To end in fire earc, p.58
To End in Fire - eARC, page 58
Tortuga by the Sea,
Sultan III;
and
TRNS Rei Amador,
Jethro Orbit,
Hole-in-the-Wall System.
“I’m getting sick of this!” Ursula Mason snarled. “Bad enough you insisted on a bidding war instead of just offering a straight up price—”
“What?” the woman on Mason’s display interrupted. “I came all the way in from Jethro to Davout just to avoid that stupid four-hour com loop after you insisted all of our ships had to stay safely away from Hole-in-the-Wall. I could be sitting there on my own bridge, drinking coffee, instead of listening to your horseshit complaints!” She shook her head in disgust. “A donate-to-charity denizen of Hole-in-the-Wall is upset that I’m trying to get the best price for my goods? That’s rich. Next I’ll be hearing fish complain that water is wet!”
“Damn you, Butry! This has gone on long enough. Start selling or—”
“Captain!” the communications officer of the watch interrupted. “Captain! I’ve got a major hyper footprint! There’s at least—” She studied her displays. “At least a dozen ships just made translation!”
She watched the displays for several more seconds, then turned to look at Mason, and her face was tight with anxiety.
“Ma’am, I don’t have any kind of light-speed confirmation yet, but from the wedge strengths and acceleration curves, I think four of them are battlecruisers.”
“Battlecruisers?” Mason strode over to look at the displays for herself.
“Battlecruisers,” she muttered.
The only battlecruiser already in Hole-in-the-Wall was the flagship of Ivan Kraus’s three-ship “squadron.” But that battlecruiser was antiquated. Maybe not a museum candidate—yet—but getting close. Mason was pretty sure—no, she was dead certain—that the battlecruisers which had just come over the wall weren’t antiquated at all. The good news was that they were more likely Solarian than Grand Alliance, judging from the acceleration rates. But even a quartet of Sollies would shred anything that went up against them.
“Time to go,” she hissed. “Now!
She wheeled away, headed for the tower entrance and the shuttle to her own orbiting ship, but she paused briefly beside the communications officer.
“Send it out on the all-ships channel. Anybody who wants to run had better start making tracks.”
And that was her good deed for the day. Now it was time to run.
* * *
Unlike Hole-in-the-Wall’s regular residents, Jarmila Soubry had known what was coming. She’d also held Rei Amador’s impeller nodes at full readiness ever since their arrival in-system, despite the additional wear and tear that inflicted. That meant it took her ship and her two light cruiser consorts less than five minutes to bring up their wedges…and their sidewalls came with them. That was, perhaps, an unfriendly thing to do in the midst of polite company. (Well, fairly polite.) But when the company consisted of criminals with a long history of violence, she made no apologies about it.
Fortunately—for it—the single pirate cruiser sharing Jethro’s distant parking orbit with “Citizen Commodore Beaumont’s” ships chose not to make an issue of it. It was too busy bringing up its own wedge to worry about anything like that. Soubry considered calling on it to surrender, but that was only an auto reflex of the naval officer she’d been. A good pirate would be more concerned about running herself than breaking the kneecaps of any fellow pirates. Besides, the poor bastards weren’t going anywhere unless the Sollies let her. Unlike Rei Amador and her smaller sisters, the pirate cruiser had shut down her nodes completely when she went into orbit. She was looking at a minimum of forty minutes to get them activated, and if the incoming Sollies were really interested in catching her, she was as good as caught.
The situation around Sultan III, on the other hand, seemed likely to be more interesting.
“Send a signal to Captain Ludendorff,” she told her com officer. “I know they’ve got our transponders on file, but…better safe than sorry.”
Amherst Importers and Exporters,
Tortuga by the Sea,
Sultan III
and
TRNS Bulavin,
Sultan III Orbit,
Hole-in-the-Wall System.
“Do we have enough time?” Hormuzd Kham’s tone was intent but calm. Alignment operatives at his level weren’t given to panic.
