Ghost War

by Michael A. Stackpole

  Second, and more importantly, Reis’ responsibilities had been expanded more broadly. The southern continent of Joppa wasn’t still under martial law, but all news suggested a “state of emergency” existed. Most civil rights had been returned and, not surprisingly, public opinion agreed to surrender little bits of them so they could feel safe. A number of events that I thought of as benign were canceled. That worried me, because Reis was just the sort to grab for as much authority as he could and would surrender it very slowly.

  The only heartening news out of Helen was that there had been no more attacks. That was something. Given that The Republic was slowly coming apart at the seams, peace couldn’t be overrated, but the lack of resolution for the whole situation left me uneasy.

  We solved the problem of the security folks by letting them know that I was Mason Dunne, Republic functionary whom Lady Lakewood knew. After I had first been brought into Overton, she recognized me and quickly recruited me to investigate the GGF. Since, as our story went, I’d been there investigating the lumber industry, I was already a trained investigator, so the shift was not wholly implausible. The two of them accepted the tale, which is not the same as believing it, but they didn’t push the story so the cracks would become too obvious.

  By the time we arrived at Terra our reports had been completed and we sent them on ahead of our arrival. Janella looked for incoming information about another assignment, but we got nothing more than hearty thanks and assurances that once we were planetside we’d have plenty to do. We were urged to relax, which isn’t easy to do on a small DropShip with nothing but survival rations, recycled water and bunks that make curbstones both broad and soft by comparison.

  It’s also tough to relax when returning to Terra. It’s weird because I was born elsewhere and was close to being an adult when I made my first journey there. Terra is the cradle of humanity—everyone knows that, no matter how far away their world is located. Men have lived, thrived and prospered on worlds that are incredibly diverse, but we were only bred to survive on one: Terra. Until you arrive there, you don’t how special a world it is.

  I watched the white-streaked blue ball grow larger through view ports and couldn’t help smiling as we went into a braking orbit, then began our descent. I really did feel like I was arriving home, and it was because of more than my residence being there. The air smelled sweeter, the trees looked natural to the eye, the water tasted better and the animals had subtle little aspects from our shared evolution that meant they didn’t feel alien even though I’d not seen them before.

  The pilot brought Valiant down as smooth as Janella’s cheek and rolled us up to the main Republic spaceport terminal in Albuquerque. By the time he cracked the hatches and the loading ramps had slid down, a shuttle arrived to gather the four of us and run us across the terminal to the maglev lightning train. Janella and I took the rear compartment of the single car while Jack and Jill went forward and strapped in. The train headed north, and fifteen minutes later we were in Santa Fe, at the Knights’ Hall.

  The fact that we landed in Albuquerque didn’t surprise me, but once again suggested things were worse than I’d ever let myself imagine. The Republic had facilities all over the planet and most often I used the Knights’ Hall in Zurich as my base of operations. The Santa Fe facility had everything needed to deal with knightly affairs, but moving the martial part of the Knights out of Zurich meant a decentralization which suggested The Republic wanted to make its key personnel hard to hit.

  In Santa Fe we were met by three individuals. The first paid great deference to Janella and conducted her off to the rooms that had been prepared for her. A military officer took her bodyguards off, while a clerk was there for me. He was a skinny kid with big eyes and a goofy grin that made me think of him as the younger brother I never had.

  “I was sent to get you, Mr. Dunne. This way, please.”

  His emphasis on my name made me suspect something was going on, but he didn’t feel inclined to let me know what it was. I shrugged, then worked my shoulders around to loosen them up. I followed him through the twists and turns of the sprawling complex. Its corridors featured golden wood walls and large windows that looked out over the countryside. The facility had been constructed to run with the natural landscape and blend with it, so it shot amoeboid pseudopods around hills and down into valleys linking various buildings.

  He was taking me off to one of the newer wings. I knew the chambers there were not as sumptuous as the ones Janella would be given, but blue blood hath its privileges. I did recall, rather fondly, the huge bathtub she had last time we were here and decided I was willing to settle for one half that size in my room.

