They shook their heads and Karl blushed. "Okay, see you later."

They accompanied him back to the truck, took possession of the plastic bags, and continued to watch him until he left the garage.

Karl finished out the rest of the day and, in fact, did help deliver the centerpieces. He refrained from checking his earlier handiwork. He did, however, take stock of the names on the place cards at each seat within the blast radius. This will be a major blow to Tharkad society, but it will raise the general level of acting on a couple of holovid dramas.

As he expected, Mr. Crippen did not buy lunch, but Karl didn't protest. Karl wouldn't protest. Karl was a nice, quiet man who kept to himself. He didn't cause trouble.

That would be how they would remember him, and how they would talk about him to the news media. Karl Kole: assassin or dupe? Historians would debate that question for years.

The assassin left Karl's place of work and walked on past the bus stop. The regulars on his bus home might notice he was not with them, but Karl regularly missed that bus. Sometimes he treated himself to dinner, but more often he took in a holovid at a local theatre. If anyone had noticed him and actually remembered, they would have seen him head toward the Tharkad Theatre on Chase Street.

He stopped at the theatre and bought a ticket to see The Immortal Warrior Returns.Glancing again at his watch, he saw he had half an hour until show time. He smiled at the girl in the kiosk and said, "I'll be back."

He lied.

The assassin walked down the street to the Argyle Hotel. At the desk he asked for the key to room 4412, which he had rented two weeks before and guaranteed with a credit card in the name of Carl Ashe. The clerk gave him the key and said there were no messages.

Carl thanked him and took the elevator to the room, where he showered and used colorant to bleach his hair bone-white. He changed into the tailored suits Mr. Ashe had ordered from a nearby tailor earlier in the week. Packing some clothes and a few toiletries into an overnight bag, Carl Ashe donned a long parka and some copper-tinted glasses, then left the room.

He had the doorman summon a taxi and ordered it to take him to the spaceport. He gave the man a miserly tip and demanded a receipt. Once inside the terminal, he went to the storage lockers and pulled out a larger suitcase and retrieved his ticket from it.

He returned to the check-in counter with the two cases and waited in line. Things moved slowly, but not so slowly that he began to worry. Glancing at his watch, he saw he had plenty of time. The clerk at the Odinflight Transport counter checked him in efficiently and whisked his bags away.

"The shuttle to the outbound Tetersen ship leaves from Gate Fourteen at seven-thirty. That's half an hour from now."

"Thank you."

He found the gate with no trouble and no delay. Nearby was an empty chair with a holovid viewer grafted onto it. He pushed a Kroner stamped with Melissa's face into the slot and changed channels until he got the public access station. He heard applause from the tinny speaker as Morgan Kell finished introducing the Archon, then returned to his seat on the dais.

The camera tightened in on the Archon as she started to speak, also catching one of the mycosia pseudoflorablossoms in its frame. The assassin ignored Melissa's words, but drank in her beauty. He could see why she was beloved by billions. She was intelligent and gorgeous. It would be a pity to let her descend into wrinkles and senility.

He turned from the holovid viewer and walked over to a visiphone booth. He dropped two Hanse Memorial coins into the slot and punched up Karl Kole's apartment. The phone rang four times before the computer answered it. The assassin punched in the numbers 112263, then hung up.

He was on board the outgoing shuttle when the computer dialed another number. Having done that, it hung up and dialed yet another number. Once it had a connection there, it downloaded a suicide note written by Karl Kole. That note would show up in Mr. Crippen's electronic mail within a day. The computer then wrote zero to every segment on its hard disk, effectively destroying its usefulness.

The computer's call was the second crucial step in the assassin's plan. The first had come when the water he used on the flowers reached the semi-permeable rubber coat. Enough moisture got through in each pot to allow a timer to use it to power up. These timers, which were set for seven hours' elapsed time, counted down faithfully, and by six-thirty all had opened a circuit that fed power from a small battery to radio-phone circuitry.

The computer's call to the cellular number that all four detonators shared came at 7:21 P.M. When the circuits detected a signal, they sent out an electric impulse that would normally have rung a buzzer. Instead, the circuits pulsed energy into the magnesium firestarters to which they had been connected. Within two seconds of the call going out, the magnesium started to burn. It, in turn, lit a small thermite charge. The thermite burned through the acrylic and ignited the molded ceramic explosive.

The explosives did not quite detonate simultaneously, though the assassin had hoped they would. The lowest one went off a half-second before the others, boosting the stand into the air by thirty centimeters. Next, the top and right ones exploded in tandem, and the last one exploded a second after that.

The fact that things did not go perfectly did not matter to the success of the assassin's mission. The bombs converted the decorative pots into lethal shrapnel. The fire and metal literally vaporized the wooden podium, killing Melissa before she ever felt any pain.

As the shuttle rolled down the runway and pulled up into the night sky, Mr. Ashe could see the flashing lights of ambulances gathered around the reception center. "Looks like some excitement downtown," he said to his seatmate.

By the time the shuttle reached the DropShip Columbus ,Archon Melissa Steiner Davion had been declared dead. By the time the Intelligence Secretariat had begun a worldwide dragnet for Karl Kole, Carl Ashe and the Columbuswere a whole star system beyond their grasp.

20

Deia

Federated Commonwealth

19 June 3055

Feeling a BattleMech lurch forward with him in the cockpit filled Nelson Geist with more happiness than he had known since his capture. The cooling vest circulated fluid through its tubes and the neurohelmet sat heavily on his shoulders—deliciously familiar sensations to a man who thought he would never experience them again. Being seated high up in the navigation and gunnery seat of the Red Corsair's BattleMasterbrought back memories, and he was smiling in spite of what his presence there meant.

She will spoil it. She will use it against me.Nelson reached out and took the joystick sighting controls in his hands and moved them around. As he expected, the gold crosshairs burning on the holographic display before him did not move. She is not so foolish as to let me to have live weaponry to play with.

Her voice crackled gently through his earphones. "How does it feel to be a warrior again, Nelson?"

"It feels right. "The second he spoke he wished he'd said nothing at all, and her laughter told him his caution was correct.

"Good."

He heard a click and other voices came on line. "We have a concentration of enemy two klicks south of your position, Red Leader. We count twelve, repeat one-two, 'Mechs. We will drive these Zouaves toward you. Blue Leader out."