by Victor Milán
“How’s it going, Master Sergeant?” A light breeze kicked dust along the street past their boots, and tugged playfully at the cuffs of their trousers.
He hesitated. That itself spoke volumes. He was a man who had been raised since puphood to the doctrine that a wrong decision right now is light years better than a “correct” decision too late. And as senior noncom with nearly three decades of service—he was older than he looked—he had no fear of any officer, even one of far more exalted rank than Tara Bishop herself, nor for that matter of the Countess herself. He would have stood up to Exarch Redburn without a second thought: in a fighting army no one outranked a good NCO.
He was not a man, in short, accustomed to choosing his words. Nonetheless he did so now.
“Unevenly,” was what he chose.
She cocked an eyebrow at him. She had gotten over being intimidated by the man, for all that he seemed an animated obsidian statue. After showing a certain initial reserve, he had come to treat her with pure professional correctness. It meant he respected her. Master Sergeant McCorkle was not a man who suffered fools gladly. Indeed, neither she nor anyone she had talked to was aware of any evidence he suffered them at all.
“Meaning what exactly, Top?”
“They’re as undisciplined a collection of barroom sweepings and gaolbirds as ever a sun of any color has risen on,” he said, his own brogue coming on more thickly than usual with the intensity of his feeling. “If I drop one for twenty, he gives me twenty more for the Old Sod. They think of us as a passel of Republican busybodies with asses so tight—begging the Captain’s pardon—that we might as well be Lyrans ourselves. I think we’ve shown them we’re a bit more than parade-ground Janes and Johnnies. But they’re wild as mountain cats, all the same.”
“Will they fight?”
That graven image face, it seemed to her, threatened to crack a smile. “If the JFs come here I think they’ll fight like demons.”
“But will they fight with us? Or on their own hook?”
“There’s the rub, Captain Bishop,” McCorkle said.
They reached a parade ground. The flags of The Republic and Skye snapped on a flagpole across it, over the regimental headquarters. On a separate staff snapped a blue flag with a black horse head, and the words “Seventh Skye Militia” above and “For Garryowen In Glory” below.
“Who the blight,” Tara asked in a quiet voice, “is Garry Owen, anyway, Master Sergeant?”
“Damned if I know, Captain,” he said.
The speaker horns mounted above the HQ buildings began to emit a rising-falling banshee wail. At the same time Tara’s personal communicator chimed for attention. She snatched it from her belt carrier.
“Bishop here,” she said, as men and women began to tumble out of barracks around them.
“This is Major Sinclair at Sanglamore.” He was a Highlander staff officer who had come in with Ballantrae and the first group of regulars from Terra. “Get back here at once. Have Shugrue assign you an escort.” Major Lars Shugrue was the Seventh’s adjutant, on whom Tara had been on the point of paying a courtesy call before observing a training exercise supervised by McCorkle and the other training staff seconded from the Highlanders.
“Affirmative on the quick return, Major, negative on the escort.” She was mildly annoyed. Sinclair was not a combat type, but neither was he usually officious. “I’m a big girl now.”
“No doubt,” came back dryly. “But the Countess wants you to get an escort anyway.”
“Yes, sir. May I ask what the matter is? Have the Falcons arrived?”
“Yes, you may ask; no they have not. And I’ll waste no more time talking when you should be moving, Captain!”
“Yes, sir.” She hesitated. “Should I bring Master Sergeant McCorkle along as well?”
“Negative, Captain. But have him gather his cadre together somewhere secure. Discreetly. Just in case. Now, move.”
She lowered the communicator and stared briefly at McCorkle. He shrugged.
“We’re mushrooms, ma’am,” he said. “Just SOP.”
A frozen-faced Skye staff lieutenant ushered Tara Bishop into the briefing room in the rectory of the erstwhile Sanglamore Academy.
Duke Gregory Kelswa-Steiner was there, as were Prefect Della Brown and Planetary Legate Stanford Eckard, dressed in severe black trimmed with gray. Chief Minister Solvaig, whom the captain had privately described to her Countess and friend as having eyes like the crescent-moon marks you might make with your thumbnails in spoiled cheese, was not in evidence, to her pleased surprise.
