Cauldron of Ghosts Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Cast of Characters

  TOIL AND TROUBLE IN THE CAULDRON OF GHOSTS

  The Mesan Alignment: a centuries-old cabal that seeks to impose its vision of a society dominated by genetic rank onto the human race. Now the conspiracy stands exposed by spies Anton Zilwicki and Victor Cachat—one an agent of Honor Harrington’s Star Kingdom of Manticore, the other a Havenite operative. The outing of the Alignment has turned the galaxy’s political framework topsy-turvy. Old coalitions have disintegrated. New alliances have been born.

  For starters, the long and hard-fought war between the Republic of Haven and the Star Empire of Manticore is not only over, but these bitter enemies have formed a new pact. Their common foe: the Mesan Alignment itself.

  But more information is needed to bring the Alignment out of the shadows. Now, defying the odds and relying on genetic wizardry themselves for a disguise, Zilwicki and Cachat return to Mesa—only to discover that even they have underestimated the Alignment’s ruthlessness and savagery.

  Soon they are on the run in Mesa’s underworld, not only hunted by the Alignment but threatened by the exploding conflict on the planet between Mesa’s overlords and the brutalized slaves and descendants of slaves who have suffered under their rule for so long. But if Zilwicki and Cachat succeed in rooting out the ancient conspiracy, a great evil may be finally removed from the galaxy—and on a long-oppressed planet, freedom may finally dawn.

  Sequel to national bestsellers Torch of Freedom and Crown of Slaves, Book Three in the Crown of Slaves, - Honor Harrington universe.

  IN THIS SERIES BY DAVID WEBER

  THE STAR KINGDOM:

  A Beautiful Friendship

  Fire Season (with Jane Lindskold)

  Treecat Wars (with Jane Lindskold)

  HONOR HARRINGTON:

  On Basilisk Station

  The Honor of the Queen

  The Short Victorious War

  Field of Dishonor

  Flag in Exile

  Honor Among Enemies

  In Enemy Hands

  Echoes of Honor

  Ashes of Victory

  War of Honor

  At All Costs

  Mission of Honor

  Crown of Slaves (with Eric Flint)

  Torch of Freedom (with Eric Flint)

  The Shadow of Saganami

  Storm from the Shadows

  A Rising Thunder

  Shadow of Freedom

  EDITED BY DAVID WEBER:

  More than Honor

  Worlds of Honor

  Changes of Worlds

  In the Service of the Sword

  In Fire Forged

  Beginnings

  ALSO BY ERIC FLINT & DAVID WEBER:

  1633

  1634: The Baltic War

  Cauldron of Ghosts

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Words of Weber, Inc. & Eric Flint.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4767-3633-4

  Cover art by David Mattingly

  First printing, April 2014

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Jim Baen, who gave writers chances.

  We miss you.

  May 1922 Post Diaspora

  “Lot of help that is too. Victor can turn almost anything into splinters.”

  —Yana Tretiakovna, Torch secret agent

  Chapter 1

  “So now what?” asked Yana Tretiakovna. She leaned back in her comfortable armchair, her arms crossed over her chest, and bestowed an impressive glower upon Anton Zilwicki and Victor Cachat. The first of whom was perched on a seat as he scrutinized a comp screen; the other of whom was slouched in an armchair and looking almost as disgruntled as Yana.

  “I don’t know,” said Cachat, almost muttering the words. “I’ve been trying to get an answer to that very question from”—his finger pointed to the ceiling—“unnamable but no doubt exalted figures on high.”

  Taken literally, the gesture might have led to the conclusion that the hard-bitten atheist Victor Cachat had suddenly become a believer, since there was nothing beyond the ceiling other than the heavens. The large suite the three people were sharing was on the top floor of a former luxury hotel in Haven’s capital that had been been sequestered for its own purposes decades earlier by the Legislaturalist secret police. After the revolution—the most recent one, that is—the new regime had tried but failed to find the rightful owners, since they’d all died or vanished. So, not knowing what else to do, they’d turned it into a combination safe house and luxury resort for guests of the government.

  Clearly, though, Cachat was oblivious to the irony involved. Still half-muttering with disgust, he went on. “So far, I might as well have been putting the question to a streetlight. Except a lamp post would at least shed some light.”

  Anton’s mouth quirked wryly. “I’m pretty sure the question you should be asking is ‘where,’ not ‘what.’ ” He pointed to something on the screen. “See that?”

  Ennui was shoved aside by interest, as Victor and Yana both rose from their chairs and came over to look at the screen.

  “And what the hell is that?” demanded Tretiakovna. “It looks like scrambled eggs on steroids.”

