Assumption of risk

by Michael A. Stackpole

  Victor shook his head. "In that question you have underestimated me and totally misjudged Kai. He is not a political animal, but he could become one. He's changed a lot from when I first knew him. He has confidence in himself now. I gather, from things he has told me, that his time on Alyina had something to do with that. His performance on Solaris shows he's still testing, still pushing to see how good he can be."

  Curaitis folded his arms across his chest. "What happens when he discovers Solaris is too small a scale on which to measure himself? Will he turn political and come after you?"

  "Kai saved my life, twice. He did it on Twycross and again on Alyina." The blue flecks in Victor's gray eyes sparked with irritation. "How can I doubt the loyalty of a friend who saved my life?"

  "Just like Galen Cox?"

  "What is that supposed to mean?" Victor frowned. "Galen saved my life too, and has kept me from doing things that would have hurt the Federated Commonwealth. He's my closest friend."

  "But he's not here."

  "Right, because I sent him to escort my sister Katherine on her trip to Arc-Royal and then on to Solaris." Victor stared at Curaitis, searching the man's face for some clue to what he was thinking. "I trust Galen implicitly."

  The security man's face deadened. "Galen Cox is outside your sphere of influence."

  "But he's with my sister."

  "Her name was on the list."

  Victor stiffened as an icy claw closed around his heart

  The list! The investigation into the death of his mother had produced the assassin, but it had failed to uncover the identity of the person who had hired him. A list of people who had purchased tickets to the reception where Melissa had died turned up only four names of those who'd had tickets but had not attended the affair. Everyone else who was there had either bought tickets themselves or been given them by friends.

  Ryan Steiner topped the list of no-shows, and Victor knew he was the one behind his mother's murder. The current rebellion proved it. With Melissa out of the way, the glue that bound the Federated Suns with the Lyran Commonwealth was coming undone. The Lyran Commonwealth, having lost a quarter of its holdings to the Clans, had suffered far more than the Federated Suns portion of the alliance. Many Lyrans resented that fact, and even more were afraid the Clans would renew the war to finish the job. Ryan had used their doubts and fears to increase his power and to position himself to assume the throne of an independent Lyran Commonwealth.

  The second name on the list was that of the Precentor Martial of ComStar, Anastasius Focht. Victor found it hard to believe that Focht was involved in his mother's death, though ComStar's virtual monopoly on interstellar communications could well have accounted for the frustrating difficulty of backtracking from the assassin to his patron. Still, Melissa Steiner Davion had represented stability within the Inner Sphere, and ComStar seemed devoted to preserving both the stability and existence of the Inner Sphere in the face of the threat posed by the Clans.

  Katherine had been third on the list. Victor could never have suspected her. He recalled what Curaitis had reported Peter telling the group about the love Melissa had inspired in all her children. Katherine, who had taken to calling herself Katrina after their maternal grandmother, would have been utterly beyond suspicion except for one tiny inconsistency— she had not attended the reception despite being notorious for her love of parties and people and attention.

  "Do you think she had a hand in my mother's death?"

  "I weigh alternatives and choose the most likely among them." Curaitis shrugged his shoulders. "Your sister fell asleep that afternoon. An agent checked on her and decided, for whatever reason, not to awaken her. She has exhibited that sort of behavior before. Had you mother not died at the reception, your sister's absence would not have been noted."

  "But she could just as easily have been faking sleep."

  "The possibility weighs against her."

  Victor nodded. His own name was fourth on the list, and speculation about his role in the assassination had often been used to boost the ratings on dying talk shows throughout the Federated Commonwealth. The fact that he had been the person to discover his father dying of a heart attack on New Avalon was coupled with his mother's violent death to create a strong case of circumstantial evidence to prove the son had slain them both.

  "Katherine's name appearing on this list is insufficient reason for me to doubt Galen or his loyalty to me," Victor said. "I trust Galen and I want you to remember that."

