Tsar Wars: Agents of ISIS, Book 1 Read online

  “I can personally swear to that,” Judah chimed in.

  Still another pause. This was a very unusual day for Wettig. “Even if I wanted to, I doubt I could accommodate you. What contacts I have left are in the intelligence services. The Velikaya Knyaghinya’s attendants are handled by other departments altogether. I couldn’t—”

  “But I could,” Hasina spoke up unexpectedly.

  “Explain yourself,” her father demanded.

  “When I served my tour—” she began, then looked around the room. “I should explain for the Bar Nahums’ benefit that serving as a freilina to the Velikaya Knyaghinya is considered a great privilege, and it’s usually rotated among young ladies of the dvoryane. I served three years ago, when the Knyaghinya was just eleven. Lady Elena is in charge of the rotation list, and she’s always been a good friend of mine. If I told her you were a cousin of mine—”

  Eva couldn’t quite contain her snort of laughter.

  “Well, a much paler cousin of mine,” Hasina continued, “a boyarynya who really earned a reward like this, I think she’d slip you into the current rotation as a favor to me. Especially if I tell her it’s not for a full term, just a limited time—say a month or two. Do you think that’s an adequate period, Father?”

  “At the rate the developments are accelerating,” Wettig said, “I’d be very surprised if Kuznyetz doesn’t make his move before then. A war like this can’t be staged on the spur of the moment, it has to be coordinated. It has a momentum all its own. Either his attempted coup will take place within that time frame or something extraordinary will have happened to stop it.”

  “With any luck,” Judah said, “we’ll be that something extraordinary.”

  Wettig made no comment over the Q-line.

  “I guess it’s settled, then,” Eva said. “I’m on board for this merry little jaunt.”

  “I will leave Hasina to coordinate the details with you, then,” Wettig said. “Good lu—oh, I’m sorry. It’s been so long since I dealt with Avram I nearly forgot. I don’t want to jinx you. Break a leg.”

  “Thank you, Your Grace,” Eva said. “I have a feeling we’re going to need all the breaks we can get before this mishegas is over.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Kavalergard

  Unfamiliar cities and new worlds didn’t faze Judah Bar Nahum. At age 23 he’d already seen more of both than most people see in a lifetime. Bustling metropolises and provincial settlements were all transient phenomena to him. The only thing real, the only thing solid, the only community that mattered, was the Ville. For everything else, he was just passing through.

  Garrimoor was the capital city of Kyrby which, in turn, was the capital planet of Scorpio sector. As such it was a thriving cosmopolitan center, with tall buildings, busy streets and even huvver lanes. It was noisy, crowded and dirty, the hallmarks of civilization. The people seemed prosperous—and, if they weren’t happy all the time, it was only because they had too much going on in their lives to distract them.

  As much as he wanted to get started on his assignment right away, Judah took his time to get oriented. “Always get the lay of the land,” Ilya Uzi had said. “You never know when you might have to disappear into it.” It sounded like good advice to Judah, so he decided to invest a day or so checking out the city.

  There were the posh, sophisticated areas where dvoryane and other important personages lived. Judah didn’t bother with them. Outsiders were too noticeable there. Instead, he concentrated on the rougher, poorer sections of the city where the buildings were lower and grimier and the citizens were kuptsy and krepostnye. A man could vanish into the crowds here and, if he knew what he was doing, go undetected for days, or even weeks.

  Downtown was largely office buildings, but there were rings of housing and neighborhoods surrounding this. And interspersed with local restaurants and shops were the ever-present kuptsy bars. From the news reports, the civil unrest was being fomented at this level, rather than in the slums. No one particularly cared if the krepostnye rioted; they could be put down brutally and no one would much notice or care. The respectable kuptsy were harder to contain and deal with.

  Judah checked the online news reports and saw that there were a handful of separatist groups listed publicly. There was nothing illegal about this; earlier tsary had decided it was wiser to leave openings to relieve pressure than to suppress it all and risk a catastrophic explosion. The few tsary who crushed free expression usually paid the penalty eventually.

