Prince of Havoc

by Michael A. Stackpole

  "Including Morgan's First Kathil Uhlans."

  "True, but Morgan was different."

  "He was murdered, but without a body, proving it would be politically difficult, wouldn't it?"

  Victor folded his arms over his chest. "Again you impart motives to me that I don't have. I loved my cousin and I love his family. I'm taking him home for a hero's burial. That in no way diminishes the sacrifices of all the others here, from General Winston on down to the lowest trooper who died.

  "But, look, if you want to head back to the Inner Sphere and tell everyone how horrid this war was, you're more than welcome to leave with us tonight. If you don't want to oversee the work you started here, I'll find someone else to do it. You may not trust me, Sir Paul, but I trust you. I trust you to do everything you can to normalize our relations with the Clans, and to lay the foundation for continuing and amicable relations between us. I don't think I have anyone here who can do a better job than you can, which is why I'm asking you to do it."

  Masters arched an eyebrow. "Not even yourself?"

  Victor looked him straight in the eye. "Most assuredly not."

  Masters blinked. "Really?"

  "Really." Victor watched the other man's face closely. "I do know my own limitations. You may think I hold myself above humanity, that I consider myself a law unto myself, but it's just not true. I'm just like everyone else—a man who was given a job to do, and now it's time to move on. I have responsibilities elsewhere that demand I move on as quickly as I can, but I will make sure this job was done right. And that means I leave a responsible, thoughtful, and competent person in charge of this piece of Huntress. That's you."

  Masters frowned. "Just when I think I've got you figured out, you do something to force a change."

  "That's because I'm changing. This whole expedition has wrought changes in us all." Victor shrugged. "And just like you, I'm hoping these changes are for the better."

  "I see." Masters slowly nodded. "Then, yes, I will remain here and govern Huntress for you. Do tell them to send an ambassador to replace me—diplomacy is an occupation with too little chivalry in it."

  Victor smiled. "An ancient Terran pundit once defined diplomacy as the art of saying 'Good dog,' while you search for a big rock. I hope you find it to be a bit better than that."

  "I'm certain I will." Masters smiled and offered Victor his hand. "Have a safe journey home and make sure whoever they send out here has a sweet voice and a supply of big rocks."

  17

  State of the Art Gallery and Cafe, Crescent Harbor

  New Exford

  Arc-Royal Defense Cordon

  15 August 3060

  Francesca Jenkins felt her heart skip a beat as the entered the gallery and caught sight of Reginald Starling. The tall, lean man had dyed his hair and eyebrows a bright, unnatural scarlet and had his fingernails elongated and painted a frightful incarnadine shade. As she drew closer, she saw the hint of fang-like dental implants lengthening his canines and saw blood-red contacts that hid his normally blue eyes. His black clothes, cut conservatively and severely, emphasized just how slender he was and definitely cast him as a creature of the night.

  She'd heard he'd taken to this undead persona, and admired his ability to tap into the Zeitgeist of the Lyran Alliance. The stunning victories the Star League Defense Force had won against the Jaguars in the Combine had surprised everyone and buoyed their spirits. What everyone had thought would be a long, difficult war had become a walkover that was greeted initially with great joy.

  Then the SLDF moved into the Periphery to deal with Smoke Jaguar resistance, and reported progress came less quickly. This left people wondering if their earlier optimism wasn't born in haste. The Jade Falcons remained on the Lyran Alliance border and, even though no Falcons had crossed into the Arc-Royal Defense Cordon area, tomorrow could always herald an attack. People began to think the Clans were not as finished as the Star League liked to report, and they waited for the Clanners to rise from the grave and wreak havoc once more.

  Starling looked up over the ice-blue coiffure of a diminutive patron and clapped his hands to his breastbone when he saw Francesca. His feral grin broadened, giving her a better look at his teeth. He immediately sidestepped the woman he had been speaking to and strode over to her. "All, Fiona, you are a vision."

