by Victor Milán
“You think to anger me,” she said. “Good tactics, brother dear—so long as you forget all the practice we both have had in swallowing our rage!”
She darted to her right, his left. He lunged forward with speed scarcely less blinding than hers for all he outmassed her cleanly two to one. His arm streaked toward her face in what was more than anything a straight punch—but aimed to lay open her cheek with the blade trailing from his huge dark fist.
Her own move had been a feint. As he committed himself to his charge she turned and simply jumped at him. Her left arm extended, elbow slightly bent, fingers of her open hand extended to touch an imaginary plane extended from her body’s center line; the outside of her arm struck the inside of his knife arm just above the elbow, too far for a wrist roll to cut her with his short weapon. At the same time she wrapped both legs about his narrow waist, kissed him quickly on the lips, and sliced his cheek above the high prominent bone with a quick, vicious cut.
At once Malvina launched herself into a back flip. It would land her outside reach of a retaliatory strike, and him with his weight still on his heels, to keep himself from falling backwards when she struck him.
But her sibkin’s neuromusculature was as Clan-bred as her own, his training as brutally Clan-intensive. Even off-balance he managed to lash out. The tip of his blade flicked lightly across the swell of her left buttock, slicing silvery synthel fabric and white skin.
She landed on her bare feet, harder than intended, staggered back several steps to regain her own balance. “Damn you!” she yelped. “That stung.”
He laughed. “You will remember me when next you sit in the cockpit of the Black Rose,” he said. Which would be for the invasion of Chaffee, after the jump for which their fleets now recharged using their solar sails, here in Whittington system. In a matter of days the desant would at last land in force upon its first true objective.
Malvina circled to Aleks’ left again, weaving her hands before her with her fighting blade laid against the inside of her slim white forearm. The pulse in her wrist made the blade jump just at the edge of visibility.
Aleks gave the weapon no more than a cursory glance. Malvina’s sinuous motions intended to render it difficult for her opponent to calculate a way past her defenses, or know when or from what angle she would launch a strike. It was also meant literally to hypnotize a foe; if an opponent made the mistake of watching her hands too long, especially her knife hand, she would program him, with surprising quickness, to anticipate her patterns even though they appeared random. Then she would strike from an unforeseen angle.
It was a killer technique—again, literally. Aleks had seen it work in duels. To prevent it working on him—since he knew from bitter experience that foreknowledge would not protect him if he allowed himself to watch her hands—he kept his eyes in soft focus, intent upon her shoulders. They were a far better indicator of imminent action anyway, though Malvina was expert at avoiding telegraphing of any sort.
“I am glad you showed some spirit,” she said, smiling. “I had begun to fear your famous compassion was getting the better of you.”
His brown eyes narrowed slightly and his nostrils flared. That was a cheap shot. Aleks had shed more tears after Porrima than the single one he allowed himself in the doomed suburb where Magnus died. Not even he, renowned, feared, admired as he was, dared weep openly in front of Clanners. Except Malvina, holding his head to her breast in bed in her quarters aboard her own flag JumpShip Black Dalliance. In her arms he let go entirely of his iron self-control and the tears flowed like waterfalls. Not for the first time; but for the first time in years.
He also knew, quite well, she was trying to provoke him. An angry fighter makes mistakes. All combat at all levels of scale, from interstellar wars to tête-à-tête duels such as this one, hinged ultimately on who made the fewer, or less telling, mistakes. And no fighting more than knife fighting, where the slightest cut, like the slice on his cheek or the one he had given his sibkin on her backside, would given enough time bleed a combatant to the point of fatal weakness.
So he laughed. It was his most effective defense against the world.
Annoyed, or seeming so, she essayed a cut for his left forearm. The knife fighter’s mortal sin, each knew, was obsessing on the kill shot: there are very few knife strokes that will instantly incapacitate a foe. Each had witnessed many fights in which a combatant had been mortally wounded by an enemy to whom she had already dealt her own deathblow.
