Surface Detail

“Deniability, Bettlescroy. You’ll have to raze the trackways, wreck my lands, blast the satellite links and damage the house itself; maybe even destroy it. That house has been in my family for centuries; it and the estate are inestimably precious to me. Or at least so everybody assumes. Who’s going to believe I brought all that destruction on myself?”

“And yet you… no, wait.” The little alien shook its head. “I have to issue the relevant orders.” The Legislator-Admiral bent over its desk, then looked up again. “That’s all; the trackways of

Espersium, centred on the house?”

“Yes,” Veppers said. “Target away.”

Bettlescroy took only seconds to issue the orders. When it came back it was after a blanked-out delay of a few more seconds during which, Veppers suspected, the Legislator-Admiral had composed itself, smoothed down its scalp scales and wiped its face. Bettlescroy certainly seemed much more like its old glossily imperturbable self when it switched back on.

“You would do this to yourself, Veppers? To your family’s legacy?”

“If it keeps me alive to enjoy my spoils, of course. And the spoils promise to be fabulous; another order of magnitude greater than anything I’ll be losing. The house can be rebuilt, the art treasures replaced, the trackways… well, I’d grown tired of them anyway, frankly, but they could be filled in and re-grown, I dare say. The energy weapons leave negligible radioactivity, hyper-velocity kinetics leave even less, as I understand it, and the missile warheads are clean, aren’t they?”

“Thermonuclear, but clean as possible. Designed to destroy, not contaminate,” Bettlescroy agreed.

“There you are then; it’s not as though I go camping in my estates at the best of times, so even if some areas are a bit radio -active I shan’t be too heartbroken. Let’s be honest; the grounds are mostly there to maintain a barrier between me and the proletarian hordes anyway. If the hills and fields do end up glowing in the dark they’ll work even better as insulation against the milling masses. And, in the end, I can just buy another estate; another dozen if I like.”

“And the people?”

“What people?”

“The people on the estate when it is laid waste.”

“Oh. Yes. I assume I have a few hours before any attack takes place.”

“Hmm.” The little alien hesitated, peered at its screen. “… Yes. The quickest attack would come from a small squadron of the ships fitted with fleet-donated anti-matter for their warp engines; if they simply sped on past without attempting to draw to a stop first they could hit the targets within three and a half hours of now. But their on-board weaponry targeting accuracy would not be great at that speed; they would struggle to hit with less than a hundred-metre error-allowance, at best. Missiles and smart warheads would be more precise, though Sichult’s own planetary defences would most likely intercept some of those. More pinpoint accuracy would need to come from ships that had slowed down almost to a stop. Again, your planet’s own defences might exact a toll, though they would probably still arrive in such numbers that this would not matter. Say four to five hours for those to arrive. One might attack the trackways themselves with the first high-speed waves and target the satellite links near the house with the later-arriving vessels.”

“So, bottom line: I’d have time to get a few people out,” Veppers said. “Not too many, of course; it still has to look convincing. But I can always hire more people, Bettlescroy. Never a shortage of those, ever.”

“Still, it is quite a toll you would ask of yourself.”

“Sometimes you have to sacrifice small things in order to achieve great things, Bettlescroy,” Veppers told the little alien. “Hosting the Hells has made me a great deal of money over the years, but they were bound to prove an embarrassment one day, or just be shut down, quite possibly with talk of law suits or reparations or whatever. All I have I can replace, and with the funds we have agreed on, and that wonderful ship… you haven’t forgotten that wonderful ship, have you, Bettlescroy?”

“It is yours, Veppers,” the Legislator-Admiral told him. “It is still being fitted out, to your instructions.”

“Marvellous. Well, with all that, I’m sure I can console myself to the loss of a few trees and my country cottage. So; let’s be clear. Nothing will happen for three and half hours, is that correct?”