Truth and Shadows mda-5 Page 2

  “What sort of proposal?” asked Thatcher. He was not yet so drunk, apparently, that he couldn’t at least fake caution.

  “We cut the cards,” she said. “High card stays in the game, low card takes his or her money and leaves the table.”

  Thatcher looked dubious. “I don’t think—”

  No, you don’t, Captain Bishop said to herself, and that’s why these two are set to clean you out. Aloud, she said, “That way we don’t waste our good luck on each other.”

  He was wavering now, she could tell. Jones and Farrell weren’t looking at each other, but Captain Bishop could feel them thinking that whatever the outcome of the cut, one mark would be as good as the other. No matter who won, the duo would have their fun tonight.

  Good, she thought. Keep on believing that for a little while longer.

  To Thatcher she said, “I’ll put fifty stones on it.”

  That brought a spark to the young man’s eyes. “Fifty stones and a seat at the table?”

  “You got it,” she said.

  “You’re on.”

  Captain Bishop picked up the deck of cards, shuffled and squared it, then slid it over to Thatcher for his cut. He turned up the two of diamonds. She retrieved the deck, shuffled again, and made her own cut. Not feeling the need to be ostentatious, she gave herself the jack of spades.

  When it came to cards, there were more kinds of skill than just one. Captain Bishop had staved off boredom, on Addicks and elsewhere, by picking up most of them.

  “Sorry about that,” she said to the young man—not so young, really, perhaps even slightly older than she was herself, but Lord, he made her feel ancient. “Maybe you’ll get your turn another night.”

  Captain Bishop watched with an expression of amiable dimness as Thatcher collected his winnings and left the tourist lounge. Then she turned to Jones and Farrell with a different expression altogether.

  “Well, that takes care of him,” she said. She picked up the cards and began shuffling them. “And now, my friends—let’s play an honest game of poker.”

  3

  Gymnasium at the New Barracks

  Tara

  Northwind

  November 3133; local winter

  The gymnasium at the New Barracks in Tara was considerably more than its name implied. The sprawling complex, larger than many commercial arenas, existed in order to serve the physical training of all the Northwind Highlanders stationed at the fort or elsewhere in the city of Tara, in addition to providing a headquarters for the various regimental sports teams. The gymnasium’s wide, domed roof covered not only the main arena but also a number of more specialized facilities—rooms with pools for swimming and diving, rooms for working out with weights and exercise machines, rooms filled with mats and bars and mirrors in which the regiment’s soldiers could practice skills ranging from fencing to folk dancing.

  Countess and Prefect Tara Campbell of Northwind and Paladin Ezekiel Crow currently occupied one of the smaller training rooms. The two of them were alone—the benches along the walls of the room held no spectators or fellow athletes, only the tote bags of bottled water and exercise gear that Crow and the Countess had brought with them. For propriety’s sake, Tara had left the door to the room standing open.

  The Countess, a petite woman with short platinum-blond hair, was wearing loose white trousers and a wraparound top secured with a black belt. The Paladin was dressed similarly, though less formally. He’d shed the quilted jacket he’d worn against the November chill, though not yet the thin leather gloves he’d worn with it. Underneath the jacket, his dark shirt and trousers, cut with enough room in them to move freely in all directions, could nevertheless have served in a pinch for everyday casual wear.

  Except, Tara thought, that Crow was never casual. His plainer garments carried no explicit or implied markers for level of skill and training—which was, she suspected, exactly the point. She didn’t think he was covering up a lack of proficiency, since nobody made it all the way to Paladin of the Sphere without being good at fighting both with and without weapons; so he was probably very good indeed.

  Good, and devious about it as well.

  Tara decided she approved. She’d used the “don’t hit me, I’m cute and harmless” act a few times herself against opponents who were stupid enough to fall for it. She smiled at Crow.

  “I have to thank you for agreeing to this. I need the practice, and it’s hard to find someone who can forget for a while that I’m the Prefect and the Countess—at least for long enough to give me a decent match.”

