by David Weber
He’d always known Tarkovsky had a quixotic streak, a bit of a Lancelot complex. But surely the major couldn’t believe anyone in Old Chicago was likely to work up a sense of outrage for what was no more than a case of business as usual! Even if he turned Laughton in, and even if the “tainted evidence” of a coerced confession didn’t automatically get thrown out—and it was true the Navy and Marines had somewhat more elastic standards in that respect—too many other people in this city had too much to lose if people doing “favors” for other people got hammered. So in the end, despite Tarkovsky’s rather…melodramatic interrogation techniques, he was looking at no more than a disciplinary slap on the wrist.
“Okay, Bryce,” he sighed. “You know, all you really had to do was ask about this across a card table. One without a recording device, of course. It’s not like there are any deep, dark secrets here.”
“So, tell me.”
Tarkovsky leaned back, crossing his legs, and Laughton nodded.
“Sure. It’s business as usual. I know you don’t like the way the system works, but that doesn’t change it. Back when I was with OFS out in the Protectorates, I got to know quite a few of the players. Shipping lines, transstellars, that kind of thing. So when the situation with the Manties started going south in Talbott, I wasn’t surprised when one of those contacts got in touch with me. Look, it was obvious to anybody smart enough to check both hatches on the airlock that Kolokoltsov and the others would screw the pooch, whatever happened. It’s not like anything I said was going to be a critical component in their ability to bugger things up! But I’ll admit that my—let’s call them ‘clients’—wanted me to do my bit to shape Federal policy. So when they suggested my analyses should reflect the Manties’ long-term objectives in the Fringe and Verge I didn’t see any way it could hurt.”
“And this notion that the Manties were deliberately fomenting unrest in the Protectorates? Was that your own contribution to ‘shaping Federal policy’?”
“Um.” Laughton pursed his lips thoughtfully. “You know, I’m not really certain about that.” He frowned. “It just sort of grew out of the situation in Talbott.”
“So all this goes back to Talbott?”
“Of course it does! The Manties pissed off a lot of people when they gobbled up Talbott.”
“Including your ‘clients’?”
“I’m sure they were pissed off by it, but, trust me, they didn’t need the annexation of Talbott to want to plant one in the Manties’ eye!”
“No?”
“Bryce, I’ll give you a thousand-credit slip if you can think of anyone in the entire league who hates the Manties more than the Kalokainos clan does!”
“So you’ve been working for Kalokainos Shipping all this time?”
“Of course I have!” Laughton shook his head. “Heinrich Kalokainos has hated the Manticorans for damned close to eighty T-years, and the only guy I can think of who hates them more is probably Volkhart. I have to admit that, in some ways, they aren’t the sharpest styluses in the box, though.” He shook his head again. “I think they still think the Manty merchant marine can be slapped down to clear the way for their ships. I also think they’re out of their minds, but I’m perfectly happy to take their credits if they want to throw them at me.”
“Kalokainos,” Tarkovsky mused. “Interesting.”
“Like I say, Bryce,” Laughton said almost compassionately, “it’s the way Old Chicago runs. You’re probably the last white knight in this entire town.”
“Maybe I am,” Tarkovsky said. “But I’m a little curious, still. You said you’re not certain if you’re the one who came up with the notion that the Manties were deliberately stirring up trouble across as much of the Verge as possible. You’re sure about that?”
“Sure about the fact that I’m not sure about it?” Laughton snorted. “Yeah, I guess that’s one way to put it.”
“Nobody pointed you at it?” Tarkovsky put an edge of skepticism into the question, and Laughton frowned.
“What are you getting at, Bryce?”
“I’m just wondering whether or not Shafiqa Bolton suggested it to you.”
Laughton stiffened, eyes narrowing in surprise. If Tarkovsky already knew Bolton was his contact with Kalokainos, surely he should’ve had some idea of who she was working for! He was too good at his job not to have traced that back. So why was he—?
