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Earl North Hollow’s Residence

City of Landing

Planet of Manticore

Manticore Binary System

April 11, 1906 PD


“no.” georgia sakristos shook her head and glared at Pavel Young, her eyes hard. “I’m telling you to drop it, Pavel. I don’t know for sure what the answer is—not yet—but I know for damned sure this isn’t!”

“I don’t think you understand,” Young said coldly. “I’m not debating this; I’m telling you this.”

“No,” she said flatly. “I won’t.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” he asked nastily, and she shook her head again.

“You can hurt me, a lot. I know that. You know that. Hell, you could possibly even get me killed, just like you can ‘convince me’ to do all those other things you want.” Her eyes were carven ice. “But it’ll take you a while to figure out how to do it, because I’m the one you count on to do your . . . selective leaking. You don’t have a clue how to rat me out to the Ballroom. Oh, I’m sure you could figure out a way, but you don’t have one now. And you know what? I’ll put up with one hell of a lot, Pavel. Even all those sex games of yours. But I won’t do this. If you insist, then I’m out of here, and you do whatever the fuck you want with your father’s files!”

Young’s eyes widened at the flat, unyielding armorplast of her tone, and her expression was even more implacable than her voice. She meant it. She truly meant it, and he’d never expected that. Not with the threat he held over her head. Other people could go to prison for decades if he decanted the “North Hollow Files.” Georgia would be lucky if she lived six T-months if he dropped her true identity into the right set of ears.

Surprise displaced fury, but only for a moment. Because the fury was driven by fear—by terror, however little he wanted to admit it. On the other hand, she was right. Unmasking her to the people she’d betrayed all those years ago wouldn’t be the easiest thing he’d ever done, especially given how little the people in question liked people like him. Worse, she knew where all the North Hollow bodies were buried—figuratively and literally. If he pushed her into fleeing, there was no reason she couldn’t send the Crown Prosecutor’s office a disastrous data packet of her own on her way out of town. So if she decided to run, to take her chances on her ability to disappear a second time, she might just succeed and completely destroy him in the process. And even if she didn’t manage either of those things, he’d still lose one of the best “dirty tricks specialists” in the entire Star Kingdom. Not to mention one of the most . . . compliant bed partners he ever had.

His jaw clenched, yet even as he glared at her, a corner of his mind realized he’d take even more pleasure in compelling her into his bed after she’d thrown down her gage. There’d be a special, even sweeter savor to it.

None of which changed the fact that he needed her to do this.

“I can’t let that bitch’s accusations stand,” he grated, “but I can’t shut her mouth, either!”

He still couldn’t really believe even Harrington had had the sheer gall to publicly accuse a peer of the realm of hiring a paid assassin. Not even in a private conversation, but in front of a slavering horde of newsies! It had been bad enough when she confronted Summervale with it, but this—!

He’d had his own operative in Dempsey’s that afternoon, equipped with a buttonhole camera attached to his shipsuit. He’d wanted to savor the moment when the bitch challenged Summervale and consigned herself to the Ellington Protocol. He’d never, not for a single moment, expected what she’d actually done, and his blood had run cold as she named him as Summervale’s employer and then drove him into challenging her.

He’d never seen that coming.

Fortunately, although there’d been plenty of witnesses, no one—except his own man—seemed to have actually recorded the confrontation. There’d been whispered rumors about what she’d said, but no proof, and no news service had wanted to risk what would happen to it under the Star Kingdom’s libel laws if it reported such a politically explosive accusation without proof. He’d realized, even then, that Georgia had been right from the outset about the suspicion which must inevitably fall upon him, but at least he’d known the bitch would be dead within days, and he’d been prepared to ride out the rumors afterward. For that matter, like he’d told Georgia, he’d actually been pleased by the fact that Cromarty—and everybody else in the damned Government—would know he’d been behind it yet be unable to prove it.

But that had been then, and this was now. The effortless way she’d destroyed Summervale was bad enough. The fact that she was still alive was terrifying. Worse, he didn’t know if she had anything like actual proof he’d hired the duelist or if she was simply assuming he’d been behind it, and that mattered. If he’d been positive she had no proof, he could simply have sued her for libel and been done with it. But if she did have evidence, even only circumstantial evidence, she could present it openly in a court of law in her defense, with catastrophic consequences.

Even that was secondary at the moment, though. The newsies had broadcast her allegations. They were out there, on the record, waiting. The bitch obviously intended to use them as the basis to challenge him. If he’d been able to sue, that wouldn’t have mattered, since the Star Kingdom’s law code specifically barred anyone from challenging someone who’d brought suit against him. But he couldn’t risk finding out the hard way that she did have proof. He dared not take that chance, but if she’d been able to take down Summervale that way . . . 

“How did she do it?” he demanded out loud now. “Where the fuck did she learn to shoot like that!”

“I don’t know,” Sakristos said. “And it’s obvious Summervale didn’t know, either.”

