by David Weber
Harahap heard the Manticoran, but his eyes were on the treecat, as focused as he’d ever been on anything in his life. He saw the furry arboreal—treecats reminded him of a fusion between a Startman pantera and a scimpanzé, or possibly an Old Earth bobcat and a lemur—crouch ever so slightly, staring at him closely. He could almost feel the intensity behind those bright green eyes, he thought.
And then he realized it wasn’t a matter of almost feeling that intensity, after all.
* * *
Clean Killer heard People’s Eyes mouth noises, but he ignored them for the moment as he dived into the other two-leg’s mind-glow. There would be time enough—
He twitched and his eyes went suddenly wide. For an instant, the entire world stood still, and then he launched himself like a long, sinuous projectile straight at the two-leg.
* * *
“Oh, shit!” Patricia Givens gasped as Clean Killer hurled himself at Harahap, both sets of arms spread wide, long, deadly fingers crooked.
Damn it! If he’s been lying to us all along, we need to know, but even so, he’s too valuable to let Clean Killer just—!
* * *
Damien Harahap saw Clean Killer coming, and his arms opened automatically. There was no conscious thought in that moment. There was only awareness, and his arms closed again, enfolding that long, slender, impossibly strong body and cradling it against his chest like the most precious thing in the entire universe.
* * *
“Oh, shit!” Patricia Givens snarled in a very different tone as she realized what had actually happened.
Thought Chaser’s obviously delighted, bleeking laughter didn’t help one bit.
* * *
“So, what do you think we should do about it? If I recall correctly, this was your brilliant idea in the first place,” the Earl of White Haven said from his wife’s com in what might not unreasonably have been described as a snippy tone.
Honor snorted. She hadn’t been able to accept Hamish’s screen when the original com request came through, because she’d been in an electronic meeting with the Joint Chiefs. He’d left her a recorded message, though, and she’d found herself laughing out loud as she’d viewed his indignant commentary. Nimitz had thought it was just as funny as she had, but it was obvious her husband remained rather less amused.
“I don’t think we should do anything at all about it,” she told him now. Imperator was currently part of a training exercise just under ten light-minutes from the capital planet, so there was a 9.2-second one-way signal delay, even over the grav com. “Actually, I think it’s the best thing that could possibly have happened!”
She sat back, cradling her outsized mug of cocoa in both hands. She waited patiently, and then, approximately eighteen seconds later, she gurgled with delight when she was rewarded with a bug-eyed look White Haven would never have permitted anyone else to see.
“‘Best thing’?” he repeated in incredulous tones. “Honor, the idea was for Clean Killer to rip his throat out if he turned traitor! How damned likely is he to do that now?”
“Hamish, why do you persist in not taking my word for it where Harahap is concerned?” She shook her head, still chuckling. “Believe me, I have no intention of nominating this man for canonization, but he’s not exactly an unmitigated monster, either. I told you where I think he’s coming from—where he’s come from for his entire life, for that matter. And now he’s been adopted by a treecat. Well, guess what? I did some research before Dame Lisa and I ever made our suggestion about Clean Killer, and in the entire history of the Star Kingdom, no treecat’s ever adopted a criminal or a traitor. Doctor Arif and I found three cases in which ’cats had adopted someone who later committed serious offenses, not some misdemeanor nonsense, and became criminals, but in each of those instances, the ’cat renounced the bond. Do you really think Clean Killer wouldn’t do that if Harahap turned? Or think there’s anyway he’d leave Harahap alive if it happened?”
She shook her head again.
“There’s one—count them, one—case of someone who was adopted subsequently being convicted of a major crime—voluntary homicide—and not being renounced by his ’cat, but that’s it as far as serious offenses are concerned. And, frankly, having looked at the facts of that case—as well as I could; it happened over a hundred and fifty T-years ago—I think it should’ve been ruled justifiable homicide. Of course,” she quirked one of her off-center smiles, “the ’cats and I tend to have much the same attitude when it comes to dealing with enemies, so you might want to take my opinion about that with a grain of salt.
