Passion for Dead Leaves

CHAPTER ONE

"And there is no question what is the big story on Peacewatch tonight. The Warmonger has quit!

"Admiral Daer, the War Criminal who commanded the bloody Imperial conquest of the Tasman System, has resigned from the Imperial Spacefleet. It has been officially posted on Spacefleet's own boards that the Warmonger has been ejected from power. 'Retired to spend more time with his family' is how the Empire has chosen to announce their surrender to the public campaign for his dismissal.

"Tonight's specially extended edition of Peacewatch will concentrate on analysing the causes and consequences of this dramatic downfall of the Empire's most senior Admiral. Peacewatch asks if this resignation is not designed more to protect the guilty than expose them.

"Truth must out! Truth will out!"

'To fight an underground army, it is necessary to fight underground.'

Mynah LaRosse kept thinking about that old Haradhim quotation. It had run around his brain ever since he had agreed to go underground in a hunt for whispers.

Two weeks into his Metropolis College residential research year, and already he had heard his first whisper. In a Haradhim movie someone would have said it was too easy. It hardly seemed possible for EVA terrorists to be so easily reached by either real or fake volunteers, so Mynah feared the lead might prove a blank. But he had called in and been commanded to try it.

So it was in deference to orders that Mynah LaRosse had sought out the dingy and unwelcoming surroundings of the cafe-bar in the centre of the so-called Kibbutz block - a concrete monolith where scholarship students survived in subsidised subsistence rooms; and orders made him sit alone in a dark corner next to the access cover of a large disposal chute, pretending to read Professor Portwright's notorious tome on the Lambs of Shanghai.

Waiting as the bait on the hook for the sharks to bite.

Fauna Kortney crashed through the window, just maintained balance as she landed on the floor, and spun quickly round to survey the combat zone at max speed.

She identified the danger almost immediately. The device was bleeping away under some sort of table on the far side of the indoor pool. An armed figure was crouching behind it and reaching down into it.

As the multiple sensory systems of her battle-projector identified the device as nuclear, they also confirmed the figure was emitting no blue Ally-Recognition signal from its weapon. They soft-patterned a display onto the inside of Fauna's battlevisor, which registered lock-on to a target validated as compatible with its on-lined battle-program.

But the Soldier who had led her in was already poised with weapon locked on target. The shot should have been his, but it was no wonder he hesitated.

A live mass of bodyheat and heartbeat sources was showing right in front of the target, in the form of a group of hostages. All registering green for non-hostile on her battle-visor. Green and small and child-size. All in the way of the big red hostile target behind them.

"Out of the way," the Soldier was yelling.

They were not moving out of the way.

The Soldier should fire anyway, Fauna thought. He might kill some children, but the device would kill all of them, and all the other hostages.

But instead of firing the man looked at Fauna for help. So it was down to her.

She took aim, seeking a line that would drill Anti-Personnel Projectiles through as little hostage as possible en route to target.

But the Soldier put his body right in the way.

"No!" the man shouted. "Those are children."

"Out of the way," Fauna yelled back desperately.

He did not move. She tried to move to get a shot around his body. He moved into her way again.

Fauna hesitated. Did she fire through him?

Then everything went blinding white.

"We lost two hundred and eleven Imperial contract personnel," Guido Broccoli - Third Sector Executive Director of the Political Intelligence Committee - itemized grimly, "and three hundred and nine relatives. Luckily most of the civilian dead came from FIP planets and had not renewed Imperial citizenship, but that still left three thousand paid-up Imperial citizens for whom we are paying terrorist casualty compensation.