“A laudable plan, but the wolves will still prey upon them.”

“Yes, my lord, which means we need to add one more creature to the menagerie of wolves and sheep: the wolfhound. While the shepherd may be stuck waiting and watching for whoever took the grid down, we have to stop the wolves somehow.”

The old man’s eyes narrowed. “Assassination?”

“Tyrannicide? That would be one way.” I glanced at Nessa. “It comes back to where we started here: making sure that pain gets properly factored into any risk/gain analysis. Wolfhounds would have to start working on the weakest individuals in the wolf packs. Subordinates whose activities cross the line would have to be punished swiftly. The wolves will have to see that they’re not going to win in a walk. Not only will it make them think twice, but in culling their packs of the weak and defective, it will make them more efficient and tougher.”

Janella frowned. “And that would be good exactly how?”

“When whoever took the grid down makes their next move, the wolves will have the strength to resist.”

Nessa pursed her lips. “And if that blow never falls?”

“Then really healthy and efficient wolf packs will tear each other apart.”

“An interesting theory, Mason.” Victor gave me a smile. “But, if there are too few shepherds, I fear wolfhounds are in even shorter supply.”

Victor’s majordomo entered the dining room and whispered in his lord’s ear. Victor nodded, considered for a moment, then looked around the table. “Thank you, Peb-worth. I think we are ready for dessert and brandy.”

“Yes, my lord.”

The old man looked at me and I saw a gleam in his eyes. “He gave me a message. It’s for you, Mason. It came from Basalt.”

I blinked. “Basalt? I don’t know anyone there.”

“No, I suppose you don’t.” His smile grew sly. “It seems Sam Donelly does, however. It appears your Mr. Handy wants to offer you a job.”

Knights’ Hall

North America, Terra

Prefecture X, Republic of the Sphere

8 January 3133

The message was necessarily vague, but rather expressive.

Sam,

Sorry to hear about your in-law trouble with Helen. I thought things would turn out differently there, but nightfall changed plans. I am pleased you are without entanglements. I am interested in resuming our partnership, with a significantly higher level of participation for you. Contact me as soon as possible. I have made good your loss and advanced passage.

Handy

Basalt 12 December 3132

Janella looked up from reading the text. “You already know he’s untrustworthy. It has to be a trap.”

“Oh, without a doubt, if he can sell me out as he did on Helen, he will. Then again, this message did come with a deposit of the five thousand stones he owed me and enough for passage from Epsilon Indi to Basalt. He must have sent it by courier to any number of worlds, and on Epsilon Indi our folks picked it up and routed it here by Black Box.”

Janella nodded. “That does not make it any less a trap.”

“True, but at least he has no suspicions about who I am. He thinks I’m really on Indi.”

Black Box communications technology was old stuff, and much less efficient than the HPGs. They couldn’t transmit much more than the message I’d gotten, but they had proved useful for Hanse Davion in circumventing a ComStar Interdiction last century. The Republic used the technology as a backup for Ghost Knight communications—slower being better than nothing—and the people maintaining Sam’s cover on Epsilon Indi used it to get the message to where it belonged.

I furrowed my brows. “What’s important here is this: we left Helen on the twenty-third of November. We can assume he left roughly the same time. He sent that message from Basalt only twenty-one days after leaving Helen. Three weeks of transit works, if he’s moving fast or lucky in catching rides. The money he’s sent for me to get there from Indi will get me there fast, so someone backing him has deep pockets.”

She gave me a knowing look. “More people than Jacob Bannson have deep pockets, Mason.”

“True. We’re also looking at an organization here. It’s a safe bet that news of a small-time felon from Acamar being released from Republic custody on Epsilon Indi was not a hot-flash news item on Basalt. Handy had someone seeking information on me. I’d go so far as to suggest that he was looking for data on a variety of people he could use on Basalt, and I was just one of them. If he’s hiring talent that is ’Mech-capable, fairly serious stuff is going down.”

“I’m still not seeing Bannson’s hand in this, nor the hand of anyone else, for that matter.”

“Okay, here’s the trick: Handy’s message suggests that your arrival—his ‘nightfall’—prompted the change of plans. If he were going to fade because you’d arrived, he’d have done so when you arrived. He waited a week. I think he sent a message to his off-world boss asking for advice and it took that long to get the message back.”

She shook her head, then got up from the conference room couch and crossed to the refreshment station to get herself a bottle of water. She tossed me one, too. “Or his local boss took a while to decide what to do.”

“And, in the meantime, Handy gets an offer to head to Basalt?” I opened the bottle and drank, then put it down and clapped my hands. “Wait, that’s it! What if Handy has two bosses? What if local talent hires him, but he’s taking orders from others who want to pit little jackals against each other?”

Janella sat back down and looked at me with disgust. “Mason, if you have to start your statement with ‘what if,’ it’s a fantasy, not a theory. You’re arguing from facts not in evidence. All we know is that your pal wants to know if you want a job. We can presume he wants you to engage in illegal activity and that your ability to pilot a ’Mech is important in this enterprise. Anything beyond that is purely speculative and we don’t have even circumstantial evidence to support it. We don’t even have a good idea of why Basalt is the target here.”

Janella was absolutely right about that. She grew up on Fletcher, which was a short jump from her home, but she’d never been there. The same could be said for the majority of the population of the Inner Sphere. Though the world was located in what had once been a slender finger of the Federated Suns, with both the Capellan Confederation and Draconis Combine in easy striking range of it, Basalt endured nothing more serious than the occasional raid down through its history. While the population was racially diverse, it had been politically stable for centuries.

The Germayne family had ruled it since the early days of the Federated Suns and the world had prospered. The people had been fiercely loyal to House Davion, and staunch allies of the Draconis March’s Sandoval family. Basalt stood ready to act as a bulwark against advances by the Combine, but they really were never called upon for more than sending troops, which they did enthusiastically.

Count Achilles Germayne had accompanied Victor Steiner-Davion to the Clan homeworld of Strana Mechty. While he had not been instrumental in the Clans’ defeat, he did fight honorably beneath Victor’s banner, and even agreed to lay down his arms when Victor called his army to do that. Later he brought a company to help Victor in the civil war against Katrina. Once that was won, he returned to Basalt. During the dark times of the Blakist uprising, he married and his wife bore him two sons, Hector and Ivan. When Stone began his reforms and Victor supported him, Achilles Germayne declared Basalt to be for Stone.