Conquerors' Pride (3 page)

But he'd surprised them. He'd quickly learned how to adapt his work and people-handling techniques to the strange new environment of politics, and had then proceeded to forge odd but potent coalitions among those who felt the same as he did about a dozen of the most important issues. None of the coalitions had lasted very long, but more often than not they'd lasted long enough to accomplish the goals he'd set for them. He'd become adept at the art of political arm-twisting, a talent that had given him a certain notoriety during that first term and the two subsequent appointments the governor had talked him into accepting. Apparently, if Donezal could be believed, some of that notoriety still lingered in the Parliament chambers.
A movement caught his eye: a young-looking Parlimin gesturing emphatically at the colleagues seated around him at his table. There were only a few Parlimins still in office who had also served during Cavanagh's stint here, but the current trend among the national and state governments of the NorCoord Union was to appoint top business and industrial leaders to the upper house, and Cavanagh spotted several men and women he'd locked horns with across tables over the years. There was Simons of Great Britain, Alexandra Karponov of Kryepost on Nadezhda, Klein of Neuebund on Prospect...
He was looking at Klein when the other's face suddenly went rigid.
Cavanagh looked back at Donezal, to find the same expression on his face. "Emergency signal?"
"Yes," Donezal told him, fumbling in his pocket and pulling out his slender whisper-call. "Full-Parliament alert," he said, peering at the message scrolling across the display. "Some kind of trouble out at-"
He broke off. "I have to go," he said abruptly, stuffing the whisper-call back into his pocket and levering himself out of his chair.
"What is it?" Cavanagh asked, standing up himself and making a quick hand signal. "What kind of trouble?"
"There aren't any details," Donezal said, starting toward the door. The other Parlimins, Cavanagh noted peripherally, were also heading rapidly for the exits. "Call my office later. Better yet, call your own Parlimin. I'm sure Jacy VanDiver would love to hear from you."
Cavanagh fell into step beside him; and as he did so, the quiet figure of his security chief, Adam Quinn, appeared at his side. "Trouble, sir?" the other asked softly.
"Yes," Cavanagh told him. "Come on, Nikolai, give. I'll owe you one."
Donezal stopped, throwing a sour look at Cavanagh and an only marginally less acidic one at Quinn. "There's a watchship coming in from Dorcas," he bit out. "Apparently, a Peacekeeper task force there has been hit. Badly."
Cavanagh stared at him, an old and all-too-familiar pressure squeezing his chest. "Which task force was it?"
"I don't know," Donezal said, frowning at him. "Does it matter?"
"Very much," Cavanagh murmured. TheKinshasa, with Pheylan aboard, was stationed with theJutland in the Dorcas area. If that was the force that had been hit... "Let's get over to the chamber," he told Donezal, taking his arm. "They should at least be able to tell us who was involved."
Donezal shook off the grip."We are not going to the chamber," he said."I am going. You're not a Parlimin anymore."
"You can get me in."
"Not for something like this," Donezal insisted. "I'm sorry, Stewart, but you'll just have to wait and find out when the rest of the Commonwealth does."
He turned and joined the general exodus of people now streaming through the dining room's main exits. "Like hell I will," Cavanagh muttered under his breath as he pulled out his phone. "Quinn, where did Kolchin go?"
"I'm right here, sir," the young bodyguard said, appearing magically at Cavanagh's other side. "What stirred up the anthill?"
"A Peacekeeper task force has been hit off Dorcas," Cavanagh told him grimly, punching in a number. "I'm going to see if I can get us some more information."
The phone screen came on, revealing a young woman in Peacekeeper uniform. "Peacekeeper Command."
"General Garcia Alvarez, please," Cavanagh said. "Tell him it's Lord Stewart Cavanagh. And tell him it's urgent."
The cables overhead lengthened and separated, dropping their ski-lift-style chair out of the upper-corridor traffic flow and bringing it to a halt at the floor. Before them, topped by a large Peacekeeper insignia, was the archway into the Peacekeeper Command section of the NorCoord Union government complex. Standing beneath the arch, flanked by the duty guard and a man wearing a major's insignia, was General Alvarez.
"Stewart," Alvarez said in greeting as Cavanagh and his two men came toward him. "I trust you realize how irregular this is."
"I do," Cavanagh said. "And I thank you. I'll try not to be too much trouble."
Alvarez made a face and looked at the officer at his side. "These are my visitors, Major. I'd like them cleared through."
"Yes, sir," the other said. "Hello, Quinn. Long time no see."
