Service for the Dead

by Martin Delrio

  Dear Mother [Will wrote]

  So far I haven’t seen much of Terra. Belgorod is very flat compared to Liddisdale, but the weather has been just as cold. The spring thaw is starting now, and you can imagine what that’s like. So far the mud hasn’t swallowed anything too important, unless you count a scoutcar and several pairs of shoes.

  Speaking of feet and shoes, he thought, and looked across the table at Lexa. She’d finished painting the toes on her right foot, and was now applying silver glitter to the big toe of her left foot with an expression of intense concentration. “I still don’t understand why you’re doing that.”

  “Because the regs won’t let me paint my fingernails.” The tone of Lexa’s voice implied that the reason should be transparently obvious.

  Jock glanced up from his mending. “No-body’ll see them once your boots are back on.”

  “But I’ll know about them. And that’s what counts.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Morale,” said Will firmly, before the argument could go on any further.

  “Ah,” said Jock, satisfied, and returned to his mending.

  “You tell him, Will,” Lexa said with a wicked grin, and began work on another star.

  My friends are well, and told me to thank you for asking about them. I’ll certainly bring them to visit if I ever have the chance. It may be a while, though, since nobody knows how long we’re going to be sta—

  The tactical radio clipped to Will’s belt gave out the earsplitting warble that preceded an all-frequencies announcement. He laid his pen aside, and turned up the volume on the radio in time to hear an unfamiliar voice begin to speak.

  “People of Terra!” it—no, she—said.

  “Uh-oh,” Lexa said, putting aside her nail polish. “Anybody want to bet it’s not the Wolf-Bitch?”

  “No,” said Will.

  Jock shook his head in silence. The voice went on.

  “We are the Steel Wolves, and we have come to take back what should have been ours. None can dispute our right.”

  “Hell, yes, we can.” Lexa made a rude gesture in a vaguely skyward direction. “Get stuffed, Kerensky.”

  “Hush,” said Will. “Listen.”

  Another voice came over the tactical radio, a more familiar one this time. “I am Tara Campbell, Prefect of Prefecture III and Countess of Northwind, and I do dispute it.”

  “Will you fight me for it, Countess?”

  “Gladly,” Tara Campbell’s voice replied. “It’s what I came all this way to do. I’d begun to think that you were going to disappoint me and not show up.”

  “I would never do that. Where shall we meet, then?”

  “Here. On the plains outside Belgorod DropPort. Just the two of us. ’Mech against ’Mech.”

  “Oh, no, Countess. I will not deny my Wolves a battle, not when I have brought them so far for it.”

  Lexa made a face. “Do us all a favor, bitch, why don’t you?”

  “Be quiet,” Will said.

  The Countess’s voice came again, low and steady. “Bring your army then. My Highlanders will stand with me, for The Republic of the Sphere.”

  “The Republic is hollow and already dead. We fight for the possession of Terra. Kerensky out.”

  There was a long silence in the Sergeants’ Mess. Finally, Jock Gordon said, “Well.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Lexa. “Fun times ahead.”

  Will picked up his pen and began once more to write.

  —ying. The next few days are likely to be busy ones, so I’m going to post this now while I have the chance and try to write you some more later. All my love to everybody—Will.

  31

  Belgorod DropPort

  Terra

  Prefecture X

  April 3134; local spring

  If Ezekiel Crow had been a different sort of person, he would have found it a subject for considerable dark humor that the only thing letting him withdraw unnoticed from Geneva to Belgorod had been the impending arrival of Anastasia Kerensky and the Steel Wolves.

  He had awakened, on the morning after receiving Suvorov’s call, to the news that a fleet of DropShips was heading in toward Terra. Repeated statements by the announcers that “highly placed sources admit that the ships may have a hostile purpose,” combined with reassuring references to the Highlander forces encamped outside Belgorod, effectively confirmed that Damien Redburn and the rest of Republic officialdom had accepted Tara Campbell’s version of events.

