The column raced northeast, as Grayson thought of the soft and inviting comfort, the sweet oblivion, of suicide.
* * *
The House Marik JumpShip Mizar materialized at the Helm jump point. Nearby, the other ships of the squadron hung motionless, poised on the gentle, invisible streams of particles from their plasma station-keeping thrusters. Orienting under gentle shoves from her thrusters, the Mizar maneuvered until her stern pointed toward the orange glare of Helm's star. It was then that the vast jump sail, absolutely black in order to absorb every stray quanta of energy possible for the starship's converters, began to unfold from the Mizar's external sail lockers. Light from the sun streamed through the sail's central hole, an adaptation that allowed the Mizar's station-keepers to maintain thrust without damage to the delicate fabric of the sail.
On board the ducal DropShip Gladius, in the almost palatial suite of rooms assigned as his personal quarters, Precentor Rachan strapped himself into the chair behind his desk, and touched the key that ran his personal decoder program through the computer mounted on his desk. The Mizar's parabolic antenna had trained on Helm IV almost from the instant the JumpShip had emerged from hyperspace into the system; within the handful of minutes necessary for speed-of-light communications to bear news that the Mizar had arrived at Helm, a coded message from Rachan's brothers in Helmdown was on its way skyward.
The Mizar's communications operator noted the receiver's code and routed the stream of meaningless garble to Rachan's screen. There, the decoder turned garble into meaning, and a printed message flowed across the monitor. As he leaned forward to read, the screen lit his features with its phosphor glow. Rachan began to smile as he read, for the news from Helm was good, very good, indeed.
* * *
Under the shelter of darkness and trees, the endless rows of bubble tents were nearly invisible. Inside one of them, two people shared closeness . . . and pain.
"Well, Lori, I've made a real a mess of it this time."
Hearing past the lightness in his tone, Lori knew that Grayson was worried sick—and that he blamed himself for their current predicament. Her feelings for this man had flip-flopped so many times in the four short years of their comradeship, but love him or hate him, Lori had come to know Grayson Carlyle better than anyone in the Legion did. No one else saw the sorrow in his eyes now. Neither Ramage, who'd been working for Grayson the longest, nor Renfred Tor, who had known him longer, could read him so well. Only with Lori did the young mercenary commander let down his guard, and even that was rare.
"Gray." Lori's soft voice was pleading. "Gray, it's not you. We were betrayed. That damned Graff! There's nothing you—"
"Nothing!" He turned to face her, grey eyes flashing. Even in the dim light from the tent's glow panel, she could see his torment. "Nothing I could have done? I've made mistakes, grave mistakes, every step of the way! And now we've lost . . . everything ..."
Lori reached out, touched his arm gently. He grabbed her, clung to her desperately. "Lori, Lori, what're we going to do? What in God's name can we possibly do?"
Lori held him, grateful for his outburst. It wasn't often that he showed his need for her, and she knew it wouldn't last long. Soon they would be making love and he would be passionate and strong. By tomorrow, he would have figured out what they should do next, once again the courageous leader of the Gray Death Legion. But now, for just these few moments, he was vulnerable, and he needed her, not just as his Exec, not just as a fellow Warrior, but as a woman. And oh, how she needed that needing!
As happened so often when she was in his arms, Lori remembered the first time she'd seen Grayson Death Carlyle. If anybody had told her back then that one day she would be in love with the man who was aiming an inferno launcher at her . . .
As a 'Mech apprentice in the Sigurd Defense Forces, she'd been working for the Bandit King Hendrik of Oberon. A difference of opinion with her training sergeant got her assigned to a Special Expeditionary Force that was actually under the command of a Kurita noble. After they'd set down on the first planet of a star called Trell, she'd gotten her first taste of real combat. Piloting a fast but lightly armed Locust, Lori had been assigned to attack the palace of Sarghad, but she and her comrades couldn't even get through the city. Wes had bought it, his Wasp's head smashed, then Garik had fled, asking her to cover him. Well, she had, and he escaped. Then Grayson Carlyle stepped out from the cover of an alley and threatened to set her already-overheated 'Mech on fire.
