False Colors wc-7 Read online

  “Sit down, Jason,” Tolwyn said slowly. He waited until Bondarevsky had settled into a chair across from him before he went on. In the darkened cabin, his quiet, firm voice seemed almost unreal, like a ghost’s. “I know all the reasons why Goliath should be dropped. Believe me, under any other circumstances I’d be the loudest voice calling for cancellation, no matter how much Max Kruger wanted his new toy. But I know a few damned good reasons for going on, too, and in my opinion they outweigh the ones in favor of dropping the project.”

  “What could justify risking so many people?” Bondarevsky demanded. “Come on, Admiral, you’ve been hiding things since before we left Terra. How can you expect any of the rest of us to go along with you if you won’t let us in on the same information you’re using to base your decisions on?”

  Tolwyn didn’t say anything for a long moment. “You can’t just accept that I know what I’m doing? Once upon a time, Jason Bondarevsky would have followed me into Hell and back out of sheer loyalty.”

  “When I was still a newbie on my first deep-space assignment, maybe,” Bondarevsky said. “Back then everything was simple. You pointed at the holo-map and laid out the mission, and I flew. Simple. But a lot’s happened since then, sir. I’m not the same man I was fifteen, twenty years ago. And neither are you. Behemoth proved that.”

  “Behemoth.” Tolwyn packed a world of contempt into that single word. “That’s where everything started to go wrong, Jason. And like a fool I didn’t see any of it coming until it was too goddamned late.”

  There was another long pause before he started speaking again. “All right, Jason, since you won’t accept my word I guess I’ll have to spell it all out. But you’re not going to like it. Not one bit of it.” He stood up and started to pace back and forth across the narrow confines of the cabin, a dark shape only half-seen in the dim light. “Remember the mess we were in after the Battle of Earth? All the Joint Chiefs were killed, most of them in that bombing the Kilrathi pulled during the peace talks, and Duke Grecko in the fighting. And the government was in chaos, too, when the President resigned because of his part in letting the Cats nail us.”

  Bondarevsky nodded, though he didn’t know if Tolwyn could see him.

  “The new government amounted to a coalition between all the major parties, and it showed. After we beat the Cats back from Terra we should have followed up with a strike that would have knocked them into the stone age, but instead we frittered away our strength against a string of useless targets until Thrakhath and his granddaddy had a chance to rebuild everything they’d lost and then some. When Concordia went down, that was the last straw. We’d fallen behind in ship building, and were starting to deploy miserable old carriers fit for the scrapyard in front-line sectors because our resources were stretched so thin. That was largely thanks to the Department of Industrial Affairs. The bureaucrats there were dragging their feet every time someone suggested a move that would cut a few corners and speed up production, and Secretary Haviland either wouldn’t or couldn’t put his foot down. But we were getting the same kind of trouble from half a dozen other cabinet people, too. It was a mess from start to finish.”

  Tohvyn paused. “I’d just been assigned to the Weapons Development Office when Concordia went down. I inherited Behemoth from Ubarov, who had the post before me. Frankly, my first reaction was to scrap the damned thing then and there. The design was all wrong, for one thing. It should have been mounted aboard a ship that could defend itself effectively…and one that had some legs, too, so it could maneuver in a combat situation. Behemoth didn’t have either capability. And I didn’t like the whole concept of blasting planets indiscriminately, either. It always seemed to me that the only thing that marked a difference between us and Thrakhath was that we had at least a modicum of morality on our side, and this was putting us on the very same level as him.

  “But before I’d finished the review and made a final decision I had a visit from an old friend of mine that changed everything.” Tolwyn fell silent, still pacing restlessly.

  “Sir?”

