"And destroying a bunch of Jacobites and religious fanatics is going to help us with Excalibur?"
"That's right. And the key to our success will be the Gray Death Legion."
"Which is what I still don't understand. The original plan, as I understood it, called for Tharkad to order the Legion to Caledonia to put down the revolt there. From what we're hearing from Folker, that is no longer an option. If anything, this new situation just complicates things for us. We're going to have to fight, not only the Caledonian rebels, but a mutinous mercenary regiment as well!"
"Possibly. It all hinges on what the Baron of Glengarry will do."
"Carlyle?"
"The same." Zellner grinned. "Delicious, isn't it? Carlyle has a reputation for siding with the common man, the little people, the popular causes. He would detest working for a small-minded monster like Wilmarth. And yet, if he wants to maintain his position as Baron of Glengarry, he'll have to follow the letter of his contract, which requires him to obey the legal orders put to him by State Command on Tharkad."
Karst gestured at the empty holographic projection plate. "Folker seemed to think Carlyle's already thrown in with the rebels."
"His third-in-command probably has. McCall is a Caledonian, after all, and would have no love for the likes of Wilmarth. He may recommend that Carlyle side with the rebels, no matter what that means to his title."
"Do you imagine that Carlyle would fight against his own son and one of his most senior officers?"
"The tactics of duty, General, can be harsh and uncompromising. I have no idea what orders these Gray Death commandos on Caledonia are under, but likely they're there simply to scout out the situation, find out who is fighting for what, that sort of thing. Any arrangement McCall or the younger Carlyle entered into would not be binding, not if it was in contradiction to the elder Carlyle's responsibilities as Baron of Glengarry or as the holder of a long-term contract to House Steiner. If Carlyle does his duty, he will arrive on Caledonia, ignore any agreement with the local rabble, and carry out the orders given him by the government's duly authorized representative on the planet."
"Wilmarth."
"Officially, yes. The real voice for Tharkad, though, is our friend Folker. But since Major Folker has been pulling Wilmarth's strings for some time now, it all amounts to the same thing.
"In any case," Zellner continued, "he will have his orders ... to put down the rebellion of Jacobite extremists and religious zealots on Caledonia. If Carlyle and the Gray Death carry out their orders, well, we will have demonstrated our resolve to maintain peace and order throughout the Skye March. Furthermore, any wrath the Caledonian population might feel after this popular insurrection is put down will be turned against a mercenary unit, a unit that we can distance ourselves from politically. They will be seen as tools of that idiot Wilmarth, and any burned cities or roasted babies they may complain about will be the Gray Death's fault.
"When we arrive, we will declare Wilmarth to be a traitor, you will take charge of the Caledonian government as we've already discussed, and the people will hail you, hail us as liberators."
"Granted. But if Carlyle does join the rebels, against Wilmarth? Against us? It could happen. This man has a reputation for doing ... the unexpected. We would find ourselves forced to destroy the Gray Death, rather than using it as originally planned."
"Then we will kill Carlyle and destroy the Gray Death Legion and the rebellion. And, once again, we will be the heroes. Not on Caledonia, perhaps. But this will look good, very good, on Tharkad. Consider the report! A rebel uprising ... and a mercenary unit supposedly loyal to House Steiner joins the revolt! Then you and I and the Third Davion Guards go in, crush the mutiny, and bring order. Tharkad is happy with us, while the Skye separatists—who will be watching this action closely, you may depend on that—will see that we will tolerate no challenge to our will to maintain order. You will be military governor of Caledonia, which will prove to be an important staging area for Excalibur's next planned move."
"Hesperus II."
"Exactly. When we control Hesperus, we will control the military muscle and sinew of all of House Steiner space. The two systems are adjacent, a single jump, only a few light years apart. We can arrange for units of uncertain loyalty to be dispatched to Caledonia to keep the peace, while our loyal forces are redeployed here. By the beginning of next year, I suspect, no later, we will be in a position to seize Hesperus II for Excalibur and carve out our own little domain among the worlds of the Skye March."
