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  Noah and his men leaped aboard, and his adjutant Subi Danvar squeezed into the cockpit. Using voice commands and pressure pads, the rotund Danvar activated the takeoff sequence. Red and blue lights flashed across the instrument panel.

  The vessel extended four short wings and lifted off. Within moments it engaged the multi-altitude electronic grid system that was part of a planet-wide transportation network. Through the open doorway of the cockpit just forward of Noah’s seat, he saw automatic systems begin to kick in, as parallel yellow and blue lines on an instrument panel screen merged into each other, and became green.

  Danvar activated touch pads beneath the screen, then reached down for something in the flight bag beside his chair. A scar on the back of his right hand marked where doctors had attached cloned knuckles and fingers, after he lost them in a grid plane crash. Noah had his own moral objections to cloned Human body parts, but he’d never tried to force his views on other people.

  He felt a characteristic gentle bump as they locked into the grid, but this was followed moments later by a disturbingly sharp jolt. The screen flashed angry orange letters: TAIL SECTION DAMAGED BY PROJECTILE.

  Before Noah could react, the screen flashed again, this time in yellow: BACKUP SYSTEMS ENGAGED.

  The craft kept going with hardly a variation in its flight characteristics, and presently Noah felt a reassuring smooth sensation as the grid-plane accelerated to the standard speed of three hundred kilometers per hour.

  “Permission to seal the cockpit,” Danvar said. “I need to concentrate on the instruments.”

  “Do it,” Noah responded. Almost before permission was granted, the pilot slid the cockpit door shut, placing a white alloy barrier between them.

  Through a porthole Noah could see that they were leaving the Valley of the Princes behind, a landscape of trees and fields, spotted with industrial complexes. Had his father betrayed him, faking a Guardian attack to bring him and his organization into disfavor?

  Unable to suppress his anger, Noah slammed his fist on the armrest of the chair, so hard that pain shot through the hand. He scanned the sky and the land below, looking for threats.

  Obviously, Subi was concerned about this himself. He was Noah’s most trusted Guardian, but somewhat eccentric at times, and very outspoken. Noah had learned to give him free rein, but new thoughts began to occur to him now.

  Could this man betray me?

  After all that he and Subi had been through together, it seemed a preposterous, paranoid thought, and Noah discarded it out of hand. While the two of them were careful to maintain their distance, keeping their relationship professional, Noah had always felt an affinity for the adjutant, a strong bond of friendship. The feeling seemed mutual.

  Master Noah heaved a deep sigh. He sat back in his bucket seat and listened to the smooth purr of the grid-plane.

  If I am meant to die today, so be it. If I am meant to live, that will happen instead. He flicked a speck of black off the long sleeve of his ruffled shirt, where the garment poked out from his surcoat.

  Ever since boyhood, Noah Watanabe had sensed a presence guiding him, a force that was always there, constantly directing his actions. He often felt it viscerally, and was convinced that it told him whether or not he was doing the right thing. His stomach was calm now, but the sensation didn’t always provide him with consistent indicators. It seemed to have lapses … unpredictable and disconcerting gaps.

  The grid-plane left the valley far behind and flew over a rugged mountain range, irregular peaks that looked like the heads of demons. On the far side of the mountains the aircraft streaked over an industrial city perched on the edge of a high cliff whose stony facets glittered and flashed in mid-morning sunlight.

  Known as the “canyon planet,” Canopa was unlike any other world in the charted galaxy, with deep rainbow-crystal gorges, powerful whitewater rivers and spectacular scenery. Cities such as the one they were flying over now were engineering marvels, clinging to cliff-faces of iridescent rock. Long ago, superstitious aborigines had lived in these areas, but had been driven out by Human traders who were the economic precursors of the modern-day merchant princes. Primitive people still lived on Canopa, but kept themselves out of view, with the exception of a few men and women who were captured on occasion and brought in for observation. Curiously, aboriginal children were never seen by outsiders, not even in pre-merchant times.

