by David Weber
Lars grinned, a lot more coldly that any young man his age should have been able to. “That’s one way to put it, I guess. She killed all three of the bastards.”
The interview was cut short there. Underwood had other fish to fry. He swiveled in his chair, which took less time than it took his panel guests because he’d been half-facing the wall screen, and gave the audience a meaningful look.
Underwood was a something of a genius at his trade. He was a master of the meaningful look that . . . actually had no clear meaning at all but imparted the sort of gravitas to him that was invaluable for successful talk show hosts.
He broke off the look when he saw that his Talking Heads had resumed their normal position and turned to face them.
“Interesting, that last item, wouldn’t you say? Charlene?”
Charlene Soulliere, the female guest who represented the Progressive Party—unofficially, not in any formal sense—had a sour expression on her face, as she’d had from the beginning of the show. For reasons that made no sense in ideological terms—in the past, if anything, they’d tended in the direction of being Havenite apologists—the Progressives were now taking a stance of sharp opposition to the rapprochement between Manticore and Haven.
Why? Nobody outside the Progressives’ own leadership really knew, but theories abounded.
One school of thought believed that the PP was on the Mesan Alignment’s payroll. Anton thought that was unlikely, although he didn’t rule it out completely. He leaned more toward the second school of thought, which was that—
The Progressives were a pack of fumble-witted loons whose incompetence at politics seemed to have no bottom.
Cathy Montaigne didn’t rule that out entirely—which she did with the Mesan-Alignment-stooges theory, on the grounds that the Mesan Alignment would have to be incompetent themselves to pay good money for Progressive Party stoogery, and there was no evidence that was true—but was more inclined toward the third school of thought, which contended that—
The Progressives were angling to get back into power as part of a coalition government with the Conservative Association. That was a truly ridiculous proposition in any sane and sensible programmatic terms but couldn’t be ruled out since the only difference between the Conservative Association and the PP when it came to political scruples was that the Conservative Association did have one fixed and invariant principle—what’s ours is ours and don’t you even THINK about mucking around with it in any way whatsoever—and the Progressives had none at all beyond the craving for political power.
“Any comment, Charlene?”
Soulliere sniffed. “One has to wonder if there is anyone in that crowd whose first recourse when faced with a problem isn’t to resort to violence—and the most brutal sort of violence at that. Do I need to remind the panel that the father of this fourteen-year-old homicidal maniac is the man who littered the grounds of the Tor estate with corpses not all that long ago?”
Cathy almost sprang out of her seat with excitement. “Yes! Go for it, Mack! Gut the fucking asshole!”
Cathy proceeded to issue several more sentences which, though grammatically impeccable, transgressed the bounds of propriety. Pretty much the way piranhas transgress the bounds of dining etiquette.
The “Mack” in question was Macauley Sinclair, the panelist sitting just to the left of the moderator. He was a short fellow with a round, cheery face, who represented the Liberal Party on the panel in the same informal way that Soulliere spoke for the Progressives.
He’d taken the place of Florence Hu on the panel. Cathy had pulled a lot of strings to make sure of that. For this show, she wanted a Liberal voice that didn’t quaver and whine. There was a reason politicians and (especially) their staffs called Sinclair “Mack the Knife” in private.
Yael Underwood, being an expert at the business, immediately saw to it that Sinclair got the floor.
“Homicidal maniac, is it?” he jeered. Then, he broke the normal rules of Talking Headship and looked directly at the viewing audience. “For reasons that are understandable, Lars Zilwicki didn’t go into the details of the incident. I happen to know them, however—as should Ms. Sanctimonious over here, if she’d done her homework.”
He gave her a skeptical glance. “At least, one has to hope that Soulliere’s comment was the product of ignorance.”
She tried to angrily interrupt but Sinclair drove right over her. Looking back at the viewing audience he continued.
“Here are the details—the very grim details. The three men in question—rightly called ‘thugs’ by Lars Zilwicki—had kidnapped the boy and his sister Berry and were holding them captive in Chicago’s infamous underground warrens. Lars was eleven years old at the time; Berry, thirteen. Both of them were badly beaten, especially the girl—who was also repeatedly gang-raped. These were the three unfortunate gentlemen whom the small fourteen-year-old girl that—”
He had a truly magnificent sneer. “—Sanctimonious Soulliere calls a ‘homicidal maniac’ killed in self-defense when they tried to visit the same atrocities upon her.”
The whole panel erupted. But Mack the Knife’s voice rose above the babble—largely because he kept speaking directly at the viewers.
“—no mistake what this is really all about. The same Progressives who proved themselves completely incapable of leading a war against the Republic of Haven when such a war was needed, are now trying to sabotage a peace treaty with the Republic when that is needed and finally available. And they’re doing so for no better reason—assuming there’s any coherent thought at all involved—than political maneuvering.”
A subscriber to Theory #3, clearly, although he was leaving the door open for Theory #2. In line with Cathy’s own position, in other words.
That was hardly surprising, since he more or less worked for her. Informally, true, and without remuneration. But there was a reason that Sinclair’s other nickname was Montaigne’s Mugger.
