by Unknown
“Happily ever after . . . at least until my mother died. Then my father went back to military service, and after that we lived here, there, and everywhere.” She paused a moment to pick up the loose papers on the table and stack them neatly. “Where did you grow up?”
“Liao.”
She looked at him, reminded again that he was older than he appeared. “Oh. Were you there during—”
His expression, always reserved, closed off even more. “During the Massacre? Yes.”
She felt a surge of embarrassment at her own verbal clumsiness. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring up painful memories.”
Everybody in The Republic of the Sphere knew the story, after all: how agents of the Capellan Confederation fomented unrest on Liao, making it into a perpetual thorn in the side for The Republic of the Sphere; how a traitor working at Liao’s DropPort had allowed an unauthorized CapCon ship to land; how the streets of Chang-an had run red with blood before the CapCons were done with Liao and The Republic of the Sphere was done with them.
“It’s all right,” he said. “It happened a long time ago. It’s just painful still, sometimes. Both my parents died in the city fighting, during the early days.”
“You were close to your parents?”
“Not close enough, as it turned out,” he said. “I couldn’t get home in time to save them.”
“I can’t imagine. . . .” On impulse, she laid her hand lightly on his arm for a moment before taking it away, and felt his muscles go tense under even that briefest of touches. “My parents are gone, too. Nothing as bad as—as what happened on Liao. But I still miss them.”
The moment was interrupted by a rumbling in the air and a rattling of the glass in the windows. A shadow passed across the clipped green lawn outside.
Ezekiel Crow froze, listening, then relaxed. “VTOL craft going over.”
“Coming down, more likely,” she said. “We’re not on any regular flight paths, and—unfortunately for our continued lack of interruptions—Headquarters knows that I’m here.”
“I don’t hear it landing.”
“There are a couple of densely wooded hills between here and the VTOL pad and that cuts down on the noise pollution and preserves the view.” She pressed the housekeeper’s call button set into the wall by the door. “Mrs. Danvers? Put some tea and some hearty sandwiches on hot standby. I think we’re going to have visitors.”
Their visitor, a quarter-hour later, turned out to be Colonel Michael Griffin. By the time the Colonel arrived in the solar, all evidence of the earlier working lunch had been cleared away and replaced by a porcelain tea service and a platter of sliced bread, meat, and cheese. Griffin filled his plate with the polite concentration of a man who had already missed lunch and was anticipating missing dinner.
“What brings you here in such haste, Colonel?” Tara asked.
“Strategic consultation,” he said. “That’s something best done face-to-face. There’s no telling who’s keeping an ear on electronic transmissions these days.”
Ezekiel Crow looked at him darkly. “Are you suggesting to the Countess that there might be traitors on Northwind?”
Colonel Griffin paused and gave Crow a level glance over the top edge of his tea cup. “I work in intelligence, my lord. Assuming traitors is part of my job.”
Tara, listening, suppressed a sigh. The two of them were doing it again, bristling up at each other like dogs; she wondered if they even realized she noticed.
As if I didn’t have enough work to do, she thought, without the two people I most depend on pushing and sniping at each other every time they’re together in the same room. That was one of the reasons I brought Crow to Castle Northwind to work in the first place, to get him out of Griffin’s way.
Oil on troubled waters time, Tara, she told herself. It’s all part of the job.
“It doesn’t even need a traitor to mess things up,” she said. “Just somebody on-planet with different loyalties or a different agenda. And even with the HPG network down, we still get enough travelers for there to be plenty of those.”
Griffin looked somewhat mollified. “It keeps me busy, I can tell you.” He sipped at his tea. “Today’s a case in point.”
“How’s that?” she asked.
“We’ve got a DropShip in at the port, and it’s brought along the usual pile of mail and news-discs.” The Colonel opened the leather valise he’d brought with him and took out a disc. “Including this one from General Davies on Quentin. Is there a player in here?”
