Profiteer

Paschal again, nothing that Argus’ data package hadn’t told him—

Dom felt a brief twinge of something—guilt?—over the data he’d ordered from Argus. Of course, he hadn’t told Tetsami about it. Playing things close to himself was an ancient habit, from even before the TEC had slammed security procedures into his skull.

He hadn’t told her.

Should he have?

Tetsami tapped him on the shoulder and pointed. “There he is. Let’s go.”

A short, balding gentleman was locking up the front door of the bookstore. As Dom followed Tetsami across the street, he had trouble picturing the man as either a revolutionary or a demolition expert. Dom also couldn’t picture him as part of the spearhead going into the occupied GA&A complex.

They got up behind the guy just as he was turning away from locking up the door. Levy seemed distracted. He didn’t notice Tetsami until he almost bumped into her.

Levy drew up short. “What?”

Tetsami smiled. “Hi, Johann.”

Levy let his back fall against the door and he wiped his hand across his forehead. “My dear ... I thought you’d be safely off-planet by now.”

Tetsami shrugged. “Something came up. We need to talk.”

Levy broke into a sweat. What a great recruit, Dom thought. “Do you know there’s a price on your head?”

She nodded. “Can we go in?”

Levy nodded as he gave a furtive glances up and down the street. He fumbled open the lock and hustled them into the bookstore.

Levy directed them through a display area dominated by tall shelves whose size made the man seem even smaller. The place smelled of old paper and had a sense of permanence about of it that was out of place in Godwin. The free space on the walls was taken up by portraits of socialist deities—Marx, Lenin, Mao, Cheviot.

The three of them ended up in a small windowless office in the back of the bookstore. Levy was careful to close the door behind him. He sat behind a green metal desk that was half-buried in books and papers. Tetsami opened her mouth, but Levy shushed her as he rummaged in one of the drawers.

He came out with a small electronic box. Dom recognized it. It was a basic countersurveillance field generator. It wouldn’t be perfect—it only caused a pulsing distortion of RF signals—but it was the first sign that this guy had something on die ball.

“Who’s your friend?”

Tetsami smiled. “We can talk now?”

“Believe me, I would have known long before now if my place wasn’t clean.” Levy wiped his forehead again. “Please, what’s going on?”

Dom and Tetsami had agreed that she would pitch their job. So Dom was in the unusual position of being the observer.

“As for my friend, Johann, he’s my current employer. More you don’t want to know.”

“You’re starting a job now?”

Tetsami nodded.

“They’re hunting for you! You and five, six hundred other people. There are hits every day. People are laying low just because of the crossfire. I could be set for life if I just shot you—”

“You won’t.”

Dom felt an icy chill fill his gut. Did anyone get away from this? Would there be anyone at the commune when he finally got there? If they were looking for only six hundred people, that meant that nearly a thousand were still—

Don’t think about it, you can’t do anything right now.

“Why are you so sure I won’t?” The way Levy said that made Dom tense.

“You’re too damn curious. You know I’m sitting on something pretty damn interesting if I’m out in the open at a time like this.”

Levy nodded with a weak grin. “I’m interested. I’ll admit that. What are we talking about?”

“We are talking about a share in at least a hundred megs or partnership in a corp enterprise.”

Levy’s skin took on a grayish cast. “That’s an order of magnitude way beyond anything—” He took a deep breath. “What do you need me for?”

“We need someone to crack a box.”

“What kind of safe are we talking about?”

Tetsami turned toward Dom. GA&A’s security was his area of expertise. “The safe is a custom job from Kaivaku Security. It was shipped from Kanaka five years ago and incorporated in the foundation of the building. Solid bedrock on four sides. The foundation of the building sits on top of it.”

“You have to go through the front.”

Dom nodded. “Two doors that are interlocked. Not supposed to open at the same time.”

“Doors the same construction?”

“No, the outer door is simply a delaying measure. The real problem is the inner door. It’s a meter thick. The exterior is covered with twenty centimeters of microalloyed steel. Inside the door, behind a casing of woven diamondwire monofilament, is an Emerson field generator with its own power supply. The door’s locked in place electromagnetically and is held up by a hydraulic system—”

Levy held up his hand. “I am getting a picture here, and I don’t think I can help you.”

Tetsami shook her head. “I saw you nodding, Johann. You know you can crack that safe.”

“Perhaps I can— but I’d need to be there. This isn’t a recipe job. You need an expert in the field when you try to pull this off.”

“We know,” said Tetsami.

There was an extended silence. Levy looked at Tetsami, then at Dom. The gray cast to his skin had gotten worse.

After a while Levy started shaking his head. “No.”

Tetsami tried to interrupt, but Levy kept talking. “You know I don’t get involved in the jobs. I can make plans for you. I can build an explosive to nearly any specification. Given enough time I can train you to get into any hardened— No. I don’t go into the field. I’m too old to get my hands dirty.”

Dom felt the corner of his mouth twitch. He tried to suppress it. “Do you know where this safe is, Mr. Levy?”

“That doesn’t matter—”

“Yes, it does,” Dom said. “The safe belongs to Godwin Arms.”

Levy was staring at him now. Dom allowed himself a smile. His cheek stopped wanting to twitch. “GA&A, the company the Confederacy took over.”

Realization seemed to dawn slowly on Levy. “The TEC ... I’m going to need serial numbers and exact specifications on that safe—”

Dom felt the dimple of the bio-interface on his neck. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Tetsami notice his hand move. Her eyebrow arched. She still didn’t know how much of him was hardware. Didn’t matter. “I can give you all the specs you need, all I need is a terminal interface.”

Levy wiped his forehead. “I am still not going to commit to anything until I know how you plan to move in and out without two companies of Confederacy marines erasing the team.”

Tetsami looked at Dom. Dom motioned to her to go ahead. It was still her show. “We know, Johann. Everyone is going to share the risk and the profit. No one goes in who isn’t sure about the plan.”

“Who else?”

“You’re the first we’ve contacted. We had to be sure we can crack the safe when we get there.”

“How many?”

“Two software jocks, two muscle, an electronics whiz, a driver, someone who knows Paralian ship design, and you.”

Levy looked at Dom and asked, “Is he electronics or software?”

Dom answered, “Muscle.”

“As well as our expert on the pre-Confederacy security setup at GA&A,” Tetsami said.

Levy seemed to be calming down. He had stopped sweating and the color was back in his face. “I gathered that from his description of die safe. You’d better have an expert on the inside setup. I’d feel a lot better if he were still inside.”

Dom shrugged. “If I were still inside, this job wouldn’t even be under consideration.”

“I suppose not.” Levy had an expression as though he knew something Dom didn’t. “Have you picked out the other team members?”

Tetsami shook her head. “Not all. I wanted to know if you have any ideas. You’re wired into the community. You’d know who’s available and who’d be interested.”

Levy sighed. “I should charge you for die info.”

Dom pulled out a kilogram note from the IBASC and placed it on top of one of the stacks of paper. “Consider that a retainer.”

“You don’t believe in half-measures, do you?” The kilogram note disappeared. “Off the top of my head, for your electronics and software, talk to Tjaele Mosasa. He’s two of the best free agents on this rock.”

“Two?” Dom asked.

“Talk to him.”

“Where?” Tetsami asked.

“Mosasa works out of Proudhon. He has a surplus place off the spaceport. He’ll be interested. It’ll appeal to his general misanthropy.”

Dom stood up and held out his hand. Levy didn’t take it. “Let’s wait until we have a deal.”

Dom shrugged. “You’ll hear from us.”

Levy nodded. “I’ll find that ship expert for you.”

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

War Crimes

“Ethics only become a problem when taken seriously.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“We are at a great disadvantage when we make war on people who have nothing to lose.”

—Francesco Guicciardini

(1483-1540)

It was the fifth Bakunin night since the operation had taken GA&A. During the previous two nights, perimeter defense had kept its hands full by repulsing nuisance attacks from a coalition of northern communes. There were people on this planet who really did not like the Confederacy. Even so, no real Bakunin resistance had reared its head yet.

As long as the Confed forces confined themselves to the single property, anything more was unlikely.

Tonight was quiet.

Quiet enough to allow Captain Kathy Shane to contemplate the end of her career.

Eight hundred and thirty-seven prisoners huddled below her, crammed behind the impromptu electrified barrier.

Eight hundred and thirty-seven.

That number was etched in her mind. Yesterday it was eight hundred and forty-three. Two lost to exposure, two to injuries sustained in the attack, one attempted escape, one suicide.

The suicide had been pregnant.

Eight hundred and thirty-seven.

Four hundred and ten men. Three hundred and eighty-nine women.

Thirty-eight children.

Shane stood alone on the platform the engineers had built on top of the remains of GA&A antiaircraft battery number seventeen. Kropotkin had long since set and the tiny lump of Guillaume was passing in front of the waning form of Schwitzguebel. The two moons didn’t quite give the scene a double shadow, but the presence of Guillaume managed to fuzz the edges.

Even in the dim lighting, she could make out the forms of individual prisoners. Few of them were military. They were office workers, secretaries, engineers, scientists, laborers.

As well as their families.

The armed defense of GA&A either died in the assault, or defended the evacuation of approximately six hundred personnel—nearly half of them children. The colonel was sending squads of marines on search and destroy missions to target the evacuees.

It was the fifth Bakunin night since the operation had taken GA&A.

The fifth Bakunin night since Colonel Klaus Dacham had ordered the death of all the GA&A workers.

Shane had stalled and delayed things as much as her rank and position would allow. The prisoners were to be cleared out in the morning.

What really scared Shane—and until now she had never thought herself capable of fearing anything—was the acceptance by her people of the coming atrocity. Men and women she’d been to hell with and back suddenly were strangers who talked of the impending murder of eight hundred civilians as if these people were simply another enemy asset to be disposed of.

During dinner, Second Lieutenant Murphy, a man she had known since his training on Occisis, a man she considered a good friend, had started a dispassionate discussion on the best way to dispose of the bodies. Shane had to excuse herself, go to the head, and throw up.

She shivered.

She crossed the platform of the makeshift guard tower. Engineering had been busy during dinner. Someone had actually taken Murphy seriously. Engineering had mounted a wide-aperture plasma cannon on the platform. Unlike the other perimeter defenses, this one covered the small space given the prisoners. If it was used on the civilians, they would only leave a slight shadow etched in the bedrock. Something easily bulldozed over—no disposal problem.

Shane closed her eyes and pictured the half-second the cannon would need to reach full power. A half second when eight hundred and thirty-seven people would feel the flesh melt off their bones. A half-second before they would be flashed into eternity.

Half a second could be a very long time.

It was going to be her hand on the switch.

Captain Kathy Shane cried for the first time since she’d joined the marines.

She had to be the one to carry out the order. She couldn’t let any of her people bear the responsibility of such an act. She could not pass on such a command.

But she just wasn’t capable.

She would falter, and Murphy, pragmatic as he was, would push her aside and fire the weapon. She could see him doing that, and he wouldn’t feel a damn thing.

She used to like Murphy.

Damn Colonel Dacham. Damn him straight to Hell. He was the scariest part of all of this. Shane seemed to be the only one who realized that they were under the command of a psychopath.

She was an officer, but she had risen up through the ranks. In her heart she was a grunt, and she had a grunt’s appreciation of the fact that more often than not, command was truly fucked.

She looked down at the prisoners and realized that this was beyond fucked.

The colonel should never have gotten a commission, much less a command. Even the intelligence arm of the Confederacy should have known better— Her people had been delivered into the hands of a crazy man.

Shane walked to the rail on the edge of the platform and saw Corporal Conner on watch in a nest fifty meters from the west edge of the electrified containment area. Conner was in full battlesuit and was bearing his weapon as though he hoped that someone would try to escape.

She used to like Conner, too.

She was wrong. Her people hadn’t been delivered to the colonel. They were no longer her people, and she doubted that they ever could be again.

Shane turned, passing her gaze over the huddled shadows of the civilians, and saw Corporal Hougland in the nest to the east. Hougland was also in a full suit. She seemed less tense than Conner.

Shane found herself wishing something would happen. They might be civilians down there, but there were eight hundred of them. There were only the three marines guarding them, including herself. Everything else was concentrated on defending the outside perimeter. The fence around them was far from maximum security.

Come on, she urged them mentally, you know what’s going to happen. You’re scientists down there, managers, you aren’t stupid. Don’t you realize that if you all decided to break for it at once, we couldn’t stop you? You haven’t got anything to lose—

Shane stopped still. A chill wind iced across sweat on her brow. She smiled.

“Neither do I.”

Her radio spoke in her ear. “What was that, Captain?” It was Conner. He was way too hyped.

Shane put her helmet on and switched on the night enhancement. After all, she really didn’t have anything to lose. Even if she managed to follow orders, any officers involved in the massacre would be fed to a Confederacy court-martial while the colonel vanished back into the TEC.

Shane would rather be court-martialed for mutiny.

“Corporal Conner, I thought I saw some motion beyond the perimeter. West flank, your area.”

Conner acted predictably, whipping around to cover his rear. He turned his back to Shane. “I don’t see anything, Captain.”

“Cover your flank, Conner. You, too, Hougland.”

Hougland gave her a thumbs up and turned away from Shane.

The only problem now was the range on her stunner. Shane killed her transponder and started down from the platform. She’d have to get Conner first. He was the one most likely to do some damage.

She got to the ground, which was still cracked and blackened from the missile hit on the tower. Hougland radioed her. “Captain, I don’t see anything.”

“Keep your area covered. I’ve seen movement west of Conner’s position. I’ve called the ship for backup.”

Conner was hearing this. He was green; this operation was his first fire mission. Shane knew he was going to see the shadows grabbing for him. She had to reach him before he started shooting, or the other marines would land on her real quick.

What are you doing, Shane? she asked herself. This was her whole life she was about to fuck with.

She could feel her pulse in her ears, and she had a copper taste in her mouth. She became aware of things she’d been safely ignoring a few minutes ago: the soft crunch of her boots on the burnt ground, the sound of her breathing echoing in her helmet, the rhythmic—almost subliminal—movement of the prisoners behind the fence to her left, the way the suit’s harness pulled into her crotch and her shoulders with each step.

She called up the tactical database. It projected the status of Hougland and Conner on the inside of her visor. Hougland’s suit was on full power, but Conner was only running on three-quarters because he had his suit on full environmental containment. If she wasn’t about to attack him, Shane would have reprimanded him for wasting the power. As it was, with the recycler going in his suit, a Paralia Leviathan could sneak up on the corporal.

Shane reached the corner of the prisoner compound and stopped. She wasn’t committed yet.

She told the computer to interpret Conner and Hougland as targets. The computer took in the information without comment and immediately the threat alarm beeped in her ear. 28.5 meters and 105.3 meters. Conner’s form was outlined in red on her visor and the computer started going through the spectrum to get a full image of him, even through the sloped dirt lip of the nest.

“Captain, where the fuck are you?” Shit, Hougland had something on the ball. She’d probably noticed Shane wasn’t on the tac database any more. Now what?

“I’m scouting the perimeter. We’re in a threat situation, I want radio silence. Kill your transponders. Hold your flank. I don’t want to hear anything unless you’re in trouble.”

Shane smiled. That bought some time. Hougland wouldn’t question orders in the middle of combat, no matter what she thought of them. Conner and Hougland dropped from the database as they killed their transponders. The computer was smart enough to retain the last information and integrate it into the threat analysis computer.

Shane advanced on Conner. According to the last information on the tac database, he had—predictably—his personal field on full. That would have caused Shane some problems if she wanted to clean him with an energy weapon. Fortunately, this mission had equipped everyone for covert ops. So Shane had a high-energy personal stunner. It was a special military issue that sucked energy like a plasma rifle, but it was designed to interact with standard-issue military defenses. It would turn a defense screen into a momentary stun field.

Its only problem was the fact that it only had a five-meter range.

Shane was within ten meters of Conner’s position, and she activated her suit’s ECM capability. It was another power drain, but she didn’t want Conner to be able to reach anyone on his radio, or track her on his own threat computer. Hougland might notice a distortion by Conner, but the risk of that was less than the risk of Conner IDing her to the whole compound.

Seven meters to Conner and the corporal started panicking. Shane knew he had just noticed the ECM. His radio was jammed, his radar was probably blowing all over his scope, and his display was probably fuzzed and rolling. Remember your training, Conner, she urged him. Don’t shoot until you have a target. If you don’t panic, we’ll both get out of this alive.

Six meters. This was her last chance to turn back.

Five meters and Conner turned around. Shane could see his eyes widen. He was sweating and hyperventilating in his suit. His weapon bore down on her, and for a moment Shane thought Conner was hyped so much that he would shoot first.

Instead, Conner’s face showed recognition, and he was visibly relieved to see her.

Shane shot him with the stunner.

An electric-blue ripple of static electricity shot across Conner’s suit, and the corporal dropped. Shane killed the ECM. Hougland’s transponder was still off-line, and there were no transmissions back to the ship. Hougland didn’t know Conner had dropped.

Conner was draped face-first over the lip of the hole that formed the nest. Shane put her foot on his shoulder and pushed him back in. She turned around and saw, ten meters back, a line of prisoners hovering beyond the fence, watching her. Not knowing what to do, she held up one finger to her visor and hoped that they had enough sense not to fuck up their own rescue.

That was it. Shane was committed now. Things would be over for her the second Conner woke up. That could be anywhere between one and three hours.

Shane headed east, toward Hougland. To Shane’s right, in the prisoners’ compound, more of the civilians were waking and turning toward her. Shane prayed that it wouldn’t draw Hougland’s attention. If Hougland turned before she got within ten meters, Shane might have to use deadly force.

If at all possible, Shane would like to avoid that.

So far, Hougland was covering her flank like the professional she was. Hougland was counting on Shane and Conner to cover her back.

Shane was fifty meters along the containment database, and there was a blip on the tac database.

Shit. Shane almost said it out loud. It was Murphy. He had just turned on the transponder in his suit. One hundred twenty seven meters south-southeast and closing. Damn it, Murphy was supposed to be off-duty at this time of night.

She was thirty meters from Hougland and running out of options.

She couldn’t have Hougland picking up any radio, so Shane activated the ECM. It was much too soon. If Hougland was in range, it was just barely. Shane started running full tilt toward her.

