Many months later, Crawford would turn that statement over in his mind again and again, looking for the nuance that betrayed the lie. But that was far in the future, and this was now.

Dazzling spears of laser fire danced around the two ’Mechs. Chinn’s Thor was the more agile, and she dodged, returning fire from her remaining laser. But the Marauder was hit by a scarlet lance of laser fire that burned armor at its left shoulder and sent it reeling to the side, its back-canted birds’ knees locking as the machine betrayed its fatal flaw. Instead of tumbling, the Marauder staggered and swayed dangerously to the left.

“Keep going, Chinn, go,” grunted the Hunter, and Crawford imagined the man, ashen-faced, struggling to right his compromised machine. “I’m there, I’ll be right…”

A suck of air, and then a dull boom, and Crawford saw a swarm of thirty missiles spewing from the nose of the remaining Oni toward the Marauder. Without thinking, Crawford cut loose with his lasers as the Hunter raked the missiles with his PPCs and Gauss rifle. Some of the missiles detonated, fragmenting around the Hunter in a flaring halo, while others gouged troughs of destruction around the massive machine. Crawford couldn’t tell how many hit the Hunter, but the massive machine jerked, first right, then left, flailing like a drowning man in a whirlpool, and then, as the fighter howled toward the ’Mech, the Hunter swung his Gauss rifle and battered the fighter from the sky.

“That’s it,” the Hunter said, his voice hitching, maybe in pain. “I’m out. No more slugs.”

Movement, and Crawford’s eyes snapped down, saw the Schmitt crashing through the fire and thundering for the cliff face. He shouted, “Buck, get your people down now, now, now!”

But finally, it seemed, their luck was turning from worse to not so bad, because the remaining fighter, a Sholagar, spun away, but slowly, almost teasingly—with Chinn moving out, trying to track the fighter for a target lock.

“Toni, let it go!” Crawford cried, but then Chinn’s voice cut in on a general frequency, and so everyone heard—and Crawford would remember it for the rest of his life.

“No choice, Andre.” Chinn’s voice was labored, but whether from pain or the heat—and, my God, it must be an inferno in that cockpit given all she’d gone through—Crawford didn’t know. “But he can’t… get away… because… they’ll know, they’ll… know… have to stop…!”

Then time slowed down, and Crawford saw everything that happened with that crystalline clarity that can only happen when a man knows that Death waits just around the bend. He saw the spear of Chinn’s laser take flight; saw the scintillating ribbon of concentrated energy tease the Sholagar’s port engine; watched the saucer tilt nearly on edge, loop and then come screaming back in a blur and with an almost maniacal joy, a pencil-thin tail of smoke diffusing behind like a gauzy black scarf, and maintain that course, on edge, presenting the least amount of surface area to its adversary.

And then time snapped back into itself, like a cable stretched to its limits, and Crawford understood the pilot’s strategy an instant too late because he had forgotten: These were warriors, too.

“CHINN!” Crawford screamed, whipping his lasers round, trying to acquire, but the Thor was in the way and he couldn’t, he couldn’t…! “Get out of the way, GET OUT OF THE WAY!”

A brilliant flare, as bright as a hundred suns, and then Crawford’s bellow of agonized fury mingled with a ball of thunder as the Sholagar smacked into the Thor’s canopy, hacking Chinn’s scream in two as the Thor broke apart in a hail of molten armor and disarticulated limbs. Another mushrooming explosion as the Thor’s missile rack detonated in a successive series of three quick bursts; the burning meadow twitched, and aftershocks rippled through the legs of his ’Mech and into Crawford’s brain. To his left, Buck’s troops staggered, some tumbling to the ground, others breaking at the knee as if in prayer.

After all that had happened, it took Crawford a few moments to realize that everything had gone deathly, absolutely… still. He heard the faint roar of the sea behind and the crackle of the fire ahead. A squalling of metal, and he turned as the Bounty Hunter slid his Marauder into position at his right hand, so close that Crawford could see the vibrant green of the Hunter’s neurohelmet through the Marauder’s ferroglass canopy.

“I want him dead.” Crawford’s voice was raw and sharp. Grief and rage lodged in his heart and squeezed. “I want him dead. You hear me? I want that son of a bitch dead.”

“Yes, of course,” said the Hunter. And then, after a pause, “Which one?”

24

Red Sands, Devil’s Lot, Klathandu IV

Benjamin Military District, Draconis Combine

5 June 3135

“Well?”

The Old Master lifted both eyebrows. He was in seiza, tucked in the far right-hand corner of their holding cell, a three-meter square titanium cage occupying the furthest third of a small prefabricated metal hut. Bars of golden light from the setting sun illuminated tiny dust motes dancing in a lazy whorl. “Well, what?”

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Katana swept her hand in an all-inclusive gesture. The cage was bolted to the metal floor. A chemical toilet, obviously from the same manufacture that must supply the Combine’s ’Mech’s facilities, squatted in the left corner. At the opposite end of the hut there was a door, locked, and a guard beyond that. “Like, this makes about the fiftieth time I’ve tried to figure a way out of here, and so this is a waste of energy and time?”

“You already know that. But, clearly, plotting an escape gives you pleasure.”

“It’s something to do. Besides, it’s galling—my fighter practically parked close enough to touch. And for a skeleton command there are plenty of people out there.”

“Now there is something to ponder: why your intelligence was faulty.”

“I was the one who thought of Klathandu. No use worrying about that now. But why haven’t they taken us off-world? Maybe waiting for instructions,” she mused. “Even tag team JumpShips take time, and they have to go the long way around. But that’s a problem. Sakamoto micromanages, has to be in on every decision.”

“All good points and they do serve to neatly evade my comment.”

“Which was?”

“That you made connections where none existed. Perhaps that was exactly what Sakamoto was counting on.”

“He can’t know how I think.”

“On the contrary, he may know exactly how you think. It is an excellent possibility that he played on your pride. Or…” The Old Master paused then said, “You could question why you allowed yourself to be captured.”

“Wait a minute.” Katana dropped into a cross-legged anza, twitching her cloak around her body. She still wore her pilot’s jumpsuit, and they’d left her the cloak, but the temperature dropped at night and the floor was chilly. “I didn’t allow a damn thing.”

“Of course, you did. Didn’t you tell Tai-i Sagi we were his guests or prisoners?”

“That was a figure of speech.”

“Well, I guess then we’ll chalk it up to the good tai-i’s being quite literal. But you keep poking your finger in the coordinator’s eye. Up to this point, the coordinator has failed to acknowledge you. So, trying to rouse his troops to insurrection…”

“They’re Sakamoto’s men.”

“They are the Combine’s soldiers. If they defect, the coordinator can’t ignore you. That is how you task him.”

“That’s ridiculous.” An unbearable wave of heat rose in Katana’s neck. “I’m not a child anymore.”