To Do or Die (A Jump Universe Novel) Read online

  Why did Izzy doubt that guilt and absolution had anything to do with this sudden turn of affairs? She grinned, for once enjoying the chase.

  “There is also the recent bit of luck that Mrs. Tordon gave us, putting the fear of God in her Commander Uxbridge and allowing him to take flight.”

  Izzy swiveled in her chair to observe the spy’s high praise turn Ruth beet red. Still, she did a decent imitation of the Marine seated next to her, saying not a word to deflect the kudos or correct the spy’s misconception . . . if indeed he did not already know she had meant to bag the commander that day.

  “Uxbridge’s sudden withdrawal of all funds in certain numbered Swiss bank accounts allowed us to trace not only where he went, but also where the funds came from.”

  “Where does the trail lead?” The woman leading the meeting rushed the spy; a glance her husband’s way made it clear she had better uses for her time.

  “Forward, to a certain planet misnamed Savannah. While we on Wardhaven were successful sending our Unity thugs and politicos packing, their President Milassi managed to hang on, pointing to an election he won before Unity took over five years back. He has to face elections in a few months. Interest in the outcome of those elections goes far beyond Savannah.”

  “Savannah was settled before Wardhaven,” Colonel Ray Longknife mused. “Industrialized from the get-go. I never had to fight them. Glad of that. Anything else we need to know about Savannah?”

  “The Humanity ambassador to Savannah has requested additional Marines to bolster his small guard. Milassi seems to be having trouble maintaining order. The Senate also has a fact-finding committee due there soon. They want a cruiser in orbit for their stay.”

  The spy turned to Izzy. “You will shortly receive orders to the Savannah system.”

  “Nice of you to tell me about them. Did that trail you’re sniffing after lead anywhere else?”

  “Yes. Forward the trail led to Savannah. Backward, and not as a total surprise, it led to this gentleman.”

  The screen behind the spy came alive as Tru Seyd tapped her reader right on cue. A face smiled out at them blandly, the kind of pictures that the business section of papers featured under the headers of “promoted” or “heading the megamergered stellar corporation.”

  Izzy found such pictures lacking in conviction.

  This one was no exception. If the years had lined that face, given it any wisdom or character, computer processing of the negative or surgery on the original had removed any evidence.

  The face was bland, blank, uninformative.

  Still, Izzy memorized it, as she might the electromagnetic fingerprint of a new enemy’s flagship. This was the target. This empty face had retailed the drugs that killed Franny and too many others.

  Deep within Izzy a question formed. Why would anyone as outwardly clean and straight as this man mess with poison?

  Izzy waved off the question; the odds of her getting an answer were not worth betting on. Then again, the odds of her getting such a man in her gun sights were pretty slim, too.

  If it came, Izzy didn’t want to miss.

  “Mr. Henry Smythe-Peterwald’s money was mature when old money was just being minted. His family has been buying and selling politicians since before graft had a bad name.” The spy examined his notes. “I believe one or two popes are in his direct lineage, though that was before the pope gave up his army.

  “The family’s money went from obscene to merely plentiful until a few generations back. Henry’s grandfather got in on the ground floor of the interstellar net. He got a lock on the hardware and managed to buy up all the software. He also invested quite heavily in several planets just opening up.”

  “Was Savannah one of them?” Izzy asked.

  “Yes.”

  Izzy made a gun with her finger. “Bang,” she said to the picture.

  “Were it only that easy,” the spy fairly moaned. “Money and power build walls that keep investigators out more thoroughly than prisons keep ordinary people in. The trap that captures Mr. Peterwald must be carefully baited and cautiously sprung.”

  “He wouldn’t be going to Savannah anytime soon?” Izzy asked.

  “He has never set foot off Earth in his life. No one in his family has.”

  Izzy had never even seen Old Earth.

  She sighed. Sailors didn’t get to pick their battles. They fought where and when they were told. She did have orders to take the Patton to Savannah and offer all assistance. She might just have a chance to bring some well-deserved pain and discomfort into Mr. Peterwald’s life.

  Others, way above her pay grade, would be the ones to bring down such a gold-encrusted scumbag as little Henry there.

  FOUR

  HENRY SMYTHE-PETERWALD X paced his father’s room. Twenty paces took him to the windows that looked out over a thousand pristine acres of woodlands.

  The old man had nurtured the waste just to impress lesser beings. Henry never knew his father to actually walk among those trees. In his youth, Henry had tried to hide there, to find some special place that was his alone.

  Father’s guards always found him.

  Today, Henry ignored the view and whirled to cover the twenty paces back to the white wall, bare except for the myriad of medical gear that kept the old man alive.

  His father had bragged, “I will live forever. I’m buying the rejuvenation treatments other people are dying for.”

  The old man would laugh at his joke, enjoying it immensely.

  “You stupid, old bastard,” Henry snarled. “You warned me never to trust a beta version. ‘Wait until the second or third upgrade to risk your own system to the new damn code.’ But you had to have the first rejuv the labs came up with. Now your brain has turned to snot?”

