by Victor Milán
Von Texeira stared at her a moment. Then he put back his great head and laughed. ‘‘I grow to like you, Master Merchant.’’
‘‘That may or may not prove wise,’’ she said. ‘‘So the Falcons deny you transport?’’
‘‘That, at least, requires no omniscience. I’m here, after all.’’
‘‘Accommodations in my ship would seem scarcely adequate to a leading merchant prince of the Lyran Commonwealth. ’’
‘‘Luxury liners currently don’t travel to the capital of the Jade Falcon Occupation Zone.’’ He smiled and laid his elbows on the table. ‘‘You may not believe this, Master Merchant, but this is not the first time I’ve had to seek . . . alternative means of transport into Clan territory. Although I must admit it is the first time I didn’t have to worry about evading official notice.’’
‘‘Indeed. You want a lift to Sudeten?’’
‘‘As you say—indeed.’’
She flipped the silver-blond scalp lock that hung down one side of her otherwise smooth-shaven head. ‘‘It’ll cost you.’’
He held up a blunt forefinger. ‘‘Please note that while they do nothing to aid my passage into the Zone, they have not forbidden it. I do carry a safe-passage from the khan herself.’’
‘‘Which, if you run into adherents of Malvina Hazen’s new Mongol philosophy, may or may not be worth a discarded jerky wrapper.’’
‘‘True enough.’’
‘‘And, of course,’’ she continued, ‘‘Turkina has not gone out of her way to make Sudeten an appealing vacation destination for little Foxes.’’ It was no secret either: the least orthodox of Clans and the most happily fanatical of Clan traditionalists did not make a comfortable combination.
Heinz-Otto von Texeira sighed. As a master negotiator, he knew far too well just what she had him by.
‘‘It’ll cost me,’’ he agreed.
Boot heels rapping on floors of dark green marble shined to a mirror finish, Star Colonel Noritomo Helmer held his head high as he strode the halls of the erstwhile planetary governor’s palace. With Malvina Hazen I never know, he thought with a certain wry amusement, whether I go to receive accolades, or death.
MechWarriors wearing holstered sidearms escorted him. He recognized three as among the most fanatic of Malvina’s new Mongol adherents. One was a Star captain from her brother Aleks’ old Zeta Galaxy, Shar Roshak. He found it disturbing that a Bloodname from Aleksandr Hazen’s former command should join openly with Malvina.
They came into an echoing space, with soaring buttresses of white stone dappled in afternoon sunlight filtering down through skylights high overhead. At the far side of the circular floor Malvina stood near the gallery that ran around it, conversing with half a dozen officers. The somber form of Beckett Malthus loomed nearby, a step behind Malvina, as if to impose his presence on the discussion without directly participating.
And there you have the Crow in a nutshell, Noritomo thought. For once Malvina’s pet, the orphaned child from the southern half of Skye’s lone landmass, was absent. That relieved him. The unnatural quality of the relationship disturbed him in ways even he could not pin to a board.
His escorts swung out to stand arrayed along the gallery to both sides in the same haughty silence in which they had accompanied him. He walked unhesitatingly forward. Malvina spoke in animated fashion, her black hand and her white one cutting the air in fluid but emphatic sweeps. Her listeners leaned toward her, laughing.
It was as if Noritomo’s mind sped to outpace the physical world, so that he seemed to move underwater, with the pale light falling on his face as through a pool’s surface overhead. He saw more clearly than he could remember seeing in his life, as if truly with a falcon’s eyes.
Thoughtfulness was not a virtue Turkina’s talons were encouraged to cultivate. Noritomo Helmer understood and even approved of that: he knew his own propensity to think—and second-guess himself—had brought the desant and him personally disaster in the Kimball system. Yet even Malvina had acknowledged that his thoughtfulness had proven vital to their victory on Skye. So he reflected now.
The six men and women, MechWarriors, who clustered around Malvina took on a strange aspect, as if they were raptors of a different kind: vultures. No, he corrected, something worse.
Because animals cannot act with calculated cruelty.
What they showed was not the simple fierce courage of a falcon, joy in the hunt and—yes—the hot blood of the kill. He shared that and was not ashamed: when he had answered Malvina’s haughty challenge, before the final attack on Skye, with the simple words ‘‘I am Jade Falcon,’’ he had spoken no more or less than the truth.
