Profiteer

Vashniya sat impassively. Kaunda thought that the dwarfish Shivan looked like some graven icon, carved from nutwood. Like something the gift shops on Mazimba might sell to rich tourists from Waldgrave or Banlieue. The kind of thing that old women in Mulawayo knocked off by the hundreds to sell to the off-worlders at 100 credits each. After the tourist shops took their cut, it amounted to a credit an hour—if the women were lucky. It let them eat.

 

“Well?” Kaunda asked.

 

“Yes, we could have blocked it. That, in fact, was why two of the Sirius votes dissented.”

 

Kaunda set down his tea. “Pardon?” He didn’t like these intelligence games, political games. He’d gotten to represent the intelligence community of the Union of Independent Worlds—such as it was—by being a strong leader and taking no shit from his seconds. The trail might be a little bloody, but it was less bloody than those of most of his contemporaries on Mazimba. However, being chief of police in Mulawayo, and then chief of intelligence for the whole planet of Mazimba, had never trained him for subtlety. It forced him to trust his betters in those matters, like Vashniya, and he didn’t like trusting people.

 

“Nothing in an Executive delegation happens by accident. Those two Sirius votes were well planned.”

 

“They wanted the proposal to fail.” Kaunda kept his voice flat, betraying none of his surprise.

 

After a moment of thought, Kaunda realized that they might not want TEC involvement. “They expected us to be solidly against and defeat them twenty-two to twenty. But if they wanted it to fail, why bring up the proposal?”

 

Vashniya patted his beard. “Rasputin is no spur of the moment enterprise. The latter phases of the plan have required nearly five years of delicate groundwork by the Centauri and SEEC intelligence services. They needed the TEC to allow them that.”

 

“I see.”

 

The TEC jealously guarded its place in the Confederacy intel community. If any planet, or group of planets, decided to do this kind of covert action unilaterally ...

 

Well, it would be bad.

 

“So,” Kaunda said, “the proposal to the TEC was a smoke screen—”

 

“To cover the realignment of the Centauri and Sirius intelligence apparatus. They wanted the idea to be shot down.”

 

“But they were—still are—primed to slip in on their own before the TEC could intervene.” Politics was a twisted arena. Things were much simpler when he was just a policeman.

 

“Just so. The plan was to set up the groundwork for Rasputin, have the TEC proposal fail, then slip in SEEC or Alliance military with no TEC involvement, and take over. Then they’d present the Congress with a fait accompli.”

 

“But because of the Protectorate’s abstention, the TEC is in charge of this.”

 

“And we have a hand in.” Vashniya smiled a little wider.

 

“I think I liked it better when we were simply divorcing ourselves from the operation.”

 

“Oh, we’ve done that. And more.” Vashniya looked out over Sydney. “When the dust settles, when the Congress meets for the first time in this new century, we are finally going to see the Europeans lose their primacy. Take the long view, Kaunda.”

 

Kaunda looked out over Sydney as well but said nothing.

 

“If the operation fails, it fails. But if it succeeds ...”

 

“If,” Kaunda said.

 

* * * *

 

It took him over a month to leave Mars.

 

It was harder to do than he had ever imagined. In his nine years he had grown attached to the severe landscape, the lethal weather, and, most of all, the isolation.

 

Even the knowledge that, fifteen light-years away, all hell was about to break loose on Bakunin, couldn’t hurry him. The events on Bakunin were, in a real sense, over already. What mattered was the coming Terran Congress and what would happen there.

 

After all this time, what disturbed him was the fact that he would be among large numbers of people for the first time in nine years.

 

Eventually he left the empty crystalline fairyland he’d lived in for so long, paid his respects at a lonely grave, and started the long walk to the nearest settlement.

 

<>

 

* * * *

 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

 

Silent Partners

 

 

“Artificial Intelligences are feared more for the latter than the former.”

—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

 

“These thinking machines are an offense against God!”

—August Benito Galiani

(2019-*2105)

 

 

Dom kept his eyes on the road while Tetsami kept her gaze locked on him. The new contragrav truck slid down the tunnel as if the tube were designed for it, not for maglev commuter traffic.

 

“I don’t see why you had to buy it,” she said when the silence got too long.

 

“We need the tunnel to make this work.”

 

“I know,” Tetsami said. She turned away from his deadpan expression.

 

The Godwin-Proudhon commuter tunnel shot by them, the magnets sliding past like a silent heartbeat in a giant concrete vein. They were well under the forest east of Godwin now. If they were lucky, ahead lay an unbroken subterranean highway that traveled nearly all the way to Proudhon.