The colonel blinked as his vision blurred suddenly. He shifted in the chair and swallowed again, heavily, at a sudden surge of nausea. What—?
A nova exploded at the center of his brain, and his entire body tensed, then collapsed forward against the restraints.
Hillary Indrakashi Enkateshwara Tower
City of Old Chicago
Sol System
Solarian League
“The next time you get a brilliant brainstorm and decide to go off on your own like a loose warhead, stop drinking whatever the hell you were drinking and breathe some pure oxygen! Goddamn it, what the hell did you think you were doing?! Or am I doing you a disservice? You are a Marine after all, so I suppose it’s entirely probable nothing as sophisticated as thinking ever entered your damned head!”
Simeon Gaddis glared at Bryce Tarkovsky, who looked back without flinching.
“I tend to agree, Simeon,” Weng Zhing-hwan said. “On the other hand, and while I’m fully aware this is only likely to reinforce those loose warhead tendencies of his, I also have to think we’re ahead of where we were.”
“You do, do you?” Brigadier Gaddis turned his glare—stepped down a couple of notches, perhaps—on his fellow gendarme. “Pray enlighten me! How exactly does this light our darkness?”
“I think the timing on that ‘aneurysm’ tells us quite a lot, Sir,” Daud al-Fanudahi said. “He was apparently just fine admitting he’d falsified his analysis, even admitting he’d done it for Kalokainos. But the instant Bryce mentioned Bolton’s name, he dropped dead. Somehow I doubt that’s a coincidence.”
“They’ve got a point, Sir,” Natsuko Okiku said diffidently. Gaddis turned his goaded expression upon her, and she shrugged. “Sir, your own forensic people found the nanotech. It’s possible—in fact, I’d say it’s probable—Laughton never knew who he was really working for, but what happened to him tracks perfectly with what Barregos says happened in Smoking Frog.”
“But ‘my own forensic people’ don’t have a clue how the hell it happened,” Gaddis pointed out. “‘He just died’ isn’t what I’d call a detailed cause of death. And they don’t know it was the frigging nanotech that caused that convenient aneurysm of his.”
His dutiful subordinate only looked at him patiently, and he scowled. Unfortunately for his mood, she had a point of her own. In fact, so did Tarkovsky, even if his lone-cowboy approach had been incredibly reckless. The brigadier couldn’t begin to count the number of ways kidnapping a serving officer in the Solarian Marine Corps could have blown up in their faces. Especially when the serving officer in question died in custody. Fortunately, whatever his other faults, Tarkovsky was a competent tactician. He’d slipped the unsuspecting Laughton a mickey, then transported the unconscious colonel up the freight lift shaft to the abandoned storeroom in Laughton’s own residential tower inside a cargo container without anyone seeing a thing. And he’d transported the colonel’s body out of the building the same way and spent the better part of two hours flying around Old Chicago and the surrounding countryside to make sure no one had followed him before he contacted any of the other Ghost Hunters.
Okiku had been holding down the fort at Hillary Enkateshwara when Tarkovsky’s secure com came in, and despite Gaddis’s misgivings about where all this might yet lead, she’d done everything right. She’d dispatched two gendarmes she trusted to collect the container from the loading dock where she’d told Tarkovsky to leave it. And those gendarmes had transported the container to one of the Gendarmerie’s less well advertised facilities, whose personnel were accustomed to reporting directly to Brigadier Gaddis in cas
es with sensitive security aspects.
She’d also instructed the senior medical examiner in that facility to look particularly closely for any sort of biological nanotech. Including—specifically—nanotech designed not to be found.
And they’d found it.
That was the key point, he thought, stepping back to perch on the corner of Okiku’s desk. They’d found the damned stuff.
He settled himself and beckoned impatiently for Tarkovsky to sit behind the facing desk, then drew a deep breath.
“All right,” he said. “Let me be very clear about this, Major. If you ever—and I mean ever—do anything like this again without previously clearing it personally with me, I guarantee you’ll disappear almost as tracelessly as Laughton. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Sir.”
