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"This," Carmichael continued, indicating the chip folio, "contains complete sensor records of what occurred. At Foreign Secretary Langtry's instructions, I've reviewed them personally, with the assistance of Captain Deangelo, my naval attaché. While I'm obviously less qualified in these matters than Admiral Webster was—or, for that matter, than Captain Deangelo is—I believe they clearly demonstrate the background circumstances, the sequence of events, and their outcome."
He paused for just a moment, letting what he'd already said settle in, then drew a deep breath.
"Minister," he said slowly, "I'm afraid we find ourselves facing the very real probability of a direct military confrontation between the Solarian League and the Star Empire of Manticore. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that we've already had one."
Despite Roelas y Valiente's best efforts, his facial muscles twitched and his nostrils flared. Aside from that, however, there might have been a marble statue seated in his chair.
"Just under one month ago, on October twenty-first," Carmichael continued, "in the system of New Tuscany, three Manticoran destroyers—"
"Jesus Christ," I
"Which one?" Nathan MacArtney asked dryly. "Byng? Prime Minister Vézien? That Manticoran klutz—what's-his-name . . . Chatterjee, or whatever? Or one of the other assorted Manticoran idiots involved in handing us something like this?"
"Any of them—all of them!" Kolokoltsov snarled. He glared down at the note for a few more incandescent seconds, then flipped it angrily—and contemptuously—onto the deck of the third member of their little group.
"I admit none of them seem to have exactly covered themselves with glory," Omosupe Quartermain observed with a grimace, picking up the discarded note as if he'd deposited a small, several-days-dead rodent in the middle of her blotter, "but I wouldn't have believed even Manties could be stupid enough to hand us something like this!"
"And why not?" Malachai Abruzzi demanded with an even more disgusted grimace. "They've been getting progressively more uppity for years now—ever since they managed to extort that frigging 'technology embargo' against Haven out of your people, Omosupe."
Quartermain gave him a moderately scathing look, but she didn't deny his analysis. None of them did, and Kolokoltsov forced himself to step back and consider the present situation as dispassionately as he could.
None of the four people in Quartermain's office had ever stood for election in his or her life, yet they represented the true government of the Solarian League, and they knew it. Kolokoltsov was the permanent senior undersecretary for foreign affairs. McCartney was the permanent senior undersecretary of the interior; Quartermain was the permanent senior undersecretary of commerce; and Abruzzi was the permanent senior undersecretary of information. The only missing member of the quintet which dominated the Solarian League's sprawling bureaucracy was Agatá Wodoslawski, the permanent senior undersecretary of the treasury, who was out-system at the moment, representing the League at a conference on Beowulf. No doubt she would have expressed her own disgust as vehemently as her colleagues if she'd been present, and equally no doubt, she was going to be more than moderately pissed off at having missed this meeting, Kolokoltsov reflected.
Unfortunately, she was just going to have to live with whatever her four colleagues decided in her absence. And they were going to have to decide something, he thought sourly. It came with the territory, since—as every true insider thoroughly understood—it was the five of them who actually ran the Solarian League . . . whatever the majority of the Solarian electorate might fondly imagine. Politicians came and went, changing in an ever shifting shadow play whose sole function was to disguise the fact that the voters' impact on the League's policies ranged somewhere from minute to totally nonexistent.
There were moments, although they were extraordinarily infrequent, when Kolokoltsov almost—almost—regretted that fact. It would have been extremely inconvenient for the lifestyle to which he had become accustomed, of course, and the consequences for his personal and family wealth would have been severe. Still, it would have been nice to be part of a governing structure that wielded direct, overt authority rather than skulking about in the shadows. Even if they were extraordinarily lucrative and luxurious shadows.
"All right," he said out loud, and twitched his shoulders in something that wasn't quite a shrug. "We're all agreed they're idiots. The question is what we do about it."
"Shouldn't we have Rajampet—or at least Kingsford—in here for this?" MacArtney asked.
"Rajampet's not available," Kolokoltsov replied. "Or, not for a face-to-face meeting, at any rate. And do you really want to be discussing this with anyone electronically, Nathan?"
"No," MacArtney said after a moment, his expression thoughtful. "No, I don't believe I do, I
"That's what I thought." Kolokoltsov smiled thinly. "We probably could get Kingsford in here if we really wanted to. But given how close all of those 'First Families of Battle Fleet' are, he's not likely to be what you might call a disinterested expert, now is he? Besides, what do you really think he could offer at this point that we don't already have from the damned Manties?"
MacArtney grimaced in understanding. So did the others, although Quartermain's sour expression was even more disgruntled than than anyone else's. She'd spent twenty T-years with the Kalokainos Line before she'd entered the ranks of the federal bureaucracy. The others had spent their professional lives dealing with the often arthritic flow of information over interstellar distances, and all of them had amassed far too much experience of the need to wait for reports and the dispatches to make their lengthy, snaillike way to the League's capital planet. But there was more to it for Quartermain, especially this time around. Her earlier private-sector experience—not to mention her current public-sector responsibilities—had all too often brought her nose-to-nose with the Star Kingdom of Manticore's dominance of the wormhole network that moved both data and commerce about the galaxy. She was more accustomed than the others to dealing with the consequences of how that dominance put Manticore inside the loop of the League's communications and carrying trade, and she didn't like it a bit.
In this instance, however, all of them were unpleasantly aware that it was going to take much longer for any message traffic from the League's own representatives in the vicinity of the Talbott Sector to reach them. Which meant that at the moment all they had to go on was the content of the Manticorans' "note" and the sensor data they had provided.
"And how much credence do we want to place in anything the Manties have to say?" Quartermain demanded sourly, as if she'd been following Kolokoltsov's thoughts right along with him.
"Let's not get too paranoid, Omosupe," Abruzzi said dryly. She glowered at him, and he shrugged. "I'm not saying I'd put it past them to . . . tweak the information, let's say. But they're not really idiots, you know. Lunatics, maybe, yes, if they actually mean what they've said in this note, but not idiots. Sooner or later we're going to have access to Byng's version of the data. You know that, and so do they. Do you really think they'd falsify the data they've already given us knowing that eventually we'll be able to check it with our own sources?"
"Sure they would," Quartermain retorted, her dark-complexioned face tight with intense dislike. "Hell, I shouldn't have to tell you that, Malachai! You know better than anyone else how much the successful manipulation of a political situation depends on manipulating the public version of information."