4

Tourist-Class Passenger Quarters

DropShip Pegasus

en route from Addicks to Northwind

November 3133

Dianna Jones—“Dagger Di” to friends and enemies alike since the first day she’d been old enough to use a knife—was not in a good mood. The card game that had promised amusement and easy pickings had not turned out well, and Jack Farrell had added insult to injury by informing her, as they left the tourist-class lounge, that they needed to meet in his cabin for a talk. Right now she didn’t feel like talking to anybody, and most especially not to One-Eyed Jack Farrell.

But personal inclinations didn’t count for much where work was concerned. And this was work; she certainly wasn’t traveling tourist class to Northwind for pleasure, or for the sake of her health.

Grimly, she followed Jack to a cabin that, except for a trifling matter of location, turned out to be identical to her own: a small, compactly designed space that had a narrow bunk set into one bulkhead, with compartments above and below for storage. Bathing and sanitary facilities were housed in a vertical pod-like unit built into another bulkhead; passengers for whom elbow room was more important than either privacy or convenience could use the roomier lavatories down at the end of the corridor. Of the compartment’s two remaining bulkheads, one was taken up by the door and the other by a combination work desk and entertainment station. The work desk was outfitted with a tri-vid, a disc player, a computer and communications console, and the room’s only chair.

Dagger Di took the chair without waiting for an invitation. She pulled it away from the desk and sat straddling it, making certain as she did so to keep between Farrell and the cabin door. Maybe their boss trusted Farrell, she thought, but there was no way in hell that she was ever going to. Farrell saw what she was doing, she could tell—but only laughed, shrugged, and stretched out on the bunk.

“Get over it, darlin’. We’ve got work to do.”

“Yeah, right.” Di was irritated, and not disposed to get down immediately to business. “Who the hell was that Northwinder bitch, anyway?”

Farrell looked smug. “You should check out the passenger lists more often. She’s a Captain in one of the Highlander regiments, traveling in mufti. Came aboard at Addicks, so she’s seen her share of fighting lately.”

“And it doesn’t bother you that she walked away with all the money on the table?”

“Not particularly,” said Farrell. “It’s not like it was ours in the first place.”

“Yes, it was,” Di said. “We won it.”

“And she won it back,” Farrell said. “The fortunes of war, Di darling.”

Di remained unmollified. “I had plans for that money. And don’t call me ‘darling.’”

“Make new plans, then. Unless—you weren’t using mission operating funds, were you?”

“Good Lord, no!” Di shook her head vehemently. “Do I look that stupid?”

“No,” he said, eyeing her knife hand nervously.

As well he might, she thought. After everything that had passed between the two of them, Farrell had to have more sense than to believe her stupid enough to gamble with an employer’s money. Especially not when their current employer was Jacob Bannson of Bannson Universal Unlimited.

Bannson hired only the best—Dagger Di had no false modesty concerning either her own worth or Jack Farrell’s—and those he hired he treated honestly. He fulfilled his part of the contract to the letter, and didn’t stint on paying his employees what they were worth. But those for whom even Bannson’s generous pay scale was not generous enough, who stole from him or double-crossed him, were dealt with swiftly and without mercy—and usually without bothering to involve the local law.

“I was using discretionary travel funds,” Di said. “Like you. Unless you decided to get stupid all of a sudden.”

“Which I did not,” Farrell said. “And do you see me repining over lost money? Unless I’m a worse judge of character than I think I am, we’ll have our chance to win it back.”

“Not with blondie keeping watch in the lounge,” Di said. “We won’t have a chance.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. She just didn’t want us bankrupting poor old Thatcher.”

“Wilberforce,” Di corrected him.

“Whatever,” Farrell said. “Under all that, the good Captain Bishop is as bored with DropShip life as we are. So long as we stay honest, she’ll be glad to play.”

“Honest,” said Di. “Hah. She gave herself the high card. And the jack of spades is a one-eyed jack—do you think she did it to tell us that she knew who we were?”

“I think she did it because she wanted Wilberforce out of the game, and she got what she wanted.”

“And you still want to play cards with her? Maybe you are stupid, after all.” Di was more thoughtful now. “She’s good. I hope we don’t come up against her in the field.”

“Anything can happen,” Farrell said. “Especially in our line of work. And it never hurts to get a feel for another player’s style.”

5

Fort Barrett

Oilfields Coast

Northwind

November 3133; dry season

Fort Barrett was a prosperous, midsized town situated on Kearney’s Oilfields Coast. The regimental post had originally served as a source of law and order for the remote district. Over the years a sizable town had sprung up around the fort, and in recent decades the entire region had grown prosperous with offshore drilling. These days Fort Barrett was a pleasant if isolated posting. The units serving there were often ones that had distinguished—and exhausted—themselves in action elsewhere, and now were being rewarded with a stint of undemanding duty in a tranquil location.

Will Elliot’s scout/sniper unit was currently enjoying such a reward. During the summer, Will and his comrades had stood with Colonel—now Brigadier General—Griffin to hold the mouth of Red Ledge Pass against the Steel Wolves, buying time for Tara Campbell and Ezekiel Crow to organize the main defense, and they had fought again, without a break for rest, in the final pitched battle on the plains. They had taken heavy losses, especially for new unblooded troops, but they hadn’t broken. And after the mud had dried and the Wolves had left Northwind, they had been sent to Fort Barrett to relax in the sun.

Will had been promoted to Corporal in the aftermath of the invasion, and had not found the duties of that rank to be overly burdensome. Life at Fort Barrett was, generally speaking, enjoyable, with good weather, an attractive location, and a soothing daily base routine. He wrote to his mother once a week, assuring her of his continued health and well-being, and sent half of his money to her every payday by automatic allotment.

He worried about his mother a bit sometimes. Jean Elliot was living these days in Kildare with Will’s sister, Ruth, and still hadn’t decided what to do about her home in Liddisdale. The house where Will and his two sisters had grown up, and where Will had continued to live with his mother until hard times had impelled him to join the Regiment, had been badly damaged in the summer’s fighting. If the structure wasn’t rebuilt before the end of winter, by spring it would be fit for nothing except selling it for the land beneath it.

This being late afternoon on a mail day, Will had just sent his mother another letter, in handwritten hardcopy since she didn’t like using her daughter’s communications console. (She fretted that Ruth might begrudge her the connection time, although Ruth had assured Will privately more than once that she did nothing of the kind.) Will had also picked up a soft but bulky package from Kildare which he suspected contained hand-knitted woolen socks—his mother made them for him every winter. He wasn’t likely to need them here on the coast, but if he’d figured out one thing about life in the Regiment, it was that you never knew where you might be going next.