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Chapter Five

The fifteen-year-old doubled over with a harsh, explosive grunt as the riot baton’s head rammed into his belly like a hammer. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. Not immediately. He just stood there, both hands grasping at the anguish while his shocked diaphragm tried to suck in enough air for a cry of pain.

It hadn’t gotten that far when the same truncheon hammered the back of his neck and clubbed him to his knees.

The Chotěbořian Public Safety Force trooper never even blinked as he used his armorplast shield to smash the fallen boy to one side. He was already choosing his next target as the CPSF waded into the crowd of “anarchist terrorists and hardened professional agitators” half-filling the enormous square called Náměstí Žlutých Růží at the heart of the city of Velehrad.

The high school and college students who’d flooded the capital with such high hopes saw the Safeties coming, but there was no way for anyone in the demonstration’s leading edge to get out of the way. The crowd behind them was too dense. They were trapped between their fellow protesters and the oncoming riot police. Most of them dropped the placards demanding new elections—or the armloads of yellow roses—they’d been carrying and raised empty hands above their heads. Here and there a handful flung themselves at the riot-armored troopers instead of trying to surrender, but the options they’d chosen made no difference in the end. The Safeties had their orders, and neural stun batons and old-fashioned nightsticks rose and fell with vicious, well-drilled efficiency.

Many of the newer victims did have time to scream as they were smashed to the street, and few of the CPSF troopers made any effort to avoid trampling them under their heavy boots. Indeed, more than one Safety took time to kick a fallen demonstrator squarely in the mouth in passing.

The demonstration’s rear ranks began to shred as the young people in them realized what was happening. Students scattered in all directions, but dozens—scores—were as unable to get out of the way as the lead ranks had been. They were grist for the mill, and the Safeties harvested them ruthlessly.

“Make examples,” their CO had told them, and the Chotěbořian Public Safety Force was nothing if not good at following its orders.

* * *

The soccer ball sliced towards the upper corner of the goal, but the leaping, fully extended keeper just managed to get a hand on it. She dragged it down and in, wrapping both arms around it and taking it with her as she hit the ground on a shoulder, then rolled back up on her knees with it clasped protectively in both arms.

Applause and whistles of appreciation spattered from the thinly populated stands, and the tallish, fair-haired man nodded in approval. Despite the nod, however, his attention was elsewhere, and he turned from the football pitch to frown at the brown-haired, still taller man standing beside him.

“I can’t believe even Siminetti was that stupid,” he said quietly, careful to keep his face turned towards the solid ceramacrete wall behind his companion. There were no security systems mounted to cover this particular spot, which wasn’t exactly an accident. He’d made certain of that when the stadium was last refurbished and he had the entire structure carefully and very, very unobtrusively checked on a regular basis to make sure things stayed that way. That didn’t mean mobile platforms couldn’t be watching it, however.

“What kind of idiot doesn’t understand the kind of resentment that putting over sixty unarmed students—some of them barely fourteen years old, for God’s sake!—into hospital and another eleven into the morgue is going to generate?!” he continued, his tone harsh with a bitter anger which burned only hotter because iron control kept it so low.

“That’s assuming he’s worried about resentment, Adam,” the other man pointed out, equally quietly. “Frankly, I don’t think he is.”

“Well he damned well ought to be!”

“You think that; I think that; and the kids who were in the square think that. I’m inclined to doubt Cabrnoch, Kápička, or Verner share our view. After all, there’re plenty of more Safeties where that crew came from if things should happen to flare up. And I don’t doubt Sabatino’s prepared to throw in enough kickbacks to pay for a few thousand—or a few hundred thousand—more if he has to.”

Adam Šiml muttered something unprintable under his breath and glared at his friend, but Zdeněk Vilušínský had known Šiml for the better part of a T-century. He knew what that glare was really directed at, so he only waited patiently for his boyhood friend to work his way through it.

Šiml turned away, staring back out across the football field while he did that working. He knew Vilušínský as well as Vilušínský knew him, which meant he also knew his old friend understood exactly what was going on in his brain at the moment. None of which did a great deal to slake his seething fury at what had happened in Náměstí Žlutých Růží.

