there for ages, arguing about some small matter, but they paid no attention to
him. Herm dismounted and led the horses over.
"Well, nephew," he began quietly, "I see you got here before me. I was delayed
in the city."
The head beneath the hood moved at the sound of his voice, stilled, and then
lifted. "I was starting to think you had forgotten me, Uncle."
"I would never do that. I hope you were not bored, waiting."
"Oh, no. I just watched the performances, and got something to eat."
Herm! You are not who I expected!
I know. Now, we are going to be pretending to be quite ordinary people, on our
way to a wedding in the hills.
We? Does that mean you aren't going to send me back?
Not immediately, Nico. I promised your father I would keep you safe-he was not
very pleased with you. Now, I want you to be called Tomas, and I will be Ian
MacAnndra. It occurred to him then that there was something he had missed
earlier, during the discussion in the study. Herm wondered why Danilo and Lew
wanted Domenic away from Comyn Castle. Then he decided they probably had good
reasons and stopped worrying about it.
I understand. That's a good choice-there are hundreds of MacAnndras in the
hills. I've been keeping an eye on the wagons while I waited, and nothing has
happened so far. What are we going to do?
We are going to remain here until morning-there's a bedroll for you-and then we
are going to decide our next move. Tell me everything you have learned thus far,
Nico.
Tomas! Not Nico. You might forget and say the wrong name-Uncle Ian!
Damn, but the boy was quick! Herm sat down next to the young man and stretched
his hands toward the fire. Then he listened intently to the voice in his mind.
The tale unwound clearly, beginning with how the Travelers' wagon had passed
Comyn Castle that morning and ending with what the boy had heard later. Domenic
seemed to have a good memory and an eye for detail. As he went over his story,
Herm could sense that Nico was starting to relax, and even enjoying himself a
bit. He asked a few questions, and discovered that Nico had never seen the men's
faces, but thought he could identify them anyhow.
At last they stood up together and got the bedrolls from the horses, spread them
out beside the fire, and prepared to sleep. Herm discovered he was very tired,
and that his legs ached from riding, but he was excited as well. The pleasant
smells of woodsmoke and horse dung, cold air and a light breeze, refreshed him.
He ignored the rocks under his bedding and thought about Katherine and the
children. His spirits started to plummet, but before he could pitch himself into
despair, he heard the boy again. I think something as happening over near the
Travelers.
What?
There as some sort of argument between the one called Vancof and another driver.
They both seem a bit drunk, and their thoughts are not very clear. But it seems
as if Vancof as picking a fight on purpose. There as an undertone in his
mind-he's afraid. No, he's drunk and torn up aside. He wants to get away from
here, but he thinks he has to stay at the same time. It is all muddled up with
remorse and firewine.
A moment later loud voices erupted in the other field. There were shouts from
within the wagons to be quiet, and the noise of wooden doors being opened and
closed. Everyone who was awake looked over with interest. A few of the muleteers
began to wander across the road, abandoning the storyteller at the fire pit in
favor of more lively entertainment.
Herm sat up and looked, and Domenic as well. Two shadowed figures were
struggling in front of one wagon, fists flying and mostly missing the mark. Then
several other people got out of the wagons and joined in the fray, trying to
separate the combatants.
The fight was over quickly, though the loud voices continued. One man swore at
everyone, and shuffled away. He vanished into a wain, and reemerged a few
minutes later with a rather clumsy bundle. He started to trudge away from the
encampment, and a woman screamed at him. He turned and shouted back at her.
That's the man, uncle that's Vancof I don't know who the harridan screaming at
him is. It's not the girl I saw earlier, but someone else. I never heard a
woman, even Mother, say such things!
You have led a very sheltered life, Tomas. Never be surprised at what a woman
can think of to say when she is angry. Can you sense anything more from him?
Not much. He really is pretty drunk. He just wants to get as far away as he can.
But I can't tell if he wants to get away from the Travelers or from the men he
talked to before. He just seems disgusted with everything.
We can't follow him without drawing attention to ourselves.
He is too drunk to get very far, I think, Uncle Ian. Sometimes Uncle Rafael gets
like this, after he has had a row with Aunt Gisela. He drinks himself into a
stupor, and falls asleep. Vancof seems to be in a similar state.
Good. Then let's get some sleep. Tomorrow promises to be an interesting day.
