Shadow of Freedom

Chapter Thirty-Two

“I wish we knew what he wants to talk about,” Mackenzie Graham groused as she locked the door behind them. Then she and Indiana headed down the rickety stairs—their apartment building’s elevator was on the fritz again—from the sixth floor. “I’m not crazy about unexpected emergency meetings.”

“We’ll find out why he’s here soon enough,” Indiana pointed out, keeping a cautious eye peeled.

The landings were none too well lit, and muggings weren’t unheard of even inside apartment complexes. Especially not here, on the older side of town, where so many “historical” buildings from Seraphim’s early days remained in use. Most of those older buildings had been constructed using natural materials and without counter-grav capability. They were smaller, built closer to the ground than the later towers, and easier to break into, and they’d never boasted the security systems that were part of the city’s newer structures. They were also firetraps, but on the limited plus side, there were fewer public security cameras on this side of town, and the rundown tenements offered their inhabitants a much higher degree of anonymity. And given what had happened to Indiana and Mackenzie’s father, and the complete destruction of the family’s financial fortunes, not even the scags were likely to find it remarkable that they’d been reduced to such miserable quarters.

The light was out again on the second-floor landing, Indiana noticed when they reached the third floor, and he slid his right hand casually into his pants pocket as the made the turn and started on down. If anyone was going to try anything, it should happen just…about…now.

The two men lurking in the landing’s shadows had obviously done this before. They came out of the darkness in a concerted attack, rushing the brother and sister from both sides, and he saw the dull gleam of a knife.

His right hand came out of his pocket in a practiced move. His thumb pressed a button, the collapsible baton extended instantly to its full seventy centimeters even as his left arm swept Mackenzie behind him.

“Gimme your wal—” the one with the knife snarled, only to break off with a scream as Indiana brought the weighted baton down.

It was a whipcrack strike, a quick, powerful flick of the wrist rather than a full-armed blow, and he recovered from it instantly. He stepped towards the knife-wielder, not away from him, as the injured mugger clutched his own shattered wrist and hunched forward. The second man had targeted Mackenzie, but she wasn’t where he’d expected her to be thanks to her brother’s shove, and Indiana’s move took him just out of the mugger’s reach, as well. The second attacker shouted an obscenity and turned towards Indiana, one hand going back over his shoulder. Indiana saw the blackjack against the third-floor landing light, but he had plans of his own, and the other man collapsed with a hoarse, whistling scream as the rigid baton’s rounded tip slammed into his solar plexus like a rapier.

The second man went down, writhing in agony, trying desperately to breathe. It didn’t look like he was going to have much luck with that, given the serious internal injuries he’d probably just suffered, a corner of Indiana’s mind reflected. At the moment, he had other things to worry about, however, and he turned back to the first mugger. He stood like a swordsman, baton poised, and the broken-wristed attacker gawked at him in disbelief.

“My sister and I were just leaving.” Indiana was amazed at how level his own voice sounded…and the fact that he could actually hear it through the thunder of his pulse. “I think your friend needs a doctor, and as far as we’re concerned, you can find him one. But I wouldn’t advise choosing this building again in the future.”

The still-standing mugger’s mouth dropped open, and Indiana extended his free hand to Mackenzie without ever taking his eyes from the other man. She took it and stepped across the still spasming, gagging body on the landing.

“I’ll give you five minutes before I call the cops,” Indiana continued, although God knew he had no intention of doing anything of the sort. “I think you should both be gone by then, don’t you?”

He nodded to the other man, then followed Mackenzie down the remaining stairs without ever turning his back on the mugger until they reached the vestibule. Then he glanced at his sister and shook his head as he saw the compact automatic pistol sliding back into herpocket.

“Idiot,” she said, shaking her own head. “There were two of them, Indy! You did notice that, didn’t you? What did you think you were doing taking both of them on by yourself?!”

“It seemed like the thing to do at the time,” he told her mildly, collapsing the baton and opening the apartment building’s front door for her with his left hand.

