A Rending of Falcons

by Victor Milán

  Heinz-Otto María Manoel de Soares zu Mannstein, Markgraf von Texeira, nodded his ponderous head. He was a big, stout man in his fifties, with a snappy cream-and-brown uniform immaculately tailored to his expansive frame and a short maroon cape about his wide shoulders. He leaned on a thick cane of Santa Marta blackthorn that had a great gleaming silver ram’s head for a crown.

  ‘‘I understand, Laborer Katya,’’ he said, reading her tag. ‘‘But I am accredited to Khan Jana Pryde on Sudeten as an official emissary from the archon. My duty remains to get to Sudeten as expeditiously as possible. Can you provide me transport within the occupation zone?’’

  It was a bit unkind, and he instantly chided himself: she could do nothing at all without consulting a Clan superior, who might or might not deign to comprehend the issue and might in fact decide to punish her for troubling him. Or her: Clanners, he knew from a lifelong experience, were equal opportunity bastards.

  Bullying a subordinate is unworthy of a merchant prince, he told himself sternly, much less a member of the Lyran Diplomatic Corps. He thought thoughts about his long-time acquaintance, the Archon Melissa Steiner, which, had they been spoken aloud, might have been construed by some as seditious. I should never have let her bully me into taking this verdammte assignment.

  He smiled at the woman, hoping to draw the sting from his ill-chosen words. Instead, she shrank from him. Racial and ethnic hatred were alive and well, and stalking the Inner Sphere, but seldom based on the color of one’s skin. Still, she was tiny and pale, and he was enormous and very, very black. The smile he showed her was full of great big teeth, almost blue-white against his skin’s darkness, and his eyes were a vivid blue. They customarily held a merry expression, which he had practiced for hours in a mirror in his youth. In fact he usually was merry. Usually.

  But he’d lost two days already wading through the impenetrable swamps of Clan Jade Falcon’s bureaucracy on Mkuranga. It would have tried the patience of Saint Theresa. Although Saint Theresa, come to think of it, hadn’t actually been patient, if he remembered his lives of the saints correctly. It depended on which one, perhaps.

  ‘‘I—I—I,’’ the woman in the russet jumpsuit said.

  But von Texeira was back in charge of himself now. He increased his smile’s candlepower, which if it did not visibly reassure the woman at least helped get him in the proper state of mind. ‘‘Forgive me,’’ he said. She blinked. Those weren’t words you heard very often from Clanners like her world’s rulers. ‘‘I know that my difficulties are not your fault. Nor do I wish to make them your problem.’’

  They were in the offices of what once had been, he suspected, a school for junior pupils. Students were now probably educated in a former factory, while what the factory had made was now produced in an erstwhile ice-skating rink. The Jade Falcons had, as always, disposed their military assets with skill and obsessive precision according to their doctrines (which in the real world were not always the most effective, thank the saints, or otherwise everyone would be born out of an Erlenmeyer flask and strut around saying quiaff and quineg all the time and never, ever, using contractions). In all else they might as well have been birds, in truth: crows or pigeons, indiscriminate and sloppy in their roosting.

  ‘‘Why don’t you call your superior and say that I insist on seeing him or her,’’ he told the frightened functionary. ‘‘If it would help to imply that I threatened you, please feel free.’’ And he smiled as nonthreateningly as he could.

  It must have worked. She brushed at a stray wisp of straw-colored hair and smiled tentatively. He had given her an out: a Clan warrior would expect nothing but timidness from a mere laborer, especially one who still belonged ethnically to the Inner Sphere. As did many, especially on the fringes of the occupation zone, despite decades of attempting to assimilate subject populations into the all-encompassing Clan way.

  Trust the feisty, bucket-headed Falcons to spurn the course Clan Ghost Bear had taken—of mutual assimilation, both cultures merging into a reasonably functional whole, he thought. Turkina’s brood preferred to play the role of occupiers, decade after decade, trying to ram their way down their Spheroid subjects’ throats. And always puzzled by their indifferent success in doing so.

  Turning away, the laborer woman spoke softly into a communicator.

  ‘‘You walk with a limp," MechWarrior Billy said. ‘‘You are a wounded warrior?’’

  Von Texeira smiled broadly. MechWarrior Billy? he was thinking. Do these people breed for a tin ear for language, along with superhuman strength and reflexes?

