Several of the others nodded in understanding, although Abercrombie seemed uncomfortable at the reminder of a Manticoran duchess’s close connections to an outlawed terrorist organization.

  “Anyway, Harahap may have been only a child when OFS moved in, but he was old enough to remember at least some of what it was like—for him personally, and his family, I mean—before that happened. And to see what StratoCorp’s arrival did to his parents by the time he was twelve. Their system managers are pretty bare-knuckled, even for the Protectorates. Like anyone with a working brain would have, he wanted out, and the Gendarmerie offered him a ticket off-world when he was only nineteen. I don’t think he worried very much, at that point in his life, over what he’d have to do to earn it. And then it turned out he has a certain talent.”

  “He told you all this?” Abercrombie asked, and Honor glanced at him coolly.

  “No, he didn’t. He didn’t have to. Whatever he might say, Sir Tyler, he can’t control his emotions any more than anyone else. He does an almost scary job of not letting them control him, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have them. And I just spent six hours talking to him.” She shook her head. “Believe me, he doesn’t have a clue how much I pulled out of what he didn’t say.”

  Abercrombie looked dubious, but Stone Climber made a soft sound in his ear and smacked him very gently on the back of the head. He twitched in surprise, then drew a deep breath and smiled at Honor in what his mind-glow told her was genuine apology.

  “I obviously didn’t have time to get his complete life story in only six hours,” she continued. “As I say, I think I got a lot more than he knows I did, though. So do you really want my impression of who and what he is?”

  “Of course we do,” Elizabeth said.

  “Really?” Honor smiled. “All right, then. I think he’s exactly what he told Zavala and Kaplan he is. A mercenary, yes, in the sense that he works for pay, but he really didn’t have much choice about taking Mesa’s offer.” She shrugged. “He certainly didn’t go looking for it, at any rate. He joined the Gendarmerie to get out of Startman, and he did what he did for the Gendarmerie because he was very good at it and because he’d become part of a system where that’s what people do.” She smiled briefly. “You might want to think about someone named Palane in that conjunction.”

  Elizabeth’s eyes flickered. Then, almost despite herself, she nodded, and Honor nodded back.

  “After we found the Lynx Terminus, his superior officer loaned him to Manpower—actually, to the Alignment, although none of them knew that—to destabilize our efforts in the Talbott Quadrant,” she went on. “He didn’t owe us anything, he had his orders, and he did his job. By the way, he also thinks Nordbrandt’s a lunatic and that the sooner we catch her and hang her the better.

  “Then, after Terekhov blew that operation wide open, he was a dangerous loose end and someone tried to tie him off. I’m inclined to believe it may really have been Kalokainos.” She grimaced. “He didn’t want to give me that name, but I was insistent.”

  “Why would he have wanted to conceal it?” Theisman asked.

  “Because I think he has visions of dealing with Mr. Kalokainos in person.”

  “Because he thinks Kalokainos ordered him killed?”

  “No, Tom. Because he thinks Kalokainos had one of his very few close personal friends killed at the same time,” Honor said quietly. “In his own way, he’s just as Old Testament as a Gryphon Highlander.”

  Theisman looked thoughtful, and Honor returned her attention to the Empress.

  “The Alignment offered him work and an opportunity to stay alive. The pay was good, I’m sure, and Harahap’s not the sort to turn his nose up at that. Hardly surprising, given where he spent his childhood and adolescence. But I’m pretty sure it was more the cover against Kalokainos—and maybe the possibility that his new bosses would help him square his account with Kalokainos someday—that drew him into Alignment employment. Well, that and the fact that he was pretty sure the Alignment would have snipped the same loose end if he didn’t accept their offer. The fact that he figured out that whoever his new bosses might be they weren’t just Manpower didn’t hurt, either. I don’t think he much liked working with Manpower, even as a Gendarme in Talbott, much less once he’d become a…free-agent, let’s say. I’m not saying that would have prevented him from taking the job, given all the other considerations—like staying alive—or that he had any objection to working for people who could pay him really, really well. I’m saying that given Startman’s history, working for Manpower wouldn’t have been high on this man’s to-do list without some pretty compelling counter arguments. Mesa and transstellars in general, yes. He had no problem there. But direct association with Manpower would never have been his first choice.”

