Flight of the Falcon

22

Outside New London Skye

17 July 3134

“As I see it, lass,” the handsome young officer with the collar of his Seventh Skye Militia dress tunic artfully undone said in a Skye-Irish brogue well-fueled by Skye-Irish whiskey, “our situation harks back to that confronting the empires of Terra herself, away back in the age of sail a century or two before spaceflight began. And thank you; you’re a blessing to a man.”

The last he said to a diminutive woman with glossy black hair bobbed to bangs across the front and long and unbound in the back, who had handed him a fresh glass. She wore a brief black dress fit to a trim but well-appointed figure and matching heels. Her features were pert and nicely chiseled, her eyes so blue as to be almost indigo. She smiled encouragingly.

He continued, duly encouraged. She was really quite lovely. Even if there was a haunting air of familiarity about her. “Back in those days, the major powers were separated by days and weeks of travel asea, their outposts and colonies by weeks, even months. Intercepting enemies or raiders or even learning of their activities was a matter as much of luck as skill. Rendezvousing or communicating with one’s own far-flung forces was no easier.”

Bodies and conversation ebbed and flowed about them in lazy currents between goosebumped white walls. The party was one of the more or less weekly affairs thrown by film mogul Hilario Gupta, owner of Islands in the Sky Productions, at his house that rambled like a random growth of giant white crystals on a forested hillside overlooking New London and Thames Bay from the north.

“Yet they managed to maintain world-girdling empires,” the officer continued. He was lean and long-jawed and had curly chestnut hair curving down his cheeks as sideburns. A circle of admiring listeners, not exclusively feminine, surrounded him as he stood in one of the somewhat stark rooms of Gupta’s polyhedron palace. “Indeed, they managed to have themselves a set of global wars from the sixteenth or seventeenth century onwards, although they didn’t get ’round to calling them ‘world’ wars until the twentieth; still, only the unprecedented scale of the forces involved distinguished the acknowledged world wars from what had gone before, not their nature.”

While he spread himself generously among his audience, he concentrated a little more on the little stunner in black with the flip bangs. For her part, she seemed to be listening with peculiar intensity. He smiled inwardly, and contemplated potentialities.

Another woman, a more than acceptable blonde, asked what was being done to protect Skye. “Well, we’re training quite intensively with these newcomers from The Republic,” he allowed, “helping them get up to speed on conditions on Skye, don’tcha know?”

“I’ll bet it’s a real pleasure training under that commander of theirs, if you know what I mean,” commented a noted New Glasgow bon vivant and gossip columnist from the fringe.

The officer generously decided not to squash the plump, bearded poseur. He had written complimentary things about the Seventh. Which was none too common. “She’s easy enough on the eyes, to be sure,

now,” he said casually. “But don’t be fooled: under that glamorous exterior beats a heart as chill as that of any Kirk divine. They’re as stiff-necked as our local Scots, now, this Northwind lot; only a trifle more rustic and rough about the edges.Sassenach at heart, they are.”

A man had sidled up to the group. He wore a loose, color-swirled smock over white duck trousers and deck shoes. He was nondescript except for a head of slightly receding dark hair and Asian eyes. He leaned in and spoke to the black-haired woman, whose attentive smile had grown a trifle glassy.

“Pardon me, friend,” the militia officer said, “but the lass is with me.”

The interloper smiled. It was a friendly smile, disarming in its charm. Yet there was something behind it that chilled like liquid nitrogen. “Not anymore,” he said lightly.

The woman nodded at the young raconteur, smiled radiantly, and rose to slip away with the newcomer.

Standing on the deck in the light of Luna, Skye’s single moon, Tara ran her fingers through her long, luxuriant, spurious hair. It felt strange to have long hair again. She enjoyed the sensation, but was glad she could be done with it when this was over. It was about the way she felt about acquaintances’ children: she loved to coo over them, and cuddle them and give way to rushes of maternal warmth. Then hand them back to their parents.

