Chapter 44

"You're telling me they're a bunch of fanatics?" Unser Diem was practically shrieking. He jerked his head sideways, in the direction of the man standing not far from him on the bridge of the Felicia III. "He'll do it, Lassiter! Don't think for a minute he won't."

The Manpower official whose image was displayed in the screen glanced at the man being indicated. Then, glanced just as quickly away. The image he saw matched the holopics of Abraham Templeton—as closely as the bandages permitted, and making allowances for the way the Masadan's face was distorted by a ferocious scowl. The General Manager of Operations, Verdant Vista, was clearly having no difficulty at all imagining the maniac blowing up a ship carrying thousands of people.

"And if that isn't enough," Diem continued, snarling, "then take another good look at that Manty cruiser. That's the Gauntlet, you—you—"

He managed to bite off the epithet. As angry and terrified as Diem was, he didn't want to offend Manpower's top official in the Congo system. Kamal Lassiter was fairly notorious for letting petty personal issues get in the way of his decisions.

But the name of the ship was enough, it seemed. Lassiter swallowed, and Diem saw him look away—presumably at another screen in the com room of Congo's central headquarters. A tactical display screen, that would be, which would show the General Manager all the vessels within the Congo system.

"Is—ah—?"

"Yes," Diem bit off. "He is still in command. Captain Michael Oversteegen. You may recall that he has something of a reputation. And if you're wondering if the reputation is overblown, I can personally assure you that it isn't. He spoke to me less than twenty hours ago over this same com, promising me that if the Princess comes to harm he's holding Manpower responsible. He was not pleasant about it, to put it mildly. And he took pains to remind me that the Eridani Edict does not apply to strictly commercial operations on privately owned planets."

Diem could feel the sweat on his forehead, as he waited for Lassiter to finally make a decision. The sweat was real enough, even if almost everything else was fakery. The reason it was real—and Diem was on the edge of panic—was because the "fakery" was only technically such. If anything, the reality being disguised was even worse than the illusion.

He hadn't spoken to Oversteegen over the com, as it happened; he'd spoken to him in person. And it had been six days ago instead of less than twenty hours. So what? In person, the Manticoran officer had been an icy aristocrat. He'd made it crystal clear to Diem that he would see to it that Manpower's installations on Congo would be so much slag if anything went wrong. Diem hadn't doubted him in the least.

Not that Diem really cared that much. Long before Gauntlet could start taking Congo apart, Diem himself would be a dead man. Of that he had no doubt at all. The man standing near him on the bridge of the Felicia was not the religious maniac Abraham Templeton, even though Erewhon's nanotech engineers had done a good job with the physical resemblance. He was something a lot worse.

Victor Cachat. A man whom Unser Diem had had nightmares about—real ones, no poetic license here—since he first met him.

Cachat spoke up, right then. "Decide, Lassiter," he said, glancing at his chrono. His voice was hoarse, presumably due to the injuries he'd suffered in the course of abducting the Manticoran princess.

"I will give you two minutes, exactly," he rasped. "Then I will shoot Diem. Then, at fifteen second intervals"—the Havenite agent masquerading as Abraham Templeton nodded toward the people shackled to a console behind him—"I will kill the rest of them. Ringstorff first, then Lithgow, then the whore. Fifteen seconds after that, I will destroy the Felicia. Three minutes from now, if you continue to quibble, eight thousand people will be dead—including Ruth Winton, of the royal house of Manticore."

"Abraham Templeton" glanced at the tac display on the bridge of the Felicia and smiled sardonically. A half-smile, rather. The apparently severe injuries to his throat and jaw made the expression as distorted as his rasping voice. "All of it in front of every news media in the inhabited galaxy, from what I can see. I count at least eighteen media vessels somewhere in this system. Most of them in orbit nearby."

From the very sour expression on his face, it was obvious that Lassiter would have liked to curse. Not so much at the situation as at the media presence. Normally, Manpower would have forbidden those ships to remain in the Congo System, but with Gauntlet present . . .

That was something else Oversteegen had been emphatic about, in his terse discussions with the Manpower officials on Congo. Any move toward the media ships by any of the light attack craft which Manpower had in orbit around the planet would be met with instant force. Nobody doubted for a minute that Oversteegen would make good the threat—and a Manty heavy cruiser was perfectly capable of destroying twice the number of LACs Manpower had on the spot.

There were undoubtedly heavier warships nearby, upon which Manpower intended to rely for support if needed, Victor knew. They were not, however, part of Manpower's private fleet, which posed its own problems for Lassiter and his masters.

