Once through the fences and into the data banks, it hadn't taken very long to determine that the Sollies own tactical recordings clearly demonstrated that Commodore Chatterjee's ships hadn't had a thing to do with the destruction of the New Tuscan space station. How much good that was going to do after more recent events in the star system was debatable, but Michelle's technicians had made complete copies of the original files.
For that matter, they had some of the actual computers in which those files had been stored, since she'd also chosen to take the battlecruisersResourceful andImpudent home with her.Resourceful was one of theIndefatigable class, like the ships captured in Monica, and she felt certain BuShips and BuWeaps would want to compare her electronics and weapons loadouts with that of the ships Technodyne had provided to President Tyler.Impudent, despite the letter with which her name began, was one of the newNevada-class ships. As such, she represented the very latest in deployed SLN technology, and Michelle knew how eagerly the engineers and analysts back home would greet her arrival.
Aside from those two units, she'd left the rest of Byng's ships in New Tuscany with Sigbee. She'd seen no reason to try to take any more of them with her, for several reasons, including the fact that the newer Manticoran designs didn't provide a lot of redundant personnel to make up passage crews for prize vessels. Besides that, she'd quickly come to the conclusion that there was no particular point in trying to refit them for Manticoran use. They were clearly inferior do anything presently in Alliance service, and the expense and effort to bring such manpower-intensive designs up to something like current standards could be far more profitably applied to other ends.
She'd considered scuttling them, and under accepted interstellar law, she would have been entirely within her rights to do so. In the end, though, she'd decided that actually scuttling them might be a case of pouring unnecessary salt into a wound. Nothing she could do was going to make the SLN happy with her, but sailing off into the sunset with every one of their ships, or blowing them up in orbit, was only likely to piss them off even worse. Not that she was any too sure that what she'd ended up doing would make them any happier. Eighty percent of their ships and ninety-five percent of their personnel were still there, and both ships and people were pretty much physically intact, but before leaving, Michelle's boarding parties had deliberately triggered those ships' internal security charges . . . which had reduced all of the surviving battlecruisers' central computer nets to so much slagged molecular circuitry, as inert and useless as a solid block of granite. No one would be reprogramming those computers; it was going to take physical replacement if the Sollies ever wanted one of those ships to get underway under her own power again. That wouldn't necessarily take them permanently out of service, but it would take months to get a suitably equipped repair fleet all the way out to New Tuscany. In fact, it might actually be cheaper and faster in the long run to send out a fleet of tugs and tow them back to a Solarian shipyard.
And if they're not permanently out of service, at least they aren't going to be available to the other side any time soon, she reflected grimly. If this goes as far south as it could, that's not exactly anything to sneer at, I suppose.
"I wish we had a better feel for how the Sollies are going to react to all of this," Van Dort said, as if he'd been reading her mind. Not that it would have taken a genius to figure out what she was thinking.
"I wish the same thing," she said. "But what I wish even more was that we had some idea how any transstellar—even one the size of Manpower—comes up with the juice to manipulate the SLN on this level. Battle Fleet admirals who just happen to hate all Manties in charge of Frontier Fleet task groups? Entire task forces of Battle Fleet superdreadnoughts on call, assuming Anisimovna wasn't just blowing smoke to the New Tuscans? I'd say this goes at least a little beyond most corporations' definition of 'business as usual.' "
Which, she added silently, is the reason I also handed complete copies of the depositions Vézien, Dusserre, Cardot, and Pélisard gave us over to Sigbee for her to pass on to their ONI. I doubt it's likely to make them any less pissed off with us,but I don't have any problem at all with getting the League simultaneously pissed off enough at Manpowerto finally do something about it!
"You think Vézien is right about Byng?" Terekhov asked.
"I don't know," Michelle said slowly. "If he is, I'm even more nervous than I was, I think. Bernardus, you know people out here better than Aivars and I do. Who do you think was closer to right, Vézien or Dusserre?"
"Dusserre," Van Dort said promptly. "I don't like him, you understand, but for somebody stuck in a fundamentally unworkable position, he's probably the smartest of the lot. Vézien may think Byng knew what was going on, but I don't. Your own intelligence dossier on him indicates that he's never been exactly the sharpest stylus in the box, and his prejudices against Manticore are glaringly obvious. I'd say they were obvious to Manpower, as well. And assuming Anisimovna really was responsible forGiselle's destruction, it looks to me as if they planned all along on putting him in a position where his anti-Manticore attitude would trigger a spinal-reflex reaction. I don't know if they anticipated that he'd go quite so far, give them such a blatantcausis belli, but they probably figured they could count on him to open fire on at least one Manticoran ship, somewhere along the way."
"I have trouble believing anyone could be that good a puppeteer," Terekhov objected. Van Dort looked at him, and the commodore shrugged.
"Your basic analysis sounds good, Bernardus, but I find it difficult to believe that anybody competent enough to put all of this together would rely on somehow maneuvering our ships close to Byng's right in the middle of the New Tuscany System, then blowing up a space station to get him to open fire. That's so far outside the KISS principle it isn't even funny!"
"I don't think that's what they did at all," Van Dort replied. "I think the 'puppeteers' relied on the fact that Anisimovna is an extremely talented and—obviously—extraordinarily ruthless operative. I think they told her what they wanted to happen, gave her the best tools for the job they could, and then sent her out to manipulate the situation however seemed best to her. From everything Vézien and his crowd had to say, she obviously had them right in her pocket. And it must have been obvious—to her, at least—that even if we hadn't responded by sending Chatterjee to New Tuscany, we'd eventually have responded by doing something that would have put our ships in close proximity with Byng's. Either that, or she and the New Tuscans would have managed to manufacture an 'incident' sufficiently serious to send Byng looking for us with blood in his eye. What's that saying from Old Terra about Muhammad going to the mountain?"
"I think you're right about that," Michelle said, "and, to be honest, that troubles me almost as much as anything else that's happened."
The others looked at her, and she waved her coffee cup in the air and grimaced. Then she set the cup down in front of her, folded her forearms on the edge of the table, and leaned forward over them, her expression serious.
"Look, we've always known Manpower hated the Star Kingdom's guts. Well, that's fair enough, because we've reciprocated. But we've also always thought of Manpower as a bunch of arrogant, money hungry, amoral bastards. They don't care about anything except money, and their arrogance leads them to do things like that business in Old Chicago when they kidnapped young Zilwicki. Or that idiotic attack on Catherine Montaigne's townhouse. Or the blatant stupidity of using slave labor, of all damned things, on Torch before the Ballroom took it away from them. Ruthless, yes. And rich, and unscrupulous as hell, but not really all that smart. Not . . . sophisticated."