Cauldron of Ghosts (eARC)

by David Weber

  My God, Pearson thought. I think she actually believes that. But she can’t really be that stupid, can she? Or is it that she’s that desperate? That she has to believe this line of bullshit she’s handing out, because the only alternative would be to face the truth? God knows that’s the last thing anyone associated with Manpower wants to do right now, but if we let her go on this way, drag all the rest of us down with her, then what happens to us? For that matter, what happens to Mesa? What’s going to stop the seccies and the slaves from taking exactly the kind of revenge anyone else would take in their place and turning this entire planet into one huge graveyard?

  Brianna Pearson had never thought of herself as a religious woman, but in that moment, she found herself wishing she did believe in God. Or did she? Because if there truly had been a God, the people whose prayers he’d be listening to were probably the ones inside Neue Rostock Tower, not the ones sitting around this conference table.

  “I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” she began. “As a matter of fact—”

  The conference room door flew open, and heads snapped around at the unceremonious, unexpected, and unacceptable interruption.

  “What’s the mean—” Brandon Ward began thunderously.

  “I’m sorry, Sir!” his senior aide cut him off. “I’m sorry, but…but this is—”

  She slithered to a stop, as if groping for words, and Ward’s frown turned even darker.

  “What the hell are you talking about, Andrea?!” he snapped.

  “Sir, Perimeter Tracking just reported a hyper footprint. A big hyper footprint—at least a dozen ships-of-the-wall!”

  Chapter 66

  Thandi Palane checked the pulse rifle magazine, then locked it in place, cycled a round into the chamber, and set the safety. She’d already checked the vibro blade at her left hip and the pulser at her right.

  She looked up and saw Victor gazing at her.

  “I hate legends,” she said, with an off-center smile.

  “I admit they can be unpleasant things,” he acknowledged. “Messy, even. Useful, though. And you have to keep your eye on the final prize.”

  “Have I ever mentioned to you that you’re a very strange person, Victor Cachat?”

  “Yes, you have.” The handsome face and blue eyes met hers levelly, and he shook his head. “And for what it matters,” he said, his voice unaccustomedly soft, “I’m sorry. I’d really rather not have turned you into a legend, Thandi.”

  “Don’t be,” she replied. “Sometimes you just draw the short straw, and I can think of a lot worse things to be fighting for—or against, for that matter.”

  “At least we gave the bastards a hell of a hard time,” Dusek said from where he sat in one corner, counting hand grenades. He looked up with a crooked smile of his own. “You really think the rest of them will finish it up for us?”

  “One way or the other,” Victor said. “We may not have kept them busy long enough for Duchess Harrington to get here from Manticore, but we sure as hell kept them busy long enough for the other seccies to get organized.”

  Thandi nodded. They could still pull in Culture and Information’s so-called newscasts, and it didn’t take a huge amount of skill at reading between the lines to know the Mesan government was sweating bullets over the pressure building in the other seccy districts. None of those other districts were as well organized—or armed—as Neue Rostock had been, but she had no doubt at all that they were a lot better organized—and armed—than they’d been three T-weeks ago, and there were a lot of them. She remembered a certain Old Earth legend, and snorted.

  “Something funny?” Dusek asked.

  “Just that I never realized I should have been named Pandora Palane, not Thandi.”

  “Pandora?” Dusek raised both eyebrows.

  “A Solly legend,” Victor said, “and she’s mixing it up.” Thandi stuck out her tongue at him, and he smiled. “You’re not inflicting all the world’s evils on your own people like that silly twit, Thandi. You’re inflicting them on the bad people.” He paused for a moment, scratching the lobe of one ear, then shrugged. “Um. Now that I think about it, you might have more of a point than I thought, though. What was the last thing to come out of the box?”

  “Hope, I think.” She shrugged. “It was in the version of it I heard, anyway.”

