To end in fire earc, p.21
To End in Fire - eARC, page 21
“Yes. Does ‘security’ include your name?”
The man stopped and turned around, his mouth slightly agape. Then he shook himself.
“Oh. Sorry. I forget stuff like that. I’m Antwone Carpinteria.”
“And my new supervisor?”
“Not…exactly.” He shook his head. “You’ll find that TA-3 isn’t much given to hierarchical arrangements.” He headed for the interior door once more. “Just don’t forget the drawn and quartered part. You can ignore the Iron Maiden, though, because it’s off in a corner. But don’t trip over the rack.”
The passageway beyond the door was short…and opened into a chamber that explained the building’s architecture. It, too, was circular, and it bordered on the gigantic. It had to be at least eighty or ninety meters in diameter, and one of the largest holo projectors she’d ever seen was mounted in the center of a ceiling at least twenty meters above the floor.
Two people awaited them, both in the maroon and green uniform of the Darius System Navy: a captain and a lieutenant commander. The captain was female, on the burly side, with very dark skin and blond hair cut rather long for a naval officer. The lieutenant commander—he seemed quite a bit older than his superior, oddly enough—was male, with the sort of unremarkable face and build that legend ascribed to top espionage agents.
Carpinteria waved a hand at them. “Captain Bernice Augenbraun. Lieutenant Commander Vergel Suarez.” He jerked a short, pudgy thumb at Gail. “Gail Weiss. Civilian analyst.”
Both officers nodded politely to her, and she nodded back. Then Carpinteria clapped his hands, and the grin was back on his face.
“And now, let’s have the show,” he said. “Back behind the lines, please.”
He pointed to a twelve-centimeter wide yellow line. It paralleled the chamber’s walls, three meters out from them to enclose the holo display’s area. He waited till they were all safely outside the hologram’s display area, and then clapped his hands.
“Avanti!” he said, and the chamber was plunged instantly into darkness. But that darkness was the black-velvet background for a breathtakingly perfect hologram of a star system, and as her eyes adjusted to the dimness, she began discerning its details.
It was dominated, using the term loosely, by the orangey brilliance of what was clearly a K-class star. There were at least five planets, but only one of them, the fourth from the star, lay within the liquid-water zone and showed the cloud-swirled blue of a world with atmosphere. As if to compensate, there were two asteroid belts. She was pretty sure the outer one, which was exceptionally dense, lay outside the primary’s hyper-limit, and the tiny fireflies of what were clearly resource extraction ships swarmed through it. Tiny as their icons might be, those ships were grossly out of scale, or she would never have seen them with her naked eye.
The outer belt might supply the raw materials, but the platforms which used them were much farther in-system, tethered to the gravitational anchor of the habitable planet and safely inside the hyper limit. There were at least a dozen artificial habitats, some of them downright huge, as well as a dense flock of what were clearly orbital refineries and an enormous bevy of orbital shipyards. Dense blocks of alphanumeric characters floated in the hologram, pegged to specific features. There were…a lot of them, and no doubt they contained tons of information, but most of them were too far away from her present viewpoint for her to read.
She had no idea where that system might be, but it was obviously a major industrial node.
“Welcome to…let’s call it System Alpha,” Carpinteria’s voice said out of the murk to her left. “Your job is to help us figure out how to defend it against a massive attack. Unless we’re wrong, if it has to be defended at all, the graserhead MDMs are going to be a key element in our tactics, and you’re our leading expert on them.”
Which was true, Gail reflected. She wasn’t a physicist, but she was a topflight naval analyst, and she’d led the teams which had evolved tactical—and strategic—doctrine for the new graserheads. But why was Carpinteria talking about just the MDMs? Why not the torpedoes, as well? She could think of several stealth applications for them right off the top of her head. Were they…off the table, for some reason? If so, why? And what was “Alpha,” and where—?
She shook that thought—all those thoughts—off. The less she knew about anything they didn’t want to tell her about, the better.
