by David Weber
“Shit,” Chernyshev whispered, and Detweiler’s face turned even bleaker.
“I’m not done yet. We also lost Luka…and Evigni.”
Chernyshev’s nostrils flared. Bardasano’s death had half-prepared him for losing his clone brother Luka, because Luka had been her senior bodyguard. Anything that happened to her would have had to go through him, first. But Evigni—?
“How?” The question came out harsh and hard.
“We’re still trying to put all of that together,” Detweiler admitted. “We know the mechanics, and we’ve taken at least two seccies who were involved, though they seem to’ve been pretty peripheral. They were interrogated…thoroughly, and they told us everything they knew,” his eyes were flint. “But what they had to say creates almost more questions than answers.
“One thing we’re confident of is that Anton Zilwicki—and probably Cachat, too, though our interrogators are less sold on that one—were right here on Mesa. We don’t know what they were after. I’m inclined to think they didn’t know—that it was more a probe than an operation with a specific objective. But the evidence suggests they made contact with Jack McBryde.”
“Jack?!” Chernyshev stared at him.
“That’s what it looks like,” Detweiler confirmed heavily. “Everything went to hell so quickly I doubt anyone’ll ever put the narrative together—not completely. But Jack may’ve gotten a bad case of second thoughts. One of the Gamma Center scientists—an alpha-line named Simões—suffered some kind of breakdown after his clone daughter was culled. It was a high-risk genome, so he should’ve been prepared, but he wasn’t. Unfortunately, his superiors felt he was essential to the project he was working on, so Isabel assigned Jack to ride herd on him.” Detweiler’s lips twitched in bitter amusement. “Apparently, instead of Jack keeping him in line, Simões pulled Jack out of line.”
“Jack always did have too much empathy,” Chernyshev said. “That was what made him so effective managing assets when he was in the field.”
“And it’s exactly the reason I pulled him from the field,” Detweiler agreed. “Anyway, somehow Jack and Zilwicki got together. We’re guessing Jack spotted Zilwicki in a routine agent’s report and that he’s the one who initiated contact. It looks like he wanted to defect—and possibly take Simões with him—but that went south when the same agent whose report led him to Zilwicki contacted Isabel directly. At that point, she had no idea what was going on, so she headed for the Gamma Center to confront him, and she took both your brothers with her. From the surveillance images we’ve been able to pull together, it looks like Zilwicki and Cachat had an escape route through the old service tunnels—one that took them under Buenaventura Tower. When Jack realized they were running and leaving him to twist in the wind, he used an insurance policy—that’s what brought down Buenaventura. But he obviously wasn’t getting out himself, so he blew the suicide charge and took the entire Gamma Center—and Isabel, Evigni, Luka, the rest of her protective detail, and Zeke Timmons—with him.”
“Zeke, too?” Chernyshev shook his head like a man who’d taken one punch too many. Zeke Timmons had been his own immediate supervisor, and Bardasano’s senior aide for field operations.
“Zeke, too.” Detweiler nodded. “No one’s sure what she was thinking, but if I had to guess, she took Zeke and Evigni because she hadn’t realized what Jack was really up to and she wanted both of them along when she confronted him and demanded an explanation of the other agent’s report.”
“If she didn’t know he’d turned, that made sense. And I really doubt it would’ve occurred to her that Jack McBryde, of all people, wanted to defect.”
“That’s what we think, too.”
“So where are we now?” Chernyshev asked in the tone of a man deliberately changing the subject.
“Well, we’ve told the galaxy it was the Ballroom and that Zilwicki was in it up to his eyebrows.” Detweiler chuckled grimly. “Since Jack blew him and Cachat—if Cachat really was with him—to hell before he blew the Gamma Center, he’s sure as hell not going to dispute our version! And it’s possible Jack didn’t set off the nuke under Buenaventura, after all. According to the seccies we’ve interrogated, Zilwicki was the one who planted that charge.”
“Excuse me? You’re telling me Manticore really was supporting a Ballroom op here on Mesa? And they got nukes through our security fences?!”
