The Scorpion Jar mda-13

by Jason M. Hardy

  “And there’s the Fallen Phantoms just south of the city.”

  “Fallen Phantoms? Are you sure they’re not just a street gang?”

  Duncan shrugged. “They may be. But they’re making a lot of noise, and the citizenry is getting nervous.”

  Heather rolled her eyes. She’d like to just ignore this group, but she’d already had two other messages today giving her the same information as Duncan. “All right. If the police want militia backup, they can have it. But they’re being spread awfully thin.”

  Duncan nodded. Heather’s noteputer beeped, but her finger was already poised to turn it off. The screen faded before she caught even a glimpse of the new message’s subject.

  No longer confined to her relatively small office, Heather strode down the hallway of her new headquarters. She had six rooms attached to this hallway in addition to her own new command room, and each was filled with staffers trying to keep a lid on Terra until the election. The rooms were windowless and gray, giving her suddenly expanded staff nothing to look at besides their work.

  She walked into a large room dominated by a gray oval table. Eight staffers awaited her arrival.

  She walked to her chair at the table’s head but didn’t bother to sit. Pressing a button beneath the table, she made the words “Kittery Renaissance,” written in large letters, appear on the wall behind her. She waited for a brief murmur to pass.

  “They’re back,” Heather said. “And whatever it is they’ve been working toward seems to be coming to a head this time. The rest of my staff, with the help of the Geneva police and the local militia, is working to keep a handle on the hundreds of other groups out there agitating. Our job is to contain this one.”

  The questions came in a flurry. “How do we know they’re back? What do they want? What are they planning? What kind of measures can we take against them?”

  Heather raised her hands. “We need to focus. We don’t have time for a full-scale investigation, we can’t get anyone into their ranks, and we may not even be able to find out why they’re doing what they’re doing. First we stop them—the rest comes after.”

  “Here’s what we know, or at least suspect. They may not be officially tied to any of the Founder’s Movement groups, but they share sympathies. Simply put, they don’t want The Republic giving ground to anyone. Ever.”

  “They sound okay to me,” said Estrin Koss, one of the Knights of the Sphere at Heather’s disposal.

  “As far as maintaining and defending our borders goes, yes. But the more extreme elements—and you can be sure Kittery is among them—aren’t content with mere defense. They want to keep us safe by eradicating our enemies, current and potential, once and for all.”

  “Preemptive strikes against potential enemies?” said Rick Santangelo, the other Knight on Heather’s team. “Have they heard about the HPG problems? We don’t even know what’s going on inside our own borders, much less in the rest of known space. This is not a good time to run out on a preemptive crusade.”

  “Is there ever a right time for a preemptive crusade?” asked Duncan, the intern who never seemed to be more than five meters from Heather. She shot him a look reminding him he wasn’t supposed to speak, but she couldn’t say she entirely disagreed with his sentiment.

  “Do you think they’re getting any outside support?” Santangelo asked. “One House or Clan secretly pushing for a preemptive strike against another?”

  “I don’t think so. It would be too much of a gamble for the outsiders—Founder’s Movement extremists don’t differentiate between groups that aren’t part of The Republic, and you can’t be sure who they’ll want to go against first. Hell, they may lobby for us to charge in every direction at once.”

  “At least it’s just an internal threat,” Koss said. “Not a problem with foreign influences.”

  “I hate to say it,” Heather said, “but we may be getting close to a point where internal threats are just as serious as external ones. Let’s be honest, the current state of The Republic is giving a lot of people plenty of things to be upset about.”

  No one replied. Koss opened her mouth, but closed it again without speaking.

  “So here’s the battle plan. We have a few video feeds from the riot. We need to scan every inch of them, identify who in the crowd is an insurgent and do everything we can to put a name with the face.

  “Second, if they’re planning something big, they need firepower. We need to watch as many points of entry as we can, see if we can catch them bringing guns, bombs, anything else into the area.

