Cauldron of Ghosts: Chapter Twenty Two

    Ruth Winton barked a sarcastic laugh. “Will you look at that? The only time in recorded history — we’re talking a good two thousand years — when the Talking Heads on a vid news program had their tongues tied.”

    It was true enough. The panel of guests on tonight’s special edition of Yael Underwood’s The Star Empire Today were all staring at the huge screen behind them. They’d just spent the last few minutes swiveled in their seats, watching the recorded footage of the gunfight in the subterranean depths of Chicago‘s Old Quarter that had triggered off the Manpower Incident years earlier.

    It hadn’t, actually. The conflict that ended with the killing by Manpower-hired mercenaries of General Raphael Durkheim, Haven’s StateSec chief in the Solarian League’s capital, and the subsequent destruction of Manpower Inc.’s headquarters in the same city by a retaliatory force sent by the Audubon Ballroom had actually been months in the making. But the general public — anywhere; on Haven as well as Terra, or Manticore — had never known more than the basic facts involved. And not all of those, and especially not the names of the key players who’d never been identified by the media, which was most of them.

    First and foremost among those previously unidentified key players was the man sitting next to Ruth at that moment. Victor Cachat, who’d wreaked most of the havoc in the scene that had just been played out on a screen for the Talking Heads of Underwood’s show. A screen, of course, that had also been watched by…

    “What’s the count now, Ruth?” asked Anton Zilwicki. He was seated next to Cathy Montaigne on another couch in the salon of the genetic treatment center.

    Ruth glanced down at the com in her hand. “Two hundred and seventy-three million viewers as of this moment, but…” She paused for a few seconds. “It’s climbing fast. Word’s spreading, obviously. By the time the replays are counted, we’ll be looking at somewhere between one and two billion people. That’s just here in the Manticore System itself. Once the recording gets shipped to the rest of the Star Empire, Haven, Beowulf, and who knows where else, the number will start getting called ‘astronomical.’”

    She tapped the com screen a couple of times. “Yeah, what I figured. “They’re already calling it the third-most-watched news show in a decade. We’re in territory that’s usually only inhabited by championship sporting events.”

    The stunned silence of the Talking Heads had been brief, of course. They were already jabbering away again.

    “– why Captain Zilwicki trusts him so much, which has always been a mystery. What’s still unclear — “

    “– think it’s now blindingly obvious — “

    “– can’t say it too many times. We have no reason — none, at, all — to suddenly place our trust in Cachat. If anything, his now-proven extraordinary savagery — “

    “– was dealing with the worst sort of StateSec killers and sociopathic so-called ‘super-soldiers’ left over from the Final War. Of course he was savage! What do you propose he should have done, Charlene? Give them a lecture? Or do you — “

    Sitting on the other side of Victor from Ruth, Thandi tuned it all out. She was still trying to process the experience herself. She’d known of the gunfight in the Old Quarter, but this was the first time she’d seen the recording of the event.

    It wasn’t the brutality of the killing that she found startling. Nor was it even Victor’s ruthlessness and the skill he’d shown at killing so many people in such a short time.

    Being completely objective about it, Thandi knew that if she’d been in Victor’s place in that half-crumbling cavern in the ancient catacombs of Chicago, the killings would have happened even faster and more surely.

    Victor probably would have died there, except that Jeremy X intervened at the end. The surviving Scrags — there’d been three of them completely unwounded and another three injured but not out of action, had all been bringing their weapons to bear on Victor when Jeremy’s pistol fusillade started taking them down.

    Thandi wouldn’t have needed Jeremy. She was bigger than Victor, stronger than Victor, faster than Victor, a better shot with any kind of projectile weapon than Victor — there was no comparison at all between their respective skills fighting unarmed or with hand weapons — and she’d spent her whole adult life training constantly for exactly this sort of combat.

    But… at that age? With no combat experience at all and only the rudimentary training Victor would have received at the StateSec academy and what he’d taught himself later in simulators?

