Cauldron of Ghosts Read online

  Her tone was cheerful. “And speaking of maestros, I think you did damn well today, myself. For a measly high commissioner and envoy extraordinary.”

  They passed out into the open. The sunlight was bright—and also quite cheering, even if the color was a little off to them. Erewhon’s star was a K5, smaller and dimmer than Haven’s or La Martine’s, which were both G stars. To Yuri and Sharon, everything seemed to have a slightly orange cast.

  There was a bit of a breeze, too, to make the day still more enjoyable. Despite his grim determination to find wrack and ruin all about, Yuri couldn’t help but feel his spirits picking up.

  Sharon, who knew him well, jumped onto the moment with heavy boots.

  “Look at all the bright spots,” she said. “First—there’s no doubt about this—the Erewhonese and the Mayans have finally decided they can trust each other.”

  “Sure. Gangsters and traitors are natural bosom buddies.”

  “Second, it’s just as obvious—they didn’t come right out and say it, of course—that they’re going to be integrating their military forces all the way down the line, not just having Erewhon serve as Maya’s workshop. That has the potential to turn two third-rate powers into one that swings some real weight.”

  “Just what the galaxy needs. Another Machiavelli in the game.”

  “Stop it, Yuri. You know just as well as I do how important that could wind up being, if the Solarian League collapses—which we both think it will, and not even that far in the future.”

  Yuri made a face. He didn’t disagree with anything Sharon was saying. It was just that . . .

  They’d reached the entrance to their apartment building. He gave Sharon a warning look. As long as they’d been moving and talking out in the open, the scrambling equipment they both carried would have made it impossible for anyone to overhear their conversation or even read their lips. And once they entered their apartment, the much more powerful and sophisticated equipment there made it possible for them to speak openly again. The danger was in this transition zone. Someone could have planted surveillance gear in the vicinity which their portable scramblers couldn’t handle, and they were still too far away for the stationary equipment in their apartment to protect them.

  Of course, it was a warning that Sharon didn’t need at all, as her answering glare made clear. It was admittedly a little silly for him to caution a former StateSec officer on security issues.

  Neither of them said anything further until they’d reached the apartment and the door had closed behind them. Then, after a quick glance at the monitors to make sure the scramblers were operating, Sharon crossed her arms and gave Yuri a level stare.

  “Okay, get it out of your system. ‘It was just that . . . ’ What, Yuri?”

  He took a deep breath. “Why me? Why do I have to be the one trying to thread the needle between encouraging them—yes, I agree; of course I agree; if they can pull off this alliance we’ll all be in a better position—and not coming right out and committing Haven to anything because I don’t have the goddam authority to do it in the first place.”

  She smiled and patted his cheek. “Because you’re so good at it. That’s why Victor made sure you got the assignment.”

  Chapter 16

  “I think you’re all insane, of course,” Honor Alexander-Harrington said with one of her crooked smiles as she sat back in her chair with her wineglass and looked at her mostly rather-less-than-reputable dinner guests. Neither of her spouses had been able to join them, and the nature of those guests—and their plans—had restricted her potential invitation list in rather draconian fashion. The table before them bore the remnants of a generous meal, and James MacGuiness made the circuit refreshing coffee cups for the coffee drinkers who had not yet transitioned to something stronger. Those coffee drinkers included Victor Cachat (not surprisingly for those who knew him) and Yana Tretiakovna, who claimed to prefer a caffeine buzz to alcohol.

  “If you thought it was a bad idea, you should’ve said so at the time,” her Uncle Jacques replied. “And if we’re going to talk about insane ideas, I could think of a few of yours over the years which were even better qualified for that particular adjective.”

  “Well, of course you can! You don’t think I’d venture an opinion like that without having a meterstick of my own to base it on, do you? Besides, I do come by my genome honestly, you know, and if memory serves there’s been a . . . less than fully rational action plan from both sides of the family tree upon occasion. I remember stories Daddy told me about one of my uncles, for example. Back when he was a captain in the BSC, I believe.”