  Remembering what his father could not, Henry laughed. He laughed in the old man’s face.

  It was safe to laugh now.

  The old man couldn’t call his guards.

  The eyes that had made Henry cringe now stared blankly at the ceiling, blinking rarely. Breath flowed in and out as the ventilator pushed and pulled. The body could easily pass for a healthy thirty-year-old’s, a good twenty years younger than Henry.

  “Now live with what it’s got you, old fool,” the son snarled at the blank face.

  The beeps and weaving patterns on the monitors quickened. Henry stepped away from the bed, put several paces between him and his father before the nurse passed through the self-opening door.

  “Mr. Peterwald, your father seems to be having a distress episode,” the woman said as she hurried to the bed.

  “I’ll leave him to you,” Henry said, avoiding even a glance at the nurse. Ms. Upton was probably the ugliest woman to pass the Nursing Boards in the last fifty years. Several others on his father’s support team rivaled her for that accolade, but Upton brought a second factor to her credit.

  Her voice made stripping gears sound melodic.

  His father had always kept the beautiful and graceful at his beck and call. Now, if the old man actually could hear, could understand what was going on around him, he’d be hating every moment of his immortality.

  Served the bastard right.

  Henry smiled as he left the room.

  An elevator took him down to his office area. The wide space it disgorged him into presented a view of plants, trees, and a waterfall.

  Hidden behind the façade, dozens of people in this room labored to fulfill his slightest whim.

  More waited patiently, hopefully, for him to permit them a moment of his time.

  He was distracted by none of them as he walked to his office. A word from him, and the waterfall would have disappeared, giving him a view to his primary secretary.

  Henry walked, breathing the aroma of the woods, listening to the chirp of birds. Almost, he was in his hiding place, his special place.

  Only now, no guards would dare disturb him. Today, no father could yank him in to put on a senseless display for lesser petitioners.

  Some
day, he might go back to the woods, the real woods, to see what his secret place had become. Not today.

  Not now. There were things to do. Grandfather had remade the family fortune. Father had added to it, reaching new heights until presidents and prime ministers sweated as waiting petitioners in this very room.

  Now that Henry had finished paying off the courts and been formally appointed the old man’s guardian and master of the family fortune, Henry would show him who was the better.

  But he’d have to do it quickly, before the old man’s brain was totally mush.

  The drug money had offered him a quick way to the heart of Unity. Grandma Smythe may have razored out the bootleggers from the family tree but that didn’t mean Henry was ignorant of the many ways the family made its fortune.

  The Unity propagandists were right. Henry and other powerful men were jacking up the price for finished goods, and offering cutthroat prices for the raw materials the outer rim could offer for payment.

  Why shouldn’t the rim send Earth the drugs its teeming masses demanded for their distraction?

  It had been an easy alliance for Henry. He had the ships; he knew which of his captains weren’t obsessive about following every little law. The profits hadn’t been all that great. Unity middlemen and the skippers had robbed Henry blind.

  But he’d gotten the connections he needed with President Urm.

  And Urm had happily promised Henry a war, with all its chances for war profiteering. And when it was done, he’d be in the prefect position to buy up losers for pennies on the dollar.

  Yes, the war could have doubled or even tripled the family’s fortune. If there was a brain cell left in the old man, he’d have had to admit that his son had beat both him and Granddad.

  But the war ended too soon.

  “Is Whitebred waiting?”

  “Yes, Mr. Peterwald,” his secretary immediately answered.

  “How long has he been waiting?”

  “Two days, Mr. Peterwald.”

  “Good. Send him in. And, Milly, change my office to one most intimidating for his personality profile.”

  “Yes, Mr. Peterwald.” There was a brief pause. “Done, Mr. Peterwald.”

  Around Henry, the room wavered, then solidified. Patterned after the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, this was one routine you couldn’t download from every site on the Web. Just keeping the mirrors synchronized took more computing power than a large city.

  Henry loved it. He relished what happened to others when he surrounded himself with these ancient trappings of power.

  Yes, it would be fun working Whitebred over in the Hall of Mirrors.

  A short, dark-haired man entered.

  He wore the buttonless gray suit that was de rigueur this month for high-powered business executives. Molded into the shoulders and arms was probably enough computing power to work a small starship.

  In Henry’s view, numbers appeared beside Whitebred, showing his respiration, heartbeat, and blood pressure, probably stripped right off his own coat’s confidential medical monitors. When Whitebred opened his mouth, Henry would get an immediate stress analysis, matched against Whitebred’s nominal stress in his last couple of corporate meetings.

  Henry kept such data on file for all his people. Good information on your subject made meetings like this easy.

  He checked the make and model of Whitebred’s own office software and suppressed a snort. Henry would know everything about Whitebred. He, in turn, would know nothing about Henry, or be in worse shape still if the poor man actually trusted the readouts that his own system fed him about Henry.

  Yes, Henry would enjoy this meeting.

  “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Peterwald,” the supplicant said.

  “Hope I didn’t keep you waiting too long,” Henry lied.

  “No, no sir. No wait at all,” the man lied in return.

