Read Shadow of Victory - eARC Online
Authors: David Weber
His hand came out of his jacket…and he discovered just how grievous that misjudgment had truly been.
* * *
Despite his inner alarm system, Harahap hadn’t really expected a lethal weapon out of a ganger. Not that quickly. But there were certain advantages to spending thirty odd T-years in unsavory places doing unsavory things. He spun on the ball of his right foot, turning his back to the other without releasing his elbow lock. His spine rammed against the considerably taller man’s chest, pinning his right hand against his torso and inside his jacket, and his own right arm shot up with piledriver force. The heel of his hand slammed into Bochart’s jaw, shattering it and snapping his head back viciously.
That sledgehammer hand continued its upward thrust, and Harahap’s forearm snaked around the back of Bochart’s neck. His arm locked, his spine bent, and the heel of his right foot smashed into his would-be killer’s right kneecap as he jerked forward and down.
* * *
Grant’s surprise became shocked disbelief. Bochart’s nascent scream as his kneecap splintered ended before it was well begun in the sharp, clear crack of a breaking neck and his body flew forward over the target’s back. The vibro blade fell from his nerveless hand as he hit the sidewalk, whining as its blade sank effortlessly into the obsidian-tough ceramacrete before the auto cutoff killed it, and the man who was supposed to be already dying spun into Franz Gillespie like an outstandingly ordinary cyclone.
Gillespie saw him coming and his own vibro blade cleared his jacket with a lethal, ugly whine. That was as far as it got, though, before Harahap was upon him. One hand, far stronger than it looked, locked on the wrist of his knife hand. The other hand darted up, wrapped its fingers in his hair, and yanked his face down to meet a rising kneecap. Bone crunched, blood splattered, and Harahap pivoted, turning in place and yanking the half-blind, three quarters-stunned Gillespie past him.
The killer from Old Terra stumbled forward, directly into the nearer of the two locals, and both of them went down in a tangle of flailing limbs.
The second local gaped in astonishment as the neatly planned ambush disintegrated. He was still gaping when Harahap swept into him and a bladed hand crushed his larynx like a mallet. He reeled backward, hands clutching at his ruined windpipe, and Harahap twisted back towards his fallen partner.
Gillespie had risen to one knee, one hand clutching his demolished, broken face, trying to clear the blood from his eyes, while his other hand swept the ceramacrete, searching for his dropped vibro blade. The other local rolled to his feet with commendable quickness…only to meet the heel of Harahap’s shoe before he was fully upright. It crashed into his solar plexus, doubling him up, sending him back to his knees, and the gendarme captain brought the point of his elbow down on the nape of his neck like an ax.
* * *
It took Brandon Grant almost two-point-six seconds to reach his decision.
Fuck the plan!
His hand came out of his own jacket—and not with another ganger’s vibro blade—as the second Meyerite went down with a sodden thud. The pulser snapped up. It found its target, and his finger started to squeeze.
* * *
Harahap spun from the bloody-faced “ganger” still trying to find his feet as a burst of pulser darts shrieked past him. That hissing, hypervelocity scream was the sort of sound no one in his line of work was ever likely to mistake for anything else, and his eyes widened as the fifth and final ganger’s chest exploded in a vapor cloud of blood and shredded tissue.
The corpse was still falling and Harahap’s brain was still trying to catch up with his trained instincts when the same pulser fired again. This time it was only a single dart, not a burst, and Franz Gillespie went down again.
“I think you’d better come with me, Captain Harahap,” a voice said far too calmly, and Harahap looked up from the five sprawled corpses.
“Pine Mountain’s finest will be along shortly,” the fair-haired, gray-eyed man he’d never seen before in his life pointed out as he slid his weapon back into the concealment of his tailored tunic, “and I imagine they’ll have all sorts of questions you’d really rather not answer. I know I’d rather not, anyway. So…”
He half-bowed from the waist, flourishing one hand elegantly in an “after you” gesture, and pointed up the street.
* * *
“So perhaps you’d like to explain what the hell that was all about?” Harahap asked just a bit acidly fifteen minutes later.
