Skolian Empire Fan Fiction Index

Part VII

Some Enchanted Evening

Chapter 31

In which security concerns are raised.

            As it turned out, Del was the only one in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area who was happy with Ricki’s choice of a dinner venue.  For everybody else, it was a monumental headache.

            “Johnny, we got a problem here at the restaurant,” the day shift manager of Niccolo’s reported to the owner’s older brother. 

            Johnny Sparnelli sighed at the com.  Edwin had worked at his brother Niccolo’s restaurant for five years, but he had only been promoted to his current exalted position the previous week.  With Nicki on vacation, it fell to Big Brother to keep things running smoothly.  “What is it?” he asked, as patiently as he could manage.

            “A double booking for the back room.” Edwin seemed more distressed than usual for such a common embarrassment.  “Cassie is new; she didn’t know that the fantasy gamers use it every Tuesday night.  It’s been going on so long, we don’t bother to write it on the book.  Most Tuesdays we could move the gamers out to the section next to the bar, but we’ll be running the basketball game this evening.  Alexandria’s hoping to go to the playoffs, and we’re expecting a big crowd.”

            The mob boss winced.  His numbers guys reported that betting was heavy on the game, and the safe money was that Alexandria would lose big. Putting orc-obsessed nerds next to drunken sports enthusiasts spoiling for a fight because their team was losing was a recipe for a very nasty, very one-sided brawl.  “Perhaps the other party could be moved instead?” he suggested.

            Edwin shook his head.  “That would be even worse.  The other party is a celebrity.  One of those holorock singers.  Put him out in the main room, and we’ll have a full-scale riot in the neighborhood.”

            “I’d rather avoid that,” the mob chieftain agreed.

            Niccolo’s Family-Style Italian Restaurant and Bar occupied the bottom floor of Nicki Sparnelli’s home.  He lived in a bachelor apartment on the top floor.  Johnny Sparnelli lived two doors down, and the empty lot between the two houses held a lush, private garden surrounded by a high, stone wall.  The close proximity of the two buildings and the equally close fraternal bond shared by their owners explained why the zoning commission had been so cooperative in granting the necessary exemptions, and why none of the neighbors had complained about the irregularity.

            “If this singer’s gotta be private, take him upstairs to Nicki’s apartment.”

            Edwin actually looked shocked.  “I can’t stick him in a messy apartment with two cats and a parrot that curses in gutter Italian!  Del Arden is a real star.  He’s used to the best.”

            Johnny Sparnelli’s back straightened.  “Wait a minute.  You said this celebrity is Del Arden?”

            “Yeah.”  The manager spread his hands wide.  “He’s got a following.  If he happens to mention that he took his woman out to Niccolo’s and we didn’t treat him right, the newsfeeds will be all over it and business will suffer.”

            “Del Arden, coming to dinner at Niccolo’s,” the mobster repeated thoughtfully.  He considered the situation for a moment, staring off into space, then looked back at the screen.  “Put them on my back patio,” he ordered crisply.  “That’s nice and private.”

            “Your patio?” Edwin looked bewildered.  “You mean in your garden?”

            “Yeah.”  Sparnelli smiled at the manager’s confusion.  “As it turns out, I owe that little punk of a songbird, Del Arden.  You might call it…a family debt of honor.”

            “A debt of… Oh.”

            Edwin knew just enough about the Sparnelli family business—the other one—to ask no more questions. 

            “Ma’am, we’ve got something interesting on the Sparnelli bug.”

            Donna Eppestine, head of the FBI organized crime unit for the Washington, D.C., area, looked up from the stack of paperwork she had been working through.  “Ezra, I’ve spent all morning looking for a way to justify our budget next year.  Don’t tell me that malfunctioning piece of junk has actually given us something useful at last?”

            It had taken almost a year of painstaking work to gather the evidence required to convince a judge to allow a wiretap on Johnny Sparnelli’s home.  When they finally had a warrant, their initial efforts to plant a listening device had been discovered and destroyed with contemptuous ease.  Six more months had gone by before they finally smuggled a live bug into the house, built into a new floor lamp.  For one glorious week, they had been able to hear every word spoken in the mob boss’s office perfectly. 

            Unfortunately, it had happened to be a week in which the Sparnelli family was painting the interior of their home, including the patriarch’s office.  The bug did collect sufficient evidence to construct a detailed profile of the sexual proclivities of the painters’ girlfriends, but like any sensible businessman, Sparnelli had chosen to conduct his business from his brother’s house next door during the renovation, escaping the fumes.      Then the painters with the athletic sweethearts had managed to knock the lamp over while moving the furniture back into the office.  Its function as a light-generating device was not affected, but the clandestine mic hidden inside had been plagued with intermittent static even since.  While the resulting recordings were not clear enough to present in court as evidence, they had provided some tantalizing tidbits from time to time.  Eppestine remained hopeful that they would eventually point her team toward a prosecutable crime-in-progress.

            “What have you got?” she asked.

            Ezra Paints, her tall beanpole of a second, shrugged.  “Maybe something big, maybe nothing at all.  Take a look at it and tell me what you think.”  He tapped a key, transferring the transcript to her screen.  “It’s a conversation between Sparnelli and Torrelli.”

            “Torrelli,” Eppestine said thoughtfully.  “That could be very interesting, indeed.”

            Vincent Torrelli was one of Johnny Sparnelli’s inner circle.  He handled security and ran the enforcement side of the business.  He was also the family’s hit man of choice when a quiet disappearance was in order.

            The transcript was distressingly full of ellipses, as usual, but some key words and phrases caught her eye:

            “…guy…sonofabitch…”

            “Nah, just business…hatchet…in my own garden…”

            “…really going to bury….”

            “…keep real quiet…”

            “Right,…no trouble…”

            “…depend on you.”

            “Tonight.”

            Eppestine looked at her second in triumph.  “Ezra, call the team together,” she ordered crisply.  “We’ve got an operation to plan, and there’s not much time.”

            “Come on, Mendoza,” Patrolman O’Ryan argued, pointing to the signs posted at the entrance to the small, decrepit playground.  “You can read as well as I can.  ‘Playground Closed for Repairs,’ ‘No Loitering, No Cruising.’”

            Manuel Diego de la Mendoza refused to back down.  “So what is the problem?” he demanded in return.  “We do not loiter, we do not cruise.”

            As captain of Los Lobos Grises, the Grey Wolves, the baddest motorcycle club (some might call them a gang) in the area, Mendoza had a reputation to maintain.  While tensions between his club and the local law enforcement had eased in the aftermath of hurricane Ethan, a certain basic conflict of interest remained.  Still, the exchange was more civil than it would have been the previous spring.

            O’Ryan, for instance, did not immediately threaten to arrest them out of hand.  Instead, he pointed inside the playground and asked, “So why do you have fifteen motorcycles hanging out in a closed-for-repairs kiddie playground at six thirty in the evening?”

            “Why, we plan the repairs, of course.”  At the policeman’s disbelieving look, he made an impatient gesture.  “We get word today:  Mr. Wrexley will match funds that were donated to Ms. Alvins for repair of playground.” 

            Newsie Ginny Alvins had made quite a campaign over Wrexley Utilities’ five-hour delay in removing the live high-voltage power line that had melted the playground’s climbing bars, so that the company’s CEO could enjoy a photo op with a congressman and make a speech to justify his proposed rate hike.  The image of the twisted, sparking tangle of melted bars—and Wrexley’s contemptuous refusal to expedite repair of the damage, caught on camera—had gone viral, providing a rallying point for those upset with the company’s slow response to repairing storm damage.

            “So Wrexley backed down, did he?”  O’Ryan’s almost vindictive pleasure was perhaps a little more than an officer of the law ought to display while on duty, but he had guarded the playground nonstop for five agonizing hours, waiting for a repair crew that never came.  “He must have gotten tired of having every holorock fan in North America calling him a greedy corporate pig.”

            The primary reason that Alvins’ story had gone viral was that her ‘cast had contained footage of leading holorock star Del Arden in addition to the less photogenic Wrexley and his pet congressman.  The singer’s reclusive habits and excellent private security guaranteed that any clips including him would be viewed multiple times by his millions of fans. 

            Arden’s eloquent intervention on the side of the children’s right to a safe playground had won the singer the loyalty of the entire run-down, poverty-stricken neighborhood.  Del Arden T-shirts had become mysteriously popular, even among those adults who disliked holorock.  Needless to say, they had become as much a part of the Lobos Grises uniform as the patches showing a rather crudely drawn wolf that decorated their leather jackets. 

            “There is a meeting in two days at the high school to plan how to use the money,” Mendoza continued.  “With Wrexley’s…donation, there is enough money to replace more than the climbing bars. We want to have a good plan ready, so nothing is wasted and we have a playground that is as good as any in Virginia.  Today, we visit ten playgrounds to see what the rich people build.  Now we each make a plan, so we can put the best parts together.”

            O’Ryan was only partially mollified.  “So how does driving your motorcycles around in the playground help with that?”

            Mendoza sought patience, always a difficult task for him when dealing with an authority figure.  “We measure to see what fits.”

            “…measure?”

            “We make a map.”  He turned to his own motorcycle, which he had dismounted in hopes of meeting the policeman halfway and avoiding exactly this sort of confrontation.  “From front, here,” he pointed, “to back, here, is two meters.  Where closer measure is needed, like with place for water fountain, a wheel is one meter around and the spokes divide into ten.  You see?”

            O’Ryan shook his head.  “Now, that is the strangest way to survey a lot I’ve never heard of before.”  He did not, however, seem inclined to stop them.  In fact, he seemed more interested than annoyed, which was pretty unusual, in Mendoza’s experience.  “What have you got for plans?”

            Mendoza called over his shoulder to the group of Lobos inside the playground fence.  “Gilberto, all of you!  Bring the plans!  Officer O’Ryan wants to look at them.”

            Mendoza’s lieutenant brought over the preliminary plans of the club members, sketched out with varying degrees of artistry over the classified ads in the back of a motorcycling magazine, a brown paper bag from the deli across the street, and other random bits of paper.  O’Ryan looked them over carefully.  “These are good,” he admitted, with what sounded like surprise.  “Oh, I can see a few problems.  You’d want to move the bathroom to here,” he pointed at the paper bag, “because the sewer runs down the center of the street and laying pipe is expensive.  Why waste your limited money on things that the kids can’t play on?  Also, in this one, you’ve got to have a cover on the sandbox so the alley cats don’t use it.”

            “He’s right,” Gilberto admitted. 

            “There’re labor and construction costs to think about, too.  That one’s a pretty elaborate setup.”  He pointed at a grocery receipt.  “Building something that complicated would be more expensive than getting several simpler structures ready-made.”

            “We think, if we get everybody in the neighborhood to help, we can buy the materials and put it together ourselves.  Like Prince Arden did, clearing those trees that fell.”

            “Construction is tricky, and you don’t want a playground to have mistakes.  You’ll have to hire an engineer go over it and…”       

            O’Ryan broke off as his com beeped an imperative summons.  He tapped the acceptance key and said, “O’Ryan here.”  He listened for a long moment, then objected, “Sir, one person really can’t…” 

            A long pause, then, “I’ll do what I can, sir, of course,” and he ended the call. 

            “I’d like to talk this over with you more,” O’Ryan said, in his normal sour tones, “but your friendly neighborhood Skolian holorock star Del Arden is taking his girl out to dinner at Niccolo’s tonight.  His security team gave the Chief a heads-up, and the Chief’s pulling me off patrol to do crowd control.  Not that one officer can do a whole lot against a bar full of rabid fans wanting autographs, even with those fancy bodyguards of his to help.  That would take a dozen or more officers, working together.”

