by David Weber
There were times when Helen—who was built on sufficiently compact and sturdy lines to have heard the dreaded adjective “healthy” applied to her person more than once—found it difficult not to resent people who drew the winning tickets in the “aren’t-I-beautiful” genetic lottery.
Not always a good thing, though, is it? she asked herself. You knew that even before you met Paulo. It’s just—
She chopped that thought off sharply. Better not to think about Paulo d’Arezzo just now. Not until they knew more.
“Sorry,” she said, and managed a smile. “Didn’t mean to take out any of my mad on you, Helga. It’s just not knowing.…”
“That much I really can sympathize with,” Helga said. “When Minister Krietzmann got briefed on Commodore Terekhov’s message and we found out you were all headed to Monica but we didn’t have any idea what had happened after you got there…That was pretty bad. And you’re right, it was the fact that we couldn’t know a thing about it for so long.”
Helen nodded soberly. As Henri Krietzmann’s personal assistant, Helga had been on the inside of that message loop right along the Quadrant’s Defense Minister. So, yes. If anyone understood what Helen and every other Manticoran in Spindle were feeling at this moment, it was probably her.
“Well,” she said out loud, looking around the noisy restaurant from their quiet, secluded little alcove, “I guess the good news is that we should be getting follow-on dispatches a lot more quickly than you guys could find out what had happened at Monica.”
“I know.”
Helga sipped her own beer. Since CruRon 94’s arrival in the Quadrant, Commodore Terekhov’s duties—and the Quadrant Cabinet’s respect for his insights—had thrown her and Helen together on several occasions, and she’d decided she liked the young Manty. Of course, Helen came from just a slightly different social strata than Lieutenant “Gwen” Archer, Admiral Henke’s flag lieutenant and the only other Manticoran Helga had truly gotten to know. She certainly wasn’t related to Empress Elizabeth, after all! But she was a Gryphon Highlander, with the sheer bloody-mindedness that implied, and that was something to which any Dresdener could relate.
“I wonder if they’re going to release the news?” she asked quietly, and Helen glanced back at her quickly.
“They’ll have to. It’s not like the news services aren’t going to be telling people about it pretty damned soon anyway,” the ensign pointed out. “This is the biggest story to come out of the war in the last twenty T-years, Helga! The Solly services’re going to be all over it, even if our own newsies weren’t. Besides, Manticore figured out a long time ago that it’s better to come clean when the shit hits the fan. You owe people that. And even if that weren’t true, if you tell them what’s really going on when the news is bad, not just when it’s good, people tend to trust your word.”
“I can see that,” Helga agreed. “And I’m not saying any one should—or could—keep a lid on it forever. I’m just wondering if they’re going to release the news now.”
“You’re probably in a better position to know about that than I am.” Helen shrugged. “Off the top of my head, though, I’d say they probably will sit on it at least a while longer. Like I say, follow-up dispatches have to be en route. I’m guessing Prime Minister Alquezar and Baroness Medusa would just as soon have more information in hand before they start panicking everybody.”
Helga nodded, listening to the restaurant diners’ cheerful, murmuring hubbub. Everyone seemed so upbeat, so cheerful. The possibility of a confrontation with the Solarian League might loom over them, but they were part of the Star Empire of Manticore now. The shield of the Royal Manticoran Navy extended over them, and, in the meantime, the annexation’s impact on the Quadrant’s economy meant a far better—and healthier—future for themselves and their children.
Except that that shield had just been dealt a shattering blow.
“Do you think it’s as bad as the preliminary report suggests?”
“Probably not. Well, maybe.” Helen grimaced. “After Lovat, I’d never’ve expected them to try something like this. A direct assault on the home system? That took what a friend of my dad’s would call great big brass ones!”
“I don’t think anyone would’ve expected it after so long,” Helga said. “I mean, you’ve been fighting Haven for ages. If anyone was going to launch this kind of attack, why not do it a lot sooner? Wouldn’t that’ve made more sense?”
“No.” Helen shook her head. “Anybody who tried something like this was going to get royally reamed, even if they ‘won.’ That’s the reason no responsible strategist would’ve signed off on it, even after we’d demonstrated the deep strike would work. In fact, I think the Commodore probably put his finger on what happened—or why it happened, at least.”