"Hello, Anders," Quinn said evenly. "Good to see you. I didn't know you'd moved to Command."
"I'm not surprised," Anders said, an edge of bitterness in the voice. "You haven't exactly kept in touch. So this is him, huh?" he added, throwing a cold look at Cavanagh. "The guy who you helped to dump on the unit?"
"Lord Cavanagh is my employer," Quinn said. "And we didn't dump on the Copperheads. We helped make them stronger and better."
"Yeah, well, that's sure not what it looked like from the inside." Anders looked at Kolchin, and for a moment his eyes seemed to glaze over. "And you're former Peacekeeper commando Mitri Kolchin," he said. "You always stock your payroll with Peacekeeper quitters, Lord Cavanagh?"
Beside him, Cavanagh felt Kolchin stir, and he could imagine what the expression on the young man's face must be. General Alvarez, facing him from a meter away, didn't have to rely on imagination. "You're not here for a discussion of career choices, Major," the general put in. "You're here to authorize temporary clearances for these men. Can you or can't you?"
Anders's lip twitched. "There's nothing in their records to prohibit it, sir," he said. "I can clear them through to the outer briefing room. No farther."
"Good enough," Alvarez grunted. "Thank you. Come on, Stewart-the watchship's records should be here anytime."
"They couldn't transmit from orbit?" Cavanagh asked.
"We didn't want them to," Alvarez said. "There are too many kids out there whose idea of fun is to tie into military transmissions and try to crack the scrambling. The last thing we want is for this to leak out before we're ready." He threw Cavanagh a tight smile. "Which is one reason we're letting you in here. Makes it easier to keep track of you."
"I see," Cavanagh said. He'd already figured that part out, actually. "What do you know so far?"
"Only that a skitter arrived from Dorcas about two hours ago telling us a watchship was probably on its way," Alvarez said. "That all by itself meant bad news."
Cavanagh braced himself. "Do you know which task force it was?"
Alvarez nodded heavily. "It was theJutland's," he said. "And theKinshasa was definitely there with it. That's the other reason you're here."
"I appreciate it," Cavanagh said, the pressure returning to his chest. "What else do you know?"
"Precious little," Alvarez admitted. "About twenty-five hours ago the tachyon pickup on Dorcas spotted an unfamiliar wake-trail, terminating in the outer rim of a minor system six light-years from Dorcas. They didn't have a tracking baseline, of course, but theJutland and the local garrison commander were able to triangulate a probable endpoint. The force went out to take a look; forty minutes after meshing in, they popped a static bomb. Dorcas picked it up, figured it meant bad news, and fired us off a skitter to give us some advance warning. End of report."
"Forty minutes sounds rather short," Cavanagh said.
Alvarez snorted. "Try frighteningly short. Especially when you consider that Commodore Dyami wouldn't have meshed in right on top of the bogies. Real-space transit time would have eaten up part of that forty minutes. Maybe even most of it."
The briefing room was deserted when they arrived. Alvarez turned on the displays for them, then left to watch the proceedings with his fellow officers in the main command center. Five minutes later the watchship's recordings began.
It was worse than Cavanagh had expected. Worse than he could even have conceived it to be. To watch the entire task force being cut to ribbons was bad enough. To watch the alien ships coldly and systematically destroying the honeycomb pods afterward was horrifying.
And to know that he was watching the death of his son made him feel physically ill. And very, very old.
The battle and its murderous aftermath seemed to take forever. According to the display chrono, the entire episode took barely fourteen and a half minutes.
The record ended, and the display went off, and for a few minutes none of them spoke. Quinn broke the silence first. "We're in trouble," he said quietly. "Big trouble."
Cavanagh took a deep breath, blinking the sudden moisture out of his eyes. It would have been quick, at least. That was something to hold on to. It would have been quick. "Could the force have been taken by surprise?"
"No." Quinn was positive. "Dyami knew to be ready for combat. That's always the assumption when you contact a new race. Besides, the force was fighting-you could see missiles being launched. They just weren't detonating."
"You know if theJutland had any Copperhead fighters aboard, Quinn?" Kolchin asked.
"I doubt it," Quinn said, shaking his head. "Most Copperhead units are stationed aboard Nova- and Supernova-class carriers these days, mostly out in Yycroman space. That's what I've heard, anyway. We could ask Anders on the way out."
"Well, at least that's something new we can try on them next time around." Kolchin paused. "And maybe NorCoord will decide it's time to reassemble CIRCE."
