Profiteer

They weren’t marking time, it wasn’t hypothetical, and it was probably the only way to get a defensible position. Dom—damn the diabolical logic of all this—needed a corporate base to defend himself and “his people.” It was that or everyone whom Dom even breathed on would have to dig a hole and hide until the TEC decided to leave the planet.

A vain hope when she had no idea why they were here in the first place.

She manipulated the holo and started reviewing the whole plan for the first time, all the while expecting the inevitable, “You’re kidding,” or, “That’ll never work.” It took an extreme effort on her part—especially with Ivor there—to avoid showing the nerves that tied her gut in a knot.

She consciously imitated Dom’s control.

“First,” she told the eight others as she called up a holo image of the current layout of the GA&A complex, “Here’s the nut we’re going to crack.”

She zoomed in on each detail as she described it. “The complex is surrounded by a two-hundred-fifty-meter diameter circle of twenty perimeter towers. Each is—was— fifty meters of diamondwire-reinforced concrete, sensors, antiaircraft, and Emerson field generators.”

She moved the pointer to the west side of the complex. “Here’s the good news—half got scragged by TEC missile fire. The entire ass-end of the residence tower—the tall building west of the quad—is hanging out over Godwin. Ditto what’s left of the old security HQ, and the extreme north end of the office building.

“The TEC is trying to fill the gap with their own equipment. The scragged perimeter towers, most have been chopped off at twenty meters for them to mount their own weapons and sensors. They’re more twitchy about a ground assault than an air attack. There’s enough computer-aimed hardware on the Blood-Tide to take out a decent airborne assault without waking their command. Their problem’s that the Blood-Tide is useless versus ground-pounders. So the nests on top of those ten scragged towers carry plasma cannons. MacMillan-Schmitt HD350, I think—”

Shane nodded and some of Tetsami’s audience whistled in appreciation.

“Again,” Tetsami continued, “we got good news. They only have the ship’s computers, and those are overloaded. They have warm bodies manning the plasma cannons, and they don’t have enough marines to man the perimeter and patrol the interior.”

Tetsami nodded at Shane. Shane elaborated for her, “There’s a one-hundred-twenty-marine complement in there, and the HD350 requires a gunner and a tech to run. That’s half the active-duty personnel at any one time.”

Tetsami nodded. “Add to that the minimum of five people stationed aboard the Blood-Tide, and another ten marines lost to injury or misadventure since this began, there’ll be ten marines on generic security as long as GA&A isn’t on some sort of alert—”

“At which point an extra seventy marines land on us,” muttered Zanzibar.

“—so with the exception of the perimeter and ship itself, we’re dealing with civilian security.”

“Until the alarm sounds,” Zanzibar said.

“I hope to avoid that.” Tetsami adjusted the focus of the holo so that everyone was looking at the central portion of the complex. She moved the pointer about, highlighting the buildings in turn, describing GA&A’s layout, until she focused on the central landing quad, where the hundred-meter-long Blood-Tide barely fit. “Now, I want to get back to the TEC ship. Flower?” Tetsami prompted.

The birdlike alien scratched its long neck with one foot as it gestured at the holo with its three-fingered hands. The three joints made its arms move with a liquid grace. “The Blood-Tide is a class of ship that was first designed as a fast troop-carrier. He is as large as a cargo ship. He deceives with that. The original model was extremely overengineered. His design incorporates a tach-drive, conventional maneuvering drives, and a contragrav generator. A quantum extraction contragrav, not the slower, safer, catalytic injection drive. Because of the multiple systems his original model could never move more than five hundred troops—”

Flower went on at length on the ship that had landed on the GA&A complex. It was the third time Tetsami had heard it all. The important points of Flower’s speech weren’t the reassessing of the Barracuda Class-Five’s military role—a reassessment that added dozens of weapons and heavier armor and reduced its carrying capacity. The important point was the multiple redundancies of the craft. Redundancies such as total separation of the defensive field generators from the drives, allowing the Blood-Tide to power a defensive screen over the whole GA&A complex without running the drives. Redundancies such as a spare computer system that could be hijacked to run the security system for GA&A from the ship—barely.

Flower took the holo’s remote and called up various schematics. Some were public domain, some had been bought or hijacked from various nets in the last few days, and a few Flower had drawn up itself. The people paying the most attention to Flower’s assessment of the Blood-Tide were Mosasa and, predictably, Ivor.

“Here, and here—” Flower used the pointer to indicate places around the landing gear, “are access points to the secondary Emerson field generator. Like most Confederacy battlecraft, the Barracuda has a multiple-layer system that can generate concentric fields of differing frequencies to deal with multiple laser hits. From the information I have been given, the Blood-Tide has only a single screen up, covering the diameter of the entire complex. Even one layer at that diameter would be a major drain on his power systems, even if he taps the GA&A power grid. With the landing gear down, it is possible to access the Emerson field generator directly through these circuits.” Two spots lit up red. “This bypasses the control computer.”

Random Walk’s robot rose and tilted at the holo. “And what about accessing the computer itself?”

“Theoretically, he could be accessed from the GA&A security grid, since they are using the ship’s computer to run the complex. This is not a good option since we know nothing of the interface they are using, only that it was designed by TEC programmers on-site. The better option is direct access to the core system of the Blood-Tide himself.”

The image rotated, pulled back, and dropped electronic schematics in favor of structural detail. “Here is the secondary core. He is placed as central to the ship as possible—”

Ivor spoke up. “What’s that big sphere crowding the starboard bulkhead?”

Flower shrunk the image even further to allow more of the internal structure to be seen. “That is the contragrav generator, which is at the center of the ship. The secondary core is central to avoid battle damage, the generator is there for maneuvering—”

“I was afraid of that,” Ivor said.

“Isn’t it dangerous to get that close to a quantum extraction system?” asked Zanzibar.

Flower bobbed its head. “There is only a radiation hazard when the drive is running, and he is shielded.”

Ivor sighed. “Those things are hideously cranky.”

Flower made a circular gesture with his foot. “We do not intend to fly him—”

“Right, we don’t,” said Tetsami. “Which brings us to the ground team, and how we’re getting Random to that computer core.”

The floating robot tilted in a bow.

“The surface team is Shane, Mosasa, and Random—or specifically, that briefcase Random’s simulacrum is holding.”

The robot placed an aluminum briefcase on the table. “I don’t show this to just anyone, but in that case is a fifth part of my brain, a crystal matrix with RF and a few I/O ports, what makes me me.”

“I was wondering how that thing was being piloted when we’re supposed to be RF shielded in here,” Zanzibar muttered.

The robot used a manipulator to open the case and revealed a keyboard, a number of cables, a small holo display, and a lot of access ports. One of them was a bio-interface jack. Tetsami didn’t want to think about that.

“Mr. Mosasa built this for me,” Random said. “So I could go out, see the world—etcetera.”

“Anyway,” Tetsami said, “Random is going to be the major cog in getting TEC security off everyone’s backs. I’ll be backing him up from the security grid end, but we need someone at the core of the Blood-Tide to make sure we pull this off. Stage one of the op is getting Random’s briefcase to the secondary core of the Blood-Tide.”

Tetsami took the remote back from Flower and changed the display. Now, floating above the table was the globe of Bakunin. The globe looked like a map someone had left unfinished, even though it was an accurate picture from orbit. Most of the globe seemed white, all except a strip around the equator where Bakunin’s one continent shot from north to south at an angle, ice cap to ice cap. A little red dot glowed on the equator of that continent, on the western side of its mountainous spine. A large blue dot glowed to its immediate west. “The red dot is GA&A and the blue dot is Godwin.”

Tetsami started to circle the table, pacing the slowly rotating globe. “Our first problem with the ground team is getting them in without flagging security. It calls for a distraction to misdirect everyone so we can get Shane up to a perimeter guard. The first problem we have is the Emerson field. A military screen can detect any EM active source crossing the perimeter—that includes Shane’s armor and Random. Second problem is the RF traffic and the transponder codes—obviously altered since Shane defected. We need to knock out all that to give Shane a window. And do it without letting them realize something’s up.”

As she passed Zanzibar, Tetsami heard her mutter, “Good luck.”

“Gladiatorial combat to the rescue.”

Not a few people said, “Huh?”

Tetsami hit the remote and a small yellow speck appeared over the planet’s equator, pacing the planet’s rotation. “The problem of getting Shane in baffled me for a while—I mean, what kind of massive ECM could I pull on the whole GA&A complex that wouldn’t look like someone deliberately fucking with them? The solution is bonehead simple—if you ever watch the public airwaves on this rock. That yellow speck there is a Troy Broadcasting Corp satellite.” Tetsami realized that her smile had grown hard. This part of her plan was petty revenge. However, it did have an elegance about it.

“The sat’s a new one, right over Godwin, and it’s been blasting anything that gets close to it.”

Tetsami punched the remote and on came footage from the wattage war between the gladiators and the demolition derby. “Troy Broadcasting has been beaming targeted high-power broadcasts straight into Godwin. They overpower any ground-based transmission, and when they really get happy, they bleed their broadcast over every holo channel available. Folks have been picking this stuff up on computers, aircar autopilots, power cables—you get the picture. Someone eventually is going to nuke that terrorist sat, but while it’s there ...”

“Oh ...” Ivor always understood her sense of humor, even if he sometimes didn’t appreciate it.

“I can hack that sat, and tightbeam their whole broadcast, full power, right on top of GA&A. They won’t know what the fuck’s going on, but for a while, this is what they’ll be getting on their tac database. It’ll take them at least fifteen minutes to get unscrambled. That’s the minimum it’ll take someone to directly program the main screen to block out the RF overload.”

Tetsami returned the holo to the overview of the GA&A complex. Overlaying it was a timer and moving blue dots representing what they knew of the guard patrols—mostly Shane’s info, supplemented by some clandestine observation from several tall buildings in West Godwin. The timer sped by as Tetsami reviewed the movements of the blue dots. After going over what they knew, Tetsami froze the image. The timer read 06:50:00.

“We’re setting up the tunnel for the strike. In three days we’ll have both access points excavated.” Two red lights activated. One underneath the far southeast corner of the complex, almost directly underneath perimeter tower number seven. One at the fringes of the image in the woods four hundred meters away from the back of the office complex.

“The subsurface team is here.” Tetsami highlighted the red dot under the complex. “The ground team is here.” The red dot in the woods glowed brighter.

“How in hell are you getting all that subsurface digging past them?” Zanzibar asked.

Tetsami shrugged and smiled. “They don’t know what’s normal, ain’t got anyone to say a subsurface tremor is wrong. Especially when we time the digging to match Proudhon’s departure schedule. Every launch at the spaceport brings us a centimeter closer. By now they’ve explained the vibrations to themselves and are busy ignoring them. A simple computer is down there now, maintaining the illusion. The intermittent digging is why it’ll take three days.”

“Isn’t someone going to check that out?” Zanzibar went on.

For the first time since the presentation began, Dom said something. “What they’ll find, if they bother to check, is that the mountain range they’re at the foot of is riddled with holes, and rings like a bell if you hit it. Every contractor I know bitches about never getting accurate soundings; any audio picture of the rock around there is so filled with ghosts and echoes, that resonance from the spaceport would seem a logical explanation—if they even notice the digging.”

Tetsami went on. “We are in position at 06:30:00, five days from now. I hack the sat. They’re washed at 06:50:00. That’s when we strike. The ground team breaks the surface. Ivor’s getaway vehicle is waiting down the hole. Shane, Random, Ivor, and Mosasa have three minutes to make it to the edge of the woods. Where they should see this blue dot.” Tetsami pointed to a frozen glowing point isolated all by itself behind the office complex. “This guard’s isolated, all the towers back here are automated, and the other marines are in the quad, the buildings, or on the other side of the complex. Shane hits him with a long-distance stunner—one shot, but it should drop him. That leaves ten minutes for Mosasa to transfer the transponder coding and the data recorder to the modified systems in Shane’s suit. Ivor gets to kill the systems on the marine’s suit and drag him into the woods.”

Tetsami accelerated the image of roving guards until the counter read 07:05:00. “By now—if they have any sense at all—they’ll have locked out my RF interference. Shane and Mosasa are inside the screen perimeter. Mosasa has to turn on his cloak—that will hide him from cameras and eyeball search for ten minutes as he follows Shane’s radar shadow. Shane keeps the guard’s rounds. We’re going to rely on Mosasa’s modifications to Shane’s transponder and comm unit here. The guard’s path takes them here.”

The holo accelerated to 07:10:00. “Right through the quad. For three minutes, Shane is the only guard patrolling here. Once she stops at the ship, she has that long before someone realizes she’s no longer keeping the other guard’s rounds. She has to be aboard the ship before then. Mosasa has to access the ship’s defense screen through the gap in the landing gear and set up a neural stun field within the ship to take out the five marines on board—”

“Wait a minute,” Zanzibar interrupted. “How the hell do you reprogram a whole system on the fly like that, in three minutes?”

“Not reprogramming,” said Mosasa softly.

“No,” Flower said, “a stun field is part of the command set in the Emerson field software installed in the Blood-Tide. It is part of Confed policy, especially in the Centauri Alliance, to—”

“Thank you, Flower,” Tetsami said. “Once the marines are out in the ship, Shane has to get Random to the secondary core in a minute and a half and hook him up. This is the most critical part of the timing. Random has to take charge of the security setup in the space between 07:13:10 and 07:14:40, when there’s no RF traffic between the guards and the ship. The transition has to be seamless, or the perimeter guards might be aware something’s up. Next job Random has is to clear the shipboard security to let Mosasa onboard without a coded transponder, before his cloaking quits.”

“Isn’t that cutting it close for Mosasa if he’s only got ten minutes?” asked Zanzibar.

“Random will make it,” said Mosasa.

“So much for the hard part,” said Tetsami. Levy snorted. “Since the Emerson screen on GA&A is blocking RF signals at this point, we’ll have no comm between the two teams—which is okay. Less radiation for them to detect. However, team two has to assume that the ground team gets in. At exactly 07:25:00, team two is going to punch through into the warehouse sublevel. The subsurface team—Mr. Magnus, Zanzibar, and Levy—has to make their way up a floor and north until they reach the third sublevel of the office complex. This should not be difficult with our guardian angel running security—”

Did she actually say that about an AI? She shuddered. “The box we’re cracking is hidden in the midst of plumbing, wiring, and suchlike. Odds are that our TEC friends don’t even know what they’ve got there—so there probably won’t be a guard. Levy is in charge of popping the safe, and inside ...”

Tetsami had circumnavigated the table twice, and she was back to her own seat. She turned toward Dom and handed him her remote. She sat and Dom stood up. Dom suddenly seemed to reach a level of presence that he hadn’t had up until then. Suddenly he looked like a CEO, a leader. He sucked in a breath and smiled. It was a small smile, and Tetsami suspected that the only other person to notice it would be Zanzibar.

“In that safe,” Dom said, “is four hundred and thirty-five megagrams worth of the future.”

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Conflict of Interest

“You can never know enough about a man’s self-interest to be able to trust him fully.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“It is a sin peculiar to man to hate his victim.”

—-Cornelius Tacitus

(ca 56-ca 120)

“Six days ago, in the city of Godwin, three marines from this command were suddenly and deliberately attacked. Corporal Sterling and Corporal Higgins were both killed instantly. Two hours ago the third victim, Sergeant Robert Clay, died from extensive burns over ninety percent of his body.”

Colonel Klaus Magnus paused to let this sink in. He had done this speech once before for the duty shift. From the look of the faces filling the cafeteria-cum-auditorium, he had their attention. The speech he was making was being broadcast throughout the complex to all the civilians, but Klaus made a point of gathering all the marines here in person. These were the ones who needed to see him face-to-face, to understand the stakes here.

Klaus let the anger creep into his voice. “These three marines were in Godwin to apprehend a deserter. They died in the line of duty. They died because of the treachery of this planet.”

Klaus slapped his hand down on the podium in front of him. “Without reason or provocation, a gang of Godwin hoodlums attacked and killed three Occisis marines in the midst of their duty. Two marines crushed beyond all recognition, one burned past repair by a plasma explosion.”

He slammed his hand again. “Why?”

He scanned the audience. Everyone alert. All eyes on him. Good. The “gang of Godwin hoodlums” might be an exaggeration, but he needed a little hyperbole to get his point across. Klaus could feel the anger in the air, even from the five marines he’d been forced to discipline a week ago.

“Why? Why this unprovoked assault? Why, when any civilized planet in the Confederacy would refuse to aid or comfort a deserter? When any civilized planet would aid in the capture and extradite such a deserter? Why?”

