Cauldron of Ghosts

by David Weber

  Criminal overlords like Dusek and Chuanli understood them also, of course, which was exactly why they used such children as guides in their labyrinth. And if that suggested that patriotic secret agents and gangsters had a lot in common, well . . . Victor had figured that out for himself a long time ago.

  * * *

  In due time—much quicker than you might think—Lily passed the chit on to Hasrul Goosens. He, in turn, brought it directly to Victor even though normally Hasrul would have used one of the dead drops that Victor had set up for him.

  He couldn’t use the ones that Cachat had originally set up for Carl Hansen and his seccy rebels because they were unsuitable for children. An obvious street kid riding elevators or wandering around a fish market would be automatically suspect, and why would such an urchin be going into an automated fortune teller booth?

  This time, however, Hasrul wanted to see for himself the results of the favor he’d called in from Achmed. So he came directly to the safe house run by Steph Turner—understanding that the term “directly” was figurative. Hasrul was quite at home moving through the long-forgotten underground passageways of the seccy districts. There was no way a Mesan security agent would be able to follow him through that subterranean maze, and while there were certain dangers, they weren’t excessive. There were a number of human predators who prowled those passageways, but a dirty urchin wearing clothes that weren’t more than two grades above rags was not their natural target. The biggest danger was that he might run into one of the fairly large number of insane people who lived down there. But most of them were harmless, and he figured he could outrun the ones who weren’t.

  On this occasion, he encountered no trouble at all.

  Hasrul was expecting to get a lecture from the man he knew as Achmed on the subject of needlessly violating security protocols. But Achmed said nothing when Steph led the boy into the back rooms of the boutique.

  Nothing except: “Came to see your mother, huh? Relax, kid. She’s doing fine.”

  Thereby reinforcing Hasrul’s allegiance, which had been rock solid anyway. It didn’t occur to the boy that perhaps that was the reason for Achmed’s unexpected response. But he was only twelve, after all. Astute for his age and shrewd in the way such children often are. But not a master spy.

  * * *

  The medical unit seemed like something out of a fable to Hasrul. He knew they existed, but he’d never seen one. For seccies, unless they were one of the few who were well-to-do, “medical care” meant seeing a doctor or a nurse who had at least a modicum of training but not much in the way of equipment and that, fairly rudimentary.

  He stared down at his mother, resting in the healing compartment, through the viewscreen that Achmed turned on.

  “Is she asleep?” he asked.

  “Not exactly,” said Achmed. “She’s basically in what amounts to a coma, except that it’s artificially induced and controlled.”

  The boy looked up at him, his normally impassive expression tight with anxiety. “But she’s okay?”

  Achmed placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “She’s fine, Hasrul. She didn’t have any active injuries. She was just suffering from a nasty combination of diseases—severe bronchitis, for one—that were piled onto exhaustion. That’s a dangerous combination, but it’s one that’s easily treated.”

  Hearing a slight noise behind them, Hasrul looked over his shoulder and saw that a man he didn’t know had entered the chamber.

  Apparently, the newcomer knew of Hasrul’s situation, or he’d deduced it from overhearing part of their conversation. “The thing works, kid, believe me,” he said. He lifted one of his knees and gave it a slap. The motion was a bit awkward but the slap was a solid one. “This knee was so much hamburger a few weeks ago. It’s still not as good as new, but it will be once—”

  He nodded toward the med unit. “Your mother comes out of it and I can go back in.” With a cheerful grin, he added: “We’ve been using it in shifts, between me and Callie and your mama and the new girl. I’m Teddy, by way.”

  “What happened to your knee?” Hasrul asked.

  Teddy indicated Achmed with his thumb. “The boss’s girlfriend shot it off.”

  “Why’d she do that?”

  “Well, Achmed wasn’t our boss then. We had, ah . . .”

  “A minor altercation,” said Achmed smoothly.

  At that point a woman came into the chamber. Hasrul looked up at her.

  And up. And up. He didn’t know her but he had a feeling . . .

  “And speak of the devil,” said Teddy. He gave the unknown woman the same cheerful grin. “Meaning no offense, Evelyn.”

