The Lost Stars: Imperfect Sword (39 page)

Drakon nodded. “That’s probably right. I know you didn’t trust Conner Gaiene.”

She looked away, distressed. “I am very sorry that he died, Artur. He was not my favorite man, but his death ennobled him.”

“Conner was always that noble man inside. He had just gotten very good at hiding it,” Drakon said, his voice heavy. “You and Colonel Kai haven’t interacted much, that I know of—”

“We haven’t,” Iceni said.

“So it makes sense that you would have entrusted Malin with that code phrase.” He looked straight at her again. “But I would very much not want to have that sort of thing happen again without my knowledge.”

She could tell that Colonel Malin would have some pointed questions directed at him when Drakon got back to his headquarters. If Drakon stopped trusting Malin at all, it would greatly lessen his effectiveness as a source of information for her. “I should also tell you that Colonel Malin thought you were already aware of the arrangement.”

Drakon paused, searching her face. “You misled him as well?”

“That’s what we do, isn’t it?” She had been hoping for more openness with Drakon, for a lowering of barriers, but he obviously had plenty of defenses up, so she could scarcely afford to lower hers. “But I will not take such actions again.”

He took several seconds to answer, then spoke with care. “There are forces working to keep us distrustful of each other. We can’t afford to let them succeed.”

“Forces?” Iceni asked. “Do you mean the Syndicate?”

“Certainly the Syndicate. Divide and conquer is an old CEO tactic. But maybe your assistant Togo as well. And maybe . . .” He gave her a look that carried an admission of his own failure. “Maybe that’s part of what Colonel Morgan wanted.”

Iceni’s smile was hard and cold. “I don’t know about you, but I hate being yanked around on anyone’s strings.”

“I never cared for it, either.”

“Then let’s move forward,” she said. “We can’t lose sight of the fact that we did win both here and at Ulindi.”

He nodded to her. “Or the fact that we won at Ulindi because you sent the battleship there.”

“Oh, hell, Artur, that battleship could have done nothing but avenge you if you hadn’t saved yourself and your soldiers.” She looked back at the star display. “Speaking of being yanked around, have you been told the message the Dancers sent to us?”

“Colonel Rogero passed it on,” Drakon said. “
Watch the different stars.
Do we have any idea what that means?”

“I talked to our astrophysicists,” Iceni said, “and according to them, all stars are different. No two stars are identical.”

“Why would the Dancers tell us to watch all stars? And if they wanted us to do that, why wouldn’t they say
watch all the stars
? What is it the Dancers expect us to do?”

Iceni smiled humorlessly, leaning back in her seat. “Or, what is it the Dancers are trying to manipulate us into doing? I get the impression that the Alliance is taking the Dancers at their words, as if they are completely sincere, truthful, and guileless.”

Drakon raised both eyebrows. “Seriously?”

“Yes. Whereas you and I know that no one, no matter their external shape, is completely sincere, truthful, and guileless. The Dancers have an agenda. They want us to do certain things, which may be to our benefit, or may be to the benefit of the Dancers.”

“They did save this planet,” Drakon pointed out.

“Agreed. Which would give them every right to express their wishes openly to us because we owe them payment for that debt. Instead, they offer vague warnings.”

Drakon shook his head, looking stubborn. “That doesn’t make sense. It’s hard enough to make people do what you want when you directly tell them what you want. Trying to manipulate them with vague statements is likely to make them do the opposite of what you want.”

“Maybe the Dancers don’t realize that. Maybe they’re using a tactic that works with Dancers.”

“Maybe.” Drakon eyed the star display, rubbing his chin as he thought. “Let’s assume that for whatever reason, the Dancers think that message is useful. Different stars. All right. I spent a lot of time in the Syndicate ground forces as opposed to the government or industry branches. To me, watch is a cautionary word. It means you’re looking for danger, or guarding something.”

She sat forward. “Then the Dancers would be telling us to guard or be on guard somewhere? That’s nothing we don’t already know.”

“Somewhere
different
,” Drakon said. “Which would mean not the usual places, or the places we’re already doing that.”

Iceni indicated the star display. “We’ve had a couple of enigma ships show up at the jump point from Pele while you were gone. They appear, turn, and jump back to Pele.”

