by David Weber
* * *
It had been a pleasant enough dinner, Gensonne decided as he gazed at the tactical display, watching as his shuttle made its way back across the wavering gray and black of hyper space.
Even taking into account the company.
“Rhamas seems a pleasant enough sort,” Captain Sweeney Imbar, Odin’s commander, commented from behind Gensonne. “He’s had an interesting life, at least, if his stories are to be believed.”
“I doubt that,” Gensonne said. “Llyn probably made them up for him to tell.”
“Maybe,” Imbar said. “Still pretty entertaining. I wonder how the two of them hooked up.”
“Probably over money,” Gensonne said. “I noticed Rhamas’s stories were pretty vague about who he was working for during any of them. I’m guessing he and his crew are just hirelings Axelrod got to fly Llyn’s ship for him.”
“And to run the weapons?” Imbar asked. “You did notice that the damn thing’s armed, right?”
Gensonne glared at him. Like he would miss something like that. “Not going to be a problem,” he assured the other. “As long as we keep him close he can’t target us. Besides, he’s not stupid enough to pull anything with the rest of the fleet all around him.”
“Yeah, hopefully,” Imbar said with a grunt. “I noticed he wasn’t talking very much at dinner. You think the food disagreed with him?”
“Probably still trying to figure out how mad we are at him for his cooked intel numbers.”
“Or maybe wondering how you figured out he was working for Axelrod?”
“Well, he can just keep wondering,” Gensonne said. “He’s kept plenty of secrets from us. We can keep a couple from him.”
“Seems fair.” Imbar was silent a moment. “I went back and looked at his last intel report before we headed off to Manticore. He never actually lied about anything.”
“There are lies, damned lies, and statistics,” Gensonne quoted the old saying. “Whether he lied or not, he sure as hell manipulated the truth.”
“Arguable,” Imbar said. “But I’ve been thinking. If he was right about those other two battlecruisers being unarmed—”
“Then what?” Gensonne cut him off. “We were fools to retreat?”
“No, no, not at all,” Imbar said hastily. “Under the circumstances, retreat was the only reasonable move. What I’m saying is that if they were unarmed then, they can’t be more than partially armed now. Especially since Manticore probably has to send to Haven or the League for more missiles.”
Gensonne scratched his cheek. That was a damn good point. And if Manticore really did have to send all the way back to the League—“You’re saying we could go back right now and take them down?”
“Probably,” Imbar said. “Though now that we’re on the road to Danak, we might as well stock up on Llyn’s new missiles first.”
“True,” Gensonne said. “A shame, though, if you’re right. Seems kind of a waste to spend a perfectly good Hellflare missile on an empty shell of a ship.”
“We don’t have to start with a Hellflare,” Imbar pointed out. “We could use a regular missile first, and if their point defenses take it out then we use a Hellflare.”
“We could,” Gensonne agreed. “Too bad the countermeasure window is so short. I’d love to be on the com with Locatelli when the missile cuts straight through his defenses. See his face as he realizes he’s about to die.”
“We could target the rest of his force first,” Imbar suggested. “That way you could at least watch his face while we take out each of his ships with a single missile.”
“That might work,” Gensonne agreed, nodding slowly. “In fact, that’s an excellent idea. If we take out enough of his screening ships, he may surrender fast enough for us to take his battlecruiser intact.”
“Oh, wouldn’t that be nice,” Imbar murmured. “And if we scare the King enough that he surrenders the whole planet before we have to destroy those other battlecruisers, we could double the size of our fleet.”
“Exactly,” Gensonne said.
Of course, after that would be small matters of arming, repairing, and crewing their captured ships. But Llyn’s final payment would go a long way toward funding all of that.
And with top-of-the-line Hellflares in the launchers, Emperor Gustav would be in for a very rude awakening.
“There,” Imbar said, pointing to the display. “Shuttle’s heading back.”
Gensonne focused again on the tactical. The shuttle was indeed returning, having dropped off Llyn and Captain Rhamas at their ship.
Together with a small device the shuttle’s crew had left implanted on Banshee’s hull while its passengers were disembarking.
Llyn had promised that he would stay with Gensonne’s force all the way to Danak. Gensonne was pretty sure neither of them believed Llyn would keep that promise past the point where unexpected trouble began.
Or perhaps the trouble wouldn’t be unexpected at all. Perhaps Llyn was once again playing with half his cards under the table. Maybe the missiles weren’t really Llyn’s property, like the little man claimed, but were earmarked for someone else. That actually made more sense than Axelrod simply buying them to give away to the Volsungs. Maybe a week out from the system, when it was too late to turn back, Llyn would apologetically mention the truth and explain that Gensonne would have to take them away from their proper owners by force.
At which point, Llyn would probably try to slink out of the battle zone before things got hot, just as he’d managed to avoid the whole Manticore incursion.
If he really wanted to get away, there was probably nothing Gensonne could do to stop him. What he could do was make sure that Llyn’s escape was a very brief victory.
His uni-link pinged, signaling a relay through Odin’s com system, and he held it up. The message was brief: Reset Spoilsport? Y/N
He smiled. Y, he confirmed.
