Well, this should really be the last snippet. [Smile]
Cauldron of Ghosts – Snippet 46
Chapter 27
Colonel Nancy Anderson waited until the Hali Sowle was eight light-minutes away from the trading depot before she said anything about their mission. There was no rational reason for that. If anything they’d said or done or just blind bad luck had given them away to the Manpower personnel staffing the depot, they were as good as dead anyway. At that range, even low-powered missiles carrying small warheads would easily destroy a ship like the Hali Sowle.
And whether they’d been found out or not, why bother keeping silent for any length of time once the Hali Sowle left the depot? They were a starship, not a submarine maintaining silence under the surface of an ocean lest they be detected by their enemies. In space, as the old saw went, no one can hear you scream — or talk, or sing, or whisper, or shout at the top of your lungs.
But, rational or not, the time just passed had been very tense. All members of the BSC handled tension well; Anderson handled it particularly well or she’d never have reached the rank of colonel. Still…
Eight light-minutes was one Astronomical Unit, one of the most ancient of all measures. It was the distance between Sol and Terra back in the human race’s system of origin.
Most Beowulfers might not be superstitious — but they still ate comfort food like anyone else. One AU was the astrogational equivalent. For reasons that might make no sense, star travelers just seemed to relax a little once they’d gone that distance.Â
“Well, I didn’t spot any problems. Did anyone?”
“No,” said Damewood. “The lion moved among the lambs with nary a one of the little fuzzballs sensing anything amiss.” He pointed to his work station, with the special displays now up that he’d made sure were not in sight when Manpower’s inspectors came through. “I was checking too, you’d better believe it.”
Sitting in the captain’s seat, Ganny El blew a raspberry. “‘The lion moved among the lambs’! Yeah, right. Completely toothless lion — no claws, neither — and a pack of lambs that sure looked like predators to me.” She held up an admonishing finger. “I’m telling you, I’m not doing this again! You hear that, Anderson? I don’t care how much money you wave under my nose.”
The colonel smiled but didn’t say anything. She had no more intention than Ganny of repeating the somewhat hair-raising experiment. One test run, carried out at a large and well-equipped Manpower depot, was enough to determine if there was any significant chance that the identity of the Hali Sowle would flag any alarms. They’d decided it was better to take the risk now with a skeleton crew than find out later when the Hali Sowle was carrying a full complement.
But no alarms had been triggered. Neither by the name nor the characteristics of the ship itself. The Hali Sowle had arrived at Balcescu Station after approaching and identifying itself quite openly; had spent two days at the depot engaged in trade and simply enjoying the depot’s restaurants and shops; and had then left in just as straightforward a manner. And there’d been no trouble of any kind, leaving aside the quarrel Ganny had gotten into with a shopkeeper whom she accused of trying to fleece her.
So, it now seemed clear that the Hali Sowle could go anywhere safely except possibly to Mesa itself. And if Zilwicki and Cachat were right in their estimate that the destruction of Gamma Center (and Jack McBryde’s accompanying actions) had obliterated the Mesan records of the vesselaltogether, the Hali Sowle could even go to Mesa.
But no one proposed to send the Hali Sowle to Mesa. It would be too risky to use the ship a second time to get the spies off the planet — much less onto it in the first place — and there was certainly no chance of using the Hali Sowle as a raider in the system. Mesa’s naval forces might be on the paltry side when compared to the fleets of star nations like Manticore and Haven, but they were more than powerful enough to swat two frigates as if they were insects.
Leaving aside Mesa, though, it now seemed that the rest of the galaxy was open to the Hali Sowle‘s new business.
Purely as an idle exercise, Anderson tried to calculate how much money it would take to get Ganny to withdraw her proclamation. The number would be large, certainly, but very far short of infinity. The Parmley clan’s matriarch wasn’t exactly avaricious, since it was never her own wealth that concerned her. But she kept an eye out for the interests of her kin like no one Nancy had ever seen.
Now that she’d finagled a full suite of prolong treatments for every member of the clan who could benefit from them and also bargained to get excellent educations for all the youngsters — and even a few of the adults who had a mind to go to school — what fresh field could she aspire to conquer?
There had be something, knowing Ganny, but what?
Loren Damewood had apparently been undertaking the same exercise. And, as was the XO’s way, didn’t hesitate from putting his speculations in words.
