Garst was a particularly ambitious man. Until recently, his ambitions had been thwarted by being confined to a single small satellite; but now, the prospect of true power was blossoming before him. He found its aroma intoxicating.

  He got up and walked around to the front of his desk, fingering gently the small medallion he had been given when he joined the organization. It was a membership badge, he had been told then, a form of identification. In form, it was quite simple: a tiny integrated circuit chip on a thin golden chain, almost invisible unless someone looked closely. But it made him part of something that obviously spanned the Galaxy and had as its goal supreme control of the human race.

  Garst knew he would never be content to be a cog in someone else's wheel. He would have to find the stepladder to the top of this power structure and climb it rapidly. He might not wind up as the big boss of the machine, but he knew lie was capable of greater things than this.

  There would be obstacles, of course. Although he'd been put in charge of this entire planet, not a single member of his staff was personally loyal to him. They'd all been picked by Lady A; even Jinda Rawling, his security chief and top aide, would probably throw her lot in with Lady A if her devotion should ever be put to the test. That meant Garst would have to work alone. No one else could be completely trusted if lie were to achieve his aims. But still, he knew he could do it.

  Helena von Wilinenhorst could prove the key to his upward mobility. Although he had been careful to mention nothing about it to Lady A, that was another of his motives for keeping that young lady alive and under close scrutiny. He wasn't sure how yet, but the young duchess might prove useful to hire in his upward climb. The thought was exhilarating.

  Chapter 2

  Mission on Mellisande

  The planet Mellisande had five moons that danced an elaborate waltz through its nighttime skies. The largest was more than half the size of Earth's own moon, and two of the others were almost as big, which meant that the nights on Mellisande were seldom dark. A silvery glow pervaded the atmosphere, lending a fairy tale aura to even the most mundane of settings. When all the moons were up at once, the night could be nearly half as bright as the day.

  At present, though, only one large and one small moon were above the horizon, for which the two shadow-shapes currently creeping through the bushes were extremely grateful.

  Their job would be difficult enough without having to run the risk of being spotted in excessively bright moonlight.

  The scene below them was a tranquil one: a large manor house set out in the country more than two kilometers from its neighbors, with open land surrounding it on three sides. Its back was built against a cliff face that rose fifty meters into the air. The cliff front was so smooth that it was judged unclimbable, leaving the occupants of the house secure in the knowledge that they could not be attacked from that direction.

  The two shadows hoped the inhabitants felt very secure; it would help them immensely.

  They lay prone side by side for several minutes on top of the cliff, studying the layout below them. Ten cars were parked in front of the manor house. As they watched, an eleventh car made its appearance, driving up the narrow dirt road from the main highway and pulling to a stop beside the others. Two people got out and walked to the front door of the house. After a few moments of waiting on the doorstep, they were permitted to enter.

  "That should be all of them," said one of the shadows in a deep, masculine voice.

  The other shadow, a female, nodded in response. "Alors, let's stop lolling about and get to work."

  The man stood up and lifted a device that looked very much like a harpoon gun. As he hefted it and focused its sights, his companion took a length of carlon rope from her utility belt and tied it onto a stake that had been driven securely into the ground near the edge of the cliff. "Ready," she said.

  The man took aim with his weapon and fired. The harpoon shot out of the gun and flew downward toward the roof of the house. Its plastic-bulbed tip shattered in the cranny between the chimney and the sloping roof, releasing a gummy white liquid that solidified immediately upon contact with the air. The instaweld formed a permanent bond between the rooftop and the spear; only the use of a special solvent would remove the harpoon from its new resting place.

  The only sound so far had been the small but unavoidable pop of the harpoon's tip as it came in contact with the building. The two people at the top of the cliff waited breathlessly to see whether there was any reaction from inside the house. When none came after three minutes, they let out silent sighs of relief; the rest of their mission could be accomplished much more quietly.

  With rapid efficiency, the man pulled the slack out of the line attached to the harpoon.

  Then, with the merest of nods to his companion, he grabbed hold of the rope and began lowering himself in a quick hand-over-hand motion to the roof of the house so far below them.

  The woman stood patiently at the top, watching her comrade make his descent and staying ever alert for trouble. While the man was traveling down the rope, he would be an exposed target, and she would have to guard him. As soon as he reached his destination, he signaled up to her and she began her own descent, while he returned the favor and kept watch for her.

  The total transfer time to the rooftop was less than five minutes. The instant they were both together, they wasted no time setting their attack plans into motion. They had preselected one window as their primary point of entrance; moving swiftly and silently to the east side of the steeply slanting roof, the man lay prone holding another, shorter length of carlon rope. The woman took hold of the free end and began lowering herself over the edge to determine whether the window was unlocked or guarded by alarms.

  All this work with ropes and climbing was hardly new to these two people; indeed, their familiarity with the equipment was almost inbred. The woman was Yvette d'Alembert, and the man was her brother Jules, and until slightly over a year ago they had been the premier aerialists in the entire Empire. As the star performers of the Circus of the Galaxy, they had been dangling from ropes and swinging on trapezes since babyhood.

