The Prince by Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling

She reached into her belt-pouch for the tenth Crown piece; about what a dockworker made in an hour, fairly steep by local standards.

“No charge for Falkenberg’s Legion, Miss,” the waiter said. He looked about seventeen, with a pleasant freckled face and was probably the son of the owners. “Compliments of the proprietors.”

“Thank you,” she said sincerely; he reminded her of George, a little. More naive, but then, on Sparta a kid could find time for childhood. And the Legion was popular in this district. She remembered the clinegraphs from briefings at Fort Plataia; about a quarter Citizen around here, and most of the rest established family people, ones who hoped to see their children make Citizen, or were saving to homestead in the outback. The Non-Citizen’s Liberation Front didn’t route demonstrations through here, since the inhabitants tended to turn out with baseball bats and shotguns to stand in menacing silence.

She took a bite of one of the steak strips; beef still tasted a little odd to her. Few enough on Earth ate much meat these days. Taxpayer food, she thought. A far cry from the endless starches, synthetic protocarb and bacteria-vat protein they issued in the Welfare Islands.

Still no sign of the contact when she had finished. Waiting. Soldiers and spies, they both spend a lot of their time waiting. Students evidently did, when they could afford to actually attend a University and not cram the study in where sleep ought to go. At the University of Sparta she had met Mary Williams; conversation had led to talks about her background on Earth, the squalid poverty of the Welfare Islands. That made a bitter radicalism plausible—plausible to the children of privileged who seemed to make up the Non-Citizen’s Liberation Front at the student level.

Idiots, she thought contemptuously. Wealthy enough to despise money. She—and George, God damn them to hell—had worked their butts off to get into the middle classes, not overthrow them. Casual meetings had led to the legal NCLF organization, and then to the clandestine.

Mary had hinted that this would be a real contact, someone she couldn’t reach herself except through a series of blind drops and cutouts. No listening bug woven into her uniform, that was far too risky against opposition of the quality the Alanas suspected. There was a team observing her, a reaction-squad and snipers with heavy Peltast rifles, so she was probably quite safe. And she had the biofeedback training that made it possible to baffle detectors. Had that, and her native wit.

Datamonger, soldier and spy—and all before my twenty-first birthday. What’s next, the circus?

Swallowing the last of the food turned out to be a little difficult. She concentrated, breathed deeply, used the trick Catherine Alana had taught her of thinking of a pool of still water, it was quicker and less de-energizing than the techniques she had used to overcome fear back home. No-Nose Charlie was nerve-wracking enough. They had never been part of the Organization back on Earth, but they had been contractors. Too many licenses for legit operation, too much paperwork and graft and pull. Everything outside the Welfare Islands was sewn up tight by the guilds and the unions and the big government-favored corporations. Who else was there to work for, she thought. All No-Nose cared about was whether you could make computer systems sit up and beg. She and George could do that, any day of the week.

After a moment her pulse slowed and the muscles in the back of her neck relaxed. Margreta sighed, ordered coffee and pulled some lecture notes out of the attaché case she was carrying. They were on software design, the University was trying to resurrect that, along with a number of other sciences. The problem was that the CoDo Intelligence people had made more effort to corrupt those files than any others, even to falsifying the early history of its development; BuInt’s attempts to suppress all dangerous science—which turned out to mean all science, period—had been all too successful. Reinvention had to go back almost to the beginning to do anything more than assemble the standard premade blocks in new positions. Xanadu and Meiji were rumored to have made a good deal of progress, but if they had nobody was talking.

A shadow fell across the paper. “Yes?” Margreta said, looking up and around. It was the waiter; the place had grown a little more crowded, extra tables set out for more soldiers and the afternoon shift from the factories. “I’m sorry, I was expecting someone; I’ll leave if you need the table.”

“No problem, Miss,” the waiter said. He smiled shyly. “Besides, I may need to keep on your good side.” At her raised eyebrows. “Just accepted as an ephebe of the Brotherhood last week, Miss, and reporting to Fort Plataia for training with the 7th Royal Infantry Monday next. Anyway, your friend called. Says they’ll be by any time now.”