            Mendoza hesitated, trying to wrap his mind around the idea that had just occurred to him.  It was unprecedented, absurd, and distinctly unrad.  He wasn’t at all sure his club would agree, but…it felt like the right thing to do.  “Prince Arden, he is a good man, to help make our neighborhood safe,” the club chief said slowly.  “He should have his time with his woman without people to bother him.”  Half defiantly, he looked O’Ryan in the eye.  “We are not police, but we are strong.  Good fighters.  We will help you keep people away from Prince Arden.” 

            O’Ryan looked at him for a long moment, then shook his head.  “Thank you for the offer, but no.” 

            Mendoza opened his mouth to protest, but the policeman held up a hand to cut him off.  “You and your club are good fighters, and good fighters make lousy police officers.  A police officer is a public servant.  That means everybody out there is your boss, and has to be treated as such.  Even when a kid half your age calls you names, you’re not allowed to act insulted, or take a swing, or even arrest his mouthy ass to teach him some manners.”

            The policeman looked around at the assembled club members, many of whom glanced away or shuffled their feet in embarrassment, recognizing themselves in that description.

            “The Allied Worlds Constitution allows all citizens to criticize the government, its policies, and its representatives freely, without fear of punishment or retaliation.  You kids are not the only ones who feel duty-bound to exercise that right every time they see a police uniform.  As an officer of the law, you can tell yourself that it’s not you, it’s the uniform, but that doesn’t make it any easier to stand there and take it when some drunken fool gets in your face.  It’s no job for a hothead with a touchy temper.” 

            Mendoza almost felt dizzy as the world he thought he knew shifted around him with the policeman’s words.  “Surely we can help,” he protested weakly.

            “If you want to help, make sure nobody has to call in a disorderly conduct complaint about noisy motorcycles on my beat while I’m gone.  That way, there’ll be backup available if I need it.”  He gestured toward the scribbled playground plans.  “Work on those, then com me tomorrow and show me what you’ve got.”  He recited his comcode.  “Fresh eyes often see things that have been overlooked.” 

            “Sure, Officer O’Ryan,” a subdued Mendoza agreed to the policeman’s back as he hurried for his vehicle.

            “We aren’t a bunch of hotheads!” Rimon snarled after the retreating taillights.  A muttered, angry agreement spread through the group.

            Mendoza spoke slowly.  “Rimon, if some rich punk who thinks that the fancy car his daddy gave him makes him better than you comes up to you and tells you that you’re a dirty spic and your mother has to be a puta because all spic girls are putas, do you think you could smile, shrug, and walk away without answering?  Be honest, with me and with yourself.”

            When Rimon remained stubbornly silent, the club leader shook his head slowly.  “Myself, I could not do that, either.  I have a temper.  But some of us…”  He looked around, assessing the group.  “Gilberto, Rosalie, Anamaria, Javier, and Benito will go into the bar, in two groups.”

            The five indicated looked at each other, then at their leader.

            “You will sit quietly and do nothing, unless somebody recognizes Prince Arden and too many people try to get close to him.  Then, you will work with O’Ryan and Prince Arden’s bodyguards to keep him safe and get the crowd moving away from him.  Do you understand?”

            The five nodded gravely, then Anamaria said softly, “We should wear boring clothes and leave our jackets outside.  If we wear our Arden shirts, people will be thinking about him.”

            “And the less they think about him, the less likely they are to recognize him,” Mendoza finished approvingly.  “Chiquita?”

            A tall girl whose black hair had been dyed wine-red and highlighted with gold in honor of her idol said, “Chief?”

            “You will monitor the Del Arden fan sites for rumors that Prince Arden is at Niccolo’s, so we have warning.”

            “I can do that,” she said.  “I can make up some other rumors to confuse things, too.”

            “What about the rest of us?” Rimon protested.

            “The rest of us…” Mendoza looked around at the others.  “The rest of us will spread out and patrol the neighborhood.  We will stop the paparazzi if they try to bother Prince Arden, and if the news gets out and his fans come, we will tell them that he has left to sign cubes at one of the vid stores.”

            With cheers, Los Lobos Grises dispersed to take up their appointed tasks.

            At half past seven that evening, the doors to the elevator that serviced the executive tower of the Prime-Nova complex opened and disgorged four passengers into the parking garage.  Two were obvious bodyguards and the blond bombshell was definitely the type of arm candy you’d expect to find with somebody who could afford to hire such formidable protection.  The fourth passenger was one of the most instantly recognizable, photogenic faces in human-settled space, at least among the younger generation.

            Across the garage, a man sat alertly forward in the seat of a common, dusty, undistinguished brown passenger vehicle, his movement concealed by tinted windows and the shadows around his chosen parking space.  “Del Arden, in the flesh!” he muttered to himself, setting aside the warm soda he’d been sipping to pass the time.  “Hammid, my boy, this is your lucky day.”

            He touched a button in the dashboard that activated several concealed surveillance devices and watched closely. “Curiouser and curiouser,” he remarked as a battered vending van pulled up in front of the group.  “A drug purchase, perhaps?”

            He watched as all four climbed into the van. 

            “Jackpot!” 

            He waited until the van started to roll toward the exit, then set his own vehicle rolling casually after it.

Chapter 32

In which Niccolo’s Italian Restaurant and Sports Bar becomes very crowded.

            Most men strive for distinction.  Hammid Gurtchel had abandoned that battle long since.  Being overlooked was far more useful.  His appearance was completely forgettable:  average size and weight, middle-aged, with dishwater brown hair cut to no particular style.  He wore mass-produced clothing that wasn’t new enough to be fashionable, old enough to be retro, or odd enough to be interesting. 

            His car was like him: common, brown, and generally worn around the edges.  There were hundreds like it on the streets of Northern Virginia, ferrying office drones and soccer moms.  Gurtchel’s car was perhaps more lived-in than most: the passenger side floor was littered with layers of candy wrappers, fast food containers, and used paper napkins.  There was one other way in which the car deviated from average.  The back was packed with surveillance equipment.  Drone cameras with miniature mics, receivers and recorders, none of it quite state-of-the-art, but all of it meticulously maintained and very effective.  None of this showed to a casual, or even not-so-casual observer, through the standard-issue tinted reflective windows. 

            For Hammid Gurtchel was a predatory bottom feeder, one of the best paparazzi in the business, and his rightful prey was wary and used to being hunted.  Like all ambush predators, he had patience.  Especially when he was hungry, and today he was hungrier than usual.

            Gurtchel made his living as a freelancer, selling embarrassing clips of celebrities to whomever might find them most useful.  His most profitable work, documenting the sexual peccadilloes or criminal activities of various politicians, had never made it onto the mesh.  Such scores were few and far between, however.  Most of his income came from clips sold to the entertainment tabloids.  He recalled with some fondness his profitable front-row seat for the neuro-amp-induced meltdown of Mind Mix’s drummer Tackman, during which several restaurant patrons had been assaulted and a wait-bot had been demolished before the police had arrived and spoiled the fun.  Unfortunately, his chief buyer, the weekly scandal rag Lives of the Famous, had suffered a downturn in views over the summer and what he’d had to offer this week had been turned down as old news. 

            “The views are going to the big newsvids, believe it or not,” Jack had complained.  “The public wants to see more about Del Arden tweaking Senator Greeley, not Mind Mix’s drug problems.”

            “Del Arden’s security is good,” Gurtchel had pointed out.  “A lot of us have tried to get onto that estate of his, but nobody’s managed even a long shot of the grounds.”

            “So find me something else,” was Jack’s unsympathetic retort.  “Our readership isn’t known for their attention span.  Get me something to distract them—the sort of juicy story the newsvids won’t run.”

            Gurtchel had been sitting in the Prime-Nova parking garage for two hours, on the off chance that he could pick up pretty singer Jenny Summerland and tail her to someplace questionable for an appropriately scandalous shot.  It didn’t matter if real drugs or sex were involved, after all.  Jack employed plenty of imaginative people who could write good, salacious copy without crossing the line into libel, but the photos being captioned had to be authenticated.

            He hadn’t really expected to get anything useful this evening; he was simply tracking his prey’s habits.  Like any good predator, however, he was quite prepared to pounce on an even more succulent target of opportunity.  It was pure luck that he had happened to be positioned at the right time and place to see a snack-food delivery truck as worn and undistinguished as his own vehicle pull into a space near the elevator that serviced the executive offices.  It had struck him as odd, because the part of the garage near the freight elevators had emptied out long ago, leaving plenty of space in which to unload cargo.  A very large, very fit man with an unusual, almost foreign look to him had gotten out of the passenger side.  He had walked a circuit around the vehicle, scanning the garage carefully, checked his com, then climbed back inside. 

            The man wasn’t newsworthy in himself, but his behavior had been strange enough that Gurtchel had noticed it.  When Prime-Nova’s hottest property and his retinue had climbed into the van some fifteen minutes later, the paparazzo knew his rent money was in the bank.  Rock stars rode in fancy limos, and that was doubly true for rock stars who happened to be fabulously rich princes from foreign, 900-planet empires.  The only reason for Del Arden to ride in a battered, anonymous van was that he intended to go someplace where he didn’t want to be seen—and that smelled like money in Gurtchel’s account, one way or the other.

            He followed the van at a cautious distance, blending in with the dozens of identical vehicles on the freeway.  He dropped back even farther when the van took to the surface streets, using a specialized, illegal copy of a police mesh-ap to track the van through downloads from the streetcams at the intersections.  When the van entered a certain working-class neighborhood with a large Italian-speaking population, he grinned and prepped a drone camera.

            As he had hoped, the drone captured the van pulling into the service drive behind Niccolo’s, the Mob restaurant.  It wasn’t a perfect shot: the sign wasn’t visible.  However, there was a distinctive mural of the Sicilian countryside painted on the restaurant’s back wall and an ornate, wrought iron gate at the end of the drive. That was enough to validate the photo’s location, if he added a continuous shot starting at the sign in front and panning around the building. 

            That was for later, however.  A big man who looked like he knew how to fight opened the gate and came through to greet the visitors.  A minute later, the van pulled through the gate into the garden beyond.  Gurtchel chortled in delight, because he was well acquainted with the seamier side of Northern Virginia.  The gate was one of two breaks in the high, stone wall that surrounded Mob chief Johnny Sparnelli’s house and the vacant lot between it and his brother’s restaurant.

            Which meant that holorock superstar and Ruby prince Del Arden wasn’t just taking a possibly interesting girl out for an Italian dinner and a special, chemically active dessert.  He had a secret meeting with the Mob.

            “You and your party are welcome to Niccolo’s, Mr. Arden,” Vincent Torrelli greeted the van’s passengers politely.  “The restaurant is crowded tonight and we have no private room available.  However, if you and your lady are willing to sit outside, we can accommodate you with perfect privacy in my boss’ garden.”  He gestured through the gate, where a riot of overgrown tomato and squash vines battled with peppers, chard, and a profusion of late-season flowers.

            I don’t like this, Wasther thought grimly from his seat next to Cameron.  He’s no restaurant worker.  He’s got thug written all over him.

            Of course he does, Del replied.  He’s Johnny Sparnelli’s second in command.  But Sparnelli said he’d stay away from me and mine, I don’t get any hint of an intent to ambush us, and Torrelli’s the person who’d plan such an operation.

            Unable to hear the silent exchange, Cameron drove the van carefully through the gate and into the parking spot Torrelli indicated.  Tyra got out first and scanned the area, but although there were several security cameras overlooking the garden and a half dozen people in the sprawling old house on the other side of it, there was nothing to indicate an immediate threat.  Reluctantly, she opened the door for Del and Ricki.

            Torelli led the way down a narrow path through the garden, stepping carefully over a large orange squash that had grown in the middle of it.  In the center was a circular patio with a little fountain that sent water trickling down over some colored rocks.  Next to it was a picnic table covered with a white linen tablecloth, ornately folded napkins, a candle, and plates and cutlery in a faux-Tuscan pattern. 

