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Gerrick smiled at the familiar thought and looked down as the high, clear sound of a child's voice cut through the work site's noise. A group of kids, students-to-be in the middle school, had asked permission to watch the completion of the main dome, and their teachers, after checking with the site supervisors, had organized a field trip. Needless to say, the Sky Domes staff had impressed them with the dangers the construction equipment represented, and Grayson children learned early to take adults' warnings to heart. They were well back under the completed eastern wall, and they were staying there, but that didn't mute their avid interest. He could see their excitement even from here as they watched the panels drifting upward on their counter-grav like some sort of impossibly beautiful seed pods and chattered to one another, and he smiled. He'd talked to some of those youngsters himself this morning, and two or three had looked like they had the making of good engineers.
He let his eyes sweep proudly back up the glittering wall above the kids... and that meant he saw it all happen.
It started almost gently, as the most terrible accidents so often do. The first movement was tiny, so slight he thought he'd imagined it, but he hadn't. One of the primary load-bearing supports, a solid shaft of alloy orders of magnitude stronger than titanium set in a hole bored fourteen meters into solid bedrock and sealed with over a hundred tons of ceramacrete, swayed like a young tree in a breeze. But that support was no sapling. It was a vital component of the dome's integrity, and even as Gerrick stared at it in disbelief it was turning, twisting in its socket as if it had been tamped into place with so much sand and not sealed into the densest, hardest mineral building material known to man. It couldn't happen. It wasn't just unlikely, it was impossible, and Gerrick knew it, for he was the man who'd designed it ... but it was also happening.
His eyes whipped unerringly to the supports which shared that shaft's component of the dome's weight. An untrained eye wouldn't even have known which ones to look at; to Gerrick, it was as obvious as if he'd spent hours pouring over the schematics that very morning, and his-heart leapt into his throat with horror as he saw one of them shifting as well!
He stared at it for one terrible, endless instant, his engineer's mind leaping ahead to the disaster to come. It was only a moment, no more than four seconds, possibly five; certainly not more than six, yet that moment of stunned inactivity would haunt Adam Gerrick. It didn't make any difference. He knew that, didn't think it, but knew it. Too much mass was in motion. The inevitable chain of events was beyond the control of any man, and nothing he did or didn't do could make the slightest difference, yet Gerrick would never forgive himself for that moment of stasis.
A soft, almost inaudible groan came from the moving supports, and a pane of crystoplast popped free. The glittering panel dropped, no longer drifting and lovely in its counter-grav supports but slashing downward like a gleaming guillotine, and Adam Gerrick began to run.
He flung himself down the scaffolding, screaming a warning, running straight towards the collapsing horror of his dream. It was madness, a race which could end only in his own death if he won it, but he didn't think about that. He thought only of the children, standing in what was supposed to be the safest part of the entire site... directly under those creaking, groaning, treacherously shifting supports.
Perhaps, he told himself later, if he'd reacted faster, if he'd started running sooner, if he'd screamed a louder warning, perhaps it would have made a difference. The engineer in him, the part of his brain and soul which manipulated numbers and load factors and vectors of force knew better, but Gerrick had two children of his own, and the father in him would never, ever, forgive himself for not having made it make a difference.
He saw one of the kids turn and look at him. It was a girl, no more than eleven, and Adam Gerrick saw her smile, unaware of what was happening. He saw her wave at him, happy and excited by all the activity . .. and then he saw eighty thousand metric tons of alloy and crystoplast and plunging horror come crashing down and blot that smile away forever.
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
He let his eyes sweep proudly back up the glittering wall above the kids... and that meant he saw it all happen.
It started almost gently, as the most terrible accidents so often do. The first movement was tiny, so slight he thought he'd imagined it, but he hadn't. One of the primary load-bearing supports, a solid shaft of alloy orders of magnitude stronger than titanium set in a hole bored fourteen meters into solid bedrock and sealed with over a hundred tons of ceramacrete, swayed like a young tree in a breeze. But that support was no sapling. It was a vital component of the dome's integrity, and even as Gerrick stared at it in disbelief it was turning, twisting in its socket as if it had been tamped into place with so much sand and not sealed into the densest, hardest mineral building material known to man. It couldn't happen. It wasn't just unlikely, it was impossible, and Gerrick knew it, for he was the man who'd designed it ... but it was also happening.
His eyes whipped unerringly to the supports which shared that shaft's component of the dome's weight. An untrained eye wouldn't even have known which ones to look at; to Gerrick, it was as obvious as if he'd spent hours pouring over the schematics that very morning, and his-heart leapt into his throat with horror as he saw one of them shifting as well!
He stared at it for one terrible, endless instant, his engineer's mind leaping ahead to the disaster to come. It was only a moment, no more than four seconds, possibly five; certainly not more than six, yet that moment of stunned inactivity would haunt Adam Gerrick. It didn't make any difference. He knew that, didn't think it, but knew it. Too much mass was in motion. The inevitable chain of events was beyond the control of any man, and nothing he did or didn't do could make the slightest difference, yet Gerrick would never forgive himself for that moment of stasis.
A soft, almost inaudible groan came from the moving supports, and a pane of crystoplast popped free. The glittering panel dropped, no longer drifting and lovely in its counter-grav supports but slashing downward like a gleaming guillotine, and Adam Gerrick began to run.
He flung himself down the scaffolding, screaming a warning, running straight towards the collapsing horror of his dream. It was madness, a race which could end only in his own death if he won it, but he didn't think about that. He thought only of the children, standing in what was supposed to be the safest part of the entire site... directly under those creaking, groaning, treacherously shifting supports.
Perhaps, he told himself later, if he'd reacted faster, if he'd started running sooner, if he'd screamed a louder warning, perhaps it would have made a difference. The engineer in him, the part of his brain and soul which manipulated numbers and load factors and vectors of force knew better, but Gerrick had two children of his own, and the father in him would never, ever, forgive himself for not having made it make a difference.
He saw one of the kids turn and look at him. It was a girl, no more than eleven, and Adam Gerrick saw her smile, unaware of what was happening. He saw her wave at him, happy and excited by all the activity . .. and then he saw eighty thousand metric tons of alloy and crystoplast and plunging horror come crashing down and blot that smile away forever.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Honor Harrington sat in her quarters and stared numbly at nothing while Nimitz curled in her arms and buried his muzzle against her. For once, even he was quenched, too crushed to comfort her, for he, too, loved the children.
Thirty of them, she thought emptily. Thirty children, the oldest of them thirteen, wiped away in a moment of transcendent horror. Crushed to death, ground to mangled ruin under eighty thousand tons of wreckage, and it was her fault. Whatever had happened, whatever had led to the disaster, she was the one who'd originally bankrolled Sky Domes. It was her money which had made the company a success, and her eagerness to win jobs and income for her steaders which had spread it across the entire planet.
A tear flowed down her face, prickling and alien feeling to the artificial nerves of her left cheek, and she made no move to dry it. Children, she thought despairingly. Intentionally or not, she'd killed children.
And fifty-two other people had died with them, a cruel corner of her brain reminded her. Three had been teachers supervising their students, teachers who'd undoubtedly had a moment of horror to realize what was happening to their charges, but the others had been Sky Domes employees. Honor's employees, most of them her own steaders.
She drew a deep, shuddering breath and hugged Nimitz's warm, living weight while the tears flowed faster and her memory replayed Adam Gerrick's com message with merciless clarity. She saw his tattered clothing, the ripped and torn hands which had fought madly to heave wreckage off small, crushed bodies... the bloodstains and his haggard, tear-stained face. He was a man who'd looked upon Hell. A man who wished he'd died with the victims of his dream, and she understood perfectly.
"No, damn it!" Adam Gerrick shouted, and his torn hands quivered with the desire to strangle the officious bastard in front of him. "My people have to be part of the investigation!"
"I'm afraid that will be impossible," the building inspector replied with cold, bitter venom. They faced each another in the tangled wreckage of Winston Mueller Middle School, and their crews stood behind them like two hostile armies. The surviving Sky Domes people had worked like demons, risking life and limb side by side with the Mueller rescue personnel in a frantic effort to save as many lives as possible. But the last survivor had been removed hours ago. It would be days, even with Manticoran equipment, before the last body was recovered, and now that the desperation which had prevented them from considering how it had happened had eased, the shock which had made them allies had turned into searing anger.
"Then make it possible!" Gerrick raged. "Damn it, man, I've got twenty-three other projects! I've got to know what happened here!"
"What happened, Mr. Gerrick," the inspector said in that same cold, vicious voice, "is that your workers just killed eighty-two people, including thirty children who were citizens of this steading." Gerrick flinched as if he'd been struck, and the inspector's eyes glowed with savage satisfaction. "As for why it happened I have no doubt we'll discover substandard construction materials and practices brought it about."
