Eric Flint's Blog, page 312

1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies – Snippet 19

1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies – Snippet 19

Chapter 11

Undisclosed location near Wietze, USE

Ann Koudsi finished her morning cup of broth — it had been unseasonably chilly overnight — and nosed back into her books and progress charts again. As the second in charge of the rotary drill test rig, and ultimately, the superintendent who would be responsible for the new machine and its crew in the field, it was her job to be The Final Authority on all things pertaining to its operation. That, in turn, meant minor or full mastery of a wide range of topics, including practical geology, mechanical engineering, the physics of pressurized fluids and gases, and even organizational management. To name but a few.

So it was not merely frustrating but alarming and infuriating when, once again, concentration on the words, and charts, and formulae did not come easily. Indeed, she discovered that she had been reading the same line about assessing imminent well-head failures because, instead of seeing it, she was seeing something else in her mind’s eye:

Ulrich Rohrbach, down-time crew chief for the rig.

Which was not just foolishness, but utter, stupid, and dangerous foolishness. As she had kept telling herself over the last nine months. It was foolishness to allow him to court her at all. Foolish that they had started taking all their meals together. Foolish that they had spent Christmas visiting what was left of his war-torn family: a widowed sister and her two perilously adorable kids. More foolish still when they had started holding hands just before Valentine’s Day, a mostly up-time tradition which he had somehow learned of (Ann secretly suspected their mutual boss, Dave Willcocks, of playing matchmaker). And most foolish of all had been their first kiss as they were laughing beneath the Maypole just weeks ago.

And there were so many reason why it was all extraordinarily foolish. Firstly, Ulrich was a down-timer, albeit an extraordinary gentlemen and more patient than any up-time American would have been in regard to the glacial progress of their relationship. It was foolish because Ulrich barely had a fourth grade education, although, truth be told, his reading had become much faster and broader in the past half year and revealed that his mind was not slow, merely starved. And it was foolish because he just didn’t look the way she had imagined the man of her dreams would look: he was not tall, dark, or particularly handsome. But on the other hand, he had kind eyes, thick sandy hair, dimples, a wonderful bass laugh, and a surprisingly muscular build, which, compacted into his sturdy 5’8″ frame, would have put any number of up-time body-builders to shame.

And what had been especially foolish about their first kiss was her own response: not merely eager, but starved. She had absolutely embarrassed herself. And why? Because, as she learned when she started flipping backward through the months on her mental calendar, it had been at least — well, it had been a long, long, long time since she had had sex.

So all right, maybe her physical reaction — her over-reaction, she firmly reminded herself — to the kiss had been understandable. But Ulrich wasn’t likely to understand it. Or, more problematically, he was all too likely to understand it the wrong way: that her sudden avid response had been to him, personally, rather than to his, er, generic maleness. And so how would she explain that to him so that he wouldn’t get more attached or more hopeful?

Are you sure that’s really what you want to do? said a voice at the back of her mind, the one that had been growing steadily louder and more ironic for the past three weeks.

Her response was indignant and maybe a little bit terrified. Of course she wanted to let Ulrich know that she wasn’t interested in him, per se. She had work, important work, to do. And after all, where could a relationship with him wind up?

Well, let’s see, said the voice, it could start in bed, then move to a house, which would quickly acquire some small, additional inhabitants —

Ann Koudsi stood up quickly, her stomach suddenly very compact and hard. She did not want to get married to a down-timer. No matter how nice, or how good-natured, or how gentlemanly — or how damnedly sexy — he was. It wouldn’t end well.

Right, agreed the grinning voice, because it wouldn’t end at all. Just like it hasn’t ended for the hundreds of other up-time-down-time marriages that have occurred over the past few years.

She paced to the bookshelf to get a book she didn’t need, opened it, furiously thumbing through the index for she had no idea what.

Unless, said the voice, what it’s really about is home.

Ann stopped thumbing the pages, forgot she was holding the book.

Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? If you marry a down-timer, it’s the final act of acceptance that you’re here in the past for good. That so much of your family, so many of your friends and almost everything else you ever knew and loved. is gone like that awful song said: dust in the wind. You won’t embrace anyone in this world because you won’t let go of the people in the other world.

Ann discovered she had clutched the book close to her chest, could feel her heart beating with a crisp, painful precision.

But here’s the problem, girl: you can’t hold on to what isn’t there, what no longer exists. And if you wait too long, if you push Ulrich away too hard, you just might lose the best thing — the best man — you’ve ever laid eyes on in this world or the —

A distinctive metallic cough broke the stillness of the remote, steep-sided glen in which they had set up their test rig. Ann looked up, disoriented and startled. That was the drilling rig’s engine, starting to run at full speed. But today’s test run had been cancelled —

Then she detected an almost subaudial hum: the rig’s turntable was  spinning at operating RPMs.

Ann dropped the book and was out the door, sprinting for the drill site, which was located in a dead-end defile a quarter mile away. There was no fire-bell or even dinner-gong to ring, to get them to stop, because other than the three cabins for the workers and the one for the senior site engineer — her — there was no one else nearby. And nothing with which to make alarm-level noise. “No reason to attract undue attention,” Professor Doctor Wecke of the Mines and Drilling Program of the University of Helmstedt had explained coyly to her when she had accepted the position. She had wondered at the isolation of the site and then wondered if Wecke’s caution about gongs and the like wasn’t a bit ridiculous. Why worry about noisemaking bells when you spent most of the day running a loud, crude, experimental rotary drilling rig?

As she ran, Ann saw the expected plume of steam from the rig’s engine, obscuring the black cloud of its wood-fired boiler, and glimpsed a small figure well ahead of her, also running toward the drill site. That figure was moving very quickly and angling in from the main access road that led off to the rig’s supply and service sheds. Then she saw its grey-dyed down-time coveralls. Distinct from the typical brown ones of the rank and file workers, that could only be Ulrich. He must have heard the engine start, too. Had probably been in the materials depot, checking the quality of the new casing before it went in the hole to shore up the soft, unconsolidated walls that would be left behind by the next day’s digging.

The next day’s digging: that deferral to tomorrow had not been merely advisable, but essential. Today’s run had to be called off because too many of the main crew, the veterans, were down with the flu. It was one of those brief but vicious late spring bugs that spreads like wildfire, burns through a body by setting both brow and guts on fire (albeit in different ways), and then burns out just as quickly. Even old tough-as-leather Dave Willcocks, head of the rotary drill development team and liaison to the academics and financiers back at the University of Helmstedt, had fallen victim to the virus. Which was a source of some extra concern at the site and beyond: this was the first sign that Willcocks was anything other than indestructible, and at seventy years of age, there was no knowing if this was just an aberration in his otherwise unexceptioned robust health, or the first sign of impending decline. Ann had seen, all too often and too arrestingly, that people aged more quickly in the seventeenth century, and the transition from good health to decrepitude could, on occasion, be startlingly swift.

 

1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies – Snippet 18

1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies – Snippet 18 

Chapter 10

Thuringia, United States of Europe

Major Larry Quinn of the State of Thuringia-Franconia’s National Guard led the way down the last switchback of the game trail, which spilled out into a grassy sward. That bright green carpet of spring growth sloped gently down to where the river wound its way between the ridge they had been on and the rocky outcropping that formed the opposite bank.

Quinn looked behind, saw the other two people in the group navigating the declination. One, a young man, did so easily. The other, a middle-aged woman, was proceeding more cautiously.

Larry smiled. Ms. Aossi had never been particularly fleet of foot, even when she had been his home room and science teacher in eighth grade. And she was more careful now. Which, Larry conceded, only made good sense: a broken leg in the 17th century was nothing to take lightly, not even with Grantville’s medical services available.

The young man with her looked back to check her progress, put out a helping hand. She accepted it with a brief, sunny smile. He returned a smaller one, complete with a nod that threatened to become a bow.

Larry’s own smile was inward only. The understated politesse he had just witnessed was typical of twenty-year-old Karl Willibald Klemm. Larry had spotted the tell-tale signs of intentionally suppressed “good breeding” the moment the young fellow arrived in his office, having been referred there by Colonel Donovan of the Hibernian Mercenary Battalion.

Although admitting that he was originally from Ingolstadt, Klemm had not divulged the other details of his background so willingly. And Larry understood why as soon as the young Bavarian’s story started leaking out. At fourteen years of age, Klemm had been recruited to play for the opposing — and losing — team in the Thirty Years War. As a Catholic, Klemm explained that he’d been impressed into Tilly’s forces in 1632, but not as a mercenary. He had been made a staff adjutant for a recently-promoted general of artillery. That general had not survived the battle against Gustav Adolf at Breitenfeld. At which point Klemm decided that his next destination would be any place that was as far away from the war as he could get to on foot.

Larry Quinn had been unable to repress a smile at the young man’s careful retelling of the events surrounding his induction. Young Klemm had been “impressed” by Tilly’s own sergeants at the age of fourteen, and then just happened to be assigned to a general of the artillery. Larry had wryly observed that this was not typical of the largely random acts of impressment whereby youths had been made to serve under the colors of both sides, usually as unglorified cannon-fodder.

Klemm had the admirable habit of staring his questioner straight in the eye when addressing a ticklish topic. No, Klemm admitted, he had not been randomly recruited. He had been plucked out of school by members of Tilly’s own general staff.

And at what school had that occurred?

Again, Klemm had not batted an eye, but his jaw line became more pronounced when he revealed that he had been in classes at the University of Ingolstadt.

The rest of Larry’s questions met with similarly direct, if terse answers. Yes, Klemm had been in his second year of studies at the tender age of fourteen. Yes, he had been in mathematics, but also the sciences and humanities. Yes, he supposed the work did come easily to him, since he was usually done before the most advanced students in each of his classes. Except in the humanities. But he somberly observed that this “failing” was because he often lacked the adult sensibilities to adequately unpack the layered meanings in most art. He had still been “just a boy” at school. Then, he had gone to war.

Tilly’s “recruiters” had apparently been well-briefed by young Karl Klemm’s predominantly Jesuit tutors. The youth not only had an extraordinarily sharp and flexible mind, but possessed what later researchers would call an “eidetic” memory. Larry doubted the existence of such savant-like powers, but was suitably impressed when Klemm scanned a paragraph, then a list of numbers, then a set of completely disparate facts, and was able to recall them perfectly afterwards.

Given the data-intensive nature of the artillery branch, it had been perhaps inevitable that Klemm had been assigned there. It had been the intent of his recruiters for him to function as a human calculator during sieges and other extended shelling scenarios. There, the ruthless laws of physics dictated results more profoundly than upon the fluid battlefields where human unpredictability, and even caprice, played a greater role in determining outcomes.

But that rear-echelon role hadn’t kept Karl Klemm from seeing the full scope of horrors on display in the Thirty Years War. Nor had it insulated him from the vicious attitudes of an increasing number of the Catholic troops. Not only were Tilly’s men weary with war, they had been forced to forage from (then pillage, and ultimately sack) towns, both enemy and allied, for supplies. Predictably, with its ranks swollen by amoral and brutish mercenaries whom Klemm could hardly distinguish from highwaymen, the rank-and-file of Tilly’s army was not receptive to a clever young fellow who was clearly the darling of the army’s highest, aristocratic officers. The resentment and hate that the soldiers could not express toward those officers themselves was redirected toward this younger, more vulnerable object of their approbation. And so young Karl Klemm had learned to keep his head down and his gifts hidden.

