—Hamish Alexander-Harrington,
Earl White Haven,
First Lord of Admiralty,
Star Empire of Manticore.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
A brisk, cool breeze swept up the avenue, snapping and popping among the brightly colored flags on the second-floor staffs of the buildings lining the street, as Abigail Hearns turned the corner and saw the ocean spread out before her. Dramatic clouds, piled high in billows and swoops of white but black and flat-bottomed with coming rain, swept in across that ocean. The rain was still several hours away, according to the met people, but it promised a tumultuous, lightning and thunder-streaked night, and she hoped she’d still be dirtside to enjoy it.
For the present she settled for filling her lungs with the freshness of un-canned air, feeling sunlight on her skin, and something inside purred in sensual pleasure. Any spacer who spent her life in artificial environments, hurtling between star systems, would have understood that pleasure, but it held a special savor for Abigail Hearns. She was a Grayson. Her homeworld’s environment tried to kill its people every single day, and children weren’t allowed outside without strict adult supervision until they were into their teens. Simple rain storms posed potential health risks as they scrubbed the heavy-metal planet’s dust out of the atmosphere; breath masks to protect against that same dust on windy days like this were standard issue; and any natural body of water was far too contaminated for anyone to dream of swimming in. The majority of Graysons would have felt acutely uncomfortable in her place, but the years she’d spent off Grayson, first at Saganami Island and then serving on ships of the Royal Manticoran Navy, had changed Abigail Hearns in a lot of ways. One of those was her love—almost the addiction—of open spaces, fresh breeze, and sunlight untrammeled by anything remotely resembling an environmental suit.
She even liked walking in the rain…without an umbrella.
It was why she’d chosen to walk the six blocks to the restaurant, rather to the disgust of the tall, powerfully built Owens Steadholder’s Guard lieutenant walking just behind her. Mateo Gutierrez wasn’t a Grayson—by birth, at least—and while he had nothing against sunlight and fresh air—in moderation—he’d seen quite enough of both during his active-duty career as a Royal Manticoran Marine, thank you very much. And as the man charged with keeping Abigail Hearns alive at any cost, he was very much in two minds about his charge’s taste for trundling around in a wide-open threat environment.
It was unlikely anyone here in the city of Thimble had any designs upon her life, but she was Steadholder Owens’ oldest daughter. That made her an important political chip, whether for Grayson’s internal politics or its relationship with the Star Kingdom, and there was always a chance someone would seek to cash that chip in. It was Gutierrez’s job to be certain that didn’t happen, and he was a man who took his duty seriously. Not to mention the very personal reasons he’d had to keep Abigail Hearns alive ever since a bloody, brutal day on a planet called Refuge in a star system called Tiberian. Mateo Gutierrez wasn’t a man who found it easy to show emotions—or so he fondly believed—but he hadn’t left the Marines and transferred to the Owens Guard on a whim.
Now something remarkably like an exasperated sigh of relief escaped him as the holo-sign of their destination flashed ahead of them.
“Oh, cheer up, Mateo!” Abigail scolded with a smile. “We’re almost there, a little walk isn’t going to kill you, and we both needed the fresh air. You can grumble all you want, but you were as tired of those bulkheads as I was!”
“There’s a reason for all the taxis flitting around this city, My Lady.”
“Yes, there is. And don’t think I’m missing your evasion of my last point.”
“Evasion, My Lady?” Profound innocence was an expression which did not suit Lieutenant Gutierrez’s face.
“Evasion.” She punched him lightly and affectionately on the shoulder, but then her own expression sobered. “And it’s good to see all this, too.” She waved one hand to take in the crowded slide walks, the curbside cafés, the delivery air vans, air cars—and, yes, taxis—buzzing by overhead. “Good to see people just being people instead of cat’s-paws…or icons on a tactical display.”
Her gray-blue eyes had darkened, and Gutierrez stopped a grimace before it ever reached his face. He knew exactly what that darkness was, but he couldn’t exactly say that. So instead—
“Could see it just as well from a taxi’s window, My Lady,” he grumbled.
