The twenty-first passenger swung onto the right-hand ladder, then straddled the ladder rails with her feet along their outboard sides, and slid the thirty feet to the deck, swabbie style, like a firefighter down a pole. When she touched the deck, she turned, grinned at me, and said, “It’s like riding a bike.” Munchkin hugged me, then pulled back. “Aren’t you surprised?”
“Almost.” Howard had told me a half hour before, in the wardroom, under threat of an Indian burn, that a Joint House-Senate Task Force, a blue ribbon panel, had been charged to investigate “certain undifferentiated and/or restricted line items” in the Defense Department budget. In other words, they were going to pry up or crawl under the loose floorž€…boards, rocks, and mattresses beneath which Howard hid the Spook money.
The rest of the delegation trickled onto the bay floorplates, and got introduced around.
Every single one was a household-word–famous former senator, representative, or governor. Former because not even a senior sitting senator can take as much time off as a boondoogle like this “fact-finding mission” would take. And not even famous politicians turn down the equivalent of a taxpayer-financed round-the-world cruise that included live tyrannosaurs.
Munchkin and I stood aside together while the legislators got presented to Bassin.
I whispered to her, “They all look sick. The transport ride was only two miles.”
“They didn’t expect the local monarch to meet their plane. This was supposed to be a surprise inspection. They’re worried somebody leaked.”
“Oh, it was a surprise. Jimmy Wethers launched three hot birds. Mimi knows better than to risk a friendly fire incident.”
Munchkin widened her eyes, and poked my belly. “You used hot, Mimi, and friendly within ten words. That’s Freudian.”
“Don’t start.”
The flight deck hatch opened, and the pilot swung onto the ladder, then slid down like Munchkin had. Mimi was a rear admiral, so she had to salute me first. Then she knuckle-bumped with former Congresswoman Munchkin. Fighter jocks and machine gunners don’t hug and kiss the air.
I began with a charming pleasantry. “Jimmy Wethers launched three hot birds. Are you on dumb pills?”
Mimi tugged off her pilot’s helmet and ran fingers through her hair. The helmet had pinched her ears so they looked like delicate pink sea shells. She said, “My orders were run dark ’til we got pinged. Now I’ve been on the radio with Jimmy, and he understands.” She snorted. “Orders. Do Spooks even bother with those?”
Munchkin grabbed my elbow, and said, “Oh-kay. Jason, come with me and meet the Chairman.”
As Munchkin steered me away, I hissed to her, “I’m no goddam Spook. What’s that woman’s problem?”
“Maybe it was you accusing her of stupidity bad enough to get her relieved of her command.” We approached a tan, trim, familiar figure, and Munchkin whispered, “This time, don’t be so charming.”
Thomas Warden had gotten elected governor of New York by jailing white collar crooks. We shook hands, as Warden said, “We don’t want to get in your way, General. But we will have to insist that you suspend whatever you’re doing for the duration of our investigation.”
“What do you think we’re doing?”
He smiled, and slapped my shoulder. “If I knew, I wouldn’t have to investigate, would I?”
“How long?”
“If you demonstrate absolute candor and cooperation, we should be out of your hair in three months.”
I shook my head. “Sir, I don’t think—”
“Then we write our draft report, Congress considers it . . . you’re back in business in two, three years.” He smiled again. “Unless you’re in Leavenworth.”
I turned to Munchkin, and pointed at the man. “Does he know—”
The chairman stopped smiling. “I know misappropriation of government funds is a felony. So’s suborning human rights violations. And this panel is empowered to detain any witness or hold him in contempt.” He smiled again. “Not that we need those powers with you and Colonel Hibble.” He looked around the bay, then walked over to look at the Starfire on the other side of the revolver. “I’ve never seen one of these in person.”
I took Munchkin’s elbow, jerked my thumb at Warden, and whispered, “And you say I’m not charming? Is Warden a fool?”
“Jason, if he’s a fool, he’s not a lonely one. In case you didn’t notice, Congress has given him one tenth of the Fleet, just to investigate Howard. The Spook budget exceeds Portugal’s, but Congress outside of the Defense, Intelligence, and Appropriations Committees is kept in the dark about it.”
I sighed. Secret defense projects’ budgets had been buried in innocuous-looking budget line items at least since the A-bomb was identified as the Manhattan Sewer District. Howard’s creative accounting made the stealth fighter budget look like a paper airplane, but rank-and-file congresspersons could hardly claim shock to learn that such things were going on.
Munchkin said, “The non-defense members of Congress don’t question the Black Ops budget. To a point. But you’ve been coddling slave traders and fomenting anarchy, and that’s just the stuff people know about. Be glad Howard has one lousy friend on this panel.”
“Howard’s future is the least of the problem. That’s the reason you joined this fiasco? So we have one lousy friend?”
“It’s not a fiasco. Secrecy is un-American.”
I rolled my eyes. “Were the Manhattan Project, D-Day, and the stealth fighter un-American? And if you say the only reason you joined this panel is to expose secrets, you’re lying.”
Munchkin crossed her arms, looked away, then exhaled.
