An old copy of a Chagall print decorated the far wall; on the stone coffee table there was a bust of Rivka's second husband Yaacov that, even to my untrained eye, was clearly the work of Rachel's mother.
Two of the chairs had been unstacked, and both were occupied: one by tall, ganging Pinhas Levine, chief of Section—my boss—the other by Senior General David Alon, who was the new DCSOPS, Deputy Chief of Staff, Operations.
Zev gave me a sideways glance as though to say that he didn't think there was any coincidence in that. Nor any danger, really; everyone in the room was among the small number who knew what I really do for a living.
"Tetsuo, Zev, Ari," Levine said, pronouncing our names like ticks on a drumhead. He settled his glasses forward on his nose and picked up a sheaf of flimsies.
Alon didn't say anything; he just set down his coffee cup and sat back in his chair, running stubby fingers through thinning hair before folding his hands over his barely-bulging belly. At fifty or so, he was losing both the minor battle of the receding hairline and the more significant campaign against the slide of his chest down toward his waistline, but the war was by no means over.
Zev unstacked a chair and handed it across the table to me; I set it down for Ari and took the next one for myself.
Rivka gestured us to sit while she went into the kitchenette, coming out with a fresh thermos-pot of coffee and a stack of rolls. "Please. Just out of the oven."
And into the recycler, if there's a God.
I repressed a shudder as I poured myself a cup of the weak coffee—on Metzada, luxury items tend not to be very luxurious—and picked up one of the rolls, biting tentatively, while Zev and Ari did the same.
It tasted horrible. Too little salt, too lumpy, and the bottom of it was burnt.
A logical necessity, really; ever since the days of David Warcinsky and the exile to Metzada, we've taken our meals in communal dining halls. Cooking is a profession: it takes a long time to learn how to do it well. Ancient traditions to the contrary, not every woman can cook well, any more than every man can be a great warrior. It's necessary for us, all too often, to force men beyond their abilities in the field; women in the kitchen are a different matter.
"So," she said, taking her seat between Levine and Alon, folding her hands primly in her lap. "Where do we stand?"
Ari looked puzzled. "I haven't put in the paper—"
"The Legion? It's not that. Forget about that." Alon drummed his fingers against his thigh. "It's not that. It's your uncle Shimon."
Levine tapped a flimsy. " 'Freiheimers,' he says, 'are rivetting their tanks. I know something else of use to you. But I am valuable where I am.' Through no coincidence, I'm sure, emissaries of both Freiheim and Casalingpaesa are offering for Metzada's services. We've meetings scheduled with both for just about a thousand hours from now, at the Thousand Worlds preserve on Thellonee."
He indicated Alon with a jerk of his chin. "David's leading a negotiating team. Tetsuo, we want you to go in under cover of it and talk to Shimon."
His face was grim. On matters of business, my boss's face is always grim. One of the things I like about him is that he never bullshits me, never tells me that I've got an easy one.
"It's not all bad." DCSOPS Alon grinned. "Both sides are so jittery they're each paying for travel and the rooms—so we make a profit, even if we turn both down. Which we won't; Freiheim will make an acceptable offer for a regiment to act as cadre, if nothing else. Going to be a deal."
Ari opened his mouth, and then closed it. I knew how he felt.
Ari earned his captain's bars on Neuva Terra under Shimon, fighting for the Casas, fighting the Freiheimers. Ari spent a lot of that time leading Casas; in fact, his first Metzadan command came later, on another world.
But it's credits that keep Metzada spinning. If the money was right, we'd sign on with Freiheim.
That's something even young light colonels ought to understand; it is something people with stars on their shoulders must. Metzada is a fragile operation, all too often; we need the offworld credits and the goods that they bring, and Freiheimer money is just as good as Casalingpaesan. Better, when there's more of it.
Levine smiled. "It seems that Shimon feels the same way you do. Does that suggest anything to any of you?"
Ari and Zev shook their heads.