“Oh, come on, Ganny. There’s got to be some price you’d settle for. What have you got a hankering for these days? Mansions on the shores of the Emerald Sea for each and every one of your kinfolk, down to the babes and toddlers? All-expenses-paid cruises on luxury liners through the Core worlds?”
Nancy couldn’t resist joining in. “How about precious metals and jewelry? That’s been a winner for going on ten thousand years.”
Ganny’s sneer was every bit as flamboyant as her cursing. “Even if such a price existed — which for the record, it doesn’t — what difference would it make to you? Between the whole lot — scrape it up from every member of the BSC anywhere in the galaxy — you couldn’t come close. Seeing as how ‘BSC’ really stands for Beggars’ Succor and Care.'”
Damewood clutched his chest. “Oh, Ganny! That’s cold!”
****
Csilla Ferenc watched the departing freighter on the screen. She had no interest in the vessel itself. The receding image was just something to look at — and wasn’t even real any longer, at this distance. The software used by Balcescu Station’s astrogation control substituted a stylized symbol for an actual image of a ship when it was too far away to be seen clearly with optical equipment.
She was just brooding. The departure of the Hali Soul — no, Sowle — had gone with even less notice than a tramp freighter normally would have gotten. That was because traffic through Balcescu had risen sharply over the past few weeks.
What bothered Ferenc wasn’t the heavy workload, so much. She didn’t enjoy it, but the overtime pay was nice. No, what bothered her was that she didn’t know the reason for the increase in traffic.
Sure, the extra ships that came through were all from Mesa and had impeccable papers. (Which were electronic, not molecular, of course; but the old term was still used by most traffic control services.) But maybe that was the problem. Their documentation was too good, in a way. In Ferenc’s experience, the documentation for real shipping concerns got frayed at the edges after a while.
Not that of this additional traffic, though. Their credentials and bona fides and bills of lading looked like they’d just come out of the virtual presses at the headquarters of Manpower, the Jessyk Combine, Axelrod Transtellar, and Technodyne.
They had serious backing behind them, too. Any questions beyond the routine ones got stonewalled — and both times she’d tried to push a little, Csilla had gotten slapped down by her superiors.
Slapped down hard and fast.
It was the speed of the reprimands that had struck her the most. The management of Balcescu were rude bastards and had been as long as Ferenc had been at the station. Reprimands were always a lot harsher than they should have been.
But they never came all that quickly. The station’s bosses were as lazy as they were nasty. Usually, you’d find out a tick had been placed in your records a week or two — sometimes a month or two — after the incident that triggered it.
Not now. Those two reprimands had been given to her within hours. Within less than an hour, in the case of the second one.
And all she’d asked for was identification for the three individuals listed as “supercargo; special assignments”! Normally, she would have gotten chewed out if she hadn’t insisted on an explanation.
Something was going on. And what bothered Ferenc was that the explanation that kept coming to her made her profoundly uneasy.
At that moment, as it happened, the person sitting at the control station next to her voiced her own worries.
“Csilla, do you think there’s really anything to all the Mantie hollering about a ‘secret conspiracy’ behind Manpower?”
Ferenc glanced around the control room quickly. The only other person within hearing range was András Kocsis, and he wasn’t paying any attention because he was in the middle of directing an incoming freighter.
She wasn’t worried about Steve anyway. He was just a working stiff like them.
Reassured, she turned to the man who’d asked the question, Béla Harsányi. “Are you trying to get into trouble?”
Béla looked uncomfortable — but stubborn. “Come on, Csilla. You’ve got to have been wondering about it yourself.” He motioned toward his own control screen. “I mean, look at the traffic we’ve been getting. Some of these ships we’ve never seen at all before, and many of the ones we have are acting… You know. Weird.”
Weird. Depending on how you looked at it, that was either discretion or circumlocution. In plain language, what Harsányi meant was that the crews of the slave ships — some of them, anyway — hadn’t been behaving in their usual manner when they came into the station on what was still called “shore leave.”
First off, a lot fewer of them took shore leave than normal.
Secondly, and more tellingly, they hadn’t been behaving like arrogant assholes when they did. They’d seemed a little subdued, actually — as if they knew something themselves that was making them a little nervous.Â
She kept her hair in a braid when she was on duty. That was an old habit from her days on a station whose artificial gravity had been erratic. One experience with being caught trying to follow traffic with her long hair flying all over and impeding her vision had been enough.