“No.” Eileen Patel had been working the numbers. “They’re coming in with too much initial velocity for even Hudson to outrun.”
“Wonderful.” Kham grimaced. On the other hand, that geometry had never been unlikely, if they really had to run. He looked at the woman at the com station. “Roberta?”
“I don’t think they’re here for us,” she said. “They seem to be really, really pissed off with Citizen Commodore Beaumont, actually.”
“Do they?”
“Yeah, when you strip it down, what they’re really saying is ‘Stop, thieves! Resistance is futile!’” She snorted. “I think they want their Cataphracts back.”
“And we’re caught in the middle of it.” Kham puffed his cheeks for a moment, then shrugged.
“Okay, standard protocols,” he said. “Roberta, make sure the secure server’s dumped to Hudson. Eileen, you make sure we’re not leaving anything incriminating in the warehouse. I don’t think we are, but double check. I’d hate to lose it, but better to blow it if we have to than to leave any breadcrumbs. When Roberta’s completed the upload, slag all the computers. Meanwhile—” he pushed his chair back “—I’ll be prepping the shuttle.”
* * *
“Annnd…we’re down,” Ruth announced as her covert link to the Amherst servers went dead.
“They’re prepping their shuttle, too,” Bulavin’s tactical officer announced.
“Pity.” Cachat pursed his lips. “A part of me hoped they’d be confident enough the Sollies were after us, not simple honest merchant traders like themselves, to try riding it out in place. At least that way we might’ve gotten some Alignment operatives to play with.” He shrugged. “Of course, unlike Milliken, they’d’ve been dead by the time we got our hands on them. And we’ve already lost their secret files.”
“I’m sure they uploaded all of them to Hudson,” Ruth pointed out.
“And if we grabbed her, her files would be gone—or her fusion bottle would blow—before we got a single kilobyte out of their computers,” Cachat replied, but although his tone was resigned, it was also philosophical. “And it’s unlikely we’ve got anything really sensitive in the data you were able to vacuum up, Ruth. But that’s the way intelligence ops go. Spectacular successes are spectacular precisely because they happen so rarely. Most of them go a lot more like this, with partial success, at best. But you got one hell of a lot of data. I wouldn’t be surprised if, between you and Anton, you were able to get at least a few nuggets out of it, but we always knew it might work out this way. And even in a worst-case scenario, we know a lot more than we did about their operations in general and in Hole-in-the-Wall, in particular. I’m pretty sure this has been a valuable node for them, and since we aren’t planning on burning it to the ground, they may just decide to come back again. Which would mean we’d know where to find them, wouldn’t it?”
He smiled unpleasantly.
* * *
“Well, this sucks,” Hormuzd Kham said philosophically as he stepped onto Hudson’s command deck.
Given the possibility that customs inspectors might get a look at the ship’s interior, it was just about as bare-bones as one might have expected out of a slightly down-at-the-heels tramp freighter. Or it looked that way, at any rate. Behind the façade of worn, well-used consoles in need of replacement were sensors, instrumentation, and an engineering plant that were all state-of-the-art and perfectly maintained.
“Shuttle’s secured, Sir,” Hudson’s captain said as Patel and Bailey followed Kham onto the command deck.
“All right,” Kham replied. “In that case, let’s get out of Dodge.”
“Yes, sir!” the captain said, and Hudson—whose nodes were always hot, if anyone had thought to check—brought up her wedge and accelerated smoothly out of Sultan III orbit. Under the circumstances, she settled for the sedate acceleration one might have expected from the sort of freighter she looked like. After all, the last thing she wanted was to draw extra attention to herself.
“I’ve always wondered,” Roberta Bailey said, watching the astrogation display. “What is Dodge? And why would people want to leave it in a hurry?”
