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  “So when do we expect to hear back from Vinnie?” he asked.

  “Sometime in the next week or so.” Allenby refilled his coffee cup again. “I don’t think Karaxis even realizes Vinnie’s back on-planet, but the only place he could make contact is in Capistrano, so we’re not going to know how it went until he’s had time to get back here without attracting anyone’s attention. So”—he shrugged—“about a week or so.”

  “And just how are the Manties planning on getting weapons shipments through to us when Tallulah controls all the traffic into and out of Swallow?” MacGruder sounded as much honestly curious as skeptical, and Allenby snorted a laugh.

  “Damned if I know!” he admitted cheerfully. “That’s up to Vinnie and this Manty super secret agent he’s hooked up with.” He shrugged. “If Mister ‘Firebrand’ can come up with a way to get the guns to us, though, I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to figure out what to do with them after he does.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Well, Hosea, I hope you’ve completed your homework assignment,” Naomi Kaplan said dryly as HMS Tristram bored through hyper-space, twelve hours after leaving Montana orbit. “I’d like to sound like I’ve got some clue what I’m talking about for the Commodore’s conference.”

  “I wouldn’t say I’m happy about the amount of detail I’ve managed to turn up, Skipper,” Lieutenant Hosea Simpkins, Tristram’s astrogator replied with a wry smile. “I’ve pulled everything I could find out of the files, but Tester knows it isn’t much.”

  “Somehow, I’m not surprised.” Commander Kaplan shrugged and leaned back in her chair at the head of the briefing room’s conference table. “Go ahead and give us what you’ve got, though.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.” Kaplan’s Grayson-born astrogator didn’t bother to consult his notes. “Technically, Saltash’s an independent star system. Actually, it’s been an OFS client for about sixty T-years. The single habitable planet is called Cinnamon. Orbital radius is about nine light-minutes, population’s just under two-point-five billion. Planetary diameter’s only point-nine-six Old Earth, but gravity’s almost a full standard gravity, so it’s obviously a little denser than most. Hydrosphere is right on seventy-three percent, and its axial inclination’s only nine degrees, so it sounds like a fairly nice place to live.

  “Unfortunately, the local political structure was a real mess sixty or seventy T-years back. The Republic of McPhee and the Republic of Lochore both claimed to be the sole legitimate system government, and they’d fought two or three wars without settling things. They were headed towards another war, and all indications were it was going to be a really ugly affair this time around, when the president of MacPhee called in Frontier Security to play referee.”

  “Where have we heard this story before?” Lieutenant Commander Alvin Tallman muttered with a scowling expression.

  “I hate to say it, Sir,” Simpkins told Tristram’s executive officer, “but in this case OFS really did end up doing one of the things it was ostensibly created to do. I’m not saying it did it out of the goodness of its heart, you understand, but if the League hadn’t intervened, McPhee and Lochore were probably getting ready to pretty well sterilize Cinnamon. That’s how bitter the situation had gotten.”

  “Any idea why things were that bad, Hosea?” Kaplan asked, her eyes intent, and Simpkins shrugged.

  “Not really, Ma’am. Given the intensity of the last war they actually fought, these people were as unreasonable as we Graysons were before we exiled the Faithful to Masada, but it doesn’t seem like religion was behind the antagonism in Saltash’s case. The only thing I can tell you for sure is that the two sides had obviously hated each other for a long time, and it looks like they’d simply reached the point of being so pissed off, if you’ll pardon my language, that they were ready to pull the trigger even knowing there was a pretty good chance they’d wreck the entire planet.”

  “Well, that sounds promising as hell,” Lieutenant Vincenzo Fonzarelli sighed.

  “It might not be that bad, Vincenzo,” Abigail Hearns said, smiling slightly at Tristram’s chief engineer. Fonzarelli looked back at her skeptically, and she shrugged. “We’re not really here to deal with the Saltashans directly, so it doesn’t matter if they’re as crazy as the Faithful…or even Graysons.” Her smile turned dimpled. “All we have to worry about is the OFS presence in the system.”

  “That’s a reassuring thought,” Lieutenant Wanda O’Reilly observed waspishly. The communications officer’s resentment of Abigail’s promotion and (in her opinion) privileged status had abated—slightly—but it still rankled, and no one was ever going to accuse O’Reilly of giving up a sense of antagonism easily.

