Benjamin McIlhenny racked his headset and stood, rubbing his aching eyes and trying to remember when he'd last had six hours' sleep at a stretch.
He lowered his hands and glowered at the record chips and hard-copy heaped about his office aboard the accomodation ship HMS Donegal. Somewhere in all that crap, he knew, was the answer—or the clues which would lead to the answer—if only he could find it.
It seemed a law of nature that any intelligence service always had the critical data in its grasp . . . and didn't know it. After all, how did you cull the one, crucial truth from the heap of untruth, half-truth, and plain lunacy? Answer: hindsight invariably recognized it after the fact. Which, of course, was the reason the intelligence community was constantly being kicked by people who thought it was so damned easy.
McIlhenny snorted bitterly and began to pace. He'd seen it too many times, especially from Senate staffers. They had an image of intelligence officers as Machiavellian spy-masters, usually in pursuit of some hidden agenda. That was why everyone knew the civilians had to watch the sneaky bastards so closely. And since they were so damned clever, obviously they never told all they knew, even when they had a constitutional duty to do so. Which, naturally, meant any "failure" to spot the critical datum actually represented some deep-seated plot to suppress an embarrassing truth.
People like that neither knew nor cared what true intelligence work was. Holovid might pander to the notion of the Daring Interstellar Agent carrying the vital data chip in a hollow tooth, but the real secret was sweat. Insight and trained instinct were invaluable, but it was the painstaking pursuit of every lead, the collection of every scrap of evidence and its equally exhaustive analysis, which provided the real breakthroughs.
Unfortunately, he admitted with a sigh, analysis took time, sometimes more than you had, and in this case it wasn't providing what he needed. He knew there was a link between the pirates and someone high up. It was the only possible answer. Admiral Gomez's full strength would have had a tough time fighting its way into Elysium orbit against its space defenses, yet the pirates had gotten inside in the first rush. McIlhenny had no detailed sensor data to back his hunch, but he was morally certain the raiders had slipped a capital ship into SLAM range under some sort of cover. The shocked survivors all agreed on the blazing speed with which the orbital defenses had been annihilated, and only a capital ship could have done it.
But how? How had they fooled Commodore Trang and all of his people? Simple ECM couldn't be the answer after all the sector had been through. No, somehow they'd given Trang a legitimate cover, something he knew was friendly, and there was simply no way they could have done that without access to information they should never have been able to reach.
It all fit a pattern—even Treadwell was showing signs of accepting that—but the colonel was damned if he could make it all come together. Even Ben Belkassem had thrown up his hands and departed for Old Earth in the faint hope that his superiors there might be able to see something from their distant perspective which had eluded everyone in the Franconia Sector.
The colonel hoped so, because what bothered him even more than how was why. What in God's name were these people up to? He hadn't said so (except very privately to Admiral Gomez and Brigadier Keita), but it passed sanity that they could be garden-variety pirates. That didn't make sense just based on cost effectiveness! Anybody who could field a force the size of the one these people had to have didn't need whatever they were making off their loot.
No doubt plunder helped defray their operational costs, but his most generous estimate of their take fell short of what it must cost to supply and maintain their ships. Just look at what they were taking: colony support equipment, spaceport beacon arrays, industrial machinery, for God's sake! They scooped up some luxury goods, of course—they'd scored over a half-billion in direcat pelts, alone, from Mathison's World—but no normal hijacker or pirate would touch most of what they took.
And even aside from their unlikely loot, there were the casualties. McIlhenny didn't believe in Attila the Hun in starships. Stupid people, by and large, didn't become starship captains, and only someone who was stupid could fail to see the inevitable result of pursuing some bizarre scorched-earth policy against the Empire. That was why massacre for the sake of massacre wasn't a normal piratical trait; it didn't pay their bills, and it did guarantee a massive response. Yet these people were deliberately maximizing the devastation in their wake. From everything the Elysium survivors could tell him, they hadn't even tried to loot beyond the limits of the capital, but they'd nuked every city from orbit! Nine million dead. What in hell's name could be behind that kind of slaughter? It was almost as if they were taunting the Fleet, daring it to deal with them.
