“No, sir. I hulled the ship, but Barton’s people hit us before I could get off another round.”
“Were you hit?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m pleased to see you’re no braggart.” Bronson took papers out of a drawer. “I have the medical reports. Apparently you were three weeks in the regeneration stimulators. And you still want another try?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right. But no more command positions for a while, Jeff. No more relative-of-the-boss. If you want to play with the big boys, you’ll have to earn it.”
He picked up a pipe from the table and began the comforting ritual of loading it.
“You see,” he continued softly, “your little fiasco on Tanith did more than cost me several hundred million CD credits. It gave me a public black eye—oh, not to the chuckleheads who watch the media, but to the people who really know things.” His hand closed tightly on the bowl of the corncob.
“That damnable hired gun Falkenberg!” Bronson’s eyes went to a picture framed in black: Harold Kewney. Barely twenty, in the uniform of a CoDominium Space Navy midshipman. His daughter’s son, the chosen heir. . . dead thirty years ago, holding a rear-guard while then-Lieutenant John Christian Falkenberg escaped. Escaped, and then—
“And the Blaines and the Grants behind him, and that Russki bastard Lermontov, God curse the day I went along with making him Grand Admiral of the Fleet. They’ve all of them cost me time and grief before, the hypocrites. . . . Do they think I’m a fool, not to know that Tanith drug money’s underwriting the Fleet? We all know the CoDominium won’t outlast even my lifetime”—he ignored Niles’s look of shock—”and I know their cure: a coup by the Fleet, with Lermontov calling the shots and the Grants and Blaines providing a civilian cover. And from what happened on Tanith, the Spartans are in it up to their ‘idealistic’ eyeballs. That so-called Prince Lysander of theirs was the one who hijacked the shuttle from under your nose.”
He pressed a control, sourly watching the mixture of hatred and envy flicker across the young Englishman’s face. The hijacking had been exactly the sort of exploit Geoffrey Niles dreamed about. And perhaps could accomplish, if he learned some self-discipline first, the Senator thought.
The door opened silently, and a man entered. An Oriental like Nakata, but without his stiffness, and dressed in a conspicuously inconspicuous outfit of dark-blue tunic and hose. Geoffrey Niles looked at him and returned the other man’s smile, feeling a coldness across his shoulders and back. A little shorter than the Englishman, which made him towering for his race, sharp-featured and broad-shouldered; the hand that held his briefly was like something carved from wood. No more than thirty.
“This is Kenjiro Murasaki,” Bronson said. “Owner and manager of Special Tasks, Inc., of New Osaka.” The capital city of the planet Meiji.
“Mr. Murasaki has agreed to . . . take care of the Spartan problem for me. New Washington is outside my sphere of operations, but Falkenberg’s Legion is not going to establish a base on Sparta if I can help it. I’ve had tentative contacts with the underground opposition on Sparta for some time; now things get serious. And the Spartans, and Grant and Blaine and Lermontov, are going to get an object lesson in what happens to people who try to fuck with Adrian Bronson.”
Niles swallowed in shock. It was the first time he had ever heard the Grand Senator use an obscenity, and it was as out-of-place as a knife-fight at a garden party.
“You can join the expedition. I’ll let you keep your nominal rank of Lieutenant Commander, but you’ll be an aide, subordinate to Mr. Murasaki and under the same discipline as other members of his organization. Or you can return to London tomorrow and never leave Earth again except as a tourist. Take your pick.”
There was a long moment of silence. Niles nodded jerkily. “If that’s acceptable to you, Mr. Murasaki,” he said, with a precisely calculated bow. The Meijian returned it, bowing fractionally less.
“Indeed, Mr. Niles,” he said, with the social smile Nipponese used in such situations. “If one thing is understood at the outset. We will be in a situation of conflict with two organizations, the Royal government of Sparta, and Falkenberg’s Legion. Capable organizations, which operate according to certain rules, the Spartan Constitution, the Laws of War. We too will operate according to rules. The Hama rules.”
