By Temptations and by War Read online

  It was meant to impress, and it did. How many such caches did Daoshen have at his disposal? Bannson was never told.

  He was treated cordially, and shown more entertainments. Eventually, the Maskirovka came with his papers for leaving Sian. Bannson was left to guess that he’d asked for more than Chancellor Liao was willing to pay. Or that plans had fallen through some other way.

  It wasn’t until he was back within Republic space that he remembered Daoshen’s last words, and how they might be read in a completely different—and threatening—manner.

  Why had Daoshen allowed him to leave Sian? The more he considered it, the more certain he became that Daoshen Liao had planned the CEO’s death before ever inviting him to the Confederation capital. Yet something stayed his hand. That glimpse behind Bannson’s public face?

  Maybe.

  “So what’s he offering?” Ivan asked. Big, yes. Ferocious, certainly. But the man was not stupid. Bannson did not tolerate ignorance, especially in those closest to him.

  “He’s offering the world,” Bannson said cryptically, and meaning it quite literally. But which? There were perhaps a dozen worlds within one jump of Capellan space. Where would Daoshen strike first? Where would he eventually install Bannson as one of his nobles?

  Bannson felt confident in his own long game. Sooner or later, the businessman gathered in what he felt owed. But if Daoshen was extending his hand a second time, could Bannson afford to turn his back on the erratic leader? Liao was coming, make no mistake. Wasn’t it good policy to keep his options open?

  “I have a better question,” Jones finally said. Her rough-edged voice shattered Bannson’s train of thought. She tossed off the last of her drink. “Why do we care?”

  Bannson wasn’t ready to share his reasons with anyone else. “Perhaps it is a case of accepting the inevitable,” he offered his agent. Sometimes that led to the most profitable business arrangements. And in the meantime, he still had assets in play, didn’t he?

  5

  Dark Descent

  Marion, attached are field reports from Algot, Foot Fall, and Wei. As you will see, Menkar was only the first of several worlds to experience severe pro-Capellan uprisings. While the timing and focus of these events suggests an outside coordinating influence, nothing is proven as of yet.

  —Report by Prefect (V) Shun Tao to Lord Governor Hidic, 14 May 3134 (leaked to press by confidential sources on 20 May 3134)

  DropShip Burning Petals

  Above Liao

  Prefecture V, The Republic

  20 May 3134

  The DropShip corridor was narrow, dusty warm and dimly lit—a seldom used translateral passage squeezed in as an afterthought between officers’ country and a power relay station. A short jump down half a flight of steep metal steps, remember to duck under the ventilation ductwork, and through an airlock quality hatch that opened onto the DropShip’s lower weather deck. A shortcut, if you knew your way around a converted Seeker-class vessel.

  Major Ritter Michaelson, late of The Republic’s vaunted Tenth Hastati Sentinels, would know.

  Michaelson wore dress blacks with enough salad on his left breast to back up his claim as one of The Republic’s elite soldiers. He pulled his service cap low so that the bill partially hid his contact-tinted eyes. Michaelson didn’t want to speak with anyone—he should have remained in his cabin. But the opportunity, forever his failing, was too great.

  The weather deck, a holdover term from when naval vessels had sailed Terran oceans, was one of the Seeker’s three observation platforms. It opened onto ten meters of the curved outside hull where armor had been replaced with thick ferroglass. Ten centimeters separated Michaelson from the oblivion of space. With no atmosphere to fog his vision, the stars stood out in sharp, cruel splendor. He had the deck to himself because the ship was so close to planetfall. That was the way he wanted to come home, back to the word of Liao. Alone and repentant.

  He got half of his wish.

  The DropShip had started a port-side roll when a crewmember making his rounds slid down a vertical ladder with hands and feet clasped expertly to the outside rail. “Sir,” he said, spying Ritter Michaelson. Then, “Major. The Cap’n has sounded our atmospheric alarm. All passengers—”

  He turned, letting the spacer see the ruined side of his face. Always a showstopper. “Should be webbed into their beds for landing,” Michaelson finished. He read the other man’s rank and name off his shipboard dungarees. “Petty Officer Samuels. I know. But I needed to see.”

