room.
“Certain elements of the populace have panicked at the latest news,” the Duke said, resuming his seat. Tara Bishop sat too. “From your account, the disorder does not appear yet to have spread to the suburbs, or at least the western ones. Chief Minister Solvaig must be succeeding in containing it.”
Tara Bishop clamped her lips on the question she wanted to ask. Sometimes she remembered she was just a captain.
“A few hours ago, a Republican merchant JumpShip entered the system,” Tara Campbell explained. “Her captain broadcast a warning: the Jade Falcons have invaded Chaffee, just across the frontier in Steiner space.”
“They conquered it, Captain Bishop,” Eckard intoned. His pale face looked more tightly pinched than usual. “With, it would appear, exemplary brutality.”
Tara Bishop gasped. She was no cherry; she had been a combat MechWarrior long before getting slugged as aide to the Countess, nor had she stopped driving herPack Hunter ’Mech into harm’s way since receiving that assignment. She had seen the elephant—not to mention the Wolf. She knew that war is misery and painhurts .
But to hear that a Jade Falcon war fleet had once again invaded the Inner Sphere was like having some kind of childhood nightmare, at once fanciful and terrifyingly visceral, come true: as if the Duke and his Legate had just told her a dragon had just landed in New Glasgow and begun laying waste the central business district.
“Impossible!” It burst out before she could stop it. Its banality appalled her. Especially since, of course, it wasn’t.
“My reaction was the same, Captain,” Prefect Brown said. “But impossible or not, it’s true. We received a massive data dump, complete with tridee documentation of the destruction of an entire city by the Falcons.”
“These aren’t wannabes like the Spirit Cats,” Tara Campbell said. Despite her rigorous lifelong training in diplomacy the bitterness was clear in her voice: but then again, she wasn’t bitter on her own account. “Or our old friends the Steel Wolves.” As far as Republican intelligence had been able to discern since her explosion onto the scene a little over a year before, Anastasia Kerensky, Canister-born on the world Arc-Royal in the Commonwealth, was the only real Wolf in her pack.
“These aren’t Republican citizens gone renegade,” the Countess continued. “They’re the genuine article, straight from Sudeten itself. Just as the Sea Fox reports suggested.”
Tara Bishop frowned. “But, Countess, the riots—”
“The initial broadcast was made in the clear,” Tara Campbell said. “The merchie captain was spooked. And I don’t blame her. She entered Chaffee system within hours after the Falcon invasion fleet jumped out to parts as yet unknown. There was still a JF JumpShip in-system, but by sheer chance orbiting at the zenith proximity point, whereas the merchant entered at the nadir. Although the planet was pretty thoroughly under the heel of a Falcon Cluster—”
“And not just any Cluster,” Della Brown broke in, “but the Turkina Keshik itself.”
Tara Bishop’s eyes widened. She didn’t know a lot about what went on in the blessedly distant Jade Falcon Occupation Zone, but she did know quite a bit about the military history of the Inner Sphere. Turkina Keshik, the first Cluster of the elite Jade Falcon Galaxy, was the Khan’s own guard, leading formation of the whole FalconTouman .
“—certain elements on the surface caught the merchant’s broadcast greeting and responded with an account of what had happened, and was still going on,” the Countess continued, showing no resentment of the interruption. “The merchie captain sat out the recharge, no doubt sweating blood every millisecond,
then jumped here quick as she could.”
“Unfortunately,” Duke Gregory said, and his heavy handsome face was pale with the effort of containing his rage, “someone else heard her initial transmission to Skye. And that someone spread the word to the whole planet: Clan Jade Falcon has seized and ravaged a world right across the border in the Commonwealth—and their course seems to point themhere ”
18
Wolf Moon (Backside of Ivanov, moon of LaBlon)
Prefecture IX
The Republic of the Sphere
27 June 3134
In slow motion, the woman dropped toward the commissary floor. The new third eye in the center of her forehead wept a single long red tear up into the air. The shot that placed it there had quit echoing in the confines of the pressure chamber, but its aftereffects still rang in the ears of the Steel Wolf officers standing before their overturned chairs.
Anastasia Kerensky had already returned her right-hand weapon, a Lyran-issue M&M Service automatic, to its holster. She was a woman of arresting beauty, with a cloud of midnight-black hair floating about her head in the low gravity and highlighted red by the overhead illumination. Folding her arms in a gesture of deliberate contempt, she faced the others of her restive pack.
“Who else thinks I’m not fit to lead the Steel Wolves today?” Her use of the contraction cracked challenge like a glove across the face.
Eyes asmolder with sullen anger, the half dozen officers, Bloodnamed MechWarriors all, turned away. Star Captain Kimiko Fetladral finally reached repose on the mat covering the decking of the prefab pressure structure. Her own Nakjama laser pistol landed beyond the tips of her lifeless, outstretched fingers with a soft thud. Ignoring her late challenger, Anastasia sat down, picked up her bowl of soup, raised its pressure-valve to her full lips.
It froze just shy of them. Her blue eyes looked across the covered bowl into the almost white-blue eyes of Ian Murchison. Although as a mere tech he would not normally be suffered to sup with warriors, the grizzled Northwinder was Anastasia Kerensky’s personal medic, as he had been when he was her bondsman. She still insisted on keeping him with her most times.
“What?” she demanded. “You told me to exert myself less.”
Murchison frowned. It was not usually a prudent thing for a member of a lesser caste to disapprove of a warrior’s actions, much less one who also happened to command more than a Galaxy of Clan warriors. But Murchison had never been prudent: though he had started out not just as a Spheroid but as a lifelong civilian as well—contract medico on Balfour-Douglas Petrochemicals Offshore Drilling Station #47 off Northwind’s Oilfields Coast, captured along with it in a covert action led by Anastasia herself—he had
the balls of a Wolf MechWarrior, and not just one of these Steel Wolf posers, either. Which was why he still had his life, his status as adoptee into Clan Wolf, and, yes, his balls.
For her part, keeping him around seemed an uncharacteristically sentimental gesture for the Wolf Bitch.
It was no such thing. He was a skilled medic—and the only living soul in the Steel Wolves she trusted to tend her when she was weakened or incapacitated. Which seemed to be happening a lot lately.
“I won’t counsel you to be more prudent,” he husked in his gravelly voice. “I’m too old to waste the breath. But I will remind you that bullet wounds—not to even mention lasers—are a bit harder to recover from than knife cuts.”
He had even less use for the Clan prejudice against contractions than Anastasia: he had not asked to become a Wolf. Neither had he demurred when Anastasia cut his final bond cord and conferred Clan status upon him. Not that he had much choice—and brave or not he was not a total fool.
Not a fool of any stripe or species. Which was also why Anastasia kept him alive, and at her side.
Slowly the others righted their chairs and sat back down. Hot gazes began to drift, back toward her. She paid them no attention, though she was fully aware of each angry glare.
They were nothing new. Ever since the initial setback on Northwind, she had faced challenges from subordinates. Even once the holdouts from the days when Kal Radick, whom she had challenged and killed in unaugmented combat, led the Steel Wolves had been weeded out, through combat or by failed challenges of their own, plenty had stepped forward to try to wrest command from her.
And now, in the wake of the disastrous invasion of sacred Terra, which ended in defeat and disgrace after
