Shadow of Victory

by David Weber

  Of course, quite a few of them—and their children—were suffering a severe case of buyer’s remorse these days.

  In return for a sizable down payment—and it had been sizable, by Chotěbořian standards, Šiml conceded—in a deal brokered by the “disinterested” facilitators of OFS, Frogmore-Wellington Aeronautics and Iwahara Interstellar had received two hundred-T-year leases, with an option to renew, on virtually all of Kumang’s deep-space resources. That infusion of cash, coupled with OFS technical assistance, had permitted the final design and fabrication of the anti-komár nanotech which had reduced the threat from the status of a deadly plague to a simply serious health threat which could be controlled, if not eradicated, by the prophylactic measures already in place.

  And all it had cost was debt peonage for the entire star system.

  As part of the articles of agreement Hruška had signed, OFS had undertaken the “reclamation” of the infrastructure ravaged by Reichart’s attack. It had been rebuilt to something approximating its pre-raid level, and as part of the reclamation, OFS had assumed administrative responsibility for it. As soon as Chotěboř managed to pay off the loans the League had extended to it through OFS, ownership of that infrastructure would, naturally, revert to Chotěboř. In the meantime, though, OFS would be required to charge a “reasonable fee” to defray its operational costs in Kumang. The last time Šiml had seen an accounting of the debt, interest, those “reasonable fees,” and penalties for chronically late payments on it had increased the original amount by approximately two hundred and ten percent.

  And the payments were always late, since there was never enough cash flow to make them. Despite Frogmore-Wellington’s and Iwahara’s down payment, the ongoing annual income from the leases was a pittance, and because both transstellars saw Kumang as a long-term investment that wouldn’t require developing for at least another fifty or sixty T-years, they were in no hurry to spend any development money until they were good and ready. The Chotěbořans themselves couldn’t capitalize on the abundant potentials of their own star system in order to generate the income to pay off their debts because, effectively, they didn’t own those potentials anymore, and Luis Verner, the current OFS governor—although, of course, his official title was only “System Administrator”—was fine with that. In fact, he’d gone out of his way to quash any Chotěbořian efforts to exploit the fragments of their star’s resources they still owned.

  Šiml wasn’t certain if that was simply part of OFS’ policy to ensure none of their peons ever got out of debt or because it was in line with Frogmore-Wellington’s and Iwahara’s policies, and it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that by now President Cabrnoch and his entire administration were firmly in the pocket of OFS and Kumang’s absentee landlords. Cabrnoch really didn’t have a choice, in a lot of ways. The sheen had started coming off his public image over the last decade or so, when Chotěboř had time to catch its breath and realize just how much of its inheritance had been traded away. By now, he had nowhere to go if he tried to buck his out-system patrons, and he clearly didn’t intend to go anywhere.

  Hruška had remained in office up until seven T-years ago, although he’d become steadily less and less relevant. By the time he’d actually died—of natural causes, as far as Šiml could tell—his vice president had been the system’s effective dictator for almost ten T-years. After Hruška’s death, there hadn’t been even the pretense of a new election. Cabrnoch had simply assumed the office, at which point a great many Chotěbořans had realized the constitution was no longer simply dying, but dead. And that was when the trouble truly began.

  “All right, Zdeněk. You’re right about that. You always have been, whether I like it or not. But this time around, Siminetti and the Safeties have crossed a line. You know as well as I do how our people will react to this; God only knows what’s going to come out of the rest of the planet’s woodwork!”

  “And you’re probably right about that,” Vilušínský agreed. “So I think it’d be a really good idea to get the word out to our cell leaders that they need to sit on anything hasty.”

  “Already in the pipeline,” Šiml said. Then he snorted. “Unfortunately, I think Jiskra may have been a bit too apt when we chose the name.”

