Alfred Harrington moved quickly across the quadrangle. He'd always been good at memorizing maps and knowing exactly where he was, and that talent had served him well here on ISU's huge campus. Despite which, he was probably going to be late to his appointment with Dr. Patterson. He and Dr. Mwo-chi had run over on their scheduled lab, partly because they were still in the familiarization phase, and she'd promised to protect him if Dr. Patterson turned ugly. Given that Patterson had a reputation for being one of the kindliest, most cheerful professors on campus, he was unlikely to stand in too much need of protection, but he really liked Patterson. And—
“Ohhh!”
Alfred threw out one arm for balance as the small, black-haired, unreasonably good-looking young woman appeared out of nowhere. She seemed to literally materialize from behind a carefully shaped bank of flowering bushes, directly into his path. His reflexes were much quicker than those of an unmodified human who'd grown up in a single gravity, but they weren't fast enough to stop him in time, and he ran into her hard enough to send her bouncing backward with the impact.
* * *
Allison found herself stumbling back with a squawk of dismay that was completely genuine. She hadn't realized how quickly he was moving, and she hadn't allowed for the sheer size and physical power of him. He was a third again her own height, with the dense muscle, heavy bone, and solid gristle of his home world. He must have weighed more than twice as much as she did, and it dawned on her as she felt her balance going that it might have been wiser to find a different way to “accidentally” encounter him.
Then his hand darted out. She'd never seen anyone move that quickly before, and the fingers that closed on her shoulder could have been forged of iron. They were gentle, but they were also completely unyielding, and she felt her incipient tumble being braked to a halt without any apparent effort at all.
“Excuse me,” he said, so earnestly she felt a pang—brief, but a pang—of guilt over having arranged the collision. “I usually watch where I'm going better than that!”
“Don't be silly.” She gave herself a shake and used her right hand to rake hair out of her eyes as he released her shoulder. “It was more my fault than yours,” she went on with complete honesty. “I know how that butterfly bush blocks the sightlines for anyone headed for Priestly Hall. If I didn't want someone to run into me, I should've stopped and looked both ways before I stepped into the open around it.”
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I think I'm fine, Lieutenant . . . Harrington.” She was careful to read the name off the plate on the front of his uniform tunic and smiled at him. “Obviously, you're from Manticore. How do you do?” She held out her hand. “I'm Allison Chou.”
It wasn't her full name, but he didn't have to know that . . . yet, at any rate. And it was the one on her admission file here at the university. It had irritated her parents, and especially her mother, no end when she decided on that, but names were personal things here on Beowulf. No one could really object, and while she suspected she wasn't fooling very many of her classmates, she could at least pretend Chou was her complete surname.
“Pleased to meet you Ms. Chou.” He took her hand, and once again she realized he was deliberately restricting the power of his grip. It was just as strong as she'd thought it was, but it was also gentle, and a strange sort of tingle seemed to flow into her own hand out of it. “Alfred Harrington. And, yes, I am from the Star Kingdom—from Sphinx, as a matter of fact.”
“I thought I recognized the accent,” she said, trying to understand that sensation. She'd never felt anything quite like it. “You're a student here?”
“Yes.” He nodded. He released her hand, and she took it back almost reluctantly. “Neurosurgery. And you?”
“Genetics.” She shrugged, wiggling her fingers unobtrusively. “Something of a tradition here on Beowulf, I'm afraid.”
“Sounds interesting to me,” he replied. “Of course,” he smiled a bit crookedly, “a lot of us Manticorans, especially the ones from Sphinx, have a certain . . . vested interest in that field, you might say.”
“I suppose you do,” she agreed.
She gazed up at him, wondering why his voice seemed to carry a peculiar overtone. She couldn't quite put her finger on what it was, but it was almost . . . furry feeling. Like something silky soft stroking over her skin. It clearly wasn't anything he was doing on purpose, yet there was something . . . intimate about it, as if the tingle her hand had felt was spreading to other portions of her anatomy. Whatever it was, it wasn't anything she'd expected to feel. And there was something else with it. Something . . . darker, sadder. It was ridiculous, of course, and she knew it, and yet what she felt at that moment was a simultaneous need to purr and to burst into tears.
“So you'll be here on Beowulf for a while?” she heard herself say, and he nodded.
“At least two or three T-years. It's not that far back to Sphinx through the Junction, though. I can grab one of the daytrips home to visit anytime I've got a couple of days free, so it's not exactly like being in exile.”
“No, I can see that.”
She was beginning to feel a little foolish. There was something so nice about just standing here, talking to him, and that was ridiculous. First, because she didn't even know him. Second, because to be brutally honest, she'd been energetically pursued (and, on occasion, caught) by men a lot better looking than he was. Third, because she had no idea where that edge of darkness was coming from, and it scared her. And fourth, because it was pretty obvious that whatever she might be feeling, he wasn't feeling it at all.
“Well,” she said, “you were clearly in a hurry before I ran into you, so I'd probably better let you get on to wherever it was you were going.”
She stepped back out of the way, and he looked down at her. He hesitated a moment, then nodded.
“You're right, I'd better get moving,” he said, and she had the strangest feeling that it wasn't what he'd started to say. “Maybe we'll run into each other again—a little less literally, next time.”
“Maybe we will,” she agreed, nodding back to him, then watched him walk away with that long, graceful stride.
Well, that was weird enough, she thought, watching him go, trying to remember anything like what had just happened. She'd met plenty of attractive men in her life, and been drawn to more than one of them. She was Beowulfan, after all, and she knew, without false modesty or conceit, far more attractive herself than most. But she'd never felt so . . . comfortable with someone so quickly.
She ambled across to one of the shaded benches and settled on it, her expression pensive. She didn't know Lieutenant Harrington from Adam's house cat, as her brother might have put it, and the entire experience had been more than a little disturbing. A lot of people thought of her as impulsive, and she was willing to admit there was some truth to that, yet she'd never encountered anything quite like this. It was as if there was some sort of link, some kind of connection, between the two of them despite the fact that they'd never even met, and that was just plain stupid. Things like that didn't happen outside really bad novels. Besides, that darkness . . . Now that the moment had passed, she tasted it far more clearly, like iron on her tongue, and she shivered. It was as if it hadn't been her darkness at all, as if it had been someone else's entirely, and that frightened her.
