by Victor Milán
Erich stiffened. Heimdall was the secret watchdog society formed as a check on Loki’s recurring tendencies to apply its brutal methods to citizens of the Lyran Commonwealth itself. It was almost as old as the terror branch itself. Some members had long been rumored to be former Loki operators. It made them extremely effective. It also earned them undying hatred from certain conservative elements within Loki.
‘‘We have been watching him secretly in hopes he might lead us to a much larger school of Heimdall fish.’’ Jäger shrugged. ‘‘He has yet to do so. He’s cagey as the Devil himself. But we still think he betrayed his comrades. So screw him.’’
He uttered a metallic chuckle. ‘‘And I’ve no doubt the damned Falcons will do just that.’’
25
The Casts
Near Hammarr Commercial Spaceport, Sudeten
Jade Falcon Occupation Zone
9 March 3136
She lay with the sinuous pale extent of her angled across rumpled indigo sheets, propped on her elbows. A cigarette trailed lazy blue smoke between the fingers of her right hand. Her slanted blue eyes were half-lidded.
He trailed stubby fingertips down her back. Her skin was surprisingly silky. The muscles beneath were firm. ‘‘You spend a great deal of time planetside.’’
She snorted smoke. ‘‘You expect me to be a spindle, like so many of us Foxes? They spend too much time in space. How can you trade a world unless you spend time with your feet on its soil, feeling its wind in your face, its sounds in your ears? How can you bargain properly with people if you don’t spend hours watching them, getting drunk with them, above all listening to them?’’
The bedroom was small, cozy, warm with hidden heaters and with the heat of recent exertion. A squat-bellied lamp glowed low beneath a metal shade pierced in indecipherable geometric designs. A hint of incense hung in the air.
‘‘Too many of my fellows are content to hide in their own holds, trusting to the awesome Clan reputation to overawe the locals, and leave the doing of real business to the factors.’’ A throaty laugh. ‘‘Why should I complain? That’s why I have my Bloodname.’’
He raised a brow. ‘‘You must fight many trials.’’
‘‘Not all my body modifications come courtesy of lucky Spheroids—although Periphery pirates and outcaste Clan bandits have contributed their share, I’ll allow.’’
‘‘I’ve seen you fight. You are a formidable grappler.’’
‘‘It comes in handy. You know Clanners don’t fear death. But humiliate them by making them tap out . . .’’
She shrugged. ‘‘And thank you. That is high praise, coming from you.’’
‘‘What do you mean?’’
‘‘You hold a fifth dan in Brazilian jujitsu from the hand of Rianna Gracie-Goldschmitt herself, quiaff?’’
He sat bolt upright. The movement reminded him uncomfortably of a Recife mammoth seal surfacing. ‘‘How do you know a thing like that?’’
‘‘Your public relations department,’’ she said. ‘‘You must recall the Lyran press made much of it. I told you, we follow your Inner Sphere media. At least, those of us who like to turn a profit do.’’
He shook his head. She was full of surprises, this one. He eased himself back down and regarded her.
Even the dim bedroom light did little to soften her face, though age had hardly affected her, he thought. But the years had been hard ones.
From his reclining position von Texeira took note of the tattoo on the generous upper swell of her right breast: a sea fox caught in the jaws of a diamond shark.
‘‘Why that tattoo?’’ he asked, voice slightly husky.
She shrugged. It made her breasts do interesting things. The sea fox seemed to struggle in its slayers’ jaws.
‘‘To remind me of the struggle within us all,’’ she said, leaning over to stub out her cigarette in a pewter mug on the floor.
Or is it to remind others of the fact? he wondered. Specifically, lovers.
‘‘Why me?’’ he asked.
She laid her cheek on his wiry-haired flesh-and-blood thigh and gazed at him.
‘‘We Clanners admire skill,’’ she said. ‘‘You have displayed extraordinary ability in a range of endeavors particularly esteemed by the Sea Fox.’’
He felt a twinge. How much does this woman really know about me? he wondered.
‘‘Then, too, I find you personally interesting. Fascinating, you might say. I have followed your career for years. And then, of course, you make me laugh.’’
‘‘I find that’s one of the most reliable routes to a woman’s heart,’’ he said. ‘‘But I don’t flatter myself that I’m an Adonis. I’m middle-aged and overweight—or old and fat, depending on how honest I’m being with myself. And I thought you Clanners worshipped physical perfection.’’
