Cauldron of Ghosts (19 page)

“I thought you’d say, ‘We’ll have to cut your throat.’ ”

“Why would we do that?” The voice sounded genuinely puzzled. “No point in it.”

Steph laughed. “I knew it! It’s Victor. Yes, I’m in.”

Andrew puffed out his cheeks. “Well. Me too, then.” He pointed an accusing finger at the wall. “Don’t argue with me, Victor! I’m coming too, it’s settled. And how the hell did you get rid of that godawful Nouveau Paris accent?”

“Why would I argue with you? I can think of at least two ways you could be very useful, just off the top of my head. Yes, it’s Victor. Berry, Ruth, Henry—show them in, please. Anton finally woke up. Thandi and Yana are climbing the walls. They don’t handle tedium well.”

There was a brief pause, perhaps two seconds, and the voice continued. “Yana says she votes for the boutique. Thandi won’t come right out and say it but she obviously does too. I have almost no idea what you’re talking about and Anton’s already looking bored but I think it’s probably a brilliant idea. Come on in and we’ll pursue it further.”

Berry and Ruth rose from the table. Kham followed them after pulling out his com and keying in some instructions.

One of the walls of the conference room began sliding aside. Beyond, Steph and Andrew could see a corridor. It looked like a hospital corridor, for whatever undefinable reason.

* * *

“It’s quite cunning, actually,” Victor said, sticking a finger against his throat. “It’s a nanotech method. They do something to my vocal cords and fiddle with the laryngeal nerve. Don’t ask me the details because I don’t have a clue. And,
voila,
my Nouveau Paris accent that I could never get rid of—it was always my one big weakness as a spy—is transformed into a Traccoran accent.”

“I hate it,” said Thandi, who was lying on a bed next to him. “I don’t mind his new body. But that new voice of his . . .”

Victor’s physique hadn’t changed much. There’d been no reason to change it since it had been quite normal. But his face was completely different. He was a very handsome man, now, in a slightly androgynous way. Dark eyes were now a bright, pale green; dark coarse hair cut short was now a fancy blond hair style. Combine that with the new voice and there wasn’t a trace left of Victor Cachat.

Anton . . . looked pretty much as he had before. Oh, his face had been completely changed, but he still had the same short, squat and extremely powerful physique.

Andrew Artlett frowned. “I don’t get it. What’s the point of leaving your body the same? No offense, but there aren’t too many people who’re built like that.”

Zilwicki got a sour expression on his face and pointed at Victor. “Blame him. I was
supposed
to get redesigned as a Hakim grandee, but—”

“That idea was a nonstarter,” said Victor, “once we realized that the only way to disguise him would be to make him so fat he’d look like a beach ball. So fat, in fact, that he’d face real health issues. What was far more important than that—”

“Minor issues of my life span and morbidity, that is,” said Anton. Sourly.

“—was that he’d be so corpulent he’d have a hard time moving quickly in case he needed to. Which, on this mission, is not unlikely. So . . .”

Victor crossed one hand over the other. “The original plan was for Anton to go in as a Hakim grandee with Yana as his servant. I suggested we swap the roles. Now
Yana
is
the rich bigwig and squatty here”—a thumb indicated Anton—“is the menial servant. Hakim’s got a big mining industry so they use a lot of modified heavy labor slaves. Look just like him, in fact.”

“He doesn’t have a slave marker on his tongue,” objected Steph.

“That’s not really necessary,” said Anton. “Hakim—this is about its only saving grace—is pretty easy-going about manumission. By now, there are quite a few descendants of ex-slaves around.”

Cachat turned his head toward an open door to the side. “Yana, stop sulking in there. You’ve got to show yourself sooner or later.”

“Screw you. This was
your
idea. I plan to hold that grudge the rest of my life.”

Yana Tretiakovna came into the room. She moved with a somewhat mincing gait, quite unlike her usual athletic stride.

The reason was . . . obvious. Steph smiled. Artlett grinned.

“Don’t. Say. Anything,” warned Yana. She glared down at her new bosom. Her very, very impressive new bosom.

“Mind you, it’s likely to be a short life,” she said. “I’m bound to topple over and kill myself the moment I get distracted.”

“It’s a status symbol in a number of Verge cultures,” Kham elaborated. “And the wealthier you are, the—ah—more voluptuous you are.”

Steph and Andrew studied Yana a bit longer.

“So what do we call you now?” Andrew asked. “Midas?”

