by David Weber
"You're saying the Prime Minister can't fire him," Alicia said.
"I'm saying the Prime Minister won't fire him over something like this, especially not when Canaris is coming up with all of her arguments for why doing it is a good thing."
"Uncle Arthur, I can't let this stand. You know I can't." Alicia looked him in the eye. "I don't care about Baron Yuroba, and I don't care about Canaris' intelligence strategies. Not this time. My company—my people—never asked much from our Empire and our Emperor. We were proud to serve, and we went in with our eyes open, and we by God did the job. And now, when our own Minister of War knows what happened, that we were set up, that we were sent knowingly to the slaughter by one of our own intelligence officers, he's too concerned about scandals to give our dead justice? No, Uncle Arthur. I can't let that happen."
"You have no choice, Alley. And neither do I."
Her head snapped up, her jaw tight, and he shook his head.
"I told Yoruba the same thing," he said. "I told him I'd go to the Emperor himself. And that's when Yoruba told me the Prime Minister has already discussed it with His Majesty. I don't think for a moment that the Prime Minister just happened to have that discussion before General Arbatov and I found out what he, Yuroba, and Canaris had already decided. But it doesn't matter. The Emperor isn't happy about it—Yuroba admitted that much, and I know His Majesty well enough to know that 'not happy' doesn't begin to sum up his feelings. But however much I may hate this, Canaris does have a point. This offers us the potential for the sort of intelligence coup that comes along maybe once in fifty years, the sort that could save hundreds or even thousands of additional lives, and she does have a responsibility to recognize that. I happen to think the advantages it offers will be transitory and a lot less effective than that—that's the nature of intelligence strategies—but the Emperor has a duty to listen to her arguments. And in the face of the unanimous agreement of the relevant members of the Cabinet and the Prime Minister, he feels he has no choice but to acquiesce. And since the entire purpose of Canaris' strategy depends upon the Rish not discovering that we know about Watts, I've been personally ordered by Yuroba, speaking for the Emperor, to expunge all record of what happened aboard MacArthur."
"Uncle Arthur —" Alicia began, her expression stricken at last, and he shook his head again, slowly, sadly.
"It has to be that way, Alley, if it's going to work. That's the bottom line, and our legal command authority has ordered us to keep our mouths shut to make sure it does work."
"And if I choose not to obey that order, Sir?" she asked coldly.
"I've been instructed by Baron Yuroba to inform you," Keita said in a voice like crumbling granite, "that you are charged, on your oath as a cadrewoman in the personal service of the Emperor, to keep silent forever on this matter. If you fail to do so, if you go public with what Shernsiya told you, you'll be court-martialed. The charge will be assaulting a superior officer, the Empire then being in a state of emergency, and the sentence, if you are found guilty, will be death."
Alicia stared at him, and something died in her eyes. Something which had always been in them before disappeared, and grief washed over Keita as he realized what it was.
"Alley," he said, "I don't —"
He broke off, his jaw tight, and stared out the windows on the far side of his office for a long moment. He could just see the spire of the Cenotaph, and all that it stood for, all that the young woman sitting across the coffee-table from him and the members of her company had given in such unstinting measure, thundered through his soul.
"Alley," he said, looking back at her, "don't."
"Don't what?" Her voice was flat, rusty-sounding, as if something had broken inside it.
"Don't let it stand," he told her, and leaned across the table towards her. "Go public. Tell the entire Empire what that godforsaken bastard did! Yuroba doesn't want a scandal? Well, give him the mother of all scandals! Let him explain to the media—and the Cadre, by God!—why he's court-martialing one of the three living holders of the Banner of Terra! He'll never do it—he doesn't have the balls for it. And if he does, no court-martial he could empanel would ever convict."
"Would you go public, if it were you, Uncle Arthur?" she asked him softly. "If His Majesty himself had ordered you not to, would you do it anyway?"
