What’s worse, Tara thought,is I don’t think he’s pulling my leg. She turned to McCorkle.
“First Lieutenant Monsen informs me that Lieutenant Padraig is a very valorous man.” He hesitated only momentarily before speaking the last word. “He served with distinction in combat with the Hastati Protectors IX.”
“It’s only that he’s a sensitive nature to him,” Monsen said. “Sure, he did his stint, won his medals, and home he came to Skye to help till the family farm in County Loguire”
Only by dint of superhuman effort did Tara restrain herself from blurting,Hitched to a plow? Shehoped his mother had been Elemental as well as his father. If not... she shuddered discreetly.
“And now he’s taken up arms again, in defense of the soil in which his blessed mother’s bones rest,” Monsen said.
Tara went to stand before the sobbing giant. “Lieutenant Padraig,” she said crisply, “I am Captain Tara Bishop of the First Kearny Highlanders Regiment. I’m also aide-de-camp to Countess Tara Campbell. In the Countess’ name, in the name of the Northwind Highlanders, in the name of The Republic of the Sphere, and on my own behalf, I would like to offer my sincerest apologies for any distress our officer’s thoughtless remark caused you. I am sure that officer meant nothing by it.”
If only because I damned well hope none of our ninety-day wonders is stupid enough to piss off a full-blooded Elemental in the wild, bottle-baby or not!
Padraig nodded and dropped his enormous hands. “That’s mighty big of ye, Cap’n,” he said to the woman a third his size without apparent irony.
“My honor, warrior”I’m double-damned, she thought fiercely,if I’ll condone trying to impose censorship on our hot-blooded girls and boys. Yet—heart and minds!—1we can’t go wounding the sensibilities of loyal soldiers of The Republic with racial slurs,of all bloody things.
But it was not her decision to make. And then, despite her regard for her commander and the deep personal friendship that had sprung up between them, she grinned from ear to ear at the realization that she could pitch this particular hot potato right into her namesake’s deceptively dainty handsA terrible thing to do to a friend. Ah, but duty’s a harsh taskmistress. . . .
She left the lugubrious giant to Monsen’s puppy-dog ministrations and joined McCorkle walking down a company street between tents and plywood shacks. No litter was visible, but the place had a slipshod air. Disreputable, somehow. A few loungers watched them warily. The rest, it seemed, were off somewhere..Hopefully improving their skills, Tara thought.
“How’s it going, Master Sergeant?” A light breeze kicked dust along the street past their boots, and tugged playfully at the cuffs of their trousers.
He hesitated. That itself spoke volumes. He was a man who had been raised since puphood to the doctrine that a wrong decisionright now is light years better than a “correct” decision too late. And as senior noncom with nearly three decades of service—he was older than he looked—he had no fear of any officer, even one of far more exalted rank than Tara Bishop herself, nor for that matter of the Countess herself. He would have stood up to Exarch Redburn without a second thought: in a fighting
armyno one outranked a good NCO.
He was not a man, in short, accustomed to choosing his words. Nonetheless he did so now.
“Unevenly,” was what he chose.
She cocked an eyebrow at him. She had gotten over being intimidated by the man, for all that he seemed an animated obsidian statue. After showing a certain initial reserve, he had come to treat her with pure professional correctness. It meant he respected her. Master Sergeant McCorkle was not a man who suffered fools gladly. Indeed, neither she nor anyone she had talked to was aware of any evidence he suffered them at all.
“Meaning what exactly, Top?”
“They’re as undisciplined a collection of barroom sweepings and gaolbirds as ever a sun of any color has risen on,” he said, his own brogue coming on more thickly than usual with the intensity of his feeling. “If I drop one for twenty, he gives me twenty more for the Old Sod. They think of us as a passel of Republican busybodies with asses so tight—begging the Captain’s pardon—that we might as well be Lyrans ourselves. I think we’ve shown them we’re a bit more than parade-ground Janes and Johnnies. But they’re wild as mountain cats, all the same.”
“Will they fight?”
That graven image face, it seemed to her, threatened to crack a smile. “If the JFs come here I think they’ll fight like demons.”
“But will they fightwith us? Or on their own hook?”
“There’s the rub, Captain Bishop,” McCorkle said.
They reached a parade ground. The flags of The Republic and Skye snapped on a flagpole across it, over the regimental headquarters. On a separate staff snapped a blue flag with a black horse head, and the words “Seventh Skye Militia” above and “For Garryowen In Glory” below.
“Who the blight,” Tara asked in a quiet voice, “is Garry Owen, anyway, Master Sergeant?”
“Damned if I know, Captain,” he said.
The speaker horns mounted above the HQ buildings began to emit a rising-falling banshee wail. At the same time Tara’s personal communicator chimed for attention. She snatched it from her belt carrier.
“Bishop here,” she said, as men and women began to tumble out of barracks around them.
“This is Major Sinclair at Sanglamore.”He was a Highlander staff officer who had come in with Ballantrae and the first group of regulars from Terra. “Get back here at once. Have Shugrue assign you an escort.” Major Lars Shugrue was the Seventh’s adjutant, on whom Tara had been on the point of paying a courtesy call before observing a training exercise supervised by McCorkle and the other training staff seconded from the Highlanders.
“Affirmative on the quick return, Major, negative on the escort.” She was mildly annoyed. Sinclair was not a combat type, but neither was he usually officious. “I’m a big girl now.”
“No doubt,” came back dryly. “But the Countess wants you to get an escort anyway.”
“Yes, sir. May I ask what the matter is? Have the Falcons arrived?”
“Yes, you may ask; no they have not. And I’ll waste no more time talking when you should be moving, Captain!”
“Yes, sir.” She hesitated. “Should I bring Master Sergeant McCorkle along as well?”
“Negative, Captain. But have him gather his cadre together somewhere secure. Discreetly. Just in case. Now,move.”
She lowered the communicator and stared briefly at McCorkle. He shrugged.
“We’re mushrooms, ma’am,” he said. “Just SOP.”
A frozen-faced Skye staff lieutenant ushered Tara Bishop into the briefing room in the rectory of the erstwhile Sanglamore Academy.
Duke Gregory Kelswa-Steiner was there, as were Prefect Della Brown and Planetary Legate Stanford Eckard, dressed in severe black trimmed with gray. Chief Minister Solvaig, whom the captain had privately described to her Countess and friend as having eyes like the crescent-moon marks you might make with your thumbnails in spoiled cheese, was not in evidence, to her pleased surprise.
Tara C. sat, not across from the others, but at the end of the table, side-on to the door; she had grown too wary to sit with her back to an entrance. It was a change Tara Bishop approved even though she regretted the need. The Countess’ smile was brief, sincere and strained.
“Glad to see you made it intact, Captain.”
Tara Bishop shrugged. “We had no trouble at all, ma’am. If anything the streets were deserted even for this time of a work day.” Her Garryowen escort, uncharacteristically silent and grim, had brought her on the quickest route from their bivouac outside town to the former military school on its bluff overlooking a thickly wooded suburb also known as Sanglamore.
“There is rioting, Captain Bishop.” To her surprise it was the Duke himself who answered. As much to her surprise, both he and Eckard had risen to her entrance. She was so junior as to merit any notice whatsoever solely because of the fact she was chief aide-de-camp to Tara Campbell, who despite her nominal disparity in title to the Duke of Skye was in fact full peer to both Kelswa-Steiner and Prefect Brown, superior to Eckard. As Prefect of III, Tara Campbell held a rank approximating field marshal, far too heavy in grade for command of her de facto division. Then the captain realized it was old-fashioned gallantry that made the men rise, deference to a lady entering a