"Verdant Vista" was the private property of Manpower Unlimited, duly registered as such under interstellar law on the planet Mesa. As an independent and sovereign star nation, Mesa was empowered to recognize the claims of its citizens or business entities and, under existing interstellar law, Manpower had the right to appeal to the Mesan Navy for protection of its private property rights. But other star nations were not required to respect those rights as they would have been required to if Verdant Vista had, itself, been a sovereign star system.

Admittedly, it was something of a gray area, with competing interpretations of the precedents. What it boiled down to, however, was that a private corporation's claim to interstellar property rights was only as good as the naval strength which backed that claim. That was why Solarian trans-stellar corporations seldom had any problems (aside from the occasional raid by outright pirates). No star nation in its right mind wanted to provoke the SLN, so they tended to sit on their own potential troublemakers—hard—when there was a Solly corporation involved.

But while Mesa maintained a navy, it was nowhere near so grand as the SLN. Indeed, it was on the small side even by the standards of single-system star nations, although its individual units had excellent hardware. Despite its nationhood Mesa was, after all, essentially a conglomerate of business interests, and navies, by their nature, are expensive propositions which do not normally show a positive cash flow.

That was why some Mesa-based corporations, like Manpower, maintained private fleets. And another reason for Manpower, in particular, to do so was that the council which governed Mesa was hesitant to use military power too openly in Manpower's special interests. There was no point actively courting negative news coverage, after all.

In this instance, however, thanks to Michael Oversteegen and Her Majesty's Starship Gauntlet, the cruiser force Manpower had assembled to back up its LACs in Congo had suffered a mischief. A rather terminal one, in fact. That was one of the odd little facts Ringstorff had been willing to confirm for them . . . along with the fact that Manpower had not replaced the destroyed ships. Which had become another factor in the planning of the unusual alliance of interests now moving in on Congo. If there were heavy ships in the vicinity at all, they were regular Mesan naval units, and they would be doing their dead level best to maintain a low profile, particularly in the face of such massive news coverage. That meant they would be somewhere else—close enough to reach Congo fairly rapidly, but not right on top of the system.

So there was an automatic delay built into the response loop. Lassiter would have to send a courier to summon them, and that offered a window in which the "forces of liberation" would be free to act. Better yet, it meant that when (or if) those units did turn up, they would be commanded by someone whose primary loyalty was to Mesa, not simply to Manpower.

"I need at least ten minutes just to discuss the situation with my people," Lassiter complained.

Cachat, masquerading as Abraham Templeton, did not bother to look up from his chrono. "You have one minute and forty seconds before I start the killing. You've had weeks to decide what to do, Lassiter. There's no point in any further delay."

"One moment." Lassiter reached out a finger and the display screen went blank.

Diem heaved a little sigh. "What are you going to do if he goes past your deadline?" he asked nervously.

The answer, somehow, didn't surprise him. Cachat was still looking down at his chrono. "In one minute and twenty-five seconds, I'm going to kill you. Then, at fifteen-second intervals, Ringstorff and Lithgow." He glanced at the pale-faced young woman shackled to the console next to the Mesans. "I will not, of course, shoot Berry Zilwicki. Her father is likely to take umbrage." Cachat sounded vaguely miffed about it, the way a craftsman will when he is not permitted to do his finest work.

Off to the side of the bridge, sitting where he was out of sight of the screens, Anton Zilwicki snorted. But he didn't bother looking up from the console where he and Ruth Winton were busily cracking into Manpower's secure communications systems.

"Pray to whatever gods you hold dear, Diem," Zilwicki murmured, just loudly enough to be heard. "If Lassiter's as careless and sloppy as his security, you're a dead man." He snorted again, as a new screen came up. "Bingo. We're in. And there's not even any internal encryption. God, I love carrier signals, especially when the people on the other end are idiots. Take it from here, would you, Ruth?"

Eagerly, the young princess' fingers began flying over the keyboard, and Zilwicki looked up and grinned at Diem. There was no humor at all in the expression.

"Personally, I remain to be convinced that Lassiter can even tell time."

Lassiter could tell time, of course. But, for almost a minute, he wasted it in a fit of screaming invective aimed at his subordinates in the control center of Congo's headquarters. There was no point to the shrieking, as, once it began tapering down, Lassiter's chief subordinate Homer Takashi pointed out. Sullenly:

"It wasn't our idea to hire those crazy Masadans, boss. In all fairness, it wasn't even Diem's—and Ringstorff tried to talk them out of it. If you want to blame somebody, kick it upstairs. It was the Council that made the decision."