“Plaza of Yellow Roses.” That was what the square’s name meant in the language of Chotěboř’s original settlers. That language had been largely supplanted by Standard English in everyday life in the three centuries since the founding, of course. For that matter, only about a third of the Kumang System’s initial colonists had been native Czech-speakers. It happened that the Šiml family had been part of that third. In fact, it “happened” that one of the leaders of that first wave of settlers, and one of the men who’d crafted the Chotěbořian Constitution, had also been named Adam Šiml.

Not that the current head of the family, such as it was and what remained of it, was in a position to say much about how that constitution had been shredded. Not if he wanted to stay out of Vězení Horský Vrchol, anyway, and he had far too many things to do for that, no matter how spectacular the view might be from its mountaintop perch.

Besides, it was far from certain he’d ever make it to the Safety Force’s main detention facility. In the last few T-years, prisoners had started quietly and tracelessly dropping off the lists of the incarcerated. They hadn’t been released, hadn’t died (officially at least), and they sure as hell hadn’t escaped. They’d simply…disappeared.

He reminded himself of that—firmly—as the rage flowed through him, but it wasn’t easy. Not when he thought about Náměstí Žlutých Růží.

The yellow rose in question was a native flower, not the Old Earth version, with blossoms the size of a large man’s hand, a gorgeous sapphire-blue throat, and brilliant yellow petals tipped in blood-red crimson. It was spectacular, and it had been chosen as the emblem of Chotěboř, as a symbol of renewal, freedom, and self-rule, by the original Adam Šiml and the friends, neighbors, and fellow employees of the Creswell Combine he’d helped convince to cash in their equity in the huge corporation and find a new home far, far away from the Calpurnia System and the growing power of the Solarian transstellars. To build a home those transstellars’ tendrils had not yet penetrated, one far enough from the League that it would have time to create—and maintain—a democracy that meant something and had the strength to resist the sort of exploitation the Creswell Combine had represented. That was what the youthful demonstrators in Náměstí Žlutých Růží had wanted to remind every Chotěbořan about…and everyone could see how well that had worked out.

“They can’t keep a lid on this forever, Zdeněk,” he said harshly, once he was confident he had his anger mostly under control. “They just can’t.”

“Until someone repeals the state of emergency, they damned well can,” Vilušínský said bluntly, “and you know it.”

“Hruška never meant that to last this long!” Šiml snapped.

“Then he frigging well should’ve included a sunset clause when he issued the decree.” Vilušínský turned his head to spit on the ceramacrete floor. “Not that Cabrnoch and Žďárská—or Siminetti!—would’ve paid much attention to it if he had.”

Šiml glared at him for a moment, but then his shoulders slumped and he nodded wearily. He’d been there—in fact, he’d been a member of President Roman Hruška’s cabinet—when the initial decree was issued. Even then, he’d seen where it was likely to end, and his protests were one of the reasons Minister of Public Safety Jan Cabrnoch’s chief of staff, Zuzana Žďárská, had made it so abundantly (if privately) clear that his services as Minister of Agriculture were no longer required. It would undoubtedly be wise of him to seek a new career in the private sector, under the circumstances. And if he was unwilling to take her friendly hint, more…strenuous methods of persuasion would be found.

Which was why he’d been a very poorly paid professor of agronomy at Eduard Beneš University for the last fifteen T-years.

“I wonder sometimes what we did to piss God off,” he said finally. His voice was heavy, his expression tired. “We probably could have handled just the damned bugs!”

“Probably. No,” Vilušínský shook his head, “we did handle the komáři in the end. Whatever else, you have to give Cabrnoch at least that much. That targeted nanotech was a brilliant move, and he did find a way to get it built.”

“Sure he did. And it was based on the R and D my people did—them and Public Health! Do you think anyone remembers that? And how did he pay for it?”

“I didn’t say he came up with the solution, and I didn’t say it came cheap. But if you’d asked most of our fellow citizens at the time whether it was worth it, you know damn well what they would’ve said! For that matter, they did say it.”

“But it opened the door to Frogmore-Wellington and Iwahara!” Šiml protested.

“So? You expected people with dying kids to think that was a bad exchange? Especially after Reichart got done with us?”

