Truth and Shadows

by Martin Delrio

  “We both know who it had to come from,” she said. “But he is not going to come to us himself. So we wait, looking like fools, for someone whom we will not know when we meet.”

  Thinking of it, she had to suppress the urge to twist her face into a snarl. Mousy brown backpackers did not do that sort of thing. She would wait, she would listen to the envoy from that person who believed that he had business with the Steel Wolves. And someday, when matters on Northwind had been settled for good and all, Anastasia Kerensky would show that person exactly what it meant to do business with Clan Wolf.

  But not now, it seemed. The barmaid had just brought over a fresh mug of beer to Nicholas Darwin, along with a small folded slip of paper.

  “From the lady over there,” the barmaid said.

  Anastasia looked without turning her head, and saw a young red-haired woman dressed in stylish but practical clothes—if by “practical” one meant “conveniently tailored for concealed weapons.” Nicholas Darwin unfolded the note, read it, and passed it over to Anastasia without a word.

  The lady needs to meet with me alone. Room 9, upstairs, in ten minutes.

  “You should not go alone,” Darwin said after she had finished reading the message. “It might be a trap.”

  “If I do not go alone, she will vanish for the night and we will have to do this all over again. And I am tired of drinking beer in Fort Barrett.”

  “Good point,” he conceded. “Even beer gets boring after a while. What should I do, then?”

  “Wait downstairs and listen. If you hear me call out to you by name, come running with your weapons ready in your hands.”

  Darwin nodded. “I can do that.”

  “Good.”

  Ten minutes passed. The other woman had left the room as soon as her note was delivered. Other parties came and went, off-shift refinery workers leaving the Riggers’ Rest as soldiers from Fort Barrett proper came in. Anastasia rose and drained the last of her beer.

  “It is time. Wait for me here, and remember—listen.”

  She went up the narrow stairs to the inn’s second floor, and down the hallway to room 9, at the far end. The door was not latched, and stood slightly ajar.

  Anastasia pushed on the door a little. It opened. She stepped inside, and the door swung shut. Hearing no sound of an automatic lock clicking over, she suppressed—for the moment—the urge to react violently, and looked around the room for the other woman.

  She found her sitting by the writing desk in the corner opposite the door.

  “Hello, Galaxy Commander,” the woman said. “I see that you got our message.”

  Anastasia took the room’s other chair without waiting for an invitation. “First things first. Who are you, and how were you able to get that message through?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” the woman said. “I’m just the hired help. As for how my principal was able to get a message through to you—I’m afraid that’s proprietary information.”

  “Whose information? And whose hired help?”

  “I think you know.”

  “I know whose name was mentioned,” Anastasia said. “But anyone can mention a name.”

  The woman smiled. “Maybe so. But Jacob Bannson isn’t a name it pays to mention if you don’t have the man himself backing you up. Which, as it happens, I do.”

  “Explain to me why I should believe you.”

  “I thought I might have to do that,” the woman said. “So I asked the boss for this.”

  She pulled a disc out of the pocket of her tailored jacket and inserted it into the room’s battered tri-vid player. The display unit filled with staticky fuzz which cleared in a few seconds to show an image of Bannson himself. The strong facial features and the full red-orange beard were unmistakable, like a viking of old in a well-cut suit; not for the first time, Anastasia suspected that he cultivated the look on purpose.

  Bannson spoke. “The bearer of this disc is acting in accordance with my wishes and is empowered to enter into negotiations in my name. Her likeness is presented now for your comparison.”

  The face in the tri-vid changed to an image of the other woman. Anastasia studied it, and was forced to concede that it was a match.

  “So you really are who you say you are.” She reached out and turned the tri-vid off. “What does your employer want from me?”

  “From you?” the woman asked. “Nothing. In fact, my employer wants to help you achieve your goals.”

  “How?”

  “By offering you the assistance of a unit or more of trusted mercenaries, including artillery, battle armor, and ’Mechs.”

