Even as she made her decision, the gym began to fill up in a hurry. One by one, a group of men filed past her. For a moment Kerri thought nothing of it, but then she looked closer. It wasn’t just any old group of men, she realized. They were all young; they all looked to be in great physical shape and had a disciplined, controlled way of moving. And they said very little, just a few words now and again, but so quietly that she couldn’t make out their accents. She watched them as they split up and with no time wasted started on the weight machines, working with a focused intensity that was almost robotic. Military, perhaps? Professional futbol team, maybe? No, military. Had to be. They just had the look.
It was odd, though, she thought. She’d skimmed the manifest looking for any Space Fleet or Marine Corps people she might know and hadn’t seen any mention of a group like this. Well, she thought, they have a right to travel, too, whoever they might be. “Come on, Kerri, time to get moving,” she said quietly to herself, promptly walking right into another young man as he tried to get past her and into the gym.
“Oh, sorry about that,” she said, embarrassed by her carelessness.
“No problem,” said the man.
To look at, he was obviously another member of the group now working out in front of her with silent, almost manic determination. Without being too obvious, Kerri moved so that he couldn’t easily get past her.
“So,” she said casually, waving a hand at the men working out in the gym, “you’re part of the team? What do you guys do? Professional futbol, maybe?”
“Please excuse me. I need to get on,” the man said quietly, his gray-blue eyes fixed on some distant point over her shoulder.
“Oh, sorry,” Kerri said, standing unmoving in the center of the narrow gym lobby, her face sporting her best “I’m a clueless old bat so please indulge me” look. “I don’t mean to hold you up, but what do you do? Come on. You’re professional futbollers, aren’t you? But which team?”
“Madam, please, I…”
“Oh, come on,” Kerri pleaded, watching with interest as the man struggled to keep control in the face of what he must have thought was a dangerously obsessive woman. “You can tell me. I can keep a secret. Which team?”
The man shrugged his shoulders in defeat. “Not futbol, ma’am,” he said resignedly, smiling a thin, forced smile, “We’re just a bunch of guys off to Frontier. We’re hard-rock miners, and there’s an asteroid waiting for us out there. Now really, please may I pass? I must get on.” His tone was polite but firm, his accent thick with the flat, stretched vowels of a Damnation’s Gate native. Well, that was what her neuronics had decided, anyway.
Kerri had had enough of the young man with the untidy yellow-gold hair and hard gray-blue eyes. Why the man made her so uncomfortable, and he did, she’d probably never know. But if he was a hard-rock miner, she was a cabbage, a very big one. She’d sneaked a look at his hands, and they looked to her like the hands of a man who’d spent a great deal of time practicing unarmed combat. The closest they’d been to rock would have been climbing a cliff.
“Oh, yes, silly me. I do so like to talk,” she said gushingly as she stood aside and waved him past. “Please.”
“Thank you,” he said more curtly than was polite.
Kerri watched him for a moment as he went through. Something wasn’t right here. A group of military men, possibly special forces, some of them, pretending to be hard-rock miners? Didn’t stack up. But, but, but. All of that might be the case, but it really wasn’t any of her business. After all, whatever mischief they might be up to, it would have to wait until they got dirtside on Frontier. There sure as hell wasn’t much they could do millions of light-years from anywhere, stuck in the vast nothingness of pinchspace.
Exercise over, aching muscles more than compensated for by a definite sense of virtue at having completed a good, solid workout, Kerri dropped into what was to become her routine for the trip: a brief word with an uncommunicative and sleepy Sam followed by a shower and breakfast and then on to the forward business class lounge. There the holovids presented a truly spectacular three-dimensional simulation of local normalspace as it rushed past them at over 4.3 billion kilometers per second. Even though it was something created by the ship’s AI—the actual view outside being only the murky gray-white nothingness of pinchspace—Kerri never tired of it. For a while as Mumtaz passed through (around, under, over?) deep interstellar space, there was little to see except the blazing glory of distant stars. But then, in a rush, a star system complete with planets, moons, asteroid belts, and comets would appear before flashing past and disappearing. But what got Kerri was the sense of wonder that the incredible show produced in her, almost a deep oneness with the enormousness of the universe.
