Shadow of Victory

by David Weber

  Topór might not be a professional, but he appeared to have good instincts. That was nice.

  “Since I don’t really visualize any need to disable any recording devices—or weapons—during this conversation, your precautions, although well taken, aren’t really necessary. This time, anyway.”

  “Glad to hear it.” Topór unsealed his coat and withdrew a small pouch and a pipe. Harahap wasn’t a huge fan of tobacco, but quite a few of the ice cream parlor’s patrons were smoking. Indeed, a canopy of smoke drifted overhead—not heavy, but clearly visible. So he supposed there was no point protesting as Topór opened the pouch, leaned back in the rustic wooden chair, which creaked a bit ominously under his solid, well-muscled weight, and began stuffing the pipe.

  “The recorder wasn’t that big a problem,” he continued as he worked, “but replacing pulsers here on Włocławek is a copper-plated bitch.”

  “Would it help to say I’m sorry about that?” Harahap asked innocently, and Topór chuckled. Then he looked up as the adolescent waitress appeared.

  “Poproszę gorącą czekoladę,” he said.

  “Oczywiście,” the young woman replied, and headed for the counter.

  “Hot chocolate does make more sense than my ice cream cone, I suppose,” Harahap observed. “I have to wonder how it tastes with tobacco, though.”

  “So you speak Polish, Panie Mwenge?”

  “No. I just loaded a translation program. It’s pretty simpleminded and damned literal,” he tapped his uni-link’s earbug, “so it doesn’t help a whole lot turning Standard English into Polish anyone here in Lądowisko would recognize, but it does have its moments.”

  “I can see where that might be the case,” Topór agreed. “And as for your question,” he flipped a permatch alight and lit his pipe carefully, “that depends on the tobacco and the chocolate, I suppose.”

  Harahap nodded a bit dubiously, and the Włocławekan chuckled. He started to say something else, then paused as the waitress returned with a steaming mug of hot chocolate and a tall carafe from which to replenish it.

  “Dziękuję, kochanie,” he said, and spun a coin through the air to her. Her right hand snapped out like a striking serpent, and he grinned as she caught it. “Don’t worry about change,” he told her.

  “Dziękuję!” The waitress gave him a huge smile, since that coin was worth at least three times the cost of his chocolate. It was also non-electronic. The local tax authorities didn’t like hard currency—cash transactions were far harder to track—which meant there’d be no record of her unexpected income.

  She scampered off, still smiling, and Harahap raised an eyebrow at Topór.

  “Not that I’m criticizing,” he said mildly, “but was that really a good idea? A tip that size will stick in her mind if any unpleasant people ask about you or me.”

  “People around here tend to develop a sudden case of amnesia when the czarne kurtki ask questions,” Topór replied. “Especially about big tippers.” He smiled even more broadly. “Besides, that’s not very likely to happen. I’m afraid quite a lot of the local riffraff like the ice cream and hot chocolate here. I don’t suppose more than, oh, fifteen percent of the black-market deals in Lądowisko get negotiated around these tables. And two-thirds of them involve the black jackets. If they aren’t actually providing—or buying—whatever’s being dealt, then they’re collecting a piece of the action for protection.”

  “I’d just as soon not be hobnobbing with any of Ms. Pokriefke’s officers,” Harahap said a bit sharply. “If they’re running a protection racket and you and I aren’t paying them, they might get just a little huffy.”

  “Who said I wasn’t paying them?” Topór asked calmly. “I do pretty well in my day job, but nobody in Lądowisko’s going to turn up his nose at a chance to pick up a little extra income on the side, and I happen to like Sarduchan pipe tobacco.” He drew on his pipe, then lowered it and blew a perfect smoke ring. “The import duties on that are pretty damned high, so I keep myself in smokes by selling it myself on the side. I show a nice profit, actually.”

  “I see.” Harahap considered that, watching the smoke ring drift up to join the overhead haze, then shrugged. “Well, I’m happy for you that you’ve found a way to make your vice pay for itself. That’s not exactly what I’m offering to provide, though. Should I assume that the fact you used the contact code to set up this meet indicates you’re interested in what I can provide?”

