‘Your presence is required in Capitas, sir,’ the messenger informed him smartly. Tynan wondered idly if his visitor was Rekef. If he himself had become a serious inconvenience, then he might even disappear conveniently without ever reaching the capital.
‘Of course,’ was all he said. ‘May I bid farewell to my family?’
‘I am sent to fetch you urgently, General,’ said the messenger, without sympathy.
Fight! Run! But he knew he would do neither. It was not his years in themselves, but the ingrained sense of duty they had gifted him with. He would submit to his fate. He would serve the Empire, as always.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, and began to plod towards the automotive.
Across the Empire, soldiers moved: companies on the march or travelling by automotive, airship or rail; specialist detachments from the Engineers or the Slave Corps split off from their strongholds, assigned to one army or another. Materiel was stockpiled and weapons were tested. Quartermasters and Consortium merchants shuffled commodities and supplies like decks of cards.
Outside the Empire itself, what moved was information. The spies and their handlers sent reports in, the tacticians and spymasters sent orders out across the known world. Agents who had lived a comfortable life under a secret identity received word that they should ready themselves to strike, to disappear, to begin manipulating their carefully hoarded contacts. Others, already hard at work, received definite instructions. The time is now.
Not everyone in Solarno was intent on living the high life. Major Garvan lived in a poor garret, a single room whose one window looked onto the wall of the building opposite. Not for Garvan the scintillating waters of the Exalsee. A bed, a rickety desk, poor meals and scraping together a few standards each week for the food and the rent. There was a surprising number of Wasps in Solarno, but the rich ones were always watched. The Solarnese could not imagine an Imperial agent of any standing not living like one of the Aristoi, if only to share in the gossip of the moneyed classes. Most of the Wasp-kinden there were poor, though, refugees from the internal troubles in the Empire, fugitives from the Empress’s wrath. There were enough of them — angry, disenfranchised and sometimes violent — that the Cortas, Solarno’s baffling twin engines of government, were considering making some laws about them. For now, though, they provided a perfect cover for an army intelligence officer.
Army Intelligence had always trodden a narrow line, not regular soldiery but decidedly junior to the Rekef. Before the war, they had served as the eyes and ears of each army, ostensibly more trustworthy than the Rekef Outlander, though in truth many held a rank in both services. During the Lowlands Campaign, however, the Rekef had gone berserk, tearing at itself in a series of brutal culls so that the genuine spy-work had often been left to Army Intelligence. Those officers who had distinguished themselves now found themselves with an uncertain authority, placed in command of important operations like the Solarno gambit, and yet with no assurance that some strutting Rekef man would not turn up and take it all over, the moment results started coming in.
Garvan was better than most at the espionage game. Garvan was used to living with lies and secrets, and the keystone of the major’s secrets was known by not one other living soul, a situation that Garvan intended to maintain. It irked the major that the various Imperial agents in Solarno — many of them not Imperial citizens at all — lived considerably more affluent lives, and even more so when Garvan had to pay out from the Empire’s coffers to keep them that way, while living in this wretched hole. Most of the agents probably found it funny, thinking back on it as they wined and dined and made polite conversation with their opposite numbers.
Intelligence Corps codes were rugged and practical, encrypted by letter substitution and then again by reference to a memorized number sequence. Nothing fancy, and the document itself had looked like nothing but an encrypted message. The army preferred functionality to Rekef subtlety. The slip of paper had been decoded, then burned and, as the flames died, Garvan was smiling a hard smile. At last the orders were in that would wrap up this operation, and where would all those pampered agents go for their next fine meal then?
A mirror hung on one of the few vertical walls of the garret, an odd piece of vanity but a necessary one. Garvan scrutinized the reflection there, seeing that familiar, slightly weathered face with its constant faint just-shaved blue about the cheeks and chin. Not a striking face, but that made it a good face for a spy.
Garvan sighed, hands slipping under the poor much-darned Wasp’s tunic to adjust the strap that flattened down her breasts. Twenty years living like this, and still it pinched. Her mother had been a camp whore with the Sixth, and she had grown up around soldiers, seen how they spoke, how they walked. She had seen, too that while they swore and complained and died, they still lived better than their enemies — or their women.
The Twelve-year War had been a good time to find spare uniforms, provided you didn’t mind stripping the dead, and there were always soldiers getting separated, then joining up with other detachments. The girl her mother had called Gesa had become the soldier Garvan, a boy too young to need to shave, but who could swear with the best of them. Always she had driven herself harder, taken more soldier’s risks to cover the woman’s risks that nobody knew she was taking. In that way she had been promoted. In that way she had been put to use by the intelligencers. Going alone into enemy territory to spy and scout was dangerous, but the duty relieved her of the constant threat of discovery. She spent her war fighting on two fronts.
For all she knew, there were dozens of women engaged in exactly the same deception, but if she had ever met one, they had not been so poor at it for her to know it.
But now she was a major and, if she had no close friends, she had some very impressed superiors. The Solarno mission was of far greater importance to the Empire than the mere city itself would suggest. She knew there were wheels within wheels, even if she did not know quite who was spinning them. A lot of her work involved ensuring that certain missives reached her superiors in the Empire, and she was not supposed to have worked out that they all came from across the Exalsee.
She straightened her tunic, the very picture of a down-at-heels Wasp-kinden man, a little slighter of build than most, but not unusually so. Living a soldier’s life had made Garvan strong and robust.
Now she would take her other tunic and wash it in a fountain somewhere, to the annoyance of the locals, and hang it out of her window to dry. Soon after that signal she would be meeting with her agents, some of them here in the garret, others elsewhere at pre-set places and times. She felt an old, familiar excitement. The Empire was on the move again, at last.
A few days later, and there were some empty tables at the Taverna te Remi. Just a couple maybe, but the place had been full to the brim all winter, each spot taken by its own band of intelligencing illuminati, the network of loyalties and hostilities drawing a political map of the world in miniature.
‘Te Gressi’s gone, and all that mob,’ Breighl observed. ‘That surprises me.’
‘They were merchant factors out of Dirovashni. They were after aviation designs, but not enough to get knifed,’ Liss declared with confidence.
‘Well, whatever — they’ve gone.’ He was speaking more quietly than usual. Everyone in the taverna was, as though the future might overhear them.
‘That Scorpion Valek,’ te Riel added. ‘Valthek? Vathek, was it?’
‘Back to Toek Station,’ Laszlo said, a guess, although he tried to sound authoritative. ‘Good work to be had keeping watch to the north, but then you’d know that.’
Te Riel stared at him flatly. ‘I don’t work for the Empire, Laszlo. Let it alone.’