by David Weber
“Makes sense.”
“I thought so. And there’s another potential downside for us in the suggestion.”
“Ah?” White Haven turned his head, looking at her, then smiled, remembering a very youthful, intensely focused Commander Honor Alexander-Harrington who’d been something of a blunt object…and not especially interested in the finer implications of interstellar diplomacy.
“Let me guess,” he said. “You’re thinking that if Gustav is so helpful and accommodating, he’ll generate all kinds of goodwill in the systems he’s protecting. The kind of goodwill that leads to things like, oh, most favored star nation trading status, military alliances, that sort of thing.”
“Exactly.” Honor shrugged. “It’s a game the Andies have been playing for a long time, Hamish. It’s how they’ve expanded their frontiers over the years without having to actually conquer anyone. They make themselves useful enough that they get invited in, and let’s face it, as imperialist strategies go, that’s about as benign as it gets. They’ve had a lot of practice and they’ve gotten very good at it, though. And the very things which would limit the systems Gustav could legitimately cover this way means they’d all fall naturally into the Andermani sphere of influence to begin with.”
“Very true, unfortunately. On the other hand,” White Haven pointed out, “they seem to be having rather more trouble absorbing their share of Silesia than we are. They probably need a while to digest that python lump before they look around for their next meal.”
“Probably. But I can’t help thinking Chien-lu—and you know how much I genuinely like him—sees this as a potential way to set the table. And maybe bribe the maître d’ to make sure Gustav gets the best seat in the house.”
“And that bothers you enough to turn the notion down?”
“I didn’t say that.” Honor shook her head again. “First, because you and I both know the Andies are going to go fishing in those waters sooner or later anyway. Like the old nursery rhyme says, fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly…and Andies gotta expand. We couldn’t change that if we wanted to. But the real reason it doesn’t bother me enough to say no?” Her lips tightened. “I’m in favor of anything that stops the sort of thing that happened to Cachalot anywhere, Hamish. We’ve lived through that right here, and I can’t convince myself the Sollies will all be as careful about minimizing the loss of life as Capriotti apparently was. I’ve lost too many people I loved. Nobody else is living through another Yawata Strike on my watch. Not if there’s one damned thing I can do about it!”
He gazed at her, hearing the iron in that promise. And, better than most, he understood that iron, knew how utterly she meant every word of it…and that she would follow those responsible for the Yawata Strike to the ends of the universe. Someday, Honor Alexander-Harrington would catch up with them, and what would happen then would be as sure as entropy…and just as cold. But the Solarian League had never met the Salamander. Not the way he had. And he doubted the Mandarins had any concept of the Juggernaut they would unleash if another Admiral Capriotti wasn’t as careful about the careless butchery of someone else’s civilians.
“I believe you,” he said simply, and he did.
She’d told him once that a monster lived deep inside her, and he believed that, too. He’d seen it as she wept for Andrew LaFollet and her family after the Yawata Strike. He recognized it, known that for all his own outstanding military record, he wasn’t even in her league when it came to sheer, focused deadliness. But that monster was chained by compassion, by the moral code of someone who’d devoted her entire life to protecting others. Who’d found a use for her monster and embraced it in a way which, conversely, made her one of the two gentlest, most loving human beings he’d ever met.
And I’m married to both of them, he thought wonderingly. How does a man get that lucky?
“What?” Honor asked in a rather different tone, her eyebrows furrowing.
“What ‘what’ would that be?” he said.
“The ‘what’ that’s making you look at me the way Nimitz looks at celery,” she replied tartly, and he laughed at her expression. She had a pretty darned good idea what was making him look at her that way, he reminded himself. His wife literally could read him—or his emotions, at least—like the proverbial book.
“I promise you, I don’t think of you remotely the way Nimitz thinks about celery, Honor!” he told her in his most serious possible tone. “Or, let me rephrase. There is a certain…I don’t know, resonance, perhaps, between the way I think of you and the way he lusts after celery. The end objective is rather different in my case, however.”