She might have given up the habit after she got to Balcescu, since there was no danger at all that this station was going to suffer from the same problem. Balcescu Station wasn’t a flea-bitten third rate transfer point in the sticks, it was Manpower’s principal depot in this whole star region. But by then she’d found that being able to fiddle with the braid was a way of calming herself down when she got a little agitated.
She was fiddling with it now. “I don’t know, Béla. Yeah, sure, I’ve wondered myself. But…”
She let go of the braid and shrugged. “First, we’ll probably never know. And second, let’s hope we never know because the only way I can see we’d find out…”
She decided to let the sentence die a natural death. But Harsányi’s lips peeled back, revealing clenched teeth.
“Yeah, right,” he said. “The only way we’ll find out is if the Manties decide to prove it — in which case we’re dead meat anyway.”
That was… something of an exaggeration, Csilla thought. Balcescu Station wasn’t anywhere near the most likely avenues of approach the Mantie fleet would take if it decided to strike at Mesa. But it couldn’t be ruled out.
Not with the Manties. Unlike the great majority of the population of Mesa — not to mention the morons in the Solarian League — Ferenc and Harsányi knew the realities of interstellar warfare.
Some of those realities, anyway. Enough to know that the Manties, if they decided to be, could be the scariest people in the universe for people like her and Béla.
First, the Manties hated slavers — and she and Béla were part and parcel of the slave trade even if they didn’t have any personal contact with slaves themselves. Second, Csilla had just celebrated her fortieth birthday — and the Manties had been at war for more than half her lifespan. Thirdly, going by the record, they were awfully damn good at it.
“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,” Csilla said. “‘Dead meat’s a little extreme, don’t you think?”
But by the time she finished the sentence, she was back to fiddling with her braid.
****
Elsewhere in Balcescu Station, in a much fancier work area, someone else was fretting over the same issue. That was the station’s CO, Zoltan Somogyi, Csilla Ferenc’s ultimate boss in the depot and the originator of the two reprimands that she was still smarting from.
Somogyi himself had forgotten about the reprimands — and done so within hours. He hadn’t issued them because he was worried about Csilla Ferenc. He barely knew the woman. She worked for him but he was the top manager of the Station. So did almost eight hundred other people.
No, he’d issued those reprimands, along with more than a dozen similar ones, because he’d been told in no uncertain terms by people he knew even less well than he did Ferenc that they would tolerate no interference with what they were doing — about which he knew even less. The one thing — the only thing, really — he did know about the people who’d given him those instructions was that their authority was paramount. Within Manpower, Inc., as well as…
Beyond it. How far beyond it he didn’t know. And that was what was causing him to lose sleep.
People like Ferenc and Harsányi knew nothing of the Mesan Alignment, not even of its existence. So far as they knew, they were simply employees of one of the giant corporations that effectively ruled their home planet. And if the work that corporation did was unsavory in the eyes of much of the human race, they were largely indifferent to the matter — just as, in ages past, men who went into the bowels of a planet to dig out its mineral wealth didn’t think much about the fact that many people thought the work they did was crude, dirty and beneath their own dignity.
In truth, Zoltan Somogyi didn’t know much more about the Mesan Alignment than his employees. The difference was that he knew it did exist although he thought it was nothing more than an organization dedicated to the secret uplift of the Mesan genome. He had hopes he might eventually be asked to join, in fact.
But there were less benign forces in Mesan society, who were even more secretive and a lot more dangerous. Somogyi was highly placed enough to have realized years before that someone, somewhere, was pulling the strings.
Who they were… he didn’t know, although he suspected they were Manpower’s innermost circle.
What their goals were… he didn’t know.
What their plans were for him… he didn’t know that, either.
What worried him was that he thought such plans probably existed. And whatever they were, probably weren’t going to be good for him. Not because those mysterious hidden powers bore any animosity toward him but simply because he was beneath their notice.
When a behemoth makes plans to go somewhere, do those plans take into consideration the small and fragile creatures that might get underfoot along the way?
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Interesting problem; if all the staff on these waystations get disappeared the MA may as well put up signs saying “we came this way”. If they don’t Z&C will have questions for them once they find some of them. Wonder which the MA would consider more damaging?
Their OPSEC sucks. Seriously, badly. And one of the things about bad OPSEC is that it means you are screwing up in ways you don’t even realize are a screw-up, usually it means you actually think the screw ups are a good idea!
