Opening Moves (51 page)

The IRON MAIDEN crossed the unseen threshold. Mechanically Tarek entered the commands for the transition sequence into foldspace. The freighter groaned as its Malenkov-Okudas sprang to life.

“Do you want to see Akvô one more time?” Rául looked out of his thick armorplast side window, the distant world glistening behind them barely distinguishable from a star. “Might be the last time we ever see it.”

Tarek Winters stared right ahead.

“
The life of spies is to know, not to be known.”

- George Herbert

C H A P T E R  1 2

The Pyramid, Chicago, North American Union, Earth.

August, 2797 C.E.

Snow drifted through the air, dancing across the deep green and blue waves of Lake Michigan and the air defense systems hidden right beneath the water's surface. On the few terraces of the Pyramid and in the streets of Chicago people pulled their coat collars higher and their hats deeper to evade as much of the crisp breeze as possible. Winter drew near across the northern hemisphere. As far down as the highlands of Guatemala the first frosts had settled in. The frosty weather had been accompanied by a slow but steady cool-down of the relations between the Big Three, and by a growing disquiet about the far away war everybody knew far too little about. Everybody was too far behind the pace of events, and the instability in the far away reaches on the outer edge of the Orion Spur was sending ripples through space that were felt everywhere. The stars stirred.

The Pact of Ten Suns was in turmoil, with one part trying to put up enough resolve to join the fight, one wanting nothing to do with it, and one wishing their star systems could be moved to a place half a galaxy away. What little factual news could be gathered from Ukhuri Prime and the Rasenni upper echelons gave conflicting signals about what course of events could be expected there. No news was bad news. No news meant instability, and instability all too often was the precursor to war. The Union did a good deal of trade with both alien powers. If they were to exchange hostilities how would that affect the Union's economy –- and the safety of its merchantmen? Closer to home, piracy around the periphery of human settled space had experienced a boom, despite intensified patrols.

And still closer to home a new round of combat had flared up between the Starkingdom of Pegasus and the Republic of Skyrise over the control of Elysium and its foldspace junction. Both sides used the black market and backdoor channels to buy military hardware from each of the Big Three, and the Euros even had military advisers in the Pegasus system. Their little war had been a convenient way for the larger players to see their new hardware in action. Never so much that anybody could have pointed fingers and drawn them into it: a missile seeker here, a tachyon sensor subsystem there, and always under the unshakeable understanding that they were trading down to a tech base that was, at best, second rate. But if his sources were to be believed, the EMC's suits in Pegasus had been quite shocked when they got hold of the stats of their navy's new long range missiles. And Nouveau Milan, the capital of the Republic of Skyrise, had tacitly turned down an ONI front's offer to supply them with a limited number of the latest generation of the
Eclipse
EW suite. The implications there were... troubling.

But not as troubling as the increased military activity of all three great powers. There now were more human warships buzzing through space than at any point in peacetime during the past one hundred years. The usual peacetime operation mode of a navy – any navy worth the name, really –was to have one third of its strength on active duty, one third in training and maneuvers, and one third undergoing maintenance or refits. All across the board, yard time had been cut, training had been postponed. Nobody had yet called up their reserves, and the media kept strangely silent on the matter as well, as if their quiet demeanor could help calm the waves. But against all logic and reason forces in every camp were convinced that the other side was just waiting to make its move.

Director William Campbell found a park bench all to himself. Centuries prior the heart of Chicago's downtown district had been right where he sat. Nowadays a wide strip of public parks along the lake's shore and the small canals leading into the roiling waters to the north divided the looming obsidian pyramid out there from Congress and the teeming metropolis to his south. Depending on the prevailing wind direction it was peacefully quiet out here, quite the achievement in the face of twenty million people.

He came out here rather often, he realized: to breathe, to think, to relax. Maybe also to indulge in a thin illusion of leading a completely normal life where he was just a man among many others, one who fed bread crumbs to the park's ducks.

Of course, that was all it ever was: an illusion. William Campbell was too important a persona to receive the blessings of a normal nine to five life, complete with neighbors and friends and trips to the local bar or sports event. In a way he had less of a personal life than the President. Even now, sitting on that bench a few meters away from the stylized metal railing near one of the small canals, with ducks cruising through the dark, cold waters and a few ravens in the sky above and in the bare trees around him, he was not alone. His security entourage held itself in the background, but it was there, out of sight, strewn across the park. Nobody with a weapon, concealed or not, would make it even within sight of him.

He didn't really mind. Not the lack of a personal life, and not the danger to that very life either. People wanted him dead. Had, did, and always would. That certainty came with the job, and it either broke you or you learned to live with it. Campbell had learned to live with it up to the point of wholly ignoring it. He wasn't a superstitious man, but one couldn't trick fate.

White clouds rose into the air as he sniffed and exhaled. He didn't really mind the weather. In fact, as a child of the Eastern Seaboard Metroplex, he found the crisp cold a lot like the weather he had known as a young man. But that had been decades ago. Since then he had been to the coldest places on Earth and beyond, from ice planets to burning deserts under binary suns, always striving to build up a network of agents and disgruntled nationals in every major empire, faction and group in known space to serve the interests of the Union. His peers in Beijing and Brussels had done very much the same even though he liked to entertain the thought that he had a qualitative edge on them. Still, it was weirdly ironic that in a cosmos of dozens of known races, hundreds of colonies and tens of thousands of outposts, he probably had more active assets on this one planet he called home than in the rest of known space combined.

