Assumption of risk

  Kai shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "This goes back to the time I spent on Alyina. I managed to avoid capture by the Clans, and when ComStar decided to take control of the world, I worked with some of the Clansmen to stop them."

  Larry leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. "Let me give you some perspective. I'd been captured and was in a firebase that had been converted into a prison camp. ComStar administered it. They treated us pretty rough and they had bounty hunters out looking for folks like Kai. After Kai escaped from them once, they wanted him bad. He brought a dead man into TZ—our camp was called Tango Zephyr—and claimed the reward for himself. That brought the Elementals down on him. He killed one in unarmed combat, which only made the other Elementals even more angry with him."

  Kai raised an eyebrow. "I think that's all beside the point, Larry."

  Galen shivered. "I've seen Elementals close up. They're huge, like monsters, and that's even before they put on their armor."

  "Hey, the normal ones are nothing compared to Taman Malthus. He had a Bloodname and was out for Kai." Larry looked sheepishly over at Kai. "Sorry, boss, but it's the truth, and you know it."

  Kai sighed. "Well, anyway, Malthus and I made a deal that included freeing all the POWs. He and I traveled to Tango Zephyr to liberate the camp. Malthus told the men there that he'd fought against me and had no desire to have me as a foe anymore. Instead he preferred I be his ally."

  Katrina smiled at Larry Acuff. "I think you're right. The story needed the perspective." She arched an eyebrow at Kai. "My brother has told me none of this."

  The Champion of Solaris frowned. "That's because he doesn't know any of it. He has too many things to take up his time. I don't like talking about the time on Alyina because I don't want to sound like a hero for what I did. It wasn't anything that Larry or any of the others wouldn't have done if given the chance. If I were a real hero I'd have found a way to get guys out of Tango Zephyr."

  "You did, boss."

  "I should have done it sooner." Kai held his hands up. "However, all of this is really beside the point. Malthus said he liked being my ally and I have the greatest respect for him. He was one hell of a commander, and winning a Bloodname among the Clans, well, that's quite an accomplishment."

  DeLon nodded. "He sounds like quite a man."

  "I think you'd like him, Thomas." Kai smiled. "You'll get a chance to meet him when ComStar and everyone agrees to let Malthus and his Star come here to visit. I expect them in time for the title defense."

  "If the agreement comes through and the JumpShip schedule works out." Keith Smith looked a bit cross. "Some of the ships we reserved are moving around, but my chain is still intact."

  "Yeah, if the connections work out. Thanks, Keith, for staying on top of that." Kai hit a second button underneath the lip of the table. "But now I think we've talked long enough without refreshment." A woman ducked through the curtain. "If it's available in the Inner Sphere, they have it here. Indulge yourselves. My guests will want for nothing."

  Lyons

  Isle of Skye, Federated Commonwealth

  Peter Davion's eyes burned as he sat in the dark staring at his holovision monitor. In the foreground the holovision reporter whisked a wisp of dark hair from where the wind had whipped it across her face. She looked excited and exhausted, as befitted someone covering what was, to date, the biggest story of her career and possibly the piece that would get her noticed by a network on a larger world.

  "The police have confirmed that the Free Skye Militia has claimed responsibility for this act of terrorism." Behind her three engine companies from the local fire department labored to pour water on the ruins of a burning building. "The spokesman said they had blown up the Prince Ian Davion Municipal Secondary School because the FSM believed it was—and I quote—'a Davion indoctrination center.' The Free Skye Militia, which was believed disbanded twenty-two years ago after the Skye Crisis was resolved through the intervention of Duke Ryan Steiner, is a group dedicated to, again quoting, 'fighting the cultural imperialism of the Federated Suns.' It has long opposed the formation of the Federated Commonwealth and it is unknown at this time if the FSM is the same organization from thirty thirty-four or merely an ideological offspring of that original group."

  Peter ground his teeth in the dark. "It doesn't matter. They're terrorists and they're at the beck and call of Ryan Steiner. I know it."

