by David Weber
Anton couldn't help but wince.
"Yeah," said Victor. "That's the problem, Anton. It's not that these kids are too fanatical. Frankly, I don't blame them one damn bit for their zeal and fervor. The problem is that they see everything in black and white. Forget the colors of the spectrum. They don't even recognize the color gray, much less any of its various shades."
A frown had been gathering on Yana's forehead, as she listened. "I don't get it, Victor. Why do you care in the first place? It's not as if you have any doubts any longer about their loyalties or dedication. Unless you've changed your mind over the last two days."
He shook his head. "It's not that I don't trust them. It's that I don't entirely trust their judgment. Let's not forget how close they've come already to compromising our mission. To put it mildly."
Anton leaned back in his chair at the kitchen table, and considered Victor's words. He understood what was concerning the Havenite agent. The small group of young seccies with whom they'd established a relationship, using the liaisons provided by Saburo's contacts, had been very helpful. They provided Anton and Victor with natives who knew the area extremely well, especially Neue Rostock. And they could also provide Anton and Victor with the assistance they might need in the future, depending on the way things developed.
Furthermore, while they were young, and suffered from the haphazard education that all seccies received, they were very far from dull-witted or incapable. To Anton and Victor's surprise, for instance, when the group had been asked to provide them with a powerful explosive device, they'd proudly presented them a few days later with a low-yield nuclear device. Nothing jury-rigged either. The device was a standard construction type used in terraforming, designed and built by a well-known Solarian company. The best Anton and Victor had expected had been something chemical and homemade.
He chuckled. "That was quite a scene, wasn't it? Funny—well, sort of—now that it's over."
* * *
"Impressive," said Anton, gazing down on the nuclear demolition device. He was doing his best not to let his surprise show.
Enough of it must have shown, though, to cause the chests of the young firebrands gathered in the basement of a modest seccy home to swell with pride. Their informal leader Carl Hansen said: "A cousin of—well, never mind the details—told us he could get his hands on one of them."
Anton nodded. He didn't want to know the details, anyway. "How'd you disable the locator beacon?"
Hansen's face went blank. He and the other youngsters in the room—David Pritchard, Cary Condor and Karen Steve Williams—exchanged glances.
"What's a locator beacon?" asked Williams.
Victor leaned away from the device—fat lot of good that would do!—and whistled soundlessly. He looked even paler than usual. Anton was pretty sure his own face looked about the same.
Moving carefully—fat lot of good that would do!—he pulled the com out of his pocket. A quick scanning search of the nuclear device yielded the port he needed.
For something like this, Anton wanted a physical connection. So he pulled out the rarely-used cable attachment and plugged it into the port.
"What are you doing?" asked Cory.
"He's going to disable—try to disable—the locator beacon," Cachat said tonelessly. "Hopefully, before anyone in charge finds out the device isn't where it's supposed to be."
A bit of irritation crept into his tone: "Did you honestly think Mesans—hell, anybody—let nuclear explosive devices roam around loose?"
"Please be quiet, everyone," said Anton. "This is . . . really quite tricky."
He heard Victor suck in a little air. Coming from him, that was the equivalent of someone else shrieking My God—doom is almost certain! Cachat knew what a genuine expert Zilwicki was when it came to these things. If he admitted it was . . . really quite tricky . . .
Complete silence proved to be too much for the youngsters. "You mean . . . they can figure out where the thing is?" whispered Pritchard.
"To within three meters, as a rule," said Victor. He was back to speaking tonelessly. "At which point they have several options, although they'll probably settle for one of the first two."
Pritchard's eyes—quite wide they were, at the moment—stared at him appealingly, and Victor shrugged.
"First, they can send out the elite commando unit to retrieve it, with lots of very big, very nasty, and very efficient guns. Plenty to"—he gave the basement a quick scan—"well, to give all the walls down here a nice even coating of new paint. The color known colloquially as BGB. Blood, guts and brains." He smiled ever so slightly at his extremely attentive young audience. It was not a pleasant expression. "Or, second, they can detonate the device. True, that second option's usually a bit extreme, but they might not really care a lot about that. Especially if they figure out who's got the damned thing."
"What part of 'this is really quite tricky' did I not make clear?" Anton said crossly.
Finally, blessedly, silence fell. And, perhaps three minutes later, Anton succeeded in disabling the beacon. In a perfect world, he'd have reprogrammed the beacon to simulate a legitimate location. But there were simply too many unknown factors to risk doing that, here. They'd just have to hope that no one had spotted the device "wandering" over the past period. If they hadn't, they wouldn't spot the missing device now until a complete physical inventory was made. Fortunately, that didn't usually happen more than once a year, even with devices as potentially dangerous as these. Modern locator beacons were so accurate, reliable and tamper-resistant that people usually just relied on a periodic check of the beacons themselves.
And, also, fortunately, most people tended to equate "tamper-resistant" with "tamper-proof." Being fair, there really weren't very many people in the galaxy who could have done what Anton had just done.
