Crown of Slaves

by David Weber

  Those creatures were not monsters, either. Just giant predators, doing what predators do. A beneficent force, even, if you could step back and consider the planet's ecology as a whole. They not only kept the population of Ndebele's other sea life in balance, they also provided immediate sustenance for a multitude of symbiotes and scavengers.

  None of which kept an encounter with one in the open sea from being a terrifying experience. And Thandi now knew—for a certainty—that whatever else she wanted from her life, being a scavenger or a predator's symbiote was not included.

  She relaxed then, bringing up the image of her newly acquired "little sister" to purge the vast frightening image of a sea beast swimming through the deeps. She held the image, as tightly as a drowning woman would clasp a lifevest.

  I love this girl.

  * * *

  After Thandi left, there was silence in the compartment, for perhaps half a minute. Then Edie Habib's face grew tight.

  "Dammit, somebody's going to have to come out and say it. I guess the XO always gets the really crappy assignments. So here it is: She knows too much."

  Rozsak glanced quickly at Huang, and then at Watanapongse. The Marine officer's face was stony. Watanapongse's . . . serene, oddly enough.

  Huang's reaction was predictable. Understanding the importance of it—the last thing he could ever afford was losing the trust and loyalty of his combat leaders—Rozsak gave voice to the stone. "I gave my word, Edie. To one of my own officers."

  But Habib was an excellent XO; which meant, among other things, that she was persistent in probing for error. "Yes, Captain, that's true. And I will tell you what else is true—and everybody here, including Kao, knows it damn good and well. It's not going to be the last time you went back on your word, in the years ahead. Not where we're going, if we ever expect to get there."

  That, too, was the simple truth. But hearing it just made Huang's face grow stonier.

  "Still," Rozsak demurred, "it's not a thing to do lightly. Having a name for having a word is worth . . . maybe not its weight in gold, but damn close. Which we will also need, where we're going. If there's any bigger pitfall in the path of ambition than being too clever for your own good, I don't know what it is."

  Watanapongse's expression had remained serene throughout. Rozsak found himself curious.

  "Why are you so blasé about the matter, Jiri?"

  "Because it's a moot point, that's why. Unless everybody here suddenly develops the intelligence of a vegetable—no offense, XO, you're just doing your job—then it ought to be obvious why the idea of assassinating Thandi Palane is just plain dumb. Not even that. 'Insane' comes closer."

  "Why?" demanded Habib. But there was more relief than anything else in her tone. Edie hadn't proposed the idea because she liked it. She'd be as glad as Rozsak to be convinced otherwise.

  Watanapongse levered himself up, from his relaxed slump. "Let's start with the fact that trying to assassinate Palane is a bit like trying to assassinate a tiger. Easier said than done. Who, after all, would we normally have given the assignment?"

  Huang rasped a little laugh. "Thandi Palane."

  "Exactly. But leave that aside. The woman's not superhuman, after all. With our resources, I'm sure we could figure out a way to do it. Which . . . might even work. And then what?"

  Watanapongse shook his head. "Oh, yeah. A really bright idea. In order to protect ourselves—from a very remote threat, since Thandi Palane is almost certain to keep her mouth shut—we kill a woman who is simultaneously—"

  He began counting off on his fingers. "The girlfriend of the Republic of Haven's best secret agent; a man who is—I've seen him in action—one of the deadliest men you'll ever meet.

  "The protector and close friend of Berry Zilwicki, whose father Anton would probably be Manticore's best spy if the idiots hadn't fired him—and, whether in or out of uniform, has demonstrated several times just how dangerous it is to cross him.

  "And—oh, perfect!—we'd also be assassinating a woman one of whose close associates now is a certain individual by the name of Jeremy X. You have heard of him? If you want more character references, just check with Manpower. Ask for their body count department."

  He slumped back in his chair, the serene smile returning. "Just forget it, Captain. This is one time when doing the right thing and the smart thing happen to coincide. There is absolutely nothing I can think of you doing in this situation which would be stupider than killing Thandi Palane. Unless you want to spend the rest of your life—probably a short one—looking over your shoulder."

