Shadow of Victory - eARC (59 page)

* * *

“Daud, meet Lieutenant Colonel Weng,” Natsuko Okiku said.

Captain Daud al-Fanudahi looked at the woman beside Okiku. She was a good fifteen centimeters taller than Okiku, and despite her surname, she was as fair-haired and blue-eyed as Okiku was black-haired and brown-eyed. And while they were the same rank and both of them wore Gendarmerie uniform, Weng’s bore the hour-glass shoulder flash of the intelligence branch and not the scale balance of the Criminal Investigation Division.

“Colonel Weng,” he said, extending his hand.

“Sir,” she replied. Her grip was firm and she met his eyes steadily, both of which he decided—hoped—were good signs.

The three of them stood in Records Room 7-191-002-A, the same “active records repository” in which Okiku had first met with him, Irene Teague, and Bryce Tarkovsky barely two weeks earlier.

“I hope you won’t take this wrongly, Colonel,” he continued after a moment, “but I’m afraid I know very little about you.”

“Which means you wonder what the hell use I could be and that you’re a little nervous about meeting me at all,” Weng said with a smile, and he nodded.

“Rather more bluntly phrased than someone of my own exquisite tact would have put it, but, yes.”

“Well, I sure as hell hope that’s what you’re wondering,” she said. “If it isn’t—and if you’re not worrying just a little over my real motives—there’s something wrong with your brain.”

“Like I told you, Daud, Brigadier Gaddis vouches for her personally,” Okiku said.

Al-Fanudahi nodded. He was still a little bemused by the way Gaddis had swooped into “his” effort to determine who and what was manipulating the Solarian League…and to what end. He was deeply grateful, of course, but it made him more than a little nervous, too. If Gaddis had picked up on his core group’s activities, who else might have noticed them? And the sense that everything was accelerating, speeding ever more rapidly into the unknown—and the dangerous—only made that nervousness worse.

“Yes, I know,” he told Okiku, then turned back to Weng. “And if the Brigadier’s prepared to vouch for you, that’s good enough for me from a security perspective. I’m just not clear on exactly where you fit into our little conspiracy.”

“Well,” Weng said, “while you’ve been coming at this from one end, some interesting intelligence has fallen into my lap over in the Operations Division. I think Brigadier Gaddis is of the opinion that we need to combine my information with yours. Because if there’s anything to your suspicions, Captain—and I’m afraid I think there is—there’s an entirely new component you don’t know anything about yet. You see—”

Chapter Fifty-Two

“Frankly, Sinead,” Bernardus Van Dort said, “I’m not absolutely convinced Khumalo isn’t right about this.” He smiled slightly. “And I am convinced he’s not going to be at all happy when he hears about your—our—plans.”

He and Sinead Terekhov shared a table, gazing out over the ocean from the terrace of Mathonwy’s, one of Thimble’s most exclusive restaurants. Seabirds, mostly native species, but with a sprinkling of imported Old Earth gulls, rode the wind, seeming to hover motionless overhead before darting down to snatch some unwary tidbit from the water’s surface. Storm clouds were rolling in from the east, but it would be hours yet before they reached the beachfront, and the sands were littered with sunbathers above the scalloped white line of gentle surf while heads bobbed against the waves offshore.

“At the moment, the thought that the good Admiral will be…irked only increases my enthusiasm,” she told him. “And, frankly, I stopped asking anyone’s permission about my movements about sixty T-years ago.”

“Believe me, I understand.” He shook his head. “Aivars described you to me, you know. I believe one of the things he said was ‘stubborn as the day is long.’ Which, coming from him, filled me with dread, you understand.”

“I am not stubborn. In fact, I’ve never understood why the entire galaxy seems determined to apply that adjective to me.”

“Of course you haven’t.”

He sipped wine, then his expression turned serious.

“The truth is, I wouldn’t let you book passage if Gertuida wasn’t armed…and Iconoclast wouldn’t be keeping her company. I might not have been able to keep you from booking it aboard someone else’s ship, but I wouldn’t have helped you do it.” He looked at her very levelly, and she nodded.

The Rembrandt Trade Union had had transitioned into Rembrandt United Shipping when the Talbott Sector’s incorporation into the Star Empire of Manticore obliterated all internal customs duties. RUS remained the Talbott Quadrant’s biggest single shipping consortium by a sizable margin, however, although competition was beginning to appear, and the Van Dort family’s dominant position in the Trade Union had been maintained in it.

RMS Gertuida was a six million-ton freighter, not a passenger ship, but like most of the RTU’ ships she’d been equipped with a small number of extremely comfortable passenger suites for the Union’s—and now RUS’—executives. Rather fewer of the Trade Union’s ships had been armed, but not only was Gertuida one of them, she’d recently emerged from a refit in which her armament had been upgraded to Manticoran standards. Her missile defenses had been strengthened significantly, her own missiles had been upgraded to be at least as good as anything anyone outside the Grand Alliance was likely to possess, and she’d been equipped with a military-grade inertial compensator and particle screening to match. In fact, she would have made a formidable privateer, Sinead reflected. With the light cruiser Iconoclast in company, she should be more than equal to any threat she might encounter en route to Montana with her cargo of military spares, ammunition, and general stores.