Lassiter ground his teeth. Everything Takashi said was true. But Lassiter was the type of supervisor who fawned over his superiors and lorded it over his subordinates. He wasn't about to send a blistering message to the three Manpower top executives who were part of the Mesan task force lurking in the barren, unnamed star system thirty-six hours away through hyper-space.

"And we're almost out of time," Takashi pointed out. None of Lassiter's other subordinates would have been that bold. But Takashi had his own patrons in Manpower's hierarchy, and beyond a certain point didn't have to put up with Lassiter's temper.

Fortunately, Lassiter's tantrum had calmed him down a bit. He was still angry, but was able to think more or less clearly.

"I don't have any choice, do I?"

Takashi shook his head. "Not unless you want the big shots to hand your head on a platter to the Star Kingdom. And the Manticorans will demand it, if their princess gets killed, don't think they won't."

Lassiter had already come to the same conclusion. If Gauntlet had been commanded by some other officer . . .

But, she wasn't. Oversteegen, no less!

Scowling, Lassiter brought the display back on. The image of Abraham Templeton returned. The maniac was still studying his chrono, with an intentness that made Lassiter's blood run cold.

"All right, all right," Lassiter said hastily. "We agree. You can dock alongside the space station and we'll do the transfers there. Although I still think—"

"Forget it, Lassiter," rasped the religious fanatic. "There is no way I'll agree to a transfer using shuttles. That would give you too many opportunities for an 'unfortunate lapse.' You can still try to double-cross us once we're docked, of course. But I can guarantee you that I'll take out your very expensive space station as well as the Felicia, if you try it."

Lassiter had, in fact, planned to take out the Masadans during a shuttle transfer, if he could manage it without killing the princess. His security crew on the space station might not be quite up to the best professional military standards, but the technicians manning the space station's close-defense weapons were more than capable of swatting shuttles with ease.

On the other hand, it had been a long shot anyway, given the need to keep the Manticoran royal alive. So, he mentally shrugged and made the best of a bad situation. A really bad situation.

"We'll be waiting for you," he said curtly. "We'll indicate the docking bay as you approach. Remember: just you and the Princess, that's all. Leave the cargo under lockdown."

A bit lamely, he added: "When I say 'you,' that means all of you."

Templeton didn't even bother to sneer. "Do I look like an idiot? I'll leave two of my men here, Lassiter, until the transfer is complete, the Princess is handed over to you, and we've got control of the ship we'll be leaving the system in. Then—I warn you—even after those two are transferred there'll still be both a remote-controlled detonator as well as a delayed-action detonator left on board the Felicia. You can probably block the remote-controlled one, once we're out of orbit, but I can guarantee you that you won't find the hidden one for at least several hours. Long enough for us to reach hyper-space, at any rate. I'll send you a message letting you know where it is, once I'm sure we're safe from ambush."

"How do I know you'll keep your word?"

Templeton bestowed on him a look which combined fury and contempt. "I swore on the name of the Lord, heathen. Do you doubt me?"

As it happened, Lassiter didn't. He found it hard to imagine himself, but on this subject his briefings had been clear. Crazed they might be, but the religious maniacs could be trusted to keep their word, if they took a holy vow.

"All right. Let's do it, then."

As soon as the contact was broken, Victor Cachat heaved a little sigh of relief and massaged his throat. "That damn rasp is going to give me a permanent sore throat," he grumbled.

From her seat, without looking up, Ruth said cheerfully: "Can't be helped, Victor. Nanotech will change your appearance or even adjust your vocal cords for the right timbre, but changing accents is harder. And—it's a bit shocking, really, for a secret agent—you've got a really thick Havenite accent and your attempts to mimic a Masadan one were pathetic. So, the rasp it is. Ah, the joys of combat injuries. Explains everything."

Victor would have scowled at her, but there was no point. Everything she'd said was true, after all. He'd tried for hours to get a Masadan accent down, and had failed just as miserably as he'd always failed at attempts to disguise his own. That had been one of the few subjects on which he'd been given a barely passing grade in StateSec's academy.

The other option would have been to let someone else undergo the nanotech procedures and try to pass himself off as the now-dead Templeton. But . . . everyone had agreed that, voice aside, Victor had been the ideal candidate. He more than anyone could act like a Masadan, as Anton Zilwicki had pointed out. Victor still wasn't sure if that was praise or insult. Probably both at the same time.

"Are you ready to support Thandi?" he asked Ruth now, and the princess nodded.

