“Welcome, Countess,” he said. “We’ve got lots to talk about, so let’s get down to business.”
“Not yet.” She sat down in the armchair beside the couch. It had been big enough once to hold her younger self and her father both, but as with everything else, it was smaller now. “There’s a third party I want to see involved in this discussion. Not the person we spoke of, but someone else.”
Bannson’s face hardened. “Tell me who. If I don’t like him or her, the whole deal is off.”
Tara reminded herself that behind the outward appearance of the nouveau riche poseur was a ruthless entrepreneur and hardened negotiator, rumored to have more than just metaphorical blood on his hands. “Fair enough,” she said. “Paladin Jonah Levin.”
She waited for several long moments while Bannson played with the hairs of his full orange beard, his eyes squinted half closed in contemplation of something invisible. Finally, he said, “All right. Levin’s no particular friend of mine, but he’s honest. Better yet, everybody in the whole Republic knows that he’s honest. This business can use somebody like that.”
Tara said, miffed, “And I’m not honest enough for you?”
“Countess, you’ve got problems of your own or you wouldn’t be standing here now.”
She couldn’t come up with a counterargument, and was spared the need to think of a reply by the sound of a knock on the penthouse door. Bannson went to the door and admitted Jonah Levin. The Paladin took the second of the room’s two armchairs, leaving Bannson with the couch as before.
“I see that Mr. Horn found you in time,” Tara said to Levin.
“Just in time, as it happened.”
Levin didn’t explain the remark any further, but Tara received the impression that the Paladin, while still maintaining his sober demeanor, was faintly amused about something.
“Mr. Bannson,” he continued. “I understand you have some information that you’re interested in sharing.”
“That’s right.”
Bannson moved over to the antique secretary in one corner of the suite—Tara remembered her mother drafting speeches at it, years ago—and took out a bulky paper envelope. He emptied the contents out onto the inlaid ebony and mother-of-pearl surface of the low table in front of the couch: papers, photographs, letters, and a battered paperback book with a slip of paper marking one page.
“All of these are copies, of course. The originals are kept safe elsewhere.”
“Of course,” Levin said.
I get the point, Tara thought. Jacob Bannson would have brought a copy of that data disc with him on his private DropShip, instead of giving one to poor Lieutenant Jones and leaving the other one in a safe back at The Fort on Northwind. And Paladin Levin would have hand carried the disc all the way from Northwind.
She swallowed her irritation and joined Levin in going through the stuff on the table. Within minutes, her awareness of being the youngest and most inexperienced person in the room had faded away entirely, replaced by a profound sense of shock.
“This is—”
She stopped, words failing her. Even the pain of Ezekiel Crow’s first betrayal on Northwind hadn’t felt like this. Here was evidence not of one single act, but of an entire life and a career of public service based on the most heinous treason imaginable.
“Despicable,” said Levin. “If the evidence is genuine.”
Bannson said, “It’s the real deal, all right. Crow pulled off a first-class cover-up, but once you’ve got hold of the first loose end”—he indicated the paperback book, a popular war memoir by a Capellan novelist who’d been a CapCon intelligence officer in his youth, with its reference to a young man named Daniel Peterson who had betrayed his homeworld of Liao to the Capellans—“you can track down independent confirmation for everything else without much trouble. Name any set of events you care to. They’ll verify.”
“I think somebody else did track them down,” Tara said. “I can’t imagine anything besides blackmail that would make him turn traitor again after all this time. And with so much to lose.”
Bannson shrugged. “What can I say? Once the information is out there, it’s out there. He probably never expected this guy to start telling war stories.”
“And I never expected to be presented with all of this,” she said. “What’s your stake, Mr. Bannson?”
“I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “Ezekiel Crow’s been standing in the way of my business plans for quite a while, and when I heard rumors about what he did on Northwind, I decided that the two of us had a problem in common—for now, at least. Just so we’re clear, I’m not talking about making any long-term alliances.”
“I think we all understand that,” Jonah Levin said. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a data disc. So his man Horn recovered it after all, Tara thought. He certainly was taking his time about letting me know. “In the interests of sharing information—I assume there’s a data reader in the room somewhere?”
“In the armoire, along with the tri-vid screen,” Tara said absently, before Bannson could reply.
Bannson didn’t say anything, only took the data disc from Levin and set it up to play. Tara knew a moment’s panicky fear that bad luck had struck her again and it would turn out to be nothing but popular music or children’s cartoons—but it was the Northwind file, with all the information intact, exactly as she’d sent it with Owain Jones. By the time it had finished playing, Jacob Bannson was grinning through his beard.
“Oh, yeah.” For a moment, his voice lost all its expensive polish and was pure low-class St. Andre. “Between the old stuff and this, we have got the man laid out on toast for breakfast.”
Tara said to Levin, “When do you think we should present it to the Exarch?”
“You don’t,” Bannson said at once. “You hand it over to the tri-vids and let them run with it. After that, it won’t matter what the Exarch thinks. He’s done for.”
“Paladin Levin?” Tara said again.
