LE5739 - Falcon Rising, page 14
Forget the bloodname. All that matters now is to remain a warrior and to return to the battlefield. And I will get the chance when the invasion resumes.
Ravill Pryde was going on about something. Joanna had stopped listening to him. "I must go now, congratulate the Grand Melee winner. The win was so sloppy, the words will choke my throat."
The House Leader walked off abruptly. As soon as he was gone, Horse came to her side.
"Interesting rumors," he said.
"Oh?"
"They say that, on Strana Mechty, Marthe Pryde is fighting simulations of the invasion of the Inner Sphere, exercises designed to eliminate the mistakes of the first incursion. She is relentless about it, I hear, pushing everyone the way we push Diana. I am certain that Samantha Clees will be recalled at any moment."
"I will not miss her."
Joanna just wanted to get away from this place and force Diana to outdo herself, now that the bloodname Trials had finally started. She needed the new invasion. If there was not something big soon, somebody might make another move to retire her or reassign her to a solahma unit. She did not plan to be solahma, ever. She had every intention of going down in flames in front-line combat.
"Diana will be competing tomorrow," she said. "We have the rest of today to make her life hell."
16
Gyrfalcon Marketplace
Ironhold City, Ironhold
Kerensky Cluster, Clan Space
27 February 3060
Normally the business of the renowned Gyrfalcon Marketplace was a small daily event. Craftsmen showed their handiwork, and people came because of the high quality of the goods. But, with the extended string of bloodname combats going on in the city, new merchants peddled wares that were sometimes not up to the standard of the market. As a result, there had been a few clumsy skirmishes among the merchants, usually with a permanent seller attacking one of the intruders and trying to smash the inferior merchandise. The intruding merchants had brought in bodyguards to protect them. Some suspected that these bodyguards were from the bandit caste, since they tended to disappear when some authority figure came to browse in the marketplace.
Peri knew little of this as she fingered a gauzy shawl that a merchant had draped over the side of his table. There was not much pattern to it, but the weaving was close and it was difficult to tell where the threads of a color blended into a slightly different shade of the same color. The merchant started to quote her a price, but she released the cloth and walked away quickly. She did not much want to buy anything, but she liked walking through marketplaces. It was relaxing, and she enjoyed taking in all the sights, sounds, scents, and colors.
She stopped at a booth featuring wooden furniture in old-fashioned, reconstructed styles. For a long while she examined an oak desk that she would have liked for her office, except that she had no office now. With Etienne Balzac's hostility toward her and the scientist caste's tendency to isolate its recalcitrant, potentially rebellious members to backwater assignments, there would be no reason to possess even such a fine piece as this desk. And the word was that Balzac would again send her somewhere far from Ironhold on her next assignment. The desk was too expensive for her, anyway. Oak trees were rare on Clan worlds, having been transplanted so long ago from faraway Terra.
To avoid the haggling of the merchant, she glanced outward from the dim booth at the brightness outside. After blinking to focus, she saw a figure who seemed vaguely familiar to her. She took a step toward the edge of the booth and squinted to see better.
It was her daughter, Diana, idly browsing at an ancient weapons table.
Peri had known Diana was on Ironhold competing for the Pryde bloodname and had chosen not to distract her by making her presence known. She remembered Diana as a squalling pinch-faced baby and then as a bright, inquisitive child, one for whom Peri had foreseen a life as a scientist. But the genetic trait of Aidan Pryde, her father, had emerged instead. Nevertheless, as Diana's mother, even one whose trueborn heritage prevented her from any deep motherly feelings, Peri was proud of anything Diana achieved. Her heroism in battle was a mirror of the heroism of her father.
Peri admired her daughter's audacity and was pleased by how good a warrior she had become, but she was not comfortable with the idea of a freeborn acquiring a bloodname.
Peri held contradictory feelings on this subject. She did not believe Diana should be competing, yet she hoped Diana would win.