Tara nodded at the polished wood tri-vee cabinet set against the far wall next to the call button. “In there.”
Griffin opened the cabinet and put the disc into the player. The tri-vee filled with images of Quentin, fading into and replacing one another—the DropShip landing field; a ship descending, the image cut off suddenly in a blaze of light; a Tundra Wolf BattleMech, seen in jerky, narrow-field motion from inside a fast-moving vehicle; armored infantry, firing Gauss rifles at something outside of the image. Ship and ’Mech and infantry armor all bore Steel Wolf insignia.
The images continued, now with a voiceover running along with them.
“General Gwyn Davies, Commander of the Highlander forces on Quentin, speaking. Two weeks ago, Quentin came under attack by elements of the Steel Wolf faction under the command of Star Colonel Ulan.
Their apparent target was the industrial district in Port Frome, since factories there produce the necessary elements for conversion of Agricultural and ForestryMechs into battleworthy configurations. It is my pleasure at this time to report that the Wolves were repulsed after sharp fighting; the rest of this disc contains full intelligence summaries and battle data on the conflict.”
The end of the brief speech coincided with the cube display’s final image: Steel Wolf DropShips rising from the landing field, and fadeout. The image loop started to repeat, Colonel Griffin hit the stop button, and Crow and Tara and Griffin looked at one another.
“Well,” said Tara, after a long silence. “We’ve been wondering for months exactly who we were going to have to fight. I think that now we know.”
21
Castle Northwind
Northwind
April, 3133; local spring
Several hours after Colonel Michael Griffin had departed from Castle Northwind, Tara Campbell and Ezekiel Crow remained at work in the solar chamber, burning the midnight oil—or at least, the midnight electrons. Clouds had darkened the skies over the castle as the afternoon drew on toward sunset, and nightfall brought with it a fast-moving spring storm. Thunder rumbled outside the windows, and strong gusts of wind dashed heavy raindrops against the leaded-glass panes. Flashes of lightning illuminated the dark, lowering clouds and the wind-tossed trees on the mountain slopes beneath.
Tara waved a hand at the weather outside. “I used to love watching bad weather from this room when I was a little girl.”
Another flash of lightning lit up the turbulent waters of the lake below the castle.
“It’s certainly dramatic,” Ezekiel Crow acknowledged.
“I always liked how solid the castle felt, no matter what was going on outside.” She laughed. “Then I got older, and found out that the weather we have around here is nothing. Down by Tara—the city, I mean; do you have any idea how annoyed I still am at my parents, sometimes?—the summer storms can tear down buildings.”
“Not good weather to fight in, to be sure.”
She sighed, and turned back to the papers and display pads on the table. “I know. But unless Radick and the Steel Wolves exercise a lot more patience than intelligence reports give them credit for, we’re probably going to have to.”
Ezekiel Crow picked up a data pad with the latest manpower reports. “At least the on-planet elements of the Regiments are coming up to full strength. That was a good thought, to start the recruitment drives.”
“Thanks.” She could feel herself blushing, and turned her head away to hide it—that was the curse of a fair s
kin, that every passing change of color showed up like neon. “When Katana Tormark left, I was afraid I was going to drop the ball completely, because I knew how unprepared I was for this job. All I could do was keep my chin up and hope that nobody else noticed how scared I was.”
Ezekiel Crow gave her a curious look. “It never occurred to you to decline the promotion?”
“If I’d thought that there was anybody else available with the right combination of family and training—then, trust me, I would have turned this job down in a heartbeat. But there wasn’t.”
“So it was a matter of doing your duty to The Republic?”
“Something like that, yes,” she said. “I know it sounds sentimental, but—”
“There’s nothing wrong with feeling a sentimental attachment to one’s home. But it’s unusual to find someone thinking about The Republic of the Sphere in that fashion.”
