Heir Apparent

by Michael Stackpole

  “You’d be in by dusk if you don’t mind cutting curves off the roads.” The farmer scratched at his beard. “You boys look like maybe you could stand to get on the outside of some breakfast.”

  Ivan shook his head. “We don’t want to be trouble.”

  “I’m not sure there’s any avoiding trouble these days.” The farmer pointed at a pile of wood, a block and an ax. “If you want to split wood, one of you, and the other shovel out the dairy barn, we can spare some eggs and cheese. Boy, go tell your mother we have guests.”

  The son gave the two strangers a hard stare, then ran off to the farmhouse. The farmer pointed Walter toward the wood pile and waved Ivan after him toward the barn. Ivan gave Walter a puzzled look.

  “Because you miss with a shovel and you won’t lay your shin open.” The mercenary gave him a nod.

  Ivan shrugged—quite in keeping with his being Spurs Spurling—and headed toward the barn. Walter took up the ax, tested the blade’s sharpness, then went to work splitting and stacking. It had been a long time since he’d done anything like that. The work warmed him up quickly, so he shucked his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and kept at it.

  Plenty of people he’d known—Hake included—would have pointed to the farm’s existence as proof that Maldives was dying. These were the same folks who’d come from a world where food production fell to giant agro-combines using ’Mechs and robots to cultivate hundreds of cubic kilometers at a pass. Those same people, on the other hand, loved to find those special little places where “craft creators” made artisanal products priced highly enough that only the well-moneyed could afford them. Had the farm been restyled to be an organic cheese manufactory, and if the farmer called himself a master cheesemaker, he’d have had those people seeking him out in droves.

  What Walter appreciated was that the farmer and his family weren’t living at a remove from the land and their food sources. Down in Rivergaard the planetary order had been overthrown, but here, on the farm, nothing had changed. Because nothing needs to change. If the whole of the corporate structure got peeled off the planet, and nature reclaimed all of Rivergaard, the farm could go on and function perfectly well without any of them.

  Which is why Maldives hasn’t died yet, and might never completely die.

  The farmer came out of the house with an enameled mug of hot tea. “Doing good work there. Ain’t your first time.”

  “Nope.”

  “But been a long time.” The farmer handed him the mug. “You and the boy, your hands don’t show much sign of manual work.”

  Walter sipped the tea, then shrugged. “We moisturize.”

  “Fair enough.” The farmer sat himself down on the piled wood. “I don’t make no assumptions, but I gots to ask: you two escape from a detail?”

  “Nope.” Walter set the tea down, then placed another piece of wood on the chopping block. “You mean work details?”

  “My boy said he seen ’em over toward the main road. Thirty-forty people, following a truck, going slow up the road. Hear tell they is working ’round Swindon. Living rough.”

  “What was in the truck?”

  “Shovels. Things to bury.” The farmer’s brows arrowed together. “Couple trucks go up there every day.”

  Work details are digging graves. “Ain’t nobody looking for us.”

  “Mister, they’s looking for anyone ain’t them.” The farmer drank more tea. “You and the boy ’pear to be good people, but I can’t be having you stay around here.”

  “We’re just passing through. We won’t forget your kindness, but we won’t be remembering it too hard neither.”

  “Obliged.”

  Walter split a log with a smooth, overhand stroke. “Anything should worry us?”

  “Ain’t nothing from Rivergaard come here in a long while. Hear tell the city ain’t as quiet as they’d like—the Collective, that is.” The farmer shrugged. “I don’t mind about Preferreds and Holders and what all, but least ways no corporators done hid behind masks. Figure you do that, you’re hiding something really ought to see the light of day.”

  They left the farm by midday. Fog played across the fields like smoke on a battlefield. Ten minutes out they lost sight of the farmhouse. By the end of an hour they saw the road heading south. Three lanes each way, it remained virtually devoid of traffic.

  Ivan shook his head. “That’s not right. Swindon isn’t a big town, but a hundred fifty miles north-northeast is St. Antoine. It’s big. The city is there year round, and gateway to the mountains for skiing and winter resorts, as well as various wineries. The road should not be empty.”

  “And yet, it is.” Walter turned south and walked parallel to the road, but kept the crest of the hills between himself and the highway. “Not really a surprise. You said they’d restrict travel.”

  “I know, but . . .”

  “This makes it real?”

  Ivan’s voice grew small. “Very real.”

  “Well, this doesn’t change our mission.” Walter pointed north. “We go to Swindon. We do some recon. I’m guessing we make the outskirts by dusk, find a place to hole up. If we get lucky, we’re in and out before anyone knows we were there.”

  “Then back around to the lake by another route.” Ivan gave Walter a resolute nod. “I may be shaken a little. I won’t stay that way.”

  “I know, Spurs, I know.”

  As the crimson kingfisher flew, Swindon might have only been twenty kilometers from the farm, but the two men had to wind their way over hills, through ravines, across streams and around farms. They were less concerned about being turned in to authorities than they were about attracting attention to people whose land they only passed through. Eight hours after they’d left the farm, they reached Swindon, then pushed on further north, so that when they turned to get closer, they came in from the northwest.

