"The House of Ward of the Jade Wolves subsequently held a Trial of Bloodright. Only one person was entered into the Trial and, in honor of his killing Khan Chistu, Vlad now claims the name of Ward." Phelan slowly scanned the gathering, knowing there was not a Wolf present who would have denied Vlad his right to a Bloodname. "The Bloodright they gave him, because of the Abjuration, was mine."
Phelan held his hand up to forestall comment. "I stand before you stripped of my Bloodname. I first came to you as Phelan Ward Kell and was later adopted by you as Phelan Wolf. I earned the Bloodname of Ward and then was elected to the office of Khan by you. I am now just Phelan again, but no less proud.
"The Jade Falcons disowned us. The Jade Wolves have not claimed us, though they have claimed what is ours. I choose to ignore the action of the Falcons and pity the Jade Wolves. In my mind and in my heart I know we are still the Wolves. We will be the Wolves forever and ever and, as Wolves, we will be true to the vision of those who created the Clans."
Phelan narrowed his eyes. "It is expected the Clan Council of the Jade Wolves will elect Vladimir Ward as its first Khan. Likewise it is assumed the Grand Council will elect Khan Crichell of the Jade Falcons as the new ilKhan. Because of the severe losses they suffered in our Trial of Refusal, we know the Falcons will not attempt to resume the war against the Inner Sphere immediately. This is good, for it gives us time to prepare for them.
"The ships and garrison Clusters that traveled with us to Morges and then jumped yet deeper into the Lyran Alliance went to Arc-Royal—my family's homeworld. It is also the headquarters of the Kell Hounds. On Arc-Royal we will create our own community and continue the traditions that have brought us to this point. My father has laid claim to a massive portion of the Jade Falcon border and has pledged his Kell Hounds to defend it. I would have us pledge our strength to defend it as well, but this will be for our Khans to decide.
"I believe this is what Ulric Kerensky intended all along, and something Nicholas Kerensky would have approved."
Phelan frowned and looked away for a moment, then turned back to the silent gathering. "There may be those who believe I am in error, those who wish for reconciliation with the Jade Wolves. That is your right and I respect it. Any of you who wish to leave here and travel back to rejoin the Crusading Clans may do so, without interference or recrimination. I ask only that you respect those of us who wish to remain true Wolves and that you will give us your best when the day comes that we must face off in combat."
Phelan swallowed hard as emotion threatened his composure. "These are my wishes and my dreams for us, but transforming my dreams into reality will fall to others. Another now claims my Bloodname. Were I truly of the Clans—born to them as you all were—I would ignore the Abjuration and Vlad's usurpation of the Bloodname I won over him. But here, now, once again in the realm of my birth I realize that I still belong to the Inner Sphere. I still admire the traditions that nurtured me. I will always be my father's son and I am proud of being a Kell.
"I am equally proud of being a Wolf, but now I must combine what is good for the Inner Sphere with what is best for the Wolves. I, who was born and raised here, will find it easier to adapt. The Wolves are welcome here—and desperately needed—but the decisions about how you will adapt to live in the Inner Sphere must come from the Wolves, not from me."
Phelan gave a slight shrug. "The matter is moot. I no longer have a Bloodname. I am not eligible to be a Khan."
From the back of the room came a voice that sliced effortlessly through the stunned silence, a voice Phelan found hauntingly familiar. "If I might, Khan Phelan, beg the indulgence of this conclave." The speaker, a tall man with a shock of white hair, slowly strode down the center aisle. He wore a simple white robe emblazoned with the golden star emblem of ComStar. His military bearing marked him as more than a ComStar functionary, and the eye-patch over his eye suggested wisdom learned through bitter lessons.
Surprised, Phelan nodded his head. "I recognize you, Anastasius Focht, and give you leave to speak." As he backed away from the podium, Phelan felt a shiver run down his spine. What is the Precentor Martial doing here? And why didn't I know he had arrived on Morges?