            Tyra scanned the area, confirming that there were no explosives present, then nodded grudging approval.  There was no sniper’s line-of-sight through the vegetables on the restaurant side or the fruit trees that grew between the fountain and the house.  Any assault would be at least slowed by the wall and the narrow pathways.  It wasn’t the estate, but she had no justification for pulling Del out if he wanted to stay.

            A mockingbird started singing.

            “This is lovely,” Ricki observed, smiling, and so it was decided.

            “I’ll have the kitchen send over your antipasto platter immediately,” Torelli assured them, and left them in peace.

            Inside the restaurant proper, the crowd was keeping the waitstaff busy.  Most of the tables were occupied and the bar was full of groans and occasional cheers as Alexandria performed down to the bookies’ expectations. 

            In the back room, a dozen nerds clustered around a holographic projection of a fanciful, medieval-esque building, contentedly arguing whether a 10^th-level magical blast that had failed to hit a wyvern would carry sufficient kinetic energy to collapse a flying buttress, and if so, whether the thief among the wyvern-hunting party would have time to snatch certain articles of value from the far end of the room before the entire structure collapsed.  Since the membership of the gaming club included two structural engineering graduate students, a materials science major, a budding archeologist, two physicists, an animal behaviorist, two med students, and a physiologist, the issue required a great deal of serious number-crunching and analysis. 

            Silas, the English major who ran the club, made one valiant attempt to argue that the presence of a fire-breathing, flying, two-legged dragon the size (and mass) of a horse was sufficient evidence that the gaming scenario existed in a fantasy universe where the normal laws of physics and biology did not apply.  This sensible argument was met with blank stares.  Even Jenna the medieval historian, who could usually be counted on for support at such times, was getting involved in the discussion, telling stories of Gothic cathedral-building mania.  Sighing, he refilled his glass from the pitcher on the table.  It was going to be one of those nights.

            Out in the main room, Officer O’Ryan stood in a secluded corner with a good view of the bar, sipping at a glass of soda water as he scanned the crowd for signs of trouble.  Across the room, Edwin watched in growing concern.  With a uniform present, the bar’s usual bouncers (and bookies) were not free to take care of business in their accustomed fashion.  Even more worrisome, the police presence hinted at some potential enforcement activity in the near future. 

            O’Ryan stiffened as two Latinos and a Latina came through the door and made their way to the last empty table in the bar area.  A few moments later, another Hispanic couple entered.  With all the tables occupied, they were forced to join their friends. 

            The Grey Wolves had left their leather jackets outside with their beloved motorcycles.  However, there had not, after all, been time to change into other shirts, so Del Arden’s face was proudly displayed across their chests.

            “Those idiots!” the policeman muttered under his breath.  “They’re going to start a riot.”  He strolled toward the restroom in a casual path that took him by the table and hissed, “I told you kids to stay away!”

            Gilberto shrugged.  “It is a free country, or so they told us in school.  I and my friends are taking the women out for a nice dinner.”

            “Your woman is Chiquita.”

            “Chiquita doesn’t like Italian food.”

            O’Ryan felt his face growing purple.  “And where are the rest of the Wolves?  Don’t bother telling me they’re at home.”

            “They check the neighborhood and the mesh.  If people say Prince Arden is here and come to see him, we know early.” 

            “God help us,” the policeman muttered under his breath. 

            Legally, there was nothing he could do.  Niccolo’s was a public restaurant, and the public was free to enter as long as the management didn’t object.  Given that the restaurant tolerated its owner’s brother and his henchmen, O’Ryan doubted that they’d object to a minor street gang, so long as Los Lobos paid their bills and didn’t start a brawl.

            “Just…don’t do anything to cause trouble,” he warned Gilberto, aware as he said it that the boy knew it was an empty warning. 

            Forgetting all about the bathroom, he beat an ignominious retreat back to his corner of the bar.

            On the patio, Del and Ricki were starting to pick through a generous antipasto platter, accompanied by a crisp Malvasia wine.  The mockingbird had made so much noise that a blue jay had dropped by to see what the fuss was all about.  It squawked thoughtfully, then swooped down to snatch an olive that had fallen off the plate and rolled to the edge of the patio.

            Ricki chuckled.  “Daring little scamp, isn’t he?” she remarked to Del, nibbling on a piece of pickled cauliflower. 

            “He’s just quick to take advantage of a lucky quirk of fate,” the singer pointed out, as he placed a piece of dried sausage on a slice of fresh bread.

            “I’ve never been good at that,” Ricki admitted.  “I guess I just have trouble believing in luck, at least for myself.”  She sipped at her glass of wine, then shook her head at the absurdity of the situation.  “When I was little, I had a playmate who lived across the hall from my mother’s apartment.  Darlene.  Her goal in life was to be a princess.  She had no idea what a princess was, of course, except that she was by definition the prettiest girl at the party and got to wear the fanciest dress.  I remember one day, just after my father disappeared on us, I got tired with her games and told her that things like that didn’t happen to poor girls like us.  She got pretty upset at me for criticizing her dream and screamed back that a girl with my attitude would certainly never get a man at all, much less a prince.  Ironic, isn’t it?”

            “Very,” Del agreed.

            On the other side of the wall, a van coasted slowly down the street toward Niccolo’s.  The painted panels on its sides bore the logo of a local tree-trimming company that contracted with Wrexley Utilities.  It pulled into a space underneath a utility pole across the street from the restaurant and started deploying the stabilizers that would allow the boom lift arm to deploy.

            Which was rather odd, because the only trees on the block grew on the other side of the street.

            A busker who had spent the last four hours in a corner of the parking lot collected the half-dozen crumpled dollars from the bottom of his battered guitar case and pocketed them.  Despite the full parking lot, he packed his instrument carefully into the case, made sure the latch was firmly closed, and carried it down the street.  When he reached the van, he glanced quickly around.  Seeing no watchers, he pulled open the rear door and jumped inside.

            The interior of the van was crowded with surveillance equipment, screens, and all five members of the FBI organized crime unit assigned to take down the Sparnellis. 

            Donna Eppestine looked up from her coffee to greet the newcomer.  “Dieter, what have you got for us?”

            Agent Dieter Buchwald shook his head.  “Something’s going down tonight, that’s for sure.  The bar shouldn’t be this crowded, big basketball game or not.  A lot more of the Sparnelli enforcers are hanging around than usual, too, and I spotted a uniformed policeman going in earlier.  We may finally have gotten a lead on who tipped the Sparnellis off before those last two raids.  I’ve got his prowler’s number.”  He pulled a dog-eared chart out of his pocket, found the proper scribble, and recited the number.

            “Cindy,” Eppestine said.

            “I’m on it.”  Her infosearch expert was already tapping at her comlink.  She stared at the results on her screen, then whistled. 

            “Something good?” her boss prompted.

            “The prowler is assigned to one Patrick O’Ryan.  He’s a beat cop over on the poor side of town.  Annandale Manors.”

            It was Ezra who asked the obvious question.  “So what’s he doing all the way over here in Mob territory?”

            “That’s not all,” Dieter continued.  “There’s a motorcycle gang in the neighborhood.  Some Hispanic club I don’t recognize.  The logo’s a grey dog.”

             “An Hispanic gang visits the Mob with a cop from their neighborhood,” Cindy said thoughtfully.  “I don’t like the sound of that, at all.”

            Ezra cursed.  “Just what we need: the Sparnellis making a deal with the South American drug runners.”

            “There’s more,” Dieter’s eyes assumed a haunted look.  “A while back, a van entered the Sparnelli compound through the alley behind the restaurant.  The windows were set to reflect, but about twenty minutes later a guy walked the wall from the outside.  I recognized him.”

            “Don’t tell me the Sparnellis have invited the Vincezzos down from New York?” Eppestine asked.  Before his assignment to her squad, Dieter had worked out of the New York office.

            “No.”  Dieter’s reluctance was almost palpable.  “It’s not the Vincezzos.  This guy…I know him from the Marines.  Sean Cameron.  He was one of the best, went for Special Forces about the time I left for the FBI Academy.”  The agent shook his head.  “I’d figured Cameron for career.”

            “What happened?” Cindy asked gently.

            “I was never able to find out,” her colleague said.  “I just heard that he’d left Annapolis—moved off base and all—and gone to work as muscle for some rock singer.”  He looked at Eppestine.  “A man like Cameron doesn’t leave the Special Forces on a whim.  Something bad must have happened to him, to bring him into Johnny Sparnelli’s orbit.  He was good, Donna.  Very, very good.  They’d have turned down his biomech to civilian levels before letting him go, but they can’t erase his training, and he was plenty dangerous before he got the enhancements.”

            “We have got to find out what’s happening inside that compound,” Eppestine stated the obvious.  “Ezra, you take the cherry picker.  Get eyes on that garden.  I want to know who is involved in this ambush and who the intended victim is.”

            Her second, who was already dressed in realistically stained off-white overalls, nodded as he strapped on an equally realistic utility belt.

            “Dieter, you and Peter get to walk the wall.  I want mics set to get anything going on in that garden.  Don’t worry about hiding the bugs for the ages.  It’s more important to get good sound tonight than to keep the Sparnellis from trashing our equipment tomorrow.  When you’re done, try to set a few bugs in the restaurant, too.”

            A stocky man whose dark skin blended perfectly with the shadows at the front of the van nodded and reached for two surveillance kits. 

            “Let’s do this, people,” Eppestine finished.  “Let’s take down the Sparnellis for good tonight.”

            Unfortunately for O’Ryan’s hopes, trouble was as much a part of the costume of the Grey Wolves as their Del Arden T-shirts and leather motorcycle jackets.  At the close of the first half, Alexandria was behind 35 to 60, thanks to a combination of some unpopular calls by the referees and an opposing center who was a foot taller and almost a hundred pounds heavier than Alexandria’s.  As hopes that the home team would reach the playoffs started to fade, the mood among the basketball fans grew darker.  One group of five young men wearing fraternity letters on their jackets, and somewhat the worse for drink, had become particularly loud.  Disappointed in the performance of their team, and secure in the delusion that being starters on the Georgetown University hockey team made them the toughest men around, they were spoiling for a fight.

            Edwin was debating whether he should call in the bouncers despite the presence of the policeman when it was suddenly too late.  The hockey team captain, weaving his way back to the bar with half-filled beer glass and empty pitcher, hooked the tip of his shoe on one of the legs of Gilberto’s chair.  He cursed as he stumbled and fell to his knees, dropping the pitcher and slopping the remains of his beer all over his hand.

            “Hey, man, are you all right?”  Gilberto asked, aware that most of the eyes in the bar had been attracted to the noise.

            The hockey captain’s handsome Nordic features twisted in humiliated anger as he struggled back to his feet.  “You did that on purpose!”

            “I promise, I did not.”  It was true, too. Gilberto had better things to do that evening than teach a college punk wannabe not to tangle with a motorcycle club second.  “Come, there’s no harm done that a wipe and a refill won’t fix.”  He reached to pull a paper napkin from the holder on the table and offered it with what he hoped was the proper balance of helpfulness and sympathy to convince the fellow to go pick a quarrel with somebody else.

            Expecting a fight, the young man was thrown off balance.  He looked at Gilberto and the rest of the Wolves with suspicion and not a little hostility as he demanded, “What are you people doing in this neighborhood, anyway?”

            Gilberto smiled and spread his hands, aware of O’Ryan’s eyes watching the exchange.  He tried to look friendly and harmless, just another put-upon member of the male species, as he said, “You are a man, so you know how it goes.  My friends and I wanted to watch the game, our women wanted to go someplace different, so we come here.”  He shrugged, nodding at the T-shirt tucked into the college student’s designer jeans.  “Where it is not so different, after all: I see that you and your friends like Alexandria and Del Arden, too.”

            Following her second’s lead, Anamaria leaned forward, wide-eyed, and asked, “Is that the Baltimore concert special edition shirt?”

