Warrior: Coupé (The Warrior Trilogy, Book Three): BattleTech Legends, #59

by Michael A. Stackpole

  Misha’s voice faded as Jeana lifted the pistol and clicked the safety off. “You’ll do no such thing. The Archon’s life is at stake here, Misha, and I will kill you to save her.”

  Misha’s expression changed from confusion to horror. “Melissa, you need help…”

  Jeana shook her head. God, she’s terrified and I can’t get her to help me. I have to tell her. “Listen, Misha, I’m not Melissa. My name is Jeana Clay, and I am Melissa’s double. She’s off with Hanse Davion.”

  Misha stared at her, her brown eyes brimming with tears and utter disbelief. “No, that’s impossible. I would have known.”

  Jeana stared at Misha intently. “Think, Misha, think. Don’t go to pieces on me now. What is the most important factor in Melissa’s marriage to Hanse Davion? What do they need to stabilize things?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think, Misha. Think about all the history you’ve learned from your father. Use your head. What do they need?”

  Misha looked down as concentration drew her brows together. “An heir. A child would unite both nations.”

  Jeana smiled. “Dead on. The Archon needed Melissa here to prevent her opposition from saying she’d sold her daughter to Hanse Davion. Melissa needs to be with Hanse so they can conceive a child. I’m here so she can be in two places at one time.” She lowered the gun. “Now, take me to the office and pray we’re in time.”

  Misha crossed to the fireplace in the back corner of the room. She pushed her fingers into the mouth of an ornamental lion’s-head carved from the marble mantelpiece and pressed down. Jeana heard a click, then the fireplace slid away from the wall. Behind it, a narrow opening revealed walls of rough bricks and mortar.

  Misha looked at her. “You’ll have to go ahead because there’s no place where you can pass me. The corridor goes along the wall for five meters, then we hit a circular stairway that will take us down to the main level where the office is located. At the base of the stairs, keep to the left, take the second right and the first left after that. The bookcase is at the far end of the office, facing the Archon’s desk. The catch is above the opening.”

  Jeana nodded and entered the dark tunnel. A musty odor hung in the air and small clouds of dust rose with each step. Jeana felt cobwebs brush against her face and hands during the trek. As she walked, she trailed the fingers of her left hand along the wall, letting the cold, rough texture anchor her in reality.

  So many games, so many lies. When this is over, Misha will feel like such a fool for having been deceived by me. She’ll be offended that Melissa wouldn’t trust her. Worse yet, she’ll have to lie to her father and not reveal any of this to him.

  She came to the spiral stairs and began her slow, careful descent. Fear fluttered through her stomach, but then died quickly. She found herself smiling almost the way she did back when her father was still alive. This is it, isn’t it? This is what you felt when you went to defend Katrina Steiner so many years ago on Poulsbo, isn’t it, Father? This is how it feels to know that what you’re doing is right, no matter what the cost…

  Jeana reached out again with her left hand to touch the wall when she stepped off the stairs. Remembering that she had to take the second right turn, she shifted the gun to her left hand. Her heart pounded in her ears as she moved along the pitch-black passage. At the turn, she shifted the gun back to her good hand, charged it, then stopped as she reached the office’s secret entrance.

  She hit the catch and stepped through the moment the bookcase slid forward enough for her to squeeze past it.

  The Archon, a shocked look on her face, rose immediately. “Melissa! What a pleasant surprise.” The surprise and anger arcing through her gray eyes demanded an explanation.

  Jeana raised the needle pistol as the Archon’s two guests rose from their chairs. “Exitus acta probat, as the duke was fond of saying. It’s over. Bailey spoiled your plans.”

  When the two Davion impostors heard her utter Sanglamore’s unofficial motto, they reacted. The shorter one moved to Jeana’s right, clawing for the gun at his belt, while the taller one moved to the left.

  Dammit! Split shot. Jeana saw the smaller man flick a glance at the Archon, forcing her decision. You’re it!

  Dropping into a combat stance, she pulled the trigger twice. The first cloud of needles shredded the uniform over the assassin’s heart. The impact half-spun him, making her second shot slam home into his left shoulder. Already dead, he flopped to the floor.

