Flight of the Falcon

17

Skye

Prefecture VIII

The Republic of the Sphere

25 June 3134

An Elemental sat weeping on a rock when Captain Tara Bishop came into the Seventh Skye Militia cantonment beneath a glory of endless blue autumn skies brushed with white wings of cloud.

Tara B managed not to gape. Instead, she cocked an eyebrow at Master Sergeant Angus McCorkle, who stood awaiting her nearby, just inside the gate with the neatly carved and painted wood sign bearing

the legend, “Welcome to the Home of the Garryowen” arched over it. His hands were clasped behind his back, and there was a studied lack of expression on his rugged black face. He was the one bearing the day-by-day brunt of trying to whip the remaining local main-force unit into shape. It had so far not been a happy task, even for as crusty an old top kick as McCorkle.

“What?” she asked.

“Lieutenant Padraig took offense at something one of our young gentlefolk said,” McCorkle said. “Captain.”

“Young gentlefolk” was what the senior noncoms in the regular Highlander regiments, the First Kearny and the Fusiliers, termed officers, mostly lieutenants junior grade, who had enlisted shortly before the first Steel Wolf invasion of Northwind and won quick commissions via plain attrition. While they had displayed outstanding courage, or at least a strong survival streak, to win their promotions, not all were as polished as even a man like McCorkle might prefer: imminent danger had forced Countess Campbell to take what she could get, including half-unlettered backwoodsfolk. Hence the habit of ironically reminding sundry that they were all gentlemen and ladies by order of The Republic’s Senate.

The air was full of the smell of ripening grain and wood smoke. Off toward the mountains a cloud of migratory birds wheeled, sojourning south before the gathering winter. The flyers were dark against the brilliant blue sky.

First Lieutenant Anders Monsen appeared beside Tara Bishop. He was the usual training liaison between the Highlanders and the Seventh. He greeted her warmly, but his boyish face showed deep consternation. “The problem bein’,” he said in his thick Skye Irish brogue, “that one of your snot—that is, a lieutenant junior grade used the term ‘motherless’ quite prominently in poor Paddy’s hearing.”

Tara shut her eyes.

The Clans were, to say the least, not popular with the Highlanders—nor any Northwinders, from Countess Tara on down. “Motherless,” a reference to Trueborn Clanners’ in vitro birth, had become a common epithet among soldiers who had seen their home worlds raped and Terra itself defiled by the Steel Wolves. That it had quickly devolved into a general term of abuse, no longer reserved for Clansfolk alone, did not exactly help.

Thanks to Devlin Stone’s voluntary resettlement program, a number of ethnic Clanners dwelt on Skye. Some held to the Canister; others had completely assimilated, still others practiced natural reproduction yet strictly among their own nominal caste, and termed themselves “Pure-bloods” in defiance of the classic Clan stigmatization of Freebirths. They were overrepresented in the Republic Skye Militia—including Trueborn warriors who were, so the Duke’s counterintelligence services assured them, unswervingly loyal to Skye and The Republic: Ghost Bears, Nova Cats, even a few Wolves and Falcons.

Whatever else he was, the sobbing man was pure Elemental. On hearing his officer speak he raised a great tear-stained face. “Ihad a mither,” he said plaintively—in an Irish brogue which, to Tara’s near-horror, was every bit as marked as Monsen’s. “An’ it’s not even a year since she joined the saints.”

“Don’t tell me he’s Catholic,” Tara said, before she could stop herself.

“What else might he be, and him a good Bogtrotter?” Monsen asked, perhaps a bit too ingenuously. “You should meet our Padre, Captain Seamus. Two hundred fifty centimeters of faith and fury is he; and wasn’t he free-fighting champion of all Skye when he was just a tad of a seminarian at St. Angela’s? A largish tad, I grant you that, now.”

What’s worse, Tara thought,is I don’t think he’s pulling my leg. She turned to McCorkle.

“First Lieutenant Monsen informs me that Lieutenant Padraig is a very valorous man.” He hesitated only momentarily before speaking the last word. “He served with distinction in combat with the Hastati Protectors IX.”

“It’s only that he’s a sensitive nature to him,” Monsen said. “Sure, he did his stint, won his medals, and home he came to Skye to help till the family farm in County Loguire”

Only by dint of superhuman effort did Tara restrain herself from blurting,Hitched to a plow? Shehoped his mother had been Elemental as well as his father. If not... she shuddered discreetly.

“And now he’s taken up arms again, in defense of the soil in which his blessed mother’s bones rest,” Monsen said.

Tara went to stand before the sobbing giant. “Lieutenant Padraig,” she said crisply, “I am Captain Tara Bishop of the First Kearny Highlanders Regiment. I’m also aide-de-camp to Countess Tara Campbell. In the Countess’ name, in the name of the Northwind Highlanders, in the name of The Republic of the Sphere, and on my own behalf, I would like to offer my sincerest apologies for any distress our officer’s thoughtless remark caused you. I am sure that officer meant nothing by it.”

