That was a lie, of course, because he expected no messages. The few friends Carlos Negron had were among his fellow workers, who also liked to keep to themselves. Any messages to Negron would be from agents who had somehow tied him to the assassination, and those were communications he definitely did notwant to answer.

On the Lamon station Carlos underwent a startling transformation from a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed longshoreman to a black-clad member of the neo-Puritanical Wildmon sect. Wearing a crisply starched black suit and black hat that hid most of his face, he boarded a DropShip for the short hop to Caledonia. Fearing a dressing-down for almost anything, no one aboard ship spoke to him during the trip, which he did not mind at all.

At Caledonia the assassin again changed his identity, once more using a room held for a dummy corporation. The fearsome Wildmon vanished and was replaced by Chuck Grayson. Grayson, bound for a gaming junket on Solaris, dressed in gaudy clothes that would have sent a Wildmon member into convulsions. Chuck booked passage on the DropShip Lady Luck,stowed his gear in his cabin, and immediately headed for a lounge.

In the lounge his garish clothes were like tiger stripes in a jungle. Worming his way through a press of merrymakers, he ended up shoulder to shoulder with a stunning brunette wearing a sarong made from the same patterned cloth as his shirt. "You have wonderful taste in clothes, Miss. ..."

Her green eyes studied him going up and coming down again. "Calley. I'm Judith Calley, but my friends call me Jude. And your taste is impressive, Mr . . . ?"

"Charles Grayson, and my friends call me Chuck." The assassin saw the bartender hand her two thick, slushy drinks with a paper umbrella stuck in each one. "Are those good?"

Jude nodded. "Delicious." She sipped one and licked her lips. "I'd give you one, but the other is for my cabin-mate. Join us over in the corner when you order."

As she moved away, the assassin told the bartender to get him one of the same, then pressed a thumb to the bar tab, which immediately logged the price of the drink to his account. Taking the drink, he cut back through the crowd and found the corner table. Jude moved over so he could sit next to her on the edge of the semicircular booth.

"Chuck, this is Ronda, my cabin-mate, and John and Toni and Georgie and Mike."

"Chuck Grayson. Hi." He sat down and smiled politely as he felt Jude's right leg press against his left. "You all seem to know each other. Did you just meet here, or . . . ?"

John, a tall, muscular man—the group's alpha male-leaned back and looped his arm over Toni's shoulders. "We all work for Fennic-Dobbs, in the electronics sales division. The figures for sales last Christmas finally came in, and our department had the highest sales andthe highest collection rate. Because of it, we won a two-month junket to Solaris."

"Very nice." Chuck raised his glass and smiled. "Congratulations."

Ronda gulped a bit of her drink. "What do you do, Chuck?"

The assassin forced a blush on Chuck. "I'm a ghost writer. I work with celebs and other bigwigs and help them write autobiographies. I also do some of those instant-bio things on celebs who hit big."

John's dark eyes sharpened. "So is this trip business or pleasure?"

"It's supposed to be the former, but I hope for a bit of the latter." He smiled easily. "I'm going to see if I can get an interview with Kai Allard-Liao. ..."

Ronda squealed delightedly. "Oh, he's such a dream. "

Everyone at the table laughed a bit and Ronda turned a brilliant shade of red. "Well, he is."

"I hope you're not alone in feeling that, Ronda. I could use the sales." The assassin tasted the fruity drink and immediately realized the thing was packed with alcohol. He set it back down and resolved to nurse the drink for a long time. "He's never talked about what he did on Alyina, and my publisher hopes I can get him to spill the story."

Ronda smiled like a cat that had caught a whole flock of canaries. "I heard that after Prince Victor tried to kill him, Kai led the planet in a revolt that threw off the Clans and that he killed the Clan leader in single combat—thereby becoming the ruler of the world."

Toni, the petite blonde beneath John's beefy arm, spoke in a quiet voice. "I don't think the Prince tried to kill Kai."

Mike laughed aloud. "Toni, you don't believe Victor killed the Archon, either."

"He didn't."

Jude leaned over and stage-whispered to him, "Toni met the Prince once, years ago. She grew up on Tharkad and went to one of the Nagelring dances."

Toni's head came up and her lower lip thrust out defiantly. "I did meet him, and I even danced with him. He's too nice to have killed the Archon. He wouldn't do it."

The assassin shook his head. "I've been buried in writing a book for the past couple of months. The Prince killed his mother?"

John waved the assertion off. "Nothing official."

"You think they'd say if there was?" Ronda asked.

Mike pushed his glass of beer aside, and began to draw on the table with his left hand. "It's like this, Chuck. Victor ordered his sister to let his mother lie in state for only two days and then had her buried in a funeral he didn't attend. Now they say he's personally working at directing the investigation of his mother's death and that he keeps viewing all the films about it. If his sister Katrina wasn't running interference for him, the whole Federated Commonwealth—or at least the Lyran part of it—would be in chaos."

Chuck nodded thoughtfully. "Mind you, I'd not put it past any ruler of the Inner Sphere to kill his predecessor. Face it, the average person lives to be a hundred, but if you're a ruler, you die at least twenty years shy of that mark. I also, seem to remember some very short-lived rumors that the Archon had her husband knocked off so she could rule the Federated Commonwealth, but those proved groundless."

Ronda shook her head. "Yes, but remember—it was Victor who found his father. Who's to say old Victor didn't kill Hanse, too?"

"With his mother in line to rule?" John frowned. "No motive."

"Hanse was going to strip the Tenth Lyran Guards from Victor because of a confidential report from Kai Allard saying that Victor had tried to murder him on Alyina. Besides, Hanse was going to disown his son because he couldn't stand the fact that Victor married Omi Kurita while he was in Drac space."

Georgie rapped her knuckles on the table top. "You're wrong about Victor, all of you. The Archon was killed by a member of the Nature First movement. They killed her with the mycosia pseudoflorato protest the warping of genetics for human whim and pleasure. That official line about a nut is just a diversion."

"If you're right," Ronda challenged, "then why are so many questions still not answered?"

"Because the government doesn't want folks to know how widespread Nature First really is. It would cause a. panic."

Jude gave him a little nudge. "They'll go on about this for hours. I want to stretch my legs. Care to tour the ship?"

The assassin nodded. "My pleasure."

"That can be arranged." Jude took his hand in hers and turned to her friends. "We'll see you later, muchlater."

27

Tharkad, Donegal March

Federated Commonwealth