by David Weber
“If you expect me to say anything that could incriminate me or implicate me in any sort of wrongdoing, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed.” She smiled brightly. “I have no idea what sort of fanciful flight of imagination may have brought you to my office, of all places on Halkirk, but I assure you that MacNish, Tonnochy, and Duncannon maintain an excellent relationship with Treasury, Security, and the rest of the Administration.”
“And very useful that is for you, too,” he agreed. “On the other hand, you might want to be a little careful. Lieutenant Touchette picked up on the meeting you had with MacLean several months ago—right after she resigned her parliamentary seat in protest. I don’t think he’s mentioned it to Macquarie or MacCrimmon, and I imagine you can cover yourself by creating a document file about a land purchase. She’s certainly well-off enough to make that work. But I’d go ahead and get started on the paper trail now, if I were you. When you have to rush something like that at the last minute, you’re likely to miss some small detail, and that’s all the forensics people really need to pull it apart.”
He paused, and the silence stretched out for several seconds, thin and brittle, while he wondered which way she was going to jump. Then, finally, she inhaled deeply.
“I do know both of the people you mentioned,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll appreciate, however, that admitting I know them—in fact, that Erin MacFadzean’s been a personal friend for many years—could be…professionally detrimental, let’s say, given their rather extreme political views.”
“Oh, come now, Ms. MacRuer! Their rather extreme political views?” he shook his head chidingly. “I don’t think Lieutenant Touchette realized that what he was seeing was a planning session of the Loomis Reform Party’s provisional wing. I’m not sure about that, though,” he added in a thoughtful tone. “From everything I can see, Touchette’s not one of President MacMinn’s greater admirers. And I’m fairly confident he thinks Zagorski is as stupid as he is greedy. So it’s possible he did realize that and just chose not to pass it along to them. I don’t think you can count on his not passing along evidence of additional unexplained meetings. And OFS didn’t assign Frinkelo Osborne as a ‘trade attaché’ in the Solly Legation here in Elgin because he was stupid, either.”
“All right.” MacRuer let her chair come forward and planted both hands on her desk. “You’ve said enough to convince me that if you’re working for MacQuarie the Uppies will be breaking down my door sometime soon. But that’s about all I have to say to you. I won’t even ask about a warrant. We both know how pointless that would be.”
“The UPS does have a habit of writing its warrants after the fact, doesn’t it?” Harahap said. “I wonder why they continue to bother with that particular legal fig leaf.”
MacRuer said nothing, only looked at him, and he snorted gently.
“Relax, Ms. MacRuer. I’m not an Uppy, and I have no intention of entrapping you in anything. In fact, after we finish our conversation, I’m going to leave your office, go back to the spaceport, and take a shuttle right back up to my ship. I’ll be in-system for another three or four days. If at the end of that time, you decide—or Ms. MacLean or Ms. MacFadzean decide—that you want to talk a little more before I leave the system, I’ll be available.”
“And just what sort of ‘conversation’ do you have in mind?” she asked.
“It happens,” he said, “that I really am a representative of a Manticoran concern which is very interested in the situation here in Loomis. I did tell a little white lie when I told you I was here for the Hauptman Cartel, however. What I actually represent is a certain rather low-visibility agency with security concerns of its own. In particular, the Star Kingdom—I’m sorry, I keep forgetting officially we’re the Star Empire now—is more than a little nervous about the Solarian attitude towards our recent annexation of the Talbott Sector, particularly after that unfortunate business in Monica. Now, I realize you’re not going to ask any leading questions that I could use to incriminate you in the People’s Court, so I’ll just chatter away about why that brings me to Loomis.
“You see, Ms. MacRuer, we’d really like Frontier Security and Frontier Fleet to have something besides us to worry about. That’s our nasty, calculating motive for talking to you. On the more altruistic front, we really do disapprove of people like Star Enterprise Initiatives Unlimited.” He grimaced as he rolled out the name. “You may not realize just how much the Star Kingdom frowns on the kind of slash-and-burn exploitation people like Zagorski specialize in. Your silver oak is a priceless resource, and not just for your system, but his get-rich-quick strategies are going to burn through your entire supply of mature silver oak in less than fifteen T-years, and we both know it takes an absolute minimum of thirty-five T-years to replace a stand. That sort of thinking is stupid on a galactic scale, and what it’s going to do to your economy in the long run is a lot worse than just stupid!