She blinked as she realized what she'd just thought. Frightened her? All right, it was strange, perhaps, but frightening? That was ludicrous. And, she decided, straightening her spine, she wasn't going to put up with it, either. Not that she knew exactly what she was going to do about it just yet. That was going to take some thinking, and it was obvious to her that there was rather more to Lieutenant Harrington than met the eye—where she was concerned, at any rate. And that meant she'd darned well better not be rushing into anything, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi or no Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. No, it was time to be subtle, to consider carefully . . . to be nosy. And what was the point in having family connections if you never used them?
* * *
“To what do I owe the honor?” Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou inquired as he pulled out his sister's chair. She settled into it, and he walked around the table to his own. He sat, eyebrows politely raised, and she smiled at him.
They looked very much alike, which was hardly surprising, given that they were fraternal twins. Of course, he was also five T-years—almost six, actually—older than she was, but that wasn't as rare on Beowulf as it was on some other worlds, where birth rates were less tightly regulated. He was slightly taller than she was, too, but no one who saw them together would ever have mistaken them for anything other than the twins they were.
“Why do you always assume I have an ulterior motive when I ask you to have lunch with me?” Allison inquired.
“Years and years of experience, mostly,” he replied dryly, and she grinned.
“I never could put anything over on you, could I, Jacques?”
“Not for lack of trying, though.”
“A girl has to practice on someone,” she pointed out.
“I'm so happy to have been of use to you,” he said with exquisite courtesy. “But you still haven't told me what this is about.” He waved one hand gently around the expensive restaurant. “Mind, I've always liked the food at Madoka's, but this was rather short notice even for you.”
“My schedule's tighter this semester.” She shrugged. “I've got smaller holes to fit things into.”
“And my own superiors' desire that I might perhaps accommodate my schedule to theirs figures into your plans exactly how?”
“Oh, be serious, Jacques!” She shook her head. “You've been twisting your schedule into a pretzel any time it suited your purposes for as long as I can remember. Don't tell me your ‘superiors' think they're going to change that!”
He considered her thoughtfully. She had a point, although not as strong a one as she might have thought. A lot of that pretzel she was talking about was more apparent than real. It would please his superiors—and him—no end if they could convince someone with a working IQ that he was simply a child of one of Beowulf's elite families, amusing himself by dabbling with a military career and not taking it any more seriously along the way than he had to. He doubted they were going to fool too many of the people who really mattered, but it was always worth a try, and even people who knew better couldn't afford to ignore official appearances. If all the rest of the galaxy perceived him as a dilettante, they'd have to act as if they did, as well . . . or else explain why they didn't. Encouraging that perception was the reason he'd probably be leaving the military—officially, at least—in a very few more years, as well, and the thought didn't make him very happy. He'd seen and done some ugly things in the BSC, but he'd been part of some pretty damned satisfying things, too. He was going to miss going out with the teams, meeting the challenges they met in the field.
“Well, while I'm certainly not prepared to agree that there's any truth whatsoever in your aspersions upon my character,” he said now, “I am here, and you indicated you had something to talk about. So . . . ?”
He arched his eyebrows again, and she began to answer, then paused as the waiter materialized at his elbow like a puff of smoke. Madoka's was among the top ten or twenty restaurants (depending on who was doing the rating) in Grendel, and the quality of its human waitstaff was part of the reason why. The twins gave the attentive waiter and his photographic memory their orders, then waited while he poured beverages and disappeared once more.
“You were saying?” Jacques prompted as soon as he had.
“Curiosity, mostly,” she said. “Of course, I could have asked you about it over the com, but I haven't seen you in almost a month, so it seemed like an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.”
He nodded, smiling at her, aware that what she'd just said was nothing but the truth. The two of them were connected on a level deeper than was common even among twins, complicated by the fact that she was not simply his twin but his baby sister. There was always that itch neither of them could quite scratch when they were apart. They'd grown used to it, over the years, and it scarcely bothered them anymore, but they always felt the relief as the itch disappeared when they sat down across the table from each other like this.
“What kind of curiosity?” he inquired.
“It's about one of my fellow students, actually.” She shrugged. “He's in neurosurgery, not genetics, so we haven't actually met. But I've run into someone who doesn't think much of him, and I'm wondering if there's any basis for it besides the someone in question's own swollen ego.”
“And you couldn't just go and find out for yourself?” he asked politely. “I hadn't realized you'd become quite so ancient and feeble since the last time I saw you.”
“Certainly I could go and find out for myself.” She made a face at him across the table, yet he seemed to sense a certain evasiveness behind the expression. “I seem to recall, however, that one of my overprotective older brothers warned me a few years back about my social recklessness. I can't quite remember which one of them it was, though.”
Jacques laughed, but she had a point. And maybe he was being overprotective, at that. But Allison had always been the one who chafed the most severely at being a Benton-Ramirez y Chou. She understood—and often resented—her family's prominence, the way its members were “expected” to go into public service or politics as well as—or even in addition to—medical careers. But she also had an almost feline refusal to be driven into anything by anyone, and she had a matching streak of impulsiveness. There was nothing careless or lazy or foolish about her, but she was a bundle of energy, capable of cheerfully multitasking in enough directions to drive anyone close to her insane, and the notion of taking precautions simply because her family was not universally beloved was alien to her. And, he acknowledged, not without a fair degree of reason. The Benton-Ramirez y Chous were widely venerated on Beowulf. It was probably one of the things Allison most disliked about being a Benton-Ramirez y Chou, he thought, because all a Benton-Ramirez y Chou had to do to be venerated on Beowulf was to breathe. Allison found that oppressive, irritating, and unearned, and he often wondered how she was going to cope with it once she left the university. But for the most part, she was absolutely right; the vast majority of Beowulfers she met were going to go out of their way to defer to her. Aside from the inevitable small number of deranged individuals to be found in any society, they certainly weren't going to threaten her in any way!
But not everyone in the galaxy was a Beowulfer, and there were better reasons than usual at the moment for her to exercise a little of that caution she hated so much. He had to admit that most of those reasons had to do with him, too, which gave his concern an edge of guilt.
“So who's the object of your curiosity, Alley?” he asked.
“He's from Sphinx,” she said. “A great big tall fellow and a Navy officer. A lieutenant, I think, although I'm not sure. He's got one gold thingy on his collar, anyway.” She tossed her head. “I get confused trying to figure out naval ranks even when they're Beowulfan, though. Why don't they use the same ones everyone else uses?”