The young Limerick rake had a keen sense of history; her education had been comprehensive enough that she recognized the essential accuracy of his tales. Nor could she argue with his comparing Terra’s age of sail to the post-HPG Inner Sphere. Although she wasn’t as ready to endorse certain other of his observations. ...

Another small contingent of troops had trickled in, of her own elite First Kearny, from facing down the Dracs—andthe Dragon’s Fury, led by Tara’s own mentor, Duchess Katana Tormark—on Sadalbary on the frontier, where once upon a day young Tara had first won a name for herself as something other than a pretty little poster girl, and so well-mannered. Grim battle-hardened veterans they were, though they made it clear they felt it was they, not the less-seasoned troops who had fought with Tara against the Steel Wolves, had something to prove: for guilt chewed them, that they had not been able to fight for their home world themselves. They brought with them three BattleMechs, anArbalest , aPanther and a powerful Tundra Wolf.

If only we had had them on Northwind,she thought,soldiers and machines. . . .

She stopped the thought. She had dedicated her life to fighting for the great experiment which was The Republic. She could not allow herself to begrudge the sacrifices her home world had made for the cause.

Or would.

They had come from the other end of The Republic, carried by a virtual command circuit: a chain of JumpShips which, upon jumping into a system, could pass cargo and passengers along to another vessel waiting with capacitors fully charged, so that it could make the next hyperspatial jump without delay. In this case it was as much happenstance as planning, hence the “virtual.” Under Devlin Stone’s reforms,

The Republic had cut back on military starships as well as BattleMechs, and the current Exarch was reluctant to press civilian hulls into service, in which Tara concurred. A combination of purpose-stationed Republican JumpShips and cooperative civilian craft had, however, enabled recall orders to reach this lot of Highlanders, and they themselves to get here, in a blindingly short time, given the enormous distance they had to traverse.

Yet their coming brought as much ill news as good, because it was only by unreasonable good fortune they reached Skye in such good time—or at all. Such conditions would seldom recur. Tara would be lucky to have half her Highlanders here before the invaders, based on any kind of reasonable projections as to when the Falcons might strike.

She sighed, drinking in a breeze tangy with the scent of mountain conifers and crisp with coming autumn. Then she shivered, although it was not chill.

“The Falcons have loaded their expedition up with all the ’Mechs they can spare,”Master Merchant Senna had told them. “We believe they carry about a fifth as many by proportion as their ancestors did a century ago. You do the math.”

Tara could. She had. She might match them in BattleMechs—in six months or more.

“Tara.” It was Paul in his loud shirt, stepping out onto the deck behind her.

She turned. With the accountant came three men, each less likely than the next: a wiry man just taller than Tara, with intense dark eyes and a brown moustache, who seemed to vibrate with excess energy; a mobile wall of blond-bearded man; and an immensely tall and skeletally lean man with a shaven skull, gargoyle-sharp face and dark red goatee, who seemed to have short horns sprouting from his forehead.

“These are the lot I told you about,” Paul Laveau said. “Countess Tara Campbell, I’d like you to meet the Firehouse Gang: Tom Cross, J. D. Rich, and Seymour Street.”

“I’m charmed,” Tara said, laughing. “Firehouse Gang?”

“We’re wizards,” said Tom Cross, the thin restless one.

“Wizards?” she echoed.

She cast a quick glance toward Paul. She had spent a lot of time with him both on and off duty the last few weeks, with a great deal of encouragement from her aide, who claimed she needed to get more recreation. TB gave the word peculiar emphasis.

Remembering a time not so long ago when a working relationship had turned into something more, and the catastrophic effects of that, Tara C. had held back. Despite that, she had found herself falling into fast friendship with Paul Laveau. His tireless work within the Palace showed he was as dedicated as she. He was also warm, wise and he made her laugh as no one she could remember had been able to do since her childhood—an ability she did not precisely look for in an accountant.