  “David Whittaker.” Tolwyn paused again, as if the name alone conveyed everything he wanted to say. Finally he continued. “Dave Whittaker was a classmate of mine in the Academy more years ago than I care to remember. We were shipmates on our cadet cruise aboard the old Albemarle. The captain sent us down in a shuttle with a survey team…you know the drill, give the middies some responsibility on some jerkwater little planet where nothing can go wrong. Well, this time something did go wrong. My helm console exploded-they never did figure out why-during the landing approach. The shuttle crashed. I woke up bund and pinned in the wreckage, without my helmet and with sulfur dioxide fumes leaking in from the planetary atmosphere. Dave didn’t have a helmet either, it had been crushed under a piece of the computer when we hit. But he stayed with me, got me out and helped me get to an emergency pressure bubble, breathing that god-awful stuff. I never would have made it if it hadn’t been for him. We both pulled six months in the hospital, and Dave got a commendation and the Distinguished Service Award. We kept in touch, off and on, but I kind of lost track of him over the last few years, until he came to see me one night at my house off-base.

  “It could have been old home week, but he didn’t waste any time making small talk. Instead he launched right into it. He wanted to sound me out on behalf of some friends of his, military officers with long and distinguished service records who were sick and tired of the way the Confederation civil government was making a hash out of the war effort. He named a couple of names…important officers, men like DuVall and Murasaki. And they were just recent recruits, not part of the main organization. It took a few minutes for me to get it through my thick skull that Dave was talking about a military coup, about throwing over all of our service oaths and rising against the Confederation government!“

  “What did you say to him, Admiral?” Bondarevsky asked.

  “Well, what I should have done was say I’d sign on and find out more, but I didn’t. I told him exactly what I thought of the idea of the military shaking loose of civilian control. I don’t care how screwed up things are in a democracy, there’s never an excuse for the military to run free of government control. Never! So Dave left, handing me a story about it was all just a vague idea and he was sorry he’d even broached it. But I knew he’d been serious. I guess my reputation for playing things my own way persuaded them that I’d be sympathetic.”

  “You could have been in a lot of danger,” Bondarevsky said. “A halfway decent conspiracy would have had you killed if they thought you were a danger to them.”

  “I know. I think Dave was the only thing that held them back…that and the fact that I didn’t do anything that could worry them.”

  “You mean…you didn’t alert ConFleet Security?”

  Tolwyn stopped his pacing and stood looking down at Bondarevsky. “I did not,” he said flatly. “And for a good reason. One of the things Dave let slip when we were talking was the fact that Security is lousy with their people. They have a whole secret wing of the security forces, an agency I later found out is designated Y-12 on the TO amp;E. But they have agents scattered all through the structure. So who could I report things to? Anyone I contacted could have been part of it, even my best friends and oldest contacts. If Dave Whittaker was one of them…“

  “You had Presidential access,” Bondarevsky pointed out.

  “And you know it takes time and several layers of bureaucracy to get a meeting, even to place a holo-call-not that I’d’ve trusted something like that to a holo-call, no matter how secure the line was supposed to be. The way I figured it, if I had made a move to see anybody I could be reasonably sure wasn’t part of the plot I’d have been dead before I knew what hit me. So I pretended I believed Dave’s disclaimers and did the only thing I could think of doing.”

  “What was that?”

  “I threw everything I had into getting Behemoth operational, Jason. Everything. I pushed every man in my command past t
he breaking point, myself included, trying to get that goddamned weapon built and tested as fast as possible.”

  Understanding dawned. “To get the war over as quickly as you could,” Bondarevsky said slowly.

  “Exactly,” Tolwyn said. “I figured the only way to head off a coup was to remove the only excuse the conspirators had. End the war by whatever means possible, and the civilian government wouldn’t have be in a position to screw things up so much any longer. So I figured Behemoth was our best possible chance. If I’d’ve known about Paladin’s Temblor Bomb project I would have thrown all my department’s resources into backing him. But his operation was strictly black, top secret all the way.”

  “So you pushed Behemoth as the best way to finish the fighting before the conspirators struck. I can see why you were under so much pressure…”

  “Can you, Jason? Can you really?” Tolwyn’s voice was suddenly ragged with emotion. “I don’t know if anyone can understand what I was going through. Try to put yourself in my place. I was being forced to put my faith in a weapon I didn’t really believe in, and the stakes weren’t just victory or defeat any more. If we didn’t stop the Kilrathi cold, one of two things would have happened. Either the Cats would have hit us so hard that we’d be joining the dinosaurs, or the conspiracy would strike and militarize the Confederation in the name of saving mankind. Either way, everything I believed in would have been gone. And on top of it all was the fact that it was Dave Whittaker who’d brought it to me. Damn it all, he saved my life when we were middies together, Jason, and yet he turned out to be part of this group that would actually consider an armed coup against our own government! I think that hurt me worse than when I lost my family.”