The private air car his unknown rescuer had tucked away in an underground parking garage five minutes’ walk from the aborted ambush’s site sped swiftly through the Meyers sky. Under other circumstances, he might have been concerned about a police pursuit, but some strange malady had overtaken the security cameras covering the entire floor on which the air car had been parked. Somehow he hadn’t been as surprised as perhaps he should have been to see the blinking “disabled” lights.
At the moment, he sat in the front passenger seat, one hand inside his own tunic with its fingers curled around the comfort of a pulser butt. Not that he wasn’t grateful for his rescue, of course.
“That, I’m very much afraid, Captain,” the pilot said calmly, never looking away from his HUD, although he had to be aware of the weapon fifty centimeters from his ribcage, “was an attempt to tidy up loose ends. I’m sure you’re aware of how the process works.”
“And just what might make me a ‘loose end’?”
“Your recent Talbott activities. You know—the ones in places like Montana, Kornati, Mainwaring. Those activities.”
“Suppose I told you I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about?”
“Well, in that case, I imagine I’d have to conclude that at least one of us was an idiot. Or that he believed the other one was an idiot, anyway.” He smiled, turning to look at Harahap for the first time, and shook his head. “Since I know neither of us fit that description, I’m sure you don’t think I happened along by sheer coincidence.”
“No, I don’t,” Harahap conceded. “On the other hand, I’m still waiting to find out why you did happen along.”
“Ms. Anisimovna asked me to keep an eye on you,” the pilot said, and despite himself, Harahap’s nostrils flared.
“And why might Ms. Anisimovna have asked you to do that?” he asked after a moment.
“Because you needed looking after?” the other suggested with a broader smile, and—despite himself—Harahap felt himself smile back.
“Under the circumstances, I’ll give you that one,” he said. “But I’d still like to know what the hell is going on before you land this air car somewhere I might not like. So while I’m suitably grateful and all, maybe you’d better explain things in a little more depth.”
“If you like,” the other agreed. He locked the autopilot stud, putting the air car on its current flight plan, and slid his chair back from the console so he could turn it to face Harahap fully.
“First, my name is Rufino Chernyshev.” He saw the look in Harahap’s eyes and chuckled. “No, really it is! It’s not the one on my pilot’s license, of course, but since I’m inclined to hope we’ll wind up on the same team, I don’t really mind sharing it with you.”
Harahap nodded affably, although he could think of another reason Chernyshev might be willing to share his real name. After all, he’d have a hard time passing it along to anyone else if he ended up dead.
“The really, really short version of ‘what the hell is going on,’ is that the operation for which Major Eichbauer was kind enough to lend you to Ms. Anisimovna and her associates has misfired pretty spectacularly. It’s likely the fallout’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better, and at least some of those associates of hers are worried about getting their fingers burned. One of them decided to cut any strings that might lead back to his involvement. Ms. Anisimovna was afraid he might do that, which is why she asked me to look after you. Unfortunately,” Chernyshev’s expression tightened for a moment, “I wasn’t able to get to Major Eichbauer in time.”
“Ulrike’s dead?” Harahap’s voice was flat, almost disinterested, and his eyes showed no emotion at all, which anyone who knew him well would have recognized as a very bad sign.
“I’m afraid so.” Chernyshev shook his head. “I took out the team that killed her, but I got there a second or two too late. She was still alive, but she was going quickly and she knew it. She’d been on her way to your meeting, and the last thing she ever did was to tell me where that meeting was.” He met Harahap’s gaze levelly. “That’s the only reason I was able to get to you in time, Captain. Friends like that are worth having.”
“Yes, they are,” Harahap agreed. “And that’s why you’re going to tell me who ordered these hits.”
“You’re a resourceful man, Captain, but I doubt even you could get to him, especially if he knows you’re still alive. On the other hand, I represent an organization which almost certainly can get to him…when the time is right.”
“And this organization of yours sent you to rescue me out of pure altruism, I suppose?”
