“I’ve been in occasional communication with James since the Fall, yes. We’ve only traded a few messages since I became Councilor, though. I think he wanted to stay off our radar.”
“Did you tell him we were meeting today?”
Mandela stopped in mid-motion, her coffee cup at her lips, then sighed again and put it back down.
“He contacted me yesterday, shortly after the bombings,” she admitted. “We had a few backdoor channels in place, but he used one I’d almost forgotten about. One I know no one else knew about.
“He said he needed to talk to you, urgently, with no one knowing.
“I told him you would be here, that I could try and arrange something with you, but he said it had to be completely under wraps and he’d contact you another way. I take it he did?”
“He did,” Annette confirmed. “And basically admitted to being a Weber Network member. Which means, Councilor, that you told a member of the organization that almost certainly wants to kill me where I was going to be.
“Do I need to point out the issue with that?”
Hope Mandela sighed.
“No, Your Grace,” she said sadly. “If you want my resignation, you’ll have it.”
“God, no,” Annette told her. “I just want your awareness of how badly this could go. I’m meeting him in that park over there”—she nodded toward the window—“and I want to know if I can trust him.”
“Are you even sure you can trust me?”
“Reasonably,” Annette replied. “What I am sure of is that finding another recognizable African representative for my Council would be a giant pain that I do not need. So, again, Councilor Mandela, can I trust your cousin?”
“To honor his word, his oaths, yes,” Mandela said. “If he said you’d be safe, you’ll be safe within his power.
“But I don’t know what being part of the Network has done to him. If he signed off on these bombings, he may well not be the man I think he is anymore.”
“I’m not sure he did,” Annette Bond admittedly quietly. “In fact, if I thought he had, I wouldn’t be meeting with him. But James Mandela would be one of the most senior members of the Network—so if he didn’t sign off on the bombings, I have to wonder just what is going on among my ex-comrades-in-arms.”
“I don’t know, Duchess Bond. All I know is that I hope we can end this conflict without more deaths,” Mandela told her. “The Weber Network is made up of some of the UESF’s finest officers and has hidden away some of the technology and knowledge we need.
“Everyone who dies fighting them or fighting for them just leaves the Duchy weaker in the end.”
“I agree,” Annette said. “I hope your cousin does too.”
#
The Nelson Mandela Memorial Park had gone through at least half a dozen different variations over the almost two centuries it had existed. The statue that James Mandela had directed Annette to had survived since its installation exactly one century after the statesman’s death.
It was a large marble statue of Nelson Mandela and Frederik Willem de Klerk shaking hands. Careful selection of the type of marble for each statue made the distinction of skin tone between the two men obvious to even a casual glance, driving home the exact point the statue’s sculptor had intended about racial reconciliation.
At some point after its construction, a pool had been installed around the statue, with soft burbling fountains. Later, a circle of trees had been added—trees now grown high enough to provide a measure of privacy to the benches and picnic tables scattered around the pool.
Pretoria was a busy modern city whose noise reached even into its parks, but the area around the statue was a zone of quiet, broken only by the laughter of playing children.
Annette could only hope that someday a memorial of her would be so perfect. She sat alone by the edge of the pool, watching the sunlight glinting off the water and the polished marble.
“Thank you for coming,” a quiet voice said, and the large form of James Mandela settled onto the edge of the pool next to her. The man looked a lot like the statue, his hair having even gone completely white sometime in the last year.
“You’re the first member of the Network to even give me a chance to speak to them,” she pointed out. “I don’t want to spend my time hunting my old comrades, Admiral.”
“It’s just James now,” he said quietly. “And no, I don’t want a commission in your Militia. All I want at this point is a quiet retirement and peace.”
“Peace is high on my own agenda,” Annette told him. “Why all of the cloak-and-dagger, James?”
“Because the leadership of the Weber Network has lost control and I don’t know who I can trust anymore,” Mandela explained, his voice sad and old. “There are five ex-Admirals who formed Alpha Cell, Annette.
“Each of us had a number of Bravo Cells we were in contact with, who linked down further. You know how a cell operation works—but Alpha Cell was in command.
“And all five of us knew you,” he concluded, admitting that he was one of the people in charge of the Weber Network. “We weren’t willing to back you, not in kneeling to our conquerors, but we were willing to give you a chance to prove whether or not you were a traitor.”
“That was all I expected,” Annette said with a nod. “I wanted you to come in and sign on, but I knew it wasn’t going to happen quickly.”
“Unfortunately, we forgot that a lot of our juniors hate your guts,” Mandela told her. “It also appears that a number of them had been creating quiet cross-communication channels between cells that weren’t supposed to know the others existed.”
“You had a mutiny.”
“We had a mutiny. They haven’t come out and challenged Alpha Cell yet, but the operations yesterday weren’t approved.
“Worse, we realized this morning that a number of our data archives have been corrupted—intentionally, we believe, but we haven’t been able to confirm yet.”
He sighed.