Lori shuddered. Ever since her parent's death in the fire that destroyed their home, she had been deathly afraid of fire. As a MechWarrior, the thought of death in combat was all part of the job, but the prospect of death by fire had broken her, shattered her nerve. There had been no choice. She had to surrender when faced with Grayson's inferno launcher.
And then Grayson had made her first a Tech, and ultimately a MechWarrior under his command. They'd managed to win on Trellwan, through a combination of superb tactics and sheer luck, and had then gone on to form an independent mercenary unit. Already the unit was something of a legend. Against unbelievable odds, the Gray Death had helped the rebels on Verthandi win their independence, and at the same time, Lori had won a personal victory. In the torture chambers of Regis, she had finally overcome her fear of fire. More, she had come to realize that she did, indeed, deeply love this young, sometimes exuberant, sometimes exasperating man beside her.
Gently, she rubbed Grayson's back and felt his trembling subside. She reached up and stroked his blond hair, moving stubborn wisps away from his rugged face. At her touch, he roused, lifted her face to his, and kissed her with a sudden, desperate eagerness. She responded ardently, fiercely glad that of all the women in the Legion, she was the one to whom Grayson turned for love and comfort.
Strange. She still wasn't entirely sure that he loved her, nor if he was capable of loving any one woman. For now, it was enough that he needed her.
The early morning sun filtered through the trees, creating mottled shadows on the ground that the bubble tent's camouflage pattern mimicked closely.
It's a lot like Sigurd here, she thought, cupping her hands around a hot mug, and taking occasional careful sips. Cold . . . rocky . . . mountainous—but beautiful. There were mountains to the south, she knew, three thousand meters tall, the tallest spires capped with eternal snows, with endless glaciers. So much like home.
She stood up abruptly and strode to the edge of the clearing behind Grayson's tent. Home! She hadn't thought of Sigurd that way for a long time. Yet Helm reminded her so much of the land of her childhood, reminded her of a time before Hendrik of Oberon's troops had arrived in fire and fury and death to force that isolated planet to join his confederation. After her parents were killed and she had been orphaned in a conquered world, Lori had joined the Defense Forces partly as a way of combating her intense loneliness. She had found friends—comrades— that helped replace her lost family, only to see them torn from her, too.
It had been harder to make new friends in the Legion. At first, on Trellwan, the men hadn't trusted her, didn't respect her; she'd had to maintain distance in order to retain authority. Then, by the time they had begun to accept her as a fellow warrior, everyone assumed that she was the Chief's woman and so avoided getting close to her all the more. It wasn't until Janice Taylor joined up on Verthandi that Lori really found someone she could talk to.
Lori looked back at the encampment. There were signs of stirring now in the other tents, though Grayson apparently still slept. As one of the early risers this morning, she had enjoyed the solitude. In a close-knit community like the Legion, it was sometimes difficult to find a private moment. She walked back to the fire, refilled her mug, and sat down on a log, hoping that a good night's rest had refreshed Grayson's mind as well as his body. She, too, was wondering how they would get out of this fix, yet felt confident that Grayson would find a way.
A soft rustle and a low moan from the tent told her that he was waking up. A moment later, he
poked out his head, sleepily trying to focus his gray eyes. Seeing her, he pushed some recalcitrant strands of straw-colored hair out of his eyes, and grinned.
"Morning, woman," he drawled. "Is that coffee I smell?"
"It sure is, Gray." Lori smiled back. "If you're good, I might even have a mug for you by the time you get out of that sack."
"Oh, I'm good, Lori, I'm real good." He pulled his head back into the tent and a moment later, emerged fully dressed. He sat down on the log next to Lori to pull on his boots.
"Did you sleep well?" she asked.
