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They'd walked another eight or nine blocks before the man behind him spoke again.
"In the middle of the next block. Number 721. On your right. Up the steps, in the front door, and continue to the end of the hall."
Harahap allowed himself a small nod and started looking for street numbers.
The next block consisted of tall, narrow tenement buildings. Back on prespace Old Earth, they might have been called "brownstones." Here on Kornati they were called "one-suns" because they were packed so closely together that only one wall had windows to admit sunlight. These particular one-suns were a bit more rundown than some, but not as badly as many others. It was an industrial district, and the blue-collar workers who lived here earned enough money to aspire to a somewhat higher standard of living.
They came to Number 721, and Harahap turned to his right and up the steps as if this had been his destination all along. The front door had been repainted fairly recently, in a deep, dark green that seemed out of place in this grimy, urban setting. It wasn't locked-doors seldom were in this part of town, where renters could rely on their neighbors to break the kneecaps of anyone stupid enough to try to rob or burglarize any of their fellow residents-and it opened at his touch.
He walked down the hallway, smelling a combination of cooking, faint mildew, and people living too close together. The door at the end of the hall swung open at his approach, and he stepped through it to find himself face-to-face with a dark-haired, dark-eyed, dark-complexioned woman of medium height.
"I suspected the rumors of your unfortunate demise were exaggerated, Ms. Nordbrandt," he said calmly.
"So I decided to let them think they'd gotten me, at least for a week or two," Agnes Nordbrandt said thirty-odd minutes later.
She and Harahap faced one another across a small table in the one-sun apartment's tiny kitchen. A pot of some sort of soup or stew simmered on the old-fashioned stovetop behind him, and he sat with his hands on the table, a mug of surprisingly good tea clasped loosely between them, while he watched her face. It seemed thi
"They did get some good people," she continued more harshly, then stopped and made herself relax. "And, while I suppose the reports of my death may be disheartening to some of our cells, I expect the blow to the government's credibility when it turns out I'm not dead to more than offset any interim damage."
"I see." He sipped tea, then returned the mug to the table and smiled ever so slightly. "On the other hand, I don't believe any of the newspaper articles I've read said that the government ever claimed you were. It's all been pure media speculation, with government spokesmen persistently cautioning people that there's no proof you're not alive."
"I know." Her grin was positively vicious. "That's one reason the entire idea appeals to me so much. The government can argue all it wants that it never tried to claim I was dead. But no one'll remember that, especially when I begin all my communiques a
"I see," he repeated. She was right, and she was also demonstrating a rather more sophisticated grasp of effective propaganda and psych war than he'd really expected out of her. Which, he chided himself, had been foolish. She had, after all, been a successful Kornatian politician before the a
"How long are you pla
"You noticed that, did you?" Nordbrandt seemed pleased by his perceptiveness. "I figure another couple of weeks, maybe three, with nothing more than a few, widely isolated operations-the sorts of thing action cells might come up with on their own if they were completely cut off from central guidance-should pretty much convince all the press pundits I'm safely dead. And it should also encourage Rajkovic and Basaricek to believe the same thing, whether they admit it to anyone else-or even themselves-or not. Or, at least, for the grays and General Suka's people to relax and lower their guards just a little. Which ought to make the wave of attacks I'm pla
"Can you afford to take the pressure off for that long?"
"For two weeks, certainly. Three?" She shrugged. "That may be a bit more problematical. Not so much here on Kornati, but on Flax. I don't want the Constitutional Convention too comfortable with the notion that they don't face any opposition."
"I see your point," he said. "On the other hand, I've just come from Montana. You've heard about Westman and his Independence Alliance's attack on Rembrandt's facilities there?"
"No. Last I heard, he was still playing around stealing people's clothes."
Her disdain for Westman's opening operation was obvious... and, Harahap thought, proved that whatever her own strengths might be, her understanding of the full possibilities of psychological warfare were, in fact, almost as limited as he'd first thought they were. Or perhaps it would be more fair to her to say she suffered from tu
"Well, that might have been a bit silly," Harahap conceded, catering to her prejudices. "If it was, though, he's decided to take a rather... firmer approach since."
He proceeded to tell her all about Westman's attack on the RTU's Montana headquarters. By the time he was done, she was chuckling in open admiration. Of course, Harahap had chosen not to stress the careful precautions Westman had taken to avoid casualties.
"I love it!" she a
It occurred to Harahap, not for the first time, that the citizens of the Talbott Cluster, including an amazing number of those who should have known better, were sadly ignorant about the societies of their sister worlds. True, Westman was what passed for an "aristocrat" on Montana, but the mind boggled at the thought of him as, say, a New Tuscany oligarch. Whatever their other faults, the Montanans would have laughed themselves silly at the very prospect.
"He did seem to be taking things lightly, just at first," he said. "But he's gotten more serious since. And he's decided to sign on with our Central Liberation Committee. That's what we finally decided to call ourselves. Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?" he added with a smile.
"He has?" Nordbrandt demanded, eyes narrowing as she ignored his humorous question.
"He has," Harahap said more seriously. "Which is one reason I suspect that even if you decided to take the full three weeks before a
"You certainly may," she said with the fervency of someone who, since their last conversation, had experienced the realities of operating from the wrong side of a capability imbalance. "How soon can we expect to see them?"
"They're in transit," he told her, and watched her eyes glitter. "Unfortunately, it's still going to take them about sixty T-days to get here. Freighters aren't exactly speed demons, and we need our delivery boys to be so ordinary-looking they slide in under the authorities' radar." She looked disappointed at the thought of taking that long to get her hands on her previously unanticipated new toys, and he smiled crookedly. "Besides," he continued, "I imagine you'll be able to make good use of all that time. After all, we're going to have to figure out how to land-and hide, here on the planet-something on the order of a thousand tons of weapons, ammunition, and explosives."
"A thousand?" Her eyes glowed, and he nodded.
"At least," he said gently. "And it could be twice that. That was the minimum quantity I was assured of when I set out. They were still assembling the shipment, though, and the numbers may well have gone up since. Can you handle and hide that big a consignment?"
"Oh, yes," she told him quietly. "I think you can rely on that!"
"Celebrant Traffic Control, this is HMS Hexapuma requesting clearance to an assigned parking orbit."
Lieutenant Commander Nagchaudhuri sat patiently at his communications panel after transmitting Captain Terekhov's request. Like all the other systems out here, Celebrant certainly didn't possess any FTL com capability, and Hexapuma had just crossed the G4 star's 20.24-light-minute hyper limit. The star system's habitable planet, which also rejoiced in the name Celebrant, was directly between the ship and its primary, with an orbital radius of just under eleven light-minutes, so it would be at least eighteen minutes before any response could be received by Hexapuma .
That was perfectly all right with Terekhov. At this range, even the sorts of sensors available in the Cluster should have gotten a clear fix on Hexapuma' s hyper footprint and impeller wedge, so they knew someone was coming. And it was only courteous to let them know as soon as possible who that someone was.