Each “why” was like a club he used to bludgeon his audience.

“By Bakunin’s own rules, our only conflict is with the war profiteers we’ve neutralized. Our battle is with Godwin Arms and Armaments. We have made extreme, and perhaps even dangerous, concessions to avoid hostilities with any other organization on this planet.”

Klaus watched his audience and felt a little internal smile when he saw a few marines nodding. One of them was Captain Murphy, Shane’s replacement and an officer much more to Klaus’ liking.

However, Klaus did not let his pleasure show; his face was a mask of anger and hard determination that he did his best to impart to his audience.

“Despite this, we’ve been under constant assault from without. Barely a week passes without the necessity of repelling an armed force from our perimeter—

“Why?

“We’ve played by this world’s rules. At considerable risk to ourselves we have battled only with the forces of GA&A—and still, we are subject to undeclared and unprovoked attacks—

“Why?”

Klaus waited a beat for his last “why” to sink in.

“Because this is Bakunin and there are no rules here!

“Wipe from your mind any notion that this is a normal world. This is a planet that, by its very nature, is at constant war with the Confederacy and all it stands for.

“No rules! Do you understand that? The evil out there? No rule of law, no rule of morality, no rule of engagement. The only rule out there is brute force and the passion of criminals rejected from every corner of the Confederacy.

“If you had any doubt in your mind, wipe it away. We are at war!”

Klaus could feel a flush inside him as he surveyed the crowd. He was winning them, had already won them.

“We’ve been at war ever since Bakunin accepted the seeds of anarchism into itself and opposed everything the Confederacy stands for—

“Unity,

“Diversity,

“and The Rule of Law!”

The entire room stood up and applauded him. He let the ovation wash over him in waves. Now that his marines had a concrete example of what they were fighting, they were his.

Klaus was glad he had decided to visit their burn tank. Unplugging Sergeant Clay had been a good move.

* * * *

“Damn it, where have you been?” Klaus demanded. He managed to generate a spark of irritation, even after the heady experience of talking to the troops. He was locked in his office looking at a glowing blue sphere and talking to an electronically altered voice.

“I’ve been incommunicado—and you don’t sound too happy to hear from me.”

“You disappear for five days and I should be happy?” Klaus leaned back and turned the chair around to face the holo sunset over Godwin. He wondered where in that city Webster had set up shop. He wondered who Webster was. As it was, he had no hold on Webster other than money, and that was no hold at all.

“Don’t be ungrateful, Klaus. Remember who’s doing who favors.”

“Expensive favors.”

“You accepted the terms I gave you. You’re the tactical genius who screwed the grab for Shane.”

Klaus spun the chair around and avoided—barely— sweeping the secure holo to the ground in fury. “How dare you—”

“I don’t have to give you anything more, Klaus. I gave you Shane, I gave you Mosasa.”

Klaus shook his head and regained his calm. Webster was lucky that he was anonymous. No one should be allowed to talk like this without repercussions. Klaus’ patience had finally reached the breaking point. “I am afraid this relationship has reached the end of its usefulness.”

“Don’t do something stupid, Klaus. Not when I’m about to hand it all over to you.”

Klaus’ hand stopped halfway to the disconnect button.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you think I mean? Why did you hire me?”

“All of them?”

“One thousand three hundred and eighty-seven as of last count. Plus Dominic, plus Shane, plus a handful of others.”

“Where?”

“No.”

Klaus was silent for a long time.

Finally, he spoke, his voice barely in control. “What do you mean, ‘no?’ “

Webster chuckled. “I wish you had your holo’s video pickup switched on, just to see your face.”

Klaus grabbed both sides of the holo, stood up, and shook it as if he could throttle Webster by remote control. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“I mean that I have to be compensated for the risk I’m taking.”

“What risk?”

“Believe me, you don’t want to know. But you’re going to have to quadruple the balance on my account before I hand you anything.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking.”

“I know exactly what I’m asking. I’ve got a monitor on the account active right now, and I’ll talk once I see numbers change.”

“Right now?”

“Unless you want a nasty surprise or two in the morning.”

“What do you mean?”

“Pay.”

Klaus debated a moment, only a moment, before he went to the main terminal on his desk and began to transfer funds. It only took a few minutes to do. With his account at TEC, his finances for discretionary spending were effectively unlimited. If he hesitated at all, it was because it galled him to be dictated to.

If he ever found out who Webster was, he was a dead man—

Or woman.

“There, you have your money.”

“Very good, Klaus. For a minute there, I thought you were going to let your pride screw you up again.”

“Talk, damn you.”

“There are two pieces to this, and you better take notes because I’m not going over this again. First, there’s the coordinates of a particular mountain valley you’ll find interesting—”

Klaus stored the location of Dom’s little commune on the computer in his desk.

“Next, if you want Dominic himself, you’re going to have to make a few modifications to your ship before oh-six-hundred tomorrow morning....”

<>

* * * *

PART THREE

Covert Action

“Whatever is not nailed down is mine. Whatever I can pry loose is not nailed down.”

—Collis P. Huntington

(1821-1900)

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Media Exposure

“Most of life is sitting around waiting for the shitstorm to start.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“Property is theft.”

—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

(1809-1865)

06:30:00 Godwin Local

“Twenty minutes, people. Get your shit together.” Tetsami’s voice echoed through the tunnel even though she was whispering into a tight-beam LOS communicator. Down the tunnel, Ivor’s contragrav was invisible but for the red warning lights glowing through the digging equipment’s scaffolding.

Mosasa, Shane, and Random were up there waiting for the signal to make the punch through to the surface.

Tetsami was under more scaffolding at her end. Above her, a trio of mining robots hugged the walls of a triangular hole. The hole went up at a steep angle to end facing a scarred concrete ceiling thirty meters away. From Tetsami’s position she could barely see the concrete underside of the GA&A complex, lit by the targeting lasers from the robots.

In an hour that concrete ceiling wouldn’t exist.

“Shane’s made it into position,” came Ivor’s voice over the communicator.

The ground team would be up the hole. Shane and company were another thirty meters closer to the surface than GA&A’s subbasement. They had to weave through a lot more scaffolding. The hole under the woods traveled through fifteen meters of clay, soil, and mulch after it left the rock that housed the maglev tube. Keeping the hole from caving in required a lot of scaffolding—and the last five meters would have no support.

Eventually, Ivor would have to get his contragrav van up that hole—he was the only person Tetsami would trust with that job.

“Tell the team to prep for the signal.”

“Will do,” Ivor replied. Shane and company were out of direct RF contact because of rock and soil. At the moment, Ivor was Tetsami’s only link to them. Once the job started, the only comm they’d have would be the clock.

A clock that read 6:35. It was time to grab the sat.

Tetsami opened the back of the maglev van parked next to her hole. Inside, Zanzibar was checking the charge on their weapons. Beyond the front of the van, Dom and Levy were making final checks on their equipment. Flower’s feathery form sat in the passenger seat in the van. It had insisted on coming, even though it had done its job during the planning stages. It wanted to see the operation personally, and right now it was watching everything with its serpentine, eyeless face.

Tetsami pulled a case containing the portable groundstation and attached it to a loose cable that was lying on the floor of the tunnel. The cable led off to the west, where it led to a surface sat antenna.

On the floor of the van she opened the case and powered it up. A holo globe began to rotate above the groundstation, and lights carved out the tracks of the orbital flotsam that surrounded Bakunin. Tetsami tapped in a few code sequences, and tracks began falling out of the picture. By the end of her key sequence, only one glowing yellow track remained, pacing Bakunin’s equator as the planet turned.

Tetsami looked up at Zanzibar, who had finished with the weapons. “Zanzibar, I’m going to fugue out for a few minutes while I talk to the sat. Keep tabs on Ivor in case something ugly happens.”

Zanzibar nodded wordlessly. Tetsami didn’t like the expression Dom’s sergeant wore. Zanzibar had never been enthusiastic about this mission, despite her loyalty to Dom. In fact, with the exception of Dom, she didn’t seem to fully trust anyone else on the team.

Despite Dom’s assurances, Tetsami understood the feeling. Attacks by Confed marines on two separate occasions made everyone a little nervous. However, Dom had assured everyone—Tetsami and Zanzibar included—that he was in control of the situation.

Besides which, they had a very narrow window in which to pull this off, leak or no leak.

Tetsami looked off, past Zanzibar and Flower, and at Dom.

You’re hiding something. You’re always hiding something.

Tetsami jacked into the groundstation and felt the shell software take over her senses. It was a high-class shell she’d written herself. It grabbed the whole sensorium in order to get the biggest shitload of info across in the shortest possible time. Every sense—vision, hearing, smell, kinesthetic—meant something.

She felt herself shoot through black space, a virtual universe that had every distraction edited out. There were only two things here. Her, and the commsat.

A glowing yellow dot appeared and, as she focused, shot toward her. In Tetsami’s time-dilated world its approach was majestic, even though its appearance and orientation took only a fraction of a second.

It resembled a golden spider. Its body was a spherical golden shell made of geodesic hexagons, its legs beams of yellow light flying off to infinity. Tetsami skimmed the surface of the geodesic, a tiny fly darting through its web, looking for the hole.

Millions of command structures shot by her, glowing, golden, venomous. The defenses on this sat were active and waiting for her to take a single misstep so they could entangle her and suck her dry.

However, Troy Broadcasting wasn’t quite as worried about the integrity of their transmission command set as they were about the integrity of the sat itself, or the content of their broadcast. It wasn’t a major weakness, but it was enough for her. Her fly landed on a control node right next to one of the golden lasers, and she leeched on to the control driver for the sat’s broadcast antenna.

The sat’s whole instruction set shuddered as her commands rippled through it. It tried to poison the data, but she had venom of her own—and since the sat’s first priority was to survive and its second to keep broadcasting no matter what, Tetsami’s little fly finally melded into the structure of the spider.

Tetsami unhooked herself from her subprogram and slipped away from the sat’s command structure. The golden sphere had changed. There was a black dot, a speck really, glued to its surface. Tetsami’s program.

And now the legs were moving. They were brightening and slowly converging on a new leg that had sprouted below the sphere. One of those glowing legs of light passed by her like a searchlight, and she had a brief full-sensory image of a melee going on in TBC’s gladiatorial stadium. An ax was swinging right at her as the contact was broken.

Mission accomplished.

She allowed herself a silent mental chuckle at the expense of Troy Broadcasting. It might not be a suitable payback for the death of her parents, but her little program might permanently lock up the sat’s command structure and cost TBC a few megagrams in lost revenue and hardware.

Of course, all that was secondary.

Tetsami jacked out. The time was now 6:47.

“No problems?” she asked Zanzibar.

Zanzibar shook her head.

Tetsami got on the comm to Ivor. “We got the sat.” Tetsami waited until the minute rolled over. “Two minutes to zero.”

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Crossing the Rubicon

“Anyone who doesn’t fight for his own self-interest has volunteered to fight for someone else’s.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“Every war, at its root, is a war of trade.”

—Robert Celine

(1923-1996)

06:50:00 Godwin Local

“... Two ... One ... Now!”

Ivor’s voice, coming from the midst of the scaffolding below, was muffled by the helmet on Shane’s modified armor. At his command, she activated the computers on the three mining robots that surrounded her.

Her visor polarized as the mining lasers fired, circling her, slicing through the few meters of soil that separated them from the surface. The scaffolding rang with showering debris. Fist-sized chunks of dirt rained down and shattered on the struts in a controlled avalanche. Shane tightened her grip as dirt and gravel pelted her.

Inside her helmet it sounded like ripping canvas.

Within a minute it was over, and the sound of raining debris was replaced by the sound of wind whistling past an opening above her. Shane looked up and saw a starry early-morning sky.

She was scrambling up the lip even before Ivor said, ‘Move.”

Lights blinked on her helmet’s display as she cleared the edge of the hole. The telltales said that her RF field was already soaking up a few thousand kilowatts of Tetsami’s commsat broadcast. She turned around and helped move equipment out of the hole—Mosasa’s long-range stunner, the huge powerpack for it, Mosasa’s tool kit, and the briefcase that held Random Walk.

Ivor pushed Mosasa over the lip as he scrambled over himself. Then he scooped up the stunner and the fifty kilo power source. Mosasa grabbed his tool kit, and Shane grabbed Random.

No words were passed as they jogged to the western edge of the woods. They ducked around trees, over logs, and scrambled down the gentle slope toward GA&A. Shane almost blundered out into the open when they reached the edge of the woods. There was no thinning before the clearing. The forest simply stopped about a hundred meters from the perimeter.

The four of them, Random mute inside his box, faced the curving end of GA&A’s office complex. It filled their entire view out of the woods. A curving concrete wall, seven stories tall, hid behind the spikes of the perimeter towers. It was overlaid by a distorting heat shimmer caused by the defensive screens of the Blood-Tide.

Not for the first time, Shane wondered what she was doing here.

She turned around, and Ivor and Mosasa had already set up the stunner. The device was an ugly-looking hybrid, cobbled together by Mosasa to fit the requirements of the mission: dropping a marine in full combat armor at one hundred meters without alerting the complex or damaging his suit.

I agreed to this, Shame thought. Am I really saving lives?

Or am I simply seeking revenge for my own people shooting at me?

“It’s ready,” said Mosasa.

“Good,” said Ivor. “Because there’s the target.”

Ivor was right. The marine roaming the perimeter had just rounded the curve of the office complex and come into view. Right now, he was the only marine in line of sight. He would remain so for close to ten minutes. Shane got behind the ugly-looking gun and sighted through it.

The monster she was about to fire had begun as her own personal stunner. Then Mosasa got hold of it. Among a number of additions to it was the stabilized tripod, the targeting computer and integral sight, and the heavily insulated stock that kept the stunner itself from touching the computer, the tripod, or the gunner. The insulation was necessary because a pair of superconducting cables led from the stunner to a fifty kilo power sink that once was the emergency backup for a Hegira Starliner’s tach-drive.

The principle was still the same as for her personal stunner. The small baton generated an Emerson field in a thin paraboloid—the generator at the tip being the focus—and it was programmed so that interference with a normal laser-damping field would create a neural stun field.

The difference was before Mosasa got hold of it, the effective range of the stunner was five meters before the field’s parabola became too diffuse. Even at that range, the energy it sucked was on the order of a plasma rifle’s. Mosasa had powered it up. It now carried about four hundred times the wattage and would probably melt when she fired it. The power spike would be so intense that GA&A security couldn’t miss it—if they weren’t having other problems with all their detection gear at the moment.

Shane looked through the sight and tracked her target.

She wondered if she knew the soldier out there. It wasn’t Conner. The form was wary, not panicky. Shane watched the soldier sweep the plasma rifle to cover the woods. Very methodical. Shane wasn’t worried about being seen. All the sensors on that suit—gray urban camouflage just like her own—would be washed out by RF interference right now.

The stunner’s targeting computer, specially RF shielded by Mosasa, locked on the marine.

Shane wished there’d been time to test Mosasa’s gadget. Her stunner had relied on a few gigs of sensitive programming to do what it did right. Mosasa had replaced that with his own programming, necessary to keep the stun field from dispersing against the defensive screens of the Blood-Tide instead of the intended target.

The plasma rifle swung back toward their position as the marine continued the patrol. The computer sight was still flashing “target acquired” at her.

Damn it, why was she stalling?

Did she know this person?

She’d never frozen in combat before, never.

An overwatted stunner could kill a person.

The marine stopped and turned. The plasma rifle tracked back to Shane’s position. The image froze for a second in Shane’s sights. Then the marine took a step forward.

Shane fired.

For the first time in her life, Shane felt a recoil from an energy weapon. The jerk she felt was the field generator exploding. Blue arcs from the discharging field shot out of the woods for ten meters. The cables to the stunner melted, smoldering in the mulch. The insulation cracked and blackened and the small targeting screen burned its last image permanently on its surface.

The image was of the marine dropping.

“Got ‘em,” Shane said. She looked across to the crumpled form and decided that she had finally chosen sides.

For better or worse. I can’t go back now.

“Gods be with us today,” Mosasa whispered. He started running to the perimeter. Ivor followed, and Shane took up the rear. The dead stunner was left where it was. It had served its purpose.

Shane wondered at Mosasa. At times the technical expert was prone to strange archaisms. But, then, stress could bring out odd things in a person. Especially combat stress.

As for instance, right now she was panting and grinning like a maniac. Whoever it was, she’d just dropped him. Poor guy didn’t even know what happened. It got her adrenaline pumping double-time and brought a feral smile even if there was a possibility she’d just killed someone who’d been a friend.

