No wonder Duchess Harrington seemed so amused by it all, he thought. If anyone understood just how good a…a moral jailer Fire Watch was going to be, it had to be her. And talk about ironic justice—!
The lift car came to a halt, the doors opened, and Archer stood to one side with a wave of his hand.
“This way, gentlemen,” he said with flawless, if less than effervescent, courtesy.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Anton Zilwicki rumbled. Harahap contented himself with a nod of thanks. Prudence suggested allowing Zilwicki to take center stage, after all.
Archer led them down the passage to a closed hatch. The neat label read “Flag Officer Briefing Room,” and the glowing light on its frame indicated the compartment was in use, but it opened the instant Archer pressed the admittance button.
“Bring them in, Gwen,” a pleasantly rough-edged contralto said, and Archer nodded to his guests.
“This way, gentlemen,” he said again, and led them into the briefing room.
Eight humans and a pair of treecats waited for them there.
Harahap scanned the faces—human and feline—as he and Zilwicki followed Archer towards the briefing table at the center of the compartment. Admiral Gold Peak was easy to identify, given her coloring and her striking resemblance to Empress Elizabeth. The tall, brown-haired, mustachioed admiral in Havenite uniform to her right had to be Lester Tourville, which meant the treecat on the back of his chair must be Lurks in Branches. Harahap had made a point of learning the name of the Second Fleet CO’s treecat companion. The blond captain seated to Gold Peak’s left was probably Cynthia Lecter, her chief of staff, and that would make the tall, chestnut-haired senior-grade captain beside Lecter Victoria Armstrong, Gold Peak’s flag captain. He wasn’t certain who the small, compact Marine brigadier might be, nor did he have a clue about the identity of the Marine master sergeant standing behind Gold Peak with yet another treecat on his shoulder, but he could make a good guess about the two civilians.
“Mister Zilwicki, Mister Graham, and…friend, Milady,” Archer said by way of introduction, and Gold Peak smiled faintly.
“Thank you, Gwen,” she said, then tilted her head. “It’s good to see you, Captain Zilwicki.”
“I could wish it was under other circumstances, Milady,” Zilwicki replied.
“As could we all,” she conceded, then turned to Indiana.
“Mister Graham,” she said. “Welcome to Tenth Fleet. Commodore Zavala speaks very well of you, although I’m afraid I don’t quite understand—yet, at least—why you’ve joined us. No doubt all will be made clear in time.”
“I hope so, Admiral,” Indy said.
She nodded to him, then looked past Zilwicki.
“And this,” she said with a noticeable lack of warmth, “must be the infamous ‘Firebrand.’”
It wasn’t precisely a greeting, Harahap decided, and contented himself with a brief bow of acknowledgment. Fire Watch, on the other hand, flattened his ears at the admiral and Harahap felt his hand-feet’s claws sink deeper into the pad on his shoulder.
One of Gold Peak’s eyebrows rose slightly, and Harahap suppressed an urge to grimace. If anyone who’d never been adopted herself was going to understand treecat body language, it had to be Gold Peak, given her decades of friendship with Duchess Harrington and Nimitz. And the last thing they needed was for Fire Watch’s obvious belligerence to antagonize her.
Further.
Behave! he thought even more loudly at the ’cat.
“However,” Gold Peak continued after a moment, dour expression easing into a broad smile, “before we get down to the reason you and I are seeing one another, Captain, I believe there are a couple of people here who’d like to greet you.”
The two civilians were on their feet almost before she’d stopped speaking. The man was an improbably handsome fellow, with green eyes and long blond hair, who looked absolutely nothing like the file photos of Victor Cachat Harahap had been shown. The woman was almost as powerfully built—for a woman—as Anton Zilwicki, although she lacked most of his undeniable massiveness, and aside from some extensive facial mods, she still looked quite a bit like the notorious General Palane.
“Anton!” the woman enveloped Zilwicki in a massive hug no lesser mortal was likely to survive. On the other hand, Harahap noted, he was hugging her back just as hard, and his eyes were suspiciously damp.
“Thandi.” He shook his head. “It’s good to see you. I was afraid—”
“Hush.” She stood back a bit, just far enough to shake him. “Somebody had to go. You drew the short straw.”
