I am Jade Falcon

by Robert Thurston

“Maybe. It is more complicated than you think.”

  “Tell us."

  "It has something to do with the way he is obsessed with Aidan Pryde, but I prefer not to talk about it."

  Horse had never been particularly curious about other people's secrets, so he just shrugged and said, "As you wish, Diana."

  Diana had a bizarre impulse to say, with affection and not lust, "I love you, Horse." She was glad to be able to suppress that impulse.

  "Why is Kael Pershaw here?" Diana asked.

  "For some devious reason, no doubt," Horse replied. "So devious that no one but him knows it—and maybe not even him."

  "Yes."

  Joanna took a last look around the room. "This is it. I wish to see this room no more. I will wait outside for the DropShip to begin boarding."

  Without a backward glance, she strode out of the room. Diana noted that Joanna's long, slim legs moved with a youthful vigor. Strange, she thought, I would be dragging my feet like they were in sludge. But no, not Joanna. A true Jade Falcon, despising her fate but going straight for its throat.

  Haline called to Joanna as soon as she opened the door from her quarters. Apparently the younger warrior had been waiting for her to come out.

  "What is it?" Joanna growled. "Unless your reason for stopping me is related to duty, I do not wish to speak with you on my last day here."

  "Nor I you," Haline said in a sneering voice. All of the prydelings spoke to Joanna with just such contempt since her defeat. "But I am sent. Star Colonel Ravill Pryde will see you in his quarters. It is an order, Star Commander."

  "I will be there soon."

  Haline started to go, then turned back. "I would hurry if I were you. Star Colonel Kael Pershaw also awaits you there."

  The information startled Joanna. When Haline was out of hearing range, Joanna looked at Horse and Diana over her shoulder through the still open door. "Why would that old molting falcon want to see me? Some long-delayed insult? A final humiliation?"

  Neither Horse nor Diana could offer an explanation. Shutting the door, Joanna left them sitting there, and then headed off toward Ravill Pryde's quarters, muttering in consternation all the way.

  16

  Falcon Guard Headquarters

  Pattersen, Sudeten

  Jade Falcon Occupation Zone

  1 August 3057

  Joanna was not prepared for the latest collection of spare parts that was Kael Pershaw. The man had been taken apart and put back together so often that she could not tell anymore which part of him was prosthetic and which was still human. That single eye, glaring out from under a thick eyebrow—that had to be human. Half of his face, as ever, was masked, hiding behind whatever disfigurement was beneath. She thought the mouth was not reconstructed, or at least the half of it she could see coming out from behind the mask seemed real. One of the hands. Maybe an ear. But the reality of the rest of him certainly debatable.

  The way he walked around the room had changed from the old Pershaw limp. One leg used to drag slightly after the other. Now he seemed to require great effort to move them both. He did not so much breathe as force his chest out and in. If either of his arms was good, she could not perceive since both swung with the same leaden motion. One of the arms was definitely fake, but she had forgotten which one.

  Ravill Pryde's replacement parts, on the other hand, were entirely human—changes of expression, attitude, and even posture that Joanna took a special joy in. Around Kael Pershaw he was nervous and deferential. Something was up, she could tell.

  The only unaltered individual in the room was Galaxy Commander Marthe Pryde, a warrior as famous for her heroism as for the fact that she originated from the same sibko as the celebrated Aidan Pryde—one of the sibkos that Joanna had trained as a falconer on Ironhold. Joanna thought Marthe looked the same. Even though she was within shooting distance of undesirable warrior age, she still seemed young. Age was suggested only in her guarded eyes. For Joanna, Marthe's resemblance to Aidan was disconcerting.

  "Star Commander Joanna," Pershaw said, his voice low and somewhat mechanical, as if electronically enhanced. "It is good to see you again. It has been a long while since Glory Station, quiaff?"

  "Aff. Very long." Joanna did not like admitting that, since—in Pershaw's presence—it made her own advanced age so much more obvious.

  "I, too, have not encountered Star Commander Joanna in some time," Marthe Pryde said.