“You said ‘massive,’” she said instead. “How massive?”
“Really, really, really massive, most likely,” Carpinteria replied cheerily. “With everything the Grand Alliance has in its toolkit. On the other hand, you may spare no expense in its defense. Well, almost.”
What the hell is going on? Gail wondered.
City of Old Chicago,
Old Earth,
Sol System.
“Where we going?” Catherine Montaigne asked.
She’d been whisked into the air car almost as soon as she’d landed at the O’Hare Shuttle Port. It was supposed to be taking her to deliver a speech on behalf of the Anti-Slavery League. She’d given a lot of those right here in Old Chicago, over the years, but they’d just flown past her normal landing platform. The one that led below the city’s surface streets to give access to the capital’s Old Quarter, since most of the Quarter was underground. In fact, it extended downward for more than a kilometer in some places.
“The Loop,” as it was also known, was the Solarian League’s most famous ghetto, and by far its largest one. It was home for millions of the capital’s immigrants, who came from all over the League—especially from the poverty-stricken worlds of the Verge. Immigrants, both legal and illegal, could be found all over Old Terra, but by far the greatest, densest concentration of them was right here in the capital.
Other long settled and wealthy core worlds kept tighter restrictions on immigration than Old Terra, and especially on immigration from the Verge. But the human race’s homeworld would have made that difficult, to say the least. It was the most polyglot planet in the human-settled galaxy. With so many family and other close ties to so many other worlds, it was simply impossible to regulate immigration all that tightly, and Old Terra was the destination of dreams, the planet with streets of gold…especially for refugees fleeing the Protectorates and the Office of Frontier Security’s “benevolent oversight.”
“Soldier Field’s back that way,” Catherine half-protested now, looking over her shoulder at the rapidly receding landing platform.
“Your days of giving speeches in Soldier Field are over, girl,” the woman sitting next to her in the rear seat said.
Her name was Fanantenanirainy, which combined her personal and surname after the custom of her homeworld of Antananarivo. She was every bit as imposing as her name, too. Her long, braided hair was about the same coffee color as her eyes and skin, and even sitting she was a head taller than Catherine. She probably weighed three times as much, too, and while some of that was fat, most of it was just her natural bulk.
Antananarivo, originally settled by people from Madagascar and Mauritius, was near enough to Sol to be considered a Core World, but it was clearly a second—or third—tier system, economically. Like many of Old Terra’s immigrants, Fanantenanirainy’s parents had moved back to the homeworld in search of brighter economic horizons when she was four T-years old. She’d lived here ever since and spent most of her adult life in Old Chicago, as a political activist engaged in the struggle against genetic slavery. In fact, she’d been the Anti-Slavery League’s Sol System vice president for the past two decades.
Happily for all concerned, she answered to the name of “Fanny.”
“We’re headed to the Mandelbaum Amphitheater in Evanston,” she continued. “But first…”
The air car began a shallow descent, sliding smoothly down the altitude lanes until it was no more than a hundred meters above a very broad surface avenue that ran more or less parallel to Lake Michigan. The thoroughfare still bore its ancient name of Lake Shore Drive, which was a bit absurd, two thousand years into the Diaspora. Over the last twenty centuries, the actual lakeshore had been pushed farther and farther to the east as the city expanded onto landfill. By now, Lake Shore Drive was on average four kilometers from the waterfront and never came closer to the lake than one kilometer.
“What in the—”
Cathy stared at the vid screen in the rear compartment, which gave her a better view of what lay ahead than she could have gotten looking through the windshield over the shoulders of the driver and the very large fellow in the passenger seat, whom no one had come right out and called her bodyguard.
“Why are all these people here?” she asked.
Lake Shore drive was bordered by very wide slidewalks and old-fashioned sidewalks—more like promenades, especially on the eastern side, nearer the lake—and they were packed. The huge crowd stretched as far ahead as she could see, and as she looked out the side window, she saw people perched on virtually every balcony of the towers that flanked the Drive.