The Precentor Martial nodded to Phelan. "Thank you, Khan Phelan. I have come here to deliver a message that was entrusted to me by Ulric Kerensky." The tall man nodded toward the rear of the auditorium. "It was recorded on holodisk, and no one has viewed it until this moment."
A screen descended behind the Precentor Martial, and static played across it for a moment before the image of Ulric Kerensky appeared.
"Forgive me, my friends," Ulric began, "if this message is hasty and brief, but I record in on the eve of my trial on charges of treason by the Grand Council. I already know the outcome of the trial and the nature of the grand enterprise into which the Wolves will be launched because of it. No, I do not claim to be an oracle, but much experience leads me to this certainty about various outcomes.
"One is this: When you see this, I will have been slain by the Jade Falcons."
Phelan went cold. Ulric knew how things would turn out, yet never shied from doing what had to be done.
"Another is that Phelan Ward will have been successful in getting you to the Inner Sphere. He does not yet know that is what he will be forced to do. He will not like it, of course, but neither Natasha nor I could do what he will to preserve our Clan. I do not envy any of the Jade Falcons sent into the Inner Sphere to pursue you—now or in the future.
"The future is what this message concerns. It is the ilKhan's right to reward the successful conclusion of a mission. The highest reward we have to bestow—the one offered Jaime Wolf and the others who ventured into the Inner Sphere half a century ago—is the creation of a Bloodname. In this vein, I, ilKhan Ulric Kerensky, have created the Bloodname of Kell, in honor of Phelan Ward Kell. He will be the first to bear this Bloodname, a name that will be respected here and feared among those you have left behind."
Ulric's message paused and applause arose from the assembled Wolves. Phelan stared gape-jawed at the screen and then at the assembly. He had just told the Wolves that he was not really part of them, but the thrill running through him at the honor bestowed by Ulric and their affirmation of it told him he was wrong. He realized that he need not choose to be either a creature of the Inner Sphere or a Wolf, but that he could be both. And if he could do that, so could the others.
The ilKhan's image nodded as if in confirmation of Phelan's thoughts. "You are embarking on a grand mission that will shape the future of our Clan, the Inner Sphere, and humanity. Remember that you are Wolves. Be true to your traditions, but do not become reactionaries. Never abandon that which makes the Wolves strong, but adopt that which will make us stronger! The Clans were always meant to be the greatest of warriors, and we have trusted science to produce the most superior soldiers ever seen. But the events of recent years have taught us one thing. In war, as in nature, adaptation is as important as selection. We have seen in Phelan Ward the greatness of a warrior born and trained in the Inner Sphere, and this teaches us that being bred for war is not all. We have eyes to see, minds to think. We have imaginations to dream of the brilliance that might arise from a synthesis of both warrior traditions.
"Your mission now is to defend the Inner Sphere from the threat represented by the Clans. Who better than you? You must stand united to prevent war from destroying a people who have neither the means to comprehend it nor withstand it. You have Khan Phelan Kell to lead you and the courage, my Wolves, to follow."
Ulric's face froze on the screen, locked in a proud smile, but his voice continued to echo through the hall. "This, I say, is your destiny as Wolves and from it you shall not shy."
A long silence followed those last words of Ulric Kerensky, Khan of Khans, and leader of Clan Wolf, the strongest of the Clans, the one with the most revered lineage extending back not only to Nicholas Kerensky, but even farther, to General Aleksandr Kerensky, who first led his exiles from the Inner Sphere int
o the dangerous reaches of uncharted space. An exodus into the unknown to form something new, something that had never been seen before.
"Seyla," spoke the Wolves as one, the single word whose meaning had been lost in the mists of time, but whose import filled Phelan's heart with pride. These were his people.
They accepted the ilKhan's charge for them and, in doing so, gave the people of worlds like Morges the faintest glimmer of light in the bleak darkness that had, until then, been their only future.
58
He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.