“Only because you suddenly decided to go on a testosterone jag! I’m not exactly a little girl anymore, you know!”

“No, you’re not. And you’re a better shot than I am, too,” Indiana acknowledged. “On the other hand, it occurred to me that shooting someone full of holes in our own building might not be the best way to keep a low profile. The Cherubim PD hates filling out the paperwork on dead bodies, but they do investigate them, you know, even on our side of town. When firearms are involved, at least.”

Mackenzie had opened her mouth. Now she closed it again. After a moment, she even nodded in agreement.

“Point taken,” she said after a moment, because Indiana was right.

The Cherubim Police didn’t give a damn how many muggers managed to get themselves killed, and if the one Indiana had dropped was found dead on the landing from blunt force trauma, there probably wouldn’t be any investigation at all. Those cops who weren’t on the take were too overwhelmed trying to look out for law-abiding citizens to worry about what happened to the capital city’s predators, and the ones who were on the take had more profitable things to worry about. But they stood up and took notice when firearms were used, and any case involving them was automatically flagged to Tillman O’Sullivan’s Seraphim System Security Police. Not because the scags cared how many proles slaughtered each other, but because the possession of firearms by private citizens was illegal. That hadn’t always been the case, but one of President McCready’s first acts in office had been to amend the System Constitution to delete its guarantee of a citizen’s right to be armed.

After all, they couldn’t have all those weapons floating around contributing to the unacceptably high crime rate, now could they?

“I’m glad you agree,” Indiana said with a grin as the two of them stepped out onto the slushy sidewalk. More snow was drifting down, and the east wind felt raw and cutting. “Mind you, I’m a little concerned. It’s not like you to give up so easily, especially when I’m right.”

“Don’t push it, Indy,” she said severely, and he chuckled.

They walked down the sidewalk to the tram station in the middle of the next block. The public transit system looked as worn out as anything else in Cherubim, and the often-vandalized tram cars’ broken windows made gaping punctuation marks in the colorful, usually obscene graffiti that caparisoned their sides. Despite that, the trams were mechanically reliable and, unlike a great many other things in the Seraphim System, they actually ran on a reliable schedule. Primarily, Indiana and Mackenzie knew, because they were the only means of transportation available to most of the capital’s population, and the system’s transstellar masters wanted their serfs to get to work on time.

The tram was just pulling to a stop as they arrived, and Indiana followed Mackenzie aboard. They presented their Transit Authority passes for scanning, and managed to find seats that weren’t in a direct draft from one of the broken windows.

The tram moved off through the snow and slush, and the brother and sister gazed out at the crowds of poorly dressed, shivering, head-bent pedestrians. There was a lot of foot traffic in Cherubim, even this late and in weather like this. They passed an occasional ground car, but those were few and far between, and the parking spaces which had once been filled to capacity and beyond stood mostly empty. Downtown Cherubim had once been home to a bustling, thriving district composed of privately owned small businesses—restaurants, bookstores, art galleries, boutiques, jewelers, pawnshops, clothiers, and electronics stores. Their owners and operators hadn’t been wealthy, perhaps, but they’d made ends meet and they’d worked for themselves. Now every other storefront stood empty. Most of those which remained looked rundown, worn out, tattered around the edges. Yet here and there an oasis of well-lit, clean crystoplast display windows offered gleaming goods for sale.

Indiana’s eyes hardened as he saw those thriving windows, because there was a reason for their prosperity. They were the ones that belonged to the mayor’s friends, or even the president’s. The ones whose owners had connections, who didn’t have to pay protection to corrupt cops and city councilmembers, or to one of the transstellars’ local managers. Hell, two thirds of them didn’t even pay city taxes!

There’s always someone willing to play jackal, he thought bitterly. Always someone willing to “go along to get along.” They may not be the ones who decided to rape Seraphim in the first place, but they sure as hell don’t have any problem squabbling over the scraps and grabbing whatever they can get on the side! And not one of them would dream of raising a hand to do anything about McCready and her bottom feeders.

