Cauldron of Ghosts

by David Weber

  “It takes at least five!” protested Alex.

  “Fine. You have six minutes.” The big captor glanced at his wrist com. “If you’re not recording by then I’ll kill you.”

  The man didn’t bother to draw the pistol at his waist, and the threat was made so matter-of-factly that it didn’t quite register on Vittoria for a moment. Then she couldn’t help but gasp.

  “What do you want me to do?” she asked. Some part of her was furious at herself for being so craven, but that part was overwhelmed by the rest of her, which was purely and simply terrified.

  “For the moment, nothing.” The captor pointed to Xavier. “You, get ready to read a little speech.”

  Thankfully, Conde had enough sense to keep his mouth shut.

  * * *

  When Alex said he had everything ready to go, the captor glanced at his wrist com again. “Four minutes and forty seconds. You lied, but we’ll let it go.”

  He nodded at one of the other captors, who stepped up to Xavier and moved him to stand just a meter from Vittoria, facing the vid recorder. Then he handed him three sheets of papic.

  “All right. Start.”

  Nervously, Xavier licked his lips. But he was accustomed to reading text written by someone else smoothly and easily, so he went right into it.

  “Once again, we in the Audubon Ballroom find ourselves forced to impart another lesson to Mesa’s rulers.”

  Some manic little sliver of Vittoria’s brain noted the use of the passive tense, which was particularly unfortunate in a manifesto of this nature. Her producer’s training almost led her to blurt out a protest. Hey! That should read: ‘We in the Ballroom will now teach another lesson—’

  She was so distracted that the next part of the speech didn’t register on her clearly.

  “—all you understand are actions, we present you with another to demonstrate our resolve. Let all those who seek to undermine the faith the masses have in our cause take heed.”

  Two of the captors who’d been standing just behind and a little to the side of Alex as he recorded Xavier stepped forward. Vittoria saw that they’d drawn their pistols.

  They were pointing them at her! Why?

  The fusillade took her down, spilling her off the chair as it splattered the wall behind her with blood, brains and shredded pieces of tissue. So she didn’t get to see Xavier vomit, or the beating he got from his captors that forced him to finish the manifesto.

  She might have gotten a tiny bit of satisfaction out of that part, at least. It was a pretty savage beating.

  * * *

  “First the killing in our own garage and now this!” said François McGillicuddy, half-shouting. “What the fuck is going on?”

  Grace Summers managed to refrain from responding with: I’d think it was pretty obvious. Instead she satisfied herself with a simple declarative sentence: “The Ballroom wants to publicly demonstrate they have the capability to strike at anyone. They killed our people to show they could penetrate our security and—”

  “Conde’s just a fucking newscaster!” said McGillicuddy. “He had no more security than—than—my fucking grandmother.”

  That was perhaps not an apt comparison, since Genevieve McGillicuddy was part of Mesa’s very upper crust and had quite a bit of security. But perhaps her grandson didn’t realize that since he’d spent his entire life in that wealthy cocoon.

  Blessedly, Grace’s colleague picked up the slack. “True—but he’s also quite well known,” said Aidan Crowder. “And unlike the assassination of the DIB people, the murder of that poor woman and Conde’s beating was recorded and dumped into the data net. Everybody and—and—their grandmother will be talking about it.”

  “Fuck everybody’s grandmother.” McGillicuddy reached out and stabbed at his desk com. “Zeno, I want an immediate doubling of security details on—on—everybody who might need it,” he finished lamely.

  And their grandmother, thought Grace. But she didn’t say it, of course.

  Chapter 54

  “Janice, we’ve got a problem,” said George Vickers. “Three of my agents have gone missing. Lajos Irvine, Borisav Stanković and Fred Martinez. They haven’t reported back in days.”

  Janice Marinescu bit off a snarled who gives a fuck? They were right on the cusp of the whole campaign and this—jackass—insisted on pestering her with a problem like this?

  “Why the hell haven’t you—oh. Never mind.” She’d just remembered that the three agents were engaged in undercover work. The trackers that were embedded in Alignment personnel on Mesa sometimes didn’t work if they were taken behind shielding—or just too many meters of soil, if someone went underground. Given the nature of their duties, that wasn’t unlikely to happen.

  “Hold on a minute.” She brought up her own records and gave them a quick examination. She was almost sure she already knew the answer to her question, but for something like this she felt obligated to make sure.

  “Okay, what I thought. None of them were slated for Houdini. I assume their meds have been kept up to date?”

  She gave the figure on the screen a sharp look. “Yes?”

  “Yeah, sure. All my people had the refresher within the last two months.”

  The special med implants in the trackers were good for at least a year. More to the point, if they weren’t pinged periodically the suicide program would automatically be initiated.

  “At this stage of the game, I think we should just forget about them,” she said.

  “What if they’ve been captured? Get interrogated?”

  “By who? The reason we’ve been using long-shot schemes to catch more terrorists is because there are so few of them left. At least, in any position to do anything. But even if they are being interrogated by some unknown and mysterious parties, so what? Stanković and Martinez are in the very outer peel and don’t know anything our enemies—the smartest of them, that is, which excludes any seccy I’ve ever heard of—can’t already figure out. Irvine knows a little more, but . . .”

