A Few Good Men

by Sarah A. Hoyt

  There is something to be said for the bastard, if that was the reason. At least he was sane enough not to want to be subject to insane arguments about nothing.

  To me what followed through that day—given my temperament—was long periods of almost deadly boredom interspersed with panic at being in a room full of people, enclosed, unable to escape, and—what was far worse—have to steer them away from the most ridiculous ideas and the most precipitous mistakes.

  It should be said that in this I had great help. The younger people in the room quietly took cues when I started to become agitated, and more often than not managed to anticipate what I was going to say. I slowly came to the conclusion that Martha was at least as sharp as Abigail, and both of them as sharp as Nat. Jan kept up with Martha, but he didn’t speak much. And if they weren’t involved, then I had truly lost my ability to connect with the human race and read feelings from looks and touches, because sometimes he would squeeze her hand, and she would launch into something that he clearly meant to say.

  Once or twice, I noted Sam casting a worried glance at their clasped hands. He no longer looked like a burned out building, or a man who has lost his son, but he still looked like a middle-aged man riding too close to the edge of a heart attack, so I hoped he wasn’t vehemently opposed to that match, though why he shouldn’t be was beyond me.

  Sam helped to keep the hotheads from the crazier—or more overbearing—ideas, too. He did it gently and with careful persuasion. I started to think he was just the sort of politician who would thrive in any form of democratic society.

  And somehow the group moved en masse to the dining room, where three meals were served. Somewhere along the line the mystery of why my servants hadn’t turned on me was solved. Even though not everyone in the house was a secret Usaian, the Remys had been shaping the hiring and keeping of retainers for hundreds of years, so the majority of the long-term, high-status servants were of ours.

  The human animal is an amazing thing. When your perceived social superiors think that a theory or rumor is not only wrong but stupid, there is a tendency to fall in line. Even when those elites are far from unanimous. In this case they were. And it wasn’t just the elites, but anyone with a record in the house. I presumed the lower-status employees—the pastry chef’s third under-helper and the dishwasher—had simply surrendered to the argument that only fools would believe that Nat was guilty or that I was anything less than the legitimate Good Man. On second thought, the fact that we’d been under siege should have denied the idea that I was, stubbornly, refusing to submit to genetic examination. At least one would hope so.

  In the end, our group—myself, Abigail, Martha, Jan and Simon—ended up being in charge of finding out where Nat was being held and forming a plan of rescue, with the rest of the group at large promising to give us what help and support they could.

  And because finding Nat and rescuing him from what was sure to be torture and interrogation was, of course, of the essence, we were excused to go and discuss the matter in our own small group, while the big groups discussed the more burning issues of who should be allowed access to even limited means of communication, of who would be eligible for a constitutional assembly, and how many years they had to have served in the Sons of Liberty or the Daughters of Liberty or another of the more militant parts of the Usaian church, and whether they would have to be born to the religion or if converts would be acceptable.

  What baffles me is that I’m sure they were glad to be rid of us and sent us out of the room with a light heart, because in their mind they were keeping us young hotheads from the really vital things that must be decided. All of them but Sam, who nodded slightly to us as we left the room.

  We ended up in my room, of course. No, wait, perhaps it was not an of course. There were many other rooms in the house that we could have adjourned to, and my office or the dining room, or even one of the many meeting rooms in which my father discussed things with a never-ending succession of dignitaries, trade ambassadors and other very important people. But that was the operative thing. In my mind, all those rooms were my father’s. I didn’t know them as intimately, and I hadn’t spent most of my childhood in them.

  Even if my room had now been breached, its walls literally split to allow a secret tunnel, it felt like the safest room in the house, and only one my frazzled nerves could tolerate after the ten hours of insanity I’d endured.

  I felt so safe in fact, that as soon as I entered my room, I realized I was in default of the Remy rules of civilization and civility, in that I was wearing no socks, and while I was wearing something under my clothes, they were my sleeping clothes. I had neither bathed nor removed my night clothes, after waking up. And I’d never had breakfast, and while we’d had meals served in the dining room, my stomach had been too tied in knots to eat much.

  So as soon as the door was closed, I looked around, then waved them to the set of chairs between the desk and the place where they normally set the table when Nat and I ate in this room. And as I thought that it struck me that it had only happened twice, but it felt like a habit of long standing, and I hoped I’d get Nat back and be able to have dinner with him again.

  “Please, find seats,” I told them. “I won’t be more than a moment. Martha or Abigail, would you order coffee and sandwiches?” Then, ignoring the fact that St. Cyr had raised his eyebrows at what I was quite sure was a tremendous breach of etiquette on my part, I grabbed a clean suit, underwear and socks from my wardrobe, went into the bathroom and briefly used the fresher. Briefly but with water. Of all of it, my lack of socks had been the most urgent thing to remedy, because I’d slipped on not my house slippers but my broomer boots, which had been chafing my feet—unused to shoes for fourteen years, and too tender to take the contact with bare, hard leather.