  Michaelson turned back to the ferroglass wall. Only four decks above the DropShip’s massive engines, he felt their deep, powerful thrum seeping up from the deckplates and warming the bottoms of his feet. He watched, waiting to see what the enlisted man would do, waiting for . . .

  Liao.

  The world rolled in from the left-hand side of the massive window, blotting out the stars like some great, shadowed curtain. Burning Petals fell into the darkside, though a dark green crescent brightened the rim of the planet where tinted sunlight bent just enough to reach around. Reflected light off of Elias’ Promise, the planet’s moon, allowed him to barely register the outlines of Nánlù and Beilù, the southern and northern continents, though right now they appeared more eastern and western given the DropShip’s equatorial approach angle.

  “How long away?” the crewman asked, over his initial shock.

  How long had it been since he’d set foot on his homeworld? In which life? “Several years.”

  “They say Liao is one of the worlds—m’be a dozen or so—that if you know their history, you know most of the important events of the entire Inner Sphere.”

  Viewed from a spacer’s eye, each world a small point of light lost among thousands, that was probably true. Liao had spawned one of the five ruling dynasties of its day. When the planet was lost to the Federated Suns in the Fourth Succession War, Chancellor Sun-Tzu sent all eight of his fanatical Warrior Houses to reclaim it twenty-five years later. The “immortal” Sun-Tzu then invested a great deal in the industrial renovation of his dynasty’s birthworld, and Liao was eventually named the capital of a reconstituted Commonality.

  Which very nearly became its death when the Word of Blake attacked.

  Intent on smashing all industrial and political infrastructure, the Jihad swept across Liao like a winter storm. This was one of the truly heroic stands of that entire war as the Capellan military and the people themselves stood up to the invaders at incredible cost. In ten long years, Liao never fell.

  No wonder Devlin Stone honored this world by choosing it as a prefecture capital.

  “If only its history ended there.”

  “Excuse me, Major?”

  Ritter Michaelson straightened with a start. “Never mind. I was just thinking back—”

  “To Terra?” The crewman had apparently waited for this chance. His gaze fell on the red patch Michaelson wore on his shoulder, identifying him as a MechWarrior. “I’m sorry, sir. But . . . well . . . the entire crew’s been talking about it. And you. I mean, you were on Terra when the Steel Wolves came, and the Black Paladin turned, weren’t you?”

  Black Paladin. That was a new one. How many more titles would come to Ezekiel Crow as word of his treachery spread throughout The Republic? No cover-ups, no citing of security concerns, were going to hold back this story. Michaelson rubbed one hand along the right side of his face, over the glassy scars that shortened his ear and crept right up to his goatee and the puckered edge of his eyebrow. At least they were out from under the bandages now.

  “I was there,” the major admitted.

  Hard to deny it, since his travel papers stated very clearly that he was lately put on deactivated leave from the Tenth Hastati. They had held the ground nearest to Paris, fighting alongside the Northwind Highlanders. But Michaelson had not been a part of that battle. His trial had come earlier.

  “Did you see Tara Campbell in action?” the crewman asked.

  Michaelson dropped his hand back t
o his side. “I most certainly did. Hero of the hour. Do not pass Knight, go directly to Paladin.”

  “You didn’t hear? The countess turned ’em down. Flat. She took her Highlanders and left. Man, that woman has some brass ones. I mean . . . well, you know what I mean?”

  “I know.”

  No doubt Petty Officer Samuels had other questions too—everyone did. Ritter Michaelson’s new life would make certain that he relived the event over and over again. He was spared for the moment, though, when Samuels showed the preternatural senses of those born to space travel and said, “We’re turning. Hands on the rail please, Major.”

  Michaelson didn’t notice for several seconds longer, then the planet began to sink in the window as Burning Petals rotated its drive flare toward Liao’s surface. Not even aerodyne DropShips truly flew out of orbit. Like the spheroid Seeker- class, they decelerated and fell. The first tremor of atmospheric turbulence shook the massive vessel, and Michaelson grasped the slender metal rail that ran along the inside of the ferroglass. Gravity shifted under unsteady feet for a moment as the DropShip’s orientation lagged slightly behind, but soon they were stable once more as the vessel became a slow-falling star in Liao’s night sky.