  "You are too kind, Reg." Francesca smiled carefully. She'd chosen to wear a red-sequined, sleeveless dress with hemline that fell almost to mid-thigh. It had a high collar that fastened tight to her throat, but a slender diamond cut-out that ran from the hollow of her throat to her navel, revealing the soft curves of her breasts and showing the bullet-wound scar right below her breastbone. That scar had always fascinated Starling, and she knew showing it off so boldly would excite him.

  "I am so glad you came."

  Francesca slipped her hand through his arm. "Are you, Reg? I was surprised to get an invitation to this opening. I'd ignored the others, assuming you wanted to gloat."

  "Just as well you didn't come to the others, because I would have gloated." Starling ted her deeper into the gallery, past the coffee bar, to a smaller room. "Your absence at first enraged me but, then, upon reflection, I found you inspiring."

  "Did you? How so?"

  Reg slipped his arm from hers and spread his hands wide. "Very inspiring, my dear. This work is all from you."

  Francesca looked around the room and swallowed hard to force her heart back into its proper place. The paintings in the room varied in size, but all shared a style and color scheme. Stalling had used a fairly primitive and impressionistic style to paint them, relying on a palette of mostly black and green, with red as an accent color. She recognized parts of her own body in many of the images, including the scar on her chest and the one over her hip. Her face, when it appeared at all, had been abstracted and rendered huge in comparison to other figures, as if she were some uber-deity constantly aware of what the other figures were doing.

  The paintings had titles like Honesty I, Trust IV, and No Secrets VIII. She did some quick mental calculations and, assuming Starling wasn't lying about the series numbers, he'd done nearly two dozen in the three months since their breakup, which was a pace that, for him, exceeded all expectations.

  She looked over at him, eyes wide. "I don't know what to say."

  "You don't need to say anything, my dear." Starling glared at a patron about to enter the small room, but that person shied off quickly. "You have never heard me say this before, but I'm sorry and I thank you."

  "Reg, are you well?"

  The man threw his head back and laughed. "Do you remember when we first met?"

  "At the spa? Yes. You took me to an opening like this that night."

  "Yes. You said something to me at that first meeting—that your condition of friendship was having no secrets from your friends. You suggested that if I couldn't handle that, perhaps we shouldn't be friends. I thought I could, at the time, and we became involved."

  She reached out and stroked the side of his face. "We became lovers."

  "We did. I shared an intimacy with you I don't think I've ever shared with anyone else, and that frightened me. That's why I had that liaison with the model I was painting. When you found out, your reaction was partly what I expected and wanted."

  "You wanted me to throw you out." Fiona let a little smile twist her lips. "And I did what you wanted."

  "Yes, darling, but not for the reason I expected. I thought you would throw me out because I had been unfaithful to you. You told me that my infidelity was not the issue, but the fact that I had lied to you about it." Reg shook his head. "After you left me, I sat and thought for the longest time. I wanted you to come to those other openings so I could humiliate you, but then I realized I had made the mistake. You had operated openly and had set up simple conditions for our friendship. I had violated those rules and paid the consequences."

  He sneered and pointed back out the doorway toward the gaily dressed patrons. "You are not like them, F
iona. They come here to own a piece of me, as if mere money could buy my spirit and command my loyalty. If I go out there and insult them, they lap it up. It's a mark of prestige that I would deign to insult them. If I refuse to sell them a piece because I say their home is not worthy of it, they will find an agent to buy it so they can say they've tricked me, not knowing that the agent will toy it at a hyperinflated price."

  "What are you telling me, Reg?" Francesca looked around the room. "Are you going to sell pieces of me to these people?"

  "Well, yes, of course." Reg smiled impishly, then walked over to a small paintingshowing a human heart rendered in green, surrounded by black, with tiny red cracks in it. "But this represents my heart, envious as it is of the peace yew know. This painting, No Secrets X, is for you. It is a piece of me that knows no price, though I would hope to redeem our friendship through it"

  Francesca peered more closely at the painting, then turned back and stood on tiptoe to give him a kiss on the lips. "Consider it a down payment, shall we?"

