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  “Anyway, the dispatch boat in question will be leaving Mobius in the next couple of days,” Breitbach continued. “Doesn’t have anything to do with us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make use of it. Especially when, despite the current unpleasantness between the League and the Manties, it’s headed into the Talbott Sector. In fact, it’s heading to Spindle by way of Montana, which is certainly in the right direction, don’t you think?”

  “Spindle?” Blanchard repeated, then smiled. “Oh, yes,” she agreed. “Spindle would be just fine with me, Michael!”

  June 1922 Post Diaspora

  “By this time, even that moron Gold Peak has to realize how badly she fucked up at New Tuscany and Spindle! Their government has to be shitting bricks thinking about the mess she’s dragged them all into. If the order relieving her ass and hauling her home hasn’t gotten to Spindle yet, it’s damned well on its way, Commissioner!”

  —Brigadier Francisca Yucel, Solarian Gendarmerie,

  To Sector Governor Lorcan Verrochio,

  Office of Frontier Security

  Chapter Eighteen

  “That went more smoothly than I expected,” Mackenzie Graham said, standing by the apartment window and gazing out at Cherubim’s snow-covered streets. Then she turned away from the window…just in time to catch her brother raising his eyebrows in her direction.

  “Don’t look so complacent at me, Indiana Graham! And don’t try to pretend you weren’t nervous about all these new arrangements, too!”

  “Never had a moment’s doubt,” he told her virtuously.

  “Bullshit,” she said tartly, and he chuckled.

  “Well, if you’re going to be that way about it, I guess I admit I felt a little bit nervous. A little bit.” He raised a thumb and index finger, perhaps a centimeter apart, and grinned at her.

  “Yeah. Sure!”

  She shook her head, and the look she gave him was that of a long-suffering sister, not the co-leader of a revolutionary movement.

  He only grinned even more broadly (and unrepentantly), but she had a point. The three T-months since their first meeting with Firebrand might have seemed like plenty of time, but given the slow speed with which ships moved between stars, it really wasn’t. In fact, the first shipment of weaponry had arrived over a T-month sooner than they’d expected it could. When the routine notification of waiting cargo containers hit the message account Firebrand had set up, it had come as a total surprise.

  Fortunately, as Firebrand had suggested, the cargo agents responsible for sneaking those containers into the smuggling queue really didn’t want to know anything about their contents. That wasn’t how it worked, and if it turned out they contained something with negative consequences, deniability—the ability to say, honestly, “We didn’t know what it was!”—was actually a fairly acceptable defense in what passed for the Solarian legal system. Or, at least, in what passed for the Solarian legal system where little things like smuggling were concerned.

  Bruce Graham had been a student of history, and Indiana had become one himself, especially since his father’s imprisonment. He wasn’t in his dad’s league yet, but he also wasn’t confined in Terrabore Prison, which left him free to pursue his self-education wherever it led, as long as he exercised a modicum of caution. He was pretty sure President McCready and General O’Sullivan had no idea how much “subversive” knowledge was tucked away in the Seraphim libraries’ files. Some of it was even in old-fashioned hardcopy books gathering dust in the physical stacks. And from his reading, Indiana had come to realize there’d actually been periods in human history when the courts would never have tolerated the omnipresent corruption of OFS and its sweetheart deals.

  Well, they probably had problems of their own, even then. On the other hand, I think I’d trade my problems for theirs, if I had the option. Which I don’t.

  “All right,” Mackenzie said, shifting from put-upon sibling back to co-conspirator, “now that we’ve got them, what do we do with them?”

  “Now that,” Indiana conceded, “is a pretty good question, Max.”

  For the moment, the containers were sitting in a warehouse he and Mackenzie were pretty sure was off the scags’ grid. It was located in the heart of the Rust Belt, and while it was in better physical shape than their meeting place with Firebrand, that wasn’t saying a lot. But it was mostly weathertight, at least, and the containers themselves were hermetically sealed and virtually indestructible. Of course, getting them there had been a not-so-minor challenge. The Krestor Interstellar shipping barcodes which had ensured their passage through customs without inspection would have stood out like sore thumbs in the Rust Belt, and so would any of the spaceport’s more modern cargo vehicles.

