"But she could be a greater danger to the Inner Sphere than the Clans."
Victor pointed a finger at Thomas. "Understand this: she may be a threat to the Inner Sphere, but she is still my blood. Her people are my people. Any external attempt to remove her will meet with swift and terrible retribution."
Thomas frowned. "I was not suggesting military conquest, Victor, though I can see how you might interpret my remark as such. But I'm confused—if you aren't suggesting a joint operation against her, why tell me what you have?"
Victor drew in a deep breath, then let it out slowly. "You understand better than most that stability is vital right now, Thomas. You are an anchor of reason in the maelstrom of trying to remake the Star League and launch an assault on the Clans. You are an honorable man who is willing to believe the best of others until you are shown that your judgment is wrong. I need you to continue to be a stabilizing influence, but I don't want you to fall prey to Katherine. You will deal with her however you choose to deal, but I want you to be aware that beneath that exterior is a woman who is willing to kill to get what she wants."
"I see." Thomas nodded. "This from a man who hid the death of my son from me—a man who put an impostor in the boy's place, a man who probably murdered his own mother and certainly had Ryan Steiner assassinated."
"I won't deny, Thomas, that I have done some things wrong, and that I have blood on my hands. I'm not proud of everything I've done, but I accept responsibility for my actions." Victor folded his arms across his chest. "The trick is to avoid having my blood on someone else's hands. That's a trick you also want to master."
"Why give me lessons, Victor?"
"Because I believe you are someone I can trust. That's not something I can say of Sun-Tzu." Victor smiled grimly. "I expect to go off with the taskforce to take the war to the Clans. When I return home, I want to be able to recognize the Inner Sphere. With you alive I figure my chances of doing that are better than even. If you fall, well, the question is whether or not there will be any reason to return."
14
Sigfried Glacier Reserve Environs, Tharkad City
Tharkad
District of Donegal, Lyran Alliance
13 October 3058
Naked save for the thick terry cloth towel draped across his loins, Victor lay back on the sauna's upper tier bench and gathered a folded towel beneath his head as a pillow. Closing his eyes he let the heat begin to sink through his flesh and began to catalog the various aches and pains he felt. Chronologically I'm only twenty-eight years old, but I feel older than Alessandro ever did, I'll bet.
The pains came in two varieties. The sharp stabbing pains came from bruises all over his body and two particularly tight hamstring muscles. He thought he'd stretched enough before the morning's fencing clinic with Tancred Sandoval, but his muscles were telling him that he had not. The bruises had come from the various places where points had been scored off him. The proliferation of them should have made Victor angry, but the fact was that most of those points had been won by Tancred. Kai and Hohiro were able to hit him, but not as much as he hit them. Finally a sport I can win at.
The overall aches came from the skiing he'd done in the afternoon. Knees, thighs, hips, shoulders, and back all hurt, and a lot more than he ever remembered from the aftermath of skiing trips in his cadet days at the Nagelring. Sure, I was younger then, but not all that much younger. He'd attacked the slopes with the same youthful abandon, but conceded that the slopes might have ended up winning the day.
Skiing had been fun, but running the media gauntlet had not been. Victor refused to have his security people clear the lift lines to the top, so he'd had to queue up to wait with everyone else. That gave the reporters time to shout questions at him from all sides. When he failed to respond, the holojournalists only made the questions nastier, hoping to provoke a response.
In my younger days I would have reacted, too. It had taken all the composure he could muster to ignore the questions and keep chatting with the other skiers. He realized that privacy was not really an option, but neither was spectacle the only alternative. He kept his temper under control, kept his guard up, and worked out his frustrations on the slopes.
And even now, when I'm relaxing, I still have my guard up. He resented having to wear a towel in the sauna, but knew he had to be careful lest some holojournalist manage to sneak in and digitize a picture of him lounging naked. I don't want to even think about what kind of headline they'd use to cover the picture.