  One of the groups, Sons of Kyrby, was holding a rally tonight, open to all (donations accepted). Judah decided it would be profitable to attend and gauge the tenor of the local opposition.

  The meeting took place in a small public hall along the fringes of the kuptsy area. The hall could hold perhaps a hundred people and was three-quarters full when Judah entered. The lights were somewhat dim; Judah guessed this was probably deliberate, so no one in the audience would be too recognizable. There was a speaker on stage taking questions from the house, and the room was already buzzing with conversations as Judah entered.

  “But she’s only a little girl,” one man was saying.

  “That’s my point exactly,” the speaker said. “The tsar’s in a coma and she’s a little girl who’s hundreds of parsecs away. She’s a little girl who’s never done a day’s work in her life. She’s a little girl who knows nothing about the problems real people face. Why should she get all the power over our lives when she doesn’t know anything about us?”

  Judah sat down at an empty seat not too close to anyone else. He was only here to listen, not interact with anyone. So, apparently, were most of the other people in the audience.

  “But we have the dvoryane to take care of local things. The tsar’s job is to run the whole Empire.”

  “But why do we need the Empire?” the speaker persisted. “What do we care what somebody way out on Altoora is doing? And why should someone on Altoora care at all about us? Why should we pay taxes for something we don’t even need?”

  “We need a central government to keep everything going,” another man chimed in from the right-hand side of the hall. “Without that, we’d be looking at wars and chaos.”

  “Yeah, right,” said the speaker with a sneer. “You must’ve had the same Civics teacher I did. That’s just propaganda, that’s all that is. Who tells the schools what to teach? The Empire, that’s who.”

  “Yeah, when you think about it there’ve been some pretty rotten tsary since the Empire started,” another man said, adding to the gripe session. “Look at Kyril II and Alexandra. They both killed thousands of people. Maybe millions.”

  “Alexandra killed mostly dvoryane,” said a royalist defender. “And Kyril was a madman. That can happen anywhere. But things have been pretty good recently.”

  “Sure—because the tsar’s unconscious and the Duma’s been running things. They can’t agree on anything, so nothing important gets done. But the tsar could die any minute, and then the Velikaya Knyaghinya becomes tsaritsa and takes over all the power herself. Maybe she’ll be smooth, but maybe she’ll be another Alexandra. Is that what you want?”

  “It doesn’t matter what we want or don’t want,” said a new person. “It’s gonna happen anyway. There’s nothing we can do.”

  “Sure there is. We can stand up and let people know how we feel. If enough people say they want things changed, things get changed.”

  “Are you calling for revolt?” asked an old man sitting alone way in the back of the hall. “There’ve been two uprisings during my lifetime, both put down ruthlessly. Thousands of people were killed, even more shipped off to Gulag. Or perhaps you were thinking of the Communist Revolution, eh tovarishch? What a noble experiment that was!”

  “Of course I didn’t mean that,” the agitator said quickly. The Communist experiment had been held in wide scorn, even in Russia back on Earth; with the rise of the Empire, it was official policy to ridicule that dark chapter of the past. “Let this little girl sit on h
er throne if she wants. But we owe her nothing, and she has no claim over us.”

  “We’re part of the largest empire the human race has ever seen,” the old man said. “Nearly a thousand worlds now, and growing almost weekly. We should take pride in being part of something greater than we are. It gives us a sense of direction, a sense of purpose.”

  “A sense of insignificance, a sense of impotence,” the rebel mocked. “We’re like ants, toiling for a queen who doesn’t know us and doesn’t care. We’re men, not ants. Let’s start acting like it!”

  Judah’d heard enough. The same arguments had been going on, to a greater or lesser degree, since the beginning of the Empire, with no real resolution but to let things go on as they were. The dissident on stage here was far too determined to be a simple complainer. Almost certainly he was an agent provacateur, planting the seeds of dissension to blossom slowly in people’s minds. Even if he didn’t arouse them to riot today, they’d heard enough so that when an uprising did start it would not be surprising and its leaders’ arguments would sound familiar.