  “I could wish we weren’t here to confront the Sollies, too, Wanda,” Kaplan said mildly. “Unfortunately, we wouldn’t be making the trip if there weren’t Sollies at the other end of it, now would we?”

  “No, Ma’am,” O’Reilly acknowledged.

  “So how much system infrastructure is there, Hosea?” Kaplan asked, turning her attention back to the astrogator.

  “Not much, actually.” This time the Grayson did look down at his notes. “There’s some mining in the Casper Belt between Saltash Delta and Himalaya, the system’s only gas giant, although the total belter population—work force and dependents, combined—is way under a half million. And there’s a gas extraction plant orbiting Himalaya itself. There doesn’t seem to be much local heavy industry, though, and the system’s only real cargo transfer platform is Shona Station. Which also happens to be Cinnamon’s only significant orbital habitat.”

  “How big a population does it have, Hosea?” Abigail asked with a frown, and Simpkins checked his notes again.

  “Almost a quarter million,” he said, and Abigail’s frown deepened.

  “Something bothering you, Abigail?” Kaplan inquired, and Abigail gave herself a slight shake.

  “Only that that’s a lot of civilians to be potentially getting in harm’s way, Ma’am,” she said. “I was just thinking about how ugly things almost got in Monica.”

  Kaplan gazed at her for a moment, then nodded.

  “I see your point. Hopefully nobody’s going to be stupid enough for us to have to start throwing missiles around this time, though.”

  “Hopefully, Ma’am,” Abigail agreed, and Kaplan turned back to Simpkins.

  “Should I take it there’s no indication that this Shona Station’s armed?”

  “Not according to anything in the files, Ma’am.”

  “Then given the Sollies’ well demonstrated ability to screw things up by the numbers, I suppose we’d better hope the files are accurate in this case,” Kaplan said dryly.

  A flicker of laughter ran around the conference table, and Tallman cocked his head at his commanding officer.

  “Do we actually know whether this Dueñas character is likely to be reasonable or not when we turn up, Skipper?”

  “That is the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” Kaplan’s smile was thinner than ever. “And the answer, I’m afraid, is that we don’t have a clue. Our bio data on him is even thinner than Hosea’s info on the star system. Officially, he’s not the system’s governor—legally it’s only a ‘courtesy title,’ it says here—” she tapped her copy of the squadron’s orders from Michelle Henke and rolled her eyes, “but from what Hosea’s said, when he says ‘jump’ the only question anyone in Saltash asks is ‘how high.’”

  “That’s about right, from everything I’ve been able to find, Ma’am,” Simpkins put in. She cocked an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged. “Under the terms of the Frontier Security ‘peacekeeping agreement,’ OFS was assigned responsibility for managing the system’s local and interstellar traffic. Just to make sure no one was sneaking any warships into position for attacks, you understand. Of course, it was necessary for Frontier Security to levy a slight service fee for looking after Saltash’s security that way.”

  “How big a service fee?”

  “Try thirty-five percent…of th
e gross, Ma’am,” Simpkins replied grimly, and Kaplan’s lips pursed in a silent whistle. That was steep, even for OFS.

  “Do you know if that level was part of the original agreement?” she asked. “Or did Dueñas and his predecessors crank it up to give them a better level of graft after they were in place?”

  “That I couldn’t tell you, Ma’am. Sorry.”

  “Not your fault.” Kaplan shook her head. “You’ve actually done better than I expected, given how small—and how far from home—Saltash is. I didn’t think you’d be able to pull this much out of the files.”

  Simpkins’ smile showed his pleasure at the compliment, and she smiled back at him briefly. Then she returned her attention to Tallman.

  “Like I say, Alvin, we don’t really have a good enough feel for Dueñas to make any predictions on how he’s likely to react when we turn up on his doorstep. Unless he’s a fool, he has to’ve known word of his activities was going to get to the Talbott Quadrant sooner or later, though, so I’m not exactly inclined towards wild optimism about how reasonable he’s likely to be. Captain Zavala checked with everybody in Montana who’s had dealings with Saltash, but he’s only held the governorship for less than a T-year. That’s not long enough for anyone to’ve gotten a real handle on his personality. On the other hand, he was sent out here specifically to replace his predecessor after things started going into the crapper between us and the League, and try as I might, I can’t convince myself that’s a good sign.”