And I can tell from his eyes he’s remembering what happened to his wife and daughters, she thought. I wonder if he knows Aivars told me about that?

She felt a sudden surge of tenderness for the man who’d become her husband’s friend and reached across the table to lay a hand on his forearm.

“I truly appreciate what good care you’re taking of me. Aivars is lucky to have you for a friend.”

“From where I sit, the luck’s on the other side,” he told her. Then he smiled. “You just be sure to tell him I put up a valiant struggle before you browbeat me into circumventing his station commander!”

“Oh, I promise!” she laughed.

* * *

The luxurious vessel plowed across another ocean, three hundred light-years from the Spindle System, in a white smother of spray under a dome of sky polished to dark cerulean by scudding white clouds. The wind was out of the west at around forty kilometers per hour—what was still called a Force Six on the Beaufort Scale on every planet settled by humanity—piling up four-meter waves, but the
Grażyna
was just over two hundred meters long. She’d been built to take anything up to and including a Force Eleven in stride. The Wiepolski Ocean’s current conditions weren’t even enough to impart much in the way of motion, and Tomasz Szponder and his guest sat on the afterdeck, watching the fishing lines that trailed aft from the heavy duty rods in the brackets at the corners of the deck.

Or that was what they were doing as far as any overhead imagery might have reported, anyway.

“So you and Tomek are satisfied?” Jarosław Kotarski said.

“As satisfied as we can be,” Szponder replied. “It’s the neatest solution we can think of, now that the Manties’ve promised their warships will arrive in the right time window. I’d really love to pull this entire thing off with nobody at all getting killed, but that’s unlikely.” He shook his head sadly. “The best we can say is that this way the smallest number of people are likely to be killed.”

“I’m in favor of that,” Kotarski said, yet his expression was worried.

“You know we’re not going to find a better opportunity, Jarosław.”

“Yes, I do. That doesn’t mean I’m not…nervous at the prospect.”

“And you should be. But I don’t really see Krzywicka or any of the others turning down my invitation, do you?”

“From Party Number Seventeen on this Dzień Przewodniczącego?” Kotarski laughed. “And on Szafirowa Wyspa? Oh, I think you can count on most of the aparatczycy’s attendance!”

“Exactly.” Szponder nodded. “It means coming out into the open, and that’s enough to make me at least as nervous as you are.” He shrugged. “But it’s absolutely our best chance to get all of them—probably even Pokriefke, this time—in one place, at one time, and in a situation under our control.”

“And what about Mazur?” Kotarski asked, and Szponder grimaced.

“I’ve discussed that with Radosław and Kinga,” he said. “Their opinion is that this year, he’ll have to attend.”

Kotarski still looked skeptical, but he also nodded. Radosław Kot wasn’t simply a journalist, and Kinga Kowalewska wasn’t just an artist. As it happened, Kinga—who was active on the literary café scene, as well as a well-known painter—was a confidential informant for the BBP. In fact, she’d been recruited by the black jackets specifically because of her relationship with Kot. His youthful record as a “hooligan,” which was political-speak for “troublemaking dissident,” would have made him an object of official interest even without his decision to become a newsie, so Justyna Pokriefke’s secret police had “suggested” to Kinga that if she wanted to stay out of the BBP’s black book herself, she should keep an eye on her longtime lover.

Of course, the BBP hadn’t realized both of them were already members of the Krucjata Wolności Myśli.

More to the point at the moment, Radosław and Kinga were the best analysts the Krucjata had where the day-to-day realities of the Oligarchia were concerned. Szponder was a member of the Oligarchia, but they were students of it. They’d focused their attention upon it with all the tenacity which had made Radosław a successful reporter even in Włocławek, and their grasp of its internal dynamic was actually better than his. And that meant their estimate of Hieronim Mazur’s response to an invitation to spend Dzień Przewodniczącego as Szponder’ guest was probably the best anyone could have given.

And, Kotarski conceded to himself, even he’s likely to feel compelled to…modify his routine a bit this year.

Mazur had made a point of never joining the Ruch Odnowy Narodowej. That hadn’t prevented him from contributing generously to the Party’s coffers; influence buying was an old, well understood game among the Włocławekan elites. But he’d deliberately chosen to maintain official separation between himself and the Party’s aparatczyków as part of the pretense that the RON remained the vigilant guardian of the people, dedicated to their well-being and the sworn foe of any who would oppress or exploit them. As such, he normally avoided Party functions, including Dzień Przewodniczącego—Chairman’s Day—the planet-wide holiday on which the Ruch Odnowy Narodowej celebrated its rise to power.

But this Chairman’s Day would be different. Not only would it be the thirty-fifth anniversary of the successful culmination of the Agitacja, but this year was also the one hundredth anniversary of Włodzimierz Ziomkowski’s birth. The reform party he’d founded had become something very different from anything he’d ever intended, but that only increased the fervor with which it embraced his life as the emblem of its virtue.

