Mission of Honor

'I agree with Admiral Theisman,' Lewis said quietly but firmly. 'And, no offense, Linda, but if it's a case of disinformation, I don't see what the hell—pardon me, Madam President—it's supposed to be disinforming us about ! Try as I might, I can't think of any conceivable reason for anyone on Mesa to try to convince the Republic of Haven we're on some centuries-long interstellar hit list right along with the Manties. Can anyone else in this office come up with a reason any Mesan would be doing anything that could so radically shake up our relations with the Star Empire? Something which might convince us we actually have an enemy in common and point both of us directly at them? '

'Admiral Lewis has a point there, Madam President,' Denis LePic agreed, his own eyes narrowing in thought. 'And there's another point, too. Cachat and Zilwicki independently confirmed the explosion that took out this 'Gamma Center' of Simхes'. While I'm willing to concede that a good disinformation operation requires enough capital investment to make it convincing, somehow I find it a bit difficult to believe that even someone like Manpower would set off a high-kiloton-range nuke right on top of one of their own top management's bedroom communities just to sell us on it.'

'And assuming McBryde knew what he was talking about, it makes at least a little sense out of the fact that Manpower—or this 'Mesan Alignment,' at least—has been acting so much like a belligerent star nation,' Theisman pointed out. 'It is a belligerent star nation; it's just that no one else realized it.'

'Oh, how I wish they'd been able to get McBryde out, too,' Pritchard said with soft, terrible passion, then waved both hands contritely when Theisman gave her a speaking glance.

'I know—I know!' she said. 'If this is true, we're incredibly lucky to have even a clue of it, much less Simхes. I'm sure he's going to turn out to be incredibly valuable—if this is true—in the long run, but he's a tech geek.' Theisman's lips twitched at the president's choice of noun, and she shook a finger at him. 'Don't you dare smile at that, Tom Theisman! Instead, think of him as Shannon Foraker.' Theisman's nascent smile disappeared, and she nodded. 'Right. That's exactly the kinds of holes we're going to have in any political or strategic military information he can give us, no matter how good the debrief is.'

'And assuming there's any way to verify that what he's telling us is the truth,' Trenis observed. They all looked at her, and she shrugged. 'All our critical naval personnel are supplied with anti-interrogation protection. It's effective against every drug therapy we know about, but we've always recognized there are likely to be therapies we don't know about. I think we have to assume the Mesans are at least as aware of that as we are—I mean, let's remember where all their traditional expertise is focused. And given anyone as ruthless as McBryde and Simхes have described, and anyone whose security's been good enough to keep all of this black literally for centuries, I have to think they've probably included some kind of suicide protocol to keep anyone from pumping someone as critical as Simхes sounds like being.'

'Or, for that matter, if McBryde was telling the truth about this new nanotech of theirs, God only knows what he might be programmed to do under, um, rigorous interrogation,' LePic said.

'Well, so far, at least, they don't appear to have installed anything to keep him from voluntarily spilling the beans when he's not under duress,' Lewis pointed out. 'If we sit him down with our own hyper physicists and let them start going over what he can tell them about this 'streak drive' of theirs, we should at least be able to tell whether or not the math holds together. Which would tend to verify—or disprove—one large chunk of what he's already told us.'

'Maybe—eventually,' Pritchart replied. 'On the other hand, I'm no hyper physicist, obviously, but I'd be surprised if they could confirm or disprove what he's got to say very quickly.' She grimaced. 'To be honest, the Manties could probably do that faster than we could, given how far ahead of us they are in compensators and grav-pulse bandwidth.'

'For that matter,' Theisman said with a crooked smile, 'it's a pity Duchess Harrington's not around anymore. I'll bet Nimitz could tell us whether or not he's lying. Or whether he's lying to us knowingly, at least.'

