There was a thoughtful silence as they all assimilated what this whippersnapper had told them. It might not be much, but it was the first hint of detail or texture in what had been a featureless cliff-wall of menace and mystery. Kthaara allowed them to consider it for a moment, then spoke.
"Thank you, gentlemen," he said to the intelligence officers, then turned back to the gathering as a whole. "And now, we will adjourn, as we all have an early start ahead of us tomorrow." The word tomorrow was conventional usage. Actually, it would be nighttime. But none of the Allied races was accustomed to a day nearly as long as this double-planet system's sixty-one-hour rotation around its components' center of mass.
The meeting broke up, and the room began to empty. Sanders finished clearing the display from the holo system and stood up and spoke over his shoulder.
"Well, Sir, shall we-?"
Once again, he became aware that his boss wasn't listening to him. He turned around.
Among the scurrying figures still remaining, one was standing quite still. From across the room, Vanessa Murakuma held LeBlanc's eyes.
Sanders sighed, gathered up his things, and departed, whistling softly.
Murakuma and LeBlanc approached each other slowly, oblivious to anyone else. They paused within a few feet, but didn't touch-they still weren't entirely alone in the room.
"How are you?" she asked tentatively.
"Hanging in there . . . Sir." LeBlanc said, and gestured towards the row of French doors that lined one end of the room. Wordlessly, they went out onto the terrace. The nano-fabric of their black-and-silver uniforms adjusted its "weave" against the winter chill so automatically that neither of them even noticed.
The building, which the planetary government of Nova Terra had placed at the disposal of the Grand Allied Joint Staff, crowned a low cliff overlooking the Cerulean Ocean to the west. The ocean extended around the globe in that direction, covering the opposite hemisphere where the permanent tidal bulge created by the companion planet Eden submerged all but a few scattered chains of islands, including New Atlantis, where LeBlanc's intelligence outfit had its isolated digs.
He leaned on the balustrade and gazed westward. Alpha Centauri A hung at its protracted afternoon, but the clouds had rolled in to cover it, and there was a low rumble of distant thunder. Heavy weather coming, he thought with a small fraction of his mind, while the rest of it sought to organize his thoughts. Finally, he turned to meet Murakuma's gaze, which had never left him.
"Have you had a chance to see Nobiki?" he began lamely. Murakuma's older daughter was serving with Alpha Centauri Skywatch. LeBlanc hadn't actually spoken to her in over two months, however, and looking at the mother he felt a sudden pang of guilt over the neglect of his semiofficial uncle's duties to the daughter.
"No." Murakuma shook her head unsteadily. "I hope to manage while I'm here. She and I have a lot of talking to do." Her eyes flickered for just a moment. "Especially about Fujiko."
LeBlanc savored the sensation of having put his foot in it up to mid-thigh.
There was no excuse. He'd just been thinking of the lost Survey Flotilla 19 earlier, and he'd allowed himself to forget that Vanessa's younger daughter had been one of those who'd vanished tracelessly into the darkness with it. He should have remembered. Should never have let himself forget the night Nobiki, despite the reserve of her upbringing, had wept for her sister on his shoulder. Perhaps it was the very pain of that memory which explained his failure to recall it now, but that was only the reason, not an excuse for it. No, there was no excuse-so he made none.
Instead, he started over. "I've missed you," he managed.
"And I you," she whispered. His heart leapt, but the accumulated hurt of many months would not be denied.
"You haven't answered my letters in a while," he got out in a very level voice, and she gestured vaguely.
"I've been . . . occupied."
"Occupied? With what, out there at Justin?"
The instant it was out of his mouth, he realized it had been precisely the wrong thing to say. Her eyes flared with green flame.
"Oh, nothing, of course! Just wait for the Bug offensive that never comes, and-"
"Vanessa, I'm sorry! I didn't mean that!" He shook his head, cursing himself for timing his maladroitnesses so close together. There were only three points of contact between the Alliance and the Bugs: the Romulus Chain, the Kliean Chain, and Alpha Centauri. There would be a fourth once the Zephrain offensive finally began, but until then only those three existed . . . and LeBlanc knew most of the human race prayed nightly to God that it would stay that way.
"Look," he said after a very brief moment, "I know you're running a third of this war! Maybe you're bored, but it's thanks to you that it's been so quiet for so long out there. The very fact that you're covering the Justin System, and that you kicked the butts the Bugs haven't got out of it-"
"Yes. So I can still look down at that planet and all its ghosts, and wonder whether they'd still be alive if I'd done . . . something different."
All at once, LeBlanc understood. He remembered the day her Marine landing force had reported the hideous death toll on Justin. The virtual annihilation-the consumption-of the millions of civilians the TFN-and, especially, its commander, Admiral Vanessa Murakuma-had been responsible for defending. The civilians they hadn't been able to defend, because if they'd stood to fight in their defense, they would have died and left the billions of civilians behind them unprotected.
It wasn't proper procedure for an intelligence officer of the TFN to hold his admiral in his arms while she sobbed her heartbroken grief and guilt, but "proper procedure" hadn't been very important to him just then.
"So you think you've been left in command of a stalemated front as a kind of exile?" he said quietly. "Because people blame you for the losses on Justin?" He took a deep breath. "Listen Vanessa: nobody blames you for that, except possibly yourself. You couldn't have prevented what happened there, and you know it. Hell, I've already told you all this in person! No one could have-and at least most of the people who died went down fighting because of the weapons and the advisors you left them. And, I might point out, if you hadn't retaken the system, the Bugs would still be occupying it. And we all know what that would mean!"
"Yes, yes," she muttered, and turned her back, turning away from both LeBlanc and that to which he was alluding. Ever since Ivan Antonov had entered the Anderson Two System and discovered the planet that had been named Harnah, the human race had lived with the knowledge that there were worse things than genocide.
The first grim lesson in that awareness had come over a communications link to an occupied planet from some forever unknown reporter's camera. The horrifying footage that anonymous witness to atrocity had recorded had been humanity's first hint that their utterly unknown, implacably advancing foes were, like the Orions, carnivores. But that same footage had also revealed that that was the Bugs' only point of similarity to the Orions, for they preferred their prey living . . . and human children were precisely the right size.