In Fire Forged: Worlds of Honor V-ARC (13 page)

“Understood,” Charles said calmly. “Incidentally, we’ll need to stop by a storage locker on the south side of town before we head out to wherever you have the
Ellipsis
stashed. There’s some specialized equipment I’ll need to pick up if we’re going to make this work.”

For a moment Mercier just gazed down at him. “Not a problem,” he said at last, stepping back with obvious reluctance. “Your clothes are in the cabinet over there. Get dressed.”

*
   
*
   
*

Charles had never been inside a Mantie
Star Knight
-class heavy cruiser before. Nor had he ever gotten up close beside one. But he’d seen plenty of pictures and HDs, both interior and exterior shots.

So, apparently, had Saint-Just’s people. The
Ellipsis,
as near as Charles could tell, was perfect.

“I’m impressed,” he commented to Mercier as the ship’s commander led the way onto the command deck. “My congratulations, Citizen Captain Tyler. If I didn’t know better, I would swear I was on a Manty ship.”

“You’ve been on many Manty ships, have you?” Tyler asked, looking suspiciously at Charles from beneath painfully thin eyebrows.

“None at all, actually,” Charles assured him, making a mental note not to make any more comments like that. Captain Tyler was a True Believer, a zealot of the most fanatical kind.

But then, every crew member he’d met so far aboard the
Ellipsis
had had that same hard gleam in his or her eye.

In retrospect, it was hardly surprising. Saint-Just would hardly have chosen anyone but True Believers for what was essentially a suicide mission.

“Citizen Navarre’s past activities are none of your concern,” Mercier spoke up, his own tone managing to echo Tyler’s own fervor while at the same time warning the captain to drop the subject. “You’ve prepared our quarters as specified?”

“You’ve been given adjoining officers’ berths near the command deck,” Tyler said. He gave Charles one last lingering look, a look that said he would obey orders, but that he was senior enough to obey them in his own way and on his own schedule.

So much of Peep communication these days, Charles mused, seemed to be on the nonverbal level. Harder for someone to prove insubordination or treason that way, he suspected.

“Good,” Mercier said. “Once we’ve confirmed that all our equipment has been properly brought aboard and stowed, you’ll take us out of dock and head immediately for the Karavani system.”

“Everything you brought aboard the pinnace has been stowed,” Tyler said, his tone implying that if his guests ended up missing something they would have no one to blame for the oversight except themselves. “Will there be anything else?” he added, gesturing to a yeoman.

“As soon as we’re underway I’ll need to begin my work,” Charles said. “I’ll need full access to the equipment crawlspaces—One-D and Four-A to start with. I’ll also need—”

“You’ll
what
?” Tyler demanded.

“—full downloads of all recent news transmissions coming from the Star Kingdom,” Charles continued, ignoring the interruption. “Your uniforms and interior décor look fine, but we’ll want to confirm every detail is up to current Manty—”

“Absolutely
not,
” Tyler snapped. “You’re going to stay as far away from my equipment as I can keep you. What kind of fool—?”

“Captain.” Mercier’s voice was quiet, but it cut off Tyler’s budding tirade as quickly as if the colonel had slapped a skinsuit patch over his mouth. “What Citizen Navarre is requesting is vital to the success of this mission. You
will
permit it.”

Tyler drew himself up to his full height. “This is
my
ship, Citizen Mercier,” he said, his voice as quiet and deadly as Mercier’s. “My authority aboard it is absolute. If I say the answer is no, then the answer is no.”

Mercier cocked his head to the side. “In that case, Citizen Captain, I would have no choice but to bring the matter to the attention of Citizen Secretary Saint-Just.”

Some of the blood drained out of Tyler’s face. “Citizen Secretary Saint-Just?” he asked carefully.

“It was he who personally authorized this mission,” Mercier said. His tone was flat, without a single hint of the gloating Charles might have heard from a lesser man. Like Tyler himself, Mercier was a True Believer, with no room in his soul for anything as petty as personal power issues. “I assumed you knew that.”

Tyler’s eyes flicked to Charles as if seeing this foreign civilian for the first time. “No, I…no,” he finished lamely.

