Remembering a time not so long ago when a working relationship had turned into something more, and the catastrophic effects of that, Tara C. had held back. Despite that, she had found herself falling into fast friendship with Paul Laveau. His tireless work within the Palace showed he was as dedicated as she. He was also warm, wise and he made her laugh as no one she could remember had been able to do since her childhood—an ability she did not precisely look for in an accountant.
“Effects wizards,” said the broad, blond Rich.
“As in movies,” said the tall and lanky Street. His horns were clever prosthetics. She hoped. “Although I wouldn’t exactly want to limit your conception of what’s meant bywizards ”
Tara turned to Paul, trying not to let her disappointment show. He had promised her more than mere diversion in bringing her here tonight. She had dared hope ... she wasn’t sure what, really. But for something real, some tangible help for her increasing inward desperation.
“I’m delighted to meet you all,” she said with practiced brightness. “But I’m afraid it’s soldiers I need
now, and tanks and BattleMechs, more than wizards.”
“Another way to think of us,” Street said, “is as masters of illusion.”
“Nice disguise, Countess,” Cross said. “Of course, I made you the moment you walked in the door. Of course. But not bad. For an amateur.”
“I’m afraid we can’t do actual soldiers for you,” J. D. Rich said, “or tanks or BattleMechs. But are you sure you can’t make use ofappearing to have a whole lot more than you do?”
She turned to look at him intently.
New London
Skye
17 July 3134
There was nothing unusual about Tara Campbell’s face and voice blanketing the airwaves of Skye. Nor was it odd she should be appearing as part of a recruiting drive, especially under the present emergency. She’d begun starring on recruiting posters as a child.
What was peculiar was the particularkind of service to The Republic she was pushing.
“Are you willing to trade your life for freedom?”her vibrantly beautiful and charming, yet solemn, face asked from holovid tanks in living rooms and bedrooms and bars in New Glasgow and Donegal.
“Freedom for your loved ones, freedom for your fellow citizens of Skye, freedom for billions of citizens of The Republic of the Sphere whom you will never even know?”it asked, two stories tall, from cinema screens in New London and Limerick and Sgain Dubh.
“Will you leave your jobs, your families, the safety of your homes and everyday life,”her voice asked from radio speakers on fishing trawlers in the North Sea and scientific stations on the southern polar ice cap, “for nothing but a certainty of danger and an extremely high likelihood of death at the hands of a merciless alien invader?
“If so,”she told laborers at a sheep station in Otero County at the continent’s far end, and in break rooms in the mighty Shipil and Cyclops factories, “then join me in fighting for Skye against Clan Jade Falcon.
“Join me—join the Forlorn Hope!”
Duke Gregory practically self-destructed.
“Himmelsfahrtkommando?”he roared. It was the term Tara used in her German-language vidcasts. It meant,tr/p to Heaven detachment.
He upset the two-hundred-kilogram blood-oak desk in his office as if it were a toy and booted his personal desk-comp through a two-hundred-year-old leaded glass window into a cobbled courtyard two stories below. It narrowly missed the Minister of Health.
Y et when his howling rage had spent itself he laughed. “If the pretty little Countess is eager to throw away her life for Skye,” he told his aides as they crept timidly out of the woodwork, “who am I to argue? At that, it might even shame some of our homegrown quibblers and carpers and special pleaders into piping down!”
Prefect Della Brown wanted to publicly censure Tara Campbell. She believed it all a publicity stunt. She also feared it sent a “negative message.”
Planetary Legate Stanford Eckard resisted. If it was a “publicity stunt,” it was one publicizing the threat to Skye—which, as rumors filtered into the system with JumpShips, of Jade Falcon attacks on Seginus, Glengarry and Izar, was becoming increasingly real to the people of Skye as well as its defenders. And after all, he observed, in any kind of honesty, the Countess had far greater experience than either of them ateither publicity or war.
But in the end it was not Eckard’s calm and reasoned arguments that caused Prefect Brown to swallow her resentment-born distrust of the glamorous offworld Countess, nor brought a smile to the scarred and pensive lips of Duke Gregory Kelswa-Steiner.
It was the response by the people of Skye, who turned out in unprecedented numbers in answer to Tara’s call, and joined the Forlorn Hope.
23
Clayton (suburb of Gray Valley City)Zebebelgenubi
Prefecture IX
The Republic of the Sphere
24 July 3134
The redbrick steeple of St. Alban’s church crumpled as it was pierced by the red lance of a large laser. It toppled onto the green below, the bells of its ancient mechanical clock jangling crazily. Watching it above the narrow pitched roofs and treetops of the houses on the next block, Captain Thomas Kaiser of the Republic Zebebelgenubi Militia felt as if it was his own heart slumping to ruin inside his rib cage.
He heard a rattle of heavy machine-gun fire as Clan infantry probed the infantry positions guarding his prize: a JESII strategic missile carrier, so fresh from the nearby Joint Equipment Systems factory in Gray Valley that it lacked a coat of paint. While the ninety-five-ton half-track self-propelled long-range missile launch vehicle lacked the extreme range of an Arrow IV or Sniper, its stupendous eighty-rocket volley gave it as great an offensive punch as any system on the modern battlefield. Using spotters, it was capable of delivering thunderous indirect fire on call. With its line-of-sight Artemis IV fire-control system it could maul aJupiter with a single salvo.
In exchange, it was virtually without defenses, lacking armor, defensive weaponry, or speed. An enterprising infantryman could neutralize it with the pry bar needed to crack open the cockpit and hit the gunner in the head. So Captain Kaiser’s mixed, understrength company of infantry and vehicles was solely devoted to shielding the giant belching beast.
“Blue Eye Four, Blue Eye Four,” he said into his headset mike, “this is Blue Six, do you read?” A crackle of high-energy atmospherics was his only answer Another observation post gone.
Zebebelgenubi was a brutally dry world, most of its water having been cracked into component hydrogen and oxygen by the high ultraviolet content of its Class A3 primary. Up here, in the lower reaches of the mountains of the northern-hemisphere continent of Gastagne, the watershed allowed Gray Valley City and suburbs such as this one, Clayton, enough irrigation to maintain a semblance of greenery, using tree and ground cover species selected or gene-engineered for low water usage. One thing even the residents of the Valley seldom saw was a completely clouded-over sky.
They had total overcast tonight: dark and ominous and flickering with lightning. Except it wasn’t clouds.
It was smoke. The smell of burning stung the middle-aged captain’s eyes and clawed the lining of his throat. Of burning wood, and plastics, and paper, and petroleum fractions. And the barbecue smell of human bodies. The whole sky to the west, where the JES factory lay, was the lurid red of an open wound.
The devils had entered the system, not through a conventional jump point forty days’ space flight from the planet itself, but from a pirate point a mere six days out. Only the chance of a comet-hunting amateur astronomer on the southern continent of Valius spotting their DropShips in his photographs a mere three days out gave the planet’s defenders any warning at all. Not that it had mattered much—since the invaders possessed the unassailable initiative granted by their ability to land anywhere on the planet they desired.
Even before eye-hurting blue drive flames appeared in the velvet early-evening sky right overhead, the local
