“Yes,” Jeremy said. “Most of them.”
“And all of that, you can tell us?”
“Of course,” Lynette said. She glanced at Jeremy and gave them a wolfish smile. “We’d be happy to.”
They didn’t enjoy talking about it but they did want to help and they were eager for revenge. Oh, yes, they were. Solomon Towne had enjoyed them both, individually and together, on multiple occasions. Devlin, perhaps surprisingly, had not. If Jeremy and Lynette could be believed, and there seemed no reason to doubt them, the majority of the Adventurers’ Club were exactly what they seemed: bored, rich people pursuing their hobbies, law-abiding citizens, for the most part.
Ah, but Solomon Towne, and Richard Salazar, and the Lady Egidia Colbert, widow of the Earl of Colbert, all had participated in Lydia Prescott Jones’ not so secret life. The Comte de Sevigny, also, hardly a surprise, and Davida Emerson.
“Not her mother?” Arcturus asked.
“No. Just Davida.”
“So far as you know, were there any others before you?” Anson asked. Once the questioning had begun in earnest, Anson had been invited to participate. He was an intelligence officer. He deserved to be there. Jeremy and Lynette had frowned at his appearance but had not objected.
“Slaves, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“There might have been,” Lynette said. “Lydia never mentioned any but one of the servants, Timothy, his name was, once mentioned a girl who used to accompany Lydia, some years ago. She grew up and moved on.”
“Or was moved on,” Anson said. “Or disposed of once Lydia tired of her.”
Jeremy frowned. Lynette shrugged.
“And you were the only ones?”
“In Lydia’s household, yes, but there were others just like us at the parties, with the other guests.”
“Do you know their names?”
Jeremy shook his head. “No.”
“And who were they with?” Michael asked.
“Davida had more than one.”
“Men or women?”
“Both.”
“Anyone else?”
“Lady Egidia has a matched pair, a girl and a boy. I think they’re twins. Both younger than us, and also Salazar. He has three young women, a blonde, a brunette and a redhead. They’re all gorgeous.”
“Salazar…” Anson frowned.
“Great,” Arcturus muttered. Michael looked at him sharply. Evidently, Arcturus recognized the name.
Richard Salazar—Sir Richard Salazar—had not yet been encountered at any meeting or activity of the Adventurers’ Club but he wasn’t hard to identify. Romulus was already feeding the information into Michael’s server. He was ninety-seven years old, the heir to a corporation that designed avionics for the Department of Defense. He was also a personal friend of Prince Elliott Samson, a distant but very rich cousin of the Imperator. At the moment, Richard Salazar was off-world on his own large ship, and had been for the past two months.
“What about Lydia’s retainers?” Anson asked. “Some of them must have known.”
Lynette shrugged. Jeremy appeared doubtful. “I suppose it’s possible, but then, why would they? The official story is that we were professional concubines, a matched set that Lydia had contracted with from another world. They were happy to have sex with us. Aside from Gregory James, none of them mistreated us. We were instructed to appear happy and satisfied with our supposed work. We did. We had to.”
Anson sat back with a frown. “Still,” he said, “we’ll question them. Some of them were with her for years. They may know more than you think.”
The interview went on for a half hour longer but neither Jeremy nor Lynette could offer anything else that might prove useful. “What now?” Jeremy said when all of their questions had ground to a halt.
“As I told you,” Arcturus said, “you’ll be returned home.”
“I don’t want to go home,” Lynette said, “not yet. Neither of us do.”
Arcturus frowned. “What do you want?”
“We want to see this through,” Jeremy said. “We want to help.”
Anson shook his head, looking skeptical. “You’re very young. You have no training in self-defense or espionage or anything else that might be useful.”
“Officially,” Arcturus said, “you’re dead. These people are completely serious about covering their tracks. I think that you would be wise to stay dead, and to vanish.”