"Damned straight I —"
He froze as he realized what she'd actually asked. Not "would you face a court-martial" but "would you disobey the Emperor's command." Because that was what it really came down to, wasn't it? Not to Yuroba's spineless idiocy. Not to the Prime Minister's concession to political expediency. Not even to Canaris' completely valid desire to use the intelligence windfall which had landed in her lap.
No. It came down to the fact that he, Sir Arthur Keita, was the Emperor of Humanity's personal liegeman. That he had given his oath to Emperor Seamus II, and before him to Empress Maire, to be his servant "of life, limb, and duty, until my Emperor release me or death take me."
"No, Alley," he said finally, softly. "I wouldn't. I can't."
"And neither can I," she said. "Not now. If it were only Yuroba, only Canaris, yes. But not now. Not now that the Emperor himself has spoken. I can't break faith with him . . . even if he has broken faith with me."
Keita flinched from the bottomless pain of her last eight words.
"Alley, he didn't —"
"Yes, he did, Uncle Arthur," she contradicted flatly. "He made a choice. Maybe it's even the right one. Maybe Canaris is right, and she can use Watts, make at least something good come out of it. But that doesn't change the fact that Canaris, and Yuroba, and, yes, His Majesty, have broken faith with the Company. With its dead. With my dead."
Tears sparkled in her green eyes at last, and she shook her head slowly, sadly, a mother mourning the death of her child.
"I'll obey his order," she said. "This one, this last time. But no more, Uncle Arthur. No more."
She reached up and unpinned the harp and starship from the collar of her uniform. The harp and starship of the House of Murphy. They gleamed in her palm, and she looked down at them for a moment through the haze of her tears, then reached out and laid them on the coffee-table between her and Keita.
"I can't serve an Empire which puts expediency before my dead." Her voice trembled at last, and she shook her head again—sharply, this time, almost viciously. "And I can't—won't—serve an Emperor who lets that happen," she said hoarsely. "Maybe it's all justified, but I can't do this anymore . . . not without betraying the Company. And if everyone else in the goddamned universe is going to betray my dead," she looked him in the eye, her lips trembling, "then they're going to do it without me."
She touched the harp and starship one last time—gently, like a lover—then rose, tall, slim, and proud against the windows and the Cenotaph's obelisk, her eyes glistening with tears. She looked down once more at the insignia on the coffee-table, and then she looked back at Sir Arthur Keita.
"Goodbye, Uncle Arthur," Alicia Dierdre DeVries said softly, and she turned without a backward glance and walked out of that place forever.
Book Four
Victims
Chapter Thirty-Three
The darkness frayed.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly even to one such as she, the warp and woof of darkness loosened. Slivers of peace drifted away, and the pulse of life quickened. She roused—sleepily, complaining at the disturbance and clutched at the darkness as a sleeper might blankets on a frosty morning. But repose unraveled in her hands, and she woke . . . to darkness.
Yet it was a different darkness, and her thoughts sharpened as cold swept itself about her, flensing away the final warmth. Her essence reached out, quick and urgent in something a mortal might have called fear, but only emptiness responded, and a blade of sorrow twisted within her.
They were gone—her sister selves, their creators. All were gone. She who had never existed as a single awareness was alone, and the void sucked at her. It sought to devour he
r, and she was but a shadow of what once she had been . . . a shadow who felt the undertow of loneliness sing to her with extinction's soulless lack of malice.
Focused thought erected a barrier, holding the void at bay. Once that would have been effortless; now it dragged at her like an anchor, but it was a weight she could bear. She roused still further, awareness flickering through the vast, empty caverns of her being, and was appalled by what she saw. By how far she had sunk, how much she had lost.
Yet she was what she was, diminished yet herself, and a sparkle of grim humor danced. She and her sister selves had wondered, once. They had discussed it, murmuring to one another in the stillness of sleep when their masters had no current task for them. Faith had summoned their creators into existence, however they might have denied it, and her selves had known that when that faith ended, so would those she/they served. But what of her and her selves? Would the work of their makers' hands vanish with them? Or had they, unwitting or uncaring, created a force which might outlive them all?
