Flight of the Falcon

2

Jade Falcon Naval Reserve BattleshipEmerald Talon Jump Point orbit Summit 4 March 3134

“There is no question possible, Galaxy Commander,” Star Admiral Dolphus Binetti said, gazing up into the holographic display of space near the emergence point which floated in the middle of theEmerald Talon ’s semicircular bridge. “The merchantman could not miss us if he were blind and his sensor crew drunk.”

Binetti was a short man, pompous and somewhat stocky, with a black spade-shaped beard around a jaw that remained firm in outline, despite his paunch. Age and declining fitness should have made him unlikely to maintain either high rank or Bloodname, which were generally held as they were won: by combat. But even before decades of enforced peace and, worse, contact with the soft races of the Inner Sphere had brought decadence to Clan Jade Falcon—so he and his hearer both believed—the Clans had realized there were roles even for warriors in which a decline in physical prowess, or indeed its absence to begin with, could not be allowed to trump knowledge and skill. Piloting a BattleMech or an aerospace fighter was not a job for an uneducated clod, but it paled beside the technical knowledge required to run a starship, much less a battlegroup. Binetti would lose his place when his command skills declined, not when someone wrestled him out of it.

Not that his guest was inclined to criticize on that basis. He himself would have fallen by the wayside long ago, had he been forced to rely purely upon his prowess in personal combat to maintain his own exalted place in his Clan. Given decadence, why not enjoy it? And anyway, whatever he had done to ensure his own survival, career and literal, had kept the Falcon from being robbed of one of her most able and dedicated servants.

As Khan Jana Pryde, ruler of Clan Jade Falcon, herself said often, “Traditions are worth respecting only if they further our cause.”

Binetti’s companion smiled and banished such mostly pleasant reveries from the cathedral of his mind. “Let him look, then, Star Admiral,” said Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus, leader of the proud Turkina Keshik—and of the expeditionary force as a whole. “There is no way to stop him.”

“We could interdict,” Binetti rapped. “Blast him from space.”

“The Khan has commanded the Talon be used only to awe, not to fight,” Malthus reminded him.

Binetti snapped up a hand in irritation. “Loose our fighters, then. They could use the blooding.”

“We could,” Malthus agreed, nodding and smiling gravely. “But to what end? The plan, remember, is to avoid conflict with our unwitting Lyran hosts if at all possible.”

“Best way to do that is to keep them in the dark,” the admiral said.

Malthus shrugged. He was a man of imposing height and breadth of shoulder, not unusual for a MechWarrior. He had a not insignificant bulge about the middle, which was unusual; but it was hidden by the artful drape of the robe-like garment he wore, green trimmed with black—the Jade Falcon colors.

Of course, such artifice was itself none too common within the Clans.

Topping all he possessed a great rounded square of head on which russet hair retreated between temple and crown, leaving a wide arrow-shaped salient down his broad forehead, and a wide, square jaw fringed with beard. To the extent the Clans, which tended to select against age, had any such thing, he fit perfectly the archetype of an elder statesman who remained, however, a prime Mech Warrior. Which was why Khan Jana Pryde had flouted tradition and decreed to him the coveted command of Turkina Keshik, lead formation of the entire Falcon Touman, and hence the greatdesant into the heart of decadence in the Inner Sphere, instead of leaving the outcome to a bidding Trial.

That, or Bec Malthus had come out second-best in a game of intrigue, a game in which he held himself past master among Clan Jade Falcon—but that thought did not bear thinking.

“They will inevitably learn, my friend,” he murmured sonorously. “Indeed, they may know already. Someone might have observed us on one of our previous jumps through Steiner space, without us observing them in turn.”

“That is so,” Binetti acknowledged, only somewhat stiffly. Disagreements were best handled circumspectly, lest they turn into open dispute—in which case the party who came out second best would be compelled by Clan custom to claim the “right” ofsurkai , the rite of forgiveness for being divisive. Khan Jana Pryde had specifically enjoined her warriors from intramural dueling, common among the Clans and incessant among Falcons. So desperate was their undertaking that literally no one could be spared.

Which made the fight currently taking place in one of the WarShip’s bays that much more remarkable. Neither Binetti nor Malthusoficially knew of the combat trial taking place between a Star Captain and a Galaxy Commander, even though it was being carried out with full Clan ceremony.

“The success of ourdesant is of course all,” Malthus intoned. “And however much it might cut against our warrior grain, old friend, all depends upon avoiding conflict as long as possible. For even given the superiority of our Clan ways and our Clan warriors—and Jade Falcon’s warriors are supreme without question in all of human space—those truths notwithstanding, our mission is so supremely ambitious, so daring, that we must seek every advantage as zealously as a Sea Fox merchant-captain grubbing after the last possible penny of profit.”

Binetti nodded his square head almost dolorously. “What you say is true, Bec Malthus,” he said. “But I burn toact . And I am not the only one: already my Naval Reserve warriors grow restive. Patience has not often been reckoned high among the Falcons’ virtues.”

