by Victor Milán
‘‘Destiny drives me,’’ Malvina said. ‘‘Destiny and dreams . . . bad dreams. My destiny is nightmare; I have known it since the crèche, although I did not consciously realize it until recently.’’
She looked down again. Attentive to her actions, Cynthy met her gaze. ‘‘Is that love I see in those clear blue eyes? Trust? We are not supposed to know these things.’’
Malvina reached down and stroked the backs of two fingers down the girl’s soft, round cheek. ‘‘Nor how I feel when I do this. Could this be tenderness?’’ She shook her head in wonder.
She understood her feelings poorly. They were not sexual. There was seldom anything tender about Jade Falcon sex anyway, least of all Malvina Hazen’s. Touch was intended to arouse or wound—if not both.
What I feel for the child is akin to what I felt for my brother, Malvina thought. She struggled to understand—for what she did not understand, she could not control. And what she did not control might control her.
‘‘I think,’’ she said at length, ‘‘that at the last that I would have someone in all the universe to mourn me.
‘‘When I have won, and the last stinking, puling remnant of humankind is extirpated, I shall take my ship and drive at full acceleration into the heart of a sun. And you shall remain alone. Khan of the galaxy. And you, dear one, shall have the choice: shall you start it over again, this stumbling human race? Or rule alone in perfect stillness and solitude, until the night closes over you as well? Choose well, my child.
‘‘Choose well.’’
A snarl of engines, a rising mosquito-whine of fans. Ahead at the end of the avenue of walking war machines a hoverbike rounded into view in a coil of dust. Its goggled rider accelerated directly toward the pair.
Fury went nova inside Malvina. ‘‘I ordained that no one trouble us!’’ she snarled. Her free hand dropped to the butt of her laser pistol.
She felt a touch on the back of her hand. She looked down. Cynthy had pressed her fingertips into Malvina’s hand as if to restrain her. Astonished, she forbore from drawing and burning down the messenger.
Instead she stooped, hugged the girl fiercely, kissed her cheek. ‘‘They are wrong, my darling, who say you are not brave as any Jade Falcon tiercel,’’ she said, hot tears running inexplicably down her cheeks.
She rose with Cynthy on her arm to await the rider, whose life the girl had won.
The new-fledged Falcon curveted his machine to a stop, careful that the braking blast did not scour Malvina and her pet with sand.
He snapped his salute with a gloved hand. ‘‘My Khan,’’ he said, ‘‘a JumpShip has just emerged in-system. It beamcast news Star Captain Timon thought you should hear at once.’’
‘‘Say it, then.’’
Her scar darkened as he did. In response, she told him to take out his hand communicator and transmit a certain word. Clearly puzzled but eager to justify his new status in his supreme khan’s eyes, he obeyed.
Somewhere in the night a siren began to wind. Lights awoke in the neighboring camps of the Falcons and the Horses. As the hoverbike rider watched in gape-mouthed astonishment, a DropShip rose from the plain a kilometer to the north on a three-lobed pillar of blue flame. Another followed, and another. Engine noises roared from the plain like surf as vehicles carried MechWarriors and techs to the silently waiting battle machines. Vast mechanical creaking and clanking sounded as ’Mechs, already piloted, strode toward DropShips waiting to lift them to orbit.
Malvina began to laugh. The courier stared at her in confusion.
‘‘See, my darling?’’ Malvina said to her ward. ‘‘We have a sign! Destiny, that foul reeking surat, has made Her choice. Clan Jade Falcon’s oldest and bitterest foes have opened the door for me. To victory!
‘‘The Golden Ordun marches. And that march shall not end until all humanity drowns in a sea of blood and fire!’’
Malvina’s face was turned toward the heavens now, where the sparks of aerospace fighters spiraled upwards like fireflies, drawing faintly luminous trails of ionized air behind, to rendezvous with carrier craft in orbit. So she did not see a single tear well from the lower lid of Cynthy’s blue eye, and roll slowly down her cheek, to drip into the sand at her feet.