When all this was over, she was going to have to have a long talk with her neuroses.

When she got to the heap of marine, Mosasa had already stripped the helmet and had cables leading into the body of the suit. “I got patches into the transponder and the data recorder. Open up.”

Shane ripped off a patch that covered a few ports that Mosasa had installed in her armor. Mosasa had done extensive mods to the operating system of her armor, chief of which was modifying her transponder and data recorder to leech security codes from another suit’s system.

Mosasa plugged her into the fallen marine, and she saw that it was Corporal Hougland. Ivor noticed her stare and said, “Don’t worry, she’s still alive.”

That generated two thoughts. She thought, You’re not supposed to worry about the enemy’s casualties.

The other thought was that Corporal Hougland would have killed her without any hesitation.

Mosasa nodded a few times, looking at a readout mounted on Shane’s midsection next to the ports he was using. “Good, the transponder codes took. You’re her now.” Mosasa gestured toward Hougland and disconnected the cables at the same time.

Mosasa was right. Shane could call up Hougland’s tac database, the info on her data recorder, even the radio was modified to synthesize Hougland’s voice with patterns lifted from the recorder.

“Okay,” Shane said. “Ivor, take her. Mosasa, let’s get moving. It’s already past seven.”

Shane and Mosasa ran to catch up with Hougland’s patrol route while, behind them, Shane caught a glimpse of Ivor grabbing Hougland in a fireman’s carry and heading toward the woods.

I’m her now, Shane thought to herself.

It was an uncomfortable feeling.

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Loopholes

“Never turn your back on the villain, especially when he’s unconscious.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“God Almighty hates a quitter.”

—Samuel Fessenden

(1847-1908)

07:01:00 Godwin Local

Ivor Jorgenson ran full tilt into the woods, toward the bolt-hole. Halfway there his shoulders ached and his lungs were on fire. The marine was too damn heavy. He had to put her down for a while.

Once he was out of eyeball range of the complex, he had time to set her down. The marine would be out for hours; they wouldn’t need him to pilot things until everything was over, forty-five minutes from now. It was good that he had the time, because the minute he leaned his burden against a convenient tree, he felt every joint in his body protest the exertion of the last ten minutes.

He was too old for this.

In his prime he could have carried this woman across a few klicks of tundra. He knew that because, when he was in his prime and Fleet Commander of the Styx Presidential Guard, he had done just that for a soldier wounded in an aircar crash.

But that was two decades ago.

Or, another way of thinking, it was only nine years ago.

Or, yet another way of thinking, it had never happened at all.

Hands on his knees, catching his breath, he realized that this was the first time he had thought about Styx in years. What should have been angry thoughts were predominantly nostalgic now. The nostalgia was embarrassing.

You can be nostalgic for anything if you’re far enough removed from it.

And Ivor’s memories of Styx were as far removed from present reality as they could get. Because of his brush with the wrong end of a wormhole, a decade-long chunk of his memory just didn’t happen as far as the rest of the universe was concerned.

Even if the universe didn’t accept it, that decade was still credited to his body’s account. He was twenty years older than he’d been on Styx, and he wasn’t up to lugging heavy marines in full armor uphill through dense woods.

Slowly, he stopped hyperventilating and felt his muscles unkink.

Once he could move without pain, he decided to lighten his burden. Nothing in the plan called for him to take the armor, too. He was just supposed to restrain the comatose marine. He walked over to her.

The name-tag read Hougland.

“Pleased to meet you, miss.” He told her as he felt for the emergency release on the suit. Triggering it would scrag the armor, but it needed to be there for medical access in field conditions. He groped around until he found the trigger.

“Forgive the imposition, but I just can’t carry all this.”

He hit the release and multiple hisses announced the separation of the seams on the armor. He picked up Hougland’s chest piece and looked for a suitable place to ditch her armor. A few meters away he saw a deadfall that seemed to fit the bill. He picked up a few more pieces and walked over to the pile of old wood and began to dig a suitable hole for the armor.

He was in the midst of digging when he noticed a red light flashing on the inside of one of the leg pieces he had brought over.

He picked it up and examined it more closely.

The flashing light was the last of a series on the side of a small rectangular box that would fit snugly on the inner thigh. A sick feeling washed over Ivor when he saw it.

This box, and things like it, went by a number of names—hardwire lightning, express, black speed—all of which meant the same thing; military biological augmentation via drugs and electronic hardware that hyped metabolism, recovery times, and reflexes to screaming high levels. The cost to the body using such things— skyrocketing blood pressure, burned out neurons, not to mention addiction—was so high that it was insane to use the things outside of combat.

If the marines out there were wired with this, then they were expecting to be attacked.

Ivor was about to run for the bolt-hole to warn Tetsami and the rest of the team about the set up when the second thought hit him.

Maxed recovery time.

Ivor turned and ducked just in time to avoid decapitation by the branch Hougland was swinging. He hadn’t heard her approach, and he was very glad that Mosasa had taken her weapons.

Hougland swung again and Ivor scrambled back, over the uncertain footing of the deadfall. He felt a breeze as a meter-long chunk of wood the diameter of his thigh swept by his face.

We took her weapons, but why am I unarmed?

Ivor backed over the precarious footing as the marine, clad only in briefs and a sweat-stained T-shirt, advanced on him.

Because we thought the driver didn’t need any, idiot.

“Do you think,” he said, nearly slipping on a loose branch, “that we could talk this out?”

Another swing. Not lethal, she was just testing the range. Ivor was beginning to feel that all this was a bit much. He glanced behind him and saw that he was backing toward the lip of a ravine.

The ground shifted beneath him, and he felt his right foot sliding downward. He still had Hougland’s thigh armor in his right hand. “Corporal Hougland, I’m sure we can come to some accommodation before permanent violence is done.”

A look of extreme distaste crossed her face. “I’m a marine, old man!” she shouted at him. She stepped forward and swung a skull-cracking arc at his head.

Apparently negotiation was not an option.

Ivor swung up his arm to block the blow with the thigh-piece from Hougland’s armor. The two met with a crack and Hougland looked surprised.

“All my age means, girl, is I’ve got a dozen years combat experience on you.”

Ivor kicked out with his right foot, spraying deadwood shrapnel at Hougland. She fell back, still holding on to her club, and Ivor had to make a complicated hopping dance to keep his footing as he stumbled down the front of the deadfall.

By the time Ivor was on solid ground again, Hougland had gotten up and was brandishing her log at him.

“You realize—”

She interrupted him with a sweep that he had to parry.

“—that this is pointless. This whole operation is in other hands now.”

Sweep, block.

“Whatever happens, it’ll be over before either of us can do anything.”

A lie, but who was counting?

She pulled an obvious feint—however well someone’s trained, a log is still an unsubtle weapon—and lunged to slam him in the groin. Ivor danced aside.

Enough was enough. Old man or not, he needed those.

Her next swing he made to block again with the thigh armor, but instead of blocking it, he let it glance off the armor and slip inside his guard. The log slammed into his side at a rib-bruising velocity. Before she could recover the log, Ivor wrapped his arm around it and held.

He grabbed it so hard that he thought he could feel the muscles in his arm tear. Hougland wasn’t expecting that, and she froze for a second.

“Playtime’s over.” Ivor shot a vicious kick at Hougland’s midsection, doubling her over. “Time for bed.” Ivor backhanded her with his left fist as hard as he could. Her head snapped back and she fell, nose and mouth bloody.

As she fell back, Ivor tossed the log aside. The right side of his body felt like a gigantic bruise.

While Hougland was still dazed, Ivor grabbed her wrists and bound them together with his belt. Then he tossed her over his left shoulder and started back toward the bolt-hole. Ivor thought of the sixty-meter climb down the scaffolding and thought, This isn’t going to be easy.

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Securities Exchange

“Seeing is believing, but belief doesn’t amount to much.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“Don’t assume you know anyone.”

—Sylvia Harper

(2008-2081)

07:11:00 Godwin Local

It was amazing how little everything seemed to have changed. The patrols, the guard towers, the Blood-Tide, all were just as Shane had left them. It was an eerie sensation. ...

Hell, if it feels odd to me, I wonder how Dominic feels.

That thought brought the predictable internal debate about just who here was on the side of the angels. Shane was slowly coming to the decision that if God had any brains at all, he had washed his divine hands of all of this long ago. Her drill sergeant had once yelled at her, after a particularly nasty battle simulation, that there were no good guys or bad guys, only fuckups and survivors—

What are you, Shane?

God, she could still remember his breath.

Why did she agree to this?

She tried to lock her mind back in the present. She checked the timer; it was twenty seconds after the last time she looked. Seemed longer.

The entire quad between the residence tower and the offices was bare of people. That would last another one and a half minutes. She glanced toward the nose gear and looked for Mosasa. She could find him, if she stared.

Mosasa had cooked up another toy for this job, in addition to her stunner and her transponder. He had built a personal cloaking field. Shane was sure that somewhere in the toy stores of the Confed Intel community there were much more advanced versions of what Mosasa had cobbled together. The principle was simple enough. Key an Emerson field for wide spectrum interference and cover the hole with a holo projection. Simple it was, but there were some major problems with it.

First was power consumption. The wider the range of wavelengths an Emerson field screened, the greater the power consumption—exponentially. A normal personal field relied on software and feedback from the screen itself to shift to whatever wavelength seemed threatening. The cells for a standard personal field could last for sixteen hours of continuous operation. With Mosasa adjusting his field to suck up the visible spectrum and into the UV and IR, he had ten minutes.

The other problem was the holo cameras and projectors which, obviously, had to project beyond the field to do any good. The little pea-sized cameras and projectors bounced outside the perimeter of the field on hair-thin wires. They not only provided the data for the cloaking holo projection, they also allowed Mosasa to see.

It took Mosasa one day to pull it all together, and the damn thing worked. Right now she was staring right at him—but what she saw seemed more like some floating pocket of denser air. The apparent refraction and heat shimmer, sometimes at right angles to the holo projection, sometimes looking reflective rather than transparent, made Mosasa look like a mirage or a trick of the light.

Shane stared and could barely see the cameras hovering over nothing.

The sight gave her a headache.

Mosasa was halfway up the landing gear, doing things to the Blood-Tide’s field control system. After a few seconds Mosasa said, “Step out from under the ship. I have the diameter programmed, but there might be some bleed-through.”

“What about you?”

“Don’t worry about me, just clear the ship. Ten seconds.”

Shane moved out from under the Blood-Tide and around to the boarding ramp in the nose. She kept her eye on the timer in the corner of her headsup as she turned to face the ship.

07:13:08 ...

07:13:09 ...

07:13:10 ...

Right on time, a warning light came on in her display. A too-weak neural stun field had washed by her, diminished by its expanding radius. Damn it, Mosasa was right next to it. Shane started for the landing gear and a voice near her wrist said, “What are you doing?”

It was Random’s briefcase.

“I thought you were off,” she whispered, making sure the suit’s comm was still off.

“You turn off your brain just because you have nothing to do at the moment?”

“I was going—”

“I know where you were going. Don’t worry about Mosasa; it was part of the calculations. A ship field control has a wide tolerance for the field diameter. He had to push the programming five meters past the skin of the ship. He’s fine.”

“But—”

“Get up the ramp!”

It was a choice between taking Random’s word and possibly blowing the most closely timed part of the operation.

Fuckup, or survivor?

“You better be right, Random.”

“Believe me. I know exactly what Mosasa’s capable of.”

Shane darted up the ramp and went through the security pass procedure with the computer, the same way she’d done a dozen times before. This was the first time she thought she’d get fried for her trouble.

After an incredibly long two-second pause, the computer accepted her as Hougland.

She stepped through the open air lock. At this point she was supposed to hear radio confirmation from the skeleton crew manning the Blood-Tide, who would ask why the hell Hougland was on board rather than scouting the perimeter like she was supposed to.

The fact that they didn’t showed that Mosasa’s stun-field jimmy had worked. The Blood-Tide crew was out of it for the next three or four hours, and if Random was patched into the security comm in time, no one in the complex would know the difference.

Shane went down a deck and ran half the length of the ship to get to the secondary computer core. It was deep, beyond the weapons stores. The corridor was yellow, black, and red, the colors of restricted access. Most of the doors she passed had blinking red lights—closed and locked.

The computer room was all the way back, at the end of the corridor. The last room before the start of the massive engine systems. The brushed-steel door was more heavily armored than the weapons lockers. Its light was blinking red.

Hougland’s codes didn’t work.

“Shit.”

“No problem,” said Random. A motor whirred, a panel on the side of the briefcase slid aside, and a small flexible cable snaked out. At the end of the cable was a needle-thin probe.

“There’s a hole next to the keypad. Insert the end of this.”

Shane picked up the silver probe and slid it in the hole.

Almost instantly, the light flashed green.

Shane tried the door and it slid to the side. The probe withdrew, and Shane walked into a chamber lined with screens, readouts, access panels, ports, and keypads. She set Random’s case on a small ledge, waist-high, on the opposite side of the room.

“Turn me over.”

“Oh, sorry.”

Shane flipped the case over. The lid popped open and a cable slithered out.

“We have half a minute,” Random said. “Do exactly as I say.”

Suddenly, Shane was frantically following Random’s orders, plugging cables that snaked from the box, punching instructions on keypads, popping access ports, and at one time killing the power for half a wall of protesting electronics.

When she was done, her headsup chronometer read 07:15:15.

“Oh, Christ, it’s over.”

“What?” came a voice from a speaker grille on the wall.

“We’re nearly thirty seconds over. The routine radio checks to the bridge—”

“Oh no worry—the comm circuits were the first thing I patched.”

Shane smiled weakly. “Of course.”

“That’s why they don’t call it artificial stupidity. Come to think, that’s as good a term as any for this security system. If I had some hands at the moment I’d slap the braindead hackhead who wrote up these interfaces. I’m losing sixty percent of my efficiency just talking to the rest of the complex.”

Shane kept looking up the hall. “Where’s Mosasa?”

“I keep telling you, don’t worry about Mosasa.”

“What do you mean, is he on board?”

“Look, he’s not doing anything to jeopardize this mission.”

“Then where is he?” Shane had a very bad picture of Mosasa crumpled in a heap by the landing gear, his cloak drained of power.

“We decided that it was just too close a thing for him to come through the dock before his cloak failed. He climbed up into the landing gear housing.”

Shane tried to stare but had no idea what to stare at. She ended up rotating in a small circle, looking up at the walls of the computer core. “Didn’t we go through that in planning? There’s no space for anyone to crawl through the structure down there.”

“Mosasa can.”

“He’s two-and-a-half meters tall!”

“Well, he has to partially dismantle himself to do it.”

“Huh?”

One of the grates in the floor started to move, and Shane swung her laser to cover it.

“Don’t worry, that’s Mosasa. I guess we’ll have to let you in on a little secret.”

The grate slid aside and Shane saw a dark hand appear.

“How the hell?”

A leg appeared, sticking up at an unnatural angle, the hand gripping the upper thigh. The hand tossed it, and the leg—just the leg, by itself—fell over with a thump, landing by Shane’s feet.

Shane took a step back and another leg was tossed out of the hole.

Then a left arm.

As Mosasa’s dragon-tattooed torso chinned itself into view, Random said, “You see, Mosasa’s as much a construct as I am.”

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER THIRTY

Capital Expenditures

“It is a fundamental inequity of the universe that, while you have only one life to give, you can take as many as you damn well please.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

(1803-1882)

07:24:30 Godwin Local

“Thirty seconds,” Tetsami said over the comm.

Dom looked down the steep hole and could barely see the commuter tunnel. In less than half a minute he would be back in GA&A. A familiar calm frosted his nerves. The same icy stillness that had gripped him when GA&A had been taken over. Not numbing this time—

Exhilarating.

“Twenty seconds.”

The three of them were in position behind the trio of mining robots. Levy was in the center; Dom and Zanzibar were leaning inward against either wall.

Each of them carried a Dittrich 1.5 mm Hyper-Velocity Electromag, a low profile weapon. An HVE wasn’t the most powerful handheld projectile weapon, and it didn’t have the greatest range, but firing 300 monocrys steel fléchettes per second it could probably handle anything they’d run into—without causing a hideous energy spike. The only problem with the Dittrich HVE was that the ammo disappeared in a distressingly short period of time.

“Ten seconds.”