* * *
On the positive side, the incident had solidified Anton and Victor's credentials with their local contacts faster and more surely than probably anything else would have done. But the same capability the youngsters had shown, when coupled to their ignorance of so many things and the narrow viewpoint Victor was describing . . .
Anton made a face. "You're worried they'll go off half-cocked."
Victor shrugged. "Not exactly. They're not fools, far from it. I'm mostly worried that, first, they'll slip on security. To really do counterespionage properly you need to be patient and methodical more than anything else. That's . . . not their strength. So I think they're more open to being penetrated than they think they are. Second, I'm worried that if things do start to come apart, they're more likely to react by helping the process than trying to dodge it, if you know what I mean. Especially some of them—like David Pritchard. Who was just assigned the task of handling the device, if we need it."
Anton grimaced again. He hadn't attended the last meeting of the group. ("The group" was the only name they had. In that, at least, showing more of a sense for security than they did in other ways.) The decision to put Pritchard in charge of the device must have been made there.
There wasn't anything wrong with David Pritchard, exactly. But Victor and Anton both sensed that the youngster had a level of quiet yet corrosive fury that might lead him off a cliff, in the right circumstances.
But . . .
There really wasn't anything they could do about it. It wasn't as if he and Victor had any real control of the group. Even its nominal leader, Carl Hansen, was no more than a first among equals.
"We'll just have to live with it. To be honest, Victor, I'm more worried at the moment about your situation with Inez Cloutier. Realistically, how much longer can you stall her?" He squinted a little. "You have, I trust, given up any idea of accepting employment?"
Victor sighed. "Yes, yes, yes. The voice of caution has prevailed. Although I hate to think what I'll be passing up."
For a moment, his expression had a trace of wistful sorrow. The sort of expression with which a normal and reasonable young man half-regrets his decision not to pursue
a possible romantic involvement. On Victor Cachat's face, the expression signified his regret at not undertaking the harrowing risk of accepting employment with a rogue ex-StateSec military force, being dispatched to places unknown and with no way to get free that either he or Anton could figure out.
"You'd have to be crazy to even think about it," said Yana. "And keep in mind that assessment is coming from a former Scrag."
Victor smiled, then ran fingers through his hair again. "We've got a bit of luck, there. Cloutier got called off-planet yesterday. At a guess, she's got to go consult with whoever is running this operation. I'm almost certain now that that's Adrian Luff, by the way."
Anton nodded. He and Victor had tentatively come to that conclusion a few days earlier, based on what Victor had been able to find out in the course of his negotiations with Cloutier.
Adrian Luff . . .
That was mostly bad news, according to Victor. Zilwicki really had no opinion of his own. He'd recognized the name from his days working for Manticoran naval intelligence, but that was about it.
Cachat knew more about him, as you'd expect, although he'd never actually met the man. According to Victor, Luff wasn't an especially brutal or harsh man, certainly not by StateSec standards. He'd scarcely been what a professional Manticoran or Havenite naval officer would have thought of as a fleet commander, but at least he'd had a far better idea than most of his SS fellows about which end of the tube the missile came out of. And while no StateSec officer assigned to ride herd on the People's Navy was likely to be a total novice where brutality and discipline was concerned, Luff had understood that breaking a man's spirit wasn't the best way to produce a warrior when you needed one.
That might speak well of the man, but Anton would have been a lot happier if this rogue StateSec military force—which was a very powerful one; he and Victor had been able to learn that much for sure and certain—had as its commander someone like Emile Tresca. Tresca, at one time the commandant of StateSec's prison planet, had been notorious for his viciousness and sadism. On the other hand, nobody in their right mind would have put him in charge of a frigate, much less an entire fleet.
"When will she be back?"
Victor shrugged. "No way to know for sure, but I get the distinct feeling it won't be very soon. If I'm right and she was summoned to meet with Luff, this is just one more little indication that wherever Luff's assembling that fleet of his, it's not that close to Mesa."
"But probably quite close to Torch," Anton said grimly. "Victor . . . I have to raise this again. I think we need to consider whether we should leave now, and bring the news of this threat back to Torch. You know and I know that Luff's planning to ignore the Eridani Edict."
"That's not actually certain yet," Victor said mildly. "I get the sense that Luff's resistant to the idea. But . . . yes, it's clear enough from the sort of questions Cloutier asked me. Part of the reason they're being so cautious about hiring people for any sort of high-level positions, it seems pretty obvious, is because Luff and his people think there's a good chance they'll be galactic pariahs before too long."
He got up and began walking about, just to stretch a little. The kitchen in the apartment was too small for him to be able to walk more than three paces. Still, they'd been sitting for hours. Anton was tempted to get up himself and join him—except there wouldn't be room. The kitchen was excessively narrow as well as small.
"I've thought about it, Anton. But I still think it'd be a mistake—and, yes, I know I'll be cursing myself for the rest of my life if we get back and find that Torch is a cinder because everyone was caught by surprise. But, first, I don't think they will be. There's simply no way for an operation of this size to be mounted without tripping some alarm wires somewhere. You have just as high an opinion of Rozsak's chief of intelligence as I do. I don't think there's much chance that Jiri Watanapongse hasn't figured out what's happening yet. Neither do you."