“The Manties or the System Defense Force?” he asked with an amused smile.
“Either. Both!”
“Because navy pukes are senior to the rest of us and they don't have any intention of letting us forget it, mostly,” he told her, sparring for time. He hadn't really expected her to ask him about Harrington, and he wasn't at all sure he wanted to encourage any interest in him she might be feeling. Not that he had anything against Harrington, of course. Quite the contrary, in fact. But he wasn't exactly invisible . . . or the safest person someone's sister—especially his sister—might be spending time with.
“Well, his name is Harrington,” she said. “Since you made such a fuss about who I spend time with, and since he happens to be from off-world, I thought I'd ask you to . . . I don't know, check up on him, for me.”
“And how much attention do you pay when I ‘check up' on people for you?” he challenged, then grinned. “I told you that jackass Illescue was going to piss you off, didn't I?”
“He's not as bad as you said he was,” she replied. He only grinned at her some more, and she shrugged. “Okay, he's bad enough,” she admitted. “He's just not as bad as you said he was.”
“Oh, I see. Thank you for explaining that to me.”
“You're welcome. And now, are you going to check out Lieutenant Harrington for me? Or should I just go ahead, walk up to him, and introduce myself? I'm perfectly willing to do just that, you understand.”
“I'm sure you are.” He considered her for another moment, and then it was his turn to shrug. “As a matter of fact, I already know quite a bit about him.”
“You do?”
She was unfolding her napkin as she spoke, draping it across her lap, and she seemed to be paying the simple activity more attention than it really needed, he thought.
“Yes, I do. In fact, I made it a point to meet him when he landed and I walked him through Customs to the university.”
She looked up from her lap, her eyes suddenly intent, and he sighed. He knew that expression. He'd rather hoped she might decide he was hinting her away from Harrington, but clearly that wasn't going to happen. And the truth was that everything he knew about the Sphinxian was to the other man's credit, although he suspected Harrington didn't see it that way.
“Why?” she asked simply.
“Because Lieutenant Harrington is a very . . . interesting fellow,” he replied. “Interesting to a fellow like me, I mean.”
She pursed her lips slightly. Unlike quite a few other members of the family, she had a very clear notion of what Jacques' duties with the Biological Survey Corps had involved upon occasion. Even she knew only a part of it, of course, and he intended to keep it that way. But she knew enough to know that being interesting to a “fellow like him” could be a very bad thing.
“I don't know anything negative about him, Alley,” he said quickly. “In fact, from everything I do know, he sounds like a very good man. But he's landed in the middle of some things that have . . . complications.”
“What kind of ‘complications'?”
“The kind I can't tell you about.” He grimaced. “Not won't tell you about, Alley—can't. It's all very classified and hush-hush, and we don't know all the implications over at BSC yet.”
“What can you tell me?” she asked, and his eyes narrowed.
He knew his sister well, better than he knew any other human being, and he recognized the edge of steel behind the question. What he didn't know was why he was hearing it. Obviously, her curiosity about Alfred Harrington was less casual than she'd tried to imply, yet there was a trace element of uncertainty in her, one he was unaccustomed to hearing or seeing. A part of him—a very strong part of him—was suddenly tempted to end this conversation now, immediately. There were currents here that he didn't want to get into, and the truth was that Harrington had made enemies of his own. Those enemies probably weren't foolish enough to try to do anything about their enmity, especially here on Beowulf, of all the planets in the galaxy, but there was no guarantee of that. And if his own activities were mixed into their calculations . . .
But this was his sister.
“He enlisted in the Manticoran Marines when he was eighteen,” he said, his voice suddenly crisper than she was accustomed to hearing from him. “He did well. By the time he was twenty-three, he'd made platoon sergeant, and the Corps was considering offering him a commission. Then there was . . . an incident. It had nothing directly to do with the Marines. He found himself in a situation, a very ugly situation, that was none of his making. He did something about it. A lot of people died, he was badly wounded himself, and when the Manties found out about it, they gave him the Osterman Cross.” He met her eyes across the table. “That's their second-highest award for valor, Alley, and it can only be earned in combat.”
Their gazes held for a moment, then he shrugged.
“The Osterman Cross can also be awarded only to enlisted or noncommissioned personnel, and it's almost always accompanied by the offer of a commission. That offer is frequently turned down, and the Manties are smart enough to accept that without prejudice when it is. They know how important that kind of noncom is, and they're just delighted to hang onto one of them instead of insisting on ‘up or out' the way the SLN does, but the offier is always made. And it was made in Lieutenant Harrington's case, but he had a rather unusual request. He asked for a transfer to the Navy and for medical school, as well.” Jacques shrugged again. “That's not as strange as it might sound, since the Navy provides all of the Marines' medical support in the Star Kingdom, but it was unusual, especially for someone who'd obviously performed so well in a combat arm. Under the circumstances, and considering what he'd done, though, it was granted, and that's why he's here.”
“What did he do to win the medal?” she asked quietly.
“That's part of what I can't tell you. It's classified, Alley. The Manties classified it when they gave him the citation.”
She regarded him very levelly, thinking about what he'd said . . . and what he hadn't. He knew lots of things that were classified, sometimes when he wasn't supposed to, but she knew his sense of integrity. He'd probably already skirted perilously close to the limits of what he was allowed—what he would allow himself—to share with her. And as she thought about it, she felt herself remembering that darkness she'd sensed in Lieutenant Harrington and she shivered.
“Well,” she said in a determinedly normal tone, “I can see that Franz was wrong—again—about whether or not Lieutenant Harrington deserved admission to ISU.”
“I'd say that if anyone ever deserved a slot at the university, it was Harrington,” Jacques agreed, then looked up as their appetizers arrived.
The waiter busied himself setting the salads and consommé before them and withdrew, and Allison picked up her fork, then glanced back up at her brother.
“Thank you,” she said. “You've given me quite a bit to think about, Jacques.”
* * *
“Here.” Sojourner X handed the chip folio to Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou.“I hope this is going to help.”
“Well, it probably can't hurt,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou said, looking up at the towering, powerfully built ex-slave.
He'd pointed out to Sojourner once upon a time that the original Sojourner Truth had been a woman, not a man, but Sojourner didn't care. In fact, he'd already known, and he'd observed that “sojourner” was a genderless noun that worked equally well for a woman's name or a man's. Besides, he'd identified closely with the original inspiration of his name. That observation had sounded a bit strange coming from a hulking, craggy-faced, heavy-featured giant, but Benton-Ramirez y Chou had realized as soon as he thought it that that was an example of prejudice on his own part, based solely on outward appearances and stereotypes.