They also all had backpacks filled with Levy’s equipment. And trailing behind them was a buzzing contragrav sled. It was custom-made, and the most expensive piece of equipment going into the complex—if you didn’t count Random Walk, who was priceless. The sled was five meters long and two wide, a simple platform anchored on top of a toroid contragrav generator that was rated for nearly two tons. It was led by a taut cable whose handle doubled as a control panel. The sled was made of an aluminum-diamondwire composite and had only ten kilos of inertia.

“Now.”

His companions turned away, but Dom kept staring at the concrete underside of what had once been his building. The photoreceptors scaled down the dazzling input as he watched the mining robots cut into the concrete at the top of the shaft. Three beams of intense light darted across the concrete, too fast to distinguish as single beams. They cut a repetitive grid pattern in the triangular concrete face.

Gravel sheeted off the wall, showering over them and down the floor of their tunnel. Dust billowed up, making Dom want to sneeze.

In less than three seconds the lasers hit the reinforcing rods.

If Random wasn’t in charge of security now, the whole team was in trouble. There were intrusion sensors to detect any breach in an external wall. They weren’t as efficient as an Emerson field, but you couldn’t trust feedback from part of a field that passed through matter—too many spurious readings—so intrusion detection under the complex was a matter of wires, computers, and cameras.

The reinforcing rods that the robots diced apart were also a circuit in the security grid. Now they were so much polyceram dust.

The lasers hit a point where the floor above them was no longer sound enough to support its own weight. A grinding snap filled the small space, and the wall erupted into a cloud of dust. Gravel rained down on the three of them and caused an odd resonant hum as it bounced across the contragrav sled.

The range finders on the mining robots detected the sudden absence of their target, and they ceased firing.

As the dust cleared, Dom queried his onboard computer. The time was 07:25:12. It had taken the lasers ten seconds to slice through the wall. Dom decided to remember that fact if he ever put up another building.

“Let’s go,” said Zanzibar. She lowered her weapon and darted to the edge of the hole, scanning the room beyond. After a second, she waved Levy ahead. Levy had the sled, and as he passed Dom, Dom had to flatten against the wall to let the sled by. It was odd, watching the sled follow Levy. It wanted to stay horizontal, and in the steep tunnel that meant that the front end had the same clearance to the floor as the rear did the ceiling. It could barely get past the robots.

When Dom followed Levy through the hole, he heard the robots begin their withdrawal. There was no sign of alarm, nor even any sign of habitation. So far, so good.

The three of them moved through the silent warehouse level. The warehouse was dark, filled with crates of unsold weapons Dom had ordered fabricated for the fictitious ship Prometheus.

There were a few thousand crates of everything GA&A made, and it gave Dom a moment’s pause.

Why did they use such a big order to cover themselves? Couldn’t they have punched in for a much smaller pretense?

Did they want five hundred tons of weapons?

Dom had yet to allow himself to wonder deeply about what the TEC was doing here. If he had managed to think of it at all, lately, it simply seemed part of his brother’s age-old, possibly justified, vendetta.

But this was larger than his brother.

Even if Klaus had managed authorization for his own games, there had to be some larger pretense for the TEC to support him. Something the old man, Dimitri, would approve of. A TEC operation outside the bounds of the Confederacy was politically dangerous, and there had to be something here to justify the risk.

But what?

For the briefest instant, Dom flashed on the idea of conquest. Maybe the TEC wanted to take over—

That was ludicrous. The operation here had barely a thousand people by now, and only one hundred fifty—at most—had any military training. Something the size of GA&A was about the only thing they could take over. One hundred fifty marines wouldn’t be able to take a moderate-sized commune. Much less a city. Or the planet. And if the TEC imported that kind of force anywhere, especially into non-Confed space where jurisdiction was open to any lawyer’s interpretation, it would count as political suicide.

Planetary self-determination was one of the cornerstones of the oft-bent but rarely broken Confederacy Charter. It was probably the only reason that the planet Bakunin was allowed to exist in its current form.

However, after logically limiting the TEC activity to things less grandiose, he was left with one disturbing fact to consider: There was enough hardware down here to equip nearly a half-million infantrymen. And once they had the new computer on-line, they could make more.

Dom let those thoughts pass and concentrated on covering Levy’s rear. They remained lucky. They wove through ten-meter cubes of boxes stacked for shipping, and saw no one. A few loaders were parked at odd angles, abandoned in the midst of their jobs. It looked as if nobody had been down here since the attack.

As they reached the point where the subterranean warehouse passed under the office complex, Zanzibar held up her hand and waved Dom up to her.

Dom stepped up and saw why Zanzibar had stopped.

“Sir, I just wanted a second opinion on how old this is.”

Dom looked down at the wreckage.

One of the crate-cubes had partially collapsed, completely filling a five-meter gap between it and its neighbor. Both cubes had charred streaks that were signs of laser fire. A corpse was half-buried by the wreckage. In the dry, climate-controlled environment of GA&A’s warehouse, the body was mummifying.

“They just left him here?” Dom asked no one in particular.

“If it’s the Executive Command, I believe it,” Levy said.

Zanzibar nodded.

Dom looked around and saw more scars of laser fire, on the packing crates, on the floor, on the walls. “It looks like he got lost in the general chaos of the invasion. They’d have no idea who they’d captured and who escaped. No reason to go hunting for corpses.” Dom kneeled by the body.

“Did you know him?” Levy asked.

“Harrison Bradley.” Dom’s computer coughed up the data without comment. “Hired him five years ago. He was the foreman down here. Looks like he popped a crate and fired on the marines—idiot.”

“Let’s go, sir.” Dom felt Zanzibar’s hand on his shoulder.

“We have a minute. Go to the lift. If Random’s on the ball, it’s waiting for us.”

“But, sir—”

“Wait for me. I need a few seconds alone.”

“Sir—”

Dom heard Levy say, “Give him his minute,” and he heard the two of them withdraw.

What the hell is this?

Dom knelt by the body of his second-shift warehouse foreman and wondered what the hell he was doing. It wasn’t like he knew this guy. Damn, he’d never even met Harrison Bradley.

However, for some reason, instead of running for it as be was supposed to, Bradley had found a crate of GA&A anti-armor focused plasma jets. Bradley—Bradley and others—if there was only one sniper they wouldn’t have missed the body—had died trying to defend GA&A.

Dom thought that might be why he was crying.

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Contingency Plans

“Screwups, like entropy, always increase over time.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“We have seen the bottom of the Abyss, and we fear the end is upon us.”

—William IV

(2126-*2224)

07:31:20 Godwin Local

Tetsami had watched the plan go forward flawlessly. The first try and no bugs.

Tetsami had flown all her life on her instincts. Right now her instincts were screaming at her. Nothing ever goes one hundred percent, and the better things look initially—

She would have almost preferred to have seen one big up-front unanticipated screwup. The longer she waited for it, the more nervous she got. When her LOS comm called for her, it was almost a relief.

But only a short-lived one.

She knew something had fucked the plan when she grabbed the headset off the door. Ivor’s voice was chattering before she could even acknowledge the pickup.

“—ser me girl, we have a problem. A big problem. Tets—”

“I got you. Ice it and tell me what happened. Did the ground team get in?”

“That isn’t the problem.”

“What is the problem?”

“The guard Shane picked off had an augmentation biopack strapped to her thigh.”

One of those? You don’t put something like that on someone just doing guard duty. Unless ...

“Sweet mother Mary and her bastard son Christ—”

“Get the picture? They’re expecting us. We got to abort—”

“Damn it, Ivor, check your time! Dom and his team went in seven minutes ago. They could be at the safe already.”

“Shit.”

“Whafuck took your ass so long to tell me this?”

“I had to subdue a very pissed marine.”

Oh. “Sorry.”

“Forget it. We’ve got to warn our people in—”

“Shut up, let me think.”

Jesus, this was bad. The TEC was expecting them to show up today. Someone in their party was passing info to the—

Don’t think about that now, think about how you can warn everyone before all hell breaks lose.

How?

Of course!

“Ivor, leave it to me.”

“Okay, what do I do with my prisoner?”

“Sit on ‘em. If this goes bad, we can always try an exchange.”

Tetsami stripped the headset and pulled out the groundstation that she’d used to hack the TBC sat. She looked around and saw Flower regarding her.

Why does Random give me the willies and I don’t think twice about the damn alien? Never mind.

“Flower, can you handle a human gun?”

“I understand small arms operation. However, human sighting mechanisms forbid Voleran perceptions, and few arms have triggering mechanisms that are comfortable with—”

“Just tell me, can you shoot that thing?” Tetsami pointed at one of the spare Macmillan-Schmitt plasma rifles racked on the inside wall of the van.

Flower ducked its head and turned it side to side. Flower’s head was hard, conical, and featureless except for the Rorschach yellow and black markings that covered its “face.” Tetsami saw no eyes, but Flower’s head bobbed as if it was scanning the weapon.

“Yes, after a fashion he will let me wield him. The area he covers should compensate for the aiming—”

“Good, grab him—it—and follow me.”

Tetsami was getting sick of Flower’s nasal wheeze. Can you call it nasal when it doesn’t even have a nose?

Tetsami shook her head as if she could shake out all the irrelevant thoughts that were shooting around in it.

She led Flower in a race up the hole to the warehouse level. She nearly slammed face first into the ground a few times, tripping over the transverse support ribs that formed a half-stair, half-ladder up the steep-angled tunnel.

She glanced behind her to see how Flower was doing. She needn’t have worried. Flower was using both legs and one arm in a fluid three-legged jog that made the alien seem to float up the tunnel behind her. Its head hovered in the geometric center of the tunnel, bobbing a meter ahead of the rest of the body. Its wings billowed behind it like a drag chute.

Tetsami was out the hole first with only a superficial scan of the room beyond. If there’d been marines down here, they’d’ve been down on her and the van already. No alarm had been raised yet. That meant that they had something of a chance. That also meant that Random had made it down to the computer core.

Assuming all that—too many assumptions but they were what she had—Tetsami might be able to keep the whole mission from imploding. If she got into the system before the marines on that damn ship woke up from Mosasa’s stun field.

She opened the groundstation and pulled the connecting jacks. In a pinch the groundstation could be used, as a regular terminal. She looked at Flower.

“Guess what. You get to play soldier after all.”

“Something unanticipated?”

“Damn straight. The marines are prepped for combat. They’re expecting us. You’ve got to find the safe team and warn them. You know the layout?”

“I studied every facet of the plan for my research.”

“Then you know where they are—don’t discharge that thing unless you’re forced to. So far it looks like they don’t know we’re here.”

“I appreciate that you believe me capable.”

“Hell, you’re all I got—go!”

Flower bobbed its head and glided down the length of the warehouse, toward the lifts to the office complex.

Tetsami took the leads from the terminal and walked over to a wall panel. The damn thing was restricted access, had a keypad, a red light, and was electromagnetically sealed. How the hell was she going to break into—

The light turned green.

“Random?”

She opened the door and found a jack for the leads to her terminal. Then she ran back and powered up the groundstation. In less than a second she was looking at a fish-eye holo of what had to be the core of the Blood-Tide. She saw Mosasa and Shane, but the voice the terminal relayed was Random’s.

“I had a security flag on the hole—saw you come in, but there’s no audio pickups down there and I’m not great at reading lips when your back’s to the camera.”

“Problem, Random.”

“I figured.”

“We’ve been expected. The marine you took out had a packet of black speed on her. If the guys on the ship are equipped that way—”

“Damn it,” said Random, “I’m sealing the ship. All the bulkheads are coming down.”

Shane said something on the holo screen, Tetsami couldn’t hear it.

“Okay, I think we’ve got a handle on it here. Our babies are locked in, incommunicado. Worse happens and I can pulse the stun field. It’ll lay out Shane, but I’ll still be in control.”

“Try to avoid that.” Shane? What about Mosasa?

“I will—” Random paused for a moment. On the holo both Shane and Mosasa turned toward the now-closed door to the computer core. “You know,” he continued, “your timing is impeccable. Our first marine just woke up, and he seems quite upset.”

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Liquid Assets

“Never say the problem is over, never mention what else could go wrong, and never say how lucky you are—there is no surer way of inviting disaster.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“Like liberty, gold never stays where it is undervalued.”

—J. S. Morrill

(1810-1898)

07:26:45 Godwin Local

“The easy way won’t work,” Dom said as he backed away from the first door. The three of them stood in one of a few dozen branching chambers sandwiched between the basement of the GA&A office complex and the subterranean warehouse levels.

Dom had tried his personal comm-code on the safe’s keypad. Predictably, it didn’t work. However, the attempt had shown him that the keypad was dead. It didn’t flash “invalid command.” It didn’t flash at all. The invaders had burned the controls rather than reprogram it.

Levy looked at the keypad. “They did a low-level EMP on this. It would wipe anything volatile. They froze the doors in place.”

Everyone unshouldered their burdens. Dom set up one of the high-power cutting beams on a tripod. Then Levy pulled out a small device and delicately placed it on top of the nose of the laser.

“Stand back,” Levy said.

Dom backed up. Levy tapped a few keys on his master holo and there was a lightning-flash pulse from the laser. Dom’s photoreceptors compensated immediately.

“The test burst worked. This thing is calibrated.”

Zanzibar was behind them, guarding their back. She said, “You’re going to cut through that with that?”

Dom saw Zanzibar’s point. The outer door was only a delaying measure. Even so, it was a square, featureless, brushed chrome wall that reached five meters to the concrete ceiling, and five meters to the side. It was recessed a meter back from the wall itself. The edges of the opening were faced with black metal. If there had been almost anything else in this safe, the outer door would be enough. Even with the lasers at their disposal it would take hours to cut through.

However, the fact was that they had no intention of cutting through the door.

Levy, grim and wordless, tapped at the holo display. The display showed a computer model of the wall’s internal structure. Levy ran his hands over the controls, and the motorized tripod swung the laser into a new position. The graphics on the holo changed as well, to show the area now covered by the scanner on the laser’s nose. The laser moved up and right a few millimeters. Once the laser stopped moving, Levy began flipping through layers of his display. Dom saw hoses and pumping equipment.

Eventually the holo showed a single two-dimensional section of the interior under the safe. The laser and the scanner were pointed down at a forty-five-degree angle. Central to the picture was an S-shaped tube. Dom was looking at a slice from it, and inside the black skin on either side of the pipe, Dom could see a grayish solid.

“What are you doing?” Dom asked.

“Time’s important. The size of the hole depends on density, pressure, viscosity and so on ...”

He trailed off and Dom didn’t interrupt him again.

A pair of green crosshairs focused on the center of the tube on the holo, and Levy tapped keys until he had a circle superimposed on the crosshairs about two millimeters wide. Levy pulled out a pair of smoked goggles and put them on.

“Now,” he said.

Dom powered his photoreceptors down to minimum intensity and was briefly blind.

Then a lance of pure energy sliced open the darkness, stabbing from the tripod-mounted laser and into the ground a few centimeters short of the massive outer door. Dom began to feel heat—from the laser and its target. The smell of molten metal seared Dom’s nose to the point where he turned off that sense.

It didn’t keep his nose from itching.

One second, two seconds, three seconds.

By now the metal floor of the recess had sprouted a bubbling black flower around the beam of light. Beyond the black, the metal was glowing red in a circle about ten centimeters in diameter.

Levy began counting down. “Five ... Four ... Three ... Two ...Got it!”

Dom heard a long whistling hiss, and the hole in the floor vomited a cloud of noxious-looking steam. The hissing decreased in volume, and the door started sinking. The descent was inexorable. It had moved three centimeters, and the hissing changed in character as the steam stopped and a millimeter wide stream of hydraulic fluid shot up and hit the ceiling.

“Damn it,” Zanzibar said as she stepped out of the way. “It’s pissing on me.”

Dom watched the door descend. Slow, too slow.

It seemed to take hours for the door to settle, but it was only 7:33 when the hydraulic fluid stopped leaking and the top edge of the outer door settled a half-meter from being flush with the floor.

Levy had three or four emergency sealant canisters— designed for spacecraft—that he had modified for this job. Instead of the bell- or fan-shaped nozzle that came with them, he had installed a hair-fine probe. Levy inserted the probe into the laser hole. He hit the button on the canister, and the can responded with an insistent hissing noise. Soon the hole overflowed with white polyceram sealant.

Levy left the can in place. The hissing continued for a few seconds, then stopped.

“So far, so good,” Dom said.

Zanzibar grunted and kept looking down the corridor.

Levy loaded all the equipment onto the contragrav sled and manhandled it over the frozen door and into the room beyond. Dom followed.