  For the first few crucial hours, though, the Terran media were too busy covering the imminent threat to report on its accompanying scandal, and Crow was able to check out of the Hotel Duquesne, and leave the city unnoticed.

  His good fortune had not lasted long. By the time he left the Belgorod shuttle hub and started out on foot for the commercial DropPort, the tri-vids had a new toy to chew on—him.

  He saw it first in the screen crawl over a newspaper kiosk. A screaming headline—TREASON DURING A CRISIS!—over a file photo captioned Paladin of the Sphere Ezekiel Crow (third from left, in black), others, seen here receiving the Exarch’s commendation for role in elimination of Footfall piracy threat, and a sample paragraph of text:

  Terra’s greatest crisis since the inception of The Republic of the Sphere was worsened, this morning, by allegations that one of The Republic’s most trusted Paladins may harbor an unspeakably dark secret. Scholars and victims alike have speculated for years over the true identity of the notorious Betrayer of Liao . . . . (continued in printed version; insert coin)

  Crow paid the money, and the newspaper kiosk whirred and disgorged a printed copy of the paper in return. He took it to a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop near the DropPort and sat down in a corner booth to read.

  It was even worse than he’d feared. The paper was only running selected items, but those were enough to make it clear they had the whole thing, and from at least two sources.

  Part of it had to have come from Tara Campbell. There was no other possible source for the transcript of the young checkpoint guard’s testimony at a Northwind inquiry:

  Q. Did you recognize the Warrior in the ’Mech?

  A. Yes, ma’am. It was Paladin Ezekiel Crow.

  Q. How did you know that? Are you sure?

  A. Yes, ma’am. It was a Blade, and everybody who was at the big battle last summer knows that Paladin Crow has a Blade.

  Q. Are you sure that it wasn’t someone else in the Paladin’s BattleMech?

  A. Yes, ma’am. He identified himself as Paladin Crow, on Republic business.

  Q. Let the transcript show that Private Higgins’ testimony is borne out by voice analysis of the checkpoint log.

  The Northwind data, Crow thought, was not the worst of it. He could have challenged the interpretation of the checkpoint incident. A Paladin’s judgment on what was or wasn’t Republic business was not something to be lightly questioned. But that damnable Capellan memoir had surfaced again as well, and the medical and genetic records that his unknown enemy had collected for the presumably dead Daniel Peterson, native of Liao, and had then correlated with the publicly available records for Ezekiel Crow, Paladin of the Sphere.

  If the media had those, they had all the rest of it. Sooner or later, they would publish it all.

  By the evening of his first day in Belgorod, the tri-vid channels were alternating clips of a video interview featuring the checkpoint guards with file footage of the combat on Liao and its grisly aftermath. Ezekiel Crow himself was reliably reported to have vanished from Geneva, and to have been sighted—more or less simultaneously—in London, Addis Ababa, and Santa Fe.

  He was fortunate that Alexei Suvorov’s dubious friendship extended to the maintenance of a firm control over transport, loading, and storage at the Belgorod DropPort. The existence of a commercial ’Mech hangar containing a Blade BattleMech remained—for now—one of the few remaining well-kept secrets in Ezekiel Crow’s life.

  However, Suvorov’s control over groundside operations at t
he DropPort didn’t extend to other matters. The port itself—like all other DropPorts on Terra—had been closed to commercial arrivals and departures by order of the Exarch for the duration of what was already being termed “the invasion crisis.”

  For all these reasons, Ezekiel Crow had not taken rooms in a local hotel. Nor was he patronizing the local restaurants. Instead, he was camped inside his rented ’Mech hangar, sleeping on a pile of boxes with his carry bag for a pillow, at the foot of his Blade. He was taking no risk that Suvorov’s friendship might unexpectedly reach its expiration date.

  Such precautions made for a furtive and mole-like existence. He went out only at night, and then only to the parts of the city where the law didn’t extend, and where nobody remarked on resemblances or asked for names. The days he spent penned up in the dim, unheated hangar, his only news of the ongoing crisis was what he was able to pick up by scanning the communications frequencies from the cockpit of his ’Mech.