  Joanna stared at Marthe's outthrust hand as if she were being offered a dangerous reptile. But it was just a handshake, a firm and confident one.

  What are they up to? Why are they buttering me up? Is this the way they treat a warrior on her way to becoming a nanny?

  "Star Colonel Pryde," Pershaw said to Ravill. "You already know our mission. It is not necessary for you to remain here, quiaff?"

  "But I—"

  "It is not necessary for you to remain, quiaff?" Pershaw's voice had become harsh, a sound grating enough back in his command days at Glory Station, but uttered more like an edict from some god these days. Ravill Pryde bowed crisply to his superior and immediately strode out of the office. Joanna smiled, relishing the humbling of the man she hated so much.

  Pershaw turned to her.

  "I am here to revoke your reassignment, or at least postpone it for a while."

  Joanna could barely contain either her elation or her surprise. "May I ask why, sir?"

  "You would be wasted in such an assignment—"

  "I believe that also."

  "—and I have another task for you that would be eminently suitable. That is right, Galaxy Commander Pryde, quiaff?”

  "Aff."

  "Sit down, Star Commander Joanna."

  "I sit only when I am tired. I am not tired now."

  The perceivable half of Pershaw's mouth seemed to smile. Joanna did not know what gave her the impression, but she wondered if the hidden part of his face ever really duplicated the part that could be seen. Did the mask divide two independent halves of his face?

  He raised his right arm, demonstrating that it at least was still a human part. The skin on the back of his hand was yellow and seemed paper-thin.

  "As you wish." Pershaw paused and glanced for a moment at Marthe Pryde, who gave him a nod.

  "When I dismissed Ravill Pryde," Pershaw began, "I told him he knew our mission. Strictly speaking, that is not true. Now that I serve the Jade Falcons as its chief intelligence officer, I find that I must often deceive others concerning my motives and my intentions. I regret that, but sometimes it is the only way to get the job done."

  Pershaw's words seemed peculiar to Joanna. In all the time she had known and observed Kael Pershaw, she had always considered him at least a little bit devious, despite any Clansman's innate distaste for deception. What unsavory scheme was he cooking up now?

  "The official story, Star Commander Joanna, is that the Jade Falcons have decided that you will be more useful to us here at the front, that you will be reassigned to a Falcon solahma unit. It is, after all, an assignment appropriate to, shall we say, your extensive service to the Clans."

  At first Joanna could not speak, then the words came pouring out in a fierce torrent. "Solahma? You want to put me in one of those senility packs? Make me cannon fodder? And you see that as some kind of honor? I would rather tie myself to a short-range missile shot off in target practice. It is the same—"

  To stop her flow of words, Pershaw help up a hand, or the facsimile of one. "I agree with you, Joanna. Solahma service is an honorable fate for most old warriors, but it would be a misuse of one so valuable as you. I feel fortunate that, at my age, solahma was not my destiny, and it should not be yours."

  "What are you saying, then?"

  "As I said, the official story will be that you have been assigned to a solahma unit, but what I have come here to tell you is that I have another mission for you, a secret mission that will bring you honor but not glory." He paused as if waiting for her response but Joanna was still too furious to spea
k.

  "I have obtained evidence that enemy agents have infiltrated our ranks. As the head of the Jade Falcon branch of the Clan Watch, it is my duty, and my intention, to root them out. Thus far our intelligence is scanty, but we have reports of suspicious activity connected with one of our solahma units, peripherally at least, I need someone in place to—"

  "A spy? You want me to be a spy?”

  Pershaw again glanced toward Marthe Pryde, who seemed somewhat amused by Joanna's explosive reactions. He touched his half-mask with the back of his false hand, a gesture that seemed useless to Joanna. It was, after all, metal touching plastic.

  Kael Pershaw studied Joanna for a moment, then his mouth twisted into something that must have been intended as a smile.

  "That is one way of putting it," he said. "Let us say instead that I need you to assist me in gathering information crucial to the welfare and survival of Clan Jade Falcon."

  Joanna did not know what to say. She just stared at Kael Pershaw, tried to gaze into his visible eye. One eye or two, he had always been hard to read.

