Through Fire (Darkship Book 4) (32 page)

Founding Father

Moments later I was in a back room with LaForce and a bevy of very deferential young people. Alexis Brisbois had gone to check on Simon. Or at least he’d said he’d go back to see if Simon needed him.

I didn’t mind because, if anything, there were too many people for such a tiny little room.

Or rather, the room itself wasn’t little, but it was filled almost to capacity by the largest communication device I’d ever seen.

A very nervous young man in an impeccable uniform—which meant if he’d taken part in the fighting he’d changed afterwards—was explaining to me the various parts of the communication device and what they did.

What it did was polyvalent communications duty. “We can’t hear the Good Men,” he said. “Though we can hear the news from several continents, but those aren’t shielded. And we can’t hear private calls, of course.”

I didn’t tell him there was nothing “of course” about it. There are times one shouldn’t disillusion the young. Instead, I asked him what the various dials did. Then I removed the cover of the machine and started poking around the insides and asking questions.

At this point, a dark young woman stepped forward to tell me the functions of various internal parts, until her knowledge ran out. She actually only knew enough to know how to fix the machine when it broke, not how to change it or make it do different things. That was fine. What she’d told me was enough for me to know what to do.

I sent her for tools, then asked the group in general for some parts I hadn’t seen. Someone saluted me and said he would ask the quartermaster. Someone else left to ask Basil for the key to some supply area or other. In what seemed like moments, I had my screwdrivers, my wrenches, my flow meters and half a dozen things whose Earth names I was unsure about, since they were different in my culture, and, having been invented separately, had their own names.

I was crawling around in the bowels of the machine, winding my way to replacing parts, and changing others’ positions, when LaForce asked, “Can you really change it so it can catch the Good Men’s communications? How would you even know what they are?”

“Because they were…because there were channels for joint force communications in the array in Circum Terra.”

“But wouldn’t the Patrician have known those too?” he asked. “Why didn’t he—”

If I was going to have to answer for what Simon did and failed to do, we were going to have some serious problems. And besides, he wasn’t a mechanic. “He wasn’t the one changing the apparatus,” I said. “I don’t think he even knew enough to ask me what I’d done.”

“What was he doing?”

“Mostly terrorizing the scientists and bureaucrats of Circum Terra so they’d leave us alone,” I said. I crawled out from under the machine and realized that LaForce had been joined by Brisbois.

“How is Simon?” I asked.

“Having fun,” he said, and there was just a hint of sourness to his expression. “I think he’s setting us up to be attacked by these moles in the next six hours or so. But he managed to convince them to come in through a specific door.”

“Six hours?”

“Most of the places are in the continents,” he said. “And you, do you think you can alter that communications apparatus to do what you want?”

“I have,” I said.

“You have?”

“Yes.”

“Then why aren’t we trying to listen to—”

“There are rather a lot of people here, aren’t there, Brisbois?” I said. “Shouldn’t you call whomever you want to listen in? Trusted people only?”

He cursed under his breath.
“Merde,”
and something else I didn’t recognize. Then he bellowed for everyone but Jonathan LaForce and I to get out.

I smiled at him and told him he and Jonathan could listen to whatever the communications were. I wasn’t likely to understand most of them anyway. I was going in search of food, since I’d had so much coffee that I was buzzing. I turned to the dark young woman and asked her where I could get a bite to eat and moments later found myself in a cafeteria, being served crusty white bread and a meaty hot soup by a servo mechanism.

The young people stayed with me, whether star-struck at being close to someone who was a friend of the Patrician or simply curious about someone who, rumor said, had come from another world, I didn’t know. At any rate, none of them managed to get up the courage to ask me anything substantial.

They asked me if I was military and I told them no. Then one of the girls asked if I had children and I told her no. And then somehow they were talking about themselves, their aspirations, their hopes for Liberte.

Their hopes for Liberte, despite their being nominally the Patrician’s army, mostly seemed to involve a freer life, without having to ask permission to change domicile or get a job, or the other petty restrictions of the Good Men’s rule, which had led to their vaunted three hundred years of stability, in reality three hundred years of stagnation.

After a while I got worried about what exactly they’d heard. It seemed to me I could hear far-off sounds of strife, though even with my enhanced hearing I wasn’t sure I wasn’t imagining it. I excused myself politely from the young people, who all stood and saluted me, in answer to what rule I couldn’t tell. In fact, I suspected saluting civilians was against the rules. Fortunately, I had no intention of telling on them.

Two of them wandered back with me to the communications room where I’d rigged the receiver.

There were more people there now, two young people twisting dials to different frequencies. I’d expected this and left notes on which frequencies might carry relevant payload.

Listening to whatever was coming through the receiver, on headphones, Mailys Bonheur looked very small and young. Scared, I thought, and was shocked, because Mailys had never looked scared, not even when we’d seen that poor man being killed by inches in the market. She’d looked horrified seeing the holo cast of the modern day guillotine, but I wouldn’t say she’d looked scared then either. She’d helped me dispose of the corpses of people she’d almost certainly known and respected, without a flinch.

But now she looked scared, her fingers holding the pen with which she took notes so hard I expected it to snap at any moment.

