Cauldron of Ghosts

by David Weber

  “I’m telling you,” Brianna Pearson said emphatically into the tension-curdled atmosphere, “we do not want to turn OPS—or, even worse, MISD—loose. Not without bringing in people from outside the Capital District, anyway!”

  “There’s no time to bring in anyone else!” Regan Snyder snapped, and Pearson glared at her. “We have to act now, and we have to act decisively,” the tall, raven-haired Snyder continued harshly. “We’ve let the damned seccies have too much free rein for too long, and this is what we get for it! It’s time we explained reality to them in terms even they can understand!”

  Pearson never took her glare off Snyder, but the corner of one eye was watching Brandon Ward, the General Board of Mesa’s CEO. What she saw there wasn’t encouraging.

  Ward was a tall, fair-haired man with gray eyes and a strong chin. He carried himself with the grace of an athlete, maintained by the hours he put in on handball courts, and he projected the image and attitude of a decisive person with genuine power. Unfortunately, any decisiveness he might once have cherished had been leached out of him long ago, and the truth was that his actual power was an amorphous proposition, at best. Chief Executive Officer or no, he’d long since learned the true limits the General Board imposed upon him. His ability to administer Mesa was almost as great as someone looking in from the outside might have supposed it to be. His ability to formulate and control Mesa’s policies was quite another matter, and Snyder—although officially “only” the Director of Commerce—was Manpower Incorporated’s representative on the Board.

  And Ward knew it.

  Snyder stood a hundred seventy-three centimeters tall and was almost as athletic as Ward (although her chosen sports had more to do with bedrooms than handball courts), with strikingly good looks which owed very little to biosculpt and quite a lot to the same genetic modification which had given her that midnight hair and incredibly blue eyes. Those portions of her appearance were due to her parents’ choices before she’d ever been born, but the stylish tattoos and body piercings were her own addition. At the age of fifty-one, she was forty years younger than Ward, although both of them were third-generation prolong recipients. Unlike him, however, Snyder was a member of the New Lodges, the members of the Mesan social elite who chose to flaunt their status and revel in their power. In Pearson’s opinion, that was stupid. The Audubon Ballroom had made a special point of picking off members of the New Lodges whenever possible, especially any of them with direct links to Manpower, and Snyder’s link to Manpower was very exalted indeed. She was VP of Operations in the Mesa System, which would have put her at the very apex of any Ballroom hit list even without her arrogant, sneering lifestyle.

  On the other hand, Pearson acknowledged to herself, she is VP of Operations, so maybe she’s not quite as stupid as I thought. Given her job, she couldn’t paste a bigger target on her back however she chose to dress, now could she? So why not live whatever way she chooses?

  On more mature consideration, however, she was just as stupid as Pearson had ever thought.

  “I think Brianna has a point,” Jackson Chicherin put in, his courteous, academic tone contrasting sharply with Snyder’s grating anger. The Commerce Director looked away from Pearson to glare at him, instead, and he shrugged. “The situation’s bad enough now without our making it even worse,” he pointed out. “If we turn Public Safety loose on the seccy districts and don’t bring in units from outside the Capital District, it’s going to be a bloodbath. Too many of their people have lost family or friends. All some of them will be interested in is getting payback, and if they can’t get it from whoever actually set off those bombs, they’ll take it from anyone they can catch.”

  Snyder’s blue eyes hardened with disdain as they bored into the short, wiry Chicherin. Part of that was the contempt of someone who considered herself a predator among predators, cutting her way up the corporate ladder with ruthlessness and determination, for someone who was basically an academic. A highly skilled, very wealthy academic, and Vice President of Research and Development for the Mesan Genetic Consultancy, but still an academic with an academic’s squeamishness for the way things worked in the real world.

  “Maybe a little bloodletting’s what we need,” she said now, her eyes as coldly reptilian as her voice. “As far as I’m concerned, we should simply call in kinetic strikes on the bastards! Level their damned towers and be done with it once and for all!” she went on, amply confirming Pearson’s estimate of her intellectual capacity. Or of her ability to pour piss out of a boot, for that matter.