"No," Gerrick half-whispered. He shook his head violently. "Sky Domes would never do something like that! My God, fifty of our people died here. Do you think we'd... we'd..."
"I don't have to think, Mr. Gerrick!" The inspector nodded to one of his assistants, and the man held out a lump of what should have been heat-fused ceramacrete. The assistant looked straight into Adam Gerrick's eyes and closed his fist, and the "ceramacrete" crumbled like a clod of sun-dried mud. Dust drifted from his fingers on the evening breeze, and there was naked hate in the eyes staring into Gerrick's.
"If you think for one minute that I'm going to give you bastards a chance to cover this up, then I'm here to tell you you're wrong, Mr. Gerrick." The inspector's voice was far more terrible for its total, icy control. "I am going to personally validate every single example of substandard workmanship on this project," he said. "And after I've done that, I'm going to personally see that you and every officer of your goddamned company are prosecuted for murder, and if one of you, even one of you, is still on this site in ten minutes, then my men will by God shoot the bastard!"
"My God," Benjamin Mayhew whispered. His eyes were locked to the live reports from Mueller Steading, and his face was white. Chancellor Prestwick stood beside his desk, staring at the same reportage, and his face was even whiter and more drawn than the Protector's.
"My God in Heaven," Mayhew repeated in a harrowed voice. "How, Henry? How did something like this happen?"
"I don't know, Your Grace," Prestwick murmured ashenly. He watched a massive beam being moved aside, and his eyes were sick as another small, broken body was lifted tenderly from under it. Work lights poured pitiless brilliance over the night-struck scene, and Mueller Guard armsmen formed a cordon around the site. The parents of the dead children stood just beyond that cordon, fathers with their arms about their wives, faces twisted with terrible grief, and the Chancellor's hands shook as he lowered himself into a chair at last.
"The Mueller inspectors claim it's the result of sub-standard materials, Your Grace," he said finally, and winced at the look the Protector threw him.
"Lady Harrington would never condone that!" Benjamin snapped. "And our own people saw every facet of that design. It exceeded code standards in every parameter, and Sky Domes was still going to show a twenty-five percent profit margin! My God, Henry, what possible motive could she have had?"
"I didn't say she did, Your Grace," the Chancellor replied, but he shook his head as he spoke. "Nor did I say she knew anything about it. But look at the scale of the projects. Think about all the opportunities for someone else to skim off the top by substituting subcode materials."
"Never." Benjamin's voice was ice.
"Your Grace," Prestwick said heavily, "the Mueller inspectors have sent ceramacrete samples to the Sword laboratories here in Austin. I've seen the preliminary reports. The final product did not meet code standards."
Benjamin stared at him, trying to understand, but the scale of such a crime was too vast to comprehend. To use substandard materials for a school's dome was unthinkable. No Grayson would put children at risk! Their entire society, their whole way of life, was built on protecting their children!
"I'm sorry, Your Grace," Prestwick said more gently. "Sorrier than I can say, but I've seen the reports."
"Lady Harrington couldn't have known," the Protector whispered. "Whatever your reports say, she couldn't have known, Henry. She would never have permitted something like this, and neither would Adam Gerrick."
"I agree with you, Your Grace, but, forgive me if I seem cold, but what does that matter? Lady Harrington is Sky Domes' majority stockholder, Gerrick is their chief engineer, even Howard Clinkscales is their CEO. However it happened, the legal responsibility falls squarely on them. It was their job to see to it that a disaster like this never, ever, happened... and they didn't do it."
The Protector scrubbed his face with his hands, and a cold chill went through him, one that was totally independent of the death and destruction on his HD. He loathed himself for feeling it, but he had no choice; he was the Protector of Grayson. He had to be a political animal as well as a father with children of his own.
Henry had seen the reports. Within days, hours, the news people would have them, as well, and what the Chancellor had just said would be being said over every news channel on the planet. Nothing, nothing, could have been better calculated to infuriate Graysons, and every person who'd ever denounced Honor Harrington, every person who'd ever even entertained private doubts about her, would hear those reports and awaken to a deep, implacable hatred for the woman who'd let this happen. And hard on the heels of that hate would come the denunciations, no longer whispers but shouts of fury. "Look!" they would cry. "Look what happens when you let a woman exercise a man's authority! Look at our murdered children and tell me this was God's will!"
Benjamin Mayhew could already hear those anguished, heartfelt cries, and in them he heard the utter destruction of his reforms.
"Dear Tester, what have we done?" William Fitzclarence whispered. He, too, sat staring at an HD, and Samuel Mueller and Edmond Marchant sat on either side of him. "Children," Lord Burdette groaned. "We've killed children!"
"No, My Lord," Marchant said. Burdette looked at him, blue eyes dark with horror, and the defrocked priest shook his head, his own eyes dark with purpose, not shock. "We killed no one, My Lord," he said in a soft, persuasive voice. "It was God's will that the innocent perish, not ours."
"God's will." Burdette repeated numbly, and Marchant nodded.
"You know how little choice we have in doing His work, My Lord. We must bring the people to their senses, show them the danger of allowing themselves to be poisoned by this harlot and her corrupt society."
"But this...!" Burdette's voice was a bit stronger, and a hint of color flowed back into his ashen face, and Marchant sighed sadly.
"I know, My Lord, yet it was God's will. We had no way to know children would be present, but He did. Would He have allowed the dome to collapse when it did if it wasn't part of His plan? Terrible as their deaths were, their souls are with Him now, innocent of sin, untouched by the world's temptations, and their deaths have multiplied the effect of our plan a thousand fold. Our entire world now sees the consequences of embracing Manticore and the Protector's 'reforms,' and nothing, My Lord, nothing, could have driven that lesson home as this has. Those children are the Lord's martyrs, fallen in His service as surely as any martyr ever perished for his Faith."
"He's right, William," Mueller said quietly. Burdette turned to his fellow Steadholder, and Mueller raised one hand. "My inspectors have already found the substandard ceramacrete. I'll wait a day or so before announcing it, long enough for us to check and recheck the analyses, so that no one can possibly question our conclusions, but the proof is there. The proof, William. There's no way that harlot or the Protector can weasel their way around it. We didn't pick the moment it would collapse; God did that, and in doing so he made our original plan enormously more successful than we'd ever dared hope."
"Maybe... maybe you're right," Burdette said slowly. The horror had faded in his eyes, replaced by the supporting self-righteousness of his faith... and a cold light of calculation. "It's her fault," he murmured, "not ours. She's the one who drove us to this."
"Of course she is, My Lord," Marchant agreed. "It takes a sharp sword to cut away Satan's mask, and we who wield the Lord's blade can only accept whatever price He thinks mete to ask of us."
"You're right, Edmond," Burdette said in a stronger voice. He nodded and looked back at the HD, and this time there as a slight, sneering curl to his lip as he listened to the reporters grief-fogged voice.
"You're right," Steadholder Burdette repeated. "We've set our hands to God's work. If He demands we bear the blood price, then His will be done, and may that harlot burn in Hell for all eternity for driving us to this."
Adam Gerrick walked into the conference room, and his face was terrible. The young man who'd left for Mueller Steading that morning had died with the collapse of his shining dream. The Adam Gerrick who'd returned to Harrington was a haunted man, with the joy of accomplishment quenched to bitter ashes in his eyes.
But he was also an angry man, filled with rage and determined to find out what had happened. He'd find the man whose greed was responsible for this carnage, this murder, he promised himself, and when he did, he'd kill the cold, calculating bastard with his two bare hands.
"All right," he said harshly to his senior engineers, "the Mueller inspectors have barred us from the site, but we still have our own records. We know what was supposed to go into that project, and we are going to find out what actually went into it ... and how."
"But..." The man who'd started to speak closed his mouth as cold, burning eyes swiveled to his face. He licked his lips and looked appealingly at his colleagues, then turned unwillingly back to his superior.
"What?" Gerrick asked in a liquid helium voice.
"I've already putted the records, Adam," Frederick Bennington said. "I've checked everything that went to the site and compared expenditures in every category against what we still have in invoice."
"And?"
"And it all checks!" Bennington said forcefully. "We didn't skimp anywhere, Adam, I swear it." He laid a mini-comp on the table. "There are the records, and they're not just mine. I'm in charge of procurement, and that makes me the logical suspect. I know that. So when I pulled the records, I took Jake Howell from Accounting with me, and I brought in three inspectors from the Harrington Bureau of Records. These figures are solid, Adam. We checked them five times. Every single item we bought and shipped to that site met or surpassed Sword code standards."
"Then someone swapped them on-site," Gerrick rasped. "Some bastard skimmed the code materials and replaced them with crap."