“No. Oh, that’s what we’re telling the rest of the galaxy, but what really happened was that a bunch of seccy wannabe Ballroom types right here on Mesa stole the damned things from a construction outfit. We’re not sure what happened to the built-in security programs, but Zilwicki had a hell of a rep as a hacker, so that probably explains it. Anyway, according to the seccies we took, the Buenaventura charge was supposed to go off after Zilwicki and his cronies had cleared the tunnels in their breakout. The service tunnel security pickups caught them still moving through the tunnels when the charge went up, though, so I’m inclined to think Jack figured out they had it and put his own trigger into it just in case they decided to depart without him. Either that or Zilwicki was a hell of a lot clumsier with the detonator than I think was very likely.”
“And the bomb in the park?”
“According to the seccies we caught, that wasn’t supposed to happen. The one who apparently knew where it was supposed to be set off died before we got that out of him, but he’d already confirmed that another member of their murderous little group went completely off the rails when Zilwicki’s operation went to hell. He’s the one who picked a more painful target and flew the bomb into the park, where he killed a couple of hundred kids my kids played with regularly. And damned nearly killed me, too, for that matter.”
“And the cyber attack?”
“That had to be Jack.” Detweiler’s eyes were bleak and cold. “Zilwicki may have been a galactic-class hacker, but whoever set that in motion did it from deep inside. Our forensic people’ve managed to reconstruct a good bit of it, and it incorporated access codes and passwords Zilwicki couldn’t possibly have had. I suppose Jack could’ve given them up to him, but even if he had, it’s pretty clear the attack originated inside the Gamma Center just before the charge went off. So all the evidence says it was Jack.”
“What did Zachariah have to say about it?”
“We’ve questioned him, of course, and he’s cooperated fully. I don’t think he had a clue what his brother was up to, and if you think about it, Jack wasn’t the sort who would’ve involved Zach. I don’t know what happened inside his head to cause him to turn, but he’d never’ve taken family with him.”
“No. No, he wouldn’t have.” Chernyshev shook his head slowly.
“But that’s basically where we are. At the moment, we’re turning lemons into lemonade by selling the rest of the galaxy our version, and the Solly newsies are falling into line nicely. Of course the Manties are denying every bit of it, but even they can’t know what happened, and Zilwicki’s association with Montaigne and her Anti-Slavery League lunatics—not to mention Torch and the Ballroom—is working against them in a huge way right now.
“In the meantime, we’ve only started putting ourselves back together. That cyber attack hit Isabel’s data storage hard—really hard. We’ve reconstituted about fifteen percent of it so far, but I’ll be astonished if we ever get more than, say, a third of it back. The rest of it we’ll have to pull back together the hard way. And with Zeke and Evigni both gone, we’ve got huge holes in our senior command structure. For now, we’ve had Yountz holding down the fort.”
Chernyshev nodded; Raymond Yountz had been Bardasano’s number two for domestic security. Given the aftermath of the “Green Pines Atrocity” it made sense to move him up into her chair, he thought. But Detweiler wasn’t done yet.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think we can leave him there. There’s too much popping loose—too much happening inside the onion, frankly, as well as the mess outside it. I need to pull Yountz back to deal with that, because nobody kn
ows his shop as well as he does and we can’t afford any—any more—dropped stitches, especially on the inside. We do not need another Jack at this late date! I’ve given him Steven Lathorous as an assistant, and that’s helped, but he really needs to move back into his own chair as quickly as possible.
“Which brings me to you.”
“Me?” Chernyshev frowned. “I don’t know the domestic side at all, Sir!”
“No, but with Isabel and Evigni gone, you know more about external ops than anyone else I can think of. In particular, I know you were completely read in on both Janus and Oyster Bay. If we get Yountz back on the domestic side, he should be able to take care of that until you’re fully up to speed, but we don’t have anyone else—especially anyone with your field experience—to take over on Janus.”
Chernyshev stared at him. He’d always avoided office duty like the plague, and he started to open his mouth to protest. Then he shut it again, and Detweiler nodded.
“So I suppose congratulations are in order,” he said.