“Hardly!” Chernyshev snorted. “No, it sent me to rescue you because you’re a very valuable asset. You demonstrated that in Talbott, and the people I work for were impressed by your talents. I expect they’d like you to continue to work for them.”
“But you’re not sure about that.”
“Things have moved rather more swiftly than anyone expected when they handed me this assignment, Captain. I’m going to have to park you in a safe house until my instructions get updated.”
“What if I don’t want to be parked?” Harahap drew the pulser from his tunic and twitched its muzzle like a pointer. “I am a captain in the Gendarmerie, after all. Now that I know someone’s put a hit out on me, I’m sure I can manage to come in out of the cold in one piece.”
“Assuming your superiors aren’t as interested in cutting those threads as the person who sent those killers after you. Think about it. Major Eichbauer and you could have led the trail of breadcrumbs right back to Brigadier Yucel if someone made it worth your time, and there’s likely to be plenty of official disfavor to go around when Old Chicago starts untangling what’s happened out here. Do you really want to take a chance that Yucel wouldn’t see the upside of your permanent disappearance?”
“Point,” Harahap said after a moment. “On the other hand, Ms. Anisimovna could see the same thing.”
“She could,” Chernyshev agreed. “But our organization still wants what it wanted before, and we’re pretty sure what happened in Talbott wasn’t your fault. So why should Ms. Anisimovna throw away such a sharp, useful tool? Especially”—he smiled a bit thinly—“when the tool in question has nowhere else to go?”
Harahap bared his teeth in what was nominally a smile, but Chernyshev had a point. In fact, he had a very good point. Still…
“All right,” he said after thirty seconds, setting the pulser’s safety and sliding it back into the shoulder holster under his tunic. “All right, you’ve made your point, and you’re probably right. So take me to this safe house of yours. But first, tell me this. Who did order the hit? I may not be able to get to him now, but I’m a very inventive fellow. With enough time, I can get to anyone.”
“I believe you could, Captain Harahap,” Chernyshev agreed, head cocked to one side, his expression almost quizzical. “At the moment, all I can tell you is who I suspect was behind it. It might have been any one of several people, and it’s going to take a while to confirm exactly which one it is. I’ll be very surprised if it turns out to be someone else, though.”
“So will I,” Harahap said honestly. He recognized another consummate professional when he saw one.
“Well, bearing that caveat in mind, I’m reasonably certain it was Volkhart Kalokainos.” Chernyshev shrugged. “Kalokainos Shipping’s been just a little too openly involved in trying to break the Manties’ kneecaps for a long, long time now, and he’s invested just a bit too deeply in some operations which could cause him considerable embarrassment if they were brought to the League’s official attention. They could also cause the League—or the people who run it, anyway—considerable embarrassment, and Kolokoltsov and the others would throw him to the wolves in a heartbeat to prevent that. Besides, Kalokainos has more than enough enemies among the other transstellars. They’d make it worth Kolokoltsov’s while to hammer him on any pretext that offered.”
“And Jessyk and Manpower don’t have any enemies, I suppose?”
“Of course they do, but they aren’t Solly-based, either. The League doesn’t really have a hammer to bring down on them—not legally, anyway. The only people they have to worry about at the moment live in star nations that begin with the letter ‘M,’ Captain.”
“I imagine they do,” Harahap acknowledged after a moment and sat back in his seat. “All right, Mister Chernyshev. Take me to this safe house of yours.”
“Already on our way, Captain.” Chernyshev smiled broadly. “And, please, call me Rufino. I suspect we’ll be working closely with one another.”
March 1921 Post Diaspora
“Dust off your researching skills, Professor. Figure out where we can buy what I need to rip the throat out of my best friend’s political monument.”
—Tomasz Szponder,
Krucjata Wolonści Myśli
Chapter Two
“It’s your move, Edyta,” the blond, blue-eyed girl said, tapping the portable chess set squeezed into the armrest space between her seat and the next. “You do plan to move sometime today, don’t you?”
“Of course I do!” Edyta Sowczyk, four centimeters shorter, with dark eyes and bright chestnut hair, tore her attention away from the window beside her. “But there’s plenty of time for that! I want to see the spaceport!”