"No way, Adam." Despite his own shock, Bennington's voice was flat with assurance. "Not possible. We're working round-the-clock shifts, and we've maintained continuous on-site visual records. You know that." Gerrick nodded slowly, his expression suddenly intent, for Sky Domes was in the midst of a motion efficiency study, and that required detailed visual records of all their procedures.
"All right," Bennington went on, "if anyone had stolen materials from the site, we'd have at least some evidence of it on record. But every air lorry that entered or left that site is on chip, Adam, and aside from the disposal lorries headed for reclamation or the landfill, none of them, I repeat, none of them, left loaded. All materials movement was into the site."
"But I saw the ceramacrete," Gerrick said. "One of the inspectors crushed it, Fred. Just crushed it in his hand, like... like so much packing material!"
"I can't help that," Bennington replied. "All I can tell you is that we have certified records that it couldn't have been substandard materials."
"Records no one will believe." Howard Clinkscales' voice was harsh as he spoke at last, and every eye turned to him. "We may know they're accurate, but who's going to take our word? If Adam saw substandard materials, then there are substandard materials on the site. We don't know how they got there, but we can't dispute their existence, and our Steadholder is Sky Domes' majority stockholder. If we make our records public, all we'll do is destroy any last vestige of trust in her. Burdette and his supporters will scream that we doctored them, that her inspectors signed off on their falsification because she told them to, and we can't prove that didn't happen. Not with physical proof of wrongdoing sitting right there in Mueller."
He looked around the table, and his heart felt old and frozen as he saw the understanding on the engineers' faces. But Adam Gerrick shook his head, and there was no surrender in his eyes.
"You're wrong, Lord Clinkscales," he said flatly. The regent blinked at him, unaccustomed to being contradicted in such a hard, certain voice. "You're not an engineer, Sir. No doubt you're right about what will happen if we turn Fred's records over to the press, but we can prove what happened."
"How?" Clinkscales’s desire to believe showed in his voice, but there was little hope behind it.
"Because we..." Gerrick waved at the men around the table "...are engineers. The best damned engineers on this damned planet, and we know our records are accurate. More than that, we have a complete visual record of everything that happened at that site, including the collapse itself. And on top of that, we've got not just the plans and the final specs that went into them, we've got all the original calculations, from the first rough site survey through every step of the process."
"And?"
"And that means we have all the pieces, My Lord. If Fred's right about the quality of the materials we shipped to that site, then someone, somewhere, made that dome collapse, and we've got the data we need to figure out how the bastard did it."
"Made it collapse?" Clinkscales stared at the younger man. "Adam, I know you don't want to believe it was our fault, dear God, I don't want to believe it!, but if it wasn't a simple case of materials theft, what else could it be? Surely you're not suggesting someone wanted it to collapse!"
"When you eliminate all the impossible factors, whatever’s left must be the truth. And I am telling you, My Lord, that if that dome was built with the materials we specified and if the plans we provided were followed, then the collapse I saw this morning could not happen."
"But..." Clinkscales paused, and something happened in his eyes. The man who'd once been Planetary Security's commanding general looked suddenly out of them, and his voice changed. "Why would anyone deliberately sabotage the project?" he asked, and he was no longer rejecting the notion; he was looking for answers. "What sort of evil monster would murder children, Adam?"
"I don't know the answer to that yet, Sir...but I intend to find out," Gerrick said grimly.
"How can you?"
"The first thing we'll do," Gerrick said, turning to his staff, "is put the visual records through the computers. I want an exact analysis of what happened. The collapse started in the alpha ring of the east quadrant, I saw it go myself, but I want a detailed breakdown of every step of the process."
"I can handle that," one of the others said in the voice of a man thankful for a task he could perform. "It'll take ten or twelve hours to break down all the visual records, but I'll guarantee what we get will be solid."
"All right. Once we have that, we model every possible combination of factors that could have caused it. Somebody get us the Mueller met records for the last three months. I don't see how it could have happened, but it's just possible some sort of freak weather effect could have contributed."
"Not likely, Adam," someone else objected.
"Of course it isn't, but we need to consider every possibility, and not just for our own analysis. I want the sick son-of-a-bitch who did this. I want him in front of a court of law, and I want a front row seat for his hanging. I saw those kids die." Gerrick shivered, and his face was drawn and even older for just a moment. Then he shook himself. "I saw them die," he repeated, "and when we find the man who murdered them, I don't want there to be one scrap of doubt about it."
A low, harsh growl of agreement answered him, and then Clinkscales frowned thoughtfully.
"You're right, Adam. If, and at this point it's only an if, but if someone deliberately caused this, then our data has to be absolutely solid. No loose ends anyone can question." Gerrick nodded sharply, and the regent went on in that same, thoughtful tone which did nothing to hide his own anger. "And there's something else you need to consider. You and your staff may be able to tell us what happened, and how, but there's still the question of who and why, and we have to nail that down just as tight."
"That may be harder, Sir, especially the 'why,'" Gerrick cautioned.
"Adam," Clinkscales said with a cold, frightening smile, "you're an engineer. I used to be a policeman, and, I like to think, a pretty good one. If there's a who and a why, I'll find them." He turned his gaze on another man, at the far end of the table. "Chet, I want the personnel records on that work crew. While you start your analysis of what happened, I'm going to be looking at every single human being who had a hand in the construction. If this was deliberate, then somewhere, somebody left a fingerprint. When you people can tell me what they did and how they did it, I'll know where to look for the person or persons behind it. And when I find them, Adam," he said with an even more terrifying smile, "I promise you'll have that front row seat you wanted."
Thirty of them, she thought emptily. Thirty children, the oldest of them thirteen, wiped away in a moment of transcendent horror. Crushed to death, ground to mangled ruin under eighty thousand tons of wreckage, and it was her fault. Whatever had happened, whatever had led to the disaster, she was the one who'd originally bankrolled Sky Domes. It was her money which had made the company a success, and her eagerness to win jobs and income for her steaders which had spread it across the entire planet.
A tear flowed down her face, prickling and alien feeling to the artificial nerves of her left cheek, and she made no move to dry it. Children, she thought despairingly. Intentionally or not, she'd killed children.
And fifty-two other people had died with them, a cruel corner of her brain reminded her. Three had been teachers supervising their students, teachers who'd undoubtedly had a moment of horror to realize what was happening to their charges, but the others had been Sky Domes employees. Honor's employees, most of them her own steaders.
She drew a deep, shuddering breath and hugged Nimitz's warm, living weight while the tears flowed faster and her memory replayed Adam Gerrick's com message with merciless clarity. She saw his tattered clothing, the ripped and torn hands which had fought madly to heave wreckage off small, crushed bodies... the bloodstains and his haggard, tear-stained face. He was a man who'd looked upon Hell. A man who wished he'd died with the victims of his dream, and she understood perfectly.
"No, damn it!" Adam Gerrick shouted, and his torn hands quivered with the desire to strangle the officious bastard in front of him. "My people have to be part of the investigation!"
"I'm afraid that will be impossible," the building inspector replied with cold, bitter venom. They faced each another in the tangled wreckage of Winston Mueller Middle School, and their crews stood behind them like two hostile armies. The surviving Sky Domes people had worked like demons, risking life and limb side by side with the Mueller rescue personnel in a frantic effort to save as many lives as possible. But the last survivor had been removed hours ago. It would be days, even with Manticoran equipment, before the last body was recovered, and now that the desperation which had prevented them from considering how it had happened had eased, the shock which had made them allies had turned into searing anger.
"Then make it possible!" Gerrick raged. "Damn it, man, I've got twenty-three other projects! I've got to know what happened here!"
"What happened, Mr. Gerrick," the inspector said in that same cold, vicious voice, "is that your workers just killed eighty-two people, including thirty children who were citizens of this steading." Gerrick flinched as if he'd been struck, and the inspector's eyes glowed with savage satisfaction. "As for why it happened I have no doubt we'll discover substandard construction materials and practices brought it about."
"No," Gerrick half-whispered. He shook his head violently. "Sky Domes would never do something like that! My God, fifty of our people died here. Do you think we'd... we'd..."
"I don't have to think, Mr. Gerrick!" The inspector nodded to one of his assistants, and the man held out a lump of what should have been heat-fused ceramacrete. The assistant looked straight into Adam Gerrick's eyes and closed his fist, and the "ceramacrete" crumbled like a clod of sun-dried mud. Dust drifted from his fingers on the evening breeze, and there was naked hate in the eyes staring into Gerrick's.
"If you think for one minute that I'm going to give you bastards a chance to cover this up, then I'm here to tell you you're wrong, Mr. Gerrick." The inspector's voice was far more terrible for its total, icy control. "I am going to personally validate every single example of substandard workmanship on this project," he said. "And after I've done that, I'm going to personally see that you and every officer of your goddamned company are prosecuted for murder, and if one of you, even one of you, is still on this site in ten minutes, then my men will by God shoot the bastard!"
