Crown of Slaves

Chapter 44

"You're telling me they're a bunch of fanatics?" Unser Diem was practically shrieking. He jerked his head sideways, in the direction of the man standing not far from him on the bridge of the Felicia III . "He'll do it, Lassiter! Don't think for a minute he won't."

The Manpower official whose image was displayed in the screen glanced at the man being indicated. Then, glanced just as quickly away. The image he saw matched the holopics of Abraham Templeton—as closely as the bandages permitted, and making allowances for the way the Masadan's face was distorted by a ferocious scowl. The General Manager of Operations, Verdant Vista, was clearly having no difficulty at all imagining the maniac blowing up a ship carrying thousands of people.

"And if that isn't enough," Diem continued, snarling, "then take another good look at that Manty cruiser. That's the Gauntlet, you—you—"

He managed to bite off the epithet. As angry and terrified as Diem was, he didn't want to offend Manpower's top official in the Congo system. Kamal Lassiter was fairly notorious for letting petty personal issues get in the way of his decisions.

But the name of the ship was enough, it seemed. Lassiter swallowed, and Diem saw him look away—presumably at another screen in the com room of Congo's central headquarters. A tactical display screen, that would be, which would show the General Manager all the vessels within the Congo system.

"Is—ah—?"

"Yes," Diem bit off. "He is still in command. Captain Michael Oversteegen. You may recall that he has something of a reputation. And if you're wondering if the reputation is overblown, I can personally assure you that it isn't. He spoke to me less than twenty hours ago over this same com, promising me that if the Princess comes to harm he's holding Manpower responsible. He was not pleasant about it, to put it mildly. And he took pains to remind me that the Eridani Edict does not apply to strictly commercial operations on privately owned planets."

Diem could feel the sweat on his forehead, as he waited for Lassiter to finally make a decision. The sweat was real enough, even if almost everything else was fakery. The reason it was real—and Diem was on the edge of panic—was because the "fakery" was only technically such. If anything, the reality being disguised was even worse than the illusion.

He hadn't spoken to Oversteegen over the com, as it happened; he'd spoken to him in person. And it had been six days ago instead of less than twenty hours. So what? In person, the Manticoran officer had been an icy aristocrat. He'd made it crystal clear to Diem that he would see to it that Manpower's installations on Congo would be so much slag if anything went wrong. Diem hadn't doubted him in the least.

Not that Diem really cared that much. Long before Gauntlet could start taking Congo apart, Diem himself would be a dead man. Of that he had no doubt at all. The man standing near him on the bridge of the Felicia was not the religious maniac Abraham Templeton, even though Erewhon's nanotech engineers had done a good job with the physical resemblance. He was something a lot worse.

Victor Cachat. A man whom Unser Diem had had nightmares about—real ones, no poetic license here—since he first met him.

Cachat spoke up, right then. "Decide, Lassiter," he said, glancing at his chrono. His voice was hoarse, presumably due to the injuries he'd suffered in the course of abducting the Manticoran princess.

"I will give you two minutes, exactly," he rasped. "Then I will shoot Diem. Then, at fifteen second intervals"—the Havenite agent masquerading as Abraham Templeton nodded toward the people shackled to a console behind him—"I will kill the rest of them. Ringstorff first, then Lithgow, then the whore. Fifteen seconds after that, I will destroy the Felicia. Three minutes from now, if you continue to quibble, eight thousand people will be dead—including Ruth Winton, of the royal house of Manticore."

"Abraham Templeton" glanced at the tac display on the bridge of the Felicia and smiled sardonically. A half-smile, rather. The apparently severe injuries to his throat and jaw made the expression as distorted as his rasping voice. "All of it in front of every news media in the inhabited galaxy, from what I can see. I count at least eighteen media vessels somewhere in this system. Most of them in orbit nearby."

From the very sour expression on his face, it was obvious that Lassiter would have liked to curse. Not so much at the situation as at the media presence. Normally, Manpower would have forbidden those ships to remain in the Congo System, but with Gauntlet present...

That was something else Oversteegen had been emphatic about, in his terse discussions with the Manpower officials on Congo. Any move toward the media ships by any of the light attack craft which Manpower had in orbit around the planet would be met with instant force. Nobody doubted for a minute that Oversteegen would make good the threat—and a Manty heavy cruiser was perfectly capable of destroying twice the number of LACs Manpower had on the spot.

