"Staff slot, huh. I'm sorry to hear it. You should be on the flight line, kid, where you belong."
"Don't I know it," Tolwyn said. "But . . . I didn't have any say in the matter. The admiral wouldn't take no for an answer, and here I am."
Blair nodded in understanding. He'd heard stories of Admiral Tolwyn's open displays of emotion, first when he had feared Kevin missing or dead, then later when the younger man was recovered and returned to the fleet. Maybe the staff job was a real effort to keep Kevin Tolwyn out of harm's way. He was, after all, the admiral's closest surviving kin and had done more than his share of fighting while serving on the Tarawa. The Medal of Honor on his chest was more than enough proof of that.
"If I can interrupt the reunion, Colonel, I think we'd better get down to business." Eisen gestured to the chairs by his desk. As they sat down, he continued. "Major Tolwyn brings us fresh orders from HQ. It looks like the war's heating up, at least as far as we're concerned. Major?"
"The attack on Locanda Four was a real wake-up call," Tolwyn said. "We knew the cats were working on a number of strategic weapons projects, but we didn't expect them to bring them into play as long as their fleet was still able to hold its own. It s against everything in the Kilrathi philosophy to resort to this kind of blatant genocide. They're supposed to like their fights up close and personal, and this is a complete departure from everything we thought we knew about them."
"Do we have any evidence they're going to use bioweapons elsewhere?" Blair asked. "Or was this some kind of . . . special case?
"We don't know," Tolwyn said. "And that has the High Command doing some serious nail-biting, let me tell you. All we know is that the cats have escalated the war, and if we don't match the ante we might as well just fold now."
"Match the ante . . . how?" Blair asked.
"The Confederation's been working on its share of doomsday weapons, too," Tolwyn told them. "The Battle of Terra scared the hell out of all of us. The big Kilrathi offensive caught everyone off guard. I don't think I need to tell you that we're on the ropes. One more attack like that and the game's over. Remember, they managed to drop over twenty standard warheads on Earth in the last attack. If only one of them had been a bio the homeworld would be a lifeless desert today. There's no way around it, this one's to the death and we have a couple of counter punches almost ready to go."
Blair said nothing. The idea of matching the Kilrathi atrocity at Locanda with a Terran retaliation against civilians appalled him, but he tried to keep his reaction from showing in his voice or expression.
Tolwyn fixed Blair with his gaze. "One of the projects is being pushed by General Taggart and the folks at Covert Ops, and the other's my uncle's pet project. That's why he got pulled from Concordia just before it went down."
Eisen cleared his throat. "If you don't mind, Major, I'd appreciate it if you'd stick to the briefing."
"Sorry, sir," Tolwyn said. "Both projects actually stem from the same basic research. It seems some of our survey work off Kilrah during Tarawa's little end run raid there a few years back has yielded some unexpected results. Kilrah is much less stable, in planetological terms, than Terra. Subject to seismic problems, quakes, volcanoes, the whole bit. Apparently there are some severe tidal stresses at work on Kilrah that render the planet extremely vulnerable to widescale seismic activity." He paused. "Given a big enough shaking, Kilrah would literally come apart.
"And HQ has a weapon that could do it?"
"More than one, Colonel. I've not been briefed on the Covert Ops project, except for generalities. But Project Behemoth, my uncle's preference, uses high-intensity energy beams on a massive scale to trigger seismic shocks. Aimed and fired properly, the Behemoth weapon could trigger the destruction of Kilrah."
"And the loss of the homeworld would cut the foundation from under the whole Empire," Eisen said slowly, with a slight smile. "It certainly is ambitious, I'll say that."
"It's genocide," Blair said quietly. "How many civilians would we be killing?"
"How many died on Locanda Four?" Tolwyn demanded. "How many more will die if they unleash their pandemic again? Look Blair, our intel people are telling us the Empire is tottering on the edge of civil war. The various clans are fed up, especially after the failure of the attack on Earth. That's why they didn't immediately launch a second attack when we had nothing left to stop them. The Emperor had to regroup — build back his fleet and keep enough forces close at home to counteract any threatened coups. It's given us the breathing room to get our new weapons on-line. If we wait any longer, though the Kilrathi might be the ones to strike first and then its us that are finished."
Blair shook his head "The end justifies the means? That wasn't what they taught back at the Academy. I thought the Confederation stood for something better than that."
Tolwyn looked away. "Yeah .. . yeah, you're right. It does." He paused. "Well, anyway, we're hoping we don't have to actually attack Kilrah. That was the deciding factor when it came down to choosing Behemoth over the Covert Ops concept. Apparently whatever they've hatched is a one-shot deal. But Behemoth is a weapon that can be used several times and the idea is to try a few very public tests on Kilrathi military bases. Let the cats draw their own conclusions about what we could do to Kilrah with the same weaponry. That's the operational plan, at least. Our hope is a good demonstration might actually push the clans into a palace coup. The Emperor and his grandson are overthrown and the other clans sue for peace."
"I guess that's better than blasting Kilrah out of existence," Blair said. "I mean, the Empire's the enemy and we have to do whatever it takes to win. But there are a lot of innocent Kilrathi out there who have nothing to do with the Emperor or Thrakhath or the whole damned war effort. Some of them are dissidents, like Hobbes was before he defected. I wouldn't want to be party to killing them all."
"Well, we'll hope it doesn't come to that," Eisen said. "I agree, it would be a nasty choice to have to make. But if we can convince them we mean business . . ."
"So what's our part in all of this?" Blair asked.
"Right now, we're still putting the finishing touches on the weapon, Tolwyn said. It won't be ready to deploy for a few more weeks. But in the meantime, we're starting to prospect the sector for a likely-looking first target. We need to conduct some extensive recon work, checking defenses, and surveying possible target planets to make sure the Behemoth will be effective against them. It wouldn't do to cruise in, open fire, and then find out the place was so tectonically dead we couldn't even cause a good earthquake."
"Recon work," Blair repeated. "That'll be quite a change, after what we've been doing."
"It'll be difficult and dangerous," Tolwyn said. We can't afford to send large forces in anywhere, for fear of putting the cats on guard. We've got a handful of carriers going out individually into the selected target systems. Victory's drawn Ariel, where we're fairly certain we've got a very suitable Kilrathi base to test."
"Ariel's a pretty tough nut," Blair commented. "I hope you're not expecting us to take them on single-handed."
"The system is inside the Caliban Nebula," Eisen said. "Dust and gas and energy discharges will play hell with shipboard sensors . . . on both sides. We can sneak in, gather as much information as possible, and sneak out again and probably never tip the cats off that we were there. Maybe even pull off a few ambushes along the way."