"My God," Benjamin Mayhew whispered. His eyes were locked to the live reports from Mueller Steading, and his face was white. Chancellor Prestwick stood beside his desk, staring at the same reportage, and his face was even whiter and more drawn than the Protector's.
"My God in Heaven," Mayhew repeated in a harrowed voice. "How, Henry? How did something like this happen?"
"I don't know, Your Grace," Prestwick murmured ashenly. He watched a massive beam being moved aside, and his eyes were sick as another small, broken body was lifted tenderly from under it. Work lights poured pitiless brilliance over the night-struck scene, and Mueller Guard armsmen formed a cordon around the site. The parents of the dead children stood just beyond that cordon, fathers with their arms about their wives, faces twisted with terrible grief, and the Chancellor's hands shook as he lowered himself into a chair at last.
"The Mueller inspectors claim it's the result of sub-standard materials, Your Grace," he said finally, and winced at the look the Protector threw him.
"Lady Harrington would never condone that!" Benjamin snapped. "And our own people saw every facet of that design. It exceeded code standards in every parameter, and Sky Domes was still going to show a twenty-five percent profit margin! My God, Henry, what possible motive could she have had?"
"I didn't say she did, Your Grace," the Chancellor replied, but he shook his head as he spoke. "Nor did I say she knew anything about it. But look at the scale of the projects. Think about all the opportunities for someone else to skim off the top by substituting subcode materials."
"Never." Benjamin's voice was ice.
"Your Grace," Prestwick said heavily, "the Mueller inspectors have sent ceramacrete samples to the Sword laboratories here in Austin. I've seen the preliminary reports. The final product did not meet code standards."
Benjamin stared at him, trying to understand, but the scale of such a crime was too vast to comprehend. To use substandard materials for a school's dome was unthinkable. No Grayson would put children at risk! Their entire society, their whole way of life, was built on protecting their children!
"I'm sorry, Your Grace," Prestwick said more gently. "Sorrier than I can say, but I've seen the reports."
"Lady Harrington couldn't have known," the Protector whispered. "Whatever your reports say, she couldn't have known, Henry. She would never have permitted something like this, and neither would Adam Gerrick."
"I agree with you, Your Grace, but, forgive me if I seem cold, but what does that matter? Lady Harrington is Sky Domes' majority stockholder, Gerrick is their chief engineer, even Howard Clinkscales is their CEO. However it happened, the legal responsibility falls squarely on them. It was their job to see to it that a disaster like this never, ever, happened... and they didn't do it."
The Protector scrubbed his face with his hands, and a cold chill went through him, one that was totally independent of the death and destruction on his HD. He loathed himself for feeling it, but he had no choice; he was the Protector of Grayson. He had to be a political animal as well as a father with children of his own.
Henry had seen the reports. Within days, hours, the news people would have them, as well, and what the Chancellor had just said would be being said over every news channel on the planet. Nothing, nothing, could have been better calculated to infuriate Graysons, and every person who'd ever denounced Honor Harrington, every person who'd ever even entertained private doubts about her, would hear those reports and awaken to a deep, implacable hatred for the woman who'd let this happen. And hard on the heels of that hate would come the denunciations, no longer whispers but shouts of fury. "Look!" they would cry. "Look what happens when you let a woman exercise a man's authority! Look at our murdered children and tell me this was God's will!"
Benjamin Mayhew could already hear those anguished, heartfelt cries, and in them he heard the utter destruction of his reforms.
"Dear Tester, what have we done?" William Fitzclarence whispered. He, too, sat staring at an HD, and Samuel Mueller and Edmond Marchant sat on either side of him. "Children," Lord Burdette groaned. "We've killed children!"
"No, My Lord," Marchant said. Burdette looked at him, blue eyes dark with horror, and the defrocked priest shook his head, his own eyes dark with purpose, not shock. "We killed no one, My Lord," he said in a soft, persuasive voice. "It was God's will that the innocent perish, not ours."
"God's will." Burdette repeated numbly, and Marchant nodded.
"You know how little choice we have in doing His work, My Lord. We must bring the people to their senses, show them the danger of allowing themselves to be poisoned by this harlot and her corrupt society."
"But this...!" Burdette's voice was a bit stronger, and a hint of color flowed back into his ashen face, and Marchant sighed sadly.
"I know, My Lord, yet it was God's will. We had no way to know children would be present, but He did. Would He have allowed the dome to collapse when it did if it wasn't part of His plan? Terrible as their deaths were, their souls are with Him now, innocent of sin, untouched by the world's temptations, and their deaths have multiplied the effect of our plan a thousand fold. Our entire world now sees the consequences of embracing Manticore and the Protector's 'reforms,' and nothing, My Lord, nothing, could have driven that lesson home as this has. Those children are the Lord's martyrs, fallen in His service as surely as any martyr ever perished for his Faith."
"He's right, William," Mueller said quietly. Burdette turned to his fellow Steadholder, and Mueller raised one hand. "My inspectors have already found the substandard ceramacrete. I'll wait a day or so before announcing it, long enough for us to check and recheck the analyses, so that no one can possibly question our conclusions, but the proof is there. The proof, William. There's no way that harlot or the Protector can weasel their way around it. We didn't pick the moment it would collapse; God did that, and in doing so he made our original plan enormously more successful than we'd ever dared hope."
"Maybe... maybe you're right," Burdette said slowly. The horror had faded in his eyes, replaced by the supporting self-righteousness of his faith... and a cold light of calculation. "It's her fault," he murmured, "not ours. She's the one who drove us to this."
"Of course she is, My Lord," Marchant agreed. "It takes a sharp sword to cut away Satan's mask, and we who wield the Lord's blade can only accept whatever price He thinks mete to ask of us."
"You're right, Edmond," Burdette said in a stronger voice. He nodded and looked back at the HD, and this time there as a slight, sneering curl to his lip as he listened to the reporters grief-fogged voice.
"You're right," Steadholder Burdette repeated. "We've set our hands to God's work. If He demands we bear the blood price, then His will be done, and may that harlot burn in Hell for all eternity for driving us to this."
Adam Gerrick walked into the conference room, and his face was terrible. The young man who'd left for Mueller Steading that morning had died with the collapse of his shining dream. The Adam Gerrick who'd returned to Harrington was a haunted man, with the joy of accomplishment quenched to bitter ashes in his eyes.
But he was also an angry man, filled with rage and determined to find out what had happened. He'd find the man whose greed was responsible for this carnage, this murder, he promised himself, and when he did, he'd kill the cold, calculating bastard with his two bare hands.
"All right," he said harshly to his senior engineers, "the Mueller inspectors have barred us from the site, but we still have our own records. We know what was supposed to go into that project, and we are going to find out what actually went into it ... and how."
"But..." The man who'd started to speak closed his mouth as cold, burning eyes swiveled to his face. He licked his lips and looked appealingly at his colleagues, then turned unwillingly back to his superior.
"What?" Gerrick asked in a liquid helium voice.
"I've already putted the records, Adam," Frederick Bennington said. "I've checked everything that went to the site and compared expenditures in every category against what we still have in invoice."
"And?"
"And it all checks!" Bennington said forcefully. "We didn't skimp anywhere, Adam, I swear it." He laid a mini-comp on the table. "There are the records, and they're not just mine. I'm in charge of procurement, and that makes me the logical suspect. I know that. So when I pulled the records, I took Jake Howell from Accounting with me, and I brought in three inspectors from the Harrington Bureau of Records. These figures are solid, Adam. We checked them five times. Every single item we bought and shipped to that site met or surpassed Sword code standards."
"Then someone swapped them on-site," Gerrick rasped. "Some bastard skimmed the code materials and replaced them with crap."
"No way, Adam." Despite his own shock, Bennington's voice was flat with assurance. "Not possible. We're working round-the-clock shifts, and we've maintained continuous on-site visual records. You know that." Gerrick nodded slowly, his expression suddenly intent, for Sky Domes was in the midst of a motion efficiency study, and that required detailed visual records of all their procedures.
"All right," Bennington went on, "if anyone had stolen materials from the site, we'd have at least some evidence of it on record. But every air lorry that entered or left that site is on chip, Adam, and aside from the disposal lorries headed for reclamation or the landfill, none of them, I repeat, none of them, left loaded. All materials movement was into the site."
"But I saw the ceramacrete," Gerrick said. "One of the inspectors crushed it, Fred. Just crushed it in his hand, like... like so much packing material!"
"I can't help that," Bennington replied. "All I can tell you is that we have certified records that it couldn't have been substandard materials."
