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  “Do you want me to rebuild it, Will?” his mother asked.

  “I want you to do whatever pleases you with it,” he said. “I’m just saying that if you plan to do anything, you’ll need to do it soon.”

  “I don’t want to sell your home out from underneath you.” His mother looked old suddenly, old and uncertain, and Will cursed himself inwardly for bringing the subject up. “The house was always meant to be yours, you know.”

  “Don’t worry, Mother. The regiment takes good care of me.”

  He heard another disbelieving snort from Ruth. “Tries to get you killed, is more like it.”

  “Hush, Ruthie,” his mother said. “He won’t be in the regiment forever, and when he comes back home he’ll need a place to live.”

  Will Elliot didn’t know what to say to that. The version of himself who’d lived at home with his mother and hiked the trails of Red Ledge Pass as a wilderness guide was not exactly dead, but he’d left that man somewhere a long way behind him, in a place he didn’t think he could ever get back to again. As for the new and different Will Elliot that the Highlander regiments and the Steel Wolves were making between them—he didn’t know yet what kind of place that man might eventually call home.

  “It’ll be a while longer before anyone needs to fret about afterward,” was all that he said aloud. “We’re going to Terra first to catch the Wolves and break them if we can.”

  3

  DropShip Fenrir

  Saffel Space Station Three, Saffel System

  Prefecture II

  February 3134

  In her office aboard Fenrir, Galaxy Commander Anastasia Kerensky looked over the fuel expenditure reports for the Steel Wolf DropShips. To herself—but to no one else—she would admit that work such as this was, for her, the least favorite of the many tasks that her rank required.

  Give her a military objective and she would take it. Give her a challenge and she would meet it. Wrestling with inventories and invoices and spreadsheets . . . even though she assigned as much of it as she could to members of the service and support castes who were trained in dealing with such things, nevertheless at some point the final numbers had to come across her desk.

  At the moment, those numbers looked grim. She had brought the Steel Wolf JumpShip out at Saffel to recharge the Akela’s Kearney-Fuchida drive prior to making the second jump that would bring the Wolves to Terra. The reports from the engineers on the DropShips told her that their arrival would be longer coming than she had anticipated.

  “The time we spent under the sea on Northwind did not help,” said Star Colonel Marks.

  He had brought in the engineering reports—for the pleasure, she suspected, of watching her get the bad news. Marks had been one of the late Kal Radick’s favorites, and Anastasia Kerensky’s most recent successes on Northwind had only served to add fuel to his dislike of her.

  “The DropShips were bleeding power the whole time,” Marks continued, “without a chance to make it back up. If we are to cover the distance between the Terran jump point and Terra itself in the fastest time possible, we will need to refuel the DropShips as well as recharge the JumpShip’s drive.”

  “How long to full charge for the JumpShip?” Anastasia asked.

  “Six point eight days using the solar sail,” he replied.

  “That is too long,” she said. “We have the advantage, now, of surprise, and we cannot afford to lose it. Every day—every hour—of delay increases the resistance we will find when we reach Terra.”

  “The Highlanders are in no shape to oppose us on Terra,” Star Colonel Marks said. “And Terra’s integral defenses are comparatively weak; they have wasted themselves in sending troops out to protect other worlds, and have kept too few behind to protect their own.”

  “If underestimating the enemy is your idea of planning,” she told him, “then do me a favor and check the air lock for leaks. From the outside. The Countess of Northwind blew up her own castle rather than let me take it. Do you think she would hesitate to strip Northwind bare in order to stop us from seizing Terra?”

  “If the Galaxy Commander says so—”

  “I say so. We cannot afford to throw away any advantage that we may have. Nor can we afford to use anything less than maximum speed for the DropShips’ approach. We have no choice—we will have to recharge and refuel at the Saffel station.”

  Once again, Marks took on the manner of someone taking pleasure from the delivery of bad news. “There is a problem. If we refuel and recharge at the station, we will have to pay for the privilege.”

