He found himself hoping that promotion would come their way as well, to ease the unwanted estrangement, but could not help feeling dubious. Jock Gordon was steady as granite, but not a particularly fast or imaginative thinker; Lexa McIntosh was fast and imaginative, all right—and a crack shot with any weapon that needed aiming—but she hadn’t completely lost the wild streak that had landed her in the Regiment to start with.

Will drew back from that line of thought with an inward sigh. He wasn’t accustomed to thinking of his friends in that manner—it had been somebody else’s job to do so until now. Feeling vaguely guilty, he scooped up a handful of the jellyfish skins and crunched them down. They tasted surprisingly good.

“I give up,” he told Lexa. “You were right.”

“Of course I’m right. Your turn, Jock—you try them.”

Jock shook his head doubtfully. He was never an eager candidate for new experiences. “I don’t know…”

“Do you want everyone to think that you’re a tourist?” Lexa demanded.

“I am a tourist.”

“You’re not a tourist,” Will told him. “You’re a soldier stationed here, which is a different thing altogether.” Will looked about the bar, scanning the handful of patrons, and found what he was looking for. “That is a tourist.”

Jock and Lexa glanced in the direction he’d indicated. A young man sat alone at a table drinking beer, dressed for hiking with a backpack propped against the wall beside him. He hadn’t come to the Riggers’ Rest alone; another backpack and a walking stick stood next to his.

“How do you know he’s a tourist?” Lexa asked.

Jock nodded agreement. “Lots of people hike.”

“He’s a tourist,” Will said definitely. “I used to work with them; I can tell.” He continued, warming to his topic. “That guy isn’t from anywhere around here.”

“Want to bet on it?” asked Lexa.

“Sure.” Will wasn’t a gambler; but this wasn’t a gamble, any more than betting that snow would close Breakbone Pass sometime during the winter. “Five stones says he isn’t from Kearney at all.”

Lexa said, “We’ll take it.”

“Where are we going to get the answer?” Jock asked.

“From him.” Will looked at Lexa. “Do you want to ask him, or shall I?”

“Better be you,” Lexa said. “He had a girl with him earlier, and she’ll be coming back any minute.”

“You sure?”

“You know what you know and I know what I know. He doesn’t look like a guy who’s just been dumped and abandoned.”

Will got up and went to the other table. He thought about the problem briefly on his way over, and decided that the direct approach was the best. There was no point in concocting an elaborate excuse when a simple request for information would work just as well.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said politely to the young man, “but I wonder if you’d mind helping my friends and me settle an argument.”

The man looked doubtful, but also curious. “An argument?”

“Well, actually,” Will said sheepishly, “we have a bet going.”

The man glanced from Will over to Jock and Lexa. “A bet, you say?”

“Aye.”

“And how am I supposed to be able to help you with it?”

“Tell us where you’re from, and if I’ve guessed the right answer I win five stones from each of them.”

The man looked amused. “I have heard stupider bets in my time, and made a few. Here—I will write it on the napkin, so they will not say you cheated.”

He scrawled something on the napkin with a pen from his shirt pocket. Will took the napkin without looking at it.

“Thanks,” he said.

He returned to his friends and handed the napkin to Lexa. “Well? What does it say?”

“I’m impressed—” she began.

“It says he’s impressed?”

“No, you jumped-up rock climber, it says he’s from Thorin.”

“The planet?” Jock said.

Lexa nodded. “Unless there’s a town with the same name somewhere in Prefecture X, which he also says he’s from. Looks like we pay up, Jocko.”

Will took their money and put it away, frowning distractedly as he did so. Lexa raised an eyebrow at him.

“Something wrong?”

“Thorin’s a long way from here.”

“Like you said, he’s a tourist.”

“I know,” Will said. “I met a few tourists from Thorin, back when I was working as a mountain guide. He doesn’t sound like he’s from Thorin.”

“Maybe he was born somewhere else,” Jock said. “People move around, you know.”

Will thought of his mother, looking more and more like she would be settling permanently with his sister in Kildare, while the house in Liddisdale turned into rubble from lying untended. “I know. It’s just—”

“Hey,” said Lexa. “Told you his girl would come back.”

The woman who came down from the upper part of the inn and joined the man from Thorin was also, by her dress, a tourist. But the man’s expression as she joined him prompted Will to give her a second look, and to see that the dull brown hair in its practical style framed a striking, strong-boned face, and that the hiking shorts and loose shirt failed dismally to hide an equally striking body.

“Quit drooling, Will,” Lexa told him. “She’s taken.”

“It’s not that.”

“What is it then, if it isn’t that?”

Will shook his head. “It’s …something. I don’t know. Probably nothing.”

He put the nagging uncertainty aside, and applied himself to his dinner. It was not until several hours later, back in his bunk at the fort, that the question and its answer came to him in a flash of memory, overlaying the face he’d seen at the Riggers’ Rest with another face, one that he’d seen over and over again in the tri-vid news during the aftermath of last summer’s war.

The leader of the Steel Wolves.

Anastasia Kerensky.

9

Balfour-Douglas Petrochemicals Offshore Drilling Station #47

Oilfields Coast

Northwind

November 3133; dry season

The motor whaleboat belonging to Balfour-Douglas #47 cut through the waves with Nicholas Darwin at the tiller, bearing Galaxy Commander Anastasia Kerensky home from the Oilfields Coast. Anastasia was not certain why the 26-foot open craft should have been called a whaleboat, since to the best of her knowledge Northwind had no indigenous aquatic mammals, and even on Terra itself nobody had hunted whales for centuries. She’d asked Ian Murchison about the name, thinking that as a former member of the oil rig’s crew he might know the reason, but the Bondsman had only shrugged and said, “It’s a sailor thing.”

“There are no sails on this—whaleboat—either,” she had said.

“Don’t ask me, Galaxy Commander. I’m just the medic.”

Anastasia would be happier, she thought, when the Steel Wolves were back on land. Land, air, or space—those, she knew, and land especially, where the BattleMechs ruled. She wanted to be striding across open ground in her custom-modified Ryoken II, dealing out carnage and destruction. All this bouncing around on choppy ocean water in a small open boat was not to her taste, even if it had been necessary in order to rendezvous with Jacob Bannson’s envoy.

“I do not like it.” She had been silent for some time; now she began talking again, in an attempt to distract herself from the up-and-down movement of the motor whaleboat. It was a long boat ride out to the oil rig, and #47 was not yet visible on the western horizon.

Nicholas Darwin, damn him, was not affected by the whaleboat’s motion. He even knew how to steer the thing, which caused Anastasia to wonder what he had done with himself on Tigress before throwing his lot in with the Steel Wolves. He was a half-breed, freeborn to a local woman; he had come to Clan Wolf out of choice. Now he glanced at Anastasia sidelong and said, “Do not like what?”

“Bannson,” she said. “Offering me gifts out of the blue.”