‘‘You should also know we Sea Foxes have our own perceptions by now,’’ she said. ‘‘My Aimag in particular is known for its eccentricities. Which is why it accepted me— a freebirth.’’
He blinked. ‘‘You?’’ Although the most cosmopolitan of Clans—maybe the only Clan to whom the word even applied—the Sea Foxes struck him as likely to be most insular in their breeding practices, given their preference for spending their lives aboard ship.
Her face tightened. ‘‘I’m sorry,’’ he said quickly. ‘‘I know—belatedly—how that question must sound to Clan ears. But I’m a Spheroid, as well as a good Catholic.’’ Who’s long overdue for confession, he thought, though this sin is the least of reasons. ‘‘I’m certainly not going to think less of you for not having been poured out of a beaker.’’
She shook her head. He thought he actually saw her eyes glisten with a tear. Only a trick of the light, he told himself.
‘‘It is strange,’’ Senna said, ‘‘to find such vulnerabilities in myself at such a time.’’
‘‘It’s a somewhat vulnerable kind of time,’’ von Texeira said.
She raised her head, rolled her body so that she lay propped on an elbow with her cheek in her palm. Shadows molded her heavy breasts.
‘‘I’ve told you something intimate about myself, Heinz-Otto, ’’ she said. ‘‘Now tell me: why are you really here?’’
He drew in a breath—and let it slide forth in a sigh. ‘‘You mean, aside from duty to my archon and my people.’’
She nodded.
‘‘It’s my family,’’ he said.
‘‘As in your tyrannical grandmother?’’
‘‘She’s the least of my worries right now.’’ Senna cocked a skeptical eyebrow. ‘‘Well, of course she worries me. The bloody woman terrifies me. Always has. But I have more pressing concerns.’’
‘‘Your wife does not understand you, perhaps?’’
He laughed. ‘‘Dona Irmagilda understands me all too well. Lately she and my mistress, Margrete, have become thick as thieves. Which poses its own problems. Margrete is the volatile one; she’s a gaucha, a cattle herder from the high plains. Dona Irmagilda is more prone to slow boils. Yes, they do bedevil me, I won’t deny it.’’
‘‘But they are not the reason you accepted such a hare-brained mission?’’
He sighed again. ‘‘Your assessment parallels my own. Well, I did hire you for your discernation. No, the real problem concerns my son, Emilião. The eldest of our three children.’’
He laced his fingers behind his head and gazed up sightlessly at the ceiling. ‘‘He is a good boy. Really he is. I love him very much.’’
‘‘Yet he disappoints you?’’
‘‘No! I mean, not exactly. You see, he’s a very talented lad. An actor. He has made a start at a splendid career in tri-vid.’’
‘‘Is acting not a useful skill for a merchant?’’
‘‘Ah, but he has the business head of an actor. He’s got no gift for trade at all. And he hates it.’’
‘‘I begin to see the problem. Still, what of your two daughters?’’
‘‘Benigna, the elder, weeps a great dea
l. She has already entered a convent. My youngest child, Imaculada, long ago fled to Tharkad, where she took a doctorate in sociology and professes undying disdain for wealth and religion alike.’’
‘‘So you’ve run out of heirs. What about some likely lieutenant? Or even taking on an apprentice?’’
‘‘Therein lies the scorpion in the bedclothes. My lady wife is ambitious. Specifically, on behalf of her eldest, Emilião. She feels the tri-vids are unworthy of him. Or at least of our two great families, the von Texeiras and her people, the San Luca clan. She insists that he should succeed me. She feels he and I are being selfish in seeking to avoid that.’’
‘‘That’s what propelled you into the middle of the Jade Falcon Occupation Zone?’’
He shrugged. ‘‘It may seem trivial to an outsider. Perhaps it is. Even most of my fellow Lyrans would find it somewhat so, I suspect. But we Recifeiros take family seriously. And neither Irmagilda nor her atrocious kinsfolk are under any circumstances to be taken lightly.’’
‘‘And looming over all is your grandmother.’’
‘‘Mamãe Luci,’’ he said. ‘‘Although ‘loom’ isn’t perhaps the word I’d choose. She’s tiny. Formidable. But tiny.’’
