EPILOGUE
The trip home from Potsdam seemed to Travis to go by faster than Diactoros’s earlier voyage in the other direction. Part of that was there was no anxiety about what they would face at the other end, part of it was that he wasn’t spending ten grueling hours a day shoveling German vocabulary and grammar into his brain.
And part of it, the best part, was that with Damocles running smoothly and the XO considered a hero, Captain Marcello was giving Lisa lots of time to spend on Diactoros with her husband.
Granted, much of that time was also spent wrangling the four greyhounds traveling with them. Marcello had taken a single look at the dervishes that were the two pups and flatly refused to let them anywhere near his ship. Given the limited free space aboard any ship, Diactoros included, it was something of a challenge to find places where the animals could burn off some of their boundless energy.
Fortunately, the adult dogs seemed better under control, or at least understood basic obedience commands and were willing to follow them. Even more fortunately, Winterfall proved to have a knack for dealing with them. He handled a lot of the caring and feeding and maintenance, and by the time they reached Manticore he had even the pups somewhat trained.
Travis had hoped to have some time along the way to talk with his brother, to perhaps start building the kind of relationship they’d never had and that Travis had always wanted. To his relief, Winterfall was not only willing to make that effort, but actually seemed equally interested in doing so.
Of course, neither of them had expected those conversations to take place over, around, and through a double pair of bouncing, attention-demanding dogs. But oddly enough, it worked. In fact, by providing a bit of a distraction, the dogs’ presence may actually have helped get them through some of the more awkward parts of their talks.
Lisa, for her part, was willing to give the brothers whatever time they needed, provided that she got the time she needed with her husband.
The three of them also spent a lot of time sitting around discussing Emperor Gustav II, the Andermani, and what the future might hold for relations between the Star Kingdom and Empire. The topics ranged all over, though of course nothing was solved.
Still, the dogs enjoyed the extra attention.
Their arrival home was marked by muted, mostly uncaring notice by the general public, followed by closed-door briefings with the Cabinet and Admiralty, followed by frantic discussions among both groups. Winterfall spent a lot of time with the former; Travis and Lisa spent an equal amount of time with the latter.
Travis’s reunion with Chomps was mildly amusing, in a strange sort of way. Both fully expected their story of the past half year to be the high point of their first lunch-time get-together, and both then had their socks knocked off by the other’s tale.
For Travis, the worst part of Chomps’s story was the revelation of Baroness Crystal Pine’s treachery. For weeks afterward he waited for his brother to say something about the woman he’d called a friend, or at least talk about how he felt about her downfall.
Winterfall never spoke of it. Travis, taking the cue, never asked.
It was three weeks after their return home that the final bombshell crashed in on them.
* * *
Travis was at one of the computers in Delphi’s Room 2021, temporarily back with SIS to work on a report Lady Calvingdell had commissioned, when a roar from Chomps’s direction shook the entire room.
He was out of his chair and across the open space in eight seconds flat, beating out the other two SIS agents who’d been at their computers and even Lady Calvingdell. “What is it?” he snapped, giving his friend a quick once-over. Nothing seemed wrong or out of the ordinary except for the grim set to his mouth and the simmering fire in his eyes. “Chomps?” he prompted.
“I was going through the recordings you brought back from the Quintessence repatriation,” Chomps said, an unnatural flatness to his voice. “I wanted to see if there was a mention of any of them in our files.” He nodded at the computer. “That’s their chief, right?”
Frowning, Travis stepped around behind him for a better look. The image on the screen showed two people, Commodore Quint and a man he didn’t recognize, both in Quintessence uniforms. “Yes, that’s Commodore Catt Quint,” he identified her. “I don’t know who the man is.”
“Oh, yes, you do,” Chomps said, an edge of frustration in his voice. “Let me back it up a couple of frames.”
The picture jerked slightly…jerked again…the woman half turned to the man…the man smiled…Chomps again paused it. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
Travis frowned a little harder. Okay, so the man was smiling now. Why should that make any difference?
And then, abruptly, it clicked.
“No,” he breathed. “No, it can’t be him. Smiley?”
“Bingo,” Chomps said darkly. “I guess running ops against Manticore wasn’t enough for him. Now he wants to destabilize the Andermani Empire, too.”
“Pull up everything we have on him,” Calvingdell ordered. “I’ll talk to Dapplelake and Winterfall and see how fast we can get a ship organized to send to Emperor Andrew.”
“Gustav II,” Travis murmured.
“Whoever,” Calvingdell said impatiently. “If they don’t already know about this man, they’d damn well better get up to speed. Who the hell is he?”
“I’d settle for what the hell he wants,” Chomps said.
“I’m not settling for less than everything,” Calvingdell bit out. “As of right now, Townsend, you’re fully reinstated. Start pulling together everything we know about Mr. Smiley and get it ready to send to New Berlin. Long will help you translate it into German—I don’t want any linguistic roadblocks to slow them down. They have no idea what they’re getting into.”
“Maybe not, My Lady,” Travis said, a fresh knot forming in his stomach. “But neither does Smiley. Emperor Gustav was very clear that he and the Andermani weren’t going to be trifled with. If Smiley isn’t careful, he may turn out to be the first object lesson of that policy.”
“I hope not,” Chomps said.
“You hope not?” Calvingdell demanded.
“That’s right, My Lady.” Chomps gestured at the smiling image still frozen on the screen. “We’re the ones he started with.
“It’s only fair that we be the ones who end him.”