by Rick Partlow
“Finley. Good help is hard to find,” Jameson affected sympathy.
The executive considered his words for a moment before continuing.
“All right, so you know,” Riordan said, his face looking as if he had just bit into something sour. “But how much do you know, and how do you know it.”
“Beyond that…well, I know that you and Fourcade were working with the Colonial Guard mutineers through third-party cutouts, and I know that you have Fleet personnel and former military working on this. But most importantly, Brendan, I know you have access to the wormholes and that you’re working with Antonov.”
Riordan’s face went pale and Jameson thought if the man hadn’t already been sitting down he would have passed out. “Where the fuck did you hear that?”
“You really shouldn’t have trusted Colonel Lee,” Jameson replied. “Or should I say, Fourcade shouldn’t have trusted Hellene D’Annique, who shouldn’t have trusted Colonel Lee.”
“Jesus Christ,” Riordan muttered, coming out of his chair and pacing across the porch, eyes glazing over in horror. “If you know, Greg, then…”
“Then O’Keefe knows,” Jameson confirmed, nodding. “And more important to your purposes, Shannon fucking Stark knows, Brendan. And you know what she’ll do if you she gets her hands on you.” He sighed. “I can really sympathize with your position: you know that I accepted the pragmatic reality that, as distasteful as I found the whole forced emigration process, we needed it to keep our society and our economy running on the colonies. O’Keefe means well, but he’s running the Republic into the ground and we might not recover.” He glared hard at Riordan. “But Jesus, Brendan…working with Antonov? He’s a Goddamned madman!”
“Dammit, Greg, I am not working with Antonov!” Riordan raged, fists clenching at his side. “I’m not fucking stupid! Antonov is working for me!”
“What?” Jameson blurted. “What the hell do you mean he’s working for you?”
The executive took a deep breath and shook himself as if trying to work the fury out of his system. “I’m afraid this conversation won’t be proceeding until and unless you can convince me why I should tell you more than you already know.”
Jameson shook his head. He levered himself out of his chair and stood to his full height, towering over Riordan. “Because, my old friend,” he enunciated every word with certainty and precision, “I am the only thing standing between you and utter disaster. However well you think you have this figured out, it is not going to go like you hoped it would.”
“You’re so sure of that, are you?” Riordan sneered. “I wouldn’t think you’d give O’Keefe that much credit.”
“It has nothing to do with O’Keefe…you think you have the military in your pocket, but you don’t. You don’t even have the Colonial Guard: Kage knew about your scheme all along and he wasn’t about to let it happen. But most importantly, whoever your wildcard is in the Fleet, whether it’s Patel or whoever, neither the Fleet nor the Marines will get behind Dominguez.”
Riordan looked very much like he wanted to ask Jameson how he knew about Dominguez, but he bit back the impulse.
“Who do you think they will get behind, Greg?” He asked instead.
“I’d think that’s pretty damned obvious,” Jameson said, grinning broadly. “They’ll get behind the same man who saw them through the last conflict with the Protectorate. That’s why I’m here, Brendan. I want you to make me President again.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“I think this is a mistake,” Kevin Fourcade repeated, arms folded across his chest sulkily. He kept glancing toward the plane’s blacked out window as if he could see through the plastic barrier.
“Yes, Kevin,” Riordan grated with strained patience. “So you keep saying. Pardon me if I don’t accept your judgment unreservedly, given your recent history of decision-making.”
“This is an incredibly complicated plan, Brendan,” Fourcade countered plaintively. “Things were bound to go wrong somewhere…you have to give some latitude.”
“Exactly, Kevin, and this is a prime example of latitude. We’ve been handed an opportunity to upgrade our position. Dominguez was never anything but a stop-gap anyway, a bone to throw the rank and file to make them think everything was on the up-and-up. With Greg on our side,” he jerked his head toward the door to their compartment-Jameson was on the other side of it, secured between two armed guards, “we can push for an immediate election and with Jameson as our figurehead, we get the military on our side. We might even get McKay and Stark to support him.” He shrugged. “If they survive.”
