Tiberius blinked. “But this will do harm…”
“Of course,” Daria said. She paused. “You see, I know Colin. He’s a decent person, perhaps the most decent person I have met… and he’s at a loose end. His objective was to come to Earth, break through Home Fleet and kick the Thousand Families in their collective nuts. He’s done it, so… now what? He thinks in terms of doing the right thing and that, his sense of duty, is what’s keeping him on Earth, trying to reform the Empire. He sees freeing the aliens as the right thing to do… and he isn’t capable of delaying, or even stalling, because others might not agree with him.”
She paused. “You do see the irony, don’t you?
“And that makes him the wrong person to be leading the Empire,” she concluded. “We need a reform process that will keep the Empire together, not one that will tear it apart… and that is the inevitable result of Colin’s plans. If butting heads with Admiral Wilhelm doesn’t force him to change his attitudes, we will have to remove him — for the good of the Empire.”
“And us, of course,” Tiberius said.
“You’re in a position to ensure that the Cicero Family survives the coming upheavals with ease,” Daria told him, flatly. “You have little to worry about, do you?”
She stood up. “Concentrate on your wedding and think about the future,” she advised. “It promises to be better than the past.”
“Someone was definitely trying to slip a bug into the Residence,” Lord Pompey Cicero said, afterwards. Tiberius, who’d been pondering the future, looked up in alarm. Daria might be confident of Colin’s general decency, but Tiberius wasn’t sure that he shared her confidence. “This one got caught in a bug field.”
He held out a tube, allowing Tiberius to peer into the magnification field. The bug was far too small for the unaided human eye to see it, even as a glint of metal against a dark background and even full magnification revealed little about it. It was capable of flying through the air and settling down anywhere, invisible and very hard to detect. It was the ultimate spying device.
“Good,” he said, finally. “Who sent this one?”
“I have no idea,” Pompey said, dryly. They might be contemporaries, but their social statuses were light-years apart. “You want a list of your enemies?”
He smiled at Tiberius’s expression. “It’s high-grade tech, Imperial Intelligence style, but it could have come from anywhere,” he added. “There are plenty of Family Members like me with contracts in Imperial Intelligence — or had contracts before the Provisional Government started cleaning out the rogues and bandits — and they could have sent it. And then there are all the newer factions, or the unions, or even the new government itself. It would be easier to list people who didn’t have access to such tech.”
Tiberius ran his hand through his hair. “I take it that you disabled it?”
“Of course,” Pompey said, sounding faintly insulted. “I did that at once, as I was taught to do, although the person who sent it would have known the minute it failed a routine call-check, or… hell, maybe it squealed before it was disabled. Still… someone was interested in you, sir, and I doubt that they wanted nude pictures of you in the bath.”
“I should hope not,” Tiberius snorted. The very idea was ridiculous. It was much more likely that one of his enemies was hoping to pick up useful or incriminating information. He wasn’t a security expert, not like Pompey, but he was fairly sure that if there was one bug, there would be others. “Go sweep for any other bugs and let me know if you find any. I have to think about this.”
“Think quick,” Pompey advised. “I doubt that Alicia would want to live in a bugged mansion.”
Chapter Seven
“Madam Ambassador, we are nearing the verge of the solar system now,” Captain Dayton said, through the intercom. “Might I suggest that you come to the bridge when we make emergence?”
“Of course,” Carola Wilhelm said. She allowed herself a smile at the obvious relief in his voice. Dayton might be loyal, very loyal, to Admiral Wilhelm, but the responsibility of ferrying an Ambassador and the Admiral’s wife was a heavy one. “I shall be up there promptly.”
She stood up as the channel closed and braced herself for the coming challenge. It was possible, she supposed, that the rebels would greet the Victorious with a hail of missiles — in which case her career as an Ambassador would come to a screeching halt — but she was fairly certain that they would choose to hear her out first, if nothing else. She’d read enough of the reports forwarded to her husband about the rebels to know that they took outdated concepts like the Moscow Accords and suchlike seriously, suggesting a certain naivety about how the universe worked. It would give her an opening she could use to make her case on Earth, before Parliament.
The mirror-field shimmered into existence at her command and she checked her appearance quickly, competently inspecting every inch of her body. She had allowed her dark hair to grow longer, but she wore it in a businesslike style, rather than allowing it to hang down and suggest a looser attitude. She had forsworn a uniform — it wasn’t as if she was a legal member of the Imperial Navy, after all — and chosen, instead, to wear a dark suit, matching the colour of her hair. She was a petite woman — she’d often joked that she was a perfect fit for her husband — but she knew she looked impressive.
She heard the timer counting down the last minutes, but ignored it, concentrating on her plans. She’d met and married Admiral Wilhelm back when he’d been a lowly Commander, an irony that hadn’t escaped her. Colin Harper had been a Commander when he’d started the rebellion against the Empire and turned the universe upside down. She’d promptly taken over her husband’s career, boosting him upwards from Commander to Commodore and finally Admiral, even though it had involved dealing with the Hohenzollern Clan. The Thousand Families might have had the power, but in her experience they simply didn’t have the intelligence or the mindset to take advantage of the chaos. Stacy Roosevelt might whine about how she wasn’t being waited on hand and foot these days, but Carola had seen, right from the start, that there was opportunity for someone swift and ruthless enough to exploit it. Why shouldn’t Markus Wilhelm, and her through him, have a shot at the Imperial Throne?
After all, the rebels have just proved that the system can be overturned, she thought, as she pinned on her single piece of jewellery. The firestar gem gleamed between her breasts, shining out against the darkness of her suit, drawing the eye towards its light. They were rare, so rare that very few people would ever have a single piece made with the gems, but the aristocratic bitch who’d owned it would never need it again. It still made her smile. Lady Hohenzollern and Stacy Roosevelt had arrived at Cottbus, in the serene expectation that they still ruled, walking right into the trap. She would use or discard them as she willed.
The hatch hissed open as she walked out, the pair of armed bodyguards falling in behind her, forcing everyone they passed to give her plenty of room. Carola wasn’t unaware of the dangers — the presence of her bodyguards would be resented — but there was little choice. Her husband might have been a competent strategist, but he lacked her killer instinct and insight into the human mind. They made a strong combination… but were they strong enough to outwit and defeat the rebels?