“You could know that a dozen ways. Proves piss ’n shit,” Sevro says.
“I have a test,” I say. “If you are a Son, you’ll know it. If you belong to the Jackal, you would have used it. Where is Tinos?”
Quicksilver smiles broadly. “Five hundred kilometers south of the Thermic Sea. Three kilometers beneath the old mining nexus Vengo Station. In an abandoned mining colony, the records of which were wiped from the internal servers of the Society by
Sevro sways there in stunned silence.
“Your father worked for me, Sevro,” Quicksilver says. “First for the terraforming consortium on Triton, where he met your mother. Then in…less legitimate ways. Back then I was not what I am today. I needed a Gold. A hard-nosed Peerless Scarred, and all the legal protection that gives. One who owed me and was willing to play rough with my competitors. Off the books, you know.”
“You’re saying my father played mercenary. For you?”
“I’m saying he played assassin. I was growing. There was resistance in the marketplace to that growth. So the marketplace had to make room. You think all Silvers play it safe and legal?” He chuckles. “Some, maybe. But business in a crony-capitalist society is the craft of sharks. Stop swimming, the others will take your food and feed on your body. I gave your father money. He hired a team. Worked off-site. Did what I needed him to do. Until I discovered he was using my resources for a side project.
He makes a mockery of the words.
“But you didn’t report him?” I ask skeptically.
“Golds treat sedition like cancer. I’d have been cut out too. So I was trapped. But he didn’t want me trapped. He wanted a co-conspirator. Gradually he made his case. And here we are.”
Sevro paces away, trying to make sense of it. “But…we’ve…been dying like flies. And you’ve been up here…humping your Pinks. Fraternizing with the enemy. If you were one of us…”
Quicksilver lifts his nose up, regaining what poise he lost during the beating. “Then I would have done what, Mr. Barca? Do tell. From your extensive experience in subterfuge?”
“You would have fought with us.”
“With what? Hm?” He waits for an answer. None comes. Sevro’s speechless. “I have a private security force of thirty thousand for myself and my companies. But they’re spread from Mercury to Pluto. I don’t own those men. They are Gray contractors. Only a fraction are owned Obsidians. I have the weapons, but I don’t have the muscle to tussle with Peerless Scarred. Are you crazy? I use soft power. Not hard power. That was your father’s purview. Even a minor house could wipe me out in direct conflict.”
“You have the largest software company in the Solar System,” Sevro says. “That means hackers. You have munitions plants. Military tech development. You could have spied for us on the Jackal. Given us weapons. You could have done a thousand things.”
“May I be blunt?”
I grimace. “If ever there was a time…”
Quicksilver leans back to peer down his humped nose at Sevro. “I’ve been a Son of Ares for more than twenty years. That requires patience. A long-eyed view. You’ve been one for less than a year. And look what’s happened. You, Mr. Barca, are a bad investment.”
“A bad…investment?”
It sounds ridiculous coming from a man chained to a metal chair with blood dribbling down his lips. But something in Quicksilver’s eyes sells his point. This isn’t a victim. It’s a titan of a different plane. Master of his own domain. Equal, it seems, to Fitchner’s own breed of genius. And more vast a character, more nuanced than I would have expected. But I reserve any affection for the man. He’s survived by lying for twenty years. Everything is an act. Probably even this.
Who is the real man beneath this bulldog face?
What drives him? What does he want?
“I watched. I waited to see what you would do,” he explains to Sevro. “To see if you were cut like your father. But then they executed Darrow”—he looks up at me, still confused on that note—“or pretended to, and you acted like a boy. You began a war you couldn’t win, with insufficient infrastructure, materiel, systems of coordination, supply lines. You released propaganda in the form of Darrow’s Carving to the worlds, to the mines, hoping for…what? A glorious rise of the proletariat?” He scoffs. “I thought you understood war.
“For all his faults, your father was a visionary. He promised me something better. And what has his son given us instead? Ethnic cleansing. Nuclear war. Beheadings. Pogroms. Whole cities shredded by fractious groups of Red rebels and Gold reprisals. Disunity. In other words, chaos. And chaos, Mr. Barca, is not what I invested in. It’s bad for business, and what’s bad for business is bad for Man.”