In case her own confusion might somehow affect Diana, hurt her, Peri thought it best not to see her until after the contest was over. She stood within the darkness of the booth until Diana had passed on, after skillfully bartering with the arms merchant for an ivory-handled knife.
How long had it been since she and Diana had had any communication? Over the years they had sent each other messages, but they had been as cold and emotionless as the screens on which they were displayed. Diana had looked well—tall and strong and beautiful. The light in her eyes was the same light that had shown from her father's eyes. It had always seemed to be there, contradicting his sadness or despair, even in his darkest moods. A light in the midst of the bleakest darkness.
I have to stop thinking like this. Too much stupid sentimentality. All these ancient feelings. Feelings are much too dangerous.
* * *
When she had finished her tour of the marketplace, Peri decided to return to her temporary quarters, a building maintained by the scientist caste for its transitory personnel and official visitors. She had a tiny room there—she had asked for the smallest room available and the building concierge had been meticulous about accommodating her request.
Three or four blocks from the marketplace, she realized she had taken a wrong turn somewhere. She walked to a corner, looked down the intersecting street both ways and saw nothing she recognized. These streets and the street ahead looked bleak, and she did not recall ever being in this part of Ironhold City.
"You are lost, quiaff?" said a deep, almost gentle voice behind her.
Startled, she turned around to face a tall, thin man dressed in the uniform of a Jade Falcon warrior. His face was bland and his pale, nearly colorless eyes almost nonexistent. He was one of those men who regularly seemed in need of a shave. Why, she wondered, did they not just grow the full beards so popular among many male warriors of the Clans?
"Aff, I do not seem to know this sector," Peri said.
"This is a warehouse district. What do you look for?"
"The Scientist Residence Complex."
"Ah. Not far from here."
"Can you direct me?"
"I will take you there."
The man started walking abruptly, turning right at the intersection. Peri almost did not follow him, since she was so surprised by the quick way he moved on and the fact he did not look back to see if she was following. She ran to catch up with him, and he barely gave her a look. Noticing the patch on his sleeve, a swooping falcon (another surprise), she said, "You are with the Falcon Guards?"
"Aff."
"I heard that Ravill Pryde had been appointed House Leader, but I thought the Falcon Guards were still stationed in the Inner Sphere."
"They are," he said, without even glancing toward her.
"Are you part of the bloodright trials?"
"The trials? Yes, I am."
Something about the way he said it made her feel he did not know what she referred to.
"Are you part of Mech Warrior Diana's team?"
"Diana. Yes, I am."
"What do you think about the controversy over her seeking the bloodname?"
"It does not concern me."
Not the response of a typical trueborn Falcon warrior. He could be on Diana's side or against her, but this diffidence was unusual.
"Do you think, as some do, that she is too short to be a bloodnamed warrior?"
"That does not concern me."
Peri stopped walking. "It does not concern you because you do not know what I am talking about."
"This is the way to your residence complex," he said, turning into an alleyway that she had not noticed before.
She had a moment of hesitation about following him, but her curiosity propelled her onward.
"You do not know who Diana is, quiaff?" she said as she entered the alleyway. The man walked on ahead of her, apparently indifferent to her.
"It does not matter," he said.
"You are wearing a Falcon Guard uniform, but you are not a Falcon Guard, quiaff?"
"It does not matter," he said and turned. Even in the dimness of the alleyway, Peri could see the man's hands curling into fists. Behind him she saw two other figures emerge from the shadows. If she was not mistaken, they too wore Falcon Guard uniforms.
She started backing away and stumbled. She fell against a wall and had to struggle to keep her footing.
The man seized her shoulders and lifted her off the ground. There was a strong smell coming from him, one that recalled to her the odors she had noticed in the area around Etienne Balzac's headquarters. For a moment she got to look into his eyes and saw nothing there. Then he threw her to the others, and they began striking her.
She took many blows—many brutal, painful blows— before she passed out.