"Records no one will believe." Howard Clinkscales' voice was harsh as he spoke at last, and every eye turned to him. "We may know they're accurate, but who's going to take our word? If Adam saw substandard materials, then there are substandard materials on the site. We don't know how they got there, but we can't dispute their existence, and our Steadholder is Sky Domes' majority stockholder. If we make our records public, all we'll do is destroy any last vestige of trust in her. Burdette and his supporters will scream that we doctored them, that her inspectors signed off on their falsification because she told them to, and we can't prove that didn't happen. Not with physical proof of wrongdoing sitting right there in Mueller."
He looked around the table, and his heart felt old and frozen as he saw the understanding on the engineers' faces. But Adam Gerrick shook his head, and there was no surrender in his eyes.
"You're wrong, Lord Clinkscales," he said flatly. The regent blinked at him, unaccustomed to being contradicted in such a hard, certain voice. "You're not an engineer, Sir. No doubt you're right about what will happen if we turn Fred's records over to the press, but we can prove what happened."
"How?" Clinkscales’s desire to believe showed in his voice, but there was little hope behind it.
"Because we..." Gerrick waved at the men around the table "...are engineers. The best damned engineers on this damned planet, and we know our records are accurate. More than that, we have a complete visual record of everything that happened at that site, including the collapse itself. And on top of that, we've got not just the plans and the final specs that went into them, we've got all the original calculations, from the first rough site survey through every step of the process."
"And?"
"And that means we have all the pieces, My Lord. If Fred's right about the quality of the materials we shipped to that site, then someone, somewhere, made that dome collapse, and we've got the data we need to figure out how the bastard did it."
"Made it collapse?" Clinkscales stared at the younger man. "Adam, I know you don't want to believe it was our fault, dear God, I don't want to believe it!, but if it wasn't a simple case of materials theft, what else could it be? Surely you're not suggesting someone wanted it to collapse!"
"When you eliminate all the impossible factors, whatever’s left must be the truth. And I am telling you, My Lord, that if that dome was built with the materials we specified and if the plans we provided were followed, then the collapse I saw this morning could not happen."
"But..." Clinkscales paused, and something happened in his eyes. The man who'd once been Planetary Security's commanding general looked suddenly out of them, and his voice changed. "Why would anyone deliberately sabotage the project?" he asked, and he was no longer rejecting the notion; he was looking for answers. "What sort of evil monster would murder children, Adam?"
"I don't know the answer to that yet, Sir...but I intend to find out," Gerrick said grimly.
"How can you?"
"The first thing we'll do," Gerrick said, turning to his staff, "is put the visual records through the computers. I want an exact analysis of what happened. The collapse started in the alpha ring of the east quadrant, I saw it go myself, but I want a detailed breakdown of every step of the process."
"I can handle that," one of the others said in the voice of a man thankful for a task he could perform. "It'll take ten or twelve hours to break down all the visual records, but I'll guarantee what we get will be solid."
"All right. Once we have that, we model every possible combination of factors that could have caused it. Somebody get us the Mueller met records for the last three months. I don't see how it could have happened, but it's just possible some sort of freak weather effect could have contributed."
"Not likely, Adam," someone else objected.
"Of course it isn't, but we need to consider every possibility, and not just for our own analysis. I want the sick son-of-a-bitch who did this. I want him in front of a court of law, and I want a front row seat for his hanging. I saw those kids die." Gerrick shivered, and his face was drawn and even older for just a moment. Then he shook himself. "I saw them die," he repeated, "and when we find the man who murdered them, I don't want there to be one scrap of doubt about it."
A low, harsh growl of agreement answered him, and then Clinkscales frowned thoughtfully.
"You're right, Adam. If, and at this point it's only an if, but if someone deliberately caused this, then our data has to be absolutely solid. No loose ends anyone can question." Gerrick nodded sharply, and the regent went on in that same, thoughtful tone which did nothing to hide his own anger. "And there's something else you need to consider. You and your staff may be able to tell us what happened, and how, but there's still the question of who and why, and we have to nail that down just as tight."
"That may be harder, Sir, especially the 'why,'" Gerrick cautioned.
"Adam," Clinkscales said with a cold, frightening smile, "you're an engineer. I used to be a policeman, and, I like to think, a pretty good one. If there's a who and a why, I'll find them." He turned his gaze on another man, at the far end of the table. "Chet, I want the personnel records on that work crew. While you start your analysis of what happened, I'm going to be looking at every single human being who had a hand in the construction. If this was deliberate, then somewhere, somebody left a fingerprint. When you people can tell me what they did and how they did it, I'll know where to look for the person or persons behind it. And when I find them, Adam," he said with an even more terrifying smile, "I promise you'll have that front row seat you wanted."
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Citizen Rear Admiral Thomas Theisman stepped into PNS Conquistador's flag briefing room with Citizen Commissioner Dennis LePic at his heels. Theisman didn't much care for LePic, but he knew most of that stemmed from his dislike for carrying a constant political anchor around with him. He'd seen the consequences of political interference in military operations often enough without ferrying politicians to the very site of the action so they could screw things up even faster.
On the other hand, he also knew how fortunate he was to be here himself. He'd survived Haven's original fiasco in Yeltsin only because he'd been lucky enough (and luck, he knew, was precisely the right word for it) to damage several of Honor Harrington's ships before his destroyer was forced to surrender to her. Only that achievement, coupled with the distraction of Captain Yu's defection to Manticore, had saved him from the Legislaturalist admirals seeking a scapegoat for that particular screw-up. And, he admitted, only the destruction of the old regime had saved him from the consequences of what had happened to the Ninth Cruiser Squadron in the opening moves of the current war. He'd made his Legislaturalist commodore look like an idiot, and her patrons would have squashed him like a bug for daring to be right when she was wrong. But the new regime had been looking for Legislaturalist scapegoats, so Commodore Reichman had been shot and Captain Theisman had been promoted.
The universe, he reflected, was not precisely overrunning with fairness, but it did seem that what went around came around. A point the Committee of Public Safety might want to bear in mind.
He shook off his thoughts as he took his seat at the conference table and LePic slid into the chair beside him. Citizen Vice Admiral Thurston and Citizen Commissioner Preznikov were already ensconced at the head of the table, and Meredith Chavez, Task Group 14T1’s CO, nodded to Theisman from across the table. Theisman didn't know George DuPres, Chavez's commissioner, but he was rumored to be more willing than most to let the professionals get on with their profession, which probably helped explain Meredith's cheerful demeanor. Citizen Rear Admiral Chernov and Citizen Commissioner Johnson of TG 14.3 arrived less than three minutes after Theisman, and Task Force Fourteen's command team was complete. Except, of course, for their chiefs of staff, whom what passed for Fleet HQ these days had decreed could not be informed of the details until Operation Dagger was actually launched. Not the most promising of preparations for an op this complex, although, to give the staff pukes their due, Dagger should be a piece of cake if Stalking Horse had succeeded.
Of course, "if" wasn't a word Thomas Theisman had ever been particularly happy about including in operational planning.
"I see we're all here," Thurston remarked. "And since we are, I can tell you that Stalking Horse seems to have worked out quite nicely."
Chavez and Chernov grinned, but Theisman contented himself with a nod. "Seems." Another of those words with unfortunate connotations.
Thurston activated the holo display, and a star map appeared above the table. He manipulated controls briefly, and Minette and Candor blinked red. A moment later, Casca, Doreas, and Grendelsbane also began flashing, but their lights were amber, not red.
"All right," he said. "You all know Citizen Admiral McQueen and Citizen Admiral Abbot have secured control of Minette and Candor. McQueen took a heavier hit from the Manty pickets than we anticipated, but they burned off all their missiles to do it. All they can do now is stooge around the outer system and watch her, and they took losses of their own. What they've got left couldn't take her on even with full magazines.
"Citizen Admiral Abbot's in even better shape. He got in without a shot, and the Manties don't have anything heavier than a battlecruiser to picket him."
Thurston paused and looked around the table to make sure everyone was with him, then used a cursor to indicate Grendelsbane.
"As you also know, we've had light, covert pickets in place around Grendelsbane and Casca for over a month, and Admiral Hemphill seems to be playing it very cautiously in Grendelsbane. She's retained her ships of the wall there, probably to be sure we don't make another flank pounce if she uncovers it, but she's dispatched a heavy battlecruiser force to support the Doreas pickets. In addition, some of her light units have joined the Manty picket still in Minette. That suggests her attentions focused there while she waits for reinforcements before going in to take it back... just as we want her to do.
"More to the point," the cursor swooped up to Casca, "our scouts up here report the arrival of a pretty damned powerful task force. I wonder where they came from?"
Thurston bared his teeth, and this time even Theisman smiled back. Damn, he thought. The man's a calculating son-of-a-bitch, but he does know how to work a crowd!
