Does he think I’ll fall through into the lake?she wondered. That would be folly: both ’Mechs were airtight and proof against the pressure of water far deeper than the DropShip’s millimeter-wave radar probing of the bottom showed the lake to be. Dumping her into the icy depths would simply cool her cockpit to a level of actual comfort, at most.
She jetted her ’Mech backward before descending on still-solid ice. She turned in flight, swinging past Aleksandr, then let go with her lasers once more.
As if reading her intention, Aleks, still at a dead run, cut a different way again. He ran now with full MASC boost, risking actuator lock for speed over a hundred klicks an hour. Malvina could not lock him up with her targeting computer. She fired her autocannon. A hit blasted a shard of ferro-fibrous armor off the side of his right thigh. The runningGyrfalcon wobbled at the impact, then steadied itself and juked again.
She scowled fiercely. “Am I that predictable?” she raged.
“Only to me,”came back promptly through her neurohelmet.
“Damnyou!” A bone-piercing wind buffeted the BattleMech; it was merely hot inside her cockpit, not baking.
Judging on the fly that he would cut away from her she fired another autocannon burst—and at the same time launched a missile volley from her torso 10-rack aimed to beat the zone he would run through if he
did.
Instead he turnedtoward her. Charging, he blasted on Ultra with both autocannon. Explosions smashed across Black Rose’s chest armor, rocking the hugeShrike back on its rear toes.
The ferro-fibrous plate was where she was hit; Malvina knew in a flash that her sibkin had done no serious damage. Nonetheless she uttered a shrill nasal scream, of outrage rather than alarm.
She triggered her whole battery: missiles, autocannon at double rate, both medium lasersLet him dodge faster than light.
He couldn’t, of course. Far less his fifty-five-ton ’Mech. Instead, he anticipated her again, jagging to her right. The root of Lily’s left right wing arced and sparked. The wing fell off.
With both wings retracted, the mass of the remaining left one did not even unbalance theGyrfalcon significantly. Not for a pilot of Aleks’ consummate skill.
“How are youdoing this?” she gritted, turning the Rose’s feet to keep tracking him. “You have never beaten me!”
“Times change, sibkin,”he said. “We change, quiaff?”
“Neg!You shall not win.” She blazed with the paired autocannon, tracking with the muzzles pointed exactly at him so that the bursts would overtake him if he cut tightly toward or away from her. Then she led him with an LRM volley.
The ice before his racing BattleMech erupted in a white cloud of ice splinters, snow and steam. Instead of shying away—and being smashed by her powerful weapons—he plunged straight ahead into the cloud.
He did not emerge from the other side.
Malvina poised, tense, waiting. An aerospace fighter fell smoking from the sky, to burst in yellow glaring billows against the hip of a conifer-clad peak several kilometers away. Malvina noted it in the compressed three-sixty display beneath her windscreen and never glanced its way.
“What do you play at, Aleksandr?” she demanded.
“It has been years since we played this way,”his voice said, “but all I learned I learned from you, my sister. Ten thousand times I lost to you; and now perhaps I shall lose— ”
Right in front of theShrike ’ s talons a crimson beam stabbed up through the ice. Its crack nearly deafened her within her cockpit.
Ultra autocannon fire chopped ice behind her right hip, drawing a curving curtain of glittering particles whose facets diffracted the pale sunlight and broke it into rainbow fragments.
“—more!”
Driven by the power of its MASC-augmented legs, theGyrfalcon pushed upward from the lake bed, fifteen meters beneath the surface, and slammed its fifty-five metric tons upward against the ice between the Black Rose and the jagged gape left by Aleks’ opening salvo. Ice squealed, groaned—and gave. As if the cuts Aleks had made with his large lasers were hinges, a great plate of ice beneath theShrike ’ s feet was driven up and over.
As was the ninety-five-ton BattleMech itself.
Malvina cried out, and then the monstrous machine crashed down on its side with an impact that pounded her into the side of her cockpit. She blacked out.
TheGyrfalcon ’s jump jets would not function under water. Instead, Aleksandr ran submerged to where the bed began sloping up toward the shore, blasted the ice clear to let his head and shoulders emerge as
he slowed to a walk. Slowly, shedding a great rippling skin of water, the Lily rose from the lake. When his jets were clear he jumped to stand beside the fallen Rose.
“I fear I have done you no kindness, sister dear,” he said softly. “But I could never hurt you.”
He raised the White Lily’s right foot and planted it on the Black Rose’s torso.
“I declare Galaxy Commander Aleksandr Hazen the winner of this Trial of Refusal,”Bec Malthus said ponderously. “We shall conduct the invasion of Skye as he desires.”
30
Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus ’ Cabin Jade Falcon Naval Reserve DropShipBec deCorbin Orbiting Skye 15 August 3134
“What do you mean?” Galaxy Commander Aleksandr Hazen demanded. He was not smiling now.
Bec Malthus turned away to look at a white-swirled blue arc of Skye, rotating beneath them. It was an image on a screen inset in the bulkhead of his cabin; as a ship of war, theBec de Corbin needed its hull integrity too badly to allow actual viewports in the living quarters. “I mean precisely what I said. Savor the occasion, boy.”
He glanced back at the taller, younger man from beneath bushy brows. “I will not relieve Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen of command of the Delta Galaxy. Did you seriously anticipate that I would?”
Aleks breathed heavily and his cheeks were flushed. “Yes. She fought to vindicate the Mongol position. She lost.”
Neither Malvina nor her BattleMech had been seriously injured. Her right shoulder had been dislocated, and she had sat in furious, white-lipped silence as a couple of Turkina Keshik warriors yanked it back into place—as theBec de Corbin rose back up through a still-contested sky, and a twisting dogfight that eventually claimed seven Falcon aerospace fighters and a dozen Skye craft. Only three aerospace warriors had successfully ejected from their stricken machines, and they had been left behind for the Republicans to recover. The Falcon would be back to reclaim them, soon enough.
“She fought to vindicate the decision of thekurultai, ” Malthus corrected. “She fought as Clan champion, not as herself. Come, you know this: you learned it in the creche, everybody does. You beat her in a Trial of Refusal, in which you were the refuser, not she. You did not best her in a Trial of Position for command of the Gyrfalcons—which Khan Jana Pryde has forbidden, and so do I.” He did not bother to state what, in Clan terms, was obvious: that if Aleks did not want his sister in command of the Gyrfalcons, he should have killed her when he had the chance.
“Malvina has become obsessed with her Mongol cult. You have seen what it has done to her—heard
her profane the Founder himself! She lost to me. The Mongols are discredited. And she, by allowing fanaticism to overcome her, has unfit herself to command a Galaxy of the Jade FalconTouman !”
Eyes curving slits, head tipped to the side, Bec Malthus asked, “Are you sure your true motivation is not vengeance upon your sister? That you have not allowed this matter to become personal?”
Aleks Hazen’s eyes flared. His big handsome face went gray. He seemed at once to grow taller—and Beckett Malthus wondered, for one of very, very few times in a lifetime spent playing others, if this one he had notoverplayed .