  “Well, I guess there’s only one way to find out, isn’t there, Ma’am?” Tallman smiled fleetingly. “Just once I wish we could do it the easy way, though.”

  “Oh, I do, too,” Kaplan told him, and then she showed her own teeth in a thinner and far colder smile. “I do, too,” she repeated, “but one thing Saltash is not going to be, people.” She looked around the conference table. “It isn’t going to be another New Tuscany. Not this time.”

  * * *

  “Any new thoughts occur to anyone since our last meeting?” Jacob Zavala asked.

  His squadron was eleven days out from Montana and still four days short of Saltash by the clocks of the galaxy at large, although only eight days had passed by DesRon 301’s clocks, and his com display was split into four equal sized quadrants. Each quadrant was further subdivided into thirds to show the commanders, executive officers, and tactical officers of four of his squadron’s five destroyers. Commander Rochelle Goulard, Lieutenant Commander Jasmine Carver, and Lieutenant Samuel Turner of HMS Kay were physically present in his flagship’s briefing room, along with Lieutenant Commander George Auerbach, his chief of staff, and Lieutenant Commander Alice Gabrowski, his operations officer. Now he looked around the faces—electronic as well as flesh and blood—with one eyebrow raised.

  “I’ve got something, Sir,” Lieutenant Commander Rützel, HMS Gaheris’ CO said. He was a heavyset man with a face designed for smiling, but at the moment he was frowning slightly, instead. “Not so much a new thought as an observation, though.”

  “Observe away, Toby,” Zavala invited.

  “I’ve been looking back at the information—such as it is—we’ve been able to pull together on Shona Station, Sir. I know none of our data suggests the station mounts any anti-ship weaponry, but according to the best info we have, there’s an OFS intervention battalion permanently stationed there. I realize it’s probably going to have a lot of its personnel deployed as detachments on Cinnamon and elsewhere around the system, but if they’ve managed to hang on to any significant portion of that troop strength and we have to actually board the station, things could get ugly.”

  There was silence for a moment. Then Captain Morgan, HMS Gawain’s CO and the squadron’s senior captain, spoke.

  “Toby’s got a point, Sir,” he said. “Under most circumstances, it probably shouldn’t be a problem, but we’ve already had ample evidence the Sollies are willing to push things way past the point of reason. Especially when we don’t have a batch of Marines of our own to send aboard to help them recognize the logic of our argument.”

  Zavala nodded soberly.

  “You’ve both got points,” he agreed. “I’d like to think any responsible officer would recognize the need to stand down when we turn up in strength, but people have different definitions of ‘responsible.’ And let’s be fair here. I’d find it difficult to roll over and play dead if a Solly squadron came sailing into a star system I was responsible for defending and started throwing around demands.”

  “And Frank’s right about our dearth of Marines, Sir,” Naomi Kaplan said a bit grimly. “Holding down crew size is all well and good, and I’m all in favor of the increased efficiency for shipboard operations, but not having any Marine detachment for moments like this is a pain in the ass.”

  Abigail Hearns, by far the youngest officer attending the conference, nodded unconsciously in agreement with her CO’s observation. She seemed to specialize in being short of Marines when she needed them, Abigail thought wryly, remembering a really unpleasant afternoon on a planet called Tiberian and another, almost as bad, aboard a shattered hulk which had once been the Solarian superdreadnought Charles Babbage.

  Never around when you need one, she reflected wryly. Well, aside from Mateo, she amended, thinking about Lieutenant Mateo Gutierrez.

  “There are moments when something more…flexible than a laser head seems indicated,” Zavala acknowledged. “Hopefully this won’t be one of them. We do need to be prepared in advance if it turns out it is, however. Now I wonder who among us might be best qualified by experience and training to oversee a little responsibility like this?”

  His tone was almost whimsical as his eyes tracked across the com display. He smiled as they came to rest upon one of his officers’ faces, and Abigail found herself looking back at him.

  “I believe you’ve had some small experience in matters like this, haven’t you, Lieutenant Hearns?”

  * * *

  “What’s this all about, Vice Admiral?” Damien Dueñas demanded a bit testily. He’d been in bed for less than two hours when the emergency com call came in, and he wasn’t one of those people who woke up cheerful.

  “We’ve confirmed a significant hyper footprint, Governor,” Vice Admiral Oxana Dubroskaya replied from his display. “Gravitics make it five separate point sources.”

