Flashpoint (Hellgate)

by Mel Keegan

  “He’s not here today?” Marin was looking around again, hunting among the guests for a very old man, perhaps a figure in a hoverchair, accompanied by a nurse.

  But Rusch made negative noises. “No, Charles is much too frail for all this rubbish. Being here, confronting Madam Prendergast, soon to be the first lady of Jagreth, would be more weight than he could carry.” She was glaring at Elaine Osman even then. “You can be so wrong about people. There was a time Elaine and I were close – before Mick was even born. God, how many years ago? Too many. She was the big star, the celebrity, young and beautiful. Charles romanced her when she was on Velcastra with the Pakrani dream team. He never even liked aeroball before he saw her, and three months later he could have refereed a game, and he could quote you stats going back decades!”

  “She’s still a beautiful woman,” Marin said slowly. “I can imagine what she must have been like, in flesh and blood rather than the game posters. It was all twenty-odd years ago.”

  “Thirty,” Rusch corrected in desiccated tones. “You saw her play?”

  “Not live. I was too young, but I saw her on the vids, classic games of yesteryear. I remember seeing interviews, profiles. She was a lot like Jazinsky.”

  “Without the brains,” Rusch added. “Elaine was the perfect athlete. All limbs and muscles and coordination, and partial vacuum between the ears. And Charles, “she said ruefully, “liked ’em that way. She was his third wife, you know.”

  Travers whistled. “I didn’t look into Charles Vidal’s file. We took a look at Madam Osman-Prendergast of course. She was married to Charles for twenty-six years and then decided she’d go further hitched to a Jagrethean senator, so she split.”

  “That’s it, in a thimble,” Rusch said with reluctant humor.

  “The tip of the iceberg?” Marin guessed.

  “Oh, yeah.” Rusch turned her eyes to the heavens. “Behind the scenes it was the Battle of Ulrand … with a lot more blood and screaming. They both tried to rope me in, because Charles was also married to my sister, Kathleen, for twenty years, and I was dear, weird, scientific Aunt Alexis to their daughter, Theresa, for eighteen years before the stupid kid took out a raceplane and plowed it face-first into a mountainside. That’s what you get for flying when you’re too stoned to read your instruments. I helped Kath and Charles get through the dark times, so he called me when Elaine broke the news that she was on her way. Of course, Elaine had called me first, with her side of the story.”

  “Which was?” Travers seemed bemused. “Unless it’s private.”

  “Private?” Rusch actually laughed, and the humor was genuine. “It was all over CityNet! For about six weeks, it was a bigger soap opera than anything in the vids. Elaine wanted out because she was still too young and ‘vital,’ as she called it, to be married to a man so old, he was impotent with sheer age and nasty about the fact she had lovers.”

  Marin’s brow arched at Travers. “She made a point.”

  “A damned good point,” Rusch agreed, “if it had been true. The fact was, she was having simultaneous wild affairs with a Fleet pilot, a news anchor from CNS and the captain of the Velcastran aeroball touring team, and Charles gave her all the rope she wanted, because he was old. Too old and frail to be attractive to a woman of Elaine’s age, and even if she had fancied him – which would have been downright weird – he couldn’t have done one damn’ about it. So he adored her from afar, over the breakfast table. He turned the proverbial blind eye to her lovers, some of whom she even brought home to the Vidal family castle – and at the time his will described a clean 50/50 split between Elaine and Mick.”

  “You’re right, it’s a soap opera,” Travers chuckled. “Tune in for the next ludicrous episode.”

  She shared the humor. “The next episode? Well, Elaine had met Rob Prendergast when he was on Velcastra for trade talks, something to do with a deal Velcastra and Jagreth had going for agricultural machinery and fine wines. Rob made her an offer. Marry me kiddo, and you’ll be Jagreth’s first lady as soon as the Colonial War gets done.”

  “And she didn’t mind forfeiting half of the Vidal fortune?” Marin wondered. “That would have to be big numbers in anyone’s currency.”

