Chapter Ten
“Excuse me, Major. I’ve got something here I think you should see.”
Major Braxton Reizinger, Solarian Gendarmerie, looked up from his routine paperwork with a certain degree of trepidation as Master Sergeant Sheila Roskilly walked into his office. Without, he noticed with an even greater degree of trepidation, any announcement from his office clerk or so much as a knock on his office door.
Those were bad signs, but he made himself frown reprovingly at her.
“Master Sergeant, haven’t you and I spoken about that thing called ‘proper channels’?”
“Yes, Sir. I think we have,” Roskilly agreed.
“I thought we had. So I assume there’s a reason you aren’t using them…again?”
“Crap gets lost going through ‘channels,’ Sir,” she said simply, and he sighed.
The hell of it is that she’s right, he reflected. Shouldn’t be that way, but she and I both know it is. And the fact that she’s old enough to be my grandmother—and that she’s been doing her job since well before I was born—probably has something to do with her…insistence.
And the fact that she hadn’t liked much of what she’d seen doing that job for the last, oh, thirty or forty T-years had something to do with it, as well.
“Then I suppose you’d better come in,” he said. “Oh! You are in, Master Sergeant aren’t you?”
“Guess I am, Sir,” she acknowledged, finally cracking a small smile, and he smiled back. There might have been more than a trace of resignation in his own smile, but there was genuine humor as well.
That humor faded quickly, however. Major Reizinger headed the Verge Desk in the Solarian Gendarmerie’s Operations Division, and OpsDiv was in charge of intelligence analysis for the Gendarmerie’s field operations. In theory, that meant everything the SG had: intervention battalions, gendarmes assigned to standard police duties in OFS-administered star systems, gendarmes assigned to customs operations, and on and on and on. Unfortunately, the Gendarmes had far too many duties and far too many people assigned to far too many places for OpsDiv to actually analyze more than a tiny fraction of the data coming at it. That was the main reason so much analysis devolved on local SG commands…and why so much of the analysis those local commands performed never made it into OpsDiv’s central files. There was simply too much of it.
Reizinger’s boss, Lieutenant Colonel Weng Zhing-hwan, who commanded OpsDiv, concentrated on cataloguing and categorizing the data stream so that she could steer it appropriately, and he had to admit she had a good sense of who needed to see what. She was also intelligent—not brilliant, in his opinion, but critically intelligent, which was unfortunately rare in the Gendarmerie’s upper echelons—and she tried to be honest, at least with herself and her most trusted people. All in all, he’d worked for infinitely worse superiors.
Unfortunately, like anyone who’d risen to her level, she also recognized the danger of being too honest when reporting to certain of her own superiors. Worse still, Brigadier Noritoshi Väinöla, who headed SG Intelligence Command, had a well-deserved reputation for sitting on (or even rejecting outright) any analysis which might conflict with the current mission priorities of General Toinette Mabley, CO of the entire Gendarmerie. Which was one reason Major Reizinger was less than delighted to see Master Sergeant Roskilly in his office this bright, sunny morning.
“All right, Sheila. Tell me what it is this time,” he said stoically.
“Yes, Sir. I’ve been looking at this for a while, actually. It started about the time the Manties discovered that Lynx Terminus of theirs. May’ve started a little earlier, to be honest, but that’s the earliest I’ve found any sign of it.”
Reizinger winced. Nothing to come across the Verge Desk was likely to be good news if the newly renamed Star Empire of Manticore was involved, and Brigadier Väinöla had already made it clear that the less he heard about the expletive-deleted Manties, the better he’d like it.
“And just what have the Manties been up to now?” he asked cautiously.
“Not sure it’s actually the Manties, Sir, but somebody’s sure as hell up to something. Don’t have a ton of corroborating evidence yet, but let me show you what I do have so far.…”
* * *
“So what do you make of Reizinger’s report?” Weng Zhing-hwan asked, spooning sugar into her cup of tea.
Despite her family name, Weng had very fair hair, bright blue eyes, and a pale complexion. She was also thirteen centimeters taller than the woman sitting on the far side of the table. The table in question was in a privacy booth in The Golden Olive, a restaurant in Old Chicago noted for its security and discretion. Weng and her companion had been meeting there very quietly for the past two or three T-years. It was safer to use The Golden Olive than the Gendarmerie’s canteen or some other “official” venue, for a lot of reasons. There was no legal reason they couldn’t have met openly, but neither of them could have counted all of the other considerations which made that…inadvisable.
“I think it’s a good thing your master sergeant never got a commission,” Lupe Blanton replied. Blanton commanded the OFS Intelligence Branch’s first section, which was tasked with the analysis of non-Solarian political and military entities. She had jet black hair, a very dark complexion, and bright silver eyes, legacy of a great-grandmother’s taste in genetic modification. “If she’d ever been commissioned, she’d’ve been canned decades ago. Either that, or she’d’ve been promoted until her brain ossified properly.”
