Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 02]

by Fire in a Faraway Place (epub)

  “Maybe,” Sanmartin said noncommittally.

  “Was there anything unusual about the body?”

  “One thing—someone stuffed a wad of cash in the victim’s right shoe. New bills.”

  “Hell!” Haijalo exclaimed. “It means the frosting Manchurians did it—probably under orders. It’s a very, very, veiy old Chinese superstition to leave money in the shoe of someone you murder so that he gets a good burial and his ghost doesn’t come after you. I don’t know if anyone believes in the superstition anymore, but Chinese security people leave money like that when they want astute folks to know they did a job. They probably squeezed out what the man knew, which I doubt was much, and then finished him off. Sumi’s serving notice on the local rads that he plays for keeps.”

  “The second platoon of the Manchurian regiment’s reconnaissance company is designated as a ‘countersubversion’ platoon,” Sanmartin said slowly, “but I don’t think Sumi is serving notice on the ARM as much as serving notice on us. We’re already starting to get complaints about the Manchurians and the Imperial guardsmen from the merchants in town. Death squads aren’t coming to help matters any.”

  A few moments later, as Sanmartin was shrugging out of his webbing, Timo Haerkoennen waved him over to take a call relayed from his home. “Hello. Sanmartin here.”

  “Hello, Raul?”

  It took him a few seconds to place the voice: Anneke Brink from the faculty of music; a nice enough woman, but much too pretty and too well aware of it. “Yes, hello, Anneke. How are you?” Brink had lost a brother-in-law, a football player named le Grange, during the rebellion, and it had taken her a while to warm to Sanmartin.

  “I am well enough, thank you. I am flattered that you remember me from all of that dreary committee work together.” Haerkoennen nodded and discreetly disappeared.

  Sanmartin smiled. “Hanna says that I should be the politician in the family. How are you?”

  “Very fine, thank you. Please say hello to your Private Erixon for me. I wish you could persuade him to turn professional for us.”

  That was another tie she was subtly reminding him of. Chaplain Erixon had a surprisingly good baritone voice, and Brink had played opposite him when Letsukov and C Company helped stage Boris Godunov.

  “I’ll say hello, but I suspect he’s content with the two professions he already has. What can I do for you, Anneke?” The hint of coquetry abruptly left her voice. “Raul, 1 am so worried. What is happening?!”

  “I wish I knew.” A feeling passed through him. “Listen, Anneke, do you own a place out in the country—a summer house or something away from the city where you could stay?” “My sister has a small place outside Boksburg.”

  “Look, take clothes and some food and go there.”

  “But I couldn’t possibly leave now—I already have a full set of classes!”

  “Go on a sabbatical or something. Just do it!” Sanmartin closed his eyes.

  Sometimes he had a feeling in his fingertips—a “pricking of thumbs,” Coldewe called it—that meant something would happen. The Germans had a long, jaw-twisting word for it, having fought their fair share of wars. Sanmartin had stopped ignoring it one or two ambushes back.

  “But, Raul—” she began.

  “Anneke,” he said patiently, more sure of himself than ever, and for a few seconds the phone trembled in his hand, “find an excuse to be away from Jo’burg for a while.”

  “Thank you, Raul,” she said in a very different tone of voice. “You’re welcome,” he said automatically, and hung up.

  Thursday(311)

  IN THE BACK ROOM OF A JOHANNESBURG GUESTHOUSE, A DOZEN

  politicians met to discuss circumstances.

  With his eyes flashing under thick white brows, Wynard Grobelaar thundered, “Stealing fruit from the stalls is one thing. Murdering people is another!” Franz Vilhofer glanced at his watch. Grobelaar, the heavyset manager of a cooperative, had run unsuccessfully against Hanna Bruwer twice.

  Andries Steen said patiently, “You can’t be sure that the new Imperials are responsible.”

  “It’s still a stick to beat Beyers with,” Assemblyman Martin Hatting said. “The question should be asked.”

  Grobelaar looked around the room. “We have talked around the edges of this for an hour, now. Both parties have to take a harder line in defense of our people.” Emboldened, he added, “If we form a third party here and now, we have the power to make them do so.”

