by Victor Milán
“Yes, your Grace,” Solvaig murmured, subsiding. The crescent-slit eyes through which he regarded Tara showed no sign of friendliness.
“Please forgive Minister Solvaig, Countess,” the Duke said. “He cares deeply about our world. Sometimes the intensity of his feelings get the better of him. It seldom clouds his judgment, however.”
His brows drew closer together again. “I hope you will understand that I regard this potential threat as primarily an affair of Prefecture IX, and Skye.”
“Surely your Grace agrees The Republic has a vital interest in defending its territories?”
He glared at her a moment. His eyes were gray, currently an icy pale.
I faced the Wolf Bitch Anastasia Kerensky in her Ryoken II without flinching, and defeated a rogue Paladin of the Sphere ’Mech to ’Mech, she thought. I’m damned if I’ll quail for a mere Duke.
“Surely the Exarch understands we are competent to handle the situation,” Della Brown put in with a trace of asperity.
“No doubt he does, Prefect,” Tara said. She thought it no good sign the Prefect—a Republican official answering directly to Geneva—should side with the local governor in a jurisdictional dispute. Worse was that she or anyone thought there should be a jurisdictional dispute.
Then again, Tara thought, unable to prevent herself feeling bitterness she was too proud to show, it’s not as if Redburn sent me out with any official standing. I might as well be a mercenary like One-Eyed Jack Farrell—or just another highborn meddler. “This is not about command or control. I was sent to offer any and all assistance I was able to.”
“Without troops, what help have you to give?” Solvaig sneered openly.
“The troops are coming,” she said. It was true she and her staff had been bundled into space before even the Highlander company which had remained on Terra could be mustered aboard DropShips. They would follow as soon as possible, as would the troops who had returned months before to Northwind. But the majority of her Highlanders were strewn across two Prefectures fighting fires. How many of them could reach Skye before the threat materialized, as she knew in her bone marrow it would?
Duke Gregory glared at her a moment longer. Then he sighed volcanically.
“I am in no position to stand on pride,” he said. He laced his fingers and put his big hands on the table before him. “Suppose you tell us what hope you do propose to tender us, Countess.”
“Countess Campbell.”
The corridor was narrow and, despite the broad daylight outside the dressed stone walls, dim. It gave her a pang of nostalgia for her own Castle Northwind, in which she had spent so much of her childhood, and which she had ordered destroyed to prevent it falling into the hands of the Steel Wolves. Sanglamore Academy had enjoyed a storied career turning out top-rate military professionals for the Federation of Skye, the Lyran Commonwealth, and the short-lived Federated Commonwealth. Like military establishments everywhere after the rise of Stone and his Republic, the Academy, which had already suffered severe losses to its faculty in the FedCom explosion and the subsequent Jihad, had gradually faded to a wisp of its former self, with whole wings mothballed for a generation. In the new Golden Age a military academy seemed a barbaric throwback.
Tara stopped and turned around. Her aide stood poised at her side like a watchdog. “Yes, Prefect Brown?”
“A word with you, if I may.”
“Certainly,” Tara said.
The Prefect came up with them. She loomed over the tiny Countess: a handsome woman in middle age, light-skinned black, with a cap of coiled dark red hair dusted with gray and large amber eyes. She had clearly once been willowy, possibly athletic; but from the spread of hips and thighs it was obvious she had spent most of her recent career piloting a desk rather than a BattleMech.
She looked meaningfully at Tara Bishop.
The captain looked back, smiling tightly, refusing to budge from her superior’s side. The Prefect focused her out.
“I must suggest you keep a tighter rein on your emotions, Countess Campbell,” the Prefect said in a tone somewhere between reproof and condescension. “You risk acting in an unprofessional manner when you allow yourself to be drawn into arguments with influential civilians.”
“You mean Minister Solvaig?”
“I do.”
Tara Campbell felt her aide stiffen. Despite the fact that her eyes stung at the patent unfairness of the Prefect’s reproach, she touched Tara Bishop covertly on the arm, signaling restraint.