The room was small, and became smaller as Levy unpacked equipment from the sled. The walls and the ceiling sloped inward toward the safe door itself. The next door was a black, featureless square about three meters on a side. Green, amber, and red lights were mounted above it. The red light was flashing; there was an interlock in the hydraulic system that was supposed to prevent both doors from opening at the same time.

Levy unloaded three lasers and tripods. One laser was much larger than the others. The extra size was its cooling system. He also unloaded probes, hoses, and more sealant canisters.

“Now,” Levy said, “we come to the tricky part. Get number three pointed at the northwest corner of the door.”

Levy went through much the same procedure he had gone through on the outer door. Only this time he was aiming two lasers simultaneously. The number one laser, the big one, was pointed at the door itself.

After a few minutes of aiming, Levy gave warning, donned the goggles again, and the two lasers fired. It began as before, brilliant beams slicing into the floor at a steep angle, but after a few seconds the beams dimmed, became intermittent. One would fire briefly, Levy would take off his goggles, look at his holo, don the goggles, and fire again.

It took nearly five minutes for Levy to be satisfied with the holes he had made. There was no hiss of hydraulic fluid, only a pair of millimeter-diameter holes set in blackened concrete craters.

“Half a millimeter to go, I think it’s clean to the hoses themselves.”

Levy handed Dom a very fine hose. The tip was metal and Dom could see an optical fiber peeking out the end.

Levy went to one hole, and Dom went to the other. The probe went smoothly down the hole. Dom fed it until it met resistance about three meters down. On the black tube there was a yellow mark that was now flush with the crater in the ground. That meant it was the end of the hole, not hung up on anything.

Levy tossed him one of the sealant canisters. “Don’t overdo it. We just want to keep a vacuum. If the pump gets clogged, we’re in trouble.”

Dom knew. They had enough spare equipment to try one more pilot hole. But that probably wouldn’t work if the hydraulic system was partially and unevenly drained. The holes were at very particular points.

Dom inserted the needle-probe into the hole next to the tube and slowly withdrew it as he discharged the sealant. The expanding polyceram goo shoved the needle-probe out, filling the crater. In seconds there was a small rock-hard white dome holding the hose in place against the concrete.

Levy examined his own handiwork and then went to examine Dom’s. “Good.”

Levy went to the pump. “Okay, Mr. Magnus. This is it.”

That strange nervous exhilaration was back. He walked around so he could watch Levy at the pump. All the many readouts meant nothing to Dom—except maybe temperature and pressure.

Levy flipped a cover off of a red button and pressed it.

Instantly the pressure shot up as the hydraulic fluid began backfilling. Levy didn’t look at the readouts. He stared at the sealant holding the hoses in place. It would be very bad if one began to leak. Neither did.

When the numbers stabilized, Dom realized he’d been holding his breath.

“Good,” said Levy. He flipped a few more switches on the small pump, and it began sucking hydraulic fluid into its tank. The pressure dropped faster than it had risen. The pump whined, made a slight slurp, and the numbers dropped near zero. The readout slowed its descent until it hit some absurdly small decimal. The pump still worked, but the number stayed the same.

“That’s as perfect a vacuum as we’re going to get?” Dom asked.

“Yes,” Levy said. “But it’s enough. That was the last major technical hump.” Levy smiled and Dom thought he could catch a hint of irony in Levy’s voice. “We’re going to have no more big proble—”

Zanzibar said, “Shit!”

There was a clatter outside and Dom hurdled the outer door to stand next to Zanzibar. Zanzibar was tensed to the breaking point and had her electromag pointed down the corridor, back they way they’d come.

The clatter had been the alien, Flower, dropping a plasma rifle.

“Damn it!” Zanzibar said. “I could have shot you.”

“I understand, but the risk made me necessary. I come to warn you of a potential difficulty. It seems that we are expected.”

Levy had been wrong. They were going to have a few more big problems.

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Counterinsurgency

“It is never as bad as it seems—but sometimes it is worse.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“Distrust all men in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche

(1844-1900)

07:32:15 Godwin Local

Shane leaned against the massive door closing off the secondary computer core. She could barely hear the commotion beyond it. It sounded as though all five marines that manned the Blood-Tide had recovered from Mosasa’s stun field.

The three insurgents seemed to have the momentary advantage. Random had sealed every door on the ship. He was still in charge of communication. If Random had to, he could still pulse the stun field.

In other words, all Shane had to do now was sit on her hands and brood on the irony.

Her own people were going to kill her.

Shane knew it was self-defeating to think along those lines, but she couldn’t help it. After Random had been hooked into the ship’s computers, her job on this mission was over. She had nothing left to do but worry.

Nothing to do unless shooting started.

And if shooting started, they were all dead.

“The safe team’s opened the outer door.” Random’s voice came from one of the speaker grilles next to her. “Flower is making its way through the warehouse level. I see no resistance.”

Shane nodded. The mission looked as though it would succeed, even if the three people in the Blood-Tide never made it back to Ivor’s getaway vehicle. Random was checking all the sublevels constantly, and he wasn’t picking up a single marine down there.

Not a single marine.

Why did that bother her?

The same reason the fact that a sentry was equipped with a bio-augmentation pack bothers me.

Those things improved combat effectiveness, but they did so much damage to the user that it was against Occisis regs to use them outside a hot combat situation. That meant the colonel was—is—expecting an attack.

But we’re in.

“And we’re trapped,” Shane whispered.

“Are we?” asked Mosasa.

Shane snapped her head to look at Mosasa. Somehow she had managed to avoid thinking of him. Easier than admitting to herself that she’d once thought of him as human.

What was he?

‘I am. You can squeeze through the vents you came through—”

Mosasa shook his head. “The emergency containment that Random used is to handle sudden depressurization. The vents are sealed. We are living off one of the redundant life-support systems now.”

Shane looked at Mosasa a little differently. His dragon tattoo glistened a metallic green in the dim lighting. “I think that might be the longest speech you ever gave me.”

“Perhaps.”

“It’s up to Random what happens now, right?”

“I trust him.”

“Do you have a choice?”

“Right now neither of us does.”

The grille spoke. “They’ve set up the equipment to take the big door. Flower’s caught up with them. Flower’s explaining the situation up here.”

“Thanks,” Shane said. Then, to Mosasa, “Who are you?”

“Tjaele Mosasa.”

Shane shook her head and Mosasa gave her a surprisingly human smile showing a few decorative gold teeth.

“Your question really is, ‘What are you?’ I’m what’s left of a smuggler named Tjaele Mosasa who found the remnants of five old Race AIs. By the time Mosasa died, Random was his own person, but with the Confed feelings about AIs, he needed a human front. The only human he could trust was Mosasa.”

“Random built you?”

“Custom-designed, with the addition of a chunk of Random’s own memory core and what software could be lifted from Mosasa’s corpse.”

Shane shook her head. “Why—”

“Why anything? Survival.”

The grille spoke. “Shane, Mosasa, we have a problem.”

“What?” Shane and Mosasa said simultaneously.

“I just lost the interface between the ship and the rest of the complex.”

Shane could feel her pulse throb in her neck, and she tasted copper in her mouth. “Can you get it back?”

“No, it was hardware. No warning, someone pulled the plug.”

“Could you—” Shane began.

“We are in very deep trouble, children,” Random continued, and a few holo displays began to flash scenes of the quad from various ship cameras. The Blood-Tide was surrounded by marines. “I’ve got a dozen invasive software probes attacking right now. I fused the doors and the life-support controls, I’ve lost communications, weapons, flight control— Oh, shit!”

After a pause, Random said, “They’ve got me locked back into the secondary core.”

Shane kept staring at the holo display from the quad. They’d scrambled all the marines. It was over. The colonel had suckered them in, and now he had everybody. Shane could feel the adrenaline throbbing and desperately wanted a target to shoot at.

“They’re piping in a message. I’m putting it on screen. I’m going to see if I can hack my way out of this box they put me in.”

One of the holo views of the quad flickered and was replaced by the colonel’s face. He’s changed, Shane thought. His eyes—there’s a shine that wasn’t there before.

Klaus looked into the camera and talked as though he were addressing a crowd of thousands. He was perfectly choreographed—pressed, tailored and packaged for mass consumption. He looked like a man who’d been studying vids of every charismatic leader of the last three centuries.

“Dominic,” he said. Shane could hear a sarcastic lilt to the name. “It has been too long since we’ve talked.”

Huh?

“I’m afraid this is a one-way transmission. I suppose it is a shame that I cannot hear you justify yourself. Justice will have to be enough—”

“Do you know what he’s talking about?” Shane whispered, even though no one could possibly overhear them.

“No. He seems to think Mr. Magnus is in here with us.”

“—like my ship? You aren’t going to leave it alive. We can poison the life support. We could pulse a lethal stun field tuned just for your artificial neurons. We could simply let you starve in there. This is the end, brother Jonah. You’ve been dead for ten years—”

“They’re related?” Shane said. She had noticed the resemblance before, but—

“However, I have something to do before I finally dispose of you for good. I know you might have taken comfort in thinking your allies might have escaped.”

The holo transmission shifted and Shane gasped.

On the holo was an up-angled shot of Dom’s secret commune, where she had taken all the civilian prisoners. A truncated white pyramid girded by greenhouses. How the hell?

“We dropped a recon module from orbit just to get footage of this. We have another ship in orbit, Dominic, the Shaftsbury. And we have the location of that valley, down to the meter.”

Klaus chuckled. The recon’s cameras were looking up at the commune and past it, toward the sky. At first the sky was obscured by a holo projection; then the recon module shifted to something other than optical imaging, and the sky outside the rim of the valley turned slate-gray, the stars tiny black points. One of the stars seemed to vibrate.

“Remember ‘pacifying’ the coup on Styx? Or did you forget about it when you washed your hands of the TEC and the rest of your responsibilities?”

“My God,” Shane said, very quietly. The star had swelled to a black blob, and it was growing. Don’t let it be what I think it is.

“TEC called it ‘shredding’ when you wiped Perdition off the map. They’ve changed the terminology since. It’s now called ‘orbital reduction of the target.’ “

It is.

Shane knew what she was about to see, but she couldn’t pull her gaze from the screen.

Dropping large objects from orbit had always been a cheap means of mass destruction. Enough mass and enough velocity can wipe anything off the map. One problem it shared with nukes was the godawful mess it left behind. A big enough rock could make a tectonic wreck of the planet, cause ice ages, evaporate oceans, and do all kinds of other nonproductive destruction.

Needless to say, in three centuries of spaceborne warfare, someone had found a solution to that particular problem. Someone in the last century decided to try dropping a ton of polyceram filaments from orbit. That person discovered two things. First, that this particular brand of monomolecular filament stayed stable during the stress of reentry. The second discovery was that it reduced the surface to gravel to a depth of a hundred meters.

The vibrating black star now looked like a circular cloud.

Klaus kept talking.

“I want you to know that if you had come to me, surrendered, I might not have done this. Just as, had you acted differently, our mother might still be alive.”

The black cloud grew, the growth accelerating. In an impossibly short time it eclipsed the entire sky. Then the camera died.

A few seconds later, as if to confirm the atrocity that had just been committed, a dull rumble vibrated the floor. When Shane felt that rumble, she could feel her stomach fall out. “God save us,” Shane whispered.

Klaus’ face returned to the holo, unfazed. “There went your army, Dominic. You aren’t a special man any more, just some criminal Bakunin flotsam I have to flush from my ship. My only regret is that you’ll be unable to attend your trial.”

The holo died.

“Thirteen hundred people.”

“Shane,” Random said.

Shane leaned her forehead against a bulkhead. Was it her? Had she led that psychopath to all those people? Did she save eight hundred people just so the colonel could mop up the rest of the survivors?

She had just lost any justification she had for being here, fighting her people.

“Shane!”

Mosasa spun her around.

“What?”

“Random just lost life support. You have to turn your suit to full containment.”

Shane flipped a few internal switches and winced at the power-level on her suit. “I only have fifteen minutes.”

“That’s okay,” said Random. “It’s only going to take them twelve to burn through the hatches to us.”

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Loose Cannon

“The more complicated the situation, the sooner and more catastrophic the eventual screwup.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“Treason is loved of many, but the traitor hated of all.”

—Robert Greene

(1558-1592)

07:35:00 Godwin Local

Despite Flower’s warning, there wasn’t a choice. They had to finish the job.

Finish this, then think of the ground team.

So, after spending a minute burning the security cameras in their section of hallway, the job went on as planned. Levy pointed the huge number one variable-gamma laser at the main safe door. After triple-checking the team’s personal radiation shields, a nervous-looking Levy began firing the laser.

The gamma-ray laser was powerful enough to cut through the door on its own, given unlimited time and power. However, that wasn’t the point. The point was the fact that with the hydraulics drained the only thing holding up the door was the electromagnetic lock buried inside it. The lock’s power supply also ran the field generator that was trying to soak up the energy from the gamma laser.

Levy was watching power readings and occasionally altering the frequency of the laser.

The whole process was invisible, even though Dom could swear he saw some infrared hot spots on the door.

‘Wow,” Levy whispered as he pulled on his goggles.

Suddenly, the gamma-laser beam dropped into the visible spectrum. Despite the automatic compensations of his artificial eyes, Dom was still blinded for a second.

The floor shook with a sound like a massive bass gong. A breeze swept by Dom as his vision came back on-line. When his sight was back, the door was gone.

“We did it,” Dom said.

The immediate shift from gamma radiation down to visible light had managed a microsecond-long overload in the door’s power circuits. That microsecond failure was enough for the weight of the door and the vacuum hydraulics to pull it open far enough to prevent the electromagnets from closing it again.

Levy rose from behind his holo, and Zanzibar stepped up between him and Dom.

“Gods,” she said.

Behind the open safe door was a long rectangular room. The visible walls, ceiling and floor were all the same black metal. The walls on either side were lined with dull-gray lockers with uniformly square doors.

Stacked on the floor ahead of them were three or four dozen white shipping containers—each the size of a foot-locker, the same containers GA&A sold rifles in. One of the containers stood near the safe door. It was open.

It was half-full of Imperial Waldgrave ten-thousand mark notes.

“Zanzibar,” Dom said, “help Levy load the sled. Flower can guard our rear.”

“Yes, sir.” Zanzibar’s voice sounded distant as she stepped forward and closed the open container.

Dom felt his pulse pounding through his temple and his neck. It was a measure of how tense he was that biological imperatives were overriding his body’s finely tuned mechanisms. He forced his thoughts into colder, smoother channels. Don’t get excited, he thought, no mistakes.

He stepped into the safe and looked at the lockers. He tried one of the locks, and it winked green at him. These locks hadn’t been wiped by the EMP that had scragged the outer door’s lock. He ran his onboard computer for inventory and began popping doors.

It had taken them nearly fifteen minutes to open the safe.

It took them three to empty it.

During the loading Dom felt a sight tremor through the building. It felt minor, and no one else commented on it. Inside, however, Dom felt an irrational dread. He had no evidence, but he suspected he knew what that tremor was.

He hoped that the preparations he had started at the commune had gone according to schedule.

Again, Levy maneuvered the contragrav sled. It was burdened with a two-meter-high pile of currency from across the entire Confederacy. The boxes were filled with everything from holographic scrip from Khamsin to the exotic-matter coinage from Shiva.

Dom and Zanzibar guarded the rear of the sled, while Flower took point with the plasma weapon. Flower made a good forward observer, since it didn’t seem to rely on light to see.

Their progress back to their hole was slower; the sled was now encumbered with a lot more inertia than when it started, and it moved sluggishly. Dom expected to run across marine resistance any moment. He expected Klaus to land on him every time they turned a corner. However, the lower levels were as empty as the first time they’d passed through.

After Flower’s warning about Klaus’ preparations, it seemed too good to be true.

It was.

Tetsami was standing by the hole when they arrived. At her feet was her portable groundstation wired to a panel in the wall behind her.

Dom knew something was wrong the minute he saw her. She was staring at the holo; what little color she had was gone from her face.

Dom ran up to her. “What happened?”

Tetsami looked up with an expression that mixed anger, horror, and utter helplessness. “It’s gone,” she whispered. “Everyone’s dead.”

Dom looked back. No one else seemed to have heard her. “Flower, Zanzibar—get the money down to the van.”

Flower nodded its serpentine neck, and Zanzibar gave him an abbreviated salute. When Levy started to go with them, Dom said, “No, Levy, stay up here. I might need you.”

Levy looked a little confused, but he stayed.

Dom waited until Flower and Zanzibar disappeared down the hole before he turned back to Tetsami. “What happened?”

