In Enemy Hands

But the heavy losses the Peoples Navy and Marines had suffered in the opening stages of the war, not to mention the officer purges which had followed the Harris Assassinations and the casualties suffered in things like the Leveller Uprising, had cut dangerously deep into the military's trained manpower. The Committee of Public Safety had acted to recall veterans who had completed their terms of service, which had almost covered the initial shortfalls, but the only real solution had to be the education and training of the required replacements to a modern standard... preferably before they got to boot camp. There were enough realists in the PRH to recognize that, and whatever her other shortcomings, Cordelia Ransom had managed to sell it to the Mob, as well. In a sort of insanely twisted logic, the need to fight a war started to preserve a parasitic life style had led to a situation in which the parasites in question were actually willing, even eager, to abandon their parasite status, repair their schools, and learn how to provide the support their military required. It was a pity the thought of making the same repairs hadn't occurred to anyone when it might actually have averted the war in the first place.

In the meantime, however, people with real educations remained in critically short supply, and they were needed not just for the military, but also to operate the Republic’s civilian and industrial infrastructure. Balancing perso

But there was at least one area in which people with minimal educations could be readily employed by the State, and that brought Harkness back to Johnson and Candleman. There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the mind either of them had been issued; it was simply that no one had ever bothered to acquaint those minds with their own potentials. They were ignorant, not stupid, and State Security didn't need hyper physicists. For that matter, even with ships like Tepes in its inventory, StateSec didn't need an enormous number of missile and gravitics techs, and those could be poached from the Navy with a suitable use of the security forces' absolute priority.

What StateSec did need, however, were shock troops and enforcers who could be relied upon to take orders and break the heads of any enemies of the People at whom they might be aimed. Seventy-five or eighty percent of its perso

And just at the moment, Harkness' watchdogs were demonstrating that very fact.

"Look," he said after a moment, still smiling at Candleman, "Parley's Crossing isn't like the other games I've, um, modified for you guys. This one's actually a simplified version of a real Navy training simulator, and that means its parameters are a lot more complex than the other packages, right?"

He paused, eyebrows raised, and Candleman glanced at Johnson. The corporal nodded, which seemed to reassure him, and he turned attentively back to Harkness.

The Manticoran felt a brief twinge of guilt as the StateSec thug looked at him with trusting eyes terrifyingly devoid of any understanding of what he was talking about. Harkness had spent enough time in the service to feel confident that anyone StateSec might have assigned to him would have been receptive to the concept of rigging the ship's electronic games library. The combination of boredom, greed, and a very human (if ignoble) desire to put one over on one’s fellows had produced the same ambition in virtually every Manticoran ship in which Harkness had ever served, and those factors operated even more strongly aboard Tepes. Still, he knew he'd been lucky to draw these two, for Johnson was an operator and black marketeer from way back. He was actually quite competent within the limits of what he knew, but he was also as greedy as they came, and neither he nor Candleman had the background to realize the consequences of giving Harkness access to the games library.

Not that Harkness had leapt right out to make the offer. The possibility of doing anything which might jeopardize his arrangement with Committeewoman Ransom was unthinkable, and so he'd done exactly what was asked of him. He'd recorded dozens of propaganda broadcasts in which he cheerfully perjured his immortal soul with accounts of all the "war crimes" he'd either observed or helped commit. Other recordings, when they were broadcast, would appeal earnestly to his ex-countrymen to follow his example and defect to their true class allies rather than continuing to serve their plutocratic exploiters. And while he'd been careful to warn Citizen Commander Jewel that he was only a technician with a severely limited understanding of the theory behind the grav pulse generators he'd learned to service, he'd also spent hours discussing the system with her and giving her pointers towards how it worked. By now, he calculated, he'd committed at least thirty different forms of treason, certainly enough to make it impossible (or, at least, fatally inadvisable) for him ever to return home.

As he'd proved his bona fides to their superiors and received a steadily greater freedom of movement, Johnson and Candleman had come to regard their guard duty as more and more of a formality. The awe inspiring heights his own black market and smuggling activities had attained during his pre-Basilisk career hadn't hurt, either. Once Johnson’s guard came down and the two of them began swapping tales of past exploits, the corporal had quickly realized he was in the presence of either a true maestro whose attainments dwarfed anything he himself had ever even dared to contemplate, or the greatest liar in the known universe.

As the tales accumulated, he'd been forced to accept that Harkness truly was a man of enormous talent... and a kindred soul. He'd sought advice, cautiously, at first, on certain of his own operations, and Harkness' suggestions had increased his profit margin by over twenty percent within the first week. From there, it had been a natural enough step to introduce him to the gambling empire the corporal helped run on the side. The real head of illicit operations aboard Tepes was Staff Sergeant Boyce, but Johnson was one of his senior assistants, and the fact that gambling aboard ship was totally against regulations made Boyce's empire even more lucrative, since no one was likely to go to an officer and complain over any losses he might suffer. But the sergeant was always on the lookout for ways to maximize his profits, and he'd been delighted when Johnson was able to up his take by something like forty percent. He'd also decided not to ask the corporal how he'd managed it, on the theory, apparently, that what he didn't know he couldn't be guilty of, and turned the entire gaming operation over to Johnson.

Which, in many ways, meant he'd actually turned it over to Horace Harkness, for the games in Tepes' libraries were far easier to manipulate than any which would have been found aboard a Manticoran ship.

Harkness had been astounded when he realized just how obsolescent they were. Several were actually variants of games he'd first encountered fifty T-years before, at the very begi