There were undoubtedly heavier warships nearby, upon which Manpower intended to rely for support if needed, Victor knew. They were not, however, part of Manpower's private fleet, which posed its own problems for Lassiter and his masters.

"Verdant Vista" was the private property of Manpower Unlimited, duly registered as such under interstellar law on the planet Mesa. As an independent and sovereign star nation, Mesa was empowered to recognize the claims of its citizens or business entities and, under existing interstellar law, Manpower had the right to appeal to the Mesan Navy for protection of its private property rights. But other star nations were not required to respect those rights as they would have been required to if Verdant Vista had, itself, been a sovereign star system.

Admittedly, it was something of a gray area, with competing interpretations of the precedents. What it boiled down to, however, was that a private corporation's claim to interstellar property rights was only as good as the naval strength which backed that claim. That was why Solarian trans-stellar corporations seldom had any problems (aside from the occasional raid by outright pirates). No star nation in its right mind wanted to provoke the SLN, so they tended to sit on their own potential troublemakers—hard—when there was a Solly corporation involved.

But while Mesa maintained a navy, it was nowhere near so grand as the SLN. Indeed, it was on the small side even by the standards of single-system star nations, although its individual units had excellent hardware. Despite its nationhood Mesa was, after all, essentially a conglomerate of business interests, and navies, by their nature, are expensive propositions which do not normally show a positive cash flow.

That was why some Mesa-based corporations, like Manpower, maintained private fleets. And another reason for Manpower, in particular, to do so was that the council which governed Mesa was hesitant to use military power too openly in Manpower's special interests. There was no point actively courting negative news coverage, after all.

In this instance, however, thanks to Michael Oversteegen and Her Majesty's Starship Gauntlet , the cruiser force Manpower had assembled to back up its LACs in Congo had suffered a mischief. A rather terminal one, in fact. That was one of the odd little facts Ringstorff had been willing to confirm for them... along with the fact that Manpower had not replaced the destroyed ships. Which had become another factor in the pla

So there was an automatic delay built into the response loop. Lassiter would have to send a courier to summon them, and that offered a window in which the "forces of liberation" would be free to act. Better yet, it meant that when (or if) those units did turn up, they would be commanded by someone whose primary loyalty was to Mesa, not simply to Manpower.

"I need at least ten minutes just to discuss the situation with my people," Lassiter complained.

Cachat, masquerading as Abraham Templeton, did not bother to look up from his chrono. "You have one minute and forty seconds before I start the killing. You've had weeks to decide what to do, Lassiter. There's no point in any further delay."

"One moment." Lassiter reached out a finger and the display screen went blank.

Diem heaved a little sigh. "What are you going to do if he goes past your deadline?" he asked nervously.

The answer, somehow, didn't surprise him. Cachat was still looking down at his chrono. "In one minute and twenty-five seconds, I'm going to kill you. Then, at fifteen-second intervals, Ringstorff and Lithgow." He glanced at the pale-faced young woman shackled to the console next to the Mesans. "I will not, of course, shoot Berry Zilwicki. Her father is likely to take umbrage." Cachat sounded vaguely miffed about it, the way a craftsman will when he is not permitted to do his finest work.

Off to the side of the bridge, sitting where he was out of sight of the screens, Anton Zilwicki snorted. But he didn't bother looking up from the console where he and Ruth Winton were busily cracking into Manpower's secure communications systems.

"Pray to whatever gods you hold dear, Diem," Zilwicki murmured, just loudly enough to be heard. "If Lassiter's as careless and sloppy as his security, you're a dead man." He snorted again, as a new screen came up. "Bingo. We're in. And there's not even any internal encryption. God, I love carrier signals, especially when the people on the other end are idiots. Take it from here, would you, Ruth?"

Eagerly, the young princess' fingers began flying over the keyboard, and Zilwicki looked up and gri

"Personally, I remain to be convinced that Lassiter can even tell time."

Lassiter could tell time, of course. But, for almost a minute, he wasted it in a fit of screaming invective aimed at his subordinates in the control center of Congo's headquarters. There was no point to the shrieking, as, once it began tapering down, Lassiter's chief subordinate Homer Takashi pointed out. Sullenly: