This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
BLOOD OF THE ISLE
A ROC Book / published by arrangement with the author
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2004 by WizKids, LLC.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.
For information address:
The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is
http://www.penguinputnam.com
ISBN: 0-7865-5127-5
A ROC BOOK®
ROC Books first published by The ROC Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ROC and the “ROC” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.
Electronic edition: September, 2004
For Russell and Roberta Loveday,
who never moved so far away
that the Internet could not reach them.
We’ve missed you.
Acknowledgments
One year I am helping to create The Republic, through articles and character bios for INN, and consulting on back history. The next, I’m doing my damnedest to tear it apart. Sometimes it feels like one of those old military make-work projects. Dig a hole; then fill it back in. Except that not all of the dirt ever makes it back into the hole. It gets scattered around, lost in the grass and clumped into the treads of work boots.
And that’s where all of our stories come from—when the pieces do not fit back together quite so nicely as when we took them apart.
I would like to thank everyone at WizKids for their tireless support in this process: Jordan and Dawne Weisman, Maya Smith, and Mike and Sharon Mulvihill, among so many others. Also the wonderful people I have been privileged enough to work with at Roc—Laura Anne Gillman, who will be missed, and Jennifer Heddle, with whom I always look forward to working—and Vic Milán, who wrote one hell of a book and ended up being a hard act to follow.
Best wishes to my agent, Don Maass, and to his office staff for their hard work on my behalf. A hearty thanks to Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch for their continued support, mentoring, and friendship.
Speaking of friends . . . thanks again go to Allen and Amy Mattila, Randall and Tara Bills, Phil DeLuca, Kelle Vozka, and Peter and Cathy Orullian, all of whom help keep me relatively sane by dragging me away from my computer from time to time. And then there are Oystein Tvedten, Herb Beas, Chris Hartford, Chris Trossen, Pete Smith, Chas Borner, and Warner Doles, who always seem ready to drag me back. Special acknowledgments go out to Dave Stansel for his recent efforts, and Mike Stackpole, who continues to keep in touch with everything.
My heartfelt appreciation also goes out to my wife, Heather Joy, who continues to indulge my selfish need to lock myself away for days and weeks. And to my children, Talon, Conner, and Alexia, who pick that lock all too regularly or not often enough—I can’t decide.
And because I would find hair balls on my pillow if I didn’t: thanks to Chaos, Rumor, and Ranger, our Siamese cats, for keeping our house in strict order. (And Loki, our dog, for his frequent infusions of happy chaos.)
For he owned and displayed such remarkable ability that even as a private person it was spoken of him that he lacked nothing but the kingdom to be a king.
The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli
1
Cheops
Seventh District, Nusakan
Prefecture IX, Republic of the Sphere
8 September 3134
Thick, viscous fog shrouded the Willamette Valley, creating the worst whiteout conditions Jasek Kelswa-Steiner had ever seen. It stretched the battlefield into a canvas of thin shadows and brief, pale flashes of fire and lightning. Lasers strobed in snatches of emerald green and angry red. Cerulean beams from particle projector cannon arced back and forth. Occasionally, a bolt of the man-made lightning of the PPC slashed into the shadows, grabbing one in a spectral aura like Saint Elmo’s fire, drawing a brief, cold outline around an armored vehicle or a BattleMech.
Jasek could only guess if it had been the enemy, or one of his own.
Violent eruptions of fire slashed a path through the knee-high sward of tall grasses and Scotch broom as a flight of missiles hammered down from the closed heavens. He ducked reflexively, as if he could drag the Griffin back by force of will.
Blackened earth pattered against the screen.
Smoke mixed into the fog, tainting the frosted blanket with a gray, dishwater color.
Appearing at nearly point-blank range, two shadows raced forward. Jasek knew they were enemy tanks even before the vehicles opened fire. They probed through the thinning curtain, relying on instruments or instinct. Light autocannon fire spanged off the BattleMech’s arms. The dark forms solidified in an instant, showing themselves as Skanda light tanks. Angular lines and their dropped nose marked them certainly as belonging to Clan Jade Falcon.
