by Victor Milán
‘‘Why hurry?’’ asked Rorion sharply.
Von Texeira set his jaw and scowled at him. Do I permit overmuch familiarity? Still, I don’t know what I’d do without him. I depend upon the boy. And he seldom lets me down.
‘‘We know the only thing it can be,’’ the younger man persisted. ‘‘Malvina and her demon hordes have arrived.’’
As if in confirmation, thunder rolled across the city, blotting out for a moment the public-announcement honk and squawk and drone. Both men turned to see a blue flame rising from the spaceport, east of them by seven kilometers of snow-covered heath. Atop it perched a great globular shape, swathed in wisps and veils of cloud. The DropShip climbed into clouds which hid all but the three-lobed artificial star of its drives.
‘‘And there goes our esteemed khan,’’ von Texeira said conversationally. ‘‘Not to mention our closest thing to an ear at court.’’
Rorion crossed himself. ‘‘It is true, then,’’ he said, and moistened his lips with a near-colorless tongue. ‘‘May God have mercy on our souls.’’
Von Texeira crossed himself as well. ‘‘We can hope, certainly, ’’ he said. He turned and set his bulk in painful motion toward their house, the better part of a kilometer away. His prosthetic ground and gouged at the stump of his leg even more cruelly than usual; he put it down to chill.
‘‘You are my designated coregn,’’ the face said from the flat projection. Scan lines tracked across it and white static fuzzed at the edges. The passage of the khan’s DropShip Falcon’s Egg through the planet’s atmosphere interfered with bandwidth-heavy audiovisual communication. But this was no matter to wait even for the ship to reach orbit. ‘‘You command Sudeten until my return. In the event I do not—’’
She paused. Standing in the darkened Falcon’s Perch communications center, Julia Buhalin, loremaster of Clan Jade Falcon, could see fatigue stamped deeply in the face of her khan despite the doubtful reception. Yet she also thought to see relief.
Mad Malvina, Beckett Malthus, their renegades and their Hell’s Horses allies had emerged into Sudeten system. Characteristically reckless, Malvina had jumped her whole force in via a pirate point just over thirty-one hours from Sudeten at one-gee acceleration. Though formidable, as any force boasting two WarShips must be, it could not hope to match the strength of Khan Jana Pryde’s grand fleet, even though her WarShips were individually much smaller than the Emerald Talon.
Khan Jana Pryde’s armada, however, led by the destroyer Jade Tornado, was at the wrong end of a four-plus-day transit to the zenith point for its departure to the Clan Wolf occupation zone. Even at two-gee acceleration, which would significantly impair even tough Falcon warrior capabilities, they could not return in time to prevent Mongol malice from striking Sudeten with full force. So Khan Jana Pryde flew to her flagship, the Aegis-class heavy cruiser Jade Talon, to lead her sorely outnumbered remaining forces in an attempt to delay the invaders until the grand fleet could return and crush them.
Julia Buhalin blamed the Steiner emissary for the disaster. How could even Falcons properly foresee, with his lies and sophistries beclouding our eyes?
‘‘—in the event I do not return,’’ Khan Jana Pryde continued at last, ‘‘you will serve as provisional khan until a kurultai can be convened to . . . see to the matter of succession.’’
Julia Buhalin saluted, then bowed in deep submission and respect. ‘‘It shall be as you command, my Khan,’’ she said. ‘‘I shall well keep your Clan until you return.’’
But even as her head bowed her violet eyes gleamed. Indeed, I shall do more than keep it, great Khan, she thought, as Jana Pryde concluded the transmission and the projection evaporated. I shall undertake the housecleaning you, with your need to balance forces, never could.
‘‘And when you resume your rightful place,’’ she said aloud, ‘‘you shall lead a stronger and more unified Clan Jade Falcon than has been known for years. This I pledge, my Khan!’’
Technicians at work in the red-lit cavern glanced up fearfully at the tone of her voice. Then they looked hurriedly back to their instruments.
‘‘—do our duty and remain at the tasks assigned us by our Clan,’’ said the tall woman in the black-and-green Jade Falcon battledress. A beaked falcon helmet constrained her flowing pale hair. A cape of brilliant jade falcon feathers draped her shoulders. ‘‘The stravags must and shall fail in their challenge to our sacred Crusade and our very way of life. . . ."
