by Victor Milán
It seemed to have dissolved into a pool of burning blood.
In his command post in a reinforced concrete building somewhere in the middle of Ceres Metals’ Fab 17 on the equatorial continent of Warsaw, on the world Kimball II, Star Colonel Noritomo Helmer flinched as a barrage of long-range missiles crunched in among his positions, even though the impacts fell half a klick away at the least.
He was losing it, he knew. To respond that way to mere artillery bombardment, and a distant one at that. The only reason he was not fighting hourly Trials of Position was that none of his subordinates wanted to take over in the face of the Cluster’s current situation.
Powless could do that to a warrior.
Snow began to fall again. It looked as if it would continue for a time, whitewashing earlier falls begrimed by industrial effluvia—where it hadn’t gone to muck from the boots and blood of men and women destroying each other without mercy. Not just with ’Mechs and artillery and tanks and hovercraft, nor even rifles and grenades. But also with bayonets and rifle butts, knives and tools and lengths of metal bar stock; boots, fists, teeth. The still air tasted of petroleum and was stale with death.
He turned away from the doorway and ducked into the red-lit depths of the command center.
It was not that he lacked the tools of his warrior’s trade, exactly, although his Phoenix Hawk IIC BattleMech had been rendered inoperable two days ago by Gauss-rifle hits from M1 Marksman tanks. It could probably be repaired—if they ever got out of the city-sized factory. But they lacked the appropriate parts.
A man with a sense of irony might have appreciated the poignancy of being caught in the middle of an immense complex devoted entirely to producing parts for engines of war, and being unable to repair one’s own machines for lack of the proper replacements. Star Colonel Noritomo Helmer was not such a man.
What he did appreciate was that he had made a crucial mistake.
There were two habitable worlds in the Kimball system, Kimball II and Kimball IV. Kimball IV was a miserable world, dry, with an unbreathable atmosphere, on which domed colonies were maintained purely to work the hugely productive mines, especially extracting bauxite. It had barely any population to speak of, not a soul more than was necessary to work the mines and keep those who worked the mines supplied with necessities. Kimball II was a glittering prize: a hot, wet, lush world, fabulously rich, with abundant agriculture, mining and heavy industry, and a population just over two and a half billion.
The problem with Kimball II was that it was a rich world with lots of heavy industry and a population of just over two and a half billion.
He should have gone for Kimball IV. It would have been an easy conquest and given him a shot at controlling traffic to and from Kimball II with his DropShips and fighters. At the very least, he would have had what his mission called for: a solid foothold in another Republican system. The Kimball II militia, geared toward defending its home world, would surely not have been able to dislodge him once he got good and dug in.
But it wasn’t the nature of Turkina’s brood to take an easy prize and then dig in. And Helmer was dazzled by the glitter of one of The Republic’s richest worlds.
The blame was not all his: when Khan Jana Pryde insisted on including Kimball among the desant’s objectives, she surely never had the miserable rock Kimball IV in mind.
The Star Colonel had decided to grab Kimball II’s biggest prize first: Ceres Metals’ colossal Fab 17. From here, certainly, he could compel the surrender of the rest of the world.
Except he had lost a third of his warriors and machines simply gouging out a foothold in the complex. And although Warsaw continent lay remote from population centers, the Kimballites had rapidly reinforced their forces at the Fab in the face of stiff opposition by his aerospace fighters. Who suffered losses in their turn.
Now he was stuck in a grinding fight. And not just any battle, but a battle of attrition, worst nightmare of any Clan commander. It was a battle that for all the might of his machines and prowess of his warriors he could not win—because no matter how many the Kimballites lost, they had made it abundantly clear that they were willing to lose more. As many as it took to eradicate the hated invaders.
He had options. He still had White Fist, the DropShip that had brought him to this cursed place. Indeed, it occupied almost the geometric center of his perimeter, like a gas giant ringed by moons—and like a giant planet seemed inexorably to be sucking his lines closer to it with each day that passed. He could have ordered his Cluster aboard and blasted away.
