Cauldron of Ghosts

by David Weber

  “Fine. We’ll go. Where are you taking me?”

  No answer came. The Gauls just turned and headed down the corridor, with Zachariah in their wake.

  * * *

  When the two Gauls ushered him into a room buried in one of the wings of the Science Center’s labyrinthine administration building, the first person Zachariah saw was Lisa Charteris. She was sitting at the end of a conference table in the middle of the room.

  Zachariah was relieved to see her. For all his outward nonchalance dealing with the two Gauls, he’d been worried—and had grown more so when they left the science labs and headed for the admin building. He hardly ever went over there and couldn’t imagine a reason the Gauls would be taking him to it unless . . .

  Unless what? The fact that Zhilov and Arpino had denied knowing anything about Jack would lead to the conclusion that at least he wasn’t facing another inquisition over his brother’s purported treason. But why else would . . .

  Zachariah didn’t like uncertainty, other than the frisson of awaiting the results of a lab experiment.

  Now, seeing Charteris, he relaxed a bit. The uncertainty was still there, because he had no more idea why she’d be present than he was himself. But he and Lisa got along well and always had. They weren’t exactly close friends, since she maintained a certain distance. But their personal interactions had always been pleasant and they respected each other professionally.

  The point being that Zachariah couldn’t imagine she’d have agreed to participate in yet another interrogation of him by security people on the subject of his brother Jack. Why would she? She’d have nothing to contribute and would find the whole business distasteful at the very least. Unlike Zachariah himself, he didn’t think Lisa questioned the official line that Jack had committed treason. But he was sure that she didn’t think Zachariah had been involved, in whatever had really happened.

  “Hi, Lisa. Fancy meeting you here.”

  She gave him a quick, almost fleeting smile, then motioned to a chair at the end of the table she was sitting at. “Have a seat.”

  He did so. He was now sitting at a right angle to her. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that Zhilov and Arpino had taken positions on either side of the door he’d just come through. They weren’t exactly standing at attention, but they came pretty close. Zachariah had a feeling the Gauls came pretty close to standing at attention even in a shower. The Genetic Advancement and Uplift League was nothing if not rigid.

  “What are we—”

  Charteris held up a cautioning hand. “Just wait a bit, Zachariah. She should be coming—”

  The door behind her swung open and a woman came through. Zachariah recognized her although they’d never spoken to each other. She was high up in the inner onion and most likely in security.

  Well . . . not “security” in the same sense that his brother Jack had been. Zachariah didn’t know anything specific about his brother’s work. He and Jack had been very careful to steer clear of that subject—just as they’d avoided discussing the exact nature of Zachariah’s job. But from various things Jack had let slip, Zachariah knew that the essential nature of his work had been what you might call “defensive.” To put it another way, Jack McBryde had been one of the Mesan Alignment’s top guardians.

  The person he’d reported to, though, Isobel Bardasano, had been . . .

  Different. If his brother Jack had been the human analog of a watchdog, Bardasano had been a wolf. Of that, Zachariah had been quite sure.

  He’d only met Bardasano twice, and on both occasions the contact was brief. He remembered her quite vividly, though. She was a striking person in her appearance. Intense in demeanor—and covered with flashy tattoos and body piercings.

  This woman had the same casually arrogant, predatory air about her, although she had nothing visible in the way of tattoos or body piercings. Not even earrings.

  He wondered if she was Bardasano’s replacement. After the destruction of Gamma Center, Bardasano had disappeared. Zachariah had no idea what had become of her. It was conceivable that she’d even been executed. The Alignment didn’t use the death penalty very often; not, at least, with people in the inner layers of the onion. And when it was used, it was kept very quiet. But it wasn’t inconceivable that even someone as high up as Bardasano might have suffered the ultimate penalty in punishment for the disaster at Gamma Center. Zachariah was sure that the now-almost-universal belief within the Alignment’s innermost core that the explosion had been caused by his brother was nonsense. But whatever had really happened, Bardasano had to have been involved in it up to her neck.