  ‘‘Ah, no,’’ he said, ‘‘nothing so heroic. I lost my right leg’’— he slapped himself on the thigh, which produced an impressive synthetic clack even through his uniform trousers—‘‘in an unfortunate encounter with a spaceport front-end loader. I have spent my life as a merchant, you see.’’

  MechWarrior Billy didn’t bother to conceal his sneer. He had not invited his guest to sit down. Then again, his narrow rump occupied the only chair in the small office, positioned behind a metal desk painted an unattractive olive drab.

  ‘‘I see,’’ he said, as if, like an incontinent spaniel, von Texeira had just deposited something on the thin, puke-colored carpet. Billy was tall and lean, with close-cropped blond hair and features that looked as if they’d been flayed from a normal man’s face and stretched over an adze. ‘‘You are Lyran, quiaff?’’

  Von Texeira beamed all over his big face. ‘‘Of course,’’ he said. Since he couldn’t do a music-hall German accent— he was speaking German—he affected his best Hayseed Parvenu, like a Nova Suevian pig farmer whose father had won the lottery. The Jade Falcon, of course, spoke perfect German, having been raised to it along with the usual Clan English. Except he made it even more soulless and mechanical than it was supposed to sound. It’s uncanny, von Texeira thought. ‘‘We’re all merchants at heart, you know. Not great warriors like the Clans.’’

  MechWarrior Billy nodded with solemnity as preposterous as his name.

  ‘‘You are a spy?’’ he asked.

  For half a second the smile on von Texeira’s big face froze in place. Given his years of experience in negotiations with heads of state and boardrooms, half a second was a very long time.

  Then his laugh boomed out. ‘‘I am a member of the Lyran Diplomatic Corps!’’ he declared with a renewed smile.

  ‘‘Whose members are notoriously spies.’’

  Von Texeira shrugged. ‘‘All diplomats are spies. At least we are honest about it.’’

  The MechWarrior said nothing to that.

  ‘‘I carry accreditation to your khan, Jana Pryde, on Sudeten, ’’ von Texeira said, bending ponderously forward, dropping a plastic datachip on the metal desktop and pushing it forward with a broad fingertip. ‘‘Unfortunately, I find myself unable to get to the planet.’’

  The MechWarrior looked at him. ‘‘What has that to do with me?’’ He wasn’t being arrogant or sarcastic, von Texeira knew. He honestly didn’t understand.

  ‘‘If my ship cannot cross the frontier,’’ von Texeira said, ‘‘then I must request transport aboard a Jade Falcon vessel.’’

  ‘‘That is impossible.’’

  It was so impossible the Falcon neglected to be snotty about it, just as if the Spheroid diplomat had suggested he put the sun in his jumpsuit pocket.

  Von Texeira smiled wider. ‘‘Nothing is impossible, my friend. All it takes is the requisite will.’’

  MechWarrior Billy frowned. It was a pensive frown, von Texeira was pleased to see, and not an angry one. ‘‘There is much to what you say,’’ the MechWarrior said.

  Von Texeira reached into his tunic. The Jade Falcon didn’t flinch, but his eyes narrowed. A big hand came out with a square-sectioned bottle. ‘‘Scots whiskey,’’ von Texeira said. ‘‘Glengarry Black Label. Accept it with my compliments.’’

  ‘‘Is this a bribe?’’

  ‘‘Of course not. It would be dishonorable to offer you a bribe. I wou
ld never dishonor a brave Clan warrior. You would most certainly kill me. Consider it, rather, a freewill token of my esteem.’’

  Billy accepted it with a scarred hand and examined it carefully. ‘‘Difficult to come by now.’’

  ‘‘Yes,’’ von Texeira said, ‘‘since your Clanswoman Malvina Hazen caught Glengarry in her talons.’’

  His haughty Jade Falcon self-control unable to keep a look of regret from his aquiline features, the MechWarrior thrust the bottle back at von Texeira. ‘‘I cannot accept this. I cannot help you.’’

  ‘‘It wasn’t a bribe, remember? It’s yours regardless.’’

  Billy set it back on the desktop. ‘‘A state of tension exists between the Commonwealth and Clan Jade Falcon,’’ he said. ‘‘This is why the border is sealed.’’

  "I’m well aware of that, MechWarrior." The desant led by the siblings Hazen and Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus had panicked, and angered, the whole Commonwealth by raiding Porrima and brutally conquering Chaffee.

