“I’d agree, General. Except for this.” The sergeant straddled the scorpion’s flipper, reached down with both hands, and lifted it like a soggy log.
Tangled around the flipper leg’s middle segment was something like kinked thread. I bent, looked closer, and a shiver shot up my spine. The thread was copper field telephone wire. From a small noose twisted into the wire’s end dangled a dripping, fleshy mass. It was bright yellow.
TWENTY-SEVEN
THE NEXT DAY, Aud and I sat on the rear-facing personnel bench of a Tressen crawler bound away from the Barrens, leaning with our forearms on the crawler’s iron tailgate. Jude rode behind us.
Aud stared back at the crawler lurching along behind us, which served as the hearse bearing Sergeant Major Erdec home. “Erdec trained me, you know. I was younger than Jude is when I first made the sergeant major’s acquaintance.”
I nodded. “I made Ord’s acquaintance the same way. Nobody forgets their Drill Sergeant.”
Aud stretched a thin smile, then frowned. “What do I do now, Jason?”
“Find out who did it?”
He shook his head. “Separatist infiltrators, almost certainly. But it doesn’t matter. I can counterattack an army that attacks me. But this? I can’t make war on smoke.”
“Clausewitz said war is politics continued by other means. Make politics your war, continued by other means.”
“Me? A warlord?”
I shook my head. “Nobody said form a banana republic.”
My translator stumbled over “banana,” as I realized that people like Aud don’t resort to politics just because people tell them to. They go there only if their inner compass turns to point them there. My advice wouldn’t make Aud’s compass twitch, but Erdec’s death might.
Aud turned to Jude, and touched his shoulder with his bandaged hand. “I owe you my life.”
Jude shrugged. “You owe me nothing. I just reacted.” He leaned forward on his elbows. “But Jason’s right, sir. About politics. You have a chance to change this world for the better. You may not trust people, General, but people trust you. I barely know you, but already I trust you.”
In Jude’s life he had known plenty of admirable people who inspired trust, not least his mother. But I suppose heroes are easier to see minus the fog of familiarity. There was light in Jude’s eyes, like I hadn’t seen in too long.
The rest of the crawler ride was just another week in mechanized-infantry paradise. We threw a track in the midday heat. The crawler in front of us, which mounted a forward-facing cannon, lurched into a narrow stream bed, and stuck its gun tube in the opposite bank. The lead vehicle took a wrong turn. The trail vehicle took a wrong turn, and we had to double back, chain it up, and drag it out of a mudhole. Everything was sharp-edged iron and oily. Unless it was muddy. Either way, as you lurched along, what didn’t cut Îk, you bruised you.
But every time we hit a snag, Jude was out in front of the problem, pulling, hauling, leading, joking with the tankers, and with Aud.
We reentered the capital after sunset. The street lamps were dark, but the crawlers were able to steer by the light of fires mobs had set in the streets. By the time the convoy dropped us off at the Consulate, I was never so glad for the opportunity to flop on a camp bed in a sandbagged cellar masquerading as Bachelor Officers’ Quarters.
Q-tip, the consul, met us in the foyer, wearing his flak jacket and pajama bottoms. “The city’s going to hell out there. Worse in Iridia. The only person people aren’t mad at is your friend Planck. The assassination attempt’s made him Elvis. Immortality’s a draw these days.”
A half hour later, Jude lay on the bunk next to me, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling beams. “That was fun, wasn’t it, Jason? Not what happened to Erdec. Not the riots. The rest of it.”
“No, it wasn’t fun. Getting paid to drive a flying saucer is fun.”
“I can’t make a difference doing that.” I smiled in the lamplight. Jude’s gifts made him look like Superman to us mere mortals, but in the mirror he saw someone who wasn’t making a difference.
Jude said, “Planck is going to change this world for the better.”
“He’s decided to go into politics? How do you know?”
“He told me. That day when I rode up front with him. He says he needs people around him who aren’t burdened by old allegiances. Jason, this is a frontier.”
“You’re saying you want to stay here?”
“The only thing back home for me is Mom.”
“That’s a big thing.”
“It is. But so is changing the world.” Jude rolled onto one elbow, and blew out the oil lantern on the low table that separated us.
I lay awake, staring up into the dark for a long time, smiling, but at the same time my heart swelled in my chest like a stone.
The next day, Ord and I took our morning run along the bank of the canal that wound through the capital. Every minute or so, a distant rifle shot echoed off the stone apartment walls that rose on both sides of us. Ord had borrowed Plastek flak vests and steel toed boots for us. That made things as uncomfortable as practicable for me, which had been Ord’s mission in life since he was my drill sergeant in infantry basic.
As we ran, I scanned the shrapnel-scarred rooftops of the riverside tenements for snipers. “You really think this is a good idea, Sergeant Major?”
“During the seige of Kabul, our Platoon softball team was two and six without flak vests, undefeated with.”
I looked over at him, his eyes twinkled, and he shook his head. “I checked with the Consul, sir. He jogs this route every day. No problems.”
