by Victor Milán
Rorion shook his head. His face was pinched, bloodless, almost purple around mouth and eyes, from more than chill. ‘‘Always this duty to the archon. Is there nothing else?’’
‘‘After the service you gave Duchess Melissa, you can ask that?’’
‘‘After my service I have earned the right to ask! Following orders I murdered and tortured and terrorized, for the greater glory of House Steiner. Have I not earned my humanity back? Haven’t you?’’
Von Texeira stopped and spun to face him. Fury knotted his big face. His nostrils flared like a bull’s. But in a single breath the air and tension flowed out of him. His shoulders fell. His jowls sagged. He looked old and his skin was touched with ash.
‘‘I will serve my archon as I swore long ago,’’ he said sadly. ‘‘But in this matter I fear what I really fight for is the future, not just of the Commonwealth, but of the entire human race. I pray daily to Espírito Santo that those interests never conflict.’’
Rorion looked up into his elder’s indigo eyes for a long moment. The breath puffed out of him, and with it the fight, as von Texeira’s anger had fled a moment before. He seemed to melt from the older man’s grasp as he turned to walk on.
‘‘I feel soiled,’’ he said as his superior joined him.
Von Texeira walked with head down and hands in pockets. The sounds had dwindled behind them to the point he could pretend to hear them no more. ‘‘Surely that’s no new sensation for you. Any more than for me.’’
Rorion’s mouth compressed to a line. He wagged his head like some kind of confused herd beast.
‘‘What is worst,’’ he said, ‘‘other than hearing those screams in my dreams the rest of my life, is that this horror awakens in me a sense of sympathy for Malvina Hazen.’’ He looked up at his senior with stricken eyes. ‘‘What she had to go through, she and her brother, to make her what she is. Can you imagine feeling sympathy for such a monster?’’
Von Texeira laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘‘Very well, boy,’’ he said, ‘‘very well.
‘‘And is that not what keeps us distinct from monsters, despite our sins?’’
‘‘None but a fool would say any in the Inner Sphere has more heart than Turkina’s brood,’’ Buhalin said hotly.
Von Texeira smiled hugely and nodded energetically. ‘‘Spot-on, Excellency! So we can hardly doubt, can we, that true Falcons will continue to fight Malvina or her fanatics and make their lives miserable on whatever worlds they take. Naturally there can be no question of abandoning the occupation zone. But I say it is impossible to do so, so long as some hold faith with Turkina.’’
‘‘They do!’’
Jana Pryde leaned back against the sill. ‘‘Your enthusiasm is laudable, Julia. Based on what my Watch tells me, it is well-founded enough.’’
Von Texeira smiled. Time to press the advantage. He leaned forward keenly.
‘‘Malvina has keen strategic insight; and if not her, Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus. One of them unquestionably will perceive that spreading the chaos of irresoluble warfare can only invite Turkina’s enemies to launch a finishing stroke at her. Already you have Clan Hell’s Horses involved, although Khan Gottfried Amirault blandly insists his Bloodname kinsman acts on his own initiative, without official sanction. How long will the Wolf hold back from rending the Falcon, when such a wonderful opportunity presents itself?’’
Buhalin’s handsome olive face drained of color. Khan Jana Pryde’s resembled a statue’s. Von Texeira was reminded that behind the Falcon khan’s façade of flamboyant emotionalism coiled a calculating, highly capable brain. The khan said nothing.
Taking as his principle qui tacit consentire, von Texeira plowed on. ‘‘Surely Malvina has seen by now that not even she can hope to conquer Clan Jade Falcon piecemeal. Indeed, is it not fair to say, O Khan, that Clan Jade Falcon can never be conquered—only destroyed?’’
Pryde went white at that. Her eyes flamed. Mouth compressed to a lipless slit, she nodded once, briskly.
‘‘Only one way presents itself for Malvina Hazen to win: she must invade Sudeten system with all the force she can muster. Whether you face her ’Mech to ’Mech or army to army, she will force you to a de facto trial for the khanship. If she wins, will not the overwhelming majority of Clan Jade Falcon grab at the chance to end the dangerous disruption and fall back upon the custom of honoring the verdict of trial by battle?’’
He turned to Julia Buhalin and performed a half bow. ‘‘In this matter I defer to the far superior wisdom of the loremaster. Is it so?’’