17
Elizabeth Hazen Medical Center
Ironhold City, Ironhold
Kerensky Cluster, Clan Space
28 February 3060
"Diana, she may not open her eyes for days, weeks," Joanna said, her voice unusually soft, probably because hospitals seemed to demand lowered voices. "She may be in a coma, for Kerensky's sake."
Diana did not even look over her shoulder, but instead continued to stand by the suspension shell in which Peri's body seemed to float, even though it was clearly connected to a double bank of diagnostic and medicine-providing equipment. It looked eerie, especially with the complex of tubing around it, leading into the shell and then through narrower lines of tubing into various parts of Peri's body. Although dressed in a hospital gown that seemed draped on her, Peri's arms, legs, and face still showed the dark and purple bruises of her beating. A medtech had told them that the attack should have killed her. However, she had been improving slowly but steadily since her suspension in the transparent shell, where curatives were administered at intervals through tubes.
Joanna realized as she looked at the body in the shell that she had not thought of Peri in years. Peri had long ago flushed out of the same sibko that had produced Aidan and Marthe, when she and Joanna met again. Aidan had fled Ironhold, and Ter Roshak had sent Joanna and a peculiar tech named Nomad to seek him. When they finally found him, he was with Peri at a scientific outpost on the planet Tokasha. By that time, although neither Joanna nor Aidan would know of it until years later, Diana had been conceived and would be born a few months after Aidan's departure. Joanna felt sick to her stomach. She did not like to think of natural childbirth.
"Diana, your first bloodname trial is tomorrow. Hanging around this place is not going to—"
"Shut up, Joanna."
Normally Joanna would have reacted to the insolence, but this time her old falconer instincts kicked in and told her to allow Diana some latitude. She did not want anything to interfere with the edge Diana would need to win a bloodname.
What am I thinking? When all this started I did not really believe she could do it. Oh, I knew that as a Jade Falcon warrior and the daughter of Aidan Pryde she has all the instincts to fight well. And with that extra degree of fierceness that not every Clan warrior can claim. Horse says there were clans in Terran history that were called barbarians. They were famed for their cruelty, their savagery, their ability not only to pierce the skin with a knife but to twist it afterward. When she fights, Diana has that kind of quality. She is a true barbarian. But not a trueborn, that is the drawback. When this started, I really believed that her freeborn origin would work against her. Now it seems to be her advantage.
She can win, I believe that now. But not if she spends tonight hovering by her mother's bedside.
What kind of emotions was Diana feeling here, in this medical center treatment room? Joanna wondered. Concern for this damaged woman inside the medshell?
As if to answer the question, Diana suddenly spoke. "I have not seen her, my mother, for some time. Why is she here? I did not know she was here. We do not communicate much. Why did she not come to see me? My quest for a bloodname, does that mean anything to her? Would she not want to encourage me?"
Joanna turned away, a bit confused and offended for reasons she could not figure out. "I am trueborn," she said. "I do not know what mothers do."
Diana laughed quietly. "Of course. Trueborn. Freeborn. Freebirth. Freebirth!"
Joanna noted the contrasting and complicated intonations in the two utterings of the same word. The first was what trueborns called freeborns, the second was the angriest curse among the warrior caste. In some way, she thought, the words defined Diana herself. Caught between the idea of what she might be, a virtual trueborn of two true-born parents who lived, thought, and fought like any warrior originating in a vat, and the fact of what she was, a freeborn from a human womb, a freebirth.
Thinking this, Joanna could not help but look at the body in the medshell. It was from this body that Diana had been born. Some hand had perhaps helped to make the emergence easier; some freeborn tech had tended to the infant, cleaning its body or removing the traces of the womb's interior; some arms had held the infant in some kind of complicated freeborn tenderness before placing it in the mother's embrace. Even thinking what little she knew about freeborn births, picturing images in ways she knew were probably distorted, like mythic monsters in children's nightmares, sent an intense wave of revulsion through her body, and suddenly she did not want to be in this medical facility room any more.
