Shadow of Victory - eARC (35 page)

“Oh Christ, Bevan!” Ross rolled his eyes. “I could care less about the damned cards! Haven’t you been listening to Freiceadan at all?!”

“Freiceadan, Sir?”

Bevan’s confusion was complete, Ross saw. The sergeant was a good man, solid and reliable, but he wasn’t exactly the most mentally agile person Ross had ever known. And clearly he hadn’t been listening to the United Public Safety Force’s internal news channel.

“According to Freiceadan, somebody just shot Colonel MacChrystal in Hendry Park.” Bevan gawked at him. “Sounds like they took out her entire detail at the same time. In fact, it sounds like her damned dog was the only survivor—the bastards just stun-gunned it! And they took out Major Kiley, his air car, and his entire detail at what sounds like exactly the same time.”

Bevan went even paler. It didn’t take a mental giant to see the connection between MacChrystal and Jordan Kiley, the man who’d officiated over the MacRorys’ murders. But Ross wasn’t done yet.

“On top of that, Zack MacLennan just screened from Rotherwal. Somebody blew hell out of that sick bastard Grazioli’s little playpen about nine minutes ago. And on top that, I can’t get Major Farquhar to answer her com. So, if it’s all the same to you, Sergeant, I think we’d better get ourselves organized, don’t you?”

“Uh, Yessir! Right away, Sir!”

Bevan stabbed a button on his panel and the general alarm wailed from every speaker in the station house…and, at only slightly lower volume, from the personal com of every UPS trooper assigned to it, wherever they might be. Startled voices answered from the squad room where the ready response force had probably been playing poker, rather than solitaire, and Ross headed for his own office at a half-run. He’d been unable to reach Amanda Farquhar, the commander of UPS’ Conerock Division, over his personal com, but his office com should be able to nail down her current location from her personal transponder. He hoped so, anyway, because he sure as hell wanted to talk to her!

Sergeant Bevan looked up as the front door opened again, and his tense, worried expression eased as Alexina Morrison and Lachlan McLaurin burst through it. They weren’t supposed to be on duty tonight, but unlike the sergeant, they obviously had been listening to Freiceadan. Both of them were only privates, but Bevan knew Ross had earmarked them for promotion after the next proficiency exam, and both of them were geared up full tactical rig.

“Good to see you,” he said as they jogged across the lobby towards him. “The Lieutenant’s in his office, and—”

The burst from Morrison’s flechette gun hit him at the base of the throat and decapitated him.

The body flipped backward, and McLaurin went by the brand new corpse at a run. He disappeared down the short hallway to the squadron, and the hard, sharp discharges of his flechette gun vanished into a terrible scream of agony.

Lieutenant Ross’ reflexes betrayed him. He charged straight out of his office, pulser in his hand…which was exactly what Private Morrison had expected. She was waiting, half-concealed behind the duty desk, and the shrieking flechette darts hit Ross squarely in the face before he ever saw her.

She reached across the desk and hit the button that overrode the security computer. The station house’s doors all opened at the same instant, and forty more armed members of the Loomis Liberation League charged through them.

* * *

“Stop squealing about it and fix the damned problem!” Nyatui Zagorski snapped from the com display. “We’ve goddamned well paid you people enough, so get your thumbs out of your asses and get a handle on this!”

Tyler MacCrimmon gripped his hands tightly together behind him and managed not to snarl back at the SEIU exec. It wasn’t easy.

“We’re trying to get a handle on it, Nyatui.” His voice was less even than he could have wished. “At the moment, we’re having just a little bit of difficulty down here, though.”

“‘Difficulty’?” Zagorski repeated. “What you’ve got down there, Mister Vice President, is a frigging disaster! Do you have any idea how much SEIU equipment those bastards have already torched?!”

“Yes, I do,” MacCrimmon replied. “I’m a bit more concerned about all the people they’ve killed, though. Including Johannes Grazioli and Jock MacRathin.”