He paused in his pacing. "And that's really all that's involved, isn't it? Just bringing a warning? It's not as if either you or I would be any help on Torch, even if we got back in time to meet the attack. That'll be a naval brawl, pure and simple. And if neither Maya nor Erewhon comes to Torch's aid"—here, his expression got very bleak—"then about all that'll be left to do is wreak whatever vengeance we can."
He started pacing again. "On the other hand, if we stay here, we have a real chance of making a lot of progress on any number of fronts. Just for starters . . ."
Anton glanced at the clock on the wall. They'd been at it for almost three hours, and it was now clear they wouldn't be ending any time soon.
"Sit down, Victor," he said. "Give someone else a chance to stretch a little."
"Yeah," said Yana. "Me first."
Chapter Forty-Six
September, 1921 PD
"Sit down, Lajos," Jack McBryde invited. "Take a load off. How does a cup of coffee sound?"
"Coffee sounds good," Lajos Irvine replied. He smiled as he said it, yet there was a slight—very slight, perhaps, but undeniable—edge to his response, and McBryde reminded himself not to grimace.
Irvine wore the traditional gray smock of a general laborer genetic slave. The smock's shoulder carried the stylized image of a cargo shuttle, which marked its wearer as a ground crewman at the Green Pines shuttle port, and the three chevrons above the shuttle marked him as a senior supervisor—in effect, a trustee. Irvine had the heavyset, muscular build to go with that smock, and if he'd cared to open his mouth and display it, his tongue carried the barcode of a slave, as well. In fact, physically, he was a slave—or, at least, clearly the product of a slave-bred genotype. Except, of course, for the fact that unlike real genetic slaves, he had the enhanced lifespan of a gamma line.
It was a fact which the Alignment's star lines seldom discussed, even among themselves, that genetically, they were much more closely related to Manpower's slaves than they were to the vast majority of humanity. For centuries, the slave lines had been the laboratories of the Long-Range Planning Board—the place where newly designed traits could be field-tested, tried out, and then either culled or incorporated into those same star lines and conserved. The LRPB had been careful to work from far behind the scenes, even (or, perhaps, especially) within the Manpower hierarchy, but its access to Manpower's breeding programs had always been a major factor in its successes.
One consequence of that was that even the Alignment's alpha and beta lines shared a whole host of genetic markers with Manpower's slaves. None of those slaves had ever received the entire package of one of the star lines, of course, just as none of them had received prolong, yet there was an undeniably close relationship between them.
That relationship helped the Alignment's penetration of the slave community as a whole, too. Irvine was an example of that, given how little modification his basic genotype had required to suit him for his role. There were never as many deep-penetration agents of his type as Alignment Security might have wished, but that was the result of a conscious policy decision, not of any inherent limitation on the number of potential agents. There'd been the occasional discussion of increasing the numbers of agents like Lajos, especially as the Audubon Ballroom had grown in sophistication and audacity. There were those (and he knew Steven Lathorous was one of them) who believed the Ballroom's capabilities were reaching the point of genuinely threatening to uncover the truth of the Alignment's existence. The people who felt that way were most likely to press for the creation of additional deep-penetrators, yet however cogent their arguments might be, the considerations of the Alignment's "onion strategy" continued to preclude the possibility. The Alignment had always relied on misdirection, stealth—on not being noticed in the first place, rather than building the sort of rockhard firewalls which were likely to attract the very attention it sought so assiduously to avoid.
Ironically, the limited numbers of available deep-penetration agents was part of what had made them so successful for so long. Not even Manpower knew that some of its "sla
ves" were nothing of the sort. That had made life hard for quite a few of Irvine's predecessors and fellows. In fact, the conditions of their "slavery" had cost more than one of them his life along the way, despite everything the Alignment's penetration of Manpower's bureaucracy had been able to do to protect them. But it also meant their security was absolute. No one outside their controls and handlers even dreamed of their existence, and keeping things that way meant holding their total numbers down to something manageable. The Ballroom was aware of the dangers of counter-penetration of course. There'd always been some of that, just as there would always be human beings who could be bribed—or coerced by terror and threats against those they loved—to spy upon their fellows. At least some of the Alignment's agents had been identified as exactly that, over the years, and paid the price the Ballroom exacted from traitors. Yet all of them had died without anyone ever realizing who—and what—they actually were.
Which, to be honest, was one of the reasons McBryde and Lathorous found Irvine's constant efforts to escape his current assignment particularly irritating. McBryde could sympathize with the fact that living a slave's life wasn't going to be especially pleasant under any circumstances, but at least Irvine's present duties were downright cushy compared to what some of his fellows had suffered—or to what they were enduring at this very moment, for that matter.
McBryde gave himself a mental shake, climbed out of his chair, and personally poured the man a cup of coffee. Brooding on Irvine's unhappiness and how much less happy the man could have been wasn't going to accomplish much. Besides, in some ways it resonated too closely for comfort with his own unhappiness.
"So," he said, handing the cup across and parking himself on the edge of his desk with a deliberate air of informality, "is there anything going on out there I should know about?"