“You’re an idiot,” she told him, shaking her head with a smile. “You know that, don’t you?”
“Maybe I am, but I’m your idiot.” He leaned closer, his kiss slow and lingering. “And you’re stuck with me,” he added in a whisper, nibbling the lobe of one ear.
“Oh, darn,” she replied, putting her arms around him.
“It’s a wonderful warm night,” he pointed out. “It’s even clear, with no rain in the forecast until midmorning, and this is a very large chaise lounge. Sturdy, too.”
“I’d noticed that.”
“Well, let me just go lock the door so we don’t inadvertently scandalize Spencer and Lucie.”
“I think that would be an excellent idea.”
He gave her another kiss, climbed off the chaise lounge, and crossed to lock the old-fashioned door. It wouldn’t stop Spencer Hawk or Tobias Stimson for a moment if a genuine emergency arose, but he smiled as he imagined their reaction if they happened to discover it was locked in a non-emergency situation. They’d snatch their hands away from the doorknob as if it were radioactive, he thought with a chuckle.
“You know,” he said, sharing the thought with Honor as he pressed the locking stud and turned back towards her, “if Tobias or Spencer come along and—”
His eyes widened. Honor stood before him, gilded in starlight and moonglow, her kimono puddled about her feet.
“About that chaise lounge…” she said, and her eyes glowed as she opened her arms to him.
Solarian Gendarmerie Headquarters
City of Vivliothḗkē
Hypatia System
Major Ingrid Latimer, Solarian Gendarmerie, hid a quick frown as she stepped through the office door. Major Latimer was a little on the stocky side—a result of her homeworld’s 1.25 G gravity—but she had dark red hair, gray eyes, and a quick-moving grace that the planet Hypatia’s 0.93 G gravity only emphasized. In her impeccable uniform, she could have been used as a Gendarmerie recruiting poster any day. More than that, she was intelligent, dedicated, and just as good at her job as her appearance suggested.
She was also an unhappy woman, and the news accounts murmuring from the HD in one corner of Major Lawrence Kourniakis’s office had quite a lot to do with the source of that unhappiness.
“Oh, hi, Ingrid!” Kourniakis greeted her, looking up from the paperwork on his desk display. “What brings you to the troglodyte side?”
“Hi, Larry.”
Latimer smiled dutifully. She was the Gendarmerie’s in-system third-in-command, head of the Criminal Investigation Division in Hypatia, and she thought of herself as an old-fashioned cop, because she vastly preferred catching crooks to wading around in the cesspool of politics and surveillance. Kourniakis, on the other hand, commanded the Security Division, charged with both cyber security and counterintelligence in the star system. He was senior to her—in fact, in addition to his security responsibilities, he served Colonel Ganesh Naran, the senior Gendarme in Hypatia, as his second-in-command—and she’d always thought his cheerful, extroverted nature was a less-than-perfect fit for someone with his responsibilities. He certainly didn’t strike anyone as the sort of fellow who would hover in corners listening to private conversations. Which, she acknowledged, might be one reason he’d been so effective in what he liked to call his “troglodyte duties.”
Now Kourniakis touched his display, tu
rning the HD volume completely down, and cocked his head at her.
“To what do I owe the honor?” he asked.
“One of my people turned up something you need to take a look at,” she replied.
“Shoot,” Kourniakis said, opening a notepad on his display, and pointing at the chair by his desk.
“We’ve been investigating some smuggling activities down at the port.” Latimer dropped into the indicated chair. “I wouldn’t’ve been too worried about it, with all the other crap going on right now, except that these particular smugglers were bringing in 7H.”
Kourniakis looked up from the note he’d been jotting with a quick, dark frown. “7H” was cop and street shorthand for “Seventh Heaven,” a particularly nasty psychedelic nanotech which had developed a hefty pool of addicts despite the psychoses it produced in long-term users. Just last week, a lorry driver down at the port had experienced a psychotic event while driving and rammed his vehicle through two warehouse bays and a crowded pedestrian walk. Six people had died on the scene, and another fourteen had been med-evaced. There was a reason nobody wanted 7H on his world.
