As usual, it seemed to satisfy her. “Bondsman Murchison.”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Make yourself presentable. The Countess of Northwind summons me to parley, and I want you standing with me when she comes.”
“Stage-dressing, ma’am?”
Across the examining table from him, Barden looked shocked. Murchison, however, had come to understand that the only way to keep Anastasia Kerensky’s respect—and her respect, so far as he could tell, was all that had kept him alive in the first place—was to push back as hard and as often as custom and the broad gap between their ranks allowed.
“An object lesson, Bondsman. Get moving—we have not got much time.”
Anastasia’s impatience was enough for Barden to let Murchison clean up and change in the sick bay locker room, and to bring him clean clothes to replace the bloodstained scrubs that he’d been wearing when she arrived. His hair was still damp from the shower when he joined her outside the sickbay door, but she only flicked her gaze up and down him once and said, “You will do. Come.”
The parley turned out not to be live and face-to-face at all, but done over real-time tri-vid link—neither commander, it seemed, was willing to leave her own territory, and the streets of the city did not offer much in the way of open neutral ground. Despite Anastasia’s impatience, the setup took time. The Steel Wolf technicians set up their tri-vid cameras and sound equipment in her field headquarters out on the DropPort landing field, with a full-size display unit that looked too big to have come with the DropShips at all—Murchison suspected that the techs had appropriated it from one of the passenger waiting lounges in the captured DropPort concourse.
Finally, the prep work was finished. Anastasia Kerensky took her position standing on an X that the Steel Wolf technicians had marked on the landing field tarmac, with Murchison standing a little behind her and to the right.
The Steel Wolf technician in charge said something in a low tone over her headset voice pickup—presumably to her Highlander opposite number—and then, more loudly, “On the air in three. Three . . . two . . . one . . . time.”
The display unit clouded, swirled, and cleared to show the Countess of Northwind and another officer—some kind of aide, Murchison supposed—standing in an impressive stone-and-wood great hall that matched pictures Murchison had seen of the Fort at Tara. The Steel Wolf tech fiddled with her controls and brought the image up closer, until Anastasia and the Countess might have been standing only feet apart.
Anastasia Kerensky said, “Countess.”
“Galaxy Commander.” Tara Campbell’s voice and expression gave away nothing; Murchison couldn’t tell from her demeanor whether the day was going well or ill for the Highlanders in the city.
“You called for this parley. Say what you have to say—we waste time, otherwise.”
At this, Tara Campbell gave a grim smile. “I wasn’t born yesterday, Galaxy Commander. Your troops will appreciate the breathing space as much as mine. And we can always go back to killing each other when we’re done.” She seemed at this point to notice Ian Murchison for the first time, and spoke to him directly. “You’re no Steel Wolf, man—not with that Northwind face on you. What’s your name?”
“Ian Murchison, ma’am. Medic for Balfour-Douglas Petrochemicals.”
“Interesting,” said Tara Campbell. “And how did the Galaxy Commander come to add a Balfour-Douglas medic to her collection?”
“The same way that I plan to add Northwind,” Anastasia Kerensky said. “Ian Murchison is my Bondsman, taken in battle.”
“Going back to the old ways, are you?” Once again, the Countess’s gaze shifted to meet Murchison’s. “I’m sorry I can’t do anything for you directly, Ian Murchison. Deal honorably with the Galaxy Commander—and if she fails to deal honorably with you in return, I’ll add that to the score I have with her when the time comes to settle all our debts.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Murchison said—but Anastasia was already speaking, overriding his voice with a hot edge of temper in her own.
“I will deal honorably with my Bondsman because he is my Bondsman, Countess, not because of any fear I have of you! And I tell you again, stop wasting my time. Do you wish to surrender?”
“Hardly, Galaxy Commander. Do you?”
“You know full well that I do not. What is your purpose, then?”