  Anastasia stiffened. “Please convey my thanks to your employer, and let him know that my Wolves and I do not desire mercenary assistance at the present time.”

  “Is that your last word on the subject?”

  “It is my only word.”

  The other woman shrugged. “Whatever you say. But the offer remains open.” She took the disc out of the player and slipped it back into her pocket. Then she gave Anastasia a level look. “And a word of advice from me to you, purely out of the kindness of my heart—”

  Anastasia was still offended. “Yes?”

  “Clean up your own house before somebody outside cleans it for you. How do you think we got your secret frequency?”

  8

  Riggers’ Rest Inn

  Fort Barrett

  Oilfields Coast

  Northwind

  November 3133; dry season

  Will, Jock, and Lexa were celebrating Will’s imminent promotion at the Riggers’ Rest. The inn was not so fancy a dining place that the management would throw out a trio of foot soldiers for daring to drink in the bar. “If our uniforms aren’t good enough to pass the dress code,” Lexa had decreed when they started out for the evening, “then we don’t want to go there.”

  On the other hand, it was close enough to uptown to serve good food as well as good booze, and the owner had a soft spot for the men and women of the Regiments, being a discharged twenty-year veteran who’d bought the inn with his mustering out pay. It was, in short, an ideal spot in which to celebrate a promotion.

  The time was the odd midway hour of the day, a bit too late to count as afternoon, a bit too early to be called evening, and the bar of the Riggers’ Rest was mostly deserted. What looked like the local after work crowd was filtering out as Will and his two friends entered, and the dinner crowd had not yet shown up.

  Jock and Lexa were already intent on getting drunk—or if not completely drunk, at the very least well-lubricated. Will was amused; this was his party, but it looked like he’d gotten stuck with being the sober one again tonight.

  The same thing had happened at the victory party in the White Horse back in Tara, after the battle on the plains. He supposed it was a reflex left over from his civilian days, when he’d worked as a wilderness guide leading parties of off-world tourists through the forests of the Rockspire Mountains. Put him in the company of people determined to be foolish, and he felt responsible for making certain they all got home.

  If life as a soldier hadn’t kicked that impulse out of him, he supposed that nothing ever would. There would be no hell-raising for Sergeant-to-be Will Elliot tonight. He resigned himself to nursing his original mug of beer and enjoying a grilled seafood platter instead.

  “Try the jellyfish skins,” Lexa said, halfway through the spread of appetizers.

  Will looked at the bowl full of salt-encrusted, semi-transparent flakes. “The what?”

  Lexa gave him a wicked grin. “Jellyfish skins. The coast here is the only place you can get them made fresh. Flash-irradiated isn’t the same.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Trust your auntie Lexa. It’s probably the last chance you’ll get.”

  An awkward silence fell over the table. Lexa had stated a truth they had been avoiding. After tonight, the three of them would never have quite the same easy friendship as before. The difference in rank, however slight, would al
ways be there, coloring their interactions with obligations and duties on Will’s part that the other two did not share.

  He found himself hoping that promotion would come their way as well, to ease the unwanted estrangement, but could not help feeling dubious. Jock Gordon was steady as granite, but not a particularly fast or imaginative thinker; Lexa McIntosh was fast and imaginative, all right—and a crack shot with any weapon that needed aiming—but she hadn’t completely lost the wild streak that had landed her in the Regiment to start with.

  Will drew back from that line of thought with an inward sigh. He wasn’t accustomed to thinking of his friends in that manner—it had been somebody else’s job to do so until now. Feeling vaguely guilty, he scooped up a handful of the jellyfish skins and crunched them down. They tasted surprisingly good.

  “I give up,” he told Lexa. “You were right.”

  “Of course I’m right. Your turn, Jock—you try them.”

  Jock shook his head doubtfully. He was never an eager candidate for new experiences. “I don’t know. . . .”