It was maddening, yet the answer was here, right here in his office and his brain, if he could only bring the pieces together. Any group who could penetrate security as if it didn't exist and use their stolen data to mount such meticulous, lethal attacks couldn't be mere loose cannons. They had an ultimate objective which, in their eyes at least, made all the killing worthwhile, and that was frightening, because he couldn't imagine what it might be and it was his job to do just that.
There were times, McIlhenny thought wistfully, when a return to the simplicity of combat looked ever so attractive.
The admittance signal hauled him out of his thoughts. He pressed the button, and his eyebrows arched as Sir Arthur Keita stepped through the hatch.
"Good evening, Sir Arthur. What can I do for you?"
"Probably not much," Keita rumbled. He removed a carton of chips from a chair and settled onto it, holding them in his lap. "I just dropped by to say good-bye, Colonel."
"Good-bye?" McIlhenny repeated in surprise, and Keita gave a sour grin.
"I'm only punching air out here. This is a job for you and the Fleet—and Treadwell, if he ever stops screaming for more ships and uses what he has—and I've been here too long."
"I see." McIlhenny sank into his own chair and swivelled it to face Keita. The brigadier's gravelly voice was as steady as ever, but he heard the despair within it. He knew what had kept Keita on Soissons so long . . . and there hadn't been a single report of the alpha-synth in ten weeks.
"I imagine you do, Colonel." Keita's eyes were sad, but he gave McIlhenny a less strained smile and nodded. "But I can't justify staying on in the hope that something will break, and—" his jaw tightened "—if she's spotted now, she's your job, not mine."
"Understood, Sir," the colonel said. "I wish it weren't true—God knows Captain DeVries deserves better than that—but I understand."
Keita looked down at the carton of chips, stirring them with a blunt index finger.
"I wish you could have known her before, Colonel," he said softly. "She was . . . special. The best. And to have it end like this, with an imperial price on her head . . ."
The silver-maned old head shook sadly, and then Keita looked up at McIlhenny's combat ribbons.
"You've been there, Colonel. If it has to be one of our own, I'm glad it's someone who can understand. Whatever she is now, she was special."
"I know she was, Sir Arthur."
"Yes. Yes, you do." Keita inhaled deeply, then rose and held out his hand. "I'll be going, then."
"Yes, Sir. I'm going to miss you, Sir Arthur. I want you to know how much I've appreciated the insight you gave me between your . . . other duties."
"Keep swinging, Colonel." Keita's grip crushed McIlhenny's hand. "Between us, I'm convinced you're on the right trail, so you watch your six. Something stinks to high heaven out here. I intend to say as much to Countess Miller and His Majesty, but you be careful who you trust. When you can't tell the bad guys from the good guys . . ."
His voice trailed off, and he released McIlhenny's hand with a shrug.
"I know, Sir." The colonel frowned a moment, then looked deep into Keita's eyes. "A favor, if I may, Sir Arthur."
"Of course," Keita said instantly, and McIlhenny smiled his thanks.
"I've made a complete duplicate of my files. Technically, they're not supposed to leave my office, but I would be very grateful if you'd take them to Old Earth with you. I'd feel much happier with someone I know is clean in possession of my data in case—"
The colonel broke off with a crooked smile, and Keita nodded soberly.
"I will—and I'm honored by your trust."
"Thank you. And with your permission, Sir, I'll arrange a periodic security download to you. One outside my normal channels."
"Do you have a feeling?" Keita's eyes were suddenly intent, and the colonel shrugged.
"I . . . don't know. It's just that I suspect we've been penetrated even more deeply than we've guessed. I don't want to sound paranoid, but these people have certainly demonstrated they're not shy about killing people. If I get too close to their mole . . . Well, accidents happen, Sir Arthur."
* * *
Vice Admiral Brinkman lit another cigar, tipped back his chair, and frowned meditatively up at the overhead. Things were getting complicated. Of course, they'd known they would—they had to, in fact, if this was going to work—but keeping so many balls in the air wore on a man's nerves.
He thought back over his discussion with Howell. He could certainly understand the commodore's concerns, and, frankly, he would have balked at hitting someone like the El Grecans if not for McIlhenny. The collateral objectives would be valuable even without the troublesome colonel, but he was the real reason they had to strike at least one nonimperial target to prove they really were "pirates." Not that Brinkman expected even the Ringbolt attack to throw him off for long. It should create confusion among the people to whom he reported, but it was unlikely to create enough.