Tara Campbell said, “I’m offering you a deal. You and yours can depart from here without pursuit, and we’ll call this round a draw—there’ll be no retaliatory attacks on Clan Wolf enclaves or Clan-influenced worlds, and no sanctions in the Senate, and the Steel Wolves can go on wreaking havoc anywhere they like so long as it isn’t Northwind.”
“Do you think that I am a fool?” Anastasia was still angry; Ian Murchison could see the hot color in her cheeks. He wondered if Tara Campbell had deliberately insulted her, or if the slap at her honor had been made in the heat of the moment, after the Countess had seen a fellow-Highlander wearing a Bondsman’s cord. “If I win here, I have all that, and without leaving an enemy at my back. No—but because I am a generous and civilized person, I have a counteroffer. Stand down, disarm your forces, and surrender Northwind to me, and you can keep your rank as Countess and your castle in the mountains, so long as you go to it and stay there and never bother me again.”
“No.”
“You are outnumbered and unprepared to resist. One more time: will you surrender?”
“You already have my answer.”
“Then I tell you, Countess,” said Anastasia Kerensky, “I will conquer your planet, and I will kill you, and I will take your pretty stone castle and I will make it into the stronghold of Clan Wolf on Northwind, and the day will come when no one will remember that a woman named Tara Campbell ever set foot in that place. Do you understand me now?”
The Countess of Northwind was pale as white marble, even in the tri-vid display, and her eyes were like cold blue fire. “You can try, Galaxy Commander—you can try.” She made a quick slicing gesture with one hand, directed at someone off-display. “Tara Campbell, out.”
46
Landing Zone; Jack Farrell’s Mercenary Encampment
Plains North of Tara; Plains Outside Tara
Northwind
February 3134; local winter
“Offload! Offload! Move it, people!”
“Soon’s everyone’s out, push the bird off the edge of the runway. We have another coming in, three minutes, guys. Move!”
The sky was clear, and the landing field between the Rockspires and the capital city of Tara was crowded. Soldiers, all of General Griffin’s troops, were forming up in ranks, units regrouping, ready to march.
The airport itself looked trampled and trammeled, in all parts and all ways. The troops had even stripped the newsstands of hot dogs, bottled water, and popular magazines. In front was chaos, only organized if one was able to recognize a certain by-the-numbers chaos that a well-trained military can sustain for as long as necessary to get the job done.
Squads were out requisitioning everything that could roll on wheels and carry troopers or equipment for a push toward the city. Others were securing checkpoints and communications gear. Above everything, the voices of sergeants with lungs of brass and vocal cords of leather pounded out orders—go here, do that, get ready, stand by, check your gear, move out! Move, move, move! You aren’t getting paid by the hour!
General Griffin with his ’Mech—one of three they had, the other two being unarmed ConstructionMechs that the newly arrived forces had requisitioned on the spot—was helping to pull newly arrived aircraft off the field and out of the way, so that the ones still incoming could land. Nothing else besides the ’Mechs had the speed or the power to do the job, and Griffin as the commanding general had nothing else to do, and no decisions to make at this point.
His battle plan, like all battle plans, resembled nothing so much as a spring-wound toy. Griffin had set it into motion, and now he could only watch as the plan lurched forw
ard on its own. Maybe later—since no plan lasts beyond first contact with the enemy—he would need to choose again between possible courses of action. But until that time came, he could work with his hands like a stevedore.
“General,” came the voice over the ’Mech’s cockpit speakers. “First battalion is formed. Request permission—”
“Permission granted,” Griffin said, without pausing in his efforts to pull a transport out of the way, off the tarmac, while another, still-laden transport was coming in behind him. “Carry out your orders.”
“Sir.”
The afternoon progressed. Local weather reports were calling the weather fair and mild for February, although Griffin knew that many of his Kearney-acclimated troopers would be feeling the effects of the cold. He, at least, wouldn’t have to worry as long as he was working inside his ’Mech. At last the final aircraft was down.
