by J. L. Doty
“You’re guessing,” Goutain snarled. “I don’t let you keep your life so you can give me guesswork.”
Nadama sat back, deciding to stay out of it until Goutain finished venting his anger. Nadama had to give Tantin credit; somehow he always managed to survive, while his peers dropped like flies, though this time Goutain’s rage did appear uncontrollable. Nadama did hope that Tantin made it through this episode. The man was quite competent, and it was appalling the way Goutain wasted good people.
Speaking of competency. . .
Chevard’s name had come up quite frequently of late. He seemed to be involved in almost every facet of the resistance. And yet, Tantin was right: prior to the resistance he had to have maintained an incredibly low profile. “I think it clear,” Nadama said, interrupting Goutain’s tirade, “that this Edwin Chevard is a false identity.”
Goutain turned toward Nadama, struggled visibly to control himself and managed to lower his voice, though only slightly. “How do you mean?”
Nadama tossed the sheaf of reports onto his desk. “These indicate there were absolutely no records of such a man prior to the resistance: no birth certificates, no family records, no tax records, nothing. It’s not possible to live and leave so empty a trail.”
Goutain frowned and considered Nadama’s words for a moment. “I suppose that’s true.”
To Tantin, Nadama said, “General, I recommend you look to local Aagerbanni civic leaders, politicians, industrial magnates; people of power who cannot easily go into hiding, and who’ll suffer in one way or another by the annexation. Don’t bother with anyone who’s already gone into hiding and is actively supporting the resistance. Such a false identity is only necessary for someone who’s attempting to maintain their pre-annexation interests.”
Tantin looked to Goutain for approval. Goutain waved a hand at him. “Do it. Just do it, you fool. Can’t you think for yourself?”
It had started with her recognition of the trampsie ship’s captain, and from that Del had grown quite suspicious of Edwin Chevard. She still wasn’t sure where she’d seen Captain Neverlose before, though her life hadn’t intersected with trampsies too often. Probably it had been somewhere in Ellitah on Tachaann, which boasted more than its share of trampsies. She just couldn’t remember exactly where or when, or under what circumstances.
As promised, Chevard’s staff treated both her and Carristan well. Chevard came to see her daily without fail, always asked if there were any problems with her treatment, asked if there was anything else she wanted, and she always told him, “Yes, I want my freedom.” And while she was free to live in and roam about a rather large and elegant suite of rooms, there was no question that she was nevertheless imprisoned. She and Carristan had explored the limits of their confinement, found that there were no views of the outside world and only two entrances to her suite from the building proper, both perpetually locked, and with, as she’d seen upon occasion, armed guards stationed beyond. But after the first few days, once she and Carristan realized that Chevard was a man of his word, that they would be treated well, they relaxed. And oddly, even though she was a prisoner, she came to realize that in some ways she was freer now than she had been on Turnlee. Dieter didn’t hover relentlessly, oppressively at hand, didn’t pop up suddenly when least expected. She had come to fear his temper, and here, that constant, gnawing dread had disappeared. She even felt a bit lighthearted.
Interestingly enough, Chevard was always careful to ask her permission before entering her presence. At first, out of spite, she’d refused and he’d stayed away, and there had been no repercussions. Later she’d agreed to receive him. Occasionally, he’d even joined them for dinner, and it was on the first such occasion that her suspicion of the man had risen to the surface of her thoughts. There was something enticingly familiar about him, though she was absolutely certain she’d never met him before.
“Your Highness, forgive me,” Chevard said. “I was boring you.”
“No, not at all,” she said, bringing her thoughts back to the moment. They were walking through an indoor garden that adjoined several of her rooms. It was styled after outdoor, formal gardens with lovely gravel pathways meandering through flowers and small decorative bushes. Chevard had gotten into the habit of visiting her there and relaying the latest news to her. “I’m sorry. My thoughts drifted for a moment.”
There was always a touch of melancholy to the man. “I do apologize that you must be confined so.”
She laughed and shrugged. “It’s the politics of my life.”
“I can’t blame you if you resent me for spiriting you away from your betrothed.”
She stopped and turned to face him. She had sensed just a hint of jealousy in his tone, as if he needed to gauge her feelings toward Dieter. And there was something very familiar about the way he’d said that, almost as if she knew this man. She stepped in close to him, just a little closer than was appropriate, and took a bit of girlish pleasure in his discomfort. “Dieter and I’ll never love one another. Dieter has too much love for himself to spare any for me.”
Chevard almost seemed happy at her response. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, but his words didn’t match his tone or expression.
She’d considered this next step carefully. As her suspicion of Chevard had grown, she’d decided upon a simple test. Before he could react, she closed the distance between them, put her arms around his neck, pressed her body tightly against him, and kissed him. He responded passionately and wrapped his arms around her waist.
By all appearances Chevard was a man in late middle age, but as they held each other, their tongues dancing back and forth almost desperately, she felt him responding like a young man in his prime. The shoulders that she held were the broad, powerful shoulders of a young man, the lips pressed against hers were strong and full, and as she pressed her entire body along the length of him, the unwilling response of his body was not that of an older man.