  But Firebrand’s colleagues had anticipated that. The containers were sized to fit inside standard cargo trailers of the sort Seraphim had built for its own use before Krestor and Mendoza of Córdoba arrived to “rescue” its economy. Even better, they were equipped with built-in counter-grav units, so the trailers hadn’t ridden suspiciously low on their suspensions. It also made the containers much easier to manhandle with strictly limited manpower once they reached their destination.

  “I’m still not happy about the transport arrangements,” Indiana went on. “Oh, they worked this time, but we had to put the whole thing together on the fly. Now that we’ve got them under cover, I want to take a little longer to think before we start moving them around.”

  “Works for me,” Mackenzie said fervently. But then she cocked her head, looking up at her taller brother. “It works for me, but at the same time, I don’t want to leave them sitting in one big, undigested lump where we could lose all of them in a single disaster if the scags get lucky!”

  “Me either. But the more we spread them around in smaller caches, the more likely one of O’Sullivan’s informers’ll stumble across one of them. Or, for that matter, that the recon platforms’ll spot something.”

  “Not if we get them out into the country,” Mackenzie argued. “I’m thinking about handing them over to Saratoga.”

  Indiana started to reply, then stopped, thinking about it. “Saratoga” was Leonard Silvowitz, a Seraphim Independence Movement area leader. He didn’t know he was taking instructions from Indiana and Mackenzie, both of whom he’d known for years, since he’d been a silent partner in the business effort which had led to Bruce Graham’s arrest. As far as their SIM roles were concerned, he knew them only as “Talisman” and “Magpie,” and his communications with them were indirect and circuitous.

  “You know,” Indiana said slowly, “that might not be a bad idea at all. I’m not crazy about putting him at risk this early, but the Farm would be a good place to stash them, wouldn’t it?”

  “The Farm,” fifty kilometers north of Cherubim, had been a part of Leonard Silvowitz’ modest business empire: a commercial farming operation which had employed several dozen people and shown a tidy profit supplying fresh vegetables and dairy products to Seraphim’s more urbanized areas. Unfortunately, that very profitability had drawn the attention of Krestor Interstellar’s local manager, and the Macready Administration had “suggested” Silvowitz lease the operation to Krestor at about twenty percent of what it was actually worth. Krestor had then proceeded to fire virtually all of Silvowitz’ employees, some of whom had been with him for as much as twenty or thirty T-years, and replace them with automated equipment.

  Technically, Silvowitz still owned the Farm, although he had no control over its operation, and Krestor hadn’t been interested in his employees’ housing (since there were no longer any employees to be housed). Those once sturdy, reasonably comfortable units were slowly decaying into ruin, like most of Seraphim, but they were still there, and Indiana and Mackenzie had planned on using them as a training site when the time came. They were far enough out to be beyond the scags’ normal zone of interest, and there was enough traffic transporting the Farm’s produce to the city and the necessary supplies back to its fields to cover quite a lot of movemen
t on the SIM’s part.

  “I think it would be a good place, or I wouldn’t have suggested it,” Mackenzie pointed out. “At the same time, there’s always the chance some service tech out there to work on a broken down cultivator or harvester might spot something.”

  “That was always going to be the case when we started training out there, anyway,” Indiana replied. “And these containers are a lot sturdier and more weathertight than I expected, so he could hide them out in the woods instead of one of the barns where your service tech might be poking around. Or someplace even better than that.”

  He smiled at her, and she frowned back for a couple of seconds. Then her expression cleared.

  “You’re thinking of Culver Hill, aren’t you?”

  “That’s exactly where I’m thinking about.” Indiana nodded. He and his sister had spent a lot of childhood summer nights camping out by the small lake just east of Culver Hill. Which was how they happened to know about the cave system that ran for kilometers under the hill itself. The caves were on the damp side, but with the containers’ hermetic seals…

  “That’s not a bad idea at all,” Mackenzie said approvingly. Then she grinned. “How did you happen to have it?”

