David Weber - At All Costs

Laura and Berry did their best to maintain suitably grave expressions, despite their mutual amusement, as they walked towards Berry's chair. They were about halfway there when the sudden, high-pitched snarl of an enraged treecat ripped through the throne room.

They spun towards the sound, and saw a cream-and-gray blur streaking through the crowd. For an instant, Berry had no idea at all what was happening. But if Laura wasn't especially well socialized, she still had the acute senses, heightened musculature, and lightning reflexes of the Scrag she had been born.

She didn't know what had set Genghis off, but every instinct she had screamed "Threat!" And if she wouldn't have had a clue which fork to use at a formal dinner, she knew exactly what to do about that.

She continued her turn, right arm reaching out, snaking around Berry's waist like a python, and snatched the girl up. By the time Genghis was two leaps from Tyler, Lara was already sprinting towards the door through which they'd entered the throne room.

She heard the sharp crack of the exploding briefcase behind her just as the door opened again, and she saw Saburo and Ruth Winton through it. From the corner of her eye, she also saw the outrider of death scything towards her as the bodies collapsed in spasming agony, like ripples spreading from a stone hurled into a placid pool. The neurotoxin was racing outward faster than she could run; she didn't know what it was, but she knew it was invisible death... and that she could not outdistance it.

"Saburo!" she screamed, and snatched Berry bodily off the floor. She spun on her heel once, like a discus thrower, and suddenly Berry went arcing headfirst through the air. She flew straight at Saburo X, like a javelin, and his arms opened reflexively.

"The door!" Lara screamed, skittering to her knees as she overbalanced from throwing Berry. "Close the door! Run!"

Berry hit Saburo in the chest. His left arm closed about her, holding her tight, and his eyes met Lara's as her knees hit the floor. Brown eyes stared deep into blue, meeting with the sudden, stark knowledge neither of them could evade.

"I love you!" he cried... and his right hand hit the button to close the door.

"Not one word," Elizabeth Winton said flatly. "Not one word about why they might have done it, or who else might have wanted to do it."

Her Prime Minister and his Cabinet sat silently as she surveyed them with eyes of frozen brown ice. The different distances and travel times from the Sol System, via Beowulf, and Congo, via the Erewhon Junction, meant the messages had arrived just over twenty-four hours apart, and Queen Elizabeth was beyond fury now. She had entered a frozen realm, where hate burned colder then interstellar space.

"They killed Sir James and tried to kill Berry Zilwicki and my niece on the same damned day. All the available evidence from Old Terra says it was a Peep operation, and who else knew we were planning a summit meeting on Torch? The Peeps and the Erewhonese, and does anyone in this room believe the Erewhon honor code would have let them do something like this? Even assuming they'd had any conceivable reason to?"

Hamish Alexander-Harrington inhaled deeply and looked around the Cabinet Room. It was unusual for the monarch to come here instead of being attended upon at Mount Royal Palace by her chief minister and, perhaps, one of two of his colleagues. In fact, it had only happened seven times in the entire history of the Star Kingdom. Well, eight now. But Elizabeth hadn't wanted to speak only to her Prime Minister; she wanted all the members of his Cabinet to hear what she had to say.

He closed his eyes briefly, his face wrung with pain, and not just for his murdered friend. The heroic determination of Berry Zilwicki's bodyguard had saved her and Ruth Winton from certain death. The ex-slave who'd closed the door in the nick of time had literally dragged the two girls out of Berry's palace. He'd had to drag them; Berry had been hysterically trying to pry the door open with her bare hands.

Every individual in the throne room had died within fifteen seconds, and another two hundred and twenty-six other people had died as the neurotoxin spread beyond the throne room through other doors, windows, and the air conditioning system. And the death toll would have been at least three times that high if the security man who'd first noticed the assassin's briefcase hadn't sounded the alarm with his panic button. The almost immediate shutdown of the air conditioning had slowed the poison's spread long enough for the rest of the people in its path to evacuate. And the agent used was apparently as persistent as it had been fast-spreading. According to early reports, it was going to be simpler to simply burn the "palace" down and start over than to decontaminate it.

"I don't understand," Baroness Mourncreek, Grantville's Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in a troubled voice. "Why did they do it? I mean, what have they accomplished?"

"They've managed to kill our ambassador to the League," Elizabeth said coldly. "Admiral Webster was highly trusted by his contacts in the League. He'd become a relatively well known media figure from his appearances on various talk shows, as well, and he'd been very effective in moderating the more extremist newsies' versions of what's been going on in the Talbott Cluster ever since Nordbrandt started killing people. They probably figured he'd be equally effective in controlling the League's reaction to Terekhov's actions at Monica. By killing him, they intended to remove that possibility and increase the odds the League will take military action against us in Talbott."

"And what happened on Torch, Your Majesty?" Mourncreek said.

"They invited us-me-to a summit meeting. I don't think they actually expected me to accept. I think it was essentially planned as yet another of their damned diplomatic lies. They probably intended to publish the correspondence of their invitation and my refusal as proof that they're the 'reasonable party' in this war. It would have bolstered their claim that they've been telling the truth about our diplomatic correspondence from the beginning.

"But then I accepted their invitation, and we nominated Torch for the site and invited Erewhon to provide security, with the possibility of repairing the damage to our relations with the Erewhonese. They hadn't counted on that. And even though they'd probably never expected to sit down and negotiate seriously, they found themselves in a position where they might actually have to do that. Where it was even possible we'd sound like the voice of reason. So they decided to avoid the entire problem by killing Berry and Ruth-after all, what's the death of two more teenaged girls to bastards like Peeps? For that matter, if the girls' schedule hadn't slipped, they probably would have killed Thandi Palane and decapitated the Torch military, as well. Obviously, the confusion and chaos which would have resulted would have made Torch completely impossible as a conference site. And even if it hadn't, they could always point to their concern about security issues and the safety of their precious President Pritchart as reasons they couldn't possibly meet with me there. After, of course, sending me their lying condolences for my niece's death-just like Saint-Just did after he murdered Uncle Anson and Cal!"

Hamish felt a protest hovering on the tip of his tongue. Not because he wasn't almost as certain of Haven's complicity as Elizabeth herself, but because it still didn't make sense to him. Theway Haven had attempted to kill Honor certainly seemed to indicate they saw assassination as a perfectly legitimate tool, and that accorded with the traditional policies of the Legislaturalists and the Committee of Public Safety, as well. Not to mention the fact that Pritchart herself had been credited with more than one assassination during her revolutionary days.