“It shouldn’t be unusual, though,” she said. “Making it not be unusual was what Devlin Stone was trying to do in the first place. Encouraging immigration, breaking up the factions—”
“Which didn’t work, unfortunately.” Crow looked grim now. “Duchess Tormark is an excellent example.”
Tara felt the sudden surge of an old anger. “If Duchess Tormark had kept faith with The Republic like she ought to have done, then the Dragon’s Fury would still be just a bunch of disaffected misfits instead of a serious military threat.”
“One could say the same thing of Galaxy Commander Kal Radick. Who is, face it, a much more immediate threat than the Dragon’s Fury.”
“I suppose so.” Tara exhaled and drew a calming breath. “But I never expected anything better of Radick or the Clans. They’re not assimilated, no matter how much they pretend to be. Katana, though . . . we had the same training, we swore the same oaths . . . and she threw it away, she made it all into nothing .”
“A betrayal.”
“Yes.”
Crow gazed out at the darkness beyond the rain-slashed windows, his expression distant and thoughtful.
“It’s always possible that she sees things differently.”
“So that’s all treason is—a case of different people seeing things differently?”
“That’s one way to look at it.”
The anger she felt at Katana Tormark’s defection was still with her, making her voice sharper than she intended. “I suppose it was someone ‘seeing things differently’ who let the CapCons put down that DropShip on Liao.”
He went very still, almost as if she’d slapped him, and spoke carefully and distantly. “Nobody knows why it was done.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to—”
“The betrayer of Liao was never found. So many people died—he would have been just one more body, buried in a common grave like all the others.”
She swallowed, feeling sick. “Your parents, too?”
“Yes.”
“I am sorry.”
He drew a deep breath and visibly put the memories behind him. “It was a long time ago. But I haven’t forgotten. It’s one of the reasons I chose the career that I did, and why I worked so hard to reach the place where I am now. I don’t want anything like that to ever happen again.”
22
Tyson and Varney ’Mech Factory
Fairfield, Northwind
May, 3133; local spring
Tyson and Varney, Limited, had built most of the Mining- and ConstructionMechs currently in use on Northwind, and held the contracts for most of the unbuilt ones. Since the winter of 3132, Tyson and Varney had also held the Northwind Highlanders’ contract for retrofitting work ’Mechs to combat models.
Today Colonel Michael Griffin had come to Fairfield in order to pay an official visit on Tyson and Varney’s main plant. Griffin, who had made no secret of the fact that he was there to check on the company’s progress, was escorted around the factory by the senior plant manager, a stocky, thick-mustached individual named Evans.
The plant was a series of immense assembly hangars, each subdivided into three or four bays. Each bay held a ’Mech in progress, worked on by teams of a dozen or more men and women under the glare of sodium vapor lights. Hoarse voices shouted back and forth, metal clanged and crashed and groaned against metal, and the ’Mech bays were full of the hiss and spark of welding torches and the smell of ozone.
The workers in their safety goggles and heavy protective earmuffs looked like strange, bulbous-headed insects crawling over the giant anthropomorphic shapes of the ’Mechs. Colonel Griffin, encountering the noise and the dazzle of the ’Mech bays for the first time, felt grateful for the pair of yellow foam plugs that Evans had insisted he put into his ears before entering the hangar.
The manager waved an arm in the direction of the ’Mechs in the first three bays.
“These are the farthest along,” he said, shouting to make himself heard over the din. “They’re out-of-the-box models, no custom mods, so retrofitting them to your specs doesn’t mean ripping anything else out first.”
Griffin followed the manager’s gesture and looked at the nearest ’Mech. He wished he knew enough about design and engineering to estimate the workers’ rate of progress. “How soon until these are finished?”
“This lot? About a month. The ForestryMechs in the next bays over, maybe a week after that.”
Griffin suppressed his sinking feeling with difficulty. “No faster?”