On the other hand, it would be easy to discount them, Michael thought. They were young, slim, beautiful and did not appear dangerous in the slightest, and yet they had slaughtered Lydia Prescott Jones and Gregory James as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Despite their youth and unimposing size, they were smart and decisive and resolute, and they had one other asset, an asset not to be underestimated. They had hatred. They burned with it. Hatred, Michael thought, led to sincere, dedicated commitment and commitment led to the sort of loyalty that could not be purchased with money, only the promise of revenge. Jeremy Baylor and Lynette Chapman had a very personal stake in the outcome. “They can stay here,” he said. “Maybe I can use them.”
Anson appeared surprised. Arcturus did not. He looked at Michael, searching his face, then he glanced at Jeremy and Lynette, sighed and gave a reluctant smile. “Very well,” he said. “If that’s what they both want. Perhaps you’re right. They may prove useful.”
Chapter 18
“These people are committing crimes,” Richard Norlin said. Michael had been sitting in the ship’s spacious library, reading an old book, an antique volume printed on actual plastique with no cybernetic capabilities whatsoever: The Count of Monte Cristo. It was a tale of revenge served very cold and one of Michael’s favorites. “Why don’t you arrest them?”
“Me?” Michael said.
Richard made an impatient gesture. “Intelligence. Security. The police. They would if you told them to.”
Richard had come a long way, Michael thought, from the useless, drunken aristocrat he had been. “Arcturus and I have discussed it. The problem is that these people have made it very clear that they will die before revealing anything about themselves or their organization. If we arrest any of them, the higher ups will presumably vanish. The human beings under their control will either vanish with them or be ordered to self-destruct. We made a decision to follow the trail of evidence, wherever it might take us, until we know who is doing what.”
Michael put down the book and shook his head. “They’re well-funded. They have connections to the highest parts of society. We know that they’ve infiltrated the police on more than one world and we know that they infiltrated the military on Illyria, and presumably elsewhere. We need to know where this goes before we take action that would prove, ultimately, to leave us no better off—and certainly no wiser—than we are now, and with all the leads that we currently do have, simply gone.”
“Fuck,” Richard said.
“Well, yeah,” Michael said.
Lydia Prescott Jones had travelled on large, luxury cruise ships. She would rent an entire suite for herself and her entourage and live in catered luxury for the duration of the voyage. Jeremy Baylor and Lynette Chapman had not been kept captive on a cruise ship, not unless a section of such a ship had been diverted for the purposes of kidnapping and forced confinement. Possible, Michael thought, but not likely. Six men had accosted Lynette and Jeremy. They had woken up in a small, isolated room and been kept there for the entire duration of the trip to Dancy. Sometime, during the three times they had been rendered unconscious, the seeds of a neural network had been implanted in their brains.
Also, the timing did not match up. Lydia Prescott Jones had been on the small world of Andover a little over two years prior. The ship she had travelled on, the Sultan’s Destiny, had stopped on Andover for three days, before resuming its leisurely circuit of ten other worlds before returning to the port of Terra Nova. It was possible that Lynette and Jeremy had been kept unconscious for days or even weeks before bei
ng awakened but this seemed unlikely. Their muscle tone had not degraded. They had lost no weight. Most likely, they had been knocked out, immediately brought to another ship and embarked on their forced journey to Dancy, and then been imprisoned somewhere until Lydia returned home to take possession.
Three other ships had been parked at the port on Andover at the same time as the Sultan’s Destiny and then made the run to Dancy. One was a small racing yacht with a crew of only three. Another was a cruise ship almost as large as Sultan’s Destiny. The last was a medium sized merchant ship called the Traveler’s Fortune.
“The Traveler’s Fortune is owned by a private consortium,” Romulus said, “based on Reliance. Its membership is difficult to determine, listing primarily a series of corporations that seem barely to exist and which do little real business. The shipping manifests of the Traveler’s Fortune are public record, however. They have paid considerable taxes on ventures that were uniformly profitable.”
“This report came from Arcturus?”
“Indeed.”