  The holovision reporter continued her commentary. "The bomb blast took place at three a.m., which was fortunate, because the school was empty at the time. Just twelve hours earlier, the school would have been packed with people attending Duke Peter Davion's presentation of the first Archon Melissa Steiner Memorial scholarship to one of the students. Experts believe that the bomb may have been intended to explode during the ceremony, which would have resulted in the death of Peter Davion in a crude parallel to his mother's assassination in a bomb blast nine months ago."

  Peter felt a cold shiver run down his spine. Only twenty-one years old and he'd escaped death because a terrorist had been sloppy. In attending the New Avalon Military Academy and during 'Mech drill exercises with his fellow Militiamen, he'd faced imaginary death countless times. He often thought about how he would go out in some glorious combat, just as had his uncle Ian and innumerable relatives before on either side of the family. He had marveled at how Victor had escaped such a death. Peter resolved that when he died, it would be in the cockpit of a BattleMech.

  That's how he envisioned it.

  That was how he wanted it.

  That isn't how it almost happened. The realization that he could be as much of a victim as his mother shook him. He had embraced the role of the warrior because of the romance and glory of it all. He had assumed that with his brother and sister ahead of him in line for the throne, his only chance to become a hero would be through his defense of the Federated Commonwealth.

  He had never considered being martyred.

  In a flash his introspection vanished as the smiling face of the young scholarship student entered his mind. She had been nervous, toying with red ringlets of hair as she listened to him read a list of her accomplishments to the five hundred people in the auditorium. She conquered her nerves when she thanked him and then gave a short speech on the meaning of citizenship and her dreams for the future. The crowd had applauded when she concluded her remarks, not just out of pride for her winning the scholarship, but in admiration of her bold wishes for the rest of her life.

  She had impressed Peter, and it angered him to think of her vanishing in smoke and fire because of someone's twisted hatred of him and his family. The people of the Federated Commonwealth were his to defend, not to expose to danger through his very presence. That others would hurt someone like her just to get at him was insane, yet Peter didn't doubt the FSM would act again, and would not be so careless the next time.

  If that's the way it has to be, I'm ready. He nodded to himself in the darkness and shut off the holovision monitor. "There will come a time when we go eyeball to eyeball," he murmured to the night, "and when that happens, I won't be the one to blink."

  17

  Tharkad

  District of Donegal, Federated Commonwealth

  1 April 3056

  Give me the thunder of a thousand guns rather than the fanfare of one trumpet! Victor Davion didn't know if he remembered that quote from somewhere or if it was something he'd made up on the spot, but he did know it summed up his feelings perfectly. If it had been in his power to avoid having to make showy awards in the throne room of the Archon's Palace in the Triad on Tharkad, he would have exercised that power gladly. And I can imagine that the man I honor today would just as soon avoid this circus as I would.

  A trumpet fanfare hissed, cracked, and popped through the public address system. Victor straightened the jacket of his dress uniform and tucked a last wisp of blond hair beneath his coronet, then held himself at attention. "His Highness, Victor Ian Steiner-Davion, Archon Prince of the Federated Commonwealth, S
upreme Marshal of the Armed Forces of the Federated Commonwealth, Duke of Tharkad, Duke of New Avalon, Duke of Donegal, Landgrave von Bremen, Minister of the Crucis March, First Lord of the Star League." Another trumpet blast heralded the opening of the doors before him and Victor began his stiff-legged march down the red carpet toward the Triad thrones.

  Many would have put his crisp step down to his desire for military precision, but in reality it came from a fit of temper. I told the Grand Marshal to delete the First Lord of the Star League line from my introduction. I don't care if it's been part of the ceremony since the Star League collapsed three centuries ago, it's farcical and I will endure it no longer.

  As he stalked down the ribbon of blood-red carpet, the First Prince forced himself to slow down and rein his anger back in. The cathedral ceilings and massive stone pillars supporting their vaults harkened back to an age when strength was reckoned in stone and combat was fought between men wearing armor of steel. In those days, Victor thought, I would have been fodder for another man's blade.

