SotU3 Chpt 30

=Chapter 30=
==State of the Union - Book 3==
----
The Triad, Tharkad
Coventry Province, Federated Commonwealth
January 1st, 3068
----
“What can you tell me?” Peter Steiner-Davion demanded as soon as the door closed behind Quintus Allard-Liao. “Tell us, rather." he amended, glancing at Tancred Sandoval and Yvonne Sandoval-Steiner-Davion. The couple were sitting on the couch of his office, Yvonne’s husband with one long arm comfortingly around her shoulders.
Quintus placed his attache case on the table. “Quite a lot more than I was expecting, Your Highness. Let me start with the good new; We have verified that the woman who died after being retrieved by the Skye Rangers is not Catherine Steiner-Davion and we are almost completely sure that the surviving woman is your sister.” He paused. “I’m sorry, let me clarify: she is virtually assured to be your sister. The only doubt remaining is the very slim chance that she is not Catherine. I’m convinced personally but until she’s back here for testing against medical samples we’ve got in the secure vaults at the Triad for in-depth security checks, I can’t completely dismiss the possibility that someone has slipped another decoy in.”
Yvonne stared at the spymaster. “Shouldn’t you just be able to check against Reinhardt? He’s not that close a cousin but he’s right there.”
“Well, there things get interesting. It appears that both of the women are General Steiner’s distant cousins, and to the same degree.” Quintus took a seat. “I’ll spare you the exact medical comparisons, but the numbers suggest that they’re both his fourth or fifth cousins. It’s hard to be precise at that distance of course - two common great-great-great grandparents between the three of them is a fairly tenuous link.”
Peter walked to the desk. “Reinhardt is our fourth cousin, so that would be right for Catherine - but are you saying this other woman is a Steiner too?”
He got a nod in return. “More closely related to you than the General is. We’re investigating further but we may need to ask for fresh blood samples from other members of House Steiner to pin it down.”
“That’ll be fun." Peter muttered. “Most of my cousins I can trust are scattered across the Federated Commonwealth holding down important duties. The only ones on hand are the ones least likely to cooperate.”
“Do you think that the dead woman might be this Kathleen Madison that the Word of Blake have warned us of?” Tancred sounded hopeful. “The same Katherine that usurped the throne?”
Peter saw Quintus frown. “It would be very tidy if she was." the younger man admitted. “But for that reason I doubt it. I might even think that she might be a decoy intended to lead us to conclude that and leave the real Katherine at large, to work unhindered on some other scheme.”
“I’d say you were being paranoid," the Archon-Prince observed, “but that’s what I pay you for.”
“Thank you, Sire. It’s pleasant to have work that fits my disposition.” Quintus grinned briefly. “It will take longer to pin it down but… well, it’s purely speculative but if this was Kathleen then there is a way that she could be a Steiner. Richard Steiner was a ComStar Acolyte at the right time, it’s possible he might have fathered her while training on Terra. Naturally or through someone arranging it clinically without his knowledge.”
“Richard…” Peter felt anger rise within him. His cousin had served ComStar, then returned to the AFFC. He’d been a Margrave in Bolan and made such a mess that Peter had had to send Victor to sort it out. And before that he’d been in Skye. “Did you ever stop investigating him for connections to Free Skye?”
''
“Not entirely, although resources have been called to other matters.” Quintus shook his head in frustration. “I’ll assign new eyes. Perhaps they’ll see something the existing team missed.”
“What else do we know?” Yvonne demanded. “This was more than one woman infiltrating Catherine’s dropship. There must have been a team.”
“Two teams.” The Chancellor’s first cousin pulled documents from the attache case and confirmed his memory. “One of them aboard the Leal Lestrade - a Free Skye cell that someone had buried very deep. Or at least they thought that they were Free Skye. We’re unraveling their connections as best we can but so far it hasn’t crossed with any other part of that organization that we know about. It’s entirely possible they’re catspaws set up by someone else just using that name.”
Peter rubbed his jaw. “Or that Robert set them up to be deniable.”
“Possible, yes.” Quintus conceded. “We don’t know yet. The other team were outsiders - they came with instructions that they were to be smuggled onto the jumpship and assisted in their mission. While the cell assumed that they were Free Skye, that doesn’t seem to be the case.”
