And a gold triangle. The identification tag read AS7- K2(TC). Tara Campbell.
“I might . . .” Tamara’s voice wandered. She sounded weak, possibly wounded. Her beloved Eisenfaust took numbing hits from the Shrike. One stream cut from shoulder to shoulder, across the face of the Wolfhound. “Parkins . . . need . . .”
Jasek throttled forward, slammed himself up against the Gyrfalcon with cannon stripping away armor and myomer flesh. It staggered Helmer, forcing him to step back. The Kelswa assault tank drove forward at his side and shoved aside a smaller Condor, then turned away from Tamara Duke to punch a Gauss slug into the Gyrfalcon’s side. More particle cannon fire splashed out to strip away myomer and cut at supports. The Gyrfalcon’s left chest sagged. Its left arm fell straight and hung down limply at its side.
“Jasek?” Tamara’s voice was soft. Lost.
“No!” Tara’s shout was right there, behind it. “Not her . . . me!”
The comms chatter pulled Jasek around, away from Helmer. He saw Tara’s Atlas rising, levering itself up on one arm. He saw Tamara Duke in between them, alone, holding position in her Wolfhound.
Not budging an inch as the ninety-five-ton Shrike limped up into her face.
Two gem-bright lasers and several hundred rounds of autocannon fire braced up the Wolfhound, ripping into its chest, its guts. Jasek waited for the Wolfhound’s head to detach and blast away. Maybe the ejection system had been damaged. Maybe Tamara never reached for the lever. Golden fire bled out of several cracks in the ’Mech’s reactor shielding. Then it burned away in a bright, angry flash of plasma as the reactor exploded and the Wolfhound disintegrated into a ball of fusion-fed flames.
The shock wave staggered the Shrike and flipped over a Condor that had skated in at Malvina’s side. It shook the ground worse than any artillery strike. Jasek held to his feet, struggling forward against the wall of flames. There was no need to search the air for an ejection rocket. It wasn’t there.
A heartbeat later, neither was the Shrike. Tara’s final Gauss slug cut into it at the back of its wounded knee, snapping the limb off with a violent twist. The assault machine toppled, and thrashed against the ground as it struggled in vain to right itself.
The Wolfhound, and Tamara Duke, were gone.
What was left of the Stormhammers and Tara Campbell’s Highlanders was in desperate straits. The Rangers appeared thunderstruck, hardly firing at all as they took in what had just happened. The Jade Falcons were rallying to Noritomo Helmer, who held a great advantage as he formed up a new offensive charge. And now Jasek’s timetable—his plan—was shot to hell. Tamara Duke was dead. No telling what was left among the Steel Wolves and Alexia’s Tharkan Strikers. It would be a long, hard fight back toward Miliano.
Or did it have to be? Jasek hadn’t planned for such a drastic and violent disruption, but he could use it. In the same way he had let Clan traditions weigh in on his side on Chaffee, he could let those traditions work for all of them now.
“Hegira,” he transmitted on an open channel. One he knew the Jade Falcons monitored. Limping his Templar into a shuffling turn, facing Noritomo Helmer and the Jade Falcon line, he cut his targeting system and dropped both arms to his side.
“Star Colonel Helmer. I formally request hegira.”
36
DropShip Himmelstor
Miliano
Skye
23 December 3134
Tara Campbell supervised the technicians racking David McKinnon’s Atlas into one of the Himmelstor’s ’Mech bay stalls. She had been able to crawl the assault ’Mech off the battlefield under its own power, and so it fell into the salvage exception granted to Jasek Kelswa-Steiner under his deal with the Jade Falcons. Tara felt good for that, at least. She still had hopes of returning the hundred-ton monster to Sire McKinnon.
Someday.
Turning from the alcove, she dodged around a lifter, its forks stacked high with a pallet of supplies, and went looking for Jasek. The bay was a hive of activity, with people rushing around in this last hour of safety. It smelled of blood and soil and nervous sweat. There was so much left to do. Equipment to store, machines to slot into the crowded bay, and people to find some corner where they could ride out what would hopefully be a short trip.
