Torch of Freedom

  Her special scorn, however, was reserved for watching people who obviously had no idea what to do with snow trying to cope with it, and it was obvious her morning stroll had given her ample fuel for that response. Mesans, it would appear, were even more clueless than most—in her humble opinion, of course—when it came to dealing with frozen atmospheric water vapor.

  Perhaps that was because the planet enjoyed mild and pleasant climatic conditions. Even the dead of winter, except in the polar regions, was no worse than a mild winter day on Haven. It didn't even begin to compare with the ferocious winter conditions of Zilwicki's native Gryphon, and the hypothermia of a Sphinxian winter would have clear-cut the planetary population like one of Old Earth's Final War bioweapons.

  Mesa's summers were probably tougher on human beings than its winters—but the summers weren't bad either. The planet's sun was a G2 star virtually identical to Sol, and Mesa itself was almost a twin of Earth. Not quite. The gravity was almost identical, but Mesa had slightly more land surface. That might have made the climate more extreme than Earth's, with less of the ameliorative effect of oceans. But Mesa was about forty light-seconds closer to the system primary and had a much smaller axial tilt—only nine degrees, in contrast to the home planet's twenty-three and a half. So the average temperature was somewhat higher and the seasonal variations quite a bit smaller.

  On most of the planet's surface, in fact, winter never brought any snow at all. But the planet had taken the name of "Mesa" from the high, tableland mesa near the center of its largest continent where the survey party placed its initial base camp on the planetary surface. What eventually became the planet's capital city had developed there, for the same largely accidental reasons that most cities on most worlds came into existence. Being at a greater altitude than most of the planet, and with a definitely continental effect, the weather in the capital was probably worse than almost anywhere else on Mesa.

  That wasn't saying much. In truth, Mesa was one of the most pleasant worlds Anton or Victor had ever visited. That made it even more disgusting that it had become the center for what both of them considered one of the foulest political systems ever produced by the human species—which had produced plenty of foul political systems, since the pharaoh Khufu erected his great pyramid with the use of slave labor more than six and half millennia in the past.

  Anton and Victor now knew a lot more about the true nature of Mesa's political system than they had when they landed on the planet, or than any other Manticorans or Havenites still knew. Jack McBryde had been cagey about imparting information to them, in each of the secret meetings they'd had since the initial contact. He'd peeled off that data much like the onion he used to depict the centuries-old strategy of the shadowy conspiracy he'd introduced to them as "the Alignment." Being as sparing as possible, each time, in the hopes of bargaining for a better deal.

  Still, he'd had to give them a lot already. It was just a crude fact of life that a person seeking to defect had less in the way of bargaining power than the people in a position to provide a new life for him or her. And neither Anton nor Victor was in any mood to be charitable.

  It spoke well for Jack McBryde, true enough—even Victor would allow this much—that he'd come to understand and detest the system created over the centuries by what he called the Mesan Alignment. But it was still appalling that any man with his obvious intelligence—even genuine sensitivities—could have supported that system as long as he had, in such a central capacity, before he finally turned against it.

  As Victor had quipped sarcastically after their third meeting with McBryde, paraphrasing a line from one of his favorite movies, it was as if an officer at one of the ancient Nazi death camps was suddenly to exclaim: "I am shocked—shocked!—to discover genocide at Auschwitz!" (Anton had understood the reference, but he'd had to explain it to Yana.)

  That probably wasn't entirely fair. Anton pointed out that the initial impulses that eventually led to the Mesan Alignment had clearly been idealistic, which it was awfully hard to say of the vision of the ancient despot Hitler. This was hardly the first time in human history, after all, that a political movement (or religion, for that matter) had begun with the best of intentions and turned into something which its founders would never have imagined might be the horrible end result. He went so far as to point out—after clearing his throat—that Victor himself bore an uncanny resemblance to many of the members of the Bolshevik Cheka in the early years of the Russian revolution almost two centuries before the Diaspora.

