Shadow of Victory

by David Weber

  Blanton frowned. That was playing pretty damned hardball, even for someone who’d been willing to set up the entire anti-Manty operation in the first place. But if Weng was bringing it to the attention of the SG’s Criminal Investigation Division she obviously thought Yucel had been involved, evidence or no evidence.

  “‘Lost’ as in eliminated?” she asked, just to be sure.

  “One of them, yes. We’ve got confirmation on that. The other one just vanished.” Weng shrugged. “From what I can see in their jackets, they were both two of our better people. Privately, I’m hoping Harahap—he’s the one who vanished—saw which way the wind was blowing and just got out from under. He seems to’ve been a damned competent sort, so if he did, I’m pretty sure he landed on his feet somewhere else, and more power to him.”

  “Are you getting as bad a feeling about this as I am?” Blanton asked after a moment, and the gendarme shrugged again.

  “I’m not getting any good feelings about it, anyway. The thing that really bothers me is that we don’t know—especially if you’re right about Verrocchio and Hongbo, and I’m pretty sure you are—exactly who the hell is using who. The Manties’ version makes a lot of sense, frankly. But if they’re right, then we’re even more screwed in the Verge than we thought we were.”

  “Ever the mistress of understatement, I see,” Blanton said dryly.

  “Which brings us back to my troublemaking master sergeant,” Weng pointed out. “Not to mention the question of just what I do with her suspicions.”

  “Um.”

  Blanton sipped her martini, silver eyes intent.

  “I hate to say it, but she’s pulled together some things my people should’ve seen, as well,” she said finally. “I want to have some of those people who should already have seen those things take a look at her analysis of them, but this wouldn’t be the first time Roskilly’s bird-dogged something we missed. The most interesting thing to me is the timing. If there really has been an upsurge in domestic unrest in the Verge, and if someone from the outside really is helping it along, then who the hell is it? It’s too broadly shotgunned to be one transstellar—or even a group of them—trying to turf out competition.”

  “We’ve both seen transstellars try some pretty raw stuff, Lupe,” Weng pointed out. “And there are definite resonances here with what the Manties claim Manpower and Technodyne were up to in Talbott.”

  “But Roskilly’s pointing at incidents that go all the way from the Madras Sector to the Maya Sector,” Blanton protested. “That’s almost twelve hundred light-years, Zhing-hwan!”

  “And some of them may be—probably are—false positives, too,” Weng responded. “Roskilly’s got good instincts, and so does Reizinger. That’s why I put him on the Verge Desk. But they can see correlations that don’t exist, just like anyone else, and God knows there are enough people in the Verge with totally legitimate complaints. People like that don’t really need much outside provocation to get…rowdy. I think the two of them are onto something, or I wouldn’t’ve invited you to lunch to talk about it, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to buy into some kind of galaxy-wide conspiracy.”

  “Even if it’s not that widespread, it’s still bigger than anything private enterprise’s tried yet,” Blanton said. “I could do without all the crap Frontier Security gets involved in, but it would take somebody with the kind of reach we have to screw with this many different star systems. We’re talking about another star nation here, Zhing-hwan!”

  “Don’t go saying that anywhere Rajmund can hear you.” Weng shook her head sourly. “I hear he’s already arguing Manticore ‘provoked’ any transstellars, Solarian or otherwise, who might—might—have been involved in Talbott. I don’t want to speak ill of your superior, Lupe. God knows I realize how distasteful you must find any criticism of him. But if he simply had to find a cesspool to climb into, couldn’t he at least have avoided Manpower?”

  “Lots of money and power at the bottom of that particular sewer,” Blanton replied cynically. “I don’t doubt he’d point the finger straight at the Manties, though. You’re right about that. And the truth is that you and I can’t take this anywhere yet. All we have is speculation and Master Sergeant Roskilly’s instincts. To be honest, we don’t even have any substantial straws in the wind yet!”

  “It’s not just Roskilly’s instincts this time, Lupe.” Weng set down her teacup and leaned forward. Her expression serious. “I’ve got a really bad feeling. And not just about the possibility that someone’s deliberately making the situation in the Verge worse. There’s something in the air. Something bad.”

