Shadow of Victory - eARC (41 page)

“Zinaida, what the hell do you think—?!”

Then another alarm sounded, and Jansen’s eyes jerked back to his own panel. He’d never heard that strident, two-toned, ear-piercing wail outside a training simulation, and he couldn’t really believe he was hearing it now.

But he was.

Something slammed into the interposed belly of Bernike’s impeller wedge and vanished with the instantaneous ferocity of a several hundred thousand-kilometers per second gravity gradient. But something else missed the wedge. It came sizzling through the tanker’s wide-open throat on a reciprocal course with a closing velocity of over 60,000 KPS, crossed the wedge’s interior at a sharp angle in approximately five-thousandths of a second, missed her enormous hull by no more than sixty or seventy kilometers, and went racing out the wedge’s kilt.

Then it was gone. The collision alert continued to sound, and Mandrapilias felt echoes of terror that hadn’t had nearly long enough to register at the time whiplash up and down his nervous system. His head jerked around to Zinaida.

“What the fuck was that?!” he demanded.

He didn’t know—then—that he would never, ever forgive himself for not reporting the incident instantly to ACT. Not that three and a half minutes of warning would have done any good.

* * *

Even the inner reaches of a star system represent a vast volume, against which even the largest spacecraft is very, very tiny. On the face of things, collisions and near collisions between spacefaring vessels were low-probability events, even for those moving along well-traveled shipping lanes. They weren’t made any more likely by the fact that an active impeller wedge was among the galaxy’s most…energetic energy signatures, which made it very hard for even the least attentive sensor tech to not see one coming. And, of course, Astro Traffic Control kept a very close eye on the multi-billion tons of military and civilian shipping passing through the Manticore Binary System at any given moment.

But the interlopers slicing into the heart of the Manticore System at twenty percent of light-speed, cutting straight through the heart of the primary shipping lane from the Draco Seven gas facility, didn’t care about ATC, and their lead wave wasn’t using an impeller wedge to accelerate. It was using something the Royal Manticoran Navy had never heard of, and it was unlikely any other sensor tech—especially any civilian tech, with commercial-grade sensors—would ever have noticed the tiny gravitic anomaly which had drawn Zinaida Merkulov’s attention. She hadn’t felt any sense of alarm, really; only the inveterate curiosity which had led her to her career in the first place. It was an itch she lived to scratch, and she’d redirected the sensors Klaus Hauptman had been kind enough to provide for her personal use towards it.

She never actually “saw” the incoming graser torpedoes at all, but she’d tracked those gravitic anomalies coming straight at her ship and extrapolated their trajectory in the nick of time.

The rest of the Manticore Binary System was less fortunate.

* * *

Sinead was watching the display when it happened.

The shuttle was the next best thing to a hundred thousand kilometers from Hephaestus, but its optical heads had zoomed in until the space station’s crazy quilt geometry completely filled the display. Even if they hadn’t been designed to be the stealthiest attack platforms yet built by human hands the graser torpedoes which had slashed past Bernike were far too distant and far too tiny to appear in any optical display. The missile pods following on their heels were somewhat less stealthy, but they were also coming in on a purely ballistic trajectory, far astern of Oyster Bay’s vanguard and falling steadily farther astern as the torpedoes’ spider drive accelerated them towards their targets.

Sinead wasn’t alone in not seeing them. No one saw them…until several million lifetimes too late.

Admiral Topolev’s task group had continued in-system for just over a month after its stealthy arrival, until it reached its deployment point, one light-week from Manticore, with a velocity of twenty percent of light-speed relative to Manticore-A. That was when it deployed its missiles and its torpedoes and then disappeared tracelessly back into hyper. The weapons it had left behind had continued coasting through space at their initial launch velocity, their sensor heads protected against particle erosion by special nose caps, until they reached their pre-programmed attack locus. Then they blew the protective caps, receipted the tactical updates from the incredibly stealthy scout ships which had been sent ahead to gather that data for them, and updated their targeting queues.

At five hundred thousand kilometers, the graser torpedoes fired, and Sinead Terekhov cried out in horror as HMSS Hephaestus disintegrated.

It was nowhere near as sanitary as “disintegrated” might imply, of course. It couldn’t be, when scores of grasers, each more powerful than most heavy cruisers’ main battery weapons, ripped into a totally unarmored civilian target the size of Hephaestus. The torpedoes were deliberately yawing on their axis as they fired, sweeping their beams across the greatest possible volume of the station, and their projectors lasted three full seconds before they burned out.

Three seconds while they closed at 60,000 KPS.

