Erik tossed his own napkin down with a casualness he did not feel and walked with forced nonchalance to the restroom. It was painted as brightly and warmly as the rest of the restaurant, with burned orange tiles running up the walls and a pattern of red clay bricks decorating the stall walls. The same light guitar music piped in through ceiling speakers. There was also a burned-hair smell that didn’t seem to belong.
He glanced beneath the stall door, saw too many feet, and kicked the door hard, breaking the lock. He leaned in to see the collapsed forms of his men resting up against the back wall, the two men Erik had let precede him into the restaurant. Still alive, with taser burns charred into the small hairs behind their ears.
They had been lured or forced from their table and disposed of without anyone noticing. Not even him.
Splashes of cold water woke them up enough that Erik could leave them without the next customer walking in and raising an alarm. Then the young nobleman left the restroom and went immediately to the front register to pay for his meal. And Farrell’s, as it turned out. Erik used hard currency, and tried to maintain a calm countenance.
Especially when he returned to his table and pocketed the black business card.
Just in case.
8
The Senate does not want proof. They want to bury their own perfidy in a closed-door committee! Yes, Geoffrey Mallowes was treated below his station as a senator and peer of the realm. He was also treated far above his status as a facilitator for assassination and treason.
—Exarch Jonah Levin, “Questions & Answers,” Terra, 9 February 3135
Terra
The Republic of the Sphere
16 February 3135
Geneva woke early.
At three in the morning, the Hall of Government stirred to life. Secretaries and political aides opened up offices, gathered together documents and data crystals, many while on headset links to confirm the day’s appointments. A nervous kind of energy bled through the halls, and would not dissipate until hours after the arrival of the ministers, the legislators and knights who minded The Republic’s business.
Exarch Jonah Levin hadn’t yet gone to bed.
Crossing the Rotunda, letting himself through the velvet ropes that guarded a set of open doors, Jonah found the Chamber of Paladins brightly lit and eerily empty. A high, domed room, it possessed a mixture of senatorial grandeur and Arthurian legend: white stone and blue-gray marble, runners of plush, crimson carpet, the gallery, large enough to seat all three-hundred-plus knights of the Sphere. On the main floor seventeen separate stations were arranged in a half-circle facing the exarch’s dock—the stations from which Jonah’s peers had elected him to The Republic’s highest post barely two months earlier.
And only Gareth Sinclair occupied this impressive space. He was waiting, standing before his private booth and tapping halfheartedly at the glowing blue holographic keyboard, or using his light stylus to occasionally draw commands right onto the screen.
“All is in place?” Jonah asked, his voice amplified by the chamber’s acoustics. The question rolled around the main floor.
Paladin Sinclair nodded, his back still to the door, and Jonah.
“Then may I ask what in Stone’s name you are still doing here?” He put a bit more bite into his voice as he stepped onto the main floor and strode toward his youngest paladin.
Gareth regained a measure of martial bearing, suddenly aware whom he addressed. The young man pivoted away from his station, facing Jonah with respectful attention.
“Heather did not leave much to chance,” Sinclair reported. “I’m not sure she fully trusts . . . my abilities. The crowds will be in place in three hours. I’m monitoring the latest reports from here.”
Jonah frowned. “This is a closed system. Paladins in chamber are not to have direct contact with the outside.” At least, that was the way he remembered his own orientation as a new paladin.
“Not so much. There are emergency protocols built into the building’s data center that allow this room to be converted into a military command post. I tapped into that and slaved my office console to this station.” He shrugged. “I’m interrupted less in this room.”
Jonah stepped up next to the younger man, stealing a glance at the work. Yes, it displayed reports of police dispatches regarding the plans to cordon off several city intersections in Geneva in preparation for today’s activities. It bothered him that Sinclair had circumvented security.
“Though not the first,” he muttered.
“I’m sorry, Exarch?”