We both knew rotational gravity made her barf. Only one thing would get her back into space.
She said, “I miss Jude so much my gut has been aching for a month.” She looked around the emptying bay and her forehead creased. “Where is he?”
We downshipped that evening, I got Munchkin tanked on Casuni mead, then I told her that, after all she had put herself through, her baby was still light years away. She still cried until the sun rose.
THIRTY-EIGHT
FOR THE FIRST MONTH, the Duck and Howard buried the inquiry panel under tourism. The panelists got holo’ed sitting on duckbills, traveled with caravans across the Highlands to see Cav¦€…orite come out of the ground in the Stone Hills, sailed the Marin to the falls, and watched scouts trick-ride the Tassin dunes on wobbleheads. They visited the Millennium Wall, got snorted at by chained wronks, and shopped the bazaars of Marinus on Bassin’s tab. They got wined and dined on His Majesty’s Royal Barge, flown to the Emerald River battlefield, and over the North Pole.
Meanwhile, Bassin raised a pick-and-shovel army of freemen, freewomen, and newly emancipated slaves, for which Ord developed and oversaw modern combat engineering training.
Eventually, Howard and the Duck exhausted the sideshows, and hearings commenced in the Rotunda of the Great Library. The Marini love their domed ceilings, and you could punt a football without scuffing the Rotunda’s.
After two months of hearings, I stood alongside Howard, as we looked down from the Rotunda’s second-floor balcony, leaning on its gilt balustrade. Through windows opposite us, we could see the Summer Palace, but the panelists down on the Rotunda’s floor couldn’t. Every hour and twenty minutes, a transport from the Eisenhower lifted off from the palace Courtyard. Ten minutes after each lift-off, another transport feathered in and landed, replacing its shipmate.
The twenty-one panelists sat around the rim of a crescent-moon table, which surrounded a witness table.
The Duck was the last witness.
Questioning had begun in the morning, from the panelist at the crescent’s left tip, and proceeded counterclockwise. As the afternoon sun threw shadows across the Rotunda, questioning wound down to the panelist at the right tip, a chubby, pale former Representative who apparently did her hair with a grenade. She ran her finger across a line on her chipboard. “One last thing. Two hun
dred seventy-six Kodiaks were recovered from Tressel. Two hundred seventy-five were inventoried when we arrived aboard the Eisenhower.”
The panel had actually been taken on tour and shown the Kodiaks in the Ike’s centerline bay immediately, on the day they arrived. That was partly to demonstrate absolute candor and cooperation, and mostly because Howard didn’t have a sock drawer big enough to hide the Afrika Korps.
The Duck, hands folded in front of him, leaned toward the witness table stenobot. “Armament was stripped off one unit. It was transferred to the Department of Agriculture’s books because it was appropriated for agricultural demonstration, Congresswoman.”
“What kind of agriculture?”
“Animal husbandry. Livestock herding.”
A gray-headed former senator paused, then peered over his turn of the century bifocals. “That’s a big sheepdog, Mr. Muscovy.”
“They’re big sheep, Senator.”
The congressperson with exploded hair tapped her chipboard’s keys as she paged ahead. Then she leaned forward, past the gray-headed senator, and turned to Thomas Warden, six seats down. “Nothing further for this witness.”
The chairman looked left, then right. “The panel will take this matter under advisement, and prepare its draft report during its return voyage.” He rapped hi«€” He raps gavel. “We stand adjourned.”
I leaned toward Howard and whispered, “If we go through with this, and we live, we’ll both spend the rest of our lives in Leavenworth.”
He shrugged. “If we don’t, there won’t be a Leaven- worth.”
THIRTY-NINE
AT THE MOMENT that the chairman dropped his gavel, across town, on the other side of Marinus, the last of two hundred seventy-six Kodiaks, downshipped from the centerline bay of the Eisenhower, was towed into dead storage in the old royal laundries beneath the Summer Palace.
At the same moment, four hundred miles overhead, the fortieth of forty-one Marini boring machines crash-built to royal specifications drawn by Howard and Ord was lashed into place in Ike’s vacated centerline bay. Thirty thousand Marini combat engineer volunteers were already packed into the rest of the bay, camping like a Boy Scout Jamboree, and into billet space designed to accommodate a ten-thousand soldier embarked infantry division. Quarters would be cramped, but Mousetrap was just one Jump away.
FORTY
THAT NIGHT, Bassin hosted a dinner party in the Summer Palace Courtyard to bid farewell to the Task Force, who the next morning would reboard the Emerald River for the voyage back to Earth. There they would write a report to Congress, and, in a year or two, Congress would reauthorize Howard to do most of what he had been up to. They thought.
If they, and the thousand other guests, had realized that a hundred feet below the woven carpets where they stood was a panzer division parking garage, the evening’s ambiance might have differed.
Most people’s idea of a dinner party on Bren is a duckbill haunch as big as a crocodile spitted above a bonfire, surrounded by drunken ogres, or by indigo-faced nomads smoking janga in water pipes. National Geographic viewership increases for Plains Clan holos. The Marini are too, well, normal.
