“I will check that.”
Jonath closed his data pad and left. Murchison stayed at his desk and waited until enough time had passed for the Star Captain to have left the managerial level entirely. Then he retrieved a data pad of his own from a desk drawer and wrote in it for some time. When he was done he left the office, locking it behind him, and went in search of Anastasia Kerensky.
He found her, as expected, in the main operational control room of the oil rig. Several other Steel Wolf officers were present as well—not Darwin, though, which Murchison considered was probably significant. If he didn’t want his injury to be discovered, he would have needed to find an excuse to absent himself from the Galaxy Commander’s company.
The Steel Wolves had transformed the rig’s control room into a military command center. Not much effort had been required—mostly, they had moved in a number of portable communications and data consoles, and had covered the main work table with a large tri-vid field map of the Kearney continent. Murchison glanced at the map in passing and recognized the Oilfields Coast, with what looked like Balfour-Douglas #47 picked out in red. The presence of several other red dots, not far away, puzzled him for a moment, since Balfour-Douglas had no oil rigs in that area that he could remember. He put the question aside; he had, for the moment, other and more pressing thoughts.
Anastasia Kerensky looked up from the map as he entered the control room. “Bondsman Murchison. Should you not be in your sick bay?”
“I have the accident and casualty reports you requested, Galaxy Commander,” he said, and proffered his data pad.
She raised an eyebrow. “You work fast.”
“It’s nothing conclusive—I don’t have the personal resources to follow up on a lot of the things I’ve listed—but some of the data might be worth looking into further.”
“Your work is not unappreciated, Bondsman Murchison.” She took the pad. “I will look into the matter myself—careless accidents should not be allowed to hamper our operational efficiency, and those responsible will be punished appropriately.”
The comment, Murchison thought, was as good as a dismissal. He gave what he hoped was an appropriately nonservile but respectful response and made a quick and silent exit. He wanted to be well out of range before Anastasia Kerensky read his report, in case the Galaxy Commander was the sort of person who liked to shoot the messenger.
20
The New Barracks
Tara
Northwind
January 3134; local winter
Paladin Ezekiel Crow had his quarters in the New Barracks, in the building designated for housing long-term important visitors. He occupied a suite of rooms very much like the ones reserved for the Prefect whenever he or she was on-planet, and that Tara Campbell was now occupying: one inner room for sleeping and one outer room for working and socializing, with sanitary facilities off the first room and a cooking and dining nook off the second, all done up in a bland offend-no-one style.
Crow knew the look well; he’d been living with it, in one local version or another, for most of his diplomatic and military career. Sometimes the default inoffensive furniture was made of polished natural hardwood, and sometimes of matte black molded resin, and sometimes of chrome; in some places the local style called for deep crimson and bright green and royal blue, and in others for beige and gray and ivory. Good taste on Northwind demanded natural wood, and paint and fabrics in subdued but not drab colors at the cool end of the spectrum; the Prefect’s official quarters were another variation on the same theme.
The only difference was that Tara Campbell had added a number of personal touches to her quarters—a picture of her parents in a silver frame; an ornamental brass lantern from Sadalbari; chairs and other items of furniture not from the general mold, but much like those which filled the rooms at her family’s mountain castle. Crow had made no such changes to his own quarters. He never had done, not since Chang-An burned. Making a mere assigned place into something like home had always seemed disloyal to him somehow, a way of saying that something else could take the place of what was lost. He was not going to do that. If he could not bring his old home back, the least he could do was not forget it.
Crow also had an office assigned to him, not in the two-century-old New Barracks, but in the massive and much older structure known as the Fort. He had considered telling his visitor to meet him there, but in the end had decided that—since he would not be acting as a representative of Northwind—the Fort would be too official a location.
His quarters weren’t much better as far as seeming official went, but he didn’t want to handle the negotiations over drinks in a bar, either. People did that when they possessed money without possessing authority, or when they had things that they wanted to hide. He was a legitimate guest on Northwind, and a Paladin of the Sphere. He had nothing to hide.
The communications console gave the double beep that meant the building’s front-door security was on the line. He picked up the handset.
“Crow here.”
“Security here, sir. We have a Jack Farrell here at the information desk who says that he’s expected.”
“He’s here on business,” Crow said. “Send him on up.”
“Yes, sir.”
A couple of minutes passed—time enough to cover a hallway and an elevator and another hallway at a walking pace—and the doorbell buzzed. Crow opened the door, and saw that it was indeed One-Eyed Jack Farrell (as the merc was known to members of his profession) waiting on the threshold.
“Come in,” said Crow.
Farrell entered. The man was well-groomed and well-dressed but—to a trained eye—not nearly as respectable as his clothes would suggest. The black eye patch was a giveaway; even if the damage had been too severe for a prosthetic, the man could have gotten a cosmetic implant. That he preferred not to, Crow thought, argued that the eye patch must be a combination of advertisement and signature.