  It was Vilušínský’s turn to snort. Šiml had suggested Jiskra—“Spark” in Czech—as the name for their organization for a lot of reasons, including his love of history. As far as Vilušínský had been concerned, the notion of striking sparks made it the perfect choice. But Šiml was right about the…feistiness of their jiskry. Those “sparks” would be only too ready to go looking for tinder after today’s incident.

  “That’s not a bad thing, in most ways,” he pointed out. “You’re right about the need to sit on them at the moment, but it’s about damned time we started actively transitioning into changing our stance, Adam. You know it is.”

  “I do.” Šiml’s face tightened. “I’d hoped we could do more to prepare the ground by nonviolent means, though. And at the moment, I’m afraid we’re just a little short of the tools to do anything else.”

  “Then we’d better start finding someone who can provide them,” Vilušínský said grimly. “And in the meantime, we’d better hope to hell none of our people who were involved in the demonstration point the Safeties in Jiskra’s direction under interrogation.”

  * * *

  “Satisfactory,” Karl-Heinz Sabatino said, rotating his brandy snifter under his nose while he inhaled its bouquet. “What’s that old saying about a gram of prevention being worth a kilo of cure, Luis?”

  “You really think it’ll be effective?” System Administrator Luis Verner sat back in the floating armchair in Sabatino’s luxuriously appointed office with his own brandy snifter. It was a sinfully comfortable chair, but his expression was less than happy.

  “I do.” Sabatino sipped, then lowered the glass and shrugged. “I’m not at all sure it’s the best solution, you understand, and I’ve never cared for Cabrnoch’s tactics. But the last thing we need is for these proles to decide to jump on the same bandwagon as those idiots in the Talbott Sector. Whatever I think of his methods, they’ll think twice about pressuring him in that direction now.”

  “Holowach thinks it might have the opposite effect,” Verner said, his eyes worried. “According to his reports, there’s an element on Chotěboř that sees those rioters as martyrs.”

  Sabatino grimaced. Technically, he had no official standing in Kumang’s governance. In fact, however, as the local CEO for both Frogmore-Wellington Astronautics and Iwahara Interstellar, he was what he liked to think of as the king frog in a small pond. Or perhaps that wasn’t the best analogy. He seemed to recall fragments of an ancient fairytale from his childhood on the farming planet of Fattoria. Something about King Log and King Stork.

  What mattered was that he was the current Chotěbořian government’s paymaster. What amounted to petty cash for a transstellar like Frogmore-Wellington or Iwahara was more than enough to make a neobarb dictator like Cabrnoch and the key members of his regime indecently wealthy by local standards. Unlike many of his fellows, Sabatino had no problem calling that what it was—graft and bribery—although he was careful to avoid those terms in discussions with Verner. There were certain words which cut too close to the system administrator’s own relationship with Sabatino.

  The truth was the truth, however, and whatever terminology they might use, Verner knew exactly whose hand held his leash. It was unfortunate no one would ever be tempted to call the system administrator the sharpest stylus in the box, but Sabatino could work with that. In fact, there were advantages to having someone who was inclined to take orders first and think about them later.

  It was rather more unfortunate, in some ways, that the Gendarmerie had stuck Verner with Major Jacob Holowach. Holowach had no more official jurisdiction on Chotěboř itself than Verner did, but he commanded the Gendarmerie-staffed System Security Force which was responsible for the police function in the OFS-mana
ged orbital and deep-space infrastructure. And whatever his official status vis-à-vis Chotěboř, he and his senior analyst, Captain Heather Price, were the lens through which official intelligence estimates arrived in Verner’s inbox. All of which would have been perfectly fine if Holowach had been more receptive to the customary inducements of his position. It was just Sabatino’s luck to get stuck with an idealistic idiot in what otherwise was a highly satisfactory assignment.

  And to have the damned Manticorans less than sixty-four light-years away, assuming the Talbott annexation went through and the Montana System ratified it. The last thing he needed was for the Chotěbořans to catch the same sort of lunacy, he thought grumpily.

