“You will move out as soon as you consider your battalion capable of offensive action. You will seal off the Gleann Mor Valley and conduct search-and-destroy through it. All arms, all commercial facilities capable of dual use, are to be destroyed. All people taking up arms against their lawful government will be turned over to the Special Police I assign to interrogating such prisoners, their wives and families. Understood?”
L. J. could almost hear the recording being made. Nothing in his military training applied to this. How do you keep your fighting honor when given orders for mass murder? Guess the academy needs some new courses. “I have recorded your orders, sir. I acknowledge them and will be ready to move out in two days, sir. Where will I rendezvous with your Special Police?”
“Amarillo.”
“I assume they will be outside my chain of command.”
“Of course. They are my Special Police.”
L. J. wanted that clearly on the record. “Understood, sir.”
“Good-bye then, Major.”
“Good-bye, sir,” L. J. said. He closed the com unit with a firm click, watched until the Net died, then turned to Mallary. “Now let’s find out who came up with the idea of writing messages to the locals on the sides of that platoon’s trucks.”
14
Outside Amarillo, Alkalurops
Prefecture IX, The Republic of the Sphere
24 August 3134; local summer
Grace studied the sun-seared rolling land before her. As her mind switched from miner’s to soldier’s thoughts, she could almost hear a click. Beside her, Ben eyed the defenses thrown up ten klicks south of Amarillo where the main road made a series of hairpin curves through a deep wash. A culvert covered a trickle of a river, but a gully-washer anywhere in the valley would have water pouring over the riverbed’s five-meter-high banks. Regularly washed out, the road was mostly potholes this summer. Few folks were feeling motivated toward their civic duty to repair the road.
Chato’s Navajos had taken a good three hundred riflemen from the south valley and shown them how to vanish. Even ’Mech MODs were either in cover, in fighting positions or hidden behind rocks. The command post was a small cattle shed, its roof falling in, lined with a double wall of sand bags. It smelled of heat and shade and cows.
“We have the main road blocked here,” Grace said. “East and west of here, the riverbank is deep and nasty. Bliven’s the only other good crossing,” she said, pointing to a map and the town a hundred and fifty kilometers east. “Syn and Wilson are down there setting up ambushes. West is your territory, Ben.”
“Any other defense in front of Amarillo?” the albino asked, his pink eyes squinting as he studied the potential battleground.
“None. Everything from here to town is too flat.”
“So we give up the town when this falls, quiaff?”
“We’ll have to. Most folks have already fled. Everyone’s heard stories of the Black and Reds. Nobody wants to be here when they show up. ’Course there are always stragglers, but with luck they’ll be too few for the mercs to notice.”
Ben eyed the land for a long time. Below them a rickety, overloaded truck chugged through the potholes at the bottom of the wash, then began its slow climb out. Once at the top, it halted and a woman in a huge straw hat and shapeless dress struggled down from the packed flatbed. She shouted her thanks, then plodded toward the barn as the truck drove off, its people, bedding and boxes swaying. One of the passengers began to sing, and others joined in.
“Nice people, those,” the woman said, setting down a box in the shade of the barn and sitting on it.
“Excuse me,” Grace said. “We’re kind of busy here. Don’t you belong somewhere else?”
The woman lifted the sleeve of her sweat-drenched smock, sniffed, and made a face. “Three days on the road, and I think a barn’s the only place that’ll take me.”
“Totally untrue,” Ben said, turning to the woman and actually smiling. “On you, mademoiselle, it is merely what other perfumes strive to be.” Grace looked at her Lone Cat. Had he gone totally crazy? “Grace, do you not remember Betsy Ross?”
Grace looked closer at the woman under the straw hat. The interloper stood, made a formal curtsy, then hiked up her dress, giving a good eyeful, and rummaged around her waist for something. With a slight victory yell, she pulled out a flat block which, when unwrapped from a reeking cloth, turned out to be an unusually large ’puter.
“I have here the full download of Alfred Santorini’s personal files. Brilliant of him to turn off the Net. Most of his security went down with it. Left his files wide open once I cracked his encryption. Here’s everything you need to know about his little operation.”
“What’s the most important thing you found?” Grace asked.
“My old master always used to say, ‘Follow the money,’ so here’s the money,” Betsy said, and brought up a spreadsheet. “Or here’s the money,” she said, bringing up another. “Or it could be this or that,” and two more screens filled with numbers, then flashed away. “I’ve been in a few ops that ran two sets of books, but four! Santorini’s way twisted.”
Betsy frowned for a moment, then shuddered. “By the way, we are killing this bastard, aren’t we? ’Cause if you folks aren’t, I’ll do it myself. He dies. Slow and very dead.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” Grace said, “that’s the plan. You have the proof in your ’puter that says we should kill him.”
“There and a few other places,” Betsy said, started to rub at her hip, then stopped herself. “Just so long as we’re agreed that bastard dies, I’m in this with you all the way.”
“What do you make of those spreadsheets?” Ben said.
“I’m sure an accountant will find all sorts of funny money in them, but taken as a whole, they point in too many directions. This one,” she said, bringing one up, “is what you’d expect him to send to his boss at Lenzo Computing. Nice, easy-to-swallow numbers for not a lot of activity.”
She flipped to a new screen. “This one has a lot more in it. For example, he lists his acquired properties. Seems that all the property that got into tax arrears was sold at auction. A very private auction. He bought it for not even pennies on the C-bill. Even that was covered by a loan he wrote himself on the Allabad Mechanics and Agriculture Bank. He’s gonna make a killing when Lenzo Computing moves here.
“But then there’s this one,” she said, frowning at the screen. “I think it’s for if he gets in trouble and has to call for help, say Landgrave Jasek Kelswa-Steiner and his Stormhammers. Here he sells a lot of stuff at a discount.”
“And the fourth?” Ben said.
“A whole lot more interesting. Note the bottom line,” Betsy said, pointing at a blank space on the sheet. “There is none. Everything gets converted to cash-producing holdings. And there’s another change. The mercs go from the cost side of the sheet to the asset side. All their property’s there, but no costs.”
“Troopers have to be paid,” Ben said. “No avoiding that!”
“He thinks he can. Santorini sends a lot of e-notes to the Roughriders’ adjutant. This one didn’t get sent. He wrote it the day things started to go bad, so maybe he was saving it. He asks the adjutant to take on a cook from Santorini’s staff.”
“The mercs are that hard up for staff?” Grace asked.
“The Major was trying to hire my maid services.”
Grace scowled. Hanson hadn’t come across to her as the kind who couldn’t keep his hands off the help. Betsy shook her head. “What I really think he wanted was info from Allabad. Anyway, I turned down the job offer in a chatty letter that told him stuff that would have cost him a pile of stones if he was paying my usual fee. He came right back with another nice, friendly note, and we kept up the chat, me feeding him intel before he asked for it. But why would Santorini send a cook?”