by David Weber
“They’re saying we did it?”
“They’re saying we enabled and sponsored it, not that we actually did it ourselves.” Langtry snorted. “They’re also making it pretty damned clear that the only reason they aren’t accusing us of doing it ourselves is because they’re such sophisticated diplomats. If they weren’t, they’d probably be as crass, crude, and direct as, oh, we were after that business with Monica, and come right out and say we did it.”
“On what conceivable evidence?” White Haven demanded, and Langtry’s expression turned more sour than ever.
“Well, that’s the main reason I wanted to talk to Honor before she left. Not just because I don’t want her blindsided in Nouveau Paris if Haven’s ambassador gets a dispatch home to Pritchart before Eighth Fleet gets there. I mean, I don’t want her blindsided, but the real question I wanted to ask her is what she knows about anything Anton Zilwicki may’ve been up to lately.”
“Zilwicki?” White Haven cocked his head.
His wife had a long-standing relationship with the Antislavery League and (some would have said) with the Audubon Ballroom. There were times—many of them—when that relationship became just a tiny bit of a problem where a duchess, steadholder, fleet admiral, and personal confidante of not only Elizabeth III but Protector Benjamin Mayhew was concerned. There was, however, no way in hell Honor Alexander-Harrington was ever going to change her spots in that regard. She’d imbibed her hatred of genetic slavery and Manpower with her mother’s milk—literally—and that hatred burned with a cold and terrible fire. So it wasn’t at all surprising Catherine Montaigne and Anton Zilwicki had become personal friends. Nor was it surprising that Montaigne and Zilwicki’s…involvement with people like Jeremy X, the theoretically retired head of the Audubon Ballroom, should splash over onto her.
“I know Zilwicki visited her aboard her flagship before Lovat,” he said now, slowly. “She didn’t really discuss whatever they talked about with me. I think she and Willie…had words over it, though.” He grimaced. “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.” His grimace turned into a smile. “Willie would have been swinging above his weight.”
Langtry chuckled. White Haven’s younger brother William—Baron Grantville and Prime Minister of Manticore—had inherited his full share of the famous Alexander temper. The foreign secretary found himself wishing he could have been a fly on the wall when that temper ran into Honor Alexander-Harrington’s calm, cool, absolute refusal to do one iota less than she thought duty demanded of her, and damn what anyone else thought.
“Why are you worried about Zilwicki?” White Haven went on. “Given what you’ve already said, I can’t think of any good reason for you to ask about him.”
“According to Mesa’s note, their conclusion—based, as I’m sure we’d all expect, on a careful and dispassionate examination of all the evidence—confirms that notorious Ballroom sympathizer Anton Zilwicki was directly responsible for the Green Pines attack. They say they have conclusive evidence he was on Mesa, that he was involved with the ‘Ballroom terrorists’ who actually planted and detonated the bombs, and that circumstantial evidence which—for some reason—they haven’t been able to absolutely confirm ‘at this time’ strongly suggests he was there with the direct sanction of the Manticoran government. They seem to be implying that we provided him and the Ballroom with support as a reprisal for their involvement in what happened in Talbott. Which, of course, they hasten to point out, never happened outside our own paranoid imagination or, conversely, outside our evil, imperialist Machiavellian attempts to turn Solarian public opinion against the blameless citizens of Mesa.”
“What a load of horse shit,” White Haven said sourly.
“Of course it is. On the other hand, there’s no denying he’s been closely affiliated with the ASL and people who are at least ex-Ballroom ‘terrorists.’ I mean, the man’s daughter is Queen of Torch and Jeremy X is her minister of war!”
“Yes, and Elizabeth’s niece is her best friend and basically runs Torch intelligence for her,” White Haven pointed out.
“I never said Zilwicki was the only Manticoran with connections to Torch,” Langtry riposted. “And did I say something to make you think Mesa wasn’t pointing that out right along with Zilwicki’s nationality? Or the fact that he used to work for ONI? Or that he’s become something of a personal friend of the royal family ever since he helped save Ruth Winton’s life in Erewhon?”
