by David Weber
He arched his eyebrows again, and she began to answer, then paused as the waiter materialized at his elbow like a puff of smoke. Madoka's was among the top ten or twenty restaurants (depending on who was doing the rating) in Grendel, and the quality of its human waitstaff was part of the reason why. The twins gave the attentive waiter and his photographic memory their orders, then waited while he poured beverages and disappeared once more.
“You were saying?” Jacques prompted as soon as he had.
“Curiosity, mostly,” she said. “Of course, I could have asked you about it over the com, but I haven't seen you in almost a month, so it seemed like an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.”
He nodded, smiling at her, aware that what she'd just said was nothing but the truth. The two of them were connected on a level deeper than was common even among twins, complicated by the fact that she was not simply his twin but his baby sister. There was always that itch neither of them could quite scratch when they were apart. They'd grown used to it, over the years, and it scarcely bothered them anymore, but they always felt the relief as the itch disappeared when they sat down across the table from each other like this.
“What kind of curiosity?” he inquired.
“It's about one of my fellow students, actually.” She shrugged. “He's in neurosurgery, not genetics, so we haven't actually met. But I've run into someone who doesn't think much of him, and I'm wondering if there's any basis for it besides the someone in question's own swollen ego.”
“And you couldn't just go and find out for yourself?” he asked politely. “I hadn't realized you'd become quite so ancient and feeble since the last time I saw you.”
“Certainly I could go and find out for myself.” She made a face at him across the table, yet he seemed to sense a certain evasiveness behind the expression. “I seem to recall, however, that one of my overprotective older brothers warned me a few years back about my social recklessness. I can't quite remember which one of them it was, though.”
Jacques laughed, but she had a point. And maybe he was being overprotective, at that. But Allison had always been the one who chafed the most severely at being a Benton-Ramirez y Chou. She understood—and often resented—her family's prominence, the way its members were “expected” to go into public service or politics as well as—or even in addition to—medical careers. But she also had an almost feline refusal to be driven into anything by anyone, and she had a matching streak of impulsiveness. There was nothing careless or lazy or foolish about her, but she was a bundle of energy, capable of cheerfully multitasking in enough directions to drive anyone close to her insane, and the notion of taking precautions simply because her family was not universally beloved was alien to her. And, he acknowledged, not without a fair degree of reason. The Benton-Ramirez y Chous were widely venerated on Beowulf. It was probably one of the things Allison most disliked about being a Benton-Ramirez y Chou, he thought, because all a Benton-Ramirez y Chou had to do to be venerated on Beowulf was to breathe. Allison found that oppressive, irritating, and unearned, and he often wondered how she was going to cope with it once she left the university. But for the most part, she was absolutely right; the vast majority of Beowulfers she met were going to go out of their way to defer to her. Aside from the inevitable small number of deranged individuals to be found in any society, they certainly weren't going to threaten her in any way!
But not everyone in the galaxy was a Beowulfer, and there were better reasons than usual at the moment for her to exercise a little of that caution she hated so much. He had to admit that most of those reasons had to do with him, too, which gave his concern an edge of guilt.
“So who's the object of your curiosity, Alley?” he asked.
“He's from Sphinx,” she said. “A great big tall fellow and a Navy officer. A lieutenant, I think, although I'm not sure. He's got one gold thingy on his collar, anyway.” She tossed her head. “I get confused trying to figure out naval ranks even when they're Beowulfan, though. Why don't they use the same ones everyone else uses?”
“The Manties or the System Defense Force?” he asked with an amused smile.
“Either. Both!”
“Because navy pukes are senior to the rest of us and they don't have any intention of letting us forget it, mostly,” he told her, sparring for time. He hadn't really expected her to ask him about Harrington, and he wasn't at all sure he wanted to encourage any interest in him she might be feeling. Not that he had anything against Harrington, of course. Quite the contrary, in fact. But he wasn't exactly invisible . . . or the safest person someone's sister—especially his sister—might be spending time with.