  “We’ll be coming in o’er Beilù, heading for the interplanetary spaceport at Lianyungang. Thirty minutes,” the crewman guessed, “and we’ll be on the ground.”

  Where he would restart his life? Ritter Michaelson: the Deutsch translation for knight. How long would he be able to live under that name? He gripped the rail tighter, finding it a bit harder to breathe. The deckplates hummed with power. Then his legs buckled as he slumped to the floor, knees striking the deck hard enough to bruise, and his vision clouded.

  For a brief second, he wondered if his history had finally caught up with him, dragging him down into darkness.

  “We’re boosting back for high orbit,” the crewman said, also kneeling on the deck as his body fought to readjust to the increased gravity.

  Michaelson struggled back to his feet, using the rail to leverage himself up. Liao did not want him back—was his first thought. Then, facing out through the ferroglass shield, he caught a streak of fire flashing past the vessel only a few thousand meters out. Another one slashed up from beneath his line of sight, and this time matched the DropShip’s roll for just a second before it pulled over and cut around the far side again.

  Aerospace fighters!

  Under attack? He felt no tremor of weapons fire, heard no call to general quarters. An escort. Burning Petals was boosting back into a holding orbit, and had been given a safety escort of at least two fighters.

  Something was going on below.

  “I have to see what this is,” Samuels said, walking bowlegged for the nearest hatch. He paused, looked back. “I wanted to ask you, well, a lot of things, I guess.”

  Michaelson nodded.

  “Did you. . . ?” Petty Officer Samuels couldn’t seem to find the perfect question. His blue eyes snagged again on the glossy ruin, winced. “Did you see a lot of hard fighting on Terra?” That was obviously the best he could do.

  “Some of the hardest of my life,” he said, and meant it.

  It was enough, and the crewman bolted down the same shortcut passage that Michaelson had used to find the weather deck. Michaelson—Michael’s son—almost smiled. It felt good not to lie, even if it was through careful interpretation. It had been some of the hardest fighting in his life. Complete with the realization that he had again betrayed everything he held close.

  That was why Ezekiel Crow had to die and it was Ritter Michaelson making planetfall over Liao, looking for a new start. For good or ill, the Black Paladin had come home.

  6

  Joy Ride

  Encouraged by Ijori Dè Guāng terrorists to try their own hand at a public message, a large group of pro-Capellan residents used rope scaffolds to scale the Lord Governor’s Executive Office Building in Chang-an and paint “Wŏ mén huì shì zì yóu dè!” across the dome. Translation: We will be free! Twelve arrests were made.

  —News clipping from the Dynasty Daily, 11 May 3134

  Lianyungang Spaceport

  Qinghai Province, Liao

  20 May 3134

  A siren wailed out long, mournful notes that echoed across the Lianyungang Spaceport’s wide expanse of ferrocrete and steel. Two merchant DropShips squatted on the tarmac, twenty-five stories tall, like improbable skyscrapers raised out of the flat, flat landing fields. From nearby towers, spotlights searched from the sides of the DropShips. From pairs of armored hovercraft that ran the spaceport’s perimeter fencing like Dobermans in a dog run.

  Evan Kurst stood at the corner of a small hangar, keeping to the shadows as he checked the northern approach. Two hundred meters away a secure customs warehouse blazed with light and security personnel. Beyond that Evan saw the fiery orange glow of the burning repair depot his people had charged with aviation fuel. Caustic fumes hung on the evening air, stinging the back of his throat. As near as he could tell, emergency vehicles and military efforts still centered on the arson.

  That wouldn’t last much longer.

  Jogging back to the side door his people had forced without any alarm, Evan rapped twice, once, once—then slipped inside and froze as the security guard’s light slapped him square in the eyes.

  “Zāo gāo, William.” Evan fought against raising his arm too quickly to shield his vision. “It’s me.”