“You have proof of that?” he asked, and she nodded.
“Plenty of proof, already bagged up and in Evidence Impound. Eleven perps in lockup to go with it…and three in the morgue because they didn’t want to come along when we knocked on their door.”
“Pity about that.” Kourniakis’s smile was thin, and she smiled back. But then her expression sobered.
“While we were surveilling them just before the bust, though, something else turned up,” she said. “We came across somebody else’s hack. Not on our perps, but piggybacked through their system to hit the planetary AG’s files.”
“Attorney General Boyagis’s office?” Kourniakis asked sharply, and she nodded.
“I think the perps were trying to keep tabs on any investigation by the VPD or the System Bureau of Investigation. Anyway, they’d managed to get into Boyagis’s files—we think we’ve IDed the hacker they hired, if you want her name—but then someone else jacked their files to get to Boyagis’s. I’m not sure who the ‘someone else’ was, but I know it wasn’t my people, so I thought I’d better come and make sure it wasn’t any of your people before we report it to Boyagis. Or, rather, before I report it to Colonel Naran and you and he report it to Boyagis.”
“No clue at all who it was?”
“None,” she confirmed. “And I assume from your question that it wasn’t you?”
“Of course it wasn’t me!” Kourniakis sat back in his chair. “Why the hell would I be hacking the Attorney General’s files?”
She considered several possible responses to that question. None of them seemed very constructive, however.
Unlike her, Kourniakis was a native Hypatian. That was scarcely unusual in the SG. In fact, the majority of the Gendarmes in Hypatia were Hypatians, given the Gendarmerie’s Core World staffing policies. Usually, Latimer thought that was an excellent idea. Core Systems weren’t Protectorates. They were full-fledged, self-governing members of the Solarian League, so there’d never been any reason for the Gendarmerie to transfer in people who had no local connections to seduce them from the straight and narrow, and there were strong arguments in favor of using as many locals as possible. Latimer’s own CID was living proof of that. Her best agents, most effective investigators, were all Hypatians, with the innate feel for their homeworld’s social patterns and interactions which could be produced only by total submersion in their environment. They also tended to get the best results whenever CID had to interface with local law enforcement agencies—which happened a lot—because they weren’t outsiders trying to cut in on someone else’s turf. And, even if all that hadn’t been true, assigning people light-years away from their friends and families when there were plenty of openings right in their hometowns had a powerful negative impact on personnel retention rates.
Right this moment, though, those personnel policies were contributing to something Latimer really didn’t like. And not just with Kourniakis, although he was certainly a case in point.
She’d known Lawrence Kourniakis for over eight T-years. They were friends. He and her husband Carl were hunting and fishing buddies, and his twin girls attended the same school as her son Peter. She wasn’t as close to Kourniakis’s wife Angelika as Kourniakis was to Carl, but both of them loved landscape photography, and Angie knew all the best vistas and exactly when the lighting would be most spectacular.
And despite all of that, Ingrid Latimer couldn’t say what she was thinking to Kourniakis. “Larry, you should be digging as deep as you can into the treasonous SOB’s files to find out just how badly the bastard and his bosses are planning on screwing the League,” wasn’t something Kourniakis wanted to hear.
Of course it’s not, she thought. Larry’s a hell of a nice guy, and I’d trust him with my life. But he’s about as blind as any of these other Hypatians. And he doesn’t think they’re doing a single thing that’s illegal.
In fairness, Latimer wasn’t certain the Hypatia System Unified Government’s actions were illegal. On the other hand, she wasn’t certain they weren’t, and it seemed to her that a few precautions were in order. Unfortunately, Colonel Naran had taken the position that the entire referendum was a local government issue. It might have federal implications, but absent a formal decision from the League Judiciary that the constitutional right of secession was no longer operative, he had no authority to interfere in the process while the Hypatians sorted it out.