He scoured his palms in his frizzy coarse hair. ‘‘The time impends when I must begin grooming my successor. No candidate in view is acceptable. And so I seek shelter here, amidst mere physical danger.’’
Senna shook her head and laughed low. ‘‘Knowing you is never dull, Margrave.’’
She rolled over to lie on his legs, breasts flattened on his thighs. Her hands did intriguing things. ‘‘Have some respect for age, woman!’’ he gasped.
‘‘I let you rest this long, quineg.’’
‘‘Is it not beautiful, Bec Malthus?’’
The space within Emerald Talon’s colossal hull had been filled with stores now consumed. Now Malvina Hazen floated naked near the focus of an array of UV-rich spotlights and water misters that had been made fast to the bulkheads. She tended with surprising care to her latest fancy.
Sourly Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus watched her from the resilient synthetic covered runway where his grip-shoes held him firmly in place.
‘‘It disturbs me, Malvina,’’ he said. ‘‘I find it unnatural.’’
It resembled a frozen explosion, a ball of twisty dark vines spiked with long black thorns and pallid leaves with dark suggestive veins. Its outer surface was covered with dozens of roses, each gleaming, each the color of deep space. Only one black rose, the largest, had a straight stem; the others were curved and twisted.
While her fleet recharged at reconquered Graus she had received it from, of all people, her coregn back in the Falcon’s Reach in the occupied Republic, provisional Galaxy Commander Noritomo Helmer.
‘‘They breed true,’’ she said, carefully trimming bits of dead growth away from the tangled branches with pinches of her white flesh-and-blood fingers. ‘‘They were created over decades by careful culling and hybridization by inhabitants of the Crespo Major space habitat in the Kimball system asteroid belt. No genegineering involved. Isn’t that fascinating?’’
‘‘They are still not natural.’’
Her laugh was musical malice. ‘‘What about us Clanners is natural? Our very conception, if you can call it that, our gestation and birth are exemplars of the artificial.’’
As she spoke she rotated in midair to face him. He saw a drop of blood on the ball of her thumb, the red shocking, the only hint of true color in the black-and-white chamber—for he was well aware his own drab presence brought color nowhere. His khan looked at it curiously, smiled, licked the blood away with her small pink tongue.
He repressed a shudder.
‘‘We are created in such a way as to eliminate the vagaries of natural reproduction,’’ he said, annoyed at himself for sounding pedantic and twice as annoyed at her for forcing him off-balance so that his usual graphite-smooth glibness deserted him. ‘‘Yet we are also taught to appreciate nature and live harmoniously with it.’’
‘‘I had this conversation with my brother, I believe— the last friendly encounter we had. It was on the gallery overlooking the shuttle deck of this very ship, before the first assault on Skye.’’
And not long thereafter you were trying your best to kill Aleksandr in a Trial of Refusal, he recalled. He forbore to mention the irony of her calling Aleks ‘‘brother.’’ Which to his mind was the most unnatural thing of all.
‘‘Will there be no end of your taking on pets, Malvina?’’ he asked.
She glared at him, eyes sapphire lasers, her hair a nimbus of pale fury. ‘‘Do you dare to question my taking Cynthy to my side?’’
Not anymore, he thought, controlling with effort the twitch that wanted to pluck at one corner of his wide mouth.
‘‘By no means, Malvina Hazen. With your—sponsorship— of the girl, you have taken upon yourself what you clearly regard as grave responsibilities.’’
He reflected briefly how odd it was for Clanners to be discussing a concept like responsibility. He doubted the word had actually existed in the Clan lexicon before contact with, and contamination by, the Inner Sphere.
But we are the oddest of Clanners, he thought. Or are we? Might we be the two divergent paths down which the Clans inevitably evolve—one toward accepting Spheroid self-interest and duplicity, the other embracing the pure hot madness of total destruction for its own sake? The thought chilled him like a kiss of liquid nitrogen.
She was watching him closely. Ever mercurial, her expression had flowed from rage into knowing amusement.
With scarcely a pause he continued, ‘‘It concerns me that you risk adding too much to your already overwhelming burdens of command.’’