"Nothing," I said, "except that it's important. And not obvious. And that he's in some kind of trouble or he wouldn't have been so cryptic. He wants us to bust him out of whatever mess he's gotten himself into." My uncle wouldn't have arranged a courier-carried message if it weren't important; he wouldn't have put it in the clear if its use were manifest.
"All true." Levine pursed his lips. "The first part didn't suggest anything to me, until I ran it by a couple of Armor boffins."
"Good men," Alon said. "They're working on the new Maccabee XI—"
"David," Levine said, stopping him. Technically, head of Section and DCSOPS are independent, and equals, but Levine reported daily to the premier; even the chief of staff sees the premier only weekly.
"Sorry."
Levine pushed his glasses back. "It seems that the old NAF Army—"
"United States Army," Alon put in. "Pre-NAF. Pre-unification."
"Quite. Well, it seems that for a while, on one model of tank, they used riveted hulls."
"World War II. M3 tanks."
"Trying to save time and money welding a few points." Lev quirked a smile. "Apparently they also saved the time and money a good test would have cost."
"Typical peacetime innovation that shakes right out in combat. It worked just fine," Alon said, "until the tank got hit. Even with a non-killing hit, often some rivets would break loose and rattle around inside."
I shrugged. So what?
Rivka Effron completed the thought. "They raided around the insides of the tank at bullet speeds, rattling right through the tank crews."
Levine eyed me and Zev levelly. We were expected to see the potentials there, in both directions.
Ari didn't; his eyes went wide. "Which means that a Casa armored cav strike would go through German armor like—"
"Freiheimer," Levine corrected patiently. "They are Freiheimers, not Germans."
Knowing Levine, I read it as a serious reproof, but Ari either didn't see that or didn't care. He just sat back in his chair, clearly satisfied, as though all that that meant was that we now had an edge for hiring on with Casalingpaesa, only pretending to deal with the Freiheimers in order to drive up the price, but . . .
As usual, he was missing the point.
It didn't just cut toward signing on with Casalingpaesa; it also meant that there was some profit to be made by selling a small bit of historical data to Freiheim. Consulting work can sometimes pay well, and you don't get your young men blown to bloody little gobbets when all you're selling is knowledge. Well, most of the time you don't.
Zev spoke up. "So. Do we keep it or sell it? And to which side?"
Ari laughed. It was a full, deep-throated roar, not the hollow laugh that I have.
" 'To which side?' You stupid shit," he said.
Zev's expression didn't change, but a vein in his temple pulsed hard; the room suddenly grew colder. My partner had a wicked temper, and my brother has always had a big mouth.
"Zev." Levine eyed him coldly, his hands resting motionless in his lap. Zev looked at him, then back at me, then shrugged microscopically.
Rivka had missed the whole byplay. "Go on, Ari."
He looked from face to face, at all of us. "You all have been thinking the same thing? You think there's a chance that Shimon Bar-El would ever give you something you're going to end up selling to Germans?"
"Freiheimers," Alon said, less patience in his voice.
"David." Rivka Effron held up a skeletal hand. "Please. Go on, Colonel."
Dig your own grave.
"To you, perhaps they're Freiheimers. But to Shimon, they're Germans. To him, they're Amalek." He turned to Zev. "Tell me: how
would you feel about going up against, say, Amharic?"
Zev shrugged. His ancestry was largely Beta Yisrael, which accounted for his cafe-just-barely-au-lait skin. The Amharic had ill-treated his ancestors, called them Falasha, enslaved them, murdered them. My ancestors, too, for that matter, although there are no predominantly Beta Yisrael families in clan Bar-El, just adoptees.
"I find it difficult," he said, pursed mouth and sardonic tone making it apparent that he also found it boring, "to get excited about what somebody did yesterday, much less about what their grandparents did centuries back. Besides," he said as his smile reappeared, "if my ancestors hadn't taken a right when they should have gone straight, they wouldn't have ended up in Ethiopia. The past is dead."
