by David Weber
“I’ll get the reader. Don’t move. Well . . . I mean, don’t . . .”
Moriarty’s expression shifted into something more derisive. Perhaps oddly, that made her look beautiful again. “I did manage to get it all the way here without destroying it, you know. I think I can hold on for another few seconds.”
“Okay, okay, sorry. It’s just . . . Jesus. I never expected we’d . . .”
“It might be nothing, you know.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Stephanie.”
Cary rummaged around in the drawer where she kept the specialized tablet. She kept it hidden for reasons that weren’t really very reasonable. To the eye, the tablet looked no different than any other. Only a close and careful examination would reveal the unusually small slot where an out-of-the-ordinary chip could be inserted. The only people who would conduct that sort of examination were Mesan security agencies and if they’d fallen into their hands the proverbial goose was cooked anyway.
Whatever a goose was. She finally found the damn thing and held it up triumphantly.
“How could it be ‘nothing’?” she demanded. “Who would put a blank chip in a bacau fluke?”
“Oh, gee, let’s see. The Tabbies, for starters. Then there are the Ivas. The Bureau of—well, no, those thugs haven’t got the brains—but there’s always the—”
“Shut up.” Cary took the chip and carefully inserted it into the reader. “If they’d spotted us they wouldn’t be fooling around with something like this.”
“Sure they would. Use us as bait to reel in our confederates. All of whom are dead and missing except Karen, I grant you, but they don’t know that.”
By now, Cary had the necessary codes entered. “Shut. Up.”
It wasn’t that she didn’t understand the possibility that some security agency was playing a longer game than usual. She just didn’t want to think about that while there was still a chance—one hell of a good chance, in her opinion—that—
The message came up and she began reading it off. “Ambassador Jim Johnson.”
Stephanie had her own tablet out. “The Envoy by Giacomo ibn Giovanni al-Fulan. Got it.”
“Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow,” said Cary, speaking slowly.
Stephanie had been counting off the words as they were spoken. “Chapter Eleven, got it.” Her half-surly skepticism was gone by now. “This has to be from Angus.”
That was a reference to the Havenite agent who’d set up this system, Angus Levigne. The cypher was an idiosyncratic one that he’d devised himself. “It’s not as tight as a one-time pad,” he’d explained, “but it’s less limited, too. Any really good decryption expert could crack it, but not very quickly because there are so many arbitrary variables that you commit to memory.”
In that matter-of-fact absolute-zero way he had, Angus added: “Be easier to just subject you to truth drugs. Speaking of which”—he’d handed them a large vial of tablets—“take one of these at least once a month. They’re a composite designed to counter truth drugs.”
He’d sounded quite pleased. Angus was . . . a little weird. And a lot scary.
* * *
It took a while to finish. When they were done, the two women stared at each other.
“Can we trust it?” Stephanie finally asked.
“Who knows, for sure?” Cary shrugged. “But the way I look at it, somebody would have had to crack Angus himself to get all the variables that make the cypher work. And how likely is that?”
Stephanie chewed on her lower lip. After a few seconds, she said: “To be honest, I can’t imagine it happening at all. I’m pretty sure he could resist torture for . . . well, a long time.”
Cary chuckled. But there was no humor in the sound. “ ‘Long time’ as in . . . ?”
“Really long time. But it wouldn’t matter anyway because he’d be gone way before then. He’s . . . you know.”
“Weird.”
Stephanie’s smile did have some humor in it. “Let’s just think of him as ‘different,’ how’s that? The key point is, yes, I think we can trust it.”
“Yeah, me too. We’ll both have to go, though. The way this contact works, one person can’t do it alone.”
Stephanie looked to the corner where Karen was resting. Sleeping, rather. She slept most of the time now.
“It’d just be for a few hours. And it’s not until tomorrow anyway. She’ll wake up sometime before then and we can explain it to her. So at least if she wakes up while we’re gone she won’t wonder what happened to us.”
“And if we don’t come back at all . . .”
“She’s dead in a few days instead of a few weeks. Way it is.”
As was generally true of seccy revolutionaries on Mesa, both women were awfully hard-boiled themselves. That was the baseline against which you had to measure someone like Angus Levigne. Even by their standards he’d been . . .
Weird and scary.
Chapter 35
“I still find it hard to believe this is the way people crossed oceans,” said Malissa Vaughn. “For centuries.”
Standing next to her at the rail of the Magellan’s observation deck, her husband smiled. The expression managed to combine condescension and uneasiness.
The condescension came in his reply: “Your history’s creaky. Try millennia, dear. Lots of millennia.”
The uneasiness came from the fact that Jeffrey Vaughn was now regretting he’d ever come up with this idea for a vacation in the first place. At the time, spending two weeks aboard a recreation of a vessel from ancient history had seemed charming—and the term seasick just a historical curiosity.
Unfortunately, he was now discovering that even aboard a huge luxury liner equipped with stabilizers there was no way to evade the fundamental facts of his current existence:
The ship he was on floated directly upon the water, supported by ancient principles of buoyancy rather than modern principles of counter-grav.