“I’m not going to pretend we’re on some sort of crusade to heal all the galaxy’s ills, because, frankly, all the galaxy’s ills aren’t our responsibility. But in this instance, we see the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. If we can identify people who are…unhappy, let’s say, with the status quo in their home star systems and might be thinking about doing something about that—people like those here in Loomis—we see every advantage to us in supporting their efforts. Obviously, we don’t want to get a reputation for encouraging people to do stupid things, so I’m not prepared to offer you and the Provos any sort of blank check. But if I can satisfy my superiors that you have a genuine organization and a genuine plan—one that can succeed and that would make things better, not worse, in Loomis—I think you could count on not just financial support and shipments of weapons, but also our best effort to keep Frontier Fleet from interfering, as well.”
Despite an excellent poker face, MacRuer’s eyes had widened while he was speaking. Now he smiled at her again.
“I think that’s more than enough on that front for this first meeting,” he told her. “This is a dance I’ve been to more than once, and I know how the steps go, but your people are doing all of this for the first time. You’re going to have to go home and talk to your leadership. Frankly, I think you need to take your time and do that right. And I’m sure you wouldn’t have gotten this far if you didn’t have at least some contacts in UPS, so you need to use them to make sure I actually have a ship in orbit and actually leave. Most local agents provocateur don’t spend their time sailing around between star systems,” he pointed out drolly, and despite her tension, she chuckled. Then his expression turned serious once more.
“I would appreciate your getting back to me before I leave in at least one respect. Travel time is a copper-plated bitch in organizing something like this on an interstellar basis, so I need to know whether your people are sufficiently serious to make it worth our while for me to come back again. I’m perfectly willing to do that if you are serious, but if you aren’t—or if you simply don’t want to trust the first stranger to come blowing in your door—and, frankly, I wouldn’t blame you if you don’t—then we need to concentrate our available resources on other star systems who are more prepared to let us work with them. I’m not saying I want any detailed commitments from you at this time. To be honest, I’d be leery about the viability of any sort of strategy you could put together that quickly. But if Ms. MacLean and Ms. MacFadzean are interested, I can arrange my schedule to get back here and confer with you. Or, at least, I can arrange for one of my associates to do that. And I’d arrange contact codes before I left.”
He held her gaze for several seconds longer, then reached out to the privacy unit once more.
“As I say, I think that’s probably enough for a first meeting, especially a cold first meeting,” he said. “And in response to something you asked about earlier, I have an excellent cover for any future contact between you and me or one of my associates. In fact, we should probably go about setting that up, shouldn’t we?”
He
pressed the stud again, deactivating the unit, and tucked it leisurely back into his briefcase. Then he took a note board from the same briefcase and flipped it open.
“Actually,” he said brightly as the display came alive, “the Hauptman Cartel’s considering investing in direct shipment of both silver oak and seafood from Loomis, now that the Star Empire’s expanding into the Talbott area. Before, you were much too far away for practical shipping considerations. Now, that situation may be changing, given the existence of the Lynx Terminus, and Mr. Hauptman is very interested in acquiring his own orbital warehousing facilities here in Loomis. I’ve done a little research, and I’ve discovered that your firm represents SEIU in most of its orbital leasing and sales agreements, so it seemed to me that you were the logical people to approach. If you’ll open a folder, I’ll send over the specs on what we’re looking for. Then you and I probably need to discuss availability and price ranges. For starters, the Cartel is thinking in terms of an investment of no more than, say, fifteen or twenty million Manticoran dollars. That would be about sixty to seventy million of your credits, if I have the exchange rate right. Assuming Mr. Hauptman’s hopes work out, we’d be increasing that to—”
Chapter Ten
“Excuse me, Major. I’ve got something here I think you should see.”
