Cauldron of Ghosts

by David Weber

  Chapter 38

  “I wish every day was like this,” said Bea Henderson. She leaned back in the pilot’s seat and sipped appreciatively from a cup of coffee that her copilot had just brought up from the small galley behind the cockpit.

  Carefully balancing his own cup, George Couch slid into his seat. He gave the landscape below no more than a passing glance—which was understandable given that the otherwise-spectacular scenery of Mesa’s famous Ganymede Canyons was obscured by fog. That was not unusual this time of day. The sun had just come up over the horizon.

  “Enjoy it while it lasts,” he said. “Soon enough, we’ll have another pack of drunken assholes to deal with.”

  Henderson made a face. Their job as pilots for Knight Tours paid quite well, since their employer catered to a very upper crust clientele. But that also meant they were expected to personally cater to their customers, not simply provide piloting skills. Some of those customers were friendly and pleasant people, but a fair number of them had the arrogant sense of entitlement that often came with great wealth—especially if they were born into it. They could be a real pain in the butt to deal with.

  This morning, though, they’d gotten orders from their employer to deadhead into Mendel. Normally, they’d make sure to have passengers going both ways. But apparently, a very exclusive party needed to be chauffeured around this afternoon and they’d been willing to pay enough to make the expense worth it.

  They’d be entering the capital’s air space within a few minutes. Henderson leaned forward to contact the control tower.

  “What the hell . . . ?” She saw that her copilot was staring at one of the screens. “Hey, Bea, you’d better—oh, shit!”

  That was all the warning she got before the surface-to-air missile fired from somewhere in the broken terrain below them blew the shuttle into pieces.

  * * *

  “—identities of the people killed haven’t been released yet,” the newscaster was saying. “But there were no survivors and initial reports indicate that the tour shuttle had a full complement aboard. That would mean about two dozen people lost their lives in addition to the pilot and copilot. Authorities say the accident appears to have been caused by a freakish malfunction of—”

  * * *

  “Well, that was a complete waste of time,” Xavier Conde complained.

  Not to mention a complete waste of money, thought his producer, Vittoria Daramy. But she didn’t say it out loud. That would have precipitated another quarrel and, at least for the moment, she was tired of bickering with her temperamental newscaster.

  The problem was that although Xavier Conde was certainly not one of the real superstars of the interstellar news media, he was well known enough and popular enough that if their mutual antagonism got heated to the point where one or the other of them had to go, she would be the one sent to the chopping block.

  She knew that Conde had tried to get her fired once already, for what he called her “obsessive chit-pinching.” The reason he hadn’t succeeded was that he was notorious for not getting along with his staff—especially producers—and for being financially wasteful. Their mutual employer had apparently decided that if they caved in to Conde’s demand they’d just have to go through it again a short time later.

  Sooner or later, though . . .

  Gloomily, she stared out the shuttle window at the ocean below.

  The vast, featureless, looks-the-same-everywhere ocean. The same ocean which, by the time they got there to do what Conde had been certain would be a dramatic newscast on the disaster, had swallowed up every trace of the Magellan and all of the victims except those who had already been airlifted to the mainland.

  Where other newscasters, who hadn’t wasted their time and money leasing a private shuttle to take them out into the middle of watery nowhere, were already in place and already interviewing the survivors.

  Being honest with herself, Vittoria hadn’t put up a big struggle against the idea. The planet she and Conde both came from, El Hira, lacked the sort of immense oceans that existed on Mesa or Terra. Plenty of smallish seas, and more lakes that anyone had ever counted, but no body of water as deep and expansive as this one. She hadn’t quite realized how long it would take to get there and how little there would be to see once they did.

  Their recording tech had tried to caution them. Alex Xu did come from a water world—from a family of fishers, in fact. He understood much better than they did that a disaster of the magnitude of the one that had struck the Magellan would leave no traces behind within a very short time span. But Conde had brushed his warning aside and Vittoria had been too preoccupied trying to arrange for the lease of a shuttle on such short notice to really think about it.

