“The intruder used the ID to get into the security complex,” Nancy said. “He made his way down to the prison cells, freed and armed the marines, then drove them out in a truck and headed into the city. So far, we have not been able to locate the truck, let alone the former prisoners. The traffic control system has been badly compromised.”
“Shit,” General Gilbert said.
“Quite,” McManus said. “A traitor in your ranks. How did that happen, I wonder?”
There’s no guarantee Commander Archer is actually the traitor, Julia thought. He might simply have been the victim of identity theft.
“I have no reason to think he’s a traitor,” General Gilbert said. “It is true his competence is limited, but ...”
“Or he could be pretending to be incompetent,” McManus said. “He might have been a long-term undercover agent, burrowing his way into your confidence until he was in a position to strike. Your entire staff could have been compromised.”
“That is unlikely,” General Gilbert said. He sounded as if he didn’t quite believe himself. “I think we have to approach the situation carefully and ...”
“No.” McManus stared at him. “There’s no time. We have to arrest your staff now ...”
General Gilbert spoke over him. “And if we do that, we’ll be unable to regroup our forces before it’s too late.”
“And can we do that” - McManus sneered - “if your staff is compromised?”
He looked from face to face. “I request, again, complete control of military forces within the city. I will arrest the staff, preventing the compromised officers from doing any further damage, then prepare a defence that will bleed the marines white if they ignore our attempts at negotiation and resume the offensive.”
“This is not the time for a sudden change in command,” General Gilbert insisted. “The war is not yet decided ...”
“And if we allow an enemy operative to remain in position within your ranks,” McManus snapped, “the war will be decided.”
The director silently assessed the mode of the table. “General Gilbert, transfer command authority to Director McManus. We’ll have to find and capture the spy before things get any worse.”
“Yes, sir,” General Gilbert said, coldly.
Julia felt a flicker of sympathy. General Gilbert was no traitor - he could have launched a coup in all the confusion, if he’d wished - but his career had been destroyed in less than a minute. The board would never forgive him for harbouring a spy ... if, of course, there was a spy. Not, she supposed, that it would matter that much. General Gilbert had enemies who hated him personally and enemies who had nothing against him, but wanted his position filled by one of their clients. And McManus would hardly leave a potential threat at his back, not now that the daggers were drawn. General Gilbert would be thrown in one of the cells soon enough.
“Regroup our forces, then hold the line as long as possible,” the Director ordered McManus. “Julia, prepare a diplomatic message for the marines. Let us see if they’re willing to talk.”
“Yes, sir,” Julia said. She’d already made up her mind. She’d play nice, right up until the moment it was time to play nasty. “I’ll get right on it.”
“General, stay behind,” the director ordered. “Everyone else, return to your duties.”
Julia stood and followed McManus out the door. The security director seemed to have a new spring in his step. She watched him greet a pair of armed guards, then hurry down the stairs to his office. He was already barking orders for command and control to be shifted to his men, even as his troops fanned out to capture General Gilbert’s staff officers. Julia wondered, as she turned to head back to her own office, how many of the poor bastards would survive the experience. Many of them personally owed their positions to General Gilbert. McManus was hardly likely to leave them alive.
She opened the door and stepped into the office, then sagged against the door. Her heart was pounding. The population monitoring system might be down - the last report had insisted it would take months, at least, to repair the system and replace the destroyed monitors - but it was quite possible someone had concealed bugs in her chambers. The director’s security staff had no reason to think she was harmless. They might fear she’d been conditioned, even though she’d passed all the tests. How could they catch her lying when she didn’t know she was lying?
Great, her thoughts muttered. You can go to jail in the knowledge you’re perfectly innocent.
She pushed herself off the door and headed for the desk. It looked a mess, but she’d placed everything with a certain degree of malice aforethought. If someone - anyone - had been in her chambers and searched her desk, it wouldn’t be easy for them to put everything back when they’d found it. Not, she supposed, that she’d been stupid enough to leave something incriminating lying around where a searcher might find it. It hadn’t taken her long, as she’d grown into adulthood and started her career, to learn random searches were a fact of life. The academy staff had been fond of them ... and woe betide anyone who got caught.
The terminal - and the junk she’d put on top of it - looked unmoved. She sat down, wondering if she was about to make the greatest mistake of her career. Second greatest, perhaps. In hindsight, returning to Onge had been a mistake. She should have known better. She should have known ... she put the thought out of her mind as she opened the terminal, wondering if she was going to spend the rest of a short and miserable life in McManus’s cells. If someone was watching her ...
They think I’m harmless, she thought, sourly. She supposed it was true. She was unarmed, effectively powerless. What can I do, without the director’s permission?
Her heart thudded as she opened her inbox. The message was where she’d left it, a call to rebellion and war. She hadn’t dared so much as delete it, for fear of acknowledging its existence. She supposed she should be glad that so many officers and men had received the message. No one, not even McManus, could purge everyone. He might as well surrender to the invaders and save time. And yet ...
Bracing herself, she opened the message and started to compose a reply.
