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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Service for the Dead

  A Roc Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2003 by WizKids, LLC.

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  ISBN: 0-7865-4288-8

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  Electronic edition: October, 2003

  PART ONE

  Falling Earthward

  1

  The Fort

  Tara, Northwind

  Prefecture III, The Republic of the Sphere

  February 3134; local winter

  Forty-eight hours after the last of the Steel Wolf DropShips lifted from the port, Tara was still burning. The city lay in the grip of a late-winter thaw, and a raw wet wind blew down the sodden streets. A cold rain fell out of a low gray sky—heavy, half-frozen drops that stung and melted against skin when they hit—and soaked into the burned and burning city, rising up again as steam and filling the air with the acrid stink of wet creosote.

  The wind carried other, worse smells with it as well. The Steel Wolves had not just burned the city before they left it. They had killed, and had left the dead behind them.

  In some quarters of the capital, smoke still rose from the rain-soaked debris. Firefighters labored to extinguish the flames while ConstructionMechs and lesser machines followed close behind, laboring to take apart the wreckage in the hope of finding and freeing any survivors. The sirens of emergency vehicles had been sounding intermittently all day; they had sounded all the night and the day before as well.

  While the devastation was not absolute, it was nevertheless comprehensive. All the elegant shops along Tara’s Silver Mile had been gutted—their contents not stolen, but burned in the street. The New Barracks had been ripped into and torn apart by’Mechs, its carpets and curtains and furniture piled atop the wreckage and set aflame. Even the River Thames, that should have flowed freely in its canals through the city, was black with ash, colored with oil, and choked with rubble.

  Only The Fort—the dark, looming structure that was the original home and headquarters of the famed Northwind Highlanders—remained untouched. Its walls of solid stone and gates of heavy iron had been designed to stand against ’Mechs and missiles and artillery, and even the Steel Wolves had proved unable to bring them down. The Fort was a relic of an older time, of the centuries of warfare and chaos before Devlin Stone’s Republic brought the Inner Sphere six decades of peace. It was still standing now that the peace had ended.

  Anastasia Kerensky and her Steel Wolves had been driven off of Northwind once before, in the summer campaign that had begun with the Battle of Red Ledge Pass and ended with the Battle on the Plains. They had come back this time with the element of surprise on their side—surprise, and the fact that Northwind’s forces, already spread out to cover nearby planets like Small World and Addicks, had been seriously depleted by the original incursion.

  Even that advantage should not have been enough to allow such a disaster. Northwind had augmented its thin-stretched forces with mercenaries under the command of One-Eyed Jack Farrell—a tough bunch, and honest as such things went, with a rep for standing by their contracts and honoring them to the letter. They should have stood by Northwind the same, but (and here, in retrospect, lay the fatal flaw) One-Eyed Jack and his mercenaries hadn’t made their contract with Northwind. They’d made their contract with Ezekiel Crow, Paladin of the Sphere, and Crow had ordered them to stand aloof from the fighting between the Highlanders and Kerensky’s Wolves.

  Tara Campbell, Countess of Northwind, was not going to say it in front of the tri-vid news cameras, but she felt at the moment considerably kinder toward Jack Farrell and his mercs than she did toward Crow. Farrell had held to his contract and obeyed Crow’s orders to the letter—to the letter, and no further. He had not exceeded those orders when he easily could have. Without that small amount of grace, the Highlander forces trapped in the city would never have escaped to regroup on the far side of the Rockspire Mountains.

  The Countess said as much, sotto voce, to General Michael Griffin. The two of them stood together outside the still unbreached gates of The Fort, waiting for the assembled tri-vid crews to finish setting up. Their dress uniforms were getting steadily wetter and clammy cold; their hair—both Tara Campbell’s spiky short blond locks and Griffin’s close-trimmed military cut—was already soggy; and Tara was half convinced that her eyelashes were starting to freeze.