“Well, his name is Harrington,” she said. “Since you made such a fuss about who I spend time with, and since he happens to be from off-world, I thought I'd ask you to . . . I don't know, check up on him, for me.”
“And how much attention do you pay when I ‘check up' on people for you?” he challenged, then grinned. “I told you that jackass Illescue was going to piss you off, didn't I?”
“He's not as bad as you said he was,” she replied. He only grinned at her some more, and she shrugged. “Okay, he's bad enough,” she admitted. “He's just not as bad as you said he was.”
“Oh, I see. Thank you for explaining that to me.”
“You're welcome. And now, are you going to check out Lieutenant Harrington for me? Or should I just go ahead, walk up to him, and introduce myself? I'm perfectly willing to do just that, you understand.”
“I'm sure you are.” He considered her for another moment, and then it was his turn to shrug. “As a matter of fact, I already know quite a bit about him.”
“You do?”
She was unfolding her napkin as she spoke, draping it across her lap, and she seemed to be paying the simple activity more attention than it really needed, he thought.
“Yes, I do. In fact, I made it a point to meet him when he landed and I walked him through Customs to the university.”
She looked up from her lap, her eyes suddenly intent, and he sighed. He knew that expression. He'd rather hoped she might decide he was hinting her away from Harrington, but clearly that wasn't going to happen. And the truth was that everything he knew about the Sphinxian was to the other man's credit, although he suspected Harrington didn't see it that way.
“Why?” she asked simply.
“Because Lieutenant Harrington is a very . . . interesting fellow,” he replied. “Interesting to a fellow like me, I mean.”
She pursed her lips slightly. Unlike quite a few other members of the family, she had a very clear notion of what Jacques' duties with the Biological Survey Corps had involved upon occasion. Even she knew only a part of it, of course, and he intended to keep it that way. But she knew enough to know that being interesting to a “fellow like him” could be a very bad thing.
“I don't know anything negative about him, Alley,” he said quickly. “In fact, from everything I do know, he sounds like a very good man. But he's landed in the middle of some things that have . . . complications.”
“What kind of ‘complications'?”
“The kind I can't tell you about.” He grimaced. “Not won't tell you about, Alley—can't. It's all very classified and hush-hush, and we don't know all the implications over at BSC yet.”
“What can you tell me?” she asked, and his eyes narrowed.
He knew his sister well, better than he knew any other human being, and he recognized the edge of steel behind the question. What he didn't know was why he was hearing it. Obviously, her curiosity about Alfred Harrington was less casual than she'd tried to imply, yet there was a trace element of uncertainty in her, one he was unaccustomed to hearing or seeing. A part of him—a very strong part of him—was suddenly tempted to end this conversation now, immediately. There were currents here that he didn't want to get into, and the truth was that Harrington had made enemies of his own. Those enemies probably weren't foolish enough to try to do anything about their enmity, e
specially here on Beowulf, of all the planets in the galaxy, but there was no guarantee of that. And if his own activities were mixed into their calculations . . .
But this was his sister.
“He enlisted in the Manticoran Marines when he was eighteen,” he said, his voice suddenly crisper than she was accustomed to hearing from him. “He did well. By the time he was twenty-three, he'd made platoon sergeant, and the Corps was considering offering him a commission. Then there was . . . an incident. It had nothing directly to do with the Marines. He found himself in a situation, a very ugly situation, that was none of his making. He did something about it. A lot of people died, he was badly wounded himself, and when the Manties found out about it, they gave him the Osterman Cross.” He met her eyes across the table. “That's their second-highest award for valor, Alley, and it can only be earned in combat.”
Their gazes held for a moment, then he shrugged.
“The Osterman Cross can also be awarded only to enlisted or noncommissioned personnel, and it's almost always accompanied by the offer of a commission. That offer is frequently turned down, and the Manties are smart enough to accept that without prejudice when it is. They know how important that kind of noncom is, and they're just delighted to hang onto one of them instead of insisting on ‘up or out' the way the SLN does, but the offier is always made. And it was made in Lieutenant Harrington's case, but he had a rather unusual request. He asked for a transfer to the Navy and for medical school, as well.” Jacques shrugged again. “That's not as strange as it might sound, since the Navy provides all of the Marines' medical support in the Star Kingdom, but it was unusual, especially for someone who'd obviously performed so well in a combat arm. Under the circumstances, and considering what he'd done, though, it was granted, and that's why he's here.”
