The Final Battle (8 page)

Jaruzelska said nothing. Michael, unable to hold himself upright any longer, collapsed back onto the bed. “Everything that’s happened has happened for a good reason,” she said.

“So you say,” Michael said, his face twisted into a furious mask.

“I do say. Now I’ll stand here as long as you like, but in the end you’ll have to hear me out,” Jaruzelska said, her voice all steel now, “so stop wasting my time. Believe me, I have better things to do.”

“Go fuck yourself,” he muttered.

“Last chance.”

Unwilling to trust her, Michael hesitated. His body trembled as he struggled to regain his composure. “Okay, I will,” he said at last, unable to find enough energy to be angry anymore, “though it had better be damn good.”

“Oh, it will be. Right, we’ve a lot to get through, so let’s get started,” Jaruzelska went on, brisk and businesslike. She pulled up a chair and sat down. “First, I would all like to apologize for what you have been put through. It was as unforgivable as it was necessary, and I’m sorry.”

“Keep talking,” Michael said, grim-faced.

Jaruzelska sighed. “Okay, bear with me as I do this one step at a time,” she said. “First, have a look at this holovid clip.”

A wall-mounted holovid screen burst into life. It took Michael a few seconds to work out what he was seeing: a flame-shot pillar of smoke that climbed from the blazing wreckage of what looked like a suborbital shuttle. “What’s that?” he asked.

“That’s all that’s left of the shuttle taking your body from Farrisport Island after your execution. As you can see, there could have been no survivors, and your mortal remains are now well and truly incinerated. In fact, my people tell me that the fire was so intense that the recovery team will be lucky to find anything more than a puddle of molten slag.”

“But why … Ah, right, I get it,” Michael said. “Okay, what’s next?”

“Watch this.”

The holovid came to life again. It juddered and jumped. Michael struggled to work out what he was watching because the image was so poor, so unsteady. Then it clicked. He was looking at a heavy cargo shuttle, its flame-scorched skin free of any identification markings. The camera moved toward a loaderbot trundling a gray shipping container out of the shuttle’s cavernous cargo bay. The letters on the side of the container said:
government of the pascanici league
. The camera continued on to where a man in a coldsuit stood, his face thrown in harsh relief by overhead lights.

There the vid paused to leave the man’s mouth frozen half open.

“What the hell was that about?” Michael asked. “That’s the worst vid I’ve ever seen.”

“It came from dustcams.”

Michael frowned. He’d never heard of dustcams.

“And before you ask, dustcams are low-res speck-size cameras that record three-sixty-degree vid before squirting it back to us via a microsat. We dropped millions of them over a lump of rock on Commitment the Hammers call Hendrik Island. We got plenty of vid, almost all of it useless. But some came through for us, and this is best we have. The analysts think it settled on someone’s jacket as he walked past that shuttle.”

Michael sat up. “So he tells us something?” he said, studying the man’s face with care.

“That piece of slime,” Jaruzelska said, pointing a finger at the screen, “is Professor Arnoldsen, and he is the Pascanicians’ best magnetic flux engineer. He’s probably the best in humanspace as well.”

Michael’s heart tripped over itself; now he knew why Jaruzelska was showing him the vid clip. “Oh, shit,” he whispered. “Antimatter production is all about magnetic flux containment.”

“It is.”

“Which makes Hendrik Island the Hammer’s new antimatter manufacturing plant, and the fact that Arnoldsen is there proves that the Pascanicians are helping them. Looks like the
NRA
’s intelligence reports really were on the money. But how did you know about Hendrik Island?”

“We analyzed Commitment’s orbit-to-earth and suborbital traffic for the last ten years.”

Michael turned to stare at Jaruzelska, wide-eyed. “You’re kidding me. That’s petabytes of data.”

“Exabytes, actually.”

Michael shook his head; he still didn’t understand. “But how?”

“After you and your dreadnoughts destroyed the Hammer’s antimatter production plant at Devastation Reef in March ’01, we all knew the Hammers had to replace the plant. The problem was figuring out where they’d put it. After a lot of debate, our intelligence guys decided that the Hammers would have to locate their new plant as close to home as possible—”

“Of course!” Michael blurted out. “Where the defenses are most concentrated; that way we couldn’t take it out again.”