Arcturus had proven to be immensely helpful. Despite his initial suspicion of Michael and Michael’s hazy origins, Arcturus had evidently decided to look upon the crew of the London as an asset. As well he should, Michael thought.
“And where is the Traveler’s Fortune now?” Michael asked.
“In transit. We are lucky. The ship is due to arrive at the port of Terra Nova in two days.”
“Good,” Michael said.
The Lady Egidia Colbert was sixty-seven years old, slim, blond, toned and beautiful. Like the late unlamented Lydia Prescott Jones, she liked being in charge. Her security was supplied by an employment agency called Coastal Personnel Services, which specialized in ex-military and police. The owner of Coastal Personnel Services was a tall, lean man named Hitoki Ogawa, who had served for thirty years in the Imperial Guard before retiring.
“I know Hitoki Ogawa,” Arcturus said. “His record was exemplary. His loyalty is beyond question.”
“Why did he quit?” Anson asked.
Arcturus grinned. “The usual reason. He has a large extended family that he’s close to. Then he met a woman who wanted him home at night, not wandering around the Empire doing God knows what. They have three kids now.”
Michael understood that completely. Something like it happened to most soldiers, sooner or later, and that was a very good thing. If it didn’t, you tended to drift further and further away from the rest of humanity. Your unit became your world and your world revolved around waiting for the next fight, and then fighting, and then waiting some more. It wasn’t a healthy lifestyle.
“Okay,” Michael said. “But will he do it?”
“He knows me,” Arcturus said. “He’ll do it.”
“Richard?” Michael said.
“Count me in,” Richard Norlin said. “I’m looking forward to it. I’ve been getting a little bored.”
With amusement, Michael noted that Matthew Oliver, listening intently to the conversation, frowned. Matthew was also growing a little bored.
Arcturus leaned back and tapped his stylus absently on the desk. He was reluctant, Michael knew this. He would rather have had one of his own men but it was Michael’s idea; Michael wanted somebody he trusted and Michael trusted Richard Norlin. It wasn’t so much that Richard had achieved enlightenment and now believed the institution of buying and selling other human beings to be barbaric and inhuman, though he did seem at least minimally embarrassed at the customs of the Diamond Empire from which he came. It was more that Richard was profoundly grateful to Michael for having removed him from a life that he had despised. And now that he had stopped drinking, and under Michael and the Illyrians’ constant tutelage, there were few better in a fight.
So, fine. Richard Norlin it would be.
Lynette Chapman peered at the holograph, her face white. Jeremy stood just behind her, hesitantly placed both hands on her shoulders and nodded his head. “You can’t tell from the faces. They were wearing masks, but they walk the same and they’re the right size. I think it’s them,” he said. “I really do.”
Lynette nodded.
The six men had taken a car from the Traveler’s Fortune and were sitting in an upscale bar two blocks from the harbor. They had been followed by a series of microdrones, one of which now hovered near the ceiling of the bar, recording the scene.
“It’s a go,” Anson said. His words were immediately transmitted below deck.
Twenty minutes later, five men sauntered into the bar, two marines and three Illyrians, one of them Matthew Oliver. They weren’t wearing uniforms. Nothing about them said military. They appeared to be five tough men, perhaps spacers, maybe construction workers out for an evening with their mates. They smelled of alcohol and perhaps a few other mind altering substances. They laughed loudly, slapped each other on the back and shoved their way to the bar.
One of the spacers from Traveler’s Fortune frowned at Matthew Oliver. “Watch it,” he said.
“Something bothering you?” Matthew smiled, gulped his beer, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and spilled a little beer on the spacer’s shirt. It didn’t look like an accident.
The spacer turned and very deliberately threw his whiskey into Matthew’s face. Then it was on. The spacers were tough and used to working as a team but were no match for the trained viciousness of their adversaries. A spacer tried to knee an Illyrian in the groin. The Illyrian slipped to the side and jabbed the spacer in the throat with the edge of his hand. The spacer’s eyes bulged as he tried to pull air in and found that he couldn’t. A few punches, a roundhouse kick and a couple of deft throws, one of which resulted in a spacer flying over the bar and crashing into the glass shelving, bringing twenty or more bottles of expensive liquor crashing down onto the prostrate body of the spacer, brought the fight to a close.
