"Hali Sowle, you are cleared to leave orbit." E.D. Trimm checked the screen again, more out of habit that anything else, just as a final precaution against the very remote possibility that an unauthorized flight—or possibly even a bolide, as statistical unlikely as that was—might have blundered into the freighter's projected course.
"Hali Sowle, signing off."
Just routine. By now, two weeks later, Trimm had only a vague memory of having done an additional check on the Hali Sowle. That was in the records, of course. But she was no more likely to check old records for no reason—the volume of traffic in and out of Mesa was truly enormous—than she would be to start going to work with a hop, skip and a jump rather than taking the perfectly functional tube.
Besides, this shift she'd had the good luck to be partnered with Steve Lund, and they'd been in the middle of a friendly argument about the latest fads in women's apparel when the call from the Hali Sowle had come in. As soon as the freighter starting moving, E.D. went back to the debate.
There were times she regretted Steve's sexual orientation. In some ways, he'd have made a better husband for her than the one she had. But it wasn't a perfect universe, after all.
* * *
"Well, I'd say that went perfectly." Friede Butry sagged back in her seat a little. She'd been more tense than she'd needed to be, a phenomenon she ascribed to her advancing years. In her youth, she'd have thought nothing of taking risks far greater than this one had been.
"À bientôt, Anton and Victor. Good luck."
"What does that mean, Ganny? A ban-ban—" Brice Miller struggled with the unknown word. He was perched on one of the other seats on the freighter's command deck. Like everything else on the Hali Sowle, the seat—like Ganny's own—exhibited those characteristics which were euphemistically referred to as having seen better days.
"Ah byan-toe. It's French. It means 'see you later.' Well, more or less. Like most words in other languages, it doesn't translate perfectly neatly. Some people might translate it 'see you soon.' "
"How soon will we see them? And where did you learn to speak French?"
"Answering the questions in order, I have no idea when we'll see them again. Maybe never. But if you're asking what you should have been asking, we'll probably be back here in the Mesa system within ten days. Two weeks, at the outside, but I'd bet on the ten days. The variable is whether or not the Imbesi arrangements work as planned, and those people strike me as well organized. As for where I learned French . . ."
She pursed her lips, studying the astrogation screen. Looking at the screen, rather. Her mind was elsewhere.
"It's a long story, youngster."
"We got time. Tell me."
* * *
"You've got cruddy tastes in clothes. Of course, I guess that's to be expected, growing up in Nouveau Paris."
"You should talk. Do you ever wear anything other than Scrag chic? Which seems to run entirely to leather."
"I look good in leather. Hey, that's an idea. Maybe we should try it."
"Don't be vulgar."
"I'm not vulgar, I'm bored. You are really lousy in bed."
"Of course I'm lousy in bed. I don't do anything. And that's hitting below the belt."
"Big deal. Far as I'd know, there's nothing down there anyway."
Anton heard a slight choking sound. At a guess, he thought Victor was trying to suppress a laugh. Fortunately, the momentary lapse was small enough that the scrambling equipment would disguise the slight break from what was supposed to be the body language of a couple having a quiet but rather fierce argument.
The equipment they had wasn't really top of the line. For that, they'd have needed Manticoran gear which could potentially cause trouble. But the stuff they'd obtained on the black market in Neue Rostock—Victor's contact Thiêu Chuanli was a veritable cornucopia of handy items—was plenty good enough for their purposes. The equipment not only protected against sound detection efforts, which any well-designed scrambling equipment would do, but it also produced just enough in the way of visual distortion to make lip-reading impossible and even interpreting body language all but impossible for any but a trained expert—and then, only if the people being interpreted were incapable of acting at all.
Victor Cachat, on the other hand, was a pretty decent actor. As you'd expect from a secret agent. And Yana had a natural flair for it.
They wouldn't have to keep it up for much longer, anyway. Anton was almost done. He kept his head down, concentrating on the personal com device in his hands. To any observer, the little not-so-dramatic scenario in the underground passageway would appear to consist of a couple having a quarrel, which their friend and companion was politely ignoring by taking care of some personal business while he waited for them to be done.
