Oh, get a grip, Lorcan! he scolded himself yet again. Sure, it looks like a huge diversion of combat power to you, but that's because you're a Frontier Security commissioner, not a frigging admiral. You're used to seeing penny-packet squadrons of destroyers—a cruiser division or two, at most—from Frontier Fleet. All of Crandall and Byng's ships between them are hardly even a light task group for Battle Fleet!
That was undoubtedly true, but it still didn't change the fact that Manpower had somehow managed to gather up more firepower than ninety-five percent of the galaxy's formal navies could have massed and get it deployed to an out-of-the-way corner like Lorcan Verrochio's. Which suggested to him (although he'd been very careful not to mention it to Valery Ottweiler or Ottweiler's buddy Hongbo) that it was past time for him to reevaluate just how deep into the League's bureaucratic and political structures the various Mesan corporations really could reach . . . and what that meant for him.
In the meantime, however, that recognition of Manpower's reach was one of the reasons Verrochio was secretly delighted by Byng's attitude. He'd come to the conclusion that disappointing Manpower would be even less wise than he'd originally thought, which meant there was no going back on his quiet little agreement with them. And, to be honest, he didn't really want to. Or not as long as there was anyone else around to scapegoat if things went as badly as Thurgood's analysis suggested they might, at least. And that was where Verrochio's good friend Josef Byng came in.
Despite his own trepidation, Lorcan Verrochio sure as hell wasn't going to shed any tears if the Manties got reamed, and he wasn't going to lose any sleep over what happened to a Battle Fleet asshole like Josef Byng, either. In fact, in Verrochio's private best-case scenario, Byng would shoot up the Manties, providing the incident Manpower obviously wanted, and get his own ass shot off in the process. And the commissioner intended to be very careful about exactly what the official record indicated about just which fool had rushed in where the wiser and cooler-headed angels of Frontier Security and Frontier Fleet had declined to tread.
"Well, Mr. Commissioner," Byng said with another smile as Verrochio shook his hand and nodded welcomingly to Admiral Thimár, "your memo indicated you were concerned about something the Fleet might be able to assist with. So," he waved his free hand at his chief of staff, "here Admiral Thimár and I are."
"So I see, so I see."
Verrochio ushered his visitors to chairs which gave them an unimpeded view of Pine Mountain, then settled back down behind his desk once more and pressed the button to summon the servants who were primed and waiting. They appeared as if by magic with trays of coffee, tea, and snacks which they distributed with deft, courteous efficiency before they disappeared once more. Byng and Thimár ignored them as if they didn't even exist, of course.
"Vice-Commissioner Hongbo and I," Verrochio continued then, nodding to where Hongbo sat nursing his own cup of coffee, "have just been reviewing some rather . . . bothersome information, Admiral Byng. Information regarding a situation which may end up requiring action on the part of the League's official representatives in the region. We're not quite certain how best to proceed at this point, however, and we'd appreciate your input."
"Of course, Mr. Commissioner." Byng sipped tea a bit noisily, then patted his lips and mustache delicately with a linen napkin. "May I ask what sort of information is proving so bothersome?"
"Well," Verrochio replied with an air of troubled candor, "to be honest, it concerns the New Tuscany System and the Manticorans." Less experienced eyes might not have noticed the way Byng stiffened slightly in his chair, and the commissioner continued as if he hadn't noticed it, either. "Part of my problem, I think, is that, to be perfectly frank, I'm not really confident in my own mind that I can consider anything that concerns Manticore without prejudice at this point." He produced a crooked smile. "After what happened in Monica, and after all of the wild accusations they've been hurling about at everyone concerning that business in Split and Montana, I feel a certain undeniable amount of . . . automatic hostility, I suppose, where they're concerned."
He paused, his expression pensive, and Byng cleared his throat.
"Under the circumstances, Mr. Commissioner, I doubt anyone could reasonably be surprised by that," the admiral said after a moment. "Certainly I don't see how it could be any other way. After my own visit to Monica, I'm convinced the people back home who sent me out here—partly because of their concerns over Manticoran imperialism, although I'm not really supposed to admit that to just anyone—had a right to be concerned."
"Really?"
Verrochio put a carefully measured dose of worry into his one-word response, tempered by exactly the right amount of relief that someone whose opinion he respected didn't think he was jumping at shadows. He gazed at Byng for a second or two, just long enough for his expression to register, then twitched his shoulders in a small shrug.
"I've tried to put some of that same view before my own superiors, Admiral," he admitted. "I don't believe I've succeeded very well, however. In fact, given the replies and instructions I've received, I've had the impression more than once that the Ministry feels I'm jumping at shadows. In fact, that impression's been persistent enough for me to come to doubt my own evaluation of the situation, to some extent, at least. But if the Navy feels that way, perhaps I haven't been as alarmist as my own superiors appear to believe."
Hongbo Junyan took another sip from his own coffee cup to hide an involuntary smile. It was truly remarkable, he reflected. He'd made at least a third of his own career out of manipulating and steering Lorcan Verrochio, yet Verrochio himself was one of the most consummate manipulators Hongbo had ever seen in operation. Which, the vice-commissioner reminded himself, shouldn't really have come as that much of a surprise, perhaps. No one could rise to Verrochio's rank in Frontier Security without having learned how to play the seduction and manipulation game with the best of them. Unfortunately for someone like Lorcan Verrochio, guile and intelligence weren't necessarily the same thing. He'd acquired what was still called (for some reason Hongbo had never managed to pin down) the "apparatchik" skill set, but no one had been able to give him an infusion of brains to go with it. Which was how he'd wound up with the Madras Sector instead of something juicier.
Yet Hongbo was coming to the conclusion that Byng was even stupider than Verrochio. In fact, he seemed a lot stupider, which took some doing.
"Well, we in the Navy have had to endure more Manticoran arrogance and meddling in areas far outside their legitimate spheres of interest than most people," Byng responded to Verrochio, and his thin smile was considerably uglier than either of the Frontier Security bureaucrats suspected he thought it was. "That's probably given us a rather more . . . realistic appreciation for what they're really like than other people are in a position to gain."
He is stupider than Lorcan, Hongbo thought, then grimaced mentally at his own ability to leap to hasty judgments. Maybe not actually stupider, he thought. It doesn't seem to be a lack of native intelligence, at any rate. It's more like a mental blind spot that's so profound, so much a part of him, he doesn't even realize it's there. It's not that he couldn't think about it rationally if he wanted to. It's that it never even occurs to him to think about it at all, isn't it?