  “Finally…” Heather took a deep breath. “We need to push anyone we know with strong Founder’s Movement connections.” She kept talking as Koss tried to break in. “I’m not trying to paint everyone with the same brush here; I know plenty of Founder’s Movement people who I consider dedicated Republicans. But if anyone can point us in the right direction—if we can find a link to the extreme elements of the movement—these are the people who can do it.”

  Everyone in the room, even Koss, nodded.

  “Does that mean,” Santangelo ventured, “that you’ll be speaking to some of your colleagues?”

  Heather grimaced. “That’s exactly what I mean. On the eve of an election, I’ll be asking some other Paladins if they have connections to traitors and insurgents.” She grabbed her noteputer and started to leave. “They should be enjoyable conversations.”

  As she walked out, Duncan trailed her, a small phone held to his ear. She hadn’t heard it ring.

  “Paladin GioAvanti, I’m getting something about the Armed Brotherhood of Belgium claiming a link to the Stormhammers…”

  27

  Office of Knight of the Sphere Cray Stansill, Geneva

  Terra, Prefecture X

  6 December 3134

  “He’s discreet,” Cray Stansill said. “Nothing illegal about that.”

  He was on the defensive. Jonah backpedaled.

  “No, no, of course not. I’m not looking to get the man in trouble—just information.”

  Stansill did not look convinced. He leaned forward in his chair, glaring, trying to summon the power of his surroundings to cow Jonah a little—even though Jonah was a Paladin and Stansill a Knight.

  It didn’t work. Jonah had been in one government office or another all day, and they had all started to look alike. When he only entered one or two a year (including his own), he didn’t notice the similar drabness that pervaded the government building. Every office had the lacquered desk, the tall bookshelves, the plush leather chair for the occupant, the hard-backed chair for the visitor. Small details, like pictures of family, changed, but the general impression remained overwhelmingly the same.

  In the space of two days of interviews, Jonah had amassed a sizable dossier on the career of Henrik Morten. He was indeed impressively discreet, leaving a long trail of satisfied sponsors but no actual evidence of illegal activities. There was plenty of rumor and hearsay, but no proof.

  The thread that had led him to Stansill was a tangled one. He’d spoken with two Knights, four Senatorial aides, and a handful of lower-level politicos, and a few of them had mentioned Stansill as a person who had spoken admiringly of Morten.

  That’s where I am after two days, Jonah thought to himself. Calling someone who’d said nice things about another person a “lead.”

  Stansill seemed to be a good sort, a Knight pleased with his position and more concerned with serving The Republic than moving up through the ranks. His salt-and-pepper crew cut made him look like a middle-aged cadet in basic training. But word of Jonah’s interviews had been traveling rapidly through the office building, and Stansill had been defensive from the beginning.

  “Why do you need information about Morten?” Stansill said, steel ringing in his tone.

  “I’ve been hearing good things about him,” Jonah said calmly. “Taking care of a sensitive problem is one thing, but taking care of a sensitive problem without causing a fuss—that’s a special ability.”
>
  “Exactly. That’s all I’m saying,” said Stansill, temporarily mollified. “I’d heard you’d been asking around about him, and word is you’ve been appointed to look into Paladin Steiner-Davion’s death. I’d hate to think somehow Henrik was coming under suspicion just because he’s an excellent troubleshooter.”

  Jonah laughed, knowing it was too late to deny what he was working on. “I wish my investigation had progressed far enough that I could put anyone under suspicion. No, I’m still in the earliest stages—I’m looking for good help. A troubleshooter. But I need to make sure anyone I hire is capable.”

  “So this is all just …vetting?”

  “Exactly.”

  Stansill visibly relaxed. “All right. Good. That, I can help with.”

  “Great. So you obviously know Henrik Morten.”

  “Yes, yes. I could tell you a few stories, in fact.”

  Jonah smiled congenially. “Go ahead!”