Not that the duelist couldn’t have known if he’d bothered to do his research, she thought. Unlike him, Sakristos had studied Harrington very carefully before she suggested Summervale as the solution to Pavel’s problem, and her research tools were far better than most. Accessing the countess’s public record hadn’t been difficult, and she’d gotten access to Harrington’s official personnel file, thanks to an Admiralty contact. More than that, though, she’d gone clear back to Harrington’s childhood, long before she’d ever become a public figure, and discovered that young Honor Harrington had taken the Sphinx Forestry Service Youth League’s Shelton Cup for pistol and rifle for two years in a row before she was thirteen. Sakristos had had no idea how current Harrington’s firearms skills might be, but she’d hoped her capabilities would come as a surprise to Summervale.

Of course, not even she had dared to hope Harrington would be as proficient as she’d actually proved!

“Well, it looks like your brainstorm about hiring the ‘perfect’ man for the job just blew the hell up, didn’t it?” Young said spitefully, and she glared at him again.

“You wanted her killed in a duel, Pavel,” she said. “That was your idea, not mine. I warned you at the time that if anything happened to her, people would automatically suspect you. But if you wanted her dead, this was the most plausibly deniable way to do it, and Summervale was the best at what he did.” She shrugged with a scowl. “Obviously, he wasn’t good enough, but he was the best available.”

“And now she’s coming after me,” Young snarled.

“If she can, yes.” Sakristos nodded. “I don’t know if she has any kind of evidence to support her allegations, of course,” she lied, “but for God’s sake, Pavel! If other people would have suspected you, just what the hell did you expect her to do?”

“Of course she ‘suspects’ me. Hell, she hates me enough she’d probably pin it on me even if she was positive I hadn’t had a thing to do with it! But we’ve got to shut her up.”

“Like you just said, we can’t.” Sakristos’ patient tone was a deliberate goad.

“Yes, we can!”

“No,” she said again. “Having her killed would be the worst thing you could possibly do. It was bad enough before, but after what she’s said, nobody in the entire Star Kingdom would believe for an instant that you weren’t behind it. Not now. And if she’s killed anywhere except in a duel, the cops—and the Government, for that matter—will open the mother of all investigations. I don’t think there’s any way they can legally link you to Summervale, especially now that he’s dead, but the instant you hire someone else, you create a fresh potential evidence chain pointing directly back at you. And Cromarty and Alexander will move heaven and earth to find it. In my opinion, the odds are way too good that they would find it, too.”

“I’ll take my chances!”

“Not with my help.” She shook her head. “I’m not brokering that one for you, Pavel. Not when it could come home to bite my ass right along with yours.”

“But—”

“Listen to me,” she interrupted. “If she has any sort of evidence, anything beyond her own suspicions, it obviously wasn’t legally obtained. If it had been, she’d already have handed it to the authorities, and they’d have opened an investigation. And I’m way too well tapped-in for them to have done that without us hearing about it.

“That means the only way she can get to you is in another duel. It’s pretty obvious that’s exactly what she intends to do. What she said to the newsies was stage-setting. But she can’t get you onto the dueling grounds unless she can challenge you, and she can’t challenge you unless you give her the opportunity. The woman’s a serving naval officer. I already know from the Admiralty that they’re going to redeploy her ship in only another couple of months. That’s how long you have to avoid her.”

“And it will be obvious I’m hiding from her, damn it. You think that won’t have repercussions? That it won’t give Cromarty and his cronies more ammunition to use against me?”

“Like they need any more ‘ammunition’!” Sakristos rolled her eyes. “If they could get to you, they’d’ve already done it. There’s nothing new here, as far as they’re concerned. As long as you can stay away from her until the Navy deploys her out of the home system, you’ll be fine.”

“Until she gets back to Manticore, you mean! What’s to prevent her from challenging me then? I can’t hide from the bitch forever!”

“She’ll be going right back into a shooting war,” Sakristos pointed out. “The Peeps may solve your problem for you, which would be perfect from your perspective. And if they don’t, then once a little time’s passed, it may be possible to arrange a suitable ‘accident’ for her when the finger won’t automatically point at you. For that matter, I’d be a lot more willing to help arrange that accident farther down the road. If I can take my time, put the groundwork in place well ahead of time, maybe arrange it through a series of cutouts, then maybe—maybe—we could take her down without everyone screaming you had to be behind it. Lord knows the woman’s made enough enemies who’d love to see her dead, from Klaus Hauptmann on down! I just need time to set it up, and I’m not going to help you put your neck into a noose by rushing things when my neck could be right beside yours.”

She held Young’s eyes levelly, refusing to back down.

Silence hovered between them for several long seconds. Then, finally, he shrugged angrily.

“All right,” he half-snarled. “If that’s the way you see it, that’s the way you see it. But you better start that planning right now, Georgia!”

“Of course I will,” she replied.

“Good.” He checked his chrono. “I’ve got that a meeting with High Ridge and New Flushing in twenty minutes. We’ll talk about this—and a few other things—when I get back.”

“Understood.”

She let him hear the bitterness in her tone, since both of them knew what those “other things” would involve, and she expected them to be thoroughly unpleasant. But she’d survived quite a lot of unpleasant things in her life, some of them even worse than the ones he demanded from her, and she could survive more of them if she had to. At least he only used the threat of having her murdered to compel her, not a neural whip.