“I’d really prefer more preparation time,” Szponder continued, “but we’ve got a month. That should be more than long enough for the critical strike teams, and from the viewpoint of operational security, the shorter the timeframe, the less likely something is to leak to Pokriefke or any of her czarne kurtki.”

“That’s true enough,” Kotarski agreed. “And the fact that you’ve already stashed so many of Mwenge’s weapons on Szafirowa Wyspa won’t hurt, either!”

“No, it won’t.” Szponder smiled. “Remind me to thank Hieronim—later, of course—for mobilizing the fisheries for us. And just think how appropriate it is to take back Włodzimierz’s revolution on Szafirowa Wyspa! Somehow, wherever he is, I expect him to be more than a little amused by the irony, don’t you?”

Kotarski didn’t smile; he laughed.

The furiously angry planetary unrest spawned by the Lądowisko airbus shoot-down had spread to the men and women who manned the Stowarzyszenie Eksporterów Owoców Morza’s enormous fishing fleet. Over a dozen of the murdered children aboard that airbus had come from fishery families, and many of their grieving parents’ coworkers had joined their demand for justice. They’d actually had the temerity to march in protest demonstrations in downtown Lądowisko. Mazur and the SEOM management hadn’t liked that at all, so they’d made examples by terminating the dead kids’ parents for taking unauthorized time off. And they’d made it clear they’d fire anyone else guilty of the same offense.

Over a hundred other workers, some of them key low-level management employees, had defied their edict, and they’d followed through with the promised firings. It had hurt productivity, but there were always enough people on Włocławek desperate for work that the downtick had been manageable, and that had made it an acceptable price for choking off visible political unrest.

Yet that hadn’t ended the unrest in question; it had simply driven it underground. The KWM had enlisted dozens of members from the fishing boat crews and processing plant staffs even before the airbus was shot down. After Mazur’s declaration of war on political dissidence, recruiting had surged. And that meant the SEOM’s own fishing boats had transported the weapons Dupong Mwenge had supplied to the KWM across the Wiepolski to Szafirowa Wyspa, Sapphire Island, the private island the Szponder family had owned for the better part of three T-centuries.

It wasn’t an especially huge island, but at forty-one kilometers long and almost twenty-four kilometers broad at its widest point, it wasn’t exactly tiny, either. In fact, it had a total area of just under five hundred square kilometers, most of which remained in a virgin state, aside from a handful of isolated beach houses and Prezent do Praksedá, the enormous, landscaped estate Szponder’ great-great-great grandfather had built for his great-great-great-grandmother.

That much space had provided plenty of room to conceal the KWM’s small arms and crew-served weapons. And the Ruch Odnowy Narodowej’s original charter had been signed in the grand dining room of Prezent do Praksedá.

Under the circumstances, Kotarski reflected, Tomasz has a point. I’ve never been all that sure about afterlives, but if there is
one, Włodzimierz’s going to laugh his ass off if we actually make this work.

* * *

“It’s good to see you, Ma’am.” There was a twinkle in Commander Naomi Kaplan’s eye as she emphasized the rank title, and Ginger Lewis waved one hand in an airy gesture.

“Always good to maintain one’s seniority over the little people,” she said complacently, and Kaplan chuckled and looked at her own tactical officer.

“You should make a note of that, Abigail,” she advised.

“Before I can think about maintaining anything, first I have to get senior to someone,” Abigail Hearns pointed out. “Not that such an unworthy thought would ever cross my mind. Unlike you heathen Manticorans, Graysons understand how important it is to maintain an appropriate humility in our dealings with those less fortunate than ourselves.”

“Sure you do,” Ginger said. “I’ve noticed how shy and retiring you are.”

The three of them sat in comfortable chairs in her day cabin, and she smiled at the younger woman. Abigail smiled back, although there’d been some suspiciously damp eyes when they arrived aboard Charles Ward as her guests. Abigail was fairly certain it hadn’t been a coincidence Aubrey Wanderman happened to be in the boat bay, personally supervising the side party when they came aboard, either. Paulo d’Arezzo would be joining them for supper when he came off-watch in about ninety minutes, and despite his noncommissioned rank, Wanderman would be there as well.

At which point, she reflected, forty-five percent of HMS Hexapuma’s total surviving personnel would sit down around a single dinner table.

With plenty of room to spare.

“I’m only sorry you missed the Commodore and Helen,” she said as that bittersweet thought went through her.

“It happens…a lot,” Ginger observed. “And maybe it’s just as well Admiral Khumalo bumped Sinead—Ms. Terekhov, I mean—off the CW in Spindle.” She shook her head. “Somehow I don’t think finding out she’d missed him by less than forty-eight hours would have been a happy thought for her. In fact, I’m pretty sure she would have broken something. Probably a lot of somethings.” She chuckled. “That’s a lady who knows what she wants, and she’s about through waiting for the Navy to let him come home again.”

“Hard to blame her,” Kaplan said. “It’s not like they left him home very long.”

“And they do have a tendency to send him off on…challenging missions,” Abigail agreed.