The Timeweb Chronicles: Timeweb Trilogy Omnibus by Brian Herbert Page A

Noah’s oft-repeated admonitions to his loyal followers was, Excess is waste. This was linked to his concept of balance, which he saw as a necessary force in the cosmos, as true for microorganisms as it was for higher life forms.
    This way of thinking had been a source of friction between Noah and his father, building up to their terrible argument. On that day, only moments after Prince Saito struck him, Noah had quit his job at CorpOne and stormed out, never expecting to return or even to speak with his father again. Noah’s environmental militancy had proven too much for the Prince, who had refused to accept any of the concepts. Like Earthian bulls the two men had butted heads, with each of them holding fast to their political and economic beliefs.
    After Noah’s resignation, his father had publicly and vehemently disowned him. Noah wondered how much of a part his twin sister Francella had played in encouraging the old man’s willful behavior. She had always hated Noah. Certainly there had been jealousy on her part; he had seen too many examples of it. But her feelings of enmity seemed to run even deeper, perhaps to her own biological need to survive and her feeling that Noah was a threat to the niche she wanted to occupy.
    At the troubling thought, Noah cautioned himself. One of his father’s criticisms of him might have been valid, the way Noah constantly saw situations in environmental terms. Sometimes when Noah caught himself doing this, he tried to pull back and look at things in a different way. But that did not always work. He was most comfortable thinking within a framework that he knew well, which he considered a blueprint for all life forms, from the simplest to the most complex.
    The grid-plane locked into a landing beam. Subi Danvar opened the cockpit door, and Noah saw the parallel green lines on the instrument panel diverge, forming flashing yellow and blue lines.
    “All systems automatic,” Subi reported. He swung out of the pilot’s chair and made his way aft, turning his husky body sideways to get past banks of instruments on each side.
    Noah felt the grid-plane descend, going straight down like an elevator, protected by the electronic net over his EDP compound.
    With a scowl on his birthmark-scarred face, Subi plopped his body into a chair beside Noah and announced, “I’m not getting any sleep until I get to the bottom of this. Somebody copied our uniforms exactly … or stole them from us.”
    “I didn’t see any of our people out there,” Noah said.
    “That doesn’t mean they weren’t involved, Master. I’ll start with the most recent volunteers and work back from there. Maybe one of them is disgruntled.”
    “Could be.”
    In an organization as large as Noah’s, with thousands of uniformed Guardians, it was impossible to keep every one of them happy all the time. It was company policy to recruit people with high ideals, capable of thinking in terms of large-scale issues … rather than petty private matters. Still, there were always personality conflicts among workers, and unfulfilled ambitions.
    The aircraft settled onto a paved landing circle and taxied toward a large structure that had gray shingle walls and elegant Corinthian columns, shining bright white in the midday sunlight. This was Noah’s galactic base of operations, the main building in a complex of offices and scientific laboratories.
    In his primary business, he performed ecological recovery operations around the galaxy, under contract to various governmental agencies, corporations, and individuals wanting to repopulate areas devastated by industrial operations. On some of the smaller worlds he also operated electric power companies, having patented his own environmentally-friendly energy chambers. The merchant princes, and not just his father, had shown absolutely no concern for ecology; they routinely raped each planet’s resources and then moved on to other worlds. Canopa, despite the wild areas that still existed