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  Robertson nodded. “I’m starting to think the PR people do this on purpose,” he rumbled.

  Venus and her business team stepped out of the door, and the audience cheered.

  “I’ll hand her back to you at 8 a.m. tomorrow,” Robertson said.

  “Not tomorrow, I’m off for the weekend. Talk to the agency, but I think they put Meeks on the morning shift.”

  “Roger,” he said. “Enjoy your weekend.”

  Venus, surrounded by her security, strutted toward the door of the restaurant. The crowd moved along with her, instructed and occasionally intimidated into to keeping a respectful distance. With her gone, Winters found herself alone beside the limo. She sighed and tugged the earpiece from her ear, then pulled a slidepad from her pocket.

  The driver’s side window opened a crack. “You ordering a cab?”

  She glanced to the tinted window. “Yeah.”

  “Hop in. I’m at the end of my shift. I can drop you off.”

  Winters thought about it for a moment, then relented. Most cars in Rackton were entirely automated, but ever since she’d found herself as part of the civilian workforce again, she’d had a soft spot in her heart for companies that still hired drivers and otherwise kept a human face on their operations.

  She stepped inside and shut the door.

  “Feel free to raid the refreshments,” the driver said over the intercom. “Miss Celebrity’s entourage cracked the seal, so all that stuff is getting replaced before the next job.”

  Winters glanced at the fully stocked bar, eventually selecting a bottle of sparkling water.

  “Where to?” the driver asked.

  “Markdale Apartments.”

  “Be there in fifteen.”

  They lifted off and joined the flow of traffic. After a few seconds, the tinted divider lowered to allow better conversation. The driver was dressed in a uniform that, like the limo, hadn’t changed with the times. He had the brim of the entirely pointless driving cap pulled low, leaving all but his carefully groomed mustache and cocky smile hidden in the dim light of the limo.

  “So,” he said, turning his head vaguely aside to address her, “private security, huh?”

  “That’s what pays the bills, hon,” she said, removing her sunglasses and rubbing her face.

  The rigid demeanor seemed to come off with the glasses. She had a roundish, almost cherubic face, friendly eyes, and a pleasant smile. If not for the downright steely attitude she’d showcased while on duty, one would have been more likely to identify her as a strangely dressed member of a parent-teacher organization than a security guard.

  “Quite a production here. You’d think she was a head of state.”

  “Heads of state wish they had the security measures Ms. Vrill has in place. But then, most heads of state aren’t nearly as popular as she is either.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I seem to remember Prime Minister Juan Masters having a fairly strong following.”

  The smile slowly slid from her face. “What exactly do you know about Prime Minister Masters?”

  When he answered, his voice was flavored by a much more British accent, and his grin had become 80 percent more rakish. “What don’t I know? Daughter’s middle name, mother’s maiden name, the key code to his personal security system…”

  “Garotte!” she barked.

  “Was that my codename at the time?” He removed the hat to reveal himself to be the same agent from the failed mission on Vye-7. “I rather thought I’d selected something snappier for that mission.”

  “Whoever cleared you to be Ms. Vrill’s driver is going to be looking for a new job tomorrow…”

  “Don’t be too hard on him. I am a professional.”

  “Stop this limo and let me out.”

  “Come now, Silo, we’ve not even had a chance to catch up.”

  “I’m not Silo, Garotte. I’m Officer Jessica Margo Winters,” she said, tapping her name tag. “And that tag would still say Sgt. Jessica Margo Winters if it wasn’t for you.”

  “Come now, I’m not entirely to blame. It takes a special sort of woman to call my bluff on a dare involving controlled demolition.”

  “Let me out or I’m calling the police.”

  “For what, may I ask? Inferior chauffeuring?”

  “I doesn’t matter what I call them for. I don’t know what you’re doing here, but unless you’ve straightened out your life since that last hearing, I’ve got to imagine you’re still in a line of work that hinges on not blowing your cover, so at the very least having a few cops show up will mean more paperwork for you.”

  “Give me the rest of the ride. If you haven’t changed your tune by then, we’ll each go off on our merry way. It’s that or wait for an autocab to spirit you off to the no doubt galaxy-class accommodations at the magnificent Markdale Apartments.”

  “When has listening to you ever led to anything but explosions and chaos?”

  “I challenge you to name a more effective way to enjoy an evening than explosives and chaos.”

  Winters crossed her arms. “I can think of at least one.”

  “Why Silo, aren’t we feeling saucy?”

  “Just talk and get it over with, hon. My apartment’s only a few minutes away.”

  He reached into a bag beside him and tossed a hunk of metal to her. “What do you make of that?”

  She held up the curved panel. After a bit of hefting, a sniff, and a flick or two, she tossed it back. “It’s the pre-contact housing for a standard forty-millimeter rocket-propelled thermal grenade,” she said. “Looks like it was probably a Cantrell.”

  “What, no model number?”

  “M795-T.”

  “That’s my girl. It took me two hours of research and a chemical analysis to confirm that.”

  “That’s because you’ve always been a pistol and sniper man. Never learned the value of a good grenade launcher.”