  “One-Eyed Jack and his people can leave whenever they want,” she said. “Tomorrow, if it makes them happy. There’s no point in punishing a bunch of mercs for honoring the deal a traitor cut with them. They aren’t anyone’s friends, and we don’t need for them to be our enemies. You and I both know they could have pushed us a lot harder than they did.”

  Griffin gave a nod of reluctant agreement. “What are you going to do about Crow?”

  The lips skinned back from Tara’s teeth in what might almost have been a snarl. “When I have him in my hand again?”

  Griffin nodded.

  What I want to do, Tara thought in the second or so before she answered, is kill him. Anastasia Kerensky would have done it without a second’s hesitation, if he’d served her as he served me. But I’m not Anastasia.

  Aloud, she said, “Hand him over to The Republic’s justice, and see him tried for his crimes by the Senate on Terra.”

  Big words, she said to herself afterward. But it’s always good to have a plan.

  The tri-vid crews were finished with their setup. The leader—a man in a well-cut suit, who looked as if he might be a news interviewer—approached Tara and General Griffin. Like everybody else Tara had seen lately, the crew leader had a drawn and shocky look under his professional polish. Tara found his kind an annoyance in good times, but they were necessary now. He and his people would have been working as hard as everyone else during the past two days, making the record, finding the telling words and the burning images that would make plain to the rest of The Republic of the Sphere what a Paladin of the Sphere had done.

  “We’re ready, my lady,” he said. “You’ll be going live worldwide as soon as you give us the word.”

  “Good. Do you have the package for Lieutenant Jones ready to go yet?”

  “Yes, ma’am. We got our last interview just this morning.”

  General Griffin looked interested. “That would have been the survivors from the guard post that passed Crow and his ’Mech through the lines to the DropPort?”

  The tri-vid interviewer smiled—Tara Campbell recognized what would have been a fighting grin on the face of someone in her own line of work. “That’s the one, all right. And they’ll clench it, for whoever sees that disc.”

  Tara knew that he spoke the truth. The report on Crow’s actions alread
y contained the data from the guard post’s logbook—a small miracle in itself, that the recorder and the discs had survived both the fighting in the city and the retreat into the mountains afterward—but people would believe on a gut level the testimony of two mud-stained and battle-weary young soldiers who had watched a hardened warrior in a Blade’Mech walk away from the fighting that was sure to come.

  Again she said, “Good. The General and I can say our piece for the live broadcast as soon as you give us the signal.”

  “Watch the red light over the main camera. When it goes green, you’re live.”

  The interviewer retreated to a secondary camera setup on the far side of the street. Tara noted that the cameras were positioned to give a good view of the unbroken Fort looming over the wreckage of the city. He assumed an earnest and trustworthy expression and began talking. She watched the light over the main camera in her own setup blinking steadily amber, and waited.

  All that would come next was drama and ceremony. The specifics and the legalities of it had been hammered out already in a marathon late-night session, in which she and Griffin and the surviving council members had hashed out what had to happen, and by whose authority. What remained now was an act not of politics, but of necessary theater.

  The amber light blinked rapidly several times in succession, then turned red. The red flashed once—twice—three times, and went green. Tara drew a breath and spoke.

  “People of Northwind!” She had her eyes on the main tri-vid camera, as though it were a person standing there, and her voice was pitched for the microphones to pick it up without distortion. In her childhood as the media darling of The Republic’s diplomatic corps, she had grown up doing this sort of thing, and she had not forgotten the technique. “It is my sorrowful duty to acknowledge that Finnegan Cochrane, your Legate, died in the fighting for this city. With so much rebuilding to be done, his place cannot go unfilled for long. Therefore, I am giving you my most trusted General, Michael Griffin—the man who held Red Ledge Pass against the Wolves last summer, and who came to the relief of this city only days ago—to be your Legate, and to oversee Northwind’s defense and recovery in my absence.”

  She paused a few moments for reaction from the unseen audience, then continued. “General Griffin!”

  “My lady?”

