A Silence in the Heavens (3 page)

“He’s worried about the HPG network still not coming on-line. Doesn’t know how the guiding business is going to do if his offworlders can’t get in touch and don’t come back.”

“Angus Macallan’s nobody’s fool. Bridie Casimir, down at the grocery, said that a DropShip came into Tara this morning with news that there’s been more fighting—on Addicks, this time. People aren’t going to be planning expensive vacations on foreign worlds as long as things like that are going on.”

Will took a forkful of tart. The flaky crust fragmented into little pieces under the pressure, and the tines of his fork clattered against the china beneath. He looked down at his hand for a moment. A splash of purple berry juice stained the white tablecloth by his plate.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’ll wash it later.”

His mother waved the offer away. “No matter. What did Old Angus say to you that’s upset you so?”

“He’s worried, like I said. Planning for the future. And he doesn’t think the business is going to be able to afford two guides for much longer.”

“So he’s letting you go?”

“Aye.”

“The stingy old bastard.” Will had never heard his mother use bad language before; he was too startled by it now to say anything. “And to think I almost married him, back in ’04.”

He finally found his voice again. “Maybe you should have. He’s kept Robbie.”

“Hold your tongue. Angus Macallan could never hold a candle to your father, God rest him.” She straightened her shoulders and drew a deep breath. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do next?”

Will nodded. The house itself was paid for, and a small annuity came in every month from his father’s pension, but Rockhawk Wilderness Tours had made the difference between comfort and genteel poverty for both of them ever since John Elliot had died. “I have my money for the last two weeks, and a bit of a good-bye payment to sweeten it. With what we have put by, that should give us a little time.”

“You’re a fine outdoorsman,” she said. “It won’t take long to find someone else who’ll take you on.”

“I don’t think so.” Driving home in the growing dark, he’d had plenty of time to think things over and come to an unhappy conclusion. “Old Angus is one of the best, and if he’s feeling the pinch then everyone else is feeling it twice as hard.” He poked at the remains of his tart with his fork. “There isn’t going to be any work here, not if the whole region’s sliding. The best I could hope for is a job in the lumber mill down by Harlaugh, and that pays less than half what I was getting from Old Angus. I’m going to have to go away.”

“I was afraid you’d want to do something like that.”

“I don’t want to,” he said. He’d known she wouldn’t be enthusiastic about losing him; both his older sisters had married and moved off some years before, one to a long-distance transport driver who worked out of Kildare on the other side of the Bloodstones, and the other to a mining engineer in Kearny. He was the only child who had remained close to home. “But if I’m going to end up looking for work in Tara anyway, I’d rather do it before every third worker in Liddisdale gets the same idea.”

5

DropShip
Dark Rosaleen,
en route to Northwind

Prefecture III, The Republic

November, 3132

T
he DropShip
Dark Rosaleen
was six days into its twelve-day journey from Northwind’s Jump Point to the planet’s main spaceport. Ezekiel Crow, Paladin of the Sphere, had been a silent presence among the handful of passengers, occupying his cabin—and the minds of the others aboard the DropShip—in much the same uncommunicative but hard to ignore fashion as his great
Blade
BattleMech occupied its berth in the largest of the vessel’s cargo holds.

In the Paladin’s case, the silence had a purpose: He had spent the first half of his journey in intensive study, ignoring the company of his fellow passengers for the company of text files and video clips. By now, Ezekiel Crow knew everything that The Republic of the Sphere’s diplomatic and intelligence services had seen fit to tell him about the planet Northwind itself, and about the young and good-looking Prefect who was, arguably, its most famous living citizen.

He knew, for example, that Northwind was the second planet out from a G2I-type star, with a temperate climate—as climatologists reckoned “temperate,” at any rate, which merely meant that the range of temperatures in most places didn’t often go outside what a properly equipped human body could endure. Of Northwind’s three continents, the greater part of New Lanark—where the capital was located—and the mineral-rich second continent of Kearny would still be in the grip of winter when he arrived. The third and smallest continent, Halidon, would be in the waning days of its summer dry season.

Crow shook his head, thinking about it. “Temperance in all things,” he murmured.