“I don’t oppose involving Jameson,” Fourcade clarified. “I just don’t see a reason to take him to the bunker.”
“It’s necessary,” Riordan told him. “He needs assurances that we have the Antonov situation under control.” He snorted ruefully. “Hell, I’d like to get some reassurance of that myself…”
Jameson emerged from the VTOL jet into an enclosed chamber. He hesitated at the bottom of the boarding ramp and glanced up, seeing the now-closed hangar doors above him. He raised an eyebrow and chuckled at Brendan Riordan and Kevin Fourcade as they met him at the bottom of the ramp. The hangar was roomy and well-lit and mostly vacant. There was room for a dozen flyers or perhaps three more of the small VTOL jets like the one on which they’d flown, but their vehicle shared the large space with but one ducted-fan flyer, parked nearly a hundred yards away. The walls were bare, undecorated concrete and to Jameson they had the look of age.
“Thorough,” he commented, obviously impressed.
“It’s not something we want someone stumbling across by accident,” Fourcade said with a testy defensiveness.
“Follow me,” Riordan told him, leading the group out of the hangar, the two guards who had watched over Jameson during the flight trailing him silently, hands still filled with compact submachine guns.
Jameson eyed them with concealed amusement as they walked. “You know, Brendan, I guess I must look dangerous, but I swear, I’ve only ever killed three people in my whole life and only one of them was with my bare hands.”
“It may seem a bit paranoid,” Riordan admitted, “but then again, we are plotting the overthrow of the government, so perhaps paranoia is just good sense.”
”Touche,” Jameson admitted.
The exit to the hangar was a large double-door that led into a broad hallway, wide enough for power-loaders to haul pallets of supplies through it to storerooms, and at the end of that hallway was a freight elevator. Riordan pressed his palm against a biometric ID plate that seemed much newer than the elevator itself and the doors opened with a quiet creak of metal, confirming for Jameson his estimate of the facility’s age. Riordan hit the last button on a panel with more than two dozen floor selections and the car jerked into motion. The ride seemed to last forever and Jameson fought the urge to check the time on his ‘link; it had been taken from him before the flight, and then he’d had to submit to a complete scan to make sure he wasn’t carrying any implanted tracking devices.
“What level of hell are we getting off at?” He asked dryly. Riordan smirked but did not reply. In fact, he didn’t say a word even when the elevator stopped a few minutes later, disgorging them at the end of a bare hallway lined with unmarked doors; he merely stepped out and led them down it with a confident stride.
He’s spent a lot of time here, Jameson realized.
The corridor split into a T at the far end and Riordan took a right without hesitation. Jameson began to see people then: dressed in civilian business casual, without even an ID badge to betray their purpose, ignoring Riordan except for an occasional nod as they passed by to press palms to security plates next to the equally anonymous doors and entering those mysterious chambers for some unknowable purpose. Finally they reached a door that seemed much newer than the rest. It was wide enough to admit a power-loader and thick and featureless, without as much as an ID plate. Jameson wondered for a moment how Riordan would open it; but only m
oments after they arrived at the door, it slowly slid aside. Waiting beyond it in a small antechamber was a dowdy, middle-aged woman with mousy brown hair and clothes that looked as if they’d been slept in. She greeted him with a forced smile and shook his hand with feigned warmth.
“Director Riordan,” she said, “so nice to have you back so soon.”
“You’re a bad liar, Maggie,” Riordan accused, shaking his head in amusement. “Don’t worry; it’s not another inspection, just a VIP tour. Dr. Cochrane, I assume you remember former President Jameson.”
The woman seemed to notice Jameson for the first time and surprise registered on her lumpy face. “Mr. President!” She exclaimed, holding out a hand. “It’s such an honor to meet you!” She glanced at Riordan doubtfully as Jameson shook her hand.
