Michael Flynn - The January Dancer

The Revolution was on its second or third round of leaders by then and finding it hard to recruit a fourth. The only one that Little Hugh ever failed to hit was Handsome Jack himself, who had turned the Broadcast Center into an impregnable fortress. Three teams tried to penetrate, two succeeded, one reached Handsome Jack’s office. His guards dispatched two of the assassins and Handsome Jack himself took out the other, which was not bad for a man with one arm.

This was the stuff of legend. Handsome Jack and the Ghost of Ardow locked in a titanic twilight struggle. Men began to sing songs—and the war was four weeks old.

There were missteps. One time, a death squad “took out” Krispin Dall, the Revolution’s District Leader in Coyne Village, while he was in bed with his mistress, and the mistress was taken out, too. That was bad, because there was an unspoken rule about noncombatants. Another time, Handsome Jack lost the whole of County Meath when his men wiped out the last of the gardy in a well-planned ambush. The Meath farmers had had a genuine affection for the old peacekeepers and the end of it was a dash of cold water in their faces. They looked at their bloody swords, at each other, and wondered what had come over them. They set out as a body for the Mid-Vale and Handsome Jack’s forces tried to stop them. That compounded the mistake, because first of all, everyone knew that the Meathmen had had a stomachful and only wanted to go home; and second, they were going home with their swords in hand, and four weeks of fighting had taught them how to get the use of them.

The Revolution had been driven back to New Down Town Center, Fermoy Village, and a few other pockets when two ships entered orbit carrying a rump regiment of ICC house troops. With guns. And helicopters. And satellite surveillance capabilities.

They had been bound for Hawthorn Rose, where the ICC expected to win a bid to provide border protection for the small but wealthy state of Falaise. They had departed Gladiola Depot, three weeks up the Grand Trunk Road, anticipating R&R at New Eireann, and found themselves a civil war instead of a rest stop. Sophia colonel Jumdar, commanding the two companies, thought civil wars bad for business—power beams to the orbitals had grown intermittent—and downright fatal to the tourist industry that ICC had hoped to acquire. The Guild of Power Engineers and the Reek Guides Association, who had stood by appalled while they watched their livelihoods destroyed, begged her to intervene before the factories refused to stay and the tourists refused to come.

The final straw was the news that the Loyalists had killed the ICC factor—in her view, an innocent bystander.

Such terrorism must not stand. She ordered her two companies to prep and drop and sent a swift-boat back to the Regimental Depot with the news of what had happened and with a call-up of the other two companies. “I will end this rebellion in a week,” she swore, perhaps forgetting that the Loyalists were not the ones who had rebelled.

So, she did.

What can you expect? The colonel had brought a gun to a knife fight. Her satellite recon could spot even small groups infiltrating through the Glens of Ardow and either orchestrate their capture or drop something on them from orbit. The latter, she did once, for demonstration, and never had to do it again. Afterward, something remarkable began to happen. People began to inform on the Ghost of Ardow.

And that set up the last act of the tragedy. Little Hugh had men and women about him now who loved him more than they loved the Vale, more than they had loved the old administration; men who would die for him, if only he would live and carry with him their hopes for “the Return of the O’Carrolls.” Red Sweeney. Maeve the Knife. Voldemar O’Rahilly. Names uttered with only a little less awe than that of Little Hugh Himself.

And die they did. Rear guard after rear guard perished to ensure his escape. Hugh moved like a fish through the water. Once as a tinker, another time as a priest, a third time as a woman. In the latter incident, he was exposed when an ICC corporal lifted his skirts with another objective entirely and received a great, and final, surprise. colonel Jumdar almost caught him in Fermoy Village, where he was disguised as a common laborer rebuilding Da Derga’s Hostel, but he slipped the net and vanished. There was a fight in the Mid-Vale where, remarkably, he was organizing the reconstruction of the burned-out farmhouses of the recalcitrant neighbors. He was using an assumed name, but it wasn’t much of an assumption, and the people he was organizing had fought long and hard for the Revolution until the Massacre of the Gardies had shocked them out of it. When the ICC squad swooped in by jet-copter, a trio of hardened Meathmen rushed them with swinging claymores and in the time it took the squad to shoot them down, the Ghost had disappeared. colonel Jumdar wondered what sort of man could command loyalty even from his enemies. When she asked Handsome Jack Garrity, the one-armed man thought for a long moment before he finally shook his head and told her, “You wouldn’t understand.”

Nor did she. Tips on Little Hugh’s whereabouts began to slow and, as often as not, began to prove false, running her squads up and down the length of New Eireann and once even to the tiny glade at the very head of the Vale below the crest of Ben Bulben.

Finally, after several days of hide-and-seek, union dockworkers at the spaceport packed Little Hugh into a crate equipped with amenities sufficient for nine weeks, addressed it and labeled it fragile, and sent it up by lighter to the transshipment station in High Orbit. There, it would await the next interstellar freighter passing through. They got all teary-eyed just before Little Hugh stepped into the crate and there were many embraces and kisses on the cheek and Sweeney the Red said, “Will ye no come back again?” And the Ghost of Ardow did something he should not have done. He swore on his father’s name that he would come back one day and redress the treachery that had been done New Eireann.

A week passed at Upabove Station and those who knew held their breath, wondering if the ruse would be discovered, and let it out only when a passing tramp freighter took the crate (and Little Hugh with it) on consignment.

Colonel Jumdar watched New Angeles depart with mixed feelings. She was not one to entertain romantic thoughts of revenge, and she had secured something of inestimable value from the hapless freighter crew for little more than an ICC promise to remit the proceeds later. Perhaps she was feeling good about that when she ordered the watch to stand down. Her mission was to restore order, and she thought Little Hugh’s escape would achieve that more effectively than his capture. Legends cause problems, but martyrs cause more. Without the Ghost of Ardow to lead them, the last Loyalists were gathered up almost as an afterthought.

In the end, no one achieved what they sought. The Loyalists did not get the old administration back. An ICC subsidiary quietly bought the management contract from the Clan na Oriel, which accepted a payment of wergild to square the accounts; and colonel Jumdar generously allowed O’Carroll employees to leave the planet at ICC expense. But neither did those Certain Persons who had started the whole thing gain the power they had sought. They had died to a man, save only Handsome Jack. And even Handsome Jack found himself marginalized. His side had won, but Jumdar did not trust him and the prize was hers, not his. She suspected, too, that he had taken a hand in the Escape of Little Hugh, and she could not understand a man who would do that.

People went back to their lives under the wary eyes of the 33rd Guard Regiment of ICC’s peace enforcement corporation. They looked at one another with horror and with pity and at the wreckage they had created and bit by bit they began to build things back up again. That suited Jumdar, who assumed the Civil Office of Planetary Manager in addition to her colonelcy, because until order was restored and the tourist trade recovered and power broadcasts returned to normal, “Sèan Company” would see no profit from this contract—and profit they desired above all else.