The datapad in her hand accessed the starship’s command network and automatically downloaded a complete status report. Anne wouldn’t have tolerated any false reporting, not after she’d learned so much from Joshua, and she was relieved to know that it didn’t look as if she had misrepresented the situation. The General Monck was in excellent shape, with all of its thousands of components showing up as green. They were completely ready for a fight. She skimmed the training schedule and had to smile. The crew might even be on the verge of being over-trained. Anne was doing an excellent job.
She looked up at Anne and wondered what was going through her head. She’d known Anne back at Morrison, back when she’d been Joshua’s Flag Captain, but where did she think they were going? Did she think that Joshua intended to make himself Emperor, or did she know the truth? The confusion suited no one, but Daria herself… and the fleet had hundreds of her people onboard. Who knew how it would all play out?
“Thank you,” Joshua said, finally. “Can you please show us to our cabins? Once we get settled in, I’ll want a full tour of the starship and then a meeting with the fleet’s Captains. We have much to discuss.”
“Of course,” Anne said. She leaned forward so that she could speak quietly. “We’re all behind you, you know.”
“Are you?” Joshua asked. “That’s good to know.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
“Did he really die in that shuttle?”
It was the first time that Colin had been able to discuss the matter with Anderson privately since Kathy and Cordova had dropped their little bombshell. If Tiberius — and God knew who else — was keeping an eye on him, a meeting with his Head of Security — to say nothing of the man commanding his Marine close-protection detail — would send up red flags. The war situation was worsening, he didn’t know for sure who he could trust, and one of his closest advisors had died in a freak shuttle accident.
“It is impossible to tell,” Major Vincent Anderson admitted, from his seat. A tall man with faintly anonymous features, Anderson looked anything, but confident. The loss of Joshua Wachter would have been worrying under any circumstances, but combined with the news about Tiberius it was alarming. “There was actually very little left of the shuttle after the accident.”
He verged into technical detail that would have confused someone without Imperial Navy experience. The shuttle’s drive field had destabilised rapidly within seconds, shearing through the hull and ripping the craft to shreds, killing everyone onboard long before any alarm could be raised. It had still been in Earth’s gravity field and the fluctuations, encouraged by the presence of Earth, had reduced the shuttle to fragments. If it had happened in orbit, the debris could have been recovered and analysed, but instead the pieces had fallen down towards the planet, burning up in the atmosphere. The little that investigators had found proved nothing.
General Neil Frandsen snorted. “We know that he boarded the shuttle,” he said, flatly, lighting one of his trademark cigars. The brand had once been reserved for the exclusive use of the Thousand Families, but after the Fall of Earth it had become available to the general public, including Frandsen himself. He had confided in Colin that he actually found the cigars rather bland and tasteless, but he kept smoking them anyway, just to remind the Thousand Families who had won the war. “We also know that he didn’t land anywhere else between leaving the spaceport and his final moments in the atmosphere. Does it not follow, then, that he is certainly dead?”
“I could give you a dozen possible ways to get him off that shuttle without being noticed, or to convince observers that he had boarded the shuttle, or even to use a cloned body to fake his death,” Anderson said, equally flatly. The two men didn’t get along very well. The Marine tended to think in terms of straight battles, while the Security Officer thought in terms of plots and counter-plots. “I cannot prove, to my own satisfaction, that Grand Admiral Wachter died in that shuttle. I consider it quite possible that he may not have been on the shuttle at all.”
Colin frowned. Conspiracy theories made his head hurt. “I see,” he said, finally. “If he wasn’t killed, then why was his death faked?”
“There are several possibilities,” Anderson said, ticking them off on his fingers. “One, he wanted to leave your service and decided to do it in a manner that would leave few questions behind. He worked with his own people, including his loyalists from Morrison, and set up the faked death scene so that he could vanish.”
“It would have killed the pilot himself, and Penny Quick,” Colin said, dryly. “Or were their deaths faked too?”
“Second, the Admiral is required for something else that Tiberius has in mind and therefore has to drop out of the public view… and, just incidentally, out of the Grand Admiralship you created for him,” Anderson said. “The death scene is set up and the Admiral leaves the system to do whatever Tiberius wants him to do.”
Colin nodded. “And the third possibility?”
Anderson shrugged. “Third, Joshua Wachter was actually killed, by one of his enemies,” he said, finally. “The man wasn’t — isn’t — actually short of enemies, from reactionaries down here to men and women who lost friends and relatives in the Battle of Morrison. It’s even possible that Tiberius ordered him killed, for whatever reason made sense to him.”
Frandsen smiled. “Why would Tiberius kill someone whose death would certainly draw unwanted attention?”
Anderson smiled. “He might have been loyal to Colin,” he said, nodding in Colin’s direction, “or alternatively refused to do whatever Tiberius wanted. I don’t think that that’s particularly likely, not after Tiberius was the person who recommended Joshua for Morrison, but it is a possibility. Frankly, sir, we don’t have enough evidence to point the finger at anyone, not in this position. We are left with an unsolved mystery.”
Colin stared down at the table thoughtfully. “Are you certain that it was murder?”
“We studied the shuttle’s records carefully,” Anderson said. “The drive should not have destabilised so badly without alarms going off everywhere; the craft certainly should not have been allowed to fly. There was no trace of any damage when it was inspected prior to use, nor is there any reason to suspect that the maintenance crews are lying. The only possibility is a deliberate piece of sabotage within the shuttle’s computer core, done competently enough to pass an inspection, yet utterly lethal when triggered. The shuttle might have been prepared for years before it was finally turned into a murder weapon.”
“What a cheerful thought,” Colin observed. He considered the thought for a long moment. A person who could sabotage one shuttle could do the same to others. “How many shuttles do we have on the planet?”
“Thousands,” Anderson said. He frowned. “I’ve ordered a check of all of their computer cores, just in case, but my gut feeling is that Wachter’s shuttle was specially prepared for its mission. The crews do run regular checks on their craft and discovering a killer program would have resulted in all of the shuttles being grounded until we had had a chance to inspect them all.”