He was probably telling the truth, Charles knew. No one aboard the
Ellipsis
would have been told of Saint-Just’s personal involvement with the plan, not even the captain’s personal watchdog, People’s Commissioner Ragli. No matter how suicidal the mission might be, there was always the chance that someone might survive long enough to be questioned, and Saint-Just would have made sure that no such avenue could ever lead back to him.

It was the way of all tyrannies, Charles knew from his reading of history. What always astonished him was not the secrecy and paranoia, but how the True Believers in those tyrannies never seemed bothered by those things.

Mercier let Tyler’s discomfort hang in the air for another two seconds. Then, without another word, he turned and gestured to the yeoman still hovering just outside eavesdropping range. “We’re ready now,” he told her. “Show us to our quarters.”

The yeoman looked at Tyler. The captain nodded confirmation, and she stepped forward. “Certainly, Citizen,” she said, gesturing back at the door behind them. “This way, please.”

*
   
*
   
*

Later, in the privacy of his own quarters, Charles searched every square centimeter of his body—or at least every square centimeter he could see—for the spot where they’d implanted the poison drip. If he could find it, there was a chance he could get the damn thing out.

But there was nothing. No quick-healed incisions, no scars, no warm spots or subtle bulges where a micro capsule might have been slipped beneath the skin. For all the evidence of his eyes and fingertips, Mercier might have been blowing complete smoke.

But Charles knew better. Men like Mercier never bluffed about things like this. Not when they didn’t have to.

Whatever they’d done to him, it was clear Charles wouldn’t be reversing it any time soon.

*
   
*
   
*

Lyang Weiss
looked up from the note, his stomach churning, his fingers squeezing the paper hard with annoyance. This was
not
what he needed today. “Thank you,” he told the messenger standing in front of his desk. “You may go.”

The woman nodded, did a precise about-face, and left the room. Weiss waited until the door had closed behind her before letting free the curse that had been trying to get out ever since he’d spotted the signature on the note.

Even so, he kept the curse short and his voice low. An Andermani embassy had certain behavioral guidelines, after all, and even a lowly assistant military attaché was expected to conform to those standards. Or perhaps
especially
a lowly assistant military attaché.

With a sigh, he turned his attention back to the note.
Important developments to occur within three weeks at Karavani,
the note read.
Vitally important you have an observer present.

And that was it. Two sentences, plus a signature. About as annoyingly cryptic as a man could get.

What the
hell
was Charles playing at this time?

It wasn’t like the man’s information wasn’t usually good. Indeed, some of the tidbits he’d tossed Weiss’s way—for sizeable sums of money, of course—had been extremely interesting, both to the embassy here on Haven as well as to Weiss’s patron back in the Empire. Charles was a Solly, after all, and a source with contacts in the League’s upper echelons was a good thing for a military attaché to have.

What made the whole relationship so stomach-roiling ambiguous was the fact that, at least on the official paper of those same Solly upper echelons, Charles didn’t seem to exist.

So who was he? The choices seemed almost pathologically bipolar: either he was a nobody, a two-bit con man who liked to pretend he was someone and had access to just enough information and gadgetry to back up that pretense; or else he was such a high-level agent that the League itself had done a serious scrub job on his past.

The Peeps seemed to lean toward the former explanation, at least according to the handful of slightly vague references Weiss had been able to dig up. But then, the Peeps had been wrong before. Most recently, and most spectacularly, with Honor Harrington.

Despite his annoyance with Charles, Weiss had to smile at that one. Though the Empire was officially neutral in regards to the Manticore/Haven war, it was hardly a secret that the Emperor’s private sentiments were on the side of the Star Kingdom, at least for the moment. Lady Harrington—Duchess Harrington now, he corrected himself—had come onto the Andermani political and military radar very early in her career, and her star had been rising ever since. Weiss’s own patron had met the woman once, and Weiss knew her execution on trumped-up charges had turned Andermani sentiment even more against Haven.