    Impossible. If Thandi Palane had been in Victor’s position at such a young age and with his level of actual combat experience — which was to say, none at all…

    There and then…

    The only reason Victor had survived — no, triumphed — was because of the man’s nature. His psychology, so to speak. Even then, as raw as any newly minted young officer and only in his early twenties, he’d been a natural killer. And a superb one, an outlier at the very edge of human potential. If that had been Thandi herself down in that cavern, she’d have been dead after taking down one or two — maybe three — of her opponents.

    She knew of no one that wouldn’t be true of. Not one person.

    Except the man she slept with every night, whenever they could.

    She felt a warm glow in her heart, then, and reached out to take Victor’s hand. That was probably not the reaction most lovers would have had, but they hadn’t been born and raised on Ndebele.

    She gave the hand a squeeze, and when he glanced at her, a warm smile.

    A very warm smile. They’d finally finished the genetic sheathing and the nanotech body transformations were far enough along for Thandi to have gotten used to her new body and Victor’s.

    Well enough, anyway. Buster, you are so getting laid tonight.

    Anton Zilwicki’s thoughts were elsewhere. He’d been associated with Victor for so long that he took the man’s somewhat peculiar nature as a matter of course. Watching the recording hadn’t bothered him in the least. He’d seen it before, for one thing. For another, although he hadn’t been there when the killings took place, he’d arrived immediately thereafter — soon enough that when his daughter Helen burst out of the shadows where she’d been hiding and raced toward him, she’d had to practically dance to get through the carpet of bodies littering the cavern floor. She’d stepped directly on two of the bodies and had gotten so much blood on her shoes that they’d thrown them away afterward.

    She’d just turned fourteen at the time. And just a short time earlier, had herself…

    “Oh, hell and damnation,” Anton said. “I made sure the news reporters couldn’t get to Helen — the Navy was very cooperative about that — and we’ve got Berry trained to a T, of course. But since Lars never met Victor and never saw the mayhem, I didn’t think we needed to do much preparation with him. I completely forgot –”

    Underwood had shifted the focus of The Star Empire Today. Again, the Talking Heads were swiveled in the chairs, watching the footage recorded earlier of an interview with Lars Zilwicki. The campus grounds of the New University of Landing formed the backdrop. Lars had just started his third year there.

    “– never saw it, not even the… leftovers, I guess you’d say. They made sure to take me and Berry out by a different route. I heard a lot about it later, of course. But I didn’t meet Victor Cachat then, and I’ve never met him since.”

    The young man on the screen shrugged. “Being honest, it didn’t have much of an impact on me. I was still way too shaken up by what Helen did the day before to think much about what happened in the cavern next to the ruins of the Artinstute where me and Berry were hiding.”

    Lars made a face. “Well, I guess not so much what Helen did as what I did to the bodies afterward. Those bastards had… hurt Berry. Really badly. I sort of lost it.”

    The image shifted to the interviewer, who was frowning slightly. “Ah… exactly what are you referring to, Mr. Zilwicki?”

    Shut up, Lars, Anton silently willed at the figure on the screen. Shut up, shut up, shut…

    “Oh, hell and damnation,” he repeated aloud.

    Cathy smiled. “We’re talking about Lars. Being interviewed by a very attractive and sophisticated-looking young woman. You really think he’s not going to keep talking?”

    “She’s ten years older than he is,” Anton growled. “At least.”

    Across from him, Berry smiled also. “And that has stopped my brother… when, exactly?”

    “– thought you already knew about that,” Lars was saying. “After Helen made her escape from the Scrags working for Durkheim — well, indirectly, I guess; you do know about that, right? — she ran across three thugs in the underground passageways. They attacked her, figuring… well, we’ll never know but I’m guessing they were planning to do the same… that, Berry — never mind all that.”

    A little apprehensively, Anton glanced at Berry. But his daughter was watching with what seemed to be a very serene expression. Knowing her, it probably was. The incident Lars was fumbling around had been a hideous one for her, but between her innate sanity and the best therapists Cathy could hire — which meant the best therapists anywhere in the galaxy — Berry had put it all behind her quite some time ago.

    “– same three who’d imprisoned me and Berry. What the shi — ah, bad men — didn’t know was that even though Helen was only fourteen at the time — she was small for her age then, too, which isn’t true these days, heh — she’d been training for years in martial arts by Robert Tye. Yeah, that Robert Tye, if you’re at all familiar with martial arts.”

