“I see,” al-Fanudahi said flatly.
“My problem here, Captain,” Okiku continued, “is that I have a naturally suspicious mind. It’s the reason I went into the Criminal Investigation Division. Well, that and the fact that I was never particularly interested in breaking heads out in the Protectorates for the greater glory of the Office of Frontier Security.” She grimaced impatently. “I have the sort of brain that gets suspicious when things hang together too well. It’s a useful sort of mindset when you start picking apart suspects’ alibis. And I’ve discovered that if it hangs together too perfectly to be true, it probably isn’t. True, I mean. Real life tends to be sloppy, not neat and tidy.”
“I see,” al-Fanudahi repeated in a rather different tone, and she gave him a quick, fleeting smile.
“Don’t get me wrong,” she cautioned. “I’m not about to buy any magic beans from you, Captain. If you want to bring me onboard, you’re going to have to do better than offering me some unsubstantiated suspicions. On the other hand, Bryce here”—she twitched her head in Tarkovsky’s direction—“vouches for you, and I consider him a pretty good character witness. So that’s going to buy you at least some credibility.”
“I’ll try not to abuse Bryce’s confidence,” al-Fanudahi promised.
“Good. And now, you were saying…?”
“I have no idea at this point how much of what the Manties are selling is accurate,” al-Fanudahi said. “I do know I haven’t been able to come up with any reason the Star Kingdom — or the Star Empire, I suppose, now — should deliberately pick a fight with the League, though. I also know Josef Byng was an anti-Manty bigot who couldn’t have poured piss out of a boot if it had the instructions printed on the heel, and when it came to finding her ass with both hands, Sandra Crandall was even worse, assuming that was humanly possible. I can’t conceive of a more disastrous choice of commanders for an area where tensions were running high, yet somehow they both ended up out in the Talbott Quadrant. And I’ve gone back and looked at Crandall’s deployment plan. She was scheduled for her ‘training exercise’ before the Battle of Monica. I haven’t been able to verify whether or not Byng had already been selected for his command at that point, as well. I suspect he had been, although I’m trying to keep an open mind on that point, but it was definitely true for her. So supposing there was any truth to my suspicions that someone besides Manticore was stirring the pot out in Talbott, it was obvious it had to be someone with a lot of juice.
“Then there was Filareta’s fortuitous deployment to Tasmania. You probably don’t realize how unusual concentrations of ships-of-the-wall that big really are, Colonel. I, on the other hand, went back and checked the records. There have been exactly five deployments of seventy or more wallers — including Crandall’s and Filareta’s — in the last two hundred and forty-three T-years, and we have both of them taking place simultaneously.”
“Suggestive, yes,” Okiku said thoughtfully, “but still only speculative.”
“Agreed.” Al-Fanudahi nodded. “But that’s where Bryce comes in.”
“Bryce?” Okiku sounded a bit surprised and cocked her head at the Marine.
“I know you’re aware Marine Intelligence is under the ONI umbrella, Natsuko,” he said. “What you may not be aware of, since we don’t exactly advertise it, is that we’re a pretty independent outfit. There are a lot of reasons for that, but, frankly, the main one is that we got dropped in the crapper once too often by faulty Navy intelligence. We got tired of taking it in the neck because a bunch of Navy pukes — no offense, Daud and Irene — didn’t know their asses from their elbows where ground operations were concerned. Things work a lot better with us handling our own intel functions, and Frontier Fleet got behind us and supported us because they’re the ones who usually have to carry the can from the Navy side when something goes wrong in a joint operation.”
It was his turn to pause, one eyebrow crooked, and she nodded a bit impatiently to show she understood.
“Well, there’s another side to it, too,” he said, his tone considerably flatter. “I know you’re aware of the kind of shit the Gendarmerie gets involved in out in the Protectorates. Trust me, what the Corps gets handed can be even worse, and sometimes the poor SOB theoretically in command of the ground op doesn’t have any idea what kind of snake pit he’s about to drop his Marines into. What with transstellars in bed with OFS, local collaborators eager to sell out for the best price they can get, and poor damned bastards too dumb to realize they can’t fight, it can turn into a cluster fuck in nothing flat. Because of that, one of the things we try to do is keep track of as many players as possible. In fact, for the last fifteen or twenty T-years, Brigadier Osterhaut’s been keeping track of as many Navy players as possible. An awful lot of senior flag officers have crawled into bed with the rest of the bottom feeders, and she likes to be able to give our Marine expeditionary force COs at least an unofficial, ‘we-never-had-this-conversation’ heads-up if one of the senior Navy officers involved in his operation has irons of his own in the fire.”
He paused again, waiting until she nodded once more. It was a slower nod, this time — a thoughtful, considering one.
“I’ve been the Brigadier’s point man on the garbage detail for several T-years,” Tarkovsky told her. “As a matter of fact, that’s how I first met Daud. And we’ve got some interesting dossiers in our burn-before-reading files. For example, we had dossiers on both Sandra Crandall and Admiral Filareta.” His expression twisted in distaste. “Neither of them was any great prize, and some of the things we found out about Filareta are enough to make your stomach crawl. But the other thing we found out about them is that both of them had close connections — primarily financial in Crandall’s case; a bit more…complicated in Filareta’s — with Manpower of Mesa.”
Okiku’s eyes widened, and he nodded.
“Both of them, Natsuko. And both of them just happened to find themselves in command of major fleet deployments within striking distance of Manty territory when Mesa started getting nervous about Manty expansion in its direction. We’re not sure about Byng. We know he had connections with some of the transstellars, but we haven’t been able to find a direct link between him and Mesa. On the other hand, given his attitude towards Manties, it wouldn’t have taken very much to convince him to go out and make trouble for them.”
“And speaking as someone who’s spent a few T-weeks pulling the records and analyzing Byng’s career — and his performance in exercises—” al-Fanudahi put in, “he would have been the perfect choice to do exactly what Mesa wanted even without having knowingly signed on for it. He hated the Manties with a passion and he had even more contempt for them than most Battle Fleet officers. Get him into the vicinity of any of their naval forces, and he could be absolutely relied upon to provoke an incident — almost certainly a disastrous incident, from our perspective, given his towering incompetence — right on schedule. Especially if someone was manipulating the situation the way the Manties claim Mesa was.”
“With Crandall parked close enough at hand to sweep up the pieces after he got himself reamed,” Okiku said slowly, her eyes intently narrowed.