by David Weber
“Makes sense.”
Debnam nodded, and Kilgore bent back over the savagely injured Manty. Unlike his companion’s, his skinsuit, seemed undamaged, despite his injuries, and—
“John,” she heard herself say in a voice she didn’t quite recognize.
“Yeah?” He looked at her, his exhaustion-lined face puzzled by her tone.
“Get on the com,” that voice she didn’t recognize said very, very calmly. “Tell them we just found Admiral Kotouč…and he’s alive.”
Governor’s Residence
City of Shuttlesport
Smoking Frog
Maya System
“Mister Ellingsen, Captain Abernathy. It’s good to see you again!” Oravil Barregos said, standing and extending his hand as Julie Magilen escorted the visitors into his office.
As in their previous visits, they’d arrived quietly in orbit aboard a small, fast, privately chartered transport whose crew had then shuttled them to the surface of Smoking Frog without imposing upon any of the commercial shuttle lines. Unlike their first two visits, however, this time their shuttle had landed directly on the Governor’s Residence’s private pad, where Magilen, Barregos’s office manager, had met them and escorted them quickly and discreetly past the security checkpoints to his office.
There was another difference from their previous trips to the Maya System, too. This time Barregos was accompanied by his lieutenant governor, as well as Luis Roszak, the senior Solarian League Navy officer in the Maya Sector.
“It’s good to see you, too, Governor,” Håkon Ellingsen, the taller and much darker of the two said, reaching out to grip Barregos’s hand.
He seemed surprised by Lieutenant Governor Brosnan’s presence, but he took it in stride. He also bore a remarkable family resemblance to the Winton Dynasty, which probably wasn’t too surprising in a senior—if covert—member of the Manticoran diplomatic corps. His family pedigree, as well as his diplomatic background, no doubt explained his calm response to Brosnan’s inclusion in this very confidential meeting. The Wintons had been playing high-stakes interstellar poker for a long time now.
His companion was much smaller, at least twenty-six centimeters shorter than him, with a sandalwood complexion, and was clearly not quite as comfortable over the lieutenant governor’s addition. Probably not too surprising in a serving naval officer who’d been seconded to the skulduggery section of the aforesaid diplomatic corps and felt a bit out of his depth.
“I wasn’t certain I would be seeing you again,” Barregos continued, waving his guests into the waiting chairs. The governor’s bodyguard, Vegar Spangen, stood post in one corner and Jeremy Frank, his senior aide, began pouring coffee for all hands.
“Will there be anything else, Governor?” Magilen asked.
“I think not—not for a while, anyway. Thank you for being your usual efficient self and getting our friends here unnoticed.”
“It wasn’t really all that hard, Sir,” Magilen pointed out with a smile. “It’s only about four hundred meters from the pad, and there’s plenty of shrubbery along the way.”
“And four or five security posts, all of them manned by people we don’t want want asking any questions about our guests, if I’m not mistaken,” Barregos replied.
“Well, yes,” she conceded.
“Which is why I think you’d better hang around, now that I think about it. Somebody’s going to have to get them back to the shuttle pad without being noticed, and who would have the temerity to notice you if you told them not to?”
“Oh, a veritable dragon, I am!”
She bared her teeth, and Barregos chuckled. Then he smiled warmly at her.
“Never a dragon! Maybe a hexapuma, given where our guests are from, though.”
“Whatever you say,” she replied, then nodded to Ellingsen and Captain Abernathy and withdrew.
“I can tell you two’ve been together a while, Governor,” Ellingsen said with a smile.
“Almost thirty-five T-years,” Barregos confirmed with a reminiscent smile of his own. “The pool sent her to me as a receptionist the first time, if you can believe it. She was not amused when she found out what I’d asked for. In fact, she really could have passed for a dragon that afternoon. Whoever made that spectacularly wrong personnel choice, though, did me an enormous favor. I couldn’t run the place without her.”
“I can believe it.” Ellingsen nodded, then cocked his head politely at Lieutenant Governor Brosnan.
