by David Weber
Kotarski and Nowak glanced at one another, then turned back to him and nodded firmly.
“It’s a risk,” Kotarski said, his tone as unflinching as Nowak’s had been moments earlier. “And if we’re wrong about trusting the Manticorans, it could be disastrous. But if we’re not wrong, it’s the best opportunity God’s ever going to offer for stopping everything we’re all dedicated to stopping.”
Silence hovered, and then Kotarski chuckled. It was so sudden both of the others looked at him in astonishment, and he waved one hand at them.
“Sorry! It’s just that I actually liked Mr. Mwenge. Quite a lot, really. I’ve been working on preventing that from affecting my thinking, but I can’t help it. And at least he has a sense of humor!”
“I don’t recall him cracking any jokes while we talked,” Nowak pointed out, and Kotarski snorted.
“Oh, but he did! In fact, it’s been a running joke since the moment he…introduced himself to you in that park, Tomek.”
“What kind of joke?” Nowak demanded. He seemed a little affronted, Szponder noted, which probably had something to do with his own jealously guarded reputation as a practical joker. “I didn’t hear any jokes!”
“Yes you did, you just didn’t know it. I didn’t limit my research only to Manticore and its foreign policy. I took a look at Mr. ‘Mwenge’ as well. The name struck me as a little odd, so I went into the University’s library banks.”
He paused, and Nowak nodded. When the Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika Department of History was ordered to terminate Kotarski’s teaching position, the department had somehow forgotten to terminate his access to its computers. His colleagues’ “oversight” had warmed Kotarski’s heart, but it had also proven extremely useful to the Krucjata Wolności Myśli. And as an ex-professor turned hobbyist, he made a point of puttering around in the library banks on a regular basis, doing research on the most disparate topics he could think of, as a cover for his occasional, deadly serious forays for information the KWM truly needed.
“Well, it turns out that ‘Mwenge’ is a word in a very ancient language, one called Swahili,” Kotarski said now. “And what it translates as is ‘Firebrand.’ I haven’t run down ‘Dupong’ yet, and I don’t intend to, since I’d just as soon not draw any attention to him if someone’s monitoring my data searches, but I’m willing to bet it means the same thing—or something very like it—in yet another ancient language.”
“You mean—?” Szponder said, his own eyes lighting with amusement.
“Exactly. He’s literally told Pokriefke and Mazur and all those aparatczycy over at KWSS that he’s here to burn their house of cards down around their ears, and they’re too damn stupid to realize it!” He shook his head with another chuckle. “How can I not like someone with that sense of humor?”
FEBRUARY 1922 POST DIASPORA
“Excuse me, Mr. Frinkelo, but this is exactly what the Eridani Edict is intended to prevent, and the Constitution obligates the League to enforce the Eridani Edict, not violate it!”
—Commander Bryson Neng,
Solarian League Navy,
XO, SLNS Hoplite
Chapter Thirty-Four
“All right, Paul.”
Innis MacLay rested one powerful hand on his son’s shoulder. What he really wanted to do was to ruffle the boy’s hair the way he had when Paul had been much younger. But fourteen-year-old adolescent pride got in the way of that sort of open display of affection these days. And if that was true under normal circumstances, it was even truer today, Innis thought.
“I’m counting on you,” he continued instead, looking into Paul’s eyes. They were the same hazel as his mother’s, and they met his father’s gaze steadily. “I’ve no doubt there are still a few Uppies about the countryside, and I’ll expect you to keep your mother and the girls safe. You’ll do that for me, aye?”
“I will, Da.”
Paul’s voice was deeper than it had been, Innis realized. It hadn’t truly broken yet, but it was closer than it had been. Had it truly changed that much in the two months since the Rising had begun?
His eyes burned for just a moment at the thought, and his grip tightened on his son’s shoulder. Then he turned and knelt to sweep the eleven-year-old twins into a huge hug.
