“To see the back of me, as it turns out,” Will said. The envelope turned out to hold more than he’d anticipated; Angus had thrown in a good-performance bonus. Conscience money, Will supposed. Well, he’d take it. “There’s only enough work these days for one guide, and my last name isn’t Macallan.”

“That isn’t fair.”

“Nobody’s pretending it is.” He put on his parka and slipped the brown envelope into an inner pocket before sealing up the front. “Take my advice and marry Robbie,” he said. “That way you’ll be safe if Old Angus starts worrying that there won’t be enough business left to pay the office help.”

3

The New Barracks

City of Tara, Northwind

November, 3132; local winter

Tara Campbell exited the ’Mech simulator as rapidly as possible, stripping out of the bulky cooling vest almost before her feet hit the floor of the armory.

She was glad she’d had the foresight to bring the plain dark changing robe with her. If the news Colonel Michael Griffin brought was important enough to drag the Prefect of Prefecture III out of a training simulation, then she didn’t have time to go back to the locker room and change—and she didn’t care to hold an emergency conference with the man while wearing only a snug pair of trousers and an undershirt gone nearly transparent with perspiration. Such an encounter would lack dignity, and a Prefect whom everybody—including the Prefect herself—suspected of being too young for such a high position needed all the dignity that she could scrape together.

She pulled on the robe and belted it tight around her waist, then hurried across the polished floor of the armory to meet Colonel Griffin. She would have preferred the chance to shower first, because even in a simulator a MechWarrior inevitably worked up a heavy sweat. But the officer had said that his news was urgent, and she wanted to make it clear to everyone that she took such messages seriously. Filling Duchess Katana Tormark’s elegant samurai shoes was going to be hard enough without alienating the very people who were supposed to be helping her do the job.

Colonel Griffin was a lean man with close-trimmed light brown hair and a brushy but well-maintained mustache. His uniform was fresh and crisply pressed, and the medals on the breast of his tunic spoke of an eminently respectable though not flamboyant service career. In the yellow sunlight that slanted down from the windows high under the armory’s vaulted ceiling, he could have passed for an artist’s depiction of old style military spit and polish. Seeing him, Tara felt even more conscious than before of her own sweat-flattened hair and informal garb.

She put her chin up. She was a MechWarrior and a Campbell of Northwind, whatever she was wearing, and no mere Colonel of infantry was going to stare her out of countenance—though she suspected already that it was not Griffin’s position as a field commander that had brought him to the armory this morning, but his secondary assignment as the officer in charge of the Regiment’s intelligence network here on Northwind.

“Colonel Griffin,” she said, giving him her most practiced gracious smile. A precocious childhood as the diplomatic community’s poster darling, she reflected, had its occasional uses even in her current position. When she absolutely had to, she could charm almost anybody. “I’m afraid the simulator isn’t very good about picking up external voices—you said something about important news?”

“There’s a DropShip coming into the spaceport in a few days,” Colonel Griffin said. “They sent word ahead. They’ve got a Paladin on board, coming to help us out here on Northwind.”

Tara felt her smile turn cynical, and couldn’t help but feel a twinge of regret at her own reaction. There had been a time when word of a Paladin’s imminent arrival would have caused her to feel a surge of anticipation that was almost hero worship, even though the newcomer’s identity remained as yet unknown. But that was before Katana Tormark’s betrayal had left her with the responsibility for keeping peace and good order in Prefecture III—under the current circumstances, such a gift from the Exarch, coming unasked-for as it did, was likely to prove in the end a double-edged sword.

“‘Just one Paladin?’” she said, quoting the age-old joke.

“‘Just one planet,’” Griffin said, finishing it.

She relaxed a little; the Colonel apparently shared her decidedly mixed feelings on the subject of unanticipated aid from that quarter.

“I don’t suppose the Exarch and the Senate have bothered to let us know exactly what problems this Paladin is supposed to be helping us out with,” she said.

If the problem that had caused Exarch Damien Redburn to send a Paladin to Northwind turned out to be only Katana Tormark’s unanticipated defection to the Dragon’s Fury, Tara decided that she was going to be more than a little angry. Redburn might as well have pinned a sign on the new Prefect’s back saying KICK ME—I’M INEXPERIENCED! Any help a Paladin might give to Northwind in the immediate future would be paid for with years of diminished credibility for Prefect Tara Campbell afterward.

“Nothing official has come in so far,” Colonel Griffin said. “I expect that the Paladin is carrying his instructions with him, and plans to brief us all upon his arrival.”

“I’ll just bet he does,” Tara said.

She caught a strand of her hair between her fingers and twisted it thoughtfully. She’d picked up the habit as a child, when her wavy auburn locks had made her a poster photographers’ darling, and the nervous gesture had survived into her angry adolescence, when she had cropped her hair rebelliously short and dyed it platinum blond. Now, in her adulthood, she still had short, spiky blond hair—and in periods of stress, she still played with it while she thought. “You said that nothing official has come in.”

“That’s right.”

“Unofficially… what do our own intelligence people think is going on?”

“Based on rumors that we’ve heard about trouble brewing on Towne,” Griffin said, “and taking into account our own recent clashes with supporters of the Dragon’s Fury on Addicks, our people think the Exarch is worried that somebody is going to make a try for Terra by going through Northwind.”

“Considering that those of us who actually live here have been worried about the same thing ever since this business started,” Tara said, “that’s no surprise.”

She drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to send out her irritation and paranoia along with it. Damn the fanatics, whoever they were, who had wrecked the HPG network and crippled The Republic of the Sphere; damn Katana Tormark for abandoning The Republic in favor of allegiance to a faction that Devlin Stone’s years of labor were supposed to have made obsolete; and while she was at it, damn the Senate and Damien Redburn for saddling her with this ambiguous gift.

After a moment, the anger faded, and she went on. “All right. We’ll assume—for public consumption, at least—that the Senate and the Exarch have recognized Northwind’s special position as part of Terra’s first line of defense, and that the presence of this Paladin signifies a recognition on Terra’s part of Northwind’s importance.”

Colonel Griffin looked curious. “Do you really believe all that?”

“Not particularly,” she said. “Which is why I want our people to keep working on it. If they’ve got any ideas about which factions constitute potential threats—other than ‘every single one of them, because they’ve all gone crazy’—I want to have the reports waiting on my desk by the time the Paladin makes landfall.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Colonel Griffin said.

“Good.” She pulled on her hair again, thinking hard. “Another thing. First impressions are important. The governor is undoubtedly going to have an official meet-and-greet for our illustrious visitor; but the Northwind Highlanders need to have their own official reception for him as well, just to make sure everybody understands that—Paladin or no Paladin—the Regiment is the host on this planet, and he’s the guest.”