Bullet-shaped treads chewed up the sward like hungry mouths. They raced to either side of the camera, trading out autocannon for medium lasers and laying in a blistering cross fire. The camera view hitched and swung around, following the left-side Skanda. Return fire came late, scarlet-tinged lasers splashing armor from the tank’s rear quarter.
At nearly 120 kilometers per hour the tanks raced off into the fog, disappearing quickly. The scene slowed, catching the Skandas as thin shadows once more, and froze just before they disappeared.
“There!” Jasek threw the remote to his best friend and aide-de-camp, Niccolò GioAvanti. Jasek came out of his chair and prowled a tight box around a kidney-shaped desk. Lean and muscular, the thirty-one-year-old leader had the powerful grace of a stalking cat. “Look at that.”
He gestured to the Tri-Vid viewer inset into one of the office’s dark, walnut-paneled walls. This compilation of gun-cam footage had been specially edited to give him an overview of an intelligence-gathering raid against the world of Ryde, where one of his Stormhammer units had run into intolerable weather conditions and stiff Jade Falcon resistance. It was showing him a lot more.
“Hauptmann Falhearst’s Griffin has a Cyclops XII extended-range laser mounted on its right arm. What the hell is he doing, not using it?”
Niccolò GioAvanti rose from his own chair and set the slender remote on the edge of Jasek’s desk. His mouse brown hair was cut short and straight across the back and sides except for a family braid twisting down over his left temple. His eyes were an unsettling pale blue and never seemed to blink enough. Wearing dark slacks and a flowing white shirt under a dark vest, he created a stark contrast to Jasek’s dusky features and crisp dress-gray uniform. Which was likely the reason he dressed that way.
Jasek watched as his friend squared the remote against a glass-topped holopic base that projected a clenched gauntlet into the air over his desk. Niccolò was obviously stalling, giving Jasek a moment in which to regain his composure. Thankfully, Jasek’s noble birth and inherited title did not stand between the two men. Niccolò himself came from a fairly influential merchant family, and twenty-two years of friendship had eroded any formality due a Landgrave and a ducal heir.
“Perhaps if we issued Tri-Vid remotes to our pilots,” Niccolò finally offered, “letting them slow the action an
d review it a time or two before making their decisions.”
Jasek glowered. Eighteen months on the world of Nusakan, sitting out a self-imposed exile, had not improved his mood. “Don’t twit me over being stuck here, Nicco.”
His friend raised an eyebrow. “Who thought Nusakan would be the perfect base of operations?”
“I did. And it was. Is!” He laughed dryly as his tongue tripped him up. “I just thought the key word would be operations, not base.”
Still, the barb stuck. Jasek snagged his desk chair and dropped back into it, testing the springs, which creaked several loud protests. The warm smell of rich leather wrapped around him as he rocked back for a moment, studying the ceiling. The scent reminded him of his father’s office, and that memory unlocked the door to so many more.
Skye will never need your kind of leadership.
Shock. And a warm thrill of anger.
We’ll see what Skye needs, Father. If you think The Republic will stand on its own merits, you’re going to be greatly disappointed.
Obviously not for the first time.
That last conversation with Duke Gregory Kelswa-Steiner, his father and Lord Governor of Prefecture IX, continued to echo through his thoughts. It had angered Jasek in the DropShip, lifting off from Skye. Chased him all the way to Nusakan, where Niccolò offered him offices and support out of the GioAvanti mercantile assets in Cheops. Drawing like-minded warriors to his standard, the Stormhammers, Jasek had stripped Prefecture IX of what little defense it mustered. Then he waited for his father to call him home. To admit to being wrong.
Duke Gregory did neither.
And Skye very nearly fell.