Grayson stretched luxuriously and then took the proffered mug from Lori's hand. "As always, after one of your delicious . . . ah . . . treatments, my love." He rested one hand on her thigh. "You're good for me, Lori. You know that?"
She smiled, but felt an inward twinge. She was not as free with endearments as Grayson was, and somehow could never fully believe his tender words. Few relationships in the Legion, or in any similar combat unit for that matter, lasted as long as theirs had already. She kept expecting Grayson to grow tired of her one day, but the thought always brought a tiny, distant chill.
"Do you have a plan, Gray? Do you know what we're going to do next?" She took a last sip of coffee and tried to steer her own thoughts away from matters personal.
The tall, blond leader took a deep breath, held it, then let it out slowly. "Yes," he said finally. "I know what I've got to do next."
Lori looked at him sharply. He had said "I," not "we." Whatever Grayson planned, it was something he planned to do himself. She knew that he still tended to view every action too personally, blaming himself if anything went wrong. Lori's own position as the Company's Executive Officer was endlessly complicated because Grayson had never learned to delegate his responsibility.
At times, the burden of command seemed far too heavy for those broad twenty-four year-old shoulders. At others, he acted as though he might take on the universe and win. Lori didn't know which attitude exasperated her the most.
"So?" She reached for the battered coffee pot on its self-powered hotplate, and poured herself another cup, more for something to do than anything else. Coffee was already in short supply, but that was certainly the least of their worries. "So . . . what's your plan?"
Grayson's studied cheerfulness was another of his masks, one she had come to know well in four years. He knew she wasn't going to approve of whatever it was he had in mind, and so he assumed this outrageously cheerful facade. Of course, he couldn't assume the facade if he wasn't truly sure of which course of action to pursue, but following his shifts of mood could be frustrating.
"First and foremost, Lori, we need information. For one thing, do this Colonel Langsdorf and our friend Graff really represent the Marik government?"
"You still think we could be caught in a civil war?"
He shook his head. "I doubt it, but it's a possibility. We've got to know where we stand with these people, and with Janos Marik, before we take another step. Then, we must contact our friends."
"Friends? What friends do we have here on Helm?"
"Oh, you'd be surprised, Lori. Back in the old days, governments kept embassies in one another's countries. The idea was to have people there to keep an eye on what was going on in the other fellow's backyard, and to have someone convenient as a mouthpiece to that government when the need arose." Grayson sipped his own coffee, and scowled at its bitterness. "No sugar? Well, never mind. There's not much sense in embassies today, of course," he went on, "not with everybody fighting everybody else half the time, and with the Great Houses controlling so many worlds."
"There are embassies : . . and ambassadors. That negotiator on Sirius V, the Steiner Special Envoy ..."
"Right, but they tend to come and go only as they're needed, say, when a trade treaty or a defense pact has to be negotiated and signed. A world like Sirius V would probably have a regular envoy from House Steiner, and House Davion, and Kurita and Marik, just because it's a fairly important world on the Liao trade lanes. But an out-of-the-way rock like Helm wouldn't have anything like that.
"Still, every one of the Great Houses has to keep tabs on what's going on in everybody else's backyards, even including backwaters like Helm. You never know when something big is going to pop in an unlikely spot."
"Spies."
"Well, sure, but there are spies . . . and there are spies."
"What do you mean?"
"Everybody uses spies, of course." His mouth tightened, and his eyes regained some of the wintry bleakness she had seen in them the night before. "Like Graff. He must have been planted on us at Galatea. God only knows why he turned on us ... or was turned on us.
"But nearly every world has a resident agent or two from one or another of the Great Houses. They're nothing like an official ambassador, but then, they're not required to perform a regular ambassador's duties. They're just there to make a report once in a while, and maybe to provide help, advice, or maybe communications to someone who might ask for it."
Lori's eyes widened. "House Steiner!"