“You really are impossible, aren’t you?” Abigail demanded, and laughed as she punched his shoulder again. But gratitude for the distraction accompanied the fresh humor in her eyes. “Well, there’s the restaurant, so you can get me safely off the street in about, oh, another five minutes.”
* * *
Helen Zilwicki looked up as Lieutenant Hearns headed for their table, threading her way through the crowd behind the majordomo heels while Lieutenant Gutierrez followed at her heels, a ponderous cruiser keeping a watchful eye on the lively destroyer of his charge.
“Does he go everywhere with her?” Gwen Archer asked softly, and Helen chuckled.
“Pretty much, except the head,” she replied. “Oh, he’s got his own battle station aboard ship, but off the ship?” She shook her head. “At that, she’s damned lucky she’s a ‘mere daughter’! That’s the only way she got off with a single personal armsman. Someone like Duchess Harrington has a permanent three-man team everywhere she goes.”
“Damn.” It was Archer’s turn to shake his head. “It’s easy to forget she’s a steadholder’s daughter…until something like this comes along, anyway.”
“Abigail has a tendency to stand stereotypes on their ears,” Helen agreed, then stood and held out her hand in greeting.
“Abigail! I’m glad you could get shore leave.”
“It is nice, isn’t it?” Abigail shook her hand instead of giving her the hug she would have received in a less public venue. “It reminds me of Landing back on Manticore, in a lot of ways.” Helen arched an incredulous eyebrow, and Abigail laughed. “Not the architecture and not the people, but the ocean. You Manties are spoiled by having oceans people can actually swim in! It probably takes a Grayson to appreciate them properly.”
“You might want to discuss that with Duchess Harrington,” Helen pointed out dryly. “Assuming you can get her off her sailboat long enough, of course.”
“Point taken,” Abigail acknowledged. “Of course, I could also point out that she is a Grayson…now,” she added and turned to Archer as he stood. Under the strict letter of naval protocol, she really should have greeted him first, as Helen’s superior officer, but it was a social occasion, after all.
“Lieutenant Archer,” she said, shaking his hand.
“Lieutenant Hearns,” he replied. “Or should that properly be ‘Miss Owens’?”
“Only if you really like making enemies.” She smiled. “On certain official occasions I have to put up with that. This isn’t one of them.”
Behind her, Lieutenant Gutierrez’s eyes might have rolled ever so slightly, but Archer resolutely ignored that possibility.
“Good enough,” he said, and waved for her to be seated.
She settled into the waiting chair, and Helen and Archer resumed their own seats. Gutierrez remained standing, somewhat to the chagrin of the waitstaff who seemed, for some odd reason, to find the next best thing to two massively-built meters of uniformed, armed watchdog plunked down in the middle of their restaurant moderately unsettling. Abigail would have invited him to join them, if she hadn’t known how useless the invitation would be.
“So,” she said, after their orders had been taken, “what’s the latest buzz from high places, Helen? Or the latest buzz you can share, at least.”
“Well, I’m afraid the Commodore hasn’t shared any ultimate-cosmic-top-secret-shred-before-reading information with me. Has Lady Gold Peak shared any with you, Gwen?”
“Of course she has.” Archer did his best to
look down his snub nose at her. “And, equally of course, I am not in a position to share that privileged information with the plebeian junior officers clustered admiringly about me.”
Abigail snorted in amusement. She’d only met Archer a couple of times, and then only in passing, but she’d suspected he had a sense of humor.
“Where is Helga when I need her?” Helen sighed, shaking her head. Then she reached into a pocket of her tunic. “Fortunately, she left me a pin to deflate you when you get too full of yourself. Let me see now. Where did I put it?”
She felt around in her pocket, and Archer laughed.
“I give!” he said.
“Good,” Helen told him, then looked back at Abigail. “On a more serious front, I’m guessing the best news from your perspective is that we should see Admiral Oversteegen within the next ten days.”
