The drive to Pad Seven wasn’t so long that Raul had time to worry after Erik Sandoval or whatever critiques he might bring to his supervisor, so instead he lost himself in an old Customs game, reading the shipping stencil prefixes on large containers and trying to identify the world from which they came. Many of them were easy, shipped in from other worlds in Prefecture IV: Tikonov and Tigress, Rio, Yangtze, and Ronel. Others tested his knowledge. M3A was Mara, of The Republic’s Prefecture III. Denebola, D9B8, was actually the governing capital of Prefecture VIII but a rare trading partner with Achernar. He pegged another container originating from VIII, SM8, but couldn’t place it between Syrma or Summer. He filed a mental note to look it up later.

True challenges came from outside The Republic, of course. Centered at the core of the Inner Sphere, with mankind’s birthworld of Terra cradled in its middle, The Republic had long enjoyed decent trading relations with most other major powers: House Kurita’s Draconis Combine, the mercantile Sea Foxes. In the few months before the Blackout, the Senate’s new Free Trade Agreement had opened up a floodgate of shipping coming in from the hundreds of worlds belonging to the Lyran Commonwealth. Even now the gauntlet crest of House Steiner was not an uncommon sight in the service corridors. And here was a prefix from deep inside the balkanized Free Worlds League. And there…

The sword-and-sunburst crest of House Davion’s Federated Suns. A device very similar to the one adopted by Aaron Sandoval and the Swordsworn.

So much for the game.

That the Swordsworn insignia borrowed so heavily from the Davion crest was not surprising. The Sandoval dynasty had deep roots in the Federated Suns, with other family lines still governing many worlds along the Davion-Kurita border. Aaron Sandoval came from a long tradition of powerful rulers, most of them jealous of their own position and ready to defend it, their worlds, and nation with armies under their complete domination.

It was because of such military-political dynasties, in fact, that the legendary Star League fell and the Inner Sphere suffered through three hundred years of Succession Wars, the Clan invasion, and then the Word of Blake Jihad. Abolishing such violent nationalism was the very reason behind Devlin Stone’s creation of The Republic of the Sphere. His incentives inspired large measures of the population to relocate until many Republic worlds held a mixture of races and cultures, blending them together, easing the tensions of old rivalries. His plan worked.

For two generations.

Raul swerved his cart out of traffic at Docking Pad Three, catching sight of a black Customs Security uniform and the harried face of CSO Palos Montgomery near the wide-open, and empty, bay. Officer Palos stood before a small crowd of dockhands and suits—union reps, was Raul’s guess—holding back their questions and outbursts with upraised hands.

Setting the brake on his cart but leaving it idling, Raul waved Palos over. His friend’s normally gaunt face looked positively drawn and haggard today, and his green eyes were bloodshot from long hours.

Palos held himself up on the cart’s battery compartment cover. “Thanks, Raul. I needed a break from that.”

“Shouldn’t you be coming off night shift?”

His friend laughed, a weak chuckle that died prematurely. “Oh, yeah. I’m looking at sixteen hours today, but what you gonna do?”

What indeed? The Blackout caused by the crash of nearly every Hyperpulse Generator in The Republic—perhaps over the entire Inner Sphere—had left each world isolated as they had never been in the long history of Humanity’s spread among the stars. Customs was just one agency being forced to pick up the slack, and no amount of overtime was going to appease a population discovering its fear of the dark.

“What’s the problem?” Raul asked, nodding his commiseration. “Where’s the DropShip that was due on Pad Three?” By his memory, that vessel should have been down yesterday. But there was something from his morning brief… “Is it still having …drive failure?”

Palos nodded. “Yeah. That’s the problem exactly. And it’s my problem until we get that egg dropped down and opened up. The crew claims to be on top of it. They just want to be sure about not plummeting down through the atmosphere.”

Raul dismissed such problems with an airy wave. “Bah. Dropping without a drive flare isn’t the problem.”

“No?”

Raul grinned. “Huh-uh. It’s that sudden stop at the very bottom.”

Fourteen hours on the job, a touch of dark humor was just what Palos needed. He smiled, briefly. “Thanks. That just leaves hourly waves of shipping agents and longshoreman reps to deal with.”

“Tell them you heard the problem might be fixed. Tell them to give you a couple hours while you leave to go get a revised ETA. Then clock out and hand it to day shift.”

Palos smiled fully this time. “You going to cover that?” he asked.

Raul shrugged, looking forward to a sixteen-hour day himself now. Jessica would have to wait on dinner. “If I can’t, I’ll get someone to handle it. Go.”

He nodded his friend on his way, moved his cart along the corridor and filed a mental reminder to check on the wayward DropShip as soon as possible. He shrugged uncomfortably. With luck, his fiancée would be working late at the hospital. It would save them from another discussion over the problems—her viewpoint—of performance-based citizenship. As Jessica Searcy liked to put it, in medical terms, the Sandovals and the Swordsworn were only symptoms of an ailment that had begun to exhibit even before the near-total collapse of the HPG network. The loss of interstellar communications, like the loss of a social antibiotic, simply allowed the sickness to fester and spread.

She could very well be right, Raul knew. It wasn’t just the pro-Sandoval population. Achernar also had a small faction of supporters for Kal Radick and his Steel Wolves, and by all reports Ronel was dealing with independent raiders as well as a pro-Combine faction calling itself the Dragon’s Fury. Shots had already been fired between factions. And Ronel, like Achernar, had a working HPG. Two worlds among the twenty-five systems of Prefecture IV that did. Or, which at least were on speaking terms. How was it on a world completely cut off from everything, brought only shipboard rumor and a few hardspooled communiqués with each passing JumpShip?

The word brought last week via JumpShip was not good, suggesting that several worlds of The Republic were under full assault. But by the schisms growing from within or some outside force? Raul didn’t know.

The air around Docking Pad Seven was stifling and smelled of hot metalwork, still bleeding waste heat left over from the DropShip’s settling burn. The tunnels under Achernar’s San Marino spaceport had been excavated during the peaceful years of Devlin Stone’s reign, with landing pads able to accommodate up to the largest DropShip class. These docking pads lowered on thick, myomer trunks—the same artificial muscle system used to animate BattleMechs, only on a grander scale—to bring cargo doors below ground level. Ventilation was the only problem, requiring electrical motors and short-term tolerance to the residue heat from drive flares. Knowing how severe the weather on Achernar could get, running hot or stormy depending on the season, Raul was grateful for the underground service corridors.

Just now Pad Seven accommodated a popular Union-class merchant conversion. The lower fourth of the spheroid vessel nested down into the service area, enough to gain access to its three cargo bays. Raul’s badge—double-checked against his identification—gained him unrestricted access to the secure landing facility. He drove his cart into the bay and straight up the secondary loading ramp, pulling aside once for a burdened LoaderMech and once more to edge past a crowd of spaceport technicians who had bluffed or bribed their way through security to see the same thing that had originally pulled Raul into the warrens today.