Fifteen meters and Shane cleared the edge of the prisoners’ compound. Hougland was trying to ID the source jamming her electronics. It was only going to be a second before she looked back and saw Shane running toward her like a maniac.

Shane looked to her right, and she saw Murphy. He wasn’t moving with any urgency—

Maybe she could still pull it off.

Hougland turned around and leveled a standard-issue MacMillan-Schmitt wide-aperture plasma rifle at Shane. Without even thinking about it, Shane made the universal gesture to hit the dirt. She hoped that her expression showed all the fear of God to Hougland. The corporal had a split-second decision to make.

Hougland took cover in the nest.

Shane reached the lip of the nest and dived in, firing the stunner. Even when she woke up, Hougland might not be sure what hit her.

Shane landed on top of Hougland’s body armor and killed the ECM. The tac database showed Murphy closing on her position. However, she wasn’t picking up any radio traffic. She was in luck, Murphy hadn’t seen her dive in on Hougland. Or, if he did, he wasn’t sure what he saw.

Now what?

Murphy was a pro. He might only be out for a walk, but once he closed on the prisoners, he’d turn on his database and notice the absence of all three transponders. He’d radio that kind of regulation breach back to base immediately.

He was now within seventy meters.

Thank God the prisoners were being quiet.

She was going to have to meet him out there and try to bull her way through.

Shane turned her transponder back on and climbed out of the nest. She took a few deep breaths to calm herself, and started walking toward Murphy. She could feel eyes looking at her out of the darkness. Suddenly the whole GA&A complex was enemy territory. She was heading toward the Blood-Tide, and the heavily-armed drop-ship was no longer reassuring. It was sinister.

Shane and Murphy approached each other, and Shane prayed she reached him before he turned on his database.

“Captain, what are you doing out here?”

Murphy was radioing her. She was still over fifty meters away from him. “I couldn’t sleep. I relieved Clarke.” That was true, as far as it went.

She could hear Murphy snort over the radio. Murphy had no tolerance for things that didn’t go according to program. He rarely, if ever, voiced his displeasure when a superior decided to improvise, but it seemed that this was one of those rare occasions.

“With all respect, Captain, you should be back at the compound at Clarke’s position. I believe you’ve heard my opinion that your guard detail on the prisoners is understaffed as it is.”

Shane knew that well. She kept advancing. Twenty meters. “There weren’t any personnel allowances made for guarding that number of people. If it weren’t for the missions into Godwin—”

“Again, with all respect, we wouldn’t have this problem if you had been more timely in carrying out the colonel’s orders.” Murphy actually interrupted her. He must be really stressed.

Fifteen meters. “I don’t believe there is a problem.”

“Captain,” Shane could make out Murphy’s face now. It was lined and he was practically grimacing. She was beginning to detect the anger in Murphy’s voice. He didn’t know, but he suspected. “I think you’ve had a problem with this mission ever since planetfall.”

Since before that.

They were within ten meters of each other now. To their right was the burnt-out foundation of the old GA&A security building. A slight smell of smoke still filled the air and managed to be cycled into Shane’s suit

Murphy stopped his approach.

“I’ve voiced my reservations to the colonel. I don’t see how they’re your concern, Lieutenant.”

Seven meters. Murphy unlimbered his weapon and pointed it at Shane. “The mission is my concern, and it is my concern when my superior officer is behaving erratically.”

Oh, God, Shane thought, this is it. She slowed her approach. Was he monitoring the radio traffic at the compound? Was that why he was here? “Are you going to shoot me with that, Murphy?”

Murphy backed up a step. “I think you intend some sort of mutiny.”

“You’re going to kill your superior officer because of your own paranoia?”

This obviously wasn’t going as Murphy had planned. “I heard your radio transmission to Conner and Hougland— There’s no enemy out there. What the hell do you think you have them doing?”

Shane began closing. She hoped her renewed confidence was showing in her voice. “You dimwit, Murphy, you know how green Conner is. The only way his performance is going to improve is if I throw him some curves—”

Six meters.

“You should have cleared it with—”

She had him now. “I was not under the impression that regulations required me to clear training exercises with inferior officers. I’m going to ask you again, Lieutenant Murphy, are you going to shoot me with that thing?”

Murphy was no longer angry. He was scared. He should have been. If Shane had been telling the truth, he was the one looking at a court-martial. He lowered the gun.

Shane smiled and shook her head. “You’re lucky you didn’t get shot, Murphy. Go back to your quarters, consider yourself under house arrest.”

Murphy wordlessly nodded behind his helmet and began to walk back to the ship. Shane followed him, five meters behind. “One question, Lieutenant. Do you have any accomplices in this fiasco, or did you engineer this on your own initiative?”

Murphy sighed. “I did this on my own. No one even knows I’m out here.”

Shane turned on the ECM and shot him with the stunner. Murphy dropped like a stone before he knew what hit him.

Shane stood beside Murphy, waiting for the alarms to sound. None did. Nobody had seen Murphy drop. He’d told the truth. No one knew he was out here.

Shane rolled him into the ruin of the old GA&A security building and pulled some wreckage over him.

Then, with one last look at the Blood-Tide, she turned toward the prisoners’ compound. She would have an hour, an hour and a half at best.

She sincerely hoped that someone in the mass of prisoners would know where the hell they could go.

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Executive Session

“Governments are always more at risk from their subjects than they are from external threats.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“A Great Power doesn’t ask if it should dominate lesser nations. If it’s a Great Power, it can, and it does.”

—Boris Kalecsky

(2103-2200)

It had been a month and a half since the intel briefing on Mars. The diplomatic invasion of Earth had begun.

Dimitri Olmanov had participated in every Terran Congress since the drafting of the Charter. The coming Congress was number eleven, the first one of the Confederacy’s second century.

The Congress would convene in a little over two standard months. The politicking had started in earnest.

The Congress had three functions: rewriting the political boundaries of the Confederacy, admitting and promoting member planets and, most importantly, modifying the Confederacy Charter, the document that made the whole shebang run.

The most important dynamic was the number of prime seats in the Congress. Dimitri was reminded of that every time he thought of Bakunin. Primes consisted of forty-three seats out of seventy-five—or eighty-three if you counted the probationary members admitted in the last Congress.

Sirius and Centauri, between them, had twenty-two of those prime seats. They’d controlled a majority of primes since the founding of the Confederacy. That meant that, for a century, the two wealthiest and—as the other three arms were fond of pointing out—most European arms of the Confederacy had dominated the Congress.

Nothing lasts forever.

The 11th Congress might see the power shift. Promoting planetary seats was a basic function of the Congress. A planet usually rose through the ranks—probationary, nonvoting, voting, full, and, finally, prime.

Conventional wisdom had it that six planets would jump from full to prime. Two from the Alpha Centauri Alliance, one from the Sirius Community, three from the remaining arms of the Confederacy. If conventional wisdom held, that meant that Cynos and Occisis would retain their one prime majority, the slimmest majority they’d ever had, but still a majority.

The problem with conventional wisdom was that it was usually wrong.

Dimitri walked through the diplomatic compound with Ambrose. It was the first time he’d been out of Confederacy tower since his return from Mars. The building rose behind the two of them, nearly a kilometer into the Australian sky. The spire was a monument to hubris, a large proportion, Dimitri knew, his own.

“Another sin,” Dimitri said, swatting the landscaping with his cane.

“Sir?” Ambrose said.

Dimitri shook his head. “Pride. I wonder if the Dolbrians were as proud of their Face as we are of our government.”

“I wouldn’t know, sir.”

“Of course you don’t. No one does. That’s the beauty of it. A hundred million years and this will all be so much dust. All this so-important bean counting.”

Dimitri saw the plaintive nonexpression that usually meant that the remains of his companion’s brain had lost the thread of the conversation. The literal-minded Ambrose was probably picturing the counting of beans.

Dimitri sighed.

The secure diplomatic compound huddled around the foot of the tower, as if in worship. The area was landscaped within an inch of its life. Every single speck of gravel had been hand-placed and was monitored by security. Bushes, fountains, and flowers were everywhere.

The scene was about as natural as Ambrose.

The knowledge that every second bush held monitoring equipment deadened the garden for Dimitri even more. It was a much more concentrated form of the same maniacal human control that was strangling Mars.

Eventually he walked into a utilitarian building inside the Centauri compound. The unpretentious building was unmarked. It could have been a storehouse or gardener’s shack.

In fact, it housed the offices of the second most powerful man in the Confederacy.

Dimitri was here to see Pearce Adams, Archeron representative to the Terran Congress, Centauri Alliance delegate to the Terran Executive Command, vice-president in charge of security for the Centauri Trading Company, and the head man of the Centauri intelligence community.

Ambrose followed Dimitri down stairs that led underground and into an office complex three times the size of the building above. Dimitri pressed no buttons, used no keys, and talked to no guards, but the secure doors opened for him anyway.

In the security-blanketed area around the tower, Dimitri doubted that there was a single door that wouldn’t.

When Dimitri walked into Adams’ Terran office, the first thing he noted was that Adams had the temperature down to its lowest setting. Adams sat at his desk, in shirtsleeves, and still looked uncomfortably hot. Dimitri didn’t shed his jacket. The cold brought back joint aches he remembered from Mars.

Dimitri wondered whether Adams was homesick or simply trying to irritate him.

The only decoration in the office was a holo on the wall, an image of low-gravity mountains gripped in an endless sunlit blizzard. Occasionally the virtual ice caught the double sun and cast multiple rain—actually ice— bows.

Dimitri decided that Adams was homesick.

“I’d prefer to talk alone,” Adams said by way of introduction.

Ambrose showed no reaction.

Dimitri looked at his companion and decided it would gain him nothing to argue the point, even though the last thing Ambrose was was a security risk. “Wait outside, Ambrose,” Dimitri said.

“Very good, sir.”

Ambrose would walk out until he’d reached fifty meters and stop. The door closed behind him, leaving Dimitri and Adams alone with the Archeron blizzard on the wall.

“What did you want to see me about?” Adams asked.

Dimitri didn’t sit. He folded both hands on top of his cane and leaned forward. “I wanted to know why two of the SEEC seats dissented on the Rasputin vote.”

Adams looked at Dimitri a little oddly. “Perhaps you should talk to the Sirius Community about—”

“I don’t wish to talk to Kalin Green—yet.”

Adams sat with an impassive expression, unmoved.

“Shall I expound a theory of mine?” Dimitri asked.

“Go ahead. I still fail to see your point.”

“You will.” Dimitri turned toward the holo as he talked. “Setting Rasputin up for a proposal required a few years of preparation. Preparation that fell mostly to you and the Community, because it was a Sirius-Centauri proposal.”

“So?”

“Those two dissenting Community votes, theoretically, could have cost those years of investment.”

“If it wasn’t for Indi abstaining.”

Dimitri smiled at the frozen holographic landscape. “Now why did they do that?”

Adams didn’t respond.

“The coalition Indi is crafting shouldn’t like Rasputin, should they? They see the whole operation, legalities aside, as a bad precedent for TEC interference in planetary affairs. And because of the Centauri-Sirius monopoly on prime seats, they see the TEC as a tool of the Europeans.”

Dimitri turned around and faced Adams. “Obviously, Indi decided to ignore the obvious. They wanted Rasputin to pass.”

Adams smiled. “Why would they want to do that?”

“The same reason you wanted it to fail.”

“Can you get to the point without the obscure Machiavellianism?”

Adams was one of the few members of the Terran Congress who wasn’t enamored of diplomatic forms and procedures. If Dimitri admired Adams for anything, it was his bluntness. That and the fact that Adams was secure enough to talk that way to Dimitri. Few others dared.

“The point,” Dimitri said, “is the fact that this coming Congress has the potential of disrupting the power structure of the Confederacy. Indi is on the ascendancy. Their expansion during the last century is paying them with seats on the Congress; their coalition will have a majority on a straight vote shortly into the promotion process.”

“So far this is all common knowledge.”

“Is it common knowledge that Indi plans to bump some nonvoting seats in the Congress straight to prime?”

Adams’ expression cracked a bit. It was fractional, the man had terrific control, but it was obvious that Dimitri had just hit a point that disturbed him greatly. Slowly Adams said, “That is a severe breach of form.”

“Form, yes,” Dimitri said. “Law, no. Promotion through the ranks is traditional but not compulsory. All a planet has to achieve is continuous human occupation for eighty years and a population over half a billion.”

“And its name on the Charter.”

Dimitri nodded. “And its name on the Charter. There’s even a precedent—”

“The first five primes were promoted immediately upon signing the Charter. Yes I’m aware of that. I fail to see what any of this has to do with Rasputin.”

“Everything,” Dimitri said.

* * * *

Robert Kaunda sat in one of the Hotel Victoria’s private dining rooms. The hemispherical holo that surrounded him and the Protectorate delegate created the illusion that they were alone on the roof of the hotel. The open sky and the Pacific’s surf were both fake, as was the sprawl of the Confederacy’s capital city behind them. In reality, they were a few layers behind guards and other diners.

What counted was the fact that they were isolated behind that holo just as well as if they were really dining alone on top of Sydney’s premier hotel.

Kaunda drank his tea and repeated himself. “Even if it is, as you say, a win-win situation, I do not like giving the Confederacy—especially the Executive—this kind of power.”

Sim Vashniya, the delegate to the Executive Command from the People’s Protectorate of Epsilon Indi, representative to the Terran Congress from Shiva, and the Gods knew what else, reclined on a chair considerably higher than Kaunda’s, his expression betraying nothing but slight amusement. “You were satisfied with my reasoning before—”

“That was when we were counting seats. As you kept pointing out, the Centauri Alliance and die Sirius Community had a majority. But with those two Sirius dissenters we could have blocked the whole thing.”

Vashniya sat impassively. Kaunda thought that the dwarfish Shivan looked like some graven icon, carved from nutwood. Like something the gift shops on Mazimba might sell to rich tourists from Waldgrave or Banlieue. The kind of thing that old women in Mulawayo knocked off by the hundreds to sell to the off-worlders at 100 credits each. After the tourist shops took their cut, it amounted to a credit an hour—if the women were lucky. It let them eat.

“Well?” Kaunda asked.

“Yes, we could have blocked it. That, in fact, was why two of the Sirius votes dissented.”

Kaunda set down his tea. “Pardon?” He didn’t like these intelligence games, political games. He’d gotten to represent the intelligence community of the Union of Independent Worlds—such as it was—by being a strong leader and taking no shit from his seconds. The trail might be a little bloody, but it was less bloody than those of most of his contemporaries on Mazimba. However, being chief of police in Mulawayo, and then chief of intelligence for the whole planet of Mazimba, had never trained him for subtlety. It forced him to trust his betters in those matters, like Vashniya, and he didn’t like trusting people.

“Nothing in an Executive delegation happens by accident. Those two Sirius votes were well planned.”

“They wanted the proposal to fail.” Kaunda kept his voice flat, betraying none of his surprise.

After a moment of thought, Kaunda realized that they might not want TEC involvement. “They expected us to be solidly against and defeat them twenty-two to twenty. But if they wanted it to fail, why bring up the proposal?”

Vashniya patted his beard. “Rasputin is no spur of the moment enterprise. The latter phases of the plan have required nearly five years of delicate groundwork by the Centauri and SEEC intelligence services. They needed the TEC to allow them that.”

“I see.”

The TEC jealously guarded its place in the Confederacy intel community. If any planet, or group of planets, decided to do this kind of covert action unilaterally ...

Well, it would be bad.

“So,” Kaunda said, “the proposal to the TEC was a smoke screen—”

“To cover the realignment of the Centauri and Sirius intelligence apparatus. They wanted the idea to be shot down.”

“But they were—still are—primed to slip in on their own before the TEC could intervene.” Politics was a twisted arena. Things were much simpler when he was just a policeman.

“Just so. The plan was to set up the groundwork for Rasputin, have the TEC proposal fail, then slip in SEEC or Alliance military with no TEC involvement, and take over. Then they’d present the Congress with a fait accompli.”

“But because of the Protectorate’s abstention, the TEC is in charge of this.”

“And we have a hand in.” Vashniya smiled a little wider.

“I think I liked it better when we were simply divorcing ourselves from the operation.”

“Oh, we’ve done that. And more.” Vashniya looked out over Sydney. “When the dust settles, when the Congress meets for the first time in this new century, we are finally going to see the Europeans lose their primacy. Take the long view, Kaunda.”

Kaunda looked out over Sydney as well but said nothing.

“If the operation fails, it fails. But if it succeeds ...”

“If,” Kaunda said.

* * * *

It took him over a month to leave Mars.

It was harder to do than he had ever imagined. In his nine years he had grown attached to the severe landscape, the lethal weather, and, most of all, the isolation.

Even the knowledge that, fifteen light-years away, all hell was about to break loose on Bakunin, couldn’t hurry him. The events on Bakunin were, in a real sense, over already. What mattered was the coming Terran Congress and what would happen there.

After all this time, what disturbed him was the fact that he would be among large numbers of people for the first time in nine years.

Eventually he left the empty crystalline fairyland he’d lived in for so long, paid his respects at a lonely grave, and started the long walk to the nearest settlement.

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Silent Partners

“Artificial Intelligences are feared more for the latter than the former.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“These thinking machines are an offense against God!”

—August Benito Galiani

(2019-*2105)

Dom kept his eyes on the road while Tetsami kept her gaze locked on him. The new contragrav truck slid down the tunnel as if the tube were designed for it, not for maglev commuter traffic.

“I don’t see why you had to buy it,” she said when the silence got too long.

“We need the tunnel to make this work.”

“I know,” Tetsami said. She turned away from his deadpan expression.

The Godwin-Proudhon commuter tunnel shot by them, the magnets sliding past like a silent heartbeat in a giant concrete vein. They were well under the forest east of Godwin now. If they were lucky, ahead lay an unbroken subterranean highway that traveled nearly all the way to Proudhon.

They were combining an inspection tour with their visit to their potential electronics whiz, and—Tetsami had to admit—this was certainly a low-profile way to travel.

“But did you have to buy it? It’s not like anyone’s guarding the entrance.”

“You’re concerned about the money?”

