by David Weber
And froze, warned by the sudden movement at the corner of his eye. Carefully, leaving his hand where it was, he looked at the guard to his left.
The man had brushed back the right-hand flap of his jacket and was gripping the butt of a side-holstered pistol. A Paxlane 405 10mm caseless, Llyn’s brain automatically identified it.
“My apologies, General,” he said. Slowly, he eased his hand out of the jacket to show the data chip between his first two fingers. “As your time is valuable, I thought it only fair that I compensate you for your generosity in allowing me some of it.” With a careful flick of his wrist, he sent the chip sailing across the table to land in front of Khetha.
The general made no move toward it. “Ulobo?” he said.
With a brief wrinkling of his nose, the plump man carefully picked it up. He pulled a tablet from his jacket and plugged the chip into the slot. “Another lock box combination,” he said, peering at the display. “Purportedly containing another fifty thousand in diamonds.”
“A very generous gift,” Khetha said, eyeing Llyn thoughtfully.
“Merely gratitude for your own generosity,” Llyn assured him. Especially since that gift had also shown him exactly where one of his guards’ weapons was located. Fifty thousand was a very fair price to pay for that kind of information. “May I take it that means you’re granting me a hearing?”
Khetha smiled. “Certainly. You have ten minutes.”
“Then I’ll be brief.” Llyn nodded toward the samovar. “I wonder if I could also prevail on your hospitality to the extent of a cup of tea?”
Khetha smiled again, this one with a hint of triumph flavoring it. By asking for tea instead of waiting for it to be offered, Llyn had lowered his status vis-à-vis his host’s, which had now put Khetha into a stronger bargaining position. If the visitor knew the custom, Khetha had just won a point.
If he didn’t, well, it wouldn’t affect the upcoming negotiations at all. But it would still mean a great deal to Khetha.
And maybe that was all the Supreme Chosen One really cared about. People who’d lost almost everything gripped what little they still had even more tightly.
The nuances and motivations of this particular bit didn’t matter a frog’s damn to Llyn. All he cared about was getting some tea.
And now, having won the round, Khetha could afford to be a thoroughly gracious host.
“Of course,” he said, gesturing to Ulobo. Scowling some more, clearly still wary of the visitor, the plump man pushed back his chair and headed for the sideboard. “Your minutes are running,” the general added.
“The situation is simple,” Llyn said. “Four T-years ago you were deposed and exiled from Canaan. Ever since then you’ve been looking for a way to return and reestablish your rule. Over the course of that time, you must certainly have made the acquaintance of some large pirate or mercenary groups whom you hope to interest in supporting that effort.”
“We’ve had contact with one or two,” Khetha said. “Most of them are too constrained by legalities or outmoded ethics for my needs. All of the others are quite expensive.” He gestured to the data chip. “I appreciate your contribution to that fund.”
“And therein lies the crux of your problem,” Llyn said. “As you say—” he broke off, nodding Ulobo his thanks as the other set a steaming mug of tea in front of him “—the most effective mercenary groups don’t come cheap.” He paused again, picking up the mug by its top and pretending to take a sip.
Not that he had any intention of actually drinking any of it, of course. Not only was it too hot to touch without burning his tongue, but he had no idea what secret ingredients Khetha or Ulobo might have put into it. Lowering the mug, he set it back onto the table.
And as he did so he dropped the two small capsules he’d been palming into the steaming liquid.
“My problem, on the other hand, is just the opposite,” he continued, casually pushing the mug a few centimeters farther from him. “My client finds himself in need of one of these, shall we say, below-the-radar groups. And while he has plenty of money—as you’ve no doubt already noted—he has no idea where and how to contact one.” He pursed his lips. “Nor do I.”
“A dilemma, indeed,” Khetha said. “How do you intend to resolve it?”