“However,” her smile disappeared and she leaned a little closer to the camera, “you’ve been adopted yourself, Hamish. You shouldn’t need me to tell you what that means. Since you seem just a trifle upset over this, though, let me recapitulate.
“One.” She took her artificial hand off the cocoa cup so she could raise her left index finger, just as she had in the initial discussion of Damien Harahap’s mind-glow. “Clean Killer’s sister and her entire family were killed in the Yawata Strike, and he came darn close to being killed himself. Two,” she extended the second finger on her left hand, “we believe—and Clean Killer agrees with us—that the Mesan Alignment was responsible for the Yawata Strike. Three,” she extended her ring finger, “Clean Killer knows Harahap worked for the Alignment—although Harahap didn’t know it was the Alignment at the time—and Harahap knows as well as we do that the Mesans are the only ones who could have pulled off the Yawata Strike. Four,” she extended her little finger, “despite that, Clean Killer adopted Harahap essentially on sight, after—I remind you—having volunteered to be his ‘bodyguard’ specifically so he could kill Harahap if it turned out he was an unregenerate ‘evildoer’ after all. And, five,” her thumb joined the fingers, “nobody who’s been adopted by a treecat has ever wanted that treecat pissed off with her, even when the ’cat in question hadn’t wanted to kill her before they ever met.
“Which means, love of my life, that whatever worries we might have cherished about what Damien Harahap might have thought or been tempted to do under some unknown future circumstances are no longer relevant.” She closed her hand into a fist and smiled again, far more broadly. “We’ve got him now, Hamish. Trust me on that one.”
Eighteen seconds later, his expression shifted again, from one of moderate outrage to sudden thoughtfulness.
“You may have a point,” he said slowly.
“Sweetheart, I do have a point. So why don’t you just go tell Pat to unknot her knickers about Mister Harahap? From this moment on, he has a conscience that hates the Mesan Alignment and all its works at least as passionately as I do, and it’s permanently parked in a corner of his mind-glow. He may not be able to sense Clean Killer’s emotions the way I can sense Nimitz’s, but, tell me—has Samantha ever found it difficult to express what she’s feeling to you?”
“I think you could safely assume the answer to that question is ‘no,’” White Haven said, and the cream and brown dappled treecat on the back of his chair laughed just as hard as Nimitz.
“Precisely.” Honor leaned back again, still smiling in triumph. “Believe me, no one wants her ’cat…unhappy with her. Dying is the easy way out, compared to having your ’cat pissed off at you! So instead of worrying about whether or not Clean Killer will warn us if Harahap starts thinking traitorous thoughts, tell Pat to start concentrating on the fact that we don’t have to figure out how to turn him and be sure he stays turned anymore.” She shook her head yet again. “Clean Killer just took care of that for us!”
George Benton Tower
City of Old Chicago
Old Earth
Sol System
“—and you don’t even want to know what this is going to look like when the Exchange opens tomorrow morning!” Omosupe Quartermain glared around the conference room at her fellows. “Trifecta’s not one of the big players—not like Technodyne or Zumwalt or even De Soto Industries—but when the market finds out what th
at bastard did, we’re going to see the mother of all runs. Another mother of all runs! God knows we’ve seen enough of them since this crap started,” she ended bitterly.
Innokentiy Kolokoltsov used his coffee mug to hide a grimace. The strong, hot brew was especially welcome at four a.m. on a tempestuous night when he ought to have been in bed hours ago. The storms rolling in off Lake Michigan lashed George Benton Tower’s flanks with seventy-five kilometer-per-hour winds and blinding sheets of rain. Thunder rumbled almost continuously and lightning flickered across the tower’s crown like an angry halo, striking its towering lightning rods again and again as it sought the absorbent earth.
It was, he thought, all too appropriate a metaphor for what was happening to the entire Solarian League, and despite the hundreds of cubic meters of ceramacrete isolating this quiet conference room from the storm’s fury, the tension about him crackled with its own angry electricity. Quartermain seldom waxed quite so strident, especially this early in the damned morning (or this late at night, depending upon how one wanted to look at it). On the other hand, she’d never been what one might call a fan of Manticore at the best of times, however, and the news from the Mobius System had hit a nerve. Not just with her, either, he thought, eyes shifting to Agatá Wodoslawski.
