Flight of the Falcon

10

Jade Falcon Naval Reserve BattleshipEmerald Talon

Jump Point

Whittington

Lyran Commonwealth

30 April 3134

Malvina Hazen launched herself toward her brother in a blinding-fast spring. A slim twenty-centimeter leaf of razor-honed Endo steel glinted in her hand.

Aleks’ dark mass of hair formed a flash halo about his head as he pivoted right. The dagger missed his cheek by a centimeter. His big left hand swept out, seemed no more than to brush his sister’s back.

She flew forward. But tucking chin to clavicle she turned uncontrolled flight into a half-roll, ending with the bare soles of her feet planted against the grav-deck exercise compartment’s padded bulkhead.

Instantly she sprang away, turning in midair to come down in a crouch facing Aleks, her dagger held reversed, blade flat along her slim pallid forearm. “Why did you not cut me?” she demanded. “You had clear opportunity.”

He laughed and shrugged his massive shoulders. “Time enough.”

She straightened, scowling ferociously. It just made him laugh again. “You always look like an angry child when you scrunch your face like that.”

Her expression mellowed as she walked toward him. She wore white trunks and a sports halter. He made do with trunks alone. Jade Falcon regulations for live-blade knife practice specified goggles and belly-protectors: attrition to their extreme-Darwinian customs was severe enough without every realistic practice session ending in the death or long-term incapacitation for duty of one or more warriors.

As was not at all unusual for them, both sibkin ignored the regulation. Such hardly pertained to Galaxy Commanders, or were even intended to. And besides, they’d ignored the regulations they disliked all their lives—and answered each and every one of the frequent challenges arising therefrom on the duelling grounds.

Upon which, famously, Aleks had never allowed a foe to die. Nor Malvina, one to live.

In this, in practice, they knew themselves well-matched. Why rob themselves of the benefits of practicing all-out, with real danger to hone the edge? Each felt that if she or he could not prevent themselves suffering serious harm, they so deserved to suffer.

“Or is this more of your damnedcompassion ?” she demanded, voice husky with scorn. “If so, then look well and see how false it is, now and always: if you do not go all out against me, how can I practice for the real thing?”

She was near him now, touch range. And flowed forward like a striking snake, blade licking out to lash across his belly and side.

Steel sang upon steel. His own blade was a mere ten centimeters long, with a broad single-edged right-triangular blade. It was actually his back-up; when in the field, even in the cockpit of White Lily, he bore a thirty-centimeter blade, clipped and sharpened halfway down the back from the point, as much short sword or machete as fighting dagger: a classic Bowie. It weighed a full kilogram—a brutal mass for knife to be wielded by a normal human. While he could wield the monsteralmost as fast as he could his bare fist, he believed that speed beat all in a knife fight. And in any event, he claimed, his Bowie was such a potent weapon there was hardly anypoint to practicing with it.

Like her he held his knife tip-downward from his hand. He barely had to pivot his arm at the elbow to block her strike. At the same time, grinning like a handsome gargoyle, he turned about his body’s center line and took his sister with a pistoning palm-heel strike on the sternum, between her small but full breasts.

She flew backward all the way to the wall. The long ice-white queue in which she wore her hair slapped the padding a beat after her body did, with as loud a sound.

He knew better than to snag her braid, did Aleks. She left it loose by design—as a lure to the unwary. Like all her muscles, those of her neck were like a BattleMech’s myomer bundles, and she was agile as an interstellar gymnast; anybody thinking to break her neck or otherwise control her only found themselves stuck to her, to their severe if not fatal dismay. It was a particularly poor move in a knife fight, since her riposte when her hair was grabbed was to reel herself in close and stab like a snake striking: about a dozen shots to the softest available target. Even with her holdout knife—pretty much the same her sibkin used—she could unstitch somebody’s guts in about the time it took them to gasp in horrified surprise.

“It is natural to take pity upon such a tiny little girl as you,” Aleks said. “Even one so tricky.”

She laughed. “Surat.”

She pushed herself away from the wall and advanced again, this time stalking like a killer cat, keeping all her inconsequential weight upon her planted foot while extending the other, not transferring any until the leading sole laid flat on the floor before her. She circled toward his left, away from his stubby blade.

“You think to anger me,” she said. “Good tactics, brother dear—so long as you forget all the practice we both have had in swallowing our rage!”

She darted to her right, his left. He lunged forward with speed scarcely less blinding than hers for all he outmassed her cleanly two to one. His arm streaked toward her face in what was more than anything a straight punch—but aimed to lay open her cheek with the blade trailing from his huge dark fist.