  He had never expected that shame and dishonor would turn out to be so boring.

  Now that the worst had happened, his dominant emotion was no longer fear, but a burning frustration. He had buried his old identity in the rubble of Chang-An, and had remade himself into a man whose entire goal had been to serve The Republic and to fight for it at need. Now the greatest threat of his lifetime had aimed itself directly at Terra, and he could do nothing, nothing at all, save listen to the airwaves for situation updates and curse the unknown name of his hidden enemy.

  He was doing just that when the all-frequencies signal went off. He listened, half in envy and half in anger, as Anastasia Kerensky arranged with the Countess of Northwind to do battle for possession of Terra—and the answer to everything came to him, fully formed, between one breath and the next.

  He keyed on the ’Mech’s radio to the all-frequencies setting, and began to speak.

  “Anastasia Kerensky! This is Ezekiel Crow, Paladin of the Sphere, and I challenge you to finish the combat between us that began last year on the Plains of Tara.”

  There, he thought. Kerensky’s arrogance would not allow her to let his challenge go unmet.

  He had tricked her into defeat last year outside Tara, drawing down the lightning and frying her ’Mech’s electronic systems with the resulting burst of EMP. If he could defeat her again now, he could—not restore his former good name, it was too late for that, even if he succeeded in taking out the heart of the Steel Wolves with one decisive stroke—but he could at least put the Exarch and The Republic sufficiently in his debt that he would be permitted a dignified withdrawal from public life.

  And if he lost—well, that would also put an end to his problems.

  The all-frequencies signal sounded again, but it was not Anastasia Kerensky’s voice that he heard reply. It was Tara Campbell’s.

  “Ezekiel Crow, you damnable traitor—if you want to fight Anastasia Kerensky, you’ll have to go through me first. This battle is mine!”

  Before he could gather his thoughts and speak, he heard Anastasia Kerensky’s laughter. Was the woman mad?

  “Countess, Paladin,” Kerensky said, still chuckling, “you will have to settle this one between yourselves. The winner leads the Highlanders—and then we fight.”

  32

  Countryside Near Belgorod

  Terra

  Prefecture X

  April 3134; local spring

  Tara Campbell walked across the open field to her Hatchetman. The spring air was crisp, the rain shower of the previous afternoon long gone, and the morning sun was bright across fields of silvery frost. The frost would be melting soon, and the ground underfoot would turn again to mud in the midday heat.

  The distant lines of the Steel Wolves did not concern her now. She had argued the reasons behind her acceptance of Kerensky’s challenge with Jonah Levin and Damien Redburn, and had won the argument. Both the Paladin and the Exarch had chided her for rashness, but they were practical men as well. The struggle for Terra would come down in the end to a struggle between two armies, no matter whether the confrontation was arranged or left to the chances of war. Anastasia Kerensky had already sent out elements of her command to attack and pin down Terra’s regular defense forces at their bases elsewhere, but she herself and the greater part of the Steel Wolves were here.

  Better for the world’s noncombatants, Tara had insisted, if most of the fighting took place on the open ground of old Russia, and not in Geneva’s tranquil streets. Redburn and Levin had, reluctantly, agreed—and nothing now nothing stood in the way of a final reckoning with the Steel Wolves for the injuries done to Northwind.

  Nothing except Ezekiel Crow.

  Anastasia Kerensky had found Tara’s anger at the traitor’s challenge a matter for amusement. She had laughed—and, laughing, had declined to fight anyone at all until one or the other was dead.

  That was one more thing, Tara thought, to add to her quarrel with the leader of the Steel Wolves. The struggle for the future of The Republic was going to have to wait, purely because Anastasia had thought it would be funny to watch the Countess of Northwind in a duel to the death with Ezekiel Crow.

  I didn’t want to have to kill him, she thought. Scratch that—I do want to kill him. Something very good was starting up between us, and that son-of-a-bitch threw it all away two decades before we ever met. But I know better than to think that killing him is a good thing—and I resent like hell having him and Kerensky box me into doing it anyway.

