by David Weber
Treysa would have been happier if Indy and Mackenzie had joined her, but she’d given up trying to convince them. Partly because she knew just how stubborn they were, but even more, Indy suspected, because she’d guessed what they were up to. They’d both worked hard to keep her uninvolved in anything that might bring official attention her way, but she was a very smart woman…and she was still the woman who’d married Bruce Graham. However frightened she might be on their behalf, she understood that there were some lines, some principles, that simply couldn’t be abandoned without a fight.
That was the real reason Indy and Mackenzie had stayed in the capital. And it was also the reason Indy had become a street hand. It wasn’t the sort of profession Bruce Graham had hoped for for his children, but it was one of the few open to a convicted criminal’s son, and it lent itself well to certain…other ends.
Mackenzie, on the other hand, had avoided the worst consequences of official displeasure because she was a highly skilled IT professional. Those were too rare on Seraphim for anyone to worry too much about her father’s criminal history. Even better, from the authorities’ perspective, a third of her clients were subsidiaries of one of the transstellars who effectively owned the Seraphim System, and most of the other two-thirds were either “independents” who were actually fronts for Krestor or Mendoza bureaucrats, their oligarch hangers-on, or McCready Administration apparatchiks. Whatever might have been true of her father—and possibly her brother—Mackenzie had clearly learned her lesson.
Indy, however, was a street hand, one of the quasi-legitimate, not-quite-outlawed brokers of the graymarket. Almost anything was available through the graymarket, if you knew the right hand and had enough money or something sufficiently valuable to trade in kind.
In a lot of ways, McCready, O’Sullivan, and Helena Hashimoto would have loved to shut down the graymarket. Unfortunately, it had become an essential part of the Seraphim economy. Shutting it down might have diverted a few more centicreds into the bank accounts of the transstellars and the pockets of their cronies, but it also might prove the final straw for Seraphimians in general. As it was, the authorities were perfectly happy to see marginalized elements—elements like Indy Graham, who knew the ice underfoot was always thin—filling that role, since they had to know what would happen to them if they ever got out of line or became sufficiently irritating to their betters.
It wasn’t much of a living, although Indy did rather better at it than Internal Revenue realized. It really wasn’t that hard for a street hand, especially one with a sister who knew computers better than ninety percent of the government’s IT so-called experts.
That, too, was one reason his current occupation was so well-suited to his ultimate ends.
“Have you ordered?” he asked now, and Mackenzie shook her head.
“Given that I was waiting for you and that you have the time sense of a torpid rock, I figured I’d wait until I saw the whites of your eyes. That way my plate wouldn’t be either empty or frozen solid by the time you got here.”
“There you go again, maligning my character without a single shred of physical evidence to back up your baseless allegations.”
“Really?” Mackenzie tilted her head, favoring him with a thoughtful expression. “You may be right. Why don’t we ask Alecta for her opinion? Or maybe we could get Thai Grandpa to give us the benefit of his observations? He’s back in the kitchen this afternoon, you know.”
“No, no!” Indy said loftily. “There’s no need to drag them into this. I’m far too considerate to impose on them that way.”
“Sure you are.” Mackenzie rolled her eyes, and Indy chuckled. But then he laid down the old-fashioned printed menu, folded his hands on it, and there was absolutely no humor in his eyes as he gazed at her across the table.
“I saw Dad yesterday. He looked like he’d been run over by a ground car.”
Mackenzie’s matching eyes went dark, and her expression tightened.
“What happened?” she asked.
“You think I expected him to tell me that in a Terrabore visitor’s cube?” Indy shook his head. “Besides, I didn’t need him to. It was the worst it’s been, Max. I don’t know how much more of it he can take.”
“Damn.” The single word came out softly, bitterly, from a young woman who seldom swore. Her eyes dropped to her own menu, but they didn’t see it. Those eyes were looking at something else, something far away, and they were bitter.
“I think it’s time, Kenzie,” he said even more softly. “Mom’s safe with Aunt Sarah and Uncle Thad, and Dad’s already in prison. How much worse can it get?”
