Shadow of Freedom

As usual, Michelle reflected, Terekhov had a damned good point.

She tipped back in her own chair, contemplating the deckhead. The fact that Tenth Fleet was only now learning about what was almost certainly the most momentous political development in the entire history of the Star Empire—or Star Kingdom—of Manticore was a stark comment on the information lags built into interstellar distances. And that was with the Lynx Terminus factored into the equation!

The dispatch from Baroness Medusa and Admiral Khumalo had arrived here in the Montana System less than six hours ago. The duplicate dispatch to Vice Admiral Theodore Bennington, commanding the other half of Tenth Fleet’s heavy units at Tillerman, wouldn’t reach its destination for another ten T-days or so. It was obvious Medusa and Khumalo had wanted to get the initial flash message to her and Bennington as quickly as possible, and she could understand that. All the same, she could also wish they’d waited long enough to get at least a few additional details before banging it off to her.

“I admit it would be nice to have at least some idea what kind of treaty proposals Pritchart has in mind,” she said after a moment. “And I suppose I really would like a little more detail than ‘Captain Zilwicki, Ballroom buddy and general all-round Manpower-hater extraordinaire, and his friend Victor Cachat, well known Havenite spy, assassin, godfather to Torch, and saboteur of our alliance with Erewhon, both promise Mesa is really at the bottom of all this.’ But I think we have to take it as a given—for now, at least—that they’re basically telling the truth, Aivars. Arielle and Nimitz would know if someone was lying, and I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume the Empress wouldn’t be taking a Havenite’s word for anything without one hell of a lot of corroboration from someone she totally trusts. These people may be wrong, but they’re notlying.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest they were, Ma’am,” Terekhov replied. “I’m just wondering how much responding to this we want to do before we get some kind of amplification?”

“That’s a very sensible question, Milady,” Vice Admiral Aploloniá Munming said. Like Oversteegen, the tallish, brown-haired, brown-eyed admiral was a native of the Star Empire’s capital planet, but her accent was about as far removed from Oversteegen’s aristocratic drawl as a Manticoran accent could be. She was not only of lower class origin, but of immigrant lower-class origin (her family had fled the People’s Republic of Haven eighty T-years before), and as proud of her commoner birth as Klaus Hauptman himself. Despite which, she and Oversteegen got along well.

She was also the commander of Battle Squadron 16, the superdreadnought core of the force Michelle had led to Montana as part of her redeployment plan.

“This is something we’re going to have to factor into all our planning,” Munming went on, “but until we have more information, we’re going to have to be very cautious about how we factor it in, I think.”

“Oh, I agree entirely, Aploloniá.” Michelle nodded vigorously. “Still, in a lot of ways, it only underscores a lot of our existing contingency thinking where Mesa was concerned. We’ve all been worried about them ever since their proxies ran into Aivars at Monica. The main change I think we need to make in our thinking is that if this dispatch is accurate—if the Mesans put together the Yawata Strike out of their own resources—they’ve got one hell of a lot more organic combat strength than we’ve thought. Frankly, most of my thinking where they’re concerned has been concentrated on the possibility of their using more Solly proxies, and I think that’s probably true for pretty much all of us. If they’re the ones who have the ‘invisible starship drives’ and they’re willing to come out into the open, they could be a lot more dangerous—a lot more immediately dangerous, I mean—than we’ve allowed for. I’m sure there’ll be a lot of other changes once we get Sir Aivar’s ‘amplification,’ but that’s going to have to wait until additional information actually gets to us.”

“Another question, if I may?” Oversteegen said.

“Go,” Michelle replied, and he shrugged.

“Another thought that’s occurred t’ me is t’ wonder just how far we might want t’ disseminate this information at this point, Ma’am.”

“According to the header on the dispatch, Sir,” Lecter said before Michelle could reply, “this same basic message was sent to the chief executive of every system government in the Quadrant. Including President Suttles.”

“Makes sense, I suppose,” Oversteegen said. “Did the Governor attach a specific security level t’ the information, Captain?”