Starfist: Hangfire (35 page)

Culloden's telephone number? The three Marines looked at one another. It was the last thing they ever thought they'd need on this mission.

"Often in life survival boils down to something very insignificant like a nail, a bullet, a telephone number," O'Mol said. "I'll get him through the central computer." O'Mol pulled the telephone from its dashboard recess, picked up the handset and pressed 0. "Lovat Culloden, Chief of Security," he said.

Almost immediately a male voice answered, "Please identify yourself and state your business."

"I must talk to Lovat Culloden."

"That is impossible, sir. He is out. May I help you?"

"Tell him that his whore and his four jacks are in town," Pasquin whispered.

O'Mol winked broadly and said, "No. I must talk to him personally. This is a matter of the most urgent nature. Kindly inform him that his whore and four jacks are in town."

The line went silent for a moment. "Culloden here." Pasquin nodded. That was Culloden's voice.

"We need to see you," O'Mol said.

"Who the hell are you?" Culloden said, but he knew who they were and was just saying that to cover himself.

"We have the information you hired us to get for you."

"My place, fifteen minutes." The line went dead.

"Katie, Katie, Katie," Claypoole murmured, "in a little while this'll all be over."

"Look sharp, Rock, we aren't out of the woods yet," Pasquin warned.

"Well, we're getting there, we're getting there," O'Mol said. "I can see the ‘light at the end of the tunnel.’" It was full dark when he pulled up to a huge iron gate set in a high stone wall. "Tell Mr. Culloden the whore and four jacks are here," he told the hard-faced men in a shack behind the gate. One of them nodded and the gate slid open slowly. They drove up a winding drive bordered on both sides by large trees. At the top of the drive, straddling a steep ridge, sat Culloden's villa.

"All right, stick together," Pasquin said. "Got your readers?"

O'Mol snapped his fingers. "Now I see why you guys were always fiddling with those things! There is a code in there that activates a transmitter, right? Christ on a handcar, I should have known."

"All we've been through, we gotta be sure the innards haven't been screwed up," Dean said. There it was,
Knives in the Night
, a novel that'd been on the Commandant's reading list forever. Even now, on the cusp of the most dangerous dilemma he'd ever faced, the opening lines stirred him: "The sun rising over the South China Sea cast long shadows..." He smiled. Like those Marines in the ancient story of a war nobody even remembered anymore, they were a team on Havanagas, just like they always were, Pasquin, Claypoole, and himself, and no goddamned civilians could touch them! He clipped the reader back on his belt, checked his blaster. He was ready.

They dismounted and walked into the foyer in a tight group, weapons held casually but ready. Their footsteps echoed loudly on the flagstone floor. Culloden stood in the center of the living room, off to one side.

They marched in and stood facing him. "Well?" O'Mol demanded. He exchanged glances with Pasquin.

"Well, what?" Culloden smiled. Suddenly the room was swarming with armed men. They burst in from every direction. Before any of the fugitives could get off a shot they went down in a tangle of wildly flailing arms and legs. "Thank you! Thank you for being so naive!" Culloden shouted above the uproar. In seconds the five were hoisted to their feet, bound and manacled.

Johnny Sticks walked in. "Thank you, Lovat, thank you very much."

"You are welcome, sir."

"Wh-What the hell's going on, Culloden?" Pasquin raged, struggling against the manacles. Dean and Claypoole screamed defiance and rage at Culloden, who just smiled calmly.

"Survival, Mister Pasquin," Culloden answered. "Who do you think betrayed the pitiful Mister Woods? I've been working for Johnny all along. We didn't kill you at once because we thought you'd lead us to the real undercover agent. We know all about your readers." He motioned to one of the men standing by, who stepped forward and plucked them from the Marines' belts. Culloden hefted them.

"You'll never send any messages on these things now." He threw one to the floor and crushed it under his foot. The second one followed. He tossed the third one to Sticks.

Sticks approached the small group of prisoners. "I must admit, gentlemen, you certainly have caused us a lot of trouble, a hundred of my men killed, three aircraft destroyed, four—or is it five?—expensive landcars up in smoke. Good thing Nast didn't send a full squad of Marines or your lives might have turned out differently. As it is, Mister Ferris is not happy, not happy at all. He's prepared special treats for all of you."