Vilušínský shook his head again, but his expression had turned gentle, and he reached out to lay one hand almost apologetically on his friend’s arm. Adam Šiml had lost his wife, Kristýna Šimlová Louthanová, his teenaged son, and both of his infant daughters to the komáři. If anyone on Chotěboř could understand the point Vilušínský had just made, it was Šiml, yet his own devastating grief only fanned his fury when he thought of how the world his wife and children would never see again had been betrayed by its own elected leaders.

Chotěboř had scarcely been on the cutting edge of technology. It was too far from the heart of the Solarian League for that. But it had possessed at least a decent medical establishment, and it had been native Chotěbořian researchers—his team, although he’d been given his walking papers before the solution was announced—who’d come up with the targeted nanotech to deal with the komár hnědý rybniční, the ubiquitous “nuisance” insect pest which had mutated into such a deadly disease vector. Yet the Chotěbořans had been unable to produce it locally, thanks to Ismail Reichart’s raiders.

Reichart had seen his opportunity in the midst of Chotěboř’s preoccupation with the komáři, not that Kumang Astro Control would have been much of an obstacle to him at the best of times, and his fleet of renegade mercenaries had hit the star system like a hammer. They’d left Chotěboř itself relatively unscathed—they’d had no desire to encounter the komár on its own ground—but they’d looted and stripped every bit of the system’s painfully built up industrial infrastructure. They’d taken even the planetary power sats, driving Chotěboř back onto surface-generated power, with all the crippling limitations that had implied, until it could somehow cobble up replacements…once Reichart finally deigned to depart with his loot.

Leaving Chotěboř totally unable to implement the solution to its desperate health crisis out of its own resources.

And that was why President Hruška, at the instigation of newly elected Vice President Cabrnoch, had taken the only option he’d seen and petitioned the Solarian League’s Office of Frontier Security for aid. Which OFS had provided…under its customary terms.

Which was how Chotěboř had effectively completely lost control of the resources of its own star system.

Under pressure from Frontier Security to “maximize income generation potential” for the system’s people, Hruška had issued yet another decree, setting aside the constitutional prohibitions designed to prevent outside exploitation of the system. He’d had no constitutional authority to do anything of the sort, but the Nejvyšší soud, Chotěboř’s supreme court, had flatly refused to take up the single lawsuit challenging his actions. Šiml had known every man and woman who’d joined to file that suit, although he hadn’t been formally associated with it. He’d wanted to be, but he’d been in too much public disfavor at the moment, scapegoated with responsibility for failing to solve the crisis himself by Cabrnoch and Žďárská. At the same time, he had to acknowledge Vilušínský’s point. However people might feel about it now, at the time Hruška’s actions had been supported by a huge majority of Chotěbořans.

Of course, quite a few of them—and their children—were suffering a severe case of buyer’s remorse these days.

In return for a sizable down payment—and it had been sizable, by Chotěbořian standards, Šiml conceded—in a deal brokered by the “disinterested” facilitators of OFS, Frogmore-Wellington Aeronautics and Iwahara Interstellar had received two hundred-T-year leases, with an option to renew, on virtually all of Kumang’s deep-space resources. That infusion of cash, coupled with OFS technical assistance, had permitted the final design and fabrication of the anti-komár nanotech which had reduced the threat from the status of a deadly plague to a simply serious health threat which could be controlled, if not eradicated, by the prophylactic measures already in place.

And all it had cost was debt peonage for the entire star system.

As part of the articles of agreement Hruška had signed, OFS had undertaken the “reclamation” of the infrastructure ravaged by Reichart’s attack. It had been rebuilt to something approximating its pre-raid level, and as part of the reclamation, OFS had assumed administrative responsibility for it. As soon as Chotěboř managed to pay off the loans the League had extended to it through OFS, ownership of that infrastructure would, naturally, revert to Chotěboř. In the meantime, though, OFS would be required to charge a “reasonable fee” to defray its operational costs in Kumang. The last time Šiml had seen an accounting of the debt, interest, those “reasonable fees,” and penalties for chronically late payments on it had increased the original amount by approximately two hundred and ten percent.

