by David Drake
“My situation couldn’t be worse,” Arnaud snapped. “I came here to ask for asylum on Cinnabar. I’ll be hanged if I go back to Pantellaria, regardless of any treason you’ve invented for me.”
He suddenly grinned in a return to good humor. “By the way,” he said, “you won’t find any evidence on the console in my trailer. Before I started here tonight, I set off a thermite grenade inside it. I didn’t know what you had done to it, Lady Mundy, but I realized you’d done something.”
“There was evidence elsewhere, of course,” Adele said, getting to her feet again. “But you’ve convinced me that you’re not a fool, Commissioner.”
She coughed; Arnaud stood up also, looking tensely hopeful. Adele said, “I’ll take to you to Captain Leary now. He’s been considering the situation following the end of the war. You may learn something to your advantage.”
Tovera gestured Arnaud to the hatch. She had holstered her submachine gun again, which was more a comment on her state of mind than on how quickly she could react to danger.
“Six says he’s not a politician,” Tovera said. “But he’s lying.”
She laughed, a cackle that might have come from a peevish reptile.
* * *
Daniel awakened in his hammock. He didn’t know where he was—neither what planet he was on nor what he was doing there. Here.
“Daniel?” said Adele’s voice, bringing him fully alert and back to his present in the conference room where he had slung a hammock instead of returning to his cubicle aboard the Kiesche.
“Hang on,” said Hogg. His feet slapped the floor, which was sheeting like the walls and roof.
Daniel’s eyes adapted to the faint light from beneath the eaves of the quickly constructed building. Twenty-centimeter-high poles from the top of the walls supported the peaked roof. The roof overhang covered the gap, but it allowed in air and enough light to be noticeable in the otherwise complete darkness.
Daniel sneezed; his nose was stuffy from residues of the freshly welded plastic and the stabilizers mixed with the mud pumped into the gap between the sheeting. When the mud hardened, the sandwich would be weatherproof and excellent insulation, but for the moment it was still curing.
Hogg shoved the door open and unhooked one end of his hammock; he had slung it across the doorway from eyebolts set into the walls. Daniel got up also. His hammock was across a back corner of the room, one bolt in either wall. He was still fully dressed, though he’d taken off his boots.
There was a jury-rigged power line from the fusion bottle in the headquarters dugout, but the light switch was near the door. “Get the lights,” Daniel said as he bent to slip on his boots. The three glowstrips on the underside of the roof flickered to what was painful brilliance for a moment.
Adele entered ahead of a burly Pantellarian sergeant. A spy? Does she have agents inside Hablinger?
“Captain Leary?” she said, reverting to formality now that he was awake. “This is Commissioner Arnaud, who wants to discuss his future with you.”
Daniel laughed, then sneezed again. An Ischian freighter had landed just after sundown. Ozone from its thrusters still lingered in the humid air. Most of the ships in Brotherhood Harbor were waiting for at least a formal armistice before they hopped to Hablinger with building materials, but the Ischians had their own reasons for wanting to arrive immediately.
“Have a seat, Commissioner,” Daniel said as he pulled out a chair for himself from the table. “When I saw you, I was only mildly surprised to learn that Lady Mundy had an agent within the Pantellarian expeditionary force. I was much more surprised when she announced who you really are.”
Like the buildings, the furniture had been manufactured from plastic tubes and sheeting in the past few hours. It was sturdy and serviceable, though it made the steel stampings of a warship look like aesthetic masterpieces by contrast.
Arnaud remained standing, his hands gripped together at waist level. “I’ve come to accept your terms, Leary,” he said.
“I haven’t stated any terms,” Daniel said. He frowned slightly. “Though if Lady Mundy has, then—”
“She has not,” Arnaud said. “When I have a negotiating position, I negotiate. When I do not, as now, I throw myself on the victor’s mercy. State your terms, sir, and I will accept them.”
He swallowed and added, “I hope the lives of my troops can be spared, as your initial announcement stated.”