Her own move had been a feint. As he committed himself to his charge she turned and simply jumpedat him. Her left arm extended, elbow slightly bent, fingers of her open hand extended to touch an imaginary plane extended from her body’s center line; the outside of her arm struck the inside of his knife arm just above the elbow, too far for a wrist roll to cut her with his short weapon. At the same time she wrapped both legs about his narrow waist, kissed him quickly on the lips, and sliced his cheek above the high prominent bone with a quick, vicious cut.

At once Malvina launched herself into a back flip. It would land her outside reach of a retaliatory strike, and him with his weight still on his heels, to keep himself from falling backwards when she struck him.

But her sibkin’s neuromusculature was as Clan-bred as her own, his training as brutally Clan-intensive. Even off-balance he managed to lash out. The tip of his blade flicked lightly across the swell of her left buttock, slicing silvery synthel fabric and white skin.

She landed on her bare feet, harder than intended, staggered back several steps to regain her own balance. “Damn you!” she yelped. “Thatstung. ”

He laughed. “You will remember me when next you sit in the cockpit of the Black Rose,” he said. Which would be for the invasion of Chaffee, after the jump for which their fleets now recharged using their solar sails, here in Whittington system. In a matter of days thedesant would at last land in force upon its first true objective.

Malvina circled to Aleks’ left again, weaving her hands before her with her fighting blade laid against the inside of her slim white forearm. The pulse in her wrist made the blade jump just at the edge of visibility.

Aleks gave the weapon no more than a cursory glance. Malvina’s sinuous motions intended to render it difficult for her opponent to calculate a way past her defenses, or know when or from what angle she would launch a strike. It was also meant literally to hypnotize a foe; if an opponent made the mistake of watching her hands too long, especially her knife hand, she would program him, with surprising quickness, to anticipate her patterns even though they appeared random. Then she would strike from an unforeseen angle.

It was a killer technique—again, literally. Aleks had seen it work in duels. To prevent it working onhim —since he knew from bitter experience that foreknowledge would not protect him if he allowed himself to watch her hands—he kept his eyes in soft focus, intent upon her shoulders. They were a far better indicator of imminent action anyway, though Malvina was expert at avoiding telegraphing of any sort.

“I am glad you showed some spirit,” she said, smiling. “I had begun to fear your famous compassion was getting the better of you.”

His brown eyes narrowed slightly and his nostrils flared. That was a cheap shot. Aleks had shed more tears after Porrima than the single one he allowed himself in the doomed suburb where Magnus died. Not even he, renowned, feared, admired as he was, dared weep openly in front of Clanners. Except Malvina, holding his head to her breast in bed in her quarters aboard her own flag JumpShipBlack Dalliance . In her arms he let go entirely of his iron self-control and the tears flowed like waterfalls. Not for the first time; but for the first time in years.

He also knew, quite well, she was trying to provoke him. An angry fighter makes mistakes. All combat at all levels of scale, from interstellar wars to tete-a-tete duels such as this one, hinged ultimately on who made the fewer, or less telling, mistakes. And no fighting more than knife fighting, where the slightest cut, like the slice on his cheek or the one he had given his sibkin on her backside, would given enough time bleed a combatant to the point of fatal weakness.

So he laughed. It was his most effective defense against the world.

Annoyed, or seeming so, she essayed a cut for his left forearm. The knife fighter’s mortal sin, each knew, was obsessing on the kill shot: there are very few knife strokes that willinstantly incapacitate a foe. Each had witnessed many fights in which a combatant had been mortally wounded by an enemy to whom she had already dealt her own deathblow.

Steel rang again as Aleks blocked effortlessly with his knife. “You think I took pity on you, then?”

It was her turn to frown. And then laugh, like a silver bell. “I know how much you loved the tales of knights, of Europe and Japan, when we were children in the sibko together,” she said. “The lore of medieval chivalry andbushido still clog your head—even though both were largely made up of whole cloth in the nineteenth century.”

He would only laugh. “Whenever they were invented, those tales speak to me,” he acknowledged. He was circling to keep facing her, taking advantage of his far longer stride to force her to move more quickly to make sure it was not she who was outflanked. His own hands he kept extended toward the plane of his center line, left hand high and open, knife hand at about navel level and very slightly refused.