And the payments were always late, since there was never enough cash flow to make them. Despite Frogmore-Wellington’s and Iwahara’s down payment, the ongoing annual income from the leases was a pittance, and because both transstellars saw Kumang as a long-term investment that wouldn’t require developing for at least another fifty or sixty T-years, they were in no hurry to spend any development money until they were good and ready. The Chotěbořans themselves couldn’t capitalize on the abundant potentials of their own star system in order to generate the income to pay off their debts because, effectively, they didn’t own those potentials anymore, and Luis Verner, the current OFS governor—although, of course, his official title was only “System Administrator”—was fine with that. In fact, he’d gone out of his way to quash any Chotěbořian efforts to exploit the fragments of their star’s resources they still owned.

Šiml wasn’t certain if that was simply part of OFS’ policy to ensure none of their peons ever got out of debt or because it was in line with Frogmore-Wellington’s and Iwahara’s policies, and it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that by now President Cabrnoch and his entire administration were firmly in the pocket of OFS and Kumang’s absentee landlords. Cabrnoch really didn’t have a choice, in a lot of ways. The sheen had started coming off his public image over the last decade or so, when Chotěboř had time to catch its breath and realize just how much of its inheritance had been traded away. By now, he had nowhere to go if he tried to buck his out-system patrons, and he clearly didn’t intend to go anywhere.

Hruška had remained in office up until seven T-years ago, although he’d become steadily less and less relevant. By the time he’d actually died—of natural causes, as far as Šiml could tell—his vice president had been the system’s effective dictator for almost ten T-years. After Hruška’s death, there hadn’t been even the pretense of a new election. Cabrnoch had simply assumed the office, at which point a great many Chotěbořans had realized the constitution was no longer simply dying, but dead. And that was when the trouble truly began.

“All right, Zdeněk. You’re right about that. You always have been, whether I like it or not. But this time around, Siminetti and the Safeties have crossed a line. You know as well as I do how our people will react to this; God only knows what’s going to come out of the rest of the planet’s woodwork!”

“And you’re probably right about that,” Vilušínský agreed. “So I think it’d be a really good idea to get the word out to our cell leaders that they need to sit on anything hasty.”

“Already in the pipeline,” Šiml said. Then he snorted. “Unfortunately, I think Jiskra may have been a bit too apt when we chose the name.”

It was Vilušínský’s turn to snort. Šiml had suggested Jiskra—“Spark” in Czech—as the name for their organization for a lot of reasons, including his love of history. As far as Vilušínský had been concerned, the notion of striking sparks made it the perfect choice. But Šiml was right about the…feistiness of their jiskry. Those “sparks” would be only too ready to go looking for tinder after today’s incident.

“That’s not a bad thing, in most ways,” he pointed out. “You’re right about the need to sit on them at the moment, but it’s about damned time we started actively transitioning into changing our stance, Adam. You know it is.”

“I do.” Šiml’s face tightened. “I’d hoped we could do more to prepare the ground by nonviolent means, though. And at the moment, I’m afraid we’re just a little short of the tools to do anything else.”

“Then we’d better start finding someone who can provide them,” Vilušínský said grimly. “And in the meantime, we’d better hope to hell none of our people who were involved in the demonstration point the Safeties in Jiskra’s direction under interrogation.”

* * *

“Satisfactory,” Karl-Heinz Sabatino said, rotating his brandy snifter under his nose while he inhaled its bouquet. “What’s that old saying about a gram of prevention being worth a kilo of cure, Luis?”

“You really think it’ll be effective?” System Administrator Luis Verner sat back in the floating armchair in Sabatino’s luxuriously appointed office with his own brandy snifter. It was a sinfully comfortable chair, but his expression was less than happy.

“I do.” Sabatino sipped, then lowered the glass and shrugged. “I’m not at all sure it’s the best solution, you understand, and I’ve never cared for Cabrnoch’s tactics. But the last thing we need is for these proles to decide to jump on the same bandwagon as those idiots in the Talbott Sector. Whatever I think of his methods, they’ll think twice about pressuring him in that direction now.”

“Holowach thinks it might have the opposite effect,” Verner said, his eyes worried. “According to his reports, there’s an element on Chotěboř that sees those rioters as martyrs.”

Sabatino grimaced. Technically, he had no official standing in Kumang’s governance. In fact, however, as the local CEO for both Frogmore-Wellington Astronautics and Iwahara Interstellar, he was what he liked to think of as the king frog in a small pond. Or perhaps that wasn’t the best analogy. He seemed to recall fragments of an ancient fairytale from his childhood on the farming planet of Fattoria. Something about King Log and King Stork.

