Marks tossed the blade back to his right hand and lunged forward, aiming for the center of her chest. Anastasia pivoted away; the blade went past her rather than into her.

As she moved, she felt the injured tissue tearing across her abdomen. The pain blossomed like a brilliant light behind her eyes, leaving a blackness when it faded. She shook her head to clear it. Her body continued the fight, a block and a counterstrike, without her fully conscious direction, before she mastered the pain, tucked it into a small part of her mind to be dealt with later.

“I could just stand here, stay out of your way, waiting for you to bleed to death or your guts to fall out,” Colonel Marks said. “Or you can offer me your neck, and I will make it quick and clean. Which do you want?”

“Neither,” Anastasia said. She kept her voice cool and level. She’d be damned if she let on she was hurt, by word, by gesture, by expression. The pain was manageable now, even as she felt blood running down her legs. “There is not any surrender here.”

“Your choice,” Colonel Marks said.

Anastasia moved a bit to her right, circling. The Colonel kept his distance and his relative position.

You think you are in control, Anastasia thought. You are following my lead. I have the initiative. I am acting, you are reacting. And you have desperately overplayed your hand.

She took a step forward, her hands in a ready position. The Colonel took a step backward. She moved to her right again, and the Star Colonel matched her movement. He was watching her every move, but she wasn’t watching him. Her attention was on the deck behind him, where Colonel Dorn lay with a silk scarf wrapped around his crushed neck.

There. Anastasia had Marks lined up. She lunged forward, starting a rising side-kick. Marks stepped back, out of range, and tripped against Dorn’s body.

He hesitated. He did not trip or fall. But his smooth action was broken, and Anastasia was ready for it. She sprang against him, bearing both of them to the deck.

She landed on top, knees on either side of his chest, his knife hand trapped in both of her hands. She twisted his fist until the blade pointed down. Then she fell forward, throwing her entire weight against his arm.

The knife penetrated his chest. He convulsed and pink-tinged foam sprayed from his nose and mouth. She rolled free, pushing back to her feet, and watched as he tried to remove the blade. His efforts grew less and less organized. He convulsed once again, and lay still.

She spun way from the body and glared at the rest of the Steel Wolves’ Star Colonels.

“Anyone else?” she shouted. “If anybody else wants to break tradition and challenge me to a knife fight, now is the time to do it!”

Nobody spoke. The pain of the knife wound took up more and more of her attention, but she refused to fall. She stood for what felt like a long time, breathing heavily and swaying a little on her feet. No one came forward. She was aware, in the part of her mind that was not occupied by a fascination with the splashing noise of her own blood hitting the polished deckplates, that the Star Colonels were breaking up the combat circle and moving away.

A shadowy figure approached her from her right-hand side. The cargo bay was growing unaccountably dim, in spite of the work lights. When she concentrated, the shadow resolved itself into Ian Murchison.

“You can fall down now and let me get to work on patching you,” her Bondsman said. His gloved hands were busy pulling things she didn’t recognize out of his medical bag, and his voice had a harsh note in it that made her wonder, fuzzily, if the silly man had actually believed that she was going to lose. “I think you’ve made your point with the boys in uniform.”

Belgorod DropPort

Terra

Prefecture X

March 3134; local winter

Jonah Levin endured the long trip from Kervil to Terra with equanimity. With the HPG network down, and with wars and rumors of wars cropping up all around The Republic of the Sphere, he felt lucky to have found a berth at all, let alone passage on a DropShip heading more or less directly to where he was going. Five days to Kervil’s jump point, a jump to an intermediate point for the purpose of recharging the JumpShip’s Kearny-Fuchida drive, then a jump to Terran space and nine days transit to Terra itself—an easy trip compared to some he’d made in the course of his years in The Republic’s service.

As usual, the greatest danger on shipboard was boredom. Jonah passed the time going over his questions about the current state of The Republic of the Sphere—questions about all of those things that could not be entrusted to written or electronic correspondence, and about all of those things that required a physically present person in order to be observed.

Eventually, it was time for him to pack his bag and stand by for departure.

The Belgorod DropPort in old Russia was lit by high-intensity flares that banished the night while leaving inky shadows anywhere the white glare was absent. Jonah was one of the first passengers off the DropShip, unhindered by the need to retrieve any trunks or boxes from the ship’s cargo handlers. Years of experience in The Republic’s service had taught him the virtues of traveling light. Almost anything that he needed he could purchase or borrow right on Terra, and he could do so faster than hauling it across space as luggage.

He presented his papers to the functionary at the first gate.

“Welcome to Earth, Paladin,” the man said, glancing at the identity swab and the screen readout that matched, calling up Jonah’s technical stats as it did so. “Downstairs and to your right, sir.”

The functionary turned to the next passenger in line, reaching for identification as at the same time he said, in the same warm tone of greeting, “Welcome to Earth, milady.”

Jonah was not offended by the obviously standard-issue courtesy—although he suspected that some others might be. The man was undoubtedly hired for his ability to exercise patience and maintain a friendly demeanor, no matter how tired and irritable the passengers he dealt with might become. And this was, after all, Terra. Even an out-of-the-way cargo DropPort like Belgorod would see people of importance coming through on a regular basis.

He continued onward as he’d been directed, downstairs and to the right, along a passageway lined with marble and floored with steel. The indirect lighting was pale white and obviously artificial, and the air moaned and clanked in the environmental system, giving out warmth and a mixed smell of industrial-strength floor cleaners and—from what source, he couldn’t imagine—boiled cabbage.

At the end of the passageway, a second rank of port officials stood behind movable barricades. These officials would have been watching the readout repeater screens, and would know exactly who was on the arriving ships. One of them moved forward now, her eyes fixed on Jonah.

“Good evening, Paladin,” the woman said, as soon as she was standing at a correct and polite two-meter distance. “What brings you to Terra?”

“Business,” Jonah replied. “I’ll be continuing on to Geneva as soon as I’ve had a chance to rest here for a few hours. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make advance arrangements for a place to stay. Perhaps you could recommend someplace—?”

“It would be my pleasure.” The port official turned, snapping her fingers at the same time and pointing to a hoverlimo driver. “A hotel? The Gospodin Manuel O’Kelly is the best in town, Paladin.”

“That will do admirably,” Jonah replied.

He allowed himself to be led to the exit, out under a sky washed clean of stars by the high-intensity lights. The wind smelled of dust and oil, heavy with water vapor—not at all like ship’s air, or like the heated and conditioned atmosphere of the port buildings. He stretched, breathed deeply, and entered the hoverlimo.