“Scouts,” Drakon said. “We saw one right after we got back.”

“Yes. Keeping an eye on us and what we’re doing. The first one showed up while there were only a few cruisers and Hunter-Killers here, plus our battle cruiser
Pele
. That worried me that the enigmas would launch an attack as soon as possible, having seen our relative weakness. But the second enigma ship showed up after you and the
Midway
had returned.”

“So they saw we have some teeth,” Drakon said. “But the Dancers must have known we are already watching the jump point from Pele. That can’t be what they were talking about.” He paused. “A warning to watch different stars. It has to be related to the enigmas, not the Syndicate. The only place we know of that the enigmas can access human space is through Pele, then here at Midway. Were the Dancers telling us to worry about the enigmas being able to reach other stars? Different stars than Midway?”

Iceni gave him a startled look. “That is plausible. Black Jack gave us some star charts showing enigma territory.” Inwardly cursing Togo’s absence, which meant he wasn’t here to do this, Iceni played with the display’s controls until it zoomed out and framed a wide region of space. “There. This is the picture Black Jack’s fleet put together from actually traversing part of enigma space and from what they could get out of the Dancers.”

Drakon studied the star chart, shaking his head. “If that chart is complete, then Pele is all the enigmas can reach for a long way using jump drives. They could go scores of light-years up, down, right, or left and find other access points to human-occupied space, if there’s nothing blocking them from going those directions, but nothing else near here. And it also matches our experience since the Syndicate boundaries got pushed back from Pele. The only place that has shown evidence of enigma activity since then is here at Midway.”

What had she been told about jump drives? Iceni frowned, thinking, then nodded. “Captain Bradamont told me something, confirming what I had seen in a Syndicate intelligence report. Do you remember when Black Jack’s fleet hit Sancere?”

“Not really. That was a big Syndicate shipbuilding star system, right?”

“Yes,” Iceni confirmed. “The thing is, Black Jack’s fleet shouldn’t have been able to reach Sancere from the star system where they entered jump space. But he knew some tricks, from the old days, that allowed the range of the jump drives to be extended a bit. The Syndicate had guessed that was what he had done, and Bradamont confirmed it for me.”

Drakon gazed at the star display again, plainly reevaluating his earlier assessment. “If the enigmas can jump farther than we think, far enough to access human space from other stars, why haven’t they done it already?”

“Maybe they’re trying to figure out how to do it. But how would the Dancers have learned of that?” She glared at the glittering stars on the display in frustration. “Every question we have just leads to more questions.”

“One thing I do know,” Drakon said. “Speaking in military terms. When you hit an obstacle, there are two approaches you can try. The first is to keep hitting it, trying to break through it. That happens a lot. The other approach is to go around it, to try to find some way of bypassing the obstacle. I don’t care how enigmas or Dancers think. Those are basic realities. The enigmas have tried going through Midway twice, and they’ve been thrown back twice. That’s another reality. So, either they keep trying to push into human space through Midway, or they try to find a way around us.”

“A different star?” Iceni chewed her lower lip as she looked at the star display. “It doesn’t help much, does it? If we don’t have a range to work with, any human star could potentially be within range of the enigma jump drives. Which ones are the different ones that we’re supposed to watch?”

“Maybe the astrophysicists can give us some clues,” Drakon suggested.

“Maybe they can. I’ll tell them to get together with our best jump-drive technicians.” Iceni smiled. “It will drive them crazy. Theoretical physicists hate dealing with engineers.”

“And vice versa,” Drakon pointed out.

Iceni sighed. “There’s been something I’ve been avoiding asking, but since we brought up the subject of crazy . . .”

He didn’t need her to specify what she meant. “I don’t know whether or not Colonel Morgan is dead,” Drakon said bluntly, his voice harsh. “But, as of when I left Ulindi, she had not contacted any of our people or been found by anyone, and there were a lot of ways she could have died. Odds are, what’s left of her is buried in the rubble of the snake alternate command center.”

Drakon shrugged before continuing. “If she didn’t die there, well, planets are big places, and that planet has a lot of smashed buildings and craters and rubble now. They’ll still be finding remains of people in the wreckage a century from now.”

