by Victor Milán
‘‘Do you feel fear, Beckett Malthus?’’
His skin crawled. The answer was Of course.
Overhead ravens, imported from Terra centuries before for reasons obscure, circled in the morning sun, croaking like prophets of doom. Not for the first time in recent months Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus felt exceeding gratitude for decades of practice at keeping his emotions from his face.
Bec Malthus was an altogether exceptional Clanner, in that he was adept at masking all his emotions. And in that he, indeed, felt fear.
And now his fear of the great black destroyer hurtling toward them from the Skye jump point was overlaid by the keener and more immediate fear of this tiny, nearly naked woman with almost-white hair.
Malvina Hazen punctuated her question with a grunt of effort as she yanked the kettlebell left-handed from the hard-packed white sand of the exercise ground. It resembled a black cannonball with a simple handle welded to it. It weighed sixty kilograms. In one smooth move she cleaned and thrust it above her head to the extent of a stiffened arm.
It was a prodigious lift even for a Clanswoman. Malvina’s left forearm and hand, and her right leg from midthigh down were black polymer: prosthetics driven by servomechanisms far more powerful than any muscle. But Malthus suspected that, even more, it was the awful elemental force of her will that enabled her to perform such feats.
There was very little Bec Malthus put outside the scope of Malvina’s will to accomplish.
For a moment she held the black sphere upraised against the cloud-crowded blue sky of Skye. Her arm began to tremble slightly. She threw the kettlebell. It landed two meters away with a thud Malthus felt through the soles of his boots, raising a white sand crater that halfway obscured it.
‘‘A Hell’s Horses WarShip approaches Skye, Galaxy Commander,’’ he said. ‘‘Our jump point observation station identified it as the Bucephalus, a Congress-class frigate. It carries missiles that can reach the surface from orbit. They can blast us from the face of this planet within a single rotation.’’
‘‘Aff,’’ Malvina said. ‘‘And if they so choose, no force I possess will stop them.’’
Though their rank was nominally the same, Jade Falcon Khan Jana Pryde had made clear when she dispatched the invasion force into the Republic of the Sphere that the senior in grade, Malthus, should command, and that Malvina Hazen and her sibkin Aleksandr Hazen—a rare pair from the same sibling cohort who won Bloodnames— should be subordinate. While no one, not even Malthus, would contest that Malvina and Aleksandr were his betters as field captains, he was by far the more experienced and deemed the wiser by the khan, who showed her own famous unorthodox streak by honoring age and wisdom over the youthful savagery Clan culture exalted.
Khan Jana Pryde well knew Malthus’ wisdom and seasoning, and his cunning. He had been her right hand—or perhaps her left—during her own brutally contested rise to power.
Yet despite the death of her beloved brother Aleks in the first attempted taking of Skye, and her own injury to the bleeding edge of death, Malvina had emerged from the catastrophe stronger, in both will and political position. Even before that devastating campaign her personality had come to dominate the desant, as the invasion was called: from the ancient Russian word for ‘‘descent,’’ meaning in that context a paratroop assault. Now both she and Malthus were well aware her will ruled supreme within the desant and the Falcon’s Reach, as the Jade Falcon Occupation Zone had come to be called.
It was a role Malthus felt comfortable with: working from the shadows. He had no ambition to sit a throne. No one, after all, called a Trial of Possession for the rank of éminence grise.
He sighed. ‘‘You are correct. Still, it would be a bitter irony to have your glorious achievements nullified in the space of a day and a night.’’
She laughed, crinkling the long scar that curled through her eyebrow and toward her mouth. It was a relic of brutal injuries sustained during the first invasion of Skye. Dressed as she was in an ivory sports bra and brief trunks of the same color, the substantial scarring of her body and limbs also was visible.
Her face had largely been restored through plastic surgery and skin grafts. Malvina had declined to spend the time out of action that having her lost arm and leg rebudded and regrown would have cost, but Malthus had on his own authority directed that her appearance be restored as much as possible using procedures which cost mere hours. For all its utilitarian rhetoric, Clan culture worshipped youth and perfection. A savagely scarred Galaxy commander ostensibly bore the evidence of her courage and service to Turkina. In reality, Malthus knew, she would be seen as damaged.