It was an effort to get up and go for a walk around the ship before lunch in time for her other passion: contract bridge with a group organized by the ship’s entertainment officer. That was followed by a people-watching walk through the small piazza, coffee with Sam at one of the small cafés before happy hour in the business class lounge, followed by dinner, idle conversation, and then bed.
If it hadn’t been for the persistent unease she felt about the group of men she had met in the gym that morning, it would have been a perfect day. Stop fussing, she told herself as she drifted off to sleep. They might well be, as she now suspected, a group of mercenaries bound for one of the endless wars that sputtered and flared on some godforsaken world out on the rim of humanspace, but that was somebody else’s problem. She’d do what little she could. She would make sure that she had full neuronics recordings of each group member, and once back home, she’d pass them on to one of her contacts in Space Fleet intelligence. They’d follow up if necessary.
Sunday, September 6, 2398, UD
City of Foundation, Terranova Planet
The city of Foundation, Terranova’s oldest and, as the name suggested, the first settlement of the Federated Worlds, was quiet in the last few hours before dawn.
Low in the western sky, Castor was setting behind the massive bulk of the New Tatra Mountains. High to the south, the razor-thin crescent of Terranova’s second moon, Pollux, cast a faint light across the sleeping city.
The large house on the low hills overlooking the city, and beyond it, the sea, dark and quiet. Inside, the sleeping form of Giovanni Pecora, federal minister of interstellar relations, struggled to resist the increasingly strident demands of his neuronics. But eventually they could not be refused any longer, and Pecora, a bulky man in his early seventies, his dark brown hair laced liberally with streaks of white—unusual for such a heavily geneered society—and red-faced with sleep, swung himself up and out of bed, muttering under his breath.
He accepted the comm.
“Okay, okay, I’m up. Give me two minutes to organize myself and I’ll be straight back to you.”
Pecora’s tone made it clear to the caller, the ministry’s duty officer, how he felt about being dragged out of bed that early in the morning. This had better be something worthwhile, something his personal agent couldn’t have dealt with, or the duty officer would wish she’d never been born. And why me? Pecora wondered as he fumbled in the dark for his dressing gown and slippers, trying hard not to wake his wife. Suddenly it hit him. The duty officer had called him direct rather than one of his senior ministerial staff, and a cold clammy hand clamped itself around his heart. Jesus, he thought, something has happened, and he was bloody sure he didn’t want to know what it was.
Heart pounding, he made his way through to his study and commed on the lights and the housebot to bring a cup of tea. Blinking in the sudden brightness, he sat down at his desk and took out an old-fashioned pad of paper and an antique liquid ink pen, things he always did in moments of stress. According to his grandmother, the pen had come from Old Earth and was over four hundred years old. The fact that it still worked was entirely due to a certain Mr. Fashliki, whose shop in the old quarter was a shrine to long-dead technologies and one of Giovanni Pecora’s favorite p
laces.
With a cup of tea safely in hand and the housebot instructed to prepare the next one and leave it outside on the veranda, Pecora finally felt up to the task of facing whatever diplomatic horror the duty officer was sitting on. Taking a deep breath to brace himself—he really was getting far too old for this sort of nonsense, he decided—he put the comm through.
“Ms. Rodriguez. Good morning. What’s the problem?”
As the duty officer laid it out for him, reinforcing the key points with clips from Captain Kumar’s pinchcomm message, Pecora began to feel physically sick, his stomach starting a slow sour churn. He knew the Hammer all too well from way back, and as he listened, he began to understand not just what the Hammer planned to do but, much more important, what that might lead to.
“Right, I understand all that.” Pecora kept his voice level. “And Prince Interstellar was certain that Mumtaz had jumped?”