Unlike the scrambling equipment, the com device was top-of-the-line, cutting edge equipment. More precisely, it was bleeding edge equipment, specially designed for Anton by one of Manticore's top electronics firms, for a cost that was normally associated with the price of air cars, not personal handheld communication equipment.
Anton could afford it. Or, rather, Catherine Montaigne could afford it. Anton was stubborn about not relying on Cathy for his personal financial needs, but he didn't hesitate to tap into her enormous fortune when it came to his professional work.
"—you manage that, anyway?"
"Not my fault that you—"
Anton keyed in the final instructions. "We're just about done with the sandbox, kiddies," he murmured, loud enough for Victor and Yana to hear him.
That done, he slid the com into his pocket. He made no attempt to disguise the motion, or the device itself. He was just a man finishing some routine work. To anyone who examined it, the com unit would seem to be a perfectly normal if somewhat expensive item produced in the Solarian League. Only if someone really attempted to break into the device would they be able to discover otherwise—and, by then, the com unit's self-destruct mechanism would have been triggered and there'd be nothing to examine but a small pile of smoldering slag.
By the time he'd put away the com unit, Victor and Yana were embracing each other. Nothing passionate, just the sort of embrace with which a pair of lovers resolve a quarrel. Or, at any rate, end it for the moment.
"Okay," he said, almost as softly. "One more to go."
They walked off, the three of them side by side. There was plenty of room, since the underground passageway was more in the nature of a large open space. The area was primarily used for the storage of private vehicles.
"I'm sick of arguing with him," muttered Yana. "It's like trying to pick a fight with a rutabaga."
"Save it for the next stop, Yana," cautioned Anton.
"What's a rutabaga?" asked Victor.
* * *
That night, in Anton's room—not the one he still maintained in the back of Turner's restaurant, but another one he'd obtained without using Saburo's contacts—he and Victor and Yana held another of the meetings they tried to hold at least every three days.
"It still seems like sorcery to me," Victor complained. "And spare me that tired old cliché about a sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. This is not all that advanced, damnation."
"Yes and no," said Anton. "The technology itself isn't especially advanced, true enough. State of the art is about the best you can say for it. But the specific programs that we developed are . . . I don't know if 'advanced' is the word I'd use. It's more like 'esoteric.' There just aren't very many people who work on this level of security programming, Victor. Sure, there are plenty of people who could have figured out how to bypass the security systems and implant false records, but so far as I know there are only two people in the whole galaxy who'd know how to prevent anyone from being able to detect that it was done afterward, even with a thorough investigation. One of them is named Anton Zilwicki and the other is Ruth Winton."
"Modest, isn't he?" said Yana. "At least he gave the woman some credit too."
Anton smiled. "In some ways, she's better at this that I am. The truth is, Ruth's reached the point where she's operating on a plane I don't even usually reach. I'm mostly acting as what you might call her crosscheck and rudder, these days. She's still prone to being over-confident."
Victor ran fingers through his hair. "And you're sure it'll work?"
"Yes. When we run—assuming we do, but we'd be fools not to count on it—we'll have left a completely false trail. Assuming you can get Carl Hansen and his people to take care of their end of the deal, so far as anyone on Mesa will ever be able to figure out, you and I and Yana exist only as scattered molecules."
Victor grunted. "The technical side of it's not a problem. That bomb will vaporize anything within two hundred meters. Whatever DNA traces they'd expect from a normal explosion will simply be too scattered to be usable, even with Mesan or Beowulfan techniques and equipment. The real problem is . . ."
He shook his head. "Let's just say that the people Saburo put us in contact with aren't as tightly wrapped as I'd like. They're not crazy, as such, but . . ."
"Fanatics," said Anton. "I do hope you notice that I didn't add any wisecrack such as 'and coming from Victor Cachat, that's saying something.' "
"Very funny. The problem is that tepid, wishy-washy people like you, whose commitment to anything beyond immediate personal matters is like mashed potatoes, just don't grasp all the fine distinctions between 'fanaticism' and 'fervor' and 'zeal.' "
Victor took a deep, slow breath. Not to control any anger—by now, the banter between him and Anton produced nothing more intense than occasional irritation—but to give himself time to try to figure out how to explain his concern.