  Which is where she might have finally ended up—to her neck, and no further.

  The woman pulled out a chair across from Zachariah and sat down. “I’m Janice Marinescu. Nice to meet you and all that, but let’s not waste time. You’re familiar with the plans for Operation Houdini.”

  That was a statement, not a question. But Marinescu paused and gave Zachariah a level stare. Apparently, for whatever reason, she wanted him to affirm that he was familiar with Houdini.

  Cautiously, he nodded. “Yes, I am. Why?”

  “Because it’s being implemented. The political situation is unfolding rapidly now and we don’t want to take the chance that someone might take advantage of the situation—”

  Someone might take advantage . . . Zachariah was tempted to say “Why don’t you come right out and use the name Manticore, which is what you know and I know we’re talking about?”

  But, he didn’t. The tension was back in full force. Something . . .

  Had gone pear-shaped. Or, at least, the powers-that-were in the very innermost circles were worried that it might be going pear-shaped soon.

  “—so you’ll be in the third departure division. You and”—Marinescu nodded at Lisa—“Chief Scientist Charteris. Although you might not be evacuated via the same route.”

  Zachariah took a deep breath. That explained the presence of the Gauls. Houdini was going to tear a lot of families apart. Including his own. The authorities were seeing to it that anyone slated for Houdini who got cold feet or second thoughts would have . . .

  Chaperones.

  He decided to think of them that way. And never mind that the chaperones undoubtedly had orders to permanently silence anyone who got too recalcitrant.

  Being completely cold-blooded about it, Zachariah understood the logic. The whole purpose of Houdini was to remove anyone from Mesa who could reveal anything about the onion’s inner layers and inner workings. They either left the planet by evacuation or they left it by shuffling off their mortal coil.

  There was no third alternative. Houdini had always been just a possibility, and one he’d never spent much time dwelling on. Now it was here. For real. As serious as the proverbial heart attack.

  Zachariah felt a sharp, almost agonizing, pain in his chest, as if he were actually having a heart attack.

  He wasn’t. He was just facing the prospect—the now certain prospect—that within a short time he’d lose his entire family. Part of the reason he’d never dwelt on Houdini in the past was that his brother Jack had also been slated for evacuation. So whatever happened, he’d still have one sibling.

  Now . . . nothing. No one.

  He’d be leaving his girlfriend Veronica behind too, but that wasn’t cause for more than regret. The relationship wasn’t really all that serious.

  The worst of it, in some ways, was that he couldn’t even say anything to his family. The seriousness with which the Alignment took Houdini had been emphasized again and again and again. Nobody could be left behind on Mesa who knew anything important.

  Which meant that if Zachariah did mention anything to his family—any member of it, just one—and the authorities found out, his whole family would be destroyed.

  He took a deep, shuddering breath. Lisa reached out and put her hand on his, then gave it a gentle squeeze.

  She’d be leaving people behind, too. He wasn’t sure who, exactly. But her hus
band was probably one of them. Jules Charteris had a responsible position in Mesa’s government, even a rather prestigious one. But no one in Mesa’s formal government—well, very few people, at least—were anywhere close to the inner layers of the onion.

  “How soon?” he asked Marinescu. Her only response was that same flat-eyed level stare.

  Chapter 22

  Ruth Winton barked a sarcastic laugh. “Will you look at that? The only time in recorded history—we’re talking a good two thousand years—when the Talking Heads on a vid news program had their tongues tied.”

  It was true enough. The panel of guests on tonight’s special edition of Yael Underwood’s The Star Empire Today were all staring at the huge screen behind them. They’d just spent the last few minutes swiveled in their seats, watching the recorded footage of the gunfight in the subterranean depths of Chicago’s Old Quarter that had triggered off the Manpower Incident years earlier.