“They fit so wonderfully well with the Kerenskys’ vision: of a warrior’s duty to care for and shield the weak. Which is, after all, the engine that drives this great Crusade of ours: to save the childlike peoples of the Inner Sphere from themselves, and their leaders’ selfishness and venality. Do not the tales of knightly chivalry andsamurai honor accord better with our ways than the Mongols you were so taken by?”

Again they exchanged a flurry of cuts. The clash of blades was tinkling music. Neither was marked again.

“The Mongols triumphed against great odds,” she said. She herself seemed to be fighting from downhill; his strength and, of much greater importance, reach were far greater than hers. To have a chance of victory, therefore, she had to either snipe from outside, slice him well and bleed him until his reactions slowed, or get inside his long arms.

Aleks’ mention oMongols had double impact: a faction had arisen in recent years among Jade Falcon’s warriors that called itself by that name. They contended, heretically, that had Nicholas been perfect, as Clan lore held, the Clans would have conquered Terra eighty-two years ago. Since the Founder borrowed so much from the Mongol hordes of old Terra, the movement demanded that the other aspects of Mongol warfare should be adopted: total conquest by any means, however harsh or “dishonorable”—all in the service, yet, of the Founder’s dream.

In the years since their last parting the sibkin’s paths had diverged in more than just spatial dimensions. Malvina was herself the Mongols’ leading proponent, had attained ristar status despite it, as had Aleksandr despite his contrary compassion. She was their focal point among the Falcons, but also within those Clans who yet considered their Inner Sphere territories to be Occupation Zones; Hell’s Horses and even Clan Wolf, ancient enemy, whom she claimed to detest more than any.

The sibkin had, with a resumption of that effortless nonverbal communication they had developed so long ago as frightened children alone against their sibko and the universe, simply mooted such issues when they came together under the eyes of Bec Malthus and Khan Jana Pryde to plot Clan Jade Falcon’s return to the Inner Sphere. But Aleks understood a conflict of their visions approached as fast as the first for-real planetary assault. And he at least did not look forward to that confrontation.

“Yet so effective were their tactics, their foes came to hugely exaggerate their numbers in their own minds,” Malvina said. She kept her tone steady, conversational. She breathed normally. As did he.

Malvina Hazen did not lack advantages of her own. Although Aleksandr possessed astounding speed for a man his size, she was as much faster than he as he was stronger.

And then—except in unarmed combat, where the disparity in strength and size was simply too great for her to overcome with any regularity—he had never beaten her.

“Their situation was not so different from what we face,” she said. “Overwhelming odds: a vastness to conquer; rich, teeming, powerful nations to defeat. The Founder did not scruple to borrow terms from the Mongols,Touman and evenKhan . Should we, Turkina’s brood, designed for ferocity, be too nice to learn from their methods and so risk throwing away our holy cause?”

As she spoke they dueled, a duet of lightning slashes and open-handed blocks and blows. An outsider would have thought it rehearsed. It was—but only in the sense that these two were both masters of the form of combat, and had spent hundreds of hours squaring off against one another in just this way.

Aleks’ big brow furrowed, and his eyes seemed to focus into the distance, past the padding affixed to the bulkhead for three meters, over his sister’s moon-pale shoulder. “Yet we must not be so entranced, even by victory, that we betray our reason for fighting, our very purpose for existence as warriors—”

They had had this debate often before.

Which was why she drew it out now. Hoping his mind would follow....

As he spoke she reversed knife in hand and thrust for his groin. He danced back, turning his right hip to back his blade, which parried hers in a cool counterclockwise arc. He caught her with sufficient force that his strength told then, knocking her knife hand well past his buttocks. He followed through, up and over in a backhand reverse slash at her cheek with savage speed.

She had already dropped, turning, using the momentum his parry’s violence imparted. She laid her free hand on the mat to pivot and came around full circle to slam the heel of her straightened left leg against the inside of his planted right ankle. Its full force delivered normal to his line of balance, the sweep scythed the leg right out from under him. He fell.

And Malvina bestrode him in the mount position, him on his back, her butt on his belly, her strong legs clamped about his hips. The needle-sharp tip of her long, widening-tapering blade depressed the skin of his Adam’s apple, ever so slightly. She leaned forward with both palms stacked on the pommel, and smiled.

“And so I win again,” she said. A droplet of sweat fell from her well-sheened forehead to his lips. He licked it away. “And so I always will. It is good that you are the one thing in the cosmos I love, brother dear!”

She laughed, threw away her knife—and before he could react had leaned forward again, pinning his wrists with her small fists, and crushed her mouth to his.

After a moment he let go his own knife, and laughed into her mouth, and returned the kiss with equal fervor.