Amazing what buried resentments you can find, she thought with a slight tremor of distaste, turning her head aside and controlling her breathing. Be what you want to seem, as Socrates said.
The unseen man laughed. “Better. Altruists are unreliable, while resentment and spite are the unfailing twin engines of conspiratorial politics.” A long silence, while he looked into the briefcase. “Sincerity, or so my equipment assures me. Well.
“However, another problem arises. You have made yourself an object of suspicion to your superiors by associating with members of the NCLF which is popularly—” a shade of irony “—suspected of having links with the People’s Liberation Army. ‘No politics in the Legion’ will scarcely stretch to cover that.”
“I never joined,” Margreta said. “Just hung around with them and didn’t win many arguments.” God, don’t let the deal be queered by its own camouflage! Gradual disaffection was much more credible than a Saul on the road to Damascus conversion; those were rarer than hen’s teeth had been before genetic engineering.
“I’ve staged some quarrels with the NCLF people at the University”—which was no problem, what a group of geeks, Mary apart; she’s quite nice in a spoiled-brat way—”and made friends with Royalists. They’ve welcomed me back like a strayed lamb.”
“Perhaps. Although I have a healthy respect for the Captains Alana. The Legion is a small organization and tightly-knit, its officer corps very difficult to infiltrate; particularly as they also have access to voice-stress equipment.”
Another pause. Who were these people? She thought. Not Spartans, not part of the NCLF’s underground apparat. Off-planet hired specialists—she almost snorted at the irony. Mercenaries. Meijians, from the captured equipment—although possibly other Orientals, say from Xanadu or even Earth, trying to make everyone think they were Meijians. Clandestine ops were like that.
“You are correct, though,” the man continued. “Such an asset is too precious to risk. Continue to use the present dropoffs; a call to this number—” he slid a slip of paper across the table “—will give you an emergency contact. Please remember that emergency is the operative word. Please also remember that you are now committed; refuse to carry out orders, and we will simply let your Legion superiors know what you have been doing.” The Legion’s punishment for treason was hanging.
“We won’t use this location again?”
“No, its utility is at an end. Good-bye, Cornet Talkins. Leave the location quickly, please.”
He nodded and rose to go, brushing past her. She waited a safe ten minutes, then rose and packed the satchel, remembering to leave a decent tip, and flagged a taxi.
“Definitely Meijians,” she said, sliding into the back seat. “They’ve got voice-stress equipment, too.”
“Good to have confirmation,” Captain Jesus Alana said from the front seat. “It would be splendid,” he went on wistfully, “to pull in that son of ten fathers and sweat out what he knows. Not with a Meijian, though.”
Margreta nodded; the technoninjas used a suicide-conditioning process, they could stop their hearts by willing it. And would; if captured.
“Feeding them disinformation will be even better,” he said. “And now . . . debriefing.”
* * *
Julio McTieran grinned to himself as he saw the young woman hail a taxi-van and drive away.
God, talk about cute, he thought Walks like a palm swaying in a south breeze. On her, red hair looks good. It was very dark red, of course. His younger sister had an orange thatch, and in his private opinion she was homely enough to stop a clock. So that’s one of the terrible slave-driving mercenaries Mike’s always moaning about. He’d have to tell his brother about that one when he came back from Mandalay on leave.
“Julio, you good-for-nothing, stop dreaming and help me with this!”
“Yes, mother,” he said resignedly, throwing the towel over his shoulder and taking the trays.
A big order for the new bunch of soldiers and their dates; five roast chicken, six burrito platters, seven orders of home-fries, ice-cream to follow, three sarsaparillas, a carafe of the tavern red, two half-liter steins of Pale Brewmaster. This bunch weren’t recruits; they had the Dales campaign ribbon, and one ferret-faced trooper with monitor’s stripes had the Military Medal. Yellowed teeth showed as he sprawled back in his chair, stein in one hand and the other arm around the waist of a girl.