24
Jade Falcon Naval Reserve WarShip Emerald Talon
Outbound to Zenith Jump Point, Antares
Jade Falcon Occupation Zone
8 March 3136
‘‘I cannot believe that you have done this thing!’’ said Beckett Malthus, storming up to Malvina Hazen as she stood gazing through the glass of the gallery overlooking the battleship’s immense hangar deck. He scarcely remembered to add, ‘‘my Khan.’’
She tipped her head sideways and gave him that maddening insouciant smile of hers. ‘‘Believe it, Galaxy Commander.’’
‘‘At least you might have told me in advance.’’
He was scared. It was not even so much what she had done that frightened him, although that threatened to rock the whole of Kerensky’s legacy to its bedrock. Nor even that she had hidden her actions from him, sending emissaries to spread the word throughout the JFOZ, but not openly decreeing it on her headquarters planet until her army spaced and began its drive toward Antares’ jump point. What made his joints tremble like an aging Spheroid’s was that she had conceived and taken such an action entirely on her own.
It was bitter medicine for one whose entire existence had long depended upon the indispensability of his counsel to the powerful.
Khan Jana Pryde had exiled him in the guise of promotion, in implicit expectation that he, like his potentially turbulent young ristar subcommanders, should fail gloriously and die. How might Malvina dispose of one whose usefulness has passed? The thought would make shudder a bronze statue of Elizabeth Hazen herself, semi-mythical Founder of Clan Jade Falcon and owner of the original flesh-and-feather Turkina.
‘‘Truth?’’ she asked him, lips smiling, her eyes laughing with malice. ‘‘I wanted to delay the moment at which I must hear you squall like a Capellan fishwife whose market stall has been upset.’’
The deadliness of such an insult to a Falcon warrior caused barely a tick of his pulse. What made him feel as if his substance fell away behind the slab façade of his face was the careless way she displayed her own certainty that he would not challenge her.
She reached up to pat his bearded cheek, which he knew to be ashen despite his iron self-control, as if he were a child she wished to comfort, like her unnatural pet Cynthy. ‘‘Poor, dear Malthus! Forgive me. The weakness was mine in wishing to avoid a scolding.’’
He shook his head. She was surely dead to all shame. But then, he thought, mastering his roil of emotions once more, we knew that already, quiaff?
‘‘But to grant the lesser castes the right to trial for warrior rank?’’ he almost stammered. ‘‘Even mere laborers? Unthinkable!’’
‘‘But the Clans have adopted not just freebirths but Spheroids in the past,’’ Malvina said. ‘‘They have no caste at all.’’
‘‘But these were warriors, in fact, who won the right with deeds.’’
‘‘And so shall those who win the chance at a Trial of Position,’’ she said. ‘‘And they will fight like Jade Falcons in fact for the merest chance of such advancement.’’
She regarded him through eyes half-lidded. Lazy-looking.
Malthus’ blood ran chill as the metal of a ship’s hull in space. He could not yet let go.
‘‘But it will topple our society from its very foundations!’’
Her smile, her eyes, were mad as wasps. ‘‘Precisely as I intend, Bec Malthus. Precisely as I intend!’’
Head sunk into the fur-lined collar of his greatcoat and bitterest funk, Heinz-Otto von Texeira walked beneath the streetlights of Hammarr with his hands thrust deep in his pockets and the taste of ashes on his tongue.
I have doubly failed, he thought. First, I have conceived no resolution to the dilemma that drove me from my family. And now thi
s.
He had spoken quite briskly to Rorion. He might say the boy got above himself—that his own leniency with his aide’s willful ways and especially his unruly tongue, only encouraged excess. But that was all merda: he was being pissy, and he knew it. Decades of professional observation of the human beast in its illimitably varied habitats and behaviors had taught him that this was the very crowning characteristic of pissiness: being too pissy to make the effort to get over being pissy.
So marinating in—whatever—he stalked alone through The Casts’ nighttime streets. Rorion had been particularly alarmed for his safety: the news had acted upon the Falcons, already on their mettle from too-close concentration and the imminence of war, like a stick whacking a hornets’ nest. A fat Spheroid out wandering alone, a merchant at that, might invite deadly assault.
Let them come, he thought savagely. Any less than an elemental in full battlearmor shall have a nasty surprise themselves. For he was not merely a fat Spheroid merchant. Nor even merely a merchant prince.