  "I have to give you credit. When I found out that I had no choice but to accept assignment as a canister nanny, I thought I could never be brought lower than that. Then you come here and tell me I am to join a solahma unit, and I think that must be the lowest I could sink. Now you tell me I am to become a spy. I have to inform on other warriors. Spy on aging warriors who have little more life to live. Pretend I am a loyal Jade Falcon and inform on my comrades? I was wrong before. Spying is as low as a Jade Falcon warrior can go. It is dishonorable for a warrior to stoop to deceit and intrigue. I cannot do it. Kill me now."

  Pershaw shrugged. "You speak truly, Star Commander Joanna. As warriors, we Jade Falcons do not hold much store with secret warfare. We prefer the direct approach, the warrior's way of resolving conflicts. Yet the ways of war here in the Inner Sphere have taught us the value of intelligence, of gathering information and analyzing it for its strategic value in combat. We are not trained for the tactics of deception. Yet, I do not ask you to spy on your own kind. We are not concerned about loyal Jade Falcons. It is the Clan Wolf agents who are posing as Jade Falcons that we must root out. Strictly speaking, this is not a spy mission. It is an emergency measure to destroy a virus to save a healthy organism. You still look doubtful. But I can convince you, I assure you."

  Joanna looked at Marthe Pryde, who nodded in agreement, then at Pershaw. "You did not mention Clan Wolf previously. I despise the Wolves."

  "Then I have convinced you?"

  "You are perhaps the only person who could have. Go on, tell me more if you will."

  "You will do great service, Joanna."

  "I only want to die well. That is my only goal now."

  "And a noble one it is. But, for this mission, we need for you to survive."

  Joanna looked away. "I was afraid of that," she said.

  17

  Solahma Number 34B Camp Site

  Dogg Station, Dogg

  Jade Falcon Occupation Zone

  15 October 3057

  Joanna had never seen a Jade Falcon warrior who looked as old as MechWarrior Bailly. Nor one as neglectful of his personal appearance. Nor one so bad-tempered that he made Joanna in mid-rage seem calm.

  Bailly's face was permanently cemented into an expression of contempt. His mouth turned down at both corners, his cheeks were sunken, his brow heavily lined, and his eyes managed to look simultaneously angry and weary. His body was bent by age, something else Joanna had never seen before in a Jade Falcon warrior. Although he was obviously vigorous, his hands looked frail, with fingers slightly bent.

  Almost from the hour of her arrival at Dogg Station, he seemed to have made it his new mission to torment Star commander Joanna.

  "We don't get many star commanders here," he said, "ranking officers are supposed to die in battle and never become solahma. Only mere MechWarriors should live to become solahma. You must've been a real misfit to end up here, Star Commander Joanna."

  Kael Pershaw had ordered Joanna to stay out of trouble, so she sucked in a deep breath, gritted her teeth, and vigorously suppressed the impulse to shove her fist into Bailly's face.

  "You use contractions." was all she said to him.

  His eyes widened, but he actually seemed pleased by the complaint. "We are solahma," he said with a shrug. "What need have we to stand on ancient rituals and ceremonies?" He turned to address the other members of the small unit that had gathered near the campfire. "We like contractions here, don't we?"

  With nods of their heads and growled murmurs, the others agreed. Most of them looked old to her, but none so old as Bailly.

  * * *

  Ever since coming to Dogg, the Clan name for a small, uninhabited world that did not appear on any of the official maps, Joanna had been wondering how she could possibly carry out her mission. It was one thing for Kael Pershaw to command her to root out a Wolf agent, but why would any spy come to such a desolate place? Like Sudeten, the planet Dogg was a frigid and forbidding world, with winds that were, if anything, even fiercer. Why, she wondered, did the Jade Falcon commanders always seem to seek out such wretched stations for their troops? Perhaps it was to remind them of home, the nesting worlds hundreds of light years from the Inner Sphere. Forbidding places, those Clan homeworlds, yet Joanna knew that it was their very harshness that had made the Jade Falcons the fiercest of all the Clans.

