One year I am helping to create The Republic, through articles and character bios for INN, and consulting on back history. The next, I’m doing my damnedest to tear it apart. Sometimes it feels like one of those old military make-work projects. Dig a hole; then fill it back in. Except that not all of the dirt ever makes it back into the hole. It gets scattered around, lost in the grass and clumped into the treads of work boots.

And that’s where all of our stories come from—when the pieces do not fit back together quite so nicely as when we took them apart.

I would like to thank everyone at WizKids for their tireless support in this process: Jordan and Dawne Weisman, Maya Smith, and Mike and Sharon Mulvihill, among so many others. Also the wonderful people I have been privileged enough to work with at Roc—Laura Anne Gillman, who will be missed, and Jennifer Heddle, with whom I always look forward to working—and Vic Milán, who wrote one hell of a book and ended up being a hard act to follow.

Best wishes to my agent, Don Maass, and to his office staff for their hard work on my behalf. A hearty thanks to Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch for their continued support, mentoring, and friendship.

Speaking of friends… thanks again go to Allen and Amy Mattila, Randall and Tara Bills, Phil DeLuca, Kelle Vozka, and Peter and Cathy Orullian, all of whom help keep me relatively sane by dragging me away from my computer from time to time. And then there are Oystein Tvedten, Herb Beas, Chris Hartford, Chris Trossen, Pete Smith, Chas Borner, and Warner Doles, who always seem ready to drag me back. Special acknowledgments go out to Dave Stansel for his recent efforts, and Mike Stackpole, who continues to keep in touch with everything.

My heartfelt appreciation also goes out to my wife, Heather Joy, who continues to indulge my selfish need to lock myself away for days and weeks. And to my children, Talon, Conner, and Alexia, who pick that lock all too regularly or not often enough—I can’t decide.

And because I would find hair balls on my pillow if I didn’t: thanks to Chaos, Rumor, and Ranger, our Siamese cats, for keeping our house in strict order. (And Loki, our dog, for his frequent infusions of happy chaos.)

Cheops

Seventh District, Nusakan

Prefecture IX, Republic of the Sphere

8 September 3134

Thick, viscous fog shrouded the Willamette Valley, creating the worst whiteout conditions Jasek Kelswa-Steiner had ever seen. It stretched the battlefield into a canvas of thin shadows and brief, pale flashes of fire and lightning. Lasers strobed in snatches of emerald green and angry red. Cerulean beams from particle projector cannon arced back and forth. Occasionally, a bolt of the man-made lightning of the PPC slashed into the shadows, grabbing one in a spectral aura like Saint Elmo’s fire, drawing a brief, cold outline around an armored vehicle or a BattleMech.

Jasek could only guess if it had been the enemy, or one of his own.

Violent eruptions of fire slashed a path through the knee-high sward of tall grasses and Scotch broom as a flight of missiles hammered down from the closed heavens. He ducked reflexively, as if he could drag the Griffin back by force of will.

Blackmned earth pattered against the screen.

Smoke mixed into the fog, tainting the frosted blanket with a gray, dishwater color.

Appearing at nearly point-blank range, two shadows raced forward. Jasek knew they were enemy tanks even before the vehicles opened fire. They probed through the thinning curtain, relying on instruments or instinct. Light autocannon fire spang ed off the BattleMech’s arms. The dark forms solidified in an instant, showing themselves as Skanda light tanks. Angular lines and their dropped nose marked them certainly as belonging to Clan Jade Falcon.

Bullet-shaped treads chewed up the sward like hungry mouths. They raced to either side of the camera, trading out autocannon for medium lasers and laying in a blistering cross fire. The camera view hitched and swung around, following the left-side Skanda. Return fire came late, scarlet-tinged lasers splashing armor from the tank’s rear quarter.

At nearly 120 kilometers per hour the tanks raced off into the fog, disappearing quickly. The scene slowed, catching the Skandas as thin shadows once more, and froze just before they disappeared.

“There!” Jasek threw the remote to his best friend and aide-de-camp, Niccolò GioAvanti. Jasek came out of his chair and prowled a tight box around a kidney-shaped desk. Lean and muscular, the thirty-one-year-old leader had the powerful grace of a stalking cat. “Look at that.”

He gestured to the Tri-Vid viewer inset into one of the office’s dark, walnut-paneled walls. This compilation of gun-cam footage had been specially edited to give him an overview of an intelligence-gathering raid against the world of Ryde, where one of his Stormhammer units had run into intolerable weather conditions and stiff Jade Falcon resistance. It was showing him a lot more.

“Hauptmann Falhearst’s Griffin has a Cyclops XII extended-range laser mounted on its right arm. What the hell is he doing, not using it?”

Niccolò GioAvanti rose from his own chair and set the slender remote on the edge of Jasek’s desk. His mouse brown hair was cut short and straight across the back and sides except for a family braid twisting down over his left temple. His eyes were an unsettling pale blue and never seemed to blink enough. Wearing dark slacks and a flowing white shirt under a dark vest, he created a stark contrast to Jasek’s dusky features and crisp dress-gray uniform. Which was likely the reason he dressed that way.

Jasek watched as his friend squared the remote against a glass-topped holopic base that projected a clenched gauntlet into the air over his desk. Niccolò was obviously stalling, giving Jasek a moment in which to regain his composure. Thankfully, Jasek’s noble birth and inherited title did not stand between the two men. Niccolò himself came from a fairly influential merchant family, and twenty-two years of friendship had eroded any formality due a Landgrave and a ducal heir.

“Perhaps if we issued Tri-Vid remotes to our pilots,” Niccolò finally offered, “letting them slow the action and review it a time or two before making their decisions.”

Jasek glowered. Eighteen months on the world of Nusakan, sitting out a self-imposed exile, had not improved his mood. “Don’t twit me over being stuck here, Nicco.”

His friend raised an eyebrow. “Who thought Nusakan would be the perfect base of operations?”

“I did. And it was. Is!” He laughed dryly as his tongue tripped him up. “I just thought the key word would be operations, not base.”

Still, the barb stuck. Jasek snagged his desk chair and dropped back into it, testing the springs, which creaked several loud protests. The warm smell of rich leather wrapped around him as he rocked back for a moment, studying the ceiling. The scent reminded him of his father’s office, and that memory unlocked the door to so many more.