Karolina Kreft sighed and shook her head with an air of martyrdom. It wasn’t a very convincing sigh, all things considered. At fifteen, she was barely a year older than Edyta, and she rather suspected that her younger friend was quite a bit smarter than she was. Not that Karolina was a dummy, by any means. She wouldn’t have been invited on this special tour of the spaceport if she hadn’t been in the top two or three percent of her class. But Edyta had been accelerated a full year ahead of her age-mates, and she was still in the top two or three percent of their class.
She also regularly beat Karolina’s socks off at chess…when she could keep her mind on the game, anyway. And that, little though Karolina cared to admit it, was one reason she wanted Edyta to go ahead and move now. The trap she’d set for her opponent’s queen’s knight wasn’t something Edyta was likely to miss under normal circumstances. Under these circumstances, though…
“We’ll get to the spaceport when we get to the spaceport,” she said. “In the meantime, let’s go ahead and try to finish up this game.”
“Oh, all right.”
Edyta flounced around in her seat—she was small-boned and petite enough she actually had space to do that, despite how tightly packed the airbus was—and looked down at the chessboard. She reached out impatiently, then paused, fingertips millimeters away from her king’s bishop. She stayed that way for a moment, then withdrew her hand and settled back in her seat.
“That was sneaky, Karolina,” she said, toying with one of her pigtails’ cheap but pretty green ribbons. The holo pattern printed on it flashed in the sunlight, and she tilted her head to one side, considering the board. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’re trying to pick on my poor little knight.”
“Who, me?” Karolina tried her very best to sound innocent, not that she expected Edyta to buy it for a moment.
“Unless it was someone else who moved your queen,” Edyta said almost absently, her eyes very thoughtful. Then she reached out again, not for the bishop this time, but for her king’s knight, and Karolina puffed her lips in frustration as her trap fell apart.
* * *
“How much longer, Andrzej?”
Lukrecja Wolińska had to raise her voice to be heard over the excited chatter of more than a hundred kids.
The high school teacher sat directly behind the airbus driver. As one of the four chaperones attached to the tour group, she had the luxury of an empty seat beside her at the moment, since her seatmate, Roman Sowiński, was currently somewhere back along the crowded central aisle attempting to quell some of that chatter. His mission reminded Lukrecja of an Old Earth king named Canute, and he was welcome to it.
Lukrecja’s real job would start once they got the bus on the ground, and she felt more than a little trepidation as she contemplated it. All the kids on the tour were good kids, but they’d also been born and raised in the Projects. They were about to have the chance to peer, however briefly, through a window into the sort of opulent lifestyle they and their parents could scarcely even imagine. And it was going to be up to her to make sure they behaved themselves while they did that peering.
The good news was that any kid from the Projects understood on an almost cellular level that there were different sorts of rules for different sorts of people. They knew the families of the Oligarchia came from a world totally unlike their own, and they also knew there were…consequences to arousing an oligarcha’s ire. She could depend on them to be on their very best behavior. The problem was that the rules of behavior they’d been taught might not be adequate for today’s expedition.
Oh, stop worrying! she told herself, looking over her shoulder and smiling as she saw Edyta Sowczyk’s head bent over the chessboard between her and Karolina Kreft. They were two of the brightest spots in her teacher’s life, and she knew both of them—especially Edyta—could scarcely wait. In a sense, both of them had grown up in the spaceport’s shadow, since their parents worked—when they could find work—for the Stowarzyszenie Eksporterów Owoców Morza, which dominated the spaceport’s business. Then again, that was true one way or another of a lot of people in the Projects.
“Not much farther, Ms. Wolińska,” Andrzej Bicukowski, the airbus driver said, raising his own voice but never looking away from his HUD, “but there’s a traffic jam in the regular approach lanes.” He tapped the earbug tied into the Lądowisko Air Traffic net. “Sounds like a pair of air lorries tangled, and then a limo ran into them. ATC’s closed down the South Approach to a single lane. Don’t imagine anybody’s moving very fast along it, either, and this beast is a bit big to be threading any needles, so I’ve filed a diversion from our original route. It’ll bring us in from the east side of the port, over the SEOM warehouses along the river.” He grimaced. “It’s less scenic, but it’ll get your kids on the ground a lot quicker.”