“Effects wizards,” said the broad, blond Rich.

“As in movies,” said the tall and lanky Street. His horns were clever prosthetics. She hoped. “Although I wouldn’t exactly want to limit your conception of what’s meant bywizards ”

Tara turned to Paul, trying not to let her disappointment show. He had promised her more than mere diversion in bringing her here tonight. She had dared hope ... she wasn’t sure what, really. But for something real, some tangible help for her increasing inward desperation.

“I’m delighted to meet you all,” she said with practiced brightness. “But I’m afraid it’s soldiers I need

now, and tanks and BattleMechs, more than wizards.”

“Another way to think of us,” Street said, “is as masters of illusion.”

“Nice disguise, Countess,” Cross said. “Of course, I made you the moment you walked in the door. Of course. But not bad. For an amateur.”

“I’m afraid we can’t do actual soldiers for you,” J. D. Rich said, “or tanks or BattleMechs. But are you sure you can’t make use ofappearing to have a whole lot more than you do?”

She turned to look at him intently.

New London

Skye

17 July 3134

There was nothing unusual about Tara Campbell’s face and voice blanketing the airwaves of Skye. Nor was it odd she should be appearing as part of a recruiting drive, especially under the present emergency. She’d begun starring on recruiting posters as a child.

What was peculiar was the particularkind of service to The Republic she was pushing.

“Are you willing to trade your life for freedom?”her vibrantly beautiful and charming, yet solemn, face asked from holovid tanks in living rooms and bedrooms and bars in New Glasgow and Donegal.

“Freedom for your loved ones, freedom for your fellow citizens of Skye, freedom for billions of citizens of The Republic of the Sphere whom you will never even know?”it asked, two stories tall, from cinema screens in New London and Limerick and Sgain Dubh.

“Will you leave your jobs, your families, the safety of your homes and everyday life,”her voice asked from radio speakers on fishing trawlers in the North Sea and scientific stations on the southern polar ice cap, “for nothing but a certainty of danger and an extremely high likelihood of death at the hands of a merciless alien invader?

“If so,”she told laborers at a sheep station in Otero County at the continent’s far end, and in break rooms in the mighty Shipil and Cyclops factories, “then join me in fighting for Skye against Clan Jade Falcon.

“Join me—join the Forlorn Hope!”

Duke Gregory practically self-destructed.

“Himmelsfahrtkommando?”he roared. It was the term Tara used in her German-language vidcasts. It meant,tr/p to Heaven detachment.

He upset the two-hundred-kilogram blood-oak desk in his office as if it were a toy and booted his personal desk-comp through a two-hundred-year-old leaded glass window into a cobbled courtyard two stories below. It narrowly missed the Minister of Health.

Y et when his howling rage had spent itself he laughed. “If the pretty little Countess is eager to throw away her life for Skye,” he told his aides as they crept timidly out of the woodwork, “who am I to argue? At that, it might even shame some of our homegrown quibblers and carpers and special pleaders into piping down!”

Prefect Della Brown wanted to publicly censure Tara Campbell. She believed it all a publicity stunt. She also feared it sent a “negative message.”

Planetary Legate Stanford Eckard resisted. If it was a “publicity stunt,” it was one publicizing the threat to Skye—which, as rumors filtered into the system with JumpShips, of Jade Falcon attacks on Seginus, Glengarry and Izar, was becoming increasingly real to the people of Skye as well as its defenders. And after all, he observed, in any kind of honesty, the Countess had far greater experience than either of them ateither publicity or war.

But in the end it was not Eckard’s calm and reasoned arguments that caused Prefect Brown to swallow her resentment-born distrust of the glamorous offworld Countess, nor brought a smile to the scarred and pensive lips of Duke Gregory Kelswa-Steiner.

It was the response by the people of Skye, who turned out in unprecedented numbers in answer to Tara’s call, and joined the Forlorn Hope.