"Welcome, Mr. President," the Marine said a bit stiffly.
"Thank you, Brigadier... Simpkins, isn't it?"
"Yes, Sir." Brigadier Simpkins smiled, pleased to be remembered by his head of state, and Harris smiled back. As if the PSF would have let him encounter, however casually, anyone he wasn't thoroughly briefed upon! But the gesture soothed Simpkins' resentment, and his invitation for Harris to accompany him down the corridor seemed much more natural.
"Admiral Parnell is waiting for you, Sir. If you'll come this way?"
"Of course, Brigadier. Lead on."
It was a short trip, and the door at the end didn't look exceptionally important—aside from the armed guards who flanked it. One of them opened the door for the President, and the people already gathered in the small conference room rose as he walked in.
He stopped his security people at the threshold with a small wave. They gave him the pained look they always did when he went anywhere without them, but they obeyed his silent order with the resignation of experience. As far as President Harris was concerned, any secret known to more than one person was automatically compromised, whether or not the enemy had discovered it yet, and he intended to compromise this information as little as possible. That was why there were only three other people in the room. The rest of the cabinet would no doubt be peeved when they discovered they'd been excluded, but that, too, was something he could live with.
"Mr. President," Admiral Parnell greeted him.
"Amos." Harris shook the CNO's hand, then glanced at his secretaries of war and foreign affairs. "Elaine. Ron. Good to see you all." His civilian colleagues returned his nod of greeting, and he looked back to Parnell. "My time's short, Amos. My appointments secretary's done a little creative scheduling to prove I'm somewhere else right now if anyone asks, but I have to resurface soon to make that stick, so let's get right to it."
"Of course, Sir." The admiral waved his guests into chairs and stood at the end of the conference table to face them.
"Actually, Mr. President, I can keep this extremely brief, since I can speak only in general terms, anyway. The distances involved mean that getting dispatches back and forth takes too long for me to try any sort of detailed coordination from here. That's why I need to relocate to Barnett."
Harris nodded in understanding. Haven was almost three hundred light-years from Manticore—and over a hundred and fifty from its own western border, for that matter. Even for courier boats, who routinely rode the risky upper edge of hyper-space's theta band, it would take something like sixteen days to get a message oneway between Haven and the Barnett fleet base across the hundred and twenty-seven light-years between them.
"I suppose I really just wanted to touch base before you go," he said.
"Of course, Sir." Parnell touched a control panel, and a huge holo map appeared above the table. Its volume was dotted with the tiny sparks of color-coded stars and was other icons, but what drew the eye were the glaring red pinpricks all along the frontier between the PRH and the Manticoran Alliance.
"The red data codes indicate the sites of our intended provocations, Mr. President." He touched another button, and a few red dots were suddenly circled by green bands. "These are the systems in which we have confirmation initial operations have been successfully completed. We've scheduled follow-up intrusions in many cases, of course, so even an initial success doesn't guarantee something still won't go wrong, but so far things look very good. The time and money we've invested in the Argus net have paid off handsomely in the data our planners had to work with when we set things up. At the moment, we appear to be almost exactly on schedule, and we've suffered no reported losses. At the same time, Mr. President, it's important to remember that somewhere along the line we will get hurt, however good our intelligence and planning. That's inevitable, given the scale and scope of our operations."
"Understood, Amos." Harris studied the holo map, savoring the wide dispersion of incidents, then glanced at Ron Bergren. "Do we have any indications they're jumping the way we want, Ron?"
"Not really, Sid." Bergren gave a small shrug and stroked his mustache. "Our intelligence conduits have a lower data transmission speed than the Navy's dispatches, not to mention the fact that it's harder for spies to get the information we need than it is for an admiral to debrief his COs. I'm afraid Naval Intelligence and my own people were essentially correct when they pointed out that we couldn't count on independent confirmation, but it does appear the Manticoran media have begun to twig to the fact that something is going on. They don't know exactly what, which indicates a fairly severe government clampdown for someone with their press traditions. Given that and my own reading of Cromarty and his government, I'd say we've got a better than even chance that they are. A lot depends on what their military recommends."
The foreign secretary raised an eyebrow at Elaine Dumarest, and it was the secretary of war's turn to shrug.
"I can only repeat what NavInt said at the outset. Caparelli's replacement of Webster as their First Space Lord is a very hopeful sign. From his dossier, he's more of a bull in the china shop than Webster was. He's well thought of by his colleagues as a tactician, but he's both less capable of delegation than Webster and weaker on the analysis side. That makes him less likely to seek advice and more prone to prefer quick, direct solutions, which certainly suggests his recommendations will follow the general pattern we're hoping for."
"I'm afraid that's the best we can say at this point, Mr. President," Parnell said in respectful support of his superior. "We're showing him a bait we hope he'll take, but no one can guarantee he will. Left to his own devices, I'm almost certain of how he'd respond, but he doesn't work in a vacuum. There's always the possibility that someone—like their Admiral Givens, who, unfortunately, is very good at her job from all reports—will see something he didn't and convince him to take note of it. At the same time, they'll have to do some of what we want, whoever calls the shots on their side of the fence."
"I was afraid you were all going to insist on qualifiers." Harris' wry smile took the potential sting from his words, and he sighed. "That's what I hate most about my job. Things would be so much simpler if other people would just be nice and predictable all the time!"
His subordinates smiled dutifully, and he looked at his chrono.
"All right, I'm going to have to wrap this up fairly quickly. Amos," he gave the CNO a level look, "we're going to rely on you to handle the final timing from Barnett. Give us all the advance warning you can so we can tie up the final prep work at this end, but I realize there may not be time for you to check with us. That's why I'm authorizing you right now to activate the final phase when you think the situation is most ripe. Don't let us down."
"I'll give it everything I've got, Mr. President," Parnell promised.
"I know you will, Amos." Harris moved his eyes to Bergren. "Ron, double-check everything from your end. Once the shooting starts, our relations with neutral powers, especially the Solarian League, may be critical. We can't risk giving the show away, but do all the pump-priming you can—and once things actually break, use our ambassadors and attache's to be sure our version of what's going on reaches the neutral media before any of their damned correspondents get into the area for 'independent' reports. I'll bring Jessup into the picture next week so his people at Information can start putting together the initial releases for your embassy people to hand out."