“And you can’t get much closer to home than dirtside on Commitment.”

“So you looked for changes in their traffic patterns,” Michael said; over and over, his forefinger stabbed out in his excitement. “You looked for shuttles. Lots of shuttles, all going somewhere they’d never gone before!”

“And that somewhere was Hendrik Island. When we crunched the data, it stuck out like the proverbial dog’s balls. Hendrik Island was home to a small research station; it used to have one shuttle a month, if that. Now it’s getting hundreds, many of them from the Pascanici League. So now we have hard evidence that proves what the Hammers are up to. That’s the good news. The bad news is that none of what you’ve seen made the slightest impression on the government. Moderator Ferrero and her Worlds First Party always wanted a peace treaty with the Hammers, and nothing was ever going to stop them from getting it.”

“I know,” Michael said, stony-faced. “I watched the holovid of the signing ceremony. It’s a disaster.”

“More than you know. One of the terms of the peace treaty was that both parties would halt all antimatter research and production. We, of course, complied. As we now know, the Hammers did not.”

“Surely Ferrero insisted that the Hammers prove they weren’t in breach of the treaty.”

“No, she didn’t. She said that would be a betrayal of the bond of trust she’d established with the Hammer of Kraa.”

“So the government won’t do anything. What happens next?”

“We take direct action. If we sit around and wait, we’ll all wake up one day to find Federated Worlds nearspace full of Hammer starships armed with antimatter missiles, and then it’s game over. Inside a week, we’ll be a vassal state of the Empire of the Hammer of Kraa with Jeremiah Polk our emperor. We don’t have a choice. We must stop him.”

“But how can you do that? With the greatest respect, I cannot—”

“Can you walk?” Jaruzelska said, cutting him off.

“I guess,” Michael said.

“If you can—” Jaruzelska’s tone left Michael in no doubt that not being able to walk was not an option. “—I’ll get Corporal Wei to find you some clothes and bring you through to the command center.”

“Yes, sir,” Michael said to her departing figure, a tiny corner of his brain still wondering why he hadn’t tried harder to kill the woman.

Light-headed from the effort it took to stay upright, Michael followed Corporal Wei through a security post manned by armed marines. He emerged into a brightly lit space humming with disciplined activity, its walls dominated by holovid screens busy with live video feeds and maps overlaid with thick clusters of tactical icons, along with status boards. The air was buzzing with nervous energy underscored by the buzz of quiet conversations from twenty or so shipsuited spacers and marines.

Admiral Jaruzelska waved him over. “Michael,” she said, “it’s good to see you up.”

“What is this place?” Michael murmured even though he knew. This was a command center, a big one, and it was a command center in the middle of a live operation. But Karrigal Creek? He didn’t know where Karrigal Creek was, but he was pretty sure that it formed no part of the Federated Worlds’ massive network of command and control centers.

“Ah, good,” Jaruzelska said when a man in faded marine greens spotted her and came over. “This is General Adam Nwosu.”

“General Nwosu,” Michael said, confused. “I’m sorry, but what are you doing here? I thought you’d retired.”

“I had,” Nwosu said; he was a chunky, well-muscled man, ebony-faced, with soft brown eyes under a wild thatch of arctic-blond hair. “But these are dangerous times, and when Admiral Jaruzelska asked for my assistance—” He shrugged. “—how could I say no?”

They shook hands. Michael was wondering why Jaruzelska would need a superannuated Marine Corps general when a third person—this one in planetary defense uniform—saw them from across the room. “General,” Jaruzelska called out. She waved at a tall, cadaverous woman with a bleak and emotionless face illuminated by penetrating blue eyes to come over. “General Fahriye Yilmaz, meet Michael Helfort.”

“Good to meet you, sir,” Michael, even more puzzled now, said as they shook hands. What was a pair of long-retired generals doing in Karrigal Creek? None of this made any sense, and his confusion was made all the worse by the abrupt change in his fortunes. It was so abrupt that he had to keep reminding himself that it was real, that it was no dream no matter how bizarre and unexpected it seemed.

“And you, Michael,” Yilmaz said, her face transformed by the sudden warmth of her smile. “You’ve done well. We owe you an enormous debt.”

