Orphan's Triumph (Jason Wander) (19 page)

In other words, he was a sadistic runt who in high school got more wedgies than handjobs and was now getting even with the world.

The Republican Socialists had emerged from Tressen’s postwar chaos to rule through a troika of chancellors. My comrade-in-arms, Audace Planck, was chosen as one chancellor because he was a hero people trusted, not because he knew politics. Zeit was chancellor for interior affairs, which had encompassed everything from rebuilding shelled-out hospitals to restoring calm on the streets. According to the Republican Socialists, Zeit was doing a great job of both.

According to our Spooks, however, Zeit was restoring calm by shipping everybody who disagreed with the RS to “pioneer” settlement camps above the Tressen Arctic Circle. The camps would “push back the frontier” and allow “those with pioneer spirit to be free.”

History credits the Nazis as “efficient,” but Zeit rendered them amateur. Poison gas and crematories were so much more complex and expensive than quietly hauling dissenters north, then herding the survivors of the journey into windswept, barbed-wire pens in the snow until they froze into ranks of meat. The operation took place out of sight, because the only way to Tressel’s Arctic was by government transport. And the RS didn’t have to dispose of the bodies. They just left them there until the snow covered them, then moved the fences and guard barracks and opened a new “pioneer settlement.”

“O Canada,” part fourteen, faded to welcome silence. The bolts of one hundred Tressen rifles crackled, then the honor guard boomed a salute that echoed off the old city’s stones. Zeit stepped forward to greet me, and I saluted first. His complexion resembled unbaked dough, cheeks peened by acne or smallpox. His eyes, as black and frigid as the orbit of Pluto, hid behind steel-rimmed bottle-bottom spectacles.

Zeit clicked his elevator heels as he returned my salute and nodded toward Jude. “My most profound condolences, General and Vice Marshall. I know both of you and Chancellor Planck were close.”

The Spooks’ recent update had reached us only as we boarded the downship. Ten days earlier, Iridian separatists had detonated an enormous roadside bomb that had obliterated the limousine in which two-thirds of the Chancellery had been riding. Among the two chancellors, one hundred bystanders, and security troops affected, only Chancellor Audace Planck had survived, although gravely wounded. He was now clinging to life in an undisclosed location. A massive manhunt throughout Tressen would soon bring the cowardly perpetrators to justice.

Spook translation, estimated with a probability of ninety-one percent: Zeit’s Interior Chancellery goons had literally frozen the Iridian insurgency in its tracks months earlier. Therefore the Resistance no longer had the military capacity to steal a second grader’s lunch money, much less coordinate a massive car-bomb, ambush. Planck’s staff had finally snooped uncomfortably close to the genocidal truth about Zeit’s Arctic new frontier. Therefore, Zeit had bombed the rivals with whom he shared power, and blamed the Iridians. But Aud Planck had survived the bomb, wounded, had figured out who was behind it, and had gone to ground. Zeit couldn’t risk declaring Aud dead just yet, lest he pop up. So Zeit was ransacking his nation for his rival, under the handy cover of the search for the assassins.

“Thank you, Chancellor.” I raised my eyebrows. “But I understood Aud Planck was alive.”

“Yes, by God’s grace. But his injuries…” He removed his spectacles, drew a hankie from his gold-braided sleeve, then wiped his eyes. The hankie came away dry.

“How soon can I visit my old friend?”

Zeit sighed as deep as a deflating tire while he retucked his hankie and shook his head. “I’m afraid his attending physicians believe any disturbance could be fatal.”

I smiled. “To whom?”

Zeit stared at me.

I smiled again. “Aud’s a hard man to keep down. I’m sure he’s been making his physicians’ lives miserable.”

Zeit pressed his lips together in a smile and nodded. “My first experience with your sense of humor, General. A soldier salvages a light remark in the darkest moments, hey?”

I stared back at Zeit. “The dark moments lie ahead for whoever tried to kill him.”

Zeit turned his eyes down while he tugged a pocket watch on a chain from his waistcoat and read it.

“Of course. Well, I assume you will wish to rest after your voyage.”

“You’re very understanding. But let’s do lunch. My diplomats will call your diplomats.”

Our motorcade through Tressia rolled from the old quarter onto boulevards scrubbed as white as bone by Republican Socialism. Jude sat with clenched fists, staring out the chugging limousine’s window as new stone buildings flashed by us, as identical as marble boxcars on a train bound in the opposite direction. “Zeit’s always been cold. But I never believed…”

Honest people believe what they’re told. I drew a deep breath. “Is he cold enough to bargain with?”