“If Gail hadn’t been off-planet during your second visit, she’d have joined Luis and me then.” Barregos shrugged. “She’s a huge improvement on her predecessor. I was pretty confident she wouldn’t try to have me assassinated when I promoted her to acting lieutenant governor. Since then, she’s become a trusted and valued member of the team. The real team.”
“Ah. We’d missed that.”
“I wouldn’t want to say your intelligence services aren’t excellent, but we’ve gone to some lengths to keep anyone from figuring that out. In fact, Gail’s sending regular reports back to Intelligence Branch to keep Mister Nyhus fully informed of our activities. Or, rather, of our total lack of activities.”
“Very good.” Ellingsen smiled his approval, and the sable-haired Brosnan nodded in acknowledgment.
“Since you’ve decided to include Ms. Brosnan in our conversations, should I take that as a sign you and Admiral Roszak have finalized your requirements for naval support?” Ellingsen continued. “Captain Abernathy’s been authorized to conditionally approve your needs, assuming they fall within the parameters we’d already discussed. If you’ve realized you need more firepower, it’s probable we can cut a little additional tonnage loose. Unfortunately, the Captain can’t guarantee that without running any fresh numbers past the Admiralty.”
“Oh, I don’t think there’s going to be a problem about force levels,” Admiral Roszak said. “There has been a slight change in plans, however.”
“Indeed?” Ellingsen raised his eyebrows, and Roszak smiled.
“Yes,” he said pleasantly. “I’m afraid the two of you are under arrest.”
Ellingsen stiffened.
“I don’t understand,” he said in the tone of someone who hadn’t quite gotten the punchline of a joke.
“Oh, I think you do,” Barregos said, and the governor’s normally affable voice had turned hard and cold. “Unfortunately for you, we had a visit from a real Manticoran admiral shortly after your last visit. Her name was Givens—Patricia Givens. I found it quite remarkable that the woman who runs the Royal Manticoran Navy Office of Naval Intelligence had never heard of either of you. Perhaps you’d care to explain that?”
His eyes bored into the two men sitting on the far side of his desk, and Abernathy’s right hand twitched.
“I wouldn’t,” another voice said, and the “captain” turned his head to find himself looking into the muzzle of the weapon in Spangen’s hand. It wasn’t a pulser. Instead, it was a stun gun, the modern descendent of the ancient Ante Diaspora Taser.
“Vegan’s a very good shot, ‘Captain Abernathy,’” Barregos said. “But if you think you can reach that pulser under your left arm—the one my security people picked up when you walked through the shuttle pad scanners—go right ahead. I understand being stunned is a very unpleasant experience, and just this moment, I’d really like to see you have one of those.”
The office door slid silently open once more. Abernathy’s head turned again, and his eyes narrowed as a brown-haired, brown-skinned man in the uniform of a Gendarmerie brigadier walked through it. He looked at the newcomer for a moment, and then his hand relaxed. In fact, he sat back in his chair with a curiously serene look and folded both hands in his lap.
“I assume you recognize Brigadier Allfrey,” Barregos said.
“I do,” Ellingsen said after a moment. “And should I assume from his presence that you have some suitable plan for our disposal?”
“Always nice to deal with a professional,” Barregos replied.
“We do have a few questions. I’m sure it’ll be a fascinating conversation. After that, we’ll be sending you to talk to some other friends of ours. I imagine you can guess where they live.”
“I understand Landing’s very nice this time of year,” Ellingsen said almost whimsically, and Barregos’s eyes narrowed. There was something about the other man’s voice. Something odd that resonated somehow with Abernathy’s relaxed body language.
“So I hear,” the governor replied, and Ellingsen smiled.
“Pity I won’t see it,” he said…and slumped in his chair.
* * *
“We don’t have a clue,” Philip Allfrey said several hours later. He looked more frustrated than surprised. “As far as the autopsy can tell, ‘Ellingsen’ had a massive heart attack and ‘Abernathy’ suffered an aneurysm. ‘Natural causes,’ both of them.”
