Shadow of Freedom-eARC (54 page)

The tram was just pulling to a stop as they arrived, and Indiana followed Mackenzie aboard. They presented their Transit Authority passes for scanning, and managed to find seats that weren’t in a direct draft from one of the broken windows.

The tram moved off through the snow and slush, and the brother and sister gazed out at the crowds of poorly dressed, shivering, head-bent pedestrians. There was a lot of foot traffic in Cherubim, even this late and in weather like this. They passed an occasional ground car, but those were few and far between, and the parking spaces which had once been filled to capacity and beyond stood mostly empty. Downtown Cherubim had once been home to a bustling, thriving district composed of privately owned small businesses—restaurants, bookstores, art galleries, boutiques, jewelers, pawnshops, clothiers, and electronics stores. Their owners and operators hadn’t been wealthy, perhaps, but they’d made ends meet and they’d worked for
themselves
. Now every other storefront stood empty. Most of those which remained looked rundown, worn out, tattered around the edges. Yet here and there an oasis of well-lit, clean crystoplast display windows offered gleaming goods for sale.

Indiana’s eyes hardened as he saw those thriving windows, because there was a reason for their prosperity. They were the ones that belonged to the mayor’s friends, or even the president’s. The ones whose owners had connections, who didn’t have to pay protection to corrupt cops and city councilmembers, or to one of the transstellars’ local managers. Hell, two thirds of them didn’t even pay city taxes!

There’s always someone willing to play jackal
, he thought bitterly.
Always someone willing to “go along to get along.” They may not be the ones who decided to rape Seraphim in the first place, but they sure as hell don’t have any problem squabbling over the scraps and grabbing whatever they can get on the side! And not one of them would
dream
of raising a hand to do anything about McCready and her bottom feeders.

Mackenzie reached out and squeezed his knee with one hand. He looked at her, and some of the bitterness leached out of his eyes as she smiled sadly at him. She knew exactly what he was thinking, of course. Once upon a time Bruce Graham had been one of those shopkeepers…until his livelihood had been destroyed by others’ corruption. Indiana saw the understanding in that smile, and he smiled back at his sister, patted the hand on his knee, and then turned back to the window.

* * *

The tram deposited them two corners away from The Soup Spoon, a restaurant they both liked and which somehow managed to keep its doors open despite its owners’ lack of connections. Probably because the place looked like a dump, Indiana reflected as he and Mackenzie slogged through the last of the slush, stamped their feet clean, and stepped out of the damp, raw cold into the warm, delicious-smelling humidity. The restaurant windows were heavily misted with condensation, and Alecta, their favorite server, greeted them as soon as she saw them.

“Indy! Max! I’ve got your regular table open. Come on back!”

The Grahams smiled and followed her towards the back of the restaurant. The Soup Spoon had absolutely no ambience to recommend it to the better type of customer. The silverware, plates, and bowls were thoroughly mismatched, the tables and booths were worn, and the cheap holo posters on the walls couldn’t hide the fact that they were badly in need of paint and maintenance. Water stains in one corner of the ceiling indicated a leak management hadn’t been able to get fixed for almost three months, and the floor really needed to be recovered.

But what it lacked in polish and upkeep was more than compensated for by the sense of welcome. It was a warm, friendly place, one whose owners knew the vast majority of their customers by first name. A place where the food might come in mismatched bowls but the kitchen was spotless, every dish was just as delicious as it smelled, and the daily special was priced to let honest people wrap themselves around a warm, sustaining meal. Indiana and Mackenzie heard other regulars greeting them by name as they passed, and they smiled and nodded and waved back while they followed Alecta to the table in a rear corner.

“He’s been waiting for you,” Alecta said much more quietly as they walked. She smiled as if she’d just made a joke. “Ben and Allen kept an eye out. They didn’t see anyone following him.”

Indiana nodded, laughing at the joke she hadn’t made.

“Thanks,” he said, and then nodded to the man called Firebrand as they reached the table.

“Glad you could make it,” he said casually, pulling out Mackenzie’s chair and seating her before he sat down himself, facing Firebrand across the tattered looking checkered tablecloth.