“You should study more history,” Kham told her. “Dodge was a town on Ante Diaspora Old Terra. It was the terminus for regular cattle drives—men on horseback who manually forced beasts weighing more than half a ton across hundreds of miles of wilderness to be slaughtered. All of the ‘cowboys’ were armed with primitive gunpowder weapons, and they were a pretty rowdy crowd. Sometimes gunfights would erupt—once they reached Dodge, they’d typically get drunk—and the less bellicose types would say ‘Let’s get out of Dodge.’”
Patel laughed.
“He’s pulling your leg, Roberta.”
“No kidding.” Bailey scowled. “How gullible do I look, Hormuzd?”
* * *
“There they go,” Ruth murmured to herself as she watched the repeater display that showed Hudson scudding away from Sultan III.
The freighter wasn’t alone, although she’d clearly been the readiest of the ragtag ships orbiting Hole-in-the-Wall. The next fastest fugitive was at least thirty minutes behind her, and each of them had picked a different direction in which to run. None of them had the base velocity or acceleration to stay away from the Solarian warships, so obviously they were hoping that with only so many platforms available, the Solarian CO would choose to run down someone else.
Bulavin wasn’t even trying to run, of course. Neither had it made any move to interfere with Hudson’s departure. If he couldn’t get his hands on its secure servers, Cachat wanted the Alignment to escape Hole-in-the-Wall secure in the knowledge that none of their information had been compromised.
Especially because it might have been.
“God, I love being a spy,” Ruth said, leaning back in her own chair in her personal quarters. “And they finally let me do it.”
Of course, as Cachat had already pointed out, the odds were that she hadn’t been a successful spy. Or, at least, not a totally successful one. She did wish there’d been a way to get into that secure server of Amherst’s. Still, they’d stolen a lot of material. Whether any of it was truly useful was more than she could say, and whether or not they’d ever be able to access it remained an open question. She thought they could crunch their way through the encryption in the end. She and Anton Zilwicki had really good computers and even better software. But maybe this whole adventure would turn out to have been pointless. Well, except for at least temporarily scouring clean a notorious nest of ruthless and bloodthirsty pirates and outlaws, of course.
But that wasn’t Ruth’s line of work.
She was a spy.
“It’s too bad we don’t get to wear fancy uniforms with lots of stripes and ribbons on them,” she told herself. “But…Well, granted, that would be sort of self-defeating.”
Café Bilbao
Dedrick Tower
Mendel, capital of Mesa
“May I make a suggestion, Arianne?” asked her father Thomas, after finishing his cup of tea and setting it back down on the small table they were occupying in a corner of the café.
“Of course, Dad.”
He pursed his lips, clasped his hands together in front of his chest, and spent a moment looking at her. “Let me preface this by saying that if you think my suggestion would offend—even irritate—your friend, then we’ll forget I made it.”
Arianne smiled. “Dad, there really aren’t many things in the universe, so far as I’ve been able to tell, that offend Saburo. And he handles irritation by…well, not suppressing it, exactly.” She took a sip from her own cup, giving herself time to think about how to say what she was about to say.
But her father beat her to it. With a little smile, he said: “I imagine that someone with his body count can put irritation in perspective.”
She choked down a laugh and set down her cup. “Well, I suppose that’s one way to put it. I was going to just say he was very even-tempered—which he really is, by the way. It’s one of the things I like about him. I don’t know how well you remember my former boyfriend—”
“Kenneth? Rather well—possibly because I found him a bit irritating. Dear God, that man could turn any mishap into a catastrophe.”
Arianne did laugh, this time. “Couldn’t he? Anyway, don’t worry about offending or irritating Saburo. I may or may not agree to your suggestion, since I don’t know what it is yet, but it’ll be something we can gauge on its own merits.”
“All right, then. What I suggest is that instead of bringing Saburo over to have dinner with us—or inviting us to your place—start by allowing your mother and sister to encounter him in a setting with more people, so they can observe rather than have to engage him directly. And make it a setting that allows them to see him through the eyes of the people who actually work with him every day.”
She frowned a little. “Like what?”
