by David Weber
The stairway let him out into a large office which, according to the blueprints Chomps had dug out, was the main Volsung Mercenaries conference room. It looked the part, too, with a long table surrounded by a dozen chairs in the center. The main office would be next door, with another door leading out to a reception office which would normally be the first place visitors would see. Hopefully, one of those places would have what he needed.
The door into the office was unlocked. Travis opened it carefully, alert for trouble. Once again, the room was empty. He passed between a pair of large, long cupboards of some sort, with surfaces textured to look like rock outcroppings and sporting planters full of exotic-looking ferns on their tops, and headed toward the glass-and-hardwood desk in the center of the room. There were a couple of guest chairs, a few hand-painted pictures of warships on the opposite wall—
“You in?” Chomps’s voice came in his ear.
Travis jerked. “Yes,” he said, feeling the sudden adrenaline spike drain away. They’d had to do a couple of other break-and-enters on this voyage, but this was by far the creepiest of them. “And there’s a computer on the desk.”
“Great,” Chomps said. “Stay put until I’m down—there may be another surprise or two on the inside of the door, and I want to be right there if you need me to help you disarm it.”
“Right,” Travis said, frowning. There was an odd sort of rumbling in his ear. Something interfering with the transmission? Or had the earpiece picked up a glitch?
Abruptly, a shiver ran up his back. The rumble wasn’t coming from his earpiece. It was coming through his other ear.
Slowly, carefully, he turned around.
He’d been wrong about the planters’ bases being cupboards. They were, instead, kennels.
And the deep rumbling was coming from a pair of large, black dogs.
Some kind of Doberman mix, his frozen mind automatically tagged them. His mother had bred a few such animals, and he remembered them being smart, powerful, and dangerous. The perfect guard animal for people who wanted to sleep well at night.
Or for people who didn’t mind returning to their office to find a bloody mess.
The dogs were just standing there, staring at him, rumbling deep in their throats. Their tails were down, their ears laid back. Swallowing hard, Travis cleared his throat.
“Chomps?” he said quietly. “We have a problem.”
“You can’t wake up the computer?”
“Never mind the computer. I woke up the dogs.”
“The—? Oh, hell. What kind?”
“Big and nasty,” Travis said, sparing a quick glance behind the animals to their kennels. “Kennels flanking the office door. Big enough for internal heat exchangers—probably why our IR scan didn’t pick them up.”
“Okay,” Chomps said. “Okay. Well, obviously, you’re going to need to take them out. Are they in range for a quick two-shot?”
“I don’t know.” Slowly, carefully, Travis eased toward the door to the outer office. If he could get to that door and put it between him and the dogs, he and Chomps would at least have bought themselves a little breathing space.
The dogs apparently knew that one. Travis was barely into his first step when the dog closest to the door took a pair of steps of his own, quick ones, angling toward the door. Travis froze, then eased the half step back. The dog stopped, and he and his partner settled back into their staring contest.
“Travis?”
“If they weren’t in range before, they’re even less in range now,” Travis said grimly. “Besides, I don’t trust there not to be a backup booby trap that a gunshot would trigger.”
“Yeah, if they’ve got dogs, they probably have that, too,” Chomps conceded. “Okay. If the gun’s out, you’re going to have to use your knives.”
Travis winced, freshly aware of the pair of combat knives riding in their thigh sheaths. “Chomps, I can’t do that. I can’t kill a dog that way.”
“If you don’t, you’re dog food,” Chomps said bluntly. “You’ll just have to—”
“Hold it,” Travis cut him off. The dogs had apparently come to a decision, and were now walking slowly and deliberately toward him. “They’re on the move,” he said, backing away at the dogs’ same pace, maintaining his distance. “They’re pushing me back toward the far side of the room.”
“No chance there’s a door on that wall, I suppose?”
“Not unless it’s hidden inside one of the paintings.”
“What about the outer office door? Can you get to that one?”
“Already tried that,” Travis said. Just the same, he once again tried to add a sideways angle to his backward motion. Once again, the dog on that side took a pair of quick steps to cut him off. “No, not a chance.”
“Okay.” Chomps was silent for another of Travis’s steps. “You said there were pictures on the wall behind you. What else is there?”
“Nothing,” Travis said.
“There has to be something,” Chomps insisted. “Planter, statue—even a wall hanging. Anything you can use as a defense or a weapon.”
“Yeah, that would be really nice,” Travis growled. “But past the desk, there’s nothing but rug.” Though he might be able to use the computer display to fend off at least one of the dogs at a time. He added a small angle to his right, away from the door and toward the desk.
But the dog on that side was just as alert as his partner. He did the same quick two-step the other dog had just done, silently waving Travis off the desk. Travis went back to his straight-back walk, and the dogs resumed their straight-ahead stalking.
“What about the pictures?” Chomps persisted. “Are the frames heavy enough to hit the damn mutts with?”
“They look heavy, and they look bolted to the wall,” Travis said, frowning as something suddenly struck him.
Why was that section of room so empty?
The end of the office where he’d entered had the planters and the disguised doghouses. The center had the desk, with not just the computer but also a handful of objects that he guessed were mementos of the Volsungs’ past glories. But the other end of the room was empty.
