Helena winced. “You’re right, of course. It makes me shudder just to think there might be traitors in the Service; it was bad enough when we had to weed out so many during the Banion mess. Find out what you can, and if it calls for official action we can bring in help from the outside.
“If things are as bad as your sister claims, you won’t have to go into much detail; just give us a preliminary report. You’re a good investigator and troubleshooter, but we’ve got specialists in planetary administration who can handle the mop-up once you’ve pointed them in the right direction. There’s no need to risk yourself unnecessarily on a minor housekeeping matter like this; the Service needs your talents too much for major projects.”
But to Pias Bavol this was far more than “a minor housekeeping matter.” This was his family, and Newforest was the planet he’d once hoped to inherit. Unimportant though it might be in the scheme of galactic history, this was his home and his people – and even though he was sorely tempted to let the friends and family who’d betrayed him suffer the consequences of their actions, he vowed to put into this case every bit of energy it took to set the situation right again.
CHAPTER 3 Return to Newforest
Pias had a major battle on his hands even before he left DesPlaines. Yvonne d’Alembert – impatient at her enforced idleness and nervous about the fate of her spouse – demanded to accompany him on his trip to Newforest. It would at least give her something to do to take her mind off Jules’s dangerous assignment on Omicron.
Pias at first protested that the children would be left unattended, to which Vonnie replied that there were plenty of servants on the vast ducal estate, as well as the Marchioness Gabrielle – and if they got tired of watching the children, Vonnie’s father was always eager to see them. “I refuse to be thought of as the weak link in this family,” she insisted. “I’m always the one who has to stay behind, and it just isn’t fair. I can pull my weight with the rest of you.”
Pias agreed that was so, but voiced a new objection. “This is a job that calls for a great deal of subtlety,” he said, “and I’m afraid you’d stand out too much.”
“Thanks a lot!” Vonnie grimaced. “I’m as good at undercover work as anyone in this family. I was taking classes before you ever thought to leave Newforest, and I got a 989 on the Thousand Point Test. That’s not exactly spaceslime, tovarishch.”
Pias shook his head as he tried to soothe his Sister-in-law’s temper. “I didn’t mean to imply you weren’t any good, but Newforest is a special case. We stayed isolated from the rest of the Empire until two generations ago. We’ve got a language of our own and a very distinct culture. Outsiders are viewed with great suspicion and distrust, and it would take you weeks, maybe even months, to learn everything you’d need to be able to pass for a native. I just can’t afford the delay. If Tas would try to kill Beti, who knows what he’ll do to the rest of the family – or to the rest of Newforest. I’ve got to stop him quickly.”
The argument continued, but in the end Pias was victorious. He would travel to Newforest alone and investigate his brother’s activities. He did promise that if any action were to be taken he would notify Yvonne as well as SOTE Headquarters on Earth, giving his sister-in-law a chance to get in on the adventure.
Pias left for Newforest a few hours later in one of the small private ships the d’Alembert family kept at Felicité’s spacefield. It was a long trip from DesPlaines to Newforest, and Pias had plenty of time to consider the strategy he would use in his investigation.
The first thing he would have to do was disguise him self. As a young marquis and heir to the planet, he had always been a popular figure and his appearance was well known to most of the populace. By the edict of the kriss, the council of elders, he was a nonperson and anyone who saw him was supposed to treat him as though he didn’t exist. That would make it hard to obtain any information from the people about what was really happening on Newforest. Even worse, Pias was afraid that someone recognizing him would inform Tas, and then he’d be in trouble.
To avoid that problem he dyed his sandy brown hair a deep black, changed his hairline with plucking and growth inhibitors, used skin pigments to darken his complexion, and applied a thick mustache to his normally bare upper lip. He inserted contact lenses to change his eye color from blue to brown. For hours he practiced speaking in a voice that was higher and more nasal than his usual tones, and he gave himself a trace of a country accent that would label him as coming from well outside the capital city of Garridan where the Bavol family made its home.
Landing on Newforest would be awkward. Because of its high gravity, no one went there casually – and because it had little heavy industry or interstellar trade, the planet attracted even fewer visitors than DesPlaines did. Anyone landing at the spaceport was an immediate object of suspicion – and particularly so if he arrived in a personal spaceship. Very few Newforesters could afford their own private ships; landing at Garridan Space port would attract undue attention – something an undercover agent preferred to avoid.
Pias would have to land somewhere unofficially. There was a range of hills about thirty kilometers south of the town where he thought he might come down unseen. He hated the thought of walking so far into town, but he could think of no alternative. Meanwhile, in preparation, he went through the ship as thoroughly as he could, removing anything that might identify it. If someone spotted it while he was gone, he didn’t want to leave any clues pointing to himself or, worse, to the d’Alemberts of DesPlaines. He’d also brought along some cases of expensive perfume and some mildly pornographic sensable tapes; if planetary officials examined the ship, they’d think he was a smuggler, not a spy.
He’d thought a secret landing would be easily arranged. Garridan was not a busy port and its detection equipment was largely unsophisticated. Since there was no naval base there either, there should have been no detectors capable of spotting his small craft – or, if they did spot him, there would be no resources for tracking him down and following him to his landing site. He would be at most a momentary enigma that would fade from their memories almost as fast as he faded from their sensor screens.
His ship emerged from subspace about twenty million kilometers out from Newforest and quickly began spiraling in. His troubles began just before he reached the uppermost levels of the planet’s atmosphere. An official radio announcement demanded that he identify himself immediately or face legal action. Pias ignored the warning and concentrated on plotting a course to land at his chosen hiding site.
The warning came a second time, and Pias suddenly noticed two ships on his sensor screen coming up to intercept him. Newforest had never had a big problem with smugglers, and no one ever wanted to land here illegally, so the government had never bothered to challenge ships before. He cursed himself for not expecting a fight after everything Beti had told him about Tas’s security crackdown, but it was still hard for him to think of his home world as anything but easygoing. In the back of his mind, Pias knew that such measures meant there was something on Newforest that required guarding from prying eyes. But that was a consideration for later; right now, he had some evasive action to take.
He wasn’t much worried about the two ships themselves. He’d naturally be careful, for either of them would have the firepower to blow his own small vessel out of the ether, but he’d evaded more thorough opposition in the past. The real threat would be from the organization behind those fighters. Newforest was now a planet on guard against intruders, and that would make his mission infinitely more dangerous.
The attackers began firing at him even before the second warning was finished, but by that time Pias already had his craft in motion. The vessel dipped and rolled and twisted as his hands played across the ship’s controls, and the fighters trying to intercept him were slow to respond; apparently they were not as accustomed to combat situations as he was – and Pias was still a rank amateur compared to his brother-in-law Jules. The security systems on Newforest must still be comparatively new, then, and the pilots unpracticed in their roles. That gave him some hope of success.