And a hard shove nearly sent him sprawling as Evan Kurst’s ax bit into his back, caving past armor and striking a deep cleft through his reactor shielding.

Sweat stung his eyes as Daniel Peterson hauled what was left of his BattleMech back around. He’d fought his way almost entirely through the House Ijori force. Vehicles lay scattered and ruined behind him. But right along that same path had come Evan Kurst in his Ti Ts’ang, followed by a number of hovercraft and infantry carriers.

Daniel levered out his right arm, lasers probing, but Evan beat it aside with the flat of his ax blade and then chopped down again. And again.

The titanium edge on the ax took his right arm off at the elbow, and opened up another deep chest wound. Laser fire and several Gauss slugs slammed into him at once, rocking him back several paces. Fusion-fed flames licked out of multiple rents in his armor, blackening the bottom edge of his cockpit shield.

He fed what few weapons he had left into the wall of onrushing forces. He couldn’t breathe.

His boots stuck to the floor as their soles began to melt.

More lasers. Flames licking higher. Throttling forward, Daniel Peterson made two steps before Kurst spent one last crushing blow against the Tundra Wolf and its reactor finally let go. Golden fire burst up through the plate decking and speared out of a dozen wounds fatal to his BattleMech.

Ejection controls…

No.

An unhealthy glow sparked inside the Tundra Wolf’s chest wound as the reactor vented spilled plasma through the cleft. Dark smoke roiled up and around the ax head. With the last of his strength, Evan Kurst wrenched the weapon free. No time to do anything more, except stand there.

The explosion ripped apart Daniel Peterson’s BattleMech with a savage fury Evan had never experienced quite so close. Golden fire splashed across his ferroglass shield, running molten fingers of melted composite down both sides. An acrid stench filled the cockpit, pulled down into Evan’s lungs where it burned like live coals. For an instant, it felt like every last molecule of oxygen had been sucked out of the cockpit, and a silence descended.

Then a magnificent roar screamed in Evan’s ears, pressed around his skull. His entire BattleMech was lifted up and hurled through the air. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see. He felt the Ti Ts’ang hit, laid out onto its back. His helmet smacked the back of his command chair with whiplash force, and pain exploded at the back of his head.

All was quiet.

Evan thought he was dead, pulled down into the abyss after Daniel Peterson. The man had warned him, after all. They were so very much alike, of course they would meet the same fate. Except that Evan remembered… he was under orders. Not to die until Mai told him to. He forced open his eyes, and worked carefully on focusing them.

He stared up through a cracked, half-melted ferroglass shield. Blue. White cloud. A Purifier infantryman stood on the bridge of the Ti Ts’ang’s brow, looking in to see if the MechWarrior was all right.

It was all Evan needed to see. With Ruskoff captured or killed, Peterson gone, the Dynasty Guard chasing down from the north—there could only be one final conclusion to the day’s fighting. The week’s campaign. The month’s struggle.

Evan rested back into his command couch, and stared up into a free Liao sky.

Chang-an

Qinghai Province, Liao

25 August 3134

Mai Uhn Wa stood at an open library window in the Governor’s mansion, drinking in the afternoon breeze. He accepted a small glass of plum wine from Gerald Tsung, but did not sip. The view out the third-floor window was intoxicating enough.

Outside the White Towers District, strings of firecrackers rattled inside garbage cans. People paraded through the streets with caricature heads of Daoshen Liao, Anna Lu Pohl, Confederation soldiers with their Han-influenced helmets and papier-mâché BattleMechs raised up on poles. A long, serpentine dragon jumped and twisted through an intersection, running along on a hundred human legs. It was like an extended New Year’s celebration. Only instead of riots, the Capellan people were truly reveling.

Michael Yung-Te slipped up beside him, the Maskirovka agent as unassuming and dangerous as ever. “Carson Rieves is in the palace, Shiao-zhang Mai. Perhaps you should rejoin us?”

Shiao-zhang. The title sounded better forced from the lips of the Mask agent. Mai Wa looked outside once more. It felt only right to sample the true New Year. But Sang-shao Rieves would not be in a forgiving mood, and it served no purpose to anger the man further without great need.

House Ijori was still in its infancy. Infants were vulnerable.

He set his wine glass on the window ledge, trading the celebration for the awkward attempts at small talk as Governor (pro tem) Lu Pohl and Gerald Tsung danced awkwardly around the room’s white elephant. Viktor Ruskoff stood at full attention, holding himself stiffly apart from the others. Sang-shao Rieves kept the Legate available, although soon Ruskoff would be allowed to follow Lord Governor Hidic to Genoa. A good place to reestablish The Republic government for Prefecture V. The tunnels and warrens of Genoa would be a tough nut to crack.

Taking Liao, for all of The Republic’s efforts and five decades of social engineering, had really been quite easy. The people, after all, were always the true power.

The people had wanted—and waited—to be freed.

The door banged back against a protective stop and the Dynasty Guard’s commander barged into the room as if storming a battlefield. Two large infantrymen followed him in. One kept a hand on the butt of a very large pistol.

“Mai Wa!” Rieves nearly rushed the House Master. “You have ten seconds to explain yourself or be shot as a traitor.”

The elder man stroked his long, wiry mustaches and the wispy beard he still refused to shave. “I am a traitor,” he reminded the other officer. Daoshen Liao’s denouncement still stood. “I serve the Confederation.”

“And that includes conducting more crimes against the State?”

“I am not sure which crime you refer to, Sang-shao Carson Rieves.” Mai remained properly deferential to the true power on Liao. Governor Lu Pohl would administer the world only so long as it suited the senior officer’s needs.

“Tā mā dè you’re not!” The crude insult, thrown out so freely and with real ire behind it, startled even the Maskirovka agent. But Rieves did not miss the implied warning, and restrained from barking out anything revealing in front of Ruskoff or the others. “The… the artifact. Your cultists raided the vault.”

This time Michael Yung-Te was startled for another reason. So Carson Rieves had informed the local Maskirovka agent of Sun-Tzu Liao’s survival.

“I have no cultists in my House,” Mai said evenly. The distant echoes of more firecrackers drifted into the room.

Rieves’s hands were opening and closing, as if wanting to fasten themselves around the neck of Mai Uhn Wa to wring the answers from him. “Where is the body, Mai?”