  "I do. My people only report on your sister, not him." The tone of Curaitis' voice almost suggested he found a paradox in that situation. "As you wish it to be."

  "It is my prerogative to choose my own enemies."

  "And my duty to see that no enemy can destroy you."

  Victor glanced at his chronometer. "And you do a spectacular job of that."

  "So far."

  "Good point. Any chance a security alert can get me out of the meetings I have this afternoon? Surely these people who want prison reform must be dangerous. Furloughs, work-release, home arrest. That has to be a security problem, doesn't it?"

  "No, sir."

  Victor grumbled to himself. "Curaitis, when do Galen and Katherine arrive on Solaris?"

  "They are in-system now. They arrive a day after Duke Ryan makes planetfall."

  "Katherine will make a show of her arrival and eclipse Ryan, I have no doubt." Victor pulled on the formal jacket that went with his navy blue dress slacks. Half a dozen medals hung heavily on the left breast and a loop of gold braid encircled his left shoulder, dipping through his armpit, to be tied off at the epaulette. The Tenth Lyran guard crest rode on his right shoulder, with a tab above it that proclaimed him a member of the elite Revenant battalion.

  He picked up a simple platinum circlet and let it hang from his hand like a magician's ring. It occurred to him, at that moment, that the damned thing was a magician's ring because it conferred on the wearer great majesty and power. And responsibility, which men like Ryan Steiner never see until they've won their prize in a bloody war that tears apart a nation. "Ryan Steiner would be willing to kill me to get this crown. I wonder if he would be willing to die for it?"

  "He's putting himself in position to find out."

  "Indeed." Victor flipped the coronet around, making it slap the inside of his forearm and back to hit the other side. "Curaitis, about the man in the leprosarium on Poulsbo, how is he?"

  The security agent's voice remained emotionless. "He has healed from the leg fracture and has been rehabilitated. He is availing himself of computer simulation time. The system is isolated, so he is electronically quarantined as well. He has revealed no sources to us, and he appears to be as insulated from his patron as his patron is from us. He is arrogant and angry, but his simulations show he is quite good. He does not, however, like where he is being imprisoned."

  "Homesickness, do you think?"

  "Perhaps, Highness."

  "We can't have that, Curaitis." Victor settled the coronet on his brow. "Bring his system up to date on Solaris and keep it that way. I'll want him ready just in case there is something to this idea of work-release after all."

  12

  Grace of God Leprosarium, Poulsbo

  Periphery March, Federated Commonwealth

  8 February 3056

  The assassin realized that if he knew what day it was, he had a fighting chance of guessing on which world they had stashed him. The T-shaped cell where they were housing him had been whitewashed from floor to the ceiling five meters over his head. A pair of bright light bulbs burned incessantly overhead. Without windows he had no way of measuring the passage of the days, though even he acknowledged that some worlds within the Federated Commonwealth had so quick a rotation that tracking night and day would have been useless.

  The cell's three arms each had its own purpose. He reckoned everything from the cell's single door, arbitrarily declaring that it was in the north wall. Opposite it, all the way against the south wall, sat his
bed, sink, and toilet. He had no privacy screens and no way to shade his eyes from the eternal light. He knew there had to be dozens of listening devices and cameras secreted about the cell, so to frustrate his captors he made sure his daily routine was just that: routine and boring.

  The cell's west arm held the most excitement for him. In it stood his treadmill. He used the device religiously, taking a certain amount of pride in the fact that he could walk without even the trace of a limp. The surgeons who had repaired the damage to his broken right leg had left a neat tracery of scars on his shin and thigh, but he was grateful that their work had returned to him use of the limb.

  His computer sat beside the treadmill on a table. He noted with amusement that its manufacturer was the same as the one that had created the computer he'd used to kill Melissa Steiner-Davion. The difference was that this one lacked the modem which had made the crime possible. Instead it had been outfitted with a ten-disk CD ROM changer and a 150 gig Opdat drive that gave him access to more data than he'd ever found useful before. The oversize color monitor and detached keyboard made it possible for him to use the machine even while in the midst of his two-hour daily workout on the treadmill.

