Interlude
Nearly a dozen years before, the gigantic online files of the Galactic Concourse—one of the many services of that feeble federation—had carried a story that had escaped the notice of most galactic citizens. That was not surprising; nearly every news story escaped nearly everyone’s notice. The reason, of course, was that there was too much news for anyone to absorb more than a minute fraction at best.
This particular news story concerned a new splinter group within the Guild of Personal Protectors. The Bodyguards had been absorbed by October for twenty years now; Adepts held the top positions and maintained them by demonstrating, through mental trickery, better martial skills than anyone around them. The bodyguard-in-the-street often wondered at the obvious lack of physical development among the top officials, for they seemed to train rarely; yet they seemed invincible in open combat.
The splinter group was headed by a young woman of extraordinary accomplishment and persuasive power. In her local sector she had won every combat tournament in every martial skill tested. The few Images that had been captured against her will showed a woman of fluid grace, tall and strong, with hair that alternated blond and brown and a face grim with past memory and present determination. But she had learned not only fighting skills; apparently she had studied the social development of the galaxy, and did not like what she saw.
When she felt that she could begin, she circulated a document among selected Bodyguards titled “The Protector’s Task.” In it she described interplanetary corruption, syndicates operating in the open, carrying drugs and contraband while planetary governments looked the other way. She described people living in squalor; she described torture, and takeover, and injustices of every kind. And she laid out the task of the Bodyguard in simple, unadorned language:
We are trained to protect; yet when those we protect kill or oppress, some among us look the other way. I say that such is cowardice. I say that such Guards have sold their moral sense for a job. I say that we, who have the skills, also have the responsibility of advising those we serve, and refusing to participate in anything they do that spreads hate and evil to other beings. If they will not hire us on that basis, then I say that this Guild should refuse to serve such ones.
Her name, she said, was Tova; and followers began to come to her. She tried to stay in the background, to place this or that of her followers as figurehead, but it soon became impossible to do. Some of her followers were puzzled by her uncharacteristic reticence; but she knew that should the October Guild connect her with the little girl Miri of long ago, her group would he destroyed within days.
One day Tova’s group took concerted action. On one planet, a military general was ready to implement a carefully laid plan to take control of the civilian government. One last peg was ready to be hammered into place. Not having heard of the October Guild, he hired a group of Bodyguards to murder thirteen top civilian leaders.
The number turned out to be unlucky for him. The Guards in question were of Tova’s faction, and they surrounded the general in his office and broadcast his image over the planet, with a running commentary of their own. The plotters were arrested, and the Guards were heroes.
But on that planet alone. The leaders of the Guild of Personal Protectors, horrified that Guild members had broken a contract, sought disciplinary action against the group: they would expel them and then punish them with elimination, quietly carried out by the top leaders themselves.
That was the plan. But the little group suddenly disappeared, taking a hefty financial award from the planet they had protected. It was then that the leaders discovered that Tova was a name that they could not trace beyond half a dozen years. She had apparently come out of nowhere.
The story was of passing interest to a few. Cor-Reed saw a summary of it, but not the Image of Tova. He dismissed the incident as the work of young hotheads.
Tova tried to have her group recognized as a separate Guild with the name “Transfer Guild.” But Bodyguard-October agents at the Galactic Concourse deflected the application.
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A drug-running starship was on its way back from Caldott, where it had dumped a shipment and gathered tangible payment in iridium and other rare metals, when three of its crew suddenly took control. Victims reported that the attackers had overcome them with bare hands and feet. The attackers sent the drug-runners, half alive after ideological indoctrination, to the nearest planet on a lifeboat, and the hijackers disappeared into interspace. “Thus,” they declared in an online story, “will the Transfer Guild deal with drugs.”
It did not take many more such incidents for the news media to begin calling the Transfer Guild “Thieves”; soon it was popularly known as “The Guild of Thieves.” Real thieves were insulted, but some were intrigued.
Other incidents ensued, but Tova wanted, above all, to mount a direct attack upon the October Guild. She used the online files too. Only the October Guild possessed the abilities that she had seen at the death of her mother—and, she now guessed, her father.
She knew, at last, who her enemy was. What she needed now were Transfer Guild members with powers to match those of October, or at least capable of shielding themselves from October attack.
While she searched for such resources, she taught and molded and fought, and formed specialists in instant reflex and combat with any weapon, or with none.
Careful watchers of the databases might have caught the correlation. Two things had to be put together; the underlying purpose of October, and the threat to it that pure idealists could offer if they had appropriate mental weaponry. The October One herself had glanced for a fraction of a second at the Transfer Guild in its early stages, before the name “Guild of Thieves” became current. But she dismissed them as self-rationalizing pirates.
And as the tachyonic stream of news information poured out of the galaxy, engulfing the satellite systems and reaching the other members of the galactic supercluster, there was one who did put the factors together. What intrigued this watcher especially was that no Thief ever broke training and came out of cover. It implied a teacher of unusual effectiveness, using techniques it might be well to learn.