  Their eyes met across the table, and, after a moment, Blanton nodded. The two of them were uniquely placed to see just how corrupt the system they served had become. They were just as well placed to see how deeply resentful the star systems being abused by it were, and that was enough to make anyone with a functioning brain nervous. People had a tendency, Blanton knew, to assume that the way things were at any given time were the way they’d always be, but that wasn’t true. “Things” changed, and when too many people got hurt too badly things could change in a vast hurry…even when something as huge and powerful as the Solarian League tried to keep them from changing.

  At the very least, the situation’s gotten bad enough that private enterprise can co-opt OFS and the Gendarmerie for purposes of its own, she thought grimly. If it’s actually another star nation, instead, that may be even worse. They’d have to be doing it for a reason, and I doubt it would be anything the League liked. On the other hand, how much worse could it be? If whoever’s behind this really can pull the puppet strings on Frontier Security and the Gendarmes this way, what else can they do?

  “You know,” she said slowly, “I just had a thought. Doesn’t the Navy have some sort of large-scale training operation going on out in the Madras Sector?”

  “Don’t even go there,” Weng said after a long, still moment.

  “I’m just saying—”

  “Lupe, you’re talking about maybe fifty ships of the wall. And Crandall’s Battle Fleet, not Frontier Fleet. Technodyne might have hooks into her, but even if they have an in with her, are you seriously suggesting someone could steer a task force that size into doing her dirty work?”

  “I’m just saying it’s a very…interesting coincidence that there just happens to be a Navy task force that big and that powerful already that close to Monica. Especially since it’s been at least a T-century since that many of Battle Fleet’s capital ships lumbered all the way out to the Verge. Probably longer than that, now that I think about it. You don’t find that interesting?”

  “If it’s not a coincidence, then ‘interesting’ is definitely not the adjective I’d choose,” Weng said. “I think I’d probably go with ‘terrifying’…if the entire possibility weren’t so totally absurd, that is.”

  “Oh, of course. Totally absurd. The only thing it could be,” Blanton agreed and finished off her remaining martini in a single gulp.

  Chapter Eleven

  “We’re trying to be reasonable, here, Ms. Allenby,” Adam Omikado said. “Surely there’s some way we can work this out.”

  “Best way to work it out would be for you to get the hell out of my place and get back in your air car,” Eileanóra Allenby told him flatly. “You got nothing I want, and I’ve got nothing you want, and you’d best take my word on that. Believe me, you don’t want what I’ve got for you.”

  Omikado’s expression tightened and for just a moment something ugly looked out of his hazel eyes. He started to speak sharply, then made himself stop and draw a deep breath. Sheila Hampton had warned him Allenby—any of the Allenbys, for that matter—was likely to be…unreasonable. He just hadn’t realized how unreasonable until he walked into Whitewater Hollow Outfitters. Just who the hell did this crone think she was to talk to him that way?!

  Unfortunately, explaining the reality of their relative positions as frankly as he wanted to was unlikely to accomplish his mission.

>   “I understand you’re upset, and I don’t blame you,” he said instead. “I wish it was possible to undo what happened. But it isn’t, and it’s been seven T-years. And even though we weren’t actually involved in the incident, I know Tallulah offered Ms. Allenby’s husband a very generous settlement, in addition to the one your own Congress offered him immediately after it occurred.”

  “The ‘incident’ you’re talking about was the murder of a member of my family.” If possible, the woman’s voice was even flatter—and much harder—than it had been. “There’s no ‘generous settlement’ going to make up for that. I don’t know what people’re like where you come from, Mr. Omikado, but ’round here, we don’t set money prices on the people we love.”

  “I’m not trying to suggest any amount of money could bring Ms. Allenby back. And I’m certainly not trying to dismiss the pain and grief you and every member of her family must have felt. I’m pointing out that my company’s done everything in its power to make whatever compensation can be made for that tragedy, even recognizing that it’s impossible to make full compensation. And, with all due respect, Ms. Allenby, you’re holding Tallulah Corporation responsible for something that was none of its doing. That was a Protection Force missile, not anything fired by Tallulah or any of its employees.”