Daniel pulled out a second chair and turned it to face his, then sat down. “I think we can do better than that, Commissioner,” he said, “but please—sit. I don’t want to look up at you, and I sure don’t want to stand. It’s been a long day.”
“Yes,” said the Pantellarian, “it has.”
Arnaud sat. He tried to brace himself on the chair back but collapsed onto the seat when he was halfway down. He had looked worn but alert initially. Now his face had a greenish pallor which was only partially caused by the bioluminescent glow strips.
The door closed behind Hogg; he and Tovera had stepped outside. Adele was in a chair beside the door, her data unit on her lap. Except for the occasional flicker of her wands, she was as unobtrusive as the dull pink surface of the plastic walls.
“First …” Daniel said. He had rehearsed this meeting, but he hadn’t expected it to come so suddenly—or here. “I’ve arranged with Ischia to repatriate your troops. With the Monfiore clan, technically, but this matter is going to require much greater resources than they themselves can provide. That’s to everyone’s benefit, as the Monfiores become benefactors of all Ischia instead of being wealthy profiteers in the midst of hostile neighbors.”
Arnaud pursed his lips. “That will be an expensive proposition,” he said. “I can’t commit the Council to paying for it. The Pantellarian council, that is.”
He shook his head angrily, glaring at the floor. “In fact, I don’t think that anything I appeared to support would pass a Council vote. I’m telling you this because I don’t want to see my troops sold into slavery to pay the cost of their transportation.”
His mouth worked as though he were about to spit, but he swallowed instead. “Not that I’m likely to survive long enough to see the final outcome.”
Daniel made a dismissive gesture with his left hand. “One thing at a time,” he said. There was a console of reasonable capacity at the other end of the table, but he didn’t think he needed it now. “The transportation costs will be covered by trade concessions, but that’s in the future. The most immediate question I see—”
He grinned. It was true that the Monfiores gained in the long term by being forced to share their profits with their neighbors. This plan too benefitted all parties, which pleased Daniel for its neatness as well as other virtues.
“—is what you would consider the best conceivable outcome to the present situation? From your viewpoint.”
“Asylum for me on Cinnabar,” Arnaud said. “The rest of my force returns to Pantellaria with an undertaking by the Council not to retaliate against them, guaranteed by the Cinnabar Senate.”
He shrugged. “If you can arrange that,” he said, “you’d be welcome to my firstborn if I had children. I could manage a nephew or two.”
Despite the joking bravado, Daniel could see real hope in the Pantellarian’s expression. It was easy to like Arnaud: he had come himself instead of sending an envoy, and his first concern was for his troops.
“You’ve told me what you consider the best practical outcome,” Daniel said, “but that’s not what I asked you. What do you consider the best conceivable outcome?”
Arnaud’s face hardened slightly. “You surrender Corcyra to me,” he said after a moment. “Which, to be honest, I don’t believe you have the power to do, but you’ve surprised me in the past.”
He nodded toward Adele. “You and Lady Mundy have.”
“Wouldn’t you rather be ruler of Pantellaria?” Daniel said. He smiled more broadly.
Arnaud pushed his fingertips together hard at chest height. �
�Explain what you mean,” he said.
“Will your troops support you?” Daniel said.
“I … think they would support me a long way, yes,” Arnaud said. “If I get them out of this mess alive, most of them would support me well beyond common sense. But I couldn’t conquer Pantellaria with this force. I couldn’t even conquer Corcyra, though …”
His eyes narrowed with a thought. “The plan Lady Mundy tricked me with—that might have worked. I still think it would have worked, and she said it was your plan. Are you offering to support me, Leary?”
Daniel laughed as though the offer was a joke. At the words, though, his mind had begun considering what it would take and what resources he might be able to raise on Cinnabar… .
No.
Before he could speak, Adele said, “I can assure you as an official of Cinnabar, Commissioner Arnaud, that the Republic’s government would forbid any action by a citizen which would precipitate renewed war with the Alliance. As the armed overthrow of Pantellaria by an RCN officer would certainly do.”
