Lawrence Watt-Evans - The Spartacus File

But until now, no one had asked her much about her own politics.

No one-not even Casper.

And Casper needed to know. He had plans for Cecelia and for PFC.

“Yes,” she said at last. “Yes, I am.”

Casper thrust a fist in the air and said, “Yes!”

“Tell them I want to surrender at the U.N., in front of the international community,” Casper said into the phone.

“Do you?” Cecelia asked.

Casper smiled. “It's a possibility,” he said.

“The U.N. should be okay,” Cecelia said thoughtfully.

“See how it would work, then, and I'll get back to you. I should have that speech ready for you soon, too.” He shut off the phone and stuck it in his pocket.

“I thought…” Mirim said.

“What?” He looked up at her, startled.

“Didn't you just ask Rose to book you on the train to Kennedy Spaceport? I thought maybe you were heading out to somewhere on the Fringe.”

“Where I might get a more sympathetic hearing?” Casper shook his head. “It wouldn't be the Fringers themselves who'd be listening to me out there, it would be the authorities, and they're heavily into suppressing rebellion.”

“But then why did… isn't that what you told Rose?”

“Don't worry about what I told Rose,” Casper said. “You just be ready to go.”

“Casper, I don't want to go out to the Fringe! Space travel scares me.”

He looked up at her with interest. “Have you ever done any space traveling?”

“No, and I'm not going to!”

He held up his hands. “Okay, okay, that's no problem! You don't have to. I promise.”

“You're going without me?”

“Look, Mirim, just trust me, okay? It'll all be fine, just wait and see.”

She looked down at him uncertainly.

“I promise,” he said.

She turned away.

He watched her go, then picked up his laptop and booted it up. He had things to do. There were a lot of arrangements to make.

It was a good thing that PFC had at least one or two serious terrorists as members; he was going to need some of Ed's skills, and other specialists, as well. He'd need a bomb, and for some reason he hadn't been getting much help from the Spartacus File with the specifications on that. Maybe part of the imprint hadn't taken properly, or maybe one of Schiano's programmers had been faking it.

He'd need some specialized equipment-equipment Ed probably couldn't provide, but he might know someone who could. Fortunately, the equipment didn't actually need to work.

And he wanted some way to remove a person without anyone knowing it; poison, perhaps, or an engineered bug of some sort…?

“Sir,” the aide said.

The Chief of Staff looked up. “Yes?”

“It's about Casper Beech,” he said.

“What about him?”

“It seems we have conflicting reports about him, sir. That lawyer of his says Beech is going to turn himself in at the U.N., but the word on the net is that he intends to head out to the Fringe.”

The Chief of Staff sat up straight and looked the aide in the eye.

“The Fringe?”

“Yes, sir. Probably to the L5 colony.”

“And once he gets there, is he planning to surrender, or to join the rebels?” He had talked with Smith and Schiano; he remembered that Beech was supposed to join a rebel group. They'd assumed that PFC was that group, but maybe Beech had decided it was time to try starting over somewhere else.

“We don't know, sir.” The aide hesitated. “He says he plans to surrender, but the people who worked on the Spartacus File say that he can't. And if you like… well, before we took over the situation, Covert had issued orders to destroy any ship Beech boarded, rather than risk letting him loose off-planet. We haven't actually countermanded those orders yet, and we can blame that on a bureaucratic foul-up if we have to.”

“Countermand them,” the chief said immediately. “We want him alive, if at all possible. If he gets off-planet… hell, it ought to be that much easier to spot him and corner him out there. Everything's so much smaller. And if he does get killed, we can blame it on the radicals, we don't have to take the heat ourselves.” He gazed thoughtfully at the wall. “I wonder… do you suppose he'll surrender out there? Maybe he thinks the radicals will back him up, or that we won't dare harm him for fear of open revolt.”

“The programmers say he can't surrender, sir.”

The chief nodded.

“If he's off-planet, he's less of a threat to us, alive or dead-we can always destroy the whole damn colony and blame the radicals.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You sure about this, Casper?” Ed asked again, holding up his ticket and freight receipt.

“Absolutely,” Casper replied. “We've got to hurt them, force them to negotiate.”

Ed nodded. “Damn straight. I've gotta give you credit, man-I didn't think you had the balls for something like this. You talk a good line sometimes, but I wasn't sure you had what it takes to be a real revolutionary, any more than the rest of these wusses. For four years they haven't dared do squat, and then you show up with this super-imprint in your head, and I think we'll finally get somewhere, then you start talking about peaceful change. If you'd stuck with that public surrender crap, I might've been tempted to put a knife in your back myself-the only thing the fat cats understand is violence, and that might have stirred some up. It's good to see you understand that you can't make an omelet without cracking some eggs.”

Casper looked at Ed, the man who had deliberately waited until a cop was leaning over the planted bomb in the New York precinct before detonating it four years before, the man behind virtually every act of violence PFC had committed before Colby had taken charge and moved the group away from overt terrorism.

Ed was a loose cannon, someone who couldn't be rehabilitated because he didn't want to be rehabilitated, someone who would always be in the way of any attempt to turn PFC into an effective political force.

Casper clapped him on the back. “Whatever it costs, Ed. I know that now, same as you do.”

Ed winced; the slap had stung. But then, everyone at PFC knew that Casper had a tendency to misjudge his own strength. “I thought you were serious about all that ‘peaceful means’ and ‘win at the ballot box’ crap,” he said.

Casper just smiled. He twisted a ring on his finger; Ed noticed that. Casper was definitely changing, Ed thought; he hadn't worn any jewelry before, so far as Ed could remember.

“You can't go that way, man,” Ed said. “You have to compromise too much if you play by their rules. You can't play politics that way and keep your ideals.”

“I know,” Casper said. “Listen, good luck, Ed-and thanks for doing this.”

“You, too,” Ed said. Then he turned and boarded the Florida train.

Casper watched him go.

He felt a surge of guilt over what he had just done-over both parts of it. He knew that before his optimization he would never have done such a thing, never even have considered it.

Now he couldn't help it.

At least, he told himself, this should be the last of it, the end of the violence. He would never do it again.

And it was better than the guerrilla war that the Spartacus File kept urging him to lead.

Cecelia Grand looked at her watch. She frowned. She'd heard the rumors about a flight to the Fringe, and intended to give Casper a piece of her mind. The U.N. would be much better for a surrender, and he damn well better intend to surrender! If he couldn't control that damned software in his head…?

Well, he had plenty of good ideas, and she liked the whole idea of getting into politics, but she wasn't going to let some damn piece of spy fiction run her life.