"And what if Anton and Victor need to make an escape during one of the stretches while we're gone?"
"Then they're shit out of luck. There's simply no way we can stay in orbit indefinitely, given our cover story. Not anywhere that has a functioning planetary government, much less Mesa. They're on the paranoid side here, and for damn good reason, as generally hated as they are." She shrugged. "But if those two characters are as good as they think they are—which is probably true—then they'll have enough sense to time whatever they might be doing that's likely to set off any alarms for one of the stretches we're in orbit. Of course, it's always possible they'll get caught by surprise by something unexpected. But that's the risk they run, in that business. Either way, I made sure we're covered in the contract. We get paid, no matter what happens."
She didn't see any reason to explain that the "contract" amounted to nothing more than a verbal agreement between herself, Web Du Havel and Jeremy X, and a representative of Beowulf's BSC. She knew, from a lifetime's experience, that she could trust the BSC and if she couldn't trust the Torch people there was nothing she could do about it anyway. But she couldn't see any way to make that clear to Artlett without undermining her years-long campaign to get her reckless great-nephew to stop trusting the fates so much.
Besides, the BSC would be footing most of the bill anyway. They'd agreed to pay the Butre clan an annual stipend for the use of the station. The stipend was more than enough to pay for the expense of providing every one of its members still young enough with prolong treatments—and with plenty left over to send them away for a regular education. The contribution of the Ballroom—technically, the Torch military and if you accepted that at face value you were a moron—was mostly going to be muscle. They'd be the ones who staffed the station, maintained the pretense it was still a slaver entrepot while actually using it as a combination stellar safe house and way station for covert operations—and treat themselves to shooting down the stray slaver ship that showed up from time to time.
It was over. Regardless of what happened to Ganny and the few members of her clan on the Hali Sowle, she'd finally managed to save the clan itself.
She heard the three boys squabbling over something, in a nearby compartment. The mess hall, from the sound of their voices. She couldn't quite make out the words. Ed and James were going at it and Brice seemed to be trying to act as peacemaker.
If they survived this expedition—and whatever other adventures their none-too-cautious souls got them into thereafter—all three of them would live for at least two centuries.
For the first time in years, Elfride Margarete Butre discovered she was crying.
"The financial data from the Hali Sowle's contract of carriage checks out okay, E.D." Gansükh Blomqvist pointed at the screen in front of him.
She leaned over and looked. Sure enough, the logo and seal of the Banco de Madrid was prominently displayed.
"Okay, then." She went to her own work station and spent a minute or so keying in some instructions, before hitting the send button. The Hali Sowle's legitimacy, heretofore provisional and temporary, was now established in the data banks of the Mesan System Guard. The next time they came through, if they ever did, the routine would go much more quickly.
She hadn't bothered to check the details of the data on Blomqvist's screen. There was no reason to waste the time. Faking that seal and logo was effectively impossible for anyone except maybe a handful of governments in the galaxy. It was certainly beyond the capability of a gypsy freighter.
It was not, however, beyond the capability of the government of Erewhon—or any of its major families, even using their own private resources. Jeremy X had been quite right. The great families of Erewhon were still the galaxy's premier money-launderers.
When one of his subordinates brought the news to Walter Imbesi that everything had cleared for the Hali Sowle in the Mesa System, he simply nodded and went back to his business. The only reason he'd asked to be notified at all was because of the political sensitivity of the project. In purely financial terms, measured against the fortune of his family, it all amounted to chicken feed.
Still, even chicken feed was not to be sneered at. The Imbesis would very likely turn a small profit. The jewels were perfectly legitimate and there was a market for them, after all. Even the sutler trade on the reverse leg shouldn't do worse than break even.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
"All right, Luiz, what do you and your minions have for me?"
Oravil Barregos sat in a chair at the head of the conference table in the high security briefing room attached to Luiz Rozsak's personal office. Vegar Spangen was parked in another chair, against the briefing room's back wall, and Rozsak, Watanapongse, and Commander Habib sat facing the governor from the far end of the table.
"A lot," Rozsak said. He grimaced and nodded to Habib. "Edie?"
The admiral's chief of staff brushed a hand over her short-cropped, dark, reddish-brown hair, then straightened in her seat as she turned slightly to face Barregos fully.
"The general strategic situation's experienced what you might describe as a . . . 'significant shift,' Governor," she said. "Most immediately pressing from our perspective is what happened at Manticore last week." She shook her head, and even her normally unflappable expression showed more than a little lingering shock. "As near as we can tell, both sides got royally reamed. Manticore's Home Fleet is just plain gone, and it sounds like their Third Fleet got hit equally hard. We don't have any official confirmation of those numbers, of course, and all the information we've got on Haven's losses is secondhand, at best, via the Manties. Bottom line, though, is that it looks like the majority of Theisman's numerical superiority just got blown out from under him."
"That was my own impression," Barregos said quietly. He shook his head. "What in God's name did Theisman think he was doing?"
"He rolled the dice, Sir," Habib replied flatly. Barregos raised one eyebrow, and the chief of staff shrugged. "After what happened at Lovat, it was pretty obvious the Havenite fleet was going to be toast going up against whatever it was Harrington's Eighth Fleet used on Giscard. Our best guess"—she twitched her head sideways at Watanapongse—"is that Theisman already had the strike force he used at Manticore assembled under Tourville when he found out about Lovat. We're guessing he'd started putting it together as part of a contingency plan either before the summit talk was ever proposed, or when Elizabeth deep-sixed the idea, at the very latest. At any rate, he had the operation already planned before Lovat—he had to have had it ready, or he couldn't have gotten it off the ground so quickly. When Harrington hammered Giscard, Theisman and Pritchart must have figured their only real chance was to score a knockout before the Manties got the new targeting systems into general deployment. Even with everything ready to go, it took someone with one hell of a lot of nerve—not to mention pure gall—to go for all the marbles that way. I doubt very much that anyone in Manticore ever even dreamed they'd pull the trigger on something like this, but one thing Theisman's already demonstrated pretty damned conclusively is that he's got enough guts for any three or four normal people."
"And he came damned close to pulling it off, too, as far as we can tell," Rozsak put in. "We still don't have the details, of course, but it sounds like he had a pretty good ops plan. Unfortunately—from his perspective, at least—it also sounds like the Manties were further along in deploying the new hardware than he'd hoped. And, unless I miss my guess, Murphy put in his centicredit's worth, as well."
"Not to mention Duchess Harrington's minor contribution," Habib added.