A Silence in the Heavens Read Free Page A

end a double-edged sword.
    “ ‘Just one Paladin?” ’ she said, quoting the age-old joke.
    “ ‘Just one planet,” ’ Griffin said, finishing it.
    She relaxed a little; the Colonel apparently shared her decidedly mixed feelings on the subject of unanticipated aid from that quarter.
    “I don’t suppose the Exarch and the Senate have bothered to let us know exactly what problems this Paladin is supposed to be helping us out with,” she said.
    If the problem that had caused Exarch Damien Redburn to send a Paladin to Northwind turned out to be only Katana Tormark’s unanticipated defection to the Dragon’s Fury, Tara decided that she was going to be more than a little angry. Redburn might as well have pinned a sign on the new Prefect’s back sayingKICK
    ME —I’M INEXPERIENCED! Any help a Paladin might give to Northwind in the immediate future would be paid for with years of diminished credibility for Prefect Tara Campbell afterward.
    “Nothing official has come in so far,” Colonel Griffin said. “I expect that the Paladin is carrying his instructions with him, and plans to brief us all upon his arrival.”
    “I’ll just bet he does,” Tara said.
    She caught a strand of her hair between her fingers and twisted it thoughtfully. She’d picked up the habit as a child, when her wavy auburn locks had made her a poster photographers’ darling, and the nervous gesture had survived into her angry adolescence, when she had cropped her hair rebelliously short and dyed it platinum blond. Now, in her adulthood, she still had short, spiky blond hair—and in periods of stress, she still played with it while she thought. “You said that nothing official has come in.”

    “That’s right.”
    “Unofficially . . . what do our own intelligence people think is going on?”
    “Based on rumors that we’ve heard about trouble brewing on Towne,” Griffin said, “and taking into account our own recent clashes with supporters of the Dragon’s Fury on Addicks, our people think the Exarch is worried that somebody is going to make a try for Terra by going through Northwind.”
    “Considering that those of us who actually live here have been worried about the same thing ever since this business started,” Tara said, “that’s no surprise.”
    She drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to send out her irritation and paranoia along with it.
    Damn the fanatics, whoever they were, who had wrecked the HPG network and crippled The Republic of the Sphere; damn Katana Tormark for abandoning The Republic in favor of allegiance to a faction that Devlin Stone’s years of labor were supposed to have made obsolete; and while she was at it, damn the Senate and Damien Redburn for saddling her with this ambiguous gift.
    After a moment, the anger faded, and she went on. “All right. We’ll assume—for public consumption, at least—that the Senate and the Exarch have recognized Northwind’s special position as part of Terra’s first line of defense, and that the presence of this Paladin signifies a recognition on Terra’s part of Northwind’s importance.”
    Colonel Griffin looked curious. “Do you really believe all that?”
    “Not particularly,” she said. “Which is why I want our people to keep working on it. If they’ve got any ideas about which factions constitute potential threats—other than ‘every single one of them, because they’ve all gone crazy’—I want to have the reports waiting on my desk by the time the Paladin makes landfall.”
    “That shouldn’t be a problem,” Colonel Griffin said.
    “Good.” She pulled on her hair again, thinking hard. “Another thing. First impressions are important. The governor is undoubtedly going to have an official meet-and-greet for our illustrious visitor; but the Northwind Highlanders need to have their own official reception for him as well, just to make sure everybody understands that—Paladin or no Paladin—the Regiment is the host on this planet,