But people had been freezing in the snows and parching in the deserts of temperate worlds all across the Inner Sphere for as long as humanity had been keeping track. Temperance was misleading, and Ezekiel Crow did not believe in allowing himself to be misled.

Prefect Tara Campbell, Countess of Northwind, was in many ways an even more disquieting factor than the planet of Northwind itself. The young Countess’s family history and her dossier of public service were matters of common knowledge. Crow knew, therefore, of her birth off-planet to Colonel Jon Campbell and Republic Senator Moelene Jaffries-Campbell; and of her childhood stint as the darling of the news and entertainment media in the aftermath of the Capellan Campaign. He also knew of her outstanding record at the Northwind Military Academy, and of her appointment—more or less by acclamation—to the position recently vacated by Katana Tormark.

The files Crow had been given contained several likenesses of Tara Campbell, all of them recent pictures from open sources. She was a petite, platinum-haired woman who, at least in her official appearances, bore only a slight resemblance to the precocious auburn-haired moppet whose likeness had won the hearts of so many back in her poster days. What Crow wished he knew, and what he had been sent to Northwind at least partially in order to find out, was whether the Countess’s delicate appearance was as misleading as the term “temperate” applied to the climate of a habitable world.

She was, undeniably, young for the position that she held. She had a rash streak in her, as well. One of the tri-vid clips had been particularly disturbing. Ezekiel Crow searched for the file amongst the others in her dossier, found it, and sent it to his cabin’s display unit.

The air above the unit filled for a moment with static fog, then resolved into the image of a crowded street. A reporter armed with a microphone—and followed, Crow guessed, by a videographer—eeled his way through the press and up onto the wide marble steps of a looming piece of governmental architecture. Either by accident or by deliberate timing, the reporter reached the top of the steps just as the Countess of Northwind emerged from within the building.

The reporter stepped forward and extended the microphone, while at the same time deftly blocking Tara Campbell’s further progress down the steps.

“Countess!” he said. “What’s your reaction to Kal Radick’s suggestion that The Republic of the Sphere should be supplanted by a new Star League?”

The reporter’s videographer brought the focus zooming in tightly on Tara Campbell. In the close-up, Ezekiel Crow could see how much the question angered her: The color rose in her fair-skinned face, her blue eyes darkened, and her full lips thinned.

“The Star League’s time is past,” she snapped at the reporter. “Perhaps Kal Radick’s time is past as well.”

Watching the videographed encounter yet again, Ezekiel Crow wished that he knew for certain whether the Countess’s sharp retort had been made in the heat of the moment, or if it had been an intentional provocation thrown out at the first opportunity.

Kal Radick had certainly reacted as if the insult had been deliberate. The Prefect of Prefecture IV had come within a hairsbreadth of formally demanding that Tara Campbell meet him for a Trial of Grievance.

The Countess, for her part, had either ignored or affected to ignore all of the Wolf Clansman’s angry protests, and had made no direct response at all to his angry comments. Her actual reply to Radick’s demand—“If he feels slighted, I invite him to Northwind where we can discuss matters in a calm and civil manner”—could have been mere empty speechmaking. On the other hand, the reply could have been exactly what it must have sounded like to Kal Radick: She was daring the Wolf to attack.

Ezekiel Crow closed down his computer files for the evening and stretched out on his bunk, dimming the lights with a gesture in the direction of the cabin’s environmental sensors. He might as well start getting his body accustomed now to the length of Northwind’s days and nights.

His mind, unfortunately, showed no interest in relaxing and going to sleep. Instead, he kept on thinking about the ins and outs of the situation—and the players—on Northwind.

Bad enough, Crow thought, if Tara Campbell’s words had been accidental. Youth and outraged patriotism, confronted with a question posed unexpectedly, and given no chance to prepare a more considered response, could have worked together to produce a hasty reply that could be understood even if not excused. But if the provocation had been deliberate—if the young Countess had intentionally given offense to the man who was now the leader of the Steel Wolves, and had done so in a way that all but invited that faction into battle on Northwind—then the future looked bleak indeed.