“How well I know,” Malthus said. He still marveled at the sheer sententiousness of his fellow ranking Clansmen, and not just cement heads like the Admiral. “Yet sacrificehas been so reckoned, and so we must sacrifice immediate gratification of our longing for the hot blood of action, no matter how strong that demand.”

“I suppose,” Binetti said grudgingly.

“In any event, emissaries of Khan Jana Pryde should shortly make official representation to the Archon to announce our mission, avow peaceful intent toward theLyranCommonwealth , and demand our passage not be contested upon pain of war.”

“Speaking of actions with little precedent in our Clan,” Binetti said, “I do not know, friend, if I can truthfully say that I hope the emissaries succeed in mollifying the Steiners, but I will admit I have little faith that they will.”

Malthus smiled. “We shall see ourselves, in the fullness of time. In the meantime, we are agreed, are we not, that we shall not contest or molest this little merchantman fleeing us so incontinently?”

“We are, Galaxy Commander,” said Dolphus Binetti. He pushed a brief snort through his broad short nose. “Bid well and done.”

“That was stupid,” the giant said, grinning all over his red-bearded face as he enfolded Aleks Hazen in his tree trunk-sized arms.

“I am grateful as always for your unflagging support, Magnus,” said Aleks, his voice muffled by the Elemental’s slablike pectoral muscle.

“Not so,” a voice said from behind Aleks. He disengaged from the giant and turned.

The voice belonged, as well he knew, to a small, compactly built, strikingly beautiful woman with a meter-long white-blond braid tossed over the shoulder of an almost all-black Jade Falcon field uniform.

“It was good for discipline,” she said in a voice crisp and cool as a springtime wind onSudeten . “We must allow those who support us to see that we support them, inferior though theybe ”

Having availed themselves of the opportunity to pop his shoulder back into its socket, tech-class medics bundled the fallen and still unconscious Star Captain from the hold. The spectators had begun to filter out. The red-bearded Elemental tossed a clean white towel at Aleks. “Some of us have duties to tend to. I’ll see you later, Galaxy Commander.” He tipped a finger off one bushy eyebrow to the small woman and walked away with the customary ponderous grace of his specialized breed.

Aleks looked down at the compact woman. “For all that your own uniform is not quite regulation,” he said. “I understand you are a stickler for discipline, Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen. Forgive me if I wonder whether you would have the same attitude had I undertaken to so instruct one of your Gyrfalcons?”

Her laugh was musical, and despite her rigid military bearing neither forced nor strained. “Of course I would! Has it beenthat long since we were sibkin, Aleksandr dear?”

Malvina sat up in bed with the covers bunched any old way around her breasts. A pink-tipped pointy one poked out regardless.

“Why did you not?” she asked, not looking at him.

“Why did I not what?” asked Aleks. He lay beside her with his hands laced behind his head. His white teeth gleamed faintly in the light of a dimmed lamp beside the bed in his austere courtesy quarters aboard the flagship.

“Why did you not bid for command of the Gyrfalcons? The real prize, Turkina Keshik, lay beyond both our grasps—we knew going in that Khan Jana Pryde had earmarked it for old Bec Malthus. But you might have won the right to command the Delta Galaxy—rather than picking the Zetas, green and still suffering the taint of long-agodezgra ”

She lay down beside him and drew the nails of her right hand down his muscular, nearly hairless chest. Many female Clan warriors wore their nails square-cut short. Malvina Hazen wore hers long, enameled white, with stars in silver on them that were visible only in the proper light.

She was as fanatical a supporter of Jade Falcon tradition, and the Crusader cause, as Aleks himself.

That did not mean that she was orthodox.

“We might have had a lovely battle, you and I,” she almost purred.

He uttered a short laugh. “Why fight? I got what I wanted.”

She sat bolt upright and glared at him with a flash of genuine anger in her ice blue eyes. “Don’t play coy with me, Aleksandr!” She dropped her voice low. “Do you not recall how I held you at night, in our sibko barracks, when you wept at the harshness of our lives?”

“I do not forget.” His grin never faltered. “I never forget, Malvina. You know.”

She frowned. Her anger softened and flowed into perplexity. “Do you scorn the Delta Galaxy, then?”

“Not in the slightest, sister dear. I merely wanted the challenge.”

“Challenge.” A hunch of her bare snow-white shoulder added the question mark.

He nodded. “The Gyrs are a fine Galaxy, veteran and eager as their totem birds; they will win great glory for themselves and the Jade Falcon with a fire-eatingristar such as yourself to lead them. Many are the songs you shall inspire together, and long will they be sung. Turkina’s Beak—” He shrugged his great, muscled shoulders. “Turning them into a Galaxy as splendid as any in our history—that will be a feat which wins me remembrance in a different kind of song.”

She said nothing about his implicit assumption that he could reform the notably incorrigible Zeta Galaxy into a top-grade formation. She doubted it no more than did he.