Skirting the edge of the Excalibur’s cavernous main bay, Tara wove between rows of hoverbikes and then a trio of MASH trucks. The mobile-hospital vehicles had been jammed together to form a small medical center right along the curved outer bulkhead. The wounded had been first priority with Jasek, and he had not bothered to separate out Stormhammers or Highlanders or Steel Wolves. Like the machines crowded into the DropShip, many of the wounded had fought under different crests and insignia but were treated with equal attention.
There would be time enough for sorting out the different commands later, after the evacuation. Tara approved. In fact she approved of much—most, even—of what she’d seen from the landgrave.
When she found him at the foot of the DropShip’s secondary ramp, directing the final stages of traffic as three different lines of vehicles converged and jockeyed for position to be included in the retreat, she nodded at that too. He had triaged them fairly well, bringing up military vehicles and flatbeds piled with the salvage the allied defenders had scraped up. The moving vans and the civilian pickup trucks flooding out of Miliano, carrying parts and materiel unloaded from the Avanti Assemblies plant and warehouses—these Jasek had peeled away to one side where they could be unloaded by hand. Now he simply pulled the last few up after the military line, no time left.
When he saw her, he handed the finale off to a master sergeant. One of her Highlanders, as it turned out. Jasek trotted behind a slow-moving J100 recovery vehicle and joined her at the side of the ramp. “Ten minutes,” he said, glancing at his watch.
Tara looked out into the gray afternoon drizzle. She couldn’t see the Jade Falcon line, holding several kilometers back from the cluster of DropShips. But she could sense them out there. Waiting. “You don’t think Helmer will give us a little room?”
“I wouldn’t want to risk lives on it.”
He paused as a long peal of rolling thunder smashed into the conversation—a fusion drive lighting off. From the side of the covered ramp, the two looked north to find a Union blasting off from where it straddled the highway. The next-to-last vessel. It rose slowly at first, then gained speed. In less than a minute it had lost itself among dark gray clouds.
“Actually, if it was Noritomo Helmer, maybe I would,” he finally admitted. “But I won’t gamble anything on Malvina Hazen.”
Tara nodded. “It still seems too easy. We ask to be allowed to pull back, and they just say okay. Too simple.”
“Nothing’s ever that easy, even if it seems like it to us. The Clans have centuries of effort behind their traditions. Maybe it did work against them this time. But having seen how Helmer kept his force intact in the face of such a long drive, I think they might have the right idea.”
Her agreement was grudging. “Still, they have to know we’ll ready a new line and they will have to come at us again. At Roosevelt Island or Cyclops, Incorporated.”
“Well, we have DropShips there as well,” Jasek said, obviously hedging. “Also at the Avanti Armory in New Dublin.”
The two of them followed the final cargo truck up the ramp. Even before they reached the head, the ramp began to retract.
“But why?” she asked. “They seem the best points for a rallied defense of Skye.”
“I agree. They would be.”
Tara almost began to argue, then remembered her own admission on the battlefield. “We’re running,” she whispered again. Then looked to the Stormhammers’ leader. “Jasek, where are you taking us?”
The landgrave looked out at Skye. Fondly. Sorrowfully. The main doors to this bay were beginning to fall, ready to seal it against atmosphere and vacuum. He stared out into the drizzle and the gray, at the fusion-scarred landscape the retreating DropShips were leaving behind, a
nd nodded once, decisively.
“Nusakan,” he told Tara then. “We’re relocating to Nusakan. All of us.” Too late for her to do anything.
Even if there truly had been nothing left to be done.
Standing atop Galaxy Commander Malthus’ Tribune, wary of the company he kept, Noritomo Helmer watched as the final DropShip blasted free of Skye. Fire and steam rolled out in large plumes. The white glare of the fusion drive lit the Excalibur’s underside in a harsh backsplash. The ground shook and Malthus’ mobile HQ swayed on its treads. Noritomo flexed his knees, cautious. The three senior officers waited very close to the forward edge of the crawler, almost two stories up. Beckett Malthus folded arms over a broad chest. Malvina paced along the very edge, as if daring fate to push her over.
Noritomo waited just between them. Trapped.