He had approached the Hibernian Mercenary Battalion without referring to his background with the enemy’s army or his unusual skills. Rather, he had heard they were looking for persons who might be handy at refurbishing broken up-time firearms. He had applied to become a mere technician. But one of the battalion’s two proprietors, Liam Donovan, had the shrewd eye of a professional recruiter and saw much more than that in young Klemm. And so had sent him on to Larry’s office.

That had been when Karl was thin, jobless, and shivering in a coat much too old to ward off the frigid fangs of the middle weeks of February. Now, three months later, in a riverside meadow, releasing Lolly Aossi’s hand as if handing off a partner in a gavotte, he seemed a different person.

“Karl,” Larry called.

“Yes, Major Quinn?”

“Has Ms. Aossi finished boring you today?”

Lolly rounded on Quinn, who was smiling mischief at her. “So I was a boring teacher, Larry?”

“Not usually, Miz Aossi, but let’s face it: a fifty-minute lesson on earth science is now a reasonable replacement for the sleeping aids we left back up-time.”

“Hmpf. Do you agree with Major Quinn, Karl?”

Klemm knelt to study the soil. “I cannot speak for anyone else, but I find geology rather fascinating.”

That’s Karl, ever the diplomat. Larry looked back at Lolly. “So why did you want to come down here from the hills?”

Lolly walked over to where Karl was strolling, now running his hands along the sheer skirts of the ridge as he studied the strata of its rocky ribs. “So that Karl could look at what surveyors and drillers would designate extremely soft ‘unconsolidated formations.’ “

“And what are those?”

Lolly turned to look at Klemm with one slightly raised eyebrow. Karl, seeing that as his cue, supplied the answer promptly. “An unconsolidated rock formation takes the form of loose particles, such as sand or clay.”

“You mean, it’s not really rock.”

“No, Larry,” scolded Lolly. “That’s not what it means at all. Sand, for instance, starts out as solid rock.”

“Like gravel.”

Ms. Aossi nodded. “Exactly.”

“So how is coming here better than going to a sand pit?”

“Because, Larry, a sand pit such as you mean is not a natural occurrence. And that’s what Karl needs to see, to experience: the formations that arise naturally around such earths, and vice versa.”

Karl brushed off his hands, put them on his narrow hips, looked at the rock thoughtfully, then at the ground. “And unless I am much mistaken, Ms. Aossi wishes me to become especially familiar with the compositions particular to alluvial or coastal deposits. The other two times we have gone on a field survey, we visited similar environments.”

Lolly stared at Klemm. She said, “Very good, Karl,” and clearly meant it, but there was also a surprised, even worried tone in her voice.

Quinn kept himself from smiling. The problem with training clever people for even highly compartmentalized confidential missions was that their quick wits could often defeat the information firewalls erected by the planners. From a few key pieces, they could begin to discern the shape, or at least the key objectives, of the operation.

Karl Klemm demonstrated that propensity in his next leading comment. “In fact, I find it puzzling that we are spending so much time in areas with these formations.”

Lolly, who was inspecting some small outcroppings of marl which disturbed the smooth expanse beneath their feet, distractedly asked, “Why, Karl? They are good challenges for you: not always the easiest areas to read, geologically. They can be quite tricky unless you know what to look for.”

“So you have taught me. And very well, Ms. Aossi. But that still begs the question of why we are studying them at all.”

Lolly stopped, a bit perplexed. Quinn now had to hide a small smile. He was no geologist, but he had learned to read people pretty well, and he could see where Karl Klemm was headed. Lolly didn’t, apparently. “We study them because they are some of the formations you might encounter when you travel with Major Quinn to the New World.”

“Yes, I might. But it seems odd to focus so heavily on these formations, since I will not be expected to survey them closely, let alone exclusively.” Karl poked at an up thrust tooth of marlstone. “Or will I?”

Lolly shot a surprised and alarmed glance at Quinn, a glance which said: Oh. My. God. Could he have guessed where exactly you’re taking him? And why? And if that cat is out of the bag, does he have to be sequestered until you leave?

Quinn simply shrugged.

Lolly Aossi crossed her arms tightly. “Well, Karl, you never know where people might want to dig. Or for what.”

“That is true, although one immediately thinks of the New World’s coastal oil deposits. However, it does not stand to reason that the USE would be interested in those, or any, oil deposits known to reside in unconsolidated rock formations.”

“And why is that?”

“Because we cannot tap such deposits, not with our current drilling technology. A cable rig will not work. The constant pounding collapses the walls of the hole. To drill in soils such as these, which in the New World predominate around the Gulf coast oil deposits, you would need a rotary drill. A technology which we do not yet possess.” He looked up from the marlstone. “I am correct n my conclusions, yes?” He did not blink.

Quinn watched and heard Lolly swallow. Looking like an adolescent who’d been caught telling a lie to her parents, she spread her hands in gesture that marked her next utterance as both an explanation and appeal. “Well, Karl, now about that rotary drill –”

 

Cauldron of Ghosts – Snippet 46

Well, this should really be the last snippet. [Smile]

Cauldron of Ghosts – Snippet 46

Chapter 27

Colonel Nancy Anderson waited until the Hali Sowle was eight light-minutes away from the trading depot before she said anything about their mission. There was no rational reason for that. If anything they’d said or done or just blind bad luck had given them away to the Manpower personnel staffing the depot, they were as good as dead anyway. At that range, even low-powered missiles carrying small warheads would easily destroy a ship like the Hali Sowle.

And whether they’d been found out or not, why bother keeping silent for any length of time once the Hali Sowle left the depot? They were a starship, not a submarine maintaining silence under the surface of an ocean lest they be detected by their enemies. In space, as the old saw went, no one can hear you scream — or talk, or sing, or whisper, or shout at the top of your lungs.

But, rational or not, the time just passed had been very tense. All members of the BSC handled tension well; Anderson handled it particularly well or she’d never have reached the rank of colonel. Still…

Eight light-minutes was one Astronomical Unit, one of the most ancient of all measures. It was the distance between Sol and Terra back in the human race’s system of origin.

Most Beowulfers might not be superstitious — but they still ate comfort food like anyone else. One AU was the astrogational equivalent. For reasons that might make no sense, star travelers just seemed to relax a little once they’d gone that distance. 

“Well, I didn’t spot any problems. Did anyone?”

“No,” said Damewood. “The lion moved among the lambs with nary a one of the little fuzzballs sensing anything amiss.” He pointed to his work station, with the special displays now up that he’d made sure were not in sight when Manpower’s inspectors came through. “I was checking too, you’d better believe it.”

Sitting in the captain’s seat, Ganny El blew a raspberry. “‘The lion moved among the lambs’! Yeah, right. Completely toothless lion — no claws, neither — and a pack of lambs that sure looked like predators to me.” She held up an admonishing finger. “I’m telling you, I’m not doing this again! You hear that, Anderson? I don’t care how much money you wave under my nose.”

The colonel smiled but didn’t say anything. She had no more intention than Ganny of repeating the somewhat hair-raising experiment. One test run, carried out at a large and well-equipped Manpower depot, was enough to determine if there was any significant chance that the identity of the Hali Sowle would flag any alarms. They’d decided it was better to take the risk now with a skeleton crew than find out later when the Hali Sowle was carrying a full complement.

But no alarms had been triggered. Neither by the name nor the characteristics of the ship itself. The Hali Sowle had arrived at Balcescu Station after approaching and identifying itself quite openly; had spent two days at the depot engaged in trade and simply enjoying the depot’s restaurants and shops; and had then left in just as straightforward a manner. And there’d been no trouble of any kind, leaving aside the quarrel Ganny had gotten into with a shopkeeper whom she accused of trying to fleece her.

So, it now seemed clear that the Hali Sowle could go anywhere safely except possibly to Mesa itself. And if Zilwicki and Cachat were right in their estimate that the destruction of Gamma Center (and Jack McBryde’s accompanying actions) had obliterated the Mesan records of the vesselaltogether, the Hali Sowle could even go to Mesa.

But no one proposed to send the Hali Sowle to Mesa. It would be too risky to use the ship a second time to get the spies off the planet — much less onto it in the first place — and there was certainly no chance of using the Hali Sowle as a raider in the system. Mesa’s naval forces might be on the paltry side when compared to the fleets of star nations like Manticore and Haven, but they were more than powerful enough to swat two frigates as if they were insects.

Leaving aside Mesa, though, it now seemed that the rest of the galaxy was open to the Hali Sowle‘s new business.

Purely as an idle exercise, Anderson tried to calculate how much money it would take to get Ganny to withdraw her proclamation. The number would be large, certainly, but very far short of infinity. The Parmley clan’s matriarch wasn’t exactly avaricious, since it was never her own wealth that concerned her. But she kept an eye out for the interests of her kin like no one Nancy had ever seen.

Now that she’d  finagled a full suite of prolong treatments for every member of the clan who could benefit from them and also bargained to get excellent educations for all the youngsters — and even a few of the adults who had a mind to go to school — what fresh field could she aspire to conquer?

There had be something, knowing Ganny, but what?

Loren Damewood had apparently been undertaking the same exercise. And, as was the XO’s way, didn’t hesitate from putting his speculations in words.

“Oh, come on, Ganny. There’s got to be some price you’d settle for. What have you got a hankering for these days? Mansions on the shores of the Emerald Sea for each and every one of your kinfolk, down to the babes and toddlers? All-expenses-paid cruises on luxury liners through the Core worlds?”

Nancy couldn’t resist joining in. “How about precious metals and jewelry? That’s been a winner for going on ten thousand years.”

Ganny’s sneer was every bit as flamboyant as her cursing. “Even if such a price existed — which for the record, it doesn’t — what difference would it make to you? Between the whole lot — scrape it up from every member of the BSC anywhere in the galaxy — you couldn’t come close. Seeing as how ‘BSC’ really stands for Beggars’ Succor and Care.’”

Damewood clutched his chest. “Oh, Ganny! That’s cold!”

****

Csilla Ferenc watched the departing freighter on the screen. She had no interest in the vessel itself. The receding image was just something to look at — and wasn’t even real any longer, at this distance. The software used by Balcescu Station’s astrogation control substituted a stylized symbol for an actual image of a ship when it was too far away to be seen clearly with optical equipment.

She was just brooding. The departure of the Hali Soul — no, Sowle — had gone with even less notice than a tramp freighter normally would have gotten. That was because traffic through Balcescu had risen sharply over the past few weeks.

What bothered Ferenc wasn’t the heavy workload, so much. She didn’t enjoy it, but the overtime pay was nice. No, what bothered her was that she didn’t know the reason for the increase in traffic.

Sure, the extra ships that came through were all from Mesa and had impeccable papers. (Which were electronic, not molecular, of course; but the old term was still used by most traffic control services.) But maybe that was the problem. Their documentation was too good, in a way. In Ferenc’s experience, the documentation for real shipping concerns got frayed at the edges after a while.

Not that of this additional traffic, though. Their credentials and bona fides and bills of lading looked like they’d just come out of the virtual presses at the headquarters of Manpower, the Jessyk Combine, Axelrod Transtellar, and Technodyne.

They had serious backing behind them, too. Any questions beyond the routine ones got stonewalled — and both times she’d tried to push a little, Csilla had gotten slapped down by her superiors.

Slapped down hard and fast.

It was the speed of the reprimands that had struck her the most. The management of Balcescu were rude bastards and had been as long as Ferenc had been at the station. Reprimands were always a lot harsher than they should have been.

