Through Fire (Darkship Book 4)

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  I got the impression that Simon was enjoying all this more than was reasonable. That perhaps he’d long wanted to destroy his own property.

  Then as he did a test run at pretending to be someone else, I realized that despite the different features he managed to give the impression of being the first young man we’d seen on the tapes, and that this young man was making a sort of desperate try on, an attempt both brave and insane.

  He backtracked and started playing with light controls by the door. This time Basil did make a sound, as the lights flickered wildly overhead. “Patrician,” he said, and then he joined Simon, and conferred with him in a low voice. To Simon’s animated instructions, he flickered lights, not so much turning lighting off as making it less revelatory. It shone where it shouldn’t and cast other places in shadow, all the while without looking unnaturally dark or suspiciously low.

  The first man, Etienne, had been slight with a sort of tripping trick of speech, where each word tried to come out before the other one was done.

  Simon captured that way of speech, the pitch of the voice, the way the man tilted his head while speaking. When the man on the other side materialized as a holo in the room—we were behind it, and he couldn’t see us, nor could we see him but as a shadow cast on Simon’s features—Simon delivered the message he’d thought up.

  The response on the other side was guarded. “Etienne? Is all well?”

  Simon broke the supposed secrecy almost immediately, reacting in an excited way, or rather like a man trying to suppress excitement. My admiration of his acting ability grew, as he poured out, in the exact mannerisms of the dead man and in a tone that was pitch perfect for excitement and triumph, the story of the Good Man coming in with his close friends, of his being captured, of the need for reinforcement, of the glory they could win in the eyes of Madame.

  Halfway through it, as I sat mouth half open in wonder at Simon’s act, my mind wondered how it appeared from the other end. It wasn’t so much a question of how it would work, but a question of whether the actions in response would be anything like Simon and I had anticipated. I wondered if we had moles on that side, the same way they had moles on our side. And then I wondered if not, why not? Could we capture their communications? I shifted in my seat, thinking how Jonathan LaForce had some indication that the Good Men were about to attack, but how? Did we at least have informers there?

  Brisbois’s hand came down on my shoulder, large and warm. Not a grip, so much as a touch, conveying concern.

  I turned back to find that Brisbois, standing behind and to the side of my chair was watching me with a curious expression. It was as though he were looking into my mind, figuring out what I was thinking. He looked in equal measure concerned and questioning.

  I opened my mouth, but he put his finger over his lips, and made a head gesture towards Simon, who was now imitating the second young man, as voluble and pitch perfect a performance as any. Then he gestured, with his head, in the other direction, behind the back of the hologram that Simon was talking to. The way we wouldn’t be seen. The way out of the room.

  I nodded, and got up, and followed him as soundlessly as possible out of the room.

  Out in the hallway, having closed the door, Brisbois said, “If you permit me, Madame Sienna, we’ll find a place to talk.” We walked down a hallway and he asked a passing young woman, blond and smart in the uniform of Simon’s forces, a question that ended in “secure room.”

  She led us down a side corridor into what looked like a meeting room, the twin of the one in which we’d sat before.

  I’ll say this for Brisbois. He would not win any contests as the most trusting man alive. After the young woman left, he looked around the room and closely examined various fixtures. I didn’t say anything as he beat with unreasonable force what appeared to be a mere smoke detector high on the wall.

  But my expression must have shown curiosity or amusement, because he smiled as he turned to look at me. “It probably was just a fire alarm,” he said. “But it’s a matter of life or death.”

  “What is?” I asked, confused, as he made sure the door was closed and locked. Strangely, it occurred to me I wasn’t afraid of being closed in with him. It made no sense, since I now knew he was quite capable of taking me out as no other man I’d ever been around could.

  On the other hand, I had been alone with him in the motel. Technically twice, since Simon had been knocked out the second time.

  “I saw that you were worrying,” he said. “When I looked at you in the room. When Simon was doing his thing. Now, it’s entirely possible that your worry is minor and needless. It’s also possible that thing on the wall really was an innocuous fire alarm. On the other hand, I don’t think so in either case. And if your worry is relevant and important, in the situation we’re in, it’s quite possible that our not being overheard is a matter of life and death.” He pulled himself up by his hands to sit on the small round conference table, which creaked under his weight, and grinned at me, the grin that transformed his more than homeless features. “So, suppose you tell me what was going through your head back there?”

  “Oh,” I said. And tried to pull a straight thread from the confusion of my thoughts. “I thought that we don’t know anything.” He raised an eyebrow and I went on, “So the centers were penetrated. I get that. There are moles. And Simon is dealing with that. Supposing he finds them all and clears them, this leaves us with two problems.”

  “Only two?” It was an amused rumble.

  I ignored it because the man had the oddest sense of humor. “Roughly,” I said. “Two centers of problems, at least. There’s the Good Men and there’s Madame.” I ticked them on my fingers, then looked at him, and he nodded. “The question is in what order we handle them.”

  “Oh, we’re going to handle them?” he asked.

  “We have to,” I said. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it? If we don’t handle Madame, then the Good Men take us.”

  “Or the Good Men take us, in any case?”