Major Braxton Reizinger, Solarian Gendarmerie, looked up from his routine paperwork with a certain degree of trepidation as Master Sergeant Sheila Roskilly walked into his office. Without, he noticed with an even greater degree of trepidation, any announcement from his office clerk or so much as a knock on his office door.
Those were bad signs, but he made himself frown reprovingly at her.
“Master Sergeant, haven’t you and I spoken about that thing called ‘proper channels’?”
“Yes, Sir. I think we have,” Roskilly agreed.
“I thought we had. So I assume there’s a reason you aren’t using them…again?”
“Crap gets lost going through ‘channels,’ Sir,” she said simply, and he sighed.
The hell of it is that she’s right, he reflected. Shouldn’t be that way, but she and I both know it is. And the fact that she’s old enough to be my grandmother—and that she’s been doing her job since well before I was born—probably has something to do with her…insistence.
And the fact that she hadn’t liked much of what she’d seen doing that job for the last, oh, thirty or forty T-years had something to do with it, as well.
“Then I suppose you’d better come in,” he said. “Oh! You are in, Master Sergeant aren’t you?”
“Guess I am, Sir,” she acknowledged, finally cracking a small smile, and he smiled back. There might have been more than a trace of resignation in his own smile, but there was genuine humor as well.
That humor faded quickly, however. Major Reizinger headed the Verge Desk in the Solarian Gendarmerie’s Operations Division, and OpsDiv was in charge of intelligence analysis for the Gendarmerie’s field operations. In theory, that meant everything the SG had: intervention battalions, gendarmes assigned to standard police duties in OFS-administered star systems, gendarmes assigned to customs operations, and on and on and on. Unfortunately, the Gendarmes had far too many duties and far too many people assigned to far too many places for OpsDiv to actually analyze more than a tiny fraction of the data coming at it. That was the main reason so much analysis devolved on local SG commands…and why so much of the analysis those local commands performed never made it into OpsDiv’s central files. There was simply too much of it.
Reizinger’s boss, Lieutenant Colonel Weng Zhing-hwan, who commanded OpsDiv, concentrated on cataloguing and categorizing the data stream so that she could steer it appropriately, and he had to admit she had a good sense of who needed to see what. She was also intelligent—not brilliant, in his opinion, but critically intelligent, which was unfortunately rare in the Gendarmerie’s upper echelons—and she tried to be honest, at least with herself and her most trusted people. All in all, he’d worked for infinitely worse superiors.
Unfortunately, like anyone who’d risen to her level, she also recognized the danger of being too honest when reporting to certain of her own superiors. Worse still, Brigadier Noritoshi Väinöla, who headed SG Intelligence Command, had a well-deserved reputation for sitting on (or even rejecting outright) any analysis which might conflict with the current mission priorities of General Toinette Mabley, CO of the entire Gendarmerie. Which was one reason Major Reizinger was less than delighted to see Master Sergeant Roskilly in his office this bright, sunny morning.
“All right, Sheila. Tell me what it is this time,” he said stoically.
“Yes, Sir. I’ve been looking at this for a while, actually. It started about the time the Manties discovered that Lynx Terminus of theirs. May’ve started a little earlier, to be honest, but that’s the earliest I’ve found any sign of it.”
Reizinger winced. Nothing to come across the Verge Desk was likely to be good news if the newly renamed Star Empire of Manticore was involved, and Brigadier Väinöla had already made it clear that the less he heard about the expletive-deleted Manties, the better he’d like it.
“And just what have the Manties been up to now?” he asked cautiously.
“Not sure it’s actually the Manties, Sir, but somebody’s sure as hell up to something. Don’t have a ton of corroborating evidence yet, but let me show you what I do have so far.…”
* * *
“So what do you make of Reizinger’s report?” Weng Zhing-hwan asked, spooning sugar into her cup of tea.
