The Unincorporated Woman (58 page)

“Where is J. D. Black?” demanded Rabbi.

It was a rare outburst for Rabbi but understandable. Of the dots in red likely to be destroyed by Gupta in the next few days was the Belter settlement Moshav Tarbut Gavriel, one of the four principal Jewish settlements left in the human race. The moshav housed a fair number of Christians and Muslims, including the home of the late Fawa Sulnat Hamdi and her son Tawfik, now chief engineer of the flagship of the Alliance. More notably, thought Kirk, it had once been the home and spiritual birthplace of the Blessed One herself, Fleet Admiral J. D. Black.

Poor Rabbi’s going to run out of Jews,
Kirk thought ruefully, fully aware of the conversion issue.

“That is a very good question,” agreed Padamir. “Ever since Fleet Order 8645, the public mood has shifted on the disappearance of J.D.”

“It didn’t cost them anything before,” Sinclair explained. “Now they may have to pay for it.”

“If we don’t stop them, the war is lost,” whispered Hildegard so quietly that almost no one heard.

“Secretary Rhunsfeld”—Sandra’s voice was equally soft and yet seemed to vibrate with a resonance that captured everyone’s attention—especially Kirk’s—“I would strongly caution you never to express that thought to anyone, under any circumstance.”

Kirk had always assumed that Hildegard was Mosh’s pawn, but could not deny what he saw. Hildegard did not even glance at Mosh when she looked to Sandra O’Toole and nodded. Hildegard reminded Kirk of a puppy who’d displeased its master, so obvious to him was Hildegard’s need not to displease Sandra. All at once, the one piece of the puzzle he was not even aware he was blind to fell into place.

“Her sentiment, though, is correct,” said Rabbi. “Without J.D., how are we to survive this?”

“It doesn’t matter if she’s ten clicks from this office or orbiting Eris,” rejoined Sandra with the same self-assuredness. “What we have to remember is that we will, as we always have, find a way to win.”

She knows where J.D. and our fleet is,
realized Kirk. It was, of course, impossible for her to know. It was the greatest secret of the war, and Kirk was positive that it had been kept.
But Damsah almighty, she knows!
And every instinct he’d developed over decades of corporate politics so cutthroat that a missed batted eyelash could spell the difference between success and failure told him so.

All of a sudden, things started to make sense. The power structure of the Cabinet, Rabbi’s insouciant ability and seeming naïveté. Kirk realized that both Hildegard and Kenji were in the President’s camp, which gave Sandra the technological skills she needed. She had three of the seven cabinet votes and who knew how many other allies he couldn’t begin to guess at. He was trying to figure out how this total nonentity had become a rival. All these thoughts came crashing down almost at the same instant, and he had to beat them back to concentrate on what she would say next.

“With all due respect, Madam President,” asked Padamir, eyes wide in horror, “exactly how will we find a way to win without most of our fleet? It seems readily apparent that a significant percentage of the population of the Outer Alliance is in very real danger of being murdered.”

All heads nodded in unison to the Information Secretary’s words.

Sandra inhaled deeply and, uncharacteristically, stood up. “We’ve been here before, Padamir, and we’ll be here again. For Damsah’s sake, man, we’re having a discussion in an asteroid that’s acting like a ship! If that doesn’t tell you something about our resolve, I’m not sure what does. We’ve gotten ourselves out of one tight situation after another. Why should now be any different? Where’s J.D.? How the hell should I know? But I have news for you: J.D. has never saved us; it is we who have saved J.D. We are the people who have given her a reason to live and a reason to fight. And by extension all who fight under her. Justin Cord didn’t make the Outer Alliance. I’ve read your history. You were freedom bound long before Justin showed up, and you’ll be freedom bound long after I’m gone. You’re the most irascible people the solar system has ever seen. Who in their right mind would want to control you? Could possibly control you?

“It’s what drives the Hektor Sambiancos of this system crazy. Now I know, as Padamir has stated, that our people out there may die. We may not get to them in time, but what we represent, what we have
always
represented, is freedom—and that won’t die. Not here in this room, or in this capital, not at Jupiter, not at Saturn, and not at the TNOs. So I implore you not to lose faith now, because when you walk out that door, there’ll be a swarm of mediabots and reporters analyzing your every word, your every twitch, and if they sense that you don’t believe, that you’ve lost faith, then I can assure that they won’t believe and that they’ll lose faith and that that message of doubt will spread like … like a gray bomb.
We
are their hope and inspiration; we wouldn’t be in this room if we weren’t. So for Justin’s sake, let’s start acting like it.”

