been cold. But I never believed…”
Honest people believe what they’re told. I drew a deep breath. “Is he cold enough to bargain with?”
Jude spun away from the window. “You’re not serious? We can’t deal with-”
“You didn’t have a problem dealing with the RS until now. Aud’s a sand grain compared to what your RS has done to the rest of Tressen.”
He shook his head. “The RS you think you see-”
“Finally, you see it, too.”
“I don’t. A power play by Zeit doesn’t prove all that stuff about the camps. The RS you think you see could never be my RS.”
I stared out the window, at a crew of thin, bent women picking up roadside trash under guard. Each woman wore a scarlet Iridian identifying medallion. I turned away from the window. “Well, now it has to be all of ours.”
FORTY-TWO
THE HUMAN UNION CONSULATE squatted like a gray marble toad, part of the new quarter of Tressia that the Republican Socialists had built. Like most everything else about the multinational Human Union, the consulate was principally paid for and staffed by Americans.
To demonstrate the Human Union’s outrage at Republican Socialist internal policy, the building had been downgraded to consulate from embassy. The Tressens cared less. The ambassador got downgraded to consul, too. Again, the Tressens cared less. But I cared because the ambassador’s paycheck shrank, and he was my friend.
Human Union Consul Eric Muscovy greeted us at the consulate’s double doors, waddling. More charitably, he was walking slightly splay-footed, and his lips protruded.
He hugged me, then frowned. “I hear you smarted off to Zeit today, Jason.”
“Next time I’ll punch his lights out, Duck.” I
“I was sorry to hear. Ord was a good man.” So was the Duck. He and Ord together had sprung me from China, once upon a time. The Duck wasn’t a Spook under diplomatic cover, though. He was an Asian-studies major who accepted backwater and offworld assignments that his peers rejected as disamenable, because distance from the home office conferred a measure of diplomatic autonomy. But the Duck was no privateer. “Rogue diplomat” is an oxymoron.
After greetings among Howard, Jude, and the Duck, Consul Muscovy peered across the wide boulevard. On the opposite sidewalk a brown-trench-coated Tressen in a slouch hat leaned against a lamppost reading a newspaper. The Duck smiled and waved. The man ignored him.
When the doors closed behind us, Jude jerked his head behind us toward the doors as he asked the Duck, “Ferrent?”
Ferrents were anvil-headed, beady-eyed brown amphibians the size of Gila monsters. Their most notable contribution to Tressen’s pseudo-Paleozoic ecology was one singularly off-putting habit. They nosed around in other animals’ dung. The Republican Socialists’ Interior Police, with their sore-thumb-brown “civilian” trench coats and slouch hats, came by their nickname honestly.
The Duck smiled and nodded. “Mister Air Vice Marshall, take a glimpse of life on Tressel for citizens who aren’t highly placed Republican Socialists. Jude, there’s a Ferrent slouching against that lamppost twenty-six hours every day. There’s another in the alley behind us, across from our back door. A Ferrent team tails everyone who goes in or out.”
Jude shook his head. “Duck, the consular staff are aliens. Outer space, hostile aliens. Foreign Service personnel get surveilled in every capital-Washington, Paris, Marinus. That doesn’t make the Ferrents the Gestapo.”
“Oh? Last week our regular shellfish monger got replaced. The new guy couldn’t catch fish with dynamite. A plant. We checked. The old monger’s house was vacant. Neighbor said the family went north.”
Jude furrowed his brow. “Pioneer camp?”
The Duck nodded. “And his wife and kids.”
Jude shifted his weight, then shrugged. “Anecdotal evidence.” I shrugged, too. Tressen’s wealth, compared to its conquered rival, Iridia, came from mineral deposits in Tressen’s north. It was marginally credible that a family might seek a new life on the frontier.
I eyed the walls. “Can we talk in here, Duck?”
He smiled. “The Tressens have rudimentary crank-toring telephones. They invented the telegraph only a couple years ago. No bug problems. On the other hand, their human intelligence collection’s aggressive. Like Stalin-era KGB. So we don’t let locals penetrate farther than the kitchen door out back. Like the phony fishmonger. ’Bots handle everything an embassy or consulate would normally hire out locally. We do our own dishes and change our own lightbulbs.”
I nodded. “How many Spooks you got in the house?”
“None, of course.” The Duck stared at me. Then he shrugged. “The cultural attache’s staff are Spooks. Don’t change the subject. You’ve been here an hour and you’ve set relations back a year.”
“Duck, even if we hold our noses, Zeit will never cooperate. Besides, he’s dirt in a uniform.”
The Duck cocked his head and pursed his protruding lips. “Economically put.”
“Is Aud Planck a viable alternative?”
“Let’s ask.” The Duck led us down the consulate’s center hallway to a door marked “Cultural Affairs” and buzzed us through a locked door.
The office was normal, but to a Tressen, or to any other non-Earthling citizen of the Human Union, the place would look like black magic, with translucent holographic images animating the space above desks. Two desks were occupied. Nearest to us a middle-aged, chipmunk-cheeked guy in a business suit glanced up from his keyboard as we entered. He looked like a hotel clerk.
When he saw Jude in neo-Gestapo black, he came up out of his chair with an aimed pistol, quicker than Wyatt Earp.
The Duck pumped his palm toward the floor. “Relax, Bill.”
Bill’s pistol remained sighted at Jude’s forehead.
The Duck said, “The air vice marshall here’s been seconded to the Human Union Space Force. His clearance at the moment is as high as yours.”
Jude, stock-still, said, “I’m getting an education since I’ve gotten back on Tressel.”
Bill dropped the pistol to his side but kept staring at Jude. “Pretty hard not to have gotten one while you were here before, Vice Marshall.”
The Duck rolled his eyes. “Billy, honest people believe the lies other people tell them. If they didn’t, you’d be a hotel clerk.”
Which was exactly what “Bill” looked to be. Before I started adviser assignments, I thought Human Intelligence Spooks, the ones who recruited and ran local agents undercover abroad, would be ruggedly handsome blokes in tuxedos. In fact, diplomatic-covered Spooks tended to look and act just a little too slow, a little too out of it, to be suspected as spies.
The Duck asked Bill, “How’s Planck today?”
I raised my eyebrows. Not, “Do you know whether Planck’s still alive?”
Bill sighed, then waved up a map of Tressen that showed the country from the capital, where we stood, to the coast. The southern part of the coast was the Tressel Barrens, a vast swamp that would someday become more coal than the English dug out of Wales. The northern coast, which for the six centuries preceding the Late Unpleasantness had been the Unified Duchies of Iridia, was a smooth rock plain dotted with fishing villages.
Bill the Spook pointed at a flashing red dot that was actually slightly seaward of the formerly Iridian coastline. “Planck’s hiding out in an isolated lober fisherman’s blind, here. The fisherman living in it’s an Iridian veteran. Planck saved his life years ago, when the guy was a POW and Planck was a Tressen platoon leader. The old guy’s