“Yes, but—”
“Hush, I said!” She shook him again, harder, and he smiled. Then he looked past her to the blond-haired young fellow.
“Victor.”
“Anton.”
They stood there, looking at one another for several heartbeats. The silence stretched out, but neither of them moved a muscle until Palane snorted in exasperation.
“You know, it’s perfectly all right to admit you’re friends. I swear, watching the two of you—!”
Zilwicki and Cachat looked at her in near perfect unison, then back at each other.
“Oh, the hell with it!” Zilwicki said. “Come here, Victor! She’s going to get pissed and hurt both of us if you don’t.”
“Probably got a point,” Cachat said after a moment. He stepped towards Zilwicki, holding out one hand, but the Highlander ignored it. He reached out, instead, wrapping both arms around the smaller, far slighter man and hugging him almost as tightly as he had Palane.
Cachat stiffened, his eyes going wide. But then that sharp, green gaze softened and he wrapped his own arms—awkwardly, hesitantly, perhaps, but still wrapped—as far around Zilwicki as he could.
“Now if only I had the holo-pics to post!” Palane said. Both men looked at her again, and she chortled at their expressions. “God, I could charge a fortune! ‘Black Victor hugs Cap’n Zilwicki, Terror of the Spaceways!’”
Cachat glared at her, but a rumble of laughter went around the briefing room. After a moment, his own glare turned into a lopsided grin and he shook his head.
“A true professional, accustomed to smooth and subtle operations planned with exquisite care and forethought—as opposed to the crude, smash-and-grab tactics espoused by mere Marines, you understand—would’ve had a camera ready,” he observed.
“And you are so going to pay for that one,” she assured him.
“I’m sure he will,” Gold Peak said. “And from everything I’ve seen and heard about him, there’ll be significant karmic payback when the moment comes. For now, though, I’m afraid we need to turn to other concerns.” She indicated three empty chairs, facing hers across the table. “Why don’t we all be seated again and get down to it. I understand you have quite a few things to tell me, Captain Zilwicki, Scourge—” she grinned wickedly “—of the Spaceways.”
* * *
“—and so, they sent Damien and me out to see what we could dig up,” Zilwicki finished his concise, organized brief some forty minutes later. “I’m sure your own intelligence people have been digging like mad, Milady, but the two of us have…a certain set of skills that may give us better shovels. And, to be honest, both of us have very personal motivations to dig up Duchess Harrington’s rabbit.”
“I see.”
Countess Gold Peak, Harahap had observed, had the ability to listen without interruptions. That wasn’t always—or even often—the case with senior officers, in his own experience. But she’d sat tipped back in her chair, jotting an occasional note into the pad on her knee, and listened without comment or question as Zilwicki spoke. Captain Lecter had interjected two questions, and the Marine brigadier—Brigadier Hibson—had asked three. Hibson’s, especially, had been brief, to the point, and well taken, but Gold Peak had simply listened, soaking it all in.
“Thank you, Captain Zilwicki,” she continued. “That was one of the better briefs I’ve received. And it didn’t come at us co
mpletely cold. Mister Cachat and General Palane had already shared your statistical findings with us—after a fashion, at least. I’m afraid neither of them fully grasped the nuances, and I certainly didn’t.” She flickered a brief smile. “Most of my math is involved with how to blow things up faster.”
“I can, ah, see where those particular math skills might not’ve been the best ones for absorbing my suspicions, Milady,” Zilwicki rumbled with a faint smile of his own.
“Yes,” she agreed, but then her smile faded.
“On the other hand,” she said, swiveling her eyes to his companions, “I’m rather less clear on exactly why Mister Graham and—especially—Mister Harahap are here.” Her expression was the antithesis of a smile as those eyes rested on Harahap. “Neither of them are statisticians either, I believe.”
“No, Milady,” Zilwicki agreed, “and neither of them fit into any neat pigeonholes. Actually, Indy here sort of wrote his own ticket.” The young Seraphimian colored slightly, although he met the admiral’s gaze with commendable steadiness. “I think at least part of it’s his desire to…ride herd on Mister Harahap. They have a bit of a history,” he added with massive understatement. “On the other hand, I didn’t have any objection to his attaching himself to the mission, whatever his original motives might’ve been. He doesn’t have anything in the way of formal training, but he’s a bright fellow and from all reports he’s actually very good—if occasionally a tad overenthusiastic—in covert situations.” He shrugged. “Someone like him can always make himself useful, and Duchess Harrington cast the final vote on his inclusion.”