Anton brought his attention back to the talk show. Sinclair was still going strong. For all that he was barely over five feet tall and was wearing a very expensive suit, it wasn’t hard at all to imagine him wielding a claymore like his ancestors had.
Whack. “—ignore what she says. The real reason for Soulliere’s hostility to Cachat is purely because the man is walking, breathing, living, tried and tested proof—tried and tested three times over—that there is no better ally for us in a fight than the same Havenites we’ve been fighting for what sometimes seems like a lifetime. I ask you—”
Babble, babble, babble. Soulliere was trying desperately to make herself heard, but the panel was now clearly swinging in Sinclair’s direction. Who was back to looking straight at the audience.
“—really simple question, as simple as it gets. You’re attacked by thugs in a dark alley. Who do you want coming to your defense?”
A truly magnificent sneer.
Whack. “Soulliere and her back room cronies? Or Victor Cachat and Anton Zilwicki? Or—better yet, because we’re talking a war here, folks, one that’s going to make our fight with Haven look like a playground spat—would you prefer a bunch of young homicidal maniacs in uniform? Such as—”
He turned to Underwood. Something indefinable in the talk show host’s posture made Anton realize that Underwood and Sinclair had set this up in advance.
“I believe you have some relevant footage, Yael, am I correct?”
“Well . . . yes. As it happens, we do.”
The back screen lit up with an image of Anton’s daughter Helen. She was wearing her dress uniform and posed somewhat formally with four other young naval officers. Anton recognized all but one of them. They were friends of Helen’s as well as comrades; people she’d gone through the naval academy with at Saganami Island.
She looked . . .
Good. Really good. She would never be a beauty, but—thank God—she took after her mother more than her father in that department. And while she might be a tad on the stocky, well-muscled side, she stood with the obvious
grace of more than ten years training in Neue-Stil Handgemenge, one of the most lethal martial arts in galactic history. But what she looked like most of all was a young woman proud of her uniform, committed to her star nation, confident in herself, and prepared to spit in the entire galaxy’s eye if that was what duty and that uniform demanded of her.
Sinclair spoke again. “That’s the young woman Soulliere called a ‘homicidal maniac.’ Not just the girl who escaped her Manpower kidnappers on Old Earth when she was only fourteen T-years old, but also the young woman who served as Sir Aivars Terekov’s assistant tactical officer throughout the Battle of Monica. And never mind that when the wolves come baying at our door again, Soulliere and her Progressive pack of curs will be the first ones screaming for exactly this young homicidal maniac—and her friends—to come to their rescue.
“Again.”
Soulliere went ballistic at that point. Anton thought that “pack of curs” was probably over the top for what was, after all, an evening talk show program.
Not that he gave a damn. He started softly singing a tune.
“Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear
And he shows ’em, pearly white . . .”
He was pretty sure the same lyrics were being sung by people all over the Star Empire, at that moment. It was a very old song, after all.
“This is going splendidly!” Cathy exclaimed. She took Anton’s hand and gave it a squeeze.
I am so getting laid tonight.
He managed to keep a solemn face, though.
July 1922 Post Diaspora
“You’re all under arrest. It turns out I have a long-suppressed megalomaniacal personality. Who knew?”
—Hugh Arai, consort to Queen Berry of Torch
Chapter 23
“Talk about a stroke of genius,” Ruth said, shaking her head with admiration as she studied the data on her tablet. “Which one of you wants to take the credit? Or are you willing to split it, in the spirit of”—she waved her hand airily—“whatever. Take your pick. Collectivism, cooperation, humility, whatever rings your bell.”
Victor looked disgusted. “Let Anton have it—or better yet, Yana.” Who, for her part, was looking at her own body in the same wall mirror Victor was using—and didn’t look any happier than he did.
“I look like a cow. What possible use are udders this size? I’ve got enough production capacity for quadruplets—but there are still only two nipples. So what’s the point?”
She glared at Victor. “Do men really like this nonsense?”
Victor didn’t look at her. He was still examining his own body and looking no happier than she did. “Ask someone else,” he said. “I was socially deprived as a youth. My opinion on these matters is not to be trusted.”
Thandi Palane had left off examining her new body ten minutes earlier and was now relaxing in an armchair. Her cheerful equanimity concerning her new physique was due to the simple fact that it wasn’t much different from her old one. Given that Thandi’s ability to commit mayhem was a large part of the reason she’d been included in the mission, it would have been counterproductive to change her body so much that all of her muscle memory would have gotten skewed. So, the gengineers had settled for adding a little weight and height.
The main change had been to her face. They’d eliminated the distinctive Ndebele facial features. They’d left her very pale skin tone as it was, but she now looked like someone from a heavy gravity planet whose ancestry had been mostly northern European instead of African. She was also a lot less good-looking.
Yana, on the other hand, now had a physique that looked like a teenage boy’s notion of the perfect female figure. A particularly callow boy, at that.
The engineers had given her a face to go with it, too. The former attractive blonde was now a gorgeous brunette whose ancestry seemed to be East Asian rather than Slavic. About the only thing they hadn’t changed very much was her height. Nanobots could do a lot, but the only way to drastically shorten someone was to remove bone or cartilage, both of which carried health risks if taken too far. So, they’d shortened her, but only by two centimeters. That would be enough to throw off any automatic body gauge software that Mesa’s security forces might be using.
