An Honorable Defense Book 1 Crisis of Empire Read online

  “This is bootless!” The governor stood up and half the table rose with her.

  “Take care how you decide and what sides you choose, Madam,” the Trader General warned.

  “And you take care with your treasons, Sirra!” Deirdre Sallee gathered her skirts and swept off toward the edge of the stage. Two seconds ahead of her, the tall footman dropped the dome. The dark tensions around the table seemed to dissipate as mellow, gold-and-silver light flooded in to mark her exit.

  Chapter 3

  Taddeuz Bertingas: STRING PULLER

  For half an hour they sat and watched the twenty-meter black egg on the stage as if it were an important but boring ritual. No one among the aides and assistants, the second secretaries and deputy directors who filled the audience seats felt so self-assured that he or she would stand up, move around, trade gossip, break out a deck of five spot, or otherwise pretend they were all cut off from the action by a wall of energy as thick as syncrete. But there was a lot of whispering, side to side.

  Tad Bertingas had folded his hands between his knees and spent the time with his future. Having seen the new D.ofC. from a distance of forty meters, Tad loathed him on sight. Small, slick, furtive, prissy, mean—all those adjectives rushed forward to describe a man who would steal a chair and then argue about it. The man’s low forehead, waxed hair, pale complexion, and rat teeth all supported those adjectives. The way his shoulders had hunched down when the Protocol Master tried to eject him implied a stubborn, ungracious soul. Tad could read signals, if not auras, and Selwin Praise was no leader. He would push from behind instead of striding out in front. Not a man to die for.

  Oh, well. What else had he expected?

  Bertingas had just reached this satori of acceptance when the dome dropped. Voices around him cut off in mid-whisper. No one expected Governor Sallee to emerge from the side of it like a great flapping bird. Her cloak fluttered around her shoulders as she charged off the edge of the stage. Her elbows jerked up as her foot came down unexpectedly on the air over that first step.

  Her pace never faltered, her face never broke its mask of anger, as she almost broke her neck on the way down. There was a scramble in the orchestra seats as Regis Sallee and the rest of the governor’s entourage recovered from their surprise and rushed to follow her, already halfway up the aisle.

  Amid the standing and the shuffling, the breaking and the running, Tad took a long look at the figures remaining on stage. Most still sat around the council table. A few had risen with the governor’s exit and now stood awkwardly, as if unsure whether the meeting was really over. Some faces were set in grim lines. Others looked woeful, like witnesses to a natural catastrophe. Halan Follard was staring into the middle distance, thinking, probably plotting, possibly amused. Only one face was actually smiling, and that was Valence Elidor’s, the master trader.

  How was Praise—? Oh, yes. He was sitting, head down, doing something with his hands, reaming under his fingernails, one by one, with a small knife. It winked and flashed in a subtle spotlight from an odd corner of the hall. Praise’s mouth was set in a sneer of concentration.

  Would this be a good time to approach and introduce himself? Well—when would ever be a good time? Like a man going into battle, Tad made his legs work to climb the steps onto the stage and approach the head of the table. The council members were leaving now. Some gave him a nod, others just pushed past him. Selwin Praise went on cleaning his fingers.

  “Excuse me? Sir? Ah . . . Citizen Praise?”

  The frosty eyes looked sideways up at him. The sneer changed to a half-smile. “Yes?”

  “I am Bertingas. Your deputy. From the Ministry?”

  “Oh?” The eyes clouded. “Yes. I remember reading about you. Born here in the Cluster, came up through the local admin, long time in the ranks. Yes. You’re Bertingas.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “I’ve read a lot about the organization you’ve been mismanaging in my absence, Bertingas. I have to tell you, quite frankly, that I am not pleased. Not pleased at all.”

  “In what way?” Tad felt a tremble—but whether of fear or anger he couldn’t decide.

  Praise pursed his lips. “What would you say the monetary value of the system in my charge is worth? In round numbers?”

  “Well, that’s hard to—”

  “Just one, just start with one node in the Hyperwave Network, shall we? Would you say a million . . . ? A billion New Rands?”