"And what might they be, you ugly little shit?" O'Mol asked.

"Ah, yes, O'Mol! Freedom fighter O'Mol! You are an unexpected prize. You'll make a noise in the world when you die."

"Look, Mister Sticks," Claypoole said, "let Katie go. She had nothing to do with any of this. I got her into this mess! For Christ's sake, please don't hurt her!"

"Ah-ha! A love affair here, eh? I'll tell you what, Mr. Claypoole. You tell me where Nast is and who his deep undercover agent is and I'll not only let her go, I'll let you and your friends go. You are nothing to us. You are entertainment to us. What do you say, Marine?"

"Aw, go fuck yourself! I wouldn't tell you if I knew!"

"Tut tut, Mister Claypoole. Make your goodbyes." He nodded to the men holding Katie and they dragged her out of the room. "She is going to light up the world a bit, Mister Claypoole. She's going to Würzburg."

"No!" O'Mol shouted. "Not the girl, Johnny! For the love of God, not her!"

Sticks only laughed. "My, my, gentlemen, have we gotten religion? All this calling upon the deity?"

"What? What?" Claypoole shouted. He saw the look on O'Mol's face at the mention of Würzburg.

"What is he going to do to Katie?"

"You don't want to know, Rock," O'Mol muttered.

"Oh, yes he does!" Sticks gloated. "He shall know the truth because if you know the truth, well, you shall be—dead." He laughed. "Würzburg was an ancient city in the country of Germany, and a thousand years ago they tortured, tried, and burned people at the stake as witches there. Your girl is going to be burned at the stake as a witch." He chortled. "She'll be one truly hot piece of pussy when they get done with her." Claypoole cursed Sticks. "Oh," he pouted, "such a vile temper! Ah, Mister Dean! I am truly sorry I've ignored you! Your girl? Miss Tara? She's already been there, and I must say, she made a complete ash of herself!" He laughed so hard he began to cough. Dean just glared.

"I'll kill you! I'll kill you!" Claypoole raged impotently.

"Oh, yes, you, freedom fighter." He turned to O'Mol. "You're going with the girl. Take him away."

The guards dragged O'Mol out.

"Oh, one more thing." Sticks held up his hand. "An old friend wants to say something to you. Juanita?"

he called.

Juanita came in from an anteroom. "What an artful display, Johnny. Get anything out of them yet?"

"Not yet, my dear. The interrogations come later. You wish to address these gentlemen?"

Juanita stepped close to the three Marines and slapped Dean and Claypoole hard. The sound of her hand echoed like a shot in the room. Pasquin saw what was coming for him so he lifted his leg and blocked the kick to his groin. Unbalanced, Juanita staggered. "You'll regret that, you bastard!" she hissed. "I'll see you three again," she warned, "and when I do, you'll wish you'd never been born."

"I'm scared shitless, lady," Pasquin told her. He turned his attention to Sticks. "Well, needle-dick, what's the treat in store for us?"

"Ah, for you, Corporal Pasquin, and your two friends here, why, all roads lead to Rome."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The surveillance techs had probably less to do than anybody else in Interstellar City. The treaty that had admitted Kingdom to the Confederation of Human Worlds expressly prohibited Confederation representatives and agents from performing any and all manner of covert surveillance on the local population. Weather, geological, and geographic surveys were allowed so long as they were required for programs designed to aid the population. The theocracy made final determination of what programs aided the population and banned any that would allow the Confederation to peek into their operations or view the lives of their people. For its part, the Confederation did not reveal to the theocracy the capabilities it had on hand out of fear the theocracy would demand to use them for its own purposes. The theocracy's purposes, the residents of Interstellar City were convinced, were largely geared toward spying on the population so it could be more completely repressed.

The only variation in belief the theocrats allowed was between their various sects, not within them.

