“Responsibility,” said Lexa, yawning widely, “is a bitch. Last to bed and first awake and behaving myself all the time to set a good example . . . why did I let you talk me into letting them promote me like this?”
“Because you trust me to have your best interests at heart?”
“Lemme think about it.” She paused for a moment, then shook her head. “Nah. Can’t be.”
Jock said, “It was the uniform—you couldn’t resist him in it. I could see you looking at him and drooling.”
“Go on. As if I’d take a chance on losing a perfectly good buddy that way.” She finished the last of her tea. “Must have done it out of the kindness of my heart. Somebody has to teach the new kids which end of the laser rifle the pretty red light comes out of.”
“That’d be you, all right,” said Will. He looked at his watch. “Time to wake the children up for breakfast.”
He and his fellow Sergeants began moving among the soldiers huddled in their sleeping bags. “Wakey wakey,” he chanted as he passed from one drowsing bundle to the next. “We’re burning daylight.”
The harangue was a familiar one from his days in Basic Training, though he’d never expected to find himself on the delivering end of it. Jock’s voice, coming from further off, provided a rumbling echo, punctuated by Lexa’s cheerfully obscene exhortations from over on the other side of the camp: “. . . and pull on your socks! Save it for Fort Barrett, boys, we’ve got work to do.”
After a hurried breakfast of hot tea and cold rations, the task force began to move out. The Balac Strike VTOLs went first, rising from the ground in swirls of dust to head out in the day’s search pattern, one VTOL covering inland, and one the seaward sector. As they climbed they dwindled to bright dots against the pink sky of dawn, catching the light of the rising sun like a pair of fast-moving morning stars.
The aircraft would be ranging ahead of the column, on the track suggested by last night’s encounter. Will hoped that the boy had given a fair representation of the truth. He hadn’t acted like a liar, but even the most truthful of youngsters wasn’t above shading or coloring a tale, sometimes not even on purpose.
The noise of the lifting VTOLs faded, and was replaced with the sound of other engines stirring to life: the troop trucks, the scout cars, the Joust tank, the General’s Koshi. Will saw the last of his squad onto their Shandra scouting vehicles, then mounted up himself.
The graded dirt road south of Benderville dwindled in short order to a rutted track, the sandy ground to either side held in place—barely—by sparse brown grass. A hot wind blew out of the coastal interior. Sand came with it, stinging against bare skin, drifting into the folds of cloth and bends of flesh, sifting down into the cracks of instruments and machinery. As the day wore on, the constant sand and grit would be worsened by the passage of the task force’s vehicles, and by the heavy footsteps of the Koshi. Will thought longingly of the hot showers in Fort Barrett; he knew that by evening he would be grateful for the chance to sluice himself off with a bucket of lukewarm water.
“Another lovely day at the seashore,” he said to the squad corporal, over the rumble of the Shandras’ engines. “Just remember, there’s daft folk in the big city who’ll pay good money for an experience like this.”
26
The New Barracks; Tyson and Vanvey ’Mech Factory
Tara
Northwind
February 3134; local winter
Ezekiel Crow woke up scared.
He had returned to his own quarters, at the close of the previous evening’s interlude with Tara Campbell, in a state of such near-euphoria that he had been hard-put not to show it. It would not have done at all for a Paladin of the Sphere to have been caught laughing aloud in delight as he walked through the halls of the visiting officers’ quarters. The same elevated mood had carried him off into a sleep filled with pleasant dreams.
The next morning, however, brought with it an emotion close enough to terror to leave him shaking. He had not realized the extent of his self-imposed isolation until part of it went away. It was as if he had been living behind walls of thick glass that muted everything outside. Now a window had opened, letting in a world of sight and sound and smell more intense than he had ever believed existed.
Distracted and thoughtful, he made himself tea in the kitchen nook, standing barefoot in his black pajamas and measuring out the tea leaves with careful hands. When the water sang in the kettle, he poured it over the leaves in the pot and waited, brooding, while they steeped.
He was not certain that he could handle this. He had ideals, he had goals, he had a hard-bought knowledge of all the things that needed to be done—things that those who were currently supposed to do them weren’t doing well, and sometimes weren’t doing at all. None of the careful plans he’d worked out over the years since his first life died in the rubble of Chang-An had taken into account something like this.
He didn’t know if it could last. He didn’t know if he should want it—if he should even allow it—to last. His life had no room in it for hostages to fortune. He had worked hard over the years to keep himself unattached—to people, to places, to anything—for the sake of the freedom of action that comes from having nothing to lose.
All would be well, even now, if only he hadn’t been made aware of everything that he was missing.
He took a clean cup from the cabinet. Like the teapot, it was of inexpensive local make, its appearance plain bordering on ugly. He’d bought the tea set when he came here, and he would leave it behind when he left. No hostages; no attachments.
He poured a cup of the fragrant tea and drank it slowly, still thinking. When he was done, he set the cup aside and went over to the communications console. There he typed in a message to Tara Campbell:
My lady—
Please do not take it amiss that I am out of touch today. I find I must go inspect the ’Mech conversion program in place at Tyson and Varney. It would be lamentable if a hitherto excellent and reliable firm were to begin slacking off for lack of supervision. Believe me when I say that I am looking forward to speaking with you again this evening, after the day’s work is finished.