“President Jameson is a new recruit for our little enterprise,” Riordan told her. “He just wanted some assurance that we have things in hand when it comes to dealing with our Russian asset.
“Ah,” she said with a nod of understanding. “Well, right this way then, Mr. President.”
The room was half a cell, half an apartment, enclosed behind a transparent, airtight wall from the three meter-high ceiling to floor. It seemed well-appointed as prisons went: besides a bed and a reclining chair, there was an exercise machine and a fully-equipped entertainment center. A partially open door in the corner led to a small, private bathroom-notionally private: Jameson was sure it was being monitored as well, though at the moment there was no one in the chamber other than their party and the doctor.
Standing at the center of the cell was a tall, broad-chested man with a face off a Roman coin: aquiline nose, deep-set dark eyes and cheekbones carved from the side of a mountain. A bushy mustache shot with grey completed the mental picture that Jameson remembered very well both from history lessons and the videos he had seen of the invasion.
“I remember you,” Sergei Pavlovitch Antonov said slowly, staring intently at Jameson, one hand resting lightly, palm out, against the transparent enclosure. His voice was being amplified by some system in the cell, because Jameson could hear him with no problem despite the intervening wall. “The hostage.”
“Yes, well…look who’s talking,” Jameson returned, cocking his eyebrow at the irony. He glanced aside at Riordan. “And you’ve actually had him here since the war?”
“His ship never left the asteroid belt,” Riordan confirmed with a self-satisfied nod. “From what we gathered under chemical interrogation, he had to alter course to avoid a Fleet intrasystem patrol ship and ran out of fuel. He probably would have drifted right out of the solar system if a couple Belt pirates hadn’t noticed him. They’d seen him on the reports from insystem and took him to one of the corporate mining stations, thinking we might be interested in making a deal.” He grinned. “We landed him for one hundred tons of soy protein.”
“Genius,” Jameson said, admiration in his voice as he stared at the former dictator. “And then you squeezed him like a grapefruit until you got the key to the wormhole network. But how did you handle the rest of them? I can’t see them all giving up just because you had Antonov.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” Riordan couldn’t hold back a laugh. “They don’t even know. We had him record messages for them…they think he’s still in command, directing them from a remote location where he’ll be safe from ‘American spies.’ He’s told them all about the great allies he’s found here…that would be us. And like the good allies we are, we’ve provided them with some extra ships they can use however we direct them to…our own, secret, ready-made fleet.”
“Which will make just the bogey-man you need to justify nearly anything,” Jameson finished for him. “And I assume you have some way to neutralize the advantages you’ve given them if they become too troublesome.”
“Of course,” Riordan confirmed. “As I’ve told you: I’m ambitious, not stupid.”
“Well, I’ve certainly seen and heard enough to convince me,” Jameson told him. “O’Keefe has to go and you’ve got the plan to get rid of him. What you need is an inroad to the military and I can give you that. Shannon Stark trusts me; I am sure I can throw her off your trail and salvage things.”
The whole time he and Riordan were speaking, Jameson was keeping a sideways eye on Antonov-mostly because the man gave him the creeps-and for some reason the Russian was smiling broadly. That bothered him greatly for some reason that he couldn’t put his finger on.
“It’s great having you aboard, Greg,” Riordan pumped his hand enthusiastically. “I have to admit, the one part of this whole operation that’s always bothered me is Dominguez…the man is too squirrelly for my tastes. Bringing him in was always Kevin’s idea.” He shot Fourcade a baleful glare.
“He was willing,” Fourcade protested, “and having the Vice President working with us was a damn sight better than nothing!”
Jameson frowned slightly, looking back and forth between the two of them, but quickly corrected his expression. He closed his mouth on the question he’d been about to ask, yielding to an instinct that asking it would be giving away more information than he’d gain.
