by Victor Milán
Jade Falcon Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen and her warriors are encamped on the planet Skye in their Occupation Zone, overseeing the consolidation of power on the worlds they've wrested from The Republic. When a ship appears at Skye's jump point and its commander declares a Trial of Possession for the wartime doctrine he claims Malvina stole from Clan Hell's Horses, Malvina sees her vision unfolding: she agrees to single BattleMech combat.
Malvina emerges from the fray victorious—and inspired to ride her growing reputation into Clan Jade Falcon's halls of power. But her bold actions may herald the beginning of a civil war that could unmake not simply her own Clan, but the entire Clan way of life.
A RENDING OF FALCONS
A bold and dashing Jade Falcon MechWarrior might have jumped straight up at the Catapult, to negate its tremendous range advantage by coming to grips. At close range the Black Hawk’s Streak missiles and hands would give it all the edge over the armless support BattleMech, heavier though it was. But a bold ’Mech jock would also have been painted against the sky by the Catapult’s FCS and blasted off its jump jet drive columns to crash to ruin in the boulder-lined streambed below.
Instead, Jorgensen took a short, fast, flat-trajectory jump straight across to the opposite slope. He hit the ground running. The ridge’s mass now masked him from the Lyran’s potent long-range battery.
The Black Hawk rocked as a heavy short-range missile fired from a man-portable launcher slammed against his right torso, just forward of the ’Mech’s massive coaxially mounted shoulder and hip joints. Red lights flashed on his heads-up display: his right-side laser’s primary control circuit was gone. He ignored both the shot—that was what redundancy was for, and a green light told him a secondary circuit had kicked in—and the grounded infantryman who launched it. With his battle-hardened elementals to back them, he trusted even the green solahma foot soldiers’ fire-and-moving-forward to police up stranded enemy infantry.
In his three-sixty viewstrip he saw one of his battle-suited giants flipped over in midair by a burst from the Catapult’s twenty-millimeter gun. It dropped straight down into the trickle of stream. As he charged upslope with what in any ’Mech-driver less supremely proficient would be mad recklessness, Jorgensen registered from his eye’s corner that elemental Dot’s tag now flashed yellow. She was no doubt out of the fight, thoroughly stunned and probably sporting broken bones, but telemetry showed she still lived. A good thing, for I can spare no front-line warriors . . .
A RENDING OF FALCONS
A BATTLETECH NOVEL
Victor Milán
ROC
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For Mike and Denise Wernig,
for keeping the faith.
Prologue
The Falcon’s Reach
Portmeirion, Skye
Jade Falcon Occupation Zone
3 August 3135
‘‘No!’’ the little girl in the rubble cried, clinging fiercely to the arm of her teddy bear. It had soft, curly brown hair, button eyes and a nose of yielding tan synthetic.
The solahma infantryman was a tall, hard man in green-and-black Jade Falcon battledress. He carried an assault rifle. His web belt and harness were hung with grenades like metal and plastic fruit. His blue eyes showed no mercy, nor did they react to the blue smoke and dust that hung in the air like pepper gas. He had washed out as a youth in his Trial of Position and would never be a MechWarrior. Combined with the normal Clan contempt for Spheroids and their soft ways, a lifetime of bitter disappointment that he would never be a true Falcon warrior left him no sympathy for the child. These soft, crawling grubbers of the Inner Sphere had no sense of discipline. They must harden or die.
It was the Kerensky way.
He backhanded her almost casually. She dropped the arm of her soft toy and somersaulted backward to sit cowering and weeping and holding her face in what had been the corner of the family room of her suburban home. It was now the joining of two stubs of wall, foamed concrete broken off to no higher than a handspan over her head if she stood upright.
The house had been shattered by a volley of short-range missiles fired from a Gyrfalcon. Several off-duty members of the Falcon garrison had been attacked in the small town on the rainy, heavily forested southwestern coast of New Scotland two nights earlier. One mixed Star of medium and light BattleMechs and another of mechanized infantry in combat cars had come through the neighborhood and flattened everything as part of a routine reprisal against Portmeirion. The girl and her bear had been playing in the backyard when the attack came; they hid in a subterranean storage space, else she would have died along with her parents and her older sister, who had been studying for an exam.
Had she stayed in the bunker-like storage space she might have escaped. But instead she ran out at the height of the barrage, screaming in terrified concern for her family.
The walking machines strode heedlessly by, with the hovercraft prowling beside their gleaming metal feet. It had been left to the infantry to mop up any survivors.
The hard-faced soldier unlimbered his rifle. ‘‘What are you doing?’’ asked a squadmate.
‘‘What does it look like?’’