Rising from his chair, Zellner walked around the desk to the room's wallscreen, which was set now to show an external view. The city of Maria's Elegy, capital of Hesperus II, was surprisingly small, and for all of the technology associated with the 'Mech plants and factories located on this world, surprisingly primitive-looking. A huddled collection of geodesic domes and tiered, multilevel enclosures of glass and aluminum, it looked small and vulnerable set against the overwhelming spectacle of the mountains. The world's F-class sun, shrunken and chill at this distance, set blue-white highlights sparkling in the glaciers at the higher elevations and gave the sky a deep blue-violet cast.
Hesperus II was known for two things, its mountains, which rose rugged and forbidding in labyrinthine folds across all four of the world's continents, and its factories, which were nothing less than the military-industrial heart of the entire Lyran Commonwealth. In its history, Hesperus II had endured no fewer than fourteen separate military invasions and unnumbered raids; there were never less than two full battalions of top-line 'Mechs guarding its principal cities, spaceports, and manufactory centers.
Zellner did not command all of those forces. Not yet. But very soon he would. For a long moment, he stood before the viewscreen, hands clasped behind his back, looking up at the mountains that encircled the tiny human landhold known as Maria's Elegy.
"Which do you think it will be, sir?"
"Eh?"
"What do you think Carlyle will do? Fight for Wilmarth? Or join the rebels?"
"It actually hardly matters, one way or the other," Zellner said with a shrug. "I confess, I'm curious. The man was created Baron of Glengarry by Prince Victor Davion himself. Davion rules the Federated Commonwealth, and so Carlyle is bound to the man—even if following orders means doing the bidding of a fat, bloody-minded toad like Wilmarth. But, as I said, he has the reputation for following populist causes. The man really is an incurable romantic. He should have been born a thousand years ago, back in the romantic age of flights to Terra's moon and covered wagons and chivalrous knights." Turning suddenly from the wallscreen, he faced Karst. "The Gray Death should be en route to Caledonia by now."
"Folker seemed to think they were already there, sir."
"An advance scouting party," Zellner said, dismissing Folker's report. "Nothing more than that. They cannot have moved much in the way of heavy equipment to Caledonia, or my agent with the Legion would have noticed. According to his last report, which was over a week ago, the Legion's DropShips were being loaded on Glengarry."
Dupré had been sending back a steady stream of coded HPG reports on the readiness and disposition of the Legion. Zellner congratulated himself again on his own foresight in securing the man as a private source.
"Your agent, yes," Karst said. "And he is your ace in the hole, I imagine, if it turns out we do have to take Carlyle out of the way."
"Just so. I doubt we'll need to exercise that particular option, however, even if Carlyle decides to take sides against us."
"Really? Why, sir?"
"Because his landhold on Glengarry is hostage to his unit's good behavior. If the Baron of Glengarry should revolt, his unit mutiny, well, Victor Davion will have no choice at all save to turn Glengarry over to another party."
"You, Marshal?"
"Field Marshal Gareth, actually, though we have discussed the possibility of my assuming the title of Baron of Glengarry, should Carlyle betray his contract. The point is, Carlyle won't be able to carry his mut
iny very far, not if we control the families his men have left behind. Do you follow me?"
"I believe I do. Sir." Karst smiled. "Carlyle and his Gray Death will be yours no matter what he chooses to do!"
"That, my dear General Karst, is the essence of successful politics. It is always best to leave nothing to chance!"
19
JumpShip Rubicon Zenith Jump Point
Caledonia System, Skye March
Federated Commonwealth
1347 hours, 7 April 3057
Space rippled, and the background of stars seemed to crawl and twist as the gravitational fabric of one small area of the cosmos folded back upon itself. Light flared out of nothingness, a torrent of free photons loosed as titanic energies relaxed their grip on one part of the cosmos and touched another. The shape that materialized, a shadow against the fading glare, was titanic, three quarters of a kilometer in length and massing some 380,000 tons. With flaring thrusters, it aligned its tail toward the Caledonian sun; over the course of the next several minutes, the ship's sail ring, rotating to keep the deployment rigging taut, began sliding off its mount encircling the JumpShip's primary station-keeping drive.
