Conquerors' Pride

2

Cavanagh smiled. "That's one of the things I've always liked about you, Nikolai: your unique combination of subtlety and bluntness. Not a single nudge or probe during the meal itself, and now straight between the eyes."

"The ravages of age, I'm afraid," Donezal said regretfully. "I find that I'm useless all afternoon if I ruin my digestion at lunch." He eyed Cavanagh over the edge of his cup. "And turning down favors while eating invariably ruins my digestion."

"Favors?" Cavanagh echoed, giving the other his best innocent look. "What makes you think I'm here to ask for any favors?"

"Long personal experience," Donezal said dryly. "Coupled with the stories about you which one can still hear being told in parliamentary back offices. If even half of them are true, it would appear you left an impressive trail of wrenched arms behind you during your time here."

"Baseless slander." Cavanagh dismissed the subject with a wave of his hand. "Sprinkled with a bit of jealousy."

Donezal raised an eyebrow. "Perhaps more than just a bit," he said. "Still, you protest more than necessary. I understand that a man cannot create your list of accomplishments without also creating a few enemies along the way."

"Plus a few friends, I hope," Cavanagh said.

"I'm certain you did," Donezal said. "Though the other group is always the louder. Still, the doomsayers we shall always have with us. At any rate, you bought lunch; the least I can do is hear you out."

"Thank you," Cavanagh said, pulling his plate from his inside pocket. He opened it, called up the proper file, and slid it across the table. "My proposal is really quite simple. I'd like to shift a part of my Centauri electronics operation out to Massif."

"Indeed," Donezal said, glancing over the first page and keying for the second. "To be located in the Lorraine and Nivernais states, I see. A good choice—the plunge in iridium prices has hit those two regions particularly hard. An influx of light industry would be welcome." He looked speculatively at Cavanagh. "So tell me what the favor is you need. Free land, or just massive tax breaks?"

"Neither," Cavanagh said, mentally crossing his fingers. Donezal had a good business mind and was, at the core, a decent enough man. But his military tour of duty on the Bhurtist homeworld of Tal during the Peacekeepers' police action there had left some scars where nonhumans were concerned. "What I need is for you to help me get NorCoord's permission to run a pair of satellite facilities in the Duulian and Avuirlian enclaves."

Donezal's face tightened, just noticeably. "I see," he said. "May I ask what Sanduuli and Avuirli have to offer that our human colonists can't match?"

"Frankly, I don't know," Cavanagh said. "That's one of the things I'm hoping to find out."

"Such as whether they can do the work cheaper?" Donezal demanded.

Cavanagh shook his head. "Such as what ideas and improvements nonhuman intelligences and methodology might suggest to us," he corrected. "The satellite facilities would be geared for R and D, not production."

Donezal looked down at the plate again, and Cavanagh could see the strain as he tried to uncouple his judgment from his memories. "You're aware, of course, that five months ago Peacekeeper Command and the Commerce Commission began tightening regulations on nonhuman handling of potential military technology."

"Yes, I know," Cavanagh said. "But the work we'd be doing would be distinctly nonmilitary. All of our Peacekeeper contracts would stay in the existing high-security plants on Avon and Centauri."

Donezal rubbed his cheek. "I don't know, Stewart. Understand, I have nothing personally against either the Sanduuli or Avuirli. And I'd certainly like to see you move a plant onto Massif. But Commerce seems very serious about all this; and to be honest, I'm not sure the term 'nonmilitary' can be applied to anything electronic anymore. There's so much bleed-through between military and civilian equipment, especially with the sort of high-density and semisentient work you do. A great deal of that is still exclusively human property, and many of us would like to keep it that way. Otherwise there could be trouble whenever the next brushfire erupts."

"Possibly," Cavanagh said. "On the other hand, a perception that the Commonwealth is being unreasonably selfish is almost a guarantee that those brushfires will indeed occur."

Donezal made a face. "Well, if that happens, the Peacekeepers will certainly be ready for it," he growled, turning his attention back to the plate. "You should see all the money they've been levering out of the treasury lately. All right, let me look at this again."

Cavanagh sipped at his coffee and looked around the Parliament dining room, memories flickering through his mind as he did so. Certainly he'd come here on business, but Donezal's facetious reference to nostalgia hadn't been completely off the mark. Cavanagh had been less than enthusiastic about serving in the Northern Coordinate Union Parliament when the governor of Grampians on Avon had offered him the job—had argued long and hard, in fact, that there were others in Grampians who wanted the appointment far more. But the governor had persisted; and Cavanagh himself would be the first to admit that the six years he'd spent in Parliament had been among the most interesting of his life. The previous twenty years, spent building up a minor electronics empire from scratch, hadn't prepared him at all for the style and routine of government operation. Everyone had known it, of course, and he suspected there had been a few side bets in the back offices that the new Parlimin from Avon, Grampians state, would never even make it off the landing field.

