“This is going to throw our timing way off,” Norah said.

Cullen shook his head. “Not really. We’ll just need to step up the pace a bit.”

Norah, protesting, said, “The people won’t—”

“Our people will,” said Cullen. “And they’ll make sure that the rest of the crowd follows where they’re needed.”

He looked from Norah to Hansel. “Most of the hard work is going to fall on the two of you—sounding out potential crowd leaders, training them so that they can train their groups, keeping everything undercover until the day. If you don’t think that you’re up to the job, say it now so that I can bring in somebody else.”

Hansel said only, “I’m all right with it.”

Norah shook her head peevishly. “If it were anyone but you, Cullen Roi, I’d be bowing out right now. But if you say that it can be done, then I suppose I’m in.”

The shadow of a thought passed across her face. “How about our man on horseback? How is this going to affect him?”

“It shouldn’t affect him at all,” Cullen Roi said. “The beauty of all this is that our man doesn’t even know he’s involved in our plan.”

He smiled. “Genuine sincerity. It’s the hardest thing in the world to fake—so we aren’t even going to try.”

Bernhard Island

Kervil, Prefecture II

22 October 3134

Jonah had lost track of the beach a few times, so he couldn’t be sure, but he thought the attackers were about to put down the third wave of the assault. If he wanted this done smoothly, that meant he didn’t have much longer to keep the defenders away from the beach.

Tradition dictated that the fifth wave was when the attackers would come under the heaviest fire. The defenders, confused, disoriented, and unsure what they were facing during the first waves, would rally for a push against the landing defenders. The casualties of the fifth wave could be far heavier than the first. Unless Jonah made sure the defenders didn’t get organized.

Two SM1 tank destroyers appeared around the corner of a building, off to Jonah’s left. They had him locked in and tracking. He sent out a beam from the Atlas’ extended-range large laser, just to let the Smileys know that he saw them and—with luck—to ruin their firing solutions. Then he swiveled the ’Mech, bringing its torso-mounted and right-arm-mounted weapons to bear. The tanks were worth expending some missiles on; Smileys were dangerous.

He pushed left hard, firing, letting the weight of the Atlas pull him sideways as it leaned. Leaves and woods exploded, and a secondary explosion followed closely. He’d gotten something.

He sent his ’Mech forward in a lumbering trot toward the Smileys. One tank was a heap of burning, twisted metal now, its fuel and ammunition cooking away. The other, intact, fired.

A stream of metal slugs mostly passed wide of the Atlas, but a few connected, catching the ’Mech in the left shoulder. They packed enough of a wallop to push the ’Mech’s torso back a little, and Jonah let it move. As it swiveled, Jonah pushed his joystick out, let the ’Mech’s right arm fly up a little. His aim stayed on the Smiley.

Pulling the trigger, Jonah sent a volley of missiles into the Smiley’s teeth. It soon became an exact twin to the other smoldering tank.

Turning from the light popping of exploding ammunition, Jonah started to wonder what the tanks were guarding.

He had barely taken two steps when a trapdoor in the earth opened and flames shot out. Jonah throttled back, but the hundred tons of steel surrounding him did not reverse quickly enough, and flames scorched his ’Mech’s skin. Angrily, he briefly pulled up then stomped on his right pedal, and the Atlas’ foot came down, shattering the trapdoor, the man beneath it, and the portable flamethrower he carried.

Checking his readouts, Jonah saw that the flamer had hit the Atlas directly enough to raise its temperature into the red zone. He slowed, allowing heat to dissipate.

Jonah took the opportunity to consider the surrounding terrain. Buildings of concrete and steel lay on every hand. The transmitter was off to his right, still a little bit out of range. He detected more infantry in motion, not coming from the proper direction and lacking an IFF signal marking them as friendlies. He lobbed a short-range missile volley in their direction to keep them from planning anything unpleasant and kept on thinking.

This particular spot hadn’t been a good place for an ambush by SM1 tanks—as demonstrated by the fact that the ambush hadn’t worked—which suggested that either his opponents were incompetent, or they’d had some other reason to guard this area. Jonah Levin hadn’t reached the rank of Paladin of the Sphere by assuming that his opponents were incompetent.

He turned toward the closest building, pushed the joystick to move out the Atlas’ powerful right arm, and reached for the building’s outside wall.

That brought the last line of defenders to life, three of them springing from the opposite side of the building, pointing a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher at Jonah’s chest.

Jonah swore. The bastards had done a good job digging themselves into the ground, out of reach of his sensors. But they couldn’t fire a rocket as fast as he could pull the trigger of his laser. Blue light shot out, incinerating the man holding the launcher along with his weapon. His comrades fell back with the heat of the blast from the exploded rocket.

Jonah surged forward and lifted his ’Mech’s right foot high in the air. The burned and bleeding pirates looked at the black spot that used to be their companion and at the huge metal foot over their heads. They made the easy choice and ran.

Jonah lowered his foot and watched them go. With their burns, they wouldn’t make it far.

He quickly scanned the area for any other late-emerging defenders and found it clear. His ’Mech’s hands once again extended to the tan wall near him, pulling it down into a pile of dust and rubble.

“Well, what do you know?” he said—without amplification, so that nobody outside the ’Mech’s cockpit could hear.

Inside the wrecked building, a group of civilians with blindfolds on their faces were handcuffed and chained to the inner wall on the top floor. Jonah keyed up his ’Mech’s external speakers.

“Friends,” he said. The amplification in the speakers sent his voice booming over the noise of battle. “Stand fast, friends are here.”

Then he keyed the internal communications circuit to the command channel. “I need a squad of infantry over here as fast as possible,” he said quietly. “With medics. I’m dropping a marker-transponder. Get me some people. I’ve found the hostages.”

Below him, by the beach, the defenders scattered as they heard their prize possession had been lost. The fifth wave landed on a beach free of gunfire.

Late in the afternoon, a VSTOL aircraft with Republic markings flew low over the beach, turned and came in for a landing. The beach was littered with broken machines; the ocean had not yet smoothed away the explosion craters. The medics and the Graves Registration unit had already cleared away the bodies and parts of bodies.

The door of the VSTOL opened and a lone man emerged, resplendent in the uniform of a Knight of the Sphere. He walked down onto the sand.

“Paladin Jonah Levin,” he said, taking the arm of the nearest trooper.

“Over there,” the soldier said, pointing, and continued on his way.

The Knight turned toward the Shandra scout vehicle that the trooper had pointed to, and walked over. The man sitting beside the Shandra was wearing only the shorts and light singlet of a dismounted MechWarrior, with no identification or rank insignia visible, but the Knight recognized Paladin Jonah Levin from his pictures on the tri-vids. Levin’s current uniform, or rather the lack of it, also showed what the tri-vid news interviews generally didn’t: a truly impressive collection of battle scars.