  Reg smiled. "A better bargain than I expected."

  "Oh, you'll pay, Reg. You'll pay dearly." She smiled at him. "But! think it's time you make your patrons pay even more dearly."

  "Indeed, my dear." Reg leaned down and kissed her. "Perhaps I will sell the pieces in this room for a fortune and a secret from each buyer. That should be fun."

  "And you'll share the secrets with me?"

  "With pleasure, Fiona Jensen, great pleasure indeed."

  * * *

  Francesca was introduced to Mr. Archie, the owner of the gallery—a man trying studiously to appear younger than he was and who fawned all over her—then presided over the ceremony of having No Secrets X's display tag altered to read "From the Private Collection of Fiona Jensen." After that the gallery owner insisted on naming some absurd coffee drink after her, which was an honor she bore only because it actually didn't taste that bad despite being only twenty percent coffee when all was said and done. She listened to Starling give a brief lecture about the "Full Disclosure" series of paintings in that room, linking its production to a demand that the government tell everyone what was really going on with the Clan war. In less than five minutes Starling turned owning a piece of his work from an investment into political protest, which spiked the prices and encouraged brisk sales.

  She begged off on joining Reg and Mr. Archie for a late dinner, but promised she would stop by another time to discuss the possibility of signing prints of the "Full Disclosure" series works along with Reg. She knew that offer was an attempt on Reg's part to give her money and to bind her more closely to him.

  This was fine with her. Her mission all along had been to get as close as she could to him and learn all his secrets. Knowing as many of them as she already did—and had known before she met him—she had a simple gauge by which to measure her progress. So far, that progress had not been great.

  Reginald Starling was really Sven Newmark, former aide to Ryan Steiner. Ryan Steiner and Katherine Steiner, current ruler of the Lyran Alliance, had conspired together to assassinate Melissa Steiner-Davion, Katherine's mother and the previous ruler of the Federated Commonwealth. Katherine had engineered things so it appeared as if her brother Victor had killed Melissa, then had used the resulting civil unrest to split the Federated Commonwealth in half.

  Sven Newmark had dropped out of sight shortly after Ryan's assassination. Various and sundry pundits had pointed to the fact that Newmark had been alone with Ryan at the time of his death. Because the older man had died of a through and through gunshot wound to the head, self-appointed experts suggested that Newmark had, in fact, been the assassin, not some sniper shooting from a half a kilometer away, as official reports suggested. Newmark's disappearance made a lot of sense, given how well-loved Ryan had been in some quarters, and only through a lot of hard work had Francesca been able to track him down to New Exford.

  Newmark was, as nearly as she knew, the only man who could link Katherine with the plot to murder Melissa Steiner-Davion. Not even the assassin who had done the job--who, as far as Francesca knew, had never been apprehended— might know of the connection between mother and daughter in this case. If Newmark could implicate Katherine in her mother's death, she would become known as the woman who murdered her own mother as well as one of the Inner Sphere's most beloved figures. And if the news ever got out, Katherine's days in power would surely be over.

  Francesca returned to her apartment, checking for telltale signs of covert entry. She pulled a keyring from her clutch and used the flashlight attached to it to provide enough illumination for her to select the proper key. Then, as she prepared to insert the key in the lock, she hit a second button on the flashlight, which played out an ultraviolet beam that swept over the floor in front of her door. a single set of footprints made by the high-heeled shoes she wore glowed purple for a second, then returned to invisibility when she shut off the light. The carpet just inside her door had been liberally dusted with a powder that clung to the soles of shoes and phosphoresced under the ultraviolet light. Anyone who had gone in and come out of the apartment would have left footprints, or would have swept them away, obscuring her prints as well.

  She opened the door and stepped inside, locking the door behind her. Flicking on a light, she took a quick visual inventory of the room, noticing if the pile of diskzines was still correctly aligned with the edge of the coffee table, or if the chair at the end of her dining table had been re-seated in the divots in the carpet, or if the legs were still offset by two centimeters, the way she'd left them when going out.