“And you’ll be minding your mother, too, the pair of you!” he told Jennifer and Keeley sternly, his voice a bit gruffer than it had been with Paul. They looked back at him—Keeley with a demure, obedient expression that went poorly with the devilish gleam in her eye and Jennifer with darker, softer eyes, shadowed with anxiety. “I said mind her,” Innis told Keeley giving her a little shake, and squeezed Jennifer tighter with his other arm.
“Like always, Dadaidh,” Keeley promised.
“Lord save your màthair, then!” he sighed, and stood, holding out his arms to his wife.
She burrowed into them, more worried than either of her daughters but determined not to show it, and he hugged her close.
“And when will you be home again?” she asked, hugging him back.
“Well, that’s not a thing I can tell you, Rùnag,” he told her. “From the looks of things, it’ll not be long, but MacCrimmon and MacQuarie’ve fooled us a time or two. Still and all, I’ll be surprised if it lasts another month.” He squeezed her again, then stood back so that he could smile down into her face. “We’ve friends at the spaceport still, and MacCrimmon’s shuttle’s on thirty-minute notice to lift.” He winked. “I’d say that sounds like a man as might be thinking it’s time to be getting off-planet and maybe even out-system.”
“Pray God it is,” she said much more softly, eyes suspiciously bright as she gazed up at him. “And just you be remembering that a great, towering fùidir such as yourself’s a bigger target than most!”
“Oh, aye, I’ll remember, Rùnag!” he reassured her, laughing as she called him a clown.
But then his smile softened. He gave her one last squeeze and felt his throat trying to close. Perhaps Paul was even more like him than he’d thought, he reflected, because he was damned if he’d say another word and let them hear the crack in his voice.
He picked up his pulse rifle, slung it over his shoulder, smiled at the four most important people in the entire universe, and headed out the door into the bright, breezy morning.
Chattan MacElfrish, not so many years older than young Paul and full of fire, was waiting with the air car. He looked up from his book reader, shoved it into a pocket, and hit the ignition button to fire up the turbine as Innis opened the door and climbed in beside him.
“The family’s good, then?” he asked.
“Aye, they are,” Innis replied.
“Then that’s the way it should be,” the unmarried Chattan told him as he lifted the air car off the ground. “It’s good they’ll be waiting for you when it’s finished, Innis. I envy you that.” He smiled, then checked the time and nodded in satisfaction. “And in the meantime, we’ve some Uppy arses to kick! I’m thinking we should make Elgin by lunchtime.”
* * *
“I don’t suppose there’s any good news?” Tyler MacCrimmon growled as he settled into his chair at the head of the conference table.
The big, tastefully—and expensively—furnished briefing room was well lit, with the presidential seal inlaid in silver and gold into the enormous, hand-polished silver oak slab of the table. That seal belonged to him now, since he’d exercised the constitutional provision which let him “temporarily” relieve Alisa MacMinn of her office on the grounds of exhaustion. That was a much kinder word than “senility,” and the press releases all assured the Party faithful the Beloved Leader would return to office as soon as she recovered.
Even her most fervent supporters seemed to feel that giving her a little…vacation might be a good idea under the present circumstances.
Crystal decanters of expensive off-world brandy and whiskeys gleamed behind the wet bar at the far end of the room, and burnished silver carafes of coffee or tea sat before each of the people seated around the
table. Soft music played, the whisper of the air conditioning sent tiny, almost imperceptible shivers up the hideously expensive spidersilk drapes which concealed the smart wall when it wasn’t in use, and feet were silent in the thick, deep pile of the midnight-blue carpet.
The entire scene reeked of wealth, of power and privilege, and the people in it were as expensively attired and perfectly groomed as the briefing room. Not a hair was out of place. And yet, Frinkelo Osborne thought from his lowly seat, half a dozen places down from MacCrimmon’s, the air seemed heavy and stale. Not in any physical sense, perhaps, but laden with the stink of fear and weighted down by the invisible heaviness of desperation.
MacCrimmon’s question hung in that heavy air, unanswered. None of his cabinet ministers seemed eager to meet his eye, and he glowered at them for several seconds, then swiveled his eyes to Keith Boyle, the Loomis System’s secretary of war.
“Well?” he said flatly.