Despite the merging of Federated Suns and Lyran Commonwealth, the Monolith Class JumpShip Rubicon was still of Lyran registry, and the insignia displayed on the inner face of the unfolding energy-collection sail was the clenched fist of the old Lyran Commonwealth and House Steiner. For fairly obvious reasons, the Great Houses of the Inner Sphere retained individual control of what were euphemistically referred to as House assets. Alliance, clearly, had not brought total trust and cooperation, even—or especially—when the Federated Suns was increasingly perceived as the senior partner of the two states, and with greater control of the joint AFFC military.
The huge Rubicon was capable of carrying nine Drop-Ships attached to the docking collars arrayed along its long, central shaft. On this passage, however, jump had been completed with only five riders—a pair of merchant DropShips and three military vessels, Union Class DropShips bearing the gray-and-black skull logo of the Gray Death Legion.
Aboard the DropShip Endeavor, Colonel Grayson Carlyle unstrapped himself from his couch on the bridge deck and, with a shove, drifted across to the complex of display screens and consoles that comprised the Battalion Operations Center a few meters away. Catching himself on a bundle of wiring threaded across the deck overhead, he braced himself alongside the couch occupied by Major Jonathan Frye. "Well, Jon," he said. "We made it this far, at least."
Frye, a craggy-faced man with a thin mustache, grimaced as he uncinched his couch harness. "If you mean, Colonel, that we made it this far without getting caught in the crossfire of a civil war, I agree. But the news we picked up at Gladius didn't sound any too good. We may not have much longer."
"Affirmative. I want to get this one cleaned up as fast as possible," Grayson said. "I don't like having the regiment scattered across sixty-five light years."
"Do you think Glengarry is vulnerable?"
"Lori can handle whatever happens there," Grayson replied, despite the small stab of worry the question raised. "It's the old tactical dilemma of splitting your forces in the face of the enemy."
Frye grinned. "Like you did at Gettysburg?"
"Um. Trouble there is that a simulation, no matter how complex, can't be totally accurate. I split my forces at Gettysburg, sure, but I was also running both halves of my forces, and I always knew what both were doing. In a real fight, I'd have to send ... well, you, for instance, on a wide flank march. After you'd vanished over the horizon with half of my BattleMechs, all I could do would be hope to hell you knew what you were doing!"
Frye chuckled. "Well, Colonel, me and Third Batt did pretty well by ourselves on Ueda and Karbala."
"That you did, Major. I never intended to suggest that I couldn't trust you out of my sight! I am worried about the people we left back on Glengarry, though. The political situation right now is ... pretty strange. Anything could happen."
"I'm sure it wasn't easy trying to decide whether to stay with the landhold on Glengarry or take off for Caledonia to check up on Alex and Davis."
Grayson shrugged slightly as though to say it hadn't really been a choice. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Let's get up to Ship Ops."
The Endeavor's bridge was designed in two levels, with Ship Operations run from a circular deck with an open center set just above the larger area reserved for Battalion Operations. When the ship was grounded on a planet, the bridge was reached by ladder or elevator running up to Ship Ops's central opening; in zero-G, however, moving from one level to the next was a matter of giving a practiced kick and gliding through empty space to the next handhold.
Catching himself on a bulkhead wiring conduit, Carlyle bobbed in midair alongside the control console occupied by Captain Jennifer Walters, the Endeavor's commander. "Hello, Jennie," he said. "What's the feed?"
"Well, Colonel, it looks like the Rubicon came through in one piece," she replied. Her blond hair, worn a bit longer than shipboard regulations generally permitted, swirled in a fine, golden haze about her head and shoulders as she turned. "They're deploying the sail now, and we have priority clearance for release and drop as soon as sail evolution is complete."