‘‘Orders were to bring in all children for proper indoctrination, ’’ the infantrywoman said. She herself had briefly been a MechWarrior, and been Dispossessed in a
battle that not only cost her her left arm but saw her performance deemed so unworthy she was denied regeneration. She would never pilot a BattleMech again. Despite the fact that she, unlike the taller man with the perpetually blue chin and cheeks, had tasted the fierce joy, the sense of unbridled power enjoyed by a MechWarrior, she never displayed his sullen bitterness. She embraced her lot, and was content seeking the lone honor left to her: death in combat.
He glared at her. ‘‘What difference does it make? It’s just a Spheroid.’’
‘‘She’s a child, Huber.’’
‘‘Nits make lice,’’ Huber said. He shouldered his weapon and aimed at the sobbing child’s head.
The girl lowered her arms and raised her chin. With tears drying on her child-chubby cheeks, she stared without blinking at the small black circle of the muzzle.
‘‘Stop.’’
It was a female voice from beyond the compound oblong of the rubbled house. It was not a loud voice. But it was a voice that commanded—and that was obviously accustomed to being obeyed.
Huber scowled. But he lowered his rifle. ‘‘Who speaks?’’ he asked.
A woman stepped into the space that had been the family room. She was tiny, scarcely larger than the child. She wore Jade Falcon dress uniform, but nonregulation, more black than green. She wore a combat knife on one hip and a handgun in an open-topped holster of hard synthetic on the other. Ice-white blond hair cascaded over the padded shoulders from beneath the flared helmet, stylized and enameled to resemble a falcon’s head. Blue eyes blazed forth beneath the helmet, intense as a bird of prey’s.
‘‘Your Galaxy commander,’’ she said.
Huber frowned in suspicion, but lowered his rifle to his hip.
‘‘The orders were, children found alive after the primary action were not to be harmed.’’
‘‘She resisted, Galaxy Commander,’’ said Huber.
‘‘She clung to her toy when he tried to take it away from her, Galaxy Commander,’’ the infantrywoman corrected. ‘‘She was terrified by the bombardment. It was no more than reflex.’’
Huber stared insolently at the newcomer as if sizing her up. He seemed little impressed. His solahma Trinary had recently arrived on this former world of the Republic of the Sphere, conquered not long before on a second attempt by a Jade Falcon expeditionary force. Though they were replacements for the Delta Galaxy, dispatched grudgingly from the Jade Falcon Occupation Zone, continuing trouble on Skye meant they had been deployed before being introduced to their ristar Galaxy commander.
Galaxy commander or no, ristar or no, it didn’t matter to Huber. Obedience to orders was deeply engrained in Clanners from their crèche days. Respect for rank was not. Only strength should rule; that was the law of the Clans.
But he could not bring himself to openly defy someone of such exalted rank. Not quite.
A brisk breeze off the nearby sea lifting her hair like a battle pennon, the woman walked over to the child. ‘‘Stand up, girl,’’ she said, not unkindly.
The girl stared up at her for a moment. She sniffled once. Then she obeyed.
‘‘What is your name?’’ the woman asked.
"Cynthy."
‘‘Well, Cynthy. Do you fear me?’’
Huge blue eyes regarded her for a beat. ‘‘Yes.’’
The helmeted head nodded crisply. ‘‘You are honest. You are brave. You will come with me.’’
‘‘Brave?’’ Huber could not keep from scoffing. ‘‘You should have heard her sniveling for her toy, Galaxy Commander.’’
‘‘I want my bear,’’ Cynthy said. ‘‘I won’t go without my bear.’’
‘‘Bravery is facing fear,’’ the woman with the ice-white hair said, ‘‘not lacking fear. In the absence of fear there is no bravery.’’ Her voice dropped low, so low her next words almost got lost within the whistle of the rising wind. ‘‘I have no fear. So I cannot be brave.’’
She walked to where the bear lay sprawled against an edge of a blond-wood end table mostly buried beneath the gray dust stirred up by the BattleMech’s barrage. She knelt, picked it up, stood. Brushing away the dust and grit, she brought it to the little girl.
‘‘Here,’’ she said, holding it out. The little girl hesitated. Then she took it and hugged it fiercely to her chest.
Huber glared. ‘‘Since when is it the Jade Falcon way to coddle the weakness of these stinking mud-crawlers?’’ he demanded.
The woman’s right arm snapped level with her face. In her small gloved fist she held the black handgun.
It flashed red light.
Huber’s head jerked. His eyes rolled up to his forehead. Between them, as if centered mechanically on the midpoint of a line connecting them, a blue hole had appeared in the bridge of his nose. It drooled a thin trickle of blood.
