“Sir!” The pilot was panting—as much from nerves, Griffin judged, as from exertion. “Some sort of jamming burst—I couldn’t get through—”

“We know, son,” Griffin said. “All our comms are down hard as well. Any pursuit?”

“No, sir. I don’t think the Wolf spotted me.”

“Or he had other things on his mind.” Griffin frowned. If I were Anastasia Kerensky, he thought, and I’d just figured out that my secret base wasn’t so secret any more, what would I do? Put that way, it was easy. “She’s going to move up the schedule for the main attack.”

Lieutenant Jones was nodding. “It makes sense. But move it up to when?”

Griffin drew his breath to answer, but was stopped by an outcry from among the troops. He turned his head and saw one of the sergeants—Gordon, that was it, a big man, head and shoulders taller than most of his fellows—shouting and pointing out to sea.

Very quietly, at his shoulder, he heard Lieutenant Jones say, “Damn.”

Out on the seaward horizon, the water was boiling. White froth churned the surface of the water so furiously that the naked eye could see the tumult from the shore, and great billowing clouds of steam ascended toward heaven. Then, slowly, rising up like Leviathan out of the deeps, came a great silver shape, shouldering the water aside and lifting itself upward as it pulled free of the ocean’s grip …a DropShip.

And another, and another, and another, coming up from the water like bubbles and dwindling into the upper air.

And Griffin knew—because he would have done the same, if he had the Steel Wolves and their DropShips and, for a few hours only, the element of surprise—where it was that Anastasia Kerensky was going. “Owain.”

“Sir.” His aide-de-camp looked stunned. They all did; Griffin suspected that his own expression at the moment wasn’t much more reassuring. It couldn’t be helped; they had to act now and stop shaking later.

“Come with me. We’re going to have to abandon the Koshi until a tech can come out here from Fort Barrett with the start-up codes. I’m going on ahead in the Balac.”

“Sir?”

“We’re going to have to strip Fort Barrett naked, Lieutenant, and get a relief force ready to move out as soon as possible. Anastasia Kerensky isn’t going to mess around with landing on the salt flats this time. She’s going to be heading straight for the main DropPort—and with our comms down, nobody in Tara is going to know that she’s coming.”

31

New Barracks

Tara

Northwind

February 3134; local winter

Ezekiel Crow was still sitting at the dining table in his quarters. The bulky envelope with its deadly, betraying address lay unopened on the table by his elbow.

He didn’t know how long he had been sitting there, not moving, not even thinking—unless you could count the prison of unwilling memory as thought. But as he came back, slowly, to the present time and place, he saw that the sky outside the windows was dark now; there had been daylight left when he arrived home and found the envelope waiting for him.

He hadn’t opened it yet. He had been afraid, when fear for his life was another thing he thought that he’d left behind in the ruins. But an envelope coming to him bearing that name and that address could not possibly contain anything good.

He had cut all ties to his former life when he changed his name and left Chang-An. He had never looked back. There shouldn’t have been anything left in The Republic that could connect Ezekiel Crow, Paladin of the Sphere, with the infamous—and never found or identified—Betrayer of Liao.

Shouldn’t have been, the voice of reason pointed out, doesn’t mean that there wasn’t. You might as well go ahead and look. There’s no point in putting it off any longer.

Reluctantly, he opened the envelope and took out the contents. The first thing to meet his fingers was a sealed letter, which he set aside. He’d have plenty of time later to look at the blackmailer’s bill. Besides the letter, the envelope contained documentation: photographs, medical records, copies of old files and old news stories, and a slim, paperbound book.

The last item puzzled him until he looked closer. It was nonfiction, a bit of autobiography from a publishing house with its headquarters in the Capellan Confederation. Based on the jacket copy, the author—now a popular novelist of some local fame in the CapCon worlds—had been a minor intelligence officer during the Confederation-Republic conflicts of recent decades, including the period covering the Liao Massacre. Like many another old soldier, he had taken advantage of newly relaxed classification levels to revisit the wars of his youth.

The relevant section of the memoir proved easy to find. After all, Crow knew the sequence of events well. Yes, there it was: “…secured the cooperation, for a fee, of a disgruntled junior officer in the planetary militia, one Daniel Petersen, in allowing the initial DropShip landing…”

A wave of strong irritation briefly washed out Crow’s fear. I was not disgruntled. I had a plan.

A plan that didn’t work.

It should have worked. The Republic had been ignoring CapCon terrorist activity on Liao for years—“too low-level to risk destabilizing the local situation,” they said. A full-scale armed incursion would have been something they couldn’t just shove into the closet and wish away. If the CapCons hadn’t triple-loaded the initial DropShip, Liao’s own defense forces could have held them at the port.

You took their money, said the voice of reason, and you didn’t expect them to cheat? You deserved to have your plan blown to pieces on the first day.

Crow told the voices in his head to stop arguing. His old stupidity—and he agreed, he had been amazingly stupid when he was young—didn’t matter anymore. The path leading to the fatal discovery was clear. His enemy, whoever that might be, had chanced to read this book, and had caught the passing reference to Daniel Peterson—and had pulled on that single thread until the whole fabric unraveled.

He felt a strong urge to destroy the contents of the envelope, but he knew that it would do no good. The items sent to him would all be copies or duplicates; the originals would be kept safely elsewhere.

Instead, he forced himself to think about the problem as objectively as possible. How bad was it, really? Allegations—it was always wise to think in terms of allegations rather than facts—could be countered, threats could be neutralized, but not from here on Northwind. For that, he needed access to the Senate and to the Exarch and to the influential media; in short, he needed to be on Terra.

I have to leave here now, he thought. It shouldn’t take much more than a couple of months to handle this, as long as I’m in the right place. And as soon as I’ve taken care of everything, I can come back.

Actually getting to Terra, however, presented difficulties. He needed a DropShip, and preferably a civilian DropShip. Was there one in port? He tried to remember the schedule for the shipping line that had won the mail-service contract for Prefecture III in the aftermath of the HPG disaster, and realized that he couldn’t remember it, or even the name of the shipping line itself. Stupid, he thought. You’ve been slipping, and you never noticed.

He’d also put off the inevitable for too long already. Willing his hands to steadiness, he opened the sealed letter.

It wasn’t handwritten. Not surprising; he might have recognized the handwriting of a known enemy or a supposed friend. Anonymous black words printed out on white paper could have come from anyone. The paper itself was of high quality, but that meant nothing. Anyone who could afford to track down Daniel Peterson—a person who had, in all but the crudest physical sense, died twenty-three years ago in Chang-An, his identity put into a mass grave with all the rest of the dead and covered up with dirt—anyone with that much money could afford to use good paper for his or her blackmail notes.