And now she knew the answer . . . and cursed it. To be the last and wake to know it, to feel the wound where her other selves should be, was as cruel as any retribution she/they had ever visited. And to know herself so reduced, she who had been the fiercest and most terrible of all her selves, was an agony more exquisite still.
She hovered in the darkness which no longer comforted, longing for the peace she had lost, even if she must find it in non-being, but filled still with the purpose for which she had been made. Need and hunger quivered within her, and she had never been patient or docile. Something in her snarled at her vanished creators, damning them for leaving her without direction, deprived of function, and she trembled on a cusp of decision, tugged towards death by loneliness and impelled towards life by unformed need.
And then something else flickered on the edge of her senses. It guttered against the blackness, fainter even than she, and she groped out towards it. Groped out, and twitched in recognition. It was the echo, the mirror, which had touched her in half-forgotten dreams, and it was brighter, sharper than it had ever been before. All of its potentialities, all of its possible choices, had collapsed into this—this single knotted moment when it must face the choice towards which both of them had journeyed for so long.
Her groping thought touched it, and she gasped in silent shock at the raw, jagged hatred—at the fiery power of that dying ember that cried out in wordless torment. It came not from her creators but from a mortal, yet she marveled at the strength of it.
The ember glowed hotter at her touch, blazing up, consuming its fading reserves in desperate appeal. It shrieked to her, more powerful in its dying supplication than ever her creators had been, and as her dreaming thought had known it, it knew her. It knew her! Not by name—not as an entity, but for herself, for what she was. Its agony fastened upon her like pincers, summoning her from the emptiness to perform her function once more.
The assault shuttle crouched in the corral like a curse, shrouded in thin, blowing snow. Smoke eddied with the snow, throat-catching with the stench of burned flesh, and the snouts of its energy cannon and slug-throwers steamed where icy flakes hissed to vapor. Mangled megabison lay about its landing feet, their genetically-engineered fifteen-hundred-kilo carcasses ripped and torn in snow churned to bloody mud by high-explosives.
The barns and stables were smoldering ruins, and the horses and mules lay heaped against the far fence, no longer screaming. They hadn't fled at first, for they had heard approaching shuttles before, and the only humans they'd ever known had treated them well. Now a line of slaughtered bodies showed their final panicked flight.
They hadn't died alone. A human body lay before the gate; a boy, perhaps fifteen—it was hard to know, after the bullet storm finished with him—who had run into the open to unbar it when the murders began.
One of the raiders stepped from the gaping door of what had been a home, fastening his belt, followed by a broken, wordless sound that had become less than human hours ago. A final pistol shot cracked. The sound stopped.
The raider adjusted his body armor, then thrust two fingers into his mouth and whistled shrilly. The rest of his team filtered out of the house or emerged from the various sheds, some already carrying armloads of valuables.
"I'll be calling the cargo flight in in another forty minutes!" The leader pumped an arm, then gestured at a clear space beside the grounded assault shuttle. "Get it together for sorting!"
"What about Yu and the rest of them?" someone asked, jerking his head at the dead raider who lay entangled with the white-haired body of his killer. Rifle fire had torn the old man apart, but Yu's face was locked in a rictus of horrified surprise, and his stiff hands clutched the gory ice where the survival knife had driven up under his armor and ripped his belly open. The leader shrugged.
"Make sure they're sanitized and leave them. The authorities'll be pleased somebody finally got some of the pirates. Why disappoint them?"
He strolled across to Yu and grimaced down.
Stupid fuck always did forget this was a job, not just a chance for sick kicks. So sure of himself, coming right in on the old bastard just to enjoy slapping him around. And now look.
The leader wondered just who the old man had been.
