taken?
Although by the Founder’s plan, literacy was universal among the Clans, they by the same design maintained an oral tradition as strong as any preliterate people’s. Eloquence was esteemed, as much a part of taking and holding high place as prowess in battle—although there were no Trials employing it, if you left aside Bec Malthus. Whose preeminent gift was notexactly rhetoric.
The Hazen ristars had excelled in public speaking, as they did in all things. An epic contest was eagerly expected, even by Turkina Keshik warriors who under normal circumstances scarcely deigned to notice the doings of the lesser formations, the Delta and Zeta Galaxies.
Those expectations were not disappointed.
They stood upon the stage of the thronged and darkened auditorium inboard Malthus’ battleship Emerald Talon . Bec Malthus stood upstage and at the center behind a podium. At his back rose a hologram of the Jade Falcon emblem, rippling slowly like a ten-meter-high flag in an imperceptible breeze. Beneath it hung the banners of Turkina Keshik, the Gyrfalcon Galaxy and Turkina’s Beak. Flanking them were the flags of the worlds conquered by the expeditionary force: Chaffee, Alkaid, Glengarry, Ryde, Summer, Zebebelgenubi, even Porrima, and with them battle-stained regimental honors of units the Falcons had beaten down in having their way with their worlds. A gap showed where the Kimball II flag was meant to be displayed; with characteristic defiance, Malvina chose to flaunt even her failures—and whatever the cause, the failure of Noritomo Helmer to turn up on schedule with appropriate evidences of victory was Malvina’s own failure, in her own mind no less than others’.
She stood downstage upon Malthus’ left, clad in her mostly black dress uniform with its black cape about her shoulders. Her white-blonde hair fell like an avalanche down the back of her cape. On Malthus’ right stood Aleks Hazen, imposing as a statue in his regulation green-and-midnight dress uniform. None wore a helmet.
“We have completed an epic journey,” Malvina declared, when a spotlight stabbed down white to grant her turn to speak, “and accomplished epic ends. We have carried the glory of Jade Falcon and the Clans almost to the heart of the Inner Sphere. And we have paid an epic price in blood.”
The assembled warriors sat in silence as absolute as that outside the JumpShip’s pressure hull. It was common knowledge that, including the absent 305th Assault Cluster, Malvina’s Gyrfalcons had lost almost fifty percent of their fighting effectives to death or injury. She had taken a rich booty ofisorla, especially in the form of Joint Equipment Systems tactical and strategic missile-launch vehicles. But it was warriors who were always thedesant’s rarest and most precious asset, and those she had spent like water.
“History will sing that the cost was worth it, for Turkina’s glory and our own. Yet we must assure ourselves of victory, and more: on terms that do not leave us too spent to hold our gains until, as they someday must, the Jade FalconTouman joins us to carry the banners of Crusade to the holy soil of Terra itself.
“In little more than one hundred hours, Falcons, Turkina will spread Her wings above our last objective. Skye will lie at the mercy of our beak and talons, helpless to do more than await our pleasure as to when and where we strike. Andhow .
“We carry with us the fires to burn their cities from orbit. I say, let New Glasgow burn!”
The audience reacted with a gasp. All knew that Malvina had made free use of terror in her conquests of Ryde and Zebebelgenubi. Yet what she was proposing struck at the root of centuries of taboo—and at the very heart of what it meant to be Clan. Only Aleks, it seemed, was unmoved—and no one in that bowl of darkness doubted that seeming was a lie.
“That we shall win decisive victory over Skye’s defenders cannot be doubted,” Malvina said. “Yet the planet’s population exceeds three billion. We can afford no repetition of Chaffee on such a scale: we must assure that when they surrender, theysubmit, fully and forever, with no thought of further resistance. The way to ensure that is to let them taste in advance what defiance will bring.”
The spotlight on her dimmed. No one applauded. Another spot pinned Aleks.