  “Well, I think you could probably make a case that hope is exactly what we’re delivering to the seccies and slaves here on Mesa. And even though I rather doubt Duchess Harrington’s ever been called ‘hope’ before, that’s damned well what the seccies are going to call her when she rolls into the Mesa System with blood in her eye in another few T-weeks. Of course,” he smiled unpleasantly, “I tend to doubt that’s how the system government and the Mesan Alignment’re going to see her.”

  “Probably not,” Thandi agreed, and looked down at her handful of still live monitors.

  It wouldn’t be long now. Two days before, Drescher’s troops had finally driven a twin pronged assault entirely through the tower on the twenty-third floor. They’d taken the central grav shafts at that level, and they were working their way methodically both up and down from that point. It was still costing them people, but the defenders were critically low on ammunition for the heavy tribarrels, and they were essentially out of missiles. They still had sizable stocks of satchel charges manufactured out of commercial blasting compound—several tons of which had been smuggled into the tower before the underground accessways were cut—and plenty of ammunition for pulsers, but those were of limited effect even against utility armor, far less against the battle-armored troopers Drescher was increasingly using as her point elements.

  In addition to the stranglehold Drescher had locked on the twenty-third floor, her troops were working their way up from the sub cellars, and the Peaceforcers advancing from that direction were going to reach the control room well before the ones fighting their way down from the twenty-third. There weren’t as many booby-traps and strong points between them and their objective, and it was pretty clear they’d figured out where Thandi’s command post was, despite any false information their maps of Neue Rostock Tower might contain. It didn’t really matter, though, because they’d taken the fusion plant nine hours ago. The tower was operating on battery power now, and that would last little more than another eleven or twelve hours, at which point the remaining environmental systems would shut down. Most of her surveillance systems were gone by now, anyway; judging by the methodical way the Peaceforcers had been taking them out, Drescher had clearly realized how valuable they’d been to her.

  At least Yana, Steph, and Andrew should be okay until Admiral Harrington gets here, she thought.

  They’d gotten Doctor Nimbakar’s infirmary out before the Peaceforcers finally cut the last escape tunnel, and Thandi had ordered Steph and Andrew to go with them. She’d tried ordering Nimbakar to go, as well, but she might as well have saved her effort on that one. Stupid, really. Anybody Nimbakar patched up was going to die anyway, in the end. But that was the way human beings were, she supposed. Sometimes it was really hard to judge where stupid ended and gallant began, and one thing Nimbakar had plenty of was guts. Who was Thandi Palane to tell her she couldn’t die caring for the wounded?

  She looked back up at Victor, and for just a moment, he wavered through a sudden prickle of tears. There weren’t many of them, those tears—certainly not enough for anyone else to notice—but in that trembling heartbeat of time, she found herself wishing passionately that she could see his face—his real face—one last time.

  Don’t be any stupider than you have to be, she told herself. You can see his “real” face anytime you want to.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, summoning the memory, treasuring the remembered smile in those dark brown eyes. Not many people had ever seen that smile, she reflected. A lot of people would have flatly denied it could exist. But she’d seen it, and she knew exactly who it was for. And that was enough, even here at the end.

  She r
eopened her eyes, looking once again at the outward stranger disguising the inward man, and her lips twitched in an unwilling smile.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just a passing thought.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at her, but she only shook her head. It wasn’t really all that funny, she supposed, but it was inevitable. The vote had been unanimous, in fact, and her gaze rested for just an instant on the detonator hanging against his chest like a necklace pendant. They didn’t have anywhere near the mountain of blasting compound they would have required to bring Neue Rostock down, even placing the charges internally, but they had enough to implode a lot of the tower. They ought to be able to take at least another thousand—more likely two thousand—Peaceforcers with them when they went. And no one had doubted whose hand they wanted on that trigger…or whose brain they wanted calculating the exact moment to press it home.

  Spiteful of us, I guess, she thought with another of those half-imagined smiles. But if I’m going to wind up becoming a damned legend, I want it to be a practical, bloody-minded, stubborn, vindictive bitch of a legend, by God!

  “Thandi?”