Chapter 19

“
What
did you say?”

Albrecht Detweiler stared at his oldest son, and the consternation in his expression would have shocked any of the relatively small number of people who’d ever met him.

“I said our analysis of what happened at Green Pines seems to have been a little in error,” Benjamin Detweiler said flatly. “That bastard McBryde wasn’t the only one trying to defect.” Benjamin had had at least a little time to digest the information during his flight from the planetary capital of Mendel, and if there was less consternation in his expression, it was also grimmer and far more frightening than his father’s. “And the way the Manties are telling it, the son of a bitch sure as hell wasn’t trying to
stop
Cachat and Zilwicki. They haven’t said so, but he must’ve deliberately suicided to cover up what he’d done!”

Albrecht stared at him for several more seconds. Then he shook himself and inhaled deeply.

“Go on,” he grated. “I’m sure there’s more and better yet to come.”

“Zilwicki and Cachat are still alive,” Benjamin told him. “I’m not sure where the hell they’ve been. We don’t have anything like the whole story yet, but apparently they spent most of the last few months getting home. The bastards aren’t letting out any more operational details than they have to, but I wouldn’t be surprised if McBryde’s cyber attack is the only reason they managed to get out in the first place.

“According to the best info we’ve got, though, they headed toward Haven, not Manticore, when they left, which probably helps explain why they were off the grid so long. I’m not sure about the reasoning behind that, either. But whatever they were thinking, what they accomplished was to get Eloise Pritchart—in person!—to Manticore, and she’s apparently negotiated some kind of damned
peace treaty
with Elizabeth.”

“With
Elizabeth
?”

“We’ve always known she’s not really crazy, whatever we may’ve sold the Sollies,” Benjamin pointed out. “Inflexible as hell sometimes, sure, but she’s way too pragmatic to turn down something like that. For that matter, she’d sent Harrington to Haven to do exactly the same thing before Oyster Bay! And Pritchart brought along an argument to sweeten the deal, too, in the form of one Herlander Simões.
Dr.
Herlander Simões . . . who once upon a time worked in the Gamma Center on the streak drive.”

“Oh,
shit
,” Albrecht said with quiet, heartfelt intensity.

“Oh, it gets better, Father,” Benjamin said harshly. “I don’t know how much information McBryde actually handed Zilwicki and Cachat, or how much substantiation they’ve got for it, but they got one hell of a lot more than
we’d
want them to have! They’re talking about virus-based nanotech assassinations, the streak drive,
and
the spider drive, and they’re naming names about something called ‘the Mesan Alignment.’ In fact, they’re busy telling the Manty Parliament—and, I’m sure, the Havenite Congress and all the
rest
of the fucking galaxy!—all about the Mesan plan to conquer the known universe. In fact, you’ll be astonished to know that Secretary of State Arnold Giancola was in the nefarious Alignment’s pay when he deliberately maneuvered Haven back into shooting at the Manties!”

“What?” Albrecht blinked in surprise. “We didn’t have anything to do with that!”

“Of course not. But fair’s fair; we did know he was fiddling the correspondence. Only after the fact, maybe, when he enlisted Nesbitt to help cover his tracks, but we did know. And apparently giving Nesbitt the nanotech to get rid of Grosclaude was a tactical error. It sounds like Usher got at least a sniff of it, and even if he hadn’t, the similarities between Grosclaude’s suicide and the Webster assassination—and the attempt on Harrington—are pretty obvious once someone starts looking. So the theory is that if we’re the only ones with the nanotech, and if Giancola used nanotech to get rid of Grosclaude, he must’ve been working for us all along. At least they don’t seem to have put Nesbitt into the middle of it all—yet, anyway—but their reconstruction actually makes sense, given what they think they know at this point.”

“Wonderful,” Albrecht said bitterly.

“Well, it isn’t going to get any better, Father, and that’s a fact. Apparently, it’s all over the Manties’ news services and sites, and even some of the Solly newsies are starting to pick up on it. It hasn’t had time to actually hit Old Terra yet, but it’s going to be there in the next day or so. There’s no telling what’s going to happen when it does, either, but it’s already all over
Beowulf
, and I’ll just let you imagine for yourself how
they’re
responding to it.”

Albrecht’s mouth tightened as he contemplated the full, horrendous extent of the security breach. Just discovering Zilwicki and Cachat were still alive to dispute the Alignment’s version of Green Pines would have been bad enough. The rest . . . !