  “It’s an astrogational display showing traffic to and from the planet,” said Cachat. “And that exhausts my knowledg
e of the matter. I can’t really interpret it.”

  Yana stared at the screen again. The ex-Scrag looked rather alarmed.

  “Do you mean to tell me that this is how orbital controllers guide spacecraft to a supposedly—ha, ha, I’m dying of laughter here—safe orbit or landing? If so, I’m never flying again. Not even a kite.”

  “Relax, Yana,” said Anton. “They don’t use this sort of condensed display at all—leaving aside the fact that all orbital routes are selected and monitored by computers. No, I slapped this together just to see if my guess was right, which is that traffic is being shifted around to allow for some sudden and unscheduled departures.”

  He pointed to . . . this and that and the other, all of which looked like nothing much of anything to his two companions. “Think of these as boltholes, if you will.”

  Victor and Yana looked at each other, then down at Anton.

  “So who’s bolting?” asked Yana.

  Zilwicki heaved his massive shoulders. For someone built along normal human rather than dwarf lord lines, that would have been a shrug.

  “How should I know?” he said. “Victor will have to find out from his unnamable but no doubt exalted figures on high.”

  Yana said something in a Slavic-sounding language that was almost certainly unprintable. Victor, a bit of a prude when it came to coarse language, kept his response to: “Well, hell.” And a second or two later: “Hell’s bells.”

  * * *

  Luckily for the dispositions of Cachat and Tretiakovna, relief from uncertainty came a few minutes later, in the persons of Kevin Usher and Wilhelm Trajan. Usher was the head of the Federal Investigation Agency, Haven’s top domestic police force; Trajan, the head of the Republic’s foreign intelligence agency, the Foreign Intelligence Service.

  Yana let them into the room, in response to the buzzer. As soon as they entered, Cachat rose to his feet.

  “Kevin,” he said, in a neutral tone. Then, nodding to Trajan: “Boss.”

  “Not anymore,” said Wilhelm. He glanced around, spotted an empty chair, and slid into it. Once seated, he molded himself into the chair’s contours, as someone does who is finally able to relax after a long period of tension.

  “You’re being reassigned to the foreign office,” he elaborated. “No longer part of the FIS.”

  He did not seem dismayed at losing the services of the man whom knowledgeable people, including himself, thought to be Haven’s most brilliantly capable intelligence agent. When President Pritchart had notified him of her decision to transfer Cachat, Wilhelm’s reaction had been: You mean I can go back to running a spy outfit, instead of being a lion tamer?

  Usher took a seat some distance away from Trajan. “It’s one hell of a promotion, Victor. If you, ah, look at it in the right light.”

  Victor gave him a dark look. “Under very dim lighting, you mean.”

  Kevin’s expression, in response, was exasperated. “Oh, for God’s sake, Victor! No, I don’t mean using night goggles. I mean bright—really, really, really bright—floodlights. Your days of creeping around in the shadows are over. Over—with a bang and a boom. O-V-E-R.”

  Trajan’s tone was milder. “Be realistic, Victor. Your exploits in launching Torch almost blew your cover completely as it was. They left it pretty tattered. Now, after Mesa? You—and Anton, and Yana”—he nodded in their direction—“just brought back the biggest intelligence coup in galactic history for . . . oh, hell, who knows how many centuries? Do you really think there’s any chance you can stay in your old line of work? Even using nanotech facial and body transformations won’t help you, since they don’t disguise DNA. Sure, that’d probably be enough for a modest, barely known sort of spy. But you? Anybody who thinks you might be coming their way will have DNA swabs taken of anybody who might remotely be you.”

  “StateSec destroyed all my DNA records except theirs the day I graduated from the Academy,” said Victor. “Those are still closely guarded and I’ve been very careful not to scatter my DNA traces about.” His tone of voice was perhaps a bit peevish.

  “True enough,” said Anton. “You won’t find Special Officer Cachat carelessly discarding a cup after he’s taken a drink from it, I will grant you that. But come on, Victor—you know the realities perfectly well. As long as you were obscure and nobody was looking for your DNA, those precautions were probably good enough. But today?”

  “Exactly,” said Trajan. He nodded toward the window overlooking Nouveau Paris. “Word’s already leaked out to the press. Within a couple of days—a week, at the outside—your name and likeness will be known to every person on Haven above the age of five and with any interest at all in the news. As well as—more to the point—every intelligence service in the galaxy, each and every one of which will be trying to get their hands on your DNA traces. Sooner or later, at least some of them are bound to succeed. So give it up. And don’t bother arguing with me or Kevin about it, either. President Pritchart made the decision. If you want it overturned, you’ll have to figure out a way to get her out of office.”

