Captain Tara Bishop looked down from the cockpit of her Pack Hunter at the man in front of her. He was dressed in a mercenary’s uniform, with a white flag—she thought, upon closer inspection, that it might be somebody’s T-shirt—hanging from a stick he was holding above his head. Two Highland troopers had him at rifle point. They were both standing well back from him, staying out of each other’s lines of fire, as well as keeping out of hers.

“You say you have a message?” she said. “Let’s hear it.”

“One thirty-six dot two,” the man said. Her ’Mech’s external mike picked it up.

“What’s that mean?” she demanded.

She had no patience at the moment for cryptic statements—she was tired and cranky, and the day that had started out badly had not gotten any better as it wore on. The parley with Anastasia Kerensky had been an almost unmitigated disaster—“almost,” because it did succeed in wasting the Steel Wolves’ time, but disastrous all the same. The Countess of Northwind had broken the link in a state of incandescent fury, white to the lips and cursing Anastasia Kerensky in terms that Bishop hadn’t suspected that she knew.

The man shrugged. “I don’t know. I was asked to carry that message to you. That’s all.”

“Take him to the rear,” Bishop ordered. As the Northwind troopers marched him off, she pondered for a moment, then dialled a frequency into her ’Mech-to-’Mech circuit: 136.2.

“Radio check,” she said.

“Hello,” came back a male voice. She’s heard that speaker before, at the mercenary encampment, and on the DropShip Pegasus before that: Jack Farrell.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“How do you feel about cutting the cards?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You against me,” Farrell said. “Your ’Mech to mine.”

“A Jupiter against a Pack Hunter?” Captain Bishop struggled between fear and skepticism. A match like that was straight out of the tales of the old days, when ’Mechs ruled the battlefield and Warriors took and answered challenges that settled the fate of worlds. It was also one-sided to the point of suicide; a Jupiter outmassed a Pack Hunter by seventy tons, and it carried more and heavier long-range weapons. There was no safety for the smaller, lighter ’Mech either in grappling or in standing off and shooting; the Pack Hunter’s only advantages lay in heat efficiency and speed. “Why the hell should I?”

“Because if you win, I’ll let you live.”

“I’m living fine right now.”

“Ah, ah, ah,” Farrell said. “You, and the Countess, and all your troopers. There’s a relief column coming from the west. I can let them through, or cut them off. I can let you out with them—fight another day, you know? Or I can bottle the lot of you up together for Wolf meat.”

Oh, but that was tempting. Even if it meant her death—but she was probably going to die in the city anyway, if the Highlanders stayed pinned between the mercs and the Steel Wolves. This was a chance to buy safety for everyone, and to buy it not with gritty, squalid street fighting against infantry and thin-skinned light armor, but with a death duel against the biggest and most deadly of ’Mechs. Too good, almost, to be true…

“Why should I believe you?” she asked.

“We’ve played cards. My word is my bond.”

“So we have”—and we both cheated, she thought, and we both know it—“and so is mine. Let me talk with the Countess.”

“Don’t take too long. I have a Koshi in my sights right now.”

“Five minutes. Ten at the most.”

“I can shuffle the cards that long,” Farrell said. “Then it’ll be time to cut the deck.”

48

Road out of Tara

Northwind

February 3134; local winter

The Countess of Northwind, Captain Bishop soon discovered, was less than enthusiastic about Jack Farrell’s proposal.

“Right,” the Countess’s voice said, over the encrypted command circuit in the cockpit of Bishop’s ’Mech. “I’m expected to trade your life for… what, exactly?”

“All of Northwind,” Bishop said. Now that she’d made up her own mind, she’d moved from fearful anticipation into a state of calm, if adrenaline-charged, resolve. “And my life isn’t any more valuable to me than the life of the youngest private in the army is to him. Or her. I haven’t checked. At any rate, it’s what we all agreed to when we signed up.”

“If that’s what we all agreed to when we signed up, then I should be the one out there taking on a Jupiter in a light ’Mech, and not you. And you can get back in touch with Farrell and tell him so. If he wants a duel, he can fight my Hatchetman.”

“Sorry, ma’am, but no.” Bishop kept her voice firm. “Only one death wish at a time allowed in this conversation, and I’ve got mine already.”

“Damn it, Captain… do you have any idea how hard it is to break in a new aide-de-camp? And you’re one of the best I’ve ever had.”

“Thank you, ma’am. My old colonel said I’d see plenty of action if I served with you. When this war is finished, you can tell him for me that he was right.”

“I can’t talk you out of this?”

“Afraid not, ma’am.”

Over the circuit, Bishop heard a sigh. “Then make the signal,” the Countess of Northwind said. “You have my permission.”

“Thanks,” said Bishop, and retuned her ’Mech-to-’Mech circuit to the frequency she’d used to contact Jack Farrell. “You have a deal,” she said over the radio.

“My deck,” said Farrell. “My shuffle. My cut.”

“I said you had a deal.”

“Then meet me within sight of the DropPort. Me in my Jupiter, you in your Pack Hunter, if you dare.”

“I’ll be there,” she said, and cut the connection. All that was left now was the chatter on the ’Mech-to-’Mech circuit, as the Countess and the Highlander forces within the city prepared to move out and take to the roads heading west.

“…Head ’em up and move ’em out”… “Leave a line. The sick and wounded”… “Automatic and robotic weapons next to the DropPort; don’t let Kerensky know that we’ve gone…”

The first thing that Captain Bishop noticed was the magnetic anomaly detector indicating a bearing of 045 relative with signal increasing. Something metal, something big, approaching from her right front. The next thing that she noticed was the rhythmic shock-waves, also increasing in strength, of a hundred-ton mass approaching at a strolling pace—if a thirty-kilometer-per-hour rate was a stroll. Her instruments detected the shock waves first, but soon it was as if she could feel them through the hull of her Pack Hunter.

Her back was to the DropPort and the Steel Wolves. Ahead of her lay Jack Farrell’s mercenaries. And sandwiched between them—the Highlanders. As long as Captain Bishop kept on fighting, the Highlanders could keep escaping. The Countess of Northwind had a thin line of sick and injured volunteers, armed with robotic and automatic weapons, creating the illusion of a solid front. Farrell had promised an escape path for the others.

If he wasn’t lying. If he wasn’t carrying out a massive ruse of war, luring all of them to a place where he could disarm or kill the Northwind army.

Nothing for it. She’d made up her mind to meet him here, to fight him here, and… she saw the approaching ’Mech, a looming, ponderous giant. Jack Farrell’s Jupiter. Huge. Heavily armored. She doubted that even her particle projector cannon could hurt it.

Well, maybe not from the front. She was fast. He was slow. If that was going to be her only advantage, she’d have to make the most of it.

She’d been daydreaming too long. The alerts in the ’Mech’s cockpit yelped at her, warning that she’d been locked on by hostile fire control. A moment later, a volley of long-range missiles leapt out toward her. Red lights flashed in the cockpit.