Though Crow had never met Farrell before in the flesh, the merc’s name and reputation were known throughout the Inner Sphere. One-Eyed Jack had the name of a tough and ruthless fighter, but—on the positive side—neither Farrell nor the units under his command had ever backed out of a lawful contract, nor were they prone to looting and rapine. When Crow had last heard of them, Farrell and his mercs had been in Jacob Bannson’s employ; but that had been before the HPG net went down, when Bannson was still trying to extend his business empire into all the farthest corners of The Republic of the Sphere.
Crow led the way to the living and work space. The chair and the couch and the low table between them were general issue, not as comfortable or as attractive as the deep, leather-covered guest chairs and the generously proportioned sofa in the Prefect’s quarters. Crow took the chair, leaving Farrell to the end of the couch.
“My compliments on your security,” Farrell said. “My name got checked against the invite list once at the main Fort entrance and once at the gate of the New Barracks before I ever got to the people downstairs here.”
“The Highlanders are good. And they’re careful.”
“But they have a problem they can’t handle,” Farrell said, “or I wouldn’t be here. I heard that you were hiring for some local work—and as it happens, my wayward children and I are currently between engagements and close enough to be available.”
“How close, exactly?”
“The entire force can be here inside twelve days.”
“That’s . . . prompt,” said Crow. His dubiousness must have shown on his face, because Farrell—as eager, perhaps, to obtain a contract as Northwind, through Crow, was to offer one—hastened to explain.
“They’re currently holding at the jump point. Pure coincidence—I came to Northwind to check on the news from around The Republic and get a line on where we might find work next, and the first thing I heard when I hit the bulletin boards was that you were in the market.”
“Yes.” Crow was careful not to appear eager. Nothing was more likely to sabotage a
deal in the making than seeming to want it too much. “We’re considering it.”
“So.” Farrell leaned back in the couch. “What’s going on that’s too much for the locals?”
“They’re overextended,” Crow told him. “Not through their own fault; they’ve been tasked with defending other worlds in Prefecture III as well as Northwind.”
Farrell made a tsk-tsk noise. “Somebody was being ambitious.”
“The Senate and the Exarch didn’t anticipate that this planet would become a target as well when they gave the Prefect her orders. She lost a significant portion of her on-planet effectives during this past summer’s campaign, and the recruitment and training of replacements will take some months. If she is not to strip other worlds of their protection, then she must hire you—or someone like you—to fill the gap.”
“We’re talking garrison duty, then.”
“Essentially. Good pay for—if you’re lucky—very little work.”
“It’s one way to rest up,” Farrell said. “Is Northwind good for the money?”
“The Republic of the Sphere, through me, is good for the money. Is that enough for you?”
One-Eyed Jack Farrell grinned. “Paladin Crow, you’ve hired yourself some mercs.”
21
DropPort
Tara
Northwind
January 3134; local winter
Twelve days after his conversation with One-Eyed Jack Farrell, Ezekiel Crow watched Farrell’s mercenaries disembark from their DropShip at the Tara port. He had an excellent view of the proceedings, standing as he did beside Tara Campbell in the VIP observation lounge of the DropPort’s main concourse—a luxurious private room, all deep carpet and glass windows snugged up under the concourse’s overarching dome. In times past, when the volume of traffic in and out of the DropPort had meant DropShips arriving and leaving several times a day, the lounge had been a gathering place for passengers who considered themselves too well-off or too important to mingle with the crowds in the general waiting area. Today, as on most days since the collapse of the HPG network, it had been empty until the Countess and the Paladin arrived.
Outside the windows, the sky over the DropPort was an intense winter blue. In the dazzle of noonday sunlight the main cargo hatch of the grounded DropShip gaped open into an impenetrable black shadow.
The mercenary infantry left the ship first, marching in formation down the ramp of the cargo hatch. Crow knew that this was standard procedure—it was the fastest way to move men and women in large groups. Allowing the mercenaries to go one by one down the passenger ramp would take hours, and would create a disorderly mess that would take more hours to sort out. All the same, the steady flow of distant figures, anonymous in their dark fatigues, oppressed him.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t know why. Liao had started out this way—the landing of a small force, meant only to restore order, or so at least they claimed—and it had ended with blood in the streets and Chang-An burning. Had there been a point all those years ago, he wondered now, when one person with the gift of foresight could have put out a hand and said, “Stop!” and prevented everything?
“You’re brooding,” said Tara Campbell. The Countess of Northwind was wearing a winter uniform, made of wool against the cold wind that blew outside, and her short, spike-cut hair gleamed bright gold in the light through the windows. She had a tendency to twist and pull at bits of that hair whenever she was feeling uncertain; it occurred to Crow that he hadn’t seen her doing so for quite a while. She was growing into her position as Prefect, then, which was good—the Senate and the Exarch had worried, at first, that her unexpected elevation to the suddenly empty post would overwhelm her. “I’m supposed to be the one with doubts about all this, not you.”
“Memories,” said Crow.
She knew enough of his past, he thought, that she would understand what he meant. He had told her last year about finding his parents dead and everything lost in the bloodbath that had become known as the Betrayal of Liao. It was rare for him to speak of the past, even obliquely, but Tara Campbell had a way of drawing confidences from him.
