Ray Longknife had a wide grin on his face as the final days of the campaign wound down.
Then Whitebred made his last desperate gamble.
How Whitebred got his arsonists into the warehouse where the voting machines were stored never did come out, but midnight, two days before the vote, the warehouse was on fire. The fire was caught fast. There were guards from the 4th Highlanders on duty, and they smelled the smoke even if the detectors had been disabled.
The fire department was quick to answer the alarm.
As was the police commissioner.
He had an arson investigation going before the fire department had the fire out.
General Ray Longknife found himself shaking his head at the whole thing. It wasn’t like this was Whitebred’s only way to handle the voting machines. The spooks, working with Lek, had spotted plenty of back doors and extra software in the computers.
Understandably, Savannah did not have a boatload of voting machines lying around waiting for the next election. The only election anyone remembered had been almost six years back. Still, computers from all over town had been collected at the warehouse and loaded with software that would turn them into voting machines.
From the looks of their software, these machines would have counted every vote as one for Whitebred.
Becky’s spooks had plans to change that at the last minute, but they’d been lying low, not wanting to scare Whitebred into making it any harder on them than it had to be.
So why burn the machines?
“That’s just plain crazy,” the Foreign Service Officer said.
“Becky, you have to understand what pressure does to people,” General Ray Longknife said. “They panic. When people panic, they do stupid things, like mess with their sure thing. Whitebred panicked, did his last stupid thing, and you can only guess how the voters will react to their voting machines’ burning. Will they blame the contender?” Ray grinned. “Or will they blame the folks responsible for maintaining the security of the voting machines? I know how I’ll bet.”
General Ray Longknife would have won his bet.
The professor won with over 60 percent of the vote. He even won the miners from up-country and the farmers.
Becky had been worried about them since all the professor’s rallies had been in town, and Whitebred owned the media feed to the hinterland. Still, the report of the fire at the professor’s house and the fire at the voting-machine warehouse went out to the entire planet.
And had its impact.
It also didn’t hurt that on election day, there were peacekeepers at every voting site, and the senators from Earth drove around, observing the election.
And when someone threw the switch to activate all the software bombs left in the unburned computers, Becky’s spooks were there to throw their own switch and cancel the software before it could do anything to the count.
Very interesting, that.
What was a surprise was Whitbread’s next move.
He left the next day for the space station. There, he did not book himself a suite on the liner that brought in the senators. Instead, he settled into a suite at the Hilton next to the station’s shipyard. Lots of coded traffic flowed between his rooms and the yard, but no one on the Second Chance could read it.
He might have skipped the liner, but he was just about the only one from the old regime who did.
There followed a second run of rats leaving a sinking ship, or at least a ship that had made a hard U-turn. Many of those leaving were wanted for various crimes under the color of law. Quite a few people in the incoming administration wanted to put out arrest warrants for them, but the system collapsed.
Too many of the judges had booked passage for themselves.
There were some left, but their courts were quickly overloaded. The courts ground slow, and justice delayed turned out too often to be justice evaded by flight.
The professor didn’t want to continue Milassi’s practice of naming his own judges. Instead, he tried to arrange a parliament to name replacements.
He recalled the last one that Milassi suppressed some ten years back. However, many of its members had died, left, or recently fled their crimes. What remained did not amount to a quorum.
Savannah began a second round of elections, this time for members of a new parliament.
SIXTY-FIVE
GENERAL RAY LONGKNIFE left the locals to this new round of politicking. He had business of his own. The senators from Earth wanted to talk to him.
They invited him to a special reception.
Just him and them.
It turned out all they really wanted was to have their pictures taken shaking the hand of the man who killed President Urm of Unity and saved them the cost of a long, bloody war.
Ray tried to explain to the first one he talked to that it hadn’t happened the way it was being reported in the media. The senator made it clear that he didn’t care how it actually happened; the media version was fine by him. What he wanted was to have his picture taken shaking the hand of the man who killed President Urm.
After a second failure at getting the truth out, General Ray Longknife switched gears.
“The star map I discovered on Santa Maria could be a problem.”
“How so?” the leader of the Senate’s committee on business and commerce asked.
“I’m concerned that in the rush to find easy planets to colonize, we may discover something that doesn’t like us and is bigger and badder than we are.”
“Surely you jest, General,” said the senator who headed the subcommittee for the Navy’s budget.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if we are alone in this galaxy or if we have company. Do you really want to find out that we aren’t and that we are the second-nastiest thing here?”
“You military men are so predictable. Give you a vista to enjoy, and all you see is a battleground. We, however, see potential, don’t we, Senator?”
“Potential and profits, my good man.”
“Could we at least set limits on how far afield we search?” Ray suggested. “We should also establish a system for tracking scout ships that go out. That way, we’ll know if some fail to come back.”