“Besides,” he added, “you would have won anyway. You always beat me, back in the sibko.” The word meantsibling cohort . It referred to a brood of Clan children, genetic siblings, decanted simultaneously from the canisters in which they had been conceived and grown to viable infants.

“Notalways,” she said. “Not hand-to-hand.”

“Nooo,” he said, drawing out the word. “Not after I grew to half again your size.” And he laughed.

She shook her head. “You must laugh more than any Clan warrior in history. Certainly among Jade Falcons.”

“Ah, no, Malvina dear, I fear I cannot claim that honor even among our own Bloodnamed. That belongs to my chief of Elementals, Star Colonel Magnus Icaza”

“I do not place him.”

“The red-beard, huge even for an Elemental. He stood me second in my Trial of Honor this day-cycle”

She made a thoughtful noise. “I expected to see that change. The readiness of your laughter. After all the years.”

He laughed again. “If I could keep laughing through what we went through as children,” he said, “I can laugh through anything.”

She turned sharply to look at him, although her expression was as mild as her chiseled features would permit. “You find fault with our system, then?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “In our case it seems to have worked, certainly. Let us say, rather, I regret the necessity of treating children so.”

For a moment he lay staring at the overhead, vaguely visible in the butter-colored light. She turned her head and regarded him, her triangular face unreadable in the dimness—and probably also in full sunlight.

“Look at us,” she murmured. “Two playmates, once. And now the Eyes of the Falcon.”

He made an amused noise, half back-of-the-throat laugh, half muted snort. “They call us worse things as well.”

It was unusual for two of three unit commanders within a Clan force to bear the same Bloodname. What was truly rare, perhaps unprecedented, was that Aleks and Malvina were sibkin: members of the same sibko.

Among the Clans sexual liaisons among sibkin were not considered remarkable and were not discouraged, since both males and females received long-term contraceptive implants while still infants. Reproduction among the warrior classes was conducted in vitro according to scientifically planned breeding programs, not left to accidents of sweaty biology. Perhaps because of their extreme closeness—and the fact that they were the sole two of their sibko to survive to maturity, in large part because of that bond—Malvina and Aleksandr had long referred to one another as brother and sister. Terms which for virtually all other Clanners carried emotional weight only in reference to comradeship, not relationship.

“Let them talk,” Malvina said, giving her head a defiant toss that made her braid slither across a bare shoulder. “We fought for our names and won them.”

Bloodnames were rare, much rarer than in the days of the Clans’ first onslaught against the Inner Sphere. Originally Nicholas Kerensky decreed that each Bloodname—the surname of a man or woman who had helped him found the Clans—could be borne by only twenty-five warriors. Then, along with persuading the Clans to draw down their stores of weapons, especially BattleMechs, Devlin Stone, founder of The Republic of the Sphere, told them they were so correct about the holy exclusivity of a warrior’s role that they should actually reduce the percentage of their total populations who were born into the warrior caste. In order to prevent Name bearers from becoming a disproportionately large part of their thus-depleted warrior classes, diluting the sacred purity of the Bloodname concept, most Clans had Reaved themselves, ruthlessly reducing the number of holders of each Bloodname in brutal Trials. They then left the Bloodcount reduced, and Bloodnames consequently much harder to come by. Or keep.

That Aleks had shortly followed Malvina in winning the Hazen Bloodname, each in their first Trial, had been considered a scandal in some quarters. Though each sibko was descended from a particular Bloodname’s originator, and its members entitled to compete for that Name, it seldom happened that two sibkin succeeded. And Hazen was a name of special reverence: it sprang from Elizabeth Hazen, keeper of Turkina herself, the Jade Falcon who gave the Clan her name.

“And I killed none of my opponents in the Trials,” Aleks said, “whereas you left none alive.”

She refused to be baited. Instead she smiled dazzlingly. “Of course.”

“The official line,” said Aleks, “as concocted behind the scenes by none other than our esteemeddesant commander Bec Malthus, is that our shared triumph proves the superiority of the Clan breeding scheme—as perfected by Jade Falcon, of course.” He chuckled. “Of course, within Clan Jade Falcon, if you say ‘behind the scenes,’ you have justsaid Bec Malthus.”

She frowned, drew a knee up under her chin. “Does that not bother you, then, that overall command has devolved upon a known intriguer?”

“Perhaps that is what we need.”

She looked at him with something near outrage. “But was it not to avoid such corruptions that Aleksandr Kerensky led us out of the Inner Sphere in the first place, centuries ago?”

He shrugged. “Indeed. And all honor to the Kerenskys and their vision. Yet whether we like it or not, change has been forced on us—was forced on us decades before our sibko was ever turned out of its artificial wombs. Even before Bec Malthus was born. Besides—”

He sat up. “This wholedesant upon which we’ve staked the future of the Clan—of all humanity—is nothing but a grand deception, is it not? And you and I are the ones who dreamed it up.”

She nodded judiciously. “That is true,” she said and smiled.

“Which is why it cannot fail.” She reached for him again.