  “I’ve gone too long without exercise myself,” Crow said, limbering his body by twisting it. “And for much the same reasons. So you’re doing me a favor as well. What do you say… five minutes, first fall, or over the line?”

  “Going over the line,” Tara said. With a wry smile, she added, “Given the burdens of rank and command, it’s the only way I’m likely to be doing it for the foreseeable future.”

  Crow gave her a little bow. “You know yourself, I suppose. And the line will be?”

  With some difficulty, Tara kept her expression politely unrevealing. Inwardly, though, she was smiling. Crow had responded in kind to her teasing comment—meant to put him off balance—which suggested that he might, indeed, not hold back out of misplaced courtesy in the match to come.

  “Make the line this row of tiles,” Tara said. She pointed with her foot to the decorative border that ran around the central area of the practice room. “First one out or over—”

  “Pays a forfeit of the winner’s choosing,” Crow said. “It’s always good to have something riding on the outcome.”

  “Fair enough. Rules?” If they’d been trained in the same traditions, she wouldn’t have needed to ask, but that was another bit of information obscured by the Paladin’s unconventional choice of practice garb.

  “Nothing allowed that might be permanently damaging,” Crow said, “or that might limit our ability to defend Northwind.”

  Tara nodded. “Seems reasonable. So… no eye gouging, but ear biting is allowed.”

  “If the Countess of Northwind desires to bite my ears, she is invited to try,” Crow said. He was, Tara thought, actually smiling a little as he said it. “Shall we begin?”

  Tara smiled back. “Surely.”

  Again Crow bowed. This time he turned the motion into a forward duck and roll that brought him to his feet close to her, but still out of her striking range.

  “Nice move,” she said, laughing, and spun forward with a kick intending to draw him out of line.

  He didn’t go for it—she would have been surprised if he had—but instead pulled off his glove and threw it at her face. She ducked, and in the moment her eyes broke contact with his, he spun forward with his own kick.

  “You wore”—Tara half turned and set an arm block to trap the leg as he kicked—“those gloves on purpose, didn’t you? Clever.”

  She had the leg, she twisted, and Crow went with the twist rather than risk a dislocation. He fell, pulled, and shot to his feet, free again and standing closer still.

  “The Countess does me honor,” he said, and dropped an arm around her shoulders, grasping the fabric of her thin shirt. He pulled her around, and threaded his other arm under her armpit and behind her skull, pressing her head forward. “Let’s take a walk together, shall we?”

  He turned her, with pressure on her head, and pushed, forcing her to walk toward the line of red tiles that marked the boundary of their fighting zone. He was pressed tight against her, front to back. The line drew closer.

  Just as her foot would have had to go across, impelled by Crow’s superior strength, Tara raised her free hand and clapped it over the hand that rested on the back of her neck. She pressed down hard on it, so that the Paladin couldn’t have moved his hand away even if he wanted to. At the same moment, she crossed one leg in front of the other, and let herself fall forward.

  She went into a clumsy roll, but Crow had to go with her—either g
o with her or break her neck, and break the terms of the contest at the same time. She fell, she rolled, taking both of them over the line of tiles. Then she relaxed, letting her body go limp.

  “You’re across the line,” Crow said. The drop-and-roll had ended with him falling beneath her, and she could feel his breath stirring the hairs on the back of her neck as he spoke.

  “I think,” Tara said, “that you touched the ground first. Paladin.”

  A moment.

  “Yes,” Crow said. “I believe that I did.”

  What she would have said then in reply, Tara never knew. She heard footsteps approaching, and scrambled to her feet in time to see Brigadier General Michael Griffin pause in the practice room’s open doorway. She became aware that she was more flustered than she ought to be, and equally aware of Crow—not flustered so much as suddenly hypercorrect—rising and moving to stand a few feet away, well out of personal distance.

