Lieutenant Jones was nodding. “It makes sense. But move it up to when?”
Griffin drew his breath to answer, but was stopped by an outcry from among the troops. He turned his head and saw one of the sergeants—Gordon, that was it, a big man, head and shoulders taller than most of his fellows—shouting and pointing out to sea.
Very quietly, at his shoulder, he heard Lieutenant Jones say, “Damn.”
Out on the seaward horizon, the water was boiling. White froth churned the surface of the water so furiously that the naked eye could see the tumult from the shore, and great billowing clouds of steam ascended toward heaven. Then, slowly, rising up like Leviathan out of the deeps, came a great silver shape, shouldering the water aside and lifting itself upward as it pulled free of the ocean’s grip . . . a DropShip.
And another, and another, and another, coming up from the water like bubbles and dwindling into the upper air.
And Griffin knew—because he would have done the same, if he had the Steel Wolves and their DropShips and, for a few hours only, the element of surprise—where it was that Anastasia Kerensky was going. “Owain.”
“Sir.” His aide-de-camp looked stunned. They all did; Griffin suspected that his own expression at the moment wasn’t much more reassuring. It couldn’t be helped; they had to act now and stop shaking later.
“Come with me. We’re going to have to abandon the Koshi until a tech can come out here from Fort Barrett with the start-up codes. I’m going on ahead in the Balac.”
“Sir?”
“We’re going to have to strip Fort Barrett naked, Lieutenant, and get a relief force ready to move out as soon as possible. Anastasia Kerensky isn’t going to mess around with landing on the salt flats this time. She’s going to be heading straight for the main DropPort—and with our comms down, nobody in Tara is going to know that she’s coming.”
31
New Barracks
Tara
Northwind
February 3134; local winter
Ezekiel Crow was still sitting at the dining table in his quarters. The bulky envelope with its deadly, betraying address lay unopened on the table by his elbow.
LIEUTENANT JUNIOR GRADE DANIEL PETERSON
CHANG-AN
LIAO
He didn’t know how long he had been sitting there, not moving, not even thinking—unless you could count the prison of unwilling memory as thought. But as he came back, slowly, to the present time and place, he saw that the sky outside the windows was dark now; there had been daylight left when he arrived home and found the envelope waiting for him.
He hadn’t opened it yet. He had been afraid, when fear for his life was another thing he thought that he’d left behind in the ruins. But an envelope coming to him bearing that name and that address could not possibly contain anything good.
He had cut all ties to his former life when he changed his name and left Chang-An. He had never looked back. There shouldn’t have been anything left in The Republic that could connect Ezekiel Crow, Paladin of the Sphere, with the infamous—and never found or identified—Betrayer of Liao.
Shouldn’t have been, the voice of reason pointed out, doesn’t mean that there wasn’t. You might as well go ahead and look. There’s no point in putting it off any longer.
Reluctantly, he opened the envelope and took out the contents. The first thing to meet his fingers was a sealed letter, which he set aside. He’d have plenty of time later to look at the blackmailer’s bill. Besides the letter, the envelope contained documentation: photographs, medical records, copies of old files and old news stories, and a slim, paperbound book.
The last item puzzled him until he looked closer. It was nonfiction, a bit of autobiography from a publishing house with its headquarters in the Capellan Confederation. Based on the jacket copy, the author—now a popular novelist of some local fame in the CapCon worlds—had been a minor intelligence officer during the Confederation-Republic conflicts of recent decades, including the period covering the Liao Massacre. Like many another old soldier, he had taken advantage of newly relaxed classification levels to revisit the wars of his youth.
The relevant section of the memoir proved easy to find. After all, Crow knew the sequence of events well. Yes, there it was: “. . . secured the cooperation, for a fee, of a disgruntled junior officer in the planetary militia, one Daniel Petersen, in allowing the initial DropShip landing. . . .”
A wave of strong irritation briefly washed out Crow’s fear. I was not disgruntled. I had a plan.
A plan that didn’t work.
It should have worked. The Republic had been ignoring CapCon terrorist activity on Liao for years—“too low-level to risk destabilizing the local situation,” they said. A full-scale armed incursion would have been something they couldn’t just shove into the closet and wish away. If the CapCons hadn’t triple-loaded the initial DropShip, Liao’s own defense forces could have held them at the port.
You took their money, said the voice of reason, and you didn’t expect them to cheat? You deserved to have your plan blown to pieces on the first day.
Crow told the voices in his head to stop arguing. His old stupidity—and he agreed, he had been amazingly stupid when he was young—didn’t matter anymore. The path leading to the fatal discovery was clear. His enemy, whoever that might be, had chanced to read this book, and had caught the passing reference to Daniel Peterson—and had pulled on that single thread until the whole fabric unraveled.
He felt a strong urge to destroy the contents of the envelope, but he knew that it would do no good. The items sent to him would all be copies or duplicates; the originals would be kept safely elsewhere.
Instead, he forced himself to think about the problem as objectively as possible. How bad was it, really? Allegations—it was always wise to think in terms of allegations rather than facts—could be countered, threats could be neutralized, but not from here on Northwind. For that, he needed access to the Senate and to the Exarch and to the influential media; in short, he needed to be on Terra.