“No?” asked Tancred. “Then who?”
“Two of them had extensive and very sophisticated cybernetics, better than NAIS has, which points one way. And on the other hand, some of their gear suggests ties to the Thuggee cult on Highspire. These weren’t amateurs: they penetrated the security of the dropship, took out three critical officers and had Catherine at their mercy for almost quarter of an hour. If it wasn’t for one stroke of luck, it’s entirely possible they could have extracted back to the Leal Lestrade with prisoners and left a team of infiltrators replacing your sister and three of her confidants.”
“This is exactly - exactly! - the sort of threat that we should have been proof against. How much more do we have to do to protect my family from being replaced like this?” Peter knew he was being unreasonable, but this was the second time. Third time, if you counted his father’s brief replacement by the original doppelganger back in 3025.
“Sire, there is no absolute security. I wish I could say otherwise. We’ll learn from this attempt, but our enemies will also learn. We can - and do - win most of the time. But it would be arrogance to claim we could win every time, however hard we’ll try to.”
“How did they fail?” Yvonne had her husband’s hand in hers, rubbing it as if for reassurance that he hadn’t been taken away suddenly. “Someone alerted Reinhardt somehow?”
Quintus nodded. “We haven’t reconstructed all of the events, but we know that signal came from Catherine’s valet.”
Peter’s sister stared in disbelief. “Wait, Madelaine Thierry? Fussy Maddy?”
“Yes. We believe she spotted them early on, identified that something was out of place and managed to communicate that fact.” The young spymaster shook his head in admiration. “Most importantly, she hid the fact that she’d managed it - if they’d known that anyone off the dropship was aware of what was going on they would probably have moved faster or more openly - directly using the Countess as a hostage rather than interrogating her.”
Peter ground his teeth at that. The worst of Catherine’s injuries were mangled fingers that had not been combat wounds. His sister had been tortured. Not so much for information - chemical interrogation was more effective - as out of what he could only imagine as sheer viciousness.
“But… Madelaine?”
Tancred reached over and brushed a few stray hairs back from his wife’s face. “Courage comes in many forms, love.”
“She never stopped complaining about how Catherine dressed! She used to be on Katrina’s staff, for crying out loud!”
Peter sighed. “She also passed every security check, and if she complained about Cat’s wardrobe, did you ever hear her say a sour word against our sister as a person? Do you know what she’d arranged for her funeral, Quintus?”
“I don’t have that information at hand, Sir, but it should be on her file.” All those who served on the personal staff of a Steiner or a Davion had that on record. It was, after all, possible that they might be following their charge into danger.
“I doubt I’ll be able to attend." the Archon-Prince said flatly. “But I can at least write the citation that’ll be read there, for how she earned a posthumous Diamond Sunburst. I dread to think what could have been done with a rogue as the Regent on New Avalon. We’ve seen what one could manage on Tharkad, I hope that we’ve learned from that disaster.”
“Will you be staying here on Tharkad until Catherine returns?” asked Yvonne. “I know you wanted to rejoin the Fifth Royal Guards, but…”
“I’d better be here for when Catherine gets back.” Peter shook his head. “If Arc-Royal was still at risk then I might feel differently, but fortunately that threat is over. And I might be needed to keep Tharkad safe from Catherine.”
“Is it true." Tancred asked carefully, “That she broke loose on her own?”
Quintus nodded. “Yes, she took the opportunity while the Rangers were drawing the attention of her captors.” He smiled thinly. “It’s admirable, but if she hadn’t then we might have the imposter to interrogate. The fatal head injury was inflicted by Catherine, after all.”
“So the story that she headbutted her doppelganger to death is true?”
“Tancred!”
“...in a manner of speaking.”
“Quintus!”
“You’re doing well, Sis. Now if you can guess my name." Peter offered sarcastically, “You’ll be three for three.”
“You’re all a bunch of rotters!” Yvonne snapped. “I hope Catherine butts your heads for you.”
“That would probably be treason." Quintus pointed out. “You’d have to hang her.”