Mackenzie reached out and squeezed his knee with one hand. He looked at her, and some of the bitterness leached out of his eyes as she smiled sadly at him. She knew exactly what he was thinking, of course. Once upon a time Bruce Graham had been one of those shopkeepers…until his livelihood had been destroyed by others’ corruption. Indiana saw the understanding in that smile, and he smiled back at his sister, patted the hand on his knee, and then turned back to the window.

* * *

The tram deposited them two corners away from The Soup Spoon, a restaurant they both liked and which somehow managed to keep its doors open despite its owners’ lack of connections. Probably because the place looked like a dump, Indiana reflected as he and Mackenzie slogged through the last of the slush, stamped their feet clean, and stepped out of the damp, raw cold into the warm, delicious-smelling humidity. The restaurant windows were heavily misted with condensation, and Alecta, their favorite server, greeted them as soon as she saw them.

“Indy! Max! I’ve got your regular table open. Come on back!”

The Grahams smiled and followed her towards the back of the restaurant. The Soup Spoon had absolutely no ambience to recommend it to the better type of customer. The silverware, plates, and bowls were thoroughly mismatched, the tables and booths were worn, and the cheap holo posters on the walls couldn’t hide the fact that they were badly in need of paint and maintenance. Water stains in one corner of the ceiling indicated a leak management hadn’t been able to get fixed for almost three months, and the floor really needed to be recovered.

But what it lacked in polish and upkeep was more than compensated for by the sense of welcome. It was a warm, friendly place, one whose owners knew the vast majority of their customers by first name. A place where the food might come in mismatched bowls but the kitchen was spotless, every dish was just as delicious as it smelled, and the daily special was priced to let honest people wrap themselves around a warm, sustaining meal. Indiana and Mackenzie heard other regulars greeting them by name as they passed, and they smiled and nodded and waved back while they followed Alecta to the table in a rear corner.

“He’s been waiting for you,” Alecta said much more quietly as they walked. She smiled as if she’d just made a joke. “Ben and Allen kept an eye out. They didn’t see anyone following him.”

Indiana nodded, laughing at the joke she hadn’t made.

“Thanks,” he said, and then nodded to the man called Firebrand as they reached the table.

“Glad you could make it,” he said casually, pulling out Mackenzie’s chair and seating her before he sat down himself, facing Firebrand across the tattered looking checkered tablecloth.

“I said I’d look forward to trying the menu the next time I was in town,” Damien Harahap replied, and sniffed deeply. “If it tastes as good as it smells, I’ll be back, too!”

“I don’t think you’ll be disappointed,” Alecta assured him, pulling out her order pad and looking back and forth between the three of them. “You guys ready to order yet?”

“They just got here!” Harahap protested with a laugh, and she snorted.

“Hey, it’s Thursday. That means Indy here is going to have the clam chowder with a side of hush puppies and coleslaw. McKinsey’s going to have the beef stew over rice, tossed salad with oil and balsamic vinegar dressing, and a side of garlic bread. Coffee for him, hot tea for her. So that only leaves you.”

She gave him the challenging grin she would have given any other new customer, and he laughed again and shook his head.

“Since it’s my first time here, why don’t you surprise me? What do you recommend?”

“Oh, man, are you letting yourself in for it!” Indiana warned him, and Alecta whacked him on the shoulder with her order pad.

“Don’t listen to him,” she told Harahap. “The problem is he doesn’t like coconut milk.”

“Coconut milk?” Harahap repeated a bit blankly, and she nodded.

“Yep. You want my advice, you’ll have the Massaman curry with duck. And maybe”—she eyed him consideringly—“in your case, we’ll add a little pineapple and some peanuts. Trust me, you’ll love it.”

“Well, I do like curry,” Harahap admitted (honestly, in this case), and nodded. “All right. Sounds good to me.”