“My hope is that you and I can build our respective problems into a pair of solutions,” Llyn said. Was the pounding of his heart starting to ease up a little? “You have contact information. I have access to money. I propose that you offer me an introduction to the most promising of these groups. In return—” He smiled. “My client will provide the funding for your return to power.”
Ulobo sat a little taller in his chair. “The entire funding?” he asked disbelievingly.
“The entire funding,” Llyn confirmed. Yes; his heart was definitely slowing from its earlier frenetic pace.
“You’re very generous with your client’s money,” Khetha said, his expression giving nothing away. “One has to wonder if he would approve.”
“No worries,” Llyn said. “I have his complete confidence, along with financial carte blanche. He also knows that the timing at our end is critical—the longer we delay in making a deal with your mercenaries, the less profit he’ll realize. Assuming the operation is launched within the next, say, five years, his profit will be high enough that paying the extra fee for the mercenaries to reestablish you on Canaan would be hardly noticeable.”
“It must be a high-profit venture, indeed,” Khetha said thoughtfully.
“It is.”
“And you could easily spend those five years you mention simply exchanging messages with mercenary groups in hopes of finding one which will meet your needs.”
“As you said, my dilemma,” Llyn said. “You, in contrast, have nothing to lose and everything to gain by agreeing to this joint venture.” He smiled. “And the gain won’t just be your return to power.”
“What do you mean?” Ulobo asked.
“He means,” Khetha said, “that if his client pays all costs, then the fund we’ve been building will no longer have to go to the Volsungs.” He cocked an eyebrow. “And no one outside this room would ever need to know that.”
Ulobo’s face cleared. “Ah.”
“Which fund, I’m guessing, already runs into the hundreds of thousands of sols, Solarian credits, or whatever,” Llyn said, suppressing a smile. So now he had a name: Volsungs. One step closer to making his move.
“You’re still asking a great deal,” Khetha said, “on what basically amounts to your word.”
“Not really,” Llyn said. “The worst possible case is that I take the name and contact information and you never hear from me again. In that event, all you’ve lost is a little time before your return. Time, I might point out, which your enemies are using to rebuild Canaan’s economy. Actually, now that I think about it, the longer you wait, the more you’ll have to return to.” He nodded toward the chip still in Ulobo’s tablet. “And you’ll still be a hundred thousand sols ahead.”
Khetha looked at Ulobo. The plump man still didn’t look exactly happy, but he gave a reluctant nod.
“But all this presumes that your merc group has the resources my client needs,” Llyn continued before either of the others could speak. “I’ve laid out my cards. Time to lay out one or two of yours.”
Khetha inclined his head. “What do you wish to know?”
“Let’s start with their location,” Llyn said. “Planet, city—all of that.”
Khetha pursed his lips, then gave a small shrug. “They’re headquartered in Rochelle on the planet Telmach. That’s in the Silesian Confederacy—”
“I know where it is,” Llyn said. Interrupting a despot’s ego was risky, but he had no choice. His heartbeat was nearly back to normal, and he needed to close this off quickly. Any minute now Ulobo or one of the guards would notice that his hands were starting to feel a little numb. “What kind of resources do they have? Specifically, how many warships and what types?”
“How many?” Llyn repeated.
Khetha’s eyes narrowed. But he merely nodded to Ulobo, who tapped a fresh access code into his tablet. “They have four battlecruisers,” the plump man reported, peering at the page that came up. “Cruisers—let me count—eight of them, light and heavy, plus ten destroyers and frigates. They also have three troop transports and a handful of other auxiliaries.”
“Excellent,” Llyn said. Yes; Ulobo’s hands were definitely moving slower than they had earlier. Fortunately, his brain was slowing down in the same proportion, which meant that his recognition of his puzzling clumsiness should take another few seconds. “That should do nicely. And you have contact names and recognition codes for someone in the group?”
“Not just someone.” Ulobo tapped his tablet. “Our contact is the head of the group, Admiral Cutler Gensonne himself.”
