Flight of the Falcon (battletech - mechwarrior - dark age 10)

by Victor Milan Неизвестный Автор

  “I have important business with the Countess,” he said apologetically.

  Tara Bishop started to go into attack mode. Despite herself Tara was intrigued. “At ease, TB,” she said lightly. “He’s gotten this far, so he’s either resourceful or determined. What is your business, exactly, Mr.... ?”

  “Laveau. Paul Laveau” He blinked and grinned a little wider. “I’m a spy.”

  Both women stared. Tara Bishop’s left hand began to stray behind her back—toward the hideout laser pistol riding beneath her battle-dress blouse, behind her left hip.

  The intruder laughed. “I hope I didn’t alarm you.” He raised his left hand from his side, deliberately, just slowly enough so the women—and his attention seemed for the moment centered upon the

  captain—could see his hand was cupped, not holding a weapon.

  He revealed in his palm a badge displaying the seal of The Republic of the Sphere and his likeness. “I’m on your side.”

  Captain Bishop stepped forward to peer at the badge. “ ‘Systems and resource auditor,” ’ she read, raising her head to study him with new scrutiny. “ ‘Office of theExarch ’?”

  “Real spies aren’t usually very glamorous,” he admitted. “I’m what you might call a forensic accountant.” “You’ve come to check ourbooks ?” Tara Campbell demanded.

  “In the midst of a Clan invasion?” asked Tara B. She took the badge holder from him, studied it, then unceremoniously tossed it to Tara Campbell, who fielded it as if the move was the most natural thing in the world and peered at it herself, brow furrowing so that her snub nose tipped up slightly.

  Paul Laveau grinned again. It seemed a natural expression for him. Not precisely what she would expect of an accountant, even one who appeared to include a cloak and maybe even a dagger among the tools of his trade.

  “What better time to ensure that The Republic of the Sphere’s resources are being properly employed, Countess? Don’t worry; you are not the object of my investigation.”

  “Who is?” Tara Bishop asked with characteristic bluntness.

  The Asian eyes appraised her calmly. “Captain Bishop—I hope I’ve not made a terrific gaffe and got your name wrong?”

  “I’m Captain Tara Bishop.”

  He nodded. “Captain Bishop, that information is confidential and need-to-know—apologies for the security mumbo-jumbo.

  “However^—he looked at Tara Campbell—“Ican tell you that my mission concerns events that preceded our learning about the Falcon war fleet, as well as your presence on Skye. Not much real mystery there.”

  “I see,” Tara Campbell said. She did:Jasek’s defection with the heart and spine of the Republican Skye Militia.

  Without preamble she flipped the badge holder at him. He fumbled it, dropped it, picked it up grinning apologetically. TB’s stern face cracked in a smile.

  But she wasn’t ready to let go. “Look, Mr. Systems and Resource Auditor Laveau—”

  “Paul, please. Or if you must, Mr. Laveau. The rest is too awful to say aloud.”

  “Paul. All respect, but aren’t you a little light in the pay grade for a job this big?”

  Paul shrugged. “Of course you’re right, Captain,” he said. “An investigation of such magnitude would normally be handled by a Knight of the Sphere. But as I’m sure you already suspect, The Republic has a

  good many more emergencies on its hands right now than it has Knights to attend them. I was what was available; the next planet to tumble into crisis is liable to get a stockroom clerk.”

  “What exactly is the nature of your business with the Countess?” Tara Bishop demanded. “I have a need to knowthat, I think you’ll concede.”

  “Your manner suggests I damned well better, Captain,” he said. “Good for you. A person needs loyal friends, as a public person requires zealous assistants. The answer: simply, I have come to ask a favor of your boss.”

  “A favor?” Tara Bishop echoed.

  “Ask,” said Tara Campbell. “I’ve got to warn you, Exarch’s combat accountant or not, there’s not much I can spare you.”

  “Your kind cooperation is all I need. I am unfamiliar with Skye. For that matter, I don’t know anything truly about you: I am not so encumbered with a bureaucrat’s soul as to believe a dossier can tell me anything truly vital about anything so complex as a world—much less a person.”

  Tara Bishop whistled admiringly. “The Republic diplomatic corps took a major hit when you opted for chartered accountancy, Mr. Laveau. You could preach pacifism on Sudeten with a delivery like that.”