  Canopa was steeped in mystery and legend, and was said to have been the domain in ancient times of a race of alien creatures … people who had gone extinct, with their bodies now on display in museums. At a number of archaeological sites around the planet, their eerie exoskeletons and personal effects had been dug up. After studying the bodies, galactic anthropologists determined that they were a race of arthropods of high intelligence. Through rune stones that had been recovered, their language had been only partially deciphered. It was known that they had referred to themselves as Nops and that they had engaged in off-world trading, but very little else was learned about them.

  Following an hour’s flight, Noah’s compound came into view atop a verdant plateau, bounded by river gorges on two sides. On land that had once been the site of industrial operations, he had restored and converted it to an impressive wildlife preserve and farm that he called his Ecological Demonstration Project, or “EDP.” The facility was far more than just structures and compounds and set-aside areas. It was a high-concept dream shaped into reality, one that included projects designed to show how man could live in harmony with the environment.

  One of Master Noah’s oft-repeated admonitions to his loyal followers was, Excess is waste. This was linked to his concept of balance, which he saw as a necessary force in the cosmos, as true for microorganisms as it was for higher life forms.

  This way of thinking had been a source of friction between Noah and his father, building up to their terrible argument. On that day, only moments after Prince Saito struck him, Noah had quit his job at CorpOne and stormed out, never expecting to return or even to speak with his father again. Noah’s environmental militancy had proven too much for the Prince, who had refused to accept any of the concepts. Like Earthian bulls the two men had butted heads, with each of them holding fast to their political and economic beliefs.

  After Noah’s resignation, his father had publicly and vehemently disowned him. Noah wondered how much of a part his twin sister Francella had played in encouraging the old man’s willful behavior. She had always hated Noah. Certainly there had been jealousy on her part; he had seen too many examples of it. But her feelings of enmity seemed to run even deeper, perhaps to her own biological need to survive and her feeling that Noah was a threat to the niche she wanted to occupy.

  At the troubling thought, Noah cautioned himself. One of his father’s criticisms of him might have been valid, the way Noah constantly saw situations in environmental terms. Sometimes when Noah caught himself doing this, he tried to pull back and look at things in a different way. But that did not always work. He was most comfortable thinking within a framework that he knew well, which he considered a blueprint for all life forms, from the simplest to the most complex.

  The grid-plane locked into a landing beam. Subi Danvar opened the cockpit door, and Noah saw the parallel green lines on the instrument panel diverge, forming flashing yellow and blue lines.

  “All systems automatic,” Subi reported. He swung out of the pilot’s chair and made his way aft, turning his husky body sideways to get past banks of instruments on each side.

  Noah felt the grid-plane descend, going straight down like an elevator, protected by the electronic net over his EDP compound.

  With a scowl on his birthmark-scarred face, Subi plopped his body into a chair beside Noah and announced, “I’m not getting any sleep until I get to the bottom of this. Somebody copied our uniforms exactly … or stole them from us.”

  “I didn’t see any of our people out there,” Noah said.

  “That doesn’t mean they weren’t invo
lved, Master. I’ll start with the most recent volunteers and work back from there. Maybe one of them is disgruntled.”

  “Could be.”

  In an organization as large as Noah’s, with thousands of uniformed Guardians, it was impossible to keep every one of them happy all the time. It was company policy to recruit people with high ideals, capable of thinking in terms of large-scale issues … rather than petty private matters. Still, there were always personality conflicts among workers, and unfulfilled ambitions.

  The aircraft settled onto a paved landing circle and taxied toward a large structure that had gray shingle walls and elegant Corinthian columns, shining bright white in the midday sunlight. This was Noah’s galactic base of operations, the main building in a complex of offices and scientific laboratories.