  There must be hundreds of such agents, not just here on Kyrby but throughout the Empire as a whole. Riots were occurring almost daily as dissent spread. As Wettig had pointed out, ISIS was but a shadow of its former self, unable to extinguish so many fires at once. If things proceeded any further, the entire Empire would crack apart—and there’d be plenty of scavengers around to pick up the pieces.

  Bright and early the next morning he walked into the storefront recruiting office of the kavalergardy, eager to enlist. The sergeant at the desk was a bored-looking man in his mid-fifties. As Judah entered, he looked up from his computer screen and his face took on an expression of professional friendliness. “And what can we do for you today, gospodin?” he asked.

  “I’d like to join the kavalergardy,” Judah said.

  The sergeant’s face brightened. “That’s just what I’m here for, son.” He rose to shake Judah’s hand and offered him a seat. As Judah sat down, the sergeant continued, “I’m Sergeant Hallif. What’s your name?”

  “Ivan Borodin, sir,” Judah replied. It was a nom de guerre that Ilya Uzi had used in the third book, Fire Storm. Using it was a slight gamble, but a whimsical one. If questioned about it he could always claim it was a coincidence. These things did happen. And Fire Storm, for some reason, had never been as popular as the rest of the series. And besides, the sergeant didn’t look like much of a reader.

  The recruiter entered the name into the form without so much as a blink of recognition. “Now Ivan, I can think of many reasons why a sharp young lad like you would want to join the kavalergardy. What’s yours?”

  “I like the work, sir, and I like being part of something greater than myself.”

  The sergeant raised an eyebrow. “You’ve done this before?”

  “Yes, sir. I was in service to Graf Hanforth for almost two years.”

  “And why did you leave?”

  “It was voluntary, sir. I’d originally been appointed to take the place of one of the officers who decided to retire. After about two years, the man un-retired and got his job back. They would have kept me on, but I figured there wouldn’t be much room for advancement in the near future, so I thought I’d look for new opportunities.” Judah paused. “The graf appointed me a boyarin, sir. I can upload the certificate and my recommendation, if you’d like.”

  “In time. I have a few other questions to ask you first.” The recruiter proceeded to ask Judah a series of questions designed to test his general educational level and his basic aptitudes for this particular work. Judah had to walk a tightrope here. Kavalergardy could not be stupid—but at the same time, an ordinary oprichnik who was too smart might also arouse suspicion in an organization on the lookout for infiltrators. After nearly two hours of interview, Judah was told to return home and wait for word of his acceptance.

  Judah returned to his hotel and spent the rest of the day researching Kuznyetz and his family. There wasn’t much available on the public web; the knyaz apparently enjoyed his privacy. Kuznyetz was not born to his title; he’d gained it by marrying Lady Teodora; there was no public record of him before his engagement to her, which was strange indeed. Marriages between dvoryane and commoners were quite frequent, and even encouraged to prevent inbreeding—but marriage to a total unknown? Definitely suspicious.

  There was plenty of public information about Teodora’s family history, and that of her family line. She married Yevgheniy when she was twenty, and ascended to her current title eight years later on the death of her father. Over the following years there was less and less public information about Teodora. The whole story now centered on Kuznyetz, while Teodora faded into obscurity. Aside from attending public ceremonies, the couple removed themselves from the sight of their subjects.

  The couple had one child, Lady Marya—and about her there was almost too much information. The ravishingly beautiful young dvoryanka, in her mid-twenties, was constant fuel for gossip. She flitted from party to party, sporting event to concert and night club to ballroom. She seemed to ignore the ceremonial duties usually assigned to the junior dvoryane, like hospital openings and statue dedications; she concentrated totally on flash and glitz. She had a handsome escort at every event, and seldom the same one twice. Cousin Eva might be equally promiscuous, but she at least was discreet; Marya seemed to flaunt her affairs for all the Empire to see.

