Crown of Slaves

by David Weber

  Not likely, thought Victor. Not with the equipment I brought with me. By now, any spy-eyes in this room are so much fried junk.

  Just to prove her point, Ginny slid a bare and very shapely leg over his thighs. Which, Victor sighed, were covered by nothing more than the thinnest pair of pajamas he owned. Ginny wouldn't let him get away with anything else.

  Yet he didn't insist that Ginny sleep on her side of the bed. There was a carefully walled-away part of him that found the feel of her body against his . . . disturbing. But he was accustomed to it, by now. This was hardly the first time he and Ginny had shared a bed, after all, nor was it the first time Ginny had worn a "nightgown" that bore more resemblance to a stripper's outfit than anything else.

  What was more important was that Victor had long since come to understand why Ginny insisted on this somewhat silly routine. True, there was neither romance nor sex between them, and never had been. But Victor understood that in some peculiar way he'd come to be for Ginny the family she'd never had growing up in Manpower's slave quarters. The young brother she'd never been able to cuddle through that long darkness, come to her at last.

  It was a very warm thought, and, not for the first time, Victor drew strength and determination from it. He cupped his hand around her head, drew her closer still and gently kissed her hair.

  Within a few minutes, he was able to shed his frets and worries, and fell asleep himself. Wondering, as he drifted off, whether he'd ever find a woman of his own he cared for as much as he did for Ginny.

  Probably not, he concluded. Victor was pretty sure romance was something that was going to be absent from his life. In truth, he'd been pretty sure of that since he was fourteen years old and dedicated himself to the revolution. The only thing that had changed, since he'd met Ginny, was that now the knowledge bothered him.

  Chapter 8

  Other people found getting to sleep that night far more difficult. A room full of naval officers in a hotel not far from the one Victor and Ginny were staying at erupted in a bouillabaisse of curses and imprecations. The officers had just finished watching the recording of Underwood's show brought by the first courier ship to land.

  "Just what we needed," complained one of them, an officer wearing the uniform of a commander in the Solarian League's navy. "God damn so-called 'special ops.' Why do they even bother distinguishing between 'gray' and 'black' ops, anyway? It all stinks the same."

  The foul-tempered remark was aimed at the officer's superior, a captain in the same navy. The captain, a trimly built man on the small side, smiled lazily in response.

  "It's an imperfect universe, Edie. Do you want me to make it worse by trotting out obnoxious old saws? 'You eat what's set on your plate.' 'Play the hand you're dealt.' I warn you, I can go on for hours. My father was addicted to the blasted things."

  The captain spoke loudly enough to be heard by everyone, and the mood in the room lightened visibly as a result. A large part of Captain Luiz Rozsak's charisma was his easy and relaxed sense of humor. Without it, the man's fierce ambition would have driven people off instead of drawing them like a magnet. As it was, Rozsak's unusually rapid rise in the Solarian League Navy—all the more unusual in that he came from one of the outlying systems instead of the old colonies which provided the SLN with most of its senior officers—had been greatly aided by his talent for drawing a capable and loyal staff around him. Instead of resenting his superior abilities, his subordinates found working with the man both pleasant and rewarding. Rozsak repaid loyalty in kind, and as he'd moved up the promotion ladder he'd seen to it that his followers did likewise.

  To be sure, in so doing he was simply following the time-honored traditions of the Solarian League Navy, for which favoritism and empire-building were viewed almost as a law of nature. That did not offset the fact that Rozsak did it with the same superb skill he did everything else. No ambitious officer was going to rise in the SLN without developing a network of patronage, civilian as well as military. That was a given. But only a very unusual officer could have overcome Rozsak's handicaps thoroughly enough to have created the network he had. Perhaps best of all, he did it without constantly rubbing his followers' noses in their subordinate status—which was also a tradition in the SLN, but one which Rozsak seemed to have no difficulty eschewing.

  He'd even proved to be talented at "special operations," something which still half-astonished his own followers. As a rule, the talents and skills required for that line of work fit a military man about as well as gloves would fit a horse.