  Swindon, according to files Walter had read at the lake, had been a small ranching community—little more than a village, really—for the better part of a century and a half. The farmers raised corn and vegetables, and ran a lot of sheep over the rolling, grassy hills. Swindon had its own cottage industry of spinning, weaving and knitting, and did a decent trade in handmade clothing. This was especially true in the Long Winter as sweaters sold briskly to those headed up to the resorts.

  Back before the war, a few Preferred and some of the rich Holders chose to build summer homes in Swindon to help escape the most humid of the Deep Summer months. That tradition had continued despite the planet’s slow decline. The sentiment among the people appeared to have been that if you could afford to maintain a home in Swindon, your fortunes had to be considered better than those of the people who could not. In First Family marriage and inheritance schemes, possession of Swindon land was not a negative.

  From the cover of a copse of trees, Ivan pointed out a large estate on a hill overlooking Swindon from the north. “That’s August House, our High Summer home. Named after my relative.”

  “I never would have guessed.” Walter gave Ivan a light jab with his elbow in his ribs. “Is it always lit up like that?”

  “No. Those lights look to be placed in the gardens, but we never had any that bright or on posts that tall.”

  “Well, someone is doing something there, so we need to reconsider.” Their original plan was to target the estate, in hopes that if they could get in, they could use secure data connections to harvest intel and do a little damage.”

  “That’s not a problem.” Ivan crouched and drew a diagram in the dirt with his finger. “Main house is here. Gardens here. Guesthouse over here. Beyond the guesthouse there’s a blockhouse next to a well. You can’t see it now, it’s down in a depression so folks can’t see it from the guesthouse. It houses the controls for the well’s pump and the sewage treatment system. It also has a safe room in case there was a problem and we couldn’t
get back to the house.”

  “And you have computer access from there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s go.”

  A half hour of careful travel later they reached the blockhouse. A wire-mesh fence topped with razor wire surrounded it. The gate had been secured with a heavy chain and a padlock.

  “I don’t remember that lock.”

  Walter shrugged. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a rectangular strip of metal as long as his finger, with a single jagged triangle poking down from the center. He folded the metal around the lock’s hook and slid the slender tooth into the block. He pressed down, driving the tooth deep, and the lock snapped open.

  Ivan stared at him. “How did you . . .?”

  “. . . shim the lock? You know about Lowland beetles, I learned other things as a kid.”

  “But . . .”

  “Spurs, sometimes you really need something that others want to keep locked safely away.”

  “That’s not right, but I find it oddly comforting.”

  “Lead on.”

  They entered the compound and Walter made even shorter work of the blockhouse door lock. Once inside the blockhouse, Ivan flicked two switches on the sewage control console, then touched two rivets on the side of the console. Air hissed and the console slid forward, revealing a small hole cut in the wall behind it.

  The two of them entered the concealed room on their hands and knees. Ivan got up, turned the lights on, then hit a switch that brought the console back into proper position. Another switch dropped a steel panel down to block the crawl space.

  Walter stood and stretched. The room had four sleeping berths built into two walls, a computer console along the third, and supply cabinets flanking the crawl space. “I’ve been billeted in worse.”

  Ivan sat at the computer and brought it to life. In addition to the main display, two auxiliary monitors lit up. “I can get us some images of the garden from here . . .”

  “First things first. We can look at that later.” Walter dearly wanted to see what was going on in the garden, but he already had a really good idea what was happening. It struck him that using forced labor to bury dead First Family members and destroy the Litzau gardens was the sort of thing that the Collective would find suitable as punishment for their prisoners.

  “Okay, working on that.” Ivan held up the memory stick he’d pulled from his pocket. “I’m also going to use the software to get rid of any geographic and tax records of the farm we were at this morning. I can even extend the Preserve’s border to annex . . .”

  “Tax records, fine; same with local directories, but don’t change the Preserve. The less attention we draw to it, the better.”

  “Good idea. Yes! I am in. Virus inserted. And out.” Ivan swung around in the chair. “I think this will work. Twenty minutes, I pull what we’ve got so far, and we go from there.”

  “Great.” They’d both agreed that for Ivan to get into the governmental computers and search around would leave him open to discovery by the Collective and whomever they had working on their data systems. What he did instead was to shape a virus that would tie into the software the Litzau family used to gather information for their DNA project. He’d be able to pull data and change some records in that first pass. At the end of twenty minutes, they could recover the data, learn how much had been changed, and then look at how much damage they could truly do.

  What Walter really wanted to find out was the fate of the Angels. They had not been mentioned at all in Collective broadcasts past the first, so he hoped for the best. The virus would sweep through hospital records for anyone associated with the Angels. Ivan also added a list of names, beginning with his mother’s, to attempt to learn their fates. Neither man had been terribly hopeful, but they’d lied to each other about how hard their friends and family were going to be to kill.

  Ivan turned to the console again. “Now, for security footage.”