“That’s not a very flattering portrait of our esteemed superiors,” Weng pointed out mildly.
“Reality has a nasty habit of not being flattering,” Blanton replied, and Weng snorted in agreement.
She finished stirring her tea, set her spoon down on the saucer, and sipped appreciatively. Then she cupped the teacup in both hands, gazing across at Blanton through the wisp of steam.
“So, having made our opinion of the upper echelons of our respective organizations clear, what do you think about it?”
“She may be seeing ghosts,” Blanton said after a moment. “On the other hand, she may not be, too. Especially if the Manties’ version of what happened in Monica is as accurate as I’m afraid it is.”
“Really?” Weng tilted her head thoughtfully. “I have to admit they’re doing a masterful job of massacring Technodyne, and I imagine there are going to be some red faces over at Navy over those battlecruisers that somehow didn’t get scrapped even after the inspectors signed off that they had been. I gather from your tone that there’s even more and worse, though?”
“I don’t know if they’re going to push it, but I’m pretty sure Verrocchio and Hongbo were in it up to their eyebrows,” Blanton said grimly. “Mind you, none of this is coming over my desk, but I know Rajmund well enough to recognize obfuscation when I see it.”
“‘Obfuscation,’” Weng repeated with a smile.
“Improving my vocabulary.” Blanton picked up the vodka martini she preferred to her companion’s hot tea and sipped. “You’ve got to admit it’s a lot politer than the nouns I usually use in his case.”
“True,” Weng said judiciously. “Very true.”
Rajmund Nyhus headed OFS Intelligence’s Section Two, tasked with analysis of internal threats to Frontier Security’s operations. There was a certain tension between Section One and Section Two, since OFS classified non-Solarian citizens (and all other non-Solarian entities) in systems it controlled or administered as “internal” to those systems, which led to all sorts of turf wars. It was also why things tended to get dropped when they had to be passed back and forth between the two sections. The fact that Nyhus’ position put him deeply in bed with every corrupt transstellar in existence didn’t help. And the fact that Section Two was also supposed to be the OFS’ watchdog on its own governors and administrators only made bad worse—much worse—in Lupe Blanton’s considered opinion.
“I get copied on all of his reports to Ukhtomskoy,” she said now. Adão Ukhtomskoy was her direct superior, CO of Office of Frontier Security Intelligence Branch, which made him the OFS’ equivalent of Brigadier Väinöla. “God knows there’re so many CYA memos and reports flowing through the system no one could possibly keep up with all of them, but I try to keep at least one eye on Rajmund’s contributions. Helps a lot when I’m trying to figure out what he’s covering up this week.”
“And this week he’s covering for Verrocchio and Hongbo, you think?”
“Them and/or whoever the hell was working Talbott.” Blanton nodded. “I’ll be astonished if Francisca Yucel wasn’t involved, too.”
“I think she probably was,” Weng confirmed rather grimly. “We’ve lost at least two of her better subordinates, anyway, and she’s always been one who likes to tie up loose ends. We don’t have any hard evidence she was involved, of course, but I’ve kicked it over to Gaddis at CID.”
Blanton frowned. That was playing pretty damned hardball, even for someone who’d been willing to set up the entire anti-Manty operation in the first place. But if Weng was bringing it to the attention of the SG’s Criminal Investigation Division she obviously thought Yucel had been involved, evidence or no evidence.
“‘Lost’ as in eliminated?” she asked, just to be sure.
“One of them, yes. We’ve got confirmation on that. The other one just vanished.” Weng shrugged. “From what I can see in their jackets, they were both two of our better people. Privately, I’m hoping Harahap—he’s the one who vanished—saw which way the wind was blowing and just got out from under. He seems to’ve been a damned competent sort, so if he did, I’m pretty sure he landed on his feet somewhere else, and more power to him.”
“Are you getting as bad a feeling about this as I am?” Blanton asked after a moment, and the gendarme shrugged again.
“I’m not getting any good feelings about it, anyway. The thing that really bothers me is that we don’t know—especially if you’re right about Verrocchio and Hongbo, and I’m pretty sure you are—exactly who the hell is using who. The Manties’ version makes a lot of sense, frankly. But if they’re right, then we’re even more screwed in the Verge than we thought we were.”
“Ever the mistress of understatement, I see,” Blanton said dryly.
“Which brings us back to my troublemaking master sergeant,” Weng pointed out. “Not to mention the question of just what I do with her suspicions.”
“Um.”
Blanton sipped her martini, silver eyes intent.