Jonah faced his man. He saw the telling signs of long hours and hard decisions on Gareth’s face. Shadows beneath the eyes and the bloodshot gaze. Reddish-blond stubble. Slumped shoulders.
“I said, you are not the first to bypass the chamber’s security. In December’s conclave, during the election debate, I received . . . anonymous communications.”
He almost let it go at that. It was information Jonah had trusted only to his ghost paladin. But, damn it, he had to start trusting more of his people at some point.
“Threats, Gareth. From among the paladins.”
“Surely not?” Gareth started as if he’d been slapped. “I mean, sure, Anders Kessel was running roughshod over me through our private messages, but maybe someone from outside . . .”
Jonah leaned in to the console, tapping at the floating keypad to override Gareth’s security with his own clearance. Easier this way. Slipping through his own security walls, the exarch brought up the scandalvid headlines that Jonah had saved to his private files. Senator Geoffrey Mallowes “held in an undisclosed location,” the caption read. The once-proud man looked harried and broken, wearing a prison-transport shock collar.
“I’ve seen it,” Gareth admitted.
“The entire world has seen it.” Jonah fixed the younger man with a withering glare. “It will be the headline on a dozen other planets by week’s end. My point is, that photo was leaked to the press by a paladin.”
That broke through Sinclair’s stoic reserve. The younger man braced himself up to boot-camp attention. “Is there something you are trying to say? Sir.”
“Just this. Quit feeling sorry for yourself. What we’re doing has to be done, and there aren’t many I trust to see it through. And if Heather GioAvanti did not trust your abilities, I promise you, she would have made any reservations known to me and you would be the one chasing rumors of a new Liao offensive on Kansu, not Janella Lakewood.”
To be fair, Gareth seemed to duly consider every word before replying. And his voice lost its token display of offense.
“I guess I have been feeling sorry for myself. But this . . . it feels—”
“Wrong?” Jonah finished for the young paladin. “Stone’s blood, Gareth! You think I don’t feel that? But what choice did Mallowes and his cronies leave us? Leaving aside, for the moment, that Mallowes tried to have me killed and was certainly involved in the murder of Victor Steiner-Davion, the great man you were considered worthy enough to replace, he led a conspiracy to control thought and overthrow The Republic. It is nothing less than that.”
“I know, I know. And I’ve nothing but contempt left for the man, believe me, Jonah. I wish our families had never crossed paths.”
Jonah stifled a weary smile. Hearing Gareth inadvertently call him by name had lifted the weight from the exarch’s shoulders for a brief instant. That kind of camaraderie was now missing from his life. But he clamped down on it quickly and smothered it under the blanket of duty.
He needed Gareth focused, not familiar.
“We all wish a lot of things,” he said. “Doesn’t mean we get to make the choice we like. Heather put together a solid operation. You need to hold up your end, and you need to do it without flinching.”
“You’re asking me to sandbag a friend. One of our own.”
An unavoidable evil, at this late hour, but not one to hang around the neck of his most inexperienced paladin. So Jonah slipped a bit more responsibility o
nto his own plate instead.
“I’m not asking,” he said.
Sir Conner Rhys-Monroe leaned over the partition and into the cab of his father’s Excelsior stretched hovercraft. He stared through tinted glass at the mob scene ahead. Since the December riots, all Knights of the Sphere on Terra had seen more than their share of civilian protests. This looked to be a large one. Conner counted hundreds of protestors at a glance. Maybe a thousand all told.
He tapped the limo driver on the shoulder.
“Ease back, Charles. Buy us some time.”
Conner ducked back into the rear. The hover-limo’s spacious passenger compartment was large enough for six men, with deep leather seats and plenty of leg room, but at the moment he shared it only with the senator. Gerald Monroe dug into a minibar freezer for a scoop of shaved ice, adding it to his morning drink of herbal supplements and fresh fruit. The scent of bananas and citrus was strong, nearly enough to overpower the senator’s aftershave, and Conner never tired of needling his father how that violated the Ares Conventions, articles one and six, governing the use of chemical warfare agents.