The realization had sent a spark of self-anger through him. If anyone on Beowulf should have been immunized against that sort of bias it was a member of his family. His direct ancestors had been instrumental in outlawing the weaponization of genetics—and opposing Leonard Detweiler's “superman” manipulation of the human genome—in the Beowulf Biosciences Code following the nightmare creations of Old Earth's Final War. They'd fought hard and successfully to get genetic weapons classified as weapons of mass destruction under the terms of the Eridani Edict, they'd spearheaded the effort to get the trade in genetically modified slaves outlawed (officially, at least) in the Solarian League, and they'd led the fight to draft the Cherwell Convention equating the slave trade with piracy . . . and imposing the same sentence for both. Beowulf had been solidly behind them in all of those fights, and Benton-Ramirez y Chou's birth planet was undoubtedly home to the largest population of liberated slaves anywhere in the galaxy. They repaid their new home world with the sort of patriotism which shamed many native born Beowulfers (or ought to have), and many of his own Biological Survey Corps colleagues were either ex-slaves like Sojourner or the children of slaves. And yet, despite all of that, he'd fallen prey to an automatic, subconscious assumption that someone who looked as brutish as a Manpower heavy laborer model was probably of less than average intelligence. The truth was that Sojourner held the equivalent of two postdoctoral degrees, one in physics and one in chemistry, and lectured in both subjects at Warshawski University.
“It may not hurt, but it won't do any good if nobody acts on it,” Sojourner pointed out now, his deep voice grim. “And it's got a limited shelflife, Jacques. Three more months, and the bastards will pull up stakes, shoot anybody not worth taking along through the head, and relocate.”
“I know,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou said more soberly. “I'll do my damnedest, Sojourner—you know that. But there are still a lot of official inquiries rattling around the League after that business on Haswell. Something about a dozen or so fine, upstanding Gendarmes who perished at the hands of ‘assailants unknown' in the course of that raid on the slave depot that wasn't supposed to be there. Can't imagine why anyone would think we'd had anything to do with such a heinous act!”
His sorrowful tone was rather marred by his wolfish grin. But then the grin faded, and he twitched an unhappy shrug.
“Unfortunately, the truth is that anyone with two synapses to rub together has a pretty shrewd idea who was actually behind that one, Sojurner. And they probably have a pretty damned good idea where I—I mean, where someone—came up with the original intel. Given all that, it's going to be hard to convince even the Boss to okay the kind of strike we'd need here, assuming the data tells us what I think it will. And under the circumstances, he may have to go upstairs and get official approval from the Board of Directors. You know how long that'll take.”
Sojourner scowled. On his face, the expression looked more than a little terrifying, and Benton-Ramirez y Chou sensed the genuine anger behind it. He knew that anger wasn't directed at him, but the waves of hatred radiating off the ex-slave made him feel as if he were leaning into a strong wind.
“Then maybe we need to call on someone more unofficial,” the professor said harshly, and Benton-Ramirez y Chou inhaled.
“I can't be hearing this,” he cautioned Sojourner. “Not yet, anyway,” he added, and Sojourner's eyes narrowed.
Benton-Ramirez y Chou bit his tongue, cursing himself for adding the qualifier. If any of his superiors were forced to take official cognizance of the fact that he was talking to anyone with connections to the Audubon Ballroom, the consequences would be immediate and drastic. Many of them already knew he was, of course, but that wasn't the same as knowing it on the record, and the Ballroom was a very sore topic between Beowulf and the bureaucrats in Old Chicago who ran the Solarian League. He was pretty sure Giuseppe Adamson, the current Permanent Senior Undersecretary of the Interior, had at least circumstantial evidence that the BSC was not only in contact with the Ballroom, but had actively run operations with Ballroom assistance. He might even have that sort of evidence about a planet named Haswell, and that could get decidedly dicey for the individuals involved in that particular op, one of whom had been then-Lieutenant Jacques Benton-Ramirez y Chou. The League took a dim view of League citizens who shot Solarian Gendarmes, even if the Gendarmes in question had been moonlighting as security goons in a Manpower slave depot on a planet where genetic slavery was officially illegal.
Well, you knew shit happens even before you signed up, he told himself. And we need the . . . extra capabilities the Ballroom offers. If you hadn't thought it was worth the risk, you shouldn't have volunteered for the op. And don't pretend you didn't think it was entirely worthwhile afterward!
Unfortunately, the Ballroom wasn't a neat, hierarchical organization. It was more of an umbrella, a collection of allied but independent chapters and groups, and it took people who could rely on the empowerment of hatred to pit themselves against the crushing power and enfluence of something like Manpower, Incorporated, and its corrupt corporate and political allies in the League. Even if the Ballroom's coordinating council had tried to rein in the more extreme members of their organization, there was no way it could have done it . . . and precious little evidence it wanted to. Given what most of the Ballroom's recruits had endured—or seen people they loved endure—it would have been foolish to expect them not to strike back as ferociously as they possibly could. Nor should it have surprised anyone that all too often for less embittered people's taste those reprisals took the form of the wholesale massacre of Manpower personnel and their business associates. Or that the Ballroom was none too fastidious about collateral damage when it struck at Manpower and its slavers. Many of the Ballroom's members and sympathizers, like Sojourner X himself, understood the downside of providing Manpower and its mouthpieces with atrocity fodder, but it would have required a direct act of God to actually stop it.
“I'll pass it along this afternoon,” he assured his hulking friend, tapping the pocket into which he'd tucked the folio. “And I'll do everything I can to get them to move on it, but I'd be lying if I said I thought there was more than a fifty-fifty chance we'll be able to accomplish anything. If your three-month time estimate is right, we'd have less than six weeks to get the operation authorized, organized, and launched, and that'd be cutting it close even under more normal circumstances, much less this soon after Haswell. I'll try, Sojourner, but I won't promise what I don't know I can deliver.”
Sojourner looked down at him for several moments, then nodded abruptly, once.
“The best you can do is the best you can do,” he said. He laid one hand on the smaller man's shoulder and squeezed briefly. “I know you'll do everything you can, Jacques. Take care.”
“And you,” Benton-Ramirez y Chou said, and watched him walk away.