  Jeana pivoted slightly, swinging the gun into line with the other man. He brought his pistol up as she triggered her third shot. She saw it paint his throat and chin with scarlet, then stroked the trigger one more time. Before she could see whether or not that shot had hit, something huge and heavy kicked her in the chest. Stars exploded before her eyes as Jeana flew back and struck her head on the bookshelf.

  A wave of blackness stole her sight, then she found herself slumped on the floor. She saw her gun lying centimeters from her right hand, but her body refused her order to grab it. As if to mock her effort, she rolled onto her back and lost sight of the gun.

  Jeana tried to swallow, but couldn’t. Must have been hit…hit hard. She felt a trickle of blood pool in the hollow of her throat. Shouldn’t there be more pain…?

  The Archon knelt beside Jeana and made the sign of the cross. Reaching out with her right hand, Katrina Steiner closed Jeana’s unseeing eyes. The Archon’s lower lip trembled as she fought back tears. First your father, and now you. Your family served the Commonwealth more bravely and selflessly than I or it deserves.

  Katrina looked up as Misha stepped through the passageway and uttered a small cry. She knelt at Jeana’s head and lifted it into her lap. “Archon, is she…?”

  Katrina nodded. She studied Misha’s face and the conflicting emotions playing across it. “You know, don’t you, that she’s not Melissa!”

  Misha stroked Jeana’s hair. “I never would have guessed. Telling me was the only way she could get me to tell her how to get through the passageway. She knew you were in danger… She said the impostors were from Skye.”

  The Archon’s nostrils flared for a moment. “Yes, they reacted when she quoted them something she’d learned at Sanglamore.”

  Misha looked up at Katrina. “What are we going to do?”

  The Archon stood slowly. “You and Melissa are to be staying at the Winter Palace for a while, correct?”

  Misha nodded. “A week.”

  Katrina thought for a moment, absentmindedly chewing on her left thumbnail. “Your stay there will be extended. Simon Johnson will seal the palace so that no one can see you or Melissa.” She smiled wryly. “And then I’ll have a special mission for you.”

  Misha stroked Jeana’s hair. “What do you want me to do?”

  The Archon peered down at her. “I cannot have you here where your father can ferret out what has happened. Not yet, at least. I have to send you away.” Katrina nodded resolutely. “Yes, you’ll go to the Federated Suns, and you will escort my daughter back home.”

  Chapter 22

  SIAN

  SIAN COMMONALITY

  CAPELLAN CONFEDERATION

  25 JUNE 3029

  The bright vermilion and gold bursts of fireworks in the sky and the sound of cheering from the palace courtyard did nothing to lighten Romano Liao’s foul mood. The rocket fire burned red highlights into her hair, but as the shadows fell in an explosion’s wake, her mood likewise darkened and deepened.

  Fools, she thought, looking down at the people gathered in the courtyard. You celebrate one minor victory as if we had won the war. Damn me to the Nine Hells, but you act as though McCarron’s Armored Cavalry actually saved Sarna from conquest! They didn’t. They just destroyed a Davion regiment. What about the other forty still breathing down on us?

  Romano turned abruptly and stalked back in from her balcony. In a pout, she dropped into the chair set before her vanity. Picking up a platinum-handled brush, she idly worked it through her hair, th
en spun and hurled it against the wall. “You’re all idiots! You’re celebrating a delay of the inevitable. We must take action to capitalize on the opportunity we now have.”

  Romano frowned at her own reflection, then forcibly relaxed her fierce expression before it could set wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. They’re celebrating the interdiction as much as McCarron’s destruction of the Fifth Syrtis Fusiliers. You’d celebrate it, too, if Justin Xiang hadn’t embraced it as an omen of disaster for House Davion.

  Her green eyes flashed like an angry cat’s as she thought about her sister’s paramour. You chose incorrectly there, didn’t you, Romano? You thought, with Tsen Shang’s war experience on the Marik frontier, that he’d share your hatred of the Free Worlds League. You thought you’d have a powerful ally in a full-blooded Capellan citizen. You thought a man raised in the Federated Suns would be too soft to establish a power base. And you thought wrong. Blood will out!

