Chapter 5
“External threats and pressures strengthen tribal bonds, and tribal bonds enhance unity and cohesion. Even the most casual examination of history reveals this truth beyond argument. If we could only see more clearly, we might aspire to tribal bonds without the need for external pressures, and thereby reap the continual benefits of unity and cohesion.”
—Dr. Georgette Hester-Vicary, Irresistible Puppeteer: The Motivational Primacy of Tribe
Hightower accelerated out of close orbit, the destroyer, Sabre, trailing behind, missiles streaking from Sabre’s bristling hardpoints to intercept ground-based munitions before they cleared Ericsson Two’s thick atmosphere.
This comprised one of many such close attack runs in the days Hightower supported the grinding assault on Ericsson Two, and Saef knew most of the attending Fleet officers silently wondered at the Admiralty’s strategy. While the rebellion had initially manifested on Ericsson Two, reducing the planetary defenses through costly conventional attacks achieved little that dropping rocks on any fortified structure wouldn’t accomplish. If the Admiralty Lords were suddenly so concerned about collateral damage, they might simply blockade the planet and remove it from any meaningful contribution to the war.
It was not merely the waste of resources and human lives that made Saef’s teeth grind in impotent frustration, nor even his inability to pursue the vital, secret goals of his Family. The inhuman enemy that seemingly orchestrated every step of the rebellion also infiltrated Fleet and the Great Houses—Imperial society writ large—and every day that passed in this creeping siege upon Ericsson Two only allowed the enemy to consolidate more power while the Admiralty pretended no alien threat existed. This did not form the only point of smoldering impatience in Saef.
“Pennysmith,” Saef said, moving toward Hightower’s bridge access as soon as they attained a comfortable distance from any planetary-based weapon systems, “I will be in my quarters. You have the bridge.”
Lieutenant Pennysmith, wearing her characteristic holo lenses across her eyes, inclined her head. “I have the bridge, Captain.”
Saef only reached his cabin moments before Inga Maru ushered Erik Sturmsohn into the well-appointed chamber. Saef poured himself a brandy and offered a glass to Sturmsohn, while Inga sauntered to a dim corner, producing a food concentrate bar and, crossing one boot over the other, leaned against a bulkhead.
Erik Sturmsohn accepted a glass from Saef a moment before his gaze locked upon the odd black sword resting on Saef’s desk. He had surrendered the blade upon his capture, and now he only considered the weapon for a potent second before focusing on Saef. “You wish to speak with me, grundling?”
Saef held his snifter between steepled fingers, looking over its rim at Erik’s brooding face. “I would like to listen.”
When Saef said no more, and the silence began to stretch out, Erik scowled, shaking his head. “You think you have bought the honor of a Sturmsohn? Are traitors so easily made in the coreworlds?”
Saef stared steadily and sipped from his glass. “You owe loyalty to the smiling demons, then? Did they buy this honor of a Sturmsohn?”
Erik’s eyes flashed, his gaze flicking to the black blade nearby, his knuckles white, squeezing the crystal snifter until Saef thought it would shatter. “With that blade I showed my love to the cold-eyed demons.”
“Alright,” Saef said. “Who are they then, these demons? What are their goals?”
Erik shrugged, looking away. “All I know is their lies. What is the truth of it?”
“What are they? From where do they come? What are their numbers?”
“What do I know, grundling? Vain imaginings and rumors only, I…” Erik fell silent, his intense gaze suddenly distant in thought.
“But what, Sturmsohn?” Saef said after a stretched silence.
Erik’s eyes slowly returned to Saef, his jaw clenched and his expression distant. “When your people smote the Skold station…I stood but seconds from a death of my own choosing.” He paused and his mind seemed to rejoin the present moment. “I and others were to become”—he said a guttural word in his Thorsworld dialect, his lips twisting as he continued—“optimized. This is their word for it, the making of demons from our people.” He shrugged and raised his glass to his lips, gulping a mouthful. “I have seen this before. Fools once volunteered for the honor, their spirit taken, a demon in its place.”
“I see, but—” Saef began before Erik cut him off.