  Three images popped up on the monitors. As Walter feared, the gardens had been dug up, long rows running across flower beds and crushed stone walkways. Decorative statuary had been knocked off their pedestals, and more than one stone figure bore signs of having been shot at. People in ragged clothes slowly tossed black earth onto piles, while others hauled limp bodies off the back of a flat bed truck and laid them a the bottom of the mass grave. Armed men and women circled the workers like vultures.

  Ivan, blood draining from his face, tapped one of the screens with a dirty finger. “You see this?”

  “Yes, Ivan. Just . . . just don’t look.”

  “What? No, Walter, we have to do something!”

  “Spurs, if we go out there, we can’t do anything but die.”

  “No, Walter, look!” Ivan tapped the screen harder. “We have to go.”

  “Shit.” Walter’s stomach imploded as he leaned closer. “This is not good.”

  The woman in the center of the image, the woman Ivan’s finger pointed to, was Sophia.

  Chapter Twelve

  Litzau Summer Home, Swindon

  Maldives

  15 November 3000

  “Look, the side of her face. It’s swollen. She’s hurt.”

  “It’s a bruise, Spurs. It’s big, but she’ll recover.”

  “We have to go get her.” Ivan rose from the chair. “We have guns here and . . .”

  “Ease back, Spurs. Slow down.” Walter held a hand up, hoping his stomach would stop bubbling acid into his throat. “We’re going to get her, rescue her. She’s going to be fine, but not if we go in without a plan.”

  Ivan stared at him. “They could kill her any second now.”

  “But they’re not going to.” Walter pointed to the chair the young man had just vacated. “Sit down.”

  Ivan looked at him, mouth agape.

  “I’m not questioning your courage or love for your sister, Spurs.” Walter raked fingers back through his unkempt hair. “A plan, remember? I need you to sit down there and tell me what you can and cannot do in that house and on those grounds.”

  “Walter!”

  The mercenary held up a finger. “Tell me, Spurs, have you ever slit a man’s throat? Have you ever used a knife to kill anything? Have you ever done more with a knife than slice into a rare steak?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “Sit down, son. Sit. Down.”

  Ivan sat, almost missing the chair. “Walter . . .”

  Walter squatted, resting his hands on Ivan’s knees. So earnest, and so out of his depth. “This is the score, Spurs. There’s at least six heavily armed guards just in the shots of the garden. Let’s suppose there’s twice as many that we’ve not seen yet. Many of them have to be eliminated or neutralized or killed, if your sister is going to get away. This has to be done fast, quietly, efficiently. You think you’re qualified for that job?”

  Ivan shook his head.

  “So, I need you to be my eyes out there. I need to know what else you can do in the house and on the grounds to help me.”

  Ivan’s head came up. “What do you put the odds at?”

  “Spurs, if I worried about odds, I wouldn’t be a merc, would I?” Walter ran a hand over his chin. “One in five, right now.”

  “I see.” Ivan spun the seat around and began hitting keys. “I can get video feed from all of the cameras inside the estate and grounds. I can lock and unlock doors. I can shut off the exterior lights—that’s part of killing the electrical system—the estate is gridded, so I can take down all or part of it depending on what’s going on. The interior lights I can control—on, off, color and intensity. And the groundskeeping systems—sprinklers—and the sound system, intercoms and stuff.”

  “And with the cameras, you can watch me as I go?”

  “Yes.”

  Walter rose and leaned on the
console beside Ivan. “Is there a way to signal me?”

  “Not without others in the house hearing. I guess I could guide you through the house by selectively locking and unlocking doors. I could do the same by turning some of the room lights on and off.”

  “Safe rooms in the house?”

  “Four.” Ivan’s fingers flew and a wire-frame schematic of the estate appeared on the screen. “One on each floor. Basement and main floor are bigger, suitable for two dozen people. The others are like this.”

  “Good.” Walter straightened up. “When I get your sister, we’ll go back through the house. Use lights and sound, if you must, to direct your sister to a safe room in the event things blow up.”

  Ivan turned and watched him. “One in five are horrid odds.”

  Walter opened up a cabinet and studied the array of weapons available. “After what you’ve told me, odds go up to 40 percent. Things are twice as good now as they were five minutes ago.”

  “Walter . . .”

  “Does your sister shoot?”

  “She knows which end of a gun to point away from herself at least.” Ivan shrugged. “She’s never been in a gunfight, to the best of my knowledge.”

  “Useful, thanks.” Walter pulled on a shoulder holster and needle pistol, then grabbed a small satchel and tossed in two blocks of ballistic polymer and a handful of propellant cartridges. He clipped that to his belt. He selected three knives. He tucked the two smaller ones into the tops of his boots, and the larger one he slipped through his belt.

  “No lasers or rifle?”

  “Lasers equal light, and I don’t want to be seen.” Walter closed the cabinet. “And if I need a long gun to shoot things at range, I have bigger problems than needing to shoot things at range.”

  Ivan got up and retracted the steel panel over the exit. “You’d better hurry.”

  Walter shook his head. “I can’t go yet.”

  “But they might kill her.”