  Anastasia frowned. “Do we not have sufficient funds for the purpose?”

  I really wish I could trust somebody else with this part of the job, she thought resentfully as she spoke. Growing up in the full Clan tradition on Arc Royal, in her childhood dreams she had pictured her older self doing many things—fighting for honor, for advancement, and for the right to direct the future of Clan Wolf in The Republic; handling weapons and vehicles and all manner of BattleMechs; surviving and holding her own in the literal cutthroat arena of Clan politics. Despite the fact that over time she had acquired an intellectual awareness of the importance of supplies and logistics, she had most certainly never cherished the image of herself as a glorified accountant and purchasing agent.

  “The station will charge a high price, especially for refueling the DropShips,” Marks told her. “If they realize that we are in haste, they are likely to raise their prices even more. They might be willing to accept trade goods instead of cash—”

  “But warships do not carry trade goods,” Anastasia finished. “The solution would seem to be obvious, Star Colonel. We are, after all, the Steel Wolves. Allow me some time to work out a plan—and meanwhile, see that the JumpShip makes ready to approach the station.”

  Cecy Harris, duty sensor tech on Saffel Space Station Three, was midway through the watch and scanning her screens for arriving ships. The work was at once duller and more nerve-racking than it had been in the days before the collapse of the HPG network. Duller because the slowdown in communications meant fewer people making interstellar journeys on a casual basis, and fewer travelers meant fewer ships; more nerve-racking because the confused political situation and the lack of up-to-date intelligence meant that the crew of Station Three had no idea, most of the time, what might come through the jump point next.

  Or, as it happened, right now.

  “Ship incoming,” she reported to the officer in charge, Luc Desroches. “JumpShip. Big.”

  “Any idea who they are?” he asked.

  “It’s a Clan configuration,” Cecy replied, after a quick look at the system’s onboard database. “Maybe Clan Sea Fox—they’re traders, or what passes for traders with those people anyhow. It’s hard to tell.”

  “We don’t have any Sea Fox ships scheduled to turn up about now,” said Desroches with a frown. “Unfortunately—”

  “The schedule doesn’t count for squat these days. I don’t think this is one of our regular visitors, though. None of them are that big.”

  “Whoever they are,” said the communications tech at the adjacent console, “they’re keeping quiet. Shall I hail them?”

  “Not yet,” said Desroches. “Let them talk first.”

  “Looks like they’re deploying the solar sail to recharge their drive,” Cecy said after a few minutes. “They probably don’t have any business on Saffel at all.”

  Desroches shrugged. “As long as they stay over there and leave us alone, they can gather all the sunlight they want.”

  4

  Outer Islands Resort

  Dalton Archipelago, Kervil

  Prefecture II

  February 3134; local summer

  Kervil—being mostly water, with its landmasses broken up into a multitude of small islands and a handful of larger ones not quite large enough to qualify as continents—was a planet of many beaches. Even the public parks and seashores seldom witnessed overcrowding. A pundit at the local university
had once proclaimed that the world’s ten larger islands alone sufficed to provide each citizen of Kervil with a kilometer of private ocean frontage. Natural human gregariousness, of course, meant that most of those citizens frequented one or another of the popular resorts instead and, on a warm summer day, the sand and the surf alike would be thronged with people.

  Jonah Levin liked people, and regarded helping people as the largest component of his life’s work and the entire reason for his job’s existence—but he did not find them, in large numbers, restful. The more people who were gathered in any one place, the more likely it became that one or more of them would recognize him and, inevitably, turn out to have a problem that only the immediate personal attention of a Paladin of the Sphere could solve.

  Over the years, Anna and the children had seen far too many of their outings and holidays spoiled by the intrusion of unexpected business. For his family’s sake, as much as for his own, Jonah had finally given in and purchased a membership in the Outer Islands Resort Community, gaining thereby exclusive rights to several kilometers of private beachfront on one of the islets in the Dalton Archipelago, with cottage facilities included. He still felt vaguely guilty about his decision—such luxuries, he couldn’t help thinking, were meant for the likes of Jacob Bannson or Duke Aaron Sandoval, not for people like him—but the happiness that it brought to his family usually assuaged the guilt.