If he was no longer the perfect killing machine he had been, just out of adolescence, when he served as one of the archon’s own terrorists in Loki, he had lost few of his skills. And gained much knowledge.
But no Falcon obliged him by stooping on what seemed a helpless boar, only to unleash a megasaur. Instead von Texeira was walking in the dark of a broken streetlamp half a block from the Sea Fox factors’ house when a new sun flared in the sky above.
He stopped. It was a small sun, although not that much smaller in apparent size than Sudeten’s bitter primary at noon. It lacked but the star’s eye-searing intensity.
It did not fail to sear his soul, that flame of distant fusion drives, joined now by one, two, three, a constellation of other drive flares. The JFNR Grand Fleet, assembled for the decisive contest with Malvina, broke orbit for the zenith jump point.
With the monster herself almost certainly on her way, they abandoned Sudeten. On Khan Jana Pryde’s orders. He raised his fists and raged against heaven.
The fit passed. He lowered his fists. His throat was raw. He actually felt better, and the greater fool for doing so.
Mãe do Deus, he thought, pray for us.
He heard a strange high skirling sound. For a moment he froze, blood colder than the night air. What creature is this?
Then he recognized melody, mad, undisciplined, yet played with unmistakable skill upon a violin. It came from the direction of Senna Rodríguez’s house.
He walked on. As he approached, the source of the sound localized itself to the walled garden behind the bunkerlike dwelling. He reached the wooden gate, its paint, gray in the light of the stars and the dwindling fusion-drives, blistered and peeling from the merciless daytime sun.
He hesitated. The music soared and dipped and drove in his ears. If his intrusion was resented, or even mistaken, it could cost him dearly. He raised a heavy fist, pounded against the gate. Then he tugged the latch and let himself inside.
In the midst of winter-bare furrows stood a strange figure: tall and gaunt in white, playing a violin tucked beneath its chin. As he entered the garden it turned.
The tune died on a last defiant scream of strings. Then Senna the master merchant lowered the instrument from beneath her chin. Her eyes were fixed upon him.
‘‘I didn’t know you played the violin,’’ he said.
‘‘I am a woman of surprises.’’
‘‘You have heard.’’ It was no question.
‘‘That Clan Wolf has mysteriously pulled back from its border with the JFOZ?’’ she asked. ‘‘Or that Loremaster Julia Buhalin persuaded Khan Jana Pryde that Malvina must certainly make peace now, in the wake of this ominous move by the Falcon’s great enemy, freeing the khan to send her war fleet to the Wolf frontier?’’
He could only shake his head. In his mind he saw again the gloating in Loremaster Julia Buhalin’s violet eyes as Khan Jana Pryde gave the fatal order. Shutting his eyes as tightly as he could only squeezed tears out to roll into his beard.
‘‘You could have done no more,’’ she said gently. ‘‘And since you could not prevail, no one could.’’
He spread his hands beside him toward the ground, half-frozen by a resurgence of bitter winter.
‘‘What are you doing?’’ he asked. His voice croaked as if he had wandered a desert for days.
She laughed. ‘‘I play a dirge for Clan Jade Falcon and the universe we have known,’’ she said. ‘‘The Falcons are an evil lot, by and large. But they are nothing to the wrath to come.’’
She let bow and instrument fall to her sides. Her white robe fell open. She wore nothing beneath it.
‘‘I have awaited you, Merchant Prince,’’ she said. ‘‘Come inside.’’
Clad in form-fitting dark uniforms, two dozen people worked in the vast warehouse bordering the Allison City spaceport on Porrima, running final checks on weapons and highly specialized equipment spread out on metal tables. There was none of the chattering and grab-assing customary among those preparing for imminent action, especially in the somewhat casual Lyran Commonwealth Armed Forces.
But then, these men and women were not LCAF.
Most knew each other, having undergone a grueling and not infrequently lethal training program together, or through refresher and skill-updating courses during infrequent stand-downs from action. Yet each operator seemed to work in isolation. Notwithstanding the real camaraderie of their unique Brüderschaft, brutal training and even more brutal experience had conditioned them to avoid unnecessary contact, to slide away from attention and never, ever, to look squarely at their targets, lest poorly understood but well-documented ‘‘sixth senses’’ alert the prey.
