Cauldron of Ghosts

by David Weber

  Disappeared. There were an untold—literally, untold—number of nooks and crannies and secret chambers and passages in the enormous edifice which might serve that purpose. And then be sealed over.

  Eventually, the eleven-year-old girl who’d served as his escort led Lajos out of the building onto a street. Lajos looked up at the sky. From what he could see, it’d probably start raining by late afternoon, but right now it was still a bright and sunny day. Well . . . as bright and sunny as the narrow man-made canyons between giant buildings ever got.

  That matched his mood. Things were looking up. Well . . . might be looking up. It never paid to get ahead of yourself.

  * * *

  “I think he’s a phony,” said Triêu Chuanli.

  The man looking at Chuanli in the com screen cocked his head. “Why?” asked Jurgen Dusek. The crime boss wasn’t asking the question in a challenging manner. He’d just watched the recording Triêu had made of the interview and had come to the same tentative conclusion himself. But Dusek was in the habit of encouraging his subordinates to explain their reasoning. It was one of the things that made him a pleasure to work for—as long as you stayed clear of angering him, of course. Then Mr. Nice Boss became something very different, very quickly.

  “He’s fumbling a little,” Triêu said. “I don’t think he really knows the business that well. What kind of fence has to ask the questions he did?”

  Dusek nodded. “Yeah, that was my sense of it also. Okay, so we’re agreed he’s a phony. But what kind of phony? Who is he really and what does he really want?”

  “Well, he could be working for one of our rivals who’s thinking of a little encroachment, or just scouting out the territory. McLeod, maybe, or Bachue the Nose.”

  Dusek shook his head. “Possible, but not likely. McLeod’s too cautious. And while the Nose is a sure-enough witch sometimes, she just doesn’t have the heft to seriously consider messing with us. Besides, why use a trafficker in this trade for the purpose? It’d make a lot more sense to go with something less flaky. You know what the body parts and tissues market is like. Up, down, up, down—sometimes I’m tempted to get out of it altogether.”

  Chuanli shrugged. “Just raising the possibility. I don’t think it’s at all likely myself. But the alternative makes even less sense to me.”

  Dusek knew what he was talking about. The alternative explanation was that “Mr. Huygens” was working for one or another of Mesa’s security agencies. Probably one of the government ones although there was a chance he might be employed by one of the private contractors.

  Normally, Dusek would have agreed with Chuanli that that was even less likely than another gang being involved. Why would a security agency bother with such an elaborate rigmarole? The agents handling Neue Rostock for the two most important official agencies—the Tableland Auditor Board and the Interservice Verification Agency—both knew how to reach Dusek if they wanted to find out anything. The TAB agent, Phuong Wilson, even had one of his private numbers.

  Jurgen made it a point to stay on reasonably good terms with Mesa’s security forces, especially the Tabbies. That meant keeping the Ballroom out of Neue Rostock altogether and keeping a lid on the seccy radicals. Once in a while—not often; Jurgen had no more love for Mesan authorities than any seccy—he’d even turn over one of them. (Although never a member of the Ballroom, which could be really dangerous.)

  So why would anyone screw around with something this elaborate?

  Triêu put into words the same conclusion Jurgen was coming to. Coming toward, it would be better to say. Everything was still tentative.

  “My guess? One of two things—or more likely, both of them together. One of the security outfits has a new boss and he or she is doing the usual routine.”

  “New broom sweeps clean. New and improved service under new management. Blah blah blah. Okay. What’s the other possibility?”

  “Everything’s starting to come apart at the seams, boss. Slowly, at first—but it’ll speed up, you watch.”

  Dusek made a face. “I don’t want to hear that, Triêu. Business is fine the way it is.”

  His lieutenant shrugged. “I don’t like it either. But I think Manpower finally pissed off one too many crowds—and from the looks of it, this new crowd can hammer everyone else flat. The Sollies just lost, what? Four hundred superdreadnoughts?”

  “Thereabouts.” The news of the destruction of Filareta’s fleet at Manticore had just reached Mesa. Just been made known to the public, at least. The powers-that-be had undoubtedly learned of it weeks earlier.

  Dusek could follow the logic himself. All too easily. “And if the Manties can manage that, who’s to say they can’t decide to scrub Manpower out of existence?”

  Chuanli nodded. “And if you and I can figure that out, so can lots of other people. Like security agents.”

  “That still doesn’t explain this guy.”

  “Not specifically, no. But I’m willing to bet we’re going to start seeing a lot of weird stuff happening. Everybody and their grandmother is going to be working the angles.”

  Chuanli’s hypothesis was just that, a hypothesis. But Dusek decided he was likely right.

  “Okay. Let’s string this ‘Mr. Huygens’ along some more, then. See what happens. In the meantime, I’ll give my tame Tabby a call and see if he can tell me anything.”

  * * *

  “You heard me,” Lajos said. “Babies, infants and toddlers. Tissues’ll do, but functioning organs are better.”

  The security officer on the screen kept staring at him. Maybe she was dimwitted.

  “Get over it, Officer Mendez,” Lajos said. “You’ve got to have some on stock.”