“I will say it’s always been one of your most attractive qualities, Cathy,” Fanny told her with a grin. “You don’t have the slightest interest in adulation or public acclaim.” She gestured at the screen. “They turned out to greet you.”
“It’s freezing out there!” Cathy protested.
That statement might not have been totally factually accurate, but it came close, especially for the sensibilities of someone who’d been raised in Landing on Manticore itself. She felt sure it was at least ten whole degrees above the freezing temperature of water, but it was also late in an early April afternoon, sliding into evening in Old Chicago, at the bottom of a deeply shadowed ceramacrete canyon between the capital’s enormous towers, and a brisk wind came whipping in off the lake.
“Freezing—nonsense!” Fanny said briskly. “It’s a beautiful day. A little chilly, yes, but this is Old Chicago. You see what those people are wearing? They’re called thermal jackets. They been around for more than two thousand years.”
She shook her head at Cathy, then leaned forward.
“Turn on the exterior audio, Andy,” she told the driver, and he fiddled with something on his panel. A moment later, Cathy winced as the roar of massed cheers flooded the air car.
“Turn it down!” she said, and Fanny chuckled again.
“You can turn it all the way off, Andy. I just wanted to give Little Miss Modesty a sense of what’s happening, since she’s obviously still mired in ancient history.”
By now, they’d reached street-level, and the air car was in ground effect mode, thirty centimeters above the pavement as it skimmed along the Drive through the enormous crowd held back by barricades and a double line of police. Cathy was dumbfounded.
“I’d assumed that if I was met by any crowd except the regulars who came to hear me talk at Soldier Field—okay, that was a fair number of years back—that they’d be booing me as a Manticoran mass murderer.”
Fanny’s shrug was every bit as massive as she was.
“Most of these people are either immigrants or the children of immigrants, Cathy. The big majority come from the Verge—or their parents or grandparents did—and a significant fraction are former Manpower slaves, or at least related to ex-slaves. You think they give a damn how many Mesans got killed? Not very many of them believe the Mesan version of events to begin with, and those who do figure the bastards had it coming anyway. Of course—”
She pointed toward the west with the thumb.
“If we were driving down Michigan Avenue, you might get a different reception. But screw those people. They’ve had almost four months since Harrington came over the wall, Damned well time they got over it, but half of them are still hiding out in their fancy apartments. Especially today.”
She swiveled ponderously in her seat to face Cathy as squarely as possible.
“I hope you’ve got your speech ready. There’ll be somewhere north of a quarter million people in the amphitheater, and way, way more than that watching on video. We’ve got a system-wide hookup. Best estimate— What’s it up to now, Yusuf?”
The bodyguard glanced down at his uni-link.
“A little more than three hundred and twenty million are already tuned in listening to the talking heads. That’ll grow a lot, once the event actually starts and she goes live.”
“Holy crap.” Cathy’s eyes were very wide.
“Like I said, I hope you’ve got your speech ready,” Fanny said, and those eyes narrowed immediately.
“My speeches are always ready.”
CNO’s Office,
Admiralty Building,
City of Old Chicago,
Sol System.
Winston Kingsford looked away from the HD to his new Director—so new, in fact, that he hadn’t actually been sworn in yet—of Naval Intelligence.
“Have you ever seen her speak before?” he asked, nodding his head toward the HD, where Cathy Montaigne had been speaking for almost twenty minutes, and Charles Gannon nodded.
“Quite a few times on recordings, and twice in person.”
“You saw her in person? Where?”
“At Soldier Field—where else? She used to speak there quite often when she was living here in exile.”
Kingsford shook his head in a gesture that bordered on disbelief.
“Chuck, I’m having a hard time picturing you underground, listening to a radical firebrand’s speech in that location. Soldier Field’s what…two hundred meters underground?”