‘‘As for my pretties,’’ she said, turning to run her fingers around the swelling bloom of the one straight-stemmed black rose as if tracing the curve of a sex partner’s breast, ‘‘I have a use for them in mind. And as for you—’’
She laughed again. The sound made him wonder if some decadent Spheroid culture, within the Capellan Confederacy perhaps, made use of small silver bells in its funerary practices.
‘‘Your usefulness to me consists in smoothing my road to my Destiny. Let me worry about how I travel it.’’
26
The Falcon’s Reach
Colquhon Mountains, Chaffee
Jade Falcon Occupation Zone
22 March 3136
Flame jetted from a dozen ruptures in the Centurion’s chest armor. White smoke gushed out to envelope the ’Mech as it tipped ponderously backward. Conifers splintered behind it. Just downslope of it two tanks and a hover APC burned on a narrow road that wound its way along the face of the hill, sending pillars of black smoke up into the blue horsetail-flecked sky.
Ignoring Lyran infantry flushed like quail from around the stricken BattleMech’s feet, Star Colonel Folke Jorgensen already had his ’Mech in motion, turning away in search of fresh targets. In these mountains, veined with hematite deposits not rich enough to justify exploitation to support the world’s nonexistent industry but ample to scramble magnetic detection, he would get little warning.
Ever systematic, the Steiners had swept his surveillance satellites from orbit before their DropShip descended into an enormous circular depression, caldera of an ancient volcano, in the Colquhon range. Their aerospace fighters fought off Jorgensen’s pitiful contingent, preventing decent observation. Making use of local woodsmen as guides they marched in company strength on Chaffee’s capital McCauliffe via a path—barely a game track—of which the Falcon occupiers were utterly unaware. Only a chance observation by a scouting Donar, quickly shot down by marauder VTOLs, had alerted Jorgensen to the route the raiders took.
The local ferromagnetism also meant the Lyrans had no advance warning their secret route had been compromised until the Ghost Bear abtakha and his Star hit them in the flank, strung out along a narrow trail between steep peaks with slopes crowded in tall, great-bo
led trees. Trees too huge to be bulled out of the way by the heaviest ’Mech or battle tank . . .
The Centurion’s MechWarrior punched out as his machine fell. The blue-and-white chute deployed above trees on a ridge across the declivity.
‘‘That one is my bond,’’ Jorgensen radioed his elementals. ‘‘Capture alive if possible.’’ The Lyran had showed courage, if more promise than actual skill as a BattleMech pilot.
From a ridgetop to his left a salvo of long-range missiles lanced toward him, their smoke trails feathered by the stiff breeze that blew up the valley. He backed his machine a handful of meters, allowing some of those monster trees to absorb the missiles.
As rockets gouged three-meter splinters from trunks thick as a man was tall, leaving bleached-white wounds, he caught a Bellona in his crosshairs. Like the Centurion, it had turned to face the Jade Falcon attackers, its large laser and long-range missile rack providing covering fire for the withdrawal of the ambushed raiders.
They make a nuisance raid, the dour former Ghost Bear thought. They were clearly making a stab at the McCauliffe spaceport, the only target of any military value in the area—if not on Chaffee.
Not for the first time he damned Malvina Hazen.
His 50-ton Black Hawk had the Jade Falcon insignia painted on the right side of its fuselage-like torso and, defiantly, a photonegative Ghost Bear badge on the left. But the ’Mech showed no blue Eyes of the Falcon, nor green Horus eye, nor yet whatever symbol the madwoman might have taken for this new rebel alliance with Hell’s Horses. Nor would it ever while Folke Jorgensen drew breath.
It was the very BattleMech Aleksandr Hazen had captured along with Jorgensen himself in a border skirmish six years before.
Jorgensen was the senior of officers remaining from Aleks’ Zeta Galaxy. Ironically, the now battle-hardened Turkina’s Beak formed the bulk of the forces Malvina and Bec Malthus had left behind to garrison their salient thrust like a spear deep into the side of the Inner Sphere. Noritomo Helmer, who now led the desant, came from Malvina’s own Gyrfalcons—but close exposure to his superior’s methods had driven him into deep sympathy with her sibkin’s more humane approach to conquest. Knowing that Jorgensen shared his belief, Helmer had set the erstwhile Ghost Bear to command the force holding the world that had suffered most from Malvina’s Mongol notions.
