The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III Read online

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you haven’t quite been stripped of your commission or court martialed yet. Your office is under the impression that you are on detached duty assisting the Kona Tatsu. I have not yet disabused them of that notion—which is why you aren’t in the brig. And you’ll stay out of it if you pass a certain test.” The KT man pulled a thick file folder from his briefcase and dropped it on Al’s chest. “Read that. Analyze it. Get it right and you stay on detached duty. Get it wrong and you’ll get a lot of practice breaking rocks on Penitence. Please bear in mind that, even for a prison planet, Penitence is not a nice place.”

  The KT man stood, nodded to Spencer, and walked out of the room. Spencer, feeling a bit stronger now, lifted himself up on his elbows to watch the man leave. There was no mistaking it, even behind the threats and the cold, hard language. This nameless secret policeman was a kindly, decent man. There had been no need for him to rescue Spencer, or block the Guard’s quite legitimate efforts to punish Spencer. He was doing Spencer a kindness, attempting to make redress for the disaster that the system had inflicted on him.

  And it was a hell of a note when you had to depend on the kindness and decency of the secret police.

  Kindness or no, Spencer had no doubt that the threat of Penitence was real. There were sharp limits to the KT’s forbearance—and the KT man was requiring Spencer to earn his own survival.

  Still a little light-headed, he sat up in bed and broke the seal on the fat file, noting that it was printed on rapid-decay paper that would collapse into powder in a few hours. He’d have to read fast.

  The first words his eyes fell upon scared the merry hell out of him. BASIC SECRET KONA TATSU. In the understated world of KT parlance, “Basic” corresponded roughly with “Ultra Eyes-only Human-only Secure-room Access Defended Document” in the rather verbose Guard terminology. And “Defended Document” meant it was legal to kill anyone who might leak it. If Spencer flunked the KT man’s little test, Penitence might be the least of his worries.

  More than a little nervous, Spencer began reading the file. Ten minutes later his nervousness was forgotten. He was too baffled and curious to remember the danger he was in.

  There was something mighty peculiar going on out in the Jomini Cluster.

  KT agents had gone missing. In a high-risk sector, that would not have been remarkable—but the disappearances were from Daltgeld, the capital world of the cluster, and Daltgeld was no danger zone. It was a tourist world, safe in the interior of the Pact’s communication lines, nowhere near any of the dozens of potential flash points.

  Perhaps that was the point. If Daltgeld could become unsettled—then what place was safe?

  Spencer pored over the papers. Agents were vanishing—but reports from the remaining agents were perfectly routine. Their fellows were disappearing, and the survivors did not bother to report it.

  It was obvious that there was a lot missing from this file, as well. It had been heavily censored. Spencer frowned. Maybe they didn’t have all the data—but they weren’t even telling him everything they knew.

  Up until the moment the KT man had arrived in his office with the news that his wife was no longer his wife, Allison Spencer had been an intelligence officer. A good one. He had never gone out to play spy—he had done real work, serving in combat units, gathering and analyzing tactical data, and then a hitch back at Guard HQ, working with long-term strategic studies. He found his old reflexes swinging into action. This sort of thing was his bread and butter.

  A small part of his mind considered that the Kona Tatsu had to know that Spencer was an intel man who loved puzzle-solving. Spencer knew that the very act of briefing him this way, showing him a part of the puzzle rather than telling him everything, was part of the game they were playing with him. More KT manipulation. The secret police were messing with his mind, teasing him.

  He knew all that, and he didn’t care. Because it was working. This puzzle intrigued him. There was something wrong on Daltgeld.

  ***

  The last of the pages had rotted away to powder, had been vacuumed away by the cleaning robot, and Spencer was sitting up in bed, eating his dinner, when the KT man returned.

  Spencer looked up and nodded thoughtfully as his control retook his seat. The term “control” seemed strange to Spencer, but after all, spies had controls, not commanders. The only possible reason to show Spencer that file was to prepare him for playing spy. He looked at the KT man, who sat, saying nothing, waiting expectantly.

  “I assume that this room is secure?” Spencer asked. A service robot rolled in, unbidden, and removed the remains of Spencer’s dinner.

  “You passed the first part of the test,” the KT man said. “You are quite right to assume that—and equally right not to trust that assumption. You may talk freely.”

  Spencer noted that the KT man did not ask him any questions. The KT man wanted him to work this out on his own. “All right, then. There was nothing in that file to suggest it directly, but it seems to me that the Kona Tatsu has been penetrated,” Spencer said. “Someone has subverted the subverters.”

  The KT man glanced away and nodded woodenly, obviously trying to mask his own embarrassment. “You have passed the second part of the test. The Kona Tatsu has failed. We are in danger from an unknown force that can neutralize our best people undetectably. Anyone who can do that threatens the entire Pact. And the Pact is exposed to enough threats as it is. It might not survive the assassination crisis. If it does, then it will still be severely weakened. Not ready to face whatever is flattening the KT on Daltgeld.”

  The nameless man looked back at Spencer and flashed a joyless, mechanical smile. “We want your help. And we’re going to get it, aren’t we?”