“What did he do to win the medal?” she asked quietly.
“That's part of what I can't tell you. It's classified, Alley. The Manties classified it when they gave him the citation.”
She regarded him very levelly, thinking about what he'd said . . . and what he hadn't. He knew lots of things that were classified, sometimes when he wasn't supposed to, but she knew his sense of integrity. He'd probably already skirted perilously close to the limits of what he was allowed—what he would allow himself—to share with her. And as she thought about it, she felt herself remembering that darkness she'd sensed in Lieutenant Harrington and she shivered.
“Well,” she said in a determinedly normal tone, “I can see that Franz was wrong—again—about whether or not Lieutenant Harrington deserved admission to ISU.”
“I'd say that if anyone ever deserved a slot at the university, it was Harrington,” Jacques agreed, then looked up as their appetizers arrived.
The waiter busied himself setting the salads and consommé before them and withdrew, and Allison picked up her fork, then glanced back up at her brother.
“Thank you,” she said. “You've given me quite a bit to think about, Jacques.”
* * *
“Here.” Sojourner X handed the chip folio to Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou.“I hope this is going to help.”
“Well, it probably can't hurt,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou said, looking up at the towering, powerfully built ex-slave.
He'd pointed out to Sojourner once upon a time that the original Sojourner Truth had been a woman, not a man, but Sojourner didn't care. In fact, he'd already known, and he'd observed that “sojourner” was a genderless noun that worked equally well for a woman's name or a man's. Besides, he'd identified closely with the original inspiration of his name. That observation had sounded a bit strange coming from a hulking, craggy-faced, heavy-featured giant, but Benton-Ramirez y Chou had realized as soon as he thought it that that was an example of prejudice on his own part, based solely on outward appearances and stereotypes.
The realization had sent a spark of self-anger through him. If anyone on Beowulf should have been immunized against that sort of bias it was a member of his family. His direct ancestors had been instrumental in outlawing the weaponization of genetics—and opposing Leonard Detweiler's “superman” manipulation of the human genome—in the Beowulf Biosciences Code following the nightmare creations of Old Earth's Final War. They'd fought hard and successfully to get genetic weapons classified as weapons of mass destruction under the terms of the Eridani Edict, they'd spearheaded the effort to get the trade in genetically modified slaves outlawed (officially, at least) in the Solarian League, and they'd led the fight to draft the Cherwell Convention equating the slave trade with piracy . . . and imposing the same sentence for both. Beowulf had been solidly behind them in all of those fights, and Benton-Ramirez y Chou's birth planet was undoubtedly home to the largest population of liberated slaves anywhere in the galaxy. They repaid their new home world with the sort of patriotism which shamed many native born Beowulfers (or ought to have), and many of his own Biological Survey Corps colleagues were either ex-slaves like Sojourner or the children of slaves. And yet, despite all of that, he'd fallen prey to an automatic, subconscious assumption that someone who looked as brutish as a Manpower heavy laborer model was probably of less than average intelligence. The truth was that Sojourner held the equivalent of two postdoctoral degrees, one in physics and one in chemistry, and lectured in both subjects at Warshawski University.
“It may not hurt, but it won't do any good if nobody acts on it,” Sojourner pointed out now, his deep voice grim. “And it's got a limited shelflife, Jacques. Three more months, and the bastards will pull up stakes, shoot anybody not worth taking along through the head, and relocate.”
“I know,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou said more soberly. “I'll do my damnedest, Sojourner—you know that. But there are still a lot of official inquiries rattling around the League after that business on Haswell. Something about a dozen or so fine, upstanding Gendarmes who perished at the hands of ‘assailants unknown' in the course of that raid on the slave depot that wasn't supposed to be there. Can't imagine why anyone would think we'd had anything to do with such a heinous act!”
