Cauldron of Ghosts (eARC)

by David Weber

  Yuri nodded. “I see. Do you have a specific recom—”

  “Pfah. You, of course.”

  Chapter 37

  Victor gazed down at the recumbent form on the narrow bed. “When was the last time she was awake?”

  “It’s been twenty hours,” said Cary. “We’re getting worried.”

  “Karen’s condition seems to have worsened a lot recently,” said Stephanie. “Starting a week ago. Before that, her deterioration was more-or-less steady but didn’t change much from day to day.”

  Victor wasn’t surprised. Given the young woman’s injuries, she had to have a tough constitution just to have stayed alive this long.

  “All right,” he said. “It’ll pose some risks, but we don’t have any choice. We’ll move her tonight.”

  Cary frowned. “Move her? Where?”

  “And why?” added Moriarty.

  “Never mind the ‘where.’ You don’t need to know. As for the ‘why,’ we have access to a regeneration unit. It’s not the sort of full-fledged unit a hospital would have, so we won’t be able to heal all of the damage. But at least we can stabilize her condition and keep her alive.”

  “For how long?”

  “Medically speaking, for years. The political situation is likely to pose the real hazard.” Victor turned away from the bed. “I’ll send people over to pick her up. They’ll be here just after nightfall. Have her ready to go.”

  “Ready…how?”

  He shrugged. “As best you can.”

  “Not a chance,” said Stephanie firmly. “She can’t even stand up.”

  Since Karen’s legs were missing below the knees, she couldn’t walk out under her own power. Victor was searching for an alternative. Simply carrying the woman out on a litter could be done, of course. There wasn’t really that much risk involved. After nightfall, unless there was someone specifically spying on them—in which case, the authorities were already alerted and the hammer was probably about to fall anyway—they could only be spotted by one of the surveillance cameras that were scattered throughout most of the seccy quarters.

  But the lighting in the corridors was pretty poor. Anyone monitoring the images would be able to determine that one live human body was being carried by two other people, but they wouldn’t see enough detail to tell exactly what was happening. Illness, an injury of some sort, it could be a number of things. It would be easy to disguise everyone’s features enough to throw off automatic face recognition software—even assuming that Mesan security had good enough images of the three women in the first place.

  So, a little disguise…misdirection, rather…

  “We won’t carry her out on a stretcher. We’ll carry her slung by the shoulders, one person on each side. I’ll have the two people who pick her up act casually, even convivially. If the incident does get picked up by a surveillance camera, anyone studying the recording is likely to think Karen just got drunk at a party and two friends came to take her home.”

  Stephanie and Cary looked at each other.

  “That’ll work,” said Stephanie, with a hard little smile on her face. “Everybody knows seccies are a bunch of souses and drug addicts.”

  “It might be a little rough on Karen,” said Cary, “but she’s tough enough to take it. And she’s light enough that the two of us can lift her.”

  Victor shook his head. “You won’t be carrying her. Not both of you, anyway. I need Cary to come with me on my visit to Chuanli. She’ll need to introduce me.”

  Both women frowned. “Why do you want to see him?” asked Stephanie. “I’d figure at this point—since we won’t be selling him Karen’s body parts after all—that we’d want to steer clear of him.”

  “You really want to know? You don’t need to but”—he shrugged—“there’s no security issues involved.”

  Again, Stephanie and Cary looked at each other.

  “No,” said Cary.

  “Yes,” said Stephanie. “I’m tired of groping in the dark.”

  “It’s simple enough. I’m going to take over Lower Radomsko—or rather, convince Jurgen Dusek that I can—in order to use Dusek’s criminal network to do this, that and the other.” He smiled a little apologetically. “Sorry, those details you don’t need to know.”

  “Hell, I’m sorry I asked at all,” said Stephanie.

  * * *

  The guy was just as freaky as Angus Levigne. And while he didn’t look like him at all—he was strikingly handsome, for one thing, which you could hardly say of Angus—he had the same air about him. Hard as a diamond; ruthless; deadly. Did Manticore have a factory that stamped them out like robots?