***
Thaddeus felt ... old.
He was in his second century. Few humans lived so long, even with the advantages of modern medicine. And ... he wondered, suddenly, if his parents had made a mistake when they’d raised him. He’d been subject to his father, at least until the old man had died, but he hadn’t had to climb the ladder himself. Nothing short of a truly disastrous screw-up would have kept him from sitting on the board, even if he didn’t become CEO. He wasn’t sure how to handle a crisis when all the tools at his disposal broke, one by one. The systems his ancestors had spent years building were starting to come apart at the seams.
General Gilbert cleared his throat. “Sir, I ...”
Thaddeus looked at him. “How long have you known Commander Archer?”
“He was assigned to the anchor station,” General Gilbert said. “And he attached himself to me as we fled to the surface.”
“I see.” Thaddeus felt his heart sink. An ambitious officer would attach himself to a superior, but so would a spy. There’d been so much confusion during the invasion, and afterwards, that it was hard to properly vet one’s officers before putting them to work. It was easy to see how the mistake had happened ... easy, too, to see how Gilbert would never be allowed to recover from it. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Thank you, sir,” General Gilbert said, stiffly. He’d stood with the others and remained standing. “Do you want anything else from me?”
Thaddeus read the younger man’s future in his eyes and shivered. General Gilbert had no future. He would go back to his quarters, put a gun to his head and pull the trigger. And why not? What did he have to live for? Gilbert couldn’t retire to the family estate and spend his declining years writing largely fictitious memoirs. McManus or one of the others would want him dead. Hell, the board would want a scapegoat for everything ...
“No,”
he said, quietly. He wanted to say something reassuring, but what could he say? Nothing came to mind. “I’ll see you later.”
He closed his eyes. There were few cards left to play now. The marines might let themselves be stalled ... it wasn’t much, he told himself, but it was all he had. The only other option was surrender and that was unthinkable. He knew he couldn’t give up. Centuries of work would be lost if he ran up the white flag. And who knew what sort of universe the marines would create?
I won’t live long enough to see it, he thought. He was tempted to call Julia and demand an update, even though it had only been a few minutes since he’d dismissed her. In hindsight, he should have listened to her. She’d been right and he’d been wrong and it was too late to make amends. Whatever they build ...
He shook his head. There were still cards to play. The game wasn’t over yet.
Chapter Thirty-Six
There were several separate problems. The empire saw itself, incorrectly, as a paternalistic state. It tried to compensate for what it saw as injustices, only to make matters worse. Wage laws drove profits down, for example; regulations that made little sense, even from a bureaucratic point of view, made further expansion difficult.
- Professor Leo Caesius, The Rise and Fall of Interstellar Capitalism
Rachel was half-asleep, despite everything, when she heard someone knock. It sounded as though they were on the verge of breaking down the door, even though it was made of solid metal. Commander Archer shifted against her, still trapped in a drugged stupor. She was mildly surprised he hadn’t woken up. The dreams she’d given him must have been more appealing than the real world. Given the alerts she’d seen flashing through the datanet, the real world was steadily turning into a nightmare.
She rolled out of bed as the knocking grew louder. She didn’t bother to get dressed as she padded to the door. Her enhanced ears could pick up at least four people on the other side, speaking in gruff, cold tones. A quick check revealed that Commander Archer’s access permissions had been unceremoniously cancelled. She smiled, despite everything, as she keyed the door. Commander Archer was about to wake up to find himself in very deep shit.
The security officers pushed in as soon as the door opened. They were well-trained, Rachel had to admit; the leader didn’t so much as look at her naked body as he pushed her against the wall and secured her hands behind her back with a plastic tie. Rachel concentrated on looking harmless as the others flowed into the bedroom, Commander Archer letting out a shout as he was unceremoniously yanked out of bed and thrown to the floor. She could hear him alternatively cursing and begging, then yelping in pain. Rachel guessed the security officers had orders not to put up with any nonsense. It was hard not to feel a flicker of satisfaction. Commander Archer hadn’t been a traitor, not in any real sense of the word, but he had been a complete asshole. He deserved pretty much everything that was going to happen to him.
They already know his codes were used to hack the system, she mused. They won’t believe he’s innocent until it’s far too late.
She widened her senses as the security troops searched the office roughly. The entire building datanet had been locked down, to the point where only high-level officers were permitted access. It was hard to be sure, but it sounded as though the entire building was being searched. She heard someone crying in the distance, perhaps one of the junior staffers. The poor girl would be lucky if she left the security complex alive. Rachel wished, suddenly, that Phelps had blown it to hell when he’d liberated the prisoners ...
A hand grabbed her arm and yanked her around. “What are you doing here?”
“He told me I had to suck him or get sent to the front,” Rachel said, doing her best to sound like a victim. “He told me ...”
“Get her out of here, down to the trucks,” the officer snapped. He shoved Rachel towards another security officer. “And then report back here.”
“Yes, sir,” the officer said.