  All the same, when I came out, feeling far more human—it’s amazing the difference little things can make to one’s comfort and sense of self—I was surprised that no one made a comment at my disappearance. And I presumed someone, possibly Martha, had explained the stuffed giraffe on my bed, because no one even gave it a look.

  They’d left a chair for me, and I sat down, almost in front of one of two little, collapsible tables that had been brought in and were laden with trays of sandwiches and pots of coffee. I took a sandwich and Abigail poured me a cup of coffee, and I tried to count the sandwiches. I remember thinking that the kitchen staff had gone mad, because there was no possible way that five people, four of whom had partaken quite plentifully of the meals in the dining room, could eat all this, not unless we stayed in this room for the next eight hours with no other form of sustenance.

  Chalk it up to the fact that I was fourteen years older than the oldest of them, and sixteen or seventeen years older than the rest of them. I was completely wrong. If we hadn’t been so busy discussing what to do and how to find Nat, I’d have watched them in fascination while they ate sandwiches at a rate that seemed to exceed the chewing capacity of the human body.

  As soon as I sat between Martha and Abigail—it had the feeling of being deliberate, as though the two of them had set to guard me—St. Cyr said, “Eh, we were just saying that if we hadn’t blown up Never-Never at least we’d now know where to find Nat Remy.”

  “If you hadn’t blown up Never-Never, and I assume you’re a member of Nat’s broomer lair, since he told me you were the ones to do so—then I wouldn’t be here.”

  “We have to take the bitter with the sweet then, don’t we?” St. Cyr said. “Now, this is what I was saying—there are several places they could be keeping Remy. My guess is that it’s not one of the known high-security prisons. Jan was saying he still has access to a lot of information we cannot get otherwise, because his father was, after all, in charge of the Scrubbers and . . . other such things, for the Good Men. He says there are maybe three other facilities like Never-Never.”

  “See,” Martha said. “Knowing us, and that we’re likely to be looking for him, I think they’d be more likely to put h
im in a low-security prison, of the type they put broomers in, when broomers get in trouble.”

  “And I say that’s nonsense,” St. Cyr said. “They wouldn’t want him in a minimal security prison. I don’t know if they know or guess that the break into Never-Never was part of the operations of the Sons of Liberty, but they know it was the operation of someone associated with Nat.” He held up a hand, in a request for silence. “Have to know, how else would they know that Nat was involved in killing Max? And so they will try to put him in a more secure facility.”

  Martha sighed. “Maybe. But it depends on whether they want to keep it secret, or to let us find out about it. If they want us to find out about it, and not be able to do anything, then they will put him in one of those six maximum-security prisons. But if they don’t want us to find out at all, if they want us to make an attack in force to the place and time of the execution, then they will want him as secret as possible. And in that case, they’ll put him in a low-security prison, reinforced for the occasion.”

  I sipped my coffee in silence, while St. Cyr told her she was out of her ever-loving mind, I finally interrupted by saying, “But what if she’s right, St. Cyr? Here’s the thing, if they can get us to make an attack in force, they can blame it on the three of us, and even if they lose—unlikely, since they have a lot more people, and a lot better weapons than we do—they can show us to be a threat to law and order, and perhaps a conspiracy that they can then accuse of anything that strikes them as convenient. Even if we acquire some control over communications by then, which you’ll have to admit is unlikely—”

  Abigail snorted in a most unladylike way and said, “If they’ve stopped arguing over who gets to write the long-form report on how many communicators must be salvaged from old flyers by then, I’ll be shocked.”

  Martha gave her an indulgent look, and I continued, “Even if we have some control over communications, they will still be the voices people trust. Some name brands in news, some people, even, have been trusted for the last fifty years.”

  “Because they were never challenged,” St. Cyr said. “I can honestly say that any time I was present at news-making events, and then read the report about it, I found hardly any resemblance.”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “But people will still trust them. And we are, to an extent, a conspiracy. The fact that we’re conspiring for freedom doesn’t make us any less of a conspiracy. There are incidents and facts they could link to to prove that we are ogres, determined to bring down civil society. So for them, it is best that we show ourselves and our hand, by attacking in full view of holo-capture devices. Even if we manage to spirit Nat away, it just ensures that we become fugitives with everyone in the world against us.”

  “There are many places to hide,” Jan said. “Some of our fugitives disappeared for years into the North American continent. From what we hear, a lot of those places are now fully livable, and the forest cover is back, and—”

  “Yes, but as fugitives, we’d be effectively neutralized,” I said. “And I bet you they’d have assassins able to track us down, because, well, you and I, Rainer, are not exactly low-profile escapees.”

  He inclined his head. “There is that,” he said. “My gut tells me that you’re right and that this would be the outcome they would try to get. But then we’ll have no choice but to do what they want, because . . . how can we find the right prison amid hundreds of low-security ones?”

  St. Cyr stood up, giving the impression of a jack in box, impelled to stand by some overpowering burst of energy. “Well, we could, all of us, disperse amid broomer bars and hangouts, and find out if there is a report of anything at all unusual. All of us are broomers, right? And each of us knows the codes, the behaviors, and each of us, even, has friends in other lairs. Well, probably not Lucius.”