* * *
“Why don't we just go ahead and shoot the little son-of-a-bitch?” Giuseppe Ardmore demanded.
He and Tobin Manischewitz sat at the desk in the cheap hotel room gazing down at the display of the computer on top of it. They could see Sojourner X ambling aimlessly away down the landscaped paths of Rosalind Franklin Park, but their attention was focused on the much smaller man he'd been speaking to. They knew where to find Sojourner again if they needed to, and he was less important than the man he'd met, anyway. As they watched, the object of their scrutiny seated himself on one of the benches, gazing out over the lake as if he had not a care in the universe.
“The bastard's caused us more headaches than any other three people I can think of,” Ardmore continued, “and it's not like there's never any crime even here on oh-so-perfect Beowulf. Put a pulser dart through his brain, take his wallet and his chrono, leave them with a mugging by ‘parties unknown,' and be done with it!”
“I can't say the notion isn't tempting,” Manischewitz acknowl-edged, but he also shook his head sourly. “In fact, it'd tickle me pink, to be honest. Unfortunately, whatever we might be able to sell to the general public, BSC and the System Bureau of Investigation will know perfectly well what happened, whether they're ever able to prove it or not. That's why Upstairs seems to've decided he's just a little too prominent for us to get away with popping him right here on Beowulf. He may be only a pipsqueak captain in the BSC, but his family makes him a very special pipsqueak captain. If we knock off a Benton-Ramirez y Chou on Beowulf, hell wouldn't hold the Beowulfers' reaction. Hell, if he gets run down by a ground car crossing against the signal at least half of Beowulf will think we put a hit out on him!”
“So what?” Ardmore scowled. “They hate our guts anyway!”
“Look, nobody's going to scream too loud if we knock off one or two—even a dozen—other BSC officers. Oh, they'll be pissed, and we'll probably get whacked a time or two for it as soon as they get the chance, but for the most part, they'd put it down to the cost of doing business. The sort of thing that happens when they piss off someone like Manpower. But if we take down a Benton-Ramirez y Chou, especially here in Beowulf itself, that's a whole different game. That family is Beowulf, Giuseppe. I think our esteemed superiors are afraid a deliberate assassination directed against one of them is likely to provoke retaliation at a somewhat higher level, and none of them want to be the object of the lesson BSC and Beowulf in general might decide to deliver. Not unless there's one hell of a potential return involved, anyway! For that matter, I have to admit that killing him could have exactly the reverse of the effect we want. It could just as easily drive the Board of Directors into adopting the policy he's been pushing for and opening a direct connection to the Ballroom.”
“Then why are we even bothering to watch him?” Ardmore waved a disgusted hand at the display, where Benton-Ramirez y Chou was leaning back on the bench with his legs crossed. “We didn't stop ‘Sojourner' from passing along the info. We're not going to kill Benton-Ramirez y Chou. We're not going to kill ‘Sojourner'. So just what the hell are we going to do? I mean, all due respect for Upstairs and everything,” he didn't sound very respectful, Manischewitz observed, “but this is a colossal waste of time if we're not going to do anything!”
It was highly probable, Manischewitz reflected, that a lot of Ardmore's frustration stemmed from the fact that both of them knew things would not go well for them if they fell afoul of the Beowulfan authorities. Their cover as licensed employees of Black Mountain Security, one of Old Earth's biggest private security and investigative agencies, wouldn't stand any serious scrutiny, despite the fact that it was completely genuine. The Black Mountain executive who'd “hired” them to provide them with the credentials which did so much to facilitate their journeys about the Solarian League would disavow them in a heartbeat if Beowulf turned up a link between them and their real employers. And that was assuming their ostensible employer even knew they'd been grabbed. Beowulf had an almost fanatical respect for the individual rights of its citizens; it was rather less fastidious about the legal rights of non-citizens in the employ of Manpower, Incorporated.
“I don't know that we're ‘not going to do anything,' Giuseppe,” Manischewitz said after a moment. “Sure, Upstairs isn't crazy about escalating any potential retaliation to upper management, but I think someone's getting more worked up about our friend Benton-Ramirez y Chou for some reason, so maybe they are going to authorize a move against him. In fact, I'm starting to think there's a pretty fair chance of it, if it can be handled anonymously enough. Not even Beowulf's going to launch the overkill kind of response Upstairs is probably afraid of if they don't have pretty damned solid proof of who needs killing from their perspective. Just floundering around popping people in the executive suite in general could easily draw too much official attention from the League. I'm pretty sure Adamson and the rest of Interior's senior people are pissed off enough with Beowulf as it is. If they know Beowulf's going after the right targets after something like a Beton Ramirez y Chou hit, they'll probably just swallow it. The last thing they'd want is for Beowulf to dump proof of a Manpower op here on League territory in Beowulf. No telling what kind of other crap might make its way into the 'faxes if that happens. So, yeah, if they can come up with something Beowulf can't prove, they might just decide to let us take him down after all.
“Problem is, we don't really know a lot about his conduits, or how tied in he is to the Ballroom in general. I'm pretty damn sure ‘Sojourner' isn't his only contact, though. And we don't know how far up he actually reaches in the system government or even the System Defense Force. We know Brigadier Tyson and Hamilton-Mitostakis think very highly of him, but not everyone in the SDF thinks all that highly of BSC's ‘hotdogs,' and we don't know how Tyson's superiors regard him. We sure as hell don't know what kind of contacts he may have on the civilian side, either! I'd be ready to bet he's got quite a few of them, though, given his family connections. I don't think anyone's going to authorize just taking him out without being able to answer some of those questions. We need to know a lot more about what he's been up to and how to tie up loose ends before Upstairs'll risk the kind of retaliation killing him's likely to provoke, no matter how deniable they think they could make it.”
“And how are we going to manage that?” Ardmore snorted. “We've had exactly zero luck getting any of our bugs inside BSC, and their security's even tighter on the Board of Directors' side. We were lucky we picked up in time to catch him and ‘Sojourner' making the drop, but we could spend years trying to get a handle on everything he's ‘up to' right this minute. And by the time we had it, he'd be years along in making even more trouble for us!”
“Maybe we could convince him to tell us about it himself,” Manischewitz suggested softly.
“Lots of luck!” Ardmore snorted again, even harder. “I've tried to get info out of one of those Survey Corps bastards before. They're tough, they're better immunized against interrogation drugs than the frigging Solarian Navy, and every one of them has a suicide switch. Even if Upstairs let us grab him, and even if we could do it without that emergency beacon implanted in his shoulder bringing the local cops and the SBI—or the damned BSC—down on top of us, we'd never get anything out of him.”
