Which included Anastasia Kerensky.
Kerensky had not bothered to duck back into the Shandra’s open cabin. She simply levered herself up onto the side frame and rolled off the top of the vehicle as easily as a child might fly down a playground slide. The warrior-leader had long legs that efficiently absorbed the short fall. Instead of a formal uniform, she wore black leathers with red piping down the arms and legs and a high mandarin collar, emblazoned with a red hourglass across her flat abdomen. The mark of the Black Widow—a nod to her ancestor, Natasha Kerensky, who had been one of the best warriors of any generation.
Except for a few welding arcs, sputtering against the armored side of a nearby Kelswa assault tank, most work around the DropShip’s bay had come to a halt. Officers and enlisted stared, some in open hostility, others in frank interest. Anastasia Kerensky knew how to make an entrance—that was certain.
Without waiting for the man who slid out of the Shandra after her to catch up, she struck out toward Jasek. Colonel Petrucci and Tamara Duke had been talking near the feet of Tamara’s Wolfhound, only a few meters away from where the Shandra had come to its final stop. They stepped forward, partially into her path, but she blew by both of them without a word. There was no telling how she recognized Jasek, but quite obviously she did.
She also had to be aware of several weapons pointed her way from surprised—or simply cautious—infantrymen. Alexia Wolf, on the far side of the bay, had slipped into the turret of a Demon to cover the Shandra. A full lance of Stormhammer BattleMechs stood silent guard over the large DropShip bay. In her position, Jasek would be concerned that an assault force had managed to drop on-world with only a few hours’ warning. The Seginus system had a twenty-eight-day burn time—very strong gravitational fields creating a great defensive barrier. The Stormhammers’ ability to calculate a nonstandard jump point had to have her worried.
But he saw not one hint of hesitation or concern in her determined stride. In a way, she reminded him of Tara Campbell. All duty and poise.
“You are interrupting my day,” she said without preamble, still several meters away but closing the distance with long strides. “Get to it.”
So much for poise. Jasek blinked away his surprise at her condescending tone, and put a restraining hand on McKinnon’s arm. “You have a lot to do here on Seginus, do you? Local merchant spacers on liberty call giving your Steel Wolves a hard time?”
She stopped an arm’s length away. Hands on her hips, leaning in toward him. Open and aggressive. Her grin was half feral. “Legate Hateya did not tell me you had a smart mouth.” Which explained how she had picked him out of the crowded bay. It was a piece of information freely given.
Be careful, she was saying. I know things.
“That’s funny. It was one of the first things Tara Campbell told me about you.”
So it was a small lie. It got his point across: Jasek knew things as well.
It backed her off somewhat. She glanced back as her man sidled up, late. He had blond hair and a secretive smile, and wore an old Republic uniform stripped of its regular insignia. He kept his hand well away from the Sunbeam laser pistol strapped at his hip.
Petrucci and Tamara Duke had accompanied him, helping close a tight box around the two Steel Wolves.
“Campbell pointed you here?” Kerensky asked warily, turning her back on Jasek’s officers. She seemed not the least bit worried at her position.
“I found you on my own. Rumors floating back along the shipping lanes. Legate Hateya requisitioning armor and actuators for a local militia with only a few modified IndustrialMechs. Plus”—Jasek smiled easily—“one jump out from Skye and Glengarry? Able to strike in either direction? It felt like a choice you would make.”
She folded her arms, supporting each elbow with the opposite hand. “How would you know that? We’ve never met.”
“You haven’t exactly kept a low profile, Tassa Kay.” It was a name she’d used before, just one more fact the Stormhammers’ intelligence-gathering raids had uncovered. He shrugged. “And the Countess provided background as well.”
That seemed to satisfy the Steel Wolf leader. She relaxed ever so slightly, settling back off the balls of her feet. “Did she provide the Paladin as well?” she asked. It was her first recognition of McKinnon. With it, she gave him a small bow of respect.