  The clerk brought me to my door and handed me a passkey. Without so much as an “I’ll get your luggage,” he turned on his heel and left. I caught the strains of some tune being hummed, which again struck me as odd, but taking odd as it comes is part of my job.

  I opened the door and had to smile. I glanced quickly down the hallway to see if I could spot the clerk, but the last of him vanished around a corner. I think he’d been watching for my reaction and, given the job he’d done, I hope he caught it.

  The rooms I’d been given matched my Zurich apartment down to everything but the small triangle of dust on the bottom shelf beside the fireplace. The furnishings looked identical, and the dark green of the living room walls contrasted perfectly with the dark wood of the shelving. I couldn’t tell if the framed holograph over the fireplace was a copy or my original, or if the keepsakes on the shelves and mantel had been duplicated or transported, but all of them were right where I’d last seen them.

  Without looking right, toward the bedroom door, or left to the kitchen, I knew everything would be perfect. That someone had gone to all that trouble meant a lot. I knew I’d have to find that clerk and thank him. In fact, I was tempted to run down the passage and find him, but one anomalous detail stopped me.

  I dropped to one knee and bowed my head. “My lord, I am at your service.”

  The man sitting in the chair beside the fireplace lifted a cut glass half full of amber liquid. “And I am at yours. You’ve always had good taste in whisky. Get up off your knee, boy. I’d rise to greet you, but I like where I am right now.”

  I rose as commanded and couldn’t help but smile. Victor Steiner-Davion wasn’t a big man—in fact, he was quite small, but the force of his personality filled the room. When my gaze met his steady gray eyes I could see life burning fiercely in them. His white hair and beard were trimmed and the hand holding the glass was rock steady. He looked much as I remembered him—as I had always seen him.

  Then I noticed the cane beside the chair. He’d used it after having his right hip replaced several years earlier. He’d worked hard at rehab and had given the cane up in time for his hundredth birthday, so going back to it wasn’t a good sign. I noticed the slight sag of his shoulders and the deepening of the lines around his eyes.

  He was beginning to look his age.

  Victor Steiner-Davion is someone people either love or hate, and many love to hate him. Right before I went off on the Helen assignment, I read Gus Michaels’ biography of him, Victor Ian Steiner-Davion: A Life. The book was pretty good and painted a strong picture of the man who was born to the throne of the most powerful of the Successor States and had it all crumble around him. Attacked from without by the Clans, betrayed by his family, he watched the nation his father had built through war and alliances just erode. He survived the murder of his first and greatest lover, Omi Kurita, the death of his son, Burton, and the death of his second love, Isis Marik.

  I’d first met him shortly after her passing, while I was still pretty much a kid, but I had no clue about the weight of tragedy on his shoulders. I knew who he was, of course; I mean, I knew the name. To me he was just an old geezer, and it wasn’t until he fished an old coin from his pocket and let me examine its profile and his that I believed. He’d still been strong then and, until I saw him now, I’d thought he would conti
nue on forever.

  He nodded to the chair on the other side of the fireplace. Another tumbler of whisky waited there on a side table. “Please, make yourself at home.”

  I smiled at the joke, and he smiled too, which made me feel better. I sat and raised the glass. “To your health.”

  “What of it there is left.” We drank, then he leaned heavily on the leather chair’s arm. “I’m a sight, I know it. You cover it no better than anyone else. They all think I’m going to flop down dead at any moment. I won’t, I promise you.”

  “I’d like you to keep that promise, my lord.”

  “I will.” His eyes twinkled. “I read your report on the Helen situation. Why is it you feel compelled to make your reports read like potboilers?”

  I blushed. “All that dry ‘the subject did this and that’ is boring. It doesn’t get across what I experience out there. I get sent out to infiltrate and work from within, and that’s not clinical or surgical. It’s messy. I’m pretty sure Hector and Pep are feeling bad about trusting me.”

