At All Costs

"Do we have a date for this summit?" Bardasano asked.

"Not yet. I'm sure the Manties will be proposing one in their reply to Pritchart, but our mole doesn't have that level of access. Even after they propose one, messages are going to have to go back and forth between Manticore and Haven, and transit time is almost eleven days each way. So it's not going to happen next week, but it looks like it is going to happen."

"Elizabeth Winton hates Haven's guts," Anisimovna said. "Even if the summit meets, how likely is it to result in an actual peace treaty? Especially after Haven initiated the attack, and given that everyone's convinced Haven was behind the Harrington assassination attempt?"

"Under normal circumstances, I might think along the same lines," Detweiler said. "But Winton's been adopted by one of those frigging treecats, and you can bet she won't attend a conference without the little monster."

"Oh." Anisimovna grimaced.

"Yes, we can't afford to overlook the little bastards any longer, can we?" Detweiler growled.

It was unusual, to say the least, for him to allow his ire to show that clearly, but Sphinx's treecats had been a sore point with Manpower and Mesa literally for centuries. The possibility of unlocking the secret of telepathy had been impossible for the bio-engineers of Mesa to resist, but they'd been remarkably unsuccessful in obtaining specimens. In fact, they'd managed to obtain only one living treecat in over three hundred T-years, and they'd discovered quickly that a treecat in captivity simply died. They still had some of the creature's genetic material, and some work continued with it in a desultory fashion, but without much prospect of successfully building the ability into humans.

The fact that the wretched little animals were even more intelligent than Manpower's own worst-case assumptions had come as an unpleasant revelation. And the ability of a fully functional telempathic to communicate its observations about the mental state of someone on the other side of high-level diplomatic negotiations was something political analysts were going to take some getting used to.

"We know, even if Winton doesn't, that Pritchart never wanted to go back to war in the first place," Detweiler continued. "If some dammed treecat gets a chance to communicate that to Winton, it's entirely possible the two of them will agree to a joint examination of the disputed diplomatic correspondence. In which case peace is likely to start breaking out all over."

"Not exactly a desirable outcome," Bardasano murmured, and Detweiler rewarded her with a tight grin and another hard chuckle.

"Nicely put. Now, what do we do to prevent it?"

"Killing Winton or Pritchart would be the most effective solution," Bardasano said thoughtfully. "On the other hand, if we could get to either of them easily, we'd have already done it. Hmmm...."

She thought for several seconds, then nodded to herself.

"I see one possibility," she said.

"Which is?"

"I've already prepared the operation you wanted on Old Earth," she told him. "I haven't scheduled a date for it yet, however. And I've also set up the groundwork for Operation Rat Poison. I can activate both of them immediately, and set them up to happen simultaneously, or at least in close succession. Given Elizabeth Winton's existing attitude towards Haven, I'd say there's a pretty good chance it would destabilize any summit arrangements."

"Especially Rat Poison," Detweiler agreed, his eyes lighting with pleasure at the prospect. Then they narrowed. "Probability of success?" he demanded.

"On Old Earth, very high," Bardasano said promptly. "Probably approaching a hundred percent. Rat Poison's more problematical, I'm afraid. Our choice of vehicles is much more limited, and all the ones we're currently considering are outside the i

"I'd really rather wait, at least until we could get better odds," Detweiler murmured.

"We can do that," Bardasano told him. "In fact, given a few more months of prep work, I could improve the odds significantly. But if we wait, we lose the opportunity to derail the summit. And I might point out, Albrecht, that even if the attempt itself fails, the mere fact that it was made ought to accomplish what we want."

"There is that," Detweiler agreed. He sat motionless for perhaps fifteen seconds, obviously thinking hard. Then he nodded his head sharply.

"All right. Do it."

Chapter Forty-Eight

"What do you think the Sollies are going to do, Your Grace?" Rafe Cardones asked quietly.

He and Honor stood side by side in the lift, along with Mercedes Brigham, Andrea Jaruwalski, Frances Hirshfield, Andrew LaFollet, Spencer Hawke, and Sergeant Jefferson McClure, one of the two Harrington Steading armsmen Andrew LaFollet had finally chosen to reinforce Honor's personal detail. Nimitz rode on Honor's shoulder, and even the spacious lift car felt more than a little crowded.

"That's hard to say, Rafe," Honor replied, after a moment. The long-awaited courier from Aivars Terekhov and Augustus Khumalo had finally arrived the day before, with news of Terekhov's crushing victory over the Monican Navy. And of the horrific price his hastily organized squadron had paid for it.

"It's pretty obvious," she continued after a moment, "that at least some Sollies had to be in on this up to their necks. The Solarian Navy doesn't just 'lose' more than a dozen modern battlecruisers."

"You think the League Navy was directly involved?" Cardones was more than a little worried by the thought, and Honor didn't blame him.

"Not the Navy as such." She shook her head. "I'm more inclined to think it was some rogue element within the Navy, or else some private interest, one of their big builders, like Technodyne or General Industries of Terra. Either of them could have provided the ships, if they'd been willing to run some risks, although I'd bet on Technodyne, given their involvement with Mesa at Tiberian. We won't know who it was for certain for quite a while, though. Admiral O'Malley's detachment won't even get there for another four days, and until he arrives, Terekhov and Khumalo are going to have all they can do just to keep the system nailed down. They certainly aren't going to be able to start conducting any investigations."

Cardones nodded thoughtfully, and she gave a small shrug.

"On the other hand, Frontier Security must have signed off on this operation, at least unofficially," she pointed out. "Without assurance of OFS support, this President Tyler would never have run the level of risk he was prepared to court. Not only that, I can't see Mesa providing this kind of logistical and financial support unless they were pretty darn certain one of their pet Frontier Security commissioners was going to back their play.

"Probably the question comes down mainly to how quickly their OFS stooges can react. If they can get in before O'Malley gets there, they might have enough locally deployed firepower to force Khumalo and Terekhov out of Monica. If they can't get themselves organized quickly enough of that, though, I don't think they're going to want to tangle with his task force. And if they blink, the longer they delay a counterattack, the less likely they are to be able to mount one at all. So I'm actually reasonably confident that if they haven't hit us by the time O'Malley gets into position, they won't. Not unless somebody on their side screws up by the numbers."