  So, here they were. Short of a scoop, on the short end of a large bill from a leasing company, more than a day behind on the project they were supposed to be working on—and saddled with an egotistical newscaster who was being even more unpleasant than usual.

  There were times Vittoria regretted her long-ago choice not to accept the offer of a post as an associate professor in journalism from New Mali Central University. Not many, true. For thing, her current salary was half again what she could ever have hoped to earn even as a tenured professor. For another, students could be as aggravating as newscasters and there were a lot more of them.

  * * *

  “It’s absurd!” said Harriet Caldwell forcefully. “Ab-surd.” She shook her tablet under her supervisor Anthony Lindstrom’s nose as if she were rattling a sheaf of papic. “For God’s sake, Tony—look at these figures! There is no way—no fucking way—that the Ballroom has the capacity to pull off something like this! They simply can’t do it. They don’t have the people, they don’t have the weaponry—and for sure and certain they don’t have access to the credentials they’d need to put enough people on board a luxury liner to set that many bombs. Not to mention that they’d need at least one software wizard to bypass all the alarms they would have set off even if they did.”

  She finally came up for air, giving Lindstrom a chance to get a word in edgewise. “We are talking about the same people who did Green Pines, aren’t we? I really don’t see how you can be so sure than a terrorist outfit that could steal a nuclear device and kill thousands of people with it aren’t capable of killing quite a bit fewer people with conventional explosives.”

  “Tony, you’re comparing apples and oranges and you know it. Sure, they killed a lot more people at Green Pines—but that’s only because they managed somehow to get their hands on what was probably a construction device. We did find one that had gone missing. That’s another thing entirely from—”

  “ ‘Gone missing,’ ” he mimicked sarcastically. “How about we translate that from minimalism? What you really meant to say is that they did have a software wizard who was capable of deactivating the device’s locator beacon—something which you know damn good and well is almost impossible to do without access to the specific codes. Yet somehow—according to you—this same great sorcerer wasn’t capable of bypassing the comparatively piddly security programs on board a cruise ship. Do I have this right?”

  By now, she was practically hopping up and down with exasperation. “Tony, that’s not a fair comparison and you know it! I never said the Audubon Ballroom were a bunch of clowns. They’ve got hundreds—hell, thousands—of corpses in their wake that proves otherwise. But they don’t—they’ve never—operated on this scale before. They send in lone assassins or small teams, which is why they can be so hard to stop. Two, three—never more than five—people. To explain Green Pines, all you need to come up with is two people. One—okay, fine, software whiz—to deactivate the beacon. And the other willing to commit suicide taking the device to the target.”

  “You need more than that,” Lindstrom said. “Where’d they get the device in the first place? We don’t leave those things lying around anywhere, you know.”

  She glared at him. After a moment, through gritted teeth, she said: “Fine. Th
ey had some more confederates.”

  Lindstrom shook his head. “You’re obsessing over this, Harriet. Just let it go.”

  He refrained from adding, which he could have, that Harriet Caldwell was notoriously obsessive—to the point where she’d been urged to get psychological counseling.

  Urged by her friends, though, not by Lindstrom himself. As aggravating as she could be, the fact remained that Harriet’s obsessiveness was part of what made her such an excellent security analyst. There was a reason that her colleagues in the Mesan Office of Investigation’s Domestic Intelligence Branch, partly in jest, partly out of spite, and in good part out of admiration, called her No-Sparrow-Shall-Fall Caldwell.

  “Just let it go,” he repeated, knowing full well that she wouldn’t. But at least he could buy himself some peace in the meantime.

  * * *

  By the next day, Janice Marinescu had been informed of the activities of Xavier Conde and his team, as well as the dissenting opinion being advanced by one of the analysts in MOI DIB. None of the individuals involved including the analyst’s supervisor were part of the onion, but all of them were being monitored—directly, in the case of the newscaster, indirectly in the case of the analyst.