But they never came all that quickly. The station’s bosses were as lazy as they were nasty. Usually, you’d find out a tick had been placed in your records a week or two — sometimes a month or two — after the incident that triggered it.

Not now. Those two reprimands had been given to her within hours. Within less than an hour, in the case of the second one.

And all she’d asked for was identification for the three individuals listed as “supercargo; special assignments”! Normally, she would have gotten chewed out if she hadn’t insisted on an explanation.

Something was going on. And what bothered Ferenc was that the explanation that kept coming to her made her profoundly uneasy.

At that moment, as it happened, the person sitting at the control station next to her voiced her own worries.

“Csilla, do you think there’s really anything to all the Mantie hollering about a ‘secret conspiracy’ behind Manpower?”

Ferenc glanced around the control room quickly. The only other person within hearing range was András Kocsis, and he wasn’t paying any attention because he was in the middle of directing an incoming freighter.

She wasn’t worried about Steve anyway. He was just a working stiff like them.

Reassured, she turned to the man who’d asked the question, Béla Harsányi. “Are you trying to get into trouble?”

Béla looked uncomfortable — but stubborn. “Come on, Csilla. You’ve got to have been wondering about it yourself.” He motioned toward his own control screen. “I mean, look at the traffic we’ve been getting. Some of these ships we’ve never seen at all before, and many of the ones we have are acting… You know. Weird.”

Weird. Depending on how you looked at it, that was either discretion or circumlocution. In plain language, what Harsányi meant was that the crews of the slave ships — some of them, anyway — hadn’t been behaving in their usual manner when they came into the station on what was still called “shore leave.”

First off, a lot fewer of them took shore leave than normal.

Secondly, and more tellingly, they hadn’t been behaving like arrogant assholes when they did. They’d seemed a little subdued, actually — as if they knew something themselves that was making them a little nervous. 

She kept her hair in a braid when she was on duty. That was an old habit from her days on a station whose artificial gravity had been erratic. One experience with being caught trying to follow traffic with her long hair flying all over and impeding her vision had been enough.

She might have given up the habit after she got to Balcescu, since there was no danger at all that this station was going to suffer from the same problem. Balcescu Station wasn’t a flea-bitten third rate transfer point in the sticks, it was Manpower’s principal depot in this whole star region. But by then she’d found that being able to fiddle with the braid was a way of calming herself down when she got a little agitated.

She was fiddling with it now. “I don’t know, Béla. Yeah, sure, I’ve wondered myself. But…”

She let go of the braid and shrugged. “First, we’ll probably never know. And second, let’s hope we never know because the only way I can see we’d find out…”

She decided to let the sentence die a natural death. But Harsányi’s lips peeled back, revealing clenched teeth.

“Yeah, right,” he said. “The only way we’ll find out is if the Manties decide to prove it — in which case we’re dead meat anyway.”

That was… something of an exaggeration, Csilla thought. Balcescu Station wasn’t anywhere near the most likely avenues of approach the Mantie fleet would take if it decided to strike at Mesa. But it couldn’t be ruled out.

Not with the Manties. Unlike the great majority of the population of Mesa — not to mention the morons in the Solarian League — Ferenc and Harsányi knew the realities of interstellar warfare.

Some of those realities, anyway. Enough to know that the Manties, if they decided to be, could be the scariest people in the universe for people like her and Béla.

First, the Manties hated slavers — and she and Béla were part and parcel of the slave trade even if they didn’t have any personal contact with slaves themselves. Second, Csilla had just celebrated her fortieth birthday — and the Manties had been at war for more than half her lifespan. Thirdly, going by the record, they were awfully damn good at it.

“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,” Csilla said. “‘Dead meat’s a little extreme, don’t you think?”

But by the time she finished the sentence, she was back to fiddling with her braid.

****

Elsewhere in Balcescu Station, in a much fancier work area, someone else was fretting over the same issue. That was the station’s CO, Zoltan Somogyi, Csilla Ferenc’s ultimate boss in the depot and the originator of the two reprimands that she was still smarting from.

Somogyi himself had forgotten about the reprimands — and done so within hours. He hadn’t issued them because he was worried about Csilla Ferenc. He barely knew the woman. She worked for him but he was the top manager of the Station. So did almost eight hundred other people.

No, he’d issued those reprimands, along with more than a dozen similar ones, because he’d been told in no uncertain terms by people he knew even less well than he did Ferenc that they would tolerate no interference with what they were doing — about which he knew even less. The one thing — the only thing, really — he did know about the people who’d given him those instructions was that their authority was paramount. Within Manpower, Inc., as well as…

Beyond it. How far beyond it he didn’t know. And that was what was causing him to lose sleep.

People like Ferenc and Harsányi knew nothing of the Mesan Alignment, not even of its existence. So far as they knew, they were simply employees of one of the giant corporations that effectively ruled their home planet. And if the work that corporation did was unsavory in the eyes of much of the human race, they were largely indifferent to the matter — just as, in ages past, men who went into the bowels of a planet to dig out its mineral wealth didn’t think much about the fact that many people thought the work they did was crude, dirty and beneath their own dignity.

In truth, Zoltan Somogyi didn’t know much more about the Mesan Alignment than his employees. The difference was that he knew it did exist although he thought it was nothing more than an organization dedicated to the secret uplift of the Mesan genome. He had hopes he might eventually be asked to join, in fact.

But there were less benign forces in Mesan society, who were even more secretive and a lot more dangerous. Somogyi was highly placed enough to have realized years before that someone, somewhere, was pulling the strings.

Who they were… he didn’t know, although he suspected they were Manpower’s innermost circle.

What their goals were… he didn’t know.

What their plans were for him… he didn’t know that, either.

What worried him was that he thought such plans probably existed. And whatever they were, probably weren’t going to be good for him. Not because those mysterious hidden powers bore any animosity toward him but simply because he was beneath their notice.

When a behemoth makes plans to go somewhere, do those plans take into consideration the small and fragile creatures that might get underfoot along the way?

 

1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies – Snippet 17

1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies – Snippet 17 

“How can it be otherwise, dearest Godmother? But before I depart to — to distant places, I want you to know this:” — and he stopped and reached out a hand to touch her cheek, down which tears promptly sped in response — “I will never suffer my sword, or those of my men, to be lifted against yours.”

“I remain a vassal of Philip, so how can you make such a promise?”

Hugh looked at her steadily. “I make my oath and I pledge my life upon it.” And then he studied her more closely, a hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. “But I foresee that my promise may not be so difficult an oath to keep as you suggest. I see other changes afoot, godmother. Don Fernando proclaims himself the King in the Low Countries, but not the King of the Netherlands? What careful distinctions. They almost seem like mincing steps and mincing words, if I didn’t know him — and you — better.”

As his smile widened knowingly, she felt another stab of panic: does he suspect our plans? He must not! Not yet, anyway — for his own sake. And his next words did indeed quicken her fear that Hugh might have stumbled upon the subtle machinations she had activated for his eventual benefit and of which he had to remain unaware, for now.

“And Fernando’s careful steps towards greater autonomy also lead me to wonder: which Americans have had your ear in the privy chambers? And how has Philip reacted to your receiving their counsel, and to Fernando’s unusual declaration? No, do not tell me. If I do not know Philip’s will on this matter, or your plans — and you do not know mine — then Philip can never accuse you of being a traitor to his throne, no matter what might occur.”

Isabella managed not to release her breath in one, great sigh of relief. No, he had no specific information. He discerned the looming crisis — the inevitable conflicts with Madrid — but nothing more specific. Thankfully, he had not learned of their plans or his role in them.

Hugh was now completing and expanding the oath with which he had begun. “So finally, know this too, Godmother. Once I have returned from my travels, if you call for my sword, it is yours. And, if Don Fernando finds himself estranged from his brother’s good opinion, and still in your favor, he may call for my sword as well.”

Until that moment, Isabella had always cherished a view of Hugh as the wonderful, smiling boy that had made her childless life a little more bearable. Now, he was suddenly, and completely, and only, a man and a captain, and possibly, an important ally in the turbulent times to come. The ache of her personal desolation vied with the almost parental pride she felt for the boy who had become this man. The contending emotions washed through her in a chaotic rush and came out as another quick flurry of tears. Through which she murmured, “Via con Dios, dear Hugh. Wherever you may go.”

He smiled, took his hand from her cheek, and put his lips to her forehead. Where he placed a long and tender kiss. She sighed and closed her eyes.

When she opened them, he was gone.

*     *     *

Amiens, France

As Du Barry entered, Turenne looked up. “What news?”

“We have word concerning the Earl of Tyrconnell’s clandestine northward journey, sir. He slipped over the border into the Lowlands without incident four nights ago. Soon after, he apparently began the process of bringing the first group of troops down to us, the ones that will go with him to Trinidad.”

“Excellent. And how do you know this?”

“Reports from our watchers near his tercio‘s bivouac report a smallish contingent making ready for travel. Several hundred more seem to be making more gradual preparations for departure.

“I see. Did Lord O’Donnell ask for their release from service at court in Brussels?”

“No, sir.”

“Then how did he manage it?”

Du Barry reddened. “I regret to say we do not know, Lord Turenne. Once he crossed the border, our agents were not able to keep track of him. He is far more versed in the subtleties of those lands and those roads. For a while, we even feared him dead.”

Turenne started. “What? Why?”

“The very last reports inexplicably placed him in Colonel Preston’s camp just outside of Brussels during a surprise attack upon a council of the other captains of the Wild Geese tercios. Our observer necessarily had to hang well back, so as not to be picked up in the sweeps afterward. By the time he returned, he could find no trace of O’Donnell, nor pick up his trail.”

Turenne thought. “Is there any chance the earl himself staged that attack? As a decoy to distract our observers, and to escape in the confusion of its aftermath?”

Du Barry shrugged. “Not unless Lord O’Donnell was also willing to sacrifice a number of his own men to achieve those ends, sir. And his reputation runs quite to the contrary of such a ruthless scheme. His concern for his men is legendary, and a matter of record. The only friction he ever had with his godmother the archduchess, other than some puppyish clamorings to be sent to war too early in his youth, were his complaints over the recent welfare of, and payrolls for, the common soldiers of his tercio.”

“Complaints for which he had good grounds, as I hear it.”

“Indeed so, Lord Turenne. Although his godmother herself has had no hand in causing the tercios‘ pay to be in arrears. That is determined by the court at Madrid.” Du Barry shifted slightly “While on the subject of the Earl of Tyrconnell’s Wild Geese, sir: is it your intent to really allow hundreds of them to cross over the border into France in one group? I suspect there might be some, er, pointed inquiries, if you were to add so many mercenaries to your payroll, and all at once.”

Turenne stared at his chief councilor and expediter. “What are you driving at, Du Barry?”

“Sir, with the recent increased tensions at court between Cardinal Richelieu’s faction, and that of Monsieur Gaston, a sudden hiring of hundreds, and eventually perhaps thousands, of new foreign mercenaries could appear to be motivated by domestic rather than foreign worries.”

“Ah,” sighed Turenne with a nod. “True enough, Du Barry. And if it reassures you, I do not intend to allow the Earl of Tyrconnell’s larger force to cross into France until we have full satisfaction in the matter of the tasks which lie before him in the Caribbean. However, in the meantime, we will provide for them as promised by sending the necessary livres over the border to the sutlers for their camps. We cannot hire them outright as long as they remain in service to Fernando and, I presume, Philip. So any money sent to them directly would be rightly construed as a sign that we had engaged their services while their oaths were still with their original employers. They, and we, would be rightly accused of base treachery.