“I’d give her a medal!” But his sister couldn’t keep her face straight and she joined them in laughing, a choking laugh that was as much tears as hilarity. “We have to find out who’s behind this.”
“We do have leads." Quintus admitted. “The trouble is, we have too many of them. One of the team was a marine who went missing on the Lucien Davion - he was supposed to replace Catherine’s chief of security - they’re cousins and he’d been surgically altered to replace the man. One of the combatants was a Thuggee, or at least pretending to be hiding the fact he was one.”
“One of Kali Liao’s cultists? Or a red herring?”
“We don’t know yet. Honestly, there are clues that could, but don’t definitely, point at the Word of Blake - or the Canopians, or even the Clans.”
“The Clans?! Now that’s a bit far-fetched, isn’t it?” asked Peter skeptically.
“They would have the medical science for the level of surgery to prepare a doppelganger." Quintus told him. “With the latest news from Arc-Royal included data on the Wolves’ command dropship that was forced down. Our analysts went through the late Khan Vladimir Ward’s personal effects with a toothcomb.”
“I’m not going to like this, am I?”
“He had personal recordings of messages from Kathrine - very candid in some respects but quite cagey in who the messages were for. But it’s possible that he was the intended recipient.”
“Which would be treason.” Peter picked up his water glass to cleanse the taste of that from his mouth.
Yvonne frowned. “And yet… Vladimir Ward would have been a potential enemy to the Jade Falcons, to Phelan and Morgan… and to Victor. And you know Kathrina never balked at any way to advance herself at someone else’s expense.”
“He also had a giftake canister - a Clan storage unit intended to hold genetic material for their breeding program. They can maintain a sample for quite a long time with very little logistics. Clan Wolf’s own scientists are sure that the donor wasn’t anyone within Clan Wolf - perhaps not even inside the Clans. They did find a very distant possible match though: Bloodhouse Steiner, one of the Clan Cloud Cobra’s genetic legacies.”
Peter felt a sharp pain from his hand.
“God, Peter!”
He looked down and saw that his hand was dripping with water, with blood joining it. The glass had cracked in his hands. “Ouch." Peter declared, as the pain of the cuts reached his brain.
Yvonne grabbed a napkin from the table while Tancred took the larger pieces of glass from him.
“I’ll get a medic." Quintus said calmly and rose to walk to the door. “Sorry, father always said not to tell Steiner-Davion’s bad news when they were drinking. I thought he meant that you might choke.”
“Stop fussing." Peter told his sister, but he held his hand still so she could catch the blood and water on the napkin and delicately start brushing shards of glass down into the rapidly pinking cloth. “How could she have even contacted the Wolves?”
“In early 3058, only months after establishing the Lyran Alliance, the new Archon almost completely isolated herself." Quintus told Yvonne once he’d spoken to the guards outside. “The only person she met was my uncle Tormano, all her announcements and speeches were pre-recorded and rather generalized. It wasn’t until partway through the Coventry campaign that she even made a public reference to it at all. My uncle took his secrets to the grave, but even he couldn’t obfuscate the matter entirely. Nondi Steiner’s own files make it clear she was deeply frustrated at his acting as gatekeeper. She even speculated that the Archon was hiding the later stages of pregnancy.”
“You think she was absent.” Peter asked
Quintus nodded. “The timing would work out. I have a team checking Jumpship movements - if she made a secret diplomatic visit to the Clan occupation zone, she could have met Ward then.”
“Met him, established correspondence… given him a genetic sample from herself.” Peter tried very hard not to wrench his hand from Yvonne’s grip. “Was that usurper in bed with a Clan khan? Are there Steiner children growing up in one of those damned Clan sibkos?”
“I don’t know, sir.” Quintus answered
Peter’s eyes flicked to Tancred. “Talk to Caesar." he ordered. “Get word to Adam and Victor. I can’t do anything about the Clan Homeworlds, but I want every sibko the Wolves have here in the Inner Sphere in our hands so we can make sure of this. I don’t care if we have to fight the Bears, or the Horses or even the Sharks for them. Don’t let even one of her children slip past us!”
----
Previous Story Arc - Return to Story Index - Next Chapter
Category:State of the Union Chapters