Back in their small, stumpy house in The Casts, the tri-vid had turned itself on. Khan Jana Pryde herself orated from the corner, a meter and a half high. Apparently that was a built-in function of all sets on Sudeten, so that no Falcon of any caste might miss an important Official Pronouncement. It gave von Texeira a slightly creepy sensation, fluttering in his stomach and tightening between his shoulder blades.
But why, he asked himself sternly, since we’ve assumed all along the place was bugged?
‘‘Shut that damned noise off,’’ he ordered peevishly as he went to the communicator on its table by the couch.
Rorion reached inside his coat. His hard brown hand came out with an autopistol. It barked once, eardrum-threateningly loud in the room’s cement confines. Glass shattered; the holographic image vanished in a final fairy-dust spiral of colored motes.
To his master’s glare the younger man returned a shrug. ‘‘I doubt we’re getting our damage deposit back anyway.’’
‘‘Come on, pick up,’’ von Texeira murmured as the communicator rang Senna’s personal code.
‘‘You hate it when people say that to you,’’ Rorion said, slipping a fresh magazine into the butt of his handgun and pocketing the old, now short one round. He made the weapon vanish again.
‘‘Pick up, pick up,’’ von Texeira said.
‘‘Perhaps you should play the message we have waiting, lord,’’ Rorion said mildly.
With a last annoyed grunt deep in the thickness of his throat von Texeira aborted the call and hit the playback button. The dark, dreadlock-framed features of one of Senna’s bonded factors appeared above the set. He looked somewhat haunted, his skin touched with gray; to his aggravation, von Texeira still couldn’t tell if it was Nestah or Petah.
‘‘Ye best be makin’ scarce from y’house,’’ he said in his weird English patois. ‘‘Dread times may be come fe—’’
Chocolate eyes sidled rapidly sidewise. The image flicked off.
‘‘Rorion,’’ von Texeira called, ‘‘we’d better get our things—’’
Rorion was already emerging from the back of the house with their two light travel bags slung from his shoulder. From their Loki service, separated though it was by more than a decade, both men had long been imbued with the principle Rely upon nothing beyond your own skin—and if it drops in the pot, thank the good Lord if you get away with that intact. As a matter of convenience they traveled light and kept such things as they did not need on their persons stowed for instant flight.
‘‘You were saying?’’ the younger man asked.
‘‘Nada interessante,’’ von Texeira said. ‘‘We must get to Senna’s house. Her bondsman looked scared. I can’t raise her. Something may have happened.’’
‘‘Can’t she take care of herself?’’
‘‘Perhaps,’’ von Texeira said. ‘‘But with Khan Jana gone and Malvina on her way with a bone in her nose, who will take care of us?’’
‘‘Point taken, milord,’’ Rorion said.
28
Military Spaceport #1
Hammarr, Sudeten
Jade Falcon Occupation Zone
3 April 3136
Star Colonel Han Crichell, tall, dark and hatchet-faced, stood glaring haughtily across the cement hangar floor at the party of warriors marching toward him. Beside him the splayed steel talons of his Gyrfalcon seemed to grip the stained cement.
The five warriors wore green armbands. They stopped several meters away. Two fanned out to each side, hands on their holstere
d sidearms. The central warrior, with an emerald-green cape hung from the shoulders of his orange-and-yellow jumpsuit, put his hands on his narrow hips and met the Star colonel eye to eye.
‘‘Star Colonel Han Crichell?’’
‘‘Do your eyes fail you, Star Captain Bodhi? You know me well enough.’’
He certainly knew Bodhi. The man was a very vocal member of the Slips in Council, a noted lapdog for faction chief Star Colonel Maurai Roshak. Only the traditional disapproval of challenges in Council, backed by a set of exceedingly humiliating guidelines for surkai drawn up by Beckett Malthus, had kept him from a dozen duels over his sneering manner.
Unlike Crichell, who sported a full if somewhat unruly head of raven’s-wing hair, Bodhi’s head was shaved to a central crest of hair dyed pink and yellow. The stooping-Turkina badge of Clan Jade Falcon was tattooed on one side, the glaring yellow-eyed jade falcon head symbol of the traditionalist faction on the other.
