CHAPTER SIX
"I don't like it. I don't like it at all, Mr. Ambassador."
Leonard Masterman, the Havenite ambassador to Grayson, looked up and frowned. Captain Michaels was seldom this vocal, and his expression was uneasy.
"Why in hell did they have to send her?" The senior military attache paced back and forth across the ambassador's carpet. "Of all the officers in the Manticoran Navy, they had to stick us with Harrington! God, it's like history repeating itself!" he said bitterly, and Masterman's frown deepened.
"I don't quite understand your concern, Captain. This isn't the Basilisk System, after all."
Michaels didn't reply at once, for Masterman was an anachronism. The scion of a prominent Legislaturist family, he was also a career diplomat who believed in the rules of diplomacy, and Special Ops had decided he shouldn't know about Jericho, Captain Yu, or Thunder of God on the theory that he could play his role far more convincingly if they never told him it was a role.
"No, of course it's not Basilisk," the captain said finally. "But if any Manticoran officer has reason to hate us, it's her, and she gave us a hell of a black eye over Basilisk, Mr. Ambassador. The Graysons must have heard about it. If Courvosier uses her presence to play up the `Havenite threat' to their own system"
"You let me worry about that, Captain," Masterman responded with a slight smile. "Believe me, the situation's under control."
"Really, Sir?" Michaels regarded the ambassador dubiously.
"Absolutely." Masterman tipped his chair back and crossed his legs. "In fact, I can't think of a Manticoran officer I'd rather see out here. I'm astonished their foreign ministry let their admiralty send her."
"I beg your pardon?" Michaels' eyebrows rose, and Masterman chuckled.
"Look at it from the Graysons' viewpoint. She's a woman, and no one even warned them she was coming. However good her reputation may be, it's not good enough to offset that. Graysons aren't Masadans, but their bureaucrats still have trouble with the fact that they're dealing with Queen Elizabeth's government, and now Manticore's rubbed their noses in the cultural differences between them."
The ambassador nodded at Michaels' suddenly thoughtful expression.
"Exactly. And as for the Basilisk operation" Masterman frowned, then shrugged. "I think it was a mistake, and it was certainly execrably executed, but, contrary to your fears, it can be made to work for us if we play our cards right."
The captain's puzzlement was obvious, and Masterman sighed.
"Grayson doesn't know what happened in Basilisk. They've heard our side and they've heard Manticore's, but they know each of us has an axe to grind. That means they're going to take both versions with more than a grain of salt, Captain, but their own prejudices against women in uniform will work in our favor. They'll want to believe the worst about her, if only to validate their own bias, and the fact that we don't have any female officers will be a factor in their thinking."
"But we do have female officers," Michaels protested.
"Of course we do," Masterman said patiently, "but we've carefully not assigned any to this system. And, unlike Manticorewhich probably didn't have any choice, given that their head of state is a womanwe haven't told the locals we even have any. We haven't told them we don't, either, but their sexism cuts so deep they're ready to assume that unless we prove differently. So at the moment, they're thinking of us as a good, old-fashioned patriarchal society. Our foreign policy makes them nervous, but our social policies are much less threatening than Manticore's."
"All right, I can see that," Michaels agreed. "It hadn't occurred to me that they might assume we don't have any female personnelI thought they'd just assume we were being tactfulbut I see what you're driving at."
"Good. But you may not realize just how vulnerable Harrington really is. Bad enough she's a woman in a man's role, but she's also a convicted murderer," the ambassador said, and Michaels blinked in astonishment.
"Sir, with all due respect, no one's going to believe that. Hell, I don't like her a bit, but I know damned well that was pure propaganda."
"Of course you do, and so do I, but the Graysons don't. I'm quite aware the entire thing was a show trial purely for foreign consumption, and to be perfectly honest, I don't like it. But it's done, so we may as well use it. All any Grayson knows is that a Haven court found Captain Harrington guilty of the murder of an entire freighter's crew. Of course Manticore insists the `freighter' was actually a Q-ship caught red-handed in an act of warwhat else can they say?but the fact that a court pronounced her guilty will predispose a certain percentage of people to believe she must have been guilty, particularly since she's a woman. All we have to do is point out her `proven guilt' more in sorrow than in anger, as the natural result of the sort of catastrophe which results when you put someone with all of a woman's frailties in command of a ship of war."
Michaels nodded slowly. He felt a twinge of guilt, which surprised him, but Masterman was right, and the locals' prejudices would make them far more likely to accept a story no civilized planet would believe for a moment.
"You see, Captain?" Masterman said quietly. "This will let us change the entire focus of the internal Grayson debate over Manticore's overtures from a cold-blooded consideration of advantages to an emotional rejection based on their own bigotry. And if I've learned one thing over the years, it's that when it comes down to raw emotion against reason, emotion wins."
" ... and this is our combat information center, gentlemen." Andreas Venizelos was short by Manticoran standards, but he stood centimeters taller than the Grayson officers in the compartment as he gestured about himself at the shining efficiency.
Admiral Yanakov managed not to gawk, but his palms itched as he took in the superb instrumentation. The holo tank was over three meters across, and the flat-screen displays around him showed every ship within ten light-minutes of Grayson. Not with single, annotated light codes for groups of vessels, but as individual units with graphic representations of mass and vector.
He stepped closer to one of the ratings and peered over his shoulder. The youngor, young-looking, anywayman didn't even twitch at his presence, and Yanakov turned back to Venizelos.
"Could you bring up the holo tank, Commander?"
Venizelos regarded him for a moment, then looked past him.
"Captain?"
Yanakov felt his expression try to freeze, then turned. Captain Harrington stood behind him, her strongly carved face showing no emotion at all, and he made himself meet her eyes. The sense of the alien grew greater, not less, every time he saw her uniform, and he suspected she'd delegated the task of spokesman to her executive officer because she felt it, too.
"Would you object to our observing the holo display in operation ... Captain?" Yanakov's voice sounded strained even in his own ears, and he cursed himself for the slight hesitation he gave her title.
"Of course not, Admiral." Her musical soprano only increased his feeling of unreality. It sounded almost exactly like his third wife's, and the thought of Anna in uniform appalled him.
"Bring up the tank, please, Chief Waters," she said.
"Aye, aye, Ma'am," a petty officer responded with a crispness that seemed odd addressed to a woman. But, Yanakov thought almost despairingly, it didn't sound a bit odd addressed to an officer. Damn it, the very concept of a female officer was an oxymoron!