“Not that far.” Gannon shrugged. “More like a hundred, and it’s not hard to find if you have a guide. And I had any number to choose from. No grad student in my field is worth a damn if he or she hasn’t snuck into Soldier Field to hear radical speeches—not to mention sampling the coffees and teas and…other substances, whose precise nature I will glide over, in the multitude of shops in the Old Quarter. I didn’t need guides anyway, since I spent several years as a grad student at the University of Chicago myself.”
He looked down and plucked the sleeve of his jacket to highlight the elbow patches.
“After I became a respectable faculty member, though, I always wore one of these outfits when I ventured into the Loop.”
“Protective coloration?” Kingsford smiled.
“Advertising, actually. No professor in my field’s considered worth a damn by his best grad students if he doesn’t make the occasional appearance himself. And Montaigne was always the biggest draw.”
“I can see why.” Kingsford looked back at the HD. “She’s not at all what I expected.”
“People—well, the proper class of people—are always surprised when they hear Montaigne speak. She has such a flamboyant political reputation that they expect some sort of shrill, over-the-top, haranguing rabble-rouser. Instead…”
He nodded toward the figure of the woman at the podium in the Mandelbaum Amphitheater.
“Instead, they get a calm, methodical presentation of a point of view that makes them uncomfortable, instead of scornful, because it’s so carefully and thoroughly reasoned—and usually not something they want to hear.”
“You sound like you admire her.”
“Montaigne has integrity, and she places principles above whatever personal ambitions she may have. Well, to be fair, someone with her money doesn’t have any reason for that kind of ambition, but you know the political animal even better than I do. Ninety percent of them are fueled entirely by ego and narcissism, and those are the furthest thing imaginable from her motivations. So, yes, I do admire her—respect might be a better word. Quite a bit, in fact, whatever differences I have with her. Which, by the way, aren’t as many as you may think. I’ve agreed with her for decades—not years, Winston; decades—on the subject of genetic slavery and the vileness of Manpower Incorporated.”
The CNO’s expression wasn’t exactly a scowl, but it came close.
“I don’t doubt it. But that woman’s consorted for those same decades—still does!—with terrorists.” He made a downward waving gesture with his hand. “And please spare me the old saw about one person’s terrorist being another person’s freedom fighter. I grant you there’s a lot of truth to it, but don’t expect me to approve of their tactics. I can’t think of any officer in the Solarian League Navy who ever snuck into the personal quarters of an undersecretary of the interior, cut his throat—and then removed the head of a statue and replaced it with the severed one.”
“Ah, yes.” Gannon smiled. “One of Jeremy X’s more notorious exploits. Would it be churlish of me to point out that the terrorists didn’t simply leave Undersecretary Albescue’s head behind, but his right hand, as well? Holding a chip that contained the undersecretary’s lovingly recorded sexual exploits…prominent among them being the abuse of slave children.”
“Albescue was a swine,” Kingsford said in a disgusted tone. “That still doesn’t mean—”
“Winston, leave off. You look at things like this from the standpoint of a man who spent his entire adult life as a naval officer. I came in as a rating, remember? From the view down there—and sure as hell from my later studies—I’ve developed a theory about this. To wit, the distinction between a proper soldier and a dirty rotten terrorist seems to be mostly a matter of the scale of the killing. If you smite your foe on an industrial scale—especially from a distance—you’re a fine fellow. Do it up close and retail, and you’re a vicious murderer. Now, I’ll grant that there are terrorists and there are terrorists, and some of them don’t give much of a good goddamn how many innocent bystanders they take out. After all, they’re terrorists, right? They want their atrocities to be as visible, as striking, and as horrifying as physically possible. The bigger the damned body count the better! But the truth?” He looked Kingsford in the eye and shook his head. “The Audubon Ballroom was always a lot more careful about ‘collateral damage’ than the SLN, especially when we were supporting OFS, and you know it, Winston.”