  She shrugged. “That’s exactly why his med implant includes the truth serum safety.”

  They’d never seen any reason to notify Lajos of that feature of his implants, either. To what purpose? If he got captured and interrogated with truth drugs, better for him as well as everybody else if he just dropped dead.

  “What about torture?”

  This was a waste of her time—time which was now extremely precious. “George, drop it. That’s an order. And why are you fussing about it? You’re slated for evacuation soon yourself.”

  She didn’t need to double-check her records to make sure she remembered the details for that evacuation. By now, she knew them by heart.

  “Yes, I know. I just . . .” He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Fine. If you don’t care, I don’t care. Signing off.”

  A moment later, the screen reverted to standby.

  She rose from her console and went over to another. Normally, that would have been staffed by one of her team members, but there were now only two of them left in the Houdini control room.

  She brought up the status of her own evacuation. That one would be much more roundabout than most, because by the time she left the whole planet would be descending into chaos.

  Good. She saw that the flyer had been brought to the underground garage. It would be fueled and ready to go.

  Kevin Haas came into the room. “Get some sleep, Janice. There’s nothing left to do but wait, and we won’t have much chance for sleep for at least thirty-six hours after we leave.”

  She knew her partner was right, but . . .

  Firmly, she told herself she was just suffering from a case of jitters. She got up and headed for the control center’s small bunkroom.

  * * *

  “I’ll make it easier for you the first time around,” said the man. “Just answer one question and I’ll leave for another stretch. Fair warning, though. I am extremely good at detecting lies. It’s part of the reason I don’t use truth
drugs. So if the answer is ‘no,’ don’t try to say ‘yes’ in order to drag everything out. And if it’s ‘yes,’ you’d better say so. The minute—the second—I think you’re lying to me, I will kill you.”

  As was true of everything about the monster, what made him so frightening was his invariant understatement. The threats were simple, straightforward, as matter-of-fact as a man might say the sky was overcast. He never scowled, never snarled, never glared. Right now, he hadn’t even bothered to take out his gun in order to emphasize Lajos’ imminent peril.

  He didn’t need to. He knew that Lajos knew he’d do exactly what he said he would, when he would, and how he would.

  Still, Lajos struggled to retain some personal dignity. “You’ve never even told me your name. Not last time either.”

  There was no longer any point in trying to claim he’d never been in that café. He also didn’t doubt the man’s claim that he was good at ferreting out lies.

  “My apologies. I didn’t mean to be rude. My name is Victor Cachat. I’m currently a Special Officer in the Republic of Haven’s Federal Intelligence Service. Prior to that—”

  But Lajos didn’t listen to any of the rest. His worst fears had been confirmed. It had been foolish to even ask that question.

  Lajos had been part of the extensive debriefing conducted by Collin Detweiler after the McBryde/Green Pines fiasco. He was the only surviving eyewitness who’d had contact with the two men suspected of being the foreign agents behind the whole affair. He’d been dismissed after his testimony was taken and examined, but not before he’d learned the basic facts as established by Detweiler and his team.

  Cachat. Again. He and his Manticoran partner were supposed to be dead. How had the man managed to—?

  But what difference did it make? Lajos didn’t doubt him, any more than he doubted any of the man’s threats.

  Cachat finished. Then paused for a moment. Then:

  “Here’s the question. All I need for now is a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ We know you’re a member of the Alignment. More specifically, that you’re working for their security forces. Don’t bother trying to deny that because it’s pointless.”

  “So what’s your question?”

  “Are you ready and willing to die for the Alignment? Not in the abstract, but here and now.”

  Cachet glanced at his timepiece. “I’ll make it even easier for you. I’ll give you five minutes to think about it. If the answer is ‘yes,’ say so at any point you choose, I’ll shoot you dead and we’re both done. If the answer’s ‘no,’ you don’t have to say anything. If you’re still silent when the time’s up, I’ll just leave. When I come back, though, I’ll have more questions.”

  He looked at the timepiece again. “Starting the count . . . now.”

  Lajos’ brain spent the next few minutes scurrying around in his skull like a mouse trapped in a cage.

  There was no way out. And . . .

  He realized, finally, just how badly his faith in the Alignment—its purpose, its mission, and for sure and certain its methods—had been eroded over the past year.

  How much? He didn’t know yet. But he was no longer willing to die for it.

  He didn’t say anything, though. He just waited.

  “Time’s up,” Cachat said. “I’ll see you in a few hours, then.” He glanced around the cell. “Do you need more water? Food?”

  “No, I’m fine.” The moment he said it, he realized what an absurd statement that was. He was anything but fine. Given the parameters of his situation, though . . .

  Again, he struggled to retain some dignity. “I don’t suppose you could do anything about the quality of the food, could you?”

  “No, sorry. If it makes you feel any better, I’m eating the same stuff you are. The kitchens—”

  He shook his head, as if he were irritated with himself. And with that he left.