“Whoops,” one of the marines giggled, and kicked the largest spacer in the head.
The rest of the bar’s customers stared at them but nobody else was dumb enough to get involved. Sirens could be heard in the distance, rapidly getting closer. The Illyrians and the marines grinned at each other, laughed like lunatics and ran out of the bar.
Police arrived, followed shortly by ambulances. Statements were taken. Reports were written, submitted and filed. The spacers, groaning and in two cases, unconscious, were loaded onto stretchers and conveyed to the nearest medical facility.
Chapter 19
Andrew Sloane was listed in the Spacers’ Guild database as a man with seventeen years of experience. He had no living family except a sister and a niece on a far-off world. His record showed an arrest for minor assault as a teenager. He had been sent for counseling and behaved himself thereafter. He had a tendency to gamble. His evaluations and recommendations on file were slightly above average but nowhere near stellar.
The captain of the Traveler’s Fortune was named Carl Severs. The day after the barfight, he sent a query to the Spacers’ Guild. Two members of his crew had been involved in an accident and would be incapacitated for at least a month. He could get by without one crew member but not two.
As it happened, the only immediately available spacer registered with the Guild was Andrew Sloane. An interview was scheduled for that afternoon.
Michael frowned. Richard was one thing, but Richard wasn’t going off planet. The rest of the crew, plus all the forces of Imperial Security would be available to give assistance if needed. And Richard was human, not that there was anything so great about being human, but at least he knew how he was supposed to behave.
Andrew Sloane was going to be alone on a ship with the bad guys, going God knew where, and Andrew was faking it in every way. “Are you sure about this?” Michael asked. He had asked the same question at least twenty times. He couldn’t help himself.
Andrew gave him a brilliant grin. “Every bird leaves the nest, sooner or later. Relax.”
He did sound sure of himself. From Michael’s point of view, that was part of the problem.
In Michael’s experience, the most common cause of major fuck ups of every sort wasn’t stupidity or even ignorance. It was self-delusion. Every man and woman who has served in the military is intimately acquainted with the colleague who marches happily into a situation completely out of their control under the blithe assumption that they’ve got it covered.
Not that the phenomenon was a secret to anybody. They studied it in training, in the vain hope that none of them would ever do something so completely brain dead. Why did Napolean decide to invade Russia in the middle of Winter? And why did Hitler do the same thing less than two centuries later? And Custer? Custer had experience. He knew how to deal with Indians, didn’t he? Then of course, the Light Brigade and that whole Valley of Death thing. What was that all about?
Yep. Self-delusion: commonest thing in the world.
Of course, Andrew Sloane’s lack of humanity did contain one very large advantage: Andrew did not care in the slightest if he lived or died.
Anson and Michael reviewed the tape after the interview. Andrew kept his responses to a minimum but it hardly mattered. Andrew Sloane was listed as a qualified spacer, the only one available on short notice and Carl Severs needed a spacer. Andrew got the job.
“Report back at 08:00,” Severs said. He didn’t look happy but he didn’t have much choice.
“Will do,” Andrew said. He rose to his impressive height. “See you in the morning.”
That night, Gloriosa knocked softly on Andrew Sloane’s door. Andrew opened it, a quizzical smile on his face. Gloriosa brushed past him. “Close the door,” she said.
Gloriosa stayed in Andrew Sloane’s room all night and left early the next morning. She was seen to be crying. Andrew, for his part, seemed shaken. His usual smile was missing. As he walked down the London’s ramp, carrying a heavy duffle over his shoulder, he looked back. The look on his face was something that Michael had never seen him display before—sadness, even regret.
Later that day, Michael said to Gloriosa, “I’m not sure that what you did last night was wise.”
The Empire of Ruin Page 10