  Crow’s darker coloring made his passing emotions hard to read. But for her part, Tara suspected irritably that she was blushing, and hoped that General Griffin would attribute the higher color to exertion rather than to any more inconvenient emotion. Michael Griffin and Ezekiel Crow had not worked easily together when the Paladin first came to Northwind, and Griffin had not been pleased when Crow, at Exarch Damien Redburn’s request, had remained on-planet to assist with the post-war recovery. He would be even less pleased if he thought that the Countess and the Paladin were depending upon each other for more than just political support.

  But General Griffin—crisply pressed and clean-shaven as always (except for the well-trimmed ginger mustache which appeared to be his one vanity)—remained the soul of politeness. “My lady. Paladin Crow.”

  Tara brushed a stray lock of hair out of her eyes. It was time to get it trimmed again, she thought absently. She’d kept it spiky-short ever since her teen years, but the past few months on Northwind had been so busy that she kept letting it go too long between cuts.

  “What brings you here, General?” she asked, leaving unsaid the implied but clear follow-up: And couldn’t it have waited?

  But, of course, it couldn’t have. General Griffin wouldn’t have interrupted one of her rare chances for private recreation without an excellent reason, and his expression showed it.

  “Regimental intelligence reports, my lady,” he said. “The latest DropShip to arrive in port brought disturbing news from our off-world intelligence assets, specifically from our agents-in-place on Tigress.”

  Tara shut her mouth on words not becoming to an already sweaty and undignified Countess. Tigress was home to the Steel Wolves, members of Clan Wolf resident in what had been—and what would remain, if Prefect Tara Campbell had any say in the matter—The Republic of the Sphere. Forces from Tigress, under the command of the Steel Wolves’ new leader Anastasia Kerensky, had invaded Northwind less than a year before, only to be repulsed with hard fighting.

  “What’s happening on Tigress?” asked Ezekiel Crow.

  “According to our agents,” Griffin said, “the Steel Wolf forces that sallied from Tigress to attack Northwind have not yet returned to the Four Cities.”

  “Is that all?”

  Griffin shook his head. “Reports also have other units departing Tigress at this time, destination unknown.”

  Tara, her momentary anger back under control, asked, “How fresh is this intel?”

  “Not as fresh as I’d like, I’m afraid. The messenger had to make three DropShip transits—one of them in the wrong direction—before he could risk putting himself onto a ship heading home.”

  “Do we have any reports of Steel Wolf activity anywhere in Prefecture III after the date on this report?” Crow asked.

  “Steel Wolf activity, yes,” Griffin said. “But it’s all small-scale stuff, and Anastasia Kerensky’s name is never associated with any of the attacks.”

  “Could she have been challenged and lost her position?” Tara wondered. “She’d have been vulnerable, after losing to us like she did last summer.”

  “It’s possible,” said Griffin. “But a new leader would have made him– or herself known, at least on Tigress, and our agents there haven’t reported any significant changes in the Wolves’ command structure.”

  A moment of grim silence followed. Finally Tara let herself give voice to what they all had to be thinking.

  “The bitch is up to something. I just know it.”

  4

  Tourist-Class Passenger Quarters

  DropShip Pegasus

  en route from Addicks to Northwind

  November 3133

  Dianna Jones—“Dagger Di” to friends and enemies alike since the first day she’d been old enough to use a knife—was not in a good mood. The card game that had promised amusement and easy pickings had not turned out well, and Jack Farrell had added insult to injury by informing her, as they left the tourist-class lounge, that they needed to meet in his cabin for a talk. Right now she didn’t feel like talking to anybody, and most especially not to One-Eyed Jack Farrell.

  But personal inclinations didn’t count for much where work was concerned. And this was work; she certainly wasn’t traveling tourist class to Northwind for pleasure, or for the sake of her health.

