A Rising Thunder

Of course, the fact that you’re paranoid doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t really have enemies…even if they aren’t the three-meter monsters you think they are. Like that nanotech crap. Ha! Why believe in fairy tales like that instead of simpler explanations? Crandall was so deep in Mesa’s pocket shed’ve picked any spot they wanted for her frigging exercise, and they could count on her stupidity to make the rest of it work out the way they wanted. Same thing with Byng, except that they probably didn’t have to promise him a thing except an opportunity to put one in the Manties’ eye. And Filareta—! If that taste of his for sick games with little girls and boys had ever made it to the public eye, he — or his career, at least — would’ve been dead, even in the League. So getting him on board wasn’t all that hard, either. And it didn’t take any “mind-control nanotech” to convince you to help hit the bastards where it hurt, now did it? Even if things are turning out a bit…dicier than you expected.

He snorted in harsh amusement, yet the truth was that he hadn’t counted on the completeness of the defeat waiting for Sandra Crandall and Massimo Filareta. He wasn’t going to shed any tears for either of the admirals involved, and he wasn’t going to pretend about that even with himself. But he hadn’t contemplated the sheer number of other people who were going to get killed. For that matter, he’d genuinely believed the new missiles would go a long way towards leveling the playing field when Filareta reached Manticore. And he’d never thought for a moment Filareta would have been stupid enough to open fire after that bitch Harrington had mousetrapped him so completely.

Never thought Haven would be willing to side with the Manties, either, did you? he asked himself derisively. God, who could’ve seen that one coming?!

He’d asked himself, since the reports of the Second Battle of Manticore had reached Old Terra, why he’d really done it. Oh, the money was the easy answer. And so was his resentment of the way he’d been denied his proper place at the table with Kolokoltsov and the rest of those parasitic civilian leeches. Their very survival had depended on Rajampet’s Navy to do the dirty jobs it took to keep them where they were, yet he couldn’t even count how many times one of those arrogant ‘Mandarins’ had shown his — or her, he thought, thinking of Omosupe Quartermain — condescension for the uniformed men and women who carried the League’s mandate out to the fucking neobarbs on the backside of nowhere.

But most of all, he’s come to realize, it had been his hatred for the Star Empire of Manticore. His resentment of its merchant marine’s reach and power and wealth. Of Manticore’s refusal to bend to the League’s demands, to show the Solarian League Navy the respect and deference it was due. For the sheer arrogance of a ten-for-a- centicredit neobarb so-called star nation — one which had laid claim to only a single star system as little as twenty T-years ago! — which had dared to use the unfair advantage of its damned Junction to actually tell the Solarian League what it could and couldn’t do. In that respect, much as he hated to acknowledge the comparison, he and Josef Byng had actually had at least one thing in common.

He didn’t give a single good goddamn whether the Manties actually had any imperial ambitions. He admitted that in the privacy of his own mind, because it didn’t matter. He remembered one of his long dead father’s favorite sayings: ‘When you fuck with the bull, you get the horns.’ Well, it was time the Manties got the goring they deserved, and if he could do well for himself out of the process, so much the better.

Yeah, all well and good, but it’s not going to make tomorrow any more fun, despite the fact that you knew something like this was coming sooner or later, he reflected. But at least you did see it coming, unlike those other cretins. That’s the reason you buried your tracks as well as you did. And—he smiled thinly—if the wheels come off anyway, you’ve got enough little tidbits tucked away to convince your esteemed civilian colleagues they’d better cover your back. Doesn’t matter how good Abruzzi is. If your insurance files ever hit the news channels, they’re all dead meat.

There was actually a part of him that hoped they’d push him into making that very point to them. It would be so…satisfying to see the looks on their faces when they realized he had them all by the short hairs. It would be the equivalent of a nuclear exchange, of course; no way there’d be any bridges back from that kind of confrontation. But he was pretty sure they planned on stuffing him out the airlock as the sacrificial goat anyway, so he might as well get his full credit’s worth out of it first.

Besides—

A ripple of musical notes, the first few bars of the overture from Adonis of Canis Major, his favorite opera, announced a com call on his private, priority combination. He scowled out at the city panorama, then sighed and pushed himself to his feet. He’d never felt any inclination to surround himself with the bevies of personal attendants altogether too many of the Solarian elite seemed to require. They were less efficient than properly programmed electronic servants, they chattered and pestered, they always had their noses in their employers’ affairs, and every one of them was a potential security breach waiting to happen. Besides, he didn’t like being fussed over in the privacy of his own home. There was enough of that in the Service!

He walked across to the living room communications terminal and frowned as he looked at the display. He didn’t recognize the caller’s combination, and there weren’t that many people who had his combination — not on this line, anyway.

He shrugged and pressed the audio-only acceptance key.

“Rajampet,” he announced gruffly.

“Sid?” a voice he’d never heard before said. “Is that you, Sid?”

“No, it isn’t!” Rajampet replied sharply. “Who is this?”

“What?” The other voice sounded confused. “I’m sorry, I was trying to reach Sid Castleman. Isn’t this his combination?”

“No, it isn’t,” Rajampet repeated. “In fact, it’s a secure government combination!”

“Oh, Lord! I’m so sorry!” the other voice said quickly. “I must’ve punched in the wrong combination.”

“I guess you did,” Rajampet agreed a bit nastily.

“Well, sorry,” the other voice repeated. “Clear.”

The connection went dead, and Rajampet snorted as he hit the termination key at his end. But then his eyes opened wide as the hand which had just hit the key went right on moving. It opened the drawer in the com console, the one where he’d kept a loaded pulser for the last fifteen or twenty T-years. It reached into the drawer, and Rajampet’s face erupted in sweat as he watched his own fingers wrap around the pulser’s butt. He fought frantically to stop his hand…without any success at all. He tried to raise his voice, shout the code to activate the penthouse’s security systems…but his jaw refused to move and his vocal cords were still.

His mind raced as the pulser rose, his thoughts gibbering like rats in a trap, and then, to his horror, his jaw did move. It dropped so that his own hand could shove the weapon’s muzzle between his teeth.

God, God! he thought, calling out frantically to the deity he’d never really believed in. Help me! Help me!

There was no answer, and alloy and plastic were cold and hard as his teeth closed on the pulser’s barrel.

They were right. The frigging Manties were right all along, a tiny corner of his brain realized, like a last pocket of rationality in a hurricane of terror. The bastards do have some kind of nan—

His finger squeezed the trigger.

Chapter Thirty

It was very quiet in the file room.

People seldom came here, which was hardly surprising. The huge, cool chamber buried deep under the