by David Weber
“I understand, Captain. I don’t have anything remotely like your personal history here, and it’s going to be difficult for me to remain—civil, I believe you said? However, I do have one bit of news that might make you feel a little better about what’s going to happen to the people behind this.”
“News, Ma’am?” Terekhov asked when she paused, and she chuckled nastily.
“When we left Manticore, we did it in company with a transport—chartered by the Crown—stuffed to the bulkheads with newsies. All sorts of newsies. In fact, at least seventy-five percent of them are Solarian newsies. This will be one of the most public—and most broadly publicized—inquiries in galactic history, Captain. It’s going to hit every news channel in the Solarian League, not just the Star Kingdom, and I intend to see to it that the Solly coverage comes from Solly reporters. No one’s going to be able to brush off those reports as partisan Manticoran reportage, and I can already tell there’ll be more than enough blood in the water to provoke a very satisfactory feeding frenzy over this one. I promise you, Captain Terekhov: the people who thought they could hide in the shadows while they hired someone else to slip the knife into your people’s back are about to find out just how spectacularly wrong they were.”
* * *
Damien Harahap looked up from his book reader as Rufino Chernyshev knocked courteously on the frame of the open door. While Harahap would never have called his current surroundings palatial, they were certainly much more comfortable than many he’d endured in the course of his career. And they had the inestimable advantage of being, so far as he could tell, completely off the Gendarmerie’s radar.
Of course there were two sides to that particular advantage. If not even his employers could find him, then it was unlikely the people who’d murdered Ulrike Eichbauer and ordered his own death could find him, either. That was the good part. The bad part was that if Chernyshev’s employers decided he was a liability rather than an asset, they’d find it remarkably easy to complete his traceless disappearance.
At least he’d had a chance to catch up on his reading in the last month or so, especially since Chernyshev had “requested” he remain off the net while they awaited instructions. Under the circumstances, it had seemed wiser to accede to the “request” gracefully. Besides, he’d been much too far behind on his history readings.
“Mind if I disturb you for a minute?” Chernyshev asked now, and Harahap gave him a crooked smile.
“My time is yours, Rufino,” he said, sweeping one hand around his small room’s plainly furnished comfort.
“Well, yes, but there are courtesies between professionals,” Chernyshev replied, stepping fully into the room. “I know this hasn’t been especially easy for you, and the truth is I’m grateful you’ve taken it as well as you have.”
“Would it have done me much good to take it any other way?”
“We both know keeping someone like you locked down against his will can get…complicated, Damien. I’m just saying that I appreciate your taking a professional attitude towards all of this.”
“You’re welcome,” Harahap said, touched—despite himself—by Chernyshev’s apparent sincerity. “I do hope you’re not soft-soaping me to sugarcoat some nasty bit of news, though?”
“No, no. Nothing like that! In fact, I’ve just heard back from my superiors. They’re very happy you’ve managed to stay alive—with, of course, my modest assistance. On the other hand, they’re sorry to hear about Major Eichbauer. My impression is that they’d really hoped to convince both of you to come to work for them. As it is, they’ve instructed me to ask you if you’d be prepared to accept an offer of employment.”
“Doing what, precisely?” Harahap leaned back in his chair. He wasn’t in the strongest bargaining position imaginable, but still…
“I don’t have a lot of details about that,” Chernyshev admitted. “My guess would be that they’d want you to continue doing essentially what you were doing in the Talbott Sector. I’d suspect they have a somewhat…broader canvas in mind, you understand, but all of that’s just my best guess. I’m sure they’ll explain everything to you when we get there.”
“And ‘there,’ presumably, is someplace other than Pine Mountain?”
“I think you can safely assume there’s a small interstellar cruise involved in the employment offer,” Chernyshev told him with a slight smile.