  He walked over to the boxy computer and flipped it on. The monitor brightened, then went blank before flashing up the logo of the Federated Commonwealth Intelligence Secretariat. As the computer went through its booting ritual of checking all its onboard memory and loading programs, the assassin also went through his own checklist of reality, looking for any clue to how he might change it.

  He knew that the Intelligence Secretariat knew that he was Melissa Steiner-Davion's killer. They had sufficient evidence in the form of fingerprints and hair and skin samples from the apartment he'd used on Tharkad to show he'd been present in the place where the bomb went off. They had the phone records to prove his computer had relayed the call from the spaceport to the cellular phone bombs he'd created to kill Melissa. If that were somehow insufficient, they also had transcripts of the various narco-interrogation sessions they'd conducted with him. While those might not stand up in any court, they left no doubt as to his guilt.

  He labored under no illusions about the government and their stance on capital punishment. Though it was allowed under law, and even prescribed for assassination and treason, in reality it was seldom employed. The courts had repeatedly commuted sentences to life plus a hundred years. Even so, no court would have commuted his sentence, but there were plenty of ways a person guilty of his crimes could be induced or forced to "commit suicide" while in custody.

  This all led him to the conclusion that the government wanted him alive. And that had to mean Victor Davion wanting him alive. Even while running from Tharkad to Solaris, the assassin had known Victor was taking a very personal and direct role in the investigation of his mother's death. Though many people mistakenly thought it was proof of Victor trying to cover his own tracks, the assassin put it down to a son's desire to see his beloved mother avenged.

  That desire for vengeance could be the only reason he was still alive. He did not think himself vain in placing himself at the top of the hierarchy of assassins in the Inner Sphere. Yes, the Draconis Combine did have their nekagami and the Capellans their Thugee cultists, but he operated alone, without government or institutional sanction. In killing Melissa Steiner-Davion he had done what no one else had been able to do. He had no equal in his vocation and he knew it.

  So does Victor Davion. The assassin's continued existence proved that, and the new disks he'd been given earlier confirmed it. The disks gave him information about Solaris—a world he already knew well—and, he chose to believe, even pointed out who he would be called upon to kill.

  The most up-to-date information on the disks had been dated the seventh of February. Most of the "news" consisted of blow-by-blow descriptions of the latest fights on the Game World, though the assassin paid little attention to it. If Victor Davion wanted any particular fighter dead, all he needed do was have the local criminal cartels do the job for him. Fixing fights and punishing fighters was their stock in trade and well below the level for which Victor would be saving him.

  Far more interesting was the information presented on the society page. The gossip columnist, an odious little man the assassin would have snuffed in exchange for a cup of coffee, previewed an upcoming party being hosted by Tormano Liao for his nephew Kai Allard-Liao. The guest list, which included a few local luminaries, boasted a truly interstellar cast of celebrities. In addition to the host and honoree, Katrina Steiner-Davion, Duke Ryan Steiner, and Omi Kurita would be in attendance. Katrina would be escorted by Galen Cox, a close friend of her brother, Victor.

  Any or all of them could have been the person the assassin would be asked to kill. He was tempted to eliminate both Cox and Allard-Liao from the list because they played relatively minor roles in the politics of the Inner Sphere, but he resisted the temptation. He'd found nothing to suggest any trouble between the St. Ives Compact and the Federated Commonwealth, but he knew that governments often started, fought, and resolved conflicts well out of view of the public. Still, Kai Allard-Liao had consistently and regularly dedicated victories to Victor Davion, hinting at a close and cordial relationship there. Besides, killing Kai would gain Victor nothing—as nearly as the assassin could make out.