            The young man preened under the feminine attention.  “Yeah.”  He nodded toward his teammates, who had come up behind him in support.  “We were at the concert, saw him tell off the President and all.”

            “Rad!”  Rosalie’s sultry lips parted in a slow smile.

            Her friend Anamaria had once described Rosalie’s smile, with some justification, as a strategic weapon with the stopping power of an elephant gun against any heterosexual human male.  The young man staggered under its impact and blinked, his intent to start a brawl completely forgotten. 

            “My name is Rosalie,” she murmured softly.

            He hastily cleared his throat.  “I’m James.  James Huthberg the Third.”  When she failed to recognize the name, he elaborated, “Georgetown hockey.  I’m team captain.”

            “Go, Bulldogs!”  Javier offered.

            “Have a refill, James.” Benito held up the still half-full pitcher that they had been nursing for the past half hour. 

            “Don’t mind if I do.”  James extended his glass in a still-wet hand.

            Gilberto leaned forward and introduced himself, the other men, and Anamaria, after which James somehow found himself introducing his teammates as Donald Havermacher, Bertram Lunderford, Richard Hutchens-Geary, and Geoffery Weston, Jr.

            The conversation came to an awkward pause as the two groups of young people realized that they had managed to place themselves in a situation in which they were required to make social conversation with people whom they would normally view with contempt.

            James was a Georgetown man, however, and captain of the hockey team.  There was also the girl with the stunning smile to impress.  He rose to the occasion and asked her, “Have you ever seen Del Arden in concert?”

            Rosalie shook her head.  “No, I haven’t heard him sing live.  The tickets were too expensive and I had to work that day.” 

            She looked up at James shyly through long lashes and the hockey player’s functional IQ dropped by half.  Since Rosalie was about as shy as a fighting pit bull, Gilberto correctly concluded that she was leading James around by his gonads, a strategy that would have met with violent objections had Rimon been present. 

            “We have all met Del Arden, though,” Gilberto interrupted, before Rosalie could take her game any farther.  “When he came to our neighborhood and spat in the eye of Wrexley Utilities.”

            “What?” James squawked.

            All five young men promptly forgot the basketball game, their beers, and even Rosalie. 

            “You were there?” Geoffrey asked.  “I must’ve watched that vid a dozen times.”  He turned to the room at large and called, “Hey, everybody, these guys were at that playground when Del Arden took on the power company!” 

            Silas the hapless English major, who had embarked on a quest for more beer and fried zucchini sticks as the argument among the fantasy players digressed into the exact chemical composition of wyvern fire, stopped and stared.  About two thirds of the sports fans in the bar also turned away from the big screen, on which Alexandria was now losing 35 to 67.  A babble of questions broke out, mercifully swamping the local newscaster’s efforts to remain cheerful and optimistic.

            Turning back to Gilberto and his friends, Geoffrey grabbed a spare chair from the table next to them and plopped down, urging, “Come on, tell us!”

            Shouts of agreement seconded the proposal.

            Nothing loath, Gilberto leaned back in his chair and surveyed his audience.  “Well, if you want to know what went down, it happened like this…”

Chapter 23

In which the usual suspects suspect each other.

            The pasta course came with glasses of a Graciano blend and a fresh garden salad.  Del had learned enough about Earth fruits and vegetables from his tour of the White House garden to be able to identify the sources of many of the ingredients in the salad bowl, although the identity of the large, black, bulbous fruits dangling from the branches of one plant eluded him. 

            Ricki couldn’t help.  She neither knew nor cared how food grew, so long as it was both plentiful and properly prepared.  She was more interested in watching a bright scarlet cardinal visit a bird feeder that hung on the branches of one of the fruit trees.

            In the quiet of the garden, as the shadows of the overgrown tomato vines started to reach across the patio, Ricki truly relaxed for the first time since she had learned that her prospective mother-in-law was to visit Earth.  The patio was a real-life version of her Life Million apartment: a place suspended in a time and space where neither Prime-Nova nor the Skolian Imperialate could reach them.  Their waiter was unobtrusive, the food was delicious, Del’s bodyguards were off patrolling the grounds, and his fans were safely ignorant of his whereabouts.

            “It’s nice to be away from all the insanity,” she admitted.  “I can handle the entertainment scene, but I’ve never had any political ambitions.”

            “I won’t promise you that you can stay of the whole political situation entirely,” Del admitted.  “Kelric’s made it pretty clear that part of the deal we struck to let me stay here includes me being an unofficial more-or-less direct contact between the Allied government and the Ruby Dynasty.  We’ll be expected to attend the occasional State dinner, and I expect President Loughten will bring her children out to the estate regularly enough to cover any use she wants to make of my…private means of communication with my family.  But most of the time, Ambassador Tron will handle the diplomatic duties, and we’ll be left pretty much alone to live our lives as we see fit.”

            Ricki thought that over, then nodded.  “I can live with that, I think.  As long as we can get away like this now and then.” 

            Del reached across the table to take her hand.  “It’s all in how you look at it,” he explained.  “I prefer to concentrate on the positive:  we have a whole, golden evening to be alone together before the world intrudes back into our lives.”

            She smiled.  “Alone sounds very good, just now.”

            George Sparnelli approached his uncle’s guest’s chief bodyguard with all due caution, speaking when he was still a good ten feet away.

            “Ma’am?”

            She turned to look at him with almost panther-like grace, a tall woman dressed in civilian clothing except for military-style gauntlets.  She was alert but in no way intimidated despite his greater height and criminal connections.  That in itself was a warning that she should not be underestimated, despite her ordinary appearance. 

            George was used to having people be afraid of him.  His fellow students had feared him when he was in school and now, the merchants and gamblers whose protection payments and debts he collected quaked when he appeared.  He was a made man, a thug to be feared among the brotherhood.  Even strangers who didn’t know that he was Johnny Sparnelli’s nephew stepped aside for him, their instincts warning that he wasn’t a man to cross.

            If half the rumors about Skolian Jagernauts were true, this woman could take him out bare-handed without breaking a sweat. 

            She met his gaze squarely.  “Yes?”

            Thus encouraged, George took a few steps closer.  “I’m George Sparnelli.  My Uncle Johnny saw your crew patrolling outside.  He says one of you is welcome to come inside the house and watch on his security monitors.  The cameras cover the alley and street pretty well.” 

            One eyebrow arched.  “That’s generous of him.” 

            She considered for a moment, then gestured one of her colleagues over.  Unlike his superior officer, this man looked the part of a foreign super-warrior.  He was bigger than George, and none of it was fat.  He moved with the balance and precision of a martial artist.  The small cannon hanging at the man’s side seemed almost an afterthought.

            “George Sparnelli, this is Secondary Na’veth Wasther,” the bodyguard’s superior introduced them.  “Na’veth, George’s uncle has offered to let you watch the security monitors he has set up on the approaches.”

            “It’ll be a little noisy,” George warned, as he led the massive Jagernaut toward the house.  “Vince’s cousin plays for Alexandria, so everybody is coming over to watch the game.  Do you like Alexandria, or do you prefer Buffalo?”

            The massive shoulders shrugged.  “Alexandria is a nice area.  I’ve never been to Buffalo.”

            George halted in shocked astonishment at such a display of ignorance.  “Not the towns,” he blurted out, embarrassed for the man.  “The basketball teams.”

            Fortunately, the Jagernaut didn’t seem to take the implied criticism personally.  “I’ve only been on Earth for about two of your months,” he explained.  “I don’t know much about North America’s popular sports.”

            “Oh.”  George tried to wrap his mind around the idea of a civilization that didn’t play basketball.  It made his head hurt, so he tried another conversational gambit.  “She called you Secondary.  Isn’t that a military rank?  For the Skolian Jagernauts?”

            One corner of the man’s mouth twitched upward with amusement as he agreed, “Yes, it is.”

            George threw caution to the wind in the face of this admission.  “Do you fly a Jag fighter?” he asked eagerly, remembering the vidcast of the graceful, deadly white ships that had escorted the Skolian flagship into Earth orbit. 

            “I did,” the man admitted.  “During the first Radiance War.”

            “I was going to enlist in ASC when I finished school,” George confessed shyly.  “I wanted to learn to pilot a fighting ship.”

            Mercifully, the Jagernaut didn’t laugh.  “What happened?” he asked instead, with what sounded like genuine interest.

            The Skolian’s unexpected willingness to listen prompted his escort to confess a secret shame that he had never told anybody else.  “I flunked the entrance exam.  I was never any good at math.”

            George had planned long and carefully how to break the news to his parents, and to Uncle Johnny.  He had crafted a beautiful argument about how, like Uncle Nikki, his talents lay elsewhere than the family business, and then he’d never even had a chance to try to follow his dream.  He liked his work with Uncle Johnny, but it still hurt.

            “I am sorry to hear that,” Wasther sympathized.  “There’s nothing like the freedom of flying a small fighter in the vastness of space.”

            It made no practical difference, at this late date.  George was a successful, seasoned criminal.  ASC wouldn’t recruit him for pilot training now even if he were a mathematical prodigy. 

            Still, it was comforting to have confirmation that his boyhood dream had been worth dreaming.

            The house was in an uproar, with grinning Mafiosi slapping each other on the backs and hooting with laughter.  The epicenter of the outbreak was the living room, where Vince Francezzi occupied the place of honor on the couch next to Uncle Johnny.  The contrast with the funereal atmosphere that had reigned before he left on his errand couldn’t be more dramatic.

            “What happened?” George called through the open living room door, there not being any space to stand inside. 

            “It’s the center for Buffalo!” 

            “You shouldda seen it!”

            “It was poetic, I tell ya!

            Uncle Johnny waved a hand for silence and the assembled Mafiosi quieted.  “The newsies were doing a halftime interview with that big Buffalo center, Gorebin,” he explained with a wide grin.  “The guy was explaining how he was gonna run right through Alexandria’s line and pop the ball through the hoop.”

            “This is a good thing?” his nephew asked in confusion.

            “It is,” his uncle confirmed, “On account of Gorebin decides to show off and demonstrate his technique to the newsie, by way of illustrating just what he’s gonna do, you understand.  The guy jumps like he’s doin’ a layup, comes down wrong, stumbles, and sprains his own damned ankle!”

            “He’s outta da game for the second half!” Vince chortled.  “And widout Gorbin, Buffalo’s got nothin’.  Alexandria’s gonna walk all over them!”

            While George could understand Vince’s glee that his cousin’s team was likely to make up some ground in the second half, the degree to which his uncle was sharing that delight struck him as unusual.  He turned to Torrelli, who happened to be standing near the door, and muttered, “I thought the bookies had predicted Buffalo by twenty?  Won’t we lose a bundle if Alexandria pulls off an upset?”

            “There’s the beauty of the whole thing,” Torrelli responded with a chuckle.  “The bookies couldn’t take bets from the home crowd over at the bar on account of there’s a uniform staking out the restaurant.  Nobody knows why.  Edwin says the guy hasn’t showed him any mug shots, and he hasn’t asked where he can place a bet, either.”

            “Maybe he just wanted a place to watch the game?”

            The hit man shook his head.  “The guy drove his prowler, he’s looking at the people, not the screen, and he’s drinking soda water.”

            “He’s on duty, then,” George agreed.  Beside him, the Jagernaut shifted his weight, a subtle reminder that George, too, had work to perform.  “Hey, I gotta go.  Save me a seat; this is gonna be a second half to remember.”

            “…And then Prince Arden’s bodyguard draws this enormous gun and blasts right through the cable!” Gilberto said, illustrating his statement with a dramatic gesture.  “She didn’t even stop to aim.”

            A collective gasp filled the room.  Even though most of his audience had watched Ginny Alvers’ newscast of the events at the Annandale Manors playground many times, the lure of hearing a first-hand account kept them hanging on Gilberto’s every word.  The crowd had grown larger as all of the fantasy gamers and quite a few of the dinner guests had stopped to listen.  Even the bartender had turned down the volume on the big screens and was shaking the mixed drinks very quietly.  Nobody noticed that without their unstoppable center, Buffalo had scored only three points in the third quarter to Alexandria’s twenty, leaving the score 55 to 63 and cutting their lead to a mere eight points.