Harahap nodded slowly, his expression thoughtful. With all due modesty, he was one of the best at what he’d been “doing in the Talbott Sector,” but he’d had the advantage of years of familiarity with the area. If Chernyshev’s reference to broader canvases meant what he suspected it did, he’d be operating outside that comfort zone. On the other hand, it was what he did best. And he had the oddest suspicion that turning down the new career opportunity would not be the very smartest decision he’d ever made.
Besides, what else was he going to do with himself? The people who’d hired his services in the Talbott Sector were among the wealthiest individuals in the explored galaxy. Not very nice people, perhaps, but filthy, obscenely rich. If he was looking at a mandatory shift to the private sector, it made sense to find the employers with the deepest pockets when he did.
“I see,” he said, laying the book reader on his small desk and pushing back his chair to stand. “When do we leave?”
APRIL 1921 POST DIASPORA
“I wonder sometimes what we did to piss God off. We probably could have handled just the damned bugs!”
—Adam Šiml, Prezident,
Sdružení Sokol Chotěboř
Chapter Five
The fifteen-year-old doubled over with a harsh, explosive grunt as the riot baton’s head rammed into his belly like a hammer. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. Not immediately. He just stood there, both hands grasping at the anguish while his shocked diaphragm tried to suck in enough air for a cry of pain.
It hadn’t gotten that far when the same truncheon hammered the back of his neck and clubbed him to his knees.
The Chotěbořian Public Safety Force trooper never even blinked as he used his armorplast shield to smash the fallen boy to one side. He was already choosing his next target as the CPSF waded into the crowd of “anarchist terrorists and hardened professional agitators” half-filling the enormous square called Náměstí Žlutých Růží at the heart of the city of Velehrad.
The high school and college students who’d flooded the capital with such high hopes saw the Safeties coming, but there was no way for anyone in the demonstration’s leading edge to get out of the way. The crowd behind them was too dense. They were trapped between their fellow protesters and the oncoming riot police. Most of them dropped the placards demanding new elections—or the armloads of yellow roses—they’d been carrying and raised empty hands above their heads. Here and there a handful flung themselves at the riot-armored troopers instead of trying to surrender, but the options they’d chosen made no difference in the end. The Safeties had their orders, and neural stun batons and old-fashioned nightsticks rose and fell with vicious, well-drilled efficiency.
Many of the newer victims did have time to scream as they were smashed to the street, and few of the CPSF troopers made any effort to avoid trampling them under their heavy boots. Indeed, more than one Safety took time to kick a fallen demonstrator squarely in the mouth in passing.
The demonstration’s rear ranks began to shred as the young people in them realized what was happening. Students scattered in all directions, but dozens—scores—were as unable to get out of the way as the lead ranks had been. They were grist for the mill, and the Safeties harvested them ruthlessly.
“Make examples,” their CO had told them, and the Chotěbořian Public Safety Force was nothing if not good at following its orders.
* * *
The soccer ball sliced towards the upper corner of the goal, but the leaping, fully extended keeper just managed to get a hand on it. She dragged it down and in, wrapping both arms around it and taking it with her
as she hit the ground on a shoulder, then rolled back up on her knees with it clasped protectively in both arms.
Applause and whistles of appreciation spattered from the thinly populated stands, and the tallish, fair-haired man nodded in approval. Despite the nod, however, his attention was elsewhere, and he turned from the football pitch to frown at the brown-haired, still taller man standing beside him.
“I can’t believe even Siminetti was that stupid,” he said quietly, careful to keep his face turned towards the solid ceramacrete wall behind his companion. There were no security systems mounted to cover this particular spot, which wasn’t exactly an accident. He’d made certain of that when the stadium was last refurbished and he had the entire structure carefully and very, very unobtrusively checked on a regular basis to make sure things stayed that way. That didn’t mean mobile platforms couldn’t be watching it, however.
“What kind of idiot doesn’t understand the kind of resentment that putting over sixty unarmed students—some of them barely fourteen years old, for God’s sake!—into hospital and another eleven into the morgue is going to generate?!” he continued, his tone harsh with a bitter anger which burned only hotter because iron control kept it so low.
