by Victor Milán
Grinding his powerful jaw in fury he continued to punish the tank as it tried to back out of harm’s way, until a violent explosion ripped the turret apart. Then, his cockpit like a furnace and redline warnings shrilling in his ears, he turned his weapons toward the nearest attacking ’Mech, a Falcon Shadow Hawk IIc.
The battering his Night Gyr had received had disabled many of its sensors. Otherwise Chistu’s battle computer would have warned him that Horsemen in Sylph powersuits had infiltrated to the feet of his immobile ’Mech and begun to scale its gouged and pitted flanks.
His first warning came when a servo-powered claw began pounding on the left side of his viewscreen. He raised his ’Mech’s arm so that the glowing hot muzzle of his remaining functional particle cannon touched one of the armor suit’s feet. With a sizzle it welded in place. He discharged the weapon, filling the cockpit with hideous glare and vaporizing the rear half of suit and occupant.
The viewscreen’s other side burst inward like hail, as ferroglass sugared rather than rake its occupant with sharper-than-razor shrapnel. Roaring in fury, Galaxy Commander Erik Chistu turned, clawing for his autopistol.
The peculiar hard-edged brilliance of coherent ruby light filled his cockpit, his eyes, his skull, his being—and was the last thing he knew.
Having accepted the adulation of her Mongol commanders, Malvina sat in a sort of warm haze inside her pavilion. She had ordered Cynthy choppered to her from the Bec de Corbin, where she waited out the battle under the care of scientist- and technician-caste minders. Now the girl half sat, half sprawled against Malvina’s leg with her teddy bear dangling from one hand. Her blue eyes gazed calmly at the warriors assembled in the tent—taking all in, while giving back nothing.
If the Falcons had been scandalized at Malvina’s indulgence of a Spheroid child, they had long ago learned to show no sign of it in range of Malvina’s lethal temper. The Horses seemed if anything to find it charming, and openly discussed the possibility of acquiring Inner Sphere children of their own as pets. Now, after today’s monumental victory, she could literally do no wrong in the eyes of any in the Golden Ordun.
Armored elementals thrust into the tent two dozen men and women. Many wore nothing more than trunks and cooling vests over the meshwork bodysuits of Clan MechWarriors. Others wore torn and scorched tanker battledress. Tattoos marked them as Jade Falcon warriors—if their hauteur, furious even in captivity, did not sufficiently identify them.
A braid of three colored strands encircled each captive’s wrist: a bondcord, indicating the Clan, unit and warrior who had compelled their surrender. Not surprisingly, most cords showed Hell’s Horses black and orange.
The bonded prisoners constituted but a small portion of the tremendous isorla that had fallen to the victors that day. Horrendous as the destruction of humans and machines had been, seldom was a BattleMech damaged so badly it could not be rebuilt and brought back to service, and almost never beyond being salvageable for precious parts. Vehicles were more fragile, but still had high recovery rates. Malvina had to acknowledge another benefit of Malthus’ amnesty: those who took it brought over their equipment in at least workable condition.
But while the fate of captured machines and scrap was not controversial, the human bounties might well be.
With the captives came a few Mongol Falcons and Horsemen who had taken captives that day. ‘‘Is everyone here who claims a bonded captive?’’ Malvina asked.
Her new aide, Star Captain Timon—her most recent aide, Star Captain Felice, having died in her Eyrie today (Malvina went through aides at a prodigal clip)—moved through the crowd asking quiet questions. Malvina slumped on her throne smiling vaguely. Fatigue had begun to set in.
The bondholders identified themselves. ‘‘Step forward,’’ Malvina ordered. The Horses obeyed without so much as a glance for confirmation at their own Galaxy commander, Malvina was gratified to see. After today, they too are mine.
She patted Cynthy’s head with a certain emphasis. Obediently the child slid off her and sat back on her heels, always watching silently and solemnly with her great blue eyes. Malvina stood.
‘‘It is my wish to offer these bondsmen and women full freedom and status as warriors,’’ she declared, ‘‘on condition they swear allegiance to our Golden Ordun, and to myself as Khan of Clan Jade Falcon and Chingis Khan. Do any challenge my wishes, quineg?’’