  Times had changed, but not so much that warfare had been eliminated. In the two millennia since Charlemagne had ruled on Terra, men had begun to settle to the stars. Just as their battlefields had become battle worlds, so had their weapons grown to accommodate their expanding conflicts. Instead of wearing a suit of armor, a warrior of the thirty-first century enclosed himself in a powerful and powered BattleMech.

  On the dais toward which Victor Davion strode, two small thrones stood backed by a pair of BattleMechs. On the left stood a Marauder, a huge but squat 'Mech with two massive, blocky weapons pods on the ends of improbably slender arms. Its legs bent backward and the cylindrical body thrust forward, making the war machine both alien and terrifying in its appearance. The fact that it had been painted in the black and gold scheme of the First Kathil Uhlans moderated the terror, for the Uhlans were known to be fanatically loyal to the service of the Armed Forces of the Federated Commonwealth.

  The other 'Mech, the one standing behind the throne representing the Lyran Commonwealth, looked wholly human, like a man at arms awaiting an order from his liege lord. The Crusader belonged to Galen Cox and had been placed in the throne room as a sign of his favor with Victor. Normally it would have sported the blue and gold of the Tenth Lyran Guards, but with Galen's permission it had been repainted with a red torso, black legs, and black trim in the manner of the Kell Hounds mercenary unit. Victor knew he should have had the 'Mech painted to match the color scheme of the Gray Death Legion, but the ceremony honoring them would only last one day, whereas the debt he owed the Kell Hounds required far more time to be repaid.

  Victor reached the dais without looking at the people lining either side of the carpet. That had not prevented him from nodding his head from time to time as he marched forward. It occurred to him idly that he tended to acknowledge bright colors and the occasional young noblewoman forced to the front of the line by an ambitious parent. Seldom, if ever, had he allowed himself to be pressured into escorting such a woman to a social function. In a quick review of the few cases where he had been coerced into doing just that, it dawned on him that he had enjoyed himself more talking with the student holovideographer than he ever had with the noblewomen.

  It could be, Victor, that you are too much a warrior to be a good noble.

  He mounted the marble steps and bowed first to the Lyran Throne and then to the one representing the Federated Suns. Had Katherine and Peter been on Tharkad they would have been seated in those thrones. He continued up two more steps and stood in front of the tallest throne, the one capped with the Sunburst and Fist of the Federated Commonwealth.

  The Grand Marshal—Victor thought he was a distant cousin or something—began to bring courtiers forward one or two at a time. The old man announced the names, and Victor smiled as if he recognized them all. Most of the petitioners wanted small land grants or waivers on laws or were being recognized for contributions in areas from agriculture to art and from cooking to the classification of scientific trivia. They all seemed terribly nervous—except for the hopelessly egotistical—and Victor was half-tempted to stop the ceremonies to conduct a survey of those who, all things being equal, would have preferred to have the award delivered to them by ComStar.

  Victor had gotten so he could ignore the strobing of the laser flash gun from his left. Each nod, each award, each smile became immortalized in a holograph the recipients would cherish or, in the case of political rivals, hide forever. He did not really begrudge the people their rewards because they had contributed to society even if it was a contribution he could not understand or find a practical use for. What the Prince most resented was the time away from handling the political crisis that was threatening to bring down his realm.

  At least one of these rewards will kill two birds with a single stone. Victor kept the smile frozen on his face knowing that the award to Colonel Grayson Death Carlyle would be a nice parry and cut back at Duke Ryan Steiner. Baron von Bulow, fiefholder of the planet Glengarry, had long been a Ryan loyalist and even though Glengarry was a tiny backwater, it was another potential hotbed of rebellion that would make the news and create an impression of widespread trouble in the Isle of Skye. It didn't matter if the demonstration pictured was the good baron's household staff doing what he told them to do under threat of firing, pictures made news and all the news coming out of the Isle of Skye had been bad lately.