“No, you didn’t,” White Haven’s sourness had turned positively corrosive. “And of course the bastards would trot that out, too.”
“Exactly.” Langtry shrugged. “But that’s why I’m looking for anyone who knows what he may actually have been up to. I was hoping Honor could tell me, because from what you’ve said it doesn’t sound like Willie can. That means the only person here in the Old Star Kingdom who might know is Cathy Montaigne. And I’ll let you guess how the newsies—and the frigging Mesans—will react if they find out the Foreign Secretary is ‘hobnobbing’ with the notorious Anton Zilwicki’s even more notorious paramour, supporter of interstellar terrorism, mouthpiece of mayhem, and general all-round longtime anti-Mesa fanatic Catherine Montaigne!”
“Then I’d recommend making sure no one finds out,” White Haven said, “because I don’t think there’s anyone else who could possibly tell you, now that Honor’s on her way to Nouveau Paris.”
He smiled slightly at Langtry’s expression, which he understood perfectly.
“Good luck,” he said sweetly. “I think you’re going to need it.”
* * *
“Well, which do you want first, Hago? The good news, or the bad news?” Captain Merriman asked.
Commander Hago Shavarshyan pushed back from his console and looked at her, not without a certain trepidation. Sadako Merriman was a petite, fine-boned woman, with a pronounced epicanthic fold and long chestnut hair, and under normal circumstances, Shavarshyan didn’t mind resting his eyes upon her one bit. Of course, she was off the market, given her relationship with Commodore Thurgood. No one was supposed to know about that, but the truth was that everyone did. Besides, Shavarshyan would be a piss-poor excuse for an intelligence officer if he didn’t even know who his own boss was sleeping with.
Something about her current expression’s combination of chagrin, resignation, and sympathy made Hago Shavarshyan profoundly nervous, however.
“Gee, thanks for the choice, Ma’am,” he replied. She said nothing, and, after a moment, he shrugged. “I guess we might as well start with the good.”
“All right. The good news is that Admiral Crandall and her task force will be leaving us shortly. Thank God.”
Shavarshyan could only nod at that. He and Merriman were both Frontier Fleet, which was less than dust on the boot heels of any Battle Fleet flag officer like Sandra Crandall. Shavarshyan had been unfortunate enough to meet quite a few Battle Fleet officers, but the only one he could think of who’d rivaled her towering combination of arrogance, overconfidence, choler, and stupidity had been Admiral Josef Byng. Now that the Star Empire of Manticore removed him from the gene pool, Crandall found herself in sole possession of that very special niche in his cherished memories, and the sooner God was good enough to get her the hell out of the Meyers System—and, for that matter, the entire Madras Sector—the better Shavarshyan would like it.
From Merriman’s expression, however, the other shoe hadn’t dropped yet.
“All right,” he said cautiously. “I’ll grant that that’s good news, Ma’am. Why do I think it’s not unalloyed good news?”
“Because you’re a first-rate intelligence officer with a clear-thinking, incisive mind,” Merriman suggested. “And because I already gave you a pretty damned big hint.”
“That must be it,” he agreed sourly. “So why don’t you go ahead an
d give me the bad news now, Ma’am?”
“All right.” The captain’s tone turned much more serious—Shavarshyan might almost have said ominous. “The bad news comes in two parts. The first part is that the reason she’s leaving us is to move directly to Spindle and demand the Manties turn over Admiral Gold Peak and her senior officers for trial on charges of murder and surrender every single ship that was present at New Tuscany.”
“She’s what?” Shavarshyan was surprised, all things taken together, that his question came out so calmly.
“She’s going to Spindle with her entire task force to collect heads, and she doesn’t give much of a damn how much breakage there is,” Merriman said grimly. “In fact, I think she’s hoping for one hell of a lot of breakage. What she really wants to do is rip off Gold Peak’s head and piss down her neck, and she informed Commissioner Verrocchio that she intended to move out within forty-eight hours. That was the day before yesterday, and I’ll be absolutely astounded if she gets those Battle Fleet scows underway this week. But once she gets there, she intends to commit what the dictionary programs call ‘an act of war.’”
