“You were close to your parents?”

“Not close enough, as it turned out,” he said. “I couldn’t get home in time to save them.”

“I can’t imagine…” On impulse, she laid her hand lightly on his arm for a moment before taking it away, and felt his muscles go tense under even that briefest of touches. “My parents are gone, too. Nothing as bad as—as what happened on Liao. But I still miss them.”

The moment was interrupted by a rumbling in the air and a rattling of the glass in the windows. A shadow passed across the clipped green lawn outside.

Ezekiel Crow froze, listening, then relaxed. “VTOL craft going over.”

“Coming down, more likely,” she said. “We’re not on any regular flight paths, and—unfortunately for our continued lack of interruptions—Headquarters knows that I’m here.”

“I don’t hear it landing.”

“There are a couple of densely wooded hills between here and the VTOL pad and that cuts down on the noise pollution and preserves the view.” She pressed the housekeeper’s call button set into the wall by the door. “Mrs. Danvers? Put some tea and some hearty sandwiches on hot standby. I think we’re going to have visitors.”

Their visitor, a quarter-hour later, turned out to be Colonel Michael Griffin. By the time the Colonel arrived in the solar, all evidence of the earlier working lunch had been cleared away and replaced by a porcelain tea service and a platter of sliced bread, meat, and cheese. Griffin filled his plate with the polite concentration of a man who had already missed lunch and was anticipating missing dinner.

“What brings you here in such haste, Colonel?” Tara asked.

“Strategic consultation,” he said. “That’s something best done face-to-face. There’s no telling who’s keeping an ear on electronic transmissions these days.”

Ezekiel Crow looked at him darkly. “Are you suggesting to the Countess that there might be traitors on Northwind?”

Colonel Griffin paused and gave Crow a level glance over the top edge of his tea cup. “I work in intelligence, my lord. Assuming traitors is part of my job.”

Tara, listening, suppressed a sigh. The two of them were doing it again, bristling up at each other like dogs; she wondered if they even realized she noticed.

As if I didn’t have enough work to do, she thought, without the two people I most depend on pushing and sniping at each other every time they’re together in the same room. That was one of the reasons I brought Crow to Castle Northwind to work in the first place, to get him out of Griffin’s way.

Oil on troubled waters time, Tara, she told herself. It’s all part of the job.

“It doesn’t even need a traitor to mess things up,” she said. “Just somebody on-planet with different loyalties or a different agenda. And even with the HPG network down, we still get enough travelers for there to be plenty of those.”

Griffin looked somewhat mollified. “It keeps me busy, I can tell you.” He sipped at his tea. “Today’s a case in point.”

“How’s that?” she asked.

“We’ve got a DropShip in at the port, and it’s brought along the usual pile of mail and news-discs.” The Colonel opened the leather valise he’d brought with him and took out a disc. “Including this one from General Davies on Quentin. Is there a player in here?”

Tara nodded at the polished wood tri-vee cabinet set against the far wall next to the call button. “In there.”

Griffin opened the cabinet and put the disc into the player. The tri-vee filled with images of Quentin, fading into and replacing one another—the DropShip landing field; a ship descending, the image cut off suddenly in a blaze of light; a Tundra Wolf BattleMech, seen in jerky, narrow-field motion from inside a fast-moving vehicle; armored infantry, firing Gauss rifles at something outside of the image. Ship and ’Mech and infantry armor all bore Steel Wolf insignia.

The images continued, now with a voiceover running along with them.

“General Gwyn Davies, Commander of the Highlander forces on Quentin, speaking. Two weeks ago, Quentin came under attack by elements of the Steel Wolf faction under the command of Star Colonel Ulan. Their apparent target was the industrial district in Port Frome, since factories there produce the necessary elements for conversion of Agricultural and ForestryMechs into battleworthy configurations. It is my pleasure at this time to report that the Wolves were repulsed after sharp fighting; the rest of this disc contains full intelligence summaries and battle data on the conflict.”

The end of the brief speech coincided with the cube display’s final image: Steel Wolf DropShips rising from the landing field, and fadeout. The image loop started to repeat, Colonel Griffin hit the stop button, and Crow and Tara and Griffin looked at one another.

“Well,” said Tara, after a long silence. “We’ve been wondering for months exactly who we were going to have to fight. I think that now we know.”

21

Castle Northwind

Northwind

April, 3133; local spring

Several hours after Colonel Michael Griffin had departed from Castle Northwind, Tara Campbell and Ezekiel Crow remained at work in the solar chamber, burning the midnight oil—or at least, the midnight electrons. Clouds had darkened the skies over the castle as the afternoon drew on toward sunset, and nightfall brought with it a fast-moving spring storm. Thunder rumbled outside the windows, and strong gusts of wind dashed heavy raindrops against the leaded-glass panes. Flashes of lightning illuminated the dark, lowering clouds and the wind-tossed trees on the mountain slopes beneath.

Tara waved a hand at the weather outside. “I used to love watching bad weather from this room when I was a little girl.”

Another flash of lightning lit up the turbulent waters of the lake below the castle.

“It’s certainly dramatic,” Ezekiel Crow acknowledged.

“I always liked how solid the castle felt, no matter what was going on outside.” She laughed. “Then I got older, and found out that the weather we have around here is nothing. Down by Tara—the city, I mean; do you have any idea how annoyed I still am at my parents, sometimes?—the summer storms can tear down buildings.”

“Not good weather to fight in, to be sure.”

She sighed, and turned back to the papers and display pads on the table. “I know. But unless Radick and the Steel Wolves exercise a lot more patience than intelligence reports give them credit for, we’re probably going to have to.”

Ezekiel Crow picked up a data pad with the latest manpower reports. “At least the on-planet elements of the Regiments are coming up to full strength. That was a good thought, to start the recruitment drives.”

“Thanks.” She could feel herself blushing, and turned her head away to hide it—that was the curse of a fair skin, that every passing change of color showed up like neon. “When Katana Tormark left, I was afraid I was going to drop the ball completely, because I knew how unprepared I was for this job. All I could do was keep my chin up and hope that nobody else noticed how scared I was.”

Ezekiel Crow gave her a curious look. “It never occurred to you to decline the promotion?”

“If I’d thought that there was anybody else available with the right combination of family and training—then, trust me, I would have turned this job down in a heartbeat. But there wasn’t.”

“So it was a matter of doing your duty to The Republic?”

“Something like that, yes,” she said. “I know it sounds sentimental, but—”

“There’s nothing wrong with feeling a sentimental attachment to one’s home. But it’s unusual to find someone thinking about The Republic of the Sphere in that fashion.”

“It shouldn’t be unusual, though,” she said. “Making it not be unusual was what Devlin Stone was trying to do in the first place. Encouraging immigration, breaking up the factions—”