“Now…this I remember.” Erik’s eyes narrowed. “There never were so many of them—the smiling demons, and they only sought fresh fools when losses were suffered.”
“That’s something,” Saef said, thinking. “So there aren’t an endless supply replacing every individual in the Myriad Worlds.…How many would you guess?”
Erik stared into space, taking another absent swallow from his glass, shrugging. “Who could say? Across every ship? Every system? Hundreds? Perhaps…And how many labor in secret among your timid worlds, grundling?”
“Far too many,” Saef said. “It is those who concern me most, in truth.”
A wry smile barely curved Erik’s lips. “Your fear is well placed. The petty greed of your worlds will be fertile soil for the demons’ lies. Traitors and greed; they are bound always together.”
Saef felt suddenly nettled at Sturmsohn’s words. Many of the heavyworlds existed now in open rebellion. What could be more traitorous? “Interesting that these…entities found allies first among the heavyworlds, isn’t it?” Saef offered in a mild tone. “Perhaps resentment, or victimhood, is even more fertile ground than greed, hmm?”
Erik’s lips thinned down to a compressed line, but his voice contained only the slightest edge as he replied, “Any oppressed people will grasp for a weapon…even blindly grasp.”
“Then this new enemy should probably have approached your ancestors a few centuries ago while they were actually oppressed. If one must read a history book to borrow an ancestors’ suffering, it seems little different than greed, doesn’t it?”
Erik made a sound low in his chest that resembled a growl, but Inga spoke, suddenly reminding Saef and Erik of her silent presence. “Perhaps they went first to the heavyworlds to deny the Imperium the strength of those worlds in the approaching conflict,” she said in a musing tone. “Or perhaps they find it all too easy to consume the Myriad Worlds one bite at a time by fragmenting us into a dozen angry factions: the Great Houses versus the lesser; demi-cits versus Vested Citizens; rich versus poor; coreworlds versus the heavyworlds.” Inga said nothing more for a time, and Saef looked from her nonchalant pose to Erik’s glowering presence before she added, “To the heavyworlds and demi-cits they offer a chance to avenge centuries of slights. They offer vengeance. To every faction, they offer one vital thing: life; the wealth of Shaper tech. Longevity.”
Saef said nothing, seeing Inga’s rationale sinking in as Erik’s expression became grudgingly thoughtful.
After a long moment, Erik flashed an inscrutable look at Inga before focusing on Saef. “Some truth there, within her words.”
Saef held Erik’s gaze, nodding slowly. “Yes…it seems everyone must begin to understand, there is becoming only one cause, one flag, one banner now. Every member of the Myriad Worlds is either working for humanity, or they are working for our extinction.”
Erik’s eyes narrowed. “And this view is shared by your Fleet? Your admirals?”
Saef hesitated a moment before shaking his head. “No. Not yet. They do not openly acknowledge any nonhuman involvement, even now.”
Erik Sturmsohn drank the final swallow of his brandy and aimed a bitter, mocking expression at Saef. “Not yet? Not yet? Then it is too late. We are doomed.”
Inga interjected again. “With only a thousand of them, or less? They aren’t holding or destroying the Myriad Worlds with a thousand individual operatives.” As Saef observed Inga speaking, he saw she spoke these words for Erik’s sake, leading him to find a conclusion of his own volition.
“No?” Erik retorted. “They need only destroy those who will not be bought, their human lackeys leading the slaughter. A thousand paymasters, a thousand saboteurs wearing the face of…of anyone; this thousand will wrap the human worlds in the chains of their choosing.”
Inga offered no response to Erik, her task accomplished, but Saef suddenly thought of the Strangers’ powerful, inexplicable N-space effect that rippled out from Delta Three. In less than a standard year it would reach Coreworld, Fleet headquarters, the emperor…the Shapers themselves?
Since the first Shaper armada arrived in human space back in 5299, the inscrutable aliens had returned on a fairly regular schedule, their unimaginably vast ships filled with the technological treasures humanity needed. The next such armada was expected in a window of time roughly corresponding with the arrival of this insidious N-space field effect in the Core system. Did these Strangers, these inhuman enemies, hope to envelop the Shapers with this field? Or the Emperor? Or did they go to such hideous lengths for some other purpose altogether?