"You just . . . don't really know, Anton. That's not a criticism, it's just an observation. From the time you were a kid, you lived in a world with wide horizons."
Zilwicki snorted. "Not usually the way the highlands of Gryphon are described!"
"Try growing up in a Dolist slum in Nouveau Paris. Trust me, Anton. The difference is huge. I'm not talking in terms of any scale of misery, mind you. I'm simply talking in terms of how narrow a view of the universe you're provided with. When I entered StateSec Academy, for all practical purposes I had no real knowledge of the universe beyond what I'd grown up with. Which wasn't much, believe me. That's . . ."
He paused for a moment. "I know a lot of people think I'm inclined toward zealotry. I suppose that's fair enough. What has changed, as the years have passed, is that my understanding of the universe has become . . . well, very large. So while I still retain the fundamental beliefs I had as a teenager, I can now put those beliefs in a much better context. I can, for instance, spend hours discussing politics with Web Du Havel—as I have, any number of times—listening to his basically conservative views without automatically dismissing those views as the self-serving prattle of an elitist."
Anton smiled. "Web just doesn't fit that pigeonhole, does he?"
"No, he doesn't. And while I still disagree with Web—for the most part, though by no means always—I do understand why he thinks the way he does. To put it another way, my view of things hasn't changed all that much, but it's no longer monochromatic. Does that make sense?"
Anton nodded. "Yes, it does."
"All right. If my view of the world was monochromatic, growing up in a Nouveau Paris slum under the Legislaturist regime, try to imagine just how little there is in the way of subtle shadings for a young man or woman who grew up here, as a seccy under the thumb of the Mesan regime."
Anton couldn't help but wince.
"Yeah," said Victor. "That's the problem, Anton. It's not that these kids are too fanatical. Frankly, I don't blame them one damn bit for their zeal and fervor. The problem is that they see everything in black and white. Forget the colors of the spectrum. They don't even recognize the color gray, much less any of its various shades."
A frown had been gathering on Yana's forehead, as she listened. "I don't get it, Victor. Why do you care in the first place? It's not as if you have any doubts any longer about their loyalties or dedication. Unless you've changed your mind over the last two days."
He shook his head. "It's not that I don't trust them. It's that I don't entirely trust their judgment. Let's not forget how close they've come already to compromising our mission. To put it mildly."
Anton leaned back in his chair at the kitchen table, and considered Victor's words. He understood what was concerning the Havenite agent. The small group of young seccies with whom they'd established a relationship, using the liaisons provided by Saburo's contacts, had been very helpful. They provided Anton and Victor with natives who knew the area extremely well, especially Neue Rostock. And they could also provide Anton and Victor with the assistance they might need in the future, depending on the way things developed.
Furthermore, while they were young, and suffered from the haphazard education that all seccies received, they were very far from dull-witted or incapable. To Anton and Victor's surprise, for instance, when the group had been asked to provide them with a powerful explosive device, they'd proudly presented them a few days later with a low-yield nuclear device. Nothing jury-rigged either. The device was a standard construction type used in terraforming, designed and built by a well-known Solarian company. The best Anton and Victor had expected had been something chemical and homemade.
He chuckled. "That was quite a scene, wasn't it? Funny—well, sort of—now that it's over."
* * *
"Impressive," said Anton, gazing down on the nuclear demolition device. He was doing his best not to let his surprise show.
Enough of it must have shown, though, to cause the chests of the young firebrands gathered in the basement of a modest seccy home to swell with pride. Their informal leader Carl Hansen said: "A cousin of—well, never mind the details—told us he could get his hands on one of them."
Anton nodded. He didn't want to know the details, anyway. "How'd you disable the locator beacon?"
Hansen's face went blank. He and the other youngsters in the room—David Pritchard, Cary Condor and Karen Steve Williams—exchanged glances.
"What's a locator beacon?" asked Williams.
Victor leaned away from the device—fat lot of good that would do!—and whistled soundlessly. He looked even paler than usual. Anton was pretty sure his own face looked about the same.
Moving carefully—fat lot of good that would do!—he pulled the com out of his pocket. A quick scanning search of the nuclear device yielded the port he needed.
For something like this, Anton wanted a physical connection. So he pulled out the rarely-used cable attachment and plugged it into the port.