And that was because McIlhenny wasn't going to give up. He might not realize what he had his teeth into, but he knew he was onto something, and he wasn't going to turn loose. The use of classified data to plan the squadron's operations had always been the shakiest part of the entire plan, yet there'd been no other way. Howell was good, but Fleet only had to get lucky once to blow his entire force out of space, so Fleet couldn't be allowed to get lucky.
If Lord Jurawski and Countess Miller hadn't insisted on sending Rosario Gomez out here, Brinkman could have made certain no luck came Fleet's way, but they didn't call Gomez "the Iron Maiden" for nothing. The nickname was, he admitted with a smile, a base libel on her sex life, but she'd earned it when she was much younger, and nothing about her style had changed since. They'd known Lady Rosario would be a problem when her assignment was announced, yet there'd been nothing they could do. They'd already taken out Admiral Whitworth to clear the second in command's slot for Brinkman; two flag officers' mysterious deaths would have been too much to risk, so they'd had to accept Gomez and concentrate on hamstringing her efforts from within.
Unfortunately, she'd assembled a staff whose tenacity mirrored her own—and one that was damnably close-knit and loyal to her. Brinkman more than suspected that she and McIlhenny had begun compartmentalizing more tightly than they were telling, and that was bad.
He rocked his chair slowly, nursing his cigar. McIlhenny had already clamped down on normal information distribution, which produced a dangerous decrease in possible suspects. The more restricted data became, the fewer people could possibly be passing it on to the "pirates," and that was bad enough. But if the two of them were beginning to restrict critical data to an inner clique only they trusted, his people might miss some critical bit of information Howell and Alexsov had to have.
At least that Justice pest had worn out his enthusiasm and decamped, and Keita would be gone within days. Both of those were major pluses, but it didn't help much with the McIlhenny problem. The ideal solution would be to remove him, but he was a cautious and a dangerous man. He could be gotten to, yet setting up an overt assassination that didn't prove how massively security had been breached would be time consuming and difficult. Worse, it would suggest there'd been a reason to kill him, and anyone with whom he'd shared his suspicions—whatever they were—would have to wonder if the reason wasn't that he'd been on the right track and getting too close to an answer.
At the very least Gomez would be out for blood, and assassinating her would be even harder. She practically never left her battlecruiser flagship these days, and about the only way to get to her would be to sabotage Antietam's Fasset drive or fusion plants and take out the entire ship. That might not be impossible, but it would certainly be difficult. Worst of all, killing her would be the Whitworth situation all over again and worse. It would put him in her command, and stepping into her shoes under the present circumstances might raise the wrong eyebrows. What if someone who shared McIlhenny's suspicions wondered why someone else might want to see Sir Amos Brinkman in her place?
He let his chair swing back upright and shook his head with a sigh. No, precipitous action against Gomez was out of the question. Pressure was building in the Senate and the Ministry as the "pirates" danced around her and laughed at her attempts to deal with them. It could only be a matter of time before she was relieved for her failures. Brinkman would be properly distressed at relieving so old and dear a friend under such circumstances—and send McIlhenny packing as part of his "new broom" housekeeping. That had been the plan for getting rid of Gomez from the beginning; it was only McIlhenny's stubborn probing that had him thinking about other approaches.
Still, the time might come when McIlhenny got too close and they had to take him out, suspicious or no. It wouldn't be a best-case scenario, but if it was a choice between that and having him figure out what was really going on, the decision would make itself. And his death would produce at least short-term confusion, especially if it wasn't an obvious assassination. If they were lucky, the confusion might even last long enough to carry clear through Gomez's relief.
Brinkman nodded to himself and stubbed out his cigar. Yes, it might become necessary, in which case it would be a good idea to put the assets in place now, and the admiral thought he might just know the way to go about it. McIlhenny had started out as a shuttle pilot, after all. That was where he'd won his spurs and first made his name, and he still had a weakness for hot shuttles and hotter skimmers. Better yet, he insisted on piloting himself whenever possible. Under normal circumstances, no one would be too surprised if he finally lost it in a midair one day, and a little help in the maintenance shop could . . . assist the good colonel right out of the sky.
He smiled a slow, thoughtful smile and tried to remember the name of that "skimmer tech" Rachel Shu had used to eliminate Admiral Whitworth. It was time for a little judicious personnel reassignment.