  Victor knew what Anton was referring to; and, after stiffening for a moment, had admitted (even with a slight smile) there was possibly a certain resemblance. In the years since he'd met Kevin and Ginny Usher, Cachat had become a genuine student of history.

  "It's still not the same, Anton," he'd said. "If you know that much about ancient history, then you also know that within two decades of the original revolution the tyrant named Stalin had murdered almost all of those early revolutionaries and replaced them with his own lickspittles. Rob Pierre and especially Saint-Just tried to do the same thing with the Aprilists in our own revolution—and damn near succeeded.

  "But we're talking centuries here, Anton, not decades. Centuries during the course of which these people committed the foulest crimes you can imagine, condemning generations of other people to slavery and brutality—and Jack McBryde finally starts choking on it, more than half a millennium after it began and after enjoying a long career himself at the trade?"

  By the time he'd finished, Victor had been as outwardly angry as Anton had ever seen him.

  "So . . . what?" he said. "Do you want to tell McBryde to take a flying leap into hellfire and be damned to him?"

  That had been enough to crack Cachat's quiet fury. "Well . . . no, of course not." He even managed a chuckle. "I'm not crazy, after all. McBryde could be one of Shaitan's top underlings and I'd work with him under these circumstances, if he wanted to defect from Hell. Holding my nose, maybe, but I'd do it. We have far too much to gain—and that's not even counting these latest hints McBryde's been giving us."

  Anton looked skeptical. "Do you really think he's got his hands on some sort of super-secret technical developments—assuming those developments exist at all?"

  "I don't think McBryde himself knows diddly squat about starship design, which is what he's been hinting at. But if I'm interpreting some other remarks of his properly, he's got someone else with him. Someone whom he's kept out of sight from us up until now."

  Anton stared at the wall, thinking about it. There had been the suggestion, in some of what McBryde had said in their last meeting the day before yesterday, that—if you interpreted it this way, and then tweaked it that way—it was not for nothing they called this trade a hall of mirrors—he wanted some form of transport off the planet that was more elaborate than a single person would need. Anton had been a little puzzled by it at the time, in fact. McBryde was a security specialist himself, so he knew perfectly well that the easiest and safest way to smuggle someone off a planet with security precautions as tight at Mesa's was to disguise them in some way or another as someone else. The more people you tried to do that for, the harder it got—and the increase in the risk was exponential, not linear.

  Alternatively . . .

  He sucked in a breath. "How many people then, do you think?"

  "At a guess, just one," replied Victor. "McBryde doesn't have a wife or children—or significant other of any kind, so far as we've been able to determine. I get the feeling he's rather close to his family, but I'd be astonished if someone with his training and experience would do anything to compromise them. There's no possible way he could get all of them off the planet, parents and siblings both. And for all we know some of his brothers and sisters have children of their own."

  Cachat leaned forward over the kitchen table, leaning his weight on his arms. "He's putting them all at a considerable risk already, it seems to me. Once he leaves, there'll be hell to pay, even if there's no in
dication that any of them knew what he was planning. If this were Haven under Pierre and Saint-Just, his family would probably all be executed anyway. But from everything we've been able to determine, this Mesan Alignment doesn't operate that crudely."

  Anton considered Victor's argument, in his slow and methodical way. Cachat, who knew him very well by now, simply waited patiently. In fact, he took advantage of the pause to make a fresh pot of coffee and find out what Yana had learned. As she did every morning, the Amazon had gone out to check the astrogation records. Entries and exits from the system by all merchant and passenger ships—most military craft, too—were kept up to date and publicly available.

  Checking those records on a daily basis was a perfectly legal activity, but it was always possible that someone might be monitoring them. So, Yana used a different method every day to search the data. Sometimes a public library, and never the same one twice in a row; sometimes the commercial shipping offices—there were lots of those in the city; and once she'd even gone down to the Extrasolar Commerce Authority itself and used their computers.

