Rajampet's image on the undersized display was tiny, but it was large enough for his odd expression to register. There was something wild and feral about it, and then the admiral grinned like a wolf.
"I'm glad to see the others are there with you, Innokentiy," he said in a harsh, exultant voice. "We just got an emergency dispatch over here in my office, and you'll never guess what's been happening with those bastards in Manticore!"
Chapter Thirty-Two
"I never knew idiocy came in so many flavors!"
Irene Teague looked up from her display, eyebrows raised, as Daud ibn Mamoun al-Fanudahi stalked into her office. Powered doors weren't very suitable for slamming behind oneself, but al-Fanudahi did his best.
"I beg your pardon?" Teague said as he hammered the manual close button savagely with the heel of his hand. Her tone was only politely interested, but that fooled neither of them, and he glared at her.
His obvious disgust and ire weren't directed at her—that much was readily apparent, but it was also remarkably cold comfort at the moment. It had become obvious, over the past few days, that even his earlier concerns over possible Manticoran military hardware had fallen short of the reality, yet even that hadn't been enough to fray his habitual control this way. So if something finally had . . . .
"I cannot believe that even those . . . those cretins could—!"
She'd been wrong, she realized. It wasn't disgust and ire; it was blind, naked fury.
"What is it, Daud?" she asked considerably more urgently.
"It's just—"
He broke off again, shaking his head, and then, abruptly, the power of his anger seemed to desert him. He sank into the chair facing her deck, legs stretched out before him, shaking his head again, this time with an air of weariness, and Teague felt a tingle of something entirely too much like outright fear as she saw the darkness in his eyes.
She started to say something else, then stopped, got up, and poured a cup of coffee. She glanced at him speculatively for a moment, then added a healthy slug from the bottle of single-malt she kept in her credenza before she poured another cup, this one without the whiskey, for herself. She passed the first Navy-issue mug across to him, then perched on the edge of her deck, holding her own in both hands, and cocked her head at him.
"Drink first," she commanded. "Then talk to me."
"Yes, Ma'am," he replied and managed a wan smile. He sipped, and his smile turned more natural. "I think it's probably a bit early in the morning for this particular cup of coffee," he observed.
"It's never too early for coffee," she replied. "And somewhere on this planet, it's well past quitting time, so that means it's late enough for any little additions."
"Creative timekeeping has its uses, I see."
He drank more whiskey-laced coffee, then settled back into the chair, and she saw his shoulders finally beginning to relax.
The sight relieved her. The last thing he needed was for fury to betray him into saying something unfortunate to one of his superiors, and she didn't want that. In fact, she was a bit surprised by how genuinely fond of him she'd become over the last few months. The fact that he was Battle Fleet and she was Frontier Fleet had become completely irrelevant as she began to realize just how justified his anxiety over possible Manticoran weapons really was. His persistent refusal to allow her to endorse his more "alarmist" analyses left her feeling more than a little guilty, even though she followed his logic. Unfortunately, she'd also followed his tracks through the reports everyone else had systematically ignored, as well, and her own sense of anxiety had grown steadily sharper in the process. The number of other reports which had apparently been creatively misfiled—and they'd discovered and managed to hunt down—had only made things even worse.
Then had come news of the Battle of Spindle. Despite all her own concerns, despite al-Fanudahi's most pessimistic projections, the two of them had been shocked by the totality of the Manticoran victory. Not even they had anticipated that an entire fleet of superdreadnoughts could be casually defeated by a force whose heaviest unit was only a battlecruiser. That was like . . . like having a professional prizefighter dropped by a single punch from her own eight-year-old daughter, for God's sake!
But if the two of them had been shocked, the rest of the Navy had been stunned. The sheer impossibility of what had happened was literally too much for the Navy's officer corps to process.
The first reaction had been simple denial. It couldn't have happened, therefore, it hadn't happened. There had to be some mistake. Whatever the initial news reports might have seemed to indicate, the Manties had to have had a task force of their own ships-of-the-wall present!
Unfortunately for that line of logic (if it could be dignified by that description), the Manties appeared to have anticipated such a response. They'd sent Admiral O'Cleary herself home along with their diplomatic note, and they'd allowed her to bring along tactical recordings of the engagement.
At the moment, O'Cleary was a pariah, tainted with the same contamination as Evelyn Sigbee. Unlike Sigbee, of course, O'Cleary was home on Old Earth, where she could have her disgrace rubbed firmly in her face, and even though she was Battle Fleet, not Frontier Fleet, Teague found herself feeling a powerful sense of sympathy for the older woman. It was hardly O'Cleary's fault she'd found herself under the orders of a certifiable moron and then been left to do the surrendering after Crandall sailed her entire task force straight into the jaws of catastrophe.
Despite the convenience of the scapegoat O'Cleary offered, however, there was no getting around the preposterous acceleration numbers of the Manty missiles which had ravaged TF 496. The reports which had confidently been dismissed as ridiculous turned out to have been firmly based in fact, exactly as al-Fanudahi had been warning his superiors. Indeed, they'd actually understated the threat by a significant margin, and as fresh proof of the fundamental unfairness of the universe, Admiral Cheng had seized upon Al-Fanudahi's original estimates, based on the lower acceleration and accuracy numbers in the original reports, and sharply reprimanded him for not having "fully appreciated the scope of the threat" in the analyses Cheng had then proceeded to ignore.
Nonetheless, the fact that al-Fanudahi had been right all along couldn't be completely ignored. Not any longer. And so the despised prophet of doom and gloom had suddenly found himself presenting briefings flag officers actually listened to. Not only that, but the Office of Operational Analysis was finally being asked to do what it should have been doing all along. Of course, its efforts were a little handicapped by the fact that it had been systematically starved of funds for so long and that ninety percent of its efforts had gone into feel-good analyses of Battle Fleet's simulations and fleet problems instead of learning to actually think about possible external threats to the League. Of which, after all, there had been none. Which meant, preposterous and pathetic though it undoubtedly was, that the only two people it had who were actually familiar with those threats happened to be in Teague's office at that very moment.
To be fair, at least some of their colleagues were immersed in crash efforts to familiarize themselves with the same data, but most of them were still running about like beheaded chickens. They simply didn't know where to look —not yet—and Teague felt grimly confident that they wouldn't figure it out in time to avoid an entire succession of disasters.
Not, at least, if the idiots in charge of the Navy didn't start actually paying attention—really paying attention, as in processing the information, not simply ackowleding it—to al-Fanudhi. Which, even now, they seemed remarkably disinclined to do.