  The eyes of the fair-haired sergeant in the uniform of the Swallow System Protection Force standing behind Omikado rolled ever so slightly.

  Way to go, asshole, Sergeant Hamby thought, even as he warned himself to keep his expression under control…at least while a Tallulah executive was anywhere in the vicinity. Your momma ever teach you how to pour piss out of a boot? Just wondering, ’cause it sure doesn’t sound like it. You aren’t doing any of us any damned favors lecturing her like she was too stupid to understand what happened! You’re talking to an Allenby, dumbass. They don’t much cotton to lectures or people who tell ’em what they should be thinking, ’specially when everybody on the damned planet knows what really happened. I’d think even a Solly could figure that out if he tried hard. And if you’ve gotta be too stupid to come in outa the snow, least you could do is to not aim the old biddy my way!

  “’Scuse me, but that was your precious high and mighty Mr. Parkman’s air car, wasn’t it?” Eileanóra asked sarcastically, as if she’d been listening to Hamby’s thoughts. “Traipsing around in public airspace with all those damned armed air cars keeping it company, if I recall rightly. Well, last time I looked nobody’d died and made him God! She had every right to use that same airspace, and there wouldn’t’a been any missiles in it if the damned TSE hadn’t insisted he needed all that extra ‘security.’”

  She glared at the tall—very tall—dark-haired man in the uniform of Tallulah Security Enterprises standing at Omikado’s right shoulder, who scowled contemptuously back down at her. At just over 198 centimeters, Robert Karlstad was forty centimeters taller than she was, which didn’t seem to faze her at all.

  And she had a point, Hamby thought, glancing at his partner, Corporal Leroy Sexton. Sexton had always been more comfortable running Tallulah’s errands than Hamby was, but even the corporal looked like he agreed with Eileanóra on that one. Hamby sure as hell did…and he understood exactly why TSE was even more hated than his own SPF. The Tallulah Corporation effectively owned most of the Swallow System, thanks to its cozy, mutually lucrative relationship with President Rosa Shuman and her administration. Theoretically, Tallulah Security Enterprises, its wholly owned subsidiary, was responsible only for internal security in Tallulah’s facilities. In fact, it operated as Tallulah’s private army, going wherever the hell it pleased and doing whatever the hell it wanted, under cover of a special agreement with the Shuman Administration which gave its personnel what amounted to diplomatic immunity.

  It also had a habit of arrogantly demanding special additional security whenever it felt like it, and it had done just that in the case of Alton Parkman’s hunting expedition seven and a half years ago. It was at least remotely possible there’d been a genuine threat to Parkman’s safety—God knew he was about as unpopular in Swallow as a man could get, and Swallowans could be a fractious lot, especially the ones like Eileanóra and her relatives, who lived up in the high hollows. But it was one hell of a lot more likely, in Josh Hamby’s opinion, that Parkman’s ego had been the real reason. Most of Tallulah’s upper echelon management simply had to flaunt their importance at every opportunity. Like the current pain in the ass trying to browbeat a fifty-year-old widow into submission.

  “I wasn’t in Swallow when that happened.” Omikado’s tone was that of a man whose patience was wearing thin. “My understanding is that our security people had credible evidence of a threat to Mr. Parkman’s life. I’m sure if they hadn’t, they wouldn’t have requested the additional security. But that doesn’t change my point, Ms. Allenby. Whatever might have been requested, it was the Protection Force that actually deployed those missiles to cover his route.”

  Which was true, as far as it went, Hamby reflected, although it overlooked the minor fact that it was a member of Parkman’s personal security detail who’d identified a battered air van returning from a doctor’s house call as a threat and demanded that it be kept clear. That couldn’t absolve the terminally stupid SPF trooper who’d actually launched the shoulder-fired SAM at Sandra Allenby of responsibility, and Hamby had shed no tears when one of the far-flung Allenby Clan caught up with him in a dark alley and squared that particular account. But it never would’ve happened if the Protection Force had been left to its own devices. And the SPF wouldn’t have been there in the first place without Tallulah.