To dine with the Marini monarch was more like an outdoor reception in the south of France. The chamber music instruments sounded woodier, the canapés were reptilian, the torches that flickered on the granite battlements were fueled by sauropod tallow, and two crescent moons sailed above them, but the panelists seemed so at home that most of them wore black tie or evening gown.
Governor Warden, all tux and teeth, stood near a carved gold fountain as I approached. He raised his silver wine flute, toasted us, and grinned like a rube.
On his home turf, with staff, Warden, or any of the other panelists, would have tumbled to our amateur coup in hours. But three hundred light years from home, disoriented by surroundings so alien that even the moons in the night sky added up wrong, Howard, the Duck, and I were poised to get away with it.
Warden spread his arms. “Hah? Did I keep my promise to be out of your hair in three months?”
“So can’t we just go back to wor®€…k, Tom?”
“Jason, that’s not my decision. And I can’t say there were no problems. But I promise you this.” He pointed with one finger that he unwrapped from the stem of his glass. “I’ll get Colonel Hibble’s projects back to active status by the end of next year. If I have to beat down doors all over Washington.”
By which time, if we waited on my new best friend, Tom, and Congress, the Slugs might be the ones beating down doors in Washington.
A late-arriving guest caught my eye as she whispered to the footman at the courtyard gate. He rapped his halberd on the pavement, then announced, “Rear Admiral Ozawa.”
With Ike already on guard above Bren, Emerald River had been too valuable a chess piece to leave idling in orbit. As soon as Emerald River had dropped off Warden’s panel, she had departed Bren, laden with Cavorite, Casuni mead, and a National Geographic holo crew just back from the boonies, for Earth.
Emerald River’s absence had been critical to our little plot, because her crew couldn’t have missed the excess traffic to and from Ike. We counted on Mimi to be dead-on schedule, always a safe bet, and not return until today.
I’m a sucker for a woman in uniform anyway, but in dress whites, by torchlight, Mimi looked to me like Cinderella with medals.
As Mimi joined us, Warden smiled at her. “Our ride home. Right on time, Admiral.”
She smiled at him, and inclined her head. “My crew tells me you’re on schedule, too.”
“Jason’s cooperation had a lot to do with that.”
Mimi stared at me, always a pulse-raising event, and smiled longer than conversational politeness demanded. “I can just imagine.”
Deep in my brain, a tiny klaxon hooted, which I mistook for lust.
I turned back to Warden. Hoodwinking the Congress, no matter the justification, had kept me awake for months. I had to know. “Tom, hypothetically, what if, when you arrived, a guy like me had just blown you off. Carried on with what he was doing. You’re just twenty-one civilians, months away from supervening authority.”
Warden cocked his head. “Well, Jason, in the first place, then he wouldn’t have been a guy like you.”
A guilt pang pinched my gut. “Sure. But you must have come up against crooks who wouldn’t back down.”
He shrugged. “Plenty of ’em. Seriously? Well, we are just twenty-one politicians.” He glanced over at Mimi. “But I’ve got a Bastogne-class cruiser and I’m not afraid to use it.”
“Of course, the crooks wouldn’t have a good reason.”
The old prosecutor stuck out his chin. “What reason could be good enough to break the law?”
I nodded. “That’s what I thought you’d say.”
The frizz-headed congresswoman who had questioned t»€d questihe Duck waved Warden to her conversation group. I sipped my wine, wondered when I had grown old enough and cynical enough to lie convincingly, then looked around for Mimi.
I spotted her fifty yards away, strolling alone beside the wall of the castle’s main keep.
The castle rose above a rock knob so that it overlooked Marinus. It was, well, a guarded fortress, and so a perfect place to hide two hundred seventy-five large objects. The battlements were guarded, as were the various locked gates in the walls. The doors to the keep, the royal apartments, the kitchens, the royal library, the observatory, were not only locked but guarded by stone-faced Household Guards in polished armor.
However, the vast caverns beneath the castle, the cold, stone laundries, hadn’t been used for a century. That was what made them a great place to squirrel away the Kodiaks. It also made them a place nobody cared about enough to guard, or to lock off. And if we had started now, somebody might have wondered why.
Mimi stopped in front of a plain, maid-sized archway in the stone wall. It didn’t even have a door, much less a Household Guard. The opening was dark, but not so dark that I couldn’t make out
downward-curving stairs just beyond its opening.
Mimi glanced around at the crowd, and then, it seemed, stared at me for a blink. Then she stepped through the doorway, and disappeared, circling down into the dark.
My heart thumped, and I walked to the doorway, as fast as I could without drawing looks from guests or guards, peered into the gloom, and waited for my eyes to adjust.
FORTY-ONE
THE STAIRS WOUND down in a tight spiral, not pitch dark, but not light enough to spot Mimi’s snow-white uniform. If it was there. I paused and listened for heel clicks on stone. Had she been wearing stilettos? What the hell did female dress-white shoes look like?
I heard nothing, except the distant drip of water onto floor cobbles.
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