by David Weber
His widow, Ning, and his two daughters—Anong, the older, was only twelve—worked in the family restaurant, along with Tanawat and Sirada’s surviving son Thanakit, their daughters Kandokwan and Wipada, and their adopted daughter Alecta Yearman, known as “Naak” because of her bright blond hair. Alecta’s husband, Josh Ricardo, was a street hand, like Indiana, and it hadn’t taken Harahap long to realize how valuable The Soup Spoon truly was to Indy and Mackenzie’s organization. He wondered how many of the family and servers were active members of the Independence Movement? He’d bet on quite a few, although probably not Wipada. She was only seventeen, with all the tempestuous passion of her fury over the death of the big brother she’d idolized. She’d have plenty of motivation, but after watching Indy and Mackenzie with her, he very much doubted the Grahams would have recruited someone that young and so…impatient.
Not that it would matter much in the end. When the hammer finally came down, the authorities weren’t likely to draw any fine distinctions between who had and who hadn’t been active members of the opposition.
Stop that, he told himself sharply as he selected another prawn with his chopsticks. It’s part of the job, and you knew it going in. It’s your own damned fault for letting yourself get close to these people, start liking them. What were you thinking, “Firebrand”?
“This is really, really good,” he said, looking up as Alecta refreshed his hot tea.
“Of course it is,” she told him saucily. “We don’t allow anything that isn’t.”
He chuckled and picked up his teacup to sip. But the cup froze midway between table and lips and his head snapped around as the restaurant door flew open and Thanakit Saowaluk burst through it.
“Thanakit!” his wife, Malee, who worked as The Soup Spoon’s hostess, looked at him in alarm. “What is it?!”
Thanakit didn’t reply. Instead, he grabbed the remote and switched the restaurant’s single, ancient HD from its usual sports channel to the Education Channel News. Run by Minister of Education Anderson Bligh, ECN was the official propaganda organ of the Seraphim system government. Unfortunately, it was also the only legal news outlet, so people had a tendency to listen to it, if only in order to know what wasn’t actually happening.
The face an ECN anchor appeared, and Harahap felt himself tighten inside. The woman was as immaculately groomed as ever, yet something about her expression, her body language, shouted panic and confusion.
“Repeating our breaking news bulletin,” she said. “Vice President Tanner has just officially announced the loss of Seraphim One, apparently with all on board.”
Mackenzie Graham inhaled sharply, her face suddenly pale; Indy muttered an obscenity under his breath; and Harahap felt ice water flow through his veins.
“The ship was approaching Seraphim planetary orbit on its return from a deep-space industrial tour when it suddenly exploded,” the news anchor continued. “A spokesperson for Mendoza of Córdoba has confirmed—I repeat, confirmed, that Ms. Helena Hashimoto, Mendoza of Cordoba’s Seraphim System Manager, was also on board as President McCready’s guest. At least three other members of the President’s Cabinet had accompanied her on her inspection of the new freight platform at Mendoza’s primary transshipping station, as well. At this time, we have no confirmation, but there are reports Oliver Schonberg, Krestor Interstellar’s system manager may also have been on board.”
The woman swallowed and looked straight into the camera.
“General Shelton, speaking for the Ministry of Defense, has announced a complete freeze of all system and interstellar traffic in and through the Seraphim System, beginning immediately and lasting until further notice.”
The news anchor disappeared, and a gray-haired, stocky man in the uniform of the Seraphim System Army replaced her, standing behind a podium which bore the seal of the Ministry of Defense. A crawl under his image identified him—for the terminally stupid, who hadn’t already figured it out—as General Howard Shelton, the Seraphim System Army’s chief-of-staff.
“I want to stress to all citizens of Seraphim that the situation is under control,” he said. “Unfortunately, Defense Minister Goforth was aboard the President’s ship. In his absence, authority for dealing with the current crisis has devolved upon me. And while this has been a terrible tragedy, I assure you we’re fully prepared to maintain order while the investigation proceeds.”
