How special, Will soon discovered. He was heading past the main pad, on his return from taking the morning muster reports to headquarters and bringing back the daily staff briefing, when he saw that the VTOL’s heavy cargo was now uncovered and mobile: a Koshi BattleMech, with hunched back, bulky arms and forward-thrust cockpit, standing on the pad while its pilot took it through the bends and stretches of what was probably a posttransport checkout routine.
Will paused to watch. It looked from the outside as though the ’Mech was engaging in a stately series of mechanical calisthenics, bending and flexing its metal-and-myomer limbs, testing the balance and stability of its twenty-five-ton bulk. The long flight from New Lanark must have been a strain on both the ’Mech and on the VTOL carrying it; only because the Koshi was one of the lightest ’Mechs would the aircraft have been able to lift with it at all.
The last time Will had seen that Koshi was at Red Ledge Pass, when the Highlander infantry held up the Steel Wolves’ armored column for thirty-six hours, buying time for the Countess of Northwind and Paladin Ezekiel Crow to organize the main defense. The rider of the Koshi had been heart and brain of that holding action, always there to back up the beleaguered infantry where the action was thickest, dealing out death to the Wolves’ infantry when they threatened to overrun Highlander positions.
The series of self-tests done, the Koshi came to the rest position and shut down. A minute or so later, the pilot left the cockpit and descended via the entry ladder. Even from the far edge of the pad, Will recognized the man’s ginger brown hair and erect posture. Fort Barrett’s important visitor was Brigadier General Michael Griffin—the pilot of the Koshi at Red Ledge Pass, and senior officer in charge of the infantry’s holding action.
Now Griffin had come to Fort Barrett. Not for a quick visit, either, if he’d brought the Koshi with him.
At noon in the Sergeants’ mess, Will’s suspicions were confirmed. He was talking with Master Sergeant Murray—who, while inhumanly spit-and-polish under all circumstances, had proved considerably more affable than Will had thought he could be—over the day’s lunchtime meal of fish and chips with sponge cake for dessert.
“I saw General Griffin warming up the Koshi this morning,” Will said.
“It’s an impressive machine.” Murray gave Will a suspicious look. “You’re not one of those foot soldiers who secretly wishes he could be riding a ’Mech, are you?”
Will shook his head. “Me? No. Too big, too noisy, too cramped . . . I’m all for living and dying in the out-of-doors. They’ll put me into a box soon enough.”
“Too true.”
“The Colonel is good, though . . . I remember the Pass.” Will finished up the last of his fish-and-chips and turned to the sponge cake. The battered fish had been excellent, made from the fresh local catch; the sponge cake tasted like it had been made by somebody who’d read a description once and missed the point. But enough chocolate frosting could make anything edible. Will chewed, swallowed, and continued, “What’s he doing here at Fort Barrett, do you know?”
“Regimental headquarters has some work for us. The Colonel’s come down here to do a reconnaissance-in-force, and we’re going to be supplying the force.”
“Somebody really likes putting him out at the sharp end,” Will said. “And us.”
“You ought to know how that works by now, Elliot: Show them that you can walk on water, and the next time around they give you deeper water with higher waves in it.”
“Aye. What are we going out looking for?”
Murray smiled. “You ought to know—you spotted her first yourself.”
“What . . . ?”
Then Will remembered the celebratory dinner at the Riggers’ Rest, and the woman who had reminded him, as he was dropping off to sleep hours later, of Anastasia Kerensky. By the time he’d awakened the next morning, he’d convinced himself it was only a coincidental resemblance. He’d turned in a report anyway, expecting it to be filed somewhere and promptly forgotten, not—
“All this on my say-so?”
“I’m afraid so, son.” Murray chuckled. “No, not really. The bright boys and girls in Regimental intelligence undoubtedly had an entire box full of puzzle parts they fitted together to get the big picture. You just gave them the missing piece.”
15
Main Concourse
Tara DropPort
Northwind
December 3133; local winter
The DropShip Cullen’s Hound would lift from Tara DropPort in twenty-four hours, and Di Jones was scheduled to ride. She had her ticket and her papers in hand, she’d checked aboard her few items of luggage—she’d traveled light, as always, and in any case she hadn’t been able to bring with her on this mission the only thing she possessed that she truly valued, her Hatchetman’Mech. Now she had time to kill before Cullen’s Hound took its departure and, thanks to Jack Farrell, damn his one remaining eye, she had an appointment to kill it with.
She met Farrell in the DropPort’s main concourse, a huge dome-covered expanse with transit links to the rest of the port and to the city of Tara proper. The concourse wasn’t as full of people these days as it would have been before the collapse of the HPG net, but it was still thronged with people. Casual interstellar travel had become a thing of the past—its existence had depended, more than most people realized, on rapid communications and a general peace—but the need to carry stored media or hardcopy news and correspondence from system to system had kept the DropShips coming to Northwind.
Jack Farrell sat on a bench near the outbound to Tara transit gate, reading a one-sheet printout of the day’s top stories from the Northwind Intelligencer. Di had a chance to read the top headline—COUNCIL PASSES ECONOMIC AID PACKAGE—before he folded up the one-sheet and tucked it into his jacket pocket.
