Shadow of Victory - eARC (42 page)

“I know. Don’t blame you, either. And—” Kápička chuckled sourly “—I don’t think Castelbranco’s going to be happy to hear it either. But I’m being as honest as I can when I tell you I’ve looked hard—in fact, I’m still looking hard—but I’ve found absolutely no evidence that…anyone in government service, let’s say, had anything to do with that explosion.”

That, Šiml reflected, was as close as Kápička could come to naming names like Cabrnoch or Žďárská, and from his expression, he was either totally sincere or one of the better actors Šiml had ever seen.

Or, more likely, a combination of both.

“Well,” he said finally, “I appreciate your informing me. And I see why you thought you should do it in person. I know you have a lot of people already looking over your shoulder on this one, Daniel, but I hope you understand that if you discover any more about these mysteriously missing explosives, I’d really like to hear about it. Especially if there might be any more of them floating around out there in the possession of whoever already tried to kill me once.”

“Of course I understand!” Kápička nodded sharply. “And I promise you that anything I find out will be forwarded to you immediately.”

“Thank you, Daniel. I appreciate that, too. And now, I’m sure you have things you need to be doing, so I’ll let you go.”

“Thanks, Adam. I’ll be in touch. Clear.”

Šiml’s display went blank, and he sat back with a cheerful smile which might have startled Daniel Kápička.

You’re not going to find out who sold these explosives on the black market, he thought with intense satisfaction, because that’s not what happened. No, you’re going to find out that these explosives were in that air lorryload that crashed over in Bílá Voda last year. Of course, they never actually got into the lorry, but I suppose the explosion was energetic enough it’s not surprising your crash investigators didn’t realize that.

His smile turned into something suspiciously like a grin. At the time, he’d been more than a little irritated with the Jiskry who’d arranged that accident. They’d been careful, and while the CPSF could readily track the explosives back to a specific delivery lot, the paperwork tracing where every part of that delivery lot had gone was much more problematical. No one would be able to prove the part of it used to blow up his limo hadn’t been aboard that lorry. And the trio who’d actually engineered the theft had no official connection to the lorry, the explosives, or even the shipping order, so he’d been forced to accept their cell leader’s judgment that it had actually constituted a very low risk. Despite which, he and Vilušínský had sent back very firm instructions to never—ever—do something like that again. The quantities of weapons and explosives which could be diverted to Jiskra that way might have been very useful, but not useful enough to risk alerting Siminetti or Kápička to the fact that members of the CPSF might belong to a secret subversive organization.

Of course, we never thought about them being useful this way, he reflected. Actually makes me feel a little guilty for the nastygram we sent them when they did it.

* * *

“Let me put this as clearly as I can, Zuzana,” Karl-Heinz Sabatino told the red-haired woman on his com. “I’m not happy. I’m not happy at all.”

“I understand that, Mister Sabatino,” Zuzana Žďárská said. “and, I assure you, President Cabrnoch isn’t any happier than you are. But, frankly, this is something you should be taking up with Minister Kápi—”

“I’ve already spoken with Daniel,” Sabatino interrupted. “And Gunnar Castelbranco’s discussed it—in some detail—with both him and General Siminetti. However, under the circumstances, and in order to avoid…misunderstandings, I feel it would probably be a good idea for me to make my feelings clear to you, as well.”

Žďárská closed her mouth. She maintained a politely attentive expression with the practiced ease of a lifetime in politics, but anger glittered in her eyes. Sabatino saw it, and it didn’t bother him a bit. Especially not since there was more than a little apprehension to keep it company.

“Thank you,” he said. “You see, Zuzana, I’ve been trying to figure out why someone might have wanted to kill Adam Šiml, of all people. I mean, the man’s uniformly beloved among sports-minded Chotěbořians, isn’t he? And Sokol is one of the relatively few institutions here on Chotěboř that’s universally popular. Oh, I know there was some ill feeling when he originally left government service, but that’s all in the past.” His eyes bored into her. “And, just between you and me—and possibly President Cabrnoch—the past is where that ill feeling had better stay. I’m aware Daniel and General Siminetti have been singularly unsuccessful in their effort to determine just how explosives delivered to CPSF’s SWAT teams could have ended up in the back seat of Adam’s air limo. I’m sure they’re doing their very best to unravel that mystery even as we speak.” He smiled with very little humor. “In the meantime, however, speaking both as one of Adam’s many personal admirers and, yes, friends, but also as the representative of Frogmore-Wellington and Iwahara Interstellar, I’d like to point out that on behalf of my employers, I may find myself required to…rethink my relationship with the current administration if it should happen the local authorities are unable to prevent the murder of a philanthropist of Adam Šiml’s stature. The loss of someone who’s become our most visible connection to Chotěbořian social causes and corporate charitable contributions would make me really, really angry, I’m afraid.”