"We didn't get as good a read on them as I'd like," Thurston admitted, "but what we did get seems to indicate they've done what we wanted. We have positive confirmation of at least five ex-PN prize ships there, and their arrival time works out right for an immediate response from Yeltsin to Stalking Horse. In addition, the entire force arrived as a single unit, which indicates it was pulled out as a unit. This isn't something they put together by scraping up ships from other locations, people."
Theisman nodded, but something about Thurston's confident explanation nagged at him, and he raised a hand.
"Citizen Admiral Theisman?"
"You say we have confirmation on five ex-PN prizes, Citizen Admiral?"
"That's correct."
"But only five?" Theisman pressed respectfully, and Thurston exchanged glances with Preznikov before he nodded.
"That's correct, Citizen Admiral," he repeated. "The range was quite long, and you know how hard it can be to interpret passive data. In addition, the Manties and Graysons seem to have refitted them even more heavily than we'd anticipated, which makes emission analysis proportionately more difficult. Given the timing, however, and the size of the force, my staff and I are confident several of the capital ships our scouts were unable to positively identify were actually prizes which had simply been refitted too extensively for us to ID with certainty."
"How many other ships are we talking about, Citizen Admiral?"
"Eight of the wall, probably eight, that is." Theisman frowned thoughtfully, and Thurston shrugged. "No doubt they picked up a couple of Manty extras that happened to be in-system. We know they've pulled all of the Manty ships of the wall which were stationed in Yeltsin out of the area, they've been positively IDed at Thetis, but it's a logical place to stage through. A good area for final exercises before they commit new units to the front."
Theisman sat back with a nod, for Thurston was certainly right about that. And the fact that the Graysons doubtlessly needed all the training they could get would only make the practice even more attractive to the Manties. Still...
He ran his mind back over his own intelligence package. Assuming Intelligence had it right, even Manticoran yards couldn't have more than eight or possibly nine of Grayson's eleven prizes back into service yet. If the original damage estimates were correct, he thought sardonically, the Republic couldn't have gotten more than six of them back on-line this soon, and it was unlikely Grayson could be as efficient as Manties were. Not yet, anyway. And if Intelligence's estimate was accurate, and if five of the prize ships had been positively located at Casca, Thurston was probably right: the Alliance had stripped the system to cover against the threat from Candor.
"On the basis of that intelligence," Thurston went on, "Citizen Commissioner Preznikov and I have decided to activate Operation Dagger in seventy-two hours. We'd like to start immediately, but we've agreed that it would be wise to spend two or three days rehearsing the operation now that we're cleared to brief your staffs and unit commanders."
Well, thank God for that, Theisman thought. Task Force Fourteen had over a hundred and sixty ships on its order of battle, including thirty-six battleships and twenty-four battlecruisers. That sounded impressive as hell, but operational security had been so tight that virtually none of their ships' companies had the least idea what Operation Dagger was about. Theisman himself, with LePic's clandestine approval, had "accidentally" leaked the ops plan to his own staff, so he'd managed to put together a series of contingency plans he could live with, but none of his captains knew what was supposed to happen. The Committee of Public Safety had seen to it that they'd learned not to ask questions, too. The chance to brief and rehearse them, even if only for a couple of days, would be invaluable, and Theisman wondered how Thurston had gotten Preznikov to agree to it. It was possible the commissioner had succumbed to the force of logic, but Theisman warned himself not to indulge his optimism too wildly on that point.
"All right," Thurston went on. "Here's what I have in mind. First, I'll give you three hours to brief in your staffs and unit COs. At thirteen hundred, Commissioner Preznikov and I will set up a task force conference net to handle any questions you or any of your people may have. After that, at, say, sixteen hundred, we'll start with a sim of the primary plan of attack, with Citizen Admiral Chavez coordinating. Citizen Commissioner Preznikov and I will observe and run the Graysons for the first sim. After that..."
The news, as the Protector had known it must, had leaked, and the media was playing the story for all it was worth.
No, he told himself sternly, that wasn't fair. The Grayson press corps was more responsible than most. In fact, it was possibly a bit too much on the "tame" side, as a reflection of its society's deference-based mores and traditional respect for authority, no doubt, and the newsies had checked their facts carefully before going public. Unfortunately, they had those facts straight, and one thing Benjamin Mayhew had learned from others' mistakes was to never, ever lie to reporters. Refusing to comment and keeping a lid on stories was one thing; destroying his credibility forever was something else entirely, and it was a deadly simple thing to do.
So he'd confirmed the lab reports in as noninflammatory a fashion as possible and preserved his credibility ... for whatever that was worth.
Shock and grief had swept the planet even before the reports made the news. Despite its ancient tradition of steading autonomy, Grayson was a world whose people rallied almost instinctively to their neighbors' support in time of trouble. But Mueller's internal resources had sufficed to do what pitifully little could be done for the victims and their families, which meant there'd been no place for outsiders to help, and that had only strengthened the rest of Grayson's grief and sympathy. The combination of their religion and planetary environment meant Graysons were programmed on an almost genetic level to help, which was one of the things Benjamin most liked about his people. But when they couldn't help they felt as if they'd somehow failed, and in this instance, that was the worst thing they could have felt. People who already felt vaguely guilty themselves had a natural tendency to be even angrier with someone whose guilt was real and unquestionable.
And, as the reports from the laboratories and inspections had made clear, someone was guilty. Most of the Mueller Middle School dome's supports appeared to have been properly set in high-standard ceramacrete, but some had not, and what made it even more heartbreaking was that the problems with the ceramacrete seemed to be entirely the fault of poor quality control. The material had all the proper ingredients, in precisely the right proportions. As far as Benjamin's own experts could determine, the entire disaster had stemmed solely from a simple failure to fuse it properly. A stupid, unforgivable, easily preventable mistake which, as the reporters had figured out, pointed at either poor equipment maintenance or grossly inadequate training. Either the fusers themselves had been defective, or else the people operating them hadn't known what they were doing, and in either case, the blame rested squarely on the management of Grayson Sky Domes, Ltd.
Greed. That was the damning verdict of the media. Sky Domes had been too greedy to invest in proper maintenance of its equipment, or else it had expanded its work force so rapidly, again, out of greed to cash in on the contracts available to it, that it had put half-trained, or possibly even totally untrained, workers into the field. And the hell of it, Benjamin thought, was that there was no way to disprove that verdict. The evidence was there, in the improperly prepared ceramacrete, and the discovery had caused a panic. Of the twenty-three other projects Sky Domes had had simultaneously under construction, eight had been suspended by the buyers. The other fifteen had been canceled outright, and no one had even commented on the fact that Sky Domes itself had put an immediate hold on all of them even before the customers reacted. Benjamin knew that order had come from Honor Harrington herself. She'd refused to allow any project to proceed until she knew what had happened in Mueller and was positive it wouldn't happen anywhere else, and no one even seemed to care... despite the fact that if Sky Domes failed to meet those projects' completion deadlines, the penalty clauses in the contracts would wipe out even Lady Harrington’s off-world fortune. She'd put every penny she had on the line by ordering the hold, and all public opinion could do was scream about the "greed" with which she'd risked the lives of their children!
It was a disaster in every sense of the word. The earlier attacks upon her had suddenly acquired a damning currency, and her role as the heroine of Grayson was no protection against the charge of child-murder. Even some of her own steaders recoiled from supporting anyone responsible for the deaths of children, and her enemies were fanning the fire with savage enthusiasm.
Steadholder Mueller's first grief-wracked news conference after the collapse had done incredible damage. Rescue operations had still been underway when he first faced the reporters. The safety inspectors hadn't even begun their initial examinations at that point, and he'd been careful not to point any fingers. But the very way he hadn't pointed them, the way he'd bent over backward to avoid accusing Lady Harrington of any wrongdoing, had only made people more certain of her guilt. And since the inspectors' reports had been made public, Mueller's grief had turned into rage at the parties responsible for the deaths.
Nor was he the only one crying out for punishment of the guilty. Lord Burdette had launched a brutal attack on Sky Domes, Lady Harrington, and the consequences of allowing women to exercise a man's authority within an hour of the dome's collapse. And while most of Grayson’s clergy were still conducting services to pray for God's mercy on the disaster's victims and their families, Edmond Burdette was preaching fire and damnation from the stolen pulpit of Burdette Cathedral, which was now packed for every fiery sermon.
For the moment, Benjamin thought grimly, he could still keep a lid on things... but only for the moment. The fury against Honor Harrington was gathering like a tidal wave, and when that wave crashed ashore, everything Benjamin Mayhew had fought to bring to his planet was all too likely to be smashed away in the general destruction.
"That's odd."