Victor drew in a deep breath, trapping hot air in his lungs. The heat in the room had risen sufficiently to start him sweating. He could taste salt on his lips and feel the light burn of sweat in his eyes. He shifted the towel around so one end lay between his knees, then used the other end to dab at the sweat in his eyes. He ran it down his chest, soaking off the perspiration there, then flipped the end away, leaving it covering him like the front half of a loincloth.
There had been positive points to the day. He and Omi had managed to share part of a run down the mountain on one of the easier slopes. Though she and her family were staying at one of the chalet's guest houses, Victor had seen very little of her, so the run was welcome time spent together. Strictly a beginner, Omi took to skiing with enthusiasm and a lot of good humor. Victor recalled her going down in thick powder snow, then coming up with her face covered in white. She brushed the snow away with a laugh, and Victor couldn't think when he'd ever seen her look more beautiful.
At another point, when he waited on line for the chair lift, a reporter asked a barbed question about Omi and his relationship with her. Even before Victor had a chance to consider an answer, a man stabbed his skis and poles into the snow, and stalked out toward the reporter.
"Have you no shame?" he asked angrily. "Have you no decency? This man has the toughest job in all of the Inner Sphere and you're asking after his love life? Don't you realize that what he does on his own time is of absolutely no interest to anyone with enough neurons to form a synapse? The measure of a man is not in who he dates or what he says, but what he does. He kicked the Falcons off Coventry and rescued Lady Omi's brother from the Clans at Teniente. The latter's enough to make them friends, and the former means you should have more respect for him."
The man's spirited defense prompted applause and catcalls from the others in line, bringing a smile to Victor's face. He tried to thank the man, offering to pay for his skiing, offering him dinner, but the man refused. "Look, Highness, if not for you and your father and your mother, we'd all be Clanners now. I appreciate the offer of a free dinner, but the fact is you've made certain I can be free to have dinner. Defending you here was the least I could do for you."
The man's remarks heartened Victor because they confirmed what he'd always hoped deep down. In the Lyran Alliance he did have a core of support that he could call upon in the future. Katherine might be the media darling here, but the people don't believe everything the holovids tell them. This is good.
Victor heard the door to the sauna open and felt the breeze as the hot air rushed out. The door closed quickly enough, but the chill sank in through the sheen of sweat on his skin. "You might want to nudge the heat up a bit, just to get rid of the cold."
"Sumimasen, Victor-sama. I did not mean to make you cold."
At the sound of her voice, Victor rolled up on his left side and, with his right hand, caught his towel and kept it in place. "Omi! What are you ... ?"
With her black hair worn up and a white towel covering her from armpits to mid-thigh, she seated herself on the lowest bench opposite him. She moved carefully and precisely, yet casually as well. It almost seemed as if, for a moment, she had forgotten he was there and was alone in her own private sanctuary.
She brought her hands up so her slender fingers loosened the knot that held her towel closed. Watching the towel fall away as if in slow motion, Victor drank in every curve and shadow it revealed as it puddled on the bench. The black bathing suit Omi wore hidden beneath it was cut high
at the hips and fastened with a red cord embracing her chest several centimeters beneath her collar bones. The thin material hugged her body like flesh, pulling taut over her flat stomach as she lay back.
Victor stared at her with his mouth hanging open. She had always been beautiful in his eyes, sensuous and sensual, but the times they had been together had always been formal and distancing. On the ski slopes, in her parka, hat, mittens, and quilted ski overalls, was the most casually he had seen her dressed. Neither that outfit, nor any of the others he'd seen her wear hinted at such raw, languid sexuality. Her long legs, the gentle swell of her breasts, that perfect face, and the first golden glistening of perspiration on her flesh—Victor could feel desire for her rising in him.
He sat up and rearranged his towel. "Omi, what are you doing here?"
