Flight of the Falcon Read online

  The chu-sa, who was himself in denial over the number of gaijin in his own family woodpile, shook his head to think of the perfidy of one whose roots lay in the Land Where the Sun Is Born. One might expect such behavior from those who sprang from lesser breeds. But a true nihonjin?

  Thus he had not hesitated to give the order to use whatever force was necessary to apprehend the traitor. Even if it meant annihilating the apartment bloc and all its occupants. It was their Confucian duty to scout assiduously for signs of deviance in their neighbors and report them to the appropriate authorities, anyway. Any damage collaterally visited upon them by the chu-sa’s tactics was nothing more than due deserts. Indeed, it was possible some of them were guilty of more than simple negligence of civic duty: the miscreant’s personal computer had contained an extensive list of coconspirators within the technical division, encrypted but using a logarithm ISF had quickly cracked.

  The corruption ran deep and wide. The entirety of planetary computer services would have to be exhaustively screened if not purged. It would take months or years.

  And the invasion preparing to stage from here into Prefecture I of The Republic of the Sphere would have to be indefinitely postponed.

  Moving in brief rushes, half the team covered with their weapons while the others darted toward the door of the second-floor unit. Frightened faces appeared in windows, oval or dark, then vanished as the cohort of men in body armor with candy-striped greaves and armpieces surrounding the chu-sa swung their automatic shotguns to bear on them. To discourage snipers, of course, in case the rot had spread further than even the security forces feared. But mainly because it was not appropriate that mere civilians should gawk at the actions of the Civilian Guidance Corps as if they were some action-entertainment holovid. The chu-sa knew in his well-developed hara—the center of him, what the vulgar would call a potbelly—that it was allowing citizens who, however skilled, were still but lowly workers to give themselves airs that had caused all this trouble.

  He was more than a Friendly Persuader. That went without saying: sealing a security breach of such magnitude was far too crucial to be left to a mere flatfoot civilian cop, however exalted his rank. The chu-sa was himself an officer of the Internal Security Force, nominally undercover.

  In the wake of the Blakist Jihad’s devastation, some worlds had bonded together for mutual defense in de facto prefectures, quite without regard for their Great House allegiances. Shionoha had formed such an alliance, scandalously with Rasalhague Dominion traitors and Lyran planets. Launching an invasion of The Republic from here would go far toward purging that taint: it could not happen too quickly, so far as the chu-sa was concerned.

  The squad reached the target apartment. The men arrayed themselves on both sides of the door and the window to its left, several crouching down and duck-walking below the level of the sill to avoid being glimpsed through drawn but flimsy white curtains, or casting betraying shadows. The chu-i in charge of the tac assault team gestured peremptorily with a Nambu handgun gripped in a black-gloved hand. His gunsho—sergeant—shook out a meter-long pentaglycerine X-charge, peeled away the plastic strips from the adhesive on its inner surface and pressed it carefully and quietly against the door. The lieutenant looked down at his colonel.

  The chu-sa drew his katana, raised it over his head and hacked down. Instantly two men standing nearby fired stubby grenade launchers at the apartment window. As they smashed through and exploded with the dazzling flash and deafening report of stun grenades, the chu-i by the door touched off his door knocker with a sharp crack of shaped-charge detonation.

  The chu-i and gunsho pivoted swiftly around the suddenly vacant doorjamb and into the apartment. The rest of the squad vanished inside by twos, spreading out within to secure the premises. The chu-sa smiled. The traitor would never escape.

  A yellow-white flash within the apartment froze the expression on his face like a blast of liquid nitrogen. The last two men into the unit were flash-silhouetted for an instant. Then they were hurtling back out, one over the metal railing, one through it, propelled and engulfed by a rapidly expanding front of white smoke and vivid orange fire, visibly coming apart like insects plucked apart by a giant’s fingers.

  The chu-sa’s retinue made love to the pavement. The chu-sa himself stood upright, sword angled down, staring in dumb incomprehension as the chu-i’s severed arm, still clutching its Nambu, bounced on the gummy black surface within two meters of him. Its ragged stump bled not blood but smutty gray smoke.