But he'd surprised them. He'd quickly learned how to adapt his work and people-handling techniques to the strange new environment of politics, and had then proceeded to forge odd but potent coalitions among those who felt the same as he did about a dozen of the most important issues. None of the coalitions had lasted very long, but more often than not they'd lasted long enough to accomplish the goals he'd set for them. He'd become adept at the art of political arm-twisting, a talent that had given him a certain notoriety during that first term and the two subsequent appointments the governor had talked him into accepting. Apparently, if Donezal could be believed, some of that notoriety still lingered in the Parliament chambers.

A movement caught his eye: a young-looking Parlimin gesturing emphatically at the colleagues seated around him at his table. There were only a few Parlimins still in office who had also served during Cavanagh's stint here, but the current trend among the national and state governments of the NorCoord Union was to appoint top business and industrial leaders to the upper house, and Cavanagh spotted several men and women he'd locked horns with across tables over the years. There was Simons of Great Britain, Alexandra Karponov of Kryepost on Nadezhda, Klein of Neuebund on Prospect...

He was looking at Klein when the other's face suddenly went rigid.

Cavanagh looked back at Donezal, to find the same expression on his face. "Emergency signal?"

"Yes," Donezal told him, fumbling in his pocket and pulling out his slender whisper-call. "Full-Parliament alert," he said, peering at the message scrolling across the display. "Some kind of trouble out at—"

He broke off. "I have to go," he said abruptly, stuffing the whisper-call back into his pocket and levering himself out of his chair.

"What is it?" Cavanagh asked, standing up himself and making a quick hand signal. "What kind of trouble?"

"There aren't any details," Donezal said, starting toward the door. The other Parlimins, Cavanagh noted peripherally, were also heading rapidly for the exits. "Call my office later. Better yet, call your own Parlimin. I'm sure Jacy VanDiver would love to hear from you."

Cavanagh fell into step beside him; and as he did so, the quiet figure of his security chief, Adam Quinn, appeared at his side. "Trouble, sir?" the other asked softly.

"Yes," Cavanagh told him. "Come on, Nikolai, give. I'll owe you one."

Donezal stopped, throwing a sour look at Cavanagh and an only marginally less acidic one at Quinn. "There's a watchship coming in from Dorcas," he bit out. "Apparently, a Peacekeeper task force there has been hit. Badly."

Cavanagh stared at him, an old and all-too-familiar pressure squeezing his chest. "Which task force was it?"

"I don't know," Donezal said, frowning at him. "Does it matter?"

"Very much," Cavanagh murmured. The Kinshasa, with Pheylan aboard, was stationed with the Jutland in the Dorcas area. If that was the force that had been hit... "Let's get over to the chamber," he told Donezal, taking his arm. "They should at least be able to tell us who was involved."

Donezal shook off the grip. "We are not going to the chamber," he said. "I am going. You're not a Parlimin anymore."

"You can get me in."

"Not for something like this," Donezal insisted. "I'm sorry, Stewart, but you'll just have to wait and find out when the rest of the Commonwealth does."

He turned and joined the general exodus of people now streaming through the dining room's main exits. "Like hell I will," Cavanagh muttered under his breath as he pulled out his phone. "Quinn, where did Kolchin go?"

"I'm right here, sir," the young bodyguard said, appearing magically at Cavanagh's other side. "What stirred up the anthill?"

"A Peacekeeper task force has been hit off Dorcas," Cavanagh told him grimly, punching in a number. "I'm going to see if I can get us some more information."

The phone screen came on, revealing a young woman in Peacekeeper uniform. "Peacekeeper Command."

"General Garcia Alvarez, please," Cavanagh said. "Tell him it's Lord Stewart Cavanagh. And tell him it's urgent."

The cables overhead lengthened and separated, dropping their ski-lift-style chair out of the upper-corridor traffic flow and bringing it to a halt at the floor. Before them, topped by a large Peacekeeper insignia, was the archway into the Peacekeeper Command section of the NorCoord Union government complex. Standing beneath the arch, flanked by the duty guard and a man wearing a major's insignia, was General Alvarez.

"Stewart," Alvarez said in greeting as Cavanagh and his two men came toward him. "I trust you realize how irregular this is."

"I do," Cavanagh said. "And I thank you. I'll try not to be too much trouble."

Alvarez made a face and looked at the officer at his side. "These are my visitors, Major. I'd like them cleared through."

"Yes, sir," the other said. "Hello, Quinn. Long time no see."