  The rebirth of the Free Skye Militia had worried Victor, especially when it looked as if their first act was the nearly successful attempt to assassinate his brother. Curaitis had assured him that Intelligence Secretariat teams had documented the absence of the bomb during Peter's visit to the school. The terrorists had slipped in later and only made it look as if the assassination had misfired because of a simple mistake. Even so, the presence of terrorists meant an escalation of the unrest in Skye, and that meant Ryan was upping the ante in the play for power.

  Ryan had played his hand well. Intelligence had been flowing from Solaris, and Victor couldn't wait for Galen and Kai to pound Ryan's fighters into insensibility. Curaitis was pleased with the nature of the intelligence they were getting from Ryan's office, but he had pointed out that it might take a long time for them to figure out what the duke was doing. Ryan communicated with the subversives in Skye through a series of codes and unless Curaitis and his people could get a key to one of these preestablished codes, cracking them would be impossible. Even so, they were able to document portions of his network and they could be swept up at a time that would be most inconvenient for Ryan.

  The antics of Richard Steiner—a cousin to Ryan and Victor both—had begun to annoy the First Prince. Richard was the AFFC Field Marshal in charge of the Skye March military district. As was proper and in keeping with his duties, Richard had been shifting troops around. The problem, however, was that the rotation had resulted in a number of Skye loyalist units being posted in Skye during a time Victor would have preferred to package the lot up and launch them into Clan space. Richard will bear watching.

  Just before the start of the afternoon's festivities, Curaitis had dropped a bombshell that had Victor even more uneasy than the situation in Skye. For Skye I have a solution I don't mind employing. For this ... The health of Joshua Marik, the only son of Thomas Marik, the Captain-General of the Free Worlds League, had begun to deteriorate again. His leukemia, which had been held in check by treatments he was taking at the famed New Avalon Institute of Science, had recurred and was killing him. That sort of thing happened on countless worlds in the Inner Sphere on a chillingly regular basis, but the children who suffered those tragedies were not the heirs to the throne of a potentially hostile nation.

  Curaitis thought it likely that Joshua would die and, because of that, he unveiled to Victor a project that his father had begun back when Joshua had first come to New Avalon. Joshua's health had been bartered in return for the Free Worlds League producing war materials for the Federated Commonwealth to use in fighting the Clans. Because
those weapons and munitions were vital to stopping the Clans, Hanse Davion knew he could not let Joshua die.

  And if the boy did die, he could not let anyone know. Hanse had initiated a program to create a physical double for Joshua. Such things had been done before by national leaders. Melissa Steiner-Davion had avoided death once by using a double. Victor could understand and condone it. In fact, if I had a double, I'd not be here right now!

  What his father had planned, however, chilled him. Maximilian Liao, Kai's grandfather, had almost conquered the Federated Suns by putting a double on the throne in the place of Hanse Davion himself. For Hanse to turn around and plan a similar deception against Thomas Marik, well, it showed Victor how utterly desperate to stop the Clans his father had been. And having benefitted from having those weapons in the war, I applaud his audacity.

  The trick of it was that now the Federated Commonwealth was no longer at war. Joshua's illness had allowed Thomas to keep Sun-Tzu at bay by giving him excuses to postpone Sun-Tzu's wedding to Isis Marik. That mean Sun-Tzu would not work actively against Thomas in case he would inherit through his wife what he could never take by force of arms. With Joshua dead, Thomas would have to accept Sun-Tzu, which would give Sun-Tzu more power than could ever make Victor comfortable.

  Please, God, make Joshua recover.

  Victor's smile broadened as the Grand Marshal called forward the only person he wanted to see that afternoon. "Colonel Grayson Death Carlyle!"

  The prince winced as the man mispronounced the mercenary leader's middle name. It rhymes with breath you old goat—everyone knows that. Carlyle seemed not to notice as he moved forward. The mercenary walked up to the dais with a quick, sure tread that marked him a military man of confidence and courage, and his bow set him well apart from the sycophantic courtiers who had dominated the afternoon's awards.