The Agent Gambit

The Agent Gambit

BY SHARON LEE & STEVE MILLER

Baen Books by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller

The Liaden Universe®

Fledgling

Saltation

Mouse and Dragon

Ghost Ship (forthcoming)

The Dragon Variation (omnibus)

The Agent Gambit (omnibus)

The Fey Duology

Duainfey

Longeye

by Sharon Lee

Carousel Tides

THE AGENT GAMBIT

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Agent of Change copyright © 1988 Steve Miller & Sharon Lee. Carpe Diem copyright © 1989 Steve Miller and Sharon Lee. Introduction © 2011 by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller.

Liaden Universe ® is a registered trademark.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Book

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 978-1-4391-3407-8

Cover art by Alan Pollack

First Baen printing, January 2011

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lee, Sharon, 1952-

[Agent of change]

The agent gambit / by Sharon Lee & Steve Miller.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-4391-3407-8 (trade pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Liaden Universe (Imaginary place)--Fiction. 2. Assassins--Fiction. I.

Miller, Steve, 1950 July 31- II. Lee, Sharon, 1952- Carpe diem. III. Title.

PS3562.E3629A7 2011

813'.54--dc22

2010042807

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

INTRODUCTION

If
The Agent Gambit
is your first taste of the Liaden Universe®, welcome, and welcome to the club, because the two novels here effectively represent the way the authors came to the story.

At the time we wrote the first books in the series our lives revolved around cats, writing–and around chess–since Steve was President of the local chess club, a voting member of the United States Chess federation, and a working USCF tournament director. We sometimes couched our work in chessic terms, looking at
variations
of story ideas, using
opening combinations
of characters or ideas, and even as
gambits
–in chess, a kind of opening move or set of moves that has some risk and a lot of potential upside.

Our first intimation that there was a game afoot came back in 1985 or so when Sharon spent all day at the typewriter and came up with one sentence: The man who was not Terrence O'Grady had come quietly. Essentially a gambit: the story action is initially seen through the eyes of a minor character in the first short chapter, only getting to our protagonist's view in the second chapter. If that opening didn't grab the reader, they wouldn't buy the book. Thankfully, readers liked it.

We've shared the follow-up story to that sentence appearing elsewhere any number of times, but essentially we took the next 24 hours off from the mundane world and, agreeing there was more than short story or novel in this sentence, charted out seven books. What most concerns us here is not all seven, but these two:
Agent of Change
and
Carpe Diem
.

Agent of Change
was written first, and it embodied (we hoped!) the essentials as we saw them: action, adventure, romance, and honor. While we envisioned a spy story and a hero who might move at the highest levels, we only nodded in passing at what spy stories looked like in 1985–there were gadgets (we wanted a science fiction book, right?) and there were spaceships. And along with the spy story tropes and the regency romance tropes (for we were playing as well as writing!) there was also a mix of hints from the back story we knew and the front story we wanted to write. Those complexities came in part from the use of language (we hope you'll be patient with adding a few words to your vocabulary) and from odd societies seen from the inside, where the reader once in awhile must take our word that this is how it works. Please enjoy, and understand that many of those little references to songs, or jokes, are on purpose.

We finished
Agent of Change
where it ends now, though the original opening chapter or two were edited and rewritten heavily once the book was sold. It took several years for the first Liaden novel to find a home, though, and in the interim, we went on, having left (as you first timers will discover) our two main characters in a bit of a pickle.

Going on was
Carpe Diem
, which is also in the book or file in front of you. Without putting too many spoilers into the intro, let us say that our main characters had thought themselves comfortable, and then discovered that they were not, and could not be, as things were developing. For one thing, they were located on a world far from where either of them wanted or needed to be. For another thing, there was the problem of having two strong-willed people with various sorts of battle trauma to deal with. We still played with words, added more about the rest of the clans and had fun.

Carpe Diem
works with a number of our usual themes: honor, romance, adventure–but it also explores deeper questions–like how do soldiers break training and become human again, and what happens when man needing breakfast faces a broken toaster.

Baen will be releasing two more Liaden Universe® reprint omnibi: the previously mentionecd
Korval's Game
(including
Plan B
and
I Dare
)
and
The Crystal Variation
(including
Crystal Soldier, Crystal Dragon
, and
Balance of Trade
). These next five novels are mostly adventure and Space Opera, with three of them following after the original seven-book story arc we'd started with. All are character-driven; all were fun to write and, we hope, fun to read.

In addition to the reprints which include the already issued
The Dragon Variation
, Baen has-or-will-be publishing four more Liaden Universe® novels:
Fledgling
, and
Saltation
, the story of Theo Waitley; and
Mouse and Dragon
, the sequel to
Scout's Progress
, as well as
Ghost Ship
, the direct sequel to both
I Dare
and
Saltation.

If this is your first encounter with a Liaden Universe® book- welcome. If you're an old friend, stopping by for a revisit-we're very glad to see you.

Thank you.

Sharon Lee and Steve Miller

Waterville Maine

September 2010

AGENT OF
CHANGE

A Liaden Universe
^®
Novel

CHAPTER ONE

Standard Year 1392

THE MAN WHO
was not Terrence O'Grady had come quietly.

And that, Sam insisted, was clear proof. Terry had never done anything quietly in his life if there was a way to get a fight out of it.