“I see. All right, that accounts for Mister Graham, but to be honest, he wasn’t the one I had reservations about.”
“I’m not surprised, Milady. But, as I mentioned earlier, Damien—” the use of his first name was not an accident, Harahap reflected “—has skills of his own which can be of great potential value to us. Not only that, his…previous employment, let’s say, gives him a knowledge base no one else has. And, frankly, he has his own reasons to want the Alignment—or, rather, what Duchess Harrington’s taken to calling the ‘onion core’—dragged out into the open.”
“Oh, I’m quite certain he has a ‘knowledge base no one else has,’” Gold Peak said grimly. “What I’m not quite clear on is why we should trust him—in light of what he was doing while he acquired that ‘knowledge base,’ let’s say.”
“If I may, Milady,” Harahap said mildly, before Zilwicki could respond, “that’s a very good question. In your place, I wouldn’t trust me. But—” he met her eyes “—I think you’ve had a little experience trusting treecats.”
“I have, indeed,” she allowed after a brief pause. “Treecats don’t always understand ‘two-legs’ and the way their minds work, though. And while they’re usually very good with people, their understanding of human political and social complexities is less well developed. I have to wonder how that might affect their ability to understand where someone’s true loyalty really lies. In short, I can visualize circumstances in which even they could be…mistaken.”
Fire Watch stiffened on the back of Harahap’s chair, his ears going flat once again. Harahap reached up quickly, but even as he did, Lester Tourville’s companion gave a short, sharp, unmistakably stern-sounding bleek. Gold Peak turned towards him, and Lurks in Branches’s true-hands started flashing sign far too rapidly for Harahap’s still limited proficiency to follow. He did recognize a few of the signs, though. The right-handed “D” tapping the back of Lurks in Branches’s left wrist, spelling “duty,” and a palm-out “W” at the corner of his muzzle, arcing outward to spell “sing.” The emphatic closure of two wiry fingers on a thumb to sign “No,” and two hands, each signing “5” near the shoulder, one above the other, pulling out and closing into “S’s” to sign “trust.” There were dozens of others, including three he’d come to recognize only too well: “Y” hands facing each other and shaking in the sign for “plays”; “A” hands, placed palm-to-palm in the sign for “with;” and palm-up bent “5”s moving upward with fluttering fingers.
He saw Tourville snort and cover his mouth with one hand as that particular trio flashed across Lurks in Branches’s true-hands. Even the corner of Gold Peak’s lips twitched, as a matter of fact. But aside from that, he had no idea what the Havenite’s companion was saying. He only knew it seemed to be taking quite some time to say and that his true-hands were very emphatic.
He stopped, finally, and Gold Peak looked at him levelly. Then she glanced at the treecat on the master sergeant’s shoulder and arched an eyebrow. The silent question evoked only a single sign—one of the ones Harahap had learned to recognize—in response: the nodding “Y” which meant “yes.” Gold Peak considered him for a moment longer, then shrugged and turned back to Harahap.
“You have…interesting advocates, Mister Harahap,” she said. “Lurks in Branches was particularly forceful in his assurances. You may have noticed that he seldom uses one sign when half a dozen will do.” Lurks in Branches bleeked a laugh, and she smiled slightly. “Alfredo, on the other hand, is a ’cat of very few signs. I think he prefers to let Lurks in Branches expend the calories to get the message across. But the message, Mister Harahap, is that not only do you have no intention of betraying us, but you’re personally determined to find the Alignment for reasons of your own. May I ask what those reasons are?”
Her tone was light, almost amused, but her eyes bored into him like paired lasers. It was not, he decided, a moment for prevarication.
“There are several of them, Milady,” he said, meeting that sharp-edged gaze levelly. “Some of them I haven’t quite figured out for myself yet. One is that the bastards played me, and I don’t like that. Another is that I’ve recently discovered I’m tired of rationalizing what I’ve done, of avoiding the consequences of my actions by simply ignoring them. I can also honestly say I never suspected what the Alignment’s true agenda was or how far it went. But the truth?”