  By the time Jiri had finished, Edie Habib was looking very rueful. "Never mind," she said, in a little voice. "I never even raised the idea. Honest."

  Rozsak chuckled. "Just doing your job, XO, as always. But I think Jiri's pretty well settled the issue. And I can't say I'm unhappy about it. Not at all. I can handle a bad taste, but that one would have been really foul."

  Rozsak expected that to be the end of it, but, to his surprise, Watanapongse spoke again.

  "Besides, it's probably a moot point from another angle, anyway. I'm quite sure that, by now, some other people have figured out the truth about the Stein killing."

  "Who?" demanded Habib. "Our security's been tight as a drum, I'm sure of it."

  "Victor Cachat, for one. About him, I'm positive." Catching Habib's quick angry glance at the compartment door, Watanapongse shook his head. "No, no, XO—he didn't get it from Thandi's pillow talk. He's smart, that's all. Better, being honest, at this kind of black ops than we'll ever be. And he was right in the middle of it, remember. He'll have figured it all out by now, don't think he hasn't."

  "Who else?" grunted Huang.

  "Hard to say. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if that too-damn-smart Manticoran princess does—the real one, I mean, Ruth Winton. Anton Zilwicki certainly will. So will some of the Erewhonese. It's not as if it's all that hard to figure out. Not for someone who's good at this kind of work, and takes a look at the determination with which Thandi saw to it that no witnesses survived."

  Rozsak wasn't really surprised, nor was he upset. He'd calculated on this possibility from the beginning.

  "Okay," he said. "It's fallback time, then. Speaking of which"—smiling, now—"I have good news from Smoking Frog. I had my meeting with the governor, and he was most deeply upset at what I had to tell him. Confess to him, rather. Oh, yes. Shocked and distressed, he was. But he also agreed that this Congo situation provides us with a perfect way to sweep the dirt under a shiny public rug."

  Everybody in the compartment was now looking cheerful. "Indeed so," said Jiri. "There are always conspiracy theories floating around, whenever somebody gets assassinated. Who but a handful of malcontents is going to believe them—when they see the glorious role played by Captain Rozsak's flotilla in the liberation of Congo? Especially when the people in the know—all of them—have every reason to keep their mouth shut. Given that, to a considerable degree, the liberation's success depends on maintaining the good will of Maya Sector and its governor."

  Rozsak cleared his throat. It was a harsh sound. "And given, as well—the governor made a point of this—that Cassetti will have to take the fall. Quietly, of course. But that should be enough to satisfy everyone who knows the truth and wants a sacrificial lamb. Goat, rather. Cassetti was too nakedly in love with power to have been a popular man. He'll do very nicely, and it clears him out of the way."

  He chuckled. "Odd, isn't it? The way things sometimes work out. Thandi Palane's the one I would have given that assignment to. And I don't think it would have bothered her at all."

  Huang made a little noise, as if he'd started to say something and then choked it off. Rozsak glanced at him. Then, seeing the meaning in his eyes, looked away.

  Oh, that's good, Kao. "Black ops" with a vengeance. And the truth is, I really don't think Palane would mind doing us that last little service.

  "Perhaps . . ." he mused aloud, "—he's still here, you know, staying at the
Suds—Cassetti will want to accompany the expedition to Congo. I'm sure he will, once I suggest it to him. That'd add luster to his name, after all . . . which could certainly use some help, as black as it's become in so many quarters."

  PART V:

  CONGO

  Chapter 44

  "You're telling me they're a bunch of fanatics?" Unser Diem was practically shrieking. He jerked his head sideways, in the direction of the man standing not far from him on the bridge of the Felicia III. "He'll do it, Lassiter! Don't think for a minute he won't."

  The Manpower official whose image was displayed in the screen glanced at the man being indicated. Then, glanced just as quickly away. The image he saw matched the holopics of Abraham Templeton—as closely as the bandages permitted, and making allowances for the way the Masadan's face was distorted by a ferocious scowl. The General Manager of Operations, Verdant Vista, was clearly having no difficulty at all imagining the maniac blowing up a ship carrying thousands of people.