Steel rang again as Aleks blocked effortlessly with his knife. “You think I took pity on you, then?”
It was her turn to frown. And then laugh, like a silver bell. “I know how much you loved the tales of knights, of Europe and Japan, when we were children in the sibko together,” she said. “The lore of medieval chivalry and bushido still clog your head—even though both were largely made up of whole cloth in the nineteenth century.”
He would only laugh. “Whenever they were invented, those tales speak to me,” he acknowledged. He was circling to keep facing her, taking advantage of his far longer stride to force her to move more quickly to make sure it was not she who was outflanked. His own hands he kept extended toward the plane of his center line, left hand high and open, knife hand at about navel level and very slightly refused.
“They fit so wonderfully well with the Kerenskys’ vision: of a warrior’s duty to care for and shield the weak. Which is, after all, the engine that drives this great Crusade of ours: to save the childlike peoples of the Inner Sphere from themselves, and their leaders’ selfishness and venality. Do not the tales of knightly chivalry and samurai honor accord better with our ways than the Mongols you were so taken by?”
Again they exchanged a flurry of cuts. The clash of blades was tinkling music. Neither was marked again.
“The Mongols triumphed against great odds,” she said. She herself seemed to be fighting from downhill; his strength and, of much greater importance, reach were far greater than hers. To have a chance of victory, therefore, she had to either snipe from outside, slice him well and bleed him until his reactions slowed, or get inside his long arms.
Aleks’ mention of Mongols had double impact: a faction had arisen in recent years among Jade Falcon’s warriors that called itself by that name. They contended, heretically, that had Nicholas been perfect, as Clan lore held, the Clans would have conquered Terra eighty-two years ago. Since the Founder borrowed so much from the Mongol hordes of old Terra, the movement demanded that the other aspects of Mongol warfare should be adopted: total conquest by any means, however harsh or “dishonorable”—all in the service, yet, of the Founder’s dream.
In the years since their last parting the sibkin’s paths had diverged in more than just spatial dimensions. Malvina was herself the Mongols’ leading proponent, had attained ristar status despite it, as had Aleksandr despite his contrary compassion. She was their focal point among the Falcons, but also within those Clans who yet considered their Inner Sphere territories to be Occupation Zones; Hell’s Horses and even Clan Wolf, ancient enemy, whom she claimed to detest more than any.
The sibkin had, with a resumption of that effortless nonverbal communication they had developed so long ago as frightened children alone against their sibko and the universe, simply mooted such issues when they came together under the eyes of Bec Malthus and Khan Jana Pryde to plot Clan Jade Falcon’s return to the Inner Sphere. But Aleks understood a conflict of their visions approached as fast as the first for-real planetary assault. And he at least did not look forward to that confrontation.
“Yet so effective were their tactics, their foes came to hugely exaggerate their numbers in their own minds,” Malvina said. She kept her tone steady, conversational. She breathed normally. As did he.
Malvina Hazen did not lack advantages of her own. Although Aleksandr possessed astounding speed for a man his size, she was as much faster than he as he was stronger.
And then—except in unarmed combat, where the disparity in strength
and size was simply too great for her to overcome with any regularity—he had never beaten her.
“Their situation was not so different from what we face,” she said. “Overwhelming odds: a vastness to conquer; rich, teeming, powerful nations to defeat. The Founder did not scruple to borrow terms from the Mongols, Touman and even Khan. Should we, Turkina’s brood, designed for ferocity, be too nice to learn from their methods and so risk throwing away our holy cause?”
As she spoke they dueled, a duet of lightning slashes and open-handed blocks and blows. An outsider would have thought it rehearsed. It was—but only in the sense that these two were both masters of the form of combat, and had spent hundreds of hours squaring off against one another in just this way.
Aleks’ big brow furrowed, and his eyes seemed to focus into the distance, past the padding affixed to the bulkhead for three meters, over his sister’s moon-pale shoulder. “Yet we must not be so entranced, even by victory, that we betray our reason for fighting, our very purpose for existence as warriors—”
They had had this debate often before.
