“All that I am, all that I do, is in the service of the Jade Falcon and humanity—true to the Founder’s vision,” Aleks said in a low, clotted voice. “Beyond Clan Jade Falcon Ihave nothing ‘personal’.”
Malthus made himself smile a false smile, nod and gesture approvingly. It was an easy thing for him to do: he had done it so many times. He would’ve patted Aleks’ great, boulder-hard shoulder, except that to lay a hand on a Clan warrior without invitation, even one such as Aleksandr Hazen, was necessarily to die on the spot.
“Just so, lad: so you do,” Malthus said in tones like warmed syrup. “And now service to the Falcon means subsuming your own desires—let us call them judgments, shall we?—to the greater good of Turkina. The coming battle is the climax: all rides upon it. Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen is far too valuable an asset to withhold from this fight.”
Aleks paced to the curved outer bulkhead and slammed his fist against it. Then he pressed it to the metal and laid his forehead against it. “She will never honor the Trial’s outcome.”
Malthus came up behind him. Lightly. “Do not be so melodramatic, lad. Rejoice: you are about to reap the victory you have done more than any except your sibkin to win! It is a deed which will resound through the Remembrance as long as our people have tongues and ears.”
“Shewill throw victory away with a terrible crime, which will raise all humanity’s hands against us.”
“Then defeat her again! Subdue Skye quickly, using your humane techniques. Allow her no scope by succeeding. If not—”
He shrugged expressively.
“Are you so eager, then, to try Malvina’s Mongol ways here on Skye?” Aleks asked.
“I am eager to win. If you suspect I may hang back so that the fighting goes poorly, to create a pretext to remove Malvina’s hood and fly her free to slay to her bloodthirsty little heart’s content, you suspect quite wrongly, boy. It ismy head which failure will forfeit.”
Aleks pushed off from the bulkhead. He started to say something, but a cursor blinking alive on the viewscreen and an almost-simultaneous buzz from Malthus’ intercom stilled him.
“Galaxy Commander, bridge,” a voice said from the bulkhead. “Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen’s DropShip White Reaperhas departed orbit on a landing trajectory.”
Aleks and Malthus stared at one another. Launching was not scheduled to begin for two more hours. “If that confounded woman proves mewrong for having kept her in command,” Malthus said in a voice like pebbles in a crusher, “rest assured that I will do what you would not!”
Hemphill Mine West of New London Skye
15 August 3134
White Reaperfell through thin high overcast toward Skye, to a point ten kilometers west-northwest of New London. Strapped into the crash harness of herShrike —more tightly than she had been for yesterday’s duel with her accursed sibling—Malvina watched the planet hurtle at them through vision blocks slaved to the DropShip’s hull-mounted video pickups.
Well, she was showing Aleks and thatsurat Malthus that, defeated in Trial or not, she hadnot bowed the neck. And she was about to show her Gyrfalcons and indeed the wholedesant that she was still fit to be ristar and Galaxy Commander.
While Malthus’ ship had descended over the North Pole for the duel, the other DropShips began orbiting Skye. They duly swept the surface with their potent sensor arrays: telescopes, infrared, side-looking and oblique radar, magnetic and gravitic anomaly detectors. Naturally, they devoted especial attention to the next day’s chosen battleground.
And they had struck pure palladium: a shallow kilometer-wide bowl gouged from the Holyrood Hills twenty kilometers northwest of New London and almost due north of thedesant DropShips’ agreed-upon landing zone. It was an open-pit copper mine, permitted by Skye’s stringent environmental laws on a guarantee that once the ore played out, the land would be returned to its previous formation and reseeded, a technique used with success across human space. Unfortunately, it had been idled not by the playing-out of the vein, but by the Blakist Jihad. Since then—analyst-techs drew the information from a commercially available database of Republican worlds purchased from a Lyran trader in the Falcon OZ during invasion planning—schemes had alternately been mounted to reopen or reclaim the mine. Despite both The Republic’s economic boom and its emphasis on environmental protection, neither had quite come to pass.
Now, it seemed, Duke Gregory had found use for it at last: pulling a fast one.
A gypsy camp had sprung up in the big bowl, now itself grown green with years. It featured the usual array of “caravans”—the interstellar nomads’ colorfully painted transport, wheeled and ground-effect—and pavilions, as well as evidence of long-term settlement in the form of shacks and larger structures of plywood and plastic sheeting, with corrugated metal roofs.
The encampment had, according to intel analysis, probably sprung up in the last few days—weeks at most. The crafty Spheroids plainly hoped the combination of metal roofs, ludicrous variegated vehicles—probably hulks towed over from a nearby scrapyard—and the metal ore yet in the ground would baffle orbiting Clan detectors. In their haste, they forgot one thing: the neutron emissions of idling fusion bottles for what appeared to be the equivalent of a pre-Republican company of at least twelve BattleMechs. Malvina’s techs believed the ’Mechs were augmented by a lance of armored vehicles and, from analysis of several freestanding figures draped in brightly patterned cloth, perhaps a lance of IndustrialMechs as well.
Had they sallied forth to take the Falcons in flank as they advanced from their specified landing zone, a force that size might have dealt a staggering blow. Had it bided its time, waited until the attack had rolled away out of range, and charged for the landed DropShips, it might have caused pure catastrophe, albeit at the cost of its own nearcertain destruction under the spacecrafts’ powerful defensive batteries. A company, even of rare BattleMechs, was no large price to pay for even one DropShip, and they might well take out more.
But ifthey were the ones surprised. . . .
Not six hundred meters away, a sixty-ton FalconVisigoth swept by, bleeding smoke, its armored sides sparking with hits from a barracuda-shoal of three Skye aerospace fighters. A PPC bolt took out its starboard engine. It pitched forward and exploded in a yellow fireball.
A moment later a pursuing RepublicanSholagar came apart as two medium pulse lasers and a large laser from theOverlord -class DropShip made it the apex of a deadly tetrahedron of light.
Malvina emitted a triumphant cry as the other two enemy fighters sheared off and streaked away. It was echoed by her MechWarriors, waiting like her in their steel and synthetic cocoons for battle. A thirty-five-tonSholagar was a poor exchange for a heavy Clan fighter in all truth: but she wanted to keep their passions focused onvictory .
The green hills and autumn yellow fields of Skye rushed up to embrace her like a lover’s arms.
A derelict blacktop parking lot, frost-heavied and weed-grown, provided a superb surface for DropShip landing jacks. Even before the bulge-belted egg of a vessel settled and its drive-flames died away, its bay doors opened and a trio of BattleMechs of the Fifth Battle Cluster sprang into the milky dawn leaking out of the hills to the east, led by young Star Colonel Cedric in aNight Gyr . Cedric had won in barehanded combat both promotion and the twice-vacated command of the Golden Talons, whose emblem, now painted on the BattleMech’s chest armor, was a black shield sporting a pair of golden claws gripping a dead wolf beneath a gold “V.” He had bid low for the honor of neutralizing the imperfectly hidden Skye ’Mech force: his Alpha Trinary with himself in command.