  “You’re out of your mind,” Pearson said flatly. Snyder’s blue eyes flashed fire, and Pearson sneered. “If you want to destroy the entire city of Mendel, you go right ahead,” she said. “I’m going to be moving to the country first, though! Do you have any idea what kind of KEW you’d need to take out a modern residential tower? Or even one of those seccy deathtraps? You can’t use that kind of weapon without plenty of collateral damage, Regan! And that wouldn’t be the only ‘collateral damage’ you’d be doing, either!”

  “We’ve let the whole frigging seccy question fester for way too long,” Snyder grated. “It was a mistake to ever allow manumission, and we’ve been paying for it ever since. I say it’s time we finally put an end to the problem once and for all, because if we don’t, I’ll guarantee you we’ll see more of this kind of crap! And don’t think for a minute that it won’t spread from the seccies to the slaves if we don’t stamp on it fast and hard. Whether we use KEWs or not, I stand by my original argument. We need to spill enough blood to drive those bastards back into their holes and keep them hiding there for the next T-century!”

  “What you’re going to get if you turn OPS loose the way its troopers are feeling right this minute will be one hell of a lot more than ‘enough blood’—whatever that is!” Pearson said sharply. “And what we don’t need right now is a bloodbath!”

  “Why not?” François McGillicuddy demanded, and Pearson managed—somehow—not to roll her eyes.

  McGillicuddy was a senior board member of Atkinson, McGillicuddy, & Shivaprakash, a major transstellar investment firm with branches in many of the Solarian League’s major star systems. He was also Director of Security, a plum post which had fallen to AMS as the result of intricate negotiations with Manpower and the Jessyk Combine. Negotiations which would never have succeeded if he hadn’t demonstrated his willingness to work hand-in-glove with Snyder. That meant his attitude was hardly surprising, but the post he held made that attitude even more . . . unfortunate.

  Pearson herself was Vice President of Operations (Mesa) for Technodyne Industries, which was how she found herself on the General Board. Technodyne had suffered major losses—both financially and in terms of prestige—after the disaster of the Battle of Monica, although it had recovered much of the lost ground by providing its newly developed Cataphract long-range missile to the Solarian League Navy. Overall, its position on the General Board was still weaker than it had been, as Pearson was only too well aware. She’d gotten her start in Technodyne’s public relations division, however. That gave her a somewhat different perspective from many of her colleagues, who seemed blissfully unaware of—or, even worse, dismissive of—the public relations implications of what they were discussing, and all of her instincts were ringing loud, insistent alarm bells as she listened to Snyder and McGillicuddy.

  “Regan’s right,” McGillicuddy continued now, as if to prove how justified her fears were. “We need to send a message to the seccies. Even more important, maybe, we need to send one to the slaves. And we need to send it right now, before those Ballroom ‘manifestoes’ have time to sink in. God only knows how they’re likely to react after that!”

  His gray eyes were as fiery as Snyder’s, but there was more fear under that anger. Snyder, Pearson suspected, didn’t yet actually feel personally threatened. She was too fundamentally arrogant—and had too much faith in her own security measures—to consider that there might be another nuclear device out there some
where with her name on it. McGillicuddy, on the other hand, had been growing increasingly anxious about the potential for seccy or even slave violence—or perhaps it would have been more accurate to say additional seccy or slave violence—ever since Green Pines. Recent events would suggest his anxiety had been entirely justified, and he was clearly terrified of where the next round of terrorist attacks might go. There might be one person on Mesa—Regan Snyder, for example—the seccies hated more than the system’s Director of Security, but it was unlikely there were two of them. And blowing up the head of the forces responsible for preventing acts of terror would have to sound very attractive to the terrorists bent on committing them.

  “Look,” Pearson said, making herself sit back and pitch her voice as reasonably as possible, “I’m not saying measures don’t have to be taken. I’m not even saying that ‘sending a message’ to the seccies is necessarily a terrible idea. I’m simply saying there’s enough trouble already headed our way without adding this kind of interstellar public relations black eye to the mix.”