* * *
The logging lorry with the MacLean Forestry Products logo moved sedately down the narrow, muddy lane through the towering silver oaks in a quiet whine of lift fans. The logging lorries of Halkirk were cheap, bare-bones versions of the more sophisticated transport available elsewhere, but they got the job done. This particular specimen was rather more battered than most, however…and if any suspicious soul had checked its transponder code, they would have discovered that it had been stolen three local months earlier from a dealership in Conerock.
Which probably won’t do us a hell of a lot of good if the Uppies catch us, Erin MacFadzean thought. It’s worth trying, though, especially if MacQuarie has them keeping tabs on Megan’s equipment. They’re less likely to spot an off-the-books lorry in the first place.
In theory, if the United Public Safety Force intercepted a load of military-grade pulse rifles in a lorry painted in the MacLean livery but stolen from a dealership a thousand kilometers from Megan’s nearest stands of timber, they should assume someone else was trying to implicate her. That she wouldn’t be stupid enough to point the finger at herself. The whole idea was rather more convoluted than MacFadzean liked, but Tad Ogilvy had convinced Megan it was worth trying.
The lorry reached a split in the trail and turned west, moving steadily away from MacLean land. In fact, they were moving into a dense belt of old-growth silver oak that belonged to one Nathalan Mundy, President MacMinn’s treasury secretary. Once upon a time, it had belonged to the MacLeans, but Mundy’s creative accountants had found a way to seize it from Megan’s cousin Raibert for back taxes eight T-years ago. Somehow—as often happened in the Loomis System—when that seized property was sold at auction, Mundy’s had been the winning bid. But he had no intention of cutting a single trunk until the scarcity Zagorski’s harvesting policies were bound to produce had driven up the price.
In the meantime, that virgin woodland, untouched except for the forestry trails cut through it, was the perfect hiding place for the weapons which had begun to arrive as promised. Megan MacLean had grown up roaming her cousin’s land as well as her own. She was intimately familiar with it, and she’d hired two thirds of Raibert’s foresters when the IRS seized the land and took away their living. They knew lots of places to stash things, and the last place the Uppies would expect resistance groups to cache weapons was on a cabinet secretary’s land!
This was the fifth—and final—trip to distribute Bolívar’s initial shipment. The other four had gone without a snag, and once she had this load snugged away, she could pass word up the chain to arrange the next shipment. And if things went the way she hoped they would, Bolívar’s second installment would deliver crewed anti-air and anti-armor weapons, as well.
And then the Loomis Liberation Front will start to grow some real teeth, she thought with a thin, cold smile.
* * *
“I wish you’d be just a little less provocative, Raghnall,” Megan MacLean said with a certain degree of asperity. “The last thing you need—any of us need—is to give MacCrimmon a pretext to bring the hammer down on us!”
“And what makes you think MacCrimmon needs a ‘pretext’ where anyone with the name MacRory’s concerned?” Raghnall had the MacRory chin…and the MacRorys’ gray eyes, which happened to be bright with anger at the moment. “You might be remembering what happened to my father and grandfather. You remember—the air-car accident?”
MacLean took a firm grip on her own temper. What she really wanted to do was grab him and shake some sense into him. Unfortunately, he was twenty-one centimeters taller than she was, and stocky for his height. And, she conceded, he had a point. As the heirs of King Tavis III, the MacRory family had great big bull’s-eyes pasted to their backs no matter what happened, and the amount of popular sentiment focused upon them only made it worse.
It wasn’t that Tavis III had been a great king, because he hadn’t. In fact, he’d been well-meaning but ineffectual and a bit weak, which was the main reason he’d abdicated following the bloody coup launched by Keith and Ailsa MacMinn’s Loomis Prosperity Party. A stronger monarch might have attempted to rally support against the coup; Tavis had seen only the promise of still more bloodshed, and so he’d handed in his crown. Most people hadn’t minded that much, and—after banning him and his entire family from politics—the MacMinns had allowed him to retire to private life, where he’d died of genuinely natural causes only a couple of years later. But the LPP had been less willing to take chances with his son, Angus, especially when people started talking about the good old days and “Good King Tavis” as SEIU started turning the screws on the Loomisian economy. As the unrest grew, more and more people started turning to the notion of bringing back the MacRory Dynasty.