“You see?” Manischewitz' smile was not a pleasant thing to see. “That's why I'm in charge. You think in such direct, simple, brutal terms, Giuseppe. Assuming I can convince Upstairs to go along with us, I have a much more subtle idea in mind.” His smile turned even colder. “One Captain Benton-Ramirez y Chou won't like one little bit.”
* * *
“Lord that's a sick weapon,” Alfred Harrington said, looking at the neural disruptor on the laboratory worktable. He felt a surge of remembered nausea, and he was actually a little surprised his hand didn't shake when he reached out to touch it.
“It is that,” Penelope Mwo-chi agreed. She stood a couple of meters back from the table, arms folded in front of her, and her face was grim.
“I've never understood why anyone would develop the damned thing in the first place, Doctor,” Alfred admitted. He turned it over and noted with a feeling of relief that there was no powerpack. “It's effective enough against unarmored opponents as a close-quarters weapon, but battle armor stops it dead, and over seventy-five or a hundred meters, it starts losing effectiveness fast even against unarmored targets. By the time you get to a hundred and fifty, you might as well be shining a flashlight at someone!”
“Agreed.” Mwo-chi cocked her head. “That's right, you did say you'd seen what one of these did. Can I ask where?”
“I . . . can't say,” Alfred replied. He looked up at her. “Sorry. I can't talk about it.”
“I see.” Mwo-chi considered him for a moment, and her nostrils flared. “I'll hazard a guess, though,” she said. “I'll bet you it wasn't in the hands of any regular military force, was it?”
“No. No, it wasn't.” Alfred frowned, and Mwo-chi chuckled harshly.
“Of course not, and not just because it's outlawed by the Deneb Accords, either. Like you just said, it's not very effective at any kind of range. At close range, sure. Anybody it doesn't kill outright will certainly be incapacitated and—what's that term you uniformed people use? ‘Combat ineffective,' isn't it?”
“Yes.” Alfred's voice was flat, and Mwo-chi shook her head quickly.
“That wasn't a slam at you, Alfred,” she said almost gently. “Or at any of your people. But however lethal it may be at close range against unarmored opponents, it's a lot less . . . flexible than an old-fashioned chemical-powered assault rifle, far less a pulse rifle or a tribarrel.”
“The crew-served version's got more range,” Alfred said grimly. “I've seen one of them take somebody down at three hundred meters. But you're right—by the time you can get that kind of range out of it, you're talking about something half again the size of a heavy tribarrel that'll kill a battle-armored infantryman at ten times that range, with an energy signature a blind man couldn't miss. That's why I've never been able to figure out why anyone persevered with its development long enough to turn it into even a practical close-range weapon.”
“That's because it wasn't originally developed as a weapon at all.” Mwo-chi's voice was as grim as Alfred's had been. He looked back up from the neural disruptor in surprise, and she shook her head. “It was developed from something called a neural whip . . . on Mesa.” Alfred's eyes narrowed, and she nodded. “By Manpower. I've got one of the damned things around here, and I'll show you my notes on its development history later, but basically they wanted an effective discipline tool, and they got one. After they'd realized how effective it was in that role, they started wondering how it would work as a ranged ‘crowd control' weapon.” She bared her teeth mirthlessly. “Give each slave a dose or two of the whip and then kill a couple of them in front of the others with the disruptor. Some forms of death are worse than others, and I imagine quite a few people who'd be willing to risk a pulser dart or a blade would think two or three times before challenging a neural disruptor. Especially if she knew it was going to be set on area effect and that everyone within ten or twelve meters of her would suffer the exact same thing she would.”
Alfred's jaw tightened hard as pieces snapped into place. Clematis hovered in the back of his mind once more, ugly with smoke and screams . . . and understanding.
She's right, a tiny voice told him. She's exactly right about how people would react. If I'd known, guessed, they'd had those damned things waiting for us, I'd never have—
He cut the thought off ruthlessly. It was hard, but he managed, and drew a deep breath, swelling his lungs with oxygen. And if this abomination was, indeed, a product of Manpower and its genetic slavers, finding them on Clematis made perfect sense.
“Can I ask why you have this thing sitting here, Doctor?” he said, tapping the disruptor with a forefinger.
“For the same reason I've got that whip locked up in a safe—to remind myself what I hate, Alfred.” She stepped closer, never unfolding her arms, and looked down at it. “Mesa's like Beowulf's dark twin. It's almost as if they're determined to deliberately turn themselves into our polar opposite in every way they can. And the hell of it is that we find ourselves doing exactly the same thing where they're concerned. I'm as guilty of that as the next woman, I suppose, but deep inside, I know it was a Mesan neurologist who came up with this thing. I can actually recognize the neural stimulator they took as the core of it, and that came from Beowulf, too. That's why I've been quietly looking for ways to reverse or repair the damage it does for so long, and I keep this here to remind me of what it is I hate.” She lifted her eyes, meeting Alfred's gaze. “So don't think I don't understand whatever it is you can't talk about. And I guess I might as well admit I've been looking for an assistant crazy enough to join my efforts for a long time. Welcome aboard, Crazy Al.”
* * *
Allison Chou sat in the environment-controlled gazebo on the ISU quadrangle with her eyes theoretically focused on her computer display. Practice was somewhat different from theory, however. In point of fact, her eyes weren't focused on anything at all and her mind was someplace else entirely.
Three weeks had passed since she'd lunched with her brother, and she was no closer to deciding what to do than she'd been when she finished the dessert course. That wasn't like her. She wasn't actually the shatter-brained, reckless, impulsive person her parents had occasionally accused her of being, but it was true that she seldom hesitated or spent a lot of time second guessing herself. She trusted their instincts, and while she might be wrong upon occasion, she was practically never uncertain.
This time, she most certainly was.
A flash of space-black and gold flickered at the corner of her unfocused vision. She looked up quickly, and her lips tightened. She'd had more than a few liaisons, and at least two genuinely passionate relationships, but she'd never felt anything like what she felt as she watched Lieutenant Harrington's tall, athletic figure striding across the quadrangle. He moved so smoothly, so confidently, and her nostrils flared as if she could scent some elusive fragrance. But it wasn't anything she could smell; it was what she'd felt, and for the first time in her fearless life she was truly afraid of another human being.
