Aleks’ mention oMongols had double impact: a faction had arisen in recent years among Jade Falcon’s warriors that called itself by that name. They contended, heretically, that had Nicholas been perfect, as Clan lore held, the Clans would have conquered Terra eighty-two years ago. Since the Founder borrowed so much from the Mongol hordes of old Terra, the movement demanded that the other aspects of Mongol warfare should be adopted: total conquest by any means, however harsh or “dishonorable”—all in the service, yet, of the Founder’s dream.
In the years since their last parting the sibkin’s paths had diverged in more than just spatial dimensions. Malvina was herself the Mongols’ leading proponent, had attained ristar status despite it, as had Aleksandr despite his contrary compassion. She was their focal point among the Falcons, but also within those Clans who yet considered their Inner Sphere territories to be Occupation Zones; Hell’s Horses and even Clan Wolf, ancient enemy, whom she claimed to detest more than any.
The sibkin had, with a resumption of that effortless nonverbal communication they had developed so long ago as frightened children alone against their sibko and the universe, simply mooted such issues when they came together under the eyes of Bec Malthus and Khan Jana Pryde to plot Clan Jade Falcon’s return to the Inner Sphere. But Aleks understood a conflict of their visions approached as fast as the first for-real planetary assault. And he at least did not look forward to that confrontation.
“Yet so effective were their tactics, their foes came to hugely exaggerate their numbers in their own minds,” Malvina said. She kept her tone steady, conversational. She breathed normally. As did he.
Malvina Hazen did not lack advantages of her own. Although Aleksandr possessed astounding speed for a man his size, she was as much faster than he as he was stronger.
And then—except in unarmed combat, where the disparity in strength and size was simply too great for her to overcome with any regularity—he had never beaten her.
“Their situation was not so different from what we face,” she said. “Overwhelming odds: a vastness to conquer; rich, teeming, powerful nations to defeat. The Founder did not scruple to borrow terms from the Mongols,Touman and evenKhan . Should we, Turkina’s brood, designed for ferocity, be too nice to learn from their methods and so risk throwing away our holy cause?”
As she spoke they dueled, a duet of lightning slashes and open-handed blocks and blows. An outsider would have thought it rehearsed. It was—but only in the sense that these two were both masters of the form of combat, and had spent hundreds of hours squaring off against one another in just this way.
Aleks’ big brow furrowed, and his eyes seemed to focus into the distance, past the padding affixed to the bulkhead for three meters, over his sister’s moon-pale shoulder. “Yet we must not be so entranced, even by victory, that we betray our reason for fighting, our very purpose for existence as warriors—”
They had had this debate often before.
Which was why she drew it out now. Hoping his mind would follow....
As he spoke she reversed knife in hand and thrust for his groin. He danced back, turning his right hip to back his blade, which parried hers in a cool counterclockwise arc. He caught her with sufficient force that his strength told then, knocking her knife hand well past his buttocks. He followed through, up and over in a backhand reverse slash at her cheek with savage speed.
She had already dropped, turning, using the momentum his parry’s violence imparted. She laid her free hand on the mat to pivot and came around full circle to slam the heel of her straightened left leg against the inside of his planted right ankle. Its full force delivered normal to his line of balance, the sweep scythed the leg right out from under him. He fell.
And Malvina bestrode him in the mount position, him on his back, her butt on his belly, her strong legs clamped about his hips. The needle-sharp tip of her long, widening-tapering blade depressed the skin of his Adam’s apple, ever so slightly. She leaned forward with both palms stacked on the pommel, and smiled.
“And so I win again,” she said. A droplet of sweat fell from her well-sheened forehead to his lips. He licked it away. “And so I always will. It is good that you are the one thing in the cosmos I love, brother dear!”
She laughed, threw away her knife—and before he could react had leaned forward again, pinning his wrists with her small fists, and crushed her mouth to his.
After a moment he let go his own knife, and laughed into her mouth, and returned the kiss with equal fervor.
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?”