  Spencer nodded woodenly. At least they weren’t insulting his intellect by pretending he had a choice.

  Chapter Three

  Suss

  Al Spencer stood in front of the mirror in his hospital room and looked himself over. A thin, haggard, flimsy-looking man stared back. He had lost a lot of weight to the feel-good button, and not yet gained it back. His uniforms no longer fit. But then, no part of his life fit him anymore. Not his involuntary bachelorhood, not his rank or service assignment. Why should his clothes?

  And what about his assignment—or should he even call it that? It would be better described as his cover, even if the face that looked out of the mirror at him didn’t look much like a spy. What was it they were expecting of him, anyway?

  He sighed unhappily. Spencer knew perfectly well what their expectations were. No need to ask himself rhetorical questions. It was pretty obvious he was meant to serve as a target, a decoy. Something for the Kona Tatsu’s enemies to shoot at while the real KT operatives got on with the job.

  He peered deeper into the mirror, tried to look himself in the eye. It wasn’t easy. Not anymore.

  He blinked and came back to himself, plucked idly at the loose folds of cloth that hung from him. Ill-fitting uniforms didn’t matter. They, like every other part of his life, were about to be shed in favor of something else. The Kona Tatsu had plans for him. They were shifting him over from the Guard to the Navy, assigning him a ship, indeed a whole fleet. In the Pact military, a transfer from one service to another was nothing unusual, but still this move would be of note. Becoming a Navy captain was the equivalent of another jump in rank from a Guard captain. In effect, he had received yet another promotion. That should have made him proud, certainly—but not even a shiny new command could resurrect his self-respect completely.

  He did not feel entitled to the command, or that he had earned it. It was the KT’s work, plain and simple. He was their man. And it was pretty damn galling to learn that the secret police could control the military command structure, seemingly at whim. How often did they do it? How many seemingly meteoric careers were really just the KT putting their own man forward? Spencer felt like a pawn in the KT’s game, and knew that it was a pretty accurate analogy.
/>   No, he didn’t have much to be proud of. Not when his fingers still curled around an imaginary feel-good control whenever unhappy thoughts came to his mind. But if he wanted to survive, and stay off Penitence, he would have to put the best possible face on the situation. He’d have to act proud, at least.

  He smoothed the uniform jacket down over his blouse as best he could, turned, and stepped out into the hallway. He had orders to depart this morning at 0900 hours, and the time had come. He had no bags with him, nothing to carry away with him but his AID. It banged against his hip as he walked. The damn thing had saved his life, but he still didn’t like carrying it.

  He looked up and down the hallway at the ward. As usual, the place was deserted. Spencer had not laid eyes on anyone but the nameless KT man since his arrival. No patients, no doctors, no nurses, no staff. There were three other rooms for patients, a nurse’s station, a diagnostic control pod—but there was no one there to cure or be cured. Just the medical and maintenance robots. They did all the work. A wholly automated ward, run that way for security reasons, no doubt. This was obviously some sort of KT facility. But was it an entire KT hospital, or just one small clinic inside a larger complex?

  Not even the KT man here to see him off. Typical. No doubt the watchers were on duty, the surveillance AIDs recording his every move. Spencer raised a hand, waved good-bye to where he thought a camera might be. But then how to get the hell out of here?

  It turned out to be simpler than he thought. All the doors but one were locked, and that led out onto a blank hallway full of doors—only one of which would open. That led out onto a stairwell. He followed it down to another doorway, and so on through a whole rabbit’s warren of tunnels, stairwells and droptubes that seemed like they must lead him halfway across the city. There was never more than one door that would open, and every door locked quite firmly behind him.

  At last he found himself decanted out into a dark, dank narrow alley. It was a fetid, nasty place—but he could see the sky from here. Al looked straight up, and saw the gleam of stars. Stars? How could that be? Al glanced at his watch. It wasn’t even ten in the morning. Unless the watch had been damaged. “AID, what time is it?” he asked.

  “It is 0957 hours planetary standard, and late evening local zone standard.”

  Al blinked, feeling badly disoriented. He was on the other side of the world from his home city.

  “Where the hell are we?”

  “I am not permitted to answer questions of locale until we are returned to your own home.”

  Typical, Al decided. His own AID was taking orders from the KT. Clearly, they wanted him to get home without knowing where he had been. Another damn test, this time an exercise in keeping his own knowledge limited. There were certainly ways he could figure out where this was. Walk out from here until he found a street sign. Memorize the star positions overhead, and then compare that to the exact time to get a longitude. But no, his AID had simply said it was “late evening”—no doubt on the KT’s instructions to be vague. Without knowing the local celestial time, he couldn’t use the sky. Never mind. He could simply walk out from here until he found a citizen to ask where he was.

  But they didn’t want him to know, were challenging him to get home without finding out. He was getting tired of these little pop quizzes. Nevertheless, he was obviously being watched, somehow, so he’d better play by the rules. “AID, call me a cab,” he said in a tired voice. “And see if you can charge the fare to the Kona Tatsu.” Al Spencer knew his credit balance wasn’t up to paying for intercontinental cab fares. He didn’t mind dancing to the KT’s tune, so long as they paid the piper.

