"Neg. I would rather have the weapons and then take our chances."

Pershaw muttered, so faintly he could barely be heard, "Typical freebirth cowardice."

"It is notcowardice. There may be skirmishes, there—"

"Do you think the Wolves will be interested in your little diversion? I doubt that. I will signal to them that you are a freebirth unit, and they will know that you are on a garbage patrol."

"If I may contradict, once they see our destination, they may try to stop us."

"And you are Jade Falcon warriors, who can fight any attacker with whatever firepower you have, quiaff?"

Pershaw had him there. It was a clear-cut victory of argumentation that left Aidan powerless. The man was, after all, the highest-ranking officer at Glory Station. He should be expected to win arguments. Knowing that did not make Aidan feel better, but again he felt a certain admiration for the hated commander. Not only that, he was quite right and Aidan should have seen it. A warrior was continually proving himself or herself as a warrior, and the higher the odds against him, the more valuable the triumph.

After some further data provided by Pershaw, Aidan asked, "Did surveillance indicate specific numbers of survivors?"

"No. But the pilot thought she saw some movement. There was a light mist, and the apparent survivors may have been no more than shadows. The mist is thicker now, and surveillance can detect nothing."

"What is the nature of the military force?"

"A Trinary, with the appropriate 'Mechs, some support personnel, supplies, the usual. I am told the Trinary's Star Captain is an especially skilled officer. She is fresh from a challenge on Dagda. She led the assault contingent, which broke the Ghost Bear line. Her name is Star Captain Joanna. No Bloodname yet, twenty-eight years old, so she is getting on in age for a warrior. But we are not here to discuss her bloodlines, quiaff?"

"Aff."

Aidan was happy that Kael Pershaw was so intent on the briefing that he had not noticed the look of surprise that must have glimmered briefly in his eyes. Joanna! Not only was this mission cursed from the start, not only did it require traversing the cursed Blood Swamp, not only was his unit diminished in weaponry, not only was the objective at the end of impossible terrain, but the objective itself was Joanna. And if Star Captain Joanna was not Aidan's own curse, then nobody was. He would rather have gone barefoot across a field of poisonous snakes, carrying burning sticks in his arms, with a cloud of methane gas settling around his head, than have to see Joanna again.

7

Joanna came to, leaving behind a dream of drowning in murky water. She came to choking, for a moment not sure if the dream was real after all, or if her desperate need for air originated elsewhere. She tried to inhale but got only a trace of air, just enough to make her conscious that her lungs seemed crushed from behind. The left side of her face was pressed against something very hard. It felt like rock. She moved her face slightly, and the substance seemed to abrade her skin like rock. But what was it pressed so hard against the rest of her face? Her next attempt to breathe seemed to get a bit more air, plus the smell of something very wet. Water? No, something else. Something with a familiar, somewhat cloying odor. It was the smell of a battlefield. Blood, it was blood. Was she smelling her own blood, pooled somewhere in the ground nearby? And what was pressing against her? The next breath added an aroma of cloth, very wet cloth.

She tried to move her body. What little movement she could accomplish was painful. A fierce pain ran up and down her back and legs, and the only movement she could manage was a twitch of her left foot. Nothing much happened when she concentrated on her arms. It was as if they had been shot off at the shoulder, like some armless 'Mech. The lack of feeling frightened her, but then came a tingling in her right hand. Knowing that she was at least one-armed brought a bizarre sense of relief.

Another breath. Nothing new. Then, suddenly, by her ear, there was an explosion. At first she thought the sound might be some signal that accompanied death, but no, she was still alive when the next moment arrived. Joanna would have been angry about dying, a whirling tornado of wrath. She intended to die on a battlefield, and that was that. This could not be death.

Just as she felt the warmth of an expired breath on her right cheek and the unmistakable stale odor of carbon dioxide contaminated by some recently ingested and unpleasant food, she abruptly understood her plight. Someone was lying on her, chest against her face, head near hers. Something else pressed down on her body, though she did not know what it was. For the moment, that was all right. At least she had defined something.

Then came another explosion of sound, another moan apparently. Whatever it was, the head shifted, then slid a bit, creating an opening, and air seemed to rush in at Joanna's face. The cloth that had been suffocating her must have been moved along with the body. She took several deep breaths, trying to get as much as she could in case the head shifted again and cut off the air.

The body moved again and her right hand was free. Reaching up and behind her, she felt the muscles in her shoulder erupt with agony. Her fingertips came down on skin, but she could not tell where on the head it was located. Her fingers roamed around, brushing against what felt like a cheekbone and going backward to some hair and an identifiable ear. Twisting her hand unnaturally, straining her wrist, she was able to grab the ear and pull weakly at it. The jerking motion moved the head, and Joanna's own head felt freer. Now her angle was really difficult. Her shoulder throbbed, her wrist threatened to break, but she managed to grab some hair and, tugging at it, somehow made the head slide to her aching shoulder.

She lifted her head from the ground, perhaps a centimeter or two, her neck muscles competing with her shoulder and wrist for pain. She could not open the eye that had been groundside, but that did not matter. She could not make out anything around her with the other one. It was apparently night, and whatever the landscape around them, everything was pitch dark.

With the clearer air came the unmistakable smell of charred matter. Something nearby had burned. But there could be no fire now, for there was no light.

She blinked her open eye several times, but nothing clarified itself for her vision. Settling her head back again to relieve the pain, she considered her situation.

No matter what she did, she could not move her body. Her right arm, pain running up and down it, could be moved, but could not do much. She could use it to move the body on top of her some more, but would have to wait a few minutes until the arm and her shoulder felt better.

No matter what her other physical incapacities, she still had one powerful weapon left in her arsenal. Her voice.

Drawing in a good lungful of air, she held the breath for a moment, then let it out in one massive, earth-shaking scream. It was the scream of the jade falcon, as taught her by a long-forgotten sibparent, back in the days when she was a mewling, spitting child of a sibko. She had been told she reproduced the bird's sound rather well, though it had been years since she had heard one, and then only at a distance.

The head above her was abruptly dislodged. It hit the rocky ground with a thud. "Wha—," said the person. It was a male voice, but she did not recognize it.

"Get up, you," Joanna said. She was distressed at the paltriness of her vocabulary in a crisis situation.