  But the job they were engaged in this night had nothing to do with trivial entertainment.

  Their real employment was as the top secret agents in the Service of the Empire. They and their entire circus family were among the ablest and most loyal servants the Crown could wish for; they had proven their worth repeatedly, and asked for little more than the honor of serving again in the future.

  As Yvette dangled alongside the window they had chosen, she examined it carefully. It was locked by a simple turnbolt from the inside, and there were no alarms on it that her sophisticated pocket sensors could detect. Pulling herself tightly against the wall, she managed to slide the bolt and pry the window open. From that point, it was a simple matter to grab onto the sill and pull herself into the room. The inside of this chamber was dark and still. It appeared to be a guest bedroom, but was not in use at the moment. As soon as her preliminary check indicated that it was safe, she gave a single sharp tug on the rope to let her brother know it was all right to follow.

  Up on the roof, Jules secured the rope by the simple expedient of breaking another small vial of instaweld at the spot where the line dangled over the eaves. As soon as he ascertained that the material had done its job, he scrambled down the rope and, within a minute, was standing beside his sister. Both agents had their stunguns out and ready for action.

  Moving with superlative stealth, they padded over to the doorway, opened it a crack and gazed out into the hallway beyond. The hall was unfortunately well lit, but at least was deserted. At the far end of the corridor they could see the staircase that they would have to use to go downstairs where their quarries awaited. Between their present location and the stairs were three closed and two open doors.

  The first two rooms they came to were empty. In the third, they encountered a couple of servants engaged in amorous pursuits; Yvette felt like a terrible spoilsport as she gave them number four stuns that would knock them out for two solid hours, but she knew her action was necessary. They could not afford to leave anyone behind them to sound the alarm; they could fight more effectively on only one front. Whispering an apology that the unconscious couple would never hear, she closed the door on them once more to restore their privacy.

  In the fourth room a man sat at a desk with his back to the door, engaged in writing. The two shadows crossing the doorway startled him and he turned quickly to see who his visitors were--but that was the last action he took for several hours. Jules's lightning reflexes stunned the man down where he was sitting without allowing him the chance to cry out in alarm.

  The fifth room was again empty, and they came at last to the stairway. The two d'Alemberts exchanged brief, encouraging glances. So far, all had gone smoothly; but from this point onward, they could expect trouble at any second. As nearly as they could figure it, there were at least two dozen people still occupying the lower floors of the house. The odds against the agents' catching all of them off guard were pretty high. They would have a fight on their hands before they were done this evening-but they had expected that and were prepared for it. Their enemies were not.

  The time for stealth had passed; speed would now be their best weapon. At the tiniest nod from Jules, both of them took off down the stairs side-by-side at top speed, streaks of fury moving at a rate that would have seemed impossible for normal human beings to attain.

  But then, the d'Alemberts were not exactly normal human beings. For more than ten generations their family had resided on the planet DesPlaines, a world of heavy metals and forbidding mountains with a surface gravity three times higher than that of Earth.

  Weaklings were weeded out in the first two generations by the planet's harsh conditions.

  The current inhabitants of DesPlaines were all superstrong and superfast. They had to be-merely standing up and walking around in such a gravitational field would tax the energies of normal people, not to mention the fact that, on a world where objects would fall at three times the terrestrial rate of acceleration, a survivor had to have lightning re- flexes. There was hardly any such thing as a "minor" accident on DesPlaines. Those who survived were definitely the fittest.

  But their genetic background was shared by more than seven million other inhabitants of their home world. What made Jules and Yvette stand out even further was the family heritage of the d'Alemberts, the long line of circus performers that traced all the way back to the founding of the Circus of the Galaxy. Physical training and agility had been the keynote of their education from the moment of their birth; now, at the very peak of their careers, Jules and Yvette were the most perfect physical specimens humanity could hope to produce.

  Little wonder, then, that the two SOTS agents came flying down the stairs at speeds calculated to dazzle the unsuspecting people they were hunting. The middle floor of the house was populated by the servants, who were banished to this level to be out of the way of the bigwigs conferring on the ground floor. They were small fry being caught in the d'Alemberts' net, of no strategic value, but they had to be stunned anyway; they would otherwise fight to protect the safety of the house, and a fight was the last thing the DesPlainian siblings wanted.

  As Jules raced into the final room on this floor, he spotted a servant standing beside a basin. He fired his stunner on pure reflex, realizing at the instant he shot that the woman was drinking a glass of water. The glass fell from the woman's hand and, quick as Jules's reflexes were, he still could not catch it before it hit the floor. The glass shattered with a sound that seemed to fill the entire universe with its noise.

  There was no help for it-the alarm was out now. The people downstairs would have heard the sound and would be on edge until some explanation was forthcoming. Even though they would not be expecting a fullscale assault, they would be on the defensive and not nearly such easy pickings as the servants had been.

  As Yvette and Jules rushed back to the stairway to continue their descent into the house, neither said a word. They didn't have to; the two had worked together as a team for so many years, with their lives literally depending on their split-second precision, that their minds functioned as a single unit. They both knew what had to be done, and each knew precisely how the other would react to any conceivable circumstance.