And Malthus had plans for Malvina. Although not, he had grown to suspect, half so ambitious as her plans for herself.
He knew she had not missed how he evaded her original question. Malvina Hazen was at once the most traditional of Clanners and the most violently unorthodox. The skill of reading other humans was neglected to the point of non-existence in all the Clans—at least the fanatic Crusader Clans, among which Clan Jade Falcon prided itself on being paramount. Yet he feared that she was learning to read him, who would be opaque to even the most Machiavellian Lyran diplomat.
‘‘Those were not glorious achievements, Bec Malthus,’’ she said in a cheery voice. ‘‘It was death, devastation and horror. No more nor less than it needed to be.’’
A chill trickled down his spine, a distressingly common occurrence in this young woman’s company. ‘‘Very well, Malvina. What then do you propose?’’
She reached up and pulled out the fastening in her hair, letting it fall like an ice slide about her shoulders. Evidently she was done with exercise for the day. ‘‘Wait, of course. Transit from the jump point takes four days. We still have more than seventy-six hours before she shapes orbit around Skye.’’
‘‘And then?’’
‘‘We shall see.’’
‘‘Galaxy Commander.’’
The chime of the communicator in her room in the planetary duke’s palace on the outskirts of New London, the Prefecture IX capital on Thames Bay, roused her from sleep in time to hear the words. Not that she had ever been a deep sleeper. Since suffering her injuries, she slept longer but even more fitfully.
She sat up, the sheet falling from her. Beneath it she slept naked. ‘‘Malvina Hazen here,’’ she acknowledged. ‘‘Speak.’’
Next to her, the pair of Delta Galaxy MechWarriors, male and female, with whom she had amused herself earlier in the evening, stirred in bed. She ignored them.
‘‘Warrior Tyrrell, communications center. We have received communication from the inbound Hell’s Horses WarShip, Galaxy Commander,’’ the disembodied voice said. It was male and obviously fighting to suppress excitement.
‘‘What does it say, Warrior Tyrrell?’’ she asked, amused at the notion of a spacecraft saying anything. From an early age she and her beloved sibkin—brother, lover, ally against the rest of the sibko and against the universe—had been secretly amused by their kin’s tendency toward extreme literal-mindedness.
‘‘The communication comes from Galaxy Commander Tristan Fletcher. He wishes to conduct a batchall for a Trial of Possession.’’
‘‘What prevents him?’’
‘‘He wishes to bargain with you in person, Galaxy Commander.’’
‘‘Very well,’’ she said. ‘‘On my way.’’
She jumped to her feet from amidst rumpled sky-blue satin sheets. The erstwhile planetary duke, Gregory Kelswa-Steiner, had lived in a manner fairly Spartan for Spheroid nobility. Which, with the immense silk-canopied bed and the Star League-era oil paintings on the wall, made it merely sumptuous by Clan standards. And this was only his secondary residence, not his hereditary holding in the planetary capital of New Glasgow to the north.
By longstanding habit Malvina kept both clothes and weapons close to hand wherever she slept. Given Jade Falcon temperaments, such habits could be risky when entertaining sexual partners. But only Aleks had
ever fought Malvina and lived. She gave the matter little thought.
Her current partners sat up now, blinking at her. ‘‘What?’’ she snapped. ‘‘You are still here?’’
‘‘You wish what?’’ Malvina asked in disbelief. Is it possible the signal is so distorted that the communications software is garbling the meaning? Is the solar storm that bad?
‘‘I said,’’ the voice of Galaxy Commander Tristan Fletcher repeated stiffly, popping with static, ‘‘I wish to challenge you to a Trial of Possession for the Mongol doctrine.’’
Malvina stared at the viewscreen in the palace’s communications center. All it showed was the image, relayed from astronomical telescopes orbiting Skye, of the Bucephalus itself, with starlight glinting from its armor plate and ominous turrets. Still over forty hours out at one-gee acceleration, the WarShip was too distant for visual communications, especially with the planet’s G8 primary—the larger member of a rare planet-possessing binary system—acting out the way it was.
