Bannson Headquarters

Tybalt

Prefecture II

February 3134; local autumn

Bannson Universal Unlimited had its corporate offices on Tybalt, in a massive arcology almost a mile high, a self-contained ecosphere with the walls of the upper portions made transparent so that observers for kilometers around could behold and wonder at the audaciousness of it all. In a single enormous building, one level held multistoried towers rising above fields of summer blossoms, another level appeared from the outside to be nothing but parkland, and a third level was packed with geometric structures whose every surface was as elaborately gilded and bejeweled as a prince’s windup toy.

“Taken altogether, the BUU arcology made for a casual display of wealth and power that drove Jacob Bannson’s enemies to distraction. It symbolized,” said Progressive Republic Today, “all that is worst about the man himself: greed, arrogance, ostentatious display, and a lack of serious feeling for either art or nature.”

Jacob Bannson didn’t worry about Progressive Republic Today. He knew that ordinary readers on Tybalt and elsewhere considered PRT to be snobbish and boring when it wasn’t bordering on actively treasonous, and his local approval rating had jumped by fifty points after that article came out.

Bannson maintained a private office suite in the heart of the building’s uppermost glittering jewel-box level, well away from prying eyes. Cameras fixed here and there on the exterior of the huge structure sent views of the city to the office’s windows—video posters constantly updated in real time—while banks of data consoles and communications links displayed information from across the surface of Tybalt. Other consoles in the same office had formerly displayed similar nearly real-time updates from all over The Republic of the Sphere; now those screens changed seldomly, if at all.

Earlier this morning, a blinking light on one of the offworld display terminals had alerted Bannson to just such a rare update. He was looking now at several months’ worth of reports—recently updated by courier mailship—from his agents in place on Northwind. He’d prompted the machine to give him a sheaf of printouts, then paced back and forth while he read them.

Bannson was an energetic man, a maker of emphatic gestures, who became restless in small or crowded rooms. Short and stocky, with wild red hair and a full beard, he had the look of a Viking raider of old. A magazine considerably less highbrow than Progressive Republic Today had once claimed that Jacob Bannson always looked like he ought to be wearing chain mail and brandishing a battle-ax. Bannson had tracked down the writer of the article and ordered him brought to corporate headquarters by a squad of BUU’s notorious and unmistakable security goons—and then hired the terrified man on the spot to work for Bannson’s own public relations division.

According to the reports Bannson was reading as he paced, things on Northwind were going well. He had long wanted to expand BUU’s operations inside Prefecture III, but had been forced repeatedly to back down under pressure from the government of The Republic of the Sphere, with its too worshipful attitude toward the status quo. The collapse of the HPG network, however, had shattered that status quo for good and all, and the associated destabilization was providing Bannson Universal Unlimited with renewed opportunities to extend its influence.

Opportunities, he thought, to which Northwind was the key. Northwind was at once the gateway to Terra and the guardian of the gate—the base of operations for the Northwind Highlanders, formidable combat troops that anybody looking to become a power in Prefecture III would have to deal with. It was also the home of Countess and Prefect Tara Campbell, who was young and untried, but who possessed large and still mostly untapped reserves of family and personal popularity. If the Countess of Northwind turned against him, BUU could kiss any further expansion into Prefecture III good-bye, and never mind the state of the HPG network.

So… Tara Campbell had to be either crippled or won over to Bannson’s side. In the best of all possible outcomes, he could accomplish both, and without her knowing. It would be tricky, but tricky was one of the things Jacob Bannson had always been good at.

He’d thought for a while that he’d found the perfect tool for the job. It wasn’t every day that you found a Paladin of the Sphere with a verifiable and blackmail-worthy secret in his past.

While there were Paladins whom Bannson would not have been pleased to find corruptible, Ezekiel Crow was not among their number. Bannson had never cared for Crow. The man was too reserved and austere to be good company, and had always regarded Bannson’s flamboyant ways not merely with distrust—which Bannson could have lived with, because no sane man trusted anyone completely—but with puritanical distaste.

Taking care of a hypocrite like that, Bannson thought as he read the reports, would be a pleasure all by itself. He was the first man to admit that his own hands were not clean, but whatever he’d done, he’d done in the pursuit of business, and he had never hidden it. He’d certainly never changed his name afterward and pretended to be a lover of the people and a defender of the right.

The HPG network had just gone down, with Bannson still pondering the best use to make of his hold over Ezekiel Crow, when a wild card had shown up in the game: Anastasia Kerensky.

Anastasia had surprised him, which Bannson didn’t like. She’d come out of nowhere—well, out of Arc Royal, which was one place his external security force had yet to penetrate. She’d walked into Steel Wolf headquarters on Tigress with nothing but a BattleMech, her genetic ID, and—so far as he had been able to learn—a few scraps of military experience gained under a false name, and had walked out again two months later as a Galaxy Commander and the person in charge of the whole Steel Wolf operation.

According to Bannson’s sources, she had pulled off that feat by killing the rogue group’s Galaxy Commander, Kal Radick, with her bare hands in a Trial of Possession. Bannson was not pleased by that. Radick had been straightforward and predictable, if you allowed for the inevitable Clan peculiarities, and no one ever had any trouble figuring out which way he was going to jump. If anyone had ever tried to teach Radick how to dissemble, Bannson thought, the Steel Wolf leader had obviously skipped the homework and failed the final exam.

Kerensky, though, was different. Trueborn on Arc Royal, she was alien in a way that the Tigress-born Steel Wolves were not. She was also ruthless and ambitious—not a crime, in Bannson’s view—but a factor to be dealt with nonetheless. And he’d read enough of the Clans’ history to know what a weight of expectation, and the inherited ability to match it, accrued to the holder of the Kerensky Bloodname.

Jacob Bannson had spent too much time cultivating his position as the preeminent force in Prefecture II to appreciate seeing it seriously threatened by anyone else. Having an Arc-Royal Clan Warrior take over from him in the role of first among equals would not, he thought, be a good thing. Not for Bannson Universal Unlimited, and not for anyone else either.

So… he had three problems: Campbell, Kerensky, Crow.

Campbell could wait, for now. She didn’t have any serious ambitions above the Prefectural level; she didn’t have any interest in pushing into Prefecture IV; and between the Steel Wolves and a duplicitous Paladin, she had problems enough on Northwind to keep her distracted from Bannson’s activities in Prefecture III. She would stay put, and Bannson could give her his full attention later.