  “Closer to a billion.”

  “And we have thirty-two stations in the Cluster as of the last audit. Haven’t misplaced any, have I?”

  “No, Sir—”

  “And the Freevid? The Shadow Box? A lot of hardware there? A couple of billion in each system, maybe? All told?”

  “Yes, Sir, although General Accounting would know the exact—”

  “I’m asking you to know, Bertingas. So, we have a communications system valued, by my quick estimate, at fifty-seven point three giga-Rands. Now, what’s your expenditure on security, Bertingas? Don’t waste my time with a guess because you don’t know, do you? But I know—”

  Fifteen point seven, Bertingas remembered. In millions.

  “—that you don’t spend more than twenty million New Rands a year. Mostly on guards who double as messengers and light clericals. It’s there in your reports. A ‘cost saving’ measure. Which means that any terrorist or rogue trader or peeved alien can walk up to one of my nodes and own it. Now, how do you think that makes me feel? Do you think I sleep well at night?”

  “I really couldn’t guess about your sleeping habits, Sir.”

  “You’d better start worrying about them, Bertingas. From now on there is one person in your life who can make you feel very fine or very not. That’s me . . . Now, after I finish some business here at the Palace, I am going to take my lunch, then I am going to inspect my nice new office in the Government Block. The one thing I hope to find there, on my nice big desk, is a report from you with a plan, fully costed, for a high-security force, paramilitary and quick-reacting, that can keep the creepers and the peepers out of my nice clean systems. Do you ponimayesh, Bertingas?”

  “Yes, Sir!”

  A cold smile came to Praise’s face. He looked at his fingernails again. “Very good. Good-bye, Taddeuz. It was nice meeting you.”

  Bertingas turned on his heel and walked off. His stomach was squirting hot acid. His teeth were grinding pale enamel—he could feel flakes of it on his tongue. He forced himself to take a deep breath and calm down.

  Now, where was his friend, Halan Follard? On the other side of the stage, talking to the old woman from Greengallow Holding. Tad approached them, hoping he could beg a ride back to the Block.

  Follard broke the line of conversation and quickly introduced him to Amelia Ceil, then went back to what seemed like small patter about the Haiken Maru quote for metasheep at the Klondyke Lift Center. In the middle, Follard suddenly paused and wagged a finger at Bertingas.

  “Reminds me,” he said. “I’ve arranged a bodyguard for you.”

  Bertingas felt he’d slipped hypersideways and dropped into a war zone. Everyone was talking security now. In sunny old Meyerbeer, City of Fountains. On white-cliffed Palaccio, where nothing ever happens.

  “I don’t need a bodyguard, Halan. Honestly.”

  “You don’t want one, but that’s not the same as you don’t need one. She’s waiting in your office right now. Treat her kindly.”

  “Her?”

  “You’ll see.” Follard turned back to Amelia Ceil and stock prices.

  Tad still needed to get back to Government Block or, considering the number of hours he’d already been awake—and ignoring Praise’s promised report—to his apartment.

  He walked up the aisle to the four o’clock door and out into the deep, false darkness of the Palace Dome. The space around the Golden House, however, was bright with the hidden lights that illuminated its arches and buttresses. Water played around him, cooling sprays from the petal pools.
He could smell grass being cut by the green techs. Bertingas remembered that public aircars sometimes paused in Krasniye Square and, failing that, a well-camouflaged monorail stop was just beyond. He started in that direction when a fast set of footsteps came up behind him.

  “Ah! Citizen Bertingas!” The voice was deep and strong and jovial. Tad turned to see Valence Elidor, minus his cluster of staffers.

  “Yes?”

  “An exciting morning, hey? Lots to think about. You look like a man afoot. For the pleasure of the walk? Or do you need a lift? After all, you came with—”

  “I would very much appreciate riding with you. At least as far as Government Block.”

  “No farther?” Elidor winked as if that meant something. He made some hidden signal then, he must have, because with a soft swoosh a large, black car dropped out of the darkness and hovered, half over the plaza, half over one of the pools. Its airskirt flattened one of the fountains and kicked up its own curtain of water. None fell on the two men. The side doors pistoned open, and Elidor waved him aboard.