“Hell, yes, I’m concerned about the money. I never thought I’d see the day when half a meg seemed like limited resources—”

“The tunnel was a relatively cheap investment.”

“Cheap?” Tetsami nearly gagged. “Put aside the fact I doubt those leeches at the Mahajan bank have ever given anyone a deal. You shelled out nearly one hundred K for this white elephant.”

“Like I said, an investment.” Dom’s finger began tapping on the control stick. “Tetsami, don’t think of the money we’re spending. At this point I am totally committed to this operation.”

“What if something goes wrong with it?”

Dom put a hand to the side of his face. “For me, that is not an option.”

The flat way Dom said that chilled Tetsami. It was not the first time she was a little scared of her partner. She looked away from the expressionless stare he was casting out down the tunnel. The computer was guiding the contragrav, but he had yet to look at her during their conversation. She wondered if there were something down the tunnel only he could see.

Tetsami wished she’d gotten hold of Ivor. She’d feel better with him in the driver’s seat, even though the computer was driving. Unfortunately, Ivor’s old message drop said he was out on a run somewhere and wouldn’t be back for three days or so.

She looked at Dom and moved the conversation to a different subject.

“How’s the cover story holding up?”

“The bankers bought the innuendo, and the rumors are spreading nicely. One place where I was pricing mining lasers, the proprietor informed me that he could direct me to an off-planet buyer who would be very interested in Dolbrian artifacts.”

Was that actually a ghost of a smile she saw?

Their cover was a very simple deception, explaining the purchase of the defunct Godwin-Proudhon commuter tube as well as masses of digging equipment, lasers, and things more esoteric. The Dolbrians—named for the first planet where concrete evidence was found of successful nonhuman terraforming—were a race that flourished perhaps a million centuries ago. The Dolbrians had scattered traces of themselves all over Confederacy space, not the least of which were the massive structures on the plains of Cydonia on Mars.

However, the most common artifacts to survive the hundred million years since their disappearance weren’t ruins, buildings, or any form of technology. The most common evidence of the Dolbrians was the planets they’d terraformed.

Depending on the expert, there were anywhere from five to two dozen Dolbrian planets in the Confederacy. Planets that shouldn’t—couldn’t—have life, an atmosphere, or be remotely habitable without some form of intelligent intervention. Planets in triple sun systems, planets orbiting too close to—or far from—their primary, planets orbiting suns too young, too old, too weak....

As far as Dolbrian planets went, Bakunin—orbiting a weak orange-red sun that never even rated a real name before humans arrived—was on the shortlist of possibilities. Very short, considering that Dolbri was Bakunin’s closest inhabited neighbor. Every once in a while a herd of academics would brave the violent politics and go up in the hills, or out in the ocean, and try to unearth some physical evidence of the Dolbrian presence.

The fact that not so much as one kilo of worked stone had surfaced did not discourage them. After all, a hundred million years is a long time.

And treasure hunting for alien artifacts was just the kind of harebrained scheme that some wealthy homegrown Bakunin nutballs might come up with. It certainly covered for their plans for much more practical treasure-hunting, as well as explaining the digging equipment.

“Do you think there might actually be some Dolbrian artifacts under the Diderot range?” she asked.

She saw a smile, perhaps, or maybe only a trick of the light reflecting back through the windshield. “The Dolbrians,” Dom said, “are a myth propagated to explain a handful of Martian rock formations and the fact that we have no coherent theory explaining the evolution of habitable planets.”

As usual, she couldn’t read his expression. “You believe that?”

He shook his head. “Not any more ...”

After a few seconds, Tetsami said, “You trailed off, what were you about to say?”

“Sorry, caught myself in a memory. A long time ago.”

Tetsami decided to let it lie. She knew practically nothing about Dominic’s background, and she had decided, after he admitted to once being a TEC officer, that it was a good thing. Since their discussion on top of the Waldgrave Hotel, she had avoided questioning him on any part of his life prior to his involvement in Godwin Arms & Armaments. She tried hard not to acknowledge the curiosity she felt.

Dom might have sensed her unvoiced inquiry, or he might have just been in an unusually loquacious mood. In any case, he volunteered, “I’ve been to Cydonia.”

“You have?” Against her better judgment she felt her curiosity piqued.

Dom nodded. “Long time ago. When I was still in the Executive Command. Since the atmosphere became breathable, a lot of old bunkers, terraforming bases, academic retreats were mothballed. The TEC uses them occasionally for secure meetings, safe houses, private retreats. The largest concentration of them is around Cydonia.”

Tetsami couldn’t help but smile. It was rather amusing picturing the archaeological find of the millennium swarming with spies and secret police. Certainly, it was out of the way.

“Anyway,” Dom continued, “when I expressed my belief to a superior on Mars, he took me out on the plains to show me the Face. Said he wanted to teach me a little about humility.”

The van drove on in silence for a while before Tetsami said, “Did it?”

“Hmm?”

“Did it teach you humility?”

For the first time since she’d met him, she heard Dominic Magnus laugh.

* * * *

The ill-fated commuter tube never quite made it to the Proudhon Spaceport, its intended destination. The tunnel ended a few klicks away from the city limits in a tangle of scaffolding and abandoned equipment. Financial disaster had killed the project in mid-stroke.

Dom parked the contragrav behind a massive digging machine that no one seemed to have thought worthy of salvage. He departed to find some access to the surface, and Tetsami was left by the scaffolding. It looked like the two of them might be the first people down this way since the project collapsed. Certainly no one had come down here from the Godwin end. Down by Godwin, the tunnels were a warren of garbage, graffiti, and the occasional squatter.

Here, under the frosted glare of the truck’s headlights, the tunnel was almost pristine. Up to the start of the scaffolding, the rock tunnel was sheathed in white tile, and the magnets were still firmly fixed behind their white plastic housing. Chrome trim was only slightly dimmed by an old layer of dust. The digging machine filled the dead end of the tunnel, behind ten meters of scaffolding. It resembled a giant insect frozen in the midst of a kill, arms stopped halfway to the rough rock wall. A burrowing monster that a mountain range couldn’t stop.

Tetsami opened the door in the head of the beast and looked over the thing, pulling herself inside. It was obvious why it had been abandoned. The magnets in the walls reduced the effective diameter of the tunnel by a meter. The machine would’ve had to be disassembled to get it out.

Tetsami smiled as she settled into the control seat and ran her hands over the inactive control panels. Nice little beast, this. A cylindrical body resting on all-terrain treads, a dozen arms in the front bearing drills, lasers, digging gear, built like a tank. Definitely an unsubtle vehicle. Tetsami liked it.

Too bad there was no way to get it out of its hole.

After a while, Dom returned. He’d found an access port that made it all the way to the surface. Tetsami left the digging machine, noting that it had a port for a bio-interface.

The maintenance shaft opened on a gentle slope that was relatively free of trees. The vantage gave a panoramic view of the city of Proudhon, and especially of the sprawl of the spaceport.

It was the first time Tetsami had seen a city other than Godwin. At least it was the first time she’d seen one when she wasn’t on the business end of a wire.

As they walked down the gravel slope, more and more of the port became visible. Barely ten seconds would pass without something lifting off or landing. It was impossible, for a while, to separate the port from the city. It might have been because, for the most part, the port was the city. Proudhon Spaceport was like a mutant chrome-neon plant that sent branches sprawling across the land, sprouting landing facilities like giant concrete leaves. Parts of it weaved into the city, surrounded it, to the point where old landing strips became avenues for ground traffic, grounded luxury liners became hotels, and high-rises became control towers.

The sprawl was lorded over by a knot of white marble towers in the center of the city, the only sign of order in the midst of the chaos. Those white towers were the home of the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation, probably the wealthiest enterprise on the planet.

Thinking how hard it must be to direct traffic in that chaos gave Tetsami a headache. Then, again, the Proudhon Spaceport Development Corporation was pretty firm in its enforcement of their traffic patterns. They had a lot of antiaircraft batteries.

“Do you know where we’re going?” Tetsami asked as she realized just how big the spaceport was.

Dom nodded. “Mosasa’s Surplus place is over there.”

He pointed at the fringe of the city/spaceport. In a vast, flat, stretch of land that spread away from both the foothills and the city, were ranks upon ranks of parked spacecraft. As Tetsami stared, she realized that all those craft, parked in formation below her, were derelicts. Some were missing control surfaces, others lacked drive sections, cabins, landing gear. In many cases, the original markings were obscured by age, but what she could see came from all quarters of the Confederacy.

A few of those ships could have been military, and a lot of them looked as though they’d been shot down.

No one stopped them as they descended from the foothills and began to walk between the endless ranks of dead spacecraft. It was eerily quiet; even the hectic activity of Proudhon Spaceport didn’t seem to leak in here.

“Damn,” Tetsami said, “Tjaele Mosasa must have the concession on every abandoned or shot-up spacecraft that passes through this place.”

“It’s quite a profitable salvage arrangement with Proudhon Spaceport Security.” The voice wasn’t Dom’s.

They both turned around to see a squashed sphere, about a meter along its wide diameter. It was floating about eye-level with Tetsami. It aimed at least three different sensor devices at them. The voice came from somewhere within the brushed metal shell. “The lady and the cyborg, here to see Mosasa?”

Cyborg? What’s that thing looking at?

The device began a slow orbit around them, just wide enough to avoid bumping into the spacecraft that marched away on either side of them.

“Afraid he’s busy,” it said. “Can I help you?”

Tetsami watched the floating lump of salvage, fascinated. There had to be a contragrav unit in mere.

“We need to see Mr. Mosasa.”

The machine made a derisive noise, as if it had been insulted. Tetsami began to wonder who, exactly, was operating the thing. It didn’t sound like they were conversing with a security program.

“May I ask who’s calling?”

Dom said, “No.”

The machine tilted itself at what could only be called a sarcastic angle. “Oh, really now. Do you expect for me to disturb him for a couple of street flotsam who won’t even—”

“Johann sent us,” Dom said.

The robot righted itself and said, somewhat petulantly, “You could have said that right off. Follow me.”

With that, the flattened sphere spun on its axis and sped down the aisle between the spacecraft at a brisk walking space. It floated off for about ten meters, spun back, and asked, “What are you waiting for?”

They followed.

As they walked behind the device, weaving between the ranks of spacecraft, Tetsami asked, “Who do you suppose is flying that thing?”

Ahead, without changing course or slowing down, the robot turned around against and regarded her with its triple video array. “The name is Random Walk, Miss. An advanced holographic crystal matrix late of the Race— who are rather late themselves—currently full partner in Mosasa Salvage Incorporated.”

The robot turned a corner as Tetsami felt a chill run through her. An AI? But that was ...

She stopped herself before she thought the word, “illegal,” or, just as bad, “immoral.” There really wasn’t any reason why Mosasa couldn’t be working with an artificial intelligence on Bakunin. It would be the only place in the Confederacy he could.

Well, only because Bakunin wasn’t part of the Confederacy.

Considering where her ancestors came from, feeling uncomfortable around an AI was hypocritical. After all, a lot of people would feel the same way about her. If they knew where her parents came from.

They rounded the gutted remains of a Hegira luxury transport, and found Tjaele Mosasa standing at the edge of a circular clearing.

Mosasa was an extremely tall black man with a dour expression. He was hairless, without eyebrows or lashes. He wore khaki shorts, a tool belt, a half-dozen earrings, and nothing else. He was adjusting a device on a tripod that pointed across the clearing at a gigantic ring that seemed to have come from the drive section of a military transport.

He looked up at them, and Tetsami saw that most of the left side of his body was dominated by a gigantic dragon tattoo. The tattoo was luminescent and changed color in the ruddy light of Kropotkin. It looked as though it was some photoreactive dye. The dragon’s neck curled around Mosasa’s and its head curled around his left ear. When Mosasa looked at them, it was with three eyes, one of them from the dragon’s profile.

“I’ll talk to you in a moment,” he said, and bent back over the tripod. The device looked like some sort of particle beam. The upright torus it was aimed at was about ten meters in diameter.

The robot—Random Walk, Tetsami corrected herself— floated up next to her and Dom and said in a self-satisfied tone, “I told you he was busy.”

Great, Tetsami thought, a snide computer. Worse, it and Mosasa were a package. The thought of working with a self-aware computer gave her a crawling sensation under her scalp.

Mosasa continued to work on his little particle beam.

“What’s he doing?” Dom asked the floating robot.

“If you tell me who you are.”

Dom looked at her. She shrugged. It was his show. She was scrambling to keep him from realizing just how out of her depth she was. Somehow she’d kept from locking up when they went over the beginnings of her plan—but the scope of the thing still scared the shit out of her.

An AI, too, why the fuck not?

“Come on,” said Random, “we are a team. And if Johann sent you, you want both of us.”

“Dominic and Tetsami,” Dom said. “That’s enough until we find out if you’re working for us.”

Tetsami nearly jumped when the robot circled around and stopped about three centimeters from her face. “Tetsami?”

She complimented herself for not yelping in surprise. “Y-yes?” she managed. Dom looked at her oddly, as if noticing her discomfort for the first time. Dom, she thought, can you really be that oblivious?

“I know that name—but then, of course I would—that is the same family I’m thinking of, isn’t it?”

Damn it. Tetsami was a common name on Dakota, but that wasn’t even common knowledge in the rest of the Seven Worlds. If someone bothered to dig into the history of the late twenty-first century, specifically the Genocide War against the Race, they might unearth a few important Tetsamis. Otherwise, for most people, it would be just a name. That was one of the reasons Tetsami had never changed it.

However, considering that the Tetsami genetics had been engineered for human-machine interface, and considering the peculiar rapport they achieved with captured Race AIs—

Of course this thing knew her. It had to be at least as old as the war.

Tetsami tried to say something, found her mouth too dry, and simply nodded.

“What luck. Someday we’ll have to talk shop, comrade—”

That thing was much too close to her. She could feel herself shaking. Dom finally saved her by saying, “You were going to tell us what he’s doing—”

“Oh, yes—” The robot sped over to Dom’s side and Tetsami could breathe again. It knows me, she thought, the damn thing knows me.

She backed up and sat down on a pile of dismantled armor. She ran her fingers over the scars left by dozens of micrometeors and listened to Random Walk with half an ear.

“—in other words, he’s trying to program an Emerson field to stop a bullet.”

“Engineers have been trying that ever since they could reproduce the Emerson Effect in the lab.”

“I’ve been telling him that,” said the robot, “but he’s convinced he can get the field to damp the kinetic energy of a particle.”

“I don’t see how. The effect is energy based, but if the field is on a massy particle’s frequency—”

“He’s finding it damn difficult—oh, boy. You better turn around, if this test is like any of the others ...”

Tetsami wasn’t facing the clearing, but she could feel the heat of the giant white flash that must have originated by the massive torus. Even though she was looking away, the reflection off the sandy ground dazzled her.

She turned around, rubbing her eyes, expecting to see the entire apparatus melted into slag. However the ring was still there, and Mosasa was next to it, looking at readout screens and nodding.

The floating robot tilted itself and rotated slightly, amazingly like a human shaking his head sadly. “He’s convinced it’s only a software problem.”

Tetsami stood up and walked over to Dom.

“What was that flash?”

Dom waved at the ring, “A force field converting a few micrograms of carbon into energy.”

“A field can do that?” She felt her hand going toward the personal screen on her belt. Suddenly she didn’t feel too safe with it on.

Dom smiled when he saw her hand move. “Don’t worry, a personal field—even a military-grade one—isn’t calibrated to handle the wavelength of a massy object heavier than an electron.”

“Besides,” said Random Walk, “a field with that small an energy sink would collapse from the overload. I better check with Mosasa before he becomes too engrossed with the data to talk to you two.”

The robot sped off toward Mosasa and the giant ring.

She kept looking at the torus. “That’s a field generator? When I first saw it, I thought it was the drive section from a spacecraft.”

“It is.”

Tetsami looked at him.

“Same technology that lets that box on your hip damp a laser beam lets that ring drive a sublight ship in-system. Plasma or hydrogen gas in one end, a coherent stream of high-energy photons out the other.”

“Uh-uh,” Tetsami said.

“You have some odd gaps in your knowledge.”

She shrugged.

“Your name seemed to mean something to the computer there.”

“I haven’t asked you about your past,” she snapped. She was sorry she said it. She should have glossed over the fact; instead she had drawn attention to it. However, Dom didn’t follow it up. He simply looked at her, nodded, and dropped the subject.

After a while, Random Walk led Mosasa up to them, and Dom got to make his pitch.

Twenty minutes and a kilogram note later, the two were in.

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Golden Parachute

“True enemies are as rare as true friends.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“It is easier to forgive an Enemy than to forgive a Friend.”

—William Blake

(1757-1827)

Objectively speaking, the escape couldn’t have gone better.

Shane had opened a thirty-six-degree hole in the marines’ northern defense perimeter simply by taking herself, Hougland, and Conner out of the loop. Somehow she managed to funnel the prisoners through security’s cone of blindness. Members of GA&A’s original security managed to maintain order within the ranks of the prisoners as she guarded the rear and waited for one of the colonel’s search and destroy missions to overtake them.

Within an hour they were under the cover of the forest, safe from most spy sats but not from overflights. Shane let two of the security people lead the way; they seemed to know where to go—and they were going away from Godwin. Shane didn’t want to go toward the city. She knew that the colonel would concentrate any search for the prisoners in the space between GA&A and Godwin.

Even so, the mass of prisoners would be impossible to hide once a concentrated search started. Even though their path seemed to take them directly away from Bakunin’s excuse for civilization.

Shane knew the whole project was doomed. They were still close enough to the GA&A complex to know when the alarm was raised.

She guarded the fatalistic march into the Diderot Mountains, waiting for a miracle.

In two hours, a miracle occurred.

* * * *

The escape couldn’t have gone better. Shane still thought that, five overlong Bakunin days later.

* * * *

Kathy Shane lay sprawled on her cot, thinking about the briefing holos they’d shown on the Blood-Tide before the jump to Bakunin space. The planetary briefings they gave the marines before a drop were always heavy propaganda jobs. All good soldiers knew that, deep down. Just a little bit of spiritual bullshit to help everyone believe that they were on the side of the Angels; they were helping the helpless; God was on their side saying, “Rah! Rah! Rah!”

Of course you believed every word, or at least fooled yourself into believing every word.

