Deathstalker 04 - Deathstalker Honor

other Clans, and that will happen only if they see you as an equal. Try not to stand quite so stiffly, sir. The clothes need to hang naturally for the best effect.” Robert did his best to fall out of parade rest. It wasn’t easy. None of it was easy. He’d taken pride in being a military man, and had given up his Navy career with only the greatest reluctance, after General Beckett had personally contacted him to make it clear Robert couldn’t be loyal to both his Family and the Fleet. He would have to make a choice, a commitment to one or the other. And in the end Robert knew his duty had to be to his Clan and his blood, and centuries of Family tradition. To think otherwise would mean the rest of his Family had died for nothing. So he had resigned from the Fleet and come home to Golgotha to be the Campbell.
    And silently cursed his duty and his Clan, all the way down to the planet’s surface, where he found a crowd of baying reporters waiting for him. Cameras shot back and forth around him at dizzying speeds, jostling each other for the best angles, and the reporters yelled out questions faster than he could answer them. Clan Campbell had been one of the main movers and shakers in the old Empire, till it was decimated and scattered by Clan Wolfe, and its potential reemergence was apparently big news. Robert had done his best to answer all questions, comments, and insinuations with monosyllabic grunts, all the time pushing steadily forward through the crowd. Partly because he knew how reporters could twist even the most innocent remarks, and partly because he really didn’t have anything to say. He was out of touch with current politics and Family intrigues, and didn’t want to say anything that might commit him to anything just yet.
    He especially didn’t want to have to admit that he didn’t have a clue as to just how he was going to rebuild Clan Campbell.
    At the time he’d thought wistfully of Owen Deathstalker and Hazel d’Ark. Say what you might about them, and there was a lot that could be said, they at least knew how to deal with the press. Some reporters apparently demanded combat pay just to interview them. But those two could get away with things like that. Mere mortals like Robert Campbell, who might yet need the support of the press in the future, had a harder road to follow.
    So the first thing he’d done, after he’d shaken off the news pack, had been to contact a service agency and hire the most experienced butler they had on their books. A quiet, unassuming, but surprisingly firm man in his late fifties, Baxter was more than just a butler. He was a personal servant, a gentleman’s gentleman, and privy to all the arcane secrets and rituals of aristocratic behavior. Even though he’d been in the Navy boy and man, Robert had still visited enough with his Family to know the basics, but the everyday minutia, by which proper behavior and social standing were judged, mutated faster than any outsider could hope to follow. Which was of course the point. High Society was meant to be elitist, complex, and mysterious. How else could you tell who was in and who was out? Half the fun of being in
    was turning up your nose at those who weren’t. Robert the military man saw the whole business as desperately childish, but he was still enough of an aristocrat to understand how seriously everyone else took it. He was the Campbell now, and he had to play the game. It was expected of him.
    The role of the Families might have been altered by the rebellion, but some things never changed.
    So he listened patiently while Baxter lectured him on etiquette and style and the correct way of shooting one’s cuffs, on the latest dances and the latest gossip, and who might be expected to support or oppose him. If Clan Campbell really was on the way up again, there were a great many people who saw advantages to be gained by striking deals while the Campbell was still weak. There were just as many more who might do anything up to and including assassination attempts to prevent his rise and preserve the status quo. Just by becoming the Campbell, Robert was inheriting centuries of intrigues and feuds, old allies and enemies. In the Families no one forgot or forgave. Unless it was expedient.
    Robert closed his eyes for a moment. He was deathly tired. Yesterday he’d been a Captain in the Imperial Fleet, with a glorious career in front of him. Now he’d given it all up, to become something he despised, because of his