She took a sip from the heavy crystal tumbler sitting on the wide edge of the tub. That was another advantage to her current quarters: the former occupant had liked good liquor, and had kept his cabinet supplied with an excellent private stock. Not the Terran vodka she preferred when she could get it, but local brews—and Northwind, she had decided, would be a planet worth taking for its distilleries alone. The amber whiskey had a taste like knives and burning embers, and a label in a language she didn’t recognize; she would remember it, though, when they left this place and had all of Northwind to plunder.

Footsteps in the main cabin interrupted her thoughts. A loaded slug-pistol lay on the rim of the tub next to the whiskey; she had the weapon in her hand and aimed before the door swung all the way open.

At the sight of the newcomer, she relaxed a little. It was Nicholas Darwin, whose undeniably handsome presence was yet another advantage to having her private quarters on the oil rig’s managerial level. She did not lower the pistol, however, but smiled at him over it.

“If you had been an enemy, I would have killed you as soon as you came through the door.”

“If I had been an enemy,” he replied, also smiling, “I would have waited on the other side and killed you when you came out.”

She laughed, not putting down the pistol. “But since you are not an enemy, waiting is too difficult for you?”

“The sight of a Galaxy Commander armed and dangerous in her bath is too rare a privilege not to be taken advantage of.”

“See an advantage and take it.” She rose smoothly from the tub, the slug-pistol in her hand. It was a move that could have been awkward, and Anastasia was vain enough to be pleased with herself that it wasn’t. And the effect on Nicholas Darwin of bath-water and soap bubbles sluicing off her naked body as she stood was all that could be desired. “I like the way you think. Bring the whiskey and come with me to bed.”

She stepped past him. He followed; when she turned, she saw he had brought a bath towel with him, as well as the whiskey bottle and the empty tumbler.

She raised an eyebrow. “Why the towel?”

He set the bottle and the glass on her bedside table, and unfolded the towel. “Mutually beneficial tactical maneuver,” he explained. “You get to not have soapy water soaking into the bedsheets, and I get to touch you all over.”

“Good plan.” She set the slug-pistol down on the bedside table next to the whiskey. “I like it.”

She liked it, as matters turned out, very much indeed. It was fortunate that nobody still living berthed on this level except for the medic, Ian Murchison, and that his room was at the opposite, or low-status, end of the managerial corridor. That put him too far away to hear most noises, and as for what he might overhear anyway… well, he was not likely to talk.

Some time later, she lay happily exhausted with her head on Nicholas Darwin’s shoulder, watching the play of light and color on the cabin’s ceiling, relaxing into a brief pleasant moment free of rank or position or struggle for power. Such moments never lasted long, but one of the good things about taking a regular bed partner was the fact that they came at all.

There was a picture on the ceiling, a changeable electronic flat poster, glowing dimly in the low ambient light. She inferred from its presence that the late manager’s taste for luxury didn’t include sex, or he would have had a mirror there instead—or at least pictures of an inspirational variety, rather than shifting landscape views.

She said so aloud, lazily and already half asleep. Darwin chuckled.

“Maybe he didn’t need them.” When he was relaxed, his dialect slipped downward out of true Clan precision into the looser speech of Tigress’s non-Clan community—a reminder that he was freeborn, the product of random genetic mingling, and not carefully bred from the Clan’s DNA stock and brought to life in the iron wombs. “Or maybe he got turned on by landscapes.”

“It takes all kinds, I suppose.”

She lay there watching the images cycle overhead: waves caught in the moment of crashing onto a sunlit beach; vast rolling fields of tall grain awaiting the harvest; a gray stone castle cupped in a mountain valley.

“I like that picture,” she said. She was growing sleepier now, relaxing against Nicholas Darwin’s side, lulled by the steady rhythm of his heartbeat. “The castle.”

“I read a story about it in a magazine, while we were stuck playing tourist in Fort Barrett. It belongs to the little Countess, the one who rides the Hatchetman ’Mech.”

She yawned. “I want one just like it someday.”

“Take Northwind, and you can have that one.”

“And see if the little Countess has a mirror over her bed.” She smiled at the thought, and still smiling, drifted off to sleep.

14

Fort Barrett

Oilfields Coast

Northwind

December 3133; dry season

It didn’t take long for Will Elliot to settle in to life as a Sergeant. The amount of work was about the same, but now it wasn’t enough simply that he himself not screw up. He had to make certain that ten or more other people didn’t screw up either. Truth to tell, he didn’t find it all that hard. He’d been doing much the same thing with Jock Gordon and Lexa McIntosh ever since basic training.

Will had feared, in fact, that his promotion, and the distance that it would put between him and his two best friends, would result in their inevitable estrangement. His worries, however, proved unnecessary. To their own surprise as much as anyone else’s, Jock and Lexa also made Sergeant shortly after Will’s own elevation in rank.

Lexa in particular had contemplated her new stripes with foreboding. “That proves it,” she said. “Something bad is going to happen.”

“What makes you say that?” asked Jock.

“Because, otherwise, who in their right mind would ever have promoted the likes of us? I’m the bad girl of Barra Station, and you—let’s just say that when your mother was filling out the order form, she didn’t check the box for the extra-brainy option.”

Will frowned at them both. “You made it through Red Ledge Pass, and you made it through the battle on the plains. As far as the new recruits are concerned, you’re old and brave and very, very wise. Don’t disillusion them.”

Within a fortnight, however, the early-morning routine at Fort Barrett was broken by a small VTOL craft setting down on the headquarters pad, and Will began to suspect that Lexa had spoken the truth. The arrival of visitors at headquarters was not in itself ominous; people came and went all the time, even here at the restful end of nowhere. But an hour or so later, a heavy cargo-lift VTOL came over, its tarp-shrouded burden dangling beneath, and landed on the fort’s main pad—which would not have been unusual either, except that the timing was all wrong for any of the regular milk runs from New Lanark. And an off-schedule cargo arrival, especially in conjunction with an important visitor, was bound to mean something special.

How special, Will soon discovered. He was heading past the main pad, on his return from taking the morning muster reports to headquarters and bringing back the daily staff briefing, when he saw that the VTOL’s heavy cargo was now uncovered and mobile: a Koshi BattleMech, with hunched back, bulky arms and forward-thrust cockpit, standing on the pad while its pilot took it through the bends and stretches of what was probably a posttransport checkout routine.

Will paused to watch. It looked from the outside as though the ’Mech was engaging in a stately series of mechanical calisthenics, bending and flexing its metal-and-myomer limbs, testing the balance and stability of its twenty-five-ton bulk. The long flight from New Lanark must have been a strain on both the ’Mech and on the VTOL carrying it; only because the Koshi was one of the lightest ’Mechs would the aircraft have been able to lift with it at all.