Death in Winter - Michael Jan Friedman [15]
Eborion leaned closer to her. “You know, Praetor, it would not be an especially difficult thing to eliminate this admiral-turned-insurrectionist.”
“Perhaps not,” she said. “But if Braeg were to meet with an untimely end, the people would know it was an assassination-and that would make a martyr out of him. Then someone else would come along to stir up the masses in Braeg’s name.”
Eborion made a sound of disgust. “So he’s to proceed unfettered, free to say and do as he wishes?”
Tal’aura glanced at him sideways. “That is a most patrician way of looking at it.”
Eborion smiled, though his long, narrow features were clearly not made for it. “I am a patrician, Praetor.”
“So you are, Eborion.” Tal’aura herself had come from humble beginnings, being the daughter of an innkeeper. But Eborion’s family was one of the Hundred-the five score clans whose wealth was almost as old as the Empire itself.
She watched Braeg lift both of his hammerlike fists in the air, bringing his diatribe to a crescendo. Then she rose and turned her back on the screen.
“We’ll allow this upstart to have his day,” she said. “Then, when he feels most secure, we’ll cut his legs out from under him, and his movement will collapse under its own weight.”
Of course, even if there were no Braeg, the outworlds would still be a matter of heated debate. They were critical components in the imperial economy, keys to a thousand fortunes.
And their continued submission to Romulus was in jeopardy, just as Braeg so eloquently proclaimed. Tal’aura acknowledged that, if only to herself. It was why she had sent her best operative, the half-blood, to Kevratas-the outworld where the currents of rebellion ran the strongest.
The half-blood would hunt down the rebel movement and attack it like a hungry warbird. She had done such work before, for Tal’aura’s predecessors, earning a name for herself with her cold and ruthless efficiency. Surely the Kevratan rebels, crude as they were, would prove no match for her.
But because Tal’aura was no longer an innkeeper’s daughter, she had also dispatched a second operative to Kevratas-a veteran spy, who was there without the half-blood’s knowledge.
Between the two of them, the praetor told herself-and only herself-firebrands like Braeg would soon have precious little to rant about.
Beverly Crusher sat in the ruddy light of a wall torch at a scarred wooden table, huddled in a nyala-skin coat like everyone else, and sipped at her pitted metal mug. It contained a frothy, bitter liquid as dark as her son’s eyes, and vaguely reminiscent of a beverage she had sampled on Delos IV when she was doing her medical internship with Dalen Quaice.
But Delos IV had been an arid, dusty place. Rainfalls there had been few and far between, and her throat had sometimes been so parched that she would have drunk anything at hand-even her own perspiration, she had joked on occasion.
Kevratas, where Beverly now found herself, wasn’t even remotely hot and dusty. In fact, it was the coldest, bitterest, most snow-clogged frozen vault of a world on which she had ever set foot, a vicious snowstorm shaping and reshaping its powdery white terrain every day for half the year.
My luck, she thought, it had to be this half.
Still, she continued to sip at the beverage-something the natives called pojjima-because every other patron was doing the same between exhalations of thick white vapor, and she didn’t want to stand out from the crowd. Besides, if she held her mug up high enough she could peer over its brim at three of the tavern’s four entrances-one directly before her, one to her right, and one a little farther back to her left.
Beverly didn’t know why the place had been built with so many doors. Maybe the people she had come to meet would be able to explain it to her.
Of course, she had never met them before, so she didn’t know what they would be able to do. If not for the information she had received regarding their appearances, she wouldn’t even have been able to identify them.
Nor would they be able to identify her. After all, the