“How spicy do you want it—scale of one to ten?”

“Make it a nine.”

“Brave man!” Alecta laughed. “White rice, or fried?”

“White. And bring the fish sauce, if you have any.”

“All right!” Alecta beamed at him. “Coffee, tea, or water?”

“Tea. And let me have chopsticks, please.”

“Gotcha.”

Alecta waited long enough to top off their water glasses, then disappeared with the order, and Harahap sat back in his chair and looked at Indiana and Mackenzie.

“I like her,” he said sincerely, and Mackenzie nodded.

“So do we,” she replied, not mentioning that Alecta, The Soup Spoon’s owners, and two other members of the wait staff were part of the SIM. There was no need for him to know that.

“Good place to meet, too,” he went on, looking around the restaurant. “In most ways, anyway. Lots and lots of ambient noise, people talking loud enough no one’s in a good position to hear what anyone else is saying, and a clientele of regulars who recognize a newcomer in a heartbeat. Makes it hard to plant somebody on you, but it’s got its downsides, too.” He shook his head wryly. “Trust me, I got quite a few second glances when I turned up! Enough to make any good spy nervous.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Indiana told him. Harahap cocked an eyebrow at him, and Mackenzie leaned forward slightly in her brother’s support.

“We’ve been regulars here since before our father was arrested, Firebrand,” she told him. “People may have wondered who you were when you walked in. In fact, that’s one of our better defenses. Nobody in here is real fond of the police, McCready, or the scags, trust me, but they know the two of us. The fact that you’re meeting us here makes you one of them, provisionally, at least.”

Harahap looked at her thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded.

“Which brings us to the reason you wanted to talk to us in the first place,” Mackenzie went on. “We didn’t expect to be hearing from you again quite this soon.”

“And I didn’t expect to be back here quite this soon,” he told her, picking up his water glass. He took a sip and grimaced slightly. “On the other hand, this isn’t the sort of profession where you get to count on reliable schedules.”

“So why this schedule change?” Indiana asked.

“Things are heating up between us and the Sollies,” Harahap told him. Which was true enough in its own way, assuming he was reading his tea leaves correctly, if not in the sense his listeners’ might expect. “It’s not general knowledge out of this way yet, but the Sollies sent a fleet—over four hundred ships-of-the-wall—to take out the Manticore System.”

Indiana’s eyes widened in shock and the beginning of dismay, but Harahap shook his head quickly.

“Didn’t work out very well for the Sollies,” he said with a thin smile. “As a matter of fact, Admiral Harrington handed them their asses, if you’ll pardon my language. Blew the hell out of them, and captured every surviving unit.”

Indiana sat back abruptly and Mackenzie’s eyes brightened.

“You kicked their asses?” Indiana asked. “Really?”

“Like they’ve never been kicked before,” Harahap assured him with a delight which was completely unfeigned. He suspected some of his actual superiors might have preferred for the Manties’ victory to have been just a tad less overwhelming, but that didn’t dampen his enthusiasm for seeing the SLN kicked flat on its back one single bit. Even when he’d worked for the Solarian Gendarmerie, Damien Harahap had loathed the Solarian League. It had simply been the best game in town.

The brother and sister looked at one another, and he was impressed by how well they controlled their obvious glee. He could see it, sitting across the table from them, but he doubted anyone else could.

“It’s going to be a while yet before anyone else on Seraphim knows about this,” he went on, not bothering to mention that the only reason he knew already was that more and more Mesan Alignment dispatch boats were equipped with the streak drive no one else possessed. “When it does, though, the transstellars are going to be more than a little unhappy. Especially since we’re busy closing down all the warp termini, as well.” He chuckled nastily. “The bottom’s about to fall out of a hell of a lot of the League’s interstellar economy, and people like Krestor Interstellar and Mendoza are going to take a hammering. For that matter, the federal government’s going to take an incredible beating when so much of its revenue stream goes belly up.”

