by David Weber
Keita had gone down to talk to her, and it had been like talking to a statue. Whatever had carried her from the surface of Louvain into Wadislaw Watts' office had abandoned her in the aftermath. He'd never seen her like that, never seen her so closed-in, never seen her close out the rest of the universe. But he'd recognized what he was seeing. She was mourning her dead all over again, seeing them once more, seeing the courage which had carried them to certain death in the service of their Emperor while the traitor who'd pretended to be a friend sent them off to die... and smiled.
And then Keita had made the decision for which, he knew now, he would never forgive himself. At the time, it had seemed only logical, but if he'd guessed, if he'd even suspected -
He gave himself a mental shake and looked her squarely in the eye. It was the least he could do.
"They're not going to shoot him, Alley," he said flatly, and for the first time, those green eyes showed emotion. They went bleak and cold, and he flinched from the betrayal in their depths.
"It's my fault," he said bitterly. "If I hadn't put it all under a security blanket, hadn't kept it quiet, they couldn't do this. But I swear, Alley, I never thought this would happen. I just thought if we could keep it quiet long enough to get word back to Old Earth, to act on what you'd discovered before the Rish got wind of it, then maybe -"
He cut himself off. No. She deserved better than excuses from him, however true those excuses might be.
"What are they going to do?" she asked finally, and he looked away for a moment before he found the courage to face her once more.
"Baron Yuroba doesn't want anything to 'tarnish' Shallingsport-or what you accomplished at Louvain, for that matter. He doesn't want a huge court-martial, doesn't want any media-circus treason trials... doesn't want to admit a Marine officer could betray his oath this way. And Canaris wants to use Watts. She knows the Rish have no way of knowing what Shernsiya told you-that even if Rethmeryk knows exactly what her farthi chi said, her own honor would preclude her from ever telling the Sphere. So if we keep it quiet, we can use what he knows to roll up every Rish intelligence op he was involved with."
Alicia's face had grown tighter, her eyes bleaker, with every word, and he shook his head.
"General Arbatov and I both protested."
In fact, Keita had pushed his "protest" so furiously that Yoruba had finally threatened him with a court-martial.
"I think, maybe, they would have listened," he continued, "if Watts hadn't set up an insurance policy."
"What insurance policy?" Alicia's voice was frozen.
"He has evidence-proof, he claims-of the involvement of at least three Senators in Rishathan intelligence operations. Not members of their staffs, Alicia-the Senators themselves. He claims that with the information he can give us, we can turn the Senators-leave them in place, but use them to feed the Rish what we want them to know. And he's got other information stashed away, information we might never find on our own-information on Rishathan operations, the identities and aliases of probably half of the Freedom Alliance's leadership cadre, black-market arms dealers who have been supplying the FALA-and corrupt Marine and Fleet supply officers who have been surreptitiously dumping weapons to them. That's his insurance policy-twenty years of evidence of treason that he won't hand over unless he gets a deal."
"And that deal is?"
"They're going to amnesty him for Shallingsport." Keita closed his eyes at last, his face wrung with pain. "He's going to be kept on active duty-officially, and for a while, at least," he continued from behind his closed eyelids. "Not for long, and his actual authority will be nonexistent. In effect, he'll be a prisoner, under constant surveillance, taking the orders of Justice's Counter-Intelligence people, and if he fails to cooperate in any way, he forfeits his amnesty.
"Eventually, in a year or two, they're going to arrange something-a fake air car accident, an illness, something like that-to let them invalid him out. Then he'll 'retire' to a very carefully supervised life somewhere. They'll keep an eye on him-a close one-and he'll remain available as a 'resource' on Rishathan intelligence techniques."
"That's it?" Alicia said flatly. "That's the justice the Company gets?"
"No, Alley." He opened his eyes and looked at her once more. "It's not justice. It's not even close. But Canaris has been aware for years that we've been hemorrhaging sensitive information to the Sphere, and she's suspected that there were Senators involved. I know she thinks Gennady, or somebody on his staff, is one of the leaks, but she's never been able to prove it. Now she sees this as her chance to finally shut that flow off. And, she says, as her chance to avoid future Shallingsports." His mouth twisted. "She pointed out that no one can undo what happened to Charlie Company, and that nothing Watts can tell us will make our dead-your dead-any less heroes. But her duty is to the living, and she can't justify not gaining access to the information Watts claims to possess. And, she says, if he doesn't have the information he says he does, she'll cheerfully try him for treason after all."
"And Baron Yuroba?"
"Baron Yuroba is an idiot," Keita said harshly. "He could care less about intelligence maneuvers. He's just determined to avoid any 'scandals' on his watch. But, idiot or not, he's still the Minister of War, and he's got powerful senatorial support."
"You're saying the Prime Minister can't fire him," Alicia said.
"I'm saying the Prime Minister won't fire him over something like this, especially not when Canaris is coming up with all of her arguments for why doing it is a good thing."
