He paused for only a moment. “What we found before I came back here was not good. Several of them are clearly malware of destructive intent. We are putting in place security measures that will let us close them down should they be activated, but we don’t really want to tip our hands before we have to.”
He shrugged. “If the hacker knows we’ve been in there, he might do something that we couldn’t spot. Just how good is this person?”
Now it was Ray’s turn to shrug. “We thought he was just the instigator, inserting something he was provided. There’s nothing in his background that says he’s anything but a vanilla business guy.”
“Who else came with him to Savannah?” Becky asked.
Eyes went up around the table.
“We’ll check the manifest of the Witch of Endor,” the spook said, and trotted out the door again.
“I find it troubling that your spook is not using the net to pass along my question,” Ray said.
“I find it reassuring, myself,” Becky said. “Why risk a breach when it’s just downstairs?”
Ray thought about that and found it satisfactory. “Shall we get on with the meeting we all came here for? What’s happening around town?”
“I had planned to let my intelligence people present their own information,” Becky said, “since they did such a good job of gathering and correlating it, but since the colonel here has them chasing vapor tails, I’ll give their report for them.”
She paused, to take a breath and glance at a flimsy.
“One of the interesting tidbits they uncovered concerns your Admiral Whitebred. Yesterday, he filed to run for president. We thought that strange. Now it seems that he knew something about President Milassi’s travel plans that neither we nor he knew.”
“You can say that again,” Mary said.
“Who else is in the running to be our new president?” Ray asked.
“I was about to come to that. A Mr. Alberto Eliade has tossed his hat in the ring, along with Professor Romali’s expected protest bid. There are others, but they have very little name recognition on the streets.”
“And these do?” Ruth said. “I’ve never heard of them.”
“I have,” Major Barbara said, entering the conversation. “The professor has made a name for himself by being a thorn in Milassi’s side. As much of a thorn as you can be and not have a mysterious accident. The Eliade family have been industrialist giants since the early days of settlement. They always landed on their feet no matter which way the wind blew.”
“I’m not sure whether you praised them or damned them,” Ray said.
“She’s said what there is to say,” Brother Scott said, through unmoving lips. “Appear to be any kind of a threat to Milassi and you die, sadly, sorrowfully, but you die. What kind of survivors do you expect us to have? All you have to do is look around this table, and the truth should be clear. If you caused the big man any trouble, he caused you more. To survive, you caused very little trouble.”
“Has either of you thought of running for president?” Ruth asked.
“Don’t make me laugh,” Brother Scott snorted, then clutched at the bindings to his broken ribs.
“Be labeled a pawn of the offworlders, and you won’t get two votes,” Major Barbara explained.
“How will that play for Whitebred then?” Ray asked.
“He inherits Milassi’s machine,” the Salvation Army officer said. “It will deliver the necessary votes. And if it can’t, the voting machines will report that they have delivered the votes. You don’t expect an honest election here, do you? There hasn’t been one since, I don’t know, Landing Day.”
Alice nodded. Brother Scott coughed painfully.
Colonel Ray Longknife drummed his fingers softly on the table. “So we need to make people believe that they can have an honest vote, then make sure we deliver an honest count.”
“That’s a tall order,” Becky said.
“But he is the man who killed President Urm,” Mary said. “It was in all the media.”
Ray groaned. Mary and the rest of the crew of the Second Chance were in on that little joke, but very few other people knew the truth. Eyes around the table turned to him with hope, or in the case of Becky, puzzlement.
“Exactly how did you do that?” she asked softly.
“Get back to me later,” he whispered. For the rest, he said, “It seems to me that bringing in peacekeeping troops from off planet give us a chance to show the folks here that the rest of humanity cares what happens here and will stand by them if they take a chance and vote for whom they want.”
“That sounds nice,” Dumont said, interrupting, “but how do we do it and who do we do it for? Which one of these guys is gonna be better for Alice here, or are they both going to be just as bad as Whitebred? I killed a good man once for that bastard. I don’t much care for the idea of his being top dog here.”
The room fell silent as Dumont’s words sunk in. All of them. Like the true story of President Urm’s demise, Ray knew the truth about Dumont. Few others did.
Becky Graven finally broke the silence. “As I see it, our first order of business is to make sure both of the not-Whitebred candidates stay alive. After that, we can decide who’s the better of the two, and maybe help them get their message out. Colonel, how do you suggest we keep them from getting suddenly dead?”
“That’s a good question,” Ray said. “I don’t think it would help either of their chances to be seen with a platoon of Society Marines tagging along behind them.”
“But without that platoon,” Mary pointed out, “their chances of surviving until after the votes are counted, assuming anyone bothers to count them, are pretty slim.”
“Trust us to make sure the votes are counted,” one of the spooks said, rejoining the meeting. “As for keeping the candidates alive and getting their message out, that’s a hard one and outside my job description.”
Ray eyed Mary and Dumont. Neither one of them had haircuts that would pass muster from a good Gunnery Sergeant. “Mary, how about you, Dumont, and that computer wizard of yours, what’s his name?”