‘‘Neg!’’ the Horses bondholders shouted at once. It was just the kind of romantic gesture she had quickly come to realize appealed to their nomad-warrior mind-set. After all, these captives had not given up even when all was lost: they had been forcibly subdued, only consenting to take the bondcord after being vanquished individually.
The five Falcons who had taken captives—one, the newly promoted female commander of the Second Falcon Jaegers Cluster, had two—exchanged uneasy looks. Malvina’s request violated both custom and their own prerogative. Bondsmen served at the pleasure of their captors, who snipped the cords one strand at a time in recognition for meritorious service, granting freedom only when, and if, the final cord was severed. Yet Bec Malthus had taught Malvina much of the nature of her Clansfolk. She perceived in her warriors severe discomfort at their unprecedented position of holding Falcons as bonded chattel.
Dampening any potential challenge to a Trial of Refusal was the fact that none had ever faced Malvina in single combat and survived. Save only Aleks—and if any of these stravags thought themselves equal to him, she would exult in teaching them just how wrong they were.
‘‘Neg,’’ all five Falcons answered at last.
‘‘You choose well,’’ she said. ‘‘You may sever the cords.’’
Drawing belt knives, the bondholders complied. The captives swore the required oaths and were welcomed by their new sisters and brothers with back-pounding embraces and sharp raptor cries.
‘‘But what of the prisoners who refuse to submit?’’ asked Timon, almost managing to sound unrehearsed. Malvina doubted any Falcon but herself and Malthus would know— and Bec Malthus himself had coached the earnest young man with the carefully waxed crest of blond hair.
‘‘Bring them before the khan,’’ Malthus declared in his deepest, most doomful tones.
These were a few more than the bonded captives, bitterenders taken alive by one means or another. More than half bore bandaged wounds; seven were brought in on litters, incapable of walking on their own.
Senior among them was Star Captain Djala Helmer, Chistu’s own aide-de-camp and ranking survivor of the day’s massacre. She glared at Malvina with unmasked hatred in her dark eyes. She could do no more: the Gauss slug that had shattered her Vulture’s cockpit had broken her spine. Straps held her to a gurney, an electro-nerve block fixed to the nape of her neck rendered her incapable of sensation and completely immobilized her, to prevent her further injuring herself. Like all Hell’s Horses captives, her wounds had been treated as assiduously as if she were a Horsewoman herself.
All the holdouts had been captured by the Horses. Malvina’s Falcons had killed all the wounded they could reach, even after Malthus called amnesty. As had their foes.
‘‘Do you submit to Malvina Hazen, rightful Khan of Clan Jade Falcon?’’ Beckett Malthus asked.
Djala Helmer’s eyes blazed. She spat at Malvina. Fortunately for all concerned, the glob fell a meter short of the toes of Malvina’s bare feet. Fortunately for all concerned, Bec Malthus had accurately calculated in advance how far a well motivated Falcon warrior could spit.
Manas Amirault stepped up to plead mercy for fellow warriors who had conducted themselves in such a way as to bring no shame upon themselves, their genetic line or their Clan. He had given, extempore, the same speech that afternoon in Bec Malthus’ mobile HQ after another patented Malvina screaming tantrum had cleared the Tribune of staff.
Though perhaps not her match in intelligence, even Malvina appreciated Amirault was a wonderfully smooth talker. Eloquence was much admired and cultivated in Clan Hell’s H
orses. Unlike Clan Jade Falcon, where speeches longer than a paragraph, other than the Remembrance, tended to be interrupted by sudden violence.
Malvina made a great show of resistance. Then Beckett Malthus spoke, no less compellingly than the Horseman ristar. He omitted what he had said that afternoon, with just the three of them present, about the mighty cargo of demoralizing shame the captives would carry back with them to Jana Pryde. His logic—this time—was every bit as leaky as the enthusiastic Manas Amirault’s. But that was Bec Malthus’ art.
When he wound up, the Falcons cried louder than the Horses for clemency to the men and women they had so desperately tried to murder that afternoon, with only a bit of flagrant shilling by Timon and a small clique picked from Malvina’s most fanatic disciples. Subtlety was not just wasted on Jade Falcons, it was seldom noticed at all.
