Truth and Shadows

by Martin Delrio

  “Anything can happen,” Farrell said. “Especially in our line of work. And it never hurts to get a feel for another player’s style.”

  5

  Fort Barrett

  Oilfields Coast

  Northwind

  November 3133; dry season

  Fort Barrett was a prosperous, midsized town situated on Kearney’s Oilfields Coast. The regimental post had originally served as a source of law and order for the remote district. Over the years a sizable town had sprung up around the fort, and in recent decades the entire region had grown prosperous with offshore drilling. These days Fort Barrett was a pleasant if isolated posting. The units serving there were often ones that had distinguished—and exhausted—themselves in action elsewhere, and now were being rewarded with a stint of undemanding duty in a tranquil location.

  Will Elliot’s scout/sniper unit was currently enjoying such a reward. During the summer, Will and his comrades had stood with Colonel—now Brigadier General—Griffin to hold the mouth of Red Ledge Pass against the Steel Wolves, buying time for Tara Campbell and Ezekiel Crow to organize the main defense, and they had fought again, without a break for rest, in the final pitched battle on the plains. They had taken heavy losses, especially for new unblooded troops, but they hadn’t broken. And after the mud had dried and the Wolves had left Northwind, they had been sent to Fort Barrett to relax in the sun.

  Will had been promoted to Corporal in the aftermath of the invasion, and had not found the duties of that rank to be overly burdensome. Life at Fort Barrett was, generally speaking, enjoyable, with good weather, an attractive location, and a soothing daily base routine. He wrote to his mother once a week, assuring her of his continued health and well-being, and sent half of his money to her every payday by automatic allotment.

  He worried about his mother a bit sometimes. Jean Elliot was living these days in Kildare with Will’s sister, Ruth, and still hadn’t decided what to do about her home in Liddisdale. The house where Will and his two sisters had grown up, and where Will had continued to live with his mother until hard times had impelled him to join the Regiment, had been badly damaged in the summer’s fighting. If the structure wasn’t rebuilt before the end of winter, by spring it would be fit for nothing except selling it for the land beneath it.

  This being late afternoon on a mail day, Will had just sent his mother another letter, in handwritten hardcopy since she didn’t like using her daughter’s communications console. (She fretted that Ruth might begrudge her the connection time, although Ruth had assured Will privately more than once that she did nothing of the kind.) Will had also picked up a soft but bulky package from Kildare which he suspected contained hand-knitted woolen socks—his mother made them for him every winter. He wasn’t likely to need them here on the coast, but if he’d figured out one thing about life in the Regiment, it was that you never knew where you might be going next.

  He left the post office with the package of socks tucked under one arm, and stepped out into the brilliant sunlight of the parade ground. The sky overhead was a bright eye-watering blue, and a stiff breeze had the banners of Northwind and the Regiment and The Republic of the Sphere snapping on their flagpoles. The air smelled of salt water and warm-climate flowers, with a faint underlying note of distant oil refinery. In the carefully tended flower beds beneath the post office windows, myriad insects buzzed and whirred.

  He was halfway across the parade ground, and the sun dazzle had not quite cleared from his vision, when he crossed the path of Master Sergeant Murray—a short, muscular man who possessed the seemingly miraculous ability to keep his uniform in fresh-pressed condition on the muddiest of battlefields.

  “Elliot,” Murray said.

  Will halted. “Sergeant.”

  “I’ve been looking for you.”

  Being looked for by a sergeant was never good. Will searched his conscience hastily for possible errors and infractions, and came up clean. He suppressed the urge to panic anyway and said, “Sergeant?” in tones of respectful inquiry.

  “The company has a problem, Elliot. With Foster going down to Halidon to train with the battle-armor boys, we’re short a sergeant. That means we’re going to have to promote somebody, and the Captain says that it ought to be you.”

  “Me, Sergeant?” Will felt blank and startled. The promotion to corporal hadn’t particularly surprised him. He’d known he was good enough at the job for that, and besides, they’d lost enough men at Red Ledge Pass and on the plains that they would have had to promote somebody regardless. But he hadn’t thought that things were still so bad they’d need to promote him again.

