With an effort Lieutenant Dana Keller pulled her eyes away from the distant flickering of laser light and keyed her comm laser. "I'm here, Beddini," she said. "What do you think? We seen enough?"
"I'd seen enough five minutes ago," Beddini told her bitterly. "Those lousy, f-"
"We'd better get moving," Keller cut him off. Watching Commodore Dyami's task force get sliced to ribbons like that had sickened her, too, but letting Beddini get started on his extensive repertoire of curses wouldn't accomplish anything. "Unless you want to wait and see if they'll come after us next."
She heard the hiss as Beddini exhaled into his mike. "Not really."
"Fine," she said, keying her nav map. Actually, it was unlikely that the aliens even knew they were here-watchships were about as sensor-stealthed as it was theoretically possible to make them. But she wouldn't have bet a day's pay on that, let alone her life. "The book says we split up. I'll take Dorcas; you want Massif or Kalevala?"
"Kalevala. My static bomb or yours?"
"We'll use mine," Keller told him, keying in the sequence to activate and drop the high-intensity tachyon explosive. "You might need yours on the way off Kalevala. Don't start your engines until I give you the word."
"Right."
Behind her Keller felt a whisper of air as the copilot returned from her abrupt visit to the head. "You okay, Gorzynski?" she asked the other.
"Sure," Gorzynski said, sounding embarrassed and still a little sick. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant."
"Forget it," Keller told her, studying the younger woman's tortured face as she maneuvered carefully in zero-gee to her copilot's seat. Younger woman, hell-Gorzynski wasn't much more than a kid. Fresh out of basic, her first real tour... and this was how it had ended. "We're heading back. Get the drive sequence ready to go."
"Right," Gorzynski said, getting shakily to work. "What did I miss?"
"Just more of the same," Keller said. "They're still going around icing the survivors."
Gorzynski made a sound in the back of her throat. "I don't understand," she said. "Why are they doing that?"
"I don't know," Keller told her grimly. "But we're going to pay them back with interest. Bet on it."
The board pinged: the static bomb was ready. Keller touched the primer and the release key, and there was a slight lurch as the bulky cylinder dropped free of the watchship. "Beddini? Static bomb away. Ninety seconds to detonation."
"Acknowledged," Beddini said. "We're out of here. Good luck."
"You, too," Keller said, and keyed off the comm laser.. "Let's go, Gorzynski."
They had swung the watchship around and were pulling for deep space when the static bomb blew up behind them, sending out a wide-spectrum saturation burst of tachyons that would blind whatever wake-trail detectors the enemy out there had. Or so went the theory. If it didn't work, the Peacekeeper garrisons on Dorcas and Kalevala had better hope they were ready for company. "Here we go," she told Gorzynski, and pressed the keys.
The sky shimmered, the stars spinning briefly into an illusion of a tunnel as the space around them twisted. And then the twist became a sphere, the stars winked out, and they were on their way.
Keller looked over at Gorzynski. The kid still looked sick, but there was something else there, too. The kind of quiet, dark determination that Keller had seen so often in hardened combat veterans.
She shook her head. What a way for the kid to have to grow up.
The door slid open, and Lieutenant Colonel Castor Holloway stepped into the Dorcas colony's Peacekeeper garrison sensor center. Major Fujita Takara was waiting just inside the door, his face looking somber in the dim red light. "What've we got, Fuji?" Holloway asked.
"Trouble, looks like," Takara told him. "Crane just picked up the leading edge of a static-bomb discharge."
Holloway looked across the room at the tachyon pickup display and the young sergeant sitting stiffly in front of it. "TheJutland task force?"
"I don't know what else it could be," Takara said. "You can't really pin down a static bomb from anything but point-blank range, but it's from the right direction."
"Strength?"
"If it's from the same spot where we placed the bogies, it's about the size of a watchship's backstop bomb." Takara's lip twitched. "I don't know if you knew, Cass, but it's only been forty minutes since the task force meshed in out there."
The room, Holloway noted, was very quiet. "I suppose we'd better alert Peacekeeper Command," he said. "We have a skitter ready to fly?"
Takara's forehead creased slightly, and Holloway could tell what he was thinking. There were only two stable stardrive speeds, three light-years per hour and twice that, with only small ships like fighters and skitters able to achieve the higher equilibrium. The problem was it cost nearly five times as much per light-year to fly at the higher speed, which on the Dorcas garrison's budget was a nontrivial consideration. "Number Two can be ready in half an hour," the major said. "I assumed we'd be waiting until we had something more concrete to send them."
Holloway shook his head. "We can't afford the wait. Whatever happened out there, the fact that a watchship dropped its static bomb means there's been serious trouble. Our job is to buy the Commonwealth every minute of prep time that we can. The details of the trouble can wait until later."
"I suppose so," Takara said heavily. "I'll get the skitter crew moving."
He left, the door sliding shut behind him, and Holloway stepped over to the tachyon station. "Can you sift anything at all out of that mess, Crane?" he asked.
"No, sir," the young man said. "The tachyon static will blanket everything else in the region for at least another hour. Maybe two."