  In his primary business, he performed ecological recovery operations around the galaxy, under contract to various governmental agencies, corporations, and individuals wanting to repopulate areas devastated by industrial operations. On some of the smaller worlds he also operated electric power companies, having patented his own environmentally-friendly energy chambers. The merchant princes, and not just his father, had shown absolutely no concern for ecology; they routinely raped each planet’s resources and then moved on to other worlds. Canopa, despite the wild areas that still existed along the route Noah was flying now, was nowhere near what it used to be. Huge areas of the planet had been stripped of their resources and denuded of beauty, leaving deep geological scars that might never heal.

  As far as Noah Watanabe was concerned, the galactic races tended to be interlopers in the natural order of things, and Humans were the worst of all. His ideas were much wider than humanity, though, or any of the races. While performing his business operations on a variety of worlds, he had begun to see relationships within relationships, and the vast, galaxy-wide systems in which they operated.

  The grid-plane came to a stop and a double door whooshed open. As he stepped down onto a flagstone entry plaza, Noah inhaled a deep breath of warm, humid air, and watched aides as they hurried to greet him. This moment was a gift. For a while, he had not been certain if he would ever make it back here.

  Chapter Eight

  The art of business is not a pretty one; it requires blood-red pigment.

  —Francella Watanabe, private reflections

  In her white-and-gold dress and star-shaped headdress, Noah’s sister gave the appearance of a lady of leisure. It was just one of the subterfuges the tall, redheaded woman employed to conceal the fact that she was responsible for the assault on CorpOne headquarters, and that she herself had received training in the most advanced styles of combat and tactical warfare.

  “Faster!” Francella shouted to four company policemen who carried her injured, comatose father on a hover-bier. With her leading the way, they ran through a dimly-illuminated corridor, just one of the tunnels that formed a maze beneath the office-industrial complex of more than twenty buildings. Originally these subterranean passageways had been the streets of an ancient Nopan city, but the community had been abandoned long ago when the inhabitants fell victim to a mysterious malady.

  Old Prince Saito, with his head bandaged, came to life suddenly on the bier. His eyes opened wide and he groaned loudly, then flopped one of his beefy arms over the side. “Noah?” he said, while lifting his head and looking toward Francella.

  She wanted to scream her rage and pound on him, but instead pressed a small skin-colored pad against her own neck, right over a throbbing vein. Almost immediately she felt a custom drug take effect, deadening her emotions and dampening twinges of personal guilt she had been feeling, concerning the things she had to do.

  Abruptly the nobleman’s eyes closed again, but he kept murmuring Noah’s abominable name. Finally he fell silent and his face went slack, though his chest heaved up and down as he clung stubbornly to life. She stared at a sapphire signet ring on his right hand and vowed that Noah would never possess it. She considered slipping it off the old man’s finger at the first opportunity, but hesitated. Soon she would have everything she wanted anyway.

  In order to maintain appearances, Francella fell back beside her father and re-secured his arm inside the electronic strap that had been holding it. His eyelids fluttered, but didn’t open.

  She spoke his name, but he did not respond. His breathing remained steady.

  Prince Saito had been injured by a hail of alloy-jacketed projectiles fired into his office building by the phony Guardians, who were conducci, mercenaries she had hired secretly. Murdering her father had been the primary objective of the professional fighters, but they may not have succeeded. She hated sloppy workmanship.

  “You’ll be fine,” she assured Prince Saito, though he seemed unable to hear her. “We’re taking care of you.”

  “Noah?” he murmured, with his eyelids still closed.

  “I’m Francella,” she said, arching her hairless brows in displeasure. “Noah tried to kill you.”

  “He wouldn’t do that … wouldn’t do that … “ Prince Saito’s face became a twisted mask as he struggled to think, struggled for consciousness, and finally gave up the effort … but kept breathing.

  She studied the heaving of his chest, and thought, Die, damn you!