  "The Hali Sowle just entered the system again," she said quietly, not wanting to disturb Anton's train of thought. She didn't know Zilwicki as well as Victor did, but she had a near-superstitious respect for the man's fabled ability to work his way through any problem.

  Victor nodded. "Any word yet as to their permitted length of stay?"

  She shook her head. "No, but it'll probably be on the records by tomorrow. No later than the day after that, for sure. I'll say this for Mesa. Their bureaucrats aren't slouches."

  Victor chuckled. "And this is . . . praise?"

  Hearing a slight noise behind them, Victor turned and saw that Anton had moved his chair back from the table a little.

  "That didn't take as long as I thought." He held up the pot. "Fresh coffee?"

  Zilwicki extended his cup. "There isn't really that much to figure. I think you're right, Victor—and I'm pretty sure McBryde will come out into the open with it at our next meeting. It'll be one more person that he wants us to smuggle out with him, and that person will be a scientist or technician of some kind who actually has the knowledge he's been hinting about."

  "You don't think he's faking anything, in other words?"

  "No." Slowly, Anton shook his blocky head. "Victor, unless I'm very badly mistaken, Jack McBryde is starting to get desperate and wants off the planet as soon as possible."

  Victor frowned. "Why? He's essentially the head of security here. Well, one of them, anyway. But you'd be hard pressed to think of anyone who could disguise what he's doing as well as he could. Even if someone does spot him up to something questionable, he could almost certainly provide some sort of half-reasonable explanation. A good enough one, at least, to give him time to make his escape."

  "I don't think it's his own situation that's pressing on him, Victor. I think—and I'll be the first to admit there's a lot of guesswork on my part—that it's this mysterious other person's situation that's driving most of the timetable here."

  "Ah." Victor sat down and took a sip from his coffee, then thought about it for a couple of minutes, and then took another sip.

  "I'm not about to second-guess you, Anton. So let's put everything on the table when we meet McBryde in two days. Tell him it's put-up-or-shut-up time, and offer the very big carrot of being able to get him and his Mysterious Other off the planet almost immediately."

  He nodded toward Yana, who'd taken a seat at the table with her cup of coffee. "The Hali Sowle's back."

  Anton drew in a breath. "In other words, you think we should make our exit at the same time. Once the Butrys leave the system, none of our alternate means of escape is all that attractive."

  " 'All that attractive'?" Victor chuckled. "Anton, unless I miss my guess, the moment the Mesan Powers-That-Be find out Jack McBryde has stabbed them in the back, all hell will break loose. There isn't a chance worth talking about that any of those 'alternate means of escape'—which I could also call the rickety ladders with which to exit a burning skyscraper—will be anything other than a death trap. If he goes, we have to go with him."

  "Well . . . true. Besides, I can't imagine we could find out much more by staying."

  "Oh, we could. Even before McBryde approached us, we'd already discovered a fair amount and started to develop some promising leads. But I agree there's nothing we could find out if we stayed that comes close to what McBryde will provide us. Besides . . ."

  He took another sip. "I was about to tell you. Inez Cloutier just got back yesterday—and she's got a definite offer from whoever the top dog is. Probably Adrian Luff, if we're right."

  "Good offer?"

  "Better than I'd imagined. There must be somebody out there who knows more about the workings of Saint-Just's field operations than I figured there'd be. I guess my, ah, reputation has preceded me."

  "Not as Victor Cachat, I hope?"

  "No. Well . . . probably not. Almost certainly not. It's always theoretically possible that they've figured out exactly who I am and are laying a clever trap. But they work closely with the Alignment, obviously—so if they've figured out who I am, why not just report me and let the Mesans right here do the wet work?" He shook his head. "No, they're probably figuring me for another one of Saint-Just's young troubleshooters. I wasn't the only one, by any means. There were at least a dozen others I knew of, and probably two or three times that many. Who knows? Now that Saint-Just's dead, probably no one. If there was ever a man who kept his own counsel, it was Oscar Saint-Just."