  “If you’ll pardon my saying so, Your Grace,” Thandi Palane said a bit dryly, “I doubt most of your uncle’s follies could outshine the one you pulled at a place called Cerberus.”

  “Or the one at a dinner party I can call to mind,” Benjamin Mayhew said even more dryly. The Protector of Grayson and his wives were the only members of the dinner party which kept her guest list from being totally disreputable, in Honor’s opinion.

  “Details. Details!” Honor waved her wineglass dismissively. “Besides, I already admitted I needed a meterstick of my own. And I never said it was a bad idea, either. I just said that the whole lot of our fearless agents”—the wineglass gestured at Thandi, Victor Cachat, Anton Zilwicki, and Yana Tretiakovna—“have fairly tangential contact with rationality.” Her smile faded. “And probably a little more in the way of guts than is good for them.”

  “While I hate to disabuse you of your obviously inflated notion of my bravery quotient, Your Grace,” Zilwicki said, “I intend to emulate an Old Earth mouse to the very best of my ability once we’re on-planet.”

  “Of course you do,” Catherine Montaigne said sarcastically. “I’ve noticed what a shy and retiring type you are.”

  “Actually,” Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou said rather more seriously, “he’s not that far wrong.” Montaigne looked at her old friend incredulously, and the Beowulfer shrugged. “There are lots of different ways to be as unobtrusive as possible, Catherine. One of the most effective is to be something else entirely as obtrusively as you possibly can. Which is exactly what our friends here are proposing to be, when you come down to it.”

  “Doesn’t mean we won’t have to be careful when we go about our nefarious activities,” Zilwicki agreed. “But the principle’s one every stage magician understands perfectly. We’ll be so busy waving our public personas under everyone’s noses that no one’s going to be wondering what we might have hidden behind the curtain.”

  “That’s all well and good,” Honor said in a much more serious tone. “And, for what it’s worth, I agree with you. But something nobody’s been talking about very much is that for this Alignment to have operated so long without anyone’s spotting it, even on Beowulf, it has to be very, very good at covert operations of its own . . . including penetration of other people’s security. That ‘sleeper agent’ your people found on Torch is one example of how far they’re prepared to go, and if McBryde was right about their having buried genetic ‘sleepers’ all over the galaxy, how confident can we really be that they haven’t penetrated the BSC itself?”

  “Much as it pains me to admit it, we can’t be,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou replied, more than a bit sourly. “Obviously, we’ve had to rethink everything we thought we knew about Mesa in light of the information Victor and Anton—and Yana—brought home. I have a few ideas about how we might look for those ‘genetic sleepers’ of yours using gene scans, but nobody’s worried much about that particular form of security screening in the past. On the other hand, we’ve always been pretty fanatical about compartmentalizing information and operating on a ‘need to know’ basis. To be honest, that’s one reason I was so uncomfortable bringing this new genetic sheathing technology into the light of day even under these circumstances. It’s certainly not impossible that the Alignment’s caught a hint of the R and D on it, or even—although I think it’s very unlikely—infiltrated some of its ‘sleepe
rs’ into the R and D program itself. But I guarantee you that anyone who’s involved with it is going to find himself under the most intense scrutiny of his entire life as soon as we get home. And I don’t see how they could have prepared a cover that’s going to stand up to our newest counterintelligence types.”

  He took a stalk of celery from the plate in front of him and offered it to the cream and gray treecat in the high chair beside him. Bark Chewer’s Bane accepted it with a pleased “Bleek!” and began chewing happily. The Blue Mountain Dancing Clan scout was Benton-Ramirez y Chou’s newly assigned bodyguard, and he and Honor’s uncle were settling into a comfortable working relationship. It wasn’t the same as an adoption bond, as Bark Chewer’s Bane’s retention of his treecat name indicated, but it was the sort of relationship which was going to become increasingly common as the ’cats integrated themselves more and more thoroughly into human society.

