“But the showering facilities here are segregated, my dear.”
“Pity, true.”
“And if we do that, by the time we’re done…”
She smiled. “Yes, the train back to Santa Fe will be here. And we’ll have to think of something to do to occupy our time heading back home. This shouldn’t be a problem unless you don’t think you can hit a moving target.”
“Only one way to find out.” I covered her hand with mine and squeezed. “And if I can’t, I’ll just have to practice.”
“Indeed, Mason.” Her eyes flashed. “Good thing it’s a long ride.”
As rides go, it wasn’t long enough. Janella and I managed to find an unoccupied cabin in first class and locked it using certain override codes I knew. Laboring in obscurity as a Ghost Knight is not always fun, but it does occasionally have its perks.
Our arrival back in Santa Fe had been anticipated. Inside the station we docked our noteputers and got complete updates of news and our schedules. We could have done this at White Sands or even on the train, but having the information would have been a distraction and, as I have learned, when practicing to perfect skills, eliminating distraction is vital. Focus. It’s all about focus.
Luckily, our superiors did not want us to report for more briefings. I wasn’t certain if this was because they wanted to give us time off, or if they were just too busy sorting wheat from chaff so that we went unnoticed for the moment. Whichever, I was pleased since it looked as if Janella and I would be able to have a quiet dinner together.
She glanced over at me from her noteputer. “You remember that dinner?”
“My mouth is watering already.”
She gave me a quick smile, but it shrank pretty fast. “My parents came in from Zurich. The good news is that they want us both to join them. Kind of a preholiday dinner.”
The bad news was self-evident, and pretty much ran along the same lines: they wanted us to join them. Her father, Thomas, is a Knight and, while not a warrior, his simply requesting we join him and his wife for dinner would have been enough to get our schedules cleared. Andrea, her mother, was a world-class jurist and I liked the both of them. They were very nice people and clearly were proud of their daughter.
But, they were parents and clearly thought that she, a noble from Fletcher, could do better than some guy who inventoried pine needles for a living. To make matters worse, while her father was happy that I had a job and seemed to enjoy my work, her mother was pretty sure something else was going on. She had a prosecutor’s nose for deception and clearly knew I was hiding something. Janella did a wonderful job of deflecting her mother, but Andrea still came after me—much in the way her namesake ’Mech relentlessly drove in on targets.
The problem was that despite his being a Knight and their both being proud and honored Republic citizens, neither one of them was cleared to know who I was or what I did. Heck, not even all the Paladins knew the identities of the Ghost Knights. Each might know one or two, and a few a handful, but the secret of our identities were held more tightly than licenses to pilot ’Mechs.
“Command performance, lover?” I put on my best I-can’t-think-of-anything-I’d-rather-be-doing face. “This time I am going to pay for dinner, and I’ll order a good wine, too—a pre-Christmas present.”
She kissed me on the cheek. “That will be perfect, yes, my dear. But, don’t worry, I will make it up to you.”
I smiled. “As long as you’re with me as you were today on the training ground, there’s nothing that will daunt me.”
17
Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men.
Knights’ Hall, Santa Fe
North America, Terra
Prefecture X, Republic of the Sphere
10 December 3132
Dinner went as well as could be expected. Janella’s mother did make a couple of runs at me, but they were halfhearted. I actually welcomed them because her fire returned when she started on me, but quickly petered out. When she got going I recognized her, but otherwise Janella’s parents were strangers.
On Helen I’d been able to see the effect of the grid’s collapse on everyday folks. While it had an impact, folks didn’t spend a lot of time pondering the larger consequences of it. They looked at how it would affect their lives right then, right there, and didn’t waste the brain sweat on looking beyond because they had no way of calculating the consequences that far out.
Thomas and Andrea Lakewood did and had. For Thomas it meant interminable delays in important experimental data. He worked on projects where multiple labs were running parallel or complementary experiments, and lessons learned in one place would immediately be applied elsewhere. Any slowdown in that sort of information exchange wasted hundreds of man-hours and thousands of stones. The delays literally would cost lives as people waited for medicines and improved food crops.
Andrea seemed to feel the impact more keenly. Being a lawyer she liked order, and the grid’s collapse was a mortal blow to order. While she did not see an anarchist lurking in every shadow, she reacted sharply to Janella’s recital of her recent trip to Helen. My role there was left out, but it would not have mattered as Andrea burrowed in on Reis and GGF, balancing their roles, their actions and the subsequent changes in the power flows on Helen. As dangerous as GGF might have been, she saw Reis’ gathering power as more so, and clearly feared this would be happening over and over again throughout The Republic and beyond.
I don’t mean to suggest her parents were panicking, for they were not. They were just smart enough and had enough education to permit them to think several steps down the line. If people as intelligent as they were could see doom in the offing and, more importantly, didn’t see any immediate solutions, the future was not very bright at all.
Eventually conversation spiraled down into comments about the food and remembrances of meals we’d had elsewhere. It might just be my opinion, but beyond the obligatory questions about how your food tastes, or the near orgasmic moaning that accompanies dessert, dinner is not the place to discuss meals eaten elsewhere. That’s only one step above discussing the weather, and when you have nothing better to discuss than the weather, you just have nothing to discuss. There is no conversation, the meal is dead, and everyone should just go home.
We did rise above weather when, over coffee, Andrea declared she thought it was nice I could travel to Santa Fe while Janella was there. “When next she is given a mission, you’ll have to come see us. You still live in Zurich, don’t you, Mason?”
“I’m here for a while, Judge. Meetings, consulting.”
“On what?”
Janella smiled. “He’s had a meeting with Victor Steiner-Davion.”
“Oh, really, Mason? Helping him with his gardening, are you?” She phrased it sweetly, as if showing me the rose’s blossom would make me forget there were thorns lurking there.
“Yes, Judge, helping with his roses. Tough to grow here.” I got up, excusing myself and found the restaurant’s manager. I covered the bill, then snagged two roses from a woman who had a basketful. I returned to the table and gave one each to the ladies—red for Janella and white for her mother. I had nothing special in mind concerning the colors, but I let her mom chew on the possible meanings for a bit.
Thomas beetled his white brows. “Now, if they will just bring us the check.”
“I’ve taken care of it.” I held hands up to quell protests. “No, the last few times we’ve had dinner, you’ve paid. My turn is long overdue.”