His voice held scathing contempt. “You don’t even have an air force left, do you? Let alone trained fighter pilots or ground support troops. If the Deng come this way — or Krishna-forbid, the Melconians — your troops, Commodore, and that Bolo are the only defense Jefferson will have. Perhaps it’s selfish of us, but we’d like to think there’d be something to at least slow them down, before they head for Ngara and our worlds.”
It was a hell of a mess, when a Deng invasion looked positively attractive.
He leaned forward, causing the manacles to clank again. “But consider this, Commodore, because I assure you, we have, more than once. That Bolo of yours takes his orders from the government. If you become that government…”
Kafari caught the hiss between her teeth before he could hear. Just what were Mr. Girishanda’s motives? And connections? He sounded more like an official with Vishnu’s Ministry of Defense than a gunrunner. She narrowed her eyes beneath the battle helmet’s face mask. The ministry would doubtless feel a great deal safer if Kafari’s rebellion succeeded in removing POPPA and the Santorinis from power. POPPA fanatics would make uneasy neighbors, at best.
When Jefferson’s economy collapsed — finished collapsing — the whole damned society would go under. It was inevitable. And the disaster wasn’t very far off, either.
And when the collapse came, hungry and angry people were going to go hunting for what they needed to survive. Jefferson still had star-capable travel, with enough guns in POPPA’s hands to turn the P-Squads into a ravening horde of armed and deadly scavengers. The closest civilized port of call they could reach lay in the Ngara system. If Kafari had been a highly placed official in charge of defending Ngara’s worlds, she would have viewed the situation on Jefferson with alarm. Intense alarm.
Even with the losses the P-Squads had sustained from steady attacks by Kafari’s freedom fighters, there were thousands of P-Squad officers out there. Nineveh Base had trained five thousand a year for ten years, before Kafari’s assault had wiped the base off the map. Even with the loss of Nineveh’s cadre of instructors, however, they still had an army of fifty thousand men already in the field. If pushed to raid off-world for what they needed, that army could smash Mali with ease and do massive damage, even on Vishnu.
There was a Bolo on Vishnu, but in that kind of scenario, it wasn’t much use. A Bolo had to know in advance that a ship was a threat, before it could act defensively. A freighter crammed full of P-Squad marauders could land a devastating attack with literally no warning and escape again untouched, simply by picking a target on the other side of the planet from the Bolo’s depot. The depot’s location wasn’t a secret from anyone. Any ordinary school child could tell raiders exactly where to find Vishnu’s Bolo. There were several thousand POPPA students on Vishnu.
And now Mr. Girishanda was offering to sell her the kind of firepower it would take to destroy Vittori Santorini and either destroy or take control of his suborned Bolo, which would end the threat POPPA and its fifty-thousand potential raiders represented. If Girishanda wasn’t on the Ministry of Defense’s payroll, he was acting on the ministry’s behalf. And probably on their orders, payroll or not. Kafari was ready to put money on it. Speaking of which…
“How many Hellbores do you have available, Mr. Girishanda? And how much money do I have to lay down, to persuade you to part with them?”
“Then you are interested?”
“In winning this war? Absolutely. In your merchandise? That remains to be seen.”
Mr. Girishanda’s smile blazed like the noonday sun over Hell-Flash Desert. “My dear Commodore, I believe we can both walk out of this deal as happy men.”
Kafari couldn’t help her own smile. “You think so?”
Dinny Ghamal was grinning fit to crack his face in half. Red Wolf merely looked pained. Girishanda, blissfully ignorant of the byplay, said, “It is my fondest hope.”
Kafari leaned forward. “Convince me to put my money on the table.”
They settled down to the serious game of dickering a price they could both live with, in every possible sense of the word. It took an hour of the hardest bargaining Kafari had done in her life. Money, per se, wasn’t the only factor in her strategy. There was plenty of money, if a person knew how to divert it from off-world investment portfolios and bank accounts. POPPA, itself, was supplying Kafari with most of the money they needed to wage this rebellion. No, the hardest portion of her job tonight would be the other demand that went along with the cash laid on the table.
When Girishanda finally accepted a price that left him looking mournful, but likely beaming with self-congratulatory success in the privacy of his own thoughts, Kafari let the hammer drop.
“There’s just one more little condition to meet, before we close this deal.”
She couldn’t see his eyes behind the blindfold, but the rest of him shifted from easy relaxation to wary tension. “Oh?”
“We have some merchandise of our own to ship out. Important merchandise.”
“What does a commander of rebels have to sell?” Girishanda asked.
“This commodity isn’t for sale.”
“It’ll cost to ship it, then,” said with a frown. “How much it’ll cost depends on what you’re shipping. And why.”
Kafari turned to Dinny Ghamal, who nodded and rose, leaving the truck and swinging the doors shut behind him.
“Who’s that?” Girishanda asked. “Who left?”
“That’s not important. We have a perishable commodity, a fairly bulky supply of it.”
Girishanda gave her a sudden scowl. “Oh, no. No, you don’t. I’m not transporting a shipload of escaped prisoners. I do not want that kind of risk, thank you, kindly.”
Kafari regarded him for a moment. “You want to sell some Hellbores. I want to buy them. If you want my money, you’ll take my commodity and ship it safely to Vishnu. Or the deal is off.”
“Don’t be stupid!” Girishanda snapped, sitting up straight and rattling the manacles when he tried to move his arms to emphasize the point. “Confound it, you need those Hellbores or that Bolo will tear you to shreds. You know it. I know it. POPPA knows it. Don’t put yourself — or my world — at risk over the fate of condemned criminals!”
His reaction was no more than Kafari had expected. Her gut still clenched in icy rage. He did not, of course, know. Nobody on Vishnu could know, yet. Spacers and refugees might talk, but the former were restricted to the environs of the spaceport, these days, and the latter had fallen to a mere trickle, thanks to draconian shifts in emigration laws. With a total lock-down on interstellar communications and escape from the camps all but impossible, who could possibly have gotten word out to Vishnu? Nobody on Vishnu could know the vicious secret of POPPA’s detention camps, except Simon, and he couldn’t talk freely without putting her and her people at risk.
“In a few moments,” Kafari told him, “you will eat those words.”
Puzzlement drove furrows into his brow, but he didn’t answer. The door opened again. Dinny had returned with a young girl in tow. She had been pretty, once. Innocent, too. She was fourteen. The sea-green eyes that looked out at the world burned with an eerie copper fire, eyes that reflected the unspeakable horrors she had witnessed and survived. They were ancient eyes, lost in a child’s face, eyes it took a strong man to meet face-on and not flinch from. It had taken every ounce of strength Kafari possessed to meet Attia’s gaze, when Dinny had first brought her in, two nights ago.