In Fire Forged Read online

  “Not precisely,” Charles said, wishing the other would stop bringing that up. His role in that debacle had almost certainly earned him a death-by-torture sentence, which was why he’d waited all this time before venturing back into Peep space in the first place.

  On the other hand, the existence of that death sentence was probably precisely why Saint-Just kept bringing it up. Bargaining, after all, was a game for two. “What you were trying back then was to irritate the Manties by using a captured Andermani ship to harass their shipping,” he continued. “What I’m proposing would leave the Manties completely out of the loop by persuading the Andermani to declare war on them.”

  “Really,” Saint-Just said. His voice was still flat, but Charles could see the first glimmerings of real interest behind those hardened eyes. “The Emperor seems very much disposed toward Manticore.”

  “I think I can change his mind,” Charles said. “Are you interested?”

  Saint-Just studied him a moment. Then, giving Charles a slight smile, he settled back into his chair. “Tell me more,” he invited.

  Charles had gone over the plan twice, and was trying to figure out a third way to come at it, when Saint-Just abruptly lifted his hand. “Enough,” he said briskly. “Colonel?”

  Charles frowned; but before he could say anything he felt the tingle of a hypospray in the back of his neck. He twisted his head around, his vision suddenly going blurry.

  He got just a glimpse of the stern-faced interrogator before the darkness took him.

  * * *

  He came to in a hospital bed. The interrogator was sitting at his side, contemplating him as someone might gaze at a particularly repulsive insect just before bringing a large rock down on top of it.

  Only instead of the gray civilian suit he’d been wearing in the interrogation cell, he was now resplendent in a full State Security colonel’s uniform. Above the pocket a small name plate read Mercier.

  “Congratulations on your promotion,” Charles managed through a desert-dry throat.

  “Let me make two things clear,” Mercier said, ignoring Charles’s attempt at pleasantries. “You’re alive for one reason and one reason only: Citizen Secretary Saint-Just thinks you can be of use to us. The assessment as to whether or not you’re living up to that potential is mine alone.” His eyes flashed. “And just for the record, I was a friend of Captain Vaccares. You do remember Captain Vaccares, I trust?”

  Charles’s dry throat went a little drier. Vaccares had been the captain of one of the ill-fated Peep ships from the whole Crippler scam. “I remember him very well,” he said. “For what it’s worth, I never intended for any of the men and women involved to die.”

  “You would certainly recognize the paving material of the road you’re traveling,” Mercier said acidly. He waved a hand around him. “Would you like to take a guess as to why you’re here?”

  Charles looked at the IV stands and gleaming medical monitors. “I’m sure you’re dying to tell me.”

  “Interesting choice of words,” the other said. “You’ve just been implanted with a slow poison drip. Very nasty stuff. So nasty that if you don’t get a milliliter of a special antidote every twelve hours, you’ll die.” He reached into his tunic pocket and pulled out a flat metal flask. “This antidote, to be specific.”

  “Which you’ll no doubt be in charge of doling out?”

  “Exactly,” Mercier said. “If you try to tug on your leash—in fact, if I even suspect you’re tugging on your leash—I’ll dump the whole batch down the sink and sit back to watch you die.”

  “Understood,” Charles said. Strangely enough, his throat was feeling less dry than it had a minute ago, despite Mercier’s threat. “But you won’t have to worry about that. I have a hundred million reasons to make sure this goes exactly as planned.”

  Mercier’s lip twist twisted. “Yes; the hundred million Solarian credits you cajoled out of Citizen Secretary Saint-Just.”

  “You disapprove?”

  “Citizen Secretary Saint-Just’s agreements are his own affair,” Mercier said stiffly. “Me, I would have thought letting you leave with your life would be more than enough payment. Especially after all you’ve already cost the People’s Republic.”

  “This will more than make up for it,” Charles promised. “Trust me.”

  Mercier smiled coldly. “Of course. One last thing.”