Rachel eyed him as he took her arm and steered her through the door and down the corridor. Professional enough, she admitted sourly. He kept his eyes on her, but there was no hint he might take advantage of her nakedness. That was annoying. She’d sooner deal with a lusty idiot than a professional. She forced herself to hang back as they walked past a row of bound staffers, sitting on the floor contemplating the remainder of their short and miserable lives. A handful of people she knew, from her formal duties, looked at her and then looked away. She felt a twinge of guilt. They didn’t deserve to be arrested and marched straight to hell.
The security officer kept pushing her as they walked down the stairs. Rachel listened carefully, trying to determine if they were alone. The lower levels seemed to have already been cleared, but it was hard to be sure. There were just too many sounds running through the air. She was tempted to hack the datanet, but if they had WebHeads watching the net ... she braced herself, then shrank back. The guard turned to grab her and she headbutted him in the nose with enhanced strength. He crumpled and started to fall. Rachel boosted her strength, snapped the tie and caught her former captor. He stared at her in shock, then opened his mouth. She crushed his throat before he could make a sound.
Idiot, she thought, as she dragged him into the next room and stripped him bare. Just because someone’s naked it doesn’t mean they’re harmless.
Rachel changed into his uniform, hid her hair under his cap and checked his equipment. His gun was fairly standard, as was his neural whip; the terminal was a design she didn’t recognise. She tried to hack it and drew a blank. The system was locked down. She put it to one side, hid the body in the closet and headed for the door. The corridor outside was empty, but she could hear voices in the distance. It sounded as though a small army of security troops had arrived. Good. No one would notice one more.
She walked down the corridor and into the garage. Row upon row of prisoners sat on the concrete floor, being watched by armed guards. Others were being searched or marched into trucks. Rachel was tempted to assign herself to one of the guard platoons and make life difficult for the security troops, but she didn’t have time. Instead, she walked to the garage door and out into the light. The troops outside paid no attention to her. Rachel smirked as she continued her walk. They were paranoid, but they weren’t paranoid enough.
There were no civilians on the streets, she noted; there weren’t many soldiers. The vast majority of people on the ground were security troopers, holding their weapons at the ready as they stood guard in front of the government complexes. They looked jittery, as if they expected to be attacked at any moment. It wasn’t an unjustified fear. The reports she’d read had been optimistic to the point of mindlessness, but it was clear security officers were under constant attack. She allowed herself another smile as she walked past a pair of antiaircraft vehicles, their sensors scanning the skies for incoming aircraft. There were so many security officers and military units on the streets that they’d be getting in each other’s way when the shit hit the fan.
She kept walking until she was out of the secure zone, then briefly linked into the datanet and sent a message. Phelps and the others would be hiding inside the city, but she had no idea where. She couldn’t tell what she didn’t know, if she got captured. She could feel unfriendly eyes following her as she walked into an alleyway, sense a pair of men following her. They felt like thugs, rather than insurgents or rebels. Somehow, she wasn’t surprised. There was always a criminal element, even in the best-behaved societies. The security officers probably didn’t care as long as no one important got harassed.
A voice came from behind her. “Hey! You come here, you pay the toll.”
Rachel turned, slowly. Two men, barely out of their teens. They carried a pair of rifles in a manner that suggested they didn’t know how to use them. She guessed they’d been taken off dead policemen or security officers. There was an outside chance the weapons didn’t even work, although she could hardly risk her life on it. She was fast, but dodging a bullet was beyond her
.
“That’s right,” the second man said. “Give us everything ...”
Rachel boosted and lunged at them. She was past their rifles before they could even start to pull the trigger. She slapped one in the head with enhanced strength, his skull cracking under the blow; she punched the other in the stomach, the force of the impact crushing his heart. She felt nothing as their bodies hit the ground. They were little more than parasites, draining the lifeblood of their communities. She stripped the first man, donning his shirt and trousers herself. Hopefully, people wouldn’t pay close attention to her now she was no longer dressed as a security officer. She took the rifles, checked them - she was amused to note the thugs only had one clip each - and then wrapped them in a stolen jacket. It would hide them from prying eyes.
Smiling, she turned and resumed her walk. She didn’t think anyone else was watching her, but she made sure to run an evasive course before linking to another datanet node. Phelps had sent a reply, ordering her to a particular location. Rachel grinned and started to walk, passing through cramped alleyways rather than walking onto the empty streets. There were few other in view, save for a security convoy that looked as if it was driving through the streets of Han. Rachel shivered in remembrance. The security officers had no idea how bad it could become.
Phelps was waiting for her at the RV point, wearing a hat and coat long enough to conceal a small arsenal. He’d taken his talents in a different direction, doing his best to look like an overweight slob rather than a helpless young woman; Rachel had to admit she wouldn’t have recognised him if she hadn’t known him so well. There was no sign of the other two. She’d hoped - prayed - they’d been sent into the city as well, even if no one had told her. They would have had good reasons for leaving her in the dark.
“It’s good to see you again,” Phelps said. He’d recognised her as easily as she’d recognised him. “Did you get out without leaving a trail?”
The Halls of Montezuma Page 34