“Does that answer your objections, Senator?”
“Adequately.”
“And have I answered your questions, Madam Devereaux?”
“Yes. You’re saying you can get the fleet to Puller, but not to any place on the other side of the Puller Gate?”
“Exactly. We are fairly confident we can make the translation to Puller, and each successful translation would give us additional data on the metric. We would not even be able to attempt a translation to Nova Aquila, however. We simply don’t have the requisite information.”
“We will be able to use Skybase translations out to both Nova Aquila and to Starwall once we have secured them,” Admiral Morgan added. “We simply need to have the time and equipment out there to make the necessary readings.”
“We think,” Alexander said. “The gravimetric situation at Starwall is pretty complicated. When I say we need exact readings, that’s not a matter of measuring the gravity from the local star and a couple of the closest planets. Starwall is close to the outer fringes of the Galactic Core, and literally millions of nearby stars are affecting the local picture. As for Nova Aquila … well, we’ll know more when we actually get some instrumentation out there. For now, though, it’s first things first. We need to secure the Puller system, and that we can do using Skybase as our transparaspace shuttle. We have the queue orders drawn up and transmitted. According to our current schedule, we will begin loading the first ships on board Skybase later today, using L-3 as our rendezvous point. The first translation to Puller space is now set for 1800 hours GMT, on 0112, three days from now. Operation Lafayette will commence as soon as the first ships are released at the Puller Gate. Any questions?”
“Yes, sir,” General Regin Samuels said. “I note in your plans that this operation will be depending heavily on a Traditionalist Catholic mutiny in the Puller system. Just how reliable is this element, anyway?”
“I believe I can answer that, Regie,” Navin Bergenhal, of the Intelligence Advisory Group, said. “We have good, solid intelligence assets throughout PanEuropean space, including inside both the DST and the DGSE. Those assets, in fact, are how we determined that the French are indeed holding some of our people for questioning.”
Not entirely true, Alexander thought. The initial data had come from Lieutenant Fitzpatrick, still watching and listening quietly from the hidden asteroid base orbiting the Puller stargate. But the Commonwealth’s DCI2 had developed that intelligence further, and brought home a lot of data concerning both the political and the military situations inside Republic space.
“From the Marines’ point of view, General Samuels,” Alexander said, “we will welcome help from local forces if it is available. We will not count on it.”
And that was the final decision made after a very long series of discussions and ops planning sessions, including many hours of virtual-reality simulations playing out each aspect of the mission. Most Marine officers, from the MIEF’s platoon commanders up to Alexander himself, felt the possibility of Traditionalist assistance at Puller was going to be more trouble than it was worth. The situation presented endless possibilities for targeting the wrong PE units, for friendly fire incidents, and for outright deception by the Republic’s defensive forces.
“So, are you saying you don’t trust the Catholics, General?” Devereaux asked.
“I’m saying, Madam Devereaux, that the MIEF will have the greatest chance for success if we welcome any help that’s offered, but go in prepared for no help at all. As a matter of fact, our defensive stature will assume that the T.C. mutiny is actually a PanEuropean deception, a trick. We would be foolish to act in any other way, or to lower our guard without very solid reasons to do so.”
“Quite right, General,” Samuels said, and other military officers in the assembled council murmured agreement.
It was impossible to get a feel for what Devereaux actually thought. Her Net persona was well filtered, her icon image emotionlessly bland in affect. When she’d asked if he didn’t trust Catholics, however, it had been impossible not to get the idea that she was fishing for something—a weakness, perhaps, or an opening for an attack. She was, he knew from her public records, from a Traditionalist Catholic family, but he also knew she wasn’t herself a believer … at least not to the extent of going to Mass or accepting the word of the Papess in Rome as law.
What the hell was her game?
He didn’t trust the woman, not after her attempt to shut down the Marine Corps. He still wished he knew what her personal stake was in the Corps—why she seemed to hate it so. Further searches of available public data had turned up nothing more on her background. So far as he could tell, she was simply a political opportunist who saw in the current situation a possible way of making political capital at the Corps’ expense.
That made her no less of a viper, however. She would need to be watched, and carefully, by the few friends the Marines still had within the Senate. He did not think it impossible that she might even be working for the PanEuropeans; the Québecois link, certainly, suggested that possibility. Quebec and France had been in each other’s pockets for centuries, since the First UN War at least, and possibly even well before that.
At least the chances were good that the woman wasn’t working for the Xul. The Xul, Alexander thought with a wry and inward grin, didn’t work with anyone unless they were Xul, and even Madam Devereaux wasn’t capable of bridging a gap like that.
“My ops planning staff has put together an assault plan,” Alexander continued, addressing the group at large. As he spoke, an animated diagram unfolded in the assembled minds of the audience. “The first ships in will act to set up a local defended space into which we can continue to drop ships and men. As you see here, there are two primary centers of interest within the Puller 659 system … here at the stargate, where our covert listening post is still in operation … and far in-system, here, at one of the moons of this lone gas giant. As of our last set of reports from the LP, the French fleet is in orbit around the gas giant. So far they’ve made no move at all to investigate the stargate.
“We will materialize here. …” He indicated an area some 10 light-seconds away from the stargate, and nearly 30 light-minutes from the gas giant’s current orbital position. “With luck, we’ll be able to bring the entire MIEF into position before the PEs even know we’re in-system.”
“Won’t they be aware of your ships when they arrive?” General Samuels asked. “Neutrino emissions from your ships’ reactors.”
Samuels had a valid point. The QPTs or Quantum Power Taps utilized by Commonwealth naval vessels required massive input from conventional antimatter power plants to open the zero-point channels. Once those channels were open and functioning, energy from the zero-point field itself was more than sufficient to keep those channels open and working, but the power-up procedure required a lot of initial seed energy … and they wouldn’t be able to go through the paraspace translation with their power taps on. That, any good QPT engineer knew all too well, was an excellent way to release a very great deal of energy into a small volume of space in an accident—a “casualty,” in naval parlance—that would almost certainly result in the complete vaporization of Skybase.
With a thought, Alexander switched on a doughnut-shaped swath of red light surrounding the glowing point of light that marked the Jovian gas giant. “We hope that the answer to that, General, is ‘no.’ At the moment the PE fleet is deep inside the radiation fields of the Puller Jovian. If their sensors are finely tuned enough, they might pick up our reactor leakage, but they would have to know exactly where to look to have much of a chance of picking us up. We’re hoping that the radiation belts in this area—and their own shields against that radiation—are going to keep them pretty well blind to our approach.”
“Isn’t that a rather slender