“They have isolated you,” I said. “To an extent. All right, maybe it wasn’t the Good Men alone, but the rebellion within the seacity made it dangerous for other rebels like the Usaians to help you, and that in turn made it more likely that they would win each battle separately.”
It seemed to me Simon had grown paler and, considering his general pallor from lack of sleep, it was saying something. It made him look sickly. He said something under his breath. I thought it was “Merde.” Then took a deep breath. “So, our top priority,” he said, “is to put down the rebellion.”
I felt like I was kicking a puppy, but the truth must be told. “Oh, no,” I said. “That was your priority…a couple of days ago. You didn’t.”
“I couldn’t,” he said. “I was—”
I saw Brisbois open his mouth to answer, and his eyebrows were low over his eyes, so much so that he looked to be imitating Jonathan LaForce. I expected at any moment that a reference to panning for gold would come flying out of his mouth. Instead, Mailys said, “The reason doesn’t matter. Madame Sienna is right. We didn’t do it then, and we should have. Now what can we do?”
“We must still put down the rebellion,” Simon said. “Because we can’t afford to have fighting in back and in front of us. We have to know one of the sides is defensible.”
“Yes,” Mailys said. “Alors, we must fight all of them at once. We must put down the rebels, and we must get help from the seacities. We must prevent the invasion.”
Simon took in a deep breath. This time what he let out was “Merde,” but he followed it with, “You know you could set me only one impossible task at a time? It would be easier.”
Brisbois made a sound that might have been laughter, but he shook his head. “No one is setting you anything, Patrician. I believe we were talking about what we could do, not you, yourself.”
Simon looked startled as if it had never occurred to him he might not be master of and responsible for every possible situation. I sympathized. I knew the feeling. In fact, the feeling was still upon me. “Yes, but we must find a way to discover who the infiltrators are in your organization first.” And as Simon looked at me, I said, “Look, the task is fairly impossible, whether with one person or ten thousand, and Brisbois might have picked people more capable of secret work and infiltration than direct fighting, but by all that’s holy, surely you realize that the impossible tasks will be slightly less impossible with the people he did hide against the eventuality? No matter how bad at fighting, a few thousand are better than six. And at any rate, a few thousand trained and competent at spying and gathering information can help us at least with part of our problem: that of finding the infiltrators in our ranks.”
“No,” Simon protested. “They won’t and can’t, when we can’t tell which in our ranks are infiltrators. It’s circular, Zen.”
The flirt was back in his voice. No, it wasn’t open, but suddenly I had the feeling that he was once more regarding me as someone decorative and fairly useless. Decorative I might be, by design, but useless I’d not been brought up to be. I said, short, and without much aim, just wanting to deflect the appreciative look in his eyes and that slight joking tone in his voice, “We could try the ‘fly, all is discovered’ trick.”
“The what?” this was Jonathan LaForce and he didn’t sound flirtatious, merely as though I were out of my ever-loving mind.
I sighed. Okay, I’d have to come up with something now. “I meant we could send some sort of message that would force them to reveal themselves.”
Basil had been mute and fixated on the conversation this long, now he looked up. “What if they don’t know, themselves?”
“Don’t know they’re rebelling?” I asked finding this unlikely.
He looked impatient. “No, I meant they don’t know who the other parties to the rebellion are. It’s not unlikely, you know? With nothing written and no scheme of the organization, the only way they could have done it—The only way they could have recruited and kept it secret this long, for that matter, is to do it in cells.” And to my utterly blank look, he continued, “Like the communist organizations in ancient days. Very efficient. Some parts of them continued to operate and arguably took down what called itself Western civilization after the main source of the ideology had collapsed.
“They organized in cells of three, where one of them knew only the other two, and one of them knew someone above and someone below. It worked, because it was both isolated and resilient. Take out one cell and that’s all you’ve taken out. Torture can’t make a man reveal what he doesn’t know.” He paused, chewing the corner of his lip. “You know, that explains something that puzzled me about it, too. They did not come at us all at once, as if a call had gone out to everyone, but by ones and twos, as though the call had been filtered down, one by one.”
“So?” Simon said. “How does that serve us? Unless we know who each of the people were supposed to contact, we can’t send a false message through their network and force them to reveal themselves. So we’re back at the beginning.”
“No,” I said. “No. Look, do you have a list of those who died?”
“Of course,” Basil said. He looked at me like I was a complete idiot.
“No, I have a point,” I said. “They lived here how long?”
“Three years,” he said.
“Without leaving?”
He made a face. “You couldn’t keep people closed up here for three years,” he said. “Not with the seacity right above us. They’d have left unauthorized, if not given permission. They had leave and routes they had to vary to get in and out.”
“This is all pointless,” Simon said. “If some of them were corrupted by Madame, Madame Parr knows where we are. Well, where the hiding places are.” The others looked as startled as I felt. I hadn’t thought of it. Simon laughed in the face of our surprise. “Please. The only reason she hasn’t sent anyone in is that it’s unlikely news that every one of her minions here has died has reached her.”