"The past is dead," Alon agreed with a nod. "I'm going to try and get a deal on a whole division, and I don't care which side. If it's Freiheim, though, we're going to have to get something ahead of time for the Bar-El information so they can have their tanks retrofitted."
Ari turned to him. "You never served with my uncle, did you?"
"Not really." Alon shook his head. "We had companies at the same time under Cohen, but we were in different battalions."
"I know you didn't serve under him, or you'd know the verses." Ari's eyes went vague for a moment. " 'Write this for a memorial in the book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua, for I will utterly blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.' Not my emphasis; his. Or, 'I—I, Shimon Bar-El—remember what Amalek did to Israel, how he set himself against him in the way when he came up out of Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not—' Remember, Tetsuo? Remember?"
I nodded, and shivered, remembering. It's one thing to hear the words in a typical one-room apartment, suitable for up to three adult bachelors or a single or paired widow with no children at home.
It's rather another to sit in a circle about a bonfire, the night before a battle, and watch a quiet pre-battle briefing of what had been a battered regiment, a plea for just one more push before we went home, turn into an exhortation that changed what had been fifteen hundred weary, battered men into fifteen hundred killers with ice in their blood, fire in their nerves, and death in their hands.
Don't tell me it doesn't stand to reason. I was there.
Ari threw up his hands. "Do I look to you like a religious?" he asked, fingers twirling at where earlocks would be. "Do you see payess here?"
Levine's face darkened; he was brought up religious. I was just as happy Ari didn't go on quoting: Levine would have come back with some Mishnah or Gemarah argument about how, in the context of Purim and the identification of Haman as an Amalekite—not to mention Deuteronomy 24:16—being Amalek was a matter of choice, not of ancestry. But that would have moved Ari as little as it would have Shimon, or me—for different reasons, in all three cases.
"I learned from Shimon, on Nueva," Ari said. "It wasn't just business there, not ever. It wasn't Metzada versus Freiheim—it was the Children of Israel versus Amalek. Tetsuo?"
Again, I nodded. I was there, and it was so. "You can talk about Shimon's Children's Crusade as an exception, but it really wasn't. Ask Dov. Unless Shimon's softening in his old age—which I don't believe for a moment—we can go ahead, explore it, but we'll find that there's no way that we can use anything Shimon Bar-El ever does for the benefit of Freiheim, or any other German colony."
Alon sighed. "Amazing that he was so effective, then."
Levine shook his head. "Not really. Most good fighting generals have their peccadilloes. I'd be tempted to say 'all,' but there's an exception or two."
You can dispute, if you want, whether or not Shimon should hold a grudge against modern humans of German ancestry, most of them as innocent as any other randomly-selected set of humans—which isn't much, really—all of them people whose grandparents' grandparents weren't even born until well after the First Holocaust . . .
. . . but argue it with him.
He did hold a grudge.
Shimon had always figured that Operation Theda Bara and the events surrounding David's Gift had closed the books on the Second Holocaust and the Sunny Musselmen—they took Eretz Yisrael away from us, for now; David Bar-El took their Ka'aba and their religion away from them forever—but the First Holocaust never had been appropriately balanced.
Alon shrugged. It was evident who wasn't going to be sent to Nueva Terra if Metzada decided to hire on with the Freiheim side in the coming bloodletting.
Rivka caught my eye, looked at Ari, then looked at the door. Levine nodded.
It was an order. I'm not bad at obeying orders.
"Ari," I said, "you've got two wives and a bunch of children sitting around their apartment, wondering why their husband and father would rather spend time with others than with them. I'll see you at dinner."
He made no motion to rise. "If there's going to be an expedition to get Shimon out, I want in on it," he said.
"Request denied," Rivka Effron snapped. There was steel in her voice. "It will be a small team going to Thellonee, under cover of the negotiators. You're not qualified to lead, and I'm not going to let you play private. The closest you have to small-unit background is running company-sized assault teams."
Ari clenched his jaw.