“No, my good man, that won’t work at all. This is free enterprise at its best. I don’t want to tell George here that I’m sending a probe out to this bunch of stars. He might rush a probe out there just ahead of me. No, General, this is best left to business. We know how to do that.”
Ray tried different senators that evening, and got the feeling very quickly that they all knew of his ideas before he’d talked to the second bunch.
And they all intended to do nothing about any of his suggestions.
Kill President Urm. Good.
Limit exploration. Never!
That night, he shared a beer in the embassy cafeteria with Captain Tordon.
“Trouble, you’re a good man,” Ray Longknife said after he’d quickly downed two beers and ordered a third.
“Huh?” the Marine said. “When a general starts talking nice to a captain, only trouble can come of it.”
“Well, trouble may come of this day, but it won’t be from what you and I talk about. It will be what those damn politicians don’t want to talk about.”
“And that is?” the captain said, clearly willing to lend the general an ear.
Ray rose to the bait and bent the good captain’s ear at great length. “Yes, I believe in the Explorer Corps. Hell, I’m getting it funded from a damn tightfisted Wardhaven legislature, but if we let every Tom, Dick, and Harriet go blundering around the jump points, God only knows what we’ll run into. It’s just plain stupid to bite off more than we can chew before we’ve grown into the space we’ve got.”
“Stupid but profitable,” Trouble pointed out.
“Dumb and deadly,” Ray said, ordering a fourth beer.
“If I may point out, General, we haven’t stumbled upon any evidence that there’s anyone out there. Other than the jump points, I mean
.”
“But we do have the jump points and the three species that built them,” Ray said, pointing at Trouble with his beer bottle. The local brew here came in long-necked bottles. Ray liked that.
“You didn’t happen to come upon anything about other aliens when you had your head against that stone, did you?”
Ray thought for a moment. Maybe more. It couldn’t be the beer, or the scotch the senators had provided him with at their reception. Damn fine scotch it was, too.
“No, I can’t think of anything. But the rock just seemed to be a map. How long has it been since you saw an ordnance map with ‘Here there be dragons,’ I ask you?”
“I don’t recall ever having seen one, sir.”
“I am not going to say, ‘Back in my day we had ’em.’ No, I’m not going to give you that joke to tell on me. I’m not that much older than you.”
“No, sir, but I think you’ve had a lot more to drink today than I have.”
Ray nodded. “I likely have, Trouble. I likely have. But you want to know something, Trouble?”
“Likely not, but you’re going to tell me anyway.”
“I’m scared. I’m really scared. The kind of scared that raises the hair on the back of your neck even before you know what you have to be scared of.
“Oh, and I want another beer.”
“Sir, the hairs on the back of my neck tell me that you don’t need another beer. You need to find your bed before you do anything you’ll regret in the morning.”
“Captain, are you giving your general an order?”
“Only a suggestion, sir,” Trouble said, and left his second beer only half-finished as he helped Ray from his chair and down the hall and across the embassy’s yard to the VIP quarters.
Ray remembered the Marine’s helping him out of his clothes and even tucking him into bed.
“Thanks, soldier,” Ray thought he said, as he curled up with his pillow.
“You’re welcome, trooper,” he remembered hearing. And maybe even, “God help us if you’re scared about the right thing.”
SIXTY-SIX
TROUBLE WAS GLAD he sent himself off to bed right after putting the general down, because two hours later—his commlink said 0100 exactly—he got a call from the duty desk.
“I don’t know if I should bother you, sir, but we’ve got a donnybrook going downtown. Some guys from the divisions in the Capital Corps came to town and got drunk. Now they’re swinging at anything that isn’t wearing the same color uniform they are: Marines, Highlanders, Grenadiers. Everybody.”
“Thanks for calling, Sergeant. I’ll be there in five,” Trouble said, rolling out of bed.
“Anything wrong?” a groggy Ruth asked.
“Not likely. Just some local soldiers blowing off steam on anyone who wears a peacekeeper’s uniform. I better go down there. No doubt some officer will be in here before dawn to get his drunks back.”
“Be careful,” Ruth said, sitting up in bed. Her nighty did a very poor job of covering her breasts.
“With you to come home to, love, I will be the best of careful.”
“You do that.”
In undress greens, Trouble gave his wife a kiss that promised he’d be careful, and trotted for the duty desk. Gunny was there ahead of him.
“Several streets downtown are now fully involved in the brawl,” Gunny reported. “We allowed a large leave party. It seemed like the worst was over, and we could relax, sir.”
“A good call,” Trouble said. “Apparently, someone else thought the same.”
“Yeah,” Gunny growled.
The duty driver had a gun truck, minus the gun, waiting for them at the embassy front door. They headed downtown.
At exactly 0122, the night was lit by a flash, followed by a loud boom.
“What was that?” the driver said.
“I think we’d better find out,” Trouble said, spotting a brightly lit fire. “Head for that.”
“Yes, sir.”
At 0124, there was another explosion followed by a fire not all that far from the first.