  If that wasn’t enough, there was always his Anna to scold him and tell him that he needed to take care of himself sometimes, too. Today was one of those days. Jonah lay stretched face-down on a beach blanket at the water’s edge, letting the warm black volcanic sand bake him from below, while the semitropical sunlight toasted him from above. Anna sat on the blanket next to him, rubbing emollient sunscreen into the skin of his back and shoulders with skillful fingers.

  Jonah’s torso, and his arms and legs as well, were marked all over with the silvery traces of old scars—relics of the desperate battle on Kurragin that had first brought a simple captain in the Hesperus militia to the attention of then-Exarch Devlin Stone. The skin there remained sensitive, even after all these years, and stress or exhaustion would cause the muscles underneath to knot and ache.

  They had come to the island cottage for a family picnic—Jonah, Anna, their two younger children and a couple of the children’s friends. Though he would have preferred to come with just Anna and the children alone, he knew his teenagers. Trying to push through a plan like that would have meant sullen compliance at best, an argument at worst, and Jonah was not in the mood for family arguments just now. The presence of a couple of strangers—very nice young people, really, he pointed out to himself; your children don’t bring home thugs and hoodlums—was a small price to pay for having the entire still-at-home family together and happy.

  “Ah,” he said. Already his tense muscles were relaxing under the gentle pressure of Anna’s fingers. “That feels good.”

  “You’re all tied up in knots.” She put pressure on a particularly tight and aching spot, and Jonah groaned pleasurably into the terry cloth beach blanket. “You work too hard.”

  “Only because there’s so much that has to get done. Believe me, I’d like nothing more than to spend the next five or six months right here.”

  Anna’s strong hands continued rubbing the emollient cream into his back. “That’s why you’re already packing your bags to go away again.”

  “I have to do it, Anna.” His voice was muffled by the beach blanket, but he wasn’t certain he wanted to look at her face. “There’s too much stuff I can’t do from here—especially with the HPG network down. Nobody’s heard anything of substance from Northwind since the fighting there last June, and nobody’s heard anything about the Steel Wolves since then, either. What I have heard about the Dragon’s Fury and the Swordsworn doesn’t make me happy, and I don’t trust Jacob Bannson any further than I could throw him bare-handed, but I can’t act to neutralize him if I don’t know what he’s doing.”

  He heard her give a gentle laugh. “That’s quite a catalogue.”

  “There’s a lot more to it than that,” he said. “Those are just the highlights—or the lowlights, if you want to look at them that way.”

  “Taken all together, what they mean is that you’re going to Terra.”

  “I’m afraid so, yes.”

  Her fingers were still working on the muscles of his back, separating out the scars left by metal fragments and laser fire and—at the very last—by edged weapons in close melee, and he felt himself relaxing into the pleasure-pain. She said, “You’re going to miss Passover with the family, you know.”

  “I’m sorry, Anna. But it has to be done.”

  “Yes. And you wouldn’t be the man I married if you didn’t do your duty.” He felt a slight hesitation in the steady movement of her fingers against his skin. “How long do you think you will be away?”

  “I don’t know. Given transit time, three months at the very least. Maybe more. I’ll come back as soon as I can, I promise.”

  He didn’t say what they both knew—that the unsettled state of The Republic might drag out his absence for much longer than three months. He knew that it was superstitious to think that speaking of a thing might make it happen; he kept his mouth shut just the same.

  “Your promise is good enough for me,” Anna said. He felt a light kiss on the back of his neck. “It always has been.”