Zagorski had opened his mouth. Now he closed it again and sat back in the chair behind his enormous desk.

“I knew about Grazioli.” His volume had dropped by at least fifty percent. “This is the first I’ve heard about MacRathin, though. Is that confirmed?”

“Yes,” MacCrimmon said tightly. “And while Johannes’ murder could have had something to do with his…tastes in entertainment, Jock’s sure as hell didn’t. I’ve got confirmation of the assassination of at least twenty-five senior government and UPS officials so far.” He emphasized the last two words harshly, his eyes locked to Zagorski’s. “But that’s not the only people these lunatics are killing, and they hit the Cooperative’s Elgin office about twenty minutes ago. MacRathin was in his office with three other board members when someone tossed in a hand grenade to keep them company. And another bunch of the bastards got into Admin and set off some kind of bomb right in the middle of the Cooperative’s main data storage. The Uppies have retaken the two lower floors, but they’re in one hell of a firefight with the sons-of-bitches upstairs!”

“Shit,” Zagorski muttered. The Silver Oak Cooperative played an important role in SEIU’s “management” of Halkirk. The front organization, completely staffed and administered by native Loomisians, functioned as the primary conduit for silver oak without getting SEIU directly involved in hammering any effort by the producers to raise prices. Jock MacRathin, its CEO, had managed the majority of Grazioli’s contacts and contracts with the local growers and loggers…and had been, if possible, even more despised than Grazioli.

“Look,” MacCrimmon pushed into the temporary break in Zagorski’s tantrum, “everyone down here’s doing his best to ‘get a handle on it,’ but this is no local disturbance. It’s going on in Elgin, Conerock, Rotherwal, and at least ten other cities and major towns. That means it’s planned and orchestrated. MacQuarie’s in her HQ, coordinating operations, and I really need to be over there helping her do that. So that’s where I’m going. my staff will keep you updated, but right now I need to be concentrating on that. So if you’ll excuse me.”

He reached out, cut the connection, and headed for his office door.

* * *

“—don’t care where the frigging guns came from,” Nathalan Mundy snarled. “What I care about is what the bastards are doing with them right now!”

The treasury secretary glared around the conference table in the basement of the United Public Safety Force’s main building in Elgin.

“And the reason I care about that is that they seem to be kicking our asses!” Mundy added.

Senga MacQuarie flushed angrily. She opened her mouth, but someone else spoke before she could flay Mundy.

“I agree the situation is…messy,” Frinkelo Osborne, the Solarian “trade attaché” who was actually the Office of Frontier Security’s senior man on the planet. “And I know you’ve suffered heavy casualties and a lot of property damage. Believe me, Mister Zagorski’s called that to my attention in no uncertain terms! But I think it’s important that no one panic here.”

“Panic?” Vice President MacCrimmon looked at him as if he had two heads. “This isn’t ‘panic,’ Mister Osborne. Nathalan might not be the most tactful person in the universe, but he does have a point. In the last two T-weeks, we’ve lost control of Conerock, Harlach, MacQuinnville, and Ohlarhn. That’s four of our regional administrative centers, and I’d like to point out to you that there were only twelve of them to begin with. As nearly as we can tell, they’ve acquired every Safety Force armory in all of those cities, too, and at this moment, Secretary MacQuarie’s probably lost close to half of her people.”

“I understand that, Mister Vice President,” Osborne said. “But however serious the situation may be, it’s still a long way from hopeless.”

He gave the Prosperity Party’s leadership the most confident expression he could summon up. The truth was, however, that he wasn’t quite as confident as he sounded—by a margin of no more than, oh, three or four hundred percent. And the truth was also that for a centicredit and a cup of cold coffee he’d let every damned person in this room go straight to hell. If anyone had ever deserved to have his planet burned down around his ears, it was MacCrimmon and his cronies, and he didn’t even want to think about what might be necessary to save their skins. One thing he did know, given how far things had already gone: it was going to be ugly. In fact, he was sinkingly certain that it would be even uglier than he could imagine.