Down below, out on the landing field, the infantry had gotten themselves clear of the DropShip and into lines for boarding transport vehicles to take them to their assigned barracks. The cargo ramp was now spewing forth other stuff than soldiers: hoverbikes, all-terrain vehicles, armored cars, tanks, and self-propelled guns; all the muscle and sinew of mechanized war. The vehicles, armor, and artillery drew up in ranks on the tarmac as they emerged. Farrell’s mercenaries, Crow thought, were a fearsomely well-equipped group.
“It won’t happen,” Tara Campbell said, breaking into his silence. “What you’re thinking about. This”—she gestured at the field below—“is all about stopping it before it happens.”
“I know,” he said. “And I know that hiring mercenaries was my suggestion in the first place, and that I argued for it until I convinced you. But still.” He looked out over the growing array of military machinery with a growing sense of ill-defined unease. “One worries.”
The mercenaries’ BattleMechs were offloading from the DropShip now. The smaller ones came first—although “smaller” was a relative term, since even the least of them towered over the big self-propelled guns. Crow spotted first a Spider, then a Firestarter, then a Mad Cat III. Nobody was making do with Industrial or Agricultural Mods here; all the mercenary force’s ’Mech’s had been designed for battle from the start. Then the last of the BattleMechs emerged from the DropShip’s shadowed interior: a Jupiter, one hundred tons of heavily armored slaughter and destruction, One-Eyed Jack Farrell’s own deadly darling.
“They’re certainly a well-equipped bunch,” Tara Campbell observed. A wistful expression passed over her features. “I wish the Council loved its own Regiments enough to vote us money for hardware like that. Hell, I wish there was money enough available that I’d feel right about asking for it.”
She stepped away from the window with a sigh. “I suppose it’s time to go shake Mr. Farrell’s hand and bid him welcome to Northwind. I hope he wasn’t expecting to get a formal reception.”
“His kind of people seldom do,” Crow said.
22
Balfour-Douglas Petrochemicals Offshore Drilling Station #47
Oilfields Coast
Northwind
January 3134; dry season
Evidence. Damning evidence, spread out across the screen of the data console in Anastasia Kerensky’s quarters.
The medic Ian Murchison had given her nothing more than a name, an account of a disturbing—and unreported—incident, and a conjecture. That had been a good move on Murchison’s part, Anastasia thought, reminding her that his Bondsman status didn’t give him any room or authority to dig further, followed up by throwing her detective challenge right back into her lap.
And it had been a clever move as well. Murchison had slipped out from under responsibility by denouncing the Galaxy Commander’s known favorite, thus forcing Anastasia to carry out the rest of the investigation herself.
She was the only person on #47 with a high enough security override authority that she could track messages sent out over her name, or with her access codes; and she was the only person who could swear definitely that some particular message was one that she had never sent.
Once she had found the first such message, the rest came much more easily. She was able to track the use of those access codes to set up hidden mailboxes, and from the mailboxes she was able to find records kept in them and—foolishly!—never erased. Carrying out a search like that was not a knack most people would expect Anastasia Kerensky to have. She was all Steel Wolf Warrior, and Warriors were supposed to be above such things.
Tassa Kay, though, had an un-Wolflike interest in learning all sorts of unseemly skills. She had learned the rudiments of this one from a temporary lover several planets back. Anastasia had needed almost two weeks to uncover what her old bedmate could have brought to light inside a fe
w minutes, but that did not matter. She had taken the time, and now she had the proof.
Now to wait. Nicholas Darwin had been away inspecting the DropShips all this while. That was yet another point in support of Murchison’s theory: Darwin could pass off a healing knife wound as an injury gained during that period. He would be coming back today, though, and sooner or later—sooner, if she were not where he could easily find her in the oil rig’s public spaces—he would come to her quarters.
She was ready for him. She would wait.
She had dressed for the occasion in Tassa Kay’s boots and leathers. The choice was fitting, she thought. She had been playing at Tassa Kay when she first met Nicholas Darwin, and she had been playing at Tassa Kay when she brought him home to her bed. She should be playing at Tassa again now, for at least this one more time.
One more time, she thought, and never Tassa Kay again?
That was tempting, but in her heart Anastasia knew better. She might need Tassa Kay again sometime, and it was not her way to throw out a good knife because she’d been fool enough to cut her hand with it.
She poured herself a tumbler of the late drill rig manager’s potent liquor, then sat on the edge of the bed not drinking it. After a while footsteps sounded outside in the corridor—she tensed, then relaxed—and Nicholas Darwin entered.
Anastasia saw him again as if for the first time: the compact, muscular body; the dark skin that had always so pleasantly surprised her with its smoothness under her touch; the bright black eyes and the laughing mouth. He had been the best of all her lovers in so many ways, a match for her in temper and in stamina, with but a single flaw. . . .
She set down her tumbler of whiskey, rose from the bed, and greeted him with a kiss.
“How are things on the DropShips?” she asked, pulling away before the kiss could deepen into something more. More would distract Darwin, which was good; it would also distract her, which was not.
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