  “As soon as BCB and I get home,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou went on, his expression amused as Honor rolled her eyes at the acronym he’d adopted for his new partner, “he and some of his friends and I will be personally interviewing every member of the team working on this project. Between us, I’m pretty sure we’ll be able to uncover anyone with divided loyalties. After that, we’ll be working our way through as much of our entire security structure as we can.” He grimaced. “Obviously, we’re going to be limited by time constraints and the number of ’cats available to us, so we’re not going to get very far beyond the ‘management’ echelons for quite some time, but we’ll pay special attention to plugging any leaks in our more sensitive programs. Especially this one. And if we find one”—the last amusement faded from his expression and his eyes were grim—“we’ll plug it very, very thoroughly indeed.”

  “That sounds like a good idea to me,” Cachat observed.

  “And to me,” Yana agreed even more firmly. The ex-Scrag had hit it off surprisingly well with their hostess. Personally, Benton-Ramirez y Chou thought that was at least partly because of how much she had in common with Nimitz. However “reformed” she and her fellow Amazons might have become since falling under Thandi Palane’s influence, there was still a lot of predator in them, and especially in Yana.

  “I hope this won’t seem too dreadfully ignorant of me,” Katherine Mayhew said, “and I know that the . . . enmity between Beowulf and Mesa’s been around a long, long time, but it seems even deeper and more, well, personal than I’d thought it was. I haven’t had the opportunity to sit in on all the intelligence briefings Benjamin has, and unlike him, no one was sending any mere women off to Old Earth for their college educations when it would’ve done me any good. But why in Tester’s name could anyone be so filled with determination or hatred or whatever it is as to spend six hundred years planning something like this?” She shook her head. “I’m not questioning any of the information Mr. Zilwicki and Mr. Cachat brought back from Mesa. I’m just trying to wrap my mind around it and understand.”

  “That’s going to be a big part of the problem when we start trying to prove any of this to the Sollies, Cat,” Honor said soberly. “The League would be prepared enough to see this as more anti-Mesan panic mongering on the part of Manticore and Haven, based on our obvious, corrupt imperialism—now that we’ve taken our masks off, that’s clearly the only reason we’ve been so fanatical about enforcing the Cherwell Conventions for so long!—but including Beowulf’s going to make it even easier for their propagandists to attack the entire idea. Everybody knows Beowulfers’ve been lunatics on anything to do with Mesa for centuries, after all. And on the face of it, it does sound pretty absurd.”

  “I didn’t mean to say that,” Katherine began, but Benton-Ramirez y Chou interrupted her.

  “Honor didn’t mean to suggest that you had,” he said. “But she’s right, and so are you. It does sound absurd. For that matter, there are people back home on Beowulf who’re going to find it hard to accept all of this. Of course, in their case it’s not going to be because they won’t believe Mesans are despicable enough for something like this; it’s going to be that they can’t believe we could have missed it for so long. And, much as I hate to admit it, one of the reasons they’re going to think that way is that we’ve become so accustomed to thinking of all Mesans in terms of Manpower and their transstellar partners.”

  “Personally,” Catherine Montaigne said, “I’ve come to the conclusion that one reason the bastards have been so busy propping Manpower up has a lot to do with setting up an obvious stalking horse. Web Du Havel and I have argued for years over why Mesa’s stood so foursquare behind genetic slavery for so long given the economics of the institution and the potential social powder keg all those seccies and slaves create on Mesa itself. Now that we know about this Alignment, it makes a lot more sense. Just thinking about the hooks it can get into people by involving them in the filth of the slave trade puts an entirely new perspective on it, but when you add in the façade it sets up—the way it colors all of our thinking where Mesa as a whole is concerned—it makes even more sense.”

  “Exactly.” Benton-Ramirez y Chou nodded. “The idea that someone might set themselves up as proponents of the galaxy’s vilest form of commerce so that we’d concentrate on that view of their villainy and not notice an even deeper one is going to take a little getting used to. And the truth is that Beowulfers have become so set in their ways of hating and despising everything about Mesa and Manpower that it’s going to take time for a lot of us to start taking this threat as seriously as we ought to.”