Unfortunately, Nyatui Zagorski had already dispatched his own report to the home office in Lucastra. Osborne doubted his version of events was going to even mention the not so minor role SEIU’s policies, arrogance, and security force’s brutality had played in creating them, but that report was the one SEIU’s patrons would be sure got read in Old Chicago. That meant it would be the one upon which the Office of Security ultimately acted, whatever Osborne did.

It’s not going to matter, Frinkelo, he told himself bitterly. Whatever you want, HQ’s made it clear enough you’re here to support Zagorski’s operations. The last thing any of your esteemed superiors need is a glitch in their personal cash flow from SEIU. So however much you’d love to watch him and all his local stooges hang—however much you may hate what it’ll take to save their worthless asses, instead—that’s not on the program this month.

“I’d be inclined to agree that it isn’t hopeless yet,” MacCrimmon said after a moment. “I hope you’ll pardon my pointing out that it seems to be headed that way, though.”

“Of course I understand your concerns, Sir,” Osborne said. And he did.

In the wake of the precisely coordinated, carefully targeted strikes in half a dozen cities, popular support had rallied to the “Loomis Liberation League” like a hurricane. The simmering unrest over SEIU’s logging policies had never been far from the surface. The fury spawned by the murder of ninety percent of Mánas MacRory’s family had brought it to a roaring boil, and the LLL’s initial successes had reached deep into that unrest with the proof that UPS and SEIU’s own security forces could be hurt. Not simply hurt—defeated. Destroyed.

Ottomar Touchette had warned Osborne it was coming, and Osborne had dutifully passed the Gendarmerie lieutenant’s analysis on to his own superiors. Not even Touchette had expected things to boil over this quickly, however. And the UPS’ increasingly vicious tactics, the product of its own fear and desperation, were only pumping more hydrogen into the furnace. On the other hand…

“Mister Vice President, I’ve already sent my dispatch boat to McIntosh. There’s a permanent Frontier Fleet detachment there. I sent the boat off five days ago, so it ought to reach McIntosh in another five or six days. When it does, I’m sure naval support at the very least—possibly even a company of Marines or an OFS intervention battalion—will be on its way here absolutely ASAP.”

Every Loomisian in the underground room was looking at him now, eyes bright with the light of drowning men and women who’d suddenly seen a rope thrown in their direction.

“All you have to do is hold on,” Osborne told them. “Just hold on for another couple of T-weeks, three at the outside, and then I guarantee it’ll be the people on the other side’s turn to worry!”

Chapter Thirty-One

“I’d really like a little more time to think about things before Admiral Gold Peak sends Lieutenant Commander Denton on to Manticore,” Gregor O’Shaughnessy said from Baroness Medusa’s com display.

“Forgive me, Gregor,” she said dryly, “but unless I’m very much mistaken, you’ve just had better than a T-month to ‘think about things,’ haven’t you?”

“Well, yes. I suppose what I should’ve said is I’d like a little more time for you to consider my report and the two of us—and Prime Minister Alquezar’s cabinet, of course—to kick it around before Reprise heads for Landing.”

“Somebody back on the Old Terra said ‘Ask me for anything except time,’” Medusa replied. “And it’s not as if Reprise is the only courier available to us. I understand exactly why Lady Gold Peak wants her on her way yesterday. We’re lucky as hell Denton spotted all those superdreadnoughts—and that the two of you were smart enough to pull out as soon as he did rather than trying to deliver my note to commissioner Verrocchio anyway—and she’s not about to waste any of that luck. The Admiralty needs that information absolutely as soon as possible, and I’m pretty sure they’d really, really like to have Commander Denton and his people there for the most exhaustive debriefing they can arrange. Let’s just worry about getting that into the pipeline first. We’ll take our time to make sure we’ve considered all the political implications and then get our own messenger off.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” O’Shaughnessy said. “I’d just like our thoughts about those political aspects to get there at the same time as the military data. It’s not that—”