  Romano let a sly grin tickle the corners of her mouth. What sort of a game is Xiang working? Does he know you sent Ling to kill him? Ling did shoot him, of that I’m certain, but did he tell Justin who gave the order? If so, why has Justin withheld the information from Candace? Is Xiang playing with her the same way Tsen Shang has become my plaything?

  She closed her eyes and summoned up one of her more disturbing but favorite fantasies. Justin Xiang came to her, his rage and contempt at her attempt to kill his father changed now into passion. They made frenzied love, and she thrilled to the cold caress of his steel hand…

  The staccato string of explosions that mark the end of the fireworks display snapped her out of the phantom encounter with her sister’s lover. With him as my right hand, no one could stand before me. With him to oppose me and back my sister, I will never gain the throne I so rightly deserve. Can I co-opt him, or will I have to eliminate him as I have eliminated other threats to the Capellan state?

  The image of her dead stepmother lying half-decomposed in the morgue came to her, then was overlaid by another image. It was her stepmother and Colonel Pavel Ridzik rutting together like animals in a bungalow on Terra. She’d not seen it, but she’d heard about it from Tsen Shang. Alexi Malenkov reported it to Justin and Tsen while we were all at the wedding of Hanse and Melissa. Ridzik and Elizabeth weren’t even cautious enough to make sure someone did not follow them to their tryst.

  A sneer contorted Romano’s beautiful features as she thought of Ridzik. You are a contemptible bastard, Ridzik. How could I ever have considered you as a consort to solidify my power base? You toady up to Hanse Davion so he doesn’t snap up your precious Tikonov, then you decide to go off on a little crusade of your own. You strike out at the Free Worlds League instead of helping your master subjugate your old homeland. Are we so meager a threat as far as you are concerned?

  Romano licked her lips. Yes, it’s time to clean up some loose ends before I make my next move. You, Pavel Ridzik, have arrogantly dismissed the Capellan Confederation. My father tried to have you killed before, but he failed. I’ll not have the sins of my father visited upon me. It is time for you to die. Romano laughed softly as she wove together the final threads in a plot he could never escape.

  BOOK III: DUTY

  “Never mind your happiness; do your duty. ”

  Will Durant

  Chapter 23

  NEW AVALON

  CRUCIS MARCH

  FEDERATED SUNS

  19 JULY 3029

  Riva Allard ran fingers back through her short black hair, then stretched. Something is definitely odd about this exam. She narrowed her blue eyes and read aloud the answer to a question about artificial stimulation of involuntary muscles from the viewer screen. “Though the technology of using electrical impulses to stimulate voluntary muscles and transform their tissue to resemble that of involuntary muscles has been available since the late twentieth century, the biomechanics of the change was not fully understood until 2947. Use of the transformation-process information has made the manufacture of myomer muscles for internal organ transplant far more feasible.” Nope, that answer was not like Bob Clark at all.

  She looked over at her teaching assistant. “Julie, when we gave this exam in Biomech 104, the Thursday section, who was Clark sitting beside?”

  Julie’s brown eyes looked upward as she concentrated. “Linda Hoffmann, the transfer from the Lyran Commonwealth.” She dug through a small pile of disks, plucking one from near the bottom of the stack. She tossed it across the narrow alley between their desks. “Here you go. She knows her stuff. I think I had her down for a 121 out of 128.”

  Riva deftly caught the disk and inserted it into the auxiliary disk drive. With a few quick keystrokes, she placed Hoffmann’s answer for the question she’d been grading next to the answer offered by Bob Clark. “Déjà vu! It appears Mr. Clark liberally copied from Ms. Hoffmann.” She turned in her chair to face Julie. “Give me a good reason I shouldn’t flunk him right into some frontline unit…”

  Julie glanced down then up again with a sheepish look. “You should have seen him in the lab. He was in my section and really knew his stuff. He’s a natural with the equipment, Riva. He did all the neural suturing for the myomer transplant on that dog earlier in the trimester…” She hesitated, searching for a word. “I guess I can only describe his performance as intuitive because he knew from the readouts others were giving him what needed to be done and what double-checked. He also knew when one of the monitors had wandered out of calibration just from the data he was hearing.”

