“We are not leaving?” The thought seemed to worry Xera, as if giving up Achernar would be a blotch on her personal honor. “Have we been recalled?”
“Neg, Star Captain. The time has come to heighten our profile on Achernar. We will be moving our staging area to a more appropriate venue.” Such plans had been discussed before, when the Steel Wolves first planned their assault on Achernar and, since, after every difficulty noted in staging raids over distance on this planet.
Xera remembered their secondary plans as well. “Are you thinking, perhaps, of the River’s Run flatlands?”
“I was thinking River’s End,” Torrent said, a choice that had not been among their original plans. He noted the predator’s gleam that immediately brightened up behind Xera’s eyes. “Or something very, very close to it.” He turned for the bay exit and a shower, leaving her behind to stew of excitement.
“Bring Star Captain Nikola Demos to my office in thirty minutes,” he said, “and we will plan.”
River’s End
Achernar
Erik Sandoval-Groell walked around the lavish apartment that had been recently given over to him by the president of Steyger Railways, readying a few last-minute details. Music was selected, placed into the playback unit, and piped through at low volume to the dozen speakers hidden throughout the suite of rooms. He opened the wine to let it breathe. Its dry, oakwood scent perfumed the air.
The door chimes rang for attention, and at Erik’s nod Michael Eus left the room to answer it and invite in Erik’s guest. The nobleman heard Eus’ welcome, and knew that the door shutting would be Eus on his way out, leaving the two of them alone. Such rendezvous were best handled in private.
Especially if it worked out completely to Erik’s liking.
“Come in,” he called, moving to the table and pouring two glasses of merlot. He heard footsteps move into the room, but did not look up until both glasses were poured full. “I hope you enjoy red,” he said, placing the bottle back in its cradle and lifting a glass to his guest.
Tassa Kay accepted it with raised eyebrows and a shrugged nod.
The female MechWarrior was doubly attractive to Erik—and likely to most men, he assumed—being both a warrior and a beautiful one at that. While she tasted the wine he drank in her curled-back red hair and the arched slant to her eyebrows, green, inquisitive eyes, and her full, hard-bodied figure. Yes, this could go very well indeed.
“Not bad,” Tassa said, cradling her wine glass expertly in a cupped hand. “When your man asked for a meeting between us, he did not mention that it would be a social occasion.” Her smile did not quite touch her eyes. “I would have dressed more appropriately.”
Erik shrugged. “I see no problem with the way you are dressed.” Tassa’s everyday uniform usually consisted of a leather jacket with steel buckles, worn open, jeans, and a shirt of breathable cotton. This evening she wore dark gray jodhpurs and a black, collared blouse with red buttons up the front—like the bright warning markings on a poisonous snake or spider. Her earrings dangled a few inches below her lobes, flashing red-enameled spiders. They played up wonderfully the red highlights in her dark hair. Erik shrugged out of his uniform jacket and threw it over the back of a nearby chair. Lifting his own glass, he said, “To casual comfort.”
They both drank. The wine was a dry variety, tasting of blackberry and currant with the barest proper hint of charcoal. Erik breathed deep the heady fumes.
“Let’s sit, shall we?” He led her over to the open-plan living room, holding out one hand to seat her at the couch but properly taking his seat across from her in a deep-plush chair.
“You are an incredible warrior,” he told her. “Honestly, I doubt I’ve seen your like before, and I think it’s safe to say that without your help, the Republic militia would not still be functioning.”
“Well that is a lot to lay on a girl on your first date.” Tassa Kay sounded amused, though she did not exactly deny Erik’s compliment.
“You know it’s true. That’s how you managed to hold out against Colonel Blaire on that first day, knowing that he needed you and your Ryoken.” He sipped his wine. “It is a handsome design.”
Tassa’s smile turned down a few watts. “Which is why you wanted to confiscate it before the arrival of the Steel Wolves?” she asked.