If only because I damned well hope none of our ninety-day wonders is stupid enough to piss off a full-blooded Elemental in the wild, bottle-baby or not!

Padraig nodded and dropped his enormous hands. “That’s mighty big of ye, Cap’n,” he said to the woman a third his size without apparent irony.

“My honor, warrior”I’m double-damned, she thought fiercely,if I’ll condone trying to impose censorship on our hot-blooded girls and boys. Yet—heart and minds!—¹we can’t go wounding the sensibilities of loyal soldiers of The Republic with racial slurs,of all bloody things.

But it was not her decision to make. And then, despite her regard for her commander and the deep personal friendship that had sprung up between them, she grinned from ear to ear at the realization that she could pitch this particular hot potato right into her namesake’s deceptively dainty handsA terrible thing to do to a friend. Ah, but duty’s a harsh taskmistress. . . .

She left the lugubrious giant to Monsen’s puppy-dog ministrations and joined McCorkle walking down a company street between tents and plywood shacks. No litter was visible, but the place had a slipshod air. Disreputable, somehow. A few loungers watched them warily. The rest, it seemed, were off somewhere..Hopefully improving their skills, Tara thought.

“How’s it going, Master Sergeant?” A light breeze kicked dust along the street past their boots, and tugged playfully at the cuffs of their trousers.

He hesitated. That itself spoke volumes. He was a man who had been raised since puphood to the doctrine that a wrong decisionright now is light years better than a “correct” decision too late. And as senior noncom with nearly three decades of service—he was older than he looked—he had no fear of any officer, even one of far more exalted rank than Tara Bishop herself, nor for that matter of the Countess herself. He would have stood up to Exarch Redburn without a second thought: in a fighting

armyno one outranked a good NCO.

He was not a man, in short, accustomed to choosing his words. Nonetheless he did so now.

“Unevenly,” was what he chose.

She cocked an eyebrow at him. She had gotten over being intimidated by the man, for all that he seemed an animated obsidian statue. After showing a certain initial reserve, he had come to treat her with pure professional correctness. It meant he respected her. Master Sergeant McCorkle was not a man who suffered fools gladly. Indeed, neither she nor anyone she had talked to was aware of any evidence he suffered them at all.

“Meaning what exactly, Top?”

“They’re as undisciplined a collection of barroom sweepings and gaolbirds as ever a sun of any color has risen on,” he said, his own brogue coming on more thickly than usual with the intensity of his feeling. “If I drop one for twenty, he gives me twenty more for the Old Sod. They think of us as a passel of Republican busybodies with asses so tight—begging the Captain’s pardon—that we might as well be Lyrans ourselves. I think we’ve shown them we’re a bit more than parade-ground Janes and Johnnies. But they’re wild as mountain cats, all the same.”

“Will they fight?”

That graven image face, it seemed to her, threatened to crack a smile. “If the JFs come here I think they’ll fight like demons.”

“But will they fightwith us? Or on their own hook?”

“There’s the rub, Captain Bishop,” McCorkle said.

They reached a parade ground. The flags of The Republic and Skye snapped on a flagpole across it, over the regimental headquarters. On a separate staff snapped a blue flag with a black horse head, and the words “Seventh Skye Militia” above and “For Garryowen In Glory” below.

“Who the blight,” Tara asked in a quiet voice, “is Garry Owen, anyway, Master Sergeant?”

“Damned if I know, Captain,” he said.

The speaker horns mounted above the HQ buildings began to emit a rising-falling banshee wail. At the same time Tara’s personal communicator chimed for attention. She snatched it from her belt carrier.

“Bishop here,” she said, as men and women began to tumble out of barracks around them.

“This is Major Sinclair at Sanglamore.”He was a Highlander staff officer who had come in with Ballantrae and the first group of regulars from Terra. “Get back here at once. Have Shugrue assign you an escort.” Major Lars Shugrue was the Seventh’s adjutant, on whom Tara had been on the point of paying a courtesy call before observing a training exercise supervised by McCorkle and the other training staff seconded from the Highlanders.

“Affirmative on the quick return, Major, negative on the escort.” She was mildly annoyed. Sinclair was not a combat type, but neither was he usually officious. “I’m a big girl now.”

“No doubt,” came back dryly. “But the Countess wants you to get an escort anyway.”

“Yes, sir. May I ask what the matter is? Have the Falcons arrived?”

“Yes, you may ask; no they have not. And I’ll waste no more time talking when you should be moving, Captain!”

“Yes, sir.” She hesitated. “Should I bring Master Sergeant McCorkle along as well?”

“Negative, Captain. But have him gather his cadre together somewhere secure. Discreetly. Just in case. Now,move.”

She lowered the communicator and stared briefly at McCorkle. He shrugged.

“We’re mushrooms, ma’am,” he said. “Just SOP.”

A frozen-faced Skye staff lieutenant ushered Tara Bishop into the briefing room in the rectory of the erstwhile Sanglamore Academy.

