On Basilisk Station

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The well-dressed man looked vaguely out of place in the luxurious office's comfortably cushioned chair and his civilian clothing, despite his expensive tailoring. His face was dark and lean, the sort of face which has been trained to say only what its owner wants it to say, and his eyes were hard as he accepted the chilled glass and sipped. Ice rattled like brittle music as he lowered the glass, and his host sank into a facing chair and tried not to look anxious.

'I was sorry to hear about your ... unanticipated problems, Mr. Canning.' The visitor's voice was deep and well-modulated, almost gentle, but his host shifted uncomfortably. 'I trust,' the visitor went on, 'that they aren't of such a nature as to interfere with our timetable?'

Wallace Canning, the People's Republic of Haven's consul on the planet Medusa, felt sweat bead his forehead. His guest might be in civilian clothes, but every time Canning looked at him he saw the uniform he ought to have been wearing—the green and gray uniform of a rear admiral in the People's Navy with the hourglass and sword of Naval Intelligence.

'I can't say for certain,' he said at length, picking his words with caution. 'Everything is too up in the air and unsettled. Until we know what this Harrington is going to do next, the best we can do is guess and double- check our potential vulnerabilities.'

'I see.' The business-suited admiral leaned back in his chair, swirling his drink in his hand and listening to its icy tinkle, and pursed his lips. Canning tried not to twitch under his level regard.

'It seems to me,' the admiral resumed after a moment, 'that there's been some sloppy execution at this end, Mr. Consul. We were assured the situation was under control. Indeed, I expected this to be a routine visit to receive your final readiness report, and now I hear that you can only `guess' about what the opposition is going to do next.' He shook his head. 'Any covert operation has a built-in risk factor, but we've put too much time into this one, and Operation Odysseus is too important for guesswork or field operations that can be completely overturned by a single new factor.'

'It can't be helped, and it's no one person's fault, either here or in the field,' Canning said, choosing to assume the role of a man defending his subordinates and not himself. 'And the `single factor' you refer to was a complete wild card no one saw coming, here or on Haven. We couldn't see it coming, Adm—Sir, because there was absolutely no way to predict that we'd get someone like this lunatic assigned to Basilisk Station after all these years.'

'I am aware of that. In fact, Mr. Canning, I was the one who chose the original timing for Odysseus's activation when Pavel Young was assigned here.'

'Yes. Well, things were moving exactly according to plan until she turned up. Since then—' Canning broke off and shrugged, raising one hand, palm uppermost.

'I understand the change in circumstances, Mr. Canning.' The admiral spoke with the patience of one addressing a very small child, his eyes deceptively mild, and the consul writhed internally but knew better than to protest.

'Moreover, unlike you, I have a dossier on Commander Harrington,' the admiral continued. 'I'm sorry to say it isn't as extensive as I'd like. As you may know, NavInt seldom builds an in-depth package on anyone who hasn't yet made list, unless they come from a particularly prominent family. All we have on her are the standard clippings and her public record, but even those are enough to indicate that she's an entirely different proposition from an over-bred cretin like Young. And, all in all, I would be forced to agree that Harrington is scarcely the sort of officer one might reasonably have expected that oaf Janacek to assign to his own private little hellhole out here.'

Canning relaxed a tiny bit, only to tense anew as his guest smiled thinly.

'Nonetheless, Mr. Canning, I can't escape the conclusion that you've taken your security too lightly. From the very beginning, you seem to have relied not on your own precautions but almost solely on the RMN's inefficiency. Granted,' he waved a hand gently, 'that inefficiency was part of our original planning, but you shouldn't have relied on its continuation. Certainly it should have been evident that your arrangements required a drastic reevaluation as soon as Harrington started shaking things up.'

'I—' Canning stood and crossed abruptly to the liquor cabinet. He poured himself a martini with hands that trembled slightly, took a swallow, then turned back to the admiral.

'I have taken some precautions, Sir, whatever you may think. Admittedly, they were long-term, routine measures, and I'll concede I was slow to realize what was happening and adjust to Harrington's presence, as well. But I've been here over six local years, and this is the first Manticoran officer who's even bothered to check manifests against canister numbers in all that time.'

'If that were all she were doing, Mr. Canning, or even if she were just arresting smugglers, I would be far less concerned,' his guest said with deadly precision. 'But that isn't all she's doing, is it? She's actively supporting Matsuko and the NPA. The local manpower she's released from customs and space control duties alone would constitute a major threat to operational security. When you add the overflights she's ordered to what your informants are reporting—' He shook his head sadly, and Canning took another long swallow of his drink.

'We're not exactly completely naked, Sir,' he said. 'I know it's only a matter of time before her recon flights hit pay dirt, but as I've said, and despite any overconfidence on my part, we do have a multi-level cover in place against exactly that eventuality. And despite her activities in space, she hasn't even come close to bothering Captain Coglin. As for the rest of her actions,' he added a bit more defensively, 'I've done everything I can to get her recalled. I've lodged over twenty individual protests, now, and I'm using my contacts with other off-world merchant factors to generate more of them. The Manticoran Admiralty has to be feeling the heat, particularly in light of the political ramifications.'

'I know about the protests, Mr. Canning. But while you're no doubt correct about the pressure they're placing on their admiralty, have you considered the fact they've no doubt also given her superiors ample confirmation that she's doing something we don't like?'

Canning flushed, and the first slow flickers of anger burned through his anxiety. All very well for the admiral to waltz in here after the fact and criticize, but what else did he expect Canning to do? Damn it, protests were the only offensive weapons he had! And, he thought resentfully, if he hadn't lodged them, the admiral would be chopping his ears off for that!

'Well, so much for spilt milk.' The admiral sighed, setting his glass on a small table and rising. 'Why don't you tell me what's gone right, instead?'

He crossed to Canning's desk and bent over the unrolled map spread across the blotter. The paper chart was far less detailed and much more difficult to manipulate than a holo map would have been, but it had never entered the consulate's electronic data base, either. And, unlike an individual holo map reader, it could be rolled up and shoved into a vault with a thermal-destruct security system. Those were considerations that made any incidental inconvenience unimportant.

Now the admiral frowned down at the map, tracing terrain features with a fingertip. Unlike the majority of his naval contemporaries, he was as comfortable with planetary maps as with star charts, for his particular nameless branch of NavInt was more concerned with Trojan Horses than open warfare. Now he tapped the map and looked up at Canning.

'The lab here on the plateau. It has a direct up-link to our orbital collector?'

'No, Sir.' Canning crossed to the desk and managed his first smile of the interview. 'It relays through ground stations here and here—' he indicated two mountain peaks in the Outback '—and the initial ground station doesn't link to our collector at all.' He met the admiral's inquiring gaze, and his smile turned into something like a grin. 'We've been tapping into Dame Estelle's own backup collector.'

'You mean you're drawing your power from the Manticoran grid?'

'No, Sir. It never enters the grid. This is their secondary collector, for use only if the main goes down for maintenance or repairs. Aside from their regular demand tests, we're the only station on it. Even if they find our tap, it won't tell them who set it up, and trying to figure out how it got there should point their attention in some very ... interesting directions.'

'I see.' The admiral nodded with the first, faint signs of approval. 'But, of course, if they do find it, they'll also find the ground station it feeds, won't they?'

'Yes, Sir, they will, but that's where the cover plan I mentioned comes in. Colonel Westerfeldt has