The driver transmitted clearance codes, and they were through.

Beautiful land, Noritomo judged, keeping an eye on the approaching complex but unable to ignore the rugged beauty rolling past him. Crisp, knife-edged mountains surrounded him, slicing at the sapphire blue sky. Everything was verdant and sweet-smelling, if low growing because of the rocky soil. Worlds like this were what had brought the Jade Falcons back to the Inner Sphere from the severe Clan home worlds nearly a century before, more tempting, in Noritomo’s opinion, than the promise of battle.

Of course, Malvina Hazen would argue that point. Then again, she also would likely argue his point if it meant a better fight and the possibility of greater honor.

The Ranger pulled to a stop in front of the complex. The large dome, easily one hundred meters across, was the color of wet basalt, all shiny and gray black. Offices. Strategic centers. Training and medical facilities. Ground-hugging barracks capable of sleeping their entire army flanked the dome, and from the south side of each rose up magnificent, slender towers that housed communications arrays, radar and satellite uplinks, and hidden weapons emplacements.

“She is waiting,” the driver told him.

Noritomo pegged him as second-line armor crew, to draw escort duty. It did nothing to deflate the driver’s superior air, however. He had a swagger and a sneering attitude that the Star colonel was finding all too common among the local garrison troops. Including the way he practically genuflected when speaking of capital-H Her.

“Our leader who art immortal,” Noritomo mouthed, lips framing the words but without sound, “hallowed be thy name.”

Malvina.

It wasn’t hard to find her. A sentry-aide at the dome’s main doors nodded to him and said, “Dojo.”

Training facilities. Left at the main intersection and up one flight of bolted-together metal stairs. Down to the end of the corridor. Noritomo kept his hands clenched into tight fists, his fingernails gouging into his palms, as he steeled himself for the meeting. Hearing the sounds of sparring, he stepped through an open door—careful of the thin mats—and waited quietly behind Galaxy Commander Beckett Malthus and a white-coated doctor while Malvina Hazen finished her sparring match.

She faced another MechWarrior, a man, each of them stripped down to shorts and a tight-fitting shirt. Malvina’s opponent was tall and roped with wiry muscle, and moved with a feral grace. He slid in low and fast, coming at her injured side, hands reaching, but was deflected by a swift jab toward his temple.

He ducked away, back on his guard. Malvina Hazen glared after him, furious.

Noritomo took the opportunity to study his immediate commander. Malvina had had a dangerous beauty before. Hard-bodied and intense, she had blond hair and brilliant blue eyes. She’d lost a measure of that on Skye, along with Aleksandr. Pulled from the ruin of her BattleMech, by all accounts Noritomo had heard, she had been more dead than alive. He believed it. Her bionic eye could hardly be distinguished from her natural one, but the scar that creased her brow and curled in toward her mouth remained. Her right arm and right leg were an obsidian black. No vanity involved here. These were prosthetics, and Malvina obviously wanted no part in disguising them to resemble her true limbs.

The Galaxy commander was obviously in a hurry. It would have taken Clan scientists only three months to rejuvenate replacement limbs for her. Another few months for conditioning. A lesser warrior might not have recovered fully, even then. Here, barely five weeks later, she was racing back toward top form. Whatever her impetus, rage or revenge, it spoke of great need.

Or great hunger.

With a battle shriek very much like a hawk’s cry, Malvina charged her opponent. She moved with very little grace, hobbled by the dead weight of her prosthetics, but made up for it in savage fury. Her sidearm chop was hard enough to break the man’s arm—Noritomo heard the wet snap. She leaped forward, grabbed two fistfuls of his hair, and while still in the air drove a knee into his nose, breaking that as well.

Malvina landed, staggering onto her good leg, crouching into a ready posture.

Her opponent landed hard on his back and lay there, dazed.

“You do not ever go easy on me!” she shouted down at him. “I want your best. Always!”

The doctor moved to the injured man, letting him get up on his own and then guiding him aside. Malvina glared after them both with contempt. “Next time bring me an Elemental.”

“Easy, Galaxy Commander.” Bec Malthus crossed his arms over a thick chest. “You will leave us no able warriors to take Skye.”

She scoffed. “What does that matter? We have Star Colonel Helmer. Finally.”

Her glare skewered Noritomo as she limped toward them. Her scar burned red and angry. This did not look like the champion being whispered about in reverent tones. Their Chinggis Khan–the title that in itself bordered on a betrayal of Khan Pryde, the Jade Falcons’ supreme leader.

Then again, with Beckett Malthus backing her, Malvina Hazen could afford a few setbacks and indulge in her dramatics. Malthus was a power in his own right. Some had called him the Shadow-Khan after he assisted in Jana Pryde’s ascension. If he had decided to play kingmaker again, Noritomo knew better than to stand in his way. Warriors who tried had a tendency to end up ruined, cast down, and with their genetic material excluded from the Clan’s breeding program.

All Malvina Hazen was likely to do to Noritomo Helmer was kill him. She still might.

“All our planning,” she said, grabbing a towel from a nearby shelf and blotting the sweat from her face. “All our previous victories. Worthless,” she spat. “I gave you Kimball II. And you may have cost me Skye.”

“The assault did not go as expected,” he agreed carefully. “I sent word to you, but my courier was intercepted at Ryde by the Steel Wolves. It was an unforeseeable tragedy.”

Malvina wrapped the towel around the back of her neck, held the ends with one white hand, one black. “Losing my brother was an unforeseeable tragedy, Star Colonel. And you do not even have his excuse of martyring yourself for our cause.”

“I am sorry for the Clan’s loss of Aleksandr Hazen,” Noritomo told her. Personal condolences would be improper, no matter how close the brother and sister had been. Everyone served the Clan. “His vision will be missed.”

“And I will make the universe pay dearly for depriving us of him,” she said in a spate of cold fury.

Malthus shifted carefully toward her, as if cautioning her, and she relented. Slightly.

“Still…” Her eyes narrowed into blue slits. She nodded. “We take this one step at a time. Our forces are battered, but not beaten. We control six key worlds in this region of space. We might still accomplish everything we desire, and more. The question becomes, how do we proceed?” She looked at him carefully. “Would you say it is time to call for Khan Pryde and the entire Jade Falcon Touman?”

It was a trap, laid out neatly in front of him and no way to step around it. The two commanders certainly knew of the talk openly spoken among warriors of Clan Jade Falcon’s desant. The death of Aleksandr Hazen and even their failure to take Skye was ultimately being laid at the feet of Khan Jana Pryde, who had refused to support the long-ranging strike with greater strength from the Falcon military.

When making her decision, Pryde had cited the Clan tradition of bidding the least amount of force necessary to claim victory and therefore the greater honor. But such blind adherence to the old ways had also been a point of contention between Aleksandr and Malvina. Aleksandr followed Clan traditions of bidding for a goal and attempting to take it with the least amount of force—and destruction visited on the target—as possible. Malvina championed a more severe approach. Rip out the spine of all potential resistance up front, and rule through the threat of holocaust.