  “She’s Rob’s sole beneficiary at this time,” Rusch said darkly. “She’s going to be worth slightly more than she’d have gotten out of Charles’s death … if she stays with Rob long enough to collect. She’ll stick to him for some time, of course, since she’s desperate to be a president’s wife. After that? Even Elaine Osman isn’t getting any younger. See that face of hers?” Rusch was glaring at it as she spoke. “She’s already been tweaked. She’s the same age as me, and she looks a hell of a lot younger.”

  She looked, Marin thought, very little older than Barb Jazinsky. “So Charles Vidal rewrote his will, after the divorce?”

  Rusch stirred and considered her empty glass. “Elaine became a very minor beneficiary. She’ll get ten percent, which is still a lot. Mick was supposed to get fifty percent. With him out of the picture, his cousins, Trick and Ying Shackleton, are going to split the balance, which is bad, because they’ll throw it away. It took three centuries to build the Vidal fortune to this point, and those stupid little brats will waste it in one generation. They’re going to inherit ninety percent of Charles’s fortune now, and the truth is, the pittance that goes to Elaine will find its way into the hands of Rob’s investment managers and will grow, while the lion’s share will be gone like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Oh, the Vidals will always be influential, well connected, but they’ll lose their position, influence, power, celebrity status. Old fashioned prestige.”

  “And they wish to any god you can think of Mick was here, and this was someone else’s memorial,” Travers finished.

  “Yes.” Rusch smiled sadly. “Life works out this way. You remember enough of your college science classes to recall the third law of thermodynamics?”

  “Entropy,” Marin said with wry humor, “always increases.”

  “There ought to be a fourth,” Travers added. He was watching Elaine Osman-Prendergast. “Scum always rises to the surface.”

  The colonel gave a guffaw. “I’ll remember that. It’ll give Bobby Liang a chuckle. Damnit, you have to hand it to Elaine. She saw the way to get herself into Chesterfield House, the Colonial Governor’s residence in Westminster, and Jagreth just loves Senator Rob Prendergast.” She gave Marin a hard look. “You’re Jagrethean.”

  “I haven’t been back there for more than a week in years,” Marin said defensively. “I don’t even know if I’m still on the electoral register. I should think they’ve filed me under ‘inactive’ and forgotten I exist.”

  “Hmm,” Rusch mused. “Well, if you do go back there, tell them you ate crab and guacamole with the president.” She glared into the corner of the beautiful courtyard, with its deep terracotta and emerald pavers, where Madam Osman-Prendergast sat under the flowering vines, balancing plate and glass in her lap and talking to big, handsome Mike Quinn. Then Rusch heaved a vast theatrical sigh and passed a hand across her eyes. “Forgive me, gentlemen. Family politics. The Vidals, the Shackletons, the Rusches, the Rabelais – they’re all sides of the same extended family.

  “We trace our lineage back over three centuries, since before the terraformer fleet which put the spit and polish on Velcastra. We go back to Louverne and Darwin’s and Earth itself.” She pushed away from the column and gave her jacket a tug. “You want to eat? The food’s quite decent, which makes a change. The last one of these things I was dragged into, you’d have sworn the waiters were running back and forth to an autochef in the garage!”

  In fact, Marin was hungry, and as Rusch drifted away to talk to Sonja Deuel he gave Travers a nudge and steered him to the table. She was right, the food was excellent, and he was eating shrimp and grilled chicken when Kristyn Bauer arrived, looking for cantaloupe and cream. Like Rusch, she wore the dress uniform, and she wore it well, with her dark gold hair impeccably styled and gelem
erald earrings glittering in her lobes. Travers was investigating the crab salad when Bauer raised a glass in salute.

  “Major Travers, Major Marin. I saw the report from Freespace. Congratulations. The job was extremely well done.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” Marin was surprised. “It’s a pleasure to see you here. I hadn’t expected to. You knew Major Vidal?”

  “No, but I know his family,” Bauer corrected. “Actually, his mother. You understand, if you’re Pakrani – or Pakrani by marriage, like myself – it’s impossible not to know of Elaine Osman, even if you don’t know her personally, and in my line of work I tend to do a lot of these functions.”