"Enjoying the sauna." She gathered up her towel and wadded it into a pillow. "It was recommended that I might take a sauna bath after skiing—by Duchess Kym Hasek-Davion, I believe. Since my father, brother, and a number of their military advisors are using the one in our building, I came to the main building. If you want me to leave .. ."
"No, no." Victor held his hands up. "No, it's just that, well, I would not think your father .. ."
"My father knows I am meeting with you. There are things we must discuss."
Victor arched an eyebrow at her. "Your father knows you are here, like this, with me?"
"My father is very busy. Details of no importance are of no importance." Omi opened her eyes and looked at him. "Please, Victor, relax."
"You don't make that easy, Omi." Victor rubbed his left hand across his chest, smearing blond chest-hair into bar dexter. "I've, ah, I've never seen you so .. ."
"Nor have I you, except in my dreams." She blushed. "Forgive me, Victor, for indulging myself without considering your feelings. I am being selfish."
"Don't, Omi. You're not doing anything wrong."
"I know that. I believe it." She closed her eyes and crossed her arms behind her head. "In the time since you and I were together, on Arc-Royal, I have traveled much, as befits my position as one of my father's aides. I was on Solaris to watch Kai defend his title. I have traveled throughout the Combine, I have been to Northwind and other worlds. In all these times and places I have watched others and how they deal with the feelings you and I share. Customs differ, methods for displaying affection differ, but no matter where I go, the gulf that separates us is the sort of thing people see as tragic."
Despite the heat in the room, Victor felt a chill run down his spine. What the two of them were doing right then—sharing a sauna—would have been seen as laughably quaint and sedate on the vast majority of worlds of the Inner Sphere. There were also fundamentalist sects who would have seen it as cause for eternal damnation, but most other people would consider such an encounter completely unremarkable. Except most other people are not the daughter of the Coordinator and the First Prince of the Federated Commonwealth.
Omi continued. "All the time since we have been apart I have remembered kissing you and how that made me feel inside. I remember dancing with you, feeling your hand against my back. I remember the press of my body against yours, feeling your breath on my neck and inhaling the scent of you. At the time I did not want to part from you, but to stay with you forever, and since then I've often wished to trade a piece of my soul for just a few more seconds with you."
Hearing the melancholy tones in her soft voice, Victor wanted to spring up and cross to her side. He wanted to sit beside her and smother her mouth with kisses. And he would have except he knew it would not stop there. He wanted her fiercely, but to surrender to his desires would alter forever his relationship with Theodore Kurita, Hohiro, and Omi, destroying friendships and perhaps even shattering the foundation of the new Star League.
"Please, Omi, I beg of you, stop." Victor knotted his hands into fists and slammed his left one against the bench. The pain arched up his arm and brought him some clarity of mind. "Believe me when I tell you that I've thought the same thoughts, had the same dreams. I've relived all our time together and woven it into countless fantasies. I want to reach out to you, to touch you, to feel you next to me, but we cannot. Not here, not now."
"I know."
"Then why come here?"
Her blue eyes opened and sparkled. "New memories for new dreams."
Victor sat back against the sauna's wall and laughed. "Yet another reason I love you, Omi Kurita. Some people barely dare to dream, but you dare to plan for your dreams."
"Plan for our dreams, Victor. Were this just for me alone, I would not be so bold."
"Domo arigato, Omi-sama. I am in your debt. Yet again." Victor gave her a broad smile. "It occurs to me that if your father knows we are meeting, what does he think is its purpose?"
The serenity on Omi's face vanished. "You are perhaps aware that there was an attempt on my father's life a few months ago?"
Victor frowned. "My sources indicated that Subhash Indrahar has dropped out of sight, but we'd heard no rumors of an assassination attempt against your father."
Omi was silent for a moment. "Subhash Indrahar gave his life to help save my father."
Victor shifted his shoulders uneasily. "Indrahar's devotion to your family was well known. His sacrifice does not come as a surprise, nor as a total tragedy, from the FedCom point of view. We've known of the existence of reactionary elements opposed to the changes your father is making in the Combine, and Indrahar must have known who they were. They're the only ones with the motive to try to kill your father, and they would have had to be fairly powerful. All in all, the math is pretty simple when you look at it that way."