Helga arched an eyebrow at her, and she tossed her left hand in a sort of throw away gesture.
“Sir Aivars,” she said, using the title Terekhov had received at Baroness Medusa’s hands, along with the Parliamentary Medal of Valor, less than a week earlier, “thinks they did this—threw the dice and went all in—exactly because of what Duchess Harrington did at Lovat. They got reamed there, too, thanks to the new MDM control systems. Their birds have just as much range as ours, Helga; they just have less accuracy, and it gets crappier as the range extends.”
Helga nodded. As Krietzmann’s assistant, she’d been present when Terekhov briefed the Defense Minister and the rest of the Cabinet on the new Manticoran missiles. She didn’t pretend to understand the technical details, but she understood the consequences of being able to utterly destroy an enemy at ranges from which she couldn’t even hit your own ships.
“Well, the Commodore thinks they must’ve figured their only chance was to hammer us hard enough to force us to surrender before we got the new weapons broadly deployed. I don’t think anyone in Nouveau Paris could’ve expected it to be a good chance, and they must have projected massive losses for their own side. But after the summit talks fell through and they saw what happened at Lovat, they probably decided it was throw the dice and take their own lumps in hopes of pulling it off or screen Mount Royal Palace with their surrender offer.”
“And so all those people got killed,” Helga said sadly, looking back down into her drink once more. Then she looked up quickly with something almost like a gasp. “Oh, Helen! I didn’t mean to suggest that—”
“’S all right.” Helen shook her head. “Oh, I’m worried about enough other people I know in the Fleet, but it doesn’t sound like they got anywhere near Hephaestus. It must’ve driven Captain FitzGerald crazy to be sitting on his bridge doing nothing in the middle of something like that, but there’s no way the Kitty could’ve done one damned thing until they get her repairs finished. So I’m not worried about Hexapuma or…or anyone aboard her.”
Helga nodded with a relieved expression, but she found herself wondering which “anyone aboard her” Helen wasn’t worried about. It sounded like a much more personal “anyone.”
“Well,” she said, “Admiral Gold Peak should be back in another three T-weeks or so. Maybe we’ll have at least some good news for her when she gets here.”
Chapter Eighteen
Vincent Frugoni, late of the Solarian League Marine Corps, frowned down at his minicomp’s display when someone settled into the seat beside him. He’d grabbed the redeye shuttle from the Capistrano spaceport deliberately, because it was usually the next best thing to empty. And as he glanced up from the display, he realized it was still the next best thing to empty. In fact, there were only seventeen other passengers on the entire eighty-seat shuttle. Like Frugoni, at least twelve of them had seized the opportunity to establish themselves in splendid isolation, unhampered by seatmates while they busied themselves catching up on either correspondence and com calls or sleep.
But not the yahoo in the seat next to him. Oh, no!
It wasn’t that Frugoni begrudged the other fellow a seat, but he’d spent three T-decades in a military career
that had seen him deployed aboard ship far more often than not. He’d had no choice but to put up with the close-packed proximity a warship’s berthing spaces enforced. Now that he was out of the service, he treasured the breathing room civilians took for granted.
He gave the idiot beside him a moderately scathing look, but the newcomer only smiled, oblivious to the wattage with which First Sergeant Frugoni had incinerated decades of hapless recruits and privates. For just a moment, he found himself longing wistfully for the uniform and chevrons—and the authority that went with them—he’d left behind along with the rest of the Corps. Unfortunately, civilian life imposed somewhat different constraints. He hated giving up his current seat, for several reasons, but there were equally good reasons to change it, and so he sighed resignedly as he closed his minicomp, stood, and reached for his overhead bag.
“Why don’t you sit back down, First Sergeant?” the intrusive civilian asked softly, and Frugoni froze. He darted another look at the other man, and the stranger smiled and patted the seat he’d just climbed out of.
“It’s a fairly comfortable seat in a very good position,” he pointed out. “And it’ll be much easier for us to talk with you sitting in it. Probably less obtrusive than shouting back and forth across the aisle, too, now that I think about it.”