Angus MacRory had known how that would end, so he’d stayed as far away from politics as he could. But Vice President MacCrimmon wasn’t the sort to tolerate even potential threats, and whatever might have been the case for Tavis’ death, there’d been nothing at all natural about his son’s or his older grandson’s. No one would ever be able to prove MacCrimmon had ordered their murder, but, then, there were a great many things no one would ever be able to “prove” in Loomis.
There was no doubt in the minds of Mánas MacRory, Angus’ younger son, or in his nephew Raghnall. Like his father, Mánas had been as apolitical as possible, but after Angus and Seamus’ deaths, that had become a frail protection, and Raghnall wasn’t prepared to see his uncle murdered the same way. There wasn’t much he could do to protect Mánas if MacCrimmon was prepared to come out into the open, but there was quite a lot he could do to preclude the sort of “accident” which had killed Seamus and Angus.
It was a sign of just how worried MacCrimmon was that Senga MacQuarie’s Uppies hadn’t moved openly when Raghnall organized the MacRory Militia out of his own family’s foresters and likeminded volunteers. There were only two or three hundred of them, but they were armed—albeit with purely civilian weapons—and Raghnall had made it clear he and his people would protect his uncle and the rest of his family. They wouldn’t stand a chance against Public Safety in a standup fight, but they also wouldn’t go down without a fight, and no one in the LPP or SEIU really knew where that would end.
The result was a sort of tense truce—or, more accurately, a standoff—between the Militia and the system government. But it was a precarious balance, and as the current discontent and anger over SEIU’s logging policies soared, it was becoming steadily more precarious.
“Raghnall, I understand how you feel,” MacLean said now. “For that matter, I agree with what you just said. But we need time—time to get ourselves organized. If something pushes MacQuarie into moving against you before the rest of us are ready to support you, it’ll be a bloodbath that sees your uncle and you both dead. The rest of us won’t be able to do a thing to stop that, and we both know MacCrimmon will seize the opportunity to do a thorough housecleaning of anyone he even suspects might oppose the regime. Wh
ich means the rest of us will go down right along with you.”
“Time, is it?” Those gray eyes turned cold. “And what about all the ‘time’ you wasted on ‘political reform,’ Megan MacLean? The time you spent playing at politics while MacCrimmon murdered my grandfather and my father?”
MacLean bit down on a hot response. It wasn’t easy, but she couldn’t deny his point. In fact, a large part of her agreed with his accusation.
“I deserve that,” she said after a moment, meeting those icy eyes levelly. “I thought I was making the right choice, but the truth is there aren’t any ‘right’ choices anymore. It may’ve taken me a while to realize that, but I didn’t start organizing the Liberation Front just to sit on my hands, Raghnall. I know why you’re worried about your uncle, and you’re right to be. But there are a lot of other people who’ve begun to see what you’ve been saying all along…and I’m one of them. We just need you to avoid letting MacCrimmon draw you into a false step until the rest of us can catch up with you and actually be ready to act. That’s all I’m saying. Just give us time. Buy us time—please!”
Raghnall glared at her, but then the broad shoulders sagged slightly and the icy fire in his eyes faded. It didn’t disappear; it was simply banked.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll not go crawling on my knees to MacQuarie and surrender our weapons. That I won’t do, not for you or God Himself! They’ll not do to my uncle what they’ve done to the rest of my family! But I’ll pull the lads and lassies back onto MacRory land. We’ll keep our heads down, mind our manners, and stay as far out of the public eye as we can. But know this, Megan MacLean—Hell won’t hold what’ll happen when the first Uppy sets foot on MacRory land after us!”
DECEMBER 1921 POST DIASPORA
“She didn’t really discuss whatever they talked about with me. I think she and Willie…had words over it, though. From what he very carefully hasn’t said to me, it wasn’t a very…productive conversation from his perspective. In fact, it’s probably a little surprising both of them emerged intact. Of the two, my money would have been on Honor, understand. Willie would have been swinging above his weight.”