  Stansill leaned back, resting his hands behind his head. “I’ve only met him once, myself, at a reception here in town. I can’t even remember who introduced us; those evenings become a blur, you know? We only talked briefly, but he didn’t seem too enthusiastic about being there. I got the impression he’d rather be doing something else.”

  “What else?” Jonah asked.

  “Anything else. A reception isn’t about doing, and Morten is a guy who gets things done. He was out of place there, so we didn’t say much to each other.”

  “So he’s a doer—but what does he get done?”

  “Oh, I’ve heard a lot of things. But there’s one, there was this one time, out on Ryde, during the rebuilding. Do you remember when that meteor hit?”

  “Remember? I was there after it hit. Six months on-planet.”

  “Really? Okay, so you know what it was like. Well, this was after the worst part of the chaos had been quelled, when the long, slow work of reconstruction was under way. There was a dispute that should have been nothing, but, with the tensions of the lengthy assignment, it grew way out of proportion.”

  “What kind of dispute?”

  Stansill shrugged. “It was about a woman. What else? A couple of Knights got into a feud when one ran off with the other one’s wife. Only he couldn’t exactly run off, because he was assigned to the reconstruction. So he was there, working side by side with the guy whose wife he’d taken.

  “Now ordinarily the two would have had to settle it themselves somehow. Fight a duel, or just punch each other out, or something, and it would be over. But the feud just got bigger and bigger as time went by, and everyone assigned to the reconstruction started taking sides. Suddenly, you had two reconstruction teams, each taking every opportunity to find fault with the other, even undermine the other’s efforts. The whole process was breaking down.”

  “I never heard about any of this.”

  “That’s exactly the point I’m getting to. Another Knight who was on planet called in Morten, I guess because he knew his reputation. Morten spent a day with one of the guys in the feud, then a day with the other. Next thing you know, they’re best friends. They’re in public everywhere together, saying nice things about each other, showing everyone that their feud is over and done with. As quickly as they’d been divided, the workers came back together. The reconstruction was saved.”

  “And the wife?”

  “Stayed with the guy she ran off with. How Morten made that all work, I’ll never know. But he did.”

  Jonah made a few notes, but, impressive as the story was to Stansill, there was little to help him out. Except for one small thing that was nagging in his mind.

  “The Knight who brought Morten into the dispute—do you remember who it was? I’d like to hear the story from him.”

  “Of course I remember! He was just elevated to the conclave!”

  Jonah’s heart dropped a little as Stansill said the name. “It was Gareth Sinclair.”

  28

  Cloverleaf Bar, Santa Fe

  Terra, Prefecture X

  6 December 3134

  It was another dry, chilly Santa Fe night. The distant stars were points of cold blue-white, like chips of diamond against the black sky. Burton Horn was where he always thought he should be at this time of night—in a bar. Unfortunately, he was there on business.

  The days just past had been strenuous, by anybody’s reckoning, but things had worked out well enough in the end. Elena Ruiz had been soothed, supported and sent away to recover in the home of her widowed mother in Albuquerque. The police, for their part, had been satisfied with her story of a home invasion interrupted by the good luck of Horn’s timely arrival.

  Whatever their suspicions (since Horn doubted they’d missed the fact that Ruiz’s alleged assailant had been dealt with professionally), they weren’t likely to push further. The Santa Fe law enforcement community already knew that Burton Horn was a Paladin’s operative. Furthermore, Horn was willing to bet that the late Delgado was already in their files as a known troublemaker, hoodlum and general bad egg. People who took money from strangers to intimidate young women living alone were seldom upstanding citizens.

  The Cloverleaf Bar, when Horn entered it shortly before midnight, was exactly the sort of place that might have attracted someone like Delgado, full of loud music and people who never looked you directly in the eye. The smell of beer and bourbon hung in the air along with tobacco smoke.