  Laveau laughed delightedly. “You truly think so? My great-grandmother always tells me I’m too glib for my own good. I am most appreciative, Captain Tara Bishop, although I think you do me too much credit. The truth is, a field accountant needs quite an array of talents, many of them unlooked for.”

  “Since you’ve done your homework you know I’m a bit preoccupied here,” Tara said. “But I can spare you a little time, I suppose. Your work’s important to The Republic too.”

  “Far from the same level as yours, Countess. Still—might I take up a fraction more of your time now, please?”

  Tara sighed, considered. “Why not? Shall we sit down?”

  “Why not ride?” he asked.

  “Ride?”

  He nodded enthusiastically. “There are excellent riding stables not far from this gloomy pile, with most appealing bridle paths through the woods. If the brochures are to be trusted, of course, although the evidence of my eyes tends to bear them out. You do ride, Countess, and well, as you do everything you turn your hand to; I trust the mass media that far at least.”

  She shook her head. The short pelt of platinum hair, not currently spiked, shifted as to a breeze. “I don’t know—”

  All this time Tara Bishop had been studying Paul Laveau with a penetrating eye.

  “She accepts,” she said abruptly.

  “But—” Tara started.

  “Go.” Her aide made shooing motions.

  “My duty—”

  Tara Bishop snorted. “Yourduty is to take better damnedcare of yourself! There’s only so much you can do, you need to rely more on your staff, and you won’t do anyone a bloodybit of good if you’ve fatigued yourself into a coma or psychosis when the Falcons finally blow into town. The best thing you can do for Skye right now is get some fresh air, exercise, and then about fourteen hours’ sleepMa’am.”

  She braced to attention and fixed her eyes above the top of the break room door. “You can now bust me back to private and assign me to waste-burning detail in perpetuity for rank insubordination, Countess Campbell, ma’am.”

  Tara was shaking her head. Laughing. But tears glittered in her eyes.

  “I had no idea you felt so strongly, Tara,” she said. “I hardly know how to respond.”

  Paul Laveau cleared his throat discreetly. “Might I be allowed to suggest: with humble pride at inspiring such devotion in a warrior the caliber of our Captain Bishop? And also, by accepting my invitation, of course.”

  And he turned his side to her and offered his crooked elbow.

  To her entire amazement, Tara Campbell slipped her arm through his, and allowed him to squire her out the door.

  19

  Chaffee

  Lyran Commonwealth The Republic of the Sphere

  1 July 3134

  With the shortest distance to travel and only one combat objective before the climactic confrontation on Skye, Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus and his Turkina Keshik spent several weeks solidifying the Clan’s grip on Chaffee before advancing to their intermediate destination, Glengarry.

  It was a grindingly frustrating time for Bec Malthus. Malvina Hazen’s destruction of the city of Hamilton had put an end to organized resistance to Clan occupation on the planet. Yet the majority of the planet’s widely scattered citizenry continued simply to ignore the Jade Falcon writ—as, the invaders’ collaborators reluctantly revealed, it had ignored the indigenous government. The
settlers were far too dispersed to be rounded up by the few Falcons Malthus had at his disposal. Raids by VTOL-borne commandos tended to turn up empty homesteads. But they did lose troops, to snipers and booby traps.

  Malthus responded by rounding up more civilians in the cities and executing them publicly in retribution. But the hinterlanders, it developed, were none too fond of city folk. The net result was increased unrest, uncooperation and sabotage in the cities themselves.

  Meanwhile, the fractious minded discovered that while direct attacks on Clanners or Clan assets brought immediate smashing vengeance—no matter how seldom it managed to land on actual perpetrators—native collaborators, including the civilian police and military, bound by the surrender terms to serve the Falcons, offered far more available targets. Neither Malthus nor his subcommanders was going to burn scarce Expedition resources because some local cop with a hastily manufactured cloth falcon-and-katana brassard wrapped around his arm got his brains splashed on some alley wall, or a bush ranger or ten got smoked in a back-country ambush.

