"Your father’ll receive it too, son." The bald head moved slowly from side to side, the scar rippling as jaw muscles clenched. "I can't perform my duty if you persist in ignoring yours."

Grayson turned from the heater and started up the ramp toward the Castle's main central passageway. "Look, Griff, I figured this might be my last chance to see her. We're pulling out in three days..."

The bald sergeant fell into step beside him. "Well pull out if these negotiations come off. Until then, you'll attend your duty, Mister, or I'll know the reason why!"

Grayson scowled. He was now 20 standard years old, and the Weapons Master had been his personal instructor in the military arts since he'd formally joined the Lance as a warrior apprentice at ten. The older he got, the less he appreciated Kai Griffith's sharp tongue or his interference in his private life. After all, Grayson wasn't a child any longer, and was both son and heir to a MechWarrior. The Weapons Master would not order his life forever.

"I'll attend to my duty," Grayson retorted, "but my private life is my own!"

"Still playing the loner, Master Carlyle? That attitude is going to buy you a world of trouble before you end your apprenticeship. Look, can't you get it through your skull that the damned Trells aren't our friends?"

"This one is. C'mon! I just wanted to say goodbye!"

Griffith shook his head disapprovingly. "The daughter of old Stannic himself, no less!"

"What has that got to do with anything?" Grayson broke in. It was true Mara was the daughter of Trellwan's chief minister, but so what?

"You keep sneaking off to play with your girl in town, and you're going to end up dead!"

Remembering a fragment of the evening's fun, Grayson only smiled and shrugged. Kai Griffith shared the prejudice of most old-time garrison soldiers against the local civilians they were supposed to protect. He would never understand.

They paused at a massive steel door set into a wall of rough-cut stone, guarded by a gray-uniformed trooper holding his submachine gun at a stiff port arms. The door was decorated with the design of a clenched, mailed fist against a sky-blue background. Griffith shook his head resignedly, knowing the stubbornness of this boy staring at him with pale gray eyes.

"We haven't finished with this, Master Carlyle. You're being trained to con a BattleMech someday, to be a MechWarrior of Carlyle's Commandos. But warriors have to learn a damn sight more than how to pilot a walking metal mountain. Get me?"

Grayson had heard the lecture and all its variations before - about discipline and dedication to the unit and working as a part of a team. He made himself look attentive as he stifled an insistent yawn. There hadn't been much sleep for him during the past rest period.

Griffith finally stopped when he realized Grayson was simply tuning him out. "C'mon, son," he said, gesturing at the door. Let's get in there and watch the reception."

2

The Combat Command Center was a bare-walled room lined with consoles and carpeted with enough powerfeeds and cables to make footing hazardous. Clusters of gray-uniformed men stood or lounged here and there, some talking quietly over cups of dew or hot chava, others studying the pale flicker of monitor screens or the eerie green glow of radar trackers. From somewhere overheard, a woman's amplified voice announced, "Mailai DropShip now entering atmosphere. Her captain confirms presence of the Oberon representatives on board. Estimate time to grounding at eleven minutes."

Two men sat at one near console. One was a dark-eyed Senior Tech in official gray-and-blue coveralls and the other a slight, swarthy-skinned man wearing a high-collared, richly worked civilian tunic. Beside them stood another civilian, silver-haired and erect, a silver-chased quarter cloak fashionable on the Inner Worlds draped across his left shoulder.

The dark-haired civilian looked up sharply at Grayson, Though his eyes were angry, he said nothing. Grayson knew Nicolai Aristobulus was keeping his reprimand silent only because of the outsider standing behind him.

"Hello, Ari," Grayson said, as though he neither saw nor felt his tutor's disapproval.

"Master Carlyle," Ari replied stiffly, with only the slightest inclination of his dark head. "You're late."

"What's Carlyle's boy doing here?" the silver-haired civilian asked, turning toward Griffith. "These negotiations are extremely delicate."

It was Ari who replied. "He is here at my request, my Lord, and at the direct order of Captain Carlyle."

"Indeed? And since when does a battlelance tutor set staff policy?"

"When he is charged with training the CO's successor... my Lord." Ari's hostility was barely restrained. "The boy may have to handle this someday."

"Let him stay, my Lord," Griffith interjected, nodding toward the monitor. "That trader DropShip's almost in."

Lord Olin Vogel scowled, then moved away to another monitor console, trailing his ruffled dignity. Behind Vogel's back, Griffith made a face at Ari. Seated at the communications console next to the tutor, Chief Tech Riviera could not conceal his own grin.

Grayson was completely uninterested in politics, but found Representative Vogel's presence with the Lance annoying. He had arrived from Tharkad 80-some standard days before, brimming with plans to forge an alliance with the nearby stellar empire of a troublesome Bandit King. None of the men or women in Carlyle's Commandos liked the stiff-necked and arrogant viscount, and the necessary formal etiquette of dealing with Katrina Steiner's personal emissary often failed to veil their black looks. Few in the unit agreed with Vogel's plan for pacifying this sector.

Fortunately, that had nothing to do with Grayson. He peered across Ari's shoulder at a console monitor. "So what's happening?"

"If you'd been here on time, you wouldn't have to ask. Your father is at the spaceport. The Mailai shuttle has entered atmosphere and should ground in ... about ten minutes."

The monitor showed the spaceport's empty expanse of ferrocrete. The image moved in peculiar, swaying bobs and dips caused by the lurching of the transmitting camera, which rode on a BattleMech.

Grayson needed no explanation of the monitor scene. The camera transmitting that ponderously shifting image was mounted on the unit's lead BattleMech, a Phoenix Hawk,45 tons of battle-scarred and endlessly patched and rewired walking combat machine. And Grayson's father was at the con.

Griffith frowned at the image. "I still wish he'd been able to take all four 'Mechs."

Riviera shrugged. "The Shadow Hawk'sin the Repair Bay, and the Captain wanted the Waspson patrol in town, just in case." He made a slight gesture toward Vogel still standing at a nearby console. "THAT one wasn't going to see his plan sabotaged for anything!"

Griffith watched the government representative with narrowed eyes. "Did we have to send both Waspsto patrol Sarghad?"

The Tech made an unpleasant face. "Who knows? The natives're none too happy about this deal."

"I wouldn't be, either," Ari said. "The line between a legitimate interstellar empire and a pack of bandits can be rather fine at times. The Trells’ll have to live with them when we're gone. They have a right to be nervous about old Hendrik's... intentions."

The meeting this hour would seal the hard-fought pact between the Lyran Commonwealth, which was using Carlyle's Commandos to garrison Trellwan, and the new and blossoming empire of Hendrick, the Bandit King of Oberon VI. It was unfortunate that the Trellwan natives had no love for Hendrik's legions, but that did not affect the secret negotiations one single jot.