“But mere provisioning cannot be so construed, for they are simply the designated beneficiaries of largesse which their countryman Tyrconnell has purchased for them. And so, even before they come to our colors, we will have bought their loyalty with ‘gifts’ of food for their hungry families. And by letting them clamor ever louder for permission to march south, we acquire something that I suspect Lord O’Donnell has not foreseen.”

“And what is that, sir?”

“Leverage over the earl himself.”

Du Barry frowned. “Now it is I who do not understand what you are driving at, Lord Turenne.”

Turenne smiled. “Let us presume that the Wild Geese in Brussels’ employ are becoming ever-more desirous of being allowed into France. Now let us also presume that the Earl of Tyrconnell succeeds in his bid to wrest Trinidad from the Spanish. We may still need leverage over him in order to ensure that we remain the recipients of what he has seized.

“I hope, and believe, that Richelieu’s factors in the New World will offer the earl a fair price, and promptly. The ship dispatched by the Compagnie des Îles de l’Amérique to discreetly observe O’Donnell’s progress carries not only the Cardinal’s personal agent, but also a great deal of silver.

“But if the negotiation with O’Donnell does not come off as planned — well, we must retain an incentive to compel him to turn the oil over to us. And if we still have the power to deny his increasingly desperate men entry to France at that time, he will have an additional incentive to look with particular favor on any terms our representatives offer him.”

Du Barry nodded, then asked in a careful voice, “Would he not have an even greater incentive to comply if we already had his men in our camps, unarmed and vulnerable to our…displeasure?”

Turenne frowned. “I will go only so far, Du Barry. Leverage should not become synonymous with extortion, or kidnapping. I refuse to offer physical shelter to men that I actually intend to use as hostages. Let others play at such games: I shall not. I will keep my honor, my good name, and my soul, thank you. Besides, our agents in Brussels report that whispers about the Wild Geese’s possible departure en masse have fueled official concerns regarding their loyalty. Those concerns may be manifesting as even further constraints upon their provisioning. Furthermore, the commanders of the Spanish tercios are finding their Irish comrades increasingly worrisome and are pleading with Philip to remove them entirely.”

Turenne stood, poured a glass of wine as he outlined the logical endgame of the evolving political situation in the Spanish Lowlands. “Consequently, as the poverty of the Wild Geese increases, so will their desperation. Given another half year, they will all be clamoring to come to Amiens and we shall be happy to accept them, albeit at rates favorable to us. And the Earl of Tyrconnell, being a true, albeit young, father to his men, will not deny them that livelihood.”

Du Barry edged closer. Turenne took the hint and poured out a second glass with an apologetic smile. “Do not worry, Du Barry, matters are in hand.”

Du Barry took the glass, raised it slightly in Turenne’s direction. “I toast the assured success of your plans, my lord, for they are so well-crafted as to need no invocation of luck.”

Turenne halted his glass’ progress to his lips. “Plans always need invocations of luck, Du Barry. For we can only be sure of one thing in this world: that we may be sure of nothing in this world. A thousand foreseeable or unforeseeable things could go wrong. But this much we know, for we have seen it with our own eyes: France has a workable observation balloon, now. But the rest, this quest for New World oil?” Now Turenne sipped. “I avoid overconfidence at all times, my dear Du Barry, for I am not one to snub fate. Lest it should decide to snub me in return.”

 

1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies – Snippet 16

1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies – Snippet 16 

Chapter 9

Convent of the Dames Blanches, Louvain, The Low Countries

“Your Highne — I mean, Sister Isabella?”

The urgency in the novitiate’s tone caused the Infanta Isabella to start — that, and a brief pulse of religious guilt. Once again, Isabella’s thoughts had drifted away from her devotions and novenas and veered into memories of her long-dead husband Albert and poignant fantasies of a family that might have been. “What is it, my child?”

“There is a . . . a penitent here to see you.”

“A penitent?” Isabella sat a bit straighter. Sister Marie was neither a very mature nor a very wise novitiate, but she certainly knew that only priests could hear confessions and that they generally did not situate themselves at convents to do so. So this “penitent” was clearly someone traveling incognito, a subtlety which had obviously eluded, and therefore baffled, the country-bred novitiate.

Isabella smoothed her habit, touched her neck as if to assure herself that it was still there, and nodded. “Show the ‘penitent’ in.”

If the young nun was surprised that the Sister who was also the archduchess of the Spanish Lowlands was willing to receive a “penitent” in the unusually well-furnished room that had been set aside for her biweekly retreats, she gave no sign of it.

But when Sister Marie returned, she was decidedly flustered.

“Sister Isabella . . . this penitent . . . I am not sure. That is, I think . . . I fear I have –”

“Yes, he is a man. Do not be alarmed, child. None of the men I know bite. At least, they don’t bite nuns. Usually.”

Sister Marie first flushed very red, then blanched very white. She made a sound not unlike a whimpering squeak, then nodded herself out and the visitor in.

Isabella smiled as she turned. So which one of her many renegade charges had been resourceful enough to find her here –?

She stopped: a large figure draped in a cloak of grey worsted had already entered and sealed the room. The cloak was ragged at the edges, loosely cowled over the wearer’s face. Whatever else Isabella had expected, this rough apparel and stealthy approach was not merely discomfiting but downright —

Then the hood went back and she breathed out through tears that, at her age, came too readily and too quickly for her to stop. “Hugh.” And suddenly, in place of what the wool had revealed — a square chin, strong straight nose, and dark auburn hair — she saw:

– the cherubic face of her newest page, sparkling blue eyes taking in the wonders of her formal, or “high,” court for the first time. Sunbeams from the towering windows marked his approach with a path of luminous shafts, which, as he walked through each one, glanced back off his reddish-brown hair as flashes of harvest gold. When summoned, his final approach to the throne was composed, yet there was mischief hiding behind the tutored solemnity of his gaze.

Isabella had affected a scowling gravity with some difficulty. “Are you sure you are prepared to be a page in this court, young Conde O’Donnell?”

“Your Grace, I’m sure I’m not!” His voice was high, but strong for his age. “But I will grow into this honor, just as I grow into the clothes you and the good Archduke always send me.” And then Albert had laughed, and so had she, and the little boy smiled, showing a wonderful row of —

His white teeth were still as bright now as then, she realized as she reached out and put two, veined, wrinkled hands on either side of Hugh’s face. “My dear boy. You have returned.”

“Dearest godmother, I have.”

And the pause told her, in the language of people who have long known each others’ hearts, that he had not just returned from Grantville, but from the long, dark travail that had started when he had turned away from his young wife’s winter grave almost five months ago. There was light in those dark blue eyes once again.

“Tell me of your trip to Grantville.”

He did. She listened, nodded several times. “And so you have decided to leave Spanish service.”

He blinked. “You have your copy of the letter? Already?”

“Of course. And you most certainly make an eloquent appeal for the home rule of the Netherlands, and link it to your own cause most cleverly.”

“So you think well of this?”

“Of the letter? The writing is like music, the idea eminently sound, and sure to save thousands of lives. And, of course, Philip will not countenance it.”

“Perhaps not. But I must try. Even though Olivares is obstinate about retaking the United Provinces.”

“So now you have ears at Philip’s court, too?”

“No, but I see what’s happening to his treasury. Yet he remains dedicated to spending countless reales to retain lands that have already been, de facto, lost to the crown. Once Fernando declared himself ‘King in the Low Countries,’ no other political outcome was possible. But Olivares has no prudence in the matter of the Lowlands. He spends money like a drunken profligate to prop up the economy while slashing even basic provisioning for its tercios. His fine faculties no longer determine how he reacts to events here. He is driven by pride and obstinacy.”

She smiled. “I will make a prince of you yet, my dear Earl of Tyrconnell. You have a head for this game.”

“That is because I have a peerless tutoress. Whose many wiles still surprise me: how did you get hold of my letter weeks before my man was to deliver it?”

“Dear boy, do you not think that I know what confidential agents you employ, and that I keep them better paid than you can afford?”

She saw surprise in his eyes and remembered how the first sight of them had been a salve to her wounded soul. He had arrived in her privy court as a stumbling toddler, shortly after she had lost her third — and last — child in infancy. In those days, she thought her attention to little Hugh’s education and fortunes was merely a clever self-distraction from her own sorrows. But now, being surprised by him like this, and finding her heart leaping up with a simple joy, she realized, perhaps for the first time, that he had been a surrogate for her losses, her childlessness. And he — fatherless a year after he arrived, and his mother a shadow figure trapped in the English court — had been, for all intents and purposes, an orphan, as beautiful and bright a child as might have stepped out of Eden. But there had been ambitious serpents all around, serpents sly and protected by titles, so she had often been compelled to protect him by employing methods as subtle and devious as theirs.

And she would still need to protect him now. “I must say that the timing of your decision to leave Philip’s employ is . . . dismaying, my dear.”

“Not as dismaying as finding that my godmother’s intelligence network includes my own servitors.”

“Hush, Hugh. How else could I know if one of them had finally been suborned by enough English pounds to betray you? But this time, it simply alerted me to your impending departure.”

Hugh’s eyes dropped. “What I found in Grantville left me no choice but to depart. Even if I was willing to go on to the fate those histories foretold, I cannot also lead my countrymen into pointless deaths. But I know well enough that Philip will not deem those sufficient grounds for my departure, not even if he were to suddenly give full credence to the revelations of Grantville. All that he will see is that I have become a base ingrate.”

Isabella smiled. “Perhaps. But here is what I see.” She laid one hand back on his cheek, hating the palsied quiver in it that she could not still. “I see a man who blamed himself, and maybe the Spanish clergy’s initial nonsense about the ‘satanic’ Americans, for his wife’s death. And I see a nobleman who had to discover and act upon what the future held in store for his land and his people. And so you went to Grantville. And you have acted as you must. Now, tell me: having visited twice, what did you think of the Americans?”

“They are . . . very different from us.” Hugh looked up. “But I had suspected that, particularly after they sent me both condolences for Anna and an invitation to visit them all in one letter.”

“Yes, their manners are often — curious. Sometimes even crude. But on the other hand, so many of our courtesies have lost the gracious intentions that engendered them. The American manners are — well, they may be simple, but they are not empty. But enough of this. If you come to me disguised in this rude garb, I presume we cannot have much time, so — to business.”

“Yes, Godmother. In part, I had come to tell you to expect the copy of my letter to Philip within the week. Which you have had for over a month, I gather. But I also came to tell you something else.”

“Yes?” Such hesitancy was most unlike Hugh, and she felt her fingers become active and tense.

“My men will not all stay in your employ.”

She closed her eyes, made sure her voice remained neutral. It would not do to impart the faintest hint to Hugh that she knew more about his most recent activities and the condition of his tercio than he did. “I presumed some of your men might wish to leave, since Philip has not sent sufficient pay in many months. A reasonable number are free to go at once. I will see to their release from service. But I cannot afford to have an entire tercio disband overnight. It will take some months to achieve a full release. And we will have to weather a torrent of displeasure from Madrid.”

“And my many thanks for bearing the brunt of Philip’s imperial temper, but that is still not what I came to tell you.”

Isabella became nervous again. Her intelligence on Hugh’s movements and meetings was uncommonly good and multi-sourced. But surprises were still possible, and at this point, the smallest surprise could derail the delicate plans she had set in motion.