  Bondarevsky found himself picturing how he might react if someone close to him, Sparks or Kevin Tolwyn for instance, had approached him with such a concept. “Yeah…that must’ve been…” He trailed off. There weren’t words for such a betrayal.

  When Tolwyn spoke again, his voice had dropped until it was barely more than a whisper. “The real hell of it wasn’t even Dave’s involvement,” he said. “God forgive me, Jason, but there was a part of me that was tempted to go along with Dave. The civilian government really was making a hash out of the war effort. In the right hands, a military government could have stabilized things long enough to deal with the Cats. It wouldn’t need to be a tyranny, if the right people were involved. And Dave Whittaker should have been one of the right people.”

  “Then what stopped you from joining?”

  Tolwyn’s answer was oblique. “Back in the days of the Roman Republic, before the Caesars, the word ‘dictator’ didn’t have any unfortunate connotations,” he said. “A dictator was just a leader appointed for the duration of an emergency with broad military and civil powers. Did you ever read Livy, Jason? Cincinnatus was a simple country squire, but when Rome was in danger he left the plow to become the dictator until the crisis was over. Then he laid down the rods of office and went back to his simple rustic life. George Washington was the same kind of man, in the early days of the American republic.” Tolwyn sighed. “But there aren’t many men like Washington or Cincinnatus, Jason. Rome had Caesar and Pompey; America had Harold Jarvis back in the early twenty-first century. I was tempted to play Cincinnatus and defend the Confederation, but I’m damned if I’m going to help some ambitious bastard play Caesar!”

  “I see your point, sir.”

  “Well, anyway, you know what happened. By the time we got Behemoth operational I was so tied up in knots over everything that I tried to carry off the whole operation on sheer brute determination. Most of my people were on the thin edge of a nervous breakdown, and I wasn’t far behind them. Otherwise we would have tightened security, and that damned Cat Hobbes would never have been able to get the details of the Behemoth to Thrakhath. Hell, there were officers aboard my flagship who were conducting a search for a spy long before I ever knew anything about it. Maybe if I’d been more conscious of anything beyond the need to get the job done I might have been able to help them find him before he screwed us all. But…I didn’t. Thrakhath jumped the fleet and knocked out Behemoth, and that was all she wrote. Fortunately Paladin was there to pick up the pieces, and Chris Blair flew the mission that ended the war before the conspirators had a chance to move. I ended up with a messy court-martial and a career in ruins even after they acquitted me. But it was what happened after the court-martial that made me realize that I’d underestimated the bastards in the conspiracy after all.”

  “After the court-martial?”

  “Just after. When I got home from the court appearance that last day, I found a message on my comm terminal. No video, just a voice using a distorter so it couldn’t be recognized. All he said was ‘We could just as easily have crushed you. Remember that we look after our friends…as long as they are friends.’”

  “You think the officers on the court were in on the conspiracy?” Bondarevsky asked.

  “I’m certain of it,” Tolwyn responded. “Just as certain as I am that it was that same bunch who had Dave Whittaker killed four months ago.”

  “But why?”

  “I did some digging, as quietly as I could, and found out that some of the conspirators were in it for a lot more than just the idea of saving us from the Cats. They call themselves the Belisarius Group. Some of the ringleaders have enjoyed the increased power they’ve acquired as a result of the war. Even under civilian authority, the military’s been riding high lots of ways. They must have figured they would lose out on their perks once the peace was signed. I suspect the civil government might not have been as stupid as everyone thought, too. The indecent haste with which they started scaling back the armed forces tells me they were worried about a coup even after the war…and it turns out they had good reason to worry.”