  Usher wiped his face with a large hand. “Wilhelm, he gets enough ideas on his own without you making suggestions.”

  Trajan looked startled. “What? I wasn’t—” Then he looked alarmed. “Officer Cachat . . .”

  “I wasn’t planning to organize a coup d’état,” Victor said sarcastically. “I am a patriot, you know. Besides, I don’t blame the President for the decision.”

  The dark look came back. “Clearly, she was misled by evil advisers.”

  Anton started laughing softly. “Ganny warned you, Victor. It’ll be your turn now for the video treatment! I’d have some sympathy except I don’t recall you ever showing any for me because my cover got blown.”

  Zilwicki looked over at Tretiakovna. “What’s your guess, Yana? Ganny thought the news services would go for either ‘Cachat, Slaver’s Bane’ or ‘Black Victor.’ ”

  “ ‘Black Victor,’ ” she replied instantly. “Give Cachat his due, he isn’t prone to histrionics. ‘Slaver’s Bane’ is just too . . . too . . . not Victor. Besides, look at him.”

  Cachat’s expression was now very dark indeed.

  “ ‘Black Victor,’ it is,” announced Zilwicki. “Victor, you need to buy some new clothes. All leather, neck to ankles. Black leather, it goes without saying.”

  For a moment, it looked as if Cachat might explode. At the very least, spout some heavy-duty profanity. But . . .

  He didn’t. Anton wasn’t surprised. Victor’s deeds were so flamboyant that it was easy to forget that the man behind them was not flamboyant at all. In fact, he was rather modest—and extraordinarily self-disciplined.

  So, all that finally came out, in a very even and flat tone of voice, was: “Where am I being assigned, then? I’ll warn you, if it’s someplace that has an active cocktail circuit, I won’t be any good at it. I don’t drink much. Ever.”

  “S’true,” said Yana. “He’s boring, boring, boring. Well, except when he’s overturning regimes and stuff like that.” She actually giggled, something Anton had never heard her do before. “Cocktail circuit! Diplomatic small talk! I can see it already!”

  Victor now looked long-suffering. For his part, Usher looked exasperated again.

  “We are not morons,” he said. “Victor, you—and you and you”—his forefinger swiveled like a turret gun, coming to bear on Anton and Yana—“are all going to Manticore. Tomorrow, so get packed.”

  Anton had been planning to get to Manticore anyway, and as soon as possible. He hadn’t seen his lover Cathy Montaigne in more than a year. He hadn’t yet come up with a way to do so that the many and manifold powers-that-be were likely to approve, though, and now it had been unexpectedly dropped in his lap.

  He saw Victor glance at him and smile. There was real warmth in that smile, too, something you didn’t often get from the man. Not for the first time, Anton was struck by the unlikely friendship that had grown up between him and the Havenite agent. Unlikely—yet all the
stronger, perhaps, because of that very fact.

  There were people in the world whom Anton liked more than he did Victor. But there were very, very few whom he trusted as much.

  “And in what capacity am I going?” he asked Usher. “Somehow, even with all this new-found cordiality, I doubt that I’ve been assigned to Haven’s foreign service.”

  Usher gave him a grin. “By all accounts—I was on Old Earth, remember, when the Manpower Incident went down—no star system in its right mind would assign you to its diplomatic corps.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  It was hardly something Anton would forget. Nothing official had ever been said, and to this day Victor refused to cross any t’s and dot any i’s. Nonetheless, Anton was quite certain that Kevin Usher had engineered the entire episode. He’d stayed in the background, letting Cachat and the Audubon Ballroom do the rough work, but his had been the guiding hand.

  Zilwicki’s daughter Helen—no, all three of his children, since he’d adopted Berry and Lars afterward—were still alive because of Victor and Kevin. It was a reminder, if he needed one, that just because he didn’t share someone’s ideology didn’t mean they didn’t take it seriously themselves. Haven’s political ideals were not Anton’s—well, some of them were—but it had been those ideals that had shielded his family.

  Suddenly, he was in a very good mood. No one in Manticore might yet know it, but the information he and Victor had brought back from Mesa was going to have an enormous impact. If things worked out the way he strongly suspected Eloise Pritchart had in mind, it would not only have ended the galaxy’s longest and most savagely fought war but actually turned two bitter enemies into allies. Uneasy and hesitant allies, perhaps, but allies nonetheless. That information had also turned a friendship right side up. All the wariness and reservations he’d had to maintain about Victor Cachat were now draining away. Rapidly, too.