Attempts at proselytizing across sects had caused great problems during Kingdom's first couple of generations. The only solution, the theocrats decided, was to ban proselytizing all together. Not everybody found that solution acceptable. Prominent among those who found it unacceptable were Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, and the followers of Sun Myung Moon. Which was why there were no longer any Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, or followers of Sun Myung Moon on Kingdom.

Conversion from one religious belief to another was a capital offense. Proselytizing was punishable by burning at the stake. It took a lot of burnings-at-stake to convince the surviving Mormons and Seventh Day Adventists to leave. The followers of Sun Myung Moon were more tractable and had left after only a few of their members were immolated.

Naturally, the theocracy didn't tell the Confederation about the penalties for conversion; there was too great a chance that the unbelievers in the Confederation would try to make them stop. Public executions for religious transgressions were too important a form of education to allow off-worlders, no matter who they were, to put an end to them.

When the theocracy asked for assistance in locating and identifying purported off-world raiders, it was too rich an opportunity for the surveillance technicians to pass up. They were like children on Midwinter's Day morning. Except they weren't opening gifts, they were planting them.

The first thing they did was turn on an unused geosync satellite that included in its broad range of view the area of the purported off-world raids. It wasn't their fault, they reasoned, that the satellite had sat idle for so long that the mechanism that would normally focus it strictly on one specific area had died and it would take, oh, six months to a year Standard to get a replacement part.

The ground surveillance techs just about cackled with glee as they went through—and beyond, if the truth be known—the area the theocracy said would provide the needed proof of the off-worlders the next time they launched one of their murderous raids. They installed cameras that did such a good job of mimicking birds' nests that birds sometimes added to them and claimed them as their own. Motion detectors were planted in such overlapping profusion that a large, dung-eating beetlelike creature endemic to the scrub could be tracked to within millimeters throughout its range. Listening devices sprang up all about, except "sprang" was not quite the word. Some of them were disguised as burls on tree trunks, others as pebbles that almost miraculously didn't wash away in a heavy rain.

And they didn't stop there. Finally released to play with their toys, they installed infrared detectors, UV

viewers, and myriad other devices that covered most of the range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Nothing would appear, move, or make a noise without the surveillance techs knowing about it.

They'd worry about how to sift through all that data after they started getting it. In the meanwhile, Oh joy! What fun simply installing all those devices!

They installed so many things that nobody could blame them if some were inadvertently left behind when they picked them up again at the end of the authorized surveillance, could they?

Surveillance Tech (15th grade) Morley Christopher scratched his neck as he peered at the bank of monitors he was supposed to watch over.

"Think we overdid it a bit?" he asked. There was no way he was going to stay on top of the data being analyzed and laid out for him by the thirty computers feeding data from six hundred surveillance devices into the fifty monitors in front of him.

"Not a chance," replied his partner, Surveillance Tech (14th grade) Elizabeth Rice.

Christopher screwed up his face and tried to count how many monitors he could clearly see without moving his head. Not enough. "Are you sure, Betty?"

Rice laughed. "Mor, we only have a few months, maybe only one or two, before we have to bring it all back in. We're getting enough data to keep us busy analyzing for years."

"But we're being inundated with so much we probably won't be able to spot the raiders when they hit again."

She smiled at him. "Mor, you've been stuck here in Insanity too long. You sound like you believe the theocrats' nonsense about off-world raiders."

"Well—"

"Come on, Mor. You know better than that." She went happily back to the Olympia Mons of data building up in front of her. The next raid would come, the theocracy would demand the identity and location of the off-worlders who made it, the techs would check the data for that time and location, and Ambassador Creadence would duly report that they'd found no sign of off-worlders and their shuttles.

Even if they had to break down all their surveillance devices immediately afterward, they'd still have mountains of data to plow through.

The mullahs had told them about the infidel crusaders who came from a demon world to rapine and burn the faithful, so when the people of Almedina heard the distant thunder on a day when the sun shone and the sky was clear, they fled to predetermined hiding places.

Hetman Mohammet paused before he fled to turn on the village's radio, its sole communication with the district capital, to inform his superior, Pasha Alaziz, of the matter. The radios given to the villages were of an ancient design, necessary to restrict villages' communications to their own district capitals.