Which meant that they'd be on Dorcas's doorstep before anyone knew how much of the task force was coming back. Or, perhaps more important, if any uninvited guests were following them in. "Keep an eye on it," he told the other. "I want to know the minute the static starts to clear."
"Yes, sir." Crane hesitated. "Sir, what do you think happened?"
Holloway shrugged. "We'll find out in a couple of hours. Until then, I suggest you try to keep your imagination from running away with you."
"Yes, sir," Crane said, a bit too hastily. "I just meant-well-"
"I understand," Holloway assured him. "It's not much fun sitting blind while you wonder what might be coming your way. Just bear in mind that the Commonwealth has a long history of winning these little encounters. Whatever's out there, we'll handle it."
"Yes, sir," Crane said. "There's always CIRCE, too."
Holloway grimaced. Yes, that was always the option. The option, and the unspoken threat behind it. There were a lot of people-not all of them nonhumans-who resented living beneath the shadow of CIRCE and the Northern Coordinate Union leaders who held sole possession of the weapon's secrets. A lot of people who felt that NorCoord's domination of the Peacekeepers and the political structure of the entire Commonwealth was based on CIRCE and CIRCE alone. But the simple fact was that in the thirty-seven years since that awful demonstration off Celadon, the NorCoord military had never again had to fire the weapon. It had kept the peace without ever having to be used.
He looked at the tachyon display, feeling his throat tighten. Perhaps this time it was going to be different. "Yes," he agreed quietly. "There's always CIRCE."
2
The lunch had been served and eaten, the empty dishes cleared away, and the frosted coffee served; and only then did Nikolai Donezal finally ask the question Lord Stewart Cavanagh had known he would eventually get to. "So," Donezal said, sipping carefully at his steaming cup and licking a stray bit of frosting off his upper lip. "Shall we get down to business? Or shall we continue to pretend your visit today has been motivated solely by nostalgia?"
Cavanagh smiled. "That's one of the things I've always liked about you, Nikolai: your unique combination of subtlety and bluntness. Not a single nudge or probe during the meal itself, and now straight between the eyes."
"The ravages of age, I'm afraid,
" Donezal said regretfully. "I find that I'm useless all afternoon if I ruin my digestion at lunch." He eyed Cavanagh over the edge of his cup. "And turning down favors while eating invariably ruins my digestion."
"Favors?" Cavanagh echoed, giving the other his best innocent look. "What makes you think I'm here to ask for any favors?"
"Long personal experience," Donezal said dryly. "Coupled with the stories about you which one can still hear being told in parliamentary back offices. If even half of them are true, it would appear you left an impressive trail of wrenched arms behind you during your time here."
"Baseless slander." Cavanagh dismissed the subject with a wave of his hand. "Sprinkled with a bit of jealousy."
Donezal raised an eyebrow. "Perhaps more than just a bit," he said. "Still, you protest more than necessary. I understand that a man cannot create your list of accomplishments without also creating a few enemies along the way."
"Plus a few friends, I hope," Cavanagh said.
"I'm certain you did," Donezal said. "Though the other group is always the louder. Still, the doomsayers we shall always have with us. At any rate, you bought lunch; the least I can do is hear you out."
"Thank you," Cavanagh said, pulling his plate from his inside pocket. He opened it, called up the proper file, and slid it across the table. "My proposal is really quite simple. I'd like to shift a part of my Centauri electronics operation out to Massif."
"Indeed," Donezal said, glancing over the first page and keying for the second. "To be located in the Lorraine and Nivernais states, I see. A good choice-the plunge in iridium prices has hit those two regions particularly hard. An influx of light industry would be welcome." He looked speculatively at Cavanagh. "So tell me what the favor is you need. Free land, or just massive tax breaks?"
"Neither," Cavanagh said, mentally crossing his fingers. Donezal had a good business mind and was, at the core, a decent enough man. But his military tour of duty on the Bhurtist homeworld of Tal during the Peacekeepers' police action there had left some scars where nonhumans were concerned. "What I need is for you to help me get NorCoord's permission to run a pair of satellite facilities in the Duulian and Avuirlian enclaves."
Donezal's face tightened, just noticeably. "I see," he said. "May I ask what Sanduuli and Avuirli have to offer that our human colonists can't match?"
"Frankly, I don't know," Cavanagh said. "That's one of the things I'm hoping to find out."
"Such as whether they can do the work cheaper?" Donezal demanded.
Cavanagh shook his head. "Such as what ideas and improvements nonhuman intelligences and methodology might suggest to us," he corrected. "The satellite facilities would be geared for R and D, not production."
Donezal looked down at the plate again, and Cavanagh could see the strain as he tried to uncouple his judgment from his memories. "You're aware, of course, that five months ago Peacekeeper Command and the Commerce Commission began tightening regulations on nonhuman handling of potential military technology."
"Yes, I know," Cavanagh said. "But the work we'd be doing would be distinctly nonmilitary. All of our Peacekeeper contracts would stay in the existing high-security plants on Avon and Centauri."
