Cauldron of Ghosts (23 page)

Anton smiled. “Leaving aside Victor’s commentary, it is true that the RP number closely correlates to the other numbers.”

“Closely correlates,” sniffed Victor. “As in the chance for losing a game is ninety percent ‘closely correlates’ with the chance of winning being ten percent.”

While they’d been bantering, Cathy had been monitoring her watch. “It’s about time. Ruth, change to the live feed, will you?”

“Sure.” The Manticoran princess tapped her tablet a few times and the image on the big virtual screen shifted to an outside view of Mount Royal Palace. A shuttle was coming in for a landing.

A minute or so went by, while the shuttle settled in and an armed security detachment took positions near the hatch through which the passengers would be disembarking.

The hatch opened and the first passenger came down the ramp. The reporter, who’d been prattling vacuities while she waited for something to happen, immediately said: “As expected, that’s President Eloise Pritchart, arriving for her scheduled meeting with the Empress and the Prime Minister. Following her is Haven’s Secretary of War Thomas Theisman. And now, if our private sources are accurate, we should be seeing . . .”

A short, very wide-shouldered man started down the ramp. “Yes, that’s him. The now-famous Captain Zilwicki, formerly an intelligence officer in the Royal Manticoran Navy and now operating on his own. Or, often, in tandem with his unlikely partner . . .”

Another man came down the ramp. He was dressed all in black, in garments which were very closely patterned on the former uniform of Haven’s now-defunct State Security.

“And that’s Victor Cachat, who has become just as famous as Zilwicki.” The reporter chuckled. “The more sensational news outlets have started referring to him as ‘Black Victor,’ we’re told.”

“Yes!” exclaimed Anton, pumping his fist. “Join the Notoriety Club, buddy.”

Victor was back to looking disgruntled; sour; even sullen.

“When are we leaving?” he demanded. “At least on Mesa I’ll be able to get some privacy.”

Ruth pursed her lips. “That may be the single most deranged statement I’ve ever heard in my life.” Then, with a grin: “But what else could you expect from . . .” Her voice lowered an octave and took on a pronounced tremor. “. . .
Black Victor
?”

Chapter 24

“Just what I always wanted,” Yana Tretiakovna said sardonically, gazing at the detailed holograph floating before her. “My very own starship.” She paused for a moment, head cocked, then frowned. “It’s smaller than I thought it would be, though. Is this the compact version?”

Her appearance had changed radically, shifting from a Slavic to an East Asian template and becoming increasingly voluptuous. The process wasn’t complete, but it was close enough for her to begin the necessary therapy to adjust for her . . . rearranged (and considerably more top-heavy) physique, and she was not pleased by the discomfort level that her new physique imposed as she grimly jogged on the gymnasium’s treadmill every day. That was probably the real reason she’d been so enthusiastic about taking a break from that strenuous exercise routine, Anton Zilwicki thought.

Of course, the fact that she was thoroughly pissed off that
he’d
required so little in the way of alterations and virtually no PT or specialized exercise programs suggested it might be . . . unwise of him to twit her over her enthusiasm. On the other hand, he’d loyally spent his gym time right beside his new partner, since his own idea of a “mild workout” would have reduced half the galaxy’s professional bodybuilders to tears.

“It’s not actually
your
starship, you know,” he pointed out mildly. “I’m sure the BSC would like to get her back intact at the end of the day.”

“I’m not planning on breaking it,” she replied a bit snippily. “And it’s not like I’m really going to be the one in charge of this side of the operation, either. If memory serves, you’re the senior member of this team.”

“Nonsense! No Technician class worker from Hakim could
possibly
be senior to a Patrician like you. Your lightest whim is my command, Mistress. Within reason, of course.”

“Oh, of
course
!” Yana’s tone was sarcastic, but her eyes were thoughtful as she studied the lines of the sleek little starship’s image. “And speaking of handing ships back over intact, just how was the Survey Corps able to lay its hands on this one so promptly?”

“They didn’t.” Anton shrugged. “That is, they didn’t have to ‘lay hands’ on anything; they own the
Brixton’s Comet
outright, and have—according to Uncle Jacques—for over thirty T-years. They just didn’t get around to mentioning it to anyone.”