The soft murmur drew Adam Gerrick's attention from his own terminal. Stuart Matthews, the leader of the Eattem analysis team, stood gazing down at a detailed holographic model of the collapsed dome. The ghastly tangle of wreckage was brutally clear, but at least the bodies had been omitted. Gerrick was grateful for that, but even now his mind insisted on supplying the crushed victims, and a fresh shudder of anguish ran through him as he remembered a smiling little girl's final seconds of life.
He closed his eyes, fighting off the pain that threatened his ability to think, then stood and walked over to the holo.
"What?" His voice was a croak, and his eyes were red-rimmed and swollen in a sunken face. He'd had less than ten hours' sleep in the ninety-odd hours since the dome's collapse, and he'd gotten those only because the medics had flatly refused to prescribe any more stimulants unless he did. Matthews was in little better shape. Like all of Sky Domes' senior engineers, he'd been skipping sleep, meals, and baths, and his own exhaustion showed as he blinked owlishly, then ran one hand through the oily tangle of his thinning black hair.
"I've been running the actual event against our models of what could have happened."
"And?"
"And they won't match, Adam. Not even if we allow for defective ceramacrete in every footing pour."
"What?" Gerrick propped his buttocks on a work table to take the weight off his shaky legs, but though his shoulders slumped with grinding fatigue, his stim-fired brain worked with a sort of detached smoothness.
"I said what happened doesn't match any of them."
"It has to," Gerrick said reasonably. "Are you sure we've allowed for all the factors?"
"Damn straight I am." Matthews' temper was on as frayed a leash as anyone else's, and his voice was sharp with exhausted belligerence, but he clamped his teeth and fought it down, then took a deep breath and held up a thick folio of data chips. "We've got everything in here, Adam. I guarantee it. Hell, I even went back and applied all the met data from the period between our original survey and the start of construction just to see if it could have had some unanticipated effect on the soil strata. And I'm telling you that nothing in our models can account for what happened here."
"Why not?"
"Watch." Matthews tapped instructions into the computers driving the holo display. The tangled wreckage reassembled itself into an intact, half-completed dome, and Gerrick shoved himself up off the worktable and stepped closer for a better view. "I'm running this at a one-to-sixty retardation rate for better detail," Matthews said without turning his head. "Keep your eyes on the alpha ring down here in the eastern quadrant."
Gerrick grunted agreement, then folded his arms and waited. Nothing happened for a moment, and then he detected the same, tiny movement he'd seen the first time. It brought back all his nightmare memories, but this time his angle of view was different... and this time he wasn't actually standing there watching children die. He could think about what he was seeing, not simply know he was trapped in an obscene tragedy.
On the other hand, he also knew how fortunate he was to be here himself. He'd survived Haven's original fiasco in Yeltsin only because he'd been lucky enough (and luck, he knew, was precisely the right word for it) to damage several of Honor Harrington's ships before his destroyer was forced to surrender to her. Only that achievement, coupled with the distraction of Captain Yu's defection to Manticore, had saved him from the Legislaturalist admirals seeking a scapegoat for that particular screw-up. And, he admitted, only the destruction of the old regime had saved him from the consequences of what had happened to the Ninth Cruiser Squadron in the opening moves of the current war. He'd made his Legislaturalist commodore look like an idiot, and her patrons would have squashed him like a bug for daring to be right when she was wrong. But the new regime had been looking for Legislaturalist scapegoats, so Commodore Reichman had been shot and Captain Theisman had been promoted.
The universe, he reflected, was not precisely overrunning with fairness, but it did seem that what went around came around. A point the Committee of Public Safety might want to bear in mind.
He shook off his thoughts as he took his seat at the conference table and LePic slid into the chair beside him. Citizen Vice Admiral Thurston and Citizen Commissioner Preznikov were already ensconced at the head of the table, and Meredith Chavez, Task Group 14T1’s CO, nodded to Theisman from across the table. Theisman didn't know George DuPres, Chavez's commissioner, but he was rumored to be more willing than most to let the professionals get on with their profession, which probably helped explain Meredith's cheerful demeanor. Citizen Rear Admiral Chernov and Citizen Commissioner Johnson of TG 14.3 arrived less than three minutes after Theisman, and Task Force Fourteen's command team was complete. Except, of course, for their chiefs of staff, whom what passed for Fleet HQ these days had decreed could not be informed of the details until Operation Dagger was actually launched. Not the most promising of preparations for an op this complex, although, to give the staff pukes their due, Dagger should be a piece of cake if Stalking Horse had succeeded.
Of course, "if" wasn't a word Thomas Theisman had ever been particularly happy about including in operational planning.
"I see we're all here," Thurston remarked. "And since we are, I can tell you that Stalking Horse seems to have worked out quite nicely."
Chavez and Chernov grinned, but Theisman contented himself with a nod. "Seems." Another of those words with unfortunate connotations.
Thurston activated the holo display, and a star map appeared above the table. He manipulated controls briefly, and Minette and Candor blinked red. A moment later, Casca, Doreas, and Grendelsbane also began flashing, but their lights were amber, not red.
"All right," he said. "You all know Citizen Admiral McQueen and Citizen Admiral Abbot have secured control of Minette and Candor. McQueen took a heavier hit from the Manty pickets than we anticipated, but they burned off all their missiles to do it. All they can do now is stooge around the outer system and watch her, and they took losses of their own. What they've got left couldn't take her on even with full magazines.
"Citizen Admiral Abbot's in even better shape. He got in without a shot, and the Manties don't have anything heavier than a battlecruiser to picket him."
Thurston paused and looked around the table to make sure everyone was with him, then used a cursor to indicate Grendelsbane.
"As you also know, we've had light, covert pickets in place around Grendelsbane and Casca for over a month, and Admiral Hemphill seems to be playing it very cautiously in Grendelsbane. She's retained her ships of the wall there, probably to be sure we don't make another flank pounce if she uncovers it, but she's dispatched a heavy battlecruiser force to support the Doreas pickets. In addition, some of her light units have joined the Manty picket still in Minette. That suggests her attentions focused there while she waits for reinforcements before going in to take it back... just as we want her to do.
"More to the point," the cursor swooped up to Casca, "our scouts up here report the arrival of a pretty damned powerful task force. I wonder where they came from?"
Thurston bared his teeth, and this time even Theisman smiled back. Damn, he thought. The man's a calculating son-of-a-bitch, but he does know how to work a crowd!
"We didn't get as good a read on them as I'd like," Thurston admitted, "but what we did get seems to indicate they've done what we wanted. We have positive confirmation of at least five ex-PN prize ships there, and their arrival time works out right for an immediate response from Yeltsin to Stalking Horse. In addition, the entire force arrived as a single unit, which indicates it was pulled out as a unit. This isn't something they put together by scraping up ships from other locations, people."
Theisman nodded, but something about Thurston's confident explanation nagged at him, and he raised a hand.
"Citizen Admiral Theisman?"
"You say we have confirmation on five ex-PN prizes, Citizen Admiral?"
"That's correct."
"But only five?" Theisman pressed respectfully, and Thurston exchanged glances with Preznikov before he nodded.
"That's correct, Citizen Admiral," he repeated. "The range was quite long, and you know how hard it can be to interpret passive data. In addition, the Manties and Graysons seem to have refitted them even more heavily than we'd anticipated, which makes emission analysis proportionately more difficult. Given the timing, however, and the size of the force, my staff and I are confident several of the capital ships our scouts were unable to positively identify were actually prizes which had simply been refitted too extensively for us to ID with certainty."
"How many other ships are we talking about, Citizen Admiral?"
"Eight of the wall, probably eight, that is." Theisman frowned thoughtfully, and Thurston shrugged. "No doubt they picked up a couple of Manty extras that happened to be in-system. We know they've pulled all of the Manty ships of the wall which were stationed in Yeltsin out of the area, they've been positively IDed at Thetis, but it's a logical place to stage through. A good area for final exercises before they commit new units to the front."
Theisman sat back with a nod, for Thurston was certainly right about that. And the fact that the Graysons doubtlessly needed all the training they could get would only make the practice even more attractive to the Manties. Still...
He ran his mind back over his own intelligence package. Assuming Intelligence had it right, even Manticoran yards couldn't have more than eight or possibly nine of Grayson's eleven prizes back into service yet. If the original damage estimates were correct, he thought sardonically, the Republic couldn't have gotten more than six of them back on-line this soon, and it was unlikely Grayson could be as efficient as Manties were. Not yet, anyway. And if Intelligence's estimate was accurate, and if five of the prize ships had been positively located at Casca, Thurston was probably right: the Alliance had stripped the system to cover against the threat from Candor.
"On the basis of that intelligence," Thurston went on, "Citizen Commissioner Preznikov and I have decided to activate Operation Dagger in seventy-two hours. We'd like to start immediately, but we've agreed that it would be wise to spend two or three days rehearsing the operation now that we're cleared to brief your staffs and unit commanders."