  Attempts to set up native-run centers in the back country for Chaffeeans to turn in their now-proscribed personal arms produced nearly one hundred percent casualties among the staff sent to run them inside three days. When indigenous rank-and-file enforcers simply refused to accept the duty, Malthus had to back down—unless he wanted to try policing the whole planet with the handful of Solahma retreads he could afford to leave behind as occupiers. Forcing the quisling commander of planetary police to actually announce the climbdown, and then sending her to the wall, made Malthus feel somewhat better, but produced no discernible improvement in either civilian compliance or law-enforcement morale.

  Nor would any conceivable hostage-and-retribution scheme render Chaffee’s indigenous wildlife any more submissive. Creatures prowled forest and shore that could peel an Elemental power-armor suit like a can of processed meat product—and treat the occupant accordingly.

  In sum, everything on Chaffee hated the Falcons.

  It was with undiluted, if not exactly public, relief that Malthus lifted his DropShips from the surface per the invasion schedule, leaving a Solahma garrison under the command of adezgra Star Colonel with a handful of vehicles, mostly loot of Porrima, to keep the peace and introduce Chaffee to the enlightened Clan way of life.

  Malthus was intrigued by the Mongol doctrines espoused, and put into horrific effect upon Chaffee, by the wild, mercurial Malvina Hazen. Even though he understood, as even her sibkin—whose intelligence and acumen Malthus had never made the mistake of underestimating—failed to, that at the root of her unorthodox methods lay blackest heresy.

  Despite Malvina Hazen’s far-from-secret stance as focal point of the Mongol movement, just a few words from Malthus—words already chosen—would still see her broken from Galaxy Commander and condemned by a Trial of Abjuration. Or worse, no matter her accomplishments. Which made him well pleased with his subordinate and protege.

  For Beckett Malthus loved none so well as those with strings for him to hold. Even if they themselves did not know they had them.

  20

  Sanglamore Military Academy

  New London Skye

  2 July 3134

  Rotating a finger’s breadth above the table in the darkened briefing room, the holovid bust seemed fully as substantial as meat and cloth and hair: a broad head with long reddish hair sweeping back from a widow’s peak almost to the collar of a black and green tunic. Russet beard fringed a broad jaw; the long upper lip was shaved clean. The eyes were sleepy looking slits in which murky green could be glimpsed, like concealed pools. The nose was broad. Something about the image radiated a sense of the certitude of power.

  “Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus, now Supreme Commander of the Jade Falcon expeditionary force,” the woman said. She was tall and rangy, with a knife scar down the right side of her long, unhandsome face, slanted blue eyes flanking an oft-broken nose. Her graying blond hair was shaved to a scalp lock. In the dimness, the badges on her spacer’s jumpsuit, of a senior member of the merchant caste on one side and of Clan Sea Fox on the other, were vague circular blurs.

  Tara Campbell’s eyes kept straying from the holographic image of the Jade Falcon commander to the actual Clanswoman. Her emotions were a roil.

  “How is it you come to know all this, Master Merchant Senna?” asked Planetary Legate Eckard. The very emotional desiccation of his words robbed them of any taste of challenge.

  “We trade in the Jade Falcon OZ,” the woman said bluntly. “We don’t like them; they don’t like us.” Like many Sea Fox merchants, she showed no compunction about using contractions. Yet Tara was chillingly aware that she wasalien, poured from a bottle in lieu of birth like the most fanatically mystic Nova Cat or rabid Wolf.

  And while her manner was one of rough camaraderie, the Countess also knew that could be no more than a trade-convenient pose: she dare not assume that this woman or any Clanner’s agenda was the same as hers, far less The Republic’s. Yet one thing she did rely upon: Clan Sea Fox hated the Falcons—trade rivals as well as blood enemies—as bitterly as she herself detested Anastasia Kerensky and her Steel Wolves.

  One side of the Clanswoman’s mouth quirked up. “But they can’t afford tonot trade with us, any more than we can afford to not trade with them. You know how it goes: everybody trades with everybody. Or did until the HPG went out.”

  She shrugged wide shoulders. “Sense tells us we should trade now more than ever, all of us, since JumpShips are the only thing now that pass between most stars any faster than light. But leave that. The point is, we don’t have to love the Falcons to trade with them, nor the other way ’round. And even among Clanners,trade meanstalk ”

  “What ought we know about this Malthus, Master Merchant?” It was easy for Tara to keep her voice genial: all it took was a lifetime’s schooling and practice in the rigors of diplomacy, and the exercise of a will which enabled a tiny slip of feminine body to make itself an interstellar unarmed-combat champion. Not much at all.

