Bred for war

  Thomas shook his head and the light of the flames flashed white over the scars crisscrossing the right side of his face. "She is receiving the finest of care here. Even sending her to New Avalon would only prolong her life another few years at most. Here at home she might have as much as three, though the damage to her lungs is irreparable. Given the debilitating nature of her condition, she has chosen the time of her own passing."

  Sun-Tzu's jade green eyes narrowed. "I have misinterpreted your message then. I did not realize she had chosen to end her own life."

  "Sophina was the Duchess of Oceana before I married her nine years ago. Perhaps because Oceana has never been a rich world, its people have developed a tradition in which the terminally ill do not attempt to prolong their lives. They believe the money and resources are better directed to the good of the community." Thomas stopped as pain furrowed his brow. "I would hold on to her for every possible moment more, but I love her too much to see her go on longer than she desires."

  Sun-Tzu marked Thomas' pain and filed it away for future use. "I loved someone that much, I would force her to undergo treatment. You're a weak, passive fool, Thomas Marik. Aloud he said, "You prove yourself a brave man in abiding by her decision. Were I wed to your daughter Isis, I am not so certain I could let her go so easily."

  Thomas' shadowed eye glinted at Sun-Tzu. "Though any father wishes a love match for his daughter, I know love is not part of your desire to mate with mine. You love only the power of what she will bring with her to the marriage bed— the chance to rule the Free Worlds League."

  "No, Thomas, it is a closer tie between my Capellan Confederation and your realm that Isis brings me."

  Thomas chuckled coldly. "Is that so, Sun-Tzu? And you believe that a good thing?"

  Sun-Tzu hesitated, unable to read Thomas' sudden shift in mood. "I do, and so do you."

  "I might at that." Thomas tapped his chin with a finger. "Perhaps I shall propose marriage to your aunt Candace, binding the St. Ives Compact to the Free Worlds League, and then perhaps I shall marry Isis to your cousin Kai. We depose you and merge all three realms together."

  The younger man felt icy tentacles of dread slithering through his guts. "If the scandal vids from the Federated Commonwealth are to be believed, my cousin Kai has taken up with a woman they claim is the mother of his son. He has brought her to St. Ives and presented her to his mother. Kai will marry her, despite the fact she is a commoner from the Federated Commonwealth. Of this I am certain. I expect the announcement to be made soon."

  "And you wish a date set for your marriage to my daughter before Kai's announcement can be made?"

  Sun-Tzu shook his head and carefully chose his words, gently escalating the volume as he went on. "You, as have many others, interpret all my actions as reactions to what my cousin does. It may be true that my mother decided to conceive me after hearing that her sister was with child, but that familial rivalry does not extend to my generation."

  Thomas held a hand up, then slowly patted the air as if to bring down the volume of Sun-Tzu's words. "Then why protest so vehemently?"

  "Ah, you are suggesting that I fear the future. From that charge there is no defense. Yet I might consider that you may the one who avoids facing the reality of the future of the Free Worlds League."

  "Impertinent as always, Sun Tzu," Thomas said mildly. "But my curiosity begs you continue."

  "You don't deny you were raised as a ComStar adept..."

  Thomas' brown eyes sparked angrily. "I was raised as a Marik."

  "Forgive me, my lord, but as Janos Marik's seventh child you had little hope of inheriting his power. You became a member of ComStar at age sixteen, I believe, and you were thirty-one when your father decided to designate you his heir. It was not until you were forty-one years old that you began to rule in your father's name. Then, everyone thought you had died in the bomb explosion that killed your father and your eldest brother. When you miraculously reappeared alive and well a year and a half later, it was only because ComStar had cared for you in secret. You will forgive me if I do not underestimate ComStar's influence in your life."

  Thomas' head came up. "And this influence, you believe, is what leads you to say I am unrealistic about the future?"

