Wing Commander #07 False Color William Forstchen (top 10 books to read .txt) 📖

Bondarevsky touched the stud by the door to Admiral Tolwyn's suite and waited with mounting concern. The admiral had not stirred from his quarters all afternoon, and now, when Bondarevsky had finally decided to seek him out, it seemed as if he wasn't planning on seeing visitors. There wasn't even a query from the intercom. Finally, though, the door slid open.

The room was dark, with all the lights out except a single worklight by the computer terminal, and the glow of the monitor screen. But Tolwyn wasn't at the desk. It took a moment for Bondarevsky's eyes to adjust to the darkness and pick out the shadowy figure of the admiral slumped back in an easy chair facing the door.

"Sir?" Bondarevsky ventured, uncertain of himself.

"Come in, Jason," Tolwyn said softly. "I suppose Vance Richards sent you."

"He . . . talked with me earlier, sir, but it was my idea to come, Admiral," Bondarevsky said.

Tolwyn chuckled, but there was precious little humor behind it. "You missed your calling, Jason. You should have been a diplomat. What Vance did was rant and rave, scream bloody murder, and call me everything but a Cat-lover, right?"

Bondarevsky didn't answer that. "I came because I think it's a mistake to go ahead with Goliath, sir. A big mistake. You're putting hundreds, maybe thousands of lives at risk on a project that had damned little chance of success from the very start. And going outside the chain of command to Kruger instead of working on a report with Admiral Richards . . ." He paused. "I've known you for most of my adult life, Admiral, and I've always thought of you as a second father. But you've not been acting like the man I remember . . . not since Behemoth. And that scares me, sir."

"Sit down, Jason," Tolwyn said slowly. He waited until Bondarevsky had settled into a chair across from him before he went on. In the darkened cabin, his quiet, firm voice seemed almost unreal, like a ghost's. "I know all the reasons why Goliath should be dropped. Believe me, under any other circumstances I'd be the loudest voice calling for cancellation, no matter how much Max Kruger wanted his new toy. But I know a few damned good reasons for going on, too, and in my opinion they outweigh the ones in favor of dropping the project."

"What could justify risking so many people?" Bondarevsky demanded. "Come on, Admiral, you've been hiding things since before we left Terra. How can you expect any of the rest of us to go along with you if you won't let us in on the same information you're using to base your decisions on?"

Tolwyn didn't say anything for a long moment. "You can't just accept that I know what I'm doing? Once upon a time, Jason Bondarevsky would have followed me into Hell and back out of sheer loyalty."

"When I was still a newbie on my first deep-space assignment, maybe," Bondarevsky said. "Back then everything was simple. You pointed at the holo-map and laid out the mission, and I flew. Simple. But a lot's happened since then, sir. I'm not the same man I was fifteen, twenty years ago. And neither are you. Behemoth proved that."

"Behemoth." Tolwyn packed a world of contempt into that single word. "That's where everything started to go wrong, Jason. And like a fool I didn't see any of it coming until it was too goddamned late."

There was another long pause before he started speaking again. "All right, Jason, since you won't accept my word I guess I'll have to spell it all out. But you're not going to like it. Not one bit of it." He stood up and started to pace back and forth across the narrow confines of the cabin, a dark shape only half-seen in the dim light. "Remember the mess we were in after the Battle of Earth? All the Joint Chiefs were killed, most of them in that bombing the Kilrathi pulled during the peace talks, and Duke Grecko in the fighting. And the government was in chaos, too, when the President resigned because of his part in letting the Cats nail us."

Bondarevsky nodded, though he didn't know if Tolwyn could see him.

"The new government amounted to a coalition between all the major parties, and it showed. After we beat the Cats back from Terra we should have followed up with a strike that would have knocked them into the stone age, but instead we frittered away our strength against a string of useless targets until Thrakhath and his granddaddy had a chance to rebuild everything they'd lost and then some. When Concordia went down, that was the last straw. We'd fallen behind in ship building, and were starting to deploy miserable old carriers fit for the scrapyard in front-line sectors because our resources were stretched so thin. That was largely thanks to the Department of Industrial Affairs. The bureaucrats there were dragging their feet every time someone suggested a move that would cut a few corners and speed up production, and Secretary Haviland either wouldn't or couldn't put his foot down. But we were getting the same kind of trouble from half a dozen other cabinet people, too. It was a mess from start to finish."

Tolwyn paused. "I'd just been assigned to the Weapons Development Office when Concordia went down. I inherited Behemoth from Ubarov, who had the post before me. Frankly, my first reaction was to scrap the damned thing then and there. The design was all wrong, for one thing. It should have been mounted aboard a ship that could defend itself effectively . . . and one that had some legs, too, so it could maneuver in a combat situation. Behemoth didn't have either capability. And I didn't like the whole concept of blasting planets indiscriminately, either. It always seemed to me that the only thing that marked a difference between us and Thrakhath was that