            “There’s this brilliant flash, and I see Mr. CEO Wrexley’s face turn purple as the cable falls,” Gilberto continued.  “You can see that he’s not used to people telling him what’s what, and he’s taking Prince Arden’s sensible measures personally.  He starts demanding that Officer O’Ryan arrest Del Arden for vandalism!”

            A chorus of boos met this declaration.  Gilberto made them wait while he refilled his glass from the fresh pitcher of beer that had mysteriously appeared on their table and took a deep swallow.  “Well, nobody was going to go along with that, and so…”

            He leaned back in his chair and continued the tale.

            F.B.I. Special Agent Peter Ogden had succeeded in planting three listening devices along the stone wall that separated the Sparnelli garden from the alley that ran between the lots on the north side.  As ordered, he’d placed them for maximum coverage and not worried too much about whether the expensive bits of meshware would fall victim to a routine sweep in the morning. 

            There would be a sweep in the morning.  Vincent Torrelli and his crew were no slouches at spotting surveillance equipment, either.  Privately, Peter suspected that the only reason the bug in Sparnelli’s office lamp had remained undetected for so long was that the damn thing always shorted out when the lamp was moved for inspection.  He supposed they should consider themselves fortunate that the particular configuration preferred by Johnny Sparnelli allowed at least some intermittent transmission.

            He crept along the wall, hugging it to remain out of sight of the Sparnelli surveillance cameras, which were better angled to capture those approaching down the street or sidewalk.  He was reaching up to place his fourth device on the top of the wall, carefully adjusting it for best effect, when four punks riding motorcycles and sporting leather jackets with vaguely canine gang insignia printed on the back entered the alley from the far side.  Gunning their motors, they skidded to a halt an uncomfortably close four feet away.  The leader reached up to pull off his helmet, revealing a young Hispanic face.

            No Hispanic gang ought to be operating within half a mile of the Sparnelli’s home turf.

            “What have we here, mi amigos?” the leader asked, looking pointedly at the bug in Peter’s hand. 

            “I think we have a snoop, Manuel,” one of his followers obliged from behind Peter.  How had they managed to surround him so quickly?

            “A paparazzo,” another added.

            “A panty-sniffer collecting fodder for the scandal sheets,” a third, female voice elaborated.

            “I think you are right,” the leader—Manuel?—agreed.  He held out a leather-gloved hand for the bug.  “Hand it over,” he ordered.  “There will be no stolen shots of this evening to trouble the peace of Prince Arden.”

            “Prince who?”  Peter shook his head in confusion, then decided it didn’t matter. “Look, kid, you’re interfering in things you’re better off not knowing about.  It could get dangerous here pretty soon.  So why don’t you forget you ever saw me and go drive your motorcycles around someplace else?”

            “Do you hear that?” Manuel asked the others.  “Things could get dangerous!  Maybe the waiters will start throwing meatballs.”

            “Ooooh!  I’m terrified!” the henchmen behind Peter said.

            This had to be resolved before the Sparnellis checked their security cams.  To the best of Peter’s considerable knowledge, this Hispanic gang wasn’t involved with the Sparnellis, which made them more-or-less innocent civilians.  At least technically.

            He reached inside his jacket and pulled out regulation plastic billfold on which his three-year-old daughter had doodled a large, pink sunflower.  Flipping it open, he showed his badge.  “Look, kids, I’m with the FBI.  That’s a Mafia stronghold on the other side of the wall, and they’re armed with a lot more than meatballs.  You need to beat it, fast, before you get caught in the crossfire.”

            Manuel sniggered.  “You expect us to believe that?” he asked scornfully, pointing at the billfold.  “Do you think we don’t have vid screens in the barrio?  Everybody knows that real FBI agents carry their badges in leather wallets.”  He gestured at Peter’s badge with contempt.  “Not plastic with graffiti scribbled on it.”

            “Leather badge cases went out last year as a cost-cutting measure,” Peter explained truthfully.  “And if you think you can keep a three-year-old girl whose Grandma just presented her with a new set of markers from scribbling on everything in sight, you’ve never met one.”

            “So your story is, you’re a Federal agent setting up surveillance on the Mob?” asked the girl, whose hard, disillusioned glare belied the youthfulness of her face.

            “I am,” he agreed.

            “So where’s your warrant?” she demanded.  “Everybody knows you’re not allowed to set bugs without a warrant.”

            “It’s filed back at headquarters where it belongs,” Peter said, losing patience.  “Where it can be produced in court to validate any information the surveillance provides.  Do you think we tell criminals we’re listening to them, so they should pretty please enunciate clearly when they discuss their crimes?”

            “You’ve got an answer for everything, don’t you?” Manuel said. 

            “Hey, Manuel,” the boy behind Peter said, “Isn’t impersonating a Federal officer a crime?”

            “Why, yes, Rimon, I believe it is,” his leader agreed, pulling a com from the pocket of his leather jacket.  “And you know, as fine, upstanding citizens, I believe we ought to notify the legal authorities about this impersonation.  Seeing as how there’s a convenient police officer nearby and all that.” 

            He keyed a code into his com, then waited for the other party to answer.  “Officer O’Ryan?  It’s Manuel.  I believe there is a crime in progress outside that might interest you.”

            “…And with the matching contribution from Wrexley Utilities, we have the money to make a fine playground, indeed,” Gilberto concluded his story.  “There will be a meeting at the high school tomorrow night, and my friends and I have drawn a plan to suggest for the new play structure.”  He used a napkin to mop up the moisture that the beer pitcher had left on the table and carefully spread out a smudged and stained flyer, on the back of which was sketched the Grey Wolves’ consensus design.

            “You can’t present that at a meeting,” Silas blurted out, too caught up in the story to remember caution.  Jocks and Lobos turned on the English major with identical glares, a sobering reminder of why he preferred his violence to be fictional.  He took a hasty step backward to distance himself from the threat and explained, “You need to make it bigger, so more than one person can see it at a time.  You should draw it on clean paper, too, so people will see that you have thought about it.”

            “English majors!” his friend Norton complained from his lofty status as an engineering student.  “You think paper is the answer to everything.”  Turning to Gilberto, he explained, “What you need is a proper three-dimensional rendering.  I’ve got an app…Christie!”  He waved at a fellow gamer who happened to be close to the door of the back room.  “Bring my comp out here.”

            It didn’t take long for Norton to translate Gilberto’s sketch into a basic rendering.  Ten minutes later, when certain issues of structural stability had been addressed, the assembled restaurant patrons had a tabletop projection to study.

            “Is that piece of cable the Jagernaut shot down still around?”  The question came from Bertram, Georgetown’s strapping goalie, who was peering over the shoulder of his team captain.

            “It was there this afternoon,” Javier said.

            “I was thinking, it would be really neat to incorporate it into the structure,” the goalie continued.  “Since it’s the reason the playground is being rebuilt in the first place.”

            This idea proved popular, as did a suggestion that the proposed spring-mounted dinosaurs in the toddler area be changed to horses, which could be modified in situ “to look like those purple unicorns from Del Arden’s world.”

            After that, the ideas began to fly in earnest.

            Outside, an elegant limo pulled up to the entrance of Nicco’s.  Hoping that the vehicle might contain some out-of-town mobster arriving for a meeting with the Sparnelli clan, thus salvaging the operation before their team became the laughing stock of the entire bureau, Ezra dutifully trained his night scope on the plates and called the numbers down to Cindy.

            She ran them, and let out a loud whistle. 

            “Something good?” Eppestine prompted.

            “That limo’s registered to the Skolian embassy.”

            Ezra could hear his boss’s heartfelt groan even over the com.  “Just what this operation needs,” she complained.  “Prickly diplomats wandering around with a Mob hit in progress.  What the blazes are the Skolians doing showing up here on a Tuesday night?”

            “Maybe the Ambassador is in the mood for some late-night Italian?” Cindy suggested.

            “It’s not the Ambassador getting out,” Ezra corrected her, peering through his goggles.  “It’s that singing Skolian prince who keeps making headlines.  Del Arden.”

            “Are you sure of the identity?”  Eppestine paced the floor of the van restlessly.

            “I can’t see his face, but he’s riding in a Skolian diplomatic limo, he’s got long, burgundy-colored hair with gold tips, there are three nasty bodyguards in black leather guarding him, and the dark-haired, pocket-sized beauty who just got out after him is hanging on his arm. Who else on Earth could it be?”

            “It’s perfect,” Gilberto said, surveying the virtual projection on the tabletop. 

            It was, too.  Norton’s design program was professional quality.  It didn’t just provide a three-dimensional rendering, it would switch to an exploded diagram at the touch of a button, run an analysis for structural integrity, and even provide a list of building materials required, with estimated prices at local supply warehouses.  The playground structure it was currently projecting had everything:  ladders and platforms, two slides and a pole, a suspension bridge connecting two sections, places to hide and lookouts from which to survey the hiding places.  Off to one side, a sandbox and a trio of purple unicorns promised hours of entertainment for the toddlers.  The estimated price tag was slightly high, but it was generally agreed that a fund drive targeting Del Arden fans could make up the difference.

            “I would love to see that when it’s finished,” James Huthburg admitted, momentarily overlooking the sheer absurdity of the son of a prominent corporate lawyer—and a Georgetown hockey captain, for goodness’ sake!—expressing the desire to drive his fancy sport vehicle into an Hispanic slum to visit a playground.

            “It was the protests from Del Arden fans like you that persuaded Wrexley to contribute the matching funds,” Gilberto pointed out graciously.  “You would be welcome in our neighborhood.”

            As they paused to look reverently at the projection again, the door to the restaurant opened.  Two black-clad figures entered, scanning the crowd with military precision.  A moment later, the burgundy-haired man from the limo followed his security detail inside.  He also looked around, searching for a familiar face.  He found it, but not where he expected.

            “Who are people you?” he asked, in heavily accented, lilting English.  “And why so many wear blouses with picture of brother of mine?”

Chapter 34

In which the alarm is sounded.

            Del and Ricki watched the sun set as their waiter placed steaming plates of veal scaloppini in front of them.  He paused to light the candles and citronella torches, refilled their water and wine glasses, nodded in satisfaction, then left them in peace. 

            Above them, a flock of house sparrows settled into their evening perches in a sprawling oak tree, chirping at each other as they reviewed the events of the current day and planned for the next. 

            Ricki was also thinking about the future.  “What if we decide to be more than a couple?  I don’t know if I’m qualified to raise the next generation of Ruby empaths for the royal House of Skolia.”

            Del shook his head. “You wouldn’t have to.  As far as I can tell, you have only the normal degree of empathy.  The genes that make me a Ruby empath are all recessive.  You might be carrying some recessive alleles yourself, but it’s very unlikely that any child of ours would get enough of them from you to have much of a Kyle rating.  They couldn’t power the Kyleweb, or be used by the Assembly to breed more Ruby psions.”

            A thought occurred to him.  He shifted uncomfortably, but she had the right to know.  “There’s another thing.  Any children we might have would be Varentos by Skolian tradition—or Valdorias, if you prefer to follow Earth’s patrilineal naming conventions.  They wouldn’t be Skolias.  That name is reserved for Ruby empaths, who are considered heirs to the Keys whether or not they have any known relation to my family.”

            “Does that happen often?  Someone waltzes in out of nowhere and is suddenly in line for the throne?”

            “I wish,” Del said.  “It would let the rest of us have a little more freedom, and it might have prevented the Assembly from launching its clandestine breeding program.  At the very least, they might have made less incestuous crosses.  However, it’s only happened twice: when my grandfather Jarec met my grandmother Lahaylia and became the first Imperator, and when Father married my mother and became Web key.”