Those grasers smashed into Hephaestus like a chainsaw into warm butter. And, like the butter, Hephaestus simply splattered across space. Chunks of wreckage—some big as battlecruisers—arced outward from the center of destruction like obscene meteors. Secondary explosions vaporized entire sections of the station as fusion plants—not just those of Hephaestus’ internal power net, but of the dozens of merchant vessels and warships docked to load or unload cargo or for repairs—lost containment in sun-bright boils of plasma.

The explosions spread from the graser impact points, racing outward, like flame along a dry tree branch. They grew, reached out to one another, embraced, merged, until they became a single terrible vortex of destruction that rivaled the power of Manticore-A itself.

Sinead’s shuttle spun madly, swinging to interpose its own impeller wedge between itself and the wreckage belching out of that hellish maw of devastation, but the optical heads, obedient to their uncaring computer’s programmed imperatives, swiveled to keep the station—or what had been the station—centered on the screen. It glared there, like some prevision of the lava fields of hell, and Sinead O’Connor pressed both hands to her mouth, her vision streaked by blinding tears, sobbing uncontrollably as she watched the nightmare which had come for HMSS Hephaestus consume the Star Kingdom of Manticore’s primary industrial platform and more than two million human beings…including the entire crew of HMS Hexapuma.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

“So, is that everything?” Adam Šiml asked, tipped back in his comfortable chair.

There was a certain overly-patient edge to the question, and Marián Sulák snorted. He’d known Šiml for well over forty T-years, and he recognized testiness when he heard it.

“Adam, you could easily have gotten out of here on schedule if you’d really wanted to. It’s not like this couldn’t have been settled over the com! Not that a confirmed autocrat like yourself would have considered that for a moment, of course. How did you survive all those years in academia?”

Šiml glowered at him, but his eyes twinkled as he shook his head.

“You know, Marián, I haven’t spent all this time sitting here in Zelený Kopec because of how much I admire your handsome face. I’m a very busy man these days, and I was supposed to be in the air to Velehrad thirty minutes ago!”

“Yes, you were. Now look at Hana and tell her, with a straight face, that the little boy in you who likes playing with models isn’t absolutely content to be sitting here right now!”

Šiml looked across the conference table at Hana Káňová, the slightly-built director for construction on Sokol’s regional Zelený Kopec board. She’d known him for a much shorter time than Sulák—a mere twenty T-years, in her case—but from her expression, she didn’t expect him to be able to take up Marián’s challenge. He had the impression—no, he was certain—she was less than delighted with the origin of the funds flowing into Sokol’s infrastructure accounts, but she was delighted by the way they let her catch up with long-deferred construction and, especially, repairs. Although, in this case, as it happened, she was doing both.

“Actually,” Šiml pointed an accusatory index finger at the youngish man sitting at her elbow, “it’s Ondřej’s fault. He should never have brought those plans to the conference.”

“I believe it was your suggestion that I bring them…Sir,” Káňová’s executive assistant replied. In fact, in addition to being her assistant, he was also her nephew, and he’d known Šiml since the day he’d turned fifteen. As a rule, Sokol tried to restrict nepotism in its paid staff, but that was hard on a planet like Chotěboř, where nepotism and cronyism had become the order of the day. In Ondřej Bilej’s case, however, Šiml had no problem with the system, since Bilej also happened to be one of the best three or four architects Šiml knew, with a special gift for sports complexes.

Even if he was a wiseass.

“That has nothing to do with the case, you young
klouček
,” Šiml shot back now “You know my weaknesses! As such, as a dutiful employee of Sokol, you should’ve taken steps to protect my schedule rather than supinely acquiescing in something you damned well knew would seduce me into breaking it!”

He pointed the same finger at the holographic model of the new multi-sport complex glowing between them. It was spectacular, with no less than four football pitches, each with its own bleacher seating, plus a pair of gymnasiums, six tennis courts, and a pair of what were still called Olympic-sized indoor swimming pools. It was going to replace no less than three existing facilities here in Zelený Kopec, all of which dated from well before the komár plague and had begun falling apart T-years ago. It was also going to cost several million credits, which would actually be considerably cheaper than trying to properly refurbish the present facilities. Under the old scheme of things, they’d have had no choice but to refurbish anyway, in the tiny dribs and drabs they could squeeze out of the budget, which would probably have taken at least ten or fifteen T-years. Under the new scheme of things, his new best friend Sabatino had agreed to cough up complete funding for the project.

“To be perfectly honest,” Bilej admitted with a smile, “it did cross my mind that you were likely to have a lot of questions, Mister Šiml. And I should probably admit I always enjoy taking you inside the nuts and bolts. Still, I think it’s just a little unfair to put all the blame on my plate.”

