David Weber - The Short Victorious War

Sarnow looked at him for a long, silent moment, then rose from his chair. Young met his gaze expressionlessly, but something about the admiral's green eyes warned him that this was yet another of the flag officers who sided with the bitch. Was she putting out for him on the side, too?

"Captain." Sarnow nodded, and Young's jaw clenched behind the cover of his beard at the omission of his peerage title.

"Admiral," he replied in an equally toneless voice.

"I imagine you've got a lot to tell me about the situation as seen from Manticore," Sarnow went on, "and I'm eager to hear it. Be seated, please."

Young slid into the chair, adjusting his sword carefully. It was awkward, but it also gave him a flicker of superiority as he compared his own sartorial splendor to the plain undress uniform the admiral wore. Sarnow glanced at him, then looked back at Harrington.

"I understand you have a previous engagement aboard the base, Dame Honor." Young's jaw clenched tighter as he used her title. "Captain Young and I will undoubtedly be tied up here for some time, so I won't keep you. Don't forget the com conference." Something like a small smile touched his lips. "It won't be necessary for you to return aboard if that will be inconvenient. Feel free to use a com aboard the base, if you like."

"Thank you, Sir." Harrington braced to attention, then glanced at Young. "Good evening, Captain," she said emotionlessly, and vanished.

"And now, Captain Young—" Sarnow sat back down and leaned back in his chair "—to business. You brought me a dispatch from Admiral Caparelli, and he says you and he discussed the situation at some length before he sent you out. So suppose you start by letting me hear exactly what His Lordship had to say."

"Of course, Admiral." Young leaned back and crossed his legs. "First of all ..."

Robert Stanton Pierre eased the small, nondescript air car out of the main traffic pattern and turned his flight computer over to Hoskins Tower's approach control. He sat back in his seat, looking out and down at the twinkling oceans and mountains of light which were Nouveau Paris, capital city of the People's Republic, and his face wore the grim, harsh expression he did not allow himself in daylight.

There wasn't much traffic this late at night. In a way, Pierre wished there were; he could have used the rush and flow of other vehicles to hide his own. But his official schedule was too busy for him to slip away during the day, especially with Palmer-Levy's Security goons watching him like hawks.

Of course, they weren't very bright hawks. His tight mouth twitched wryly, despite the pain locked deep within him. If you showed them what they expected to see, you could count on them to see it—and to stop looking for anything else. That was why he'd made sure they knew about his meetings with the CRP. The Citizens' Rights Party had been part of the system for so long its leadership, with a very few exceptions, couldn't find its ass with both hands, an incapacity which reduced it to little more than a convenient blind for his real activities. Not that the CRP wouldn't prove useful if—when—the time came. It just wouldn't be the CRP Palmer-Levy (or, for that matter, most of the present CRP's leaders) knew anything about.

Approach control nudged his air car closer to the pinnacle of the tower, and he turned his attention fully to it.

Hoskins Tower was just over four hundred stories tall and a kilometer in diameter—a huge, hollow hexagon of steel and ceramacrete, dotted with air traffic access points and thrusting up from the greenery so far below. There'd been a time when Nouveau Paris' towers, each a small city in its own right, were its pride, but Hoskins Tower's supposedly near-indestructible ceramacrete was already beginning to crack and scale after barely thirty years. Seen close at hand, the tower's skin was leprous with slap-dash patches and repairs, and though it wasn't evident from the outside, Pierre knew its upper twenty-three floors had been closed off and abandoned over five T-years ago because of massive plumbing failures. Hoskins was still on the waiting list for repair crews who, probably, would get around to its pipes someday. Assuming, of course, that the bureaucrats didn't end up diverting them to some more urgent "emergency" (like repairs to President Harris' swimming pool)... or that the repair crews didn't decide life would be easier on the Dole and simply quit.

Pierre didn't like Hoskins Tower. It reminded him of too many things from his own past, and the fact that even a Dolist Manager with his clout hadn't been able to get its plumbing fixed infuriated him. But this was "his" district of the capital. He controlled the votes of the people who lived in Hoskins, and it was to him they looked for their share of the welfare system's spoils. That made him a very important man to them—and gave him a security screen here that even Palmer-Levy couldn't match... or breach.

Pierre's lips curled back from his teeth as approach control inserted him into the tower's hollow top and his air car began drifting down the patchily lit bore. Despite the physical youth prolong conferred, he was ninety-one T-years old, and he remembered other days. Days when he'd fought his way off the Dole, before the rot had set so deep. There'd been a time when Hoskins Towers plumbing would have been fixed within days—when the discovery that the bureaucrats in charge of its construction had used substandard materials and evaded building codes throughout the massive structure in order to pocket enormous profits would have led to indictments and prison time. Now, no one even cared.

He punched an inconspicuous button, and the air car withdrew itself from approach control's grip, it was illegal—and supposedly impossible—to do that, but like everything else in the Peoples Republic, there were ways around that for anyone with the money to buy them and the will to use them.

He slid the air car sideways, sidling up to an abandoned apartment on the three hundred and ninety-third floor, and settled it onto a terrace. The terrace hadn't been designed for such landings, but that was why the air car was so small and light.

It was time, Pierre thought as he powered down the systems, for someone to fix Hoskins Tower. Among other things.

Wallace Canning raised his head, the movement quick and nervous. Heels clacked sharply on the bare floor, echoing and resounding down the hollow, empty corridors until it seemed an entire, unseen legion was converging upon him, but he'd been to plenty of meetings like this over the last three years, if not any under quite such outre conditions. He was no longer prone to panic, and his pulse trickled back to normal as his ears sorted out the single pair of feet at the heart of the murmuring echoes and a patch of light appeared.

He leaned back against the wall, watching the patch become a beam that swung from side to side as the walker picked his way down the steps from the mezzanine. Halfway down, the beam flicked up, pinning Canning to the wall while he screwed up his eyes against its intensity. It held on him for an instant, then swiveled back down to the bits and pieces of fallen ceiling littering the stairs. It reached their bottom at last and crossed to Canning, and then Rob Pierre shifted the light to his left hand and extended his right.

"Good to see you, Wallace," Pierre said, and Canning nodded with a smile that was no longer forced.

"Good to see you, too, Sir," he said. There'd been a time when saying "Sir" to a Prole, even one who was also a Dolist Manager, would have choked him. But those days were gone, for Wallace Canning had fallen from grace. His diplomatic career had ended in humiliation and failure, and not even his Legislaturalist family had been able to save him from the consequences. Worse, they hadn't even tried.