  It wasn’t that he would have blamed them on any personal level. In their position, he would have wanted the same things himself, and he wasn’t happy about the number of people who’d been hurt in the recent…unpleasantness. Those numbers were extraordinarily low compared to what happened in other star systems, but this wasn’t “other star systems.” This was the system he was responsible for managing, and the fewer people who got hurt along the way, the better, from his perspective. Not that he thought he could do his job without anyone getting hurt. The galaxy didn’t work that way.

  Which was why it was so important to discourage any Chotěbořian tendency to emulate Talbott. The home office would be extraordinarily unhappy if they suddenly found themselves dealing with the Manties, who had a well-deserved reputation for keeping transstellars cut down to size, in rather sharp contrast to their customary comfortable relationships with the Office of Frontier Security.

  “Holowach always sees bogeymen under the couch, Luis,” he said, sweeping his brandy in a dismissive wave that expressed rather more confidence about that than he actually felt. “Besides, wasn’t he the one that warned you the Talbotters’ example was spreading to Kumang?”

  Verner nodded, although that wasn’t exactly what Holowach and Price had told him. It was close enough, though, and he wondered uneasily if Holowach’s warnings that there was more going on under the Chotěbořian surface than the Cabrnoch Administration knew (or was prepared to admit, anyway) might not be rather more accurate than Sabatino was willing to acknowledge. The truth was that Verner much preferred the CEO’s analysis. The notion that the rumbles of discontent making their way through the population of Chotěboř represented the first ripples of a generalized, still unfocused discontent was far more comforting than the idea that any sort of organized reform movement might be ticking away under the surface.

  Besides, the system administrator reminded himself, it’s not like even Holowach or Price have any evidence of that kind of organization! If they did, that would be different. As it is…

  Sabatino watched Verner’s face for a moment, then took another sip of brandy to hide an incipient frown. From the system administrator’s expression, it would appear that this time Holowach had succeeded in shaking his superior’s confidence. Well, it was hardly surprising he’d made the effort. Sabatino’s own sources made it clear Holowach had strongly opposed the crackdown in Náměstí Žlutých Růží. Given that, of course he’d be pouring all kinds of alarmist reports into Verner’s ear after the fact.

  Especially when at least some of them were almost certainly accurate.

  “In my opinion,” he said, lowering the snifter, “Holowach’s an alarmist, and the sooner you can get rid of him, the better. However,” he drew the word out, “it’s possible—remotely possible, I suppose—that he might have a point about how some of the more…civically active Chotěbořans may react to this. So maybe we need to be a little prophylactic.”

  “Prophylactic?”

  “It probably wouldn’t hurt to find a vaccine against that sort of infection,” Sabatino said, rather pleased with the analogy, actually, given Kumang’s history. “Something that can pour oil on the waters,” he continued, mixing metaphors mercilessly.

  “What sort of something did you have in mind, Karl-Heinz?” Verner sounded a bit cautious, and Sabatino smiled.

  “What we need is a local mouthpiece to soothe any tendencies towards…hastiness on these people’s’ part. Let’s face it, Luis—from their perspective, they really do have quite a lot to be unhappy about. In fact, if I could find a way to…improve the situation locally, I’d do it. Unfortunately, the home office won’t let me change the economic playing ground. But if I can’t do that, we need to find someone who can convince these people—really convince them, I mean—that they’re being listened to and that what can be done will be done. Someone from outside the government but with the stature to be listened to. To convince them he has a real chance to deliver on answers to at least some of their grievances.”

  “And should I assume you have someone in mind?”

  “Actually, I was thinking about Šiml.”

  “Šiml?” Verner blinked in astonishment. “Karl-Heinz, he hates our guts. That’s one of the few things Holowach and your people agree on!”

  “That’s not exactly true.”

  Sabatino shook his head, stood and set his glass on the end table, and crossed to stand looking out of his two hundredth-floor office window at the night-struck city of Velehrad’s sparkling strands of lights.