‘‘It is,’’ she said. From the spark in her eyes he could see she wished him, in the colorful English expression he had heard as a young man adventuring in a rustic region of Prefecture IX, ‘‘in hell with his back broke.’’ Yet he would do all he could to win her over, even at this late date.
He turned back to Pryde, who stood by the arched window with harsh sunlight rendering her visage almost skull-like. ‘‘I submit that our only chance to save Clan Jade Falcon from the chaotic insanity of Malvina Hazen and her Mongols is to muster the entire touman here at Sudeten. Any lesser measure can result only in disaster.’’
For a moment she gazed out over Hammarr’s buildings. Then she nodded once, like an ax descending.
‘‘I shall give the orders at once,’’ she said hoarsely. ‘‘You have the right of it, merchant. That witch Malvina has but one goal. And when she comes to grasp it I shall crush her like the stinking surat she is!’’
23
The Casts
Hammarr Commercial Spaceport, Sudeten
Jade Falcon Occupation Zone
1 March 3136
The greatest Jade Falcon disaster since Tukayyid sparked a wildfire that raged rapidly throughout the JFOZ. Open war between Khan Jana Pryde’s adherents and Mongols broke out on half a dozen worlds. Perceived foes of the dominant faction were arrested or simply attacked in overwhelming numbers and murdered without quarter. Clan traditions of honor, fraying steadily since initial contact with the treacherous and unpredictable denizens of the Inner Sphere, were on some planets shredded completely in the claws of the Rending.
The conflagration quickly blew back in the faces of Malvina and her Golden Ordun. On only a quarter of occupation zone worlds did her adherents prevail. In most cases they found themselves beset by pro-Jana Pryde guerrillas— a form of warfare that ironically proved well suited to the Jade Falcon mind-set, with its love of savage slashing attacks.
Not only warriors opposed the Mongols. On Botany Bay a conspiracy of senior scientists and technicians introduced an aerosol nerve agent into a meeting of the revolutionary Council. Pro-Jana Pryde warriors quickly overpowered the surviving Mongols. Convicted quickly in show trials, they were declared dezgra and publicly executed. Holovids of the proceedings were quickly dispatched throughout the JFOZ.
Camped out in the steppe east of the Rakusian Hills on joint maneuvers with the Fire Horse Galaxy, Malvina reacted to the holovid with a shrieking tantrum that gave everyone within a thirty-meter radius of her mobile yurt someplace else to go in a hurry. Even Beckett Malthus, who had weathered many of her eruptions, bowed and withdrew with all deliberate speed as she frothed threats to purge her own technician and scientist castes.
The only soul with courage to remain was Galaxy Commander Manas Amirault. His response to her outburst was to seize her, kiss her deeply and begin tearing her uniform off.
A normal woman of the day might well have resented such treatment. But this was Malvina, in whom homicidal frenzy and erotic passion were separated by the thinnest of membranes. Manas was rewarded by a ride wild even for a Horseman.
Later, as her Hell’s Horses playpartner nursed a collection of bruises, bites and gouges that made it hard for an outsider to tell whether he had made love or experienced an assault with intent to kill, Malvina watched a second set of holovids from Botany Bay. These showed how, outraged by the unforgivable chalcas the lower-caste conspirators had perpetrated agai
nst the renegade warriors, the resurgent Jana Pryde-faction warriors rounded them all up, under the guise of rewarding them, and put them to death as well. Then, driven by fear or bloodlust or both, they proceeded to totally exterminate the planet’s scientist and technician populations.
That give Malvina pause—then kicked her brilliant and twisted mind into overdrive.
‘‘So this is how Jana’s lackeys serve those who serve them,’’ said Malvina to Manas. He sat beside her on a rumpled pile of cushions, predictably shocked speechless by the pro-Jana Pryde warriors’ cruel perfidy.
She stretched, catlike, and smiled. If I needed anything to cement him and his Horses more tightly to me, she thought, this holovid provides it.
Aloud she said, ‘‘If chalcas is what they fear so much, then chalcas shall I give them!’’
‘‘Malvina Hazen is losing,’’ said the small, wiry man perched none too comfortably on the sofa of Nestah and Petah’s house in The Casts outside Hammarr. Trader Wingo seemed perpetually nervous planetside, hands twisting, features pinched and cold-looking under a skullcap of space-black hair. But he called his cargo ship the Dreaming Butterfly, an allusion that surprised and delighted von Texeira. ‘‘None can stand against her in the field. But too many Falcons feel she has gone too far.’’
