Torch of Freedom wos-2 Read online

  There was great courage there, also, but Anton had that as well. So did many people. Courage was not really that rare a virtue in the human race—as Victor himself, with his egalitarian attitudes, was quite fond of pointing out. But for Cachat, that level of courage seemed to come effortlessly. Anton was sure the man didn't even think about it.

  Those qualities made him a very dangerous man, at all times, and a scary man on some occasions. With his now-extensive experience working with Victor, Anton had come to be certain that Cachat was not a sociopath—although he could certainly do a superb imitation of one. And he'd also come to realize, more slowly, that lurking beneath Victor's seemingly icy surface was a man who was . . .

  Well, not warm-hearted, certainly. Perhaps "big-hearted" was the right term. But whatever you called it, this was a man who had a fierce loyalty to his friends as well as his beliefs. How Cachat would react if he ever found himself forced to choose between a close friend and his own political convictions, was difficult to calculate. In the end, Anton was pretty sure that Victor would choose his convictions. But that wouldn't come without a great struggle—and the Havenite would demand complete and full proof that the choice was really inescapable.

  Princess Ruth probably hadn't parsed Victor Cachat as thoroughly and patiently as Anton Zilwicki had done. There were very few people in the galaxy with Anton's systematic rigorousness. Ruth was definitely not one of them. But she was extremely intelligent and intuitively perceptive about people—surprisingly so, for someone who'd been raised in the rather cloistered atmosphere of the royal court. In her own way, she'd come to accept the same things about Victor that Anton had.

  Anton had once remarked to Ruth, half-jokingly, that being Cachat's friend and collaborator was quite a bit like being an intimate colleague of a very smart and warm-blooded cobra. The princess had immediately shaken her head. "Not a cobra. Cobras are pretty dinky when you get right down to it—I mean, hell, a glorified rodent like a mongoose can handle one—and they rely almost entirely on venom. Even at his Ming the Merciless worst, Victor is never venomous."

  She'd shaken her head again. "A dragon, Anton. They can take human form, you know, according to legend. Just think of a dragon with a pronounced Havenite accent and a hoard he guards jealousy made of people and principles instead of money."

  Anton had conceded the point—and now, watching Ruth's half-irritated and half-affectionate exchange with a Havenite agent she'd once detested, he saw again how right she'd been.

  It's not that easy, all things considered, to hold a grudge against a dragon. Not for somehow like the princess, at any rate, with her horror of appearing silly. You might as well hold a grudge against the tides.

  "Just trying to stay in practice," Victor said mildly, "in the unlikely event I should be presented at the Manticoran court in Landing. Wouldn't want to fumble with royal protocol, even if it is all a bunch of annoying nonsense, because it would undermine my secret agent suavety."

  "There's no such word as 'suavety,' " replied Ruth. "In fact, that's got to be the stupidest and least suave word I've ever heard."

  Victor smiled seraphically. "To get back to the point, Ruth, I don't happen to think it's likely myself that this Dana Wedermeyer person"—he pointed to the pad—"is anything other than what she or he seems to be. Which is to say, a very highly placed Mesa Pharmaceuticals manager giving orders to a subordinate. Or, rather, ignoring a subordinate's complaints."

  "But . . ." Ruth looked back down at the pad, frowning. "Victor, you've read the correspondence yourself. Pharmaceuticals' own field people out here were complaining about the inefficiency of their own methods, and this Wedermeyer just blew it off. It's like she—or he, or whatever—never even looked at their analyses of her own corporation's labor policies."

  For a moment, the frown darkened into something very harsh. "The murderous and inhuman labor policies, I should say, since they amounted to consciously working people to death. But the point for the moment is that even their own employees were pointing out that it would be more efficient to start shifting over to increased automation and mechanical cultivation and harvesting."

  "Yes, I know. On the other hand, despite their complaints, Pharmaceuticals was showing a profit."