He suddenly came to his senses, realized what he was doing, and took an alarmed step back from her. “Your Highness, please forgive me. I don’t know what came over me.”
There’d been something familiar about that kiss, as if she’d kissed him before, and she didn’t try to hide her surprise. And then there were his shoulders . . . and Mr. Neverlose . . . who had worked with Charlie in that saloon on Tachaann . . . and Charlie had given Carristan the hint to contact Mr. Neverlose . . .
“Charlie!” she said. She stepped toward him. “It’s you, isn’t?”
His shoulders slumped, he closed his eyes and lowered his head. She’d heard of visual distortion fields, but never seen one in action until he switched it off.
He opened his eyes and looked at her sheepishly. “I . . . uh . . .”
She wanted to be furious with him, curled her hands into fists and planted them on her hips. “I should be so angry with you.”
She knew she didn’t sound as angry as she wanted to, and sounded more like she was really happy to see him, which was, in fact, the case. At least Charlie looked like he wanted to crawl under a rock and hide. “Don’t you trust me?” she demanded.
He repeated himself. “I . . . uh . . .”
“Wow!” she said. “Mr. Articulate. You should—”
He shut her up by stepping forward, wrapping his arms around her waist, pulling her tightly against him, and kissing her. It was a kiss that made the last one seem rather tame, though now that she knew she was kissing Charlie, she had to admit most of that was her fault.
Charlie, Roacka, Roger, and Seth stood silently in the lift as it plummeted into the depths of the bedrock beneath Starfall. Charlie wanted physical verification of the existence of platforms one through twelve, and of the computer’s analysis of their capabilities. It wouldn’t do to need such defenses and find that they really only existed in the bits and bytes of the computer. So far they’d boarded five of the platforms,
activated them briefly, verified their capabilities, status, maintenance, and repair requirements, then run a quick physical inventory of their systems before shutting them back down. Until they were prepared to properly activate and man the systems, they had to keep them a closely guarded secret.
Manpower turned out to be less and less of a problem. Each platform required a crew of about twenty, since much of it operated under computer control. And every tenday there were more defections from House de Maris and others. There had been something like ten thousand men in various Syndonese POW camps. And while most had not been part of the Two Thousand, they all had suffered similar depravations. Charlie’s name had become a symbol for opposition to useless, pointless wars, and the result was a steady stream of highly trained and experienced spacers and their families. And many of the women wanted to serve in the same capacity as their husbands. Charlie’s consent to train the women as combatants occasionally raised a few eyebrows, but more often than not was accepted with little more than a shrug.
Cesare had stocked the barracks on the platforms with nonperishable foodstuffs, so that was one issue they didn’t have to worry about. But Charlie didn’t have enough crewmen to fully operate the platforms’ weapons, so he decided to staff them with couples, married or otherwise.
Now that they knew the layout and status of the platforms, each verification team carried a full stock of supplies for the barracks, just in case some of the nonperishables had perished. And Charlie had purchased a number of in-system shuttles to ferry crews back and forth, driving him even further into debt. Winston had warned him that his credit would soon run out.
But what else could he do?
It was Roger who discovered the facilities on Luna in the Overlord schematics. Charlie hadn’t noticed them because he’d asked for a schematic of the entire Overlord system, which meant the scale on his screen had been adjusted to view the entire Sol system, and Luna was too small a detail to show up on such a scale except as a single red dot. Roger had been reviewing the locations of Overlord’s spare parts inventory with an eye toward repairs on the platforms, and he’d noticed that much of it was located on Luna. So when he’d zoomed in on the Starfall schematics, with the Overlord schematics active, it showed that large defensive batteries pocked the surface of the moon itself, with a number of power plants buried far beneath old, radioactive hot spots, a nice way of keeping them hidden from anything but a detailed examination. But what intrigued them most was a large facility beneath Starfall. To reach it, the schematics directed them to a special lift.
“How deep does this fucking thing go?” Roacka demanded.
Roger answered, “From the schematic, I’d guess about three hundred meters.”
They waited several more seconds before the doors of the lift opened with a whoosh. The lights in the room beyond turned on automatically, revealing what appeared to be a small reception area, with a counter behind which a guard or receptionist might sit. They stood immersed in an eerie silence for several moments, but when the lift doors began to close, Roacka said, “Fuck this,” forced the doors to reopen, and marched into the reception area. The only exit visible, other than the lift, was a door to one side and behind the receptionist’s desk. Roacka marched up to the door, opened it, and held it for Charlie. “You want to do the honors, lad?”
As Charlie stepped through the door the lights in the room beyond came on, and he found a bullpen of desks, though no indication as to their purpose. There were a number of doors on the periphery of the bullpen, and a quick glance through a few of them merely revealed simple offices. It reminded Charlie of a large operations center of some sort. The far wall appeared to be transparent plast, and as Charlie approached it he called over his shoulder, “Roger, see if you can bring up some of these systems—especially the lights—and find out what we’re dealing with here.”
