Few of them shared her taste for late-night strategy sessions, but people didn't argue when the head of InSec asked them to stay late.
'I'll drop by Statistics and light a fire under them about that correlation of CRU activities before I leave,' Saint-Just told her. 'I think you may be onto something there. Won't hurt to be sure, anyway.'
'Good.' Palmer-Levy stretched and yawned, then grinned wryly. 'I think I may have stayed up a bit late even for me,' she confessed.
'Then go home and get some sleep,' Saint-Just advised.
'I will.' Palmer-Levy turned away and waved her personal aide after her. The two of them stepped out of the conference room, gathering up her security detail as they went, and headed for the elevators.
The elevator deposited the Security chief and her bodyguards in the air car garage on the tower's four- hundredth floor. A tech team swarmed over her limo, completing the routine check for unpleasant surprises, and Palmer-Levy waited patiently for them to complete their task. Memories of Walter Frankel were far too vivid for her to begrudge the time it took.
'All clear, Ma'am,' the senior tech said finally, scrawling his name on the signature pad of a memo board. 'You're ready to fly.'
'Thank you,' she said, and led the way aboard.
The air car looked like a luxury civilian limo and boasted the internal fittings to match, but it was fast, heavily armored, and equipped with a sophisticated sensor suite based on the Marines' forward reconnaissance vehicles, and its pilot was a decorated combat veteran. Palmer-Levy smiled at him as she settled into her seat, and he nodded back respectfully, waiting until the hatch closed before bringing up his turbines and counter-grav. The limousine lifted without even a curtsy, and he sent it gliding along the ramp toward the outer access point.
'Mark!' the spotter's whisper crackled over her com, and Usher and his team tensed in readiness. The spotter shifted position, aligning the passive sights of her designator on the nose of the limousine sliding out of the access point, and tension crackled silently across the roof.
'Painting—now!' she snapped, and squeezed the stud.
An alarm shrieked, and Palmer-Levy's pilot twitched in his seat. One eye dropped to the lurid light on his EW panel, and his face paled.
'We're being lased!' he barked.
The launching charge lit the tower roof like lightning as it spat the Viper missile from the tube. Its tiny impeller drive kicked in almost instantly, accelerating it at over two thousand gravities even as its sensors picked up the glare of reflected laser light from the air car below and in front of it, and its nose dipped.
The pilot twisted the controls in a frantic evasion maneuver, but the Viper had an optical lock now, and his speed was too low to generate a miss. He did his best, but it was too late for his best to be enough.
Constance Palmer-Levy had one fleeting instant to realize what was happening, and then the edge of the Viper's impeller wedge struck.
The air car tore apart in a hurricane of splintered composites. Its hydrogen reservoirs exploded in balls of brilliant blue flame, and the commander of Internal Security and her bodyguards cascaded down across Nouveau Paris in a grisly rain.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
'Thank God.'
Commander Ogilve relaxed at last as PNS
He glanced at his com officer.
'Record a most immediate to Admiral Rollins' personal attention, Jamie. Message begins: Sir, my latest Argus dump confirms total—repeat, total—withdrawal of Manticoran wall of battle from Hancock. Analysis of data suggests maximum remaining force in Hancock consists of one battlecruiser squadron and screening elements.
'Aye, Sir.'
Ogilve nodded and leaned back, letting himself feel his weariness at last even as he envisioned the hive of activity his signal was about to kick off aboard Admiral Rollins' flagship. A footstep sounded beside his chair, and he looked up at his exec.
'Somehow I don't think this is going to hurt our careers, Sir,' the exec murmured.
'No, I don't imagine it will,' Ogilve agreed unsmilingly. His exec came of prominent Legislaturalist stock, and the commander didn't like him a bit. Worse, he didn't trust his competence. But it sometimes seemed the political game was the only one that counted in the Peoples Navy, and if that meant Commander Ogilve had to carry his exec on his back, then Commander Ogilve had better just have strong back muscles.
And, he thought sourly as the exec moved back to his own station, if he did get promotion out of this, maybe it would mean a new assignment that got him away from at least one incompetent asshole.
Admiral Yuri Rollins shook his head, still suffering the lingering aftereffects of numb disbelief, as the Argus dump's images played themselves out in his flagships main holo sphere for the third time.
'I can't believe it,' he muttered. 'Why in hell would Parks do something this stupid? It's got to be a trap.'
'With all due respect, Sir, I don't see how it can be,' Captain Holcombe disagreed. 'For it to be a trap, they'd have to know about Argus, and there's no way they can.'
'Nothing is impossible, Captain,' Rear Admiral Chin said frostily, and Rollins' chief of staff flushed at her tone.
'I didn't mean to say that they couldn't possibly have detected the birds, Ma'am,' he replied a bit stiffly. 'What I meant was that if they knew about them, they would certainly have taken them out by now.'
'Indeed? Suppose they know about them and choose subtlety over brute force? Why destroy them if they can use them to lie to us?'
'Unlikely,' Rollins said, almost against his will. 'Whatever tactical advantage deceiving us in Hancock might offer would be more than outweighed by the strategic damage they're suffering in other systems. No,' he shook his head, 'they'd never let the net stay up if they knew it was there.'
'And if Admiral Parks is the only one to have noticed the platforms?' Chin asked. 'If he's only just become aware of them, he might have chosen to use them in his own case while dispatching couriers to the commanders of other stations to alert them to the danger.'
'Possible, but again, unlikely.' Rollins turned away from the display and thrust his hands into his tunic pockets. 'If he knows about them at all, then presumably he also knows they cover the entire system periphery. That means he can't sneak back in to set any sort of ambush without being picked up. Somehow I don't think he'd deliberately risk letting us in unopposed on the off chance that he could intercept us from some distant position.'
'I suppose not.' Chin folded her arms and looked accusingly into the sphere. 'In that case, though, I have to wonder what he thinks he's up to.'
'I think it's another indication he doesn't know about Argus, Ma'am,' Captain Holcombe offered. She raised an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged. 'If he's not in Hancock, he almost has to be picketing the Alliance systems in the area. Assuming that to be the case, I believe he uncovered Hancock precisely because he feels we can't know he's done it. After all, one of Argus' primary objectives was to cut down normal scouting ops to make Manty commanders overconfident in hopes they'd make mistakes just like this.'
'True.' Chin pursed her lips a moment, then nodded. 'I suppose it just seems too convenient for him to suddenly do exactly what we want him to.'