“There hasn’t been much change since yesterday,” Boyle replied. He twitched his head at the uniformed officer sitting beside him. “General Renwick’s just returned from an inspection of our front-line units. I won’t say his report is hugely optimistic, but we don’t seem to have lost any more ground overnight.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” MacCrimmon growled. “What about taking any ground back?”
“That’s…not going to be easy.” Anger flashed in Boyle’s eyes, although he was careful to keep it out of his voice. “If we had more manpower, we might be able to accomplish something along those lines. As it is, I’ve instructed General Renwick to impress upon his people that we can’t afford to lose anything else before we’re relieved.”
MacCrimmon’s jowls flushed. For an instant, Osborne thought the Acting President was going to lash out at Boyle, but then his nostrils flared and he sat back in his chair, visibly leashing his anger, and gave a single, jerky nod.
That was better than Osborne had really expected. MacCrimmon had always had a tendency to find scapegoats for his own failures and make examples when others failed him, and that tendency had become more pronounced as the LLL closed in on Elgin. Fortunately, even he seemed to realize this disaster was very little of Keith Boyle’s making.
Osborne’s own sources indicated that Boyle probably would have loved to launch a coup that put himself in control, but there’d never been much chance of that. Mostly because the Army had been reduced to a mere eighty thousand men and women over the course of the last several decades as first Lachlan MacHendrie and then his protégée Senga MacQuarie built up the United Public Safety Force at the Army’s expense. After all, as they’d pointed out time and again, there was no one for an army to fight, but MacCrimmon could always use more policemen! And besides, they’d added much more quietly in MacCrimmon’s ear, did he really want to trust someone like Boyle with any real combat power?
Which was why the UPS actually had actually been provided with more light armored units than the Army, and why there’d been so many heavy weapons tucked away in various UPS armories scattered around Halkirk.
Heavy weapons which had found their way into the rebels’ hands, in all too many cases.
Osborne glanced at the spidersilk drapes, and he was just as glad they were drawn. If they’d been open, the smart wall’s display would have made dismal viewing. After fifty-six days of fighting, the Prosperity Party’s loyalists held exactly two of Halkirk’s twelve regional administrative centers. They still controlled Elgin—or most of it, anyway—and there’d been no serious fighting on Thurso or in Red Bluffs, Glenquoich, or Gilliansbridge, the next three largest cities on Halkirk. But seventy-five percent of the smaller towns and cities had gone over to the Liberation League, and probably as much as fifty percent of the population outside those major cities actively supported Megan MacLean and her fellows. Personally, Osborne suspected that Ottomar Touchette’s estimate of seventy percent was closer to the mark. In fact, among the loggers and foresters who were the backbone of the system’s economy, the percentage was even higher, thanks to Nyatui Zagorski’s policies.
That was also a huge part of the reason the Party loyalists had been driven back into the larger towns and cities. The UPS had learned that going into the woods after well-armed, motivated men and women who spent their entire lives there was a good way to lose troopers and their equipment.
It doesn’t help any that MacLean and her people came so close to completely decapitating the UPS in the opening hours, either, he thought. I may not’ve thought much of Colonel MacChrystal as a human being, but she had a lot better idea about how to organize field operations than MacQuarie or any of the other HQ chair warmers. Not to mention the fact that losing her and two of her three deputies created enough confusion the Liberation League damned near managed a coup de main right here in Elgin that could have ended the entire rebellion in the first forty-eight hours!
He shook his head mentally, careful to keep the ever-increasing contempt he felt for the men and women in the briefing room out of his expression. If a single one of them had possessed enough sense to pour piss out of a boot—and the spine to argue with Zagorski—before this bitched up disaster began…
“Any more on MacGill’s location?” MacCrimmon continued.
“Not really,” MacQuarie admitted. “There are reports she’s in Conerock, but we’re just chasing rumors at this point, I’m afraid.” She shrugged unhappily. “We’re tapping a lot of their com traffic, but not enough, and they’re surprisingly good at communications discipline. They almost always use code words rather than giving names or places in the clear, and they’re obviously using a lot of dead-drop mailboxes. We’ve found and shut down over a thousand of them, and I’m pretty sure we’ve only scratched the surface. And on top of that, it looks like they use couriers to physically deliver messages whenever time permits.”