Despite her family name, Weng had very fair hair, bright blue eyes, and a pale complexion. She was also thirteen centimeters taller than the woman sitting on the far side of the table. The table in question was in a privacy booth in The Golden Olive, a restaurant in Old Chicago noted for its security and discretion. Weng and her companion had been meeting there very quietly for the past two or three T-years. It was safer to use The Golden Olive than the Gendarmerie’s canteen or some other “official” venue, for a lot of reasons. There was no legal reason they couldn’t have met openly, but neither of them could have counted all of the other considerations which made that…inadvisable.
“I think it’s a good thing your master sergeant never got a commission,” Lupe Blanton replied. Blanton commanded the OFS Intelligence Branch’s first section, which was tasked with the analysis of non-Solarian political and military entities. She had jet black hair, a very dark complexion, and bright silver eyes, legacy of a great-grandmother’s taste in genetic modification. “If she’d ever been commissioned, she’d’ve been canned decades ago. Either that, or she’d’ve been promoted until her brain ossified properly.”
“That’s not a very flattering portrait of our esteemed superiors,” Weng pointed out mildly.
“Reality has a nasty habit of not being flattering,” Blanton replied, and Weng snorted in agreement.
She finished stirring her tea, set her spoon down on the saucer, and sipped appreciatively. Then she cupped the teacup in both hands, gazing across at Blanton through the wisp of steam.
“So, having made our opinion of the upper echelons of our respective organizations clear, what do you think about it?”
“She may be seeing ghosts,” Blanton said after a moment. “On the other hand, she may not be, too. Especially if the Manties’ version of what happened in Monica is as accurate as I’m afraid it is.”
“Really?” Weng tilted her head thoughtfully. “I have to admit they’re doing a masterful job of massacring Technodyne, and I imagine there are going to be some red faces over at Navy over those battlecruisers that somehow didn’t get scrapped even after the inspectors signed off that they had been. I gather from your tone that there’s even more and worse, though?”
“I don’t know if they’re going to push it, but I’m pretty sure Verrocchio and Hongbo were in it up to their eyebrows,” Blanton said grimly. “Mind you, none of this is coming over my desk, but I know Rajmund well enough to r
ecognize obfuscation when I see it.”
“‘Obfuscation,’” Weng repeated with a smile.
“Improving my vocabulary.” Blanton picked up the vodka martini she preferred to her companion’s hot tea and sipped. “You’ve got to admit it’s a lot politer than the nouns I usually use in his case.”
“True,” Weng said judiciously. “Very true.”
Rajmund Nyhus headed OFS Intelligence’s Section Two, tasked with analysis of internal threats to Frontier Security’s operations. There was a certain tension between Section One and Section Two, since OFS classified non-Solarian citizens (and all other non-Solarian entities) in systems it controlled or administered as “internal” to those systems, which led to all sorts of turf wars. It was also why things tended to get dropped when they had to be passed back and forth between the two sections. The fact that Nyhus’ position put him deeply in bed with every corrupt transstellar in existence didn’t help. And the fact that Section Two was also supposed to be the OFS’ watchdog on its own governors and administrators only made bad worse—much worse—in Lupe Blanton’s considered opinion.
“I get copied on all of his reports to Ukhtomskoy,” she said now. Adão Ukhtomskoy was her direct superior, CO of Office of Frontier Security Intelligence Branch, which made him the OFS’ equivalent of Brigadier Väinöla. “God knows there’re so many CYA memos and reports flowing through the system no one could possibly keep up with all of them, but I try to keep at least one eye on Rajmund’s contributions. Helps a lot when I’m trying to figure out what he’s covering up this week.”
“And this week he’s covering for Verrocchio and Hongbo, you think?”
“Them and/or whoever the hell was working Talbott.” Blanton nodded. “I’ll be astonished if Francisca Yucel wasn’t involved, too.”
“I think she probably was,” Weng confirmed rather grimly. “We’ve lost at least two of her better subordinates, anyway, and she’s always been one who likes to tie up loose ends. We don’t have any hard evidence she was involved, of course, but I’ve kicked it over to Gaddis at CID.”