  “You want to tell Captain Fletcher that he doesn’t know what he’s doing?” Murray asked.

  “No. But—” Will paused. He’d had an unpleasant thought. “Sergeant, is there trouble coming that nobody’s talking about?”

  Murray gave him an approving look. “No trouble right now—but you know how to think about things, Elliot. That’s good. Be at the admin building at 1000 tomorrow to sign the papers.”

  They parted, and Will, feeling a bit light-headed, continued back to the shadowy coolness of the barracks. There, he found his friends Jock Gordon and Lexa McIntosh—the former a muscular giant of a man and the latter a diminutive gypsy-dark woman—passing the time quietly at the end of their duty day.

  Jock was a farm boy from New Lanark, the youngest of too many brothers, and Lexa had run wild with the youth gangs of the Kearney outback until a judge—perhaps seeing a bit of potential that she herself had not—had given her a choice between time in the Regiment and time in jail. At the moment Jock was polishing the already gleaming buttons and buckles of his dress uniform, and Lexa was lying on her stomach in her bunk reading a six-month-old copy of FashionSphere.

  She looked up from the magazine’s pages as Will approached. “Hey, Will. It says here that open-toed pumps are coming back into style. Do you think I should buy myself some the next time we get paid?”

  “Go for it,” Jock said, when Will didn’t answer. “They’ll be just the thing for those long marches.”

  “Once in a while I do go somewhere that doesn’t involve hiking twenty-five miles and shooting people at the end of it,” Lexa replied. She trailed off, looking at Will, who hadn’t said anything. “Will? Are you all right?”

  He sat down heavily on his bunk, still clutching the package from his mother. “Um,” he said. “Yes. I’m all right—I’m fine. Really.”

  “Well, you look like somebody hit you over the head with a sock full of sand. Not that I’d know about that from experience, mind you.”

  Jock set aside his rag and his can of polish and gave Will his full attention. “Is it bad news from home?”

  “No.” The word came out sounding fainter than Will intended. He tried again, and this time achieved a normal voice. “It’s—Master Sergeant Murray says they’re going to promote me. To Sergeant.”

  Lexa turned to Jock. “Told you they’d do it before New Year’s. Pay up.”

  Will looked from one of his friends to the other. “Did everybody see this coming except me?”

  Jock grinned. “Aye.”

  “What am I going to do?” Will asked plaintively.

  “Your job, what else?” said Lexa. “In the meantime, since it’s payday and they haven’t actually pinned the stripes on you yet—let’s all go out tonight and celebrate while you’re still poor and humble enough to socialize with the likes of us.”

  6

  Prefect’s Office

  New Barracks

  Tara

  Northwind

  November 3133; local winter

  For the first time in several years, Captain Tara Bishop was back in the city with which she (like the Countess of Northwind) shared a name. A great deal had happened during the time she had been gone, and a lot of things had changed. She’d been nothing more than a green Lieutenant Junior Grade when she left home to join the Highlander forces serving offworld—and The Republic of the Sphere
had been a happy and peaceful place, with the HPG communications network up and running, providing the thread of regular, almost real-time contact that tied together The Republic’s scattered political entities.

  The Lieutenant Tara Bishop of those days had not anticipated seeing any combat harder than the occasional skirmish with pirates or with disaffected political extremists. Fighting against the latter, especially, seemed almost unfair, since as a class they tended to be chronically underfunded and undersupported, the last political resort of perpetual losers and hopeless romantics.

  That was then, Captain Bishop reminded herself as she made her way through the streets of the capital. This is now.

  And “now” meant a universe in which the HPG net had gone down, at the hands of one or another of a dozen different parties, all claiming responsibility for the job, although Captain Bishop remained more than half convinced that the real culprit was somebody else who wasn’t talking about the job at all. In that new universe, every fringe group and neo-factionalist in the Inner Sphere was suddenly raising an army and trying to carve out an area of influence. Case in point, the Dragon’s Fury on Addicks—and while Captain Bishop had been fighting there, keeping the Kurita Dragon’s grasping claws away from a peaceful world with no real standing army to put up a defense, her own home planet had come under attack.