“I think we got a problem,” Gunny muttered.
Trouble hit his commlink. “Duty desk, turn out the troops. Full battle kit. More orders to follow.” He tapped off. “Corporal, does this rig have a gun locker?”
“Under your seats, sir. Combination is forty-one, thirty-eight, forty-one. My old lady’s measurements.”
Trouble stood, while Gunny opened the gun locker and issued rifles to himself and the corporal. He handed a holstered automatic to his captain. They settled back down in their seats and watched the night light up. A layer of low-hanging clouds had moved in. Unfortunately, it was more smog than a portent of rain to cool the place off.
Two fires reflected brightly from the low scud, giving the city a hellish glow.
Sirens added sound to the visuals.
The driver slowed down as they approached the center of town. There were still several drunken fights going on along the street they drove. Trouble ignored them.
The flaming building at the end of the street, surrounded by a traffic circle, held his eyes.
“Isn’t that the Justice Building?” Gunny asked.
“That it is,” Trouble said.
A police officer halted them before they got too close. Ordering the driver to stay put, Trouble and Gunny dismounted and talked their way past the police line.
As they got closer, Trouble spotted the police commissioner’s car. He only had to ask twice for directions to find the man watching the fire burn.
“Morning, Commissioner,” Trouble said.
“Morning, Trouble. What brings you to my little bonfire?”
“Same thing that brings you, sir. I thought we’d posted guards at all your municipal buildings?”
“You had. I had. Have you heard about the brawl the soldiers of the 1st Corps threw tonight?”
“Yep, that’s what got me up.”
“I understand the beat cops had to holler for help. The Highlanders called out the guard, as you say, and we pulled in reinforcements from all over town.”
“Including the building guards,” Trouble provided.
“Yep.”
“That boom I saw and heard on the way in here,” Trouble began, “sure seemed familiar. Kind of like military-grade explosives.”
“I didn’t actually see either explosion,” the commissioner admitted. “I’ll take your word for it. By the way, if you have any experts on what a military-grade bomb looks like after it does its boom thing, I’d be grateful for the help.”
Trouble made a call, and more people got roused from their beauty sleep.
More fire equipment arrived and went to work, but the building was fully involved and burning furiously.
The fire commissioner joined the police commissioner. He agreed, in his professional capacity, that this fire had a major accelerant behind it.
“Can this poor stranger ask what I’m watching burn?” Trouble ventured.
“The easy answer is the Justice Department,” the police commissioner said. “Think all the courts and their records, as well as the records of all investigations into any and everything we’ve done or had reported by someone in hope of justice for the last ten years.”
“So if a poor woman got raped by someone or ones,” Trouble offered, “all records of that investigation are now going up in smoke.”
“Yes. Everything. Likely even the reports made by the station cops. All our records were centrally located. For efficiency.” The commissioner’s reply had a bitter twist to it.
Trouble looked around and spotted a second fire’s glow off to their left. “Can I ask what else is burning?”
This time it was the fire commissioner who answered. “The Interior Ministry Building. Strange that,” he added after a pregnant pause. “There were always rumors that Milassi had his good friend at the Interior Ministry run a snitch operation. You want to know which of your neighbors is reporting on you, you’d likely go to the Interior
Ministry. Not last month, I admit, but next week, under a new administration, those records just might be available.”
“I take it that that’s not likely after tonight.”
“Not very,” both locals growled at the same time.
Trouble turned around. Up the street, a large contingent of Highlanders was breaking up a fight. There was a bus filling with drunken brawlers, many of them hanging out the windows and filling the gutter with vomit.
“I was planning on just turning those troops over to their officers when they asked for them. Professional courtesy and all,” Trouble said.
“I’d prefer that you didn’t,” the police commissioner said.
Trouble didn’t respond directly, just raised a questioning eyebrow.
“We may have a major problem with our Army,” the police commissioner said.
“And that blasted dam,” the fire commissioner added.
“I have this uneasy feeling that there’s something about the lay of the land here that I wasn’t briefed on.”
“Can you set us up with a meeting with your boss types? Not at the embassy. They better come in the back door at my office. I’ll try to get the professor in, too. He better know what we know.”
“Pick a time. I’ll have them there,” Trouble said, confident a captain could order a hungover general and a chief of missions to march to his drum.
Once he told them the little tidbits that had been dropped in his lap, he doubted wild horses could keep them away.
SIXTY-SEVEN
TROUBLE FOUND THE meeting was set for 1000 hours next morning. He led General Ray Longknife, Becky Graven, Mary, and Lek in the back door of the police commissioner’s office building. A secretary met them and hurried them up a back staircase. It seemed important that few saw them.
The offworlders did their part. Lek’s bug buster worked overtime on their entire approach march.
The police commissioner seemed surprised to be shushed in his own conference room, but his eyes grew wide as Lek first identified, then destroyed a dozen bugs. Included was one on the room’s projector and commlink.
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