            Inside the house, the Mafiosi drank a rousing toast to Alexandria’s upset 82-71 victory.  Johnny Sparnelli slapped Vince Francezzi heartily on the back in congratulations, then stood.  “You guys make yourselves at home,” he said.  “I’ve got something to take care of in the garden.”

            Torrelli followed the don out of the room.  “You want I should go instead of you, boss?” he asked softly.  “Those Jagernauts of Arden’s are nasty customers.”

            Johnny Sparnelli was no stranger to dangerous situations.  After Fitz McLane had warned him off of “Del Arden,” he had spent some time looking into the General’s claims.  There wasn’t a whole lot of solid information on the Skolian Jagernauts available on the Earth meshes, but what little he could find suggested that anybody making a hostile move toward their charge would be terminated, instantly and with extreme prejudice.

            None of which changed the necessities demanded by his old-fashioned, Sicilian sense of honor.

            Sparnelli considered the offer, then shook his head.  “Nah.  Some things a guy has to do require the personal touch.  From the heart to the heart, as they say.”

            Outside of the Sparnelli enclave, things were not going well for the FBI.  On the north side of the property, Special Agent Peter Ogden found himself in the novel position of arguing with a street cop over whether a motorcycle gang had the legal right to hold him under a citizen’s arrest for trespassing on a mob chieftain’s property. 

            On the other side of the compound, his colleague Dieter had troubles of his own.   Dieter had placed his first camera, then turned stealthily, hugging the wall.

            A middle-aged, utterly forgettable man was standing behind him, in full view of the mob cameras.  He did not look happy.

            “You low-down poacher!” he snarled.  “Get your own celebrity to follow.  I saw him first; the story is mine.”

            “Story?” Dieter asked.  He had worked in the D.C. Organized Crime Unit for six years, now.  He thought he knew all the Sparnelli gang, and most of the important players in the other crime families, but this fellow’s face, such as it was, was new to him.

            “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about,” the man responded. He pointed accusingly at the second surveillance device in the agent’s hand. “I know every picture-shooter in the business, and that one’s top quality.  I’ve got rent to pay. As long as Prime-Nova’s songbird is in that garden, nobody but me takes pictures of him.  I’m not splitting my profits with the new boy in town, get me?”

            “I’m afraid I don’t,” Dieter admitted.  “Prime-Nova’s what?”

            His question was met with open contempt.  “Playing dumb, are you?  I’ll make it simple for you,” his critic offered.  “It’s my story, and I didn’t become the best paparazzo in the business by sharing with a Johnny-come-lately.  Got it now?”

            “You’re a paparazzo?”  The confrontation was getting stranger by the moment, but Dieter couldn’t afford to get distracted.  Sooner or later, if this went on, the Sparnellis were going to notice that something was going on outside their stronghold.  He was actually a little surprised that no Sparnelli flunkies had yet arrived on the scene.

            “Look,” Dieter said, pulling out his ID.  “I’m an FBI agent.  You’re in the middle of an operation.  Things might get very dangerous here, so you need to clear the area and leave us to do our job.”

            The paparazzo eyed the FBI badge in its plastic holder with open contempt.  “Where’d you get that?  A cereal box?  You expect me to believe the FBI is following a rock star around?  That went out with Herbert Hoover.”  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wallet.  “For this work, kid, you want a more generic impersonation in a private company, one that doesn’t carry a jail sentence.  Like a mesh installation company, or the tree trimmers.”  He flashed surprisingly realistic badges for safely non-existent companies providing those two utilities.  “Being an off-world professor can open doors, if you can manage an accent, or the caterer if there’s a party, or…”  He stopped his litany, closing the wallet.  “The point is, you’re not only an amateur, you’re a dumb amateur.  FBI, indeed!”

            The criminal life is, at heart, an exercise in gaining the means to indulge oneself without putting in the hard work necessary to actually earn those indulgences.  Johnny Sparnelli ran a tight operation, but there were limits.  Due to Vince Francezzi’s connection with the Alexandria team, the entire criminal enterprise had been basketball-crazy for weeks.  When the tide began to turn in Alexandria’s favor so dramatically, there was no discipline on Earth that could have kept Sparnelli’s security team from sneaking away from the monitors to watch the end of the game.

            Secondary Wasther, however, had spent his youth following the much sterner tradition taught on the distant world of Diesha.  He was a decorated veteran of the First Radiance War and had spent his entire adult life under military discipline as an elite member of the most effective military machine humanity had ever created.  He and the rest of his team were responsible for guarding a Ruby prince in foreign territory; nothing could have lured him from his post.

            Besides, he didn’t care about basketball.

            Wasther, then, was watching alone in the Sparnelli compound’s security room when the two FBI agents ran into trouble.  The Sparnelli security setup had quite good visual feeds, but lacked the audio feeds that the equivalent military equipment would carry.  The Jagernaut had the additional handicap of being culturally illiterate:  his two months on Earth had not been sufficient to familiarize him with Earth’s many ethnic groups or the distinguishing garb and mannerisms of its varied social strata. 

            He could and did recognize that there were two vigorous confrontations going on outside the compound, one of which involved a police officer and a group of young men and women wearing Prince Del-Kurj’s picture on their T-shirts.  The high camera angle, grainy picture quality, and his inexperience with Earth clothing fashions and ethnicities kept him from recognizing the Lobos so far out of their previous context.  The presence of “Del Arden” fans did suggest to him that a leak of some kind might have occurred, perhaps among the restaurant staff or the Mafiosi who had assembled to watch the game.  If Del’s whereabouts had been posted to any of the fan sites, the handful of people outside could turn into a rabid mob of holorock fans in minutes.

            He reached for his gauntlet to report the possible security breach to Tyra.

             “You people put face of my brother on blouses of you because you like too-loud noise he makes?”         

            The stranger retreated a step before the massed glares of shocked outrage.  Fortunately, his obvious confusion and strong physical resemblance to their idol held the assembled fans in place and silent long enough for Gilberto to take remedial action.

            The Lobos lieutenant held his position in the gang in part because he noticed details.  In this instance, while everybody else was staring at the man who claimed to be Prince Arden’s brother, and whose wine-red hair and violet eyes could have resulted from a currently popular genetic tattoo, he had turned his attention to the three looming bodyguards.  Unlike most of the bar’s patrons, he had actually had the chance to observe Jagernaut uniforms at close range.  More to the point, he had observed uniformed Jagernauts at close range.  He had no illusions about what a weapon that sliced high-voltage cable as if it were butter would do if fired into an angry mob.

            And so he turned and used his most insolent drawl to observe to James Huthberg, “He is Prince Arden’s brother, for sure.  Who but a brother says something like that?”

            “It surprise you, that to learn,” the prince answered wryly, attempting a joke despite his broken English.  “My name Vyrl, this my wife name is Kamoj.”  He looked with interest at the table top, on which the holographic image of the play structure was still being projected.  “What that is?”

            Gilberto explained, ending, “Since your brother is why we have money to rebuild playground, we want it to look like pictures of his world on the vid.”

            Vyrl examined the structure closely, then shook his head.  “Is wrong, like in vid of Del.  Lyshrioli houses not have cone roof, but…”  He sketched a shape with his hand, made a frustrated sound when he was met with black stares, then reached into a pocket and pulled out a top-of-the-line portable com.  He fiddled with it a moment, then keyed a button.  “Like here.”

            A second projection appeared on the table next to the play structure.  It was a rambling farmhouse, its sections sporting intricate patterns in bright, primary colors: emerald green, sapphire blue, turquoise, and ruby red.  The roof came in bell-shaped segments, giving the impression of a bouquet of upside-down flowers.  “Is my home,” he explained with quiet pride.

            “It looks like a farmhouse.”  Rosalie sounded disappointed.

            “House for farm useful for farmer, that I am,” the prince replied.

            “Why are the walls painted so many colors?” James asked.

            “Is not paint,” Vyrl answered.  “Lyshrioli wood is colored.  One tree alone not build house.  Have colors anyway, make pretty, right?”

            Norton was already tapping the keys of his comp with the authority of a concert pianist.

            Tyra’s security team was well able to discourage a handful of overly enthusiastic fans with no permanent damage to anyone.  The prospect of protecting her charge from several hundred of them was another matter entirely.  Thus, her first response to Wasther’s report of a confrontation outside involving Del Arden fans was to trigger a mesh-based diversion program she had designed to limit flash mobs.  No less than three separate mesh identities, well-established and active Del Arden fans all, excitedly reported sighting their idol at three different, plausible locations.  In combination with the similar stories Chiquita had started, many Del Arden fans hoping for a glimpse of their favorite celebrity spent the evening vainly speeding from one rumored location to the next.  Fortunately for all concerned, Niccolo’s was not among them.

            Diversion launched, Tyra detailed Tertiary Ja’chmna, the fourth member of the security team, to keep a close watch on Del and Ricki and to be prepared to evacuate them if necessary.  Then she ran for the gate, Cameron at her heels.  Cameron, whose ASC affiliation was more easily confirmed by Allied law enforcement than her ISC rank, went left to disperse the group of fans with the police officer.  Tyra sprinted in the other direction, around the restaurant, and discovered Hammid Gurtchel still browbeating the long-suffering Dieter. 

            Tyra had joined Cameron on Del’s security detail one and a half Earth years before, when the prince was just starting to build a reputation in the holorock industry.  She was a consummate covert ops agent, able to blend in perfectly with Del’s Allied road crew.  At heart, however, she remained a Skolian Jagernaut protecting a Ruby prince.  When Earth customs threatened to compromise her charge’s safety, she discarded them without a second thought. 

            Moving with enhanced speed, the Jagernaut grabbed Gurtchel and spun him around, slamming his back against the wall with sufficient force to make him grunt, albeit not enough to do permanent damage.  “I warned you what would happen if you came snooping around Del Arden again,” she snarled.  Holding him in place with one hand, she began methodically searching his pockets.  When she found his com, she let him go and plugged it into her gauntlet.

            “That’s mine!” Gurtchel protested, not quite daring to reach for it.

            “You can have it back when I’ve finished with it.”  She checked the readout and tsked.  “That’s quite a collection of surveillance drones you have linked in.” Tapping a button on her gauntlet, she continued, “Unfortunately for you, I don’t have the time or inclination to sort through all the pictures you’ve taken, so I’m wiping everything.”

            “The First Amendment gives me the right to photograph public figures…” the hapless paparazzo began.

            “I am not concerned with your First Amendment,” Tyra said with finality.  She handed the com back to Gurtchel. 

            The paparazzo took it, tapped a few queries with increasing desperation, then glared angrily at Tyra.

            “That’s a whole year’s work you’ve destroyed!”

            “You should have heeded my warning when I ran you off from the estate,” the Jagernaut repeated, with no sympathy whatsoever.  Turning, she looked Dieter up and down, eyeing the surveillance device he was carrying.  “Is this your assistant?”

            “Special Agent Dieter Buchwald, FBI,” the younger man introduced himself.  He reached into his pocket, withdrew a plastic holder, and offered it to Tyra.  “Here are my credentials.”

            The Jagernaut examined them skeptically.  “Can anyone vouch for you?”

            “I thought I saw an old acquaintance earlier,” the young man said, after a moment’s hesitation.  “Sean Cameron.  Is he working with you?”

            Tyra nodded. 

            “We were in the military together.  He can vouch for me.”

            The Jagernaut weighed that claim for a moment, then spoke into her gauntlet.  “Cameron, come out front when you can.”

            “We’re on our way,” came the reply.  A few moments later, the Marine escorted Peter Ogden, Officer O’Ryan, and the four Lobos over to them.

            “This man claims to be one Dieter Buchwald, an agent for your FBI,” Tyra told Cameron, nodding at her second captive.  “He says you can vouch for him.”