Careful. Erik busied himself with a long taste from the glass, feeling the light smile curling at the edges of his mouth. “I believe it was Legate Stempres who originally tried to secure your machine, and obviously with good reason. If you had been working hand-in-glove with the Steel Wolves, I doubt we’d be sharing this wonderful wine right now.” A wary tightness around Tassa Kay’s eyes gave her away, as if she steadied herself from revealing anything. Erik grasped for what it might be, failed, and pursued his original proposal. “In fact, given your value to the local militia, I’m surprised that you have not renegotiated your original deal with Blaire.”
Tassa shrugged. “I gave my word on the matter. As, I believe, have you.”
“I can appreciate that.” Appreciate it, but never agree with it. “Still, if my reading of the regulations are correct, I concur with Raul Ortega’s original assessment in that you could demand a bond of somewhere in between twenty-one and twenty-four million Republic bills for the continued availability of your BattleMech and your skill.”
“You are very well informed about what went on inside the militia command post,” Tassa said, eyes narrowed.
“I am very well informed about everything—and everyone—on this world.” Erik could not sit still. He rose in a fluid motion and began to pace around his side of the room. “Everything, that is,” he said then, “except you. Who are you? Where do you come from? What are you doing here?”
She shrugged. “I thought men liked a touch of mystery in their lives.”
Erik laughed into his glass. “Sandovals prefer to keep the secrets, not have secrets kept from them.” He sipped carefully. “Although in this case, I might be willing to live with the mystery. Especially,” he said with a frank stare of interest, “if it were on my side of the line.”
Stretching back into the sofa’s comfortable embrace, Tassa kicked her feet up onto the glass-topped coffee table and lounged in a more relaxed posture. “I’m listening.”
Erik leaned over the back of his vacated chair, amber eyes staring unblinkingly at his guest. “Twenty-four million,” he said bluntly. “In Republic Stones or in a Federated Suns account. I’ll give you the deal that Colonel Blaire wouldn’t—a fully bonded contract for your services on Achernar, to be used for repair or replacement as necessary. And when you leave, you can keep ten . . . twenty percent of the balance for services rendered.”
Tassa considered it and Erik watched as her eyes blurred for a moment as she seemed to be looking back at something. She gazed down into the red pool swirling about in her glass. “You are very generous,” she finally said, and softly, barely more than a whisper.
Erik began to pace again, circling the room now in long, slow strides. “When it’s something I want, I don’t haggle over the price. I think you’re worth it, and I’m willing to pay.”
Tassa continued to stare into her wine. “Quite the compliment. You know. For a woman like me.”
“I never believed there were women like you, Tassa Kay.” Erik stopped behind her, reached down with one hand to trace the back of one finger along the warm curve of her ear, and across her flawless cheek. He heard her sharp intake of breath, felt the slight hitching tensions. Was she choking back sobs? Erik leaned down behind her. “We could be very good for each other, you and I,” he whispered.
That was when she finally started to laugh.
Not a nervous titter or an appreciative chuckle. No. Tassa threw her head back in a full-bodied, riotous laugh warm with her amusement and complete rejection. “Oh. My. You know, Erik, I thought I could hold a straight face through all of this. I really did. But it was too much.”
She rocked forward, slipping out from
under his touch and coming to her feet with the grace of a hunting animal. “You are completely without any sense of honor or shame, except possibly where it impacts your public-relations campaign, and you’re a poor judge of character. You think you can buy me as one of your ‘Yes-my-lord’ people, both on and off the field? You are impetuous, self-centered, and, perhaps worst of all, impatient.
“Good for each other?” she scoffed, coming around the end of the couch at him. “I doubt I could trust you not to dampen your uniform the first time I whispered in your ear.”
Erik had known refusal, even defeat, in the past. But never—ever—had anyone torn into him in such a manner. His ears burned with an embarrassed flush, and his fingers felt numb with a kind of distant cold.
“That was a mistake,” he promised her, voice flat and dark.
Tassa looked ready to dash the rest of her wine into his face, then reconsidered, but not because she feared him. Her sorrowful glance made it clear that she wouldn’t waste good wine on him. She drained off the merlot, then tossed the fragile glass over one shoulder.
