1

Paladin Steiner-Davion's
Residence, Santa Fe
Terra, Prefecture X
1 October 3134

The final glimmer of a purple-and-orange sunset had disappeared into the chill of a late-autumn night. Even here, away from downtown, the sky-glow from greater Santa Fe overwhelmed all but the brightest stars, while the background noise of city traffic, machinery and, above all, people, underlay everything like a heartbeat, or like breath.

At well past midnight, the sprawling headquarters of the Knights of the Sphere was, for the most part, dark and silent. Even in its residential wings, quiet ruled. The majority of Knights with quarters in the complex worked hard and valued their rest, and those who were of a mind to relax or work off tension usually wandered to other parts of the city to play.

The suite of rooms belonging to Paladin Victor Steiner-Davion appeared, from the outside, to be no different from the rest. Only in the office was there light—and that merely the glow from a single data screen. All the curtains were tightly drawn; no one outside would know that the Paladin was awake and at his desk.

You'd think that at my age I wouldn't need to hide in the dark and work in secret, Victor thought to himself. He gave a tired, quiet laugh. At my age, I shouldn't have to do this kind of work any longer, period.

We believed we'd taken care of all these problems, he thought. We told ourselves that we'd left them behind along with everything else from the bad old days—the family ties and alliances that we set aside, the BattleMechs that we gave up and turned in for scrap—because Devlin Stone's vision of a new order was going to make all of our fears and precautions obsolete. Maybe we should have known better. The darker aspects of human nature do not simply disappear because some of the tools are taken away. Power will always be contested. In so much you were wrong, Kattie, dear sister, but about this aspect of human nature you may just have been right.

Yet the dream had become real; for a few brief decades it had worked. Until the day Devlin Stone made the mistake of thinking that he could step away from his creation and let it run without him.

Was the dream flawed, then, from its very inception? Surely The Republic of the Sphere ought to be able to continue without the charismatic presence of its founder. What did it say—about Devlin Stone, about The Republic, and about those who had given their lives and their loyalty to both—that it might not?

I have to believe, Victor thought, that we did not choose wrongly, and did not fight in vain.

His data screen pinged, distracting him from his reverie to announce a file arriving. He checked the address from which the file had been sent, and smiled. The sender's true name—which appeared nowhere in the document—would have shocked respectable people and would have shocked The Republic's intelligence services even more had they known that Victor Steiner-Davion was in correspondence with its owner.

But Victor had lived for a long time. He had been a MechWarrior during the turbulent, bloody years before the founding of The Republic. In his youth, and even in his middle age, he'd associated with any number of people whose names and dossiers would have made law enforcement and intelligence services distinctly nervous. And quite a few of those people still owed him favors.

The information contained in this particular file had been bought with the price of several of those favors. But Victor considered the favors well spent. At his age, he wasn't likely to find another reason to need them, and the information was good to have. The work he was doing now was like building a mosaic. He had in his possession a great number of small pieces, each one individually nothing—but when put together in precisely the right fashion, they would make the picture plain.

Collecting all the tiles for the mosaic was the easy part, he reflected, at least if you happened to be him. You only needed sufficient money—or a sufficient number of favors owed—and sufficient patience, combined with decades of practice at standing back and taking the long view. Anyone could have done it, given those qualities.

The next part, though, would be much harder. He had to present his mosaic in such a way that even the dimmest Senators and Knights and— especially—Paladins could see and understand the picture he created. Not to single out any individuals, but if the truth were told, some of his comrades-in-arms had always been more notable for courage and fighting skill than for brains.

So he couldn't just lay out the evidence and let the facts speak for themselves. He had to lead his audience step by obvious step to the right conclusion. This would be his legacy to The Republic of the Sphere, one last act performed for the sake of the dream of Devlin Stone, and it had to be done just right. The forthcoming election could hinge on how well he did his job, on how many of the Paladins understood what he now knew.

It was more than simply arranging the facts and ideas; he had to find the exact right words and tone, and put everything in the right order. He'd never been much of a man for talk, and not much of a diplomat either, although the newsreaders now called him a statesman—a reward, he supposed, for having lived so long. He was a MechWarrior first and always, and the task of moving others to his way of thinking through convincing argument was a far different task than piloting a 'Mech.

It was late. Eventually the words and the sentences blurred together, and Victor dozed, sitting upright in his chair. Then he slept more deeply, as the chair—a marvel of modern design and medical engineering—adjusted its contours to his slumbering form.

Morning came, bringing with it daylight streaming past cracks in the closed curtains, and he woke with a start to a cheerful voice saying, "Good morning!"

Both the voice and the good cheer belonged to Elena Ruiz, the housekeeper (though he and she both knew quite well that she was more nurse than housekeeper) who looked after his suite of rooms. She was a pleasant sight for an old man's eyes, even in her plain white uniform—dark hair, olive skin, and a face always open and ready to smile. Her greeting was followed by a blaze of light as she drew the curtains mercilessly open, letting in the bright desert sun.

Victor responded with a good-natured grumble. "Woman, they pay you to keep me healthy, not to kill me."

"Hah," she said. "You'll outlive all of us. And if you slept in your bedroom like most people, you wouldn't have to worry about me opening the curtains in the morning."

"I was working," he said. The display on his data screen was on and glowing, bearing out his words. He frowned briefly. The display should have followed his lead and gone into sleep mode sometime last night. It must have been brought back to life by some vibration or bump to the desk.

Victor shut down the file. He would work on it again later, after the coming of night once more brought privacy. Then he turned to Elena Ruiz.

"Now—what's for breakfast?"

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