“It’s an imperfect galaxy, Gregor,” Medusa interrupted. “We’ll just have to do the best we can. And I suppose I should probably point out that it’s up to Admiral Gold Peak to determine when a warship under her command departs for Manticore. She might get just a little cranky if I tried to order her to hold Reprise while I got my own thinking in order. Especially since she’s quite well aware that I have four perfectly serviceable dispatch boats in orbit around Spindle. For that matter, I suspect I could probably hire another one if I really needed to.”

“Yes, Ma’am. Understood.”

“Good. But having said all of that, I want you here in my office fifteen minutes after Reprise reaches Spindle, understood?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Then I’ll see you then. Clear.”

Medusa cut the connection, then tipped back in her chair and looked across her desk.

“There are times,” she said mildly, “when I understand why you military types aren’t unreservedly fond of Gregor, Augustus.”

Augustus Khumalo smiled and shook his head. He’d taken a pinnace down from HMS Hercules, his superdreadnought flagship, for the regular mid-week conference with Baroness Morncreek and Joachim Alquezar later that afternoon. Because he’d already been at Medusa’s official residence when Michelle Henke’s first message to the Imperial Governor arrived, he’d actually beaten O’Shaughnessy’s com transmission to her.

“It’s not that we’re not ‘fond’ of Mister O’Shaughnessy,” he said now. “We’re very fond of him, actually. Sort of the way you’re fond of a cousin you know is really, really smart…and still want to strangle from time to time.”

“You can’t imagine how that relieves my mind.” Medusa’s tone was desert dry, but then she gave herself a shake and let her chair come back upright.

“Still, he does have a point. The political implications are going to be about as hairy as anything I could imagine. I know he doesn’t trust you Neanderthal military types’ judgment in all things, and I think it’s silly of him to worry that an ‘unbridled’ military report may prejudice thinking in the Foreign Office and the Cabinet. But deciding exactly what us political authorities should be advising will be a handful. And I really would like our analysis and recommendations to reach Manticore before the Admiralty starts issuing movement orders.”

“Understood.”

Khumalo nodded. Despite the uniform he wore, his responsibilities and decisions carried an unavoidably political aspect. In effect, he was not simply the military commander on Talbott Station, but also the First Lord of Admiralty in Alquezar’s local cabinet.

“I can’t argue with that,” he continued, “and one thing we can be pretty sure of is that Earl White Haven and Admiral Caparelli aren’t going to let any grass grow under their feet when they start considering new deployment orders. Like you just told Gregor, we’re incredibly lucky Denton—and Gregor—made the smart choice and headed straight back here. The question is how close behind them Crandall might be. Assuming, of course,” he added, his tone even drier than Medusa’s had been a moment earlier, “that this is Admiral Crandall and that she is headed our way.”

“Assuming that,” Medusa agreed, and rolled her eyes.

Michelle Henke had brought a treasure trove of information home from New Tuscany, including the entire classified database of every battlecruiser in the late, unlamented Admiral Byng’s task force. A complete copy of that data had already been forwarded to Manticore, where ONI would indulge in a gleeful orgy of analysis, so Reprise’s report that she’d detected seventy-odd ships-of-the-wall in the Myers System wasn’t going to come at the Admiralty quite as cold as it might have. But while Byng’s files had contained the information that Battle Fleet was conducting some sort of training exercise clear out here in the Verge, those ships were supposed to be in the McIntosh System, not Meyers. There might be all sorts of innocent reasons for them to have changed their station, but according to the testimony of members of the New Tuscan cabinet (who’d fallen all over themselves cooperating with Admiral Gold Peak), the mysterious Aldona Anisimovna had informed them of Crandall’s presence as part of seducing them into serving as Manpower’s cat’s-paw. That implied all sorts of ugly possibilities, given Manpower’s earlier effort to prevent Talbott’s entry into the Star Empire.