"Well, almost," she qualified. "We're still accessing, and the main security system looks like a stand-alone. But the com hierarchy ties it all together, and I've got access to the main system. And I've located the internal communications and surveillance systems. I'll be into them by the time she can get aboard the station, and I've already tapped the net between the station and Torch."

Cachat grimaced. The ex-slaves had settled on a new name for Congo, after the liberation. "Torch," the planet would be called thenceforth. The debate had come down to a final decision between "Beacon" and "Torch," and Jeremy had carried the day. A beacon of hope was all very well, he'd agreed, but their world was going to generate more than just light. It was going to ignite the conflagration which would finally reduce Manpower and all of its works to ashes and dust. From the perspective of an agent accustomed to operating in the shadows, Victor found the name a bit overly flamboyant, but the servant of the revolution inside him was firmly on Jeremy's side.

"So notify Thandi that Operation Spartacus is ready to roll," he said almost curtly.

"Just did it," replied Ruth cheerfully. "God, is this fun or what?"

Thandi acknowledged the message from Ruth, then checked her chrono and nodded in satisfaction. She still had a few minutes—long enough for a quick last inspection of her troops. "Quick" was the right word, too. She was now in command of a battalion-sized unit of troops, divided into four companies. Each of those companies was positioned in one of Felicia's large bays, so Thandi had to visit each of them in her inspection tour.

For all that the dispersal of her troops was a bit of a headache, Thandi found a grim satisfaction in the situation. It was ironic that the large bays Manpower had intended to permit the rapid murder of hundreds of slaves would also permit people wearing battle armor and Marine-issue armored skinsuits to launch a lightning mass assault on Manpower's space station. Anton Zilwicki called it "being hoist on their own petard," an archaic expression which Thandi understood once he explained, but still found a little silly.

She was a bit nervous at the prospect of leading such a large unit into battle, but not much. First, because she had the experience and steadying influence of Lieutenant Colonel Kao Huang at her side. Second, because although Thandi had never herself commanded anything larger than a company before, she'd been an assiduous student since she first joined the Marine Corps. So she'd observed the process at first hand—which, for the past year working with Huang, had put her in close proximity to one of the SLN Marine Corps' premier combat commanders.

But, finally—and probably most importantly—because this entire operation was so far outside normal Marine Corps practice that any amount of prior experience would have still left her jury-rigging almost everything. And, in practice if not in theory, she'd really only be leading a company-sized unit anyway. Her own company, as it happened. Bravo Company, Second Battalion, 877^th Solarian Marine Regiment, which she'd been leading for months since its former commandant, Captain Chatterji, had been placed on indefinite medical furlough for the treatment of severe combat injuries.

Bravo Company had been divided into its four platoons, and those platoons would be spearheading the assault on Congo's space station. In theory, they would do so as private volunteers acting as an integral part of company-sized units of the new "Torch Liberation Army."

It was a threadbare mask, perhaps, but not unheard of by any means. OFS frequently used the practice of "granting leave" to entire units which then "volunteered" to "assist" some out-planet regime in the suppression of dissent. Or, more rarely, even in the outright conquest of someone else. The regular SLN and Marines did not, perhaps, but the precedent was there.

Besides, it was supposed to be threadbare, she reminded herself. At the proper time, everyone in the civilized galaxy was supposed to see right through it . . . although, naturally, no one would officially admit that they had.

So "the Torch Liberation Army" it was. In theory. In practice—as Thandi had made crystal clear to the Ballroom gunfighters and Amazons who filled out the ranks of the battalion—her regular platoons would do all of the fighting. That was true for the assault on the space station, at least, whatever might wind up happening later when the assault on the planet itself occurred. The "friendly fire" casualties and indiscriminate damage which would be sure to occur with a mob of amateurs storming a space station were enough to give her nightmares. The Ballroom and Amazon troops could tag along behind—and get most of the glory—but she wanted them in the back and effectively out of the action.

She'd expected a ferocious argument, but there hadn't been one. For the first time, she and Jeremy X had faced a potential clash—and Jeremy, to her relief, had sidestepped it neatly. She was beginning to realize that a very shrewd mind was at work beneath the superficial appearance of a maniacal terrorist. Jeremy was no fool, and understood himself that a military assault on a gigantic space station was a different matter than an assassination carried out by a small unit of killers. All the more so, since they wanted to capture the space station—as intact as possible—rather than destroy it. This would become Torch's critical space station, after all, which would be useless if it had been gutted in the taking.

So, in effect, she was leading a company-sized unit of Solarian Marines. Granted, in an operation which was hardly being done by The Book.