Jude spun away from the window. “You’re not serious? We can’t deal with—”

“You didn’t have a problem dealing with the RS until now. Aud’s a sand grain compared to what your RS has done to the rest of Tressen.”

He shook his head. “The RS you think you see—”

“Finally, you see it, too.”

“I don’t. A power play by Zeit doesn’t prove all that stuff about the camps. The RS you think you see could never be my RS.”

I stared out the window, at a crew of thin, bent women picking up roadside trash under guard. Each woman wore a scarlet Iridian identifying medallion. I turned away from the window. “Well, now it has to be all of ours.”

FORTY-TWO

THE HUMAN UNION CONSULATE squatted like a gray marble toad, part of the new quarter of Tressia that the Republican Socialists had built. Like most everything else about the multinational Human Union, the consulate was principally paid for and staffed by Americans.

To demonstrate the Human Union’s outrage at Republican Socialist internal policy, the building had been downgraded to consulate from embassy. The Tressens cared less. The ambassador got downgraded to consul, too. Again, the Tressens cared less. But I cared because the ambassador’s paycheck shrank, and he was my friend.

Human Union Consul Eric Muscovy greeted us at the consulate’s double doors, waddling. More charitably, he was walking slightly splay-footed, and his lips protruded. He hugged me, then frowned. “I hear you smarted off to Zeit today, Jason.”

“Next time I’ll punch his lights out, Duck.” I
told
them not to send me. Time for a subject change.

“Got your message. Thanks.”

“I was sorry to hear. Ord was a good man.” So was the Duck. He and Ord together had sprung me from China, once upon a time. The Duck wasn’t a Spook under diplomatic cover, though. He was an Asian-studies major who accepted backwater and offworld assignments that his peers rejected as disamenable, because distance from the home office conferred a measure of diplomatic autonomy. But the Duck was no privateer. “Rogue diplomat” is an oxymoron.

After greetings among Howard, Jude, and the Duck, Consul Muscovy peered across the wide boulevard. On the opposite sidewalk a brown-trench-coated Tressen in a slouch hat leaned against a lamppost reading a newspaper. The Duck smiled and waved. The man ignored him. When the doors closed behind us, Jude jerked his head behind us toward the doors as he asked the Duck, “Ferrent?”

Ferrents were anvil-headed, beady-eyed brown amphibians the size of Gila monsters. Their most notable contribution to Tressen’s pseudo-Paleozoic ecology was one singularly off-putting habit. They nosed around in other animals’ dung. The Republican Socialists’ Interior Police, with their sore-thumb-brown “civilian” trench coats and slouch hats, came by their nickname honestly. The Duck smiled and nodded. “Mister Air Vice Marshall, take a glimpse of life on Tressel for citizens who aren’t highly placed Republican Socialists. Jude, there’s a Ferrent slouching against that lamppost twenty-six hours every day. There’s another in the alley behind us, across from our back door. A Ferrent team tails everyone who goes in or out.”

Jude shook his head. “Duck, the consular staff are aliens. Outer space, hostile aliens. Foreign Service personnel get surveilled in every capital—Washington, Paris, Marinus. That doesn’t make the Ferrents the Gestapo.”

“Oh? Last week our regular shellfish monger got replaced. The new guy couldn’t catch fish with dynamite. A plant. We checked. The old monger’s house was vacant. Neighbor said the family went north.”

Jude furrowed his brow. “Pioneer camp?”

The Duck nodded. “And his wife and kids.”

Jude shifted his weight, then shrugged. “Anecdotal evidence.” I shrugged, too. Tressen’s wealth, compared to its conquered rival, Iridia, came from mineral deposits in Tressen’s north. It was marginally credible that a family might seek a new life on the frontier.

I eyed the walls. “Can we talk in here, Duck?”

He smiled. “The Tressens have rudimentary crank-toring telephones. They invented the telegraph only a couple years ago. No bug problems. On the other hand, their human intelligence collection’s aggressive. Like Stalin-era KGB. So we don’t let locals penetrate farther than the kitchen door out back. Like the phony fishmonger. ’Bots handle everything an embassy or consulate would normally hire out locally. We do our own dishes and change our own lightbulbs.”

I nodded. “How many Spooks you got in the house?”