‘‘You have spoken, my glorious warriors,’’ Malvina declared. ‘‘Because of the honor you have brought our united Clans this day, I can only accede.’’
She looked at the captives. They stood or lay glaring unrepentantly at her. They long to tear my throat out with their teeth, she thought. The realization made her giddy, so that she must struggle to keep from spoiling the whole wellcrafted moment by laughing aloud. Never before, perhaps, had she so fully felt her power.
‘‘Hear my judgment: you will be placed upon a fast shuttle and delivered under truce to your JumpShip waiting at the zenith point, thence to be taken where her master chooses.’’
That had been settled by sunset with the naval colonel commanding the Peregrine vessel. Senior naval commanders tended to be far more reflective than Falcon warriors of other branches, but if anything less perceptive of nuance. The Sudeten-faction shipmaster had immediately agreed to receive the prisoners and allow the Mongol craft and crew that delivered them to return in-system unharmed.
Still unspeaking, the captives were hustled out to a Cardinal VTOL waiting to carry them to the shuttle.
‘‘My Falcons, my Horses,’’ Malvina said, ‘‘Mongols all. I salute you for your victory.’’
It was the signal for Timon and her command staff to usher out the officers. Malvina bent and helped Cynthy to her feet. The little girl threw her arms around the woman’s neck and kissed her scarred cheek. Malvina handed her to her attendants, and Cynthy was taken off to bed.
The Chingis Khan was left with her chief advisor and chief ally, alone in the pavilion. ‘‘You have served me well too, Bec Malthus,’’ she said. ‘‘Most well.’’
With a sardonic half smile, he bowed.
‘‘You may leave us,’’ she said.
‘‘As my Khan wishes,’’ he said. He turned and glided out without seeming to move his feet beneath the hem of his robes.
Malvina turned to Manas Amirault. Her robe fell open. Beneath it she was nude.
She reached out and took his strong, scarred hand and placed it on a pink-tipped breast. ‘‘Come,’’ she said in a low voice. ‘‘It is time for our celebration.’’
22
Hammarr, Sudeten
Jade Falcon Occupation Zone
24 December 3135
‘‘My Khan, we cannot abandon the occupation zone!’’ Loremaster Julia Buhalin almost wailed.
‘‘With all respect, Loremaster,’’ Heinz-Otto von Texeira said with his customary smiling blandness, ‘‘no such thing need occur. The more worlds Malvina’s Mongols seize, the more they must deplete scant resources to keep them. Popular as the Mongol doctrine has become, the overwhelming majority continues to reject it as destructive to your great Clan. The renegades face incessant, disruptive guerrilla warfare.’’
Such as we face on planets that have declared for us, he did not say. He had almost grown inured to thinking of Jade Falcons as we.
The far-off primary sprayed blue-tinged morning light through a narrow arch of window into Jana Pryde’s office in the Falcon’s Perch high above Hammarr. Von Texeira took advantage of his prosthetic leg, and the fact that little was expected of Spheroids but weakness, to sit with his hands folded on the crown of his stout black cane. Julia Buhalin stood by the door, wearing emerald and cream robes suitable to an important member of the Falcon warrior caste, clutching her staff of office. Jana Pryde herself stalked back and forth before the window, like a secretary bird on the veldt of Afrika, the little-settled eastern continent of Recife, her stern but handsome features a battle-ground between the pale hair yanked taut in a ponytail behind and the scowl that sought to pull them forward. She wore a white jumpsuit, its crisp bright purity broken only by the requisite badges of Clan, caste and unit.
Despite the situation’s deep gravity, a restless and unruly part of von Texeira’s mind could not help wondering at the Clan obsession with jumpsuits. Especially Clanswomen. Are they gene-designed so they only have to pee once a day?
‘‘Moreover,’’ he went on, ‘‘Malvina has experienced dedicated guerrilla resistance firsthand, in the zone she conquered within The Republic. Even on those worlds where she unleashed her frightful Mongol doctrine’’—diplomatically he refrained from speaking the name Chaffee—‘‘the occupiers face relentless rebel attack. No degree of counterstrike or reprisal has sufficed to still these insurgencies. Surely no one believes that Jade Falcons have less fighting spirit than denizens of the Inner Sphere?’’