“I appreciate your concern, Prefect Brown,” she said. “Should that concern extend to wondering whether the publicity that tends to accompany me goes to my head, I can only request that you please accept my assurance that it does not.
“Moreover”—she allowed steel to touch her voice—“I beg to remind the Prefect that despite my appearance I am not a child, not even an adolescent; and that I am, in fact, myself the Prefect of Prefecture III, and not some actress engaged to play the role.”
The big liquid eyes blinked twice rapidly. “Northwind is a long way from here, Countess,” she said huffily.
“Let us all hope it’s not too far for my soldiers to get here before the Falcons do.”
With a grim “Good day,” Prefect Brown strode off down the hall on her long legs. Tara Campbell stared after her with a gaze like icicles.
“Well,” she said, when she and the other Tara had the corridor to themselves, “I’d say I handled that pretty badly.”
“You didn’t punch her,” TB said brightly. “If you made a mistake, ma’am, I’d say it was not letting me do it.”
15
Jade Falcon Naval Reserve Battleship Emerald Talon
Jump Point
Chaffee
Lyran Commonwealth
20 May 3134
“Nestlings of Turkina,” Beckett Malthus’ voice intoned in the darkness, “attend me.”
It was the briefing theater inboard the Emerald Talon. The auditorium, like half a bowl, was full of expeditionary force officers. Malthus stood at a podium with Aleksandr and Malvina Hazen seated flanking him. They were all but unseen in the dark: all eyes were fixed above and behind them, upon the holovid tank displaying a giant map of Prefectures VIII and IX of The Republic of the Sphere and the Lyran Commonwealth frontier, in which Chaffee was highlighted, a glowing green orb bigger and brighter than the rest.
“The time has come,” the Supreme Commander said, “to drop all pretense. The maskirovka has served its purpose. Now the time has come for the Jade Falcon to swoop in a mighty desant.”
Shrill falcon screams pierced the dark, and cries of “Seyla!”
“In the first wave, Zeta Galaxy shall jump first to Laiaka.” A red line descended from Chaffee and to the left, away from Terra and into Prefecture VIII. It touched a star which glowed yellow. “From that staging point, Turkina’s Beak shall have the honor of striking Alkaid.”
The line took a short jog down and right to a star that suddenly expanded into a red giant, as if going nova. The Zeta contingent cheered lustily. The Turkina Keshik officers looked bored and restive, and the Gyrs openly hostile, at the scantling Zetas being named first.
“The Gyrfalcon Galaxy”—the Deltas uttered falcon screams—“jumping through Zebeneschamali and Carnwath systems, shall strike at Ryde.” A white line zigzagged to the right.
“Finally,” Malthus said, as a third, green line radiated a short distance down and right from Chaffee, “the Turkina Keshik will seize and hold the world of Glengarry.” The Keshik officers maintained an aloof silence, as if to signify to their rivals and inferiors—to be redundant—that they were professionals, and had done this sort of thing before.
“In the second phase, the Keshik will consolidate its hold upon Glengarry and begin its reconstruction according to the Founder’s precepts, as has commenced on Chaffee. Zeta Galaxy will take Summer.” The red line looped beneath and past Skye, through Alcor and Mizar, then hooked up and right, almost to the border of Prefecture X, Th
e Republic’s core.
The white line forked like lightning. One line stabbed almost straight down, through a system called Unukalahi, and then to a system right next door to Skye, virtually on a line between it and Terra. The other white line thrust a short jump up and right.
“The Gyrfalcons will split at Ryde. One element will take Zebebelgenubi, near our final objective. The other will strike at Kimball II.”
He paused. The cheering, which had devolved into a lusty exchange of insults between the Gyrs and the Zetas, dwindled to silence.
“And then,” Malthus said, “ten weeks from this very day, we rendezvous in Skye system. The Falcon shall spread her wings above Skye itself as all three forces converge. Skye shall fall. The road to Terra will lie open before us, and then Khan Jana Pryde will not withhold the Jade Falcon Touman. They will surely join us in our triumph. Our ancient Crusade will be victorious at last: General Kerensky shall have truly returned home!”