  He stepped to the side of the bed, his smile vanishing, his eyes dark and cruel as he gazed down into Charles’s face. “This is the last time you’ll see me in this uniform,” he said. “From now on, I’ll be traveling in civilian clothing, and you’ll refer to me as Citizen Mercier. But.” He tapped his colonel’s insignia. “These will always be here, even if you can’t see them. Aboard the Ellipsis I will have full authority, over you and over the mission.”

  “Understood,” Charles said calmly. “Incidentally, we’ll need to stop by a storage locker on the south side of town before we head out to wherever you have the Ellipsis stashed. There’s some specialized equipment I’ll need to pick up if we’re going to make this work.”

  For a moment Mercier just gazed down at him. “Not a problem,” he said at last, stepping back with obvious reluctance. “Your clothes are in the cabinet over there. Get dressed.”

  * * *

  Charles had never been inside a Mantie Star Knight-class heavy cruiser before. Nor had he ever gotten up close beside one. But he’d seen plenty of pictures and HDs, both interior and exterior shots.

  So, apparently, had Saint-Just’s people. The Ellipsis, as near as Charles could tell, was perfect.

  “I’m impressed,” he commented to Mercier as the ship’s commander led the way onto the command deck. “My congratulations, Citizen Captain Tyler. If I didn’t know better, I would swear I was on a Manty ship.”

  “You’ve been on many Manty ships, have you?” Tyler asked, looking suspiciously at Charles from beneath painfully thin eyebrows.

  “None at all, actually,” Charles assured him, making a mental note not to make any more comments like that. Captain Tyler was a True Believer, a zealot of the most fanatical kind.

  But then, every crew member he’d met so far aboard the Ellipsis had had that same hard gleam in his or her eye.

  In retrospect, it was hardly surprising. Saint-Just would hardly have chosen anyone but True Believers for what was essentially a suicide mission.

  “Citizen Navarre’s past activities are none of your concern,” Mercier spoke up, his own tone managing to echo Tyler’s own fervor while at the same time warning the captain to drop the subject. “You’ve prepared our quarters as specified?”

  “You’ve been given adjoining officers’ berths near the command deck,” Tyler said. He gave Charles one last lingering look, a look that said he would obey orders, but that he was senior enough to obey them in his own way and on his own schedule.

  So much of Peep communication these days, Charles mused, seemed to be on the nonverbal level. Harder for someone to prove insubordination or treason that way, he suspected.

  “Good,” Mercier said. “Once we’ve confirmed that all our equipment has been properly brought aboard and stowed, you’ll take us out of dock and head immediately for the Karavani system.”

  “Everything you brought aboard the pinnace has been stowed,” Tyler said, his tone implying that if his guests ended up missing something they would have no one to blame for the oversight except themselves. “Will there be anything else?” he added, gesturing to a yeoman.

  “As soon as we’re underway I’ll need to begin my work,” Charles said. “I’ll need full access to the equipment crawlspaces—One-D and Four-A to start with. I’ll also need—”

  “You’ll what?” Tyler demanded.

  “—full downloads of all recent news transmissions coming from the Star Kingdom,” Charles continued, ignoring the interruption. “Your uniforms and interior décor look fine, but we’ll want to confirm every detail is up to current Manty—”

  �
�Absolutely not,” Tyler snapped. “You’re going to stay as far away from my equipment as I can keep you. What kind of fool—?”

  “Captain.” Mercier’s voice was quiet, but it cut off Tyler’s budding tirade as quickly as if the colonel had slapped a skinsuit patch over his mouth. “What Citizen Navarre is requesting is vital to the success of this mission. You will permit it.”

  Tyler drew himself up to his full height. “This is my ship, Citizen Mercier,” he said, his voice as quiet and deadly as Mercier’s. “My authority aboard it is absolute. If I say the answer is no, then the answer is no.”

  Mercier cocked his head to the side. “In that case, Citizen Captain, I would have no choice but to bring the matter to the attention of Citizen Secretary Saint-Just.”

  Some of the blood drained out of Tyler’s face. “Citizen Secretary Saint-Just?” he asked carefully.