  Several blocks away, a man on a motorcycle glanced over his shoulder to see, through extreme-angled wraparound sunglasses, a globe of black smoke roll up into Madlock’s dingy afternoon sky. Given the frequency of power outages—the Dracs blamed the HPG breakdown, implausibly—and the age-old Japanese propensity, transmitted like some kind of virus to the Combine’s subject races, for using indoor charcoal grills for heat and cooking when better sources of power were unavailable, fire was a fairly common event. Even if House Kurita did successfully discourage too much use of structural rice paper in Combine buildings.

  But this was clearly a hot-and-fast blaze, not some kicked-over kotatsu lighting off a shoji-screen room divider. The man on the Mitsu-Gurevich café racer braked, put a leathered leg down and let the big bike slide through a quarter rotation to a halt as pedestrians and bicyclists scattered and cursed him.

  There were no candy-striped civilian cops in sight. Traffic was light; the change of the sixteen-hour shift was far away. The rider looked again, moved his glasses down his nose to give himself a better view. He was a medium-sized man, his build difficult to determine under his padded gray-and-khaki jacket. He had spiky straw-colored hair, rather fine if unremarkable features, and green Asian eyes.

  He hoped none of his erstwhile neighbors had been harmed. Before fleeing his apartment he’d set a device that should have triggered a fire alarm—directly, since the smoke detectors were sporadically maintained at best, like so many things in the Draconis Combine—fifteen minutes ago.

  As fervently he hoped his little surprise had paid off the accounts of a few of House Kurita’s paid leg-breakers. Mostly low-level, granted, but it was the grunt-class Friendly Persuaders who did most harm to the ordinary folk who suffered beneath their sullen gaze. The true professional torturers of the ISF did not deign to waste their attentions upon the downtrodden and everyday.

  He smiled a not altogether pleasant smile. More than likely the last thing the first candy-stripe thug into his small cell of a bedroom had seen on this world was a single playing card: the Knave of Hearts. Naturally, he had picked it up—

  Triggering multiple charges of pentaglycerine secreted throughout the small apartment along with plastic containers of gasoline siphoned from official internal combustion engine land-vehicles.

  The card itself was unlikely to survive the conflagration currently sending a quite satisfactory pillar of jet-black smoke to join the general aerial crud and corruption. If it did, it might be overlooked in the ham-handed search of the rubble—the officials in charge of the investigation being far, far more interested in finding someone, anyone, besides themselves to saddle with blame for the debacle than in actually getting to the bottom of what had happened. And if it survived, and were turned up, its significance might be missed, depending on whether it was civilian cops or sorely overextended ISF operatives who came across it.

  The man on the big Drac bike was an artist. His medium was chaos.

  He hated all external authority and government. It was the ruling passion of his life. Even that government which he served—judging it the least of available evils, including the swaddling totalitarian nanny-state of The Republic, now collapsing inward on itself in the wake of the HPG shutdown.

  For their part, his superiors were inclined to overlook his little foibles, even though members of their service were supposed to be fanatically loyal to their House. Themselves professionals in the art of chaos, they knew they had a Mozart in their midst.

/>   It might be a security risk to leave the calling card; yet the man on the bike would escape the planet and Kurita space, or he would not, and the leaving of the card would likely have no bearing. And most important, his mission was accomplished: his neat framing of a sizable portion of the competent computer techs on Shionoha would derail the Dracs’ invasion plans for months. Why precisely his masters should care if the Kuritans invaded The Republic, the operator had no need to know. His surmise—not that he greatly cared—was that they didn’t want the Combine getting too big for its hakama.

  And if the ISF should, at some point, realize the significance of the card, and that it was not a hoax, that their military had been infiltrated and victimized by the Knave of Hearts, the legendary—or was it imaginary?—LOKI operative: that would increase their paranoia and insecurity and long-term disorder, and further serve the passions of the man behind that name, and House Steiner, whom he served reluctantly and yet to the fullest extent of his extraordinary gifts.