  ‘‘It is forbidden for Jade Falcon vessels to transport outsiders.’’

  ‘‘Even one with a safe-passage from Khan Jana Pryde herself?’’

  ‘‘There are no exceptions.’’

  ‘‘It has taken me three days to find you, friend Jade Falcon,’’ von Texeira said. Billy’s eyes widened; von Texeira was reasonably sure no one had ever called him that before. ‘‘With great respect, I ask: is there anyone on Mkuranga who can grant me this permission?’’

  ‘‘There is not.’’

  Von Texeira nodded briskly. It wasn’t the Clan way to lie, and the Jade Falcons prided themselves on being the ne plus ultra of all Clanners. He didn’t take that to mean they wouldn’t lie. They were human, despite the lengths to which they went to conceal the fact. But they were no bloody good at lying.

  And one had to be very good at lying indeed to slip one past Heinz-Otto von Texeira. He knew that without the least scrap of doubt or vanity.

  ‘‘Travel across the Jade Falcon Occupation Zone,’’ the MechWarrior said, a bit ponderously, as if uncertain whether he was speaking out of turn, ‘‘is not proscribed.’’

  ‘‘In other words, if I find my own transport, I won’t be hindered?’’

  ‘‘Precisely.’’

  He nodded. ‘‘I thank you, MechWarrior Billy. May you soon win your Bloodname.’’

  The warrior stood. He was almost as tall as the diplomat. Which made him tall indeed. ‘‘I have something I wish to say,’’ he said. ‘‘I am Jade Falcon. I am a Crusader. I believe in the vision of Kerensky and our duty as Clans to bring order and peace to the Inner Sphere.

  ‘‘But what is being done in our name in The Republic— this so-called ‘Mongol doctrine,’ the deliberate devastation of your world of Chaffee, the use of chemical agents—’’ He shook his narrow head. ‘‘It is dishonor.’’

  ‘‘Do you really think so?’’ the female elemental asked. She had a cap of curly, dark blond hair, tanned skin, green eyes. She was a dainty 215 centimeters or so tall.

  ‘‘Absolutely,’’ said Rorion Klimt. They stood on the steps of the occupation headquarters speaking English. The Clanners here in occupied Steinerspace tended to speak flawless German from childhood, and so did he. Whereas he spoke English, the Clan lingua franca, with what most Anglophone women considered a charming Brazilian Portuguese accent.

  When it served his purposes, anyway.

  ‘‘The somewhat somber green of your tank top accentuates the emerald green of your eyes.’’ Among other things. ‘‘It’s really most fetching.’’

  He was a man of average height for a Spheroid, or even below, which meant he was dwarfed by the off-duty elemental wearing shapeless tan cargo pants. He had dark olive skin, a narrow head with slanted eyes, and cheekbones and a forehead rendered expansive by the hasty retreat his dark brown hair was beating to either side of a thin salient. He had about him the easy, wiry, slightly feral grace of an alley cat. Closely tailored to his lithe form, even the grayish-greenish Steiner Feldgrau uniform trimmed with forest green looked natty. His chauffeur’s cap rested on the seat of the armored limousine parked at the curb in front of the drab brownstone.

  The elemental frowned. ‘‘I never really thought of it that way.’’ It was hot out on the street of the capital of New Katanga, and humid. Whereas his keen features were dry, her face, which really was quite pretty in its way, shone with sweat. Just as he and his boss looked right at home among the sparse street traffic of dark-skinned local inhabitants, both felt perfectly at home in the climate. The Clanners, predominantly though not exclusively of Northern European ancestry, suffered here. They preferred colder worlds—more suitable to their chilled-glass-decanted souls, he felt.

  ‘‘You simply don’t understand what a beautiful woman you are.’’

  ‘‘We are not encouraged to think in such terms,’’ she said. ‘‘Do you really think so?’’

  He nodded. ‘‘Has no one ever said that to you before?’’

  ‘‘No.’’

  ‘‘Truly?’’ He shook his vulpine head. ‘‘A monstrous shame. Is not physical beauty, after all, both a product of a good bloodline and disciplined cultivation and maintenance, like combat prowess? I should think your fellow Clansmen would honor it.’’