Tetsami looked up at Dom and opened her mouth. It took a few seconds before she said, “He wiped it off the map!”

Dom felt a familiar icy chill grip his stomach. What have you done, Klaus? He made sure to keep Levy in his peripheral vision. Dom noted that he backed away slightly.

The bastard targeted the Commune, didn’t he?

“Tell me,” Dom said softly. “The ground team, are they all right?”

“I don’t know. I had contact, but—” She seemed to lose some of the disengagement and emotion began leaking into her voice, mostly anger. “He knew, Dom. He knew about the team going into the ship. It was a trap.”

Dom nodded.

Tetsami shook her head and knelt at the holo. “He cut all contact to the ship, then he piped this in.”

Dom watched the holo broadcast. Watched his brother for the first time in fifteen years. As he watched, the cold gripped him, freezing every nerve in his body. His racing pulse slowed, and he could feel things sharpen and draw into too clear a focus.

When he saw the holo of the polyceram net slicing through the Diderot Commune, it seemed the world had achieved the perfect stillness of absolute zero.

“Tetsami,” Dom said.

“Yes?”

“Go down with Zanzibar, Flower, and the money. Bug out now.”

“But ...”

“Now! Take the van and evac to Godwin. Blow the hole when you leave. Tell Ivor to give us and the ground team fifteen minutes. At eight hundred he bugs out, no matter what!”

Tetsami looked like she wanted to argue, but she simply looked at him with an expression of mute pain.

“We rendezvous at the commune site.”

“But—” Tetsami looked at the holo that had so recently shown the destruction of the commune.

“The warehouse is compromised. Klaus won’t be looking at Diderot. It just got ‘reduced’ from orbit. Now go!”

Tetsami left without further words.

Again Levy started toward the hole, and again Dom stopped him. Dom put his hand on Levy’s arm and said, “No, I need you.”

“But why?”

“Come on,” Dom said, pulling the short old man after him. Dom went deeper into the warehouse levels, toward the elevators that would take them up into the office complex.

“What are we doing?” Levy sounded nervous.

Dom stopped by a stack of packing crates that had been upended in the chaos of the invasion. He ran the crate’s ID through his onboard computer. It was what he was looking for. He pulled a crate roughly from the pile of debris and ripped the top off of it with his left hand, the artificial one.

“What?” Levy said.

“Long-range, high-frequency sniping laser.” Dom pulled an arm-long rifle from the dozen that packed the crate. “Let me have your HVE.”

Levy handed Dom the electromag, and Dom continued leading them toward the elevators.

“What are you doing?” Levy asked, a pleading note crept into his voice.

They made it to the elevator and Dom pushed Levy in. Dom hit the buttons for the second level of the complex and the codes for the air traffic tower on the roof.

“You’re going to kill him, aren’t you?” Levy was sweating.

“That’s the whole point, isn’t it?” Dom looked down at Levy. “Or each other. It doesn’t matter much to you, does it?”

Levy paled.

“Someone’s been feeding Klaus our plans. Someone’s been a TEC plant. But not a good one, Levy. If the plant fed Klaus all he knew, we’d all have been dead long before now. It makes no sense, unless the plant had his own agenda.” The elevator dinged as they rose above the warehouse levels and began passing the sublevels of the office complex.

Levy began shaking his head. “You have to kill him now. This is your only chance. He thinks you’re in the ship—”

“Your first mistake was when I initially talked to you. I didn’t notice at the time, but I’m cursed with a very good memory. You mentioned the TEC’s involvement before anyone else knew about it. I let it slip by me because I was checking people for prior employment by the Executive. I forgot that there were other sorts of relationships.” Dom looked down at Levy. “It’s about Paschal, isn’t it?”

Levy looked frozen.

“Klaus contacted you, and you saw it as a way to get close enough—”

“Stop it.”

“You engineered all this to distract him. To give me a shot at his back. To make me want to.”

Levy jumped up and grabbed Dom’s collar. “You have to stop him. What he did on Paschal. You have a chance to do it—”

“I should kill you.”

The doors opened and Levy let go of him.

Dom checked the corridor, saw it was empty, and held the door open. “I’m not going to kill anybody.”

“But—”

“I don’t want to know what’s going through your head, Johann. But if you want Klaus, this elevator is going straight to the tower.” Dom tossed the laser rifle into the elevator. “That weapon has a good range.”

Levy looked down at the rifle.

The doors closed on him.

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Zero-Sum Game

“Never play chicken with someone who has nothing to lose.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“All men think all men mortal, but themselves.”

—Edward Young

(1683-1765)

07:45:00 Godwin Local

“The whole idea is insane,” Shane yelled at Mosasa. Her suit was working overtime, and her breath tried to fog the inside of her helmet. The readouts were showing that the atmosphere outside the suit had reached a near-zero oxygen level and the pressure was dropping.

Mosasa showed no effect from an environment that would have KO’d any normal human in less than two minutes. “It’s our only chance.”

“You’ll flood the compartment.”

“You can set your personal field to block the radiation.”

“What about Random? What about you?”

“Shane,” came Random’s voice from the walls, “we have seven minutes before the resident marines cut through that door.”

“Damn it!” Shane didn’t like what she was feeling. It was all falling apart around her. “Can’t you get to flight control from the computer?”

“They were expecting this,” Random said. “I can’t get out of the secondary core.”

Shane looked up at the ceiling panels. Beyond them was the center of the ship, where the contragrav was.

“Can you do it?” she asked Mosasa.

“Once I crack the control box, I can make it do anything I want.”

“What about the radiation?” Shane couldn’t help but think of the legendary quirks of quantum extraction contragravs. The things were nasty when you ran them within the operation specs.

“I’m not human, Shane.”

“Does that mean you can sit next to that thing while it’s running?”

“Time, people,” Random said. “Move it!”

Mosasa stepped on a ledge and pushed aside one of the heavily shielded panels. A warning light came on, filling the room with a flashing yellow glow. He looked at Shane and gave an all-too-human shrug. “I guess we’re about to find out.”

Mosasa disappeared up the hole.

“I do not like this,” Shane said.

“Mosasa can do it.”

Shane quietly adjusted her personal Emerson field to screen her from harmful radiation. The adjustment cost her three minutes on her environmental containment. She pointed her plasma rifle at the door and waited.

“I’m sorry, Shane.”

“Why? This isn’t your fault.”

There was a pause. “I can’t explain fully. My surface is a mimetic reproduction of human psychology, but my thoughts are—different. Most intellectual beings don’t have the equipment to foresee the consequences of their actions.”

“You saw this coming?” Shane asked.

“I could have.”

“I’m the idiot who put myself in this position, Random. Don’t blame yourself for my mistakes.”

“A moral question.”

“Hm?”

“Does prior knowledge of someone’s decision—and the consequences of that decision—require you to share responsibility for that decision?”

Shane didn’t have an answer for that.

Time seemed to stretch into infinity as she waited for something to happen. She watched the chrono in the corner of her headsup and watched the numbers change too slowly.

“Why weren’t you horrified?” Random asked.

“Huh?”

“Two AIs, working independent of any supervision. Most Bakuninites would find that too disturbing. You’re Confed material, you should be screaming in horror.”

The chrono changed to read 07:48.

“Maybe I will, when I’ve got a chance to think.” Sweat was rolling down her face, despite the cooling system, and she desperately wanted to wipe off her forehead. She blinked her eyes and wished for a sweatband.

“I just appreciated your concern for Mosasa.”

Shane nodded inside her helmet and kept watching the door. She thought she saw something and began to run her visor through its enhancement modes.

Random kept talking. “He’s the closest thing I have to a son.”

Please God, Shane thought, don’t tell me the AI’s losing it.

“Look, Random, I chose my team, okay? That’s you, Mosasa, everyone. Do you have any surveillance on the corridor out there?”

“No, they’ve locked me in. The only pictures I have are the ones they pipe in.”

Shane kept staring at the door. Her visor’s setting had locked into the IR, and the door was beginning to glow around the edges. Heat trails were piping in from the sides.

“Random, they’re cutting in from the other side now.”

“They’re early,” Random said matter-of-factly. “Some of the onboard marines must’ve been in position when we boarded.”

“It’ll take them two to five minutes to cut open the door.”

“How long for Mosasa—?”

“Seven to ten.”

“Been nice knowing you, Random.”

“You can hold them off. There can only be five at most.”

“Only one of me.”

Her chrono flipped over to 07:49.

Parts of the door were now glowing in the visible spectrum. The marines out there must have a cutting torch.

She dialed her MacMillan-Schmitt for maximum discharge. Not a setting recommended for firing inside enclosed spaces, especially with a fully charged wide-aperture plasma rifle. But a second shot probably wasn’t going to happen.

“What’re you doing?” asked Random.

“Setting this on full.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

Shane laughed. More like suicidal. There was a good chance of her filling this room with plasma backwash. That’d fry her just as bad as the troops outside the door. “The jet might vent out.”

“There’s only ten meters down that corridor before there’s another emergency door.”

“They might have cut through it.” There was a long silence after she said that. And after a while she said, “Then again, they might not have. You don’t have any idea, do you?”

“No, but if I were laying an ambush, I’d put them in one of the empty lockers down that hall.”

Shane nodded. “So I’m taking a chance.” After a moment, she added, “Maybe you should lock yourself up in that case of yours.”

As she heard the sounds of cables withdrawing and Random’s case closing, she considered the fact that she probably knew the marines on the other side of the door. She could surrender and escape with her life. For some reason the thought shamed her.

I chose my team.

“I made my bed,” Shane whispered. “Now it’s time to die in it.”

Smoke was wisping from the bottom of the door. The edges were glowing red and occasionally the light from the cutting torch flashed along the edge. Parts of the door were warping inward.

It was 07:50.

“Think the others made it, Random?”

“Yes,” came the voice from the case’s speaker, behind her. “All the force is surrounding the ship.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

“No regrets?”

“Only one.”

“What?”

“I think I chose the wrong line of work.”

At 07:50:30, the door to the secondary computer core of the Barracuda-class troop-carrier Blood-Tide fell open and ex-Captain Kathy Shane fired her weapon.

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Extreme Prejudice

“Nothing is so fierce as a coward who is backed into a corner.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“A desperate disease requires a dangerous remedy.”

—Guy Fawkes

(1570-1606)

07:48:00 Godwin Local

The elevator rose.

Johann Levy stared at the rifle on the floor in front of him and thought of Paschal.

Twelve years ago he had been a young lawyer rising in the Paschal hierarchy. There might have been a chance of rising in the secular arm of the Paschal government, if it weren’t for the revolution. If he hadn’t panicked. If he had stayed.

It was the colonel’s fault. Klaus Dacham had been a captain then, and he’d ordered the TEC reinforcements to roll over all the demonstrations. Five hundred dead, ten times that injured, ten times that imprisoned. Even the Paschal Elders who had called for help were shocked.

Levy had been one of the liberal voices in the establishment, but when he had seen most of his friends from the university disappear at the hands of the TEC, he had run. Left Paschal, left the Confederacy, left everything he had known, to come to this nihilistic little dirtball called Bakunin.

Levy had never forgiven himself for that.

Worse, he had left himself. He hadn’t even dared to apply for his own exit visa. He had stolen a friend’s and had left the planet wearing that identity. The real Johann Levy was most likely in some unmarked student’s grave on Paschal.

Somehow, the twisted process of his own mind had made him, a gentile lawyer on Paschal, metamorphose into an expatriate Jewish revolutionary on Bakunin. He had spent the last dozen years capitalizing on Levy’s reputation as a revolutionary.

He was a revolutionary who had done nothing when the guns had begun to fire. A revolutionary who might have had a platform to condemn what was going on, who instead packed his bags and left before he attracted attention.

He had built a string of contacts, learned the arcane lore of security and armor, bombs and surveillance—all without ever putting himself in any physical danger.

He had long ago admitted to himself that he was a coward.

If he weren’t a coward, he wouldn’t be in the position he was in now.

What had he been thinking when he allowed the colonel to contact him and contract for his expertise in the Bakunin underground? Did he really think that he could use “Webster” against Dacham? Was that it? Or was he just too terrified to say no?

He had dealt with the devil, and his own hands were as bloody as Colonel Dacham’s.

Levy wanted the colonel to pay for Paschal, but his own fear kept him from ever going through with it. He had built up “Webster’s” credibility to the point where he knew he could’ve gotten a personal meeting. With Colonel Dacham’s brother as bait, he could have had the colonel where he could have finished him off—

Why hadn’t he done that?

The elevator continued to rise as Levy slowly knelt to pick up the weapon.

He hadn’t wanted to do the dirty work. That was it. He was afraid to. He had been drowning in deception and manipulation for so long that it seemed easier to arrange for the colonel’s own brother to do it. It would have been a perfect setup, if Jonah Dacham had cooperated.

Ironic, Levy thought, how many deaths I am responsible for when I’ve never fired a shot.

Levy stood straight and checked the laser. It had a full charge.

It’s over, he thought, all the duplicity, the lies, the running. After dealing with the colonel, after this last betrayal, there was nothing left for him. Bakunin was the last place anyone could run. Bakunin was the end, and if you kept running from here, all that was left was an abyss.

Levy knew he was never going to leave this building alive.

He thought of the students cut down on Paschal. He thought of nearly fourteen hundred people cut down from orbit only minutes ago. He thought of the people on the Blood-Tide whom he’d betrayed. He thought of Klaus Dacham.

A dozen years of fear and anger gripped him like a tourniquet.

Then the elevator doors opened and he no longer had time to be afraid.

The elevator had stopped at the top of the air-traffic control tower for the GA&A complex. It was a massive room housed inside a ten-meter-high transparent dome. Control panels were everywhere, showing holo tracks of local aircraft. The view commanded the entire complex and the wooded hillside all the way down to Godwin.

There were five people in there.

Levy surprised himself by shooting first.

The guard Levy shot was standing next to the elevator. The man had a personal field, but it was a civilian model and it failed under the strength of the laser rifle Levy wielded. The guard was still turning to see what was happening when the power sink on his field exploded and the beam sliced through his abdomen.

As the guard collapsed, Levy felt something burn his right shoulder and he dove for the cover provided by one of the consoles.

The elevator was inside a pillar that rose into the center of the control room. There’d been another guard on the other side of it, and he was rounding it, aiming a handheld laser pistol at Levy.

Levy screamed as he swept his laser across that half of the room. Consoles exploded, a chair erupted into flames and burning smoke, and the attacking guard’s field proved as useless as his comrade’s. The guard got one more shot at Levy before his field collapsed and his face turned into a hollow blackened groove.

Levy scrambled behind another console and realized that he couldn’t feel his left leg any more.

There was moaning somewhere, and Levy looked for the four techs he’d seen when the elevator doors had opened. He kept close to the floor, pulling himself around the base of a console. Once he cleared the rank of consoles in front of the elevator, he saw two of the techs.

One was facedown on the floor with a hole burned in his back. The other looked as though his head had been too close to one of the exploding consoles. He was moaning and clutching his face with bloody hands.

The elevator doors dinged and Levy swung the rifle to bear on it. The doors closed on the third tech.

He was sitting up and felt a paralyzing pain through his body as something slammed into his back. He swung the carbine around, firing. He spun fast enough to see the woman swinging the chair at him before the rifle’s beam sliced her in half. The chair still managed to slam into his right arm as the woman’s corpse folded over in front of him. Levy heard a crack and didn’t know if it was his arm or the chair.

For a few seconds the only sound was moaning from behind him.

Levy looked down and saw the reason he couldn’t feel his left leg was that most of it was gone below the knee.

Strangely, that didn’t upset him.

In fact, he laughed a little and told the woman folded over in front of him, “That wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

Well, he was here. In a few minutes they were going to come for him. He fired into the elevator to keep that from being too easy.

That accomplished, he only had one thing left to do.

Slowly, Johann Levy began to drag himself toward the edge of the dome, all the time praying that Colonel Dacham was out in the open somewhere down there.

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Market Crash

“It ain’t over until the fat lady’s dead.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“The popular method of pacifying a tiger is to allow one’s own consumption.”

—Li Zhou

(2238-2348)

07:48:00 Godwin Local

From what Dom saw of the office building, it was deserted. GA&A obviously had yet to restart commercial operations. Floor two was empty of anybody, including security patrols—

But then security had another problem at the moment.

Every time Dom passed by a window overlooking the landing quad—for security reasons, every GA&A building only had windows facing in toward the complex—he could see the backlit behemoth of the Blood-Tide surrounded by ground troops.

