The White Fleet (Blood on the Stars Book 7) Page 21

  But that didn’t mean whatever civilization the fleet had just found shared those belief systems. There was an arrogance that made it easy to measure others based on one’s own standards, and Barron knew it affected him as much as anyone else. As difficult as it was to escape his own prejudices, it wasn’t really that difficult to imagine a culture, very different from his own, building a system of ethics around their own quest to improve lifespans, eliminate disease, increase strength and intellect. Especially if their history was one of surviving an apocalypse that nearly destroyed humanity and left most of those who remained deeply scarred.

  If that’s what we’ve found, it’s going to complicate the prospect of peaceful relations, to say the least. The Confederation and the Union, and most of their neighbors, had spent at least half of the past century fighting each other, seeing each other as hateful enemies…and they shared much of the same culture. A society based on eugenics would be almost alien to the Rim nations…and no doubt such people would feel the same about the Confederation, or the Alliance.

  “It certainly looks that way, Tyler. What little communication I’ve been able to have with the captive, it’s clear he considers himself superior to everyone else present, us included. And, you have to see these soldiers. They’re normal people, at least it looks like they were, if tending to be a bit larger and stronger than most, but what was done to them is…” She let the words trail off.

  “I’ve read the reports.” He’d gotten a stack of updates on the analyses of the soldiers killed in the fighting, from the medical teams and Rogan’s people. The Marines liked to think of themselves as the best, but they’d suffered a loss ratio of more than two to one in their fights with the still-unidentified troopers, and that was in spite of having significant numerical superiority. “It’s hard to imagine anyone letting someone…do that to them.” The soldiers were human, or at least they had been at one time, but they had so much equipment attached to their bodies and implanted inside them, Barron would almost call them cyborgs.

  “And the people who seem to be native to this world…clearly, they’re the descendants of survivors who suffered mutations and genetic damage. From radiation certainly, but perhaps also from biological and chemical agents. The strange thing is…” She was silent for a moment. “…well, they seem to be familiar with the prisoner, and with the soldiers. They appear to be very concerned that we’re holding the captive against his will, and there hasn’t been a minute when there wasn’t a crowd of them outside the hut, chanting, bowing, crawling around almost like…”

  “Almost like they were worshipping the prisoner?” The intel Barron had seen all pointed to some kind of relationship between the villagers and the captive. He’d come up with a few thoughts on what that could be, and he didn’t like any of them.

  “Yes. Like they think he’s a god…or something close to that.”

  Barron leaned back and rubbed his forehead. He’d faced death in battle more times than he could easily count, and he remembered the fear, the difficulty in deciding how to proceed in combat situations. But he’d never felt as unsure of what to do as he did now. He had his people on the surface analyzing everything possible, getting what little they could from the prisoner…but he knew they were all distracted now, worried that the mysterious illness spreading through the ranks would hit them next. Barron knew he had inadvertently inflamed their fears—and signaled that the problem was a very serious one—by terminating all return flights to the fleet. He’d even put the flight crews who’d piloted shuttles back and forth into quarantine, and ordered all future flights to drop cargo on one-way automated landing sleds instead of touching down. Whatever was ravaging his people down there, he couldn’t let it spread to the fleet.

  “Do what you can, Atara…and let me know how I can help. Anything you need. I mean anything.” He felt the urge to call her back to Dauntless, to make an exception to the orders he’d imposed on the landing parties. But he knew he couldn’t. He had to keep her there with the others, even watch her die if the med teams didn’t find a way to defeat this new disease. He couldn’t risk losing the entire fleet…or take the slightest chance of bringing a deadly plague back to the Confederation.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Troyus City

  Planet Megara, Olyus III

  Year 315 AC

  “You can see now, what I have told you is one hundred percent true, Senator. I don’t know why Mr. Holsten has taken the action he has, but there’s no doubt he has done it. Apart from the enormous costs of deploying a naval task force and a Marine division, the damage being done to Dannith’s economy is staggering.” Marieles stood with one hand on the railing, taking turns between looking at Senator Farrell and staring out over the pristine waters of the Crystal River. She suspected the waterway had been far less appealing a century and a half earlier, as Megara clawed its way out of the short dark age it had experienced after the Cataclysm. The planet had been an industrialist’s dream then, with a focused obsession on production at all costs, and little regard for anything else.

  Things had changed significantly, thanks to one hundred years of being the central hub of a prosperous and growing Confederation. She wondered how the factory workers on polluted Vespas or the indentured servants of Rogaloth would react if they could see what their sweat and toil supported. Troyus was a virtual paradise now, freed of the need to manufacture anything—save carbon dioxide from the endless chatter of Senators and other government officials.

  “I understand your frustration, Desiree, and I assure you, I share it. I can also promise you that the Senate will not sit by and allow such a flagrant abuse of power go unchallenged. Confederation Intelligence has been far too unregulated for years now. That agency is, in my opinion, an ongoing threat to the liberty of our great Confederation, and the time has come to do something about it. We simply cannot allow…”

  She reminded herself to listen…or at least to look like she was listening. She’d caught her mind wandering more than once in conversations with the longwinded Senator. It was all the more potent a reminder of how intensely boring the man was, since she was not the high-powered lobbyist she pretended to be, but a Sector Nine—no, People’s Protectorate—agent. Her entire life had been spent humoring assets and marks, and the difficultly she’d experienced with Farrell spoke volumes of the inanity of the man’s seemingly endless drivel.

