Shadow of Freedom

Besides, you may not have heard anything about what happened to Filareta yet, but you are going to hear about it a hell of a lot more quickly than any of the Sollies in the vicinity! You’ll still have the advantage of a shorter communication loop, better intel, and the strategic initiative when the time comes, unless those bastards in Mesa figure out some way to bollix everything up again.

For that matter—

The soft buzz of her terminal interrupted her thought, and she brought the chair upright and reached for the accept key.

“Yes? What is it, Gwen?” she asked as Gervais Archer’s image appeared on the display.

“Sorry to disturb you this late, Milady,” Archer said, “but something’s come up that I think you may need to deal with.”

“What?” she asked, eyes narrowing.

“Another ship’s just arrived in-system from Mobius, Ma’am. It’s a Trifecta freighter. According to what her master told the port authorities, he’s here to see whether or not Mr. Ankenbrandt was able to find a supplier for that meat-buying contract.”

“But—?” she prompted when he paused.

“But her purser’s transmitted one of the code words Ankenbrandt supplied, Ma’am. I think she wants to talk to you.”

* * *

“You know,” Michelle said three hours later as she regarded the com images of her senior officers, “when we were discussing the situation in Mobius, I’d really hoped we’d have a little more time—like, say, maybe even a whole week—before we actually had to decide what we’re going to do about it. Silly of me, I suppose.”

“It does bring to mind the old cliché about raining and pouring, Ma’am,” Munming agreed.

“I suppose it could be argued you still don’t have t’ rush t’ a decision, Ma’am,” Oversteegen pointed out. “I mean, even if we’d really been the ones they were talkin’ to all along, this is still a good two or three months sooner than Ankenbrandt told us they were supposed t’ be callin’ us in.”

“I realize that, Michael. But this”—she tapped a hardcopy summary of her Alfredo-verified interview with Yolanda Summers, the new messenger from the Mobius Liberation Front—“puts a different complexion on things. It’s pretty clear the situation’s gone to crap faster than Ankenbrandt ever expected when he was sent out. In fact, that’s the entire reason this Summers turned up so soon, and I don’t blame the MLF leadership one bit for sending her out so quickly after Ankenbrandt. If even half of what’s in here is accurate, things are getting ready to drop straight into the crapper in that star system, and it’s going to be ugly when they do. Especially given this information that Lombroso’s expecting intervention battalions to arrive shortly. I’m going to assume that if he thinks they’re coming, the odds are they’re already in the pipeline, which means that even if we send someone immediately, Frontier Security’s likely to be in-system and boots-on-the-ground by the time anything of ours can get there.”

“With all due respect, Ma’am, that might be an argument against reacting quickly,” Rear Admiral Ruddick suggested. She looked at him, and he shrugged. “Assuming you’re right about that, we probably can’t get there in time to prevent a bloodbath in the first place. If that’s the case, all our ‘intrusion into the star system’—and that’s how we all know the League is going to describe it—will achieve is to pump extra hydrogen into our face-off with the Sollies without preventing whatever’s already happened to Ankenbrandt’s resistance movement by the time we do get there.”

“I understand your argument, Mickaël, but I’m not going to pussyfoot around the League in the name of expediency. People’ve been doing that for centuries, and look how well that’s worked out!” She shook her head. “No. If they want to go on playing this kind of game, this time they’re going to have to show me their cards or fold, because I am damned well going to call them on it! Having said that, though, I’m not just shooting from the hip, either. There’s a genuine method to my madness on this one.

“First, Mobius isn’t a member of the Solarian League, and it’s not an official protectorate, either. It doesn’t even have an officially sanctioned OFS presence like Saltash. Technically and legally, it’s an independent star nation, even if the Lombroso Administration is as corrupt and tyrannical as they come, not to mention being in Frontier Security’s hip pocket. So it’ll be a bit difficult for the Sollies to call us on intruding into their space. They’ll do it anyway, of course, but we’ll have plenty of opportunities to attack their claims.