by Unknown
Colonel Griffin was a lean man with close-trimmed light brown hair and a brushy but well-maintained mustache. His uniform was fresh and crisply pressed, and the medals on the breast of his tunic spoke of an eminently respectable though not flamboyant service career. In the yellow sunlight that slanted down from the windows high under the armory’s vaulted ceiling, he could have passed for an artist’s depiction of old style military spit and polish. Seeing him, Tara felt even more conscious than before of her own sweat-flattened hair and informal garb.
She put her chin up. She was a MechWarrior and a Campbell of Northwind, whatever she was wearing, and no mere Colonel of infantry was going to stare her out of countenance—though she suspected already that it was not Griffin’s position as a field commander that had brought him to the armory this morning, but his secondary assignment as the officer in charge of the Regiment’s intelligence network here on Northwind.
“Colonel Griffin,” she said, giving him her most practiced gracious smile. A precocious childhood as the diplomatic community’s poster darling, she reflected, had its occasional uses even in her current position.
When she absolutely had to, she could charm almost anybody. “I’m afraid the simulator isn’t very good about picking up external voices—you said something about important news?”
“There’s a DropShip coming into the spaceport in a few days,” Colonel Griffin said. “They sent word ahead.
They’ve got a Paladin on board, coming to help us out here on Northwind.”
Tara felt her smile turn cynical, and couldn’t help but feel a twinge of regret at her own reaction. There had been a time when word of a Paladin’s imminent arrival would have caused her to feel a surge of anticipation that was almost hero worship, even though the newcomer’s identity remained as yet unknown. But that was before Katana Tormark’s betrayal had left her with the responsibility for keeping peace and good order in Prefecture III—under the current circumstances, such a gift from the Exarch, coming unasked-for as it did, was likely to prove in the end a double-edged sword.
“ ‘Just one Paladin?” ’ she said, quoting the age-old joke.
“ ‘Just one planet,” ’ Griffin said, finishing it.
She relaxed a little; the Colonel apparently shared her decidedly mixed feelings on the subject of unanticipated aid from that quarter.
“I don’t suppose the Exarch and the Senate have bothered to let us know exactly what problems this Paladin is supposed to be helping us out with,” she said.
If the problem that had caused Exarch Damien Redburn to send a Paladin to Northwind turned out to be only Katana Tormark’s unanticipated defection to the Dragon’s Fury, Tara decided that she was going to be more than a little angry. Redburn might as well have pinned a sign on the new Prefect’s back sayingKICK
ME —I’M INEXPERIENCED! Any help a Paladin might give to Northwind in the immediate future would be paid for with years of diminished credibility for Prefect Tara Campbell afterward.
“Nothing official has come in so far,” Colonel Griffin said. “I expect that the Paladin is carrying his instructions with him, and plans to brief us all upon his arrival.”
“I’ll just bet he does,” Tara said.
She caught a strand of her hair between her fingers and twisted it thoughtfully. She’d picked up the habit as a child, when her wavy auburn locks had made her a poster photographers’ darling, and the nervous gesture had survived into her angry adolescence, when she had cropped her hair rebelliously short and dyed it platinum blond. Now, in her adulthood, she still had short, spiky blond hair—and in periods of stress, she still played with it while she thought. “You said that nothing official has come in.”
“That’s right.”
“Unofficially . . . what do our own intelligence people think is going on?”
“Based on rumors that we’ve heard about trouble brewing on Towne,” Griffin said, “and taking into account our own recent clashes with supporters of the Dragon’s Fury on Addicks, our people think the Exarch is worried that somebody is going to make a try for Terra by going through Northwind.”
“Considering that those of us who actually live here have been worried about the same thing ever since this business started,” Tara said, “that’s no surprise.”
She drew a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to send out her irritation and paranoia along with it.