“I will not speak of Clan traditions,” Aleks said in his rich, rolling baritone, only slightly strained. “You all are imbued with them in your genes, even as am I. I speak of results. On Alkaid and Summer I promised the populace in advance that I would honor the Laws of War. I employed the minimum force required to defeat defending forces on the ground, and afterwards kept my promise. By decent treatment of noncombatants and defeated foes alike I secured the willing cooperation of the planets’ people. As a result Alkaid and Summer are fully secure with minimal garrisoning, already capable of resupplying us. All for minor loss to ourselves.”
“When was it ever the Jade Falcon way to boast of avoiding casualties?” Malvina flared from the neardarkness. Passion made her break protocol.
“I speak of scant resources,” he said, “of our own smalldesant amidst a vast ocean of Inner Sphere humanity.”
“All the more reason to leverage such force as we can bring to bear,” Malvina said with a shake of her head, “especially when it comes to securing the cooperation of those whom we subjugate.”
Aleks’ cheek twitched at her use of the wordsubjugate . “Does no one remember Turtle Bay?” he asked. Despite the ferro-fibrous strength of his will, his voice rose.
“Perhaps we remember it too well,” his sibkin said, her own voice dangerously low, “for the wrong reasons.”
“Clan Smoke Jaguar brought disgrace upon themselves and all the Clans by destroying the city of Turtle Bay from orbit,” Aleks said. “All Clans denounced the act. And subsequently when the forces of the Inner Sphere—under their cynical and fraudulent evocation of the blessed name of the Star League—counterattacked, it was the Smoke Jaguars whom they chose to hunt down and subject to a Trial of Annihilation, destroying them utterly.”
“The craven Wolves led the cry to turn away from the Smoke Jaguars and renounce the use of naval vessels. It was merely one in an unbroken chain of their betrayals of the Clan Way,” Malvina replied.
“If we massacre civilians upon Skye,” he said, turning from her, “we will not simply dishonor Clan Jade Falcon. We will also rouse, not just Skye, but the whole population of The Republic, if not all the Inner Sphere, against us.”
“Give the barbarians a taste of the fate that awaits those whose who resist the Falcon’s flight and they will collapse,” she said.
Then she laughed, and her laugh was malice, glass and silver. “And what does it matter, anyway? They are barbarians. We held out the liberating hand of truth and rationality to them almost a century ago, and they spurned us. Even after decades of what they term peaceful coexistence, in which they have had ample time to apprehend our system’s unquestionable superiority, still they refuse to accept it. I say, enough of coddling the weak, the inferior! If the masses of old humanity will not accept the future, let them make way for the New Humans: we, the Clans.”
Her sibkin had turned to stare at her. “The Founder was explicit, that it was our duty to protect the weak, the lesser, to uplift them,protect them—”
“And if that be so, I say: the Founder was wrong.”
Her brother’s cheeks went pale. Unnoticed in the dark at the rear of the stage, Beckett Malthus’ bearded jaw gaped open. Here was his foremost string upon her, the deep secret that he alone had discerned, which if revealed would mean her certain death. Her unspeakable heresy—which she had just blurted out before every subcommander in thedesant’s ground forces.
“The Founder did well when he designed us: our life, our traditions, the Canister,” she said in a voice that rang so loud she scarcely needed amplification. “But not even his vision could encompass all the future. In his greatness, Nicholas Kerensky simply could not conceive how unworthy the mass of humanity would prove.
“Wise as he was, the Founder failed to grasp an essential truth: in creating us, he created a superior order of human being. He honored the relentless forces of evolution, as he taught us to honor them. And what is the way of evolution, if not that the superior shall drive the inferior into extinction?
“Yes, I speak heresy. But my heresy is to honor truth above the words of one long dead, even one we rightfully honor above all. We are the force of evolution, and it is our right. Whether or not the fact comforts us, it is a scientific inevitability that we shall displace the Spheroids utterly, soon or late. I say, let us spread our wings to the winds of destiny, and speed to seize the future in arrow flight, as befits true sons and daughters of the Falcon!”
In the fury of the warriors’ applause and hawk-cries, Aleksandr knew she had won the day. Unseen behind him, a look of wonderment and calculation transfigured Beckett Malthus’ bearded face.