“Thank you. And good luck in the army; I hope you haven’t been listening to too many romantic stories. It’s hard work.” Even by her standards; still, it would be very useful to have a scientific understanding of combat. The Talkins’ twins had learned a good deal on the streets, and there was teaching available there if you could pay, but the Legion was a different category altogether.

“You’re welcome, Miss, and my brother’s in the 1st, he fought in the Dales—you’d think they crawl up cliffs pulling themselves along by their lips, to hear him talk.”

Margreta smiled and shook her head as the young man bustled away, catching a tray of beer steins at the serving window and weaving between the tables to a boisterous party in high-collared gray tunics and stubble-shave haircuts. Imagining himself one of them, she supposed, as she clipped the attaché case closed. Babies, she thought All overgrown babies. Trying to prove how tough they were.

She started slightly when the dark man in the conservative brown tunic and tights stopped at her table.

“Do not be alarmed,” he said, moving forward with fluid smoothness. He took her hand in a grip like a pneumatic clamp, as impersonal as a machine too.

“We have now,” he went on, seating himself and laying an attaché case on the table, “eliminated the obvious; police tailing efforts, implanted electronics, and the rest. Passive observation is possible, of course.”

* * *

The man was about 175 centimeters, brown-skinned, Latino from the cast of his features. Unusually fit, not massive but broad-shouldered and moving lightly as a racehorse. Not a native Anglic speaker, she judged; an ear for the nuances of language was another thing common to her new profession in Intelligence and her old life on the fringes of the illegal. The mystery man had no trace of a regional or planetary accent. That was rare. Definitely not a Spartan, their dialect was so archaic that it was almost English; it retained the final “g,” differentiated between “c” and “k,” and had fewer of the Spanish and Oriental loanwords that made up so much of the modern language. This man’s Anglic had a pellucid clarity like a very good Al language program or someone high up in the CoDominium information services.

“I should think the information I’ve delivered over the past weeks would be proof of my bona fides, sir,” she said; a combination of respectfulness and firmness was best here.

A slight chuckle. “Yes, but as we both know, Miss Talkins, it is often worth the sacrifice of real data to plant a double agent who can feed disinformation into an opponent’s information-bloodstream. Granted that the files you have contributed are mostly useful, and all have been corroborated independently, this possibility remains.”

Margreta allowed herself to lick her lips; they tasted of salt. “Paranoia is also a threat in this business, sir,” she said.

A quaver? No, too much. He’s got to think I’m valuable, and an agent with weak nerves is a walking invitation to disaster. “Properly safeguarded, an agent in place in the Legion’s intelligence section would be a priceless asset.”

“Quite. But an exceedingly risky occupation for an agent with a comfortable position elsewhere,” he said dryly.

“I’m scarcely comfortable where I am, sir,” she said coldly. “My origins . . . I have abundant reason to sympathize with the Movement.”

A skeptical silence. All right, girl, time to really act.

“All right. Sir.” A calculating viciousness in her tone now. “I’ve seen enough to know the Helots stand a good chance of winning. If I get in on the ground floor, I can really get somewhere—all the best jobs in the Legion go to Falkenberg’s cronies, and you can’t get ahead unless you hold a line command and women can’t. I don’t want to spend thirty years being a glorified commissioned clerk, or marry some po-faced whiskey-swilling mercenary and breed a litter of officerlets. I want to be something, myself.

“And,” she added, panting slightly, “I want the satisfaction of seeing those bungling incompetents who got my brother killed stood up against a wall and shot. All my life—all my and George’s life—we’ve had to wade through wet cement to get a living, while morons without a tenth our brains sat fat and happy up on top, rigging the game against us. We couldn’t break in back home because we didn’t have parents in the business—bad as bloody India. And here, these so-called generals couldn’t figure out anything better for a man with George’s brains to do than carry a field computer over a minefield.”