    “So she was able to successfully defend herself?” said the interviewer.

    Lars grinned, a lot more coldly that any young man his age should have been able to. “That’s one way to put it, I guess. She killed all three of the bastards.”

    The interview was cut short there. Underwood had other fish to fry. He swiveled in his chair, which took less time than it took his panel guests because he’d been half-facing the wall screen, and gave the audience a meaningful look.

    Underwood was a something of a genius at his trade. He was a master of the meaningful look that… actually had no clear meaning at all but imparted the sort of gravitas to him that was invaluable for successful talk show hosts.

    He broke off the look when he saw that his Talking Heads had resumed their normal position and turned to face them.

    “Interesting, that last item, wouldn’t you say? Charlene?”

    Charlene Soulliere, the female guest who represented the Progressive Party — unofficially, not in any formal sense — had a sour expression on her face, as she’d had from the beginning of the show. For reasons that made no sense in ideological terms — in the past, if anything, they’d tended in the direction of being Havenite apologists — the Progressives were now taking a stance of sharp opposition to the rapprochement between Manticore and Haven.

    Why? Nobody outside the Progressives’ own leadership really knew, but theories abounded.

    One school of thought believed that the PP was on the Mesan Alignment’s payroll. Anton thought that was unlikely, although he didn’t rule it out completely. He leaned more toward the second school of thought, which was that –

    The Progressives were a pack of fumble-witted loons whose incompetence at politics seemed to have no bottom.

    Cathy Montaigne didn’t rule that out entirely — which she did with the Mesan-Alignment-stooges theory, on the grounds that the Mesan Alignment would have to be incompetent themselves to pay good money for Progressive Party stoogery, and there was no evidence that was true — but was more inclined toward the third school of thought, which contended that –

    The Progressives were angling to get back into power as part of a coalition government with the Conservative Association. That was a truly ridiculous proposition in any sane and sensible programmatic terms but couldn’t be ruled out since the only difference between the Conservative Association and the PP when it came to political scruples was that the Conservative Association did have one fixed and invariant principle — what’s ours is ours and don’t you even THINK about mucking around with it in any way whatsoever — and the Progressives had none at all beyond the craving for political power.

    “Any comment, Charlene?”

    Soulliere sniffed. “One has to wonder if there is anyone in that crowd whose first recourse when faced with a problem isn’t to resort to violence — and the most brutal sort of violence at that. Do I need to remind the panel that the father of this fourteen-year-old homicidal maniac is the man who littered the grounds of the Tor estate with corpses not all that long ago?”

    Cathy almost sprang out of her seat with excitement. “Yes! Go for it, Mack! Gut the fucking asshole!”

    Cathy proceeded to issue several more sentences which, though grammatically impeccable, transgressed the bounds of propriety. Pretty much the way piranhas transgress the bounds of dining etiquette.

    The “Mack” in question was Macauley Sinclair, the panelist sitting just to the left of the moderator. He was a short fellow with a round, cheery face, who represented the Liberal Party on the panel in the same informal way that Soulliere spoke for the Progressives.

    He’d taken the place of Florence Hu on the panel. Cathy had pulled a lot of strings to make sure of that. For this show, she wanted a Liberal voice that didn’t quaver and whine. There was a reason politicians and (especially) their staffs called Sinclair “Mack the Knife” in private.

    Yael Underwood, being an expert at the business, immediately saw to it that Sinclair got the floor.

    “Homicidal maniac, is it?” he jeered. Then, he broke the normal rules of Talking Headship and looked directly at the viewing audience. “For reasons that are understandable, Lars Zilwicki didn’t go into the details of the incident. I happen to know them, however — as should Ms. Sanctimonious over here, if she’d done her homework.”

    He gave her a skeptical glance. “At least, one has to hope that Soulliere’s comment was the product of ignorance.”

    She tried to angrily interrupt but Sinclair drove right over her. Looking back at the viewing audience he continued.

