Darwin looked amused. “Courtship by proxy? They do say he wants to found a new Great House.”

“Whatever he wants from me, it is not that,” she stated definitely. “He has never met me, and will not have heard of me before I challenged Kal Radick.”

Though he might, she thought, have heard of Tassa Kay. Anastasia had not bothered to keep a low profile when she was traveling—and fighting for The Republic of the Sphere—as Tassa, and if Bannson proved either clever enough or well-informed enough to link the two names based on intelligence reports alone, he was even more dangerous than she had thought.

“Jacob Bannson is playing a chess game for power in The Republic of the Sphere,” she said, “and he wants me to be one of his pieces. But it is not going to work.”

“No?” asked Darwin.

“I will not be a pawn in anybody else’s game. Not while I have the ability to be a queen in my own.”

“Bannson is not someone it pays to have for an enemy.”

“He does his fighting with money,” Anastasia said.

“He is ’Mech qualified. That takes more than money.” Darwin sounded thoughtful. The floppy cloth brim of his borrowed tourist-hiker’s hat overshadowed his eyes, making it difficult for Anastasia to judge his expression.

The whaleboat was bouncing about harder now; the wind had picked up some, and the waves had curls of white on their tops. Anastasia swallowed and kept talking. “You certainly sound impressed by him.” Her voice came out sharper than she had intended.

“No,” said Darwin. “But I do not wish to see you underestimating him.” He paused and looked away. This time she thought he might deliberately be using the shadow of his hat brim to hide the emotion on his face. “The way that Kal Radick underestimated you.”

That was direct enough as warnings went, Anastasia thought. Kal Radick was dead. She had killed the former Galaxy Commander and leader of the Steel Wolves with her bare hands in a Trial of Possession, and had taken his rank and the Wolves both. She had been able to do so in large part because Radick had not seen her as dangerous until moments before the end.

“Tell me about Bannson, then,” she said.

Jacob Bannson’s business activities in The Republic of the Sphere had never affected distant Arc Royal, and Anastasia had heard of him only in the vaguest of general terms. If the tycoon had decided to mix himself in the Steel Wolves’ affairs, however, she definitely needed to learn more. Such a talk would have the added advantage of distracting her from the threat of motion sickness brought on by the whaleboat’s erratic motion through the choppy water. Ian Murchison had suggested that she prepare herself with a medication taken in advance; she had waved the idea aside on the grounds that a person who was qualified to ride a ’Mech would not be susceptible. She thought now that she should have listened to the medic in the first place.

“Bannson,” said Nicholas Darwin in a thoughtful tone. He looked away for a moment, out toward the western horizon, where Balfour-Douglas #47 was now visible as a distant gray blur. Oceangoing scavenger birds wheeled in the air above it, small black dots against the blue. “Do you want the stuff that gets broadcast about him on the tri-vids, or the stories that get told about him on the streets?”

“Both.”

“All right. The short official version first. He was born on St. Andre—the family was not in rags, but they were not citizens either. They had a small business.”

“What kind?”

He shrugged. “Selling something, I think. Jacob Bannson left his school without graduating—this is an important thing on some worlds in The Republic because without graduation papers it is hard to find employment—in order to work for his parents. The business had some kind of trouble, but Bannson turned it around inside a year, and ended up owning all his competition while he was at it. After that, he kept on going.”

So far, Anastasia thought, she was hearing only the biography of a shopkeeper, writ large. There was nothing about this story that could explain a man who cultivated the image of a raider of old; nothing that could account for the weight she had already learned was given to his name. “What does the street gossip say?”

“That the competitor Bannson took over was the same one who had almost forced his parents’ business into bankruptcy. And that he did not just take over the man’s company, he ruined him outright—left him stripped too naked to start over.”

“A man who doesn’t believe in sparing his enemies, then.” Anastasia Kerensky felt inclined to approve. “Go on.”

“He had made enemies,” Darwin said, “growing so wealthy so fast. They accused him of something—of breaking The Republic’s rules for how business ought to be conducted, I am not sure how. All anybody knows is that inside three years all of his accusers were found guilty of even worse crimes than mere rule breaking, and that Bannson supplied the evidence. After that, nobody dared to cross him. It took The Republic of the Sphere itself to stop him from expanding his financial empire into Prefecture III.”

“He lost very little time making up for it once the HPG net went down,” Anastasia said. The whaleboat was approaching the oil rig now. Nicholas Darwin steered the craft deftly between the platform’s giant metal legs and into the calmer, shadowed waters beneath. Anastasia drew a deep breath and released it. Then she asked, “Do you think he could have done it himself? Brought the net down on purpose to take advantage of the disruption?”

“Nobody knows,” said Darwin. “And nobody wants to ask.”

10

Castle Northwind

Northwind

Prefecture III

December 3133; local winter

Captain Tara Bishop had to admit that her new post as aide-de-camp to the Countess of Northwind had its benefits—the present opportunity to spend a long working weekend as a guest in the Countess’s family castle being one of them. Castle Northwind was a large gray stone structure, unabashedly pseudomedieval in design; the Countess had described it earlier to Captain Bishop as looking like the combined good-parts version of Edinburgh Castle, Carnarvon, and the Tower of London, with all the modern amenities built in.

Today the Countess was in residence, along with Paladin Ezekiel Crow. Their personal banners flew from the castle’s parapets along with the banners of Northwind and of the Regiments. And where the Countess was, there her aide was also. The three of them were at work in the castle’s lesser hall, a large rectangular room with a vaulted timber ceiling. Comfortable upholstered chairs and a long worktable of polished dark wood had been set up in front of the big granite hearth, and a wood fire blazed in the massive cast-iron grate.

Off to one side another table, also of dark wood, supported a row of silver warming dishes with domed lids. The warming dishes held a selection of breakfast delicacies brought up from the kitchen by the castle’s resident staff, all of whom seemed genuinely happy to have the Countess and her aide and a Paladin of The Sphere in temporary residence. Captain Bishop supposed that with the Countess living in the New Barracks, or even off world, for most of the year, the lives of the castle staff lacked interest a great deal of the time. They would be pleased at the chance to show off their expertise to strangers.

Captain Bishop was pleased as well. She was not so long away from Addicks that she failed to appreciate a post that came with the choice of kippered silverlings or baked eggs in saffron sauce for a casual working breakfast, not to mention the choice between a bottomless pot of finest imported Capellan black tea and an equally bottomless urn of Terran dark roast coffee.

At the moment she was working on her first mug of coffee—the Paladin and the Countess didn’t share her taste for the beverage, preferring the more traditional tea—and listening to a discussion of the problems inherent in a postwar economic recovery. This weekend was dedicated to administrative work, and specifically to the ongoing cleanup process after the past summer’s military campaign.