“I’ve made others in the past,” she said to the musical accompaniment of shattering crystal, “and I’ll make more in the future, I’m sure. But I’d rather make mistakes than have no idea what I am doing. You don’t, Erik, on or off the field.” She turned for the apartment’s foyer, dismissing him as easily as Erik might a servant in his uncle’s home.
“Quite frankly,” she said, “I have had better offers.” Tassa cast a single, appraising glance back at him. “In all respects.”
Achernar Militia Command Post
Achernar
The hard pounding on his BOQ door roused Raul from his silent contemplation. He had never turned on the lights after Jessica’s departure, feeling more comfortable sitting alone in the dark. His room still smelled of the wasted liquor, smoky and sharp, and his face remembered the stinging slap of his ex-fiancée’s hand.
Another round of knocking. It sounded like someone might be kicking the door on the other side.
He considered not answering it, considered sitting quietly in the dark until the person simply went away, but then a third, more commanding, series of poundings drew him reluctantly off the kitchen chair and around to the door. Whoever it was, they could be made to go away. Just then Raul didn’t care if the Steel Wolves were at the edge of the base, ready to overrun the capital. He wasn’t going out to answer an alert—he’d be of no use to anybody right now if he tried, and McDaniels wasn’t going to haul him over to the O-club either. He wasn’t going out, period.
He yanked open the door, and Tassa Kay stepped up to plant a long kiss over his mouth.
Like their moment on the Sonora Plateau, he didn’t expect it. Unlike then, he didn’t respond, and that threw a momentary hitch into her approach. Tassa stepped back, sized him up and down, and then said, “So you going to invite a girl in?”
Raul almost told her no. Then he inhaled the taste of her off his lips, and felt a spread of warmth along the back of his neck. Did he really want to sit in the dark for the rest of the night? Tassa’s mercurial moods might never bring her back to his door again if he turned away now. And he wasn’t up to forcing another woman to walk away on him. One had been enough.
He didn’t answer her directly. Didn’t need to. Raul simply shoved the door open wide and then backed to one side, allowing Tassa to slip past and into his room.
Then he kicked the door shut behind them both.
19
The Day After
Achernar Militia Command
Achernar
7 March 3133
Memories of the previous night invaded Raul’s morning thoughts, teasing him awake with whispers of flesh and the promise of long, passionate kisses.
He remembered deep green pools of life swimming under his own gaze, acres of tanned skin and a few thin scars he did not remember on Jessica’s body. Not blond hair hanging down into his face. Coltish red hair, long and damp. The scent of lavender soap and honest sweat, and the cool, sharp touch of a steel-bound crystal pressed against his chest.
As long as it takes . . .
Hearing the husky whisper in his mind and placing it with a face, a body, Raul opened his eyes. He stared at the ceiling of his quarters, still dim in the early morning light. An arm, draped casually across his chest, pressed down with unfamiliar weight. He turned his head far enough to find Tassa Kay, sleeping on her front, head turned toward him. Her eyes remained closed and her breathing deep and even, yet somehow Raul knew that she was awake as well. He suddenly knew a lot more than that.
“You’re Clan,” he said softly, though not quite whispering.
Tassa’s eyelids rolled back like gunports opening. Bright, intelligent eyes stared back at Raul without a trace of guilt. “I did not know you could tell . . . this way.”
Hearing her confirm it, Raul blinked rapidly as he cleared sleep from his eyes and the haze of time from his memories. “No. I mean, it’s been a lot of little things. Adding up over the days. But you’re Clan. Trueborn?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Raul wasn’t certain why that should make a difference, that Tassa had been born from iron womb technology. Maybe she seemed a touch more alien because of it. He stared back up at the ceiling, trying to sort through his thoughts.
“You don’t speak like a Clanner.” Then, “Not always,” he amended. “You use contractions. And you don’t follow strict bidding practices in combat.”
“A wise warrior once commented that slavish adherence to tradition is the sign of a weak mind. I’d like to think that I’m a bit like her.”