  “I think you can safely assume that, yes,” Topór replied. “There are a hell of a lot of details that’ll have to be worked out first, of course.”

  “At the moment, I imagine I probably have a lot better feel for that than you do.” Harahap chuckled briefly. “This is what I do, after all. From what you just said, though, should I also assume I’m going to have to work out those details with someone besides you? Or in addition to you?”

  “Yes, you should,” Topór agreed. “So why don’t you finish up your ice cream cone while I finish up my chocolate, and then the two of us should go for a little tram ride.”

  * * *

  Progress, Damien my boy. Progress! Damien Harahap told himself that evening as he settled into the comfortable spaceport hotel room suitable for a lower mid-level bureaucrat with the Oscar Williams Madison Foundation. He would have preferred something more palatial, but it was certainly adequate. And it was convenient for his meeting tomorrow morning with yet another clutch of KWSS bureaucrats eager to find out how the Oscar Williams Madison Foundation would burnish Włocławek’s halo for the League. He loathed those meetings, but he had no intention of blowing them off or being anything other than intent, focused, and highly efficient during them. Harahap’s superiors had the connections to make sure the Foundation did exactly what Hieronim Mazur was paying it to do. For that matter, Harahap—or, rather, Dupong Mwenge—truly was an OWMF employee, and the Foundation connection was going to come in handy if Harahap started shipping in “medical supplies” for the Siostry Ubogie. Covers didn’t come any better than that, and he’d do whatever it took to maintain it.

  Even endure another meeting with that pompous ass Mazur, he told himself, and shuddered.

  But then his thoughts returned to his afternoon with Topór.

  I’m still not at the top of their organizational tree, he thought. Not quite. But I suspect “Grot” is pretty damned close to the top.

  The tram had deposited him and Topór on a slushy, old-fashioned sidewalk outside an only moderately rundown apartment building. It had reminded him in some ways of the “one-sun” in which he’d met Agnes Nordbrandt in the city of Karlovac. Of course, narrow, squeezed-in tenements were much the same all across the Verge; form followed function, after all.

  One difference, though, he reflected. “Grot” is a lot closer to sane than Nordbrandt ever was.

  He reminded himself that it wouldn’t do to rush to any premature judgments in that regard, but Grot could scarcely be less sane! Besides, Harahap had decided he liked the man. And he wondered about that code name. It translated as “spearhead,” which could just be a coincidence, but Harahap had found himself wondering if the choice of that particular alias had been a bit of a Freudian slip on someone’s part. Certainly Grot struck him as exactly the sort of fellow who might be “spearheading” an underground organization. Especially one with a name like “the Free Thought Crusade.” There was a definitely professorial air about Grot, with an extraordinarily sharp brain lurking close behind it, and it had been obvious he had something very like a mentor’s relationship with Topór.

  He’d also spoken with remarkable—and rather proprietary—assurance about the Krucjata Wolności Myśli’s objectives.

  But he’s still not the fellow in charge, Harahap decided, leaning back and watching the local soccer channel on his suite’s smart wall. He’s near the fellow in charge, but they aren’t going to bring me into a face-to-face with the guy who’s really calling the shots. Not this quickly…if they’re ever willing to do it at all, and in
their place, I damned well wouldn’t be. But by the same token, they had to introduce me to someone high enough up to pass judgment on my reliability and utility. And it has to be someone whose judgment they respect. Judging by Topór’s attitude, that’s exactly who Grot is. And, to be fair, he’s obviously a very, very smart fellow. I don’t think he’s the type to take anything for granted. Unfortunately for him, he’s a little too honest to realize what a cunningly deceitful fellow I am.

  He was a bit surprised to discover he actually regretted that. He’d liked Grot, and he found himself hoping even more strongly that the KWM might succeed here in Włocławek.

  But whether they do or not isn’t really my concern. What matters is that I have my foot well and truly in the door. We’ll just have to see what Grot has to say when he gets back to me tomorrow. And in the meantime, he decided, watching a particularly spectacular save, the local teams aren’t half bad.