12
Lyle Belfontaine stared at the stack of sheets on his desk. They were the
messages he had sent during the past two days, and all of them had been returned
without any reply. This was something that had never happened before, and it
left him with a knot in his belly and a raging headache. It was as if the
Federation had vanished from the galaxy, leaving him stranded on Cottman IV. He
had not felt so helpless since his father had dismissed him over thirty years
before. And he had not felt so frustrated since just before the disastrous
events on Lein III, when he had tried to overthrow a planetary government
against all the rules of the Federation. It gave him an anxious feeling, a
roughening of the skin at the back of his neck, an almost prescient sense that
he might revisit those events, and this time make them work out to his
advantage. Strange-this planet must really be getting under his skin, if he was
starting to think like the superstitious natives who believed in such nonsense.
Miles Granfell walked into the office without announcement, his face sober, but
his eyes gleaming with surpressed emotion. His boots were soiled, as if he had
been walking on dirt, and his usually tidy hair was wind-tossed. Without a word,
he took the chair on the other side of the desk and stretched his long legs
forward.
"What is it?" Lyle growled the words, glaring at the stack of returned messages,
aggrieved and almost eager to take it out on his underling. "Where have you
been?"
"Oh, 'walking to and fro upon the earth.' "
Belfontaine recognized this as some sort of quotation. The last thing he wanted
to do was play literature with Granfell, but he decided he had to be patient.
"What is that supposed to mean?"
Granfell grinned and crossed his ankles. "I have some good news. Regis Hastur is
dead."
Belfontaine found himself angry at the man's words rather than pleased. Surely
he should have known about this before his subordinate! With an effort, he
mastered his emotions and asked only, "Are you sure?"
"
Vancof is, which will have to do for now."
"I see. Well, that is news indeed," he conceded with as much grace as he could
muster. When he did not say anything further, the other man shifted in the
chair, as if trying to gauge Lyle's mood.
After a minute of silence, Granfell asked, "What's all that clutter? I've never
seen so much paper on your desk in all the years you have been here."
Lyle eyed the other man with thinly masked dislike. Granfell's tone bordered on
insolence. Then he dismissed his feelings-it was just Miles' way, after all. "It
is every message I have sent out in the past thirty-six hours. Regional
Headquarters seems to have . . . vanished."
Granfell came to attention abruptly. "Is there some problem with the relay
station?"
"I don't know. Our transmitter appears to be functioning perfectly, but whatever
I send out just bounces." He did not need to add that the transmitter for
Cottman IV was ancient by Federation standards, that all the equipment at
Headquarters had been there for ten or even twenty years without replacement.
Fortunately, most of it still worked, but recently they had had to scavenge
parts from some mechanisms to keep others going-all because of the austerity
measures that had spread across the Federation.
"This is serious, Lyle."
"I am well aware of that," he answered as icily as he could. "It makes your
concerns that we might be abandoned here take on a whole new dimension."
"Precisely. And I think we should . . ." Miles' voice faltered, and he looked
around the office slowly. "It makes planning anything very difficult," he said
at last.
Belfontaine looked at him dumbly for a moment, until he realized that Granfell
had something he wanted to say that he did not want to have heard or recorded.
Even the chance that they were going to be stuck on Cottman instead of removed
did not relieve him of the fear of being suspected of working against the
Federation. There were automatic devices in the walls of the room which heard
everything, and he had no control over them, even though he was part of the
Security Forces. If Lyle had been able to, he would have turned off the
listeners long since. And just because the Federation was out of touch at
present did not mean it would remain so. They had to proceed with caution.
"My head feels like I have been on a three-day drunk. Let's take a walk, and
consider our options," he replied after a moment.
"The hangover without the pleasure of the booze, you mean?" The words were
spoken casually as Granfell unfolded his long body from the chair, smiling
without humor.
"Precisely."
Belfontaine picked his all-weather cloak off the hook beside the door. They
walked out of the office together, down the corridor, and took the lift to the
ground floor without speaking again. Then they exited the building, coming into
a chilly night, the sky overcast as usual, and the wind brisk. They moved across
the tarmac in silence, until they were well away from everything, and had some
assurance of not being overheard.
"So Regis Hastur is dead. And I never even got to meet him."
"Yes. And if the Federation has left us behind, we have our own lives to think
about. Vancof told me that Regis' heir is Mikhail Hastur, and we know even less
about him than we did about Regis. What I do know is that they are going to take
the body up to some place near Lake Hali, some religious site."
"Who is?"
"All of them, the entire Comyn Council, is my understanding, with their wives
and children, and who knows how many else."
"You mean that the Castle is going to be . . ."
"I'm not sure if it will be empty, but I suspect that it would be comparatively
easy pickings. But that is just a building. The real power here is in the
Domains." After stating this obvious fact, Miles paused for several seconds, as
if experiencing difficulty in continuing.
Belfontaine waited as patiently as he could, sensing the tension in his
subordinate. "And?"
