“heading for the Inner Sphere. They passed the data along to a Lyran trader at Arcturus, in Wolf territory.”
Tara felt the skin contract on her face as if the room’s carefully conditioned air had suddenly become dry as the lunar surface. She did not like or trust any Clanner.Dislike anddistrust were paltry euphemisms for the feelings she harbored for the Wolves.
“The Wolves trade with everybody,” said General Cordesman, who sat to the Exarch’s left. “Everyone does, and has for generations. Including the Falcons.”
“Even had Clan Wolf learned somehow of the message the Sea Foxes carried,” Major Kiyosaki said, “we believe it unlikely they would have tried to prevent it reaching The Republic of the Sphere. It’s a tossup as to who hates the Falcons more, the Wolves or the Foxes.”
“Why did the Sea Foxes assume the Falcons were headed for The Republic?” Captain Bishop asked, not bothering to petition for the floor this time. “For that matter, why do we? A line drawn from Graceland through Kandersteg heads them right into the middle of the Commonwealth.”
“But, just as you pointed out,” Tara said, “their behavior is inconsistent with an invasion of Steinerspace. It’s as if—”
She turned to the Exarch. “—as if they don’t want to be slowed down on their way to their real goal. And what target would they want badly enough to commit so large a portion of their total military resources, so deep in the Commonwealth?”
Redburn looked around the table. “A decapitation strike at Tharkad?” Cordesman suggested. He had a heavy, deeply lined face and bristling eyebrows. “Perhaps they feel they can conquer the Commonwealth by destroying the Archon and her government at a stroke.”
“They haven’t learned from their mistakes if they think that,” Captain Bishop said. “I know the Clans disdain any history but their own, but even they have to’ve noticed that taking out Inner Sphere leaders doesn’t stop their subjects from fighting Clan conquest tooth and nail. The Clanners can be mighty thick-headed at times, but few of them are actually stupid. Ahh. General. Sir.”
Everybody had turned to stare at the junior officer with the temerity to speak right out among so many stars and important civilians.
“They’re headed here,” Tara Campbell said quietly but firmly across the silence.
Redburn sat a moment, gazing at her with eyes sunk deep in his skull. He glanced at the high-ranking officers who flanked him. “We dare not operate on any other assumption,” he said in a voice as papery as a dried corn husk.
Tara turned back to the display. The circuits in her head were working madly. “They won’t come near to following the path the Foxes took,” she said, “because for the Falcons to take a WarShip into Wolf space would mean instant, all-out war between them. Raids’re one thing; a battleship is quite another.”
She paused, then shook her head. What a bother! To have to think of people who hate Clan Wolf as much as I do as enemies!
Aloud, she went on: “So, if we stipulate that their target is The Republic—and I agree with you,
Exarch”—with effort, she forbore from addingfor once , out loud, anyway—“that we dare not assume anything else—they will probably enter our territory in Prefecture IX.”
“Which, Countess Northwind,” the Exarch said, flattening his palms on the table before him, “is why I have decided to dispatch you at once to Skye, the Prefectural capital, to begin organizing a defense against a possible invasion of The Republic of the Sphere. Which honesty compels me to warn you will be a most desperate undertaking indeed.”
She stared at him. It was as if the air had solidified within the column of her throat.
“What about the Triarii Protectors IX?” she asked. “The Principes Guards and Hastati Sentinels?”
“It is thispeace, ” Cordesman said, not bothering to conceal leaden distaste. “The golden age: the universal draw-down of forces, the pressure from the Senate and the civilians to keep spending less and
less on the military.”
He sighed. He did not acknowledge either the Exarch’s look of mild alarm or Tara’s narrow-eyed anger at his criticism of policies which sprang from Devlin Stone himself.
“In sum, Countess, the three Republican regular combined-arms regiments charged with defending Prefecture IX are paper tigers—as they were even before the HPG went down and Jasek Kelswa-Steiner seduced the lion’s share of their remnants into his Stormhammer regiment, gutting Skye’s militia into the bargain. Aside from whatever planetary forces may remain, Prefecture IX lies open to the Falcon fleet.”
9
The Forest Primeval Near New London, Skye Prefecture IX The Republic of the Sphere 30 April 3134
Overhead a virago screeched outrage at the intrusion. Much occupied by his thoughts, Duke Gregory Kelswa-Steiner, Governor of Skye and Lord Governor of Prefecture IX (and only the second to hold both titles), continued to ride, oblivious to the possibility the jaylike local bird-analogue might dislodge a hard, baby fist-sized seed pod from the lofty branches and drop it with remarkable accuracy on his head. He almost wished it would; it would give him a chance to vent some of the anger simmering within him by blasting the creature with the pulse- laser pistol in its flapped holster on the belt of his leather riding breeches.
His horse Iago’s dark chestnut coat was sheened with sweat and the beast breathed hard despite the morning’s early-autumn cool. The animal was a gelding. The Duke was a man’s man, a qualified Mech Warrior who had fought in The Republic’s armed forces against the first Capellan invasion before resuming civilian life, and secure enough in that fact not to burden himself with an uncut stallion.
Which occurred to him in a most unflattering way in his almost-ritual daily thinking about his son, Jasek, and possible omissions he had made in the boy’s upbringing.
Duke Gregory should have been a man at peace: a big, fit, middle-aged man in robust health, with most of his hair, and that seal brown going to distinguished silver at the temples. A crisp morning ride in beautiful woods outside the Prefectural capital of New London, with mountains close enough on one hand to break into view at times above the trees to the north, and Thames Bay close enough on the other to smell salt-sea breeze as well as sun-warmed leaves. The great trees were upon the cusp of turning, and late-season field insects sang sawing yet melodious tunes without awareness of the impending arrival of first frost to still their voices.
His domain enjoyed relative peace and order, unlike the Prefectures on the other side of The Republic, wracked by rebellion and factional warfare, or even Terra itself, which had suffered invasion by the Steel Wolves some months before—a poignant thing for the Duke, as for most Skyians, since Clan Wolf had played a key role in freeing Skye of the brutal violence of the Blakist Jihad decades before. It was part of his collective memory, as it had happened before his birth. Skye shared no boundaries with any Clan zone. Its only neighbor not of The Republic was the Lyran Commonwealth, of which Skye itself had once been part; and House Steiner still maintained, at least publicly, its cautious bourgeois approval of The Republic, and disavowed any interest in reclaiming the territory it had ceded to Devlin Stone. The Draconis Combine, an ancient enemy, lay dangerously near, it was true, as did the perilously disordered fragments of the Free Worlds League. Yet planet and Prefecture generally prospered.
He had, Duke Gregory knew, fortuitous placement between the core Prefecture X and the trade-minded Commonwealth to thank in large part for that fact, as for the relative rapidity with which Skye had recovered from the Jihad. Interstellar traffic had dropped sharply in the wake of the HPG collapse. Yet it had also rebounded, if not to pre-collapse levels. Without question, trade was facilitated by faster-than-light communications, yet it did not depend upon them. The nations of pre-space flight Terra had enjoyed substantial, even global trade long before they possessed means of communicating faster than a good ship could sail with favorable winds.
They had also seized, held and administered empires. That latter thought was not so comforting.
Which was only tangentially why the Duke scowled as he rode through the beautiful morning.
The main reason was none other than his son and, as soon as he got around to it, erstwhile heir: the Landgrave Jasek Kelswa-Steiner.
The problem was, the boy longed to be a hero. Which would not have been so bad. Except he had the stuff for it.
