With both wings retracted, the mass of the remaining left one did not even unbalance theGyrfalcon significantly. Not for a pilot of Aleks’ consummate skill.
“How are youdoing this?” she gritted, turning the Rose’s feet to keep tracking him. “You have never beaten me!”
“Times change, sibkin,”he said. “We change, quiaff?”
“Neg!You shall not win.” She blazed with the paired autocannon, tracking with the muzzles pointed exactly at him so that the bursts would overtake him if he cut tightly toward or away from her. Then she led him with an LRM volley.
The ice before his racing BattleMech erupted in a white cloud of ice splinters, snow and steam. Instead of shying away—and being smashed by her powerful weapons—he plunged straight ahead into the cloud.
He did not emerge from the other side.
Malvina poised, tense, waiting. An aerospace fighter fell smoking from the sky, to burst in yellow glaring billows against the hip of a conifer-clad peak several kilometers away. Malvina noted it in the compressed three- sixty display beneath her windscreen and never glanced its way.
“What do you play at, Aleksandr?” she demanded.
“It has been years since we played this way,”his voice said, “but all I learned I learned from you, my sister. Ten thousand times I lost to you; and now perhaps I shall lose— ”
Right in front of theShrike ’ s talons a crimson beam stabbed up through the ice. Its crack nearly deafened her within her cockpit.
Ultra autocannon fire chopped ice behind her right hip, drawing a curving curtain of glittering particles whose facets diffracted the pale sunlight and broke it into rainbow fragments.
“—more!”
Driven by the power of its MASC-augmented legs, theGyrfalcon pushed upward from the lake bed, fifteen meters beneath the surface, and slammed its fifty-five metric tons upward against the ice between the Black Rose and the jagged gape left by Aleks’ opening salvo. Ice squealed, groaned—and gave. As if the cuts Aleks had made with his large lasers were hinges, a great plate of ice beneath theShrike ’ s feet was driven up and over.
As was the ninety-five-ton BattleMech itself.
Malvina cried out, and then the monstrous machine crashed down on its side with an impact that pounded her into the side of her cockpit. She blacked out.
TheGyrfalcon ’s jump jets would not function under water. Instead, Aleksandr ran submerged to where the bed began sloping up toward the shore, blasted the ice clear to let his head and shoulders emerge as
he slowed to a walk. Slowly, shedding a great rippling skin of water, the Lily rose from the lake. When his jets were clear he jumped to stand beside the fallen Rose.
“I fear I have done you no kindness, sister dear,” he said softly. “But I could never hurt you.”
He raised the White Lily’s right foot and planted it on the Black Rose’s torso.
“I declare Galaxy Commander Aleksandr Hazen the winner of this Trial of Refusal,”Bec Malthus said ponderously. “We shall conduct the invasion of Skye as he desires.”
30
Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus ’ Cabin Jade Falcon Naval Reserve DropShipBec deCorbin Orbiting Skye 15 August 3134
“What do you mean?” Galaxy Commander Aleksandr Hazen demanded. He was not smiling now.
Bec Malthus turned away to look at a white-swirled blue arc of Skye, rotating beneath them. It was an image on a screen inset in the bulkhead of his cabin; as a ship of war, theBec de Corbin needed its hull integrity too badly to allow actual viewports in the living quarters. “I mean precisely what I said. Savor the occasion, boy.”
He glanced back at the taller, younger man from beneath bushy brows. “I will not relieve Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen of command of the Delta Galaxy. Did you seriously anticipate that I would?”
Aleks breathed heavily and his cheeks were flushed. “Yes. She fought to vindicate the Mongol position. She lost.”
Neither Malvina nor her BattleMech had been seriously injured. Her right shoulder had been dislocated, and she had sat in furious, white-lipped silence as a couple of Turkina Keshik warriors yanked it back into place—as theBec de Corbin rose back up through a still-contested sky, and a twisting dogfight that eventually claimed seven Falcon aerospace fighters and a dozen Skye craft. Only three aerospace warriors had successfully ejected from their stricken machines, and they had been left behind for the Republicans to recover. The Falcon would be back to reclaim them, soon enough.
“She fought to vindicate the decision of thekurultai, ” Malthus corrected. “She fought as Clan champion, not as herself. Come, you know this: you learned it in the creche, everybody does. You beat her in a Trial of Refusal, in which you were the refuser, not she. You did not best her in a Trial of Position for command of the Gyrfalcons— which Khan Jana Pryde has forbidden, and so do I.” He did not bother to state what, in Clan terms, was obvious: that if Aleks did not want his sister in command of the Gyrfalcons, he should have killed her when he had the chance.
“Malvina has become obsessed with her Mongol cult. You have seen what it has done to her—heard
her profane the Founder himself! She lost to me. The Mongols are discredited. And she, by allowing fanaticism to overcome her, has unfit herself to command a Galaxy of the Jade FalconTouman !”
Eyes curving slits, head tipped to the side, Bec Malthus asked, “Are you sure your true motivation is not vengeance upon your sister? That you have not allowed this matter to become personal?”
Aleks Hazen’s eyes flared. His big handsome face went gray. He seemed at once to grow taller—and Beckett Malthus wondered, for one of very, very few times in a lifetime spent playing others, if this one he had notoverplayed .
“All that I am, all that I do, is in the service of the Jade Falcon and humanity—true to the Founder’s vision,” Aleks said in a low, clotted voice. “Beyond Clan Jade Falcon Ihave nothing ‘personal’.”
Malthus made himself smile a false smile, nod and gesture approvingly. It was an easy thing for him to do: he had done it so many times. He would’ve patted Aleks’ great, boulder-hard shoulder, except that to lay a hand on a Clan warrior without invitation, even one such as Aleksandr Hazen, was necessarily to die on the spot.
“Just so, lad: so you do,” Malthus said in tones like warmed syrup. “And now service to the Falcon means subsuming your own desires—let us call them judgments, shall we?—to the greater good of Turkina. The coming battle is the climax: all rides upon it. Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen is far too valuable an asset to withhold from this fight.”
Aleks paced to the curved outer bulkhead and slammed his fist against it. Then he pressed it to the metal and laid his forehead against it. “She will never honor the Trial’s outcome.”
Malthus came up behind him. Lightly. “Do not be so melodramatic, lad. Rejoice: you are about to reap the victory you have done more than any except your sibkin to win! It is a deed which will resound through the Remembrance as long as our people have tongues and ears.”
“Shewill throw victory away with a terrible crime, which will raise all humanity’s hands against us.”
“Then defeat her again! Subdue Skye quickly, using your humane techniques. Allow her no scope by succeeding. If not—”
He shrugged expressively.
“Are you so eager, then, to try Malvina’s Mongol ways here on Skye?” Aleks asked.
“I am eager to win. If you suspect I may hang back so that the fighting goes poorly, to create a pretext to remove Malvina’s hood and fly her free to slay to her bloodthirsty little heart’s content, you suspect quite wrongly, boy. It ismy head which failure will forfeit.”
Aleks pushed off from the bulkhead. He started to say something, but a cursor blinking alive on the viewscreen and an almost-simultaneous buzz from Malthus’ intercom stilled him.
“Galaxy Commander, bridge,” a voice said from the bulkhead. “Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen’s DropShip White Reaperhas departed orbit on a landing trajectory.”