“We don’t want to show our hand yet, but we have reason to believe there may only be one copy left of the technological data we hid away—and I think I know where it is,” Mandela concluded heavily.
“We…made a mistake,” he said calmly.
“Which one?” Annette asked acidly. “Not working with me from the beginning? Not controlling your action teams?”
“Trusting one of our subordinates too thoroughly,” Mandela replied. “As your operations have expanded, the likelihood that some of the scientists and engineers we buried would be tempted to come out of the shadows rose.
“One of our Bravo Cell leaders suggested bringing as many of them together into a safe location as we could.”
“Let me guess: that cell leader is who you think is going rogue,” Annette guessed.
“Exactly. You’ve met Joseph Anderson, yes?” Mandela asked.
“Neither of us enjoyed the encounter, but I have, yes.”
“He was in charge of a secret facility, our final backup for the data archives and a hidden, fortified bunker for our covert communications network. We…agreed to move most of our civilian charges there.”
“So, Joseph Anderson, who utterly hates my guts, now has an unknown number of civilian hostages—whose skills the Duchy of Terra needs—plus possibly the only copy of the compressed-matter armor tech schematics? Is that about it?”
“Yes,” he sighed.
“What do you expect me to do about it?” she asked.
“Alpha Cell has agreed that this is a failure on our part and a violation of our oaths,” he said slowly. “We have agreed that I can provide you with the coordinates of the Weber Archive Facility.”
“Not good enough,” Annette snapped. “If I send in my people, it’s the ‘jackbooted thugs’ of the Imperium crushing the ‘noble resistance.’
“No, you need to step up, Admiral Mandela, and prove yourselves.”
“We don’t know who we can trust,” he reminded her.
“Do you really expect me
to believe that your Alpha Cell doesn’t have at least one triple-S company they hid away without telling the rest of the Network?” Annette asked dryly. “You have at least one strike force you can rely on.”
“The bunker is well defended. We can’t take it on our own.”
“I don’t need you to. I just need you to show me you actually give a damn about these people, Mandela.”
He sighed, looking across the water at the statue.
“It seemed so clear and easy when I agreed to this,” he admitted. “I never even thought the Weber Protocols would be activated, but even once they were, it was straightforward: the aliens who conquered Earth were the bad guys, we fought them as hard as we could while keeping civilian casualties down.
“Except the only reason we were actually keeping civilian casualties down was because the A!Tol were going out of their way to provide fantastic medical care to victims of our ‘collateral damage.’ And while we could write off a bunch as pragmatic attempts to buy submission, they really didn’t seem as bad as we’d thought they would be.
“And then you came back, claiming they were our best hope after all.”
He shook his head.
“I don’t know what’s the right thing anymore,” he concluded, “but I’m left with a choice between Annette Bond, who threw away her career to do the right damned thing; and Joseph Anderson, who I wouldn’t trust to watch my car.”
He handed her an old-fashioned UESF scroll communicator.
“Give me twelve hours to activate our team, then have Major Wellesley or whoever you put in charge of this use the contact in this.
“But promise you’ll get those people out, Your Grace.”
“I will do everything I can. I can’t promise success,” Annette warned, “only our best damned effort.”
#
Chapter 14
“We have a problem.”
Annette was keeping her entire Council in the loop on everything so far, treating them all as having “need to know,” so it wasn’t unacceptable for Li Chin Zhao to walk into the meeting room where she, Villeneuve, and Wellesley were going over plans for hitting the Weber Archive Facility.
Plus, the Chinese businessman and Party member had rapidly moved into the unofficial “inner circle” of her Council, the subset of her trusted Councilors she trusted completely.
“We have a few problems,” she pointed out as he joined them at the table. “Currently at the top of the list: extracting the archives and the hostages from Anderson’s without losing any of either.”
“Then I guess this is more of a complication to that problem,” Zhao told her. “I’ve had people quietly digging into what happened to Morgan Casimir since we met with Nova Industries.”
A chill ran down Annette’s spine.
“What did you find?”
“Everything proceeded according to the plan laid out in Elon’s will after the conquest. She was staying in a house in the Rocky Mountains, conveniently in an area with limited surveillance or overhead. She was being taken care of by a hired nanny and watched by a security team.
“Shortly after the announcement of your elevation, however, she was apparently scheduled to be moved off-world to a safe zone somewhere in the Sol system, likely to join her father.”
“Scheduled,” Annette echoed. “As in she didn’t.”
“Her car went missing on the way to the spaceport, along with two escort cars, her nanny, and twelve heavily armed bodyguards,” Zhao said flatly. “The security agency has been trying to find her since with no luck.”
“Where?” Annette demanded.
“They’re not sure exactly where they lost them, but their route passed within twenty kilometers of the location of the Archive.”
“So, in addition to the eighty-plus scientists and engineers and almost four hundred of their family members the Network says Anderson has in there, he likely has Morgan Casimir,” the Duchess of Earth said grimly.
“I’m sorry, Your Grace, but you had to know.”