“Surely you don’t expect him to admit that?” Marián chuckled. “Adam’s life is totally untrammeled by anything as limiting as the schedule constraints we mere mortals put up with. If it weren’t for Květa, he’d never get anywhere on time!”

“Now that is not true!” Šiml protested. “Why, I was actually early once—about three years ago, it was, for a faculty meeting, I think—and Květa didn’t have anything to do with—”

The ear-shattering explosion shook the office, rattled the windows violently, and completely demolished the executive parking area outside Sokol’s Zelený Kopec offices.

* * *

“Adam!” Karl-Heinz Sabatino held out his hand with a concerned expression as Adam Šiml walked down the shallow steps into the outsized sunken living room. “My God! You could’ve been killed!”

“I know.” Šiml gripped his hand and shook it firmly. “And I have to admit, I never saw it coming. Nobody did.”

He grimaced as Sabatino released his hand and pointed him into one of the huge armchairs by the picture window overlooking the capital’s skyline from atop Zlatobýl Tower. Zlatobýl, at the very heart of Velehrad, was the tallest tower in the capital, and the yearly rent on Sabatino’s penthouse—which occupied its entire top floor—would have built two sports complexes the size of the one in Zelený Kopec.

The spectacular view was a bit limited today, unfortunately. The skies over Velehrad were dark, heavy with black-bellied clouds despite the early afternoon hour, and raindrops battered the crystoplast window. Lightning flickered behind the towers on the far side of Náměstí Žlutých Růží, pulsing in the belly of those clouds, and the rumble of thunder was loud enough to be heard despite the penthouse’s soundproofing. Sabatino glanced out into the thunderstorm’s violence and shook his head.

“Maybe we should have—seen it coming, I mean,” he said. He turned back to Šiml, and his eyes had turned hard. “Politics can be a much more dangerous game than anything Sokol sponsors, Adam. I’ll admit it never occurred to me that anything like this might happen, but maybe I should’ve remembered some of the players don’t worry a lot about the rules.”

“You know,” Šiml said, “it’s at least remotely possible this was purely personal, Karl-Heinz.” Sabatino looked skeptical, and the Chotěbořian shrugged. “I’m not saying I’m incredibly unpopular these days, but there has to be at least someone I’ve royally pissed off over the years. For that matter, don’t forget how many people did absolutely hate me back in the bad old days when we still didn’t have a cure for the komár.” He shook his head, allowing more than a trace of bitterness into his expression. “It’s hard to blame people who lost someone they loved for feeling that way…especially after Jan worked so hard to make me the scapegoat. I’d thought most of that had faded. In fact, I’m positive most of it has, looking at the ’faxes and the political columns, but this really could’ve been someone whose opinion of me hasn’t changed, you know.”

“Funny you should mention that.” Sabatino’s voice was grim, and he barked a laugh when Šiml lifted an eyebrow. “That’s exactly what Cabrnoch told me he thought had happened.”

“Well, he has to say something,” Šiml pointed out. “And to be fair—although being fair to Jan isn’t all that high on my priority list—there hasn’t been time for any kind of determination. They’re just starting the investigation, you know. It’s entirely possible he genuinely doesn’t have any better idea of who may've been behind this than you and I do.”

Sabatino snorted and looked back out into the storm. He obviously suspected that Jan Cabrnoch had a very good idea of who’d planted the bomb in the brand-new air limousine he’d provided for Adam Šiml.

“Well, we’ll see what his ‘investigation’ turns up,” he said in that same grim voice. “And I’ve already requested that Gunnar be kept apprised of its progress. Personally apprised.”

Šiml’s eyebrow rose again. Gunnar Castelbranco, the head of security in Kumar for Frogmore-Wellington and Iwahara, was a hard, ruthless, not particularly nice, but highly intelligent fellow. He was also far more concerned with getting results for his boss than about any toes he might step on in the process, and he probably knew where all the political bodies of the Cabrnoch Administration were buried. No one in that administration was likely to miss the significance of Sabatino’s insistence that Castelbranco be kept “personally apprised” of the investigation’s findings.

“I appreciate your concern, Karl-Heinz,” he said, after a moment, “but having Gunnar looking over Cabrnoch’s and Kápička’s shoulders isn’t going to make my relationship with either of them any better.”

“I realize it might have that effect,” Sabatino acknowledged. “in fact, I thought about that before I spoke to them. Some things are more important than others, though. I don’t want anything happening to you, Adam, and something damned well nearly did.” He turned back from the window and smiled thinly at his guest. “And, while I’ve come to value our personal friendship, we both know my concern here goes well beyond that.”

Šiml looked back at him, then shrugged in acknowledgment.