  “But . . .” Mendez looked to the side, at something or someone—probably someone—Lajos couldn’t see. After a couple of seconds, she looked back. “We’re running a prison here, Agent Irvine, not a nursery.”

  Definitely a dimwit. Either that, or—being fair; you never knew—she was laboring under dimwit orders. “I know that. Here’s what else I know. You maintain the second largest morgue in the city. I can’t believe you’re not getting spillover from other morgues, especially the main police morgue. Their business comes in spurts, and yours is a lot more predictable. So have somebody check. There’ll be at least some of the stuff I need.”

  Abruptly, she nodded. “I’ll get back to you.”

  * * *

  After she cut off the contact, Officer Mendez turned to her supervisor, Lieutenant Jernigan. She’d been standing far enough away not to be visible on the screen. She’d had no particular reason to do that. It was just the ingrained habit of someone who shirked responsibility as much as possible.

  “What’s the story, Lieutenant?”

  “I don’t think we have any. He’d be right, normally. But things have been a little hectic lately.”

  Hectic. Leave it to Jernigan to be slack about everything, including the way she described things. It’d be better to say that the correctional center had bordered on chaos ever since Green Pines. Supervisors had been forced to improvise. One of their hastily made decisions had probably been to lighten the workload on the staff by jettisoning any cases that seemed cut-and-dried.

  Such as cases involving babies and infants dying in accidents. Unless there were clear indications of foul play, just feed them into the incinerator and give the ashes to the grieving families. That was quick, easy—and best of all, required very little labor. The crematoriums were mostly automated.

  Not being a slacker like Jernigan, Officer Mendez took the time to check. But her supervisor turned out to be right. At the moment, the correctional center’s morgue had no suitable cadavers.

  She then checked the city’s main morgue. Same story. Apparently, things had been hectic for them also over the past few weeks.

  Enough. She kicked the problem upstairs. Jernigan immediately kicked it up another level.

  By the end of the day, the problem arrived back where it started. On the desk of Lajos
Irvine’s boss, George Vickers.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” he said. “Do I have to do everything?”

  He put in a call to a friend of his who worked for the Long Range Planning Board and explained the problem.

  The friend—Juan Morris was his name—scratched his jaw and gave the matter some thought,

  “Well . . . We’ve got two probable culls coming up. The final decision hasn’t been made yet, but let me see what I can do.”

  * * *

  Morris got back to him toward the end of the next day. “Sorry it took so long, George. Things have been a little crazy around here since . . . well, never mind the details. A missing link in the chain of command—and way high up, to make things worse. But that winds up working in your favor since Valerie’s tearing her hair out and moving the culls up—she’s authorized to make that decision, lucky for you—will lighten the work load some.”

  Vickers nodded. “Good. How soon . . . ?”

  “Oh, the culls were done immediately. How do you want the remains? Intact, dismembered, exsected—what?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Leave them whole—better drain the fluids, though, and pouch them—and I’ll let Irvine figure out how he wants to handle it. That’s his headache.”

  * * *

  Less than a day later, the goods were delivered to Irvine’s office. After he opened up the containers he spent some time staring at the contents. There were times he really hated his job.

  Really hated it—and more so and more often, these last months.

  Lajos had been exhilarated when he’d first been brought all the way into the onion, after Green Pines, as a reward for ferreting out McBryde’s treason. But as time passed and he became more familiar with the Alignment’s goals and methods, his uneasiness had grown.

  Some of that uneasiness, perhaps most of it, was the skepticism of a man who’d spent his adult life testing the limits of rational planning in the trenches, so to speak. He’d never heard of the Scot poet Robert Burns. But if someone had recited to him that poet’s most famous line of verse—The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley—he’d have immediately responded: “You can say that again.”

  He was a firm believer in the ancient Murphy’s law. And he found it hard to believe that the law could be abrogated simply by planning really well and for centuries at a time.

  But some of that uneasiness went beyond pragmatism. Some of it had a moral nature. As hard-bitten and tough-minded as Lajos had thought himself to be, he’d never imagined a ruthlessness as unadulterated and adamantine—as pure—as that of the Alignment’s central leadership. He could accept—he had accepted—the brutalities visited on slaves and seccies as an unfortunate necessity for the eventual advancement of the Mesan genome. But he’d come to understand that the Detweilers and those around them simply didn’t care at all. The misery and injustice that Lajos saw around him every day, and hardened himself against, was simply data to them—and not particularly important data at that.

  The objects he was staring at now were the gruesome remains of what had once been human beings. Very small ones—and very defenseless ones. But he was quite sure that if he could look at those objects through the eyes of his ultimate superiors he would see nothing of the sort.

  Just . . . objects. Being put to good use now that they turned out to be unsuitable for their original purpose.

  August 1922 Post Diaspora

  “Hell, I’m sorry I asked at all.”

  —Stephanie Moriarty, Mesan revolutionary

  Chapter 34

  Zachariah McBryde had never been able to weep for his brother Jack. He wasn’t sure why, exactly. At first, he’d been too shocked—not just at Jack’s death but at the manner of it. Suicide, committed by a traitor? It was unthinkable.