"Only to a gifted mathematician is it simple." Omi sat up and crossed her ankles. "My father is fairly certain that when what we are deciding here gets announced, the rumors will begin to fly. He suspects that the use of the Combine as a staging area will become translated into an attempt by you to make certain any Clan reprisals come against the Combine instead of your sister's realm."
"That's a novel idea." Victor sighed. "I expect the media here to suggest I'm abandoning the Lyran Alliance and stripping it of troops. Ditto the press in the Federated Commonwealth. They'll castigate me for using our troops to win Combine worlds back from the Clans or exhort me to take those worlds in the name of the Federated Commonwealth. I'm sure your father would love that idea."
"He trusts you, Victor, to keep your word."
"Just make sure he never asks me to promise never to see you again."
"I do not think that will be a problem." Omi smiled easily. "My father has several plans in mind to fight the reactionary element in the Combine, but they will require your cooperation."
"Details?"
"I have many to share with you, but not here." She stretched and Victor's heart caught in his throat. "Perhaps I could explain his thoughts over dinner?"
"You've read my mind." Victor nodded toward the door. "You can shower and change in any of the northeast wing's guest suites. That will give me enough time to arrange for dinner—a dinner from which we can weave a legion of dreams."
15
Warrior Quarter
Strana Mechty
Kerensky Cluster, Clan Space
27 October 3058
Feeling drained and as weak as a puppy, Vladimir Ward of the Wolves pulled himself up into a half-sitting position and tucked a pillow between himself and the bed's headboard. He tugged at the sheet, teasing it up over his right leg so he could soak up the runnels of sweat pouring down his face and chest. His hand fell limply across his chest and his eyes closed. He felt the soporific aftermath of sex start to tug him toward sleep, but he refused to give in to it.
His body, sated and exhausted, allowed his mind to wander, and he found himself thinking about things that had never occurred to him before. Because all breeding within the Clans' warrior caste was conducted artificially, the linkage between coupling and procreation did not exist. Carnal pleasure became a gift shared between friends,
a means of celebration, and even a form of competition where no one lost. He knew that between members of the lower castes sexual intercourse was loaded with myriad other meanings and shadings, but he had never thought much about that one way or the other. He lived as a warrior should and that was all that mattered.
Coupling with comrades was one thing, but love was not part of it. Love was something for the lower castes—and the misguided denizens of the Inner Sphere—and Vlad knew they used the word to cover a vast range of affinities. Warriors, on the other hand, valued friendship and camaraderie, but the exclusivity that seemed to accompany love would have spawned jealousy and rivalry. Both were destructive to military discipline and order, and those were especially honored by the warriors of the ruling caste.
Vlad recalled a time when one of his former sibmates—a young woman he had known since infancy—had confessed that she had fallen in love with someone. The experience had confused her terribly, a confusion made even worse by the fact that she had fallen in love with the bondsman Phelan Kell. Ranna had come to Vlad seeking guidance, and her need for reassurance had landed them in bed together.
At the time he had not understood what she was going through or why she began to avoid him later. She came to believe she had betrayed Phelan with me. That realization had come before Vlad ever met the woman he believed he loved, but until now, until he had coupled with someone other than the woman he loved, he could not fully grasp what Ranna had felt. He had dismissed her feelings as a mental aberration, but now he knew it was something more than that.
In Katrina Steiner he had found a woman for whom he ached. It was so much more than physical attraction and lust, though that component could not be ignored. As he spoke with her, spent time with her, he felt a unity of spirit that he had only previously known with other warriors. He knew he should have reviled her because she was not a warrior in any way, shape, or form, yet her internal strength burned as brightly as his did. It felt as if he had discovered a part of himself that he had not known was missing.
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