“Unfortunately, I had this odd idea that since we were the Office of Operational Analysis, we might actually try doing some analysis of real operational data. So I started poking my nose into things people probably wished I’d have left well enough alone, and I really irritated Vice Admiral Hoover. For some reason, she seemed to feel my interest in such matters suggested Technical Analysis hadn’t been doing its job very well. Go figure.”
He smiled crookedly.
“In the course of my journey into unpopularity, I began to realize reports of new Manticoran and Havenite weapons developments and new tactical and strategic doctrines had been systematically suppressed. They didn’t suit the party line, and our own prejudices — our certainty that we had to have the best tech anywhere — created a natural set of blinders. That can happen to anyone, I suppose, but no one was even trying to allow for the problem or get past it to look at what was really happening, and at least some of it was deliberate, coming from people protecting their own little patches of turf. People like Admiral Polydoru over at Systems Development, for example, where any suggestion we might be dropping behind was anathema. Or, for that matter, Vice Admiral Hoover’s people, who seemed more concerned with establishing that they hadn’t missed any significant new developments than with figuring out whether or there’d been any new developments. And no one was even worried about the implications. It couldn’t really matter what a bunch of neobarbs was up to, after all. Couldn’t have any significance for the Solarian League, now could it?”
He shook his head, his expression disgusted.
“I’ll admit it took me years to get to the point of realizing how bad things were myself, and I was at least trying to do my job, so I suppose I shouldn’t have been too surprised at what happened when I started suggesting we might want to look a little more closely at those ridiculous rumors. What did happen, of course, was that my career prospects took a sudden turn for the worse. I was already on the Admiralty’s shit list because I’d been making waves at OpAn; the suggestion that there could be anything at all to the stories about new Manticoran missiles or inertial compensators only made it worse. Fortunately, I’d at least been smart enough not to hand over the actual reports I’d collected. As long as I was only suggesting there were vague rumors that should be looked into, I was a nuisance and a crackpot but not an active threat to anyone’s career. They were satisfied to tuck me away in my dead-end little assignment and ignore me.
“That, alas, was when Irene fell into my clutches.”
He smiled suddenly at Teague.
“It took me a while to corrupt her properly, but after I’d exposed her to those toxic reports I’d collected, she caught the same leprosy I had. I managed to convince her to keep her mouth shut, though. Having one of us on the lunatic list was bad enough, and I figured if and when the centicredit finally dropped, ONI was going to need someone who had a clue. Since I also figured one of the first things they’d do would be to give me the ax for having dared to be right when the Powers That Be had been wrong, I hoped keeping her out of the line of fire would let her be that someone with a clue. Then this whole situation with the Manties blew up, seemingly out of nowhere, and all of a sudden people like Admiral Thimár were actually asking me for briefings.
“Not that it did Eleventh Fleet any damned good.”
His smile vanished abruptly.
“I did my best to convince Jennings, Bernard, and Kingsford the whole idea was insane, but they weren’t interested in listening. Bernard, in particular, seemed especially eager to push Raging Justice as a viable strategic option, and she didn’t want to hear anything that might have thrown cold water on her proposal.”
He paused, one eyebrow arched, and Okiku nodded. She was Gendarmerie, not military, but she recognized the names. Fleet Admiral Evangeline Bernard was the CO over at the Office of Strategy and Planning. Fleet Admiral Winston Kingsford was the commander of Battle Fleet, which made him second only to Chief of Naval Operations Rajampet in the SLN’s hierarchy, and Admiral Willis Jennings was Kingsford’s chief of staff.
“Kingsford seemed a little more doubtful,” al-Fanudahi continued, “but he wasn’t arguing, and he wasn’t pushing for more information. That led me to conclude that the mastermind really behind it all was Admiral Rajampet himself. I think Bernard really believed her own arguments about the Manties’ morale being on the edge of collapse after that attack on their home system, but she wouldn’t have pushed it that hard if it hadn’t been sponsored from on high. And if Kingsford was less than wildly enthusiastic, that really left only one person who could be doing the pushing.”
“If it was Rajampet’s idea, why not push it himself?” Okiku asked.
“Doesn’t work that way, Natsuko,” Tarkovsky said. “It’s called deniability. I hope Daud and Irene won’t get too pissed with me for pointing this out, but the Navy’s a hell of a lot more of a bureaucracy than a fighting machine these days, and creating the right paper trail’s more important than formulating the best strategy. If Rajampet could get Bernard to push the Raging Justice concept from below, he could ‘endorse’ it without owning responsibility for it. He was simply listening to his subordinates — the subordinates who were supposed to be making strategy recommendations, giving him a menu of options, for that matter — like a good officer. And in a way, Bernard was protected, too. She’d recommended the strategy, but she had no authority to implement it. The decision to adopt her recommendation lay with the operational commanders — who always had the option of not adopting it — so once Rajampet signed off on it, she didn’t own it, either. That meant responsibility could be dropped somewhere between her desk and his, without splashing on the career of either of them, if it went sour.”
Okiku looked at him for a moment, as if she suspected he was pulling her leg. Then she shrugged and turned back to al-Fanudahi.
“I’ll accept it works the way Bryce has just explained, Captain. But I don’t think you arranged this thoroughly clandestine and conspiratorial meeting just to complain about having your advice ignored.”
“No, I didn’t,” al-Fanudahi agreed grimly.
“The thing is, Colonel, that it’s part of a pattern. Oh, I keep reminding myself never to ascribe to malice — or enemy action — what can be explained by good old-fashioned incompetence and bureaucratic inertia. And when you crank in Navy nepotism, cronyism, corruption, graft, and careerism, you can explain pretty much anything without requiring some kind of malign outside influence. But there’s more to it this time.”
He paused, clearly hesitating, and Okiku smiled thinly.
“Let me guess, Captain al-Fanudahi. You’re about to suggest to me that the Manties’ allegations of ‘malign outside influence’ in the form of this Mesan Alignment of theirs was responsible for it?”
“To some extent, yes,” he said, and paused again, watching her expression closely.
“I hope you realize how thoroughly insane that sounds,” she said after a moment. “And despite the strictly limited faith I normally put in Education and Information’s version of galactic events, the notion that Manticore’s fabricated all of this to cover its own actions and ambitions actually seems more likely than that anyone could have carried off some kind of interstellar conspiracy for so many T-centuries without anyone catching them at it. Permanent Senior Undersecretary Abruzzi’s argument that the Manties’ claims would only be expected out of someone who actually was responsible for at least enabling the Ballroom to carry out the Green Pines bombing hangs together pretty well, too.”