“It seems that you may have saved my life,” Benzi said to Alonza. “I’m very grateful.”
Alonza thought of Colonel Sansom’s orders. Get the operative into custody as quietly as possible, he had told her. If he had wanted to keep this matter quiet before, he certainly would not want word about the woman’s attempt on Benzi’s life to leak out now.
Presumably the operative had been sent here for the purpose of killing the Habber, and afterward those who ran the shadowy and mysterious secret service of the Guardians had come to their senses and decided to call off the mission. She wondered what the diplomatic consequences would have been if Sameh had succeeded, and exactly what whoever had given the woman her orders had hoped to accomplish.
There was no question of what Alonza’s own fate would have been had Benzi died.
Colonel Sansom and those above him would have had to punish somebody. The loss of her rank and a court-martial would have been the least of her punishment; any work detail she was assigned to after that would be a lot worse than anything her mother had probably suffered.
She realized then what Sameh’s movements had reminded her of when the woman had moved toward Benzi. Amparo had sometimes moved in the same way, creeping up on her marks when there weren’t other people around, ready for a quick and disabling blow to the back of the head with her pouch of pebbles and small stones.
“You’ll have to store the body,” she said to Tom, “until Colonel Sansom gets back. And I’ll have to make a report.” She turned to Benzi. “I’ll need a statement from you,” she said. “Once it’s recorded, you can board your ship and be on your way.”
“In other words,” Benzi said, “you’d prefer to keep this quiet.”
“Obviously.” Alonza sighed. “You must know that we have our few extremists, people who would prefer that we have nothing to do with your people, but be assured that such folk will be watched even more closely from now on and that you’ll be safe. I don’t know what you intend to tell your own people.” She thought of his Link. “Maybe they already know.”
“My Link was closed—is closed.” Benzi’s face was solemn. “But they will be informed.
This shouldn’t affect our agreements with your Council, since you saved my life. In protecting me, you honored our agreement.”
“My duty,” she said. “It wasn’t out of any particular concern for you.”
“I know, and that speaks well of you and your Guardian training.” For a moment, she thought that he was being sarcastic again, and then he bowed his head to her.
“We’ll go to Tom’s office, and you can give me your report there.” Tom would keep quiet, and Benzi would soon be gone; she strongly doubted that this Habber would ever return to Earth or to the Wheel again.
Tom told his infirmary staff that Sameh Tryolla had unexpectedly died of a stroke, a cause of death verified by a scan of the corpse. Alonza doubted that any of them believed that was the whole story, but they seemed willing to accept it. Benzi’s passengers would simply assume that their former companion was being kept in the infirmary for more tests. She wondered if any of them would try to find out about her in years to come, if they would even be able to call up any records about her fate. Sameh Tryolla might disappear as thoroughly as though she had never existed, which in a sense, she hadn’t.
Where had they found her? But Alonza could guess the answer to that. The woman who had become Sameh Tryolla would have come from the ranks of those on Basic; she would have been someone who could vanish from her earlier life without anyone’s missing her and slip easily into another life. She had probably been a child much like Alonza herself.
After Benzi’s ship had left the Wheel, Alonza sent a short report to Colonel Sansom, promising him a full report when he returned. Things had not gone as he might have hoped, but the operative’s mission had been aborted and the whole business kept quiet.
What still nagged at her was exactly why Sameh had been sent here to kill the Habber, what the purpose of her mission was. Would any Habber have served equally well as her target, or had she been after Benzi in particular? Maybe those using Sameh had wanted to make an example of the man who had abandoned his world for that of the Habbers.
But would they have jeopardized Earth’s treaties with the Associated Habitats simply to punish Benzi? Would they have risked losing their uneasy but enduring peace with the Habbers as well as the loss of the resources and expertise their more advanced technology could provide to the home world?
Sameh Tryolla could not have left the camp outside Tashkent carrying a disrupter in her duffel without the connivance of at least one of the camp’s Guardians. Someone might have slipped the weapon to her at the port in Tashkent, before she boarded the shuttle, but getting it to her earlier so that she could conceal it before leaving for the Wheel would be safer. No security officers at the Tashkent port or aboard the shuttle would have bothered to search any of the travelers, who had already been cleared by Keir Renin and his people in the camp and had been under Guardian supervision ever since.
More unanswered questions—and it was probably best, Alonza thought, to leave them forever unanswered.
Colonel Sansom returned to the Wheel thirty hours after Sameh’s death. Alonza met him at the hub, accompanied him to the infirmary, and sat with him while he perused the full report on a pocket screen in the office of Tom Ruden-Nodell.
“You did well, Major Lemaris,” the colonel said.
“I’m sure any of your officers would have done as well,” she replied.
“I’m not at all sure of that.” His voice was hard.
“One thing puzzles me, though,” Alonza said. “Seems to me that the whole point in using a weapon like a disrupter is to make sure no one knows you’ve used it. I mean, I can see Sameh Tryolla using it if she and her victim were alone. Slap the thing on the Habber, make sure he’s dead, ditch the thing in a recycling slot and nobody’s the wiser.
But to make the attempt in front of witnesses—”
“Obviously she was so intent on her mission,” the colonel interrupted, “that she didn’t consider that, and simply used the means she was given. In any case, what would you have done had she succeeded? Put her under restraint and under guard, go through all the usual procedures—informing me, getting your report together, waiting for diplomats to arrive to try to reassure the other Habbers—”
“Waiting for my own court-martial,” Alonza added.
“Needless to say. And the operative would have been officially charged, sent back to Earth for a hearing, and probably have disappeared after that. Maybe that’s what she was promised if she were caught—a hearing, a sentence, and then a new life and identity.”
“Somebody really wanted that Habber out of the way, then,” Alonza said.
“No, Alonza. Think.” Jonas Sansom leaned forward in his chair and rested his arms on Tom’s desk. “Someone wanted me out of the way.”
She stared across the desk at him. “But—”
“I should have been here to take charge of the situation. I would have been if not for those damaged tracking telescopes, and that was pure chance.”
“So they had to abort Sameh’s mission,” Alonza said, “but they didn’t have a way to tell her—”
The colonel shook his head violently. “No. Saying that the mission had to be aborted was probably part of the plan. It was the way to be certain that I would be there when she struck at the Habber, that I would have to take responsibility for failing to protect him.”
“But why would anybody want to get you?” she asked.
“Perhaps you don’t want to know why, Alonza. I know Earth needs the Habbers and their technology more than we’re willing to admit, and I haven’t made any secret of my opinions. There are others who disagree, who would willingly see Earth become even more impoverished if they could be rid of our agreements with the Habbers. Let’s leave it at that.”