It was the last thing she ever saw.
* * *
Frinkelo Osborne stood on the landing platform of SEIU Tower, his face hard and set as he watched fresh smoke billow up to join the dense, choking cloud hovering above the Loomis System’s capital. Over twenty percent of Elgin’s buildings had taken at least some damage, he thought disgustedly. MacQuarie insisted it wasn’t that bad, and it was possible his own estimate was high because of the revulsion and fury boiling through his brain, but he didn’t think so. She was a liar trying to cover her own arse, and she was going to have plenty of covering to do now that the shooting was over. Just what he could see from his present vantage point was going to cost billions to repair, and the damage her in Elgin was nothing compared to what Captain Venelli’s KEWs—not to mention the UPS’ kill teams—had done to the rest of the planet. He remembered his conversation with Venelli in Hoplite’s briefing room and his right hand rose, touching the hard angularity of the holstered pulser under his left armpit.
Tempting, so tempting. He could walk into Zagorski’s penthouse office and no one would think twice about admitting him. And once he got there…
He took his hand away from the pistol again and grimaced bleakly. The thought might be tempting, but he wasn’t about to act on it, and he knew it. Just as he knew the real reason he wanted to paint Nyatui Zagorski’s office walls with his brains.
Osborne had served OFS well, for longer than he liked to remember, but this was the worst. Somehow he’d always managed to avoid the details like this one, but now he’d climbed down into the sewer with the worst of them, and he’d never be clean again.
And the worst of it, he thought in the cold, cruel light of honesty, is that now that I’ve done it once, it’ll be easier the next time. And if I stay with it long enough, there will be a next time. There always is.
He stood for another few minutes, gazing at the blazing apartment building, wondering how much longer it would stand before its skeleton collapsed into the inferno, wondering if there was anyone still alive inside that furnace, praying for death.
Then he turned and walked silently away.
* * *
It was still and dark in the smoke-choked sewer under the city of Elgin. There was no light, no movement…no life. Not any longer, and a data chip folio settled slowly, slowly through the bloody water into the sludge below.
March 1922 Post Diaspora
“Trust me, the hole would’ve been a hell of a lot deeper!”
—Ensign Helen Zilwicki,
Royal Manticoran Navy
Chapter Three
“Just a second, Gwen,” Captain Loretta Shoupe said as she followed Lieutenant Gervais Winton Erwin Neville Archer out of Admiral Augustus Khumalo’s office space aboard HMS Hercules.
Gervais had just finished delivering a late-hour briefing to Khumalo and Shoupe, his chief of staff. There’d been a lot of those briefings over the last three weeks, and it didn’t look like getting better anytime soon. The entire Spindle System was still somewhere between astonishment and euphoria over the devastating defeat Admiral Gold Peak’s Tenth Fleet had inflicted on the Solarian League Navy, but the Navy remained too busy to celebrate as it scrambled frantically to deal with the enormous flood of POWs it had so suddenly and unexpectedly acquired. Despite which—or perhaps because of which, given the exhaustion quotient of her crew—the ancient superdreadnought flagship of the recently created Talbott Station was quiet around them.
“Yes, Ma’am?” Gervais replied, turning to face her.
“You know Ensign Zilwicki pretty well, don’t you, Gwen?” Shoupe’s tone made the question a statement, Gervais thought, and wondered where she was headed.
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said again. Despite the monumental rank disparity between a mere ensign and a senior-grade lieutenant, he’d come to know young Zilwicki, Sir Aivars Terekhov’s flag lieutenant, very well, as a matter of fact.
“I thought you did,” Shoupe said now. She actually looked a bit uncomfortable, but she went on steadily. “The reason I ask is that—like everyone else, I suppose—Commander Chandler and I are trying to get some kind of handle on this story coming out of Mesa. I don’t want to intrude on her or pressure her, but the truth is that we really need any insight she could give us about this.”
Gervais nodded respectfully, despite a quick flare of anger. Commander Ambrose Chandler was Khumalo’s staff intelligence officer, and like Captain Shoupe, he was usually on Gervais’ list of good people. And Gervais even understood exactly why they were looking for any “insight” they could get. The horrendous ’fax stories about what the Solly newsies had dubbed the “Green Pines Atrocity” had reached Spindle the day after the battle—less than nineteen hours after Admiral O’Cleary’s surrender, in fact—and he didn’t envy Admiral Khumalo or Baroness Medusa (or, for that matter, Lady Gold Peak) when it came to dealing with this one’s implications. None of which him any happier about where he was pretty sure Shoupe was headed.
“Yes, Ma’am?” he said in as neutral a voice as he could manage.
“I don’t want you to grill her, Gwen,” Shoupe replied with an edge of sharpness. “But it’s obvious just from what we’ve heard from home that this story’s already making problems—big problems—where Solly public opinion is concerned. For that matter, the local Solly newsies are starting to ask the Governor and the Prime Minister for their reactions to ‘Manticoran involvement in the atrocity,’ as if anyone out here would have a clue even if the Star Empire had been behind something like that!” She snorted in disgust. “What makes them think we could know more than they do, given the communications loop, or that we’d’ve been briefed in on a black op like this—assuming anyone back home could’ve been stupid enough to sanction it—completely eludes me, but there it is.”
She shrugged. It was an angry, frustrated gesture, Gervais noted.
“On top of that, we’re less than two hundred and sixty light-years from Mesa,” she went on. “No one expects the Mesans to launch some kind of retaliatory strike at us, but they’re for damned straight going to play it for all it’s worth in the League. And given how far they’ve already gone to destabilize the Quadrant, there’s no telling how else they might try to capitalize on it. For one thing, I think we can be pretty damned sure they’re going to be flogging their version of what happened to every independent star system in hopes of keeping any more of them from siding with us or being ‘neutral’ in the Star Empire’s favor. It looks like the Solly newsies are fully prepared to help them do it, too, to be honest, and we need to be able to knock that on the head. While I doubt Ensign Zilwicki’s in a position to shed any light on what actually happened in Green Pines, any window into what her father might have been doing—really doing, I mean—to lead Mesa to make this kind of claim could be extraordinarily useful.”
“I haven’t discussed it with her, Ma’am,” Gervais said. “I haven’t seen her face-to-face since the story hit Spindle, and, to be honest, it wasn’t something I wanted to discuss with her over the com. My understanding is that it’s been months since she actually saw her father, though, and frankly, I doubt she’d be able to add anything much to what we already know.”