What mattered was that he was the current Chotěbořian government’s paymaster. What amounted to petty cash for a transstellar like Frogmore-Wellington or Iwahara was more than enough to make a neobarb dictator like Cabrnoch and the key members of his regime indecently wealthy by local standards. Unlike many of his fellows, Sabatino had no problem calling that what it was—graft and bribery—although he was careful to avoid those terms in discussions with Verner. There were certain words which cut too close to the system administrator’s own relationship with Sabatino.

The truth was the truth, however, and whatever terminology they might use, Verner knew exactly whose hand held his leash. It was unfortunate no one would ever be tempted to call the system administrator the sharpest stylus in the box, but Sabatino could work with that. In fact, there were advantages to having someone who was inclined to take orders first and think about them later.

It was rather more unfortunate, in some ways, that the Gendarmerie had stuck Verner with Major Jacob Holowach. Holowach had no more official jurisdiction on Chotěboř itself than Verner did, but he commanded the Gendarmerie-staffed System Security Force which was responsible for the police function in the OFS-managed orbital and deep-space infrastructure. And whatever his official status vis-à-vis Chotěboř, he and his senior analyst, Captain Heather Price, were the lens through which official intelligence estimates arrived in Verner’s inbox. All of which would have been perfectly fine if Holowach had been more receptive to the customary inducements of his position. It was just Sabatino’s luck to get stuck with an idealistic idiot in what otherwise was a highly satisfactory assignment.

And to have the damned Manticorans less than sixty-four light-years away, assuming the Talbott annexation went through and the Montana System ratified it. The last thing he needed was for the Chotěbořans to catch the same sort of lunacy, he thought grumpily.

It wasn’t that he would have blamed them on any personal level. In their position, he would have wanted the same things himself, and he wasn’t happy about the number of people who’d been hurt in the recent…unpleasantness. Those numbers were extraordinarily low compared to what happened in other star systems, but this wasn’t “other star systems.” This was the system he was responsible for managing, and the fewer people who got hurt along the way, the better, from his perspective. Not that he thought he could do his job without anyone getting hurt. The galaxy didn’t work that way.

Which was why it was so important to discourage any Chotěbořian tendency to emulate Talbott. The home office would be extraordinarily unhappy if they suddenly found themselves dealing with the Manties, who had a well-deserved reputation for keeping transstellars cut down to size, in rather sharp contrast to their customary comfortable relationships with the Office of Frontier Security.

“Holowach always sees bogeymen under the couch, Luis,” he said, sweeping his brandy in a dismissive wave that expressed rather more confidence about that than he actually felt. “Besides, wasn’t he the one that warned you the Talbotters’ example was spreading to Kumang?”

Verner nodded, although that wasn’t exactly what Holowach and Price had told him. It was close enough, though, and he wondered uneasily if Holowach’s warnings that there was more going on under the Chotěbořian surface than the Cabrnoch Administration knew (or was prepared to admit, anyway) might not be rather more accurate than Sabatino was willing to acknowledge. The truth was that Verner much preferred the CEO’s analysis. The notion that the rumbles of discontent making their way through the population of Chotěboř represented the first ripples of a generalized, still unfocused discontent was far more comforting than the idea that any sort of organized reform movement might be ticking away under the surface.

Besides, the system administrator reminded himself, it’s not like even Holowach or Price have any evidence of that kind of organization! If they did, that would be different. As it is

Sabatino watched Verner’s face for a moment, then took another sip of brandy to hide an incipient frown. From the system administrator’s expression, it would appear that this time Holowach had succeeded in shaking his superior’s confidence. Well, it was hardly surprising he’d made the effort. Sabatino’s own sources made it clear Holowach had strongly opposed the crackdown in Náměstí Žlutých Růží. Given that, of course he’d be pouring all kinds of alarmist reports into Verner’s ear after the fact.

Especially when at least some of them were almost certainly accurate.

“In my opinion,” he said, lowering the snifter, “Holowach’s an alarmist, and the sooner you can get rid of him, the better. However,” he drew the word out, “it’s possible—remotely possible, I suppose—that he might have a point about how some of the more…civically active Chotěbořans may react to this. So maybe we need to be a little prophylactic.”

“Prophylactic?”