A bank of broad, thick windows ringed the bridge at this level, giving a three-sixty view around the DropShip. The window set above Captain Walters's station was looking aft down the length of the Rubicon's central spine. The Legion DropShip Defiant was next in line, and a half a kilometer farther off, the sail was slowly opening beyond the splayed reach of the Rubicon's towering deployment masts. Half a dozen monitors at Walters's station repeated the scene from various alternate angles, relayed to the Endeavor from cameras mounted elsewhere along the Rubicon's enormous length. Caledonia's yellow-orange sun gleamed in a burst of dazzling luminosity through the circular opening at the sail's center.
Caledonia itself was invisible, though a representation of the world appeared on one of Walters's screens. It would be five days more before the Gray Death's Third Battalion would touch down on the world.
Five days until Grayson saw his son again.
The communications officer's station was located next to the DropShip captain's. Lieutenant Xavier Mendez was pressing the earphone of his headset tightly against his ear, a look of intense concentration on his face. "Colonel?"
"Yes, Lieutenant."
"We don't seem to be getting anything from Caledonia. No news, no vid carriers, nothing but a computer voice message that says all communications have been temporarily interrupted."
"Anything on the Legion's tac frequencies?"
"Just static, sir. I think the whole spectrum is being jammed."
"That doesn't sound promising," Frye said, floating alongside with one hand on a console support.
"Agreed." Some thirty light minutes from Caledonia, of course, two-way communications were impossible, but if Alex or Davis had some vital information to communicate to the Legion when the unit arrived in-system, they might have set their transmitter to broadcasting the same coded burst over and over.
But someone was blanketing all of the standard military frequencies—the civilian frequencies, too—making reception of even one-way recorded messages impossible.
"Anything in the message about why service has been cut off?" Frye asked Mendez.
"No, sir. Just the temporarily interrupted bit And the other freaks are definitely being jammed. We won't be able to transmit through them, either."
"Then we'll be going in blind," Grayson said. This didn't sound good.
"Colonel?" Frye said. "When we get to Caledonia, what then? Are we really going to be fighting the Jacobites?"
Carlyle sighed. That question had been looming larger and larger in his mind for some time, and the jamming of Caledonia's comm frequencies didn't reassure him. "Our orders are to restore order," he said. "Let's wait until we can establish contact with Alex and Davis, and see what they have to say, first."
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But he was already sure enough of what the situation would be, based on the last HPG report from McCall. The Caledonian's worst fears, it seemed, had materialized, and it was entirely possible that the Legion would soon find itself fighting McCall's friends and family.
Carlyle's grip on the wiring conduit tightened until his knuckles showed white. The Baron of Glengarry was already questioning his basic loyalty to the state that had hired him.
Would this, he wondered, be the first battle of the long-threatened civil war?
He didn't like that thought at all.
Lieutenant Mendez turned in his seat. "Colonel?"
"Yes, Lieutenant?"
"Sir, the planet's being blanketed, but regular ship-to-ship communications are still open. A call just got relayed to us from the Rubicon's skipper. There's a small shuttle waiting at the jump point. Apparently they're waiting for us."
"That's interesting." Could it be Alex? Or McCall? Where would they get a shuttle? Did this have anything to do with the jamming at Caledon? "Any word on who's aboard or what they want?"
"Let me check, sir."
Mendez began speaking quietly over his headset as Grayson digested this bit of news. Whoever it was waiting for them had taken a bit of a risk. Every star system had two standard jump points, one at the system's zenith, one at the nadir. However, any starship with adequate navigation charts and system ephemerides could also make use of nonstandard points, the so-called "pirate points." True, Jump-Ships, especially the big ones like the Rubicon, tended to stick with established and published schedules. It did, after all, save both time and money if DropShips planning to join a JumpShip at a given system were waiting at the right spot when the starship arrived, and not sitting hundreds of millions of kilometers away on the other side of the local star.
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