  Galen Cox was an equally low-possibility target. If Galen were out of favor with Victor, the prince would never have assigned him the honor of escorting his sister on her current goodwill tour through the Commonwealth. If Galen had managed to dishonor himself while on that tour, he could have been recalled to Tharkad or summarily dismissed. Though it pleased the population to think of Katrina as their virgin princess, there were those who would love to learn of a romantic affair between her and the dashing hero who had saved her brother's life in the Clan War. The rumors of a falling-out between Victor and Galen, darkly hinted at in the society column, were yet one more reason not to have Galen killed.

  The assassin, while on the run and even while living the identity of a florist on Tharkad, had heard the rumors linking Victor Davion with Omi Kurita. He thought it odd that the same people who speculated at great length about Katrina's romantic adventures found Victor's possible involvement with Omi distasteful and shocking. Were not Victor and Omi as star-crossed as Romeo and Juliet, the most famous lovers in history? Yet Victor's detractors considered even a hint of the prince's involvement with Omi the equivalent of high treason.

  He doubted, therefore, that Omi would be his victim. Her death on a Commonwealth world would be a catastrophe of titanic proportions. Retaliation would be swift and certain, and likely would end the Steiner-Davion line. More important, though, Omi's death could serve no purpose for Victor. Even if the two were not lovers, her friendship with the prince made relations between the Commonwealth and the Combine more cordial, and that had a direct impact on how future wars against the Clans would be waged.

  The remaining three people on the list are very viable targets. The assassin allowed himself a laugh over the oxymoron "viable targets," then began to sort out the reasons why he would be used against them. The process did not take long, but yielded very satisfactory results.

  Tormano Liao seemed the least likely target. He did have political power and was quite capable of stirring up trouble between the Capellan Confederation and the Free Worlds League. Foolish action on his part could ignite a war between Federated Commonwealth forces and those two nations along their very long common border. But Victor would not want Tormano creating trouble for him while faced with the urgent necessity of building up to hold off the Clans on another border.

  Besides, assassinating Tormano could bring more trouble than it was worth. Tormano and his Free Capella movement, no matter how small, presented a threat to Sun-Tzu Liao and the Capellan Confederation. If Tormano was eliminated, it would take some of the pressure off Sun-Tzu, giving him a chance to commit mayhem. Though the reports were weeks old, the Zhanzeng de Guang strikes in the Sarna March we
re just the sort of thing of which Sun-Tzu would be capable. Again, any increase in terrorist activity against the Federated Commonwealth would require Victor to send in Federated Commonwealth troops, and he could only do that by stripping them away from the Clan border. Exactly the thing he didn't want to do.

  Victor's sister Katrina presented an interesting target. The assassin almost dismissed her outright, but something about how she looked in the pictures the computer displayed stopped him. She was pretty—bewitchingly so—yet she managed to look different in each one. Her chameleon-like ability to adapt her appearance to the various types of functions she was called upon to attend had helped endear her to the people. Adaptability was a survival trait without which leaders died, and she had it in abundance.

  Her eyes. The assassin studied them in each image and noted that they did not change. In a short interview with her displayed on one disk, he saw an intelligence in her eyes that her easy answers and easier laugh belied. The only time he noticed it changing came when she stood with Galen Cox, her arm linked in his. The look softened, but did not dull, suggesting that she was able to enjoy her emotions without ever truly letting them override her brain.

  Why would Victor want her dead? She had supported him in everything he had done since becoming the First Prince. She had run interference for him and helped repair his image with the popular media. She had done more to shore up his position than he had himself.

  All this speculation brought the assassin back to a key point in his case for his own survival: vengeance. He didn't know if Victor suspected his sister of hiring someone to kill their mother, nor did the assassin know whether, in fact, she was the person who'd ordered and paid for Melissa's death. It was entirely possible that she was his secret patron, but then why wouldn't she have wanted Victor killed or otherwise neutralized at the same time she got Melissa out of the way? If Katrina had ambitions—and that look in her eyes told him she did—she had more patience and foresight than any other politician in the Inner Sphere.