And by the time they finish “sorting it out,” it’ll be too late. Unless something turns around pretty damned quick, these people aren’t going to just just cross the Rubicon. They’re going to cross it, blow up their bridges behind them, and throw the splinters back into the river with a rock tied to their ankles! In fact, maybe the metaphor I want has more to do with the Red Sea than any rivers.
“Well, if it’s not you, then maybe it’s one of the Liberty Committees,” she said out loud. “They’re making enough noise, and don’t forget the injunction Allerton’s asking for. The Committees could be looking for inside information about where Boyagis’s thinking is on that.”
“And it could also be some damned newsy wanting a scoop,” Kourniakis shot back just a bit quickly. “It doesn’t have to be one of the Committees, Ingrid. For that matter, it could be one of Allerton’s people looking for exactly the same kind of info.”
“It could,” she conceded, although she didn’t think for a minute that it was.
Senator Makiko Allerton had made her opposition to the referendum madness crystal clear. Her arguments against secession were just as emotional as the strident demands of the dozens of Liberty Committees which had sprung up to organize in favor of it and she was, in Latimer’s opinion, a far more eloquent spokeswoman. But she was also badly outnumbered. She was fighting a losing battle, and that battle had gotten a hell of a lot harder when that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Abruzzi-MacArtney soundbite hit the public boards here in Vivliothḗkē. The vote trend had been clear almost from the beginning, but opposition to the referendum had plummeted and support among the previously undecided had skyrocketed in the wake of that stupid, obviously—and heavily—edited scrap of private conversation.
Allerton and her small cohort of doggedly loyal fellows in Hypatia’s unicameral legislature had fought hard against the referendum while it was still in the draft stage, and they hadn’t stopped fighting since. The political cost for Allerton, who almost every pundit agreed would have been the next System President if the referendum had never come along, had been steep, but she’d refused to yield. Now, though, after the disaster of the Abruzzi-MacArtney clip and with only three more days until the actual vote, it must be obvious even—or perhaps especially—to her that she was destined for defeat. Even Latimer had to admit that her probably-doomed request for an injunction, postponing the referendum until the legality of secession was ruled upon by the Federal courts, was no more than a last-ditch, f
orlorn hope effort to avoid the inevitable.
Whatever else Makiko Allerton might be, though, she was a woman who believed in due process and the rule of law. She’d dedicated her entire life to that. The possibility that she might have hacked the Attorney General’s office simply didn’t exist.
Which, the major acknowledged unhappily, doesn’t mean one of her supporters couldn’t’ve done it without her knowledge or approval. I hate to say it, but Larry’s got a point about that. I just wish I felt more confident he’s still trying to keep the playing field level in his own mind. And I hate even having to wonder about that, damn it!
“Anyway,” she said out loud, “I figured you needed to hear about it. Under the circumstances, I’m just as happy I don’t have to make the call about whether or not to tell Boyagis about it, but I thought it would be a good idea to give you a heads-up before the official report lands in your inbox.”
“I appreciate that.” Kourniakis smiled at her. “And as soon as that official report gets here, I’m sure Colonel Naran will pass it on to the AG.” He shrugged. “Until the referendum’s actually voted on, all of the rules about jurisdictions still apply, and this is clearly in Boyagis’s. Thanks for bringing it to me, Ingrid.”
“You’re welcome.” She pushed up out of the chair and extended her hand across the desk. “Take care, Larry.”
“You, too, Ingrid.” Kourniakis stood to shake her hand. “And don’t forget Friday night. Alethea and Alexia have informed me they intend to cook supper.” He shook his head. “God only knows what it’ll be, but I promise it won’t poison anybody.”
“That’s what you say now,” she replied with a smile, then nodded and headed back for her own office.
* * *
Lawrence Kourniakis watched the door close behind Ingrid, then settled back behind his desk and turned the HD volume back up. The talking heads weren’t saying anything he didn’t already know, but he let them natter in the background as he tipped back in his chair, gazing at the closed door with a pensive expression, and ran the conversation back through his mind.