“I’m just a Knight,” he said. “The Exarch doesn’t tell me stuff like that. All I officially know is that I’m supposed to deliver the formal announcement and tell you that the Exarch requires your presence in Geneva.”

Mandela raised an eyebrow. “How about what you know unofficially?”

“Not much more. If I had to guess, I’d say that the Exarch was hoping to take all the assorted factions by surprise. He means to hold the election before they have a chance to get their political machines running in high gear.”

“Hmph,” said Mandela. “It’s a good thought. Damien isn’t stupid, and the damned factions are going to kill everyone if something isn’t done about them first. Here, so far it’s only rioting and dirty tricks—it could be worse. But on Terra—” he shook his head “—on Terra, the factions mean business. They have dozens of different ways to follow Devlin Stone’s vision, and each of them thinks they’re the only ones who have it right. Believe me, if I wasn’t here, the situation would be far worse. Don’t let the fact that there aren’t any armies involved yet fool you.”

“I heard the news stories while I was driving out from the port. The situation sounds …complicated.”

Mandela snorted. “That’s an understatement. Anywhere you’ve got two people on Sheratan you’ve got at least three political factions, and the locals can’t even vote for town dogcatcher without having two protest marches and a riot about it first.”

“Is the situation safe enough for you to leave it without an observer?” Robert asked.

“Not really,” Mandela said. “But a Paladin isn’t necessary for a simple matter like overseeing the local planetary elections.” He looked at Robert. “A Knight of the Sphere should be more than sufficient, now that we have one on hand.”

Bernhard Island

Kervil, Prefecture II

22 October 3134

The morning of Operation Aftershock dawned fair and bright. The tropical sky arcing overhead was a clear matte blue, the ocean below it was scarcely ruffled by the gentle breeze, and the sunlight glittered over the surface of the water like a layer of golden spangles. Bernhard Island was a dormant volcanic cone, its seaward approach dominated by rugged cliffs above vivid green slopes falling down to a long arc of black-sand beach. From the ocean, Bernhard looked like an unspoiled paradise, the stuff of a hundred tourist brochures.

And all of it was lies.

Bernhard Island was in fact a pirates’ haven, and under ordinary circumstances it would have been cleaned out long ago. Kervil Marine Law Enforcement was a well-armed and thoroughly professional combat force, quite capable of rounding up the typical piracy ring as soon as its criminal activities came to light.

These pirates, however, were not merely local criminals. When KMLE agents tracking half a dozen apparently unrelated cases compared notes, they saw similarities in methods and structure that pointed to the existence of a larger organization. Nor, upon investigation, did all of the stolen cargoes and prisoners’ ransoms stay on-planet; KMLE’s detective work found links to off-world buyers of goods and suppliers of weapons, as well as ties to smuggling rings on Terra and elsewhere. The criminal enterprises that preyed on Kervil’s shipping lanes, they discovered to their dismay, were only the planetary branch of a multiworld organization almost as large in its scope as the pirates of Sadalbari had been in their heyday.

Even worse, after several months of careful investigation and infiltration it became clear to Kervilian intelligence that the nerve center of the greater criminal organization was not located somewhere safely off-world in somebody else’s jurisdiction. The interplanetary pirates had hidden their main administrative-and-support base in the depths of the lava caves of Kervil’s own Bernhard Island.

Today, a task force assembled for the occasion waited just over the horizon from the island. In their current position, the ships of the task force could not be seen by human observers, even on the island’s high ground, and they had maintained radio silence for the past thirty-six hours. Kervil Marine Law Enforcement stood poised to hit Bernhard without warning in overwhelming strength.

The interplanetary scope of the pirates’ endeavors was responsible for the presence among KMLE’s current assets of an Atlas BattleMech piloted by a Paladin of the Sphere. The Atlas took up most of the well deck of Kervil Marine Law Enforcement’s Amphibious Assault Ship Waverley. Operation Aftershock’s other landing craft had been dispersed to her sister ships Ellis and Cuthbert, also taking part in the assault.

The goal of Operation Aftershock was to smash the pirate organization’s nerve center before its members could escape. There would be no advance warning, no chance for the high-level bosses to flee, no time for the incriminating documents to be wiped or shredded. Nothing but the hammer of justice, smashing down—and Paladin Jonah Levin and his Atlas had come to swing it.

The landing ships waiting offshore were specialized craft, their hulls painted pale blue to blend in with the ocean mists of Kervil, each of them carrying many smaller boats. The largest of the ships could ballast down, flooding the vessels’ well decks so that small cargo craft loaded with heavy tracked and wheeled units could float out. The smaller landing ships carried boats hung from davits, each boat large enough to hold a squad of regular or armored infantry.

At the moment, a rainsquall obscured the distant horizon. Just beyond that horizon, on the shores of Bernhard Island, the pirates waited. Jonah Levin was sure that they weren’t asleep; even with radio silence in effect, the approach of the landing force would be putting out too much noise on the electromagnetic spectrum for them to rest easy. No one had accused these freebooters of being anything other than ruthless and effective. That was why an army with both regular and armored infantry, and with wheeled, tracked and hover armor, lay just over their horizon—and that was why Jonah’s Atlas squatted in a specially constructed hold in the Waverley’s belly.

The Atlas was still attached to the ship’s service power lines, but was otherwise ready to move as soon as Jonah climbed into the cockpit and strapped himself into the pilot’s seat. The Atlas had no jump jets, which meant that Jonah, little as he relished the prospect, would have to wade his ’Mech ashore while every artillery piece on the island poured energy and projectile fire onto him.

The ships drove forward, toward the horizon. Jonah ascended from his ’Mech’s resting place to meet the Waverley’s captain on the ship’s bridge for a final conference before the assault.

“They have to know we’re coming now,” the captain said, “if they aren’t blind rather than just dumb.”

Jonah nodded. “So they must.”

“You wanted the charts?”

“Yes.”

“Here you go, then.”

Jonah looked at the display the captain brought up on his data terminal. “Can you give me a picture of the subsea contours?”

“No problem.” The captain touched a sequence of keys, and the false-color display melted and changed, now showing the water off the coast in gradations of blue and green where it had previously been a solid-colored area.

“How recent is this data?” Jonah asked.

“Some years old. This has been a poorly charted area.”

Jonah pointed at a bar of lighter color that thrust outward from the southern promontory of the shoreline. “Do you see this spit matching data from the task force today?”

“Nothing to contradict it,” the captain said.

“Then put me over the top of it… here,” Jonah said, pointing again. “Kick out your boats; I’m going for a stroll.”