“This is Sire—”
“I know who David McKinnon is and I know why you are here,” Kerensky cut him off, never taking her gaze off the venerable warrior. To him she said, “I have studied your exploits from the Jihad. The raid on Terra. The last stand at Krupp Armaments.” There was a measure of envy in her voice, but a sly look in her green, predatory eyes. “And I have heard about the Founder’s Movement. If you are working with the Stormhammers, Skye is in trouble. Again.”
Whatever his personal thoughts of contacting Kerensky, McKinnon revealed nothing that would jeopardize Jasek’s plans. “Was there any doubt the Falcons would come back for it?” the Paladin asked.
“Not really,” the second Steel Wolf answered for Kerensky, joining the conversation. “Star Commander Yulri,” he introduced himself directly to Jasek, then shrugged. “I was not on Ryde or Skye, but Tassa filled me in on happenings. A blind surat could have seen this coming.”
Kerensky nodded. “But since it was made very clear that it was not our problem, we left there. Now we are here.” She sounded very final.
Jasek had no intention of giving up without a fight. “I would think the Black Widow would want to be wherever the action is.” As taunts went, he thought it not too bad of one.
Until Kerensky bit into him with a glare. “Let’s get one thing clear right now. I am not the Black Widow.” She brushed a hand over the red design on her abdomen. “I wear the hourglass as a tribute to my gene-mother, but I’m my own warrior.”
Natasha Kerensky’s daughter? That was one for the history books. “And your father?” he asked, instantly curious.
“Is my business,” she said, bluntly evading the question. “Let us say that I have a lot to live up to, all right? I do not need more baggage from you. Quaiff?”
He nodded, gaining a slight measure of understanding for Kerensky. And understanding could lead to persuasion. “Aff,” he said, answering her rhetorical question in Clan fashion. Then, “Very much, aff. I know something about trying to live up to a legendary heritage.”
She hesitated. Jasek didn’t think he was meant to see it, but he caught the brief flicker of interest in her eyes. He knew how to play it too. Strike a very calm and confident pose. Wait.
“And what have you discovered?” she finally asked.
“You can’t do it. Ever.” He let a smile build on the corners of his lips, spreading slowly as if he shared a secret with Kerensky. “But we still try, don’t we?”
It was as if no one else existed in the conversation for a few brief heartbeats. McKinnon and Yulri were forgotten. Tamara Duke chewed jealously on her bottom lip, but was held back from comment by Petrucci, who put a hand on her elbow.
Anastasia Kerensky nodded slowly. “We’re not given much choice.”
They might have been defeatist words, but Jasek heard the pride in her voice and thought he understood it. She looked at those expectations and saw the challenges to overcome, and the glory there to be won. The desire for personal accomplishment did not burn quite so hot in his blood, but the duty he held to the people of Skye filled its place nicely.
And like Kerensky, “I would not have it any other way.”
She chewed on that for a moment, face held in an impassive mask. He saw her decision come with a light behind her eyes. One edge of her mouth turned up in a seductive smile.
“All right,” she agreed. Not so much chipping away at her icy exterior as she was smashing it with one blow. “We can talk.”
17
The Acropolis
Tairngoth, Glengarry
3 November 3134
Recalled from Glengarry’s capital of Dunkeld wi
th news of the midnight raids, Malvina Hazen crouched within the Skadi’s small passenger compartment as the VTOL turned above her Acropolis and then thundered over Tairngoth’s rolling hills for another two kilometers before it circled in for a landing. The craft’s landing skids bumped against the ground and a side door rolled back with a metallic grind. Night still clung to the Tairngoth area like a funeral shroud, damp and chill with the promise of coming rains. Malvina Hazen promised herself she’d pull that shroud around several Republic warriors before morning.
Beckett Malthus met her as she jumped down from the VTOL, the tall warrior standing defiantly beneath the still-thrashing blades. Running lights washed his face in amber and emerald, and his stormy eyes showed a hint of anger in them.
At her, or reserved for the attacking Republic troops?
Malvina did not care, and she did not bother with much more than a curt nod as she surveyed the impromptu staging area with a critical eye.