“Thank you,” he said after a moment, his tone poison-dry. “I think my imagination’s up to the task of visualizing how
those
bastards will eat this up.” He twitched a savage smile. “I suppose the best we can hope for is that finding out how completely we’ve played their so-called intelligence agencies for the last several centuries will shake their confidence. I’d
love
to see that bastard Benton Ramirez y Chou’s reaction, for instance. Unfortunately, whatever we may hope for, what we can
count
on is for them to line up behind the Manties. For that matter, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them actively sign up with the Manticoran Alliance . . . especially if Haven’s already on board with it.”

“Despite the Manties’ confrontation with the League?” The words were a question, but Benjamin’s tone made it clear he was following his father’s logic only too well.

“Hell, we’re the ones who’ve been setting things up so the League came unglued in the first place, Ben! You really think someone like
Beowulf
gives a single good goddamn about those fucking apparatchiks in Old Chicago?” Albrecht snorted contemptuously. “I may hate the bastards, and I’ll do my damnedest to cut their throats, but whatever else they may be, they’re not stupid or gutless enough to let Kolokoltsov and his miserable crew browbeat them into doing one damned thing they
don’t
want
to do.”

“You’re probably right about that,” Benjamin agreed glumly, then shook his head. “No, you
are
right about that.”

“Unfortunately, it’s not going to stop there,” Albrecht went on. “Just having Haven stop shooting at Manticore’s going to be bad enough, but Gold Peak is entirely too close to us for my peace of mind. She thinks too much, and she’s too damned good at her job. She probably hasn’t heard about any of this yet, given transit times, but she’s going to soon enough. And if she’s feeling adventurous—or if Elizabeth is—we could have a frigging Manty fleet right here in Mesa in a handful of T-weeks. One that’ll run over anything Mesa has without even noticing it. And then there’s the delightful possibility that Haven could come after us right along with Gold Peak, if they end up signing on as active military allies!”

“The same thought had occurred to me,” Benjamin said grimly. As the commander of the Alignment’s navy, he was only too well aware of what the only navies with operational pod-laying ships-of-the-wall and multidrive missiles could do if they were
allied
instead of shooting at one another.

“What do you think the Andies are going to do?” he asked after a moment, and his father grated a laugh.

“Isabel was always against using that nanotech anywhere we didn’t have to. It looks like I should’ve listened.” He shook his head. “I still think all the arguments for getting rid of Huang were valid, even if we didn’t get him in the end, but if the Manties know about the nanotech and share that with Gustav, I think his usual ‘realpolitik’ will go right out the airlock. We didn’t just go after his family, Benjamin—we went after the
succession
, too, and the Anderman dynasty hasn’t lasted this long putting up with that
kind of crap. Trust me. If he thinks the Manties are telling the truth, he’s likely to come after us himself! For that matter, the Manties might deliberately strip him off from their Alliance. In fact, if they’re smart, that’s what they ought to do. Get Gustav out of the Sollies’ line of fire and let him take care of us. It’s not like they’re going to need his pod-layers to kick the SLN’s ass! And we just happen to have left the Andies’ support structure completely intact, haven’t we? That means they’ve got plenty of MDMs, and if Gustav comes after us while staying out of the confrontation with the League, do you really think any of our ‘friends’ in Old Chicago’ll do one damned thing to stop him? Especially when they finally figure out what the Manties are really in a position to do to them?”

“No,” Benjamin agreed bitterly. “Not in a million years.”

There was silence for several seconds as father and son contemplated the shattering upheaval in the Mesan Alignment’s carefully laid plans.

“All right,” Albrecht said finally. “None of this is anyone’s fault. Or, at least, if it
is
anyone’s fault, it’s mine and not anyone else’s. You and Collin gave me your best estimate of what really went down at Green Pines, and I agreed with your assessment. For that matter, the fact that Cachat and Zilwicki didn’t surface before this pretty much seemed to confirm it. And given the fact that none of our internal reports mentioned this ‘Simões’ by name—or if they did, I certainly don’t remember it, anyway—I imagine I should take it all our investigators assumed he was one of the people killed by the Green Pines bombs?”

“Yes.” Benjamin grimaced. “As a matter of fact, the Gamma Center records which ‘mysteriously’ survived McBryde’s cyberbomb showed Simões as on-site when the suicide charge went off.” He sighed. “I should’ve wondered why those records managed to survive when so much of the rest of our secure files got wiped.”