The end the dogs were forcing Travis into.
“Did the blueprints show a basement?” he asked.
“A—? Let me check.”
Travis and the dogs had taken two more steps before Chomps answered. “There’s no basement shown, but the buildings on either side have them. You see something?”
“Maybe.” Steeling himself, Travis took his eyes off the dogs and gave the floor behind him a good, hard look.
There it was. It was subtle, nearly invisible, in fact, against the dark pattern of the carpet. But it was there.
A long stress crease two meters from the far wall and running parallel to it along the entire width of the room.
“Travis?”
“Yeah, yeah, hang on,” Travis said. He threw a glance back at the dogs, confirmed they were still doing their slow advance, then looked over his shoulder at the wall behind him. The paneling was some sort of wood, he decided. Hopefully, strong; hopefully not impenetrable.
“I’m coming in,” Chomps decided abruptly. “If I trip an alarm, then we’ll just have to run for it.”
“No, wait,” Travis said. “Let me try something first.”
Chomps hissed loudly into his mic. “Make it fast.”
“Trust me.” With a supreme effort, Travis forced his right hand to ease off its death grip on his gun and slid both hands slowly down his thighs to his sheathed combat knives. He drew them slowly, watching closely for a reaction.
The dogs’ ears flattened a bit more. But neither broke step. Still backing away from them, Travis turned the knives into overhead-slash positions in his hands.
Two more steps to the crease in the rug. Bracing himself, he made a final adjustment to his grips…
And then, spinning around, he took one final step to the very edge of the crease and leaped toward the wall. A fraction of a second
before he hit he swung both knives over his head as hard as he could, burying them halfway to their hilts in the wood. He slammed chest-first into the wall, the impact nearly jolting him loose from the knives before he could tighten his grip. Behind him, the dogs gave an enraged howl and leaped forward. Travis peered over his shoulder, cringing against the wall—
And as his attackers’ paws hit the carpet on Travis’s side of the crease, the entire section of floor between the crease and the wall swung downward, dropping them into the officially non-existent basement.
The howl of rage became a yip of surprise and dismay. Travis craned his neck just in time to see both animals tumble helplessly into a pit filled waist-high with fist-sized plastic balls.
“What the hell’s going on?” Chomps demanded. “Travis—?”
“It’s okay,” Travis said, starting to breathe again. “The dogs are out of commission.”
“Are they barking? I don’t hear anything.”
“They’re not,” Travis said. “Must be trained to stay quiet. Hang on.”
He measured the distance across the gap with his eyes. It was uncomfortably long, but he should be able to make it. Pulling his knees up and tucking them to his chest, he braced his feet against the wall and pushed off.
Two meters was a long jump, especially backwards. But with a pair of very angry dogs floundering around in the ball pit below him, he had plenty of motivation to get it right. Even so, he barely made it, landing on his back with his legs briefly dangling into space. He clawed his way back from the edge, and scrambled back to his feet. “Okay,” he breathed, trying hard not to hyperventilate. “I’ll be right there.”
It was clear from Travis’s first glimpse of Chomps’s anxious face that the big Sphinxian was practically melting down with questions. But he didn’t ask them. He waited until they were back in the office, and as Travis headed to the computer he went over to the trap door for a look.
“Damn bloodless bastards,” he growled. “The ball pit’s a nice touch. Requires zero maintenance, and your intruder doesn’t get damaged by the fall before you have a chance to question him. And then damage him, probably. Damn good thing you figured it out in time.” He leaned a little farther over the edge. “Your mother breeds dogs, doesn’t she?”
“Yes.” The computer came up, and Travis fed in the first part of their worm program. “And yes, that breed is quite capable of tearing you to pieces.”
“Figured as much,” Chomps said, taking one last look and then joining Travis at the computer. “Let’s get this done, and then get the hell out of here.”
* * *
The Volsungs’ computer system proved harder to crack than either of them had anticipated. After half an hour of hearing the dogs growling and trying to scramble up the trap door, they decided it would be simpler—and safer—to just take the system with them.
It took several hours’ more work aboard Casey, but in the end they found what they were looking for.
* * *
“Walther,” Clegg said flatly, frowning at the data. “That’s not what it says here.”
“No, Ma’am,” Travis agreed. “But we think that’s a blind, set up to send anyone who digs this far into their system the wrong direction.”
“There are indications of a write-over, Ma’am,” Chomps added, reaching past her to point at the appropriate places. “These two spots here are the most obvious. If you dig farther, it looks like Walther is the name that was buried.”
“How do you know that’s not a second blind?” Clegg asked.
“There doesn’t seem to be anything deeper,” Travis said. “More importantly, we also have confirmation from another direction. Governor Bilshing’s private files also point us to Walther.”
“He’s got title to the system, and the files show he’s closely associated with Gensonne and the Volsungs,” Chomps said. “They’re probably his go-to guys for whatever nasty things he needs done.”
“Right,” Travis said. Actually, that last bit was mostly speculation on Chomps’s part. Still, even if some of the individual pieces were somewhat squishy, the overall picture was more than definitive. At least to them.
