trvik: переводы

→Fortunately, as Firebrand had suggested, the cargo agents responsible for sneaking those containers into the smuggling queue really didn’t want to know anything about their contents. That wasn’t how it worked, and if it turned out they contained something with negative consequences, deniability—the ability to say, honestly, “We didn’t know what it was!”—was actually a fairly acceptable defense in what passed for the Solarian legal system. Or, at least, in what passed for the Solarian legal system where little things like smuggling were concerned.

→“Spindle?” Blanchard repeated, then smiled. “Oh, yes,” she agreed. “Spindle would be just fine with me, Michael!”

→“Anyway, the dispatch boat in question will be leaving Mobius in the next couple of days,” Breitbach continued. “Doesn’t have anything to do with us, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make use of it. Especially when, despite the current unpleasantness between the League and the Manties, it’s headed into the Talbott Sector. In fact, it’s heading to Spindle by way of Montana, which is certainly in the right direction, don’t you think?”

→Blanchard nodded again. Joseph Landrum was one of Breitbach’s senior cell leaders. In fact, Landrum had been with the movement longer than Blanchard herself. He was one of the MLF’s smoother operators, too, and she wasn’t surprised Breitbach had chosen him to manage whatever interstellar communications link they’d been able to establish.

→“In a manner of speaking,” he said with his customary evasiveness. Then he shrugged. “What the hell, if anything happens to me you need to know about this anyway. We have a…call him a friend on the crew of one of the local transstellars’ dispatch boats. I’m not going to tell you which, even now, although I will tell you Landrum knows how to get in touch with him.”

→“Dispatch boat?” Blanchard didn’t even try to conceal her surprise at that one. “You’ve got access to a dispatch boat, Michael?”

→“In addition to anything we do here locally, though, I think it’s time we sent off our own dispatch boat. If Lombroso and Xydis are running to Verrochio, we need to do some running of our own.”

→“I hope he doesn’t, and I don’t think he will,” Breitbach said now. “I think I scared the crap out of him by pointing out what Mátyás could get out of him in the end if anyone did figure out who he really is. Of course, I also think I’ll have another little conversation with him about it before we turn him loose on this one, just to be on the safe side.

→Breitbach’s expression tightened for just a moment, for Marrone’s one weakness as a revolutionary was the very passion which made him so effective in his role of spokesman and propagandist. He wanted—needed—to be hands-on, and the Guard had damned nearly caught him putting up one of his own graffiti less than three months ago. Breitbach had read him the riot act over that episode, ending by pointing out how disastrous it would have been for the Liberation Front if Lombroso’s thugs had gotten their hands on a member of their central committee. Marrone had argued that they probably would have figured he was only one more rank-and-file member of the movement, or even no more than a sympathizer, but his heart hadn’t really been in it.

→“I do, too.”

→“I just hope Thomas doesn’t take any chances along the way…again,” she said.

→Blanchard nodded. Thomas Marrone headed the MLF’s agitprop section. There were undoubtedly many better and more stylistically refined writers in the universe, but Marrone had a gift for putting the people of Mobius’ hatred and fury into words at any time. Probably that was because that hatred and that fury were so deeply his, as well. There was no cynicism, no ideology, in his hard-hitting anonymous posts or the graffiti slogans and cartoons with which he’d decorated more than one wall even in downtown Landing. There was only outrage, wrath, and passion, and the people who saw and read his messages knew it.

→“For the moment, we use what happened today.” Breitbach bared his teeth. “One of the things you can always count on a thug for is plenty of martyrs. God knows I never would’ve supported anything like the demonstrations if I’d expected Yardley would react this way, but now that she has—now that she’s managed to kill that many people—I think she’s going to hate what Thomas and his people do with that death toll. The hard part’s going to be convincing people that this time we aren’t inflating the body count, really.”

→“So what do we do?” she asked.

→And if they wound up with a couple of Frontier Fleet destroyers in orbit around Mobius Beta, the system’s capital planet, the chance of getting any additional arms shipments delivered would become virtually nil.

→Blanchard cocked her head, frowning in thought for a moment or two, then nodded slowly. The Guard’s brutal reaction to the peaceful demonstrations had surprised the MLF. Despite the general effectiveness of its penetration of the régime’s middle echelons, no one in the movement had had a clue what was coming in time to even contemplate doing anything about it. In this instance, despite what had happened, that was probably a good thing, Blanchard thought. If they had known, they might have been drawn into the open, into a standup fight with the Guard, too early. Their stockpile of modern weapons, like the antitank launchers which had taken out a total of five Scorpions before they themselves were destroyed, was growing steadily, but it was nowhere near large enough yet.

→“I doubt they’d use them on any target in an urban area, if only because of how that would piss off the Lombroso toadies the city in question belongs to. And we’re not going to give them any nice, isolated targets out in the countryside where they could make big craters without pissing off Lombroso’s supporters. No, I’m more worried about their managing to effectively interdict any additional arms shipments.”

→“You think they’d use starship weapons on planetary targets?” Blanchard couldn’t hide her alarm, but Breitbach shook his head.

→“Actually, it’s not the intervention battalions I’m most worried about,” Breitbach said, and Blanchard’s eyes widened in surprise. “I’m more concerned about the possibility of his sending along a couple of Navy destroyers to ride herd on their transport and possibly provide a little orbital fire support.”

→“Wonderful,” she muttered.