Anderson arrived within ten minutes. “I was checking out some leads,” he said, by way of explanation. “What can I do for you, boss?”
Colin smiled. “The Ambassador,” he said. There was no need to expand on who the Ambassador was. “What do you make of her?”
“She’s managed to organise herself a small living space and embassy on the edge of Soul Rider,” Anderson said, referring to one of the more eccentric sections of the High City. In fact, if Colin recalled correctly, it had been designed and built by the Hohenzollern Clan, centuries ago. It was an odd coincidence… if it was a coincidence. “So far, she doesn’t seem to have done much, beyond looking up a few contacts from her days here. We managed to tap into the calls and they were mainly inanities and other shit. I think she’s planning to hold a party within a week.”
“So she doesn’t plan to leave in a hurry,” Colin said, thoughtfully. “That’s interesting.”
“Or she intends to leave right after she’s spoken to Parliament and doesn’t want us to know it,” Anderson suggested. “She hasn’t actually made any preparations for a party yet, as far as we know; no food, drink or entertainment. Of course, that could change, but…”
Colin nodded. “Who did she call?”
Anderson listed seven names. “There’s no one there from the… highest reaches of power, now or pre-rebellion,” he said. “The Wilhelm Family were apparently clients of the Hohenzollern Clan and wouldn’t have had any major links with the Cicero Clan, or the Roosevelt Clan, or anyone else. The only oddity is that one of the people she called was Lord Tyler.”
It took Colin a moment to make the connection. “Kathy’s father,” he said. It promised to be a worrying development. “What did she say to him?”
“Very little of interest,” Anderson said. “I can send you the recordings if you would like, but they were really basic greetings and a brief exchange about how lucky Tyler was to have recovered his daughter. I got the impression that Lord Tyler wasn’t entirely pleased about that.”
Colin snorted rudely. Lord Tyler had made a surprising amount of political capital out of his martyred daughter and then Kathy had ruined it by turning up alive. He’d then tried to exploit her position in the Provisional Government to enhance his Family, which had barely escaped ruin in the wake of Roosevelt’s collapse, but Kathy had refused to play ball. Lord Tyler hadn’t been too happy about that either.
“Too bad,” he said, finally. “Anything else?”
“Reading between the lines, I had the impression that they’d had an affair at one point, but there’s no way to know for sure,” Anderson concluded. “The only other suspicious detail is that Ambassador Wilhelm has instituted a very severe counter-surveillance regime in her embassy. I had some bugs in the building, but they were all found and deactivated within hours. She’s got some good people with her.”
“And the Tau Ceti Convention forbids us from bugging the embassy,” Colin concluded, sardonically. “If someone else actually bugs the embassy, they’d even be within their rights to go to war.”
He scowled. The Tau Ceti Convention, like the Moscow Accords, had been dragged up from the past to fill a need, but it was somewhat vague and open to interpretation. It dated from the days of the Federation and had been crafted to prevent further struggles between the Federation and what would become the first-rank worlds, but no one had used it for centuries. The embassy was effectively foreign soil and, by recognising it as an embassy, they were giving credence to Cottbus as an independent state, but what other choice was there? They couldn’t allow the Ambassador to use a battlecruiser as an Embassy!
“Yes, sir,” Anderson agreed. “I will keep an eye on her and let you know the minute the situation changes.”
“Please,” Colin said. “What is she doing now?”
“Researching,” Anderson said. “She’s studying all kinds of details on the new government, pulling them up from the database, so my guess is that she’s preparing for her speech. Past that…”
He shrugged. “Unless you want a more rigorous approach…”
“No, thank you,” Colin said. He shook his head. “Just keep a close eye on her and any others who happen to show up.”
“Understood,” Anderson said. “One other matter that has come to my attention; the first-rank council has been meeting, several times, over the last few days.”
Colin frowned. The first-rank worlds had covertly organised themselves to fight the Empire as a contingency plan, one that they’d put into operation after the Empire had attempted to scorch Gaul. They were used to working together without being detected, but now, with so many of their people in the new government, they were making waves.
“I see,” he said, finally. “How is this alarming?”
“Over the six months since we won the war, they met, on average, twice a month,” Anderson said. “They discussed matters of only limited interest and planned sessions in Parliament. Over the last two weeks, however, they have met seven times… and I have no idea what they discussed. Like pretty much every other player in the game, they took out our bugs and everyone else’s as well.”
Colin rolled his eyes. Everyone who was anyone had allies, spies and surveillance devices everywhere, trying to be the first to discover something that could be used for their own purposes. The first-rank worlds had had a superb intelligence network into their former masters, even touching Earth itself, and they were masters at countering the Empire’s probing spies. There was no reason to think that they were up to anything alarming, or so he hoped, but Anderson was right. It didn’t bode well.
“Keep an eye on it,” he ordered, finally. There was just so much to keep track of. “Inform me if anything changes.”
He turned his attention back to his terminal as Anderson saluted and left the office. Back when he’d founded the Shadow Fleet, he’d been surprised to discover just how much paperwork was still necessary, despite being on the run from the Empire and the prospect of a violent death somewhere in the near future. The government he’d created to run the liberated sectors had required yet more paperwork… and the Provisional Government was worst of all. He had to see hundreds of documents, requests, pleas and threats… and without looking at them, he couldn’t tell what was urgent and what could be safely ignored. Everyone seemed to think that he could devote himself exclusively to one issue, but he had so much to deal with that he could barely shovel half of it onto his subordinates.
I should just ignore anything that’s not marked urgent, he thought, sourly, as he opened yet another message. The sender seemed to believe that Colin had no other priority, but a pet scheme to terraform a few hundred worlds in order to create more living space. Colin junked it after reading the first few lines. The human race had been in space for nearly two thousand years, but only a handful of worlds had ever been terraformed. Mars had been terraformed, back in the days before the flicker drive, and a handful of others had been marked down for attention, but mostly there were plenty of habitable worlds without needing to go to the expense of a full terraforming project. The Empire did try to terraform some worlds, such as Harmony, on the cheap, but mostly it wasn’t worth the effort.
He keyed his terminal absently and opened a new message file. “Record for Admiral Garland,” he ordered. Katy and her fleet were still assembling at Jupiter. For once, the timing issue had worked out in their favour. “Katy, I am attaching details of the recent contact from Cottbus, but as far as I can see, this changes nothing. Unless the speech in front of Parliament is something radical, like an offer of surrender in exchange for amnesty, I suspect that you will still be in the fire. Hold the fleet until after the speech, then be ready to move out on a moment’s notice.”