“Don’t you mean another act of war, Ma’am?”
“You’re not going to win any popularity prizes pointing that out, Hago. Besides, she is an admiral, even if it’s only in Battle Fleet, where competing skill levels leave a little to be desired. I think you’d be well advised to remember that.”
“Excuse me, Ma’am?”
Shavarshyan felt more than a little taken aback. He knew exactly how Merriman thought of Crandall. For that matter, her comment about Battle Fleet flag officers’ skill levels only underscored the contempt most Frontier Fleet officers felt for their Battle Fleet counterparts. Which made the implied reprimand of her last sentence even more surprising.
“I said you’d be well advised to remember she’s an admiral,” Merriman told him. “Because it’s occurred even to her that if she’s planning on rushing off into the Talbott Sector and committing the Solarian League to a potential war with the Star Empire, it would behoove her to have someone with at least a modicum of background knowledge about Talbott along. In fact, she’s formally requested that we temporarily assign someone with that sort of knowledge to her staff.”
Shavarshyan stared at her in horror, and she nodded slowly.
“I’m afraid you just drew the short straw, Hago. You’ve got twenty-four hours to tidy up your desk and pack. Then you’re reporting aboard Buckley for a little voyage.”
JANUARY 1922 POST DIASPORA
“It’s not that we’re not ‘fond’ of Mr. O’Shaughnessy. We’re very fond of him, actually. Sort of the way you’re fond of a cousin you know is really, really smart…and still want to strangle from time to time.”
—Admiral Augustus Khumalo,
Royal Manticoran Navy,
CO, Talbott Station
Chapter Thirty
It was a beautiful night, Colonel Kirsten MacChrystal decided as she followed Bhaltair, her four-year-old Hypatian Mountain Hound, down the park jogging path. The stars were just coming out in a sky cloudless enough to be visible even here, in the heart of the capital where sky glow so often killed visibility, and Thurso was a gorgeous, brilliant sapphire almost directly overhead, pouring its light down. The park’s artfully landscaped lighting managed to provide more than enough illumination without violating the…intimacy of the night, the air was cool enough to be fresh without nipping, and a gentle breeze danced and murmured in the trees. It felt good to be out of the office, especially on a night like this, and she chuckled to herself as Bhaltair disappeared into the banks of flowering hibernia that fringed the path.
He was a big, cheerful, always curious dog who asked nothing more than an hour or so in the evening out with his person, and MacChrystal was perfectly happy to give it to him. The Hypatian was an ancient breed, produced in the Hypatia System over a thousand years ago out of a crossing of the even more ancient Rottweiler and Greater Swiss Mountain Dog. They were big—Bhaltair tipped the scale at just under eighty kilos—playful, and generally gentle, but they were also ferociously protective.
That was one of the reasons Bhaltair had come into her life, because the United Public Safety Force was not the most universally beloved organization in the Loomis System, and Colonel MacChrystal was the commanding officer of its Elgin Division. The woman in charge of the system capital’s police force could reasonably expect to be unpopular with a great many Loomisians.
That was also the reason MacChrystal was always accompanied by a ten-man security team when she took Bhaltair for his evening walk in Hendry Park. And why Hendry Park’s jogging paths were closed to the public for thirty minutes before and after Bhaltair’s walk. The team maintained a moving perimeter, far enough out that she could at least pretend she was out alone with Bhaltair but in visual and electronic contact with one another at all times. She really wished she could just leave them the hell home at moments like this, yet she wasn’t remotely stupid enough to venture out into a public park without precautions. She supposed she could always have someone else take Bhaltair out—a point which had been made rather strongly by Alastair MacKeggie, the commander of her personal detachment—but she refused to give the bastards the satisfaction. Captain MacKeggie was of the opinion that she was probably even more unpopular than usual in the wake of the Mánas MacRory “arrest attempt,” and he was undoubtedly right, but MacChrystal had learned long ago that the one thing she absolutely couldn’t do was to let anyone even think she’d been intimidated.
Besides, she loved nights like this and she wasn’t about to give them up in fear of the sort of crackpot scum who were so upset over the MacRorys.
