"And what does it do?" Anton asked almost softly.
"It basically builds its own dispersed architecture, bio-based computer," McBryde replied levelly. "It taps into its host's neural system, but it's totally passive until the host encounters whatever triggering event was preprogrammed into it. At that point, it . . . takes over." He waved one hand vaguely, clearly frustrated by his inability to describe the process more clearly. "As I understand it, it can only be programmed to carry out fairly simple, short term operations. It does have some limited AI function, apparently, but not very much. And it can't override the host's own efforts to reasser control of his voluntary muscles indefinitely. No longer than four or five minutes, apparently."
"Which is long enough, obviously," Victor said grimly. He regarded McBryde for several silent seconds, then tapped the chip on the table between them. "And this is?"
"Well, let's just say that when I started thinking about how well I could explain this thing to you, I realized the answer was 'Not Too Damned Well,' " McBryde replied with a slight smile. "So it occurred to me it might be as well for me to provide any supporting evidence I could. That"—he indicated the chip—"is the best version of that supporting evidence I was able to get my hands on without tripping too many internal lines. It's the report of the field agent who supervised the Webster assassination. It includes names, places, and dates . . . and also describes the hack of the bank records he used to implicate the Havenite ambassador's drive. Plus the elimination of the hacker who carried it out. I imagine there's more than enough in there that can be corroborated from the Old Earth investigation, once you know where to look."
"I imagine there is," Anton agreed. He picked up the chip and tossed it into the air, then caught it and tucked it into a pocket. McBryde was almost certainly correct about that, he thought, and glanced at Cachat, one eyebrow arched. The Havenite nodded ever so slightly, and Anton looked back at McBryde.
"The day after tomorrow suit you?"
Jack shook his head. "I can't. Well, I could, but it'll take at least another day to get Herlander ready and, besides, I can put the extra time to good use by covering our tracks on the way out." He smiled thinly. "Of course, I imagine you've already done the same—and please note that I'm not asking what or how—so I figure between your schemes and mine not even Bardasano will be able to figure out how we got off the planet."
Chapter Fifty
"I hate waiting for the sound of a second shoe's hitting the floor," Admiral Osiris Trajan grumbled. None of his three dinner guests responded. First, because he hadn't directed the comment specifically to one of them, but, secondly, because they'd both been with the admiral long enough to recognize a rhetorical statement when they heard one.
Apparently, though, it wasn't quite as rhetorical this time as they'd thought it was, and he looked across the table at the auburn-haired, gray-green-eyed woman in the captain's uniform sitting opposite him.
"How about you, Addie?" he asked. "Are you feeling a bit less than perfectly cheerful about this whole thing?"
"Ours not to reason why, Sir," Captain Adelaide Granger, the commanding officer of Trajan's dreadnought flagship, replied with a wry grin. She wiped her lips with her snow-white napkin and arched one eyebrow quizzically at the admiral. "Might I respectfully inquire what has aroused the Admiral's ire at this particular moment?" she asked.
Trajan gave something which sounded suspiciously like a snort and wagged his head at his flag captain.
"You'll come to no good end, Addie," he warned her. "Trust me, you're not irreplaceable, you know."
"No, Sir," she agreed equitably. "But—again, with the utmost respect—given the Admiral's own . . . foibles, finding a replacement and beating her into shape would probably take longer than the Admiral would care to invest in the project."
This time, the other two officers seated at the table noted with relief, there was no doubt about Trajan's amusement. All three of his subordinates admired and respected Trajan—he wouldn't have been selected as Task Force Four's commanding officer if he hadn't been widely regarded as one of the Mannerheim System-Defense Force's two or three best flag officers. Normally, he was also an excellent boss. But there was no denying that he had his moods, and frustration tended to make him more than a little . . . prickly. Fortunately, Captain Granger had been something of a personal protégé of his for quite some time, and she'd developed a deft touch for defusing any serious irritation on his part. That would have been enough to make her presence welcome to Trajan's staff even if she hadn't been such a clearly superior officer in her own right.
"You're probably right about that," Trajan agreed with his flag captain now, and tossed his own crumpled napkin onto the table beside his empty plate. "About how long it would take, that is, of course," he added. "That bit about 'foibles' is scarcely applicable in my own case, however."
"Of course not, Sir," Granger said gravely. "I must have misspoken somehow."
"That happens sometimes to lesser mortals, or so I hear," Trajan observed, and it was Granger's turn to chuckle.
"Nonetheless," Trajan went on a moment later, in a considerably more serious tone, "I'm not happy about this entire op. I never have been, and I haven't gotten any happier in the last four or five T-months, either."
There was no doubt in any of his listeners' minds what operation he was speaking about. Task Force Four had no direct involvement in it—for which all of them were privately grateful—but they'd been briefed on "Operation Ferret". . . and about its objectives, given its implications for the MSDF's future operations.
"I don't think anyone's really happy about the notion of relying on Luff and his collection of paranoiacs, Sir," Commander Niklas Hasselberg said now. Trajan looked at his fair-haired chief of staff, and Hasselberg shrugged. "Sometimes deniability comes at a price in reliability, Sir."
"I realize that, Niklas," Trajan said. "In this particular instance, though, I'm not really convinced deniability is an important enough reason to rely on them. For that matter, I'm not really convinced the operation itself is a wonderful idea—or even necessary, at this point. Especially when we've gone to so much effort to keep this end of the bridge so completely black for so long."
"My understanding is that the decision was made at the highest levels, Sir," Commander Ildikó Nyborg, Trajan's operations officer, pointed out in a diplomatic tone, and Trajan snorted yet again, this time harshly.
"It was certainly that," he agreed.
All three of his subordinates understood. Although Hasselberg was the only other person present who knew the identity of the actual individual behind that decision, all of them represented star-line genomes. Star-lines were a minority in the MSDF's officer corps as a whole, of course, but they were heavily concentrated in the more senior ranks, and for duties as sensitive as their own current assignment there'd been some judicious personnel shuffling. As a result of which, Task Force Four's command structure was undeniably top-heavy in alpha-lines, beta-lines, and gamma-lines.
Which meant that, unlike the majority of their fellow officers, they knew the Mannerheim System-Defense Force was actually an adjunct of the Mesan Alignment Navy no one else knew even existed. So the term "higher up" had a very different meaning for them than it would have had for any of those non-Mesan officers.
"I'm not saying the Verdant Vista terminus isn't important, because it is," Trajan continued. "And I realize that using obvious Manpower proxies is about as deniable as it gets, given who's in charge of the system these days. From that perspective, I don't have any qualms about Ferret. The problem is that I think the operation itself is unnecessary. Worse, it's a complication we don't need. We could put a force through the bridge any time we wanted to that would be more than big enough to overwhelm anything the 'Kingdom of Torch' could possibly put in our way. We don't really have to take the system to exercise effective control of the terminus, and if it were my call, we'd go ahead and wait until we actually needed to use the thing. In which case we wouldn't have to rely on Luff's rejects at all."