Profiteer

Kropotkin had dropped below the western horizon. The sky was fading from blood-red to the purple of a deep bruise. Below the ledge where Tetsami stood, the sprawl of Godwin glistened with blacks and browns like some divine compost heap saturated with human insects. From here she could see the speck of the GA&A complex, a small scar in the woods where the Blood-Tide had gone down, and the circular crater where Klaus’ orbital attack had reduced a mountain valley to so much gravel.

 

Over, Tetsami thought.

 

That one word covered a hell of a lot of territory. She wished she knew if she’d blown it or not. It all worked, didn’t it?

 

Didn’t it?

 

She hugged herself and shivered in the breath-fogging cold.

 

Somehow they all had managed to pull themselves out of a potential disaster. All except Levy, of course....

 

“Poor fucking Johann,” she whispered.

 

It had taken her two or three days to sort out those last fifteen minutes or so. She still didn’t understand it, exactly, and she probably didn’t want to. The only really clear thing about the whole situation was the fact that Colonel Klaus Dacham had lost the final confrontation, and might even be dead.

 

Somehow, Dom had outmaneuvered his brother. Outmaneuvered him as cynically and heartlessly as he’d outmaneuvered everyone else.

 

Especially Tetsami.

 

Why didn’t he tell any of us Klaus was his brother? She slammed her fist into her thigh in frustration. Why didn’t he tell us about the preparations at the commune? Why didn’t he tell us that Levy might have been the one—

 

Everything had knotted up into a burning little ball in her gut. Most of her anger was directed at her “partner,” Dom.

 

Dom had seen the attack on the commune coming. He had prepared for it. By the time of the attack, almost all of Dom’s people had moved into the tunnels in the mountains around the commune. Klaus’ recon drone had given Dom’s people enough warning to evac all the above-ground personnel into the retrofitted caverns. The buildings had been reduced to rubble, but only one person had been killed and a few dozen injured when an unstable cavern collapsed in the attack.

 

Part of Tetsami hated Dom for not telling anybody— hell, for not telling her— about that. Seeing the holo of the commune disintegrating and not knowing....

 

Just the memory of how she’d felt made her want to throw up, or cry, or kill someone.

 

She had expected to rendezvous on a mass grave, and instead found Dom’s people intensively involved in rendering the endless caverns habitable. There were medical facilities, hydroponics gardens, and all manner of things stripped from the main building before the balloon went up.

 

Dom could have told her, could have trusted her.

 

Worse was Johann Levy. She wanted to believe that Dom only knew of Levy’s betrayals after the fact. But she couldn’t shake the suspicion that Dom had used Levy as an exercise in cold-blooded manipulation. It was intimately tied up in the wretched feeling that had enveloped her ever since the completion of the mission.

 

It’s not as if the project weren’t risky. Sure, the ideal would have had no casualties on either side. But it’s foolish to think everyone could come out unscathed.

 

Right?

 

Tetsami stared out at the wretched sprawl of Godwin and forced herself to admit her real problem.

 

It had been her idea, her plan, her command—and she hadn’t been ready for it. She hadn’t been ready for people getting hurt and killed. She wasn’t ready for Shane.

 

Dom had had extensive medical facilities moved into the caverns, but they’d been barely enough to stabilize her. Shane had lost a considerable portion of her lower body, couldn’t breathe without assistance, and— mercifully—had yet to regain consciousness.

 

Shane was somewhere down in Godwin now, Ivor having smuggled her back to the Stemmer Facility for major reconstructive work. Any prognosis beyond simple survival was anyone’s guess.

 

Mosasa and Random were both intact after the episode, and for some reason that only made Tetsami feel more uncomfortable around the AI and its keeper.

 

On top of Shane, there were the five marines who’d been aboard the Blood-Tide. The marines who’d been in front of the weapon, while Shane had just been brushed with the plasma backwash.

 

Add to them the marines who’d died when the Blood-Tide backed into the GA&A office complex, the people who’d been shot by Levy in his manic attempt to assassinate Klaus, and Johann Levy himself who was almost certainly dead.

 

The more Tetsami brooded, the more corpses floated up to the surface.