No one spoke as the artificial thunder continued to crash over them. They waited. A light rain pattered down around the trio, dripping off their emerald green foul-weather ponchos and beading on black, knee-high boots, splashing against wet-black steel. Everything else was drowned out by the throaty rumble of the rising Excalibur.
Jasek’s DropShip. He knew it down in his bones. The Stormhammers’ leader would be the last man away.
“You have a lot to answer for,” Malvina Hazen finally said.
Noritomo pulled himself up to strict attention. “At the commander’s disposal.”
“Aff,” she agreed. Stopping her pacing, she stood balanced on the balls of her feet, with her heels hanging out into space. “And I should have disposed of you several times over. Your list of failures grows impressive, Star Colonel Helmer.”
And yet both Malthus and Malvina Hazen had entered brief commendations into his codex for rescuing the final battle for Skye. An interesting conflict.
“I stand by my decisions,” he stated formally. He would defend them as well, if it came to that, in a Circle of Equals.
“As do I,” Beckett Malthus offered, stepping up next to the Star colonel. His impassive stare let nothing of his personal feelings show, but his words, at least, melted away a small measure of Noritomo’s concern. “Your forward thinking and your adherence to the Way of the Clans earned your reprieve last night.”
The soft-spoken man looked him directly in the eye. “I would have forbidden any punishment against you, Noritomo Helmer. You should know that I did not have to do so.”
Surprised, Noritomo looked to Malvina Hazen, who nodded with something resembling reluctant admiration. “Galaxy Commander Malthus pointed out, and I agreed, that you have done as my brother would have. You held to your personal ideals and honor, and you possibly saved the entire assault on Skye. Certainly you made it happen faster than per our original plans. For that, I am forced to admit that my brother’s ways may not have always been incorrect.”
Grudging, left-handed, but an impressive admittance by Malvina Hazen regardless. “I am honored.”
“You may be yet. We shall see.”
It felt like vindication. Though not without a small price. In the battle, Noritomo had unbent enough himself to recognize Malvina Hazen’s value to the desant and how her way of unbridled war could be properly applied at the right time. Such as his quick-and-ruthless push past Kerensky’s roadblock, subordinating his own honor to that of Beckett Malthus in order to accomplish his goal.
It was a small step to make toward a meeting of philosophies with Malvina Hazen. But a critical one.
“I am Jade Falcon,” he said.
Malvina lifted her obsidian arm, rubbed the knuckles of her artificial fist along her jaw. Coming to a decision, she nodded. “And you will remain on Skye. With me. Galaxy Commander Malthus will oversee matters on Glengarry for the time being, coordinating with our outlying holdings while we rebuild our forces here.
“Your duty, Star Colonel, will be to keep my brother’s spirit alive among our forces. You will continue to challenge me.” Her smile was thin and humorless. “Until you prove yourself wrong or I simply get tired of your incessant meddling.”
One foot in a minefield. The other on slippery ferrosteel. Noritomo could almost wish for an insignificant garrison post. But Clan warriors did not back away from a fight.
“Aff, Malvina Hazen. I understand completely.”
He gave her a short bow, then stepped forward to let the toes of his boots hang out over the crawler’s edge. Purposefully, he did not look in her direction. If she decided to shove him over, let her try it. He would respect the Chinggis Khan, but he would not be afraid of this woman.
In fact, he decided, he might accomplish a great deal should he remain alive long enough. Today, perhaps, he had pushed some of Pandora’s evils back into the box. Enough that he could once again stand proudly as a Jade Falcon warrior. It would be a struggle, keeping that lid on, but he welcomed the challenge.
He glanced back to nod his appreciation to Beckett Malthus, wanting to thank the man for his support and shore up the bridges he had made into that camp. But Malthus was gone, back down the open hatch and into the belly of his Tribune command vehicle. Noritomo had indeed been left alone with Malvina Hazen, for better or for worse.
He stood by her side, silently, watching as the Himmelstor lost itself in the clouds.