Tara C. sat, not across from the others, but at the end of the table, side-on to the door; she had grown too wary to sit with her back to an entrance. It was a change Tara Bishop approved even though she regretted the need. The Countess’ smile was brief, sincere and strained.
“Glad to see you made it intact, Captain.”
Tara Bishop shrugged. “We had no trouble at all, ma’am. If anything the streets were deserted even for this time of a work day.” Her Garryowen escort, uncharacteristically silent and grim, had brought her on the quickest route from their bivouac outside town to the former military school on its bluff overlooking a thickly wooded suburb also known as Sanglamore.
“There is rioting, Captain Bishop.” To her surprise it was the Duke himself who answered. As much to her surprise, both he and Eckard had risen to her entrance. She was so junior as to merit any notice whatsoever solely because of the fact she was chief aide-de-camp to Tara Campbell, who despite her nominal disparity in title to the Duke of Skye was in fact full peer to both Kelswa-Steiner and Prefect Brown, superior to Eckard. As Prefect of III, Tara Campbell held a rank approximating field marshal, far too heavy in grade for command of her de facto division. Then the captain realized it was old-fashioned gallantry that made the men rise, deference to a lady entering a room.
“Certain elements of the populace have panicked at the latest news,” the Duke said, resuming his seat. Tara Bishop sat too. “From your account, the disorder does not appear yet to have spread to the suburbs, or at least the western ones. Chief Minister Solvaig must be succeeding in containing it.”
Tara Bishop clamped her lips on the question she wanted to ask. Sometimes she remembered she was just a captain.
“A few hours ago, a Republican merchant JumpShip entered the system,” Tara Campbell explained. “Her captain broadcast a warning: the Jade Falcons have invaded Chaffee, just across the frontier in Steiner space.”
“They conquered it, Captain Bishop,” Eckard intoned. His pale face looked more tightly pinched than usual. “With, it would appear, exemplary brutality.”
Tara Bishop gasped. She was no cherry; she had been a combat MechWarrior long before getting slugged as aide to the Countess, nor had she stopped driving her Pack Hunter ’Mech into harm’s way since receiving that assignment. She had seen the elephant—not to mention the Wolf. She knew that war is misery and pain hurts.
But to hear that a Jade Falcon war fleet had once again invaded the Inner Sphere was like having some kind of childhood nightmare, at once fanciful and terrifyingly visceral, come true: as if the Duke and his Legate had just told her a dragon had just landed in New Glasgow and begun laying waste the central business district.
“Impossible!” It burst out before she could stop it. Its banality appalled her. Especially since, of course, it wasn’t.
“My reaction was the same, Captain,” Prefect Brown said. “But impossible or not, it’s true. We received a massive data dump, complete with tridee documentation of the destruction of an entire city by the Falcons.”
“These aren’t wannabes like the Spirit Cats,” Tara Campbell said. Despite her rigorous lifelong training in diplomacy the bitterness was clear in her voice: but then again, she wasn’t bitter on her own account. “Or our old friends the Steel Wolves.” As far as Republican intelligence had been able to discern since her explosion onto the scene a little over a year before, Anastasia Kerensky, Canister-born on the
world Arc-Royal in the Commonwealth, was the only real Wolf in her pack.
“These aren’t Republican citizens gone renegade,” the Countess continued. “They’re the genuine article, straight from Sudeten itself. Just as the Sea Fox reports suggested.”
Tara Bishop frowned. “But, Countess, the riots—”
“The initial broadcast was made in the clear,” Tara Campbell said. “The merchie captain was spooked. And I don’t blame her. She entered Chaffee system within hours after the Falcon invasion fleet jumped out to parts as yet unknown. There was still a JF JumpShip in-system, but by sheer chance orbiting at the zenith proximity point, whereas the merchant entered at the nadir. Although the planet was pretty thoroughly under the heel of a Falcon Cluster—”
“And not just any Cluster,” Della Brown broke in, “but the Turkina Keshik itself.”