  Theisman nodded slowly, but Pat Givens frowned.

  “That’s all well and good, and I don’t doubt anything you’ve told us, Your Grace. But one thing about this bothers me. Bothers me a lot.” Honor’s arched eyebrow invited her to continue, and the woman who ran the Office of Naval Intelligence shrugged.

  “He’s alive,” she said. “The Mesan operative Van Hale and Genghis turned up on Torch before the assassination attempt had some sort of suicide protocol. From the fragmentary reports we’ve gotten from Old Terra, Rajampet committed suicide—probably that ‘killer nanotech’ of theirs—when it looked like his connection to them might come to light. Then there’s what happened with ‘Ellingsen’ and ‘Abernathy’ on Smoking Frog. For that matter, there’s what happened to those four the ’cats helped us scoop up right here in the Old Kingdom. It looks like every agent who knows who she’s actually working for drops dead the instant she’s found out. I find it difficult to believe the Alignment wouldn’t fit a mercenary, not even one of their own people, with the same…security software.”

  “You think he’s a plant,” Honor said.

  “I think he could be a plant.” Givens shrugged again. “Everything he’s told you may be the truth, but what he was told, what he was allowed to learn, could have been carefully orchestrated.”

  “Why?” Theisman asked for a third time.

  “I don’t have a clue,” Givens admitted frankly. “And there’s no conceivable way they could’ve arranged the chain of circumstances that ended up with him in our custody. I’m willing to grant ‘genetic supermen’ all sorts of esoteric talents, but I’m pretty sure that one would be beyond anyone. So I don’t really see how they could specifically have aimed him at us. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t plan on aiming him at someone, eventually. So I don’t have a theory to propose about their possible objectives at this point. All I’ve got is a question. Why is this man still alive?”

  “I think the answer is Jack McBryde,” Honor said, and felt the others’ astonishment as all of them turned to look at her.

  “I told you this is a smart, capable fellow,” she reminded them. “You think he hasn’t wondered the same thing? Of course he has! And I think he may have hit on the explanation. From my conversation with him, it would appear, ladies and gentlemen, that he received several physical upgrades when he became a full-time Alignment operative. I think we may want to look carefully at some of the mods they gave him, because they sound pretty interesting and most of them don’t have a thing to do with genetic modifications. However, he got those mods at the Gamma Center just before they rushed him off on his first op as a full-fledged Alignment employee. And he was scheduled to go back to the Gamma Center for additional ‘upgrades’ when he got back to Mesa. Only the Gamma Center wasn’t there anymore, and given the confusion after Green Pines, he wasn’t too surprised no one was worried about getting one more agent’s benefits package tweaked.

  “But according to what Dr. Simões has told us about McBryde’s contingency plans, most of the Gamma Center’s records went with the base when he pushed the button. Not just the ones on site, either; Simões says he planned to drop an attack into the Alignment’s entire secure net.” She shrugged. “I think it may have worked. Harahap didn’t know anything about McBryde or his plans, but when he didn’t drop dead after capture, it occurred to him that all his erstwhile employers might think he got a suicide protocol…when he hadn’t.”

  “My God,” Givens said softly. “You really think that’s what happened?”

  “Yes, I do. And if I’m right—”

  “If you’re right, we really do have somebody who can give us an inside look at this false-flag operation,” Elizabeth said. “And someone they’re going to assume is dead, not a threat. And if he’s not a threat, they don’t have to worry about covering up anything he might conceivably tell us about.”

  “As a start,” Honor agreed, nodding firmly. “I think we may have the end of a string that leads right into the inner workings of the Alignment. All we have to do”—she smiled whimsically—“is to convince Mr. Harahap he ought to accept the Queen’s dollar. And, of course,” her smile turned much colder, “see to it that he’s an ‘honest craftsman’ for us, too.”