  Riva nodded slowly. I know he’s good with the tools and can get the work done, but his performance has dropped off from where he started at the beginning of May. “Do you have any idea what the problem is? His performance has deteriorated badly. He’s still got the final exam, but even if he aced it and maxed your mark for his lab work, he’d still be looking at a 2.4 for the course. With those grades, he’ll get chucked to a frontline unit faster than a shipment of coffee runs out these days.”

  Julie nodded, then sighed heavily. “I think things went to hell when he heard about the Fifth Syrtis Fusiliers getting hammered on Sarna. He’s got a brother…Tom…who was in that unit. He’s not heard from him since the attack a month and a half ago. Not knowing is killing him…”

  Riva glanced at the picture of her brother Dan sitting on her desk. Bob Clark’s not alone in worrying about loved ones in this war, but we all have to persevere. He doesn’t know what happened to his brother, and I get to see holovids of mine getting shot up!

  She looked back at Julie. “All right. We’ll play it this way. Tell him he’s got five days to get me a ten-thousand-word report on how he knew the monitor was out of whack during the operation, and the logical consequences of the problem. I also want a covering letter stating that his concern for his brother was what distracted him during the exam.” I’ll see if I can talk to my father and find out if Tom Clark is OK, or what the story is. Bob Clark will be more valuable here learning how to patch people up from the war than he will be dying to get some Liao soldier a medal.

  Riva jotted down a note about speaking to her father, then looked up and smiled as Kym Sorenson entered the office and perched herself on the corner of her own desk. The pretty blond woman leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes for a moment. Riva smiled sympathetically. “Bad down in the wards, huh?”

  Kym nodded, her eyes still closed. “We got a new load of casualties from the front. Over a dozen are from Sarna, late of the Fifth Syrtis Fusiliers. For them, being shipped to New Avalon is something worse than being sent to hell.” Her blue eyes came slowly open. “But I think I might have two subjects who’d be willing to take a chance on your program.”

  Kym glanced at her small compad. “One was looking forward to a career playing zero-G soccer. His legs got badly burned when his Warhammer tangled with two Marauders, and so the doctors don’t think they’ve got enough neural tissue to make fully articulated limbs work. The other was a pianist who lost her left hand. She’s got an alle
rgy that makes her a poor candidate for a cybernetic hand, and she doesn’t believe a metal hand would give her the feel she needs to play anyway.”

  Riva smiled. “Good. Dr. Banzai wants to tour the wards on Friday. I’ll give him their names and case histories tomorrow. Anybody else look promising?”

  Kym sighed heavily. “Not really. Only the usual clowns who claimed they needed ‘special stimulation’ and they’d be fine. I took their names for Julie…”

  Julie blushed and all three women laughed aloud. Riva shut down her computer and stacked the disks it spat out at her on the left side of her desk. “Nearly quitting time. What are we going to do tonight?”

  Julie shrugged expressively. “I’m not going to go watch The Immortal Warrior, Part 47 again. I don’t mind looking at his body when they have him running around with no shirt on, but if I see him use a photon sword to cauterize that needler wound on his stomach again, I’ll throw up.”

  Riva laughed lightly. “Second that. Every time I see the finale where he drives a Saladin hovertank into that Phoenix Hawk Land-Air ’Mech, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. I also like the scenes where they didn’t get around to covering the Kurita insignia with Liao insignia… You can’t tell what front they’re supposed to be fighting on.”

  Kym affected an air of wounded artistic pride. “Don’t you two get it? This is an allegory for man’s struggle against ignorance.” She shook her head, letting golden curls ripple down over her shoulders. “I’m with Julie—oiled pecs are fine for a while, but the rest of that film is creative graveyard.”

  “Graveyard, that’s what New Avalon’s been like since the interdiction.” Riva ticked items off on her fingers as she spoke. “We all knew publicly broadcast holovid programs were insipid, but now we’re limited to those produced here on New Avalon. The difference between yogurt and New Avalon is that yogurt has culture—all we’ve got is diplomats, soldiers on leave, and aging holovid stars who can’t get off-world because they’ve not got priority.”