  Sun-Tzu shook his head ruefully, trying to buy time to pick his way through the minefield of Thomas' question. "ComStar's concerns, and indeed your preferred areas of research, have focused on the recovery of technology lost after the collapse of the Star League three centuries ago. You are at your most animated, my lord, when discussing technical matters with technicians." He opened his arms. "Though you surround yourself with candles and books and other antiques, perhaps it is because they offer you refuge from the complexities of life in the Inner Sphere today.

  "You will be sixty-six years old this year, sir, and though many of us can hope to live at least another three decades beyond that, the life expectancy of Inner Sphere rulers is not nearly so long. In four years you will be Hanse Davion's age at the time of his death—and he died of natural causes. Takashi Kurita, Melissa Steiner, my mother, and even Ryan Steiner all died prematurely at the hands of an assassin."

  Thomas arced an eyebrow. "That could be read as a threat, Sun-Tzu."

  "It is reality, my lord. You realize, of course, that I would have no reason to assassinate you until after your daughter and I are wed."

  "An excellent reason why I should never permit the union."

  "An understandable line of reasoning, but it is flawed. Right now, an alliance between the Free Worlds League and the Capellan Confederation means that Victor Davion must think hard before trying to complete what his father started thirty years ago. With you as Captain-General, Victor will never try to finish off the Capellan Confederation. Should you be slain after I have wed Isis and the throne go to her, Victor could play the various factions within the Free Worlds League off against each other by pointing to me as an enemy in their midst. They would not support her, and my realm would die."

  "You would do well, then, to keep me alive."

  "Indeed, that is my wish. Should you die before I wed your daughter, things become even worse for your nation. You bind the Free Worlds League together. By forming the Knights of the Inner Sphere, you have provided its people a high ideal to which they can aspire." Foolish and antiquated as it is, Sun-Tzu might have added, but didn't. He made sure the smile in his heart never reached his lips. "Without you, this confederation of worlds will balkanize and Victor will gobble it up piecemeal."

  The Captain-General nodded patronizingly. "You paint a bleak picture of the future, Sun-Tzu. It sounds like you see no way to avoid a war with Victor Davion."

  "None."

  "And your solution to this dilemma?"

  "I have one, but I don't think you want to hear it now." Sun-Tzu frowned, the dim light accentuating the lines on his forehead and around his almond-shaped eyes. "As you know, I have placed agents and subversives throughout the occupied Sarna March. They go by various names and under various guises. I have continuously used them to probe and test."

  "Testing your Uncle Tormano's Free Capella Movement?"

  "It does seem that way, does it not? In reality, I am testing Victor and his responses to my actions. He worries about the threat of the Clans and, for the time being, lets others deal with problems in his realm. He has given his sister the task of settling the fallout from the Skye Rebellion. He used to have my Uncle Tormano to neutralize my operations in the occupied territory, but now Kai has assumed control of the Free Capella Movement. Before the Clan invasion, Hanse Davion and Melissa had attempted to integrate the Sarna and Tikonov Commonalties into the Federated Commonwealth. Now Victor treats them like colonial provinces while he prepares to fight the Clans."

  "If he is so preoccupied with preparing for war with the Clans, why should he fight us?"

  "He is a Davion. Duplicity and opportunism are in his blood."

  Thomas smiled. "You see him as his father reborn."

  "And
you see him as his mother incarnate."

  "No, Sun-Tzu, I view him as a mixture of both. He has his father's martial and leadership skills and his mother's vision for the future. He has not honed them to the edge his parents had, but he is young yet. As are you."

  "Maybe so, Thomas, but mark me well because I have studied history and I foresee what is to come. Someday— and I fear it will be sooner rather than later—Victor Davion will realize that only by unifying the Inner Sphere can he hope to defeat the Clans. On that day, he will come for us."

  Thomas nodded slowly, thoughtfully. "And you have a plan to counter him?"