  * * *

  As was true of modern residential towers everywhere, most people in Neue Rostock ate food that they prepared themselves in their own kitchens. Still, with this many people concentrated in a single building, there was always a large number who wanted to eat at one of the cafeterias or restaurants scattered throughout Neue Rostock.

  But now, the tower’s public kitchens were closing. The cooks had spent the last period making foods that could be carried easily and would keep for days without refrigeration. The foods weren’t noxious, but probably the best that could be said for most of them was that they were bland.

  For thousands of people undergoing an evacuation, however, it made for the most practical diet. Chuanli was finding refuge for them in other towers, but it was a slow process and priority was being given to children, the elderly and the ill. Some of Neue Rostock’s people would be living underground for days, maybe weeks.

  * * *

  The evacuation was proceeding a lot more smoothly than Thandi had expected. She’d underestimated—quite badly, in fact—the extent to which Dusek and his people wielded authority in Neue Rostock.

  The problem, she now realized, was with the very term “criminal gang.” Both words in that term were . . . off.

  To begin with, while many of the activities Dusek oversaw were against Mesan law, most seccies had little if any problem with them. For the most part, those activities which Dusek and his people operated directly themselves involved entertainment—defining the term a bit broadly to include liquor, drugs, gambling, sex, bot fighting, all sorts of racing and sports matches. He even owned and operated a third of the district’s public libraries.

  Seccy social mores were perhaps coarse, by the standards of many worlds—certainly the Core worlds—but that just reflected the reality of their lives. The more unsavory of those businesses, like prostitution, were ameliorated by seccy attitudes. Many young women and men did a stint working that trade and left it after a few years with usually little in the way of permanent consequences. Very often, the way they quit was by being matched up with someone by one of the mating services—some of which were also run by Dusek.

  Many of whatever social services existed in Neue Rostock were maintained by the gang. If someone needed medical treatment and couldn’t afford it, their first (and usually only, and always last) recourse was to ask the gang for help. As long as you hadn’t done something to put you in Dusek’s bad graces, a loan would always be forthcoming. And while outright grants were never given, Dusek was willing to forgive a loan in cases of real hardship. A lot of families over the years had seen their old folks die in reasonable comfort and grace thanks to a loan from the gang—which, if they really couldn’t afford to pay it back, would usually be cancelled.

  In short, using the term criminal to describe Dusek and his people . . . wasn’t inaccurate, exactly. But it was also much too limited. If he was Neue Rostock’s robber baron, the baron part of the description was preeminent.

  The term “gang” was even more misleading. To begin with, it was closer to a small army than anything usually implied by the term “gang.” Dusek had hundreds of people on his own payroll, and thousands more whose income derived from him indirectly.

  The reason none of the major crime lords in the seccy districts had tried to take over Lower Radomsko wasn’t because they couldn’t have done so. Dusek, for instance, could have flattened any of the Lower Radomsko gangs—or all of them put together. The real deterrent was that if any one of them tried, the other major bosses would come in also to prevent them from gaining another large territory.

  The term “organization” was a lot more accurate than “gang.” The seccies themselves usually called Dusek’s organization “the outfit.”

  So, the evacuation was going quite well. The outfit had even managed to keep most signs of it from becoming evident outside of Neue Rostock. People whose jobs were such that an absence would have become quickly noticed by the authorities were allowed to keep going to work for the time being.

  The situation couldn’t last for very long, of course, especially with people being
filtered into neighboring towers. But unless Victor and Anton’s assessment was badly off, it wasn’t going to anyway.

  Thandi had no opinion on that subject herself. But by now, she did have a firm opinion on the subject of Cachat & Zilwicki Espionage, Ltd.

  It was the best outfit of its kind in the galaxy.

  October 1922 Post Diaspora

  “We have, to put it as mildly as I possibly can, got a grudge against the Alignment.”

  —Victor Cachat, Haven agent

  Chapter 55

  “They’re almost in the zone,” said Kevin Haas.

  Janice Marinescu was watching the progress of the commercial flyer on her own screen. On board were George Vickers and two other alpha-line high-ranking members of the Alignment.

  The flyer was now coming in for a landing at the airfield just outside the city of Dobzhansky, three hundred kilometers to the southwest of Mendel. From there, Vickers and his companions were supposed to take a shuttle to one of the orbital stations, where they would board the Jessyk Combine vessel that would take them outsystem. They were starting their Houdini evacuation.

  Starting . . . and ending. All of them had been carefully evaluated and found wanting in one important respect or another. In the case of Vickers—the only one of the three Janice knew personally—the problem was excessive narcissism and egotism, an unfortunate side effect that tended to crop up in his genetic line.

  There was a tried and tested method—tested for at least ten millennia, since humans first began domesticating animals—for dealing with that problem. Cull the unwanted variants in the genetic line.

  The final decision had been made by Collin Detweiler two days ago, just before he left himself.

  “Okay . . . now,” said Haas.

  Marinescu keyed in the command. The nuclear device that had been secreted in the flyer’s cargo bay detonated.

  The yield of the explosion was eight kilotons, roughly half the size of the “Little Boy” bomb used on Hiroshima over two millennia earlier. The height at which the detonation occurred was a little over five hundred meters, which was just about the same height as that of the Hiroshima detonation.