Respectfully,
Ezekiel Crow
He sent the message, then proceeded to wash and dress and put on clothing for the day. He wore his usual plain civilian clothes; they helped to keep him unnoticed and out of trouble.
That done, he headed out in the direction of Tyson and Varney, where the plant manager was surprised to get an unscheduled visit from Northwind’s current Paladin-in-Residence. Nevertheless, he happily took Ezekiel Crow on a tour of the hangar where the next generation of battle-modified IndustrialMechs was under construction. As Crow had expected—in spite of having deliberately implied otherwise in his letter to Tara Campbell—everything at the factory continued on track and in order.
Over tea and sandwiches in the plant’s executive cafeteria after the inspection, Crow gratified the manager by praising Tyson and Varney’s good work, and by promising to take any of their concerns to the Prefect. The manager, beaming with relief at what he assumed to have been a narrow escape, was inclined to be chatty.
“It’s good that the Exarch sent you to Northwind,” he said, “and not somebody else.”
Crow wondered if the manager would think the same thing if he knew that the Paladin sitting across the table from him was only there because he needed to avoid Tara Campbell until he could figure out whether he wanted to move closer or to run away. “Is it really?”
“Yeah,” said the plant manager. “I wasn’t born yesterday; I know that Paladins are only human. We could have gotten handed over to somebody who was more interested in pulling rank on the locals than in working with them—and that would have been a disaster, especially last summer. But you and the Prefect worked together like you’d been on the same team since preschool.”
Somewhat to Crow’s surprise, the offhand remark did much to clarify his own conflicted feelings. He had been thinking of
Tara Campbell as a hostage to fortune, and—as the manager had just unwittingly pointed out—such an estimate was seriously in error. She was a power in her own right, a leader whose strength and skills complemented his. Any closeness between the two of them would only serve to lighten his burden, not to make it greater. Together, they would truly become a force to be reckoned with.
He thanked the plant manager for his kind words and made his farewells, then headed back toward the capital city and the New Barracks feeling considerably happier than he had upon awaking. He was not a man given to public displays of emotion, but inwardly, at least, he was smiling as he made his way up the stairs to his quarters. He would wash away the grime of today’s travel, he thought, and put on new clothes. Then he would go speak again with Tara Campbell.
There was a fat envelope lying on the dining table in his quarters when he entered. The sight gave him pause for a moment—the envelope had not been there when he left. The exterior had his name and rank written on it in black marker, with a scrawl of different-colored ink showing that Security down at the main door had signed for the delivery in his absence. Security would have passed the envelope along to the regular cleaning crew when they came in to clean the floors and change the bed linen and wash his plates and teacups.
He opened the envelope, only to find another envelope inside. This one bore a different address:
LIEUTENANT JUNIOR GRADE DANIEL PETERSON
CHANG-AN
LIAO
“No,” he said. “No.”
Letting the inner envelope fall unopened from suddenly nerveless fingers, he sank into the chair and buried his face in his hands.
27
Jasmine Flower Wine Shop
Chang-An
Liao, Prefecture V
October 3111; local summer
He sat at a table in the corner back with his head in his hands. A bottle, not the first of the evening, stood at his elbow; and next to the bottle, a wineglass. He was trying his best to drink himself into oblivion, and oblivion was not cooperating.
The Jasmine Flower Wine Shop was on the outskirts of Chang-An—far away from the current fighting, and even farther away from the burnt-out shell of the urban center. Any resistance going on inside the city came from desperate civilians. The local military units had been crushed during the first days of the fighting, wiped out as an effective force for the crime of daring to resist when the Capellan Confederation landed a DropShip and started disembarking soldiers.
The CapCons had double-berthed—maybe even triple-berthed—their DropShip. They’d packed it with two or three times the number of soldiers it should have carried; they’d overstuffed its cargo holds with armored vehicles, with heavy weapons, and with BattleMechs. A single DropShip of that class was not rated to carry so much; it should not have been able to carry more than the local defenses in Chang-An could have dealt with handily.
He had worked the numbers out carefully—he was good at such exercises—before he had even considered . . . but he had not considered that the Capellans would lie, or that they would put a DropShip at such risk.
That was the first betrayal.
No, he thought. Be honest with yourself, at least. It was the second.
He poured himself another glass of wine. His hands were shaking so that he had to steady the neck of the bottle against the lip of the glass. He managed to still the trembling long enough to pick up the wineglass and drain it without spilling. The wine was a heavy red from the dry temperate coast, harsh and tannic; his head was full of its fumes. They didn’t help to get the smell of burning out of his nostrils, or out of his memories.
Chang-An’s public health services had dug common graves for the city’s innumerable dead—drivers of earthmovers and IndustrialMechs risking their lives to furrow up ground out of the way of the fighting, then laying the bodies out in rows like seed for an obscene crop someday to come. He had brought his parents’ bodies there himself and put them in; they had no other friends or family left alive to do it. And the earthmovers had covered them up again.