“And why should I want to talk to you?” Frugoni asked just a bit sharply. “For that matter, who the hell are you?”
“Eldbrand, Harvey Eldbrand.” The other man extended his hand; Frugoni looked at it with a marked lack of enthusiasm.
“I don’t know any Eldbrands, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, no. We’ve never met.” The other fellow—Eldbrand—smiled, still holding out his hand until Frugoni finally shook it…briefly.
“However,” Eldbrand went on then, “I do know some of the other people you know…and I also know quite a bit about you.”
“Here on Swallow, people take their privacy seriously.” Frugoni’s voice had taken on a much harder edge.
“I know,” Eldbrand said calmly. “That’s why you should sit back down so we can talk. I promise you’ll find the conversation…interesting. You may even find it useful.”
“Useful how?”
Even as he asked the question, Frugoni knew he shouldn’t have. He should have just shaken the guy’s hand, told him he must have the wrong party, and gotten the hell away from him while the getting was good. But now he was half-trapped. One or two other passengers had glanced his way, seen him standing—and seen him talking to the stranger. That was likely to stick in their minds if anyone asked them any questions. And even if it didn’t, the interior of every air shuttle in the Swallow System was covered by cameras. Given who he was and who his sister had been, the Fivers—the agents of General Tyrone Matsuhito’s Inspectorate Five, the Swallow System’s secret police—would be very interested in any imagery of him. If he made a point of walking away at this point, they’d want to know why. On the other hand, if he just sat back down…
He hesitated a moment longer, then calmly took his bag from the overhead compartment, opened it, pulled out a book reader, then closed the bag and put it back. He settled back into his seat, smiled at his companion (although there was no smile in his blue eyes), and flipped the book viewer open.
“I don’t like people who crowd me on shuttles,” he said conversationally. “Especially people I don’t know who say they know me.”
“That’s not what I said. I said I know a lot about you, which is true. And candor compels me to admit that I caught this flight because you did.”
“Really?” Frugoni leaned back. “I think I’m liking you less and less.”
“That’s a pity,” Eldbrand said cheerfully, “because once you get to know me, you’ll find I’m a very useful sort of fellow.”
“There’s that word again—‘useful.’” Frugoni shrugged. “You want to book a tour of the Cripples? That’s the only interest I could see us sharing. I mean, no offense”—a bared-teeth smile gave the lie to the last two words—“but you don’t exactly look like somebody who’d be ‘useful’ to me in a professional sort of way.”
The stranger actually chuckled.
“Oh, not in the way you’re thinking, anyway!” he said feelingly. “I doubt I’d last fifteen minutes in the Cripples, and I don’t have any local business accounts or contacts that could help your charter service’s bottom line. But that wasn’t what I was talking about.”
“Well, these days, that’s all I’m interested in talking about,” Frugoni told him. “I’m not in the Corps anymore, despite that ‘First Sergeant’ business. I run a charter service—a damned good one, if I do say so myself—but it’s still in the startup phase. I’m not interested in focusing on anything else right now.”
“Not officially, anyway,” Eldbrand said, and Frugoni tensed.
“You really are looking for trouble, aren’t you?” His expression was as calm as ever, but his eyes were hard. “This isn’t a good planet for people who go around playing—what’s the term? Agent provocateur, I think. All I am these days is a businessman. Okay, I’m pissed off as hell at Tallulah, and Tallulah’s pissed off at me for competing with them for scraps of the tourist trade. But I’m making it work—mostly because I’ve got so much better contacts up in the Cripples, which is their own damned fault—and that’s what I’m interested in. I don’t like Tallulah, but I’ve decided the only place I can really hurt them is in their cash flow, and that’s exactly what I’m doing, in my own modest way. All I’m doing. If you’re trying to imply anything else—or if somebody, and I’m naming no names, wants you to get me to implicate myself—you’re wasting your time. I’ll put on my dancing shoes and pop the champagne if something really, really nasty happens to Tallulah, but I’m not stupid enough to try to make it happen. So why don’t you take your obscure comments and peddle them somewhere else?”
“First Sergeant—I’m sorry, Mister Frugoni—if I were a Fiver, or even working for the SFC, I wouldn’t need you to implicate yourself.”
