"Then what?"

"Then we get our refugees up there. I want you to find DeVillar." As one of the two MechWarriors with any experience at Durandel when the attackers had struck, Lieutenant DeVillar was the closest they had discovered to authority among the survivors found so far. "Put him in charge of rounding up all the survivors, plus any vehicles they can get to run. He is to take command of the group and organize an encampment, but he must also continue the search for other survivors."

There had to be survivors, Grayson thought. They had uncovered perhaps fifty bodies so far. They couldn't allbe dead! In the meantime, that river valley would provide shelter, plus food and water, for as long as the group remained undiscovered.

"I'll alert the 'Mechs," he added. "The Company will head back to the LZ at full gallop."

"You're afraid for the DropShips."

"Damn right I am. We lose our DropShips, and we're stuck here . . . and we don't even know who's mad at us yet—or why!"

He didn't add what Lori must already know—that if their communications with the Phoboswere being blocked, it had to be because hostile forces were moving against the DropShips. Grayson knew that if he wanted to act, it had better be fast. Time was running out. Maybe it had already run out, and the Legion would be too late once again.

Grayson simply wouldn't think about that. With luck, they had a chance.

7

For the past two years, Colonel Julian Langsdorf had been the regimental commander of the 12th White Sabers, an understrength regimental assault group assigned to garrison duty on Thermopolis, along the Free Worlds League frontier with the Lyran Commonwealth. That had changed less than two weeks before when none other than General Kleider of Janos Marik's House Command Staff had approached him.

Kleider was a heavy-set man, one of those court functionaries given to wearing torso armor in the form of rank upon glittering rank of military medals and awards. His eyes were deep-set under bushy, gray brows that seemed permanently drawn together in the strain to concentrate. His fat lips, too, seemed always to be puckered, though it could as easily have been in deepest thought as at the remembered taste of something particularly sour.

"I am here at the behest of Lord Garth, Duke of Irian," Kleider had said without preamble, moments after entering Langsdorf's staff briefing room at his garrison headquarters. "His Grace has formulated a plan, and your participation is deemed essential to its execution." The general spoke with the smooth assurance of one who knows that his words cannot fail to impress the listener.

And Langsdorf had been duly impressed. Irian was a minor dukedom, located on the border of the Marik Commonwealth Principality. Its once extensive industrial facilities had been ravaged and raided time again by both Steiner and Liao forces. Garth, the current Duke of Irian, was nevertheless reputed to be highly placed in the webwork of relations, favors, and favorites that permeated the Marik court on Atreus all the way to the Center Seat of the League Staff Command of the Captain-General himself. Any plan involving Garth was certain to be the result of high-level planning, indeed.

"I will serve His Grace in any capacity, sir," Langsdorf had replied, and he meant it. His loyalty was—had always been—to the person of Janos Marik. In the neo-feudalism of the current era, with its interconnected personal allegiances and oaths of military support, any service rendered to Lord Garth was service rendered to Captain-General Janos Marik himself.

Kleider had pursed his heavy lips and gone on to explain that a plot had been discovered with the Free Worlds League, one threatening the very foundations of the League's delicate balance of principalities. Should this plot succeed, Kleider said, the bonds holding together the principalities would dissolve in the blood of civil war. The Free Worlds League would be reduced to anarchy, and the greedy dogs and jackals that pressed so close from every border would surely see it as their chance to seize anything they could.

The plot, it seemed, had originated with a House Steiner mercenary who had managed to secure a contract with Janos Marik for a protracted campaign along the Liao border. Fortunately for the Free Worlds League, Lord Garth had discovered evidence that this mercenary had betrayed Janos Marik and was organizing a rebellion on the very planet granted to him as landhold. The name of that world was Helm.

Thus had Julian Langsdorf now come to Helm. On Kleider's orders, he had landed and seized the planet's starport and its capital of Helmdown. Through a simple ruse, he had also captured the highest-ranking members of the rebellion and dealt with them appropriately. Then, when the rebels had deployed their 'Mech garrison to meet his approach to their castle stronghold, Langsdorf had personally led the 5th Marik Guards in a wild fight to utterly crush the rebels' resistance, smash their capital, and overrun their castle.

The Colonel's orders were to hold his prize until either Kleider or Duke Irian relieved him.

Though he'd done well, Langsdorf was unhappy with his command. It was fine to be hailed as Defender of the League, to know that he was preserving the rule and power of Janos Marik himself, but his operational orders from Kleider offered scant room for his own judgement. Worse yet was that his judgement told him that he was doing a thing that was wrong.

According to the unwritten but quite powerful Conventions of War, themselves descendants of the far older Ares Conventions, civilian populations were not the proper targets of war. Only if a civilian population should rise in revolt, should take arms against its lawful ruler, was that ruler allowed, even obligated,to treat the civilians as an enemy army.

When a civilian population was unarmed, and its army had announced formal surrender by an acceptable agency such as a white flag or neutral messenger, then those people became wards of the conquering army's commander, who was now charged with their protection.

Kleider's orders left little room for the rebels' formal surrender, however. Langsdorf was to answer any resistance, however token, with an overwhelming blow, using every bit of force at his command. The rebel army was to be destroyed even if it meant leveling the village of Durandel and the castle of Helmfast. Furthermore, Langsdorf was ordered to ignore any white flags or other formal declarations of surrender, which were sure to be tricks by the perfidious rebels.

Langsdorf had been horrified. "General! You are making it impossible for these people to surrender to us! Surely a living population is more valuable than one that has been trampled and destroyed! A town whole and productive is more valuable to us than . . . than burned-over rubble!"

Kleider had laid his hand on Langsdorf's shoulder in a fatherly way, his bushy eyebrows rising toward his forehead. "Son, there is more to this than you know. These . . . orders . . . they're distasteful, I know. But His Grace, Lord Garth, has accumulated evidence suggesting that this . . . this foul mercenary is guilty of abominable atrocities in Liao space."

"Atrocities? What atrocities?"

"I don't know the details, Colonel. But from what I've heard, from what His Grace was able to confide in me, this mercenary band planned to commit an atrocity while in the service of Janos Marik, with the sole intention of laying blame for the incident at the Captain-General's own hand!"

"God is heaven ..."

"God had little to do with this scheme, I fear. Imagine! By making the Captain-General responsible for this atrocity, whatever it is, the mercenaries sow the seeds of civil war. The various factions leap to support or denounce Janos Marik. In the chaos, the mercenaries hope to seize power for themselves. And they could, too, with the League falling to pieces, the army in shreds, our worlds open wide to invasion by Liao and Steiner."