Before he had finished talking, Basil had slapped a part of the table that turned on a com. I couldn’t see it, but a hologram formed in the middle of the table, turned towards him. From where I was, it looked like nothing but a pattern of lights and shadows, moving. He barked orders into it, too rapidly and too coded for me to understand. Close this, lock that, watch that.
Then he slapped the holo off. “So what you’re saying is that we have no time. We can secure this one place, but as soon as they try to break in here and find it locked, they’ll know they’ve been revealed, and the other centers will be opened for them, betrayed, if you will, by the inside traitors, so that our own people will be massacred with no appeal.”
“It would seem so,” Simon said.
“No, damn it,” I said. And the swearing surprised me, both because it wasn’t something I was in the habit of doing and because it came out in the local patois. I understood it as it hit my ears though. It sounded very rude, which was, of course, satisfying.
“No?” Simon said. “What other choice do we have?”
“The choice to move quickly and snare the traitors,” I said.
Why Call Them Back from Heaven?
They were all staring at me, as though I’d grown a second head. I struggled to express an idea that wasn’t yet even a full idea, just a sort of inchoate feeling. “Get a list of those dead,” I told Basil. “I assume that even though they weren’t kept prisoners here, people went through a central control for messages to the outside.”
“Of course,” Basil said. He was back to looking very tired and sighed. “I know we must seem like fools to you, but we’re not actually completely stupid. We knew some control of what they were allowed to say and to whom was necessary. Or at least of whom they contacted. They could call other people in the other centers, not in the seacity itself. We knew they could reveal us when they went on leave, but that was likely to be less of a temptation face to face than in the middle of long, daily contacts with friends and sweethearts
. They might reveal us to people in other centers, but that was less of a threat. After all, they too were at least semi-isolated from the seacity.”
“So you know who they called in the other centers?”
He looked startled. And then he was slapping the table again, and the hologram appeared. “Etienne,” He said. “Do you know who”—he rattled off half a dozen names—“called in the other centers?”
The answers came back and he wrote them down. He slapped on the table. “Madame Sienna,” he said, “I don’t know what we can make of it, because it’s possible the person they called most is not the important one, but then two of them called only one person, in each of the other centers.”
“Good,” Simon said. “We’ll take those two.”
“Very well,” Basil said. “Take them and do what?”
“Pass a message down through their network,” he gave a slight smile. “Fly, all is discovered, perhaps.”
“No,” I said.
“No?” Simon asked.
“No.” My mind was working below conscious level again, and I had to fill in the reasons I’d said that instinctive “no.” “‘Fly, all is discovered’ will just lead them to call Madame. We have only a short space of time before they do anyway, out of panic. And we can’t be ready for their attack because we don’t know where and when. The goal is to bring them to us in a place and time of our choosing. We must say something else.”
Simon pulled at his lip. “Yes, I see your point. Perhaps more ‘we are victorious, reveal yourselves and take control’?”
“That’s all very well,” Basil said. “But it won’t help.”
“No?”
“No. If we do that, then they’ll attack. The people they’ll attack will have no idea what they’re doing,” he said. “If I could warn the others…These people are, maybe, five percent of the total, and if we could warn the ones in charge at the centers, we’d have a good chance of defeating them. But if they attack their comrades without warning…”
“Well, what then?” Simon said. “If we tell them to come to our aid they’re likely to call Madame, and that we already have a danger of.”
“No,” I said.
“No?”
“No. Look, in this type of organization, they all eat each other. What I mean is, I got the impression that, like in the original revolution, even the minions of Madame are none too safe. Step wrong and it could be them losing their heads.”
“Yes, but these people are in our own hidden centers. They’re not—”
“Listen to me,” I said. “Are those people who only contacted one person out of the center likely to be high rank, Basil?”
Basil nodded. “If by that you mean they were well-trained specialists, key people I counted on, yes.” He made a face. “Damn them. How could they have let themselves be corrupted by a gospel of the inherent superiority of improved people?”
“Easily enough,” Brisbois said. His voice sounded both heavy and resentful. “How not? It’s in the wording, itself: improved. We’re better, right? And being better, how can we avoid taking over? Trust me, I heard that gospel myself, a little modified, and when you’re young and stupid—and everyone who is young is stupid in a very specialized way—it’s an easy message to convince people of.”
Basil sighed. “But yes. They’re people I’d never have expected to be reachable by conspiracy. Which is what scares me.”
“It shouldn’t scare you,” I said. “This is the message to send out: We have the Good Man. He’s not dead—” Simon made a sound of extreme surprise. I gestured him away. “He’s not dead and we have him cornered with his closest associates. But we are involved in heavy fighting. Basil is dead”—another sound of surprise, which I ignored—“but some of the loyal members of this force are still fighting. We’re near winning but need assistance. If you send only enough people to overcome resistance, we can overpower them, capture the Good Man, Alexis Brisbois, the Good Man’s companion, Jonathan LaForce and Mailys Bonheur. Together we can take them to Madame and claim the glory and honor of having captured her greatest enemy.”