Tara Bishop’s eyes widened. She didn’t know a lot about what went on in the blessedly distant Jade Falcon Occupation Zone, but she did know quite a bit about the military history of the Inner Sphere. Turkina Keshik, the first Cluster of the elite Jade Falcon Galaxy, was the Khan’s own guard, leading formation of the whole Falcon Touman.
“—certain elements on the surface caught the merchant’s broadcast greeting and responded with an account of what had happened, and was still going on,” the Countess continued, showing no resentment of the interruption. “The merchie captain sat out the recharge, no doubt sweating blood every millisecond, then jumped here quick as she could.”
“Unfortunately,” Duke Gregory said, and his heavy handsome face was pale with the effort of containing his rage, “someone else heard her initial transmission to Skye. And that someone spread the word to the whole planet: Clan Jade Falcon has seized and ravaged a world right across the border in the Commonwealth—and their course seems to point them here.”
18
Wolf Moon (Backside of Ivanov, moon of LaBlon)
Prefecture IX
The Republic of the Sphere
27 June 3134
In slow motion, the woman dropped toward the commissary floor. The new third eye in the center of her forehead wept a single long red tear up into the air. The shot that placed it there had quit echoing in the confines of the pressure chamber, but its aftereffects still rang in the ears of the Steel Wolf officers standing before their overturned chairs.
Anastasia Kerensky had already returned her right-hand weapon, a Lyran-issue M&M Service automatic, to its holster. She was a woman of arresting beauty, with a cloud of midnight-black hair floating about her head in the low gravity and highlighted red by the overhead illumination. Folding her arms in a gesture of deliberate contempt, she faced the others of her restive pack.
“Who else thinks I’m not fit to lead the Steel Wolves today?” Her use of the contraction cracked challenge like a glove across the face.
Eyes asmolder with sullen anger, the half dozen officers, Bloodnamed MechWarriors all, turned away. Star Captain Kimiko Fetladral finally reached repose on the mat covering the decking of the prefab pressure structure. Her own Nakjama laser pistol landed beyond the tips of her lifeless, outstretched fingers with a soft thud. Ignoring her late challenger, Anastasia sat down, picked up her bowl of soup, raised its pressure-valve to her full lips.
It froze just shy of them. Her blue eyes looked across the covered bowl into the almost white-blue eyes of Ian Murchison. Although as a mere tech he would not normally be suffered to sup with warriors, the grizzled Northwinder was Anastasia Kerensky’s personal medic, as he had been when he was her bondsman. She still insisted on keeping him with her most times.
“What?” she demanded. “You told me to exert myself less.”
Murchison frowned. It was not usually a prudent thing for a member of a lesser caste to disapprove of a warrior’s actions, much less one who also happened to command more than a Galaxy of Clan warriors. But Murchison had never been prudent: though he had started out not just as a Spheroid but as a lifelong civilian as well—contract medico on Balfour-Douglas Petrochemicals Offshore Drilling Station #47 off Northwind’s Oilfields Coast, captured along with it in a covert action led by Anastasia herself—he had the balls of a Wolf MechWarrior, and not just one of these Steel Wolf posers, either. Which was why he still had his life, his status as adoptee into Clan Wolf, and, yes, his balls.
For her part, keeping him around seemed an uncharacteristically sentimental gesture for the Wolf Bitch. It was no such thing. He was a skilled medic—and the only living soul in the Steel Wolves she trusted to tend her when she was weakened or incapacitated. Which seemed to be happening a lot lately.
“I won’t counsel you to be more prudent,” he husked in his gravelly voice. “I’m too old to waste the breath. But I will remind you that bullet wounds—not to even mention lasers—are a bit harder to recover from than knife cuts.”
He had even less use for the Clan prejudice against contractions than Anastasia: he had not asked to become a Wolf. Neither had he demurred when Anastasia cut his final bond cord and conferred Clan status upon him. Not that he had much choice—and brave or not he was not a total fool.
Not a fool of any stripe or species. Which was also why Anastasia kept him alive, and at her side.