Damn the fanatics, whoever they were, who had wrecked the HPG network and crippled The Republic of the Sphere; damn Katana Tormark for abandoning The Republic in favor of allegiance to a faction that Devlin Stone’s years of labor were supposed to have made obsolete; and while she was at it, damn the Senate and Damien Redburn for saddling her with this ambiguous gift.
After a moment, the anger faded, and she went on. “All right. We’ll assume—for public consumption, at least—that the Senate and the Exarch have recognized Northwind’s special position as part of Terra’s first line of defense, and that the presence of this Paladin signifies a recognition on Terra’s part of Northwind’s importance.”
Colonel Griffin looked curious. “Do you really believe all that?”
“Not particularly,” she said. “Which is why I want our people to keep working on it. If they’ve got any ideas about which factions constitute potential threats—other than ‘every single one of them, because they’ve all gone crazy’—I want to have the reports waiting on my desk by the time the Paladin makes landfall.”
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Colonel Griffin said.
“Good.” She pulled on her hair again, thinking hard. “Another thing. First impressions are important. The governor is undoubtedly going to have an official meet-and-greet for our illustrious visitor; but the Northwind Highlanders need to have their own official reception for him as well, just to make sure everybody understands that—Paladin or no Paladin—the Regiment is the host on this planet, and he’s the guest.”
“An excellent idea.”
“I didn’t spend my formative years tagging along after a couple of diplomats without learning something from the experience,” she said. “For the reception, we’ll need to pull together a theme that emphasizes Northwind’s local traditions and autonomy on the one hand and our loyalty to The Republic of the Sphere on the other.”
“I have an idea or two about that,” Griffin admitted.
“Good,” she said. “Then you have the whole job. I’d probably have asked for you anyway, because I want somebody from local intelligence in on the planning—you and I both know that the security aspects of this affair are going to be hellish.”
4
Elliot residence
Village of Liddisdale, Northwind
November, 3132; local winter
Night had fallen by the time Will Elliot reached his mother’s house in Liddisdale. Most of the shops clustered around the town’s central green had already closed, except for the fuel station and the all-night pharmacy, and the streetlights had come on. He parked the BannsonBuilt in the cottage’s attached garage next to his mother’s electric runabout, stowed his parka and boots in the mud room between the garage and the house proper, and went inside.
The kitchen smelled of pot roast and fresh bread, and the lingering spiciness of baked fruit. His mother had made a berry tart earlier; he saw it waiting on the counter by the stove.
Jean Elliot came bustling into the kitchen and enveloped her son in a warm hug. “It’s good to see you home, Will.”
“It’s good to be home. You didn’t have to hold up supper on my account.”
“I wouldn’t have cooked such a big meal if I didn’t plan on sharing it with you,” she said. She stepped back and gave him a gentle push. “Go clean yourself up while I get the table ready.”
Half an hour later, scrubbed clean of mud and wood smoke and dressed in fresh clothes, Will joined his mother in the dining room. She’d brought out the good plates and the good table linen and her wedding silver, causing him to wonder for an instant i
f today was some special occasion whose significance he had forgotten. Then he remembered how, when his sisters were home, his mother had always liked to make at least one day a week a proper sit-down dinner—“for the sake of civilizing the heathen,” as she had put it—and he decided that she must be feeling nostalgic.
For the first several minutes of the meal, he said nothing, only ate hungrily to make up for all the self-heating dehydrated rations he’d had to consume for breakfast, lunch, and dinner while out on the trail. Finally they reached dessert, and he was slowing down enough to say, as he took a slice of the berry tart, “I had a talk with Old Angus today.”
“Ah,” said his mother, looking unsurprised. “I thought you might have something on your mind.”
“He’s worried about the HPG network still not coming on-line. Doesn’t know how the guiding business is going to do if his offworlders can’t get in touch and don’t come back.”
“Angus Macallan’s nobody’s fool. Bridie Casimir, down at the grocery, said that a DropShip came into Tara this morning with news that there’s been more fighting—on Addicks, this time. People aren’t going to be planning expensive vacations on foreign worlds as long as things like that are going on.”