“You thiÓze=chenk if Planck went into politics he could reverse this mess, the way we reversed the Second Afghan?”
“The general’s an aggressive commander. He wouldn’t be afraid to change things.”
“Jude seems to think change is what this place needs.”
“Of course he does, sir. If a man is twenty and not a liberal, he has no heart. If he’s forty and not a conservative, he has no brain.”
I said, “Planck’s offered Jude a position on his personal staff.”
We slowed to a walk, the cobblestone path to our front wiped out by a shell crater. The crater made a half-bowl filled in by the river.
Ord said, “If the general will permit me a personal observation that will be hard on Congresswoman Metzger.”
“It will be hard on me. I thought I had lost Jude on Bren. I was just getting him back again. Now this.”
On the canal, a canopied barge chugged by. Its wake pushed waves that lapped into the crater, then receded. Ord pointed down at the water. “The relation between parent and child is like waves on a shore, sir. Adolescence, marriage, more children, perhaps divorce. A constant cycle of pulling away, then returning.”
The barge moved on, and the waves diminished, then vanished.
I said, “But the cycle ends, eventually.”
“Always, sir. In the meantime all we can do is stay afloat.”
A week later, a general strike shut down the capital of Tressen, and a bomb destroyed a wing of the Iridian parliament building. Ten days later, the Iridian currency collapsed, and paramilitary gangs made up of unemployed veterans warred openly in the streets of Tressen’s largest port. Three days later, the Iridian prime minister was lynched from a lamp post by a mob.
Eleven days after that, the Imperator of Tressen and the Regent of Iridia met in the Tressen capital. The following afternoon, the monarchs summoned the Acting Iridian Prime Minister, as well as the sitting Tressen P.M., and accepted their resignations with extreme regret.
At eight o’clock that evening, their majesties received their choice to fill the vacancies. At nine o’clock, General Audace Planck was sworn in as one of three generals serving as a joint Prime Ministrate, with plenipotentiary powers, and charged by the unified monarchy to form a cabinet and restore order.
At midnight the same evening, ten minutes before the last moment we could lift to th
e Kabul and still meet the Eisenhower on schedule, Howard, Ord, and I strapped in to a fresh transport.
Jude remained behind, newly appointed to Planck’s personal staff. Jude couldn’t come to see us off, but he sent a runner with a note for me that ended, “Love, Jude.”
I chose a window seat, and stared out into the darkness all the way up, so Howard and Ord couldn’t see the sheen on my eyes.
Four weeks later, the same transport tÓame anransferred us from the Kabul to the Eisenhower as they matched orbits above Bren.
Until and unless we made something out of Mousetrap, Bren was a waypoint between Tressel and Earth anyway. Earth needed help from Bren to develop Mousetrap almost as much as Earth needed Bren’s Cavorite.
So, if I believed what Nat Cobb had said about the importance of personal relationships and trust counting for more in diplomacy than protocol, I belonged here now.
When I had overnighted on Bren while I returned from my previous visit to Tressel, I passed the night with old friends in low places. When Howard, Ord, and I climbed down the disembarkation ladder from the transport, its cold skin’s crackle echoing in one of the Ike’s launch bays, one of those old friends was waiting for us.
TWENTY-EIGHT
THE HUMAN UNION ASSOCIATE CONSUL to the Court of Her Majesty Marenna the Fourth, Deliverer of the Stones, Protector of the Clans of Marin, and Sovereign of the Near Seas, was a duck.
Actually, Eric Muscovy’s lips just stuck out a little, and he walked splay-footed. But that was plenty for his classmates, from grade school through the Harvard Center for Asian Studies.
I hugged him, then held him at arm’s length and grinned. “Why’d you burn fuel to come up here, Duck?”
The Duck’s eyes twinkled as he shook Howard’s hand. “I shouldn’t have. Howard tacked on a fuel surcharge last quarter. But I could bury our bar bill from your last visit in Spook travel expenses.”
I rubbed my forehead. The memory of my most recent evening with the Duck still made my head ache.
Ord smiled at the Duck, and stuck out his hand. “DeArthur Ord, Consul. We met in Tibet.”
The Duck shook Ord’s hand, nodded, and smiled. “I’d never forget that.”
If it hadn’t been for Ord, the Duck, and a bamboo ladder, I would have rotted in the infirmary of a Chinese prison, with two broken femurs and a collapsed lung.
Duck’s smile faded as he waddled to the bay’s exit hatch with us in tow. “I met you up here because I just heard you left a bad situation on Tressel.”
“It should improve.”
Duck nodded. “So I thought I’d relieve your anxiety about this situation. This one’s a done deal.”
I shook my head. “I don’t like it. I doubt that Bassin does, either.”
