The Shadow of Saganami

'Yes, I did,' he replied. He poured himself a fresh cup of coffee from the carafe Joanna Agnelli had provided, leaned back, and crossed his legs. 'Why? Didn't you?' he asked innocently.

'Skipper, far be it from me to suggest you're talking through your beret, but Hope doesn't care much for this little brainstorm of yours. And she still doesn't know the half of it, whatever she may suspect.'

'Nonsense. Just a little perfectly understandable... -apprehension at having her previous orders overruled on such short notice, I'm sure.'

'Sure it was,' Ginger said, shaking her head with a smile. Then her expression sobered. 'Skipper, I don't much care for Hope. She looks to me like an ass-coverer who abhors the very thought of sticking her neck out. When she figures out what you're really planning, she's going to have three kinds of hissy fit.'

'What I'm really planning?' Terekhov arched his eyebrows, and she snorted.

'I'm an engineer, not a tactical officer, Sir. I check the gizmos and widgets, oil the parts, wind the ship up, and make her go wherever you lordly tactical types decide. And I do my best to patch up the holes you same tactical types eventually get blown in my perfectly good ship. Still, I'm not exactly brain dead, and I've had six months now to watch you in action. Do you really think I haven't figured it out?'

Terekhov considered her thoughtfully. He'd found himself missing Ansten FitzGerald more and more badly since sending him off to Monica seventeen days ago. Indeed, he'd been more than a little surprised by just how badly. The executive officer wasn't brilliant, but he was far, far from stupid, and he was also competent and experienced and possessed the courage of his convictions. He'd become exactly the sort of sounding board a good XO was supposed to be, even when Terekhov never said a word to him. Simply visualizing FitzGerald's probable response was often all he needed to do.

Ginger Lewis was different. Although, as she'd just pointed out, she was an engineering specialist, not a tac officer, she had a first-class brain-a better one than FitzGerald's, as a matter of fact. Possibly even a better one than Terekhov himself had, he often thought. And the fact that she'd come up as a mustang, without ever attending Saganami Island, gave her a different perspective. It was as if thinking outside the box came naturally for her, and she possessed a degree of irreverence which was both rare in a regular officer and refreshing. In many ways, he realized, she was almost more valuable to him in the present circumstances than FitzGerald himself might have been.

'I imagine you've deduced most of it, Ginger,' he conceded after a moment. 'And you're probably right that Hope isn't going to be delighted when she finds out. Assuming, of course, that worse comes to worst and we do end up provoking a major interstellar incident.'

'You remember, back in 281, when Duchess Harrington blew that Peep Q-ship out of space in Basilisk, Skipper? You know, the one that got her convicted as a mass murderer in absentia by the Peeps?' Ginger asked, and he nodded.

'Well, that was 'a major interstellar incident,'' she said. 'What you've got in mind is going to be something else entirely. Something I'm not sure they've actually invented a word for yet. Although, now that I think about it, 'act of war' might come pretty close.'

He considered disagreeing with her, but he didn't.

She was right, after all.

* * *

'I knew Yvernau was an idiot,' Dame Estelle Matsuko said over the appetizer. 'I never realized he was directly descended from a lemming, though.'

''Lemming,' Milady?' Gregor O'Shaughnessy repeated, and she wrinkled her nose and reached for her wineglass. She sipped, then set the glass back down and brushed her lips with a napkin.

'It's a species they have on Medusa,' she told him. 'Actually, the name goes back to an Old Earth species. The Medusan version was named because it has some similar habits. Specifically, at irregular intervals, enormous masses of them get together and either charge off the edge of a high cliff or swim straight out to sea until they drown.'

'Why in the world do they do that?'

'Usually because they breed like Old Earth rabbits, only more so. Their numbers grow to a level which threatens to destroy their environment, and that seems to be their genetically programmed mechanism for reducing the population pressure.'

'It seems a bit excessive,' the analyst observed.

'Mother Nature can afford to be excessive,' Medusa pointed out. 'There are always plenty more where they came from, after all.'

'True,' O'Shaughnessy conceded, then cocked his head. 'Actually, that's not a bad metaphor for Yvernau, now that I think about it. He and his fellow oligarchs really are threatening their own environment, and like those... lemmings of yours, there are, unfortunately, plenty more where he came from. Although, to be fair, I was also rather taken with Alquezar's metaphor during the debate.'

''Dinosaurs with stomachs full of frozen buttercups,'' Medusa quoted with a certain relish. 'Something wrong with it, though. I don't think it was dinosaurs with buttercup-stuffed tummies. I think it was... elephants? Hippopotami? Something warm-blooded, anyway. But it was a nice turn of phrase, I'll grant you that.'

'And Yvernau didn't like it very much, either,' O'Shaughnessy said with poorly suppressed glee.

'No. No, he didn't,' the baroness agreed judiciously.

She and her guest fell silent as uniformed Navy stewards, assigned to her support staff along with Colonel Gray's Marines, removed the appetizers and replaced them with the soup course. It was a delicious local concoction of chicken, rice and a local grain which closely resembled pearl barley, and the Provisional Governor sampled it appreciatively.

'So how do you think the New Tuscan government's going to react to his little fiasco, Milady?' O'Shaughnessy asked. He was officially her analyst and intelligence chief, but he'd long since discovered that in political matters, she was often better at his job than he was.

'Hard to say,' she replied thoughtfully. 'What they ought to do is get behind him and help him over the cliff, of course. I just wish I were confident they'll see it that way.'

'About a third of his own delegation would cheerfully shoot him on the Convention floor,' O'Shaughnessy observed, and she nodded.

'They certainly would. And they could make a nice profit selling tickets. Did you see Lababibi's expression when she realized his motion was going to fail?'

'Yes, Milady.' O'Shaughnessy smirked. Undeniably, he smirked. 'I'll almost guarantee you her instructions were to support him. She must've been delighted that Spindle's position as host meant she had to vote last.'

Medusa nodded. She'd been watching Yvernau's expression almost as closely as Lababibi's when the Spindle System President rose to cast her vote. The New Tuscan had obviously counted hers as being in the bag, and his furious consternation when she voted against his motion had been almost as obvious as her own delight.

'It's been obvious for weeks-months-Lababibi despises Yvernau,' she said. 'He's probably the only person in the entire Convention who didn't know it. And you're right about her instructions. But the motion had already failed before the vote got to her, so she's not even going to have to pay the price of disobeying orders. She's the woman who put them firmly on the winners' side instead of death-locking them to the losers, the way she'd been told do to. And she got to kick Yvernau publicly in a particularly sensitive spot in the process. Talk about having your cake and eating it, too!'

She and her analyst smiled nastily at one another. Then she shook her head.

'It should be evident to anyone with a measurable IQ that Yvernau's policy's been proven a disastrous failure, Gregor. Sheer, cynical pragmatism, as well as principle, ought to turn his supporters back home against him. But the members of the New Tuscan political elite-I use the term loosely, you understand-have more than a little lemming in their own genotypes. Why else would they have set up the rules for their delegation the way they did?'

'It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.'

'So did the first Peep attack on Grayson,' the baroness said dryly, and the analyst chuckled. But his humor was fleeting, and he frowned.

'You may be right, Milady,' he said slowly. 'Everything I've managed to put together about Yvernau