The water immediately in question was a tiny, tiny, tiny portion of a very, very, very big ocean.
The latent energy in a planetwide ocean impacted by a planetary atmosphere dwarfed even the energy production and capabilities of modern civilization.
Which meant the ship . . . jiggled. Went up and down and side to side and back and forth as it damn well pleased and his stomach was welcome to take the hindmost if it didn’t like it.
“All you all right, dear?”
“I’m fine,” he said. Thereby unconsciously exhibiting another historical phenomenon, the ingrained reluctance of the human male to admit to frailty—a trait which was almost as deep-seated as the reluctance to ask directions from strangers.
“You don’t look fine. You look almost green, in f—”
That was as far as she got before the explosion that ripped a huge tear in the Magellan’s hull threw both of them off the deck and into the water. They fell almost thirty meters. Neither one of them was directly killed by the impact, but Jeffrey was knocked unconscious and drowned quickly. Malissa was so dazed that when she came back up to the surface she just swam in a circle. She didn’t even notice that the ship was getting farther and farther away.
But it didn’t get very far. Another explosion staggered the ship, this one at the bow. Within two minutes, the Magellan was visibly settling in the water and starting to list to starboard. By then, however, the emergency evacuation procedures were already underway.
In the ancient days when ships like this were the standard form of seagoing vessel, the training for emergency evacuation measures was usually done in a casual and slipshod manner. Typically, a cruise ship setting out on a voyage would have a single drill early on, which consisted of nothing more than lining up the passengers in their designated evacuation areas and then dismissing them almost immediately. No one actually got into the lifeboats; indeed, the lifeboats never so much as budged on their davits.
But the Magellan was a novelty on Mesa. It was one of the very few floating ships of any size on
the whole planet. In fact, it was the first passenger vessel in almost four centuries—and its two predecessors had been much smaller river boats. So, the evacuation drills had been taken quite seriously. They’d had two drills on the cruise already, even though the voyage was still less than half over. And each drill concluded with the passengers and crew getting aboard the escape shuttles. The only thing that wasn’t done that would be in a real emergency was lifting the shuttles out of their cradles and flying to safety. That would have been costly—and the one thing no one in that day and age was worried about was the possibility that simple counter-grav atmospheric craft would malfunction.
So, within a short time a full third of the ship’s complement had been ferried off the Magellan and were on their way to the mainland. Another five hundred were loading into more shuttles.
The first shuttle to explode had actually not left the ship yet. It was still resting in its cradle when it disappeared in a fireball that killed everyone already aboard and still loading, as well as every exposed person on the deck for sixty meters on either side. The exact death toll would never be known.
Less than ten seconds later, two of the shuttles already in the air exploded. Five seconds after that, two more shuttles on the ship blew up. The accumulated fatalities already numbered at least a thousand.
Panic-stricken passengers and crew now sought safety inside the ship. Sinking or not, the Magellan had sturdy bulkheads. Almost no damage caused by the exploding shuttles had penetrated the interior. The open decks where the shuttles had been berthed, on the other hand, were places of sheer carnage.
Shortly thereafter, just as the surviving members of the crew were starting to bring some order out of the chaos, a third explosion struck the Magellan. As well built as she was, the liner had never been designed to handle this sort of damage. It capsized within a minute. The almost stately pace at which the ship had been settling until then turned into something much more rapid and terrifying. The bow plunged beneath the surface and the stern rose up out of the water. Four and a half minutes later, the last few meters of the stern sank below the waves.
Of the 2,744 passengers and 963 crew members aboard, only 855 survived. Three of the shuttles that had managed to lift off the Magellan made it to the coast unharmed. That accounted for almost six hundred of the survivors. The rest were rescued after the ship sank, pulled out of the water by rescue craft flying out from the mainland. The first of them arrived forty minutes after the alarm was sent on the heels of the initial explosion. Fortunately, the explosions had spread a lot of floatable debris into the water surrounding the ship, so people who lived long enough to get off the ship had something to hang onto. And since the ship had been sailing in Mesa’s northern subtropical zone, hypothermia had not been a problem.
One of the first people pulled out of the ocean was Malissa Vaughn. Despite being addled by her impact on the water, she was a good swimmer and her natural instincts had kept her afloat. Because the ship had travelled another two hundred meters from where she’d been thrown before the second explosion finally brought it to a halt, she hadn’t been struck by any of the debris produced by the exploding shuttles, either.
She didn’t remember a thing. Her last memory had been of walking onto the deck with her husband. He’d wanted some fresh air.
Between the force and fire of the explosions and the number of people who drowned, very few bodies were recovered. The identities of those killed had to be reconstructed from the ship’s own records—or rather, the records held by its parent company, Voyages Unlimited. The Magellan had sunk in ten kilometers of water, so salvaging the ship’s own computers would have been very costly. Why bother, when the parent company held duplicate records in its computers on dry land?