His knees buckled. He dropped to them, then fell on his face. Dust whoomped up around him.
The woman raised her hand, tipping the black handgun backward. ‘‘Does anyone else wish to question me?’’ she asked in a quiet, penetrating voice.
No one answered.
She looked at Cynthy. The child had winced at the laser’s crack but showed no other reaction. The woman holstered her pistol, then knelt and held out her arms. The girl came to her and slipped her arms around the woman’s neck.
The diminutive blond woman stood up as if the child in her arms was no more substantial than the toy she clutched between them.
‘‘Remind your comrades,’’ she said to the surviving troopers, ‘‘that in Gyrfalcon Galaxy, the will of Turkina is the will of Malvina Hazen.’’
Then she turned and carried the child from the ruins to a waiting hoverbike.
1
The Falcon’s Reach
The Desolation, Skye
Jade Falcon Occupation Zone
3 August 3135
From opposing ridgetops the two light tanks faced each other across a kilometer of hard, sandy soil broken by bitter, thorny scrub and granite outcrops. Standing on the top deck of the tank’s hunched, flatiron shape, Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen regarded her opposite number through electronic binoculars.
He stood on the khaki dirt of the ridgetop beside his own Scimitar MkII, identical to hers. He watched her with his own optical gear, she noted with amusement. He was, she knew, handsome in his way: a tall, lean, dark-complected man with his hair shaved on the sides and a long, brown horsetail scalp lock blowing out in the wind. He wore a whipcord uniform in tan and dark brown, with a web belt for a sidearm. The hilt of a short, curved sword jutted up over his right shoulder.
‘‘Warriors of the Hell’s Horses are romantics,’’ Malvina Hazen said. ‘‘It is good to know. We will be able to make easier use of them.’’ That she would fail to triumph in the coming Trial of Possession did not cross her mind.
Her driver, Wyndham, peered up at her with enormous owl eyes from the open driver’s hatch. He was a tiny man, not a centimeter taller than the minute Galaxy commander herself, and possessed a disproportionately large head. By breeding and birth he was an aerospace pilot, as genetically optimized to his role as were the Clan elementals, at the far end of the size spectrum. He had failed his Trial of Position, and rather than become a flight technician with the fleet he had taken the step—to him less painful than dropping in caste—of volunteering for combat with Turkina’s ground forces.
Once, Malvina knew, his failure would have forced him into a non-combat role. But the great drawdown of BattleMech forces into which The Republic’s founder, Devlin Stone, had shamefully cajoled the Clans had forced them greatly to expand their armor and infantry branches. They desperately needed warriors. The flash-fire spread of war through the Inner Sphere after Stone’s long peace had caught the Clans flat-footed, the same as the Spheroids themselves. More and larger sibkos were being percolated and decanted throughout Falcon space. But years would pass before those warriors could join the fight, and the crisis was upon Turkina now.
Those who lacked the extraor
dinary combination of physical and mental attributes and skills needed to pilot a ’Mech or a fighter were still more than capable of filling the ranks of the less prestigious combat arms. Probably Wyndham intended to expiate the shame of failure by seeking glorious death in battle at the first opportunity.
But no Spheroid had yet proven good enough to give him the death he wanted. He had become by consensus the best driver in Malvina’s Gyrfalcons. His fighter pilot’s eyesight, reflexes and cryogenic nerve might not have sufficed to win him a position in the service for which he had been bred and trained, but they made him so proficient a driver that even MechWarriors accorded him respect. Especially given the dearth of qualified officers that accompanied the great drought of Clan warriors, Wyndham’s exemplary annual proficiency retest scores and battlefield record would suffice to win him administrative promotion without the need to issue a Trial of Grievance to seize a position from a superior. Yet he repeatedly had refused advancement, not just in rank but to the more prestigious position of gunner or vehicle commander.
Such behavior was at odds with Clan character, to say nothing of the hot-blooded Falcon nature. Malvina wondered if having failed his aerospace Trial of Position, he deemed himself dead to honor and chose to seek death in the way he felt would best serve the Falcon. Or perhaps he simply chose to continue serving his flamboyant ristar commander in his current role.
Neither he nor Malvina Hazen, of course, labored under any illusion that he was as good a combat driver as his Hell’s Horses opposite number. They were the Clans’ acknowledged masters of vehicular war.
But his huge dark eyes were eager and falcon-intense as Malvina nodded to him. ‘‘You know what to do, quiaff?"
The great head nodded once. ‘‘Aff, Galaxy Commander.’’
‘‘Then let us prepare,’’ she said. ‘‘The flare to commence will go up in sixty seconds.’’ She dropped lithely down her own hatch into the turret and sealed it over her head.