            The Marine inspected the agent, taking in the ragged clothing of his disguise.         Dieter essayed a small wave and a weak smile.  “Hi, Sean,” he greeted the Marine.  “It’s been a while.”

            “So it has,” Cameron agreed, then turned to address Tyra with a shrug.  “He is Dieter Buchwald and he was working for the FBI last I heard from him.  That was about three years ago, though.  A lot can happen in three years.”

            “I’ll say,” Dieter agreed.  “What happened, Sean?  I heard through the grapevine that you’ve become a bodyguard-for-hire for a holorock star.  I thought you were career Marine for sure.”

            “I am,” Cameron agreed.  “I’m just on detached duty.” 

            “Detached duty?  To guard a holorock star?” 

            The big Marine smiled wryly.  “Yup.” 

            “What’s going on here?” 

            Donna Eppestine descended upon them with the businesslike stride of a senior government official.  She looked Tyra and Cameron up and down, then said firmly, “I’m Donna Eppestine, FBI.  I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

            “We can’t leave,” Tyra stated with equal firmness.  “We are a security detail guarding…”

            “I don’t care if you’re guarding the King of Skyfall, you’re interfering with an FBI operation.”

            Cameron inserted his overlarge bulk between the two women.  “Ma’am, I’m ISC Marine Sergeant Sean Cameron, Special Forces.”  He nodded in Tyra’s direction.  “This is Jagernaut Primary Tyra Jarin.  She heads the security detail guarding Ruby Prince Del-Kurj Skolia, known to his millions of fans as ‘Del Arden.’”

            Dieter closed his eyes and muttered, “Of course.  Bodyguard to a holorock star, he said.”

            “As it turns out, Del actually is the current King of Skyfall,” Tyra added.  “And while we apologize for interfering with your operation, we can’t leave, because His Highness is having a private dinner in the garden back there.”  She nodded at the wall.

            Eppestine drew breath to argue the point, but before she could speak her com gave a shrill whistle.  Giving Tyra a Look that promised the discussion was far from over, she raised it to her mouth and said, “Eppestine here.”

            Tyra’s bio-enhanced hearing was quite sensitive, nor did she have any compunction about eavesdropping, under the circumstances.

            “Donna, it’s Ezra,” a tinny voice said.  “I’ve got eyes on Johnny Sparnelli entering the garden from the house and carrying a package.  Something’s going down, and it could be our assassination attempt.”

            With a curse, the Jagernaut turned and leaped for the wall.  It was only eight feet high; hardly a challenge for her enhanced biomech.  Cameron followed on her heels. 

            Donna Eppestine stared after them for a brief moment, then shook herself.  “We may have a line on the intended victim,” she told her second, reaching for the firearm she kept in a shoulder holster.  “It’s a Skolian prince.  This is big, Ezra, and there’s no time to call reinforcements.  We’re going in.”  She glanced at the wall, shook her head, then turned to Dieter and Peter.  “Let’s get around to the gate!”

            They got two steps before their way was blocked by a motorcycle. 

            “Estúpido idiotas!  There is not the time to knock politely, when Prince Arden is in danger!” 

            With an impressive roar of the engine, Rimon swung his motorcycle around them and parked it next to the wall.  Jumping off, he pointed at the seat.  “Here is a way over wall.  You go, fast!”

            To their credit, the FBI agents didn’t hesitate more than a fraction of a second before using the offered step to scale the wall.  Knowing they were overmatched by the firepower the Mob could bring into play, Officer O’Ryan went over after them.  There was nobody left to order the Lobos not to follow, so they did.

            Only Hammid Gurtchel stayed behind.  He valued his hide too much to go running toward people waving firearms.  Some stories just weren’t worth the price.              Besides, the blasted Jagernaut had wiped his com free of the programs that controlled his drone cameras.

            Gilberto looked at the revised playground design longingly.  The upside-down-flower roofs and brightly colored patterns that Norman had added turned the structure into a fantasy straight out of a fairy tale.  “And what cost for such a playground?” he asked.

            Norman queried the program for the total and frowned.  “About twice your budget,” he admitted reluctantly.  He tapped the menu for a breakdown.  “A good third of the cost comes from the paint job.  Those fancy patterns are pricy.”

            “Without the patterns, it is not right,” Anamaria complained.

            “I know some art students who might be willing to paint on the patterns,” Bertram suggested.  “They could paint the unicorns…” he glanced at Prince Vyrl “…I mean, lyrine, at the same time.”

            “If you take the labor for painting out and just cost the materials, that leaves you only six hundred dollars short,” Norman reported. 

            “Six hundred!” Rosalie objected.  For a girl from the poor end of town, six hundred might as well have been six million.

            James Huthberg, however, was more optimistic.  “We can put out a table on the quad,” he said.  “Get the frats and sororities behind it, and that gap will close quickly.  There are a lot of Del Arden fans on campus who loved that newsvid.”

            “For that matter,” Silas pointed out, “there are even more on the mesh.  Put out a call on the boards, and a lot of them might send in a few dollars.  Especially when they see the design.”

            “That’s a good i…” Gilberto broke off as all five coms carried by the Lobos sounded the special alarm call that meant an emergency in progress.  He looked at his, then addressed the room in general.  “Prince Arden is under attack.  We must help him.”  He whirled to look at Edwin.  “Where is he?  Where is Del Arden?”

            The manager shook his head in refusal, but the second was having none of it. 

            “We know Prince Arden is here,” he pointed out.  “There is no time for the police to arrive, so it is for us to act.”  He looked around the room, making eye contact with the waitstaff, bartenders, busboys, and even the assistant cooks who were peering out from behind the swinging kitchen doors to watch the spectacle.  “Who will show us where to go?”

            Edwin knew that Johnny Sparnelli had business with Del Arden.  He had not informed his staff of that complicating factor, however.  This omission proved problematic when the young Del Arden fan who had drawn the short piece of linguini, and with it the right to wait on his idol, pointed back through the kitchen to the door opening onto the alley and said, “He’s in the garden!  Come on, I’ll show you.”

            With a roar, the whole room charged in pursuit, denuding the kitchen of knives, iron skillets, bowls of fruit, and other potential weapons as they passed through.

            Wasther swore loudly in Skolian Flag, startling Vincent Torrelli, who had left the celebration of Alexandria’s upset victory to check on him. 

            “What is it?” the hitman asked.

            The Jagernaut pointed at one of the monitors, where a mob was chasing the waiter who had been serving Del out into the alley, waving various implements with lethal intent.  “Either the food was really bad, or His Highness’ fans have found him.”

            Torrelli contributed a few Italian expletives of his own.  “I’ll get the boys,” he said, and left at a run.

            Wasther didn’t try to stop the mobster.  The Jagernauts were skilled bodyguards, but the garden was an enclosed space and the fans would have the van’s escape route blocked in seconds.  Crowd control generally requires lots of bodies in easily identified, official uniforms, which is why Del’s security team relied on local police for that service when the prince was touring. 

            Wasther just hoped that Torrelli’s colleagues would exercise some professional discipline and restraint.  He bolted for the garden.

Chapter 35

In which reinforcements arrive.

            In the garden, Del and Ricki were feeding each other succulent bites of tiramisu, licking it slowly off the forks.  This pleasant activity was interrupted when Ja’chmna came to high alert, striding past them to place himself firmly between the dining pair and the approaching Johnny Sparnelli.

            The mob chief stopped, shifting the cloth bundle he was carrying under one arm so he could spread his empty hands wide.  “It’s all right,” he told the Jagernaut.  “I got no quarrel with your boss.  It’s getting a little chilly, though, and my wife thought the lady there might appreciate the loan of a shawl.”

            Ja’chmna hesitated, not quite able to understand Sparnelli’s heavy New York-Italian dialect.

            Del might be a civilian, but he was neither naive nor overly trusting.  He dropped his barriers far enough to confirm that Sparnelli had no hostile intent.  Only then did he nod to the Jagernaut.  “Let him approach,” he ordered quietly in Iotic.

            Ja’chmna obediently stepped aside, although he continued to keep his attention riveted on their host. 

            Sparnelli helped Ricki drape the borrowed shawl over her bare shoulders, moving slowly and carefully so as not to alarm Ja’chmna.  Then he turned to Del and said, “I brought the shawl out myself because I wanna thank you for what you’re doing over at the high school for the Madrigals.  My son-in-law, Al Tresconi, says that when my granddaughter Lucy gets home from school on Tuesdays, all she can talk about is what you taught them about singing.”

            “I’m glad she’s enjoying it,” Del responded with cautious diplomacy.

            “The kid’s had a hard time since her mother died,” Sparnelli continued, his sincerity apparent to the empaths present.  “You’ve got her interested in living again.  I owe you for that.”

            “You owe me nothing,” the prince said firmly.  The last thing he wanted was further entanglement with the local criminal sector.

            “You’re doin’ it to help the kids, not to impress their families.  I understand that.”  Sparnelli spread his hands, showing flashes of heavily scarred knuckles. “You live in the public eye and you wanna keep your reputation clean; I can respect that, too.  But I’m Italian, and family is important to us.  A guy goes out of his way to help my grandkid, I’m not gonna forget.”

            “Family is important to me, too,” Del admitted.  Even when they drove him half crazy with anger and frustration, he never doubted the strong bonds of love and loyalty that bound him to his relatives.

            “Then you know I mean it,” Sparnelli said.  “You’re an honest man, but even an honest man sometimes needs information, or a crooked politician gives you trouble and needs setting straight, or you need tickets to a show and it’s sold out.  If that happens to you, you let me know, and I’ll take care of it.”  He glanced sideways at Ja’chmna, a subtle hint that Del’s bodyguards could act as intermediaries to redeem such a favor, leaving the singer’s own hands clean.

            Del didn’t have the heart to explain to the crime boss just what resources a Ruby prince could command in the areas of information gathering, politician intimidation, and belated ticket acquisition.  It would take too long and besides, Sparnelli was sincere.

            “I will keep what you have said in mind, Mr. Sparnelli,” he said instead, accepting the crime lord’s gesture in the spirit it was offered.  “It is good to know that Lucy has family who love…”

            He broke off as Tyra and Cameron bounded over the wall, calling out a warning. All four occupants of the garden immediately looked around for the threat.  The roar of Rimon’s motorcycle on the other side of the wall provided some indication of where, if not what.  They were therefore looking in the right direction to see the three FBI agents come over the wall after the two bodyguards.  The agents had not paused to put on their identifying vests and were easily mistaken for civilians, especially when sharp-eyed Dieter Buchwald pointed at Del and called, “There he is!”  The uniformed Officer O’Ryan came over the wall next, appearing to be in hot pursuit of the agents.  When the four Lobos brought up the rear, the party inside the garden naturally assumed that Del’s fans had discovered his whereabouts and eluded whatever crowd control measures had been attempted. 

            Botanically illiterate as Del’s would-be rescuers were, the first two waves attempted to take a shortcut through a tangle of blackberries, with predictable results.  Cameron and Tyra became thoroughly entangled, while Eppestine, Ogden, and Buchwald were only temporarily slowed.  Officer O’Ryan hesitated, reaching to assist Buchwald, until the agent ordered him to go.  The police officer took off after the less altruistically inclined Lobos, who, seeing the fate of the others, had detoured around the bramble patch with only minor damage. 

            Unlike his colleagues, Ja’chmna was free to act.  “Back to the van, now!” he ordered Del and Ricki, placing himself between the prince and the presumed holorock enthusiasts.

            Del was already moving, one protective arm around Ricki.  He had seen the three FBI agents, now free of the brambles, pursuing the Lobos with drawn pistols.  They had taken only two steps toward the van, however, when there was a loud commotion in the alley between the restaurant and the garden gates.  “What the…?”  His jaw dropped as closer inspection revealed their waiter opening the gates for an angry mob armed with improvised but potentially effective, culinary-based weapons. 

