The Margravine graced the role of Guest of Honor, each citizen handed forward by the Mayor and her husband with an accompanied name and position uttered by the ceremonial aide-de-camp appointed from the Saints Battalion. Trippe looked the part and played it well, back straight, regalia pressed, voice clear without shouting. She greeted each with no trace of condescension; as if genuinely surprised by joy at the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet water reclamation department heads, gunnery sergeants, and cheese mongers.
Lillith’s smile broke like dawn as Barthes approached. “Colchis! How wonderful! I’d no idea that anyone else was here!” Anyone else being a euphemism for anyone else like us. Anyone else from Court. Which Barthes knew was bollocks on two counts. Firstly, Saint George was by now fairly crawling with unofficial advance teams of every description, most of them holed up in the same less-than-satisfactory hotel, but what could you do? Secondly, there was very little that Lillith Van Zandt did not know, if she cared to, and the composition of the advance team for the accession delegation would certainly be something that she would want to know.
“Dame Lillith! Imagine my joy!” He swept a hand to encompass the holographic plinths that lined the stairway and dotted the room beyond, forming convenient conversation points. “Your usual flair! It’s what brings you here, I suppose?”
The projections had an eerie physicality. Some of the nearer plinths sparkled with crystals; others looped images of working machinery dating back to DaVinci. Notably absent was any reference to asteroid mining.
“Oh, yes!” she gushed. “And all done with local technology! Isn’t it divine? The Mayor is quite enthusiastic about an exchange! She’s promised some exquisite examples of opal meerschaum folk art! ” Meaning a cultural exchange; specifically, a curatorial exchange with the Imperial Museum of Minerals and Mining, of which the Margravine of Batavia was a noted patroness.
“Really Colchis, we must chat when I’m done with the line. We need to get our people together to go through your archives!” Meaning the New Utah archives. Meaning to establish precedent for what was, and what was not, allowable portrayal of technology.
Which, thought Colchis, should have been done well before I ever entered this receiving line. My, my Lillith. What are you up to this time?
It was autumn crisp on the evening mountain. Clegg shivered. To Tanith skin, the brisk air was Siberian, and to Tanith eyes, the valley view was grey. Rather, Clegg’s body shivered. Clegg himself was not acutely aware of physical sensations. Like breathing, they existed somewhere in a vague background noise of physiology. Notions like discomfort had no easy purchase in his mind. As the light faded, and the torch lights that lined the processional Way winked on far below, Clegg’s attention was occupied by his eyes and ears, not his gooseflesh. While those organs did their jobs, his mind wandered, pondering the utterly asinine bullshit that meant he was outside wearing shadowflage, not inside wearing Delft.
The bullshit had a name, and its name was Major Johannes Trippe. Clegg had no time for Trippe, because Clegg had no time for pomposity, heroes, or heroics. Heroes were for the most part nave, bombastic rogues who failed to coordinate their actions and called attention to themselves. This made them difficult and dangerous to protect, if you worked for them, and dangerous to be around, if you worked with them. You accomplished the mission by focusing on it and training people to task, not by encouraging heroics. Heroics just got people killed. Take guard mount that evening. There’d stood Trippe, the pompous ass, blarting on about proud traditions and The Saints Battalion and The Mission on New Utah Making Men out of Maxroy’s Purchase Boys. Get on with it, thought Clegg. Quit filling their heads with tripe, or they’ll wind up wearing it just like that boy down below.
Which was why he was out here in the cold, listening. His contract guaranteed the personal security of Dame Van Zandt, her household, and her guests. Trippe-the-hero could bluster away all he liked about Clegg’s so-called mission post beginning at the mansion’s doors, but in practical terms, that’s where Clegg’s brief ended. If Clegg let an external threat pass through those, he hadn’t done his job. If Dame Van Zandt was threatened by her own staff; by her own guests, that was her problem. Clegg’s problem was that Trippe’s brats were uselessly manning fixed posts while visions of sugarplums danced in their heads. If some Mormon-tea-addled guest went after the Margravine Batavia with a cocktail toothpick, the household goons in Delft would handle it. Clegg was concerned with forces rather more sinister.
Clegg’s philosophy was simple. People who shot at you were your enemy. Things that tried to eat you were your enemy. Those that did neither were, for the moment, not your enemy, until they got pissed off or hungry. That pretty much summed up life on Tanith. The only way out of that vicious state of affairs was to buy your way out—which, for Harlan Clegg, was never going to happen unless he got paid out on this contract. He vaguely imagined an alternative reality where people just got on with their lives, whatever that meant. It was hard to picture, since he’d never seen it, but it lurked back there in some racial memory of a home and a farm and domesticated animals. Nothing drastic. Nothing idyllic. Long days of work and short nights of sleep just fine. Just a bit less kill-or-be-killed.
So he’d appreciate it, thank you very much, if half-assed heroes would quit complicating his business, act moderately professional, and leave his people the fuck alone. Like that Ollie Azhad character. His lads were good. Shitty business about his kids, but there you were. Trippe had this fucked-up notion that Azhad needed a reminder of who was running the show. Clegg wasn’t so sure. Maybe that cowboy shit worked out here—who knew where the fuck they were?—but on Tanith pissing off a guy with eyes in every neighborhood was not an attractive path to career success. Or that TC Zone Captain. No drama. Just kept those dicks-for-brains kids from fucking up in some wise spectacular, which is about as good as it got with amateurs.
Branches snapped. Clegg concentrated. On Tanith, things ate you if you couldn’t figure out how big and where they were. On the subject of Azhad, thought Clegg, it’s that fucking Sauron dinosaur. All brawn, no brains, like something crawled out of a fucking swamp. Clegg listened. Three people, one big—that would be the Sauron—two average, moving away, downhill towards the FLVR pool. Off to spike the fireworks. Clegg shrugged. That was Trippe’s call, for better or for worse. Not his problem if Trippe’s nasty little buddies played at heroes—at least not until these lunatics pissed off enough people that they figured out who to come after to get even.
All the same, it was a shitty business about those kids.
North Badlands, Borrego Springs (Swenson’s Valley), New Utah
Sargon struck. If the swarms of humans meeting on the mountain were nothing to do with these vermin in the sand hills, there was no reason not to. They had no interest to defend. They might even be allied. Sargon’s orders to Enheduanna were simple. “Return them where you found them. Have them muster if she speaks the truth. Kill them if she lies.” With that, Courter and Quinn’s incarceration abruptly ended, and they were swept back up the trail they’d descended by Porters, Runners, and Warriors moving at the double-time.