playing card: a jack of hearts.
Paul, she was thinking.you bastard . Yet the thought lacked heat.
You lied to me.
Still, she knew that—unlike a certain other—he had never betrayed her.
Any more than he had died yesterday on Seminary Hill when his stolenPhoenix Hawk IIC exploded. She felt certain of that now, irrationally perhaps. No body had been found. It had seemed neither surprising nor mysterious at the time: another stone added to the crushing weight of post-battle depression that followed victory as surely as defeat, once adrenaline subsided.
Smiling, she thanked the Legate and handed him back his scrap of paper, now crumpled from her brief fierce grip. Then, head held high, she strode off down the sunlit corridor, leaving the Legate looking curiously after her.
“There you go, Rabbi Martinez,” the travel agent said, handing a chip encased in clear protective plastic to the red-bearded man in the heavy winter coat trimmed with lustrous black direbeast fur from the northern forests of Skye. “Your passage aboard the DropShipGrimalkin day after tomorrow, continuing to Syrma aboard the Gold Star Lines JumpShipIlluminatus Prime ”
He smiled. “Have a safe and pleasant journey home.” It had been centuries since anyone would have found anything remarkable about a rabbi being named Martinez, any more than that he should have red hair. Or eyes of distinctively Asian shape, albeit a piercing jade green in color.
“Thank you kindly, young man,” the rabbi said, with an accent indicating his origin was in the northwest quadrant of Syrma’s northerly continent Amygdala. “I must admit I am eager to return home. I fear I found my sojourn here far more adventurous than I anticipated.”
The agent bobbed his sleek head and laughed. “It’s been that way for all of us, Rabbi.”
Saying a last farewell, the man turned and pushed his way into the bright, cold morning. He walked down the street in the direction of New London’s most discreetly luxurious hotel.
The man who had just displayed credentials establishing his identity beyond question as Rabbi Yitzhak Martinez, of Talwin, Syrma, Prefecture VIII of The Republic of the Sphere was indeed headed home. His home just wasn’t Syrma.
He should, no doubt, have checked a certain cavity behind a certain loose stone in a certain retaining wall beside Thames Bay, to see if a new assignment awaited him. But to Hell with that: he had a vacation coming. What could his superiors do, send him on a suicide mission?
They’d long since tired of tryingthat .
He intended to live as high and handsomely as possible for a month or three. Nor would the comptrollers have a gripe about that: it wasn’t coming out oftheir tight fists, clutched like a drowner’s upon the Archon’s black budget.
He didn’t know precisely where the late and thoroughly unlamented Augustus Solvaig had come by his pile of fine rubies and emeralds from Skye’s mines, worth far more than their mass in gold. He did know the minister wouldn’t be having any further use for them.
He paused to gaze into a display window. A trivid set inside showed a petite, pretty woman with short, platinum-blond hair being interviewed by reporters. He stood a moment, hands in his pockets, watching.
Then he touched the brim of his fedora, turned, and stepped right out with his cane tucked underneath his arm. It was a good day to be alive. He had long ago learned to appreciate each new day he got; “good” was just a bonus.
No passersby thought it strange he was whistling “Garryowen.” It was on everyone’s lips, these days. Jade Falcon Naval Reserve BattleshipEmerald Talon Zenith Jump Point Orbit Skye
21 August 3134
“Welcome back to the ranks of the living, Galaxy Commander Malvina Hazen,” Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus said warmly, coming into the stateroom in his flagship, which had been converted to a convalescence chamber. “I came as soon as our medical technicians announced you had resumed consciousness.”
The room was dark, lit only by discreet butter-colored lights near the floor. Malvina sat upright in the bed, with a white smock hanging loosely on her shoulders, as if she had shrunk. The eyes she turned to him were like ports open to the endless night outside the hull.
“We ride a spaceship,” she said. “By that very fact I know we failed.”
“Not so,” Malthus said. “First, though, I regret I must inform you that your sibkin, Galaxy Commander Aleksandr Hazen, died a death worthy of Clan Jade Falcon and the Bloodname you both shared on Skye.”
She closed her eyes briefly. “I know,” she said. “I saw him die. In a dream.”
He nodded. If he doubted, he was not one to say so. Especially not to this woman at this time.
“How can you say that we have not failed?” she demanded. “Has all life been burned from the face of Skye?”
“Oh, no. We left scarcely a mark. Yet the battle for Skye was an epic one,” he said in honeyed tones, “which will long be sung in the Falcon’s nests. And while ourdesant fell short of conquering Skye, it succeeded in its most significant objectives: Chaffee, Ryde, Zebebelgenubi, Alkaid, Summer, Glengarry: we hold all these worlds yet, with the Kimball II system doubtless soon to fall if it has not done so already. We hold a beachhead in Republic space. Khan Jana Pryde will deem the initiative a success.”
He smiled broadly. “Once she receives the report I am drafting.
“In all candor, Aleks’ death was his last great service, to the Falcon and to us personally. He has given himself to be accountable for our setback upon Skye, as well as a martyr of the first magnitude. Not only was his death, facing two famed enemy MechWarriors, so immaculate as to erase all taint that might accrue to his reputation through defeat, but one of his killers was none other than the Steel Wolf Anastasia Kerensky—than whom no more perfect Jade Falcon hate-object could possibly be devised.”
He started to say more—how glory, acclaim and historical immortality would be the outcome of the Falcon’s Flight, not infamy at all. And how all should accrue to the ristar Malvina Hazen, the Falcon’s remaining Eye, whose very survival would be deemed miraculous in Clan Jade Falcon’s Remembrance....
But when she looked at him with pale fire in her eyes, the words died in his throat. He held himself lucky indeed they were all that died then.
“Do you not see how little that means to me?” she demanded. “I would see them destroyed.”
“Whom?” Bec Malthus asked.
“Skye. You. Us . Clan Jade Falcon. I would see us exterminated and our genetic material poured into the foulest cesspool in existence. I would see the Clans destroyed. I would see the crawling maggots of the Inner Sphere destroyed. I would destroy them all. All!”
She ran her hands up over her face, her fingers back through her hair. “And most of all I would destroy myself”
He stared in horror. “It is the sickness speaking, Galaxy Commander. You cannot mean—”
“I do! I mean it all and more! I would cleanse the universe of the blight of humanity with purifying fire—the fire of suns, if I could. There is only one in all the universe I would have spared. And he died. Trying to save me!
“Is that not a delicious irony?”
She put her face in her hands and wept as if to turn herself inside out.
He stood by, bearded broad face immobile. A normal Clansman would have been shocked, disdainful at such a display of weakness by a heroine so acclaimed.
Bec Malthus sought to hide, not contempt, but exultation. He did not misread her passion for weakness, as his fool Clansfolk would. In this small woman he sawpower —power beyond imagining, could he but channel it.
And he was just the man to do it.
When Malvina’s rage and grief subsided enough to let her hear, he said, “You shall have what you desire,” very softly.
She lowered her hands slowly and looked up at him. “What do you mean?”
“All,” he said. “I perceive in you the certainty of infinite clarity. In the purity of your hate, I find redemption. The worlds of Man lie at your feet. You shall trample them.”
She rose, her face too proud to show the pain her body betrayed by its stiffness and slowness. “Have you heard nothing of what I said? I reject Clan customs and titles. I reject all!”