“Seyla!” the Falcon’s brood thundered in a voice of one.
“I knew I would find you here.”
The tall, broad-shouldered shape brooding over the railing that overlooked a shuttle deck, which was a cavern of darkness whose floor was grown with little mushrooms of light between dark, gleaming masses, looked up and around.
She saw the flash of his teeth in the dimness of the gallery, the darkness of his face. “I am surprised you would seek me out.”
The command council following the kurultai had quickly curdled into rancor. Malvina pressed her case for harsh action: Chaffee had been subdued by her destruction of Hamilton. It could provide their model for conquest: applied frightfulness. The Mongol way.
Her sibkin had argued that conquest by terror was repugnant to Clan ways. That while harsh measures might be necessary in response to extreme provocation, the Falcons could not rely on them too greatly without overturning what they stood for, what they had returned to the Inner Sphere for: to free and safeguard the people there, not destroy them.
Sentiment clearly ran against him. The officers of Beckett Malthus’ Turkina Keshik had supported Malvina almost as enthusiastically as her own Gyrs. Only among his own commanders had Aleks found support; and even some of them seemed dubious.
Despite the fact the consensus was going away from Aleks, Bec Malthus ordained compromise: each Galaxy Commander might conduct his and her campaign as they wished; and when the fleets rejoined, at the zenith jump point four days out from Skye orbit, they would see what had been seen.
Pale face and silver hair appeared to float in air, vaguely agleam as if from within. The rest of her was cloaked in deep-space black with token green, itself scarcely other than black. The difference could not be seen in the dim amber footlights.
“It seems a waft of the air of home blows through,” he said, his voice a gentle rumble, “banishing for a moment the smell of hot metal, lubricants and ozone.”
“The soap with which I washed my hair and body,” she answered artlessly. “Made of Sudeten herbs. Home, if you would call it that.”
His smile was crooked. “We Clanners,” he said. “We dote upon nature, even though we ourselves are but little products of it. We so love to retreat into it during training and brief respites from duty. And to smuggle its smells and sometimes stolen scenery into the steel wombs into which we were born from glass ones.”
She was close enough that he could see the arch of her brow. “You find fault with our Clan ways?”
“I am amused by some of them, right enough.” He turned back to the rail, folded his big arms onto it, leaned there gazing out across the hangar deck. Above and beyond the shuttles being made ready for departure to the other JumpShips in the fleet, two great oblongs of starfield shone, silver upon black, one on either side of the central launch-lock. So arrogant had Clan Snow Raven been in their technology and might that they built huge crystal viewports on the battleship’s hangar deck, as if the shuttles were mettlesome steeds and needed to be able to see the starry realm to which they would soon or late return. In times when danger impended, armor shutters heavy as a Broadsword-class DropShip descended before each like closing eyelids.
“Our ways have changed since the first return to the Inner Sphere. Some out of need, others . . . just changed. Some changes were for the best. Others I would see made right again. And others are not yet made, that need to be.”
She stood close beside him. She seemed clenched, and at the same time aglow with something like fury. It was as if she had something to say but could not.
He turned and looked at her in wonder. There were few things she could not do, if she chose.
“You have right,” she said at last. “But we might differ as to what should be changed, and how.”
“It is true.”
He turned, reached a broad square hand to her. It stopped midair. It seemed as if some sort of membrane, invisible, insensible to touch, but real nevertheless, had descended between them.
His eyes met hers. He dropped the hand.
“Change comes,” he said. “Changes greater than any of us expect.”
“Not greater than I expect.”
“We shall change the Inner Sphere as drastically as did our predecessors of the First Crusade, win or lose,” he said. “What upheavals will the Inner Sphere inflict on us—win or lose?”
“Exalt us,” she said. “Or destroy us. Better that than slide deeper into decadence.”
She laughed. It was brittle music, like tiny icicles shattering in a cold Sudeten dawn.
“You disappoint me, brother,” she said. “I had come here hoping you might give me answers. Instead all you have in your mouth is more questions.”
She turned from him. “What answers we find, we shall find in action. And so our ways part. For now.”