  “Have you been following the news much?”

  “My days are pretty long lately. Between watching Venus and watching the deranged super-fans who try to raid everything from her garbage to her sink trap, there’s not a whole lot of time left for newsfeeds.”

  “I see. Had you been able to tear yourself away from your glamorous postmilitary career, you would have seen some rather impressive pyrotechnics happening on Vye-7.”

  “Involving these? I wasn’t aware of any hot wars in that sector.”

  “There aren’t any. To the best of my knowledge—and there’s not much better knowledge than mine on this particular matter—there aren’t any sanctioned covert actions on that planet.”

  “Besides yours, I assume.”

  “Naturally.”

  “So who was hurling these things?”

  “An organization called the Broadline Syndicate. Paramilitary consortium.”

  “No one paramilitary gets their hands on an M795-T without official military backing.”

  “My assessment precisely. And while I’d like to know the name of that military, the operation that put me in position to turn up that little bit of evidence was already a failure by the time I found it.”

  “So you’re out of resources.”

  “Silo, really. You know me better than that. I’m never out of resources. I’m simply between official backers at present.”

  “So why are you talking to me?”

  “Because my last backer was rather well equipped for investigation, and until this turned up, there was no suggestion of military involvement. So those lurking in the shadows are doing a remarkable job of covering their tracks and otherwise keeping the lid on matters.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time a corporate army had backing like this.”

  “Not nearly the first, no, but how often has that sort of thing worked out well for the general well-being of the region?”

  “About fifty-fifty.”

  “I’m not overly fond of those odds.”

  “Relax, hon. An army doesn’t part with this level of ordnance unles
s there’s a major threat to counterbalance them. The kind that’ll take years of fighting to break the stalemate.”

  “Funny you should mention that…”

  Her expression dropped. “You screwed this up, didn’t you?”

  “Naturally I am not at liberty to divulge details, but let us say that the aforementioned stalemate may have been prematurely concluded through some truly brilliant intervention by a person or persons both unknown and stunningly talented.”

  “So you blew it.”

  “A not-ideal outcome resulted from substandard intelligence.”

  “This is exactly why folk shouldn’t go monkeying around in civilian affairs. Look, all of this is fascinating and all, hon, but what exactly does any of it have to do with me?”

  “There’s a job to be done, and clearly it will take a more capable team than the one that botched it the first time.”

  “I’m not in that business anymore, Garotte.”

  “Oh come now, Silo. If we all stopped playing simply because we were asked to, the field of battle would be empty. The young lady I had the good fortune of sharing a team with not so long ago didn’t strike me as the sort who would give up being a soldier.”

  “You don’t give up being a soldier. Once a soldier always a soldier. But once you’ve had a discharge from one military it’s not so easy to put on the uniform for another one.”

  “Had I my druthers, I wouldn’t have you in any uniform at all.”

  “That banter of yours is going to get you a mouth full of knuckles if you don’t cool it, mister.”

  “I only mean that one does not require the backing of a government to make a difference.”

  “We are talking about a fighting force armed with M795-Ts. It’ll take more than a couple of soldiers to make a difference against that.”

  “You, my dear, are forgetting something.”

  “Oh?”

  “One of those soldiers is you, and the other one is me.”

  He eased the limo to a stop outside a towering building. Like most of the buildings on Tessera, there was a degree of artfulness to the architecture, but not nearly so much as could be found in the heart of the city. This place had the very distinctive look of a neighborhood intended to be seen out the window of a vehicle traveling somewhere far more important.

  “We have arrived. I’m afraid I’ll need your answer in short order. Time is a factor and finding an adequate replacement for you will be no small task.”

  “You’ve got that right.”

  She opened the door and stepped out, circling around to the driver’s side window. He held out an old-fashioned business card, printed with a lengthy alphanumeric network address.

  “Drop me a line if you change your mind,” he said.

  She snatched the card and shook it in his face. “I should burn this card, you know. You’ve brought me nothing but trouble for as long as I’ve known you.”

  “Inarguably so, but I pride myself on bringing a higher class of trouble than the rest of the riffraff.” He gave her a crisp salute. “Until we meet again, Silo.”

  He piloted the vehicle up and away.

  Winters crumpled the card in her fist and gritted her teeth. “I’m not Silo.”

  She took a moment to regain her composure and raised her hand to toss the card away. Reluctantly, angrily, she slipped the card into her pocket.

  “Not anymore…”

  #

  An hour later, Silo paced in front of an oven, waiting for the timer to ring. It had been depressingly difficult to find an apartment with even a kitchenette. These days cooking was a lost art. If there was one good thing to result from her return to civilian life, it was the chance to start cooking her own meals again. That and knitting had been two things her mother and grandmother had ganged up on her to demand she learn, and it gnawed upon her conscience a bit that she’d not been as studious in either pursuit as she might have been. At least, until now.

  She glanced over the agenda for the following day and breathed in the aroma of what she hoped would be a passable casserole. The fact that she wasn’t on the schedule for the weekend didn’t mean they wouldn’t be calling her. Best to be prepared. Once she’d finished reading the agenda and working out how she’d handle it if asked, she flipped through to some news.

