“That’s my analysts’ read,” Yardley agreed, and Mátyás nodded in agreement.
“So what do we do about it?” Lombroso wheeled to face them once more, clasping his hands behind him. “Do we back the pressure off in hopes things will quiet down again, at least some, until Verrochio’s intervention battalions get here? Or do we try to bring the hammer down harder?”
“I think that depends in part on whether or not the battalions are really on their way,” Yardley replied. “Is it your impression they are, Mister President?”
“I think they almost certainly are,” he said after a brief hesitation. “Xydis wouldn’t have gone as far out on a limb promising she’d ask for them if she didn’t expect to get them. And let’s face it, we’ve always known that if she’d really asked for them before, they’d have been here a long time ago. Besides, she attached her endorsement to my messages to Commissioner Verrochio. I don’t think she would’ve done that if her own messages weren’t urging Verrochio to do the same thing. For that matter, even if she wasn’t then, she damned well is now that we’ve lost Braddock’s regiment! As for how long it’s going to take them to get here”—he shrugged—“your guess is as good as mine.”
“If that’s the case, then I think we should hammer them now—hard,” Yardley said. “I think failing to hit them whenever and however we can, especially after Brewster’s escapade, is only going to further embolden them, and I don’t think ‘restraint’ is going to cool any tempers on the other side. The best we might accomplish would be to get them to back off enough to let the MLF leadership reassert control, and, frankly, if there really are Solly Gendarmerie intervention battalions on the way, backing off is the last thing we want them to do.”
“Excuse me?” Lombroso’s expression was perplexed, and she shrugged.
“Mister President, the MLF is the best organized batch of malcontents we’ve ever faced. They’re tightly compartmentalized and—usually—highly disciplined. That’s one reason we’ve had so much trouble penetrating them. But if the present provocations are spontaneous, not ordered from above, then they’re probably going to be less meticulously planned and executed than the MLF operations we’ve seen in the past. That increases our chances of catching them at it and maybe scoring a few successes of our own. Taking some live prisoners we can…talk to at our leisure, let’s say. Pushing them into hasty, ill-conceived, wildcat attacks—and, no, I’m not putting Brewster into that category, but it’s the best way to describe this other, smaller crap—can only increase their vulnerability. It’s bound to generate confusion, and Friedemann’s people are a lot more likely to be able to get someone inside or crack one of their communications lines open if they’re trying to control their people on the fly. For that matter, even if we don’t manage to break a single cell, any operations they mount are going to pull them further out into the open, at the very least. If we can suck them off balance, get them to expose themselves where we can get at them—especially if they don’t know the intervention battalions are on their way—they’ll be a much softer target for whoever Brigadier Yucel sends to kick their asses for us.”
Lombroso frowned thoughtfully. He’d never considered the problem in those terms, yet now that he thought about it, Yardley’s recommendations actually made sense. In fact, they were more imaginative than he was accustomed to hearing out of her.
“If that’s the case, should we expand our own offensive operations?” he asked after a moment. “Turn the heat up even further?”
“I don’t see where it could hurt,” Yardley said. “And, to be honest, there are some agitators and so-called ‘newsies’ out there who’ve been giving the MLF one hell of a lot of aid and comfort, especially since the May Riots. I’d like to have the opportunity to entertain some of them, too. And whether we go after them now or later, we’re still going to have to break a few necks in the end. Might as well make a start on it now.”
Lombroso nodded, then turned back to the window once again, lips pursed. He thought about it for perhaps a minute, then shrugged.
“All right,” he said grimly, “go do it.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Excuse me?”
Stephen Westman, of the Montana Westmans, tipped back his spotless white Stetson the better to raise both eyebrows at the rather unassuming looking man who’d just been shown into his office.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got any kind of documentation to support this tale of yours?” he went on.
“No, Mr. Westman,” his visitor admitted. “Not that you’drecognize, anyway.”
“Ah, I see. You have some kind of code word or secret handshake Admiral Gold Peak will recognize, but for some reason you need me to introduce you to her.” He shook his head, blue eyes hard. “Mister, I realize it wasn’t so very long ago I got played like a fiddle, but you know, even a Montanan can learn. Hell, even a Westman can learn if you use a big ’nough cluestick!”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” the visitor said with a puzzled expression. “I was just given your name as a person to contact here on Montana who might have the connections—and be willing—to put me in touch with the senior Manticoran naval officer in the system. All I need is the opportunity to speak to whoever that is. If that’s this ‘Admiral Gold Peak,’ then that’s who I need to talk to.”
Westman frowned. He’d never seen this stranger before, and he couldn’t place the man’s accent. The fellow had just turned up in the office he maintained here in the Montana capital of Brewster, shown credentials identifying him as a purchasing agent for the Trifecta Corporation, and announced his interest in acquiring Montanan beef for export to the Mobius System. Given that Mobius was little more than a hundred and ninety light-years from Montana—about two T-months for a normal bulk hauler, but barely three T-weeks for the faster ships that served the passenger and perishable goods trades—the idea actually made quite a lot of sense. According to the purchasing agent, the cost of beef in Mobius, where livestock producers were few and far between and even genetically engineered cattle had adapted only poorly to the local environment, was about ninety Manticoran dollars a kilo, as opposed to considerably less than three dollars a kilo here on Montana. Mobian beef wasn’t especially good, either, whereas Montana’s beef had a galaxy-wide five-star quality rating (and quite a few gourmands would have given it six stars, if they’d been allowed to), and interstellar freight rates were ridiculously cheap. He could easily afford to pay Westman five or six times the spaceport delivery price on Montana and still show a five or six hundred-percent profit.
From what little Westman knew about Mobius, it seemed unlikely the typical Mobian was going to be able to afford prices like that. There were probably enough transstellar employees and their flunkies to make it a viable long-term proposition, though. And that wasn’t really his problem, either way, so he’d flown into Brewster to meet with the man. At which point the “purchasing agent” had sprung his surprise.
Question is, is he really as pig ignorant about my little dustup here on Montana as he’s pretending? Seems unlikely, if I’m s’posed to be willing to act as his introduction, but let’s be fair, Stevie. Montana’s not exactly the center of the known universe as far as people living somewhere else are concerned. Things might’a got just a little garbled in transmission.
The real problem, he admitted to himself, was that he had been played like a fiddle by “Firebrand,” the Mesan agent provocateur who’d offered to provide his own resistance effort with weapons for his campaign to prevent Montana from becoming part of the Star Empire of Manticore. He’d done some stupid things in his life, but right off hand, he couldn’t think of any which had been stupider than that one. For one thing, he’d been wrong about the Manties. For that matter, he’d even been wrong about Bernardus Van Dort, and that had been a really unpleasant pill to swallow. But what he found even harder to forgive himself for was accepting Firebrand at face value. When he’d discovered he’d actually been working with something as foul as Manpower, Incorporated…