And it also implies that this Admiral Crandall’s just as likely to do something spectacularly stupid as Byng was, the governor reflected grimly. It’d be a mistake—as I’m sure Gregor would point out—to automatically assume she’s stupid enough to attack us, but that’s where the smart money would go. And we’ll get hurt a hell of a lot less if we assume that’s what she’ll do and she doesn’t than if we assume she won’t…and she does.

“I’m sure Admiral Gold Peak and her people are discussing that very point as we sit here,” she said. “In the meantime, I think we’d better ask Joachim to get hold of Henri Krietzmann. Under the circumstances, it couldn’t hurt to have the Quadrant’s minister of war present for our regular weekly get-together, now could it?”

* * *

“Colonel Weng is here, Brigadier.”

Brigadier Noritoshi Väinöla, CO of Solarian Gendarmerie Intelligence Command, grimaced and checked the time display in the corner of the report he’d been reading. One thing about Weng Zhing-hwan, he thought; she was punctual as hell.

Well, that and she was actually willing to think, which was unfortunately rare in the upper reaches of the Solarian League’s intelligence services.

“Send her in,” he told his secretary, closing the report on his memo board.

His office door opened a moment later and Lieutenant Colonel Weng stepped through it.

“Zhing-hwan,” he said, nodding in greeting, and she nodded back.

“Good afternoon, Sir,” she replied, and one of Väinöla’s eyebrows rose at her unusually formal tone. Her memo requesting this meeting had sounded routine, but there was nothing “routine” about her expression. Or her body language, for that matter.

“You said you had something we needed to discuss.” He rose and headed across to the comfortable armchairs arranged around the coffee table in the corner of his office nearest the window that looked out across Lake Michigan. A carafe of coffee, and another one of hot tea for the lieutenant colonel, were waiting on the table. He poured himself a cup, settled into one of those armchairs, and pointed at another one. “Should I assume whatever it is might be just a tiny bit more important than your memo seemed to imply?”

“Yes, Sir,” Weng said. “I’m afraid it is. Or that it may be, anyway.”

She sat, but she didn’t pour herself tea, even though it was her favorite blend. Väinöla’s platinum hair was even fairer than Weng’s, but he was twenty centimeters taller than she, and his dark brown eyes had a pronounced epicanthic fold. Now those eyes narrowed at her unusual abstention. It was the only really overt sign of anxiety she showed, and he took a slow, deliberate sip of coffee while he reflected upon how unlike her it was to show any at all.

“And why might that be, Colonel?” he asked, lowering his cup.

“Because I think Rajmund Nyhus is deliberately feeding Frontier Security bad information,” she replied bluntly.

“Now that,” Väinöla said softly after a ten-second pause, “is an interesting…assessment. And it brings to mind two questions. First, why do you think that? And, second, why are you telling me about it?” He paused again, cocking his head. “Now that I think about it, there’s a third one, isn’t there? Why is he doing it? Assuming he is, of course.” He smiled thinly. “You can answer them in order.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Weng drew a deep breath. She opened her own memo board, but she didn’t look down at it, and her blue eyes met his levelly.

“I try to stay at least broadly informed about what’s going on in the other intel shops.” She began.

“That would be a reference to your semiregular tête-à-têtes with Lupe Blanton?” Väinöla asked pleasantly. “The ones in which you share privileged internal information from the Gendarmerie with a minion of Frontier Security?”

“Well, yes, Sir.” Lieutenant Colonel Weng shrugged ever so slightly. “You and I have discussed the way intelligence data bottlenecks often enough, and I’ve known Lupe for a long time. She’s always respected the confidentiality of anything I gave her…just as I’ve done with her.”