"Hello, Anders," Quinn said evenly. "Good to see you. I didn't know you'd moved to Command."

"I'm not surprised," Anders said, an edge of bitterness in the voice. "You haven't exactly kept in touch. So this is him, huh?" he added, throwing a cold look at Cavanagh. "The guy who you helped to dump on the unit?"

"Lord Cavanagh is my employer," Quinn said. "And we didn't dump on the Copperheads. We helped make them stronger and better."

"Yeah, well, that's sure not what it looked like from the inside." Anders looked at Kolchin, and for a moment his eyes seemed to glaze over. "And you're former Peacekeeper commando Mitri Kolchin," he said. "You always stock your payroll with Peacekeeper quitters, Lord Cavanagh?"

Beside him, Cavanagh felt Kolchin stir, and he could imagine what the expression on the young man's face must be. General Alvarez, facing him from a meter away, didn't have to rely on imagination. "You're not here for a discussion of career choices, Major," the general put in. "You're here to authorize temporary clearances for these men. Can you or can't you?"

Anders's lip twitched. "There's nothing in their records to prohibit it, sir," he said. "I can clear them through to the outer briefing room. No farther."

"Good enough," Alvarez grunted. "Thank you. Come on, Stewart—the watchship's records should be here anytime."

"They couldn't transmit from orbit?" Cavanagh asked.

"We didn't want them to," Alvarez said. "There are too many kids out there whose idea of fun is to tie into military transmissions and try to crack the scrambling. The last thing we want is for this to leak out before we're ready." He threw Cavanagh a tight smile. "Which is one reason we're letting you in here. Makes it easier to keep track of you."

"I see," Cavanagh said. He'd already figured that part out, actually. "What do you know so far?"

"Only that a skitter arrived from Dorcas about two hours ago telling us a watchship was probably on its way," Alvarez said. "That all by itself meant bad news."

Cavanagh braced himself. "Do you know which task force it was?"

Alvarez nodded heavily. "It was the Jutland's," he said. "And the Kinshasa was definitely there with it. That's the other reason you're here."

"I appreciate it," Cavanagh said, the pressure returning to his chest. "What else do you know?"

"Precious little," Alvarez admitted. "About twenty-five hours ago the tachyon pickup on Dorcas spotted an unfamiliar wake-trail, terminating in the outer rim of a minor system six light-years from Dorcas. They didn't have a tracking baseline, of course, but the Jutland and the local garrison commander were able to triangulate a probable endpoint. The force went out to take a look; forty minutes after meshing in, they popped a static bomb. Dorcas picked it up, figured it meant bad news, and fired us off a skitter to give us some advance warning. End of report."

"Forty minutes sounds rather short," Cavanagh said.

Alvarez snorted. "Try frighteningly short. Especially when you consider that Commodore Dyami wouldn't have meshed in right on top of the bogies. Real-space transit time would have eaten up part of that forty minutes. Maybe even most of it."

The briefing room was deserted when they arrived. Alvarez turned on the displays for them, then left to watch the proceedings with his fellow officers in the main command center. Five minutes later the watchship's recordings began.

It was worse than Cavanagh had expected. Worse than he could even have conceived it to be. To watch the entire task force being cut to ribbons was bad enough. To watch the alien ships coldly and systematically destroying the honeycomb pods afterward was horrifying.

And to know that he was watching the death of his son made him feel physically ill. And very, very old.

The battle and its murderous aftermath seemed to take forever. According to the display chrono, the entire episode took barely fourteen and a half minutes.

The record ended, and the display went off, and for a few minutes none of them spoke. Quinn broke the silence first. "We're in trouble," he said quietly. "Big trouble."

Cavanagh took a deep breath, blinking the sudden moisture out of his eyes. It would have been quick, at least. That was something to hold on to. It would have been quick. "Could the force have been taken by surprise?"

"No." Quinn was positive. "Dyami knew to be ready for combat. That's always the assumption when you contact a new race. Besides, the force was fighting—you could see missiles being launched. They just weren't detonating."

"You know if the Jutland had any Copperhead fighters aboard, Quinn?" Kolchin asked.

"I doubt it," Quinn said, shaking his head. "Most Copperhead units are stationed aboard Nova- and Supernova-class carriers these days, mostly out in Yycroman space. That's what I've heard, anyway. We could ask Anders on the way out."

"Well, at least that's something new we can try on them next time around." Kolchin paused. "And maybe NorCoord will decide it's time to reassemble CIRCE."

"Perhaps," Cavanagh said. "Quinn, we need to send word to Aric and Melinda about this."

"I can do that, sir," Quinn said. "What should I tell them?"