“Well, that’s useful,” MacCrimmon said acidly. His support for Senga MacQuarie was running thin, and although her dark eyes glittered she had sense enough to keep her mouth shut.
“All right, bottom line time. Our projections indicate the bastards will take Elgin away from us within the next four days,” MacCrimmon said to Osborne, his voice flat. “Right now, we’ve got them confined on the western perimeter, but they’re constantly burrowing deeper. More to the point, our orbital sensors show them concentrating for a push through Swantown, and we don’t have anybody left to stop them. Once they break through the Army’s cordon, they’ll come in behind the Public Safety troopers holding the western side of town.”
Osborne nodded soberly. Swantown—a wealthy “bedroom community” suburb of Elgin—lay along the Swan River, on the southwestern edge of the capital. If the Liberation League secured Swantown, the hard-pressed Uppies being slowly driven west would be flanked…at which point, panic would turn their stubborn retreat into a rout. Especially since they knew what was going to happen to them if they fell into the Liberation League’s hands after the increasingly vicious “reprisals” and atrocities of the last four or five T-weeks.
And what MacCrimmon hadn’t said was that the fall of Swantown would also mean the loss of Elgin Spaceport…the off-world escape route for the Prosperity Party’s upper echelon and their family members.
“I understand, Mister President,” the “trade attaché” replied.
“I believe you told us we could expect relief from McIntosh within three T-weeks ‘at the outside,’” MacCrimmon continued. “While I wouldn’t want to sound like I doubt you, that was almost six T-weeks ago.”
“I know, Mister President.” Osborne nodded again. “I know. And all I can tell you is that the relief force must be underway to us right now.”
* * *
“An’ keep your bloody heads down!” Alexina Morrison, who’d been a private in the United Public Safety Force less than two months earlier, shouted the furious reminder as the first hypersonic pulser darts began to hiss and crack overhead. “We need to take the fuckin’ tower, not to get your worthless arses killed!”
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A couple of the foresters under her command actually grinned at her, but most of the other forty-five men and women of her assault team only nodded grimly. They’d seen too many killed because of a moment’s carelessness. Besides, they’d come to regard Alexina Morrison with near idolatry. Not only had she and her partner been instrumental in taking Conerock in the first place, but she’d been in the forefront of the vicious streetfighting in Elgin from the very beginning…and she was still alive. That was a not insignificant accomplishment for someone who persistently led from the front.
“All right,” she continued in a slightly less penetrating tone, “when we hit the freight entrance, Tammas’ll go right and head for the lift shafts. Regina, you’ll go left and take out the maintenance and engineering control room. The rest of you will follow me straight for the lobby. All of you got that?”
Heads nodded, and she gazed at all of them for a moment, then jerked her head at the waiting objective.
“All right then, let’s get to it,” she said grimly.
* * *
Captain Dugald Dempster cringed as a new crescendo of explosions tore through the smoke billowing up to his left. Theoretically, he commanded an entire UPS company; what he actually commanded were thirteen troopers supported by a single light tribarrel, and the tribarrel was running low on ammo.
“Anything from HQ, Morag?” he asked, trying hard to keep the desperation out of his voice.
“No,” Sergeant Morag MacCuffie, his single remaining noncom said flatly.
MacCuffie was a lifer, hard as nails and with about as much compassion or mercy as a claw hammer, and her squad had been one of the first to be assigned to reprisals. Most of that squad was dead now, which was how Dempster had inherited her. He’d never liked her much, but at least he could count on her not to fold on him. If for no other reason than the number of people on the other side who’d see to it that she took a long time dying.
“Time to go,” she continued in that same, flat voice, her eyes tracking steadily from left to right and back again as she peered through her helmet’s vision-enhancing face shield. Even with it, she couldn’t see a damn thing through all the smoke and dust. “Left flank’s going to cave in the next five minutes, and we haven’t heard squat from MacWilliams in over half an hour.”