She gave him a curt nod, then stood and strode out of his office.

She closed the door carefully behind her before she allowed herself to smile, and Pavel Young would not have liked that smile. Not that she had any intention of allowing him to see it.

For someone who believed he was so cunning, Pavel was remarkably stupid, she thought. Or, no, that wasn’t really true. What he was was an arrogant narcissist, the sort of sociopath who lived in a universe populated not by other human beings, but only by himself and human-shaped things put there for his use and convenience. For him to do whatever he wished to with. And he was so busy thinking about all the things he could do with—or to—those things that it never occurred to him to worry about what they might do to him until something rubbed his nose in it. And his family’s position of power and wealth, and his father’s protection, had let him get away with that for his entire life.

Except for Honor Harrington. She’d refused to let him use her the way he’d used everyone else in his life, and that was the true reason he—and, to be fair, his father—had devoted so much time and effort to their efforts to destroy her. How dared she not lie down for him the way all those others had done? Obviously, she had to be punished for it!

And how well has that worked out for you, Pavel? she thought sardonically as she walked down the carpeted hallway.

The fact was that Georgia Sakristos approved of Honor Harrington. Or, at least, of the Sword of Damocles she represented for Pavel Young, at any rate. She’d expected Harrington to dispose of Denver Summervale, although she honestly hadn’t anticipated that the countess would accomplish that phase of her own master plan quite so proficiently. It was true that her denunciation of Young as Summervale’s employer might prove a tactical error on her part, since it had warned him of how she intended to kill him in his turn. As they said, forewarned was forearmed, even in Pavel’s case. On the other hand, Sakristos had every intention of kneecapping any preventive measures Pavel might contemplate. And she had to admit that watching him squirm, watching the worm of terror devour him, was even more entertaining than she’d hoped. After what he’d done to her, the things he’d compelled her to endure since his father’s death, she took a cold, vicious pleasure in his punishment.

Yet hurting him was secondary. A sweet elixir distilled of vengeance and satisfaction, but only a side effect of what she truly needed.

She reached her own office, closed the door behind her, and seated herself behind her desk, and her eyes were bleak and hard.

Dimitri Young had promised to delete her file from his records. In fact, she’d thought he had, until he died and Pavel gloatingly read her a synopsis of that file and wondered out loud what the Audubon Ballroom would do if they ever happened to find out what had become of the woman she’d once been.

Dimitri had never pressed any particularly onerous physical demands upon her, but that had been solely because of his age and infirmity. Neither of those things afflicted Pavel, and she’d quickly discovered that his demands were about as sick and degrading as they came. Unfortunately, she had no choice but to submit to them anyway, because what would happen to Elaine Komandorski, if the Ballroom’s ex-genetic slave terrorists ever caught up with “Georgia Sakristos,” was even worse.

Far worse.

Still, her first week as Pavel Young’s “lover” had made one thing clear: either she had to run, taking her chance that she could evade the Ballroom once again . . . or he had to die. And the choice between those options had made itself when she realized he hadn’t changed Dimitri’s office security protocols.

That minor oversight might suggest she’d been wrong about whether or not he truly was stupid, she reflected, given the games he’d forced her to play. On the other hand, he might not be aware of all the nuances of the protocols his father had set up. That was the sort of “nuisance detail” he preferred to delegate to lesser beings, like her.

She knew he was aware that, as his chief of security, she had access to his father’s files, but that access was limited. She could access files and she could add data, but only the system administrator—Pavel—could delete files. And, in the event of his death, the files and administrator authority would pass to his brother Stefan along with the title.

But what Pavel didn’t realize was that in the interval between his own death and the probate of his will, Sakristos would serve as the credentialed administrator until those credentials transferred to Stefan. She’d managed to insert that little window of opportunity into Dimitri’s security without his noticing when she’d set it up initially, and she ought to have used it when he died to make certain her file had been removed. But she’d thought—then—that the previous earl had kept his promise to delete it long since, so she’d seen no reason to risk Pavel’s checking the access logs. It would have been bad enough that he might have realized she’d tampered with the files, but it would also have led him to her back door. At the very least, he would have slammed it shut, and she’d been able to visualize several even more unpleasant outcomes.

None of which had been as unpleasant as the ones she’d ended up with.

But once she’d realized Dimitri had lied to her, she’d known she’d have to see to the file’s deletion herself. All she needed to do was to arrange Pavel’s demise, then use her access before the database fell into Stefan’s hands.

Hopefully, Countess Harrington was about to take care of that small task. Sakristos certainly intended to do everything she could to help Harrington, at any rate. It would provide the perfect solution to her problem, with no possible suspicion attaching to her, given the long-standing hatred between Harrington and Pavel Young.

And if the countess should fail, Sakristos could always fall back on Plan B, because whether she was willing to do it for him or not, Pavel was quite correct about Georgia Sakristos’ ability to arrange a quiet murder or two at need.

And some things were definitely worth killing to escape.


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