“Di,” he said, rising to greet her. “Nice to see you again.”
“Farrell. Wish I could say the same about you.” The statement was only a half-truth. She had to admit that he was a dangerously good-looking man, even—or especially—with the black eye patch. She wished that the sight of him didn’t make her so twitchy, even after all this time.
As always, he seemed unaffected by her insults. “Let’s find a better place to talk. Maybe local intelligence has this whole building stuffed full of eyes and ears, and maybe it doesn’t, but I don’t feel like taking the chance.”
“Back into the city?”
“Works for me,” he said, and headed off with long strides for the outbound to Tara gate, leaving her to follow.
One light-rail ride and two hoverbus transfers later, they ended up sitting opposite one another in the back booth of a corner café in the working-class section of Tara. The air in the café was rich with the smells of sausages and steak and bacon, and the background chatter of the noontime crowd was punctuated by the pop and sizzle of hot fat.
Farrell ordered two luncheon specials—today’s offering was a mixed grill—and a pot of coffee from the booth’s touch-screen menu. The coffee was strong, black, and fresh; the cream came in a pottery jug.
Di frowned at Farrell’s high-handed assumption that he knew what she wanted without asking, but stopped short of actual protest. She’d missed breakfast in the rush to get her luggage checked aboard Cullen’s Hound twenty-four hours before departure. Now she was hungry, and she wasn’t going to let the fact that One-Eyed Jack Farrell knew her likes and dislikes keep her from enjoying lunch.
Of course, there remained the business discussion to be gotten through as well. Farrell began it, while they drank coffee and waited for their specials to arrive.
“How did the meeting with your target go?”
Even here—in a place as unlikely to be bugged as any in the city—he didn’t mention Anastasia Kerensky’s name. There was no point in drawing attention to themselves by speaking the name of the woman who had led the Steel Wolves to within hours of striking at the city’s heart.
“Eh. Turned me down flat.”
“I
t was always a possibility,” Farrell said. “Those people don’t think like us.”
“I didn’t meet any of ‘those people.’ Just her.”
“She’s one of them, never fear. Crazy like all the rest.”
“If you say so.” Di wasn’t sure exactly what she thought about the meeting with Anastasia Kerensky. The woman’s refusal had caused her to feel frustration, yes, but also respect. It was the latter sentiment that had prompted Di to let fall the bit of info about the mole in the Steel Wolf command—which was something she was definitely not planning to tell Farrell about, or Jacob Bannson either. “She doesn’t want to owe anything to anyone, that’s the problem.”
Farrell’s response was a lazy smile. “Takes one to know one, darlin’. Not that you’re crazy or anything.”
“And this is the point where I remind myself that I can’t kill you right now because we’re both working for the same guy.”
“That’s right,” he said. The waitress brought them their luncheon specials, and he paused for a moment until she had gone away again. As soon as the woman was safely back behind the counter, he dug into his bacon and sausages and continued, “I wouldn’t worry about the no-deal thing. The boss didn’t hire you to be his traveling saleslady.”
“Good thing, because she sure wasn’t buying.” Di finished her first cup of coffee and poured another. “On the other hand, the boss should appreciate my travel diary.”
Farrell raised his eyebrows. “Lots of pretty pictures?”
“And lots of notes. What about you?”
“I’m still waiting for the right moment to approach my target.” The raised eyebrows gave way to a disgruntled expression. “At least yours is an honest villain—”
“Villainess.”
“All right, villainess—who isn’t lying about anything and isn’t on anybody’s side but her own. I wouldn’t trust mine any farther than I could throw a BattleMech.”
“I wouldn’t trade with you, that’s for sure. Your target gives me the cold shivers—make a wrong move, and you could end up deader than yesterday’s breakfast.”
“Worried about me, love?”
Di shook her head vehemently. “Thinking that I’d be real sorry if somebody else put a knife into you before I got around to doing it myself.”
“Relax, sweetheart.” Farrell leaned back and gave her his most annoying and lascivious grin. “I’m saving myself for you.”
16
Balfour-Douglas Petrochemicals Offshore Drilling Station #47
Oilfields Coast
Northwind
December 3133; dry season
Night had fallen over Balfour-Douglas #47, drawing Ian Murchison once more out onto the observation deck for a few minutes of quiet solitude. He leaned against the deck’s metal railing and relaxed as best he could in the night air, his skin cooled by the breeze blowing across the open water. Neither of Northwind’s two moons was up, but the sky held a myriad of stars spread out against velvet black. Down below, in the water swirling around the legs of the drilling platform, floating bioluminescent jellyfish drifted and sparkled.
Murchison was tired, not least from the unremitting state of low-level anger and anxiety that he knew was worth his life to express, and the double cord on his left wrist was a constant irritant.
There was also the matter of his deal with Galaxy Commander Anastasia Kerensky.
He wanted to ask himself what had possessed her, but he knew better. The Steel Wolves’ commander believed, for some reason—for all he knew, it could be his open and honest face—that he was steady and reliable. More to the point, she saw in him someone steady and reliable who had not been part of the Steel Wolves’ military machine since the day he was decanted, someone with a fresh eye to look for signs of duplicity and betrayal.
