The ethos effect, p.41
The Ethos Effect, page 41
The line that bothered Van the most was the last one. From what little he’d seen and heard, public opinion was definitely in favor of harsh measures against Sulyn, but he didn’t know what had changed matters so much. Or had that bias always been there, and he’d just ignored it?
... Commander Van Cassius Albert, commanding the RSFS Fergus, former commander of the corvette Eochaid in the Regneri incident. Also former CO of the Gortforge. Considered a good, but not outstanding ship-handler... Sub-commander Forgael, exec and senior pilot, also competent, but was one of the principal grievants in the Naomi case...
The Naomi case? Van concentrated, and his vastly improved memory—or memory access ability—brought up the name. Jillyan Naomi had been a major on the deValera, who had accused the senior commodore of pressuring junior female officers into having sex with him, promising either better annual reports or unsatisfactory ones. The evidence had been overwhelming, and the commodore had been court-martialed. Major Naomi had been transferred to the McCourt. Two years later, her body had been found at the base of a stone staircase on Sulyn, where she had been on leave visiting a friend. A local magistrate had found that her death had been caused by a broken neck from a fall. The bruises on the inside of her arms had not been explained.
Van nodded to himself and went back to the entry before him.
... None of the pilots on the Fergus are rated in the top-level of combat effectiveness...
Van drew in his breath. The implications were clear enough, but they were only implications, and not solid proof. He laughed softly. What he had wouldn’t be admissible in any court, and certainly not before a Board of Inquiry—and he’d never survive to reach a board, not if he went through the RSF. It was clear enough to him that the Marshal’s Council had wanted an “incident” in the Scandyan system, and they’d set it up in a way to remove another troublesome officer—him. When that had failed, they had implemented an alternative plan.
He continued to search through the files until he found another hint.
... contingency plans required activation of Commander Baile. After the loss of the Fergus in transit back to Tara ... only remaining survivor of the Fergus’s encounter with the unidentified cruiser is Commodore Van Albert... recommend retirement... commodore’s health will be known to be less than perfect after his medical treatment in the aftermath of the Revenant attack on the Keltyr embassy in Valborg ... would not be surprising if he did not long survive once he returns to Bannon...
The mention of contingency plans and the “activation” of Commander Baile were suspicious. Even so, the pieces fit together, though some were missing. But once again, even if Van could have forced release of the records, they were less than conclusive in a legal sense. Still, although he could not prove what had occurred, he had his answers—or enough of them.
In a practical sense, he could do very little. He couldn’t prove anything, and he dared not return to the Republic, not with two deaths on his hands, even though the RSF might never make the connection, and even if one of the deaths was in self-defense and the other certainly justified...
But... was he just rationalizing? Did his need to know, to discover what had happened, really justify his actions?
He’d done what he’d thought was right for Tara time after time, and in the end, what had he gotten? Any number of attempts to kill him or set him up to be killed, and the sacrifice of at least two RSF ships for political purposes.
He needed to send off a message torp to Trystin and meet with him—again—on Perdya. Between the Revenants and the Tarans, their section of the Arm was looking less and less stable—and Van didn’t even know what might be happening with the Argenti and the Coalition.
He checked the EDI screen again.
Neither of the cruisers had moved, but Van changed his own course to move “down” at right angles to the system ecliptic. That would play hell with his jump calculations, and add hours, if not days, to his transit time to Perdya, but there was no way any Republic vessel could reach him before he could reach an area clear enough for the Joyau to jump clear. After all he had done, he didn’t feel like risking anything more, just in case, unlikely as it was, that in the time since he’d left the RSF headquarters, the bodies had been found and linked to the “Diaphur.”
Chapter 67
More than half a week passed before Van managed to lock the Joyau into Perdya’s orbit station. The off-coordinate jump translation had resulted in the loss of three days in translation time, and an additional two days in nonjump travel because the Joyau had dropped into norm space well away from Perdya. Still, Van had preferred the lost time to the possibility of an encounter with RSF warships.
He just hoped that his family had gotten his message—and that they had acted upon it. He couldn’t make them, but everything pointed to the Republic becoming more and more inhospitable to black Tarans in the days and months to come.
Once the Joyau was safely locked in, Van left Eri on board to handle the maintenance and took the down-shuttle to Cambria, even though the IIS headquarters had already informed him that no one knew where Trystin was—only that he had left word that he was in an uninhabited system engaged in testing equipment.
Joseph Sasaki was waiting when Van stepped off the lift on the top floor of the IIS building.
“Have you heard anything new from Director Desoll?” Van asked. “I’d sent a torp...”
“We relayed it via coded standing wave,” Sasaki replied. “I hoped you might know where he was. Less than an hour ago, we just got word. The Revenants have just smashed the Keltyr fleet, and are taking over the Keltyr systems... or half of them The other half, the ones closest to the Taran systems, are being taken by RSF fleets...”