  "Speak as you wish," Joanna said to Bailly. "I despise contractions, but I would not stop others from using them."

  "Oh?" Bailly said. "We hadn't expected you to be so agreeable. Your reputation suggested otherwise."

  "You know of me?"

  "Yes. For some of us you are celebrated. They think a Falcon Guard officer's an impressive addition to our little unit. Somebody to really despise. We understand, for instance, that you were one of the worthless Falcon Guards whose incompetence lost us the battle of Twycross."

  "Incompetence! Let me tell you—"

  "Tell me what?"

  No, she thought, it would be wrong to respond to this imbecile. Anyway, he was right. Shame instead of glory had covered the Falcon Guards that day seven years ago. With the whole Cluster trapped in the Great Gash of Twycross, an Inner Sphere officer named Kai Allard had managed to explode charges hidden in the walls of the pass, setting off an avalanche that buried virtually every single Falcon Guard warrior under slag. Joanna had been one of the few who did not die, somehow digging her way out of her own BattleMech to survive.

  "Nothing. I refuse to discuss Twycross."

  "As so you should."

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "If I had been with the Guards on Twycross, I too would refuse to speak of it. I wouldn't even bother volunteering for solahma duty. I'd just take twenty steps into an ocean and ten steps back."

  "Suicide is dishonorable."

  "More honorable than bearing the shame of Twycross?”

  “It was not—never mind. I see you are—”

  “I'm what?"

  "Forget it, Bailly." Some of the other warriors sitting nearby had been listening, but Joanna didn't care. It had been a month since she'd come to Dogg and already she was sick of them all. And even more sick of this place, where she didn't even have a cot or a foot locker for comfort. The warehouses near the spaceport were virtually the only real buildings at Dogg Station. Joanna and the rest of the members of the solahma unit slept out of doors.

  She wrapped her rough patched blanket around her and settled down on the hard, rocky ground of Dogg to do the same thing she did every night—tried to make sense of this assignment. During her briefings with Kael Pershaw, she had learned that intercepted dispatches revealed that the Wolves had substituted at least one of their warriors for a true Jade Falcon in this unit. But why? Not only was the unit worthless solahma, but they were merely on garrison duty on a planet where DropShips came only once a month to refuel and to deliver nonessential materials for storage in a group of huge, semicircular ware
houses that had originally been built by the Federated Commonwealth's logistics command.

  Joanna had arrived on one of those DropShips, after a long and slow transit of almost four weeks. It had left her nerves on edge and her head full of questions. Dogg definitely seemed to be off the beaten path and the last place any spy would want to come. The only thing special about this world was its strategic placement along the supply routes so essential to Clan military success. Without the network of supply lines that brought in warriors and materiel from the far-distant Clan worlds, the entire Clan invasion and their current occupation worlds would have been impossible.

  Joanna knew little about Clan DropShip and JumpShip operations within the occupation zone. Kael Pershaw had told her that they were so intricate that even some officers at the highest command levels had no idea how they worked. Most Clan warriors knew only that they had been transported here from the homeworlds, along with the necessary supplies, and that the means for accomplishing such troop movements were still secret from the enemy. It would make sense for the Inner Sphere to try to send a spy to a place like Dogg, trying to discover the route back to the Clan homeworlds. But the Wolves had no reason to spy on the Jade Falcons to learn that information. If they had placed an agent within the garrison troops on Dogg, they could only be up to no good.

  Even the monthly DropShip did not remain long on Dogg. After delivering its cargo and reloading with other supplies, it quickly lifted off. Indeed, the whole operation was so routine that it was run by members of the technician caste. The only Jade Falcon warriors present were the members of this solahma unit whose duty was to defend the supply depot from attack. But it had not taken Joanna long to realize how absurd that was. If the supply depot had contained anything worth protecting, the Falcon commanders would never have assigned a collection of old, worn-out warriors as its protectors. That brought her back to her original question: Why would the Wolves want to place a spy here? After two months she was no closer to the answer to that question than the day she arrived.