  Haiken Maru did well for itself. The interior was faced with unblemished gray Dowda leather, soft as Human skin. Because the Dowda, of planet Kraal in Arachne Cluster, had an intelligence potential of point nine three, hunting or farming them as animals was a capital offense.

  The side panels pulled down to make a communications console better than the one in Bertingas’ office. His didn’t have a wet bar with refrigerator. The tongs were silver, the glasses fused crystal.

  The overhead was painted—by a living artist, not a reprobot—in a scene that, after some staring, Bertingas interpreted as The Execution of the Traitor Rydin. With a sense of shock, Tad realized that this wasn’t even a copy but an offwork by Poreeter himself.

  The rest of the car came into focus: patterned carpets, gold filigree, beveled quartz, matched mahogany from Earth. The appointments inside this vehicle were worth the lifetime salary of a government bureaucrat, even at Bertingas’ level.

  While he frankly gawked, the car rose silently and passed through the Dome into bright sunshine. Without being told, the chauffeur took it to 800 meters, outside the pattern, and made slow circles.

  “Do you mind if we orbit the city for a bit?” Elidor asked. “I get so little chance to talk with someone in your fascinating profession.”

  “That’s funny,” Bertingas said. “For the second time in one morning my host would rather talk than fly . . . Well now, I didn’t know Communications was so interesting.”

  “I mean the technical end, the casting of illusions, the shaping of information, the creation of entertainment . . . ”

  “Does a man in your position need much entertainment?”

  “Well put.” Elidor stroked the Dowda skin beside his thigh. “But I do need information. Often.”

  “I am fully conversant with the Baseform Scatter—”

  Elidor barked out a laugh. “What I need isn’t optically encoded. Oh no . . . Ah, hmmm . . . It’s my impression that a man in your position juggles a lot of electrons, visual images, backgrounders, ‘sound bytes’ do you call them? You would also have access to files on just about everything that’s gone out over the last, say—two weeks?”

  “That’s a fair assumption.”

  “Including the original, and possibly a dozen outtakes, of Governor Sallee’s first Freevid address upon planetfall, the archival copies of her formal council sessions, and, presumably, some record of what we just witnessed this morning?”

  “Most of that, yes.”

  “Your technical section, presumably, could blend some of these electrons so that, on the wire, in theory at least, Governor Sallee might appear to pledge her support for Chairman Borking’s claim to the High Secretariat?”

  Bertingas put his obvious answer aside and instead asked his own question, however audacious.

  “What is the basis of Borking’s claim? Why would he have a chance?”

  “Cultural dynamics, Tad.” Elidor didn’t seem at all offended. He smiled with real pleasure. “The Pact is rotten at the core, from Central Center outward. We all know that. The authority of the high secretary, the power to expand the Pact’s spheres of domain, its markets, its knowledge, its technical capabilities—all of this is wasted in the palsied hands of congenital halfwits. Which is exactly what the Holcomb regency has become. To remain loyal to them is to remain loyal to chalk pudding. It costs you almost nothing and it nourishes you not at all.

  “Villem Borking is a decisive man, Tad. He has a program to restructure the Pactwide economy along more vital lines. Put banking under the control of people who know how to use money, instead of just sit on it. Put the military on a paying basis. Put the unique capabilities of our alien populations to more creative use.

  “With a strong economy and a unified political structure, we can begin again the outward expansion that is the heritage of every Human. The stars can be ours again!”

  “I see.” Bertingas nodded. “And Deirdre Sallee’s support—or the appearance of it, at least—could really help?”

  “One cluster governor backing our Chairman will be like dropping a seed crystal into a supersaturated solution. The other governors, who now lack direction, will unite behind her, behind Borking. The advance on Central Center will be quick and bloodless.”

  Bertingas shook his head. “An—impromptu—broadcast could be denied later, by the governor, in person.”

  “Not if the technical quality were—um—convincing. If you feel your people are unable to achieve that, be sure that Haiken Maru’s facilities and staff are at your disposal. They are capable of quite a lot.”

