I crossed my arms. “Are you done?”
The Duck crossed his arms. “Are you?”
“Perhaps he is, Consul. But I am only beginning.” Celline stood in the doorway that led to the apartment’s second room.
Clothes may not make the woman, but they make a duchess if she looks the part to start with. Celline was so pure-blood royal on both sides of her family tree that her rank survived her father’s death. Chin high, Celline, fifty-seventh Inheritrix of the Duchy of Northern Iridia, and last surviving successor to the common throne of the Unified Duchies of Iridia, lit the gritty tenement. Her business suit was the color of a fawn in autumn, and her blond hair was drawn back so that her eyes looked bigger and greener. Her jewels of rank, as if she needed any, were what the netbloids would call understated, a tiara set with grape-sized emeralds that matched her eyes.
I held my breath, partly because, well, Celline merited it. Partly because we couldn’t produce jack squat in the way of credentials if the Duck didn’t believe Celline was the duchess.
The Duck stared at her.
My heart pounded.
“Your Grace favors her mother.” The Duck bowed.
I exhaled.
Celline cocked her head and smiled. “You are too kind. Have we had the pleasure?”
The Duck didn’t have to work at smiling. “I would surely remember, Your Grace.”
I leaned toward Jude and whispered, “She’s really good at this.”
He whispered back, “I liked her better barefoot.”
After ten minutes of diplomatic slap and tickle, Celline turned and motioned to two vacant chairs in the room’s corner. “Sit with us, Mr. Muscovy.” After they sat, she crossed her legs, then knit her fingers over her knee. “Consul, we must inquire as to the union’s intentions as a cosigning guarantor of the Armistice.”
The Duck cocked his head. “Your Grace?”
“We are not rabble. We are the duly constituted government of Iridia. We no longer require Tressen assistance to maintain order. We intend to expel Tressen by such force as required, as is our right.”
The Duck nodded. “That is your right. That is what the union agreed to.” He glanced across the room, where deaf old Pytr stood guard at the window with a single-shot pistol. “But I’m not authorized to alter the current-ah-imbalance of force.”
Celline shook her head. “We’re not asking for star-ships, Mr. Muscovy. Or for unrewarded charity.” Celline leaned toward the Duck and gave him a look that, I suspected, had been the last thing many a sea monster had seen. “Give us the tools to defeat these butchers and we’ll give the union Cavorite to choke on.”
A smile and a tiara will get a girl only so far, even with a man of conscience. In the subsequent negotiation, the Duck insisted on Cavorite first, within a month, tools of revolution after. The Spooks would prime the pump with a sprinkling of weapons, communications gear, and intelligence dope. America had handed out under-the-table party favors like that since the Cold War. But there would under no circumstances be any military or Spook hands-on participation, not even real-time intelligence if things heated up, except to haul away Cavorite when and if my new boss and her “reformed government” delivered.
Considering that my new boss’s negotiating muscle consisted of maybe a double handful of resistance fighters as fierce as old Pytr, we shouldn’t have expected any more generous terms. The Duck had no choice but to hedge his long-shot bet, which he was placing with his employer’s chips. If we failed, the Human Union needed to be able to plausibly deny connection with these misguided rebels when it knuckled under to the RS, and to knuckle under fast.
So job one was to deliver Tressel’s weapons-grade Cavorite to the Human Union within a month. But a planet’s a big place, and I didn’t even know where to start. However, I knew who did.
FIFTY-ONE
WITH THE SPOOKS’ HELP, I met Howard Hibble the next day, at the Tressen National Museum of Natural History, a logical place for a person of Howard’s peculiar predilections to visit. I found him in a basement storage room that reeked of formaldehyde.
Howard was standing on tiptoe, reading labels of shelved specimens, when I closed the door behind us and locked it.
Howard said, “What a great place! Couldn’t you just spend the day?”
“Howard, we have twenty minutes before your Ferrent tail figures out that isn’t you upstairs in the library.”
Howard reshelved a jar packed with trilobites the size of kosher dills, then sighed. “That’s not the only clock that’s running.”
“What have you heard?”
“Nothing. That’s the problem. We have no idea how the Pseudocephalopod will use its new Cavorite. Our best alternative is to do unto It before It does unto us.”
“Which we want to help you with.”
“We?”
“I’m retired now.”
“I heard that. They say the dental plan’s awful.”
“I take it that the Tressel Cavorite fall didn’t land in the middle of nowhere. If it had, you would have just snuck down here, mined what you needed, and snuck away. Without telling the Tressens a thing.”
Howard’s eyes widened. “You think I’d do that?”
“Not think. Know.”
He sighed. “The Joint Intelligence Directorate wouldn’t let me.”
“Assuming we can deal with the fall’s location, wherever it is, what will it take to get the meteorites out?”
“Weapons-grade Cavorite behaves like it’s less dense even than the Stone Hills Cavorite we mine on Bren. Each meteorite’s as light as a tennis ball, so they don’t burrow or burst on impact, like nickel-iron meteorites would. The fall took place forty thousand years ago, give or take. But the environment around it is static. We estimate that forty-two percent of the bolides remain at or near their individual points of impact, exposed on the surface. We designed these terrific ’bots that would scuttle around the surface and harvest them like tomatoes.”
“Where are your ’bots now?”
“ Pasadena.”
“ California?”
“Actually, there’s just the prototype. It cost as much as a main battle tank.”
I sighed. “Could people just go around and pick the rocks up off the ground?”
“That would be simpler, wouldn’t it?”
“How long would that take?”
He shrugged. “Depends on how many pickers you have. If you had a thousand pickers, a week or so. Once the bolides were gathered to a central point, one Scorpion could fly in, pick up the whole kaboodle, and be gone inside an hour.”
I narrowed my eyes. “That’s too easy.”
Howard sighed. “I haven’t told you where the Cavorite fell.”
FIFTY-TWO
TWO WEEKS LATER, pounded by a two a.m. downpour, Aud Planck and I carried cheap civilian suitcases down an alley in Tressia’s old town. Despite healing accelerants, Aud gritted his teeth as he disguised his limp, more so because he, like me, had to pretend his suitcase was no heavier than a normal traveler’s valise.
From other compass points, Jude and Celline, and six other groups of two, converged on our destination, with the modest objective of saving the human race and the more local benefit of beginning the end of Republican Socialism on Tressel.
We rounded a street corner and bent forward into the wind that drove the cold rain. Down the cobbled pavement of the dark street we entered snaked a double line of people bent like us, bundled like us, and carrying luggage like us.
We slipped into the line, and a shivering woman, clutching a scarf around her head, leaned out to peer toward the line’s head. “How much farther?”
A chubby soldier alongside the line motioned her back into her place. “Not far. Not far now. These coaches will be crowded, but when you get off, there will be stoves where you can dry your wet clothes.”