“This is the last time I’m going to say this, Austin. Don’t butt in. Let this play out. You don’t have all the facts.”
“Yes, sir,” Austin said, having no intention of ignoring a friend in danger. Manfred Leclerc was a decent man. Austin had to help straighten this out—and find out what intrigue his father was involved in. He had the uneasy feeling that Sergio knew more about Hanna’s and Dale’s deaths than he was letting on.
He quickly left the office, closing the doors behind him. Tortorelli and Elora had already vanished. Austin considered following the Minister, then knew it would do him no good to spy on her. She was the expert at such things. Whatever he saw or overheard would be exactly what Elora wanted him to know.
“Damn her,” Austin exclaimed. Office workers turned at his outburst. He smiled weakly and waved them back to work. She was the master spy, always rooting about for news. She might have had him followed to the ’Mech factory, or she might have known earlier of his visit, since it had hardly been a state secret. He took a deep, settling breath.
Austin had to find Manfred Leclerc before Elora whipped up a vigilante mob, and knew only one place to begin his search. Stride lengthening as his resolve hardened, Austin left the Palace. He needed to don some camouflage before the hunt.
18
Blood Hills Barracks, outside Cingulum
Mirach
1 May 3133
The huge unwinking disk of the springtime sun splayed across the western horizon, confusing the eye with strange crimson wavelengths and allowing twilight to sneak in to claim the rugged land for night. To the north, glaciers had retreated forty thousand years earlier, leaving behind steep valleys with rounded bottoms and more minerals than could be mined in any man’s lifetime. To the east a plain stretched to the Marabot Ocean. This ragged plain was all that looked familiar to Austin Ortega. As a child, he had hiked there and knew how deceptive it could be. Small ferocious animals snapped at unwary hikers’ ankles and the dearth of water made a trek of any distance hazardous. Southward lay the capital of Cingulum, the city where Austin had been born.
Mirach was a cold, obscure world ignored by most of The Republic, but to Austin it was home. Savage weather, wan sun, oceans dotted year-round with icebergs—it was the perfect training ground for a warrior. In spite of this, Austin felt he had been shortchanged. He wasn’t a warrior, not like Dale had been.
Stop that, he thought. It did no good dwelling on what he thought were his shortcomings. If he didn’t stay positive about uncovering the information he needed, he would certainly fail. Austin wasn’t going to let Manfred Leclerc take the fall for the attack at Industrial Giants.
This set off a new circuit of thoughts. He had to prevent his friend from being used as a pawn in Elora’s power game, but there was more to his mission. Austin reluctantly admitted he wanted to prove he wasn’t useless to his father. Sergio Ortega was a decent man, a great man in many ways, who had guided Mirach through good times and bad. But he was pigheaded and never admitted he was wrong. Austin couldn’t convince his father that a good Governor was not only beneficent, but also able to rule with an iron hand when necessary. The demonstrations across Mirach were growing in violence now, and yet Sergio had failed to quell them.
A battalion of battle armor patrolling the cities would do the trick, Austin thought. That would keep the hotheads from whipping up the fear that threatened the stability of an entire world. Seeing companies of the Legate’s finest marching through the capital would also put an end to Lady Elora’s verbal tinkering. No riots, no paranoia about being cut off from the rest of The Republic, and she would become a toothless tiger.
But Sergio continued to counsel Tortorelli not to deploy troops. His one concession to restoring order had been to send out the police, but Austin saw this as too little, too late. The police had no stomach for trying to control the uncontrollable.
Austin snapped back from his reverie when he almost missed the turn in the road. He careened through the curve, fighting the controls and finally righting the car. Then he opened up the throttle and whirred along to the barracks at better than two hundred kilometers per hour. All too soon, he saw the rotating blue and yellow lights atop the guardhouse and knew he had to slow down. More than a klick away, he took his foot off the accelerator. Speed peeled away like layers of an onion, bringing him to a reasonable pace by the time he could make out the individual guards on duty. Austin braked and brought the car to a halt beside the guard standing duty on incoming traffic.
“Sir, good evening,” the guard said. She bent over and peered into the car. “Just you?”
“Returning from R and R,” he lied. Austin had pulled out his uniform from storage, the one he thought he would never wear again, and had put it on for this charade. Although he was no longer entitled to wear the black-and-silver, it surprised him how right it felt.
“What unit?” she asked, frowning a little.
He started to say he served under Captain Leclerc, then caught himself. Even if Manfred hadn’t been in serious trouble, that wouldn’t have been an acceptable response. The FCL was being broken up, the soldiers deployed to smaller units all over the continent of Musasalah. Some of the scuttlebutt he had overheard between the FCL guards still at the Palace detailed how some of the First Cossack Lancers were even being sent across the planet to the other continent of Ventrale to garrison research outposts. Any cohesion in the FCL would be completely erased within months.
Austin figured that was Tortorelli’s intent: destroy the Governor’s bodyguard and leave him vulnerable. Any element of the Legate’s force sent to protect Sergio Ortega wouldn’t have the devotion, the loyalty, the take-a-bullet dedication Manfred had instilled in the FCL.
“On detached duty with the Legate’s staff. Liaison with Governor Ortega’s office.” Austin fumbled in his pocket and pulled out his legitimate ID. It said nothing of military standing but had the official seal and his father’s signature at the bottom of the card.
The guard took the ident-card and peered at it under the bright guardhouse light. Then she ran it through a verifier. Austin held his breath until he was sure the guard wasn’t calling up his full dossier.
“Go on in, Lieutenant,” she said. “You know the way to Colonel Armitage’s office?”
“To the command office? Of course,” Austin said, “but I have to stop at the barracks for a few minutes.”
She stepped back, saluted, and waved him on in. He realized then that he had passed one final, small test. It was good that he had come out here several times with Manfred, Dale, and the other FCL officers for training seminars. Austin refrained from flooring the accelerator. He drove slowly into the tangle of narrow streets, hunting for the proper crossing thoroughfare. When he found it, he turned in and pulled over.
Austin jumped from the car, made certain his uniform was in order, then entered the front door of the barracks. Two men lounging around looked up but, once they saw his FCL uniform insignia, hastily turned away. That gave him an idea of the status of Manfred’s former unit. Insulted by this pointed disregard, he made his way upstairs to the rooms allocated to the FCL. Or what remained of them.
The first three he checked were empty, but in the fourth he found a veritable fountain of information. Master Sergeant Dmitri Borodin was like a spider in the middle of a web. Every vibration, no matter how tiny, became a full-fledged rumor in a single telling. He was just the man Austin wanted to see.