“How?”
“The sequence is clear from what the Manties have released. Filareta sailed into an ambush; Harrington sprang the trap and gave him the option of surrendering or being destroyed; he opened fire; she handed him his head. Right?”
Heads nodded, and he shrugged again.
“Well, we can’t possibly win if we try to defend his actions. So instead, we change the storyline. Harrington deliberately drew him into the trap; she offered him the option of surrendering as a ploy to get him to scuttle his missile pods; he did scuttle his missile pods…and the instant he’d given up the one weapon she was afraid of, she opened fire and cold bloodedly destroyed his fleet. It was never about giving him a chance to surrender; it was always about her intention to destroy him whatever he did.”
“How the hell do you expect to make that stand up?” Wodoslawski demanded. “Especially with the recordings the Manties have already made public!”
“We point out that they’re the recordings the Manties have made public,” Abruzzi replied. “They’ve told us they’re clean copies of the actual conversation, but we have no proof of that. We point out that Filareta’s orders gave him the option of standing down or even surrendering if it turned out Admiral Rajampet’s estimate of the tech imbalance turned out to be in error. I don’t know if they did — in fact, I doubt like hell they did — but by the time an official transcript of them gets released, they damned well will have! On the basis of those instructions and what appears to have been the tactical situation when Harrington demanded his surrender, we believe that’s what he actually did. At which point Harrington opened fire, and everything after that point in the ‘official record’ they’ve sent us is almost certainly a skillfully edited montage of the actual battle.”
“It’ll never fly,” Wodoslawski said flatly.
“It might,” Kolokoltsov said more slowly, eyes narrowed as he considered the scenario. “It has the advantage of being consistent with what we’ve been saying about Spindle and the other confrontations. Sure, some people are going to see it as the same old line, but for a lot of others that continuity’s going to give it a certain legitimacy. It’ll fit with what those people have already accepted as the truth, and the Manties can’t disprove it. They can provide all the sensor recordings and recorded messages they want, but all of them will be coming from official government organs, and any good, cynical Solarian citizen knows government organs routinely lie their asses off when it suits their purposes.”
“Oh, yeah?” Wodoslawski leaned back in her chair. “And what about Haven throwing in with them? Validating the same story?”
“Basically, the Havenites cut a deal with the Manties,” Abruzzi responded. Her gray eyes widened in disbelief, and he chuckled harshly. “I’m sure Innokentiy’s Foreign Ministry sources and analysts can come up with all sorts of straws in the wind to justify it, but what obviously happened was that Manticore offered Haven a bargain. Clearly, Haven’s war-fighting technology has to be roughly on a par with Manticore’s for it to have survived this long. That means they’ve got a major tactical advantage — only a fleeting one, until our own Navy acquires matching weapons, of course — over the League, too. So Manticore’s offer was simple: let’s stop shooting at each other long enough for us both to rip off big, juicy mouthfuls of territory from the League and anyone else who gets in our way while we’ve still got the military edge to get away with it. Think of it as a variation on the old cliché about my enemy’s enemy being my friend. In this case, it’s a case of my enemy’s helpless victim being my helpless victim, too. Or that’s how Manticore sold it to Haven, anyway.”
“You’re saying that in this version of reality Haven saw the opportunity to throw in with Manticore for a piece of our pie and figured that was a better deal than trying to finish off the Manties and getting nothing out of it except a bunch more losses of their own and — maybe — control of the Junction at the end of it?” Wodoslawski said in a much more thoughtful tone.
“We’ve been explaining that the Manties are cold-blooded, cynical imperialists from the beginning,” Abruzzi pointed out. “This would be just more of the same on their part, wouldn’t it? And the fact that Haven, who’s always hated Manpower as much as Manticore in the first place, is the one who ‘confirmed’ this nonsense about the so-called Mesan Alignment fits in rather nicely.”
“You know, that’s what bothers me the most,” Wodoslawski admitted. “It was Pritchart who brought this to the Manties, not the other way around. I agree it’s nonsense, but if Haven really believes it…”
“I’d just point out to you that according to the fairy tale they’ve been spinning, it was Zilwicki and Victor Cachat who brought this Simões home from Mesa,” Abruzzi said, and rolled his eyes. “I’m sure all of us remember what a loose warhead Zilwicki was right here in Old Chicago when he claimed Manpower had kidnapped his daughter. I don’t think anyone’s going to call him a disinterested witness where anything to do with Mesa is involved! For that matter, if there’s one scrap of truth to Mesa’s version of Green Pines, Zilwicki would have every conceivable reason to come up with some far-fetched story about centuries-long conspiracies as a way to cover up his own guilt! And then there’s Cachat, who’s been spending the last couple of T-years getting further and further into bed with the Audubon Ballroom through his cronies in Verdant Vista, and who appears to have been with Zilwicki in Green Pines. Another sterling, utterly trustworthy character witness against Mesa! And, as the cherry on top, it’s the Manties’ treecats’ supposed ability to know when someone is lying that ‘proves’ Simões isn’t.
“The most charitable scenario I’ve been able to come up with is that Zilwicki and Cachat managed to sell this fabrication to Pritchart and her administration, at least tentatively. I think the most plausible explanation of why it took them so damned long to get back home was that they spent the intervening months holed up somewhere with Manty intelligence putting the aforesaid fabrication together and priming Simões as their ventriloquist’s dummy. Then they sailed off home to Nouveau Paris, made their ‘shocking revelation’ to Pritchart, and convinced her to share their information with Manticore. At which point — surprise, surprise! — the mind-reading treecats of Sphinx ‘confirmed’ Simões’ truthfulness.
“Frankly, the really interesting question is whether or not Pritchart really bought it in the first place. We’ve all been around for a while, Agatá. We know how the game’s played. It’s possible Pritchart actually believes this nonsense, and that her statements to that effect in the messages the Manties’ve sent us are absolutely genuine. But I’d say it’s considerably more likely she realizes full well that Zilwicki and Cachat have ‘sold’ her a crock of bullshit which justified her making Elizabeth the offer we’re going to claim Elizabeth made to her. In other words, she saw the opportunity to get out from under the war with Manticore in a way that would put her on Manticore’s side of the table at the peace conference that divvies up the Solarian League.”
“You know,” MacArtney said after several moments of silence, “that could actually be what happened. Or something close to it, anyway. I’m not saying Filareta didn’t fire first, whatever we’re going to tell everyone, but that really could be how Haven wound up in the Manties’ corner.”