But these MechWarriors hungered clearly for pain. For the terror in their victim’s eyes, for the sight of ragged refugees fleeing without hope from horror beyond comprehension. From a desire, not to save the people of the Inner Sphere from themselves, but to feast on their carcasses while they still lived and to savor their screams of agony.
And he realized what he despised, truly despised, about Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen and her Mongol doctrine: it was indulgent.
Time caught him up. He strode forward again briskly, head high, as befit a Jade Falcon marching to meet Destiny—good or ill.
Malvina smiled at his approach. The others turned lean and eager faces to him. They would welcome him so, he knew, whether or not they meant to rend his flesh like vultures.
‘‘It is good of you to join us, Galaxy Commander,’’ she said.
Now the Star colonel’s step faltered. He glanced around. Malvina stood before him like a tiny ice statue; Bec Malthus lurked behind, most of all like a vulture—or a carrion crow. For a wild moment Noritomo Helmer wondered whether Malvina was hallucinating, or greeting the shade of her dead brother—
Malvina’s attendants gave yipping laughs, making him think of them momentarily as dogs.
He stopped and looked at the diminutive woman, with her hair cascading about the shoulders of her midnight-black uniform. ‘‘Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen,’’ he said, ‘‘I do not understand.’’
‘‘You are seldom so slow on the uptake, Noritomo. Or, to repeat, Galaxy Commander Helmer.’’
He stared at her in confusion. His cheeks burned. He could think of nothing to say.
It was Bec Malthus who rescued him—which made him resent the man more somehow. ‘‘You have earned promotion, Noritomo Helmer,’’ he said in his deep voice that rolled like surf. ‘‘You have proven yours are the steadiest hands in which to entrust the expeditionary force—and by extension, the fate of our crusade.’’
Noritomo looked at Malvina. He caught himself on the cusp of asking if they were joking.
‘‘What of you?’’ he asked, his voice rougher than he intended.
‘‘The Falcon has abandoned her boldest fledglings,’’ Malvina said. ‘‘Or rather, someone pretending to serve Turkina has. You have seen how we languish here, a lonely salient driven deep into our enemy’s side. Yet the promised Jade Falcon touman does not come. Instead we are sent culls in numbers insufficient to make good our losses. Someone must now return to the nest and demand accounting.’’
He stood to attention and waited.
‘‘We go to Sudeten,’’ Malthus said. ‘‘Galaxy Commander Hazen and myself.’’
‘‘I take with me the Emerald Talon and a scratch Galaxy, ’’ Malvina said, ‘‘comprising elements of Delta and Zeta Galaxies and Turkina Keshik. Our equipment, obviously, goes with us.’’
It was a huge a bite out of his already overstretched resources. He would lose a disproportionate number of his best warriors. But the sting of that loss was soothed, not inconsiderably, by the knowledge that they would also be the worst of Malvina’s bloodthirsty fanatics. The more benign vision of Noritomo Helmer—and Malvina’s late brother Aleksandr—would prevail in the Falcon’s Reach.
For the moment. The obvious question was whether Khan Jana Pryde would confirm such an appointment. But it would show wea
kness to ask.
‘‘You honor me, Galaxy Commander,’’ he said. He spoke midway between Malvina, the desant’s true commander, and Malthus, the titular one.
‘‘Not at all,’’ she said. ‘‘You have redeemed your failures, and so proven your worth to the Falcon.’’
Of course, he thought, each caress from the velvet glove must be followed by a slap. . . .
‘‘What are your orders?’’ he asked a point in space.
Malvina laughed. ‘‘Doubtless they will surprise you, Galaxy Commander Noritomo Helmer. They are: hold. Hold what the Falcon has seized, consolidate the grasp of Her claws.’’
‘‘Should a target of opportunity present itself—?’’
‘‘Ignore it. I know that every Clansman and woman and machine we have is barely enough to hold our salient. I know that I deprive you of some of our finest steel. To expand our holdings could only weaken our grasp—fatally.