‘‘Star Colonel Han Crichell,’’ he said again, not bothering to keep contempt from his voice and scarred lips, ‘‘you are to accompany me to a place of confinement.’’
‘‘On whose authority?’’
‘‘On the authority of Loremaster Julia Buhalin, acting in the name of Khan Jana Pryde.’’
Crichell arched a brow. ‘‘So that is how the land lies. And if I refuse?’’
Bodhi showed his perfect teeth. ‘‘Then we shoot you down like the surat you are and drag your corpse to the Falcon’s Perch by the heels.’’ He and his four companions drew their sidearms.
A roaring shattered the air. It went on and on, accompanied by a huge flame flickering from up and to Han Crichell’s left.
The Star colonel could actually see his enemies’ clothing, and Star Captain Bodhi’s lean features, distorted by the potent blast from the minigun not five meters away, firing from the right arm of a parked Koshi. Then the five were washed away by the stream of heavy-jacketed bullets, to lie shattered, torn and sodden on the pavement to Han Crichell’s right.
The gunfire ceased. The echoes chased each other around the vast hangar like giant bats, dwindling with agonizing slowness into a silence that seemed itself to ring. Or perhaps that was just the Star colonel’s ears.
The Koshi’s cockpit side hatch opened. His aide-de-camp, MechWarrior Jeni, stuck her head out. Her fresh feminine features were flushed with passion, her green eyes bright.
‘‘So far has the honor of Clan Jade Falcon fallen,’’ she said. ‘‘And these stravags claim to be the true guardians our tradition!’’
‘‘You were right,’’ Crichell said without looking away from the pile of steaming, maroon cloth, all that remained of arrogant Star Captain Bodhi. ‘‘I did not imagine Julia Buhalin could act so rashly. She shows herself to be as mad as Malvina.’’
He shook his head. ‘‘Our course is clear,’’ he said. ‘‘We must act swiftly to defeat her insanity before facing the insanity of the Mongols.
‘‘To think such a day could ever dawn over Turkina’s own nest!’’
It was not only members of the ‘‘moderate’’ Jess faction that Julia Buhalin sent security teams, augmented by trusted Slip warriors, to arrest. She also availed herself of the opportunity to troll in certain ranking scientists and technicians who, in her opinion, exercised altogether too much power over Clan affairs. Using the emergency as a pretext to humble the lower castes was to her mind among the greatest services she could render Turkina and her khan.
Having just received disturbing news from the Lyran Commonwealth border, she dealt also with a certain other annoyance.
Julia Buhalin was constitutionally incapable of truly comprehending Malvina Hazen’s most recent proclamations. Otherwise she would never have acceded to the exalted rank of loremaster. It did not occur to her that, by arresting the very scientists and technicians who actually ran Clan Jade Falcon, she might be removing the cooling rods that regulated a potentially disastrous reaction.
She was not history’s first politician to be ignorant of the law of unintended consequences.
‘‘Now that’s a sight I never thought I’d see,’’ Rorion Klimt said.
Grimacing and puffing from the brisk walk to Senna’s house, von Texeira asked, ‘‘What’s that?’’
A street declined to their left, in the direction of the commercial spaceport around which The Casts had sprung up. Although non-Clan offworlders (and of course the Sea Foxes, whom the Falcons only grudgingly considered Clanners) were largely shunted into the quarter, they weren’t the only ones to work here. A laborer gang in brown shop-worker jumpsuits had gathered in the street at the foot of the hill. They actually appeared to be arguing with a tall man with a crest of green-dyed hair, dressed in green and canary yellow with a scarlet cape flapping in the icy breeze, who could be nothing but a MechWarrior.
‘‘Astonishing,’’ von Texeira said. His big round face creased in a scowl of perplexity and concern. Street demonstrations were no uncommon sight on Recife, unusual for the free but Teutonically order-minded Commonwealth. But on a Clan world? And the occupation zone capital, at that?
‘‘Talking back to a MechWarrior like that is pretty bold,’’ Rorion said. ‘‘To understate the obvious.’’