  “Oh, give me a break, Brianna!” Snyder sneered. “We’re Mesa, remember? Every do-gooder and moral crusader in the explored galaxy’s spent the last four or five T-centuries telling everyone what moral lepers we are. You really think that breaking a few heads—hell, breaking a few necks!—is going to make us even more leprous?”

  “What I’m saying,” Pearson’s tone was just a bit over controlled, “is that the Manties and the Havenites are screaming nonsense about our being behind the attacks on Manticore. They’re telling everyone who’ll listen that we’ve been manipulating the League into attacking Manticore, as well. It’s ridiculous, and only a fool would believe we would—or could—do something like that! But if we respond to these attacks with wholesale bloodshed, we’ll hand them a golden opportunity to hammer us for it. It’s going to be bad enough whatever we do, but if we pile up some sort of massive body count, you can be damned sure their propagandists’ll use it for all it’s worth! Give them enough opportunities to paint us as the galaxy’s bogeyman, and their claims will start gaining traction. If nothing else, it would make it a hell of a lot harder for our friends in the League to scare up any support for us if they decided to come after Mesa directly! With them already blowing away Solly battle fleets right and left, do you really want to hand them that sort of hammer in addition? And don’t forget, that muckraking bitch O’Hanrahan is right here in-system at this very moment. She’d be right on top of any ‘excesses’ our security forces might commit, and don’t think for an instant that she wouldn’t be shouting about them at the top of her lungs to all her League audience! You have no idea how much influence that woman has, and she’ll pull out all the stops on this one.”

  Chicherin leaned back in his chair, watching the other members of the General Board, and tried to keep his dismay from showing. He was an alpha-line whose family had been part of the Alignment for generations, and like the vast majority of the Alignment’s membership he’d always hated Manpower and the institution of genetic slavery.

  From a cold-blooded business perspective, Mesa’s position as the galaxy’s foremost genetic slaver was a continual stumbling block for Mesan Genetic Consultancy. MGC was what some people mockingly described as “the kinder, gentler face of Mesa,” a firm which provided many of the same services as those provided by Beowulfan geneticists. It was known to push the limits of the Beowulf Biosciences Code hard—even to ignore them, upon occasion—but partly because of that, it had produced some of the most successful genetic modifications for colonists whose planets demanded that sort of alteration. Unfortunately, quite a lot of people who would have dealt with MGC under other circumstances had been scared off by a combination of moral repugnance for the slave trade and fear that the genetic mods they wanted would be “contaminated” by Manpower’s. And however much Chicherin hated to admit it, quite a lot of the basic R&D which underlay MGC’s accomplishments really had originated in Manpower’s labs. There were times he felt dirtied by that knowledge, but research was research. Even though he would never have condoned the programs which had produced that data, he could hardly justify not making use of it.

  From a personal moral perspective, he loathed the institutionalization of an entire subset of the human race which was automatically considered inferior—indeed, subhuman—and denied the dignity and the rights of other human beings. From a professional viewpoint, he knew how completely unjustified the prejudice which produced that situation actually was. Genetic slaves might have been tailored—designed—for specific ends, but they were just as human as anyone else, and the bigotry which denied that simple fact was not simply morally wrong but based entirely on ignorance and stupidity.

  And from a philosophical perspective, he was firmly convinced that MGC’s public proselytization in favor of genetic uplift (and the Alignment’s covert enhancement of Mesan citizens) had been held back for T-centuries by Mesa’s association with genetic slavery. For that matter, much of the continuing galactic prejudice against the entire concept of planned genetic uplift was fueled by the existence of genetic slavery—and the public’s attitude towards it—in Jackson Chicherin’s opinion.