  “You’re probably correct.” He sighed. “I excised the last bit from the report before I sent it to Zurich. Once you left CDRF custody your report ends.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  Victor sipped a bit more of the Irish whisky, smiled, then regarded me again. “I know you well enough to know you don’t like how the Helen situation resolved itself. I refused Lady Lakewood’s first few entreaties to bring you back, but I need you here, for as long as I can have you. You were being wasted on Helen.

  “I don’t know how much Janella was able to tell you, since there are things we didn’t know when we sent her out, and there is a lot of intelligence we’re not broadcasting in any way. It would be devastating. The damage that could be done by panic alone would be irreparable. We actually think that’s what the enemy wants.”

  I nodded. “No clue as to who it is?”

  “Unfortunately, no. One of the leading theories is it’s the Word of Blake trying to strike again, but Stone pretty much wiped them out. We know there are a few pockets in what was the Free Worlds League, but those who’ve taken Blakism to heart won’t cause much trouble for a while. They’ve devolved their own societies so they’re barely above the Stone Age. They’re searching for a new form of technology that will be liberating and uplifting, but they spend most of their time fighting disease and insects that devour their crops.”

  I drank a bit and let the whisky slowly trickle fire down my throat. “If not them, then who? The peace was good for everyone. I do know that the Capellan Confederation’s leader always spouts revolutionary rhetoric, but he’s been all growl and no fang.”

  Victor’s eyes hardened. “Daoshen Liao is not someone to be underestimated at any cost. He is undoubtedly smarter than his father was, is tainted by his aunt’s madness, and negotiated a settlement with Stone that allowed him to preserve his dignity and an illusion of power. The problem is that Daoshen is very much an illusionist and has done much over the last twenty years to create this aura of invincibility. Reports from the CapCon are very rare, but it looks as if the grid’s collapse has given him a chance to crack down on enemies and tighten his grip on power.”

  The old man shook his head. “That being said, however, none of the Successor States, to our knowledge, possessed the troops and ships needed to stage the raids that took the grid down. Worse yet, having hit, they have pulled back. I think they anticipated old hatreds coming to the fore again, and are willing to let us tear ourselves apart, so they can just sweep in and take over.”

  I set my glass down as my guts knotted up. “Then what I saw on Helen was pretty mild?”

  “Like a match to a supernova, Mason.” Victor tossed off the last of his whisky. “The Inner Sphere is smoldering and unless we can put out the hot spots right now, it will reach a flashpoint and everything will be lost.”

  13

  It is to be all made of faith and service . . .

  It is to be all made of fantasy.

  —Shakespeare

  Knights’ Hall, Santa Fe

  North America, Terra

  Prefecture X, Republic of the Sphere

  8 December 3132

  I got up from my chair and found the whisky bottle where I normally kept it, then returned and refilled his glass.

  He smiled up at me. “My doctors would tell me this isn’t good for me, but I’ve outlived a number of them. My cousin Morgan used to take a dram of scotch before he’d go to sleep.”

  I glanced at my chronometer. “It’s not quite that late, my lord.”

  “I’ve not been sleeping much anyway.” He sighed heavily and I could see the weight of events settle on him. I had no doubt that dealing with the communication grid’s collapse had exhausted everyone, but Victor appeared to be wearied by it. In his lifetime he had seen what had been believed to be an endless cycle of war and peace, then the cycle was broken. Stone’s reformation ushered in an unparalleled era of peace and it might well have appeared to him that, unlike his peers, he might die peacefully.

  Weary though he may have been, Victor Steiner-Davion possessed a keen intellect and hunger for knowledge. Michaels, in his biography, suggested that Victor’s greatest strength had been his ability to learn. When responsibility was thrust upon him he had been trained to be a soldier, but he managed to learn to be a politician and a ruler and a diplomat. His enemies never recognized that, given enough time, he would learn enough to be able to defeat them; yet he had done so time and time again.

  He sat me down and began to ask me many questions about my time on Helen. While the whole problem of who had been behind Handy and why did dominate the conversation, he also zeroed in on how the people were dealing with the stresses tearing at The Republic. “Do you think, Mason, were power brokers to leave things alone, that the people would be content to do so as well?”