The joke wasn’t funny today.
“I’d feel better if you’d take the underground entrance,” the knight said, sitting with his back to the driver, facing his father.
“In seventeen years, Conner, I’ve never been ashamed of the public’s eye.”
“You damn well should be.”
It slipped out before he could guard his tongue. That was the wrong way to convince his father of anything. He knew it. Senator Gerald Monroe was also Viscount Markab—which made Conner a lord by official title—and he set great store in the family’s honor. Always had.
This scandal was hard enough on his father without Conner breaking faith with the family. But . . .
“Influencing military officials at the highest levels? Coercion?” Conner swallowed back the tight knot in his throat. “Conspiracy, Father?”
Monroe nodded, winced, clearly at odds with his own behavior. “The decisions I made, I made in good faith. You know that, Conner.” He stiffened his back. “I won’t hide my head now.”
“I’m more worried about your ass, Father.” Conner looked over his shoulder. Even through the Excelsior’s soundproofing he heard the chants of angry protests. At least a thousand. “They sound upset.”
“And rightly so. They believe their government failed them. Where else do people go when they can’t trust normal channels to address their grievances?”
Not after his father, preferably. But Conner did not argue with the senator. The headstrong man might be right, might be wrong, but either way he was emphatically so. Nothing ever dissuaded him once he set his course, which was about the only way a round-eyed liberal—even if a viscount—got himself elected from the otherwise conservative, Asian-centric population of Markab.
Of course, marrying a local businesswoman with samurai blood in her family hadn’t hurt, either.
Certainly, it made for an interesting family mix. Conner had inherited darkish skin and slight folds at the corners of his eyes from Asai Rhys, but he shared more looks in common with his father. Good height and build, piercing, peridot eyes, the same light brown hair. At seventy, Gerald Monroe was finally going gray on the sides and wore his hair conservatively combed. Conner, half his father’s age, preferred a tight Mohawk that heralded his flair for the dramatic. No one had told him that being a Knight of the Sphere meant being dull.
Then again, today’s excitement he hadn’t bargained for.
The protestors had real people power behind them, massing out in front of Geneva’s senate building, sweeping in a living ocean of angry faces right up to the marble steps where a squad of large men in green fatigues waited, then around them and up to the gray, stately columns on the building’s portico. Some protestors waved placards. Most waved their fists, pumping them to chants of “Stone the Senate” and “One nation, one law,” among others.
There were a few pro-Senate islands weathering those turbulent seas, but they looked weary and besieged after a morning of being shouted down, shoved back, and generally failing in the face of the exarch’s popular support. Of course, such an immediate groundswell of grassroots strength did not just happen, and did not come cheaply.
Conner smelled the work of paladins in this.
“Bump the curb, Charles. Put us right up against the main steps.”
Gerald Monroe smiled tightly at his son’s concern. “That’s illegal,” he reminded the knight.
Like the senator had any room to talk. “I’ll take the hit.”
The crowd saw the Excelsior, of course, and swarmed to either side of the executive hovercraft, squinting through tinted ferroglass to see who had the nerve to arrive out front. One of the small pro-Senate packs, cheering and waving signs that read NOBLE VICTORY! and EXARCH, NOT MONARCH! anchored itself to the left fender of the Excelsior as the lower skirting touched the curb.
Charles goosed the lift fans, slipping the hovercraft over the curb and up onto the Mall walk. Pro-Senate supporters helped clear a path to the steps, where the men in fatigues separated them from the worst of the mob and then formed a tight cordon around the car’s rear door.
“Friends of yours?” Senator Monroe asked.
Conner nodded. Gauged the crowd’s reaction to the unarmored infantrymen. Still a great deal of anger out there.
“I should have ordered them out in battlesuits,” he muttered. Maybe call out some Pegasus scouts while he was at it, and slip into the cockpit of his Rifleman. “Stay put Charles,” he ordered the driver. “This one’s on me.”