“Godmother, it may yet transpire that Philip will think worse of me than merely being an ingrate. Though Spain may have made some temporary alliances of convenience, her interests are still ranged against almost every other nation of Europe. And so, if my employ is not with Philip, I might find myself confronting his banners, rather than beneath them.”

Despite anticipating this, Isabella still felt a stab at her heart, wondered if it was emotion or the frailty of age. “Dear boy, this is dire news.”

Cauldron of Ghosts – Snippet 45

Cauldron of Ghosts – Snippet 45

Chapter 26

Lajos Irvine’s boss George Vickers had done one thing right, at least. The two assistants he’d provided Lajos looked to be a lot more capable than the numbskulls he’d been provided the last time his superiors decided he needed support.

That had been Isabel Bardasano’s doing. The now-deceased former head of Alignment Security had normally been as sharp as they come. But that time, the fieldcraft of the meatheads she’d handed Lajos had been so bad they’d given themselves away to the targets as soon as they encountered them. Being fair to Bardasano, she’d been in a hurry and the only forces she had immediately at hand were some of Mesa‘s security people. They hadn’t been part of even the outermost layers of the Alignment and were accustomed to dealing with seccies. They’d also had the vicious nature and the overconfidence that normally infected a “security force” whose brutality and violence was unchecked by anything remotely like “legal rights” on the part of their victims. A very little bit of that was enough to turn even once-intelligent human beings into arrogant, head-breaking thugs, and Lajos’ hastily assigned “backup” had been at their trade entirely too long.

To make things worse — not to mention terrifying — the targets in question had been the deadliest bastards Lajos had ever run across in his entire career. One of them, especially. That maniac had gunned down all three goons in that many seconds — no, probably less. Lajos didn’t remember too well because he’d been so frightened.

He’d been even more frightened a short time later when the two targets dragged him into a tunnel and had a short discussion over whether or not to kill him. That they’d do so without hesitation had been manifestly obvious. Lajos still woke up sometimes with nightmares of the cold gaze of the gunman. Those black eyes had been as merciless as a spider’s. He’d never forget them.

This time around, though, the higher-ups seemed to have had their heads screwed on straight. These two agents were part of the Alignment and had the earmarks of people with experience in the field against serious opponents. They were the police equivalent of elite special forces, not uniformed goons. Lajos didn’t have any doubt that the men would handle themselves just fine if it came down to rough stuff. Which, hopefully, it wouldn’t. Lajos had no romantic notions concerning violence. If all went as planned, his transactions and dealings with Mesa’s seccie underworld would be as banal and unexciting as grocery shopping.

Lajos finished reading through his notes and turned away from the monitor. “I’m thinking our best bet is to approach either Jurgen Dusek in Neue Rostock or go the other way and see if we can get someone in Lower Radomsko interested.”

Neue Rostock was at the center of the seccie districts in the capital. It was a heavily crime-ridden area and Dusek was the district’s acknowledged crime boss. Not the only one, but what ancient gangsters would have called the capo di tutti capi.

Lower Radomsko presented a different picture. It was also well into the central areas inhabited by seccies and was, if anything, even more crime-ridden than Neue Rostock. But its underworld was disorganized, dominated by a multitude of small gangs none of whom recognized any master.

“I’d go for Neue Rostock,” advised Stanković. “Dealing with Dusek will be a lot easier than trying to deal with that mob of crazies in Lower Radomsko.”

Martinez issued a little grunt, which seemed to indicate his agreement.

Lajos leaned the same way as Stanković, but for the moment he decided to play the devil’s advocate. “Yeah, that’s true — but so is the corollary. If things go wrong, dealing with Dusek will be a lot less easy. I’ve never dealt with the man before, but I know a lot about him. By all accounts, once you scratch that gangster-politesse veneer of his you’re dealing with Attila the Hun’s first cousin. He’s the mean one in the family, by the way.”

Stanković chuckled. “Yeah, I’ve heard the same thing. But…” He turned his head sideways a little, to give Lajos a slanted gaze. “Don’t take this the wrong way, boss, but I don’t think you’ve had much experience in Lower Radomsko.”

“None at all,” Lajos agreed. “Personally, that is. I know a fair amount about it, though, just from –” He waved his hand. “Stuff.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. The thing is, you really have to spend time there to get a good sense of it. Freddie and I never did ourselves but we worked with a Mesan security agent — one of the Tabbies — who’d spent years there. The stories he had to tell…” He shook his head. “The place is a shithole.”

Lajos leaned back in his chair, his interest rising. “Go on,” he said.

“It’s…” Stanković groped for words.

“Fucking lunacy,” provided Martinez.

His partner nodded. “That’s about right. It’s just chaos, boss. You’ll think you’ve made a deal, gotten some sort of arrangement — this happened to the Tabby three times, I’m not kidding — and the next minute some other asshole has shoved his way in and you’ve got to start all over. One of those times he told us he wound up having to deal with four gangs. And it wasn’t any big money deal, neither.”

“Just looking for a runaway slave,” said Martinez. “The bounty amounted to pocket change. But for the sorry-ass screwballs in Lower Radomsko” — he rubbed a thumb and two fingers together — “what you and I would call pocket change is worth killing over.”

“He got the runaway, eventually,” said Stanković. “But not before five people had been killed — one of whom was the runaway herself. Got her throat cut by one gang just so another one wouldn’t get the bounty.”

“Screw Lower Radomsko,” said Martinez.

Lajos laughed and raised his hands in a mock gesture of surrender. “Okay, okay, guys. I’m convinced. Neue Rostock it’ll be, then.”

Lajos was pleased. More than a decision had been arrived at here, he knew. A working relationship had been moved forward, too. He’d been worried about that a little. Lajos’ entire career had been as a lone wolf. He had no experience handling other agents and hadn’t been sure if he had the skills or aptitude for it. Judging from the friendly expressions on the faces of Stanković and Martinez, though, it seemed he did.

****

“What’s up, boss? Did you get the results from — “

Seeing the people already sitting in Anastasia Chernevsky’s office, Zachariah McBryde abruptly stopped talking. When he got the summons to report to Chernevsky — which came via personal courier, which was unusual but not unheard-of — he’d assumed she wanted to discuss one of the projects they were working on.

That couldn’t possibly be what she’d summoned him for, though, he now realized. Two of the four scientists in the room had no connection to the work he was doing, and he didn’t recognize one of them at all. The only reason Zachariah even knew she was a scientist was because the lab coat the woman was wearing had the tell-tale signs of a working garment.

But the icing on the cake was the presence of Janice Marinescu. He hadn’t seen her since the meeting where she informed Zachariah and Anastasia that Operation Houdini was being set underway.

He got a sharp, sinking feeling in his stomach. The experiments he’d been running lately had been difficult enough to keep his mind focused. As time went by with no further notice or even mention of Houdini, he’d managed to half-forget about the issue. And now here it was, back in full force. There could be no other reason for Marinescu’s presence.

“Okay, we’re all here,” Marinescu said. “The five of you in this room are the people from this science project who’ve been selected for Houdini. Anastasia Chernevsky in in overall charge of the center. Three of you” — she glanced briefly at Zachariah and the two scientists he knew — “are task force directors, and Gail Weiss is… let’s just say she has special skills we don’t want to lose.

“As you’ve probably already guessed, Houdini has just gone from alert status to active status. The first division is already being taken off-planet. Unfortunately, we’re evacuating a lot more people in a shorter span of time than we’d foreseen. That means we’re forced to use avenues of exfiltration that we hadn’t planned on originally. Many of us — including all five of you in this room — will be evacuated via Manpower shipping.”

One of the task force directors, Stefka Juarez, made a face. It had been an involuntary reaction and the expression left her face within two seconds, but Marinescu spotted it and gaze her a hard gaze. “Is there a problem, Ms. Juarez?”

She didn’t wait for an answer before continuing. “It’s a little late in the day, don’t you think, to discover you have qualms about Manpower’s activities. You’re in the inner layers of the onion and have been since you were a teenager. You’ve known for years — and if you had any disagreements you certainly kept them quiet — that the Alignment’s longterm goals required the development of genetic slavery. And still do — and will, for several more generations.”

She stopped and gave all of them that cold gaze. “The same goes for the rest of you. So if it turns out — which it has — that you have to be exfiltrated by ships from the slave trade, deal with it. You may have been able to keep your hands clean in your scientific work, but others of us — me, for one — have not enjoyed that luxury. You’ll forgive me if I don’t have any sympathy for your current plight. Which, as plights go, isn’t much.”

She stopped to look at each one of them in turn, for a second or two. “Do any of you have anything you want to say?”

All of them were silent. Chernevsky and Gail Weiss shook their heads.

“Very well.” Marinescu had her hands folded in her lap. Now she unclasped them and pointed at the door. “When you leave here, each of you will be escorted by a member of the Genetic Advancement and Uplift League to a briefing room. There, you’ll be given the details of your evacuation route. Everything you need to know except the exact time of departure and the specific ship you’ll be taking. We won’t know that for a while yet. Right now, we’re only halfway through scheduling the evacuation details for the second division.”

The third of the task force directors, Joseph van Vleet, was frowning. “How will we know –”

“– when to leave? The same member of the Uplift League whom you’ll meet when you leave here will come and notify you. They will also accompany you throughout the evacuation. Every stage of it until you reach your final destination.”

Once again, Juarez grimaced. Zachariah barely knew her, since their work was in areas quite far removed from each other. He couldn’t help but wonder, though, how someone who’d been made a task force director could have such abysmal social skills.

“Is that really necessary?” she asked.

Marinescu looked at her the way a predator studies the weakest member of a herd. After a short pause, she said: “The very fact you ask that question demonstrates that it is.”

She turned her eyes onto the rest of them. “Do I need to explain again — how many times has each of you been briefed on Houdini? at least three — that the whole point of the operation is to prevent our enemies from learning anything about the Alignment. I should say, as little as possible about the Alignment and nothing at all about the inner layers of the onion — or even the onion’s existence. The only way to be sure of that is to follow two essential guidelines.

“First, no one outside the group selected for Houdini can know anything about it. That means nobody. That includes spouses, parents, children, siblings, cousins, friends — nobody. Secondly, nobody can be left behind who does know about Houdini. Nobody. Not. One. Single. Person.”

She paused again, to scan all of their faces. Looking for weakness, hesitation, indecision, vacillation… anything that would trigger her predator’s instincts. Her own gaze was pitiless.

Zachariah held his breath. The moment was… dangerous. Really, really dangerous.

“If you don’t understand exactly what that means,” she continued, “let me explain it to you as clearly as I can. If you tell anyone about Houdini who is not part of it, that person will be eliminated. So will any person that that person might have told. I stress might have told. We will bend the stick in the direction of caution, be assured of that.”

She nodded toward Anastasia. “If Director Chernevsky tells her husband or any of her three children, to give a hypothetical example, all of them will be eliminated. Including herself, of course. Violating the tenets of Houdini will be considered high treason. Do you all understand me?”

Anastasia’s face was drawn, but she nodded curtly. So did Zachariah and van Vleet. Weiss and Juarez just stared down at the floor.

“Just to be clear on this. ‘Telling anyone’ will be interpreted as broadly as possible. So don’t try — don’t even entertain the possibility in your dreams — to let your family and friends know you’ll be leaving by some circuitous or indirect means. Do not tell them that you’ll be going on a long trip soon due to your work. Do not give them unusual gifts. Do not take them on sudden vacations. Do or say absolutely nothing that is in any way out of the ordinary. And don’t doubt for a moment that you will be under surveillance. We will know if you do.”

