Or, as it happened, right now.

“Ship incoming,” she reported to the officer in charge, Luc Desroches. “JumpShip. Big.”

“Any idea who they are?” he asked.

“It’s a Clan configuration,” Cecy replied, after a quick look at the system’s onboard database. “Maybe Clan Sea Fox—they’re traders, or what passes for traders with those people anyhow. It’s hard to tell.”

“We don’t have any Sea Fox ships scheduled to turn up about now,” said Desroches with a frown. “Unfortunately—”

“The schedule doesn’t count for squat these days. I don’t think this is one of our regular visitors, though. None of them are that big.”

“Whoever they are,” said the communications tech at the adjacent console, “they’re keeping quiet. Shall I hail them?”

“Not yet,” said Desroches. “Let them talk first.”

“Looks like they’re deploying the solar sail to recharge their drive,” Cecy said after a few minutes. “They probably don’t have any business on Saffel at all.”

Desroches shrugged. “As long as they stay over there and leave us alone, they can gather all the sunlight they want.”

Outer Islands Resort

Dalton Archipelago, Kervil

Prefecture II

February 3134; local summer

Kervil—being mostly water, with its landmasses broken up into a multitude of small islands and a handful of larger ones not quite large enough to qualify as continents—was a planet of many beaches. Even the public parks and seashores seldom witnessed overcrowding. A pundit at the local university had once proclaimed that the world’s ten larger islands alone sufficed to provide each citizen of Kervil with a kilometer of private ocean frontage. Natural human gregariousness, of course, meant that most of those citizens frequented one or another of the popular resorts instead and, on a warm summer day, the sand and the surf alike would be thronged with people.

Jonah Levin liked people, and regarded helping people as the largest component of his life’s work and the entire reason for his job’s existence—but he did not find them, in large numbers, restful. The more people who were gathered in any one place, the more likely it became that one or more of them would recognize him and, inevitably, turn out to have a problem that only the immediate personal attention of a Paladin of the Sphere could solve.

Over the years, Anna and the children had seen far too many of their outings and holidays spoiled by the intrusion of unexpected business. For his family’s sake, as much as for his own, Jonah had finally given in and purchased a membership in the Outer Islands Resort Community, gaining thereby exclusive rights to several kilometers of private beachfront on one of the islets in the Dalton Archipelago, with cottage facilities included. He still felt vaguely guilty about his decision—such luxuries, he couldn’t help thinking, were meant for the likes of Jacob Bannson or Duke Aaron Sandoval, not for people like him—but the happiness that it brought to his family usually assuaged the guilt.

If that wasn’t enough, there was always his Anna to scold him and tell him that he needed to take care of himself sometimes, too. Today was one of those days. Jonah lay stretched face-down on a beach blanket at the water’s edge, letting the warm black volcanic sand bake him from below, while the semitropical sunlight toasted him from above. Anna sat on the blanket next to him, rubbing emollient sunscreen into the skin of his back and shoulders with skillful fingers.

Jonah’s torso, and his arms and legs as well, were marked all over with the silvery traces of old scars—relics of the desperate battle on Kurragin that had first brought a simple captain in the Hesperus militia to the attention of then-Exarch Devlin Stone. The skin there remained sensitive, even after all these years, and stress or exhaustion would cause the muscles underneath to knot and ache.

They had come to the island cottage for a family picnic—Jonah, Anna, their two younger children and a couple of the children’s friends. Though he would have preferred to come with just Anna and the children alone, he knew his teenagers. Trying to push through a plan like that would have meant sullen compliance at best, an argument at worst, and Jonah was not in the mood for family arguments just now. The presence of a couple of strangers—very nice young people, really, he pointed out to himself; your children don’t bring home thugs and hoodlums—was a small price to pay for having the entire still-at-home family together and happy.

“Ah,” he said. Already his tense muscles were relaxing under the gentle pressure of Anna’s fingers. “That feels good.”

“You’re all tied up in knots.” She put pressure on a particularly tight and aching spot, and Jonah groaned pleasurably into the terry cloth beach blanket. “You work too hard.”

“Only because there’s so much that has to get done. Believe me, I’d like nothing more than to spend the next five or six months right here.”

Anna’s strong hands continued rubbing the emollient cream into his back. “That’s why you’re already packing your bags to go away again.”

“I have to do it, Anna.” His voice was muffled by the beach blanket, but he wasn’t certain he wanted to look at her face. “There’s too much stuff I can’t do from here—especially with the HPG network down. Nobody’s heard anything of substance from Northwind since the fighting there last June, and nobody’s heard anything about the Steel Wolves since then, either. What I have heard about the Dragon’s Fury and the Swordsworn doesn’t make me happy, and I don’t trust Jacob Bannson any further than I could throw him bare-handed, but I can’t act to neutralize him if I don’t know what he’s doing.”

He heard her give a gentle laugh. “That’s quite a catalogue.”

“There’s a lot more to it than that,” he said. “Those are just the highlights—or the lowlights, if you want to look at them that way.”

“Taken all together, what they mean is that you’re going to Terra.”

“I’m afraid so, yes.”

Her fingers were still working on the muscles of his back, separating out the scars left by metal fragments and laser fire and—at the very last—by edged weapons in close melee, and he felt himself relaxing into the pleasure-pain. She said, “You’re going to miss Passover with the family, you know.”

“I’m sorry, Anna. But it has to be done.”

“Yes. And you wouldn’t be the man I married if you didn’t do your duty.” He felt a slight hesitation in the steady movement of her fingers against his skin. “How long do you think you will be away?”

“I don’t know. Given transit time, three months at the very least. Maybe more. I’ll come back as soon as I can, I promise.”

He didn’t say what they both knew—that the unsettled state of The Republic might drag out his absence for much longer than three months. He knew that it was superstitious to think that speaking of a thing might make it happen; he kept his mouth shut just the same.

“Your promise is good enough for me,” Anna said. He felt a light kiss on the back of his neck. “It always has been.”