“What now?” his aide asked him.
“Set demolition charges,” Griffin replied. “No retreat. No spoils for the Wolves if they win. We’re going east at speed. Inform me of first contact. Nothing else matters.”
He was already taking the Koshi eastward at a fast lope, near enough to red-line to be worrisome if he were the kind to worry. He’d have a chance to let the ’Mech cool down once he reached the head of the column. Until then, his place was up front, and the sooner he got there, the better.
“Nothing past here but scouts and skirmishers,” the colonel in charge said, when Griffin reached the moving collection of odds and ends at the pointy end of the stick.
The first troops in line had been packed into buses commandeered from the airport for the purpose, and were traveling behind a dump truck with a long-range heavy laser strapped into place on the truck bed with chains and heavy ropes. The colonel himself rode in the front passenger seat of a limousine hovercar requisitioned off the lot at the airport rental company. The hoverlimo’s capacious rear seating area had been given over to a complete field communications setup, technician included.
“We’ll be at Tara around dusk,” Griffin said. “We’re moving fast. Punch a hole through to the Countess, consolidate forces. Then we’ll see what she wants to do.”
“You have an opinion on that?” the colonel asked.
“Fight them.”
“You’re not going to get much argument there.”
“Report coming in,” said the communications specialist. “Scouts have reached the edges of Tara. Reporting city held against them.”
“Wolves?” Griffin asked. “On this side?”
“The scouts don’t think so. But whoever it is, they’ve got a Jupiter.”
“Just what I needed to make my day complete,” Griffin said. “Carry on.”
The relief column continued to the east.
“You want us to do what?”
“You heard me,” Jack Farrell said to his second-in-command.
When the mercenary force’s farthest-out pickets had brought in reports of a large force approaching Tara from the west, Farrell had reacted by summoning his officers to a council of war. They had gathered at the ad hoc command post he’d set up earlier by the foot of his Jupiter’Mech, and he had presented them with his decision. The logic of it was taking a while to sink in.
Patiently, he went over it all again. “You will defend against the Highlanders coming in from the west to the minimum. You will shoot to miss. On receiving any kind of fire at all, you will pull back and open a corridor.”
“What about our contract?” his segundo asked.
“Under our contract,” Farrell said, “we’ve been ordered to secure the roads out of Tara against the Highlander forces in the city, and not to fight against the Steel Wolves unless or until the Steel Wolves first attack us. There’s nothing either in our orders or in our contract that says what we should do about any other forces that might decide to join in on the action—which leaves that decision up to me. And I say that our contract never covered being caught between the upper and the nether millstones with the Highlanders turning the mill.”
“It’s not going to look good, though.”
“That’s crap and you know it,” Farrell said. “Trooper for trooper and ’Mech for ’Mech, our happy bunch of heavily armed misfits are as tough and as brave and as nasty as any Northwind Highlander or Steel Wolf Clansman in The Republic of The Sphere. But anybody wanting us to hold out to the last man has to say so up front and make the contract worth it for our next of kin, and our current employer didn’t. No shame to him, either; there aren’t many employers out there who’ll go that far.”
“Bannson would,” said his segundo.
“Which is why we’d do it for Bannson if he paid us to,” Farrell agreed. “But that’s for another contract and another war. Right now, we’re working on fulfilling this one without getting chewed to bits in the process.”
He looked around at his commanders. “Are we all singing off of the same sheet of music now? Good. Then here’s the deal: We’ll give the Highlanders an impressive show. I want to hear explosions and I want to see fireworks. But I do not want casualties—no casualties among our troops, and minimal among the others. Let them know they’ve been in a fight, but no more than that. Am I making myself clear?”
“We don’t let the Highlanders inside the city out,” his segundo summarized. “But if the Highlanders outside the city happen to force a corridor . . . well, that has nothing to do with us, and what they decide to do with it is their business.”