  5

  Bannson Headquarters

  Tybalt

  Prefecture II

  February 3134; local autumn

  Bannson Universal Unlimited had its corporate offices on Tybalt, in a massive arcology almost a mile high, a self-contained ecosphere with the walls of the upper portions made transparent so that observers for kilometers around could behold and wonder at the audaciousness of it all. In a single enormous building, one level held multistoried towers rising above fields of summer blossoms, another level appeared from the outside to be nothing but parkland, and a third level was packed with geometric structures whose every surface was as elaborately gilded and bejeweled as a prince’s windup toy.

  Taken altogether, the BUU arcology made for a casual display of wealth and power that drove Jacob Bannson’s enemies to distraction. It symbolized, said Progressive Republic Today, “all that is worst about the man himself: greed, arrogance, ostentatious display, and a lack of serious feeling for either art or nature.”

  Jacob Bannson didn’t worry about Progressive Republic Today. He knew that ordinary readers on Tybalt and elsewhere considered PRT to be snobbish and boring when it wasn’t bordering on actively treasonous, and his local approval rating had jumped by fifty points after that article came out.

  Bannson maintained a private office suite in the heart of the building’s uppermost glittering jewel-box level, well away from prying eyes. Cameras fixed here and there on the exterior of the huge structure sent views of the city to the office’s windows—video posters constantly updated in real time—while banks of data consoles and communications links displayed information from across the surface of Tybalt. Other consoles in the same office had formerly displayed similar nearly real-time updates from all over The Republic of the Sphere; now those screens changed seldomly, if at all.

  Earlier this morning, a blinking light on one of the offworld display terminals had alerted Bannson to just such a rare update. He was looking now at several months’ worth of reports—recently updated by courier mailship—from his agents in place on Northwind. He’d prompted the machine to give him a sheaf of printouts, then paced back and forth while he read them.

  Bannson was an energetic man, a maker of emphatic gestures, who became restless in small or crowded rooms. Short and stocky, with wild red hair and a full beard, he had the look of a Viking raider of old. A magazine considerably less highbrow than Progressive Republic Today had once claimed that Jacob Bannson always looked like he ought to be wearing chain mail and brandishing a battle-ax. Bannson had tracked down the writer of the article and
ordered him brought to corporate headquarters by a squad of BUU’s notorious and unmistakable security goons—and then hired the terrified man on the spot to work for Bannson’s own public relations division.

  According to the reports Bannson was reading as he paced, things on Northwind were going well. He had long wanted to expand BUU’s operations inside Prefecture III, but had been forced repeatedly to back down under pressure from the government of The Republic of the Sphere, with its too worshipful attitude toward the status quo. The collapse of the HPG network, however, had shattered that status quo for good and all, and the associated destabilization was providing Bannson Universal Unlimited with renewed opportunities to extend its influence.

  Opportunities, he thought, to which Northwind was the key. Northwind was at once the gateway to Terra and the guardian of the gate—the base of operations for the Northwind Highlanders, formidable combat troops that anybody looking to become a power in Prefecture III would have to deal with. It was also the home of Countess and Prefect Tara Campbell, who was young and untried, but who possessed large and still mostly untapped reserves of family and personal popularity. If the Countess of Northwind turned against him, BUU could kiss any further expansion into Prefecture III good-bye, and never mind the state of the HPG network.

  So . . . Tara Campbell had to be either crippled or won over to Bannson’s side. In the best of all possible outcomes, he could accomplish both, and without her knowing. It would be tricky, but tricky was one of the things Jacob Bannson had always been good at.

  He’d thought for a while that he’d found the perfect tool for the job. It wasn’t every day that you found a Paladin of the Sphere with a verifiable and blackmail-worthy secret in his past.

  While there were Paladins whom Bannson would not have been pleased to find corruptible, Ezekiel Crow was not among their number. Bannson had never cared for Crow. The man was too reserved and austere to be good company, and had always regarded Bannson’s flamboyant ways not merely with distrust—which Bannson could have lived with, because no sane man trusted anyone completely—but with puritanical distaste.