            Gilberto, spying the drawn pistols in the hands of the FBI agents from his place beside the waiter, pointed an accusing finger and shouted, “They are trying to kidnap Prince Arden!  Get them!”

            With a roar, the mob surged through the gates, cutting the FBI agents off from Del and Ricki and Del and Ricki off from the van. 

            “Del!  Watch out!”  Tyra shouted frantically in Iotic, as she and Cameron struggled with the bramble patch.  She switched to Flag and ordered, “Ja’chmna, get them out of there, now!”

            Sparnelli cursed in loud and fluent Italian.  “I’ll get my boys to run them off,” he promised.  He had taken six steps toward the house when Wasther charged out the door. Two dozen Mafiosi were close on his heels, looking almost like a professional sports team in their Alexandria jerseys, T-shirts, and caps.  The criminals were led by Vincent Torrelli and armed with an assortment of pistols, brass knuckles, knives, two broken beer bottles, and a tire iron wielded by one particularly large specimen of Sicilian manhood.

            They, too, were determined to protect Del.  Torrelli pointed at the mob coming through the gates and shouted, “Head them off!  Keep them away from him!”  To a criminal, they charged.  Tyra and Cameron were almost free of the brambles, but they were far behind the armed FBI agents and the Lobos.  Estimating distances and obstacles, Del figured that the three groups were likely to clash in the only clear space available: the patio.  Ja’chmna was one of the best Kelric could provide, but even the Jagernaut could not create an escape route where none existed.  Instead, having reached the same conclusion as Del, he placed himself in the middle of the open space, hoping to deflect the combatants away from his charges.

            “Somebody’s going to get hurt if this goes on much longer,” Del muttered to Ricki.  He took a deep, controlled breath, and projected a command voice that would make a drill sergeant weep.

            “THAT IS ENOUGH!”

            His voice echoed off the stone walls, cutting through the confusion like a knife and bringing all three groups to a shambling halt.  Del turned in a circle, glaring impartially at Jagernauts, Mafiosi, motorcycle gangers, jocks, geeks, restaurant wait staff, FBI agents, police officer, and…his brother Vyrl?  Leaving that last improbability for later, he continued, “Now, would somebody please explain to me what this terrible danger is that’s approaching so rapidly that it can’t wait until I’ve finished my tiramisu?”  His eyes settled on the head of his security detail.  “Tyra?”

            The Jagernaut shrugged, no hint of apology on her bramble-scratched face.  “The FBI agents here told me that they had credible intelligence that someone was to be assassinated in this garden tonight.”  She nodded toward the three agents, who were now pointing their guns at the ground and looking rather sheepish.  “Then their lookout called down to report that Mr. Sparnelli was approaching you.”

            “Yes, he was approaching me,” Del agreed dryly.  “He’s Lucy Tresconi’s grandfather.  He wanted to tell me she enjoys Madrigals.”

            Johnny Sparnelli looked at the FBI agents incredulously.  “You guys thought I was about to off a Ruby prince?”  When they failed to respond, he continued with real indignation.  “My boys may step outside the law now and then, but we ain’t stupid, we ain’t ignorant, and we ain’t suicidal, neither.”

            It took almost half an hour to persuade the restaurant patrons, Mafiosi, and assorted law enforcement officers to leave.  By then, the coffee was stone cold.  The tiramisu had also become an early casualty of the confrontation when the edge of Ricki’s borrowed shawl had caught the plate as she rose and dragged it off the table. 

            Del surveyed the wreckage mournfully, then recalled his manners.

            “Ricki, this is my brother Havyrl,” he said in English. “He’s a pretty decent farmer, when he’s not too busy experimenting on the crops.  Vyrl, Ricki Varento is my producer.  Be nice to her, or she might reconsider whether to marry me.”

            Like all of Del’s siblings who had inherited their father’s gift for languages, Vyrl had at least a rudimentary command of English.  It could be deciphered by most native speakers despite the Lyshrioli grammar overlying the heavy Texan drawl he had picked up from their father’s friend Brad Tompkins, the Houston-born manager of the Dalvador spaceport. 

            Vyrl looked at Ricki with unfeigned curiosity.  “I very glad am to meet good-hearted woman who tolerate loud noises of good-timing Del.”  Switching to the more formal Iotic, he continued, “Del, this is my new wife, Kamoj Argali.  She’s the governor of Argali Province on Balumil.  Water sprite, this is my brother Del-Kurj, the Dalvador Bard.”

            Kamoj was tiny, with long black hair and cat’s eyes with vertical pupils.  The dialect of Iotic in which she murmured her greeting was odd, but quite understandable.  Introductions over, Del returned to the important task of trying to figure out what the blazes was going on.

            “We were having such a peaceful evening,” he complained to Vyrl.  “Not that I’m not glad to see you, brother, but did you have to bring half the city with you?  And why are you on Earth, anyway?”

            Vyrl shrugged.  “Kamoj and I were returning to Lyshriol from a visit to her world when Kelric diverted our ship and its escort to Parthonia to pick up Mother.  Neither of us has ever seen Earth, so we decided to come along.”

            “So Mother is here?” Del asked, switching back to English.  He was generally good at reading people and judged that his new sister-in-law was less likely to take offense at a conversation she couldn’t understand than his fiancé.  “We weren’t expecting her for another few days.” 

            “Yes, Mother here is,” Vyrl said, gamely following Del’s choice of language.  “She talk with Ambassador Tron, so we borrow limo of her and come you to see.”  The younger prince’s eyes—and his feet—strayed toward Johnny Sparnelli, who was mournfully inspecting the damage to his tomato vines.  “Is those Earth berries to eat?”

            Sparnelli turned around, holding out a handful of small, dark red, pear-shaped fruits he had salvaged off a broken branch.  “It’s a cherry tomato.  For real Italian food, you gotta have tomatoes.  Try a couple.”

            Vyrl might consider himself a simple Lyshrioli farmer, his royal status and adjunct professorship of agricultural genetics at the elite Parthonia University notwithstanding, but he could identify most of the food crops common to Skolian worlds in addition to the bubble-based crops unique to Lyshriol.  The prospect of a wholly new crop enthralled him.  He took a representative sample of the fruits Sparnelli offered, inspected their anatomy, then popped one into his mouth.

            “Is good!” he said.  Switching to Iotic, he offered a second tomato to Kamoj.  “Try this Earth berry, water sprite.  It’s delicious.”

            “Earth has more crops, more flavorings, and more cuisines than you’ll find anywhere in the Imperialate,” Del explained in Iotic as Kamoj cautiously nibbled.  Turning to Ricki, he switched back to English.  “Vyrl’s a farmer, love.  He won’t leave until he’s learned every edible plant in the garden.  We might as well sit back down and be comfortable.  Maybe we can even find our waiter and get him to bring over some more coffee and tiramisu.”

            With Vyrl and Kamoj present, there was no graceful way for Ricki and Del to slip off to the Prime-Nova suite for the night.  Nor could Ricki plausibly invent an urgent appointment, under the circumstances.  As a result, she found herself in exactly the position that she had been dreading:  on her way back to her singing lover’s Annandale estate to meet her prospective mother-in-law. 

            While such an event would have caused any sane woman a certain amount of apprehension under any circumstances, Ricki was fairly certain that most mid-level music industry executives did not have to worry about mothers-in-law who oversaw foreign policy for notoriously belligerent, 900-planet foreign empires.  She had successfully avoided Del’s mother during Anne’s wedding, but that was no longer an option.  

            Ricki wasn’t ready for this meeting. 

            She had not had time to discuss the finer points of Skolian etiquette with Del, so she had no idea how to address his mother.  Should she bow, as a commoner to a queen? Bowing was still found in some exotic corners of Allied society, but hers wasn’t one of them.  She had seen the elaborate court bows that Ambassador Tron offered the members of the Skolian ruling family and doubted she could mimic them credibly.  There were too many subtle variations, depending on the exact rank of bower and bowee.  No, bowing was out:  it would just make her look like an inept social climber.

            Which might be technically accurate, but was hardly the impression she wanted to make.

            Del greeted the members of his family with a grin and a hug when he wasn’t angry with them, but that seemed far too familiar for a first meeting, especially since her engagement to Del was still informal.  Shaking hands, the Allied all-purpose greeting, might be sufficiently respectful, but was more suited to a business meeting.

            She was still mulling over her options as the van came to a halt and they all got out.  The bodyguards dispersed, Vyrl and Kamoj went upstairs to seek their guest suite, and then it was just her and Del, walking into the dining hall.  On the far side of the hall, a woman was talking with Ambassador Tron in front of the rustic hearth.  She turned as they entered, sensing their presence in the uncanny way all of Del’s family seemed to have.  Del’s face lit up with that million-watt smile that made all the fans swoon.  He called a greeting in one of the Skolian languages and bounded lightly forward to hug his mother.

            Ricki stopped short, just two steps into the room.  It was much, much worse than she had imagined in her wildest nightmares. 

            Del’s mother wasn’t just a high-ranking foreign dignitary.  She was a warrior goddess out of ancient mythology. 

            Ricki had undergone several biosculpts to turn her face into a beautiful mask and her body into a weapon.  In the music business, she was known as the blonde barracuda:  the gorgeous, untouchable golden girl who wielded her power ruthlessly, making and unmaking the fortunes of Prime-Nova’s stable of talent at her will.  It was an artificial creation, but one that had served her well.

            Roca Skolia was the real thing.

            She was taller than Ricki, but her sleekly muscled body moved with a dancer’s grace.  She might be over a hundred years old, but she didn’t look a day over twenty.  She did, however, have the poise and air of command appropriate to a senior matriarch.  The combination was devastating.  Roca’s skin, eyes, and hair were metallic gold, glowing warmly in the dining hall’s indirect light.  Unlike her son the Imperator, whose stoic manner often made him look like a statue, this woman looked as warm and volatile as a sun—and as likely to casually incinerate anybody who flew too close. 

            In short, if Ricki was a barracuda, Roca Skolia was a dragon:  beautiful, dangerous, and deadly to anyone or anything that threatened her horde.  And plain Ricki Varento of Earth had blithely donned a suit of Hollywood plastic armor plate and walked into the dragon’s lair to steal away one of her most prized treasures: her son.

            “Come say hello to my mother, Ricki.”  Del was back at her side, still grinning.  He took her hand and tugged. 

            Like a condemned prisoner, Ricki crossed the room, her knees wobbling and threatening to give out all together.  Roca Skolia watched her approach, her golden face giving away nothing but polite interest. 

            “Mother, this is Ricki Varento, who produces my vids,” Del made the introduction, more formally than usual for him.  “Ricki, my mother, Roca Skolia.”  Mother and son looked at each other in silent communication, then the dragon’s attention settled on Ricki.  For a long moment the Skolian queen simply looked at her, measuring her mettle.

            Finally, unable to stand the silence, Ricki found herself blurting, “I’m pleased to meet you, ma’am.” 

            The dragon considered this opening sally thoughtfully, then condescended to accept it as worthy of notice.  “It is belated, that we each know the other, Ms. Varneto,” she replied, with the odd, almost-correct choice of words that occurred when a computer-based language translation program was in use.  Seasoned diplomat that she was, she managed to make the broken English sound dignified.

            Turning to Ambassador Tron, Roca murmured a phrase in Skolian.  It was apparently a polite dismissal, because the Ambassador gathered up the meshscreen from the table between them and left, after bowing deeply and respectfully to her, less deeply to Del, and barely nodding to Ricki.

            All of which made Ricki Varento’s place in the Skolian hierarchy pretty clear.

            When the door closed behind the Ambassador, Roca turned her attention back to Ricki.  Gesturing at the table, she indicated the chair the Ambassador had been using.  “Come, you sit and we learn know the other.”  Though politely phrased, it was not a request.

            Prudently, Ricki obeyed the dragon’s order.

 Part 8

Index To The Price of Peace

Skolian Empire Fan Fiction Index

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