Only now, the truth of that “execution” had been blown across the galaxy, along with the Peeps’ sordid little secret. Pierre and Saint-Just would be scrambling to cover their butts from the resulting firestorm, and Weiss knew just how dangerous both men were when backed into a corner.

Setting the note aside, Weiss keyed his computer. First step was to find out just what and where this Karavani was.

It was a Peep system, of course, but one so small and unimportant that its description barely filled three pages. It was a border system, completely uninhabited except for a small mining operation in the rings of the fifth planet and a courier transfer station in orbit around that same planet. It was about the last place in the known universe anyone would want to visit.
 

Unless, that is, the would-be vacationer was carrying a load of contraband Solly weapons and equipment. The third of the three pages on Karavani was an Andermani Intelligence report suggesting that the system was being used by Solly sympathizers to transship the officially banned technology being sent under the table to the People’s Republic.

Was that what Charles was suggesting? That the Andermani should see if they could catch the Sollies and Peeps in a violation of League neutrality?

Weiss looked at the note again. No. Even if catching them red-handed would actually accomplish anything, that didn’t feel like Charles’s style. He was always more flamboyant than that, even while he tried to stay under everyone’s radar.

But whatever was about to go down, Weiss would bet heavily it would be worth sending someone to watch.

Or maybe even going himself.

He keyed his com for the ambassador’s office. “This is Weiss,” he identified himself to the secretary. “I need to speak to Ambassador Rubell as soon as possible.”

*
   
*
   
*

The crawlspace was dark, narrow, and stifling, and for a ship that had been so recently renovated it was surprisingly dirty. But with ingenuity and a certain looseness of the joints that he’d been born with Charles managed to get the Echo hardware in place. One down, he told himself as he worked his way through the oily dust. Twenty-seven to go.

Mercier had been waiting alone when Charles first wriggled his way in through the access panel. But he wasn’t alone now. “Citizen Captain,” Charles puffed as he pulled himself back out into the fresh air of the corridor. “What brings you here?”

“I wanted to check on your progress,” Tyler said, looking Charles up and down with obvious distaste. No crewman of
his,
Charles guessed, would ever get so filthy carrying out his duty. “I also wanted an actual explanation as to what you were doing down here.”

“Understandable,” Charles said. “Unfortunately, as I told you earlier, this technology is extremely secret and, frankly, isn’t supposed to be out here at all. I’m afraid that’s all I can tell anyone.”

Tyler folded his arms across his chest. “Make an exception,” he ordered.

Charles shook his head. “I’m afraid—”

“Make an exception,” Tyler repeated, his voice the temperature of liquid hydrogen.

Charles looked at Mercier. But for once, both men were clearly in agreement.

And it wasn’t like the theory of this wasn’t well-known anyway. “Fine,” Charles said with a sigh. “What active sensors do is shoot out focused beams of microwave or visible-spectrum radiation, which then bounce off a target and return to the sender, frequency-shifted with the relative velocities between—”

“We know all that,” Mercier interrupted.

Charles nodded. “Right. Well, what the Echo system does is tie in your passive sensors with your own active sensors and communications array so that when a wave packet strikes the hull and starts back, your own active sensors send out a perfectly matched packet that’s shifted a hundred eighty degrees out of phase.”

Tyler grunted. “Won’t work,” he said. “Your phase-inverted packet can’t catch up with the reflected pulse, which means that the leading edge of the reflection will still make it back intact.”

“You would be right,” Charles agreed, “
if
the sensors were embedded directly into the hull. But if you’ll check your specs, you’ll see that your sensor arrays extend anywhere from three to ten meters out from the main hull. That gives the Echo enough lead time—about three nanoseconds per meter—to analyze the packet and create and kick out the phase-shifted duplicate.”

“It can do all that so quickly?” Tyler asked, looking down at the bag on the deck with a hint of respect.

“It can,” Charles assured him. “It’s not as perfect as using a sensor-absorbing hull coating, of course. But this is simpler and much easier to retrofit a ship with. And under normal conditions it will render you adequately invisible to most active sensors.”

“Provided our wedge is down, I presume,” Mercier said. He was eyeing the bag, too, a thoughtful gleam in his eye.