"Perhaps," Cavanagh said. "Quinn, we need to send word to Aric and Melinda about this."
"I can do that, sir," Quinn said. "What should I tell them?"
Cavanagh shook his head. "It doesn't matter," he said through the ache. The ache, and the growing rage that his son had been so cold-bloodedly taken from him. "Just tell them their brother is dead."
3
The Meert was typical of his species: short and stocky, with small greenish-brown overlapping scales and a face that humans almost invariably compared in shape and texture to a peeled orange. He stood stiffly across the desk, his pale-yellow eyes boring into Aric Cavanagh's face, his teeth dripping with saliva.
Decidedly unhappy.
"I want to talk to Cavanagh," he growled, his English coming out mangled but more or less understandable. "I was promised Cavanagh."
"Iam Cavanagh," Aric told him. "Aric Cavanagh, Lord Stewart Cavanagh's firstborn son. I'm also director of CavTronics operations for this region of space. Whatever your complaint, you may express it to me."
The Meert hissed under his breath. "Human," he growled, making the word a curse. "You care first for yourselves. The Meert-ha are nothing to you but slaves."
"Ah," Aric said, cocking an eyebrow. "Do the Meert-ha care more for humans than for themselves, then?"
The overlapping scales opened slightly, settled back into place. "You insult the Meert-ha?"
"Not at all," Aric assured him. "I merely seek clarification. You accuse humans of caring more for their own kind than for nonhumans. Is it different with the Meert-ha?"
The Meert was silent a moment, his scales flipping rhythmically up and down. Aric stayed seated, resisting the urge to ease his chair a little farther back from the desk. For a pair of heartbeats he was a teenager again, engaged in his favorite lazy-day pastime of verbally driving his younger brother crazy, when he'd suddenly awakened to the fact that he no longer had thirty centimeters and twelve kilos on the kid. The game had stopped being fun that day... and the Meert standing in front of the desk had a lot of the same look about him.
He shook off the memory. He wasn't fifteen anymore, that wasn't Pheylan standing there preparing to pound him, and a nonhuman work foreman in a CavTronics electronics plant surely wouldn't be rash enough to physically attack the owner's son. Still, he was beginning to wish he hadn't left Hill outside with the car. Normally, he didn't feel any need for one of his father's cadre of security guards on these plant tours; but palpitating Meertene scales meant there was a lot of body heat being dumped, and if the Meert was getting overheated, it probably meant he was angry. Aric had thrown in that comment to put the Meert's accusations of species loyalty into perspective, as well as to hopefully knock the approaching tirade off track a little. The whole thing would be rather counterproductive if the Meert tried to break his face instead.
The scales settled back in place. "It is still true that you think of the Meert-ha as slaves," the Meert said.
"Not at all," Aric said, starting to breathe again. "We have always treated our Meertene employees with respect and honor."
"Then why this?" the Meert demanded, pointing two thick fingers out the window. "Why do you close this workplace?"
Aric sighed. Here it came: the same argument he'd already been through twice on this trip, with two other nonhuman species. He wondered if Commonwealth Commerce had had any idea of the trouble they were creating when they first started dropping these new restrictions through the hopper five months ago. Or if they'd even cared. "In the first place, we aren't closing the plant," he told the Meert. "We're only scaling back some of its operations."
"Meert-ha will no longer work here."
"Some Meert-ha will lose their jobs, yes," Aric conceded. "As will some from the Djadaran enclave, as well."
"Will humans lose jobs?"
"I don't know," Aric said. "That has yet to be decided."
The scales quivered. "When?"
"Whenever we so choose," Aric said. "Would you wish us to rush these decisions?All of them?"
The Meert shook his head, the movement scattering droplets of saliva to both sides. In mainstream Meertene culture, shaking the head was often a signal of challenge; Aric could only hope that in this case the Meert was mimicking the human gesture instead. "I speak only of justice," he growled.
"Justice is my goal as well," Aric assured him. "And the goal of my father. Be assured we will both do whatever is possible to achieve it."
The Meert tossed his head. "We will watch and see," he said, crossing the fingers of his hands in the Meertene farewell gesture. "Stay slowly."
Aric returned the gesture. "Go slowly."
The Meert turned and strode out through the office door. "Justice," Aric muttered under his breath, finally letting go with the grimace he'd been holding back since the Meert first barged in. His father had warned the Commissioner of Commerce-had warned him repeatedly-that this was both bad politics and bad business. He might as well have tried talking to moss.