  “None taken,” she said. But her eyes had never left Hasrul.

  “You must be the boy Achmed keeps bragging about,” she said. “Hasrul, right? I’m Evelyn del Vecchio.”

  He nodded. To allegiance and loyalty, trepidation was now added. Hasrul had never been especially scared of Achmed himself. But his girlfriend . . .

  “Very pleased to meet you,” he said firmly. Any other response struck him as most unwise.

  * * *

  “Well, that tears it,” Victor said later, after he’d been able to read Anton’s summary of the data. He didn’t try tackling the data itself. For starters, the math was way over his head. And when you had Anton on your team, why would you fiddle with stuff like this? It’d be like having a master chef on your team but insisting on cooking lunch yourself. “All hell’s about to break loose.”

  Thandi had been reading the same summary, over his shoulder. “Why do you say that? All Anton’s claiming is that the rats are deserting a sinking ship. And even he admits that the data that led him to that conclusion is fuzzy as all hell.”

  “If Anton says the pattern is there, I believe him, fuzzy data or not. And the thing is, we’re not actually talking about rats doing something purely pragmatic like abandoning a doomed vessel. We’re talking about fanatics working on a long-range plan. You don’t scheme for six centuries and then just cut and run.”

  Victor had a peculiar expression on his face. It seemed to Thandi like a weird mix of pride—no, more like a craftsman’s self-esteem and self-assurance—combined with what looked like a tinge of guilt.

  “The scary thing is that I can think the way they do even if I really don’t,” he said. “If that makes any sense.”

  She could follow the convoluted logic. “So . . . you don’t really think you think what?” She shook her head. “God, that’s twisted. What I mean is, what do you think they’re doing?”

  “They can’t just run and hide, Thandi. They’ve got to destroy any evidence they ever existed in the first place. That’s been their basic tactic all along. And the pattern Anton’s pointing to matches perfectly with something else that’s been bothering me.”

  “Which is?”

  “You’ve been following the news.”

  “About the Magellan?”

  “And that shuttle that supposedly blew up over Ganymede Canyons. If you think that happened because of a freak accident you’re a lot more gullible than I think you are. That was an act of sabotage as surely as what took place aboard the cruise ship. The question then becomes: who did it? The Ballroom’s being blamed, but I don’t believe that for a minute.”

  Thandi shook her head. “No, of course not. We got a thorough briefing from Saburo and Jeremy concerning the Ballroom’s assets on Mesa. No names were mentioned because—”

  “First, we didn’t need them so there was no point in possibly compromising security. And second, because there really wasn’t much anyway.” Victor raised Anton’s data chip. “The Ballroom certainly didn’t have the assets to pull off something like the Magellan.”

  “So you think they were acts of provocation.” Thandi’s tone made it clear that was a statement, not a question.

  “Yes, but . . . There’s something off about it.”

  Thandi frowned. “Off . . . how? Seems like pretty standard fare to me.” Her voice got a litt
le sing-song tone to it. “ ‘The wickett ee-vil Ballroom terrorist fiends are working night and day, plotting still greater acts of monstrous villainy against the pee-pul, deeds so foul their like has never been contemplated before . . . blah blah blah. How is that ‘off’?”

  Victor chuckled. “Up to a point, it’s standard fare. But where it’s off is in the constant drumbeat about the Ballroom’s capability. They emphasize that over and again. Which is in direct contravention to the usual tactics used against revolutionary and opposition groups. In which . . .” He cleared his throat. “I am something of an expert, having been trained by Oscar Saint-Just himself—who was a monster, I grant you, but was no slouch either.”

  Now, Thandi grinned. “I can’t wait to hear this. Lessons in wrongdoing from a master of the trade.”

  “Very witty. The key nexus—perhaps combination is the right term—is to emphasize the opposition’s villainy but also to downplay their capabilities. You don’t want to build up the image of their prowess, for God’s sake—”

  “You don’t believe in God.”

  “Very witty. Because if you do that, you’re effectively serving as your enemy’s recruiting agent. Wow! If they’re that good, maybe I should join them. See what I mean?”