“It was too good. Wasn’t it, Murphy?”

Good enough for almost all her people to forget what they’d learned about illegal orders. Good enough not to question the colonel. Good enough to make her people believe that the people of Bakunin deserved what they got.

She should have had her own briefings after those holos. She’d known they were over the top when she saw them....

Bakunin, home of a million perversions.

Bakunin, where every citizen is a thief and a murderer.

Bakunin, economic black hole trying to pull the Confederacy into its anarchic chaos.

Bakunin, where your typical inhabitant would shoot you, rape you, and steal your boots simply because there was no law that said he couldn’t.

Shane knew that by the time Dacham had given the order to vaporize the prisoners, her people had begun to think of Bakunin less as a planet and more like the first circle of Hell. If Dacham ordered carpet bombing the continent with micronukes, Shane thought most of his command would go along without any question. Those who’d question were probably too scared to do anything.

His command.

Shane shivered.

The room they’d put her in wasn’t originally designed as a cell. The mattress she lay on was an electrostatic fluid of variable viscosity, much more comfortable than her bunk aboard the Blood-Tide. There was a separate bathroom that seemed to have an unlimited supply of hot water. There was a half kitchen that allowed her to call up her own menu at any time. There was even a full holo entertainment system on the far wall from the door.

The only thing to show that she was a prisoner was the fact that the door was locked.

For perhaps the dozenth time in the last four days Shane wondered if she should have simply split off from the prisoners once she got them safely outside the perimeter. And again, the same answer: She’d done the right thing.

She had chucked her career—hell, she had chucked her whole life—to free those people, and she’d make damn sure they made it to safety. She’d been the only armed member of the escape, and if she’d split off from them, they’d have been defenseless.

Fortunately for the prisoners, there was an emergency rendezvous set up by the former CEO, Dominic Magnus. They’d been barely three hours out of GA&A when the patrol at the commune here saw them and took them in, through one of the hidden caves that dotted the Diderot Range.

Unfortunately for Shane, the command here took a dim view of her. The guards would have wasted her if the prisoners hadn’t spoken up on her behalf.

So, instead of summary execution it was, “Thank you, Captain Shane; drop your weapon, Captain Shane; do not move, Captain Shane; follow us, Captain Shane; remove the armor, Captain Shane; we’ll talk to you later, Captain Shane ...”

At which point the door slid shut on her, leaving her alone in this room wearing only her sweaty underwear. She had not seen or heard from her captors since. Since the room had its own food and water, they could keep her isolated here indefinitely.

Preferable to the brig on the Blood-Tide anyway.

Shane ran her hand over her head. The even nap of hair felt odd to her. She had been here long enough for her hair to grow back somewhat, and instead of shaving the Occisis stripes back, she decided to do her hair in an even crewcut. The transverse stripes were a symbol of the marines, and it seemed a bit disrespectful for her to maintain them in her situation.

Waiting for something to happen was getting on her nerves.

Hell, maybe they’ve forgotten about me.

Shane chuckled. More likely, since she had discovered the location of their hideout, they’d chucked her in here while they moved the body of GA&A’s personnel elsewhere. In which case she could be abandoned in an empty building being run by a computer, and eventually the food and water would give out. Perhaps a few years from now—

Oh, come on. If they ‘d do that, it would be much simpler to shoot me in the head to keep themselves safe.

The worst thing about this all was that she could see their point of view. She wouldn’t trust her in this situation. Defectors in any situation were terribly unreliable. In fact, she could see Colonel Dacham setting up this whole charade to find out where the GA&A personnel could be hiding. It was a TEC kind of trick. If she didn’t know better, she could easily picture herself as one of his agents.

As if that thought had triggered some sort of security alarm, the door decided just then to open for the first time in five days. Shane leaped off of the cot in surprise, taking a defensive stance across from the door as if it would do any good against a laser carbine. She stood there, naked except for a pair of Occisis-issue briefs, as the door whooshed fully open.

Standing there was the dark lithe form of Sergeant Mariah Zanzibar, the person who—as far as Shane could tell—was in charge of security for this place. Flanking her were a pair of guards in black monocast armor; each had a snub-nosed antipersonnel laser. Looked like Griffith Three-As from where she was. She didn’t get a closer look at them, because Zanzibar stepped through the door and it slid shut behind her.

Shane relaxed a little bit, but not much.

Zanzibar stood in front of the door, looking down at Shane. Probably couldn’t have found two more different-looking women in the Confederacy if you tried. Zanzibar was lean, tall, and built like a panther. The comparison made Shane look like a heavy-boned attack dog. Zanzibar was so dark and Shane so pale that the labels black and white were as accurate as they could be with any pair of humans. Where Shane was rounded, Zanzibar was flat. Where Shane was heavily muscled, Zanzibar was svelte. Where Shane looked like she could walk through an obstacle, Zanzibar looked like she’d flow around it.

Zanzibar, at the moment, was wearing the gray jumpsuit that seemed to be the uniform around this place, and she carried a small briefcase. She tossed the case on the bed and said, “Get dressed. Someone wants to meet you.”

“Who?” Shane asked.

Zanzibar said nothing.

For a moment, Shane considered refusing, but she thought better of it. After all, what was the point? They could come in and drag her wherever, clothes or no clothes. Shane picked up the case, looked at Zanzibar, and sighed when Zanzibar made no sign of leaving to give her some privacy. Shane opened the case and put on the clothes she found inside, another gray jumpsuit.

Once she was dressed, Zanzibar nodded. As if in response, the door slid open.

Zanzibar led, and the two guards followed. They walked her through an endless warren of corridors, many of them with open panels in the walls revealing pipes and sheaves of unconnected optical cable. Many of the lights weren’t working. It all felt as though it had just been taken out of the packing material after a long time in storage.

From what little she’d seen, the complex looked like just another of the self-sufficient communes that dotted the almost barren surface of Bakunin. Inside, under the complex—the route she and the prisoners had been ushered through—a shaft dug down to the water table, and another dug down to a shielded power plant. As far as she knew, none of the commune even broke the surface.

All in all, a nice little bolt-hole which Colonel Dacham, obviously, had no idea existed. If he did, it would’ve been a crater by now.

It gave Shane a perverse pleasure to think that most of GA&A’s personnel, as far as Colonel Dacham was concerned, had fallen off the face of the planet.

After a while, the tone of the corridors changed. Instead of apartments, they now passed offices, and eventually they boarded an elevator. Zanzibar said something to the control panel in a language Shane didn’t recognize, and the elevator began going up.

And up.

And up.

When the elevator had passed two-dozen floors, it announced that it’d reached ground level. The counter changed color as they passed, and kept going. Twenty floors above ground level, the elevator stopped.

Penthouse suite, Shane thought.

What the elevator opened on wasn’t a suite, but it was familiar. The doors opened on one side of a transparent— probably armored—partition, on the other side of which was a command center, probably for the whole commune. Zanzibar led her off, but in her brief view of the room filled with a dozen people or so she could see holos showing air-traffic patterns, perimeter security, stats on the power plant, and—of all things—at least a half-dozen examples of local Bakunin entertainment programming.

Then they were past the partition, and Shane noticed that she and Zanzibar had lost their escort.

Zanzibar led her down the corridor, through three security checks and two armored doors.

Eventually, after they had passed more security than she’d have needed to go through to board the Blood-Tide, Zanzibar stopped in front of an unmarked door.

The door whooshed open on a plushly appointed office decorated in mirrors and off-world woods. For a brain-numbing moment she thought that the person sitting behind the desk was Colonel Klaus Dacham.

The brain-lock lasted only a few seconds. The man behind the desk was slightly taller, less stocky, his face and hands less lined.

But he could be the colonel’s son, he looked so similar.

The man waved to a chair opposite the desk and said, “Please sit.”

Shane took a step forward, and the door whooshed shut behind her. She felt every muscle in her body twitch at the noise. That was the point at which she realized exactly how nervous she was. Shane was suddenly aware of the way her heart was pounding and that her face was flushed and sweating—

You’d think I was just about to enter combat.

She looked back at the man behind the desk. He regarded her with eyes as polished brown as the wood lining his office.

Maybe I am.

Shane took the offered seat and began to realize whom she was facing. “You’re Dominic Magnus, aren’t you? CEO of Godwin Arms.”

He tilted his head in an almost imperceptible nod. “And you’re Captain Katherine Shane, one of the officers who divested me of that title.” The flat way he said that was more frightening than the colonel’s trembling rages.

“I think I may have divested myself of my own title,” Shane said.

The small nod again. “So it would seem.” Damn it, did he think that she was a plant? Did they think all those prisoners were a cover to get her in here?

Well, Shane thought, it’s what I would think.

He continued. “You committed no small act by freeing my employees. You could be charged with treason, mutiny, and desertion. Not to mention a score of other charges.”

Shane sat up straight. “It was an illegal order, sir.”

Huh? Why was she justifying herself to him?

“You were obligated only to refuse the order. Not to give aid and comfort to the enemy.”

Maybe it was the colonel in some sort of disguise, here to torment her.

“Simply refusing the order would have landed me in the brig, sir.”

“But then you could have defended your actions. No court-martial would have convicted you.”

“But there would have been eight hundred corpses, sir.”

“Treason carries the death penalty, Shane.”

“You’re assuming I could live with the alternative on my conscience, sir.”

There was a long pause. Then he said, “Do me a favor and stop calling me ‘sir.’ “

“What should I call you?”

“Dom, Mr. Magnus, ‘hey you.’ At this point, ‘sir’ is not very appropriate.” He stood up and faced a long mirror behind his desk. He clasped his hands behind him; one finger was twitching rhythmically. “Forgive the questions, but I need to have a good idea of your state of mind.”

“Why?”

“I’ll get to that. First, though, I want you to know how grateful I am that you did save my people.

“Look, it was—”

“I know something of what you went through, making that decision. I had a similar trial, fifteen years ago. I know what kind of wounds that can leave.” His hands dropped.

Shane stayed quiet. Colonel Dacham had personally briefed the team on this man. She knew that Magnus had been an officer high in the Executive Command up until fifteen years ago. Colonel Dacham insisted that Magnus had turned traitor, began fighting everything the Confederacy stood for, etcetera.

Shane felt an involuntary wave of sympathy for the man in front of her.

He turned around, putting his hands on the desk. “Something like this doesn’t happen suddenly.”

“What do you mean?” Was he accusing her of something? It didn’t sound like it. But it didn’t seem his emotions ever touched his voice.

“You must have been dissatisfied with your command, the marines, long before you’d be able to make a decision like that.”

“But—” Shane began to object, but she had the sinking feeling that Dominic Magnus was right. For a long time, especially after she became an officer, she’d been hiding a growing disillusionment with the marines—even from herself. When had she thought of herself, in the few moments she’d been brutally honest, as anything other than a government-sanctioned mercenary? How long had it been since she’d honestly believed what the briefings said, that they were on the side of the angels?

How long?

Years.

He was nodding at her, as if he could read her chain of thought. “What commanded your loyalty, Shane?”

Good question. She thought about it for a long time. It wasn’t the Confederacy, which she’d always seen as a self-perpetuating bureaucracy only interested in preserving the status quo. It wasn’t the planetary governments, a lot of whom were pretty nasty and deserved the rebellions that it was her job to put down. Certainly not the TEC. Not even the Occisis marines themselves. That realization hit home, because there was a time when the marines were everything, the marines were her honor. It had been a long time since she’d felt that, she realized. The dozen petty little conflicts she’d been witness to had sapped that out of her.

There really was only one thing that had commanded her loyalty in the end.

“My people,” she said.

Her people, her team, her command, her friends. All of whom had become strangers ever since Colonel Dacham had taken charge. She felt warmth by her eyes and hoped Magnus wouldn’t notice her tears.

“My people,” she repeated coldly.

“That’s good,” Magnus said. “That’s the only loyalty worth anything.” He sank back into his seat, nodding. “So what do you want to do, Shane?”

Put my hands around Klaus Dacham’s neck and slam his head into a bulkhead until his brains ooze out of his mouth.

“I don’t know,” she said.

He made a steeple of his fingers and looked at her over his tapping forefingers. “Perhaps I can offer a suggestion or two.”

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Loyal Opposition

“The future is the past’s revenge.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“We are dead men on furlough.”

—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

(1870-1924)

Dominic Magnus was barely aware he was going to recruit Shane until he had done it. It made little sense on the surface, especially as careful as he was being with every other potential member of the team.

It might have been a wave of empathy he felt for Shane. Her forced renunciation of the Confederacy was painfully akin to his own.

Of course, she was lucky enough to come to her decision before people died.

Once he had extended his hand, the corporate leader took over, and he found that he couldn’t withdraw it. Even as Shane stared and tried to refuse his offer, Dom found himself playing Lucifer and turning the offer into something she couldn’t deny.

It wouldn’t be a betrayal, he told her. If she were involved in their heist, her information might actually save the lives of the marines. Perhaps it could even be an act of contrition.

Dom hated himself for the words even as he said them. She was vulnerable, and he was twisting her ...

But the corporation needed her. His people needed her.

He wove his argument seamlessly, even after Shane told him who was in command of the GA&A takeover.

* * * *

Dom left the interview amazed at how calm he was acting. He walked around to the observation room, hands clenching unconsciously. For once, his nervous tics were the farthest thing from his mind.

The door slid aside on Tetsami and Zanzibar, who sat on the other side of the massive one-way mirror behind the desk in the interview room. He could see Shane, still sitting in the room beyond the mirror. Shane had a bemused expression. Dom thought he might have left a little abruptly.

Zanzibar was seated at the monitor’s station, but right now she was ignoring the displays recording Shane’s blood pressure, skin galvanity, pupil dilation, etcetera. Instead, she was looking at Dom with an expression of concern.

“Sir,” Zanzibar’s voice was softer now than it normally was. “She could be lying about—”

“Escort her back to her room. I’ll finish the interview later.” Dom said it slowly and deliberately. He wasn’t sure his mouth would work.

Zanzibar looked at him for a long moment, slowly nodded, and left.

Tetsami looked back through the mirror at Shane. “Are you sure it’s a good idea involving her?”

“The information she has is invaluable.”

“What if she’s a plant?”

“She’s not a plant,” Dom said coldly.

Tetsami turned around slowly and looked at him, really looked at him, for the first time since he’d come into the room. Her expression now showed some of the concern that had crossed Zanzibar’s. Dom realized his cheek was twitching.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“A plant would not have mentioned my—” Dom raised a shaking hand to his face. “Would not have mentioned Klaus Dacham to me.”

“Can I do some—”

“I need to be alone,” Dom whispered.

“But—”

“Now!”

Tetsami circled around him, looking as though she was trying to decide whether or not to be scared. She was through the door before Dom could see which won.

Dom was alone in the observation room.

“Klaus,” he whispered. The harsh name scraped his throat.

He watched as Zanzibar entered the interview room and escorted Shane out. Zanzibar had known him for the better part of a decade, and she could only suspect what this meant. She’d seen only the fringes of the wound that Klaus Dacham was clawing open. Tetsami had no idea. And Shane—

She thought that GA&A had just been stage one in some larger TEC operation.

Did that matter? Would it matter to Klaus?

Helen Dacham’s death had affected both of her sons. Perhaps Klaus even more than him. Amazing how tragedy could sharpen parts of life once thought faded.

Helen was their only parent. She had not been a good mother. She’d been prone to extreme emotion. She drank. She beat her sons. She had her sons beg from Waldgrave’s tourists.

The Executive Command had been a way for both of them, him and Klaus, to escape.

Escape.

Escape was all Dom had ever tried to do.

His hands were on top of the observation chair Zanzibar had been sitting in. His left hand clenched through the upholstery on the headrest, all the way to the chair’s metallic skeleton.

It had been after Dom’s greatest success as a TEC officer. He had single-handedly “suppressed” a military coup on Styx without losing a single TEC operative. He had received commendations on the deftness of the surgical strike.

It was in the glow of that victory that he had received word that Helen Dacham had been on Styx, in Perdition.

Perdition, a city that no longer existed.

He deserted the TEC and had lived within the cracks of the Confederacy until—

For the first time in a decade, he had to face something totally unexpected. And, again, it was his brother.

He looked up at the empty observation room and realized that his whole body was shaking.

“My God, Klaus. Wasn’t it enough for you?”

He pulled on the chair, and his left hand yanked it free of the shaft in the floor. There was a screech as the metal under his left hand bent. He barely felt the pseudoflesh on his fingers crush and give way.

“You killed me already!”

Dom swung the chair at the observation window. The one-way mirror was armored, and the chair bounced off it, starring the view of the interview room and setting off a dozen red lights on the observation console. Dom swung the chair again....

“What the hell are you doing here, Klaus?”

“Don’t you know?”

“The Command?”

Klaus laughs.

The chair hit the window again. It bounced, leaving a concave depression where it hit.

“Gunrunning is low on the Executive priority list at the moment. This is personal.” Klaus is no longer laughing.

“What are you talking about?” Jonah backs to the railing, wondering where his security is. He’s been out of the game since Styx. Five years. Longer since he’d seen his brother.

“You could have saved her, Dominic.”

God, no.

Dom swung the chair harder. The sound was even louder this time, and white dust blew from the cracks in the window. The view into the interview room became fractured and rainbow-colored. Somewhere a siren blared.

“What could I, anyone, have done?”

“Shut up! It was that damn Styx operation!”

“Talk sense! That was a black op. There was no way the TEC—”

Dom swung the chair and the observation window exploded.

Klaus’ gun fires and Jonah tumbles over the railing, a hole in his shoulder.

The chair sailed through in a cloud of polymer glass fragments.

Jonah tumbles through the air. Above him is a blue cloudless sky. Below him is the green foam of the waste reclamation tank. Blue. Green. Blue. Green.

The pieces of the window twinkled as they fell, a mutant snowfall, alternately seeming transparent and mirrored. Glass. Mirror. Glass. Mirror.

Blue. Green.

Glass. Mirror.

He splashes into the waste tank. The tailored bacteria begin to feed. The pain begins.

There was a crash as the remains of the window hit the ground. The chair bounced off the desk in the interview room, spun, and tumbled to the ground. In the distance, the sirens continued.

