I opted instead for two handfuls of a sugary breakfast cereal, milk to wash it down, and a hot shower. The cereal’s crunch did help wake me up, and the shower got me straightened out enough that I could manage to shave without slitting my own throat. There’s something about drawing cold steel over your flesh that promotes clarity of mind.

I dressed in gray slacks and jacket over a white shirt and the black throat ribbon that functioned as staff drone dress. Clipping identification to me, I left my chambers and headed toward the central building of Knights’ Hall. The interactive message center built into the door of my food storage unit had displayed a notation indicating that I was expected to meet with Knight Consuela Dagmar by nine, and I arrived with five minutes to spare.

We met in a small conference room that had been outfitted with black leather couches thick enough to cushion a ’Mech’s drop from the ionosphere. They’d been arranged in a square, with a holoprojection table in the center. It had dark wood panels rimming it and a black glass plate that protected the projection equipment. Back behind the couch where I would sit, a sideboard lay against the wall stocked with water, juices and a variety of healthy foodstuffs like fruit, nuts and seeds.

Janella and Nessa—who was there to act as Victor’s eyes and ears—had already arrived in the room and sat whispering with each other from contiguous corner spots on two couches. A drone in gray like me—save his ribbon was purple and fixed at the crossing point with a silver stud—gave me the eye as I entered. He puttered around with the foodstuffs, then bowed to the doorway as the Countess entered.

“All is in readiness, my lady.”

She smiled and nodded to him. “Very good, Wroxley. If I need something else, I will call.”

“I await your command, my lady.” With that the older man bowed sharply, letting a strand of his comb-over flop down, and departed.

The door hissed shut behind him and Consuela Dagmar smiled at me. “It is good to see you again, Mason. You are looking much better than I’d been given to expect.”

I shot a glance at Janella. “They only used fists, not chainsaws.”

“But they were big fists, my love.” She gave me a smile. “Luckily you heal quickly.”

I gave her a wink, which coaxed a blush onto her cheeks, then returned my attention to the Knight. Though in her seventies, she looked not a day over fifty. She wore her black hair short, still, after the fashion of many a Mech Warrior, and her dark eyes remained alive. In many ways she reminded me of Pep—rather, Pep had reminded me of her, younger and quite feisty. Consuela had plenty of fire yet, but through the years she had learned to temper and direct it.

She waved me to a seat on the same couch as Janella, then she took a place opposite us. She wore a cream-colored jacket and skirt over dark brown boots, with a royal blue blouse beneath. The outfit complimented her olive skin, a fact made apparent as she smoothed the skirt, then leaned forward.

“First, I’ve read the reports from Helen and, while I agree that the resolution was less than satisfactory, it was probably the best we could have gotten from the situation. Had Handy not sold you out, I suspect you would have risen in the organization and might have eventually pierced the veil surrounding those behind him. So you know, a Republic magistrate on Acamar quashed the warrant for Sam Donelly’s arrest, noting evidence had been gathered illegally. He was released from Republic custody on Epsilon Indi. There he has gone to ground since prosecutors on Acamar are still seeking him for questioning.”

I nodded. “Thank you, my lady. I don’t know if I’ll ever need Sam again, but he was useful.”

“We’ll keep him alive for a while. All his datafiles are in place, and with all the confusion right now, creating a new identity and getting the data spread out far enough would be a problem we just don’t need to address.”

“Yes, my lady.”

Consuela reached beneath the edge of the table and hit a hidden button. A small blue cube sprang to life, hovering above the table. Darker blue letters burned on the sides of the box as if projected from within—and looking through the side I could see the words in reverse on the side opposite me. The cube slowly rotated clockwise as the Countess from Lambrecht began to speak.

“The current crisis presents us with a series of problems on three levels: strategic, operational and tactical. I have further divided them into two camps, which I have labeled Lions and Jackals. The lions are those who managed to take the grid down, while the jackals are feeding on the resulting confusion. And, yes, to answer the first obvious question, the lions could be masquerading as jackals.

“Of the lions we know very little. On 7 August of this year they hit HPGs on ComStar’s alpha circuit. Over the past four months we have collected a lot of information about their methods and they vary from using aerospace fighters to strafe or having a zero-g assault team hit a site, to using missiles and other DropShip weapons to do the damage. In some cases the ships were coming up from planets. In one case, and we have confirmation of this, a JumpShip released a DropShip, jumped out, released a second, then jumped again and released a third, hitting three stations.”

My eyes narrowed and somehow I managed to keep my jaw from hitting the floor. A JumpShip could easily travel between worlds, but it required time to recharge between jumps, and that recharging took anywhere from days to over a week, depending on the nature of the sun it was using to recharge. It was possible to use onboard generators to hot load an engine, but that increased the chances of damaging the Kearny-Fuchida drives. Damage them and the ship would go nowhere or, worse, would go somewhere and never be seen again.

To do what had been described meant the ship was carrying a Lithium Ion battery. That wasn’t unheard of, but it was rare. The presence of such a ship meant whoever the lions were, they had serious resources at their disposal. That ship should have also made it easier to track them because of its uniqueness.

I glanced up from the box. “There was no tracing that ship.”

“None. We had positive identification of it, or of the ship it was supposed to be. Registry was old Free Worlds League and it’s been plying a simple trade route. Interviews with DropShip captains who jumped with it indicate nothing out of order. Rates were normal. There was nothing to mark it as unusual, though no one seems to remember interacting much with the crew. In fact, the only odd thing there is that descriptions of the JumpShip’s commander vary, as if members of the crew took turns commanding.”

I nodded. “And, as a trade ship, it’s in a perfect position to gather intelligence. Agents can send messages, or ship cargo up. Local authorities are concerned with things that enter their gravity well, not lurk in high space.”

Janella shifted on the couch. “Hitting all of the alpha circuit in one fell swoop, though, that requires an incredible amount of coordination. There are a lot of stations to hit.”

Consuela nodded. “As reports filter back in, the depth of planning is astounding. Attacks were matched to the amount of security available in each system. Data from the Capellan Confederation is sketchy at best, but there it seems a lot of stand-off weaponry was used, and a few attacks were made by agents who had been part of the Capellan military. In one case, ComStar was conducting a VIP tour of the HPG when one of the VIP’s entourage produced a laser and did the damage. All of this was clearly years in the planning stages. They picked their targets and struck hard.”

I sucked on my lower lip for a moment. “What about the beta circuit? Did they get hit at the same time?”

“A few sites did, yes, but most of them were taken down over the next week or two. The HPG network is vast, and the operators at the secondary stations were not unused to having the alpha stations go down from time to time. They would routinely save traffic and either dump it to JumpShips heading to the appropriate location, or would just wait until the alpha stations started sending them data again. It is believed that, in a number of spots, ComStar gave data to the lions, then had their stations hit. We have no idea what sort of data they got and what they are going to do with it, but that is a whole other level of concern.