As much as she did not want to feel any sympathy for Drakon where Morgan was concerned, Iceni could see how his shrug was an unsuccessful attempt to cover up his own distress. “I know she served you well, but she also betrayed you. If she died in the line of duty, that may have been the best possible outcome.”

“Yes. If she died,” Drakon agreed, nodding heavily.

“You think she might still be alive?”

“Until I see a body, I will not be sure. Morgan could be almost superhuman at times.”

“And you are no longer concerned about the child, who by this time might already have been born?”

Drakon sat looking at nothing for several seconds before replying. “Either Morgan’s fail-safe plans took effect, and the girl is already dead as well, or what Morgan told me about provisions being made was true, and the girl has been allowed to survive Morgan’s death. That will give me time to find her.”

He focused on Iceni. “That makes one more person we need to find, but it seems to me the priority is to find your former assistant.”

“We do not
know
he acted against us,” Iceni repeated. “He may be pursuing whoever did pass that information to the Syndicate.”

Drakon let his skepticism show. “I’m sure that’s what he will say. If he shows up at your door. You changed all your codes, so he shouldn’t be able to get through that door.”

Iceni shook her head. “If Togo wants to get somewhere, he’ll do it. The tougher the defense, the longer he will take to get through, but he will succeed.” She lightly tapped one sleeve of her jacket, the one from which Drakon had once seen a weapon appear with startling swiftness. “If necessary, I can defend myself, and I will shoot to kill, but my chances against him, if he has turned, are not nearly as good as I would like.”

“Do you need extra security?” Drakon asked. “I can send over some people and some equipment.”

“Me?” Iceni laughed. “Need extra protection? I’m invincible, General Drakon. The people idolize me.”

“I saw the vids,” Drakon said. “You did look invincible.” It was hard to tell how he felt about that.

“You didn’t see me once I got back inside this office,” Iceni said. She let her defenses slip. There was quite literally no one else with whom she could share this. “I am frightened, Artur.”

He sat straighter, alarmed in a way that gratified her. “Of what?”

“Them. The people. Not in the Syndicate way. I am frightened of what they will do for me, what I can ask of them. You weren’t there, Artur. You didn’t feel it.” Iceni ran both hands through her hair. “I got back into this office when it was over, and I swear I could hear the gods laughing at me. Have you ever held a weapon so dangerous that you were afraid to use it?”

“It really felt like that?” Drakon asked.

“Yes. I know that I can do some very big things now, Artur. But that means I can make some very big mistakes.” She closed her eyes, seeing the vast crowd again in her memory. “We’ve been worried about giving them more freedom, enough freedom, enough rights, that they wouldn’t revolt against us.”

“Yes,” Drakon said. “The last elections should have kept them quieter longer than this.”

“No!” She opened her eyes and glared at him. “They didn’t want more freedom from me. They wanted a leader. They wanted safety and security and surety. I could have reinstituted all sorts of Syndicate rules then and there, and they would have cheered me.”

Drakon just stared at her. “You’re sure of that?”

“Positive. They will do what I ask, but I still can’t force them. Does that make any sense? It’s true. Let’s lay this out. You must know from what Colonel Rogero told you that the ground forces can no longer be used to enforce our rule.”

“Yes,” Drakon agreed. “Which means I can’t launch a coup against you.”

She lowered her hands and deepened her glare. “That wasn’t my point. I still consider this a partnership.”

“Even though you no longer have to consider it a partnership?” Drakon smiled thinly. “Thanks. It’s been trending this way for a while. I’ve seen it. To the citizens, and to the mobile forces, you’re the one in charge. I’m your senior assistant.”

“You are my partner,” Iceni insisted.

“Not to the citizens. And you were just talking about how much power they have given you.”

“It’s not like I could order my warships to bombard the planet! I’m not talking about coercion! Don’t you understand that?”

“Yes, I do.” Drakon shrugged again. “It’s called leadership. Real leadership. It’s why my division followed me here and why they followed me when we moved against the Syndicate. You’ve built something stronger than that with the citizens, and,” he continued, “you earned it. That was an incredibly gutsy move, facing that crowd with nothing between you and them but whatever defenses were worked into your suit.”