  “But without the War there’s no excuse…”

  “Exactly.” Tolwyn sat down again, leaning forward and talking now with an intensity that reminded Bondarevsky of the admiral’s customary aura before a major engagement. “The conspiracy has penetrated beyond the military now, Jason. They’ve got people on the Peace Commission, in the Foreign Office, plenty of key places. And they are deliberately engineering a revival of the Kilrathi War so that there will be a sufficient threat out there to justify them seizing power and holding on to it.”

  “That’s…that’s a pretty powerful accusation, sir.”

  “It’s true. I’ve been collecting information ever since the court-martial, trying to gather enough evidence of what’s going on to stop them, but they’ve covered their tracks awfully well. I know a lot of what they’re trying to do, but I can’t prove very much of it.” He paused. “As far as I can tell, their plan is to stir up trouble out here on the frontier. They’re doing everything in their power to embroil Kruger in a fight with Ragark, knowing full well that Kruger doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of stopping a full-scale invasion. But at the same time they’re not letting the truth get out back home. When the Landreich falls, it will be another ‘sneak attack’ by the Kilrathi. Ten major colonies and all the people on them will be martyrs to the cause of resisting the Kilrathi hordes once again. They know that a show of support early on will probably make Ragark back off. He’s no fool. So there is a concerted effort to keep Kruger and his people from getting so much as a hearing back home…and at the same time, they’re already setting things up so that the blame for the Landreich’s fall will be laid at the government’s doorstep. Who disarmed the fleet? Who failed to respond to Kruger’s warnings? So they’ll have another war, and it will look as if the inept civil government is to blame. The perfect conditions to carry off the coup.“

  “It sounds plausible, I suppose,” Bondarevsky said, dubious. “But you’re ascribing an awful lot of power to these people. What do they need a coup for, if they’ve already got such a long reach?”

  “They’re powerful, but so far they have to operate very carefully, and from the shadows. And they didn’t keep all of thei
r original membership when they started this new phase. I’m convinced Dave Whittaker died because he couldn’t go along with this new plan.” Tolwyn slumped back in the chair again. “At least I hope that’s why. I’d like to think that, in the end, he really was the same man I remembered.”

  “But they still want to use you?”

  “I think so. I’m pretty sure they see me as a figurehead to give their regime an air of respectability. And look how they’ve set me up for it! They can blame the court-martial and my subsequent disgrace on the short-sighted civilian government. When they sweep into power I’ll be the military man who was the victim of the civilian leader’s meddling, rescued and reinstated by the saviors of the Confederation.”

  “MacArthur,” Bondarevsky said. “A lot of people would have supported him after he clashed with Truman in the Korean War.”

  “Exactly,” Tolwyn said. “I suspect I’d only last long enough to give them time to get a grip on things. Then some ‘enemy of the people’ would assassinate me, paving the way for tighter control and more repression.”

  They’re still playing a dangerous game. You don’t have much left to lose by airing what you know.”

  “Ah, but right now I’m so thoroughly discredited that nobody would believe me without some damned convincing proof. And these people play dirty, Jason. Why do you think I sent Kevin out here ahead of me? I figured he’d be the first one they’d target if they thought I was getting dangerous to them. Out here they can’t touch him. I think.”

  “Okay, I see all of what you’re saying. But I’m still not sure where Karga fits in to all this, or why we should risk our people in what looks like a lost cause.”

  “Come on, man, think.” Tolwyn sounded exasperated. Terra’s one hope is if the situation here in the Landreich doesn’t develop the way the conspirators have planned it. If we can just hold Ragark back, stop his invasion scheme, we not only save the Landreich, we also buy time to fight the conspiracy. They can’t mobilize without Ragark’s fleet orbiting Landreich after a bloody campaign that violates the Treaty in a big way. And that supercarrier is our last chance to hold the Cats back. Without it, Kruger doesn’t stand a chance. We have to get her back in service, Jason. Without her, we’re not just looking at the end of the Landreich. We’re looking at the fall of the Confederation to a pack of tyrants a hell of a lot worse than Thrakhath ever would have been. He would have exterminated the human race…but this lot will do worse. They’ll extinguish everything we believe in, turn the Confederation into a tyranny, maybe ignite a civil war. Better to the fighting the Cats than to live to see a military junta deciding the fate of mankind.“