  Vilhofer almost choked. “Hear this straight, Wynard. Beyers can break any man here, and if you push at him, make sure you knock him over, because he will push back.” He uncoiled his legs and stood. “Unless someone shows me that they can do better than he has, you will count me out. I also think that anything we do to undermine the government now will only play into the hands of the new Imperials. If the rest of you want to make a noise to no good purpose, do it, but don’t include me.” He rose and left. Steen and three others followed him out. Grobelaar looked around the table uncertainly.

  Juriaan Joubert said tersely, “If we quarrel among ourselves, the new Imperials will swallow us whole. Franz has the right of it. //'the Imperials begin to oppress the people, and if Beyers does nothing to stop it, then we should challenge him. Until then, we would be well advised to be quiet.”

  “Well, I won’t,” Hatting said. “It’s time someone showed our people that some politicians are willing to stand up for them.” Picking up his hat, he left and began preparing a speech for that afternoon.

  When the Assembly met, hours later, Hatting rose to hurl his denunciations before the news cameras—and was promptly ruled out of order by Hanna Bruwer. For the next hour, he writhed in agony. Moments after the newsmen left, Bruwer looked right through him and called a recess.

  As she left her high seat on the way to the restroom, she murmured, “Martin, you should wait for the car to slow down before you grab for the steering wheel.”

  “Hexe!” Hatting hissed, loud enough for the room to hear. It meant “witch.”

  Bruwer turned and said in a quiet voice that carried nonetheless, “Martin? I seem to recall that Albert and I both campaigned for you, and you owe us. I think I left my broom outside. Please polish it up for me.”

  When the Assembly reconvened a few hours later, Hatting found a dozen dust rags from his colleagues on his desk.

  Returning home from the session, Bruwer found Anneke Brink waiting on her doorstep. Brink colored. “Oh, Vroew Bruwer. I did not expect to see you. I am Anneke Brink, I am a professor at the university. I was waiting for your husband.” “Heaven knows when he will be home. You had better come

  on in.” She nodded to her bodyguard. “It is all right, Tom. Juffrou Brink, this is my secretary, Tom Winters.”

  Stepping inside, she greeted Vroew Beyers and scooped up Hendricka. “Should I ask what my husband has done to offend you?” she asked with the child wrapped around her neck.

  “Oh,” Brink stammered. “It is nothing like that. When I asked him whether there would be trouble, he suggested that I take leave and move to the country.” She tried to conceal her anxiety. “I thought I should discuss it with him. I learned this morning that he has resigned from the faculty.”

  “I will have to ask Raul when I see him next. I do see him sometimes,” Bruwer said lightly, coldly appraising Brink.

  Her blush deepened. “Oh, I did not mean to cause trouble. I ... I don’t want you to think ...”

  Bruwer suddenly burst out laughing. “Oh, I’m so very sorry,” she said, wiping her eyes. “It just dawned upon me that you must think that I am a jealous wife.”

  “Well, I’m not sure that it is all that funny,” Brink rejoined. “Oh, it would be if you knew Raul better.”

  “You can’t trust any of them!” Brink said bitterly, with the experience of two marriages behind her.

  “Raul, I can trust,” Bruwer said calmly. “He has many faults, but he has not lived a normal life and I doubt that he would know how to look at an
other woman.” War had not killed Raul Sanmartin’s conscience, as it had with some men; other pieces of him, perhaps, but not that. She changed the subject. “If Raul told you to take a leave of absence and go to the country, I suspect that it is good advice.”

  “It is an easy thing to say, but it really is a difficult choice to make. I wish that I could be as sure as you!”

  Hendricka smiled at her and hid her face behind her mother’s head.

  “What a lovely daughter you have,” Brink said lamely. “Hendricka is more Vroew Beyers’s child than mine. Don’t you follow politics at all? I thought my enemies made the situation notorious several years ago.” Bruwer studied Brink’s face.

