Darwin stepped back, turned to his left, and pushed. Greer fell away from him, back pressed against the observation platform’s railing. Greer was a lanky man; the top bar came up no higher than his waist.

“Good-bye,” Darwin said, and spun again, his foot high, smashing out with a side kick to Greer’s chin. The man vanished backward over the rail.

Darwin stooped and picked up the knife from where it had fallen. He looked at it for a moment, then dropped the weapon over the railing into the sea below.

Murchison faded back into the darkness and took the opposite-side stairway back up to his quarters. He didn’t bother undressing and going to bed. Not at all to his surprise, his beeper sounded almost as soon as he had closed the door behind him. He went down to sick bay and—as he had expected—found Nicholas Darwin waiting for him outside the closed door.

“Star Colonel,” he said, “is there a problem?”

“An injury, Bondsman Murchison.”

“Where’s the patient?”

“Here.”

“Come in, then, and let me see to it.”

Murchison opened the door to sick bay and flipped on the lights. With the improved illumination, he saw that Star Colonel Darwin had his right hand squeezing hard on his left biceps. Blood stained his bare fingers, and the sleeve below the gripping hand was dark with blood.

“Take a seat, sir,” Murchison said. “What do you have?”

“A cut.”

Murchison pulled on a pair of examining gloves. “Let’s take a look.”

The Star Colonel took away his hand. Already the blood between his fingers was dark red and clotting. Nothing was spurting out of the wound—that meant no arteries had been cut, which was good.

“Is this your favorite shirt?” Murchison asked, reaching for a pair of trauma shears. A moment later, when the area was exposed, “Let me clean that up for you, sir. It looks like you’ll have to have a few stitches. Is your tetanus immunization up to date?”

“Of course it is. Now hurry up.”

“Yes, sir. Now, if I didn’t know better, I’d say that looked a lot like a knife wound. The Galaxy Commander wants any weapons injuries logged and reported.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Darwin said. “There’s no need to log or report such a minor accident. I’m leaving in the morning on a tour of inspection, and all that paperwork would just make for delay.”

“Yes, sir,” Murchison said again. He pulled a laceration tray from the cabinet and unsealed it on his working table. “Now this is going to hurt a bit…”

The Star Colonel’s dialect had slipped a moment ago, Murchison thought. Darwin’s word choice had veered away from the annoying overprecision that the Clans favored in their speech, and his accent had thickened slightly. He was clearly more upset than he let on; more upset than the wound itself should have merited, given the typical reaction of Murchison’s other Clan patients to similar injuries. Star Captain Greer—the late Star Captain Greer—had hit a nerve in Nicholas Darwin somehow. Several nerves, if the resulting pain had proved bad enough to warrant a trip over the side.

Murchison finished the patch-up job and sent Star Colonel Darwin away to bed. Probably, for a change, to his own—Darwin’s footsteps, instead of continuing in the direction of the Galaxy Commander’s quarters, headed toward the stairs leading back down to the oil rig’s next lower level, where most of the Steel Wolf officers on board had their compartments. Murchison, meanwhile, sat alone in the sick bay for quite a while, thinking.

17

The New Barracks

Tara

Northwind

January 3134; local winter

The city of Tara marked the start of the new year with a grand military review presenting the defense forces of Northwind to the civilian population. Planetary Legate Finnegan Cochrane stood in the reviewing stand as the people’s representative. Paladin Ezekiel Crow and Countess Tara Campbell were, for once, among the participants in the parade rather than the dignitaries watching it: their Blade and Hatchetman ’Mechs, and Captain Tara Bishop’s Pack Hunter, brought up the rear of the parade, coming after the infantry units and the armored cars, the tanks and the artillery, the converted Agricultural and Mining ’Mechs.

The parade had at last made its ponderous way through the streets of the city and back to the New Barracks. Tara and Crow had taken the first opportunity to change out of their ’Mech combat gear and back into working uniform, and had left Captain Bishop behind to handle the final details of parade cleanup—one of advantages of having an aide, Tara reflected, was that you could occasionally shift the boring stuff onto somebody else for a few hours.

She and Crow walked side by side in companionable silence across the open ground between the Armory and the main Barracks complex. After a while the Paladin said, “Please tell me that I won’t have to listen to bagpipes again for a very long time.”

“You mock our great cultural heritage,” said Tara, laughing. “Everybody on Northwind likes the sound of the bagpipes.”

“I don’t. I’m not certain I would even call it music.”

“It’s not music—not just music, anyhow.” She pulled her face into an exaggeratedly serious expression. “According to my old cultural anthropology tutor, the sound of the pipes is ‘an auditory stimulus designed to evoke an altered state of consciousness.’ He meant that it gets the battle fury of our ancestors roaring in our veins.”

“My ancestors, however, have decided that it gives them a headache.”

The back-and-forth joking had taken them up the steps and into the main bachelor officers’ quarters of the Barracks complex. Tara, in her persona as Prefect of Prefecture III, had a suite of rooms there as well; the door opened with a touch of her hand to the lock. She entered the suite, Crow following, and waved the Paladin to a guest chair. Then she went over to the sideboard, which held a heavy crystal decanter etched with the regimental crest and a set of matching tumblers. The decanter was full of a dark amber liquid.

“It’s past noon,” she said, “and I’ve spent the past six hours marching—marching, would you believe it!—in a Hatchetman BattleMech. Care to join me?”

Crow shook his head. “Thank you, but no.”

“That’s right. I forgot. You don’t.” She poured herself a modest one finger of whiskey and stoppered the decanter. Taking the chair across from Crow, she stretched out her legs and contemplated the toes of her boots. Her mood was changing; she was coming down off the post parade and bagpipes high, and crashing hard. “And the people on Northwind would be shocked if they found out I did. Don’t ever let anyone decide that you’re the people’s darling, my lord Paladin. It’s damned wearing.”

“You carry it off well.”

“I’ve been practicing since I was barely old enough to walk.” She sipped at the whiskey. Crow said nothing. She said, “They depend on me, and I worry all the time that it’s not going to be enough.”

“Last summer—”

“Was only the first time. They’re going to keep on coming—if it isn’t Anastasia Damn-her-eyes Kerensky it’s going to be the Swordsworn or the Dragon’s Fury or some other group of heavily armed opportunists.” She took another sip of whiskey. The strong fumes crawled up her nose and clawed at her throat as she drank. “And it doesn’t matter how impressive we look on parade, we don’t have enough men and women under arms to keep on fending them off.”

“If you’re concerned about the size of the Northwind garrison, you could always withdraw the Highlander units from planets such as Small World and Addicks.”

“And leave those planets bare? No.”

He shrugged. “It was a thought. If you’re unwilling to call in the off-world forces, you’ll have to recruit at home.”