  So, while all of Rozsak's subordinates in the hotel room were disgruntled by what they'd seen in the broadcast, none of them were really downcast about it, much less panicky. Yes, it was an unfortunate turn of events. But they were quite sure Rozsak would figure out a way to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. They'd seen him do it before, and more than once.

  "It's not as bad as it looks, Edie. Of course, we'll have to figure a way to get Zilwicki out of the picture. And damn quickly, too."

  "Is he really as good as all that?" asked Lieutenant Karen Georgos. She pointed a slender finger at the now-dark HV. "What I mean is, that had all the earmarks of a show. Nobody as slick as Yael Underwood is going to spend that much time boring everyone with drab and dreary reality."

  Captain Rozsak cocked an eye at another officer in the room, signaling him to provide the answer.

  Lieutenant Commander Jiri Watanapongse levered himself out of a slouch in an armchair across the room. He'd been the most disgruntled of them all, watching the broadcast, and was still clearly trying to fight off a dark mood.

  "He's that good, yes." He gave the holoviewer a sardonic glance. "Oh, sure, they milked the romantic angles for all they were worth. Heroic dead wife, stoic widower, plucky daughter, new love found in unlikely places, twaddledeedee, twaddledeedum. Beauty and the Beast, you name it, Underwood hauled it all out. But don't kid yourself. I can guarantee you that right this very moment—"

  He cast another sardonic glance at the window. Somewhere beyond it, behind the curtains and the electronic shields Rozsak's people had erected as soon as they took possession of the hotel suite, rose the towering structure of Suds Emporium, the oldest and still tallest edifice in Erewhon's capital city of Maytag. The Suds, as the Erewhonese called it, was an odd sort of building. It combined the functions of Maytag's most prestigious hotel, its largest commercial exchange, its most expensive boutiques—and, in practice if not in theory, was the real center of Erewhon's political life.

  Most people assumed that the "Suds" of the title, as with the name of the planet's capital city itself, were testimonials to obscure figures from Erewhon's early history. Intrepid pioneers, no doubt, Erewhon's equivalent of Lewis and Clark.

  Watanapongse, Rozsak's intelligence specialist, had done his research and knew the truth. The people who'd founded the colony of Erewhon, centuries earlier, had apparently had a wry sense of humor. So, digging up long-forgotten terms from the ancient history of Earth, they'd bestowed names which tweaked the respectable Solarian society they'd left behind, without that society even realizing it.

  Today, Erewhon was as respectable a planet as any in the galaxy, even if it still retained some odd customs deriving from its origins. But it had been founded by a consortium of successful figures in organized crime, looking for a way to—the expression was still in use, although very few people in modern times understood its etymology—"launder the money."

  The sardonicism in Watanapongse's glance, however, was not due to that. It came from the fact that he knew which odd collection of people was having a meeting simultaneously with this one, except—damn fools—they'd insisted on doing it in plush surroundings instead of, as he and Rozsak had opted, choosing a modest and less well-known hotel.

  "Leave it to the Mesans," he sneered, "to insist on crapping in a gold toilet."

  A harsh little laugh swept the room. By normal standards, none of the men and women gathered in that hotel room were especially burdened by fini
cky moral sentiments. But the contempt they held for Mesa and all its works was not simply that of hard-boiled military officers of a hard-boiled society. Even for them, Mesa was a byword for foulness.

  "Our courier ship overtook theirs along the way. And since we had military-grade sensors and we got here first, we were able to catch them right after their junction translation and verify that it was the same Jessyk Combine vessel which left Manticore ahead of us."

  He let that item get digested for a moment. The Jessyk Combine was one of the giant commercial enterprises which dominated the Mesa System. Manpower Unlimited, the galaxy's premier trafficker in genetic slavery, was another, and by far the most publicly notorious. None of them, however, were what could be called "ethical enterprises," and Jessyk in particular had close if informal connections with Manpower. The connections were distant enough—obscure enough, rather—that Jessyk had never been outlawed in the Star Kingdom, as Manpower had. But no one in the know doubted for a moment that wherever you found a Jessyk courier carrying information, Manpower would be getting it just as quickly as Jessyk.