“Gentlemen,” he said instead, striking a conciliatory tone, “let’s not waste time on recriminations. We’re all working towards a common goal: to preserve the Republic as we know it. Vice President Dominguez will serve his purpose, as will I, and we should think about how to best use each asset we have.”
“You’re dead right, as usual, Greg,” Riordan relented. “What we need to concentrate on is getting rid of O’Keefe before he does any more damage.”
“Before he starts a civil war trying to stop us,” Jameson amended for him. “If it comes to that, we’ll lose everything.”
Behind them, Antonov laughed loud and long.
“Riordan doesn’t know,” Shannon mused thoughtfully, staring at the readout on her tablet. She, Ari and Roza were gathered around the table of the Houston safe-house, listening to a recording of the conversation inside the bunker. They hadn’t been able to chance bugging Jameson, but they had still had that Trojan on Fourcade’s ‘link…and knowing when the meeting was happening, they’d activated the device’s recorder and then later had it send a data squirt over the ‘net with that sound file.
“He doesn’t know what?” Ari asked, confused. He and Roza had been floored by the revelation that Antonov was on Earth and a captive of the Executive Council, but Shannon had, surprisingly, taken it in stride.
Stark looked up from the tablet, a fierce glint in her eye. “He doesn’t know about the Patton,” she expanded. “He doesn’t know that’s why Dominguez is cooperating. But Fourcade knows, and he’s not sharing the information with his boss.”
Ari suddenly remembered Dominguez’ statements when he’d been drugged at President O’Keefe’s house, when he’d said that Fourcade knew about the Patton. “You’re right, ma’am!” he exclaimed. “But what game is he playing?”
Roza’s face grew thoughtful for a moment, then she grabbed the tablet and typed in a request. Realization dawned on her face and she turned the tablet back around so they could see the readout. “This is the roster of the Patton.”
“Holy shit,” Ari said. “We never thought to look for him there.”
“Kevin Fourcade was on the Patton,” Shannon breathed.
Roza nodded firmly. “He was working for the mining multicorps, checking the damage to the facilities on Aphrodite. We didn’t pay attention to the lists of corporate employees that were on the ship,”
“You know what this means,” Ari told Roza and Shannon. “Riordan thinks he’s running Antonov…”
“But Antonov is running Riordan,” Shannon finished for him. She picked up her ‘link and tapped in a message. “I need to talk to the President.”
* * *
“Holy mother of God,” Nunez breathed softly, subconsciously whispering as if the Protectorate ships on the screen could hear him from thousands of kilometers away.
“Where the hell a
re they all coming from?” Pirelli asked, shaking her head.
On the Tactical display she could see one ship after another transitioning from the wormhole through which they’d entered the system and then moving in a conveyor-belt line to one of the system’s other gates. Behind them the system’s primary glared harshly, while in the foreground the brown, blue and now mostly white surface of Peboan gleamed in its distant light and scant warmth.
“I assume they’re coming from Novoye Rodina,” McKay replied, hanging from the railing behind her bridge station so he could look at the readouts over her shoulder. “I guess we know now why they fought so hard to keep us out of here.”
“Thank God we got here before they started coming through,” Nunez commented, crossing himself. “And that they we were able to move out of the area before they spotted us.”
The Sheridan had arrived insystem hours ago and the convoy of Protectorate ships hadn’t ceased since then. There were dozens of them and they were still coming through with no end in sight.
“That leaves us with a big problem still, though,” McKay reminded him. “They’re heading for Earth; nothing else makes any sense. And if we go through the same way, we’re going to have to fight our way through them.”
Nunez looked at him sharply. “Colonel, we don’t have the antimatter or the missiles left for that kind of fight.”
“Hence the whole big problem thing, Commander,” McKay replied dryly. “We only have one real choice, and it sucks.”
“We have to go back to Earth using our Eysselink drive,” Nunez realized, dismal resignation in his voice, “which will take nearly six weeks.”
“If the enemy ships are heading for Earth, too,” Pirelli objected, “they could be there long before that.”