Some of the strategists claimed that all this represented a failure by their enemies to attack when they’d expected to, though it seemed to Saluus that what they called the proof of this relied too much on simulations and shared assumptions.
It had all certainly gone on for a long time now. People had worked their way through the various stages of shock, denial, defiance, solidarity, grim determination and who-knew-what else; nowadays they were just tired of it. They wanted it all to end. They feared how that end might come about, but they were half broken by the erratic bombardment and the ever-present uncertainty.
Worse — in a way, because news had somehow leaked out of when the invasion by the Starveling Cult had been expected, and it had not yet materialised — people were starting to think that it might not now ever happen. The real conspiracy theorists believed that it had all been a huge military-industrial paranoid death-fantasy right from the start, that no real threat had ever existed, that most of the attacks were being carried out by the security forces themselves, either as part of an inter-service conflict or in a carefully planned series of cynical, deliberately self-sacrificial moves that would gain sympathy for the armed forces even as the mass of people lost the few remaining civil liberties they still had; that it was all just an excuse to turn the whole Ulubis system into a semi-fascist society, securing power in the hands of the privileged few.
Even those of a more moderate turn of mind chafed at the freedoms lost and the restrictions imposed, and had begun asking where exactly was this terrible threat they had been preparing for for the best part of a year? Shouldn’t the sky have lit up by now with the invading fleet’s drives as they decelerated into Ulubis near-space? People were starting to question the need for all the sacrifice and hardship and to wonder if too much was being done to counter a threat that so far hadn’t materialised and not enough to deal with the ongoing attrition of small-scale but still intermittently devastating attacks.
The strategists were wondering where the E-5 Discon forces were, too. There had been wild arguments over what the best strategy was: go out to meet the invading fleet or fleets, hoping to gain a slight edge by a degree of surprise — and keeping at least some of the fighting out of the populated reaches of Ulubis system — or sit tight and wait, building up maximum forces where they were in the end most needed? Drone scout ships had already been dispatched in the general direction the invasion was coming from but so far none of them had found anything. A very literal long shot.
A giant magnetic rail gun was being constructed in orbit round G’iri, the smaller gas-giant beyond Nasqueron, built to scatter space in front of the oncoming fleet with debris: a huge blunderbuss supposed to throw a sleet of surveillance machines and a cloud of tiny guided explosive or just kinetic mines before the invading ships, but it was only now getting up to speed, months late, wildly over budget and plagued by problems. At least this latest failure couldn’t be laid at the door of Kehar Heavy Industries. Saluus’s firm had never been involved in the contract. They’d been the obvious people to build it but it had been handed over to a consortium of other companies partly just to show that KHI didn’t have a monopoly and to give some of the others a shot at a big project.
The interim report on the Nasqueron debacle had pretty much cleared KHI, finding nothing worse than occasionally imprecise accounting, the sort of rush-resulted corner-cutting that was only to be expected in anything like the current emergency. The whole storm-battle farce had been a home-grown military fuck-up in other words, just as Saluus had maintained from the start. Partly as a result, he had become more integrated into the whole planning and strategic superstructure of the Ulubine Mercatoria and even, fairly regularly, the Emergency War Cabinet.
This made sense. It also appealed to Saluus’s sense of importance, and he was self-aware enough to know and accept this. And, of course, it had the additional effect of tying him in tighter to the political hierarchy of the system, identifying him even more strongly with the ruling structures and individuals, giving him more of an incentive to fight to preserve Mercatorial rule. If the bad guys did sweep in and take things over it would be harder now for Saluus to wave his hands and claim to be just a modest shipbuilder, now humbly at the service of the new masters.
Still, proximity, access and even a degree of control over such power was something Saluus felt comfortable with and, if the worst did happen, he still wasn’t as symbolically part of the old regime as the others in the War Cabinet, and his control of KHI would make him valuable to whoever ran the system. He’d play it by ear. Besides, he had an escape route mapped out. The longer the E-5 Discon invasion took to happen, the shorter would be the time to wait for the Mercatoria counter-attack, in which case he might be better off just disappearing while the bad guys settled in and prepared their own defences. (In theory they were supposed to be kept in the dark that the Mercatorial fleet was on its way, but news of that had leaked too and anyway their Beyonder allies would surely have told them.)
If it was simpler to hide then Saluus would hide. He’d try to get involved in some guerrilla activity, too, hopefully at a safe remove, so that when the Mercatoria did retake the system he would look like some sort of hero rather than a coward only interested in his own wealth. But keeping out of the way was sometimes the best strategy when things got messy. He had a very fast ship indeed being built in one of the secret yards, a prototype that he fully intended to make sure was never quite ready for active service or even military trial runs. It would be his way out, if he needed it.
In all this, amazingly, the woman he had first known as Ko, when she’d been with Fassin Taak — her real name, the name she used now, was Liss Alentiore — had been a real help. He’d fallen for her, he supposed. In fact, he’d fallen for her to the extent that his wife — despite her own happily indulged and numerous dalliances — had, for the first and only time, shown signs of jealousy. (Liss herself had suggested a way out of this, though it had occurred, at least as a fantasy, to him as well. So now they had a very stimulating little menage a trois going.)
More to the point, Liss had proved a trustworthy confidante and reliable source of advice. There had been a few occasions over the last few crowded, sometimes desperate months when Salluus had not known which way to react and he’d talked it over with her, either in the semi-formality of his office, flier or ship or from pillow to pillow, and she’d known what to do, if not immediately then after a night or two’s thought. She was canny in a sidelong, catlike way; she knew how people worked, how they thought, which way they would jump, almost tele-pathically sometimes.
He’d invented a post for Liss in his entourage and made her his personal private secretary. His social and business secretaries had both been quietly piqued, but were smart enough to accept the new face with a degree of feigned generosity and seemingly genuine grace, and without trying to do anything to undermine her. Saluus had a feeling that they had each anyway gauged Liss accurately, and realised that any attack they might try on her would likely rebound on themselves.
His own security people had been suspicious of her at first, finding all sorts of insalubrious stuff hinted at in her past, and then a sort of suspicious fuzziness. But ultimately there had been nothing damning, certainly nothing that was worse than what he’d got up to when he was her age. She’d been young, wild and she’d mixed with dubious types. So had he. So what? He’d quizzed her gently on her past himself and got an impression of hurt and trauma and bad memories. He didn’t want to hurt her further by inquiring too deeply. It added to his feeling that, in some almost unbearably gallant way, he’d rescued her.