  The name he’d given Cary and Stephanie was Philip Watson. Stephanie was sure it was a pseudonym, just as she was sure “Angus Levigne” had been as well. Watson hadn’t precisely identified himself in terms of who he represented. Levigne had been equally vague. But Carl Hansen had told them Levigne and the squat powerful-looking man who’d come with him on that previous mission were Manticoran agents. Stephanie had seen no reason to doubt him, even though the two agents who’d come to Mesa earlier had spoken with completely different accents.

  She hadn’t recognized either one of those accents. But this guy, Watson, spoke with yet a third accent, one which Stephanie did recognize. Manticorans rarely came to Mesa but Dockhorns came often because they were heavily involved in the slave trade. Stephanie had encountered several of them over the years. The accent was quite distinctive.

  Why would a Dockhorn be working for Manticore? That didn’t make much sense.

  She’d been immediately suspicious but…

  The problem was, she couldn’t think of any logical reason Watson would be anything other than a Manticoran agent. It made even less sense that one of Mesa’s security agencies would be running such an elaborate sting operation. Why bother? If they knew enough to have completely penetrated the security arrangements made by Levigne, they’d know that Stephanie and her two surviving confederates were isolated small fry. They’d just stamp them out.

  She’d discuss it with Cary after she got back. There could be several explanations, after all. In the meantime, she needed to do what she could to get Karen ready.

  There was that about Watson. She’d had the same sense about Levigne, too. They might be utterly ruthless but they were not disloyal. Something about them—it was there even if she couldn’t put a finger on it—exuded you don’t leave a fallen comrade behind just as surely as they did deadliness.

  Stephanie’s eyes teared up—something which almost never happened to her. But she and Cary and Karen had become very close over the years of struggle, especially the harrowing period since Green Pines. She’d been sure Karen was doomed and that she’d even have to dismember her.

  She managed a little chuckle, then. Karen might still be doomed, of course. As Watson had intimated, the political situation remained perilous. But whatever else, at least Stephanie wouldn’t have to cut her up like an animal carcass.

  She managed an outright laugh, at that point. Talk about a low bar!

  * * *

  “We used them quite a bit on Parmley Station,” Andrew explained. Thandi followed his finger as he pointed to the objects positioned at intervals just under the basement’s ceiling. There were ten of them, all told; four down each side and one in the center of the narrow walls that formed the ends of the sunken chamber.

  “And there are more along the floor,” pointing those out as well. “The gadgets were originally mining equipment.”

  Seeing Thandi’s small frown of puzzlement, Artlett got a jeering smile on his face. “Soldiers! Talk about one-track minds. Not ‘mining’ as in warfare, Thandi. ‘Mining’ as in digging deep holes in the ground to haul out minerals.”

  The frown stayed in place. “Do they still do that?”

  “Yeah, believe it or not. It’s a rare practice nowadays, of course. It’s generally much easier and more efficient—not to mention cheaper—to either use one or another type of molecular re
combination or just strip away an entire asteroid. But occasionally there’s a substance that’s worth getting the old-fashioned way. The thing is, such mines almost always require deep penetration. So—”

  He indicated the gadgets once again. “These things. They’re called pressor nodes. Once they’re triggered, they set up a lattice that reinforces whatever structure they’re embedded in, like a mine tunnel or a cavern. We used them as safety precautions in parts of the station that were at risk of rupturing. I had to adapt them some, so they’d hold something together as well as resist external pressures and impacts.”

  Thandi was impressed. Artlett could be a pain in the neck, but the man was a genuine wizard when it came to tech stuff. “In other words, by setting them up here you’ve turned this sub-basement into what amounts to a bomb shelter.”

  Andrew waggled his hand. “Within limits. A direct hit by a targeted penetration bomb will punch through. And it doesn’t stand a chance against a kinetic energy weapon strike from orbit. But we should survive anything short of that.”