It’ll be Liao all over again, he thought, if we can’t stop it in time. Death everywhere, and blood ankle deep in the streets . . .

. . . the night sky an ugly red-brown in the lurid glow of the burning DropPort . . .

. . . a man’s high-pitched screams, going on for long minutes without stopping . . .

. . . silence, worse than the screams . . .

. . . bodies scraped up like garbage and tipped by the ’Mechload into mass graves. . . .

Helpless against the onslaught of memories, he closed his eyes and let the rush of images bear him away once more into nightmare.

6

City of Chang-an, Liao

Prefecture V, Republic of the Sphere

October 3111, local summer

T
wenty-two years before, the night sky over Chang-an had been a lurid red, shot through with yellow and streaked with black. The wind that blew across the city stank of smoke and spilled fuel and the sour nose-prickling smell of Gauss rifles in prolonged use. It carried with it the heavy crump of explosions, the crash of structures collapsing into rubble, the tumult of voices shouting and screaming.

He was running, dodging through the streets, trying to make it home on foot. He’d seen the Liao Conservatory of Military Arts go down, seen the main building collapse into itself when the missile hit, seen the pillar of smoke and flame rising into the sky. The deed was necessary, he knew, for those on the other side—the cadet corps had been holding the Conservatory in force with small arms and at least one autocannon. Still—minutes ago the school had been there, and now there was nothing where it had stood except craters and a pile of rubble.

He was out of breath, stumbling as he ran. He’d come on foot all the way from the DropPort. Hours and hours it had taken—walking fifty paces, running fifty, walking fifty again, as he’d been taught in his military training to reserve his strength—and he hadn’t dared to grab a vehicle for any of it, because that would have made him too good a target.

The streets were blocked by people trying to escape the city, and choked with Liao defense forces coming in, while the invaders poured from the DropShip and spread out into the city like ink into water. When he’d seen on the news-screens the path the invaders were taking, and the places where resistance was gathering to meet them, he knew that he had to go home. Not to his own small bachelor apartment near the Port, but to the house he had grown up in, where his parents still lived—right along the path where the forces would collide. Were now colliding.

He saw Xin Sheng Boulevard ahead at last, a broad avenue running through the heart of the city from the business district to the Hall of Civic Governance. He had to cross it, one way or another. Home lay beyond, in a city neighborhood of town houses grouped around open squares. His parents had chosen to live in that district because of him—children could play safely in the squares, watched over by parents and nannies and the vigilant local police.

Now Xin Sheng Boulevard ran like a river of destruction in his path. He crouched in the shelter of a flight of concrete steps leading up to a first-floor office—the nameplate next to the door readHARMONIOUS

VOYAGING TRAVEL AGENCY . The office’s windows were all broken, and the room inside was dark.

Laser flashes of rifle fire came from the upper windows across the avenue, and more flashes answered them from the windows above his head.

A squad of Capellan Confederation soldiers crouched in the shelter of a public transit stop, firing at the windows on the far side of the avenue. One of the CapCons threw a dark green smoke grenade, and in the next instant the air roiled with throat-clenching white fog. The CapCons shouted and rushed into the street, moving like shadowy figures through the smoke. More laser fire came flashing down; some of the shadowy figures fell, but the others kept on running. The smoke scattered the laser fire, making a light too brilliant to look at.

Then he heard the rumble of engines and the sound of metal thudding on concrete in regular, titanic footfalls.

He looked to his left. Down at the Hall of Civic Governance end of the avenue, a looming anthropomorphic shape strode around the corner of the building, one massive arm punching out and into the third-floor windows as it came: a
Thunderbolt
BattleMech, swinging into action. He had no chance at all of crossing the avenue now.

In desperation, he backtracked a block to a transit tunnel entrance, and plunged down its steps into the dark. He paused at the bottom to let his eyes adjust—as he’d hoped, the battery-powered emergency lights were on, and the tunnel was illuminated by their crimson glow. He didn’t see either CapCons or defenders anywhere nearby. If the transit cars were no longer running, he could follow the tunnel down one—no, two—stops, then go up and through the Governance Center subterranean concourse to get out, and make it home that way from the other side.