Dom raised his left hand and saw lacerations on the pseudoflesh leaking clear liquid. The pigment was off, and it looked as though he was beholding a flayed chromium skeleton.

Dom wanted to cry but found himself unable to.

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Glass Ceilings

“We hate that which is too much like ourselves.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“There is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others.”

—Michel de Montaigne

(1533-1592)

Tetsami followed Zanzibar and Shane out of the control center and almost jumped out of her skin when the alarm sounded.

Ahead of her, Zanzibar inclined her head slightly, as if listening to something, and turned around. “That’s nothing to be concerned about.”

From your face, it don’t look it, lady.

However, Tetsami didn’t challenge her. It was probably the truth—as far as it went. The only one in any immediate danger was probably Dom. Whatever mainspring had been tightening in the CEO-man’s skull had been close to snapping ever since she’d met the guy.

Tetsami rode in the elevator with Zanzibar and the prisoner, and decided that she was pretty damn sick of surprises.

This whole damn complex was one of Dom’s surprises—just like the insurance money. It seemed that every time she almost believed he thought of her as a partner in this heist, every time she believed that they might actually have an equal share of this crap, something was sprung to remind her that she was way out of her depth.

Damn it, it was her job. Dom might be backing the enterprise, but without her he’d be lost. He wouldn’t even know what he needed. If this were any other group of Godwin freelancers, she’d be in command of this heist.

But Dom wasn’t another Godwin freelancer. He was a CEO-man who breathed his own superiority as if it was air.

She wanted to strangle him.

“Since we made it unobserved to Proudhon, I think it’s probably safe to link up with some of my people on the way back,” he’d said.

Some of his people, sheesh.

“Some people” turned out to be just about fourteen hundred employees who had managed to escape the invasion of GA&A, and the linkup place happened to be a massive commune that Dom had apparently invested in sometime during the past year.

A bolt-hole known only to him and his security people, just in case, as though he was expecting all this crap.

In other words, he owned the place outright. The Diderot Commune was an asset that was worth that cashed-in insurance policy several times over.

The elevator reached one of the residential sublevels and Zanzibar deposited the prisoner—or was Shane an ally now? Once the door closed, the two of them were left alone in the corridor. Tetsami noted the absence of the two guards that had accompanied Shane up to the control center and decided that Shane was, indeed, an ally.

Dom’s security chief was looking at her with an expression of vague disapproval. “We’ll need to find you quarters for the night, and get you on the security computers.”

Tetsami shrugged. Zanzibar was another surprise, one that Tetsami didn’t like, though she couldn’t say why.

No, that was a little self-deception. Tetsami knew exactly why she didn’t like Zanzibar. It was because Zanzibar seemed to know Dom so much better than she did. A stupid thing to be irritated by. After all, Zanzibar had apparently been working for Dom ever since GA&A got off the ground.

“Follow me.” Zanzibar waved her along. As Tetsami followed her, she decided that Zanzibar’s height didn’t help.

Tetsami startled herself by asking Zanzibar, “You don’t like me, do you?”

The question seemed to take Zanzibar aback. She stopped walking and looked down at Tetsami. They had stopped in one of the ubiquitous half-finished corridors that peppered the massive commune building like cholesterol deposits in an old circulatory system. “Why do you say that?”

“Come on. Ever since I got here, you’ve been treating me like an active germ culture—or maybe a census taker. You look like you really want to throw me in with our marine friend.”

Zanzibar shook her head and resumed walking. “You exaggerate.”

“Yeah, if your voice got any colder, you’d lose your tongue to frostbite.”

Zanzibar didn’t stop, but cast a withering glance over her shoulder at Tetsami.

Great, Tetsami thought, alienate Dom’s employees. He’s already suggested that Zanzibar might make part of the team—

That was just it. Tetsami was the one planning the damn break-in, and she didn’t like Zanzibar. Not at all. From the looks of things, the feeling was very mutual.

* * * *

Tetsami ended the day in a little modular apartment near the core of the commune. A place she supposed was pretty much like the place where they’d filed Captain Shane. Zanzibar had programmed Tetsami’s security clearance into the base computer looking as though she were undergoing an amputation without an anesthetic.

When Tetsami was left alone in her room, the first thing she did was make sure the door was unlocked.

“I’m not having second thoughts—more like tenth or twentieth.”

She sighed and sat in a recliner facing the built-in holo. There were controls on the armrest, and she switched the holo through the local airspace without really paying much attention to it. She stopped on a scene where two overlapping channels were warring on the air, playing the game “Who’s got more wattage?”

She stared through the rainbow-blurred imagery and thought of the job she was supposed to do.

Objectively, she was doing well. The people they needed were falling into place. Even if she didn’t like Zanzibar, Zanzibar had been chief of security at GA&A before the Confederacy happened to the place. Was there anyone she’d prefer to have in on the break-in?

Shane, a defecting member of the team that took GA&A over had to be high on the list.

And even if she didn’t like AIs—no, that was too kind. They were creepy, perverted, and scared the bejesus out of her. But, even if she didn’t like Mosasa’s little machine, Random Walk, a Race-built Al machine could run rings around any human-built computer. That’s why they were one of the few things that were illegal throughout the Confederacy. Capital crime to run one.

That, and genetically engineering a sentient being, Tetsami thought.

“Admit it, you don’t like Mosasa’s toy because it reminds you—”

Reminds me that I’m not really human.

Random Walk’s circuitry was a relic of a few centuries past, just as Tetsami’s genes were a relic. The birth of the Tetsami clan occurred back when every nation was still jammed onto one planet, when the scientists were still klutzing around with the stuff of life.

When the Wars of Unification came, the UN command decided that engineering human-level intelligences wasn’t a good idea. Every citizen whose genes had been fiddled with got shot down a convenient wormhole like the rest of the undesirables.

In the end the genetic undesirables got Tau Ceti, a system lucky enough to have two inhabitable planets. The Tetsamis got the frozen ball of Dakota, along with all the other engineered humans. All the other genetic products got Haven and, eventually, five planets beyond.

The Seven Worlds was now one of the five arms of the Confederacy.

Tetsami’s parents had escaped Dakota—a rather unpleasant place with one of the more despotic regimes in the Confederacy—and came here, Bakunin. The pair of them managed to parley their genetic and technical heritage into high-paying high-class jobs as executive combat hackers.

It was a prestige job that, in the end, got them killed.

Tetsami was barely old enough to understand what was going on when Ivor Jorgenson smuggled her out of the wreckage. Eventually, despite Ivor’s objections, Tetsami followed in her parents’ footsteps—up to a point.

Tetsami distrusted all corporations and had long ago promised herself that she would be a permanent freelancer. She’d never sell her soul to a corporation, even though she might make ten times what she lived on in the streets.

And, eventually, she would abandon this shithole of a planet.

What burned her was the fact that to do that, she would have to disguise her heritage. If someone discovered her roots, they were likely to look at her the way she looked at Random Walk. This despite the fact that by the time the Tetsamis’ bloodline had reached her generation, her genes were as human as the next woman’s. A thorough gene scan on her probably wouldn’t even show anything unusual.

The only gift from her parents was her exceptional facility with a bio-interface.

Even though she could prove her humanity with a gene scan, she’d still be treated like a freak.

Maybe that was Zanzibar’s problem.

Her train of thought was derailed by an annoying buzz. The buzz repeated a few times before she realized that it was the door. She opened her eyes, realizing that she’d nodded off long enough for the gladiatorial contest to win the wattage war over the demolition derby.

She went to the door and opened it. Standing outside, in the hall, was Dominic Magnus. He looked—odd.

“Can I come in?”

Tetsami shrugged and stood aside, not quite certain whether or not she was irritated at her “partner.”

Dom walked in and spared a glance at the holo, where two hypertrophic steroid junkies were dueling with a pair of chain saws. He shook his head slightly and settled on the edge of her bed.

“I wouldn’t blame you for being angry at me,” he said.

Tetsami settled into the chair and killed the holo during a particularly gruesome parry. “Dom, I don’t know if I’m pissed or not yet.”

Dom sighed. Tetsami decided why he looked so strange. He looked tired. The look of fatigue was radically out of place on his face. It was as if a marble statue had suddenly sneezed. “I’m sorry for snapping at you back there. The news caught me a lit—”

Tetsami suddenly realized that they were on two very different wavelengths. “Whoa there, hold it a minute.”

“What?”

“You think that you being upset is why I should be pissed?”

Dom looked confused.

“Okay, I didn’t say that quite right.” She took a breath and started again. “Dom, if I’m angry at you, it’s not because you flipped a gear back there.”

Something she said actually made him wince.

“But I wanna know, CEO-man, if I’m your partner in this, or if I’m just another frigging employee.”

“Partner,” Dom said quietly, as if he didn’t quite understand the word.

She was beginning to realize that Dom hadn’t been thinking along these lines at all. “Damn straight. You might be financing this op, but I’m planning this thing. We pulled each other out of the shit. We’d be dead without each other—and this heist would never’ve been born.”

“I know.”

“I thought we were in this together.”

“We are.”

“Oh, we are?” Tetsami stood up and kicked the holo display. “Then why the fuck didn’t you let on about this place?”

Dom inhaled. “I was keeping it secret. They’re after GA&A employees and I didn’t want to lead—”

“That kept you from telling me? You’ve pulled Zanzibar and Shane on to the team without even talking to me!”

“They fill the requirements, and Shane knows—”

“I don’t give a shit what Shane knows! For all you know she could be the ever-loving colonel’s mistress. And that ain’t the point.”

Dom sat there, quietly, for a long time. After a while he said, “I suppose it isn’t.”

“So, am I your partner? Or am I just another employee you get to order around?”

“And if I say you’re an employee?”

Oh, you fucking bastard. “I’ll get that box cracked if you give me a kangaroo to work with. But I’m gone once I get paid. Way gone.”

“What if you’re my partner?”

What’s the difference, really? She was planning to blow this rock whatever happened. “I don’t know.”

“I came here for another reason, too.”

“What?” She didn’t like him just changing the subject like that.

“The window is closing. According to Shane, GA&A is part of a larger Confed operation. Once they get GA&A fully operational, they go on to Phase Two.”

“Which is?”

Dom shrugged. “Need to know, Shane didn’t. Anyway, getting GA&A operational requires a new mainframe. They’re importing one from off-planet. It’ll be here in little over a week. Ten days, installed.”

“And a new mainframe means a new security system.” Great, just what we needed.

“So we have to go before it goes on-line or me, Zanzibar, and a dozen Paralian ship experts won’t make a difference.”

“You just made my day. A week?”

“Ten days, partner.”

Tetsami looked at Dom and smiled. “You bastard.”

“I’ve been called worse.”

“I’m sure.”

“We need to fill the holes left in the team, and you need to polish up our plan for getting in.”

“And out.”

“And out,” Dom agreed.

“All we need is a ship expert and a driver. Levy said he knew a ship expert, and the pilot I contacted is back in Godwin by now.”

“Good, take Zanzibar and Shane back to Godwin and get things moving.”

“What about you?” Tetsami tentatively stuck out her hand toward him.

“I’ll meet you at the warehouse in a couple of days. I have to do things here.” He reached in the pocket of his jumpsuit and pulled out a small computer and placed it in Tetsami’s outstretched hand. “Here’s a line on our liquid assets, in case you need anything.”

Tetsami stared at her hand, taken by surprise again.

She could swear that she could feel the weight of the three hundred-some K they had left in the account. Dom left her there, staring at the computer that held all that money in virtual limbo.

She felt vaguely pissed again, but for no real reason.

I’m his partner all right.

Bastard.

Only a week....

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Leaks

“We are the property of those we hate.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“It is a strange desire to seek power and to lose liberty.”

—Francis Bacon

(1561-1626)

“I don’t like insubordination, Captain Murphy.”

Murphy was rigid and as unmoving as a statue. “No, sir.”

Klaus was receiving Murphy is his current command center, Dominic’s old office. By all rights, Klaus should have been happy with the way the operation was going. Phase one of Rasputin was proceeding apace. In eight Bakunin days the new mainframe would arrive. The residence tower was now filled with Confederacy people, his people.

However, Klaus wasn’t happy.

First there’d been his brother.

Then there was Shane.

Now this.

“I don’t like disobedience.”

“No, sir.”

Klaus sighed. Was he getting through to this man? Did Murphy understand what this meant? First there was Shane, then these five marines, then ... It was like a virus, it had to be excised before the entire company was infected.

“What am I going to do with these people?”

“I have them under house arrest, sir.”

“Is that a suitable punishment for mutiny, Murphy?”

Murphy’s gaze looked shallow and far away.

“The teams I’m sending into Godwin are necessary to this mission. I cannot accept any disobedience. Especially because, thanks to one traitor, there are nearly fourteen hundred enemy agents still unaccounted for.”

“Yes, sir.”

“An extreme circumstance calls for extreme measures, don’t you think?”

Murphy was silent.

“Don’t you think, Captain Murphy?”

After a long pause, Murphy said, “Yes, sir.”

“Good. I want the first of them, the squad leader, prepped for the interrogation room in the Blood-Tide. The rest, I want them to observe.”

Murphy stood there.

“Dismissed.”

Murphy turned on his heel and left.

Klaus knew he was having this trouble because of Shane. If it weren’t for her sending the containment operation balls-up, none of these solders would even think of disobeying his orders.

Shane and command at TEC. His subordinates were quoting TEC orders back at him. “No widening of the operation beyond the complex until phase one is completed.”

Damn it. He was the one on the ground here. He was the one who gave the orders. He was the one who answered to the TEC. He was in control of an operation once it hit dirt—

Why did they sabotage his authority?

Why did Dimitri sabotage his authority? Klaus knew he was doing what the old man wanted. Klaus had thought long and hard, and he’d decided that neutralizing “Dominic Magnus” had to be part of his unwritten mission.

Otherwise, why send him?

Klaus turned the chair and faced Godwin out the side of the transparent dome. The city looked like a glowing fungus in the sunset. Some malignant growth that you’d find under a rock. All of Bakunin was like that, a throbbing cancer in the side of the Confederacy.

He was the surgeon.

He would have advocated blasting this place to the bedrock. Flash this entire criminal nation into infinity from orbit. That would have solved both problems, his and the Confederacy’s.

No, Klaus thought, that would be too easy. And they need a planet with a population of a half-billion or so. Half a billion people and eighty years standard.

Bakunin had over a billion people, and it’d been occupied for a hundred and four years.

“You did pick the perfect place to nest, didn’t you— brother?”

A cesspit of disease and perversion. A boiling swamp just like the one Klaus had thought his brother had died in.

No mistakes this time. Klaus wouldn’t finish until he had Dom’s corpse in his arms.

The holo built into his desk beeped for his attention. Someone had finally gotten around to fixing the thing so it didn’t give Klaus headaches every time he looked at it. He answered the call.

Looking out of the holo was Jonathan Whissen-Hall, one of the civilians who’d come on the Blood-Tide. He was the TEC communications officer, the one with the security clearance to handle the coded messages.

“What is it, Mr. Hall?” Klaus was aware that truncating his hyphenated name was irritating to Whissen-Hall, but the damn thing was too long, and Whissen-Hall kept any irritation below the level of insubordination.

“Our first synchronization call came in on the tach-comm.”

“Oh?” Things were speeding along. “How’s our schedule?”

“Well within the margin. The first sync signal was pulsed from Earth day three-oh after we left.”

“Good. How long do we have to the Congress?”

“Counting the lag, sixty-five days standard.”

That was a tight deadline, until Klaus factored in the duration of the Congress—which would stay in session for nearly six months. “Anything important sent with the sync message?” Klaus asked.

“Late intel on Bakunin, some other things. I’ll upload a secure package to your office.”

Klaus nodded and broke the connection.

Well, he and the Executive were on the same clocks now. And now that he thought of clocks—

He looked over his shoulder at Godwin. The overlarge red-yellow orb of Kropotkin was setting. It was time to talk to Webster.

He checked to make sure that the outer door was locked and took out his secure holo. He put it on the desk, let it check his DNA, and typed in the seed.

Soon, Webster’s voice came from the blue spherical test pattern. “Hello, Colonel.”

“Any news?”

“The score stands at Bakuninite gunrunners, one thousand three hundred eighty-seven. Confederacy, zero.”

“No one’s unearthed any more GA&A personnel?”

“Funny thing about people, Colonel. You start shooting at them, they hide.” Klaus didn’t like Webster’s sarcastic tone. However, Webster was the only operative he had who was free of Executive interference.

“You can’t hide that many people.”

“Colonel, this is a planet you’re talking about. Godwin itself has a population of ten million, and your targets could have disappeared anywhere between Troy and Proudhon by now. If they made Proudhon, they could be off-planet.”

Klaus pounded the side of the chair with his fist. He didn’t like needing people like Webster. “They have to be together, somewhere. Somewhere close.”

Eight hundred people couldn’t just vanish into the woods in less than three hours.

“The only people who would know would be Dominic’s people.” Webster sounded strange, as though he wasn’t telling Klaus everything. Klaus hated that.

“Any news about Dominic?”

“Yes.”

“He’s holed up with his people?”

“No. He’s been spreading stories about searching for Dolbrian artifacts in the mountains.” Webster sounded as though he found that amusing.

“Huh?”

“That’s the information I have. A cover for something.”

I can see that, Klaus thought. “No current location?”

“It might be a good idea to prep for something against GA&A.”

Dominic would be a fool to try to retake GA&A. “I’ll take that under advisement.”

“Cheer up, I do have some good news.”

“What?”

“Remember that ‘traitorous bitch,’ as I believe you called her? Kathy Shane?”

Klaus leaned toward the holo, suddenly interested. “Yes?”

“I have some information on where she’s going to be....”

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER TWENTY

Executive Action

“Bravery comes when there are no other options.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“It is the policy of this government to fire when fired upon.”

—Damion Castle

(1996-2065)

Tetsami was concentrating on maneuvering through the chaotic Godwin traffic, so she missed it the first time Shane asked.

“What?” Tetsami asked as she turned the van on to one of the elevated roads into Central Godwin.

“Does that tunnel really go right under the GA&A complex?”

“Yep.”

The traffic on the overpass was a little better mannered. Commuting execs mostly, even though it was pretty close to midnight. One thing Godwin didn’t do was keep regular hours.