"Exactly. The Lyran Commonwealth government has got to remember what we did for them on Verthandi. Hey! We beat Kurita and won free a world that had been stolen by the Dracs a few years before . . . then set up things so that House Steiner could regain some lucrative trade rights there. Yes, I think Katrina Steiner's government remembers that and I think they'd be glad to help us."
"Do you know the Steiner . . . ah . . . ambassador?"
"The Steiner spy. I was told, lives at an address on Hogarth Street. It's a local merchant firm that deals in off world trade."
"So, how the hell did you find out about him?"
"One of Janos Marik's aides told me back when I signed the contract that gave us Helm. He gave me the address of a House Davion agent, too." He grinned. "Hell, he even offered me addresses for agents for Kurita and Liao as well, but I turned him down. I didn't figure we'd be wanting to talk to those people, much!"
"I should think not." Lori's voice betrayed her surprise, and her amusement. The so-called civilized peoples often acted in ways that continued to amaze and confound her. There were many things in life for which distant, cold Sigurd had not prepared her. "And Marik's people actually know about this guy?"
Grayson shrugged. "Hey, like I said, he's just a merchant with ties to the Lyran Commonwealth. Nothing flashy . . . and nothing illegal. It's just that his merchant connections give him a means of sending messages off-world unobtrusively from time to time, and so House Steiner pays him a little on the side to keep an eye on things that might interest Katrina here."
"Like a Marik invasion of the Lyran Commonwealth? That could be a dangerous job."
"It has its rough points. Of course, I doubt that Janos Marik's generals would tell this guy about their invasion plans. It's the spies you don't know about that can cause you trouble."
She saw his jaw tighten again. "Like Graff," she said.
He nodded. "Like Graff."
"So why you?"
"Eh?"
"Why do you have to go? Any of us could make contact with this guy. Give us the address, and we'll do it.”
“No."
"Ah. Grayson Carlyle against the universe . . . once again?"
"It's not like that, Lori. But it is something I have to do."
"Is it, Gray?" She stood suddenly, her eyes flashing in the early morning light. "Is it? Or are you tripping over your damned pride again?"
He started to answer, but she had already turned and crawled back inside their tent.
She didn't know whether to feel happy or furious that he did not crawl in after her. When Lori heard his boot-steps moving away from the tent after a time, she felt the loneliness from long ago welling up inside her once again.
14
The skimmer resting in the sun-broken shadows of the woods was an ancient one, scratched, marred, and with only the faintest trace of brown-on-gray patterns to show where coats of paint had once been. The engine access panels
that had borne the grey-on-scarlet death's head of the Legion had been removed, leaving the grease-black convolutions of the engine visible through gaping openings on either side of the turbine nacelle. More scratches had been added up forward, where a vibroblade had been used to scrape off the battered little craft's serial numbers. The Magna CC light laser and its pintle mount in the cargo well aft of the driver's seat had been removed, and the mounting rack unbolted from its brace struts and folded onto the deck. The craft had been carefully inspected by four of the Legion's Techs, including Alard King himself, to make certain that there was nothing about the vehicle that would call attention to its real identity.
While the demilitarized skimmer had been undergoing transformation, both Grayson and King had been undergoing a similar transformation.
"There's something, I suppose, for going native," King said. He spread his hands and looked down at himself. "But I feel a little out of place, don't you, Colonel?"
Both men wore workboots, trousers, and simple tunics—little more than coarse-woven bags with holes for arms and heads—belted at their waists.
"Oh, I don't know, Alard." Grayson plucked lightly at the front of his tunic. "If our mission doesn't go well, we may have to retire and dress like this all the time."
The men and women of the Gray Death Legion, like the personnel of all but the largest and most prosperous mercenary units, had no one uniform in common. Many wore items of clothing acquired during previous service. Charles Bear, for example, had once been with the 21st Centauri Lancers, and usually wore the gray and green helmet and jerkin that was standard-issue for that regiment, though the unit insignia had been removed or painted over. Delmar Clay still wore the green and brown summer campaign jacket used by Hanson's Roughriders.
The Price of Glory Page 14