  As they raced down the stairs in tandem, twin blurs against the powder blue wallpaper, a bead peered out from a doorway, obviously curious about the crashing noise from upstairs. The man's eyes widened at the sight of the two forms dashing down the steps, and he let out a yelp of astonishment. Yvette fired her stunner, but the man was just able to duck back out of sight, and begin sounding the alarm in earnest. The battle royal had begun.

  The stairs ended at the front of a hallway, with a large living room to the left and a slightly smaller salon to the right. Jules turned without hesitation toward the living room, leaving the other side of the house to the capable hands of his sister.

  As he entered the room, Jules looked an imposing foe indeed. His body was short, as was typical of DesPlainians--only 173 centimeters tall-but he was solidly muscled and not a man to be regarded casually. He was dressed in a gray jumpsuit (he and Yvette having decided that gray would offer better camouflage under the moons of Mellisande than dead black) and the tight cut of the clinging fabric emphasized all the bulging muscles of his hundred kilogram body. He turned his head back and forth quickly, further ruffling his short brown hair, as his steel gray eyes scanned the room to size up the situation.

  There were seven people in the living room, five men and two women. All of them were familiar to him from pictures he had studied. They were the major leaders of this world's criminal underground; a list of the offenses committed by just these seven people would have been taller than Jules, and each of them represented an organization that multiplied their powers manyfold.

  The closest person to the doorway was a man seated in a great chair. As Jules's fleeting form burst into the room, this man started to rise from his seat, one hand reaching into his coat pocket for a weapon. It was a move he never completed. Jules grabbed the man's hand before it could reach the holster; using his own forward momentum and the man's rising movement, he yanked the hapless gangster to his feet. That pull helped slow Jules down and, expert athlete that he was, he used that to his advantage. With his unwilling accomplice as an axis, Jules whirled around once, then planted his feet and swung the man around instead. The man was lifted off his feet and flew heavily through the air, colliding with another man and woman across the room and knocking them all to the ground, unconscious. Jules was not specifically a weightlifter-his cousin Rick could have performed the same feat a lot more effortlessly-but his powerful DesPlainian body could still put a lot of force behind his movements, and the result was most gratifying.

  By this time, though, the other four people in the room had been alerted enough to draw their own weapons-blusters, Jules noted quickly. These people did not play around with halfway measures. They would rather scorch some of the wallpaper than let him get away with the effrontery of this invasion.

  Jules's reflexes were faster, though. Stun-gun in hand, he downed two of the men across the room before having to duck to avoid the blaster beam that sizzled the air above his head. He turned his dodging motion into a low flat dive and a roll that brought him into collision with the knees of the last remaining male. The fellow was knocked off his feet and tumbled over Jules's body, thereby receiving a blaster bolt intended for Jules. There was only one foe left, a middle-aged woman with a steely glint in her eyes and a burning blaster in her hand.

  Under the proper circumstances, Jules could be as chivalrous as the most gallant courtier. But niceties such as not shooting a woman did not apply when that woman was trying to kill him. Raising his stunner once more, he squeezed off a shot that dropped the woman in her tracks. before she had a chance to correct her aim. He looked around quickly, making sure there were no other foes in the vicinity, then got to his feet and raced out to see if his sister needed any help.

  As she ran into the salon, Yvette d'Alembert looked hardly less formidable than her brother. Though ten centimeters shorter and thirty kilos lighter, her body was still of the sturdy DesPlainian stock. The gray jumpsuit that she, too, wore emphasized all the best aspects of her feminine form. She was a sight that would be pleasing to the eyes of any man-except one who had to come up against her in combat.

  She found five antagonists waiting for her as she entered the room, all men. Two of them she was able to dispose of immediately with her own stun-gun before she had to start dodging the blaster beams that the other three were employing liberally.

  She dived behind one large, overstuffed chair to avoid a beam that would otherwise have hit her at chest level. Taking advantage of her cover, she shot down another of her foes, and the remaining pair bolted. One of them tried to make it out the door, but Yvette was not going to allow that. Lifting the massive chair off the ground, she threw it with all her strength at the fleeing criminal. The man's blaster burned a hole through the upholstery, but couldn't slow the heavy object in its flight path. The impact of its weight knocked him hard against the wall, where he crumpled to the floor, unconscious.

  Throwing the chair left Yvette devoid of cover against the beams of the final gangster.

  She twisted away frantically as one bolt went by. It caught the edge of her gun, heating the stunner so much that Yvette could not hold onto it. She dropped the gun and fell behind a low coffee table, on top of which were several items of bric-a-brac.

  The last man, thinking his opponent disarmed and helpless, stood up and aimed his blaster carefully; he would take no chances on missing his shot this time. But he reckoned without knowledge of Yvette's resourcefulness and skill. Grabbing a small emerald statuette from the tabletop, the SOTE operative hurled it with all her DesPlainian strength and aerialist's accuracy straight at the face of her enemy. The object hit him in the jaw with a resounding crack of shattered bone, and the man fell backwards onto the floor, out cold.

 

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