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"And your point is?" Bourmont asked when he paused.
"I'm just a little worried about our home security while we're in that position, Sir. It would be embarrassing if an emergency came up and the Navy wasn't able to respond."
"Um." Bourmont frowned, tugging at his lower lip, then shrugged. "Unfortunately, I don't see any way around it, Isidor. Oh, we'll schedule things to keep our more powerful and modern units ma
"No, Sir. But I was wondering if we might ask Mr. Levakonic if it would be possible to deploy some of his 'missile pods' to cover our more important installations. As I understand it, they're pretty much suited to indefinite deployment, as long as they can be serviced regularly, so it wouldn't be as if we were actually expending them. And I'd feel a lot better with some additional firepower to back us up."
"Um," Bourmont said again, frowning. "I think you're probably being overly concerned, Isidor," he said finally, "but that doesn't mean you're wrong. And it would be embarrassing to be caught out that way, however unlikely I might think it would be. The missile pods won't be arriving for a couple of months, but I'll discuss the idea with Levakonic. And if it won't throw us behind schedule, I think it's a good one."
"Thank you, Sir. It would make me feel a lot better."
"Me, too, now that you've brought it up," Bourmont conceded, and grimaced. "It's going to be a real strain to pull this one off," he went on. "And I'll be honest, the thought of actually mounting the operation's enough to make me nervous. But I think the pla
"Yes, Sir," Hegedusic replied, his eyes clinging to the second battlecruiser as she nuzzled into her own space dock. "Yes sir, I am."
Agnes Nordbrandt sat in the safe-house's kitchen, sipping hot tea, and waited.
She liked kitchens, she reflected. Even small, cramped ones like this. It was something about the soothing, sustaining ritual of preparing food. The smells and tastes and textures that wrapped a comforting cocoon around the cook. She got up and crossed to the lower of the two stacked ovens, bending over to peer in through the glass window in its door, and smiled. The Kornatian "turkey" really did rather resemble the Terran species which had given it its name, and the one in the roasting bag had turned a rich, golden brown. It would be ready for the celebratory di
She turned away and walked out of the kitchen. The one-sun's narrow hall was dark, even though it was only midafternoon, because her apartment was located at the very back of the building. The lack of sunlight bothered her sometimes, but there were advantages to her apartment's location. Among other things, it had permitted her to cut an emergency escape hatch from her bedroom to an old sewer tu
She climbed the steep, narrow stair at the back of the one-sun. It was supposed to serve as an emergency stair to be used only if the elevators were out. Given that the elevators hadn't worked once in the entire time she'd been in the building, the stairs saw a lot more use than they were supposed to. She grimaced wryly at the thought as she made her steady way upward.
I wonder how Rajkovic and Basaricek are going to feel when they find out I'm alive after all? I'd love to see their faces. Then again, I'd love to see their reaction to the knowledge that I've been hiding right under their noses from the very begi
She shook her head, still bemused by the opposition's myopia. Maybe it was the fact that the people looking for her knew she'd always been relatively affluent. Her adoptive parents had been well enough off to send her to private schools and pay most of her tuition when she went off to college. Her parliamentary career had paid pretty well, too, not to mention the noneconomic perks that had gone with it. So maybe it simply never occurred to the people looking for her that she would quite cheerfully hide in plain sight simply by becoming poor.
It had been one of her better ideas, she decided yet again as she crossed the one-sun's flat roof to the clothesline. Drawing a regular social support stipend turned her into the purloined letter so far as government agencies were concerned. She was right there, in plain sight, yet hidden and anonymous behind an absolutely legitimate social support account number and case file. They knew exactly who she was, and that she was harmless, so they ignored her completely.
And the same principle applied to her choice of safe-houses. When a woman was poor enough, she became effectively invisible, and the densely populated tenements of the Karlovac slums became an infinitely better hiding place than some camouflaged bunker tucked away in the mountains.
Not to mention the fact that the tenements are much more convenient to my work.
She walked along the clothesline, blinking against the bright sunlight, her short hair-auburn now, not black-blowing on the brisk breeze that flapped the sheets and towels pi
She glanced at her chrono. That was one of her few concessions to her role of terrorist commander. It was a very good chrono, worth more than a full year of her one-sun apartment's rent. But she'd had that expensive timepiece remounted in a cheap, battered case suited to the sort of chrono a poverty-stricken widow might reasonably possess. She didn't care what it looked like; only that it kept perfect time.
Which it did.
The first explosion thundered across the capital precisely on schedule. A thick cloud of debris, flame, and smoke shot up near the city's center, and Nordbrandt ran to the front edge of the one-sun's roof. There was no risk of giving herself away now-everyone who could was moving, craning her neck, trying to see what was happening. Indeed, she'd have aroused suspicion if she hadn't rushed to stare off towards the plume of smoke rising out of the swelling mushroom of dust.
Then the second explosion bellowed.
The first had been a delivery truck, parked-in the same parking space in which it had been parked every day for the last three weeks-outside the main city post office. Had anybody examined that truck on any day except today, they would have found it loaded with legitimate parcels and packages being delivered to the post office by the courier service whose name was painted on its sides. But last night the courier service employee, who belonged to one of Nordbrandt's cells, had loaded his vehicle with something else before he parked it, set the timer, locked it, and walked away. And the truck had simply sat there, waiting until mid-afternoon, when the post office would be most crowded.
She shaded her eyes with her hand, staring towards the post office. Or, rather, towards the flaming, tumbled heap of rubble which had been the post office. She could see one or two people staggering around, clutching broken limbs or bleeding wounds. More lay writhing-or motionless-on the sidewalks, and half a dozen ground vehicles added their own smoke and flame to the hellish scene. Kornati's tech base was sufficiently primitive that most vehicles still used petrochemical fuels, and tendrils of liquid fire flowed across the pavement, seeking the storm drains, as bleeding fuel tanks gushed flame. And she could see other people already begi
Gutsy of them, a cold, thoughtful corner of her brain acknowledged. Especially after the way we set up the Nemanja bombing. Maybe it's time we started setting follow-up charges again.
She turned her attention towards the second explosion, but it was farther away. She could see the smoke, hear sirens, but she couldn't actually see anything. Not that she needed to. Another truck, from the same courier service, had been parked in a basement garage under the city's largest department store. Judging from the smoke and dust cloud, the bomb must have been even more successful than she'd hoped.
Then the third bomb detonated-the one in the stolen ambulance parked under the marquee of the Sadik Kozarcanic Army Hospital. She'd had her doubts about that one. There'd been a far higher chance that the team charged with placing the ambulance would be detected and intercepted, which would have alerted the authorities to the fact that an operation was underway. And even if they weren't, security remained too tight, despite the growing certainty she and the Movement had both been killed, for them to get the ambulance close enough to do the kind of structural damage they'd managed at the post office and department store. But she'd decided it was still worth the risk as a psychological blow. They hadn't attacked hospitals before. And, in fact, she had no intention of adding hospitals to the list. Not civilian hospitals, anyway. But there was no way for the government or the general public to know that, now was there?
The fourth bomb went off, but it was clear across the city, too far away for her to see it from here. Not that she needed to. The neat operational pla