  “He hates Cabrnoch and the rest of Cabrnoch’s crowd with a pure and blinding passion, all right. I’ll give you that. And he’s probably no fonder of you or me than he has to be. But do you really think he went back to his family’s damned Sokol to be apolitical?” The CEO snorted. “Please, Luis! He may have been only the Minister of Agriculture when the shit hit the fan, and he doesn’t have a pot to piss in, financially. But with his family name, he had to have his eyes set on exactly the office Cabrnoch ended up in. And I guarantee that the way Cabrnoch kicked his ass out of government—and blamed him for the delay in dealing with the komáři, to boot—didn’t do one damned thing to make him any happier. There’s no way in the universe a man like that could see a ‘sports association’ as anything but an eventual political platform!”

  “But he’s always insisted Sokol remain a nonpolitical, nonpartisan organization,” Verner pointed out. “For that matter, his family’s been adamant about that from the very beginning. If he starts straying from that line, it’s likely to cost him a lot of the popularity he’s regained over the last couple of decades.”

  There was, Sabatino acknowledged privately, at least a bit of truth to that. The original Adam Šiml had singlehandedly founded the Sdružení Sokol Chotěboř, the Falcon Association of Chotěboř, even before the colonists had departed Calpurnia en route to Kumang. It had been part of his determination to rebuild and sustain his Czech heritage, and he’d modeled it on an ancient, third-century Ante Diaspora sports association which had also been called Sokol.

  There’d been differences, of course. Šiml’s Sokol had also been intended as a nationalist organization as well as a sports association, but there’d been no pressure for it to become a political organization like its original model. Its purpose had been to remind the descendants of the Czech lands of who they were and where they’d come from, not to promote the re-emergence of Czech ethnicity and culture from the empire which had engulfed those lands back on Old Terra. The fact that it would contribute to its members’ health along the way was almost icing on the cake in its founder’s view. Highly desirable icing, but almost incidental to its other functions.

  Like the original Sokol, Šiml’s had emphasized gymnastics, but it had branched out into all other areas of sport, including—or perhaps especially, given Chotěbořans’ passion for football—soccer. Membership had fallen over the years, though a surprising percentage of Chotěbořian parents had continued to enroll their children, at least. At one time, almost eighty percent of all Chotěbořans had been sokoli. By the time the komár turned deadly, that had fallen to perhaps fifteen or twenty percent, but Sokol had been a tower of strength during the plague years. It was a system-wide organization, outside government, which had responded with generosity and incredible
effort, and many of its members had died helping others. That had earned it tremendous respect and a powerful upsurge in enrollments—adult enrollments, not just those of children and adolescents. And when its founder’s descendant was hounded out of office, with his family’s already faltering fortune decimated by the way he’d personally thrown everything he owned into trying to mitigate the consequences of the komáři, the governing board had invited him, the present-day Adam Šiml, to accept the předsednictví of his ancestor’s creation.

  It had been more than just a gesture of gratitude to a man or to a family name. The stipend which came with the president’s office wasn’t enormous, but it had at least prevented him from starving until he finally managed to land his teaching position at the university. And he’d repaid the governing board by throwing all of his energy into rebuilding Sokol into what his many-times-great-grandfather had intended it to be: an organization which guarded Chotěboř’s sense of identity and trained and educated its sons and daughters—morally, as well as physically—without pounding them with any party line. That political neutrality, eschewing any partisan position, was fundamental to all Sokol had become, and it was more valuable to those parents now than it had ever been before. It was a refuge not only from the remorseless indoctrination which was part of every schoolchild’s daily life but also from the increasing bitterness and even outright despair which had enveloped so many of Chotěboř’s adults.

  And the fact that it didn’t preach any competing political indoctrination was also the only reason it survived as a legally tolerated organization. Well, that and the fact that President Cabrnoch was himself a fanatic footballer.