“Investigation, General?” a voice asked from off camera, and Shelton nodded gravely, exactly as if the question had been spontaneous and unexpected.
“Astro Control sensor techs may—I stress the verb, may—have detected a missile trace in the seconds before Seraphim One was destroyed. At this time, those records are being very carefully analyzed by Astro Control, the Army’s own experts, and the Ministry of Security. Until that analysis has been completed, no ship will enter, leave, or change position within our star system.” His jaw tightened resolutely. “If, in fact, this was an assassination, and not simply a tragic accident, I assure you that we will determine the identity of the guilty party and that punishment will be swift, sure, and severe.”
“Oh my God,” Mackenzie whispered. Harahap looked at her, his own brain still trying to process the information, and she shook her head. “My God, my God!”
Her reaction puzzled him, since he wouldn’t have counted her among the greater admirers of the newly dead, but when he looked at Indiana, her brother’s expression was even tauter than her own.
“What?” he asked, and Indiana shook himself.
“If McCready’s really gone, this is going to get really ugly really quickly,” the young man said harshly. “McCready picked Tanner because Tanner’s got the backbone of one of Thai Grandpa’s noodles and the brain of a Pekingese. He’s the closest thing to a nonentity you’re ever going to meet. And Shelton and O’Sullivan hate each other’s guts. Bligh was McCready’s man, but if he wasn’t on Seraphim One, he’s going to be backing either Shelton or O’Sullivan. And if Patricia Mansell—she’s Minister of the Economy—is still alive, she’ll be the third pole of power, because she’s tapped in with all of the economic interests. If Hashimoto and Schonberg are both gone, she’s in one hell of a position to consolidate control of the entire economic infrastructure. That’s a powerbase at least as big as the Army or the Scags, and none of the three of them are going to settle for seeing either of the other two end up in the Presidential Palace. The fact that Shelton’s making the announcement may mean Bligh’s already decided which way to jump, but it could also mean the real reason that newsy looked so nervous was all the Army troopers with fixed bayonets standing around the set. And O’Sullivan’s probably spitting nails because Shelton got in first with the announcement and made himself the face of ‘the forces of order’ here in Seraphim.”
He shook his head, then grimaced at Harahap.
“Sorry, Firebrand. It looks like you’re stuck in the middle of a nice, nasty little civil war, but at least this is exactly one of the contingencies we planned for. Never thought it’d happen, of course, but if it did, we wanted to be ready. And we are…although, with all shipping locked down, it doesn’t look like any of us’re going to be able to pass word to your friends in Talbott.”
He smiled thinly.
“Welcome to the Revolution,” he said.
AUGUST 1922 POST DIASPORA
“So I suppose it comes down to a fairly simple question, doesn’t it? Are you prepared to comply with my requirements, or do we get messy about this?”
—Captain Amanda Belloc, RMN,
CO, HMS Madelyn Hoffman
Chapter Fifty-Eight
“—and I don’t give a single solitary damn what’s happening in the capital!” Warden Genevieve Bryant snapped. “Until I hear differently from General O’Sullivan, nothing changes here at Terrabore. Nothing, d’you understand me, Sampson?”
“Of course I do, Ma’am.” Major Frederick Sampson, the commander of Terrabore Maximum Security Prison’s guard force, didn’t—quite—snap to at
tention, but he came close. He also looked more than a little stubborn, however. “I’m only saying the troops are…uneasy. There’re an awful lot of rumors, Ma’am, and with Shelton saying General O’Sullivan was behind—”
“There’s no way in the goddamned world General O’Sullivan shot down Seraphim One,” Bryant growled. “Even if he’d wanted to—and I can’t think of a single reason he would—the SSSP doesn’t have anything in inventory heavy enough to take down a ship that size! For that matter, the entire notion that a single missile hit caused the thing to blow up with no survivors strikes me as pretty damned suspicious. Seraphim One was no starship, but it was still something like a hundred and twenty-five thousand tons. That’s a lot of ship to ‘vaporize’ with a single missile hit. Frankly, it sounds more to me like something went wrong internally, like in its fusion plant.”
