Chapter Forty-One

August, 1921

"So you're ready to call it 'official,' then?" Oravil Barregos asked.

"I'm not going to call anything we can't get better confirmation on than this 'official,' " Luiz Rozsak began in a significantly more sour tone of voice, only to pause as his voice was buried in a sudden roar of applause from the audience.

Neither of them had been speaking very loudly to begin with, since they were seated in the governor's box in Corterrael Coliseum on Vorva, the single moon of the planet Smoking Frog. The coliseum's enormous expanse opened before and below them, packed to old-fashioned standing room only as the annual System Festival got underway, and the clowns, acrobats, and jugglers of the Lebowski Circus were taking full advantage of Vorva's low natural gravity. It was one of the "Fabulous Lebowskis' " boasts that they used neither counter-grav nor even safety nets, and the spectacular quadruple somersault Aletha Lebowski had just executed between trapezes had the entire cast crowd on its feet.

"I'm not prepared to call anything 'official' at this point," Rozsak repeated, once the uproar had eased enough for Barregos to hear him. "Not when the best we've been able to come up with is corroborating rumors. With that proviso, though, I'd say it's 'official' enough for us to proceed on the assumption that it's reliable information. It's close enough for me to think we'd damned well better not act as if it isn't reliable intel, at any rate!"

As always, Vegar Spangen had the governor's portable anti-snooping system in operation. It was quite a good system, but nothing was infallible, and given the public venue, neither Rozsak nor Barregos was being very specific, despite all the background noise. Now the governor frowned for a moment, then shrugged.

"Well, if that's your judgment, I'm not going to argue with it. Go ahead."

"Yes, Sir," Rozsak acknowledged with a bit more formality than usual, and the two men turned their own attention back to the Fabulous Lebowskis.

"Impressive," Rozsak observed two of Smoking Frog's planetary days later as he stood on the flag bridge of SLNSMarksman contemplating the icons on her master plot.

The Marksman class was unique among Solarian Navy light cruisers in that it had a flag bridge. Of course, the fact that Marksman and her sisters belonged to the Solarian League Navy was something of a technicality, Rozsak supposed. As was the fact that, at 286,750 tons, she was bigger than the majority of the League's heavy cruisers.

She was, in fact, the first of the Maya Sector's "emergency program" to emerge from the newly expanded Carlucci Industrial Group yards in Erewhon, and she and the seven sisters currently in formation about her represented the largest warships in the Maya Sector Frontier Fleet Detachment the SLN had seen fit to place under Rear Admiral Rozsak's command.

Which didn't make them the largest ships under his command, of course. And didn't mean the SLN knew they were actually "his," either. In point of fact, his nominal superiors back on Old Earth were under the odd impression that they were Erewhonese units the SLN was merely helping to man because the Republic of Erewhon found itself "temporarily" short of trained manpower. That sort of assistance was part of the Office of Frontier Security's standard operating procedure for gaining influence with independent star nations, so no one back on Old Earth had turned a hair when Rozsak reported that he was applying the tactic in Erewhon's case. It helped that Erewhon had applied the Royal Manticoran Navy's new standards of automation to its own new construction without bothering to mention that fact to the galaxy at large. The fact that an entire ship's company for one of the Marksmans was actually considerably smaller than the complement of one of the SLN's far smaller Morrigan-class light cruisers made it far easier to convince The Powers That Were back on Old Earth that all Rozsak's people were doing was to "help fill in the holes" in otherwise Erewhonese crews.

He gazed at the icons which had just completed their scheduled exercise for a few more seconds, then turned to face Captain Dirk-Steven Kamstra, Marksman's commander. Kamstra was of only moderate height, with brown hair, brown eyes, and a rather chunky physique. No one would have called him massively muscular, although he was considerably broader (and, undeniably, thicker) than Rozsak himself, and the uncharitable might have been inclined to describe his habitual expression as somewhat bovine. "Phlegmatic" might have been a better term, although it was sadly true that there was no glow of genius or superior intellect in those brown eyes.

Which was fortunate, in Luiz Rozsak's considered opinion, since it had caused so many people to completely overlook the incisive, sharply honed intelligence lurking behind that stolid, unimaginative-looking exterior. In point of fact, he knew the exterior in question had been developed specifically to hide what was going on behind it . . . including its owner's simmering hatred for what Frontier Security had done to Geronimo, his parents' homeworld. The fact that Kamstra had managed to attain officer's rank in the SLN despite having been born on what had become a Frontier Security protectorate planet six T-years before his own birth made him almost unique. The fact that he'd made it as high as captain (which was a recent promotion) had been made possible only by certain strategically placed patrons, prominent among whom were one Oravil Barregos and one Luiz Rozsak, and they would never have managed to pull it off if anyone in the Solarian League Navy's flag ranks had suspected for one moment how Dirk-Steven Kamstra had come to regard OFS and all its works.

The fact that no one ever had—or would, before it was too late, at least—was one huge reason why Dirk-Steven Kamstra was both the commanding officer of Light Cruiser Squadron 7036, SLN, and, after Edie Habib and Jiri Watanapongse, Rozsak's most trusted subordinate. He was also one of the very few people who knew exactly what Oravil Barregos and Luiz Rozsak had in mind for the Maya Sector's future. All of which, of course, explained why he held the command he currently held.

"Very impressive, Dirk-Steven," Rozsak said now.

"I'm pleased with them myself, Sir," Kamstra replied. "We've still got a few rough spots—couldn't be any other way, I suppose, given how much doctrine we're inventing as we go along—but, overall, I think they've done well." He glanced at the icons himself, then looked back at Rozsak. "It'd help if we could go ahead and exercise the entire force together instead of more or less hiding the new units off in a corner, as it were, of course."

"It looks like you might just get that opportunity," Rozsak said a bit less cheerfully. Kamstra's left eyebrow arched slightly, and Rozsak snorted in harsh amusement. "Let's go ahead and take this to your briefing room," he suggested.

"Of course, Sir." Kamstra inclined his head respectfully in the direction of the door which connected the bridge directly to the flag briefing room.

"Attention on deck!" the newly promoted Captain Edie Habib said crisply as Rozsak stepped through the door with Kamstra at his heels.

The people seated around the briefing room table rose quickly, standing as Rozsak made his way to the chair awaiting him at the table's head. Kamstra, as his senior officer in space, took the chair at the table's far end, waiting with the others until Rozsak had seated himself.

"Sit, sit," the rear admiral said, just a bit impatiently, and his subordinates did. It was all a bit more formal than usual, he reflected, but, then, circumstances weren't exactly usual, either.