“A glaring hole in security,” Zanzibar said, with enough annoyance that one might think she was still in charge of security for the complex.

Tetsami shrugged. Security’s loss was their gain. “It wasn’t there when the complex was built. The project went bankrupt, I hear, because of angry people who didn’t like their foundations undermined. They laid siege to the backers until they agreed to pay them off.”

Shane looked at Tetsami as though she’d said something unusual. “You don’t mean they sued, do you?”

Tetsami burst out laughing, and even Zanzibar seemed to crack a smile.

Shane shook her head and looked out at the high-rises that were sliding by the van. “Do you know anything about this ‘Paralian ship expert’ your friend is introducing us to?”

“No,” Tetsami said. “We kept our communication as short as possible.” With barely concealed irritation she added, “Dom said this ‘Flower’ guy checks.”

Of course Dom had waited until they were leaving to volunteer that information. He’d said it in an aside, as if it wasn’t really that important that he was double-checking everything himself, in secret.

So, Dom? Do I check? The bastard probably had a file on her. The bastard probably had a file on everybody.

They were coming up on a major intersection, and Tetsami began slowing the contragrav van. In front of them, beyond the cross-street, another Godwin monolith was going up. Right now it was just a metal skeleton bracketed by four gigantic robot cranes, their arms reaching over the street and the neighboring—shorter— buildings.

As Tetsami slowed the van, Shane said, “Flower—” From the sound, Shane had a low opinion of any expert on Paralian ship design that could be found on Bakunin.

“Just because—” Tetsami began.

“Down!” Shane yelled suddenly, folding into her own footwell. She barely got out the word, “Sniper!” when a line of razor-straight polychromatic brilliance sliced through the body of the van.

Tetsami clicked on her personal field even as she realized that it was going to do little against the carbine the sniper was wielding. It had sliced through the van in a well-aimed shot that had taken out all the maneuvering controls. All she had left was the power to the contragrav. Without thinking about what she was doing—only that she had to get away—Tetsami goosed the contragrav.

As the van slid forward, accelerating and rising, something large and explosive clipped the rear. A dull boom shook the van and suddenly the air inside was hot and rancid. One of the loading doors in the rear fell away— Tetsami heard it. Zanzibar cursed in a language Tetsami didn’t understand.

Something slammed into the side of the van—vehicle or weapon she couldn’t tell—and suddenly all the van’s controls were unresponsive. The van drifted off the road, still going top speed. They lost altitude and shot toward the construction.

With the controls dead and the construction zooming at her, Tetsami closed her eyes and covered her face with her arms.

More shots. The van hit something and vibrated like a bass drum. A dull explosion and an ozone smell told Tetsami that the batteries had exploded. The van tilted and, after an excruciating half-second, rolled. Then, abruptly, it slammed to a bone-jarring halt.

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” Tetsami began to untangle herself from the harness. The van was on its side, the floor wrapped around the base of one of the crane towers. “Who’s hurt?”

Zanzibar was crawling out from a pile of boxes that littered the back of the van. The boxes had been carrying Shane’s powered armor, and Zanzibar—still cursing— finished ripping open one crate and pulled out an assault weapon. Beyond the security chief, the rear half of the van was gone.

“Shane!” Zanzibar yelled, ignoring Tetsami. “Shane! Who are they? How many? Where?”

Damn it, Zanzibar, she might be dead. Tetsami uncurled from the seat and found footing to stand upright. They only had minutes, maybe seconds—and Shane was the only one to see their attackers. Tetsami looked at Shane, who was still wedged in the passenger footwell where she’d taken cover. Shane was now in a fetal position, glued to the ground by the chair and the warped front of the van.

“Shane?” Tetsami said.

There was a groan and Zanzibar almost pushed Tetsami aside to get at Shane. That was enough. “Damn it, Zanzibar! Cover our ass. You’ve got the fucking weapon!”

Zanzibar looked startled.

“NOW!”

The mental logjam broke, and Zanzibar took cover and watched out the broken rear of the van.

That was a waste of three seconds. “Shane?”

Another moan. Then, “I think I’m trapped in here.”

“Where are they?”

“Only saw the one. Octagonal high-rise. Roof. North.” Shane began to breathe heavy. “Marines. Colonel’s cleanup crew.”

“How many?”

Shane took a long time to answer. After another moan she said, “At least three. Snipers cover the intersection, ambush. Ground team, maybe.”

Shane had to pause to breathe. Her voice sounded wet. “Circle to get us ...” Shane’s voice faded and she didn’t respond when Tetsami tried to rouse her. At least her breathing was steady.

After too long assessing Shane’s condition, Tetsami asked, “You hear that, Zanzibar?”

“Yes, damn it. This weapon gives us shit for cover from those snipers. It’s a short-range plasma rifle. It’d hold off a ground team, for a while. But the snipers can hold us down here indefinitely. All they have to do is frag the van.”

“You see any snipers?”

“One. The guy who took off the rear of the van is halfway up the trapezoidal building to the east of the intersection.”

“Any cover out there?”

“The construction above us blocks the guy to the north. But the guy to our east—” She waved out the missing rear of the van with her gun. “I could look right at him if I took a step outside. Right on the other side of the highway from us.”

“Does the road offer any cover?”

“Thirty meters of open dirt with no cover between here and there. We’d never make it.”

“No idea where number three is?”

“Not even if there is a number three.”

Now what? Tetsami looked out the shattered windscreen in the front of the van. The van had come to rest at the southeast corner of the construction. She was looking down the length of the south side of the building, looking at robot workers, stacks of construction equipment, the foreman’s command trailer, and the base of one of the massive, now-frozen construction cranes.

Tetsami got an idea.

She scrambled over next to Zanzibar at the other end of the van to see out the back.

“Watch it! A few more centimeters and you’ll be in the line of fire.”

Across the dirt no-man’s-land was the highway, on the other side of the highway was the base of the tower that supported the second sniper, and over the intersection was the ass end of the northeast crane—shorter than the business end, it stuck out well over the intersection.

Tetsami stumbled over to the front and the windshield, but she couldn’t see the business end of the crane. She tried to remember if it was one that carried a girder. As she tried to see it up through the skeleton of the new building, she decided it had been.

“Zanzibar, I’m going to try something.”

“What?”

“I’m making for the foreman’s trailer.”

“What?” Zanzibar looked over her shoulder at Tetsami, then toward the windshield and the trailer. “That’s fifty meters, in the open, with no idea where the third sniper is.”

“I’m covered from the first two, and I have a force field.”

“One and a half seconds max against a military laser carbine.”

“Cover me if someone starts firing.”

“Damn it, this thing has no range.”

“It’s a bright light that’ll screw up their aim.”

“Oh, shit,” Zanzibar ducked and made over to the windshield so she could cover Tetsami’s run.

“Do you have any better ideas?”

“No, and that’s the problem.”

Tetsami spared one glance at the green light on her field generator. It was lit. Her otherwise-invisible field was operating.

She nodded at Zanzibar, stepped out the broken windshield, and began running. A flash dazzled her and she felt a fiery dagger lance into her right shoulder. Her force field had soaked up some of a carbine blast, but a lot had gotten through. She could smell synthetic fibers smoldering.

Tetsami was under the sights of the third sniper.

She kept running.

She weaved out from under the laser for a moment, and suddenly her shadow was dancing ahead of her, pointing toward the trailer. The massive ruddy light had to be Zanzibar’s return fire. The plasma rifle was like a signal flare behind her.

Tetsami spared a breathless glance at her field generator, the indicator light faded from red to amber. Another beam lanced ahead of her and Tetsami ducked and rolled in the dirt.

Halfway there.

The third sniper was above her and to the right. That would put him somewhere up in the building’s metal skeleton. Figured.

Tetsami leaped to her feet and kept running toward the trailer, and cover.

Another shot of energy hit her. The beam struck her leg, and she felt burning heat in her calf and smelled her jumpsuit starting to smolder. She looked down. A line of strobing color was diffracting into rainbow circles that flashed along the perimeter of her field over her leg, as if the laser had hit an invisible elliptical shell surrounding her. The fact she saw anything at all meant that her field generator was about a second from overload.

The box at her belt that generated that ellipsoid field was flashing a red warning light and beeping at her furiously. Her leg was beginning to cook.

Five meters from the trailer, she removed the generator from her belt, tossing it as she jumped for the side of the trailer.

She hit cover against the side of the foreman’s trailer at the same time her field generator exploded. Tetsami crumpled to the ground, breathing heavily, waiting for that laser carbine to slice her unprotected body in half. After a few seconds it seemed that wasn’t going to happen.

She looked up and back. Zanzibar was poking the plasma rifle out the windshield and up toward the murky scaffolding. As Tetsami watched, she pumped off a cone of red-orange energy that hurt to look at and lit the entire construction site. Zanzibar must’ve cranked the beam all the way up. She glanced in Tetsami’s direction and gave her a thumbs-up.

Tetsami had been fortunate. The trailer was parked at an angle to the construction. Its shadow blocked the third sniper’s view of her.

She stood up, right leg a little wobbly, and slid along the trailer, back glued to its side. Near the rear she came to an entrance. She tried the handle.

Locked—

“Damn it.”

Such a simple thing, and it really fucked her plans. She didn’t have time to jimmy a lock.

Okay, but what’re the odds that there’s someone in there? Pretty good, right? Tetsami nodded to herself. Most folks would have at least one human supervisor on a project like this. That was the guy who had shut things down when the shit hit the fan.

Guy probably got a big bribe to let sniper number three take his position up there.

External sensors had to see her, so how to do this?

“All right, I’m addressing the a-hole inside this can.” Tetsami put a hand in her coat and put on her best crazy expression. “I’m carrying a few AM grenades—you know how twitchy they are—if I buy it out here, you probably won’t have to wait for my partner back there to frag the trailer.” Zanzibar punctuated that with another spectacular shot into the superstructure. Tetsami silently thanked her.

Hell, if she had been carrying some antimatter grenades and the bottles went, they could probably say good-bye to the whole building. AM was a sneak weapon, no one was fool enough to carry it into open combat where a stray shot or EM pulse could turn you into a two-hundred-meter crater. Terrorists liked them because they were small and you couldn’t really detect one—except when they malfunctioned.

Whether it was the AM threat, or Zanzibar behind her taking potshots with a plasma rifle, the door slid open for her. She piled inside, pushing aside a pale straw-haired guy who couldn’t be any older than she was. He stammered, “L-look I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t want any trouble here. The company is going to—”

“The company’s going to hang you, boy, for letting that marine geek up there.”

“I had nothing to do—”

“Shut up.”

Tetsami made her way down the length of the trailer. One end was dominated by a control center. The walls were alive with screens showing the POV of various robot workers. There was a massive computer board, displays showing elevations of the structure being built, blinking lights—a lot of fire warnings, Tetsami noted—a comm tap into the wider computer net, and—just what Tetsami was looking for—a bio-interface jack.

She pulled a small optical cable out of her pocket and checked the connections. They matched.

“Hey, you can’t—”

“Don’t fuck with me, Blondie, or I’ll slice your balls off and jam them up your nose.”

Blondie shut up.

She made the connection into the jack and made sure the terminal was slaved to it. Then she took a few breaths to calm herself, and held the rounded end of the cable to the concavity in the skin at the base of her neck.

The magnetic end of the cable went home with a click audible through the bones of her skull. It took a fraction of a second for software and hardware to engage each other. It always seemed an eternity to her. She knew that it was her time sense telescoping, even before the hardwired interface programming got up to running speed. In a sense, her brain had been hardwired for the job even before she’d been born.

Time stretched into infinity. Her senses shut down. She fell into the bio-interface’s shell programming. First there was a solid blue infinity, white noise, the smell of oranges, the feeling of pins and needles washing over her body. Then there was a jerk as the bio-interface’s reality fell into place and gave her back the senses it didn’t want.

It kept her vision and filled her point of view with a fairly pedestrian field full of control options: cubes labeled with icons, sliding over the same blue background. Her hearing dropped back to the real world, and she could hear Blondie’s breathing. It sounded much too slow to her, as her time sense of the virtual world sped up way ahead of realtime. Kinesthetic and tactile senses dropped out too, except for her right hand, which apparently was the control surface.

The setup was primitive as hell, and buggy, too—she still smelled oranges.

Since the terminal software had given up her skin, she could feel a smile stab her cheeks.

Tetsami began walking through the software. Three levels into the surveillance option, she found out that the oranges weren’t a bug. She tripped something, and the orange smell turned rotten and became a putrid stab through her forebrain. A security measure that would have knocked her out of the shell program if she weren’t a pro.

She had barely noticed the smell change when she’d already started an internal dialogue with the hardware in her skull. She had cut out the olfactory I/O before the odor became crippling.

Should have done that earlier. Should have known the oranges weren’t an artifact.

Didn’t matter. Most folks couldn’t cut out a slaved sense on the fly without losing the contact, but she had, so no harm done.

Since she was on a priority terminal for the construction computers, she didn’t run afoul of any more stringent security. Most of the access-denied stuff was straddling external inputs. In less than three seconds she had cubes up showing windows on the construction scene.

She scanned the views as fast as she could, looking at the world through the eyes of dozens of robots. At one point, she heard Blondie’s breathing change tempo and come closer. She yelled, “Don’teventhinkit”

She didn’t know if he understood what she said at the speed she was operating, but it sounded as though he stopped moving.

Lock.

She found what she was looking for. She had the view from the northeast crane. The other views scrolled until she found cameras with views she wanted. A view looking at the armored marine on the roof of the building to the north, one looking at the sniper halfway up and in the corner of the eastern building, and another of the guy firing on the van from the tenth floor of the construction.

Now to hack the operations software.

Tetsami had to drop to the code to bypass some safety programs, all of which were frighteningly easy to override. It only took a little prodding to get the arm on the northeast crane to allow itself to go a complete 360.

She slipped into the control system of the crane while spinning off a few improv hyperprograms linking her multiple views of two of the snipers to the on-line engineering programs.

The crane was lifting a two-ton girder and rotating north as she fed the vectors and speeds to the engineering program.

The engineering program did as she asked and ran up a velocity profile and overlaid a schematic on her view out the crane’s camera. Tetsami smiled again. The crane itself didn’t reach, but since she’d killed the safety protocols, the engineering program had used its new freedom to get the girder where she wanted. It was easy now that she didn’t require the girder’s velocity to be zero at the end of its track.

She gave the program the okay to take over the placement of the girder.

The crane arm backed up a few degrees and began a rotation north, accelerating near the failure point of the mechanism. The end of the cable shot to the end of the crane arm, and the girder swung out over the road like a stick on a string. At a very specific point, the winches holding the cables let go and the girder was in free fall.

The sniper on the roof of the octagonal sky-rise must not have been watching above him. At almost the last minute he looked up, and the left half of the girder took him off at the knees.

The sniper was mulched by the two-ton bar of steel. The girder kept rolling, tearing up the roof, smashing antennas, landing lights, a few aircars, and the entrance to an elevator.

By then Tetsami had the northwest crane on-line, and that girder was already slicing through the corner of the twentieth story of the trapezoidal high-rise. This girder didn’t have to go into free fall to do its job, and it stabbed through the corner of the building like a pin through a folded flap of skin.

Tetsami was lucky. She saw the sniper as he was thrown through the side of the building and tumbled toward the ground. She wouldn’t have to swing the crane again.

Blondie began to scream.

It was a hideous slow-motion bellow that Tetsami first thought belonged to the carnage she was wreaking. Her nose, now stranded in realtime, told her otherwise. There was the smell of burning synthetics, overloaded circuitry, and burning flesh.

Sniper three wasn’t a dope. He’d seen his friends get wasted and was trying to frag the control trailer. She was smelling a near miss. In a moment or two the geek was going to waste her.

So much for tactical genius. You should have wasted him first.

Tetsami got a fix on a camera with a view of the goof. He was in full armor, sort of half leaning and half clamped on the edge of floor ten. He was pointing his carbine down—toward her no doubt. As she watched, there was the stroboscopic flare from below—Zanzibar and the plasma rifle.

She expected to be blinded, but the cameras on the robot she was looking through adjusted to the light level without so much as a twitch. She looked for the ID of the robot. It was a plasma welder.

She took control of the thing and realized that she couldn’t move it any nearer to the sniper without alerting him. The specs on this beast had it going no more than a klick an hour, max, and it was as big as he was with sinister looking manipulators and jets everywhere. With the plasma tanks on it, it looked like a bomb....

Hell, it is a bomb.

Her connection fuzzed, and the trailer filled with the smell of another near miss. She didn’t allow it to screw up her programming. The safety locks on the welder were a little tougher than the safety locks on the cranes, but she broke it in three seconds.

Even as her control died, she shot the improv program to the core of the welding robot.

Three simple commands: Close the welding aperture to zero, power up the plasma generators to max, and—after waiting a second—lose the magnetic containment.

The trailer rocked again, in the wake of a giant explosion. Tetsami jacked out the cable and fell into the real world. Blondie quivered in the corner. No laser sliced the trailer.

Her shot had been right on target.

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Foreign Relations

“The difference between us and the alien is the belief that we know ourselves that much better. The similarity lies in the fact that we are ignorant of both.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr.”

—Muhammad

(570-632)

Sergeant Mariah Zanzibar, for the first time in seven years, found herself questioning Mr. Magnus’ judgment. Those doubts were perhaps the most painful thoughts to cross her mind in those seven years. She had given her loyalty to Dominic Magnus, and personal disloyalty was one of the worst crimes she could think of—up there with incest and fratricide.

She had tried to convince him, preach caution, warn him about the people he was using. However, she’d known she was preaching to deaf ears even before his interview with Shane.

She should have resigned then.

Instead, she had accepted his decision to go on with the bizarre plan. He was right about her knowledge of GA&A security. They needed her.

She should still have resigned in protest. It might have made him reconsider, though Zanzibar knew him well enough to know that would have been unlikely.

So, after having her protests brushed aside, she had gone along ...

To end up shot full of holes in the middle of Godwin with the two people in Magnus’ new organization that she trusted the least.