Geoffrey Niles frowned. “I’m . . . Please excuse my ignorance of Japanese history,” he said, racking his memory.
The smile grew broader. “Not Japanese, Mr. Niles. Hama was a city in . . . the Republic of Syria, then; Northern Israel, since 2009. In the later 20th century, it rebelled against the Syrian government.” Geoffrey let one brow rise slightly. “The government made no effort to pacify the city. Instead it was surrounded by armor and artillery and leveled in a week’s bombardment. The survivors died by bayonet, or fire when flamethrowers were turned on cellars. Man, woman and child.”
Black eyes held blue. “Hama rules. First: There are no rules. Second: Rule or die. Understood?”
* * *
Bronson drew on the pipe. “Something can be made of that young man,” he said, glancing at the door Niles had closed behind him.
“Perhaps, excellency. Yet the best steel comes from the hottest fire,” Murasaki said politely.
“If you mean, do I want him kept out of harm’s way, the answer’s no,” Bronson said brutally. “I expect that rebellion to do a lot of damage before it’s crushed, and that means fighting. It’s time to see what young Niles is made of, one way or the other. This isn’t a time for the stupid or the weak, and I don’t want them in my bloodline. Test him; I’d be delighted if he passes, but if it kills him, so be it.”
* * *
SPARTA:
Skida Thibodeau blinked as the light-intensifiers in her faceplate cycled down; it was fairly bright in the yard behind the ranch house, with the burning hovertruck not ten meters away.
“Smith!” she shouted. “Get that doused, do you want the RSMP down on us?”
Most of the fifty-odd ranch hands and laborers were gathered in an apprehensive clump, beneath the weapons of the guerrillas. Some wore the rough coveralls of working dress, others no more than a snatched-up blanket; they were a tough-looking lot, the sort you could hire cheap for a place a long way from the pleasures of town. Almost all men; there was a severe imbalance between the genders among deportees who made it to Sparta, and most women could find work closer to Sparta City than this. Some glowered at the attackers, others cringed, but none seemed ready to defy the raiders whose nightsight goggles and bandannas made them doubly terrible, anonymous in their outbacker leathers.
Others of the guerrillas were leading spare horses and mules out of the stables, fitting packsaddles and loading them with bundles of loot, everything from weapons to trail-rations and medicine. She was glad to see nobody was trying to hide anything massive anymore, or steal liquor for themselves, but . . .
The tall woman took three quick steps to where the ranch-family stood in a huddle of personal servants and the retainers who had been fighting by their sides. One of the guards had his hand under the skirt of a housemaid, ignoring the girl’s squirming and whimpers. The man was one of her old hidehunters; they were nearly as much trouble as that clutch of Liberation Party deportees from Earth Croser had sent along two months back.
No point in wasting words, she thought, and whipped the butt of her rifle around to crack against his elbow. The man gave a wordless snarl of pain and crouched for a moment, before looking aside.
“Ay, Skilly, you said—”
“Keep you hands to youself,” she hissed. “That for later. Be political, you silly mon. Now bring the haciendado and his woman out. You, Diego, take their children over to the shed and lock them in. Take the nursemaid too. And Diego, Skilly would be angry if anything happened to them.”
The crowd grew quieter still as the couple who owned this land were prodded out into the trampled earth of the yard. Velysen, Skida remembered from the intelligence report. Harold and Suzanne Velysen, Spartan-born, Citizens. They were unremarkable. A man in his midthirties, dark and wiry; the woman a little younger, blond and as plump as you got on this heavy-gravity world. Another woman who looked to be the wife’s younger sister. Harold Velysen had managed to don pants and boots, but his wife was still in torn silk pajamas that showed a bruise on her right shoulder where a rifle-butt would rest. Skida pitched her voice to carry, standing with legs straddled and thumbs in her belt:
“Now, listen. The Helots has no quarrel with you workers. The Non-Citizens’ Liberation Front fights for you aboveboard and legal; we Helots does it with guns. Nobody’s been hurt except the ranchero and his gunmen, hey? Not even his children. The Helots fights civ-il-ized.”