The room remained deathly still as Sandra resumed her seat. She stared around the table, practically daring a negative response.

“I will order the convoys to break up,” announced Rabbi. “Every asteroid for itself. It will mean far greater losses and almost no chance of resupplying anyone. They will be truly on their own, abandoned by everyone in the face of the enemy.”

“But it will make it a lot harder for Gupta to get them,” agreed Sinclair, eyes glinting with possibility. “He’ll have far too many targets.”

“It will look like we’re panicking,” groused Padamir, “floundering even, against the UHF.”

“Exactly,” said Kirk, Sinclair, and Sandra at the very same time.

Damn you to hell, you Cerean bastards. My daughter did not die so you could safely accelerate to Saturn surrounded by the best orbats in the Alliance with J. D. Black no longer fooling anyone, hiding and waiting for Trang to attack. He won’t attack, because he knows she’s there. So enjoy your safety while the rest of us poor dumb sheep get slaughtered at the altar of freedom. While Oberon Settlement scatters and prays the UHF doesn’t murder us deep in our own space, I hope you bastards have nightmares in your nice safe beds.

One of many similar letters to the editor

Alliance Daily Star

AWS
Spartacus,
Asteroid belt

Admiral Omad Hassan walked the levels of his new ship. He found it interesting that walking did not tire him out at all. With his old legs, he found going from zero gravity to high gravity tiring as hell. Like most officers, he knew the standing regs on getting enough 1 g exercise per day: at least forty minutes recommended, an hour an a half preferred. And like most, he didn’t even come close to meeting them. There was always something that needed doing on a ship, and from ensign to admiral, it usually needed doing right away. But Omad was honest enough with himself to admit the truth. As much as he missed the
Dolphin,
he liked his new “girl” and somehow always found time to walk her decks.

He approached the officers’ club, which was a fancy name for a corner of the ship that wasn’t quite needed for anything else and was not secure enough to put something really important in. On Omad’s ship, the rules worked a little differently for officer and enlisted clubs. Officers could go to officers’ clubs only, while the enlisted could go to both. But only officers who received special dispensation from the admiral himself could go to the enlisted club, which was larger and more lavishly provided for. Most other ship captains were appalled by this flagrant breaking with tradition, but Omad didn’t really care for tradition. What he did care about was the fact that his officers would work harder and be more pleased by the “enlisted privilege,” as they called it, than by any other distinction he could give them short of promotion. Omad made sure to award it only to those his entire crew would agree merited such an honor. So officers and crew alike knew that on Omad’s ship, down was indeed up and they wouldn’t have it any other way.

Of the other ships in his flotilla, only Suchitra’s, the
Otter,
had adapted the same policy, but as the war continued and officers from the
Spartacus
got promoted to commands of their own, it would spread. He knew J.D. didn’t think highly of the idea, but Omad also knew that J.D. could insist her crew sleep in shackles chained to a wall and they would only deferentially ask if they should shackle themselves upside down or right side up. Omad put that thought from his mind as he entered the officer’s club.

“Attention!” he heard someone shout. Before he could stop them the women and men in the club rocketed to attention. It wouldn’t have happened on the
Dolphin,
a frigate with an intimate crew. They would have been likely to tell him to close the damn hatch or to congratulate him on having to pay for the next round. But the
Spartacus
was a heavy battle cruiser with a much larger crew that had absorbed J.D.’s views on discipline and decorum. It wasn’t that J.D. ordered her fleet to become more military, but her example had transformed what had once been a fleet of pirates and scoundrels with the lack of discipline to match into a depressingly boring, regimented fleet. Omad wasn’t against it and knew that with better discipline came victory, but he also didn’t have to like it … much.