  "I can guarantee you," Watanapongse continued, "that the people gathered over there took even less pleasure than we did watching that recording. A lot less. They've run into Zilwicki in the trenches, which we haven't."

  "And won't, if all goes well," added Captain Rozsak firmly. His eyes swept the room, his gaze harder than usual. "I trust that's understood by everyone. We've got no bone to pick with Anton Zilwicki, and only a fool—judging from all evidence—would pick a bone with him just for the hell of it."

  Relaxed and normally good-humored he might be, but Luiz Rozsak was also the boss, and nobody doubted it. His brown eyes swept back across the room again, and were met by a little wave of nods.

  "Good," he grunted. Then, more easily: "I admit he's a headache for us, so we'll have to figure out how to ease the pain. But nothing direct, people. The last thing we want is to draw that man's attention our way."

  For a moment, his face assumed some of the sour expression that had earlier been on the face of Commander Edie Habib. In truth, Captain Rozsak was no fonder of "black ops" than any of his subordinates, for all that he was much better at it than most military officers. It was ultimately a filthy business, no matter how much perfume you sprayed over it. And while Luiz Rozsak was perfectly prepared to get his hands dirty in the pursuit of his ambitions, he preferred the dirt to be soil instead of sewer muck.

  He swivelled his head and brought the most junior officer in the room under his gaze. Thandi Palane was the only Marine lieutenant in the group, and, even after a year, she still seemed a bit dazed at having been selected by Captain Rozsak to be one of his inner circle. As a junior officer from a backward frontier system, she'd assumed her career would be slow at best, and would soon enough stall out completely. She'd been resigned to that prospect, since even early retirement from the Solarian Marines was vastly superior to any life she'd have had if she'd stayed on her home planet. Ndebele was still under the control of the Office of Frontier Security, which meant—in practice, if not in the official theory of the Solarian League—that she would have remained the serf of Solarian bureaucrats and their allied conglomerates.

  The last thing Thandi Palane had expected was an invitation to join the staff of one of the SLN's better-known fast-track captains. True, there was a trace—more than just a trace, in fact—of the "outsider" about Luiz Rozsak himself. But there was also the smell about him of an up-and-comer, too. Rozsak had already punched several tickets as a ship commander, and was now enjoying the prestigious status of a Central Staff officer detached for duty to one of the Solarian League's important sector provinces. Rank be damned. Above the junior levels, civilian connections counted for at least as much in an officer's prospects for advancement as official rank did, and Luiz Rozsak was now officially the second ranking officer in the Maya sector. He might not hold flag rank—yet—but most commodores in the SLN and not a few of its admirals would have given their eye teeth to be on his close terms with System Governor Oravil Barregos and his political chief-of-staff and Lieutenant Governor Ingemar Cassetti.

  Rozsak was amused at the way Palane so obviously had to fight to meet his eyes. Sooner or later, he knew, he'd have to overcome that shyness. He needed followers who were self-confident in their own right, not simply obedient to him. He'd even considered the tactic of seducing the young woman, something he normally avoided with his subordinates, in the hopes that an affair with her much-idolized patron might rub away some of her social awkwardness. That he'd succeed in the seduction, he didn't doubt at all. Rozsak was a physically handsome man as well as a charismatic one, and the lieutenant had all the signs of a young woman with a crush on her glamorous boss. But he'd come to the conclusion such a course would be far more likely to do harm than good for Palane's development, even leaving aside the obvious dangers it posed for overall discipline.

  He'd come to that conclusion with some regrets, to be sure. The lieutenant was a very attractive woman, all the more so in that the genetic strain which had produced her was far enough outside the usual parameters of the now much-mixed human species to appeal to Rozsak's taste for the exotic. But one of the reasons for Luiz Rozsak's rapid rise was his iron self-discipline. He let nothing get in the way of ambition, neither his distaste for black ops nor the prospect of pleasure with a beautiful young woman.

  "What about your Amazons, Thandi? They might do the trick."

  He recognized her hesitation for what it was, and had to suppress a sigh. Even after working in close proximity with Rozsak for months, Lieutenant Palane still wasn't comfortable with the idea of contradicting her superior.