  She put the anger and resentment out of her mind as best she could, and concentrated on the task at hand: the necessity, since it could not be helped, of defeating and killing Ezekiel Crow.

  Crow, in his faster, lighter Blade.

  His heat efficiency was as good as hers. His weapons were almost the same as hers. He lacked the crushing, slashing hatchet that made her ’Mech devastating in hand-to-hand and close-quarters fighting, and that had allowed her to cut through the Steel Wolves’ lines during the defense of Northwind’s capital city. He’d have to be a fool to get within half a kilometer of her.

  He wouldn’t have to. He’d just run in, fire, and run away. Again and again, until he’d hit—or created—a vulnerable point on her ’Mech. He could keep dancing around her all day—until her heat built up, her weapons broke down, and she would be left crippled on the field. Then he would be the hero of The Republic after he took on Anastasia Kerensky. The news media had a short memory, and present victory would wipe out past disgrace.

  Or maybe Crow would have been too weakened by the single combat to lead an army effectively—especially an army he’d betrayed and abandoned to the same enemy once before—and Anastasia would triumph.

  I could be handing Terra over to the Steel Wolves right now.

  She stopped herself. It didn’t pay to think that way, not so close to combat, with everything already fixed and decided. Later, if she lived, she would have plenty of time to think about how she could have done things better.

  Her aide-de-camp, Captain Bishop, was waiting by the foot of the Countess’s Hatchetman’Mech. It would be warm inside the Hatchetman, and would get warmer as the day progressed. Tara removed her quilted jacket and warm-up pants, stripping down to the shorts and T-shirt she wore underneath. Goosebumps sprang up on her arms and legs as the chilly air hit her bare skin.

  Captain Bishop took the discarded garments from Tara and folded them over her arm. “Nice day for a ’Mech fight,” she said. “I’ll stand by in my Pack Hunter in case anything goes wrong.”

  “Just stay with the troops,” Tara said. “They’ll want to see you.”

  “You’ve got it,” Bishop said. “Take care of that bastard Crow, and they’ll chase the Steel Wolves from here to Tigress for you if you let them.”

  “Pushing them back to their DropShips and away from Terra will be enough for one day. But Crow has to come first.”

  Tara climbed the access ladder into the cockpit of her ’Mech. Once inside, she put on and connected the neurohelmet that allowed her to inter
face with and control the ’Mech, and the cooling vest that kept her from succumbing to the debilitating heat of the cockpit’s interior during a battle. With her mind still mostly on the twin problems of Anastasia Kerensky and Ezekiel Crow, she ran through the Hatchetman’s primary and secondary security sequences, and brought the ’Mech’s power plant to life.

  “Testing, command circuit,” she said over the cockpit’s internal comms. “One, two, three, three, two, one. How copy, over.”

  “Copy all, test sat,” Bishop said over the earphones. “I’m mounting up now.”

  “Keep your honor, that’s all I ask.”

  “That’s all I’ve ever tried to do, ma’am,” Bishop said. “And you try to keep your head. We’re going to need you later.”

  Tara Campbell set the Hatchetman into motion, walking it out of the camp, heading west. She felt the earth tremble under the Hatchetman’s feet with every step she took. The quickly thawing ice crystals in the previously frozen earth left voids in the soil where water gathered, and the ground she walked over had the consistency of thick chocolate pudding.

  Up ahead of her, Ezekiel Crow was waiting.

  33

  Countryside Near Belgorod

  Terra

  Prefecture X

  April 3134; local spring

  Tara Campbell saw the Blade’s heat signature on infrared before the opticals picked it out. Not long after, it came into visual range: a long-legged silhouette, for a ’Mech, and short in the torso, with the distinctive multiple weapons array of rotary autocannon, medium laser, and short-range laser in its right arm. Not the most hard-hitting of BattleMechs, but fast, and—with a clever MechWarrior at the controls—capable of devastating feats of fire and maneuver. She keyed on the all-frequency broadcast.