My eye’s so damned fresh it’s never going to see anything, he thought bitterly. I’m not looking for a needle in a haystack, I’m looking for one needle in a whole bin full of needles.
The idea depressed him. Maybe Anastasia Kerensky would believe him when he said that he couldn’t find the traitor because all her Steel Wolves blurred together, for the most part, into one indistinguishable and largely unpleasant mass. More likely, she would think he was lying.
The murmur of voices around the corner of the observation deck broke into his thoughts, and stirred his curiosity in spite of his unhappy mood. He edged closer, keeping well out of sight, until he had drawn near enough to recognize the voices of Star Colonel Nicholas Darwin—the Galaxy Commander’s favorite—and Star Captain Greer. Both men ranked high in Anastasia Kerensky’s councils, which sufficed to lift them out of the general run of Warriors in Murchison’s recall.
Greer’s voice was the first to resolve into words. “. . . longer do we go on waiting like this? We need to bring up the DropShips and attack.”
“You have the wrong man for that question.”
“Do I? You are Kerensky’s darling.”
Darwin’s voice was slightly lower than Greer’s, and tinged with amusement as well as with a faint difference in the accent. “If you think that means I have any influence on the Galaxy Commander’s decisions, you do not know her well at all.”
Greer’s voice took on an ugly note. “And you know her better than you let on. I am not blind; I have seen you going about her work. If she had not given you the keys—”
Murchison eased forward, keeping himself in darkness, until he could see the two men standing outside the door to the stairwell. The small light over the door illuminated them: Darwin dark and compact; Greer tall, pale, and rawboned.
Their body language at the moment reflected the antagonism he’d overheard in their speech. Greer was trying to loom over Darwin, while Darwin was leaning back against the railing in a manner clearly meant to look annoyingly relaxed. The tense set to his shoulders, however, gave his posture the lie.
Murchison considered clearing his throat or dropping a writing stylus—anything to make a noise and break the tension. After reflection, however, he remained silent. If Anastasia Kerensky had made him into a spy; then he would play the spy and do nothing, only listen.
Darwin said, “What would you have me say to her, then? ’If I may distract you for a moment, Galaxy Commander, Star Captain Greer desires to know when it will please you to lift the DropShips?” ’ He laughed. “And when she says, ‘Star Captain Greer will know that the DropShips are lifting when Star Colonel Darwin learns about it and tells him so,’ do you think I am stupid enough to ask her anything more?”
“I think you are a nasty patch of freeborn scum, and the only good you are to the Galaxy Commander comes from your—”
“Be careful.” Darwin’s voice was quiet now and not at all amused. “You insult Anastasia Kerensky, which is foolish. And you insult me, which—considering that you and I are standing here alone together without witnesses—is even more foolish.”
Star Captain Greer took a step forward. “You are threatening me.”
“Well, yes. I thought you would notice it eventually.”
Greer made an inarticulate noise of disgust and slid his right hand down over his left forearm. When the hand came up into view again, twenty centimeters of knife protruded from his fist—not one of the clasp knives that Murchison had long been accustomed to seeing in use on the rig, but something double-edged and leaf shaped, a serious fighting knife. The metal was subdued, a matte black color that neither reflected nor shone in the light; the edges alone, where the blade had been sharpened, glittered.
“Then I will send the Galaxy Commander the part of you that she likes best,” Greer said. “In an extremely small box.”
“You are welcome to try, Star Captain.” Darwin pushed away from the railing and widened his stance, flexing his knees and bringing his hands up to waist level, palms open and empty. He made little “come hither” motions with his fingers. “You are very welcome to try.”
Greer didn’t answer. Not with words. He turned his left side to Darwin, empty h
and up. The hand with the knife he lowered behind him, switching his grip on the blade from point up to point down. Then he stepped forward, his left hand grasping Darwin’s left arm high up as he turned and brought the knife in his right hand slashing up and cutting Darwin’s arm.
Unfazed, Darwin turned and grabbed Greer’s left hand with his own right, squatting at the same time to duck under his opponent’s outstretched arm. Then he straightened, and Greer’s left arm, extended over Darwin’s shoulder, broke with a crack when the elbow bent the wrong way. The knife clattered to the deck plates as Greer’s other hand went lax from the shock.
Darwin stepped back, turned to his left, and pushed. Greer fell away from him, back pressed against the observation platform’s railing. Greer was a lanky man; the top bar came up no higher than his waist.
“Good-bye,” Darwin said, and spun again, his foot high, smashing out with a side kick to Greer’s chin. The man vanished backward over the rail.
Darwin stooped and picked up the knife from where it had fallen. He looked at it for a moment, then dropped the weapon over the railing into the sea below.
Murchison faded back into the darkness and took the opposite-side stairway back up to his quarters. He didn’t bother undressing and going to bed. Not at all to his surprise, his beeper sounded almost as soon as he had closed the door behind him. He went down to sick bay and—as he had expected—found Nicholas Darwin waiting for him outside the closed door.
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