  * * *

  “So both of you think we should take Mr. Mwenge up on his offer?” Tomasz Szponder asked, pouring vodka into Jarosław Kotarski’s glass.

  Tomek Nowak sat at the other end of the desk in Szponder’s Wydawnictwo Zielone Wzgórza office with a glass of honey mead, and the pleasant scent of his pipe tobacco clung to his sweater, tickling Szponder’s nostrils. Now he raised his glass slightly in Kotarski’s direction, obviously inviting the older man to respond first.

  “We both know Tomek can get a little…overenthusiastic sometimes,” Kotarski said now, with a smile. “In this case, though, I think he’s right. Whatever else ‘Mr. Mwenge’ may be, he’s not working for the czarne kurtki. Mind you, that doesn’t necessarily mean he is working for us, but that old saying about my enemy’s enemy comes into play, I think.”

  “I don’t like how cozy he is with KWSS,” Szponder said. “Having him zipping in and out of their offices adds an entirely unnecessary level of risk to anything we have to do with him.”

  “Actually, that could work for us,” Nowak put in. Szponder cocked an eyebrow at him, and Nowak shrugged. “He is going to be ‘in and out of their offices’ whenever he’s in-system, and they’re all going to know why he’s here. That means he’s probably the only outworlder in the entire system they won’t be watching for contact with dangerous revolutionaries. If we screw up, we’re likely to lead Mała Justyna to him, but I don’t think he’s very likely to lead her to us.”

  “Tomek has a point,” Kotarski agreed. “And I’ve done some research on Manticore. Besides what falls into the ‘everybody knows’ category, I mean.” He snorted. “And I’ve discovered that in Manticore’s case, what ‘everybody knows’ in the Solarian League is even farther off the mark than usual. I’m not prepared to propose them for sainthood, but this is one of the only two star nations to equate the genetic slave trade with piracy and actually execute slavers taken with slaves on board. And they apply the ‘equipment clause’ to determine whether or not a ship is a slaver. They were one of the prime drafters of the Cherwell Convention, for that matter. They have a reputation for being the sort of traders who could skin one of our own oligarchowie and then sell his hide back to him, and nobody gets that reputation without being pretty damned ruthless from time to time, but they also have a reputation for genuinely respecting the rule of law.”

  Szponder made a moderately incredulous sound, and Kotarski laughed.

  “Remember what I used to teach, young man,” he said. “I don’t use terms like ‘respect the rule of law’ lightly. But I can tell you that—reading between the lines—the thing that really, really pisses the Sollies off is the number of times the Manticorans have told the League in general and Solly transstellars in particular to pound sand. Well, that and the number of times they’ve helped other star systems stand up to their neighbors, including the League. I found several verified instances of that, including a system called Marsh, another one called Idaho, and a third—the most important by a huge margin—called Grayson.”

  “Out of the bigness of their hearts, I suppose?”

  “Surprisingly, I think that actually may have played a part in several of their decisions.”

  Both of Szponder’s eyebrows arched in surprise at Kotarski’s tone, and the ex-professor laughed again. It was a considerably harsher sound this time.

  “I know our own beloved political leadership makes it hard to believe that sort of thing, but do try to remember that not even Włocławekan politics were always corrupt. For that matter, if you really believe all politicians are automatically and irrevocably corrupt, just what exactly do you think is going to happen to you if we actually pull this off, Tomasz?”

  “Don’t think I don’t spend the occasional night worrying about exactly that.” Szponder looked down into his vodka, then raised his eyes to Kotarski’s. “I think about Włodzimierz a lot, sometimes. If it weren’t for Grażyna, I’d probably worry about it even more than I do.”

  “As long as you do worry about it, it won’t happen,” Kotarski said almost gently. “But my point is that there really are political leaders who prefer doing the right thing whenever that’s feasible. Most of them realize—or at least I hope to God they do—that it won’t always be feasible, but that doesn’t mean the right thing isn’t their default setting. And what’s impressed me most from the research I’ve done since Tomek’s first conversation with Mr. Mwenge is that Manticore seems to recognize the pragmatic advantage of doing ‘the right thing.’”