Sampson looked less than totally convinced, and she suppressed the need to rip off his head and stuff it up a handy bodily orifice. But she knew he wasn’t alone in the uncertainty percolating through his brain, and in her calmer moments, she found it hard to blame any of the prison’s guards for that.
“Look, Major,” she made herself sound as reasonable as she could, “at this moment, Shelton’s saying anything he thinks will help his position. But think about this. If anyone in Seraphim did have a missile with the capacity to take out a ship that size before it ever got close enough to enter parking orbit, who do you think that would be? Us…or the Army? And if, by any chance, the Army might have been involved, who do you think the people who really killed all those people would want to blame it on? Some individual crazed gunman? Or the only organized force on Seraphim that could possibly stand in their way?”
Sampson cocked his head for a moment, then nodded slowly.
“I don’t say it necessarily was the Army,” the warden continued. “All I’m saying is that I know damned well it wasn’t us. At the moment, Shelton’s not saying it was us, either. I know he’s implying it as hard as he can, but he hasn’t come right out and said it…yet. So go back to your people and tell them the Security Police are still in charge of this prison, that we’ll stay in charge of it until someone with the legal authority to tells us otherwise, and that General O’Sullivan—unlike General Shelton—is a Cabinet minister. That means he’s in the civilian chain of command, and that means he’s Shelton’s superior.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
This time Sampson did come fully to attention, saluted, then turned smartly and marched out of Bryant’s office.
She watched him go with mixed feelings, then stalked around her desk and flopped into her chair with an expression that was far more anxious than she’d allowed the major to see. The truth was that even now, forty-eight hours after Seraphim One’s destruction, she still didn’t have a clue who’d fired that missile, except that she was almost as confident as she told Sampson that it hadn’t been Tillman O’Sullivan. For one thing, she was pretty sure he’d have taken her into his confidence if he’d planned anything like this. He hadn’t selected someone he didn’t trust to command the SSSP’s most sensitive prison, and he and Bryant went back a long ways together.
On the other hand, she was nowhere near as confident as she’d tried to imply to Sampson that Howard Shelton had been behind it, either. She’d always known Shelton was ambitious, but she’d never seen any sign he had the sheer nerve to try something like an out-and-out coup. That would take a lot more courage than he’d ever displayed. Now, taking advantage of the confusion created by someone else’s coup attempt—that she could see him doing. And Anderson Bligh was smart enough to recognize that Shelton’s command of the Army’s forces in and around Cherubim gave him de facto control of the capital…at least for now. That could explain why he appeared to be backing Shelton. Whether he’d go on supporting the Army general if the open fighting that was beginning to look inevitable actually broke out was another question, of course.
And then there was Patricia Mansell. She, Bligh, and O’Sullivan were the only surviving members of Jacqueline McCready’s Cabinet. Well, Vice President Tanner was also a member and, under the strict letter of the Constitution, he was also McCready’s successor. But McCready, who’d had a healthy sense of self preservation, had been very careful about who she chose for that position, and Hussein Tanner was a nonentity. He was, however, smart enough to realize that in any fight to the finish to succeed McCready, the body count was likely to be high…especially on the losing sides. Unless Shelton got hold of him and managed a miraculous infusion of backbone, Tanner was more likely to be looking for a way out of the impending dogfight than a way into the presidency. So the four people with the inside track to power in the Seraphim System were Bligh, O’Sullivan, Mansell, and—if he could manage it—Shelton. And while the Army was more heavily armed than the SSSP, it was also much smaller than the system-wide police force O’Sullivan commanded. That was probably the only reason Shelton was still firing barrages of innuendo in O’Sullivan’s direction instead of getting off the centicredit and actually proclaiming martial law with himself as acting head of state.