Jonah Levin was looking thoughtfully at the last image on the data disc—the pair of battle-weary young troopers who’d manned the checkpoint on Northwind.
“Give the information to the Exarch,” he said. “There’ll have to be a formal inquiry. But give a copy to the tri-vids first.”
28
Hotel Duquesne
Geneva, Terra
Prefecture X
April 3134; local spring
Captain Tara Bishop took the Countess of Northwind’s suggestion, and found herself a spot in the hotel bar from which she could keep an eye on the main lobby while she waited on events taking place above. Just another episode in the exciting life of a Prefect’s aide, she thought. Lucky me.
Under the circumstances, she couldn’t help remembering the Colonel she’d served under on Addicks, back in the time—far off now, even if not quite a full year had elapsed between that day and this—when all she had to worry about was intermittent local skirmishing between the Highlanders and the Dragon’s Fury, instead of the Steel Wolves and the fate of Terra. She hadn’t wanted to leave off soldiering in the field in order to serve as Tara Campbell’s aide-de-camp, and her Colonel had needed to give her a stern and fatherly lecture on the proper care and feeding of a good career.
Promising young officers—by which, it seemed, he meant her—should listen to their superiors and go where they were posted, especially when the new assignment offered them a chance to gain valuable experience and make useful political connections.
“If you’re aiming for the top,” he’d finished, “you need to know what it looks like up there first.”
So far, she thought, the main descriptive term that came to mind was “expensive.” The bottles drawn up in ranks on the shelf behind the bar included a full platoon, at least, of genuine Terran whiskeys, most of them old enough to bear arms in The Republic and a good half dozen of them older than she was. She pulled out a twenty-stone note and laid it on the bar. The bartender came over.
“I’l
l have the Glen Grant,” she said.
“Will that be the twenty-five year old, or the fifty?”
What the hell, she thought. I’m not likely to have another chance any time soon. “The fifty.”
The twenty-stone note went away, and the bartender came back a few minutes later with a heavy paper bar coaster, a crystal tumbler full of amber liquid, and a handful of small coins.
Expensive was the word, all right, she thought. She took a careful sip. But worth it.
She settled down to make the shot of Glen Grant last until the Countess finished her meeting upstairs. At this late hour on a weeknight, there was only one other customer in the bar, a plain man in a plain suit, apparently no more inclined to chat than she was—and, like her, watching the lobby as he drank.
Popular hobby around here, she thought. In fact, the bar was situated admirably for keeping tabs on the comings and goings of the hotel guests. Tara wondered if the Duquesne’s architect had designed it that way on purpose, for the convenience of spies, aides-de-camp, and flunkies in general.
This is Geneva, she reminded herself. Anything is possible.
Lobby watching might have been the bar’s main attraction, but the management appeared willing to give at least a nod to the traditions. There was a discreet tri-vid box on the back counter, tucked underneath the shelves full of bottles, small enough that the figures moving around inside it appeared as dollhouse-size miniatures.
Captain Bishop, as usual, found the display annoying. It was bad enough to have to watch entertainers shrunk down to the size of her thumb, but the news stories were even worse. Something in Bishop’s mind balked at the idea of taking real people and their real pain and happiness and dirt and calamity, and turning them into bright little toys.
I’d sooner have a flat-screen video wall, she grumbled to herself. If anybody even makes those anymore.
Perversely, her irritation only helped the tri-vid box draw her attention even more. It was a news channel, too. Winter sports scores, for hockey and curling. I didn’t know they played that on Terra, she thought, I always believed we invented it on Northwind. And the weather: a warming trend over western Europe, storms in the North Sea, the possibility of a thaw in Russia. That wasn’t good. She had no illusions about what the terrain around Belgorod was going to be like when the ice melted in the frozen ground.
The top of the hour came around again, and the breaking news, read by a bland-faced announcer whose head and shoulders filled most of the box. Captain Bishop had read a story once, when she was a little girl, about a witch who kept a closet full of different heads, and tri-vid newsreaders always made her think about that. The book had given her nightmares for weeks.
The volume on the box was kept low; it took almost a full minute for the announcer’s words to penetrate into her awareness.
“New details coming in from the jump point space station on the identity of the unknown ship that emerged several hours ago: DropShips are disengaging and setting course for Terra. These ships have likewise refused to identify themselves…”
“Damn.” She slammed back the last of the Glen Grant and headed out into the lobby at a near run, pulling out her phone as she went. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed that the plain man was doing the same thing with an urgency almost equal to her own.
I wonder who the hell he’s talking to? she thought, her right thumb already hitting the Countess of Northwind’s private code. If she’s disconnected, there’s no help for it, I’m going to have to go up to the penthouse and pound on the door myself. But Tara Campbell’s familiar voice said, “Yes?” after the first ring.
Bishop ignored the sharp-edged implication that this had better be good. “Countess, the Steel Wolves just came through at the jump point and are heading in.”
29
Hotel Duquesne
Geneva, Terra
Prefecture X
April 3134; local spring
Ezekiel Crow slept uneasily in his bed at the Hotel Duquesne. His nights since leaving Northwind had all been restless, and his dreams were bad.