  Dueñas stiffened and felt his face oozing towards expressionlessness. Merchantships didn’t travel in shoals like that in Solarian dominated space, and he wasn’t expecting any additional Navy visitors. Or not from his own Navy, at any rate.

  “What else can you tell me, Vice Admiral?” he asked after a moment.

  “Less than I’d like to, Sir.” Dubroskaya she didn’t much care for Dueñas, and she’d argued—respectfully—against his plan from the outset, which was one reason she took such care to address him as courteously as possible. “They’re headed in-system now, but they made their translation right on the hyper limit, and they’re still over nine light-minutes from Cimarron. It’ll be another couple of minutes before we can get any lightspeed sensor reads on them. I can confirm that they’re headed for the inner system on a least-time course for a zero/zero intercept with the planet in approximately”—her eyes moved to the time display in the corner of her own com—“another one hundred and seventy-one minutes, however. From their footprints and the strength of their wedges, CIC puts them in the hundred and fifty to two hundred-ton range, but their initial velocity was nine hundred and twenty-six kilometers per second, and they’re up to just over thirty-two hundred now. That means they’re accelerating at five-point-six KPS squared, Governor.”

  Dueñas looked blank, and Dubroskaya reminded herself not to sigh.

  “Sir, our Rampart-class destroyers are only half that big, and their maximum acceleration rate, with zero safety margin on the compensator, is only five-point-zero-nine KPS squared.”

  Understanding blossomed in Dueñas’ eyes.

  “Manties,” he said.

  “I don’t
see how it could be anyone else with that accel, Sir,” Dubroskaya agreed.

  The system governor didn’t look very surprised, she thought. Unhappy, yes; but not surprised.

  “Damn,” Dueñas said mildly after a moment. “I’d hoped to get some additional reinforcements in here before they turned up.” Dubroskaya stiffened visibly, and the governor shook his head quickly. “That’s no reflection on you or your ships, Vice Admiral, I assure you. But I’d be happier if we had an even greater margin of superiority. One thing these people have already demonstrated is that they’re not exactly likely to be reasonable.”

  Dubroskaya contented herself with a silent nod, although she wasn’t sure “reasonable” was a word Damián Dueñas should be throwing around at a time like this. Impounding the merchant vessels of a sovereign star nation and jailing their entire ships’ companies without trial or bail didn’t strike her as meeting the dictionary definition of that adverb, either, no matter what theoretical justification for it he might have concocted. On the other hand, the decision wasn’t hers to make, and she wasn’t going to shed any tears about pinning the Manty upstarts’ ears back the way they needed.

  “Even assuming there’s any truth to the rumors about Spindle, Governor,” she said, “we’re not picking up anything that could be transporting the missile pods they’d need to equalize the odds here in Saltash.”

  Those rumors were a lot more fragmentary than she would have preferred, but they did seem to strongly suggest that Fleet Admiral Sandra Crandall’s visit to the Spindle System hadn’t gone very well. The only problem was that no one in Saltash had a clue as to how badly it might have gone. The battle (if a battle had actually been fought at all) had taken place little more than two months earlier, and there simply hadn’t been time for any reliable account of it to reach a backwoods star system like Saltash.

  One thing Dubroskaya was confident of was that the stories they had heard—like the ones about what had happened to Josef Byng in New Tuscany—had obviously grown in the telling. There had to be at least some core of truth to the wild tales of disaster, but the destruction of dozens of SDs while the Manties got off scot free? Ridiculous! Still, the SLN had clearly taken losses and, presumably, retreated from the system in the face of unexpectedly heavy resistance, and that was more than bad enough for Oxana Dubroskaya. The fact that a Solarian fleet had failed to take its objective for the very first time in the SLN’s history was a sobering—and infuriating—thought, and she was determined not to let overconfidence lull her into creating her own disaster, which was one reason she was less than enthralled by Dueñas’ strategy. She and her staff had analyzed the badly garbled bits and pieces of information they had as carefully (and pessimistically) as possible, however, and it seemed evident that the Manties must have managed to get more system-defense missile pods into the system than Crandall had realized. They’d probably been longer-ranged than Crandall had expected, too, judging by the limited accounts they had. That was the only explanation they could come up with…and as she’d just pointed out to the governor, missile pods in Spindle weren’t going to help them in Saltash.