“ ‘As long as it takes,” ’ he quoted her. “You came here to wait for the Steel Wolves.” He remembered another of her evasive answers. “What did you come here looking for, Tassa Kay?” His vidphone chirped for attention, but he ignored it. “Is that even your name?”
“It is name enough,” she said with formal cadence, letting her eyes drift back to half-mast. “And I came here looking for battle, which is its own reason for existing. I wanted to test the Steel Wolves, and test myself against them, and that is all the answer you are going to get, Raul Ortega. It should be enough.”
It should be. As much as anything else was an answer for him these days, living from day to day with little else on his mind except where the next attack would come from and how soon would it take to get his BattleMech fixed up afterward. The vidphone chirped again. Raul glanced toward it, then shrugged. Tassa might have refused to answer questions, but she had never outright lied to him.
He just needed to ask better questions.
Throwing the covers aside, Raul padded over to the wall-mounted conference phone and turned the camera off. Then he stabbed at the connection. The screen scrambled to life, showing a middle-aged man in a business suit and a silver goatee. In the lower left-hand corner the antenna-and-globe sigil for Stryker Productions Limited, the local ComStar affiliate, revolved on a vertical axis. Not the early-morning call Raul would expect. Right then, he wasn’t certain what to expect anymore.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Raul Ortega?” the man asked. Raul nodded, then remembered he had turned off the camera. He repeated his earlier question. “Mr. Ortega, my name is Hanson Doles. This is a courtesy call to let you know that you have a message addressed to general delivery at our HPG station.”
Raul was at once intrigued and cautious. With the failure of the HPG network, any message was golden. A personal message? It bordered on the unbelievable. Raul’s security-trained mind didn’t trust it. “Is it verifaxed?” he asked.
“It is not.”
“Then why not send it by conventional transmission? I’ll pay for the charge.”
Hanson Doles rubbed one hand over his goatee. “I can only repeat, sir, that you have a message waiting here at the station. Conventional transmissions are . . . I guess you might call them suspect at the moment.”
Raul stiffened. Erik Sandoval had troops stationed near—
or inside—the HPG station. But if that was the problem, and Doles was trying to circumvent any monitoring, then he was taking a risk merely contacting Raul. “Who is it from?” he asked, still not willing to let it go. It wouldn’t be the last time he asked one question too many.
Doles frowned, his wide face taking on extra years. He shifted in his seat, but his duty to deliver outweighed any discomfort. “Lady Janella Lakewood, Knight of the Sphere.” And then, obviously having said enough in his own opinion, Hanson Doles cut the transmission from his end.
Tassa was sitting up in his bed, sheet draped over one shoulder and her necklace charm dangling down over her exposed breast. “You are becoming more popular by the day, it seems.”
Jessica was gone. River’s End lost to Sandoval. Star Colonel Torrent might attack again at any time, and Raul had a Clan warrior lounging in his bed. He felt pulled in five different directions. No. Pushed. Pushed from five different directions, each one of them trying to force him in a direction he wasn’t certain he wanted to go. Tassa was here, she was waiting and he definitely had to have a talk with her, but Raul suddenly felt a need to step away and think. Me time, as Jessica would have said.
“I have to go out,” he told her. It was the start of something, whether an apology or a promise he wasn’t certain.
Tassa cut him off with a simple shrug. “I am not surprised.”
ComStar HPG Station: Stryker-A7
Achernar
Two MiningMech conversions dominated the courtyard of the River’s End ComStar compound, their weapons covering the broad avenue. Dark patches the color of wet concrete augmented their usual utility gray paint, putting together a rudimentary cityscape camouflage. Short-range missile packs sat double-stacked over the MiningMechs’ left shoulder. A pair of anti-infantry machine guns replaced the grinder heads normally found on the left hand. Both converted IndustrialMechs stood in frozen profile as Raul rounded the corner. Arriving in a military jeep, though, he quickly drew their attention.
A Call to Arms Page 20
