Sir Arthur Keita had never married; he had no children, for he had invested his entire life in the service of his Emperor and the Terran Empire. Yet if he had no children of his own, he'd had hundreds-thousands-of sons and daughters. Sons and daughters who had worn the same green uniform he had. Who had served proudly, well. Too many of whom had died in the serving. His pride in them had been too deep, too powerful, to ever be shaped into mere words, and in all those years, he had never been prouder of any of them than he was of the daughter who faced him now, green eyes calm, head unbowed.
The daughter he had failed.
"Alicia," he said quietly.
"Uncle Arthur."
She stood regarding him calmly, her hands at her sides, and he inhaled deeply.
"Please, sit," he said, waving his right hand at the comfortable chairs around the coffee-table that floated on the sea of dark imperial green carpet.
She cocked her head. For a moment, he thought she was going to refuse. But then she shrugged ever so slightly, crossed to the indicated chair, and settled herself into it.
He seated himself in another one, facing her across the table, and for just a moment, he looked every year of his advanced age. He scrubbed his face with his palms, then lowered his hands.
"General Arbatov and I have just come from a meeting with Baron Yuroba and Minister of Justice Canaris," he said. "The subject of that meeting was Wadislaw Watts."
Her lips tightened ever so slightly, but no other expression crossed her face, and her green eyes looked back at him steadily.
He would almost have preferred some more visible sign of emotion, even if the emotion were rage or fury. But she'd shown very little emotion, of any sort, since the MacArthur Marines had pulled her off of Watts.
Keita knew, although he doubted the Marines had realized it, that she'd let them pull her off. And would she have let them if she'd guessed where this was all going? he wondered. But even as he did, he knew the answer.
Yet even as she let them subdue her, handcuff her, she hadn't said a word to explain what she'd done, or why. Brigadier Sampson hadn't had a clue what to do with her, but he'd known she'd assaulted a superior officer who was barely alive after the savage beating she'd delivered. The fact that the officer in question had produced a weapon he wasn't supposed to have in his office and put three rounds from it through his desktop suggested that her actions might at least have begun as self-defense. But even if they had, they'd obviously gone far, far beyond what would have been required to disarm him, and her refusal to speak had left the brigadier little choice but to slap her into one of MacArthur's brig cells.
And then Sampson had personally played back the recording from the hidden unit his investigators had found in the bottom drawer of Watts' desk.
At least he'd had the good sense to immediately com Keita, and Sir Arthur's face had twisted in furious anguish as he listened to the recording of Alicia's indictment. There'd been no question in his mind-or Sampson's-that every single word of it had been accurate, but neither had there been any corroborating evidence. The Rish matriarch who'd told Alicia was dead, Watts was unconscious-the surgeons had given him only a slightly better than even chance of ever regaining consciousness-and Alicia was in a cell.
Keita had gone down to talk to her, and it had been like talking to a statue. Whatever had carried her from the surface of Louvain into Wadislaw Watts' office had abandoned her in the aftermath. He'd never seen her like that, never seen her so closed-in, never seen her close out the rest of the universe. But he'd recognized what he was seeing. She was mourning her dead all over again, seeing them once more, seeing the courage which had carried them to certain death in the service of their Emperor while the traitor who'd pretended to be a friend sent them off to die … and smiled.
And then Keita had made the decision for which, he knew now, he would never forgive himself. At the time, it had seemed only logical, but if he'd guessed, if he'd even suspected -
He gave himself a mental shake and looked her squarely in the eye. It was the least he could do.
"They're not going to shoot him, Alley," he said flatly, and for the first time, those green eyes showed emotion. They went bleak and cold, and he flinched from the betrayal in their depths.
"It's my fault," he said bitterly. "If I hadn't put it all under a security blanket, hadn't kept it quiet, they couldn't do this. But I swear, Alley, I never thought this would happen. I just thought if we could keep it quiet long enough to get word back to Old Earth, to act on what you'd discovered before the Rish got wind of it, then maybe -"
He cut himself off. No. She deserved better than excuses from him, however true those excuses might be.
"What are they going to do?" she asked finally, and he looked away for a moment before he found the courage to face her once more.
"Baron Yuroba doesn't want anything to 'tarnish' Shallingsport-or what you accomplished at Louvain, for that matter. He doesn't want a huge court-martial, doesn't want any media-circus treason trials … doesn't want to admit a Marine officer could betray his oath this way. And Canaris wants to use Watts. She knows the Rish have no way of knowing what Shernsiya told you-that even if Rethmeryk knows exactly what her farthi chi said, her own honor would preclude her from ever telling the Sphere. So if we keep it quiet, we can use what he knows to roll up every Rish intelligence op he was involved with."
Alicia's face had grown tighter, her eyes bleaker, with every word, and he shook his head.
"General Arbatov and I both protested."
In fact, Keita had pushed his "protest" so furiously that Yoruba had finally threatened him with a court-martial.
"I think, maybe, they would have listened," he continued, "if Watts hadn't set up an insurance policy."
"What insurance policy?" Alicia's voice was frozen.
"He has evidence-proof, he claims-of the involvement of at least three Senators in Rishathan intelligence operations. Not members of their staffs, Alicia-the Senators themselves. He claims that with the information he can give us, we can turn the Senators-leave them in place, but use them to feed the Rish what we want them to know. And he's got other information stashed away, information we might never find on our own-information on Rishathan operations, the identities and aliases of probably half of the Freedom Alliance's leadership cadre, black-market arms dealers who have been supplying the FALA-and corrupt Marine and Fleet supply officers who have been surreptitiously dumping weapons to them. That's his insurance policy-twenty years of evidence of treason that he won't hand over unless he gets a deal."
"And that deal is?"
"They're going to amnesty him for Shallingsport." Keita closed his eyes at last, his face wrung with pain. "He's going to be kept on active duty-officially, and for a while, at least," he continued from behind his closed eyelids. "Not for long, and his actual authority will be nonexistent. In effect, he'll be a prisoner, under constant surveillance, taking the orders of Justice's Counter-Intelligence people, and if he fails to cooperate in any way, he forfeits his amnesty.
"Eventually, in a year or two, they're going to arrange something-a fake air car accident, an illness, something like that-to let them invalid him out. Then he'll 'retire' to a very carefully supervised life somewhere. They'll keep an eye on him-a close one-and he'll remain available as a 'resource' on Rishathan intelligence techniques."