“I’m impressed,” Llyn said. There was no harm in soothing Khetha’s ego a bit, after his impolite interruption a moment ago. “I presume you also have a ship standing by that can take us to him?”
Ulobo frowned. “Excuse me?”
“A ship,” Llyn repeated. He was pretty sure the answer was yes, given the Supreme Chosen One’s hasty departure from Canaan four years ago. But he needed to be absolutely sure. “One that’s sufficiently fueled and stocked to travel to Telmach.”
“Of course we have a ship,” Ulobo said uncertainly, sending a frown toward his boss. “You’re not suggesting we leave now, are you?”
“Not at all,” Llyn said. “At least, not the we part.”
And as Ulobo’s frown deepened, Llyn reached up to his left, brushed aside the flap of his guard’s jacket, and yanked the Paxlane 405 from its holster.
The guard tried to stop him. He really did. He tried to step out of Llyn’s reach, tried to swing his hand down to grab Llyn’s wrist.
But he had no chance. The soporific that Llyn had released into the air through his steaming mug of tea had turned the man’s muscles into mush, his judgment and self-awareness into colorless fog, and his reflexes and entire nervous system into slow-flowing mud. Llyn evaded his fumbling hand with ease before firing off a point-blank shot into the man’s chest that ended any hope of resistance. With the report from the shot still echoing across the room, Llyn tracked the gun in a one-eighty-degree arc, taking out the guard to Khetha’s right, then the guard to his left, and finally the guard to Llyn’s right. All three men collapsed to the floor still fumbling uselessly at their holstered weapons.
Khetha was clawing his own tunic open, his expression that of an angry and desperate thundercloud, and Ulobo was cringing in helpless horror, when Llyn’s final two shots sent them to join their bodyguards in hell.
An instant later Llyn was out of his chair, leveling his gun at the door behind him. If the room wasn’t as soundproof as he’d assumed, Pinstripe and Blue Shirt could be charging in at any second to find out what all the shooting was about.
But the door remained closed. Either the room was soundproof, or else it wasn’t abnormal to hear the sounds of violence coming from inside. Keeping his eyes and gun on the door, Llyn backed around the table to Ulobo’s glassy-eyed corpse. He picked up the tablet, wiped the few stray drops of blood off onto the back of Ulobo’s jacket, and took a close look.
The ever-present danger with this kind of operation was that the soporific’s timetable might have made him jump the gun, that Ulobo might have been rattling off the warship stats from memory. But no. The Volsung Mercenaries file was still sitting there, wide open to the universe, with all the necessary contact names, uni-link numbers, addresses, passcodes, and even copies of the correspondence Khetha and Admiral Gensonne had exchanged across the void over the past couple of years.
And with that, Llyn had everything he needed to open his own negotiations with the Volsungs for Axelrod’s covert operation against Manticore. Best of all, by using Khetha’s contact information, any backtrack anyone might attempt in the future would dead-end here in this room on Casca. There would be no data track that could ever point to Axelrod.
Not that there was likely to ever be such an investigation. The winners wrote the history, after all, and Axelrod had made it a point to always be among the winners. In fact, Llyn had explicitly been informed by his controller that if he had to leave Khetha and his group alive, that would be acceptable. But Llyn’s policy was to always, always cover his tracks.
Speaking of which…
Crossing back to the bodies on his side of the table, he retrieved his uni-link. He’d set up the message template inside the Soleil Azur’s mail packet during the long voyage from Haven, tucked away in the will-call folder. But the final details couldn’t be entered until he knew where Khetha would set up their meeting. He checked his uni-link’s GPS reading—as he’d predicted, they were right in the center of Quechua City—then added the location to his message. After that, it was simply a matter of sending a quick and innocuous code word to the criminal gang he’d hired, which would send them to the message drop and set their part of the job in motion.
And even if they screwed up, it wouldn’t matter. None of them knew Llyn’s name or employer, or who it was they were going to be disposing of. They’d certainly never seen his real face. A few more hours, and there would be literally nothing that could ever be backtracked to Llyn, the Volsung Mercenaries, or Axelrod.