I wasn’t going to do it anyway! Daniel thought. His momentary irritation melted away. But that’s an aspect of the business that I hadn’t considered.
He grinned at Adele, then said to Arnaud, “No, you couldn’t conquer Pantellaria, but according to my sources—”
Adele.
“—the Council of Twenty isn’t very popular. Things were all right just after Guarantor Porra’s thugs were thrown out, but right now a lot of folks seem to think that the Council is a bunch of rich people screwing every piaster they can get out of everybody else. Not so?”
“Go on, Leary,” Arnaud said, his face almost blank. “But keep in mind that I’m not exactly a man of the people myself. I’ve improved the family fortune considerably, thanks to investment by Bantry Holdings in some measure—”
His sudden smile was half-amused, half mocking.
“—but we Arnauds are still one of the oldest families on Pantellaria.”
“You may have more popular support than you believe, Commissioner,” Adele said. “Your shipyard is regarded as a good place to work, and you’re a great deal more approachable than many of your nouveau riche fellows on the Council. Your popularity with the public is one of the reasons the rest of the Council has been trying to arrange the defeat of your expeditionary force as soon as you lifted from Pantellaria.”
“It certainly seems like that!” Arnaud said. “You know, I’ve had to use my own money to pay the troops for the past three months? The Council hasn’t transferred money into the expedition’s account.”
“I can show you internal communications among your fellows,” Adele said. “Though referring to the other councillors as ‘your fellows’ is probably a misnomer. But that doesn’t matter now.”
“No,” said Daniel. Arnaud was seated between him and Adele, so the Commissioner was snapping his head around like a spectator at a tennis match. “Ordinary people don’t have to support you, so long as they don’t oppose you. As the residents of Corcyra most certainly have been doing.”
“I have provided Captain Leary with a breakdown of the private troops in the service of your other councillors,” Adele said. “He is convinced that the force available to you would be sufficient to defeat—”
“You’ll scare them into taking their badges off and hiding,” Daniel said.
“—or simply overawe them,” Adele went on, nodding.
“And your forces aren’t simply those you brought to Corcyra, Commissioner,” Daniel said, leaning forward. “There are other troops here who would be more than happy to follow you to Pantellaria. To go back, in many cases.”
He and Adele were selling Arnaud on their plan. It was a good course for the Pantellarian, but it was the only course which would also accomplish all of Daniel’s objectives.
Arnaud blinked and stiffened. “No,” he said. “You mean the exiles, don’t you? I won’t do that.”
“The Self-Defense Regiment and the Navy of Free Corcyra,” Daniel said, keeping his voice genially calm. “Which in the past have been paid by exiles, I believe, but that needn’t continue to be the case. And the Corcyran garrison, whose members will be particularly willing to leave here. Their commander, Colonel Bourbon, is both competent and honest.”
“Look, I know the people, the families mostly, who bolted here when the Alliance pulled off of Pantellaria,” Arnaud said. “I don’t have problems with them, no more than usual, anyway; I was in pretty tight with Porra’s last administrator myself, to tell the truth. But I’m not going to have a bloodbath back at home or a return to Alliance control. That’s what they’ll want, some of them.”
“What most of them want,” said Adele, “is a return of their property on Pantellaria. And revenge against the political enemies who forced them into exile and expropriated that property, of course. But none of them, and not all of them together, can force through that agenda over your opposition.”
A computer-synthesized voice would have had more warmth; it would have been programmed to seem human. Adele didn’t bother to do so. And at that, her cold, precise delivery gave the words the solid certainty of a stone wall.
“You’re buying internal peace for your planet,” Daniel said. “That’s a very good return for simply giving back the property of fellow citizens. The Council of Twenty had a good opportunity to bring Pantellaria together when the Alliance left. Instead you simply made yourselves richer. You did, Commissioner.”
