CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“I’m telling you, it’s all true!” the red-faced man’s hologram shouted. “There’s a ship, loaded with survivors, in transit to the Viktrix System by way of Alramal. If you can get there in time—”
“I understand your urgency, Agent Kortnev,” Murphy interrupted. “I do. But this isn’t a decision I can make lightly.”
“—you can prevent a horrible miscarriage of justice!” Trent Kortnev continued.
At the moment, he and the free trader MacMillan were 3,800,000 kilometers from Ishtar, which imposed a one-way communications delay of almost fourteen seconds, but he seemed unaware of the protocol which required one end of the conversation to pause and give the other end an opportunity to respond.
“All of those people are Federation citizens,” he went on, “and the only one who could possibly prevent this from happening to them is you, Admiral. They don’t have any idea that rescue’s even possible, but surely they’ve already been through enough! It’s not as if—”
“I’m speaking, Agent Kortnev,” Murphy said sharply, and cut the incoming audio. Then he stood back, arms folded, watching the other man’s mouth move for twenty-eight seconds until Kortnev stopped talking and closed it abruptly.
“Thank you,” he said then, and exhaled a long, slow sigh.
He and the rest of his key staff were on Ishtar’s flag bridge. The big FTLC was forty-three light-minutes from the system primary, en route to Brigit, New Dublin’s ringed gas giant, as part of O’Hanraghty’s surprise exercise. She was slated to play the Aggressor role, coming in from the outer system at a high velocity, and her current position put her fifty-one light-minutes from Crann Bethadh and the rest of TF 1705.
MacMillan, a bit smaller even than Papsukkal, was inbound, decelerating at just under eleven hundred gravities out beyond the stellar Powell Limit. Her current velocity relative to the primary was down to about ten percent of light-speed whereas Ishtar was moving almost twice that fast, but the two starships were on widely diverging vectors which slowed their closing velocity considerably. MacMillan would reach her closest approach at roughly nine light-seconds in another seven minutes. After that, the range would begin to open once more.
It had taken MacMillan a long time to identify Ishtar—or for the free trader’s skipper to be willing to allow his passenger to communicate with a capital ship of the Terran Federation Navy, at least—but Kortnev had contacted the FTLC twenty minutes earlier.
Murphy glanced at the bulkhead time display. Ishtar had sent a flash priority message to Tara City as soon as Kortnev delivered his initial report, but it wouldn’t reach Crann Bethadh for another thirty-one minutes. He considered that for a moment, then turned back to the holo display.
“This is very unsettling news, Agent,” he said. “You’re asking me to leave this system for unregulated space and expose New Dublin to a League assault in my absence.”
He paused, waiting. The range had fallen to only twelve light-seconds, and twenty-four seconds later, Kortnev raised a pleading hand into the field of his visual pickups.
“But think of the lives, Admiral.” He wiped his mouth. “The people of Inverness suffered enough from the League attack, and now they’re being carted off to slavery by savages from beyond the blue line. You can’t just sit here and let them slip away into a nightmare future like that! I—”
He cut himself off and shook his head, staring imploringly from the holo.
Murphy leaned against the command ring beneath the holo projection and looked over his shoulder.
“O’Hanraghty, thoughts?” he said.
“Kortnev did bring a fair amount of supporting intelligence with him, Sir,” the XO said. “I’ve been examining the material he burst-transmitted to us, and there’s more substance to it than I really expected. It’s not like we’re just taking his word for it.” He shook his head. “Imagine that. I’m actually suggesting it might make sense to leave the system based on trust in the word of Federation Intelligence.”
“I’ll try not to have a heart attack,” Murphy said dryly. He looked back at the display. “Do you have any additional intelligence, beyond what you’ve already sent us, Agent?”
“It’s all in my report,” Kortnev said twenty seconds later. “But I’ve been beyond the line for almost two years. My network is well developed, and—”
Murphy muted the sound again with the swipe of a finger and looked at the display tied into Ishtar’s command deck.
“Captain Lowe, assuming I decide to buy into this wild-goose chase, how long until we could wormhole out on a heading to Alramal?”
“Commander Creuzburg’s been working the numbers, Sir,” the flag captain replied. “It’s fortunate that we’re already well beyond the Powell Limit. At eighteen hundred gravities, we’d hit the supralight threshold in about three-point-eight hours. We’d have to bend our vector, but that’s a more than sufficient window. And it’s a bit less than twelve and a half light-years to Alramal. We could be there in five days, if we push it a bit in wormhole space.”
“I see.”
Murphy nodded and glanced at O’Hanraghty. Silas’s numbers had been spot on for MacMillan’s arrival vector, although the free trader had arrived several hours after his most pessimistic ETA. It didn’t matter. In fact, it helped, because it meant Ishtar was farther into the “surprise exercise”…and even farther from Crann Bethadh, with a commensurately longer communications lag.
