In Fire Forged: Worlds of Honor V

by David Weber

  None of which changed the fact that she was sitting here, enjoying the breeze as it caressed her short-cropped hair, on a bench in a public park on a Silesian planet at the invitation of a man she’d never met before who seemed to know an awful lot about her and her family. If she hadn’t actually lost her mind, she’d certainly managed to display enough questionable judgment to get on with.

  Nimitz twitched in her arms, and she straightened. The treecat turned his head, looking along one of the paths, and she followed his gaze, then stiffened ever so slightly as she recognized the waiter. He saw her at about the same time she saw him, and something about his body language suggested a combination of both surprise and relief.

  He looked both ways, up and down the path and across the lake, then quickened his pace very slightly, strolled up to her, and waved one hand at the bench on which she sat.

  “May I join you, Commander?”

  “It’s a public bench,” she pointed out, and he smiled slightly.

  “So it is,” he agreed, and settled gingerly into place.

  She studied him frankly, and he sat patiently, giving her time. His eyes were a peculiar shade of amber, almost yellow, and his dark complexion had an odd cast which wasn’t quite like anything she’d ever seen before. Not surprisingly, probably, given the variations the two thousand years of mankind’s Diaspora had worked into the basic warp and woof of humanity. But there was something about him . . . something—

  Her thoughts chopped off abruptly as he opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue.

  It was an absurdly childish gesture . . . except that it wasn’t. Given her family history, she knew exactly what she was looking at as he showed her the barcode of a genetic slave on his tongue.

  He let her look at it for an instant, then closed his mouth, and this time his crooked smile was bitter.

  “I told you I knew your family on Beowulf, Commander,” he said. “In fact, I once met your mother personally, although I doubt she remembers it. She was barely out of high school at the time.”

  “Mother’s memory might surprise you,” Honor replied. She knew she sounded as if she were playing for time—since she was—but she also chuckled. “Mind you, that memory of hers can be pretty selective when it suits her purposes.”

  “And yours, Commander? Can your memory be selective when it suits your purposes?”

  Honor regarded him thoughtfully for several seconds, then shrugged.

  “I’m not going to answer that just yet,” she told him. He looked a question at her, and she flicked her right hand in a throwing-away gesture. “I’m not going to give you any sort of carte blanche, not until I’ve got some idea what this is really all about, and I’m not going to pretend I will, either. I don’t imagine you’d have gone to all the trouble of inviting me to meet with you out here if you didn’t have something fairly significant on your mind. If you want to go ahead and tell me about it, I’m willing to listen. I’m not willing to give you any guarantees about what I’ll do if I don’t like what I hear.”

  She held his gaze very levelly.

  “Bearing that in mind, do you want to continue this conversation? Or should we both just sit here and admire the lake?”

  “You’re rather more direct than your relatives back on Beowulf, Commander. Did you know that?”

  “I take after Daddy’s side of the family in that respect, I think,” she said, and he snorted.

  “That’s certainly one way to describe him,” he said feelingly, and Honor allowed one eyebrow to arch at the fresh evidence that he knew a very great deal, indeed, about her and her family.

  He sat looking at her for several more thoughtful seconds, then gave his head an odd little toss. It was a decisive gesture, and he turned sideways on the bench to face her fully.

  “In case you’re wondering, Commander, I didn’t have any idea you’d be anywhere near the Saginaw System before Commodore Teschendorff walked you into the restaurant. I mean, I don’t want you thinking my presence here on Jasper has anything to do with your presence here on Jasper. It’s just one of those things that happens every once in a while, however unlikely they may seem.”

  Honor watched him levelly, but Nimitz’s right hand-foot pressed very gently against her thigh in the signal that told her the waiter was telling her the truth.

  “I suppose I can accept that coincidences happen,” she said.

  “When I began to realize who you might be—to be honest, it was Nimitz that started me thinking about it, then I saw your eyes.” The waiter shook his head. “Did you know you have your mother’s eyes?”

  “It’s about the only part of her I did get,” Honor said wryly. Her own overgrown gawkiness had been an even more painful cross to bear during her prolong-extended adolescence because of her own mother’s exquisite, almost feline beauty. Honor loved Allison Harrington dearly, but there was still a part of her which couldn’t quite forgive her mother for being so much more beautiful than she herself would ever be.

  The waiter started to say something, then shook his head and changed whatever it had been into something else.

  “Working here in Onyx, I hear things,” he said. “In fact, I hear lots of things. For example, I hear that the Evita’s case has already been resolved. In a manner of speaking.”

  “Resolved?” Honor repeated sharply, straightening on the bench. “What do you mean, ‘resolved’?”

  “I mean the good ship Evita—and her entire sadly misunderstood and maligned crew—has mysteriously vanished,” the waiter told her. He watched the shock and fury welling up in her eyes, then shook his head. “Surely that’s not a complete surprise, Commander!”

  Honor managed not to glare at him. Nimitz quivered against her with the barely audible sound of a snarl which wasn’t directed at the waiter but fully mirrored her own rage. Then her nostrils flared, and she grimaced.

