Information spilled up her arm, crisp and clear as any her Alpha receptor had ever pulled from a tactical net, and that was impossible. Yet it was happening—happening in a heartbeat, like a burst transmission from a forward scout but less focused, more general and disorganized.
Concern. Uncertainty. Satisfaction at her physical condition and deep, gnawing worry about her mental state. Discomfort over his decision not to mention Intelligence's interest. Burning wonder over how she'd survived untended and undetected in the snow. Genuine distress for the deaths of her family, and an even greater distress that she seemed so calm and collected. Too calm, he was thinking, and I have to listen to that recording. Maybe—
He released her hand and stepped back. Clearly, he had sensed nothing at all out of the ordinary, and his hand rose in a small wave.
"I'll see you in the morning, Cap—Alicia," he said gently. "Go back to sleep if you can."
She nodded and closed her eyes as he withdrew ... and knew sleep was the last thing she was going to be able to do.
Chapter Four
Benjamin McIlheny looked up from a sheaf of hard copy as a hatch hissed open aboard the battle-cruiser HMS Antietam, then rose quickly as Sir Arthur Keita stepped through it. Keita wore the green-on-green of the Imperial Cadre with the golden harp and starships of the Emperor below the single starburst of a brigadier, and if he was a head shorter than the colonel, he was far thicker and broader. "The Emperor's Bulldog" was silver-haired and pushing a hundred years old; he was also built like the proverbial brick wall, hard-faced, with eyes that were quick and alert under craggy brows. Keita was the Imperial Cadre, and his arrival had been something of a shock. The colonel suspected they would have seen someone far less senior if Keita hadn't been right next door in the Macedon Sector, anyway.
The man behind him could have been specifically designed as his antithesis. Inspector Ferhat Ben Belkassem, well short of his fortieth year, was small, neat, and very dark, with liquid brown eyes and a strong, beaked nose. His crimson tunic's collar bore the hourglass and balance of the Ministry of Justice, and he seemed pleasant enough—which was far from sufficient to reconcile McIlheny to his presence. This was a job for the Fleet and the Marines. By McIlheny's lights, not even Keita had any real business poking his nose in—not that he intended to say so to a brigadier. Particularly not to a Cadre brigadier, and especially not to a Cadre brigadier named Sir Arthur Keita. Which, because Colonel McIlheny was an intrinsically just man, meant he couldn't say it to Ben Belkassem, either. Damn it.
"Sir Arthur. Inspector."
"Colonel," Keita returned crisply. Ben Belkassem merely smiled at the omission of his own name—a lack of reaction which irritated the colonel immensely—and McIlheny waved at two empty chairs across the conference table.
Ben Belkassem waited for Keita to seat himself, then slid into his own chair. It was a respectful enough gesture, but the man moved like a cat, McIlheny thought. Graceful, poised, and silent. Sneaky bastard.
"I've downloaded all of our data to Banshee," he began, "but, with your permission, Sir Arthur, I thought we should probably begin with a general background brief." Keita nodded for him to continue, and McIlheny switched on the holo unit. A display of the Franconian Sector appeared above the table, like a squashed quarter-sphere of stars. An edge of the Empire appeared along its flattened side, green and friendly, but the scarlet of the Rishathan Sphere crowded its rounded upper edge, and a sparkle of amber Rogue Worlds and blue systems claimed by the Quarn Hegemony threaded through its volume. McIlheny slipped into his headset, connecting the display controls to his neural receptor, and a single star at the sector's heart blinked gold.
"The sector capital." The announcement was probably redundant, but he'd learned long ago to make sure the groundwork was in place. "Soissons, in the Franconia System. Quite Earth-like, but for rather cool temperatures, with a population just over two billion. A bit high for this region, but it's one of the old League Worlds we retook from the Lizards more or less intact."
His audience nodded, and he cleared his throat.
"We really should have organized a Crown Sector out here a century ago, but with the Rishatha hanging up there to galactic north it seemed reasonable to turn our attention to other areas first. God knows we had enough to worry about elsewhere, and the Ministry of Colonization decided not to draw Rishathan attention south until we'd firmed up the central sectors. As you can see—" skeins of stars suddenly winked to life beyond the sector's curved frontier, burning the steady white of unsurveyed space "—there's a lot of room for expansion out there, and once we start curling around their southern frontiers, the Lizards are likely to get a bit anxious. We didn't want them extending their border to cut us off before we were ready." He glanced up at the others. Ben Belkassem was watching the display as if it were a fascinating toy, but Keita only grunted and nodded again.
"All right. The Crown began organizing the Franconian Sector three years ago and sent Governor General Treadwell out a year later. It's a fairly typical Crown Sector in most ways: ninety-three systems under imperial claim—twenty-six with habitable planets—and thirty-one belonging to someone else in the same spatial volume. We've got five Incorporated Worlds besides Soissons, though one of them, Yeager, just elected its first senators this year. Aside from them, we've got fifteen Crown Worlds with Crown Governors, or—" his mouth twisted, "—we had fifteen Crown Worlds. Now we only have twelve."
Four stars pulsed lurid crimson as he spoke, wide-spaced, almost equi-distant from one another. One was the primary of Mathison's World.
"Typee, Mawli, Brigadoon, and Mathison's World," McIlheny said grimly, one of the stars blinking brighter with each name. "Mawli, Brigadoon, and Mathison's World are complete writeoffs; Typee survived ... barely. It was the first world hit, and it's been settled for over sixty years—a freeholder colony from Durandel in the Melville Sector—and apparently their population was too spread out for the raiders to hit anything smaller than the major towns. The others—" He shrugged, eyes bitter, and Keita's mouth tightened.
"Things started out quite well, actually," McIlheny went on after a moment. "Governor Treadwell's got three times the normal Crown Sector Fleet presence because of the Rishatha and the Jung Association, so we—"
"Excuse me, Colonel." Ben Belkassem's voice was surprisingly deep for such a small man, almost velvety, with the cultured accent of the mother world. McIlheny frowned at him, and the inspector smiled. "I didn't have time for a complete update on the foreign relations picture out here. Could you give me a little detail on this Jung Association? Am I correct in remembering that it's a multi-system Rogue World polity?"
"Pocket empire, more like," McIlheny said. "These three systems—" three closely-clustered amber lights flashed "—and two treaty dependencies, MaGuire and Wotan." Two more lights blinked. "When the Lizards blitzed the old Terran League, a League Fleet commander—a Commodore Wanda Jung—managed to hold Mithra, Artemis, and Madrigal. The Lizards never even got their toenails into them," he added with grudging respect, "and for somebody their size, they still pack a lot of firepower. All three of their main systems have Core World population levels—about four billion on Mithra, I believe—and they're very heavily industrialized. Until we got ourselves organized, they and El Greco were the major human power bases out here."