“That’s assuming he’s worried about resentment, Adam,” the other man pointed out, equally quietly. “Frankly, I don’t think he is.”
“Well he damned well ought to be!”
“You think that; I think that; and the kids who were in the square think that. I’m inclined to doubt Cabrnoch, Kápička, or Verner share our view. After all, there’re plenty of more Safeties where that crew came from if things should happen to flare up. And I don’t doubt Sabatino’s prepared to throw in enough kickbacks to pay for a few thousand—or a few hundred thousand—more if he has to.”
Adam Šiml muttered something unprintable under his breath and glared at his friend, but Zdeněk Vilušínský had known Šiml for the better part of a T-century. He knew what that glare was really directed at, so he only waited patiently for his boyhood friend to work his way through it.
Šiml turned away, staring back out across the football field while he did that working. He knew Vilušínský as well as Vilušínský knew him, which meant he also knew his old friend understood exactly what was going on in his brain at the moment. None of which did a great deal to slake his seething fury at what had happened in Náměstí Žlutých Růží.
“Plaza of Yellow Roses.” That was what the square’s name meant in the language of Chotěboř’s original settlers. That language had been largely supplanted by Standard English in everyday life in the three centuries since the founding, of course. For that matter, only about a third of the Kumang System’s initial colonists had been native Czech-speakers. It happened that the Šiml family had been part of that third. In fact, it “happened” that one of the leaders of that first wave of settlers, and one of the men who’d crafted the Chotěbořian Constitution, had also been named Adam Šiml.
Not that the current head of the family, such as it was and what remained of it, was in a position to say much about how that constitution had been shredded. Not if he wanted to stay out of Vězení Horský Vrchol, anyway, and he had far too many things to do for that, no matter how spectacular the view might be from its mountaintop perch.
Besides, it was far from certain he’d ever make it to the Safety Force’s main detention facility. In the last few T-years, prisoners had started quietly and tracelessly dropping off the lists of the incarcerated. They hadn’t been released, hadn’t died (officially at least), and they sure as hell hadn’t escaped. They’d simply…disappeared.
He reminded himself of that—firmly—as the rage flowed through him, but it wasn’t easy. Not when he thought about Náměstí Žlutých Růží.
The yellow rose in question was a native flower, not the Old Earth version, with blossoms the size of a large man’s hand, a gorgeous sapphire-blue throat, and brilliant yellow petals tipped in blood-red crimson. It was spectacular, and it had been chosen as the emblem of Chotěboř, as a symbol of renewal, freedom, and self-rule, by the original Adam Šiml and the friends, neighbors, and fellow employees of the Creswell Combine he’d helped convince to cash in their equity in the huge corporation and find a new home far, far away from the Calpurnia System and the growing power of the Solarian transstellars. To build a home those transstellars’ tendrils had not yet penetrated, one far enough from the League that it would have time to create—and maintain—a democracy that meant something and had the strength to resist the sort of exploitation the Creswell Combine had represented. That was what the youthful demonstrators in Náměstí Žlutých Růží had wanted to remind every Chotěbořan about…and everyone could see how well that had worked out.
“They can’t keep a lid on this forever, Zdeněk,” he said harshly, once he was confident he had his anger mostly under control. “They just can’t.”
“Until someone repeals the state of emergency, they damned well can,” Vilušínský said bluntly, “and you know it.”
“Hruška never meant that to last this long!” Šiml snapped.
“Then he frigging well should’ve included a sunset clause when he issued the decree.” Vilušínský turned his head to spit on the ceramacrete floor. “Not that Cabrnoch and Žďárská—or Siminetti!—would’ve paid much attention to it if he had.”
Šiml glared at him for a moment, but then his shoulders slumped and he nodded wearily. He’d been there—in fact, he’d been a member of President Roman Hruška’s cabinet—when the initial decree was issued. Even then, he’d seen where it was likely to end, and his protests were one of the reasons Minister of Public Safety Jan Cabrnoch’s chief of staff, Zuzana Žďárská, had made it so abundantly (if privately) clear that his services as Minister of Agriculture were no longer required. It would undoubtedly be wise of him to seek a new career in the private sector, under the circumstances. And if he was unwilling to take her friendly hint, more…strenuous methods of persuasion would be found.
