F. Wilson - An Enemy of the State

He seemed surprised and somewhat abashed at what he had just said. He gestured to the tray, which had started to steam. “Better eat that while it's hot.” As LaNague turned away, the guard moved closer to the bars and spoke again. “One more thing…I'm not supposed to do this, but-” He thrust his open right hand between the bars.

LaNague grasped it and shook it firmly. “What's your name?”

“Steen. Chars Steen.”

“Glad to know you, Steen.”

“Not as glad as I am to know you!” He turned and quickly strode toward the exit at the end of the walkway.

LaNague stood and looked at the tray for a while, moved by the small but significant gesture of solidarity from the guards. Perhaps he had touched people more deeply than he realized. Sitting down before the tray, he lifted the lid. He really wasn't hungry, but made himself eat. After all, it was a gift.

He managed to swallow a few bites, but had to stop when Mora drifted through his mind. Since his arrest he had been doing his best to fend off the thought of her, but lost the battle now. She would be learning of his capture soon, hopefully not from the vid. Telling her beforehand would have been impossible. Mora would have done everything in her power to stop him; failing that, she would have tried to be arrested along with him, despite the way he had been treating her.

A short spool had been left explaining everything…a rotten way to do it, but the only way. With his appetite gone, he scraped the remaining contents of the tray into the commode and watched them swirl away, then crawled back into the recess and forced himself to sleep. It was better than thinking about what Mora was going through.

“HOW COULD YOU let him do it?” Mora's voice was shrill, her gestures frantic as she twisted in her seat trying to find a comfortable position. There was none. Her mind had been reeling from the news about Josef-now this!

“How could I stop him?” Radmon Sayers said defensively as he stood before her in the LaNague apartment. He had waited until the pilot and his wife had fallen asleep in the other room, then had put on the spool and let LaNague explain it himself.

“Someone else could have gone! One of his loyal” -she hated herself for the way she snarled the word-“followers could have taken his place! No one in the Imperium knows what Robin Hood looks like!”

“He didn't feel he could allow anyone else to be placed in custody as the most wanted man in the out-worlds. And frankly, I respect that decision.”

Mora sank back in her chair and nodded reluctantly. It was unfair of her to castigate Sayers, or to call into question the courage of any of the Merry Men. She knew Peter-although with the way he had been behaving since her arrival on Throne, perhaps not as well as she had thought. But he had never been good at asking favors of anyone, even a simple favor that was due him. He preferred to take care of it himself and get it out of the way rather than impose on anyone. So the idea of asking someone else to risk his life posing as Robin Hood would have been completely beyond him.

“I'm sorry,” she mumbled through a sigh. “It's just that I had the distinct impression he had someone else in mind as the public's Robin Hood.”

“That may have been a calculated effect for your benefit.”

“Maybe. What are we supposed to do now?”

Sayers fished in his pocket and came up with three vid spools. “We wait for an opportunity to play one of these over the air.”

“What's on them?” Mora asked, rising from her seat.

“Your husband…making an appeal to the people of Throne to choose between Metep and Robin Hood.”

“Are they any good? Will they convince anyone?” She didn't like the expression on Sayers’ face.

“I can't say.” He kept his eyes on the spools in his hand. “A lot of the public's acceptance will depend on the fact that he's been identified as Robin Hood. The news bulletins should be breaking just about now, although hardly anybody's watching. But all of Throne will know by breakfast.”

“Play one for me.”

“There's three, one for each of the contingencies he thought possible.”

“Play them all.”

Sayers plugged them into the apartment holovid set, one after another. Mora watched with growing dismay, an invisible hand making a fist with her heart in the middle, gripping it tighter and tighter until she was sure it must stop beating. Peter's messages to the people of Throne were beautifully precise and well reasoned. They pointed out the velvet-gloved tyranny of the Imperium, and the inevitable consequences. No one living in the economic holocaust engulfing Throne could deny the truth of what he said. He appealed on the grounds of principle and pragmatism. But there was some vital element missing.

“He's doomed,” Mora said in a voice that sounded as hollow as she felt. The third spool had just finished throwing out its holographic image of Peter LaNague, alias Robin Hood, sitting at a desk and calmly telling whoever might be listening to rise up and put an end to the Outworld Imperium once and for all.

Sayers puffed out his cheeks and exhaled slowly. “That's what I told him when we recorded these. But he wouldn't listen.”

“No…of course he wouldn't. He expects everyone in the galaxy to respond to pure reason, now that he's finally got their attention.” She gestured toward the vid set. “A Tolivian or a Flinter would understand and respond fiercely to any one of those spools. But the people of Throne?”

She went to the window. Pierrot sat on the sill, drooping heavily over the edge of his pot in the morose kengai configuration. She had watered the tree, spoken to it, but nothing she did brought it upright again. She looked beyond to the dark empty streets awaiting dawn, and thought about Peter. He had become a different man since leaving Tolive-cold, distant, preoccupied, even ruthless. But those spools…they were the work of a fool!

“Why didn't he listen to you, or check with me, or take somebody's advice? Those spools are dry, pedantic, didactic, and emotionally flat. They may get a good number of people nodding their heads and agreeing in the safety of their homes, but they won't get them out in the street, running and shaking their fists in the air and screaming at the tops of their lungs for an end to Metep and his rotten Imperium.” She whirled and faced Sayers. “They won't work!”

“They're all we've got.”

Mora saw the three spools sitting in a row beside the vid set. With one swift motion she snatched them up, hurled them into the dissociator in the corner, and activated it.

Sayers leaped forward, but too late. “No!” He stared at her in disbelief. “Do you realize what you've done? Those were the only copies!”

“Good. Now we'll have to think of something else.” She paused. It had been necessary to destroy the spools. As long as they remained intact, Sayers would have felt duty-bound to find a way to broadcast them. But with them now gone beyond any hope of retrieval, he was free to act on his own-and to listen to her. Mora had already concocted a variation on Peter's basic plan. But she would need help-Flinter help. With Josef dead and Kanya gone she knew not where, Mora would have to turn to other Flinters. They were available, filtering down in a steady stream over the past few weeks, setting up isolated enclaves, waiting for the time when their services would be needed. Mora knew where to find them.

HE WAS ALMOST THERE. Gasping for breath, Broohnin stopped on a rise and looked back at the dim glow that was Primus City. Last year it would have lit up half the sky at this distance, but with gloglobes fast becoming an endangered species on its streets, the city was a faint ghost of its former self. He sat down for a moment and scanned the terrain behind him, watching for any sign of movement as his lungs caught up to his body.