“Because the regs won’t let me paint my fingernails.” The tone of Lexa’s voice implied that the reason should be transparently obvious.
Jock glanced up from his mending. “No-body’ll see them once your boots are back on.”
“But I’ll know about them. And that’s what counts.”
“I don’t see how.”
“Morale,” said Will firmly, before the argument could go on any further.
“Ah,” said Jock, satisfied, and returned to his mending.
“You tell him, Will,” Lexa said with a wicked grin, and began work on another star
My friends are well, and told me to thank you for asking about them. I’ll certainly bring them to visit if I ever have the chance. It may be a while, though, since nobody knows how long we’re going to be sta—
The tactical radio clipped to Will’s belt gave out the earsplitting warble that preceded an all-frequencies announcement. He laid his pen aside, and turned up the volume on the radio in time to hear an unfamiliar voice begin to speak.
“People of Terra!” it—no, she—said.
“Uh-oh,” Lexa said, putting aside her nail polish. “Anybody want to bet it’s not the Wolf-Bitch?”
“No,” said Will.
Jock shook his head in silence. The voice went on.
“We are the Steel Wolves, and we have come to take back what should have been ours. None can dispute our right.”
“Hell, yes, we can.” Lexa made a rude gesture in a vaguely skyward direction. “Get stuffed, Kerensky.”
“Hush,” said Will. “Listen.”
Another voice came over the tactical radio, a more familiar one this time. “I am Tara Campbell, Prefect of Prefecture III and Countess of Northwind, and I do dispute it.”
“Will you fight me for it, Countess?”
“Gladly,” Tara Campbell’s voice replied. “It’s what I came all this way to do. I’d begun to think that you were going to disappoint me and not show up.”
“I would never do that. Where shall we meet, then?”
“Here. On the plains outside Belgorod DropPort. Just the two of us. ’Mech against ’Mech.”
“Oh, no, Countess. I will not deny my Wolves a battle, not when I have brought them so far for it.”
Lexa made a face. “Do us all a favor, bitch, why don’t you?”
“Be quiet,” Will said.
The Countess’s voice came again, low and steady. “Bring your army then. My Highlanders will stand with me, for The Republic of the Sphere.”
“The Republic is hollow and already dead. We fight for the possession of Terra. Kerensky out.”
There was a long silence in the Sergeants’ Mess. Finally, Jock Gordon said, “Well.”
“Yeah,” agreed Lexa. “Fun times ahead.”
Will picked up his pen and began once more to write.
–ying. The next few days are likely to be busy ones, so I’m going to post this now while I have the chance and try to write you some more later.
31
Belgorod DropPort
Terra
Prefecture X
April 3134; local spring
If Ezekiel Crow had been a different sort of person, he would have found it a subject for considerable dark humor that the only thing letting him withdraw unnoticed from Geneva to Belgorod had been the impending arrival of Anastasia Kerensky and the Steel Wolves.
He had awakened, on the morning after receiving Suvorov’s call, to the news that a fleet of DropShips was heading in toward Terra. Repeated statements by the announcers that “highly placed sources admit that the ships may have a hostile purpose,” combined with reassuring references to the Highlander forces encamped outside Belgorod, effectively confirmed that Damien Redburn and the rest of Republic officialdom had accepted Tara Campbell’s version of events.
For the first few crucial hours, though, the Terran media were too busy covering the imminent threat to report on its accompanying scandal, and Crow was able to check out of the Hotel Duquesne, and leave the city unnoticed.
His good fortune had not lasted long. By the time he left the Belgorod shuttle hub and started out on foot for the commercial DropPort, the tri-vids had a new toy to chew on—him.
He saw it first in the screen crawl over a newspaper kiosk. A screaming headline—TREASON DURING A CRISIS!—over a file photo captioned Paladin of the Sphere Ezekiel Crow (third from left, in black), others, seen here receiving the Exarch’s commendation for role in elimination of Footfall piracy threat, and a sample paragraph of text:
Terra’s greatest crisis since the inception of The Republic of the Sphere was worsened, this morning, by allegations that one of The Republic’s most trusted Paladins may harbor an unspeakably dark secret. Scholars and victims alike have speculated for years over the true identity of the notorious Betrayer of Liao… (continued in printed version; insert coin)
Crow paid the money, and the newspaper kiosk whirred and disgorged a printed copy of the paper in return. He took it to a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop near the DropPort and sat down in a corner booth to read.
It was even worse than he’d feared. The paper was only running selected items, but those were enough to make it clear they had the whole thing, and from at least two sources.
Part of it had to have come from Tara Campbell. There was no other possible source for the transcript of the young checkpoint guard’s testimony at a Northwind inquiry:
Q. Did you recognize the Warrior in the ’Mech?
A. Yes, ma’am. It was Paladin Ezekiel Crow.
Q. How did you know that? Are you sure?
A. Yes, ma’am. It was a Blade , and everybody who was at the big battle last summer knows that Paladin Crow has a Blade.
Q. Are you sure that it wasn’t someone else in the Paladin’s BattleMech?
A. Yes, ma’am. He identified himself as Paladin Crow, on Republic business.
Q. Let the transcript show that Private Higgins’ testimony is borne out by voice analysis of the checkpoint log.
The Northwind data, Crow thought, was not the worst of it. He could have challenged the interpretation of the checkpoint incident. A Paladin’s judgment on what was or wasn’t Republic business was not something to be lightly questioned. But that damnable Capellan memoir had surfaced again as well, and the medical and genetic records that his unknown enemy had collected for the presumably dead Daniel Peterson, native of Liao, and had then correlated with the publicly available records for Ezekiel Crow, Paladin of the Sphere.
If the media had those, they had all the rest of it. Sooner or later, they would publish it all.
By the evening of his first day in Belgorod, the tri-vid channels were alternating clips of a video interview featuring the checkpoint guards with file footage of the combat on Liao and its grisly aftermath. Ezekiel Crow himself was reliably reported to have vanished from Geneva, and to have been sighted—more or less simultaneously—in London, Addis Ababa, and Santa Fe.
He was fortunate that Alexei Suvorov’s dubious friendship extended to the maintenance of a firm control over transport, loading, and storage at the Belgorod DropPort. The existence of a commercial ’Mech hangar containing a Blade BattleMech remained—for now—one of the few remaining well-kept secrets in Ezekiel Crow’s life.
However, Suvorov’s control over groundside operations at the DropPort didn’t extend to other matters. The port itself—like all other DropPorts on Terra—had been closed to commercial arrivals and departures by order of the Exarch for the duration of what was already being termed “the invasion crisis.”