"No problem," the bishop said with an equally thin smile.

"I'll be going, then. Wait fifteen minutes before you leave."

"Of course." She was a bit nettled, though she didn't let it show. Did he think she'd lasted this long without learning her trade?

The door closed behind him, and she sat on a floor cleaner, lips pursed, considering how best to fill her pen with properly diffident vitriol, while the hand in her pocket squeezed the data chip that could kill a world.

Chapter Five

Sean MacIntyre landed neatly in the clearing and killed the power.

"Nice one, Sean," Tamman said from the copilot's seat. "Almost as nice as I could've done."

"Yeah? Which one of us took the top off that sequoia last month?"

"Wasn't the pilot's fault," Tamman replied loftily. "You were navigating, if I recall."

"He couldn't have been; you got home," a female voice said.

Tamman smirked, and Sean raised his eyes to the heavens in a plea for strength. Then he punched Tamman's shoulder, and the female voice groaned behind them as they grappled. "They're at it again, Sandy!"

"Too much testosterone, Harry." The younger voice dripped sympathy. "Their poor, primitive male brains are awash in the stuff."

Tamman and Sean paused in silent agreement, then turned towards the passenger compartment with vengeful intent, but their purposeful progress came to an abrupt end as Sean ran full tilt into a large, solid object and oofed.

"Damn it, Brashan!" he complained, rubbing the prominent nose he'd inherited from his father to check for damage.

"I'm simply opening the hatch, Sean," a mechanically produced voice replied. "It's not my fault you don't watch where you're going."

"Some navigator!" Harriet sniffed.

"Fortunately for a certain loudmouthed snot," Tamman observed, "she's a princess, so I can't paddle her fanny the way she deserves."

"Don't you just wish you could get your hands on my fanny, you lech!"

"Don't worry, Tam," Sean said darkly. "I'll be happy to deputize. As soon—" he added "—as a certain oversized polo pony gets out of my way!"

"Oooh, protect me, Brashan!" Harriet cried, and the Narhani laughed and stood aside, blocking off the cockpit as the hatch opened. The girls scampered out, and Galahad's litter-mate Gawain followed, raised muzzle already scenting the rich jungle air.

"Traitor!" Sean kicked his friend—which hurt his toe far more than his target. Brashan was only ten Terran years old, six years younger than Sean, but he was already sufficiently mature for full enhancement. The augmentation biotechnics provided was proportional to a being's natural strength and toughness, and the heavy-grav Narhani were very, very tough by human standards.

"Nonsense. Simply a more mature individual striving to protect you from your own impetuosity," Brashan returned, and trotted down the ramp.

"Yeah, sure," Sean snorted as he and Tamman followed.

It was noon, local time, and Bia blazed directly overhead. Birhat lay almost a light-minute further from its G0 primary than Earth lay from Sol, but they were almost exactly on the equator, and the air was hot and still. The high, shrill piping of Birhat's equivalent of birds drifted down, and a bat-winged pseudodactyl drifted high overhead.

Sean and Tamman paused to check their grav rifles. Without full enhancement, neither could handle a full-sized energy gun, but their present weapons were little heavier than Terran sporting rifles. The twenty-round magazines held three-millimeter darts of superdense chemical explosive, and the rifles fired them with a velocity of over five thousand meters per second. Which meant they had enough punch to take out a pre-Imperial tank... or the larger denizens of Birhat's ecosystem.

"Looks good here." Sean's crispness was far removed from his earlier playfulness, and Tamman nodded to confirm his own weapon's readiness. Then they turned towards the others, and Sean made a face. Sandy was already perched in her favorite spot astride Brashan's powerful back.

He supposed it made sense, even if she did look insufferably smug, for something had gone astray in Sandra MacMahan's genes. Neither of her parents were midgets, yet she barely topped a hundred and forty centimeters. If she hadn't had Hector MacMahan's eyes and Ninhursag's cheekbones, Sean would have suspected she was a changeling from his mother's bedtime stories. Of course, she wasn't quite fifteen, but Harriet had shot up to almost one-eighty by the time she was that age.

Not, he thought darkly, that Sandy let her small size slow her down. She was so far out ahead scholastically it wasn't funny, but the thing he really hated was that whenever they got into an argument she was invariably right. Like that molycirc problem. He'd been positive the failure was in the basic matrix, but, nooooo. She'd insisted a power surge had bridged the alpha block, and damned if she hadn't been right... again. It was maddening.

At least he had a good sixty centimeters on her, he thought moodily.

He and Tamman caught up with the others, and he tapped the grav pistol at Harriet's side pointedly. She made a face but drew it and checked its readiness. Sandy—of course—had already checked hers.

"Which way, Sean?" Brashan asked, and Sean paused to orient his built-in inertial guidance system to the observations he'd made on the way in.

"About five klicks at oh-two-twenty," he announced.

"Couldn't you set down any closer?" Harriet demanded, and he shrugged.

"Sure. But we're talking about tyranotops. You really want one of them stepping on the flyer? It might get sort of broken around the edges."

"True," she admitted, and drew her bush knife as they approached the towering creepers and ferns fringing the clearing.

As always, she and Sean took point, followed by Tamman, while a wide-ranging Gawain burrowed through the undergrowth and Brashan covered the rear. Sean was well aware Brashan was the real reason his mother and father raised no demur to the twins' excursions. Even a tyranotops—that fearsome creature which resembled nothing so much as a mating of a Terran triceratops and tyrannosaurus—would find a fully enhanced Narhani a handful, and Brashan carried a heavy energy gun, as well. As baby-sitters went, Narhani took some beating, which suited Sean and his friends just fine. Birhat was ever so much more interesting than Earth, and Brashan meant they could roam it at will.

Odd birds and beasts fluttered and rumbled in the underbrush, starting up in occasional panic as Gawain flushed them, and many of them were species no one else had yet seen. That was one of the things they loved about Birhat. The old Imperial capital had reverted to its second childhood after the bio-weapon hit, for the toxin hadn't been able to reach the sealed, protected ecosystems of the Imperial family's extraplanetary zoos. By the time failing environmental equipment finally released the inhabitants of over a dozen different oxy-nitrogen planets, the weapon itself had died, and forty-odd thousand years of subsequent natural selection had produced a biosystem that was a naturalist's opium dream.

For all intents and purposes, Birhat was a virgin planet, and it was all theirs. Well, theirs and three-quarters of a billion other people's, but that left lots of empty space, since most of the Bia System's steadily growing population was concentrated in and around the new capital or out in the system's enormous spaceborne industrial complexes, working like demons to resurrect the Empire. And, of course, at the moment they were in the middle of the Sean Andrew MacIntyre Continental Nature Preserve the Crown had established to honor Sean's uncle, who'd died fighting Anu's mutineers.