  "But only because Manpower was giving them a discount rate on their slaves—and pretty damned steep discount, too!" Ruth argued. "That's one of the points their own managers were making—that they couldn't count on that discount rate lasting forever." She grimaced. "If it went out from under them, if they had to start paying the full 'list price' for their slaves, then the inefficiencies their people here on Torch were pointing out would have really come home to bite them! In fact, there was this one—"

  She paged through the documentson her pad for a moment, then found the one she wanted and waved it in triumph.

  "Yeah, this one! From what's-his-name," she glanced at the display, "Menninger. Remember? He was talking about Pharmaceuticals' overall exposure. They were already leasing their entire operational site here on Manpower, but they were counting on Manpower's giving them preferred slave prices, as well, and let's face it, Manpower transtellars don't have a whole lot of fraternal feeling for each other. Manpower's eaten quite a few of its Mesan competitors along the way, and this guy was worried they were setting Pharmaceuticals up for their next sandwich by putting them deep enough in Manpower's pocket they'd have to accept an unfriendly takeover or go bust!"

  Jeremy X cleared his throat. "Let's not forget how closely most Mesan corporations collude with each other, as well, though. Sure, they've demonstrated a huge share of shark DNA over the years, but they do work together, as well. Especially when they're engaged in something the rest of the human race isn't all that likely to want to invest in. Openly, at least. And you can add to that the fact that we're certain that many of them are actually owned, in whole or in part, by Manpower. Like Jessyk."

  Anton pursed his lips, considering the point. "You're suggesting, in other words, that Manpower was deliberately accepting a loss in order to boost the profits of Mesa Pharmaceuticals—in which they possibly have a major ownership share, even if they don't control it outright."

  "Yes."

  "Which was part of my point about wondering if this Wedermeyer might be working for someone besides—or, in addition to, maybe—Pharmaceuticals," Victor said. "If Manpower does have a hidden stake in Pharmaceuticals, then they may have been in a position to go on offering their 'discount rate' forever. As long as they were charging enough to cover their bare production costs, at least. I mean, there's nothing in the correspondence from this end that's concerned with humanitarian considerations. They're simply saying they could squeeze their profit margins upward, in the long run, if they started switching over. Even by their own analysis, it would have taken quite a while to amortize the equipment investment, especially assuming their outlay for slaves stayed where it was. They were more concerned about the long-range consequences of losing that rate—of having Manpower yank it out from under them, or threaten to, at least, at a time when it would give Manpower the greatest leverage with them. But there's nothing in the correspondence from the Mesa end to explain why the locals' analysis was being 'blown off,' to use your own charming term Ruth. Suppose Wedermeyer was quietly representing Manpower's interests? Wanted Pharmaceuticals deeper into Manpower's pocket . . . or simply knew there'd already been a quiet little off-the-books marriage between them? In that case, he or she could very well have been in a position to know they were worrying over nothing. That their 'discount rate' was grandfathered in and wasn't going to be going away anytime soon."

  Ruth had her lips pursed also. "But what would be the point, Jeremy? Oh, I'll grant the possibility of Wedermeyer being working for Manpower. I doubt her own supervisors would have missed it if she was doing it against their interests, though. I mean, Pharmaceuticals has been around for two or three T-centuries, too, so it damned well knows how the game is played. Somebody besides her had to be seeing at least some o
f these memos, given the extended period over which they were written. The fact that she didn't even bother to come up with an argument—not even a specious one—for her position suggests she was pretty damned confident that she wasn't worried about getting hammered by one of her own bosses. That only makes sense if Manpower does own Mesa Pharmaceuticals, and what possible motive could they have had for hiding that connection, really?

  "It's not like their position with Jessyk, where the legal fiction that Jessyk's a separate concern helps give them at least a little cover when they're moving slaves or other covert cargoes. There wouldn't be any point in maintaining that sort of separation from Pharmaceuticals, and there was certainly no legal reason they'd have had to hide that connection. And there are a lot of reasons why they shouldn't have bother. If thw two of them were already connected, they were at least doubling their admninistrative costs by maintaining two separate, divorced operations here on Torch. Not to mention everywhere else the two of them are doing business together. Why do that? Even assuming they are in bed together, and that Manpower is covering its production costs back home, despite the discounted rate, we're still looking at Peter robbing his own pockets to pay his flunky Paul. They were discounting their slaves to Pharmaceuticals by over twenty-five percent. Leaving aside all the other economic inefficiencies built into the relationship, that's a hell of a hit to the profit margin they could've made selling them somewhere else instead of dumping them here to subsidize Pharmaceuticals' inefficient—by their own field managers' estimate—operation!"