  “Very funny.” Indiana scowled at her. “But since I seem to be doing the intellectual heavy lifting today, I hereby nominate you to figure out exactly how we’re going to get them to the Farm in the first place.”

  “Well, the first stage is to let Saratoga know they’re coming,” Mackenzie pointed out. “We’re going to need him to take a look at the caves and be sure he can get them in. Even with the counter-grav, moving them’s going to be a pain, especially without a lot of warm bodies to help, and there are some pretty narrow spots just inside the caves’ entrance.”

  “Agreed. But let’s not tell him what we’re planning to send him.” Indiana’s expression was considerably more serious than it had been. “There’s no point telling him the guns have arrived if it turns out he can’t handle them.”

  Mackenzie nodded soberly. One of their guiding principles was that what someone didn’t know, someone couldn’t spill accidentally…or under the sort of the duress Tillman O’Sullivan’s scags were expert at applying.

  “All right.” Indiana gave a brisk nod of his own. “I’ll put the message together and get it into the secure drop for Osiris.” “Osiris” was Janice Karpov, Indiana and Mackenzie’s contact with Silvowitz. “If I get my butt in motion, I can probably make the drop this evening still.”

  “Just don’t take any stupid chances, Indy,” Mackenzie said a bit sharply. He looked at her, and she scowled again, more darkly than before. “You’ve always just had to run right out and start playing with your toys, ever since you were a kid, and some things really don’t change, do they? I swear, I’ve known five-year-olds with more patience than you have! Well, discretion, anyway.” She snorted. “Those weapons aren’t going to get all old and worn out sitting there for an extra day or two.”

  “I know they aren’t, Max.” Indiana’s tone was more soothing than agreeing, but Mackenzie was willing to settle for that. Getting him to admit she had a point would probably have been expecting too much, but that wasn’t the same thing as his not knowing she had one.

  “If I can make the drop without pushing too hard, I’d still prefer to get it done tonight,” he continued. “All the same, we didn’t set up secure communications routes just so I could blow things when a really important message comes along, did we?”

  “That wasn’t why I thought we were doing it, no,” she agreed.

  “Point taken,” he capitulated. Then he grinned. “You know, I know all about secure communications and how important they are, but still, I’d really love to see Uncle Leonard’s face when he finds out he’s about to receive an entire battalion’s worth of small arms and support weapons!”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “—haven’t heard anything new out of Gold Peak or Medusa, anyway,” Captain Sadako Merriman said, looking up from the notes on her minicomp’s display. “That doesn’t mean they aren’t up to something, of course, Commissioner.” She grimaced. “The truth is, we’re pretty sure they are up to something. We just don’t have a clue what.”

  The slender, fine-boned Frontier Fleet officer wasn’t one of Lorcan Verrochio’s favorite people for several reasons. Among other things, she had an annoying habit of seeming unimpressed by his own august presence, but she also had an equally annoying habit of telling him the truth. He supposed that counted for something, even if “don’t have a clue” wasn’t exactly what he wanted to hear out of his senior naval intelligence specialist.

  “We’re trying to get better information, of course, Commissioner,” Commodore Francis Thurgood (who had the distinction of being someone Verrochio liked even less than Merriman) put in. “In the wake of what happened to Admiral Crandall, though, we’re not in a position to push as hard for it as I’m sure we’d all like to. I don’t think the Manties would be very receptive to any ‘port visits’ on our part, for example.”

  “I’m aware of that, thank you, Commodore,” Verrochio said as pleasantly as he could.

  The stocky commodore had a weathered-looking appearance which Verrochio found strange in someone who spent his entire working life in artificial environments. And, although Thurgood was reasonably careful to avoid emphasizing it, he’d also tried to warn Sandra Crandall about what she was walking into. Of course, even his gloomy projections had fallen well short of the reality; they’d just been closer than anyone else’s.