“Lek, sir,” Mary provided.
“How about the three of you visit our two candidates today and do a security check for them? Maybe some of your exploration guards could ditch their uniforms and see about doing bodyguard duty for them, assuming they want protection.”
Mary and Dumont both sprouted grins. “Don’t mind if we do, sir,” Mary said for both of them.
“We still need to take the measure of these two,” the diplomat said.
“I think Brother Scott and I should pay them a visit,” said Major Barbara. “Maybe at the same time your Mary does. We can at least get some idea of where they stand.”
“Could I come too?” came timidly from Alice. “They both have kids about my age. I’d kind of like to talk to them. See what they’re like. I don’t know, maybe knowing something about how they treat their kids and what their kids are like would tell us . . .” Alice ran out of words.
But she didn’t stop talking for lack of encouragement. Both Major Barbara and Brother Scott were nodding along, smiling. So were Mary and Dumont.
“Kids say a lot about a man,” Ray said, wincing inside at being so far from his own impending fatherhood. “Alice, you’ve got yourself a job. I’ll look forward to your report.”
If anything, the poor girl seemed to grow smaller under the pressure of universal approval. “Can I tell you my report?” she asked. “I don’t write so good.”
“Alice, you write fine,” Major Barbara said, but then hastened to add as panic spread across the young woman’s face, “But yes, you can tell us all about your visits with the kids.”
“Thank you,” came in barely a whisper.
“You’re going to need to come up with some idea to help the candidates get their messages out,” the spook added after a pause for Alice to recover. “We’re monitoring the public media, and it’s flooded with your Mr. Whitebred’s smiling f
ace and all his promises. Not sure exactly what he’s promising, but he’s promising that tomorrow the sun will rise, and it will be warm.”
Ray and Becky exchanged looks.
“We’ll have to think about that,” Becky said.
“Tell me. Who owns the media around here?” Ray asked, fearing the answer.
“The government pretty much controls the net,” the intelligence analyst said. “There are a few independent sources, but they only survive because they didn’t upset Milassi.”
“And what are the chances they’ll be willing to upset Whitebred?” Mary asked.
“Today, slim to nil,” the spook replied.
“We’ll need to change that by the end of the week, at the latest,” Ruth said with a smile that brooked no disagreement.
On that note, the meeting broke up.
FIFTY-EIGHT
MARY ARRANGED A visit to Professor Romali’s home early that afternoon. They had a late-dinner invitation to Mr. Eliade’s estate.
She chose three armored SUVs from the embassy motor pool and filled them with nine of her former Marines. The older half of them had spent most of their lives as asteroid miners, and the younger half were street kids like Dumont. None would be mistaken for hard-core Marines once they donned civvies.
With body armor underneath.
Automatics were issued to all, with discreet holsters. Long guns and antitank weapons went into the back, easily accessible, but not in anyone’s face.
Major Barbara went into one rig, Brother Scott the next. Mary and Dumont led, with Lek eyeballing his black boxes. They got to the professor’s home with no alarms. Mary liked that.
The professor’s home was on a tree-lined lane one block from the university. It was a pleasant brick two-story, with ivy growing up the north wall. Students and professor types walked and rode bikes up and down the street.
Mary had seen places like this in vids, but she’d never actually been to one. Considering what she’d seen so far of Petrograd, she wondered if somehow her SUV had made a jump and deposited them on another planet.
“Wow, this is my kind of street,” Dumont whispered to Mary. “I bet their trash cans are fat pickings.”
“Shut it down, Marine,” Mary said softly, through tight lips. “You’re a lieutenant in the Society of Humanity Marine Corps. You eat off linen in the ship’s wardroom. Neither you nor I will gawk. Read me?”
“Loud and clear, old lady, Captain, ma’am,” he said, but he had his game face on as he headed down the line to supervise the establishment of a secure perimeter. There were four steps between the curb and the professor’s front door. Alice helped Brother Scott out of the rig, then held him up with one of his arms over her shoulder. His other arm was over Major Barbara’s. With halting steps, they made it toward the door.
A dog began barking. It must have been a greeting because the professor, his wife, and two teenage children were at the door, and soon helping Brother Scott, as if five people made it easier than two.
Lek slipped in the house easily with everyone’s attention focused on Brother Scott and was back at the door with an “all safe” signal for Mary as the others worked their way up the final two steps. Fortunately, the front parlor was their goal, so once they were in the house, they hadn’t far to go.
The wife dismissed herself and the kids to get something for their visitors to drink. Somehow, Alice managed to attach herself to the son and daughter as they retreated with their mother to the kitchen. The wife returned quickly with tea and biscuits for their guests, then joined her husband on a couch.
What Mary would have bet was the Father Chair had been given to Brother Scott. Mary joined Major Barbara on the couch facing the professor. Lek and Dumont found portions of the wall not covered with paintings—the wife painted—or certificates and pictures of the professor with colleagues or students.