Jasek scrubbed one hand over his face. Opening his eyes, he found himself staring at the clenched-gauntlet hologram projected over its glass-eyed emitter—the symbol of House Steiner and the Lyran Commonwealth. The mailed fist was burnished copper with silver chasing. The background was dark blue, nearly indigo, the same color as his eyes.
A promise, she’d said, giving it to him. He very nearly smiled. A token of our shared resolve.
Which, as it turned out, was not all they had shared.
But he couldn’t live inside memories, even pleasant ones, for long. Niccolò waited patiently, right elbow braced on the back of his other fist, right hand tapping a knuckle against his chin. Jasek knew his friend would wait as long as it took; he had never outlasted Nicco in any game of patience.
“All right,” he finally admitted. “So it’s not fair to expect perfection out of the Stormhammers.”
He had splashed two fingers of dark whiskey into a tumbler earlier. It sat on his desk, untouched and unwanted. Leaning forward, he reached past the glass and stabbed at the remote, continuing the gun-cam footage. He left the slender wand slightly canted toward the edge of the desk, knowing it would annoy his friend.
On the Tri-Vid, the scene cut to another camera. This one, according to the information tag scrolling along the bottom of the screen, was mounted on a Hasek mechanized combat vehicle. More fog. A shadow grew and coalesced into the Griffin that had been under fire only a few seconds before. The fifty-five-ton war avatar showed laser scoring along its left leg and right flank, and jagged armor where its left-shoulder plating had been ripped apart in an earlier engagement. A long-range-missile system sat on its right shoulder. Its lasers appeared intact, stubbing out of the centerline and mounted on the outside of its right arm. The BattleMech’s “head” had one of the best range-of-views of any design, Jasek knew, with more than eight square meters of ferroglass curving around the cockpit.
Standing nearly nine meters tall under most circumstances, the BattleMech crouched, twisting from side to side as if expecting another attack at any moment. Jasek tried to imagine what Falhearst’s HUD had to look like—a tangle of icons and data tags. What had the Mech Warrior been thinking, trying to regroup in the face of a determined assault, cut off from the Stormhammers’ DropShip?
Jasek watched as the Hasek disgorged two squads of Purifier infantry. The battle armor troops fanned out in front of the Griffin, mimetic armor blending them into the sward with perfect camouflage. Only the bending grasses and scrub brush betrayed their passage as they moved forward to act as an early-warning picket. Slowly, too slowly, the combined-arms lance advanced. He said so aloud.
“This isn’t five and six,” Niccolò reminded Jasek, referring to The Republic’s prefectures that bordered against the Capellan Confederation. “We haven’t seen real combat in more than forty years. That much, at least, Devlin Stone did accomplish.”
“Yeah, well, where’s Stone now?” Jasek asked, not expecting an answer. Niccolò did not volunteer one.
Of course, both men had been raised on Devlin Stone’s “accomplishments.” His status, perhaps deservedly, as the war hero who saved the Inner Sphere from Word of Blake’s Jihad. The campaign to form a new Republic and promote peace through a policy of economically enforced disarmament and the intermingling of cultures.
Jasek had endured such lessons from his father as well as in his formal schooling. Duke Gregory was a true believer, one of Stone’s early supporters when the bulk of Prefecture IX had been known as the Isle of Skye. For generations, Skye had sought independent rule from House Steiner’s Lyran Commonwealth. Then Devlin Stone dangled the carrot of The Republic in front of them, and Duke Gregory helped lead Skye into Stone’s camp. Soon The Republic of the Sphere had gobbled up nearly all worlds within 120 light-years of Terra, humanity’s birthplace.
But to Jasek’s way of thinking they had merely traded one lord for another, and the grandeur of House Steiner for an upstart with dreams of utopia.
His friend agreed. “For all his speeches of forging a new path,” Niccolò had said, “there are still two types of government: republics and principalities. We may style ourselves The Republic of the Sphere, but we are still Stone’s hereditary fiefdom. And without him, we founder.”
