“‘As long as it takes,’” he quoted her. “You came here to wait for the Steel Wolves.” He remembered another of her evasive answers. “What did you come here looking for, Tassa Kay?” His vidphone chirped for attention, but he ignored it. “Is that even your name?”
“It is name enough,” she said with formal cadence, letting her eyes drift back to half-mast. “And I came here looking for battle, which is its own reason for existing. I wanted to test the Steel Wolves, and test myself against them, and that is all the answer you are going to get, Raul Ortega. It should be enough.”
It should be. As much as anything else was an answer for him these days, living from day to day with little else on his mind except where the next attack would come from and how soon would it take to get his BattleMech fixed up afterward. The vidphone chirped again. Raul glanced toward it, then shrugged. Tassa might have refused to answer questions, but she had never outright lied to him.
He just needed to ask better questions.
Throwing the covers aside, Raul padded over to the wall-mounted conference phone and turned the camera off. Then he stabbed at the connection. The screen scrambled to life, showing a middle-aged man in a business suit and a silver goatee. In the lower left-hand corner the antenna-and-globe sigil for Stryker Productions Limited, the local ComStar affiliate, revolved on a vertical axis. Not the early-morning call Raul would expect. Right then, he wasn’t certain what to expect anymore.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Raul Ortega?” the man asked. Raul nodded, then remembered he had turned off the camera. He repeated his earlier question. “Mr. Ortega, my name is Hanson Doles. This is a courtesy call to let you know that you have a message addressed to general delivery at our HPG station.”
Raul was at once intrigued and cautious. With the failure of the HPG network, any message was golden. A personal message? It bordered on the unbelievable. Raul’s security-trained mind didn’t trust it. “Is it verifaxed?” he asked.
“It is not.”
“Then why not send it by conventional transmission? I’ll pay for the charge.”
Hanson Doles rubbed one hand over his goatee. “I can only repeat, sir, that you have a message waiting here at the station. Conventional transmissions are… I guess you might call them suspect at the moment.”
Raul stiffened. Erik Sandoval had troops stationed near—or inside—the HPG station. But if that was the problem, and Doles was trying to circumvent any monitoring, then he was taking a risk merely contacting Raul. “Who is it from?” he asked, still not willing to let it go. It wouldn’t be the last time he asked one question too many.
Doles frowned, his wide face taking on extra years. He shifted in his seat, but his duty to deliver outweighed any discomfort. “Lady Janella Lakewood, Knight of the Sphere.” And then, obviously having said enough in his own opinion, Hanson Doles cut the transmission from his end.
Tassa was sitting up in his bed, sheet draped over one shoulder and her necklace charm dangling down over her exposed breast. “You are becoming more popular by the day, it seems.”
Jessica was gone. River’s End lost to Sandoval. Star Colonel Torrent might attack again at any time, and Raul had a Clan warrior lounging in his bed. He felt pulled in five different directions. No. Pushed. Pushed from five different directions, each one of them trying to force him in a direction he wasn’t certain he wanted to go. Tassa was here, she was waiting and he definitely had to have a talk with her, but Raul suddenly felt a need to step away and think. Me time, as Jessica would have said.
“I have to go out,” he told her. It was the start of something, whether an apology or a promise he wasn’t certain.
Tassa cut him off with a simple shrug. “I am not surprised.”
ComStar HPG Station: Stryker-A7
Achernar
Two MiningMech conversions dominated the courtyard of the River’s End ComStar compound, their weapons covering the broad avenue. Dark patches the color of wet concrete augmented their usual utility gray paint, putting together a rudimentary cityscape camouflage. Short-range missile packs sat double-stacked over the MiningMechs’ left shoulder. A pair of anti-infantry machine guns replaced the grinder heads normally found on the left hand. Both converted IndustrialMechs stood in frozen profile as Raul rounded the corner. Arriving in a military jeep, though, he quickly drew their attention.
And their aim.
From the corner to the compound’s main lobby Raul was stopped three times, asked for identification twice, searched once, and generally made aware that Erik Sandoval-Groell had invested more security around the HPG station than the militia base used to cover their main gates. A Demon medium tank guarded the front door, parked in the shadow of the large parabolic dish that rose over the bunker-style compound, angled crosswise across the sidewalk. Hauberk armored infantry walked posts around the station perimeter and Raul spotted another squad on the roof.
Just inside the door a uniformed squad bearing assault rifles inquired to the business of every customer, adding further intimidation to any traffic not daunted by the outside show of force. No customer was about to forget that the station was under Sandoval “protection.” Raul submitted to a second check of his identification and stated his business very simply as a personal—not military—pick-up. A corporal checked to see that Raul Ortega did have a post waiting care of general delivery. With a glare the duty sergeant let him pass.
Hanson Doles met Raul at one of the two dozen service desks, taking over for a customer service agent who wore the white mantle so commonly known on Achernar as the duty uniform of Stryker Productions. There was no way to tell if Doles was a ComStar corporate officer or part of the local affiliate in charge of caring for the massive station—as before, Doles wore a simple suit, although Raul noticed up close that the showing tail of his breast-pocket handkerchief was monogrammed with the globe-and-antennae logo of SPL. They sat on opposite sides of a glass-topped surface, a small monitor sitting between them on a swivel-base.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Ortega. May I see some identification, please?” His voice was cultivated for calm assurance, but the man did not even try to disguise the suspicion that clouded his hazel eyes. “And for a requested secondary verification, can you provide the verbal key? ‘The Swordsworn are not necessarily here to help…?’” he began, trailing off into the question.
After so many security and I.D. checks, Raul began to question whether he was really himself. Then he remembered one afternoon at the Officer’s Club. “They were just here first,” he finished, wondering how Janella Lakewood had known of his conversation with Kyle Powers. He must have passed it along to her. Which meant that Powers had been looking ahead toward his own injury or death days before Torrent challenged him.
“They are still here, Mr. Ortega.” The way Hanson Doles pitched it, Raul felt certain the man was simply voicing his own negative opinion of the situation. “Thank you for your patience. You may use this terminal to view your message. I have a dedicated earpiece for you,” he passed over the plug-shaped device, standing, “and if you would sit in my seat, no one else should be able to view the screen. When the message has played through, a computer glitch will erase it automatically.”
Raul stood, shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and then moved slowly around to the working side of the desk. “Do you perform this kind of service often?” he asked.
“Twice since Kyle Powers’ arrival on Achernar. Before that, the records show our last reception of a heraldic code to be more than five years ago.” Doles moved off with casual aplomb, stationing himself several meters to one side.