“I hate to say it, but she’s pulled together some things my people should’ve seen, as well,” she said finally. “I want to have some of those people who should already have seen those things take a look at her analysis of them, but this wouldn’t be the first time Roskilly’s bird-dogged something we missed. The most interesting thing to me is the timing. If there really has been an upsurge in domestic unrest in the Verge, and if someone from the outside really is helping it along, then who the hell is it? It’s too broadly shotgunned to be one transstellar—or even a group of them—trying to turf out competition.”
“We’ve both seen transstellars try some pretty raw stuff, Lupe,” Weng pointed out. “And there are definite resonances here with what the Manties claim Manpower and Technodyne were up to in Talbott.”
“But Roskilly’s pointing at incidents that go all the way from the Madras Sector to the Maya Sector,” Blanton protested. “That’s almost twelve hundred light-years, Zhing-hwan!”
“And some of them may be—probably are—false positives, too,” Weng responded. “Roskilly’s got good instincts, and so does Reizinger. That’s why I put him on the Verge Desk. But they can see correlations that don’t exist, just like anyone else, and God knows there are enough people in the Verge with totally legitimate complaints. People like that don’t really need much outside provocation to get…rowdy. I think the two of them are onto something, or I wouldn’t’ve invited you to lunch to talk about it, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to buy into some kind of galaxy-wide conspiracy.”
“Even if it’s not that widespread, it’s still bigger than anything private enterprise’s tried yet,” Blanton said. “I could do without all the crap Frontier Security gets involved in, but it would take somebody with the kind of reach we have to screw with this many different star systems. We’re talking about another star nation here, Zhing-hwan!”
“Don’t go saying that anywhere Rajmund can hear you.” Weng shook her head sourly. “I hear he’s already arguing Manticore ‘provoked’ any transstellars, Solarian or otherwise, who might—might—have been involved in Talbott. I don’t want to speak ill of your superior, Lupe. God knows I realize how distasteful you must find any criticism of him. But if he simply had to find a cesspool to climb into, couldn’t he at least have avoided Manpower?”
“Lots of money and power at the bottom of that particular sewer,” Blanton replied cynically. “I don’t doubt he’d point the finger straight at the Manties, though. You’re right about that. And the truth is that you and I can’t take this anywhere yet. All we have is speculation and Master Sergeant Roskilly’s instincts. To be honest, we don’t even have any substantial straws in the wind yet!”
“It’s not just Roskilly’s instincts this time, Lupe.” Weng set down her teacup and leaned forward. Her expression serious. “I’ve got a really bad feeling. And not just about the possibility that someone’s deliberately making the situation in the Verge worse. There’s something in the air. Something bad.”
Their eyes met across the table, and, after a moment, Blanton nodded. The two of them were uniquely placed to see just how corrupt the system they served had become. They were just as well placed to see how deeply resentful the star systems being abused by it were, and that was enough to make anyone with a functioning brain nervous. People had a tendency, Blanton knew, to assume that the way things were at any given time were the way they’d always be, but that wasn’t true. “Things” changed, and when too many people got hurt too badly things could change in a vast hurry…even when something as huge and powerful as the Solarian League tried to keep them from changing.
At the very least, the situation’s gotten bad enough that private enterprise can co-opt OFS and the Gendarmerie for purposes of its own, she thought grimly. If it’s actually another star nation, instead, that may be even worse. They’d have to be doing it for a reason, and I doubt it would be anything the League liked. On the other hand, how much worse could it be? If whoever’s behind this really can pull the puppet strings on Frontier Security and the Gendarmes this way, what else can they do?
“You know,” she said slowly, “I just had a thought. Doesn’t the Navy have some sort of large-scale training operation going on out in the Madras Sector?”
“Don’t even go there,” Weng said after a long, still moment.
“I’m just saying—”
“Lupe, you’re talking about maybe fifty ships of the wall. And Crandall’s Battle Fleet, not Frontier Fleet. Technodyne might have hooks into her, but even if they have an in with her, are you seriously suggesting someone could steer a task force that size into doing her dirty work?”
“I’m just saying it’s a very…interesting coincidence that there just happens to be a Navy task force that big and that powerful already that close to Monica. Especially since it’s been at least a T-century since that many of Battle Fleet’s capital ships lumbered all the way out to the Verge. Probably longer than that, now that I think about it. You don’t find that interesting?”
“If it’s not a coincidence, then ‘interesting’ is definitely not the adjective I’d choose,” Weng said. “I think I’d probably go with ‘terrifying’…if the entire possibility weren’t so totally absurd, that is.”
“Oh, of course. Totally absurd. The only thing it could be,” Blanton agreed and finished off her remaining martini in a single gulp.