  “Raul’s battalion has a number of hard and very necessary rules, because the battalion can leave a world at any time and never return. In a way, I, too, am a soldier, you see, a most reluctant one. One rule is that married couples within the battalion must adopt children out. It is a rule they do not break.” Although Bruwer said this without effort, Brink did not mistake the pain in her voice.

  “When Hendricka confounded matters by arriving a month before my first election, as Raul could tell you, I took to my bed with her in my arms and cried for three days before I would give her up to Vroew Beyers. Then I whipped the devil and the living God out of the pompous hack that Christos Claassen ran against me. I have heard the things they said and still say when they think that I am not listening.”

  Bruwer looked up at the clock on the wall. “But even though Betje Beyers has been a good mother to both of us, it was very hard on me. And I know that it was harder on Raul. If he told you that you should go to the country, I suggest that you follow his advice.”

  “Thank you very much for speaking with me, Vroew Speaker,” Brink said timidly as Winters showed her to the door.

  Hours later, Sanmartin let himself in. “Are you awake?” he asked softly.

  “Yes. I tried to read and decided that I couldn’t. Have you eaten?”

  Sanmartin flipped the light on. “Kasha made me something weird and Russian. Or Finnish—I think it was a fish pudding.” “You’re impossible,” his wife observed. “By now, you know about Hatting. And Vroew Beyers tells me that Hendricka has been reading to herself for a week and neither one of us noticed.” She sighed. “I wish there was something I could do. A magic wand I could wave for all of our troubles.”

  “Me, too,” Sanmartin said with passion as he stripped out of his battle dress.

  “Anneke Brink was by here earlier. I twisted her arm to get her to go to the country. What is going on that worries you so?”

  “The ARM is about to make a move, and I don’t trust Matsudaira and Sumi not to do something stupid.”

  “No. That is not what I meant. Something is very wrong on Earth so that people like Sumi and Matsudaira are sent here, and Captain Yanagita is allowed to make subtle threats that if I do not grant concessions to USS, unpleasant things will happen. Explain this to me so that my heart understands.”

  He sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. “How much do you know about politics back on Earth?”

  “Obviously not as much as you think I should. We have the Imperial Government, the Japanese government, and the governments of the affiliated nations.”

  “Yes, and also no. About a decade ago, the Imperial ministries began working out of the same buildings as their Japanese government counterparts, and the two sets of ministries are becoming interchangeable. The affiliated governments are stuck because they can’t tax or regulate international commerce, and the Guardianship Council decides what constitutes international commerce based on the advice they get from the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry. Most of the time, the Guardianship Council goes along with what they’re advised to do.” Bruwer waited for him to continue.

  “In Japan, the United Democratic party always forms the government, but it’s really just a collection of factions— haibatsu—which divide up the available political offices between them. The big corporations funnel money to the haibatsu leaders, who dole the money out to their followers, which pretty much takes institutionalized corruption to its theoretical limits. The titular leaders—the prime minister of Japan, the emperor, the Imperial Senate—don’t decide anything. The Japanese call them mikoshi, ‘portable shrines.’ When a scandal breaks, as they do with regularity, a bunch of ministers resign and the haibatsu leaders hand their offices to another bunch.” He smiled thinly. “The Japanese have always distinguished between tatamae, how things should be in principle, and honne, how things actually are.”

  “And the Diet?” Bruwer asked, thinking about her own quarrelsome assemblymen.

  “It is hideously expensive to run for the Diet, and every election district in Japan elects the three or four people who collect the most votes. A Diet candidate who doesn’t belong to a haibatsu wouldn’t get any money to run, and if he won, his district wouldn’t get anything, instead of the tunnels and roads no one needs that everyone else gets in return for their votes. So most of them are owned, body and soul, and they rubber-stamp the legislation that the career bureaucrats in the ministries put together. Everything has gotten hereditary—everybody comes from the same families and goes to the same schools.” “How does one break into this network?” Bruwer asked, frowning.

  “Marry someone’s daughter or get adopted.”

  Bruwer held her hands up to her temples, starlight from the window playing over her hair. “The Imperial Government shepherded humanity through the crazy years after the crack-up.”