  It hadn’t, actually. The conflict that ended with the killing by Manpower-hired mercenaries of General Raphael Durkheim, Haven’s StateSec chief in the Solarian League’s capital, and the subsequent destruction of Manpower Inc.’s headquarters in the same city by a retaliatory force sent by the Audubon Ballroom had actually been months in the making. But the general public—anywhere; on Haven as well as Terra, or Manticore—had never known more than the basic facts involved. And not all of those, and especially not the names of the key players who’d never been identified by the media, which was most of them.

  First and foremost among those previously unidentified key players was the man sitting next to Ruth at that moment. Victor Cachat, who’d wreaked most of the havoc in the scene that had just been played out on a screen for the Talking Heads of Underwood’s show. A screen, of course, that had also been watched by . . .

  “What’s the count now, Ruth?” asked Anton Zilwicki. He was seated next to Cathy Montaigne on another couch in the salon of the genetic treatment center.

  Ruth glanced down at the com in her hand. “Two hundred and seventy-three million viewers as of this moment, but . . .” She paused for a few seconds. “It’s climbing fast. Word’s spreading, obviously. By the time the replays are counted, we’ll be looking at somewhere between one and two billion people. That’s just here in the Manticore System itself. Once the recording gets shipped to the rest of the Star Empire, Haven, Beowulf, and who knows where else, the number will start getting called ‘astronomical.’ ”

  She tapped the com screen a couple of times. “Yeah, what I figured. They’re already calling it the third-most-watched news show in a decade. We’re in territory that’s usually only inhabited by championship sporting events.”

  The stunned silence of the Talking Heads had been brief, of course. They were already jabbering away again.

  “—why Captain Zilwicki trusts him so much, which has always been a mystery. What’s still unclear—”

  “—think it’s now blindingly obvious—”

  “—can’t say it too many times. We have no reason—none, at, all—to suddenly place our trust in Cachat. If anything, his now-proven extraordinary savagery—”

  “—was dealing with the worst sort of StateSec killers and sociopathic so-called ‘super-soldiers’ left over from the Final War. Of course he was savage! What do you propose he should have done, Charlene? Give them a lecture? Or do you—”

  * * *

  Sitting on the other side of Victor from Ruth, Thandi tuned it all out. She was still trying to process the experience herself. She’d known of the gunfight in the Old Quarter, but this was the first time she’d seen the recording of the event.

  It wasn’t the brutality of the killing that she found startling. Nor was it even Victor’s ruthlessness and the skill he’d shown at killing so many people in such a short time.

  Being completely objective about it, Thandi knew that if she’d been in Victor’s place in that half-crumbling cavern in the ancient catacombs of Chicago, the killings would have happened even faster and more surely.

  Victor probably would have died there, except that Jeremy X intervened at the end. The surviving Scrags—there’d been three of them completely unwounded and another three injured but not out of action, had all been bringing their weapons to bear on Victor when Jeremy’s pistol fusillade started taking them down.

  Thandi wouldn’t have needed Jeremy. She was bigger than Victor, stronger than Victor, faster than Victor, a better shot with any kind of projectile weapon than Victor—there was no comparison at all between their respective skills fighting unarmed or with hand weapons—and she’d spent her whole adult life training constantly for exactly this sort of combat.

  But . . . at that age? With no combat experience at all and only the rudimentary training Victor would have received at the StateSec academy and what he’d taught himself later in simulators?

  Impossible. If Thandi Palane had been in Victor’s position at such a young age and with his level of actual combat experience—which was to say, none at all . . .

  There and then . . .

  The only reason Victor had survived—no, triumphed—was because of the man’s nature. His psychology, so to speak. Even then, as raw as any newly minted young officer and only in his early twenties, he’d been a natural killer. And a superb one, an outlier at the very edge of human potential. If that had been Thandi herself down in that cavern, she’d have been dead after taking down one or two—maybe three—of her opponents.

