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 skin, 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.”