Frugoni’s eyes flared. He started to reply, then stopped, unwilling to give the other any additional openings. He hadn’t expected a provocateur to accept his challenge that openly. Now that the extraordinarily ordinary-looking man had done just that, he had no idea what to say next. And in a case like that, the best thing to say was absolutely nothing.
“Relax,” Eldbrand said, then snorted softly. “Sorry. That’s the last thing you’re going to do. Clichés seem to rise to the surface at a moment like this, though. What I meant was that I’m here as a friend, or at least a…benevolent neutral as far as the Cripple Mountain Movement is concerned.”
Frugoni reached casually into his jacket pocket and the worn hilt of a Mark 63 combat vibro blade settled into his palm. He wouldn’t be walking away if this went as badly as it was beginning to seem it might, he thought almost calmly. But if he wasn’t, then neither was the other man.
“Three months ago,” Eldbrand said calmly, “on one of your trips to Wonder, you left your hotel, went to a bar named O’Casey’s—a fairly disreputable bar, actually—and had half a dozen beers with a lady of…dubious reputation named Gladys.” He grimaced. “As assumed names go I suppose ‘Gladys’ is no worse than Harvey, but I believe that many years ago you knew her as Chief Petty Officer Gloria Stephanopoulos. That was during your deployment to support an OFS op—in the Dillard System, I think. Do I have that right?”
An icy chill settled in Frugoni’s belly. He never moved a muscle, but those blue eyes had taken on an even colder tinge. One that anyone who’d ever seen combat with First Sergeant Frugoni would have recognized instantly. Eldbrand, however, appeared oblivious to it.
“For the sake of argument, let’s assume I do have it right,” he continued. “And let’s also—just for the sake of argument—assume I know about your friend’s various business enterprises, including the gunrunning. And let’s further assume I know the reason you were drinking all that cheap beer in that really kind of horri
ble bar was that you hoped Gladys could connect you with one of her suppliers. Somebody who might be able to come up with a few hundred military-grade pulse rifles, and maybe a few SAMs and anti-vehicle weapons.”
“If there happened to be a single word of truth in these ‘assumptions’ of yours—which there isn’t, of course—you’d probably be a dead man sometime in the next, oh, thirty seconds,” Frugoni said softly.
“Now that would be a great waste, First Sergeant. Oh, I know you’re not a Marine anymore, but I’m pretty sure I’m talking to the First Sergeant right now, not the ‘legitimate businessman’ you really, really want Five to think you are. Think about this for a moment. If anyone with the Inspectorate—hell, anyone on Tallulah’s payroll, for that matter!—knew what I’ve just demonstrated I know, why in the world would they try to entrap you? Trust me, if the local authorities had the information I have, you’d have been ‘disappeared’ the instant you set foot back in Capistrano. I don’t know if they’d have gotten you alive—even if they had, I expect the Marines’ anti-interrogation protocols would be causing their interrogators all kinds of grief right now—but they sure as hell wouldn’t pussyfoot around ‘entrapping’ you!” He shook his head. “You know even better than I do that that’s not the way Matsuhito or Karaxis operates.”
Frugoni sat back in his seat, the not-yet-activated vibro blade still in his hand, while his brain raced. Every instinct still warned him this was some sort of setup, but Eldbrand had a point. Swallow wasn’t a place where the authorities worried a lot about niggling little things like evidence or proof. Not anywhere outside the Highlands, anyway. If anyone in Rosa Shuman’s government had suspected any of what this stranger had just laid out in such a devastating detail, they would have grabbed him first and worried about substantiating it later…right after they finished filling in the grave.
They damned straight wouldn’t waste time stringing me along in hopes of getting to Floyd, either, he thought. If there was any way they could get their hands on him or Jason or any of the others, they’d’ve done it years ago. Tyrone and Karaxis don’t need any more “evidence” to go after the boys than they would to grab me, but they also know there’s no way any of them’re poking their noses out of the Cripples anytime soon. And they know damned well I wouldn’t invite Floyd to do anything of the sort…and that he’d know it was bogus if I did! So what the hell does this guy want?