  “No,” she admitted. “Not a complete surprise. I wish it was.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  The waiter’s amber eyes were oddly sympathetic, almost gentle, yet she saw something else under the sympathy that was anything but gentle.

  “I’m well aware of Governor Charnowska’s vocal support for a closer, more cordial relationship with the Star Kingdom, as well, Commander,” he continued. “I’m afraid, though, that the situation in this sector is . . . less than ideal, shall we say?”

  “I’m sure it is.” Honor leaned back. “On the other hand, I hope you won’t be offended if I say it’s obvious to me that you have some sort of information you want to share with me. Besides the disappearance of the Evita, I mean. You know as well as I do that I’d have found out about that soon enough on my own. So let’s take it as a given that you dropped it on me to get my attention and demonstrate that you really do ‘hear things’ here in Onyx. Now suppose you tell me exactly who you are and exactly what it is I’m sitting here on this bench to hear about?”

  He blinked at her directness, then chuckled, yet she sensed a new and deeper tension. It wasn’t anything overt, nothing she could have pointed at, but she didn’t need Nimitz to recognize the tautness of someone approaching a threshold or Rubicon. Then he drew in a lungful of air, let half of it out, and shrugged.

  “My name is John Brown Matheson, Commander. My mother adopted the last name—Matheson—for the first officer of the Havenite heavy cruiser that captured the slaver she was on. I chose ‘John Brown’ when I joined the Audubon Ballroom.”

  Despite herself, Honor’s eyes widened. The Ballroom was officially listed as a terrorist organization even by the Star Kingdom, which wasn’t too surprising in light of the atrocities it was prone to inflict upon the employees and customers of Manpower, Incorporated. Simple executions were seldom enough for the vengeful ex-slaves and children of slaves who filled the Ballroom’s ranks. Quite a few of them were fond of a ditty from an old pre-space operetta about “making the punishment fit the crime,” and they had centuries of crimes to punish . . . and imaginations which were both inventive
and grisly. Which was why even the Star Kingdom, which had hated and opposed the interstellar genetic slave trade for centuries, and which thoroughly sympathized with the victims of that trade, wasn’t prepared to endorse the sort of carnage the Ballroom all too often wreaked.

  Which, in turn, explained exactly why no serving officer of the Royal Manticoran Navy had any business at all sitting on a park bench talking with an acknowledged member of what was arguably the bloodiest—and certainly one of the most successful—organization of “terrorists” in the explored galaxy.

  She ought to stand up immediately, nod pleasantly to him, and be on her way. She knew that perfectly well.

  “And just why would a member of the Ballroom want to talk to me?” she asked instead.

  The waiter—Matheson—didn’t actually move a muscle, yet somehow he seemed to sag in relief, anyway. None of which showed in his voice as he continued in the same matter-of-fact tone.

  “When I said this situation in Saginaw was ‘less than ideal,’ I was guilty of just a bit of understatement. As a matter of fact, the situation here in Saginaw is a hell of a lot worse than that, Commander Harrington. And at least a quarter of the rot is coming out of the Casimir System.”

  “Casimir?”

  Honor couldn’t keep a flicker of surprise out of her own voice. She knew relatively little about Casimir, but from what she remembered off the top of her head, Casimir was a K0 star with seven planets and a fairly extensive but not especially spectacular or valuable asteroid belt. Unlike most star systems, it did have two habitable planets, although Anná, the innermost of the two, was no great prize. Beatá—twenty percent larger and two light-minutes farther out than Anná—was supposed to be a much nicer proposition, although both of them combined had little more than five hundred million inhabitants.

  “Casimir,” Matheson said flatly, then snorted harshly. “I don’t blame you for being surprised. The reason there’s so much grief coming out of Casimir right now is that the people responsible for it deliberately picked what you might call an out-of-the-way spot to set up shop.”

  “And who might those ‘people’ be?” Honor asked, watching his expression closely.

  “Manpower.” Madison’s flat, uninflected tone made the single word the filthiest obscenity in his vocabulary.

  “Manpower’s established a major slave depot in Casimir,” he continued in a marginally less passion-flattened voice. “It’s rapidly becoming the primary transshipment point for the slave trade here in the Confederacy, as well as for several other independent star systems out this way.”

  Honor knew from Nimitz’s reaction that Matheson wasn’t lying to her, but that didn’t mean what he thought was the truth actually was, and for the life of her she didn’t see any logical reason for Manpower to put one of its clandestine slave-trading depots in Silesia. That thought must have showed in her eyes, because Matheson shook his head.

  “Before you decide I don’t know what I’m talking about,” he said, “think about this. The wealthy and corrupt families here in the Confederacy are even wealthier—and a lot more corrupt—than their counterparts most places. Let’s face it, the entire Confederacy doesn’t have a pot to piss in compared to the Star Kingdom or the Solarian League, but people with the right connections can still squeeze an obscene amount of money out of their less fortunate neighbors. People with the right connections to become, oh, a system governor—or even a sector governor—let’s say. And whenever there’s that much money and that much economic corruption floating around, personal corruption and degeneracy are never far behind. That’s why the Ballroom has so many people scattered around the Confederacy. The kind of sick SOBs who dabble in ‘pleasure slaves’ or who simply prefer the sorts of ‘resorts’ someone with connections to Manpower can offer them, are thicker on the ground out here than in a lot of places.”