  “Do you want everyone to think that you’re a tourist?” Lexa demanded.

  “I am a tourist.”

  “You’re not a tourist,” Will told him. “You’re a soldier stationed here, which is a different thing altogether.” Will looked about the bar, scanning the handful of patrons, and found what he was looking for. “That is a tourist.”

  Jock and Lexa glanced in the direction he’d indicated. A young man sat alone at a table drinking beer, dressed for hiking with a backpack propped against the wall beside him. He hadn’t come to the Riggers’ Rest alone; another backpack and a walking stick stood next to his.

  “How do you know he’s a tourist?” Lexa asked.

  Jock nodded agreement. “Lots of people hike.”

  “He’s a tourist,” Will said definitely. “I used to work with them; I can tell.” He continued, warming to his topic. “That guy isn’t from anywhere around here.”

  “Want to bet on it?” asked Lexa.

  “Sure.” Will wasn’t a gambler; but this wasn’t a gamble, any more than betting that snow would close Breakbone Pass sometime during the winter. “Five stones says he isn’t from Kearney at all.”

  Lexa said, “We’ll take it.”

  “Where are we going to get the answer?” Jock asked.

  “From him.” Will looked at Lexa. “Do you want to ask him, or shall I?”

  “Better be you,” Lexa said. “He had a girl with him earlier, and she’ll be coming back any minute.”

  “You sure?”

  “You know what you know and I know what I know. He doesn’t look like a guy who’s just been dumped and abandoned.”

  Will got up and went to the other table. He thought about the problem briefly on his way over, and decided that the direct approach was the best. There was no point in concocting an elaborate excuse when a simple request for information would work just as well.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” he said politely to the young man, “but I wonder if you’d mind helping my friends and me settle an argument.”

  The man looked doubtful, but also curious. “An argument?”

  “Well, actually,” Will said sheepishly, “we have a bet going.”

  The man glanced from Will over to Jock and Lexa. “A bet, you say?”

  “Aye.”

  “And how am I supposed to be able to help you with it?”

  “Tell us where you’re from, and if I’ve guessed the right answer I win five stones from each of them.”

  The man looked amused. “I have heard stupider bets in my time, and made a few. Here—I will write it on the napkin, so they will not say you cheated.”

  He scrawled something on the napkin with a pen from his shirt pocket. Will took the napkin without looking at it.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  He returned to his friends and handed the napkin to Lexa. “Well? What does it say?”

  “I’m impressed—” she began.

  “It says he’s impressed?”

  “No, you jumped-up rock climber, it says he’s from Thorin.”

  “The planet?” Jock said.

  Lexa nodded. “Unless there’s a town with the same name somewhere in Prefecture X, which he also says he’s from. Looks like we pay up, Jocko.”

  Will took their money and put it away, frowning distractedly as he did so. Lexa raised an eyebrow at him.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Thorin’s a long way from here.”

  “Like you said, he’s a tourist.”

  “I know,” Will said. “I met a few tourists from Thorin, back when I was working as a mountain guide. He doesn’t sound like he’s from Thorin.”

  “Maybe he was born somewhere else,” Jock said. “People move around, you know.”

  Will thought of his mother, looking more and more like she would be settling permanently with his sister in Kildare, while the house in Liddisdale turned into rubble from lying untended. “I know. It’s just—”

  “Hey,” said Lexa. “Told you his girl would come back.”

  The woman who came down from the upper part of the inn and joined the man from Thorin was also, by her dress, a tourist. But the man’s expression as she joined him prompted Will to give her a second look, and to see that the dull brown hair in its practical style framed a striking, strong-boned face, and that the hiking shorts and loose shirt failed dismally to hide an equally striking body.

  “Quit drooling, Will,” Lexa told him. “She’s taken.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “What is it then, if it isn’t that?”

  Will shook his head. “It’s . . . something. I don’t know. Probably nothing.”