“You know exactly how much worse it can get,” she replied, raising her eyes to his face. “And you know exactly what Dad would say if he even thought we were thinking about something like that.”
“Dad’s not in position to say anything to us,” Indy said bitterly. “He won’t be for at least another thirty-five years, and that assumes he lives that long. You know how likely that is in Terrabore.”
“Is that why you want to push ahead? To get Dad out?”
“You know there’s more to it. I won’t pretend seeing him yesterday, realizing how badly they beat the crap out of him again, isn’t a factor in my thinking, but there’s always been more to it than that. And we haven’t been setting up the cells just to let them sit there.”
Mackenzie bit her lip. She wanted to argue with him—she’d always been the cautious one, the one who’d spent her time hauling Indy out of one scrape or another, despite the difference in their ages, for as long as she could remember—but she couldn’t. She’d known where he was headed from the outset, and she’d been with him every step of the way. And she agreed with him, really. Agreed with him absolutely. It was just such a big step from simply organizing to doing something…more active.
“You know what’ll happen to all of us if the scags realize what’s going on,” she said. “Are you really ready for that?”
“I don’t want to be overdramatic, Kenzie, but remember what Jefferson said about ‘the tree of liberty.’ I don’t want to shed any more blood than I have to—not even tyrants’ blood, much less patriots’—but it’s gone too far to end any other way. And then there’s Burke. You know how Dad always loved him.”
“‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,’” Mackenzie quoted softly, and Indy nodded.
“I can’t do nothing anymore, Kenzie. I just can’t. And neither can you, can you?”
She looked down at her menu once more for fifteen or twenty seconds, then back up at him and shook her head.
“No, Indy,” she said very, very quietly. “I can’t.”
Chapter Eight
“Oh-ho! This is interesting, Sir.”
Lieutenant Brandon Stiller looked down at the pair of uniformed legs visible—from ankles to just above the knee—protruding out of the guts of the fire control console.
“And what would ‘this’ be, Maggie?” he inquired. “It’s just a bit hard to see down inside there with you at the moment.”
“Oops. Sorry about that, Sir,” CPO Magdalena Grigoriv said. Her voice was rather muffled, but clear enough. “Just a sec.”
In fact, it was rather less than the specified second when the display on Stiller’s tablet flicked to life with the imagery from the visual pick up mounted beside the lamp on Grigoriv’s headset. He looked at it for a moment or two, rubbing his chin as he frowned thoughtfully, then shrugged.
“I give,” he said. “Other than another chunk of molycirc, I still don’t know what ‘this’ is. Any hints?”
“What this is, Sir, unless I’m badly mistaken, is a secondary backup of the tac log.”
“Is it now?” Stiller’s expression was suddenly intent. “I didn’t know they had one of those aboard these ships.”
“Yes, Sir. Gets more interesting every day, doesn’t it? But look here.”
Grigoriv’s hand entered the field of view, indicating a pair of co
nnectors. It was a slender, fine boned hand, since she was barely a hundred and sixty centimeters tall, which was one of the reasons she was the one exploring the innards of the consoles on the command deck of MSN Remorseless (until recently BC-1003 Incomparable, late of the Solarian League Navy). Not only was Stiller an officer (if a rather junior one), but he was also twenty-five centimeters taller than she was and considerably broader. Of course, the fact that she’d demonstrated the best intuitive feel for the…idiosyncrasies of Solarian tech had more than a little to do with why she’d drawn the assignment, too. It would appear that for any possible technological issue there was a right solution, a wrong solution, and a Solly solution. There were times when Stiller had no idea what could have inspired the SLN to adopt the one they had.
“This one”—the fingernail on the index finger tapping the connector on the right had acquired more than a little dirt—“goes straight to the TO’s station, and this one here”—she tapped the second connector—“goes to the feed from CIC. But there’s no connector to anywhere else. It accepts input from both those sources, and it can output to the tactical officer’s station, but it’s pretty clearly a standalone data storage unit.”
“My, my, my,” Stiller murmured. “I wonder if they wiped this one, too? Assuming they knew about it, of course.”
