was a battle he had won. “It’s in the old duke’s Constitution.”
“For which reason you yourself shall make the speech for me, Augustus,” Duke Gregory said in a tone which did not invite demurral, “and do so eloquently and well. Have it on my desk in half an hour for my approval.”
Solvaig looked to his master. Being so summarily dismissed did not sit well with him. He nodded and was gone.
Duke Gregory looked a long moment after him, brow furrowing. He turned to the Countess.
“You’ve won. Now I suggest you return to your preparations.”
His beard split in a gigantic grin. “And if you show half the spirit defying the Falcons as you have defying me, those bottle-baby bastards don’t stand a bloody chance.”
26
DropShip White Reaper
Orbiting Zebebelgenubi Prefecture VIII The Republic of the Sphere 1 August 3134
Malvina awoke with a jar, like falling several centimeters.
She snapped upright. Around her the bedclothes were a swamp sodden with fearful sweat.
She was alone. Although not in the dark. She always slept with the lights on, alone or not.
She had been dreaming about the last time she slept with the lights out. The night of the sixth anniversary of her and Aleks’ Decant.
The night they came for them.
There were eight of them, motivated by sound calculation in the scheme of Darwinian creche economics: fewer mouths to feed equaled more food for all. So it was only fitting the runts, the two weakest, should sacrifice for the good of the sibko. It was the Clan way that had been dinned into them unceasingly since before their ears could make sense of speech.
Aleks fought back, furiously and in the grip of transfiguring fear, throat too tight to scream, his face white and twisted as the bedsheets now clutched in Malvina’s wound-wire fists. They concentrated on him as the boy, even though he was the smaller. Small and scared as he was, with his body wastes streaming down his skinny brown legs, he fought them: a merciless mortal battle, there in the dark of the studiedly cheerless dormitory room.
Aleks’ hopeless frenzied valor had bought Malvina the freedom to act.
By the time two burly Proctors, mere laborers, had arrived to subdue the combatants with blows and stunstick, two nocturnal assailants lay dead. Yimm would survive, but hampered by having but a single eye died two years later in a training accident without help from Malvina. But only because it took her too long to get to him. The other five attackers who lived through that terrible night had predeceased him, not by accident, although several seemed so.
She shook herself, came back to herself. Her eyes refocused. She had been seeing it all as if the air between her eyes and the bulkhead of her cabin inWhite Reaper were a holovid stage.
They came back, she thought, riding a nebular ring of desolation. They always come back.
No matter how often she killed them. No matter how many she killed. They kept returning for her and her brother in her dreams.
She gripped her head in her hands and screamed. The bulkheads swallowed the sound.
She would hold to the lesson she had learned as a terrified child: keep killing until no one threatened her and her sibkin any more. She would kill as many as it took to make the attackers in her dreams stay dead, stayaway .
And if what it took was for her to kill every living human being in the galaxy, then cast herself into the blazing heart of a star—
Her breathing had returned to normal. She lay down on her side, happily curled, resting her cheek on her folded hands.
Then at last we will all sleep in peace, she thought, and slept again, and dreamt no more.
27
Ceres Metals Fab 17 Warsaw Continent, Kimball II Prefecture IX The Republic of the Sphere 7 August 3134
Far away against a bank of slate-colored clouds whose tops were night, an orange flame glared like a second sun at the top of a flare tower burning off unused fractions of petroleum drawn from deep beneath the surface. The real sun had just descended below the horizon of the industrial waste-scape that surrounded the 305th Assault Cluster of the Gyrfalcon Galaxy as far as the eye could see.
It seemed to have dissolved into a pool of burning blood.
In his command post in a reinforced concrete building somewhere in the middle of Ceres Metals’ Fab 17 on the equatorial continent of Warsaw, on the world Kimball II, Star Colonel Noritomo Helmer flinched as a barrage of long-range missiles crunched in among his positions, even though the impacts fell half a klick away at the least.
He was losing it, he knew. To respond that way to mere artillery bombardment, and a distant one at that. The only reason he was not fighting hourly Trials of Position was that none of his subordinates wanted to take over in the face of the Cluster’s current situation.
Powlesscould do that to a warrior.
Snow began to fall again. It looked as if it would continue for a time, whitewashing earlier falls begrimed by industrial effluvia—where it hadn’t gone to muck from the boots and blood of men and women destroying each other without mercy. Not just with ’Mechs and artillery and tanks and hovercraft, nor even rifles and grenades. But also with bayonets and rifle butts, knives and tools and lengths of metal bar stock; boots, fists, teeth. The still air tasted of petroleum and was stale with death.
He turned away from the doorway and ducked into the red-lit depths of the command center.
It was not that he lacked the tools of his warrior’s trade, exactly, although hisPhoenix Hawk IIC
BattleMech had been rendered inoperable two days ago by Gauss-rifle hits from Ml Marksman tanks. It could probably be repaired—if they ever got out of the city-sized factory. But they lacked the appropriate parts.
A man with a sense of irony might have appreciated the poignancy of being caught in the middle of an immense complex devoted entirely to producing parts for engines of war, and being unable to repair one’s own machines for lack of the proper replacements. Star Colonel Noritomo Helmer was not such a man.
What he did appreciate was that he had made a crucial mistake.
There were two habitable worlds in the Kimball system, Kimball II and Kimball IV. Kimball IV was a miserable world, dry, with an unbreathable atmosphere, on which domed colonies were maintained purely to work the hugely productive mines, especially extracting bauxite. It had barely any population to speak of, not a soul more than was necessary to work the mines and keep those who worked the mines supplied with necessities. Kimball II was a glittering prize: a hot, wet, lush world, fabulously rich, with abundant agriculture, mining and heavy industry, and a population just over two and a half billion.
The problem with Kimball II was that it was a rich world with lots of heavy industry and a population of just over two and a half billion.
He should have gone for Kimball IV. It would have been an easy conquest and given him a shot at controlling traffic to and from Kimball II with his DropShips and fighters. At the very least, he would have had what his mission called for: a solid foothold in another Republican system. The Kimball II militia, geared toward defending its home world, would surely not have been able to dislodge him once he got good and dug in.
But it wasn’t the nature of Turkina’s brood to take an easy prize and then dig in. And Helmer was dazzled by the glitter of one of The Republic’s richest worlds.