‘‘In fact, should it prove necessary, you may withdraw from one or more planets we have seized. Anything, so long as you keep a foothold in the Inner Sphere. And above all hold Skye—your life upon that!’’
With effort he kept his face impassive. Mad, she was, and he skirted the edge of calling her worse. But she still possessed one of the keenest military minds in Clan Jade Falcon, which meant the human universe. As she had just shown.
‘‘My life upon it,’’ he agreed.
‘‘Very well,’’ Malvina said. ‘‘We depart immediately. My new Galaxy already boards shuttles. May Turkina’s wings be your shield.’’
So that is why I’ve been getting so many reports of activity today, Helmer thought.
Malvina turned and marched out of the echoing rotunda. Her retinue followed like a pack. Last went Beckett Malthus, after one last, hooded look of his eyes, the color of pond water, at the desant’s newly anointed commander.
Galaxy Commander Noritomo Helmer stood as if frozen. Not by the task before him, daunting as it was: no man or woman could become and remain a Star colonel in Clan Jade Falcon without welcoming any challenge.
It was the implications of Malvina’s act—and Malthus’ machinations, for surely he had encouraged her, if not put her up to it—that rooted his feet to the marble. For the two surviving original commanders of the expeditionary force to return to Sudeten, without orders, aboard one of the most fearsome WarShips remaining in human space . . .
It took enormous effort of will to keep his limbs from trembling. He was struck to the soul with the greatest fear he had ever known.
Not for himself.
For Clan Jade Falcon.
He could see only one outcome to Malvina’s actions: the unthinkable.
Falcon against Falcon. A Rending.
6
Hammarr, Sudeten
Jade Falcon Occupation Zone
12 September 3135
‘‘It would appear, milord,’’ said Rorion from the front passenger seat of the limousine the Lyran Embassy had had waiting for them at Hammarr spaceport, ‘‘that someone has given the anthill a mighty kick.’’
He spoke German out of politeness to the driver, a young redheaded woman in gray Lyran livery.
Outside the long, low-slung ground car’s tinted ferroglass windows, people moved not with the briskness one associated with a planet reasonably assimilated to Clan ways, but with a sort of jerky energy, like lizards on a hot day. Not that it was hot: it was seldom hot at this latitude on southern Sudeten, and now it was winter anyway. The sky was like a white sheet hung before a pallid white ghost of a sun, and a half-frozen rain drifted down out of the sky as if diffident about sullying the Falcon capital’s streets.
Men and women in the drab laborer jumpsuits dawdled uncharacteristically, heads together in conversation on street corners and in doorways. Nor did the solahma enforcers in padded vests and helmets dotting the broad boulevard touch them up to return them to their duties, von Texeria noticed. They too were busy gossiping amongst themselves.
Hammarr was a city of domes: some flattened on top, some left round, but all built low to the ground and just reeking of structural strength. The sole tall building on the skyline was the Falcon’s Perch: residence and command center of the Falcon khan herself, spiking into spires two hundred meters into the thin and chill blue sky, and all of stressed cement reinforced with endosteel and laced with supersized synthetic strands. After being largely leveled during the Falcon arrival the century before, the city had been rebuilt to withstand bombardment.
The streets were broad, the traffic sparse and rigidly controlled. They were as clean, von Texeira thought, as if vacuumed and hand-scrubbed every hour on the hour.
‘‘This city has all the charm of a crematorium,’’ Rorion complained. ‘‘It combines all the less delightful characteristics of a factory and a fortress.’’
‘‘What you’d expect,’’ von Texeira said, in Portuguese this time, ‘‘of a world settled by Germans and ruled for eighty years by a Crusader Clan.’’
‘‘Sim,’’ Rorion agreed.
‘‘But what is all the excitement about?’’ the merchant prince turned diplomat asked, in German again. ‘‘I wouldn’t think the serfs were permitted emotion on Sudeten.’’
‘‘Haven’t you heard, Margrave von Texeira?’’ the driver asked.
‘‘We’ve heard nothing since entering the system.’’ Through a pirate point, of course, less than a day out from the capital world at a leisurely one-gee accel-decel. Nor had Sudeten orbital control offered more than the conventional challenge to identify themselves as Senna Rodríguez’s cargo ship, Gypsy Tailwind, approached the planet. The Falcons were not fond of the Sea Foxes but were resigned to their ways, it seemed.
