“If I may remind you, Gregor,” she said, intervening before Khumalo could respond, “the Admiral specifically told us when he introduced Mr. Ankenbrandt that Admiral Gold Peak wanted us to form our own initial impressions cold. I happen to think that was a good idea on her part, but whether it was or not, he’d made it very clear before we ever began why he hadn’t pre-briefed either of us on it.”
O’Shaughnessy colored at the unmistakable frost in the Governor’s tone. He started to say something, then made himself stop, and his nostrils flared as he drew a deep breath.
“Yes, Milady.” He looked Khumalo in the eye. “My apologies Admiral.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Khumalo’s tone might have been just a little short, but he didn’t let irritation distract him. Instead, he turned back to Medusa.
“Milady, I very much doubt that you and Mr. O’Shaughnessy could have been any more surprised than I was when Ankenbrandt screened me and introduced himself with one of Admiral Gold Peak’s authenticator code words. And I know you couldn’t have been any more surprised than I was when he arrived aboard Hercules and handed over a secure Navy message chip from her. Having read her message—I’ve brought a copy of it along for you and Mr. O’Shaughnessy—and heard Ankenbrandt’s story, though, I think we’ve got a hexapuma by the tail in this one. And it’s not even really our hexapuma!”
“Assuming Ankenbrandt really is telling us the truth and not a plant who’s somehow found a way to fool even a treecat when he lies, I’m afraid it is our hexapuma, Admiral,” O’Shaughnessy said thoughtfully. He’d obviously gotten over his initial pique and reengaged his brain, Medusa noted. “This is incredibly clever on someone’s part. The potential consequences if dozens of planetary resistance movements get slaughtered when they believe—completely accurately, as far as they know—the Star Empire’s promised to support them…”
He shook his head, his expression grim, and Khumalo nodded.
“That’s approximately the analysis Admiral Gold Peak’s sent along.” The tall, heavily built admiral chuckled suddenly. “The analysis, I might add, which was initially proposed by Ensign Zilwicki.”
“No, really?” Medusa smiled. “The acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it?”
“I don’t believe she has any inclination to become a ‘spook,’ Madame Governor,” Khumalo said. “Doesn’t mean she doesn’t have the instincts, though. And personally, I’m pretty sure she’s onto something here. This has this Mesan Alignment’s fingerprints all over it.”
“Maximum return for minimum investment,” O’Shaughnessy agreed, nodding firmly. “And misdirection, and directed at at least three targets I can see already. God only knows how many secondary targets this thing is aimed at!”
“The question is how we respond to it,” Medusa pointed out. “I think you were right that this was something I had to hear first while wearing my Imperial Governor’s hat, Augustus, but I’m going to have to go ahead and brief Joachim and his cabinet on it. Among other things, if Ankenbrandt’s really a representative sample, the majority of messengers from any of these resistance movements are going to be heading right here to Spindle. The Quadrant’s government needs to know they’re coming.”
Khumalo nodded, and Medusa pursed her lips, thinking for several moments. Then—
“Should I assume Lady Gold Peak sent a recommendation along with her report?”
“She did, Madame Governor.”
“And you’re not going to tell me what it was unless I pull it out of you with a pair of pliers, right?”
“A simple order to come clean will do, Madame Governor,” Khumalo replied with a smile. “Still, I have to admit I’m curious to see whether your response parallels hers.”
“All right, I’ll give it to you.” Her own smile faded, and her eyes hardened. “I think we need to send back orders to treat any messenger from a genuine resistance movement—it was as smart of her as I would have expected to use a treecat to verify Ankenbrandt’s truthfulness—as if they really had been in contact with Manticore all along. I don’t see how we can afford not to. At the same time, though, we have to be cautious. We don’t know what kind of booby-traps the Alignment could have built into something like this. Don’t forget those invisible starship of theirs. A few of them tucked away to ambush our units responding to a resistance movement’s call for assistance could do a lot of damage.”
She cocked an eyebrow at Khumalo, and the burly admiral nodded.
“That’s almost exactly what Admiral Gold Peak recommended,” he said, and reached into his breast pocket. He extracted a chip folio and laid it on Medusa’s desk. “Here’s her actual report, including the treecat’s—Alfredo’s—assessment of Ankenbrandt’s truthfulness.”
“Thank you.” Medusa scooped up the folio. She looked at it for a moment, then tossed it to O’Shaughnessy.
“You take a run through it first, Gregor. Be thinking about it after you finish so we can exchange notes as soon as I’m through with it.”
“Yes, Milady.”
“Admiral Khumalo, unless Gregor and I come up with something that causes me to change my mind, we’ll be sending a dispatch to Lady Gold Peak before the end of the day confirming her own analysis and proposed course of action. At the same time, though, we obviously need to kick this further up the chain to Foreign Secretary Langtry, Prime Minister Grantville, and Her Majesty, as well. I’d like you, Captain Shoupe, and Commander Chandler to provide your own individual appreciations to accompany that report back to Landing.”
“Yes, Milady.”
“In that case, as Duchess Harrington would say,” she smiled, “let’s be about it.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“You know,” Michelle Henke said thoughtfully, “I’m beginning to wonder exactly what qualifications the Sollies look for in candidates for their naval academy. I mean there has to be a filtering process. You couldn’t just go out and pick middies at random and get such an invariably stupid crop of flag officers. There has to be some kind of system. If you just picked names out of a hat, for example, somebody would have to have a functional brain. Right?”
“You’d like to think so, anyway, Ma’am,” Gervais Archer replied. He’d been working quietly on his minicomp when the dispatches couriered to Tillerman from Spindle arrived. “May I ask what prompted the observation at this particular time, though?”
“Oh, you certainly may,” she said much more grimly, and entered a command. The dispatch she’d been viewing appeared on Gervais’ display, and his eyes widened slightly as he saw the security header. He started to ask her if she was sure about giving him access but quickly changed his mind. Countess Gold Peak didn’t make that sort of careless mistake. Besides, as her flag lieutenant, he needed access to all sorts of information that didn’t generally come the way of someone as junior as he was.
The message had come directly from the Lynx Terminus, relayed to the Tillerman System and addressed to Admiral Bennington for his information, since the Lynx CO hadn’t been aware the countess had moved to that system herself. The addressee list in the header showed the same message had been sent to Admiral Khumalo and Baroness Medusa in Spindle. It would have reached the Quadrant’s capital star system just over two weeks ago, but the decision to copy it to Bennington in Tillerman meant Tenth Fleet’s CO had gotten the information at least four or five days sooner than she would have if she’d had to wait for it to be relayed from Spindle. Now Gervais sat back, reading quickly, and his expression grew bleaker with every sentence. Then he came to the tabular data at the end.