At All Costs

"I suppose anything's possible." Tallman shrugged. It wasn't as if anyone could threaten the League, after all. The very idea was preposterous.

"Well," his employer said, "if that's all taken care of, I suppose you'd appreciate your fee."

"You suppose correctly," Tallman told her.

"The most important thing of all," she said, not hurrying to hand over the untraceable hard copy bearer bond certificate, "is that this particular manipulation be completely untraceable. The only place it can lead is back to the Havenites."

"I understood that from the begi

"Good!" She smiled. "That's exactly what I needed to hear. And now, for your fee."

She reached into her smartly tailored jacket, and Tallman let his chair come back fully upright, reaching out his hand-then froze in shock.

"Wh-?" he began, but he never finished the question, for the pulser in her hand snarled. The burst of darts hit him at the base of the throat and tracked upwards across his neck and the left side of his face, with predictably gruesome results.

His employer grimaced with distaste, but she'd been careful to sit further back than usual. She was outside the splatter pattern, and she dropped the pulser on the desk, straightened her jacket fastidiously, and let herself out of the office. She walked down the hallway and took the lift to the parking garage, where she climbed into her air car and flew calmly off. Five minutes later, she landed several miles away from the late, lamented Tallman's office building.

This parking garage was in a much less desirable part of town. Most of the vehicles parked here were old, battered. The sort of things youth gangs looking for a quick credit would turn up their noses at.

She parked her own new-model, expensive sports vehicle in a stall beside one such battered, grimy air car, and climbed out into the shadows. She looked around carefully, then took a small handset from her pocket and pressed a button. Her face seemed to ripple and shudder indescribably, and her complexion-not just on her face, but everywhere-shifted abruptly, darkening and coarsening, as the nanotech which had coated every millimeter of her body turned itself off. The invisibly tiny machines released their holds, drifting away on the morning breeze, and in place of the rather tall, blonde woman who had murdered Roderick Tallman, there stood a dark-faced man, slightly below the average in height, with a wiry, muscular build and a bosom.

He grimaced and reached inside his shirt, removing the padding, and tossed it into the back seat of his air car. A quick squirt from a small aerosol can, and the padding dissipated into a wispy fog.

He adjusted his clothing slightly, then unlocked the grimy vehicle beside the air car in which he had arrived. He settled himself at the controls, brought up the counter-grav, and flew calmly away. He inserted the vehicle into one of the capital city's outbound traffic lanes, switched in the autopilot, and leaned back in his seat, wondering idly whether or not the vehicle he'd abandoned had been picked up and stripped yet.

If it hadn't, it would be very shortly, of that he was confident.

Sir James Bowie Webster smiled pleasantly, despite the fact that his teeth badly wanted to grit themselves, as he stepped out of his official diplomatic limousine in front of the Greater New Chicago Opera House. He'd never liked opera, even at the best of times, and the fact that the Sollies prided themselves that they did this-like everything else-better than anyone else in the known universe irritated him even more.

If pressed, Webster was prepared to admit that the citizens of planets like Old Earth and Beowulf at least meant well. The fact that they had little more clue than a medieval peasant about things that went on outside their own pleasant little star systems was unfortunate, but it didn't result from any inherent malevolence. Or even stupidity, really. They were simply too busy with the things that mattered to them to think much about problems outside their own mental event horizon. But the fact that they complacently believed that the Solarian League, with its huge, corrupt bureaucracies and self-serving, manipulative elites, was still God's gift to the galaxy made it difficult, sometimes, to remember that most of their sins were sins of omission, not commission.

At least he and Carmichael were making some progress dealing with the bloody events in Talbott. Accounts of the Battle of Monica were really only just begi

Webster never saw the pulser in the hand of the Havenite ambassador's chauffeur.

"What? What did you say?" William Alexander, Baron Grantville, demanded incredulously.

"I said Jim Webster's been shot," Sir Anthony Langtry said, his face ashen, his voice that of a man who couldn't-or didn't want to-believe what he heard himself saying.

"He's dead?"

"Yes. He and his bodyguard were killed almost instantly, right outside the Opera House, of all goddamned places!"

"Jesus." Grantville closed his eyes on a stab of pain. He'd known James Webster most of his life. They'd been personal friends, but not nearly so close as Webster and Hamish had been. This was going to hit his brother hard, and the entire Star Kingdom was going to be stu

"What happened?" he asked after a moment.

"That's the really bad part," Langtry said grimly. The Foreign Secretary had come to Grantville's office in person with the news, and something about his tone sent a chill down Grantville's spine.

"Just the fact that he's dead is bad enough for me, Tony," the Prime Minister said a bit more tartly than he'd really intended to, and Langtry raised a hand, acknowledging the point.

"I know that, Willie. And I'm sorry if it sounded like I didn't. I didn't know him as well as you and Hamish, but what I did know about him, I liked a lot. Unfortunately, in this instance, the way he was killed really is worse."

The Foreign Secretary drew a deep breath.

"He and one of his bodyguards were shot and killed by the Peep ambassador's personal driver."

"What?!"

Despite all his years of political training and a basic personality which remained calm in the face of disaster, Grantville erupted to his feet behind his desk, leaning forward over it to brace both hands on its top. Eyes of Alexander blue blazed with consternation-and rage-and for just a moment it looked as if he intended to vault physically across the desk.

Langtry didn't reply. He simply sat, waiting for the Prime Minister to work through his shock the same way he had when the news first hit his office. It took several seconds, and then, slowly, Grantville settled back into his chair, still staring at Langtry.

"That's what happened," Langtry said finally, after the Prime Minister had seated himself once more. "In fact, it's pretty damned open and shut. The driver's dead, of course-Webster's second security man nailed him, and three Solly cops at the Opera as additional security saw the whole thing. In fact, one of them got his sidearm out in time to put at least one dart of his own into the driver, and one of the others got the entire thing on his shoulder cam. It's all on chip, and they sent the visual record out with the dispatch."