“Perhaps you are correct, Sturmsohn,” Saef said. “But perhaps if we could learn their real objective, we could stop them before they achieve that goal, whatever it is.”
Erik shook his head, his face a grim mask. “This is their great strength, grundling. We know almost nothing of the demons and their plans. But they? They know nearly all that we do.” He looked piercingly at Saef. “They assuredly know you.…The dagger for your back, grundling? Be sure they have it fashioned, poisoned, poised.”
* * *
Some hours after their meeting with Erik Sturmsohn, Saef lifted the small black case that had provided so many unpleasant sensations for him ever since Imperial consul Winter Yung had issued it to him. It was a scarce and costly quantum-entangled communicator, meant to provide instant, unmonitored communication to its mated comm, perhaps light-years distant. With QE comm’s inherent bandwidth limitations, it allowed only simple text messages, which was more than enough for Saef’s “handler” in Imperial Security to receive reports, and to order Saef to undertake unpleasant tasks for which he generally felt poorly suited. He had never welcomed this secondary role as a secret operative for Imperial Security, but the Family commanded, and Saef obeyed.
While most Fleet capital ships and carriers operated QE comm sets mated to counterparts all held at Fleet headquarters, Saef never obtained a clue where his own secret messages were received, only that a reply routed from Winter Yung rapidly arrived in nearly every case.
Saef assiduously entered a succinct account of his interview with Erik Sturmsohn and sent the message on its way. He contemplated Winter’s reaction as he waited for any potential reply. In his months as an asset for Winter Yung, Saef had uncovered a wealth of information about enemy activities, mostly through sudden, violent action, rather than the application of actual spycraft. Saef smiled to himself. Perhaps Winter would appreciate intel actions more in keeping with an actual agent, crediting Saef with learning something of the intelligence trade after all.
The QE comm set chirped as a message appeared from wherever its counterpart lay within the Myriad Worlds. Saef’s smile disappeared as he read the terse words of the reply.
Sturmsohn is a dangerous enemy agent. Eliminate him immediately. Winter Yung.
* * *
Winter Yung had only visited Lykeios Manor, the fortified old estate of the Sinclair-Maru, on one prior occasion, and she had not especially enjoyed many disparate aspects of the experience, particularly the Sinclair-Maru themselves.
Since that first visit to the manor, Winter’s entire existence had dramatically changed, and she discovered that her acceptance of the Sinclair-Maru had evolved along with that transformation. While all old-fashioned ways constantly lacerated Winter’s nerves, that curious reserve which seemed a unique quality of the Sinclair-Maru elevated Winter’s exasperation nearly to the point of explosion. The core genesis of these feelings arose from a technical Imperial secret known only to a very select number of Imperial operatives, and that technical secret dwelled within Winter’s skull.
As Winter disposed her slender, elegant figure upon an equally elegant settee within one of Lykeios Manor’s parlors, the delicate curve of her lips twitched into a barely concealed sneer. Her intolerable position as a supplicant seeking aid from the Sinclair-Maru seemed worse by the moment as Cabot Sinclair-Maru and his old-generation peers said so little, gazing at her in their wooden way, concealing their thoughts with alarming success.
As a native of Battersea herself, Winter knew the Sinclair-Maru well in her younger years, even attending one school or another with Bess Sinclair-Maru—how many decades ago had that been? Six? Seven? In those days Winter found the stuffy conservatism only a fraction worse than the staid quality of her own Imperial Family. But Winter’s training as an Imperial agent, and her selection as a candidate for a new, secret Shaper implant became a sharp bifurcation point in her life.
The techniques Winter developed to master the powerful tools implanted in her skull had continually threatened to overset her sanity, to the point Winter wondered what precisely sanity might comprise. Still, with the very best of rejuv treatments, Winter maintained the youth, vigor, and beauty of her school years, and entirely sane or not, she had mastered the “mind-reading” analytics of her top secret implant along with all its other powerful tools.