Even as she approached the intersection of Sacco and West Lenin, she still found it incredible that they had escaped from the ambush with their lives. Worse, she kept feeling unprofessional irritation at the fact that it was Tetsami who had saved them. Mr. Magnus had placed Tetsami in command of the trio, and she’d performed well—

That made Zanzibar mad.

Neither Tetsami nor Shane deserved his trust. Tetsami was a freelance software jock with no loyalty except to herself. Shane was a traitor; she had sold out every trust she had ever earned.

Zanzibar spat into the middle of the intersection. She checked the chronometer on her wrist—fifteen minutes late for the meeting. Not bad, considering she was on foot. Tetsami had stolen a truck from the construction site to evac Shane and get her to a medic, leaving Zanzibar to meet with their bookish contact, Levy, and the Paralian ship expert named “Flower.”

What a name.

Zanzibar scanned the surrounding buildings for an ambush, and saw nothing. She tracked with the nearly discharged plasma rifle anyway. There might only be a half-second burst left on the thing, but its deterrence value helped keep the casual Bakunin night crawlers at a distance.

After one last survey of the night-emptied landscape, she slung her weapon and walked up to the entrance of Bolshevik Books. The windows were opaqued, and the store was obviously closed. She paused before she pressed the call button.

Could she have been followed?

It was a paranoid thought but one worth reviewing. There was the possibility of a ground team of marines out there. She had avoided further ambush by going underground at the construction site. The Godwin sewer system was hideously complex. No one knew it all, but Zanzibar was aware of the best subterranean highways. She’d surfaced nearly ten klicks away from the construction site.

Was that good enough?

She never got a chance to answer her own question. The intercom came alive, a laser began scanning her, and a small holo of a nervous-looking gentleman asked, “Who’s there?”

The man was balding, middle-aged, and had an accent that Zanzibar thought belonged to either Paschal or Thubohu. It was probably Levy. She gave the password, “I’m a patriot.”

“There are no patriots on Bakunin.”

“Then perhaps I’m a partisan.”

“Enter, comrade.” The “comrade” part was laced with audible sarcasm. Zanzibar shrugged. The exchange had gone as she expected. Now all she had to do was meet this Flower, and see if the “expert” was what the plan needed.

What the plan needs is a miracle.

The door opened, and Johann Levy ushered her into his bookstore. She followed him through the stacks of paper-bound books. Levy led her into a windowless office awash in clutter. The only concession to order was a clear spot on the metallic green desk upon which sat a counter-surveillance generator, a wide-band signal detector, and a secure holo communicator unit. Everything was off except for the countersurveillance box, since you couldn’t transmit in or out of an RF-damping field.

Flower was sitting behind the desk.

Zanzibar suppressed a gasp when she crossed the threshold, and she had to summon a reserve of composure to continue striding over to Levy’s offered seat without showing her surprise.

She hadn’t expected Flower to be nonhuman.

Not only nonhuman, alien.

Nonhumans were fairly common in the Confederacy, on Bakunin at least. Most people had met at least one descendant of pre-Unification genetic projects. The Seven Worlds, the Tau Ceti arm of the Confederacy, were all populated by those Terran nonhumans. There were over a hundred species of them.

But whatever mistrust—even horror—existed between humans and their creations, they weren’t aliens.

In three centuries, the humans of the Confederacy had found evidence of only five intelligent extraterrestrial species.

There were the Dolbrians, who had died out over a hundred million years ago, leaving very few traces.

There was the Race, who had fought humanity and had been nearly exterminated in the Genocide War. The Race now never ventured off their world orbiting Procyon, where old United Nations battle stations still blasted anything that achieved orbit.

There were the Paralians, an aquatic civilization with little technological base, but who were so advanced in mathematics and theoretical physics that they had known the structure of tach-space centuries before humans launched a wormhole at Vega.

There were the worms of Helminth, with whom Confederacy scientists were still, as far as Zanzibar knew, trying to communicate.

Then there were Flower’s people, the Volerans.

Volera was discovered during the Indi Protectorate’s massive colonial expansion. Sixty-two years ago, one of the hundreds of Indi scouts had come across a highly attractive planet circling Tau Puppis, a star not only on the fringes of the Indi Protectorate, but on the fringes of the Confederacy.

It was found to be inhabited by a small population of highly technological avian creatures while it was still called Tau Puppis IV. Sometime after the planet was named Volera, it was realized that this planet was actually a remote outpost of another interstellar civilization.

Ever since, diplomats from the five arms of the Confederacy and the Voleran “Empire” had been engaged in a delicate dance on the fringes of both civilizations, trying to prevent any potentially disastrous contacts. That diplomatic dance was going on on the other side of the Indi Protectorate from Bakunin, almost ninety light-years away.

And, here, sitting behind a green metal desk was a Voleran named Flower who was purporting to be an expert on Paralian ship design.

Zanzibar slowly sat down, trying not to stare.

Levy closed the door. It looked like a simple swinging wood door, but Zanzibar heard a telltale static hiss when it closed—either more antisurveillance or some physical protection. Zanzibar assumed both. She could see almost instantly that all the clutter in Levy’s office was carefully staged and ordered. The rumpled little man was probably never out of arm’s reach of a weapon while he was in the store.

The little ones were always the most dangerous.

“Your name is Mariah Zanzibar, is it not?” he asked.

“And you’re Mr. Johann Levy.”

He nodded. “I’ve found you an expert on Paralian ship design who might be willing to work on this escapade.”

Zanzibar nodded and took the opportunity to look at the Voleran. It looked like a cross between a snake, a bird, and some sort of bush. Wings rose from a set of broad shoulders and were at the moment, draped about it like a cape. Its torso was long, broad, and tapered down to become—Zanzibar could only suppose as the desk was in the way—a tail.

The feathers—if that’s what you called them—were red, brown, and yellow, lighter on the underside and darker on top. They were flat and veined like leaves.

The neck was extremely long. Fully extended it would be a third of its height. The neck was bare of feathers—or was it foliage?—revealing leathery-looking brown skin.

Equally bare were its limbs. Each seemed double-jointed and had an extra knee/elbow. They all ended with three opposable digits. Two arms rested on the table in front of it, fingers locked in a disturbingly human gesture.

In a very inhuman gesture, it had one leg—built exactly like one of its arms, only longer and more muscular—bent up, backward, to support its head in a cupped three-toe foot.

Its head looked to be off some sort of dinosaur. A long bony beak emerged from a domed skull dominated by huge jaw muscles. It all sloped seamlessly back into a neck arched like a question mark. Zanzibar looked for a face in among the mottled yellow and black markings on the head, but couldn’t find one. Except for the mouth, its head was as featureless as a bullet.

“Hello,” Zanzibar said. “As Mr. Levy mentioned, I’m Sergeant Zanzibar.” She hoped she was looking at the right place when she talked. She considered offering her hand, and decided not to. “You are?”

“My name has translated himself as Flower.” It conducted an elaborate gesture with its hands that Zanzibar supposed was a greeting. “I am pleased to discover your need.”

Its voice was extremely odd: high-pitched, nasal, and very deliberately phrased. It was like listening to someone perpetually on the verge of a sneeze. “It has been long since I have heard someone who requires my expertise.”

“That’s what I’m here to find out. Whether or not you’re what we’re looking for.” Listen to yourself. You don’t even approve of the project. Zanzibar put those thoughts aside. Her job right now was finding someone who knew the ins and outs of that ship in the GA&A landing quad. She wasn’t here to second-guess. Not herself, not her duty. “We need someone with extensive knowledge of systems, mechanics, weaponry, etcetera, of Paralian-designed ships. We need someone who knows everything about a particular ship design, including the classified particulars and Confederacy in-house modifications.”

It made an imitation of a human nod, which amounted to a bobbing of the head on the end of its long neck. “It is right for you to be skeptical.”

“Forgive me if I have my doubts.”

“Shall I explain myself?” Zanzibar wondered how it talked. The serrated beak was rigid, and barely opened when it spoke. The few glimpses Zanzibar got inside its mouth showed an intricate palate made of ridged holes and muscular flaps. Flower seemed to have at least three tongues.

Zanzibar thought it looked like someone playing a flute from the inside.

“Go ahead,” she said.

“I have resided within the Terran Confederacy for thirty standard years. Many Diplomatic Envoys owned me as an Imperial Military Observer for twenty-three of those years.”

Zanzibar felt a half-smile reach the corner of her mouth. “You were a spy?”

“I was an Observer. One of the Emperor’s hands picks the academies for scholars to be its ears. I was one of those ears, and my observations were of the Confederacy military.”

“So you’re no longer an Observer?”

“My term of service to the Emperor ended himself. I still study human warfare, but only for my own ears.”

“Quite a hobby.”

Flower made a circular gesture with its free foot. Zanzibar interpreted it as a shrug. “I was studying the topic even when I was male. If I return to the Empire, I return to my academy. I do not because an alien culture provides more interest than my own. Bakunin allows me to have a free hand in my studies. Freer than when I was an extension of the Emperor’s hand.”

“I see. So you do know the kind of information we need?”

“You require information the Kalcthwee’rat provides me.” it was the first time Zanzibar had heard a native Paralian term pronounced with anything approaching authenticity “The Kalcthwee’rat translates himself as Blood-Tide. He is a Paralian-designed, Confederacy-built drop-ship. He modifies on the Barracuda class-five troop-carrier. He sizes between the Manta fighter and the Hammerhead light bomber. He moves in tach-space, in-system, and can maneuver atmospheric with and without contragrav assistance. The Barracuda design was originally—”

“Okay,” Zanzibar said, holding up her hand. “Has Mr. Levy informed you of what we need you for?”

“Not in any detail. I do know that you are offering me a chance to observe firsthand a human military operation. I would find such an experience invaluable even if no payment was offered.”

I’ll be damned, Zanzibar thought, a thrill-seeking alien.

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Family Values

“There is no aspect of politics that was not first invented within the confines of a human family.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“If Absolute Sovereignty be not necessary in a State, how come it to be so in a family?”

—Mary Astell

(1666-1731)

Tetsami thought that the name, the Stemmer Facility, sounded more like a factory than a hospital. From the outside, it looked like a factory. The whole building was a one-piece blank-gray truncated pyramid that was typical of the bunkerlike architecture infecting most of Godwin. It had no windows, a shortage of surface access, and no external indication that it was a hospital, and one far removed from the biological chop-shops she’d known back in the old days.

Tetsami snorted. All of her previous life was now the “old days.” She disliked the fact that she was waxing nostalgic about her years as one of the best freelance hackers in the Godwin corporate shithole.

There was a reason. In those eight years she’d never been involved in this kind of shitstorm. Because of the way her parents died, she’d shunned any sort of corporate identity—no matter what it cost her in potential kilograms—to avoid being targeted in the dirty little wars that constantly rippled through the sea of Bakunin economics. Now she was stuck in the middle of a whole flood of the same shit that’d killed them.

No wonder she was pining for the “good old days.”

Days when the only laser she’d deal with would be piped through an optical datalink.

The only thing on the plus side at the moment was the fact that, now that she’d entered the rarefied atmosphere of corporate economics, the medical treatment was that much better. Shane was getting the full exec layout right in the middle of Central Godwin. It would have been cheaper to boot to the East Side. Tetsami did know some hacks there who were safe.

However, it was a given that the East Side of Godwin was crawling with informants and blabbing maggots.

Here in Stemmer, she had a chance of getting Shane fixed up without the honcho in charge of GA&A finding out about it. The docs here cost—but they wouldn’t sell you out. Couldn’t, since everything was cash up front, and all it would take for Stemmer to lose most of its lucrative executive clientele would be one info leak.

Tetsami stood in one of the private waiting rooms, hoping for word on Shane.

“Don’t let this be a fuckup,” she whispered to herself occasionally. Hell, it looked as though someone had set them up. Tetsami kind of hoped that it wasn’t Shane who’d done it. However, Shane was the only person that Dom hadn’t checked five light-years from everywhere. Which meant that if it wasn’t Shane, it could be anybody—

“Hey, ‘lil girl, heard you were looking for me.”

Tetsami turned around to face the man who had just walked into the room. “Ivor!”

Ivor Jorgenson filled the door behind her. He stood over two meters, a head and a half over Tetsami. His hair was snow white, and his eyes were an icy blue.

She ran up and hugged him.

He patted her on the back and said, “Glad to see you, too, but what the hell’s going on?”

“Sit down.” She disengaged and perched herself on one of the overstuffed lounge chairs. “I’ll tell you about it.”

Ivor nodded and thrust his bulk down on another chair. “You better, punkin—you gave me one hell of a fright. First a coded message on my comm telling me you got a job for me. Then a message to meet you at Stemmer—you could ‘ve mentioned that it wasn’t you who got busted up.”

Tetsami saw the concern on Ivor’s face and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Sorry—I was in such a rush here, I barely got the message out. If you ain’t an exec, it takes a lot of grease to get them pulling here.”

“Well, I’m glad it wasn’t you. But what the hell are you doing out in the open? I’ve heard—”

“It’s true.”

Ivor’s face became very cold. “Who backed the contract?”

“Ivor—”

“Tell me the bastard who put money on your head—”

“Ivor—”

“I’ll kill the son of a—”

“IVOR!” Tetsami held up her hands until Ivor quieted. “Look, it’s a bit bigger than that. You couldn’t take them by yourself, anyway. Even if I wanted you to.”

He sighed and shook his head. “What have you gotten mixed up in this time, punkin?”

“Maybe the biggest payoff for one job either of us could ever see.”

* * * *

As she talked to Ivor, she had to admit that seeing her not-quite-father again gave her an inordinate amount of reassurance. It was both calming and an annoyance for someone who had spent half her life in pursuit of fanatical self-sufficiency.

And as she went over the high points and the horrors of her last dozen days, she began to question involving her white-haired “uncle.”

It wasn’t because her initial impulse to pull him in was either sentimental or unprofessional. As far as pilots went, Ivor was the best one she knew or knew of. He had once been the ranking member of the Stygian Presidential Guard, Airborne. Ivor Jorgenson once had—twenty years or so ago—control of the entire planetary defense of the planet Styx. Tetsami might be the only one on the planet who knew that little fact, and even she didn’t know the name under which he’d served. Ivor’s connection with Styx had long ago withered and been abandoned. His reputation as a pilot on Bakunin had been built over the twenty years of his residence here.

Yes, he was the best pilot she knew, and there was no question about her being able to trust him.

Her second thoughts had a deeper origin.

This shit was dangerous, and she didn’t want to lose what was left of her family. All through the discussion, she kept remembering the corporate war that had destroyed Holographic DataComm. The EMP that toasted her parents spared her only because she had no hardware in her skull at the time. Ivor, who was HDC’s data smuggler—slipping copies of product into the closed media environments of certain communes—had realized that Tetsami’s genetic heritage made her a potential corporate asset. If Ivor hadn’t evacked her, she’d probably’ve had a short brilliant career as a pet corporate hacker for the Troy Broadcasting Corporation. A career that would most likely end where her parents’ had ended.

When she’d gotten her biolink implanted, it was the only time she’d known Ivor—with his explosive temper—to have come close to striking her.

As she pulled Ivor farther into her proposal, she became more and more ambivalent about involving him in her dangerous game. She began to understand what his fears had been when she’d finally entered her parents’ line of work.

* * * *

After Tetsami had spent an hour explaining things, Ivor said, “To think, when you were six, I thought you were cute.”

“And I thought you were dashing, Uncle Ivor—you’re evading the question.” Tetsami wasn’t sure what answer she wanted to hear.

“You know I’ve got commitments—”

“Hauling produce up to Jefferson? Come on?”

“Don’t denigrate an honest living.”

“You never worked an honest day in your life.”

Ivor stood up and paced, running large hands through white hair. “You know I hate this, don’t you? The only family I’ve had since I landed on this rock—do you go out of your way to put yourself in these scrapes? You’ve driven my hair white, you want me to go bald as well?”

“You had white hair ten years before I was born.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Neither is your hair.”

Ivor sighed and stopped pacing. “You know you’ve sold me, don’t you?”

Tetsami nodded slowly, feeling relieved and disturbed at the same time.

“But only to keep an eye on you,” Ivor finished.

“Of course.”

After that, the conversation drifted into safer channels. It had been close to a year standard since they’d seen each other, and there was a lot of catching up to do. It took Tetsami a little while to get Ivor to admit that the produce run was a scam; he was really smuggling propaganda out of Jefferson City to the outlying communes that supplied it with food.

“What’s the point?”

Ivor shrugged. “The Jefferson Congress decided that if some of the communes went democro-capitalist, they’d get a better deal on the food. I think it’s revenge. Those fanatic Americans really don’t like it when they’re called the Thomas Jefferson Commune.”

“But they are one, aren’t they?”

Ivor laughed. “Just don’t tell them that.”

“I mean, if they ain’t a commune, and they ain’t a corporation, then they’re a State, and someone would have to do something about that—”

The door to the waiting room slid aside, revealing a man wearing a blue one-piece cleansuit. His face was hidden behind a plastic mask that turned his eyes into tiny optical cameras and his mouth into a speaker grille. He asked, “You are waiting for patient D5/789/3467?”

Tetsami nodded.

“You can see the patient. The injuries were not as extensive as first expected. The remaining balance of your security deposit was refunded to your account.”

Tetsami stood up, tugged Ivor’s elbow, and followed the doctor.

The two of them walked through wood-paneled corridors, across plush carpets from the Protectorate. Ivor faded back behind her and whispered, “Patient D5-slash-78-whatever? Doesn’t your marine have a name?”

“As far as these exec docs are concerned, no.”

The room Shane was in did its best to look like a hotel room.

Shane looked undiminished by her experience. She was sitting up on the edge of the bed; the gown they’d given her resembled a kimono more than the paper hospital thingie Tetsami expected. The only sign of injury was a purple bruise surrounding a sealed gash that ran down the right side of her face. Shane looked up at Tetsami and gave a little half-smile. “This has got a shipboard infirmary beat all to hell.”

“How’re you feeling?” Tetsami asked.

“Well—physically.”

“Up to getting out of here?”

Shane nodded. ‘They said I’m fine. They didn’t even need to cut me open. Though—” She looked in Ivor’s direction. “Unless I scrambled my brains more than I thought, that is not Zanzibar.”

“Oh, yes. Kathy Shane, Ivor Jorgenson.”