Pitch darkness beyond the transparent plast windows hid whatever lay there. Charlie stood there staring into nothing for several moments until Roger called, “Got it.” A moment later the room beyond the windows lit up and he tried to make sense of what he saw. The room in which he stood appeared to be a few meters above a warehouse floor, with rows of shelves two or three meters high stretching into the distance. Seth stopped beside him, stood there for a moment with his hands on his hips, then suddenly gasped and pointed to a thin line that crossed the floor below them. “Holy fucking shit. That’s a gantry.”
The scale of the place suddenly snapped into perspective. “We must be a good ten meters off the floor, and those shelves have to be fifteen meters high.” At that scale, that meant some of the hardware racked down there was large, heavy equipment.
“Charlie,” Roger said, completely forgetting himself for the moment. The tone of awe in his voice made them all turn his way.
Roger sat at one of the desks, the glare of an active screen reflected in his eyes. “You’re looking at just one of four such warehouses, all of the same size. This manifest lists ten completed transition drives in inventory, all of cruiser class or better.”
Seth and Roacka both hurried to stand behind Roger and look over his shoulder. Charlie stayed at the plast windows and turned to survey the warehouse while listening. “If I’m reading this correctly there are over fifty large transition batteries, thirty transition launchers, and assorted sublight drives and power plants, all completely assembled, modularized, and ready to be installed in hulls. It looks like there’s also enough stocks of smaller spare parts to keep a fleet of thirty or forty warships going for at least a year.”
“But no hulls?” Charlie asked.
“No, no hulls.”
There wouldn’t be. Charlie had asked more as a matter of form. One didn’t assemble hulls in a gravity well, not even one as insignificant as Luna’s. For just an instant Charlie imagined he could see Cesare’s reflection in the plast beside him. “You sneaky bastard, you,” he said, and didn’t try to hide the smile that formed on his face. “Where are the hulls?”
At the entrance to the apartments Delilah and Carristan shared, Charlie said, “Computer, please inform Her Royal Highness that I wish to see her.”
Several seconds passed, then Carristan opened the door and greeted him very formally. “Your Grace,” she said, curtsying deeply. When she straightened she gave him a smug look.
Today Del wore a light summer dress that fell to just below her knees, just the tiniest bit transparent, with a few too many buttons undone in the front. Well, actually, he thought, stealing another glance at her, maybe it isn’t too many.
She took his arm as if they were a young couple enjoying a stroll on a clear spring day. “Let’s walk in the garden,” she said.
She guided him into the indoor garden, with Carristan following several paces behind them. Charlie glanced over his shoulder at the older woman. She returned his look with a knowing smile.
Del said, “You know, she’s not going to leave us alone.”
“Why?” Charlie asked.
Del shook her head sadly. “After the way you kissed me. Absolutely shameless! My mother would never approve.”
Charlie recalled that he hadn’t really been the one in control of that kiss. Yes, he’d initiated it, but once begun Del had piloted the ship rather nicely. He considered saying something like, You seemed to enjoy it, but decided to keep that thought to himself.
“So,” Del said, “you’re supporting the resistance?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You did when you were pretending to be Edwin Chevard.”
Winston, Roacka, and Charlie had discussed how much to tell Del. Charlie wanted to bring her into his inner circle, but Winston was reluctant to do so, while Roacka vehemently opposed the idea. If Del fell into the wrong hands, she or Carristan could be put under deep neural probe, and anything she knew, they would know. “Only need-to-know,” Roacka had reminded him.
Charlie d
idn’t like it, but he’d capitulated.
“I do support the resistance,” he said, “though, does that really surprise anyone?”
“No,” she said, “it doesn’t. So what exactly are you doing to support them?”
With more ships each day taking advantage of Andyne-Borregga’s facilities, its importance in the opposition to Goutain and Nadama was becoming less of a secret every day. So he figured he could at least share that bit of information with her.
Charlie said, “I’m trying to support a free port that FAR can use for supplies and repairs for its ships.”
Del stopped in the middle of the garden, forcing him to stop with her. She turned to face him. “That’s wonderful. I’m well aware that ships can’t operate without some sort of base.”
“But it’s straining my meager resources to the limit.”
“Yes,” she said, smiling, “the penniless bastard thing again.”
He shrugged. “Still penniless, but no longer officially a bastard.”
“So what can I do to help the resistance?”
She caught him off guard with that question. “I’m not sure, but let me think on it.”
Long after he left her that day, that question remained at the forefront of his thoughts. He discussed it carefully with Winston and Roacka.
“Let’s put her in front of the press,” Roacka said, “have her publicly denounce Nadama and Goutain’s aggression.”
Winston said, “She can’t do that because she’d be denouncing her father as well. And it wouldn’t be fair to put her in that position.”
Charlie decided to get Arthur’s advice on the subject, but that would have to wait until his next stop at Andyne-Borregga.
CHAPTER 26
