“That’s right, Sergeant McIntosh,” said Will.

To the boy, he said, “We need to know if they’ve come back, so that we can kick them again.” He took out the sheet of paper with the artist’s photorealization of Anastasia Kerensky’s current appearance, unfolded it, and showed it to the boy. “One of the people we’re hunting for looks like this—have you seen her anywhere?”

The boy shook his head.

“You may not have seen her at all, just her vehicle.”

The boy shook his head again. “Nobody’s come this way except you guys.” He paused, and his brow wrinkled. Will could almost hear him thinking. “Does an aircraft count as a vehicle? Because I’ve seen one of those a couple of times.”

Will put aside his can of soup and stood up. “I think the General wants to talk with you.”

“I don’t know—maybe I’d better—”

Lexa snaked out an arm and grabbed the boy before he could run. “Oh, no you don’t.”

“Hey!”

“Don’t worry,” Jock said. “She isn’t going to hurt you.”

“He’s right,” said Will. “Let him go, Lexa.”

Will turned back to the boy. “Nobody’s angry with you, and General Griffin is a nice man.” Moved by inspiration, he added, “He pilots the Koshi.”

The boy’s eyes went to the BattleMech, looming nine meters tall at the center of the task force’s small encampment. “Can I see it if I go with you and talk to him?”

“It’ll be hard to miss it. Come along.”

The boy followed Will over to where General Griffin, his aide Lieutenant Jones, and the company commanders were eating their own cans of self-heating soup conveniently next to the foot of the Koshi. Saluting, Will said, “General Griffin, sir. This young man says he’s seen aircraft.”

Griffin got an eager gleam in his eye distinctly at odds with his spit-and-polish soldierly appearance. “How many?”

The boy swallowed nervously and said, “Only one, both times.”

Griffin said to his aide, “Jones… your data pad.” He took the pad, then tapped and wrote on it with the attached stylus until he had called up pictures of several different aircraft. Will recognized all of them as known Steel Wolf configurations.

“Did they look like any of these?” Griffin asked the boy.

“It’s hard to tell. They were a long way off.” He pointed. “But I think it was that one.”

Griffin, half to himself and half to the boy, said, “Excellent. Now we know we’re on the right track. If there’s anything you’d like—”

The boy’s eyes grew very bright. “Can I see inside your BattleMech?”

The General suppressed a smile. “I think we can manage that.”

25

Benderville

Oilfields Coast

Northwind

February 3134; dry season

The recon force set out the next morning from Benderville. The encampment began stirring into motion a couple of hours before the usual time, while the sky was dark, with only a pearly glow of coming sunrise along the inland horizon. As Sergeants, Will, Jock, and Lexa were all awake in the early-early. They stood by the supply truck drinking flash-heated tea—strong and sweet with sugar and condensed milk—from their mess cups prior to waking the rest of the infantry.

“Responsibility,” said Lexa, yawning widely, “is a bitch. Last to bed and first awake and behaving myself all the time to set a good example… why did I let you talk me into letting them promote me like this?”

“Because you trust me to have your best interests at heart?”

“Lemme think about it.” She paused for a moment, then shook her head. “Nah. Can’t be.”

Jock said, “It was the uniform—you couldn’t resist him in it. I could see you looking at him and drooling.”

“Go on. As if I’d take a chance on losing a perfectly good buddy that way.” She finished the last of her tea. “Must have done it out of the kindness of my heart. Somebody has to teach the new kids which end of the laser rifle the pretty red light comes out of.”

“That’d be you, all right,” said Will. He looked at his watch. “Time to wake the children up for breakfast.”

He and his fellow Sergeants began moving among the soldiers huddled in their sleeping bags. “Wakey wakey,” he chanted as he passed from one drowsing bundle to the next. “We’re burning daylight.”

The harangue was a familiar one from his days in Basic Training, though he’d never expected to find himself on the delivering end of it. Jock’s voice, coming from further off, provided a rumbling echo, punctuated by Lexa’s cheerfully obscene exhortations from over on the other side of the camp: “…and pull on your socks! Save it for Fort Barrett, boys, we’ve got work to do.”

After a hurried breakfast of hot tea and cold rations, the task force began to move out. The Balac Strike VTOLs went first, rising from the ground in swirls of dust to head out in the day’s search pattern, one VTOL covering inland, and one the seaward sector. As they climbed they dwindled to bright dots against the pink sky of dawn, catching the light of the rising sun like a pair of fast-moving morning stars.

The aircraft would be ranging ahead of the column, on the track suggested by last night’s encounter. Will hoped that the boy had given a fair representation of the truth. He hadn’t acted like a liar, but even the most truthful of youngsters wasn’t above shading or coloring a tale, sometimes not even on purpose.

The noise of the lifting VTOLs faded, and was replaced with the sound of other engines stirring to life: the troop trucks, the scout cars, the Joust tank, the General’s Koshi. Will saw the last of his squad onto their Shandra scouting vehicles, then mounted up himself.

The graded dirt road south of Benderville dwindled in short order to a rutted track, the sandy ground to either side held in place—barely—by sparse brown grass. A hot wind blew out of the coastal interior. Sand came with it, stinging against bare skin, drifting into the folds of cloth and bends of flesh, sifting down into the cracks of instruments and machinery. As the day wore on, the constant sand and grit would be worsened by the passage of the task force’s vehicles, and by the heavy footsteps of the Koshi. Will thought longingly of the hot showers in Fort Barrett; he knew that by evening he would be grateful for the chance to sluice himself off with a bucket of lukewarm water.

“Another lovely day at the seashore,” he said to the squad corporal, over the rumble of the Shandras’ engines. “Just remember, there’s daft folk in the big city who’ll pay good money for an experience like this.”

26

The New Barracks; Tyson and Vanvey ’Mech Factory

Tara

Northwind

February 3134; local winter

Ezekiel Crow woke up scared.

He had returned to his own quarters, at the close of the previous evening’s interlude with Tara Campbell, in a state of such near-euphoria that he had been hard-put not to show it. It would not have done at all for a Paladin of the Sphere to have been caught laughing aloud in delight as he walked through the halls of the visiting officers’ quarters. The same elevated mood had carried him off into a sleep filled with pleasant dreams.

The next morning, however, brought with it an emotion close enough to terror to leave him shaking. He had not realized the extent of his self-imposed isolation until part of it went away. It was as if he had been living behind walls of thick glass that muted everything outside. Now a window had opened, letting in a world of sight and sound and smell more intense than he had ever believed existed.

Distracted and thoughtful, he made himself tea in the kitchen nook, standing barefoot in his black pajamas and measuring out the tea leaves with careful hands. When the water sang in the kettle, he poured it over the leaves in the pot and waited, brooding, while they steeped.