“And she’s also one of the few people in Ukhtomskoy’s shop with a working brain.” Väinöla sipped more coffee. “I can’t say I’m wildly enthusiastic at the notion that anyone on that side of the aisle’s getting a look inside our intel gathering process. At the same time, I’m familiar with the need for workarounds to fill in holes in our own information, and Blanton’s one of the good ones, even if she did end up in OFS. So what can you tell me—without violating the confidentiality of anything she told you, of course—about Nyhus cooking his reports to Ukhtomskoy?”

“Actually, Lupe knows I’m bringing this to your attention, although her suspicions about what Nyhus is doing depend on information I shared with her, rather than the other way around. Do you remember a memo from Braxton Reizinger I copied to you back in June?”

Väinöla frowned, searching his mental files, then shook his head.

“Sorry, no.”

“It’s not like you don’t have enough other reports to read, Sir, and we didn’t really have anything concrete, anyway. But one of his analysts—Master Sergeant Roskilly—bird-dogged some interesting reports to him, and he forwarded them to me. Reports about levels of unrest out in the Verge.”

“Roskilly!” Väinöla snapped his fingers. “I do remember her, although she was only Staff Sergeant Roskilly when I had the Verge Desk. And I think I remember your memo, too, now. Something about deliberate provocations and outside support?”

“Yes, Sir.” Weng nodded. “I asked Reizinger to keep Roskilly on it and to keep me informed, and I’ve been coming steadily to the conclusion that she’s absolutely right. Somebody definitely is stirring the pot in at least a dozen star systems, and Roskilly’s right when she points out that, given the distances involved, it has to be the result of an interstellar effort. The problem is that Nyhus seems to’ve picked up on the same thing—which, to be perfectly honest, struck me as unusually competent for him—but he’s drawing radically different conclusions. Or that’s what he’s telling Ukhtomskoy, anyway.”

“What kind of radically different?”

“If you remember Roskilly, you know how good she is,” Weng said just a bit obliquely, “and she’s been working this hard. Despite which, she hasn’t been able to nail down who might be responsible for it. None of our sources have been able to shed any light on that, which hasn’t kept some of them from speculating, of course.” Her lips twitched. “And a lot of the speculation, not too surprisingly, perhaps, given what happened in Monica, has focused on the Manties.”

“I’m not surprised.” Väinöla snorted. “By this point, certain people are seeing Manties under every bed in the galaxy!”

Weng nodded. She knew her boss shared her own conclusions about just who’d done what to whom in the Talbott Sector.

“Roskilly’s problem is that no matter how far down she drills, there’s no reliable information on who’s poking up the fire, whatever certain people may be suggesting. None.”

“And this is significant because—?” Väinöla raised both eyebrows.

“Because according to what Lupe tells me, Nyhus is telling Ukhtomskoy he has ‘solid evidence’ from ‘confidential sources’ that the Manties are behind it. Now, I suppose it’s always possible Frontier Security has better ‘confidential sources’ in the Verge than we do, but if that’s the case, it’ll be the first time it’s ever been true!”

Väinöla chuckled harshly. There wasn’t a lot of amusement in the sound.

“You’re suggesting he’s fabricating that evidence and hanging it on ‘confidential sources’ to keep anyone from catching him at it,” he said.

“That’s exactly what I’m suggesting, Sir. And what worries me quite a bit is that I can’t answer that third question you posed. I know he’s in bed with dozens of transstellars, including Manpower, so on the surface, there’re plenty of people he might be shilling for. Given Frontier Security’s—well, Verrocchio’s, anyway—involvement in that business in Talbott, I’m inclined to focus on Manpower and Kalokainos as his most probable…patrons. I might’ve added Technodyne to that, if Technodyne didn’t already have enough trouble coming down on it. But if this is happening on the scale it looks like it is, it’s way too widely spread to be any transstellar, or even any consortium of transstellars, I can think of.”

“But if it’s not somebody like Manpower or Kalokainos, then doesn’t Manticore become the logical prime suspect?”