No, be fair, she told herself. You're not afraid of him; you're afraid of what you're feeling, because you don't understand it.
And that was nothing but the truth.
She'd never felt so strongly drawn to a man, or to any other person. Even now, with him at least sixty meters away and not even looking in her direction, she felt that same, soft, warm purring sensation deep inside. It wasn't simply sexual attraction, although it was simultaneously one of the most erotic things she'd ever felt, and it wasn't appreciation of masculine beauty or awe of his brilliant intellect. He wasn't all that handsome, and while for all she knew he might well be brilliant, she'd scarcely even spoken to him, so he certainly hadn't had much of an opportunity to impress her with his intellectual accomplishments! It was just . . . nice, although that was a ridiculously anemic word for what she was feeling. It was as if she'd found something she hadn't realized she'd lost, encountered an old friend she'd never known she knew. As if she'd finally discovered what she needed to complete herself. The sheer intensity of it, for all its warmth and gentleness, would have been almost enough to frighten her all by itself. She would have wondered how much of that she was imagining, how much she was making up out of whole cloth, and how long anything so ephemeral, so impossible for her to define even to herself, could possibly endure.
But it wasn't alone, and that was what truly frightened her. There was that darkness, that sense of pain, like a promise of anguish—or anger—hidden just beyond the horizon. It was like a brooding shadow looming over everything else, and she didn't know what it was or where it had come from or what it might mean. Was it something coming from him, something inside him, hidden under everything else like poison at the heart of some delectable confection? Or was it something inside her, something she'd never realized was there which roused itself when he was near? Or some sort of premonition, some subliminal warning she was sending to herself on the basis of clues her conscious mind hadn't grasped yet? Or was it even real at all? Something she was simply imagining, just as she was imagining all the rest of it? And what right did a young man whom she didn't even know, someone from an entirely different star nation, have turning her calm, orderly life topsy-turvy without even so much as looking in her direction?
She sighed, shook herself, and made herself focus once again on the display. She was behind on her assigned reading, and Doctor McLeish wasn't going to take “I was mooning over a young man I don't even know” as an excuse.
* * *
Alfred Harrington never even glanced in the gazebo's direction, but he knew she was there. He always knew where she was—or in what direction, anyway—and that worried him. It worried him a lot.
He continued on his way, never breaking stride, never hesitating, never indicating any awareness of her presence at all, yet it was as if he could feel her inside his own skin with him. The strength of the attraction was astounding, and it frightened him, because he couldn't explain it.
Or is it really because you think you've actually seen something like it before?
Nonsense! He snorted dismissively, but the thought wouldn't quite go away, however hard he tried to banish it, for he'd grown up on Sphinx, and he was a Harrington.
Maybe you're a Harrington, boy-oh, but you're no frigging treecat! And neither is she. And you've got no business at all thinking this way about a woman you don't even know!
All of which was perfectly true . . . and didn't do one damned thing about his problem.
He reached his dormitory, rode the grav shaft to his floor, let himself into his apartment, and crossed to the balcony. He picked up the compact electronic binoculars and looked through them, and his mouth tightened as he saw her sitting in the gazebo, still studying her computer display.
He set the binoculars down, feeling as if he'd become some sort of Peeping Tom or voyeur, and dropped into a chair. He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees, and scrubbed his face with both hands before he straightened up and inhaled deeply.
This was ridiculous. Unfortunately, being ridiculous didn't seem to be keeping it from happening, and he had no damned idea what to do about it. He'd been strongly attracted to a few women in his time, but never like this. Never with the sense that he was looking at the person who was meant to be his other half. The person without whom he could never quite be whole. It was like some incredibly sappy, turgidly written, really bad romance novel—the sort his sister Clarissa had loved to read when she was thirteen. “His other half”? Where did he get off feeling something like that about someone he'd spoken to exactly once in his life? He didn't believe in “love at first sight,” and he never had, and—he told himself firmly—he didn't now, either. Whatever this was, it wasn't that . . . even if he had no damned idea in the world what it was.
Don't be so sure of that, the small voice he was doing his best not to listen to said. You've always had those “hunches” of yours, haven't you? You've always been so smug about your ability to “read” other people. Used it to win quite a few poker games over the years, too, haven't you? And your family's been hanging around with 'cats for over three T-centuries, hasn't it? What if there's a reason so many Harringtons have been adopted over the years? What if there's something “different” about you?
Nonsense. So he was good at picking up hints from body language, and reading the subliminal clues everybody gave out! And maybe he had usually known when somebody in his unit was in trouble, needed a friendly ear—or an arse-chewing—to get him back on track. That didn't mean he had some kind of “extrasensory perception,” and even if he did, she wasn't a Harrington, or a Sphinxian, or even a Manticoran!
And that, he finally admitted to himself, was a huge part of the problem.
He sighed and rubbed his face again, his expression grim. If he was . . . different, if it turned out he did have some . . . special ability, what right could he possibly have to use it on someone else? Did she feel anything at all for him? She certainly hadn't shown it, if she did. But if she did, was it because of something he'd done—done to her? He didn't feel like an evil wizard going around casting spells on people. He didn't want to be, either, and even if she did feel something about him, he wanted her to feel that about him, not about some mysterious aura he might be emanating!
He smiled crookedly as he realized just how twisted and convoluted that last thought had been, yet that made none of it untrue or irrelevant. And the smile disappeared quickly as he thought about the other side of it.
He was damaged goods. He wasn't the person he'd always thought he was, and sometimes it felt as if the veneer concealing the monster within from the rest of the world was growing thinner and more transparent. Clematis had shown him the monster, though. That was why he'd run away from the Corps, away from the sweet seduction of the killing.
He looked down at his hands as if they belonged to a stranger, and the remembered hot, intoxicating taste of blood pulsed through him again. It was a sickness, an infection, and he was afraid of it. More afraid than he'd ever been of anything in his life. A man with that monster hidden at his heart had no business getting close to others, for he was unclean . . . and he was dangerous.
He inhaled again, then climbed out of the chair and headed for his kitchen. At least someone with his metabolism could seek the solace of food without falling prey to terminal obesity.
* * *
“Well?” Giuseppe Ardmore demanded, and Tobin Manischewitz shook his head.
“You're not a schoolgirl, and this isn't your first party, Giuseppe,” he said severely, but Ardmore only snorted.