  "I do, one that undergoes constant revision and refinement. Whenever you are ready to see to deal with Victor Davion, I will make the plan available to you." Sun-Tzu bowed and started to turn toward the door, then stopped. "Of one thing I am certain, my lord, and it is this: when war is inevitable, it is better to fight on your enemy's soil than on your own."

  "A preemptive strike?"

  "If survival is the goal, my lord, would you not prefer to kill the cobra before he strikes?"

  Sun-Tzu bowed, then turned and slipped from the room, the door closing soundlessly behind him. And if you cannot see the wisdom of that yet, Thomas, I will have to find a way to make it even clearer.

  4

  Peace, n. In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.

  -Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

  Avalon City, New Avalon

  Cruets March, Federated Commonwealth

  26 May 3057

  Victor Ian Davion, First Prince of the Federated Commonwealth, groaned. "If this is the kind of luck that's going to mark my reign, I might as well abdicate now. Do you want the job, Jerrard?"

  Galen Cox shook his head. "No, sir, I do not." He smiled despite the adamance of his tone. 'This was a bit of bad luck, but I think we can turn it to our advantage, pending a full report from Curaitis."

  The Prince brushed the sandy blond hair back from bis forehead and sighed. "What kind of odds do you think we could have gotten on Solaris on the chances of an exact double for Joshua Marik showing up at the Davion Peace Park Zoo and getting spotted by a scandal-vid reporter?"

  "Long odds, and longer still if they knew the real Joshua had died and been replaced with a double." Galen gave a slight shrug. "It looks like pure coincidence, though. Once the child took off her cap and you could see the shock of red hair spilling down her shoulders, well, it was pretty obvious that she wasn't Joshua. The oversized clothes she was wearing and the amateur application of cosmetics gave her that sunken-eyed look."

  Victor stepped out from behind the massive oaken desk thnt had served his father so well for almost forty years.

  "Thank you for getting a quick jump on the story and killing it. And the follow-up story."

  "You've got to hand it to those gossip hounds. They have great imaginations. Instead of killing the story when they found out that Joshua can't be Joshua because he's a she, they get ready to run 'Victor to wed sex-change Marik heir.' " Galen laughed aloud. "Would have been the wedding of the century."

  Victor gave Galen a withering stare. "I fail to see the humor there. Drawing attention to Joshua is not a good idea at this time."

  "I know that, sir, and that's why I think this whole affair could work to our advantage. We'll arrange for a video of a meeting between Missy Cooper and Joshua. It will make her famous and show everyone that Joshua is doing fine. Frankly, folks know better than to believe the scandal vids. If strange stories about Joshua start showing up there, it will cast doubt on anything else said about him."

  "I wish that held true for stories about me and the conspiracy to kill my mother." Victor rubbed his eyes, then dropped onto the sofa near his desk. "You know, of course, that I had Galen Cox killed because I was covering up the murder of my father right here in this office."

  Galen nodded as he came to sit in a wing-backed chair to Victor's left. "So I've heard and, just so you know, I don't think there's more than an ounce of truth in that story."

  Victor laughed in spite of himself. "Thank you, my friend, for putting all this into perspective. In a world where perception can become reality, I have to remember that reality is what I must deal with. So, in that vein, what have you been doing about this scandal vid?"

  "Suppressing it would only make it become more valuable, so I've sent instructions out to all Intelligence Secretariats explaining what happened and including some background information on this Miss Cooper. I've promised them follow-up material. The Tattler is going to run the Cooper/Joshua material as a human interest piece in about a week. All our people will have that material two days before it hits and will be encouraging local media outlets to run their own look-alike contests."

  Victor nodded. "Very good. How did you get the Tattler to agree to shifting the focus of the story?"

  Galen swallowed hard. "I told them you'd give them an exclusive statement on the announcement of Kai Allard-Liao's engagement. I played up the angle about your knowing them both during the Clan war, back on Alyina and Twycross. Five minutes, no more."

