occupiers. Forcing the quisling commander of planetary police to actually announce the climbdown, and then sending her to the wall, made Malthus feel somewhat better, but produced no discernible improvement in either civilian compliance or law-enforcement morale.
Nor would any conceivable hostage-and-retribution scheme render Chaffee’s indigenous wildlife any more submissive. Creatures prowled forest and shore that could peel an Elemental power-armor suit like a can of processed meat product—and treat the occupant accordingly.
In sum, everything on Chaffee hated the Falcons.
It was with undiluted, if not exactly public, relief that Malthus lifted his DropShips from the surface per the invasion schedule, leaving a Solahma garrison under the command of adezgra Star Colonel with a handful of vehicles, mostly loot of Porrima, to keep the peace and introduce Chaffee to the enlightened Clan way of life.
Malthus was intrigued by the Mongol doctrines espoused, and put into horrific effect upon Chaffee, by the wild, mercurial Malvina Hazen. Even though he understood, as even her sibkin—whose intelligence and acumen Malthus had never made the mistake of underestimating—failed to, that at the root of her unorthodox methods lay blackest heresy.
Despite Malvina Hazen’s far-from-secret stance as focal point of the Mongol movement, just a few words from Malthus—words already chosen—would still see her broken from Galaxy Commander and condemned by a Trial of Abjuration. Or worse, no matter her accomplishments. Which made him well pleased with his subordinate and protege.
For Beckett Malthus loved none so well as those with strings for him to hold. Even if they themselves did not know they had them.
20
Sanglamore Military Academy
New London Skye
2 July 3134
Rotating a finger’s breadth above the table in the darkened briefing room, the holovid bust seemed fully as substantial as meat and cloth and hair: a broad head with long reddish hair sweeping back from a widow’s peak almost to the collar of a black and green tunic. Russet beard fringed a broad jaw; the long upper lip was shaved clean. The eyes were sleepy looking slits in which murky green could be glimpsed, like concealed pools. The nose was broad. Something about the image radiated a sense of the certitude of power.
“Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus, now Supreme Commander of the Jade Falcon expeditionary force,” the woman said. She was tall and rangy, with a knife scar down the right side of her long, unhandsome face, slanted blue eyes flanking an oft-broken nose. Her graying blond hair was shaved to a scalp lock. In the dimness, the badges on her spacer’s jumpsuit, of a senior member of the merchant caste on one side and of Clan Sea Fox on the other, were vague circular blurs.
Tara Campbell’s eyes kept straying from the holographic image of the Jade Falcon commander to the actual Clanswoman. Her emotions were a roil.
“How is it you come to know all this, Master Merchant Senna?” asked Planetary Legate Eckard. The very emotional desiccation of his words robbed them of any taste of challenge.
“We trade in the Jade Falcon OZ,” the woman said bluntly. “We don’t like them; they don’t like us.” Like many Sea Fox merchants, she showed no compunction about using contractions. Yet Tara was chillingly aware that she wasalien, poured from a bottle in lieu of birth like the most fanatically mystic Nova Cat or rabid Wolf.
And while her manner was one of rough camaraderie, the Countess also knew that could be no more than a trade-convenient pose: she dare not assume that this woman or any Clanner’s agenda was the same as hers, far less The Republic’s. Yet one thing she did rely upon: Clan Sea Fox hated the Falcons—trade rivals as well as blood enemies—as bitterly as she herself detested Anastasia Kerensky and her Steel Wolves.
One side of the Clanswoman’s mouth quirked up. “But they can’t afford tonot trade with us, any more than we can afford to not trade with them. You know how it goes: everybody trades with everybody. Or did until the HPG went out.”
She shrugged wide shoulders. “Sense tells us we should trade now more than ever, all of us, since JumpShips are the only thing now that pass between most stars any faster than light. But leave that. The point is, we don’t have to love the Falcons to trade with them, nor the other way ’round. And even among Clanners,trade meanstalk ”
“What ought we know about this Malthus, Master Merchant?” It was easy for Tara to keep her voice genial: all it took was a lifetime’s schooling and practice in the rigors of diplomacy, and the exercise of a will which enabled a tiny slip of feminine body to make itself an interstellar unarmed-combat champion. Not much at all.
Those strange slanted eyes appraised her for a long moment before the Clanswoman spoke. “He’s a
snake. A conniver and contriver.”
“They have those in the Jade Falcons?” asked Colonel Robert Ballantrae with both surprise and a sneer. “Outside the merchant caste, of course.”
“Go easy, Robert,” Tara murmured.
The knife-damaged face showed no reaction. It struck Tara that this woman was probably little less skilled at her own brand of diplomacy than Tara herself. She tried to imagine what that would cost a Clanswoman bred. Even among the Sea Foxes, who honored merchants scarcely less than warriors—if indeed, they recognized such a distinction.
Outside experts, self-proclaimed, debated that latter point. Although they were the most ubiquitous of the true Clanners—the wild true breed, not Republicans of Clan descent—in the Inner Sphere, the Foxes were in many ways the least known. Where most Clans were notable for their braggadocio, they were extremely private, holding their daily lives and culture as closely as their treasure.
“They have connivers everywhere—even in the Spheroid military,” Master Merchant Senna said. Tara Campbell braced herself to hear her say,even among the Paladins of The Republic . The media had trumpeted her own disgrace by traitor Paladin Ezekiel Crow throughout The Republic; there was no way a Sea Fox more than a jump inside a Prefecture, as Skye was, could fail to know of it. Nor was it egotism that assured Tara Campbell this woman knew everything about her which was publicly known, and probably a good deal besides. Sea Fox merchants undertook their caste calling with the same zeal with which other Clans’ warriors attacked theirs, but with considerably more foresight and preparation.
“The key to Beckett Malthus, and the threat that you face, is that Malthus is brilliant, versatile and entirely sociopathic, by Clan or normal human standards.”
Tara looked around at her companions: her aide Tara Bishop at her side, Colonel Ballantrae nearby, Legate Eckard and Prefect Della Brown, each also with an aide. Duke Gregory took the Sea Fox woman and her intelligence seriously, even if he had declined to attend in person.
“He is old for a Clan warrior,” the woman said, “in his fifties—he was born in 3081, the year Devlin Stone proclaimed The Republic. His right arm has been prosthetic since he won his Bloodname: he’s always disdained regeneration. He remains a formidable MechWarrior.”
She chuckled. “Which isnot why he is the most feared being in Clan Jade Falcon, not excepting Khan Jana Pryde.”
She paused and sipped from a mug. It was coffee poured by a Sanglamore cadet pressed into service as an aide; she had fortified it with a shot of something from a silver flask of her own which, by a waft of scent, Tara judged to be brandy.
“He has fought few Trials in his time,” she said, leaning a forearm on the table. “You see, a very long time ago, not long after he won the Malthus Bloodname, a prominent Mech Warrior set about destroying him. He did not immediately call Malthus out, but preferred to belittle him, hoping to provoke the one-armed young warrior to challenge him.
“Instead, through a series of events no one could quite piece together after the fact—and after the fact, perhaps, no one particularly wanted to—Malthus’ rival found himself subjected to a Trial of Annihilation. He was
