by Victor Milán
I must get used to the taste of that name in my mouth, she thought bitterly. She was safe, of course; even one so lost to proper behavior as Malvina would never dare act against her. Or Clan Jade Falcon would simply rise in revolt.
Let her feel the sting of the precedent she set, Julia Buhalin thought. Her full lips smiled.
An aide approached, still wearing the green Slip faction brassard. Julia would have to reprove her for that later.
‘‘Yes?’’
‘‘Excellency,’’ the warrior said, ‘‘planetary defense reports that the WarShip Emerald Talon has entered the atmosphere of Sudeten.’’
Julia Buhalin stared at her without comprehension. A murmur drew her eyes to the crowd. Upraised arms sent them skyward.
In a panel depicting the visage of Elizabeth Hazen a small yellow sun had appeared.
A yellow corona appeared around the Emerald Talon’s prow. In an instant it engulfed the whole huge ship. A bow wave of light blazed out around it.
"But a WarShip is not streamlined to enter atmosphere!’’ exclaimed Manas Amirault. Even as he spoke he saw the tremendous mass begin to break into pieces under stresses it had never been designed to endure.
‘‘No,’’ Malvina said. Her smile was mad wide. Her eyes shone like stars. ‘‘It isn’t.’’
Again they saw projected the crowds gathered in Falcon’s Way before the Perch. Someone pointed up into the sky toward the east. The viewpoint swung that way. This was clearly a news broadcast: the discreet green Jade Falcon Information Service logo was tucked at the bottom of the display.
For a moment Malvina saw nothing unusual. Then high up a yellow glow began to spread like a stain through a great fluffy mass of cumulus.
The cloud began to boil. The light grew brighter. Then an elongated mass thrust through, blazing like a meteor. It swelled rapidly, trailing a thick white contrail that writhed as if braided of vast serpents.
‘‘Malvina!’’ Manas Amirault exclaimed, sitting up in alarm. ‘‘What is this?’’
Impossibly her smile widened. She leaned into the hideous yellow radiance cast by the projection.
‘‘Judgment,’’ she said.
In its screaming descent the Emerald Talon broke into three primary sections. Inertia kept them close together on their downward trajectory. Lesser fragments flared bright and burned up like meteorites. But even the terrific heat could make little impression upon 1.2 million tons of mass.
The incandescent compressed air mass driven before the Emerald Talon struck the Perch like a bomb. As the battleship filled the sky the burning oxygen splashed across the plaza. Unprotected humans flared into momentary flame and vanished in a tidal wave of brilliance. Malvina saw a Spirit teetering, paint blistering, fuselage and metal limbs beginning to glow red before it was swallowed up.
Then the three main fragments of the great ship hit the heart of Hammarr like a close-grouped charge of shot.
The image went black. For a moment nothing showed above the stage. Then appeared a view from Sudeten orbit, just far enough to show the whole planet as a globe.
A dazzling white beacon shone from the midst of the southern landmass. White clouds rippled away from it like smoke.
‘‘No,’’ whispered Galaxy Commander Manas Amirault.
‘‘Khan Malvina Hazen, Bridge,’’ a brisk male voice said from a wall speaker.
‘‘Bridge, Malvina Hazen,’’ she said. ‘‘Speak.’’
‘‘Our sensors report that the Jade Falcon Naval Reserve WarShip Emerald Talon has suffered catastrophic reentry into the atmosphere of Sudeten. Impact point is calculated at Hammarr center, at approximately the coordinates of the Falcon’s Perch.’’
‘‘Acknowledged,’’ Malvina said. ‘‘Chingis Khan out.’’
A fiery globe rose from the surface. It sucked clouds up about it, transforming itself to a white mushroom.
‘‘How could Dolphus Binetti do such a thing?’’ asked Manas Amirault as if his throat had swollen half-shut.
‘‘Because I ordered him to,’’ Malvina said breathlessly. ‘‘He was dying. His ship was dying. I offered him one final chance at history.’’
She jumped astraddle her partner. Her hand reached below her round-muscled buttock to find him. The artificial arm snaked round his neck.
‘‘You grabbed for me before,’’ she breathed into his neck. ‘‘Are you still in the mood? I want you now.’’
