“An excellent idea.”

“I didn’t spend my formative years tagging along after a couple of diplomats without learning something from the experience,” she said. “For the reception, we’ll need to pull together a theme that emphasizes Northwind’s local traditions and autonomy on the one hand and our loyalty to The Republic of the Sphere on the other.”

“I have an idea or two about that,” Griffin admitted.

“Good,” she said. “Then you have the whole job. I’d probably have asked for you anyway, because I want somebody from local intelligence in on the planning—you and I both know that the security aspects of this affair are going to be hellish.”

Elliot residence

Village of Liddisdale, Northwind

November, 3132; local winter

Night had fallen by the time Will Elliot reached his mother’s house in Liddisdale. Most of the shops clustered around the town’s central green had already closed, except for the fuel station and the all-night pharmacy, and the streetlights had come on. He parked the BannsonBuilt in the cottage’s attached garage next to his mother’s electric runabout, stowed his parka and boots in the mud room between the garage and the house proper, and went inside.

The kitchen smelled of pot roast and fresh bread, and the lingering spiciness of baked fruit. His mother had made a berry tart earlier; he saw it waiting on the counter by the stove.

Jean Elliot came bustling into the kitchen and enveloped her son in a warm hug. “It’s good to see you home, Will.”

“It’s good to be home. You didn’t have to hold up supper on my account.”

“I wouldn’t have cooked such a big meal if I didn’t plan on sharing it with you,” she said. She stepped back and gave him a gentle push. “Go clean yourself up while I get the table ready.”

Half an hour later, scrubbed clean of mud and wood smoke and dressed in fresh clothes, Will joined his mother in the dining room. She’d brought out the good plates and the good table linen and her wedding silver, causing him to wonder for an instant if today was some special occasion whose significance he had forgotten. Then he remembered how, when his sisters were home, his mother had always liked to make at least one day a week a proper sit-down dinner—“for the sake of civilizing the heathen,” as she had put it—and he decided that she must be feeling nostalgic.

For the first several minutes of the meal, he said nothing, only ate hungrily to make up for all the self-heating dehydrated rations he’d had to consume for breakfast, lunch, and dinner while out on the trail. Finally they reached dessert, and he was slowing down enough to say, as he took a slice of the berry tart, “I had a talk with Old Angus today.”

“Ah,” said his mother, looking unsurprised. “I thought you might have something on your mind.”

“He’s worried about the HPG network still not coming on-line. Doesn’t know how the guiding business is going to do if his offworlders can’t get in touch and don’t come back.”

“Angus Macallan’s nobody’s fool. Bridie Casimir, down at the grocery, said that a DropShip came into Tara this morning with news that there’s been more fighting—on Addicks, this time. People aren’t going to be planning expensive vacations on foreign worlds as long as things like that are going on.”

Will took a forkful of tart. The flaky crust fragmented into little pieces under the pressure, and the tines of his fork clattered against the china beneath. He looked down at his hand for a moment. A splash of purple berry juice stained the white tablecloth by his plate.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ll wash it later.”

His mother waved the offer away. “No matter. What did Old Angus say to you that’s upset you so?”

“He’s worried, like I said. Planning for the future. And he doesn’t think the business is going to be able to afford two guides for much longer.”

“So he’s letting you go?”

“Aye.”

“The stingy old bastard.” Will had never heard his mother use bad language before; he was too startled by it now to say anything. “And to think I almost married him, back in ’04.”

He finally found his voice again. “Maybe you should have. He’s kept Robbie.”

“Hold your tongue. Angus Macallan could never hold a candle to your father, God rest him.” She straightened her shoulders and drew a deep breath. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do next?”

Will nodded. The house itself was paid for, and a small annuity came in every month from his father’s pension, but Rockhawk Wilderness Tours had made the difference between comfort and genteel poverty for both of them ever since John Elliot had died. “I have my money for the last two weeks, and a bit of a good-bye payment to sweeten it. With what we have put by, that should give us a little time.”

“You’re a fine outdoorsman,” she said. “It won’t take long to find someone else who’ll take you on.”

“I don’t think so.” Driving home in the growing dark, he’d had plenty of time to think things over and come to an unhappy conclusion. “Old Angus is one of the best, and if he’s feeling the pinch then everyone else is feeling it twice as hard.” He poked at the remains of his tart with his fork. “There isn’t going to be any work here, not if the whole region’s sliding. The best I could hope for is a job in the lumber mill down by Harlaugh, and that pays less than half what I was getting from Old Angus. I’m going to have to go away.”

“I was afraid you’d want to do something like that.”

“I don’t want to,” he said. He’d known she wouldn’t be enthusiastic about losing him; both his older sisters had married and moved off some years before, one to a long-distance transport driver who worked out of Kildare on the other side of the Bloodstones, and the other to a mining engineer in Kearny. He was the only child who had remained close to home. “But if I’m going to end up looking for work in Tara anyway, I’d rather do it before every third worker in Liddisdale gets the same idea.”

DropShip Dark Rosaleen, en route to Northwind

Prefecture III, The Republic

November, 3132

The DropShip Dark Rosaleen was six days into its twelve-day journey from Northwind’s Jump Point to the planet’s main spaceport. Ezekiel Crow, Paladin of the Sphere, had been a silent presence among the handful of passengers, occupying his cabin—and the minds of the others aboard the DropShip—in much the same uncommunicative but hard to ignore fashion as his great Blade BattleMech occupied its berth in the largest of the vessel’s cargo holds.

In the Paladin’s case, the silence had a purpose: He had spent the first half of his journey in intensive study, ignoring the company of his fellow passengers for the company of text files and video clips. By now, Ezekiel Crow knew everything that The Republic of the Sphere’s diplomatic and intelligence services had seen fit to tell him about the planet Northwind itself, and about the young and good-looking Prefect who was, arguably, its most famous living citizen.

He knew, for example, that Northwind was the second planet out from a G2I-type star, with a temperate climate—as climatologists reckoned “temperate,” at any rate, which merely meant that the range of temperatures in most places didn’t often go outside what a properly equipped human body could endure. Of Northwind’s three continents, the greater part of New Lanark—where the capital was located—and the mineral-rich second continent of Kearny would still be in the grip of winter when he arrived. The third and smallest continent, Halidon, would be in the waning days of its summer dry season.

Crow shook his head, thinking about it. “Temperance in all things,” he murmured.