Flight of the Falcon

24

Seventh Skye Militia Cantonment Outside New London Skye

1 August 3134

Standing by the feet of herHatchetman ’Mech, Tara Campbell gratefully accepted the two-liter plastic jug from a Seventh Skye Militia troopie and promptly upended it over her head.

She was quite unself-conscious about standing in front of several hundred near-strangers wearing only a khaki sports bra and brief trunks of the same color beneath her cooling vest, which stood open to allow the cool late-autumn breeze to lave her baked body. Not even on Northwind, a world far more prudish than cosmopolitan Skye, would such have attracted much attention: it was how MechWarriors dressed, unless they wanted to pass out from heat exhaustion in their machines. Since half a dozen BattleMechs had turned out for joint maneuvers this afternoon, plus a dozen Highlander and local Industrials, she wasn’t the only one standing around scantily clad. Not all the female ’Mech jocks even wore halters—for Tara herself a matter of comfort and practicality rather than modesty anyway.

She shook her head, spluttered, bit off a mouthful from the jug, rinsed her mouth and spat into the churned-up gorse. She was going to be coated with greenish-gray mud directly: the autumn-dry ground

cover on the practice field outside the Seventh cantonment had been well churned up by the afternoon’s mechanized maneuvers, and the same breeze that brought blessed coolness also kicked up dust. It made no difference: she already knew she’d need a shower after this. Anybody did, who’d done more in a BattleMech than walk it sedately to a maintenance shop.

“Are we cut off from Terra, Countess?” the young private who’d brought her water asked anxiously.

She grimaced, covering the lapse with another splash of water on her forehead—which was still so hot she was surprised it didn’t sizzle. The news had hit yesterday with the latest JumpShip emergence: the world of Zebebelgenubi had been seized by the fearful Malvina Hazen, with reportedly the greatest atrocity yet.

Zebebelgenubi was Skye’s nearest neighbor in space, roughly two parsecs distant—and it lay with almost mathematical precision upon a line between Skye and Terra.

“Not at all, Heinrich,” she said to the youth, whose hair had been shaved to a white-blond plush, which made his ears appear to stick out in a most unfortunate manner. She had heard his name called by a fellow Garryowen; she had been trained since earliest childhood never to forget a name: another facet of diplomatic upbringing. “JumpShips can still travel by way of Alphecca and Smyrna. It’s not so easy to cut a system off from other stars without holding the jump points.”

She smiled. “And thank you for the water.”

He grinned back, shyly, and half-tripped walking away. Not realizing his clumsiness might have another cause she attributed it to wholly understandable fear: Zebebelgenubi’s sun burned high in the early nighttime sky at this latitude and time of year on Skye. To know that the Jade Falcon’s talons had closed invisibly about it could lead to sensations similar to a clawed foot clutching one’s own heart.

Or at least hers.

With a clank of loose actuators and a blat of diesel engines, a ForestryMech sprayed with Skye autumn woodlands-pattern camouflage of dusty green and shades of medium green on a khaki base marched up to halt earthshakingly nearby. It raised its giant chainsaw right arm in a salute and froze that way. The cockpit opened. A ladder of synthetic rope, white twined with blue and blue plastic rungs, snaked down. Lieutenant Colonel Hanratty descended with an alacrity startling for a middle-aged woman of her size.

She grinned and sketched a salute at Tara, fully as unself-conscious of her state of undress, then accepted a water jug from another enlisted and went through the same routine as the Countess.

Seeing Tara speak to the mere enlisted man without biting his head off, other Garryowens of various rank began to drift toward her. She smiled and nodded encouragingly at them. She had noticed on earlier visits that they had an easy, democratic attitude among ranks: too relaxed, perhaps; the Seventh troopers occasionally treated their officers with something like contemptuous indulgence. It translated into general sloppiness, and could well, she knew—or anyway believed, since it was something taught in officer academies, although she had never experienced it—lead to a lethal tendency to debate orders in action instead of unhesitatingly following them.

Still, while the crispness of their formations did not make her hold her breath for the HPG net to come back up so she could comm the joyous word back to Northwind, they handled themselves and their machines competently enough. They hit their marks and maneuvered with immense panache, if seldom precision.