Bastards had it coming anyway, she thought, inhaling deeply as she filled her lungs with the hibernia’s scent. If they didn’t want their heads broken, they should never’ve organized their frigging “militia.” Did they really think we could let that kind of challenge pass? Especially now, of all times?!
She snorted, irritated at herself for letting thoughts of Luíseach MacRory MacGill disturb her at a moment like this. The bitch couldn’t hide forever, and when they found her, she’d follow the end the rest of her troublesome family had. It was only a pity Kiley had missed her when he made a clean sweep of the rest.
Whatever the public might have been told, Senga MacQuarie’s instructions had been singularly clear on that point. None of the MacRorys were to survive their “arrest,” and the existence of the “MacRory Militia” had offered the perfect pretext. Whether or not the “militia” actually intended to fight was beside the point; the UPS’ after-action reports would make it perfectly clear that it was the militia who’d provoked whatever happened by opening fire even before the arrest force had announced its identity.
Never expected the sons of bitches to put up that sort of fight, though, she acknowledged sourly.
The militiamen’s final casualties had been total—the UPS squads who’d shot the wounded and handful of prisoners in the back of the head had made sure of that—but casualties had been heavy for the assault force, too. Over ninety of MacChrystal’s troopers had died, with another thirty-five wounded. There was also the minor matter of sixteen armored tac vans, one command vehicle, and a pair of SEIU sting ships. They’d managed to keep a lid on their actual losses—or she thought they had, anyway—but they’d made one hell of a hole in her own command, and they hadn’t done much for the UPS in general.
And in the confusion, MacGill and her husband got away. Damn I hate it that that happened! And, she acknowledged, Senga wasn’t any happier about it.
Well, MacQuarie would just have to deal with it, she told herself. And so far her people had things under control. They’d met the “demonstrations”—it was against official policy to call them “riots”—with a maximum of force and a minimum of tact. A couple of hundred arrests and several hundred broken heads had whipped the “demonstrators” back to their kennels, and they hadn’t heard a peep out of them in the last week and
a half.
I don’t care what Touchette says. If anything more “organized” was going to happen, it’d have started by now. You’d think a Gendarme would’ve figured that out if anyone could! These bastards don’t have the guts to—
Her head snapped up as she heard a sudden, ferocious growl from Bhaltair. She whipped around towards the shrubbery where he’d disappeared…just as the pulser dart struck one centimeter below her right eye and her head disintegrated in a cloud of crimson and gray mist.
* * *
“Don’t spare the hydrogen, Ira,” Johannes Grazioli said as his air limo sped through the cloudless Halkirk night. His chauffeur glanced at him in the small com screen by his knee, and Grazioli chuckled. “I’m in a hurry tonight,” he said.
“Yes, Sir,” Ira Valverde acknowledged solemnly, and returned his attention to the HUD. He didn’t doubt his employer was “in a hurry tonight.” Technically, he wasn’t supposed to know—although, to be honest, Grazioli didn’t seem to give a damn who did know—about the pair of underage sisters waiting in the SEIU executive’s luxurious Rotherwal apartment. For that matter, the mere existence of the Rotherwal apartment was supposed to be a deep, dark secret. Which it was, officially at least, since a senior SEIU executive (and they didn’t come a whole lot more senior then Johannes Grazioli, Senior Executive for Logistics, Loomis System) wasn’t supposed to have a “secret” pied-à-terre.
Someone with Grazioli’s tastes needed a private hideaway, however. There were rumors, which Valverde believed, that he’d been caught with his fingers in the Manpower cookie jar in his previous post in the Bessie System. The SEIU Board of Directors had an unusual puritanical streak where genetic slavery was concerned, so if the rumors were true, it spoke well for Grazioli’s connections that he was still employed. By the same token, it probably explained how he’d ended up in a system like Loomis and as the number two member of the hierarchy, rather than as System Manager. Given the…esoteric nature of Grazioli’s chosen entertainments, there wasn’t much question in Valverde’s mind just how he’d found himself in bed—literally—with Manpower.