  She frowned. “I’d think something that effective would generate so much energy that it’d be easily detected.”

  “Well, sure—but we won’t be using them except in an emergency. That’s ‘emergency’ as in ‘the Mesan authorities are trying to blow their way into the place’—in which case, what difference does it make if they detect the use of pressor nodes? They already know we’re here or we wouldn’t need to use them at all.”

  “If they try to blow their way in, as you put it, they’ll certainly cut off the power to the building first.”

  “Teach your grandmother to suck eggs! We faced the same problem in Parmley Station. We didn’t want slavers to be able to detect our locations, which they certainly would have if we’d kept the nodes powered all the time. But we didn’t need to, since they were only there for emergencies.”

  He gave Thandi the sort of pitying look usually reserved for children having trouble with simple math problems. Then, pointed to one of the pieces of equipment in a corner of the chamber. “See that? It’s a Faber-Knapp battery. I’ve been charging it ever since we arrived. In another day or so, there’ll be enough stored up to give all the nodes a power surge to keep the structure intact long enough for us to make our escape.”

  “Escape wh—”

  “And before you ask ‘where,’ let me show you something.” He led the way around a corner in the chamber. Thandi saw what looked for all the world like a spaceship hatch recessed into the wall.

  “That’s an access hatch that leads to one of the sewer lines,” he said.

  She made a face. Seeing it, Andrew chuckled.

  “Relax. I looked around a bit. That sewer doesn’t look like it’s been used in decades. This is a big city and it’s been here for centuries. Given that much time, the subterranean passages will be a gigantic maze. After a while, no one really knows exactly what exists and where it goes.”

  “Are you sure there’s a way out?”

  He gave her the same pitying look—adjusted downward, so to speak. Poor kid can’t add two plus two. “How am I supposed to know? It’d take days—weeks, maybe months—to explore what’s probably out there. But it can’t be any worse than the situation we’d be in, can it?”

  She smiled. “Point taken.”

  When they got back into the main part of the chamber, Thandi glanced at the ceiling. “How’s she doing?”

  Andrew shook his head. “She’s not in there any longer. The guy is. What’s his name?”

  “Teddy.”

  “Yeah, him. Silly name for a thug, you ask me. We swapped them out quickly to make sure his wounds got stabilized. After a couple of more hours, we’ll swap them again. They’ll stay in longer, the second time around.”

  “Where is she?”

  “We’ve got her in a room on the second floor.”

  Thandi frowned. “Who’s watching her? You’re down here and I thought I heard Steph moving around in the front room.”

  “Relax. Her wounds aren’t life-threatening.”

  “I’m not worried about that. If she escapes, we could have trouble.”

  “Escape!” Andrew’s mouth twisted into a jeer again. “First off, she’s heavily sedated. Secondly, she’s not getting out of that room—I know; I made sure it was secure—with anything less than explosives, which she doesn’t have. And they’d kill her if she set them off, anyway, in that small a room. It’s not much more than a glorified closet.”

  * * *

  Anton frowned at the figures on the screen. “What the hell…?”

  A possible explanation came to him. He was not one to jump to conclusions, though. So he spent a few minutes pondering various ways he might be able to cross-check the information. Not to make sure it was accurate—he’d already made sure of that—but to develop the needed correlations.

  Correlation wasn’t causality, of course, not even when it reached one hundred percent. A toddler’s ability to walk is invariably preceded by feeding on milk. It does not thereby follow that milk causes pedestrianism. Still, if he could produce the same results within a reasonable margin of error using several different correlations, he’d know he had a line on something.

  So. His initial results had been obtained by crosschecking disappearances with residence. An obvious correlation would be to crosscheck disappearances with occupations. Another would be to crosscheck disappearances with job status. A third might be…

  Mesan citizens registered their DNA at birth. Cracking into those records would be tricky, but Anton was sure he could manage it. The bigger problem would be crunching the numbers involved, after he got them. But there were advantages to being Cathy Montaigne’s lover. She was always willing to place her wealth at his disposal when he needed something for his work. Such as a shipboard computer whose capabilities vastly exceeded anything a pleasure yacht required. Centillions trembled at its approach; vigintillions just fell over dead.