  And now it had brought them this. It made him want to weep. He had no burning sympathy for the Audubon Ballroom—genetic slavery’s moral corruption couldn’t simply grant carte blanche to its opponents where the commission of equally ugly atrocities was concerned—but he found it difficult to blame the Ballroom for its hatred and the tactics that hatred spawned. At the moment, it was easier to blame the terrorists than usual, given the number of personal friends and colleagues he’d lost in the nuclear attacks like the one on Saracen Tower, yet how could shedding even deeper rivers of blood make the situation better? It was hardly likely to deter any future attacks which had already been planned, and it was likely to produce even more terrorist recruits among the seccies McGillicuddy and Snyder wanted to terrify.

  None of which even considered Pearson’s point about the propaganda advantages Mesa’s enemies would wring out of any government-sponsored atrocities!

  Despite all of which, he could already see which way this was going to end. Snyder was far and away the single most powerful member of the General Board. Manpower had spent too many T-years cementing its alliances with the other megacorporations who named the Board’s members, and its thirty percent interest in Noroguchi Nanotech and Cybercom of Mesa (not to mention its never officially acknowledged outright ownership of the Jessyk Combine) gave it plenty of raw political power of its own. With McGillicuddy backing her play, she was going to carry the day eventually.

  Unfortunately, he was right.

  * * *

  “All right.” François McGillicuddy’s eyes were hard as he sat behind his desk, facing the holographic images of Commissioner Bentley Howell and Commissioner Fran Selig. “The Board’s greenlighted Rat Catcher. What do we need to make it work and how soon can we implement?”

  “That depends on how hard we intend to hit them, Sir,” Howell replied.

  The handsome, dark-haired, dark-complexioned Howell was the commanding officer of the Mesan Internal Security Directorate. MISD—its critics normally pronounced the acronym “missed,” especially since its . . . overly enthusiastic reaction to Green Pines—was technically a mere division of the Office of Public Safety. Of course, OPS had a lot of divisions, and more total manpower than any other agency of the Mesa System government. It needed the warm bodies because, despite its relatively innocuous name, it was the primary suppressive arm of the Mesan government and it answered only to the Procurator of Public Safety and, beyond the Procurator’s Office, to the Director of Security. The Procurator, unfortunately, had been attending a soccer match at a stadium in Dobzhansky when a nuclear device exploded directly above it. For the present, McGillicuddy had taken over the Procurator’s duties in addition to his own, which was how he came to be speaking directly to Howell and Selig, who—as CO of the Office of Public Safety—was Howell’s superior. Nomi
nally, at least; MISD had a reputation for creatively misconstruing directives with which it disagreed.

  Selig was a small woman, barely a hundred and fifty-seven centimeters in her bare feet, with dark blue hair and intense green eyes. There were other, more subtle genetic mods in her family background, however, and she was far stronger and tougher than she looked. She was also a savvy, skilled bureaucratic infighter, although that hadn’t helped her rein in Howell. MISD was a separate fiefdom within OPS, and the gauntleted fist gripping the drawn dagger of Public Safety on the MISD shoulder patch reflected that status only too accurately. When push came to shove, when it was time to put away the neural whips and the water cannon and the tear gas dispensers and send in Public Safety’s true hard men and women, that was when MISD came into its own.

  “How hard to do you think I want you to hit them, Bentley?” McGillicuddy replied to Howell’s question. “I want those seccy bastards hammered. I went them hammered so flat they won’t even think about getting back up.”

  “So you’re not talking about just breaking a few more heads, Sir?” Selig asked, and McGillicuddy snorted.

  “I’m talking about putting pulser darts through a few heads,” he said flatly, and Selig nodded. If she was surprised, it didn’t show. And, in fact, she’d been anticipating that decision for some time. Her uniformed OPS troopers had already broken quite a few heads over the past day or so, and she was entirely in favor of taking things to the next level.

  “Do you want to put my people in immediately, Sir?” Howell asked.

  “Not immediately.” McGillicuddy shook his head and pointed at Selig. “First, I want your people to push the rabble back into its kennels, Commissioner Selig. I want them holed up so Commissioner Howell’s people will know right where to find them in large enough numbers to make sure the survivors hear our message loud and clear. Understood?”