“Bullshit, Philip,” Luis Roszak said pleasantly. The admiral was parked at one end of Barregos’s conference room table with a large cup of coffee.
“Of course it is.” Allfrey shrugged. “I’m just telling you what the ME said. And, by the way, he figured it was bullshit, too, given the fact that both those ‘natural causes’ deaths occurred in the same twenty-five-second span. He said something about lottery numbers when I asked him what the odds against that were.”
“I have to say I find this disturbing,” Gail Brosnan said. The others looked at her, and she shrugged, her expression worried. “Not the fact that they’re dead. Given what they said to you the last the last time they were here, Oravil, I can’t think of anyone who deserves to be dead more than they did. And I’ve always been a great believer in that old proverb about dead men and tales. But I don’t like how…calm they were about it. Seeing somebody that relaxed just before she kills herself makes me wonder about exactly what we’re up against here.”
“I don’t think they did kill themselves,” Roszak said. The others looked at him, and he waved his coffee cup. “I think they knew they were going to die, but I don’t think they killed themselves,” he amplified. “If there’s anything to what Givens told us about this ‘killer nanotech’ the ‘Alignment’s’ supposed to have, it’d make perfect sense to install a version of it in their agents. There’s always the chance even the most dedicated operative will decide against suiciding when the time comes. If you’ve got something like the Manties are describing, you can take that off the table.”
“So you think all their agents are walking around with this stuff inside?” Allfrey asked.
“Yep. And so do you, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess I do.” Allfrey didn’t look overjoyed by his own admission.
“As Gail just suggested, this may make any interrogations…difficult,” Barregos said in a light tone that fooled no one. “And it makes me wonder just how motivated these people really are. I mean, if you and Philip are right, Luis—and I think you are—they knew what was going to happen. That means they knew whatever it is had been implanted before they ever came to call on us the first time. I’m sure they expected to get in and out again, just like they’d done before, but these were obviously top-notch, smart people. I’ve been inclined towards assuming they were as mercenary as your average transstellar’s covert operative, but it’s hard to imagine a typical operative agreeing to carry an involuntary suicide switch around with him.”
“I could see that,” Roszak demurred. “Offer somebody a big enough payoff, especially if the somebody in question’s convinced he’s smarter and quicker than anyone he’s likely to come up against, and he might well agree. After all, his ego would tell him nobody was going to trip him up. Even if he admitted the possibility to himself intellectually, he’d still figure the odds were in his favor.” He shook his head. “It’s not the fact that they’d been rigged to die if they were caught the bothers me. It’s not even the fact that they knew they were. What bothers me is that they were so calm about it.” He shook his head, dark eyes shadowed. “That’s the signature of a zealot. Whatever else they might have been, these two were true believers. And—” his voice turned harsher “—so was the crew of their damned transport.”
Barregos grimaced. With “Ellingsen” and “Abernathy” dead, Roszak had been forced to use his fallback plan. Instead of convincing one of them to order the transport to stand down, he’d tried for a covert boarding action, sending in Marine special forces operators in skinsuits on a ballistic intercept.
Individual powered-down skinsuits were extraordinarily difficult to detect, but the transport’s crew obviously had. They’d allowed the twelve-Marine squad to make soft landings on their vessel’s hull. Then they’d dumped their fusion bottle and blown themselves—and the Marines—into plasma. The sensor records made it abundantly clear that that was what had happened, and reactor bottles didn’t dump spontaneously.
“So basically what we have to pass on to the Manties is a whole bunch of nothing,” the governor said disgustedly.
“I think we got a little more than that, Oravil,” Roszak said. “If nothing else, we’ve got a pair of bodies, and if the Manties and Havenites have more experience with this nanotech, they may spot something our forensics people don’t know to look for. At the very least, it would be confirmation our bad guys and their bad guys really are the same people. I don’t think we need that confirmation, though. It’s hard for me to imagine there’s more than one galaxy-spanning conspiracy out to get Manticore at any given moment. Well, okay. Maybe more than one, but not more than two!”