Indiana and Mackenzie nodded in understanding, and he shrugged.

“The thing is—and the reason I’m here is—that things are moving faster than we ever really anticipated.” Which, he reflected, was damned well true. In fact, it was probably as true for a real Manticoran as it was for the Alignment at the moment! “That means we’ve got both additional opportunities and additional risks to think about.”

“I can see that.” Indiana’s expression was thoughtful, his tone cautious. “Exactly how does that affect us here in Seraphim, though? I mean, obviously it does, or you wouldn’t be here so far ahead of schedule.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Harahap acknowledged. “First though, have the weapons shipments gotten through all right?”

“Yeah.” Indiana nodded. “You took us by surprise by getting the first one in here so quickly, but everything’s worked like clockwork so far. We’ve gotten them out of the capital to a secure location, too. And we’ve started establishing secondary weapons caches now.” He shrugged slightly. “We’re still working out the best way to handle training our people, and I won’t pretend we wouldn’t like to have more guns to go around, but we’re in a lot better shape than I would’ve believed we could’ve been a few months ago.”

“Do you have an actual plan to use them?” Harahap asked, looking at Mackenzie this time, and she shrugged.

“We’ve got a long-range plan, a short-range plan, and at least a dozen contingency plans,” she said.

“What kind of timetable are you looking at?”

“For the long-range plan?” She snorted. “Try two or three T-years.”

“That’s not so good,” Harahap said.

“Depends on what you mean by ‘good,’” she responded. “It would take two or three T-years, yeah, but we figure the odds of success, even without fleet support from the Star Empire, would be three or four to one.”

“I can see where that would appeal to you,” he conceded. “On the other hand, a lot of things can change—or go wrong—in that long, which means odds can shift a lot. So what’s the time frame for your short-range plan?”

Indiana and Mackenzie looked at each other for a moment, then turned back to him.

“A minimum of ninety T-days,” Mackenzie said flatly. “A hundred and twenty would be a lot better. And, frankly, our chances of success without outside support would suck.”

“Um.” Harahap frowned down into his water glass for several seconds before he looked back up.

“Okay, cards on the table time. I don’t have complete information myself, I’m sure you both understand why that’s the case. But what I’ve been told is that the current strategic position is very favorable for our side. The problem is that like I just said, things can change, sometimes quickly. From what they’re telling me, I’m guessing—and it’s only a guess, not the kind of thing anyone would be confirming to someone at my level—that the Admiralty’s thinking in terms of going onto the offensive now that they’ve kicked the Sollies’ butts in Manticore.

“The reason I say that is that they want to accelerate all of the liberation movements we’ve been supporting. Not just you guys—all of them. Now, for some of them, that would be nothing short of outright suicide at this point, and in their cases I’m recommending that they don’t do anything of the sort. I’m not sure my bosses would be delighted to hear about that.” He smiled tightly. “On the other hand, my bosses aren’t out here, and I am. And, frankly, I don’t see where sending someone off half-cocked and getting them wiped out before we can get them any support is going to help anybody very much.”

He shrugged and took a sip of water, giving them time to absorb the fact that nice-guy Firebrand was looking out for them.

“At the same time, though,” he continued, lowering the glass again, “I can see where raising all the hell we possibly can in the Sollies’ backyard would work to everyone’s advantage. Especially if I’m right, and the Admiralty is planning on kicking in the League’s front door. In fact—”

He paused, obviously considering what he was about to say, then shrugged.

“Beowulf didn’t let the Sollies through the Beowulf Terminus to support the attack on the home system,” he said softly. “Instead, they’ve signed on with us.” He smiled thinly. “That means we’ve got a protected avenue directly into the heart of the Core Worlds. I think the Admiralty’s planning on using it, too. But when they do, they want the Sollies looking over their shoulder. Given what’s already happened to Battle Fleet, the League is probably going to have to call in Frontier Fleet units to reinforce closer to home. What I think my bosses have in mind is to make such a ruckus out here in the Verge that OFS won’t turn loose a damned thing without kicking and screaming the whole way.”