Duke Gregory Kelswa-Steiner was there, as were Prefect Della Brown and Planetary Legate Stanford Eckard, dressed in severe black trimmed with gray. Chief Minister Solvaig, whom the captain had privately described to her Countess and friend as having eyes like the crescent-moon marks you might make with your thumbnails in spoiled cheese, was not in evidence, to her pleased surprise.

Tara C. sat, not across from the others, but at the end of the table, side-on to the door; she had grown too wary to sit with her back to an entrance. It was a change Tara Bishop approved even though she regretted the need. The Countess’ smile was brief, sincere and strained.

“Glad to see you made it intact, Captain.”

Tara Bishop shrugged. “We had no trouble at all, ma’am. If anything the streets were deserted even for this time of a work day.” Her Garryowen escort, uncharacteristically silent and grim, had brought her on the quickest route from their bivouac outside town to the former military school on its bluff overlooking a thickly wooded suburb also known as Sanglamore.

“There is rioting, Captain Bishop.” To her surprise it was the Duke himself who answered. As much to her surprise, both he and Eckard had risen to her entrance. She was so junior as to merit any notice whatsoever solely because of the fact she was chief aide-de-camp to Tara Campbell, who despite her nominal disparity in title to the Duke of Skye was in fact full peer to both Kelswa-Steiner and Prefect Brown, superior to Eckard. As Prefect of III, Tara Campbell held a rank approximating field marshal, far too heavy in grade for command of her de facto division. Then the captain realized it was old-fashioned gallantry that made the men rise, deference to a lady entering a room.

“Certain elements of the populace have panicked at the latest news,” the Duke said, resuming his seat. Tara Bishop sat too. “From your account, the disorder does not appear yet to have spread to the suburbs, or at least the western ones. Chief Minister Solvaig must be succeeding in containing it.”

Tara Bishop clamped her lips on the question she wanted to ask. Sometimes she remembered she was just a captain.

“A few hours ago, a Republican merchant JumpShip entered the system,” Tara Campbell explained. “Her captain broadcast a warning: the Jade Falcons have invaded Chaffee, just across the frontier in Steiner space.”

“They conquered it, Captain Bishop,” Eckard intoned. His pale face looked more tightly pinched than usual. “With, it would appear, exemplary brutality.”

Tara Bishop gasped. She was no cherry; she had been a combat MechWarrior long before getting slugged as aide to the Countess, nor had she stopped driving herPack Hunter ’Mech into harm’s way since receiving that assignment. She had seen the elephant—not to mention the Wolf. She knew that war is misery and painhurts .

But to hear that a Jade Falcon war fleet had once again invaded the Inner Sphere was like having some kind of childhood nightmare, at once fanciful and terrifyingly visceral, come true: as if the Duke and his Legate had just told her a dragon had just landed in New Glasgow and begun laying waste the central business district.

“Impossible!” It burst out before she could stop it. Its banality appalled her. Especially since, of course, it wasn’t.

“My reaction was the same, Captain,” Prefect Brown said. “But impossible or not, it’s true. We received a massive data dump, complete with tridee documentation of the destruction of an entire city by the Falcons.”

“These aren’t wannabes like the Spirit Cats,” Tara Campbell said. Despite her rigorous lifelong training in diplomacy the bitterness was clear in her voice: but then again, she wasn’t bitter on her own account. “Or our old friends the Steel Wolves.” As far as Republican intelligence had been able to discern since her explosion onto the scene a little over a year before, Anastasia Kerensky, Canister-born on the world Arc-Royal in the Commonwealth, was the only real Wolf in her pack.

“These aren’t Republican citizens gone renegade,” the Countess continued. “They’re the genuine article, straight from Sudeten itself. Just as the Sea Fox reports suggested.”

Tara Bishop frowned. “But, Countess, the riots—”

“The initial broadcast was made in the clear,” Tara Campbell said. “The merchie captain was spooked. And I don’t blame her. She entered Chaffee system within hours after the Falcon invasion fleet jumped out to parts as yet unknown. There was still a JF JumpShip in-system, but by sheer chance orbiting at the zenith proximity point, whereas the merchant entered at the nadir. Although the planet was pretty thoroughly under the heel of a Falcon Cluster—”

“And not just any Cluster,” Della Brown broke in, “but the Turkina Keshik itself.”

Tara Bishop’s eyes widened. She didn’t know a lot about what went on in the blessedly distant Jade Falcon Occupation Zone, but she did know quite a bit about the military history of the Inner Sphere. Turkina Keshik, the first Cluster of the elite Jade Falcon Galaxy, was the Khan’s own guard, leading formation of the whole FalconTouman .

“—certain elements on the surface caught the merchant’s broadcast greeting and responded with an account of what had happened, and was still going on,” the Countess continued, showing no resentment of the interruption. “The merchie captain sat out the recharge, no doubt sweating blood every millisecond,

then jumped here quick as she could.”

“Unfortunately,” Duke Gregory said, and his heavy handsome face was pale with the effort of containing his rage, “someone else heard her initial transmission to Skye. And that someone spread the word to the whole planet: Clan Jade Falcon has seized and ravaged a world right across the border in the Commonwealth—and their course seems to point themhere ”