  * * *

  "So that's the bottom line. Take it or leave it."

  Jack McBryde returned Victor Cachat's flat gaze with what he hoped was an imperturbable gaze of his own.

  The fact that Cachat had made what amounted to the ultimatum was a signal in itself, Jack knew. As their negotiations had progressed, Zilwicki and Cachat had fallen into the familiar roles of "good cop/bad cop." McBryde recognized the routine, of course—which Cachat and Zilwicki would know perfectly well—but that didn't really make much difference. The routine was ancient because it was so effective.

  All the more effective here, Jack thought wryly, when your option as the "good cop" was Anton Zilwicki! As part of any other pairing except with Victor Cachat, Zilwicki would have been playing the "bad cop."

  Cachat was . . . unsettling. And would have been, even if McBryde hadn't known his reputation. There were times when those dark eyes seemed as black as the stellar void, and every bit as cold.

  "All right. Here's what I want: passage off the planet for myself and a friend of mine. The friend is male, close to my age, and one of Mesa's top physicists specializing in ship propulsion. More precisely, he's an expert on a new type of ship drive that is completely unknown to anyone else in the universe."

  There might have been a slight expression that came to Zilwicki in response to that statement. Hard to tell, on that blocky face. There was no expression at all on Cachat's.

  "Go on," said Victor. "And what do you provide us, beyond this physicist of yours?"

  In for a penny, in for a pound. Jack had once even looked up the etymology of that old saw. "What I give you is the following: First, the nature and plans of the Mesan Alignment for both Manticore and Haven. Which are, ah, about as inimical as you can imagine."

  "Generalities only go so far, McBryde."

  "Let me finish. And, second, I can tell you how—in layman's terms; I don't have the background to understand the technical aspects of it myself—the Mesan Alignment asassinated Ambassador Webster, got Colonel Gregor Hofschulte to attempt to assassinate Crown Prince Huan, and got a Lieutenant Meares to attempt to assasinate Honor Harrington and William Henry Tyler to attack your own step-daughter Berry, Anton. Among other attacks. Trust me, there are more of them—and more successful ops—than you people even guess yet. Including"—He looked squarely at Cachat—"the one which . . . inspired, shall we say, one Yves Grosclaude to kill himself, if that means anything to you."
r />   For the first time since he'd met Victor Cachat, an actual expression came to the Havenite's face. It was a very faint expression, true, but between that little frown and the slight pallor, Jack knew the reference had registered.

  Zilwicki was frowning at Cachat. "Does that mean anything to you?"

  "Yes," Victor said softly. "Something Kevin's suspected—" He shook his head. "I'm afraid I can't talk about it, Anton. This is one of those places where the interests of my star nation and yours probably aren't the same."

  Anton nodded, and looked back at McBryde.

  "Okay. And what do you want in exchange? Keep in mind, Jack, that because of the—ah—unusual nature of this partnership between Victor and me, neither one of us can offer you asylum in our own systems. Eventually, I imagine you'll probably wind up on Erewhon, or somewhere in Maya Sector. For the time being, though, you'll be sequestered on Torch and I can pretty well guarantee that one of the very first people who'll be talking to you is Jeremy X. He's not likely to be friendly, either."

  A slight smile came to Zilwicki's face. "There won't be any physical stuff, though—you know, beatings, torture, that sort of thing—and you won't even be subject to poor living conditions. My daughter will see to that; and would, even without me talking to her. But there won't be anything fancy or luxurious. Not for several years, at a guess."

  Jack wasn't surprised by any of that. And . . . didn't care. Not any longer.

  "It's a deal," he said. He took a chip out of his vest pocket and slid it across the table. "Here. I made this up as a sort of . . . good will gesture, I suppose you'd call it. It doesn't have any technical stuff on the assassination technique itself. As I say, the best understanding I have of it myself is only what you might call an informed layman's grasp. Basically, though, it's a new approach to medical nanotech, only this one's virus-based and does replicate on its own."