Truth and Shadows

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 Ba

“Jacob Ba

“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.”

“Ba

“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 Ba

Jacob Ba

“Ba

“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 Ba

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 Ba

“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 Ba

“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 ba

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.