Although, he admitted with a thin smile as he studied the revised text, the effect towards which it was directed might not be exactly the one the President had had in mind....
Chapter Forty Four
Sir Edward Janacek had discovered that he no longer enjoyed going to work in the morning. He would never have believed that might come to pass when Michael Janvier first invited him to return to Admiralty House, but things had changed since that heady day of triumph.
He nodded to his yeoman and strode on into his inner office. His desk was waiting, and there in the middle of the blotter sat the locked dispatch case containing chips of the overnight communications. Like the trip to his office itself, that box had become something he dreaded, especially in light of the arrival of Eloise Pritchart's most recent missive the day before. He didn't really want to admit its existence, but he glanced at it as he started to walk past the desk towards the coffee carafe sitting in its accustomed place on the credenza. Then he stopped dead. A crimson light blinked on top of the dispatch case, and his stomach muscles tightened as it flashed at him.
Given the inevitable lags in communication time for units deployed over interstellar distances, there wasn't a great deal of sense in awakening senior members of the Admiralty when dispatches arrived in the middle of the night. Even if their contents were desperately important, getting them into the hands of their recipients an hour or two sooner wasn't going to have any significant effect on the turnaround time for a decision loop a dozen light-years or so across. There were, of course, exceptions to that rule, especially for star nations which possessed wormhole junctions, and senior communications staffers were expected to recognize when those exceptions occurred. Except in those very special circumstances, however, the Admiralty's most senior echelons could anticipate a night's sleep unflawed by the precipitate delivery of bad news.
But that flashing light indicated that Simon Chakrabarti, as First Space Lord, had already read the overnight dispatches...and that in his opinion one of them was of special importance.
The First Space Lord had been becoming steadily more unhappy for months now. Janacek was prepared to accept his in-house expression of a certain degree of concern, of course. It was the First Space Lord's job to warn his civilian superiors of any worries he might entertain, after all. But Chakrabarti had gone beyond private discussions of concern or even verbal expressions of those same concerns in face-to-face meetings. He'd actually begun drafting formal memos whose arguments were becoming steadily more pointed, and he'd been following the message trafficespecially from Silesiawith what Janacek privately considered obsessive attentiveness.
As part of that attentiveness, he'd taken to recording marginal notes on the dispatches he found of particular concern. Which, Janacek thought as he watched the malignant, blinking red eye with a sort of dread fascination, was not something he wanted to deal with just now.
Unfortunately, as Pritchart's response to Elaine Descroix's most recent note had reminded the entire High Ridge Government, what he wanted didn't always bear a great deal of resemblance to what he was going to get.
He squared his shoulders, inhaled deeply, and marched across to the desk. He sank into his chair, scarcely noticing its comfort, and reached out to key the combination into the dispatch case lock plate. The combination of fingerprints, proper numerical code, and DNA tracers convinced it to open for him, and he pulled out the chip on top of the pile.
For just a moment, he felt an undeniable sense of relief, because it was in a Fleet message folio, not one with the flashings of the ONI. So at least it wasn't a fresh admission from Francis Jurgensen that that insufferable son-of-a-bitch Theisman had managed to deceive them as to his navy's combat capabilities after all. But that fleeting relief vanished as he read the header that identified it as a message from Sidemore Station.
Oh my God, he thought around the fresh sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. What's that lunatic done now?
He drew another deep breath, slipped the chip into his desk top reader, and called up the message header.
"Just how bad is it, Edward?"
The Prime Minister's anxiety showed far more clearly than he wanted it to. Indeed, Janacek thought, it undoubtedly showed far more clearly than High Ridge thought it did. Not that the baron was alone in that, and the First Lord felt the echo of his own tension and strain coming back from the other members of the working cabinet. Aside from Janacek and High Ridge himself, that working cabinet currently consisted of Elaine Descroix, Countess New Kiev, Earl North Hollow, and Sir Harrison MacIntosh.
"That's very difficult to say," the First Lord replied. "I'm not trying to dodge the question, but all we have right now is Harrington's initial report about the Zoraster System incident itself. It will be at least a few days before we get anything more than that, I'd imagine. It would have taken at least that long for the Andies to respond to the incidentor to Harrington's message to their station commander in Sachsen. So any later report from her is going to be delayed at least that long before reaching here."
"But when those messages do get here," Marisa Turner pointed out anxiously, "the events in them will be over two weeks old. There's absolutely no way for us to tell how far Harrington may have pushed the Andies even as we sit here."
"Now, just a moment, Marisa," Janacek replied strongly. "Everyone in this room knows my opinion of 'the Salamander.' I'm not about to change it at this late date, either. But, much as I may distrust her judgment, in this instance she's certainly showed far more restraint than I would ever have anticipated."
He tapped the hardcopy of Harrington's report, where it lay on the conference table in front of him. An identical copy lay in front of each of them, and he wondered for a moment if New Kiev had even bothered to read hers.
"To be perfectly honest, my initial fear when I read her account of the incident was that she was likely to head for Sachsen cleared for action to demand satisfaction from Admiral Sternhafen. Instead, to my considerable surprise, she actually seems to be working actively to reduce tensions. Of course, there's no way to tell how Sternhafen reacted to her suggestion of a joint investigation, but the fact that she came up with the idea at all has to be taken as a good sign, I think."
"On the surface," she agreed. Then she shook her head and made a face. "No, you're right," she admitted. "It's just that I worry about her temper. Her first reaction has always seemed to be to resort to force immediatelyor, at least, to meet force with greater force. I suppose it's just...difficult for me to conceive of her in the role of peacemaker."
"For you and me both," Janacek admitted. "Nonetheless, that does seem to have been her initial response, at least, in this case."
"If so," North Hollow observed acidly, "it's undoubtedly for the first time in her entire life!"
"I won't disagree with you there, Stefan," Janacek replied.
"But you say there's no way to predict how Sternhafen reacted to her proposal," High Ridge pressed, and Janacek shrugged.
"Obviously not. If this really was an accident, an unintended confrontation, then the man would have to be a bigger lunatic even than Harrington not to seize this opportunity to back off and cool things down. Of course, given the provocative behavior the Andies have been evincing out there, it's impossible to say whether or not it really was accidental. Admiral Jurgensen, Admiral Chakrabarti, and I, are currently inclined towards the view that it was unintended. If the Andies had intended to begin a war with us, then surely they would have done it by attacking more than a single, isolated heavy cruiser. Moreover, it seems fairly evident that their ship took Jessica Epps by surprise. Whether that's the case or not, they'd at least managed to get into attack range well before Jessica Epps initially ordered this suspected slave ship to heave to. What that suggests to us, is that the Andies didn't go into this looking for a fight. If that had been their objective, then it's virtually certain that they would have fired soonerprobably before Jessica Epps even knew they were there."