The precaution was probably unnecessary, but changing a person’s height by a few centimeters was not significantly risky—so why not do it? Anton, Victor and Thandi had all had their heights changed as well, but in their cases they’d been made a little taller.
“Take credit for what, Ruth?” asked Andrew Artlett. He was sitting next to Steph Turner on a sofa against the wall opposite the big mirror. His physical appearance had been modified only slightly, because there was no need to do more than that. The one time Mesan inspectors had come aboard the Hali Sowle, Andrew had stayed in his cabin. The Mesans might still have his genetic record—or rather, that of the Parmley clan members to whom he was closely related—but they hadn’t made any physical images of him. The only reason nanobots had been used on him at all—his nose and brow ridge had been thickened, his cheekbones made more prominent and his eye and hair color changed—was to protect against the remote chance that the Mesans had somehow gotten their hands on old holopics of him. That chance was so remote it was well-nigh astronomical, but since a minor body adaptation was easy they’d decided to do it.
More precisely, Anton and Victor had decided to have it done—over Andrew’s protests. He’d accused them of being motivated by nothing more than a determination to spread the misery around.
There was . . . possibly a bit of truth to the charge. Nanobot body engineering was a thoroughly unpleasant experience.
“Take a look at this,” Ruth said. She keyed in some commands and her virtual screen was enlarged tenfold and projected far enough away so Andrew and Steph could see it easily.
“You see this and this? And this?” She manipulated the cursor to highlight three figures on the screen. The figures were labeled Perspective Density, Adjustment Velocity and Reversal Prospect.
Andrew’s frown was enhanced by his modified brow ridge. Steph’s frown looked about the same as it always did, because her features had been modified to make her face a bit more slender. As with Andrew, her body modification had been minimal and mostly confined to her face. The likelihood that Mesa had good holopics of someone who’d owned a small restaurant in the seccy quarters was small. They might have a few images, but they wouldn’t be precise enough for body identification software.
The real danger for her was that the Mesans certainly had her DNA on record, for the good and simple reason that Mesa obtained DNA samples at birth from every resident of the planet. And even if Victor and Anton’s hypothesis that Jack McBryde had badly damaged Mesa’s security files was correct, it was unlikely that McBryde had gone so far as to destroy all DNA records. He would have targeted the records of Mesa’s enemies—which, ironically, would not have included Steph Turner at the time.
So, she’d gotten a genetic sheath, as had Andrew. Steph’s was more subtle than that given to everyone else, though. There was no need to disguise her origins as a Mesa seccy. To the contrary, that would be an integral part of her cover. They’d only needed to put a few changes in the sheath that would obscure her individual identity.
“Ruth, I haven’t got the faintest idea what any of those numbers mean,” said Steph.
“Same here,” said Andrew. “And I’ll add to that—hey, I’m a dummy, okay?—that I don’t even understand what the terms mean. I know what each one of those words means, taken by itself. But what the hell is the ‘density’ of a perspective?”
Berry piped up. “I’m a dummy, too.” She was perched on the edge of her seat and leaning over in order to get a better view of the screen. “How about an explanation?”
Ruth looked at each of them in turn, her expression a mix of puzzlement, mild consternation, and uncertainty. Those sentiments could be translated—quite easily, by her best friend Berry—into the following phrases:
How can any
one be this ignorant of basic sociometric attitude assessments?
Am I supposed to explain what this all means?
I’m really not the best person to do that since my explanation is likely to be harder to understand by people who don’t know anything to begin with.
Anton came to her rescue. “Translated a bit roughly, the terms mean the following. ‘Perspective density’ refers to the sureness of the opinion. They call it density because—”
“—they’re a pack of cone-headed sociometricians and they’d rather die than use clear terminology,” said Victor.
“Well, yes, that too. But as I was saying before I was interrupted by Secret Agent Sourpuss, they use the term ‘density’ because the firmness with which someone holds an opinion is usually the product of multiple cross-associations. To give an example, a person believes a planet is a sphere because they know many things which all reinforce that opinion. Whereas if their opinion on a given subject is established by only one or two inputs, that opinion’s density will be thin.”
“Except the term they actually use for a thinly sustained opinion is ‘disagglutinated,’ ” said Victor. “It’s got six syllables instead of one. This is why Anton and I are spies instead of sociometrician cone-heads.”
Anton shook his head sadly. “He’s always had a bitter streak. Mind you, he’s also right. They are a lot of cone-heads.”
“What does the number mean, then?” asked Andrew. “Perspective density: 0.67.”
Ruth decided she could answer that one easily enough. “It’s a scale of 0 to 1, in which ‘0’ means the perspective is so disagglutinated—and for the record, I think the term is quite appropriate—that it might as well not exist, and ‘1’ is a perspective so heavily and completely buttressed by a multitude of other opinions that it is accepted as pure and simple fact.”
“Give me examples,” said Steph.
Ruth was back at sea again. Examples? How do you give examples of basic—