“I did,” she agreed, looking back at the overhead imagery of the Archive they’d been reviewing. Morgan Casimir’s mother had died in childbirth—a freak accident that even the best modern medicine couldn’t stop in time. Annette had known the little girl from almost the moment of her birth.
“It doesn’t change anything,” she finally admitted, looking up to meet Wellesley’s gaze. “Freeing the hostages was already at the top of our priority list. That one of the hostages may be…personally important to me doesn’t change those priorities.”
“We can prioritize her,” Wellesley offered.
“How?” Annette snapped. “We don’t know where any of the hostages are being held, let alone Morgan. No, Major. We continue as planned—but we damned well get all of the hostages out, you hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
#
James waved Tellaki over to join him as the big reptilian alien entered his office.
“Come in, Troop Captain,” he ordered. “Have a seat.”
He didn’t have a lot of Rekiki subordinates, but Tellaki and his troopers had proven their worth and value again and again before the Duchess and Tornado had returned to Earth, which was why the big alien was in his office now.
“What do you need me for, Major?” the alien asked, the translator at his neck translated his soft, sibilant hissing into something James could understand.
“We’re going to be launching an operation in the next few hours that’s going to require me to take personal command,” James told him. “Most of the Guard will be deployed for a single strike.” He shook his head. “We’re still extremely short of personnel I trust enough to call Guardsmen.”
In truth, he hadn’t added a single member to the Ducal Guard since they’d returned. A few weeks wasn’t enough for him to be able to judge if he trusted anyone with the Duchess’s life—even the handful of other ex-SSS troopers who’d signed on.
“My brothers and I are ready to serve as needed,” Tellaki responded instantly. “Send us where the fighting is heaviest.”
“Unless something goes very wrong, I’m doing the exact opposite,” James admitted. “We’re going to go kick in a major Weber Network base and the last thing we need is video footage hitting the ’net of alien soldiers kicking down doors and taking human prisoners.”
The Rekiki looked at him with unreadable alien eyes and bowed his long neck in what James was pretty sure was a physical tic equivalent to a human sigh.
“I understand, Major Wellesley,” he conceded. “What would you have me do?”
“I’m leaving a small team of human bodyguards around Bond, but that’s purely for PR. With the number of Guardsmen I’m throwing into the breach here, security for the hotel and the Council is going to fall on my nonhuman Guards.
“You’re taking command of the Duchess’s immediate detail and general responsibility for the other details until this op is over,” James told him. At some point, he’d have to promote himself so he could promote his junior officers. Right now, everyone under him was a Troop Captain, with authority as required for a given mission.
It could get confusing.
“I’m putting Bond’s safety in your hands, Tellaki,” he told the alien. “Which isn’t something I’d have expected to be saying a year ago.”
“I appreciate the trust you are extending me,” Tellaki replied slowly.
“You can do the job, and I need a sentient I know can keep her safe while I take care of this mess.”
“These were your brothers-in-arms once,” the Rekiki said. “Won’t they be amenable to negotiation?”
“If they were going to negotiate, they’d have done that instead of blowing up recruiting offices,” James admitted. “No, I’m about to have to kill people I trained with. Possibly even people I trained myself.
“I made my choice. So did they.”
He’d regret it. He truly would—but they’d chosen the path of terror bombings and hostages.
#
With Bond’s immediate protection sorted, James pulled out the communicator she’d given him and turned it on.
It brought up the old UESF operating system, but none of the usual icons or processes were available. Just a contact list that only contained one contact.
He activated it.
“Una salus victus,” a voice replied after a few moments’ ringing.
“Nullam sperare salutem,” James completed the Latin phrase. “Who dares wins, and Manchester United for the Cup.”
The only hope for the doomed is to hope for no safety. In the mind of the Special Space Service, their goal was victory and the protection of the innocents they were sent out to save, not their own survival.
“Who dares wins,” of course, was the motto of the Special Air Service, many of whose traditions the SSS had inherited.
“Of course you’d be a Man United fan,” the other voice complained. “I back Madrid, myself.”
“I’m a year out of date on who’s playing for who,” James noted. “Got to fall back on the old standbys. This is…?”
“Alpha Commander,” the other man said simply. “Which is bullshit, ’cause you’ll recognize me the moment we meet, but my orders come from what little damned structure is left of the UESF.”
“And mine come from the Duchess,” James told him. “Is that going to be a problem?”
Alpha Commander sighed.
“Bond would recognize me even faster than you will,” he complained. “So, no, it won’t be a problem. Can’t say I was planning on throwing in with her just yet, but…”
“When people start locking up kids and blowing up recruits, the pattern starts looking familiar,” James said. The SSS hadn’t dealt with too much of that itself, but too many of the organizations its history linked to had.
“And then a man has no choice,” Alpha agreed. “You have the coordinates?”
“I do. Do your people need a ride?”
“Major, Major, Major,” the other SSS officer chuckled, “the odds are that the Network is done, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I just handed you the locations of any of our other bases.”
Duchess of Terra (Duchy of Terra Book 2) Page 10
