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."

There was silence for a moment. Osiris Trajan had a well-deserved reputation for openness with subordinates he trusted. "Everybody knows everything" about any current operation, at least at the level of his own staff, was practically a mantra of his, because he regarded it as the only way to get their best thoughts—and prevent competent people from making ignorance-based mistakes. But his comments about the operation against Torch were unusually blunt, even for him, given the fact that TF 4 wasn't even assigned to the MSDF covering force on the other end of the Verdant Vista wormhole bridge.

Captain Granger cocked her head to one side, clearly considering what he'd said. She stayed that way for two or three seconds, then shrugged.

"From a purely military perspective, I agree with you completely, Sir. And I suppose it's always possible someone somewhere's gotten her nose out of joint over what happened in Verdant Vista when we lost control of the system in the first place. I think, though, that the operative factor here, in many ways, is a concern about what the Manties may eventually figure out about the wormhole bridge."

"They aren't going to figure out anything about it that's going to do them any good, Addie," Trajan countered. "Besides, they've already figured out just about anything that could be deduced from their end, or they never would have gotten their survey ship through to SGC-902 in the first place. For all the good that did them."

He grimaced, and so did Granger and Nyborg. Hasselberg, on the other hand, only shrugged.

"I admit that was . . . unpleasant, Sir," the chief of staff said. "It was clearly within policy and Commodore Ganneau's instructions, though."

"I'm fully aware of both those points, Niklas." Trajan's voice was considerably frostier than normally came Hasselberg's direction. "I'm also aware, however, that it was a single cruiser—and one that was the next best thing to totally obsolescent, at that—and Ganneau had an entire battlecruiser squadron sitting there, with two of them already at action stations and knowing exactly where anything from the other end had to come out. Do you really think a Manty skipper would have been stupid enough to fight with eight battlecruisers sitting there ready to turn his ship into plasma? Ganneau had the option of ordering him to surrender; he just refused to take it."