He reached out and touched Indy’s shoulder without ever looking at the younger man.
“I betrayed Indy, his sister, all of his friends. It was nothing personal, just a job, like dozens of other jobs I’d done before. And I knew I’d be able to leave it all behind when the hammer came down. But then everything went to hell and, for the first time in my career, I got trapped in my own trap. I saw it from the inside, not in my rearview mirror. And I realized I’d let myself like those people a hell of a lot more than I ever should have. They were real for me, people who mattered, and I’d been completely prepared to leave them to take the fall because that was the job.”
It was very quiet in the briefing room, and the shoulder under his fingers was tense. He could taste Indy’s surprise almost as if he’d been a treecat himself, but perhaps that wasn’t really what was happening. Perhaps what he was really tasting was his own surprise as the words flowed out of him and he realized every single one of them was true.
“I’m no paragon of virtue, Milady. I’m someone who’s always taken pride in his abilities and his skills, but I never really let myself think very hard about the consequences of what I used them to do. On Seraphim, I didn’t have that option. And that means I don’t have it anywhere else anymore, either. Worse, your people—specifically, Duchess Harrington—gave me the chance to—forced me to—make a choice. And then there was Fire Watch.”
The treecat flowed down from the back of his chair, sitting upright in his lap, leaning back against him while bright green eyes looked defiantly at everyone on the far side of the table.
“The Alignment killed his sister, her family, all of her friends, and he felt her die.” Damien Harahap’s face could have been carved from granite. “He felt her die. I’m still just learning my way around treecats, Milady, but I’ve learned enough to start to at least dimly understand what that must have been like for him, and no one—no one—will ever do that to him or another treecat again.”
He was distantly startled by the quiver in his voic
e, the burning in his eyes, but he never looked away.
“I owe a lot of people a lot of debts, for good or ill,” he told the admiral. “I’ll be a long time paying them. But I’ve decided it’s time to get started, and I don’t know a better place to begin. They tell me treecats always know if a human is lying, and given what I’ve seen out of Fire Watch so far, I’m inclined to believe it. So let me put this the clearest way I can for them to taste for you. To use Duchess Harrington’s metaphor, I’ve taken Empress Elizabeth’s dollar and I owe her an honest day’s work. I’ve always believed in that. But this time I’ve gone farther. For the first time since I left Startman, thirty-four T-years ago, I have a home. I haven’t had one of those since StratCor took it away when I was seven years old. Now I do, and it’s right here.” His hands caressed Fire Watch with feather gentleness. “And I will kill anything that tries to take it away from me again.”
He stopped and cleared his throat, feeling unaccustomedly abashed in the absolute silence, but his eyes held hers without wavering. Then she glanced at Lurks in Branches. He nodded once, emphatically, and it was her turn to clear her throat as she turned back to Harahap.
“Well, who am I to argue with a passel of treecats?” The huskiness of her voice betrayed her whimsical tone. “I suppose that makes it a case of ‘welcome aboard’…Plays with Fire.”
DECEMBER 1922 POST DIASPORA
Solarian Merchantship Star Galleon
Beowulf System
“Last one,” Evelyn Chernitskaya, first officer of the Kalokainos Lines freighter Star Galleon, announced in a tone of profound relief.
Captain Simeon Russo smiled thinly. He understood Chernitskaya’s relief, and he was just as happy to be done with the deployment phase himself. Trundling across the Beowulf System, heading in from the hyper-limit to deliver the Beowulfan property the Warner system government had seized prior to the secession referendum, would have been slow in any case. The “cargo containers” which had somehow found their ways overboard in a steady trickle had made it nerve-racking, as well. Ships seldom passed one another closely enough for anyone to have noticed something that small separating from another ship, but this time—naturally—they’d had a relatively close neighbor for most of their voyage towards the planet Beowulf. There’d been little chance of their unwelcome companion noticing anything even if it had been looking in exactly the wrong direction—two million kilometers was “close” only by the standards of a star system’s dimensions—but everyone aboard Star Galleon had breathed a sigh of relief when the stranger’s course diverged towards Cassandra, the Beowulf System’s second inhabited planet.