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Whatever might have been true in Manticore's case, however, New Tuscany had offered fertile soil for the standard Mesan techniques, and until Manticore had become involved in the Talbott Cluster, Metcalf hadn't had anything more important to do than to polish his network. Which meant Taliadoros was almost certainly correct—Anisimovna probably was better informed about what was happening throughout the New Tuscany System than Prime Minister Vézien. Quite possibly even better informed than Damien Dusserre, for that matter, although she'd have been less willing to wager on that possibility.
"You're probably right, though," she continued out loud. "It's more likely that Vézien is doublechecking his information before passing it on than it is that he's deliberately trying to keep us in the dark."
Taliadoros nodded again, and Anisimovna flowed to her feet. She padded barefoot to the terrace wall, gazing out across New Tuscany's capital for a few more moments of thought. Then she turned back to her bodyguard.
"I think it's time that I be very carefully sitting here doing absolutely nothing suspicious," she said. "And if I'm here, you have to be here. I think it would probably be a good idea to close down any private communications cha
"Yes, Ma'am. And Ambassador Metcalf has doublechecked the communications relay. Even if anyone detected it, there's no way it could be traced back to us."
"I like a positive mindset, Kyrillos, but my own recent experience leaves me disinclined to take anything for granted."
"Of course, Ma'am."
"All right, then," she said. "Go and make sure we aren't talking to anyone Mr. Dusserre's eavesdroppers can't listen in on. Wouldn't want him getting any nasty suspicions about why we might be trying to evade him, after all. And while you're doing that," she smiled, "I think I'll go have a shower and a pre-supper martini."
"I don't believe this shit," Commodore Ray Chatterjee muttered as he studied the icons on the plot being driven by the recon platforms he'd sent in-system ahead of himself. "How the hell did these people get here, and what the hell are they doing here?"
"I don't know, Sir," Lieutenant Commander Lori Olson, his operations officer, said quietly. "Right off the top of my head, though, I doubt it's anything we'd be happy about if we did know."
"You've got that right," Chatterjee agreed grimly.
He sat back in his command chair, his expression even grimmer than his tone had been, and thought hard.
When he and Ambassador Corvisart had been sent off to New Tuscany, no one had counted on this. So just what were the two of them supposed to do when they found seventeen Solarian battlecruisers and five of their destroyers parked in orbit around the planet?
This stinks to high heaven, he thought. The only question is whether or not the Sollies know they're part of whatever the New Tuscans are up to . . . and I've got a bad feeling about that. I suppose it's at least remotely possible the Sollies don't know, but they'd have to be dumber than rocks not to realize the New Tuscans were trying to play them. Not that I haven't known a few Sollies who were dumber than rocks. Strange how that's not a very comforting reflection at the moment.
"Contact the Ambassador, Jason," he said to Commander Jason Wright, his chief of staff. "Ask her to join us in my briefing room. Then get hold of Captain DesMoines and ask him to join you, me, and the Ambassador."
"Yes, Sir."
"Yes, Mr. Prime Minister?" Anisimovna said pleasantly, raising one eyebrow at the view screen while she swirled ice gently in her martini glass. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
"I thought you'd like to know that we've just been notified that three Manticoran destroyers or light cruisers have entered the system. They're headed for New Tuscany right now. We expect them to reach parking orbit within the next three hours."
"Indeed?" Anisimovna allowed her eyes to narrow with exactly the correct degree of sudden speculation as she leaned forward to set her glass on the edge of the coffee table in front of her. "I hardly expected them so soon, Mr. Prime Minister. Are all of our . . . special assets in place?"
"We're getting plenty of emissions and other data off them from the new platforms," Vézien assured her, although she suspected he was rather less confident than he chose to appear. "Minister of War Pélisard is in contact with Admiral Guédon right now. She says she's confident of capturing enough data for us to . . . massage however we have to for the Sollies' consumption. My only concern is having Byng right here in-system already." He shook his head and allowed a hint of concern to creep into his expression. "I wish he hadn't been in such a tearing hurry to get here!"
"I understand, Mr. Prime Minister." Anisimovna gave him a wry smile. "I never expected Commissioner Verrochio to respond so promptly to our first note, either. After all, Sollies never do things in a hurry—that's one of the things the rest of us dislike about them so much. Does Admiral Guédon expect to be able to work around them?"
"Probably." Vézien puffed his cheeks for a moment. "Nicholas—I mean, Minister Pélisard—seems to feel fairly confident of that, at any rate. But if the Sollies make a close comparison between the data their own sensors are undoubtedly recording right this minute and the 'incidents' we're going to be sending them shortly, they could very well spot the stuff we're recording right now when they see it again later."
"Oh, I wouldn't worry too much about that, Mr. Prime Minister." Anisimovna's smile turned wolflike. "Admiral Byng is sufficiently unfond of the Manties to overlook any inconvenient little problems, and Commissioner Verrochio and his staff are already primed to do exactly that, as well. All we need is something that's remotely plausible for anyone who doesn't have access to the data you're capturing at the moment."
"What do you make of them, Ingeborg?" Josef Byng asked, standing with his hands clasped behind him as he studied the enormous master plot on SLNS Jean Bart's flag bridge.
"Preliminary reports are still coming in, Sir," Captain Ingeborg Aberu, Byng's operations officer, replied. She looked up from her own console for a moment and grimaced as her eyes met Byng's, as if to ask what else could be expected from a combat information center ma
"From what we have so far, though," she continued, "it looks like three light cruisers. They're headed in-system. We believe they've already burst-transmitted to the local government, but they haven't squawked their transponders, so we don't have any definitive IDs just yet. Under the circumstances, though, I don't think there's much doubt who they belong to, Sir."
"Ballsy of them, Admiral," Karlotte Thimár observed. Byng looked at her, and the chief of staff shrugged. "I mean bringing it straight to New Tuscany this way. That's a bit of an escalation from harassing the New Tuscans' shipping in someplace like this Pequod System."
"From 'harassing,' maybe, Karlotte," Byng replied. "But from firing on and destroying an unarmed merchantship going about her lawful business?" His jaw muscles tightened. No one in Meyers before his departure for New Tuscany, not even he, had dreamed the situation could have escalated that rapidly out here, or that even the Manties would be that blatant about their behavior, and he felt a fresh wave of righteous anger go through him. "I think what we're seeing here is a direct progression of the kind of crap they've been pulling all along," he continued. "I think they've decided to come turn the screws on the New Tuscan government in its own backyard!"