  "That's five minutes too much, dammit." Victor's hands knotted into fists, then he forced them open and released his anger. "No, wait, I have to do it You were right in setting it up. Katherine would be so polite to the Tattler that it would pain them to say anything bad about her. More people end up seeing their material than anything official we send out, so I might as well get myself humanized by them."

  "I hoped you'd see it that way."

  "I'm certain of that, Jerrard." Victor looked around the wood-paneled office and noted that ever since he'd become First Prince, the chamber no longer looked as grand or felt as warm as during his father's domain. During that time, in the years Victor was growing up, it had been a place of power, a place where decisions were made affecting the lives of billions of people.

  Creating a double for Joshua had been one of those decisions—the Gemini Project, a final legacy of Hanse Davion's reign. Alive and well, Joshua was Thomas Marik's heir and the greatest obstacle to any secret hopes Sun-Tzu Liao might have of ruling the Free Worlds League. But everyone knew Joshua was incurable. The boy would soon die, opening the way for Sun-Tzu.

  Thomas had been stalling on Sun-Tzu's marriage to Isis for years, but he couldn't put it off forever. Once Liao married Isis, he would be poised to control both his own fanatical Capellan Confederation and the industrially powerful Free Worlds League.

  No one could doubt what Sun-Tzu would do with that power if Thomas Marik, died by natural or unnatural causes, and Isis inherited his throne. Sun-Tzu wouldn't waste an instant mobilizing to take back the Liao worlds lost to the Federated Commonwealth in the Fourth Succession War. Hanse Davion's armies had seized half of the Capellan Confederation in the war, more than a hundred planets that became the basis for what was now named the Sarna March. Those worlds, which had previously thrust like an angry finger between the Lyran Commonwealth and the Federated Suns, now belonged to Federated Commonwealth. Nothing stood between the alliance of their two great star empires.

  Victor had thought long and hard about whether to continue the Gemini Project once his advisors brought it to his attention. The idea of replacing Joshua with a double and deceiving Thomas Marik about his son's death went totally against his grain. But in the end he'd been persuaded that it was the only way the Federated Commonwealth could buy enough time to prepare to meet the potential threat of Sun-Tzu Liao. Two years were what his close advisors estimated would be needed to do that while simultaneously trying to prepare for the next stage of the war against the Clans. The Federated Commonwealth was rich and strong, but its borders were vast and there were only so many troops to defend them.

  They would allow Joshua to die when the boy no longer had any hope, but would keep the double in his place for at least two years. At the end of that time they would send Thomas Marik the sad news of his son's demise and return the body of the real Joshua Marik to his fin
al resting place in the Free Worlds League.

  Given the more pressing problems he had in his realm, Victor agreed to defer dealing with the Sun-Tzu threat by using the double. After all, two years was not much time, but it was time Victor needed for preparation and for handling the other serious threat to the Federated Commonwealth.

  "My sister had nothing to do with Missy Cooper?"

  Galen shook his head. "Preliminary reports contraindicate that possibility, but Curaitis is doing some final checks before he signs off on that idea. In any event, there is no way she could have known about Gemini because the whole operation took place here on New Avalon and it was top secret. Even your mother didn't know about it."

  "What?"

  "I think that was Alex Mallory's doing. Alex probably thought she'd kill the project if he told her about it, so he never did. Only if Joshua had died would he have proposed activating Gemini." Galen frowned. "I don't know that I'd have made the same decision, which is why I might not be the best replacement for him."

  "No, you're the perfect replacement for Alex. Aside from being bright, you know me well. And Katherine too. You two were actually discussing marriage, I hear."

  "Yes, well, I don't think I'd feel too comfortable doing that now." Galen shuddered. "If I was looking for a wife, I think I'd rather have one who would answer yes to the question, 'You know someone is going to kill your husband. Do you warn him or not?' "

  "Remind me to put that one on my list, too. My point is, though, that you've been closer to her than I have. You know her mind."