  “I’m sure, but still—”

  “The governor’s position is uncertain. She has not yet decided where her own advantage lies. That’s what bred such confusion and disruption at this morning’s special meeting. By helping her decide, you would be doing her a service. Anyway, even if she were to change her mind—again!—and repudiate the transmission, that would be politically . . . nonviable. No other force in contention for the secretariat would be able to trust her. Governor Sallee will be obliged to honor the commitments you will be . . . clarifying for her.”

  “I’m sure she would still find a way, in private, to reward me for forcing her hand. Administrative terminations on Palaccio begin with a hyperinjection of nepenthe, I believe? Beyond that, the details are usually clouded, but she might make an exception in my case.”

  “Not if a successful Haiken Maru promoted her to some capacity at Central Center—say, the Interspecies Commission on Commemorative Stamps?—and appointed a more sympathetic governor for Aurora. Not if that new governor made a startling discovery of who, in the Communications section, actually did all the work. There might then be a new director. Even a new planetary administrator.”

  “That’s a prodigious collection of ‘ifs,’ Sir. The future might not be that assured.”

  Elidor shrugged. “A bold man must take bold risks.”

  “You make it sound easy. And attractive. However—and please understand that I mean you no offense—there is a certain sense of professional ethics and trust that one acquires after spending a decade in an organization. To turn all of that on its head, even in the name of fine-sounding things like ‘cultural dynamics’ and ‘spheres of domain,’ is just not in me. I’m sorry.”

  Valence Elidor pursed his lips and stared ahead for a long minute, then nodded. “I can understand that. Yes, I can appreciate your sentiments.”

  With the gentlest of bumps, the aircar grounded on the avenue outside Haiken Maru’s offices in Meyerbeer. Bertingas could not recall any signal from Elidor to the chauffeur, nor even when they had stopped orbiting and started descending. The hatch popped up on Elidor’s side. As he moved to step out, he paused, leaned forward and spoke into a metal grille. A silver one, Tad noted.

  “Take the Deputy Director wherever he wants to go, Andre.” With a faint smile and a wave that was almost a brushing gesture, Elidor completed his exit. />
  “Citizen?” the grille asked.

  Bertingas asked to be taken back to the Government Block, and the aircar surged upward.

  It climbed too fast, too long, too high.

  “What’s wrong?” Tad demanded of the grille.

  The voice that came from the front was under strain: “I don’t know—the controls—malfunction—”

  Bertingas had no eye for heights, but the ground was a long way down. Maybe 3,000 meters? The Palace gardens looked like the pattern on a playing card, with a black stone in the center. All of Meyerbeer would soon disappear under his hand. So were they at 4,000 meters? Higher . . . ? And was the aircar’s cabin pressurized?

  When the chauffeur blew the bolts on the forward escape hatch, Tad thought the whole car was coming apart. The front end split in three sections like a melon, and the plush partition at the head of his compartment automatically folded back.

  The chauffeur was a small man with wide shoulders, like an over-muscled monkey. He buckled on an escape harness, climbed out on the front skirt, closed his eyes, and threw himself off backwards, like a skin-diver tumbling into the water. Tad knew how the harness worked: as soon as the person was clear, it would unreel a hundred meters of braided metal pigtail; the battery pack would discharge itself, creating an electrostatic drag just like a personal drop tube. You fell from the sky with the crack of a thunderbolt. It was so exciting, some people did it for fun.

  Not this time.

  The harness trailed only three meters of its pigtail. Either it had jammed or someone had cut it. The pack gave one feeble blue spark then shorted out. Tad could hear the man’s scream above the hum of the car’s ducted fans. It went on a long time.

  By the time the scream faded, the fans themselves had changed pitch. Above 5,000 meters, the air became too thin to support the car. In a second or two it would begin to sideslip. If it rolled beyond a certain degree . . .

  Bertingas climbed into the open steering compartment and found the other escape harnesses. His eyes saw what the chauffeur’s had missed: abrasions on the reel mechanism, cracked plastic, broken wires. Someone had worked them over with the blunt end of a hatchet.