7

The New Barracks

City of Tara, Northwind

November, 3132; local winter

The day after she received word of the Paladin’s imminent arrival, Tara Campbell met with Colonel Michael Griffin in her New Barracks office. The room was small and plainly furnished—all of its contents were standard Regimental issue, and could have occupied an office on any world where the Highlanders had a fighting presence—but it was her personal sanctum, and she had chosen it deliberately over any of the more formal chambers in the Fort proper.

She felt the oppressive weight of history less in these rooms than she did in the historic structures of the Fort, and found them generally more comfortable. The heat in the Barracks office could be adjusted to an individual’s preference, for one thing. The Fort’s environmental controls, by contrast, had a global setting, determined in the secret recesses of the maintenance department by a combination of energy efficiency and ancient custom that Tara had never been able to figure out. She inevitably found the rooms in the Fort proper either too chilly or too warm.

Today, the weather outside her office was foggy and cold; the city was not showing its best face. Tara felt sorry that she wouldn’t be able to spend more of the winter at Castle Northwind, the private residence of the Count or Countess of Northwind and the location of many of her fond childhood memories. She let herself relax for a moment, remembering Castle Northwind’s crackling hearths and forested grounds, and the winters when she would go sledding down the long hill above the lake and make angels in the snow.

“Did you ever make snow angels, Colonel Griffin?” she asked absently, as she pulled up the files she wanted onto her computer screen. “When you were young, that is?”

He shook his head. “I grew up on the Oilfield Coast, in Kearny. No snow—”

“That’s too bad.”

“—but a great deal of sand and sunshine.”

He sounded as if he missed it, and she made a note of the thought. The long, gray winters in the capital affected some people adversely, and perhaps the Colonel was one of them. She’d never hear it from him, though, if that were the case. He had the look and manner of one of the old-style Regimental officers—the ones who would consider it bad form to mention that they were mortally wounded and bleeding to death in their boots. Such stoicism was useful to a commander in desperate times, when nothing could be done about the problem, but less so when it could mean losing a good officer to the slow erosion of a treatable malaise.

Right now, however, other problems demanded Tara’s attention. She opened the topmost file on her computer and turned the screen around so that both she and Colonel Griffin could see it.

“I wanted to talk with you,” she said, “about the Prefectural Intelligence report.”

Griffin didn’t glance over at the display screen, although Tara could tell—from the way she could see him actively not looking at it—that she’d already piqued his curiosity enough to make him want to do so.

“I’m afraid I’m not cleared at that level,” he said.

She snorted. “I’m the Prefect. If I say you’re cleared, you’re cleared. And I want you to see this because it concerns Northwind directly.”

“In what manner, ma’am?”

The Colonel still hadn’t looked at the screen, but his entire bearing had changed at her words. He was now projecting firmly restrained eagerness to be about the work she was undoubtedly planning to assign to him. Tara suppressed a smile. Griffin was one of the old style, indeed.

“Prefectural Intelligence,” she said, “believes that one or more of the factions that have arisen in the aftermath of the HPG net breakdown is likely to make a try for the conquest of Terra. By way of Northwind.”

Colonel Griffin’s expression changed again. “That’s… not good,” he said.

Tara wondered if that masterful piece of understatement meant that he was thinking the same thing that she had thought when she first read PrefIntel’s report. An invasion, if it came, would mark the first time in living memory that there had been war on Northwind.

Nobody on this world was accustomed to war anymore. They didn’t know what a city park smelled like after foot soldiers with Gauss rifles had been killing each other in it for seven days, or what a once-charming country villa looked like after its roof and walls had been crushed under the foot of a ’Mech. The Vale of Flowers on Sadalbari had been a lovely place until the Black Dragon pirates set up shop there and The Republic decided to root them out.

Tara herself had come out of that campaign with a brightly glowing reputation. News sources across the Sphere fell with eagerness upon the story of the “Angel of Sadalbari,” the young officer who had saved the day when her Colonel was taken out of action by ’Mech failure in the midst of battle. She’d even been featured on the cover of Republic Today–although the article inside had made the fighting on Sadalbari, and its aftermath, sound a great deal cleaner and more romantic than she recalled.

“‘Not good’ sums up my reaction as well,” she told Colonel Griffin after a moment. “This report gives Prefectural Intelligence’s assessment of the relative likelihood of attack by the various known factions. When you read it, you’ll see they give the best odds to the Dragon’s Fury, the Steel Wolves, and Duke Aaron Sandoval and his Swordsworn, in that order. I want you to read the report and give me local intelligence’s opinions on the same issue.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “If I may?”

He reached over and tapped out the command to transfer a copy of the file to his own computer.

Tara continued. “I have to tell you, Colonel, that I already agree with PrefIntel on at least one thing: This world is in grave danger. And I believe that we must take steps to protect it.”

“Do you have any plans?”

“There’s a lot of things that we can’t do until we know for certain who the enemy will be,” she said. “Other things, though… we can up the strength of the Regiments. I’ve already authorized a heavy recruitment drive; I can do that much on my own, by virtue of my position as Countess of Northwind.”

Tara saw that the Colonel was nodding as she spoke. He was on her side in this, definitely. That was good. She was going to have to push the recruitment drive through the full Council, and the long years of peace had left its members less than entirely willing to increase the size and strength of the Regiments. She couldn’t share the most telling details of PrefIntel’s report without compromising the intelligence that it contained. Under those circumstances, a strong voice on her side would help.

“What about equipment?” Griffin asked. “Recruiting alone isn’t going to be enough.”

“True,” she said. She called up another file. “This is our best estimation of current needs. As you can see, due to our recent deployment of forces on Addicks and elsewhere, we have a grand total of two BattleMechs currently available on-planet: my own Hatchetman and the Koshi belonging to the planetary reserves. Any invasion force we encounter is almost certain to bring more ’Mechs than that into play. Suggestions?”

“Word from our off-planet intelligence sources is that local defense forces across the Sphere have begun making effective use of converted ForestryMechs and IndustrialMechs. We have a good number of those available, as well as MiningMechs and ConstructionMechs.”

“Yes,” she said. “But we can’t commandeer all of them. There are people relying on those ’Mechs to keep their businesses going. If we save the planet from invasion only to have the economy crash afterward, we won’t have helped things very much.”