  She pursed out her lips in a little moue, considering. It made her look as adorable as a person over two meters tall could look. Don’t let your prejudices gull you, Rorion reminded himself sharply: it was easy to dismiss Clanners as dim by reason of their ponderous and clunky speech, like elemental battlearmor with poorly maintained bearings, and especially easy to disregard their giant gene-engineered power infantry precisely because of their size. Still, he found himself suspecting that elemental Elaine was not the sharpest polycarbide cutter in Turkina’s toolroom.

  ‘‘There may be something to what you say,’’ she said pensively.

  ‘‘Of course there is, my sweet.’’ Then, glancing around, he said, ‘‘But I see my boss approaching. I fear I will have to let you go about your business, dear child.’’

  She smiled. ‘‘Very well, Ho-ree-own,’’ she said, carefully pronouncing the name the way he had taught her.

  ‘‘Tschau, baby.’’

  His eyes followed her admiringly as she swung down the street. A moment later Heinz-Otto von Texeira came gimping with surprising alacrity, given his prosthetic and cane, down the broad steps between the cement lions weathered into pug dogs.

  The diplomat’s gaze followed his chauffeur’s. ‘‘You’re incorrigible, Rorion,’’ he said.

  He spoke Brazilian Portuguese, one of two native languages they shared. The odds of any Clansman or woman understanding Portuguese approximated the odds of von Texeira’s being hit by a meteorite as he stood here on the sidewalk, which was heaved and cracked by the roots of Mkuranga’s overly-energetic flora. Abstract interest in languages was a Clan preoccupation to about the same extent as knitting and dancing cotillion.

  Rorion flashed his brilliant smile. ‘‘My family has been incorrigible for generations,’’ he said. ‘‘Usually in service to yours, Heinz-Otto.’’

  ‘‘It’s a partnership that works,’’ his superior acknowledged with a mammoth shrug. ‘‘I envy you the role, sometimes: you get to let yourselves be seen to be scoundrels.’’

  ‘‘I don’t know,’’ said Rorion. ‘‘Remember your cousin Waldemar.’’

  ‘‘I try not to. Take me back to the consulate. We can cool off and consider our options.’’

  Von Texeira breathed a sigh of relief as his broad behind came to rest on the limo’s broad, cream-colored leather rear seat, taking his not inconsiderable weight off foot and stump. The machine was a Fury armored limousine provided by the Lyran consulate. With six big, independently powered wheels, armor plate and a remote-controlled pop-up turret containing two Browning-Sperry machine guns (cleverly concealed in the extra-thick roof of the passenger compartment) it was for all intents and purposes a ten-ton light combat car. Wh
ile assiduously trying to stamp out private ownership even of small arms—a hallmark of tyranny, to von Texeira’s mind—the quirky Clan sense of honor permitted official representatives of the Great Houses and The Republic wide leeway in possessing combat equipment, up to and including BattleMechs. Von Texeira suspected it was precisely because any of these representatives might turn into full-blown combatants at any time, given the way Devlin Stone’s peace was dissolving.

  Rorion turned up the air conditioning. Similar though Tshombe’s climate was to their homeworld of Recife’s, it didn’t mean either man enjoyed the sticky heat.

  Cargo and utility vehicles made up the bulk of traffic. Pedestrians thronged the sidewalks. Clan Jade Falcon discouraged private vehicles almost as vigorously as they did firearms. The foot traffic walked rapidly; their masters discouraged dawdling by Clan laborers and locals alike. They kept their gazes down, lest they be deemed to challenge some passing warrior, which would have swift, and swiftly fatal, results.

  As if by magic the traffic thinned. Between the tall façades of Tshombe’s business district, faced with local limestone and glowing almost blue in the sunlight, a BattleMech came striding. It was a Phoenix Hawk IIc, the jutting beak shape of its cockpit and the flamboyance of the folded airfoil wings fastened to its back-mounted jump jets marking it unmistakably as the new Falcon mark of the old Steel Viper standby. A Point of elementals in the squat power-armor suits the Inner Sphere forces initially nicknamed ‘‘toads’’ tramped beside its taloned feet.

  As they passed, the eighty-ton ’Mech ostentatiously turned its head as if scrutinizing them. Von Texeira felt a certain tightening of his scrotum, knowing that the ’Mech mounted a heavy minigun in its head. It made him laugh aloud.

  ‘‘I love dealing with the Clans,’’ he declared enthusiastically as BattleMech and retinue clanked past, causing vibrations that could be plainly felt even through the limo’s luxurious suspension. ‘‘It’s like walking in a cage full of wild beasts. Bracing!’’