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"Commodore," she said slowly, "is there something I ought to know?"
Seventeen more seconds passed, and then the arctic blue eyes on her com display widened ever so slightly, as if in surprise. Then they narrowed again, and he nodded.
"Yes, Milady, I suppose there is," he said quietly. "I'd rather assumed you'd have received Admiral Khumalo's dispatches about it, though. I suppose they must have passed you in transit."
He paused, clearly suggesting that perhaps the vice admiral would prefer to tell her about whatever it was in person, and Michelle snorted. If he thought she was going to sit around on her posterior waiting for the pe
"I'm sure Admiral Khumalo and I will be discussing a lot of things, Commodore," she said just a bit tartly."In the meantime, however, why don't you go ahead and tell me about it?"
"Yes, Milady," he said again, seventeen seconds later, and drew a visible breath and squared his shoulders ever so slightly. "I'm afraid we received dispatches from the home system just over three T-weeks ago. The news isn't good. According to Admiral Caparelli, the Havenites attacked in overwhelming strength. From all appearances, Theisman and Pritchart must have decided to put everything on one throw of the dice after what happened to the Havenites at Lovett and go for an outright knockout blow before we could get Apollo into full deployment. We stopped them, but we got—both sides got—hit really hard. According to the follow-up reports we've received since, it looks like—"
Chapter Thirty-Eight
"I'm not happy about this, Maxime," Damien Dusserre said. "I'm not happy about it at all."
"I don't think you see me doing handsprings of joy about it, either, do you?" Prime Minister Maxime Vézien shot back tartly.
"Damn it, I knew this whole thing looked too good to be true from the very begi
Vézien felt a powerful urge to punch the security minister squarely in the nose, but he suppressed it easily enough. First, because the younger, larger, stronger, and physically much tougher Dusserre would probably have proceeded to remove the Prime Minister's limbs one at a time, with the maximum possible amount of discomfort. But secondly, and even more to the point, because Dusserre was, indeed, the one member of the Vézien Government who had consistently voiced his reservations about the entire operation.
Which didn't keep him from going ahead and signing off on it, anyway, Vézien thought rather snappishly. Maybe he didn't like it, but I didn't see him coming up with any better ideas!
Actually, as Vézien was well aware in his calmer moments, one of the reasons he was so easily pissed off with his Security Minister these days was that Damien Dusserre was Andrieaux Yvernau's brother-in-law. It was Yvernau's brilliant strategy at the Constitutional Convention which had gotten the entire New Tuscany System into the Star Empire of Manticore's black books in the first place, and Vézien couldn't quite suppress the ignoble urge to vent his frustration on Yvernau's relatives. And he could at least tell himself there was some justification in it, given the fact that it was Yvernau's family co
Yes, there is, he reflected. But the truth is, as you're perfectly well aware, Max, whether you want to admit it, that even though Yvernau is an idiot, not even a genius could have come up with a good strategy once those parliamentary bastards back in Manticore got up on their high horse and started bleating about "repressive local régimes" here in the Cluster. And having that bitch Medusa in the driver's seat didn't help one damned thing, either. If we'd only realized where all of this was going to go when that son-of-a-bitch Van Dort came around selling us on what a gold mine that whole damned a
"I know you've had reservations, Damien," he said out loud instead of the considerably more cutting (and satisfying) responses which flickered through his head. "Unfortunately, reservations or no, we're where we are, not where we might want to be. So why don't we both just go ahead and admit that neither of us is happy about the situation and then do what we can to make the best of it?"
Dusserre gave him a sour look, but then the Security Minister drew a deep breath and nodded.
"You're right," he acknowledged.
"Good."
Vézien tilted back in his comfortable chair and gazed up through the office's huge skylight. That skylight was one of the Prime Minister's favorite perks, one that offered refreshment and energy whenever the weight of his high political office crushed down upon him. It wasn't a view screen, wasn't an artificial image gathered from remote cameras. It was an actual, honest to God skylight, almost three meters on a side. Its thermal-barrier smart glass panes automatically configured themselves to filter sunlight, and then, under other conditions, seemed almost to disappear entirely. When it rained, the sound of the raindrops—from a gentle patter to a hard, driving rhythm—filled the office with a soothing sense of natural energy. When lightning rumbled about the heavens, he could watch God's artillery flashing in mist-walled valleys among cloudy mountains. And when it was night, he could look up through it to moon-struck cloud chasms or the clear, awesome vista of the distant stars burning so far above him.
At the moment, unfortunately, the sight of those stars was much less soothing than usual.
"Do you have the feeling, Damien," he asked slowly after several seconds, "that Ms. Anisimovna is privy to information the rest of us haven't received yet?"
"I've always felt she was working to an agenda and a set of instructions we didn't know anything about—and that she wasn't about to tell us anything about, either." Dusserre sounded almost surprised by the question, as if its answer was so painfully self-evident he couldn't quite believe the Prime Minister had asked it.
"That's not what I asked." Vézien lowered his eyes from the skylight to gaze at the other man instead of the stars. "Of course we don't know what her real instructions are, and, of course, she's not going to tell us. We wouldn't tell her everything if our positions were reversed, either, would we? But what bothers me at the moment is that I have the oddest feeling that she knows more about a lot of things than we do." He frowned, seeking the words to more clearly explain what he was getting at. "I mean about things the rest of the galaxy is going to find out about in due time but doesn't know about yet," he said. "Things—news stories, events—that no one here on New Tuscany's even heard about yet that she's already factoring into her plans."
Dusserre looked back at him for several seconds, then snorted.
"I'll grant you the woman is fiendishly clever, Max. And I'll also point out that she's receiving regular messages via private dispatch boats from Mesa and God knows where else, whereas we're basically dependent on the news services—which don't exactly see us as one of their red-hot bureau depots—to find out what's going on anywhere else in the galaxy. So, yes, she probably does know quite a few things we haven't found out about yet. But let's not talk ourselves into thinking she's some kind of sorceress, all right? It's bad enough that we don't have much choice but to dance with her and let her lead without our deciding she somehow magically controls the orchestra's choice of music, as well!"
Vézien grimaced, but he also let the point drop. His initial question had been at least partly whimsical, after all. Still, though . . . Try as he might, he couldn't quite shake that feeling—that . . . intuition, perhaps—that Aldona Anisimovna was always at least a couple of jumps ahead of anyone else in the New Tuscany System, and he didn't much care for the sensation.