She took a step toward the door, then stopped. She could not leave Diana. Not just because of some lingering companionship, but because she could not let her lose the match tomorrow, the match for which Joanna had so meticulously and cruelly prepared her. She had to get Diana out of here, get her thoughts back on track toward the bloodname.
It was at that moment that Joanna finally understood her own complex emotions toward Diana. Diana would win the bloodname that Joanna could not. That was Joanna's need now. She had to take charge.
"Diana, we are leaving. Nothing good can be accomplished here."
"I wish to talk with—"
"And you should not. You will not. If I have to grab you by the throat and drag you out of here, I will. This is no place to—"
"All right, all right. I wish to go. You are right. Nothing can be accomplished here. This is just a woman in a medical shell. She is of no importance to me any more."
Diana strode past Joanna toward the door. "Her pain does not concern me, not in the least," Diana said and turned at the doorway to address Joanna. "But I do wish her well."
Joanna followed, shaking her head in confusion, deciding she would never understand this strange freeborn-trueborn warrior.
* * *
As soon as the two warriors had left, Peri's eyes opened. She had regained consciousness moments ago and heard the last words of Joanna and Diana.
I could have opened my eyes, let Diana know I was awake. I do not know why I did not. What I heard I like. She sounds like a trueborn warrior, something like Aidan Pryde when he was on a tear.
She did not remember the violence that had brought her into this medshell. She would find out soon enough, she knew.
Inside a medshell there was very little feeling, so she had no suspicion of the pain she would feel outside, the pain to which Diana had referred. She had a vague memory of being lost. And of a Jade Falcon warrior who was not a Jade Falcon warrior helping her, but she could not focus her mind sufficiently to recall the details.
Should I even attempt to see Diana again? I do not know. But I will see her compete for the bloodname. Win the bloodname. Yes.
18
Jade Falcon Training Area 14
Ironhold
Kerensky Cluster, Clan Space
1 March 3060
Samantha could sense many eyes on her as she sat in the holovid observation room watching the holovid version of the contest between MechWarrior Diana and her first-drawn opponent, a Star Commander from the Eighth Talon Cluster. Although the fight had just started, Samantha recognized that Diana would win this one. As she maneuvered her Nova across the narrow Blood Plateau, the venue choice of Star Commander Ethan, her superior piloting skills were obvious.
Coming near the edge of the plateau, Diana seemed unconcerned about the one-and-a-half-kilometer drop-off. In one stunning move, she pivoted the Nova to face her opponent's Mad Dog and triggered a PPC barrage that sent the armor boiling off both sides of the Mad Dog's torso. As Diana moved sideways along the cliff edge, Samantha watched big hunks of the Mad Dog's armor making the long, slow drop to the ground below.
In response, Ethan battered the torso of Diana's Nova with his large lasers. Though his fire did not seem to do much damage, the Nova seemed to sway and slip a bit toward the plateau rim. Most of those watching in the observation room gasped sharply, as they expected the Nova to follow the Mad Dog's armor fragments on the long trip down to the ground.
Samantha watched more dispassionately than the rest, but she thought Diana had taken too much of a risk. Her tactics had allowed her to maneuver toward the side of the Mad Dog and get off the devastating previous shots, but she had made herself too vulnerable to the Mad Dog's assault.
Now Diana moved away from the rim, which Samantha mentally applauded. Again, her control of the Nova was skillful. The Nova seemed almost to dance across the surface of the plateau, fearlessly facing the frantically firing large lasers and missiles of the Mad Dog. Diana held her own fire until in short range, ignoring the successful laser hits and using her anti-missile capability artfully against the Mad Dog's missiles, then she launched about as devastating an onslaught as Samantha had seen in a bloodname contest. Firing wildly in intervals to lower her heat, she sidestepped and triggered her medium laser, the red bursts intensifying the previous damage inflicted on the Mad Dog's torso.