Will took a forkful of tart. The flaky crust fragmented into little pieces under the pressure, and the tines of his fork clattered against the china beneath. He looked down at his hand for a moment. A splash of purple berry juice stained the white tablecloth by his plate.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’ll wash it later.”
His mother waved the offer away. “No matter. What did Old Angus say to you that’s upset you so?”
“He’s worried, like I said. Planning for the future. And he doesn’t think the business is going to be able to afford two guides for much longer.”
“So he’s letting you go?”
“Aye.”
“The stingy old bastard.” Will had never heard his mother use bad language before; he was too startled by it now to say anything. “And to think I almost married him, back in ’04.”
He finally found his voice again. “Maybe you should have. He’s kept Robbie.”
“Hold your tongue. Angus Macallan could never hold a candle to your father, God rest him.” She straightened her shoulders and drew a deep breath. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do next?”
Will nodded. The house itself was paid for, and a small annuity came in every month from his father’s pension, but Rockhawk Wilderness Tours had made the difference between comfort and genteel poverty for both of them ever since John Elliot had died. “I have my money for the last two weeks, and a bit of a good-bye payment to sweeten it. With what we have put by, that should give us a little time.”
“You’re a fine outdoorsman,” she said. “It won’t take long to find someone else who’ll take you on.”
“I don’t think so.” Driving home in the growing dark, he’d had plenty of time to think things over and come to an unhappy conclusion. “Old Angus is one of the best, and if he’s feeling the pinch then everyone else is feeling it twice as hard.” He poked at the remains of his tart with his fork. “There isn’t going to be any work here, not if the whole region’s sliding. The best I could hope for is a job in the lumber mill down by Harlaugh, and that pays less than half what I was getting from Old Angus. I’m going to have to go away.”
“I was afraid you’d want to do something like that.”
“I don’t want to,” he said. He’d known she wouldn’t be enthusiastic about losing him; both his older sisters had married and moved off some years before, one to a long-distance transport driver who worked out of Kildare on the other side of the Bloodstones, and the other to a mining engineer in Kearny. He was the only child who had remained close to home. “But if I’m going to end up looking for work in Tara anyway, I’d rather do it before every third worker in Liddisdale gets the same idea.”
5
DropShipDark Rosaleen, en route to Northwind
Prefecture III, The Republic
November, 3132
The DropShip Dark Rosaleen was six days into its twelve-day journey from Northwind’s Jump Point to the planet’s main spaceport. Ezekiel Crow, Paladin of the Sphere, had been a silent presence among the handful of passengers, occupying his cabin—and the minds of the others aboard the DropShip—in much the same uncommunicative but hard to ignore fashion as his great Blade BattleMech occupied its berth in the largest of the vessel’s cargo holds.
In the Paladin’s case, the silence had a purpose: He had spent the first half of his journey in intensive study, ignoring the company of his fellow passengers for the company of text files and video clips. By now, Ezekiel Crow knew everything that The Republic of the Sphere’s diplomatic and intelligence services had seen fit to tell him about the planet Northwind itself, and about the young and good-looking Prefect who was, arguably, its most famous living citizen.
He knew, for example, that Northwind was the second planet out from a G2I-type star, with a temperate climate—as climatologists reckoned “temperate,” at any rate, which merely meant that the range of temperatures in most places didn’t often go outside what a properly equipped human body could endure. Of Northwind’s three continents, the greater part of New Lanark—where the capital was located—and the mineral-rich second continent of Kearny would still be in the grip of winter when he arrived. The third and smallest continent, Halidon, would be in the waning days of its summer dry season.
Crow shook his head, thinking about it. “Temperance in all things,” he murmured.
But people had been freezing in the snows and parching in the deserts of temperate worlds all across the Inner Sphere for as long as humanity had been keeping track. Temperance was misleading, and Ezekiel Crow did not believe in allowing himself to be misled.
