changed right up to the point when it’s too late to stop us.”
“You’re going back to Commitment?”
“We are.”
“But there’s no way to do that without the government knowing, surely. It’s impossible!”
“We don’t think so. You should know that. After all, you stole three dreadnoughts from under Fleet’s nose. We’re planning to do the same, only on a larger scale.”
“Hijacking three ships is one thing,” Michael protested. “Making off with an entire battle group is quite another, and that’s what you’ll need. It can’t be done. The operation to get the support the NRA needs will be huge. It’ll involve tens of thousands of people and fifty, sixty ships, maybe more. There’s no way you can maintain operational security. Someone will talk.”
“All good points, but stay with me while I go back a bit. I need to give you the full story.” Jaruzelska was quiet for a long time. “Did you ever wonder,” she continued, “why I threw you to the wolves?”
“A million times a day,” Michael said with a flash of resentment, “and don’t think for a second that I’ve forgiven you for that, because I never will.”
“We had our reasons.”
“Which were?”
“We needed Fleet in particular and the marines and planetary defense as well to see Caroline Ferrero and her government for what they were: lackeys of the Hammers, puppets dancing as Jeremiah Polk pulled the strings. And to do that, I needed to turn you from villain to victim.”
“Villain to victim?” Michael shook his head. “That makes no sense.”
“Oh, but it does,” Jaruzelska assured him, “and here’s why. When you stole those three ships, nobody in Fleet agreed with what you’d done. Many felt your arrest was a good thing. They thought it wiped away one of the worst stains on Fleet’s record. But a few things changed that. The first was your speech in mitigation at your trial.”
“My speech? World News called it … let me see if I can remember their exact words … yes, ‘a tissue of self- serving lies.’”
“Well, since the Hammers were paying them at the time, what else would they say? But I can tell you this: I have heard a lot of speeches in my time, but yours was a work of genius. Do you know how many times it has been downloaded?”
“No.”
“Over a half a billion times, and that’s just here on the Federated Worlds. Your speech is famous, Michael, right across humanspace.”
“It wasn’t me,” Michael said, his cheeks reddening with embarrassment. “The credit should go to my dad. I told him what I thought, what the rest of the team thought, why we did it. He was the one who turned all that into something worth hearing.”
“He didn’t tell you that your speech was put together by the best psycholinguistics team in human history?” Jaruzelska asked with a half smile.
“It was?”
“Oh, yes,” Jaruzelska said with a nod. “Their job was to craft the most persuasive speech ever written. You had to convince everyone that even though you were as guilty as hell, you didn’t hijack those dreadnoughts because you were a lovelorn fool. You did it because your motives were good, because you could see what the rest of us were too slow, too stubborn, too self-interested to see: that it was only a matter of time before the Hammers smashed us into the dust. And guess what? It worked. Right across the Federated Worlds and especially in the military, your approval rating soared. It’s never dropped, and we’re making sure it never will. You are a genuine hero, Michael, and you might as well get used to it.
“The death sentence was the second step, and we made sure there was plenty of commentary pointing out that execution is a barbaric institution that has no place in a civilized society. We also made sure that everybody knew that your sentence was imposed because that was what the government wanted.”
“Despite the fact that it was handed down by a court? The judge wouldn’t have been too happy.”
“Let’s just say that she is a friend of ours,” Jaruzelska said. “We owe her big time.”
“You didn’t stop there, though, did you?” Michael said. “You spread the idea around that the government pushed for the death penalty only because that was what the Hammers wanted. Am I right?”
“Ferrero the puppet having her strings pulled by Polk the puppet master,” Jaruzelska said. “You know what? I think we’ll make you a psyops man of you yet,” she added with a smile.
“I don’t have your sneaky, devious mind, sir. Niccolo Machiavelli would have been proud of you, though. So what came next?”
“The final step was persuading President Diouf to-”
“Whoa, hold on, sir! The president is in on this?”
“No, she’s not. All you need to know is that a mutual friend, a man whose advice and guidance Diouf has relied on for most of her adult life, convinced her that the Federated Worlds would be at grave risk if she did not turn down your request for clemency. The president was told only as much as she needed to understand why she was being asked to do something … so extraordinary. In the end she agreed to go along with us, but only when we convinced her that you would not actually be executed.”
Relief flooded through Michael; he had not been wrong to trust Diouf.
“And that was when things got very dirty,” Jaruzelska went on. “When Diouf turned you down, we had to convince the Worlds that you had been unfairly treated. The Hammers helped us there. We have holovid of the dumb bastards trying to bribe Diouf to let your execution go ahead. Twenty million FedMarks they offered her. She refused it, of course, but we slipped a story to the trashpress saying that she had taken the money. To muddy the waters a bit more, we concocted another story that the Hammers were so pissed by Diouf’s refusal that Polk forced Moderator Ferrero to blackmail Diouf into turning down your appeal for clemency.”
“Diouf’s the closest thing I know to a saint,” Michael said; he looked incredulous. “How do you blackmail a saint?”
“Easy. You cook up a story, backed by lots of seemingly credible evidence, that Diouf financed a child slavery racket operating out of the Rogue Planets in the ’50s, and then …”
Michael grimaced; that would have hurt Diouf.
“… you give it to the trashpress and tell them that Ferrero was using it to blackmail the president. The story was so juicy, so hot, they just couldn’t resist the temptation. They went public with it the day you were executed. The timing could not have been better.”
“Then what?”
“The story’s already been retracted-needless to say, that’s seen by some as part of the government’s cover- up-and Ferrero and Diouf are going to sue for defamation. But that still leaves people wondering if they’ll ever get the truth. Was the president bribed by the Hammers? Did Ferrero blackmail her into abandoning all her principles? And if Diouf wasn’t bribed or blackmailed, then why did she go against all her principles and allow your execution to go ahead? Not that it matters, not now. We’ve got what we need. We’ve turned you from villain to victim, and the process has seriously undermined Ferrero’s credibility, so much so that the average Fed now thinks her appeasement of the Hammers will come back and bite the Federated Worlds in the ass. They don’t know how, they don’t know when, but they think it will. And that’s the environment we need to support what we’re trying to do here.”
Michael shook his head. “That’s really … I was about to say clever, but maybe evil would be a better word.”
“I prefer to call it a work of genius,” Jaruzelska said with a touch of smugness.
“Maybe it was,” Michael snapped. Jaruzelska’s conceit angered him, and it showed. “I understand why it had to be done, but from where I’m sitting, it looks much more like a work of bloody-minded torture. I thought I was about to be executed. You could have told me it was all an elaborate hoax. You should have!”
“But we did,” Jaruzelska protested. “We made sure Colonel Kallewi told you.”
“Hah!” Michael snorted with derision. “That was way too late. By then I wanted to believe what she was saying, but I couldn’t. When they strapped me down, I knew for a fact that I was about to die. Didn’t matter what anyone had said. I thought they were just trying to make things easier.”
“I’m sorry,” Jaruzelska said, her voice soft, “really I am.”
