The Second Contract
Halveth — Day Thirty-Six
Major Halvard Reyes-Kant had told himself, on the drive back from the crossroads outside Ves Karrow, that the contract had been the last of its kind he would take without asking questions, and he had believed it for exactly as long as it took the broker to offer him a second one.
The broker’s name was Emeric Vossler, a soft, well-fed man who worked out of an office two streets from the Federal Reserve of Deposits and had never, in Reyes-Kant’s four years of taking his contracts, once been seen without a fresh flower in his lapel, and he received the major now in the same office, behind the same desk, with the same unhurried courtesy he had used to offer eleven contracts before this one.
“Another six hours’ perimeter work,” Vossler said.
“Same region. A larger consignment this time.”
“For the Halshire Brigade.”
Vossler’s expression did not change, which was itself an answer.
“I don’t disclose end users, Major. You know that.”
“I saw the markings on the trucks last time, Emeric. I’m not asking you to disclose anything. I’m telling you I already know, and I’m asking you to tell me the truth about it anyway, because I’d like to find out whether that’s still something you’re capable of.”
For a long moment Vossler said nothing, turning a pen over between two fingers, and something in his soft, careful face shifted, fractionally, into what might have been the closest thing to discomfort a man like him permitted himself in a professional setting.
“Yes,” he said finally. This story is hosted at g.com.
“Halshire Brigade. The same consignment path as before.”
“Financed by whom?”
“That I genuinely don’t know in full, Major, and I say that as a man whose entire business depends on knowing such things. I broker the movement. I don’t always broker the money behind it, and in this instance the money arrived through an intermediary account I have not been able to fully trace, which is, I will admit, unusual enough that it has cost me some sleep of my own.”
“Two governments,” said Reyes-Kant.
“Both paying for the same shipment, neither aware of the other.”
Vossler looked at him for a long moment, and the pen stopped turning.
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t, precisely. I’m telling you what it looks like from where I stood on a ridge, watching a militia that hands out bread with one arm and takes delivery of thirty crates with the other, financed by money nobody upstream seems willing to explain.” Reyes-Kant leaned forward.
“I’ve spent six years telling myself that not asking was the same thing as not being responsible. I watched a girl in that town dig her brother out of a collapsed house with her hands the same week those crates arrived. I don’t know if the crates and the girl are connected. I suspect they are. And I find, Emeric, that I’ve run out of the particular kind of not-knowing that used to let me sleep.”
He did not take the second contract.
It was the first time in six years he had turned Vossler down, and the broker’s face, as he said it, held an expression of genuine surprise that told Reyes-Kant something about how rarely, in this business, anyone ever did.
“You understand,” Vossler said, carefully, “that declining one contract does not undo the last one.”
“I’m not asking you to undo anything, Emeric. I’m telling you that I’ve been a man who didn’t ask questions for six years, and I’ve decided, as of this morning, to become a slightly more expensive one to hire, because the questions are apparently going to cost me something either way, and I’d rather they cost me a contract than whatever they were starting to cost me for free.”
He walked out into a grey Halveth afternoon with no new contract in hand and a company on the payroll that would need paying regardless, and understood, walking back toward the tram stop, that he had not solved anything — had not fed the town, had not un-armed the militia, had not traced the money back to whichever ministries had let it flow — but had done, for the first time in longer than he cared to count, the one thing that had actually been within his power to do, which was simply to stop.
It was not much.
He knew that.
A single declined contract did not balance a ledger that had, by his own estimate, run for six years in the wrong direction.
But Fisk’s question in the car, two weeks earlier — did you ever watch something happen that you knew was wrong, and not stop it, because it wasn’t the mission.
It had stayed with him in a way few questions from a junior corporal ever had, and he found, walking through a city he had spent four years treating as neutral ground rather than a place where real consequences accumulated, that he finally had an answer for her, even if it had taken him two weeks and one declined contract to arrive at it.
Not this time, he thought, and it was a small thing, and it was, for the moment, the only thing he had.
At the tram stop, waiting in the grey afternoon light, he took out his field notebook — the same kind Voss carried, though the two men had never met and would not have recognized in each other’s ledgers anything but a coincidence of habit and wrote, in a hand less neat than a minister’s aide’s but no less deliberate, a single line under a date: Vossler, second contract, declined.
He did not know what he meant to build from it, a record of contracts refused rather than contracts taken, a ledger kept for reasons he could not yet fully articulate even to himself.
But he closed the notebook and put it away feeling, for the first time in longer than he cared to admit, that he had started keeping an account of something other than what the money had cost him.