Transportee, Julio thought. He lifted one tray on each hand, corded forearms taking the strain easily; Julio believed in being prepared, and he had been working out more than the Brotherhood training required. Running up and down Thermopylae Point with hand-weights fifteen times every morning, then back home through the streets before the traffic started. If a transportee can get the Military Medal, I certainly can.
His mother was laughing and talking with the soldiers; some were from the neighborhood, some from the Valley, a few even from the Minetown slums, but they were all enjoying her banter. Julio felt invisible as he held the trays for her to serve, watching the way the soldiers’ girls clung to their arms, smiling and looking pretty and fresh in their thin print frocks. Only one more week, he thought doggedly. One more week till I report.
He was turning with the empty trays when he noticed the bicycle stopping outside. Nothing unusual about it, a two-seater commuter model, thousands like it. The two men on it were dressed in ordinary clothes, except that they were wearing white Carnival masks weeks and weeks before the season. The young man recognized the shape one drew from beneath his cloak easily enough; the Walther 10mm machine-pistol was part of the training program for his Brotherhood. It was the fact that it had no place here, that it was so strange, that was what kept him standing and staring blankly while the man raised it, finger tightening on the trigger.
One of the soldiers had better reflexes. The snaggle-toothed monitor kicked the table over for a barricade and drew his sidearm in the same motion, firing without even getting out of the chair. The terrorist gunman lurched backward off the bicycle, and most of the burst went high, cracking into the rooftiles. Diners were shouting, trying to get to their feet, but they were blocked by the table and their chairs and the screaming, milling patrons, bottles and food and wine and blood. The soldier fired again, not quite quick enough to stop the second man on the bicycle as he jerked the pin from a grenade and lobbed it into the Cock and Grill’s courtyard. Julio’s eyes followed its arc.
Five second fuse, he thought with detachment. The men on the bicycle were both down now; the soldier who had shot them was prudently behind the heavy oak of the table, and his hand reached up to jerk down the girl who had been sitting beside him. Few of the other patrons had that training, most had not even seen the weapon land.
Three seconds. The oblong grenade clattered to the brick not far from him, spinning on its side like a top. Fragmentation model, he realized; that was part of ephebe training too. Lined with coils of notched steel wire, kill-radius of fifteen meters.
It detonated less than a second after he dove onto it and flattened himself to the ground.
CHAPTER THREE
Croftons Encyclopedia of the Inhabited Planets
(2nd Edition):
Terraforming: techniques whereby an extrasolar planet is rendered more habitable for humans and/or other Terran life. Prior to the discovery of the Alderson Drive (q.v.), terraforming referred primarily to hypothetical projects to render planets such as Mars and Venus inhabitable. While technically practical, the discovery of worlds with oxygen-nitrogen atmospheres and carbon-based life cycles has made such endeavors non-cost-effective. Habitable planets have proven to be relatively common, and the basic similarities in their biologies—e.g. the prevalence of close analogs to DNA—has given considerable support to the ‘panspermia’ hypothesis that the basic building-blocks of life are introduced from space, where complex hydrocarbons and amino acids are formed spontaneously. Differences in detail, for example the “handedness” of sugars or, less seriously, the presence or absence of various vitamins, pose severe problems to human colonization. A random introduction of Earth bacteria, plant life and simple animals is an excellent trial indicator of the suitability of a roughly Earthlike world for human settlement.
As a general rule, the less advanced the ecology, the easier the introduction of Terran forms will be. On Tanith (q.v.), which contrary to surface appearances is in a post-Miocene, post-mammalian stage of evolutionary progress, only intensive protection by man allows any Terran plant or animal life to survive at all. The native species are simply more efficient. Most oxygen-atmosphere planets are less formidable, and selective introduction of higher animals is possible once the native ecosystems are disorganized by human activities. Most favorable of all are worlds like Meiji (q.v.), Xanadu (q.v.), or Churchill (q.v.), where the native ecologies are notably simpler than the Terran; here the introduced forms, with some simple genetic engineering to compensate for factors such as differences in length of year, often replace the local life-forms spontaneously.