  Those strange slanted eyes appraised her for a long moment before the Clanswoman spoke. “He’s a

  snake. A conniver and contriver.”

  “They have those in the Jade Falcons?” asked Colonel Robert Ballantrae with both surprise and a sneer. “Outside the merchant caste, of course.”

  “Go easy, Robert,” Tara murmured.

  The knife-damaged face showed no reaction. It struck Tara that this woman was probably little less skilled at her own brand of diplomacy than Tara herself. She tried to imagine what that would cost a Clanswoman bred. Even among the Sea Foxes, who honored merchants scarcely less than warriors—if indeed, they recognized such a distinction.

  Outside experts, self-proclaimed, debated that latter point. Although they were the most ubiquitous of the true Clanners—the wild true breed, not Republicans of Clan descent—in the Inner Sphere, the Foxes were in many ways the least known. Where most Clans were notable for their braggadocio, they were extremely private, holding their daily lives and culture as closely as their treasure.

  “They have connivers everywhere—even in the Spheroid military,” Master Merchant Senna said. Tara Campbell braced herself to hear her say,even among the Paladins of The Republic . The media had trumpeted her own disgrace by traitor Paladin Ezekiel Crow throughout The Republic; there was no way a Sea Fox more than a jump inside a Prefecture, as Skye was, could fail to know of it. Nor was it egotism that assured Tara Campbell this woman knew everything about her which was publicly known, and probably a good deal besides. Sea Fox merchants undertook their caste calling with the same zeal with which other Clans’ warriors attacked theirs, but with considerably more foresight and preparation.

  “The key to Beckett Malthus, and the threat that you face, is that Malthus is brilliant, versatile and entirely sociopathic, by Clan or normal human standards.”

  Tara looked around at her companions: her aide Tara Bishop at her side, Colonel Ballantrae nearby, Legate Eckard and P
refect Della Brown, each also with an aide. Duke Gregory took the Sea Fox woman and her intelligence seriously, even if he had declined to attend in person.

  “He is old for a Clan warrior,” the woman said, “in his fifties—he was born in 3081, the year Devlin Stone proclaimed The Republic. His right arm has been prosthetic since he won his Bloodname: he’s always disdained regeneration. He remains a formidable MechWarrior.”

  She chuckled. “Which isnot why he is the most feared being in Clan Jade Falcon, not excepting Khan Jana Pryde.”

  She paused and sipped from a mug. It was coffee poured by a Sanglamore cadet pressed into service as an aide; she had fortified it with a shot of something from a silver flask of her own which, by a waft of scent, Tara judged to be brandy.

  “He has fought few Trials in his time,” she said, leaning a forearm on the table. “You see, a very long time ago, not long after he won the Malthus Bloodname, a prominent Mech Warrior set about destroying him. He did not immediately call Malthus out, but preferred to belittle him, hoping to provoke the one-armed young warrior to challenge him.

  “Instead, through a series of events no one could quite piece together after the fact—and after the fact, perhaps, no one particularly wanted to—Malthus’ rival found himself subjected to a Trial of Annihilation. He was killed, and his whole genotype purged.”

  Tara glanced at her aide. Tara Bishop was nodding. Clan warriors, especially those of proud Jade Falcon, feared little, least of all death. But such were Bec Malthus’ gifts that he found something theydid fear.

  “Now a Trial of Annihilation is far too potent a weapon for frequent use, although that first luckless warrior isn’t Beckett Malthus’ only rival to suffer it. His enemies, let us say, have a way of ending up dezgra —disgraced. Make no mistake, he’s capable of fighting when he has to—and winning. It’s just been quite a spell since hehad to.”

  “Intrigue doesn’t come naturally to Clanners,” Prefect Brown said musingly.

  “Nicholas Kerensky tried to breed it out of his bottle babies,” Tara Bishop said. “So now that the Falcons have a master manipulator among their warrior caste, nobody can deal with him. I guess that’s what you call the law of unintended consequences.”