Flight of the Falcon

11

New London Spaceport

Skye

Prefecture IX

The Republic of the Sphere

1 May 3134

Tara Campbell, Countess of Northwind and General commanding the three Highlander regiments, had been favorably impressed by the “honor guard” sent to meet her and her retinue as they debarked their DropShipParris Mac-Bride. The air was lightly brushed with chill despite a vigorous late-morning sun and the heat still radiating from the funnel-shaped cement blast pit. They appeared most businesslike, altogether professional and turned out for action rather than ceremony.

Her lifelong diplomatic training to always guard her reactions served her just as well as her equally lengthy study of the martial arts in not flinching when a half-brick, thrown from the crowd jostling just beyond the vibrowire perimeter, bounced off the clear polycarbonate dome of the hovercar.

“Bloody heathen,” murmured Command Master Sergeant Angus McCorkle, senior noncommissioned officer of the Countess’ own First Kearny Regiment, from his seat in front of Tara—with its back to the car’s outside, and hence to the angry mob of protesters. He sat upright, every crease in his utilities razor sharp, his black skin taut as a drum. If spending two days under doubled weight had taken the toll on him it had on Tara, he showed no sign of it. And he, she thought jealously, did not even have discreet makeup to fall back on.

“This does not seem a propitious sign,” said Tara’s aide, who sat beside her at the rear of the passenger compartment. She was pale and there were circles under her eyes—but those eyes were alert, as was her posture, despite the way her body was crying almost audibly for rest. Captain Tara Bishop had been a combat MechWarrior long before she became a REMF with a cushy billet. She knew from long experience how to stay sharp in a threat zone despite bone-deep weariness.

“I apologize for this part of your reception, Countess,” said the earnest and almost painfully handsome young captain who led the reception party. Like the rest of the escort, he was dressed in urban-camouflage battle dress; his sole concession to ceremony was that he wore the powder blue beret of The Republic Skye Militia with the insignia of the Ducal Guard. Neither he nor any man or woman of his security detail wore any visible rank badges. Tara approved that too: Sar’nt McCorkle would have called them “sniper aim-points” She was sure that despite his wearing soft cover, the hovercraft’s driver, her own head concealed by a boxy helmet, had a second lid for him tucked away out of sight up in the driver’s pit.

It also took all Tara’s tungsten-carbide self-discipline to keep her changeable eyes—at the moment pale blue—from focusing obsessively on the tattoo on the shaven side of his head beneath his beret: the snarling wolf’s head affected by many a full-fledged warrior of Clan Wolf.

She made herself look away, out at the mob. There seemed a thousand of them, pressing as close to the wire as they could without getting a good jolt. The ones right across the perimeter waved signs written mostly in Commonwealth German. Yet the bunch ahead, across the highway that led away from the spaceport gate into the Prefectural capital itself, brandished English placards.

“I wonder ifTeufelscheiss means what I think it does,” she murmured.

McCorkle frowned. His moustached face seemed by hue and apparent hardness to have been carved from a chunk of ebony. “If I knew, I’d not be tellin’ ye, lass,” he rumbled in a rare appearance of the thick Northwinder brogue to which he had been raised.

He fixed young Guard Captain Martin with a glare that had reduced a good many higher-ranking officers to quivering protoplasm. “What d’ye mean, letting this lot greet the Countess so?”

Captain Martin looked distressed—not an expression Tara expected to see on a Clan face. “We uphold the law that guarantees free speech, Master Sergeant,” he said. “We, at least, are still loyal to The Republic.”

The Master Sergeant’s eyes blazed red. Literally, as the capillaries within became engorged. It was a very, very bad sign: it meant that McCorkle, whose own self-control could put to shame Tara Campbell’s, was on the very brink of killing rage. No matter how composed he looked, two days’ high gee had told on him, too. “And what might you be meaning by that?” he demanded.

Tara leaned forward to touch his arm. “Peace, Top,” she said. “Don’t you see he’s talking about troubles in his own house, not ours?”

“It is true, Master Sergeant,” Martin said. His gray eyes were haunted-hollow and the skin of his tanned, healthy face had gone slack and slightly ashen. “I meant no offense.”

McCorkle drew a deep breath, nodded. His eyes began to clear.

Tara leaned back, hiding her own sigh.^nd so my life has gone, these last few years, she thought with a bitterness that surprised herMy arrival sparks a riot, and my first semiofficial act on Skye is to defend a Wolf .

She had studied the world’s current state as extensively as she could during the nine days’ voyage to the Terran jump point and the much shorter high-gee hop from this system’s. She knew the shame of Skye’s military to which Captain Martin had obliquely referred. As she knew that Skye had received a substantial number of Wolf Clanners during Devlin Stone’s resettlement program. Feeling a certain resentful pressure from Skyians, these were known to cleave strongly to The Republic, as a buffer against the locals. But he was stillClan .

“I will apologize for leaping at conclusions,” McCorkle husked. “I’ll not ask you to go against your stiff-necked Clan pride.”