For a moment Van just gaped. He felt as if he’d been gut-punched. “The RSF... Tara... they’re cooperating, allying themselves with the Revenants?”
“That’s what the Service says, and we’re getting coded standing wave messages from the planetary offices in the Keltyr systems. The media haven’t reported it yet. I expect that any moment”
Van shook his head. The pieces had been there. He just hadn’t expected them to go together that way.
Sasaki stiffened.
Van sensed the incoming and waited. Sasaki looked at Van. “Let’s go to your office. There’s a standing wave message for you.”
The two walked silently down the corridor. Once in his office, Van used the system to call up and display the message. Decrypted, it was simple enough.
Immediate action: Joyau is to take on a complete load of message torps, cargo awaiting at the Aerolis Belt shipyard, and any additional message torps able to be fitted in the Joyau‘s cargo bay. Make rendezvous with Salya and the Elsin ASAP.
The coordinates were there, but offhand Van didn’t know where they might be, except they looked to be somewhere close to the Revenant systems.
“That says where he’ll be,” Van said. “And where we’ll all be.” He pulsed an order for a hard copy of the coordinates, even as he used his implant to burn them into memory.
Sasaki looked back at Van. “I’ve ordered a private shuttle to get you back to orbit control two. I don’t think you’d better wait for the regular shuttle. The private shuttle will be touching down on the grass in front of the building in five minutes.”
“That bad?”
“The Coalition knows Director Desoll. They know he’s not here, but it won’t take them long to think about you and Nynca.”
Van didn’t even nod. He just retrieved the hard copy of the message and coordinates, folded it and slipped it into his shipsuit, then turned and hurried to the lift Even so, the shuttle was waiting for him hovering over the grass.
“Director Albert?” called a crewman in a maroon shipsuit “That’s me.”
“We need to hurry.”
Van jumped onto the ramp that didn’t quite touch the ground. Even before he was inside, the shuttle was climbing, and by the time be strapped into one of the luxurious leather couches, it was screaming skyward. Van was the only passenger.
The Revenants taking over the Keltyr systems? Given what Van had seen in the last few years, that didn’t surprise him as much as the Republic’s alliance with the Revs. His own people, though? Should he have seen it? Ashley had as much as told him that matters were getting bad, and that had been two and a half years ago. His fathers’ messages had also suggested the same. Then there had been the growing numbers of unfavorable references to the Keltyr that he’d observed.
So why was it so hard to believe?
Because he’d wanted to believe the RSF and the Republic were better than the Revenants? Because, despite the way he’d been treated, he’d hoped for better? Again, he had to ask -himself whether the entire Republic culture was what he had thought—or what he had wanted to believe.
He forced himself to try to relax as he waited.
As the shuttle neared orbit control, the crewman reappeared. “The private lock is closer to your ship, but you’ll need to hurry. They’re debating whether to close Perdya to both outgoing and incoming traffic. A decision could come anytime.”
“Thank you.” Van nodded and began to unstrap. He followed the crewtech to the lock, where he stood waiting.
There was a muted thump as the shuttle eased into the locking bay, followed by the hissing of pressurization.
As Van started to step out of the lock, the crewman grinned. “We’re all behind you.”
Van accepted the words with a nod and another, “Thank you.” Behind him—or IIS? For what? To take on the Revenants?
He hurried down the station corridors to lock charlie three.
Once more, Eri was waiting.
“We’re leaving immediately?” she asked.
“Tor Aerolis.” Van pulsed the lock closed and headed for the cockpit. Rushing back to the ship was getting to be too much of a habit. “To pick up torps and cargo, and then rendezvous with the Elsin and the Salya.” Van paused. “Did you hear about the attack on the Keltyr?”
“Yes. Joseph linked here just a while ago.”
“We need to get clear before the Coalition decides to freeze traffic.” Van slipped into the command couch.
Eri laughed. “We should hurry, but they will wait until we’re clear.”
“Because they know IIS.”
“Because they know Trystin,” she replied.
Chapter 68
From the beginning of written human history, there has always been a debate over the ethics of ends and the ethics of means. Can a good and ethical solution result from the use of unethical or immoral means? Does the end justify the means? Virtually all ethicists would agree that, of course, it does not, because, first, actions should be ethical in and of themselves, and, second, because corrupt means almost invariably result in corrupting the ends.
One difficulty with this position has been discussed in some detail, and that is the problem of war. War is evil, yet wars have been fought to combat and correct greater evils. If one accepts the premise of the ethicists, then greater evil will always triumph because the ethical soul will not stoop to an unethical action, even if it precludes a greater evil. The necessary evil of war against a greater evil has become accepted as the necessary compromise, in practical terms, and nation after nation, political system after political system, has gone to extreme lengths to “prove” that each was only acting to prevent a greater evil when it has gone to war.
This conflict between practice and theory obscures a more fundamental question that both ethicists and politicians have avoided whenever possible: Are there societies and cultures that are so evil that they do not deserve to survive? Certainly, at times in human history, scholars and politicians have judged that certain societies fit that criterion, but almost always comfortably in academic retrospect or in grandiose political statements that lead nowhere except to public office.
