Blanchard nodded again. Joseph Landrum was one of Breitbach’s senior cell leaders. In fact, Landrum had been with the movement longer than Blanchard herself. He was one of the MLF’s smoother operators, too, and she wasn’t surprised Breitbach had chosen him to manage whatever interstellar communications link they’d been able to establish.
“Anyway, the dispatch boat in question will be leaving Mobius in the next couple of days,” Breitbach continued. “Doesn’t have anything to do with us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make use of it. Especially when, despite the current unpleasantness between the League and the Manties, it’s headed into the Talbott Sector. In fact, it’s heading to Spindle by way of Montana, which is certainly in the right direction, don’t you think?”
“Spindle?” Blanchard repeated, then smiled. “Oh, yes,” she agreed. “Spindle would be just fine with me, Michael!”
June 1922 Post Diaspora
“By this time, even that moron Gold Peak has to realize how badly she fucked up at New Tuscany and Spindle! Their government has to be shitting bricks thinking about the mess she’s dragged them all into. If the order relieving her ass and hauling her home hasn’t gotten to Spindle yet, it’s damned well on its way, Commissioner!”
—Brigadier Francisca Yucel, Solarian Gendarmerie,
To Sector Governor Lorcan Verrochio,
Office of Frontier Security
Chapter Eighteen
“That went more smoothly than I expected,” Mackenzie Graham said, standing by the apartment window and gazing out at Cherubim’s snow-covered streets. Then she turned away from the window…just in time to catch her brother raising his eyebrows in her direction.
“Don’t look so complacent at me, Indiana Graham! And don’t try to pretend you weren’t nervous about all these new arrangements, too!”
“Never had a moment’s doubt,” he told her virtuously.
“Bullshit,” she said tartly, and he chuckled.
“Well, if you’re going to be that way about it, I guess I admit I felt a little bit nervous. A little bit.” He raised a thumb and index finger, perhaps a centimeter apart, and grinned at her.
“Yeah. Sure!”
She shook her head, and the look she gave him was that of a long-suffering sister, not the co-leader of a revolutionary movement.
He only grinned even more broadly (and unrepentantly), but she had a point. The three T-months since their first meeting with Firebrand might have seemed like plenty of time, but given the slow speed with which ships moved between stars, it really wasn’t. In fact, the first shipment of weaponry had arrived over a T-month sooner than they’d expected it could. When the routine notification of waiting cargo containers hit the message account Firebrand had set up, it had come as a total surprise.
Fortunately, as Firebrand had suggested, the cargo agents responsible for sneaking those containers into the smuggling queue really didn’t want to know anything about their contents. That wasn’t how it worked, and if it turned out they contained something with negative consequences, deniability—the ability to say, honestly, “We didn’t know what it was!”—was actually a fairly acceptable defense in what passed for the Solarian legal system. Or, at least, in what passed for the Solarian legal system where little things like smuggling were concerned.
Bruce Graham had been a student of history, and Indiana had become one himself, especially since his father’s imprisonment. He wasn’t in his dad’s league yet, but he also wasn’t confined in Terrabore Prison, which left him free to pursue his self-education wherever it led, as long as he exercised a modicum of caution. He was pretty sure President McCready and General O’Sullivan had no idea how much “subversive” knowledge was tucked away in the Seraphim libraries’ files. Some of it was even in old-fashioned hardcopy books gathering dust in the physical stacks. And from his reading, Indiana had come to realize there’d actually been periods in human history when the courts would never have tolerated the omnipresent corruption of OFS and its sweetheart deals.
Well, they probably had problems of their own, even then. On the other hand, I think I’d trade my problems for theirs, if I had the option. Which I don’t.
“All right,” Mackenzie said, shifting from put-upon sibling back to co-conspirator, “now that we’ve got them, what do we do with them?”
“Now that,” Indiana conceded, “is a pretty good question, Max.”
For the moment, the containers were sitting in a warehouse he and Mackenzie were pretty sure was off the scags’ grid. It was located in the heart of the Rust Belt, and while it was in better physical shape than their meeting place with Firebrand, that wasn’t saying a lot. But it was mostly weathertight, at least, and the containers themselves were hermetically sealed and virtually indestructible. Of course, getting them there had been a not-so-minor challenge. The Krestor Interstellar shipping barcodes which had ensured their passage through customs without inspection would have stood out like sore thumbs in the Rust Belt, and so would any of the spaceport’s more modern cargo vehicles.
But Firebrand’s colleagues had anticipated that. The containers were sized to fit inside standard cargo trailers of the sort Seraphim had built for its own use before Krestor and Mendoza of Córdoba arrived to “rescue” its economy. Even better, they were equipped with built-in counter-grav units, so the trailers hadn’t ridden suspiciously low on their suspensions. It also made the containers much easier to manhandle with strictly limited manpower once they reached their destination.
“I’m still not happy about the transport arrangements,” Indiana went on. “Oh, they worked this time, but we had to put the whole thing together on the fly. Now that we’ve got them under cover, I want to take a little longer to think before we start moving them around.”
“Works for me,” Mackenzie said fervently. But then she cocked her head, looking up at her taller brother. “It works for me, but at the same time, I don’t want to leave them sitting in one big, undigested lump where we could lose all of them in a single disaster if the scags get lucky!”
“Me either. But the more we spread them around in smaller caches, the more likely one of O’Sullivan’s informers’ll stumble across one of them. Or, for that matter, that the recon platforms’ll spot something.”
“Not if we get them out into the country,” Mackenzie argued. “I’m thinking about handing them over to Saratoga.”
Indiana started to reply, then stopped, thinking about it. “Saratoga” was Leonard Silvowitz, a Seraphim Independence Movement area leader. He didn’t know he was taking instructions from Indiana and Mackenzie, both of whom he’d known for years, since he’d been a silent partner in the business effort which had led to Bruce Graham’s arrest. As far as their SIM roles were concerned, he knew them only as “Talisman” and “Magpie,” and his communications with them were indirect and circuitous.
“You know,” Indiana said slowly, “that might not be a bad idea at all. I’m not crazy about putting him at risk this early, but the Farm would be a good place to stash them, wouldn’t it?”
“The Farm,” fifty kilometers north of Cherubim, had been a part of Leonard Silvowitz’ modest business empire: a commercial farming operation which had employed several dozen people and shown a tidy profit supplying fresh vegetables and dairy products to Seraphim’s more urbanized areas. Unfortunately, that very profitability had drawn the attention of Krestor Interstellar’s local manager, and the Macready Administration had “suggested” Silvowitz lease the operation to Krestor at about twenty percent of what it was actually worth. Krestor had then proceeded to fire virtually all of Silvowitz’ employees, some of whom had been with him for as much as twenty or thirty T-years, and replace them with automated equipment.