Spoilsport reset. Timer: 12 hours.
The timer started its countdown. Gensonne watched for a couple of seconds, then returned the program to the uni-link’s background. From now on, every twelve hours from here to Danak, he would get that same prompt. If Spoilsport didn’t get the proper reset code within an hour after the count ran to zero, the device would assume that none of Gensonne’s ships were in relay range and act accordingly.
A starship was an amazingly sturdy thing. But even a ship as modern and sturdy as Llyn’s couldn’t survive a half kiloton blast going off right against its hull.
“So he’s ours now?” Imbar asked.
“Yes,” Gensonne said, his smile turning grim. Finally, finally, he had that little worm exactly where he wanted him. “He’s ours.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The Palace, Elizabeth’s father Michael had once warned her, was both the safest and the least safe place she could ever be.
The safest, because the Queen’s Own were always standing watch around her. The least safe, because there was nothing she could do, and no person she could meet, without a good chance that someone else would know about it.
Most of those someone else’s were of the Palace Guard and the Queen’s Own, all of whom she should be able to trust. But even people who had pledged their loyalty and their lives to the Monarch could slip, or accidently say the wrong word, or possibly even be bribed or blackmailed.
But there were ways to lessen that danger. One was to hold any such secret rendezvous in the Royal Sanctum, which was as isolated from the rest of the Palace activities as it was possible to be. The other was to leave the arrangements to someone of proven competence and discretion.
Elizabeth had paced the Sanctum four times by the time Adler finally slipped in through the Queen’s private entrance. “Your Majesty,” the bodyguard greeted her sovereign. “My apologies—there was a small holdup outside the garage entrance.”
“That’s all right,” Elizabeth assured her. But her main attention was on the figure in the shadows. “You weren’t seen, were you?”
�
��She’s very good at her job, Your Majesty,” Joshua Miller assured her, stepping into the room. “There may have been an alley cat or two who spotted us, but no one else.”
“Good,” Elizabeth said, breathing a little easier. If word of these clandestine meetings got out… “Thank you, Adler. You may wait outside.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” Adler said, bowing again. She shot a speculative look at Miller, and then backed out of the room.
The door closed behind her, and Miller grinned. “She has no idea, does she?”
“Oh, I’m sure she knows exactly what’s going on,” Elizabeth said, wrinkling her nose. “Hard to keep secrets from your bodyguard. I just hope she knows enough of it to sit on the rest of the guards and keep them from asking questions.”
“She will,” Miller said firmly. “I’ve known people like her. She’ll follow your orders to the letter and to the spirit, with no room anywhere for personal interpretation. And she’ll trust that you know what you’re doing.”
“I hope you’re right,” Elizabeth said, crossing to the couch and motioning for Miller to sit. “On both counts. As it is, it’s clear that Breakwater and his faction already have some suspicions.”
“Yes, thanks to you,” Miller said, a bit ruefully. “I could feel the tension in the Lords all the way over in the Commons. How did you know that announcing I would make a speech would trigger that much reaction?”
“It was really just a guess,” Elizabeth said. “A test run, if you will. In retrospect, though, it makes perfect sense. Breakwater’s always known way more than he should, even when you add up all the cronies and information sources he has. And this little stunt has clinched it.”
“He knows about Burgundy’s list,” Miller said soberly. “Which leads to the question of whether he knows what the list is.”
“I don’t know,” Elizabeth said. “But he does seem to know all seven names. I had Colonel Jackson watch com and uni-link traffic when I invited Placido Amadeo over for dinner this evening.”
“And Breakwater’s links went ballistic?”
“Nothing so obvious,” Elizabeth said, shaking her head. “But Jackson says he definitely took notice.”
“More notice than a Queen entertaining a prominent shipbuilding industrialist should have garnered, I gather?”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “I’m sure your movements are being watched, too.”
“Well, if he wants to electronically look over my shoulder while I relax with couple of classic vids at home tonight, he can be my guest,” Miller said.
“I hope they’re at least movies you like.”
“Of course. As I said: classics.”
“Good.” Elizabeth took a deep breath. “Well. Shall we get started?”
* * *
“Ready?” Chomps’s voice came softly through Travis’s earpiece.
Travis clenched his teeth. “Ready,” he said. Hardly, he thought.
And the evening had begun so well.
Mostly, anyway. He and Chomps had scouted the Volsung Mercenary office building, they’d confirmed that the known members of staff were either in their rooms in the apartment building next door or out bar-hopping, and Chomps had arranged somehow to have the local police presence harmlessly diverted elsewhere. As far as everyone on Casey was concerned—aside from Clegg and the senior officers, of course—the two of them had simply escorted Hauptman down to the surface for yet another sales pitch, so that part was covered.
Then had come the gearing-up. Chomps had equipped himself for the break-in with a handgun and a pair of big, nasty-looking knives, a rappel line setup, and something to bypass the office alarm system. They’d gotten across the city and successfully made it up to the roof without being detected.
