Dire Steps Read Free

Leeger started for the door. “I’ll do it myself.”
    H eavy clouds blotted the sun when Olech emerged from the building where the prisoner was being held. Unity Plaza was almost the size of a small city and still growing, but its central tower wasn’t far away, so he decided to walk. All around him, stone buildings rose out of manicured lawns, structures that housed the workings of humanity’s highest level of government. In spite of that lofty status, Olech had insisted on large expanses of green grass with walkways as the complex grew. Thousands of ­people lived and worked at Unity, and the Chairman of the Emergency Senate was now surrounded by men and women hustling from one place to another.
    Tensions among the alliance planets had reached even this place, and Olech knew that several of the faces in the crowd were Leeger’s security ­people working incognito. Olech had flatly rejected the assignment of a bodyguard detail while inside Unity, but Leeger had insisted on the hidden escorts. Drone messengers flitted across the gray sky, and the Chairman knew that some of them were surveillance robots assigned to protect him.
    Despite the threatening clouds, Olech wore a sunny smile as he walked. He was greeted by many of the different staffers as they passed, and returned most of the salutations by name. Mixed with the oppressive sense of a distant, lurking danger was a different sensation, one of expectancy and even relief that manifested itself in the humanity flowing around him. Olech Mortas had always considered himself a man of the ­people, and he still prided himself on his ability to take the pulse of a crowd.
    He suspected that this particular crowd was feeling relieved because his daughter Ayliss was due to depart the next day, after a six-­month residence. As an officer of the Veterans Auxiliary, Ayliss was being placed in charge of one of the newly-­formed veteran colonies in the war zone. She’d spent the previous weeks being trained in her new duties by Olech and Reena, which some had viewed as an unwelcome rapprochement between the absentee father and the resentful daughter. For years, a rumor had circulated that Chairman Mortas hired attractive young men and women in a subconscious effort to replace the two motherless children who had grown up disliking him. The presence of his daughter at Unity had damaged the psychological ecosystem for many of its personnel, and they were glad to see her go.
    The sun broke through the clouds for half an inhalation, momentarily casting the smiling faces in a bleached-­out light. For that instant, in Olech’s mind, they took on the pale, empty visages of dead men and women. Olech recognized some of the blank masks as ­people he’d sent to the war, all of them young, all of them killed. It was not the first time he’d hallucinated in this fashion, though the experience was relatively new.
    Olech maintained his pleasant façade when he reached the security wall around the enormous stone tower that was his home. Moving through the scanners on a side gate, he wondered just how the carefree staffers would feel if they could see what he sometimes saw in them. Or if they knew that Ayliss was not the only Mortas who was about to leave them.
    N abulit looked up when Leeger reentered the interrogation room. He didn’t speak, so Leeger placed an object on the table within his reach. It was a small dagger with a black handle inside a worn scabbard, and it made Nabulit look away.
    â€œWe found this hidden in your effects, along with the recordings of the Chairman’s son. Jander told me about the man who owned this dagger. Cranther, the Spartacan Scout who died saving his life on Roanum. Jan was carrying this knife, and a longer one, when he got to Glory Main. Decided to help yourself to a souvenir?”
    Nabulit looked down at the weapon, but made no move to touch it.
    Leeger took the dagger, and drew it from its