She paused again. “I repeat: do you all understand me, in every particular?”

This time, everyone nodded.

“Good. Now, as to the second issue. It may turn out — this is not likely, but it can’t be ruled out altogether — that at some point in the evacuation, through no fault of your own, you become compromised. If that happens, the member of the — the Gaul, to hell with circumlocutions, will see to it that you do not fall into enemy hands. You won’t have to do anything. It will be done for you. If you need me to spell that out, I will do so.”

Again, the pause. By now Zachariah just wanted to get the meeting over with. He felt like he’d been beaten on the head with a club. Beaten on his spirit, rather — or soul, if he had one.

Marinescu was not one to let anything slide, however. “I repeat. Do any of you need me to spell out what this means?”

All five of them shook their heads.

“Good. Director Chernevsky, if you would lead the way? You will be followed by the others at five second intervals in alphabetical order. After Chernevsky, Juarez goes, followed by McBryde and Van Vleet. Ms. Weiss, you go last.”

Chernevsky was already on her feet and heading for the door. After a slight hesitation, Juarez got up and followed. After the director passed through the door, Juarez glanced at her timepiece. Five seconds later, she followed.

Zachariah did the same. When he came through the door, Anastasia was no longer in sight. Juarez and her escort were already well down the corridor.

One of the three Gauls still waiting stepped up. “Task Force Director McBryde, I will be your escort. Come with me, please.”

Zachariah recognized him, but he couldn’t remember if this one was Zhilov or Arpino. But the man was already moving down the corridor so he didn’t ask.

He didn’t suppose it mattered anyway. He felt a lot like a man being led to the scaffold. Under the circumstances, would you ask the executioner his name? It seemed like a waste of time and effort. In the nature of things, your relationship with your executioner was fleeting.

 

Cauldron of Ghosts – Snippet 44

Cauldron of Ghosts – Snippet 44

Chapter 25

Cary Condor took off her hat and hung it on a peg next to the door. Like everything else in their apartment, the peg was an antique. It was a piece of actual wood, made from one of the trees called nackels that covered much of Mesa‘s lowlands. Nackelwood had no interesting grain; no aromatic odor; nothing. Its sole virtues were that it was readily available, easy to work and cheap.

It was a fairly common material used for furniture in seccie areas — but even in seccie areas most small items like clothing pegs were made of modern extrusile memory foams. As the hat drew near, the foam’s embedded sensorium would cause it to extrude as a peg shape, which it would withdraw once the object was removed. Using a wood peg, on the other hand…

The thing was rigid, fixed, immovable, an actual safety hazard. What if you slipped? You could lose an eye on the damn thing.

But that was admittedly far down the list of dangers they faced. So Cary didn’t give the peg more than a perfunctory scowl before hanging up her hat and turning to her companions.

Just one companion, as it turned out. Karen was still asleep.

“How is she?”

Stephanie was sitting at the small kitchen table. “No better — but no worse, either, from what I can tell. I think her condition may have stabilized, at least a little.”

Sighing, Cary pulled out a chair and joined Stephanie at the table. “What makes the whole thing so horrible is that if we could just get her some decent medical care…”

“We could heal her. Completely. New legs, new organs, the works. With modern medicine, it wouldn’t be that hard and not even too expensive.” She shrugged. “For all the good that does. We might as well wish for our own spacecraft and no-questions-asked orbit clearance, while we’re at it.”

Cary laughed. “And a pilot, don’t forget! Neither one of us knows a thing about operating spaceships.”

“Or even flyers, in your case,” said Stephanie. “Hell, I can barely manage to handle a simple flyer myself.”

Cary winced. She’d flown with Stephanie, once, with Stephanie at the controls.

Once. It was an experience she’d sworn never to repeat. Most seccies — Cary and Stephanie were no exception — had little experience operating equipment beyond whatever they might learn on a job. Most seccies who knew how to fly learned the skills as cabbies, personal valets or lorry drivers. Stephanie’s experience had come entirely from a few months she’d spent working for a restaurant as a parking attendant.

Cary hated Mesa‘s overlords. Manpower, Inc., the Jessyk Combine, any and all of them. She knew that David Pritchard’s detonation of the nuclear device at Green Pines had been tactically insane — not to mention suicidal for himself. But she’d never had any trouble understanding the emotions that had driven him to do it.

More than half of Mesa‘s population was kept in conditions of chattel slavery, without even the hope of manumission. The descendants of slaves who’d been freed centuries earlier when manumission had still been legal, seccies like Cary herself, lived in conditions that were better but only marginally so. Worse, actually, in material terms, more often than not. But unlike an outright slave, a seccie had a certain degree of personal freedom. Very circumscribed freedom, granted, but at least someone like Cary didn’t have to account to a master or mistress for everything they did or every step they took.

Her angry musings were interrupted by Stephanie. “Look, there’s no point chewing on ourselves over Karen’s situation. The truth is, we’re lucky any of us are still alive. Once David — and damn him again — set off that bomb, something like this was bound to happen.”

Cary couldn’t help but shiver. The weeks following the detonation at Green Pines had been…

Hideous. Mesa‘s security forces had gone berserk. They’d ripped through the seccie quarters like weasels set loose in a chicken coop. Their official rationale had been “rooting out terrorists,” but that had been an excuse — and one they didn’t care at all if anyone believed. They’d simply been wreaking vengeance.

Ironically, that very savagery was probably all that had kept Cary and Karen and Stephanie from being captured. The security forces had been so engrossed in random slaughter that they’d actually been a little lax in punishing real enemies.

So, keeping just half a step ahead of their pursuers, Cary and her two companions had managed to escape, although Karen had been terribly injured in the process. But the security forces had captured most of their former confederates.

They’d caught the leader of their group, Carl Hansen, within a few hours after Green Pines. His corpse, rather. Carl had committed suicide when he realized he had no chance of escape. If he hadn’t, the security thugs would have caught everyone. But Carl’s suicide bought the rest of them a little breathing space.

Cary didn’t know who else might have also escaped. Unfortunately, they couldn’t use the drop boxes to re-establish contact with any of them who’d done so. Angus Levigne had set up those locations, and he’d been insistent on keeping knowledge of them restricted to a small circle. The only ones in that circle who were still alive were the three women in that apartment.

A finger poked her shoulder. “Hey, snap out of it,” said Stephanie. “Whatever place you’re at right now, it’s not doing you any good. Let’s concentrate on the moment. Did you find out anything today?”

Cary realized that she had wandered off mentally. That happened to her a lot, just as the nightmares came to her almost every night. She knew she was suffering from a bad case of PTSD — which, like Karen’s injuries, was a medical condition that could be easily cured if she had access to the right treatment.

Sure. All she and Moriarty had to do was steal a flyer, hope that Stephanie wouldn’t kill them in a crash along the way, steal a shuttle at the spaceport that neither of them knew how to operate so they could reach orbit where they could steal a spacecraft neither of them knew how to operate so they could travel to a planet neither of them knew how to navigate to where they could get the medical assistance they needed from nobody they knew which they’d pay for with money they didn’t have.

The tough problem, of course, would be evading Mesa’s orbital defenses.

She couldn’t help but break into laughter. Genuine laughter, too, even if it was probably a bit hysterical.

“Well, the drop box had nothing, as usual. But I did meet that person you were told to look for.”

Stephanie’s lips tightened. “So, at least that…” She took a breath. “Wasn’t wasted.”

Stephanie had been the one who’d made the initial contact with the district’s criminal gang. Since they didn’t have any money to spare, she’d paid for the information they needed a different way.

It had been unpleasant, certainly, but no worse than anything they’d already been through. Both of them had spent time in the custody of the security forces, in the past, being interrogated. “Interrogation,” in the parlance of Mesa‘s security thugs, routinely included rape. That was almost invariably true for young women, usually true for young men, as likely as not for middle-aged people and not unheard of even in the case of the elderly.

Cary had gone through it twice. The worst of it, in a way, had been the bizarrely impersonal nature of the brutality. Her rapists had seemed to be acting out some sort of routine, as if what they were engaged in was just part of a job. It wasn’t simply that they treated her as slab of meat; so far as she could tell, they really didn’t see her as anything else. They might as well have been butchers working at their trade.

She shook her head, shaking away the memories at the same time. She could do it with those, because she’d been able to get psychological treatment afterward that had prevented the trauma from getting fixed into PTSD.

“Anyway, what you learned turned out to be true. I went to that bar he told you about.”

“The Rhodesian Rendezvous.”

“Yeah. Talk about a dive! That place is a little scary. Well, more than a little. The only people who seem to hang out there are roughnecks to a man — and I do mean man. I was the only woman in the place.”

She chuckled, very dryly. “For once, I was glad I don’t look like you.” Cary wasn’t unattractive. But she wasn’t nearly as good-looking as Moriarty.

For her part, Stephanie made a face. “Trust me, girl. Looking like me is as much of a curse as a blessing. Anyway, what happened then?”

“That guy was there, all right. The one that — what was his name? I can’t remember — told you to ask for.”

“Jake. Something. I don’t remember his last name. For that matter, I’m not sure he ever gave it to me.”

“Well, for whatever it’s worth, at least Jake didn’t cheat you. Triêu Chuanli was there, all right. In one of the back rooms, not in the main area of the bar. I had to do some fast talking to get to see him, but they finally let me.”

Stephanie’s lips quirked. “Bet they made it like some sort of royal audience.”

“Actually, no. Well, they did — the two goons who ushered me back there, I mean — but Chuanli himself was pretty low key. He was even polite. Asked me to sit, if I wanted any sort of refreshment. Ha!” She smiled. “Just as if I was a proper lady and he was a proper gentleman offering tea and crumpets. Whatever crumpets are.”

“They’re a goofy type of pancake. The ancient Angleterrans used to eat them, whoever they were.” Moriarty made an impatient shooing motion with her hand. “Keep going.”

Cary decided to cut the small talk that had followed for a few minutes. Triêu — he’d insisted on being on a first name basis — really had been quite pleasant, even cordial. If she hadn’t known he was some sort of higher-up in a criminal cabal, Cary would have thought he was a professional of some sort. Maybe even a university professor.

Good-looking guy, too. But again, she shook her head.

“The long and the short of it is that, yes, he’d be interested in our merchandise whenever we see fit to present him with it. He was obviously curious as to why we didn’t have it right now — or even have a date in mind. But he didn’t push that at all.”

“Is that the long or the short? And whichever it is, what’s the kicker? There’s got to be one.”

Cary smiled. “Bad expression. I should have said, ‘the short and the short of it.’ What it came down to was, yes, he’d be willing to buy. No, he wasn’t slobbering all over himself with eagerness. This sort of merchandise, it seems, does have a market but it’s a pretty erratic one and if it takes too long maintaining the merchandise in good condition can cost enough to eat up any profits he might make. You can’t just stuff it into a freezer. So — this is the kicker — the price isn’t that great. He’ll give us a deal. We either take a straight-up payment –”

“For how much?”

Cary gave her the amount, in all three currencies Chuanli had offered to deal in. Moriarty grimaced.

“That’s not much,” she said. “Wouldn’t keep us going for more than another three months, tops.”

“Or we can share part of the risk with him. We could wind up with quite a bit more, if he can turn the merchandise around quickly. Or we might end up with even less than the straight-up price, if it takes too long. In whatever case, though, we don’t get paid until he makes the sale. Or sales — which is more likely — if he winds up having more than one customer.”