  That correlation would be a lot fuzzier than the others—and they were already fuzzy—but if Anton’s surmise was correct he should be able to see regular patterns. However Mesa might be ranking its citizens, that should manifest itself in the genomes selected. There’d be clusters involved.

  One more correlation. Perhaps…

  “That is so freaky,” said Yana. “I’ll never get used to it.”

  Startled, Anton’s eyes came back into focus. He looked to his left and saw that Yana was sprawled on the luxurious divan against the salon’s wall. (Technically, it was a bulkhead, but the term just didn’t fit—really, really didn’t fit—the splendor of the thing. What sort of self-respecting bulkhead is laden with original works of art each of which cost a small fortune?)

  “What’s freaky?” he asked.

  “You are. I’ve been watching you for ten minutes. In that entire time you haven’t moved except for blinking your eyes and occasionally twitching a finger.”

  “I’m thinking,” he said, defensively.

  She shook her head. “You are not. Thinking is what people do for maybe fifteen seconds at a stretch. What you’re doing is even more unnatural than this ridiculous fake body of mine.”

  However often Yana groused privately about her new physique, she never broke cover when it came to her apparel. Right now, she was wearing an outfit designed by one of Terra’s top couturier which accentuate her already flamboyant figure and clung to her like mist. Literally, like mist: the material was just barely short of transparent and seemed somehow aerated. The material was something Anton had never heard of before, called vaporaise. The stuff was apparently so expensive that when gold bullion came calling it had to use the servants’ entrance.

  “Of course!” he exclaimed. He turned back to the computer. “Correlate disappearances with fashion purchases.”

  “Glad to be of help,” said Yana.

  * * *

  “Are we expecting any trouble?” asked Borisav Stanković, as they neared the entrance to their destination.


  Lajos Irvine shook his head. “No. And if there were any—no offense, guys, but we’re on Dusek’s turf—there isn’t much you could do anyway.”

  “Yeah, we’d be toast before we knew anything was up,” said Freddie Martinez.

  His tone was placid. It was a sign of the high quality of Lajos’ sidekicks that neither one of them felt any need to strut or swagger. Even the Alignment’s gunmen were top grade.

  “So why are we here?” Stanković wasn’t being belligerent, he just wanted to make sure he and Freddie understood what they were supposed to do.

  “You’re basically window-dressing, Bora. I’m trying to pass myself off as a person of substance in the milieu.”

  “That being the criminal underworld,” said Stanković, nodding. “It wouldn’t do for such a fine and upstanding fellow to carry his own goods to an exchange. Especially without bodyguards.”

  He and Martinez were both carrying valises that held the body parts Lajos would be selling today. Both in their left hands, leaving the right hands free in case weapons needed to be drawn.

  Not that they would be—or could be. If they were walking into an ambush, the first sign of trouble would be their sudden and near-instantaneous demise. Men like Dusek and Chuanli weren’t fumblers. But it was all a moot point. The goods they were carrying weren’t valuable enough—not even close—for Dusek to tarnish his reputation for straight dealing. Lajos was bringing his own bodyguards simply because of protocol. In the sometimes topsy-turvy world of organized crime, it would be considered a faux pas to do otherwise. Like wearing casual work clothes to a ball. Appearances needed to be maintained.

  Chapter 38

  “I wish every day was like this,” said Bea Henderson. She leaned back in the pilot’s seat and sipped appreciatively from a cup of coffee that her co-pilot had just brought up from the small galley behind the cockpit.

  Carefully balancing his own cup, George Couch slid into his seat. He gave the landscape below no more than a passing glance—which was understandable given that the otherwise-spectacular scenery of Mesa’s famous Ganymede Canyons was obscured by fog. That was not unusual this time of day. The sun had just come up over the horizon.