“Maybe not, but that doesn't mean I'm not looking forward to it. If it's been okayed, at least.”
Manischewitz shook his head again. That last sentence had been an afterthought, and not a terribly sincere one. Not that either he or Ardmore would have dreamed of moving without authorization; their employers had a nasty way of making examples out of people who did that.
And you are the one who came up with the idea, so it's sort of hypocritical to hold Giuseppe's . . . enthusiasm against him. So why does it bother you so much?
“Why is this so personal with you?” he asked out loud.
“Who said it was personal?” Ardmore shot back.
“The fact that you're so busy looking forward to it,” Manischewitz replied, realizing in that moment exactly why the other's enthusiasm worried him so. “I don't much care for the entire Benton-Ramirez y Chou clan myself, but you're acting like you've got a New Texas mosquito trapped in your vac helmet. If we screw this one up—if we give the Beowulfers even a hint of a chance of IDing us before we dump the body and get off-world again—we're going to be so damned dead a DNA sniffer couldn't find us, and I don't like it when somebody on an op this risky gets his head too far up his arse because he's looking for personal payback. So what is it with you and this guy?”
“I don't like him, all right?” Ardmore said after a moment. “He and his family have been busting our chops for centuries now, and I don't like it. I don't like that smug, superior attitude of his—like he's so much smarter and better than any of the rest of us—either. He's being a pain in our arse, and he's gonna be a bigger one if we don't do something about it, and I'm not going to pretend it won't be especially satisfying to squash any Benton-Ramirez y Chou—and especially this one—like a bug.”
“No, it's more than that.” Manischewitz settled into one of the apartment's chairs, his eyes hard. “You've got a personal reason to want this particular guy's balls, and I want to know what it is. Now, Giuseppe.”
Ardmore glared at him, but Manischewitz only leaned back, waiting. He didn't object to a little personal motivation if it could help get the job done, but too much motivation—or motivation that was too personal—was a good way to screw the pooch. And any unfortunate little failures here on Beowulf were likely to have fatal consequences for the people involved in them.
“All right,” Ardmore said finally, with a scowl. “Three years ago, in New Denver, I had a little . . . run in with the frigging BSC.”
“In New Denver?” Manischewitz' eyes narrowed. “The New Denver? On Old Earth?”
“No, the one in Andromeda! Of course the one on Old Earth!”
“What the hell were you doing on Old Earth?!”
Manischewitz was shaken. He and Ardmore had worked together on several occasions over the last ten or fifteen T-years before they'd been more or less permanently teamed a couple of years earlier, but never in the Sol System. For that matter, their employers normally went far, far out of their way to avoid staging the sort of operations he got handed on the mother world. Genetic slavery thrived in the underbelly of the League, hidden in the sewers of corruption that most soft, protected Core Worlders never saw or knew about, and Manpower took pains to avoid anything that might cause it to intrude into the light where they might see it.
“If Upstairs had wanted you to know about it, they probably would've told you about it, don't you think?” Ardmore shot back. Then he shook his head. “Look, you want to know why it's personal with Benton-Ramirez y Chou? I'll tell you! We were in New Denver to take out Fairmont-Solbakken.”
“You were going to assassinate Aurèle Fairmont-Solbakken?” Manischewitz demanded. This just kept getting worse and worse! Aurèle Fairmont-Solbakken was the senior member of the Beowulf delegation to the Solarian League's Assembly.
“Of course,” Ardmore said impatiently. “The Beowulfers had just gotten the bureaucrats to sign off on permanently stationing a Frontier Fleet detachment in Lytton, and somebody Upstairs was pissed off as hell about it.”
Manischewitz had to think for a moment before he could place the Lytton System, then he remembered. It was a small, dirt poor, nominally independent star system within a few light years of the Sasebo System . . . one terminus of the Erewhon Junction. Had—?
“Are you saying they were trying to set up a base in Lytton?”
“Of course they were!” Ardmore snorted. “The Erewhonese are skittish as hell where anything about the slave trade's concerned. Probably has something to do with being stuck off in a corner close to the Havenites and the Manties. Hell, for all I know they've got ‘principles'! All I know is that Upstairs figured that a quiet little cargo transfer point in Lytton would let them take advantage of the Erewhonese Junction without having any . . . product on board when they went through Erewhonese Customs. They could head out through hyper, drop off a cargo at some out of the way spot like Silesia, head home by way of the Manticore Junction clean as a whistle, come through from Erewhon, pick up a fresh cargo at Lytton, and deliver it to a whole sector's worth of customers far enough out from the Core that nobody was going to ask any questions. Then turn around and head back the other way, rinse and repeat. Hell, they could even pick up extra change shipping legal cargo over the Erewhon-Manticore leg! Until the Beowulfers shoved their oar in, anyway. And apparently Fairmont-Solbakken leaned on the permanent undersecretaries pretty damned hard. I always figured there was a little blackmail involved in the horsetrading, but I could've been wrong about that. What I know for certain, though, is that the Navy put a destroyer detachment in Lytton and kept it there. So Upstairs decided to ‘send a message' to Beowulf, and my team and I were supposed to deliver it.”
“Obviously it didn't get delivered after all,” Manischewitz observed.
“No, not so you'd notice,” Ardmore agreed in a hard voice. “Matter of fact, it didn't go so well for my team. There were eleven of us, including my partner Gerlach and me; I'm the only one who got out alive. Somehow, the Beowulfers figured out what was coming and they dropped a BSC special ops team on us right in the middle of New Denver. I was out on surveillance when they hit; when I came back, it was like the rest of them had never existed. I don't know whether all of them were killed before their forensics people tidied up or if some of them got hauled back to a safe house somewhere on Old Earth and pumped dry first. I just know they were all gone, and that that little bastard Benton-Ramirez y Chou who'd ‘just happened' to be vacationing in New Denver when Fairmont-Solbakken arrived, was nowhere to be found after. So, yeah, it's kind of personal for me, Tobin. You got a problem with that?”
“I've got no problem at all, as long as you remember that I'm the senior guy on this team and you don't let the personal part of it get in the way of getting the job done. And as long as you remember that the whole object here is to not kill him. Yet, at least.”
“Oh, yeah, I'll remember that.” Ardmore's smile was ugly. “Because, you know what? I don't think it's gonna work. I think he's gonna try to get cute, instead, and when he does, both of them get dead. And that'll suit me just fine, Tobin. Just fine.”
* * *