"What are you doing?" asked Cory.
"He's going to disable—try to disable—the locator beacon," Cachat said tonelessly. "Hopefully, before anyone in charge finds out the device isn't where it's supposed to be."
A bit of irritation crept into his tone: "Did you honestly think Mesans—hell, anybody—let nuclear explosive devices roam around loose?"
"Please be quiet, everyone," said Anton. "This is . . . really quite tricky."
He heard Victor suck in a little air. Coming from him, that was the equivalent of someone else shrieking My God—doom is almost certain! Cachat knew what a genuine expert Zilwicki was when it came to these things. If he admitted it was . . . really quite tricky . . .
Complete silence proved to be too much for the youngsters. "You mean . . . they can figure out where the thing is?" whispered Pritchard.
"To within three meters, as a rule," said Victor. He was back to speaking tonelessly. "At which point they have several options, although they'll probably settle for one of the first two."
Pritchard's eyes—quite wide they were, at the moment—stared at him appealingly, and Victor shrugged.
"First, they can send out the elite commando unit to retrieve it, with lots of very big, very nasty, and very efficient guns. Plenty to"—he gave the basement a quick scan—"well, to give all the walls down here a nice even coating of new paint. The color known colloquially as BGB. Blood, guts and brains." He smiled ever so slightly at his extremely attentive young audience. It was not a pleasant expression. "Or, second, they can detonate the device. True, that second option's usually a bit extreme, but they might not really care a lot about that. Especially if they figure out who's got the damned thing."
"What part of 'this is really quite tricky' did I not make clear?" Anton said crossly.
Finally, blessedly, silence fell. And, perhaps three minutes later, Anton succeeded in disabling the beacon. In a perfect world, he'd have reprogrammed the beacon to simulate a legitimate location. But there were simply too many unknown factors to risk doing that, here. They'd just have to hope that no one had spotted the device "wandering" over the past period. If they hadn't, they wouldn't spot the missing device now until a complete physical inventory was made. Fortunately, that didn't usually happen more than once a year, even with devices as potentially dangerous as these. Modern locator beacons were so accurate, reliable and tamper-resistant that people usually just relied on a periodic check of the beacons themselves.
And, also, fortunately, most people tended to equate "tamper-resistant" with "tamper-proof." Being fair, there really weren't very many people in the galaxy who could have done what Anton had just done.
* * *
On the positive side, the incident had solidified Anton and Victor's credentials with their local contacts faster and more surely than probably anything else would have done. But the same capability the youngsters had shown, when coupled to their ignorance of so many things and the narrow viewpoint Victor was describing . . .
Anton made a face. "You're worried they'll go off half-cocked."
Victor shrugged. "Not exactly. They're not fools, far from it. I'm mostly worried that, first, they'll slip on security. To really do counterespionage properly you need to be patient and methodical more than anything else. That's . . . not their strength. So I think they're more open to being penetrated than they think they are. Second, I'm worried that if things do start to come apart, they're more likely to react by helping the process than trying to dodge it, if you know what I mean. Especially some of them—like David Pritchard. Who was just assigned the task of handling the device, if we need it."
Anton grimaced again. He hadn't attended the last meeting of the group. ("The group" was the only name they had. In that, at least, showing more of a sense for security than they did in other ways.) The decision to put Pritchard in charge of the device must have been made there.
There wasn't anything wrong with David Pritchard, exactly. But Victor and Anton both sensed that the youngster had a level of quiet yet corrosive fury that might lead him off a cliff, in the right circumstances.
But . . .
There really wasn't anything they could do about it. It wasn't as if he and Victor had any real control of the group. Even its nominal leader, Carl Hansen, was no more than a first among equals.
"We'll just have to live with it. To be honest, Victor, I'm more worried at the moment about your situation with Inez Cloutier. Realistically, how much longer can you stall her?" He squinted a little. "You have, I trust, given up any idea of accepting employment?"
Victor sighed. "Yes, yes, yes. The voice of caution has prevailed. Although I hate to think what I'll be passing up."