  He glanced at Sexton again, and the corporal’s eyes looked as unhappy as his own. Well, he’d never thought Leroy was the sharpest stylus in the box, and he knew damned well the corporal was actively on Tallulah’s payroll, as well as the SPF’s, but even he had a brain that worked occasionally…which was more than Hamby could say for their current charges. Omikado had been in-system for less than a local week, and he obviously hadn’t bothered to learn a solitary damned thing about the locals since he’d gotten there. That was bad enough, but the truth was that Karlstad worried Hamby more at the moment. Omikado was a pissant desk jockey, the kind that just couldn’t believe the rest of the universe wasn’t as impressed with him as he was. He clearly didn’t understand a thing about the woman he was talking to. If he had, he’d’ve been out the door already, given that his balls were so small it would take a microscope to find them.

  Karlstad, though…

  Hamby didn’t know as much as he wished he did about “Call me Buddy” Karlstad, but he didn’t much like what he did know. The man was ex-Solarian Gendarmerie, and Hamby had seen entirely too many of them working for Tallulah. Most of them had at least figured out they no longer had the Solarian League in their back pocket, but Karlstad looked like one of the ones who still thought he was serving in an intervention battalion, and his expression was ugly as Eileanóra shook her head sharply.

  “You don’t seem to understand, Mr. Omikado,” she said then. “I don’t rightly care who actually fired the missile. And I’m not interested in any ‘generous’ compensation to me or to my cousin. For that matter, I’m not much interested in you. But none of that really matters just now, ’cause the bottom line is, I’m gonna do business with whoever I want to do business with, and I don’t want to do business with you.”

  You stupid old bitch, Omikado thought venomously. He knew she was actually barely four T-years older than he was, but the weathered face and silvering hair of someone who’d never received prolong looked far older to someone who had. Tallulah could buy and sell you—hell, I could buy and sell you, myself—out of petty cash!

  He made himself draw another deep breath and force down his searing anger. It was hard. He loathed uppity neobarbs like Eileanóra Allenby. He’d been born, raised, and educated on Old Terra itself, and dealing with jumped up, ignorant, penniless, squatters on worthless dirt-ball planets who thought they were his e
qual was the next best thing to intolerable. He was willing to admit, at least intellectually, that that was a weakness. If he expected to advance to upper-echelon management for Tallulah or any other Solarian transstellar, he had to learn to pretend he respected trash like Allenby. That was one of the reasons he’d been sent out here—to learn to do that pretending.

  This is all Uncle Levi’s fault, he thought bitterly. Getting me sent out to the armpit of the galaxy as some kind of favor. “Needs seasoning” is it? Him and his damned old boys’ network! And that’s exactly why Hampton picked me for this. I frigging well know it is!

  “A simple matter that needs the attention of someone from Management.” That was how Sheila Hampton, Alton Parkman’s chief of staff, had described it. The fact that she and his Uncle Levi had gone to school together clearly had nothing to do with him being selected for it. Of course not!

  He glanced around Allenby’s “office,” looking for something to distract himself while he wrestled with his resentful anger. Unfortunately, it only made him even more aware of just how unbelievably arrogant Allenby—like every other citizen of Swallow he’d met—really was. And how little their circumstances merited that attitude of theirs. The office had to be a couple of hundred T-years old, and its exposed overhead beams and the well-worn, hand-hewn wooden planks of the floor weren’t the affectation, the deliberate archaism, they would have been on any civilized planet. They were the best this godforsaken world could do, and she was just the sort of neobarb you’d expect to find in this weatherbeaten, ready-to-collapse-under-its-own-weight hunting lodge, festooned with near-elk antlers and stuffed snow bear heads. Not only that, but it was Whitewater Hollow’s outer, public office. She’d refused even to invite him into her private office…assuming an ignorant, dried up old bitch like her had a private office!