  An old man in a conical rice-straw hat, with a scraggly graying blond mustache and a white duck in a bamboo cage on one slumped shoulder, stood near the tail of the stranger’s bike berating him loudly in low-caste Japanese.

  The Knave of Hearts smiled to him, nodded and, with a snarl of his big V-twin engine and a squeal of road-grabbing wide-track tires, was on his way.

  Hotel Savonarola

  Florence, Southern Europa, Terra

  Prefecture X

  The Republic of the Sphere

  4 March 3134

  Tara Campbell, Countess and Prefect of Northwind, threw herself on her belly on the hotel bed.

  “The cliché ‘bird in a golden cage’ comes to mind,” she said. She picked up the remote control and clicked on the holovid.

  As if to validate her fatalistic mood, her own head and shoulders appeared: spiky white-blond hair, hazel eyes, snub-nosed cover-girl features, big silver hoops in her ears and an off-the-shoulders top that looked like a white T-shirt that had had the collar and upper parts of the shoulders torn out. It had been ’grammed from above and in front of her.

  “The glamorous Countess Northwind was seen last night at Formio’s, Florence’s hottest night spot, taking a break from a grueling round of meetings with the Exarch concerning the current crisis within The Republic—”

  “They also serve who hang out in the rear with the gear and look good on the propaganda tri-dees,” said her aide, Captain Tara Bishop, coming into the room behind her. She was a larger woman than the Countess, which wasn’t saying much, not truly tall but strong and trim. With a shock of hair between dark blond and brown and dark green eyes, she was plain by comparison to the other Tara, but only by comparison.

  She stopped dead when she saw her boss’ image. “Hoo, you were pretty décolleté there, TC.”

  In the months since she had been assigned as the Countess’ aide, between the first and second Battles of Northwind against Anastasia Kerensky and her Steel Wolves, she had proven herself an infallibly efficient and indispensable assistant, as well as a fierce and fearless MechWarrior. Especially in the weeks since they had defeated the Steel Wolves on the wintry Russian steppes, she had also become a close friend and confidante to her Countess.

  “Shot from that angle, sure,” Tara Campbell said grimly. “They might as well have just dropped the pickup down the front of my top while they were at it.”

  “Don’t let them hear you say that.”

  Tara Campbell muted the sound but left the three-dimensional video display live: she was hoping against hope they might show actual news that might cast light upon the situation in the crisis-racked Republic. Hyperpulse generator comms to several planets near Terra had been restored, and JumpShips entered Sol system every day, from Republican worlds, the Great House domains, even the Clan Occupation Zones—although, ominously, the last category had been few of late. Not that any Clanners were particularly welcome since the Steel Wolves had invaded.

  “You’d think,” she said, rolling onto her back, “that I’d earned the right to do something real, TB. Something substantial.”

  Captain Bishop folded herself into a chair at a table by the window and plucked an apple from the basket of fresh fruit the hotel provided its important guest every day.

  “You don’t consider a show-the-flag and reassure-the-taxpayers tour a major contribution to the war effort?” she asked.

  Tara produced a most un-Countess-like snort through her dainty nose.

  “You made one crucial career mistake, TC,” TB said, biting into the fruit. She waved it in the air. “You were publicly right when a big important man was just as publicly wrong.”

  Having seen their homeworld, Northwind in Prefecture III, devastated by Anastasia Kerensky and her renegade Steel Wolves—with help, impossibly, from a turncoat Paladin of The Republic of the Sphere—the two young woman warriors had arrived on Terra with such of the Countess’ surviving forces as could be quickly scrambled into a relief force. The beautiful, bad and entirely mad Anastasia Kerensky was obsessed, Tara Campbell knew, with the dream of succeeding where all the Clans’ previous efforts had failed: the conquest of Terra.

  Once on Terra, the Northwinders found themselves virtually under arrest, suspected of collaboration with the Steel Wolves—and Paladin Ezekiel Crow, Northwind’s betrayer, with a mortal lock on the ear of Exarch Damien Redburn.