"Uncle Arthur, I can't let this stand. You know I can't." Alicia looked him in the eye. "I don't care about Baron Yuroba, and I don't care about Canaris' intelligence strategies. Not this time. My company-my people-never asked much from our Empire and our Emperor. We were proud to serve, and we went in with our eyes open, and we by God did the job. And now, when our own Minister of War knows what happened, that we were set up, that we were sent knowingly to the slaughter by one of our own intelligence officers, he's too concerned about scandals to give our dead justice? No, Uncle Arthur. I can't let that happen."
"You have no choice, Alley. And neither do I."
Her head snapped up, her jaw tight, and he shook his head.
"I told Yoruba the same thing," he said. "I told him I'd go to the Emperor himself. And that's when Yoruba told me the Prime Minister has already discussed it with His Majesty. I don't think for a moment that the Prime Minister just happened to have that discussion before General Arbatov and I found out what he, Yuroba, and Canaris had already decided. But it doesn't matter. The Emperor isn't happy about it-Yuroba admitted that much, and I know His Majesty well enough to know that 'not happy' doesn't begin to sum up his feelings. But however much I may hate this, Canaris does have a point. This offers us the potential for the sort of intelligence coup that comes along maybe once in fifty years, the sort that could save hundreds or even thousands of additional lives, and she does have a responsibility to recognize that. I happen to think the advantages it offers will be transitory and a lot less effective than that-that's the nature of intelligence strategies-but the Emperor has a duty to listen to her arguments. And in the face of the unanimous agreement of the relevant members of the Cabinet and the Prime Minister, he feels he has no choice but to acquiesce. And since the entire purpose of Canaris' strategy depends upon the Rish not discovering that we know about Watts, I've been personally ordered by Yuroba, speaking for the Emperor, to expunge all record of what happened aboard MacArthur."
"Uncle Arthur -" Alicia began, her expression stricken at last, and he shook his head again, slowly, sadly.
"It has to be that way, Alley, if it's going to work. That's the bottom line, and our legal command authority has ordered us to keep our mouths shut to make sure it does work."
"And if I choose not to obey that order, Sir?" she asked coldly.
"I've been instructed by Baron Yuroba to inform you," Keita said in a voice like crumbling granite, "that you are charged, on your o
ath as a cadrewoman in the personal service of the Emperor, to keep silent forever on this matter. If you fail to do so, if you go public with what Shernsiya told you, you'll be court-martialed. The charge will be assaulting a superior officer, the Empire then being in a state of emergency, and the sentence, if you are found guilty, will be death."
Alicia stared at him, and something died in her eyes. Something which had always been in them before disappeared, and grief washed over Keita as he realized what it was.
"Alley," he said, "I don't -"
He broke off, his jaw tight, and stared out the windows on the far side of his office for a long moment. He could just see the spire of the Cenotaph, and all that it stood for, all that the young woman sitting across the coffee-table from him and the members of her company had given in such unstinting measure, thundered through his soul.
"Alley," he said, looking back at her, "don't."
"Don't what?" Her voice was flat, rusty-sounding, as if something had broken inside it.
"Don't let it stand," he told her, and leaned across the table towards her. "Go public. Tell the entire Empire what that godforsaken bastard did! Yuroba doesn't want a scandal? Well, give him the mother of all scandals! Let him explain to the media-and the Cadre, by God!-why he's court-martialing one of the three living holders of the Banner of Terra! He'll never do it-he doesn't have the balls for it. And if he does, no court-martial he could empanel would ever convict."
"Would you go public, if it were you, Uncle Arthur?" she asked him softly. "If His Majesty himself had ordered you not to, would you do it anyway?"
"Damned straight I -"
He froze as he realized what she'd actually asked. Not "would you face a court-martial" but "would you disobey the Emperor's command." Because that was what it really came down to, wasn't it? Not to Yuroba's spineless idiocy. Not to the Prime Minister's concession to political expediency. Not even to Canaris' completely valid desire to use the intelligence windfall which had landed in her lap.
No. It came down to the fact that he, Sir Arthur Keita, was the Emperor of Humanity's personal liegeman. That he had given his oath to Emperor Seamus II, and before him to Empress Maire, to be his servant "of life, limb, and duty, until my Emperor release me or death take me."
"No, Alley," he said finally, softly. "I wouldn't. I can't."
"And neither can I," she said. "Not now. If it were only Yuroba, only Canaris, yes. But not now. Not now that the Emperor himself has spoken. I can't break faith with him... even if he has broken faith with me."
Keita flinched from the bottomless pain of her last eight words.
"Alley, he didn't -"
"Yes, he did, Uncle Arthur," she contradicted flatly. "He made a choice. Maybe it's even the right one. Maybe Canaris is right, and she can use Watts, make at least something good come out of it. But that doesn't change the fact that Canaris, and Yuroba, and, yes, His Majesty, have broken faith with the Company. With its dead. With my dead."
Tears sparkled in her green eyes at last, and she shook her head slowly, sadly, a mother mourning the death of her child.
"I'll obey his order," she said. "This one, this last time. But no more, Uncle Arthur. No more."