“Thank you. But no apology is necessary: your instinct was to defend your honor, as any warrior’s would be. Yet please understand: I am of The Republic of the Sphere, and of Skye; and then I am a Clansman.”

The young officer spoke with unmistakable quiet pride—itself not particularly Clanlike. Yet loathing crawled within her for all things Clan—and for none more than the Wolf. It was the Steel Wolves who had twice attacked her home world, had forced her to destroy her own ancestral castle to keep it from falling into their hands, who had burned and flattened Tara itself with widespread butchery of civilians who had not been able to flee the fighting. The Steel Wolves whom she and her Highlanders had turned back from Terra itself scarce months before, by the skin of their teeth.

Like this soft spoken and oh-so-good-looking young man, the Steel Wolves had proclaimed themselves

loyal citizens of The Republic, not so very long ago.

But be fair, she reproved herself sternly. He’s already had one chance to turn his coat, and passed it by—no doubt at great cost to himself.

“They’re protesting against The Republic, though,” Tara Bishop said, jerking her head toward the shouting mob.

Captain Martin nodded. “They desire reunion with the Commonwealth. Your presence particularly excites them because they feel the Exarch underscores their subservience to The Republic, by here sending The Republic’s most famous hero.”

Something in the cadence and placement of the words made Tara look at him with a stirring of amusement. She had finally realized that, although he spoke English with a cosmopolitan accent little different from her own, his own birth tongue was almost certainly German.

“At least they hate you for the right reasons, Countess,” Tara Bishop murmured.

McCorkle gave her a Look. He had seen her in action in herPack Hunter , as he had seen their commander in her signatureHatchetman . He knew it was as great a mistake to downcheck Bishop for her attractiveness and often flippant manner as it was to underestimate the Countess herself, as so many did, because of her own cover-girl looks and pixy size. Yet he sometimes had a problem remembering that when Captain Bishop cracked too wise.

Tara could not help recalling that the one prior time she had seen the bloody-eyed death look of McCorkle’s ancient Terran ancestors, now thankfully faded, come into his eyes was when he looked upon what Anastasia Kerensky had made of Tara-the-city.

The gates slid open as the hovercar approached. As if that were a signal, the crowd on the highway’s far side broke through the thin cordon of militiamen armed with truncheons and clear curved shields and lunged out onto the pavement. But not, it seemed, to block the car’s path. Rather to fall upon the pro-Steiner mob, who obligingly broke free of their own restraining line and charged to meet them in a fist, boot and sign-swinging melee.

“Okay,” Tara Bishop said, “I’m confused.”

“For once I agree with you, Captain,” McCorkle said. “A bad omen, doubtless.”

Martin was speaking softly for the benefit of the commo set clipped to his right ear. He trembled perilously on the edge of a smile.

“What’s this about, Captain Martin?” Tara asked.

He snapped his expression back to a milspec mask before turning it toward her. “These are rival anti-Republicans, Countess,” he said.

“Why are they dusting it up with the Steiner fans?” Bishop asked.

“They are remnants of the Free Skye movement that fought for freedom from the Commonwealth, Captain Tara Bishop. These folk are angry because they feel they have exchanged one foreign master for another. They wish us shut of The Republic, but have no desire to be again subjugated by House

Steiner.”

With a whine of turbines that was clearly audible through the hovercar’s polycarbonate dome along with the crowd noise, which was swelling enthusiastically in response to the brawl, a squad of Guard hoverbikes zipped through the opening gates. Tara Campbell gasped. It looked as if the armored and helmeted riders meant to drive full speed right into the battling mob.

Instead they turned at the last instant, banking their rides, whipping them about, and racing their engines. Great blasts of air spilled out from under their flexible skirts.

The hoverbikes were comparatively small and light—but their blowers would push them, their riders, and their weaponry along at fifty-four klicks an hour. The force of their wind sent rioters tumbling across the blacktop. The hoverbikes began to perform what Tara recognized as acaracole , like sixteenth century cavalry: advancing, turning, blasting air, moving toward the rear to let the riders behind them have their turn.

Martin spoke another sotto voce command. A burly six-wheeled, forty-five-ton Ranger infantry fighting vehicle with Ducal Guard flashes rolled out the gate. With the fight blown out of them along with whatever dignity they may have been clinging to, the erstwhile brawlers parted before it, scampering back to their respective mobs. The riot-equipped militia troopies sealed the line behind them, and Martin’s driver steered their own hovercar adroitly out the gates.

“Very professionally done, Captain,” Tara Campbell made herself say as the little convoy gathered steam toward the skyscrapers of downtown New London. “Please pass my compliments to your people.”

He nodded. “I will, Countess Tara Campbell. Thank you.”

He went back to scanning the green hills, now blessedly devoid of demonstrators, rolling by to either side of the road as he passed on Tara’s compliments via his commo headset.

Casually and discreetly, attracting the attention of neither man, Tara Bishop took hold of her commander’s hand and gave it a quick squeeze.

Tara Campbell was tempted to flare at her aide. To tell her she was an adult, that she did not need such childish reassurance.

But she didn’t. Instead she flashed her a quick and vulnerable smile, and mouthed the word,,thanks .