  She brought the matters up in her team’s morning conference. Concluding with: “I think we can turn Conde’s activities to our benefit. Is Mitchell’s team available?”

  “Yes,” said Kevin Haas, her chief lieutenant. “They just finished with the Fischer job last night. I agree that they’d be the ideal team for that. Do you want them to handle”—he glanced down at his tablet—“the Caldwell problem as well.”

  Marinescu shook her head. “No, that’d be overkill. We don’t have all that many Alignment teams at our disposal. Just farm it out to one of our liaisons at the OPS.”

  “Done,” he said, making a note on his tablet.

  September 1922 Post Diaspora

  “I urge you to surrender immediately, but it won’t exactly break our hearts if you don’t.”

  —Colonel Donald Toussaint, RTN

  Chapter 39

  Triêu Chuanli was much as Victor remembered him. Slender, a bit on the short side; relaxed and debonair in his demeanor; a gentleman to all outward appearances. He didn’t seem quite as suave as he had in Victor’s earlier encounters with him, though. Perhaps Chuanli was a bit startled to find himself in a room with a man even more handsome than he was.

  By now, Victor had adapted to his new appearance. Flexible as always, he’d discovered that being extremely good-looking was an excellent disguise in its own right. It was much like being extremely ugly—people didn’t notice you because they were so dazzled or repelled by your features.

  Beowulf’s nanotech engineers had given him the sort of good looks found in models, not those found in vid stars. Despite their reputation for being gorgeous, most vid stars—although they were certainly attractive—had features that were far enough away from an abstract ideal to give them a definite personality that viewers could attach to their performance. Not so, for models. They were mute; ultimately, possessing no personality at all. That was not their function. They needed to possess a beauty that was so idealized and abstract that it did not detract from what really mattered, which was the attractiveness of the goods they were displaying.

  In short, peas in a pod. And a good-looking pea in a pod is still a pea in a pod. A passerby would notice such a person, just as they would notice a particularly striking flower. But if they were asked an hour later to describe them, they would find it surprisingly difficult.

  Well . . . Its petals were red. It had a . . . you know . . . a stalk.

  Well . . . He had blond hair and blue eyes. His features were really . . . you know . . . regular.

  The only thing really distinctive and easily described were height, hair and eye color. There wasn’t much Victor could do about his height—except that it was average to begin with—but he could handle the rest. He carried with him at all times the wherewithal to change his hair and eye color within seconds. And naturally, being Victor, he’d trained himself to do so both in a simulator and in real physical practice.

  * * *

  “The situation in Lower Radomsko is a nuisance, certainly,” said Chuanli in response to Victor’s opening remarks. “But it’s a familiar nuisance. We’ve lived with it for decades, now. It’s one of those problems for which the proposed remedies always seem worse than the disease itself.”

  Victor nodded. “Yes, I understand that. But the danger of a disease is closely tied to . . . the environment, let’s call it.”

  He made it a point to thicken his Dockhorn accent as much as possible, almost to the point of caricature. Not quite, but . . . close. His aim was for Chuanli to suspect him of being an off-worlder who was mimicking someone from Dockhorn.

  Whether he could do so or not was unclear. The problem wasn’t on Victor’s end. Oddly, where in times past he’d found it well-nigh impossible to disguise his natural Nouveau Paris accent, he was finding it quite easy to manipulate his new voice.

  But it didn’t do any good to present a Dockhorn accent which was not quite right—if Chuanli wasn’t familiar enough with the accent to know the difference. For all the man’s sophistication, it was that of a gangster who’d been born and raised and spent his whole life in very constrained circumstances. A sophisticated Mesan seccy is still a Mesan seccy.

  What Victor was figuring on was that Chuanli was probably recording this entire conversation—and would have a real language expert study it afterward, if he decided the matter was important enough.

  “The environment,” stated Chuanli. His tone of voice was flat and devoid of affect. “Meaning . . .”

