Free Empery by Michael P. Kube-McDowell

related to the Danfield Device is currently being conducted under the authority of the Defense Research Office, with the concurrence of the Command Board.
    THIS RELEASE AUTHORIZED UNDER CODE
41-1-425-R
    Harmack Wells
Director
USS-Defense
    (MORE FOLLOWS)
    There were times when Felithe Berberon found himself feeling a grudging admiration for Harmack Wells—for his unwavering internal compass, for his almost self-righteous sense of purpose, for the intellectual and emotional commitment he brought to anything he did. Since those were also the qualities that made Wells so damnably difficult to deal with, the feeling never lasted long. But it was real enough while it lasted, even if it did leave Berberon feeling faintly disloyal.
    This was one of those times. The meeting was going splendidly for Wells. The Comité was in his element, holding forth in loving detail on the system he had diligently shepherded through the approvals process since joining the Service as a defense strategist more than a dozen years ago.
    Berberon reflected that he was perhaps the only person in the room—Wells excepted—with a sense of what had led to that moment. Triad had become Wells’s personal charge almost by default. When first proposed, none of the senior Defense staff was eager to embrace it, in part because the timing was wrong—the Defender program having just hit full stride—and in part because of difficulties within the Affirmation.
    The new Elder of Rena-Kiri was then refusing to recognize certain guarantees contained in the Affirmation of Unity signed by his predecessor. He could do so with impunity, in part because the Affirmation specifically reserved him that right, and in part because the Unified Worlds, then as now, were not unified at all. The Affirmation created no executive machinery by which other signees could respond in concert.
    Even so, Elder North’s repudiation of Rena-Kiri’s responsibilities under the Affirmation was so hard-edged that it divided the other worlds into two camps, one that saw the Renan action as a threat to the Affirmation generally and one that saw it as a defense of the principle of planetary independence. There was a real fear that Triad would be seen by the latter group not as a strategic deterrent, but as a tool by which the majority would enforce discipline and move the loose twelve-member planetary confederation toward some more rigidly structured federalist body.
    Any such suspicion on the part of the Renans (or the three other worlds that sided with them) was ludicrous on its face, of course. The Service was not an arm of the Affirmation but an independent, self-supported, and self-directed organization. And no Chancellor, certainly not Chancellor Delkes, would have approved any such use of any such weapon. Nevertheless, because of the perceived potential for diplomatic disaster, Triad was not merely ignored. It was actively squelched. Berberon himself had helped see to that.
    Though not there at the conception, Wells soon adopted the Triad proposal as his own. Each time he advanced in the Defense bureaucracy—and he had advanced with uncommon speed—he brought Triad along with him, refining it, updating it, winning over key skeptics, emphasizing the Mizari threat, until now he stood just one step away from final vindication.
    All the more marvelous to watch because you really believe it, Berberon thought as he listened.
    “The Danfield Device will effect the most concentrated release of energy known outside a stellar core,” Wells was saying. “Picture an amount of energy equal to that required to boost a Sentinel to supercee, but released in less than a millisecond. If the device is triggered on the way down, the energy outflux will boil the atmosphere off the planet like peeling the rind off an orange. The shock wave and windstorm alone will shatter anything less dense than a granite mountain for five thousand kilometres in every direction.”
    Wells paused a moment to let that image