Whoever planned this thought that giving the freighters good papers would make them less noticeable (individually yes, some ships will have good new papers, and those aren’t the ones the station crew worries about, it’s the collective impact of so many ships with good papers that got notices). They thought that having the crew stay aboard would reduce the chance of someone blabbing (which it does, but now they don’t need to blab for every shop keeper on the station to know something is up, and it’s so obvious that someone locked in traffic control notices the oddity, imagine what actual entry control at the docks must think). They thought that telling the station management to make sure no one questioned anything would keep things quiet (and notice that the viewpoint character doesn’t really want to discuss this).
So there’s nothing to worry about here, they’ve carefully avoided leaking anything (except that the precautions themselves give away the fact that there is something to leak). That’s bad OPSEC, and you don’t have OPSEC this bad unless you don’t really know about OPSEC, in which case you don’t ever realize you screwed up.
The real question is, how the fuck did these people keep ANYTHING a secret for a millennia or however long its supposed to have been. I know it has to be clear to the readers that a good intelligence agent could spot the flaws, but this is so bad it’s silly.
Two words for ya: “false trail”.
This probably isn’t the only route they’re using, which means that ‘obvious’ precautions that stick out just a bit too much would distract attention from more established routes where they might actually be shipping the Mesans in secret. On top of that, they could ship through this same station using more normal ships, and the very flaws in the precautions of the fake ships would be like a floodlit “secret doings here!” sign that would distract attention away from the ships they were actually moving people with.
That makes a lot more sense to me, and it’s a basic principle of intelligence/counterintelligence.
False trail doesn’t work when the alleged goal is to hide the fact that there’s any trail at all.
They don’t want to hide WHERE they are going, that would be trivial, go straight from Mesa without stopping, space is big and they need one carefully controlled wormhole. They want to hide that anyone is going anywhere at all, so why lay a false trail when you don’t want anyone to think there is a trail at all?
IMO the text evidence is that this is a “rush job” so bad mistakes are being made.
Of course, Manticore and Allies will see that there’s a trail but everybody else might see it as “Manticore grasping at straws to prove their stupid conspiracy theory”.
I don’t think going straight from Mesa would work. Assuming they’re headed for Darius, the final leg from some intermediate point to Darius would also have to be secret, which means it has to be worked by ships and crew that never go anywhere else. If they just use regular Jessyk Combine shipping, somebody is likely to talk eventually unless they destroy the ship and crew after arrival at Darius.
I’m more or less on the “beggars can’t be choosers” side here – they had a carefully thought out evacuation plan, but the sudden change meant they couldn’t increase the capacity of the pipeline without leaks showing. Manpower and Jessyk only have so many of these bases.
Which makes me wonder. Where is this base that it’s close enough to Torch to get hit, and close enough to Mesa for the first leg?
Wasn’t there a wormhole somewhere near Torch that the MA knows about and other people don’t know what’s on the other side of? That would make a plausible explanation for being both close to Torch and on the way. Alternately, Torch is going for a deep strike near Mesa for some reason.
Um, no. I made a silly mistake. That station is actually Jack McBryde’s 4th stop or so. Still, it’s suspicious that it’s close enough to Torch to be a target for Torch’s first real raid. Either Darius is somewhere on that side of the map, or one of the Felix junction termini is. Or something else.
To some extent the question is answered in the rest of the book. (Which means you — or your public library — will have to buy it so you can read it.)
Good question. A possible answer: these people have never worked with the underside of the shipping industry, so they simply don’t know they’re creating a problem. They zip around the galaxy in well-maintained ships with impeccable (if false) papers. The people who would know the actual situation, that is Manpower and Jessek Combine, are regarded as mushrooms – kept in the dark and fed on crap.
Another possible answer: the original plan was for the genetic slave trade to be disbanded or destroyed before anyone had any inkling that there was anything to look for. And if anyone did trip over anything, then there are only two secrets that need to be concealed: who’s doing it, and Darius.
OK, if taking extreme measures to conceal secrets reveals the fact that there are secrets to be kept how did the MA agenda remain unrevealed for hundreds of years while they maintained moderate security. Obviously some people in a position to know things would have had questions earlier, and careful training or simple fear would have gone only so far in keeping down the buzz. Interstellar transport and communications should have spread gossip across all star nations about Mesa.
One aspect of their prior security is that most of their operations would be seen (if discovered) as “just more nasty stuff by the Mesan Corporations” not as “nasty stuff by the Mesan Alignment”.