It was all very complicated, and it was likely to get messy as hell, but Genevieve Bryant couldn’t quite rid herself of the suspicion that none of the “usual suspects” had actually been behind what happened to Seraphim One. The problem was, she didn’t have a clue who else it might have been.
* * *
“Are you sure you want to be quite this hands-on, Firebrand?” Indiana Graham asked, Seraphim System Army helmet tucked in his left elbow. “I know you’re a daring interstellar secret agent and all that, but there’s a really good chance you could get yourself shot.”
“Comes with the territory.” Damien Harahap shrugged rather more calmly than he actually felt. “Like you said, welcome to the revolution.”
Indy grinned and smacked him on the shoulder, and Harahap smiled back at him, wondering how all this was going to end.
Badly, probably, he thought. On the other hand, I’m sort of like the fellow in that old story about riding the tiger. Nobody’s getting out of this system anytime soon, and the SIM is going to do this, whether I participate or not.
It was a less than enthralling prospect, but he’d always tried to be a realist about these sorts of things. And one of the realities was that if the SIM mounted a rebellion that failed, it was extremely likely one Damien Harahap would find himself enmeshed in the inevitable post-failure investigation and ruthless purge. Somehow he doubted the Swallowan authorities would draw any fine distinctions between an outside agent provocateur who’d intended the uprising to succeed and one who’d only intended for it to fail.
That meant he’d damned well better see that the SIM succeeded, and this sort of thing was something he was good at.
Besides, I never had anything against Indy and Mackenzie, he reminded himself. Fine with me if they pull it off. And if they do, I’ll get my ass aboard the first ship out of this system before Mendoza and Krestor—or Oginski and Kalokainos—move in and “restore order” under new management.
Personally, he strongly suspected the destruction of Seraphim One hadn’t been a political assassination in the normal sense at all. There was no evidence of an actual missile strike, aside from Howard Shelton’s so far unsubstantiated statements, and that sounded like an inside job to him. That was the way he would have handled it, anyway, and for his money, Oginski had been after Hashimoto and Schonberg, with killing McCready and her cabinet officials as no more than a useful side effect. That was a little more bare-knuckled than usual, even for an Oginski op, but no one had ever accused the Oginski Group of shying away from a little bloodshed. It was unfortunate for them that they’d missed Schonberg, but if Harahap had been the Krestor Interstellar system manager, he’d be hiding in a very deep, very well protected hole somewhere while he screamed for help…assuming he could get a ship out of the system. The kind of people prepared to take out a presidential yacht with a thousand people on board, including its crew; the President,
three members of her cabinet, and her entire staff; and the security personnel for McCready and Hashimoto, were unlikely to leave the job half done.
In the meantime, however…
“All right,” Indy said to the two hundred other men and women gathered in the crowded, dilapidated Rust Belt warehouse. “We’re ready. Firebrand, you’re number two in the queue. Juggler,” he turned to Thanakit Saowaluk, “you’re number three.” The other two men nodded, and he looked at the others. “The rest of you get to your own vehicles and be ready to move the instant Magpie or I come up on the com and call you in. I hope we won’t need you; if we do, come in balls-to-the-wall and shoot anything in a Scag uniform on sight. But remember, no one else moves until Saratoga and Osiris do, and you don’t move at all unless one of the two of us tells you to, right?”
Heads nodded, and he nodded back. Then he pulled on his helmet, glanced at Harahap and Saowaluk and twitched his head at the three waiting air lorries.
They were standard Mastodonte heavy-lift lorries which had been acquired from Mendoza of Córdoba courtesy of the funds Firebrand’s superiors had made available to the Seraphim Independence Movement. By a strange coincidence, the Mastodonte had been selected twelve T-years ago—only after a scrupulously honest and open bidding process, of course—as the Seraphim System Army’s primary troop transport and cargo vehicle. And by an even stranger coincidence, all three of these Mastodontes were painted in the SSA Transport Command’s colors…and their cargo beds were fully occupied by grim-faced, heavily armed men and women in SSA uniform.