I have to leave here now, he thought. It shouldn’t take much more than a couple of months to handle this, as long as I’m in the right place. And as soon as I’ve taken care of everything, I can come back.
Actually getting to Terra, however, presented difficulties. He needed a DropShip, and preferably a civilian DropShip. Was there one in port? He tried to remember the schedule for the shipping line that had won the mail-service contract for Prefecture III in the aftermath of the HPG disaster, and realized that he couldn’t remember it, or even the name of the shipping line itself. Stupid, he thought. You’ve been slipping, and you never noticed.
He’d also put off the inevitable for too long already. Willing his hands to steadiness, he opened the sealed letter.
It wasn’t handwritten. Not surprising; he might have recognized the handwriting of a known enemy or a supposed friend. Anonymous black words printed out on white paper could have come from anyone. The paper itself was of high quality, but that meant nothing. Anyone who could afford to track down Daniel Peterson—a person who had, in all but the crudest physical sense, died twenty-three years ago in Chang-An, his identity put into a mass grave with all the rest of the dead and covered up with dirt—anyone with that much money could afford to use good paper for his or her blackmail notes.
The letter contained only three sentences:
Farrell’s mercenaries are at your disposal. Anastasia Kerensky wants Northwind. See that she gets what she wants.
32
The New Barracks
Tara
Northwind
February 3134; local winter
Captain Tara Bishop was working late in her office at the New Barracks. Night had already fallen outside, but she still had files and papers to go through in the interest of preparing economic and intelligence summaries for the Prefect—who had left her own office and gone back to her quarters precisely at the end of the working day, in direct contravention of her usual
practice. Tara Campbell was a habitual overstayer at the office, to Captain Bishop’s periodic dismay—since unlike the Prefect, the Captain had something approaching a private social life.
Of course, the Captain thought, there was always the chance that Tara Campbell had at last acquired a social life of her own that didn’t revolve around will-attend, will-have-fun diplomatic and military occasions. The Prefect hadn’t said anything to that effect—she was a very private person, most likely in response to having grown up in the political spotlight—but she’d had the look about her this morning. Not as tense as usual, and happier, and just a little smug. Captain Bishop recognized the signs, and there was only one person who could be the cause.
I wonder, Bishop thought, if I tracked down our friend Paladin Crow, would he be smug and happy too?
Captain Bishop smiled to herself and opened up the next file. She wasn’t going to begrudge either one of them the chance. Both the Prefect and the Paladin were too straight-arrow to let a relationship get in the way of their duty; what would have been hormone-addled slacking off in less driven and committed types was likely to manifest itself in the pair of them as nothing more than a retreat from their usual high levels of overwork.
And even that, she suspected, wouldn’t last for long. Give them a while to get used to the idea, and they’d go right back to working eighteen-hour days. They’d just be working them together instead of separately.
Captain Bishop turned her attention to an economic report on reforestation policies in the planet’s lumber-producing regions. She was scarcely a page in, and chewing her way through a dense paragraph on the development of second-growth forests in the lower Rockspires, when her desk’s communications console suddenly erupted in flashing red lights and began sounding an alarm. And not her own desk alone—the sound-and-light display was also coming from the Prefect’s empty desk in the outer office, with backup alarms echoing from desks both occupied and unoccupied all over this part of the building.
The alert might be sounding throughout the New Barracks, but the message was coming in straight to the Prefect’s desk. Captain Bishop pushed the button that routed the absent Prefect’s calls to her own desk, picked up the handset, and said, “Prefect’s office Captain Bishop speaking this is not a secure line how may I help you?” all in one rapid nonstop breath.
“This is Tara DropPort,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “We have DropShips landing without authorization. I say again, DropShips landing without authorization.”
Oh damn, Captain Bishop thought. Oh damn oh damn oh damn. We didn’t find them in time.
With her free hand, she slapped the button that sent the “wake up and get the hell back up here” alarm to the Prefect’s quarters. As an afterthought, she sent it to the Paladin’s as well, then went on to hit the General Quarters alarm, the signal that would have every soldier in the New Barracks at his or her duty station within minutes.
At same time, she asked, “Do you have an ID on the ships, DropPort?”
“It’s the Steel Wolves—we saw their insignia and configuration enough times last summer to know.”
“Recommend you evacuate your personnel now, DropPort.”
“Already on it,” said the voice at the other end. “It’ll take the Wolves a little while to open up and roll on out, and everybody who isn’t going to fight should be gone by then. We’ve got a couple of civilian ships caught down on the ground; they’ll just have to button up tight and wait for the dust to settle.”
The DropPort commander sounded calm, almost cheerful, but Captain Bishop knew it for the calm that comes after ceasing to waste energy on things like hope. If the Wolves were planning to force their way from the landing field into Tara proper, the fighting was going to be vicious, and the troops stationed at the DropPort would be the city’s first line of defense. Bishop racked her brains, trying to remember the size of the force stationed at the port. Her mind eventually supplied her with a dismayingly small number.