The major had not said “and it will never happen again,” Gaddis noted. On the other hand, he felt reasonably confident Tarkovsky understood he was only half-joking about the consequences.
“That said,” the brigadier continued, “Natsuko has a point. The same one, I’m sure, you were making, Zhing-hwan. I wouldn’t call it ‘proof,’ but this is pretty conclusive evidence the Other Guys are, in fact, operating right here in Old Chicago and that they don’t want us looking in Ms. Bolton’s direction. And as you said, Natsuko, this matches pretty nearly perfectly with Barregos’s version of what happened to his ‘Manties.’ My examiner isn’t a genetic specialist, and he’s not on the cutting edge of bio-nanotech, so he doesn’t have a clue what the stuff he found was supposed to do or how it was engineered. He does know it’s not only based on Laughton’s own DNA but seems to’ve been designed to be indefinitely self-replicating—until after it kills its host, anyway—which breaks about seventeen provisions of the Beowulf Code. And whoever built it, it’s sophisticated as hell.”
“Evidence it really did come from Mesa?” Weng thought out loud. Gaddis looked at her, and she shrugged. “Or maybe from somebody in Mesa, anyway? After Beowulf, they’ve got the best geneticists and bioengineers in the galaxy.”
“Which makes it tempting to look in Mesa’s direction,” Gaddis acknowledged. “At the same time, there are other highly competent biotechs, Zhing-hwan. Using a technique which would point a finger at Mesa if somebody stumbled across it would have to be attractive to the Other Guys.”
“Assuming the Other Guys really aren’t Mesans themselves,” she replied.
“Assuming that.” He agreed, then looked at Tarkovsky. “You say he didn’t look nervous or apprehensive at all?”
“Not a bit, Sir. I’ve uploaded the video.”
“I know you have. But you’re the interrogator who was actually in the room with him.”
“Yes, Sir.” Tarkovsky nodded his understanding. “And, as I say, he actually seemed more relaxed as we went along.” He shook his head, his expression unhappy. “I have to say, I hate how this worked out in a lot of ways. Tim might’ve been dirty, but he had a point. Everybody in this goddamned city’s ‘dirty’ one way or another! He clearly didn’t think he was any dirtier than anyone else, and he seemed perfectly comfortablle comfortable ID-ing Kalokainos. In my opinion, he genuinely believed that was who he was working for and figured that between the favors other people owed Kalokainos and the general cesspool of Old Chicago politics, he’d walk away in the end. He didn’t have any idea he was about to die.”
“That was my impression from the video,” Gaddis said. “I just wanted your confirmation. And if he didn’t have any notion he was about to die, that probably does indicate he was only a tool, not part of the core effort.”
“I think it also indicates we’re right that Bolton’s a handler for the Other Guys. In fact, she’s probably a pretty important handler. However the nanotech killed him, it didn’t do it until Bryce brought up her name,” al-Fanudahi said, and Gaddis nodded.
“At the same time, though,” the brigadier pointed out, “we have to wonder how broadly the Other Guys have distributed this ‘drop dead’ security protocol of theirs. We’ve already demonstrated that they’re really, really good at avoiding surveillance and electronic eavesdropping. If anybody we arrest and interrogate falls over dead the instant we ask any useful questions, it’s going to be damned hard to build any kind of case we could take to anyone, even Rorendaal and her people at Justice. Any of the Mandarins would laugh us out of their offices if we can’t bring them something a hell of a lot solider than this!”
“Agreed.” Al-Fanudahi’s expression was grim, verging perilously close to despair.
He couldn’t dispute a single one of Gaddis’s points, but that only made him more desperate. He and Irene Teague had nowhere near full data on “Operation Fabius,” but what they did know, they didn’t like.
