He’d push for unilateral action, and if the Old Earth Alliance, the Sylvanians, and all the rest were disinclined to go along, then so be it. The Federated Worlds would of course follow due process. Oh, yes. Every tedious step of the way: a formal notice of a state of limited war, properly served, of course, and supported by an affirmed statement of facts and a demand for financial restitution. All strictly in accordance with every word of the New Washington Convention, of course. That should do it, he said to himself, suddenly energized by the thought of taking the fight to the Hammers with or without the support of the rest of civilized humanspace.
Pecora finished his tea-his fourth cup-and got up, legs and back stiff from inactivity. The eastern sky was now a stunning melange of mauve shading into blues, golds, and pinks rich with the promise of a hot sunny day. Beyond the city, the ocean was turning from a dark gunmetal gray to an inviting deep blue. It was going to be a beautiful day. Pecora sighed deeply as he strangled at birth any idea he might have had of going down the coast to catch a long lunch at Trinh’s and watch the world go by. It was almost six, and the matter at hand couldn’t wait any longer.
He put the comm out, tagged with the codephrase “Sampan Two” needed to convene an urgent meeting of the inner cabinet, and went to take a shower.
After some perfunctory small talk, the meeting of the inner cabinet broke up.
The meeting had been a bruising one. Shocked disbelief had shifted to a blend of outrage and frustration before degenerating into interfactional squabbling, with the unspoken question of who was going to be blamed looming large in the minds of most of those present. But as always, Moderator Burkhardt had pulled things together long enough to get the massive if sometimes cumbersome resources of the Federated Worlds moving in the right direction.
It wasn’t long before Pecora found himself alone at the table. Throughout the meeting, even if only as an undertone, the mood had been harsh and unforgiving. Over the years, the Federated Worlds and its allies had been dragged into war by deliberate Hammer provocations three times and had hundreds of thousands of deaths to show for it. Although the Sylvanians had stressed that the information was being provided to head off war, that now looked very much like a forlorn hope. If the Federated Worlds moved with speed and precision to recover the
But he also knew the Hammer. It would take every ounce of diplomatic skill backed by an overwhelming show of military strength to stop them from overreacting. Pecora didn’t like the odds. Deep down he knew that if it came to an all-out shooting war, Burkhardt would have great difficulty persuading the public to settle for anything less than the Hammer’s unconditional surrender. There were still too many people mourning the deaths of too many loved ones killed at the hands of the Hammer to allow for anything less.
As Pecora left the building, he made up his mind. Planetary security had been tasked with finding out just how in the hell the supposedly inviolate system of personal identity security checks might have been compromised enough to allow a gang of psychopathic hijackers onboard a Fed mership, the intel spooks at Department 24 were going to mobilize their Hammer humint assets to try to find out what the Hammers were up to, and the Data Intercept Agency’s massive databanks of electronic intercepts were being trawled to see if anything relevant had been missed.
More relevant to solving the problem if it really was as Captain Kumar had described it, the task of working out how to get the
So, short of declaring war on the Hammer himself, there wasn’t much more he could do right now.
He commed his wife. They would take that long lunch at Trinh’s, after all, and if asked, he would ascribe this morning’s meeting to factional party politics.
Sunday, September 6, 2398, UD
The trip had been surprisingly busy. Ribot believed in sims, sims, and more sims. Michael and his team had spent hours and hours going through the deployment, setup, calibration, and go-live of DefGrav’s remote gravitronics packages. The schedule called for the entire process to take seven days, but Michael was increasingly confident that they could do it in less, not that he would ever admit that to anyone and certainly not to Ribot, who would have immediately moved the goalposts.
For once not on watch-another thing Ribot believed in was giving Michael as much combat information center time as he could bear-a tired Michael stood at the back, well out of the way, as he waited for the pinchspace drop.
“All stations, this is command. Get ready, everybody; we will drop in five minutes.” The XO’s voice was irritatingly cheerful, and no wonder, Michael thought. Jacqui Armitage was one of the very few people onboard for whom a move into or out of pinchspace caused nothing more than a momentary spasm.
Michael began to steel himself, to try to will his body into behaving itself.
“All stations, dropping now.”
With that, Michael’s stomach turned itself inside out. But, he consoled himself, perhaps it was not quite as bad as last time. Or so he fervently hoped.
The command crew rapidly got itself back together. With the threat plot reassuringly empty, in quick succession Armitage had confirmed that everyone had survived the drop, deployed the heat dump panels, and begun the process of spinning the ship on its axis, ready to commence its deceleration burn.
“Captain, sir. Command. We are on track, vector correct and aligned ready to commence our deceleration burn, which is due in fifty-five minutes’ time. That gives us time to deploy pinchcomms to catch the 22:00 transmission sked and get our drop report away.”
“Captain, roger. Let’s do it.”
Seconds later, Michael watched as the holocams tracked the massive pinchcomms antenna as it deployed. At almost 10 meters across and 3 high, it was an impressively large piece of equipment; it had to be if it was to get the beam accuracy it needed to communicate across pinchspace. To look at, it was just a shallow concave oval shape with the jet-black pinchspace stasis generator mounted dead center. Slowly the antenna emerged, the single massive hydraulic ram lifting it smoothly clear of its armored container behind the surveillance drone hangar. As it cleared the hull, the array began to twitch as its AI hunted out the optimum path to the nearest relay station, in this case a long-range pinchcomms relaysat sitting in interstellar space about halfway between
Finally, the twitching stopped as the dull silver array locked on to the pinchcomms carrier wave, ready for the routine 22:00 message broadcast.
“Captain, sir. Command. Pinchcomms are up and locked on, and the jump report has gone. Er, hold on a minute, sir. Something is coming through for us marked flash.” Armitage’s voice betrayed her shock.
What the fuck is going on? Michael asked himself. Messages with a flash precedence were usually used only to report enemy contacts, and so far as he knew, it was very unlikely that the Feds had gone to war with anybody in the five days since they had left Terranova.
“I’ll deal with it in my cabin.” From the look on his face, the captain clearly shared Armitage’s shock. As Ribot hurried out of the combat information center, Michael was left with a very uneasy feeling in the bottom of his stomach, and it had nothing to do with the residual effects of
