PART ONE

Falling Earthward

1

The Fort

Tara, Northwind

Prefecture III, The Republic of the Sphere

February 3134; local winter

Forty-eight hours after the last of the Steel Wolf DropShips lifted from the port, Tara was still burning. The city lay in the grip of a late-winter thaw, and a raw wet wind blew down the sodden streets. A cold rain fell out of a low gray sky—heavy, half-frozen drops that stung and melted against skin when they hit—and soaked into the burned and burning city, rising up again as steam and filling the air with the acrid stink of wet creosote.

The wind carried other, worse smells with it as well. The Steel Wolves had not just burned the city before they left it. They had killed, and had left the dead behind them.

In some quarters of the capital, smoke still rose from the rain-soaked debris. Firefighters labored to extinguish the flames while ConstructionMechs and lesser machines followed close behind, laboring to take apart the wreckage in the hope of finding and freeing any survivors. The sirens of emergency vehicles had been sounding intermittently all day; they had sounded all the night and the day before as well.

While the devastation was not absolute, it was nevertheless comprehensive. All the elegant shops along Tara’s Silver Mile had been gutted—their contents not stolen, but burned in the street. The New Barracks had been ripped into and torn apart by ’Mechs, its carpets and curtains and furniture piled atop the wreckage and set aflame. Even the River Thames, that should have flowed freely in its canals through the city, was black with ash, colored with oil, and choked with rubble.

Only The Fort—the dark, looming structure that was the original home and headquarters of the famed Northwind Highlanders—remained untouched. Its walls of solid stone and gates of heavy iron had been designed to stand against ’Mechs and missiles and artillery, and even the Steel Wolves had proved unable to bring them down. The Fort was a relic of an older time, of the centuries of warfare and chaos before Devlin Stone’s Republic brought the Inner Sphere six decades of peace. It was still standing now that the peace had ended.

Anastasia Kerensky and her Steel Wolves had been driven off of Northwind once before, in the summer campaign that had begun with the Battle of Red Ledge Pass and ended with the Battle on the Plains. They had come back this time with the element of surprise on their side—surprise, and the fact that Northwind’s forces, already spread out to cover nearby planets like Small World and Addicks, had been seriously depleted by the original incursion.

Even that advantage should not have been enough to allow such a disaster. Northwind had augmented its thin-stretched forces with mercenaries under the command of One-Eyed Jack Farrell—a tough bunch, and honest as such things went, with a rep for standing by their contracts and honoring them to the letter. They should have stood by Northwind the same, but (and here, in retrospect, lay the fatal flaw) One-Eyed Jack and his mercenaries hadn’t made their contract with Northwind. They’d made their contract with Ezekiel Crow, Paladin of the Sphere, and Crow had ordered them to stand aloof from the fighting between the Highlanders and Kerensky’s Wolves.

Tara Campbell, Countess of Northwind, was not going to say it in front of the tri-vid news cameras, but she felt at the moment considerably kinder toward Jack Farrell and his mercs than she did toward Crow. Farrell had held to his contract and obeyed Crow’s orders to the letter—to the letter, and no further. He had not exceeded those orders when he easily could have. Without that small amount of grace, the Highlander forces trapped in the city would never have escaped to regroup on the far side of the Rockspire Mountains.

The Countess said as much, sotto voce, to General Michael Griffin. The two of them stood together outside the still unbreached gates of The Fort, waiting for the assembled tri-vid crews to finish setting up. Their dress uniforms were getting steadily wetter and clammy cold; their hair—both Tara Campbell’s spiky short blond locks and Griffin’s close-trimmed military cut—was already soggy; and Tara was half convinced that her eyelashes were starting to freeze.

“One-Eyed Jack and his people can leave whenever they want,” she said. “Tomorrow, if it makes them happy. There’s no point in punishing a bunch of mercs for honoring the deal a traitor cut with them. They aren’t anyone’s friends, and we don’t need for them to be our enemies. You and I both know they could have pushed us a lot harder than they did.”

Griffin gave a nod of reluctant agreement. “What are you going to do about Crow?”

The lips skinned back from Tara’s teeth in what might almost have been a snarl. “When I have him in my hand again?”

Griffin nodded.

What I want to do, Tara thought in the second or so before she answered, is kill him. Anastasia Kerensky would have done it without a second’s hesitation, if he’d served her as he served me. But I’m not Anastasia.

Aloud, she said, “Hand him over to The Republic’s justice, and see him tried for his crimes by the Senate on Terra.”

Big words, she said to herself afterward. But it’s always good to have a plan.

The tri-vid crews were finished with their setup. The leader—a man in a well-cut suit, who looked as if he might be a news interviewer—approached Tara and General Griffin. Like everybody else Tara had seen lately, the crew leader had a drawn and shocky look under his professional polish. Tara found his kind an annoyance in good times, but they were necessary now. He and his people would have been working as hard as everyone else during the past two days, making the record, finding the telling words and the burning images that would make plain to the rest of The Republic of the Sphere what a Paladin of the Sphere had done.

“We’re ready, my lady,” he said. “You’ll be going live worldwide as soon as you give us the word.”

“Good. Do you have the package for Lieutenant Jones ready to go yet?”

“Yes, ma’am. We got our last interview just this morning.”

General Griffin looked interested. “That would have been the survivors from the guard post that passed Crow and his ’Mech through the lines to the DropPort?”

The tri-vid interviewer smiled—Tara Campbell recognized what would have been a fighting grin on the face of someone in her own line of work. “That’s the one, all right. And they’ll clench it, for whoever sees that disc.”

Tara knew that he spoke the truth. The report on Crow’s actions already contained the data from the guard post’s logbook—a small miracle in itself, that the recorder and the discs had survived both the fighting in the city and the retreat into the mountains afterward—but people would believe on a gut level the testimony of two mud-stained and battle-weary young soldiers who had watched a hardened warrior in a Blade ’Mech walk away from the fighting that was sure to come.

Again she said, “Good. The General and I can say our piece for the live broadcast as soon as you give us the signal.”

“Watch the red light over the main camera. When it goes green, you’re live.”

The interviewer retreated to a secondary camera setup on the far side of the street. Tara noted that the cameras were positioned to give a good view of the unbroken Fort looming over the wreckage of the city. He assumed an earnest and trustworthy expression and began talking. She watched the light over the main camera in her own setup blinking steadily amber, and waited.