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  “On a somewhat more serious note, Sir,” Kaplan set down her wine and began buttering a second roll, “what do you think’s going on with the New Tuscans?”

  “Not anything we’d like.” Terekhov shrugged and frowned in distaste. “Bernardus Van Dort and Admiral Khumalo asked me that, too, and like I told them, I haven’t had enough time back in Talbott to form any considered opinion. That said, I wouldn’t trust a single one of them in the same airlock with me.

  “Their oligarchs—especially that idiot Yvernau—did everything they could during the constitutional convention to buy immunity from any domestic changes. And according to Baroness Medusa, they’ve been insisting ever since that their exclusion from the economic incentive package represents some kind of economic retaliation, not the inevitable consequence of their own decision not to join the Star Empire when they didn’t get the special guarantees they demanded.”

  His frown deepened and he shook his head.

  “They remind me an awful lot of the old Legislaturalists, to be honest. I’m damned sure they’re deliberately contriving these incidents in Pequod; I’m just not sure what they hope to achieve. But I don’t like what I’m hearing about Cardot’s take on all this one bit.”

  Helen felt herself nodding in agreement. Alesta Cardot was New Tuscany’s minister of foreign affairs, and as Terekhov’s flag lieutenant, Helen had seen the complete footage of Cardot’s protest note about “Manticoran provocations” in the Pequod System. The protest in question had clearly been aimed at someone besides Prime Minister Alquezar and Baroness Medusa, since the “provocations” were totally fictitious. Helen doubted Cardot would have discussed them in such detail—or shown so much visibly (and obviously) restrained outrage—over nonexistent affronts to New Tuscan’s sovereignty if she hadn’t intended that recording as future evidence of how dreadfully her innocent New Tuscan spacers had been treated by those horrid, arrogant Manties.

  “I don’t like it either,” Kaplan said soberly, as if she’d just heard Helen’s thoughts. “Especially since I can only think of one audience for her to impress.”

  “OFS,” the commodore agreed with a nod. “To be honest, what worries me most is that we don’t know if this was a brainstorm of Yvernau and Prime Minister Vézien, trying to pressure us into granting the economic concessions they still want, or if someone else’s put them up to it for purposes of his own.”

  “Like the same someone who put President Tyler up to something, Sir?” Tallman asked quietly.

  “I don’t want to be looking under the bed for bogeymen just because of what’s already happened, Commander. That’s one reason I try to remind myself it’s possible this was an internal brainstorm of the New Tuscan government. After all, this is only the second orchestrated effort to break our kneecaps out here.”

  “Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, and three times is enemy action, you mean, Sir?” Kaplan said dryly, and Terekhov nodded.

  “But the second time isn’t always a coincidence,” he pointed out grimly.

  “You fill me with confidence, Sir.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t panic just yet, Naomi. After what happened at Lovat, I expect the Admiralty should be able to reinforce us much more heavily sometime soon. Whoever pulled Tyler and Monica together with people like Nordbrandt has already demonstrated he’s willing to do just about anything to get what he wants, but manipulating something like the League isn’t a project that’s going to proceed at lightning speed. No matter how corrupt the Sollies are—and trust me, I’m not about to underestimate that—” Terekhov’s lips quirked, “any effort to organize some sort of repeat performance will have to burn a lot of time just sending conspirators back and forth. That should give us a window to build strength in the Quadrant before the puppetmasters’ next move.” He shrugged. “I’m sure we won’t like whatever they have in mind, but, then again, New Tuscany may not like what we have in mind when it finally hits the fan.”

  “And Admiral Gold Peak’s just the person to show them that,” Kaplan agreed. “I pulled my snotty cruise aboard Agni when she was in command.” She snorted softly. “I understand she hasn’t exactly mellowed a lot with time, either!”