“It probably wouldn’t hurt to find a vaccine against that sort of infection,” Sabatino said, rather pleased with the analogy, actually, given Kumang’s history. “Something that can pour oil on the waters,” he continued, mixing metaphors mercilessly.

“What sort of something did you have in mind, Karl-Heinz?” Verner sounded a bit cautious, and Sabatino smiled.

“What we need is a local mouthpiece to soothe any tendencies towards…hastiness on these people’s’ part. Let’s face it, Luis—from their perspective, they really do have quite a lot to be unhappy about. In fact, if I could find a way to…improve the situation locally, I’d do it. Unfortunately, the home office won’t let me change the economic playing ground. But if I can’t do that, we need to find someone who can convince these people—really convince them, I mean—that they’re being listened to and that what can be done will be done. Someone from outside the government but with the stature to be listened to. To convince them he has a real chance to deliver on answers to at least some of their grievances.”

“And should I assume you have someone in mind?”

“Actually, I was thinking about Šiml.”

Šiml?” Verner blinked in astonishment. “Karl-Heinz, he hates our guts. That’s one of the few things Holowach and your people agree on!”

“That’s not exactly true.”

Sabatino shook his head, stood and set his glass on the end table, and crossed to stand looking out of his two hundredth-floor office window at the night-struck city of Velehrad’s sparkling strands of lights.

“He hates Cabrnoch and the rest of Cabrnoch’s crowd with a pure and blinding passion, all right. I’ll give you that. And he’s probably no fonder of you or me than he has to be. But do you really think he went back to his family’s damned Sokol to be apolitical?” The CEO snorted. “Please, Luis! He may have been only the Minister of Agriculture when the shit hit the fan, and he doesn’t have a pot to piss in, financially. But with his family name, he had to have his eyes set on exactly the office Cabrnoch ended up in. And I guarantee that the way Cabrnoch kicked his ass out of government—and blamed him for the delay in dealing with the komáři, to boot—didn’t do one damned thing to make him any happier. There’s no way in the universe a man like that could see a ‘sports association’ as anything but an eventual political platform!”

“But he’s always insisted Sokol remain a nonpolitical, nonpartisan organization,” Verner pointed out. “For that matter, his family’s been adamant about that from the very beginning. If he starts straying from that line, it’s likely to cost him a lot of the popularity he’s regained over the last couple of decades.”

There was, Sabatino acknowledged privately, at least a bit of truth to that. The original Adam Šiml had singlehandedly founded the Sdružení Sokol Chotěboř, the Falcon Association of Chotěboř, even before the colonists had departed Calpurnia en route to Kumang. It had been part of his determination to rebuild and sustain his Czech heritage, and he’d modeled it on an ancient, third-century Ante Diaspora sports association which had also been called Sokol.

There’d been differences, of course. Šiml’s Sokol had also been intended as a nationalist organization as well as a sports association, but there’d been no pressure for it to become a political organization like its original model. Its purpose had been to remind the descendants of the Czech lands of who they were and where they’d come from, not to promote the re-emergence of Czech ethnicity and culture from the empire which had engulfed those lands back on Old Terra. The fact that it would contribute to its members’ health along the way was almost icing on the cake in its founder’s view. Highly desirable icing, but almost incidental to its other functions.

Like the original Sokol, Šiml’s had emphasized gymnastics, but it had branched out into all other areas of sport, including—or perhaps especially, given Chotěbořans’ passion for football—soccer. Membership had fallen over the years, though a surprising percentage of Chotěbořian parents had continued to enroll their children, at least. At one time, almost eighty percent of all Chotěbořans had been sokoli. By the time the komár turned deadly, that had fallen to perhaps fifteen or twenty percent, but Sokol had been a tower of strength during the plague years. It was a system-wide organization, outside government, which had responded with generosity and incredible effort, and many of its members had died helping others. That had earned it tremendous respect and a powerful upsurge in enrollments—adult enrollments, not just those of children and adolescents. And when its founder’s descendant was hounded out of office, with his family’s already faltering fortune decimated by the way he’d personally thrown everything he owned into trying to mitigate the consequences of the komáři, the governing board had invited him, the present-day Adam Šiml, to accept the předsednictví of his ancestor’s creation.