She reached up and unpinned the harp and starship from the collar of her uniform. The harp and starship of the House of Murphy. They gleamed in her palm, and she looked down at them for a moment through the haze of her tears, then reached out and laid them on the coffee-table between her and Keita.
"I can't serve an Empire which puts expediency before my dead." Her voice trembled at last, and she shook her head again-sharply, this time, almost viciously. "And I can't-won't-serve an Emperor who lets that happen," she said hoarsely. "Maybe it's all justified, but I can't do this anymore... not without betraying the Company. And if everyone else in the goddamned universe is going to betray my dead," she looked him in the eye, her lips trembling, "then they're going to do it without me."
She touched the harp and starship one last time-gently, like a lover-then rose, tall, slim, and proud against the windows and the Cenotaph's obelisk, her eyes glistening with tears. She looked down once more at the insignia on the coffee-table, and then she looked back at Sir Arthur Keita.
"Goodbye, Uncle Arthur," Alicia Dierdre DeVries said softly, and she turned without a backward glance and walked out of that place forever.
Book Four: Victims
Chapter Thirty-Three
The darkness frayed.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly even to one such as she, the warp and woof of darkness loosened. Slivers of peace drifted away, and the pulse of life quickened. She roused-sleepily, complaining at the disturbance and clutched at the darkness as a sleeper might blankets on a frosty morning. But repose unraveled in her hands, and she woke... to darkness.
Yet it was a different darkness, and her thoughts sharpened as cold swept itself about her, flensing away the final warmth. Her essence reached out, quick and urgent in something a mortal might have called fear, but only emptiness responded, and a blade of sorrow twisted within her.
They were gone-her sister selves, their creators. All were gone. She who had never existed as a single awareness was alone, and the void sucked at her. It sought to devour her, and she was but a shadow of what once she had been... a shadow who felt the undertow of loneliness sing to her with extinction's soulless lack of malice.
Focused thought erected a barrier, holding the void at bay. Once that would have been effortless; now it dragged at her like an anchor, but it was a weight she could bear. She roused still further, awareness flickering through the vast, empty caverns of her being, and was appalled by what she saw. By how far she had sunk, how much she had lost.
Yet she was what she was, diminished yet herself, and a sparkle of grim humor danced. She and her sister selves had wondered, once. They had discussed it, murmuring to one another in the stillness of sleep when their masters had no current task for them. Faith had summoned their creators into existence, however they might have denied it, and her selves had known that when that faith ended, so would those she/they served. But what of her and her selves? Would the work of their makers' hands vanish with them? Or had they, unwitting or uncaring, created a force which might outlive them all?
And now she knew the answer... and cursed it. To be the last and wake to know it, to feel the wound where her other selves should be, was as cruel as any retribution she/they had ever visited. And to know herself so reduced, she who had been the fiercest and most terrible of all her selves, was an agony more exquisite still.
She hovered in the darkness which no longer comforted, longing for the peace she had lost, even if she must find it in non-being, but filled still with the purpose for which she had been made. Need and hunger quivered within her, and she had never been patient or docile. Something in her snarled at her vanished creators, damning them for leaving her without direction, deprived of function, and she trembled on a cusp of decision, tugged towards death by loneliness and impelled towards life by unformed need.
And then something else flickered on the edge of her senses. It guttered against the blackness, fainter even than she, and she groped out towards it. Groped out, and twitched in recognition. It was the echo, the mirror, which had touched her in half-forgotten dreams, and it was brighter, sharper than it had ever been before. All of its potentialities, all of its possible choices, had collapsed into this-this single knotted moment when it must face the choice towards which both of them had journeyed for so long.
Her groping thought touched it, and she gasped in silent shock at the raw, jagged hatred-at the fiery power of that dying ember that cried out in wordless torment. It came not from her creators but from a mortal, yet she marveled at the strength of it.
The ember glowed hotter at her touch, blazing up, consuming its fading reserves in desperate appeal. It shrieked to her, more powerful in its dying supplication than ever her creators had been, and as her dreaming thought had known it, it knew her. It knew her! Not by name-not
as an entity, but for herself, for what she was. Its agony fastened upon her like pincers, summoning her from the emptiness to perform her function once more.
The assault shuttle crouched in the corral like a curse, shrouded in thin, blowing snow. Smoke eddied with the snow, throat-catching with the stench of burned flesh, and the snouts of its energy cannon and slug-throwers steamed where icy flakes hissed to vapor. Mangled megabison lay about its landing feet, their genetically-engineered fifteen-hundred-kilo carcasses ripped and torn in snow churned to bloody mud by high-explosives.
The barns and stables were smoldering ruins, and the horses and mules lay heaped against the far fence, no longer screaming. They hadn't fled at first, for they had heard approaching shuttles before, and the only humans they'd ever known had treated them well. Now a line of slaughtered bodies showed their final panicked flight.
They hadn't died alone. A human body lay before the gate; a boy, perhaps fifteen-it was hard to know, after the bullet storm finished with him-who had run into the open to unbar it when the murders began.