  Horn had dressed for the occasion. He’d made no effort to look local; he wasn’t familiar with the Santa Fe outlaw style, and knew it would be pointless to try. But he knew the interstellar spaceport version of that same style quite well. It wasn’t his usual look—give him nondescript invisibility any day—but in black trousers, a muscle-hugging black knit shirt, and a loose black coat obviously cut to conceal weapons, he would be recognized at once as a serious player from out of town.

  Horn let the inner door of the Cloverleaf slide shut behind him and moved through the crowd to the bar. He took a seat on a stool near one end, out of the bright lights, and waited for the bartender to finish filling a quartet of frosted beer mugs and putting them onto a tray. The waitress sashayed off to a table on the far side of the room with the beers, and Horn took the opportunity to catch the bartender’s eye.

  The bartender came over to him. “What’s your poison?”

  Horn laid a fifty-stone note on the bar. “Bourbon, straight.”

  “Bourbon it is.” The bartender poured a shot of bourbon and set the glass on the bar in front of Horn. He picked up the fifty-stone note and looked at it. “Planning on running a tab?”

  Horn didn’t touch the shot glass. “No.”

  “I might have trouble making change for this.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Uh-huh.” There was a long pause. The bartender gave Horn a summing-up glance. “With that sort of cash, are you looking for one of our …special services?”

  Horn smiled smugly and played dumb. “Special services?”

  “Look, I’m not playing games. You know what you want. Ask, and I’ll help you if I can.”

  Horn acted like he was pondering the offer. “What if I want something stronger than bourbon?”

  “I’ve got what you see behind me,” the bartender said, waving at two shelves of dusty bottles.

  “Come on,” Horn scoffed.

  “I don’t know you. For strangers, what you see is what you get.”

  Horn peeled off another bill. “How many do I have to put down before we’re not strangers?”

  The bartender’s eyes were drawn to the money like rats to a sewer. Finally he said, “Look, I don’t sell anything like that. I run a completely legit business, you understand? But what I can do is make referrals.”

  “Referrals?”

  “Right. There’s a guy in the back, wider than he is tall, named Snorky. He might be able to help you out. And there’s Pritt.”

  “What’s he got?”

  “Nothing. But he knows people. People looking for compan
ionship. He’s a kind of …matchmaker, right?”

  “Right. Sorry, I don’t want any of that stuff. Anyway, what if I’m a cop?”

  “Then go introduce yourself. Snorky loves cops.”

  “Scary guy, huh?”

  “Uh-huh,” the bartender said.

  He broke the ensuing silence by going off to serve a new arrival at the other end of the bar. Horn watched him go, then picked up his shot glass and drained it. The bourbon was cheap stuff, too sweet for Horn’s taste. He was glad that this job didn’t require him to pretend to like it for long. He set the empty shot glass down on the bar.

  The bartender came back, and Horn said, “Another.”

  “I thought you weren’t running a tab.”

  “Things change,” Horn said. “If I can’t get what I came for, I might as well get what I can.”

  The statement drew a curious look from the bartender. He poured Horn another shot and asked, “What did you come here for?”

  “The answer to a question.”

  “What kind of question?”

  Horn took a swallow of the bourbon before answering. The bartender’s curiosity was piqued now; a little delay would serve to draw him in further. “A simple one. A question of identity.”

  “I don’t give out names.”

  “What about Snorky and Pritt? Those names came out pretty easy.”

  The bartender scowled. “They can take care of themselves. They come in here to do business five or six nights a week; they like it when I point people their way.”

  “Respected regulars, I can tell,” said Horn. “Don’t worry, you won’t have to name anybody.”

  “What do you want, then?”

  Horn reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled out the picture of Henrik Morten that Levin had sent him earlier from Geneva. He unfolded it and spread it out on the counter. “A simple yes or no—did you see this man talking with Tony Delgado anytime recently?”

  The bartender studied it, frowning. “Yes. I don’t know who he is, just that he isn’t one of our regulars and probably isn’t a local, either. But he and Tony were here once or twice. Tony never introduced me. Your boy never seemed too comfortable, always seemed antsy to move on.”