to the Old Republic. But however long they've been planning, they've still got to hold themselves to a manageable level of complexity. They've got to be able to coordinate everything, and we've had enough experience trying to coordinate the Republic to know how tall an order that can be even when we don't have to worry about keeping communications lines covert. Which has particular point in a case like this, I suspect, since I tend to doubt they could bury their sleepers quite as deeply as you've just suggested. There's got to be at least some contact somewhere if they aren't going to lose their assets simply because someone dies before she gets around to telling her son or daughter 'Oh, by the way. We're actually secret agents for the Mesan Alignment. Here's your secret decoder kit. Be ready to be contacted by the Galactic Evil Overlord on Frequency X with orders to betray the society you've been raised all your life to think of as your own.''
'Granted.' Theisman nodded. 'But that contact could be damned well hidden, especially when no one's had any reason to look for it in the first place.'
'I agree, Sir,' Victor Lewis said. 'Still, the President just made another excellent point. For them to make this work, they have to have an almost fanatical respect for the KISS principle.' LePic laughed harshly, and the admiral smiled—briefly—at him. 'I'm not talking about their overall strategy, Sir. Obviously, they haven't been afraid to think big where that's concerned! But if they've genuinely managed to keep all this under wraps for so long, and if they've actually gotten far enough along they're really ready to pull the trigger, then they have got to be some of the best covert operators in the history of humanity. And from our own experience, I can tell you that for them to have managed that, they have to have been pretty damned ruthless about prioritizing and assessing risks. They're probably willing to be as complicated as they have to be to accomplish anything they feel is genuinely critical, and they're probably operating on a huge scale, but they're not going to operate on any huger scale than they think they absolutely have to.'
'That actually fits in with what we've seen so far, assuming what's been happening to the Manties is actually part of this strategy McBryde described to Cachat and Zilwicki,' LePic acknowledged with a thoughtful expression. 'They've got pieces in motion all over the board, but when you come right down to it, aside from the actual attack on the Manties' home system, none of it's required a lot of manpower'—he winced at his own unintentional double entendre but continued gamely—'or military muscle of their own . In fact, almost all the movement we've seen could have been produced very economically. Get to Byng and Crandall, and maybe one or two of the Kolokoltsov group, then add somebody around your level in the military, Tom, and you get the fleet movements that brought the Manties into conflict with the Sollies. And then momentum—Solly arrogance, the inherent corruption of the League's system, the lack of meaningful political control, the competition between Frontier Security satrapies, the desire for revenge because of the way the Manties had humiliated them militarily—pushes things along with very little additional effort on your part. Meanwhile, you concentrate your intensive efforts somewhere else—organizing whatever was in some of those 'bargaining points' McBryde was hanging on to to encourage Cachat to get him out—where informed cooperation is critical to your final strategy.'
'Which brings us back to Nouveau Paris,' Pritchart said grimly.
The others looked at her, and she barked a metallic, snarling laugh.
'Of course it does! For that matter, Tom, you and I have already discussed this, in a way. If McBryde was telling the truth about the existence of this 'assassination nanotech' of theirs, I think we finally know what happened to Yves Grosclaude, don't we?' She showed her teeth, and this time the glare at the backs of her eyes burned like a topaz balefire. 'Frankly, it ties in rather neatly with the only bits and pieces of forensic evidence Kevin and Inspector Abrioux managed to come up with at the time. And just why, do you think, was this 'Mesan Alignment' kind enough to provide Arnold with one of its most closely held, top secret toys? Remember what you were just saying about sleepers, Tom? And that little comment of yours, Denis, about producing movement economically?'
The others were staring at her in shock, and she wondered why. From the instant she'd heard about McBryde's description of the new Mesan nanotechnology, she'd realized what had happened to Grosclaude. And if one of this 'Alignment's' critical objectives was the destruction of both the Star Empire of Manticore and the Republic of Haven, what better, more elegant way to go about it than to send them back to war with one another?
'It makes sense, doesn't it?' she pressed. 'They played us—me— by having Arnold doctor the diplomatic correspondence. Hell, they may've had someone at the other end doing the same thing for High Ridge! No one's seen hide nor hair of Descroix ever since the wheels came off, now have they? And then, when we figured out what Arnold had done, they played Elizabeth by convincing her we'd killed Webster and tried to kill her niece exactly the same way the Legislaturalists killed her father and Saint-Just tried to kill her! God only knows how many millions of civilians and spacers—ours and the Manties'—these . . . people have gotten killed over the past eighty T-years or so, and Elizabeth—and I—both walked straight into it when it was our turn!'
The president's rage was a bare-fanged, bristling presence in the office now. Then Theisman raised one hand in a cautionary gesture.
'Assuming a single word of what McBryde told Cachat and Zilwicki is true, you may well be right, Eloise,' he said quietly. 'In fact, assuming there's any truth to it, I think you almost certainly are right. But at the same time, it may not be true. I don't know about you, but there's a part of me that would really, really like to be able to blame all the people we've killed—and the people we've had killed on our own side—on someone else's evil machinations instead of our own inherent ability to screw up. It may be that that's what happened. But before we start operating on that assumption, we've got to find some way to test whether or not it is.'
'Oh, I agree with you entirely, Tom,' Pritchart said. 'At the same time, though, I think we've already got enough, what with the records Cachat and Zilwicki brought home of the Green Pines explosions and how they don't match the Mesa version, what Simхes can tell us, what our own scientists can tell us about his new drive claims, to justify very quietly reaching out to Congress.'
Theisman looked distinctly alarmed, as did LePic. Trenis and Lewis, on the other hand, were obviously trying very hard not to look alarmed. In fact, they were trying so hard—and failing so completely—that the president chuckled much more naturally.
'I'm not planning on talking to anyone unless Leslie, Kevin Usher, and probably you, Tom, all agree that, whoever it is, she's at least her own woman. And, trust me, I'm thinking in terms of a preliminary security vetting God might not pass! And I'm certainly not going to bring anyone like McGwire or Younger in on this until and unless we feel absolutely certain McBryde's and Simхes's information is credible. But if we do come to that conclusion, this is going to change every single one of our foreign policy assumptions. That being the case, I think we need to start doing a little very careful, very circumspect spadework as soon as possible.'