He threw her away from him with a cry of shame.
She fell through the image of the violated planet to slam against the bulkhead with her heels in the air. In an second she sprang into a crouch. Her eyes flamed at him from the midst of the projected globe. The parti-colored lasers painted pictures of devastation upon her bare belly and breasts.
‘‘You dare?’’ she snarled.
‘‘You dare?’’ he asked back. ‘‘You have destroyed a city!"
‘‘It was mine to destroy! I am khan of Clan Jade Falcon. I am khan of all humankind!’’
‘‘But remember Edo! Remember Turtle Bay!’’
‘‘I do. I meant this lesson to eclipse that one. As it has.’’ Strangely, debate had calmed her. The murderous rage had faded from her eyes. Her tone was reasonable now.
Almost.
‘‘But Clan Smoke Jaguar was destroyed.’’
‘‘By the Spheroids. They were weak. That was why they bombarded Edo from space—in angry acknowledgment of their weakness. I have burned Hammarr out of strength.’’
She gestured toward her naked body. ‘‘I have lit a bonfire to commemorate our triumph. Let the other Clans—and the puling Republic of the Sphere—look on and despair.’’
‘‘But such wanton murder—’’ His face was drawn in horror. ‘‘Of your own! Your own people!’’
‘‘They defied me,’’ she said. ‘‘Worse, when Sudeten was threatened by invasion, they fell to fighting one another like Spheroids in a tavern brawl. The Jade Falcon gene pool has languished long in need of cleansing. Now I Reave it with fire. Can you not see the glory?’’
‘‘No!’’ He jumped from the bed and began searching for his uniform, which he had discarded in haste shortly after entering the compartment. ‘‘I see—’’
He shook his head. His black topknot whipped his bare, muscular shoulders. ‘‘I—see evil.’’
Malvina’s expression was almost hurt. ‘‘But this is the Mongol doctrine. It is what brought you to the Falcon occupation zone, united your destiny to mine.’’
Again he shook his head, like a child refusing to go to bed. He still gripped the twisted black rose in his left hand as if unaware he did so. A drop of blood fell from his fist. One of the thorns had pierced his palm without him noticing.
‘‘No. It was a parody of the true Mongol Way you practiced. We came to teach you the true Way: of the tactical doctrine, of the style of life Kerensky really meant his children to lead. And to steer you away from the false path you had strayed upon.
‘‘Our Clan, Hell’s Horses, had lost its purpose. We hoped to blend our deeper understanding of the ancient ways with the Crusading fire that burned within you. But never such a fire as that.’’
Her laughter was wicked silver music. ‘‘How can you set the cosmos alight if you scruple to burn a world?’’
‘‘How can I have been so blind?’’ he said. ‘‘You are lost to honor; lost to the Clan way. I pity you.’’
He stooped, caught up his brown-and-khaki whipcord trousers, straightened with them hanging from a dark hand. ‘‘I must ask to use your communicator, Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen,’’ he said formally. ‘‘I must inform my people: we withdraw to the Hell’s Horses occupation zone at once.’’
‘‘I challenge you,’’ she said.
He stared at her as if she had spoken in some old tongue dead before the dawn of space travel. ‘‘What did you say?’’
‘‘I challenge you,’’ she said, still crouched, naked and feral and clothed in desolation. ‘‘I, Malvina Hazen, Khan
of Clan Jade Falcon, Chingis Khan, challenge you, Galaxy Commander Manas Amirault, to a Trial of Possession: of the Mongol doctrine, of Fire Horse Galaxy.’’
She stood erect, seeming to rise from the globe like a legendary sea-goddess from surf. ‘‘I bid myself as you see me. How will you defend?’’
He only shook his head. ‘‘This is madness. I cannot—’’
‘‘But I can!’’ Like a leopardess she sprang. Once more she caught him around the waist with her legs, the white one and the black. Her hands clutched for his throat.
He dropped the rose, grabbed her forearms and held her off. ‘‘Your strength cannot match mine, Malvina Hazen,’’ he said. ‘‘I permit you to unsay your challenge, if you allow us to withdraw unhindered.’’