“We’re not just stamping out stuff with cookie cutters here,” Evans said, scowling. “There’s a lot more one-of-a-kind handiwork goes into making these babies than most people think, and retrofitting them into units that can fight is a lot trickier than it looks.”
“I’m sure it is,” Griffin said hastily. “How about the new construction?”
“I won’t lie to you. It’s going a lot slower than we’d like.”
“The Prefect isn’t going to be very happy about that.”
“The Prefect will just have to live with it,” the manager said. “It turns out that designing a reconfigured IndustrialMech or ForestryMech from the ground up is only a couple of notches short of designing a full-scale BattleMech, and that’s a tough job. Not that Tyson and Varney couldn’t handle it, if you gave us all the right materials.”
“I’m certain you could,” said Griffin. “But what you’re telling me right now is that the new construction isn’t going to be coming on-line any time in the immediate future.”
“I don’t like being the bearer of bad news . . . but yeah, that’s about it. We can slap the design engineers around a bit, remind them they’re not supposed to be inventing the next generation in BattleMech technology here, but it’s still not going to change any of the basic problems.”
For a moment, Griffin considered ordering the shutdown of the redesign project. His mandate from Tara Campbell extended as far as that, he thought, even if his nominal authority didn’t; and if he stated for the record that he thought the ’Mech redesign program was a failure and ought to be closed down, the Countess would probably back his decision.
Griffin remained in silent thought long enough to notice the manager sweating. Finally he said, “Keep that part of the project going anyway. It may not be of much help to us in the short term, but in the long term . . .
in the long term, Mr. Evans, I’m very much afraid that things are going to be different. And your design engineers may yet get their wish.”
“I’ll tell them what you said,” the manager told him, and Griffin could see the man’s relief, somewhat tempered by his understanding of what Griffin had implied for the future. “Right now, I believe that if we reallocate resources and manpower and go to round-the-clock shifts, we can have the first retrofitted units ready to roll in three weeks or a bit less.”
“That would be good,” Griffin said. “I’ll make certain that the Prefect has your estimate.”
The manager gave him a gloomy look. “Which had better be binding, I suppose.”
Griffin smiled. “You sa
id it, Mr. Evans. I didn’t.”
23
The New Barracks
Tara, Northwind
June, 3133; local summer
Tara Campbell was asleep in the Prefect’s quarters in the New Barracks when the wall speaker buzzed.
She came fully awake in an instant when a voice began speaking immediately without waiting for an acknowledgment—an override at this hour never meant good news.
“Prefect Campbell, please come to the Combat Information Center.”
Another buzz from the speaker, and the voice repeated, “Prefect Campbell, please come to the Combat Information Center.”
Tara was already out of bed and scrambling for her clothes. “On my way.”
She dressed in haste: plain working uniform, first item in the closet and the easiest to grab; enough underwear to be decent; hair finger combed and cleared back from her face with a stretch knit band. She was halfway to the Fort and the CIC before she realized that she was wearing not regulation shoes and socks, but her favorite pair of ancient bedroom slippers.
The hell with it, she thought. Northwind could survive the knowledge that its Countess wore fleece-lined tartan moccasins.
She wouldn’t be the only person who’d gotten an unexpected wake-up call, either. The courtyards and corridors of the Fort were full of people in uniform heading places with purposeful speed. Alarms clamored in the halls and stairwells as she made her way down to the bombproof chamber in the depths of the Fort that housed the Combat Information Center for Northwind’s local defense forces.
When she reached her destination, Colonel Michael Griffin, whose quarters were closer to CIC than hers, was already there, pacing back and forth amid the uniformed specialists who monitored the display screens on CIC’s array of communications and data consoles. Ezekiel Crow had VIP housing in a distant wing of the Fort complex; he arrived at a run forty-five seconds after Tara. The Paladin’s normally flawless uniform tunic and trousers looked tired and wrinkled. Tara could only guess that the nearest complete set to hand when the summons came had been the ones he’d taken off the evening before.