* * *
As soon as the first shuttle blew up, it became obvious to the authorities that the catastrophe which had struck—was still striking—the Magellan could not possibly be the result of an accident. Even the explosions on board the ship itself, especially two of them, were highly suspect. But given that the vessel’s design and construction were hardly what anyone would have called standard, and given that very few people on Mesa—outside of the officers and crew of the Magellan itself—had any experience with floating ships, it was conceivable that some peculiar mishap or set of mishaps had occurred.
Counter-grav shuttles, on the other hand, were about as exotic as boots—and just as reliable. The moment the first shuttle exploded in its cradle, any thought that they might be dealing with an accident went out the window.
The Green Pines incident had occurred only one year before, after all. The possibility—no, the probability—of another terrorist outrage was well established.
Voyages Unlimited (not to mention its insurers) was entirely in favor of adopting a terrorist explanation. You might even say, ecstatically in favor. But their public spokesmen, being practiced professionals, managed to maintain their mournfully solemn expressions throughout.
* * *
“Are you listening to this shit, boss?” Skylar Beckert, Director of Domestic Intelligence Analysis for the Mesan Internal Security Directorate, demanded as she burst into Bentley Howell ‘s office. Howell was the MISD’s commanding officer, and as a rule, he didn’t usually react well to uninvited eruptions into his office. Skylar, however, was something of an exception to that rule, even under ordinary conditions—which these assuredly were not—because of how often she and her people had ferreted out the exact information Howell required. Including information which rivals like Fran Selig or Gillian Drescher had had no intention of sharing with MISD.
“Of course I’m listening, Sky!” Howell snapped. He was glaring at the com unit on the corner of his desk. “I missed the first twenty seconds or so, though. Who the fuck is this?”
“They claim they’re the Audubon Ballroom,” Beckert replied. “They’re delivering some kind of ‘manifesto’ . . . and taking credit—if you can call it that—for the Magellan.”
“Bastards!” Howell hissed. “I told Selig and McGillicuddy—”
“Boss, I know that’s who they claim to be,” Beckert cautioned, “but I don’t think we can necessarily take that at face value. Some other terrorist organization might be responsible and just trying to deflect the reprisals on someone else.”
“Oh, right . . .” Howell’s tone oozed sarcasm. “Just what terrorists are famous for, their shrewdness and sagacity.”
Beckert hid an internal sigh behind an attentive expression. Commissioner Howell’s contempt for all seccies and slaves—and especially for ex-slaves—was the one truly dangerous chink in his armor, in her opinion. There were times when it was wiser not to press a point too strongly, however, so she simply walked around the end of his desk until she could see the com image at which he had been glaring when she entered.
That image was of a person sitting at a small table and looking directly at the viewer. The gender of the person couldn’t be determined, thanks to carefully baggy clothing and the fact that his or her face and voice were being electronically shielded, and a corner of her mind wondered why they’d bothered with a visual image at all. Proving the point that there was a real person behind it? The wreckage still settling on the ocean floor had already made that clear enough! And despite her own caution to Howell, Beckert could think of very few other organizations which might have had enough sheer gall—or enough raw hatred—to carry out an attack like this on Mesa, of all planets.
Whoever the hell they really are, they picked the wrong world to try this shit on, she thought grimly.
“—while millions of disenfranchised citizens live in abject poverty,” the speaker was saying. “We can only hope the scavengers on the ocean floor get some sustenance from our blow for freedom. They perform a useful function, unlike the parasites who have the wealth to idle away their time on monstrously expensive and ostentatious luxuries. All such—”
* * *
“—warned. Continue on your present course and—”
Xavier Conde was not one of the League’s top newscasters, but he was solidly in the second tier. He had many of the prerequisites for the job down cold. He was good-looking, telegenic, as ambitious as Satan and not burdened by an excessive number of scruples.
He was also not especially bright, which might have had something to do with his continued failure to crack into the top tier in his profession. Or perhaps the problem lay more in the fact that he was convinced he was extraordinarily intelligent—so he kept coming up with half-baked schemes to prove it. He might have gotten farther if he’d just accepted his limits with equanimity. After all, there were any number of well-known newscasters whom no one had ever suspected of being the sharpest edges around.
Conde and his team had arrived on Mesa a month earlier, to do a special report on the casualties suffered by the planet’s so-called “seccies” in the Green Pines outrage. His thesis—which he genuinely thought to be original—was that terrorists often kill and main “their own” in the course of their fanatical crusades.
Mesa’s Directorate of Culture and Information, needless to say, had been very supportive of the project.
“Come on, people! Let’s go-go-go!”
Chapter 36
“So how’s married life treating you?” one of his bunkmates asked Supakrit X. But the newly (re)promoted sergeant gave no answer.
Lying on his own bunk across the narrow aisle, Corporal Bohuslav Hernandez raised his head from his pillow and looked over at the still form of the sergeant. “Treating him pretty good, I’d say. He’s already asleep.”
“I still think he’s nuts,” said the fourth member of the cabin, Corporal Ted Vlachos. He was sitting on the edge of the bunk just above Hernandez. “You wouldn’t catch me sharing a bed with that woman. Tick her off a little too much—zip—you’re for the long jump.”