Wearing a charcoal black Galvin overcoat with bronze buttons below a deep crimson scarf a tall Caucasian man approached on the gravel path and stopped opposite Campbell, his back towards the
Central Security Directorate
's director as he leaned on the metal railings, staring into the dark waters below. The wind plucked at the man's auburn hair and he absentmindedly rubbed his fingers against the cold.

“
The north wind blows, here on the river it's cold,” the stranger's voice suddenly disrupted the quiet.

Campbell consciously concentrated on the bag of breadcrumbs in his hands before he spoke, too.

“And darkness falls beside the level sea.” He leaned forward towards the waddling ducks. “I'm glad you could make it, Mr. Chen.”

The man – Chen – looked down at his fingers. “Do you know how much hassle it is, changing back every time I get back to my family?” he asked quietly, as if the question was meant only for his own ears.

“I can only imagine. I suppose you're lucky then that your body has no immune response to the changes,” Campbell replied evenly. Changing a man's appearance so completely, as done with Liao Chen, was usually something reserved for reconstructive surgery and genetic treatments for those who had suffered the most jarring injuries. Chen
looked
as American as any man named Miller would have: white, with some freckles, close to two meters tall and with a shock of auburn hair he was ordinary, but not unattractive. The images in a secure file in Campbell's computers showed Chen as he really was: Cantonese, black-haired and barely one hundred and eighty centimeters tall. The miracles of modern medicine, human endurance and national demands. The director also knew that Chen
didn't
have any family, but he wasn't inclined to let that slip. Information was a currency, and this was no auction house. But Chen was a conduit for what he had to say, a conduit to his master. “You know why I asked for this meeting?”

Chen cracked his knuckles. It sounded like breaking twigs. “Given the overall volatile nature of the situation? You could say I've got a hunch.”

“This escalation is in nobody's interest,” Campbell stated flatly. “We had to send out ships to Orion, and you know that as well as anybody else.”

“
My principal is in agreement with that point, but the decision to react with military movements was a political one, not a strategic one.” Chen stared at his wobbling reflection in the canal's waters. “Just as your government's statements in the follow up have been political, not necessarily factual.”

Campbell could feel the slight smile on the Alliance agent's face and his mouth tightened. Not at his words, but at their irrefutable veracity. “The President needed to soothe some domestic aches. Some people called for a stronger response to your criticism.”

The auburn haired spy unwrapped a pack of cigarettes and lit one, deeply inhaling the fumes. “Come the next elections your Secretary Randolph will be gunning for the presidency. We've noted his willingness to play this crisis for his own ends. My principal is wary of the price he seems to be willing to pay for his ambitions.”

“
I'm more concerned about who it will be who pays that price. The President had to smooth some of the waves. Would've been nice had your employers followed her example.”

Chen shrugged, not looking at him. “I don't need to lay out the foreign policy reasons as to why the Chairman did not follow her lead.
In this day and age no political statement by a leader of a superpower is ever only domestic. The last thing the Europeans or the Alliance will do is show apparent signs of weakness and indecision in the face of large scale Union military movements.”

Showing weakness was a fatal mistake when your main focus was on keeping together nations comprised of dozens of cultures, some of them greatly different. That vast reservoir of people, ideas and resources was one of the driving forces of progress and competition, but also of instability. And with hundreds of millions of lives depending on stability, nobody could afford that weakness.

“But I suppose you haven't arranged for this little gathering just to go over moot points again? Otherwise my principal might grow suspicious of the concord you and she have.” Chen formed a ring with his cigarette smoke and blew it across the canal where it faded in the wind. He took a deep breath. “The air smells like snow. Reminds me of home.”

Given that Chen came from the almost tropical south of China, Campbell had good reason to doubt that. But he respected the subtle craft of the man a few paces away from him.

Chen shot him a brief glance over his shoulder. “It's about the war, isn't it?” He drew on his cigarette. “That seems to be the main topic nobody's speaking about these days. What do you suggest?”

Campbell had to hide a smile. Chen's words could just as well have been spoken by a female voice, so much did they resemble Xixi Wenbiao's straightforward style. As much as the woman at the top of the Alliance's fearsome intelligence apparatus was renowned for her ability to set in motion the most subtle and layered plots, as little patience did she have when the cards were on the table. “I don't really put much stock into the war itself. Too far away for any of us to really matter,” he explained curtly. “But it might prove to be just what's needed to deescalate this situation. The President's been...
persuaded
to send a ship to observe what's going on. But nobody's told her just
where
exactly to send it, or that's it supposed to be a recon vessel. That's where your employer would come in.”

“
I'm listening,” Chen flipped the cigarette bud into the water.

“
Tanith.”

“
The name rings a bell.”

“
Trade hub world in the Pact. Still close to the front lines, though it's unlikely there'll be any real danger. Seems as if it's home to a human expat population numbering in the thousands: Indies, former Euros, Union and Alliance citizens. If the Union Navy were to evacuate them unilaterally that would just fan the flames, but...”