Epilogue
Cheops
Seventh District, Nusakan
5 January 3135
Leaving Niccolò next to the elevators, Landgrave Jasek Kelswa-Steiner joined Alexia Wolf and Tara Campbell. Both women were watching the Steel Wolf exodus from the comfort of the Cheops DropPort observation tower. He placed a hand on Tara’s shoulder, and the three stood together for a moment in front of the bronze-tinted windows as vehicles and ’Mechs, infantrymen and technicians, all gathered by columns and ranks on the tarmac. Steel Wolf forces straggled in from the Himmelstor as well as from three other DropShips. Some were towed behind heavy trucks. The half-gutted shells of several ruined tanks and a Mad Cat III rolled in on the flatbeds of J100 recovery vehicles. All in all, if they were returning to Seginus with half their initial strength, he’d be surprised.
“I’d hoped Anastasia would join us,” he said, staring through the tinted ferroglass. The warmth of Nusakan’s summer sun barely filtered through. “We owe her a great deal.”
Alexia had made the trip from Skye to Nusakan aboard the Steel Wolf JumpShip. “She preferred to remain in orbit.” A sly smile played on her lips. “Said that she did not want you charming her into another futile stand. At least, not until she’s had time to re-form and rest her people. She did extend an offer for you to visit Seginus, if you have any personal time to spare.” Alexia held up a hand as Jasek startled, pulling away from Tara. “I told her you would refuse. That you . . . rarely work that way.”
Tara glanced from one to the other, obviously not following the exchange, but choosing not to intrude. “Seginus will not be receiving much in the way of aid and resupply,” the countess said. Having had a few weeks in transit to acknowledge the loss of Skye, she had already begun planning a new defensive stand for Prefecture IX. “She would do better to stay close.”
Frowning, and without looking away from Alexia, Jasek nodded. “Think you can talk her out of it?” he asked Tara. Almost hoping.
“There is a remote area, with old militia facilities, on Nusakan’s southern continent. The Steel Wolves could occupy that.”
“I will pass that information to the commander,” Alexia offered.
He heard the finality in her tone and accepted that the Steel Wolves would not be staying. Neither would Alexia. “This war is not over,” he reminded her. “Will you ask the Steel Wolves to at least keep open a line of communication?”
“I will see to it,” she promised. Leaning in to him, Alexia Wolf put an easy hand around the back of Jasek’s neck and pulled him down for a kiss. There was no desire in it, no strength. It was soft and sorry, and then it was over.
“Thank you for everything,” she told him.
She nearly left on that, but paused to s
ize up Tara Campbell with a quick glance from head to foot. “You win,” she said, as if casting a vote of confidence. A half smile. “I did not think it was possible.”
Tara gazed after Alexia with a confused look. She turned to Jasek, and brushed her platinum blond hair back with a quick sweep of slender fingers. “That looked suspiciously like a good-bye.”
“It was.” Jasek steeled himself against showing how much the loss hurt him. As a commander losing one of his best officers, more than as a man losing his lover.
He nodded after her. “Alexia is leaving with Kerensky and the Steel Wolves,” he said. “We were always a temporary stop for her. Now that she’s proven herself as a warrior, it’s time for her to follow her original path. I hope she finds what she is looking for with them.”
First Tamara, who held such hopes for Jasek, even though he had been casually committed to another. Now Alexia. It wasn’t a surprise. But was she leaving so soon because of her desire to “return home” with the Steel Wolves, as close as she could get to being among the Clans, or because Jasek had allowed something far more serious to come between the two of them? Her parting comments seemed to indicate a measure of both.
“And the rest?” Tara asked, not letting it go. Like a terrier getting her teeth into a bone, she’d worry it until it cracked. “What did I win?”
“I think she meant . . . me,” he offered with a small smile.
“How’s that again?”
Clasping hands behind his back, hiding his nervousness, Jasek turned away from the window. Tara’s bright blue eyes studied him warily. She knew. And she was just as obviously scared for what it might mean. “On Chaffee and again on Hesperus II,” he explained slowly, “I kept hearing your voice in my head. It stuck with me, Tara. I couldn’t shake it, and didn’t want to. From the first day we met, I’ve felt an incredible attraction for you.”
He paused, stepping forward. “And I’ve flattered myself into thinking you felt something for me.”
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