That had been the first night he’d tried to get drunk. But he hadn’t been able to get drunk enough.
Three more DropShips had come down at the port today; more soldiers poured out of them into the city and the surrounding countryside. He had seen them, had gone back and hidden in the shadows to watch. He’d seen transport aircraft, too, and heavy gear—Saxon APCs, Maxim Mk2 Transports, even a Mobile Tactical Command HQ—all of it meant for supporting large-scale field maneuvers, not for city fighting.
And this wasn’t the equipment for a quick raid. It was take-the-whole-planet stuff. He knew the theory; he had studied it, and had been at the top of his class. He had never seen the theory at work until now.
Another betrayal, that.
One ship, and one ship only; that had been the word. He knew distances, and he knew the times to and from the jump points. There was no way additional ships could have come this quickly, even in response to a maximum-priority HPG message. The new ships had to have started on their way before the first ship had even landed.
He buried his face in his hands again. The CapCons had lied to him from the beginning, and he had believed their lies. There was not enough wine in Chang-An to make that better. Maybe not enough wine on all of Liao.
The table shifted under his elbows, and the bench opposite him creaked as somebody sat down uninvited. Unwillingly, he lifted his head, and saw a slender, smiling, ordinary-featured man in a CapCon uniform. The last time he’d seen him, the man had worn civilian clothing.
“You’re a very difficult young man to find these days, Lieutenant Peterson.”
“Go away.”
“Now, now. Is that any way to speak to your benefactor?”
“I have a benefactor? I don’t see anyone like that in here.” He gave a harsh, choking laugh. “Just a traitor and a lying bastard. Respectively.”
The CapCon shook his head, still smiling. “A bit late for second thoughts, I’m afraid. The thing is done.”
He said nothing, willing the man to go away. A useless effort—the smiling man only crooked his finger at the wineshop waiter for another glass. When it arrived, he filled it, unbidden, and sipped, shuddering.
“Dreadful stuff, this. You could do better with us.”
“I don’t think so.”
“We brought our own vintages—the better to toast your name after the first landing.”
The sudden flash of anger cut like a knife through the dullness of despair. “You promised me that my name would never be spoken.”
Smiling, still smiling, the man said, “And it was not. We drank our toasts to the Betrayer of Liao.”
“Get out.”
“All in good time. I came here with a purpose, you know.”
“If I let you tell me about it, will you leave?” He made a disgusted sound deep in his throat. “Go ahead.”
The man reached into the pocket of his uniform tunic and pulled out a card with a name, a rank, and an address printed on one side, and a string of numbers neatly handwritten on the other.
“This is the number for your account on Terra. The agreed-upon funds are there and waiting for you to access them.” He laid the card down on the tabletop next to the wineglass and rose to leave. “As is a bonus of one stone for each Republic citizen killed in the fighting. You see, we are not ungrateful.”
And the smiling man was gone.
He waited, trembling with rage, but the smiling man did not come back. The anger built and built. At length he got to his feet, moving slowly and deliberately. He was holding so much anger, he thought, that moving too fast might break him. He wrapped his fingers carefully around the neck of the empty wine bottle.
“Toasted my name.” He spoke to himself in a steadily rising whisper. “My name. My name.”
He lifted the bottle and threw it against the back wall of the wineshop so hard that it shattered. A few seconds later, the wineglass followed it.
“Not
any more.”
The wineshop waiter was staring at him, and he knew it was time to leave—leave the shop, leave the city, leave the world. Daniel Peterson had died on the first day of the fighting in Chang-An. When he figured out who he was now, he’d give himself another name.
He almost left the smiling man’s business card behind on the table. In the end, though, he picked up the card and took it with him. Because it didn’t matter who he was going to become.
He’d always need the money.
28
South of Benderville
Oilfields Coast
Northwind
February 3134; dry season
By noon, the cockpit of Brigadier General Michael Griffin’s Koshi was hotter than a steam bath. Despite the best efforts of generations of designers, the ’Mech had not yet been built that didn’t leave its pilot sweating like a pig. Griffin had been drinking water steadily since early morning, along with extra rations of the specially formulated drinks issued to regular troopers during desert maneuvers, and to MechWarriors any time an extended stay in the ’Mech’s cockpit was required.
It was nevertheless a good thing, Griffin thought, that he wasn’t planning on a brisk bout of hand-to-hand combat any time soon. He knew from experience that after marching the Koshi with the task force all day long, he would leave the cockpit at nightfall feeling—as his grandmother would have said—like he’d been beaten all over with a broom handle.
At least the polarized ferroglass viewports cut out the worst of the glare bouncing off the miles and miles of water and sand that passed for scenery along the Oilfields Coast. The soldiers outside would need protective goggles, which some of them would not wear because of the discomfort or because of the reduction in their field of view, and heavy-duty sun-screen, which some of them would, inevitably, forget. At nightfall, both groups would complain of eyestrain and sunburn, and would rest poorly. Then the next day, it would all begin again—and still they had found no sign of Anastasia Kerensky.
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