  He put the nagging uncertainty aside, and applied himself to his dinner. It was not until several hours later, back in his bunk at the fort, that the question and its answer came to him in a flash of memory, overlaying the face he’d seen at the Riggers’ Rest with another face, one that he’d seen over and over again in the tri-vid news during the aftermath of last summer’s war.

  The leader of the Steel Wolves.

  Anastasia Kerensky.

  9

  Balfour-Douglas Petrochemicals Offshore Drilling Station #47

  Oilfields Coast

  Northwind

  November 3133; dry season

  The motor whaleboat belonging to Balfour-Douglas #47 cut through the waves with Nicholas Darwin at the tiller, bearing Galaxy Commander Anastasia Kerensky home from the Oilfields Coast. Anastasia was not certain why the 26-foot open craft should have been called a whaleboat, since to the best of her knowledge Northwind had no indigenous aquatic mammals, and even on Terra itself nobody had hunted whales for centuries. She’d asked Ian Murchison about the name, thinking that as a former member of the oil rig’s crew he might know the reason, but the Bondsman had only shrugged and said, “It’s a sailor thing.”

  “There are no sails on this—whaleboat—either,” she had said.

  “Don’t ask me, Galaxy Commander. I’m just the medic.”

  Anastasia would be happier, she thought, when the Steel Wolves were back on land. Land, air, or space—those, she knew, and land especially, where the BattleMechs ruled. She wanted to be striding across open ground in her custom-modified Ryoken II, dealing out carnage and destruction. All this bouncing around on choppy ocean water in a small open boat was not to her taste, even if it had been necessary in order to rendezvous with Jacob Bannson’s envoy.

  “I do not like it.” She had been silent for some time; now she began talking again, in an attempt to distract herself from the up-and-down movement of the motor whaleboat. It was a long boat ride out to the oil rig, and #47 was not yet visible on the western horizon.

  Nicholas Darwin, damn him, was not affected by the whaleboat’s motion. He even knew how to steer the thing, which caused Anastasia to wonder what he had done with himself on Tigress before throwing his lot in with the Steel Wolves. He was a half-breed, freebor
n to a local woman; he had come to Clan Wolf out of choice. Now he glanced at Anastasia sidelong and said, “Do not like what?”

  “Bannson,” she said. “Offering me gifts out of the blue.”

  Darwin looked amused. “Courtship by proxy? They do say he wants to found a new Great House.”

  “Whatever he wants from me, it is not that,” she stated definitely. “He has never met me, and will not have heard of me before I challenged Kal Radick.”

  Though he might, she thought, have heard of Tassa Kay. Anastasia had not bothered to keep a low profile when she was traveling—and fighting for The Republic of the Sphere—as Tassa, and if Bannson proved either clever enough or well-informed enough to link the two names based on intelligence reports alone, he was even more dangerous than she had thought.

  “Jacob Bannson is playing a chess game for power in The Republic of the Sphere,” she said, “and he wants me to be one of his pieces. But it is not going to work.”

  “No?” asked Darwin.

  “I will not be a pawn in anybody else’s game. Not while I have the ability to be a queen in my own.”

  “Bannson is not someone it pays to have for an enemy.”

  “He does his fighting with money,” Anastasia said.

  “He is ’Mech qualified. That takes more than money.” Darwin sounded thoughtful. The floppy cloth brim of his borrowed tourist-hiker’s hat overshadowed his eyes, making it difficult for Anastasia to judge his expression.

  The whaleboat was bouncing about harder now; the wind had picked up some, and the waves had curls of white on their tops. Anastasia swallowed and kept talking. “You certainly sound impressed by him.” Her voice came out sharper than she had intended.

  “No,” said Darwin. “But I do not wish to see you underestimating him.” He paused and looked away. This time she thought he might deliberately be using the shadow of his hat brim to hide the emotion on his face. “The way that Kal Radick underestimated you.”