  "And if that isn't enough," Diem continued, snarling, "then take another good look at that Manty cruiser. That's the Gauntlet, you—you—"

  He managed to bite off the epithet. As angry and terrified as Diem was, he didn't want to offend Manpower's top official in the Congo system. Kamal Lassiter was fairly notorious for letting petty personal issues get in the way of his decisions.

  But the name of the ship was enough, it seemed. Lassiter swallowed, and Diem saw him look away—presumably at another screen in the com room of Congo's central headquarters. A tactical display screen, that would be, which would show the General Manager all the vessels within the Congo system.

  "Is—ah—?"

  "Yes," Diem bit off. "He is still in command. Captain Michael Oversteegen. You may recall that he has something of a reputation. And if you're wondering if the reputation is overblown, I can personally assure you that it isn't. He spoke to me less than twenty hours ago over this same com, promising me that if the Princess comes to harm he's holding Manpower responsible. He was not pleasant about it, to put it mildly. And he took pains to remind me that the Eridani Edict does not apply to strictly commercial operations on privately owned planets."

  Diem could feel the sweat on his forehead, as he waited for Lassiter to finally make a decision. The sweat was real enough, even if almost everything else was fakery. The reason it was real—and Diem was on the edge of panic—was because the "fakery" was only technically such. If anything, the reality being disguised was even worse than the illusion.

  He hadn't spoken to Oversteegen over the com, as it happened; he'd spoken to him in person. And it had been six days ago instead of less than twenty hours. So what? In person, the Manticoran officer had been an icy aristocrat. He'd made it crystal clear to Diem that he would see to it that Manpower's installations on Congo would be so much slag if anything went wrong. Diem hadn't doubted him in the least.

  Not that Diem really cared that much. Long before Gauntlet could start taking Congo apart, Diem himself would be a dead man. Of that he had no doubt at all. The man standing near him on the bridge of the Felicia was not the religious maniac Abraham Templeton, even though Erewhon's nanotech engineers had done a good job with the physical resemblance. He was something a lot worse.

  Victor Cachat. A man whom Unser Diem had had nightmares about—real ones, no poetic license here—since he first met him.

  Cachat spoke up, right then. "Decide, Lassiter," he said, glancing at his chrono. His voice was hoarse, presumably due to the injuries he'd suffered in the course of abducting the Manticoran princess.

  "I will give you two minutes, exactly," he rasped. "Then I will shoot Diem. Then, at fifteen second intervals"—the Havenite agent masquerading as Abraham Templeton nodded toward the people shackled to a console behind him—"I will kill the rest of them. Ringstorff first, then Lithgow, then the whore. Fifteen seconds after that, I will destroy the Felicia. Three minutes from now, if you continue to quibble, eight thousand people will be dead—including Ruth Winton, of the royal house of Manticore."

  "Abraham Templeton" glanced at the tac display on the bridge of the Felicia and smiled sardonically. A half-smile, rather. The apparently severe injuries to his throat and jaw made the expression as distorted as his rasping voice. "All of it in front of every news media in the inhabited galaxy, from what I can see. I count at least eighteen media vessels somewhere in this system. Most of them in orbit nearby."

  From the very sour expression on his face, it was obvious that Lassiter would have liked to curse. Not so much at the situation as at the media presence. Normally, Manpower would have forbidden those ships to remain in the Congo System, but with Gauntlet present . . .

  That was something else Oversteegen had been emphatic about, in his terse discussions with the Manpower officials on Congo. Any move toward the media ships by any of the light attack craft which Manpower had in orbit around the planet would be met with instant force. Nobody doubted for a minute that Oversteegen would make good the threat—and a Manty heavy cruiser was perfectly capable of destroying twice the number of LACs Manpower had on the spot.

  There were undoubtedly heavier warships nearby, upon which Manpower intended to rely for support if needed, Victor knew. They were not, however, part of Manpower's private fleet, which posed its own problems for Lassiter and his masters.