  “I imagine that’s one way to put it,” Terekhov agreed. “And from everything I’ve ever heard about her, she’s still a cruiser captain at heart. Like someone else I know.” He smiled as Kaplan and Tallman chuckled, choosing not to mention any reservations about how desirable that might be in a fleet commander. “I’m sure she’ll have quite a bit to say about New Tuscany when she gets back from Montana next month.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  My, you’ve been a busy fellow, haven’t you, First Sergeant Frugoni? Damien Harahap thought, studying the imagery.

  The man looking back at him from the holo display in his cabin aboard the yacht Факел had blond hair, blue eyes, and an improbably innocent expression. Or maybe it only seemed innocent because of what he knew about its owner.

  He brought the dossier back up and paged through the screens with a pensive frown. First Sergeant Vincent “Vinnie” Frugoni, Solarian Marine Corps, with enough commendations and proficiency awards to fill a cargo shuttle. Wounded in action twice, mentioned in dispatches three times, and twice turned down recommendations for OCS. All that by only age forty-four—a virtual babe in arms in a society with third-generation prolong.

  Obviously a lifer with no interest in a commission, Harahap reflected. Until seven T-years ago, anyway. He shook his head. Somebody damned well should’ve been keeping a closer eye on you, First Sergeant.

  He pursed his lips, mourning the fact that not one of the League’s myriad security services seemed to have even noticed First Sergeant Frugoni’s abrupt choice in career changes. What the hell was wrong with those people? Anybody with half a brain should have realized that—

  Be fair, Damien, he told himself. You’re actively looking for things like this, but there’s no reason the Marines should’ve been. And there’s no OFS or official Gendarmerie presence in Swallow, either. Anything that’s going on there is on Tallulah’s plate, not the League’s, and I doubt they’re going to advertise their more spectacular screw-ups to anyone outside the system. So I guess it’s not too inexcusable that nobody seems to’ve noticed that Frugoni’s decision not to re-up came barely five T-months after his sister was killed.

  Harahap’s current employers, on the other hand, had come upon Frugoni working backward. The steadily gathering unrest in Swallow’s Cripple Mountains had attracted the eye of one of Isabel Bardasano’s analysts almost two T-years ago. The analyst in question had dived into its origins and discovered First Sergeant Frugoni when he realized how much of it stemmed directly from the death of Sandra Frugoni Allenby.

  What a stupid waste that was, Harahap thought with genuine regret. No wonder the Allenbys are mad as hell over it.

  Sandra Frugoni had arrived on Swallow as a Tallulah Corporation employee, but what she’d seen there had shifted her priorities radically. She’d given Tallulah notice within six months; within seven, she’d had her own medical practice, serving the men and women of the majestic, rugged Cripple Mountains, where isolation—and the fact that no one outside the Cripples gave much of a damn—made good medical care almost as rare as it had been on pre-space Old Terra. Her decision had resulted in an earnings drop of over seventy percent, not to mention the active harassment of her erstwhile employer, but she’d clearly never looked back. Harahap didn’t know if she’d met Floyd Allenby before or after her decision to leave Tallulah’s employ, and he had to wonder how that marriage would have worked out ultimately, given the fact that she’d been a third-generation prolong recipient and Floyd had never received even the first-generation therapies. That sort of thing often ended badly. But it might not have in this case…not that it mattered any longer, courtesy of an inexcusably stupid shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile.

  And you’d already decided you were retiring to Swallow when the time came, hadn’t you, Vinnie? It�
��s not just your sister’s death, is it? You’re one of the ones with a conscience; I can tell. You didn’t like some of the things the Marines have to do, and you’d had a bellyful, hadn’t you? So you were looking for a place to settle down, maybe set up your own guide operation with your in-laws, watch your nephews and nieces grow up. But now there won’t be any of those nephews and nieces, and that was a bad, bad mistake on Tallulah’s part.

  And then, of course, there was Frugoni’s brother-in-law.

  Harahap switched to another file—one that showed a weathered, tallish man with brown hair, brown eyes, sun-browned skin, a close cropped beard, and a nose that could have served as an ancient rowing galley’s ram. Floyd Allenby was only thirty-two T-years years old, barely half his dead wife’s age, and there were laugh lines among the weather-induced crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. But there was no laughter in that man’s face these days.