Unless someone had come up with an ultra-secret weapon about which nobody in Operational Analysis knew a damned thing, any attack on Beowulf would be a disaster for the Solarian League Navy. Raging Justice and Hypatia made that much abundantly clear. It was possible—indeed, what they were hearing suggested it was probable—that Strategy and Planning believed the SLN had come up with some technological equalizer they hadn’t mentioned to OpAn. They might even be right. It was hard for al-Fanudahi to conceive of one big enough to actually level the playing field, but they could have found something which offered Fabius at least a chance of reaching its targets.
Even if they had, though, the SLN was still likely to suffer massive casualties, on top of those it had already taken. That was enough to turn his stomach, but there was an even worse possibility. If the Manties hadn’t carried out the “Mesa Atrocity,” whoever had carried it out had demonstrated their willingness to murder millions to further their goals. And if they were willing to murder millions of Mesans, there was no reason to think they wouldn’t arrange the murder of millions of Beowulfers, as well. In fact, if the Other Guys really were the Mesan Alignment, they’d probably be a lot more willing to slaughter Beowulfers, given the history between them. And what happened if they did? If they managed to kill a million or two citizens of Beowulf and blame it on the SLN? Or, even worse, genuinely used the SLN to inflict those deaths? How would the Grand Alliance react to that?
The public boards were full of stories—some from accredited newsies; most anonymously sourced—about a new amendment to the Constitution, one designed to solve the League’s current fiscal crisis. Given the atmosphere here in the Sol System, the amendment—if it existed, and he thought it probably did—would sail through the rumored truncated ratification process in a heartbeat, despite any legal flaws in the procedure. And if the Mandarins were able to tap however deeply they needed to into the enormous economic power of the League, the situation would change radically. The probability of the League’s collapse—or, at least, the collapse of its Federal government, which might possibly have restored sanity to its foreign policy—would decrease significantly, and the Grand Alliance would know it was looking at a much longer, much more dangerous conflict.
Whether or not anyone in Old Chicago wanted to admit it, Daud al-Fanudahi knew that so far, the Alliance had exercised enormous restraint. It hadn’t wanted this war and it didn’t want to fight this war, and he’d come to admire its chosen strategy. The tactician in him might be critical of the way their defensive stance left the initiative in the League’s hands, but the strategist in him understood. Their defensive advantage was so great they could afford to let the Solarians come to them, at least where their critical core systems were concerned. They didn’t have to seek opportunities to chew up the SLN, and they’d actually done their best to minimize Solarian casualties, instead. They’d relied on the “soft power” of economic warfare, done everything they could to encourage the collapse of the political clique driving the confrontation, without killing anyone they could avoid killing. Their immediate strategic objective was clearly to strangle the Federal government fiscally while simultaneously peeling away Protectorsate systems and Solarian trading partners unil the Mandarins—or their successors—were force
d to accept a negotiated peace. That much was obvious. But he suspected their ultimate objective was to encourage nothing less than the dissolution of the entire League into smaller, less juggernaut-sized successor states, like the Mayan Autonomous Regional Sector and this new Renaissance Factor coalescing around Mannerheim.
Both of those were waiting strategies, though. They were the tactics chosen by the side with minimal ambitions for territory…and sufficient confidence in its own military capabilities to be patient. To let time work for it.
So what happened if there was another “Mesa Atrocity”—this one in one of the Grand Alliance’s systems? One coupled with a sudden improvement in the Mandarins’ fiscal situation and the simultaneous use of some new weapon which let the SLN get inside their defenses and kill still more of their civilians? What happened if all of that flowed together and convinced the Royal Manticoran Navy and its allies to start taking the war—genuinely taking the war—to the Solarian League for the very first time?
And what happened if they concluded that the League had decided the Eridani Edict no longer applied? If they decided the only way to prevent more of mass casualties was to adopt a policy of ruthless reprisal? Prove they would, indeed, exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, however many millions of Solarians that killed, if that was what it took for the Mandarins to recognize sanity when they saw it?
If the gloves really come off, who knows where the killing will stop…if it stops?
An icy chill went through Daud al-Fanudahi as he stared into that question’s hollow eyes and only darkness looked back. Because the single thing he knew was that he didn’t know the answer.