‘‘The Mongol doctrine?’’ she echoed.
‘‘The modern Mongol mode of waging war,’’ the disembodied voice said. ‘‘The use of high mobility, the mangudai and the tulughma. It originated with Clan Hell’s Horses. You have wrongfully appropriated it. I will see it returned to its rightful owner.’’
Malvina drew in a deep breath. When she used the term, ‘‘Mongol doctrine’’ meant the deliberate use of terror to force enemies to submit, both during and after conquest. The Clans had long eschewed attacks on civilian populations as contrary to honor; the devastation from orbit of the Draconis Combine world of Turtle Bay by Clan Smoke Jaguar vessels had been a factor in bringing on the Trial of Annihilation that had wiped them out.
But times had changed, as the hated Devlin Stone had never ceased to remind them. One such change: Malvina and Aleks had defied Clan cultural disdain for the past by assiduous study of military history. Of course, they had come to almost diametrically opposite conclusions about the lessons that history taught. . . .
What Malvina’s followers, among the desant and increasingly throughout Clan Jade Falcon, came to call the Mongol doctrine was also, ironically, quite at odds with Hell’s Horses practices. Indeed, they were known for their shocking indulgence of conquered Spheroids by integrating them as greatly as possible into their strange and un-Clanlike system of emphasizing teamwork over individual drive, thus turning away from the Darwinian struggle of all against all that Kerensky in his wisdom had surely intended for his cauldron-born children.
He thinks I’m copying their battlefield tactics, she thought. She laughed. No one ever said the Horsemen were bright.
‘‘As you will, Galaxy Commander Tristan Fletcher,’’ she said aloud.
‘‘With what forces do you defend, Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen?’’
‘‘Myself, alone with a driver, in a single vehicle. You determine its class. I shall specify the Circle of Equals.’’
A stifled gasp ran through the dozen or so warriors and technicians who were either on duty in the communications center or had found plausible excuses to be there. A pause, then: ‘‘But are you not a MechWarrior, Galaxy Commander? ’’
The implied insult brought snarls from the listening Falcons. Malvina showed no reaction. ‘‘I am. But you do not fight in a BattleMech by preference, do you? You Horsemen love your armored vehicles. That is your specialty, Tristan Fletcher. Quiaff?’’
‘‘Aff.’’
‘‘Then I shall defend in a vehicle.’’
‘‘Have you experience in vehicular combat?’’ Fletcher asked after another pause.
‘‘Only insofar as I have commanded formations of vehicles. Not as crew.’’
‘‘You are . . . most honorable, Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen. I accept. We shall fight in Scimitar MkII tanks.’’
‘‘Seyla. I will inform you of my choice for location of the Circle of Equals within twenty-four hours.’’
One more pause, while the blustery solar winds sang their crackling song. ‘‘Bargained well and done. Tristan Fletcher out.’’
Malvina turned to her staff. ‘‘Get me maps of every desert and steppe on this world,’’ she commanded.
They stared at her. To take on a Hell’s Horses warrior in a ground-vehicle duel was akin to offering to wrestle an elemental barehanded. If she lost, it would bring dezgra upon the whole expeditionary force. It would also leave them all stuck inside virulently hostile territory, bereft of her superhuman wit and will, which had driven the desant so deep and kept it there.
She smiled at them. ‘‘My sibkin Aleksandr did wrestle an elemental barehanded,’’ she reminded them. ‘‘He won, too.’’
Her expression changed to an incandescent glare. ‘‘Now perform your tasks. I have no intention of losing!’’
2
The Falcon’s Reach
The Desolation, Skye
Jade Falcon Occupation Zone
3 August 3135
Just ahead and to the left of the speeding Scimitar, sand particles spurted into the air, driven by residual ground moisture and various organic matter flash-heated to steam by the kiss of a blue-green laser beam. As if seeing the shot by precognition, Wyndham had already sent the 35-ton hovertank skidding sideways, throwing up its own cloud of dust.