Her hair, pale and unbound, whipped his face as she struggled. Her efforts were futile. His hands gripped her wrists, one flesh and bone, the other steel and polymer, like bands of iron.
Then she quit thrashing and smiled sweetly through the hair curtain hanging in her face. ‘‘You have no conception of my strength, Manas Amirault.’’
Her black prosthetic arm twisted in his grasp so savagely his thumb broke with an audible crack. He might have cried out then, in surprise if not pain. But Malvina’s black ankle locked her white leg behind his back. Servomechanisms began to tighten it inexorably around his rib cage.
The breath was crushed from his body in a voiceless scream. She used the distraction to break her natural hand free. She caught his wrists in turn.
He writhed. Now it was he who could not break free. Her black hand closed on his wrist until the bones squealed and grated together. All this time he could draw no breath; her false leg continued to compress his ribs. Ominous cracking noises issued from his chest.
He tried to head-butt her. She lowered her face and took it on the crown. His noble nose flattened itself against the curve of her skull. He reared his head back, eyes rolling like a horse about to bolt. Blood gushing from his nostrils made matted red streaks in her near-white hair.
She laughed and squeezed harder. The veins stood out from his neck. His mouth gaped in a rictus of silent agony.
He plunged forward against the bulkhead, seeking to crush her with his weight. She grunted and took the blow. It was already too late: he had been too long without air. The vertebrae of his lower spine were beginning to displace beneath the relentless pressure of Malvina’s black prosthetic leg.
He levered down his head. His brown eyes met hers with an unvoiceable plea.
She smiled and released the horrible grip of her black hand. His own hung like a wilted flower from his crushed wrist. Nonetheless hope flared in his eyes.
Malvina pressed her mouth to his in a fierce and lingering kiss. Then she seized his long topknot with her black hand and broke his neck with a single pull.
His body collapsed beneath her. She shuddered and cried out in ecstasy as she felt life flee him.
For a moment she lay sprawled across his unmoving torso. His skin felt waxen, already oddly cool. Then she rose, shook back the dripping tangle of her hair, went to pick up the rose he had let fall. She placed it on his muscular broad chest and crossed his unresisting hands across it. Then she stooped to shut his eyes with gentle strokes of her thumbs. Lightly she kissed both lids.
Then she stalked to the wall communicator with scarlet rivulets running down her marble-white breasts.
‘‘Bridge, Khan Malvina Hazen,’’ she said. ‘‘Send a crew to my quarters at once. There is a mess that requires cleanup.’’
When the cries of Hail, Malvina Hazen! Hail, Chingis Khan had died away on the flying bridge, Beckett Malthus alone stood unmoving, staring at her as from the bottom of a pit.
‘‘What have you done?’’ he asked.
‘‘Clear the bridge,’’ Malvina said. The crew and staff, Hell’s Horses as well as her own Falcons, obliged without question. The Bec de Corbin, after all, was really run from the CIC at its core. Their cheeks were still pink with triumph, and they chattered like songbirds.
The great viewscreen showed the blackness of space and Sudeten merely a bigger, brighter star among the multitudes, as well as floating holodisplays showing various aspects of the aftermath of the Emerald Talon’s final ride around and above the planet’s surface. When they were alone she said, ‘‘What was necessary.’’
For one of the few times in his life he could find nothing to say.
Malvina moved to a console where two zero-gee vases sat clamped with instant-adhering patches—a precaution against violent maneuvers, since the DropShip was decelerating at one gravity on its approach to Sudeten. A single black rose sprouted from each.
She drew one out. Its stem was curled like a comma.
She flowed to Malthus like fog. Taking one of his great hands in her tiny one, she pressed the rose upon him. ‘‘You served Jana Pryde well until she cast you aside,’’ she said. ‘‘You have served me well as I rose to seize control of Clan Jade Falcon. Now you shall serve me as khan of our Clan— and beyond!’’
So saying she seized the lapel of his jacket and drew him down to kiss him on the lips. Then she released him.
The door to the flying bridge stood open. Two laborer women stood there with Cynthy standing between, clutching Burton Bear to the breast of her white-trimmed black dress. At a gesture from Malvina, the girl came forward. Her attendants remained in the corridor outside.