  “Are you enjoying your work with us?”

  “Yes, very much,” he lied again. “I think I have a lot to offer the corporation.” That was not a lie, at least as Whitebred saw it.

  “Well, we have to look out for our returning war heroes.”

  The man winced visibly.

  “I liked your idea. The way you were running that fleet, you could have ended the war in a day.”

  The man preened.

  Henry abstained from pointing out that his bottom line was predicated on the war’s going for another six months. Whitebred did not have permission to end the war so suddenly. Then again, his actions hadn’t mattered one whit.

  “I really could have if those mutineers hadn’t ruined everything.”

  “Apparently, yours weren’t the only mutinous hands around. It was one of his own men that killed Urm.” And ruined all my profitable plans.

  “Yes,” Whitebred hissed.

  “I understand that you were able to leave a bit of a present behind for your mutineers.”

  “Yes, Mr. Peterwald.”

  “Well, I have a surprise for you. That Colonel Longknife who killed Urm also bought your cruiser off the scrap heap. Even hired what was left of its crew, most of your mutineers, I understand.”

  “Have they attempted a jump?” The man was hardly breathing.

  “As I understand it, Longknife, Abeeb, and the Marine captain went tooling off to a meeting several jumps from Wardhaven. Never got there,” Henry announced dolefully.

  Whitebred beamed from ear to ear.

  “Yes, I think you have taken care of all our problem people.” Henry chuckled.

  The other man laughed out loud.

  This was going rather pleasantly. The man was Henry’s kind of fellow.

  “How would you like to be an admiral again?”

  “I don’t think the Navy would have me, Mr. Peterwald. But, if you can arrange it, sir, and that’s where you want me, I’m your man,” he quickly corrected what another man might mistake for a rejection.

  Henry smiled his understanding.

  “No. There’s nothing in the Humanity Navy that interests me. However, Savannah is in need of a new fleet commander. The station there is doing double duty for me. The Navy shores up a government I find very convenient, and its yards will work on ships other places are squeamish about handling, if you know what I mean,” Henry said with a raised eyebrow.

  “Definitely, sir,” Whitebred said, no question even hinted at.

  “Good. I want a man there in charge of all that. President Milassi of Savannah owes me several favors already. What with an election coming up, Milassi will want to owe me many more.”

  Henry snickered at the malleability of politicians.

  Whitebred joined him in the laugh.

  “Having my own man on the scene is just what I need. You’ll command not only the ships and yards but several battalions of Marines. Think you can handle that?”

  Whitebred had the good sense to say nothing at this reference to his recent inability to command his own fleet.

  “I might add, that unlike the fools you had to put up with in the war, most of these officers know where their money comes from. The real money, not that pittance they draw from Savannah.”

  With it clear that all the important officers were in Henry’s pocket, Whitebred leaned back in his chair. “When do you want me to start?”

  “Right now would be good. I want to update you on the history of Savannah. Not the crap the media would feed you.”

  Henry stood, walked around his desk, and put an arm around Whitebred’s shoulders as the man scrambled to his feet. “My grandfather started that colony. I think of it like a plantation that’s been in the family for generations. Can’t let it be tossed around like a ball among strangers, can we?”

  “No, Mr. Peterwald, we can’t let that happen.”

  “Good, how would you like to do dinner?”

  Henry beamed happily as the man nodded.

  “We can talk more over food. Milly, have security scrounge up my son from wherever he’s hiding. It will be an education for him to h
ear how the family runs things.”

  FIVE

  WHERE RUTH GREW up, they had words for how she felt: useless as tits on a boar hog. Worthless as a fifth wheel.

  None of those were as useless as an officer’s wife while he was busy moving his detachment. Trouble was prowling around his green-clad troops, talking with his Gunny, busy as a man could be . . . and impervious to Ruth’s presence.

  Older Marine officer wives had warned Ruth about this. She understood it . . . in her head. But living through it . . . that was another thing entirely.

  Maybe she should have stayed on the Patton, or come down on another shuttle.

  But she had work of her own to do.

  And it would help if she was introduced to the embassy staff by Trouble so that they would connect her with him.

  After all, if she got in trouble and had to run for the safety of the legation, it would help if the Marine at the embassy gate knew to let the captain’s woman in.

  And Ruth was busy getting herself in trouble.

  Or at least not doing what a simple space-based farmer or officer’s wife should do.

  Izzy and Trouble covered this during the time the Patton was in transit.

  Those idiots back on Riddle had hardly known how to grow the drug plants. Surely, they hadn’t done the bioengineering that turned common Earth-based plants into forget-the-world dust. No, someone else had created the stuff.

  Ruth’s job was to find that someone and do something about them.

  Right! Easy! Just land on a strange planet and wander around asking any stranger, “You know where the illegal-drug research station is?”

  I wouldn’t survive a day.

  Izzy and Trouble had looked at her dumbly, and said, “That sounds like a plan,” and left her to stew over a real one.

  As Trouble got his Marines and their duffel bags loaded aboard a bus sent by the embassy for his company, Ruth rented a car from a counter in the spaceport.