“Here. On the plains outside Belgorod DropPort. Just the two of us. ’Mech against ’Mech.”
“Oh, no, Countess. I will not deny my Wolves a battle, not when I have brought them so far for it.”
Lexa made a face. “Do us all a favor, bitch, why don’t you?”
“Be quiet,” Will said.
The Countess’s voice came again, low and steady. “Bring your army then. My Highlanders will stand with me, for The Republic of the Sphere.”
“The Republic is hollow and already dead. We fight for the possession of Terra. Kerensky out.”
There was a long silence in the Sergeants’ Mess. Finally, Jock Gordon said, “Well.”
“Yeah,” agreed Lexa. “Fun times ahead.”
Will picked up his pen and began once more to write.
–ying. The next few days are likely to be busy ones, so I’m going to post this now while I have the chance and try to write you some more later.
31
Belgorod DropPort
Terra
Prefecture X
April 3134; local spring
If Ezekiel Crow had been a different sort of person, he would have found it a subject for considerable dark humor that the only thing letting him withdraw unnoticed from Geneva to Belgorod had been the impending arrival of Anastasia Kerensky and the Steel Wolves.
He had awakened, on the morning after receiving Suvorov’s call, to the news that a fleet of DropShips was heading in toward Terra. Repeated statements by the announcers that “highly placed sources admit that the ships may have a hostile purpose,” combined with reassuring references to the Highlander forces encamped outside Belgorod, effectively confirmed that Damien Redburn and the rest of Republic officialdom had accepted Tara Campbell’s version of events.
For the first few crucial hours, though, the Terran media were too busy covering the imminent threat to report on its accompanying scandal, and Crow was able to check out of the Hotel Duquesne, and leave the city unnoticed.
His good fortune had not lasted long. By the time he left the Belgorod shuttle hub and started out on foot for the commercial DropPort, the tri-vids had a new toy to chew on—him.
He saw it first in the screen crawl over a newspaper kiosk. A screaming headline—TREASON DURING A CRISIS!—over a file photo captioned Paladin of the Sphere Ezekiel Crow (third from left, in black), others, seen here receiving the Exarch’s commendation for role in elimination of Footfall piracy threat, and a sample paragraph of text:
Terra’s greatest crisis since the inception of The Republic of the Sphere was worsened, this morning, by allegations that one of The Republic’s most trusted Paladins may harbor an unspeakably dark secret. Scholars and victims alike have speculated for years over the true identity of the notorious Betrayer of Liao… (continued in printed version; insert coin)
Crow paid the money, and the newspaper kiosk whirred and disgorged a printed copy of the paper in return. He took it to a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop near the DropPort and sat down in a corner booth to read.
It was even worse than he’d feared. The paper was only running selected items, but those were enough to make it clear they had the whole thing, and from at least two sources.
Part of it had to have come from Tara Campbell. There was no other possible source for the transcript of the young checkpoint guard’s testimony at a Northwind inquiry:
Q. Did you recognize the Warrior in the ’Mech?
A. Yes, ma’am. It was Paladin Ezekiel Crow.
Q. How did you know that? Are you sure?
A. Yes, ma’am. It was a Blade , and everybody who was at the big battle last summer knows that Paladin Crow has a Blade.
Q. Are you sure that it wasn’t someone else in the Paladin’s BattleMech?
A. Yes, ma’am. He identified himself as Paladin Crow, on Republic business.
Q. Let the transcript show that Private Higgins’ testimony is borne out by voice analysis of the checkpoint log.
The Northwind data, Crow thought, was not the worst of it. He could have challenged the interpretation of the checkpoint incident. A Paladin’s judgment on what was or wasn’t Republic business was not something to be lightly questioned. But that damnable Capellan memoir had surfaced again as well, and the medical and genetic records that his unknown enemy had collected for the presumably dead Daniel Peterson, native of Liao, and had then correlated with the publicly available records for Ezekiel Crow, Paladin of the Sphere.
If the media had those, they had all the rest of it. Sooner or later, they would publish it all.
By the evening of his first day in Belgorod, the tri-vid channels were alternating clips of a video interview featuring the checkpoint guards with file footage of the combat on Liao and its grisly aftermath. Ezekiel Crow himself was reliably reported to have vanished from Geneva, and to have been sighted—more or less simultaneously—in London, Addis Ababa, and Santa Fe.
He was fortunate that Alexei Suvorov’s dubious friendship extended to the maintenance of a firm control over transport, loading, and storage at the Belgorod DropPort. The existence of a commercial ’Mech hangar containing a Blade BattleMech remained—for now—one of the few remaining well-kept secrets in Ezekiel Crow’s life.
However, Suvorov’s control over groundside operations at the DropPort didn’t extend to other matters. The port itself—like all other DropPorts on Terra—had been closed to commercial arrivals and departures by order of the Exarch for the duration of what was already being termed “the invasion crisis.”
For all these reasons, Ezekiel Crow had not taken rooms in a local hotel. Nor was he patronizing the local restaurants. Instead, he was camped inside his rented ’Mech hangar, sleeping on a pile of boxes with his carry bag for a pillow, at the foot of his Blade. He was taking no risk that Suvorov’s friendship might unexpectedly reach its expiration date.
Such precautions made for a furtive and mole-like existence. He went out only at night, and then only to the parts of the city where the law didn’t extend, and where nobody remarked on resemblances or asked for names. The days he spent penned up in the dim, unheated hangar, his only news of the ongoing crisis was what he was able to pick up by scanning the communications frequencies from the cockpit of his ’Mech.
He had never expected that shame and dishonor would turn out to be so boring.
Now that the worst had happened, his dominant emotion was no longer fear, but a burning frustration. He had buried his old identity in the rubble of Chang-An, and had remade himself into a man whose entire goal had been to serve The Republic and to fight for it at need. Now the greatest threat of his lifetime had aimed itself directly at Terra, and he could do nothing, nothing at all, save listen to the airwaves for situation updates and curse the unknown name of his hidden enemy.
He was doing just that when the all-frequencies signal went off. He listened, half in envy and half in anger, as Anastasia Kerensky arranged with the Countess of Northwind to do battle for possession of Terra—and the answer to everything came to him, fully formed, between one breath and the next.