The Excelsior’s gull-wing door cracked open, and Conner was first onto the Mall walk. His arrival set back several of the protestors, who obviously had not expected a man in knight’s uniform. He wore the formal steel gray, with scarlet piping and the gold shield on each arm and a cape of rank falling down to the back of his knees, in scarlet and gold as well.
Using the moment of confusion (and intimidation) to his advantage, Conner helped his father from the back of the hovercraft and escorted him quickly up the marble steps and past the high, thick columns that flanked the Senate entry. He half-expected a violent charge, a call for rope and a search for the nearest tall tree, unarmored infantrymen notwithstanding, but the mob was mad, not murderous. They let the two men through without any trouble.
Conner breathed easier. Until Paladin Gareth Sinclair met them at the door to Gerald Monroe’s office.
“Senator Monroe,” the paladin said by way of greeting. He lounged against the wall, making himself comfortable. There was little respect in the title. “Enjoy your morning commute?”
“You set that up,” Conner accused the other man. At Gareth’s glare, he added, “Sir.”
It was hard thinking of Gareth as a paladin and therefore his superior. His advancement was too recent, coming on the eve of the election of the new exarch. They had served together for so long, first as knights-errant and then as knights. Both were from noble families. They had more in common than they had differences. Or so Conner had thought.
“Of course we did,” Gareth admitted, levering himself away from the wall. He sounded surprised that Conner could think otherwise. “If the Senate thinks they can duck their head into the sand and ride this out, perhaps a few demonstrations will convince them to cooperate.”
“Convince?” Gerald Monroe asked, drawing on his seventy years politicking to infuse his voice with absolute contempt. “Or threaten? That circus out there”—he waved his hand dismissively—“that is not public debate. It’s the preliminary to a police state.”
It was a strong statement. But Conner, at least, saw the fear in his father’s eyes.
Gareth must have as well. He struck fast, like a shark sensing blood.
“And were you this concerned with the separation of powers when you attacked the foundation of The Republic’s national defense? Or were you only thinking about yourself? Senator? You compromised our security. You’ve called
into question the loyalty of every officer and knight touched by one of your programs, and I believe you did this for no other reason than a selfish gathering of power for personal gain.”
“It was a mistake,” the senator whispered, crestfallen.
“It was a mistake to begin, Senator Monroe. Now it’s murder. Victor Steiner-Davion was a well-loved figure throughout The Republic. How do you think the people of Markab will react to news of your complicity in his death?”
“I will explain that I had nothing—”
The paladin cut him off with a violent slash of his hand. “We are not giving you the chance to explain. No appeal to the people for forgiveness. Paladin Heather GioAvanti has four knights on Markab already working the media and the local government to begin your impeachment, sir. When you stand Noble’s Court, not if, you will do so without the added status as a senator of The Republic.”
“Gareth!” Conner stepped in to head off the building storm. The young knight knew what resources the exarch and any of his paladins could bring to bear. But his father did not yet see the danger.
“I’ll fight you,” Monroe threatened, trumping his son by sheer volume. “I have friends and deep resources on Markab. When I reach them, you’ll find it won’t be so easy.”
“Senator, you are under the mistaken impression that you will be allowed to leave Terra. You are under military investigation, sir. The headlining charge is treason. ‘The Republic of the Sphere at the time being in a state of war against outside nations . . .’ All activity which undermines the strength of the military shall be seized upon and tried at the discretion of the military.”
“But I had nothing to do with Paladin Steiner-Davion’s death!”
“And why do you believe that matters?”
A hollow sensation opened in the pit of Conner’s stomach. Paladin GioAvanti—and the exarch—were willing to go that far? Stretching evidence to browbeat the senator into submission? He watched his father turn ashen, open his mouth and then close it when nothing came out, the great speaker stumped for words for perhaps the first time in his life as The Republic’s executive branch rolled over him like a juggernaut.
Sword of Sedition Page 8
