After the initial surge of triumph at surviving the storm, he returned to more practical
matters. He and Li were separated from the main hunting party, without supplies or
transportation back to the village. The storm might not be completely over; this could be
merely a temporary lull before the full fury returned. Night would be upon them soon as
well. He had best make preparations accordingly.
When he turned around to scout the immediate area, he saw it. There, high up on the top
of a hill, its walls reflecting the dying sunset rays, was a large house. It was nothing
spectacular as houses go-but on Gastonia, anything that was neither a prefab but nor a
crude wooden shack could be considered a mansion. It was three stories tall, with walls
of brick, stone and timber, and it stood imperiously on its hilltop looking down on the
valley in which Jules stood, as though it knew it was the grandest edifice on this world
outside the Governor’s garrison.
Such a house should not be here, not this far from both the village and the garrison.
Despite his physical fatigue, Jules felt a surge of renewed energy charging through his
body. He and Vonnie had come to Gastonia looking for something that was not quite
right, and this house in the wilderness certainly fit that description. He would have to
investigate it more closely and he would never have a better cover story than the truth,
that he was a hunter lost in the storm and needing help.
He picked Li up once more and started off toward the house. The strangely clear air
after the storm had a deceptive effect, and the building turned out to be farther away
than it looked at first. Jules found he had to trudge nearly two kilometers before it
seemed appreciably closer. He kept walking, though, and the house appeared even more
magical the nearer he came. In the long, fading shadows of twilight the windows lit up,
and the house took on the aspects of some grand castle in a fairy tale.
There was a small stand of trees at the base of the hill, and from out of the shadows,
before Jules could think to hide, came a guard. He was a tall man, wearing clothes that
had obviously been made off-planet … and he tamed a blaster. Jules noted that
particular detail with a great deal of interest indeed.
“Stop!” the guard ordered. He did not have to reach for his weapon, confident that any
normal Gastonian would not be armed well enough to fight him. “What are you doing
here?” “Looking for help,” Jules said. “My comrade and I got trapped in the storm. He’s
badly hurt, and I’m not in such great shape myself.”
“Why did you come here?”
“We got lost, separated from the rest of our hunting party. After the storm, I saw this
house. It’s pretty fancy; how did it get here, and how did you get that blaster?”
“I’ll ask the questions around here,” the guard said brusquely. “Come this way-and stay in
front of me at all times.”
Jules walked in the indicated direction, still carrying the unconscious Li. Fifty meters up
the hill, behind a large boulder, was a guard station. Two other men were currently on
duty there-and both of them had blasters, too. Jules decided to play the role of a rube,
and gawked blatantly at the station’s equipment, which consisted largely of an intercom
back to the house and an infrared scanner to survey the valley at the bottom of the hill.
No wonder they spotted me so fast, Jules thought. They probably had their sights on me
all the way across the valley.
One of the other guards had noticed his staring, and took out his blaster in a threatening
gesture. “Hey, you, stop looking where you ain’t supposed to.”
“Sorry.” Jules quickly looked down at his feet in a gesture of abject apology. “I just never
expected to see a setup like this here on Gastonia. Where’d you get it all, anyway?”
“Shut up!” The guard who’d brought him here gave Jules a hard backhand slap across
the face. The agent’s anger rose, but he kept it under control. This was not the time for a
fight out until he learned more about what was going on here, and what odds he had to
face. “Didn’t I tell you not to ask questions?” the guard continued.
Jules remained silent, and the three guards conferred among themselves about what to
do with these interlopers. Finally one of them said, “We might as well call up to the house
and find out what she wants to do with them.”
Mention of the word “she” quickened Jules’s pulse slightly. Could they be referring to
Lady A? Was she here on Gastonia? Was he finally going to meet her face to face-and if
so, how could he turn such a meeting to his advantage under these circumstances?
His hopes were dashed, though, when the woman to whom these men owed allegiance
replied over the intercom. Jules had heard Lady A’s voice before, on a tape, and this
voice, though strong, did not have the same tone of imperious command as the
conspiracy’s ringleader. There was something familiar about it, though, Jules would have
sworn he’d heard it before, although the precise memory escaped him at the moment.
The chief guard explained to his boss how he had found the prisoners, and repeated
Jules’s story. The woman at the other end was silent for a moment, then said, “Bring
them up to the house. I’d like to have a look at them.”
The guard turned to Jules. “You heard what she said. Get moving.”
Jules walked out the door of the station, still carrying Li on his shoulders, and marched
up the steep hill to the big house. The guard followed a few steps behind him. Even had
he wanted to make an escape attempt, Jules could not have dropped Li’s body and
turned to fight before the guard could have drawn his blaster and fired. Of course, Jules
desired no such thing; at the moment he was delighted to be getting an escort into the
house.
As he walked through the door, he was greeted by a sensation he hadn’t felt since he’d
arrived on Gastonia, a feeling he’d almost forgotten existed-warmth. This house was
heated efficiently, and did not need to rely on the uneven heating of the crude fireplaces
in most Gastonian dwellings. To Jules, who had now spent more than a month living
under the cold Gastonian conditions, it was almost uncomfortable to be comfortable.
He was ushered into a room that could have passed for a wealthy salon on any civilized
planet-comfortable furniture, carved wooden tables, circular carpets, indirect ceiling
lighting, even a sensable set in one corner. Anywhere else, Jules would not have thought
twice about the decor-but on Gastonia it was an anachronism for which he had to find an
explanation.
A woman walked into the room from another hallway. She wore a red caftan covered
with gold beadwork, silk slippers trimmed with fur and a dark blue fur-edged cape. But
when Jules got a look at her face, his heart froze. Coming across the carpet toward him
was Tanya Boros-former Dowager Duchess of Swingleton, former heir to all of Sector
Twenty … and the only daughter of the infamous Banion the Bastard, pretender to the
Throne until a couple of years ago, when the d’Alemberts thwarted his carefully laid
conspiracy.
Although the harsh climate of Gastonia could age a person quickly, Tanya Boros looked
as beautiful and young as ever. Her years of exile on this world had been gentle with her,
and Jules was sure she could not have spent much time in the village. But life within this
villa could not have been what Stanley Ten had had in mind when he commuted her death
sentence to life imprisonment in exchange for her renunciation of all titles and a renewed
vow of loyalty to the Empire.
Jules cursed himself as all kinds of a fool for not expecting to run into her here. It had
been his actions that condemned her to this planet, and yet he had scarcely given her a
thought in the intervening years. Partly it was because he’d been too busy with other
things-but also, he knew, it was because there was a tendency to think of someone on
Gastonia as already dead. Now he was learning how wrong that assumption was.
He had to think quickly. Tanya Boros had met him years ago as duClos, an ex-Puritan
masseur and bodybuilder. He had moved with an athletic spring to his step and affected
a prissy, supercilious tone, sneering at her nobility and insulting her to her face. He had
been smooth-shaven save for a pencil-thin mustache and had spoken with a slightly nasal
twang.
Since there were no shaving implements on Gastonia, his face-like that of every other