“One way to find out, Sir.” Grigoriv’s other hand appeared in the field of view. Nimble fingers quickly attached a probe to the memory unit’s diagnostic panel, and she snorted. “Dunno exactly what’s in here, Sir, but there’s a lot of it! I mean, a whole big lot.”
“Well, in that case, Maggie, I suppose we ought to see about encouraging it to tell us about itself. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Copy that, Sir!”
* * *
“That was…careless of them,” Augustus Khumalo said as the intelligence summary ended. “I assume Admiral O’Malley and Ms. Corvisart already have copies of this?”
“Yes, Sir.” Commander Chandler nodded. “I’ve distributed it to everyone on the authorized list.”
“And all of this was in it?” Khumalo flicked a finger at the display in front of him, which currently displayed only the wallpaper of HMS Hercules. It was a purely rhetorical question, as his satisfied smile made clear, but Chandler nodded again.
“We downloaded through the TO’s station before we actually pulled the unit. I don’t think the Monicans realized they’d given us the complete access codes.”
“I think it’s more likely Captain Kurtz’s theory is correct, Sir,” Aivars Terekhov said.
He and Ginger Lewis had come aboard Hercules as Khumalo’s dinner guests just before Chandler delivered his latest intelligence prize. Now the admiral crooked an eyebrow at him, and Terekhov shrugged.
“I think she’s right, Sir. They didn’t know it was there any more than we did. If they’d known, they would’ve scrubbed it before we got hold of it.”
Khumalo nodded. The Monicans had used the interval between Terekhov’s destruction of their operational battlecruisers and his own arrival in-system to delete all manner of incriminating files. Unfortunately for them, the Manticoran cyber forensics teams had managed to recover a great many intact computer cores from the shattered military component of Eroica Station. But this was the first complete and undamaged download from one of the ex-Solarian battlecruisers’ log systems to fall into their hands. And, having scanned the output Chandler had already worked through, the admiral understood exactly why they’d scrubbed everything else they could get their hands on.
“I can understand the Monicans not realizing it was there,” he said after a moment. “But Technodyne must have known about it!”
“They should’ve known about it,” Terekhov agreed. “On the other hand, Technodyne’s an enormous operation, Sir, and all this was completely ‘black.’ I’d bet they compartmentalized like crazy when they set it up, and we’ve all seen examples of what can happen when someone does that. How many times has that kind of thing bitten us on the ass against the Peeps?”
“You’re thinking someone didn’t get the word about where these ships were going, so that someone didn’t bother to mention the backup to anyone else?”
“Something like that. Then again, they may have known about it all along and just not told Monica because they didn’t care. They never thought we’d get our hands on these ships, Sir. They worried about changing emission signatures and cosmetic changes to weapons and sensor suites to disguise them on external scans, but they never expected our techs to actually take their hardware apart!”
“I suppose that’s true,” Khumalo said, forbearing to point out that any such expectations would have been amply justified if not for a certain Aivars Terekhov. “I imagine Ms. Corvisart and the Foreign Office will be very happy to get their hands on this, though.”
He tapped the display at his elbow, and Terekhov nodded. The download from the backup log covered every stage of Incomparable’s transformation into Remorseless. It was a complete record of the modifications to the ship’s systems, which had captured Technodyne technicians not only making modifications themselves but also running sims and instructing Monican personnel in the operation and maintenance of top-secret Solarian League Navy hardware. Worse, it had captured Technodyne supervisors discussing how the ships had been diverted to Monica’s use. Since that included specific mention of the Solarian League inspectors who’d signed off on the ships’ complete demolition by the reclamation crews, it was a particularly damning bit of evidence in the case Amandine Corvisart was building against Technodyne and the League in general.
“The newsies will salivate the instant they see it,” the admiral predicted, and Terekhov nodded once more.
“Did Stiller and Grigoriv document every stage of this, Ambrose?” the captain asked.
“Every bit of it,” Chandler confirmed. “Our crews are documenting everything, but as soon as Stiller realized what Grigoriv had turned up he brought in one of the Solly observers, as well.”