No longer are the people of the Inner Sphere content casually to accede to changes of rule, as they did during the heyday of Great House rivalries, he thought, not without triumph.The Inner Sphere rejects the Clans and their unnatural system. We have learned at last that we cannot acquiesce without losing first our identities, and then our humanity.
He was in unusually sour mood, so much so that it was hard to plaster over with his practiced demeanor of good spirits. He had fought with his aide (and bodyguard, and other things as well). That grieved him, for it had gone far beyond the chaffing that passed semi-constantly between them, to the perplexity of outsiders.
Yet it was far from the most grievous thing he had experienced today.
Khan Jana Pryde had assigned the Lyran diplomats a ground car and driver, the former armed and armored mostly out of habit, the latter a sullen female solahma garrison trooper. Von Texeira knew enough of Clan ways to be wary of her: such persons generally thought of little but securing honorable death in battle. If battle were denied them, it might, it always seemed to him, occur to them to find some way at least to avoid the crowning dezgra of death in bed. In this context the words vehicular suicide sprang irresistibly to mind.
Apparently they or similar terms had sprung into the khan’s mind. Her minions had quite obviously instructed the driver that should any mishap befall her passengers, her gene-stock, already called into question by her failure to maintain front-line warrior status, would be poured straightaway down the drain.
Accordingly, whenever she took them anywhere she drove in precisely the manner of von Texeira’s eighty-five-year-old maiden aunt Dona Tilda, half-blind but refusing regeneration or even correction, at a stately twenty kilometers an hour. At least there was nothing wrong with the Falcon’s eyesight, garrison soldier or not: she did not bounce the sedan off the odd wall or imperil inattentive pedestrians the way Aunt Tilda did.
So von Texeira and Rorion tended to walk when time allowed. The exercise did neither of them harm. The fact that walking any distance shot pain up von Texeira’s stub of thighbone, through his hips, up his back and down his arm, did not deter him. He had lived with those pains for years, and long ago resolved they would never get the better of him.
This afternoon on their way to the Perch they passed an open field near a clot of drab structures, not readily distinguishable from the rest, which must have housed a crèche. The sky was even more crowded with cloud than usual, the color of the sidewalk, hanging low over the heads of the two outlanders as they walked along with their breath emerging in visible puffs.
A crowd of warrior-caste children had gathered in the midst of the field, otherwise bare but for dri
ed and colorless scraps of ground cover. A pair of minders in pastel-green jumpsuits and technician-caste badges stood disinterestedly by.
The children laughed and called out in piping imitations of the bird-of-prey war cries affected by their elders. All except one. That one—male or female, von Texeira couldn’t tell—screamed in authentic agony and terror as several sibkin joyously kicked and stomped on it.
‘‘What in Hell’s name is going on?’’ Rorion demanded, his handsome face gone pale in outrage.
‘‘What does it look like, Rorion?’’
The attacked child’s cries grew more desperate, gasping. Squaring his shoulders, Rorion began to march into the field.
Von Texeira grabbed his arm. Rorion spun back around, dark eyes wide. For a moment he tensed as if about to try to break the grip. Then he visibly decided against it. Wisely—and not just because of respective rank.
‘‘Wait. There’s more at stake here than your preferences. ’’
‘‘My preferences? This is brutal murder! Of a child!’’
‘‘Yes. How many children—how many Lyran children— will die if we throw away whatever tenuous influence we have here?’’
‘‘Iemanjá, it’s Christmas Eve!’’
His master continued to stare at him with expressionless blue eyes.
Rorion’s slender frame swelled as he drew in a deep breath. Then it deflated. He tried to turn.
Von Texeira let him go.
As they walked away the younger man asked, ‘‘Why do we help these monsters?’’
‘‘You were ready to help one of them.’’
‘‘A child, Margrave! A child.’’
Von Texeira’s great shoulders lifted and dropped the straps of his black greatcoat in a sigh. ‘‘Yes. We help monsters because we must. It is the best way to serve our archon.’’
