A flicker of genuine pain, the pain of someone who'd been betrayed and used by someone he'd trusted, flashed across the commerce secretary's expression, but his voice never wavered.
"However I might feel about Manticore, you and Admiral Theisman are right about how desperate our military position is. And if this is the one chance we've got to survive on anything approaching acceptable terms, I don't want some political grandstander—or, even worse, someone who'd prefer to see negotiations fail because he thinks he can improve his personal position or deep-six the Constitution in the aftermath of military defeat—to screw it up. And if we get far enough to actually start dealing with the matter of who did what to whose mail before the war, it's likely to be just a bit awkward tiptoing around someone who'd be perfectly willing to leak it to the newsies for any advantage it might give him!"
"I find myself in agreement with Tony," Rachel Hanriot said after a moment. "But even so, I'm afraid Leslie has a point. There's got to be someone involved in these negotiations who isn't 'one of us.' I'd prefer for it to be someone who's opposed to us as a matter of principle, assuming we can find anyone like that, but the bottom line is that we've got to include someone from outside the Administration or its supporters, whatever their motives for being there might be. Someone to play the role of watchdog for all those people, especially in Congress, who don't like us, or oppose us, or who simply question our competence after the collapse of the summit talks and what happened at the Battle of Manticore. This can't be the work of a single party, or a single clique—not anything anyone could portray as having been negotiated in a dark little room somewhere—if we expect congressional approval. And, to be honest, I think we have a moral obligation to give our opponents at least some input into negotiating what we hope will be a treaty with enormous implications for every man, woman, and child in the Republic. It's not just our Republic, whatever offices we hold. I don't think we can afford to let ourselves forget that."
"Wonderful." Walter Sanderson shook his head. "I can see this is going to turn into a perfectly delightful exercise in statesmanship. I can hardly think of anything I'd rather do. Except possibly donate one of my testicles to science. Without anesthetic."
Pritchart chuckled. One or two of Sanderson's colleagues found his occasional descents into indelicacy inappropriate in a cabinet secretary. The president, on the other hand, rather treasured them. They had a way of bringing people firmly back to earth.
"Given what you've just said," she told him with a smile, "I think we'll all be just as happy if we keep you personally as far away as possible from the negotiating table, Walter."
"Thank God," he said feelingly.
"Nonetheless," Pritchart went on in a voice tinged with more than a little regret, "I think you and Rachel have a point, Leslie. Tony, I'm as reluctant as you are to include any 'negotiators' whose motivations are . . . suspect. And your point about the correspondence issue's particularly well taken. In fact, it's the part of this which makes me the most nervous, if I'm going to be honest. But they're still right. If we don't include someone from outside the Administration, we're going to have a hell of a fight in Congress afterward, even if Rachel didn't have a point of her own about that moral responsibility of ours. And to the brutally frank, I think we'll have a better chance of surviving even if we end up having to air some of our political dirty linen in front of Admiral Alexander-Harrington, if it lets us move forward with a least a modicum of multi-party support, than we will if we find ourselves in a protracted struggle to get whatever terms we work out ratified. The last thing we need is to have any of those people in Manticore who already don't trust us decide that this time around we're being High Ridge and deliberately stringing things out rather than acting in good faith."
Chapter Nine
"What's the current status of Bogey Two, Utako?"
"No change in course or heading, Sir," Lieutenant Commander Utako Shreiber, operations officer of Task Group 2.2, Mesan Alignment Navy, replied. She looked over her shoulder at Commodore Roderick Sung, the task group's CO, who'd just stepped back onto MANS Apparition 's tiny flag bridge, and raised one eyebrow very slightly.
Sung noted the eyebrow and suppressed an uncharacteristic urge to snap at her for it. He managed to conquer the temptation without ever allowing it to show in his own expression, and the fact that Schreiber was probably the best ops officer he'd ever worked with, despite her junior rank, helped. He'd hand-picked her from a sizable pool of candidates when Benjamin Detweiler handed him this prong of Oyster Bay largely because he valued her willingness to think for herself, after all. And the fact that he'd worked hard to establish the relationship of mutual trust and respect which let a subordinate ask that sort of silent question helped even more.
All the same, a tiny part of him did want to rip her head off. Not because of anything she'd done, but because of the tension building steadily in the vicinity of his stomach.
"Thank you," he said out loud instead as he crossed to his own command chair and settled back into it.
At least I've demonstrated my imperturbability by taking a break to hit the head , he reflected mordantly. Unless, of course, Utako and the others decide I only went because the damned Graysons are worrying the piss out of me!
That second thought surprised a quiet snort of amusement out of him, and he was amazed how much better that made him feel. Of course, there was a galaxy of difference between "better" and anything he would describe as "good."
Up until the past twelve hours or so, Sung's part of Operation Oyster Bay had gone without a hitch, so he supposed he really shouldn't complain too loudly, even in the privacy of his own mind, when Murphy put in his inevitable appearance. The advantages of technology and heredity were all well and good, but the universe remained a slave to probability theory. The Alignment's strategists had made a conscientious effort to keep that point in mind from the very beginning, as had the planners of this particular mission. In fact, both Sung's orders and every pre-op briefing had stressed that concern, yet he doubted his superiors would look kindly on the man who blew Oyster Bay, whatever the circumstances.
He frowned down at his small repeater plot, watching the red icons of the Grayson Space Navy cruiser squadron.
Just my luck to wander into the middle of some kind of training exercise , he thought glumly. Although I'd like to know what the hell they think they're doing exercising clear up here. Damned untidy of them .
Oyster Bay's operational planners had taken advantage of the tendency for local shipping to restrict itself largely to the plane of a star system's ecliptic. Virtually all the real estate in which human beings were interested lay along the ecliptic, after all. Local traffic was seldom concerned with anything much above or below it, and ships arriving out of hyper almost invariably arrived in the same plane, since that generally offered the shortest normal-space flightpath to whatever destination had brought them to the system, as well, not to mention imposing a small but significantly lower amount of wear and tear on their alpha nodes. So even though defensive planners routinely placed surveillance platforms to cover the polar regions, there wasn't usually very much shipping in those areas.
In this instance, however, for reasons best known to itself—and, of course, Murphy—the GSN had elected to send an entire squadron of what looked like their version of the Manties' Saganami-C -class heavy cruisers out to play half way to the hyper limit and due north of Yeltsin's Star.