My comment came out a little more vehemently than I might have liked, and the surprise on Victor’s face made this quite apparent. “It would seem, Mason, you have taken a specific dislike to Mr. Bannson.”
“Yes, my lord.” I raised my napkin to my lips and wiped my mouth. “The more I read, well, I can understand the motivations of the jackals out there—wolves in the current analogy. Take Katana Tormark, for example. She’s steeped in the Combine’s warrior tradition, and her sense of tradition is urging her to do what she’s doing.”
“To the best of your knowledge, Mason.” Nessa jabbed a hunk of romaine with her fork. “We don’t truly know what she is thinking or dreaming.”
“Sure, that’s true, and I might not be looking deeply enough in her case, but with Bannson, there’s no looking deep. He’s as shallow as a pie plate to my mind. Greed is driving him, pure and simple. He likes money, he wants more, and he also wants to punish The Republic for not praising what a great human being he is.”
Janella kept her voice soft. “I doubt making him a Knight would convert him to the cause.”
“No, it wouldn’t, not at all, because he’d want to be a Paladin, and then the Exarch. Bannson wants to be at the top of the food chain, not because that’s the top, but because he can then start nibbling away at the links below him.” I frowned. “Look, I can understand greed, but he’s so open about it. If greed is what’s motivating Tormark, or Aaron Sandoval or anyone else, fine, but at least they dress it up in tradition.”
Nessa smiled. “Bannson would say he’s a traditionalist, too. He’s not out for greed, but for prosperity. You even said, Mason, that plenty of folks see him as a champion for the little guy, and someone who wants them to succeed. Perhaps you’ve misread him.”
I shook my head. “Okay, score one for the Devil’s advocate, but we can be realistic about this, too. Bannson is only out for himself and while I think it’s great that those who run in his pack will get eaten up by him, I fear for all the little-guy sheep they’ll tear apart while on their rampage.”
Victor pushed his salad plate away from the edge of the table. “I don’t disagree with your fears, Mason, but I wonder what we can do about it. There are too few shepherds.”
“But we can make more shepherds. Looking over the reports, there are folks out there who really are pleading for peace and reason. We have to use our resources to help promote them and their ideas. If we protect the peacemakers, if we hold them up as examples, we will get others to think along those lines. If people equate peace with stability, we kill two birds with one stone.”
“A laudable plan, but the wolves will still prey upon them.”
“Yes, my lord, which means we need to add one more creature to the menagerie of wolves and sheep: the wolfhound. While the shepherd may be stuck waiting and watching for whoever took the grid down, we have to stop the wolves somehow.”
The old man’s eyes narrowed. “Assassination?”
“Tyrannicide? That would be one way.” I glanced at Nessa. “It comes back to where we started here: making sure that pain gets properly factored into any risk/gain analysis. Wolfhounds would have to start working on the weakest individuals in the wolf packs. Subordinates whose activities cross the line would have to be punished swiftly. The wolves will have to see that they’re not going to win in a walk. Not only will it make them think twice, but in culling their packs of the weak and defective, it will make them more efficient and tougher.”
Janella frowned. “And that would be good exactly how?”
“When whoever took the grid down makes their next move, the wolves will have the strength to resist.”
Nessa pursed her lips. “And if that blow never falls?”
“Then really healthy and efficient wolf packs will tear each other apart.”
“An interesting theory, Mason.” Victor gave me a smile. “But, if there are too few shepherds, I fear wolfhounds are in even shorter supply.”
Victor’s majordomo entered the dining room and whispered in his lord’s ear. Victor nodded, considered for a moment, then looked around the table. “Thank you, Peb-worth. I think we are ready for dessert and brandy.”
“Yes, my lord.”
The old man looked at me and I saw a gleam in his eyes. “He gave me a message. It’s for you, Mason. It came from Basalt.”
I blinked. “Basalt? I don’t know anyone there.”
“No, I suppose you don’t.” His smile grew sly. “It seems Sam Donelly does, however. It appears your Mr. Handy wants to offer you a job.”
19
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge.
Knights’ Hall
North America, Terra
Prefecture X, Republic of the Sphere
8 January 3133
The message was necessarily vague, but rather expressive.
Sam,
Sorry to hear about your in-law trouble with Helen. I thought things would turn out differently there, but nightfall changed plans. I am pleased you are without entanglements. I am interested in resuming our partnership, with a significantly higher level of participation for you. Contact me as soon as possible. I have made good your loss and advanced passage.
Handy
Basalt 12 December 3132
Janella looked up from reading the text. “You already know he’s untrustworthy. It has to be a trap.”
“Oh, without a doubt, if he can sell me out as he did on Helen, he will. Then again, this message did come with a deposit of the five thousand stones he owed me and enough for passage from Epsilon Indi to Basalt. He must have sent it by courier to any number of worlds, and on Epsilon Indi our folks picked it up and routed it here by Black Box.”
Janella nodded. “That does not make it any less a trap.”
“True, but at least he has no suspicions about who I am. He thinks I’m really on Indi.”
Black Box communications technology was old stuff, and much less efficient than the HPGs. They couldn’t transmit much more than the message I’d gotten, but they had proved useful for Hanse Davion in circumventing a ComStar Interdiction last century. The Republic used the technology as a backup for Ghost Knight communications—slower being better than nothing—and the people maintaining Sam’s cover on Epsilon Indi used it to get the message to where it belonged.
I furrowed my brows. “What’s important here is this: we left Helen on the twenty-third of November. We can assume he left roughly the same time. He sent that message from Basalt only twenty-one days after leaving Helen. Three weeks of transit works, if he’s moving fast or lucky in catching rides. The money he’s sent for me to get there from Indi will get me there fast, so someone backing him has deep pockets.”
She gave me a knowing look. “More people than Jacob Bannson have deep pockets, Mason.”
“True. We’re also looking at an organization here. It’s a safe bet that news of a small-time felon from Acamar being released from Republic custody on Epsilon Indi was not a hot-flash news item on Basalt. Handy had someone seeking information on me. I’d go so far as to suggest that he was looking for data on a variety of people he could use on Basalt, and I was just one of them. If he’s hiring talent that is ’Mech-capable, fairly serious stuff is going down.”
“I’m still not seeing Bannson’s hand in this, nor the hand of anyone else, for that matter.”
“Okay, here’s the trick: Handy’s message suggests that your arrival—his ‘nightfall’—prompted the change of plans. If he were going to fade because you’d arrived, he’d have done so when you arrived. He waited a week. I think he sent a message to his off-world boss asking for advice and it took that long to get the message back.”