And if the bastards do have that kind of range — and accuracy — there’s no point training to fight them, anyway. We’ll be dead meat no matter what we do!
It wasn’t a thought he was prepared to share even with Burrows, although he suspected the chief of staff had reached the same conclusion. On the other hand, Burrows continued to believe — probably correctly, Filareta thought — that the Manty missiles at Spindle must have come out of system-defense pods, not shipboard launchers. No matter what else, missiles that long-ranged had to be huge, which meant no mobile unit could carry them in the numbers which had been reported. And if they had come out of system-defense pods, then even that incomparable military genius Rajampet was probably right about how the January attack on the Manties’ home system had depleted their supply of them.
Unfortunately, that attack had occurred at least six T-months before Filareta could possibly get there to exploit it. He wasn’t as confident as Rajampet that the Manties wouldn’t be able to make a lot of that damage good in the meantime. And, even more unfortunately, there were a few things Burrows didn’t know and Filareta was in no position to tell him.
The fleet admiral picked up his own wineglass, sipping with less than his usual appreciation while his mind flowed down internal pathways which had become entirely too well worn over the two T-weeks since he’d received his orders for Operation Raging Justice. Actually, they’d started wearing their way into his cortex the instant he heard about Sandra Crandall’s debacle. Or, at least, the instant he first heard the Manticorans’ analysis of how Crandall had come to be aimed at them in the first place.
Burrows, he knew, put zero credence in Manty claims that Manpower and/or other Mesa-based transstellars had deliberately fomented the incidents in the Talbott Quadrant. The chief of staff was no innocent virgin where corporate influence on naval policies was involved, but it was preposterous to suggest that any transstellar, however powerful, could actually control major fleet movements! That was the stuff of paranoid conspiracy theories, as far as Burrows was concerned.
It might not have been if he’d known what Massimo Filareta knew.
Filareta couldn’t be positive Crandall had been influenced by Manpower, but he knew for damned certain that he had. He knew all about his own reputation as a hard-partying fellow, and he knew there were rumors about certain other of his more…esoteric tastes. As far as he knew, though, no one knew about his most deeply hidden cravings. No one, at least, but his “friends” at Manpower, who’d long since fallen into the habit of providing for those cravings. Those same “friends” had eased his way in other fashions, as well, and he’d always known that someday they’d want payback. But he’d been all right with that; it was the way the system worked, even if his particular set of incentives would have been regarded as beyond the pale even by jaded Solarian standards.
So he hadn’t been surprised when one of his “friends” explained why they wanted him in command of the task force to be deployed to Tasmania. They wanted a Solarian naval presence close to the Manties — close enough to discourage them from diverting strength to Talbott to respond forcefully to Manpower’s proxies — and they wanted its CO to be someone they could trust to make that point to Manticore if the need arose.
And you just can’t quite brush off the suspicion that they may have sent Crandall out to Talbott with exactly the same “you’re just a diversion” explanation, can you, Massimo? Especially when you’re sitting here waiting for the damned missile colliers.
That was the final element which had him considering the sort of “paranoid conspiracy theories” with which Burrows had so little patience. The order to prepare to receive a massive influx of reinforcements had arrived on April the eleventh, with instructions to sortie no later than the twenty-fifth. Obviously, the reinforcements he was to expect had already been put into motion, and although the timetable had been tight, he’d felt reasonably confident of making the ordered departure date. Except that two days later, he’d received orders to await a convoy of ammunition ships loaded with the latest Technodyne ship-to-ship and system defense missile variants. As a follow-up dispatch had explained, it would delay the operation by no more than forty-eight hours, assuming the missile colliers experienced no delays of their own.
He’d been surprised Technodyne was supplying anything, given the legal firestorm still swirling around the huge arms manufacturer. But then he’d examined the new order a bit more closely and discovered that the “Technodyne” shipment had actually originated in the Mesa System.
Which was odd, since there was no Technodyne manufacturing facility in that star system.
Technodyne did have a corporate headquarters on Mesa, so it might have made sense for shipping orders to originate there, but there was no way the missiles themselves should be coming from that star system. Not if they’d actually been built by Technodyne, at least. Unless, perhaps, they were coming out of ammunition stockpiles already amassed by someone — someone other than the Solarian League Navy — in the aforesaid system.
As far as Filareta knew, not even Burrows had noticed that discrepancy. Nor had the chief of staff looked at the transit times involved. Oh, if anyone did look, they’d probably find that the colliers had been “diverted in transit” from some other, reasonably innocent destination, just like quite a few of his reinforcing superdreadnought squadrons. Massimo Filareta wasn’t “anyone,” however. He was as certain as a man could be that the missiles in question had actually left Mesa before his orders to sortie had been written on Old Terra, and they hadn’t been “diverted in transit,” either. They’d been intended for Tasmania from the outset…which, in turn, suggested that the same someone in the Mesa System from whose stockpiles they’d been drawn had calculated that Filareta’s command was going to receive exactly the orders it had received.
And those orders had been written only as a consequence of what had happened to Sandra Crandall.
Given all that, the Manties’ “preposterous” claims about Mesa began to seem a lot less preposterous. And the fact that “Technodyne” just happened to have been developing a longer-ranged, tube-launched shipkiller missile at the very moment the analysts back home in Old Chicago had finally become aware of Manticoran missile ranges was another of those “coincidences” Filareta found difficult to swallow.
No, he thought now, lowering his glass and staring down into the wine. No, you’re a pulser dart aimed at Manticore by your “friends,” Massimo. And so was Crandall. And someone else — someone back in the Sol System itself — has to be in on this, too. It’s the only way those oh-so-fortuitously available missiles could have been slipped into the order queue so smoothly. It could be Kingsford, I suppose. He’s spent long enough learning to punch Rajampet’s buttons. Or it could be Rajampet himself. I never would’ve thought he was smart enough to make a good conspirator, but someone else could be calling the shots for him the same way they were for Crandall…or me, for that matter. And when you come down to it, it doesn’t really have to’ve been someone at the top. Someone in the right position in Logistics could’ve stage-managed the whole thing, at least as far as the missiles are concerned. Not that it really matters how they managed that part. No, what matters is whether they pre-positioned me just in case I’d be needed, or because they figured all along that Crandall was going to get reamed? Because if they deliberately set her up to get wasted, they could be doing exactly the same thing to me.