Barregos lips twitched and he shook his head. But then he nodded, too.
“Point taken,” he said. “And I think we’ve got confirmation we’ve been put on the same hit list.”
“I’m still not completely sold on that part of it.” Roszak drank more coffee, then shrugged. “That’s one of the reasons I really wanted to have a little heart-to-heart with those two. Are we on their hit list, or did they simply see us as one more club to use on the Manties and Haven?”
“Does it really matter?” Brosnan asked, and Roszak nodded.
“I think it does, Gail. If they put us on their little list as a target, not as a potential weapon, it suggests they know more about our ultimate intentions than we thought anybody outside the Sector did. And if they know more about our plans, who knows who else does? For that matter, if they know, have they arranged to make that information available to our lords and masters in Old Chicago if something prevents their original plan from working?”
“That’s…an interesting question,” Barregos said slowly.
“And likely to affect our own timing?” Roszak asked with a raised eyebrow.
“I’d say there’s a distinct possibility.” No one could have described Oravil Barregos’s expression as eager, but there was very little indecision in it. “We have Givens’s promise of naval support if we really need it, and this time we know the offer’s legitimate,” the governor continued. “The real problem’s Erewhon. No one in Suds expected us to move before we had the first of our own podnoughts. Even with the Manties—the real Manties—promising to support us and provide their ‘Mycroft’ for system-defense, that could be a problem. We had enough trouble getting them to agree to accelerate the timetable last time. I’m afraid Havlicek, at least, may be less than delighted if we suggest moving it up even farther. She wasn’t that enthusiastic last time, and I doubt she’ll care for the notion of increasing the window of vulnerability between declaring our intentions and when the Manties can get Mycroft installed.”
“No, she won’t,” Roszak agreed. “We may not have a choice, though. Especially not if what Philip’s telling us about the other systems out our way is accurate, and I think it is. These two were here to press us to act in the next couple of months, Oravil. I’m willing to bet they’ve had other people pushing the same schedule in Kornati and some of the other systems in our vicinity. If those other systems start going up in flames, that’s likely to draw a response from Frontier Fleet. And when that happens—”
�
�When that happens, somebody will get a lot better look at what we’ve been building out here,” Barregos finished. “At which point, the hammer comes down.”
“Unless we get in before they do, with the Manties standing ominously behind us.”
“That might make it just a bit harder for Manticore to sell the rest of the galaxy on the notion that they didn’t have anything to do with it,” Brosnan pointed out. “If we move and announce the Star Empire’s supporting us, Abruzzi and his people will fall all over themselves arguing that that couldn’t have happened if we hadn’t coordinated it well ahead of time. And that’ll lend an awful lot of credence to the notion that Manticore was the instigator all along.”
“You may be right,” Barregos said after a moment. “In fact, you probably are. But Landing and Nouveau Paris have to have thought about that before they sent Givens out here in the first place. And the bottom line is that we’re not doing what we’re doing to help their Grand Alliance.” He looked around the table, his face hard. “We’re doing it to protect the Maya Sector and the people who live here. If that’s inconvenient for the Manties, I’m afraid they’ll just have to live with it.”
Bassingford Medical Center
and
Mount Royal Palace
City of Landing
Manticore Binary System
Star Empire of Manticore
Megan Petersen turned from the window as the waiting room door opened behind her. She expected a nurse or a doctor; what she got was a hard-eyed man in a green-on-green uniform with sergeant’s stries and a nameplate that read “McGraw.” Those hard eyes swept the room with the precision of a laser tracker. Then he nodded courteously to her and keyed his uni-link.
“Clear,” he said, and came to a parade rest to one side of the door.
It opened again, a moment later, and it was Megan’s turn to come to attention as a very tall woman with a treecat on her shoulder came through the door. Two more green-uniformed men followed her.