"Ari." Alon held up a placating hand. "I'll be talking to DCSPERS tonight about your next assignment. And I'll see you at oh-eight-hundred tomorrow to talk about how we handle this FFL thing. That's got to be a high priority, all things considered."
"General—"
"Go home, Ari."
Generals, before they're ever generals, learn to settle for winning what battles they can: wordless, Ari rose and left.
When the door shut behind him, Zev snickered. "Pretty majestic, isn't he? Just what we need on an easy little snatch-and-run, a fucking hero."
"Shut up," Levine said flatly. "Tetsuo, our latest intelligence on Shimon is sketchy; we don't have any operatives in New Portsmouth. All I can tell you for sure is that he's living near the port, in a fairly rundown section of New Portsmouth. He may be doing a bit of consulting on the side, but there are rumors that he's somehow involved in local criminal activity."
Rivka raised an eyebrow. "You don't seem surprised."
"True. And I'm not bothered, either." I wasn't surprised, and even if I was, I know better than to let it show. "I don't mind dealing with established criminals—the richer, the more powerful, the better. They have an address. So, say he's made himself too valuable to some underworld bigshot. If you give me enough support, I can probably get him out of that kind of situation, but what do we do then?"
"Can you?" Rivka Effron raised an eyebrow. "I don't trust this uncle of yours, and I'm not about to risk a team of expensively trained and highly valuable young soldiers on getting him out of whatever mess he's in. You can have a half dozen semi-retired veterans. Or retired ones, if you want They'll be going in as career noncoms accompanying a negotiating team. I don't want a bunch of eighteen-year-old elite strikers trying to play clerk. Nobody's going to believe that."
It made sense. Most of what the old woman decides makes sense. "As long as I get my pick—"
"Volunteers, only."
I repressed a smile. The old woman is devious, wise, and subtle, but she doesn't understand quite everything. "And when I get him out?"
"If you get him out." Rivka Effron looked me in the eye. "How can you be sure you'll even find him?"
"Not a problem," Zev put in. "Assuming he wants to be found." He looked over at me. "What say we just make our presence known to every criminal type we can, and see what happens?"
I nodded. "Trick is to make sure we stay alive while we're bumping around, but it should work. He'll be findable." She was underestimating my uncle. As long as we kept it straightforward, we'd find him. "But when we do find him? What then?"
She seemed not to hear the question. "If he isn't lying, then he's got some sort of fix on some contract. Like he had on Indess."
<
br /> "Almost certainly," Levine agreed. "If he isn't lying."
"Why?" Alon asked. "How can you be so sure? Couldn't he just be angling for another try at a command?"
Zev snorted. My partner never had a high opinion of generals. "You really eager to give him a command? Particularly after he outsmarted Rivka's favorite killer last time?" he went on, indicating me with a jerk of his thumb.
"No, but—"
"Of course not. And he knows it. And he also knows that it's going to be one of us headhunters coming out for him. Section isn't trained in complicated military planning. So it's going to be something simple, elegant."
I picked up the train of thought. "It's going to take more than twenty words to describe, but it's going to be something that he knows he can convince a Section killer is a good plan, even with some lesser mortal leading it. But he's not going to tell us until we've got him out of his predicament, if then. He might hold out until we're on the scene, wherever the scene is."
Zev nodded. "We find him; he tells us—assuming that he will tell us. We either refer it to you, or go ahead and implement it. What then?"
"I have had about enough of this Shimon Bar-El," Rivka said. "Find out what he knows, then fix it so that he isn't a problem for us anymore."
Alon nodded. "It's clearly necessary. He's a loose cannon."
"Pinhas?" I turned to Levine.
He sat silent for a long moment.
"There has long been," Pinhas Levine said, with a deep sigh, "a lot more knowledge locked up in his head than I like to think about. He's always known too much. He's managed to keep himself out of the wrong hands, so far, but . . ."
He shook his head. "Make it look like an accident."
CHAPTER FOUR
Not For Glory Page 6