  “…tried for years to organize my colleagues to deal with…”

  “Excuse me, Senator…I’m sorry to interrupt…” But, if I don’t, odds are I’m going to kill you and throw your body in the river. “…but I’m afraid I have a rather pressing engagement elsewhere, one I cannot miss, as much as I wish we could continue this discussion.”

  “That’s a pity, Desiree. I was about to suggest we might extend our conversation over dinner. I know of a very quiet spot not far from here. They have the most amazing…”

  “I’m devastated that I must decline for now, Senator. As much as I would prefer to continue enjoying your company, sadly, work calls. I just wanted to get this latest…package…to you today, and I felt I needed to hand it to you directly.”

  “Thank you, Desiree. You are most kind…and conscientious. I understand the plight of your clients on Dannith, and I can promise you action. Quickly.”

  She smiled and nodded, though she suspected her definition of “quickly” and Farrell’s differed significantly. She reached out, putting her hand on the Senator’s arm and holding it there for a moment. The gesture wasn’t overtly seductive, but was enough to make the politician think about it. “I trust we will find time for a more…productive…discussion soon, Barton.”

  “Soon, indeed, Desiree.” The Senator leaned in toward her, but she pulled away first, somehow managing to look like she was driven by haste, and not pure revulsion for the Confed politician. Marieles was willing to do whatever was necessary to complete the mission, but if things went that way, she’d need to make sure she had an antiemetic on hand. She wasn�
�t sure how much of her disgust was a reaction to Ferrell’s physical unattractiveness and how much to the sheer idiocy he spewed every time his mouth opened. For now, she would get what she could through pure verbal manipulation. She’d worry about taking things further later, if and when it became absolutely necessary.

  She turned and walked down the path parallel to the river. She did have other work to do—that, at least, was the truth. Farrell wasn’t even a significant part of her original mission, but his position as vice-chairman of the committee overseeing Confederation Intelligence made him an ideal asset for her new secondary operation.

  Her efforts to subvert the Confederation government had been going well, but by any measure, it was still a long-term plan, one of gradual destabilization. Turning the Senate on Gary Holsten…that was child’s play by comparison, especially since half the sitting members of the body had engaged in past tiffs with the spy.

  She knew Holsten had his own ways of keeping the Senate off his back, and after meeting so many of the august body’s members, she could only imagine the grotesqueries which had ended up in the Confed Intelligence chief’s private files. The list of those in that dossier included Ferrell, no doubt, and overcoming the Senator’s fear of blowback from Holsten was the trickiest part of her assignment. She was working Ferrell, pushing him as hard as she dared—and supplying him with written complaints from business owners and citizens on Dannith. Most of those were forged, but that was only because Holsten had been smart enough to cut off most communication from the embargoed planet. That was a short-term game for Holsten. It wouldn’t keep things quiet long, and it only added to the actions that could be called abuse of power, but it would buy him some time.

  Marieles had never minded lying to complete a mission. In fact, she didn’t particularly differentiate between the truth and falsehoods. She thought more in terms of what those involved needed to hear, and she gave them that. She’d learned realities in her career that most people never managed to completely understand. A well-crafted, believable lie, for example, could be far safer and more useful than an unprovable truth. People constantly ruined themselves chasing after concepts of fairness and justice that didn’t exist. She had long ago promised herself she would never be one of them.

  She had an insurance policy on the Dannith operation, as well, a backup for the unreliable Senator’s efforts. She’d assured Ferrell that everything she’d given him was confidential, and she’d promised to wait, to hold it all and let him proceed in his own way. Then, she’d almost immediately made sure all the information was leaked to the media and to half the other Senators in Troyus City. None of it could be traced to her, of course…at least she was pretty sure of that. But if Ferrell didn’t move quickly, or if he allowed Holsten’s dirty little file to deter him, he would be forced to take action when he started seeing news reports on the vid about the Dannith blockade. She’d even managed to line up some protests to start the next day, mostly professional rabble rousers who’d turned out to be quite a bit cheaper and easier to find on Megara than she’d expected.

  The events on Dannith were unrelated to her Operation Black Dawn, but there was some potential crossover. If she could get Holsten in real trouble, perhaps even suspended from his role as head of the intelligence agency, it would wreak havoc on Confed counterintelligence efforts…just as she was putting Black Dawn into its final stages. And, if Holsten fought back as aggressively as she suspected he would, the Confederation’s Senate would descend into an orgy of scandal and infighting…the perfect setting for Black Dawn.

  The plan to destabilize the Confederation was enormously complex, and there were countless ways it could be thwarted. Holsten in prison and his closest operatives scrambling for cover would create the perfect opportunity, and eliminate a good number of the potential sources of failure. Marieles knew quite well the rewards that would await her back on Montmirail if she succeeded.