Alexis Brisbois stood glowering nearby, his shoulders against the wall, his arms crossed over his chest. He had the look of a man who’d rather be anywhere else. He also had the look of a man who’d seen his death. I realized from where he was, he could see Mailys and the paper she was writing on.

The young people who’d insisted on walking me to the room took a look in, turned around and left. I didn’t blame them. I would have left too, given the choice. I could tell they were shaken because they didn’t even salute.

Brisbois looked up as I entered and frowned at me, as though I were a particularly unruly cat dragging a much-chewed mouse in. Then he compressed his lips and sighed. “Madame Sienna,” he said, and inclined his head slightly.

“How bad is it?” I asked, at the same time someone opened the door behind me, and said, “Yes, how bad is it, Brisbois? And what is it that you’re all doing without letting me know?”

I turned around and I could have slugged Simon for his paranoia, if it weren’t for the fact that paranoia was the logical result of being raised as he’d been and living as he had, not to mention the shock to the system of the revolution and finding his henchman had plotted these hideouts behind his back and without his knowledge.

“I decided this, Simon,” I said, my voice trying for brisk but coming out wooden. “I thought we couldn’t do much unless we knew more about the enemy’s intentions. Both the internal and the external enemies. So I rigged this, which seems to have been Basil’s private communication device and his way of monitoring his employees’ communications, to listen in on both Madame and the Good Men.”

Simon’s expression of amused teasing, really a cover for insecurity, vanished as though wiped out. Instead he gave me an evaluating look, long and hard, and then asked, “How did you know their frequen—” He waved a hand. “Never mind. The gadget in Circum Terra.”

“Yes,” I said. “The gadget.” It had been more than a gadget—a linkage of them, all devilishly complicated—but I suspected trying to tell Simon this would only cause him to say that wasn’t important. Which would be right.

“And what we found,” Alexis said, moving off from the wall, giving the impression of a lumbering mountain shaking itself upright, “is something I don’t know how to get around. And Madame Sienna can stop taking the full blame for this, too, Simon. I fully approved of and encouraged her exploit.”

Simon’s eyebrows rose. The slightly amused look returned and the corner of his lip twitched upward. “No use defending her, Alexis. It’s not as though I could punish her. Or you. I’m not sure how much power I have in these, my nominal command centers.”

Alexis made the sound commonly transcribed as
pfui
, but his expression didn’t change. “I don’t think,” he said, “you are that stupid. You know very well all of these people would follow you, if you required it. They respect me, but they were raised to revere you. They might at times have had their doubts about you, but I’ve seen you command their obedience with a look.” He glared at Simon as though he’d given him offense. “Which is why, my friend, we’re going to need you.”

Simon’s smirk vanished and his expression became alert. He looked from Brisbois to Mailys and seemed, for the first time, to realize what their expressions meant and that they didn’t look in full command of themselves. His gaze swept over me, and returned to Alexis again. “How bad is it?”

Mailys swept off her headphones and swallowed. “It means this,” she said. “That the Good Men have deployed a massive coalition from all the territories they control.” She hesitated. “Not overwhelming, mind, but massive, the kind of coalition that could easily overwhelm not just Liberte but also Shangri-la and the territories, without pausing to pick up the corpses.” She sighed. “Even if we had our former force, we couldn’t have defeated them in straight combat because they are better equipped and battle-hardened. And they have troops that have been fighting for the last few years.”

“Yeah, against the Olympus coalition,” Simon said.

“You’ll have to ask them for help,” Alexis and I said at the same time.

Simon waved to us. “Undoubtedly,” he said. “But can we win even with them?”

Alexis pursed his lips. He removed the note pad from in front of Mailys and looked at it. “How…interesting,” he said, then he looked at Alexis. “I suggest we ask Olympus to help as soon as possible. If they won’t help, it’s best to know right away.”

“So we know how best to die?” Alexis said.

Simon ignored him, and looked up at me. “
Ma petite,
can you harden this communication device so no one can spy on us, as we spy on them?”

“No,” I said, honestly. “I mean, someone with my abilities on the other side will still be able to spy on us, but—”

“But not a mere mortal?
C’est bien, ma petite.
”

“I don’t see how even Olympus can break us out of this,” Brisbois said. “And I don’t see how you can convince them. Zen thinks if we make them see that if they don’t help us, they’ll face an enlarged enemy, it will convince them, but I doubt it. After all, they can’t count on us in either case. Not in the situation we’re in right now.” And then, as though dragging himself back from a long distance. “And how was your little deception?”

Simon shook his head. “They’re on their way, of course. At that, you might know more than I do?”

Mailys made a sound and Simon looked at her. “Yes,
ma petite
?” Which he’d apparently decided to call every female.

Mailys shook her head. “Monsieur, it isn’t that your deception didn’t work.”

“But—”

“But someone overheard your conversation at the other end, and they have called Madame, who also intends to attack…here.”

“
Epatante
,” Simon said and smiled. I had the impression his smile was brittle and glassy, a thing that might crack and fail at any moment. “It never rains, but it pours. Mailys, go and tell Monsieur Basil about our…ah…expected guests. And you.” He smiled at another young woman standing by the buttons. “Do put me in touch with Olympus as soon as possible.”