  “Things weren’t always this bad,” he agreed, reaching up to take her wrists. “If the corporations got more than their share, enough trickled down to benefit the rest of us. The Imperial system was never what it should have been, but for a long time, it meant a lot of good for a lot of people.”

  “Dear God. What has happened to make it change?”

  “I think ..he said, and he thought. “I think that affiliated nations and the colonies have grown up. Their industries compete. The corporate keiretsu need to constantly increase their share of economic power to make the payoffs that keep the things in place. Like the Red Queen in the book that Hans showed me, they have to keep running faster and faster to stay in the same place. It isn’t enough for them to dominate Japan’s market and compete in external markets, they have to dominate external markets as well.”

  He thought of a story. “A Swiss I met on Ashcroft told me how his company once tried to set up a production line for microchips. Suddenly, nobody in MITI could sign licenses for them, and a few days later, another MITI bureaucrat told the Swiss government that there was a problem with the certification for Swiss dairy products. The Swiss aren’t economically self-sufficient. They took the hint. In Argentina, when I was about five, a new government took power and pledged to end dependence on Japanese products. About a year later, they were thrown out by a coup.”

  “Are you saying that the corporations use the Imperial Government to attack the affiliated nations? Yes, you are. That is what is happening here.”

  “It frightens me that the corporations may have discovered that it’s easier to use military force to keep the affiliated nations and the colonies in order than it is to use economic leverage. The corporations used to use the Imperial Government to try to beggar the nations they disagreed with. Now, I think that they have begun selectively destroying what they can’t control.”

  “Lord God.” She held his hands and stared at him gravely. “So you are telling me that unless we give in to Matsudaira, Admiral Horii may try to destroy us as a people. Are you telling me that we should give in?”

  He nodded.

  “But we can’t!” she said, shaking him. “We can’t. How can they think that it is right to do this?”

  He looked at her, aware she had touched a nerve. “Love, Japanese have been telling themselves they’re different from other people for so long that some of them don’t think that we’re human.”

  Friday(311)
/>   AROUND MIDNIGHT, HAERKOENNEN FINALLY WORRIED MIZOGUCHl’S

  message from the tape. Recording the message backward, Mizo had raised it four octaves in pitch, speeded it up to a hundred times normal speed, and buried it in the hiss.

  It confirmed what Vereshchagin suspected. Increasingly, restive Earth and its colonies were held to the Imperial way by force. The Ministry of Security had expanded its emergency powers. National battalions had been disbanded and non-Japanese officers dismissed. Worst of all, the colony on Esdraelon had been pushed into revolt. It paid the price of failure, its population reduced by two-thirds.

  When Mizoguchi finished, Harjalo turned to look at Vereshchagin. The Variag was standing very still with his hands folded. His face was absent of expression.

  “So this is what we’ve been preparing for,” Haijalo said. “This is what I feared,” Vereshchagin replied. “I had hoped ..he started to say, and stopped.

  “So what do we do?” Haijalo asked him.

  “I do not know, Matti,” Vereshchagin said softly. “Tell Piotr and Raul, for now. They both know or suspect most of it.” Vereshchagin reached into his pocket and pulled out his pipe, gently turning it over in his hands. “Please take charge of things for a day or so. I must think on this. In any case, we must wait for the ARM to make their move. I must go back. Admiral Horii will expect to see me at staff call as usual.” He stood and started to leave.

  “Anton,” Harjalo said. Vereshchagin turned.

  “Remember what the Roman centurion said?”

  “Yes, Marcus Flavinius. ‘If we must leave our bones to bleach uselessly on the desert road, then beware the legions’ anger!’ ”

  Saturday(311)

  FOLLOWING STAFF CALL, VERESHCHAGIN, WHO HAD NO ASSIGNED

  duties, was reading in his assigned quarters when Horii and his aide, Captain Watanabe, came to call.

  “Good morning, Admiral.” Vereshchagin rose and bowed slightly, then he snapped off the reader.

  “Good morning, Lieutenant-Colonel.” Apart from a hammock, a field desk, and a chair, the room had no furniture, so Horii remained standing. “What book were you reading?”