  They ascended a corrugated alloy ramp to a platform and ran across to the opposite side, where they boarded a small maglev rail car. Francella took a seat at the rear of the vehicle, while the others placed the bier on the floor in the center of the aisle, and then took seats themselves. Armored doors closed and the car accelerated quickly, throwing Francella against her seat back.

  Only half an hour earlier, fifty-eight heavily armed conducci had attacked the CorpOne complex. She had hired them through a series of middlemen in such a circuitous chain that no one knew who had originally paid for their services. As the Security Chief for the company, Francella Watanabe had ways of getting things done discreetly. She had, however, put out the word that any mistakes would be handled brutally … and the killers had not done their job cleanly, as she had demanded.

  The CorpOne policemen in the rail car with her had known nothing of the plot and had interfered, going to the aid of the Prince and whisking him off to safety, with Francella in tow … trying to figure out what to do.

  Her thoughts racing, she touched an electronic transmitter at her waist, setting off explosives in the tunnel behind them. The company security men chattered excitedly and stared out the rear window of the railway car at the flaming tunnel.

  But Francella had other matters on her mind. Privately, she was considering how best to finish the job on her father, but she needed to do it carefully, so that no one suspected a thing. For years she had been monitoring the old man’s declining health, and had hastened it along by seeing to it that the “cellteck” life extension drugs and other medicines he took were of less effect than they should have been. With those products at full strength—many manufactured in CorpOne laboratories—he might have lived to a hundred and ten, another twenty-seven years.

  Too long for her to wait. She wanted control of all family corporate operations as soon as possible, before anything could erode her position.

  The alterations in her father’s pharmacopoeia had been slight but cumulative, so that over a period of years they undoubtedly subtracted time from his life. An actuary secretly in her employ (his services obtained through another circuitous series of middlemen) had prepared projections showing how much she had probably shortened the unnamed subject’s life. Based upon raw medical data that she had provided for the actuary, he had originally estimated a reduced life span of seventeen months, twenty-four days, and a few hours.

  Unfortunately that had been modified by the interference of the Prince himself, who had unwittingly compensated for her tricks by improving his diet and instituting a moderate exercise program. In the process, the big man, unaware of her actions, had been bragging that he’d lost two kilos over the past few weeks. Undoubtedly the net effect on his
health had been minimal, since he had always been sedentary and had such an enormous girth. She had been waiting for him to slip back into his old ways, but the crisis had interfered … the meeting between Noah and her father that she could not allow.

  At Francella’s instigation another explosion sounded behind the maglev car in which she rode. The vehicle shuddered, but kept going. It entered a brightly-illuminated tunnel, and moments later a heavy alloy door slammed shut behind them, keeping them safe from pursuers or the fire and detonations that she had set off.

  A rapprochement between Francella’s brother and father would have unraveled much of her carefully-crafted efforts over the past decade, allowing her hated brother to gain a toe-hold on CorpOne operations.

  She and Noah, her fraternal twin, had never gotten along very well, and the problems started early. After the babies were born, they thrashed around on a table and gave each other bloody lips. Over the years there had been respites between them, cease-fires, but they were few and far between … and tense. The siblings had always loathed one another, and had exchanged few words in the last fifteen years.

  Their mother Eunicia, the only woman Prince Saito ever married, had almost died in childbirth. She had lived for years afterward, but never fully recovered, and was always a frail woman, finally dying in a grid-plane crash at the age of fifty-one. Prince Saito had never been the same afterward.

  In recent weeks the old man had been wavering about Noah, and had mentioned the possibility of revamping his business operations in order to satisfy his son. This could involve bringing her hated twin back into the corporation, with all of his costly, meddlesome ideas about environmental issues. Francella could not tolerate that.

  Upon learning of the scheduled meeting between the men, she had gone into a crisis mode. Setting aside her attempts to erode the Prince’s health, she had moved forward quickly. Her military-style attack with phony Guardians was a risky course of action, but offered the potential of distinct benefits. It could eliminate the Prince much more quickly, while placing the blame for his “tragic death” on Noah.