Stephanie grimaced again. “That means we have to trust him, too.”

Cary and pursed her lips. “I don’t think that’s actually a problem, Stephanie. It’s hard to explain, but… I get the sense that when you deal with someone like Chuanli, it’s taken for granted that everyone is acting in good faith. Honor among thieves, I’d guess you’d say. That’s probably because since nobody can appeal a dispute to the courts, nobody wants to take a risk that the swindled party comes back at you with bloodshed in mind.”

Stephanie rolled her eyes. “Oh, right.” She spread out her hands, indicating the cramped apartment. “We’re practically awash in hit men. Oh, wait. I guess that’d have to be hit girls, since there are no actual men here.”

“Hey, look. Nobody ever promised us a rose garden.”

“Yeah, but is it too much to ask for a cactus garden? This is pushing it.” Stephanie chewed on her lower lip for a few seconds. “So what do you think? Go for the better but riskier deal?”

“Yeah.”

She chewed on her lip for a few more seconds. “Okay. What the hell. We may as well keep living dangerously, given our track record.”

 

1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies – Snippet 15

1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies – Snippet 15 

Eddie saw no hint of reaction in Simpson’s perfect poker face, but reasoned that his CO’s observations must be similar to his own. Kirstenfels evidently knew a lot about his topic, but probably did not understand the ignition variable: that with calmer seas and a percussion cap instead of a fuse, the rifles would be fairly accurate out to their medium ranges. But he certainly did understand the broader strategic implications of putting guns like those on ships that could travel on the ocean. Even if these ships were not being built for high seas battles, they might be intended to sail and steam into engagements on calmer, bounded bodies of water.

“I am speaking, of course, of their potential usefulness in the Mediterranean,” finished Kirstenfels.

Which was both a correct and an incorrect guess, Eddie allowed. Eventually, that was where the new class of ships would probably be needed and hopefully, be decisive. But before then —

Simpson raised an eyebrow. “Mr. Kirstenfels, that is, to put it lightly, a most improbable surmise. What could possibly possess the USE to become embroiled in a Mediterranean conflict?”

Kirstenfels actually hazarded a small smile. “I could think of several possibilities. Ottoman expansion. Any serious threat to Venice, where the USE — and Grantville in particular — is heavily invested. An increase in the Spanish adventurism on or near the Italian peninsula, possibly including an attempt to eliminate Savoy’s small but troublesome fleet.”

He settled back in the chair that had been built — unsuccessfully, evidently — to prevent such relaxed postures. “However, the specific nature of the conflict is hardly the key datum in my surmise, Herr Admiral. I have been studying the ships you are building. They are high weather designs. That is more than you need if you were just going to punt around the Baltic.”

Simpson’s chin came out defensively. “Perhaps you’ve overlooked how rough the weather gets up here. In all seasons.”

Kirstenfels nodded politely, but didn’t look away. “Yes, but by that reasoning, then your choice of smaller craft becomes even more puzzling. The smaller hulls you’ve been procuring for portage on the larger ones are invariably very shallow-draft. They are lateen or yawl-rigged, have low bows, are narrow in the waist. Not for the Baltic.” Kirstenfels glanced out the lead-mullioned windows at the choppy grey swells beyond the bay. “Five months out of the year, these waters would swamp such boats on a regular basis. They are, however, perfectly suited for the Mediterranean: river and inlet scouting, touching on shallow coastlines, and regular ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore exchanges.”

A slow, ironic smile had been growing on Simpson’s face as the reporter laid out his case. Kirstenfels’ answering frown deepened as the admiral’s grin widened. “This amuses you, Admiral?”

Simpson seemed to stifle a chuckle. “Oh, no, no. Please continue. I like stories. Particularly fanciful ones.”

For a moment, Eddie glimpsed Kirstenfels without his mask of bourgeois suavity and well-groomed calmness. Intent and beady eyes stared and calculated, unaware that he had just been taken in by his own gambit, that the ships’ ultimate goal was the Mediterranean — just not yet. But all hungry newsman Kirstenfels knew was that his finger had slipped off whatever sensitive spot had first irked Simpson, that the story which he had been building was about to slip away from him. He was annoyed, anxious, resentful at the easy unvoiced mockery with which his hard-gained evidence was being dismissed, and his conjectures along with them.

Kirstenfels’ eyes lost that brief feral glaze. He tried a new tack. “Well, since you enjoy fanciful tales, let’s try this one. That the fleet you’re building is not bound for the Mediterranean at all, but for waters with somewhat similar characteristics and sailing requirements. Specifically, the Caribbean.”

Simpson seemed to allow himself to smile. “Ah, now there’s a new one. Tell me more.”

Kirstenfels didn’t get rattled this time. “I’d be happy to, Herr Admiral. Beyond the indisputable fact that the flotilla you are currently building would be supremely well-suited for operations in those waters, some of you Americans are likely to be relatively familiar with those waters. And you have a special interest in projecting your power into the New World, since the Caribbean has something the Mediterranean doesn’t.”

“Oh? Like what?  Simpson seemed to be trying to hide a smile once again.

“Like Trinidad. Like Pitch Lake. Like easily-reached oil.”

Simpson allowed the smile to resurface but it was faintly brittle, and Eddie knew what that meant: that surprised him. And now Kirstenfels has hit the nail right on its head. If I don’t do something, he’s going to see and figure out the meaning of the look on Simpson’s face and then the cat will truly be out of the bag —

Eddie grinned, covered his mouth hastily.

Kirstenfels looked over at him sharply. “I have said something amusing, Commander?”

Eddie put on a straight face, shook his head earnestly. “No, Mr. Kirstenfels. I’m just, well, surprised that you figured out our secret.”

“Your secret?”

“Yes, sir. About taking the flotilla to the Caribbean. It’s no good for us to deny it any longer, now that you’ve put all the facts together.”

Kirstenfels’ frown returned. And Eddie could see the wheels of presupposition turning behind his grey, uncharitable eyes: I know they will not tell me the truth, so my guess about the Caribbean must be false. But they want me to believe it in order to throw me off the real scent. Of course, I should check to see if this, too, is just a ruse —

Kirstenfels looked at Simpson whose face was once again wooden. “So, Admiral, since we are free to talk about the Caribbean, then — “

With a sharp look at Eddie, he cut off the reporter, “I cannot comment on any operations we might, or might not, have planned for the Caribbean.” The faintest hint of the histrionic had crept into his voice, at which Eddie nearly smiled: very well played, Admiral.

And Kirstenfels had obviously taken the bait. The instant he heard that slightly theatrical tone in Simpson’s prohibition on further conversation about the Caribbean, a tiny smile crinkled his lips. Eddie could almost see the thought bubble over the newsman’s head: So, the admiral play-acts at upset and worry. The two of them hope to mislead me into thinking my guess about the Caribbean was accurate. All in order to divert me from my first, best hypothesis: that they really are preparing for action in the Mediterranean. A smug expression flitted across Kirstenfels’ features and was gone all in the same instant, but Eddie knew the look of vindication and triumphant certainty when he saw it.

Simpson had folded his arms. “Is there anything else, Mr. Kirstenfels?”

The newsman rose, cap in his hands. “No, thank you, Admiral Simpson. Am I free to go?”

Simpson looked as though he had swallowed a gill of spoiled vinegar. “Unfortunately, you are, Mr. Kirstenfels. But any subsequent incidents will have consequences. You have been directly and personally warned not to pursue any further investigation into the ships we are building here or their potential uses. If you disregard that warning, I will hand you over to a judge to determine just how profound your disloyalty is in the eyes of the government of the USE. The Marines will see you out.”

“And I presume I am not allowed to ask any questions of your men that might be construed to be an inquiry into their ultimate destination in the Mediterranean?”

“Or the Caribbean,” Simpson added peevishly. If Eddie hadn’t known better, he would have truly believed that the admiral was now irritated at having to play-act at such lame and obvious conceits as prohibiting Caribbean inquiries.

“Or the Caribbean,” Kirstenfels agreed, almost facetiously from the doorway. “Good day, gentlemen.”

Simpson stared at the door for five silent seconds before turning toward Eddie and matching his smile. “Thanks for the quick thinking, Commander. He had me on the ropes for that first second, when he hit on the Caribbean.”

“My pleasure, Admiral. You’re quite the poker player. Masterful last bluff, by the way.”

The older man’s smile became slightly predatory. “Do you play poker, Commander?”

“Not with you, sir.”

“Ah. Well, in this case, that caution might indeed be more helpful than a gamesman’s daring. At any rate, I’m sure we’ll be hearing about our Mediterranean flotilla any day now.”

“Yes, but Kirstenfels’ report will be so premature that it will actually be meaningless.”

“‘Premature,’ Commander?”

“Yes, sir. As you pointed out honestly enough, we have no reason to go down there. But you left out an important qualifying word: ‘Yet.’ “

Simpson’s rare light-hearted mood extinguished as sharply as a candle in a cold breeze. “Situations can change very dramatically and very quickly, Commander. We could find ourselves wishing for a Mediterranean fleet much sooner than our own timelines of ‘international eventualities’ suggest. But enough: we’ve lost a lot of time misdirecting that ambulance chaser. What’s the latest status update on the New World mission, Commander?”

 

1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies – Snippet 14

1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies – Snippet 14 

Chapter 8

Lübeck, United States of Europe

At a nod from Simpson, the two Marine guards stood at ease, but remained flanking the man who had hired the skiff. The fellow did not look particularly anxious. Then again, he did not appear particularly comfortable, either.

Simpson took his seat, glanced at the chair beside him, which Eddie quickly occupied, grateful to be off his one real leg.

Simpson scanned the few scant reports he had on the man and his activities. Scanned them long enough to have read them five times over, Eddie realized.

The man from the skiff cleared his throat. “Admiral, I wonder if I might –”

“Herr Kirstenfels — if that is your real name — I have not finished studying the information we have on you and your actions today. I will speak with you when I have concluded.”

“But Admiral, I only –”

It was quite clear what he wanted: a chair. But Simpson, who had kept this slightly pudgy man from sitting since he was taken into custody, simply waved him to silence.

Herr Kirstenfels shifted his feet but did not resume his request.

After another minute, Simpson put down the papers and folded his hands on the desk in front of him. “Herr Kirstenfels, I presume you are aware that you not only put your own life at risk, but also the owner of the skiff?”

“Yes, Herr Admiral, I know this now. May I please have a seat?”

Simpson frowned. “Herr Kirstenfels, you are hardly in a position to request anything, but I will allow you to be seated.” The admiral pointed out a chair to one of the Marine guards, who promptly fetched it and put it behind the detainee. Who sat on it and winced: it was as small, hard, and ugly a chair as humans could craft. Which, as Eddie knew from prior witness, Simpson kept on hand for exactly this purpose. “Now, I wonder if you know how much trouble you are in.”

“Perhaps I do not.”

Eddie suppressed a frown. Kirstenfels’ admission sounded humble enough, but it also sounded faintly coy. Not what one would associate with an appropriately cowed, even intimidated, civilian. The undertone in his voice did not suggest fear, but watchful maneuvering. Hmmm . . . did we catch this guy, or did he want to get caught?

What Simpson had heard, if anything, was not suggested in his response. “I shall provide a brief outline of the situation in which you find yourself, Herr Kirstenfels. You entered a test range during official operations. You did so with the admitted intent to observe our weapons trials. Since we did not announce the trials publicly, I must conclude that you bribed or extorted that information out of a representative of the USE’s armed forces or government. And that alone constitutes grounds for a full investigation by my staff.”