  She frowned thoughtfully. “Now that you point it out . . .” She looked over at the wallscreen. “Their coverage of the Ballroom does seem almost . . . Well, not laudatory. But—”

  “But not disparaging,” Victor concluded for her. He shook his head. “It’s all wrong, Thandi. The correct tactic is to sneer. That’s why terrorists are always ‘cowardly,’ even though the phrase ‘cowardly terrorist’ is an idiotic oxymoron.”

  “Okay. And what follows?”

  He got up and looked around the room, as if he were gauging it as a shelter or a refuge. “What follows is that I’m pretty sure we’re going to be glad Andrew brought those pressor nodes with him. From now on, everybody’s got to sleep in the lowest subbasement where he placed them.”

  She finally understood what he was getting at. “Jesus. Do you really think they’re that ruthless?”

  He gave her the cold, flat-eyed stare that Victor could do like no one else she’d ever known. “These are the same people who subjected millions upon millions of people to lives of unending slavery, brutality and horror for more than half a millennium. Of course they’re that ruthless.”

  Chapter 41

  Elsewhere in Mendel, in a hotel suite that was a lot less luxurious than Anton and Yana’s yacht, a person who was widely considered one of the Solarian League’s best investigative journalists was expressing her own suspicions.

  “Everything about this is fishy,” Audrey O’Hanrahan stated forcefully. “The picture you’re painting for me—trying to paint—is like a . . . like a . . .” She paused, then chuckled harshly. “It’s like a manticore, that’s what it is. Bits and pieces of completely different animals stuck together with narrative glue and passed off as a real live critter. I don’t buy it.”

  The Mesan public information officer across the suite’s small desk from her looked deeply offended. Or he tried to, anyway. O’Hanrahan was quite certain—for a host of reasons—that his high dudgeon was equally false.

  “Audrey,” he began in a tone which fused let’s-be-reasonable-about-this with a finely calculated dash of I’m-being-as-patient-with-you-as-I-can and overlaid by just a hint of but-even-my-superbly-controlled-temper-has-its-limits, “I assure you—”

  She waved him down.

  “Spare me, Kyle. Why are you making such a big deal about the so-called ‘Ballroom threat’? And why do you think you could sell it to me for even a heartbeat? I covered the aftermath of Green Pines, remember?”

  He started to argue the point. “Oh, come on. You didn’t get here until—”

  “I got here plenty soon enough. It’s not as if your security forces had been subtle and their activities hard to document. I know exactly how savagely they behaved.”

  Her face tightened with anger.

  “You have no idea how fortunate you were that my producers convinced me to leave out the most damning footage I’d recorded. But leaving all of that aside, you—you personally—kept assuring me of how thoroughly and completely your security forces had ‘rooted out and destroyed’—that was your phrase, not mine—the Ballroom on Mesa. In fact, you claimed at the time—your phrase again, not mine—that ‘not even pitiful remnants remain intact.’ Which, by the way, I thought at the time was a particularly fatuous way to put it.”

  Kyle Fraenzl’s expression was now stiff with indignation. The stiffness being required, of course, because the indignation was manufactured. O’Hanrahan wasn’t going to let him get away with that, either.

  “Come on, Kyle. There’s no point pretending. Both of us know one of two things is true—either you were lying then, or you’re lying now. Which is it?”

  He sniffed, then looked out the window.

  “There’s nothing to see out there but drizzle,” she told him remorselessly. “We’re a thousand meters up. So quit stalling. Lies past, lies present—I won’t bother asking about lies future, because that’s given—but which is it in this case?”