  Victor nodded. "I agree, and that's exactly why I don't think there's any logical explanation except . . ."

  "Except what?"

  He shrugged. "I don't know. But we've already agreed that there's something rotten about Manpower that goes beyond their greed and brutality." He pointed to Ruth's reader. "So, for the moment, we can just add this dead fish to the smelly pile."

  PART II

  1921 Post-Diaspora.

  (4023, Christian Era)

  Because the Beowulfers imported a full, functional technological base, and because they were within such close proximity to Sol that scientific data could be transmitted from one planet to another in less than forty years, they never endured any of the decivilizing experiences many other colonies did. In fact, Beowulf has remained pretty much on the cutting edge of science, especially in the life sciences, for the better part of two millennia. Following the horrific damage suffered by Old Earth after its Final War, Beowulf took the lead in reconstruction efforts on the homeworld, and Beowulfers take what is probably a pardonable pride in their achievements. Beowulf's possession of a wormhole junction terminus—especially a terminus of the Manticoran Wormhole Junction, which is the largest and most valuable in known space—hasn't hurt its economic position one bit. In short, when you arrive in Beowulf you will be visiting a very wealthy, very stable, very populous, and very powerful star system which, especially in light of the local autonomy enjoyed by members of the Solarian League, is essentially a single-star polity in its own right.

  —From Chandra Smith and Yoko Watanabe, Beowulf: The Essential Guide for Commercial Travelers. (Gonzaga & Gonzaga, Landing, 1916 PD)

  Chapter Eight

  February, 1921 PD

  Brice Miller began slowing the cab as he approached Andrew's Curve, often called Artlett's Folly by some of Brice's less charitable relatives. The curve in the roller coaster track was also a rise, which tended to fool the rider into thinking the centrifugal force wouldn't be as savage as it was if the cab went into the curve at full speed.

  In the amusement park's heyday, the cabs had been designed to handle such velocities. But that had been decades ago. Age, spotty maintenance, and the deterioration brought on by the nearby moon Hainuwele's plasma torus had made a lot of the rides in the enormous amusement park in orbit around the giant ringed planet Ameta too risky for public use. Which, of course, just added to the downward spiral caused by the original folly of the park's creator, Michael Parmley, who had thought up this white elephant and poured both a fortune and his extended family into it.

  Brice's great-grandfather, he had been. By the time Brice was born, the park's founder had been dead for almost forty years. The small clan he left behind in possession of the now-ramshackle and essentially defunct amusement park was presided over—you couldn't really use the term "ruled" to apply to such a contentious and disputatious lot as her multitude of offspring and relatives—by his widow, Elfride Margarete Butre.

  She was Brice's favorite relative, except for his two cousins James Lewis and Edmund Hartman, who were the closest to his own age. And, of course, except for his very very favorite relative, the same uncle Andrew Artlett for whom the curve or the folly—it had been both, really—were named.

  Brice loved his uncle's curve, although he always approached it very carefully since the accident. He'd been with his uncle when Andrew gave the curve its name. Coming into that section of the giant roller coaster at a truly reckless velocity, both of them whooping with glee, Andrew had managed to break the cab loose from the tracks. Not from the magnetic track, of course—it would probably have taken a shipyard tug or a small warship to do that—but from the magnetic grips themselves. The metal must have gotten fatigued over the long years.

  Whatever the cause, the two grips had snapped as neatly as you could ask for. And there they were, a forty-two-year-old-going-on-twelve uncle and his eight-year-old-and-aging-rapidly nephew, in a cab not more than ten meters in any dimension, tumbling through space. The proverbially "empty" space, except this portion of the universe contained a lot of ionized particles vented from Hainuwele and swept into Ameta's magnetosphere, along with gases from Yamato's Nebula. They had no source of propulsion usable on anything except maglev tracks, and with only the meager life support systems you'd expect for an amusement park roller coaster cab which had never been designed to be occupied for longer than a few minutes at a time.