  Grimly, she followed Jack to a cabin that, except for a trifling matter of location, turned out to be identical to her own: a small, compactly designed space that had a narrow bunk set into one bulkhead, with compartments above and below for storage. Bathing and sanitary facilities were housed in a vertical pod-like unit built into another bulkhead; passengers for whom elbow room was more important than either privacy or convenience could use the roomier lavatories down at the end of the corridor. Of the compartment’s two remaining bulkheads, one was taken up by the door and the other by a combination work desk and entertainment station. The work desk was outfitted with a tri-vid, a disc player, a computer and communications console, and the room’s only chair.

  Dagger Di took the chair without waiting for an invitation. She pulled it away from the desk and sat straddling it, making certain as she did so to keep between Farrell and the cabin door. Maybe their boss trusted Farrell, she thought, but there was no way in hell that she was ever going to. Farrell saw what she was doing, she could tell—but only laughed, shrugged, and stretched out on the bunk.

  “Get over it, darlin’. We’ve got work to do.”

  “Yeah, right.” Di was irritated, and not disposed to get down immediately to business. “Who the hell was that Northwinder bitch, anyway?”

  Farrell looked smug. “You should check out the passenger lists more often. She’s a Captain in one of the Highlander regiments, traveling in mufti. Came aboard at Addicks, so she’s seen her share of fighting lately.”

  “And it doesn’t bother you that she walked away with all the money on the table?”

  “Not particularly,” said Farrell. “It’s not like it was ours in the first place.”

  “Yes, it was,” Di said. “We won it.”

  “And she won it back,” Farrell said. “The fortunes of war, Di darling.”

  Di remained unmollified. “I had plans for that money. And don’t call me ‘darling.’”

  “Make new plans, then. Unless—you weren’t using mission operating funds, were you?”

  “Good Lord, no!” Di shook her head vehemently. “Do I look that stupid?”

  “No,” he said, eyeing her knife hand nervously.

  As well he might, she thought. After everything that had passed between the two of them, Farrell had to have more sense than to believe her stupid enough to gamble with an employer’s money. Especially not when their current employer was Jacob Bannson of Bannson Universal Unlimited.

  Bannson hired only the best—Dagger Di had no false modesty concerning either her own worth or Jack Farrell’s—and those he hired he treated honestly. He fulfilled his part of the contract to the letter, and didn’t stint on paying his employees what they were worth. But those for whom even Bannson’s gene
rous pay scale was not generous enough, who stole from him or double-crossed him, were dealt with swiftly and without mercy—and usually without bothering to involve the local law.

  “I was using discretionary travel funds,” Di said. “Like you. Unless you decided to get stupid all of a sudden.”

  “Which I did not,” Farrell said. “And do you see me repining over lost money? Unless I’m a worse judge of character than I think I am, we’ll have our chance to win it back.”

  “Not with blondie keeping watch in the lounge,” Di said. “We won’t have a chance.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. She just didn’t want us bankrupting poor old Thatcher.”

  “Wilberforce,” Di corrected him.

  “Whatever,” Farrell said. “Under all that, the good Captain Bishop is as bored with DropShip life as we are. So long as we stay honest, she’ll be glad to play.”

  “Honest,” said Di. “Hah. She gave herself the high card. And the jack of spades is a one-eyed jack—do you think she did it to tell us that she knew who we were?”

  “I think she did it because she wanted Wilberforce out of the game, and she got what she wanted.”

  “And you still want to play cards with her? Maybe you are stupid, after all.” Di was more thoughtful now. “She’s good. I hope we don’t come up against her in the field.”

  “Anything can happen,” Farrell said. “Especially in our line of work. And it never hurts to get a feel for another player’s style.”

  5

  Fort Barrett

  Oilfields Coast

  Northwind

  November 3133; dry season

  Fort Barrett was a prosperous, midsized town situated on Kearney’s Oilfields Coast. The regimental post had originally served as a source of law and order for the remote district. Over the years a sizable town had sprung up around the fort, and in recent decades the entire region had grown prosperous with offshore drilling. These days Fort Barrett was a pleasant if isolated posting. The units serving there were often ones that had distinguished—and exhausted—themselves in action elsewhere, and now were being rewarded with a stint of undemanding duty in a tranquil location.