The second-floor window into the Volsungs’ isolated section of their office building was well protected by dual alarm systems, but Chomps was well versed in the arts of hacking, jacking, and cracking. While Travis played lookout on the other side of the rooftop, watching the building’s street entrance, Chomps tackled the window. Despite the fact that the task felt to Travis like it took at least an hour, Chomps in fact had the alarms neutralized inside of three minutes.
And then, the whole thing had gone sideways.
Somehow, their earlier reconnaissance had failed to detect that the damn window was too small for Chomps’s Sphinxian bulk to fit through.
Which had left them with only one option.
“Okay,” Chomps said. “When I whistle, I expect you to break the all-Telmach rooftop racing record.”
“You sure I can’t just come back there, get your gear, and then we change places?”
“You want to leave either side of the building unwatched that long?” Chomps countered. “Come on, you’ll be fine. The rappel line is set, and you know how to get into the harness. You did remember to grab your gun and knives, right?”
“Of course,” Travis said.
Though that had been another sticking point. Chomps was a whiz-bang cat burglar and crack pistol shot. Travis was neither. Even more critical—at least to Travis—was the question of whether official members of the Star Kingdom of Manticore ought to be running around a foreign planet with lethal weapons in the first place.
Chomps had conceded the theoretical point—sort of—but reminded Travis that they were dealing with vicious men who absolutely wouldn’t give a second thought to carrying and using lethal weapons themselves. Travis had conceded that point in turn, and the guns and knives had gone into their packs.
“Relax, Travis,” Chomps soothed. “Trust me, this is the easy part.”
Travis made a face. “Yeah. Right.”
“Or think of it as the end part,” Chomps offered. “Our final scene before we hand the whole thing off to someone else. Is that better?”
“Sure,” Travis said.
Only it wasn’t. And both of them knew it.
Still, he had to admit that he’d never expected them to get even this far.
The first part of the journey had been sheer leg- and data-work. They’d dug up the ground and found Gensonne’s footprints in the sand. They’d tracked his materiel, his men, and his money. They’d visited, hacked, cajoled, and cross-examined dozens of men and women, none of whom had the slightest idea that they were even being interrogated, let alone what the puzzle was they were supplying pieces to. And after only two months in the Silesian Confederacy, they had successfully tracked Manticore’s attacker to his lair.
Almost.
Because while the Volsung Mercenaries’ headquarters might be here on Telmach, their ships were nowhere to be seen. Nor were there any indications in the official records of mysterious comings and goings that might indicate a quiet base somewhere within the system but beyond the hyper limit.
No, Gensonne had another base somewhere. Somewhere nearby, presumably, but another base nevertheless.
Tonight, if they were lucky, he and Chomps would get the last piece they needed to find it.
“One more minute to pop the window latch and you’ll be set,” Chomps said. “And I mean that about breaking the speed record.”
“Don’t worry,” Travis said. “I’ll be there before you’re here.”
Chomps grunted, and the earpiece fell silent. Staring down at the light traffic passing by on the street five stories below, Travis counted out the seconds…
“Got it. Go.”
“Right.” Giving the street one last check, Travis turned from the edge and headed toward the rear of the building in a crouched-over jog.
He reached Chomps’s side of the building just as his partner came up from below. The Sphinxian rolled over onto the roof and stripped off his harness, and was halfway to the street side by the time Travis had the harness on and headed down on the motorized rappel line. By the time he reached the Volsungs’ window, he knew, Chomps would be on guard duty above him.
He only hoped that no one had entered the building and office during the thirty seconds they’d left the street unwatched.
Firmly, he put that thought out of his mind. It was one thing to practice killing another human being in close-order combat. It was, he suspected, something else entirely to actually look into another person’s eyes while pulling a trigger.
He really didn’t want to find out for sure how different that experience would be.
The rappel line was small and compact, lowering him on a slender line that didn’t look strong enough to support a child’s weight. It also worked perfectly, depositing him neatly outside the second-story window Chomps had opened.
He slipped inside and unhooked his harness from the line. The room he was in seemed to be a sort of crash area, with a pair of cots on opposite sides of the room and a small table in the middle. Fortunately, no one was taking advantage of the area for a nap. Unfortunately, there were no computers, tablets, or file cabinets that might hold the data they were looking for. Keying his light-amp lenses up a notch, keeping one hand on his holstered sidearm, he crossed to the door and slipped out into the corridor.
The building was a relatively small one, and there were only three other doors between Travis and the stairs. He paused outside each as he passed, confirming with his audio enhancer that there were no signs of activity behind any of them. He reached the stairs and headed cautiously down.
The stairway let him out into a large office which, according to the blueprints Chomps had dug out, was the main Volsung Mercenaries conference room. It looked the part, too, with a long table surrounded by a dozen chairs in the center. The main office would be next door, with another door leading out to a reception office which would normally be the first place visitors would see. Hopefully, one of those places would have what he needed.
The door into the office was unlocked. Travis opened it carefully, alert for trouble. Once again, the room was empty. He passed between a pair of large, long cupboards of some sort, with surfaces textured to look like rock outcroppings and sporting planters full of exotic-looking ferns on their tops, and headed toward the glass-and-hardwood desk in the center of the room. There were a couple of guest chairs, a few hand-painted pictures of warships on the opposite wall—
