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"Wise of him, no doubt," Benjamin murmured, remembering the gray-faced, exhausted young man he'd seen on his own com screen, was it really only three hours ago? He shook his head, then brought his chair back upright.
"I think we should leave him there for now," he said slowly, then nodded. "In fact, let's a
"The conclusion we want, Your Grace?" Hanks repeated, and Benjamin smiled.
"Reverend, unless they already know about the Sky Domes analysis, the people really responsible for this must feel pretty confident just now, and I'm sure they figure Lady Harrington must be growing desperate. Well, I'd like to use that against them, and if we can convince them that she's summoned her chief engineer to a 'spin control' conference in an attempt to salvage something from the wreck, it should make them even more confident... and less wary. Besides, I'd just as soon have Gerrick out of reach of the media at least until after the special sessions behind us."
"I think that's wise, Your Grace," Prestwick put in. "In fact, if you approve, I'll also contact Howard Clinkscales. Between the two of us, I'm sure we can concoct an absolutely truthful, and highly misleading, release to reinforce that image, and I'll also ask him to warn the rest of Sky Domes' engineers to keep a low profile."
"Good idea, Henry. Good idea." Benjamin pinched his nose and tried to think of what else they could do, but nothing occurred to his weary brain.
"With your permission, Your Grace, I think I'll go up to Terrible, as well," Reverend Hanks said. Benjamin quirked an eyebrow, and Hanks shrugged. "I know Lady Harrington well enough to realize this must have been a terrible ordeal for her, Your Grace. I'd like the opportunity to speak with her, and I could also take her the writ of summons for the Conclave without putting it through official Navy cha
"It would, indeed, Reverend, though I feel a bit uncomfortable using the head of Father Church as a mere courier!"
"There's nothing 'mere' about it, under the circumstances, Your Grace," Hanks replied, "and Father Church, and the people of Grayson, owe Lady Harrington any service we can legitimately perform for her."
"You're right, of course," Benjamin agreed, then looked back and forth between the two older men on the far side of his desk. "In that case, gentlemen, I think we should get things organized."
"Well, that was an ... interesting disaster," Citizen Rear Admiral Theisman observed. His tone was so dry that even Citizen Commissioner LePic gri
Theisman sighed. He wasn't at all happy about arming a planet full of religious fanatics, especially when he knew from personal experience what they were capable of, but if he had to do it, he preferred to do it right. No doubt his fellow task group commander was getting an earful from Thurston and Preznikov at this very moment, but it really hadn't been Chernov's fault. This was a more complex op than even Theisman had fully suspected. Neither he nor Chernov had known, for example, that the entire task force was going to arrive in Yeltsin in a single body before detaching the Endicott attack force ... for the very simple reason that it hadn't been part of the original plan. Theisman thought it an eminently sensible alteration, he'd never been happy about splitting the task force into two forces and having them go in completely independent of one another, but it would have been nice if he and the other task group COs had been informed of it a bit sooner. As it was, the entire maneuver had come at them almost cold, and it was hardly surprising that Chernov's astrogation had been off.
Still, he reflected, the whole purpose of a sim was to figure out what could go wrong and fix it. You never found all the problems, of course. The best you could do was disaster-proof your ops plan against the screwups you knew about and hope the others didn't bite you on the ass too hard.
"All right," he told his staff, "we had a little accident. These things happen. The idea is to keep them from happening the same way twice, so let's look over all our movement orders. Tomorrow's the last day of simulations we get, people. Five days from now, we have to get it right the first time, or we're going to be looking at something a damn sight more serious than data bits in a computer, right?"
"Right, Citizen Admiral," LePic said firmly, and the rest of the staff nodded.
"In that case," Theisman said, turning to his ops officer, "let's pull up the general operational schematic first, Megan. I want to see if we can't integrate Citizen Admiral Chernov's task group a bit more intimately with ours from the outset. If we'd had him inside our own com net, we'd have realized he was drifting off course before we went into hyper leaving Yeltsin."
"Yes, Citizen Admiral," the ops officer said, tapping commands into her terminal to summon the proper files. "In fact, Citizen Admiral, I was thinking that what we might want to do is..."
Thomas Theisman leaned back in his chair, listening to his staff tear into the problem, and hoped like hell that Yeltsin really was as bare as Thurston’s intelligence appreciations suggested. Because if it wasn't, and if they didn't get a much larger percentage of the bugs exterminated before they got there, God alone knew how Operation Dagger was really going to end up.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Samuel Mueller frowned down at the archaic sheet of parchment on his blotter. The writ of summons' stilted, old-fashioned legalese was familiar enough, except for the last sentence, which no living steadholder had ever seen. Mayhew had the right to append it under the old Constitution, but that made Mueller no happier to be ordered to keep the session secret "upon peril of the Sword's displeasure." It was like a throwback to the bad old days when the Protector had been able to threaten his steadholders, and the fact that Mayhew truly could threaten them only made it more disagreeable.
For now, at least, Mueller thought as he reviewed recent events.
His colleagues had been bloodthirsty enough devising their plan, but deciding where to execute it had been a problem. For them, at least. Samuel Mueller had seen the ideal spot immediately, and the others were enormously grateful to him, once he'd maneuvered them into suggesting it.
Burdette's repugnance at the thought of killing his own steaders had been plain from the outset; all Mueller had needed to do was look grave and encourage his fellow steadholder to gird his loins to the task God had sent them. His own stern acceptance of the distasteful necessity of Marchant's plan, coupled with the thoughtful observation that it wouldn't do to choose a Sky Domes project in the steading of Harrington’s most bitter critic, had prompted Burdette to suggest that perhaps, in that case, Mueller Steading might be a better location. Mueller had allowed himself to appear horrified...which had brought Marchant neatly into the argument at Burdette's side. The defrocked priest and his Steadholder had made their case with passion, and when he'd finally, grudgingly, allowed himself to be talked into it, they'd expressed their admiration for his willingness to pay the price of God's work most becomingly. They'd been too busy finding reasons to arrange the accident somewhere, anywhere, other than in Burdette to even consider the benefits Mueller's "sacrifice" would buy him.