Claremont peered at Ghreni closely. “You didn’t think this was how it was going to go, did you? Being duke? Getting everything you planned for?”

Ghreni opened his mouth to respond and croaked. He swallowed, embarrassed, and tried again. “No,” he said.

“Well, surprise, then, Lord Ghreni,” Claremont said. “And now, tell me: What’s it going to be? Are you going to use me, or not?”

PART THREE

Chapter 13

Less than ten minutes after Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby emerged out of the Flow in the Hub system and began its thirty-seven-hour real-space trip to Hub’s imperial station, a bomb went off in the entertainment district of the city of Chadwick, on Hub. The bomb had been placed in a restaurant and went off just after the lunch rush, killing ten people in the restaurant, two people on the street outside. The restaurant itself was gutted.

The response was quick. Automated fire suppression units sprang from their hidey-holes to minimize that threat; the public air systems in that area switched over to particulate filtering mode to keep the air breathable for the immediate environment. The massive doors to that section of Chadwick, so rarely activated, ground closed in order to seal off the spread of any possible conflagration, the damage of which would be horrifying in that enclosed, underground environment. Transport tubes in and out of Chadwick were shut down and physically sealed off. Until local and imperial authorities reopened the tubes, the only way in or out of Chadwick would be overland, in hard vacuum. But even the access tunnels to the surface were closed off and policed.

Not that it mattered. “They’ve looked at the security cameras for the week prior to the bombing, both from the restaurant and on the streets around it,” said Gjiven Lobland, the imperial investigator at the scene, in video piped into the executive committee’s meeting room at the imperial palace, three hours after the bombing. “There’s nothing. No drops, nothing left behind by a customer, no suspicious activity. We’ve identified all the patrons and staff who ate or worked there and we’re working through them, starting with the ones with criminal records. So far, all of them have come up clean.”

“So how did the bomb get in there?” asked Upeksha Ranatunga, representing parliament.

“We’re looking into it. What video we have shows the explosion originating in the back of the restaurant, in the storage areas. We have the forensics people in there now.”

“If it went off in the storage areas then it might be something that was delivered,” Archbishop Korbijn said. “In which case it could have been something that had been sitting there for days, or weeks.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” Lobland agreed. “We’ve got investigators looking through delivery records. We’ll find it.”

“Has anyone claimed responsibility?” Cardenia asked.

“No, Your Majesty. Not yet. We’re monitoring communications planetwide. When we know, you will know.”