“Beowulf’s sided with the Star Empire?” Indiana asked half-incredulously. His knowledge of astrography outside a twenty or thirty-light-year radius of Seraphim wasn’t exactly profound, but he knew Beowulf was no more than a T-week or so from the Sol System itself for a ship with a military grade hyper generator and particle screens.

“That’s what the dispatches say, and, frankly, it’s the only way we could know what happened in the home system this quickly,” Harahap pointed out. He shrugged. “Only way the home office could’ve gotten a dispatch boat out here this fast would have been through the Beowulf Terminus, which suggests to me that—”

He shrugged again, holding up one hand, palm uppermost, and Indiana nodded slowly.

“So just how soon would ‘your bosses’ like us to start raising a ‘ruckus’ here in Seraphim, Firebrand?” Mackenzie asked, her eyes narrow.

“As soon as you feel you possibly could,” Harahap replied. “Hopefully within the next three T-months or so.”

“Ninety T-days, in other words,” she said flatly.

“Yes,” he said.

“And you can get us naval support in that timeframe?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“How?” Her tone was a bit skeptical. “I’m as excited about the possibility as Indy is, Firebrand. But if your navy’s going to be going directly after Sol, how is any of it supposed to make its way all the way out here?”

“It’s not.” He shook his head. “What’s going to happen is that Admiral Gold Peak is about to launch an offensive out of the Talbott Cluster in the next month or so.” He met Mackenzie’s eyes levelly, confident in his ability to lie convincingly. “Her main objective is going to be the Madras Sector,” he continued, blithely ignoring the fact that Gold Peak almost certainly wasn’t going to do anything of the sort. “That’s going to require most of her heavy units, but it should leave plenty of cruisers and destroyers available for…other duties, let’s say. Like turning up here in Seraphim to provide you with some orbital support. And to make sure Frontier Fleet doesn’t provide any orbital support to McCready and O’Sullivan.”

Mackenzie looked at him for several moments before, finally, she nodded slowly. It actually made sense, she thought. Assuming Gold Peak managed to meet the schedule Harahap had described. And assuming there was some way to coordinate properly.

“Do you need an answer tonight?” she asked.

“To be honest, I’d prefer one as soon as possible,” Harahap said, and this time he was telling the truth. “On the other hand, I know this came at you completely cold, and the last thing either of us needs is for you to rush into something that’s just going to get you all killed without accomplishing anything for us. I’ll be on-planet for another couple of days, so you’ve got that long to think about it, but then I’m going to have to move on to my next destination.”

“I don’t know if we can have a decision for you that quickly,” Indiana put in. He looked across the table at his sister, then back at Harahap. “We’d be putting a lot of people at risk, and we’re going to have to go back and evaluate the assumptions of our contingency plans.”

“I can understand that. But if I head out of the Seraphim System, I take your communications link with me.” He grimaced. “Once I’m out of here, I won’t be able to communicate with Admiral Gold Peak to warn her you’re planning to move.”

“We might be able to work around that,” Mackenzie said slowly, and Harahap’s eyebrows rose. He hadn’t expected to hear that.

“How?” he asked. He’d hoped giving them a two-day window would push them into making a decision, and he was none too delighted by the suggestion that there was a factor in the equation that he hadn’t known about.

“Mendoza of Córdoba imports beef from Montana,” Mackenzie said. “They make regular trips, and they maintain an irregular schedule of dispatch boats between here and Meyers. About half the time, the boat stops off in Montana to check on market conditions, see about renegotiating contracts if the market price’s changed, that sort of thing.” She shrugged. “We’ve got contacts in the crews of some of the freighters on the Montana run. For that matter, we’ve got contacts on at least two of the dispatch boat crews. It’s about twenty-eight T-days from here to Montana by dispatch boat; more like six T-weeks for one of the high-speed freighters. If we can use the dispatch boat, we could get a message to Meyers in a couple of T-months. If we have to use the freighter and arrange a message relay from Montana, we might be looking at as much as four T-months. Maybe even longer.”