Pritchart nodded, but she also leaned back in her own chair, her lips pursed, her expression intent. Trenis started to say something more, only to stop as Theisman raised his hand and shook his head. He, LePic, and the two admirals sat silently, watching the president think, while endless seconds ticked past. Then, finally, she looked back at Theisman, and there was something at the backs of her topaz eyes. Something that made the secretary of war distinctly uneasy.

'I think we have to assume at least the possibility that McBryde and Simхes were both genuine defectors and both of them were telling the truth,' she said. 'As Denis has pointed out, nuking one of your own towns—even a small one, if it happens to be a luxury satellite suburb for your own elite and their families—is an awful steep price to pay just to sell a lie to someone light-centuries away from you. Especially what could only be a pointless lie, since, like Admiral Lewis, I can't see any way having us believe all this would help Manpower.'

No one else said anything, and she smiled wryly. The expression went oddly with that bleak, hard fire behind her eyes.

'It's going to take a while for me to get my mind wrapped around the concept that for the last five or six centuries a bunch of would-be genetic supermen have been plotting to impose their own view of the future on the human race. In one way, it's actually easier for me because it includes those Manpower bastards. I'm so used to thinking of them as the scum of the galaxy, capable of anything as long as it suits their purposes, that I can actually see them as the villains of any piece. But this master plan of theirs, this 'Alignment,' is something else.'

'If McBryde was right about the Alignment having been involved with the Legislaturalists—and especially with DuQuesne—then it may be possible for us to turn up evidence of it,' LePic said thoughtfully. 'I know we'd be going back a long way,' he continued when the others looked at him, 'but we never had any reason to suspect outside influence before. That puts a whole new perspective on how we got stuck with the 'People's Republic' in the first place, and if we look at the records from that angle, we may spot something no one even had a reason to look for at the time.'

'You really think they could 've played any significant role in that, Sir?' Trenis asked. He raised an eyebrow at her, and she grimaced. 'To be honest, that was one of the bells and whistles that most strongly suggested disinformation to me. I mean,' she turned to Pritchart, 'I'm always up for a good conspiracy theory, Madam President—God knows the history of the People's Republic's left all of us ready for that! But managing to overthrow someone else's constitution without leaving a single fingerprint—?'

The admiral waved her own hands in a baffled gesture, but Pritchart shook her head.

'Actually, I'm inclined to see that as a point in McBryde's favor,' she replied, and snorted harshly at Trenis' surprised expression. 'If there's anything to this at all, these people obviously think in terms of century-long operational frameworks, Admiral. For that matter, think of the chutzpah involved in anyone's thinking they could actually overthrow something as big and powerful as the Solarian League! Anybody willing to take that on would look at destabilizing something as small as the Old Republic as an exercise in light lifting. For that matter, they may even've seen it as a setting up exercise—a chance to practice their technique before the main event!'

'Assuming someone's actually managed to put something like this together, the fact that they've taken such a long view would make them extraordinarily dangerous,' Theisman said thoughtfully. LePic, Trenis, and Lewis looked at him interrogatively, but Pritchart only nodded with an odd blend of curtness and grim approval, as if he was following her own chain of logic.

'Think about it,' he told the others. 'If they're willing to approach something like this on a generational basis—if their strategists at any given moment have been willing to work towards something that's not going to happen until their grandchildren's or their great-grandchildren's time—think about the kinds of covers they could build for their agents. We could be looking at twenty or thirty generations of sleepers, for God's sake! There could be people right here in Nouveau Paris, people whose families have been solid citizens of the Republic for three or four hundred years, who are actually part of this Alignment. Think about the kind of intelligence penetration that implies. Or about how long and subtly they could work on influencing political trends and policies. Or the media.'

The others weren't looking confused anymore. In fact, all three of them were rather pale as Theisman's implications sank home.

'You're right,' Pritchart agreed. 'On the other hand, let's not get too carried away. They may think they're superwomen, but I don't see why we should start thinking of them that way. I don't doubt they could do exactly what you're describing, Tom. In fact, that may well be what they did