  “It’s not a very hopeful view, is it? I thought we were going to try to get people to rally behind Simon? That it was the whole point of dragging him into this?”

  Brisbois gave the impression of counting back from a million. Or at least it seemed to me to take that long, looking at his rolled up eyes, his pursed lips, his whole expression that of someone absorbed in a calculation he can’t share with mere mortals. “Ah,” he said. “There is a difference between trying and succeeding.”

  “You don’t think we’ll succeed?” I asked.

  “I think we’re going to get creamed,” he said. “But I also don’t believe in giving up without a fight. The thing is, I think in the end it is going to come to this: holing up in the secret bases and plotting a takeover, the way the old bast—the old Good Man did. I don’t think Simon is magical, nor do I think that he can pull a solution out of thin air that didn’t work before.”

  I sat down. I sat at his side and splayed my hands on the table. Arguably I’d given up too soon when Len had been sick with radiation poisoning and I’d been the only person who could have saved him. I could have saved him by doing something unconventional, something that wasn’t in the instructions for what we should do. I could have commed Earth, or at least Circum Terra. We’d heard, by then, all of us, that Earth was trying to find Kit’s wife, Athena Sinistra. I could have offered to give them hints of her location. I could have strung them out long enough for Len to get treatment. I just hadn’t realized it at the time. I’d been dumb with his suffering, sick with loneliness and helplessness.

  I hadn’t thought of saving him, I realized, as my heart turned within me, and it felt like my gut filled with ice. I had thought of stopping the suffering. And not even his suffering, no, but my suffering at having to watch him suffer.

  I was a coward and a fraud, and my cowardice had cost my husband his life.

  I looked up at Alexis Brisbois, that big, uncomely face, the lowered brows. And then I read the pain a
nd fear in the eyes. And I knew. I knew that like me back then, he was scared, and he just wanted the pain to stop. It wasn’t a tangle of emotions likely to produce the best results.

  I looked him in the eye and I said, “Damn it, no. You are trying to give up without giving up. You’re trying to do it in the fastest possible way, to stop the suffering. Yours, the seacity’s, and Simon’s too. Of course staying here, quietly, and working at slow subversion would be more comfortable. Almost going back in time, wouldn’t it, Monsieur Brisbois? Reliving your youth?”

  There was a moment. His hand rose and I moved back a little, but his surprised glance told me he had never meant to strike me. Instead, he clenched his fist. Then unclenched. “And what was your bright idea?” he asked. “And why do you think I’m giving up too soon, instead of trying to accept the inevitable.”

  “It’s not inevitable and you know it. You’re a competent and intelligent man, and yet you willingly…You have sabotaged your own side by not gathering the required intelligence.”

  “What?”

  “You said Jonathan LaForce told you the Good Men were plotting to attack. He’d told me the same. But you have, to my knowledge, made no effort to find out when. And don’t tell me it doesn’t matter,” I said, as I saw his shoulders starting to hunch. “Don’t tell me we’re lost anyway. If we know when they’re set to attack, if we have enough time, we can request help from Olympus.”

  “Yes, because they were so helpful before.”

  I let his sarcastic answer stand, and said nothing, until he sighed and said, “I beg your pardon. You deserve a better answer than that. We both talked to Keeva. At least I did, and I suspect you did too. It was pretty plain that he couldn’t do anything to help us.”

  “I don’t think that’s strictly true,” I said. “He wouldn’t do anything to help us, when the matter was that Simon might be captured and perhaps killed or traded as a hostage. Or rather that by his own rules and those of the Usaians he couldn’t do anything openly. He still, I am fairly sure, organized my return here to attempt to help. But that is not the point. The situation has changed.”

  “Oh?”

  “While it was a matter of Liberte seacity eating itself, it didn’t matter to the Usaians. And it’s possible that either Keeva didn’t believe the Good Men would attack or couldn’t make his own commanders believe it.”

  “Likely the latter. Keeva is not stupid and knows more history than most people. I feared the Good Men would attack, and he probably does also. But it is also possible, Madame Sienna, that he meant to take the opportunity, while the Good Men were preoccupied with us, to score some point.”

  “This is possible,” I said. “But now they will have word of how devastated the seacity is. It’s perfectly possible they thought the revolutionary government would be strong enough to defend the seacity from the Good Men. If so, they were not counting on Madame’s madness.”

  Brisbois had stopped looking adversarial. He clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth, and said, “This is more than possible. This is likely. Very few people who have not seen Madame’s madness up close would realize that her paranoia, the counterpart of her preference for the under game and the back stab, would be reflected in her organization.

  “While she was an underground leader, she looked relatively sane. After all, everyone looks sane, even if paranoid, when the paranoia is justifiable. That is, when they are outlawed and people really are seeking to capture them or kill them. But when she’s in command, turning as she does on everyone, even those who are no threat to her, and even, I have reason to believe, her own ranks—”

  “You have spies in her ranks?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Let us say, instead,” he said. “That I recognized some of the names in the public executions.”

