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Manticore had declined to be absorbed. In fact, it had resisted so strongly and successfully—and had embraced so many military i
The thing that makes it so damned irritating, Albrecht reflected, is that everything else is going so well. In a lot of ways, Manticore and Haven shouldn't matter a fart in a windstorm, given their limited size and how far away they are. Unfortunately, not only are they both likely to grow nothing but bigger and stronger if we don't take steps, but the wormhole network gives Manticore the ability to reach almost any part of the Solarian League quickly, in theory, at least. And they aren't really that damned far away from us, either. Talbott is bad enough in normal-space terms, but the entire Manty home fleet is only sixty light-years—and two junction transits—away from Mesa by way of Beowulf. And the Manties keep right on introducing new pieces of hardware at the most inconvenient times. Not to mention pushing the damned Havenites into following their lead!
"I don't think we want to abandon the onion at this particular moment," he said finally. Benjamin started to say something more, then closed his mouth and nodded, accepting the decision, and Albrecht smiled at him.
"I understand that you're thinking about our internal arrangements and the way we compartmentalize information and operations, not the face we present to the galaxy at large, Ben," he said. "And I'm not saying I disagree with you in theory. In fact, I don't disagree with you in practice, either. It's just a matter of timing. We've always intended to bring the entire Strategy Council fully inside well before we actually push the button, after all. It may well be that we need to reconsider our decision trees and pull that moment further forward, too. I don't want to do that precipitously, without considering all of the implications—and without carefully considering which of the Council members might pose additional security risks—but I'm perfectly willing to concede that this is something we should be looking at very seriously."
"I'm glad to hear you say that, Father," Collin Detweiler said. Albrecht glanced at him, and Collin smiled a bit crookedly. "I think Ben feels his shoes pinching a bit harder than the rest of us because his emphasis is so much on the military side of things. But I have to say that my toes are feeling a little squeezed, too."
"They are?"
"Oh, yes." Collin shook his head. "I'm glad you've at least let me bring Bardasano most of the way inside. That makes coordinating covert ops a lot simpler and cleaner. But that's not quite the same thing as making them easy and efficient, and now that we're ramping up to the main event, its inconvenient as hell when the only person I've been allowed to bring that far inside has to spend so much of her time hundreds of light-years away."
"How serious a problem is that, really?" Albrecht asked, his eyes narrowing intensely.
"So far, it hasn't been all that bad," Collin admitted. "It's cumbersome, of course. And to be perfectly honest, the need to keep coming up with convincing rationales for why we're doing some of the things we're doing can get pretty exhausting. I'm talking about internal rationales, for the people we actually have doing them. You don't want idiots pla
"Daniel?" Albrecht looked at the third younger man. "What about your side of things?"
"It doesn't really matter very much one way or the other from where I sit, Father," Daniel Detweiler replied. "Unlike Benjamin and Collin, Everett and I have been openly involved with our R and D programs all along, and no one questions how thoroughly we compartmentalize on that side. Obviously, everyone knows some R and D has to be kept 'black,' and that helps a lot from our perspective. We can set up quiet little projects whenever we feel like it, and no one asks very many questions. At the same time, I have to agree with Collin that bringing Bardasano this far inside has been a considerable help, even for us. We can use her to handle the security on anything we need kept really well hidden while we get on with the business of coordinating the programs themselves. It would help if we could bring people like Kyprianou all the way in, though."
Albrecht nodded slowly. Renzo Kyprianou was in charge of bio-weapons research and development and a member of the Mesan Strategy Council. At the moment, however, not even the Strategy Council knew everything the Alignment was up to.
Not surprisingly, I suppose, he mused, given that the Alignment's always been so much of a . . . family business.
His lips twitched in an almost-smile at the thought, and he wondered how many members of the Strategy Council had figured out just how close he truly was to his "sons."
The official demise of the Detweiler line had been part of the strategy designed to divert the galaxy's—and especially Beowulf's—attention from Leonard Detweiler's determination to uplift human genetics in general. The Detweilers had been too strongly and fiercely devoted to that goal for too long, and the apparent—and spectacular—assassination of the "last" Detweiler heir by greedy elements on the Manpower Incorporated board of directors had punctuated the fact that the increasingly criminal Mesans no longer shared that lofty aspiration. It had also served to get Leonard's descendants safely beneath anyone else's radar, of course, but its most useful function had been to help explain and justify Mesa's switch to the full-bore exploitation of genetic slavery by Manpower. The steady, ongoing improvement of the alignment's own genomes had been buried under Manpower's R&D programs and camouflaged as little more than surface improvements in physical beauty.
But whatever the rest of humanity might have thought, the Detweiler line was far from extinct. In fact, the Detweiler genome was one of the—if not the—most improved within the entire Alignment. And Albrecht Detweiler's "sons" were also his genetic clones. Bardasano, for one, he felt certain, had figured that out, despite how closely held a secret it was supposed to be. It was possible Kyprianou had, as well, given how closely he worked with Daniel. For that matter, Jerome Sandusky might cherish a few suspicions of his own, not that any of that trio was going to breathe a word of any such suspicions to anyone else.
"All right," he said. "As soon as Everett, Franklin, and Gervais get back to Mesa, we'll all sit down and discuss this. As I say, my only reservation has to do with the timing. We all know we're getting close—very close—and I don't want last-minute impatience to push us into making a wrong decision at this point."
"None of us want that, Father," Benjamin agreed, and the other two nodded. Taking the time to think things through had always been a fundamental principle of the Alignment's operational pla
"Good. In the meantime, though, what's your impression of Anisimovna and Bardasano's report?"