  “That’s just it,” Katherine Mayhew admitted. “I’ve always wondered exactly why the hatred between your people and the Mesans cuts so deep. I don’t have any problem understanding that it could, you understand. After all, we have our own relationship with Masada as an example. I just don’t understand the . . . the mechanism for it, I guess you’d say.”

  “I think that’s because—like the original Manticoran colonists—your ancestors missed the Final War, Cat,” Honor said. “By the time the first Manties debarked from Jason, that war had been over for a long time, but it’s even further removed for you Graysons. Or us Graysons, I suppose I should say.” She smiled again, briefly. “You didn’t find out about it until you reestablished contact with the rest of the galaxy, and to be honest, you had a lot more pressing worries at the time, given Grayson’s planetary environment and the Masadans, when you did find out.”

  “Honor’s right,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou agreed. “And I have to admit that as terrible as the Final War was, it has a lot more ongoing immediacy for Beowulf and Mesa than for anybody else in the League. More even than for people living in the Sol System today, for that matter. I know our Final War Museum in Grendel is the best and biggest in the entire League, but that war only gets a single wing in the Solarian Military Museum in Old Chicago.”

  “I don’t know as much about the Final War—stupid damned name, when I think about it—as I wish I did,” Cachat said. He smiled faintly. “Like the Graysons, I’ve had more pressing worries until very recently.”

  “It probably wouldn’t hurt for you to spend a little time in the Museum while you’re on Beowulf,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou said thoughtfully. “Assuming you’ve got the time for it, anyway. There are some really good VR programs covering it in the System Database, though, and you’re going to be spending at least a while recuperating from the mods.”

  “Oh, goody!” Yana snorted. “Educational VRs to distract us from all the things you’re going to be doing to us. I can hardly wait.”

  A general chuckle ran around the table, but then Benton-Ramirez y Chou sobered and returned his attention to Katherine Mayhew.

  “Despite Victor’s well-taken observation on the stupidity of calling any war the ‘final’ one, Old Earth’s version of it came entirely too close to being just that, at least where the Sol System was concerned,” he said much more somberly. “The Ukrainian Supremacists may have started it when they turned the super soldiers loose,” he glanced semi-apologetically
at Yana, who snorted in amusement at his expression, “but they weren’t the only lunatics running asylums. And let’s be honest, the super soldiers weren’t really all that much more heavily genetically modified than Honor here is. Enhanced strength, better reflexes, they heal faster, and enhanced intelligence—although that one’s still a rather . . . nebulous concept—but that was small beer compared to the other crap that got turned loose. For example, there were the Asian Confederacy’s version of super soldiers. Now, those were scary. Implanted and natural weaponry, a metabolism that was so enhanced they ‘burned out’ in less than twenty years and their combat gear had to include intravenous concentrated nourishment just to keep them running that long, and enough other genetic tinkering to make them all sterile—thank God! In terms of effectiveness in sustained combat, the mods didn’t do a lot for them, given the sophistication of the weaponry available even to us poor old ‘pure strain’ models. Doesn’t really matter all that much how strong someone is or how good his reflexes are when he’s up against a main battle tank. But it turned them into god-awful special operations troops, and the ‘intelligence’ mods on them pushed them over the edge into the outright megalomania that proved Old Earth’s undoing. It was when they turned on the Confederacy’s political leadership in the Beijing Coup that the Final War really turned into the ultimate nightmare.”

  “Why did they stage the coup?” Cachat asked. Benton-Ramirez y Chou arched an eyebrow at him, and the Havenite shrugged. “The Confederacy was winning against the Ukrainians, from what little I know about the history involved, but that all turned around shortly after the coup. So why did they do it? And why did it turn around?”

  “They staged the coup because they were sterile,” Honor said before her uncle could reply. “They’d decided their obvious superiority to the pure strain humans who were giving them orders proved they should be in charge, and they’d decided they were clearly the next step in human evolution. But the Confederacy’s leadership controlled the cloning farms where they were created, and the Confederacy refused to allow them unlimited reproduction.” She shrugged. “So they staged their own revolt in order to take over the cloning facilities and produce more of their own kind.”