  She knew of no one that wouldn’t be true of. Not one person.

  Except the man she slept with every night, whenever they could.

  She felt a warm glow in her heart, then, and reached out to take Victor’s hand. That was probably not the reaction most lovers would have had, but they hadn’t been born and raised on Ndebele.

  She gave the hand a squeeze, and when he glanced at her, she gave him a warm smile.

  Buster, you are so getting laid tonight.

  * * *

  Anton Zilwicki’s thoughts were elsewhere. He’d been associated with Victor for so long that he took the man’s somewhat peculiar nature as a matter of course. Watching the recording hadn’t bothered him in the least. He’d seen it before, for one thing. For another, although he hadn’t been there when the killings took place, he’d arrived immediately thereafter—soon enough that when his daughter Helen burst out of the shadows where she’d been hiding and raced toward him, she’d had to practically dance to get through the carpet of bodies littering the cavern floor. She’d stepped directly on two of the bodies and had gotten so much blood on her shoes that they’d thrown them away afterward.

  She’d just turned fourteen at the time. And just a short time earlier, had herself . . .

  “Oh, hell and damnation,” Anton said. “I made sure the news reporters couldn’t get to Helen—the Navy was very cooperative about that—and we’ve got Berry trained to a T, of course. But since Lars never met Victor and never saw the mayhem, I didn’t think we needed to do much preparation with him. I completely forgot—”

  Underwood had shifted the focus of The Star Empire Today. Again, the Talking Heads were swiveled in the chairs, watching the footage recorded earlier of an interview with Lars Zilwicki. The campus grounds of the New University of Landing formed the backdrop. Lars had just started his third year there.

  “—never saw it, not even the . . . leftovers, I guess you’d say. They made sure to take me and Berry out by a different route. I heard a lot about it later, of course. But I didn’t meet Victor Cachat then, and I’ve never met him since.”

  The young man on the screen shrugged. “Being honest, it didn’t have much of an impact on me. I was still way too shaken up by what Helen did the day before to think much about what happened in the cavern next to the ruins of the Artinstute where me and Berry were hiding.”

  Lars made a face. “Well, I guess not so much what Helen did as what I did to the bodies afterward. Those bastards had . . . hurt Berry. Really badly. I sort of lost it.”

&nb
sp; The image shifted to the interviewer, who was frowning slightly. “Ah . . . exactly what are you referring to, Mr. Zilwicki?”

  Shut up, Lars, Anton silently willed at the figure on the screen. Shut up, shut up, shut . . .

  “Oh, hell and damnation,” he repeated aloud.

  Cathy smiled. “We’re talking about Lars. Being interviewed by a very attractive and sophisticated-looking young woman. You really think he’s not going to keep talking?”

  “She’s ten years older than he is,” Anton growled. “At least.”

  Across from him, Berry smiled also. “And that has stopped my brother . . . when, exactly?”

  “—thought you already knew about that,” Lars was saying. “After Helen made her escape from the Scrags working for Durkheim—well, indirectly, I guess; you do know about that, right?—she ran across three thugs in the underground passageways. They attacked her, figuring . . . well, we’ll never know but I’m guessing they were planning to do the same . . . that, Berry—never mind all that.”

  A little apprehensively, Anton glanced at Berry. But his daughter was watching with what seemed to be a very serene expression. Knowing her, it probably was. The incident Lars was fumbling around had been a hideous one for her, but between her innate sanity and the best therapists Cathy could hire—which meant the best therapists anywhere in the galaxy—Berry had put it all behind her quite some time ago.

  “—same three who’d imprisoned me and Berry. What the shi—ah, bad men—didn’t know was that even though Helen was only fourteen at the time—she was small for her age then, too, which isn’t true these days, heh—she’d been training for years in martial arts by Robert Tye. Yeah, that Robert Tye, if you’re at all familiar with martial arts.”

  “So she was able to successfully defend herself?” said the interviewer.