-Thomas Paine, The American Crisis
Avalon City, New Avalon
Cruris March, Federated Commonwealth
1 January 3058
Weary from the New Year's celebrations he'd been duty-bound to attend, Victor Davion sat alone in his office. With half the buttons on his dress jacket undone, he sat back in his big chair and put his booted feet up on the corner of his desk. One hand swirled brandy around in a snifter and the other felt as if it should have a cigar in it. He smiled, remembering the time or two he had seen his father in so relaxed a state.
But you would never have relaxed now, would you, Father? Victor's decision to accept Thomas' offer had ended the war, which gave his people something to truly celebrate. They also rejoiced in the victory of Nanking and the death of the tyrant on Zurich. Both worlds had returned to the Federated Commonwealth, giving him a slender finger of influence poking into what he had lately begun to call the Chaos March. While he was pleased to retain those worlds, part of him wondered if they would not be so tempting that Sun-Tzu would feel he just had to go after them again.
Any other time that would have been enough to cause him some concern, but other news had relegated Sun-Tzu's potential trouble-making to a minor nuisance. Early the day before he had gotten a message from Morgan Kell that proclaimed the creation of the Arc-Royal Defense Cordon, an area spanning the worlds from Kooken's Pleasure Pit to Koniz. Though that encompassed most of the Lyran border with the Clans, it left significant gaps that Katherine would have to cover or risk Clan breakthroughs above or below the Cordon.
For the Grand Duke of Arc-Royal to put such a large slice of the Lyran Alliance under his control, even for the purpose of defense, was quite an affront to the ruler of the nation. Had Victor been on the throne in Tharkad, he would either have slapped Morgan down or required an oath of personal fealty. Victor knew Katherine could manage neither the former nor obtain the latter from Morgan. What their mother's cousin had effectively done was carve a sovereign state out of the middle of the Alliance, weakening Katherine considerably without crippling the defense against the Clans.
One more thing for her to think about, which is good. Left to her own devices, or those of Tormano, she finds too many ways to make trouble for me. Victor knew he needed more time to measure the full impact of Tormano Liao's rise to the position of Katherine's advisor, but the sale of JumpShips back to the Federated Commonwealth was already a bad sign. Even so, Victor assumed Tormano would always have one eye on the Capellan Confederation.
The Prince of the Federated Suns took a swallow of brandy and relished the burn as it went down. Thinking back over the past year he realized his biggest lesson had been not to underestimate Thomas Marik. Because Thomas had been restrained by the presence of Joshua on New Avalon, both Victor and this intelligence apparatus had considered the Free Worlds League impotent and its leader a minor player in the politics of the Inner Sphere. Nothing in Thomas' background would have suggested he could engineer so skillful an operation to recover his planets.
Obviously, his fascination with technology and idealism are but the outer layers of the onion. Victor knew he could never again take Thomas for granted, and he translated that into a rule he must extend to everyone around him. Never assume—know!
A gentle knock at the door brought Victor's head around. "Come."
An ashen Galen Cox opened the door and stepped into the office, pulling the oaken door shut behind him. "Good, you're sitting down—and you have a strong drink in hand."
Victor pulled his feet from the desk and sat forward. "You look as if you've seen a ghost, Jerry. What's the matter?" A thousand possible scenarios ran through his brain, but only the renewal of war with the Clans struck him as one that could have made Galen look so stricken. "You're the one who looks like he could use a drink. Get one and tell me what's happened."
"After, my lord. I want to get this straight." Galen held up two fingers. "Two things, one minor and one major. The minor one comes first because it provides a perspective on the major one."
"I'm listening."
"You remember, of course, the trio of Liao agents who were at the hospital and were killed trying to get to Joshua?"
"Yes."
"The war shifted some of our intelligence assets around and made League codes and ciphers a priority down in Crypto. It wasn't until after things slowed down that some of the backlog started to get cleared up. Part of that was processing the orders sent to the Liao agents. Once that was done we discovered that the message had been encrypted with a routine we had tagged, in the department, as 5707. That means it was the code sequence being used in July of last year."