  “I might still have some friends . . .” I said, thinking of friendly acquaintances and friends from lairs who had occasionally joined with ours for some party or some special event. It seemed to me that since the majority of those were working class and not Good Men, and since most of them had been in their twenties at the time, the chances of any of them having experienced considerable mortality—even given the fact that broomers, by definition, did stupid things at high speed—were relatively low.

  “Well, yes, but your friends are probably fewer than the rest of us. I suggest that I, and—separately—Martha and Jan go and visit acquaintances in other lairs and see if there’s gossip. Any strange behavior on the part of the law, like a sentence being vacated early, and the prisoner thrown out onto the big bad streets again, or even just a strange transport surrounded by armed men landing in the prison. And as for Lucius, I suggest he take Abigail as a blind and a reminder of current-day feuds and whatnot, should he need it, and go hit all the bigger broomer bars in the nearby seacities.”

  “They might have sent him to a seacity half across the globe,” I said.

  This time it was Martha who snorted, which goes to show that rude behavior ran in that family. It made me like them a terrible lot. “Like that bunch of paranoids would trust him too far from their reach. Let’s face it: Nat—and you—are threats to the nearby Good Men and to the little alliance amid this group which are all within twelve hours—tops—broom flight of each other. Less than that in a flyer. Yes, all the Good Men will unite to punish the murder of one of them, but will they bestir themselves to do something about it, when their domains are half across the world? And will the local Good Men, who have no contact with them, trust them with a valued prisoner? I bet you not.”

  Jan sighed. “Then they are fools, because this will be the shot that was heard around the world.”

  Martha gave him a concerned look, then nodded. “We shall pray it is so.”

  Cloak and Skirt

  First I want to register the fact that I’d never before been prayed over or, for that matter, blessed. It was a very odd experience, particularly since—while I wouldn’t be willing to bet that there was nothing after death—I was far from being convinced that there was an afterlife, or a God.

  But before we left, Martha put her hands on my shoulder and Jan’s and murmured something about God watching over us in our endeavor, and allowing us to find Nat and bring him home safe. And then she stood on tiptoes and kissed me on the cheek. Before that could register, Jan patted me awkwardly on the shoulder. They headed out towards the terrace, brooms in hand.

  “Wait,” I said. “It might not be safe.”

  “Safer than in recent days,” Simon said. He looked at me, again, with those oddly shrewd eyes, above the wealth of improbably gaudy ruffles. “If you are right and they want us to run our heads into the noose, they’re not going to try to capture us before, are they? That would stop them getting the big name. Besides, it’s you they want to capture. And besides all, we’re the Brooms of Doom, we know how to fight.” He gave Abigail a lopsided smile. “Now, Angel, you bring him to the lair . . . oh, by midnight, and we’ll discuss what we found if anything. I still say we’ll find nothing and will be left with looking at high-security facilities. I don’t know which one I hope for. They’re both bad situations for us.”

  “Angel?” I said, feeling oddly protective and like this was something that Sam should have been here to hear.

  Abigail shrugged. “Sounds good, doesn’t it? Means nothing. See, I grew up with Nat and Max and Martha, and all of them, and all their friends too treated me like a little sister. Martha started calling me Angel, so then they all did. But they all treat me like I’m a little kid and Simon is the worst of them. He keeps warning me about boys, as if I were ten, instead of twenty.”

  “Would you be very upset with me if I also started warning you about boys?” I asked. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, but she was striking and full of energy and fire, and I suspected like most self-sufficient young women, she’d be curiously blind to the workings of her own heart, much less to the possibly less than honorable ideas of any young men approaching her.

  She gave me
a side long glance. “Not at this point. I expect everyone I meet will become as bad as Nat.”

  “Is Nat bad? That way?”

  Her eyelids came down halfway and she sighed. “We’d better go out through the tunnel,” she said, stepping to the door and locking it. “We’d better make it as stealthy as possible. I’ll go out first. Despite what Simon says, there’s just the bare possibility they’ll be scanning for you specifically. I still feel you’re a high-value target. If I were the Good Men, I’d still try to capture you, anyway.”

  While she was talking, I’d opened my secret compartment and was dressing in broomer leathers and—because I wasn’t sure where exactly our search would take us, in a pair of longer, just-below-the-knee boots with a serious look of utility-wear about them. It was the type of boots that were worn by workers who had to wade through low-flowing rivers or step into flooded basements to repair pipes. Though they were leather, they were made in such a way as to be impermeable. I had no idea who had thought to furnish me with a pair of those, but whoever it was I loved him or her. These would keep my feet warm should there be a long flight ahead, and they would keep them dry and clean, should we need to wade through one of the piles of refuse quite normal in certain areas of town.

  When I was done, a look in the mirror told me I looked like a dangerous broomer indeed. Good, since I was going to go into those certain—by which one should read dangerous—areas of town accompanied by Abigail. I figured I needed all the intimidation I could muster. Sam would expect it of me, and perhaps Nat too.