It did.

Turtle gave the Guardship time to become preoccupied with the surprises he had bestowed upon P. Benetonica. Then he rattled the Web with a coded torrent.

His Godspeaker masters approved what he was trying to do.

Good. Their minds had to be adjusted to a specific set, too.

— 127 —

WarAvocat had not mistaken Jo for Haget. He had promoted her. Hardly had she been cleared by Medical than she was chin deep in planning a chastisement operation against House Tregesser. Her assignment was WarAvocat's idea of a reward.

She was to lead the regimental combat team assigned to capture Tregesser Horata and the villains.

He made no mistake calling her Colonel. His mistake was failing to wonder what mischief Kez Maefele had been up to during his stay on Tregesser Prime.

VII Gemina broke off the Web and swooped in the grand Guardship style, attacking without warning, without explanation to a system that went into a whining panic, wanting to know what they had done. They always did.

The change came when Jo's assault craft reached four thousand meters altitude, while riderships filled with invaders began forcing dockage all around station 3B.

Some unsuspected, undetected, automated system wakened.

A shaped blast gutted every docked rider. Soldiers already disembarked hurtled out of the ring, carried by the winds of decompression.

VII Gemina fighter patrols came under fire from a thousand small killer satellites.

Jo's assault craft encountered a barrage so accurate and intense forty percent did not reach the ground intact.

The survivors arrived scattered, disorganized, and without communications because a heavy jam blanket had spread over the whole region. Automatic strongpoints, indistinguishable from workaday structures, responded to the presence of unknown weapons. They were proof against all but the regiment's heaviest weapons.

It got worse when the city's shields went up. And worse still when Tregesser security forces counterattacked.

They were no untrained, disorganized rabble.

Jo survived the landing. She wondered if she would be as lucky with the inquiry certain to follow the fighting. This would not be an auspicious entry in her record.

WarAvocat had gone a sickly gray. He stood nose to nose with the worst moment of his life. WarCentral's wall display screamed debacle. Casualties already between forty-five hundred and six thousand. Those for the landing team were uncertain. VII Gemina had no contact with the ground.

Every station in the system had raised Guardship quality screens. The 3A, an antique supposedly out of service, was spewing seeker mines that made fighter deployments suicidal.

Down below every significant population center had vanished behind a pearlescent screen.

WarAvocat had not encountered that before. He did not like it. He had the firepower to scorch Tregesser Prime several times over. If he tried, when he ran out of ammunition, those cities would be sitting there still. The atmosphere itself protected them from his most powerful arguments.

Aleas came. "Message just arrived via system traffic band. You'd better listen."

He accessed Communications. The shimmer behind his shoulder said, "Invader, your hostile behavior has triggered an automated doomsday defense which cannot be deactivated by anyone in this system. It will remain active till it is destroyed, you are destroyed, or its control is satisfied that you have withdrawn."

WarAvocat cursed. He accessed Gemina and discovered that he could not communicate with House authorities because of the jam blanket. He learned that those authorities had tried to warn VII Gemina before system defenses went active.

"Damn! We just shot ourself in the foot. I can hear the Ku laughing."

"You think he's responsible?"

"Yes. If we'd come in and said ‘Please' and had taken Traffic direction, we wouldn't have run into anything. Only he would design a system triggered by our bad manners."

He asked Gemina for tactical suggestions. The choices were not exciting. He did not want to destroy Tregesser Prime. He wanted to punish House Tregesser's scheming masters. If he limited himself to that, he had to invade Tregesser Horata and the Tregesser Pylon. Which meant accepting heavy losses.

"We could pronounce a Ban," Aleas suggested.

"And have all Canon mock us." Aching inside, he issued orders. It would be the hard way.

What else had the Ku left him?

Jo gained control gradually. She used messengers till she discovered that the public comm service remained undisturbed by the jam blanket. After six hours she had communications with all her battalion and company commanders. She told them to avoid fighting, to find ways around the strongpoints and under the screens.

Air support arrived. Reinforcements came. Armor and heavy artillery materialized. It still took another two days. And not once did she take one prisoner who had the slightest idea why a Guardship would attack Tregesser Prime. They thought VII Gemina had gone rogue.

The House security forces were embarrassingly good. They made the soldiers buy every meter with blood. Their only failing was inadequate numbers.

WarAvocat greeted Colonel Klass wearily. "Plant yourself. Relax." Pause. "This has been the most embarrassing incident of my life. Eighteen thousand casualties. Massive equipment losses. Their casualties were lighter than ours. And we did not catch one criminal."

"They had positional advantages." Klass sighed. "I'm confused. I was sure I killed Provik, Shike, and Provik's girlfriend on V. Rothica 4. Though AnyKaat didn't find their bodies when she got their stuff. You dealt with them here, later. Seeker says none of them went offworld while he was here."

"It is puzzling. It has been from the day we ran into a krekelen shapechanger centuries after the last one died. Aleas wonders if someone isn't framing House Tregesser."

"I don't believe that."

"Neither does she. She entered it as a hypothesis because it doesn't contradict the known facts. She's useful that way."

Klass nodded. He supposed she was too tired to care. "Colonel, we lack the critical witness. Lupo Provik. Everyone else seems to be dead."

"I really thought we'd get it from Cable Shike. But I and I only got the inside story on some nasty family politics. And the Ku. He admitted that. But the case is thin. He didn't know the Ku had been aboard a Guardship or to Starbase till you bombed them with the news. The Ku was a major public figure at the time—I confirmed that with a minute's research—and they couldn't believe you'd missed, but since you did and you'd increased his value a million times, they weren't going to help you overcome your ignorance."

WarAvocat muttered to himself.

"Shike says the Ku and artifact convinced them they'd never been anywhere near Starbase, that you weren't interested in him at all, you were after her."

None of it held together. But Shike could not have lied. What they got from him was the truth he knew. But... His comm buzzed. "What?"

Aleas appeared. "Is Colonel Klass there?"

"Yes."

"The alien Seeker has gotten something off the Web. I can't make sense of what he's trying to tell me. He's excited. Upset-excited."

"Bring him." He broke the connection. "Your Meddinian friend is in a lather." He paused to think. She said nothing. "It all comes back to the Ku. Always. Each time we trace him, his reported behavior makes him look apolitical or even sympathetic. He saved you.... But nothing happened to you in the universe where the Tregessers live. I'm confused, too, Colonel. You sure as hell got stuck on Merod Schene somehow."