He smiled again, the expression thin and cold.

“I do trust you’ll convey my deep concern in this matter to the President.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea, Sinead.” Lisa Katherine O’Daley’s blue eyes were dark, her expression troubled, and she shook her head as she gazed at her daughter. “I know you’d like to get away, but if Aivars isn’t expecting you—”

“No, he’s not expecting me,” Sinead O’Connor interrupted, her tone rather more clipped than she normally used with her mother. “He’s not expecting the news he’s going to get in another week or so, either. I’d just as soon he saw me as soon after that as I can arrange.”

“Sinead—” Lisa began, then stopped, looking at the pain in her daughter’s green eyes. She knew that same pain echoed in her own, but it went even deeper for Sinead.

Thirteen days had passed since the murderous attack the newsies had already dubbed “the Yawata Strike” after debris strikes on Sphinx destroyed the entire city of Yawata Crossing. There’d been 1.25 million people in Yawata alone. The best current estimate was that over seven million civilians had been killed, combining losses on the planetary surfaces with what had happened to the Star Kingdom’s major space stations. No one had released numbers on military casualties yet, but everyone knew they’d been hideously high, as well, and Lisa doubted there was a single family in the Manticore Binary System who hadn’t lost someone they loved. God knew Lisa had! In fact, she’d lost over thirty coworkers—some of whom she’d known for upwards of forty T-years—in the First Interstellar Bank of Manticore’s Hephaestus office. And at least ten of her late husband’s friends and colleagues had died in the destruction of the Hephaestus headquarters of Brookwell, O’Daley, Hannover, and Sakubara, the partnership he’d helped build into one of the Star Kingdom’s half-dozen most successful investment management firms.

They came from old money on both sides of the family, the O’Daleys did, and a precious lot of good that did in the face of so much pain and loss.

But at least I was in Landing when it all happened, she thought. Sinead wasn’t. Sinead saw it happen. Maybe that’s the difference. But…

“Have you discussed this with Charley?” she asked.

“No.” Sinead sat back on the small settee on the other side of the coffee table and looked out the four hundredth-floor office’s floor-to-ceiling window across the city of Landing. It looked so…normal, she thought. How could it look that way after what had happened?

“No,” she repeated, looking back at her mother. “He’s still on Gryphon, I think. Besides, I’m pretty sure he’s too busy to talk to me right now.”

Her mother snorted. Like Sinead, Lisa knew what Charles O’Daley really did at the Foreign Office. If there was one person who was turning over every rock for any clue as to who'd attacked them, her son was that person. And he probably blamed himself for every one of the millions of dead. After all, it was his job to have known about whoever had committed that atrocity. The fact that no one else in the entire Star Empire had seen it coming would never blunt his bitter sense of self-blame.

There was a lot of that going around, she reflected.

She climbed out of her chair and crossed to the window. She looked out it, her thoughts paralleling her daughter’s, although she didn’t know it, while she thought about guilt, responsibility, and pain. Then she turned back to Sinead.

“You and Aivars discussed your going with him when he first deployed to Talbott,” she pointed out. “You decided against it then because he was going to spend so little time in any single star system. So when you come down to it, will you really be any closer to him—effectively, I mean—than you are right here at home?”

And if you’re not, you’ll be alone with all this pain, where I can’t reach you, either, she carefully didn’t say.

“I don’t know.” Sinead replied. “But I know I won’t be any farther from him. And for at least the immediate future, he may be spending more time in Spindle, given what just happened there. And I need to be there with him, Mother…because of what just happened here.”

“And how would you get there?” Lisa asked gently. “You can’t just book a suite on one of the Hauptman Cartel liners, you know.”

The devastation of Manticore’s orbital infrastructure had locked down all regularly scheduled civilian shipping routes. Eight passenger liners had been caught at Hephaestus or Vulcan, Sphinx’s equivalent. All of them—and everyone aboard them—had been destroyed. Even Lisa, with all her contacts as First Interstellar’s CEO, didn’t begin to have a complete count on how many freighters and cargo and personnel shuttles had been swept into oblivion along with them. It was going to take time to sort out so much death and destruction.

