Satisfied, he immediately stripped off all his clothes and walked into the bathroom. From a toiletries kit he took a bottle of what appeared to be allergy capsules and ate two of them. Returning to the main room, he set the alarm chronometer in the headboard for one hour, then lay down to nap. When the alarm went off, he got up and went back to the bathroom and turned on the sunlamp.

The capsules had contained a drug that stimulated his skin to produce melanin, and the sunlamp helped him darken up quickly. His pasty gray skin took on a healthy olive tone. Using hair dye he blackened the hair on his head and body. That job finished, he returned to the main room and dressed in the trousers and workshirt a merchant marine like Negron would wear.

It took less than four hours to complete the total transformation from Carl Ashe to Carlos Negron.

Carlos Negron, shouldering the duffel bag he'd left in the room eight months before, headed back out to the Merchant Marine Union Hall near the docks at the base of the station. He mixed in with a crowd of workmen like himself who had recently come in from a planetary shuttle, then entered the Hall and presented his dues card. The man at the door logged him in and waved him on through the door.

The assassin knew that the quick scan of the dues card would put him in line for an upcoming outbound job. Because Carlos' history showed him to be competent with loading equipment and even light construction 'Mechs, he would be chosen for jobs that involved such machinery. It also showed that he had done a fair amount of work on the Marik border, which meant he would be heading down and away from Tharkad, and that would take him eventually to his goal.

He left his duffel with an apprentice and headed into the bar. There, despite regulations, smoke filled the darkness. The crowd looked sparse, which pleased him for two reasons. The first was that it lowered the chances of his bumping into anyone who might remember him from his earlier visit. Second, and far more important, it meant that ships were harvesting crew at a quick rate, a good sign that he might be leaving Thuban for another world in short order.

He settled at the bar and ordered a beer. The bartender delivered it with more head than liquid and slopped half of that on the bar itself. Carlos frowned and rapped his fist against the bar. "What's this?"

The bartender looked at what he had done, then shook his head and whisked the glass away. "Sorry, mate. The holovid's showing the disk of the Archon's funeral. I missed it the first time they ran it through the system. Here, this one's full and on the house. Drink it in the Archon's memory."

Carlos respectfully raised the glass. "To the Archon and her place at God's table."

A number of others in the bar joined his toast. A man in the back followed it immediately with another. "And God rot that scrawny bastard who calls himself her son."

That toast got more drinkers than the one he had offered, confusing the assassin. "What has Victor done?"

The bartender's expression became almost a snarl. "Not what he's done, but what he hasn't. Do you remember when his father died? Old Man Hanse lay in state for thirty-one days, a month and a day! What did his mother get? Two days! Even Jesus got three!"

"You can be sure Victor didn't offer her that much for fear she'd rise from the dead!" quipped the man in the back.

The bartender leaned forward. "The way we hear it, he sent a message to Katrina and told her, 'bury the bitch!' Gave her an order, he did. He was coming in as fast as he could from the Dragon's border—will make it a week from now, I've been told by those what know—but couldn't have the funeral wait. Mind you, the other children came on a command circuit from New Avalon—over twice the distance Victor had to go—and they made it. Can you imagine that? Prince Victor didn't even want to attend his mother's funeral?"

Up on the holovid screen affixed in the corner of the bar, the assassin saw the camera focus in on a tall, slender woman dressed head to toe in black. Beside her on the left stood a tall man with blond hair, who the assassin recognized as Ryan Steiner. "That the Archon's daughter?"

"Spitting image of her grandmother—was named for her, too. Victor made her preside over the funeral. Those are her brothers Peter and Arthur, and the girl there is Melissa's youngest, Yvonne." The bartender shook his head as he wiped away a moisture ring on the bar. "Katrina's been defending Victor, pointing out that he's got a government to run. Most of the people feel sorry for her so they accept it, but deep down we know the truth."

Carlos nodded and drank some beer. "Been nothing but trouble since Melissa married Hanse."

The man from the back of the bar came over and plopped himself down on the seat beside Carlos. "You know it, brother. But you also know why Katrina gave Melissa to Hanse, eh?"

Carlos shook his head. "Why?"

"Hanse told her that if she didn't, he was going to make an alliance with the Dragons. He would have married Constance Kurita. He would have forced his half-sister Marie to divorce Michael Hasek-Davion and would have married her off to Theodore. If he'd 'a done that, right now we'd all be drinking rice wine and speaking Dragon."

The assassin, who was fluent in Japanese, decided it was no time to reveal his prowess with that tongue. "I didn't know that."

The man from the back nodded emphatically. "Yes, part of the Davion plan, you know. You can see Victor keeping it up, too, the way he carries on with Omi Kurita. Why do you think the Tenth Lyran is stationed on the Drac border?"

"Hearing you tell it like that, it all begins to make sense."

"Damned straight it does." The man's eyes narrowed. "I can even tell you who did it, who set the bomb and why."

The assassin made Carlos lean in closer. "Who?"

The man glanced around the room, then lowered his voice. "Victor had it done. Being so tight with Omi, he had some of her assassins, the nekogami,do the job. The thing is this—they missed the real target. The bomb wasn't meant to get Melissa."

"No?"

"No. See, it was meant to get Ryan Steiner. Victor pledged to his father on his deathbed that he would kill Ryan. See, Ryan was supposed to be there. He was the one who was supposed to introduce the Archon that night, not Morgan Kell. It was meant to get him, it was."

The assassin wanted to be cautious, but he knew Carlos would have pressed the point. "But wasn't the explosive powerful? Didn't everyone on the dais die?"

The man shrugged. "The Kurita character for 'enough' translates as 'overkill,' you know. Besides, not everyone died. Morgan Kell lived, though he probably wasn't meant to. Now, there's a patriotic family for you—they're waiting his wife's funeral so the Hounds can kill off bandits."

"Patriotic?" Carlos indicated that the bartender should draw two more beers. "I mean, I know what the Hounds have done and all, and I appreciate that, but isn't Morgan's son a Khan of the Wolf Clan?"

"Aye, that's true, mate." The man beside him drained off a third of the beer. "But you have to understand something. The son of my wife's cousin went to the Nagelring at the same time as bonny Prince Victor and this Phelan. He told me that Phelan wanted nothing to do with his high and mighty cousin. Makes him okay in my book, even if he was brainwashed by the Clans. And, here, look, Phelan came all the way back for his father's retirement, didn't he? You can bet that he'd have been there for the funeral if it was his father had died. And he willbe there for his mother's."