"What I think you should do is . . . arrange for this funeral train to be
attacked along the road somewhere." The words came in a rush, as if Granfell
wanted to release them as fast as possible. When Belfontaine did not react, he
went on. "I told Vancof to scout out a likely ambush site-which he did not like
very much. But if a substantial part of the ruling class were removed, there
would be no obstacle to Federation rule-assuming that there still is a
Federation in a few weeks. I confess that this sudden silence makes me very
uneasy. What do you think is going on out there?"
Belfontaine moved more quickly to keep the chill out of his bones. He thought
about this sudden proposal, wary and suspicious. He did not like his underlings
to have ideas of their own, and he was aware that such a plan was very
dangerous. If it went awry, it was his head that was in the noose, not
Granfell's.
There was something about this sudden proposal that rang alarm bells in
Belfontaine's mind. What if Regis Hastur was still alive, and the entire thing
was some plan to discredit him as Station Chief. It would not be the first time
some ambitious subordinate had tried to further himself at the expense of his
commander. He had never entirely trusted Granfell, had he? The whole thing
seemed too good to be true, and Lyle had learned very early in life to mistrust
anything he had not learned firsthand, for himself.
Still, he should be able to determine if, indeed, Hastur was dead. If he was, he
knew why he had not been informed-Lew Alton was behind it, of course. It would
be just like the man to keep him in the dark. He felt surrounded by enemies and
incompetents, suspecting everyone, even the Planetary Administrator, Emmet
Grayson, whom he had managed to neutralize effectively for the most part. The
reorganization of the Federation bureaucracy had made it easy for Belfontaine to
exclude Grayson from any real authority, but he still had a few loyal followers
among the personnel at HQ. It seemed an unlikely prospect, but one which would
bear considering when he was alone.
"I can only speculate about what is happening in Federation space, Miles. My
best guess is that in order to keep things going they have simply closed down
intersystem communication for the time being. That would keep any ambitious
admirals or planetary governors from conspiring or causing trouble."
"You think they have isolated all the member worlds, then?"
"Those that might be disloyal, certainly."
"But why take us out of the loop?"
"A sound question, for which I have no answer. For all I know, some group has
seized control of the relay station itself. The dissolution of the legislature
may have triggered some crisis we cannot imagine-it was an ill-considered move,
in my opinion. I have no doubt that Nagy's Expansionist advisors assumed that
they could control the situation, but I have never had a great deal of respect
for most of them."
"Politicians," Granfell sneered.
"Exactly." He weighed his next words carefully, wishing to seem neither too
eager nor too reluctant. Granfel
l's reaction to them would tell him a great
deal. "Do you seriously think this funeral train can be attacked successfully?"
"I think it worth a try, yes."
"I don't want a try, Miles. I can't risk violating Federation policy. It would
have to appear as if it were a local action, not a Federation move."
"Yes, that's true. I thought that we might take advantage of our Aldaran friends
in this." The wind gusted and the words were muffled.
"What precisely do you have in mind?" Aldaran friends? He meant Dom Damon, who
was no friend to anyone but himself. All of Belfontaine's suspicions
hardened-why bring Dom Damon into it? What was Granfell up to?
"If we fly some of the troops down from the Hellers, land them along the road,
and attack the train . . ."
Lyle was shocked for a second as Granfell paused. This did not sound like a spur
of the moment plan, but something that had been thought out far more completely.
On the other hand, from the evidence of his boots, Miles had walked from
wherever he had met Vancof, and perhaps he had used the time to think it
through. He had never underestimated the intelligence of his subordinate before,
and he was not going to begin now. "We have about a hundred useful men up
there," he answered reasonably, as if he were thinking about it, when instead
his mind was racing with fresh suspicions. "The funeral procession will be
heavily guarded, won't it? The natives here may be backward, but they know how
to fight." He waited to hear Granfell's reply, to measure it. The strange
prickling he had had earlier on the back of his neck returned.
"Dress the men up in local clothing and pass them off as brigands. God knows
there are enough of those up in the hills. And I am sure that a couple platoons
of trained soldiers could take out these paltry guards without using blasters.
We might mine the road or . . ."
"And if the Federation appears, and there is a Board of Inquiry, what then?"
"If you aren't ready to take the risk . . ."
"I did not say that, Miles. But we have to be extremely cautious. I just want to
be certain that, whatever happens, nothing can be traced to us. The idea of
using men from the Hellers complex is a good one, since we can blame Dom Damon
if anything goes wrong. We all know that he thinks that he could run Cottman if
he ever got the chance. He would make an excellent scapegoat, particularly if he