"Blood." The answer to everything.

"Your understanding ennobles you. I am pleased to see that there is some little honor in the Dragoons."

Dechan was angered by the slight, another sign that his Dragoon loyalties still tugged his emotional strings. Defiantly, he said, "Enough for you."

The Coordinator smiled. "So I had hoped."

For the first time, Dechan looked outside. He saw what Takashi stared at so raptly, the blue and gold Archer.Dechan didn't understand what the Coordinator was seeing as he stared at the 'Mech, but he knew now that the rumors of Takashi's obsession were more than that. Not sure which of his loyalties prompted him, Dechan felt the need to know the Coordinator's mind.

"Forgive my impertinence, Coordinator -sama, but may I ask a question?"

A slight wave of Takashi's hand was his answer.

"Why is that BattleMech in your garden?"

The Coordinator was silent for so long that Dechan thought that he had misinterpreted the hand signal, that it had not been permission to speak. Dechan rose, assuming he had been dismissed. Just as he was about to pass through the door, he heard Takashi speak, so softly that Dechan wondered if he had been meant to hear.

"The Fox is gone now," the Coordinator said. "All I have left is the Wolf."

7

As Subhash Indrahar listened to the conversation between the Coordinator and the Dragoon spy, his brows drew together with worry. Once Takashi had nearly destroyed the Combine with his obsession to destroy the Dragoons. Now with the Clan invaders encroaching, the Combine could no longer afford to humor Takashi's samurai honor. Once his old friend would have seen that as clearly as Subhash did, but as the years passed Takashi seemed to grow weaker in mind as Subhash grew weaker in body.

Touching the controls on the arm of his powered support unit, he sent the chair wheeling across the room. The door slid open just in time for his chair to continue on without stopping. As he entered the command center, Internal Security Force agents snapped to attention all around the perimeter of the chamber. The technicians and special agents at their consoles barely glanced up, however; they had work to do. All was as it should be.

Despite his concern, Subhash almost smiled. The cogs in the great machine that was the Draconis Combine whirred on. Nothing must interfere with the functioning of this great machine of state. If someone, even a Coordinator, were to become sand in the gears, the sand must be removed and the gears re-greased.

Subhash cut smartly around a corner and slowed to a stop at the station of a red-haired man wearing the black uniform of an operations agent. The man's uniform was clean, but so rumpled it looked as if he had recently returned from action. The agent looked up from his console as the powered chair rolled to a halt with a soft sigh of brakes and a whiff of volatilized rubber. He straightened, coming to as much of a formal stance as he ever did.

"Ohayo,Subhash -sama," said Ninyu Kerai-Indrahar.

"Attend me," Subhash said, spinning the chair.

They entered a transpex-walled conference chamber. As Subhash rode to the central console, Ninyu engaged the anti-listening devices. The room now secure, Subhash began to speak.

"What were you working on?"

"The last batch of dispatches from Dieron. Gregor reports things are shaping up there as you expected."

Feared would have been a better word. For all the ancient rivalry between House Kurita and House Davion, it had been House Steiner and their Lyran Commonwealth that had most hurt the Combine in the last generation. The Commonwealth's successes, even before joining with the Federated Suns to become the Federated Commonwealth, had bred a new generation of hatreds. Those animosities now smoldered on the Dieron-Skye border.

The appointment of the new warlord of Dieron was one of Subhash's rare failures. Takashi, having learned of his son Theodore's machinations in the Dieron Military District, had insisted on personally choosing the new warlord. His choice of Isoroku was most regrettable. The young fool had Kurita blood, all right—all the bad parts. He saw military glory as the road to rulership of the Combine and dreamed of supplanting both Takashi and Theodore.

Even so, the situation might have been managed had not the Federated Commonwealth appointed Richard Steiner to command in the Ryde Theater. Richard was the son of Nondi Steiner, one of the Commonwealth's great military heroes of the last generation. Steiner had made little secret of his desire for revenge against House Kurita, no doubt believing this would make him more popular among the masses. He was most certainly going to need a heavy dose of popularity should he ever attempt to achieve his more secret goal of wresting the rulership of the Federated Commonwealth away from the Davion line and gaining it for his own House.

For all the intensity of Inner Sphere rivalries, they were not the greatest threat to the Draconis Combine in these latter days. Despite the ComStar Treaty of Tukkayid, which forbade the Clans to advance rim-ward toward Terra, the Clans still threatened Combine star systems spinward and anti-spinward. Even the most cursory study of that treaty revealed that its terms did not prevent the invaders from expanding their grasp within the Inner Sphere, so long as they approached no nearer to Terra. Such a solution might be satisfactory to ComStar, but it left much of the Combine, including the capital, at risk.

The Combine was not the only state at risk. Much of the former Lyran Commonwealth was beyond the treaty's boundary and also wide open to predation by the Clans. The Federated Commonwealth could not ignore such a threat to what was now its economic heartland. Any clear-sighted ruler could see that this was no time for military adventurism. Subhash hoped that young Victor Davion realized the foolishness of continuing to prosecute the old Davion-Kurita rivalry while the two Houses currently faced a greater common enemy. Indeed, the director fully expected Davion to follow his father's recent policy of demilitarization along the Combine's border with the Federated Commonwealth. But the Prince was young and not securely in control of his state. Already there had been incidents.

"The combination of the aggressive Isoroku Kurita and the equally belligerent Richard Steiner is volatile," Ninyu concluded.

"Correct. However, we may have a more dangerous situation developing."

"This is new, then?"

"No." Subhash rapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. "Unfortunately, it is old."

"Takashi."

Subhash was pleased that his protege' was so astute. If only the son of his now-withered loins were so competent . " Your reasons?"

"I saw that he had called for the former Dragoon." Ninyu consulted his watch. "An appointment that might be over by now. Barely. Now I speak to you and find you agitated."

Subhash smiled. Yes, far better than his bumbling son. "The Coordinator is dwelling on the past."

Screwing his face into a frown, Ninyu said, "I thought you said that letting him build that Archerwould settle it."

Subhash sighed. "The infallibility of the Director of the ISF is only credible to those who do not live in reality. Those of us involved in the great game know infallibility does not exist, only skill and fortune."

"And the first often produces the second," Ninyu finished for him. He shook his head and frowned. "If the Coordinator is focusing his attention on those damned mercenaries again, it will be trouble. His obsession almost cost us the Combine during the Fourth Succession War. Had it not been for Theodore's brilliant strategies on the Lyran front and the limited Davion presence on the Federated Suns front, we would have been crushed. But the Coordinator had his priorities. As it was, we lost too many star systems. We should have been able to halt the Lyrans and take systems from Davion."