Unfortunately, Clegg insisted on somewhat higher standards, which meant he and Chomps occasionally had to oversell their findings a little.
“Fine,” Clegg said. “So what do you propose as our next step?”
“I think we need to go to Walther and take a look, Ma’am,” Travis said. “A quiet, distant look, of course—a shallow chord across the edge of the hyper limit, for instance, with our wedge down. Given a wide enough baseline, Casey’s sensors ought to be able to get a good feel for what’s there.”
“Very well, I’ll give the order,” Clegg said. “Dismissed.”
Travis nodded. “Ma’am.”
“Ma’am,” Chomps echoed.
“That went well,” Travis commented as they made their way down the passageway from the Captain’s office. “Better than I expected.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” Chomps rumbled. “She’s hoping we’re wrong.”
“She seemed pretty convinced,” Travis said, frowning.
“Why not?” Chomps said. “She gets paid the same whether we’re showing the flag, letting Hauptman run around, or flying off on wild goose chases. She clearly thinks we’ve got the entirely wrong end of the stick, and is happy to give us the opportunity to poke ourselves with it.”
“So that we’ll go back to Manticore in full-blown disgrace?”
“Exactly,” Chomps said. “We’re the new kids on the block, and everyone who gets some of their territory getting handed over to us is going to resent that.”
“How does that bother Clegg? The only toes we’re stepping on are ONI’s.”
“Hardly,” Chomps said. “We’re also cutting into the Lords’ and Commons’ authority—all those lovely oversight committees, you know—Breakwater’s purse-string control, and probably a few others I haven’t thought of. Captain Clegg’s particular square of turf is Casey, and our ability to give her orders cuts way too deep into that for her to be happy with it.”
Travis thought about that. “So shouldn’t her best approach be to cooperate with us so that we succeed and she can get us off her ship?”
“Or to cooperate with us, hope that we fail, and never have to see us or any other Delphi people aboard her ship ever again,” Chomps said dryly. “Whatever else you say about Clegg, she’s definitely the long-view type.”
“Well, then, let’s just hope we’re right,” Travis said. “For our sakes and Manticore’s.”
“Right,” Chomps said. “Especially Manticore’s.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Susan Tarleton was a big, hawk-faced bear of a woman. She’d been in politics longer than Winterfall had been aware that politics even existed, with over half of those T-years spent sitting in the small side room off the Prime Minister’s office, where the Foreign Secretary traditionally held court.
Which wasn’t nearly as impressive as it sounded. While the Foreign Secretary position was technically a cabinet post, pretty much everyone treated her as an adjunct of the Prime Minister’s office, including the Prime Minister himself. Indeed, the quiet joke was that the Foreign Secretary was really just a regular secretary, with the Foreign having been added to justify a salary bump.
Given all that, it wasn’t surprising that Tarleton had held the Foreign Secretary position this long mainly because no one else really wanted it. Up until the Secour Incident, the Manticoran version of foreign affairs had consisted mostly of sifting through data from Haven and the League that came in on the occasional sporadic freighter or courier. But then had come Secour, and then Casca, with each incident sparking an increase in communications with foreign governments. For a while, according to rumor, there had been actually been some mild interest in ousting Tarleton so as to put someone’s favorite son or daughter in what was starting to be perceived as a prestigious and important position.
But the interest
had faded quickly. As soon as people realized that most of the information was military, and that the Foreign Secretary’s sole task was to compile it and pass it on to the Admiralty, the Prime Minister, and the Palace, the perceived prestige evaporated and it was back to business as usual.
Especially since Tarleton’s appearance and manner didn’t exactly encourage encroachment on her turf.
All of that ran through Winterfall’s mind as he approached her desk, adding to his apprehension.
Which made her response to him that much more unexpected.
“Of course I know you, My Lord,” she said, nodding her head respectfully. “What can I do for you?”
“I’ve come on an errand from Chancellor Breakwater,” Winterfall told her, mentally crossing his fingers. “I need to find a document that Duke Burgundy was preparing at the time of his death. It was a response to Earl Breakwater’s suggested budget for MPARS.”
“All such documents would be under the care of Prime Minister Harwich now,” Tarleton pointed out.
“Yes, I know,” Winterfall agreed. “And in fact the Prime Minister has already submitted his response to the Exchequer and the Palace. But His Grace had spoken to Earl Breakwater about some private suggestions he was going to make, and it was thought they would be a valuable addition to the government’s considerations.” He gave her a sad half-smile. “You worked more closely with His Grace than anyone else in the government,” he added. “I’m sure that you, even more than the rest of us, appreciated the depth of his mind and the uniqueness of his vision and ideas.”
“Indeed,” Tarleton said, and Winterfall thought he could see a brief shine of gathering tears in her eyes. “I’m sure Earl Breakwater would agree that the current Prime Minister is hardly in Duke Burgundy’s class.”
“So do we all,” Winterfall said with a commiserating nod. “Breakwater locked horns many times with Burgundy, but always considered him an exceedingly worthy opponent.”
“Indeed,” Tarleton said again. “I wish I could help you, My Lord. Unfortunately I have no way to access His Grace’s files or documents.”