Well, thank God for that, Theisman thought. Task Force Fourteen had over a hundred and sixty ships on its order of battle, including thirty-six battleships and twenty-four battlecruisers. That sounded impressive as hell, but operational security had been so tight that virtually none of their ships' companies had the least idea what Operation Dagger was about. Theisman himself, with LePic's clandestine approval, had "accidentally" leaked the ops plan to his own staff, so he'd managed to put together a series of contingency plans he could live with, but none of his captains knew what was supposed to happen. The Committee of Public Safety had seen to it that they'd learned not to ask questions, too. The chance to brief and rehearse them, even if only for a couple of days, would be invaluable, and Theisman wondered how Thurston had gotten Preznikov to agree to it. It was possible the commissioner had succumbed to the force of logic, but Theisman warned himself not to indulge his optimism too wildly on that point.
"All right," Thurston went on. "Here's what I have in mind. First, I'll give you three hours to brief in your staffs and unit COs. At thirteen hundred, Commissioner Preznikov and I will set up a task force conference net to handle any questions you or any of your people may have. After that, at, say, sixteen hundred, we'll start with a sim of the primary plan of attack, with Citizen Admiral Chavez coordinating. Citizen Commissioner Preznikov and I will observe and run the Graysons for the first sim. After that..."
The news, as the Protector had known it must, had leaked, and the media was playing the story for all it was worth.
No, he told himself sternly, that wasn't fair. The Grayson press corps was more responsible than most. In fact, it was possibly a bit too much on the "tame" side, as a reflection of its society's deference-based mores and traditional respect for authority, no doubt, and the newsies had checked their facts carefully before going public. Unfortunately, they had those facts straight, and one thing Benjamin Mayhew had learned from others' mistakes was to never, ever lie to reporters. Refusing to comment and keeping a lid on stories was one thing; destroying his credibility forever was something else entirely, and it was a deadly simple thing to do.
So he'd confirmed the lab reports in as noninflammatory a fashion as possible and preserved his credibility ... for whatever that was worth.
Shock and grief had swept the planet even before the reports made the news. Despite its ancient tradition of steading autonomy, Grayson was a world whose people rallied almost instinctively to their neighbors' support in time of trouble. But Mueller's internal resources had sufficed to do what pitifully little could be done for the victims and their families, which meant there'd been no place for outsiders to help, and that had only strengthened the rest of Grayson's grief and sympathy. The combination of their religion and planetary environment meant Graysons were programmed on an almost genetic level to help, which was one of the things Benjamin most liked about his people. But when they couldn't help they felt as if they'd somehow failed, and in this instance, that was the worst thing they could have felt. People who already felt vaguely guilty themselves had a natural tendency to be even angrier with someone whose guilt was real and unquestionable.
And, as the reports from the laboratories and inspections had made clear, someone was guilty. Most of the Mueller Middle School dome's supports appeared to have been properly set in high-standard ceramacrete, but some had not, and what made it even more heartbreaking was that the problems with the ceramacrete seemed to be entirely the fault of poor quality control. The material had all the proper ingredients, in precisely the right proportions. As far as Benjamin's own experts could determine, the entire disaster had stemmed solely from a simple failure to fuse it properly. A stupid, unforgivable, easily preventable mistake which, as the reporters had figured out, pointed at either poor equipment maintenance or grossly inadequate training. Either the fusers themselves had been defective, or else the people operating them hadn't known what they were doing, and in either case, the blame rested squarely on the management of Grayson Sky Domes, Ltd.
Greed. That was the damning verdict of the media. Sky Domes had been too greedy to invest in proper maintenance of its equipment, or else it had expanded its work force so rapidly, again, out of greed to cash in on the contracts available to it, that it had put half-trained, or possibly even totally untrained, workers into the field. And the hell of it, Benjamin thought, was that there was no way to disprove that verdict. The evidence was there, in the improperly prepared ceramacrete, and the discovery had caused a panic. Of the twenty-three other projects Sky Domes had had simultaneously under construction, eight had been suspended by the buyers. The other fifteen had been canceled outright, and no one had even commented on the fact that Sky Domes itself had put an immediate hold on all of them even before the customers reacted. Benjamin knew that order had come from Honor Harrington herself. She'd refused to allow any project to proceed until she knew what had happened in Mueller and was positive it wouldn't happen anywhere else, and no one even seemed to care... despite the fact that if Sky Domes failed to meet those projects' completion deadlines, the penalty clauses in the contracts would wipe out even Lady Harrington’s off-world fortune. She'd put every penny she had on the line by ordering the hold, and all public opinion could do was scream about the "greed" with which she'd risked the lives of their children!
It was a disaster in every sense of the word. The earlier attacks upon her had suddenly acquired a damning currency, and her role as the heroine of Grayson was no protection against the charge of child-murder. Even some of her own steaders recoiled from supporting anyone responsible for the deaths of children, and her enemies were fanning the fire with savage enthusiasm.
Steadholder Mueller's first grief-wracked news conference after the collapse had done incredible damage. Rescue operations had still been underway when he first faced the reporters. The safety inspectors hadn't even begun their initial examinations at that point, and he'd been careful not to point any fingers. But the very way he hadn't pointed them, the way he'd bent over backward to avoid accusing Lady Harrington of any wrongdoing, had only made people more certain of her guilt. And since the inspectors' reports had been made public, Mueller's grief had turned into rage at the parties responsible for the deaths.
Nor was he the only one crying out for punishment of the guilty. Lord Burdette had launched a brutal attack on Sky Domes, Lady Harrington, and the consequences of allowing women to exercise a man's authority within an hour of the dome's collapse. And while most of Grayson’s clergy were still conducting services to pray for God's mercy on the disaster's victims and their families, Edmond Burdette was preaching fire and damnation from the stolen pulpit of Burdette Cathedral, which was now packed for every fiery sermon.
For the moment, Benjamin thought grimly, he could still keep a lid on things... but only for the moment. The fury against Honor Harrington was gathering like a tidal wave, and when that wave crashed ashore, everything Benjamin Mayhew had fought to bring to his planet was all too likely to be smashed away in the general destruction.
"That's odd."
The soft murmur drew Adam Gerrick's attention from his own terminal. Stuart Matthews, the leader of the Eattem analysis team, stood gazing down at a detailed holographic model of the collapsed dome. The ghastly tangle of wreckage was brutally clear, but at least the bodies had been omitted. Gerrick was grateful for that, but even now his mind insisted on supplying the crushed victims, and a fresh shudder of anguish ran through him as he remembered a smiling little girl's final seconds of life.
He closed his eyes, fighting off the pain that threatened his ability to think, then stood and walked over to the holo.
"What?" His voice was a croak, and his eyes were red-rimmed and swollen in a sunken face. He'd had less than ten hours' sleep in the ninety-odd hours since the dome's collapse, and he'd gotten those only because the medics had flatly refused to prescribe any more stimulants unless he did. Matthews was in little better shape. Like all of Sky Domes' senior engineers, he'd been skipping sleep, meals, and baths, and his own exhaustion showed as he blinked owlishly, then ran one hand through the oily tangle of his thinning black hair.
"I've been running the actual event against our models of what could have happened."
"And?"
"And they won't match, Adam. Not even if we allow for defective ceramacrete in every footing pour."
"What?" Gerrick propped his buttocks on a work table to take the weight off his shaky legs, but though his shoulders slumped with grinding fatigue, his stim-fired brain worked with a sort of detached smoothness.
"I said what happened doesn't match any of them."
"It has to," Gerrick said reasonably. "Are you sure we've allowed for all the factors?"
"Damn straight I am." Matthews' temper was on as frayed a leash as anyone else's, and his voice was sharp with exhausted belligerence, but he clamped his teeth and fought it down, then took a deep breath and held up a thick folio of data chips. "We've got everything in here, Adam. I guarantee it. Hell, I even went back and applied all the met data from the period between our original survey and the start of construction just to see if it could have had some unanticipated effect on the soil strata. And I'm telling you that nothing in our models can account for what happened here."
"Why not?"
"Watch." Matthews tapped instructions into the computers driving the holo display. The tangled wreckage reassembled itself into an intact, half-completed dome, and Gerrick shoved himself up off the worktable and stepped closer for a better view. "I'm running this at a one-to-sixty retardation rate for better detail," Matthews said without turning his head. "Keep your eyes on the alpha ring down here in the eastern quadrant."
Gerrick grunted agreement, then folded his arms and waited. Nothing happened for a moment, and then he detected the same, tiny movement he'd seen the first time. It brought back all his nightmare memories, but this time his angle of view was different... and this time he wasn't actually standing there watching children die. He could think about what he was seeing, not simply know he was trapped in an obscene tragedy.