His sorrowful tone was rather marred by his wolfish grin. But then the grin faded, and he twitched an unhappy shrug.
“Unfortunately, the truth is that anyone with two synapses to rub together has a pretty shrewd idea who was actually behind that one, Sojurner. And they probably have a pretty damned good idea where I—I mean, where someone—came up with the original intel. Given all that, it's going to be hard to convince even the Boss to okay the kind of strike we'd need here, assuming the data tells us what I think it will. And under the circumstances, he may have to go upstairs and get official approval from the Board of Directors. You know how long that'll take.”
Sojourner scowled. On his face, the expression looked more than a little terrifying, and Benton-Ramirez y Chou sensed the genuine anger behind it. He knew that anger wasn't directed at him, but the waves of hatred radiating off the ex-slave made him feel as if he were leaning into a strong wind.
“Then maybe we need to call on someone more unofficial,” the professor said harshly, and Benton-Ramirez y Chou inhaled.
“I can't be hearing this,” he cautioned Sojourner. “Not yet, anyway,” he added, and Sojourner's eyes narrowed.
Benton-Ramirez y Chou bit his tongue, cursing himself for adding the qualifier. If any of his superiors were forced to take official cognizance of the fact that he was talking to anyone with connections to the Audubon Ballroom, the consequences would be immediate and drastic. Many of them already knew he was, of course, but that wasn't the same as knowing it on the record, and the Ballroom was a very sore topic between Beowulf and the bureaucrats in Old Chicago who ran the Solarian League. He was pretty sure Giuseppe Adamson, the current Permanent Senior Undersecretary of the Interior, had at least circumstantial evidence that the BSC was not only in contact with the Ballroom, but had actively run operations with Ballroom assistance. He might even have that sort of evidence about a planet named Haswell, and that could get decidedly dicey for th
e individuals involved in that particular op, one of whom had been then-Lieutenant Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou. The League took a dim view of League citizens who shot Solarian Gendarmes, even if the Gendarmes in question had been moonlighting as security goons in a Manpower slave depot on a planet where genetic slavery was officially illegal.
Well, you knew shit happens even before you signed up, he told himself. And we need the . . . extra capabilities the Ballroom offers. If you hadn't thought it was worth the risk, you shouldn't have volunteered for the op. And don't pretend you didn't think it was entirely worthwhile afterward!
Unfortunately, the Ballroom wasn't a neat, hierarchical organization. It was more of an umbrella, a collection of allied but independent chapters and groups, and it took people who could rely on the empowerment of hatred to pit themselves against the crushing power and enfluence of something like Manpower, Incorporated, and its corrupt corporate and political allies in the League. Even if the Ballroom's coordinating council had tried to rein in the more extreme members of their organization, there was no way it could have done it . . . and precious little evidence it wanted to. Given what most of the Ballroom's recruits had endured—or seen people they loved endure—it would have been foolish to expect them not to strike back as ferociously as they possibly could. Nor should it have surprised anyone that all too often for less embittered people's taste those reprisals took the form of the wholesale massacre of Manpower personnel and their business associates. Or that the Ballroom was none too fastidious about collateral damage when it struck at Manpower and its slavers. Many of the Ballroom's members and sympathizers, like Sojourner X himself, understood the downside of providing Manpower and its mouthpieces with atrocity fodder, but it would have required a direct act of God to actually stop it.
“I'll pass it along this afternoon,” he assured his hulking friend, tapping the pocket into which he'd tucked the folio. “And I'll do everything I can to get them to move on it, but I'd be lying if I said I thought there was more than a fifty-fifty chance we'll be able to accomplish anything. If your three-month time estimate is right, we'd have less than six weeks to get the operation authorized, organized, and launched, and that'd be cutting it close even under more normal circumstances, much less this soon after Haswell. I'll try, Sojourner, but I won't promise what I don't know I can deliver.”