When they arrived at Sirialis, Taylor called him in. “We need the ansible access code.”
Harlis handed it over. Taylor handed it on to one of his communications techs. “Strip the records and check our control,” he said.
“Sir.” The man turned away and fiddled with controls Harlis couldn’t see. “Someone did think we might come here. It’s a voice message from Brun Meager—warning the population Harlis might show up, and then that she couldn’t get Fleet to respond.”
“A trap?”
“Could be,” Taylor said. “We won’t stay that long. We can resupply anyway—it’s an ag world. With money on it, all concentrated in one place, right, Harlis?”
It still stung that Taylor had quit calling him Ser Thornbuckle, or even Thornbuckle. “Yes,” he said slowly. “The main banking outlet’s in the home village.”
“Just how fancy is that house?” Taylor asked. “Got a lot of things in it? Jewelry those women left behind?”
“I doubt it,” Harlis said. “They take it with them, or put it in the bank.”
“We might just take a look,” the man said. “Admiral Lepescu said this was a showplace. Gardens, lawns, stables—you ride, don’t you, Harlis?”
“I can, yes. I’m not that fond of it.”
“Not that fond of it.” Lately they’d taken to mocking him, repeating his phrases.
“Captain, I can’t get past the lockout. His password got us into the incoming queue, but there’s a traplink on the outgoing, and I can’t budge it.”
“That might make it difficult to get your funds, mightn’t it, Harlis?”
“Maybe it wants an ID check—sometimes it does—and I have to go to the terminal.”
“Well, then, I think we’ll take a shuttle down and see for ourselves . . .”
Harlis felt naked without even a p-suit when the others in the shuttle wore PPUs and armor. Six of them were neuro-enhanced marines, huge and bulky in their battle armor. At their order, he called down to the shuttle field. Someone answered—he didn’t know the name—and turned on the field’s electronic guidance system. He couldn’t see it himself; this shuttle had no windows. He felt the BUMP-bump-bump of the shuttle’s landing and roll in, then the hatch opened and the scent of Sirialis rushed in, the smell taking him back to a childhood that now seemed very far away.
In the midst of them, feeling small and vulnerable, Harlis walked across the field wondering why no one had come to meet them. The men looked this way and that, assessing, cataloguing.
“Piece of cake,” someone said.
“Find us transport,” said Taylor. But the hangars and shelters were empty. In the office, the only sign of occupation was the main control board, powered up and humming faintly. Taylor grinned. “They’re playing hard to get, are they? Want a hunt?” The other men grinned too, and nodded.
“We’ll see. Looks like we’ll have to walk—where’s this bank, Harlis?”
The village street, in early summer, looked like a travel poster: the neat stone buildings, the planters full of flowers, more flowers on the vines that clambered here and there. A marmalade cat raised its head from a doorstep, then slid down and into a flowerbed between cottages.
“Where is everybody?” Taylor asked. “Did they just run off in the fields?” One of the NEMs kicked open the door to the bank. “Some security,” Taylor sneered.
They herded Harlis inside. No one was there, but the autobank was on, just as the shuttle field power had been on. Harlis entered his access codes, and his credit cube, and waited for the light to come on. The autobank transferred the contents of his accounts to the cube. He strained to remember Bunny’s code—the bank would lock out for two hours if he made a mistake—but his first try worked. Bunny’s account balance, however, was zero.
“Get your offworld accounts,” Taylor said. Harlis entered the complete access codes for financial ansible transfers, and waited.
ANSIBLE ACCESS DENIED. ENTER CORRECT CODE.
“They changed the codes,” Taylor said. “They changed the codes.” With the word he backhanded Harlis across the face. “And all you had here was a lousy two hundred thousand—” He jerked his head at the others. “Let’s go.”
“I can get more,” Harlis said. “I know I can, if—”
“Shut him up,” Taylor said. One of the NEMs flipped his weapon over and tapped Harlis on the shoulder. It looked like a tap, but it felt like his shoulder was broken.
“Stuff at the house, Captain?” asked one of the men.
“Knickknacks,” Taylor said. “Probably all that’s left—the civs have run out, like the rabbits they are; they’d have taken the good stuff that was easy to move. Unless you want sheets and pillowcases and things they wouldn’t bother with—”
The man laughed. “Not me, sir.”
Harlis looked up the street, where the top stories of the house rose above the trees that edged the gardens.
“Want a last look, Harlis?” asked Taylor. “Think there’s something worthwhile they won’t have taken away, or locked up so you can’t get at it?”
“Pictures,” Harlis said hoarsely. “Books, tableware, furniture, weapons . . .”
“Weapons?”
“Hunting weapons, and old ones, antiques.”
“Worthless trash,” Taylor said. “I’m not getting blisters going up there for souvenirs.”
He led the way back to the shuttle; Harlis looked around, hoping against hope that someone would come to rescue him. There were only twenty mutineers in the landing party; he knew the militia could muster more than that. Couldn’t they see he was a prisoner?
No one came, and the NEMs shoved him back aboard the shuttle for its return journey.
When they got back aboard, Taylor had two men bring Harlis to the bridge. “I think this smug little world needs a lesson,” he said. “As does Harlis here. We’re going to break a few windows, knock down a few chimneys.” He looked at Harlis. “We’ll start with your house, Ser Thornbuckle.” He turned to his weapons officer. “You have the coordinates—drop one down the middle.”
Harlis felt his mouth drying. “No—don’t do that. Why destroy it?”
“Because I want to,” Taylor said. “Because I can.”
“But—they didn’t do anything to you . . .”
“They didn’t,” Taylor said. “You did. You lied to me. And it annoyed me, and when I’m annoyed I sometimes take it out on things.”
“But—but it’s mine,” Harlis said. “It’s mine, it always should have been, and besides, it’s beautiful.”
“Not anymore,” Taylor said. He grinned. “Show us, Leon,” he said. Up on the screen, the great house appeared, serene and lovely in its encircling gardens and lawns, glowing in the early summer morning light, as beautiful as Harlis had ever seen. He could almost smell the roses. Then the missile struck; the house bulged, as if swelling with outrage, and was hidden in a boiling cloud of explosive debris. “Good shot,” Taylor said. “So much for that one.”
The expanding cloud from the first explosion obscured the view of the stable, but not the second billow, the thicker, more boiling cloud. Harlis felt sick; his stomach churned. He had never liked horses that much, but he had never wished them harm, either, and he could imagine the terrified animals that weren’t killed at once, the shattered legs, the blood . . .
“We got what we came for,” Taylor said. “Now that we have the money.”
“Lob a few more at ’em?” asked another man.
“No. We may need our weapons for something else. But it makes a statement. Nobody’s going to think we’re playing a game.” His voice changed, turning soft and sweet and rotten. “Ser Thornbuckle seems unwell, Smithers. Take him to his cabin.”
Harlis lay staring at the overhead, unable to sleep, his mind running the sequence over and over and over. The house—his house—gone, utterly gone. Destroyed. The grand staircase, the ballroom, the fencing salon, the billiard room, the library, the morning room, the sunroom, his own suite with his personal treasures . . . gone, in a moment of time, a puff of smoke and surge of flame. Horror and grief and fear circled around the memory of what he’d seen, dread furies that screamed his name. Bunny would kill him for this—Bunny was dead—so many were dead—so much destruction—how could he? How had he? And what could he do? His body shivered, long shuddering quakes, as he remembered the hard hands that had hurt him, the cold eyes that had examined him and found him soft, contemptible, the feral smiles that had delighted in his pain, in his fear, in his horror at their capacity to destroy.