If Simpson had meant to frighten Kirstenfels, it apparently had not worked. The smallish man merely nodded, listening carefully to each of the specifications read against him. When the admiral had concluded, he reflected momentarily, and then asked, “But have I broken any laws?”

Simpson’s color changed slightly. “That remains to be seen.”

“Pardon me, Herr Admiral, I should have been more precise. Were any of the actions you cited just now legal violations?”

“Your presence on the test range certainly was. Your possession of information regarding the trials may be.”

“Well, Admiral Simpson, as to the latter, I did not suborn or solicit information illegally.”

Eddie noticed, and so did Simpson, judging from the slight stiffening of his neck, the carefully official language.

Kirstenfels expanded upon his claim. “I simply overheard the conversation between some of the land-based test crew talking about the gun with the sailors who were preparing to go out with it on today’s trial.”

– A convenient and utterly incontestable alibi, Eddie conceded silently.

“And as far as being on the range during the test is concerned, I do not know how that could be illegal, Admiral.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if the trial was supposed to be a secret, how could anyone know it was illegal? Since your men were speaking about the weapon tests in a public place, I rather assumed it was not secret. And I never did hear anything about that stretch of the Baltic being off-limits to the public.”

“That is because ‘the public’ does not often venture into those particular waters, and because we had distributed navigational restrictions to all the ship operators and owners currently in port.”

“Ah. But that is still not a declaration of illegality, Herr Admiral. Rather, it is an official attempt to make the area temporarily unreachable to the public. Those are two very different things. Wouldn’t you agree?”

John Simpson was motionless, but Eddie could read that as one of the clear signs of growing fury. Simpson had a particular sore spot when it came to the press. In his view of up-time events, they had been uncharitable to his country and his comrades in the way they depicted the Vietnam War, in which he had lost his own foot. The press had once again been opportunistic and accusatory when he was a captain of industry afterwards. And Eddie could see that Simpson would soon leave a crater where this hapless reporter was now sitting, if he gave voice to even a small measure of his rage. Which was not in the interests of the Navy —

But Simpson surprised Eddie by exhaling at a slow, controlled rate and then smiling, albeit without the faintest hint of genuine amity. “Well, Mr. Kirstenfels, it seems you wanted to get access to me for an exclusive interview. And now you have it, don’t you?”

Kirstenfels stammered for a moment, obviously surprised at being sniffed out so quickly. “Er . . . well, yes, I suppose that may have been part of my –”

“Come now, Mr. Kirstenfels, what else would be sufficient motivation to sail near a live-fire range? Certainly nothing having to do with our guns.”

“Well, in point of fact, your guns are a matter of keen interest to me.”

“So it seems. I have reports that, during the land-based proving trials, some of our perimeter guards escorted you back beyond the no-trespassing line.” Simpson’s restored smile was anything but genial. “You are an artillery enthusiast, perhaps?”

But Kirstenfels, despite his unprepossessing appearance, turned out to have more than his share of sand. “Perhaps, but not in the way you mean, Admiral Simpson.”

“Then why don’t you explicate?”

“Thank you, Herr Admiral, I will.”

And Eddie could tell from Simpson’s suddenly rigid jaw, that he had just given the reporter what he wanted: not merely an opening, but an invitation.

The reporter had produced a pad and one of the new, if crude, pencils that were starting to show up in a variety of forms. “You see, Admiral Simpson, I have been duly impressed by the tremendous range and accuracy of your new guns.”

“They are not really new,” Simpson corrected.

Kirstenfels nodded. “No, of course not. They are modeled on the ten-inch naval rifles you used in the Baltic War, except these are breech-loaders rather than muzzle-loaders. But I was surprised to see the mounts for them being readied on the frigate-style ships you are building at your secure facility in Lübeck.”

“Oh, and why is that?”

“Well, for the very reason you demonstrated on the water earlier today. Guns such as those require a very stable ship in order to be accurate. The monitors you first put them on have exactly that kind of stability in the mostly calm waters where you employed them, but not the sea-going frigate-style hulls you are currently fitting with steam engines.”

Well, Eddie reflected, the steam-engine “secret” was going to come out at last. Which was just as well: it had always been a pretty laughable as a “classified” project. After all, it was simply a logical progression to move from steam-powered monitors to steam-powered blue-water ships. In fact, all their projections had presumed that some external observers would have surmised, and then confirmed, that development long ago. Eddie and Simpson privately conceded that Richelieu had probably had definitive intelligence reports on that aspect of the ships’ construction no later than March.

But “investigative reporting” was a new phenomenon, and frequently, even the best down-time newspapermen missed telltale clues of what might be transpiring simply because they did not have nuanced enough knowledge of up-time technology to understand how small details were often indicative of whole stories. It was the old problem of the expert tracker who is tasked to find an animal he has never seen or heard of.

But in this case, Kirstenfels was a reporter who obviously understood the greater significance of the (literally) “smoking gun” he was investigating. “My reading in Grantville last month suggests that those long guns would be almost useless while riding up and down the swells of the Atlantic. But there are other bodies of water — strategically significant bodies of water — for which they might be far more suited.”

 

Cauldron of Ghosts – Snippet 43

This book should be available now so this is the last snippet. 

Cauldron of Ghosts – Snippet 43 

“Well, than Andrew and Steph will be, anyway,” Yana corrected him with a smile, and he chuckled.

“Actually, I think they’re probably going to be more comfortable than Victor is,” he said. “Working crew berths aboard liners like the Pygmalion may not be luxury suites, but they aren’t exactly dungeon cells, either. Their quarters will actually be more comfortable — and probably more spacious — than anything Andrew had growing up on Parmley Station, and they’ll be a hell of a lot better than anything Steph had as a seccie growing up in Mendel. But poor Victor! Can you even imagine how badly his revolutionary’s instincts are going to revolt against a first-class suite on one of the fanciest luxury liners in space?” Anton shook his head, his sad expression belied by the twinkle in his deep eyes. “I foresee great angst on his part!”

“Bull.” Yana laughed. “You know exactly how he and the Kaja will be spending their time in that first-class suite of theirs!”

“I have no idea what you could possibly be talking about,” Anton said virtuously, and Yana laughed again.

She had a point, Anton conceded, and even if she hadn’t had one, Victor Cachat was nothing if not adaptable. And the fact that Mesa was one of Pygmalion‘s regular stops (and that her captain owed Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou several very sizable personal favors) was going to prove very useful. The ship, one of the Tobias Lines’ elite vessels, had exactly zero connection with anything Beowulfan and the line’s owners had been among the Solarian League’s most vociferous critics of “Manticoran mercantile imperialism” for the last forty or fifty T-years. They deeply resented Manticoran penetration of what they considered to be rightfully “their” markets, especially as that penetration pushed them further and further out of the bulk freight carrying trade and into the passenger traffic. They couldn’t complain about their profit margin on the fast, sleek liners they continued to operate, but a very high profit margin on a couple of dozen vessels came in a poor second compared to a moderate profit margin on several score vessels.

What mattered at the moment was that there was absolutely nothing to make even a member of the Mesan Alignment suspicious of Pygmalion‘s pedigree, and she’d plied the same route — which included both Beowulf and Mesa — for the last seven T-years. She was a thoroughly known quantity, and her owners didn’t need to know that Captain Vandor’s daughter-in-law owed her life and the lives of her three then-unborn children to a BSC covert team under the command of one Major Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou. In fact, Captain Vandor and his family had been very careful about seeing to it that that particular bit of knowledge did not become public. There were several reasons for that, but the most important one was that Vandor was a man who believed in paying his debts, which included keeping the identity of the unknown criminals who’d raided the offices of a highly respected Solarian shipping line — the one, in fact, which had employed (and continued to employ) one Sebastián Vandor — and in the process “kidnapped” a secretarial worker who had subsequently managed to escape from her abductors and was now the mother of Sebastian’s grandchildren.

The Tobias Lines would have looked with disfavor upon any efforts to publicize the fact that its current CEO’s (sadly deceased) brother had been using the company’s assets to cover Manpower shipments of genetic slaves inside the League. Of course, that had been back in the good old days when Tobias had still boasted a sizable freighter fleet. Times had changed . . . but memories were long, and there was no statute of limitations on the League’s anti-slavery laws. But that once-upon-a-time relationship was one reason Pygmalion served the Mesan run and enjoyed a certain coziness with the Mesa System’s government and its various agencies.

All of which only helped make the liner one of the least likely to be suspected means whereby desperate and coming spies might be inserted into the very heart of darkness.

Brixton’s Comet wasn’t quite as speedy as Pygmalion. The passenger liner had military grade particle screening and a military grade hyper generator, as did most of the galaxy’s relatively small number of really fast passenger liners and specialty freighters. Brixton’s Comet, although she was obviously the sort of plaything only the fabulously wealthy might possess, did not have military grade particle screening. She could go as high in hyper-space as Pygmalion could, but her sustained velocity there was barely seventy percent as great. The passenger liner could make the trip from Beowulf to Mesa via the Visigoth System and its wormhole junction in little more than twelve T-days; Brixton’s Comet would require eighteen. On the other hand, the yacht wasn’t dependent upon the passenger liner’s schedule and Yana and Anton ought to be able to leave at least a full T-week and a half before Pygmalion did. That meant they ought to arrive in Mesa a good four T-days sooner than the rest of their team did, which would give them that additional time to establish their own covers . . . and that much more separation from the insertion of the others.

Victor and Thandi would enter Mesa openly, relying upon their thoroughly legal (albeit rather less than legally obtained) visas, which would subject them to the full rigor of Mesan Customs. That was fine, since the Mesans were supposed to figure out — eventually — that Victor’s ostensible reason for visiting their fine planet was not precisely what he had declared upon arrival. Mesa being Mesa, the authorities ought to be quite satisfied with that discovery and pat themselves on the back for it without spending much thought worrying over the possibility that the dark little secret they’d discovered about their guest was there specifically to be discovered and provide the sort of answer which would keep them from looking any deeper.

Andrew Artlett and Steph Turner would enter Mesa in less visible fashion. It wasn’t at all uncommon for ships like Pygmalion to sign on temporary crew, and it wasn’t much less common for that temporary crew to jump ship. It was an acknowledged way for the big lines, especially, to find the hands they needed in a short-term arrangement with the understanding that they could pay dirt poor wages because what the short-term hands in question had in mind was finding cheap transportation to where they really wanted to go. “Gypsies” was the most commonly used polite term for people like that, and nobody worried his head too much over their comings and goings. Admittedly, Mesa was likely to keep a much closer eye on any gypsies who decided to stay on in someplace like Mendel, but Victor had come up with an extremely Victor-like plan to let them drop entirely off the grid once they were on-planet.

As a general rule, Anton Zilwicki disliked plans which had too many moving parts. The Demon Murphy was the unceasing foe of those who became too enamored of their own cleverness, and Zilwicki had adopted the KISS Principle as his guiding light long, long ago. In this instance, however, he’d considered every aspect of the insertion plan, and assuming they were going to actually continue with what Duchess Harrington had so aptly described as their insanity, he was satisfied this was the best way to go about it.

Besides, he thought, looking down at the hologram, she really is a sweet little ship. I’m going to enjoy playing with her. And this time I’m not going to spend T-weeks on end playing cards and listening to Andrew whistle. What’s a little possibility of mayhem and disaster compared to that?