Flight of the Falcon

4

Jade Falcon Naval Reserve BattleshipEmerald Talon Jump Point Summit

4 March 3134

Alone in his dark cabin with his dark thoughts, Bec Malthus sipped cognac.

By now the Jade Falcon trade factors upon Tharkad would have delivered their ultimatum to House Steinerhands off or else! He did not doubt the manner of it would be gauche and brutal. We are a gauche and brutal people, by and large.

It was not a judgment on his part, but a sober assessment of fact, and not at all condemnatory in his mind. The thing upon which he prided himself most, the one thing which in his mind justified and redeemed the entirety of his existence and his acts by means of the service he rendered his Clan, was his capacity for total, ruthless objectivity.

He took another mouthful, almost daintily, rolled it about on his tongue, savoring the smoky piquancy. Although by the standards of the soft and self-indulgent Inner Sphere, he knew, he would be held something of a prude, by Clan precepts he was a raging hedonist. He concealed most of his pleasures from the scrutiny of his fellows as scrupulously as he did his political machinations. Yet the one weakness he permitted to be seen was his love of fine food and drink.

He might have justified his indulgences to himself by observing that, after all, none served the Falcon better now, and few had ever served Her as well, as he. He didn’t bother. Frankly, he did not give a pinch of Turkina’s holy poop for such nonsense. He felt neither guilt nor shame; what he hid, he hid because others’ awareness of it could cause them to act in ways adverse to his interests.

His table was a tame enough vice, indeed, a somewhat reassuring one, inasmuch as it was known and unlikely to bring harm or discredit upon the Falcon or her get. The Clan rhetoric, particularly Jade Falcon rhetoric, about iron will and self-denial contained, as he well knew, an element of willful self-deception. Few adults of the warrior class failed of having at least one vice—as defined by the Spartan Clan ethos, that was; to Spheroids, it was the Clans’ self-definedvirtues that were terrifying.

He smiled And now I and a pair of warrior children lead an army of naifs to liberate people whose closest approach to a unifying passion is a desire notto be subjected to the harsh will of the Clans.

When they plannedthis initiative months ago onSudeten , the two Hazen ristars had given it a curious name:desant . In Russian, the native language of Nicholas Kerensky, Founder of the Clans, it meant what it sounded like in English,descent . But in the ancient Soviet military art from before the age of space flight, it had another meaning. It referred to a drop of air-mobile troops—generally a very daring one, striking at key targets deep in enemy territory.

Both Aleks and Malvina were keen students of military history. That itself represented a departure from pure Clan tradition and was one of the Inner Sphere encroachments that Bec Malthus at once resented and embraced. For the Clans had been designed to spite the past. By forgetting about it.

That had failed. Ever objective, Malthus would acknowledge that, at least to himself.

He smiled, sipped.In order to preserve Jade Falcon ways, he thought/ am willing to destroy them. He held up the goblet to the dim ocher shine of a potted-down lamp beside his chair, in a toast to himself. That in itself was true to the spirit of rough-and-tumble Clan ways.

Yet there was another word from the same lexicon that applied to this mission equally well. More specifically, to that of the emissaries on Tharkad. That word wasmaskirovka . While it had been appropriated by House Liao for its intelligence service, neither of the hotblooded young ristars was reluctant to reclaim its use per the original meaning.

The word meantmasquerade . It had been used by the Soviets to signify a ruse concocted to cover intelligence or military operations.

Thedesant meant to see the Steel Wolves eradicated, no doubt about it. Every Jade Falcon did. And every woman and man of the expeditionary force down through the techs to the lowliest laborers burned with the desire to be part of that holy extermination.

But it was not the real objective.

That was: to conquer a bridgehead in the Inner Sphere, centered upon the world of Skye, the capital of Prefecture IX. And if they could win and hold that bridgehead convincingly enough, the full strength of Clan Jade Falcon might, Khan Jana Pryde willing, eventually join them in one great final Crusade to liberate Terra and all of the decadent Republic.