The memory of the expressions on her Marines' faces when they were informed they had all "volunteered" to participate in the splendid project of liberating genetic slaves from Manpower could still bring a chuckle to her. Like all Solarian Marines, Bravo Company's people were hard-bitten professionals—the majority of them mercenaries, in all but name—with about as much in the way of idealistic impulses as so many Old Earth barracuda. But, they'd seemed more amused by the subterfuge than anything else. They certainly weren't going to argue the point—not with Lieutenant Colonel Huang scowling at them, and with their own several months' experience with Thandi in command. True, her Marines called her "the Old Lady" instead of "Great Kaja." But they said the words in a tone of voice which her Amazons would have recognized.

That had been Captain Rozsak's proposal, which he'd advanced the day after Thandi's resignation at a meeting of all the central figures involved. Easily and smoothly, Rozsak had explained all the advantages to the ploy. Not the least of them being the mutual benefits to Torch and the Solarian League's Maya Sector of establishing a publicly close relationship from the outset. A benefit to Torch, because Maya Sector would provide the new nation with the safe and powerful neutral base which gave any liberation movement an invaluable reservoir.

From the other side, covering themselves with a thinly veiled halo of moral glory from their participation in the liberation of Congo would be of inestimable benefit to the Solarian political and military forces associated with Governor Barregos. Leaving aside the need to cover up the truth about Stein's murder—which only a few people knew about, after all—things were about to get very turbulent within the Solarian League. Barregos intended to stake out the moral high ground for himself, right from the beginning—and Congo was to be the proof of it.

Thandi had been a bit dubious, but Du Havel had agreed immediately. And then later, in private conversation after Rozsak and his Solarian staff were gone, had elaborated on the logic.

"It's a very smart move, on their part. Whatever else he might be, Barregos is as canny a politician as any in the Solarian League. That means, among other things, that while he doesn't fetishize public opinion, he also doesn't make the more common mistake of seasoned politicians of underestimating it either."

Thandi's expression must have been cynical. Catching sight of it, Du Havel shook his head. "Don't read the reality of the OFS planets onto the entire League. Yes, to be sure, actual control of the League—in the sense of day-to-day operations—rests in the hands of its bureaucrats and combines. But that's only true above the level of the great star systems in the Old League—and then, only on sufferance. The one thing which the powers-that-be in the League have always been careful about is not to get the huge inner populations stirred up about anything. Their luck is about to run out, however, unless I miss my guess. The liberation of Congo, followed immediately thereafter by the foundation of a star nation of ex-slaves and its declaration of war on Mesa, is going to shake everything up. That's why—"

He smiled cheerfully, glancing at Anton Zilwicki. "—I'm so pleased that Anton called in every favor the Anti-Slavery League has piled up with the media over the past few decades. This flamboyant military operation is going to be happening in front of the galaxy's holorecorders, not in some obscure frontier outpost where the bureaucrats can keep the media away until the cover story is in place. I guarantee you that it will be headline news all over the Solarian League—and wildly popular with a significant proportion of the population. For years, every Solarian official has clucked his tongue at the iniquities of genetic slavery, while making sure that absolutely nothing was done about it. Now, their hands will be forced—with Governor Barregos standing out as the dynamic League leader who played a key role in the affair. They'll want to cut his throat, of course. But . . . he'll have made that ten times harder to do."

"Especially after the Renaissance Association jumps into the act," added Anton. "They have even better connections with the Solarian media than the Anti-Slavery League, and they'll pull out all the stops as soon as I notify Jessica Stein of what's happening." He cleared his throat. "Which I will, the moment it's too late for her to meddle with it."

Her last-minute inspection tour done, Thandi returned to the bay where she'd be leading First Platoon. To her surprise, Berry was there. The Queen-to-be was making a last-minute inspection of the troops herself. Insofar, at least, as Berry's informal way of mingling with soldiers could be called an "inspection." Even those hard-boiled Marines seemed rather charmed. It was like getting a send-off from everybody's favorite kid sister.

"What are you doing here?" Thandi demanded quietly, almost hissing. "The balloon's about to go up. Get yourself out of here, girl. We can't afford to lose you."

Berry smiled. She took Thandi by the arm and led her to the hatch which led out of the great bay. "I'm leaving, I'm leaving. I really came just to make the same point to you. Don't forget that you're now our new Supreme Commander-in-Chief, Thandi Palane. So none of your hair-raising personal charges, d'you hear? We can't afford to lose you, either."

Thandi didn't quite know what to say.

Berry did. "Your monarch has spoken," the girl said. With considerable royal loftiness, in fact, marred only by her stumble as she passed through the hatch.