“Why did you not?” she asked, not looking at him.
“Why did I not what?” asked Aleks. He lay beside her with his hands laced behind his head. His white teeth gleamed faintly in the light of a dimmed lamp beside the bed in his austere courtesy quarters aboard the flagship.
“Why did you not bid for command of the Gyrfalcons? The real prize, Turkina Keshik, lay beyond both our grasps—we knew going in that Khan Jana Pryde had earmarked it for old Bec Malthus. But you might have won the right to command the Delta Galaxy—rather than picking the Zetas, green and still suffering the taint of long-agodezgra ”
She lay down beside him and drew the nails of her right hand down his muscular, nearly hairless chest. Many female Clan warriors wore their nails square-cut short. Malvina Hazen wore hers long, enameled white, with stars in silver on them that were visible only in the proper light.
She was as fanatical a supporter of Jade Falcon tradition, and the Crusader cause, as Aleks himself.
That did not mean that she was orthodox.
“We might have had a lovely battle, you and I,” she almost purred.
He uttered a short laugh. “Why fight? I got what I wanted.”
She sat bolt upright and glared at him with a flash of genuine anger in her ice blue eyes. “Don’t play coy with me, Aleksandr!” She dropped her voice low. “Do you not recall how I held you at night, in our sibko barracks, when you wept at the harshness of our lives?”
“I do not forget.” His grin never faltered. “I never forget, Malvina. You know.”
She frowned. Her anger softened and flowed into perplexity. “Do you scorn the Delta Galaxy, then?”
“Not in the slightest, sister dear. I merely wanted the challenge.”
“Challenge.” A hunch of her bare snow-white shoulder added the question mark.
He nodded. “The Gyrs are a fine Galaxy, veteran and eager as their totem birds; they will win great glory for themselves and the Jade Falcon with a fire-eatingristar such as yourself to lead them. Many are the songs you shall inspire together, and long will they be sung. Turkina’s Beak—” He shrugged his great, muscled shoulders. “Turning them into a Galaxy as splendid as any in our history—that will be a feat which wins me remembrance in a different kind of song.”
She said nothing about his implicit assumption that he could reform the notably incorrigible Zeta Galaxy into a top-grade formation. She doubted it no more than did he.
“Besides,” he added, “you would have won anyway. You always beat me, back in the sibko.” The word meantsibling cohort . It referred to a brood of Clan children, genetic siblings, decanted simultaneously from the canisters in which they had been conceived and grown to viable infants.
“Notalways,” she said. “Not hand-to-hand.”
“Nooo,” he said, drawing out the word. “Not after I grew to half again your size.” And he laughed.
She shook her head. “You must laugh more than any Clan warrior in history. Certainly among Jade Falcons.”
“Ah, no, Malvina dear, I fear I cannot claim that honor even among our own Bloodnamed. That belongs to my chief of Elementals, Star Colonel Magnus Icaza”
“I do not place him.”
“The red-beard, huge even for an Elemental. He stood me second in my Trial of Honor this day-cycle”
She made a thoughtful noise. “I expected to see that change. The readiness of your laughter. After all the years.”
He laughed again. “If I could keep laughing through what we went through as children,” he said, “I can laugh through anything.”
She turned sharply to look at him, although her expression was as mild as her chiseled features would permit. “You find fault with our system, then?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “In our case it seems to have worked, certainly. Let us say, rather, I regret the necessity of treating children so.”
For a moment he lay staring at the overhead, vaguely visible in the butter-colored light. She turned her head and regarded him, her triangular face unreadable in the dimness—and probably also in full sunlight.
“Look at us,” she murmured. “Two playmates, once. And now the Eyes of the Falcon.”
He made an amused noise, half back-of-the-throat laugh, half muted snort. “They call us worse things as well.”
It was unusual for two of three unit commanders within a Clan force to bear the same Bloodname. What was truly rare, perhaps unprecedented, was that Aleks and Malvina were sibkin: members of the same sibko.
Among the Clans sexual liaisons among sibkin were not considered remarkable and were not discouraged, since both males and females received long-term contraceptive implants while still infants. Reproduction among the warrior classes was conducted in vitro according to scientifically planned breeding programs, not left to accidents of sweaty biology. Perhaps because of their extreme closeness—and the fact that they were the sole two of their sibko to survive to maturity, in large part because of that bond—Malvina and Aleksandr had long referred to one another as brother and sister. Terms which for virtually all other Clanners carried emotional weight only in reference to comradeship, not relationship.
“Let them talk,” Malvina said, giving her head a defiant toss that made her braid slither across a bare shoulder. “We fought for our names and won them.”
Bloodnames were rare, much rarer than in the days of the Clans’ first onslaught against the Inner Sphere. Originally Nicholas Kerensky decreed that each Bloodname—the surname of a man or woman who had helped him found the Clans—could be borne by only twenty-five warriors. Then, along with persuading the Clans to draw down their stores of weapons, especially BattleMechs, Devlin Stone, founder of The Republic of the Sphere, told them they were so correct about the holy exclusivity of a warrior’s role that they should actually reduce the percentage of their total populations who were born into the warrior caste. In order to prevent Name bearers from becoming a disproportionately large part of their thus-depleted warrior classes, diluting the sacred purity of the Bloodname concept, most Clans had Reaved themselves, ruthlessly reducing the number of holders of each Bloodname in brutal Trials. They then left the Bloodcount reduced, and Bloodnames consequently much harder to come by. Or keep.
That Aleks had shortly followed Malvina in winning the Hazen Bloodname, each in their first Trial, had been considered a scandal in some quarters. Though each sibko was descended from a particular Bloodname’s originator, and its members entitled to compete for that Name, it seldom happened that two sibkin succeeded. And Hazen was a name of special reverence: it sprang from Elizabeth Hazen, keeper of Turkina herself, the Jade Falcon who gave the Clan her name.
“And I killed none of my opponents in the Trials,” Aleks said, “whereas you left none alive.”
She refused to be baited. Instead she smiled dazzlingly. “Of course.”
“The official line,” said Aleks, “as concocted behind the scenes by none other than our esteemeddesant commander Bec Malthus, is that our shared triumph proves the superiority of the Clan breeding scheme—as perfected by Jade Falcon, of course.” He chuckled. “Of course, within Clan Jade Falcon, if you say ‘behind the scenes,’ you have justsaid Bec Malthus.”
She frowned, drew a knee up under her chin. “Does that not bother you, then, that overall command has devolved upon a known intriguer?”
“Perhaps that is what we need.”
She looked at him with something near outrage. “But was it not to avoid such corruptions that Aleksandr Kerensky led us out of the Inner Sphere in the first place, centuries ago?”
He shrugged. “Indeed. And all honor to the Kerenskys and their vision. Yet whether we like it or not, change has been forced on us—was forced on us decades before our sibko was ever turned out of its artificial wombs. Even before Bec Malthus was born. Besides—”