“I didn’t know about that,” Harahap admitted truthfully.

And I wish you didn’t know about it, either, he added silently. On the other hand, as far as I know Gold Peak isn’t going anywhere near Meyers without direct orders from home. So, worst-case scenario, you get a message to Montana in two months. Hmmm…

He thought about it. The odds were that any messenger from Seraphim would be regarded as a nutcase, if not a Solarian agent provocateur, by any Manticoran naval officer. The Manties certainly weren’t going fall all over themselves dispatching warships into Solarian territory on some wild goose chase substantiated by nothing more than somebody who claimed his revolutionary organization had been in contact with them all along! In fact, he could probably help that reaction along just a bit.

“All right,” he said, nodding with an expression of profound relief. “Actually, I’m relieved to hear you have another means of communication. I’d still prefer to know what your plans are before I have to leave, for a lot of reasons, but I can understand why you’re going to have to think about this, and at least you’re not as dependent on us as I thought you’d be to communicate with Admiral Gold Peak. Is your contact arrangement such that you know now if you’d be able to send a message off?”

“The schedules aren’t cast in ceramacrete, if that’s what you mean,” Mackenzie said. “They usually hit within, oh, a local week or so of their regular departure times, though.” She shrugged. “That’s for the freighters, of course. The dispatch boats are on a lot more irregular schedule.”

“But you could count on getting one off within a one-T-month window?”

“Oh, that we could do,” Indiana assured him.

“All right. I’m going to give you a code phrase for Admiral Gold Peak. When she hears it, she’ll know I sent you, and on that basis, she’ll be prepared to dispatch an appropriate naval force to support you immediately.” Actually, it would probably finish off any chance Gold Peak might believe them. Since there was no such code phrase, she’d have to take it as proof that their messenger was an imposter, but there was no point worrying them with that, he thought. “With that in mind, would you be prepared to go ahead and kick off your ‘short-range’ plan within, say, two T-months of having sent off your messenger?”

“I don’t know,” Mackenzie said hesitantly. “Without having coordinated directly with Gold Peak, without knowing support is on its way, we’d be asking our people to take an awful risk.”

“I realize that, but this is the kind of business risks have to be taken in,” Harahap pointed out. “And you’d be in complete control of whether or not you sent the messenger in the first place. It would be a case of your having looked at the situation here in Seraphim and decided you really can pull it off, assuming you get Admiral Gold Peak’s naval support before anybody from OFS or Frontier Fleet could respond to McCready. If you aren’t satisfied you can do that, then you never send your messenger off in the first place.”

Indiana was nodding thoughtfully, and Mackenzie looked at her brother with a worried expression. He saw it and smiled at her.

“I’m not going to rush off into anything without your support, Max,” he reassured her. “But Firebrand has a point. We’d be the ones calling the shots.”

“Could we do that and then wait until Admiral Gold Peak actually gets here?” Mackenzie asked.

“I suppose.” Harahap injected a doubtful note into his tone, and both Grahams looked at him. He shrugged. “Look, I understand your concerns. But the Star Empire’s up against it, too, you know. We’ve supported you this far, as the weapons shipments you’ve already received indicate. We’d like to support you further, and as I explained to you the first time we met, it wouldn’t be in our interest to encourage people to revolt and then stand back and watch them get the chop.

