flashing in the glare of the distant primary. She folded her ’Mech’s right knee, pivoting clockwise in a flash.
Just missing theShrike ’s head, the great blade smashed into the extended-range medium laser set in Black Rose’s left shoulder. White smoke gouted from it like arterial spray. Malvina’s board lit with red lights and warnings shrilled. It had been a good stroke, a vicious one.
But not enough. Far from that.
She swung her machine’s torso back the other way. The hatchet had sunk deep into theShrike ’s torso and stuck fast. The Rydian jock managed to wrench it free, and then the two autocannon that made up Black Rose’s left arm blasted the codpiece-like armored housing protecting theHatchetman ’s groin area and slammed it back into the pump house. The wall cracked and sagged.
With commendable speed, theHatchetman pushed off from the crumpled wall with its elbows and jumped straight up. Malvina followed. The humanoid ’Mech with the oddParasaurolophus -like head, with its long back- sweeping crest, could climb away from her spiky monster; even wizard Clan design could only do so much with a ninety-five-ton machine.
But the lighter ’Mech had not gotten that great a literal jump on Malvina—Clan reflexes again. The pilot aimed another hatchet blow at Malvina’s cockpit. Laughing, with gentle pressure on the attitude jet controls, Malvina pirouetted the vast machine out of its path.
The massive weapon’s momentum almost toppled theHatchetman off its drive columns. The pilot managed to keep it upright and airborne, just barely.
Until with a blast from her 100mm autocannon Malvina blew off one of the Spheroid ’Mech’s Luxor 2/Q jets.
TheHatchetman fell to the sulfurous hardpan with such force that displaced air rocked the hovering Shrike . The Rose had excellent thermal efficiency, but heat rose quickly in the cockpit, coating
Malvina’s near-naked body in instant sweat. The stink of sulfur pressed like thumbs at her nostrils, infiltrating through the cockpit seal or perhaps gaskets aft in the fuselage—she would have words with her tech crew on returning to the ship.
It was time to come down. An unfamiliar voice spoke in her ear across the general frequency she left open in case the locals found something to say to her.
“Terms,” it said. A woman’s voice.
“As if,” Malvina replied. Her taloned right foot came down on the front of theHatchetman ’ s sloped head, eliciting a sharp scream, quickly cut off.
With the Water Pure plant secured, the Ryde planetary government capitulated, even as fighting continued at other Jade Falcon landing sites across the planet. Malvina was almost disappointed. Yet with limited numbers and less time—both needed careful husbanding, for the crowning glory at Skye—she could not afford the luxury of a campaign of any length. She had places to be and people to kill. There had been no choice but to go for the planetary jugular.
Unlike Chaffee’s, Ryde’s defenders were professionals, thoroughly conventional. When they surrendered it was likely they considered it binding. Yet despite their unconditional surrender, Malvina wanted to ensure that there would be no repetition of the guerrilla campaign that had caused such difficulties on the Lyran world.
Of a global population of almost 680 million, Malvina’s Gyrfalcons quickly rounded up sixty-eight thousand at random and herded them into confinement areas improvised from sports venues and factory parking areas near the Clusters’ landing sites. Then with local media broadcasting the scene on tridee under threat of Elemental flamers, they proceeded to decimate the captives: making them count down, having every tenth one step forward, driving that tenth portion together and then killing them with machine gun and laser fire—men, women, children.
Evolution had come to Ryde, Clan style. Or at least that version practiced by Malvina Hazen and her Mongol faction.
17
Skye
Prefecture VIII
The Republic of the Sphere
25 June 3134
An Elemental sat weeping on a rock when Captain Tara Bishop came into the Seventh Skye Militia cantonment beneath a glory of endless blue autumn skies brushed with white wings of cloud.
Tara B managed not to gape. Instead, she cocked an eyebrow at Master Sergeant Angus McCorkle, who stood awaiting her nearby, just inside the gate with the neatly carved and painted wood sign bearing
the legend, “Welcome to the Home of the Garryowen” arched over it. His hands were clasped behind his back, and there was a studied lack of expression on his rugged black face. He was the one bearing the day-by-day brunt of trying to whip the remaining local main-force unit into shape. It had so far not been a happy task, even for as crusty an old top kick as McCorkle.
“What?” she asked.
“Lieutenant Padraig took offense at something one of our young gentlefolk said,” McCorkle said. “Captain.”
“Young gentlefolk” was what the senior noncoms in the regular Highlander regiments, the First Kearny and the Fusiliers, termed officers, mostly lieutenants junior grade, who had enlisted shortly before the first Steel Wolf invasion of Northwind and won quick commissions via plain attrition. While they had displayed outstanding courage, or at least a strong survival streak, to win their promotions, not all were as polished as even a man like McCorkle might prefer: imminent danger had forced Countess Campbell to take what she could get, including half-unlettered backwoodsfolk. Hence the habit of ironically reminding sundry that they were all gentlemen and ladies by order of The Republic’s Senate.
The air was full of the smell of ripening grain and wood smoke. Off toward the mountains a cloud of migratory birds wheeled, sojourning south before the gathering winter. The flyers were dark against the brilliant blue sky.
First Lieutenant Anders Monsen appeared beside Tara Bishop. He was the usual training liaison between the Highlanders and the Seventh. He greeted her warmly, but his boyish face showed deep consternation. “The problem bein’,” he said in his thick Skye Irish brogue, “that one of your snot—that is, a lieutenant junior grade used the term ‘motherless’ quite prominently in poor Paddy’s hearing.”
Tara shut her eyes.
The Clans were, to say the least, not popular with the Highlanders—nor any Northwinders, from Countess Tara on down. “Motherless,” a reference to Trueborn Clanners’ in vitro birth, had become a common epithet among soldiers who had seen their home worlds raped and Terra itself defiled by the Steel Wolves. That it had quickly devolved into a general term of abuse, no longer reserved for Clansfolk alone, did not exactly help.
Thanks to Devlin Stone’s voluntary resettlement program, a number of ethnic Clanners dwelt on Skye. Some held to the Canister; others had completely assimilated, still others practiced natural reproduction yet strictly among their own nominal caste, and termed themselves “Pure-bloods” in defiance of the classic Clan stigmatization of Freebirths. They were overrepresented in the Republic Skye Militia—including Trueborn warriors who were, so the Duke’s counterintelligence services assured them, unswervingly loyal to Skye and The Republic: Ghost Bears, Nova Cats, even a few Wolves and Falcons.
Whatever else he was, the sobbing man was pure Elemental. On hearing his officer speak he raised a great tear-stained face. “Ihad a mither,” he said plaintively—in an Irish brogue which, to Tara’s near-horror, was every bit as marked as Monsen’s. “An’ it’s not even a year since she joined the saints.”
“Don’t tell me he’s Catholic,” Tara said, before she could stop herself.
“What else might he be, and him a good Bogtrotter?” Monsen asked, perhaps a bit too ingenuously. “You should meet our Padre, Captain Seamus. Two hundred fifty centimeters of faith and fury is he; and wasn’t he free- fighting champion of all Skye when he was just a tad of a seminarian at St. Angela’s? A largish tad, I grant you that, now.”