Her Shrike and an accompanying Shadow Hawk IIC stood guard, their three-story profiles backlit by elevated banks of fluorescent lights. A maintenance vehicle lifted two technicians and a half ton of missile reloads up to the back of her ’Mech. Two short columns of vehicles warmed up nearby, stagger-parked against each other like a row of broken chevrons. From the air she had noticed that they pointed more or less in the direction of Glengarry’s false dawn—where Dunkeld’s lights reflected against the heavy cloud cover. And eighty kilometers beyond that, Malvina knew, the sky would cast back a reddish-orange glow as the Argonaut Munitions Depot blazed in a fire too hot for even the toughest firefighters. She imagined the taste of ash and burned gunpowder that would be choking the air around the fire.
Well, she’d be tasting blood before the night was through, if Beckett had readied everything according to her orders.
“You have an Alamo missile standing by?” she asked without greeting.
He frowned at the lack of courtesy, but Malvina was not about to play formality games. Not this night. Beckett had pledged himself to her.
“With reservations,” he admitted, pacing her on the short trip between VTOL and BattleMech. “We have exactly three of the nuclear-tipped missiles. I am not so certain this is the best time to use one.”
Malvina unzipped the wrists on her jumpsuit, then paused to raise one foot and then the other to loosen her ankle zippers as well. “Here or on Skye,” she said with a shrug. “If we can destroy a large number of Republic troops, it will be well spent. I have no intention of letting this pitiful excuse for an assault rob us of honor.”
Malthus nodded, and Malvina decided to accept that as the Galaxy Commander’s full agreement. She felt the night’s clammy touch on her left arm, and also climbing the exposed skin on her left leg. Her right side …nothing. Neither warmth nor chill. Her prosthetic replacements reacted to nerve firings, imitating the function of real limbs with a full range of motion, but the sensory details coming back the other way were limited. She could sense pressure, and would feel simulated, low-grade pain if the replacements took severe damage, but not much more. That was the trade-off for a hasty return to combat status. For not waiting while the scientist caste vat-grew true limbs.
That was the trade-off for getting back to Skye as soon as possible.
Only Skye had come to her this time. Several companies, striking at a wide range of targets meant to harass her local defenders. Summer and Ryde had reported heavy raiding assaults as well over the last week, and the loss of too many standing garrison troops. That would not happen here!
“We push them back to their DropShips,” Malvina told him, waiting for technicians to clear the lowering gantry. “With one Alamo we might bring down a Union, or an Overlord. Cost them a full company or two in mixed forces. Let them take that back home as the cost of such a foolish venture.”
She struggled into the gantry’s cradle, still not as coordinated with her replacement arm as she might wish, but unwilling to wait for the lift to lower completely to the ground. The cradle reversed direction, lifting her toward her cockpit.
“Stand ready,” she ordered Malthus.
If he thought to argue the point any further, he decided to wait until she had fully suited up for battle. Malthus turned for a Tribune mobile HQ that waited at the head of the vehicle column. Malvina Hazen beat him into position by clambering quickly into her cockpit and stripping out of the jumpsuit, pulling it off over her combat boots. The jumpsuit went into a locker built into the back of her command chair, traded for the thin cooling jacket that would keep her body temperature down in the strain of combat. The jacket had abbreviated sleeves, stopping just above her elbows, and was made from black ballistic cloth in case she was forced to eject (again) onto a live battlefield. On each shoulder was stitched an emerald eye, like the false eyes under a cobra’s hood. Aleksandr had had them sewn into the cloth after both of them made the rank of Star colonel.
It was one of the few physical reminders of her lost twin that Malvina kept.
Sliding into the waiting seat, she reached up for her neurohelmet, which rested on an overhead shelf, and settled it over her head with a snug fit, careful that the receptors made good contact with her scalp. She stuck two telemetry pads to the inside of her left thigh and above the left wrist. Her replacement bionics had built-in telemetry. Finally, she threaded a braid of three cables through the loops on the front of her cooling jacket, and connected the single jack into the socket at the neurohelmet’s base.
The technician who had walked the ninety-five-ton Shrike to the staging area had left the fusion engine on hot standby and her computer on. What was left for her was to release weapons and full gyroscope capability, and remove the speed dampeners that locked into place while in maintenance mode.