  Dempsey’s Bar

  Sunrise Tower

  City of Landing

  Manticore Binary System

  “You have reached your destination, Sir,” the air-cab said.

  Indiana Graham stopped craning his neck and swiveling his head like some sort of rotating sensor system as the cab slid neatly to a stop at the hundred and twelfth-floor landing stage and hovered there on counter-grav. The starboard hatch licked open, and he started to ask the vehicle’s AI if it was sure they had the right destination, but he stopped himself in time. The cab had doublechecked the address when it heard his off-world accent. He hadn’t realized how pronounced that accent actually was until he reached Manticore itself. No one had been rude enough to comment on it aboard Tristram, and he’d had other things on his mind for the voyage here. It had been brought rather more sharply to his attention since the shuttle flight from orbit to the city of Landing, however. Not because anyone had deliberately remarked upon it or pointed any fingers at the guy who talked funny, but Manticoran AIs were clearly programmed to recognize accents and dialects that weren’t native to Manticore. Not because they couldn’t understand the strangers, but because the strangers were strangers, and the AIs’ programming doublechecked the sorts of things strangers might have problems with—like addresses in an unknown city.

  “Thank you,” he said, instead. The cab was a machine, but thanking his “driver” was second nature to him, since there were precious few AIs back home. And it didn’t hurt anything to stay in practice.

  “You’re welcome, Sir,” the cab replied. “Please, remember Circle City Taxis if you have further transportation needs. And, on behalf of Circle City, have a pleasant day.”

  Indy chuckled and stepped just a bit gingerly across the half-centimeter wide—and four hundred-plus meter deep—gap of empty air onto the Sunrise Tower landing. He moved clear of the debarking area as the air-cab went zooming back into Landing City’s meticulously managed airspace. He was several minutes early, so instead of finding the lifts, he strolled over to the landing stage rail and propped both hands on it as he leaned forward and looked out over the largest, most magnificent city he’d ever seen.

  This is what Cherubim could’ve been like, he thought, drinking in the mammoth pastel towers.

  They rose like ceramacrete mountains from the green belts and parks, the bike trails and walking paths and the broad avenues where ground traffic moved steadily about the giants’ feet. The entire population of the Seraphim System’s capital could have been housed in one of them—two, at the outside, if they’d wanted to avoid crowding—he thought. Crystoplast glittered and gleamed in the late morning sunlight, some of the towers had smart skins which slowly changed color or portrayed works of art or landscapes from elsewhere in the Manticore Binary System. Jason Bay was an endless, polished expanse of blue marble, swirled with white as it stretched away from him to the south, and the air was like crystal as he drew it deep into his lungs. It was the capital city of what was arguably the wealthiest star nation, on a per capita basis, in the history of mankind. Of course it was going to put anything from a poor star system like Seraphim to shame! But there was more to it than that.

  There’s a reason Seraphim’s poor, he thought grimly, his enjoyment of the view dimmed. McCready and O’Sullivan were homegrown, and scum like that didn’t need any outsiders to teach it how to be scum. But it was Krestor and Mendoza who gave them the chance, and it was OFS and the Sollies who stood behind them with a club in their hands. And without Firebrand—

  He stopped that thought short…again. His feelings about the agent provocateur seemed to have become even more ambiguous since they’d reached Manticore. Even before he’d seen Landing, it had been…difficult to process the discovery that his home star system owed its recovered freedom to a cynical ploy which had provided the Seraphim Independence Movement with so many weapons, so much economic support, purely to blacken Manticore’s eye when their uprising was inevitably crushed.

