“You see somethin’ up there, Kurst?”

Whit Greggor stepped up next to Evan. Greggor was the one Ijori Dè Guāng member present tonight that Evan knew. The large man had a voice that rumbled up from deep within his chest, broad, Slavic features, and crew-cut reddish-brown hair turning premature gray. Too old to be a student, full of ideals. Too young to remember life under the Confederation, fifty-some years before. Evan pegged him as a thug. Mai Wa probably recruited the tough out of a dark alley somewhere.

Did Evan see something? More than Greggor could imagine.

“Freedom,” he finally said. “I’m enjoying sunlight that never looked down on the Word of Blake… that never knew Devlin Stone.”

“I’d rather catch the drive flare of our ’Ship. We need more weapons.” He cracked his scarred, oversize knuckles. “Then we can ram real freedom down the throats of all these paper citizens.”

“Spoken like a true patriot.” Crude and boorish, the sentiment summed up Greggor quite well. Evan considered it very likely that there was a bridge somewhere missing its troll. Would a man like this even care to understand what he was fighting for?

“You sayin’ we don’t need more weapons?”

“We need something,” Evan agreed. Weapons. Resources. Leaders. The people of Liao longed to slip The Republic’s harness. Mai Wa prophesied that once the landslide began, it would sweep the world.

Evan believed now more than ever.

“So what’s the holdup, you think? The new ComStar blackout?”

“Could be.”

The man hawked, spat to one side. “What else, ya think? The oubluduk cowlheads’ve never had their shit in one sock.”

Greggor’s speech was often laced with Russian curses and colorful stock, but his analysis did not differ much from Evan’s. ComStar’s local service had gone down again, disconnecting Liao from the rest of the Inner Sphere for the second time this month. Without faster-than-light communications provided by the organization’s network of hyperpulse generator stations, disruptions occurred in everything from shipping schedules to interplanetary market trades. Once had been a costly anomaly, virtually unknown since the agency’s inception.

Twice? Evan wondered.

“The JumpShip could have had technical problems,” Evan finally said. “Customs maybe stopped the DropShip in orbit.” Besides the HPG network, so much relied on the tenuous fabric of interstellar travel: jump-capable vessels that moved thirty light-years at a leap and DropShips ferrying goods and people between worlds.

Greggor wasn’t satisfied with that. “I still say it’s ComStar. Got us all frigged up again. Filthy vrebrachneys.”

Evan shrugged. Greggor’s black moods could be contagious. A shout from another cadre member saved him from any reply.

“Lights! Lights on the road!”

“Truck,” someone else called out. “Hovercraft.”

This time Evan didn’t worry about the noise. He worried about who was arriving so late to their party. A chill took him as he drew his needler pistol, felt its uncomfortable weight in his hand. His efforts in the Ijori Dè Guāng so far had been limited to “liberating” supplies from remote military compounds and sabotaging public transportation services. Military academies taught MechWarrior cadets basic small arms handling—laser pistols, for example—and those he wasn’t allowed to carry outside the firing range. The needler was a more vicious weapon than any he’d trained with.

Perspiration warmed under Evan’s arms as he took cover behind his rented haulers, extending the weapon in a two-hand grasp over the vehicle’s hood and waiting for confirmation of sight, fight, or flight.

The open-bed hovercraft flashed its lights twice, once, twice.

“Mai! It is Mai Wa.” The resistance leader. Liao’s best hope.

Relief flooded Evan with a cold touch, like an aftertaste of the regret that came after any compromise. Part of him had looked forward to pulling the trigger, he realized, placing himself apart from those who talked, and among the company of those who did. Even the Cult of Liao, Evan had discovered recently, honored action over rhetoric. In that, the underground political movement had more in common with the forming Ijori Dè Guāng than most people thought.

The hovertruck cut its lights and lift fans just short of the gathered haulers, settling to the ground as its air cushion spilled out from beneath rigid skirting. The dying whine of its lifters reminded Evan of this morning’s visit to the Cult of Liao shrine, and the humming of its generator, which echoed off stark, barren, bunker walls.

Mai Uhn Wa slid out from the cab, pouring himself to the ground with a fluidity which Evan had come to envy. His shaved head was tanned to a leathery brown, his mustache oily black and obviously dyed on the fifty-odd-year-old man. Small and compact, rarely given to exaggerated gestures, Mai Wa might have been any Capellan-descended citizen you passed on the street if you never noticed his eyes. Black and hard, and never blinking enough, they were eyes that had seen—and still saw—too much.

Yet Evan would show his mentor something the other man had never dreamt to look upon.

The thought warmed him, buoyed his hopes, until Mai Wa looked over his assembled cadre and shook his head slowly. Once.

“The DropShip will not arrive,” the elder man informed them straightaway. “Our off-world network is compromised.”

“Compromised?” Greggor sounded as if he was struggling with the meaning of the word. “How? Who?”

Evan had never asked about Mai’s off-world contacts. In a resistance cell organization, the less you knew the better. Evan already knew more than he should about Liao-based operations, including the names of other cell leaders, which he put down to being a prominent Mech Warrior candidate. Among more common members Evan carried influence, which Mai Wa had used in this last year.

Now he regretted not asking. His ability to advise would be limited.

“Customs Security on Genoa halted all outbound traffic three days ago,” Mai Wa told them. “In the process of routine management, some …discrepancies were uncovered. The DropShip was destroyed trying to flee authorities.”

Like dominoes poised to topple, no doubt a great deal of Mai Wa’s network stood exposed. How bad was this setback? And why halt all outbound traffic? The disruption such a decision caused… would pale next to any larger disruption already occurring.

“The blackout,” Evan said, spitting out the word like a mouthful of rancid naranji pulp. The timing could not be coincidence. “Genoa noticed that we were off the HPG net again.”

“Yes,” Mai said. “And no. And not exactly.” The small man seemed to be carrying an extraordinarily large burden, and now simply heaved it aside in the most direct manner possible. “Four days ago, Genoa witnessed something we were spared. In a way. They saw nearly every world go dark. In a six-hour period, they lost HPG contact with all star systems but one, New Aragon, which reported much the same thing.”

The implications rolled over Evan Kurst like an assault tank. HPGs reached out fifty light-years. Two worlds reported a complete loss of signal from almost every other station within that distance?

“Arboris?” someone asked. “Ningpo and Gan Singh?” Neighboring worlds. “New Canton?” The capital of Prefecture VI.

Mai had little left to offer. “Only a single JumpShip has come in bearing any news so far. Shipboard rumor claims that sporadic contact has been made with New Canton, yes. And with Achernar in Prefecture IV. But we may be looking at over ninety percent loss of the ComStar network. If that extends into any of the Great Houses at our borders…”

Hundreds. Thousands of worlds. Dark. Evan grasped at the full implications. Missed. “Our work here,” he asked, “what of it?” The awaited supplies were everything they needed to flesh out a true resistance force. To make the Ijori Dè Guāng something other than one more small-time movement. Evan felt their work slipping away into nothingness.