  To her unspoken but profound relief, Northwind’s capital city and its main DropPort showed few obvious marks of the fighting. She knew from the reports she’d read en route from Addicks that the final battle had taken place away from built-up areas, in the open farm and grazing land of the plains north of Tara; she’d seen pictures, and knew that in a season or two most of the scars of combat would be gone.

  On the other hand, the homes and small towns along the road through Red Ledge Pass had not been so fortunate. Captain Bishop had gone skiing and rock climbing in that area, and the place-names attached to stories of the Steel Wolves’ trail of destruction were ones she remembered from holidays past: Harlaugh, Liddisdale, the Killie Burn, all of them wrecked or polluted, and needing far longer than a couple of seasons to repair.

  The changes in the capital, once she started looking for them, proved to be more subtle. Soldiers in uniform were a more common sight than they’d been in the days before the HPG collapse, a reminder that the Highlander Regiments were expanding in size for the first time in some decades. Prices these days were higher than Captain Bishop remembered, driven upward by war and uncertainty. She was glad that she’d kept—and augmented by some judicious participation in games of skill—her pay from Addicks, and equally glad that she could count on finding meals and a bed waiting for her at the New Barracks.

  First things first, though. Before she could settle in to her new quarters, she had to present herself and her orders to Prefect Tara Campbell. She’d taken the time before leaving the DropShip to freshen up, putting on a clean uniform and a touch of cosmetics—not enough to look gaudy, just enough to show that she took the occasion seriously enough to make an effort—and had brushed some order back into her short blond hair.

  At least it’s my natural color, she reflected. I know for a fact that the Countess dyes hers.

  This irreverent thought cheered her as she passed through the front gate of the fort complex with a flip of an ID card, and made her way to the New Barracks and another ID check, and then at last to Tara Campbell’s offices. The Countess was in. Like everything else on Northwind, Tara Campbell had changed since the last time Captain Bishop had seen her. She looked older than she had when Captain Bishop met her on Addicks, and tireder as well, as though she’d been getting by for too long on too few hours of sleep a night.

  She looked harder, too, in a way that Captain Bishop couldn’t quite put a finger on, except to say that she looked like someone who’d made the tough decisions.

  Captain Bishop saluted and handed across her orders.

  “Captain Tara Bishop reporting for duty as ordered, ma’am.”

  “At ease, Captain, and take a seat.” The Prefect waited, smiling politely—she had grown up around diplomats, and would probably smile politely even if you set her hair on fire—while Captain Bishop complied. Then she continued, “I see that you’re going to be my new aide.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Captain Bishop said.

  “Excellent.” The Prefect smiled again, and this time it looked genuine. “I’ve been making do with temporarily assigned personnel ever since the battle on the plains, and it hasn’t been working out as well as I’d like. Having someone who’s actually up to handling the responsibilities of the job may let me get some rest.”

  “I hope to do a good job, ma’am,” Captain Bishop said.

  “Of course you do. Your Colonel speaks highly of you; he wouldn’t have recommended you for the post if he didn’t think you were capable.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Captain Bishop also remembered her Colonel telling her—when she complained to him about having to leave Addicks—that a post as aide to the Prefect was a big step upward in the direction of better things, and one that most career minded young officers would be damned grateful to get. He’d also said that the Countess of Northwind wasn’t merely a political soldier. She wouldn’t hang back when fighting needed to be done, and anyone serving as her aide would see all the action that she ever wanted.

  “The very first thing we have to get clear,” Tara Campbell said, “is that if you’re going to be any good to me as an aide, you’re going to have to speak freely, like you did back on Addicks. None of this ‘yes ma’am’ and ‘no ma’am’ stuff. Tell the truth and shame the devil, as my father used to say.”

