accommodating the local laborers, at least to an extent. Not abusing them overtly, say.
The matter was ripped from her hands.
Her Gyrs’ blood ran boiling hot, flash-heated by their massacre of Militia troops and the not inconsiderable casualties the Zeb soldiers had dealt them. When they broke through the last defenses into Gray Valley City itself, they ran amok. They rampaged through the streets devastating at random, killing every living thing that crossed their sights. From the MechWarriors in their giant striding engines of destruction to the vehicle crews to Elementals to the fledglings and old warriors on foot, they gave themselves over to an ecstasy of annihilation.
Malvina ordered them to halt. She was ignored. They had already disregarded her very explicit orders issued before the landing. Now not even the secret language of shrieks and whistles she had taught them availed her. She raged and cursed and threatened, to no effect.
They stopped, in the end, when they got tired.
She halted herShrike at the edge of a vast paved expanse and dismounted. She stripped off her sweat-sodden vest and trunks, and then the mesh coolsock they all wore like some priestly undergarment. The night air evaporated the sweat from her body, bringing blessed coolness, although it had a gritty quality, and each caress brought a hundred tiny impacts.
Naked, pale, tiny, unarmed and alone, she walked slowly forward, the cement hard and warm with day’s heat beneath bare soles, between the burned and brittle skeletons of trees, and the fallen statues, and the bodies. There were a great many bodies. Flies crawled on them, huge things with brilliant chrome yellow bellies that seemed to glow like sparks. The stench was not yet bad, nor had the bodies begun to bloat despite the heat; aridity made decomposition slow.
Besides, it was hard to smell anything over the reek of conflagration.
Returning to obedience, at least for the moment, her troops had followed her summons to assemble in a great central square. Around them the city burned like a pyre. No patrols roved the streets, because the streets were an impassable hell of heaped rubble and howling flame. No troops secured any perimeter, because even ten thousand corpses posed little threat to a Jade Falcon Cluster. Even the infantry were too weary now to raise their weapons, the MechWarriors wilted and dehydrated in oven-hot cockpits. Spent like fired cartridges.
Except their eyes, which smoldered still with bloodlust and defiance.
She looked into those eyes and saw mirrored—herself.
It was the crux.
She stopped before them and raised her hands above her head.
“Falcons!” she cried. Her words were thrown forward over her own shoulder, made huge by the loudspeakers mounted in the Black Rose, kneeling in vast metal supplication behind her.
Her Gyrfalcons stared sullenly at her. They did not know what to expect. Of her or of themselves.
“I salute you,” she declared. “We are what humans were meant to be. We are humanity perfected by its own hand. We are the Future; we are Destiny.
“My brother Galaxy Commander has said we have no right to slaughter the Spheroids like beasts. And he is correct.
“It is not our right to hunt the lesser like the Falcons that we are. It is not our privilege.
“It is our duty.”
And she had them, then, forever; and the night rang with their screams of salutation, and of worship.
24
Seventh Skye Militia Cantonment Outside New London Skye
1 August 3134
Standing by the feet of herHatchetman ’Mech, Tara Campbell gratefully accepted the two-liter plastic jug from a Seventh Skye Militia troopie and promptly upended it over her head.
She was quite unself-conscious about standing in front of several hundred near-strangers wearing only a khaki sports bra and brief trunks of the same color beneath her cooling vest, which stood open to allow the cool late-autumn breeze to lave her baked body. Not even on Northwind, a world far more prudish than cosmopolitan Skye, would such have attracted much attention: it was how MechWarriors dressed, unless they wanted to pass out from heat exhaustion in their machines. Since half a dozen BattleMechs had turned out for joint maneuvers this afternoon, plus a dozen Highlander and local Industrials, she wasn’t the only one standing around scantily clad. Not all the female ’Mech jocks even wore halters—for Tara herself a matter of comfort and practicality rather than modesty anyway.
She shook her head, spluttered, bit off a mouthful from the jug, rinsed her mouth and spat into the churned- up gorse. She was going to be coated with greenish-gray mud directly: the autumn-dry ground
cover on the practice field outside the Seventh cantonment had been well churned up by the afternoon’s mechanized maneuvers, and the same breeze that brought blessed coolness also kicked up dust. It made no difference: she already knew she’d need a shower after this. Anybody did, who’d done more in a BattleMech than walk it sedately to a maintenance shop.
“Are we cut off from Terra, Countess?” the young private who’d brought her water asked anxiously.
She grimaced, covering the lapse with another splash of water on her forehead—which was still so hot she was surprised it didn’t sizzle. The news had hit yesterday with the latest JumpShip emergence: the world of Zebebelgenubi had been seized by the fearful Malvina Hazen, with reportedly the greatest atrocity yet.
Zebebelgenubi was Skye’s nearest neighbor in space, roughly two parsecs distant—and it lay with almost mathematical precision upon a line between Skye and Terra.
“Not at all, Heinrich,” she said to the youth, whose hair had been shaved to a white-blond plush, which made his ears appear to stick out in a most unfortunate manner. She had heard his name called by a fellow Garryowen; she had been trained since earliest childhood never to forget a name: another facet of diplomatic upbringing. “JumpShips can still travel by way of Alphecca and Smyrna. It’s not so easy to cut a system off from other stars without holding the jump points.”
She smiled. “And thank you for the water.”
He grinned back, shyly, and half-tripped walking away. Not realizing his clumsiness might have another cause she attributed it to wholly understandable fear: Zebebelgenubi’s sun burned high in the early nighttime sky at this latitude and time of year on Skye. To know that the Jade Falcon’s talons had closed invisibly about it could lead to sensations similar to a clawed foot clutching one’s own heart.
Or at least hers.
With a clank of loose actuators and a blat of diesel engines, a ForestryMech sprayed with Skye autumn woodlands-pattern camouflage of dusty green and shades of medium green on a khaki base marched up to halt earthshakingly nearby. It raised its giant chainsaw right arm in a salute and froze that way. The cockpit opened. A ladder of synthetic rope, white twined with blue and blue plastic rungs, snaked down. Lieutenant Colonel Hanratty descended with an alacrity startling for a middle-aged woman of her size.
She grinned and sketched a salute at Tara, fully as unself-conscious of her state of undress, then accepted a water jug from another enlisted and went through the same routine as the Countess.
Seeing Tara speak to the mere enlisted man without biting his head off, other Garryowens of various rank began to drift toward her. She smiled and nodded encouragingly at them. She had noticed on earlier visits that they had an easy, democratic attitude among ranks: too relaxed, perhaps; the Seventh troopers occasionally treated their officers with something like contemptuous indulgence. It translated into general sloppiness, and could well, she knew—or anyway believed, since it was something taught in officer academies, although she had never experienced it—lead to a lethal tendency to debate orders in action instead of unhesitatingly following them.
Still, while the crispness of their formations did not make her hold her breath for the HPG net to come back up so she could comm the joyous word back to Northwind, they handled themselves and their machines competently enough. They hit their marks and maneuvered with immense panache, if seldom precision.
She suspected that they had been firmed up more than a bit by her own Senior Master Sergeant, Angus McCorkle, putting the fear of God into them despite lacking any identifiable “official” status. Early in his tenure with