  “The political environment, I’m referring to. To be precise, the fact that the current setup on Mesa—specifically, in the seccy quarters—is about to become a textbook example of what will happen to a house of cards when a strong wind comes up. A hurricane-force wind, I should say.”

  He frowned, as if a sudden thought had occurred to him. “You do have hurricanes here on Mesa, don’t you?”

  Chuanli gave him a thin smile that had very little in the way of friendliness. “Lots of ’em, on the coasts. But here in Mendel, we’re up on the tablelands. About the worst we ever get is . . .”

  He turned his head toward one of the two bodyguards standing against the wall behind him. “What would you call it, Stefan? A stiff breeze?”

  The bodyguard’s thick lips curled into a sneer. “Breeze, my ass. A zephyr. A real man can piss right into it.”

  The sneer made it clear that he had his doubts as to the manhood of the visitor in the room.

  Victor grinned at him. The expression was not one that came naturally to him, but hours of practice in a simulator had perfected it. The grin had even less in the way of friendliness than Chuanli’s smile. It was a predator’s grin. A shark’s grin.

  “You won’t be able to piss into this wind, trust me. It’s got a name. We call it ‘the manticore.’ When it blew through my home system it flattened everything. Well, everything that had the initials OFS or the logos of any transstellar operating out of Mesa, anyway.”

  The level of tension in the room went instantly from mild to moderate-and-rising-fast.

  But there was no trace of that in Chuanli’s tone. That remained, as it had since the interview began, calm and relaxed.

  “I wasn’t aware the manticore blew in Dockhorn. Unless my astrography is way off, you’re five hundred light-years from the Star Empire and not connected by any direct wormholes.”

  “You’re correct. But Dockhorn isn’t actually my home system. It’s just the system my associates and I find it useful to operate from at the moment.”

  “Your associates being . . .”

  Victor made a dismissive hand gesture. “There’s no need to get into that yet. My purpose in this meeting is not to persuade you of anything, Mr. Chuanli. I’ll be doing that with practical results. I simply wanted, as a matter of court
esy, to let you know that my associates and I will be probing business possibilities in Lower Radomsko. None of our projects should conflict with any of your interests and we hope to develop good relations with you and Mr. Dusek.”

  He rose and gave Chuanli a polite nod, then repeated the nod to bodyguard Stefan. He ignored the other bodyguard.

  “I’d appreciate an escort out of the building,” he said. His smile this time was genuine. “I’m afraid I’ll get quite lost otherwise.”

  Chuanli smiled back. “I can pretty much guarantee that.” He gestured toward the door behind Victor. “You’ll find the same boy out there who guided you here in the first place. He’ll lead you out.”

  * * *

  The boy gave his name as Ambros. Apparently, his superb memory for three-dimensional mazes didn’t extend to nomenclature. On the way in, he’d told Victor his name was Thanh.

  But that might be intentional, too. If seccy sophistication had its limits, it also had its subtleties. That could be the boy’s way of letting Victor know that he couldn’t be bribed. More precisely, he could be bribed—but the bribe wouldn’t do any good.

  A fine and sprightly young lad, in short. Victor had been much like him, at the age of ten, when he’d supplemented his family’s meager income running errands for the gangsters in his part of the Nouveau Paris slums. You did your job, you kept your mouth shut—and if you did take a bribe you made sure the boss knew about it and didn’t think you were up to no good.

  It wasn’t perhaps quite as easy to make someone disappear in Nouveau Paris as it was in Neue Rostock. But it was easy enough.

  * * *

  “He neglected to mention that little detail,” said Thandi sourly as she gazed down on the recumbent form of Karen Steve Williams. The truncated form, that is.

  “Pretty hard to pretend we’re just hauling our drunken friend home by supporting her on our shoulders when she doesn’t have any legs below the knees,” she continued. “Oh, well. You work with Vic—Philip Watson, you learn to improvise.”