To show just how understated, the MechWarrior reached abruptly to his belt. His hand came up. Ruby light flashed three times. Three laborers fell. One thrashed and howled. The other two just lay smoldering in the trampled slush.
Some laborers from a nearby warehouse, broad-framed in pink jumpsuits and some nearly tall as elementals, had joined the dispute. One of these now snatched up a bright blue plastic drum which, if full, must have weighed forty kilos, swung it over her head, and threw it at the MechWarrior. Still clutching his laser pistol, the warrior flung up both arms. He managed to fend the barrel from his head. But its mass staggered him, and even upward of a hundred meters away the two Lyrans winced, a beat later, to hear the crack of a forearm snapping.
Before he could recover, a shop worker stepped up behind him and swung a meter-long tool two-handed at his skull. It struck with a noise like an ax hitting damp wood.
The warrior went to one knee. With an inarticulate cry of fury, the laborers surged forward. The warrior quickly vanished beneath a seethe of bodies and fists and heavy work boots.
‘‘Perhaps justice of a sort for that scene we witnessed yesterday, Rorion,’’ von Texeira said.
‘‘So social revolution comes at last to the Falcon heart-land, ’’ Rorion said, ‘‘courtesy of Malvina Hazen, the arch-reactionary. ’’
‘‘Let’s hope her evil burns out here and goes no further,’’ his master said.
Down the hill the laborers, now calling out in hoarse triumph, seemed to be engaged in some sort of tug of war.
‘‘Come,’’ von Texeira said. ‘‘We’d best get to Senna’s as quickly as possible. The laborers may have half a millennium’s resentment built up against their overlords, but they regard us as no better than rats. I suspect the streets won’t be healthy for outlanders.
‘‘And besides, I don’t really think we need to see any more here, do we, my boy?’’
‘‘Certo,’’ the younger man said, reseating his pack and hurrying on.
In space ahead new stars appeared. Others faded, vanished.
Standing beside Malvina Hazen on the Bucephalus’s observation deck, Cynthy clapped small hands together. ‘‘Pretty,’’ she said.
Beckett Malthus felt his gorge rise. The word was the first he had heard the Inner Sphere child speak. And what she called pretty was Jade Falcon Clansmen and women dying in their aerospace fighters.
Killed by their fellow Jade Falcons. What have I done?
The cold calculator in his mind—the part which, ultimately, had always ruled him—said, What seemed best at the time, always. And whatever you have done, can even a mind as devious as yours conceive a way to undo it?
Galaxy Commander Manas Amirault stood on Malvina’s other side, smiling slackly as a Spher
oid at a sporting event. Then again, Bec Malthus reflected, they weren’t his Clansfolk killing each other out there. Or mostly not: his own aerospace forces swarmed in a protective globe around his WarShip, following the wounded Emerald Talon toward Sudeten.
‘‘Great Khan,’’ a Horsewoman naval aide murmured respectfully to Malvina, ‘‘the Falcon Star admiral wishes to speak to you.’’
‘‘Send,’’ she said. A holographic stage rose from the floor of the ferroglass-fronted observation chamber, which was lit only by the lights of stars—and battle.
Dolphus Binetti’s gray visage seemed sunken behind his helmet visor. He and his bridge crew wore pressure suits so that a hull breach would not incapacitate them all at a stroke.
‘‘Jade Talon approaches, my Khan,’’ he said. His image flickered with transients, yellow and white scanlines and sparkles, from the energies unleashed by the fighter battle and the battleship’s defensive batteries. The energies about to be released would dwarf them. ‘‘She will come within primary-weapon engagement range within three hundred seconds.’’
‘‘You have my complete trust, Star Admiral,’’ Malvina said. ‘‘Fight as you choose.’’
‘‘Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen,’’ he said with painful correctness, ‘‘duty compels me to confess your faith might prove misplaced. As you are well aware my ship remains grievously damaged from her engagement at Skye. Though I pledge to you the utmost efforts of myself and my crew, my abilities may not suffice to defeat an undamaged WarShip, smaller though she is, in company of so many fighters and DropShips."
‘‘You will do what you must, Star Admiral Dolphus Binetti, ’’ Malvina said. ‘‘You are Jade Falcon.’’
