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chunk of the problem on Ardennes. If things had stayed at the urban guerilla level, we had options.
    “But,” she said grimly, “someone just blew up a town. Fifty thousand people , Damien.”
    He’d been trying not to think about it.
    “What use is His Protectorate if we do not protect people?” he whispered, and she nodded.
    “Regardless of what Mage-Governor Michael Vaughn may or may not have done to provoke it, we cannot - we will not - permit that to stand unchallenged and unavenged.”
    A shiver ran through the ship as the engines engaged. The runes on the floor flared slightly to Damien’s eyes, their magic counter-acting the acceleration to provide a consistent gravity.
    Silently, he opened his own PC and pulled up the data on Karlsberg. A mining town with a population of fifty thousand, one hundred and sixty-two as per the last census. What little information he had hardly suggested a stronghold of the planetary government or a strategic target.
    “I don’t trust Vaughn,” he said quietly, looking at an image of a rundown town with some kind of military barracks on the outskirts.
    “You shouldn’t,” the Hand replied. “Everything I’ve seen suggests he’s slime, the worst kind of Governor we have. If it wasn’t for the Karlsberg attack, I’d happily roll in and remove him. That has to wait, now, until we deal with whatever bastard killed a town.”
    “Fifteen destroyers,” Damien murmured, reviewing the stats on the Ardennes’ Self Defense Force. “Looks like they’re mostly in orbit.”
    Alaura stopped glaring at her desk and looked at him. “What are you getting at, Damien?”
    “The ASDF should have spotted anyone getting into position to drop an improvised kinetic,” he said quietly. “And if I was going to risk that, I’d have gone for a more important target than a back-country mining town.
    “If I shouldn’t trust Vaughn on anything else, why are we trusting him when he says his enemies blew up a town?”

    #

Chapter 6

    Julia Amiri studied the device sitting on her tiny writing desk with a sigh. Technically, there was nothing illegal about a civilian on Ardennes owning even the frequency hopping high-powered communicator, though the military-grade encryption programming was certainly questionable.
    In practice, if the Ardennes Special Security Service learned that one of the many immigrants sharing apartments in Nouveau Versailles south-eastern quarter possessed the communicator, she’d be lucky if she lived long enough to be disappeared. They would assume, correctly, that the ex-bounty hunter was an offworld spy.
    So the real question was whether carrying the device was more likely to get her in trouble than leaving it in her room.
    The room in question was tiny, less than eight feet on a side and one of five single bedrooms around a central kitchen. The entire building was like that - shared tiny spaces for people living on the pittance that the Ardennes government required people to work for instead of receiving welfare.
    The tall, black-haired woman smiled grimly. There was no official reward for turning in offworld spies - after all, Ardennes’ government would insist they had nothing to hide from the Protectorate! - but that didn’t mean her roommates wouldn’t figure they would be paid for turning her in.
    They would be right, after all. She couldn’t risk it. She scooped the communicator into her purse with the small high velocity pistol. Unlike the communicator, the pistol was illegal, but would get her in much less trouble if found.
    Leaving the tiny room, Amiri quickly descended the fourteen flights of stairs to the ground - she wasn’t sure if the elevator had ever worked in this building. Certainly no-one was fixing it, and the stairs were hardly a burden for her.
    Trying not to openly show her disgust for the situation around her, Amiri joined the crowd outside. There were no vehicles on the streets here - the immigrants and other poor bastards swept up in