“I said I’d look forward to trying the menu the next time I was in town,” Damien Harahap replied, and sniffed deeply. “If it tastes as good as it smells, I’ll be back, too!”

“I don’t think you’ll be disappointed,” Alecta assured him, pulling out her order pad and looking back and forth between the three of them. “You guys ready to order yet?”

“They just got here!” Harahap protested with a laugh, and she snorted.

“Hey, it’s Thursday. That means Indy here is going to have the clam chowder with a side of hush puppies and coleslaw. McKinsey’s going to have the beef stew over rice, tossed salad with oil and balsamic vinegar dressing, and a side of garlic bread. Coffee for him, hot tea for her. So that only leaves you.”

She gave him the challenging grin she would have given any other new customer, and he laughed again and shook his head.

“Since it’s my first time here, why don’t you surprise me? What do you recommend?”

“Oh, man, are you letting yourself in for it!” Indiana warned him, and Alecta whacked him on the shoulder with her order pad.

“Don’t listen to him,” she told Harahap. “The problem is he doesn’t like coconut milk.”

“Coconut milk?” Harahap repeated a bit blankly, and she nodded.

“Yep. You want my advice, you’ll have the Massaman curry with duck. And maybe”—she eyed him consideringly—“in your case, we’ll add a little pineapple and some peanuts. Trust me, you’ll love it.”

“Well, I do like curry,” Harahap admitted (honestly, in this case), and nodded. “All right. Sounds good to me.”

“How spicy do you want it—scale of one to ten?”

“Make it a nine.”

“Brave man!” Alecta laughed. “White rice, or fried?”

“White. And bring the fish sauce, if you have any.”

“All right!” Alecta beamed at him. “Coffee, tea, or water?”

“Tea. And let me have chopsticks, please.”

“Gotcha.”

Alecta waited long enough to top off their water glasses, then disappeared with the order, and Harahap sat back in his chair and looked at Indiana and Mackenzie.

“I like her,” he said sincerely, and Mackenzie nodded.

“So do we,” she replied, not mentioning that Alecta, The Soup Spoon’s owners, and two other members of the wait staff were part of the SIM. There was no need for him to know that.

“Good place to meet, too,” he went on, looking around the restaurant. “In most ways, anyway. Lots and lots of ambient noise, people talking loud enough no one’s in a good position to hear what anyone else is saying, and a clientele of regulars who recognize a newcomer in a heartbeat. Makes it hard to plant somebody on you, but it’s got its downsides, too.” He shook his head wryly. “Trust me, I got quite a few second glances when
I
turned up! Enough to make any good spy nervous.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Indiana told him. Harahap cocked an eyebrow at him, and Mackenzie leaned forward slightly in her brother’s support.

“We’ve been regulars here since before our father was arrested, Firebrand,” she told him. “People may have wondered who you were when you walked in. In fact, that’s one of our better defenses. Nobody in here is real fond of the police, McCready, or the scags, trust me, but they know the two of us. The fact that you’re meeting us here makes you one of them, provisionally, at least.”

Harahap looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded.

“Which brings us to the reason you wanted to talk to us in the first place,” Mackenzie went on. “We didn’t expect to be hearing from you again quite this soon.”

“And I didn’t expect to be back here quite this soon,” he told her, picking up his water glass. He took a sip and grimaced slightly. “On the other hand, this isn’t the sort of profession where you get to count on reliable schedules.”

“So why
this
schedule change?” Indiana asked.

“Things are heating up between us and the Sollies,” Harahap told him. Which was true enough in its own way, assuming he was reading his tea leaves correctly, if not in the sense his listeners’ might expect. “It’s not general knowledge out of this way yet, but the Sollies sent a fleet—over four hundred ships-of-the-wall—to take out the Manticore System.”

Indiana’s eyes widened in shock and the beginning of dismay, but Harahap shook his head quickly.

“Didn’t work out very well for the Sollies,” he said with a thin smile. “As a matter of fact, Admiral Harrington handed them their asses, if you’ll pardon my language. Blew the hell out of them, and captured every surviving unit.”

Indiana sat back abruptly and Mackenzie’s eyes brightened.

“You kicked their asses?” Indiana asked. “Really?”

