He chuckled. "I know it's a bit much, at first sight. I was nineteen years old the first time I came onto a flag bridge—that was the old Prince Igor—and I almost walked into the tactical plot, I was so confused. One of the worst ass-reamings I ever got followed, if you'll parson the crude expression."
Berry smiled, but the smile faded away soon.
"You're sure about this, Luiz?"
She spoke informally because in the weeks since what had come to be called the Battle of Torch, a quiet but profound sea change had swept through the small number of Torch's leaders who knew the truth about the Stein assassination and the events that had followed on The Wages of Sin and elsewhere. A change in the way they looked at Rear Admiral Luiz Rozsak.
Before the battle, they'd considered Rozsak an ally, true enough. But it had been purely an alliance of convenience and not one of them had personally trusted the admiral. No farther than I could throw him—when I was a toddler, was the way Jeremy had put it. Indeed, not only had they not trusted Rozsak, they'd been deeply suspicious of him.
Today, it was still unlikely (to say the least) that anyone was going to confuse the admiral with a saint. But it was impossible to match the previous assessment of Rozsak as a man driven solely, entirely and exclusively by his own ambition with the admiral who'd led the defense of Torch at such an incredible cost to his own forces and risk to his own life.
A man driven by a fierce ambition, yes. Solely by ambition, however . . . No. That, it was no longer possible to believe.
At that, the growing warmth of Torch's inner circle toward the admiral was a candle, however, compared to the enthusiastic embrace with which Torch's population had greeted the Mayan survivors of the battle. Any officer or enlisted person in the fleet who went down to the planet—and there none who didn't, except for those still too badly injured to make the trip—swore then and thereafter that there was not, never had been, and never would be a shore leave better than the one they enjoyed on Torch in the weeks that followed the battle.
No one on Torch doubted that those Mayan fighting men and women had saved the planet's population from complete destruction. Not once the State Sec officers who survived the battle and the ones who surrendered afterward started talking.
And they started talking very quickly, and they talked and talked and talked. Their immediate fear had been that Torch would hand them over to the Republic of Haven. Then Jeremy X and Saburo started interrogating, and within two days it was the profound hope of every State Sec officer that they would be turned over to the Haven navy.
Jeremy X's notions concerning "the laws of war" and the proper rules governing the treatment of POWs would have met with the approval of Attila the Hun. And while Berry Zilwicki might have squelched Jeremy, she wasn't going to squelch Saburo.
He started every interrogation by placing a holopic between himself and the person being interrogated. "Her name was Lara. And her ghost really, really, really wants you to tell me everything you know. Or her ghost is going to get really, really, really peeved."
So, within a few days, they knew everything—at least, everything that had been known by Santander Konidis and the other surviving officers. But that was enough to know the three critical items.
First, that Manpower had surely been behind the whole plot. Second, that the Mesa System Nay had played a major part in providing training and logistical support. And, third, and beyone any faintest shadow of a doubt, that Manpower had planned and ordered a complete violation of the Eridani Edict.
Thereafter, however—quite to the surprise of Konidis and his subordinates—all threats and mistreatment had stopped. Within a month, all of the State Sec survivors had been relocated onto an island and provided with the wherewithal to set up reasonably comfortable if austere living quarters, along with a sufficient food supply brought in once a week under heavy guard.
The armed forces of Torch placed no guards on the island itself, and didn't even maintain a naval patrol beyond a small number of vessels. But the more adventurous of the State Sec forces who experimented with the possibility of trying to escape by sea soon gave it up. It turned out that the lifeforms in Torch's warm oceans were every bit as exuberant as the ones in its tropical rain forests. Especially the predator that looked like a ten-meter long cross between a lobster and a manta ray, and whose dietary preferences seemed to exclude rocks but absolutely nothing else.
That measure had been taken at Rozsak's request.
"I'd really be much happier if I knew that none of those survivors was in a position to tell anyone—and that includes Haven—exactly what happened here and what weaponry I possessed and what tactics I used."
"Certainly, Admiral," Web Du Havel had said. "But . . . ah . . . that still leaves the population of Torch itself. Which, at last count, numbers a little over four and a quarter million people and grows—this is immigration alone—by almost fifteen thousand people every T-week."
Rozsak had shrugged. "It's not a perfect world. But the State Sec survivors would have an incentive to talk—spill their guts, rather, once Haven gets hold of them—and your people don't. In fact, from what I've heard, you've launched a very effective public campaign to establish and maintain tight security."
"Yes, we have," Hugh had said.
Berry had glanced at him, smiled—and then made a face. "I still think 'loose lips sink ships' is a corny slogan."
"It is. It also works." There were some subjects concerning which Hugh Arai had no shame whatsoever. "How long do you want us to hold them, Admiral?"
"To be honest, I don't know. There are still too many variables involved in the equation for us to know yet what'll be happening. If it's a financial strain to maintain the prisoners, I can talk to Governor Barregos and see if—"
Du Havel had waved that aside. "Don't worry about it. The one thing Torch is not, is poor or strapped for funds, even with having to provide initial support for most immigrants, who usually arrive with nothing much more than the clothes they're wearing. But the support doesn't normally last long, because the job market is booming. Plenty of pharmaceutical companies have been quite happy to come here and replace Manpower's operations with their own."
Web had exchanged looks with Jeremy and Berry and Thandi Palane.
"Consider it done, Admiral," Palane had said then, with one of her simultaneously dazzling and ferocious smiles. "We'll keep 'em on ice for as long as you want."
"Are you sure, Luiz?" Berry repeated now. "You paid a terrible price for this ship, and the others."
For a moment, Rozsak's face looked a bit drawn. "Yes, we did. But there are some very good reasons why it'd be better if the surviving State Sec ships were pressed into Torch service rather than Mayan service."
"Such as?" Berry asked.
He looked at her for a moment, then shrugged.
"Trust me, it's not a case of misplaced gallantry on my part, Your Majesty!" He snorted in obvious amusement, then sobered. "The truth is, that they'd be white elephants as far as we're concerned. There are . . . reasons we'd just as soon not have anyone from Old Earth poking around in Maya, Berry, and if we start taking ex-Havenite ships into service, someone's likely to do just that.
"And they're not likely to when word of the battle gets there? Or were you thinking you could get away with just not mentioning it?" Berry knew she looked skeptical. "We're willing to keep our mouths shut, Luiz, but don't foget all of those pharmaceutical companies. I imagine we're going to have newsies out here from the League sometime real soon now, and there's no way we're going to be able to keep the fact that there was a battle here in the system under wraps whan that happens! Weapons and actual losses are one thing, but . . ."