Ivor extended a hand and gave Shane a beaming smile, “Pleased.”

Shane managed to find a full smile of her own and grasped his hand. “So, are you an innocent bystander, or are you one of Dominic’s nutcases?”

Ivor shook his head. “Neither.” His smile never wavered.

Tetsami stood. “Well, get dressed and we’ll go down to the warehouse—”

“Uh, this is it. The doctors trashed my jumpsuit.”

Tetsami looked Shane up and down. “Kind of drafty. Sheesh—” she shook her head. “I didn’t salvage any luggage—all I got was your case of armor and a few weapons. Damn.”

Shane shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Here,” Ivor shrugged out of the pseudoleather jacket he was wearing. He held it out. Shane wasn’t much taller than Tetsami. Despite her being built like a weightlifter, Ivor’s jacket draped her like a tent.

“Thanks—” Shane slipped her feet into a pair of hospital slippers by the bed. “Let’s go.”

Tetsami shrugged and led them out of the building.

Behind her she heard them talking.

“Tetsami told me what happened. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to—”

“I know how it feels when your own people turn on you.”

“I turned on them.”

“I know about that, too.”

As they got to the exit, Tetsami asked, “Ivor, how’d you get here?”

He pointed out the window across the parking lot, “My rig’s over there.”

“Good, we have to empty out the truck I appropriated. I burned the transponder on it, but someone’s going to trace it eventually.”

“Appropriated?” Shane asked.

“Stole,” Tetsami explained. “You were unconscious.”

The three of them walked out to the parking lot.

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Controlling Interest

“History is an accident.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“None climbs so high as he who knows not wither he is going.”

—Oliver Cromwell

(1599-1658)

Dom walked through an ancient cavern, his thoughts as dark as the glassy black walls. He was more than two hundred meters beneath the commune. The only signs of humanity down here were the lights left behind by the construction crew and the omnidirectional hum of the overbuilt fusion generator.

Whatever the temperature was in the snowy valley that hid the commune, the temperature down here was a constant ten degrees C.

Dom’s breath fogged, casting halos around the rectangular lights that lined his path.

It would be nice to walk down here forever. Nice to lose himself in the heart of Bakunin’s only mountain range, the spine of Bakunin’s only continent. It would be easy to do, too. If he took a few branches beyond the end of the lights, it would be unlikely that anyone would ever find him. The caverns down here allegedly ran the length of the continent, from glacier to glacier.

Dom was surprised that the option held any attraction for him. The impulse revealed a facet of himself he didn’t like. Was he so damn used to running?

The walls peeled back as Dom walked into a huge chamber, losing themselves in darkness. The floor collapsed into blackness ten meters away. There was one lone light in here, fixed above the entrance behind him.

He’d been walking for nearly an hour, and he had reached the end of the construction crew’s amateur spelunking. Dom was probably the first human being to stand on this ledge since the commune was finished, years ago. He was certainly the first one down here since the Diderot Commune had been abandoned, and that was at least a decade.

The commune complex had been his for less than a year, and it was barely operational. Dom was certain none of his people had been down this way yet; there was too much to do, too much to fix, and too few people. The commune was originally constructed to house ten thousand, and Dom only had around fourteen hundred people. Less than a thousand when he subtracted children, wounded, and elderly dependents.

Dom ran his hand over the wall. Someone had used a laser torch to carve a list of initials in the obsidian.

His fingers traced the carving. It was the most permanent thing that the construction crew had done. This carving, down here where the weather never changed, on a planet that was—for most practical purposes—tectonically dead, would probably outlast other signs of the human presence on Bakunin by a million years.

That made Dom think about the Dolbrians, who were supposedly responsible for this planet. Maybe that’s what all their mysterious sculptures, mounds, and trenches were—cosmic graffiti.

Dom surprised himself by smiling.

His old boss, Dimitri, wouldn’t appreciate that sentiment. Him with his almost spiritual worship of the Dolbrians.

But the idea struck a chord in Dom. After all, isn’t that all anyone wanted? What was life but a frantic attempt to make some sort of impact on an indifferent universe? An effort to scrawl “I was here!” as big as possible?

The Dolbrians had left one hell of a mark. People were reading their graffiti a megacentury after they’d died out. Or vanished. Or whatever.

Dom turned and faced the dark cavern. He didn’t adjust his photoreceptors to get a better picture. He stayed watching the darkness.

What kind of mark was he going to leave when he died?

His breath puffed out in a cloud as he said, “Brother, what are you doing to me?”

For the first time in a long while he was thinking in terms beyond the corporation he’d birthed.

“Mr. Magnus?” said a voice from behind, down the passage. Its owner was panting heavily.

“Mr. Magnus, sir?” the voice’s owner ran up behind him, boots echoing across the rocky floor. Soon another plume of breath joined Dom’s above the abyss.

“Yes?” Dom turned and looked at a short swarthy individual. Having an onboard computer meant he knew the names and history of everyone who worked for him. The gentleman next to him had run the third-shift carpool and dispatch back at GA&A. His name was Desmond.

“We’ve got the aircar you wanted out of stores. It’s ready on the pad.”

“The contragrav?”

“Yes.”

Dom nodded. “Can we spare it?”

“We’ll get by.”

Silence stretched. Desmond remained standing next to him.

“Anything else?”

“Well, uh, sir—”

Dom turned around so he could face Desmond.

“We’ve installed the holos and the field generators. There are people who’ve seen that and feel we’re much too vulnerable.”

“The generators were supposed to compensate for that.”

Desmond nodded.

Silence stretched and Dom finally said, “It isn’t enough.”

“The commune still feels too exposed. A lot of us are nervous, especially with the potential threat.”

Dom nodded. He had purchased this bolt-hole less than a year ago, and there had been precious little time to prepare it.

With Klaus out there, tins commune really wasn’t safe. Klaus was behind a systematic targeting of GA&A personnel. If he became aware of the location of Dom’s commune, he would eradicate it. Klaus would need only a fraction of the force he had used against GA&A.

Dom needed some way to make things more defensible.

He nodded to himself and started leading Desmond back to the fusion generators and the elevator to the commune. “Yes, Desmond. I think I have a solution, something I should have thought of earlier.”

He spent a few hours drafting a plan, organizing an engineering detail and a construction squad, getting the ball rolling. That done, he delegated authority and satisfied himself that things would run fine without him again.

When he took the aircar—contragrav, not vectored thrust—Bakunin had settled deep into a moonless night.

Dom lifted off from a snow-dusted carpool on the fringe of the commune building. He let the computer handle the initial trajectory of his craft as he watched the commune recede.

The building was a massive, white, truncated pyramid with a skirt made by the hydroponics greenhouses. The structure filled the floor of this nameless valley. The craft rose, and there was a shimmer as he passed through the defensive screens of the commune. The force field dome here was not designed to block lasers or plasma, or to fry the delicate electronics of a missile—the building didn’t have power systems that could cope with that. This field was designed with more passive thoughts in mind: reducing the stray infrared and EM signature of the commune town to that of the rest of the mountain around it.

There was another shimmer, and suddenly the commune vanished as Dom’s craft passed through the floor of the holo screen. A dozen independent projectors ringed the valley, raising the image of the valley floor above the top of the commune. From this close it was obviously a projection, but from an overflight, another peak, or a satellite, the commune would be invisible.

Sadly, both the holo and the defense screens were jury-rigged measures that took two full Bakunin days to implement. Dom didn’t want to leave until both were operational. They were last-minute compensations for the fact that he had never planned for the commune to be a target. The commune was housing for displaced refugees. Corporate wars almost never extended to targeting employees. Corporate battles were battles for assets.

Dom hadn’t anticipated Klaus.

As the dead snow-capped peaks receded behind him, he hoped his late measures would be enough to hide his people.

He should have anticipated this. The whole commune should have been built underground, with adequate ground-air defensive weaponry.

Dom turned away from the mountains and decided it was too late for regrets.

* * * *

Dom flew his contragrav in a wide circle around Godwin, above the hardwood forest that camped in the shoulder of the mountains. The forest seemed an afterthought, a result of the congruence of the equatorial “heat” and the chain of mountains blocking the moisture blowing off of Bakunin’s world-ocean. It seemed almost providential.

The people who believed in Dolbrian intervention on Bakunin pointed to this as a sign of their intervention. They also pointed to the fact that, by all rights, Bakunin should be an iceball, but a combination of its proximity to its weak star, an infinitesimal axial tilt, and a thick moisture-laden atmosphere made the equator on the planet’s one continent fairly comfortable. One side of the mountains was lush, one side desert, and the dead tectonics of the planet meant that it had been this way—except for the slow erosion of the mountains—almost since the Dolbrians existed.

Dom shook his head. He was still thinking of ancient civilizations.

It was Dimitri. Dolbrians were one of Dimitri’s little obsessions. And, unless one of Dimitris’ annual medical procedures—this year a kidney, the next his liver, nerve grafts, bone marrow—had gone wrong recently, Dimitri was in charge of the TEC mission that had cost Dom GA&A.

In fact, Dimitri would have to be personally overseeing something like this.

Dimitri.

Dom wanted to kill him almost as much as he did his brother.

The warehouse Dom had rented from Bleek was in the northwest corner of Godwin, sitting right on top of the gentle northward curve of the ill-fated Godwin-Proudhon commuter tube. That’s where he was headed. A direct route straight for the warehouse from the commune would have saved him several hours and given him less of an opportunity for reflection, but it also would have carried him over the GA&A complex, as well as East Godwin. Those were two risks he wasn’t ready to take. So his contragrav aircar had started north, away from everything, turned west over the white synthetic marble of Jefferson City, and turned around so he merged with east-bound air traffic from New Paris.

As he flew over the residential outskirts of Godwin— walked suburban enclaves patrolled by private security armies—the eastern sky beyond the mountains began to lighten. The slight ruddy glow that lit the mountains from behind made him think of what they must have looked like when they were sharp-edged and volcanically active.

A northern turn took him abruptly into a forest of warehouses.

He landed just as the mountains’ shadow passed him, slicing its way east, abandoning the dull black cubes of the warehouse district to the red dawn light.

The warehouse he was renting from Bleek Munitions was typical of its kind—blocky, windowless, over-engineered, and about as subtle as a slap in the face. Unlike GA&A, Bleek wasn’t in a centralized location, so it needed way stations like this at various points in its logistical set up. This place was supposed to be a stop for munitions orders going off-planet via Proudhon, which was why it sat on top of the hypothetical commuter tube. Since the tube was never finished, this warehouse was fairly useless. It was badly placed and spent most of its time empty.

Ail reasons that Dom chose it to base his operation.

Our operation, he told himself, thinking of Tetsami.

The past two days had been the only point during the last dozen when he’d been without Tetsami’s company. There was a numbing realization that in ten days he’d gotten used to Tetsami, perhaps even needed her. It gave Dom a vague feeling of unease. He didn’t want to think of himself as using a colleague as an emotional crutch.

It was unprofessional.

And emotional involvement in his kind of work was dangerous, possibly crippling.

He had to shift mental gears.

Our operation.

This thing he and Tetsami had started, it was different from GA&A. There were different expectations. Tetsami had pointed out something. These people were not his employees. They were his partners. Whatever he did, Tetsami was part of it just as much as he was, and everyone involved would have a piece.

He pushed open one of the gull-wing doors and stepped out on to the roofside landing area.

An elevator mounted at the edge of the roof slid open, and two people stepped out. It was Sergeant Zanzibar and a giant white-haired gentleman who looked vaguely familiar.

Ivor Jorgenson, Dom remembered from his research. Where have I seen you before?

They were both armed with Macmillan-Schmitt wide-aperture plasma rifles. The things were close-combat jobs, scaled-down versions of a vehicle plasma-jet. Confed infantry liked them, even though they sucked power a few magnitudes beyond a similar-sized laser. Unlike a laser, one shot from a plasma rifle could probably clean this roof.

The marines nicknamed it “pocket sunshine.”

When Zanzibar and her escort saw who he was, they lowered their weapons. Zanzibar walked up to him, and the white-haired man hung back by the elevator. “Welcome back to Godwin, Mr. Magnus. Did you run into any trouble on your way here?”

Dom shook his head. “No.”

“Security here’s been a nightmare. We’ve been ambushed twice by Confed marines. The last was an attempt on Mosasa and Random Walk when they came into Godwin.”

“Mosasa was never a GA&A employee.” Dom didn’t like that.

Zanzibar nodded. “Some details of this op seemed to have leaked back to Colonel Dacham.”

“Damnation and taxes!” Dom slammed his fist against the shell of his contragrav and only barely noticed Zanzibar’s shocked expression.

“I’ve done what containment I can,” Zanzibar said. “Everyone’s locked down here in the warehouse. No communication is going out. I was worried about the commune—”

Dom shook his head. “Don’t. The commune is all right.”

“If Dacham IDs the commune and where it is—”

“Damn it, Zanzibar! What do you think I’ve been doing the last two days?”

“Sorry, sir.”

Dom took a deep breath. “No. I’m sorry. It’s been a rough few days.” He surprised himself by putting his hand on Zanzibar’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about that. It’s been taken care of. Your job’s here.”

“It’s only a matter of time before somebody traces this warehouse.”

“All we need is a few days. Is everyone here?”

Zanzibar nodded. “Mosasa and Random arrived yesterday.”

“Is he all right?”

“Yes.” Zanzibar sounded odd. “They tried to take us—me and Ivor were escort—by surprise. They got me and Ivor stunned, but apparently they missed Mosasa entirely.” Zanzibar sounded suspicious.

“What happened?”

“Apparently Mosasa crisped three marines while we were out.”

“He wasn’t hurt?”

“Not a scratch.”

“I don’t like that.”

“Neither do I.”

“Any idea where the leak came from?”

Zanzibar shook her head and looked irritated. “No. I’d put my money on Shane. If there were any way she could have known who Mosasa was and how he was coming in.”

“It could have been Mosasa.”

“I know. A stunner miss seems too damn convenient. But the marines were crisped. Seems costly for a cover job.”

Dom sighed. “Well, we keep a lid on for now. Take me down to meet the team. We don’t have much time before we have to hit Klaus.”

* * * *

By mid-morning—after Dom was briefed by Tetsami— the team was all together in one place for the first time.

So all Klaus needs is one missile, Dom thought as he took his seat to the right of the display holo.

The warehouse could be subdivided by computer-controlled wall modules, and their meeting room was a large chamber constructed entirely of the programmed wall units. They sat in a cube twenty meters on a side and would have had one hell of an echo problem if Mosasa hadn’t included sound dampers in with the more conventional countersurveillance devices.

Nine people sat in a ring around a circular table that had once been a pedestal for some piece of heavy machinery. Dom and Tetsami sat on either side of a holo generator aimed above the table.

Dom folded his hands before him and began.

“All of you’ve been given some idea of what we plan to do here. It’s time for specifics. None of you is committed yet. Considering time and security problems, this is your one chance to back out.”

Dom scanned the room. He had to make the offer. Levy looked a little nervous. The bird-thing’s head was bobbing on a serpentine neck in a very inhuman manner. Mosasa’s dragon tattoo showed more expression than Mosasa did.

No one backed out.

Dom nodded. “Good. Since this is the first time you’ve all been together, let’s have some introductions— Tetsami?”

Tetsami stood. She was going to have to bear the brunt of the presentation since it was, for the most part, her plan.

She ran her hands through her hair. She looked as though she’d been missing some sleep. “Well, you all know me—in fact you’re lucky if I haven’t pumped you for information in the past sixty-four hours—but for formality’s sake, I’m Kari Tetsami.”

Funny, though it was in her file, it was the first time Dom had ever considered her first name.

“I’m coordinating this expedition. If you have a problem with the plan, you talk to me.”

Tetsami waved at Ivor. He was putting away his third sandwich and washing it down with a mammoth container of coffee. “This is Ivor Jorgenson, the best pilot I know of on this rock. He’ll be the one extracting the surface team from the complex.”

She continued, counterclockwise around the table. Next to Jorgenson was Shane, who was nursing a large bruise on the side of her face. “Kathy Shane, she’s our marine. She was kind enough to defect with a full load of body armor. She’ll be the one to get the ground team into the ship.”

Mosasa was next. “Tjaele Mosasa is our expert on communications, electronics, security systems, and so on. He’s already done worthwhile work on the transponder in Shane’s armor, and he is going to make sure that the folks holding GA&A don’t see us coming.” Mosasa nodded politely, the glow from the holo projector reflecting off his scalp.

Floating next to Mosasa was a squashed metal sphere carrying what looked like an oversized briefcase in one of its manipulators. “The robot is actually being run by Random Walk, an artificial intelligence.” Dom felt he heard Tetsami’s voice lower a few degrees. “Random will be responsible for taking charge of the computers aboard the Paralian ship in the landing quad.”

Johann Levy was next, short, balding, and perpetually nervous. Dom also noted that he was sitting between the two nonhumans. “Johann Levy is our demolition expert. He has the most important job, cracking the safe.”

Next was the bird, a creature who had been getting his—her? its?—share of stares. “Flower is a Voleran,” just in case they hadn’t guessed; “it—please don’t call Flower ‘he,’ that would be an insult—is our informant on the design and weaponry of the drop-ship that we have to deal with. Flower will not go in on the ground, but our success relies on it as much as on any member of the group.”

Then there was Zanzibar. “Mariah Zanzibar knows the hardwired security setup in the complex. She’s also combat-trained and will back up the team going into the safe.

“And, finally, Mr. Dominic Magnus, the man whose money we’re stealing.”

Dom nodded at the rest of the assembled team.

“What’s at stake here,” said Tetsami, “for each of us, is a flat twenty megagrams. Or an equal share of a corporate takeover.” She smiled. “Now that we know each other and why we’re involved, shall we get down to what we’re going to do?”

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Press Conference

“Mercenaries may not win as many wars as fanatics do, but they live longer.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“Gold is everything; without gold there’s nothing.”

—Denis Diderot

(1713-1784)

Sometime during the introductions it hit Tetsami. It was actually going to happen. This heist she had been planning—at least half out of desperation—was actually going down.

Until now, standing in front of the eight other team members, she’d been deep-down convinced that this whole idea was hypothetical. Something to mark time while she or Dom thought of some way to get out from under the Confed guns.