  He held Honor’s eyes for a moment, and she nodded slowly.

  “On the other hand, I never said the Casimir depot is just for the slave trade. Manpower’s got connections with any black market or illegal trade you’d care to name, and the Jessyk Combine is using Casimir as a transfer point for all kinds of cargoes no one wants to bring openly through customs, even here in the Confederacy.” He grimaced, lips working as if he wanted to spit on the ground. “There’re billions of Solarian credits worth of illegal goods and services—slaves, drugs, black-market weapons, stolen technology, you name it—being handled through Casimir, Commander. We didn’t find out about it immediately, of course, but it’s been going on for over two T-years now, and ‘business’ is growing steadily.”

  She believed him, Honor realized. She would have believed him even without Nimitz’s endorsement of his truthfulness. And she also found herself wondering if it was remotely possible Commodore Teschendorff had deliberately steered her to Chez Fiammetta . . . and to this particular waiter.

  On the face of it, that was even more ridiculous than anything Matheson had told her. Teschendorff was a commodore, with an entire squadron of heavy cruisers under his command. What possible reason could an officer that senior have for deliberately putting the captain of a mere destroyer—and one which belonged to a foreign star nation, at that—into contact with a terrorist organization just so it could pass her this kind of information?

  Yet even as she asked herself that question, she realized it might not be ridiculous at all. If Matheson was right about what was going on in Casimir, and if it had been going on as long as he said it had, then even the Confederacy Navy would have heard the odd hint about it by now. Which meant that if the Confeds weren’t doing anything about it, it was because they’d been told not to. Some of them—a lot of them—were probably being paid off directly by Manpower, Jessyk, and the other outlaws and criminals using Casimir’s services, but there had to be more to it than that. And given what Matheson had just said about corrupt sector governors, Honor had a sinking sensation about who was most likely to be protecting Casimir.

  Which could just explain exactly why Commodore Teschendorff might have embarked on something as Byzantine as deliberately throwing Honor together with Matheson—assuming, of course, that the commodore knew or suspected enough about Matheson’s Ballroom connections to steer her that way. If she’d been a senior officer who thought something like Casimir was going on in a sector adjacent to her own assigned duty station—somewhere where she herself had no authority—and she had reason to know it was being protected at the highest level, she might just want to draw it to the Star Kingdom’s attention, as well.

  Especially given the Manticoran position on the Cherwell Convention and the genetic slave trade in general.

  Great, she thought sardonically. He and Matheson between them are telling the skipper of a single destroyer that’s almost fifty T-years old about it. If Matheson’s right about everything that’s going on there, it’d take at least a couple of cruisers—not to mention a battalion or so of Marines—to do anything about it! And that doesn’t even consider the fact that I’m under orders to cooperate with Charnowska. I can just imagine how the Admiralty’s going to react if I go charging off and poke my nose into an illegal operation on this scale being carried out with the full knowledge and approval of the pro-Manticore sector governor we’re supposed to be supporting!

  “I really appreciate your willingness to tell me all this,” she said after a moment in a rather snappish tone. “But has anyone bothered to tell the Silesians about it? I mean, it is their star system.”

  Matheson didn’t even bother to reply. He simply gave her a look that was so pitying she felt herself blush. But she also shook her head stubbornly.

  “All right, forget I asked that. But I can hardly justify taking some sort of unilateral action—which is what you’re really asking me to do, as we both realize perfectly well, even though at this particular moment I don’t see a whole lot that I could do—without at least mentioning ‘my’ suspicions to the local authorities.”

  Matheson looked a lot more than just skeptical,
and she shook her head again.

  “If you’re right about what’s going on—and I don’t know anything that would prove you’re not—you’re handing me a live hand grenade and inviting me to look for the pin. You know it, and I know it. And I’m sure you also know I’ve got my own orders from the Admiralty. To be perfectly honest, I’m of the opinion that those orders and the supplementary instructions I was given to go with them will pretty much preclude my doing anything at all about this beyond informing my own superiors about it as quickly as possible.”

  Disappointment flickered in Matheson’s amber eyes, but she continued doggedly.

  “I didn’t say that was what I wanted to do; what I said is that it’s what my orders will limit me to doing. And before I can do even that much and figure that anyone’s going to listen to me, I have to be able to tell them I at least discussed the situation with Sector Governor Charnowska. Believe me, no flag officer is going to authorize an operation against an installation in sovereign Silesian territory on the say-so of a mere commander—and one who’s been hobnobbing with Ballroom terrorists, at that!—without having all of the formal i’s dotted and t’s crossed. It’s just not going to happen.

  “On the other hand, if Charnowska doesn’t know about it, then it’s my duty to tell her. And if she does know about it—if she’s actually involved in it herself—she may decide it’s time to cut her losses and shut things down before the Admiralty does do something about it unilaterally.”