But that was not the Jade Falcon way. As he understood it, anyway.
He might, likewise, have followed his commander’s lead: sent White Fist aloft to rain destruction upon the people of Kimball II, burn their cities until they broke. But, although he worshipped the White Virgin as blindly as all the other Gyrfalcons, he lacked the heart. Indiscriminate slaughter of noncombatants also was not the Clan way.
Besides, while he was not a particularly reflective man, a truth had nonetheless stamped itself upon his brain: if he outraged the populace sufficiently, the sheer mass of their two and a half billion could simply swamp his puny handful of warriors, ’Mechs, and Elementals as if they’d been dropped in the planet’s abundant oceans.
He was not, needless to say, going to make the rendezvous at Skye.
A warrior rushed in the door of the Tactical Operations Center. “Sir,” she gasped, “we just had a runner from the Third Trinary. They are under heavy assault from the south. Enemies have infiltrated behind them through the sewers and cut their land lines, and are taking them under fire from the rear!” The Kimballites had power-jamming stations working from within the factory itself, making radio communications unreliable at best.
As she spoke, he heard a rise in the thump and crackle of distant battle. He stepped to the mouth of the bunker to see the flares of energy weapons underlighting the clouds, blue and green and scarlet.
The snow came down heavily now. A fat flake landed on his open left eyeball, stinging with cold until he blinked it away.
At least, he thought with grim satisfaction, I did my duty and sent off my JumpShip to inform my Galaxy Commander that we cannot join her for the invasion of Skye.
Even though it means we’re trapped in this Founder-forsaken system.
Heaven’s Gate
Ryde
7 August 3134
Anastasia Kerensky looked sharply out the window of the planetary police headquarters. “Is that Falcon still moving?” she demanded, staring narrow-eyed at a body hanging from one of the ornate cast-iron lampposts in the park outside. “It’s hard to tell in the dark.”
By the glow of the several surviving lights it was possible to tell that the trees were just budding out and the ground beneath was trodden bare. The mesh fence topped with razor-tape coils that had enclosed the makeshift holding pen for hostages, which the park had become under the military government Malvina Hazen had left behind, had been mostly trampled down.
Ian Murchison peered out the window. His expression was pinched, although whether with disapproval or something else Anastasia was hard-pressed to tell. Disapproval’s a part of it, certainly, she decided.
“I believe another citizen just shot at the body,” he said. “Or possibly struck it with a thrown brick. I can’t see whether there’s anyone close enough.”
“Do you object to the way I dealt with the Falcon garrison?” she asked, taking a bite from a local fruit, making a face at its sourness, and then taking another. “Or the way I allowed local justice to take its course with the survivors?”
“Mob action is never pretty.”
She shrugged. “I thought this particular mob action had its own esthetic. I found rolling Star Captain Simon in razor wire a particularly imaginative touch.”
Her personal medico grimaced.
“Ah, well. Each to his own tastes.” She cocked a brow at him. “Although I hardly think you’d have sympathy to waste on the Falcons, given what
they did to this world.”
“I must confess I scarcely know how to feel about all this,” Murchison said. “That’s hardly a new sensation for me, as you no doubt know.”
She shrugged and daintily spat the pit of the fruit she had just consumed into a metal wastebasket, where it rang.
“I am disappointed we missed Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen,” she said. “I’m looking forward to making her acquaintance. But at least we know where she’s headed.”
She smiled, well, wolfishly. “And I have to admit it was damned thoughtful of the idiot subordinate she sent haring off to Kimball to provide us with a perfectly serviceable Merchant-class JumpShip. That by itself guarantees this little venture will prove a profitable one for the Steel Wolves.”
“It’s not what you came for.”
She looked at him through the gloom of the office. A fluorescent light winked on and off overhead like a tic in an eyelid. “No,” she said quietly, “it’s not. What I want is blood.”
PART THREE
Yarak
“n. Falconry. The eagerness of birds of prey to hunt.”
