As a Nova Cat, Benjork had learned that the universe is a fickle place. He did not expect material things to reflect what other people call rationality. He knew that karma rules us all whether we be rock and water or flesh and blood. Nova Cats do not weep for what must be.

Benjork Lone Cat knew all of these things—not as a man might know it in his head, but as only a dreamer can know it in the deepest essence of his being.

So now he walked apart from the others who gathered around their fallen comrade, murmuring about how sad it was that the young girl had died, too. Distant from all others who mourned, Benjork opened his cockpit and let the spurious dampness that some might mistake for tears flow from his eyes and be swallowed down by the thirsty red dirt of Alkalurops.

When the dampness was gone, the Lone Cat lifted his right arm to the universe. He shook it, his threat to the very stars. “Know you who watch, you who send dreams. I will stand with Grace and all her kin. This land beneath my feet is my land, the land of my dream. And neither hell nor demons may take it while I breathe.”

15

Kilkenny, Alkalurops

Prefecture IX, The Republic of the Sphere

28 August 3134; local summer

Damn near getting killed while leading a losing fight had to be the worst day of Grace O’Malley’s life. Or so she’d thought. Now she knew she’d thought wrong. Leading a losing battle while safely in the rear, chained to maps, was a whole lot worse.

Worse still, it left her time to think she just might be winning.

Grace looked out over Kilkenny from the Congregational Church steeple. For a moment she let the wind blow in her face and blow the cobwebs from her brain. She didn’t feel any better.

The plan seemed to be working. Hanson was leading his hard-charging mercs right down her throat. In the Gleann Mor Valley, people shot and fell back. Chato said the ground around Falkirk was ready for the coming fight.

But did the fight have to be there?

Day after day refugees streamed past Grace. Did she want her friends in Falkirk reduced to that? She eyed a pile of reports held down against the wind by a thirty-millimeter shell. They said the mercs were paying for every klick they advanced. Tanks lost treads to mines. Hovertank fans were bent. Infantry used up their fantastic armor, which deflected sniper shots from their hearts, and now advanced much more cautiously. BattleMechs were a whole lot more careful where they put their feet. It didn’t take long to fix a busted footpad, but every bent foot meant another ’Mech awaiting repair rather than charging forward.

Grace rested her eyes on the west and its just visible hills. Ben was out there, racing for Kilkenny with someone he said she had to talk to. Someone Betsy and Hanson would really want to talk to. Grace was new to this fighting thing. But new as she was, she knew that you planned the fight and fought the plan. Being a miner, she knew plenty of folks who’d paid dearly for not following their plans.

Despite it all, Grace slowly walked around her map. Done, she called Victoria to climb the steeple stairs and go over the map with her. Grace had a new plan to talk through.

L. J. scowled at the map in front of him. With the Net down and his client unwilling to bring it up for a “minor” thing like the decisive battle for Gleann Mor Valley and maybe this whole stinking planet, L. J. was reduced to pushing pieces of paper around a paper map and hoping the real fighting men and machines were somewhere near where his map table showed them to be.

Once upon a time, say three hundred years back, this planet had a Global Positioning System. But the satellites had worn out, and no one had replaced them. So now Roughriders had to read geodetic ground markers to find out where they were, and report their location over the radio. Even his artillery was reduced to line of sight unless he wanted to waste what little ammo he had. God! And I’ve wanted to command a battalion since I was a kid!

L. J. worried his lower lip as he studied his western flank. He’d finally ordered the platoon guarding his left to advance and make contact with the missing Black and Reds. They’d found them… or what was left of them.

The good news was that the opposition was running. They’d left anything they couldn’t grab, even some of their dead. The bad news was what he’d learned from the damaged ’Mechs left behind. Their armor was good. Their SRMs, from the damage done, were very good. L. J. rubbed his chin. Why had they taken off? He’d only sent a platoon. They could have smashed it. But when the platoon happened on the ambush, the enemy was long gone, not even dust on the horizon of this usually dusty planet.

No, Grace’s troops had found something they considered important enough to make them abandon their own dead. L. J. shook his head. Whoever had taken out the Black and Reds could have charged straight for Allabad. Threaten Allabad, and Santorini would have been screaming for the Roughriders to protect his delicate hide.

L. J. flipped through the file he had of the mercs Grace had signed up. Woman, woman, woman… Hold it. He’d seen that woman before. That was Betty Rose, the maid he’d tried to hire! Betsy Ross, huh? Wonder what her real name is. He glanced down the file on her. Too damn short. He didn’t need Intelligence to tell him this was a false résumé.

He shuffled the file again. Boy: tank driver… No tanks so far. “What have we here?” he said. “Benjork Lone Cat. Bet you’d enjoy taking Field Marshal Fetterman’s thugs down.” L. J. froze. He checked the platoon’s report. Yep, there it was. The big, hulking Atlas was missing. “Not something I want to meet, not with just my little Koshi.” But if they captured the Field Marshal, they captured the Atlas.

Damn; what I’d give for some decent pictures of my left flank. L. J. shook his head. Fighting with no bandwidth was like fighting in one of those ancient wars with the first tanks or knights on horses. “I don’t know shit,” he whispered.

The satellite had just made a pass over the valley. The Chief and the Network Services team had cobbled together a way to take very low-resolution pictures off the overhead coverage. He studied what he had. A major enemy force moving fast up the west road. That road led straight to Falkirk. It also met with a side road that could take you to Kilkenny. That town had a fertilizer plant turning out rockets. If he kept the pressure up, he could be there by late tomorrow. The valley narrowed there. He’d strung his forces across two thirds of the valley for most of the push from Amarillo. Kilkenny looked like a place to concentrate. “Mallary, do you have a moment?” he called.

“Be there in a minute,” she said, then arrived sooner. “Casualty reports, sir.”

“Bad?”

“No. Not if we had the spare parts to fix what’s broken.”

“Deaths?” L. J. asked, suspecting he knew the answer.

“Not a one again today, sir. Two more ’Mechs lost their footpads. Two more tanks are hung up waiting for spare treads. We’ve got three types of tracks on our rigs, sir, and six types of fans. We’ve grounded one of each and are parting them out to keep the others running.”

“But no deaths. Grace has managed to inflict, what, twenty percent casualties and still not kill anyone?”

Mallary provided the exact level of his reduced strength. “Twenty-three percent, sir.”

“She’s trimming us, but not making anyone mad.”

“Maybe the civilian doesn’t have a taste for the jugular.”

L. J. shook his head. “No, I’ve fought that woman. She’d have gladly killed me when I was chasing her up that hill. And she has to have people who’ve lost loved ones to the damn B and Rs.”