“Sir, I didn’t focus on Mumtaz in particular. I figured that would get people asking questions we didn’t want asked right now, so I had them dump all their jump records for all merships for the last month, and I’m afraid there’s no doubt. Mumtaz unberthed at 02:43 UT, a bit after 20:30 local, and Prince Interstellar’s ops center received her jump report saying that she would jump at 09:12 UT. I’ve also checked with Terranova nearspace control. Mumtaz jumped on schedule.”
“Right, then.” Shit, shit, shit. Only missed her by two hours, Goddamn it. “Okay, Ms. Rodriguez, thank you for all that. And also let me say that you were right to call me and not the ministry staff, though they won’t thank you for it. But don’t worry, I’ll fix that.”
“Thank you, sir.” The relief in Rodriguez’s voice was palpable, her avatar visibly relaxing, the lines of stress marking her mouth and eyes fading away. Damn good avatar software, Pecora thought in passing. So good that it must have cost somebody a small fortune.
“And well done also for not making it obvious that it was the Mumtaz you were interested in. That was smart thinking.” And under a lot of pressure, too. Pecora made a mental note: Rodriguez was someone to watch.
Pecora paused for a moment as he thought through the implications before continuing. “But if what we’ve been told is correct, then someone at Prince Interstellar will connect our inquiry about their ships and wonder just how the hell we knew in advance that Mumtaz was going to disappear. So comm the contact details to me, and we’ll make sure that we remind them of a few facts of life. Oh, and put a security lock on everything we’ve talked about, with key access for my and your eyes only for the moment.”
“Sir.”
“Okay. Leave it all with me, and I know I don’t have to tell you to keep this to yourself, but I will. Do not tell another living soul, and that’s an order.”
“Sir, I’ve not and I won’t.”
“Pleased to hear it. Good night.”
“Good night, sir.”
Pecora leaned back in his chair, cradling a mug of tea in his hand, its warmth a pleasant contrast to the terrible icy fear that gripped him. He felt a million years old all of a sudden. If Rodriguez’s report was true, and they needed to be damn sure that it was—the Hammer had been known to leak false intelligence just to make mischief—the chances of this affair not turning into the Fourth Hammer War were very slim indeed. He drank the tea in a series of large gulps and set down the mug before standing up to make his way out onto the veranda. He picked up the next mug—it took a minimum of two to get him going in the morning—and settled into his favorite chair. Giovanni’s thinking chair, his wife called it. He had time. The Mumtaz was gone, and nothing in God’s universe could stop the hijacking now.
After twenty minutes of silent reflection, with the eastern sky beginning to turn pink with the promise of another hot and humid day, its light beginning to pick out the city below him and the bay that stretched out in front of it, Pecora’s mood, dark and heavy to start with, was even more depressed. Whatever the Federated Worlds might do, there was one thing they had to do, and that was get the crew and passengers of the Mumtaz back. There was simply no way that he or any other member of the federal government would allow their people to remain in the hands of those fanatics.
And that meant confronting the Hammer. And in this case, that would have two inevitable consequences, both guaranteed by the very nature of Hammer’s polity, culture, and history.
First, Merrick would go. Even though being chief councillor gave Merrick enormous power, he was not an absolute dictator, and there were certain rules that had to be followed. And Merrick had broken rule number one: Consult your fellow councillors on all matters of significance. He clearly had not, and that put him up against every other member of the Supreme Council for the Preservation of Doctrine. History showed that when that happened, there could be only one outcome: an orgy of blood as his enemies took the opportunity Merrick’s hubris had given them to eliminate both Merrick and as many of his supporters as possible.
The prospect of Merrick and his murderous cronies getting the treatment they had handed out to so many others didn’t bother Pecora too much. In fact, justice would be served by what DocSec might do to Merrick. But for a chief councillor, Merrick was somewhat unusual. Surprisingly, the man was quite popular for someone with so much blood on his hands.