    “Here are the details — the very grim details. The three men in question — rightly called ‘thugs’ by Lars Zilwicki — had kidnapped the boy and his sister Berry and were holding them captive in Chicago‘s infamous underground warrens. Lars was eleven years old at the time; Berry, thirteen. Both of them were badly beaten, especially the girl — who was also repeatedly gang-raped. These were the three unfortunate gentlemen whom the small fourteen-year-old girl that –”

    He had a truly magnificent sneer. “– Sanctimonious Soulliere calls a ‘homicidal maniac’ killed in self-defense when they tried to visit the same atrocities upon her.”

    The whole panel erupted. But Mack the Knife’s voice rose above the babble — largely because he kept speaking directly at the viewers.

    “– no mistake what this is really all about. The same Progressives who proved themselves completely incapable of leading a war against the Republic of Haven when such a war was needed, are now trying to sabotage a peace treaty with the Republic when that is needed and finally available. And they’re doing so for no better reason — assuming there’s any coherent thought at all involved — than political maneuvering.”

    A subscriber to Theory #3, clearly, although he was leaving the door open for Theory #2. In line with Cathy’s own position, in other words.

    That was hardly surprising, since he more-or-less worked for her. Informally, true, and without remuneration. But there was a reason that Sinclair’s other nickname was Montaigne’s Mugger.

    Anton brought his attention back to the talk show. Sinclair was still going strong. For all that he was barely over five feet tall and was wearing a very expensive suit, it wasn’t hard at all to imagine him wielding a claymore like his ancestors had.

    Whack. “– ignore what she says. The real reason for Soulliere’s hostility to Cachat is purely because the man is walking, breathing, living, tried and tested proof — tried and tested three times over — that there is no better ally for us in a fight than the same Havenites we’ve been fighting for what sometimes seems like a lifetime. I ask you –”

    Babble, babble, babble. Soulliere was trying desperately to make herself heard, but the panel was now clearly swinging in Sinclair’s direction. Who was back to looking straight at the audience.

    “– really simple question, as simple as it gets. You’re attacked by thugs in a dark alley. Who do you want coming to your defense?”

    A truly magnificent sneer.

    Whack. “Soulliere and her back room cronies? Or Victor Cachat and Anton Zilwicki? Or — better yet, because we’re talking a war here, folks, one that’s going to make our fight with Haven look like a playground spat — would you prefer a bunch of young homicidal maniacs in uniform? Such as –”

    He turned to Underwood. Something indefinable in the talk show host’s posture made Anton realize that he and Sinclair had set this up in advance.

    “I believe you have some relevant footage, Yael, am I correct?”

    “Well… yes. As it happens, we do.”

    The back screen lit up with an image of Anton’s daughter Helen. She was wearing her dress uniform and posed somewhat formally with four other young naval officers. Anton recognized all but one of them. They were friends of Helen’s as well as comrades; people she’d gone through the naval academy with at Saganami Island.

    She looked…

    Good. Really good. She would never be a beauty, but — thank God — she took after her mother more than her father in that department. And while she might be a tad on the stocky, well-muscled side, she stood with the obvious grace of more than ten years training in Neue-Stil Handgemenge, one of the most lethal martial arts in galactic history. But what she looked like most of all was a young woman proud of her uniform, committed to her star nation, confident in herself, and prepared to spit in the entire galaxy’s eye if that was what duty and that uniform demanded of her.

    Sinclair spoke again. “That’s the young woman Soulliere called a ‘homicidal maniac.’ Not just the girl who escaped her Manpower kidnapers on Old Earth when she was only fourteen T-years old, but also the young woman who served as Sir Aivars Terekov’s assistant tactical officer throughout the Battle of Monica. And never mind that when the wolves come baying at our door again, Soulliere and her Progressive pack of curs will be the first ones screaming for exactly this young homicidal maniac — and her friends — to come to their rescue.

    “Again.”

    Soulliere went ballistic at that point. Anton thought that “pack of curs” was probably over the top for what was, after all, an evening talk show program.

    Not that he gave a damn. He started softly singing a tune.

    He was pretty sure the same lyrics were being sung by people all over the Star Empire, at that moment. It was a very old song, after all.

    “This is going splendidly!” Cathy exclaimed. She took Anton’s hand and gave it a squeeze.

    I am so getting laid tonight.

    He managed to keep a solemn face, though.