It took another change of appearance using the last set of clothes and cosmetics in the bag and another relocation before Morgan was able to check over some of the files she had pilfered. Drakon wanted her to get in touch with and organize any possible sources of resistance to Haris on this planet. If such people existed, the snakes were probably already watching them. All she had to do was evaluate the snake files to see which ones under suspicion were probably actually disloyal to Haris.
She frowned as she scanned the data. Over a week ago, the snakes had started hauling in a lot of the people whose files she had downloaded. The usual suspects were being rounded up, along with many others. Something must have triggered that, but there was no hint of what that something might be in any of the files.
Morgan checked the time, annoyed by what she saw. She had been on the ground for three hours, and aside from successfully infiltrating the planet, breaking into the ISS files, downloading everything she needed, uploading various malware that might escape the notice of the ISS, and killing one snake, she had hardly accomplished anything yet.
Still, as the old underground joke went, what did you call one dead snake?
A good start.
Gwen Iceni stood in her office, facing the grand virtual window that dominated one wall. Once, the window had shown a cityscape, as if looking out upon a large metropolis from a vantage point in a high building, the image changing in real time as each day wore on. A real window in that wall would have shown only rock, or perhaps armor, since her entire office was buried and well fortified against attack.
She had never really worried about whether the city in the false window was real, and if so where it was really located, or whether it was just some computer-generated fantasy. It still represented her reality in a way, that what lay outside her office was not terribly important. It was just one more planet, one more place to work in before she moved on to somewhere else. Perhaps even to wherever that city was.
But, soon after the revolt against the Syndicate, Iceni had changed the view to show a beach here on Midway. A beach she knew really existed, one in the same latitude and not too far north of here, so the sunrises and sunsets and weather were the same as on the surface of the planet outside her office. She had kept the view there, and now stood watching the small waves roll in over the white beach, no two moving exactly the same or reaching the exact same height up the beach before falling back into the mass of the sea.
Like human lives, perhaps, reaching out of the universe’s mass of… something… to reach for… something… before their brief span was done, no two the same, most of them causing only the smallest changes, though every once in a while great waves driven by the storm would change the beach in a way that endured for some time. And then they were gone.
Hell, aren’t I the moody one today? Iceni thought. Maybe I feel another storm coming.
A voice spoke out of the air around her. “Madam President, Captain Bradamont has arrived.”
“Send her in.” As Bradamont entered, Iceni kept her eyes on the waves, then finally turned and faced the Alliance officer. “Good afternoon, Captain.”
“Good afternoon, Madam President.” Bradamont, looking as out of place as ever in her Alliance fleet uniform, also revealed some curiosity. “You requested that I come to see you?”
“Yes.” Iceni walked back to her desk and sat down, waving Bradamont to a chair as well. “Do you realize the level of irony that you encapsulate, Captain?”
“Probably not.” Bradamont took her seat, then gave Iceni a speculative look. “Do you mean the fact that I’m helping a former Syndicate star system fight off its enemies?”
“That’s just part of it.” Iceni waved again, and the star display sprang to life, many stars hanging in silent splendor in the air to one side of her desk. “The biggest part is this. You are an officer of the enemy, the Alliance, the force that the Syndicate, that people like me, fought and hated and killed and were killed by, for the last century. And you are also the only person in this star system that I can completely trust.”
“Surely—”
“No, not General Drakon or my closest aides or anyone else in this star system can have my full trust. In fact, all of my training and experience cautions me that the less trust I place in them the better.” Iceni leaned back. “I suppose that feels very alien to you.”
Bradamont crooked a smile. “Not compared to the enigmas. Madam President, I have worked for or with more than one person in Alliance circles who seemed to personify the same concepts of not trusting anyone. I do have trouble grasping the idea of an entire society organized along those lines.”
“Even after being here awhile?” Iceni gestured toward the door. “You left your bodyguards outside. You’ve become accustomed to having bodyguards accompany you whenever you leave the ground forces headquarters complex, and you didn’t question that those bodyguards did not come in here.” She touched a control on her desk and a slight rumbling transmitted through the walls and doors. “At a single command, I can turn this office into the equivalent of a citadel on one of our battleships. There is that much armor, that many active and passive defenses, built into it. Right now, it would take an immense amount of effort to break into here.”
Bradamont looked around, impressed. “It’s amazingly well concealed. You have those defenses because of the enigma threat?”
“Every star system CEO has an office like this, Captain. Because we fear our own citizens, the people, more than we fear the Alliance or the enigmas.” Iceni touched the control again, deactivating the defenses. “That’s what I want to talk to you about. Not my warships, but the people.”
“Your people?”
Iceni hesitated, then nodded. “Yes. My people. That’s hard to say. I’m not supposed to care about the workers. They’re just another form of spare part. When one breaks, you throw it away and get another, and the fewer resources you invest in them, the better.” She made a face. “It’s supposed to be efficient, but as far as I can tell, it leads to immense inefficiencies. That’s a problem I’m trying to correct.”
“General Drakon shares your assessment of that problem,” Bradamont said.
“Yes. That is one of the factors that led me to first reach out to him as a potential ally.” Iceni rested her elbows on her desk and clasped her hands in front of her, looking at Bradamont over them. “Here’s the core of my problem, one that I can only talk about to you. Any government rests on certain legs. The more legs, the more stable it is. A traditional Syndicate star-system government depends on four legs for stability. One is the CEOs, another is the Internal Security Service, the third is the mobile forces, and the fourth is the ground forces. If one of those legs falters, the other three keep the government stable, keep the citizens in line through fear and coercion, although frankly the snakes don’t falter very often.”
Bradamont nodded, her eyes intent with thought. “In the Alliance, our star-system governments depend upon support from the people, the different branches of the government itself, the business community, out of self-interest, and backup from the Alliance government if they need assistance. I guess that adds up to a lot more than three legs.”