“Oh, good!” Abigail smiled broadly, and even Gutierrez allowed himself a much smaller smile. Michael Oversteegen was as maddening a product of the Manticoran aristocracy as could be imagined, a perfect example of the drawling, lazy fop the Liberal Party loved to caricature. None of which mattered a bit to anyone who’d ever been privileged to serve under him, especially in places like Tiberian.
“I thought you’d like to know,” Helen said. “But the fact that he’s bringing another full squadron of Nikes and at least another squadron of Saganami-Cs with him is even better news from where I sit.”
“Absolutely,” Abigail agreed. “Especially after New Tuscany,” she added, her expression darkening once more.
Helen nodded with a matching edge of bleakness. At least, unlike Abigail, she hadn’t seen three-quarters of her destroyer division’s ships blown out of space by six times as many battlecruisers while they orbited peacefully—and helplessly—around the planet of New Tuscany. The hit Helen had taken from that massacre had been nowhere near as savage as the one Abigail and the rest of HMS Tristram’s crew had sustained, although something still tightened dangerously inside her whenever she thought of Amandine Corvisart’s death. She’d liked Corvisart, damn it!
At least the slaughter of Commodore Chatterjee’s people had been avenged by the destruction of SLNS Jean Bart and the arrogant, stupid, supercilious, incompetent, egotistical, stupid admiral who’d opened fire on them. Abigail felt a deep, intense satisfaction at that thought, and if anyone had cared to point out that it was uncharitable of her, she wouldn’t have given a single solitary damn. That didn’t mean she was oblivious to the potential consequences for the Star Empire’s steadily worsening relations with the Sollies, of course. Which was why the arrival of Michael Oversteegen’s big, powerful and very, very dangerous battlecruisers would be so welcome. She couldn’t think of anything in the Solly inventory—up to and including their best ship of the wall—that would really enjoying going toe-to-toe with a Nike.
Although, she added conscientiously, it would be far better all around if nothing of that sort ever happened, of course.
“Well, at least until the Sollies get around to restoring their computers, none of Byng’s battlecruisers are going anywhere,” Helen pointed out.
One of Michelle Henke’s last steps before departing New Tuscany had been to trigger the security function in the surrendered battlecruisers’ computer nets, using the access codes she’d demanded as the precondition to allowing Byng’s survivors to surrender rather than following him straight to hell. The software had obediently lobotomized the ships, reconfiguring those nets from computers into pristine blocks of undifferentiated molecular circuitry. Every trace of data had been irrevocably erased, and while the molycircs themselves were just fine, it would require a properly equipped repair team to rebuild the matrices that turned them back into computers once again, and even then, they’d have to be completely programmed—from scratch—before those ships went anywhere. Until then, they were as effectively out of action as if Tenth Fleet had blown every one of them out of space along with Jean Bart.
“That ought to buy us some breathing space, anyway,” Archer agreed with profound satisfaction. “Of course, after New Tuscany, any Solly with a functional brain would know better than to screw around with the RMN, anyway. Unfortunately, Sollies with functional brains seem to be just a little thin on the ground.” His smile was tart enough to pucker every lip within fifty meters. “But with half their available ships stuck in New Tuscany orbit for the next four or five months, even Sollies may not do anything else stupid in the meantime.”
“We can hope, at least,” Helen said. “I’m not going to hold my breath, though.”
* * *
“So how are things back in Swallow, First Sergeant?”
Vincent Frugoni’s blue eyes narrowed.
“I don’t use that anymore, Mr. Eldbrand,” he said. “Especially around here,” he added a bit pointedly.
“Here” was The Busted Stein, a bar on the less-good side of Anatevka, the largest city—such as it was—on the planet Tevye and capital of the Wonder System, and Damien Harahap allowed himself to roll his eyes.
“I applaud your caution,” he responded, after a moment, “and if it really bothers you, I won’t use it either. But I didn’t exactly pick this spot at random.” He tipped back in his chair and twitched his head in the direction of the somewhat villainous looking bartender. “He does enough illegal business with enough unsavory characters out of this bar that no informant who likes his kneecaps is going to report anything that happens in it. And I personally swept it for electronic eavesdroppers when I arrived.”