  If Zavala hadn’t turned up, we would’ve been crushed, too. His eyes darkened. We’d all be dead by now…if we were lucky. Me, Kenzie, Dad, Tanawat—all of us. God knows we got enough people killed, anyway. His eyes went darker still as he remembered Ning Saowaluk, remembered how she’d died and all the others who’d died with her. I know that. And I know he was only there because of Admiral Henke and Admiral Culbertson. Henke didn’t have to decide Manticore was going to save the people who’d thought that was who they’d been talking to all along. And Culbertson damned well didn’t have to send ships out looking for places that might’ve happened, either! How many star nations would have done that? Would’ve diverted naval forces to something like that, gone looking for someone else’s fight, when it was already fighting the Solarian League for its own survival?

  He was pretty sure he could have counted the number on one hand…without using all his fingers. But Manticore had, and Prime Minister Grantville had greeted Indy himself, personally, almost as if Indy had been a visiting head of state and not a rag-tag revolutionary from the back of beyond.

  All that was true, yet without Firebrand—without the “Mesan Alignment’s” cold-blooded, cynical intervention—there would have been no rebellion when McCready died. Or, if there had been, it would have been short and very, very ugly for the rebels.

  So what do I hope happens to him? Indy asked himself, abandoning the pretense that he could simply brush any thought of the traitor who’d been one of his closest friends—or who he’d thought was one of his closest friends—out of his mind. The one thing I can count on is that if anybody can land on his feet, it’ll be Firebrand! And he’s got to have some really valuable intelligence to trade. But from what Abigail was saying, they want his hide for a lot more than just “Operation Janus.” And do I want them to collect it because of what he intended to do in Seraphim, or do I try to plead his case with them because of what he actually did do in Seraphim? For that matter—

  His brand-new Manticoran uni-link beeped, and he shook himself. He’d used up his time cushion standing here staring at the pretty scenery and worrying. If he didn’t get a move on, he was going to be late, and that would be a Bad Thing.

  He snorted at the thought, squared his shoulders, and headed for the nearest lift shaft, grateful for the discreet signage pointing him toward it and hoping he didn’t look too much like a country rube with manure still on his shoes.

  “Incoming at four o’clock, My Lady,” Lieutenant Gutierrez said quietly.

  Abigail Hearns twitched ever so slightly, then glanced up at her towering personal armsman with a quick grin. His answering smile was slight but deeply amused, and she shook her head reprovingly at him.

  “Teasing isn’t nice, Mateo,” she said.

  “Teasing, My Lady?” Gutierrez’s tone was bland innocence itself, but his eyes twinkled at her—for a moment—before they resumed their unending threat search, sweeping the atrium about them. “Wouldn’t know anything about ‘teasing,’” he added.

  Abigail snorted and punched him affectionately in the chest. It was rather like punching a boulder—or a nearoak—and it was probably as well none of her father’s steaders were present to see. A steadholder’s daughter wasn’t supposed to show affection for her armsman openly, and she certainly wasn’t supposed to have physical contact—in public—with a man who was neither married to nor related to her! Fortunately, they weren’t on Grayson and there were no steaders.

  Besides, if I could scandalize them just by punching Mateo, think of how many of them would drop dead out of pure apoplexy at the thought of Miss Owens—heir, however distantly, to Owens Steading—actually meeting a man without any chaperones at all!

  The thought gave her considerable pleasure. In fact, few days went by when she didn’t do something that would have scandalized those conservatives. The mere fact that she was a serving naval officer would have been enough for most of them without her doing a single thing. The amount of time she spent interacting with male officers would have made that still worse. The way she went gallivanting around foreign planets with only Mateo to keep her out of danger—and, of course, to protect her virtue—would have been intolerable. But to actually arrange to have lunch with a man she’d known for less than a T-month in a public venue without a single female companion—!

  Oh, the heart attacks would have come thick and fast! And if they’d known what she was thinking about the man in question…

  I can only hope the tale gets home to Owens, suitably embellished, she thought wistfully, and turned to look in the direction Gutierrez had indicated.

  The young man walking towards them, his eyes scanning the atrium, no longer seemed quite as overwhelmed as he had immediately after they’d reached Landing. She was glad. And despite any uncertainty he’d felt at the time, she’d been confident he’d find his feet quickly. He was a lot tougher and more resilient than he realized.