He left the post office with the package of socks tucked under one arm, and stepped out into the brilliant sunlight of the parade ground. The sky overhead was a bright eye-watering blue, and a stiff breeze had the banners of Northwind and the Regiment and The Republic of the Sphere snapping on their flagpoles. The air smelled of salt water and warm-climate flowers, with a faint underlying note of distant oil refinery. In the carefully tended flower beds beneath the post office windows, myriad insects buzzed and whirred.

He was halfway across the parade ground, and the sun dazzle had not quite cleared from his vision, when he crossed the path of Master Sergeant Murray—a short, muscular man who possessed the seemingly miraculous ability to keep his uniform in fresh-pressed condition on the muddiest of battlefields.

“Elliot,” Murray said.

Will halted. “Sergeant.”

“I’ve been looking for you.”

Being looked for by a sergeant was never good. Will searched his conscience hastily for possible errors and infractions, and came up clean. He suppressed the urge to panic anyway and said, “Sergeant?” in tones of respectful inquiry.

“The company has a problem, Elliot. With Foster going down to Halidon to train with the battle-armor boys, we’re short a sergeant. That means we’re going to have to promote somebody, and the Captain says that it ought to be you.”

“Me, Sergeant?” Will felt blank and startled. The promotion to corporal hadn’t particularly surprised him. He’d known he was good enough at the job for that, and besides, they’d lost enough men at Red Ledge Pass and on the plains that they would have had to promote somebody regardless. But he hadn’t thought that things were still so bad they’d need to promote him again.

“You want to tell Captain Fletcher that he doesn’t know what he’s doing?” Murray asked.

“No. But—” Will paused. He’d had an unpleasant thought. “Sergeant, is there trouble coming that nobody’s talking about?”

Murray gave him an approving look. “No trouble right now—but you know how to think about things, Elliot. That’s good. Be at the admin building at 1000 tomorrow to sign the papers.”

They parted, and Will, feeling a bit light-headed, continued back to the shadowy coolness of the barracks. There, he found his friends Jock Gordon and Lexa McIntosh—the former a muscular giant of a man and the latter a diminutive gypsy-dark woman—passing the time quietly at the end of their duty day.

Jock was a farm boy from New Lanark, the youngest of too many brothers, and Lexa had run wild with the youth gangs of the Kearney outback until a judge—perhaps seeing a bit of potential that she herself had not—had given her a choice between time in the Regiment and time in jail. At the moment Jock was polishing the already gleaming buttons and buckles of his dress uniform, and Lexa was lying on her stomach in her bunk reading a six-month-old copy of FashionSphere.

She looked up from the magazine’s pages as Will approached. “Hey, Will. It says here that open-toed pumps are coming back into style. Do you think I should buy myself some the next time we get paid?”

“Go for it,” Jock said, when Will didn’t answer. “They’ll be just the thing for those long marches.”

“Once in a while I do go somewhere that doesn’t involve hiking twenty-five miles and shooting people at the end of it,” Lexa replied. She trailed off, looking at Will, who hadn’t said anything. “Will? Are you all right?”

He sat down heavily on his bunk, still clutching the package from his mother. “Um,” he said. “Yes. I’m all right—I’m fine. Really.”

“Well, you look like somebody hit you over the head with a sock full of sand. Not that I’d know about that from experience, mind you.”

Jock set aside his rag and his can of polish and gave Will his full attention. “Is it bad news from home?”

“No.” The word came out sounding fainter than Will intended. He tried again, and this time achieved a normal voice. “It’s—Master Sergeant Murray says they’re going to promote me. To Sergeant.”

Lexa turned to Jock. “Told you they’d do it before New Year’s. Pay up.”

Will looked from one of his friends to the other. “Did everybody see this coming except me?”

Jock grinned. “Aye.”

“What am I going to do?” Will asked plaintively.

“Your job, what else?” said Lexa. “In the meantime, since it’s payday and they haven’t actually pinned the stripes on you yet—let’s all go out tonight and celebrate while you’re still poor and humble enough to socialize with the likes of us.”

Prefect’s Office

New Barracks

Tara

Northwind

November 3133; local winter

For the first time in several years, Captain Tara Bishop was back in the city with which she (like the Countess of Northwind) shared a name. A great deal had happened during the time she had been gone, and a lot of things had changed. She’d been nothing more than a green Lieutenant Junior Grade when she left home to join the Highlander forces serving offworld—and The Republic of the Sphere had been a happy and peaceful place, with the HPG communications network up and running, providing the thread of regular, almost real-time contact that tied together The Republic’s scattered political entities.

The Lieutenant Tara Bishop of those days had not anticipated seeing any combat harder than the occasional skirmish with pirates or with disaffected political extremists. Fighting against the latter, especially, seemed almost unfair, since as a class they tended to be chronically underfunded and undersupported, the last political resort of perpetual losers and hopeless romantics.

That was then, Captain Bishop reminded herself as she made her way through the streets of the capital. This is now.

And “now” meant a universe in which the HPG net had gone down, at the hands of one or another of a dozen different parties, all claiming responsibility for the job, although Captain Bishop remained more than half convinced that the real culprit was somebody else who wasn’t talking about the job at all. In that new universe, every fringe group and neo-factionalist in the Inner Sphere was suddenly raising an army and trying to carve out an area of influence. Case in point, the Dragon’s Fury on Addicks—and while Captain Bishop had been fighting there, keeping the Kurita Dragon’s grasping claws away from a peaceful world with no real standing army to put up a defense, her own home planet had come under attack.

To her unspoken but profound relief, Northwind’s capital city and its main DropPort showed few obvious marks of the fighting. She knew from the reports she’d read en route from Addicks that the final battle had taken place away from built-up areas, in the open farm and grazing land of the plains north of Tara; she’d seen pictures, and knew that in a season or two most of the scars of combat would be gone.

On the other hand, the homes and small towns along the road through Red Ledge Pass had not been so fortunate. Captain Bishop had gone skiing and rock climbing in that area, and the place-names attached to stories of the Steel Wolves’ trail of destruction were ones she remembered from holidays past: Harlaugh, Liddisdale, the Killie Burn, all of them wrecked or polluted, and needing far longer than a couple of seasons to repair.

The changes in the capital, once she started looking for them, proved to be more subtle. Soldiers in uniform were a more common sight than they’d been in the days before the HPG collapse, a reminder that the Highlander Regiments were expanding in size for the first time in some decades. Prices these days were higher than Captain Bishop remembered, driven upward by war and uncertainty. She was glad that she’d kept—and augmented by some judicious participation in games of skill—her pay from Addicks, and equally glad that she could count on finding meals and a bed waiting for her at the New Barracks.