"Star Captain Joanna, with all due respect, you just delegated me as your guide out of here. Not only do the 'Mechs need to be checked out, but we should go out into the field fully armed. We do not even know if the weapons systems of your surviving machines are completely operable. Not only that, but—"

Even though Joanna was not speaking, Aidan could sense her busily plotting and relishing her next words. "Star Commander Jorge, you seem to have no taste for combat. I had not thought your dark band was for cowardice."

"It was not. It was for—"

"Then why do you attempt to oppose my order? I propose getting right into battle and not slinking back to Glory Station to lick our wounds. We are fighters, we are warriors. You know all the chants. They do teach the chants to freeborns, do they not? Respond, please."

"They do, Star Captain."

"I see. Perhaps the words are not understood by freebirth filth in the same way we trueborns do. Indeed, for us it is more than mere understanding. We absorbthe words that proclaim the bravery of our warriors and the way of the Clans. They become part of our personality, our character. Listen to me, Star Commander Jorge, and do not protest like the freebirth filth you are. Plot our course out of his hellhole. Do you understand?"

"I understand. But there is one order . . . belay that word, one requestI must make of you and your warriors."

"Yes?"

"You must power-down your weapons systems, shut them off completely wherever possible."

"Your request mystifies me, Star Commander."

"We are going to be traversing one of the most cluttered terrains in the entire Clan empire. The area we will pass through is more forest than jungle. At times you will be surrounded by trees. A blast from a laser, an idle shot at a spooky shape in the darkness, and the entire forest can be instantly aflame around you. You could be incinerated or turned into a dessicated shell before you could eject. And, if you did manage ejection, chances are you would drop into a severe conflagration. With a battle raging at the other end of our journey, and the odds against us, we cannot afford to lose any more 'Mechs through accidents."

"All right, Jorge. I will give the orders. But when we are in Blood Swamp and can smell the foul stench of the Wolves, we jack them back to full power."

"Agreed."

"What right have you to agree, freeborn filth? The proper response is a mere affirmative, quiaff?"

He suspected she relished his hesitation as much as she liked the sound of her own words. "Aff," he said finally.

As she instructed the contingent to phase down their weapons, Horse's voice came over their private comm-line. "What kind of swamp gas were you emitting there? The whole forest instantly aflame? There's about as much chance of that happening as there is of me becoming ilKhan. The leaves positively drip with moisture, the bark is like sponges."

"I was counting on Joanna's ignorance of the terrain. Her weakness has always been impulsive action. I did not want her to endanger her . . . her commandwith a rash act, especially since a too-quick trigger finger could—"

"Wait, wait. You know I hate the trashborn and would not mind if they were all enveloped in fire. But I don't believe you are all that concerned about the safety of the command.This is something between you and Star Captain Joanna, isn't it? Isn't it?"

"Please, Horse, no contractions."

"Now I know that something is going on with you. You only get upset about contractions when you go back to seeing yourself as trueborn. You're on your high horse, Jorge. This Joanna has taken over your role and you're looking for revenge. I hear it in every response you give her. And maybe this urge for vengeance goes all the way back to Ironhold, am I right?"

"I just do not want trigger-happy intruders killing wildlife native to—"

"You are reaching for straws. Since when were you so worried about wildlife? You're angry at her for pulling rank. You want to exert control, even if you have to do it secretly. Pull strings from behind the scenes."

"Give it up, Horse. We have a mission here."

"Just don't put the rest of us in jeopardy for your own private vendetta, Jorge. We may not have the same genetic brand as you, but we have served you well."

"I know that, Horse. I grant you that I resent Joanna, and I would welcome the chance to get her into the Circle of Equals and crush her this time, but-"

"This time?It has happened before? You two have fought before?"

Aidan recalled the time Joanna had beaten him in an honor duel within the Circle. And suddenly he saw that Horse's speculation was quite accurate. He wanted to avenge that defeat, neededto. There was a moment when, back then, he had vowed that he would. The vow was as good as a Clan oath to him.

"There is no need to discuss this further, Horse. We have a mission."

"I hate it when you turn trashborn."

"I am trashborn and you know it."

"Yes, I know it."

Horse's voice was unusually bitter as he abruptly cut his link to the commline. The one person in the universe Aidan did not want angry at him was Horse. They had been together for so long that, in a skirmish, they acted in concert without communication. They had qualified in the Trial together and had served in the same units since. He would have to make it up to him.

When he thought of Horse as the single person whose approval he needed, Aidan realized that it was not quite true. There was Marthe, too. Since the last time he had seen her on Ironhold, she had, he assumed, risen quickly in the ranks. She was probably a Star Captain by now. She had, after all, entered the warrior caste with two "kills" in her Trial, which started her at a higher rank. Aidan never asked others if they had heard about her and never checked rosters of other Clusters on other worlds for her name. They had grown up together in the sibko, and until Marthe had surged ahead of him in warrior training, had been very close, closer than most sibko members ever became. Joanna would probably know where Marthe was now. But he would have gone on his knees and begged Kael Pershaw for the information before he would ever ask Joanna anything.

12

Star Captain Dwillt Radick's BattleMech, a Viper,surged with power and what he liked to think of as confidence, as the 'Mech's own eagerness to get into battle, an alacrity that duplicated his own. As he settled into the cockpit's command couch for another check of his instrumentation, he called up terrain maps onto his secondary screen. Kael Pershaw's choice of combat site had surprised him. It was a relative flat-land, and except for a swamp into which no Mech-Warrior would take his 'Mech by choice, offered few hiding places. A lot of scrub and large clumps of shaggy bushes dotted the ugly, so-called Glory Plain. This area deserved neither the name of plain nor of Glory. Plains were meant to be magnificent, even majestic—fields of grain moving with the wind, brilliantly green grasslands, open spaces with few civilized interruptions.

From what he knew about Glory, very little of the planet reflected the honorable name given it by some mad cartographer. It was a hellhole where no sensible person would come unless he or she had a damned good reason. The Pershaw gene heritage was just such a reason. The Pershaw line was a solid one that had consistently produced the kind of warriors Clan Wolf respected. No gloryhounds, just heroes with an astonishing victory ratio. Clan Wolf scientists had sifted through Bloodnames from several Clans, and the Pershaw line had checked out as among the most superior. Because neither Radick nor even Mikel Furey was privy to the major goals of Clan Wolf, Radick could only suspect that acquiring genetic strains with a glorious tradition was part of the rumored program to make the Wolves the most powerful of the seventeen existing Clans.