“All of that’s true, but I also have to say that we’ve got to allocate our resources carefully. Not things like weapons shipments. Those we can arrange basically whenever and wherever we need to. But we’re talking about warships, about naval support, and we’re up against the Solarian League, the biggest navy in the history of the galaxy. If you can’t commit to a specific date for your own organization to strike until you’ve actually got Manticoran warships in orbit around the planet, you’re probably going to get pushed further down the priorities queue. I’m not trying to make any kind of threat here, or give you any kind of ultimatum. I’m just saying that if Admiral Gold Peak is looking at requests for support, she’s probably going to give priority to the people running the greatest risks. And if she’s strapped for light units, she’s probably not going to give very much priority to somebody who tells her they can’t take action until they have Manticoran units actually in their skies. She’ll figure that if you’re waiting for that kind of response, you won’t be coming into the open until you get it, and if you’re not out in the open, you’re probably not going to take any heavy hits from the scags, so she can afford to let you wait while she deals with more pressing commitments.”

“You’re saying she’d refuse to send us support?” Indiana asked.

“No, I’m saying there’d be a good chance she’d move you down the list.” Harahap shrugged. “She’d probably send word back by your contact telling you how soon she’d be able to free up units to send in your direction. It might not be very long. On the other hand, given how other operations go, it could be you’d be looking at your original two or three-T-year timeframe. More probably, it would fall somewhere in the middle.”

The Grahams looked at each other again. Indiana raised one eyebrow, and Mackenzie shrugged. Then he turned back to Harahap.

“We understand what you’re saying. We understand the logic behind it, too. And the truth is, as I’m sure you realized before you said it, that there’s no way we want to leave our dad—or anyone else—rotting in Terrabore Prison one minute longer than we have to. We’ll look at our options, and at our communications channels, and see what we can do. I don’t think there’s any way we could possibly give you an answer before you have to leave the system, but we will make our minds up as quickly as possible.”

“That’s all I can ask for.” Harahap smiled. “Like I say, no one wants you running stupid risks, so look at those options carefully. But if you do decide to move, Admiral Gold Peak will be there for you.”

“Good.”

Indiana looked as if he wanted to say more, but at that moment Alecta reappeared, carrying a tray laden with steaming bowls. She set it down and began distributing food, and Harahap settled back, sniffing appreciatively. The curry smelled just as good as she’d promised, and he allowed himself to look forward to it.

He wasn’t completely satisfied with the evening’s work, and his bosses wouldn’t be either. Fortunately, they were professionals who understood timing was always a problem in an operation like this one, and no one could ever predict how it would work out in the end. Not really. There was always some damned unknown factor waiting around to screw things up, like that idiot Zagorski in Loomis. An entire T-year of preparations and quiet contacts right down the tubes because of him and MacQuarie, and the fumblers hadn’t even turned up evidence that Manticore had been involved with the LLL! Talk about wasted effort! As a general rule, incompetent opponents were a blessing, but when they were too frigging stupid to do their own jobs just when you actually needed them to…

He brushed that thought aside. Done was done, and Loomis hadn’t been his op, anyway. This one was, and he was a craftsman who took pride in his work.

So did those superiors of his who weren’t going to be happy if he couldn’t convince these kids into accelerating their schedule. He didn’t know exactly why that was, and those superiors weren’t about to tell him, but that was fine. He understood the rules, even if they could turn around and bite someone on the arse too often for comfort, and he’d do his best to pull it off. It was obvious he wasn’t going to rush these two after all, though. Indiana was clearly more inclined to act quickly, yet it was equally clear he wasn’t prepared to overrule Mackenzie’s more cautious, analytical approach. His employers were just going to have to settle for the best he could do, and at least they were far more pragmatic—and aware of operational realities and limitations—than some of the people he’d worked for in the past. As long as he was honest in his reports to them they were unlikely to send him a pulser dart just because he hadn’t been able to accomplish the impossible.

Harahap considered the odds as he began ladling curry over a plate of rice. Fifty-fifty, he decided. Maybe as high as sixty-forty, his favor, given Indiana’s aggressiveness, but not any better than that. Still, he’d won a lot of bets at worse odds than that, and if this one didn’t work out, all he and his employers lost was the time and the piddling expense of the weapons they’d provided. Whereas if it did work…

I can live with fifty-fifty, he decided. After all, it won’t be my ass, whichever side craps out.