  I had to think about that for a moment or two, and took the time to refill my glass as I did so. Setting the bottle down, I turned my back to the small bar and leaned there, watching him. “Well, my lord, the common folks are concerned about keeping a roof over their heads, food in their bellies and some basic creature comforts. As long as they don’t have any evidence that someone else is trying to do them out of something they think they’ve earned, they tend to make do. When it appears they’re losing something they’ve been counting on, or that has been promised to them, that’s when they grumble and protest. The crew I worked with was happy with hard work, good beer, Tri-Vid fights and fun. When PADSU started to threaten those things, they began to react.

  “It’s the way it is with dogs, I think. A dog’s head comes up and his hackles rise before he growls. And he growls before he snarls and snarls before he bites. Without someone agitating out there, we’re at hackle stage. Get folks stirred up and you have growls and snarls.”

  Victor accepted that and we spoke more about what I’d heard concerning power factions in Prefecture III which, on a world like Helen, was less than might have been hoped. Katana Tormark’s resignation as the military leader of the Prefecture had caused a stir, but most folks liked her replacement, Tara Campbell of Northwind. I’d seen no evidence of anyone like Tormark or Jacob Bannson trying to curry favor or garner power though, as Victor aptly pointed out, either could have been Handy’s paymaster.

  “If I’d thought it was Bannson, I would have asked for more money. He can afford it.”

  Victor smiled at that remark, then bade me accompany him back to his chambers in the Hall. I offered him my arm, not because he needed it, but out of friendship, and he accepted it. We walked along slowly and he leaned both on my arm and the cane, though not as heavily as I might have expected.

  We reached his chambers easily enough and discovered a dinner already waiting for us. The old man had glanced up at me with a twinkle in his eyes. “I know how you detest DropShip rations and, unfortunately, your Lady Lakewood will be dining with Consuela Dagmar and my granddaughter, Nessa, as she is debriefed on the situation on Helen.
I hope you do not mind my ambushing you this way.”

  “My lord, I am honored.”

  “But if I had invited you, you would have begged off.”

  “Only to see what had been stocked in the storage unit in my chambers.”

  Victor laughed. “It was all the food you had in Zurich, still frozen.”

  “Ugh.”

  “Well, I never go into battle without a reserve, and knowing it would be inedible was another inducement for you to join me.”

  “Again, my lord, I am honored.” As I was bidden, I sat at his right hand and we ate happily. At least, I know I was happy. I assumed, based on his smiles and laughter, that he enjoyed things as well.

  While there is quite a bit of interaction between Knights of various ranks, and friendships do grow and fade, the kindly interest Victor had taken in me was a bit out of the ordinary. I’m not certain why it was that he took me under his wing, for he recruited me, engineered my education, and guided me to my present role as a Ghost Knight.

  Janella has advanced two theories, each of which supports the other. The first is that Victor had lost his son, Burton, and then Isis Marik in relatively short order. The burden of his own mortality had to be upon him, for Kai Allard-Liao and Hohiro Kurita, both powerful contemporaries and close friends, had since passed, leaving him very much alone. Janella thought, in learning about me, Victor had found someone who could be shaped into one more good thing he had done for the universe. I became his hobby.

  The problem with that idea was simply that Victor really had no time for hobbies. His duties as a Paladin kept him very busy. His stature within the Inner Sphere meant that he could intervene in situations and calm them almost by just showing up. In his years he had learned so much about what motivated people that he could pick out their weaknesses and desires, then play one off against the other to resolve difficulties.

  Her second theory was that I reminded him of someone he’d known. We both rejected the idea that I reminded him of himself, since our backgrounds and natures were completely different. From time to time we searched for candidates who would fill the bill, and found the search fruitless until Janella heard a story about Phelan Kell and his being expelled from the Nagelring on Tharkad. What he’d done to get kicked out was similar to what I’d done to earn Victor’s attention—though Phelan was dealing with ice and I was dealing with fire.