Prefect Tara Campbell, Countess of Northwind, was in many ways an even more disquieting factor than the planet of Northwind itself. The young Countess’s family history and her dossier of public service were matters of common knowledge. Crow knew, therefore, of her birth off-planet to Colonel Jon Campbell and Republic Senator Moelene Jaffries-Campbell; and of her childhood stint as the darling of the news and entertainment media in the aftermath of the Capellan Campaign. He also knew of her outstanding record at the Northwind Military Academy, and of her appointment—more or less by acclamation—to the position recently vacated by Katana Tormark.
The files Crow had been given contained several likenesses of Tara Campbell, all of them recent pictures from open sources. She was a petite, platinum-haired woman who, at least in her official appearances, bore only a slight resemblance to the precocious auburn-haired moppet whose likeness had won the hearts of so many back in her poster days. What Crow wished he knew, and what he had been sent to Northwind at least partially in order to find out, was whether the Countess’s delicate appearance was as misleading as the term “temperate” applied to the climate of a habitable world.
She was, undeniably, young for the position that she held. She had a rash streak in her, as well. One of the tri-vid clips had been particularly disturbing. Ezekiel Crow searched for the file amongst the others in her dossier, found it, and sent it to his cabin’s display unit.
The air above the unit filled for a moment with static fog, then resolved into the image of a crowded street. A reporter armed with a microphone—and followed, Crow guessed, by a videographer—eeled his way through the press and up onto the wide marble steps of a looming piece of governmental architecture. Either by accident or by deliberate timing, the reporter reached the top of the steps just as the Countess of Northwind emerged from within the building.
The reporter stepped forward and extended the microphone, while at the same time deftly blocking Tara Campbell’s further progress down the steps.
“Countess!” he said. “What’s your reaction to Kal Radick’s suggestion that The Republic of the Sphere should be supplanted by a new Star League?”
The reporter’s videog
rapher brought the focus zooming in tightly on Tara Campbell. In the close-up, Ezekiel Crow could see how much the question angered her: The color rose in her fair-skinned face, her blue eyes darkened, and her full lips thinned.
“The Star League’s time is past,” she snapped at the reporter. “Perhaps Kal Radick’s time is past as well.”
Watching the videographed encounter yet again, Ezekiel Crow wished that he knew for certain whether the Countess’s sharp retort had been made in the heat of the moment, or if it had been an intentional provocation thrown out at the first opportunity.
Kal Radick had certainly reacted as if the insult had been deliberate. The Prefect of Prefecture IV had come within a hairsbreadth of formally demanding that Tara Campbell meet him for a Trial of Grievance.
The Countess, for her part, had either ignored or affected to ignore all of the Wolf Clansman’s angry protests, and had made no direct response at all to his angry comments. Her actual reply to Radick’s demand—“If he feels slighted, I invite him to Northwind where we can discuss matters in a calm and civil manner”—could have been mere empty speechmaking. On the other hand, the reply could have been exactly what it must have sounded like to Kal Radick: She was daring the Wolf to attack.
Ezekiel Crow closed down his computer files for the evening and stretched out on his bunk, dimming the lights with a gesture in the direction of the cabin’s environmental sensors. He might as well start getting his body accustomed now to the length of Northwind’s days and nights.
His mind, unfortunately, showed no interest in relaxing and going to sleep. Instead, he kept on thinking about the ins and outs of the situation—and the players—on Northwind.
Bad enough, Crow thought, if Tara Campbell’s words had been accidental. Youth and outraged patriotism, confronted with a question posed unexpectedly, and given no chance to prepare a more considered response, could have worked together to produce a hasty reply that could be understood even if not excused. But if the provocation had been deliberate—if the young Countess had intentionally given offense to the man who was now the leader of the Steel Wolves, and had done so in a way that all but invited that faction into battle on Northwind—then the future looked bleak indeed.
