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"Yes, Ma'am."
"Good. And now," Michelle drew a deep breath and turned her attention to Edwards, "I suppose it's time I did my duty and checked in with our hosts personally. And, of course," she smiled without any humor at all, "with our fellow visitors to this pleasant little corner of the universe. Please raise the Monican port admiral for me, Bill."
"Yes, Ma'am."
The conversation with Rear Admiral Jane Garcia, Monica Traffic Control's senior officer, went rather better than Michelle had anticipated.
Garcia didn't even attempt to pretend she was happy to see Michelle's battlecruisers, for which Michelle couldn't blame her. Having been a prisoner of war herself, she had a better appreciation than many Manticoran officers might have of just how bitter a pill it must have been to see the destruction of virtually Monica's entire navy. Undoubtedly a great many of Garcia's personal friends—quite probably family members, as well, given the way military service tended to run in families in most star nations—had been killed along the way. And however much Manticore might have regarded Monica as a corrupt, venal tool of Frontier Security, the Union was Garcia's star nation. Its ignominious surrender, and the fashion in which Manticore had dictated peace terms afterward, could only have made Garcia's anger worse.
Despite that, the other woman's demeanor had been crisp and professional. Although she hadn't welcomed Michelle to Monica, she'd been surprisingly courteous otherwise. Her lips might have tightened just a moment when Michelle asked her to pass her compliments to President Tyler, but she'd nodded almost naturally, then asked if Michelle had any pressing service requirements.
With that out of the way, unfortunately, Michelle no longer had any excuse for not contacting theSolarian senior officer. Fortunately, Garcia had volunteered the Solly's name.
"All right, Bill," Michelle sighed. "Go ahead and raise Admiral Byng's flagship. I suppose—"
"Just a minute, Ma'am," Cynthia Lecter interrupted respectfully. Michelle paused and looked at her chief of staff, one eyebrow arched, and Lecter nodded towards the display in front of her at her own command station.
"I've just been looking at ONI's records, Ma'am," she said. "I punched in Admiral Byng's name, and it looks like I got a direct hit."
"Really?"
Both of Michelle's eyes rose in surprise. The Office of Naval Intelligence did its best to keep track of the senior perso
"I think so, at any rate," Lecter replied. "It's always possible they have more than one Admiral Josef Byng, I suppose."
"Given the size of their damned navy?" Michelle snorted. "I'd say the odds were pretty good, actually." She shrugged. "Well, go ahead and shoot me whatever you've found."
"Yes, Ma'am."
The entry which appeared on Michelle's display a moment later was surprisingly long. For reasons which became depressingly clear as she skimmed through it.
The file imagery showed a tall, aristocratic-looking man with chestnut hair, just starting to go gray at the temples, and sharp blue eyes. He had a strong chin and sported a bristling mustache and a neatly trimmed goatee. Indeed, he looked every centimeter the complete professional naval officer in his immaculately tailored dress whites.
The biographical synopsis which went with that sharp, taut imagery, however, was . . . less aesthetically pleasing.
"It says here he's a Battle Fleet officer," Michelle said aloud, and even to herself, her tone sounded plaintive, like someone protesting that there surely had to be some sort of mistake.
"I know, Ma'am." Lecter looked profoundly unhappy.
"I hope—oh, how I hope—that either you've got the wrong man or else this is just a very unhappy coincidence," Michelle said, and Lecter nodded.
In many ways, Josef Byng was a typical product of the SLN, according to the ONI file. He came from a family which had been providing senior officers to the League Navy for the better part of seven hundred T-years; he'd graduated from the naval academy on Old Terra; and he'd gone directly into Battle Fleet, which was far more prestigious than Frontier Fleet. He was a second-generation prolong recipient who was just over a T-century old, and he'd been an admiral for the last thirty-two T-years. Unlike the Royal Manticoran Navy, the SLN had not developed the habit of routinely rotating senior officers in and out of fleet command to keep them current both operationally and administratively, and it looked as if Byng (or his family) had possessed sufficient pull to keep him in what were at least technically space-going commands for virtually his entire flag career.
That didn't mean as much in Battle Fleet as it might have in other navies, given the huge percentage of Battle Fleet's wall which spent virtually all of its time in what the SLN euphemistically referred to as "Ready Reserve Status." It was quite possible for an admiral to spend several T-years in command of a squadron of superdreadnoughts, accruing the seniority—and drawing the pay—which went with that assignment, while the superdreadnoughts in question simply went right on floating around in their mothballed parking orbits without a single soul on board.
What was much more interesting to Michelle at the moment, however, was the fact that fifty-nine T-years ago, a young, up-and-coming Captain Josef Byng had been officially reprimanded—and moved back two hundred names on the seniority list—for harassing Manticoran shipping interests.
Her skimming eyes slowed down as she reread that particular portion of the entry again, and she grimaced. Despite the ONI analyst's dry, rather pedantic writing style, it was easy enough to read between the lines. Captain Byng had clearly been one of those Solly officers who regarded neobarbs—like Manticorans—as two or three steps below chimpanzees on the evolutionary tree. It also appeared that his wealthy and aristocratic family (although, of course, Old Terra didn't have an aristocracy . . . officially) was deeply involved in interstellar commerce.
It was common enough in Manticore for families involved in the Star Kingdom's vast shipping industry to provide officers for the Navy, as well, and Michelle was perfectly well aware that more than one of those officers had used and abused her authority in her family's interest. When the RMN became aware of those instances of abuse, however, it usually took action. On those rare occasions—which no longer occurred with anything like the frequency they once had—when the officer involved had proved too well co
That, unfortunately, was not the case in the Solarian League, where cronyism and the abuse of power were both common and accepted. Especially in the Shell and the Verge, officers with "comfortable" relationships with the local OFS structure routinely used their positions to feather their own nests or promote their own interests. Captain Byng had obviously seen no reason why he shouldn't do the same thing, but his harassment had been far more blatant than most. He'd gone so far as to impound three Manticoran freighters on trumped up smuggling charges, and the crew of one of them had spent almost two T-years in prison without ever even being given the opportunity to face a judge.