If it hadn't been for the kid, he'd have gotten a hell of a lot more of us, whoever the fuck he was.
The old man had been bellied down behind a water trough, completely out of sight. No one would even have suspected he was there, if he hadn't come out of cover, tried to stop the kid from running into the open. That was when Yu had spotted him and charged in to club him down with the butt of his assault rifle.
But it didn't work out that way, did it Sergeant Yu? the leader thought viciously. The old bastard gutted you like a fish . . . and then he used your fucking weapon to kill three more of us of us before we could gun him down.
And even that wasn't the end of it. The delay to deal with the old man had given the younger bastard in the house time to reach his own weapon. He'd killed five more of the "pirates" before he went down, and he'd have gotten still more if his pistol hadn't been a civilian model. They'd caught him reloading and finished him off before he can do any more damage.
There's going to be hell to pay when Alexsov hears about this, the leader thought. And God knows how Shu is going to react!
A shiver of something much too much like panick for his taste ran through him, despite his hard-edged words to the man who'd asked the question. He knew he really ought to have called it in already, and sooner or later he was going to have to do that.
But not yet, he told himself. Not yet. Not before I damned well have to! And at least the old fart gave this stupid fucker what he had coming. Guess I actually owe him a vote of thanks for that much.
The leader had chosen long ago to sign away his own humanity, but he would shed no tears for the likes of Yu. He turned his back and waved again, and the assault party filtered back into the smoke and ruin and agony to loot.
She came out of the snow like the white-furred shadow of death, strands of amber hair blowing about an oval face and jade eyes come straight from Hell. Her foundered horse lay far behind her, flanks no longer heaving, his sweat turned chill and frozen hard. She'd wept at how gallantly he'd answered to her harsh usage, but there were no tears now. The tick pulsed within her, and time seemed slow and clumsy as the icy air burned her lungs.
The communicator which had summoned her weighted one parka pocket as she moved through the whiteness. She'd recognized the shuttle class—one of the old Leopard boats, far from new but serviceable—and counted the raiders as they gathered about their commander. Twenty-four, and the body in the snow with her grandfather, and the others tumbled in front of the house, made thirty-three. A full load for a Leopard, the emotionless computer in her head observed. No one still aboard, then. That meant no one could kill her with the shuttle's guns . . . and that she could kill more of them before she died.
Her left hand checked
the survival knife at her hip, then joined her right upon her rifle. Her enemies had combat rifles, some carried grenades, all wore unpowered armor. She didn't, but neither did she care, and she caressed her own weapon like a lover. A direcat like the one who'd been raiding their herds since winter closed its normal range could pull down even megabison; that was why she'd taken a lot of gun with her this morning.
She reached the shuttle and went to one knee behind a landing leg, watching the house. She considered claiming the bird for herself, but a Leopard needed a separate weaponeer, and it had to be linked to its mother ship's telemetry. She could neither hijack it without someone higher up knowing instantly nor use its weapons, so the real question was simply whether or not they'd left their com up. If they had, and if their helmet units were tied into the main set, they could call in reinforcements. From how far? Thirty klicks—from the Braun place, the computer told her. Less than a minute for a shuttle at max. Too short. She couldn't snipe them as they came out, or she wouldn't get enough of them before she died.
Her frozen jade eyes didn't even flinch as they traveled over her brother's mangled body. She was in the groove, tingling with memories she'd spent five years trying to forget, and she embraced them as she did her rifle. No berserker, the computer told her. Ride the tick. Spend yourself well.
She left her cover, drifting to the power shed like a thicker billow of snow. A raider knelt inside, whistling, his helmet on top of the console so he could get his head and shoulders into the access panel as he unplugged the power receiver. Ten percent of her sister's credit had gone into that unit, the computer reflected as she set her rifle soundlessly aside and drew her knife. A half step, fingers of steel tangled in greasy hair, a flash of blade, and the right arm of her parka was no longer white.