Given a little context and a moment of dialogue, the analytic routines of her implant extracted hidden truths from most any subject Winter focused her attention upon, detecting and interpreting a thousand minuscule cues every second. Excitement or heightened passions in any target of Winter’s sifting made their innermost secrets plain to her augmented vision. Heightening the passions of certain members of the quasi-nobility suited Winter’s appetites perfectly, particularly in the years since her sanity had been…modified, and she excelled at her work.
Among the Sinclair-Maru, though, some anachronistic repression seemed to have submerged all their normal passions beneath an impenetrable veneer that limited Winter’s “mind-reading” to a minimum, and incidentally left Winter feeling clammy all over.
Cabot Sinclair-Maru remained among the worst of them, by Winter’s standards, his somber, somewhat handsome features a closed book to her, and unfortunately Cabot was, once again, the Family executor since Bess Sinclair-Maru fell from that position.
Winter clearly remembered her prior visit to Lykeios Manor when Bess still held the reins of power just months ago.…Bess, her old classmate, badly handled by the passing decades, had greeted Winter then, a tough, sober old woman.
Even more keenly, Winter remembered the enemy ambush that had nearly destroyed Winter and Bess together. She still felt the encircling, protecting embrace of Bess’s arms, still heard the soft, pained gasps as hot shrapnel ripped through Bess’s flesh, stopped only by Winter’s Shaper body shield. The physical body of her old classmate lay all but destroyed that day, and only the unilateral intervention of young Saef purchased a second chance for Bess, through the costly miracle of full Shaper rejuv.
As Winter regarded Cabot Sinclair-Maru, she barely restrained the outward signs of her hatred. Cabot had evidently punished Saef for the vast medical expenditure dropped to save Bess. To Cabot, Bess had been entirely expendable, and Saef’s investment of prize money he personally won in combat represented an unconscionable rebellion in Cabot’s eyes.
Passionless old puppeteer!
Cabot’s own youth clung on, despite his centuries, one of the old generation who had enjoyed the Sinclair-Maru’s former opulence from an earlier age with all its attendant Shaper tech.
“Consul,” Cabot said in his reserved, urbane manner, “of course we were grieved and troubled to hear of this assassination attempt upon you, right in your consular office no less.”
Winter ground her molars as she waited for Cabot to dawdle his way through observations she had already addressed with Cabot’s underlings.
“But it seems the—er—proper course for you is to seek protection from Imperial Security sources, rather than here within a mere private home.”
Her temper scarcely in check, Winter managed to speak with icy civility. “I already explained all this to your people; the bloody assassin was an Imperial Security source. Are you people listening?”
Cabot leaned to the silver cocktail service, pouring a few fingers of amber liquid into a small glass. “May I offer you a drink, Consul?”
“No!” Winter snapped. “I need a solution to our little problem, not a drink.”
Cabot listened to her heated words, placidly unruffled, which only drizzled accelerant on Winter’s bottled rage. “It hardly seems likely, Consul, that so many traitors populate the teeming ranks of Imperial Security, or else this current war would already be decided, the Emperor overthrown.”
Winter rarely exercised measurable patience in the last many decades, and she found the unfamiliar effort to be maddening now. She drew a slow breath, asking, “How much did Saef share regarding the…unique enemies encountered in his Delta Three mission?”
Cabot regarded Winter with a bemused expression for a moment, evidently digesting the apparent subject change, sipping from his glass, and the flicker of Winter’s analytics system hinted at contempt behind Cabot’s eyes. Fear and hatred she had often perceived through the years, but not contempt. “I’m sure Saef shared very little,” Cabot said at last. “In the interest of Fleet secrecy requirements, of course.”
Almost certainly a lie, but as Winter’s gaze searched that damnably smug face her analytics remained mute.
“Of course,” Winter said in a dry tone. “Well, perhaps he hinted that anyone, no matter how loyal, how well known, can be quite suddenly turned to the enemy’s cause.”
Cabot stared at Winter without expression for a few heartbeats before saying, “If you suggest such a thing, Consul, we shall certainly take it to heart, and thank you for the warning.”
“You don’t understand at all, do you?” Winter said, making no effort to conceal the sneer.
