacHendrie and then his protégée Senga MacQuarie built up the United Public Safety Force at the Army’s expense. After all, as they’d pointed out time and again, there was no one for an army to fight, but MacCrimmon could always use more policemen! And besides, they’d added much more quietly in MacCrimmon’s ear, did he really want to trust someone like Boyle with any real combat power?
Which was why the UPS actually had actually been provided with more light armored units than the Army, and why there’d been so many heavy weapons tucked away in various UPS armories scattered around Halkirk.
Heavy weapons which had found their way into the rebels’ hands, in all too many cases.
Osborne glanced at the spidersilk drapes, and he was just as glad they were drawn. If they’d been open, the smart wall’s display would have made dismal viewing. After fifty-six days of fighting, the Prosperity Party’s loyalists held exactly two of Halkirk’s twelve regional administrative centers. They still controlled Elgin—or most of it, anyway—and there’d been no serious fighting Thurso or in Red Bluffs, Glenquoich, or Gilliansbridge, the next three largest cities on Halkirk. But t seventy-five percent of the smaller towns and cities had gone over to the Liberation League, and probably as much as fifty percent of the population outside those major cities actively supported Megan MacLean and her fellows. Personally, Osborne suspected that Ottomar Touchette’s estimate of seventy percent was closer to the mark. In fact, among the loggers and foresters who were the backbone of the system’s economy, the percentage was even higher, thanks to Nyatui Zagorski’s policies.
That was also a huge part of the reason the Party loyalists had been driven back into the larger towns and cities. The UPS had learned that going into the woods after well-armed, motivated men and women who spent their entire lives there was a good way to lose troopers and their equipment.
It doesn’t help any that MacLean and her people came so close to completely decapitating the UPS in the opening hours, either, he thought. I may not’ve thought much of Colonel MacChrystal as a human being, but she had a lot better idea about how to organize field operations than MacQuarie or any of the other HQ chair warmers. Not to mention the fact that losing her and two of her three deputies created enough confusion the Liberation League damned near managed a coup de main right here in Elgin that could have ended the entire rebellion in the first forty-eight hours!
He shook his head mentally, careful to keep the ever-increasing contempt he felt for the men and women in the briefing room out of his expression. If a single one of them had possessed enough sense to pour piss out of a boot—and the spine to argue with Zagorski—before this bitched up disaster began…
“Any more on McGill’s location?” MacCrimmon continued.
“Not really,” MacQuarie admitted. “There are reports she’s in Conerock, but we’re just chasing rumors at this point, I’m afraid.” She shrugged unhappily. “We’re tapping a lot of their com traffic, but not enough, and they’re surprisingly good at communications discipline. They almost always use code words rather than giving names or places in the clear, and they’re obviously using a lot of dead-drop mailboxes. We’ve found and shut down over a thousand of them, and I’m pretty sure we’ve only scratched the surface. And on top of that, it looks like they use couriers to physically deliver messages whenever time permits.”
“Well, that’s useful,” MacCrimmon said acidly. His support for Senga MacQuarie was running thin, and although her dark eyes glittered she had sense enough to keep her mouth shut.
“All right, bottom line time. Our projections indicate the bastards will take Elgin away from us within the next four days,” MacCrimmon said to Osborne, his voice flat. “Right now, we’ve got them confined on the western perimeter, but they’re constantly burrowing deeper. More to the point, our orbital sensors show them concentrating for a push through Swantown, and we don’t have anybody left to stop them. Once they break through the Army’s cordon, they’ll come in behind the Public Safety troopers holding the western side of town.”
Osborne nodded soberly. Swantown—a wealthy “bedroom community” suburb of Elgin—lay along the Swan River, on the southwestern edge of the capital. If the Liberation League secured Swantown, the hard-pressed Uppies being slowly driven west would be flanked…at which point, panic would turn their stubborn retreat into a rout. Especially since they knew what was going to happen to them if they fell into the Liberation League’s hands after the increasingly vicious “reprisals” and atrocities of the last four or five T-weeks.
And what MacCrimmon hadn’t said was that the fall of Swantown would also mean the loss of Elgin Spaceport…the off-world escape route for the Prosperity Party’s upper echelon and their family members.
“I understand, Mister President,” the “trade attaché” replied.
“I believe you told us we could expect relief from McIntosh within three T-weeks ‘at the outside,’” MacCrimmon continued. “While I wouldn’t want to sound like I doubt you, that was almost six T-weeks ago.”
“I know, Mister President.” Osborne nodded again. “I know. And all I can tell you is that the relief force must be underway to us right now.”
* * *
“An’ keep your bloody heads down!” Alexina Morrison, who’d been a private in the United Public Safety Force only a month earlier, shouted the furious reminder as the first hypersonic pulser darts began to hiss and crack overhead. “We need to take the fuckin’ tower, not to get your worthless arses killed!”
A couple of the foresters under her command actually grinned at her, but most of the other forty-five men and women of her assault team only nodded grimly. They’d seen too many killed because of a moment’s carelessness. Besides, they’d come to regard Alexina Morrison with near idolatry. Not only had she and her partner been instrumental in taking Conerock in the first place, but she’d been in the forefront of the vicious streetfighting in Elgin from the very beginning…and she was still alive. That was a not insignificant accomplishment for someone who persistently led from the front.
“All right,” she continued in a slightly less penetrating tone, “when we hit the freight entrance, Tammas’ll go right and head for the lift shafts. Regina, you’ll go left and take out the maintenance and engineering control room. The rest of you will follow me straight for the lobby. All of you got that?”
Heads nodded, and she gazed at all of them for a moment, then jerked her head at the waiting objective.
“All right then, let’s get to it,” she said grimly.
* * *
Captain Dugald Dempster cringed as a new crescendo of explosions tore through the smoke billowing up to his left. Theoretically, he commanded an entire UPS company; what he actually commanded were thirteen troopers supported by a single light tribarrel, and the tribarrel was running low on ammo.