Which was why he’d been a very poorly paid professor of agronomy at Eduard Beneš University for the last fifteen T-years.
“I wonder sometimes what we did to piss God off,” he said finally. His voice was heavy, his expression tired. “We probably could have handled just the damned bugs!”
“Probably. No,” Vilušínský shook his head, “we did handle the komáři in the end. Whatever else, you have to give Cabrnoch at least that much. That targeted nanotech was a brilliant move, and he did find a way to get it built.”
“Sure he did. And it was based on the R and D my people did—them and Public Health! Do you think anyone remembers that? And how did he pay for it?”
“I didn’t say he came up with the solution, and I didn’t say it came cheap. But if you’d asked most of our fellow citizens at the time whether it was worth it, you know damn well what they would’ve said! For that matter, they did say it.”
“But it opened the door to Frogmore-Wellington and Iwahara!” Šiml protested.
“So? You expected people with dying kids to think that was a bad exchange? Especially after Reichart got done with us?”
Vilušínský shook his head again, but his expression had turned gentle, and he reached out to lay one hand almost apologetically on his friend’s arm. Adam Šiml had lost his wife, Kristýna Šimlová Louthanová, his teenaged son, and both of his infant daughters to the komáři. If anyone on Chotěboř could understand the point Vilušínský had just made, it was Šiml, yet his own devastating grief only fanned his fury when he thought of how the world his wife and children would never see again had been betrayed by its own elected leaders.
Chotěboř had scarcely been on the cutting edge of technology. It was too far from the heart of the Solarian League for that. But it had possessed at least a decent medical establishment, and it had been native Chotěbořian researchers—his team, although he’d been given his walking papers before the solution was announced—who’d come up with the targeted nanotech to d
eal with the komár hnědý rybniční, the ubiquitous “nuisance” insect pest which had mutated into such a deadly disease vector. Yet the Chotěbořans had been unable to produce it locally, thanks to Ismail Reichart’s raiders.
Reichart had seen his opportunity in the midst of Chotěboř’s preoccupation with the komáři, not that Kumang Astro Control would have been much of an obstacle to him at the best of times, and his fleet of renegade mercenaries had hit the star system like a hammer. They’d left Chotěboř itself relatively unscathed—they’d had no desire to encounter the komár on its own ground—but they’d looted and stripped every bit of the system’s painfully built up industrial infrastructure. They’d taken even the planetary power sats, driving Chotěboř back onto surface-generated power, with all the crippling limitations that had implied, until it could somehow cobble up replacements…once Reichart finally deigned to depart with his loot.
Leaving Chotěboř totally unable to implement the solution to its desperate health crisis out of its own resources.
And that was why President Hruška, at the instigation of newly elected Vice President Cabrnoch, had taken the only option he’d seen and petitioned the Solarian League’s Office of Frontier Security for aid. Which OFS had provided…under its customary terms.
Which was how Chotěboř had effectively completely lost control of the resources of its own star system.
Under pressure from Frontier Security to “maximize income generation potential” for the system’s people, Hruška had issued yet another decree, setting aside the constitutional prohibitions designed to prevent outside exploitation of the system. He’d had no constitutional authority to do anything of the sort, but the Nejvyšší soud, Chotěboř’s supreme court, had flatly refused to take up the single lawsuit challenging his actions. Šiml had known every man and woman who’d joined to file that suit, although he hadn’t been formally associated with it. He’d wanted to be, but he’d been in too much public disfavor at the moment, scapegoated with responsibility for failing to solve the crisis himself by Cabrnoch and Žďárská. At the same time, he had to acknowledge Vilušínský’s point. However people might feel about it now, at the time Hruška’s actions had been supported by a huge majority of Chotěbořans.