“None, of course.” The Duck stared at me. Then he shrugged. “The cultural attaché’s staff are Spooks. Don’t change the subject. You’ve been here an hour and you’ve set relations back a year.”

“Duck, even if we hold our noses, Zeit will never cooperate. Besides, he’s dirt in a uniform.”

The Duck cocked his head and pursed his protruding lips. “Economically put.”

“Is Aud Planck a viable alternative?”

“Let’s ask.” The Duck led us down the consulate’s center hallway to a door marked “Cultural Affairs” and buzzed us through a locked door.

The office was normal, but to a Tressen, or to any other non-Earthling citizen of the Human Union, the place would look like black magic, with translucent holographic images animating the space above desks. Two desks were occupied. Nearest to us a middle-aged, chipmunk-cheeked guy in a business suit glanced up from his keyboard as we entered. He looked like a hotel clerk. When he saw Jude in neo-Gestapo black, he came up out of his chair with an aimed pistol, quicker than Wyatt Earp.

The Duck pumped his palm toward the floor. “Relax, Bill.”

Bill’s pistol remained sighted at Jude’s forehead.

The Duck said, “The air vice marshall here’s been seconded to the Human Union Space Force. His clearance at the moment is as high as yours.”

Jude, stock-still, said, “I’m getting an education since I’ve gotten back on Tressel.”

Bill dropped the pistol to his side but kept staring at Jude. “Pretty hard not to have gotten one while you were here before, Vice Marshall.”

The Duck rolled his eyes. “Billy, honest people believe the lies other people tell them. If they didn’t, you’d be a hotel clerk.”

Which was exactly what “Bill” looked to be. Before I started adviser assignments, I thought Human Intelligence Spooks, the ones who recruited and ran local agents undercover abroad, would be ruggedly handsome blokes in tuxedos. In fact, diplomatic-covered Spooks tended to look and act just a little too slow, a little too out of it, to be suspected as spies.

The Duck asked Bill, “How’s Planck today?”

I raised my eyebrows. Not, “Do you know whether Planck’s still alive?”

Bill sighed, then waved up a map of Tressen that showed the country from the capital, where we stood, to the coast. The southern part of the coast was the Tressel Barrens, a vast swamp that would someday become more coal than the English dug out of Wales. The northern coast, which for the six centuries preceding the Late Unpleasantness had been the Unified Duchies of Iridia, was a smooth rock plain dotted with fishing villages.

Bill the Spook pointed at a flashing red dot that was actually slightly seaward of the formerly Iridian coastline. “Planck’s hiding out in an isolated lober fisherman’s blind, here. The fisherman living in it’s an Iridian veteran. Planck saved his life years ago, when the guy was a POW and Planck was a Tressen platoon leader. The old guy’s been nursing Planck, but the chancellor’s got a fractured lower left leg and a serious head wound. One or both are infected, because he’s running a couple degrees of fever.”

I narrowed my eyes. “How’d you get a bug on a chancellor?”

“Sources and methods, General.” Translation: no comment.

The Duck rolled his eyes. “He’s Triple-A cleared. You might as well tell him.”

Bill frowned. “I didn’t, General. You did. You and Vice Marshall Metzger.”

“What?”

“You remember after the Armistice, and before the embargo, you picked out a ’Puter at a jeweler’s in Georgetown? Antique Rolex mechanical watch case, with modern guts?”

I frowned. “As a gift for Aud. The Tressens can’t get used to telling time digitally. I sent it to Jude so he could hand deliver it. What does that matter?”

Bill shrugged. “Counterespionage monitors the spending patterns of everybody with Triple-A clearance or higher. When a guy who’s worn a plastic Timex all his life suddenly blows four months’ pay on an antique watch, they’re curious.”

The heat of adrenaline spiked through me. “They thought I was on the take?”

“They think everybody’s on the take. It’s their job. When they found out who you were having it engraved to, they passed the word to the Tressen desk.”

“When I picked up the watch, the clerk said there had been a break-in. But my order was okay.”

“Perfectly okay. Just midnight modified with a homer/monitor.”

“You bastards.” I rolled my eyes. “Did they repeal the Constitution while I was gone?”

Bill shook his head. “The Constitution’s fine. The Bill of Rights applies to American citizens, not aliens. Chancellor Planck’s as alien as they come.”

I thumbed my chest. “I’m an American citizen.”

Howard raised his palm. “Who was entrusted with information that could badly damage the national interest if sold.”