Sunset slowly darkened the room. Von Texeira thought he better saw how Senna turned the profit that brought her not just tolerance but a Bloodname. Wingo no doubt used diffidence as a mask to gain advantage, but it was obvious enough to put a canny trading opponent on guard. Whereas a Spheroid could relax with the uncommonly accessible Senna Rodríguez, laugh and joke and drink the night away. And in the morning sign on the dotted line.
Was that why you made her such liberal terms? asked that trickster voice from the back of his great skull. He had freely spent his sovereign’s money, though Archon Melissa, God guard her and send her strength, like any good Steiner, threw pfennige around as if they were WarShip hatch covers and made generous concessions on behalf of Recife Spice and Liquors. While his bone of calculation, supercooled as a New Avalon Institute of Science supercomputer, told him those bargains were good for country and company and a família, he knew he might have cut closer. But, in truth, he liked Senna, Clan or not. She is a boon companion.
Or do you just grow susceptible to feminine wiles in your dotage, old man? the voice persisted. Von Texeira snorted into his cup of Rasalhaguian akvavit brought along as house gift by Wingo. After Recife’s lithe-limbed beauties, his fire-haired wife and his mistress, the gaucha Margrete, how far could he be led astray by a rangy Clanswoman whose face had never threatened to make her a tri-vid star before it acquired its broken nose and overlay of scars? Still, another part of him thought, if no beauty, she is all woman. . . .
"You must forgive my patrão," Rorion said solicitously. "He’s getting on in years, and when he stays up drinking after his bedtime shows a regrettable tendency to drift away.’’
‘‘I’m alert enough to cuff your empty head, cub,’’ the larger man growled.
He wasn’t really angry. This was just a game they had played for a very long time. Wingo cast an uneasy look at Senna. Her lanky frame shook to unvoiced laughter. Her fellow trader relaxed a screw-turn or two.
‘‘At least Jana Pryde has opened her eyes,’’ Senna said, reclining at her full impressive length on a couch. Von Texeira could not decide if she truly reminded him of some sybaritic ancient queen at a banquet. ‘‘The Buhalin’s fit to be tied. You should have heard her screeching at the kurultai when the khan proposed rallying the touman on Sudeten.’’
Coughing violently, Rorion jackknifed in his chair, as if the schnapps were too strong for him. ‘‘You bugged the Eyrie?’’
‘‘Not at all,’’ Senna Rodríguez said blandly. ‘‘Khan Jana’s security forces did. Very well, I might add.’’
‘‘And you sold them the devices?’’ Rorion asked.
‘‘Oh, no. That would be obvious, would it not? We developed the technology and sold that to them. They make their own.’’
‘‘We like to keep abreast of things,’’ Wingo said. ‘‘Especially where Clan Jade Falcon is concerned.’’
Von Texeira roared with laughter. ‘‘Master Merchant, you are a marvel!’’
She smiled lopsidedly. Her long turquoise eyes seemed to watch him closely. ‘‘Perhaps. But I had nothing to do with it."
"I insist."
‘‘You are the customer,’’ she said, shrugging. ‘‘Don’t let it make you think you’re always right, though. I am still Clan.’’
‘‘And myself a Spheroid,’’ von Texeira said, ‘‘howbeit a somewhat oblate one.’’
Senna laughed uproariously. Wingo sat with both hands on his drink, blinking at her in the gloom as if afraid she might jump on him and bite him.
‘‘Unlike our Falcon cousins, bless their simple black souls,’’ she said, eyeing him obliquely, ‘‘we Foxes make it a practice not to judge contents by their packaging.’’
A couple of hours, and bottles, later, Trader Wingo excused himself, pleading press of business. Von Texeira suspected he was mainly eager to get back to his shuttle and back to orbit. These Sea Foxes never seemed anything but ill at ease with the feel of real dirt beneath their feet.
Except Senna, of course.
Having risen to see him off, von Texeira thought to make his own excuses once Senna had come back in after accompanying her peer out onto the porch. He swayed slightly. Is it accumulated fatigue and stress, he wondered, or am I so old I can no longer hold my cachaça?