“We have Romania, Kenya, and Russia on the racks,” O’Hanraghty said. “With Commodore Granger added to the system defenses and Foch and Patton back in service, we wouldn’t make that big a hole in the heavy hitters, Admiral.”
“Which will be cold comfort if they hit New Dublin while we’re gone and we didn’t leave enough,” Murphy pointed out.
“No, Sir, but he does have a point about what’ll happen to those people—assuming his info’s good—if somebody doesn’t do something about it. And at least the exercise plan put Fury on the Number Six rack. She and her fighters will be a lot more useful than another battleship would be if we have to cover any appreciable volume.”
“That’s true,” Murphy acknowledged. “But if the League’s present in Alramal in strength—”
“I don’t think that’s very likely, Sir,” Captain Lowe offered from the display. “Alramal’s a freehold system. Doesn’t belong to either side. Might be a carrier passing through from time to time, but not ‘in strength.’ And if we delay to pull in any more of the battleships, we’ll be cutting the window Agent Kortnev gave us really close. If we leave now—right now—we should arrive about twelve hours before his earliest ETA for the slaver. By the time we decelerate, build a vector back to Crann Bethadh, and redistribute, then accelerate back out on the right vector to Alramal, we’ll lose that entire margin plus some.”
“He’s right about that, Sir,” O’Hanraghty said.
“I don’t like being rushed this way,” Murphy muttered, then inhaled deeply. “But you’re both right, of course.”
He glanced at the time display again with an intent, frowning expression that hid a bubble of internal glee. It was the middle of the night in Tara City. In twenty-three more minutes, Ishtar’s first transmission would reach Crann Bethadh and Andy Lipshen would find himself dragged out of bed to view it. At which point, he would undoubtedly begin feverishly planning to either abort any venture beyond the blue line or at least make sure he came along to keep an eye on things. But any message from him, would take almost an hour to reach Ishtar, and any response from Murphy would take another fifty minutes to get back to him. Which meant Ishtar would wormhole out for Alramal ten minutes before Lipshen got it.
At which point, he thought blissfully, the true frothing would begin.
He looked back at Kortnev’s image. The man’s mouth was moving again—or, really, moving still—and Murphy unmuted him.
“—on my honor as an agent of the Federation,” the man was saying. “I swear that the intelligence comes with the highest level of confidence. And, of course, I’ll personally accompany you. That’s only right, since it’s my information which would be taking you into possible danger.” He paused and raised his chin slightly.
“That’s quite an endorsement,” Murphy said. “I’ve looked at the math, however, and I’m afraid your ship can’t rendezvous with Ishtar before we wormhole. Not if we’re going to make Alramal in the window you’ve given us.”
The inevitable transmission lag intervened. Then—
“But…but this is my operation!”
“It’s your information.” Murphy rapped a knuckle against the command ring. “It’ll be our operation. And just in case we arrive at Alramal and discover it’s a trap, I think you’d better surrender yourself to the local system authorities. They’ll make you comfortable until we return.”
“Am I…am I under arrest?”
“Just consider it…an indefinite hold until we sort out everything you’ve told us.” Murphy smiled. “If it will make you feel better, you’ll be my honored guest in the governor’s mansion, and I’ll personally ask my good friend Captain Lipshen to look after you until we get back. Does that sound so terrible?”
“Well. No, but I—”
Murphy cut the agent’s holo.
“Well, that’s one less headache,” O’Hanraghty observed.
“Captain, take us to Alramal,” Murphy told Lowe.
“The decision’s made, Sir?”
“It’s made. Now I’ve got to explain it. XO, with me.”
“Aye, aye, Sir,” Lowe said as Murphy and O’Hanraghty headed for a door flanked by two of Logan’s Hoplons.
Murphy crossed the ready room on the far side and stood gazing into a visual display, watching Brigit and its spectacular rings slide across the screen as Ishtar altered heading. The door locked behind O’Hanraghty.
“A concern, Sir?” the chief of staff asked.
“Every point I raised against following Kortnev’s information applies to Silas.” Murphy turned to face him and crossed his arms. “If Silas is compromised, he could have baited us into an ambush at Alramal. He doesn’t have to have turned; if he’s been identified, he could have been fed the information to do that. Or just to draw us away from New Dublin to weaken its defenses. This Admiral Xing doesn’t seem to be anybody’s fool.”
“No, Sir, but Silas got his info well before the attack on Scotia; he just used the ‘slavers’ as a pretext to prime Kortnev. So if the information was planted on him to suck us away from New Dublin, they must have already been planning on a follow-up attack here. That’s certainly possible, but my read—like yours—is that Scotia was more a case of testing the waters. I don’t see them having set up something this elaborate to uncover New Dublin before they even hit Scotia.”
“There is that,” Murphy acknowledged. “But it could still be a counterintelligence op using him to suck us—or whoever he handed the information to—into a trap.”
