First things first, though. Before she could settle in to her new quarters, she had to present herself and her orders to Prefect Tara Campbell. She’d taken the time before leaving the DropShip to freshen up, putting on a clean uniform and a touch of cosmetics—not enough to look gaudy, just enough to show that she took the occasion seriously enough to make an effort—and had brushed some order back into her short blond hair.

At least it’s my natural color, she reflected. I know for a fact that the Countess dyes hers.

This irreverent thought cheered her as she passed through the front gate of the fort complex with a flip of an ID card, and made her way to the New Barracks and another ID check, and then at last to Tara Campbell’s offices. The Countess was in. Like everything else on Northwind, Tara Campbell had changed since the last time Captain Bishop had seen her. She looked older than she had when Captain Bishop met her on Addicks, and tireder as well, as though she’d been getting by for too long on too few hours of sleep a night.

She looked harder, too, in a way that Captain Bishop couldn’t quite put a finger on, except to say that she looked like someone who’d made the tough decisions.

Captain Bishop saluted and handed across her orders.

“Captain Tara Bishop reporting for duty as ordered, ma’am.”

“At ease, Captain, and take a seat.” The Prefect waited, smiling politely—she had grown up around diplomats, and would probably smile politely even if you set her hair on fire—while Captain Bishop complied. Then she continued, “I see that you’re going to be my new aide.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Captain Bishop said.

“Excellent.” The Prefect smiled again, and this time it looked genuine. “I’ve been making do with temporarily assigned personnel ever since the battle on the plains, and it hasn’t been working out as well as I’d like. Having someone who’s actually up to handling the responsibilities of the job may let me get some rest.”

“I hope to do a good job, ma’am,” Captain Bishop said.

“Of course you do. Your Colonel speaks highly of you; he wouldn’t have recommended you for the post if he didn’t think you were capable.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Captain Bishop also remembered her Colonel telling her—when she complained to him about having to leave Addicks—that a post as aide to the Prefect was a big step upward in the direction of better things, and one that most career minded young officers would be damned grateful to get. He’d also said that the Countess of Northwind wasn’t merely a political soldier. She wouldn’t hang back when fighting needed to be done, and anyone serving as her aide would see all the action that she ever wanted.

“The very first thing we have to get clear,” Tara Campbell said, “is that if you’re going to be any good to me as an aide, you’re going to have to speak freely, like you did back on Addicks. None of this ‘yes ma’am’ and ‘no ma’am’ stuff. Tell the truth and shame the devil, as my father used to say.”

“Yes, ma’—” Captain Bishop caught herself. “I’ll do my best. But it’s a lot easier out in the field.”

The Countess of Northwind laughed. “Believe me, Captain Bishop, you’re not the first person ever to notice that.”

Riggers’ Rest Inn

Fort Barrett

Oilfields Coast

Northwind

November 3133; dry season

When Anastasia Kerensky had returned to Northwind, the last place she’d expected to find herself spending an evening—spending several evenings, in fact—was drinking beer incognito in a Fort Barrett pub, even with her trusted officer and occasional lover Nicholas Darwin along for escort and backup. Disguise and subterfuge did not suit her temperament. While she was fighting for The Republic on Dieron and Achernar as Tassa Kay, she had reveled in the high-visibility accomplishments of her other self, and never bothered to change either her looks or her manners. Tassa Kay had simply been a version of Anastasia Kerensky cut loose from the bonds of Clan and Bloodname, free instead to act as she pleased in all things. She had enjoyed being Tassa Kay.

This time, though, she had been forced to adopt an identity so far from her own that it chafed like an ill-fitting shoe. She had temporarily lightened her long hair from its distinctive lustrous black with reddish highlights to a plain drab brown—she would be glad when she could reverse the effect, but for now it was necessary for her to appear the opposite of flamboyant. She had traded her snug black leather jacket and trousers for practical traveler’s gear: sturdy thick-soled shoes and bulky socks; hiking shorts and a loose shirt and a floppy wide-brimmed hat; a backpack and a walking stick.

Her entire outfit came from the crew lockers on the captured offshore oil rig. The medic, Ian Murchison, had found the items for her at her instruction, and the hair-color kit as well, though with an expression that said he had not enjoyed the task. All things considered, however, the oil rig’s sole surviving crew member was adjusting to his Bondsman status as much as anyone was likely to who wasn’t already Clan.

Nicholas Darwin was similarly outfitted, and from the same source, although in Anastasia’s opinion the outdoor-tourist look worked considerably better on him than it did on her. He was a compactly built man, not overlarge but quite strong, as befitted a Warrior who fought his battles from the cramped interior of a tank, and the hiking shorts showed off his dark skin and his well-muscled legs to excellent advantage.

Anastasia and Nicholas had been waiting at the Riggers’ Rest for over a week now, in the guise of travelers on a hiking tour of the Oilfields Coast. They had worked up a cover story to explain their unfamiliar accents, but Fort Barrett’s booming oil economy had drawn in so many offworlders over the past couple of decades that they never needed to use it.

They had been brought to Fort Barrett by a mysterious coded message that had come in over the main communications rig in Balfour-Douglas #47. Such a message should never have made it through to Anastasia Kerensky at all. The Steel Wolves had communications and intelligence specialists hard at work making certain that the drilling station’s customary flow of messages and reports never faltered. So far as the outside world knew, Balfour-Douglas #47 was still operating normally.

Nevertheless, a message had come through, and from a source who should never have known where she was, let alone how to contact her: Fort Barrett. You pick the place. I’ll find you there. We want to talk business.

That message had led directly to twelve days spent drinking local beer out of heavy glass mugs and eating dried salted jellyfish skins. The jellyfish skins were a popular local bar food, of the sort that visiting offworlders were expected to try once and write home about shuddering; by now Anastasia was half worried she was starting to develop a taste for them.

“I do not like this,” she said.

“You could have fooled me,” Nicholas Darwin said. “That makes the second bowl of those things that you have finished this evening.”

“Not the food,” she said. “This waiting for a person who does not give their name.”

“You said you knew who it came from.”

Anastasia took a long drink from her mug of beer. She wished that it were vodka, but the Riggers’ Rest was not the sort of place to have the good stuff in stock. Besides, vodka was the drink of choice for her alter ego Tassa Kay in a hell-raising mood, and she was not being Tassa Kay now. She was merely Anastasia in disguise.

“We both know who it had to come from,” she said. “But he is not going to come to us himself. So we wait, looking like fools, for someone whom we will not know when we meet.”