The Countess of Northwind and Paladin Ezekiel Crow were at work in the castle solar, a large, airy room at the top of the main tower. Afternoon sunlight streamed in through the leaded-glass panes of the tall windows, illuminating the remains of a working lunch spread out on the central table. The crumbled leftovers of a beef roast wrapped in pastry shared space with file folders and data pads and other administrative debris.
“Didn’t I tell you that we’d get a lot more done if we did our work here instead of in the city?” Tara Campbell said.
“We’ve had fewer interruptions while we’ve been working here, at any rate,” Crow admitted.
“That’s because there isn’t any place in the city where I’m not on the job and available to anyone who needs to see me,” she said. “When I come back to Castle Northwind, I’m at home, and the staff here has known me so long that they’re almost family. They know better than to let people bother me if I don’t want to be bothered.”
“I suppose it’s one of the advantages to growing up in a castle.” He smiled briefly. “Like a princess in one of the old stories.”
“Happily ever after… at least until my mother died. Then my father went back to military service, and after that we lived here, there, and everywhere.” She paused a moment to pick up the loose papers on the table and stack them neatly. “Where did you grow up?”
“Liao.”
She looked at him, reminded again that he was older than he appeared. “Oh. Were you there during—”
His expression, always reserved, closed off even more. “During the Massacre? Yes.”
She felt a surge of embarrassment at her own verbal clumsiness. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring up painful memories.”
Everybody in The Republic of the Sphere knew the story, after alclass="underline" how agents of the Capellan Confederation fomented unrest on Liao, making it into a perpetual thorn in the side for The Republic of the Sphere; how a traitor working at Liao’s DropPort had allowed an unauthorized CapCon ship to land; how the streets of Chang-an had run red with blood before the CapCons were done with Liao and The Republic of the Sphere was done with them.
“It’s all right,” he said. “It happened a long time ago. It’s just painful still, sometimes. Both my parents died in the city fighting, during the early days.”
“You were close to your parents?”
“Not close enough, as it turned out,” he said. “I couldn’t get home in time to save them.”
“I can’t imagine…” On impulse, she laid her hand lightly on his arm for a moment before taking it away, and felt his muscles go tense under even that briefest of touches. “My parents are gone, too. Nothing as bad as—as what happened on Liao. But I still miss them.”
The moment was interrupted by a rumbling in the air and a rattling of the glass in the windows. A shadow passed across the clipped green lawn outside.
Ezekiel Crow froze, listening, then relaxed. “VTOL craft going over.”
“Coming down, more likely,” she said. “We’re not on any regular flight paths, and—unfortunately for our continued lack of interruptions—Headquarters knows that I’m here.”
“I don’t hear it landing.”
“There are a couple of densely wooded hills between here and the VTOL pad and that cuts down on the noise pollution and preserves the view.” She pressed the housekeeper’s call button set into the wall by the door. “Mrs. Danvers? Put some tea and some hearty sandwiches on hot standby. I think we’re going to have visitors.”
Their visitor, a quarter-hour later, turned out to be Colonel Michael Griffin. By the time the Colonel arrived in the solar, all evidence of the earlier working lunch had been cleared away and replaced by a porcelain tea service and a platter of sliced bread, meat, and cheese. Griffin filled his plate with the polite concentration of a man who had already missed lunch and was anticipating missing dinner.
“What brings you here in such haste, Colonel?” Tara asked.
“Strategic consultation,” he said. “That’s something best done face-to-face. There’s no telling who’s keeping an ear on electronic transmissions these days.”
Ezekiel Crow looked at him darkly. “Are you suggesting to the Countess that there might be traitors on Northwind?”
Colonel Griffin paused and gave Crow a level glance over the top edge of his tea cup. “I work in intelligence, my lord. Assuming traitors is part of my job.”
Tara, listening, suppressed a sigh. The two of them were doing it again, bristling up at each other like dogs; she wondered if they even realized she noticed.
As if I didn’t have enough work to do, she thought, without the two people I most depend on pushing and sniping at each other every time they’re together in the same room. That was one of the reasons I brought Crow to Castle Northwind to work in the first place, to get him out of Griffin’s way.
Oil on troubled waters time, Tara, she told herself. It’s all part of the job.
“It doesn’t even need a traitor to mess things up,” she said. “Just somebody on-planet with different loyalties or a different agenda. And even with the HPG network down, we still get enough travelers for there to be plenty of those.”
Griffin looked somewhat mollified. “It keeps me busy, I can tell you.” He sipped at his tea. “Today’s a case in point.”
“How’s that?” she asked.
“We’ve got a DropShip in at the port, and it’s brought along the usual pile of mail and news-discs.” The Colonel opened the leather valise he’d brought with him and took out a disc. “Including this one from General Davies on Quentin. Is there a player in here?”
Tara nodded at the polished wood tri-vee cabinet set against the far wall next to the call button. “In there.”
Griffin opened the cabinet and put the disc into the player. The tri-vee filled with images of Quentin, fading into and replacing one another—the DropShip landing field; a ship descending, the image cut off suddenly in a blaze of light; a Tundra Wolf BattleMech, seen in jerky, narrow-field motion from inside a fast-moving vehicle; armored infantry, firing Gauss rifles at something outside of the image. Ship and ’Mech and infantry armor all bore Steel Wolf insignia.
The images continued, now with a voiceover running along with them.
“General Gwyn Davies, Commander of the Highlander forces on Quentin, speaking. Two weeks ago, Quentin came under attack by elements of the Steel Wolf faction under the command of Star Colonel Ulan. Their apparent target was the industrial district in Port Frome, since factories there produce the necessary elements for conversion of Agricultural and ForestryMechs into battleworthy configurations. It is my pleasure at this time to report that the Wolves were repulsed after sharp fighting; the rest of this disc contains full intelligence summaries and battle data on the conflict.”
The end of the brief speech coincided with the cube display’s final image: Steel Wolf DropShips rising from the landing field, and fadeout. The image loop started to repeat, Colonel Griffin hit the stop button, and Crow and Tara and Griffin looked at one another.
“Well,” said Tara, after a long silence. “We’ve been wondering for months exactly who we were going to have to fight. I think that now we know.”
21
Castle Northwind
Northwind
April, 3133; local spring
Several hours after Colonel Michael Griffin had departed from Castle Northwind, Tara Campbell and Ezekiel Crow remained at work in the solar chamber, burning the midnight oil—or at least, the midnight electrons. Clouds had darkened the skies over the castle as the afternoon drew on toward sunset, and nightfall brought with it a fast-moving spring storm. Thunder rumbled outside the windows, and strong gusts of wind dashed heavy raindrops against the leaded-glass panes. Flashes of lightning illuminated the dark, lowering clouds and the wind-tossed trees on the mountain slopes beneath.