“Like a celebration of the Mumps, specifically. More generally, a celebration of the progress Mesa has made over the past few months in creating a new society. Invite some key people from the Mumps—obviously, that would include Saburo—along with some people from the administration you think would be helpful. And, of course, some people from the Engagement. That, along with the fact that we’re also your family, would be enough to get us into the affair.”
Arianne stared at him. “I’m…not…I’m not sure what would be gained.”
“Arianne, think. You’re too close to this. Leaving aside the personal relationship you’ve developed with the man, you’ve been working alongside Saburo for months. He’s become what you might call a complete human being to you. But what do your mother or sister know about him? Nothing, except that he’s a notorious Ballroom terrorist—call him a ‘striker,’ if you prefer—and the concept of ‘Ballroom striker’ is just an abstraction to them. If you do it the way I’m suggesting, they get to encounter him in a broader context and can interact with him—or not—however they choose. Whereas if you plunk him straight down next to them at a dinner table you’ll be jamming them into a corner.”
She thought about it. Put that way, she could see his point. But there was something that made her bridle—
“Dad, how come you aren’t having a problem with this?”
He chuckled. “You’ve been in existence for almost half a century and haven’t figured out yet that people are different?” He shrugged. “It’s probably due to our varied experience. Your mother’s an artist. That makes her sensitive to what I’ll call the human condition but it doesn’t give her much exposure to it beyond what she’s encountered in her own life.”
“Fair enough. But you and JoAnne are both educators, and if anything I think JoAnne is likely to have more trouble accepting Saburo than anyone else in the family.”
He shook his head. “‘Educator’ is too broad a term. JoAnne is a teacher. And the kids she teaches are and always have been full citizens. I’m an administrator, and quite a bit of my work—you might be surprised how much—required me to deal with the education of slaves.”
She reached down but saw that her cup was empty. She preferred coffee, though, and she’d already had two cups. That was her limit for the day. Any more and she’d get jittery. “Slaves? What about seccies?”
“Seccies were on their own. Whatever educational systems they had, they had to create and maintain themselves. For the most part, that was handled by the criminal syndicates and religious denominations. But slaves weren’t allowed any self-organization at all, so their education had to be provided by Mesan authorities.” Seeing that she was still staring at him, he added: “Arianne, whatever else Mesa was—and still is—it’s a highly advanced technical society. Illiterate and ignorant slaves are simply of no use.”
He sighed and stared down for a moment into his empty cup, as if he was reading tea leaves—except there weren’t any there. “I’ve understood for a long time just how hideous a society we created here—though not for us, of course. I’m supposed to look down on someone like Saburo because he’s a killer? At least he committed his killings on a retail scale—and he chose his targets carefully and for a good reason. We were just indiscriminate mass murderers. All of it justified by the supreme goal of uplifting the human race—and never mind if it was done on the corpses and crushed lives of real actual people.”
“Dad, that’s not really fair to us.”
“As individuals? No, it isn’t. But nobody is just an individual, Arianne. Every one of us is also a member of a society, and carries that responsibility also. And that doesn’t change simply because the society places extreme limits on what options an individual might have. Yes, very tight limits were placed on us—those of us full citizens on Mesa who disapproved of what Mesa had become. So what? Even tighter limits were placed on someone like Saburo—or Jeremy X, for that matter.”
He broke off long enough to order another cup of tea, using the autoserver. Then said: “My point is simply that if people are going to accept the constraints they were placed under—and forgive their sins because of those constraints—then it behooves them to extend that courtesy to others as well. I’m not going to condemn a man like Saburo for his past choices, since I find it quite easy to understand why he made them. I don’t think I would have made those same choices myself, but—”
Here, he smiled. “If I’d had his hand-to-eye coordination, I might have. Who knows? But what really matters are the choices that he—all of us—make now. And from what you’ve told me—and I’ve spoken to other people about him, after I realized the two of you were in a personal relationship—Saburo’s choices seem to have been very impressive.”
The new cup of tea emerged from the autoserver, and Thomas reached for it. After taking a sip, he set the cup down and smiled again, more widely.