She suspected that they had been firmed up more than a bit by her own Senior Master Sergeant, Angus McCorkle, putting the fear of God into them despite lacking any identifiable “official” status. Early in his tenure with them he had stood without flinching against the wrath of an enraged Elemental—not poor Padraig, turning out to defend the farm despite his own unresolved post-traumatic stress disorder, but a Hell’s Horse with a long black horsetail of hair hanging from the crown of his otherwise naked skull to the small of his immense, wedge-shaped back—and then, when the man’s shoulder’s bunched to crush him, brought him to his knees with an uppercut to the groin that observers swore lifted the monster several centimeters off the ground. Since that incident, they realized he was no phony parade-ground spit-and-polish hardass, but agenuine hardass, who wasn’t going to go all runny when exposed to the heat of real combat—any more than a block of Endo steel exposed to a candle flame. And they respected him for it.

She hoped, now, to win their respect as well.

Which, it turned out, was going to entail facing their questions without flinching. “What about these Forlorn Hopes of yours, Countess,” a female lieutenant asked defiantly. “Don’t ye have faith in us?”

“O’Malley—” Hanratty commenced a warning growl.

Tara held up a finger to her. “I do,” she said, meeting the young woman’s scowling gaze square-on and nodding firmly. “I have faith in my Highlanders, faith in you, faith in the Ducal Guard and other planetary defense forces, and faith in God. But I would not be keeping my faith with you if I told you I was confident all those things would be enough.

“I have no wish to weaken your arms with worry. That’s never done anyone a scrap of good. Yet I will not lead under false colors: the Jade Falcons are as potent a natural disaster as a hurricane. All the help that I—thatwe —can get in meeting them won’t be too much. Fair enough, Lieutenant?”

The woman blushed and dropped her eyes. “Fair enough, Countess. I—I’m sorry.”

Tara clapped the taller woman on the shoulder. “No need to apologize for asking a just question.

“Now.” She turned to face the group as a whole, intermingled now with her own dismounted Northwinders, curious and perhaps a bit protective of their Countess among these not-altogether friendly outsiders. “When the sky lights up with the drive-flames of Falcon DropShips it will be too late for questions.”

They nodded, as did their commander. Other questions came: more of technical particulars and less of challenge. Tara answered mechanically.

Inside she felt a twinge at the young subaltern characterizing the Forlorn Hopes ashers . She had intended initially to lead them in action herself. It seemed necessary, given her determination never to order troops to do anything she herself feared to do.

Thatintention blew up a storm as big as the Countess’ new recruiting campaign itself, which still had the Herrmanns AG media group howling in chorus about how it was really concealed genocide against the German population. Legate Eckard had been primly disapproving. Prefect Brown tried, again, to forbid her—but lacked stature to make it stick: Brown might be senior in grade, but Tara was a Countess, and nobility told in The Republic as it did throughout the Inner Sphere. The Prefect urged Duke Gregory Kelswa-Steiner to intercede, but he refused; if the offworld glamour-girl wanted to throw her silly life away at the head of a lot of civilians armed with push brooms and popguns, he didn’t mean to trouble

himself over the fact.

Her own officers combusted, as intensely if not as flamboyantly as Prefect Brown. She was the most seasoned battle commander on Skye. Although the Duke had been no slouch in his time, she had fought more, for higher stakes, and much more recently. None had faith in career desk-pilot Della Brown, nor the dry-stick Eckard—not in their ability to handle forces in actual war. Nor was any Highlander commander eager to serve under the moody Duke.

As for lesser Skye leaders, the Northwinders who knew Hanratty liked her, and respected her well enough: but none was really sure she could manage her own scapegrace and scrap-built regiment in battle, much less a division-sized planetary defense against a first-division team like the Falcons. Major von Traub, commanding the Ducal Guard, they would not even consider taking orders from. While Duke Gregory, perhaps understandably, doted on the man for his loyalty—in contrast, say, to that of his son and heir—and was pressing the fractious Skye Chamber of Deputies to jump him up clear to his first star as Lieutenant-General, the Highlanders all suspected that, Elsie-connected as he was, he had been left behind by Jasek’s defection because the younger Kelswa-Steiner didn’t want him. Although the official face the Guard showed the Highlanders was a stainless-steel plating of military correctness that didn’t quite mask frosty dislike, there was enough covert fraternization between the formations that the off-worlders knew they weren’t the only ones to harbor those suspicions.