It took only a few questions from Major Barbara before the professor launched into a long list of what was wrong with Savannah and what he would do to change them. Mary liked what she heard but noticed that, like the mice who voted to bell the cat in the ancient cautionary tale, the professor was long on bells but kind of short on specifics as to how the bell got around the cat’s neck.
Then again, it had been a long time since anyone on Savannah had had a chance to make anything happen.
The professor did admit that he could not do all of this himself. He had begun a series of meetings with academics, as well as people from finance and industry, to see what they could do in a new administration. He was even able to name names. A few, he admitted, were bureaucrats from the present administration.
“The people who run the waterworks or the solid-waste-treatment plant were hired for their skills, not their political résumés.”
Mary liked that practical twist.
Still, she had to wonder, how much did the professor believe in what he was saying and how much of it was language he spouted because it sounded good? Lek was watching the numbers on one of his rarely used black boxes. With any luck, he’d have an opinion on what the candidate actually believed and what was held a mite bit loosely.
He ended his sales spiel by asking Major Barbara and Brother Scott to endorse him. They skillfully dodged the issue, pointing out that they’d be talking to Mr. Eliade that evening, and they’d like to withhold judgment until after that.
“Are you meeting with Mr. Whitebred?” he asked.
“He hasn’t returned our call,” Major Barbara said.
Which came as a surprise to Mary. Had these two actually asked to talk to the new strongman?
“Would you please tell me if he does? I’ve called him about arranging a three-way debate, but I haven’t heard back from either of the others.”
“Is that how you intend to get your message out?” Brother Scott asked.
That produced a worried frown from the professor. His wife rested a supportive hand on his knee.
“I’ve contacted everyone I know in the media. Right now, none of them can even offer me a price sheet for time on their channel. They’re booked solid by Whitebred. It looks like I’ll have to take it personally to the people, but how do I even get the message out that I’ll be holding a rally? Some of the students are offering to distribute handbills, but there are parts of town none of them dare go,” he said with an expressive shrug.
“Maybe we can look into other options,” Major Barbara said, standing.
The withdrawal was no easier, although this time Alice had the son help her with Brother Scott, leaving the adults more time to talk. The professor seemed talked out, but the wife stepped in.
She was very troubled by the children abandoned to live on the street. “But I don’t think the kids are the real problem. Why do so many husbands die on the job? Why do so many wives die? What is wrong with our society that so very many children have no place to go but the streets?”
Mary liked that question. She made a note to ask the smart people back at the embassy if they had any answers. Mary had a lot of questions, but she put them off until she was back at the embassy, down in the basement . . . and debugged.
Lek reported they’d only picked up two bugs.
“How come even the college area has spy bugs drifting around?” Mary asked no one in particular as she settled down at the conference table in the embassy.
“Maybe it’s not just the college, but the home of a presidential candidate,” Becky said. One of her spooks, the one who’d debugged them, nodded agreement.
Before the major or brother could start talking, Mary stepped in. “Lek, were you running your voice-stress analyzer at the professor’s place?”
“Guilty as charged,” the old computer mage agreed.
“And you found?” Mary gave him a lead when he didn’t go on.
“He believes in what he’s saying, I’ll give him that much. He’s not at all sure how he’s going to make it happen, but what he says is true and what he hopes for he sincerely wants to do.”
Co
lonel Ray Longknife turned to Major Barbara. “What do you think of what he had to say?”
“I liked what I heard,” she said slowly.
“I liked that he’s already talking to people who can help him make it happen,” Brother Scott added. “He strikes me as a bit more practical than some professors I’ve met.”
“I liked what his wife said about taking better care of parents to keep us kids off the street,” Alice said.
Mary had no idea how the young woman had ended up on the street. She hadn’t dared to ask. Now Alice provided the answer.
“My father died when a crane toppled and killed him. Mom took sick, us not allowed to use the company clinic after that, and she died, too.” She hung her head. “I tried to take care of my baby brother, but he died before we’d been on the street a year. It’s hard on the streets.”
“Kids your age belong in school,” Ruth said, as softly as she could.
“The professor’s kids are in a school at the university,” Alice said in answer to Ruth. “They like it. They go to school with a lot of other professors’ kids. His daughter’s in a competitive piano program. Her dad comes to all her recitals. He even changes some of his speaking engagements to fit her into his schedule.”
“How does she feel about his running for president? That may mess up his getting to recitals,” the colonel asked.
“She knows that. She was kind of leaning toward putting her playing on hold for a few months so she could campaign with him. Maybe play before all the political talking gets started. She really thinks he’d make a good president.” Alice paused. “Though she admits that she’s not all that sure what kind of dad a president can be. She said she thinks he’ll still make time for her and her brother.”
“What’s her brother think?” Becky, the diplomat, asked.
“He’s not so sure. I think he and his dad have it a bit harder, getting together. His sister says that’s just because they’re two bulls in the same field, whatever that means.”
“I’ve been there,” Ray admitted with a tight scowl. “My old man and I were never happier than when he was on one planet, and I was on another.”
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