“That’s the general idea,” Farrell said. “Now we’re going to go out and apply it. Carry on.”
The meeting dispersed, and Jack Farrell turned away to where his Jupiter was waiting. He climbed up the access ladder to the cockpit. His primary employer had left him a great deal of discretion in dealing with his current contract holder, and he hoped that he was exercising it sufficiently now.
Once in the cockpit, he donned the cooling vest and neurohelmet and brought the hundred-ton Jupiter rumbling to life. Then he turned its ponderous footsteps onto the road heading west, to see for himself what was approaching.
47
Mercenary and Highlander Positions
Various Roads Out of Tara
Northwind
February 3134; local winter
“Contact,” said the observer for the mercenary rocket battery.
The mercs currently blocking the roads out of Tara had received some strange orders in their time, and the ones they fought under now were stranger than most. But they’d learned to trust Jack Farrell’s one eye when it came to looking out for the main chance, and they obeyed. Not without questioning—that wasn’t in their nature—but they obeyed.
“Where away?” said the sergeant in charge of the battery.
“Looks like a light armored truck, mounted laser, hull down past that rise.”
“Got it,” the sergeant said.
A moment later the observer asked, “Inform Jack yet?”
“Yeah, just passed it back.”
“Okay . . . I see one, two, three squads, jump armor, with flamers. They’re doing squad rushes.”
“We’ll let ’em know we spotted ’em,” the sergeant said. To the crew of the rocket battery, he said, “Short-range missile. Two pairs, aim two short, two long.”
“Missiles away,” said the leader of the battery crew.
With trails of white smoke, the missiles arched up and out. The laser tracked them. One exploded in midair, then a second, a third just above the ground, the fourth—one set to go long—impacted out of sight.
“Tubes expended,” said the battery crew leader.
“Fall back,” the sergeant said. “That’ll slow ’em some.”
“General,” Lieutenant Owain Jones reported over the command circuit. He’d had to leave behind the Joust tank in which he usually shadowed Griffin’s Koshi, and was riding in a Fox armored car. “We’re meeting resistance.”
“How much, and where?” Griffin asked.
“So far, it’s light
. No KIAs on our side. Our troopers are returning fire.”
“Do not slow down,” Griffin ordered. True to his own words, he kept his ’Mech striding onward in the direction of the city as he spoke. “Not for any reason. The line we’re facing will not be thinner at any time. If we don’t punch through now, we won’t punch through at all.”
“I’ll pass the word along.”
“Good. Has anyone got comms with the Countess?”
“We had a brief contact earlier,” Jones said. “There was a parley, but it didn’t go anywhere. The forces in the city are bracing for a Steel Wolf push.”
“What about the units we’re encountering here?”
“Mercs,” said Jones. “They’ve got the Countess and her people pinned, but nobody seems to know if they’re going to coordinate an attack with the Wolves or not.”
“If we have anything to say about it,” Griffin said, “then the answer is ‘not’.”
Ahead smoke was rising. Griffin headed that way. The Koshi swiveled its head from side to side as he advanced at a lope to provide some heavier support than the infantry could manage on their own. He found a squad hunched behind a wall, with small arms fire coming in overhead—deadly stuff for the unarmored infantry, but nothing that would trouble him.
He stepped around the corner and laid down a spread of missiles in the direction the fire was coming from. The front of a building exploded into rubble.
“Move out!” Griffin commanded, then sprinted forward himself. “Move it up, people. Open a hole, and form a perimeter, north and south.”
“We have a Condor, grid nine-one-four.”
“I’m on it,” Griffin said. “Now I want some speed here. Punch through!”
One-Eyed Jack Farrell sat atop his Jupiter—not inside the cockpit, but under the open sky, perched on the ’Mech’s shoulder and using its great height as a vantage point for observation. He wore a set of communications headphones, with a wire trailing back into the ’Mech’s interior.
Truth and Shadows Page 18
