“Sit down, Jason,” Tolwyn said slowly. He waited until Bondarevsky had settled into a chair across from him before he went on. In the darkened cabin, his quiet, firm voice seemed almost unreal, like a ghost’s. “I know all the reasons why Goliath should be dropped. Believe me, under any other circumstances I’d be the loudest voice calling for cancellation, no matter how much Max Kruger wanted his new toy. But I know a few damned good reasons for going on, too, and in my opinion they outweigh the ones in favor of dropping the project.”
“What could justify risking so many people?” Bondarevsky demanded. “Come on, Admiral, you’ve been hiding things since before we left Terra. How can you expect any of the rest of us to go along with you if you won’t let us in on the same information you’re using to base your decisions on?”
Tolwyn didn’t say anything for a long moment. “You can’t just accept that I know what I’m doing? Once upon a time, Jason Bondarevsky would have followed me into Hell and back out of sheer loyalty.”
“When I was still a newbie on my first deep-space assignment, maybe,” Bondarevsky said. “Back then everything was simple. You pointed at the holo-map and laid out the mission, and I flew. Simple. But a lot’s happened since then, sir. I’m not the same man I was fifteen, twenty years ago. And neither are you. Behemoth proved that.”
“Behemoth.” Tolwyn packed a world of contempt into that single word. “That’s where everything started to go wrong, Jason. And like a fool I didn’t see any of it coming until it was too goddamned late.”
There was another long pause before he started speaking again. “All right, Jason, since you won’t accept my word I guess I’ll have to spell it all out. But you’re not going to like it. Not one bit of it.” He stood up and started to pace back and forth across the narrow confines of the cabin, a dark shape only half-seen in the dim light. “Remember the mess we were in after the Battle of Earth? All the Joint Chiefs were killed, most of them in that bombing the Kilrathi pulled during the peace talks, and Duke Grecko in the fighting. And the government was in chaos, too, when the President resigned because of his part in letting the Cats nail us.”
Bondarevsky nodded, though he didn’t know if Tolwyn could see him.
“The new government amounted to a coalition between all the major parties, and it showed. After we beat the Cats back from Terra we should have followed up with a strike that would have knocked them into the stone age, but instead we frittered away our strength against a string of useless targets until Thrakhath and his granddaddy had a chance to rebuild everything they’d lost and then some. When Concordia went down, that was the last straw. We’d fallen behind in ship building, and were starting to deploy miserable old carriers fit for the scrapyard in front-line sectors because our resources were stretched so thin. That was largely thanks to the Department of Industrial Affairs. The bureaucrats there were dragging their feet every time someone suggested a move that would cut a few corners and speed up production, and Secretary Haviland either wouldn’t or couldn’t put his foot down. But we were getting the same kind of trouble from half a dozen other cabinet people, too. It was a mess from start to finish.”
Tohvyn paused. “I’d just been assigned to the Weapons Development Office when Concordia went down. I inherited Behemoth from Ubarov, who had the post before me. Frankly, my first reaction was to scrap the damned thing then and there. The design was all wrong, for one thing. It should have been mounted aboard a ship that could defend itself effectively…and one that had some legs, too, so it could maneuver in a combat situation. Behemoth didn’t have either capability. And I didn’t like the whole concept of blasting planets indiscriminately, either. It always seemed to me that the only thing that marked a difference between us and Thrakhath was that we had at least a modicum of morality on our side, and this was putting us on the very same level as him.
“But before I’d finished the review and made a final decision I had a visit from an old friend of mine that changed everything.” Tolwyn fell silent, still pacing restlessly.
“Sir?”
“David Whittaker.” Tolwyn paused again, as if the name alone conveyed everything he wanted to say. Finally he continued. “Dave Whittaker was a classmate of mine in the Academy more years ago than I care to remember. We were shipmates on our cadet cruise aboard the old Albemarle. The captain sent us down in a shuttle with a survey team…you know the drill, give the middies some responsibility on some jerkwater little planet where nothing can go wrong. Well, this time something did go wrong. My helm console exploded-they never did figure out why-during the landing approach. The shuttle crashed. I woke up bund and pinned in the wreckage, without my helmet and with sulfur dioxide fumes leaking in from the planetary atmosphere. Dave didn’t have a helmet either, it had been crushed under a piece of the computer when we hit. But he stayed with me, got me out and helped me get to an emergency pressure bubble, breathing that god-awful stuff. I never would have made it if it hadn’t been for him. We both pulled six months in the hospital, and Dave got a commendation and the Distinguished Service Award. We kept in touch, off and on, but I kind of lost track of him over the last few years, until he came to see me one night at my house off-base.
“It could have been old home week, but he didn’t waste any time making small talk. Instead he launched right into it. He wanted to sound me out on behalf of some friends of his, military officers with long and distinguished service records who were sick and tired of the way the Confederation civil government was making a hash out of the war effort. He named a couple of names…important officers, men like DuVall and Murasaki. And they were just recent recruits, not part of the main organization. It took a few minutes for me to get it through my thick skull that Dave was talking about a military coup, about throwing over all of our service oaths and rising against the Confederation government!“
“What did you say to him, Admiral?” Bondarevsky asked.
“Well, what I should have done was say I’d sign on and find out more, but I didn’t. I told him exactly what I thought of the idea of the military shaking loose of civilian control. I don’t care how screwed up things are in a democracy, there’s never an excuse for the military to run free of government control. Never! So Dave left, handing me a story about it was all just a vague idea and he was sorry he’d even broached it. But I knew he’d been serious. I guess my reputation for playing things my own way persuaded them that I’d be sympathetic.”
“You could have been in a lot of danger,” Bondarevsky said. “A halfway decent conspiracy would have had you killed if they thought you were a danger to them.”
“I know. I think Dave was the only thing that held them back…that and the fact that I didn’t do anything that could worry them.”
“You mean…you didn’t alert ConFleet Security?”
Tolwyn stopped his pacing and stood looking down at Bondarevsky. “I did not,” he said flatly. “And for a good reason. One of the things Dave let slip when we were talking was the fact that Security is lousy with their people. They have a whole secret wing of the security forces, an agency I later found out is designated Y-12 on the TO amp;E. But they have agents scattered all through the structure. So who could I report things to? Anyone I contacted could have been part of it, even my best friends and oldest contacts. If Dave Whittaker was one of them…“
“You had Presidential access,” Bondarevsky pointed out.
“And you know it takes time and several layers of bureaucracy to get a meeting, even to place a holo-call-not that I’d’ve trusted something like that to a holo-call, no matter how secure the line was supposed to be. The way I figured it, if I had made a move to see anybody I could be reasonably sure wasn’t part of the plot I’d have been dead before I knew what hit me. So I pretended I believed Dave’s disclaimers and did the only thing I could think of doing.”