It had been more than just a gesture of gratitude to a man or to a family name. The stipend which came with the president’s office wasn’t enormous, but it had at least prevented him from starving until he finally managed to land his teaching position at the university. And he’d repaid the governing board by throwing all of his energy into rebuilding Sokol into what his many-times-great-grandfather had intended it to be: an organization which guarded Chotěboř’s sense of identity and trained and educated its sons and daughters—morally, as well as physically—without pounding them with any party line. That political neutrality, eschewing any partisan position, was fundamental to all Sokol had become, and it was more valuable to those parents now than it had ever been before. It was a refuge not only from the remorseless indoctrination which was part of every schoolchild’s daily life but also from the increasing bitterness and even outright despair which had enveloped so many of Chotěboř’s adults.

And the fact that it didn’t preach any competing political indoctrination was also the only reason it survived as a legally tolerated organization. Well, that and the fact that President Cabrnoch was himself a fanatic footballer.

“I mean,” Verner went on, “Sokol has to be the most apolitical organization on the entire planet. Even if he wanted to change that—even if he could change it—don’t you think it would be hard to turn that around? I mean to turn it into any sort of effective political machine quickly enough to keep Cabrnoch and Kápička—or at least Siminetti—from cracking down on it long before he could complete the transition?”

“Of course it would.” Sabatino snorted and turned from the window to face his guest. “I’m not saying it would work, Luis; I’m simply saying it’s obviously what he has in mind. And I’m sure he doesn’t expect to be able to do anything with it tomorrow or the day after. But that’s what he’s working for in the long term, I’m sure of it. And that means that however much he may—how did you put it? ‘hate our guts’?—he’d see the advantage in garnering our support. He’d have to recognize how much good we could do him if he agrees to scratch our back. Which is why it’s about time I made a significant philanthropic donation to his sports association.” The CEO smiled. “In fact, I should have done it long ago. I mean, how much worthier a cause could there be than an association which helps people stay fit and active?”

“I don’t know, Karl-Heinz.” Verner plucked thoughtfully at his lower lip.

“Do you really think he’s going to turn up his nose if I offer to put, say, a half million credits into Sokol’s bank account?” Sabatino laughed derisively. “Of course he isn’t! Hell, I’ll make it a full million—even two or three, if that’s what it takes. I’ll even throw in a half dozen, brand new soccer stadiums! For that matter,” his cynical expression eased for a moment, “that would probably be worth doing in its own right. It’s not like I don’t have the spending authorization to ‘invest in local infrastructure,’ and it certainly couldn’t make people like me or my bosses any less!”

He sipped more brandy, then looked back up at his guest, and the cynicism was back in his smile.

“But the point is that I’m sure he’ll convince himself there are all kinds of good reasons—ways he can use those funds against Cabrnoch, maybe even against us—when he starts thinking about any offer I make him. And I’m telling you the man has political ambitions of his own. He’ll play ball with us, whether or not he intends to stay on the team in the end, as long as it offers him a way to begin building a solider powerbase against Cabrnoch. And when you come down to it, I don’t really care what happens to Cabrnoch or Juránek or any of the others. Given how universally detested they are, Šiml might actually be a better front man for us with the Chotěbořans, when you think about it. The fact that everyone knows he was effectively forced out of government would actually work for him these days, as unpopular as Cabrnoch and Kápička have made themselves the last few years. It’s been long enough people’ve forgotten how pissed off they were at him for not solving the emergency, just like they’ve forgotten how grateful to Cabrnoch they felt at the time, and it’s never a bad thing to have another arrow in the quiver. So it’s past time we saw about putting Šiml in our pocket as an insurance policy, and that shouldn’t be too hard. Once he takes our money, once he accepts our support, we’ll own him just as surely as we do Cabrnoch.”

Sabatino turned back to the window, gazing out into the darkness as he considered the possibilities.

“I should’ve thought of this before,” he said, half to Verner and half to himself. “The home office wouldn’t like it a bit if the locals decided to jump on the Talbotters’ bandwagon. But when you come down to it, providing them with domestic political reform might be the best way to stave off serious agitation for the same sort of arrangement Talbott’s trying to strike with the Manties. If they think they’re getting a government that will keep us in our place they’ll be a lot less likely to take to the streets—or start looking for some other star nation to take them over lock, stock, and barrel—now won’t they?”


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Framed