Orphan's Triumph

FORTY-ONE

THE TRESSENS GREETED US with one black-uniformed honor guard company, one chancellor, one military band, and one multilingual soloist.

The band maestro jerked his baton, and the band played the Human Union Anthem, which was actually “O Canada” expanded to include a verse for each planet of the Human Union, in the planet’s principal language. French, Russian, and Chinese stood in for planets like Weichsel that hadn’t developed a principal language. If you think standing through two anthems before an international soccer game is long, try fourteen verses of the same song.

Jude stood to my right, in Tressen dress blacks. Howard and I wore our own Class-A’s, and our host wore his, while he stood facing us at attention as his nation’s band played.

However, Berbek Zeit’s black jodphur-pants uniform differed from the ground up. I had studied a Spook intel report during the trip to Tressel, a few weeks old and prepared by the Spook who fronted as Human Union cultural attaché in Tressia. Chancellor Zeit’s black jackboots were custom-made to add three inches to his five-foot, six-inch height. How the Spooks got into Zeit’s closet I didn’t need to know. The Spooks also reported that the decorations on Chancellor Zeit’s chest were phony, except for one he got for taking an enemy position in a one-room school. The position was defended by an old man armed with a cane and two dozen children. The defenders perished after the school doors were sealed from the outside and a fire accidentally broke out. In nine places simultaneously.

The Spook report concluded that Zeit “suffers from megalomania and multiple latent antisocial pathologies, exacerbated by adolescent trauma, presently manifested in authoritarian behaviors and trappings.”

In other words, he was a sadistic runt who in high school got more wedgies than handjobs and was now getting even with the world.

The Republican Socialists had emerged from Tressen’s postwar chaos to rule through a troika of chancellors. My comrade-in-arms, Audace Planck, was chosen as one chancellor because he was a hero people trusted, not because he knew politics. Zeit was chancellor for interior affairs, which had encompassed everything from rebuilding shelled-out hospitals to restoring calm on the streets. According to the Republican Socialists, Zeit was doing a great job of both.

According to our Spooks, however, Zeit was restoring calm by shipping everybody who disagreed with the RS to “pioneer” settlement camps above the Tressen Arctic Circle. The camps would “push back the frontier” and allow “those with pioneer spirit to be free.”

History credits the Nazis as “efficient,” but Zeit rendered them amateur. Poison gas and crematories were so much more complex and expensive than quietly hauling dissenters north, then herding the survivors of the journey into windswept, barbed-wire pens in the snow until they froze into ranks of meat. The operation took place out of sight, because the only way to Tressel’s Arctic was by government transport. And the RS didn’t have to dispose of the bodies. They just left them there until the snow covered them, then moved the fences and guard barracks and opened a new “pioneer settlement.”

“O Canada,” part fourteen, faded to welcome silence. The bolts of one hundred Tressen rifles crackled, then the honor guard boomed a salute that echoed off the old city’s stones.

Zeit stepped forward to greet me, and I saluted first. His complexion resembled unbaked dough, cheeks peened by acne or smallpox. His eyes, as black and frigid as the orbit of Pluto, hid behind steel-rimmed bottle-bottom spectacles.

Zeit clicked his elevator heels as he returned my salute and nodded toward Jude. “My most profound condolences, General and Vice Marshall. I know both of you and Chancellor Planck were close.”

The Spooks’ recent update had reached us only as we boarded the downship. Ten days earlier, Iridian separatists had detonated an enormous roadside bomb that had obliterated the limousine in which two-thirds of the Chancellery had been riding. Among the two chancellors, one hundred bystanders, and security troops affected, only Chancellor Audace Planck had survived, although gravely wounded. He was now clinging to life in an undisclosed location. A massive manhunt throughout Tressen would soon bring the cowardly perpetrators to justice.

Spook translation, estimated with a probability of ninety-one percent: Zeit’s Interior Chancellery goons had literally frozen the Iridian insurgency in its tracks months earlier. Therefore the Resistance no longer had the military capacity to steal a second grader’s lunch money, much less coordinate a massive car-bomb, ambush. Planck’s staff had finally snooped uncomfortably close to the genocidal truth about Zeit’s Arctic new frontier. Therefore, Zeit had bombed the rivals with whom he shared power, and blamed the Iridians. But Aud Planck had survived the bomb, wounded, had figured out who was behind it, and had gone to ground. Zeit couldn’t risk declaring Aud dead just yet, lest he pop up. So Zeit was ransacking his nation for his rival, under the handy cover of the search for the assassins.

“Thank you, Chancellor.” I raised my eyebrows. “But I understood Aud Planck was alive.”

“Yes, by God’s grace. But his injuries…” He removed his spectacles, drew a hankie from his gold-braided sleeve, then wiped his eyes. The hankie came away dry.

“How soon can I visit my old friend?”

Zeit sighed as deep as a deflating tire while he retucked his hankie and shook his head. “I’m afraid his attending physicians believe any disturbance could be fatal.”

I smiled. “To whom?”

Zeit stared at me.

I smiled again. “Aud’s a hard man to keep down. I’m sure he’s been making his physicians’ lives miserable.”

Zeit pressed his lips together in a smile and nodded. “My first experience with your sense of humor, General. A soldier salvages a light remark in the darkest moments, hey?”

I stared back at Zeit. “The dark moments lie ahead for whoever tried to kill him.”

Zeit turned his eyes down while he tugged a pocket watch on a chain from his waistcoat and read it. “Of course. Well, I assume you will wish to rest after your voyage.”

“You’re very understanding. But let’s do lunch. My diplomats will call your diplomats.”

Our motorcade through Tressia rolled from the old quarter onto boulevards scrubbed as white as bone by Republican Socialism. Jude sat with clenched fists, staring out the chugging limousine’s window as new stone buildings flashed by us, as identical as marble boxcars on a train bound in the opposite direction. “Zeit’s always been cold. But I never believed…”

Honest people believe what they’re told. I drew a deep breath. “Is he cold enough to bargain with?”

Jude spun away from the window. “You’re not serious? We can’t deal with-”

“You didn’t have a problem dealing with the RS until now. Aud’s a sand grain compared to what your RS has done to the rest of Tressen.”

He shook his head. “The RS you think you see-”

“Finally, you see it, too.”

“I don’t. A power play by Zeit doesn’t prove all that stuff about the camps. The RS you think you see could never be my RS.”

I stared out the window, at a crew of thin, bent women picking up roadside trash under guard. Each woman wore a scarlet Iridian identifying medallion. I turned away from the window. “Well, now it has to be all of ours.”