—New Avalon Institute of Science Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, Edition CCCV, New Avalon, Federated Suns, 3032
28
Zenith Jump Point
Skye
10 August 3134
The Falcon fleet assembled: from Glengarry came Beckett Malthus in his Nightlord, from Summer came Aleksandr Hazen. His sibkin Malvina had been the first into Skye system from Zebebelgenubi. Her order had destroyed the unarmed Skye station.
She was viciously angry. She had lingered at the Zebebelgenubi jump point, waiting for Star Colonel Noritomo Helmer, due back sans a garrison left on conquered Kimball II. When the time came—and he did not—she had been compelled to jump to Skye. She would not miss the grand adventure, the culmination of their mighty and desperate enterprise.
The reassembled fleet waited another day at Skye’s zenith point for Helmer’s JumpShip. They had no element of surprise; Skye’s defenders had known they were coming for weeks at least. A day could make small difference to the outcome, so Bec Malthus reasoned—although Aleks Hazen argued for immediate departure in-system.
Malthus took advantage of the twenty-four hour delay to convene a kurultai of all commanders and Bloodnamed warriors among the expeditionary force. At stake lay the final fate of Skye: how was the prize to be taken?
Although by the Founder’s plan, literacy was universal among the Clans, they by the same design maintained an oral tradition as strong as any preliterate people’s. Eloquence was esteemed, as much a part of taking and holding high place as prowess in battle—although there were no Trials employing it, if you left aside Bec Malthus. Whose preeminent gift was not exactly rhetoric.
The Hazen ristars had excelled in public speaking, as they did in all things. An epic contest was eagerly expected, even by Turkina Keshik warriors who under normal circumstances scarcely deigned to notice the doings of the lesser formations, the Delta and Zeta Galaxies.
Those expectations were not disappointed.
They stood upon the stage of the thronged and darkened auditorium inboard Malthus’ battleship Emerald Talon. Bec Malthus stood upstage and at the center behind a podium. At his back rose a hologram of the Jade Falcon emblem, rippling slowly like a ten-meter-high flag in an imperceptible breeze. Beneath it hung the banners of Turkina Keshik, the Gyrfalcon Galaxy and Turkina’s Beak. Flanking them were the flags of the worlds conquered by the expeditionary force: Chaffee, Alkaid, Glengarry, Ryde, Summer, Zebebelgenubi, even Porrima, and with them battle-stained regimental honors of units the Falcons had beaten down in having their way with their worlds. A gap showed where the Kimball II flag was meant to be displayed; with characteristic defiance, Malvina chose to flaunt even her failures—and whatever the cause, the failure of Noritomo Helmer to turn up on schedule with appropriate evidences of victory was Malvina’s own failure, in her own mind no less than others’.
She stood downstage upon Malthus’ left, clad in her mostly black dress uniform with its black cape about her shoulders. Her white-blonde hair fell like an avalanche down the back of her cape. On Malthus’ right stood Aleks Hazen, imposing as a statue in his regulation green-and-midnight dress uniform. None wore a helmet.
“We have completed an epic journey,” Malvina declared, when a spotlight stabbed down white to grant her turn to speak, “and accomplished epic ends. We have carried the glory of Jade Falcon and the Clans almost to the heart of the Inner Sphere. And we have paid an epic price in blood.”
The assembled warriors sat in silence as absolute as that outside the JumpShip’s pressure hull. It was common knowledge that, including the absent 305th Assault Cluster, Malvina’s Gyrfalcons had lost almost fifty percent of their fighting effectives to death or injury. She had taken a rich booty of isorla, especially in the form of Joint Equipment Systems tactical and strategic missile-launch vehicles. But it was warriors who were always the desant’s rarest and most precious asset, and those she had spent like water.
“History will sing that the cost was worth it, for Turkina’s glory and our own. Yet we must assure ourselves of victory, and more: on terms that do not leave us too spent to hold our gains until, as they someday must, the Jade Falcon Touman joins us to carry the banners of Crusade to the holy soil of Terra itself.
“In little more than one hundred hours, Falcons, Turkina will spread Her wings above our last objective. Skye will lie at the mercy of our beak and talons, helpless to do more than await our pleasure as to when and where we strike. And how.