Unfortunately, that is all too often where the public discussion ends.
What of the other problem—the case where unethical ends lead to ethical results or where truly ethical means lead to an unethical result? We see few discussions about either possibility, particularly about the idea that ethical and moral people or principles can in fact create unethical ends. Yet how much suffering has been created by truly good men pursuing ends they thought ethical and moral? Is it not possible that such pursuit could lead to true evil?
Values, Ethics, and Society Exton Land New Oisin, Tara 1117 S.E.
Chapter 69
The trip outbound from Perdya to the outer Belt had been quiet, although Van had noted several Coalition warships also traveling outbound. Mason Jynko had had both a dozen armed torps, a half dozen message torps, and ten large smooth-finished crate-boxes—each roughly two meters long and a meter in height and width—waiting for the Joyau at the Aerolis complex.
Two short hours had been all that it took them to load the Joyau, although the mass of the unmarked boxes was significant.
“What’s in them?” Van had asked.
“I don’t know,” Jynko had replied. “These are the last ones. He brought them in sealed. The mass calculations are on each, but I don’t know what they are.”
So Van was carrying ten crate-boxes, each one massing close to two hundred kilos, plus ten spare torps, in the cargo bay.
As they cleared the Belt complex, outbound, Van scanned the EDI screens. There were more warships gathered, a fleet in each outer quadrant, than Van had ever seen before in one system, and all were Coalition ships.
“The Coalition isn’t exactly happy,” he observed, looking across at Eri, strapped in the second seat.
“That is an understatement. The last conflict with the Revenants almost destroyed the Coalition. Now ... with the Taran Republic as an ally...”
“I can’t believe the Republic stooped that low...”
“Stooping low is easy,” Eri commented dryly. “Rising above baseness is rarer.”
“You’re right about that. But...” He checked the outbound course again, easing the Joyau another ten degrees to port, just to make certain they would reach a jump point well away from any of the gathering Coalition warships. He still had trouble understanding either how he had been so blind or how things had changed so much and so quickly in the Republic.
Before they had even reached Aerolis, Van had checked the rendezvous coordinates and verified them. The Joyau’s destination was a system without even planoformable planets, but a system high in the Arm, well “above” most of the human systems.
“We all want to believe better of where we were raised, I guess,” Van continued. “At least, I do.”
“Like ... Director Desoll, you are an idealist,” Eri said evenly.
“Is that bad?” asked Van, half-wondering why Eri was suddenly so talkative, even as he checked systems and screens again. They still had another two hours before they would reach a position far enough from the gravitational fluxes with a low enough dust density to permit a jump.
“Most revolutionaries and many tyrants began as idealists.”
“So why did they change?”
“Because they expected too much from the common people. Director Desoll, he protests that he does not. But he does.”
That was another disturbing thought, at least to Van. “In what way does he expect too much of people?”
“He expects that they will act in their own interests. They do not, because they do not know what is best. They only know what they want.”
Van nodded, thinking of his fathers and the conversation they once had had about most people being creatures of appetite rather than of thought “Someday he will do something that is terrible and wonderful,” Eri said. “Again.”
Again? Van straightened in the command couch. “What did he do before?”
“I do not know. Nynca said that, but she would not explain.”
“What exactly ... is she his daughter?” Van blurted.
Eri smiled. “No. I do not know, but... she may be the daughter of his granddaughter. I do not know this, but from what they have said, I think it may be so.”
Van frowned. Marti had said that Trystin was old, but Nynca was older than Van, and, if she were his great grandchild, that meant that Trystin had to be well over a hundred fifty. He looked fifty at the most. Marti had suggested that Trystin might be one of the handful of immortals, and Van had to believe that well might be the case ... unsettling as the implications were.
Chapter 70
Van was on full alert when the Joyau came out of jumpspace, scanning the system, but there were only two EDI traces in the entire system. One was a comparator beacon, and the other matched the profile of the Elsin.
He was still wondering what Trystin had done that was so wonderful and terrible, and whether it could really have been either. Even with the power of IIS behind him, Trystin hadn’t done that much, not in the larger scheme of things. Between them, over the past few years, they’d destroyed perhaps ten Revenant vessels. While those losses might have been significant to the Beldorans or the Keshmarans, that number was a mere annoyance to powers like the Revenants, the Coalition, or the Argenti, and slightly more than a minor problem to the Republic.
Still scanning the screens and checking monitors, Van turned the Joyau toward the Elsin.
“Two hours, I’d guess,” Van said to Eri in response to her unspoken question. “The Salya’s not on the screens yet.”
“Nynca will be here,” Eri predicted.
“She won’t be happy, but she’ll be here.”
“She is less certain than he is.”
Van almost laughed. Trystin did have an air of certainty, of complete assurance that what he did was the right thing to do. “I’m in her camp.”