  She looked behind her, just a quick check to make sure she was out of Ferrell’s sight, and then she stopped, turning again toward the river. It meandered from the government district through a neighborhood of exclusive shops, and, finally, to the base of Lantern Hill, where most of the Senators and the highly-paid lobbyists—including at least one fake one, herself—kept apartments. She’d come to Troyus City on a mission, but she still found herself surprised by its pleasantness and beauty. The metropolis outshone even Liberte City on Montmirail, and by several orders of magnitude.

  She knew the capital was where the highest ranked of the elites were, and that the average Confed citizen never saw anything even remotely comparable to the wonders of Troyus. She was also well aware that many of the worlds of the Confederation’s Iron Belt were industrial hells, populated by workers little better off than those of the Union. But, still, there was little doubt in her mind now that the average Confed lived a much better life than the near-sustenance level existence of vast majority of the Union’s citizens. And, she understood even more acutely the importance of the propaganda machine that kept that information from the masses back home.

  The same reality was one big reason why the Union had been unable to defeat its foe, she realized. For all the corruption and the poverty she knew existed on many worlds, most Confederation citizens felt some level of genuine patriotism. They believed their lives were better than they would be in another nation, and certainly in a place like the Union. The equivalent sentiment in the Union was a pale imitation, driven by blatant and repeated propaganda, and enforced by the deaths squads of Sector Nine…now, the People’s Protectorate.

  Another person might have come to the conclusion that she was on the wrong side, that the Union was evil, and the Confederation good. Perhaps, for just a few seconds, something of the sort danced on the outskirts of her thoughts. But she was a creature of the Union, and she recognized where her path to wealth and power lay. She’d been a successful operative, and save for the past year and a half, she’d lived quite well on the fruits of her victories. She had long ago eradicated any weakness or moral quandaries that could interfere with the ruthlessness her own success required, and she recognized the importance of her current work. This was the true opportunity, the one that would lead her to the upper levels of the People’s Protectorate, and potentially farther, perhaps to whatever body eventually replaced the old Presidium.

  She smiled as she panned her eyes down the river banks, scanning one magnificent building after another. The Confederation was strong, there was no doubt about that. It had proven to be too mighty to defeat economically or militarily. But there were more ways to gain a victory, to destroy an enemy. Now she was going to kill it from the inside like a deadly cancer, invading its vital areas and destroying them one by one.

  She would exploit their political divisions, use their corruption and decadence against them. She would turn them in on each other and watch them topple their own institutions in a mad frenzy to destroy each other. The Confederation’s weakness was arrogance. They saw the troubles of nations all around them, civil war in the Alliance, revolution in the Union, and they believed such things couldn’t happen to them.

  She would show them they were wrong, that they were not immune to the sorts of upheavals that shook the other nations.

  She would bring them the Black Dawn.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Planet Zero

  Zed-11 System

  Year 315 AC

  “I need more samples. I don’t care if you have to chase the locals through the woods and hold them down, but it has to be now.” Stu Weldon was Dauntless’s chief medical officer, a position he’d held since the day Tyler Barron had taken command of the old Dauntless, and one he’d refused to give up, even when it had moved to a new ship bearing the name. Even when Barron had bumped him up in rank and gave him the added post of top sawbones of the entire fleet.

  “Yes, Doctor Weldon.” The assistant turned and raced off, away from the medpod Weldon was leaning over and out the small doorway of the hut. The shack
s were filthy and dark, extremely poor raw material for a makeshift hospital, but they were all Weldon had, at least until the Marines finished putting up the prefab structures Barron had sent down from the fleet.

  Weldon didn’t like the readings on the pod…he didn’t like them at all. Whatever was afflicting the landing party—and the number of victims had grown to over seventy now—nothing he’d tried had been even partially effective in slowing the progression of the disease. He’d started reviewing readings and data transmitted up to the fleet, until he’d thrown his hands in the air at the difficulty of long-range analysis and stated unequivocally that he was going to the surface, and that no one was going to stop him. Barron tried, at least, but the admiral’s legendary stubbornness had once more met its match in that of his chief surgeon. In the end, Barron had relented. Mostly, Weldon suspected, because Barron knew it was the best chance of getting somewhere on addressing the growing epidemic.

  He hadn’t lost any of the patients yet, but that was just because he’d put the worst of them in partial cryo-stasis. That number had risen to more than two dozen, and it had challenged the Marines and fleet support personnel hastily building infrastructure to keep up with his needs. The medpods used a fair amount of energy under normal circumstances, but activating the cryo systems really turned them into electricity hogs. The landing party was still on battery power, and it was going through fresh units as quickly as Barron could get more down to the surface.

  The admiral had finally sent a portable fusion reactor, but moving something like that with shuttles required massive disassembly, and the corresponding need to put the thing back together. That was a complex job, especially when it was mostly a bunch of Marines working on it, following directions sent down from the engineering team on Dauntless. Weldon suspected many of the fleet’s experts had volunteered to come to the surface, but he was just as certain Barron wasn’t going to let anyone else down, not unless it was absolutely vital.