“We carry with us the fires to burn their cities from orbit. I say, let New Glasgow burn!”
The audience reacted with a gasp. All knew that Malvina had made free use of terror in her conquests of Ryde and Zebebelgenubi. Yet what she was proposing struck at the root of centuries of taboo—and at the very heart of what it meant to be Clan. Only Aleks, it seemed, was unmoved—and no one in that bowl of darkness doubted that seeming was a lie.
“That we shall win decisive victory over Skye’s defenders cannot be doubted,” Malvina said. “Yet the planet’s population exceeds three billion. We can afford no repetition of Chaffee on such a scale: we must assure that when they surrender, they submit, fully and forever, with no thought of further resistance. The way to ensure that is to let them taste in advance what defiance will bring.”
The spotlight on her dimmed. No one applauded. Another spot pinned Aleks.
“I will not speak of Clan traditions,” Aleks said in his rich, rolling baritone, only slightly strained. “You all are imbued with them in your genes, even as am I. I speak of results. On Alkaid and Summer I promised the populace in advance that I would honor the Laws of War. I employed the minimum force required to defeat defending forces on the ground, and afterwards kept my promise. By decent treatment of noncombatants and defeated foes alike I secured the willing cooperation of the planets’ people. As a result Alkaid and Summer are fully secure with minimal garrisoning, already capable of resupplying us. All for minor loss to ourselves.”
“When was it ever the Jade Falcon way to boast of avoiding casualties?” Malvina flared from the neardarkness. Passion made her break protocol.
“I speak of scant resources,” he said, “of our own small desant amidst a vast ocean of Inner Sphere humanity.”
“All the more reason to leverage such force as we can bring to bear,” Malvina said with a shake of her head, “especially when it comes to securing the cooperation of those whom we subjugate.”
Aleks’ cheek twitched at her use of the word subjugate. “Does no one remember Turtle Bay?” he asked. Despite the ferro-fibrous strength of his will, his voice rose.
“Perhaps we remember it too well,” his sibkin said, her own voice dangerously low, “for the wrong reasons.”
“Clan Smoke Jaguar brought disgrace upon themselves and all the Clans by destroying the city of Turtle Bay from orbit,” Aleks said. “All Clans denounced the
act. And subsequently when the forces of the Inner Sphere—under their cynical and fraudulent evocation of the blessed name of the Star League—counterattacked, it was the Smoke Jaguars whom they chose to hunt down and subject to a Trial of Annihilation, destroying them utterly.”
“The craven Wolves led the cry to turn away from the Smoke Jaguars and renounce the use of naval vessels. It was merely one in an unbroken chain of their betrayals of the Clan Way,” Malvina replied.
“If we massacre civilians upon Skye,” he said, turning from her, “we will not simply dishonor Clan Jade Falcon. We will also rouse, not just Skye, but the whole population of The Republic, if not all the Inner Sphere, against us.”
“Give the barbarians a taste of the fate that awaits those whose who resist the Falcon’s flight and they will collapse,” she said.
Then she laughed, and her laugh was malice, glass and silver. “And what does it matter, anyway? They are barbarians. We held out the liberating hand of truth and rationality to them almost a century ago, and they spurned us. Even after decades of what they term peaceful coexistence, in which they have had ample time to apprehend our system’s unquestionable superiority, still they refuse to accept it. I say, enough of coddling the weak, the inferior! If the masses of old humanity will not accept the future, let them make way for the New Humans: we, the Clans.”
Her sibkin had turned to stare at her. “The Founder was explicit, that it was our duty to protect the weak, the lesser, to uplift them, protect them—”
“And if that be so, I say: the Founder was wrong.”
Her brother’s cheeks went pale. Unnoticed in the dark at the rear of the stage, Beckett Malthus’ bearded jaw gaped open. Here was his foremost string upon her, the deep secret that he alone had discerned, which if revealed would mean her certain death. Her unspeakable heresy—which she had just blurted out before every subcommander in the desant’s ground forces.