Although he could be as brutal as any Hammer chief councillor, he wasn’t as dangerously devious and untrustworthy as Jeremiah Polk, the man most likely to succeed Merrick, a man that the analysts on the Hammer desk felt Merrick grossly underestimated. That meant that Merrick’s overthrow could lead to civil war. And if there was one thing worse than going to war, it was going to war with worlds whose political leaders depended for their very survival on a credible external threat or, if one did not exist, inventing one.
The second consequence, as inevitable as it was disheartening, came from the nature of Hammer people and their society. As a general rule, Hammers were almost incapable of acting honorably when dealing with outsiders. With some worthy exceptions, they just could not do it. It was not part of their culture to be held accountable by anyone not on the Path of Doctrine; that was precisely why the Hammer Worlds were shunned by most of the rest of humankind. To deal with Hammers at any level was to ask to be ripped off.
And so, any proposition that the Mumtaz might be returned with her people and cargo unharmed would be treated with absolute contempt. So, if the Feds wanted Mumtaz, they would have to take it back, and the Hammers would not like that one little bit.
All of that was fine up to a point, but Pecora had been around long enough to have learned the most fundamental lesson of interstellar relations. It was a simple lesson best summed up in only one word: self-interest. For all the overblown language trotted out by politicians and diplomats, every issue between systems came back to that word: self-interest. Very simple, really.
So yes, the Federated Worlds could act unilaterally to recover the Mumtaz together with her unfortunate crew and passengers. If it wanted to. But doing that would be a decision not taken lightly. For all that the rest of humanspace had suffered at the hands of the Hammer, and they had and grievously, the consequences of unilateral action on the interests of the Sylvanians, the Frontier, the Old Earth Alliance, and all the rest would have to be worked through in excruciatingly tedious detail.
Pecora felt the frustration rise. In the end, it all boiled down to only two issues, anyway: the impact on interstellar trade and the impact on system security. Everything else was peripheral. If unilateral action to recover the Mumtaz threatened either or, God help the Worlds, both, they were stuffed. A multilateral solution it would have to be, and that meant that weeks, months, even years of negotiation would follow while the Hammers sat back laughing. Meanwhile, the Mumtaz’s crew and passengers would be left to rot in some damned Kraa prison camp. Christ, what a depressing thought.
Fuck them all, Pecora thought in a rare flash of unrestrained anger. This time the Hammers had gone too far. If the rest of humanspace couldn’t see that, that wa
s their problem. All of a sudden, he knew what had to be done. He’d push for unilateral action, and if the Old Earth Alliance, the Sylvanians, and all the rest were disinclined to go along, then so be it. The Federated Worlds would of course follow due process. Oh, yes. Every tedious step of the way: a formal notice of a state of limited war, properly served, of course, and supported by an affirmed statement of facts and a demand for financial restitution. All strictly in accordance with every word of the New Washington Convention, of course. That should do it, he said to himself, suddenly energized by the thought of taking the fight to the Hammers with or without the support of the rest of civilized humanspace.
Pecora finished his tea—his fourth cup—and got up, legs and back stiff from inactivity. The eastern sky was now a stunning mélange of mauve shading into blues, golds, and pinks rich with the promise of a hot sunny day. Beyond the city, the ocean was turning from a dark gunmetal gray to an inviting deep blue. It was going to be a beautiful day. Pecora sighed deeply as he strangled at birth any idea he might have had of going down the coast to catch a long lunch at Trinh’s and watch the world go by. It was almost six, and the matter at hand couldn’t wait any longer.
He put the comm out, tagged with the codephrase “Sampan Two” needed to convene an urgent meeting of the inner cabinet, and went to take a shower.
After some perfunctory small talk, the meeting of the inner cabinet broke up.
The meeting had been a bruising one. Shocked disbelief had shifted to a blend of outrage and frustration before degenerating into interfactional squabbling, with the unspoken question of who was going to be blamed looming large in the minds of most of those present. But as always, Moderator Burkhardt had pulled things together long enough to get the massive if sometimes cumbersome resources of the Federated Worlds moving in the right direction.
Helfort's War: Book 1 Page 12