“Quicker is good,” Lukrecja said with feeling, as the background chatter reached a new decibel level. “Quicker is very good.”
Bicukowski chuckled and the airbus turned into one of the tertiary approach lanes along the outer ring route.
* * *
“What the fuck does that idiot think he’s doing?” Wiktoria Lewandowska growled.
She stood in the Stowarzyszenie Eksporterów Owoców Morza’s main shipping and traffic control room glowering over one of the duty controller’s shoulders at the display. The orange icon moving across it showed no transponder code. That was true for quite a few of the icons on his display at the moment, probably because the air traffic crews and their computers were still trying to sort out the confusion of the worst midair collision in the last five or ten years. It wasn’t too surprising their systems were hiccupping, given the fact that a badly damaged air taxi had spun out of the fireball and impacted directly atop an automated air traffic relay station. But none of the other blank icons were intruding on her airspace. Oh, sure, the route along which it was headed was technically in a public transit lane, but it cut directly through SEOM’s airspace. Public or not, that air belonged to SEOM, and everybody damned well knew it!
“Probably another lorry trying to avoid that pileup on the South Approach, Ma’am,” the controller replied, putting her own thoughts into words. “Hard to be sure, of course. ATC’s being even slower than usual updating the feeds. Probably too busy trying to sort out the mess.”
“Well I don’t give a damn how busy Traffic Control is!” Lewandowska snapped. “That’s our airspace, and I’m sick and tired of having frigging gypsies drift through it anytime they damn well please!”
The controller considered—briefly—pointing out that there weren’t that many gypsy air lorries working the spaceport these days. The big transport lines had frozen them out again, and it was going to be months, at least, before they started getting a toe back into those particular waters. God only knew what they’d find to survive on in the meantime. In fact, quite a few of them probably wouldn’t survive at all. That always happened when the big boys shut down their access again. But it wasn’t his business to tell Wiktoria Lewandowska anything she didn’t want to hear.
“Tell him to clear our space right damned now,” she commanded.
“Already tried, Ma’am. He’s not answering on any of the standard freight channels.”
“He’s not?” Lewandowska turned her eyes from the display to glare at the unfortunate controller. “Why the hell not?”
“I don’t know, Ma’am,” the controller replied, very carefully not adding How the hell am I supposed to know? to his answer.
“Well, we’ll just see about that!” Lewandowska stepped back and keyed her personal com. “Give me Perimeter One,” she said.
* * *
Andrzej Bicukowski frowned and killed another fifty kilometers per hour of airspeed. It wasn’t unheard of for Lądowisko Air Traffic Control to get behind in the outlying sectors of the system capital, but it was unusual for them to drop the ball this close in to the heart of the city. Especially this close to the spaceport. The oligarchowie didn’t like it when their flight plans got screwed up, but it looked like that pileup on the South Approach must be even worse than he’d thought it was. Over a dozen emergency vehicles were headed into it now, and it sounded as if the automated system had gone on the fritz again. Every professional driver and pilot in Lądowisko knew the entire system needed to be replaced, but convincing the people who controlled the credit flow to spend the necessary money wasn’t the easiest thing in the world.
“Lądowisko Spaceport Control,” he said into his mike again, hoping like hell there might be at least one human backing up the automatics. “Marianna Tours One-Zero-Niner requests copy confirmation of flight plan update. Repeat, Marianna Tours One-Zero-Niner requests copy confirmation of flight plan update.”
He sat back, the fingers of one hand drumming lightly on the control column, then growled a mild obscenity under his breath as a red icon pulsed in his HUD.
Great! Not enough they won’t talk to me, but now the transponder’s gone down! What a time for the update feeds to shut down!
He slowed the airbus still further, going to Visual Flight Rules. Fortunately, visibility was excellent.
* * *
“Yes, Control,” Kazimierz Łukaszewski said. “Perimeter One copies.”