‘‘You disappoint me, Malvina Hazen,’’ Tristan Fletcher’s voice said in her headset. ‘‘I had hoped you might at least put up a fight. But if all you do is run from me, you do no more than delay the inevitable.’’
She had already spotted her opponent’s plume of yellow dust, streaming from the flank of a hill half a kilometer to her left. By reflex she rotated the turret to bear on him. She had no intention of firing. She possessed only one volley of four rockets, no reloads, and the other Scimitar was outside their short range. Her other weapons fired forward along the hovertank’s long axis with very little play. Fletcher was well outside her covered arc.
And all went according to her plan.
Wyndham arrested the Scimitar’s sideways skid with blasts of its steering jets. The vehicle scooted forward, rocking Malvina back against the rear of her padded command seat. Her headset howled at the ionization track left in the air as another small extended-range laser shot cracked mere meters behind the stubby little tank’s stern. The Scimitar plunged into the broad sand-bottomed mouth of an arroyo. A rocky ridge shielded them from further fire.
The gamble had paid off. Malvina once again knew where her enemy was. And he was inexorably getting closer.
Pylons flying the green-and-yellow pennons of Clan Jade Falcon and the black-and-orange of Clan Hell’s Horses marked a ten-kilometer square, called the Circle of Equals regardless of its shape, amid the desert known as The Desolation in the southern hemisphere of Skye’s supercontinent of New Scotland. Air-dropped radio beacons emitted tones that became audible at a quarter kilometer and grew louder as the combatants neared the boundary.
Overhead drifted helicopters from various Skye civilian news services, and even a dirigible like a fat, white sausage with red and black stripes that the Herrmanns AG media group usually used to cover sporting events. For all Malvina Hazen’s fondness for calculated frightfulness—her actual Mongol doctrine—once she had smashed Skye, her hand lay upon the populace with surprising lightness. Which she knew from history was also, ironically, the Mongol way.
The one iron prohibition was against media commentary directly bearing on the occupation or the occupiers, especially anything that might encourage resistance to the Clan. After a minor breach, a Falcon elemental in full battlearmor had invaded a Skye One studio and ripped a popular female news anchor limb from limb during the Live at 1800 tri-vid cast. The media got the message.
Today, the reporters and their holocams were out in force—not by Malvina’s permission but by her command. The images and sounds they captured would be carried as recordings by JumpShips throughout the Inner Sphere and beyond. It was Malvina Hazen’s way of putting all of humanity on notice for wha
t was in store for it. She doubted many, if any, would fully appreciate the import of her message.
But soon or late, they would learn.
‘‘You are mad’’ had been Bec Malthus’ comment when he learned of the batchall.
‘‘I thought we had established that long since.’’
Holding her arms out to her sides, Cynthy walked along the rampart of the New London ducal residence between two crenellations, a space of about a meter. For her it was two steps and turn about. She wore a blue-and-white dress, black shoes with white stockings. Her blond hair was tied in pigtails; the pink tip of her tongue protruded from the side of her mouth as she concentrated.
The two Spheroid women on duty from among those Malvina had assigned to the girl’s care went rushing toward her with cries of alarm. One was small and lean and dark, the other big, broad and redheaded. Both were Skye natives. Malvina wanted the girl raised under as close to locally appropriate conditions as possible.
The big red-haired woman got there first. Crooning in some unfathomable local dialect of English she plucked the girl away from the twenty-meter drop and folded her to her substantial bosom. By her tone of voice she was alternately scolding and soothing. Cynthy looked at her blankly.
‘‘Fascinating,’’ Malvina said as the big woman set the girl down, faced away from the rampart and gave her an encouraging little pat on the behind. Malvina wondered what the fuss was about.
Irritated, Malthus shook his head. A MechWarrior of his Turkina Keshik had sneered at Malvina Hazen’s coddling of the Spheroid child two days before, not long after the Galaxy commander had returned with her. Malvina called out the man on the spot. Fortunately, it had been out of doors, outside a barracks at the edge of town used by the occupiers. Fortunately. Because she had opened his muscle-ribbed belly with her knife, yanked out several meters of his intestines, scaled his back and throttled him with a bloody, gray-green loop of his own guts.
