She thought about it for several seconds, and found herself wishing fervently that Gowan Maddock were here to take the responsibility off her shoulders. He wasn't, though. She had to make the call.
And, really, she reflected, it's not my call to make after all. For that matter, it wouldn't be Gowan's, if he were here. I can't make Konidis do anything he doesn't choose to do,and Gowan couldn't, either.
"Citizen Commodore," she said, "I can't argue with anything you've just said. I'm sure my own superiors, as well as Manpower, would have been much happier if our original intelligence estimates and planning had held up. Obviously, they haven't, and your people's losses have already been far, far greater than anyone could possibly have anticipated. And you're right about the fact that the current regime has declared war on us, as well, and about that declaration's implications under interstellar law and the rules of war. So, under the circumstances, I agree with you that the second option you've described is far and away the better of the two."
"I'm glad you agree." Konidis suspected he hadn't quite managed to keep his relief out of his voice, but he didn't much care, either. He wasn't going to become a genocidal mass murderer, after all. Not today. And, he discovered, for right now at least, the enormous relief of that fact outweighed the potential consequences for the PNE's future.
But it's not like I'm completely willing to just forgive and forget, he thought more grimly. We may have just lost the entire future of the Revolution along with Citizen Commodore Luff, and if we have, I want some of our own back. His eyes flicked to the master astrogation plot, where the planet Torch drew steadily nearer. I'm glad we won't be bombarding the planet, but I think I'm even gladder that these people won't know that. That they'll come out and fight where I can get at them instead of just running away.
"Citizen Commander Sanchez," he said, raising his voice to attract the chief of staff's attention. "We have some planning to do."
"Of course, Citizen Commodore."
"Ludivine," Konidis continued, turning to Citizen Lieutenant Ludivine Grimault, his staff communications officer, "I'm going to want a com conference with all of our squadron and divisional commanders. Get that set up ASAP, please."
"At once, Citizen Commodore."
Unlike Sanchez, who still seemed totally focused on the task in hand, Grimault was clearly relieved to have something to do, and Konidis smiled briefly at her. Then he turned back to Sanchez and his com link to citizen Captain Egert.
"There's been a change of plans," he told them both. "We're not going to hit the planet directly."
Egert's eyebrows rose, but he thought he saw the reflection of his own relief in her eyes. Sanchez, on the other hand, frowned . . . predictably, Konidis supposed.
"We're not just going to go home, though," he continued grimly. "We owe these people, and we're going to take out every ship, every space station, every resource extraction center, and every communications and power collection array they have. We're going to completely trash their extra-atmosphere infrastructure, and if we've got time, we're going to take out any infrastructure they have on the planet with precision strikes, as well. We're not going to be committing any Eridani Edict violations now that the bastards know who we are, but we're going to do absolutely the next best thing. And, frankly," he bared his teeth, "after what's already happened to us, I'm going to enjoy every minute of it."
Sanchez still seemed less than delighted at Konidis' decision to abandon what had been the primary mission objective from the outset, but his expression showed his complete agreement with the citizen Commodore's last sentence. For that matter, Egert nodded emphatically, as well.
"All right," the citizen Commodore went on briskly, "first, I think we—"
"Excuse me, Citizen Commodore."
Konidis frowned at the interruption and turned his head.
"What is it, Jason?" he asked rather more sharply than he normally spoke to his ops officer.
"I'm sorry to interrupt, Citizen Commodore." Something about Citizen Lieutenant Commander Petit's expression sent a sudden icicle down Konidis' spine. "I'm sorry to interrupt," Petit repeated, "but CIC's just picked up three fresh impeller signatures breaking planetary orbit."
"And?" Konidis asked when Petit paused. The planet was still well over a hundred million kilometers away, far outside any range he would have had to worry about even if he'd still had Cataphracts in his magazines.
"And CIC's has tentatively identified them, Citizen Commodore," the operations officer said quietly. "They make it two more of those Erewhonese cruisers . . . and another ammunition ship."
It took Santander Konidis almost five seconds to realize he was staring numbly at Petit, and the silence on PNES Chao Kung Ming's flag bridge was absolute.
PART III
Late 1921 and 1922 Post-Diaspora.
(4023 and 4024, Christian Era)
Leonard Detweiler, the CEO and majority stockholder of the Detweiler Consortium, a Beowulf-based pharmaceutical and biosciences corporation, found himself with a great deal of money and not a great deal of sympathy with the Beowulf bioethics code which had emerged following Old Earth's Final War and Beowulf's leading role in repairs to the brutally ravaged mother world. Almost five hundred years had passed since that war, and Detweiler believed it was long past time that mankind got over its "Frankenstein fear" (as he described it) of genetic modification of human beings. It simply made sense, he believed, to impose reason, logic, and long-term planning on the random chaos and wastefulness of natural evolutionary selection. And, as he pointed out, for almost fifteen hundred years, mankind's Diaspora to the stars had already been taking the human genotype into environments which were naturally mutagenic on a scale which had never been imagined on pre-space Old Earth. In effect, he argued, simply transporting human beings into such radically different environments was going to induce significant genetic variation, so there was no point in worshiping some semi-mythic "pure human genotype."
Since all that was true, Detweiler further argued, it only made sense to genetically modify colonists for the environments which were going to cause their descendants to mutate anyway. And it was only a small step further to argue that if it made sense to genetically modify human beings for environments in which they would have to live, it also made sense to genetically modify them to better suit them to the environments in which they would have to work.
Chapter Sixty-One
November, 1921
Queen Berry looked a little bewildered by the flag bridge of the Chao Kung Ming. The Spartacus, rather, as the government of Torch had decided to rename her.
"Let me get this straight. You manage battles from here?"
"I can assure you, Your Majesty, that after you've spent some time in one of these"—Admiral Rozsak swept his hand around—"all of this actually makes sense, instead of seeming like a gazillion flashing lights and weird-looking icons. With experience, for instance, this"—here he pointed to the tactical plot—"is a most handy gadget. And quite easy to interpret, believe it or not."
Berry study the gadget in question, very dubiously. "It looks like a vid I saw once. A documentary about deep-sea luminous fish, looking really bizarre and moving around completely at random, so far as I could tell."