Cauldron of Ghosts by David Weber, Eric Flint Page A

Cachat’s performance, on the other hand, had been flawless.
    Startled, Cathy looked at Anton Zilwicki. “You told me he was a rabid republican.”
    “I said no such thing. ‘Rabid’ means raving; slavering with fury; downright witless. Victor neither raves nor slavers and he certainly isn’t witless. Setting that aside, yes, he’s a republican. Sort of the way polonium is radioactive.”
    She turned back to Victor. “But he did that perfectly.” She waggled her fingers. “Maybe just a shade too flamboyantly.”
    “I figured it was better to err in that direction than the other,” said Cachat. “Given the nature of the exercise.”
    “But . . . you’re too young. From what Anton tells me. You wouldn’t have been more than a boy during the Legislaturalist era.”
    “And born and raised in a Dolist slum to boot,” added Anton.
    “Then how would you have learned—?”
    Anton made a loud snorting noise. The sound conveyed an odd cross of derision and grudging admiration. “He would have practiced it in a simulator on the way here,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe how much faith Victor has in the gadgets. He never travels without one if he can manage it—he even squeezed one into the courier ship—and he spends at least an hour a day in there practicing whatever. I’d accuse him of idolatry and worshipping golden calves except he’s as much of an atheist as he is a republican.”
    “Oscar Saint-Just was a monster,” said Victor. “Doesn’t mean he wasn’t smart. He believed in the value of simulator training and I learned it from him.”
    Cathy started to make a flippant remark but stopped. A thought had just crossed her mind. She’d never met Victor Cachat before this moment but she had seen him before, in a manner of speaking. One of Jeremy X’s people had made a video recording of the gun fight in the bowels of Old Chicago between Cachat—later joined by Jeremy himself—and a group of Havenite soldiers and their Scrag allies. That had happened during the so-called Manpower Incident.
    The quality of the recording had been quite poor; what you’d expect to get from a cheap handheld device in bad lighting conditions. But even so, two things had struck her powerfully when she’d watched afterward. Jeremy hadn’t wanted to show it to her but she’d insisted and he owed her too much to refuse.
    The first was the sheer brutality involved. “Gun fight” was far too antiseptic a term for the slaughter produced when people shot each other at literally point blank range and the person doing most of the shooting had been armed with a flechette gun.
    He’d known how to use it, too, and that had been the second thing Cathy had been struck by. Once the fight began, Cachat had been nothing but a blur. Partly that was the poor quality of the recording, but mostly it had been Cachat himself. He’d moved quickly, surely, spinning, shifting aside—while every shot he fired went true. He hadn’t seemed like a man so much as a killing machine.
    He would have been what, at the time? Twenty-one years old? Twenty-two? Certainly not more than twenty-five.
    “The fight in Old Chicago,” she blurted out before she could stop herself. “When you saved Helen. You practiced that in a simulator.”
    Victor frowned and glanced at Zilwicki. Who, for his part, spread his hands.
    “Don’t look at me. I kept my description vague. Really vague. And it was all over before I got there anyway.”
    “Jeremy,” Victor muttered. “Damn him. He told me—I asked, later—that there hadn’t been any recordings made.”
    “He’s been known to lie.” That came from Anton.
    Cachat’s frown faded into a mildly irritated expression. “Sort of like plutonium is radioactive.”
    He looked back at Cathy. “Yes, I trained for it in a simulator. A much bigger and more sophisticated simulator than the portable one I take with me, of course. How else could I have managed it?”
    She felt like she was being extremely rude,