“Of course I understand that,” he said. “I just don’t want you getting too firmly wedded to the notion that this had to be political. It may have been. In fact, I’ll be honest and admit I find it a bit difficult to believe any of those people who might be pissed off at me would be sufficiently pissed off to try and blow me up in midair. That doesn’t mean it can’t be what happened, though. And while I appreciate that your involving Gunnar’s intended to protect me, I hope it’s not going to…further polarize my relations with Jan. I don’t think it’s going to help either of us if this dumps more poison into that relationship.”

“Be honest, Adam!” Sabatino actually chuckled as fresh thunder crashed and re-echoed over Velehrad. “‘That relationship’ was pretty damned ‘poisoned’ when he froze you out of the government in the first place. When I started pouring funds into Sokol, it got about as bad as it ever could!” He shook his head. “No, whether any of his people were actually involved in this or not, he’d have danced a jig if it succeeded, and you know it. Under the circumstances, the benefit of making him aware that I’m…casting a protective wing over you, let’s say, far outweighs any possible negatives.”

“I just don’t want this to complicate our plans, Karl-Heinz.”

“I hope it doesn’t, either, but it may actually have simplified our priorities,” Sabatino pointed out. “And,” he looked up as a uniformed maid stepped into the open living room door and knocked lightly on the doorframe, “I see supper’s about ready. Let’s let this rest until we’ve eaten. But I’ve asked Gunnar to drop in after supper to discuss getting you some full-time security of your own.” Šiml opened his mouth to protest, but Sabatino shook his head. “I’m not talking about any of our people. If nothing else, I wouldn’t want to ‘taint’ you with that off-world patina. And I’m sure you don’t want a bodyguard following you around wherever you go. But whoever tried to kill you once may try twice, or even three times, and he only has to get lucky once. Besides, after what was clearly an attempt to murder you, I doubt any of your friends in Sokol—or anywhere else, for that matter—will think it’s out of line for you to acquire at least a little protection. So be prepared to humor me on this one.”

He pushed himself up out of his chair before Šiml could respond, and laid one hand on the Chotěbořian’s shoulder.

“Now come eat before it gets cold,” he said.

* * *

“I thought I’d better screen you directly, Adam,” Minister for Public Safety Kápička said from Adam Šiml’s com. Five days had passed since the explosion had demolished Šiml’s limousine, the Zelený Kopec executive parking area, and the thankfully unoccupied cars belonging to Marián Sulák and Hana Káňová which had shared it with the limo.

“Why shouldn’t you screen me, Daniel?” Šiml cocked his head. “It’s not as if you don’t have my com combination,” he pointed out mildly.

“Well, no, it’s not,” Kápička agreed. “But this isn’t personal, Adam. It’s not even about football.”

“Actually, I sort of suspected that,” Šiml said gently. “I was trying to put you at ease.”

“I appreciate the effort, but I think I’d best get on with it.” Kápička seemed to brace himself. “Our forensics people have finished their analysis of the explosive residue. In fact, they finished it day before yesterday, but I asked Jaromír Lepič to have them run the entire test protocol again. I got the results from him about twenty minutes ago, and he’s probably passing them on to Gunnar Castelbranco right now. In fact, I’ve asked him to make sure Captain Price gets them for System Administrator Verner’s information, as well.”

“This is all sounding very ominous, Daniel.”

“What it is is embarrassing, and maybe worse than that,” Kápička said. “According to the taggants, the bomb that took out your limo came from us.”

“‘Us’? Which ‘us,’ Daniel?”

“CPSF,” Kápička sighed.

“What?” Šiml sat up straighter. “That was a Public Safety bomb?!”

“No!” Kápička said quickly. “I swear to you, Adam, that nobody in Public Safety had a damned thing to do with it! Or, at least,” he added with the air of someone trying to be scrupulously honest, “if there was any involvement by someone in my shop, it was purely personal and I haven’t been able to find a single person with a motive to harm you in any way. And the instant we got that first taggant analysis, I pulled out all the stops looking for someone like that, I guarantee you!” He shook his head. “No. The explosives were manufactured for our SWAT teams, but it looks to us like someone stole them.”

“Stole them,” Šiml repeated carefully, and Kápička waved one hand.

“I know how that sounds. It’s the only answer I can think of, though,” he said, then paused and shook his head unhappily. “Actually, as much as I hate to admit it, we have the occasional problem with CPSF equipment—including weapons, sometimes, I’m afraid…finding its way onto the black market. We do our best to keep it quiet, for obvious reasons, but it does happen. From what Lepič’s already turned up, I’m afraid this is another instance of that.”

“I see.” Šiml looked at him levelly for several seconds, then shrugged. “I can’t pretend I’m happy to hear about that, Daniel. For a lot of reasons.”