Arnaud’s immediate response was an angry glare. Then he coughed a laugh and said, “Point taken. The silver lining in this is that because the spoils were divided pretty much among Council members, it’ll be relatively easy for us to correct our mistake. Although—”
His eyes went unfocused as his mind leaped to a different thought.
“—not all of my colleagues will see what we did as a mistake. The Alliance administrators had us at each others’ throats all the time they were in charge. You can say we should have done better when they left, but what happened to most of the exiles was no more than justice for what they’d done to others.”
“All the more reason to stop doing Guarantor Porra’s work for him, I would think,” snapped Adele.
“And your colleagues don’t have five thousand troops with combat experience,” Daniel said. “Don’t sell your force short, Arnaud. No, they’re not a Land Force Commando, but they’ve trained together, they’ve been shot at and they’ve shot back. That puts them in a whole different class from what anybody else on Pantellaria has obeying his orders.”
“Look,” said Arnaud. He stood up abruptly. “Look. I don’t want to be dictator of Pantellaria. I don’t want to be a penny-ante Porra myself.”
“Then don’t be,” said Adele. She didn’t raise her voice, but her words snapped like a whip. “The Council of Twenty was supposed to be a transition to the elected assembly that ruled Pantellaria before you were absorbed into the Alliance. Go back and tell your colleagues that the Council is going to hold elections for a new Assembly in three months time.”
“But—” Arnaud said.
“But nothing,” Daniel said. “You’ve got five thousand veteran votes for the proposition, and everybody on the planet except maybe a few of your colleagues will support the idea. And if any other councillors really want to make an issue of it, put them in jail for a few days.”
“You may find that more of the Council is on your side than you expect,” Adele said. “According to my information—”
Pantellaria had been a major Alliance ally during the war. Mistress Sand’s array of spies there obviously hadn’t been disbanded when the Treaty of Amiens was signed.
“—some of the minor councillors are concerned at the chance of civil war between their more powerful colleagues, and the smarter councillors—”
Adele’s smile was the visual equivalent of her clipped tone.
“Not a majority, I fear. The smarter councillors, as I said, are concerned about revolution if things don’t chan
ge. Both concerns are valid, even if Alliance agents don’t work to increase their likelihood. Which is also a valid concern.”
“Lady Mundy and I have seen revolutions,” Daniel said. We’ve seen the next thing to revolution on Cinnabar, and it was the blessing of heaven that it wasn’t the real thing. “If you go home and knock a few of the harder heads together, you’ll be doing everyone on Pantellaria a favor.”
“Including the people who’ll curse you every day till they die,” said Adele. “Because they don’t have your good sense.”
“They also don’t have your army,” Daniel said. “So long as you’re satisfied with being rich and powerful, my bet is that your rich, powerful colleagues will come to believe that you’re offering a better alternative than hanging from a lamppost. Now, are you willing to try?”
Arnaud gave Daniel a lopsided smile and sat down again. “I’d been wondering what I was going to do with myself on Cinnabar,” he said. “I guess that on balance I’d rather go back to Pantellaria and straighten things out. I knew something had to be done before I brought the army here, and from what you tell me things haven’t gotten better.”
He took a deep breath. “All right, Leary. What’s the next step?”
“The next step,” Daniel said, “is that we tell Hogg and Tovera to let in the Corcyran leaders and Giorgi Monfiore. I’m sure that Lady Mundy summoned them while we’ve been talking.”
Adele nodded agreement and said, “I have.” Her smile was almost that of a normal person.
“We’ve got a great deal of negotiating to do,” Daniel said, rising to walk to the door, “but Corcyra and Pantellaria both will gain from it.”
And with luck so will Rikard Cleveland, who’s the reason I came here in the first place.
CHAPTER 27
Outside Hablinger on Corcyra
Adele worked at her usual station on the Kiesche, sifting the data from Arnaud’s personal console. She allowed herself a smile, though it didn’t reach her lips: she probably had the only complete copy of the contents, now that Arnaud had melted the unit to slag.