“Omosupe’s right about that,” the permanent senior undersecretary of the treasury said, as if his eyes had summoned her agreement. “We not going to get hit as hard by the market at Treasury as she is over at Commerce, but that’s mostly because interest rates have already tanked.” Her expression was at least as bitter as Quartermain’s. “It’s a hell of a note when the upside is that the situation’s already so shot to hell that even something like this can’t make it worse! Except, unfortunately, that it can…and will. Mobius wasn’t that huge chunk of our cash flow from the Protectorates—not by itself. But if we don’t get some kind of handle on this, we’re going to look like an elephant gnawed to death by ants.”
Kolokoltsov winced internally at the simile, but he couldn’t deny its aptness.
“What I want to know,” Malachai Abruzzi said, turning icy eyes upon his normal ally, Nathan MacArtney, “is why we didn’t hear about any of this before this frigging Terekhov blew the piss out of Yucel’s Gendarmes? Not to mention massacring the entire legitimate system government while he was at it!”
“That is an apropos question,” Kolokoltsov agreed, lowering his coffee mug and turning toward the permanent senior undersecretary of the interior. He tapped the memo on the table smart top in front of him. “According to this, you’ve been getting reports about Manty provocateurs in the Fringe for months now, Nathan!”
“Without any confirmation,” MacArtney pointed out in response. “For God’s sake, Innokentiy! There are seventeen trillion conspiracy theories running around in our so-called intelligence community! Half of them are from people trying to cover their own arses, and half the rest are from people so scared they see Manties under their own beds, much less making trouble in the Fringe! If I brought every one of them to you before we were able to confirm or disprove it, that’s all the hell we’d be talking about!”
He glared back at the other Mandarins, his body language defensive, but Kolokoltsov had to acknowledge his argument had at least some validity. Maybe not enough to excuse the way this had blindsided them, but some.
“I’m not sure that’s a sufficient explanation,” he said out loud, his tone cool. “At the same time, none of us have covered ourselves with proactive glory since this all started. So instead of trying to fix blame for why we didn’t see it coming, what do we know about it now? I think—” his smile was frosty “—we need to at least know how many arteries have been slashed before we start trying to control the bleeding.”
“As far as what actually happened in Mobius is concerned, I think we’ve got the essentials,” MacArtney said, after a moment. “Everything we have so far comes from Captain Weaver’s report, so I’m sure there’s still a lot to fill in, but I don’t expect what she’s already told us to change very much.”
And we should trust your judgment about that after you never even mentioned the possibility something like this might happen? Kolokoltsov thought sardonically. I know I just said we’ve all made mistakes, Nathan, but really…
“And Captain Weaver’s said exactly what, Nathan?” Wodoslawski asked.
“Actually, I think Omosupe may have a better fix on that than my people do—yet, anyway.” MacArtney shrugged. “I’ve got more background information—more possible background information—to help set it into context, but Weaver went to Commerce before she got around to us.”
Kolokoltsov didn’t—quite—frown as he heard the slight but unmistakable edge in MacArtney’s voice, but he felt a vast weariness that owed very little to the lateness of the hour. The ship was foundering under them, and they were still trying to score points about who’d left which porthole open. In fairness, MacArtney did have a point in this case, however.
Captain Josephine Weaver commanded the Kalokainos Lines freighter Rudolfo Kalokainos. So far as any of them knew, Rudolfo Kalokainos was the only League merchant vessel to have escaped from Mobius, and Weaver had headed directly for Old Terra. According to her, Aivars Terekhov—and, oh, how all the Mandarins had come to hate that name!—hadn’t even tried to prevent Rudolfo Kalokainos’s departure, however, so it seemed likely other Solarian and neutral dispatch boats and freighters would soon be spreading the news elsewhere.
