Anisimovna smiled back at him and nodded in mingled relief and genuine pleasure. The assignment she'd been handed was one of the most complicated ones she'd ever confronted. It hadn't come off perfectly, but it hadn't had to come off perfectly , and from everything they'd said, it sounded as if the operation had accomplished its goals.
"And because I am satisified," Albrecht told her, "I'm probably going to be handing you some additional hot potatoes." She looked at him, and he snorted. "That's your reward for pulling this one off. Now that we know you can handle the hard ones, we're not going to waste you on easy ones. And, frankly, the fact that we've lost Isabel is going to have us looking harder than ever for capable high level troubleshooters."
"I see." She put as much confidence and enthusiasm into her voice as she could, but Albrecht's eyes twinkled at her.
"Actually," he told her, "now that you've reached the center of the 'onion,' you'll find that, in a lot of ways, my bark is worse than my bite." He shook his head, the twinkle in his eyes fading. "Don't misunderstand. There are still penalties for people who just plain fuck up. But, at the same time, we know the sorts of things we're assigning people to do. And we also know that sometimes Murphy turns up, no matter how carefully you plan, or how well you execute. So we're not going to automatically punish anyone for failure unless it's abundantly obvious they're the reason for the failure. And, judging from the way you've handled this assignment, I don't think that's likely to be happening in your case."
"I hope not," she replied. "And I'll try to make sure it doesn't."
"I'm sure you will." He smiled at her again, then leaned forward in his chair, crossing his forearms on the edge of the desk in front of him.
"Now, then," he continued more briskly. "It's going to be another couple of T-weeks before anyone can 'officially' get here from New Tuscany. That means the Manties are going to have that much more time to get their version of events out in front of the Sollies. Worse than that, from the Sollies' perspective, it's going to be leaking into the League's media through the wormhole network faster than the government's version of events can spread out from Old Terra. From our perspective, that's a good thing . . . probably. It would take an old-fashioned miracle for those numbskulls in Old Chicago to do the smart thing and offer to negotiate with the Manties, so I think we can probably count on them to take the ball and run with it where . . . creative reinterpretation, shall we say? . . . of events in New Tuscany is concerned. Despite that, it's entirely possible that there's at least one—possibly even two—honest newsies on Old Terra. That could have unfortunate repercussions for the way we want to see this handled. Fortunately, we have people strategically placed throughout the League's media, and especially on Old Terra.
"What I want you to do now, Aldona, is to sit down with Collin and Franklin. They'll bring along some of our own newspeople, and the three of you will work with them to come up with the most effective way to spin what happened in New Tuscany to suit our needs. Given our allegations about Green Pines, a goodsized chunk of the Solly media is going to be salivating for anything that puts Manticore in a bad light, which should help a lot, and now that you've brought us all that raw sensor data from both incidents—not to mention those nice authentication codes—we can get started on a little creative reinterpretation of our own for the Sollies. I've got a few ideas on how best to go about that myself, but you've demonstrated a genuine talent for this sort of thing, so sit down and see what you can come up with on your own, first. Thanks to the streak drive, we've got two weeks to massage the story here on Mesa any way we have to before it could possibly get to us by any normal dispatch boat. I want to use that time as effectively as possible."
"I understand."
"Good. And, in the meantime, although you really don't have the need to know this, there's going to be another little news story in about two more T-months."
"There is?" Anisimovna glanced around, puzzled by the sudden, predatory smiles of all three Detweilers.
"Oh, there certainly is!" Albrecht told her, then waved at Benjamin. "Tell her," he said.
"Well, Aldona," Benjamin said, "in about another two months, a little operation we've been working on for some time, one called Oyster Bay, is going to come to fruition. And when it does—"
January, 1922, Post Diaspora
"I've got a bad feeling about this . . . ."
—Admiral Patricia Givens, RMN
CO, Office of Naval Inteeligence
Chapter Five
Captain (JG) Ginger Lewis was not filled with confidence as she headed down the passageway aboard HMSS Weyland towards Rear Admiral Tina Yeager's office. It wasn't because she felt any worry over her ability to discharge her new duties. It wasn't even because she'd started her career as enlisted, without so much as dreaming she might attain her present rank. For that matter, it wasn't even because she'd just been assigned to the Royal Manticoran Navy's primary R&D facility when all her actual experience had been acquired in various engineering departments aboard deployed starships.
No, it was because she hadn't seen a single happy face since she'd arrived aboard Weyland half an hour before. Most people, she suspected, would have felt at least a qualm or two at being the new kid, just reporting in, when something had so obviously hit the rotary air impeller.
I wonder if it's just over here in R&D or if Aubrey and Paulo are about to get the same treatment? she wondered. Then she snorted. Well, even if they are, Paulo has Aubrey to take care of him.
The thought made her smile as she remembered Aubrey Wanderman's first deployment. Which, by the strangest turn of events, had also been her first deployment. She'd been quite a few years older than him, but they'd completed their naval training school assignments together, and she'd sort of taken him under her wing. He'd needed it, too. It was hard to remember now how young he'd been or that it had all happened almost fourteen T-years years ago. Sometimes it seemed like only yesterday, and sometimes it seemed like something that had happened a thousand years ago, to someone else entirely. But she remembered how shiny and new he'd been, how disappointed he'd been at being assigned to "only" a "merchant cruiser" . . . until, at least, he'd discovered that the captain of the merchant cruiser in question was then-Captain Honor Harrington.
Her smile faded just a bit as she remembered the clique of bullies and would-be deserters who'd made Aubrey's life a living hell, at least until Captain Harrington had found out about it. And the way she'd found out about it had been when their attempt to murder a certain acting petty officer by the name of Ginger Lewis had failed and Aubrey, who'd fallen under the influence of Chief Petty Officer Horace Harkness and HMSWayfarer 's Marine detachment, had beaten their ringleader half to death with his bare hands. She was still a bit surprised she'd survived the sabotaged software of her EVA propulsion pack, and she knew she hadn't emerged from the experience unscarred. Even now, all these years later, she hated going EVA—which, unfortunately, came the way of the engineering department even more than anyone else.