He punched the button, dropping his orbiting air car out of automatic and checked his displays. There it was. The fat-assed orange icon lumbering across SEOM’s private airspace wasn’t even trying to clear the perimeter quickly. It was just ambling right through the middle of the airspace SEOM paid perfectly good money for. Ms. Lewandowska was right. It was about damned time the gypsies learned their lesson.
* * *
Lieutenant Ludwik Kezczyński,
Siły Zbrojne Włocławka
, growled in disgust and came around for another circle of the spaceport. He’d just completed a four-hour training mission, and he was more than ready to put his sting ship back on the ground and hand it over to the ground crew. Not only had it been boring as hell, but he had a hot date waiting, and Pelagia wasn’t the sort who cared to be kept waiting by a mere lieutenant in the planetary armed forces. He didn’t think she’d be impressed when he said “I tried, Honey!”
He checked his display, and his ill temper eased just a bit as he realized the pileup was even worse than he’d thought it was. There were over a dozen vehicles involved, they’d landed all over the ground traffic lanes, some of them in bits and pieces, and at least three of them—not to mention what looked like a couple of ground lorries—were on fire. No wonder ATC was tearing its hair while it tried to sort out the mess. And they weren’t going to get that done anytime soon, either. It looked like Pelagia was just going to have to—
His train of thought hiccuped as he noticed the icon swooping down from the north-northeast at a dangerous rate of speed. It was the sort of maneuver a trained military pilot noticed, and he punched a command into his sensor suite, then frowned. The transponder said it was a civilian air car, all right, but its emission signature matched that of a
Skrzydło Jastrząb
forward reconnaissance vehicle, which mounted a pair of thirty-millimeter pulse cannon and provision for up to six underwing missiles. What the hell was it doing screaming down like a bat out of hell that way?!
“Lądowisko Spaceport Control, Stingship Alpha-Five-Charlie requests priority direct link to civilian air car Oscar-Mike-Sierra-Echo-Seven-One!”
* * *
Kazimierz Łukaszewski’s lips drew back in an anticipatory smile as the icon swelled rapidly in the center of his display. It still wasn’t flashing a transponder, and he checked his approach angle carefully. Perfect. He was coming in from the land side of the Szeroka Rzeka estuary. His little demonstration would have plenty of deep, empty water in which to land.
* * *
“Alpha-Five-Charlie, Lądowisko Spaceport Control.” The voice in Lieutenant Kezczyński’s earbug sounded more than a little harried. “Trying to get you that link, but things are a little confused just now.”
“Lądowisko Control, Alpha-Five-Charlie copies, but you’d better expedite. I don’t know what this idiot thinks he’s doing, but—”
* * *
Łukaszewski was old-school. Or he liked to think of himself that way, anyhow. What he really wished was that he’d been born on Old Earth back when aircraft were made of canvas and wire and the only fire control they had was the human eye. It had taken men to fly those contraptions!
Under the circumstances, he decided, he could allow himself a small treat, and he disengaged the fire control computer and activated the manual trigger button on his flight column.
* * *
A proximity alarm screamed, and Andrzej Bicukowski stared in horror at the projected flight paths on his short-scan radar. There was no time to ask ATC what was happening. There wasn’t even time to hit the seatbelt warning sign.
He slammed the throttle wide open and heaved the huge airbus around to port, circling across the estuary in a frantic effort to avoid the midair collision.
* * *
“Oh, Christ—no!”
Lieutenant Kezczyński’s face went white as the airbus in the Marianna Tours livery turned sharply left, away from the oncoming “civilian” air car. He understood instantly what the bus driver was doing, and why. And under normal circumstances, it would have been the right thing to do.
Today, it was exactly the wrong thing.
* * *
“Oh, shit!” Kazimierz Łukaszewski screamed. He tried—he really tried—to get his finger off the trigger, but it was a lifetime—a hundred lifetimes—too late.
The airbus swerving to avoid a midair collision with his air car flew straight into the “warning burst” of pulser fire and disintegrated in a blinding ball of flame.