power outages—the Dracs blamed the HPG breakdown, implausibly—and the age-old Japanese propensity, transmitted like some kind of virus to the Combine’s subject races, for using indoor charcoal grills for heat and cooking when better sources of power were unavailable, fire was a fairly common event. Even if House Kurita did successfully discourage too much use of structural rice paper in Combine buildings.
But this was clearly a hot-and-fast blaze, not some kicked-overkotatsu lighting off ashoji -screen room divider. The man on the Mitsu-Gurevich cafe racer braked, put a leathered leg down and let the big bike slide through a quarter rotation to a halt as pedestrians and bicyclists scattered and cursed him.
There were no candy-striped civilian cops in sight. Traffic was light; the change of the sixteen-hour shift was far away. The rider looked again, moved his glasses down his nose to give himself a better view. He was a medium-sized man, his build difficult to determine under his padded gray-and-khaki jacket. He had spiky straw- colored hair, rather fine if unremarkable features, and green Asian eyes.
He hoped none of his erstwhile neighbors had been harmed. Before fleeing his apartment he’d set a device that should have triggered a fire alarm—directly, since the smoke detectors were sporadically maintained at best, like so many things in the Draconis Combine—fifteen minutes ago.
As fervently he hoped his little surprise had paid off the accounts of a few of House Kurita’s paid leg- breakers. Mostly low-level, granted, but it was the grunt-class Friendly Persuaders who did most harm to the ordinary folk who suffered beneath their sullen gaze. The true professional torturers of the ISF did not deign to waste their attentions upon the downtrodden and everyday.
He smiled a not altogether pleasant smile. More than likely the last thing the first candy-stripe thug into his small cell of a bedroom had seen on this world was a single playing card: the Knave of Hearts. Naturally, he had picked it up—
Triggering multiple charges of pentaglycerine secreted throughout the small apartment along with plastic containers of gasoline siphoned from official internal combustion engine land-vehicles.
The card itself was unlikely to survive the conflagration currently sending a quite satisfactory pillar of jet- black smoke to join the general aerial crud and corruption. If it did, it might be overlooked in the ham-handed search of the rubble—the officials in charge of the investigation being far, far more interested in finding someone, anyone, besides themselves to saddle with blame for the debacle than in actually getting to the bottom of what had happened. And if it survived, and were turned up, its significance might be missed, depending on whether it was civilian cops or sorely overextended ISF operatives who came across it.
The man on the big Drac bike was an artist. His medium was chaos.
He hated all external authority and government. It was the ruling passion of his life. Even that government which he served—judging it the least of available evils, including the swaddling totalitarian nanny-state of The Republic, now collapsing inward on itself in the wake of the HPG shutdown.
For their part, his superiors were inclined to overlook his little foibles, even though members of their service were supposed to be fanatically loyal to their House. Themselves professionals in the art of chaos, they knew they had a Mozart in their midst.
It might be a security risk to leave the calling card; yet the man on the bike would escape the planet and Kurita space, or he would not, and the leaving of the card would likely have no bearing. And most important, his mission was accomplished: his neat framing of a sizable portion of the competent computer techs on Shionoha would derail the Dracs’ invasion plans for months. Why precisely his masters should care if the Kuritans invaded The Republic, the operator had no need to know. His surmise—not that he greatly cared—was that they didn’t want the Combine getting too big for itshakama .
And if the ISF should, at some point, realize the significance of the card, and that it was not a hoax, that their military had been infiltrated and victimized by the Knave of Hearts, the legendary—or was it imaginary?—LOKI operative: that would increase their paranoia and insecurity and long-term disorder, and further serve the passions of the man behind that name, and House Steiner, whom he served reluctantly and yet to the fullest extent of his extraordinary gifts.
An old man in a conical rice-straw hat, with a scraggly graying blond mustache and a white duck in a bamboo cage on one slumped shoulder, stood near the tail of the stranger’s bike berating him loudly in low-caste Japanese.
The Knave of Hearts smiled to him, nodded and, with a snarl of his big V-twin engine and a squeal of road- grabbing wide-track tires, was on his way.
Hotel Savonarola
Florence, Southern Europa, Terra
Prefecture X
The Republic of the Sphere 4 March 3134
Tara Campbell, Countess and Prefect of Northwind, threw herself on her belly on the hotel bed.
“The cliche ‘bird in a golden cage’ comes to mind,” she said. She picked up the remote control and clicked on the holovid.
As if to validate her fatalistic mood, her own head and shoulders appeared: spiky white-blond hair, hazel eyes, snub-nosed cover-girl features, big silver hoops in her ears and an off-the-shoulders top that looked like a white T-shirt that had had the collar and upper parts of the shoulders torn out. It had been ’grammed from above and in front of her.
“The glamorous Countess Northwind was seen last night at Formio’s, Florence’s hottest night spot, taking a break from a grueling round of meetings with the Exarch concerning the current crisis within The Republic—”
“They also serve who hang out in the rear with the gear and look good on the propaganda tri-dees,” said her aide, Captain Tara Bishop, coming into the room behind her. She was a larger woman than the Countess, which wasn’t saying much, not truly tall but strong and trim. With a shock of hair between dark blond and brown and dark green eyes, she was plain by comparison to the otherTara , but only by comparison.
She stopped dead when she saw her boss’ image. “Hoo, you were pretty decollete there, TC”
In the months since she had been assigned as the Countess’ aide, between the first and second Battles of Northwind against Anastasia Kerensky and her Steel Wolves, she had proven herself an infallibly efficient and indispensable assistant, as well as a fierce and fearless MechWarrior. Especially in the weeks since they had defeated the Steel Wolves on the wintry Russian steppes, she had also become a close friend and confidante to her Countess.
“Shot from that angle, sure,” Tara Campbell said grimly. “They might as well have just dropped the pickup down the front of my top while they were at it.”
“Don’t let them hear you say that.”
Tara Campbell muted the sound but left the three-dimensional video display live: she was hoping against hope they might show actualnews that might cast light upon the situation in the crisis-racked Republic. Hyperpulse generator comms to several planets near Terra had been restored, and JumpShips entered Sol system every day, from Republican worlds, the Great House domains, even the Clan Occupation Zones—although, ominously, the last category had been few of late. Not that any Clanners were particularly welcome since the Steel Wolves had invaded.
“You’d think,” she said, rolling onto her back, “that I’d earned the right to do something real, TB.
Somethingsubstantial ”
Captain Bishop folded herself into a chair at a table by the window and plucked an apple from the basket of fresh fruit the hotel provided its important guest every day.
“You don’t consider a show-the-flag and reassure-the-taxpayers tour a major contribution to the war effort?” she asked.
Taraproduced a most un-Countess-like snort through her dainty nose.
“You made one crucial career mistake, TC,” TB said, biting into the fruit. She waved it in the air. “You were publicly right when a big important man was just as publicly wrong.”
Having seen their homeworld, Northwind in Prefecture III, devastated by Anastasia Kerensky and her renegade Steel Wolves—with help, impossibly, from a turncoat Paladin of The Republic of the Sphere—the two young woman warriors had arrived on Terra with such of the Countess’ surviving forces as could be quickly scrambled into a relief force. The beautiful, bad and entirely mad Anastasia Kerensky was obsessed, Tara Campbell knew, with the dream of succeeding where all the Clans’ previous efforts had failed: the conquest of Terra.
Once on Terra, the Northwinders found themselves virtually under arrest, suspected ofcollaboration with the