“The Navy still has ships in the pipeline,” Sinead replied. “I talked to Terry Patterson day before yesterday.” Her nostrils flared. “Claudia was on Vulcan with her ship. And Peter had gone out to have dinner with her.”

“Oh, God,” Lisa breathed as the fresh pain hit.

Commodore Terrence Patterson, Admiral Patricia Givens’ deputy at the Office of Naval Intelligence, had been one of Charles’ personal friends for many years. He and his family had been O’Daley houseguests on dozens of occasions, and her eyes burned as she remembered his daughter, his son-in-law, and their two children…who would never see their mother or father again.

“I didn’t know,” she said softly, looking at her daughter, and Sinead smiled. It was a sad smile, one that quivered just a bit.

“I expect it’ll be months before we know everyone we’ve lost.” Her voice was husky, and she cleared her throat almost viciously. “I didn’t know when I screened Terry, either. His yeoman told me before she put me through.” She looked away from her mother. “I almost hung up before he came on the com. I mean, what was I going to say to him after that? But Chief Powell had already told him I was waiting, and I couldn’t just cut and run.” She looked back at Lisa. “And do you know what the very first thing he said to me was?” Her voice turned husky again, wavering around the edges, and her eyes brimmed with tears. “He told me how sorry he was to hear about Hexapuma.”

“Oh, Sinead.”

Lisa crossed quickly to the settee and sat beside her. She put her arm around her daughter, and Sinead let her head rest on her mother’s shoulder while her eyes burned. They sat that way for almost a full minute before Sinead drew a deep breath and straightened.

“Anyway,” she patted her mother’s knee and made her voice sound almost normal, “I knew he wouldn’t have time for idle conversation, given what must be going on at the Admiralty right now. So I went straight to the point and asked him if he thought the attack would affect dependent passages to Spindle.”

“‘Dependent,’ sweetheart?” Lisa cocked one eyebrow, and Sinead smiled at the welcome edge of humor in her mother’s tone.

“For certain values of the word, yes, Mother. Especially if it helps get me where I want to be aboard a Navy transport at a time like this.”

“Oh, I see!” Lisa nodded. “And what did he have to say?”

“He said he didn’t know.”

“And this was a surprise to you?”

“Not really. But he suggested I might ask Captain Mathis over in BuPers, so I did. And he says the Navy’s pulling in every transport it can find. They’re obviously going to have a lot of personnel transfers—God knows they’ll probably have to pull shipyard techs from every station we’ve got just to sort through the wreckage—and until they know where they’re going to be transferring people to and from, all nonessential personnel movement’s on hold.”

“That sounds less than promising.”

“At least some transports will still be moving back and forth, Mother. They have to be, however disrupted normal shipping may be,” Sinead said. “And he told me he could put me on the standby list on an as-available basis aboard one of them. I told him to go ahead and do that, but there’s no telling how long I’d have to wait. I thought about taking Kaisers Witz, but Captain Marco told me about her forward alpha nodes.” She smiled crookedly. “I guess it’s lucky he couldn’t get her moved up in the repair queue.”

Lisa nodded, silently grateful in more than one way that the small but well appointed yacht her own father had commissioned sixty T-years ago had still been waiting for a repair slip on Hephaestus when the attack came in.

“So it looks like I’m stuck, for now at least,” Sinead conceded. “But I’m not giving up, and Captain Mathis promised to let me know if anything opens up.” She smiled again, less crookedly. “Being married to the man who won at both Monica and Spindle seems to carry a few perks I hadn’t counted on.”

* * *

“Captain Lewis?”

Ginger Lewis looked up from her book reader’s article on gravitics sensor maintenance techniques. There was nothing new in it, but reading old manuals was a lot less depressing than following the news channels.

“Yes, Senior Chief?”

“Captain Mathis can see you now, Ma’am.”

“Thank you, Senior Chief.”

She switched off the reader, slid it into her pocket, and followed the petty officer down a remarkably long hall, even for Admiralty House. He turned a corner, then rapped on an old-fashioned, unpowered door, opened it, and stuck his head into the office beyond.

“Captain Lewis is here, Sir.”

“Thank you, Clement,” a voice said, and the senior chief stood aside, holding the door for Ginger.

She stepped through into a moderate-sized office. It was buried too deeply in Admiralty House for windows, but a smart wall was configured to show a busy ski slope, complete with cloudless blue sky, brilliant sunlight, and flying cascades of powder snow as somebody slalomed past the camera. It was probably from someplace on Gryphon, Ginger thought, and felt her mouth stiffen as she thought about what she’d left behind to answer BuPers’ summons. It was only by the grace of God and Vice Admiral Faraday’s surprise evacuation drill that she was still alive. Too many of the people she’d met aboard HMSS Weyland in Gryphon orbit, people who’d begun the process of becoming colleagues and friends, had been less fortunate.