“Now that was a smart move,” Commander Lewis said. “Technodyne’s going to scream we fabricated all of it, but that’s going to be a harder sell with one of Ms. Corvisart’s pet newsies validating where we found it and how we downloaded its contents.”
“Never underestimate the power of money and corruption when it comes to the Solarian League legal system, Ginger,” Terekhov advised. “Of course, the court of public opinion’s a different venue. It probably will do some good there.”
“And it might do some good right here in Monica, too,” Khumalo pointed out. “However, I suspect dinner is about to be served. Before we sit down to it, Aivars, how are Hexapuma’s repairs coming?”
“Quite well, considering.” Terekhov waved in Lewis’ direction. “Ginger and her people are just about completely exhausted by now, but with Captain Kurtz’s people’s assistance, we should be ready to hyper out within a couple of weeks.”
“That’s a remarkable achievement,” Khumalo said sincerely, with an approving nod for Lewis. “I wouldn’t have believed anyone could put her back together when I first saw your damage report!”
“I’m not sure I would’ve argued with you, Sir,” Terekhov said. “Ginger never doubted, though.”
“I wouldn’t go quite that far, Sir.” Lewis shook her head. “It was more a case of my not daring to tell you I cherished any doubts about my own peerless ability to glue the bits and pieces back into place.”
“Well, whatever you may’ve thought at the time, Commander, you’ve amply justified Captain Terekhov’s confidence in you since. In fact—”
A soft chime interrupted the admiral, and he checked his personal chrono.
“All right. Shop talk is now officially suspended until after dinner.” He slid back his float chair and stood. “If you’ll all come with me, I think the cooks have put together something fairly palatable.”
* * *
“No, Mister President.” Amandine Corvisart’s tone might be courteous, but it was also decidedly cool a
nd about as far from affable as it was possible for a voice to be. “I’m afraid that point is not negotiable.”
Roberto Tyler stared at her across his desk, then glanced at the other two men seated in his private office.
Admiral Gregoire Bourmont wouldn’t meet his eyes, not that the president was especially surprised by that. Bourmont was a broken man, devastated on a personal as well as a professional level by the crushing defeat—the outright destruction—of his entire navy by what he’d since discovered was a scratch-built squadron composed primarily of second line Manticoran warships. He seemed like a man trapped in a nightmare from which he couldn’t awaken, and Tyler doubted that was going to change anytime soon…if ever.
Alfonso Higgins, the Republic of Monica’s chief of intelligence, was still functional, however, and he did meet his president’s gaze. In fact, he shrugged ever so slightly, and Tyler’s jaw tightened. Higgins had minced no bones about his conclusion that they had no choice but to accept the deal—any deal—Manticore was willing to offer at this point. His own intelligence reports and analyses made it abundantly clear that Tyler’s presidency hung by the proverbial thread. The Monican electorate understood exactly how the Republic’s political system worked, and by and large they’d been willing to accept that for the last several decades. Even more importantly, his fellow kleptocrats had stood firmly behind him as long as his policies continued to bring in the Solarian cash they needed to grease the wheels of their personal fortunes. But that was before Tyler had involved their star nation in one of the most colossal debacles—if not simply the most colossal debacle—in its history. Very few of those kleptocratic friends of his were all that fond of him at the moment. And if the Star Empire of Manticore so much as whispered the possibility of incorporating Monica into the newly annexed Talbott Sector into that electorate’s ear, any plebiscite would approve the notion by an overwhelming majority.
No doubt it would, Tyler thought resentfully, returning his attention to Corvisart. But the damned Manties have to watch their asses, too. Frontier Security may be willing to swallow a lot after how spectacularly Anisimovna and her frigging friends have screwed the pooch, but the outright forcible annexation—plebiscite or no plebiscite—of a League ally would be really pushing things. In fact, the Sollies might actually want the Manties to try it! If they can turn this into some sort of raw territorial grab on the Manties’ part they may be able to shout loud enough about that to keep their public from paying any attention to the evidence.