  “It was he who personally authorized this mission,” Mercier said. His tone was flat, without a single hint of the gloating Charles might have heard from a lesser man. Like Tyler himself, Mercier was a True Believer, with no room in his soul for anything as petty as personal power issues. “I assumed you knew that.”

  Tyler’s eyes flicked to Charles as if seeing this foreign civilian for the first time. “No, I…no,” he finished lamely.

  He was probably telling the truth, Charles knew. No one aboard the Ellipsis would have been told of Saint-Just’s personal involvement with the plan, not even the captain’s personal watchdog, People’s Commissioner Ragli. No matter how suicidal the mission might be, there was always the chance that someone might survive long enough to be questioned, and Saint-Just would have made sure that no such avenue could ever lead back to him.

  It was the way of all tyrannies, Charles knew from his reading of history. What always astonished him was not the secrecy and paranoia, but how the True Believers in those tyrannies never seemed bothered by those things.

  Mercier let Tyler’s discomfort hang in the air for another two seconds. Then, without another word, he turned and gestured to the yeoman still hovering just outside eavesdropping range. “We’re ready now,” he told her. “Show us to our quarters.”

  The yeoman looked at Tyler. The captain nodded confirmation, and she stepped forward. “Certainly, Citizen,” she said, gesturing back at the door behind them. “This way, please.”

  * * *

  Later, in the privacy of his own quarters, Charles searched every square centimeter of his body—or at least every square centimeter he could see—for the spot where they’d implanted the poison drip. If he could find it, there was a chance he could get the damn thing out.

  But there was nothing. No quick-healed incisions, no scars, no warm spots or subtle bulges where a micro capsule might have been slipped beneath the skin. For all the evidence of his eyes and fingertips, Mercier might have been blowing complete smoke.

  But Charles knew better. Men like Mercier never bluffed about things like this. Not when they didn’t have to.

  Whatever they’d done to him, it was clear Charles wouldn’t be reversing it any time soon.

  * * *

  Lyang Weiss looked up from the note, his stomach churning, his fingers squeezing the paper hard with annoyance. This was not what he needed today. “Thank you,” he told the messenger standing in front of his desk. “You may go.”

  The woman nodded, did a precise about-face, and left the room. Weiss waited until the door had closed behind her before letting free the curse that had been trying to get out ever since he’d spotted the signature on the note.

  Even so, he kept the curse short and his voice low. An Andermani embassy had certain behavioral guidelines, after all, and even a lowly assistant military attaché was expected to conform to those standards. Or perhaps especially a lowly assistant military attaché.

  With a sigh, he turned his attention back to the note. Important developments to occur within three weeks at Karavani, the note read. Vitally important you have an observer present.

  And that was it. Two sentences, plus a signature. About as annoyingly cryptic as a man could get.

  What the hell was Charles playing at this time?

  It wasn’t like the man’s information wasn’t usually good. Indeed, some of the tidbits he’d tossed Weiss’s way—for sizeable sums of money, of course—had been extremely interesting, both to the embassy here on Haven as well as to Weiss’s patron back in the Empire. Charles was a Solly, after all, and a source with contacts in the League’s upper echelons was a good thing for a military attaché to have.

  What made the whole relationship so stomach-roiling ambiguous was the fact that, at least on the official paper of those same Solly upper echelons, Charles didn’t seem to exist.

  So who was he? The choices seemed almost pathologically bipolar: either he was a nobody, a two-bit con man who liked to pretend he was someone and had access to just enough information and gadgetry to back up that pretense; or else he was such a high-level agent that the League itself had done a serious scrub job on his past.

  The Peeps seemed to lean toward the former explanation, at least according to the handful of slightly vague references Weiss had been able to dig up. But then, the Peeps had been wrong before. Most recently, and most spectacularly, with Honor Harrington.

  Despite his annoyance with Charles, Weiss had to smile at that one. Though the Empire was officially neutral in regards to the Manticore/Haven war, it was hardly a secret that the Emperor’s private sentiments were on the side of the Star Kingdom, at least for the moment. Lady Harrington—Duchess Harrington now, he corrected himself—had come onto the Andermani political and military radar very early in her career, and her star had been rising ever since. Weiss’s own patron had met the woman once, and Weiss knew her execution on trumped-up charges had turned Andermani sentiment even more against Haven.