  She looked up as Nolan Olsen called her name. The Neue Rostock building superintendent’s refusal to leave had been just as adamant as Rudrani Nimbakar’s, and Thandi had wasted less effort arguing with him. Partly that was because she’d gotten to know him better and realized more quickly how futile it would have been, but mostly it was because he’d been much more useful for the grim grinding out of the defense. He’d done wonders keeping the internal systems online—or limping along, anyway—and he was at least as exhausted as anyone else in the control room. Yet there was something peculiar about his tone.

  “What, Nolan?”

  “We’ve got a com call coming in.” He sounded almost bemused, although there was something else—something tauter, even darker—under the bemusement. “It’s for you.”

  “What?” Thandi straightened. The Peaceforcers hadn’t been able to shut down their internal communications net, but they’d managed to cut any external links. “For me?” Olsen nodded. “From who?”

  “She says she’s Lieutenant General Drescher,” Olsen replied.

  Thandi blinked, then looked at Victor and Dusek.

  “Little late for any surrender demands, don’t you think?” Dusek asked wryly.

  “Won’t cost her anything to try,” Victor pointed out. “And she probably has at least a pretty good idea of how much it’s going to cost her to finish things up the hard way, too.” He shrugged. “Hard to blame her for giving it a shot.”

  “I suppose you want me to say something deathless and noble to her?” Thandi said, looking at him sourly, and he chuckled.

  “Deathless, maybe. Noble?” This time he actually laughed. “Neither of us is a Manty aristocrat, Thandi! I vote for something pungent and to the point.”

  “Such as?”

  “‘Go fuck yourself?’” Dusek suggested helpfully.

  “Too many syllables,” Victor said, shaking his head. “She’s only a general, you know. She’d get confused.”

  “And which one of the two generals involved were you referring to?” Thandi inquired.

  “The other one, of course. Wouldn’t be safe to talk about you that way.”

  Thandi snorted, but she also looked back at Olsen.

  “Can you switch it to my station, Nolan?”

  “Yeah, I can still manage that much.”

  He punched in a command and one of Thandi’s dead monitors flickered to life with the image of a petite, dark-haired woman in the uniform of the Mesan Planetary Peaceforce with a lieutenant general’s insignia. She was a few centimeters taller than Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou, yet she strongly reminded Thandi of the Beowulfer. That was irritating, given how much she’d liked Benton-Ramirez y Chou.

  “Yes?” she said, more than a bit brusquely.

  “I’d asked to speak to Thandi Palane,” the woman on the monitor responded stiffly.

  “I’m Palane,” Thandi said even more brusquely, and the other woman’s eyes narrowed.

  “Not according to the imagery of Captain Palane from the Solarian Marines you aren’t,” she replied, and Thandi felt her eyebrows rise.

  It certainly wouldn’t have been impossible for Mesan intelligence to get its hands on a copy of her official Marine file, but it wouldn’t have been easy, either. On the other hand, once Torch declared war on Mesa, it would have made a lot of sense for the Mesan intelligence agencies to look for all the information it could find on one Thandi Palane. Although, now that she thought about it, it was questionable just how much good that would do them, given the various unnatural things Admiral Roszak had done to her official file when she went to work on his personal staff.

  “Surely not even a Mesan would have expected me to come waltzing in wearing my own face, General Drescher?” she pointed out acidly.

  “I guess not,” Drescher conceded after a moment, her eyes still intensely focused on Thandi’s face. “Good disguise, though. Beowulf?”

  “Given the fact that your government—such as it is and what there is of it—is already trying to blame Torch for those ‘Ballroom terrorist attacks,’ do you really expect me to say anything you could cut and edit to accuse anyone else of the same sorts of things?”

  “I guess not,” Drescher said again, this time with a snort that sounded like genuine amusement. Then she shook herself. “I’m going to take you at your word that you really are Thandi Palane, though.”

  “You have no idea how deeply flattered I am by your concession. And would it happen that that means you’re about to get around to telling me why you commed?”