“Bassin has no say about it. His mother’s the monarch. He’s the spare heir. Bassin’s mother and my boss ironed out the details last night. We deliver two hundred seventy-six Kodiaks, plus trainers and technicians. Marin personnel will operate them to secure the Cavorite caravan routes against Casuni and Tassini raids. In exchange, Marin will deliver, and replenish as needed, sixty thousand trainable workers, plus civil engineering cadre, until Mousetrap is completed.”<Ön e/p>
I spun in the corridor, and grabbed Howard by the shoulders. “Exchange? The Marini are gonna build Mousetrap?”
“It’s a fair trade. Mousetrap enhances Bren’s security as much as Earth’s and Tressel’s.”
“And you get to bury the project off the Spook balance sheet. This is hideous.”
Howard pouted. “It’s just bookkeeping. You always overreact.”
“I’m not talking about money. Trainable workers? They’re slaves, Howard! Replenished means that when overwork kills one, Marin will send another.”
The Duck spun me away from Howard, and pointed a finger at my chest. “I don’t like it either. But I don’t make policy, and neither do you. And neither does your old friend Bassin, the abolitionist. So right now he’s on his way back to Marinus from the front, because a good Crown Prince supports his mom’s decisions. Just like you’re going to support your chain of command’s decisions.”
I crossed my arms and huffed. Then I asked, “So. What are Bassin and I supposed to do tomorrow?”
“Shut up while she signs. Smile. Wear your medals. It sucks, but I’ve had to do it for years.”
“Except without the medals.” It was a dirty shot, and I knew it even as the words left my lips.
The corners of Duck’s mouth turned down, then he cocked his head at the ribbons on my chest. “How many GIs got replenished so you could get those medals?”
I balled my fists as we faced each other. The Duck had saved my life, and I knew he was still just an Associate Consul because he had objected too often to inhumane host-country policies. But if we had both been fifteen years younger I would have decked him.
Besides, the Duck was half right. If I came to a fork in the road where the army and I had to part company, I could resign. But meanwhile, I had to follow orders just like I had when I was a Spec 4. Aud Planck had come to such a fork. Maybe I was approaching one. But I didn’t have to choose, yet.
So I took a deep breath, then asked the Duck, “What time’s the signing ceremony tomorrow?”
“High noon. Don’t keep the old girl waiting.”
TWENTY-NINE
THE NEXT MORNING ORD, Howard, and I met the Duck at the town gate to the Summer Palace two hours early. One hour of that cushion was because it takes an hour to get from the gate to the Hall of Mirrors, where Her Majesty and the Duck’s boss would sign the Kodiaks-for-slaves deal. The Summer Palace has more square footage than the Pentagon. The other hour was because the Duck wasn’t kidding about not keeping the old girl waiting.
With time to spare, the captain of the queen’s householders escorted us not to the Hall of Mirrors, but to Bassin’s apartments.
As crown prince, Bassin had no authority, but lots of room in which to exeÞparrcise it. The “parlor” where he received us was a gilded, dome-ceilinged rotunda bigger than most U.S. state capitols’.
He strode across the room’s marble floor wearing the unadorned, brown uniform of a colonel of engineers. Like every other grown man who still lived in his mom’s house, Bassin was stuck with her decor. But he could have taken any rank he chose. For that matter, he could have invented one, and some cape-and-plume uniform to match. But an engineer, a brick-and-mortar builder, was what he was, and with Bassin what you saw was what you got.
Unless he was masquerading as a prospector, to spy on the slave trade he despised. That misadventure had cost him an eye, and a leg. And his mother’s good will, which may have wounded him worse.
I started to kneel, but he pulled me up straight and gave me a shoulder-pat hug, and another to Howard, to Ord, and even to the Duck.
Bassin frowned. “I had looked forward to seeing Jude again.”
“He stayed on Tressel. He thinks he has to save the world.”
Bassin wrinkled his forehead above his eyepatch. “Wasn’t saving this one costly enough?”
“You should talk.”
Bassin turned to the Duck, stiffly. “Consul Muscovy, please understand Marin’s gratitude for the Motherworld’s generous offer.”
The Duck bowed about a half inch. “And please understand Earth’s gratitude to Her Majesty for accepting it. How are things at the front, sir?”
The Duck knew exactly how things were at the front. Tactical Observation Transports loitering above the caravan routes relayed real-time overhead intelligence to our Consulate all twenty-four point two Earth hours of every Bren day. The TOTs showed that things stunk at the front for Marin, so badly that Bassin’s convoy had been ambushed by Casunis. He had only arrived at the palace an hour before we had. It was the Duck’s way of reminding Bassin why his mom had made this deal.
“I’d say not bad enough to export slaves. But it isn’t up to me, Consul.” Bassin turned to me. “We have an hour before the ceremony, Jason. I know Mothe
r would love to share a social moment with her son and her former commander-in-chief.” It was Bassin’s turn to make a half-ass bow, as he extended his palm toward a door that opened into the corridor to the queen’s apartments.
I glanced at the Duck and shrugged.
He fingered his blue cummerbund. He knew Bassin was going to lobby his mother to kill the deal, and I was being carted along like an apple for the teacher. The Duck didn’t like it, but associate consuls couldn’t argue with royalty. Neither could high school dropout generals.
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