Jasek clenched his jaw as the Griffin struggled forward through the fog, sniped at by Jade Falcon tormentors who materialized as half-visible ghosts or simply guessed well based on the Clans’ superior instrumentation. A stream of energy from a PPC blasted through the thick curtain and sloughed away a ton of armor in a wide swath across the ’Mech’s chest. A Stormhammer Panther made brief contact, the smaller ’Mech leading a pair of Scimitar hover tanks and a long line of Cavalier battle armor infantry. For a moment, it looked as if the full unit might reconstitute itself and make a stand.
Then the Jade Falcons hammered into their flank.
A Gyrfalcon led, arms thrust forward, alternating between large lasers and medium-weight autocannon. Two Skandas—maybe the same two from before—charged in at its side, challenging the Hasek MCV, with a Kite recon vehicle trailing and adding its SRMs to the hard-hitting assault.
The Cavalier infantry managed to swarm one Skanda, jumping onto its top and ripping away large chunks of armor. They thrust arm-mounted lasers into the crew space and filled the cabin with lethal energy. The Purifiers, by design or just bad luck, ended up in the path of the Kite. Like a lawn mower, the hovercraft slammed through their formation, its nose crumpling. Bodies flew to either side, broken and lost.
The Stormhammers shattered.
Rather than stand their ground, pitting two ’Mechs against the one Gyrfalcon, the Panther broke left with its Scimitar support and the Griffin right. The fog claimed both, separating them as the Falcon MechWarrior hammered the Hasek’s nose into unrecognizable scrap. The Griffin sliced its lasers at the other fifty-five-tonner, but it lit off jump jets and rocketed up, out of sight, before suffering much damage.
Jasek stood, scooping up his drink and carrying it with him as he walked a slow perimeter around the outer wall of his office.
“I’m tired of waiting, Nicco. I’m done watching. I’ve sat by while the Jade Falcons tear up our worlds these last two months, and I’m telling you that it’s killing me. Skye very nearly fell! I feel like I’m the one lost in that damnable fog, and I don�
��t know where the next blow is coming from.”
Niccolò leaned against the side of Jasek’s desk. “But look at how much more we know compared to twelve months ago. Even twelve weeks ago.”
Jasek shrugged, looked down into his drink. Amber liquid sloshed back and forth. “We know nothing. We suspect. We suspect that other prefectures are having just as much trouble with the loss of the HPG network, and we suspect that the Falcon incursion is more than they claim—this ‘hunting expedition’ to destroy the Steel Wolves.”
Folding his arms over his chest, Niccolò disagreed. “We know what worlds the Falcons hold, where they are strongest and weakest. We also know that your father has accepted that Skye cannot stand on its own.”
“Granted,” Jasek said. A tight smile cracked his stern expression. “At least there is that.”
When the Jade Falcon force hit Skye itself, the only reasons the world did not fall were the presence of Tara Campbell’s Highlanders and the intervention of Anastasia Kerensky’s Steel Wolves. Three rival factions coming together in the face of a common threat: how his father have hated that. Would he have rather had his son, and the Stormhammers, by him then?
Or was he just that stubborn, to look the other way even in the face of overwhelming odds?
Was it time to find out?
On the Tri-Vid, the scene cut back once again to the Griffin’s own gun-cam footage. The fog thinned as the BattleMech slogged its way up a gentle slope, rising above the disturbance. A final, upward jog of broken stone lifted it over a thick blanket of cotton, the camera swinging back and forth with the Griffin’s even gait.
The Hasek was lost back in the gloom. Only a limping trio of Purifier infantry remained, scurrying around the Griffin’s feet like feeder fish sticking with their shark.
But this shark was wounded, and hunted by predators stronger than itself. Jasek raised the tumbler to his lips, inhaling the whiskey’s strong scent, then set the glass back on his desk when he saw the first Jade Falcon ’Mech lift itself from the fog bank, rising up on the same open ridge. A bird-legged Vulture, with Elemental infantry scurrying about its feet.
Blood of the Isle Page 1