Which was why she drew it out now. Hoping his mind would follow. . . .
As he spoke she reversed knife in hand and thrust for his groin. He danced back, turning his right hip to back his blade, which parried hers in a cool counterclockwise arc. He caught her with sufficient force that his strength told then, knocking her knife hand well past his buttocks. He followed through, up and over in a backhand reverse slash at her cheek with savage speed.
She had already dropped, turning, using the momentum his parry’s violence imparted. She laid her free hand on the mat to pivot and came around full circle to slam the heel of her straightened left leg against the inside of his planted right ankle. Its full force delivered normal to his line of balance, the sweep scythed the leg right out from under him. He fell.
And Malvina bestrode him in the mount position, him on his back, her butt on his belly, her strong legs clamped about his hips. The needle-sharp tip of her long, widening-tapering blade depressed the skin of his Adam’s apple, ever so slightly. She leaned forward with both palms stacked on the pommel, and smiled.
“And so I win again,” she said. A droplet of sweat fell from her well-sheened forehead to his lips. He licked it away. “And so I always will. It is good that you are the one thing in the cosmos I love, brother dear!”
She laughed, threw away her knife—and before he could react had leaned forward again, pinning his wrists with her small fists, and crushed her mouth to his.
After a moment he let go his own knife, and laughed into her mouth, and returned the kiss with equal fervor.
11
New London Spaceport
Skye
Prefecture IX
The Republic of the Sphere
1 May 3134
Tara Campbell, Countess of Northwind and General commanding the three Highlander regiments, had been favorably impressed by the “honor guard” sent to meet her and her retinue as they debarked their DropShip Parris Mac-Bride. The air was lightly brushed with chill despite a vigorous late-morning sun and the heat still radiating from the funnel-shaped cement blast pit. They appeared most businesslike, altogether professional and turned out for action rather than ceremony.
Her lifelong diplomatic training to always guard her reactions served her just as well as her equally lengthy study of the martial arts in not flinching when a half-brick, thrown from the crowd jostling just beyond the vibrowire perimeter, bounced off the clear polycarbonate dome of the hovercar.
“Bloody heathen,” murmured Command Master Sergeant Angus McCorkle, senior noncommissioned officer of the Countess’ own First Kearny Regiment, from his seat in front of Tara—with its back to the car’s outside, and hence to the angry mob of protesters. He sat upright, every crease in his utilities razor sharp, his black skin taut as a drum. If spending two days under doubled weight had taken the toll on him it had on Tara, he showed no sign of it. And he, she thought jealously, did not even have discreet makeup to fall back on.
“This does not seem a propitious sign,” said Tara’s aide, who sat beside her at the rear of the passenger compartment. She was pale and there were circles under her eyes—but those eyes were alert, as was her posture, despite the way her body was crying almost audibly for rest. Captain Tara Bishop had been a combat MechWarrior long before she became a REMF with a cushy billet. She knew from long experience how to stay sharp in a threat zone despite bone-deep weariness.
“I apologize for this part of your reception, Countess,” said the earnest and almost painfully handsome young captain who led the reception party. Like the rest of the escort, he was dressed in urban-camouflage battle dress; his sole concession to ceremony was that he wore the powder blue beret of The Republic Skye Militia with the insignia of the Ducal Guard. Neither he nor any man or woman of his security detail wore any visible rank badges. Tara approved that too: Sar’nt McCorkle would have called them “sniper aim-points.” She was sure that despite his wearing soft cover, the hovercraft’s driver, her own head concealed by a boxy helmet, had a second lid for him tucked away out of sight up in the driver’s pit.
It also took all Tara’s tungsten-carbide self-discipline to keep her changeable eyes—at the moment pale blue—from focusing obsessively on the tattoo on the shaven side of his head beneath his beret: the snarling wolf’s head affected by many a full-fledged warrior of Clan Wolf.