Donezal rubbed his cheek. "I don't know, Stewart. Understand, I have nothing personally against either the Sanduuli or Avuirli. And I'd certainly like to see you move a plant onto Massif. But Commerce seems very serious about all this; and to be honest, I'm not sure the term 'nonmilitary' can be applied to anything electronic anymore. There's so much bleed-through between military and civilian equipment, especially with the sort of high-density and semisentient work you do. A great deal of that is still exclusively human property, and many of us would like to keep it that way. Otherwise there could be trouble whenever the next brushfire erupts."
"Possibly," Cavanagh said. "On the other hand, a perception that the Commonwealth is being unreasonably selfish is almost a guarantee that those brushfires will indeed occur."
Donezal made a face. "Well, if that happens, the Peacekeepers will certainly be ready for it," he growled, turning his attention back to the plate. "You should see all the money they've been levering out of the treasury lately. All right, let me look at this again."
Cavanagh sipped at his coffee and looked around the Parliament dining room, memories flickering through his mind as he did so. Certainly he'd come here on business, but Donezal's facetious reference to nostalgia hadn't been completely off the mark. Cavanagh had been less than enthusiastic about serving in the Northern Coordinate Union Parliament when the governor of Grampians on Avon had offered him the job-had argued long and hard, in fact, that there were others in Grampians who wanted the appointment far more. But the governor had persisted; and Cavanagh himself would be the first to admit that the six years he'd spent in Parliament had been among the most interesting of his life. The previous twenty years, spent building up a minor electronics empire from scratch, hadn't prepared him at all for the style and routine of government operation. Everyone had known it, of course, and he suspected there had been a few side bets in the back offices that the new Parlimin from Avon, Grampians state, would never even make it off the landing field.
But he'd surprised them. He'd quickly learned how to adapt his work and people-handling techniques to the strange new environment of politics, and had then proceeded to forge odd but potent coalitions among those who felt the same as he did about a dozen of the most important issues. None of the coalitions had lasted very long, but more often than not they'd lasted long enough to accomplish the goals he'd set for them. He'd become adept at the art of political arm-twisting, a talent that had given him a certain notoriety during that first term and the two subsequent appointments the governor had talked him into accepting. Apparently, if Donezal could be believed, some of that notoriety still lingered in the Parliament chambers.
A movement caught his eye: a young-looking Parlimin gesturing emphatically at the colleagues seated around him at his table. There were only a few Parlimins still in office who had also served during Cavanagh's stint here, but the current trend among the national and state governments of the NorCoord Union was to appoint top business and industrial leaders to the upper house, and Cavanagh spotted several men and women he'd locked horns with across tables over the years. There was Simons of Great Britain, Alexandra Karponov of Kryepost on Nadezhda, Klein of Neuebund on Prospect...
He was looking at Klein when the other's face suddenly went rigid.
Cavanagh looked back at Donezal, to find the same expression on his face. "Emergency signal?"
"Yes," Donezal told him, fumbling in his pocket and pulling out his slender whisper-call. "Full-Parliament alert," he said, peering at the message scrolling across the display. "Some kind of trouble out at-"
He broke off. "I have to go," he said abruptly, stuffing the whisper-call back into his pocket and levering himself out of his chair.
"What is it?" Cavanagh asked, standing up himself and making a quick hand signal. "What kind of trouble?"
"There aren't any details," Donezal said, starting toward the door. The other Parlimins, Cavanagh noted peripherally, were also heading rapidly for the exits. "Call my office later. Better yet, call your own Parlimin. I'm sure Jacy VanDiver would love to hear from you."
Cavanagh fell into step beside him; and as he did so, the quiet figure of his security chief, Adam Quinn, appeared at his side. "Trouble, sir?" the other asked softly.
"Yes," Cavanagh told him. "Come on, Nikolai, give. I'll owe you one."
Donezal stopped, throwing a sour look at Cavanagh and an only marginally less acidic one at Quinn. "There's a watchship coming in from Dorcas," he bit out. "Apparently, a Peacekeeper task force there has been hit. Badly."
Cavanagh stared at him, an old and all-too-familiar pressure squeezing his chest. "Which task force was it?"
"I don't know," Donezal said, frowning at him. "Does it matter?"
"Very much," Cavanagh murmured. TheKinshasa, with Pheylan aboard, was stat
ioned with theJutland in the Dorcas area. If that was the force that had been hit... "Let's get over to the chamber," he told Donezal, taking his arm. "They should at least be able to tell us who was involved."
Donezal shook off the grip."We are not going to the chamber," he said."I am going. You're not a Parlimin anymore."
"You can get me in."
"Not for something like this," Donezal insisted. "I'm sorry, Stewart, but you'll just have to wait and find out when the rest of the Commonwealth does."
He turned and joined the general exodus of people now streaming through the dining room's main exits. "Like hell I will," Cavanagh muttered under his breath as he pulled out his phone. "Quinn, where did Kolchin go?"
"I'm right here, sir," the young bodyguard said, appearing magically at Cavanagh's other side. "What stirred up the anthill?"
"A Peacekeeper task force has been hit off Dorcas," Cavanagh told him grimly, punching in a number. "I'm going to see if I can get us some more information."