‘‘A battleship has jumped into the system at the zenith point,’’ the driver said, awe evident in her voice. WarShips were rare; a Clan battleship represented the greatest concentration of killing power in history. It was as if a two-hundred-foot nuclear-powered dinosaur out of a Draconis Combine tri-vid show were descending on the city. ‘‘A Nightlord. They say it’ll shape Sudeten orbit at any minute!’’
Von Texeira felt a sensation in his stomach like a DropShip on assault descent. ‘‘Not—’’
‘‘It’s the Emerald Talon, milord. Word at the embassy is that both Beckett Malthus and Malvina Hazen are aboard.’’
Von Texeira brought his ham-sized fist down on the seat beside him with a sound like a pistol crack. ‘‘Merda!’’
‘‘Lord?’’ the driver asked in confusion.
‘‘He means Scheisse,’’ Rorion translated helpfully.
‘‘Lord Margrave, I am sorry if I spoke out of turn.’’ Words tumbled from the young driver’s mouth. ‘‘I know it’s wrong to repeat gossip. I only thought—’’
Von Texeira reached forward to give her a reassuring pat on her right epaulette. ‘‘You have served well, dear child. I wasn’t responding to the fact that you spoke, but to what you said.’’
‘‘There’s something the Sea Foxes didn’t know, in any event,’’ Rorion said in Portuguese. Triumphantly, for he found the Foxes more than a trifle smug, though much better companions to his tastes (admittedly low) than any Clanners he had ever met. And he had met more than a few.
‘‘Or didn’t see fit to share with us,’’ his master pointed out in the same language.
Rorion scowled. ‘‘There’s that.’’
If the sterile winter streets of Hammarr buzzed with muted concern, there was nothing at all muted about the mood inside the Lyran Commonwealth embassy. The great stressed-concrete structure, not far from the khan’s mid-town fortress, practically vibrated with a resonance just this side of outright panic.
Ambassador Graves was a portly man whose head did not quite measure up to his girth. The face on the front of that small head, sticking up like a bud from the stand-up collar of his mauve-and-lavender afternoon diplomatic dress jacket, was that of a frightened white rabbit.
He stood by the sideboard in his dark-paneled offic
e pouring fluid from a square cut-glass decanter whose facets twinkled in the track lighting. "P-plum brandy?’’ he asked, pouring about half of it over the exposed white cuff of his shirt. Von Texeira had to look away; the liqueur was bright, deep red. It made the man look as if he had slashed his wrist. ‘‘Soothes the nerves wonderfully, I find. You’ll not credit this, but it’s actually quite good. Jade Falcon merchants make it from fruit grown on land they own. In the equatorial zone, don’t you know, where it’s warm a good three months a year.’’
Von Texeira raised a brow. ‘‘Summer Home label? I know it well. We import it ourselves. Paying extortionate prices to the Falcon merchants, I might add.’’ It was another testament to the Jade Falcon merchants’ status as prophets without honor among their own that of all the Clans only they and, naturally, the Sea Foxes, should be canny enough to produce luxury goods for export to the decadent Inner Sphere.
‘‘Your taste is superb, Excellency,’’ he added. Though it took not so much a refined palate as a pulse to prefer Summer Home brandy to what the Clanners themselves drank. That was suitable only for stripping very old enamel from the bulkheads of scows.
He stepped forward and picked up the glass to spare the man the impossible task of handing it to him. ‘‘I thank you, Excellency.’’
‘‘Proßt,’’ said the ambassador, and dashed his own glass straight down. He managed not to spill a drop.
Inwardly von Texeira sighed. In the best of all possible worlds House Steiner’s representative to their powerful potential foe would be a man or woman of indomitable courage and resolve, a lion to their Jade Falcon. That best world, von Texeira always reflected, must lie in some other galaxy, or possibly an alternate universe. In the dimensions he inhabited, a truly forceful representative would inevitably provoke the famous Falcon temper. And be shipped home to the Commonwealth in a cryo-coffin—worst case, delivered by Jade Falcon invasion fleet.