  Paladin Jonah Levin had helped Tara expose the truth: that Crow was a serial traitor, not just on Northwind but as the famed Betrayer of Liao, who sold that world to a brutal massacre by Capellan Confederation invaders in 3111. Barely in time, the Northwinders had been rehabilitated to play the key role in turning back the Steel Wolf invasion.

  Longtime media darling Tara Campbell became a more-hyped heroine than ever before: the Savior of Terra, she was labeled on all the newscasts. She protested, loudly, sincerely and truthfully, that she was only one among many who had saved the planet; naturally, she was ignored. And Exarch Damien Redburn had to smile and nod approvingly as the Terran media piled acclaim upon the diminutive young woman he had publicly dismissed as a hysterical weakling.

  It was not something the proud ruler of an interstellar superpower enjoyed.

  “I know I stepped on the Exarch’s cape,” she said now, sitting up and clasping her knees. “But we’re supposed to be The Republic’s fire brigade. Why doesn’t he send us to fight the Capellans?” The bulk of her Northwind troops was still on Terra, though in more comfortable billets than the frigid internment camp-cum-bivouac outside Belgorod they had been confined to upon their initial arrival.

  Her aide frowned. “It may be that the Exarch fears you might just be too successful. You’re already walking away the single-most popular human being in The Republic, if not the whole Inner Sphere. Maybe he’s afraid you’ll get some Roman notions about the best solution to the current cascade o’ crises.”

  “Then he’s a bigger ass than I thought he was!” Tara flared. “Serving The Republic is my whole life. I’ve never done anything else—never wanted anything else. It’s not power—it’s principles: the ideals of Devlin Stone.”

  “Strange how having a lot of power seems to change a person’s perspective. I’m just a poor little soldier girl, but I have a feeling Exarch Redburn is pretty suspicious of professions of idealism.”

  “But it’s true. What do I have to do to prove myself?”

  Seeing the gleam of moisture in her boss’ hazel eyes, the captain decided to lighten the mood. “Face it, TC: you do look good on recruiting posters. For women, you’re an inspiring role model: Countess Tara, fearless lady warrior who still has keen fashion sense. For the men, well-—”

  The Countess said a vulgar word. “I was a poster girl as a child, TB. I’m an adult, I’m thirty years old. I’ve fought battles. I’ve won battles. Besides—” She shook her head. “My people are scattered across a dozen planets. Fighting now. Some will die today. Maybe right now, as we speak. And my place is with them. Not shopping.”

/>   4

  Jade Falcon Naval Reserve Battleship Emerald Talon

  Jump Point

  Summit

  4 March 3134

  Alone in his dark cabin with his dark thoughts, Bec Malthus sipped cognac.

  By now the Jade Falcon trade factors upon Tharkad would have delivered their ultimatum to House Steiner: hands off or else! He did not doubt the manner of it would be gauche and brutal. We are a gauche and brutal people, by and large.

  It was not a judgment on his part, but a sober assessment of fact, and not at all condemnatory in his mind. The thing upon which he prided himself most, the one thing which in his mind justified and redeemed the entirety of his existence and his acts by means of the service he rendered his Clan, was his capacity for total, ruthless objectivity.

  He took another mouthful, almost daintily, rolled it about on his tongue, savoring the smoky piquancy. Although by the standards of the soft and self-indulgent Inner Sphere, he knew, he would be held something of a prude, by Clan precepts he was a raging hedonist. He concealed most of his pleasures from the scrutiny of his fellows as scrupulously as he did his political machinations. Yet the one weakness he permitted to be seen was his love of fine food and drink.

  He might have justified his indulgences to himself by observing that, after all, none served the Falcon better now, and few had ever served Her as well, as he. He didn’t bother. Frankly, he did not give a pinch of Turkina’s holy poop for such nonsense. He felt neither guilt nor shame; what he hid, he hid because others’ awareness of it could cause them to act in ways adverse to his interests.