  “Your line of work?” Travers echoed, opening a fresh bottle of mineral water.

  Nothing slithered past Bauer. She gestured at the green glass bottle of Mount Strathmore water. “You’re on duty? Ah, of course. Harrison’s security.”

  “For some reason,” Travers said fatuously, “he doesn’t feel safe, and this is the most exposed he’s been in a long, long time.”

  “I know … and he’s right.” Her voice dropped to a murmur. “None of us feels safe. The slightest hint that we might have republican sympathies, and we’ll be branded as war criminals.” Her brows arched at Travers. “Anything goes wrong, Major, anything at all, and we fail to win this war we’re orchestrating, and every one of us will become either a fugitive or a small can of ashes interred in a numbered grave. Let the Confederacy win this, and there will be military trials and executions by the thousand.”

  “Colonel Rusch was saying the same thing a moment ago,” Marin said thoughtfully.

  “Yes.” Bauer picked over a basket of strawberries for three or four that took her fancy. “And she must be looking over her shoulder every day now, since she’s well known to have had a close relative who was so openly and fervently Daku, he wore it on his chest.” She popped a strawberry into her mouth. “Michael Vidal, and that damned tattoo he sported.”

  Marin took a bottle of water from Travers, and sipped. “It’s not actually illegal in the Deep Sky to have Daku affiliations, ma’am. The Daku are as much a philosophical and spiritual movement as they are political. More so, in fact.”

  “Oh, yes, this much I know.” Bauer was watching her husband, who had taken a chair across the courtyard and seemed to be listening to the unabridged version of Elaine Osman’s life story “Spirituality is the last loophole through which the Daku fly, and when the Confederacy stitches it up, everyone from Bobby Liang on down is going to be in hot water if we lose this war.”

  The Daku symbols were everywhere in Chandra Liang’s home. They were cast as tiny bronzes and set into the lamps, worked in ceramics and fired in rainbow hues. The open-headed ankh was the symbol of freedom, not merely for the colonies, but for the individual.

  “Mister Liang wears the symbol with pride,” Travers observed. “So did Mick … Michael Vidal. He was a good friend of mine – of ours, actually. One thing I always meant to ask him, and never got the chance.”

  Bauer smiled. “Shoot. If I know, I’ll tell.”

  “The Daku symbol.” Travers gestured at the lamps, which were fashioned around it, in bronze. “The ankh was from ancient Earth. I saw it on CityNet, a long time ago. It stood for immortality, or infinity.” Bauer nodded, and Travers added, “So why do the Daku use it with the open head?”

  “Ah.” Bauer’s eyes creased in amusement. “A most astute question, Major. Michael Vidal could have answered it for you! The ankh did indeed symbolize immortality, but this came to mean first the freedom from the sheer tyranny of death, and then freedom from any tyranny at all. The liberty of the Deep Sky, yes? Why is the head of the ankh open? Because it’s broken, Major. Or perhaps not broken, but incomplete. If ever the Deep Sky is free, and the Daku survive to enjoy those days, the ankh will be competed, or mended. As it is, it’s merely a symbol of the desire for a freedom we don’t yet possess.” She sighed heavily. “I’m pleased to see you running security for Harrison. Keep your wits about you, gentlemen. Trust nothing to chance and question everything you see.”

  “Even here?” Marin asked quietly.

  “Well, perhaps not in Bobby Liang’s house,” Bauer admitted, “but here on Velcastra we’re all under the Fleet microscope. Harrison Shapiro is Fleet on Borushek. It all dances to his tune there. Here, you don’t have any such luxury, and you can expect to be watched. I know – fact! – I’m under surveillance myself. So is Alexis. These are paranoid times, and it would be far too easy to jump at every shadow we see … but remember what I said, Major Marin.”

  With that she stepped away, and he watched her stroll across the courtyard to join her husband and Osman. Travers drew to his side, still eating, and for some time they were silent, content to watch the more key players in this game. At last Travers handed his empty plate to a passing steward and said acidly, “This could get ugly. Dangerous.”