“You weren’t the only one who didn’t think about that,” his father pointed out harshly. “It did disappear him pretty neatly, though, didn’t it? And no wonder we were willing to assume he’d just been vaporized! God knows enough other people were.” He shook his head. “And I still think we did the right thing to use the whole mess to undercut Manticore with the League, given what we knew. But that’s sort of the point, I suppose. What’s that old saying? ‘It’s not what you don’t know that hurts you; it’s what you
think
you know that isn’t so.’ It’s sure as hell true in
this
case, anyway!”

“I think we could safely agree on that, Father.”

They sat silent once more for several moments. Then Albrecht shrugged.

“Well, it’s not the end of the universe. And at least we’ve had time to get Houdini up and running.”

“But we’re not far enough along with it,” Benjamin pointed out. “Not if the Manties—or the Andies—move as quickly as they could. And if the
Sollies
believe this, the time window’s going to get even tighter.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.” His father’s tone was decidedly testy this time, but then he shook his head and raised one hand in an apologetic gesture. “Sorry, Ben. No point taking out my pissed-offedness on you. And you’re right, of course. But it’s not as if we never had a plan in place to deal with something like this.” He paused and barked a harsh laugh. “Well, not something like
this
, so much, since we never saw this coming in our worst nightmares, but you know what I mean.”

Benjamin nodded, and Albrecht tipped back in his chair, fingers drumming on its arms.

“I think we have to assume McBryde and this Simões between them have managed to compromise us almost completely, insofar as anything either of them had access to is concerned,” he said after a moment. “Frankly, I doubt they have, but I’m not about to make any optimistic—any
more
optimistic—assumptions at this point. On the other hand, we’re too heavily compartmentalized for even someone like McBryde to’ve known about anything close to
all
the irons we have in the fire. And if Simões was in the Gamma Center, he doesn’t know crap about the operational side. You and Collin—and Isabel—saw to that. In particular, nobody in the Gamma Center, including McBryde, had been briefed about Houdini before Oyster Bay. So unless we want to assume Zilwicki and Cachat have added mind reading to their repertoire, that’s still secure.”

“Probably,” Benjamin agreed.

“Even so, we’re going to have to accelerate the process. Worse, we never figured we’d have to execute Houdini under this kind of time pressure. We’re going to have to figure out how to hide a hell of a lot of disappearances in a really tight time window, and that’s going to be a pain in the ass.” Albrecht frowned, his expression thoughtful as he regained his mental balance. “There’s a limit to how many convenient air-car accidents we can arrange. On the other hand, we can probably bury a good many of them in the Green Pines casualty total. Not the really visible ones, of course, but a good percentage of the second tier live in Green Pines. We can probably get away with adding a lot of them to the casualty lists, at least as long as we’re not leaving any immediate family or close friends behind.”

“Collin and I will get on that as soon as he gets here,” Benjamin agreed. “You’ve probably just put your finger on why we won’t be able to hide as many of them that way as we’d like, though. A lot of those family and friends
are
going to be left behind under Houdini, and if we start expanding the Houdini lists all of a sudden . . .”

“Point taken.” Albrecht nodded. “Look into it, though. Anyone we can hide that way will help. For the rest, we’re just going to have to be more inventive.”

He rocked his chair from side to side, thinking hard. Then he smiled suddenly, and there was actually some genuine amusement in the expression. Bitter, biting amusement, perhaps, but amusement.

“What?” Benjamin asked.

“I think it’s time to make use of the Ballroom again.”

“I’m not sure I’m following you.”

“I don’t care who the Manties are able to trot out to the newsies,” Albrecht replied. “Unless they physically invade Mesa and get their hands on a solid chunk of the onion core, a bunch of Sollies—most of them, maybe—are still going to think they’re lying. Especially where the Ballroom’s concerned. God knows we’ve spent enough time, effort, and money convincing the League at large that the entire Ballroom consists of nothing but homicidal maniacs! For that matter, they’ve done a lot of the convincing for us, because they
are
homicidal maniacs! So I think it’s time, now that these preposterous rumors about some deeply hidden, centuries-long Mesan conspiracy have been aired, for the Ballroom to decide to take vengeance. The reports are a complete fabrication, of course. At best, they’re a gross, self-serving misrepresentation, anyway, so any murderous response they provoke out of the Ballroom will be entirely the Manties’ fault, not that they’ll ever admit their culpability. And, alas, our security here is going to turn out to be more porous than we thought it was.”