  “It would.” Drescher’s expression sobered. “The reason I screened was to propose an immediate cease-fire in place, followed by the phased withdrawal of all of my personnel from Neue Rostock Tower.”

  Despite herself, Thandi blinked, then shot a sudden, incredulous glance at Victor and Dusek. Dusek looked as stunned as she felt. Victor…not so much. He did look suddenly and intensely interested, however, which was about as close to “stunned and incredulous” as Victor Cachat ever came.

  Thandi looked back down at Drescher’s image, trying to imagine what could be behind the other woman’s last, preposterous sentence. Surely she didn’t think she could dupe them into lowering their guard, letting her surprise them with a sudden attack in the midst of “negotiating” this cease-fire of hers! But if not that, then—?

  “Why?” she asked bluntly, and Gillian Drescher smiled very strangely at her.

  “Well, General Palane, it seems something new has been added to the balance of forces here in the Mesa System. Thirty-five minutes ago—”

  Chapter 67

  "Your Grace, Captain Lewandoski is here.”

  Honor Alexander-Harrington rose behind her desk as Lieutenant Commander Waldemar Tümmel, her flag lieutenant, escorted her visitor into her day cabin aboard HMS Imperator.

  Captain Spencer Hawke, her personal armsman, followed both men, his eyes narrow and his gunhand hovering near the pulser at his hip. Hawke’s uneasiness would have been obvious to anyone, far less someone with Honor’s ability to taste the emotions of those around her, and she didn’t blame him. But she wasn’t really focused on her armsman’s emotions at the moment, either, because her visitor’s had hit her over the head like a club the instant he came in range.

  She heard a soft sound behind her as Nimitz vaulted from his bulkhead perch to land on the corner of her desk. The treecat’s ears stood straight up, his tail rising behind him, and the sharpness of his own concern flowed to her over their link as he, too, sampled that storm of emotion.

  “Captain Zilwicki,” she said, holding out her hand, and saw—and tasted—Hawke’s astonishment at the greeting. She didn’t blame the young Grayson for that any more than she’d blamed him for his uneasiness. The last time either of them had seen Anton Zilwicki, he’d still looked like Anton Zilwicki. This man had the same ba
sic physique, but that was the only real point of physical resemblance between him and the Zilwicki they’d both met.

  Honor was less surprised than Hawke—or Tümmel, for that matter—but that was because she’d recognized the codeword “Lewandoski” had transmitted as soon as the yacht Brixton’s Comet emerged from the Manticoran Wormhole Junction by way of its Beowulf Terminus. Lieutenant Commander Harper Brantley, her staff communications officer, had patched the incoming transmission through to her somewhat against his own better judgment. He probably wouldn’t have put through a transmission from a completely unknown foreign civilian under normal circumstances, but he’d been with Honor for a long time now. Along the way, he’d discovered that she knew quite a lot of unlikely—many would have said disreputable—individuals, and Captain Lewandoski had been…insistent.

  Honor hadn’t recognized him any more than Brantley had, yet she’d recognized the codeword “Pygmalion” which had been chosen (inevitably) by her Uncle Jacques. And since the man on her com display had been using that codeword and obviously wasn’t Thandi Palane, Yana Tretiakovna, or Victor Cachat, there was only one person he could have been. And so she’d authorized the yacht’s luxurious shuttle to dock aboard Imperator and cleared Lewandoski—Zilwicki—to be escorted to her day cabin.

  The mere fact that Zilwicki had returned so unexpectedly and so much ahead of schedule had filled her with disquiet. She’d never been familiar with all of the details of his mission. There’d been no reason she should know, and she’d been rather preoccupied with her own duties—the ongoing process of fusing two navies which had been mortal enemies for the better part of seven T-decades into a smoothly integrated fleet undoubtedly qualified as one of the trickiest bits of cat-herding ever to come her way—when he actually departed. But she’d known its general parameters and that he shouldn’t have returned home this precipitously.