Hernandez clicked her claws on the card as she passed it over.
Vashniya hesitated. He looked at his card while everyone waited. He was a chocolate-brown man, bald with a heavy white beard, and very short. As he sat there, smiling enigmatically, he looked like a dwarf smiling over some golden horde.
Vashniya’s expression was unaccountable. Dimitri certainly didn’t understand the delegate’s glee. Dimitri had already counted prime seats in his head. Even if Vashniya had his two allies solidly with him—even if Indi and company were unanimous against—they would still be one vote short, twenty-two to twenty-one.
Vashniya passed the card over.
Dimitri slid all five cards into a terminal set into the tabletop and read the results to himself before announcing them.
What? He almost said it out loud. He almost let surprise register in his face, something he never let himself do. It wasn’t that Operation Rasputin failed. The measure passed, just as expected, and with a heavy margin.
It was how it passed.
In a dry voice, Dimitri read off the totals. “The final vote of the Executive Command stands: Twenty votes for, seven against, sixteen abstentions.” When Dimitri read the number of abstentions, Kalin and Green looked shocked, and most of the people in the room turned to look at Vashniya, who was smiling impishly. “The motion carries,” Dimitri concluded.
Why? Dimitri thought. The entire block from Epsilon Indi abstained, all fifteen votes. That wasn’t all. There had been two defecting votes from Sirius. That meant that if Indi had voted against, Rasputin would have been blocked.
The Indi Protectorate constantly complains about Centauri and Sirius having de facto control over Confed policy. And Vashniya, after gathering the Union and the Seven Worlds into a coalition, just let Centauri and Sirius force through another proposal.
So why is he smiling?
Dimitri left the Executive meeting planning to assign a task force to study recent changes in internal Confederacy politics.
* * * *
Ambrose met him at the door, as always. Dimitri’s bodyguard was never more than fifty meters away from his charge, a distance Ambrose’s enhanced body could clear in less than a second.
“Rasputin passed, Ambrose.”
“Very good, sir.”
They walked to the aircar. As they did, Dimitri decided he was going to miss Mars. If you left out the effects of the atmosphere, the lesser gravity made Dimitri feel half his age.
Unfortunately, half his age was eighty years standard.
“I suppose it is good, even if the circumstances were odd.”
“Yes, sir.” Anyone else would ask about the “odd circumstances.” But Ambrose seemed to have no sense of curiosity. It was one of the things Dimitri liked about him.
“Good indeed. Sirius gets to pretend it’s solving its economic problems, and I get to finally stage the climactic confrontation.”
Ambrose opened the door for Dimitri, and Dimitri tapped the side of Ambrose’s leg with the cane. “Do you get that? My swan song, finally.”
“As you wish, sir.”
Dimitri slipped into the back of the aircar, and Ambrose settled into the driver’s position. “I’ve been waiting ten years to send Klaus to Bakunin.” Dimitri closed his eyes. “With the need for my successor becoming more and more pressing, for a while there I thought I was going to have to exceed my authority—if that’s possible— and invent a mission for him.”
“It is good you didn’t have to, sir.”
“Yes, Ambrose.” Dimitri yawned. “Wake me when we get to the spaceport.”
* * * *
CHAPTER TWO
Freedom Fighters
“War is simply honest diplomacy.”
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
“We go to gain a little patch of ground
That hath in it no profit but the name.”
—William Shakespeare
(1564-1616)
Captain Kathy Shane had a bad feeling about Operation Rasputin. It wasn’t just the fact that this was the first time she’d been attached to a Confed Executive mission. If that had been it, she might have been able to discount the feeling. It wasn’t even the fact that the two companies under her command were going to operate outside the Centauri Alliance, the first time she’d heard of the Occisis marines leaving that sphere.
No, that wasn’t the problem. This was a cooperative effort with the TEC, which meant that her command could leave their nominal jurisdiction for anywhere in the Confederacy.
Anywhere in the Confederacy.
That was the problem.
The planet, Bakunin, was outside of the Confederacy’s jurisdiction. It had never signed the Charter. It didn’t even have a government with which to sign the Charter.
That lack of a government was the seed of the dilemma facing Captain Shane. One of the cornerstones of the Confederacy Charter was planetary sovereignty. Layers of sovereignty wrapped the Confederacy like an onion. Every planet was a force unto itself, the arms of the Confederacy keeping interplanetary order, and the TEC keeping interstellar order. Only two things were supposed to call for interstellar military action—
Defending a sovereign planet from external aggression, and defending a legitimate planetary government from internal rebellion.
Operation Rasputin was neither.
Shane lay in her bunk, thinking of her upcoming command. Her cabin was tiny, wedged to the rear of the troop compartment of the Blood-Tide. Even so, the accommodations on the troopship were palatial. She was command, and thus was the only Marine officer on board with private accommodations.
Normally a Barracuda-class ship could give most officers private quarters, but Shane’s Occisis marines only formed two thirds of the ship’s complement. The rest of the force was TEC civilians—and the colonel.
The troop-carrier Blood-Tide had left Occisis undermanned. Only two, of a possible three, marine companies rode the craft to Sol. In Sol orbit, the Blood-Tide picked up the Executive personnel, their command for this mission.
That was another thing that rubbed Shane wrong. Not so much working with the TEC, but the fact that their command was a TEC spook, Colonel Klaus Dacham.
Shane looked at a chrono set in the wall.
2400 hours Bakunin. They’d been on Bakunin’s thirty-two-hour day ever since entering Sol space a week ago.
In a half-hour the Blood-Tide would engage its tach-drive.
Her ship communicator buzzed. “Captain Shane.”
She picked the little device up from a dent in the wall that wanted to be an endtable. “Shane here.”
“This is Colonel Dacham. I want the commanding officers to assemble in the briefing area for departure.”
“Yes, sir,” she said as the communicator went dead.
* * * *
At 2415 the entire command staff aboard the Blood-Tide was assembled in the briefing room. Herself, six platoon commanders, and another half-dozen civilians. Even without the uniforms, anyone could have separated the civilians from the marines. The Occisis marines were all large-boned, squat, fair-skinned, and had a habit of sitting at attention. The civilians were much more racially diverse, and a few of them exceeded two meters in height— taller than any marine on board.