He had recurrent nightmares about an enemy whose face he couldn’t see, dogging his footsteps through scenes of war and devastation: the mass graves of Chang-An, after the CapCon troops had their way with the city; the streets of Northwind’s capital, defended at every square and intersection by grim-faced Highlanders caught between the hammer of the Steel Wolves and the anvil of Jack Farrell’s mercenaries; the placid streets of Geneva, untouched by war for centuries and even surviving the Word of Blake Jihad unscathed, stained in his nightmares by fresh blood. He revisited them all, night after night, and always the shadowy figure was there as well.
The images had more truth in them than paranoia; his waking hours were haunted by the same awareness. Whoever had pulled together and rewoven the raveled threads of his past had to have intended more than a one-time act of blackmail, however devastating to the recipient that act might have been. Crow’s enemy hadn’t been content to destroy the trust between him and the Countess of Northwind—the trust, and every good thing that might have grown from it. Sending the evidence directly to Tara Campbell would have sufficed for that.
Instead, his enemy had arranged for Crow to destroy Tara’s trust himself.
That alone was enough to convince him that gaining Northwind for Anastasia Kerensky had never been the shadow stranger’s goal. The Steel Wolves’ victory had been only a side benefit, or perhaps not important at all. He, Ezekiel Crow—Daniel Peterson, once of Liao—had been from the beginning the one real target.
In the dark hours of the night, Crow was forced to admit that the shadow stranger had done his work exceedingly well. He’d succeeded so thoroughly on Northwind that Crow was now engaged in the most desperate fight of his life—a struggle for his career, for his reputation, for his very identity—even if nobody on Terra knew of the battle but him.
It did not surprise Crow that he should be the target of so much concentrated enmity. It was perhaps even inevitable, now that the one thing that had kept his past safely buried for so many years—the fact that no one had ever spoken aloud the true name of the infamous Betrayer of Liao—had been taken away.
But a hatred that strong wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to show its face. Sooner or later, the hidden enemy would no longer be content with making Ezekiel Crow shove the knife into his own guts. He would want to step out of the shadows and twist it himself.
Until that day came, however, Crow would fight back—because it wasn’t in his nature to let himself be defined by either the words or the silences of others—and he would have bad dreams.
He woke from his most recent nightmare to the sound of the room phone ringing. Still half asleep, he reached out an arm and picked it up.
“Hello?”
“Ezekiel, my friend.”
The voice, recently familiar, was most definitely not that of a friend. Crow knew better than to use Alexei Suvorov’s name over an unsecured line. “What is it?” he asked.
“A word of timely warning, in regard to the package that my firm handled for you recently.”
Package, thought Crow. Tara Campbell’s messenger.
“Yes?”
“There have been recent attempts to redeliver it. You’ll be glad to hear that the latest one seems to have been successful.”
Glad? he thought. No, probably not.
“Did you get a signature from the recipient?” he asked.
“Yes, indeed.” Suvorov sounded like he was enjoying the conversation. If he was, Crow thought, it wouldn’t be surprising. Crow’s breakup of the Footfall smuggling ring had set the crime lord back several million stones, and had come close to bringing him to trial. “Paladin Jonah Levin.”
“Thank you.”
Crow hung up and let the wave of despair wash over him. Jonah Levin was the worst possible person to have obtained proof of Tara Campbell’s story. The Paladin from Kervil was, so far as Crow knew, the only genuinely incorruptible person
he had ever met. Levin wouldn’t be deterred from doing justice, and he would definitely not appreciate Crow having lied to him directly about the matter.
Maybe, Crow told himself, it’s time to start thinking about cutting your losses and getting out.
In the morning, he decided, he would go to Belgorod, and begin making arrangements for transporting one man and a Blade ’Mech to someplace else.
Someplace a long way from The Republic of the Sphere.
PART THREE
Coming to Judgment
30
Highlander Encampment
Belgorod, Terra
Prefecture X
April 3134; local spring
Ever since the news had came out that unknown DropShips were emerging at the Terran jump point, the Northwind Highlanders encamped near Belgorod had been on high alert. No one had as yet produced absolute confirmation that the incoming ships belonged to Anastasia Kerensky and the Steel Wolves, but no one was foolish enough, either, to believe that they didn’t. When word came of a second wave of unidentified DropShips following close on the track of the first, that made things even worse, since the most likely explanation was that the new ships were more Steel Wolves, being kept in reserve for a second-wave attack.
The uncertainty made for taut nerves all around. The arrival of slightly warmer weather only served to compound everyone’s troubles by turning the ground underfoot into sloppy, spongy mud with the consistency—and the tenacity—of very thick glue.
Evening after dinner on the eighth day found Will Elliot and his friends sitting at a table in the Sergeants’ Mess tent. By now, the three of them had evolved their own separate ways of dealing with the tension. Will was writing a letter home, Jock Gordon was mending a torn pocket flap on a set of fatigues, and Lexa McIntosh had taken her boots off and was painting her toenails dark blue and stenciling them with silver-glitter stars.
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