Flag In Exile

flawlessly in the latest sim. Unfortunately, Citizen Admiral Chernov's TG 14.3 had completely misunderstood its orders. He'd strayed badly out of position on the approach to Masada, and the computers ruled that the Grayson battlecruisers protecting Endicott had managed a successful interception. They'd taken heavy losses from Chernov's escorts, but not heavy enough to keep them from killing both his troop transports and four of his five freighters full of weapons.

Theisman sighed. He wasn't at all happy about arming a planet full of religious fanatics, especially when he knew from personal experience what they were capable of, but if he had to do it, he preferred to do it right. No doubt his fellow task group commander was getting an earful from Thurston and Preznikov at this very moment, but it really hadn't been Chernov's fault. This was a more complex op than even Theisman had fully suspected. Neither he nor Chernov had known, for example, that the entire task force was going to arrive in Yeltsin in a single body before detaching the Endicott attack force ... for the very simple reason that it hadn't been part of the original plan. Theisman thought it an eminently sensible alteration, he'd never been happy about splitting the task force into two forces and having them go in completely independent of one another, but it would have been nice if he and the other task group COs had been informed of it a bit sooner. As it was, the entire maneuver had come at them almost cold, and it was hardly surprising that Chernov's astrogation had been off.

Still, he reflected, the whole purpose of a sim was to figure out what could go wrong and fix it. You never found all the problems, of course. The best you could do was disaster-proof your ops plan against the screwups you knew about and hope the others didn't bite you on the ass too hard.

'All right,' he told his staff, 'we had a little accident. These things happen. The idea is to keep them from happening the same way twice, so let's look over all our movement orders. Tomorrow's the last day of simulations we get, people. Five days from now, we have to get it right the first time, or we're going to be looking at something a damn sight more serious than data bits in a computer, right?'

'Right, Citizen Admiral,' LePic said firmly, and the rest of the staff nodded.

'In that case,' Theisman said, turning to his ops officer, 'let's pull up the general operational schematic first, Megan. I want to see if we can't integrate Citizen Admiral Chernov's task group a bit more intimately with ours from the outset. If we'd had him inside our own com net, we'd have realized he was drifting off course before we went into hyper leaving Yeltsin.'

'Yes, Citizen Admiral,' the ops officer said, tapping commands into her terminal to summon the proper files. 'In fact, Citizen Admiral, I was thinking that what we might want to do is...'

Thomas Theisman leaned back in his chair, listening to his staff tear into the problem, and hoped like hell that Yeltsin really was as bare as Thurston’s intelligence appreciations suggested. Because if it wasn't, and if they didn't get a much larger percentage of the bugs exterminated before they got there, God alone knew how Operation Dagger was really going to end up.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Samuel Mueller frowned down at the archaic sheet of parchment on his blotter. The writ of summons' stilted, old-fashioned legalese was familiar enough, except for the last sentence, which no living steadholder had ever seen. Mayhew had the right to append it under the old Constitution, but that made Mueller no happier to be ordered to keep the session secret 'upon peril of the Sword's displeasure.' It was like a throwback to the bad old days when the Protector had been able to threaten his steadholders, and the fact that Mayhew truly could threaten them only made it more disagreeable.

For now, at least, Mueller thought as he reviewed recent events.

His colleagues had been bloodthirsty enough devising their plan, but deciding where to execute it had been a problem. For them, at least. Samuel Mueller had seen the ideal spot immediately, and the others were enormously grateful to him, once he'd maneuvered them into suggesting it.

Burdette's repugnance at the thought of killing his own steaders had been plain from the outset; all Mueller had needed to do was look grave and encourage his fellow steadholder to gird his loins to the task God had sent them. His own stern acceptance of the distasteful necessity of Marchant's plan, coupled with the thoughtful observation that it wouldn't do to choose a Sky Domes project in the steading of Harrington’s most bitter critic, had prompted Burdette to suggest that perhaps, in that case, Mueller Steading might be a better location. Mueller had allowed himself to appear horrified...which had brought Marchant neatly into the argument at Burdette's side. The defrocked priest and his Steadholder had made their case with passion, and when he'd finally, grudgingly, allowed himself to be talked into it, they'd expressed their admiration for his willingness to pay the price of God's work most becomingly. They'd been too busy finding reasons to arrange the accident somewhere, anywhere, other than in Burdette to even consider the benefits Mueller's 'sacrifice' would buy him.

Well, perhaps the purity of their motives blinded them to the more worldly possibilities so evident to Mueller. He was as committed to God's work as anyone, but he saw no reason to ignore the opportunities God chose to offer him in its doing. Not that it had been an easy decision. He had no more wish to kill his own steaders than the next man, he had, after all, assumed an obligation to them when he swore fealty to Benjamin IX's grandfather, but as Burdette and Marchant had said themselves, sacrifices had to be made. And while he was truly shocked by the deaths of children, which had never been part of the original plan, Marchant had been right again. They were about God's work, it had made their strategy far more effective... and the added tragedy had only enhanced the advantages Mueller's fellow conspirators failed to perceive.

Neither Burdette nor Marchant had yet realized how deep in his debt they now stood. Nor had it occurred to Burdette that what he might not choose to give Mueller out of gratitude could be secured hereafter by other means. Burdette hadn't even noticed that while there was no evidence linking Mueller to the plot, he had complete details on every phase of their operations. With that in hand, his steading's investigative agencies could always 'discover' evidence of the others' involvement later, and any allegations Marchant and Burdette might make about his own complicity would be futile. And that, he thought with another smile, would give him an iron hold on Lord Burdette for the rest of his life.

Nor was that the only, or even the greatest, advantage he'd secured, for he and his steaders were the victims of this atrocity. That not only made him the last person anyone would suspect of involvement, but also positioned him nicely to lead the attack on Harrington, and, indirectly, on Mayhew, as a matter of principle. He could wax as bitter in his rhetoric as he pleased, and it would be put down to perfectly natural outrage rather than to ambition. And if worst came to worst and somehow their plan to brand Harrington with responsibility miscarried, he was also positioned to recoil in shock and adopt the voice of sweet reason in order to 'heal the wounds' left by this tragedy. Best of all, any concessions he made to that end would gain him enormous sympathy as a wise and judicious statesman and put that upstart Mayhew publicly in his debt.

Not, of course, that he intended to fail. But it never hurt to cover all possibilities, and one thing he was determined upon. He had no intention of passing his son a hollow authority in his own, God-given steading, and he was only fifty-two. With the new medical advances, he could expect to last well into his nineties, even without prolong, and, he thought with grim humor, that would give him plenty of time to, as the verse from his childhood had put it, 'try, try again.'

He paused and frowned as a new thought occurred to him. If he was going to think about covering possibilities, he ought to be certain his flanks were covered, as well. The only six people with direct knowledge of his involvement in any plans against Harrington and Mayhew were Burdette, Marchant, and Samuel Harding, on the one hand, and Surtees, Michaelson, and Watson on the other. The latter three were no threat, since he'd kept both sets of plans separate and they had no knowledge of any illegal acts. But the others might become a problem, and so, for that matter, might the other workmen who'd sabotaged the site. Mueller had taken pains to insure his own security, and, aside from Harding, he'd never met any of the saboteurs. But he wasn't at all certain the need for internal security would occur to fanatics of Marchant’s stripe ... or how much he might confide in his tools. After all, he and Burdette had told Mueller the names of the others involved in the plot, hadn't they?

His frown deepened, and he nodded to himself. Burdette and Marchant were obvious threats; the others were more problematical, but he couldn't rule out the possibility that they'd heard his name mentioned. A third-