  “Yes, ma’—” Captain Bishop caught herself. “I’ll do my best. But it’s a lot easier out in the field.”

  The Countess of Northwind laughed. “Believe me, Captain Bishop, you’re not the first person ever to notice that.”

  7

  Riggers’ Rest Inn

  Fort Barrett

  Oilfields Coast

  Northwind

  November 3133; dry season

  When Anastasia Kerensky had returned to Northwind, the last place she’d expected to find herself spending an evening—spending several evenings, in fact—was drinking beer incognito in a Fort Barrett pub, even with her trusted officer and occasional lover Nicholas Darwin along for escort and backup. Disguise and subterfuge did not suit her temperament. While she was fighting for The Republic on Dieron and Achernar as Tassa Kay, she had reveled in the high-visibility accomplishments of her other self, and never bothered to change either her looks or her manners. Tassa Kay had simply been a version of Anastasia Kerensky cut loose from the bonds of Clan and Bloodname, free instead to act as she pleased in all things. She had enjoyed being Tassa Kay.

  This time, though, she had been forced to adopt an identity so far from her own that it chafed like an ill-fitting shoe. She had temporarily lightened her long hair from its distinctive lustrous black with reddish highlights to a plain drab brown—she would be glad when she could reverse the effect, but for now it was necessary for her to appear the opposite of flamboyant. She had traded her snug black leather jacket and trousers for practical traveler’s gear: sturdy thick-soled shoes and bulky socks; hiking shorts and a loose shirt and a floppy wide-brimmed hat; a backpack and a walking stick.

  Her entire outfit came from the crew lockers on the captured offshore oil rig. The medic, Ian Murchison, had found the items for her at her instruction, and the hair-color kit as well, though with an expression that said he had not enjoyed the task. All things considered, however, the oil rig’s sole surviving crew member was adjusting to his Bondsman status as much as anyone was likely to who wasn’t already Clan.

  Nicholas Darwin was similarly outfitted, and from the same source, although in Anastasia’s opinion the outdoor-tourist look worked considerably better on him than it did on her. He was a compactly built man, not overlarge but quite strong, as befitted a Warrior who fought his battles from the cramped interior of a tank, and the
hiking shorts showed off his dark skin and his well-muscled legs to excellent advantage.

  Anastasia and Nicholas had been waiting at the Riggers’ Rest for over a week now, in the guise of travelers on a hiking tour of the Oilfields Coast. They had worked up a cover story to explain their unfamiliar accents, but Fort Barrett’s booming oil economy had drawn in so many offworlders over the past couple of decades that they never needed to use it.

  They had been brought to Fort Barrett by a mysterious coded message that had come in over the main communications rig in Balfour-Douglas #47. Such a message should never have made it through to Anastasia Kerensky at all. The Steel Wolves had communications and intelligence specialists hard at work making certain that the drilling station’s customary flow of messages and reports never faltered. So far as the outside world knew, Balfour-Douglas #47 was still operating normally.

  Nevertheless, a message had come through, and from a source who should never have known where she was, let alone how to contact her: Fort Barrett. You pick the place. I’ll find you there. We want to talk business.

  That message had led directly to twelve days spent drinking local beer out of heavy glass mugs and eating dried salted jellyfish skins. The jellyfish skins were a popular local bar food, of the sort that visiting offworlders were expected to try once and write home about shuddering; by now Anastasia was half worried she was starting to develop a taste for them.

  “I do not like this,” she said.

  “You could have fooled me,” Nicholas Darwin said. “That makes the second bowl of those things that you have finished this evening.”

  “Not the food,” she said. “This waiting for a person who does not give their name.”

  “You said you knew who it came from.”

  Anastasia took a long drink from her mug of beer. She wished that it were vodka, but the Riggers’ Rest was not the sort of place to have the good stuff in stock. Besides, vodka was the drink of choice for her alter ego Tassa Kay in a hell-raising mood, and she was not being Tassa Kay now. She was merely Anastasia in disguise.