Dom quickly came to an office that fit his requirements. One of the benefits of having the floor plan of the GA&A complex in a computer inside his skull.

This second-floor office used to belong to Cy Helmsman, Dom’s late veep in charge of operations. This particular office had been both RF-secured and given priority access to the GA&A network.

The office building was a U, cupping half the landing quad. Cy’s old office was right in the center of that U, and normally it had a commanding low-angle view of the entire GA&A operation through its double-height picture windows.

That view, however, was dominated by two of the Blood-Tide’s main drives. The view out the window was like looking down the throat of a double-barreled volcano.

Dom looked out and thought of the caverns honeycombing the mountains between Godwin and Proudhon. He smiled briefly.

“While there’s life, Klaus ...”

Dom slipped behind the desk and powered Cy’s terminal. This office was hardwired into whatever data lines survived in the complex. It took Dom less than thirty seconds to realize that the invaders had barely touched the original equipment.

“Why, Klaus,” he whispered to himself, “you’re being paranoid.”

Even though there was still 20% of the processing capacity left aboveground, Klaus’ people had done their best to avoid any of GA&A’s old computers. Everything they used on the site they must have hauled in and coded themselves. It seemed a waste of resources to Dom.

However, it did mean that the system he was plugged into now was just about how he’d left it. His personal codes still worked, and while GA&A’s original computer system had been disconnected from every sensitive area—such as the security system and what was left of the perimeter air defenses—it was still linked to the base communications network. Dom supposed that the marines had their own communications and weren’t worried about the old system being compromised.

Dom set the commands up and paused—

He didn’t have to do this. He could still slip out of here.

Dom queried his onboard computer. He had eleven minutes before Ivor bugged out.

No, Dom thought, I can’t let this go on. I can’t keep running—

Can I?

Dom flipped open the audio circuit on the holo in front of him, and his voice went out over every comm channel wired into the GA&A complex.

“Klaus.”

Dom waited. He thought he could hear a commotion from outside, on the quad.

He walked over to the window. It was somewhat dangerous, but the quad was floodlit, and the office was dark. He knew even enhanced vision couldn’t see through the mirror-tinted glass, especially in the veep suites.

“Klaus,” he repeated, keeping his voice level. His broadcast was going out over the PA system, the intercoms, the closed-circuit holos—everywhere. It was disorienting hearing his voice vibrate the window in front of him.

When he was next to the window, the Blood-Tide occupied almost all of his field of view. The troop-carrier’s massive drive-laden ass filled the cup of the office building’s U. He could barely see the edges of the residence tower beyond the hump of the ship’s drives, and most of the quad was covered by the stubby wings.

The Blood-Tide was fifty percent larger than the largest ship the landing quad was designed to handle. It was amazing that the ship had fit in the space at all. It was a hundred meters long, and Dom knew from his computer-remembered plans that the clearance between the residence tower and the office building was a hundred ten meters.

Dom felt admiration for the pilot who’d landed the thing. The engines were barely three meters from the window.

Dom had to get right up to the window and look down to see the marines on the ground. There must have been a hundred of them, in full armor, urban camouflage, and bearing enough hardware to lay waste to all of East Godwin. They were mustering, half of them coming toward the office complex.

“Klaus,” Dom repeated. “If you want me, talk to me.”

Marines began to surround the base of the office complex.

“Jonah.”

Dom turned and saw Klaus’ face on the holo. The view behind Klaus was mostly sky. The view seemed familiar. As Dom talked, he quickly ran possible locations through his mind.

“Hold off your marines. I want to make a deal.”

“A deal for your surrender?” Klaus shook his head. “You are in no position to bargain. We have you pinpointed in the office complex. The exits are sealed. We can take you any time we wish. No deals.”

“You had me trapped aboard the Blood-Tide.”

Klaus hardly looked fazed by Dom’s suggestion. “Obviously you were never aboard that ship. Surrender, Dominic, and I guarantee you will survive to see your trial.”

Dom shook his head. “There are some conditions.”

Klaus laughed. Dom stared at the holo image. Where was he? “Your arrogance is amusing. In less than a minute you are going to be in custody, conditions or not. You’ve always had an inflated view of yourself.”

“And you were always dangerously rash. Do you think I’d be talking if I didn’t have a card to play?”

“What can you possibly do?”

“Trigger a few thousand kilos of high explosives planted throughout the GA&A complex.”

There was a long pause. “You’re bluffing.”

“I could be. Or I could have set the timer before I called you. It could be that if I don’t say the right word in the next three minutes, the whole complex disappears.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Cy Helmsman might argue with you.”

Yes, Klaus, you know I’m bluffing. But you also know where I’m calling from. Can you be sure? Can you afford to be sure? You’ve made it quite a point to remove everything you think I live for.

Klaus leaned out of the display and said something offscreen. Once Dom had an unobstructed view of the background, he knew where Klaus was. Behind Klaus was the same view of Godwin that Dom had seen every day for seven years. Klaus was on top of the residence tower. He was right outside Dom’s old office.

Dom looked out the window and tried to see beyond the drives of the Blood-Tide. He thought he could see a mass of people on top of the tower, next to the matte-black office dome.

“Okay,” came Klaus’ voice. “You have three minutes. What are your conditions?”

“First, once you have me, you cease persecuting GA&A’s former employees. Up to and including anyone who might have been involved in this operation.”

Klaus smiled. “Agreed, with you in custody I will cease to have any interest in the survivors.”

You evil bastard. You think you’ve won, don’t you?

“Second, my people aboard the Blood-Tide are given passage off the complex and released.”

Klaus smiled even more broadly. “Of course.”

The ice gripped Dom’s stomach. They’re already dead. He’s killed them.

He had wanted to give Shane, Mosasa, and Random a chance. It looked as though he was too late. Well, he would have to face it, he had run out of cards to play. He almost wished that he had peppered the complex with explosives, so he could set them off and take Klaus with him. Instead, Dom turned toward the window.

“You have two minutes left.”

Dom noticed marines turning toward the Blood-Tide. The whole ship seemed to shift its weight slightly, as if in a gigantic shrug.

“I want this ‘trial’ to be public.”

“I intend to air your crimes for everyone to see, have no fear. I am sending in marines now. I expect you to turn yourself over quietl—” Something offscreen was stealing Klaus’ attention. Someone hit the mute, and Dom noticed a lot of the marines downstairs running toward the Blood-Tide.

What?

“Jonah,” came Klaus’ voice from behind him. Dom turned and saw Klaus riding the edge of fury. “While you talk of surrender and capitulation, your ‘people—’ your Bakuninite traitors—are setting off plasma explosions aboard the Blood-Tide. You get no deals.”

“Damn it, Klaus!”

“I’m going to make you pay for everything!”

That was the point at which the world decided to explode.

Dom’s brain, computer-assisted as it was, had to suddenly contend with processing a tremendous amount of information in a very short time. From Dom’s point of view, this had the ironic result of slowing his thought processes down to a crawl.

Klaus was finishing his sentence, the word “everything” still on his lips, when a flower of smoke erupted from his arm. Dom watched his brother fall across the holo, knocking the image askew. In the cockeyed slice of the top of the residence tower, Dom saw telltale heat ripples cutting through the air, marking the passage of the otherwise invisible beam of a high-frequency sniping laser. The invisible laser cut through air, concrete roof, and defending guards with equal impunity. The angle of the shots marked them as originating from above the office complex, in the air-traffic tower.

It had to be Levy.

Dom had barely a fraction of a second to grasp that when the doors to the office blew apart.

Five well-armed marines fanned out into the room, even as the doors were still in the air. Part of the door landed on the desk, smashing the holo Dom was watching. Four narrow-aperture plasma rifles turned to lock on him. Dom started raising his arms as the leader shouted, “Freeze!” through the loudspeaker on his shoulder.

One marine didn’t level his weapon at Dom. He was the last one into the room, and he never looked at Dom at all. He ran into the room to take his position between the front two marines and froze, weapon at his side, staring, through his faceplate, out the window behind Dom.

Dom stood there, arms raised, facing the marines across the desk. There was a second of silence. The floodlights in the quad cut abstract shadows in the wall beyond the marines.

The shadows were moving.

The one marine looking past Dom said, “My God.” Dom never would have heard the hoarse whisper without his enhanced ears.

The light disappeared entirely and, despite the warnings, Dom turned.

The view out Cy Helmsman’s picture windows was now entirely dominated by a pair of the Blood-Tide’s eighteen-meter diameter main engines. As Dom watched, the engines moved slowly upward. Looking at the silent, majestic progression, Dom could swear that the engines were getting closer—nearly touching the window.

Then they touched.

The entire office complex tried to shake itself apart. Glass flew into the room. The floor tilted down toward the window, scattering marines and throwing Dom across the desk.

Two marines tumbled past him, stopping short at the window as Dom grabbed for purchase on the desk. The entire room shook. Dom looked behind him, right down the throat of the Blood-Tide’s number three main engine.

“Shit.”

The floor was still tilting, and the engine looked as though it was backing toward him. The desk was starting to slide. A marine fell into the gap between the edge of the floor and the engine, there was a grinding noise, a scream, and the marine disappeared.

The Blood-Tide continued to rise.

The building was shaking itself apart around him, and behind him the number three engine was sliding up, past him. Dom lost track of the marines. As the engine rose, the floor tilted back. Soon it would be shifting in the opposite direction as the bottom of the engine passed by this floor.

The engine was huge. It could swallow most of the room Dom was in. It looked more like a cavern than ever. If the maniac who was piloting the Blood-Tide fired the mains, the blast would vaporize the whole building.

Dom felt a massive shudder through the surface of the desk, and part of the roof above him buckled. Dom jumped as pieces of the ceiling began collapsing. He landed on the still moving floor between the desk and the engine. Dom fell on his side and rolled as the floor itself began to crack and buckle. As he tumbled, he caught glimpses of the space beyond the floor. He saw one ugly scene of a marine being ground between multiton slabs of concrete on the floor below him.

Dom’s mad scramble, avoiding collapsing ceiling and suddenly hungry floor, took him straight toward the window. He had hoped to get by the Blood-Tide, but by now that entire side of the room was slowly moving engine. Even with the edges of the containment nozzle shredded and torn by the impact with the building, it was the only stable refuge left.

He threw himself into a manic dive into the number three engine as the room behind him evaporated into a billowing cloud of pulverized concrete. He slammed inside the bell of the containment nozzle with a force that dimmed his vision; part of the room followed him, slamming across his back and making part of his world fade out.

As Dom sank his left hand into the electromagnetic mesh of the engine, he hoped the pilot wouldn’t fire the thing any time soon. Then he let the world float away.

* * * *

Dom was somewhat surprised that he didn’t wake up dead.

His first conscious thought was that his back and his left arm were screaming pain messages at him. His self-diagnostics were telling him that nothing irreparable had been done to him. It didn’t help much with the pain. Something huge had fallen across his back, pinning him to the inside of the engine.

All he could see was the mesh in front of him. He couldn’t even get a view of what was pinning him down. Wreckage held him in place from the shoulders down. At least the ship seemed to have stopped moving.

Dom pulled his left hand free of the mesh. It seemed redundant to clutch at the engine when he was pinned in place. As he let go, he tried to turn his neck—

“Shit!” he yelled in pain.

He was suddenly aware of what kind of trouble he was in. Wherever the Blood-Tide had landed, there would be marines surrounding the site in short order. He had just volunteered his location-—and he was pretty damn helpless at the moment.

Dom held himself still, letting the pain fade for a moment, and hoped no one had been within earshot of his curse. It was a vain hope. In moments he could hear someone at work behind him, at the throat of the engine.

Dom steeled himself against the pain—even if he severed his spinal column, it was only a sheaf of easily replaced superconducting monofilament—and turned his neck to see the rear of the engine.

He finally saw that what held him in place was a ten-by-two-meter chunk of polyceram-reinforced concrete. Also, to his surprise, the engine was now clogged with wood. Chunks of trees had been broken off and wedged in the engine.

As Dom watched, a large log dotted with purple-orange foliage shifted and started to slide out. It was followed by another. And suddenly, there in a two-meter gap, was Mosasa.

“What the hell happened?” Dom asked.

Mosasa managed to answer that question as he did his utmost to quickly extricate Dom and get him to Ivor’s waiting getaway vehicle before Klaus’ marines showed up.

Mosasa told Dom what had happened aboard the Blood-Tide. Trapped inside the ship, with no way out, Mosasa had climbed into the support system for the contragrav and had wired control directly into the hardware. He had flown blindly north, eventually slamming into the wooded foothills high up on the Diderot Mountains.

Ivor had caught up with the Blood-Tide within a few seconds. His vehicle had been up and ready to bug out on Dom’s orders, and the spinning-out-of-control troopship was hard to miss.

As Mosasa—possessing a strength that Dom didn’t expect—helped move the concrete slab off him, Dom asked about the other team members.

The news wasn’t good. While Random had managed to fuse the access to the hatch controls on the ship, five marines had been aboard the Blood-Tide to ambush the team. Shane had managed to take out the marines when they’d cut through the hatch of the secondary core, but only at the expense of critically injuring herself in a plasma backwash. The life support on her suit was barely keeping her alive. Ivor was waiting to evac her to Godwin.

As Mosasa helped to half carry Dom out of the engine, he said, “We need to get you to a doctor, too.”

Dom shook his head. “We can’t risk travel to the city. They’ll see that. If we’re north of GA&A, we might manage the commune unseen. There’re medical facilities there.”

Mosasa clasped Dom’s arm. “You don’t know. Klaus—”

“I know what Klaus did.” Dom looked up at Mosasa. “We have to get to the commune rendezvous.”

Mosasa looked at Dom and nodded.

Despite the plan going badly wrong, it had worked. Dom knew it had all come together. Badly, and costing more than it should’ve. But it had all worked.

Best of all, the way everything had gone, Klaus was going to assume everyone was dead.

<>

* * * *

EPILOGUE

Economic Indicators

“You are free and that is why you are lost.”

—Franz Kafka

(1883-1924)

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Closing Costs

“No one can be quite as annoying as a potential lover.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“It is much more secure to be feared than to be loved.”

—Niccolo Machiavelli

(1469-1527)

Kropotkin had dropped below the western horizon. The sky was fading from blood-red to the purple of a deep bruise. Below the ledge where Tetsami stood, the sprawl of Godwin glistened with blacks and browns like some divine compost heap saturated with human insects. From here she could see the speck of the GA&A complex, a small scar in the woods where the Blood-Tide had gone down, and the circular crater where Klaus’ orbital attack had reduced a mountain valley to so much gravel.

Over, Tetsami thought.

That one word covered a hell of a lot of territory. She wished she knew if she’d blown it or not. It all worked, didn’t it?

Didn’t it?

She hugged herself and shivered in the breath-fogging cold.

Somehow they all had managed to pull themselves out of a potential disaster. All except Levy, of course....

“Poor fucking Johann,” she whispered.

It had taken her two or three days to sort out those last fifteen minutes or so. She still didn’t understand it, exactly, and she probably didn’t want to. The only really clear thing about the whole situation was the fact that Colonel Klaus Dacham had lost the final confrontation, and might even be dead.

Somehow, Dom had outmaneuvered his brother. Outmaneuvered him as cynically and heartlessly as he’d outmaneuvered everyone else.

Especially Tetsami.

Why didn’t he tell any of us Klaus was his brother? She slammed her fist into her thigh in frustration. Why didn’t he tell us about the preparations at the commune? Why didn’t he tell us that Levy might have been the one—

Everything had knotted up into a burning little ball in her gut. Most of her anger was directed at her “partner,” Dom.

Dom had seen the attack on the commune coming. He had prepared for it. By the time of the attack, almost all of Dom’s people had moved into the tunnels in the mountains around the commune. Klaus’ recon drone had given Dom’s people enough warning to evac all the above-ground personnel into the retrofitted caverns. The buildings had been reduced to rubble, but only one person had been killed and a few dozen injured when an unstable cavern collapsed in the attack.

Part of Tetsami hated Dom for not telling anybody— hell, for not telling her— about that. Seeing the holo of the commune disintegrating and not knowing....

Just the memory of how she’d felt made her want to throw up, or cry, or kill someone.

She had expected to rendezvous on a mass grave, and instead found Dom’s people intensively involved in rendering the endless caverns habitable. There were medical facilities, hydroponics gardens, and all manner of things stripped from the main building before the balloon went up.

Dom could have told her, could have trusted her.