Pete, walking at Sam's left behind the prisoner, wasn't so sure. To all appearances, the man they had taken
was
Terrence O'Grady. He had the curly, sandy hair, the pug nose, and the archaic black-framed glasses over pale blue eyes, and he walked with a limp of the left leg, which the dossier said was a souvenir of an accident way back when he'd been mining in the Belt of Terado.

They stopped at a door set deep into the brick wall of the alley. Up in front, Russ raised his fist and struck the heavy kreelwood twice.

They waited, listening to the noises of the night city beyond the alley. Then the door opened silently on well-oiled hinges, and they were staring down a long hallway.

As he stepped over the threshold, Pete gritted his teeth and concentrated on the back of the man before him. The man who was not Terrence O'Grady. Maybe.

It was in no way a remarkable back: slightly stoop-shouldered, not quite on a level with Pete's own. Terrence O'Grady, the dossier noted, was short and slender for a Terran, a good six inches below the average. This made him a valuable partner for bulky Sam, who handled the massive mining equipment effortlessly, but was not so well suited to exploring the small gaps, craters, and crevices where a rich vein might hide.

Sam and Terry made money in the Belt. Then Terry quit mining, bought himself some land with atmosphere over it, and settled into farming, child raising, and even politics.

Eight years later Sam got a bouncecomm from Terry's wife: Terrence O'Grady had disappeared.

Sam went to talk to wife and family, as an old friend should; he asked questions and nosed around. No corpse had been found, but Sam declared Terry dead. He'd been too stubborn a dreamer to run out on all of them at once. And, given Terry's luck, someone would have had to kill him to make him dead before old age.

Sam said Terry had been murdered three years ago.

But recently there had been rumors, and then this person here-wearing a dead man's face and calling himself by a dead man's name.

Pete shook himself as they rounded a sharp corner and barely avoided stepping on the prisoner.

"Look sharp!" Sam whispered harshly.

They turned another corner and came into a brightly lit, abandoned office.

The man who was not Terrence O'Grady nearly smiled.

From this point on, he knew the layout of each of the fourteen suites in this building, the voltage of the lighting fixtures, the position of doors and windows, the ambient temperature, and even the style and color of the carpets.

Within his mental Loop, he saw a number shift from .7 to .85. The second figure changed a moment later from .5 to .7. The first percentage indicated Chance of Mission Success; the second, Chance of Personal Survival. CMS recently had been running significantly above CPS.

His escort halted before a lift, and both numbers rose by a point. When the lift opened onto an office on the third floor, the Loop flickered and withdrew-the more imminent the action, the less precise the calculations.

THE DESK WAS
beautiful
, made of inlaid teak and redwood imported from Earth.

The man behind the desk was also imported from Earth and he was not beautiful. He had a paunch and an aggressive black beard. Soft hands laced together on the gleaming wood, he surveyed the group with casual interest.

"Thank you, gentlemen. You may stand away from the prisoner."

Russ and Skipper dropped back, leaving the man who was not O'Grady alone before Mr. Jaeger's desk.

"Mr. O'Grady, I believe?" Jaeger purred.

The little man bowed slightly and straightened, hands loose at his sides.

In the depths of his beard, Jaeger frowned. He tapped the desktop with one well-manicured finger.

"You're not Terrence O'Grady," he said flatly. "This readout says you're not even Terran." He was on his feet with a suddenness surprising in so soft an individual, hands slamming wood. "You're a damned geek spy, that's what you are, Mr.-O'Grady!" he roared.

Pete winced and Sam hunched his shoulders. Russ swallowed hard.

The prisoner shrugged.

For a stunned minute, nobody moved. Then Jaeger straightened and strolled to the front of the desk. Leaning back, he hooked thumbs into belt loops and looked down at the prisoner.

"You know, Mr. . . . O'Grady," he said conversationally. "There seems to be a conviction among you geeks-all geeks, not just humanoid ones-that we Terrans are pushovers. That the power of Earth and of true humans is some kind of joke." He shook his head.

"The Yxtrang make war on our worlds and pirate our ships; the Liadens control the trade economy; the turtles ignore us. We're required to pay exorbitant fees at the so-called
federated
ports. We're required to pay in cantra, rather than good Terran bits. Our laws are broken. Our people are ridiculed. Or impersonated. Or murdered. And we're tired of it, O'Grady. Real tired of it."

The little man stood quietly, relaxed and still, face showing bland attention.

Jaeger nodded. "It's time for you geeks to learn to take us Terrans seriously-maybe even treat us with a little respect. Respect is the first step toward justice and equality. And just to show you how much I believe in justice and equality, I'm going to do something for you, O'Grady." He leaned forward sharply, his beard a quarter-inch from the prisoner's smooth face. "I'm going to let you talk to me. Now. You're going to tell me everything, Mr. O'Grady: your name, your home planet, who sent you, how many women you've had, what you had for dinner, why you're here-everything." He straightened and went back around the desk. Folding his hands atop the polished wood, he smiled.

"Do all that, Mr. O'Grady, and I might let you live."

The little man laughed.

Jaeger snapped upright, hand slapping a hidden toggle.

Pete and Sam dove to the left, Russ and Skipper to the right. The prisoner hadn't moved at all when the blast of high-pressure water struck, hurling him backward over and over until he slammed against the far wall. Pinned by the torrent, he tried to claw his way to the window.