  A bit of the berserker there, Harahap decided. Or maybe that’s not fair. The man’s a clansman, and his people are feudists. He’s not berserk; he just has a highland clansman’s notion of what constitutes justice and doesn’t give a rat’s ass what it takes to get it. If that means getting killed, he’s okay with it, but that’s not remotely the same as having a death wish. Better remember that, Damien.

  He closed the file and leaned back, listening to the music—it was one of the pieces Bardasano had been listening to during their interview, something called Eroica by some ancient composer named Bayhoven—while he thought.

  Rufino Chernyshev had been spot on with his “guess” about the new responsibilities Bardasano had intended to offer Harahap. Which was about as surprising as the fact that sun tended to rise in the east. Chernyshev wouldn’t have had that “chance conversation” with him if Bardasano hadn’t approved it ahead of time. But Harahap had to admit that even his own suspicions had fallen short of his new employers’ actual ambitions.

  He wasn’t foolish enough to believe she’d told him anything remotely like everything, and any information she’d given him about Operation Janus bore exactly as close a resemblance to the truth as her superiors wanted it to. That was something a field agent for the Gendarmerie learned to take in stride, but this time the stride had been just a bit wider than usual.

  Whether or not he believed everything Bardasano had to say about this “Mesan Alignment,” it definitely far greater resources than any transstellar—or alliance of transstellars—he’d ever heard of. And it was a very serious player; that much was obvious, because Bardasano had been forced to give him more background than he’d had if she’d wanted to make full use of his intelligence, as well as his skill set. He was positive she hadn’t given him one thing more than she’d decided she had to, but even that restricted information was enough to underscore the sheer, audacious magnitude of the Alignment’s operations. It seriously intended to destroy the Star Empire outright. And while Bardasano hadn’t said so, it was obvious from what she had said—to someone like Damien Harahap, at least—that they’d been working on that for a hell of a lot longer than could be accounted for by Manticore’s discovery of the Lynx Terminus.

  I wonder how involved the “Alignment” was in Haven’s decision to go back to war? Hell, given the scale these people seem to think on, I wonder how much it had to do with Haven’s decision to go to war with Manticore in the first place! Seems like an awful lot of work, though, and I wonder what their endgame is? It’s got to be more than just punching out the Manties’ lights!

  Yes, it did, but he reminded his curiosity bump that there were some things it was wiser not to know. Especially when one was a newly promoted operative in the employ of a hyper-paranoid interstellar conspiracy. But at least there were some surprising perks involved. Not least among them the vessel with which they’d provided him. Факел had been built on what was technically a dispatch boat’s hull, but the dispatch boat in question had been larger than the bare-bones utility vessels used by most navies or data courier services. Officially, Факел was the Christiane Hauptman, a Manticoran-registered fast personnel transport for the Hauptman Cartel. That was concealed behind a false Solarian registry which listed her as the Caroline Henegar, for use when Harahap wasn’t openly employing his cover as a Hauptman employee. Her actual builders and owners had never given her a name at all, only a hull number—DB-10024—so he’d felt free to bestow his own name for what he thought of as “internal use.”

  Captain Yong Seong Jin, DB-10024’s commander, had been puzzled by his choice, initially. She’d never heard of a language called “Macedonian,” but once he explained the name’s origins to her, she’d been amused rather than affronted. That was good, since it had confirmed she really did have a sense of humor.

  He suspected Yong was an ex-officer of the Mesan System Navy—or possibly not even “ex”—given the brisk efficiency with which she ran her small command. It was an interesting speculation, given what it would imply about the “Alignment’s” relationship with the government of Mesa. What really mattered, though, was that she was about as professional as officers came. Not only did she obviously enjoy her command, she was smart, had an imagination she wasn’t afraid to use, and was obviously aware of the…modalities covert operations required. He had no concern about her ability to support his mission without accidentally blowing their cover, which was more than he’d been able to say about some SLN officer with whom he’d been forced to work upon occasion.