  “Oh,” I said, understanding what he hadn’t said, including that he’d known some of those people, possibly that some had been friends in his misspent youth.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Given enough time, I suppose she’d turn on Jean Dechausse himself, no matter how pliant he is to her wishes.” He took a deep, noisy breath, a sound like a drowning man. “All right, you have a point. Olympus’s spies are probably not in Madame’s inner circles. If we couldn’t penetrate those, I am sure they couldn’t either. And from the outside, they might have thought she would be a competent enough leader to oppose real resistance from the Good Men. But what does that mean to Olympus helping us or not?”

  Everything,” I said. “Think about it from their point of view. Having the Good Men’s armies attacking Olympus is good for the Usaian movement. After all, it gives Olympus the opportunity of striking elsewhere while their enemy is busy. Classic tactics. Now, Lucius Keeva might have, out of a personal loyalty or perhaps some feeling of obligation, tried to rescue Simon, but from the point of view of strategy, a prolonged battle in which, in the end, the Good Men might suffer losses and never take Liberte was a good thing. And at any time, Olympus could ally with the revolutionary government of Liberte, and don’t say they wouldn’t, I suspect they would ally with anyone to bring about their security.”

  “I wasn’t about to say anything,” Brisbois said. He rubbed his hand across his face. “I would do the same, to bring about my security. And I think you’re right, that sending you to perhaps attempt to save Simon was a sop to Keeva’s conscience. But if I follow you, what you’re saying is that the Good Men just rolling over us will not be to their best interest.”

  “Think about it. Liberte itself is not much territory, but it comes with Shangri-la and with vast territorial lands and the people in them. And some of those lands are right next to the ones claimed by the Usaians, aren’t they? Up above the Olympus territories, a thin sliver, but a place from which to conduct a land war?”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it and said nothing. I saw my opportunity and struck home. “So if we had halfway decent information and could send a mayday to Olympus, we stand a good chance of surviving. Perhaps even of winning.”

  Brisbois nodded. He stood from the table, which creaked again with his movement, and without a word, headed out the door.

  I was so startled by this that I sat there trying to figure out what it could mean. I couldn’t figure out any way that it could be a threat to me, though, and before I had time to get truly alarmed, I heard voices in the hallway. I stood as he came back with Jonathan LaForce.

  Alexis closed the door, and told LaForce. “It’s secure. Now, how did you know that the Good Men were massing to attack, and what can you tell us? Do you have spies among them?”

  Jonathan made a face. It was a glowering face. “I had spies,” he said slowly. “And that was one of the last reports I got, and then…” He shrugged. “They went dark. Whether they were discovered or whether the fact I lost most of my equipment and could no longer listen in on the right frequencies, or even whether in the run up to an invasion it became too difficult to get in touch with us, I don’t know. I couldn’t guess.”

  “But you got information they were planning an attack?”

  “Yes.”

  “Reliable?”

  “Yes.”

  “But not when?”

  “It was the beginning of their plans…”

  “And if we managed to get you in touch with your assets in the Good Men camp?”

  “I don’t think we could,” he said. “I mean, it’s not just a matter of equipment, though that’s part of it, but they were supposed to report in ways that depended on our being in the palace and—”

  “And in charge. Yes. I set up some of those ways.”

  I was thinking. I was thinking that not only was one of the abilities engineered into me the capacity to alter or improve machines, more or less intuitively, after a cursory look and a description of how they worked, but I actually knew the communications tech from Earth.

  Simon and I had studied them before our expedition to Circum Terra with the Usaians. I had helped dismantle the machinery that had restricted Eart
h’s mass communications to channels the Good Men controlled. That had involved a whole lot of learning about Earth’s way of communicating.

  “Do you have communication apparatus here?” I said, before realizing how stupid that was. “I mean, beyond what Simon is using. Something that could be used to scan general communications and frequencies?”

  “If you mean what the Good Men are using—” LaForce started.

  “That and what Madame Parris using as well.”

  He opened his hands. “Here is my problem, Madame Sienna. My experts and specialists are dead. They were killed in the first onslaught on the palace. I strive to do my job as best I can, but I can’t raise the dead.” There was a note to his tone that meant I should really be asking Brisbois. And he was right, but I doubted Brisbois could raise the dead, either. And it wasn’t needed.

  “If you can get me a communications apparatus, of sufficient size, I can probably harden it against interference and get both their communications streams.”

  A look passed from LaForce to Brisbois, but Brisbois said, “Do it. I’ve seen and heard things about what she can do.”

  Founding Father

  Moments later I was in a back room with LaForce and a bevy of very deferential young people. Alexis Brisbois had gone to check on Simon. Or at least he’d said he’d go back to see if Simon needed him.

  I didn’t mind because, if anything, there were too many people for such a tiny little room.

  Or rather, the room itself wasn’t little, but it was filled almost to capacity by the largest communication device I’d ever seen.

  A very nervous young man in an impeccable uniform—which meant if he’d taken part in the fighting he’d changed afterwards—was explaining to me the various parts of the communication device and what they did.

  What it did was polyvalent communications duty. “We can’t hear the Good Men,” he said. “Though we can hear the news from several continents, but those aren’t shielded. And we can’t hear private calls, of course.”