For a moment, his expression had a trace of wistful sorrow. The sort of expression with which a normal and reasonable young man half-regrets his decision not to pursue a possible romantic involvement. On Victor Cachat's face, the expression signified his regret at not undertaking the harrowing risk of accepting employment with a rogue ex-StateSec military force, being dispatched to places unknown and with no way to get free that either he or Anton could figure out.
"You'd have to be crazy to even think about it," said Yana. "And keep in mind that assessment is coming from a former Scrag."
Victor smiled, then ran fingers through his hair again. "We've got a bit of luck, there. Cloutier got called off-planet yesterday. At a guess, she's got to go consult with whoever is running this operation. I'm almost certain now that that's Adrian Luff, by the way."
Anton nodded. He and Victor had tentatively come to that conclusion a few days earlier, based on what Victor had been able to find out in the course of his negotiations with Cloutier.
Adrian Luff . . .
That was mostly bad news, according to Victor. Zilwicki really had no opinion of his own. He'd recognized the name from his days working for Manticoran naval intelligence, but that was about it.
Cachat knew more about him, as you'd expect, although he'd never actually met the man. According to Victor, Luff wasn't an especially brutal or harsh man, certainly not by StateSec standards. He'd scarcely been what a professional Manticoran or Havenite naval officer would have thought of as a fleet commander, but at least he'd had a far better idea than most of his SS fellows about which end of the tube the missile came out of. And while no StateSec officer assigned to ride herd on the People's Navy was likely to be a total novice where brutality and discipline was concerned, Luff had understood that breaking a man's spirit wasn't the best way to produce a warrior when you needed one.
That might speak well of the man, but Anton would have been a lot happier if this rogue StateSec military force—which was a very powerful one; he and Victor had been able to learn that much for sure and certain—had as its commander someone like Emile Tresca. Tresca, at one time the commandant of StateSec's prison planet, had been notorious for his viciousness and sadism. On the other hand, nobody in their right mind would have put him in charge of a frigate, much less an entire fleet.
"When will she be back?"
Victor shrugged. "No way to know for sure, but I get the distinct feeling it won't be very soon. If I'm right and she was summoned to meet with Luff, this is just one more little indication that wherever Luff's assembling that fleet of his, it's not that close to Mesa."
"But probably quite close to Torch," Anton said grimly. "Victor . . . I have to raise this again. I think we need to consider whether we should leave now, and bring the news of this threat back to Torch. You know and I know that Luff's planning to ignore the Eridani Edict."
"That's not actually certain yet," Victor said mildly. "I get the sense that Luff's resistant to the idea. But . . . yes, it's clear enough from the sort of questions Cloutier asked me. Part of the reason they're being so cautious about hiring people for any sort of high-level positions, it seems pretty obvious, is because Luff and his people think there's a good chance they'll be galactic pariahs before too long."
He got up and began walking about, just to stretch a little. The kitchen in the apartment was too small for him to be able to walk more than three paces. Still, they'd been sitting for hours. Anton was tempted to get up himself and join him—except there wouldn't be room. The kitchen was excessively narrow as well as small.
"I've thought about it, Anton. But I still think it'd be a mistake—and, yes, I know I'll be cursing myself for the rest of my life if we get back and find that Torch is a cinder because everyone was caught by surprise. But, first, I don't think they will be. There's simply no way for an operation of this size to be mounted without tripping some alarm wires somewhere. You have just as high an opinion of Rozsak's chief of intelligence as I do. I don't think there's much chance that Jiri Watanapongse hasn't figured out what's happening yet. Neither do you."
He paused in his pacing. "And that's really all that's involved, isn't it? Just bringing a warning? It's not as if either you or I would be any help on Torch, even if we got back in time to meet the attack. That'll be a naval brawl, pure and simple. And if neither Maya nor Erewhon comes to Torch's aid"—here, his expression got very bleak—"then about all that'll be left to do is wreak whatever vengeance we can."
He started pacing again. "On the other hand, if we stay here, we have a real chance of making a lot of progress on any number of fronts. Just for starters . . ."
Anton glanced at the clock on the wall. They'd been at it for almost three hours, and it was now clear they wouldn't be ending any time soon.
"Sit down, Victor," he said. "Give someone else a chance to stretch a little."
"Yeah," said Yana. "Me first."