“Not really, General,” Michael said, bobbing his head, embarrassed.

“We’ll catch up later, Fahriye, Adam. Michael, this way,” Jaruzelska said. She threaded her way through the controlled confusion and into a small room off to one side. “Sit!” she said, pointing to a chair.

“I get it now,” Michael said as Jaruzelska found her seat. “All of that out there—” He waved a hand in the direction of the command center. “—that’s the planning team for a military coup. You’re going to kick Ferrero out and take over, aren’t you?”

“I wish we could,” Jaruzelska said, laughing, “but no, sadly, we’re not. That was our initial thought, but we realized that a coup would tell the Hammers that something was up. No, we want them to think that nothing has changed right up to the point when it’s too late to stop us.”

“You’re going back to Commitment?”

“We are.”

“But there’s no way to do that without the government knowing, surely. It’s impossible!”

“We don’t think so. You should know that. After all, you stole three dreadnoughts from under Fleet’s nose. We’re planning to do the same, only on a larger scale.”

“Hijacking three ships is one thing,” Michael protested. “Making off with an entire battle group is quite another, and that’s what you’ll need. It can’t be done. The operation to get the support the
NRA
needs will be huge. It’ll involve tens of thousands of people and fifty, sixty ships, maybe more. There’s no way you can maintain operational security. Someone will talk.”

“All good points, but stay with me while I go back a bit. I need to give you the full story.” Jaruzelska was quiet for a long time. “Did you ever wonder,” she continued, “why I threw you to the wolves?”

“A million times a day,” Michael said with a flash of resentment, “and don’t think for a second that I’ve forgiven you for that, because I never will.”

“We had our reasons.”

“Which were?”

“We needed Fleet in particular and the marines and planetary defense as well to see Caroline Ferrero and her government for what they were: lackeys of the Hammers, puppets dancing as Jeremiah Polk pulled the strings. And to do that, I needed to turn you from villain to victim.”

“Villain to victim?” Michael shook his head. “That makes no sense.”

“Oh, but it does,” Jaruzelska assured him, “and here’s why. When you stole those three ships, nobody in Fleet agreed with what you’d done. Many felt your arrest was a good thing. They thought it wiped away one of the worst stains on Fleet’s record. But a few things changed that. The first was your speech in mitigation at your trial.”

“My speech? World News called it … let me see if I can remember their exact words … yes, ‘a tissue of self-serving lies.’”

“Well, since the Hammers were paying them at the time, what else would they say? But I can tell you this: I have heard a lot of speeches in my time, but yours was a work of genius. Do you know how many times it has been downloaded?”

“No.”

“Over a half a billion times, and that’s just here on the Federated Worlds. Your speech is famous, Michael, right across humanspace.”

“It wasn’t me,” Michael said, his cheeks reddening with embarrassment. “The credit should go to my dad. I told him what I thought, what the rest of the team thought, why we did it. He was the one who turned all that into something worth hearing.”

“He didn’t tell you that your speech was put together by the best psycholinguistics team in human history?” Jaruzelska asked with a half smile.

“It was?”

“Oh, yes,” Jaruzelska said with a nod. “Their job was to craft the most persuasive speech ever written. You had to convince everyone that even though you were as guilty as hell, you didn’t hijack those dreadnoughts because you were a lovelorn fool. You did it because your motives were good, because you could see what the rest of us were too slow, too stubborn, too self-interested to see: that it was only a matter of time before the Hammers smashed us into the dust. And guess what? It worked. Right across the Federated Worlds and especially in the military, your approval rating soared. It’s never dropped, and we’re making sure it never will. You are a genuine hero, Michael, and you might as well get used to it.

“The death sentence was the second step, and we made sure there was plenty of commentary pointing out that execution is a barbaric institution that has no place in a civilized society. We also made sure that everybody knew that your sentence was imposed because that was what the government wanted.”

“Despite the fact that it was handed down by a court? The judge wouldn’t have been too happy.”

“Let’s just say that she is a friend of ours,” Jaruzelska said. “We owe her big time.”

“You didn’t stop there, though, did you?” Michael said. “You spread the idea around that the government pushed for the death penalty only because that was what the Hammers wanted. Am I right?”