Hauptmann Kommandant Balto Jäger stood with his hands behind his tapered lower back, gazing down through the window of the small office perched at catwalk level high above the stained cement floor. He was a tall man, his bearing reminiscent of an early stint in the LCAF. He wore LCAF battledress as elementary cover. His hair was a steel brush, his face darkened and seamed and scarred by dozens of suns and hundreds of battles. The black ceramic disk covering his right eye gave his stern face a terrifying aspect. Or so he sometimes heard the typing pool whisper.
Spotlights clamped to the steel tracery speared down like blue-white laser beams. The space above, between the catwalk and the stressed-ferrocrete structure’s high, rounded roof, was dark as the belly of space itself. It might as well be an open invitation to black-clad intruders to spy on the proceedings, relying on the operators’ night vision being totally disrupted by the glare.
Jäger wished they would. He was himself drawn taut as a bowstring, yet he, unlike his operators, would find no release in action. He would only learn outcomes later— months later, indeed, unless the insertion of one or more Loki agents went disastrously wrong. Then he’d learn all too quickly.
It would be gratifying for his site security team, with their bunker-buster Zeus rifles and starlight scopes, to blast a few ninja-clad DEST off the I beams. It was also unlikely. Even the SAFE agents who had swarmed to Porrima in the wake of the devastating Jade Falcon raid had been trolled in by a mole hunters sweep weeks before.
He cleared his throat. ‘‘It is trite to say so,’’ he said aloud, ‘‘but I wish I was going along.’’
He looked back at his aide, who stood half-bent over a computer display projected above the desk in the darkened office.
‘‘You too, Erich?’’
‘‘Nein,’’ said the young man without looking up. He likewise wore LCAF camos, with a first leutnant’s bars on the shoulders. ‘‘I am just as happy to be convalescing for this one, Herr Hauptmann Kommandant.’’
‘‘The Falcons are a handful, I admit,’’ Jäger said. ‘‘Still, where’s your sense of adventure, boy?’’
‘‘I am still waiting for it to be fully regenerated along with my leg,’’ the leutnant said, slapping his thigh. ‘‘And was it not you who said there are old Lokis, and bold Lokis, but no old, bold
Lokis?’’
‘‘One says so many things,’’ Jäger said, gazing through the glass again.
‘‘In any event,’’ the younger man said, ‘‘another adventure will doubtless come along soon enough. Perhaps a nice holiday jaunt into the FWL.’’
The corner of Jäger’s mouth twitched. They weren’t supposed to know anything, of course, since even a Loki operator could in time be compelled to speak if she fell into enemy hands. But everyone in the LCAF and House Steiner’s intelligence apparatus knew perfectly well a major strike was being prepared against the Mareks. It was a sign of how seriously the archon took the dangers posed by this Falcon renegade and her bloodthirsty fanatic followers that they diverted the resources to launch this substantial probe into the JFOZ. That, and to draw attention from the preparations along the southern border . . .
A reconnaissance in force and a retaliation for the Porrima raid and the rape of Chaffee, the simultaneous strike against five Falcon-held worlds would also serve to cover the insertion of Loki teams to do what they did best: sow terror and confusion over the coming months.
‘‘Hauptmann Kommandant?’’
Arching a brow in surprise, Jäger turned back. It was rare to hear hesitation in his hotspur aide’s young voice.
‘‘Na ja, Erich?’’
‘‘What about the archon’s special emissary to Sudeten? The Markgraf von Texeira zu Mannstein?’’
Jäger’s forehead furrowed and his jaw jutted. ‘‘What of him?’’
‘‘Won’t things go hard for him when word of these raids reaches the khan?’’
‘‘He knew the risks when he undertook the mission.’’ The Hauptmann Kommandant’s voice had taken on something of the nature of ball bearings in a grinder.
‘‘But I have seen the files. He was one of us once, nicht wahr? And that aide of his, as well, Rorion Klimt—I took a close-combat class from him once, on Donegal. He fights most brilliantly.’’
Jäger spun back to face the window so his aide would not see the anger suffuse his features. ‘‘He was, yes. Von Texeira. But some of us old boys have reason to believe that after he retired back to his whores and his boardrooms, he chose to join Heimdall.’’