  Still, they managed to eke out the air and power long enough to be rescued by the clan's grande dame, who came after them with the somehow-still-functional yacht that had been one of the many follies left behind by her husband. Fortunately, Elfride Margarete Butre had been a renowned pilot in her day, and the old lady still had the knack of flying by the proverbial seat of her pants. That was about the only way she could have managed to pull off the rescue before the cab's shielding was overwhelmed by the harsh and lethal radiation in Ameta's magnetosphere, given that the yacht's instrument systems were in the same parlous state of repair as just about everything owned by the clan of a material nature.

  On the negative side, the same Elfride Margarete Butre had an acid tongue that suffered no fools gladly and suffered downright screwballs not at all. As it happened, the com systems on both the yacht and the now-adrift roller coaster cab had been among the few pieces of equipment still functioning almost perfectly. Nor, alas, could the com system in the cab be turned off by the inhabitants. It had been designed, after all, to pass on instructions to idiot tourists. So, the entire rescue was accompanied, from start to finish and with not more than four seconds of continuous silence, with what had gone down into the clan's extensive legendry as Ganny's Second-Best Skinning.

  (The Very Best Skinning had been the one she bestowed upon her deceased husband, when she first learned that he'd died of a heart attack in the middle of attempting to recoup his lost fortunes in a game of chance—right at the point where he'd triumphed but before his opponents had turned over the purse. Leaving aside the expletives, the gist of it had been: "Forty years living on the edge, you put me through! And you couldn't hold on for four more seconds?")

  Fortunately for Brice, his age had sheltered him from most of the ferocious diatribe. Still, even the penumbra of the vitriol poured upon Uncle Andrew by Ganny El had scarred him for life.

  So he liked to think, anyway. The incident was several years in the past, and Brice was now fourteen years old. That is to say, the age when all bright and right-thinking la
ds come to realize that theirs is a solemn fate. Doomed, perhaps by destiny, perhaps by chance, but certainly by their exquisite sensitivity, to the tormented life of the outcast. Condemned to awkward silences and inept speech; consigned to the outer darkness of misunderstanding; sentenced to a life of loneliness.

  And celibacy, of course, he'd told himself until three days earlier—whereupon his uncle Andrew piled misery onto melancholy by explaining to him the fine distinction between celibacy and chastity.

  "Oh, cut it out, Brice. You're just in a funk because—"

  He held up a meaty thumb. "Cousin Jennifer won't give you the time of day, and for reasons known only to boys who have been turned into hollow mindless shells by hormones—yes, I knew the reasons myself way back then, but I've long since forgotten since I stopped being a teenage cretin—your 'affections,' as they are politely called, have naturally settled on the girl in your vicinity who is probably the best-looking and certainly the most self-absorbed."

  "That's not—"

  "Point two." The forefinger came up to join the thumb. "You have therefore persuaded yourself that you are bound for a life of solitary splendor. If you can't have Jennifer Foley, you'll have no lass for a bride. Not that you've got any business daydreaming about brides, when you've got Tempestuous Taub riled at you for your dismal performance in trigonometry."

  Brice scowled. His much older cousin Andrew Taub was the very least favorite of his cousins, at the moment. It was preposterous to expect a fourteen year old boy gripped by life's great despairs to attend to the tedious—no, leaden—dullness of sines and cosines and such. Even a teacher as anal-retentive as Andy Taub ought to realize that much.

  "That's not—"

  Remorselessly, the middle finger joined its fellows. "Point three. You don't care about marriage anyway. You're only telling yourself that because you're still"—he paused for a moment, his heavy features disfigured by a caricature of thought—"at least four months away, by my best estimate, from the liberating realization that you don't need to be married to get laid—which is actually what your Mongol horde of hormones has got you worked up about, when it comes to Cousin Jennifer."