“It’s good that the Exarch sent you to Northwind,” he said, “and not somebody else.”
Crow wondered if the manager would think the same thing if he knew that the Paladin sitting across the table from him was only there because he needed to avoid Tara Campbell until he could figure out whether he wanted to move closer or to run away. “Is it really?”
“Yeah,” said the plant manager. “I wasn’t born yesterday; I know that Paladins are only human. We could have gotten handed over to somebody who was more interested in pulling rank on the locals than in working with them—and that would have been a disaster, especially last summer. But you and the Prefect worked together like you’d been on the same team since preschool.”
Somewhat to Crow’s surprise, the offhand remark did much to clarify his own conflicted feelings. He had been thinking of Tara Campbell as a hostage to fortune, and—as the manager had just unwittingly pointed out—such an estimate was seriously in error. She was a power in her own right, a leader whose strength and skills complemented his. Any closeness between the two of them would only serve to lighten his burden, not to make it greater. Together, they would truly become a force to be reckoned with.
He thanked the plant manager for his kind words and made his farewells, then headed back toward the capital city and the New Barracks feeling considerably happier than he had upon awaking. He was not a man given to public displays of emotion, but inwardly, at least, he was smiling as he made his way up the stairs to his quarters. He would wash away the grime of today’s travel, he thought, and put on new clothes. Then he would go speak again with Tara Campbell.
There was a fat envelope lying on the dining table in his quarters when he entered. The sight gave him pause for a moment—the envelope had not been there when he left. The exterior had his name and rank written on it in black marker, with a scrawl of different-colored ink showing that Security down at the main door had signed for the delivery in his absence. Security would have passed the envelope along to the regular cleaning crew when they came in to clean the floors and change the bed linen and wash his plates and teacups.
He opened the envelope, only to find another envelope inside. This one bore a different address:
LIEUTENANT JUNIOR GRADE DANIEL PETERSON
CHANG-AN
LIAO
“No,” he said. “No.”
Letting the inner envelope fall unopened from suddenly nerveless fingers, he sank into the chair and buried his face in his hands.
27
Jasmine Flower Wine Shop
Chang-An
Liao, Prefecture V
October 3111; local summer
He sat at a table in the corner back with his head in his hands. A bottle, not the first of the evening, stood at his elbow; and next to the bottle, a wineglass. He was trying his best to drink himself into oblivion, and oblivion was not cooperating.
The Jasmine Flower Wine Shop was on the outskirts of Chang-An—far away from the current fighting, and even farther away from the burnt-out shell of the urban center. Any resistance going on inside the city came from desperate civilians. The local military units had been crushed during the first days of the fighting, wiped out as an effective force for the crime of daring to resist when the Capellan Confederation landed a DropShip and started disembarking soldiers.
The CapCons had double-berthed—maybe even triple-berthed—their DropShip. They’d packed it with two or three times the number of soldiers it should have carried; they’d overstuffed its cargo holds with armored vehicles, with heavy weapons, and with BattleMechs. A single DropShip of that class was not rated to carry so much; it should not have been able to carry more than the local defenses in Chang-An could have dealt with handily.
He had worked the numbers out carefully—he was good at such exercises—before he had even considered… but he had not considered that the Capellans would lie, or that they would put a DropShip at such risk.
That was the first betrayal.
No, he thought. Be honest with yourself, at least. It was the second.
He poured himself another glass of wine. His hands were shaking so that he had to steady the neck of the bottle against the lip of the glass. He managed to still the trembling long enough to pick up the wineglass and drain it without spilling. The wine was a heavy red from the dry temperate coast, harsh and tannic; his head was full of its fumes. They didn’t help to get the smell of burning out of his nostrils, or out of his memories.
Chang-An’s public health services had dug common graves for the city’s innumerable dead—drivers of earthmovers and IndustrialMechs risking their lives to furrow up ground out of the way of the fighting, then laying the bodies out in rows like seed for an obscene crop someday to come. He had brought his parents’ bodies there himself and put them in; they had no other friends or family left alive to do it. And the earthmovers had covered them up again.
That had been the first night he’d tried to get drunk. But he hadn’t been able to get drunk enough.
Three more DropShips had come down at the port today; more soldiers poured out of them into the city and the surrounding countryside. He had seen them, had gone back and hidden in the shadows to watch. He’d seen transport aircraft, too, and heavy gear—Saxon APCs, Maxim Mk2 Transports, even a Mobile Tactical Command HQ—all of it meant for supporting large-scale field maneuvers, not for city fighting.
And this wasn’t the equipment for a quick raid. It was take-the-whole-planet stuff. He knew the theory; he had studied it, and had been at the top of his class. He had never seen the theory at work until now.
Another betrayal, that.
One ship, and one ship only; that had been the word. He knew distances, and he knew the times to and from the jump points. There was no way additional ships could have come this quickly, even in response to a maximum-priority HPG message. The new ships had to have started on their way before the first ship had even landed.
He buried his face in his hands again. The CapCons had lied to him from the beginning, and he had believed their lies. There was not enough wine in Chang-An to make that better. Maybe not enough wine on all of Liao.
The table shifted under his elbows, and the bench opposite him creaked as somebody sat down uninvited. Unwillingly, he lifted his head, and saw a slender, smiling, ordinary-featured man in a CapCon uniform. The last time he’d seen him, the man had worn civilian clothing.
“You’re a very difficult young man to find these days, Lieutenant Peterson.”
“Go away.”
“Now, now. Is that any way to speak to your benefactor?”
“I have a benefactor? I don’t see anyone like that in here.” He gave a harsh, choking laugh. “Just a traitor and a lying bastard. Respectively.”
The CapCon shook his head, still smiling. “A bit late for second thoughts, I’m afraid. The thing is done.”
He said nothing, willing the man to go away. A useless effort—the smiling man only crooked his finger at the wineshop waiter for another glass. When it arrived, he filled it, unbidden, and sipped, shuddering.
“Dreadful stuff, this. You could do better with us.”
“I don’t think so.”
“We brought our own vintages—the better to toast your name after the first landing.”
The sudden flash of anger cut like a knife through the dullness of despair. “You promised me that my name would never be spoken.”
Smiling, still smiling, the man said, “And it was not. We drank our toasts to the Betrayer of Liao.”