Grayson remembered the young and eager officer. He had not been more than 20 years old, and sported a wiry mustache whose obvious purpose was to make its owner look older. Fraser had joined the Legion, as had so many others, on Galatea. He claimed to have heard so much about the exploits of the Gray Death Legion that it made him want to join. "I want to win some of that glory myself," Fraser had told him.

Grayson had sat the young Fraser down in that Galatean bar and bought him a drink. Glory was the wrong reason to join the infantry, he'd explained. There was glory, certainly, in the military traditions and the camaraderie, the bravery and the sacrifice of combat. But such glory came only at a price. A steep price.

Though Fraser's training at a military academy on New Exford had marked him for a commission, he continued to insist that the Legion was for him. He was so determined to wait for an opening among the 'Mech apprentices that he would even give up his Lieutenant's commission. Fraser told Grayson that one day he would be a MechWarrior, a bearer of the truebanner of glory. . .

Grayson had nearly turned him down, but something in the young man's eagerness reminded him of his own green apprenticeship. Fraser had signed the articles that brought him in as a junior lieutenant, and been posted to Baron's armored company, a first step in the long training that might one day lead to piloting a 'Mech. Within a year, he had become a Senior Lieutenant and been entrusted with the authority of Baron's Company Exec.

And now Fraser was dead. Grayson wondered how much glory the boy had found, in being smashed by the foot of fifty-five tons of armored steel. He may have died a hero, but he had also paid the highest possible price. And the battle had continued on after Fraser's death, as though the young man never existed at all.

Sergeant Burns, of Ramage's Special Ops force, had witnessed the final action in the town. With the defending force clearly beaten and scattered, the remaining town leaders of Durandel had decided to surrender. After seeing a white flag flying from the town council's office dome, the militia in Helmfast, themselves mostly citizens of Durandel, had followed suit. The gates to Helmfast had been opened, and the Marik conquerors welcomed according to the usages and conventions of war.

Grayson let his gaze linger on the outcome of those conventions. Not a single building had been left intact. The gates, walls, and turrets of Helmfast Castle had been burned and blasted and torn by laser fire . . . from within.The destruction had been complete and deliberate. While looking at the ruins around him, he pondered these deceptions leading to more deceptions, a twisting of the Conventions that seemed aimed directly at the heart of the Gray Death, and Grayson himself.

The burden weighed heavily on him now. Had it been his stupidity that had put the Legion in their current position? Or had he been too cockily assured that whatever he faced, he could certainly handle it? Of seven hundred people left at Durandel, his men had found less than four hundred so far, and many of those were injured. The fighting efficiency of his unit would be seriously compromised by the knowledge that many of their wives, husbands, children, or other loved ones were dead, or else hiding in the woods and the mountains, possibly wounded and dying.

And if the enemy took his DropShips, Grayson and his men would be trapped here on Helm.

There had been tricks . . . and tricks within tricks.

As he gazed up at the ruins of Helmfast, his fists clenched around the Marauder'scontrol grips. There would be no more such tricks.

* * *

Hours later, Lori found Grayson, in what had once been the briefing room in Helmfast Castle. The south wall had been blasted in, the ceiling timbers charred, the two-story windows smashed. The tile floors were ankle-deep in broken glass, plaster dust, and chunks of stone.

Grayson had brought a small, two-seat skimmer right through the hole in the wall. Cables stretched from the hovercraft's auxiliary generator and into the computer built into the conference table in the center of the room. Above him, a pair of large display screens were mounted on the east wall. Somehow, some way, much of the Castle's electronics had remained intact, though the power generator had been destroyed and fire had consumed many of the circuit controls.

"Grayson?"

He didn't respond at first. His back was toward Lori as he hunched over the computer keyboard.

"Gray?" she said, a bit louder. "Sergeant Burns has uncovered a supply of plastic explosives buried in a warehouse in Durandel."

Grayson turned to looked at her, but his eyes were unseeing, almost as though he didn't recognize her. Then what she was saying seemed to penetrate. "Good," he said, with a nod. "Good."

"You've got the briefing room computer working!"

"There's not much else left up here that works. It was built into the table, and this room survived pretty much intact."

"So I see," Lori said. She looked up at the maps. The 69 one on the left was blank, but the one on the right displayed expanses of green, ocher, and blue arrayed as a photographic map. "Plans?”

“Options."

She crossed the rubble to a point behind his shoulder, staring up at the screen. "What map is this? It's not . . . is that a map of Helm?"

"A very, very old one, yes. It's the computer display map that came with Helmfast, the one the Janos Marik gave me as part of the Title Ceremony. It's a computer-enhanced map, based on photographs taken from an orbital satellite . . . but it was made something like three centuries ago, so it's a bit out of date."

"I should say so!"

Now Lori understood why she'd been confused by the sea on the map. The Dead Sea Flats of today's Helm were bone-dry and barren, mineral-encrusted deserts. But on this map, a small sea still lay south of Durandel. Glowing letters identified it as the Yehudin Sea.

"Want to see how it works?"

She nodded.

"The operation is simple enough. An extremely detailed set of high-imagery photographs are digitized and stored in the computer's memory. The computer creates a referent grid." He turned to the keyboard and typed an entry. Lori now recognized the terrain on the right-hand screen, the southward sweep of the land from the Aragayan Mountains to beyond the Nagayan Mountains. Forests showed as dark, mottled, scratchy-looking grays, greens, and blues. The West Equatorial Sea was a deep and crystal blue, except near the shore along islands, where shallow sandbars created smooth strips of green and green-blue.

He used a display pointer on the screen to indicate a gray patch north of the dead sea bottom. "That," he said, "is Durandel. It's at coordinates 456 dash 076, mag level three. The smallest object we can see here is perhaps a kilometer across."

"Gray ... I knowhow to read a map."

"I'm sorry, Lori. It's been a long, long night." He keyed an entry, and the perspective of the map changed, the ground leaping forward on the screen. The broad sweep of land was now dominated by the tiny gray patch of Durandel. Individual buildings could be made out, and everywhere else, rubble. Helmfast clung to the rim of the bluff above the town.

"There is level five, a one hundred-fold magnification. The smallest object we can see at this enlargement is about a meter across, one thousand times smaller than at level three." He leaned back, looking up at the map.

"It doesn't help us tactically, of course," he said. "It's a bit too far out of date for that. But I have found us a valley across the Aragayan Mountains to the north. The terrain is not difficult. There's a valley ... the Valley of the Araga, about eighty kilometers from here. We can set up a camp there, and keep it out of sight of the Marik ships in orbit."