Worse was Johann Levy. She wanted to believe that Dom only knew of Levy’s betrayals after the fact. But she couldn’t shake the suspicion that Dom had used Levy as an exercise in cold-blooded manipulation. It was intimately tied up in the wretched feeling that had enveloped her ever since the completion of the mission.

It’s not as if the project weren’t risky. Sure, the ideal would have had no casualties on either side. But it’s foolish to think everyone could come out unscathed.

Right?

Tetsami stared out at the wretched sprawl of Godwin and forced herself to admit her real problem.

It had been her idea, her plan, her command—and she hadn’t been ready for it. She hadn’t been ready for people getting hurt and killed. She wasn’t ready for Shane.

Dom had had extensive medical facilities moved into the caverns, but they’d been barely enough to stabilize her. Shane had lost a considerable portion of her lower body, couldn’t breathe without assistance, and— mercifully—had yet to regain consciousness.

Shane was somewhere down in Godwin now, Ivor having smuggled her back to the Stemmer Facility for major reconstructive work. Any prognosis beyond simple survival was anyone’s guess.

Mosasa and Random were both intact after the episode, and for some reason that only made Tetsami feel more uncomfortable around the AI and its keeper.

On top of Shane, there were the five marines who’d been aboard the Blood-Tide. The marines who’d been in front of the weapon, while Shane had just been brushed with the plasma backwash.

Add to them the marines who’d died when the Blood-Tide backed into the GA&A office complex, the people who’d been shot by Levy in his manic attempt to assassinate Klaus, and Johann Levy himself who was almost certainly dead.

The more Tetsami brooded, the more corpses floated up to the surface.

Do we start counting the three marine snipers I had to kill at the construction site?

It was all so damn ugly, so damn brutal. It was nothing like the clean digital world of the computer net she had worked in until now. Sure there’d always been risk—but somehow it was a cleaner risk. No one’s blood on her hands but her own. No one between her and the guns. No one out there taking shots for her.

Tetsami ran her hand across her eyes and wondered what she was going to do with her life.

No question, she could bail out now. She could cash in her share of the spoils—twenty megagrams, more money than she’d ever think to see in a lifetime—say good-bye to Bakunin, and find some civilized place to retire. She could even pay her way to Earth.

She tried to find some joy in the prospect, but the idea only filled her with a hollow dread.

“This is a wretched planet.” Tetsami spat over the ledge.

“Perhaps,” came a familiar voice behind her. “But it has its points.”

“Hello, Dominic,” she said without turning around.

“I’ve been looking for you. People get lost in these caverns.”

“I wanted to get lost.”

She heard him step up next to her. “Nice view.”

“The view’s shit.” She turned and looked at Dom. He was staring down at Godwin. “What do you want?”

“To thank you—”

“You’re welcome.” Her mouth felt dry when she said it. The irony in her voice sounded extremely unsubtle in her ears.

“—and give you this.” He held out to her a small plastic envelope.

Tetsami took it and tore the seal. Inside was a sheaf of plastic currency, all kilogram notes from the IBASC. Fifty of them. Tetsami looked at the cash, briefly unable to speak.

“That’s what I owe you. In addition to your share, of course.”

Tetsami suppressed an urge to toss the whole package off the edge of the cliff. She wanted to scream and cry, run around in circles, tear her hair out—

Hell, anything to get his attention.

“Dominic, you unfeeling bastard.”

Dom turned to regard her, and the nonexpression on his face made her even angrier.

“Do you even see people when you look out of those eyes of yours? Was all this just some sort of weird economic transaction to you?”

Dom, for once, looked puzzled.

Tetsami took the sheaf of bills and jammed them inside Dom’s shirt. “Keep it! I never delivered the damn data on Bleek anyway. And another thing—”

Dom was glancing down at his shirt and looking marvelously lost. “What?”

Tetsami grabbed both sides of Dom’s head, cocked it to the side, and kissed him savagely, until she thought she tasted blood. Hers, his, it didn’t matter. When she let go of him she said, “Think about that, you asshole.”

She left him standing on the ledge as, behind him, the stars began to come out.

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Propaganda Victory

“Once you have mastered the art of deceiving yourself, deceiving others is that much easier.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“No man spreads a lie with so good a grace as he that believes it.”

—John Arbuthnot

(1667-1735)

“There’s been some loose talk about how bad off we are.” Klaus looked over the impromptu parade ground. It had been the landing quad, but now that they had the new mainframe and power systems on-line they didn’t need the Blood-Tide in the center of the complex running the defensive screens. Now that they had the perimeter towers back, the Blood-Tide sat next to its cousin, the Shaftsbury, on a new staging area directly east of the complex.

Without a ship in the way, he could comfortably address all his personnel at once. With the last load from the Shaftsbury there were nearly two thousand civilian techs, plus the remaining one hundred ten marines. It had been three days since the “incident.” Klaus stood there, at the focus of their uncomfortable silence. He had placed the podium inside the curve of the office building’s U. Someone else might have debated the wisdom of having his audience face not only him but also the shredded front of GA&A’s offices where the Blood-Tide had backed into them. It was an all-too vivid reminder of six presumed dead and five injured marines, and a pair of dead and injured civilians.

The silence stretched.

Someone else might have seen the anger in the ranks, the sinking morale, and feared it.

Klaus didn’t fear it. Anger was good. Anger could be used. Anger wasn’t something to shrink away from. On the contrary—

Anger was a gift from God.

Klaus scanned the front rank and made a sweeping gesture with his left arm. His right was still mostly immobile due to a laser shot from the observation tower. “Look. We fell under attack from Bakuninite terrorists, anarchists whose sole aim is our destruction. But look around you— are we destroyed?”

Hit them with the blatantly obvious, first. Klaus looked around, getting a feeling for the mass of the crowd.

“Do you know what those terrorists planned to do?” Of course not. Klaus had been good about putting a lid on the security breach in the warehouse level. No more than a half-dozen trusted people knew about the commuter tube down there—a tube that had since been secretly blasted shut.

“Imagine igniting all the drives in the Blood-Tide while simultaneously decoupling the containment on the contragrav’s quantum extraction furnace.”

Klaus smiled. He had most of them now. A good proportion of the civilians were technical, and could imagine that. For the benefit of the rest, Klaus continued. “If that had happened, you wouldn’t be looking at the damaged building behind me. You would be looking at a glass-bottomed trench nearly a kilometer long from the bottom of a crater fifty to a hundred meters deep.”

He could feel the mood shifting like the tide. Slow, but inevitable. And, properly used, just as hard to deny. It was becoming hard to keep his gestures in check, and he decided to hell with the laser wound. The medic could deal with it. He thrust out his right hand and the pain gave him a shot of adrenaline.

“Preventing this was a defeat? The five marines who died, died to prevent that. The terrorists were tampering with the contragrav by the time the marines managed to stop them—at the cost of their own lives. The flight of the Blood-Tide was the contragrav malfunctioning. They were that close!”

A bit overdramatic perhaps, but the sound of his own amplified voice from the PA systems buoyed him like a drug.

“If it had not been for my own intelligence sources and those five marines, we would not now be ready for the second phase of this operation. Every single one of us would be dead.”

Klaus smiled.

It was time to dispose of the rest of his problems.

“Isn’t it interesting that there are those here who call this defeat?”

A long silence followed. He let it hang as the implication of that sank in. There was another purpose—other than drama—for the pause in his speech. It was a cue for his loyalists to get ready.

“Isn’t it interesting that among the missing is a marine officer whose duty was to guard the perimeter? Isn’t it interesting that the transponder logs show this officer as the last person to board the Blood-Tide? Isn’t it interesting that this officer was on a detail with the Bakuninite traitor Kathy Shane when eight hundred prisoners were allowed to escape?

“Isn’t it interesting that I was nearly a victim of a sniper from our own air-traffic control tower?”

All his people were in position within the hushed crowd.

“It should be obvious to anyone, even without the intelligence sources I have access to, that there are traitors—Bakuninite anarchist sympathizers—within our own ranks. Traitors that have been there since the beginning. The trap I laid with the Blood-Tide had another goal, in addition to taking out the terrorists who were immolated within it—

“The trap was there to implicate the traitors within our own ranks!”

That was the signal for his people to grab nearly two dozen liabilities from within the audience. Most of the people sat in shocked silence as Klaus’ security team dragged twenty-four men and women out of the crowd.

Twenty-four problems, all counted as solved.

“Look at them! Two dozen secret assassins, every one waiting for the right moment to destroy any one of you. Each one would gladly give life itself to see this complex blown off the face of the planet. But they overreached, and exposed themselves—and now they’re revealed for the cowards they are.”

All of them were making quite a hue and cry as they were being dragged to the residence tower behind the crowd. One of them, the marine Conner, was actually crying.

Every single one of them was denying everything.

Klaus would make a bet that not one in ten of the audience believed them. And that one would do nothing about it—because anyone who did would be dragged away with the others.

Klaus waited for the commotion to die down before he went on.

“We are not weaker now. We are stronger.

“We have not been defeated. We have triumphed.

“We are not at the end. We are only beginning.

“Look around you. The future is ours. Bakunin is ours. They will not stop us!”

The speech lasted another forty minutes. When he left the podium, he got a standing ovation.

<>

* * * *

CHAPTER FORTY

Plausible Denial

“Those who are most sure of themselves are those possessing the fewest facts.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

“I have been ever of the opinion that revolutions are not to be evaded.”

—Benjamin Disraeli

(1804-1881)

Sim Vashniya liked Earth. He liked the blue skies, the ash-free air, and the light gravity that made him feel as though he could do anything. Not only was he enjoying the environment, but his own plans were going very well. Everything was perfect.

Which made it all the more troubling to feel the edges of his mouth twitching toward a frown.

He stroked his beard to conceal the effort he made to maintain his smile. “What are you asking me?” he said.

There was no real reason for him to dislike Dimitri. The old Russian was only another professional trying to do his own job. But for some reason Vashniya was finding it difficult to maintain his good humor, something that usually never took a second thought.

For the first time in quite a long while, Vashniya was annoyed.

The two of them, Vashniya and Dimitri, were sitting in Dimitri’s office. Surrounding them was bedrock, and the monolithic foundation of the Confederacy tower. They were deep in the bowels of the Confed bureaucracy, both literally and figuratively.

“I would like a straight answer, Vashniya.”

Dimitri looked weary. Vashniya understood, but he didn’t sympathize. Every decade, right before the Congress, things got hectic in the intelligence community. That was a given. Water was wet, deep space was a vacuum, and every ten years Confed politics reached critical mass.

It was no excuse for Dimitri to be so unsubtle.

“Am I now to abase myself and admit to all the imagined crimes of the Indi Protectorate?”

Dimitri rubbed his forehead. “I’m not accusing you of anything.”

“I am relieved.”

“You can’t deny what happened on Mars.”

“Nothing denied, nothing admitted.”

Dimitri slammed his hand on the desk. “Damn it! I’ve been playing this game for twice as long as you’ve been alive. I am supposed to run the Security apparatus for the entire Confederacy.”

Vashniya stood up. He felt his smile leave. “Thank you for inviting me, but I think I’ll go now.”

Dimitri sank back in his chair. “I’m sorry. Forgive the outburst.”

“I don’t think we have anything more to say.”

“Don’t you understand this at all? My job is to hold the Confederacy together. It’s delicately balanced, and any change in the power structure is my business.”

Vashniya did not sit down and he did not repair his smile. “What could possibly change?” He made no effort to withhold the irony in his voice.

“We both know the potential of planetary promotions in the next Congress. Especially now that you have the Seven Worlds here backing you—”

“I understand. Perhaps from where you sit any shift in power may seem too destabilizing. A threat.”

Dimitri was nodding.

Vashniya sighed. “So much for the TEC’s much-lauded independence. You’ve admitted that you are nothing more than an agent for the interests of Sirius and Alpha Centauri.”

“Have you ever thought that any substantial shift in the Confederacy might erupt into something less desirable?”

“Everyone in power must fear change.”

“I don’t say that the current system is perfect, but there’s a process in place—”

Vashniya stepped toward the door. “I deeply resent the implication that the People’s Protectorate intends to violate the Charter. If you do so again, I will lodge a formal protest.”

“I told you, I’m not accusing you of anything. Would you please sit down and listen to me for a minute?”

Vashniya sat down, thinking clean thoughts to calm himself. He felt his frown weaken a little. “Perhaps I overreact. But please, let us expedite this. We are both busy men. Ask me something I can answer, and I will.”

“Okay. No specifics—but, Sim, I am going to have to deal with whatever happens afterward. Should I be worried?”

Vashniya sat back, stroked his beard, and felt the smile return.

“Perhaps, Dimitri. Perhaps you should worry.”

* * * *

Sim Vashniya’s mood had returned to normal by the time he arrived back at the Indi Consulate. There was time left in the day for the more normal burdens of his duty, even this far from Shiva. Not the least of which was an appraisal of the Protectorate’s intelligence operation on Earth. He was doing well on that, even if the local people took offense at being outranked by a non-Chinese—

Racism was an unhappy thought; he banished it.

The Consulate was part of the diplomatic sprawl that surrounded the spire of the Confederacy tower. Each building dotting the parkland at the tower’s base represented another planet, or group of planets. Each building claimed a portion of land in the name of its own government—which was the reason why none of them was housed in the tower itself. Even though the kilometer-tall building could easily house all of them just as well as it housed most of the governmental bureaucracy that ran the Confederacy.

The only planet that housed its diplomatic function with the building itself was Earth.

The main Indi Consulate was central to a dozen lesser buildings that housed diplomatic staffs of various member planets. It was hard to tell just how many buildings there were because of the extensive landscaping. If Vashniya stuck to the path, he could pass buildings twenty meters on either side of him and never see anything but trees, gardens, and the occasional pond.

That’s why he didn’t notice the man until he was upon him.

Vashniya was crossing the ornamental stone bridge that led to the front courtyard of the Indi Consulate when a voice addressed him.

“Mr. Vashniya?”

Vashniya turned and saw a furtive figure step out from behind a tree. The man addressing him had appeared from out of nowhere, and Vashniya’s first thought was he was about to be ambushed. The feeling faded. The trees around him concealed more security than anywhere else on the planet. The man could not be a threat and be within a kilometer of here.

“Yes?” Vashniya asked.

“I was told you may be able to help me.” Now that Vashniya had a good look at the man, he began to wonder. The man had the unsure fumbling gait of a new arrival, unfamiliar with the gravity. Heavier than he’s used to, Vashniya thought. The man’s hair was bleached from heavy UV, but the stranger’s skin showed no sign of burning. The clothes he wore were new—very new.

An enigma from off-planet.

“What can I do for you?”

The man raised his hand to brush through his hair, and Vashniya noticed that it was a rather crude biomechanic, scarred and pitted in contrast to the polished image the rest of the man was trying to portray. The man noticed Vashniya looking and put the hand in his pocket.

“There’re no offices for the Seven Worlds here.”

Vashniya nodded. “I believe they only maintain one embassy out of their own sphere, on Mazimba.” The man had gone considerably out of his way to chase a shadow.

“But there’s a Tau Ceti delegate here for the Congress.”

“Actually, she’s from Grimalkin.”

“I need to talk to her.”

Vashniya chuckled. “I am not a secretary. I don’t make appointments for other diplomats. You have to talk to her.”

The man looked exasperated. “If I knew where to find her, I would.”

“Ah, I see the problem.”

“Can you tell me how to get in touch with her?”

“Why?”

The man only hesitated for a fraction of a second, but Vashniya noticed it. “I’m tracking down relatives on Dakota.”

It was a lie.

Vashniya decided to let it rest. He could question Hernandez about it if this man’s meeting with her ever took place. “Francesca Hernandez, she’s staying at the Victoria. They can ring her from the desk, and if she’ll talk to you, she’ll talk to you.”

“Thank you.”

The man turned to go, and Vashniya said, “Be prepared. She isn’t human.”

He turned, raising the metal hand to his cheek. “In that sense, neither am I, Mr. Vashniya.”

“Can I have your name?”

There was another brief hesitation before he said, “Jonah. My name’s Jonah.”

Jonah disappeared into the woods as suddenly as he had appeared. Vashniya stood watching where he’d been for a long time.

A trivial incident, really, Vashniya thought.

Vashniya returned to his duties. However, try as he might, he was unable to put the “trivial” incident out of his mind. That and the phrase he had spoken to Dimitri: “Everyone in power must fear change.”

Of course, his worries weren’t warranted. Vashniya was in control of the powers he was unleashing. But for some illogical reason, his meeting with Jonah made him doubt himself, and he didn’t understand why.

<>

* * * *

APPENDIX A