“You’re right. It could be, unlikely as I think that is. But if it is, it’s because they did ID him and fed him false info. It’s not because they turned him.”
Murphy raised an eyebrow at the grim certainty in O’Hanraghty’s voice, and the chief of staff crossed to a bulkhead cabinet to remove a bottle of whiskey and two glasses.
“Don’t forget that Silas…has a history, Terrence. Good agent, long list of successful ops until Montclaire went to shit. You’ve read the report.” He poured whiskey. “A full operational detachment, best trained individuals the Federation could manage, and they were massacred by the Rish out beyond the blue line. All except Silas, and he survived by the skin of his teeth.”
“And because it was a covert operation, the Federation had plausible deniability and could officially…not notice it had happened.” Murphy nodded. “Which was convenient for the official line, wasn’t it?”
“It was.” O’Hanraghty finished pouring into the glasses and squeezed their bases to activate the cooling pads inside them. “And don’t think The Powers That Be didn’t sweep him under the rug with indecent haste. You’re not an intelligence weenie, so you may not realize just how quickly and completely they drop-kicked him into the intelligence shitcan.”
“After he claimed he and his team witnessed a Rishathan arms trade to the League?” Murphy laughed harshly. “I don’t have to be ‘an intelligence weenie’ to know how quickly they deep-sixed that one, Harry. Especially since the evidence was conveniently lost when the Rish destroyed his team’s ship. But that’s one of the things that’s bothering me. Everything the xeno-anthropologists tell us about the Rish emphasizes how much they love the long game. Could that be what’s happening here? A long con? Could they have played Silas, set out to use him as a catspaw, from the moment he came back from Montclaire?”
“Now that’s a tinfoil-hat conspiracy.” O’Hanraghty sipped whiskey. “Coming from someone who’s believed in tinfoil-hat wild ideas for so long…maybe I’m not the best judge.”
“If we’re right to believe Silas, this could bring the war to an end. If we’re wrong, we die in an ambush. Or they hit New Dublin in overwhelming strength while we’re gone, and we come back to another smashed planet.”
Murphy clinked his glass against his XO’s.
“It’s Silas,” O’Hanraghty said. “If it was only that nincompoop Kortnev, we could just nod our heads, say how interesting the information was, and then send a report back to the Oval and wait for orders. But it’s Silas, and he’s no fool.”
“Agreed.” Murphy swallowed whiskey, then squared his shoulders. “And now for the fun part. Explaining all this to Tolmach.”
“It won’t be that bad, Sir,” O’Hanraghty said in an encouraging sort of tone. “I think he’s starting to warm to you. Besides, it’s a recorded message, not a live two-way.”
“And I’m about to lie to him,” Murphy said unhappily. “I hate that. The man deserves better.”
“And we can’t tell him the truth without involving him in something certain parties might decide to call treason,” O’Hanraghty pointed out.
“I know that. Doesn’t make me feel any better.”
“Well, the good news is that everything you’re about to record is based on the official record of what we got from Kortnev. With any luck, he may never figure out that we just gamed the situation.”
“And just what about that bloody-minded, sneaky old man makes you think that?” Murphy snorted. “For that matter, anything he doesn’t figure out, Dewar sure as hell will. Especially if we come home with proof to back up Silas’s story.”
“If we come home with proof to back up Silas’s story, do you really think Tolmach or Dewar is going to have any qualms about how we got it? After the price the Fringe has paid for so long?”
“No, but if this goes wrong, all bets are off.”
Murphy drew a deep breath, sank into a chair, and activated the comm station built into the table in front of it. He glanced back up at O’Hanraghty.
“Let’s hope we’re not fools,” he said.
“We’ll get an answer one way or the other when we reach Alramal.”
O’Hanraghty raised his glass in ironic salute.
“Thanks ever so much,” Murphy said. Then cleared his throat. “Record,” he said, and the display before him blinked to life.
“Hello, Mr. President,” he said. “By the time you see this, I’m sure Captain Lipshen will already have been bending your ear about how important it is that he gets aboard Ishtar. Unfortunately, the math won’t work, so I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave him behind. Trust me, I am deeply and sincerely sorry for burdening you with him.”
Murphy allowed himself a smile, picturing Alan Tolmach’s…colorful response to that. Then his expression sobered.
“As it happens, we’ve just come into possession of intelligence that requires us to act very quickly if we’re going to act at all,” he continued. “You’ve probably already seen the initial burst data packet. I’m appending a more complete version of the information to this message, just to be sure, however, and I’m also sending you the agent who delivered it. At present, we have no reason to doubt his veracity, and I’m sure Captain Lipshen will be keeping a close eye on him in our absence, but frankly, I’ll feel better with you and General Dewar in the loop.
“Basically, it all goes back to Inverness. It seems that between Captain Drebin’s departure and our arrival in Scotia—”