  Only now, the truth of that “execution” had been blown across the galaxy, along with the Peeps’ sordid little secret. Pierre and Saint-Just would be scrambling to cover their butts from the resulting firestorm, and Weiss knew just how dangerous both men were when backed into a corner.

  Setting the note aside, Weiss keyed his computer. First step was to find out just what and where this Karavani was.

  It was a Peep system, of course, but one so small and unimportant that its description barely filled three pages. It was a border system, completely uninhabited except for a small mining operation in the rings of the fifth planet and a courier transfer station in orbit around that same planet. It was about the last place in the known universe anyone would want to visit.

  Unless, that is, the would-be vacationer was carrying a load of contraband Solly weapons and equipment. The third of the three pages on Karavani was an Andermani Intelligence report suggesting that the system was being used by Solly sympathizers to transship the officially banned technology being sent under the table to the People’s Republic.

  Was that what Charles was suggesting? That the Andermani should see if they could catch the Sollies and Peeps in a violation of League neutrality?

  Weiss looked at the note again. No. Even if catching them red-handed would actually accomplish anything, that didn’t feel like Charles’s style. He was always more flamboyant than that, even while he tried to stay under everyone’s radar.

  But whatever was about to go down, Weiss would bet heavily it would be worth sending someone to watch.

  Or maybe even going himself.

  He keyed his com for the ambassador’s office. “This is Weiss,” he identified himself to the secretary. “I need to speak to Ambassador Rubell as soon as possible.”

  * * *

  The crawlspace was dark, narrow, and stifling, and for a ship that had been so recently renovated it was surprisingly dirty. But with ingenuity and a certain looseness of the joints that he’d been born with Charles managed to get the Echo hardware in place. One down, he told himself as he worked his way through the oily dust. Twenty-seven to go.

  Mercier had been wai
ting alone when Charles first wriggled his way in through the access panel. But he wasn’t alone now. “Citizen Captain,” Charles puffed as he pulled himself back out into the fresh air of the corridor. “What brings you here?”

  “I wanted to check on your progress,” Tyler said, looking Charles up and down with obvious distaste. No crewman of his, Charles guessed, would ever get so filthy carrying out his duty. “I also wanted an actual explanation as to what you were doing down here.”

  “Understandable,” Charles said. “Unfortunately, as I told you earlier, this technology is extremely secret and, frankly, isn’t supposed to be out here at all. I’m afraid that’s all I can tell anyone.”

  Tyler folded his arms across his chest. “Make an exception,” he ordered.

  Charles shook his head. “I’m afraid—”

  “Make an exception,” Tyler repeated, his voice the temperature of liquid hydrogen.

  Charles looked at Mercier. But for once, both men were clearly in agreement.

  And it wasn’t like the theory of this wasn’t well-known anyway. “Fine,” Charles said with a sigh. “What active sensors do is shoot out focused beams of microwave or visible-spectrum radiation, which then bounce off a target and return to the sender, frequency-shifted with the relative velocities between—”

  “We know all that,” Mercier interrupted.

  Charles nodded. “Right. Well, what the Echo system does is tie in your passive sensors with your own active sensors and communications array so that when a wave packet strikes the hull and starts back, your own active sensors send out a perfectly matched packet that’s shifted a hundred eighty degrees out of phase.”

  Tyler grunted. “Won’t work,” he said. “Your phase-inverted packet can’t catch up with the reflected pulse, which means that the leading edge of the reflection will still make it back intact.”

  “You would be right,” Charles agreed, “if the sensors were embedded directly into the hull. But if you’ll check your specs, you’ll see that your sensor arrays extend anywhere from three to ten meters out from the main hull. That gives the Echo enough lead time—about three nanoseconds per meter—to analyze the packet and create and kick out the phase-shifted duplicate.”