Jonah stifled a weary smile. Hearing Gareth inadvertently call him by name had lifted the weight from the exarch’s shoulders for a brief instant. That kind of camaraderie was now missing from his life. But he clamped down on it quickly and smothered it under the blanket of duty.

He needed Gareth focused, not familiar.

“We all wish a lot of things,” he said. “Doesn’t mean we get to make the choice we like. Heather put together a solid operation. You need to hold up your end, and you need to do it without flinching.”

“You’re asking me to sandbag a friend. One of our own.”

An unavoidable evil, at this late hour, but not one to hang around the neck of his most inexperienced paladin. So Jonah slipped a bit more responsibility onto his own plate instead.

“I’m not asking,” he said.

Sir Conner Rhys-Monroe leaned over the partition and into the cab of his father’s Excelsior stretched hovercraft. He stared through tinted glass at the mob scene ahead. Since the December riots, all Knights of the Sphere on Terra had seen more than their share of civilian protests. This looked to be a large one. Conner counted hundreds of protestors at a glance. Maybe a thousand all told.

He tapped the limo driver on the shoulder.

“Ease back, Charles. Buy us some time.”

Conner ducked back into the rear. The hover-limo’s spacious passenger compartment was large enough for six men, with deep leather seats and plenty of leg room, but at the moment he shared it only with the senator. Gerald Monroe dug into a minibar freezer for a scoop of shaved ice, adding it to his morning drink of herbal supplements and fresh fruit. The scent of bananas and citrus was strong, nearly enough to overpower the senator’s aftershave, and Conner never tired of needling his father how that violated the Ares Conventions, articles one and six, governing the use of chemical warfare agents.

The joke wasn’t funny today.

“I’d feel better if you’d take the underground entrance,” the knight said, sitting with his back to the driver, facing his father.

“In seventeen years, Conner, I’ve never been ashamed of the public’s eye.”

“You damn well should be.”

It slipped out before he could guard his tongue. That was the wrong way to convince his father of anything. He knew it. Senator Gerald Monroe was also Viscount Markab—which made Conner a lord by official title—and he set great store in the family’s honor. Always had.

This scandal was hard enough on his father without Conner breaking faith with the family. But…

“Influencing military officials at the highest levels? Coercion?” Conner swallowed back the tight knot in his throat. “Conspiracy, Father?”

Monroe nodded, winced, clearly at odds with his own behavior. “The decisions I made, I made in good faith. You know that, Conner.” He stiffened his back. “I won’t hide my head now.”

“I’m more worried about your ass, Father.” Conner looked over his shoulder. Even through the Excelsior’s soundproofing he heard the chants of angry protests. At least a thousand. “They sound upset.”

“And rightly so. They believe their government failed them. Where else do people go when they can’t trust normal channels to address their grievances?”

Not after his father, preferably. But Conner did not argue with the senator. The headstrong man might be right, might be wrong, but either way he was emphatically so. Nothing ever dissuaded him once he set his course, which was about the only way a round-eyed liberal—even if a viscount—got himself elected from the otherwise conservative, Asian-centric population of Markab.

Of course, marrying a local businesswoman with samurai blood in her family hadn’t hurt, either.

Certainly, it made for an interesting family mix. Conner had inherited darkish skin and slight folds at the corners of his eyes from Asai Rhys, but he shared more looks in common with his father. Good height and build, piercing, peridot eyes, the same light brown hair. At seventy, Gerald Monroe was finally going gray on the sides and wore his hair conservatively combed. Conner, half his father’s age, preferred a tight Mohawk that heralded his flair for the dramatic. No one had told him that being a Knight of the Sphere meant being dull.

Then again, today’s excitement he hadn’t bargained for.

The protestors had real people power behind them, massing out in front of Geneva’s senate building, sweeping in a living ocean of angry faces right up to the marble steps where a squad of large men in green fatigues waited, then around them and up to the gray, stately columns on the building’s portico. Some protestors waved placards. Most waved their fists, pumping them to chants of “Stone the Senate” and “One nation, one law,” among others.

There were a few pro-Senate islands weathering those turbulent seas, but they looked weary and besieged after a morning of being shouted down, shoved back, and generally failing in the face of the exarch’s popular support. Of course, such an immediate groundswell of grassroots strength did not just happen, and did not come cheaply.

Conner smelled the work of paladins in this.

“Bump the curb, Charles. Put us right up against the main steps.”

Gerald Monroe smiled tightly at his son’s concern. “That’s illegal,” he reminded the knight.

Like the senator had any room to talk. “I’ll take the hit.”

The crowd saw the Excelsior, of course, and swarmed to either side of the executive hovercraft, squinting through tinted ferroglass to see who had the nerve to arrive out front. One of the small pro-Senate packs, cheering and waving signs that readNOBLE VICTORY! andEXARCH, NOT MONARCH! anchored itself to the left fender of the Excelsior as the lower skirting touched the curb.

Charles goosed the lift fans, slipping the hovercraft over the curb and up onto the Mall walk. Pro-Senate supporters helped clear a path to the steps, where the men in fatigues separated them from the worst of the mob and then formed a tight cordon around the car’s rear door.

“Friends of yours?” Senator Monroe asked.

Conner nodded. Gauged the crowd’s reaction to the unarmored infantrymen. Still a great deal of anger out there.

“I should have ordered them out in battlesuits,” he muttered. Maybe call out some Pegasus scouts while he was at it, and slip into the cockpit of his Rifleman. “Stay put Charles,” he ordered the driver. “This one’s on me.”

The Excelsior’s gull-wing door cracked open, and Conner was first onto the Mall walk. His arrival set back several of the protestors, who obviously had not expected a man in knight’s uniform. He wore the formal steel gray, with scarlet piping and the gold shield on each arm and a cape of rank falling down to the back of his knees, in scarlet and gold as well.

Using the moment of confusion (and intimidation) to his advantage, Conner helped his father from the back of the hovercraft and escorted him quickly up the marble steps and past the high, thick columns that flanked the Senate entry. He half-expected a violent charge, a call for rope and a search for the nearest tall tree, unarmored infantrymen notwithstanding, but the mob was mad, not murderous. They let the two men through without any trouble.

Conner breathed easier. Until Paladin Gareth Sinclair met them at the door to Gerald Monroe’s office.

“Senator Monroe,” the paladin said by way of greeting. He lounged against the wall, making himself comfortable. There was little respect in the title. “Enjoy your morning commute?”

“You set that up,” Conner accused the other man. At Gareth’s glare, he added, “Sir.”

It was hard thinking of Gareth as a paladin and therefore his superior. His advancement was too recent, coming on the eve of the election of the new exarch. They had served together for so long, first as knights-errant and then as knights. Both were from noble families. They had more in common than they had differences. Or so Conner had thought.