  Not until she finally dug up a poorly reported record of a skirmish between warring factions on Vye-7 did she even realize she’d been searching for what Garotte had described. She wandered into her living room and flopped onto her love seat, dislodging a small pile of knitted pot holders and trivets. The article was short, little more than a pile of contradictory anecdotes regarding two large groups of vehicles blowing each other to bits. Unsatisfied with the level of journalistic rigor, she dug deeper. Where exactly was this planet? Who were these groups? Who were the other stakeholders in a potential war between them?

  A picture formed in her mind, and it wasn’t a pretty one. At this precise moment in time, Vye-7 wasn’t of much value. It was just one of a dozen planets at the very edge of one of the colonized portions of the galaxy. But within twenty years, the dozen planets at that fringe would be solidly developed worlds fueling the expansion beyond. And twenty years after that, it could be one of the most powerful planets near the point where two fringes would meet.

  That much was simply the way of things. But the reason there were two fringes to begin with was due to the parallel expansions of the Trans-Kuiper Union of Republics and the Orion United Consortium of Planets. Interplanetary treaty had a number of very specific provisions regarding expanding worlds. To avoid the peppering of colonial flags on thousands of worlds in order to claim ownership, there were minimum requirements of everything from population to economic output before an entire world could formally fall under the stewardship of any given government. Despite this, planets graduating to full membership tended to fall into line with the neighboring ones to avoid friction. Vye-7 was far enough from any aligned world that it was just possible it might sign on with the TKUR instead of the slightly closer, considerably more powerful Orion Consortium.

  That was bad.

  Winters stood and resumed pacing. Her brain juggled this new information with the concerns already cued up, leading to a bizarre thought process that bounced between the day-to-day business of a singer/actress, the recommended cooking time for a mushroom casserole, and the long-term socioeconomic implications of a power struggle on a developing planet. Around the same time the casserole was ready to come out of the oven, she determined that it was time to make the call.

  She slipped on an oven mitt and thumbed her slidepad to its seldom-used but ostensibly primary function of communication. The network address Garotte had given her was a bit unwieldy for a single thumb to enter. Once she set the meal down on one of her many surplus trivets, she shook off the oven mitt to finish the entry.

  If this had been her first call to a covert agent, she might have been confused. Garotte had clearly put considerable effort into ensuring that the call was as secure as possible, something that despite the claims of their commercials didn’t actually rate very highly on the minds of device manufacturers and service providers. The negotiating connection bounced through various go-betweens, their incomprehensible addresses flicking through the connection bar and triggering various hidden features of her device. The camera shut off, the screen dimmed. Layer upon layer of encryption scrambled the data. Nearly a full minute later, she finally heard the warbling tone indicating a device at the other end was waiting to be answered.

  “I knew you couldn’t resist my magnetic charm and infallible logic,” oozed the voice of her one-time collaborator.

  “Listen, hon. This call isn’t because of you, it’s in spite of you, so stow that ego before you collapse under the weight of it.”

  “Whether it was my animal charisma or the clarion call of duty, this call was an inevitability. I suppose you’ve done your due diligence on the subject of Vye-7.”

  “Grudgingly.”
r />   “And your assessment?”

  “Oh, quit playing around. Same as yours. We’ve got a planet at the edge of Orion territory, near a TKUR border. It’s in the middle of a tug-of-war, and someone big is giving one side of the rope an extra tug. Either it’s Orion, which’d be a pretty strange thing to do since they were liable to end up with the planet anyway, or it’s TKUR, which’d set the stage for them to have their foot in the door of a potential tactical linchpin in a few years. If there’s a chance—and there’s a darn sight better than a chance—that it is TKUR tugging on that rope, then the job you botched may as well have been the first shots fired in a sector-wide conflict in a couple of decades.”

  “Artfully phrased and insightfully observed,” Garotte said.

  “Now I’m not saying I want to help out, because I can’t. But if I did want to help out, what exactly do you figure we’d be able to do?”

  “That depends upon the answer to one question.”

  “Which is?”

  “What is that delightful aroma?”

  Confusion flickered briefly across Winters’s expression. Irritation quickly replaced it. She stalked to the door of her apartment, unlocked it, and threw it open. Garotte was leaning on the doorway, slidepad to his ear, confounding grin on his face. He glanced at her in mock surprise.

  “Well my heavens, if it isn’t Jessica Winters? What are the odds that we two might meet under such—”

  “Get your butt in here before you bother the neighbors,” she growled. She grabbed him by the arm and yanked him inside. When the door was shut and secured, she tapped off her slidepad and tossed it on the love seat. “How long have you been there?”

  “I arrived shortly before you came to your senses. Let us say I was confident you would see the value of my position.”

  “You sure are full of yourself.”

  “If I must be full of something, better myself than some of the other options.”

  “Take a seat,” she said, gesturing to the table. “We’ve got things to discuss. You eat yet?”

  “I haven’t, but I wouldn’t think of intruding upon your meal.”

  “So you’ll appear in a lady’s limo and in front of her apartment door, but you won’t eat her casserole?”