“If we can’t save Northwind from invasion, the state of the economy isn’t going to matter,” Griffin pointed out.

“It’s not that simple,” she said. “A victorious campaign coupled with a wrecked economy leaves us wide open for a takeover by the next faction that’s willing to have a try. Our ancestors fought too long and too hard for a free world of their own—we can’t betray them by throwing it away.”

“We’re still going to need those ’Mechs.”

“Then find somebody in your department who knows economics and can do the math,” she told him, “and have him or her figure out what percentage of the available ’Mechs we can take and retrofit for combat without damaging the planetary infrastructure beyond repair.”

Finally he gave a slow nod. “I have a couple of people I could put on that job.”

“Good. And get somebody else to start talking with the firms that actually produce all those working ’Mechs. Find out if they can start adding a certain number of… ah… preconfigured fighting models to each production run.”

“I can do that myself,” he said.

“Assign someone else to it if you can,” she said. “I want you to jaunt down to the Aerospace Branch of the Academy, on Halidon—they’ll need to know that there’s trouble in the wind, and that they’re as much a part of the defense mix as any of the units on Kearny or New Lanark.”

She paused and added, smiling, “It’s summer down there. Take a day or two of your accumulated leave, Colonel, and enjoy the sand and sunshine because once that Paladin gets here, I don’t think any of us are going to make it out of the city for quite a while.”

8

Commercial District

City of Tara, Northwind

December, 3132; local winter

Winter in the Bloodstone Range had been clean and snow-clad and cold. Winter in the capital city of Tara, Will Elliot had found, could be clammy and unpleasant. The streets were filled with dirty puddles of half-melted slush and raked by a raw, incessant wind that felt like it had come straight down from the polar regions without encountering so much as a strand of electric fencing by way of a windbreak.

The weather alone was not so bad—the mountains were much colder, and often as wet—but the air in the city smelled of garbage and chemicals and close-pressed humanity, and vibrated with the strident clamor of people and machines. Even the Great Thames River, clean and fast-running when it came out of the mountains north and west of Harlaugh, in Tara had been cramped and channeled and forced to run through concrete ditches.

He could have endured everything, he thought, if there had only been work. But so far, the time he’d spent living in a rooms-by-the-week hotel and eating generic-label microwave dinners for his one meal each day had failed to turn up any useful possibilities. He didn’t have the right kind of education, or enough of the education that he did have, to apply for office work; he wasn’t a member of the trade organization that controlled hiring and labor at the DropPort; and the few jobs that he could have gotten paid less than living in Tara cost, and would leave him with no time in which to search for something better.

He was on his way back to his rented room after another fruitless day of searching when he saw the poster in the shopfront window:

The poster’s artwork depicted a young woman in full-dress uniform standing next to the foot of a BattleMech. On the outside wall next to the display window hung a metal rack full of brightly printed flyers, all of them bearing titles like “Regimental Advanced Education Program: Learn While You Serve” and “Earth, Space, and Sky: Aerospace Fighter Command” and “Your Pay and Benefits.”

Will peered through the glass door at the room inside—a quick glance only, for the sake of appearing casual rather than increasingly desperate. He saw a man in uniform, with medals, sitting at a desk in the front of the office. A door in the wall behind the desk opened into another room, but Will couldn’t make out what lay on the other side. The man in uniform was talking to a nervous-looking young woman in regular clothing; she sat in a straight chair on the other side of the desk.

The diner across the street had a cheap lunch special, a hot meat pie and choice of two vegetables. Will decided that he could afford to treat himself this once. One way or another, he wasn’t going to be needing to stretch out his dwindling supply of cash much longer. So far, nothing he’d found in the capital had turned out to be better than the Harlaugh mill; he’d probably be heading back there tomorrow anyway.

He picked up a copy of the “Pay And Benefits” flyer to read while he ate. By the time he’d finished the meat pie and paid for his meal, the girl had left the recruiting office and the chair across the desk from the man in uniform was empty. Will pushed open the door and stepped inside.

He went up to the desk and said quickly, before he could change his mind, “I want to enlist.”

The man in uniform—from this close, Will could see that the name plate on his desk read Master Sergeant Dylan ap Rhys—looked him up and down and said, “If you’re here because you want to be a MechWarrior, you might as well turn around now and go home. We’ve got exactly two BattleMechs on the entire planet, and they’re spoken for.”

Will shook his head. “I don’t want to be a MechWarrior,” he said—and it was true. He’d always failed to understand the attraction of the giant fighting machines. Big as they were, next to the mountains they were small. “I just want to enlist.”

Ap Rhys’s expression became somewhat friendlier. “Then we might have a place for you.” He gestured at the chair facing him. “Sit down, and let’s talk.”

Will sat down. Ap Rhys produced a sheaf of papers and a pen from the top drawer of his desk.

“Now, then,” the Master Sergeant said. “Full name?”

“William Alan Elliot.”

“Place and date of birth?”

“Harlaugh General Hospital. 3109.”

“Education?”

“Liddisdale Secondary School,” he said. “3127.”

Master Sergeant ap Rhys gave him a considering look. “You’re a bit older than the usual run of walk-ins we get here. Do you have a current employer?”

Will shook his head. “That’s why I’m here.”

“I see,” the Master Sergeant said. “What about your previous employer?”

“Rockhawk Wilderness Tours. I was a guide.”

“What was the reason for your discharge?”

“There wasn’t enough work left for two guides,” Will said. “I was the spare.”

The Master Sergeant looked sympathetic. “Things like that can happen when times are bad. So you want to move from being a guide to being a soldier.”

“I have to work at something. And soldiering must be better than working at the lumber mill.”

“We’ll see if you still feel that way four years from now,” the Master Sergeant said. He pulled another document out of the collection from his desk, and marked one of the blank spaces near the bottom with a scrawled X. “If you’ll sign here, we can start with the preliminary swearing in and move right on into the standard test battery. That’ll give us an idea what your best assignment is going to be.”

He paused and looked Will in the eye. “If you’re going to back out, now’s the time and the door to the street is right behind you. Once you’ve signed—hunting down a deserter is a deal of trouble.”

Everything was suddenly moving very fast, Will thought. The pen was slippery in his hand; he managed to write “Will Elliot” in the indicated blank without scrawling too badly, but it was a near thing.