Victor nodded. "I follow you. Go on."
"The thing of it is that we had 5707 in the computers because we had picked up the key to it when the Maskirovka first tried to get it to their sleeper agents and we prevented its being passed on to them. I'm fairly certain the Maskirovka knew we had the key because they sent a new code—one we didn't get—and through that transmission we identified their back-up system for code transmission. Our efforts with 5707 should have prevented the agents from being able to decode the orders when they got them.
"The problem is that the 5707 code key appears to have been re-sent in place of the 5709 code key to agents here on New Avalon. The message that the Liao agents got in September used the July code a code the Maskirovka should have known we had cracked. This means, in short, that the July code was sent here again and the message encrypted with it followed. On no other world was the 5707 code key repeated and, in fact, we picked up a variety of 5709 keys."
Victor frowned. "What you're telling me is that someone sent an old code and, by implication, an old message to the sleeper agents here. This would imply ComStar or Word of Blake. I guess it was the latter, given our cordial relations with ComStar at the moment. This further suggests, however, that the Word of Blake sent the message to Sun-Tzu's agents to create an incident to set off a war. An attempt on Joshua's life could have forced disclosure of the switch."
Galen nodded. "I think we have to consider the fact that Thomas knew we had put a double in his son's place. He laid the groundwork for the war and then went out and prosecuted it."
"And by using Liao agents he does not jeopardize his own people, points me at Sun-Tzu, and even provides himself an excuse for turning on Sun-Tzu later if Sun-Tzu tried to defy him. He got a number of bonuses from one simple act that he knew would not endanger his son." Victor gave a low whistle. "I'm even more impressed."
"Wait, there's more." Galen took a deep breath. "You remember, when the war started, you told me you wanted to duplicate the genetic tests Thomas was claiming proved the double was not his son?"
"Yes. And you gave me the results of the tests a week later."
Galen shook his head. "No, I gave you the result of some of the tests. They were the crucial ones, the father-son match. Lab techs, well, they're the sort of folks who operate in their own world. As far as they're concerned, anal retentive is not only hyphenated, it's capitalized and printed in bold italics."
"Obsessive are our lab people?"
"Even more so than you, sir."
Victor arched an eyebrow. "Is that possible?"
"Yes, but only because they have no life outside the lab and, therefore, no real understanding how important information can be. At seven PM today, while I
was getting ready for your reception, the head of the genetic identification department dropped some files to me with a note saying he thought he'd sent them before, but had forgotten. They were the results of the rest of the blood tests.
"When Joshua originally came here, and throughout his time here, his family sent whole blood for use when he needed transfusions. The lab people used that blood to do the genetic testing. Not only did they test the double against the family, but they tested the real Joshua against his family. As expected, the real Joshua matched with his mother arid father, but he didn't match against Isis."
"Of course not, she was his half-sister."
"Highness, no match means no relationship. They're not brother and sister, at least, not blood relations."
Victor's head came up. "You mean Isis' mother was impregnated by someone else, then claimed her child was Thomas'? If I recall my history correctly, she was born about a month after the bomb attack on Thomas. She was proclaimed his daughter while ComStar had him stashed away being healed up."
"That's correct, but you're missing the point. At the time of Isis' birth, Thomas was believed dead. To prove paternity, Isis had a DNA identification done that matched her with blood taken from Thomas and held in case of medical emergencies."
"I know, I know, I've had plenty of liters taken from me for storage in hospitals in case I'm injured. So you're saying, then, that because there is no match between Isis and Joshua that Joshua isn't really Thomas' child?"
Even as he asked the question, the paradox struck him. "Wait, Joshua matched his father. Isis matched her father, but the two of them don't match. That means her father isn't his father."
Galen nodded slowly. "Which means Thomas Marik isn't Thomas Marik."
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