  He heard nothing from the recruiter that day, and still nothing the next. He paced back and forth in his hotel room, trying to derive some solace from what his hero Ilya Uzi said: “Trust in patience, and develop backup plans while you wait.” But backup plans were slow in coming. Maybe I don’t have what it takes after all, he thought. Maybe my daydreams were just that—empty fantasies.

  Midmorning on the third day he received the call he’d been hoping for. It wasn’t the recruiting sergeant, but some anonymous voice telling him he’d been provisionally accepted, and he should report that afternoon to a certain office for a physical exam.

  He was on time for the appointment, with only minor concern. The examination would show he was a Zionian, but what did that matter? There wasn’t much prejudice against his people these days, and Zionians were even valued in the military services for their strength and reflexes. There’d be nothing to indicate he was a spy, and his heritage might even work in his favor.

  As it turned out, the doctor was bored and the examination perfunctory. If she even noticed Judah’s racial heritage she never mentioned it. His heart and lungs worked fine, he was free of disease, and his blood tests were negative for drugs. She called in her findings to the guard office, and orders were sent down for Judah to report for duty first thing the next morning.

  He showed up as ordered, wearing his neatest clothes and his most eager expression. He saluted smartly as he was greeted by a captain who didn’t bother to introduce herself. She looked down at her computer tablet and back up at him. “Ivan Borodin?” she asked.

  Judah snapped to attention. “Reporting as ordered, ma’am,” he said crisply.

  “It says here you requested a position in the kavalergardy.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I served for Graf Hanforth—”

  “Yes, I read his recommendation. Most impressive. You happen to be in luck, too. A position on the household staff just opened up this week. You can have the job if you want it.”

  Judah’s heart leapt happily, but he took great care not to let it show on his face. “Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.”

  The captain pointed to a door on her left. “Go down there to Cdr. Aab. He’ll get you your uniform and kit. Welcome to His Grace’s kavalergardy, junior lieutenant. That will be all.”

  “Thank you again, ma’am.” He saluted, did a rapid about-face and left through the indicated door. He was in! With any luck, he’d discover the secret plans Kuznyetz was hatching and be able to foil them. Ilya Uzi would be proud.

  Observing the scene on a security monitor, Pavel Lubikov turned to
his lord. “I must repeat my concerns about this policy, Your Grace. Hanforth is known as a close ally of Wettig. This man is almost certainly a spy.”

  Kuznyetz smiled mirthlessly at his prime councilor. “Of course. That’s why I want him right here, where we can keep an eye on him. A spy you know is not a threat. I believe in the old adage that you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

  “He will be closely watched,” Lubikov agreed. “Wettig must be scraping the bottom of the barrel, to send someone so obvious.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Freilina

  After saying quick farewells to the company, Eva followed Lady Hasina back to the woman’s private space yacht for the long trip to Earth. Hasina was stone-faced all the way to the ship; Eva ignored the cold behavior and kept a friendly smile plastered on her face. If she’s trying to rattle me, Eva thought, she’ll have to do better than that.

  The small ship lifted off as soon as its two passengers were aboard. Eva tried to introduce herself informally to the three-person crew, but they were obviously taking their cue from their mistress and were polite but distant. Eva simply retired to her assigned cabin, lay on the bunk and waited patiently for Hasina to make the first move.

  An hour or so after leaving Turtello there was a knock on the door. “Come in,” Eva invited.

  Hasina entered, looking very businesslike. “I’ll have to brief you on the background we’ve created for you. You will be Lady Ilona Farik, daughter of a boyarin from Liaska—”

  “No,” Eva said simply.

  Hasina seemed to share her father’s distaste for interruptions. She stared daggers at Eva for a few seconds, and finally said coldly, “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

  “Well, the name’s smooth, I can live with that. But the Ville hasn’t been to Liaska since I was, oh, three or four. I wouldn’t know my way around there.”