weaker than he, not the other way around.”
“Lecture me, will you?” With startling speed Lopata crouched and shot himself at the normal-sized man like a bolt.
Aleks stood unmoving. Time seemed to stretch as the Elemental unfolded his huge limbs to catch him, bear him down and crush him. Aleks’ warriors shouted for him todo something .
Beyond the last instant, or so it seemed, he did. He stepped aside, grabbing the wrist behind a vast outstretched right hand with both of his. And yanked.
Had he done no more, Lopata would have struck the hull like a flesh meteor, crushing his skull or breaking his monstrous neck. It would have been an acceptable outcome—heroic, even, for a mere MechWarrior facing the apparently impossible odds of bare-handed battle with a mighty Elemental.
But Aleks tucked the arm into his own chest, partially arresting the giant’s momentum.
It was not an untrammeled act of mercy. Lopata bellowed as his shoulder was wrenched from its socket. Then the WarShip hit him slam in the back.
The Elemental’s agonized cry ended in a voiceless gust as all breath was driven from his body. He bounced, floated up again, stunned and inert. Aleks reeled him in, encircled his neck with an arm that looked like a child’s against it and choked out the Star Captain.
He stood up, stepped back and touched a finger to his brow. “I salute you, Star Captain,” he told the sleeping giant. “Perhaps in future you will treat my technicians with the respect due those without whom the mightiest warrior would be but a mud man waving sticks at the moon. If not—”
He shrugged his own not-inconsiderable shoulders. Then as his seconds gathered about him like an asteroid swarm drawn to a giant planet, he threw back his head and laughed, as for the sheer joy of living.
He was Aleksandr Hazen, Bloodnamed, and he was a hero.
2
Jade Falcon Naval Reserve BattleshipEmerald Talon Jump Point orbit Summit 4 March 3134
“There is no question possible, Galaxy Commander,” Star Admiral Dolphus Binetti said, gazing up into the holographic display of space near the emergence point which floated in the middle of theEmerald Talon ’s semicircular bridge. “The merchantman could not miss us if he were blind and his sensor crew drunk.”
Binetti was a short man, pompous and somewhat stocky, with a black spade-shaped beard around a jaw that remained firm in outline, despite his paunch. Age and declining fitness should have made him unlikely to maintain either high rank or Bloodname, which were generally held as they were won: by combat. But even before decades of enforced peace and, worse, contact with the soft races of the Inner Sphere had brought decadence to Clan Jade Falcon—so he and his hearer both believed—the Clans had realized there were roles even for warriors in which a decline in physical prowess, or indeed its absence to begin with, could not be allowed to trump knowledge and skill. Piloting a BattleMech or an aerospace fighter was not a job for an uneducated clod, but it paled beside the technical knowledge required to run a starship, much less a battlegroup. Binetti would lose his place when his command skills declined, not when someone wrestled him out of it.
Not that his guest was inclined to criticize on that basis. He himself would have fallen by the wayside long ago, had he been forced to rely purely upon his prowess in personal combat to maintain his own exalted place in his Clan. Given decadence, why not enjoy it? And anyway, whatever he had done to ensure his own survival, career and literal, had kept the Falcon from being robbed of one of her most able and dedicated servants.
As Khan Jana Pryde, ruler of Clan Jade Falcon, herself said often, “Traditions are worth respecting only if they further our cause.”
Binetti’s companion smiled and banished such mostly pleasant reveries from the cathedral of his mind. “Let him look, then, Star Admiral,” said Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus, leader of the proud Turkina Keshik—and of the expeditionary force as a whole. “There is no way to stop him.”
“We could interdict,” Binetti rapped. “Blast him from space.”
“The Khan has commanded the Talon be used only to awe, not to fight,” Malthus reminded him.
Binetti snapped up a hand in irritation. “Loose our fighters, then. They could use the blooding.”
“We could,” Malthus agreed, nodding and smiling gravely. “But to what end? The plan, remember, is to avoid conflict with our unwitting Lyran hosts if at all possible.”
“Best way to do that is to keep them in the dark,” the admiral said.
Malthus shrugged. He was a man of imposing height and breadth of shoulder, not unusual for a MechWarrior. He had a not insignificant bulge about the middle, which was unusual; but it was hidden by the artful drape of the robe-like garment he wore, green trimmed with black—the Jade Falcon colors.
Of course, such artifice was itself none too common within the Clans.
Topping all he possessed a great rounded square of head on which russet hair retreated between temple and crown, leaving a wide arrow-shaped salient down his broad forehead, and a wide, square jaw fringed with beard. To the extent the Clans, which tended to select against age, had any such thing, he fit perfectly the archetype of an elder statesman who remained, however, a prime Mech Warrior. Which was why Khan Jana Pryde had flouted tradition and decreed to him the coveted command of Turkina Keshik, lead formation of the entire Falcon Touman, and hence the greatdesant into the heart of decadence in the Inner Sphere, instead of leaving the outcome to a bidding Trial.
That, or Bec Malthus had come out second-best in a game of intrigue, a game in which he held himself past master among Clan Jade Falcon—but that thought did not bear thinking.
“They will inevitably learn, my friend,” he murmured sonorously. “Indeed, they may know already. Someone might have observed us on one of our previous jumps through Steiner space, without us observing them in turn.”
“That is so,” Binetti acknowledged, only somewhat stiffly. Disagreements were best handled circumspectly, lest they turn into open dispute—in which case the party who came out second best would be compelled by Clan custom to claim the “right” ofsurkai , the rite of forgiveness for being divisive. Khan Jana Pryde had specifically enjoined her warriors from intramural dueling, common among the Clans and incessant among Falcons. So desperate was their undertaking that literally no one could be spared.
Which made the fight currently taking place in one of the WarShip’s bays that much more remarkable. Neither Binetti nor Malthusoficially knew of the combat trial taking place between a Star Captain and a Galaxy Commander, even though it was being carried out with full Clan ceremony.
“The success of ourdesant is of course all,” Malthus intoned. “And however much it might cut against our warrior grain, old friend, all depends upon avoiding conflict as long as possible. For even given the superiority of our Clan ways and our Clan warriors—and Jade Falcon’s warriors are supreme without question in all of human space— those truths notwithstanding, our mission is so supremely ambitious, so daring, that we must seek every advantage as zealously as a Sea Fox merchant-captain grubbing after the last possible penny of profit.”
Binetti nodded his square head almost dolorously. “What you say is true, Bec Malthus,” he said. “But I burn toact . And I am not the only one: already my Naval Reserve warriors grow restive. Patience has not often been reckoned high among the Falcons’ virtues.”
“How well I know,” Malthus said. He still marveled at the sheer sententiousness of his fellow ranking Clansmen, and not just cement heads like the Admiral. “Yet sacrificehas been so reckoned, and so we must sacrifice immediate gratification of our longing for the hot blood of action, no matter how strong that demand.”
“I suppose,” Binetti said grudgingly.
“In any event, emissaries of Khan Jana Pryde should shortly make official representation to the Archon to announce our mission, avow peaceful intent toward theLyranCommonwealth , and demand our passage not be contested upon pain of war.”
“Speaking of actions with little precedent in our Clan,” Binetti said, “I do not know, friend, if I can truthfully say that I hope the emissaries succeed in mollifying the Steiners, but I will admit I have little faith that they will.”
Malthus smiled. “We shall see ourselves, in the fullness of time. In the meantime, we are agreed, are we not,