  “The Manticorans’ decision to recall their merchant shipping from Solarian space isn’t helping, Governor,” Merriman added. “I realize we didn’t have much of their shipping here in-Sector to begin with, but there was always at least some…cross-pollination, let’s say. Merchant spacers talk to each other wherever their paths happen to cross. They always seem to know a lot more than you think they should about what’s going on, and you can usually pick up a lot listening to them. In this case, though, there’s no one to do the talking.”

  Verrochio nodded, not that he needed reminders about how painfully the Manties had wounded the League’s interstellar commerce. He’d managed to sidestep any responsibility for Sandra Crandall’s decision to attack Spindle, but its disastrous consequences had created enough crap to splash everyone in the sector, especially its commissioner. Official news of the Manty merchies’ recall had reached Meyers less than two weeks earlier, and the ruinous consequences of the withdrawal of Manticoran vessels from the League’s shipping lanes had been none too gently pointed out to him by higher authority. Some of those higher authorities hadn’t been shy about suggesting that it was the direct result of events in his sector, either.

  “With all due respect, Commissioner, it’s also possible we’re not hearing anything because there’s nothing to hear about,” Brigadier Francisca Yucel put in.

  The Madras Sector’s senior Gendarmerie officer had blonde hair, gray eyes, and the short, square muscularity of a heavy-worlder. She also had an unhappy expression, and Verrochio scowled mentally as he looked at her. She’d never liked Thurgood (whom she referred to as “that old woman”) or Merriman (who she regarded as an interloper into internal security matters which were none of her affair), and she disagreed strenuously with their analysis of the Manticorans’ probable intentions. She was also a bigger pain in his posterior than Merriman and Thurgood combined, but that didn’t necessarily mean she was wrong.

  “I realize you have a different perspective from the Navy’s, Francisca,” the commissioner said. “But it’s Commodore Thurgood’s and Captain Merriman’s responsibility to look at the worst case from a naval perspective.”

  “I agree.” Yucel didn’t try very hard to sound as if she meant it, Verrochio observed. “I’m simply saying we shouldn’t scare ourselves into hiding in a corner on the basis of what happened at Spindle. By this time, even that moron Gold Peak has to realize how badly she fucked up at New Tuscany and Spindle! Their
government has to be shitting bricks thinking about the mess she’s dragged them all into. If the order relieving her ass and hauling her home hasn’t gotten to Spindle yet, it’s damned well on its way, Commissioner!”

  Verrochio nodded in acknowledgement, although he was a far cry from agreeing with her. Nothing he’d seen out of the Manties suggested any inclination on their part to give ground, and he very much doubted Elizabeth Winton was going to recall her cousin from Talbott anytime soon. He did have to agree with at least one of Yucel’s underlying premises—that no one except a maniac would willingly contemplate an all out war with the Solarian League, no matter how good his weapons technology was. Unfortunately, every indication he’d seen said the Manties were maniacs. That was why he rejected her opposition of anything that smacked of “appeasement.” It was her view that giving ground to Manticore would only increase the Star Empire’s arrogance and ambition, whereas refusing to be bullied and panicked into giving it whatever it wanted would cause it to pull in its horns. She might actually be right about that. In fact, he hoped she was. But after the string of disasters which had landed on his doorstep, he had no intention of being the one who refused to be “bullied” and found out the Manties weren’t bluffing after all.

  “It’s possible Brigadier Yucel is right about that, Commissioner,” Thurgood said. Without, Verrochio noticed, sounding any more sincere than Yucel had. “For the moment, however, Gold Peak’s still in command—according to our most recent information, at any rate—and I think we can safely assume she’s going to at least redeploy her forces. She may be more…confrontational than her government would like, but in a tactical sense, at least, she’s demonstrated she’s nobody’s fool. And, as she demonstrated for better or worse at New Tuscany, she’s not afraid to act on her own authority, either.” He smiled thinly; he’d tried to warn Josef Byng, too. “I anticipate encountering a heavier Manty naval presence along our frontier very soon now. I’ll agree that I don’t think she’s going to push any confrontations with the League if she can help it, but she’s not going to be backing down, either.”