  "Verdant Vista" was the private property of Manpower Unlimited, duly registered as such under interstellar law on the planet Mesa. As an independent and sovereign star nation, Mesa was empowered to recognize the claims of its citizens or business entities and, under existing interstellar law, Manpower had the right to appeal to the Mesan Navy for protection of its private property rights. But other star nations were not required to respect those rights as they would have been required to if Verdant Vista had, itself, been a sovereign star system.

  Admittedly, it was something of a gray area, with competing interpretations of the precedents. What it boiled down to, however, was that a private corporation's claim to interstellar property rights was only as good as the naval strength which backed that claim. That was why Solarian trans-stellar corporations seldom had any problems (aside from the occasional raid by outright pirates). No star nation in its right mind wanted to provoke the SLN, so they tended to sit on their own potential troublemakers—hard—when there was a Solly corporation involved.

  But while Mesa maintained a navy, it was nowhere near so grand as the SLN. Indeed, it was on the small side even by the standards of single-system star nations, although its individual units had excellent hardware. Despite its nationhood Mesa was, after all, essentially a conglomerate of business interests, and navies, by their nature, are expensive propositions which do not normally show a positive cash flow.

  That was why some Mesa-based corporations, like Manpower, maintained private fleets. And another reason for Manpower, in particular, to do so was that the council which governed Mesa was hesitant to use military power too openly in Manpower's special interests. There was no point actively courting negative news coverage, after all.

  In this instance, however, thanks to Michael Oversteegen and Her Majesty's Starship Gauntlet, the cruiser force Manpower had assembled to back up its LACs in Congo had suffered a mischief. A rather terminal one, in fact. That was one of the odd little facts Ringstorff had been willing to confirm for them . . . along with the fact that Manpower had not replaced the destroyed ships. Which had become another factor in the planning of the unusual alliance of interests now moving in on Congo. If there were heavy ships in the vicinity at all, they were regular Mesan naval units, and they would be doing their dead level best to maintain a low profile, particularly in the face of such massive news coverage. That meant they would be somewhere else—close enough to reach Congo fairly rapidly, but not right on top of the system.

  So there was an automatic delay built into the response loop. Lassiter would have to send a courier to summon them, and that offered a window in which the "forces of liberation" would be free to act. B
etter yet, it meant that when (or if) those units did turn up, they would be commanded by someone whose primary loyalty was to Mesa, not simply to Manpower.

  "I need at least ten minutes just to discuss the situation with my people," Lassiter complained.

  Cachat, masquerading as Abraham Templeton, did not bother to look up from his chrono. "You have one minute and forty seconds before I start the killing. You've had weeks to decide what to do, Lassiter. There's no point in any further delay."

  "One moment." Lassiter reached out a finger and the display screen went blank.

  Diem heaved a little sigh. "What are you going to do if he goes past your deadline?" he asked nervously.

  The answer, somehow, didn't surprise him. Cachat was still looking down at his chrono. "In one minute and twenty-five seconds, I'm going to kill you. Then, at fifteen-second intervals, Ringstorff and Lithgow." He glanced at the pale-faced young woman shackled to the console next to the Mesans. "I will not, of course, shoot Berry Zilwicki. Her father is likely to take umbrage." Cachat sounded vaguely miffed about it, the way a craftsman will when he is not permitted to do his finest work.

  Off to the side of the bridge, sitting where he was out of sight of the screens, Anton Zilwicki snorted. But he didn't bother looking up from the console where he and Ruth Winton were busily cracking into Manpower's secure communications systems.

  "Pray to whatever gods you hold dear, Diem," Zilwicki murmured, just loudly enough to be heard. "If Lassiter's as careless and sloppy as his security, you're a dead man." He snorted again, as a new screen came up. "Bingo. We're in. And there's not even any internal encryption. God, I love carrier signals, especially when the people on the other end are idiots. Take it from here, would you, Ruth?"

  Eagerly, the young princess' fingers began flying over the keyboard, and Zilwicki looked up and grinned at Diem. There was no humor at all in the expression.