Frugoni considered that, then shrugged.
“Point taken.” Frugoni pulled out a chair on the other side of the small, unsteady table and sat. “And it’s probably paranoid of me to worry about it here.”
“No,” Harahap said after a moment. “No, it’s not paranoid at all, and I apologize.” Somewhat to his own surprise, he meant it, too. “Tradecraft is tradecraft, wherever you are, and breaking it is never a good idea. Sometimes the smartass in me forgets that. Sorry.”
Frugoni sat back, his expression faintly surprised, then chuckled.
“I’m glad to see I’m not the only smartass at the table.”
“Well, I think that’s probably an element in the character of most people who get involved in this sort of thing,” Harahap observed. “And, trust me, there are times it helps. As long as you remember—the way I sometimes forget to—to keep it under control. In my defense, I’m actually pretty good at doing that under normal field conditions.”
“As you say, we can probably dispense with at least some of our paranoia in a high class, upscale place like this,” Frugoni said dryly, and it was Harahap’s turn to chuckle. But then his expression sobered.
“Should I assume you found the opportunity to discuss my offer with your brother-in-law?” he asked quietly, leaning forward across the table.
“That’s why I’m here. If I hadn’t, and if he hadn’t wanted me to follow it up, I wouldn’t be,” Frugoni pointed out.
“That was intended as what’s known as a conversational gambit,” Harahap told him with a smile. “I did say I could be a smartass, didn’t I?”
“Yes. Yes, I believe you did. And—”
Frugoni paused and looked up in faint surprise as a waiter materialized at his elbow. Obviously he hadn’t expected anything of the sort in an establishment like The Busted Stein.
“Drink?” the waiter inquired succinctly.
“It’s sort of required if we’re using the table,” Harahap told the ex-Marine, indicating his own two-thirds full stein. “I’d stick with the beer, though. It’s not great, but I’m not sure about all the ingredients in the harder stuff.”
The waiter appeared unconcerned by Harahap’s aspersions upon his place of employment’s beverages. He only waited until Frugoni shrugged.
“Bring me one of those.” He nodded at Harahap’s stein, and the waiter grunted.
“Five credits,” he said, proffering his memo board.
“Five credits?” Frugoni repeated
, and the waiter shrugged. Frugoni glowered at him for a moment, then sighed. “All right. All right!”
He touched his uni-link to the waiter’s board, authorizing the charge, and the Anatevkan turned and ambled away.
“This place gets better and better,” Frugoni muttered, and Harahap laughed.
“Compared to some places I’ve done this kind of business, it’s a palace, believe me!”
“What a fascinating life you must live,” Frugoni said sourly. Then shrugged. “But, as I was saying, I’ve talked to the others. I’m not going to blow any smoke up your ass by pretending there aren’t some serious reservations. Mostly because however good you make the offer sound, even the boys up in the high hollows are smart enough to realize that if it comes to a choice between us and you, you’re going to pick you.”
Harahap started to speak, but the other man held up one hand.
“I’m not saying any of us think you ought to pick anybody else if your people find themselves up against it, Eldbrand. You shouldn’t. I’m just telling you everybody on our side recognizes that. Which means, among other things, that we’re not going to let you any further inside. Not because we aren’t grateful or anything, but there’s that old saying about two people keeping a secret.”
“‘Any two people can keep a secret…as long as one of them is dead,’” Harahap quoted, and Frugoni nodded.
“Exactly. Bearing that in mind, are you ready to buy a possum in a sack?”
Harahap frowned thoughtfully. The “possum” of Swallow bore very little physical resemblance to the original Old Terran species, although it filled much the same ecological niche. It was also considered one of the delicacies of mountain cuisine, and he recognized the allusion to the mountaineer who’d sold a sack full of possums to a credulous flatlander…who’d gotten home to find the sack full of venom frogs, instead.