Yana smiled at Anton’s use of the we’re-less-than-totally-fond-of-him-but-he’s-not-all-that-bad nickname Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou had received from the small party of spies planning on sneaking onto the most dangerous planet in the galaxy. No one was quite certain how it had begun, although Yana suspected it stemmed from the conferences which both he and his formidable niece had attended in the Old Star Kingdom, but it had been Victor Cachat who’d first used it—completely deadpan—to Benton-Ramirez y Chou’s face. To his credit, the half-sized Beowulfer had simply gone right ahead with the abstruse point he’d been explaining at the time without so much as a blink. From his reaction and from what she knew about the BSC, Yana wouldn’t have been especially surprised to discover that some of his team members during his own time in Beowulf’s special forces had called him the same thing. Or something even more disrespectful, given the BSC’s informality in the field and just how well he’d performed there. It was the sort of backhanded compliment elite forces routinely paid to those they most respected. Whatever the reason, he seemed perfectly comfortable with it.

And it certainly took less time to say than his surname did.

“And just how sure are they that no one
outside
the BSC knows that they’ve owned her outright for years and years?” she asked.

“Fairly confident.” Anton shrugged again. “That’s about as good as it gets in this business, you know. They bought her—had her built, really, right here in the Hidalgo Yard—through about six layers of shell companies, and they’ve operated her on a lease basis ever since. And according to Uncle Jacques, she’s only been used twice in all that time for specific covert operations. They’ve actually earned back her construction costs several times over by now, all through legitimate leases, and she’s been leased so many times, by so many different lessees, that she has an absolutely ironclad history, no matter how deep anyone looks from the outside. About the only way anyone could consider her suspect would be for the ‘anyone’ in question to have someone deep enough inside the BSC to know all about her. And if they’ve got anyone that deep, we’re all screwed before we ever leave Beowulf, so I figure we might as well operate on the assumption that
her
identity’s at least as secure as ours are going to be.”

Yana considered that for a moment, then nodded. For all her often deliberately “lowbrow” public persona, the ex-Scrag was ferociously intelligent, and while her actual experience and skill set tended more towards focused mayhem than covert operations, she’d had enough experience operating with the duo of Cachat & Zilwicki to accept Anton’s analysis without too many qualms.

Now he manipulated the image, expanding it until they could make out the hull’s details.

“She’s a nice little ship, actually,” he pointed out with a connoisseur’s enthusiasm. “Only about forty-five thousand tons, of course, but in most ways she’s a lot like Duchess Harrington’s personal yacht, the
Tankersley
. She’s fitted up on a rather more luxurious scale than the duchess ever considered necessary, and she doesn’t have accommodations for quite as many warm bodies, but the basic power plant and automation are virtually identical.”

“That’s good, considering how little
I
know about the guts of a starship,” Yana observed dryly. She was a skilled small-craft pilot, at home behind the controls of anything from high-performance air-breathing atmospheric craft to heavy-lift cargo shuttles or an all-up armored assault shuttle, but all of that experience was strictly sub-light.

“Don’t worry,” Anton said reassuringly. “I know
my
way around a starship’s innards just fine, and this design incorporates so much automation—and so many multiply redundant backup systems—that the possibility of any sort of serious malfunction’s effectively nonexistent. And,” he added feelingly, “she’s not only one hell of a lot younger than
Hali Sowle
, but she’s been properly maintained for her entire life.”

“Well,
that’s
a relief. I’ve spent long enough drifting around playing cards for one lifetime, thank you very much.”

“Me, too.” Anton grinned. “And while we’re on the subject of reasons not to worry, the reason she’s got all that automation is that she was intended from the beginning to be operated by a two-person crew. It’s not like I’m going to need a lot of assistant engineers, and I’ll probably be able to find time in my arduous schedule to do any astrogating we need, as well.”

“You get us there in one piece, and I’ll be happy,” Yana told him.
Brixton’s Comet
’s normal-space controls were essentially little more than an upgraded and fancified version of a regular cargo shuttle. In fact, they were a bit simpler even than that, since the yacht had never been intended for atmospheric flight. Of course, there was the minor matter of the Visigoth Wormhole to consider. Which reminded her . . .

“You do realize that getting us there in one piece includes getting us through the damned wormhole, don’t you?” she asked.

“Between Visigoth’s traffic control, the ship’s computers, and my own odd few decades of naval service, I’m sure we’ll be able to limp through it somehow,” he assured her.

“Yeah, sure,” she agreed, eyes fixed on the holograph.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said in a rather more reassuring tone. “We’ll be fine at least as far as the transportation’s involved. And we’ll be a lot more comfortable than the others will.”

“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 seccy 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 secret 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 Sebastián’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 cunning 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.