Making a copy of the Volsung file was the work of a minute. Finding the data on Khetha’s private ship, including its parking orbit, access codes, and start-up procedures, took another five. Next on the list was locating Khetha’s private shuttle, which turned out to be stashed away in a private hangar at the Quechua City spaceport on the southwest side of the city.
A shuttle that size typically required a minimum of two people at the controls. A spacecraft was more complex, with anywhere from a ten- to twenty-man crew necessary for safe operation. Llyn had only himself.
But he was confident he’d be able to handle both vessels without serious difficulty. A man like the Supreme Chosen One wouldn’t assume that a crew would be ready when he needed to make a quick exit. For that matter, he probably wouldn’t assume that even his closest advisors and guards would be ready.
And a man living on the edge—a man, more importantly, who would never allow his own skin to be dependent on anyone else—would make damn sure his escape vessels were sufficiently automated and preprogrammed that he could get out completely on his own.
Which led directly to the next tick on Llyn’s checklist: both the shuttle and courier ship were heavily automated, with both the engine and impeller systems as foolproof and failproof as it was possible to build them. In addition, the ship’s helm systems included a menu of preplotted courses to a dozen different systems.
Llyn had a fair amount of training in ship operations, including piloting, astrogation, and engineering. He had no doubt that he could handle this one.
And if he reached the courier and found it not quite as much of a one-man operation as he was expecting, that would be all right, too. Over the past week he’d also spent a few hours laying the groundwork for hiring a small crew who could get him to a system where he could touch base with another Axelrod operative and obtain alternative transport.
He spent another two minutes sifting through Ulobo’s tablet at random, letting luck and serendipity guide his search. Khetha had someone keeping tabs on events back on Canaan, he noted with interest, no doubt making a mental list of who he would execute first when the Volsungs returned him to power. An expensive hobby, given the cost of data transference across interstellar distance, but one he wasn’t at all surprised that the Supreme Chosen One had taken up.
Those men and women would be able to sleep better from now on. Not that they would ever know it.
And with that, his mental count-down reached zero. He probably had another ten or fifteen minutes before the criminals he’d summoned showed up, but he had no intention of
cutting things that close. Especially not when the instructions were to deal with and eliminate all evidence at this location. The clean-up crew probably wouldn’t include any of the higher-ups he’d dealt with, and he would hate to try to convince a simple grunt squad that he was their employer.
At best, it would cost valuable time. At worst, it would mean more bodies for the survivors to dispose of. Turning off the tablet, he set it back on the table in front of its former owner. Then, crossing the room, he pushed open the door, shot Pinstripe and Blue Shirt before either could begin to register that they were being attacked, dropped his gun beside the bodies, and headed back up the tunnel.
It was still reasonably early, but Quechua City was finally starting to come alive. Llyn took a moment to orient himself—the customs complex over there, the downtown market over there, the Hamilton Hotel over there—and headed off down the street. He could grab a cab later, but it was always best to leave the scene of a crime on foot. Eyewitnesses were unreliable; cab records weren’t.
Besides, he had a little time still to kill. Most of the city’s air traffic hadn’t yet started, and there were few things more obvious and notable than a single vehicle flying through an otherwise empty sky. Another hour, and he could make his way to the airport and fire up Khetha’s shuttle.
Meanwhile, his early-morning activities had caused him to miss breakfast. Smiling to himself, he turned in the direction of Fourteenth and Castillon and headed off at a brisk walk. The preopening aromas from the coffee shop on that corner had been most promising.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Commander Shiflett, in her infinite wisdom, had decreed that the men and women of HMS Damocles should start the day after their first-night bash on Casca with some exercise on the streets of Quechua City.
The Royal Manticoran Navy, in its infinite wisdom, had decreed that such workouts should be administered by the ship’s petty officers.
