“Or to get herself reamed as a way to pump extra hydrogen into the fire,” Irene Teague suggested softly. Okiku looked at her sharply, and the Frontier Fleet captain shrugged. “I thought Daud was out of his mind when he first suggested that possibility, Colonel. But the more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed. And then this brilliant idea of sending Eleventh Fleet out to repeat Crandall’s experience on a grander scale came along.”
“You’re suggesting someone deliberately got all those spacers killed by maneuvering the Navy into battles it couldn’t win? Is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s what I’ve started to think, at any rate,” al-Fanudahi admitted somberly. “It didn’t make any sense to me at first, though. Why would Manpower, which has always hated the Manties — and vice versa — arrange an anti-Manty strategy that wasn’t going to work? Anybody willing to make a fortune off something as disgusting as the genetic slave trade probably isn’t going to lose any sleep over getting a few million Solarian spacers killed, but what was the point? Manticore basically only had to reload between engagements. We were that outclassed, and I couldn’t convince myself that anybody able to arrange something like this could have had such piss-poor intelligence they wouldn’t realize what was going to happen.”
“From what you’re saying, we didn’t realize it,” Okiku pointed out.
“No, but if my suspicions were correct, we didn’t arrange it, either,” he retorted. “And then, after Spindle, there was that ‘mystery attack’ on the Manties’ home system. Trust me, Colonel, that wasn’t us. We don’t have a clue how whoever it was pulled it off, and there’s no way in hell we could’ve done the same thing. One thing that’s just become pretty damned painfully obvious, however, is that Admiral Thimár’s theory that whoever did it had to have crippled the Manties’ defenses on his way in was out to lunch. But the salient point that occurred to me was that if it wasn’t us, it was almost certainly Manpower, unless I wanted to assume there was yet another third-party out there who had it in for Manticore. Only if Manpower had that sort of resources, then it hadn’t needed us in the first place.”
“You’re making my head hurt, Captain,” Okiku complained, and he snorted.
“I had my own share of headaches trying to work my way through all of this in the first place, Colonel Okiku,” he assured her.
“So where is all of it going?” she asked.
“Until the Manties and the Havenites dropped their little bombshell about this ‘Mesan Alignment,’ I really only had what I suppose you’d have to call a gut feeling,” he said. “The only thing I could come up with was that for some reason whoever was really orchestrating all of this wanted the League involved. And the truth is we’ve become so frigging corrupt it wouldn’t have been all that hard to arrange, especially when no one had any reason to see this coming. Just three or four senior flag officers could have put the whole thing together, if they were the right senior officers. A half-dozen would’ve been more than enough.
“But if whoever the plotters were realized how thoroughly we were outclassed by the Manties, then they couldn’t have expected us to take them out. Not quickly or cleanly, anyway. Not without a hell of a lot of losses of our own. So why throw us into the mix at all?
“I’d already begun to suspect — that ‘gut feeling’ I mentioned — that the Manties weren’t the real target. Or, at least, not the only target. And like I told Irene at the time, the only other target on the range was us. It seemed ridiculous, but it was the only conclusion I could come up with.
“And then Pritchart announced there was this vast interstellar conspiracy which had targeted both the Star Empire and the Republic of Haven. One which — assuming there was any real basis for her claims — was obviously manipulating the League’s policies. And one which obviously had its own idea of how the galaxy’s power structure should be arranged…which probably didn’t include the conspirators’ playing second fiddle to the League indefinitely.”
“Are you seriously suggesting that this conspiracy the Manties and the Havenites are talking about not only exists but is also aimed at destroying the Solarian League, as well as the Manties?”
“I’m not sure it wants to destroy the League,” al-Fanudahi responded. “I do think it wants to cripple us, maybe break us up, though.” He waved both hands in frustration. “Look at what’s happening! The Navy’s taking it in the ear; the Manties’ closure of the wormhole networks means the League’s economy is about to be hammered like it’s never been hammered before; and we’re heading into a full-blown constitutional crisis. For the first time in T-centuries, people are actually talking about the Constitution…and the fact that we haven’t paid any damned attention to it in the last six or seven hundred years. And don’t think for a minute that the beating we’ve taken from the Manties isn’t going to send tidal waves through the Verge and the Protectorates, Colonel Okiku. It is — believe me, it is! And when all hell breaks loose out there, and when the Core Worlds start looking at the worst recession they’ve ever seen and blaming it all on the policy of a bunch of unelected bureaucrats, I think it’s entirely possible we’re going to start shedding member systems. For that matter, I think it’s possible we’re going to see the entire federal government melt down completely. I know that seems preposterous — we’re talking about the Solarian League—but it really could happen.”
He stopped talking, and silence hovered in the records storage room for long, fragile seconds. Then Okiku shook her head.
“My God,” she said softly. “No wonder people think you’re a fucking lunatic! But you really could be right.” She shook her head again, her expression an odd mix of wonder and fear. “You could.”
“Believe me, there’s nothing I’d like better than to be wrong,” he told her equally softly.
“So why bring me in on it?” she asked after a moment. “Trust me, I’m not going to be thanking you for it. If there’s anything at all to this theory of yours, whoever the conspirators are—‘Mesan Alignment’ or someone else entirely — they sure as hell aren’t shy about killing people. I’d just as soon not give them a reason to add me to their list.”
“You and me both,” al-Fanudahi said feelingly. Then he shrugged. “The problem is, they have to be tied in at the highest levels, and I don’t have a clue how to find them. I’m an intelligence analyst, not a criminal investigator. I truly think — I’m truly afraid—I’m onto something here, but I don’t have a clue how to go about investigating it, and the Office of Counter Intelligence has been basically a place to park people with more family connections than competence for decades. Rear Admiral Yau’s abilities are…less than stellar, let’s say, and the rest of his section takes its cue from him. For that matter, if I were out to engineer the covert penetration of another navy, the very first place I’d set up shop would be inside that other navy’s counter intelligence service in order to make sure my operatives didn’t get caught. I don’t dare hand this to OCI without at least some idea of who’s in whose pocket, and I can’t just go to Justice or hand it over to the JAG for investigation without going to OCI first. The procedures simply aren’t there, and it would just get kicked back to Yau, probably with a pretty pointed observation that I should have gone through channels in the first place. So I need your expertise, and I need it without anyone else’s knowing we’ve talked.”