“Good luck.” Kare sounded skeptical.

“It’s one possibility.” Reynaud shrugged. “I may be able to come up with another. Or, much as I hate to admit it, there may not be any way to skate around it. But I promise I’ll do my damnedest, because you’re right. This is too important for premature release.”

“I’d say that was a fairly generous understatement,” Kare said seriously. Then he grinned. “On the other hand, and even granting what a tremendous pain in the ass all of this bureaucratic oversight has been, think about it, Mike. We’re about to add another terminus to the Junction. And not one of us—especially not me—has the least damned idea where it leads!”

“I know.” Reynaud grinned back. “Oh boy, do I know!”

Chapter One

“STEEEEE-riiiiike onnnnne!”

The small white sphere flew past the young man in the green-trimmed, white uniform and smacked into the flat leather glove of the gray-uniformed man crouching behind him. The third man in the tableau—the one who had issued the shouted proclamation—wore an anachronistic black jacket and cap, as well as a face mask and chest protector like the crouching man wore. A rumble of discontent went up at his announcement, sprinkled with a few catcalls, from the crowd which filled the comfortable seats of the stadium to near capacity, and the man in white lowered his long, slender club to glower at the man in black. It didn’t do him any good. The black-clad official only returned his glare, and, finally, he turned back towards the playing field while the man who’d caught the ball threw it back to his teammate, standing on the small, raised mound of earth twenty or so meters away.

“Wait a minute,” Commodore Lady Michelle Henke, Countess Gold Peak, said, turning in her own seat in the palatial owner’s box to look at her hostess. “That’s a strike?”

“Of course it is,” Lady Dame Honor Harrington, Duchess and Steadholder Harrington, replied gravely.

“I thought you said a ‘strike’ was when he swung and missed,” Henke complained.

“It is,” Honor assured her.

“But he didn’t—swing, I mean.”

“It’s a strike whether he swings or not, as long as the pitch is in the strike zone.”

For just a moment, Henke’s expression matched that which the batter had turned upon the umpire, but Honor only looked back with total innocence. When the countess spoke again, it was with the careful patience of one determined not to allow someone else the satisfaction of a petty triumph.

“And the ‘strike zone’ is?” she asked.

“Anywhere between the knees and the shoulders, as long as the ball also crosses home plate,” Honor told her with the competent air of a longtime afficionado.

“You say that like you knew the answer a year ago,” Henke replied in a pretension-depressing tone.

“That’s just the sort of small-minded attitude I might have expected out of you,” Honor observed mournfully, and shook her head. “Really, Mike, it’s a very simple game.”

“Sure it is. That’s why this is the only planet in the known universe where they still play it!”