He left Kiyomasa standing in the room, staring at his feet.

40

We came down the ramps hot and ready, hitting the ground while the dust from the Chieftain'slanding was still rising. There were only four of us—there had been no time to fill the DropShip with its full complement without raising an alarm, so all we had were the 'Mechs still aboard from the trip to the Draconis Combine. I was in the lead machine and Grant Linkowski piloted the Colonel's Archer.Hans Vordel's Victorand Franchette's Gallowglaswere only seconds behind us. Only the four of us to meet a full regiment of the Home Guard's armor and infantry.

When we weren't immediately fired upon, I allowed myself some hope that our landing clearance had not been a subterfuge, a ploy to bring the Wolf into a trap. In the distance I could see the ranked armor through the dissipating dust. I popped my magnification up a couple of grades, and breathed a sigh of relief. Lieutenant Colonel Joe Garcia, Carmody's second, was standing in the open on the deck of his Rommel tank. Colonel Edna Grazier, armored ops chief, stood beside him. If it had been a trap, they would have been buttoned up in their vehicles.

As I throttled my Lokidown, I noticed how hard my cooling suit was working and I realized how frightened I had been.

I opened communications with a laser link, making arrangements for setting up the Colonel's headquarters. In less than an hour, the command staffs were gathered in Garcia's mobile command trailer, listening to his explanation. Working as closely as he had with his boss, Garcia had suspected that there might be trouble. He'd put his forces on alert as soon as he lost communications with Carmody back in the World. He hadn't known what to expect and our arrival had been a surprise. He had decided to play it cautious: hence the assembled forces. Once he heard our account of the escape and Carmody's death, he knew where he stood.

"Colonel Wolf, we may be a bunch of downtesters, pensioners, newbies, and sibkids, but we're gonna stand by you. There's no honor in murder. I have to admit that I didn't understand about the Trial when I heard, but I thought that you must have had something in mind. Looks like I was right. You were just doing it to smoke out the rats so everyone could see them run, weren't you?"

"You're overestimating my abilities, Joe."

"If so, I'll be the first, Colonel."

"I'll do what I can to justify your faith."

"I'm not worried, Colonel."

"Maybe you should be, Joe. Lord knows we've got a lot to worry about."

"I've got confidence in you, Colonel."

"Thanks, Joe. I appreciate that. I haven't done a lot to deserve it lately." There was an awkward silence in the trailer for a moment, then the Colonel said, "But the past is dead, and we'll be just as dead unless we get rolling. So if we can get into the ops center, we can start getting serious about showing the upstarts who really owns the Dragoons."

The Colonel and the Home Guard officers took the train from the port to the training center complex. We took the 'Mechs cross-country, which was faster than following the rail line or the highway, both of which were confined to the long shallow grade around the northern hills. We couldn't have kept up with the train anyway. During the trip I was able to establish linkage to the ops center through my Lokiand got a jump on my staff work. I was able to dump a map-update into the computer so that it was waiting for the Wolf when he arrived.

The command center at the Tetsuhara Training Facility didn't have all the sophistication of the main center at Wolf Hall, but it was superior to the Chieftain'sfacilities. The advantage of space without concern for mass allowed better support for my Lokiand provided more than adequate triple C for the forces at hand. The ground-based sensor array gave good coverage, but it was supposed to be part of a planetwide system. With the connective links cut, it wasn't operating at full efficiency, leaving holes in our coverage that bothered me. And with the satellite links down, we were also limited in the range over which we could control forces. With some work we could set up relay stations that would minimize the communications dead zones. Relay stations had some advantages; the commlasers and optical cable systems were far less vulnerable to intercept. As I finished my tour of the ops center, Grazier was reacting to the update map.

"This is all?" She looked horrified. "What happened to Yukinov?"

"Probably still on Ingersoll with the rest of Alpha Regiment," the Wolf told her.

We had learned that Kelly Yukinov was never actually on his way to Outreach, despite the intel report indicating that he would attend the fateful council meeting that had resulted in the Trial of Position. There was no doubt that Yukinov was loyal to Colonel Wolf and a report of his imminent arrival was surely meant to assure the Colonel that his partisans would have a majority in the council meeting. Those reports had been false, engineered by Captain Svados in support of Elson and Alpin's coup. I still didn't know if the Wolf had been taken in by the subterfuge or if he had some other reason for letting the council meeting take place. Could Garcia be right when he suggested that the Wolf had planned it all along? Jaime Wolf hadn't exactly denied the possibility, but he hadn't confirmed it either. Whatever Colonel Wolf's plans had been, the meeting had taken place, he had been deposed, and we were all here in the Outback because of it.

"Alpha may be behind us," the Wolf said, "But they're not here. Since we're cut off from hyperpulse generators, we can't contact them. Even if we could, the situation on Crimond makes it unlikely that they could pull out in time to affect what will be happening here."

"Could the sitreps from Crimond have been falsified, too?" Garcia asked.

"Yes," I told him. "But it's unlikely. FedCom news media report Clan presence and that means combat."

"So we can't count on Alpha," Grazier said glumly.

"But neither will they be arrayed against us. Like Alpha, the Dragoon forces offplanet are engaged. They will be unable to affect anything in the immediate future. On either side. We can only count on what we've got here in the Outback to deal with Alpin's forces onplanet."

"And in orbit," Garcia grumbled.

"That doesn't look to be an issue," the Colonel said.

"What?"

"While we were on our way here, Ham Atwyl and his wingman peeled off for high orbit. They rendezvoused with the cache fleet. Ham's plan was to explain the situation. He seemed to think he could bring them around to our side or at least keep them out of any combat, and he seems to have had some success. Half an hour ago, Fleet Captain Chandra made a broadcast. She's declared the fleet neutral in any conflict. Gobi Station and all orbital and deep-space assets in system are included in this neutrality."

"Including satellites?" Grazier asked.

"Yes. All orbital scans are being withheld. Chandra says they will eliminate or disable any satellites used for unauthorized transmissions. The wording of Chandra's statement seems to omit any aerospace assets currently grounded. However, she is urging any disputants, her word, to minimize damage to Dragoon aerospace assets by minimizing use."

"What's Ham doing now?" Cythene Martel asked. As captain of the Chieftain,she was a part of Atwyl's command.

"Nothing. They've cited him as a participant and interned him for the duration of the dispute. Chandra has taken over the Aerospace Command till then." The Wolf shrugged. "Looks like the Fleet Captain is playing for a bigger role for aerospace in Dragoon hierarchy, whichever side comes out on top."