  “The KT pays all operational expenses of its personnel. It’s taken care of,” the AID said, with what might have been just a hint of gently mocking humor in its voice.

  A cab dropped out of the sky and touched down in the middle of the street. It sidled over to the curb on its hoverskirt and opened its door in front of Al. He climbed in and sat down. “Tell the cab to opaque windows and take me home,” he told the AID testily. “And fly via non-direct routes.” The KT wouldn’t want him to be able to look out the window, or calculate his starting point from measuring the flight time.

  Which meant he had a flight of long and indeterminate length to look forward to, hours of sitting inside a blacked-out cab with nothing to see or do.

  The cab door shut, the windows blacked out, the interior lights came on, and the robot cab whooshed into the sky. Damn them. Damn them all and the games they played. And damn me, too, for playing with them, as if I had much choice, Spencer thought.

  ###

  The near-silent thrumming of the cab’s engines, the dim interior lighting and the enforced inactivity conspired to put Allison Spencer into a light doze. He slept as the kilometers whispered past, his hand now and again clenching around an imaginary switch.

  It took only the slightest shift in the cab’s motion to awaken him. His eyes sprang open the moment the cab’s nose pitched downward, and it took him a second or two to remember where he was. “Cab, what is it?”

  “Additional passenger proceeding to same destination has hailed me,” the cab answered in a dull voice.

  The same destination! The cab was supposed to be taking him home! He hadn’t planned on providing target practice just yet. He reached out and broke the seal on the emergency manual operation switch. He pushed the switch in hard, waiting for the manual controls to pop out so he could fly himself out of here. It scared him when nothing happened, but it didn’t exactly surprise him.

  The situation was not good. Here he was, unarmed in a cab he could not control, heading toward a landing, a meeting with someone who had to know who he was. “AID! See if you can find a KT distress band and send an SOS. Flash under attack. Whatever the hell the KT calls it.”

  “We are not under attack,” the AID announced calmly. “This stop was prearranged.”

  Al Spencer felt his blood go cold. “You knew this was going to happen?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Who is it we’re picking up?”

  “I am not at liberty to tell you.”

  Al felt the sweat beading up on his forehead. His AID told him this was no attack—but his AID willfully had withheld information from him. How far a step was it from there to lying? If he were about to be attacked, could he trust this machine to tell him what it knew? “AID, who the hell do you work for?” he asked. He only had a few seconds to straighten this out.

  “I am now employed by the Kona Tatsu, and have been assigned to your case.”

  What sort of case was he? Spencer wondered irritably. Medical? Mental? Legal? Intelligence? “You are incorrect. I am employed by the Kona Tatsu. I own you. You are one of the tools I use to do my employer’s bidding. And I am expected to discard and destroy any tool that does not perform up to specification, before it could endanger a KT asset, such as myself. The specification for an AID includes keeping its owner informed and apprised of all pertinent data. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “Captain Allison Spencer.”

  “Then, AID, who the hell is waiting to meet this cab?”

  “A KT operative, name, rank and mission unknown.”

  “That’s more like it. I think.” It wasn’t any more informative, but at least the AID was admitting it didn’t know. Spencer was inclined to accept its ignorance: AIDs weren’t usually very good liars. And even if the new arrival was a KT agent, that didn’t necessarily mean all was well. Every other organization in the Pact was divided into rival factions. Why not the Kona Tatsu? Why shouldn’t his nameless friend back at the hospital have enemies?

  With that happy thought, Allison felt himself grow heavier for a moment as the cab braked and came in for a landing. Ten seconds later the interior lights dimmed to nothing. Al heard the door pop open, and saw the sky framed by the door for half a moment. A shape flitted through the door, silhouetted against the dark night sky. T
he door clicked shut and the cab was airborne again, pitching upward to head for the sky.

  “Lights on,” a firm, low-pitched woman’s voice commanded. The cab’s interior lit up, and Allison Spencer found himself face to face with the figure of a smallish woman dressed completely in black, and nose-to-nose with the repulsor pistol she held in her hand. Her clothes were so dark that she was hard to see even in the cab’s lighting. Even her face was hidden behind a black mesh maskcap that cloaked her features completely. “Name,” she snapped out, in tones that made it an order and not a question.

  “Allison Spencer,” he answered. “Who the hell are you?”

  “What is your control’s name?” she demanded.

  “How the hell would I know?” he replied irritably. “The son-of-a-bitch never told me.”

  His inquisitor chuckled at that, and made the pistol disappear. “That’s him all right,” she said cheerfully. “Always very careful about need-to-know.” She cocked her head over her shoulder. “Santu, what’s the story?” she asked abruptly.

  “His AID confirms his identity via radio link,” a muffled voice replied from the rucksack on the woman’s back. “I’d trust it. The military models are hard to manipulate without leaving traces.”

  “All right, Spencer, you are who you are. So maybe we can get down to business.”