  William Hartsfield clicked off the heavy flash, but did not hook it back to his belt. The weight sat comfortably in his hand and would make a good bludgeon. Evan didn’t worry for his safety. The man was simply nervous, and nervous men needed to feel prepared.

  “How does it look?” the security man asked.

  “It looks like the militia will be contracting more civilian work,” Evan said shortly, dismissing the arson with a shrug.

  The repair depot was actually a matter of convenience for the Liao garrison, servicing any vehicles stationed at the spaceport. But it made for a nice diversion, and fire always hit the planetary news.

  “Going to be a good haul,” the guard said.

  Evan nodded. Four military hoverbikes commanded the center of the hangar, each parked inside a yellow box painted onto the floor. Beyond the bikes, red-tinted flashes dimly lit the interiors of two VV1 Rangers and circled around the metal cages of battlesuit berths. Feet shuffled over the smooth ferrocrete, and someone kicked a loose bar of metal they had cut from one cage. It clattered noisily over the floor. There had been no way to arrange a hijacking of the larger vehicles, so they’d be sabotaged and left behind.

  “Time?” a voice called from inside one Ranger.

  Evan checked his watch. “Plus six and time to put up or shut up, Greggor.” The large man was no deft hand at sabotage. He was simply holding the light for an Ijori Dè Guāng member who was. “If they can’t black box those vehicles, burn the ignition now and let’s move.”

  Whit Greggor climbed out of the vehicle. “They’re closing up the panels now. Next time someone cranks one of these over, they’ll burn out every last circuit as well as the entire starter system.” He sounded like a kid at Christmas—a big kid, ready to blackjack the fat man and take the bag for himself.

  It would have been easier to simply burn the Rangers now, but this way the sabotage might not be discovered for days. That meant another news cycle this week with mention of the Ijori Dè Guāng. People had to know that the resistance continued. They needed constant reminders.

  Other cell members exited the two Rangers wearing watch caps and nylon face masks. William already knew Evan and Greggor, and the team Evan had assembled for this night’s work, but many of them did not know each other and Evan kept it that way. What a man does not know, he cannot betray.

  So close to the end, William fidgeted from one foot to another. “They’ll be expecting me to check in soon, Kurst. We’ve got to wrap this up.”

  Evan traded warm clasps with the security guard, steering him aroun
d as Greggor padded up silently behind. “We cannot talk again, William. You know that.” The man would fall under some suspicion no matter how Evan arranged this. William’s pro-Capellan politics were well documented.

  “Yeah. I think this would be a good time to go visit relatives on Styk. You know, as part of my crisis therapy.” He smiled weakly. “Not in the face, okay? And, ah, nothing broken, if you can help it.”

  Evan braced the man, clapping a gloved hand to each shoulder. “I promised we’d take good care of you,” he said, then released him as Greggor brought a small device up toward the back of his neck.

  A flash of blue sparks and a singing zzzap, and it was all over. William Hartsfield collapsed like a gyro-struck BattleMech, his legs and arms twitching with uncontrollable spasms. The scent of ozone and scorched hair burned in the air. Evan forced himself to watch as Greggor knelt down to deliver another charge from the pocket stunner.

  “We should kill him,” the large man said, standing. “You know this.”

  Two sides warred in Evan’s heart. To maintain perfect security, a loose end like William should be silenced. Mai Wa would not have hesitated, not with the safety of the movement at risk. But in the last year Evan had grown into his own, and he still remembered with perfect clarity the military policeman, laid out on the ground and bleeding from multiple wounds in the chest and neck . . . the stench of shredded plastic . . .

  . . . the weight of a needler pistol in his hand.

  William Hartsfield was a patriot. Like so many of Evan’s resources, he’d come recommended through the Cult of Liao. He had also applied for academy training and failed to place, very likely because of his parents’ pro-Capellan leanings. The Republic claimed it did not discriminate, but of course it did. Everybody did, toward one side or the other. Evan could still end up the same way: trained as a MechWarrior and then shuffled aside at the last moment in favor of a die-hard citizen. It could be him lying on the ground some day.