  “You notice that.” Marin was watching the guests he did not recognize, those who had come in with Vidal’s more distant relatives. “Did Liang’s house security check any of these people? One Confederate spy among this company, and … damn.”

  “So we do like the lady says,” Travers suggested. “Trust nothing and keep our eyes wide open. So.” He gave Marin a speculative look. “What do your Dendra Shemiji eyes tell you about this crowd?”

  Marin set down his plate, took a swig of the sharp, bitter mineral water, and settled against the pillar where Alexis Rusch had been twenty minutes before. “A few of them are here on business – Zulika Garrick, Paul L’Engle, the Bauers, Rusch. The rest? There’s a lot of tomb raiders here. They’re waiting for the Vidal fortune to be carved up, since Mick is out of the picture, leaving the likes of Trick Shackleton, who can’t wait to get his hands on the inheritance when old Charles Vidal falls off his perch! And there’s a lot of party animals who’re only here for the free booze and the chance to get their faces on CityNet.” He gestured at the vidnews crew. “I don’t see anyone suspicious. If I did, it would be the scrawny blonde in the black skinthin, or the ghost-pale kid who looks like he’d dissolve if he got wet. There’s something not right about them – which probably means they’re either casing the place and will be back later to steal anything that isn’t nailed down, or they’re trying to figure out how to seduce their way into the money. Who they hell are they?”

  They were not on the official guest list, so they could only have arrived as guests of the formally invited. Travers took a handy from his pocket and petitioned the house AI for data. Chandra Liang had instructed it to work with Shapiro’s crew, and the feed was available moments later. “They were all scanned on the way in,” he mused. “So were we. The AI documented our equipment, guns and all, but we’re authorized to be armed, so it didn’t raise any alarms. The rest? No weapons, no suspicious chemistry, no biohazard, no surveillance gear. Only a dozen or so authorized sidearms and the hardware brought in with the CNS crew. So?”

  “So relax.” Marin turned his face to the sun, which shone full and strong through the high armorglass dome. “Chandra Liang is as paranoid about his security as Harrison Shapiro. For what it’s worth, we’re probably as safe here as anywhere.”

  “Too many Daku in one place at one time, too much blue republican blood,” Travers said thoughtfully. “You heard Bauer. Lose the Colonial War, and images captured right here, right now, could be used to incriminate us.”

  “Incriminate?” Marin echoed.

  “How’d you like to be shot as a war criminal?” Travers demanded.

  “I’d like to avoid being shot as anything.” Marin nodded at the bench which had just emptied, on the long wall opposite. “Sit, while we’ve got the chance. Shapiro’s group are going to be talking until the last call for the shuttle to the memorial.”

  In fact, they talked longer. The shuttle was an executive skybus, docked on Aragos at one of the portals not fifty meters from the Liang mansion. After the third call the courtyard emptied out, and still Shapiro’s group r
emained in the sealed room. Travers and Marin watched the stewards ushering Madam Deuel and the official aides, Garrick and L’Engle, into the last of the buggies, and it pulled out with a soft burr of motors. From the long lawns in front of the house they saw the skybus pull out on a steep angle, arcing away over Elstrom StarCity.

  They had not realized they were not alone on the lawns until they heard the chink of glasses, and Marin turned back toward the house as Alexis Rusch appeared. In one hand she had a half bottle of San Sebastian champagne, in the other, three flutes.

  The quiet after the troupe of guests vanished was profound. Marin heard birds, the shush-shush of a water cannon, the soft buzz of traffic from the distant side of the platform, where gardeners were working. Travers took two of the flutes and held them while she brimmed all three and dropped the empty bottle to the grass.

  She raised her glass. “Here’s to you, Michael, wherever you are. No way would I have ever said this in earshot, but you were the bratty little kid I couldn’t stand, the boy I started to admire as he grew up, the man I came to like for his own sake, and the professional I learned to trust … you were the true heir to everything Ernst Rabelais ever was, ever did. You were the best of us, kiddo, and I’m going to miss you, long as I live. The weird thing is, you’ll probably outlive us all, and wherever you are, whenever you are, may the sun shine on your face, may the skies be blue and the air clear.”