“As you were,” he grumbled, and headed over to the table where Marilynn Nitelowsen was sitting. When he got there, he was gratified by her nonmilitary wave and the fact that she hadn’t bothered to get up. He saw that she already had a drink and so before he sat down, he went to the automated bar. In the enlisted mess hall, volunteers served as bartenders, but in the officers’ club, you had to make do with a cheap food and drink unit. So Omad made his own drink, a Bahama Mama, and headed back. “I’m sorry I couldn’t give you the enlisted privilege,” he said. “But officially, you haven’t done anything worth receiving it.”

“And I had better not,” she quipped. “I’m here only to observe how you’re performing your duties and report back to the President and the admiral,” Marilynn said, parroting back the gossip that she had helped to spread about her presence on the flotilla’s flagship.

Omad put a little box on the table so Marilynn could see and turned it on. She checked her DijAssist and nodded. “Kenji’s sure about this thing, eh?” asked Omad. “I know the little bastard’s a genius and all, but if you ever drank with the guy, you’d realize that he does sometimes let his genius get ahead of the curve. The ideas he has for harnessing the energy of artificial black holes for FTL is scary, like drunk-guy, middle-of-the-night scary.”

“Because he’ll waste his time on something impossible when he could be working on more important stuff?” offered Marilynn.

“Hell no.” Omad laughed. “Because the bastard might pull it off!”

“If he says that that”—her eyes beelined to the box on the table—“will make our conversation safe, then I’ll trust the bastard.”

“Speaking of bastards, what do you know of Fleet Order 8645?”

“Just what the rest of the flotilla knows.”

“I was hoping Fleet Intelligence or your wonder teams had some more insight.”

“Not cut off out here we don’t. But I don’t doubt the bastards will do exactly what they say. The question is, what can we do about it?”

Omad took a slow pull on his drink and considered the question. “We hope J.D. can stop it. If she can’t we add it to the list. And do as much damage to the UHF as we can.”

“We all have to do the best we can,” agreed Marilynn.

Omad nodded his head a few times, then slurped from the top of the glass. “How are your insertions going?” he asked, changing tack. For the past two weeks, Omad’s fleet had been raiding UHF outposts and capturing any ships they could in the now occupied asteroid belt. As he destroyed the outposts and the ships, he’d been allowing the UHF crews to jettison in the escape pods to be picked up later by passing UHF patrols. Some of the escape pods did not have UHF personnel but rather Marilynn’s handpicked volunteers. Omad had been extremely skeptical that it would work. The UHF would be alert for just such a ploy and would check the background of anyone found after being let go by Omad “the Murderer” or the now more popular “Legless Hassan.”

“We’ve managed to get seventy-three of our operatives into their escape pods,” said Marilynn with cryptic pride, “and so far, seventy-three have reported back that they’re past detention and moving toward their postings. Most of them will go to Earth–Luna and their orbits, but quite a few will go to Mars.”

“Mars?” coughed Omad, barely managing to avoid shooting the rum-soaked drink out his nose. “How the hell did you manage that?”

“You make it sound difficult,” purred Marilynn, clearly toying with the admiral.

“Difficult, my ass—bloody impossible! I’ve been in this war since the beginning—”

“As have I,” Marilynn interrupted softly.

“Really.”

“I seem to have a knack for being in important places at important times. I don’t bother questioning it anymore. I joined the fleet because J. D. Black admired my proficiency with a holo-tank, of all things.” She saw his eyebrow shoot up. “As you know, I
was
an information security specialist before the war.”

“Very well,” acceded Omad, “since the beginning of the war, both sides have done an admirable job of defending their territories from intelligence incursions, but successes for the UHF are much harder. Because they’re so much bigger it’s easier for us to slip in where they’re not looking. What happens after I get ’em in is usually Kirk’s domain. Still, one, two, even five makes sense. I can do those sorts of drop-offs in my sleep. But seventy-three … and counting? Well, that’s just plain freaky, Commodore. Stuff of tall tales, actually.”

“And yet, here we are.”

“Yes, here we are. And you and O’Toole have somehow managed to slip these seventy-three commandos into an area that Pakagopolis has staked her reputation on keeping secure. And now you tell me that they’re all on their way to the Core fucking Worlds themselves, using the UHF’s own transportation network to get there?” Omad smiled broadly. “My dear Commodore Nitelowsen, what kind of mojo are you operating with, and more important, where can I get me some?”