Tsar Wars: Agents of ISIS, Book 1 by Stephen Goldin

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