New London Spaceport
Skye
15 May 3134
Though the day was warm, especially here with the primary sun—so much like Terra’s own Sol—bouncing its heat off the blacktop of the spaceport into the faces of Tara and her escorts, the breezes blowing down from the Sanglamore Mountains west of New London were bladed with chill. They carried the scent of great splayed leaves turning all gold and tan and russet and orange, and the smell of the rich black soil they sprang from, and from heights greater still lordly evergreens twice taller than any ’Mech.
“Here she comes!” the shout went up from the troops around them. A point of blue-white brilliance had appeared above, burning laser-like through the white horsetails of clouds brushed across a sky as achingly blue as Northwind’s own. The powerful defensive emplacements, which like the ones guarding New Glasgow’s spaceport boasted powerful weapons remounted from DropShips as well as conventional anti-aircraft armaments, moved automatically to track its descent.
“About bloody time,” said Command Master Sergeant Angus McCorkle, standing a respectful distance behind his commander and her taller, brown-haired aide. He wore full Northwind regimentals, including a kilt and sash of the blue and black Campbell tartan, though he wore a tartan-banded cap instead of a bearskin-covered helmet. The two Taras wore conventional dress uniform, khaki with trousers. Although neither tradition nor regulation forbade a woman of the Highlanders wearing the kilt, and although she was in fact the Campbell, with better claim upon the sett—the traditional plaid pattern—than any, Countess Tara seldom wore it. She had enough trouble overcoming her pretty-girl image without appearing at solemn public functions wearing what was in reality a short skirt. Especially on a day as breezy as today.
And far less regimental, she reflected. Although it would almost be worth it, to hear that fat fool Herrmann howl.
With a roar of drive jets the DropShip Blue Bayou settled toward the designated blast pit. It lay well away from the spaceport’s main buildings, beyond any number of invitingly vacant landing spots. Tara suspected the remote location was another half-subtle dig from her hosts. It did sport a boggy fen of tall, feather-headed grasses gone gray in the long summer heat across
the wire to discourage the protesters who still dogged Tara’s steps.
There seemed no guile behind the smile of Lieutenant Colonel Brigid Hanratty, commander of the planet’s largest remaining military formation as well as today’s escorts and security detail—no more Ducal Guards for Tara. Hanratty was a big, rawboned woman with a face like a prizefighter and a great mass of curly, metallic red hair bound, unlikely enough, into pigtails. Despite the fact she looked like the cliché image of an Irish washerwoman, she had shown herself, in the few days Tara had been liaising with her, to be at the least a competent officer with a solid grasp of military matters.
She also professed a high regard for Tara Campbell’s military accomplishments, from Sadalbari onward. Far from resenting the petite and beautiful Countess, she seemed vastly tickled that such a redoubtable battle leader should appear to her in the guise of what she termed a “wee porcelain doll.” So hearty were her expressions of admiration that Tara had not even felt the usual stab of resentment—champion martial artist that she was, as well as much-bloodied MechWarrior and proven battlefield commander—that being referred to as a “porcelain doll” normally inflicted.
Hanratty seemed legitimately delighted to have Tara Campbell on Skye and working with her, under whatever plan. Well, she’s the only one, Tara thought as the ship’s landing jacks extended and it settled onto the ferrocrete rim of the pit with a vast roaring and grinding.
That statement was not altogether true. The Skye mass media were as adulatory as the media on Terra had been—except for those owned by the powerful Herrmanns AG, who portrayed her as a demon incarnate. Yet her official reception had little warmed: Planetary Legate Eckard was so introverted as to be a cipher, Prefect Brown was aloof and disapproving, Minister Solvaig openly hostile. In general the Duke himself seemed to find her as welcome as a cold sore; yet he had shown no reticence about intervening in her behalf, either at the first unfortunate meeting with Prefecture officials or subsequently when Tara had been reluctantly compelled to call instances of bureaucratic obstruction and noncooperation, quite frequent at first, to his attention. It was as if he was torn between resentment and relief at her presence—and blamed her for both.