On the ten-key pad at her left hand, Malvina keyed in her personal cipher. The computer awoke with several new lights flashing for attention. She toggled them all on.
“Identify,” a synthesized and vaguely feminine voice directed her.
“Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen.”
The computer processed that for several long seconds, comparing her voice patterns with those stored on a secure storage device. Finally, the computer prompted, “Proceed with secondary protocol.”
Because the technology existed to fake voiceprints and crack number ciphers, most BattleMechs carried a second authorization key that was necessary to turn over complete control to the MechWarrior. This was a private code that could be known only to the warrior. Malvina had lifted an obscure line from the Jade Falcon Remembrance, the living prose that told the entire history of her Clan back to its founding.
“ ‘Let the Falcon take flight in a new generation,” ’ she quoted. “ ‘Let the stars be its hunting grounds.” ’
As status lights cleared from amber to green, Malvina throttled forward into a ground-hammering stride that pushed her Shrike toward the front of the waiting column. Nothing would slow her now.
This was her generation.
And it was time to hunt.
18
Chauncy Plateau
Tairngoth, Glengarry
4 November 3134
Alexia Wolf tensed over the controls of her Uziel, unable to shake the jangling nerves that often plagued her in combat. The examiner in charge of screening freeborn applicants for Clan Wolf had promised her it was nothing. The trembling of a hunter scenting blood. Alexia knew only that the prickling sensation crawling over her scalp had been at its worst just before she failed her Trial of Position, when her testing partner turned on her, and had never once heralded good news.
“Here they come.” McKinnon’s voice was dry and leathery, and calm for a man about to step into the teeth of battle.
It was all the warning she received from McKinnon or her own nerves. The Shrike they had detected moving up on their position—waiting between Dunkeld and the local Jade Falcon military reservation—was coming fast with only a pair of Nacon armored scouts as company. Stormhammer spotters had a vehicle column
and a Shadow Hawk IIC about a kilometer back, also looking for the open plateau on which the Tharkan Strikers waited. With Colonel Petrucci hitting three targets within close proximity, McKinnon had judged—correctly—that the Jade Falcons would push units from their Acropolis base toward the city. In an audacious gamble, the Paladin pushed far ahead of the main strikes to counter any reprisal by the Jade Falcons. Alexia brought her company along for support.
The plateau was a backdoor route into Dunkeld. It was also the site of an old battlefield, where some now-forgotten mercenary command had fought against occupying forces. Rusted hulks littered the landscape for a dozen kilometers in every direction, creating a background magnetic-resonance disturbance where a company of Stormhammer machines could hide itself. Their angle of attack wasn’t the best, and in short order the Falcons might overwhelm their position, but at the moment the advantage belonged to the Skye forces.
Alexia caught an electric blue flash out of a stand of scaly firs, recognizing the capacitor discharge of a Gauss rifle. A silver blur smashed into the Shrike’s left shoulder, shoving it around. Stabbing lances of red energy followed as McKinnon threw chivalry to the wind and followed up his ambush with lasers. His Atlas shouldered aside tall trees as if they were young saplings, and strode into the open.
“Striker Team One.” Alexia opened up communications, switching her sensors from passive over to active. “Advance and fire.”
A light Pack Hunter broke cover from a nearby quarry, leading out a Kinnol and two Hasek MCVs, which staggered into a line-abreast foreign formation. Alexia stood her Uziel away from a pile of rusted vehicle frames. Her PPCs had enough reach to throw some additional damage at the wounded Shrike, but not until McKinnon cleared her line of fire.
A lesser MechWarrior would have fallen under the Paladin’s savage ambush. The Shrike’s pilot was apparently made of sterner stuff. Staggering to one side, the ninety-five-ton machine quickly got a solid stance back beneath it. Turning, it levered forward both of its ultra-class autocannon and belted out extra-long pulls from each. Slugs tipped in depleted uranium hammered at the Atlas, ripping long gashes through the assault ’Mech’s pristine armor.
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