  Fortunately, Edie Habib had all the instincts and skills of the superb executive officer she'd been when Rozsak had had a ship command.

  "C'mon, Thandi, spit it out. I promise the Captain won't bite your head off."

  Another little laugh swept the room, though it was not a harsh one. Most of the men and women in that room had at one time been in Thandi's position, and they were not unsympathetic to her plight. Rozsak's style of leadership was rather unusual in the Solarian League's armed forces, most of whose senior officers did not take kindly to subordinates who argued with them. It took some getting used to.

  Her hesitation was only brief, however. This much Lieutenant Palane had learned: the one thing which was guaranteed to bring the Captain's wrath down on your head was to dance around him or try to feed him whatever line you thought he wanted to hear.

  "It's not a good idea, Sir. In my opinion, that is," she added hastily.

  Rozsak inclined his head, urging her to elaborate.

  "The thing is, my—uh, 'Amazons,' as you call them—really don't know their ass from their elbow, when you get right down to it." She flashed a smile which, for all its quick nervousness, was dazzling enough to make Rozsak regret again that he'd decided to maintain his personal distance from her. "They remind me a lot of me, that way."

  Again, some laughter, which Rozsak joined in. Now obviously more relaxed, Thandi continued.

  "So the problem is that while I don't doubt if we waved them under Zilwicki's nose we'd draw his attention—especially with one of his daughters along for the trip—"

  "No kidding!" exclaimed one of the Navy lieutenants lounging against a wall. Jerry Manson, that was. "Let Zilwicki get a whiff of some Scrags on Erewhon, he'll have his hackles up like a dog in an alley."

  Rozsak caught the sudden frown on Thandi's face and cleared his throat. Manson was a problem, and Rozsak decided that slapping him down would be all to the good.

  "Lieutenant Palane has already requested once that we avoid that term when referring to her special unit. As you may recall, I agreed with her. A leader who sneers at his own troops—or lets anyone else do it—hasn't got a pot to piss in when he needs it, people."

  The flush on Manson's face, combined with the look of thanks on Thandi's, made it clear that Rozsak had made his point. Several points, actually, not
the least of which was to remind everyone that while the captain was relaxed and easy-going, he was the Captain.

  The point being made, Rozsak saw no reason to rub salt into the wounds. "I don't mean to bite your head off, Jerry. It's an easy slip to make, but we still need to watch it." He gave Palane a friendly smile. "For that matter, I suppose I should stop calling them 'Amazons.' "

  Thandi shook her head. "I don't think that would bother them at all, Sir. In fact, if they knew what it meant, it'd probably tickle them pink. It's just that . . ."

  Watching the young woman struggle with her thoughts, trying to find a way to express them properly, Rozsak decided to do it for her. In truth, he was quite pleased with Palane's instinctive defense of her unit, and understood where it came from perfectly well. Unlike a lot of the SLN's officers—most of them, in fact—Rozsak had combat experience. He also had high hopes for the Marine lieutenant. Where Rozsak was going in the years ahead, he was going to need good combat officers around him. Staff officers, even capable ones like Manson, he could buy by the dozen.

  "It goes all the way back, Lieutenant Palane. Esprit de corps, if you want to get fancy and antique about it. There's never been an army in history worth a damn that was ashamed of itself. So, given where they're coming from, I can well understand why your—ah, ladies—"

  Another laugh, and this a loud one—loudest of all, from the lieutenant herself.

  "—don't want to be called Scrags." His eyes swept the room, hard as stones. "And that's an end to it. Please continue, Lieutenant."

  When his gaze came back to meet Thandi's, he saw the gleam in her eyes. And, once again, had to firmly suppress the treacherous urge. The young officer really was extraordinarily attractive. Those gleaming eyes—the dazzling smile even more so—would look splendid against a pillow.

  "The thing is, Sir, I don't see any chance they could keep the maneuver going. A direct assault, sure, that's one thing. But this kind of tricky dancing . . . If Zilwicki's half as smart as he's made out to be, he'd smell a red herring. And then he'd start wondering what the red herring was supposed to distract him from."