Skye will never need your kind of leadership.

Shock. And a warm thrill of anger.

We’ll see what Skye needs, Father. If you think The Republic will stand on its own merits, you’re going to be greatly disappointed.

Obviously not for the first time.

That last conversation with Duke Gregory Kelswa-Steiner, his father and Lord Governor of Prefecture IX, continued to echo through his thoughts. It had angered Jasek in the DropShip, lifting off from Skye. Chased him all the way to Nusakan, where Niccolò offered him offices and support out of the GioAvanti mercantile assets in Cheops. Drawing like-minded warriors to his standard, the Stormhammers, Jasek had stripped Prefecture IX of what little defense it mustered. Then he waited for his father to call him home. To admit to being wrong.

Duke Gregory did neither.

And Skye very nearly fell.

Jasek scrubbed one hand over his face. Opening his eyes, he found himself staring at the clenched-gauntlet hologram projected over its glass-eyed emitter—the symbol of House Steiner and the Lyran Commonwealth. The mailed fist was burnished copper with silver chasing. The background was dark blue, nearly indigo, the same color as his eyes.

A promise, she’d said, giving it to him. He very nearly smiled. A token of our shared resolve.

Which, as it turned out, was not all they had shared.

But he couldn’t live inside memories, even pleasant ones, for long. Niccolò waited patiently, right elbow braced on the back of his other fist, right hand tapping a knuckle against his chin. Jasek knew his friend would wait as long as it took; he had never outlasted Nicco in any game of patience.

“All right,” he finally admitted. “So it’s not fair to expect perfection out of the Stormhammers.”

He had splashed two fingers of dark whiskey into a tumbler earlier. It sat on his desk, untouched and unwanted. Leaning forward, he reached past the glass and stabbed at the remote, continuing the gun-cam footage. He left the slender wand slightly canted toward the edge of the desk, knowing it would annoy his friend.

On the Tri-Vid, the scene cut to another camera. This one, according to the information tag scrolling along the bottom of the screen, was mounted on a Hasek mechanized combat vehicle. More fog. A shadow grew and coalesced into the Griffin that had been under fire only a few seconds before. The fifty-five-ton war avatar showed laser scoring along its left leg and right flank, and jagged armor where its left-shoulder plating had been ripped apart in an earlier engagement. A long-range-missile system sat on its right shoulder. Its lasers appeared intact, stubbing out of the centerline and mounted on the outside of its right arm. The BattleMech’s “head” had one of the best range-of-views of any design, Jasek knew, with more than eight square meters of ferroglass curving around the cockpit.

Standing nearly nine meters tall under most circumstances, the BattleMech crouched, twisting from side to side as if expecting another attack at any moment. Jasek tried to imagine what Falhearst’s HUD had to look like—a tangle of icons and data tags. What had the Mech Warrior been thinking, trying to regroup in the face of a determined assault, cut off from the Stormhammers’ DropShip?

Jasek watched as the Hasek disgorged two squads of Purifier infantry. The battle armor troops fanned out in front of the Griffin, mimetic armor blending them into the sward with perfect camouflage. Only the bending grasses and scrub brush betrayed their passage as they moved forward to act as an early-warning picket. Slowly, too slowly, the combined-arms lance advanced. He said so aloud.

“This isn’t five and six,” Niccolò reminded Jasek, referring to The Republic’s prefectures that bordered against the Capellan Confederation. “We haven’t seen real combat in more than forty years. That much, at least, Devlin Stone did accomplish.”

“Yeah, well, where’s Stone now?” Jasek asked, not expecting an answer. Niccolò did not volunteer one.

Of course, both men had been raised on Devlin Stone’s “accomplishments.” His status, perhaps deservedly, as the war hero who saved the Inner Sphere from Word of Blake’s Jihad. The campaign to form a new Republic and promote peace through a policy of economically enforced disarmament and the intermingling of cultures.

Jasek had endured such lessons from his father as well as in his formal schooling. Duke Gregory was a true believer, one of Stone’s early supporters when the bulk of Prefecture IX had been known as the Isle of Skye. For generations, Skye had sought independent rule from House Steiner’s Lyran Commonwealth. Then Devlin Stone dangled the carrot of The Republic in front of them, and Duke Gregory helped lead Skye into Stone’s camp. Soon The Republic of the Sphere had gobbled up nearly all worlds within 120 light-years of Terra, humanity’s birthplace.

But to Jasek’s way of thinking they had merely traded one lord for another, and the grandeur of House Steiner for an upstart with dreams of utopia.

His friend agreed. “For all his speeches of forging a new path,” Niccolò had said, “there are still two types of government: republics and principalities. We may style ourselves The Republic of the Sphere, but we are still Stone’s hereditary fiefdom. And without him, we founder.”

Jasek clenched his jaw as the Griffin struggled forward through the fog, sniped at by Jade Falcon tormentors who materialized as half-visible ghosts or simply guessed well based on the Clans’ superior instrumentation. A stream of energy from a PPC blasted through the thick curtain and sloughed away a ton of armor in a wide swath across the ’Mech’s chest. A Stormhammer Panther made brief contact, the smaller ’Mech leading a pair of Scimitar hover tanks and a long line of Cavalier battle armor infantry. For a moment, it looked as if the full unit might reconstitute itself and make a stand.

Then the Jade Falcons hammered into their flank.

A Gyrfalcon led, arms thrust forward, alternating between large lasers and medium-weight autocannon. Two Skandas—maybe the same two from before—charged in at its side, challenging the Hasek MCV, with a Kite recon vehicle trailing and adding its SRMs to the hard-hitting assault.

The Cavalier infantry managed to swarm one Skanda, jumping onto its top and ripping away large chunks of armor. They thrust arm-mounted lasers into the crew space and filled the cabin with lethal energy. The Purifiers, by design or just bad luck, ended up in the path of the Kite. Like a lawn mower, the hovercraft slammed through their formation, its nose crumpling. Bodies flew to either side, broken and lost.

The Stormhammers shattered.

Rather than stand their ground, pitting two ’Mechs against the one Gyrfalcon, the Panther broke left with its Scimitar support and the Griffin right. The fog claimed both, separating them as the Falcon MechWarrior hammered the Hasek’s nose into unrecognizable scrap. The Griffin sliced its lasers at the other fifty-five-tonner, but it lit off jump jets and rocketed up, out of sight, before suffering much damage.

Jasek stood, scooping up his drink and carrying it with him as he walked a slow perimeter around the outer wall of his office.

“I’m tired of waiting, Nicco. I’m done watching. I’ve sat by while the Jade Falcons tear up our worlds these last two months, and I’m telling you that it’s killing me. Skye very nearly fell! I feel like I’m the one lost in that damnable fog, and I don’t know where the next blow is coming from.”

Niccolò leaned against the side of Jasek’s desk. “But look at how much more we know compared to twelve months ago. Even twelve weeks ago.”

Jasek shrugged, looked down into his drink. Amber liquid sloshed back and forth. “We know nothing. We suspect. We suspect that other prefectures are having just as much trouble with the loss of the HPG network, and we suspect that the Falcon incursion is more than they claim—this ‘hunting expedition’ to destroy the Steel Wolves.”