“Captain Lewis, reporting as ordered, Sir,” she said.

“Captain.” The extraordinarily tall, heavily tanned, brown-haired officer behind the desk had a pronounced Gryphon accent, which suggested her guess about the ski slope’s location had been on the money, and he stabbed an index finger at a chair. “Sit,” he invited.

“Thank you, Sir.”

Ginger sat obediently while he looked back down at a memo on his display. He had to be almost two meters tall, she thought, and dauntingly fit. From the looks of him—and bearing that smart wall in mind—he probably spent a lot of time on skis. Then he looked back up at her with blue eyes which seemed even brighter in that tanned face.

“I’m sure you’re wondering why you’re here,” he said with the air of someone getting right to the point, but then he paused as if inviting a response.

“I am a little curious, Sir,” she admitted. “Obviously, BuPers needs to find somewhere to put me after what happened to Weyland. Given how…chaotic things are, I didn’t to be ordered to report personally at Admiralty House, though.” She smiled faintly. “It seemed like an awful lot of trouble for BuPers to go to where one squeaky new junior-grade captain’s concerned. Especially—” the smile disappeared “—with everything else you have to worry about just now.”

“Actually, that ‘everything else’ is why you’re here, Captain Lewis,” Mathis told her, and tipped back in his chair, stroking his walrus mustache with an index finger while he considered her.

“I have a slot to fill,” he said then, “and when I plugged the requirements into the personnel database, your name came out.”

“May I ask what kind of slot, Sir?”

“It happens, Captain, that there was a conference on Hephaestus on the twenty-sixth. One of several, I’m sure.” His mouth tightened. “This particular conference, however, was a meeting of ship’s captains and their execs chaired by Vice Admiral Toscarelli.”

Ginger winced. Anton Toscarelli had been the Royal Manticoran Navy’s Third Space Lord, the CO of the Bureau of Ships. His death aboard Hephaestus had already been announced, but somehow Mathis’ words gave that death an immediacy it hadn’t had before.

“The reason I mention this,” the other captain continued, “is that among the officers attending that conference were the CO and XO of Charles Ward, one of the new David Taylor FSVs. Her electronics officer was also on the station for a briefing on the newest Lorelei platforms.” He grimaced. “Effectively, that pretty much decapitated the ship’s entire command structure, particularly since the EO had taken along her assistant and the Tacco had hitched a ride to have lunch with his fiancée at Dempsey’s. At that, though, she was luckier than four other ships with senior officers at the Vice Admiral’s conference, because she wasn’t actually docked at the station.”

Ginger winced again, harder, trying to picture what the loss of every department head except Astrogation and Medical must have done to Charles Ward’s ship’s company. But even as that thought went through her, she felt her interest quickening. If the ship needed a new chief engineer, too…

“What do you know about the Taylors, Captain?” Mathis asked.

“Only what I’ve read in the Proceedings,” Ginger admitted. “I know the operational concept behind them, but I’ve never actually seen one, I’m afraid.”

The Taylors were a new departure in support ships whose pedigree owed at least a little—conceptually, at least—to the Trojan-class AMCs. Far smaller than mammoth repair vessels like HMS Ericsson, whose technicians had helped rebuild Hexapuma after the Battle of Monica, the Taylors ran to around three million tons, only about twenty percent bigger than the new Nike-class battlecruisers.

The challenge handed to BuShips’ designers had been to produce a “fast combat support vessel” which combined substantial repair capability and a modest capacity as an ammunition/stores ship in a package which was fast enough to stay with a detached force of battlecruisers. The result was the FSV, a ship which could be configured—and reconfigured—at need to fulfill a spectrum of missions, and the result looked…odd the first time someone saw it.

Oh, the forward twenty percent of a Taylor’s outboard profile looked pretty much like a standard bulk carrier’s hull, with a few rather features thrown in. But stretching aft from that was a long, relatively narrow tube—a central core which contained the basic ship systems and life support—that terminated in what looked for all the world like a warship’s after hammerhead. Four full-length ribs projected outward from the core, designed to serve as attachment points to mate the core hull with four quarter-hull section modules. Those modules included straight cargo carrying variants, but also those fitted with machine shops, as ammunition carriers, or even as personnel transport quarters and life support.