Orphan's Triumph

FORTY-FOUR

“YOU TWO SHUT UP!” Our driver slowed as his headlights lit a trench-coated Ferrent, who stood in the middle of the road ahead of us waving his arms. The flank of a sedan angled across the pavement behind him, and two helmeted infantry regulars, rifles unslung, leaned on the roadblock’s fender.

The Ferrent stepped alongside our car’s open driver’s-side window, propped one foot on the running board, and gazed up and down our phaeton’s flanks. Segmented chrome exhaust headers as thick as a woman’s thigh snaked out from beneath a hood as long as a wet-navy cruiser’s. “I know this car. From party rallies. It’s Commissioner Kost’s.”

“He’s my uncle.”

The Ferrent raised his eyebrows beneath his slouch hat’s brim. “Oh, really? Papers.” He extended a leather-gloved hand, palm up.

Our driver pulled three folded documents from inside his jacket, then handed them to the Ferrent.

The Ferrent jerked his thumb at the two infantry grunts behind him. “We’re after the bastards that ambushed the chancellors.”

In fact, the bastard they should have been after was Zeit, the remaining healthy chancellor. The saving grace of this mess was that my godson was seeing the reality of the Republican Socialist utopia that he and Planck thought they served. It was actually hell with better cars.

Our driver nodded. “Bastards. They should be shot.”

“Oh, they will be.”

Behind the Ferrent, one GI worked his rifle’s bolt. I swallowed.

The Ferrent didn’t unfold the papers, just poked his head through the window at us. “Who are you two?”

I fingered the white silk scarf drawn up around my throat, beneath a fur-collared coat that made me look like an organ grinder’s monkey. Bad enough to speak with an offworld accent. Worse, a translator disk’s rasp might not pass for natural speech.

Our driver tossed his head toward us. “Wounded veterans. Mute due to their wounds. We’re bound to my uncle’s place on the coast, for a holiday with him.”

The Ferrent raised his eyebrows. “So late?”

“The night air helps their throats.”

I bit my lip and waited for a bullet. It was the stupidest lie I’d ever heard.

The Ferrent handed back the papers as he stepped off the running board. Then he turned and waved the two soldiers to roll the blocking car back.

Five minutes later, as we drove on toward the coast, I leaned forward and said to our driver, “I can’t believe that Ferrent bought that story!”

Our driver said, “He didn’t.”

“But you stole this car from a party wheel?”

The young man shook his head. “I drive this car all the time. Everybody in Tressen knows Waldener Kost is a blatant homosexual. He isn’t my uncle, he’s my boyfriend.”

I cocked my head. “But we-”

“Waldener’s taste runs to ménage. That Ferrent knew when to look the other way.”

I squirmed in my seat. Ménage? Espionage may make strange bedfellows, but not this one.

Jude leaned forward, too. “If a party ranker is your boyfriend, why are you helping us do this?”

“I don’t know what ‘this’ is, and don’t tell me. It’s enough that I know that you two are doing something to bring down the RS. The RS has sent hundreds of thousands of homosexuals north to the death camps. Including the man I loved. Kost signed his papers himself. I will bide my time with that despicable man until the day that the RS falls. On that day I will slit Waldener Kost’s throat with a razor. Then I will watch the hypocrite bleed to death.”

I leaned toward Jude. “The anecdotal evidence is mounting.”

Jude sat back, silent, and stared out the phaeton’s window until sunrise.

For the trip up the coast, another partisan took us off the driver’s hands at the dock behind Waldener Kost’s weekend cottage. It was a spired granite seventy-nine-room chateau “purchased” by the RS from an Iridian duke whose family had built it six hundred years before but who recently felt the need to make a new life on the northern frontier. Nobody was actually at Kost’s place, least of all Kost. That suited me, because my taste doesn’t run to ménage, even het.

Our new guide could have made me reconsider.