“Yeah, me,” Brisbois said, bitterly. I chose to ignore him.
“Explain to me,” Basil said. “Why this is not like a message to come help us, because we are discovered. Why wouldn’t they call Madame?”
“Because capturing the Good Man is something the revolutionaries, all of them, most particularly Madame, would be grateful for. They’ll want to be part of it.”
“But they’ll let out word that the Good Man is alive.”
“Not hardly,” Simon said. He cast me a speculative look out of the corner of his eye, and then his lips trembled in something like amusement that he pulled back from. It was as though he weren’t absolutely sure how to view me: as a beautiful woman or a dangerous associate. “They won’t talk. I think Zen has it. What the rest of you fail to see is the inherently paranoid nature of this movement.”
“No,” Alexis said. “I see it. I simply fail to see how this can benefit us.”
“They’ll want a portion of the glory,” Simon said. “We know that and we know the conspiracy was paranoid and selfish, because if it weren’t we’d already be hip deep in Madame Parr’s agents. That we aren’t can mean only one thing, and that is they wanted the glory all to themselves, instead of giving the alarm about the invasion. That says all you need to know about the nature of this movement. Even seeing their comrades die, even besieged, they chose to continue fighting alone rather than to call a source of troops, because fighting alone allowed them to have the glory of capturing me. Or perhaps they were afraid of having made the wrong choice, and can’t tell how their movement leaders would react. Judging by those show executions, the movement is more than a little unpredictable, and addicted to blood.”
“They were all very young,” Basil said. “Or most of them.”
“Which explains but doesn’t excuse it,” Simon said. “Still, that being the nature of the movement, they’ll come hot foot to capture me. And then we can try babble juice, or other means to figure out the rest of the moles who don’t come. Do you think there are chances they’re protected with dead man switches, which will kill them if they talk?”
Alexis pushed his lips out, in a considering expression. His eyebrows were low over his eyes again. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Look, they’re not that high-level. Not enough for them to spend the effort, much less the time and expense, of protecting each and every one of them. But that is not the problem, Simon.”
“What is it then?”
“We don’t have the dead men. They can’t believe, in any way that the dead men are talking to them. And if it’s a cell system, anyone else talking to them about secret stuff will set off alarms. They’ll know security was breached. They’ll know something was wrong. They won’t come.”
“Ah…” Simon smiled. “Ah. Indeed. And yet, Alexis, you know what my original was created for.”
“As a spy? You still would need time to infiltrate and establish an identity, and—”
Simon waved him away. “Basil, do you have recordings of these people? Can I see them?”
Moments later, Simon was staring intently at recordings of two young men. The circumstances were much what we could expect of the sort of recordings this sort of installation would make, of course: reports on their guard watch—mostly nothing to report.
The longest reports were the ones where they described what they had done on their leave in the seacity. Mostly telling us where they’d eaten and what they’d done and such. I wondered how much of it was a fiction, but there were heartbreaking glimpses of personality and animation. They’d smile or nod when saying something. And I realized that yes, they were very young. And enhanced. And likely feeling put upon by the Good Man and the world in general. They would be tempted. of course.
Simon played these tapes more than the others. I wondered why. There were no clues to what to tell their contacts in them.
“I think I got it, Ba
sil,” he said, at last. “Do you have uniforms like the ones the dead men were wearing?”
“You can’t hope to pass as them,” Basil said. “They had quite different features. They will—”
“I have no intention of letting them see my features.”
“I don’t see how you can avoid it, sir,” he said. “They will be suspicious if you make two calls and, in both of them, tell them the video is out.”
“Yes,” Simon said. “They’d be if I were stupid enough to do something so dumb. I’m not, thank you.”
“But then—” Basil said.
“Give the man what he asked for, Basil,” Brisbois said, very quietly. I noticed the people who, presumably, knew Simon best, Mailys, Brisbois, LaForce, were not saying anything, hadn’t made any protest. I started to wonder if Simon was some sort of shape shifter.
Turned out, no. What he was was a superb actor and master of stage setting, lighting, movement.
He went away with the reluctant Basil and came back moments later, wearing a uniform similar to what the people in here wore. He moved…differently and somehow managed to look taller. No, I have no idea how. He couldn’t change his features, but his features—once he had played with lighting, the arrangement of furniture and what I’ll call stage setting—were not in the light at any time, or seen fully on. And his features such as they were had that kind of generic quality that a glimpse from the side, a view of the ear or the chin could be a thousand different people.
What was convincing, though, was the way he moved. He was already in character as he came in and started to disarray the furniture, overturning chairs, skewing a picture on the wall, aiming his burner and making a burn mark on the door, just above his head. Basil took in breath at that, but then it must have occurred to him that if the door belonged to anyone it was Simon and that he couldn’t scold a man for destroying his own property.
Through Fire (Darkship Book 4) Page 27