‘‘You may leave us now, Bec Malthus,’’ Malvina said, smiling and kneeling with her arms spread to embrace the girl, who ran to her.
Malthus allowed himself a thunderous frown. Malvina just smiled at him, slowly, over the girl’s shoulder.
He turned on his heel and left.
Having got a look at the Galaxy commander’s expression, the two laborers fled down the corridor before him as fast as they could without indecorum. He walked at a deliberate pace. It felt to him as if the ship—his ship!— were decelerating at two gravities instead of one.
She dismissed me like a mere laborer! he raged inwardly. On my own ship! Is this what I have become, her lackey? I am Jade Falcon! He threw the rose to the runner at his feet, raised his boot to crush it. And froze.
Aberrant as it was, his nature remained that of a Falcon warrior decanted. As such, it defined mercurial. And as quickly as he reminded himself of his own lofty heritage, his Bloodright, his anger turned to cold, sick despair that drained the strength from his knees. He lowered his foot and fought to keep from swaying.
I am Jade Falcon. The simple proud statement of fact rang horribly hollow in his brain. He had just helped inflict upon his Clan a wound greater than any ever dealt it by a foe. Not even Tukayyid could compare with the desolation of this day.
He did not ask himself what he had done: that was horribly clear, the moreso to a man who prized himself upon being a supreme realist. But he asked himself what it was that Malvina Hazen had become.
To ask was to answer.
After a lifetime, itself long for a Clan warrior, of cynical observation and appraisal of his kin and kind, there was one value he had always shared with the most unquestioning Jade Falcon zealot: that compassion was perversion and mercy a crime, and that the weak must be culled for the betterment of Clan and race. But this hour, watching the dome of white fire rise where once the capital of the Falcon zone had stood, some limit had been reached. Some cold bulwark he and every Falcon was taught from birth to erect against certain human feelings had been burned through by the sunlike heat of the Talon’s fall.
Now emotion flooded him. Spheroid emotions, which he had studied as cynically and disdained, if anything, more thoroughly than unthinking Clan passions. Misery. Despair. Horror. Sadness. Pity.
In that instant, standing alone in the DropShip corridor staring down unseeing at the black rose at his feet, Beckett Malthus died. And someone else rose from the muck of sick emotions to fill his shell and inspirit him anew.
The Clan ideal, which the Falcons exulted in taking to extremes, was to ex
alt oneself, win glory, smash foes on the battlefield and rake down rivals in order to rise as high as ability could possibly carry one. Yet, paradoxically, selflessly: for the good of the Clan, for the Clans and Kerensky’s vision, to drive evolution closer to the perfection of the human genotype. In the end the individual, be she laborer or warrior, meant nothing. Turkina was all.
He had exemplified the opposite: caring nothing for glory nor visible rank but seeking power and influence, and all for himself.
But now he was dead to all that he had been before. A new resolve became an ember within him, burned brighter and hotter until he was surprised his beard did not catch fire and the paint of the bulkheads around him blister.
Slowly, carefully, he knelt and picked up the rose. Cradling it in his big palm, he stood straight.
I will serve you with all my skill and zeal, Malvina Hazen, he silently swore. Until such time as my death can destroy you, and eradicate the blood-taint with which you have infected not just the Clans but all of humankind.
The time was not now. He knew that. He could not yet envision, subtle and expansive as his imagination was, the circumstances in which he could do what he now knew must be done.
But Beckett Malthus, perhaps alone among Clan Jade Falcon, had cultivated patience as a skill.
He would wait. Until the lines converged.
Then blackness.
Almost girlish in her excitement, Malvina Hazen led her ward to the console. There she plucked the remaining black rose from the confining membrane. It alone had a long, straight stem, from which Malvina herself had stripped all thorns.
She knelt and folded Cynthy’s hands across it against the girl’s breast. She kissed her on the cheek.
‘‘And thus do I seal your fate, my darling,’’ Malvina said, ‘‘as I have sealed others’ this day.
‘‘Only yours differs from theirs. You I will always shield with all my wit and skill, with my very body if need be.’’
She stood to her full height facing the starry blaze in the viewport. ‘‘You shall rule all,’’ she said in a voice that rang from the bulkhead. ‘‘You shall be the last.’’