  Everything seemed in order, so she went to her bedroom, kicked off her shoes and slipped out of the dress. She hung it up, then pulled on a warm, terry cloth robe and sat down at her computer. She flicked it on, did a hardware reset, then interrupted the normal init process. She called up a program named Scramble, which, if loaded after a normal init process, would fill the screen with a children's puzzle game.

  In its present form it allowed her to encrypt and decrypt messages. She typed in a brief message. "Contact made. Target is receptive. Mission hot again." She glanced over it once, quickly, then set the program to encrypting it.

  The encryption scheme functioned in two ways. The first thing it did was to pull out of memory the contents of a book and locate each of the message's words in that book. Those words then became reduced to a three-number code indicating page, paragraph, and word number. Contact, for example, was found on page seventy-seven, the second paragraph, fifth word, making it 77-2-5 in the encrypted message.

  The second half of the encryption worked similarly, but had been designed to work with Francesca's cover occupation. She had told Newmark she was a researcher who compiled bibliographies for scholars doing research. The Scramble program sorted through the indices of countless volumes, looking for similar subject cites, which could be expressed in terms of edition, volume, and page number. Each coded word of the message, then, would be rendered into a book cite and even if the lot of them were pulled and read, they would make a certain amount of sense. The indices searched were highly technical, so even if codebreakers looked up the cites, they wouldn't have a clue as to what they meant.

  The cites were then packaged up into a simple email that went to any of a dozen cover identities Francesca's control agent, Curaitis, used to recover data. The cover identity was chosen to be consistent with the nature of the data used to create the cites. Similarly, messages back to Francesca would contain cites, travel ticket prices, or other data that could be expressed in numbers, and the program would pull them apart and present her with the message. All messages were kept short to minimize the ability of others to decode them, and the books from which the words were chosen were changed on a regular schedule.

  Francesca sent the message, then sat back and smiled. When she had first come to New Exford it hadn't been difficult to befriend and seduce Newmark, but getting deep enough into him to win his trust had been much harder. Just when she thought she'd made
some headway, he betrayed her. She had been tempted then to take him back, but decided at the last moment that rejecting him would work better. Since everyone loved him on the surface and despised him behind his back—-and he knew it—having someone who cared for him at heart seem to hate him On the surface was different, and Reginald Starting lived for different. as a covert operative for the Federated Commonwealth's Intelligence Secretariat, Francesca Jenkins knew her mission was vital and that speed was of the essence. The initial stage of the operation had been to let Katherine know that her brother knew of her complicity in Melissa's death. It was a move meant to unsettle Katherine and had been effective, but it also meant Katherine would want to tie up any loose ends that might implicate her directly. Sven Newmark was such a loose end and, even though Francesca had used computer viruses to destroy the information that led her to Reginald Starling, she knew that her Lyran intelligence counterparts wouldn't be far behind her.

  She stretched, shut off the computer, lay her robe across the foot of her bed, then crawled under the covers. "Doesn't matter how close they are now, though. I'm closer and soon, very soon, I'll have the information I came for."

  18

  DropShip Josephine, Nadir Recharge Station

  Skye, Isle of Skye

  Lyran Alliance

  30 September 3060

  Archon Katrina Steiner studied a holographic projection of the Inner Sphere and allowed herself a moment to luxuriate in anticipation of controlling it all. There were, she admitted to. herself, a few obstacles to her taking power everywhere, but obstacles were meant to be overcome. And overcome I shall.

  The first barrier between her and success was her brother Victor. Though no one in the Inner Sphere had yet learned of the success of his strike at the Clan homeworlds, Katrina already knew all that had transpired during her brother's year-long absence from the Inner Sphere. Little automaton that he is he went, he saw, and he conquered. Damn that Lincolm Osis to a dozen hells for not having twisted off Victor's head when he had the chance.