She made herself look away, out at the mob. There seemed a thousand of them, pressing as close to the wire as they could without getting a good jolt. The ones right across the perimeter waved signs written mostly in Commonwealth German. Yet the bunch ahead, across the highway that led away from the spaceport gate into the Prefectural capital itself, brandished English placards.
“I wonder if Teufelscheiss means what I think it does,” she murmured.
McCorkle frowned. His moustached face seemed by hue and apparent hardness to have been carved from a chunk of ebony. “If I knew, I’d not be tellin’ ye, lass,” he rumbled in a rare appearance of the thick Northwinder brogue to which he had been raised.
He fixed young Guard Captain Martin with a glare that had reduced a good many higher-ranking officers to quivering protoplasm. “What d’ye mean, letting this lot greet the Countess so?”
Captain Martin looked distressed—not an expression Tara expected to see on a Clan face. “We uphold the law that guarantees free speech, Master Sergeant,” he said. “We, at least, are still loyal to The Republic.”
The Master Sergeant’s eyes blazed red. Literally, as the capillaries within became engorged. It was a very, very bad sign: it meant that McCorkle, whose own self-control could put to shame Tara Campbell’s, was on the very brink of killing rage. No matter how composed he looked, two days’ high gee had told on him, too. “And what might you be meaning by that?” he demanded.
Tara leaned forward to touch his arm. “Peace, Top,” she said. “Don’t you see he’s talking about troubles in his own house, not ours?”
“It is true, Master Sergeant,” Martin said. His gray eyes were haunted-hollow and the skin of his tanned, healthy face had gone slack and slightly ashen. “I meant no offense.”
McCorkle drew a deep breath, nodded. His eyes began to clear.
Tara leaned back, hiding her own sigh. And so my life has gone, these last few years, she thought with a bitterness that surprised her. My arrival sparks a riot, and my first semiofficial act on Skye is to defend a Wolf.
She had studied the world’s current state as extensively as she could during the nine days’ voyage to the Terran jump point and the much shorter high-gee hop from this system’s. She knew the shame of Skye’s military to which Captain Martin had obliquely referred. As she knew that Skye had received a substantial number of Wolf Clanners during Devlin Stone’s resettlement program. Feeling a certain resentful pressure from Skyians, these were known to cleave strongly to The Republic, as a buffer against the locals. But he was still Clan.
“I will apologize for leaping at conclusions,” McCorkle husked. “I’ll not ask you to go against your stiff-necked Clan pride.”
“Thank you. But no apology is necessary: your instinct was to defend your honor, as any warrior’s would be. Yet please understand: I am of The Republic of the Sphere, and of Skye; and then I am a Clansman.”
The young officer spoke with unmistakable quiet pride—itself not particularly Clanlike. Yet loathing crawled within her for all things Clan—and for none more than the Wolf. It was the Steel Wolves who had twice attacked her home world, had forced her to destroy her own ancestral castle to keep it from falling into their hands, who had burned and flattened Tara itself with widespread butchery of civilians who had not been able to flee the fighting. The Steel Wolves whom she and her Highlanders had turned back from Terra itself scarce months before, by the skin of their teeth.
Like this soft spoken and oh-so-good-looking young man, the Steel Wolves had proclaimed themselves loyal citizens of The Republic, not so very long ago.
But be fair, she reproved herself sternly. He’s already had one chance to turn his coat, and passed it by—no doubt at great cost to himself.
“They’re protesting against The Republic, though,” Tara Bishop said, jerking her head toward the shouting mob.
Captain Martin nodded. “They desire reunion with the Commonwealth. Your presence particularly excites them because they feel the Exarch underscores their subservience to The Republic, by here sending The Republic’s most famous hero.”
Something in the cadence and placement of the words made Tara look at him with a stirring of amusement. She had finally realized that, although he spoke English with a cosmopolitan accent little different from her own, his own birth tongue was almost certainly German.