“Like they’ve never been kicked before,” Harahap assured him with a delight which was completely unfeigned. He suspected some of his actual superiors might have preferred for the Manties’ victory to have been just a tad less overwhelming, but that didn’t dampen
his
enthusiasm for seeing the SLN kicked flat on its back one single bit. Even when he’d worked for the Solarian Gendarmerie, Damien Harahap had loathed the Solarian League. It had simply been the best game in town.

The brother and sister looked at one another, and he was impressed by how well they controlled their obvious glee.
He
could see it, sitting across the table from them, but he doubted anyone else could.

“It’s going to be a while yet before anyone else on Seraphim knows about this,” he went on, not bothering to mention that the only reason
he
knew already was that more and more Mesan Alignment dispatch boats were equipped with the streak drive no one else possessed. “When it does, though, the transstellars are going to be more than a little unhappy. Especially since we’re busy closing down all the warp termini, as well.” He chuckled nastily. “The bottom’s about to fall out of a hell of a lot of the League’s interstellar economy, and people like Krestor Interstellar and Mendoza are going to take a hammering. For that matter, the
federal government’s
going to take an incredible beating when so much of its revenue stream goes belly up.”

Indiana and Mackenzie nodded in understanding, and he shrugged.

“The thing is—and the reason I’m here is—that things are moving faster than we ever really anticipated.” Which, he reflected, was damned well true. In fact, it was probably as true for a real Manticoran as it was for the Alignment at the moment! “That means we’ve got both additional opportunities and additional risks to think about.”

“I can see that.” Indiana’s expression was thoughtful, his tone cautious. “Exactly how does that affect us here in Seraphim, though? I mean, obviously it
does
, or you wouldn’t be here so far ahead of schedule.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Harahap acknowledged. “First though, have the weapons shipments gotten through all right?”

“Yeah.” Indiana nodded. “You took us by surprise by getting the first one in here so quickly, but everything’s worked like clockwork so far. We’ve gotten them out of the capital to a secure location, too. And we’ve started establishing secondary weapons caches now.” He shrugged slightly. “We’re still working out the best way to handle training our people, and I won’t pretend we wouldn’t like to have more guns to go around, but we’re in a lot better shape than I would’ve believed we could’ve been a few months ago.”

“Do you have an actual plan to
use
them?” Harahap asked, looking at Mackenzie this time, and she shrugged.

“We’ve got a long-range plan, a short-range plan, and at least a dozen contingency plans,” she said.

“What kind of timetable are you looking at?”

“For the long-range plan?” She snorted. “Try two or three T-years.”

“That’s not so good,” Harahap said.

“Depends on what you mean by ‘good,’” she responded. “It would take two or three T-years, yeah, but we figure the odds of success, even without fleet support from the Star Empire, would be three or four to one.”

“I can see where that would appeal to you,” he conceded. “On the other hand, a lot of things can change—or go wrong—in that long, which means odds can shift a lot. So what’s the time frame for your short-range plan?”

Indiana and Mackenzie looked at each other for a moment, then turned back to him.

“A minimum of ninety T-days,” Mackenzie said flatly. “A hundred and twenty would be a lot better. And, frankly, our chances of success without outside support would suck.”

“Um.” Harahap frowned down into his water glass for several seconds before he looked back up.

“Okay, cards on the table time. I don’t have complete information myself, I’m sure you both understand why that’s the case. But what I’ve been told is that the current strategic position is very favorable for our side. The problem is that like I just said, things can change, sometimes quickly. From what they’re telling me, I’m guessing—and it’s only a guess, not the kind of thing anyone would be confirming to someone at my level—that the Admiralty’s thinking in terms of going onto the offensive now that they’ve kicked the Sollies’ butts in Manticore.

“The reason I say that is that they want to accelerate all of the liberation movements we’ve been supporting. Not just you guys—
all
of them. Now, for some of them, that would be nothing short of outright suicide at this point, and in their cases I’m recommending that they don’t do anything of the sort. I’m not sure my bosses would be delighted to hear about that.” He smiled tightly. “On the other hand, my bosses aren’t out here, and I am. And, frankly, I don’t see where sending someone off half-cocked and getting them wiped out before we can get them any support is going to help anybody very much.”