“Have I missed something, Consul? It seems you seek to embroil our House in some conflict that is the sole purview of Imperial Security.”
Winter tossed her head with a sharp laugh. “When Bess got blown to shreds you might have found a subtle hint there. You have been embroiled for months. If you’re not too thick to get that hint, a team of assassins shooting the shit out of the Medical Specialties Center and your people—that might have suggested something to you.”
In the history of Battersea’s last century, the attack on the Medical Specialties Center remained a unique display of focused violence, and its clear objective was the destruction of Bess Sinclair-Maru, though her mental faculties remained an open question even after the restoration of her body and her girlish youth.
“The attack you reference is something,” Cabot said, unmoved. “Your troubles are something else.”
Once again Winter’s analytics flickered across Cabot’s veiled features, grasping at empty air. Was this strategy, or sheer stupidity on his part? In all her decades as an Imperial operative, Winter had never experienced the sickening sensation that filled her now: helplessness.
As Winter sifted her disjointed thoughts, the parlor door slowly opened and Bess peeked in, peering cautiously about before easing inside, pressing the heavy door closed behind her.
Despite the tumult of her thoughts and emotions, Winter couldn’t restrain a ghost of a smile at the sight of Bess. Even as classmates decades before, Bess had never possessed the elfin fragility she now embodied, the rebuilding of her body stripping away the high-grav conditioning of Sinclair-Maru young, along with the evidence of many hard years.
“Gah?” Bess said in a concerned tone, her verbal capacity just as absent as evidence of her former intellectual brilliance.
Winter held out a welcoming hand to Bess even as she turned her bitter gaze upon Cabot. Bess edged past Cabot’s seat, her eyes glancing sidelong as she slipped up to Winter.
Winter’s eyes locked on Cabot. “Do you Sinclair-Maru believe you can stand alone, a solitary island, as the other Houses are consumed?” Winter said, then patted the cushions of the settee for Bess. “Sit here, Bess dear.”
Cabot’s gaze rested briefly on Bess before returning to Winter, a grimace moving his lips, though Winter’s analytics provided little she could not intuit on her own: Displeasure, frustration. He drank the last swallow from his glass and sighed softly. “Shall we indulge in an—er—exchange of plain speaking, Consul?”
Bess produced a small piece of colored wax and a crumpled drawing pad, and began carefully drawing shaky lines, the tip of her tongue extending from the corner of her mouth.
“Gods, yes!” Winter said, fixing Cabot in her scrutiny.
Cabot rolled the empty glass between his hands for a moment before placing it to one side. “Please pardon my blunt words, Consul, but you appeared on our doorstep in a—er—most unconventional fashion, unaccompanied by your normal retinue, and you left an untidy mystery behind you in Port City.”
Winter shrugged. “Under the circumstances, etiquette was not foremost in my thoughts.”
Bess looked up at Cabot and said, “Gah, boo,” in a soft voice before returning to her drawing.
Cabot’s eyes flicked briefly to Bess, but he continued, “I do not complain, Consul, but it strikes me that if you are not maintaining communications with your Imperial network for fear of these—er—enemy agents, things may become untenable for our House.”
Winter shook her head, glaring. “How so?”
Cabot stared for a long moment at Winter before saying, “If Imperial authorities now accuse the Sinclair-Maru of taking you as a hostage, how could we reply?”
Winter’s hand clenched suddenly…How had she missed this twist?
Through gritted teeth Winter said, “They will demand my return…and if you yield, I am as good as dead.”
Cabot frowned heavily. “And if we refuse, we will be classified as rebels…besieged…destroyed. I am rather surprised they have not demanded this of us yet, if all your fears of enemy agents are—er—fully justified.”
“Bah!” Bess declared, presenting her drawing of segmented lines and irregular geometric objects to Winter.
Winter absently took the drawing, her mind racing to formulate a plan or argument to remain in the only sanctuary she knew on the whole of Battersea. “There must be a way…”
“I am terribly sorry, Consul,” Cabot said, his voice betraying no great sorrow. “I am not certain what course you should pursue, but it is clear the Sinclair-Maru cannot be your refuge.”