  Eventually, the fact of his brother’s death had sunk in. But to this day, Zachariah had never accepted the explanation given by the authorities.

  He’d said nothing, however; made no protest.

  Life inside the onion, especially for someone as far into it as Zachariah, was far removed from what most people would have considered “tyranny.” The onion was not governed by democratic principles, certainly. The Detweilers had always been and still were the ultimate authority, much like the family that owned and managed a huge corporation.

  But there was more to it than that. The family owners of a firm commanded the loyalty of their employees simply by paying them. The Detweilers did that as well, but the people bound to them in the onion also shared a common vision of humanity’s future. They were dedicated to a cause, a purpose, that went far beyond the simple acquisition of material goods and comforts.

  The human race had produced many such ideologically driven and ideologically cohered organizations in its history. Most of them had been religious, most of the rest had been political, and some had been purely social in their orientation. But almost all of them had had one thing in common: united by a determination to persevere over opposition and enmity, they tended to be tightly disciplined and hierarchical. That hierarchy might be selected by democratic methods and guided by an egalitarian ethos, but it was ultimately authoritarian. Or, at least, tended in that direction. A pope is still a pope, even if he is selected by a conclave of his peers.

  The Mesan Alignment was more hierarchical and authoritarian than most, by virtue of its own defining principles. There was no more than lip service paid to democratic methods, and none at all to egalitarianism, as you’d expect from a movement based on the principles of genetic superiority and inferiority. Ultimately, the Detweilers ruled because they were the Detweilers—the alphas of the alpha lines. More like a medieval dynasty, in some ways, than anything else.

  That said, it was a modern dynasty with a modern, even hyper-sophisticated, attitude toward command and obedience. Members of the onion, especially those in the inner layers, were given a great deal of latitude. Their views were actively solicited and encouraged, not simply tolerated. An outsider—the archetypical alien from another universe, for instance—who observed the interactions of members of the onion as they went about their work, would have found them impossible to distinguish from the interaction of people in a democratic polity guided entirely by legal principles.

  Until the ax came down. Then, the differences became clear and stark.

  One could put that as crudely as possible. It takes a long time to execute someone in a democracy ruled by law. The Detweilers or their delegated lieutenants could do it in minutes, even seconds—no longer than it took for the order to be transmitted and the wherewithal of homicide assembled.

  So, Zachariah had kept his mouth shut about his brother Jack’s supposed treason. The sophistication of the Alignment’s leadership had been demonstrated by their refusal to punish any member of Jack’s family. That had been true even informally. No one had lost a job, been demoted, or been refused later advancement. But open protest—resistance of any kind to the official line—would have been exceedingly dangerous. Quite probably fatal.

  For all those reasons—perhaps other reasons, too; it was certainly not something Zachariah was going to discuss with a therapist—he’d never wept for his brother.

  Now, as he watched his home planet receding in the viewscreen, he could finally grieve Jack’s death—because he was grieving for his entire family. The rest of them were still alive, true enough. But there was little chance that Zachariah would ever see them again. Now that the final great struggle was at hand after centuries of preparation, no one in the inner layers of the onion thought it was going to be easy—and certainly not quick.

  The problem was simple and inevitable, as the leaders of the Alignment had always known it would be. The prerequisite for accomplishing their goal was the dissolution of the Solarian League. Whatever its faults and weaknesses—its many, many, many weaknesses—the League was just too great an obstacle to their purpose, by virtue of its social mass if nothing else.

  Early on, the Detweilers had pondered the possibili
ty of using the League as a vessel for the transformation of the species, but they had never found a plausible mechanism for doing so. The League had to go, therefore. But that same immensity meant that great forces needed to be assembled against the League—and very few of those forces could be allowed to understand their own purpose. They were themselves inimical to the Alignment; more so, in many ways, than the League itself.

  Leonard Detweiler’s great-great-great-grand-daughter Cecilia had once depicted the problem thusly: We will bring down the great bison with a pack of wolves. The tricky part is that we don’t control the wolves.

  Thankfully, there had been enough room on the slave ship for Zachariah to have a private cabin. At least he was spared the presence of his Gaul keeper. So, as he watched Mesa dwindle in the viewscreen until it was just one bright speck among a multitude, he wept, softly and steadily. What made the tears so bitter was that he had never been able to say goodbye to anyone.

  He was still weeping when the ship made its alpha translation and he left the system of his birth. Probably forever. Almost certainly for many years.

  * * *

  When she came into the living room of their apartment, Stephanie Moriarty’s face was taut and drawn. So much so that her natural beauty was overwhelmed by her own expression.

  Cary Condor noticed at once. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m . . . not sure ‘wrong’ is the right word.” She began slowly removing her jacket. There’d been a chill that morning when she left. As she did so, she retrieved something from one of the pockets and held it up.

  “I found this in the fish.”

  “Oh, my God.” Cary practically whispered the words. She got up hastily and came over to stare at the little chip; so flimsy it was translucent. It looked more like a fish scale than anything manufactured. That was by design, of course.