Hidden Empire - Kevin J. Anderson [94]
All citizens looked to their brave and powerful King for answers, for consolation...and the old man could do nothing.
When the panicked Oncier terraformers had returned, they broadcast their news over a thousand bands, squawking like startled chickens rushing back to their coop. The Hansa could never control or spin the news now.
In the waiting room behind the Throne Hall, Basil Wenceslas grumbled, frightening the King with his naked anger. "Damn! I would have preferred to keep this matter classified for a while. We don't know how to assess what's happened. We don't have any answers. Everything was destroyed—but why? Was it an outside attack, or some sort of...cosmic event, like an aftershock of the Klikiss Torch?"
"You can bet it was an attack," said General Lanyan, who stood stiffly at attention while Basil paced the floor. He had been recalled from the EDF base on Mars to discuss the crisis.
Frederick brushed at a speck of lint on his robes and looked around for a goblet of sweet wine. He had offered Basil a strong drink, but the Chairman shook his head, refusing to let anything cloud his thoughts. In contrast, King Frederick very much wanted to numb the dread he felt. "Basil, I can make an announcement that we're investigating, but we still have no answers. Will that put them at ease?"
Basil slammed a flat palm against a fluted Corinthian column and said sarcastically, "Good idea. Let's tell every person in the Hansa that we're helpless and ignorant."
"But we really don't know what happened," Frederick said.
"And neither do they," Basil retorted. "A King must never let anyone see that he's in the dark."
Frederick took a gulp of his sweet wine and didn't answer. He looked at the uniformed military man—Lanyan, not Lanson, he chided himself—and tried to shore up his confidence that the Earth Defense Forces would respond to this disaster. The General wanted to retaliate and crush the mysterious aggressors so that peace could return to the human colony worlds.
"I may be stating the obvious, Chairman Wenceslas," Lanyan said, "but it might have been the Ildirans. Their Solar Navy was present at Oncier, watching our test. Maybe they felt threatened because we have such powerful technology. Who else could it have been?"
"It's a big universe, General, filled with many things we don't understand," the King said. "We've explored only a portion of one spiral arm in our galaxy—"
"Frederick," Basil interrupted, sounding exasperated, "even the Ildirans with all their history have never encountered another alien race. I don't want to muddy the issue by making up bogeymen. The threat of war with the Ildirans is frightening enough. On the other hand, General, I am also highly skeptical that the Solar Navy has weaponry approaching the power necessary for such destruction."
"True. This has got to be something new, and the Ildirans have been stagnant for centuries." Lanyan walked to one of the triangular windows that looked out upon the Moon StatueGarden. Topiary shrubs and ornate sculptures spread across hundreds of acres on the Whisper Palace grounds. "And it wasn't a ragtag group of pirates like Rand Sorengaard. The Roamers might want revenge against us, but they certainly don't have the technology to destroy whole moons."
After Basil's scolding, Frederick kept his thoughts to himself. Since the geology was so unstable during the rapid warming of the moons, perhaps the satellites had simply broken apart by themselves. Plenty of tidal forces, tectonic heat expansion, explosive gas volatilization...but it was ridiculous to think that Jack, George, Ben, and Christopher would all self-destruct at once, and that the flying rubble could have coincidentally destroyed the distant observation platform.
"We must find out what provoked this, and who did it," Basil said. "We haven't heard of any other attacks, have we?"
The General shook his head. "But then, without widespread