  “Advantage?” Szponder cocked his head.

  “People trust Manticore to keep its word because they have historical evidence Manticore does keep its word,” Kotarski said simply. “I’d say Manticore thinks carefully about the pros and cons before it gives its word, however. In the cases of both Marsh and Grayson, they needed military bases in the region, and in each case both sides recognized it was a matter of mutual self-interest and advantage for all parties involved. But also in both cases, Manticore went far beyond the minimum it had to do. It was building allies, not just bases from which to operate. They poured enormous amounts of their own resources into those systems, and over the course of their relationship, both Marsh and Grayson—especially Grayson—have made huge economic and industrial progress…and paid Manticore back two or three times over.” He shook his head. “Don’t think for a minute that the Manticorans didn’t have their eye on that potential return on their investment’ from the outset, either. I think the Manticorans seek that sort of relationship not simply because of that ‘default setting’ of theirs, but because those relationships have paid off so powerfully for them over the T-centuries. Whatever their bottom-line motive, though, any star system they approach only has to look at Grayson to see how the Star Kingdom of Manticore interacts with its friends and allies. That’s the reason all those systems in the Talbott Sector voted to join this new ‘Star Empire of Manticore,’ Tomasz.

  “And what I see when I look at Mr. Mwenge’s offer is the pragmatic military advantage to Manticore in helping us if at the same time that distracts the Solarian League from concentrating on the Star Kingdom. That’s on the one hand. What I see on the other hand is the damage Manticore could do to literally T-centuries of reputation if it turned around and threw us to the wolves. If it comes down to a life-or-death decision, one in which their own survival or a truly vital core interest would be threatened if they didn’t let us drown, then they probably would. Anything short of that, Manticore won’t do that.”

  “I think Jarosław’s right,” Nowak said quietly. Szponder looked at him, and he shrugged. “We’re all agreed the lid is blowing off here in Włocławek, one way or the other, sometime soon, but I think Mazur genuinely believes Pokriefke and the czarne kurtki can keep it clamped down forever.

  “He’s wrong, and we all know what’ll happen if he finds that out and there’s no one to take effective control when people finally go into the streets and just don’t care how many of them get killed this time around.” Nowak’s expression was somber, his voice grim. “It’ll be bloody, it’ll be me
ssy, it’ll be destructive as hell, and what Mazur and the other bastards in the Oligarchia will do when they realize they can’t stop it is call in Frontier Security to hammer the lid back down, no matter who they have to kill or how much of Włocławek’s future the Sollies demand as their thirty pieces of silver.

  “That’s what all of this is about, Tomasz. I know how important it is to you that we get back to what Włodzimierz Ziomkowski stood for, and I agree with you a hundred percent. But I’ll be honest. What matters more to me immediately, what keeps me awake at night worrying about my wife and my kids, is what happens if the explosion comes and there’s no one to take the controls and steer. No one with the organization and the firepower to impose control and kick hell out of the Oligarchia, Krzywicka, Pokriefke and the goddamned BPP before they have time to whistle up Frontier Security and Frontier Fleet. And right now, we can’t do that. We just can’t, and all of us know it. That’s why we had to use the Krucjata to tamp down the riots after SEOM shot down that airbus.”

  “And you think Mwenge—the Manticorans—will give us the firepower we need?” Szponder said, and it wasn’t really a question.

  “What I think is that no one else will,” Nowak said unflinchingly.

  “Tomek has a point,” Kotarski said. “And while we’re making points, don’t forget they’re offering us naval support, too. That implies interstellar recognition of us as the legitimate Włocławekan government by one of the most militarily and economically powerful star nations in the galaxy. And on the purely military side, it also suggests that the łowcy trufli will have a hell of a problem convincing OFS and Frontier Fleet that crushing us would be another low-cost operation.”

  “So both of you advise accepting the offer?”

  Szponder looked back and forth between his two senior lieutenants—his theoretician and his tactician—and it was obvious he was asking for advice. That he intended to make the decision himself in the end.