Senna returned, closing the door behind her. ‘‘We have enjoyed your hospitality, Master Merchant,’’ von Texeira began. But Rorion, himself a bit unsteady, settled his weight suddenly forward in a pugnacious pose.
‘‘Why do you help us?’’ he demanded.
Senna regarded him coolly. ‘‘For pay, of course.’’
‘‘Why do you help us?’’ he asked again.
To ask the same question twice of a Bloodnamed Clanswoman was to invite sudden death. Senna Rodríguez’s scarred face showed no flicker of emotion.
‘‘To pluck some pinions from the Falcon’s wing,’’ she said.
Rorion’s eyes had retreated in their sockets; his face was sallow, but his cheeks flushed as from some Recife jungle fever. ‘‘Why do you really help us?’’
‘‘Rorion,’’ von Texeira said softly.
But Senna smiled slowly. ‘‘We are the most adaptable of Clans, you know,’’ she said. Rorion pulled his head back on his neck as if the seeming non sequitur was a slap. ‘‘We changed our name twice, and so our nature. Other Clans think us fickle and weak.
‘‘But in truth we know how to adapt. So we—some of us—or is it only I?—study the Inner Sphere and its ways not just to learn how to better it in negotiations or battle but to blend its best with ours. Because we must. Or the consequences are unthinkable.
‘‘Kerensky did many things well. But in the long term his vision was flawed. Fatally flawed.’’
Rorion’s brows had started to clench again. Now his eyes widened in surprise. It was as if his grandmother had spat at an image of the Blessed Virgin.
In Clan eyes, Senna had spoken pure heresy.
‘‘Malvina Hazen, you see, is not a freak,’’ Senna said. ‘‘No aberration. She is the only logical culmination of Clan genetics and culture. Wherever Kerensky meant to steer his children, she is the polestar toward which our course is truly shaped. Should she fall short of her terrible ends, there will only rise another, and another. Like her but even more capable. Until . . .’’
She stopped. In amazement von Texeira realized she was choked with emotion.
‘‘The Founder sought to bring an end to the endless strife and discord, the corruption and the wars they engendered— the billionfold suffering and death. But what he has done is to raise up ultimate evil. An exterminating angel.’’
‘‘Abaddon,’’ von Texeira whispered. His aide crossed himself.
‘‘To you, stopping Malvina is a goal in itself, Merchant Prince,’’ said Senna. ‘‘To me it is a step—a crucial step, but only one—in a longer journey. That is why I walk the path I do. It is a wayward path, even in the eyes of my own notoriously nonconformist Clan. And yet I will find a way to drag them after me. Because I must. For Clan Sea Fox, for all the Clans, and for all humankind.’’
She looked down at the red tile floor, then shook her head so her crest of hair waved like a frond. ‘‘Perhaps I am no less mad than Malvina Hazen.’’ She shrugged—then raised her head to gaze at them with haughty eye and smiling lips.
‘‘But what of that? I am Sea Fox. I too am Clan!’’
A moment passed in silence. Von Texeira stepped forward, extending his right hand. Senna gripped his forearm, and he hers. An instant later Rorion stepped up and caught the Clanswoman’s left hand the same way.
‘‘If there is one thing a Recifeiro understands,’’ von Texeira said, ‘‘it is a hopeless romantic gesture. We are with you, Master Merchant.’’
It was a young Falcon warrior who brought the news: a freebirth half-breed from Dompaire who won his right to Trial of Position in the blood-soaked Rakusian Hills. He rode a hoverbike wildly through the night.
Cynthy’s small hand warm and dry in hers, Malvina Hazen walked through a forest of aligned-crystal steel. The legs of parked Jade Falcon BattleMechs rose like dark rectilinear trunks about them. Above they bloomed into a mad topiary of shapes against the starry sky of Antares.
They walked alone, no guards shadowing them. When she wished solitude, solitude she would have. And if she chose to share her private moments with a pampered Inner Sphere child—she was Chingis Khan.
If my command can burn a world, surely I can walk alone with this child if I choose.
‘‘Why do I keep you?’’ she asked the girl. Cynthy looked up at her, her blue eyes wide and nothing of apprehension showing on her open young face. Her teddy bear dangled limply over her other arm, which she held crooked against the front of her blue-and-white dress.