This, she thought, is going to be a very long night.
Even the few minutes it took for the Prefect to come at a run from her quarters to the office in the New Barracks seemed to stretch out forever. When the Prefect arrived, Captain Bishop handed over the conversation with the DropPort commander—and the responsibility for the defense of the entire planet—with an unvoiced sigh of relief. Ezekiel Crow arrived a few minutes later, looking grim.
“Paladin Crow,” the Prefect said as soon as he entered the office, “I need you to take command of Farrell’s mercenaries. If we can hit the Wolves from two directions at once before they penetrate too deep into the city, we’ve got a good chance at pushing them back onto their ships. Or at least of pinning them down hard enough to force a negotiation.”
“Anastasia Kerensky doesn’t negotiate, that I’ve noticed,” Crow said.
“Then she needs to learn,” said Tara Campbell. “And I’m counting on you to help me teach her.”
33
Fort Barrett
Oilfields Coast
Kearney
Northwind
February 3134; dry season
The Balac Strike VTOL taking the General back to Fort Barrett took off in a cloud of white dust and arrowed away northward at top speed. Will Elliot was already urging the members of his scout/sniper platoon back onto their Shandras before the noise of its departure died. Up and down the line he could hear the voices of Jock and Lexa and the other sergeants chivvying the rest of the soldiers into the troop trucks. Not more than a minute later, the major who commanded the reinforced rifle company—with General Griffin gone he’d be the senior officer, and in command of the whole task force—gave the order to mount up and move out.
“Sarge?”
That voice, on the other hand, belonged to one of the privates in the scout/sniper platoon. Will suppressed the urge to look over his shoulder for Master Sergeant Murray or Sergeant Donahue or one of the other godlike figures of his own early enlistment.
“What is it, soldier?” he asked.
“Were those the DropShips we’ve been looking for?”
Will bit his tongue. Be patient, he thought. You were this green once yourself, not so long ago. “That’s right, soldier.”
“Where do you think they’ve gone?”
“I don’t think anything,” Will said. “But the General thinks they’re heading for Tara.”
“What about us, Sarge?”
That one was easy. “We’re going back to Fort Barrett, on the double. And after that, we’re going where we’re told.”
Thinking on it afterward, Will decided that the forced march back to Fort Barrett rated as one of the most unpleasant experiences of his entire first term of enlistment—worse even than making a fighting retreat out of Red Ledge Pass in the pouring rain. The misery that time hadn’t lasted nearly as long, and he’d been able to relieve his feelings by shooting at things. This was nothing but hard going from before dawn to after dark, in the choking dust and the relentless sun. The column stopped periodically for rest and food, but only long enough to ensure that the soldiers did not collapse from exhaustion. But worst of all was knowing that on the other side of the world, the Steel Wolves had already landed at Tara DropPort.
When the column arrived at Fort Barrett, they found the base in a state of furious activity. The barracks were crowded with soldiers from units normally stationed at smaller bases all over Kearney; some units were even housed in rows of tents set up on the sports field and the parade ground. And every Regimental troop-transport aircraft in Kearney—or what looked like it—was lined up on the landing field, wingtip to wingtip, with barely enough room left open for landing and takeoff. Mixed in among them were passenger craft bearing the insignia of three different civilian airlines.
Lexa McIntosh whistled in amazement as soon as she saw the civilian aircraft. “Where the hell did they get those?”
“The General commandeered them, I suppose,” Will said.
“Can he do th
at?”
Jock said, “Doesn’t look like anybody’s stopping him.”
“I’m surprised he hasn’t sent troops off to Tara already,” Lexa said. “I don’t know what the Wolves are planning, but it can’t be good.”
“They have to be bleeding over there,” Jock rumbled in agreement.
Will shook his head. “Look at it. He’s planning to hit the Steel Wolves with everything that Kearney’s got.” He was speaking slowly, because he hadn’t had to think about things this way before. “It must have taken him this long to get all those aircraft together, and to get all the troops and supplies and weapons ready.”
“Couldn’t he have sent some on ahead?” Lexa wondered.
“He probably wishes he could send himself on ahead,” Will said. “Remember the Pass—he was in the thick of it there. But he can’t do any good this time unless he brings enough muscle with him to make a difference.”
34
Jack Farrell’s Mercenary Encampment
The Plains Outside Tara
Northwind
February 3134; local winter
Ezekiel Crow left the New Barracks at a run, heading for the hangars outside the Armory where the ’Mechs were stored. The Countess of Northwind’s words rang in his head:
Take command of Farrell’s mercenaries. If we can hit the Wolves from two directions at once before they get too deep into the city, we’ve got a good chance at pushing them back onto their ships.
The Countess was right, he thought. Bringing the mercenaries into action was the solution to the current problem. The regimental forces in and around Tara would not be enough by themselves to meet the attack. Anastasia Kerensky would have brought more Wolves to the battle this time than she had before—all of the ones who hadn’t gone home to Tigress, augmented by those who had left Tigress over the past months for an unknown destination. The Highlanders needed the mercenaries to make up their missing numbers, if the streets of Tara were not going to become another Chang-An.
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