Slowly the others righted their chairs and sat back down. Hot gazes began to drift back toward her. She paid them no attention, though she was fully aware of each angry glare.
They were nothing new. Ever since the initial setback on Northwind, she had faced challenges from subordinates. Even once the holdouts from the days when Kal Radick, whom she had challenged and killed in unaugmented combat, led the Steel Wolves had been weeded out, through combat or by failed challenges of their own, plenty had stepped forward to try to wrest command from her.
And now, in the wake of the disastrous invasion of sacred Terra, which ended in defeat and disgrace after Anastasia’s physical incapacitation—itself in large part a result of her incomplete recovery from having her belly laid open in a knife duel with the last of the Kal Radick bitter-enders, Star Colonel Marks—the challenges came almost weekly. Even if they all had the same depressingly predictable outcome: the same one that Star Captain Kimiko Fetladral’s had produced.
Because right over the restive Steel Wolves’ heads hung the rich pleasure planet of La Blon, so ingenuous in its happy hedonism that it believed the horrors of war would never touch it. Indeed they had not, for centuries; even the Word of Blake Jihadists had spared it. Literally beneath the renegades’ feet, on the planet-facing far side of the tidelocked satellite that the locals called Ivanov but which its secret inhabitants named Wolf Moon, lay the prosperous city of Overlook Point, with a big automated spaceport five hundred kilometers away. All were ripe and ready as staked lambs.
Yet Anastasia forbade her raiders to pluck those prizes. She understood too well, as her unruly subordinates would have had they the brains to be fit to command, that to take any of those morsels would bring the final retribution of The Republic of the Sphere slamming down like a rogue planet upon their heads.
The Republic was decadent; the Steel Wolves’ defeat upon Terra had been a narrow thing. Yet The Republic was huge and The Republic was mighty, mightier than Anastasia herself had given it credit for being. And it was angry now. She and her Steel Wolves were outlaws, hated by trillions. The next time Republican forces caught up with them would be the last.
Anastasia could hardly have cared less about the Steel Wolves save as means to her own ambitions—which were only banked, far from extinguished. As far as she was concerned, her followers were sheer ersatz, Spheroids themselves, for all they aped Clan ways. But she was not quite ready to yield her own personal adventure, life, to her nemesis: plucky, platinum-haired Tara Campbell, the “pretty little Countess” as Anastasia called her, whom, over the course of their many meetings on the field of war, the Wolf Bitch had grown secretly to like almost as much as she hated.
Her personal communicator buzzed for attention. She flipped it open and held it to her
ear. It was one of her electronic intelligence officers in the central pressure-dome, monitoring communications between La Blon and the lively space traffic, both intrasystem and a surprising profusion of interstellar visitors. La Blon was no backwater like Northwind, and even the vanishment of the HPG net had scarcely scratched its trade. Which perversely made it a better place to hide: it was easy for Steel Wolf craft to blend in with all the rest.
Her medico watched with keen eyes as she listened. The others’ attention was more furtive but no less intent.
She snapped her communicator shut and snorted a laugh. “A trader in from Steiner space has caused a sensation with some surprising news,” she announced to the room as a whole, although she was looking at Murchison.
The other Wolves stopped talking and eating and turned to look at her. Although they knew their leader had passed herself off as a Spheroid on more than one occasion—some quite recent—none of them suspected she would bore them with trivia. Which, to them all, mere gossip about Spheroid doings was by definition.
“It seems that there’s a fleet crossing the Lyran Commonwealth,” the commander said. “A war fleet. Out of the Jade Falcon Occupation Zone.”
If the room had been silent a moment before, now it became a vacuum. The warriors stared at their alpha bitch as if trying to draw the rest from her with the suction of their eyes.
“It seems the turd-birds gave an ultimatum to the Archon herself—they have balls if not brains, I give them that. They blithely violate Steiner space, and they demand the Squareheads do not interfere with them, upon pain of war.”
“Crossing Steiner space?” demanded the recently elevated Star Colonel Aretha Vickers. Her voice was crumpled like wastepaper, relic of a forearm blow to the throat during her sibko days. She had disdained surgical correction. “To do what?”