  * * *

  Fraenzl had had the misfortune of dealing with O’Hanrahan in the past. The Directorate of Culture and Information had assigned him to her during the aftermath of the Green Pines disaster, and she’d been just as unwilling then to pretend she believed him as she was now. Other newsies understood they had to at least pretend they thought he was telling them the truth—wink-wink, nudge-nudge—if they wanted any sort of access. But not O’Hanrahan. And the worst of it was that he knew there was no point even trying to evade her. She wouldn’t let him get away with it, and her name was far too well known outside the Mesa System for him to even contemplate freezing her out. The instant he tried to do that, she would announce to the galaxy at large that there Had To Be A Reason, and her reputation for journalistic integrity—not to mention her willingness to go for the jugular of even the most powerful vested interests—gave her far too powerful a microphone. The last thing Mesa needed at this moment in history was the sort of public relations black eye an Audrey O’Hanrahan could deliver. So he had only two options: answer questions with a reasonable degree of veracity, or get up and walk out in a huff.

  Personally, he would have opted for the huffy walkout. Indeed, he yearned for it. But he’d been given his instructions by the Director for Culture and Information himself.

  “Whatever you do,” Director Lackland had told him, “don’t walk out on her. God knows I’d’ve been a hell of a lot happier if she hadn’t decided to poke her nose into this story in the first place, but now that she’s here, we can’t afford to even look like we’re trying to shut her out. She’ll just make a ruckus about it that’s likely to do more damage than anything else. Every third word in her report will be either ‘evasive,’ ‘dissembling,’ or ‘elusory.’ ”

  So he was stuck. All he could do now was follow his instructions to the letter, however foolish that might make him appear.

  “In retrospect”—he cleared his throat—“we were perhaps overly sanguine.”

  “ ‘Perhaps?’ ”

  The single word oozed sarcasm, and he clenched his jaw.

  “Fine. We were overly sanguine.”

  “The word ‘sanguine’ derives from the same root as the word ‘sanguinary’—which means ‘bloodthirsty.’ Which your security forces certainly were at the time. Remember—I was personally a witness. So now you’re telling me that in addition to being a pack of rabid beasts, they were also incompetent?”

  Fraenzl felt himself glaring at her. The woman’s ability to twist words was—was—

  She smiled at him. The expression was simultaneously sanguine and sanguinary.

  “You might want to watch your blood pressure, Kyle,” she said. “Besides, by now you ought to be used to me. And I’m still waiting for an answer.”

  * * *

  By the time Fr
aenzl left, O’Hanrahan had squeezed out of him an official acknowledgment that the assessments made by the planetary security agencies after Green Pines concerning their success in destroying the Ballroom on Mesa had been—the phrase he finally settled on was “magnified by optimistic bias.”

  The obtuseness of government officials—or of corporate spokespeople, who were a variety of the same species—when it came to confessing their mistakes never ceased to amaze her. A simple “Hey, we were wrong” or “Yeah, we screwed up badly” would do far less damage in the long run than the sort of mealymouthed verbiage they insisted upon.

  Magnified by optimistic bias. Was she going to have fun with that!

  She pushed back from the desk and crossed to the window. As the lead reporter for The Truth Will Out, the most widely watched investigative news site on Old Earth itself, her producers were less tightfisted than most. So she’d been able to afford the extra expense of a room overlooking an actual landscape instead of the artificial canyons—however tastefully decorated they might be—that made up most of the modern city’s interior. From her present perspective, she could see all the way to the edge of the tableland upon which Mendel was situated.

  Or she could have, anyway, if it hadn’t still been overcast and drizzly. But it didn’t matter. She wasn’t really interested in the view; she just found that staring into a distance helped concentrate her thinking.

  She twisted a lock of auburn hair around one index finger, crystal blue eyes narrowed, while she contemplated her assignment here. Her real assignment, which was one of the trickiest she’d ever been given, and not her cover assignment.

  Audrey O’Hanrahan had devoted thirty T-years to establishing herself as one of two or three of the Solarian League’s—perhaps even the whole human race’s—most diligent, scrupulous, and unbiased investigative reporters. Time after time, she’d demonstrated that if Audrey O’Hanrahan said something was true or false, you could count on it. In particular, you could count on her news accounts to be impartial. Like anyone, she could make an occasional mistake, but any mistake of hers was promptly acknowledged and publicly corrected. And no one who didn’t have her own ax to grind had ever seriously accused her of slanting her reports to fit some preconceived notion or allegiance.