It had been Tara’s own aide, Captain Tara Bishop, who changed her mind as the two shared a nightcap on a narrow balcony overlooking the Sanglamore quad, with enemy-held Zebebelgenubi gleaming like a self-luminous tumor in the sky.

“Do me a favor, TC,” Tara Bishop said quietly. “Just take a step back and look at it from outside your skin.”

“There’san attractive image.” The two showed each other brief grins.

“What wouldyou think of a supreme commander who chose to lead a self-professed suicide force? If you were a Militia grunt in the ranks—or a private soldier from the Regiment?”

Spoken by a Northwinder, in that tone of voice,the Regiment meant one thing only: in Tara Bishop’s case the First Kearny Highlanders, in which she still technically served, on temporary duty assignment to the Countess’ staff.

Tara’s cheeks had tightened until her eyes almost vanished. “I’d think he—she—had despaired. Given up.”

Eyes huge in Luna-light, Tara Bishop nodded.

Now came TB herself in herPack Hunter with its Ripper extended-range particle projector jutting from its right shoulder. She had been making sure all stragglers from the just-completed exercise got rounded up. Tara waved at her aide and friend. The speedy thirty-ton ’Mech returned the gesture with its humanoid right hand.

The question session broke up. The Garryowens seemed satisfied with the answers she had given them. Tara happened to overhear one sergeant speaking to another: “Face it, Gerald my boy,” the woman said, draping a comradely arm across the taller man’s shoulders, “anybody who makes that Sassenach pig Herrmann squeal so loud as this one doeshas to be riding with the angels!”

In a few moments Tara Bishop sauntered up, wearing a midriff-baring olive drab T-shirt and exceptionally brief trunks beneath her bulky armored cooling vest. It was the taller woman’s conviction, her superior knew, that she could walk around, in her words, “buck nekkid,” and no one would so much as glance at her so long as Tara Campbell was in view. She was, as the Countess repeatedly tried to tell her, quite mistaken.

Tara B started to say something. Before the words came out of her mouth Tara’s comm unit buzzed on her hip. She snatched it up, heart in throat: it had to be dire news indeed for anyone to comm her here.

“Countess,” a voice said quietly, and tension rendered it momentarily unfamiliar.

Then: “Paul?” She turned away from as many bystanders as she could, shielding the unit with her hands. “Good heavens, I’m on maneuvers here—”

“Not a personal call. Emergency meeting going on in the Palace, room three-oh-five. You should be there.”

“When?”

“Ten minutes ago, ideally. You didn’t hear this from me. I’m out.”

The line went dead.

Tara knew that Paul believed he was closing in on—whatever it was he was hunting. She really didn’t need to know, and had more than enough things shedid need to, frankly, so she never asked. She doubted this pertained to that in any way.

She had come to know him as a rock-solid man, who though intellectually as nimble as anyone she had encountered, was decidedlynot prone to imagining things. It was the most accountant-like trait she’d seen in him. If he thought the matter vital—

Quickly, quietly, she explained the situation to her aide. “We need to get you back now,” Tara Bishop said flatly. “Damn. Rush hour’s about to get going. Traffic’s going to bark.”

She spoke briefly into her own hand communicator and turned a frown to the Countess.

“No VTOLs available to pick you up,” she said. “Nothing inside half an hour.”

“MyHatchetman —”

“Too lead-footed—with all respect.”

“Your ’Mech, then.” The captain’sPack Hunter had a top speed of 119 kph, almost twice as fast as Tara C’sHatchetman . It could theoretically get her to the Lord Governor’s palace in just over fifteen minutes.

“No time to rekey the neurohelmet to interface with your brain patterns, Countess.”

As one the two women turned to stare up at the light BattleMech, standing with its cockpit ajar to let the breezes cool it and dry its pilot’s sweat from the form-fitting command couch.

“Good thing you’re small,” Tara Bishop said, “and that we’re really good friends.”