IE it’s the game of hiding a “major crime” by “making it look like a minor crime”.
Everybody knew how nasty the Mesan Corporations were so nobody looked to see if anything was being hidden behind the cover of the Mesan Corporations.
Oh, it helped that the nasty Mesan Corporations did stuff (including stupid stuff) that wasn’t ordered by the Mesan Alignment.
G. K. Chesterton in “The Man Who was Thursday” has a similar dodge, where a character who wants to disguise their identity as a socialist revolutionary keeps failing until he uses the disguise of a over the top socialist revolutionary poet, who nobody took seriously.
Partial reason? It isn’t the trade craft that is raising flags, it is the volume. Prior operations, where they did have ‘cover’ ships rather than streak drives? An odd ship here or there with ‘very good’ papers could get passed off.
Several ships, behaving oddly, all in a bunch? Small oddities get noticed by repetition. Also AFAICT Houdini wasn’t supposed to happen this soon or fast. So by ‘overloading’ the evacuation pipelines you get small ‘ruptures’ and ‘leaks’ like this. Their ultimate destinations are still disguised, and I suspect they scatter from here on. But it is those first few trade stations nearest Mesa that are getting traffic upticks large enough to be suspicious.
Right, the key is the volume. And that’s something they can’t do much about except to spread it out over a long time. And apparently, they had previously intended to spread it out over a long time, but now they can’t.
Anyway, I don’t get the feeling that Houdini has to hold up for a long time. It only has to hold up for “long enough.”
I guess that if Manticore and Haven had pounded each other into a pulp, or better yet the old PRC had won the war, then their plans might have worked out. But now that Haven and Manticore are both still reasonably intact, it’s going to be difficult for Mesa to win in the end no matter what they do.
How do they hide the direction they went? Every single Manpower space station simultaneously blows up.
Talk about leaving another Real Big Clue that there’s someone behind the scenes.
Actually, now that I think of it, I’m not so sure they can risk having the last leg to Darius (if that’s where they’re going) be from Manpower stations. Granted, Darius has one terminus of the Felix junction, but that simply moves the coalescence point to somewhere around Mannerheim.
This is difficult, but it certainly would fit with their past patterns.
Those nasty Ballroom people have been factored in? Don’t forget MAlign have had several red herrings in play, just that “best laid plans”/Murphy have a bad habit of showing up. Or Jack McBryde and Z&C, in this case. MAlign are scrambling and definitely unused to it – glacial planning into a spectacular meltdown! Oops! And no Bardasano to recommend common sense..
Having made comment re Isabel Bardasano, it struck me that the central control of the onion is all male, and I’m not being picky, but males are not as good at multi-tasking, a little point made by DW in the scene at the Detweilers’ post the Filareta fiasco. Evelyn is reading high tech information while “crocheting” and presumably following a pattern, also her conversation with Albrecht. And making sense. Actually she was probably knitting – crochet is usually done with 1 hook! Albrecht, on the other hand was concentrating on one point. And feeling lonely.
Don’t forget, they are rushing to execute Operation Houdini. That means they have to skip some of the steps and due diligence they would do if they had time. When you are rushed, you make mistakes.
A thought. The Manpower station is probably closer to Hanuwele than Torch – these troops were based at Parmley Station, as was “Hali Sowle”.
The MA isn’t handeling the transition from long term planning to make it up as you go along well.
I think it’s a mindset problem which will bite them more and more as the story progresses.
MAlign has always been too clever by half.
Just a note – the nasty author couldn’t be aligning the Houdini use of Manpower shipping with the fact that our intrepid heroes arre traveling on one Manpower vessel and are operating a second Manpower “favored” vessel. Any chance members of the onion just happen to end up in proximity to them?
If you haven’t read Cauldron yet, I won’t spoiler it. Let’s just say that it opened up a rather delicious possibility. “Walk into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.” The fly being, of course, [redacted].
Although it depends on which set of heroes you’re talking about. I don’t think any of the three teams headed to Mesa are traveling on a Manpower vessel.
I have read Cauldron, and IIRC the delicious possibility only remained opened for about a chapter at most. Or did I miss something? Difficult to discuss this here. Maybe you could post on the forum?
A question, what would be the difference between Lajos and Simeos, they both give up a secret? If anybody knows I would appreciate illumination. Thanks
Well without spoilering things here, Lajos is a security agent and Simoes is as scientist, maybe.