the youngest sister of Fleet Admiral Chiara Otis, the Mannerheim System-Defense Force's chief of naval operations.
Diplomatic or not, it was also an indication of just how much Hasselberg trusted the other officers seated around the table. It was highly unlikely that his observation would have evoked any anger from Fleet Admiral Otis, but that wasn't really the point.
'He may be Admiral Otis' brother-in-law,' Captain Granger said, 'but that's not who's watching his ass for him, Niklas.'
'Of course not, Ma'am,' Hasselberg agreed. 'But Admiral Kafkaloudes is. And, unfortunately, that's almost the same thing.'
'I think we should probably turn this conversation in another direction,' Trajan said calmly. The others looked at him, and he shrugged. 'Oh, I don't disagree with anything that's been said. On the other hand, there's not much point in discussing something everyone already agrees about, and discussing the CNO's and her chief of staff's—or her chief of staff's, at least—little . . . foibles'—he smiled quickly at Granger as he used her own earlier terminology—'even among friends is neither productive, diplomatic, wise, nor supportive of good discipline.'
Granger looked back at him for a moment, gray-green eyes stubborn. Then she inhaled deeply, nodded, and sat back in her chair, reaching for her wine glass.
The truth, Trajan thought, was that Kafkaloudes' empire building tendencies were well known throughout the MSDF. In fact, they were so well known that Fleet Admiral Otis' willingness to put up with them was widely regarded as her single true weakness. She was smart, competent, experienced, and dedicated to her duty, yet it was impossible for Trajan to believe she was unaware of Kafkaloudes' vendettas against anyone who ever made the mistake of rousing his ire. And it was an ire which roused with remarkable ease.
The problem was that, personality shortcomings aside, he really was very good at his job. And, to give the devil his due, part of his job clearly was to protect Otis, because in protecting her, he also protected her effectiveness. That was why Granger and Hasselberg were almost certainly correct where Ganneau was concerned. Otis might not protect him just because he was her brother-in-law—in fact, Trajan, who knew the fleet admiral quite well, was pretty damn sure she wouldn't—but she didn't have to. The commodore could rely on Kafkaloudes to quietly suppress any personal criticism of him. After all, it wouldn't do to have that criticism splash on the CNO! Or that, at any rate, was how Kafkaloudes could be counted upon to see things.
And Hasselberg had a perfectly valid point about Ganneau's actions. They were covered by his orders, even though Trajan knew Ganneau had been expected to use his own discretion about employing lethal force. And there were arguments in favor of exactly what the commodore had done. Trajan might not like them very much, but he couldn't deny their existence. The reason Ganneau's squadron had drawn the duty of watching the Alignment's end of the Verdant Vista Bridge in the first place was that judicious personnel assignments similar to those which had been tweaked in Task Force Four's favor had led—purely coincidentally, of course—to the Sixth Battlecruiser Squadron's being exclusively officered and manned by what happened to be Mesan star-lines. None of them were going to mention what had happened to anyone else, but if a Manticoran survey vessel had been brought in by vessels of the Mannerheim System-Defense Force . . .
'Leaving aside any discussions of our senior officers,' Hasselberg said after a moment, 'there's still your own point, Admiral. The Manties can't possibly realize what they're dealing with from their end of the bridge.'
He glanced at the smart wall bulkhead of Trajan's dining cabin as he spoke, and the others followed his gaze to it. The wall was configured at the moment to show not the Felix System, where Vivienne and the rest of TF 4 were currently conducting 'routine training exercises,' but what lay at the other end of the Verdant Vista Wormhole Bridge.
It was centered on a single star which looked slightly brighter than any of the others in their field of view. In fact, the only reason for its apparent brightness was that it had been considerably closer to the recording pickup than any of the others. It was actually only a lowly M8 dwarf, without a single planet to its name. Or, rather, to its number, for it had never achieved the dignity of the name all its own. It was simply SGC-902-36-G, a dim little star just this side of a 'brown dwarf,' of absolutely no particular interest to anyone and over forty light-years from the nearest inhabited star system.
It was also, however, home to a never before observed hyper-space phenomenon: a pair of wormhole termini, less than two light-minutes from one another and less than ten light-minutes from SGC-902-36-G itself. In fact, they were precisely 9.24 light-minutes from the star, which put them exactly on its hyper limit, and made them the only wormhole termini in the explored galaxy which were less than thirty light-minutes from a star.
No one had ever encountered anything like it before, and even all these years after its discovery, the Mesan Alignment's hyper-physicists were still trying to come up with an explanation for how the 'SGC-902-36-G Wormhole Anomaly' (also known as 'The Twins ') had happened when all generally accepted wormhole theory said it couldn't have. There were currently, Trajan had been told, at least six competing 'main' hypotheses.
Obviously, no one had ever predicted that any such thing was possible. In fact, the Alignment had literally stumbled across it in the course of surveying the wormhole junction associated with the Felix System, where Trajan's task force was currently exercising. Not that the galaxy at large had any idea of that junction's existence, either. It had been discovered initially by a 'Jessyk Combine'–backed survey expedition operating (very surreptitiously) out of Mannerheim under direct orders from the Alignment. Jessyk never shared survey information with anyone unless there was an excellent reason for it to do so, and in this case the Alignment had decided there was an excellent reason
Felix was an uninhabited star system little more than ten light-years from Mannerheim. The dim K2-class star was brighter than SGC-902-36-G, and it did have one marginally habitable planet, although that was about the best anyone was ever likely to say about it. The planet itself, which had never been assigned any better name than 'Felix Beta,' was a fairly miserable piece of real estate, with a gravity 1.4 times that of Old Earth, an axial inclination of thirty-one degrees, and a miserly hydrosphere of barely thirty-three percent. With an average orbital radius of right on six light-minutes, it was a cold, arid, dusty, windstorm-lashed, thoroughly wretched lump of dirt, but the Alignment had been considering it as a potential site for further development anyway, because of its proximity to Mannerheim.
The Republic of Mannerheim openly abhorred and despised the genetic slave trade and the outlaw Mesan transstellars which promoted it . . . which was one of the things that made it so valuable to the Mesan Alignment. The fact that Mannerheim's system-defense force was one of the most powerful of the entire Solarian League, and that there was absolutely nothing to associate it with Manpower or the Mesa System's government, didn't hurt, either. As such, it would have been handy, the Alignment had thought, to tuck its secret arsenal away someplace everyone knew was absolutely useless yet was simultaneously close enough to Mannerheim for the MSDF to keep a protective eye on it. Of course, there had been downsides to the proposition, the worst of which was that it would also have been close enough to Mannerheim for someone to innocently stumble across things the Alignment didn't want anyone stumbling over. The chance of someone actually doing that had been remote, to say the least, of course. When it came to concealing things, ten light-years might as well be ten thousand, unless there was something to prompt some busybody into making the trip in the first place.
What no one had expected—until the survey team the Alignment had sent to Felix under cover of the Jessyk expedition completed a thorough analysis of the system primary's emissions—was that there would have been plenty of reason to make the trip, if only anyone had known that Felix was associated with a major wormhole junction. Not on anything like the scale of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, perhaps, but still considerably larger than most, with no less than four secondary termini.
They led to several interesting places (including the Darius System, which actually had been chosen as the site for the MAN's arsenal), and the Alignment had kept the Felix Junction's existence as 'black' as they had the entire colony in Darius.
In fact, although the Alignment had known about it for better than two T-centuries, the MSDF had first become aware of it less than ten years ago. Officially, at least; many of the senior MSDF officers who knew about the Alignment had also known about the Felix Junction from the very beginning. As far as the bulk of the MSDF was