  In addition to the palatial comfort of Факел’s fittings, she was faster than any other ship aboard which he’d ever traveled. He was no hyper-physicist, and he had no idea how the “streak drive” accomplished its magic, but Факел’s interstellar speed was substantially higher than anyone else’s. The fact that the “Alignment” had something like that tucked away in its pocket, reserving it solely for its operatives’ use rather than making it available to the rest of the galaxy for a stupendous price, further underscored just how serious a player it was.

  Nor was Факел the only goodie which had come his way.

  He wasn’t entirely happy about the new medical package his employers had provided. He’d seen too many ways in which suicide switches could be rigged even without access to someone’s doctor, and he suspected that his new doctor would have been perfectly happy to do just that. That thought was enough to provoke the occasional bad dream, but they hadn’t really needed any elaborate doctor’s visits to set up something like that. There were much simpler ways to go about it, and he told himself firmly to look at the upside.

  If Bardasano was to be believed, the booster to his prolong had just added close to another T-century to his expected lifetime. The ability to see in near-total darkness wasn’t anything at which a field operative was likely to turn up his nose, either. And neither were the repair nanites swarming around his system. Bardasano had demonstrated their efficacy for him by slashing her own palm and then letting him watch as the deep cut closed and began healing before his very eyes. It was almost like carrying his very own regen clinic around with him, although he strongly suspected they violated the prohibitions on self-replicating, broad-spectrum biological nanotech. The times that sort of initially innocuous technology had gotten out of hand were enough to make anyone nervous, but if it was going to be wandering around the galaxy anyway, he might as well get in on it, himself. The oxygen reservoir implanted in his abdomen and the EM spectrum sensors implanted across his shoulder blades were well worth having, as well, and he’d been promised improved anti-disease nannies when he got back, as well. Unlike the repair nanites, they needed to be specifically coded to his own genotype so they could recognize any intruders, and there hadn’t quite been time to get that done before he had to catch his shuttle for his new assignment.

  And let’s face it, he thought wryly, nobody lives forever, anyway. Sure, Bardasano’ll dispose of me in a heartbeat if I turn into a liability, but I already knew that. Probably be a lot harder for me to just…disappear now to avoid that, though. I wouldn’t be
at all surprised if my “regularly scheduled medical checkups” are going to include resetting some sort of dead man’s switch from now on. That’s how I’d’ve set it up, anyway. But the pay’s good, the work’s challenging, and as long as I don’t trip myself up and blow an assignment, they’ll keep me around and keep me in the field.

  In an odd sort of way, that was almost amusing, and he closed his eyes and smiled as he let the music sweep over him.

  * * *

  “My God,” Helga Boltitz said, shaking her head as she stared down into her drink. “I can’t…I can’t believe it.”

  “You can’t believe it?” Helen Zilwicki shook her head, her expression grim, and Helga looked up quickly.

  “I know it has to be worse for you,” she said. “And I know I can’t really imagine how much worse at this point, especially with no more information than we have. But it just seems so…impossible.”

  “That’s certainly one way to put it.” Helen inhaled sharply, then took a deep swallow from her stein of beer. She took her time before she lowered the stein again and looked at her table companion across it.

  Helga Boltitz had to be one of the most beautiful women she’d ever met, and she’d met some really beautiful ones. For that matter, given her adoptive mother’s life-long involvement with the Audubon Ballroom, she’d known quite a few women—and at least one man, she thought bitterly—who’d been genetically built from the ground up to be beautiful. People who bought pleasure slaves didn’t want ugly property, after all. And that didn’t even count the number of people who’d invested in the perfect profiles and skin texture biosculpt specialists provided all across the galaxy.

  But Helga was from Dresden, where even prolong had only just become available. There were no biosculpt practices on Dresden, which meant she’d come by every bit of her attractiveness the old-fashioned way.