It was unfortunate, but scarcely surprising, that Weaver had chosen to report what had happened to her employer before she got around to mentioning it to the federal government. It was equally unsurprising that someone at Kalokainos had promptly leaked the news to the public. Volkhart Kalokainos’s personal hatred for everything remotely connected to the Star Empire of Manticore had been legendary even before New Tuscany, and the incredible hit the shipping-based Kalokainos empire had taken since the Manties started seizing wormholes hadn’t made him any happier. Not surprisingly, probably, since current estimates said Kalokainos Shipping had lost over eighty percent of its value. So it wasn’t surprising the news had leaked so rapidly…or that the Gendarmerie casualty count Weaver had reported—whch, admittedly, had been bad enough on its own—had been inflated by two or three hundred percent.
Few people had been awake to react here in Old Chicago when the story broke, but two thirds of the planet were up and about when the leak hit the public boards. The instant response had been furious anger, and that fury was certain to increase as the news sank fully home. At the moment, Malachai Abruzzi’s people were playing catch-up, trying to get in front and shape the narrative to make sure that growing fury was directed somewhere besides at the people in this room, but they had their work cut out for them.
More to MacArtney’s immediate point, however, Quartermain’s position in the Department of Commerce meant she tended to hear things from the League’s transstellars before anyone else. In this case, the fact that she’d been an executive with Kalokainos Shipping for twenty T-years before becoming a bureaucrat only gave her even better connections.
From her expression, she was less than pleased to have him underscore that point.
“As you say, Nathan, we have a lot of pieces to fill in.” Her tone was as chill as her expression. “What we actually know—or think we know, at any rate—is that President Lombroso asked Commissioner Verrocchio for support after a violent insurrection broke out on Mobius. According to Weaver, it started in Landing but spread quickly. In response to Lombroso’s request, Verrocchio sent Brigadier Yucel and a couple of intervention battalions, along with enough light naval support to control Mobius’s orbital space. Yucel landed her Gendarmes to secure the capital and called in orbital strikes on half a dozen towns.” Her lips twisted in distaste. “Weaver says that effectively broke the rebellion’s back, although the hard-core rebels refused to concede defeat, so Yucel and her people assisted the Mobian planetary authorities in rounding up the diehards. She’d almost com
pleted that part of the operation when Terekhov turned up. He took out the Navy units—Weaver’s not sure if they were destroyed or simply surrendered, although she thinks they most likely did, given the odds against them—and entered Mobius orbit himself. He contacted Yucel and demanded that she cease operations immediately and surrender her people. She refused. At which point he devastated a couple of square blocks of downtown Landing with a KEW strike on Yucel’s HQ. Weaver says he killed the entire remaining planetary government in the same strike. Somebody named Breitbach wound up running the show planet-side. Weaver says he was supposedly the rebellion’s leader and Yucel had him in custody but didn’t realize who he was.” Quartermain shrugged. “I don’t know if that’s true or if he’s just a Manty mouthpiece, but that’s all we do know at this point.”
Kolokoltsov nodded. That hadn’t added a lot to what he already knew, but it certainly defined the parameters of their problem. The political and diplomatic parameters, anyway; he was unhappily certain Quartermain and Wodoslawski would be able to provide far more depressing detail about the economic parameters when they got around to that side of the problem.
But apparently Quartermain had provided new information for at least one of the Mandarins.
“None of the newsies have mentioned anything about Yucel’s authorizing any kinetic strikes,” Wodoslawski said sharply. “Is Weaver certain about that?”
“As certain as she is about any of it.” Quartermain shrugged again. “We’re dealing with a single report, Agatá. With no way to crosscheck, I can’t guarantee any of it.”
“If the Gendarmes started using KEWs before Terekhov ever turned up, that’s not going to play well with the public,” Wodoslawski worried.
“Which is probably the reason our good friends over at Kalokainos haven’t mentioned it to anyone…yet,” Kolokoltsov said. Quartermain gave him a moderately dirty look, but said nothing.
“Can we keep it from coming out?” Abruzzi asked.