“Which didn’t work, unfortunately.” Crow looked grim now. “Duchess Tormark is an excellent example.”

Tara felt the sudden surge of an old anger. “If Duchess Tormark had kept faith with The Republic like she ought to have done, then the Dragon’s Fury would still be just a bunch of disaffected misfits instead of a serious military threat.”

“One could say the same thing of Galaxy Commander Kal Radick. Who is, face it, a much more immediate threat than the Dragon’s Fury.”

“I suppose so.” Tara exhaled and drew a calming breath. “But I never expected anything better of Radick or the Clans. They’re not assimilated, no matter how much they pretend to be. Katana, though… we had the same training, we swore the same oaths… and she threw it away, she made it all into nothing.”

“A betrayal.”

“Yes.”

Crow gazed out at the darkness beyond the rain-slashed windows, his expression distant and thoughtful. “It’s always possible that she sees things differently.”

“So that’s all treason is—a case of different people seeing things differently?”

“That’s one way to look at it.”

The anger she felt at Katana Tormark’s defection was still with her, making her voice sharper than she intended. “I suppose it was someone ‘seeing things differently’ who let the CapCons put down that DropShip on Liao.”

He went very still, almost as if she’d slapped him, and spoke carefully and distantly. “Nobody knows why it was done.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to—”

“The betrayer of Liao was never found. So many people died—he would have been just one more body, buried in a common grave like all the others.”

She swallowed, feeling sick. “Your parents, too?”

“Yes.”

“I am sorry.”

He drew a deep breath and visibly put the memories behind him. “It was a long time ago. But I haven’t forgotten. It’s one of the reasons I chose the career that I did, and why I worked so hard to reach the place where I am now. I don’t want anything like that to ever happen again.”

22

Tyson and Varney ’Mech Factory

Fairfield, Northwind

May, 3133; local spring

Tyson and Varney, Limited, had built most of the Mining– and ConstructionMechs currently in use on Northwind, and held the contracts for most of the unbuilt ones. Since the winter of 3132, Tyson and Varney had also held the Northwind Highlanders’ contract for retrofitting work ’Mechs to combat models.

Today Colonel Michael Griffin had come to Fairfield in order to pay an official visit on Tyson and Varney’s main plant. Griffin, who had made no secret of the fact that he was there to check on the company’s progress, was escorted around the factory by the senior plant manager, a stocky, thick-mustached individual named Evans.

The plant was a series of immense assembly hangars, each subdivided into three or four bays. Each bay held a ’Mech in progress, worked on by teams of a dozen or more men and women under the glare of sodium vapor lights. Hoarse voices shouted back and forth, metal clanged and crashed and groaned against metal, and the ’Mech bays were full of the hiss and spark of welding torches and the smell of ozone.

The workers in their safety goggles and heavy protective earmuffs looked like strange, bulbous-headed insects crawling over the giant anthropomorphic shapes of the ’Mechs. Colonel Griffin, encountering the noise and the dazzle of the ’Mech bays for the first time, felt grateful for the pair of yellow foam plugs that Evans had insisted he put into his ears before entering the hangar.

The manager waved an arm in the direction of the ’Mechs in the first three bays.

“These are the farthest along,” he said, shouting to make himself heard over the din. “They’re out-of-the-box models, no custom mods, so retrofitting them to your specs doesn’t mean ripping anything else out first.”

Griffin followed the manager’s gesture and looked at the nearest ’Mech. He wished he knew enough about design and engineering to estimate the workers’ rate of progress. “How soon until these are finished?”

“This lot? About a month. The ForestryMechs in the next bays over, maybe a week after that.”

Griffin suppressed his sinking feeling with difficulty. “No faster?”

“We’re not just stamping out stuff with cookie cutters here,” Evans said, scowling. “There’s a lot more one-of-a-kind handiwork goes into making these babies than most people think, and retrofitting them into units that can fight is a lot trickier than it looks.”

“I’m sure it is,” Griffin said hastily. “How about the new construction?”

“I won’t lie to you. It’s going a lot slower than we’d like.”

“The Prefect isn’t going to be very happy about that.”

“The Prefect will just have to live with it,” the manager said. “It turns out that designing a reconfigured IndustrialMech or ForestryMech from the ground up is only a couple of notches short of designing a full-scale BattleMech, and that’s a tough job. Not that Tyson and Varney couldn’t handle it, if you gave us all the right materials.”

“I’m certain you could,” said Griffin. “But what you’re telling me right now is that the new construction isn’t going to be coming on-line any time in the immediate future.”

“I don’t like being the bearer of bad news… but yeah, that’s about it. We can slap the design engineers around a bit, remind them they’re not supposed to be inventing the next generation in BattleMech technology here, but it’s still not going to change any of the basic problems.”

For a moment, Griffin considered ordering the shutdown of the redesign project. His mandate from Tara Campbell extended as far as that, he thought, even if his nominal authority didn’t; and if he stated for the record that he thought the ’Mech redesign program was a failure and ought to be closed down, the Countess would probably back his decision.

Griffin remained in silent thought long enough to notice the manager sweating. Finally he said, “Keep that part of the project going anyway. It may not be of much help to us in the short term, but in the long term… in the long term, Mr. Evans, I’m very much afraid that things are going to be different. And your design engineers may yet get their wish.”

“I’ll tell them what you said,” the manager told him, and Griffin could see the man’s relief, somewhat tempered by his understanding of what Griffin had implied for the future. “Right now, I believe that if we reallocate resources and manpower and go to round-the-clock shifts, we can have the first retrofitted units ready to roll in three weeks or a bit less.”

“That would be good,” Griffin said. “I’ll make certain that the Prefect has your estimate.”

The manager gave him a gloomy look. “Which had better be binding, I suppose.”

Griffin smiled. “You said it, Mr. Evans. I didn’t.”