  The man was looking stalwart and forthright in his dress uniform, in spite of the rain and the wind. She’d have to check the recording afterward to see if he came across as well on the tri-vid as he did in person. In his new position, it would be a great help to him if he did.

  “Do you accept this assignment?” she asked. Not that there had ever been any question. Michael Griffin was as loyal as Ezekiel Crow had been treacherous. Whatever his Countess had asked of him, he had always stood ready to do.

  This time was no exception. “Yes, my lady.”

  “Then care for Northwind as I would care for Northwind, while I and my regiments are away. We leave within the week for Terra.”

  2

  Ruth Elliot Fletcher’s House

  Kildare, Northwind

  Prefecture III

  February 3134; local winter

  Night had fallen in Kildare, on the far side of the Rockspires from Tara, and a cold dry wind was blowing down the suburban street where Will Elliot’s sister lived. Will, who was visiting his family on a thirty-six-hour leave, found Kildare’s semiarid winter weather an unsettling change from the still-deep snows of the mountains. Too many changes, too fast, he thought, and wasn’t completely certain he was thinking about the weather.

  He’d flown by civilian short-hop aircraft from a small landing field in the western foothills of the Rockspires to the airport in Kildare, using his leave orders to get priority passage. He was wearing a clean and freshly pressed uniform. All of his civilian clothes had stayed behind in a footlocker at Fort Barrett when he went with General Griffin’s force to the relief of Tara, and they weren’t likely to catch up with him any time soon. For his own part, after going from the baking heat of the dry season on Kearney’s Oilfields Coast to the subzero cold and deep snow of a mountain winter, with hard fighting at the end of it, the chance to be wearing something besides dirty summer-weight fatigues was a blessing all by itself.

  Now he stood on the front steps under the porch light of his sister’s house, waiting to ring the doorbell. This visit would mark the first chance he’d had to spend time with his family since the end of last summer’s fighting, when he’d helped his mother salvage what she could from the rubble of the Liddisdale house. Jean Elliot hadn’t been happy then to learn that her only son was going off to Fort Barrett on the Oilfields Coast, a long way from the mountains. She’d be even less happy now.

  Will realized that he was hesitating, his finger poised above, but not quite touching, the doorbell button. That was irony for you, he reflected. He’d lain in wait for Anastasia Kerensky’s soldiers at the gates of Castle Northwind with less trepidation.

  But that, as his friend and fellow Sergeant Lexa McIntosh would say, was because all that the Steel Wolves could do was kill him. His family, on the other hand, could always choose to make a scene. Not his mother by herself, but with his oldest sister involved . . . Ruth fretted about things, and she liked to spread the joy around.

  She’d leaned on Will all during his growing up, pushing him to make something of himself, by which she apparently meant “find a job in an office somewhere instead of spending all your time hiking around the mountains.” His chosen work as a wilderness guide had not pleased her at all. He still didn’t know—though he suspected—what she thought of soldiering.

  All right, he thought. Buck up and do it.

  He pressed the button. A bell rang inside, and a moment later his sister Ruth opened the door. She said, “Will!” as though she hadn’t expected him and enfolded him in a warm hug. He noticed with surprise that she was crying.

  He patted her hair awkwardly. “Here, now, Ruthie. What’s that all about?”

  “I’m just glad that you’re still here. The things we heard—” She pulled away and blinked her eyes dry again. “Come in, come in. Dinner’s almost ready, and mother has the good silver out.”

  He followed Ruth into the bright lights and good food smells of the house. His nose recognized the scents of roast leg of lamb and his mother’s homemade false-mint jelly, and of mashed purpleroot with lots of butter. His stomach, after too many weeks in a row spent living on field rations, growled in happy anticipation. He saw that the good silver was out indeed—his mother had thrown the entire set into the back of the electric runabout, along with a change of clothing and her wedding pictures, when she left Liddisdale last summer just before the Wolves came through—and the white tablecloth on the big table. Everywhere Will looked, he saw evidence of how the house had been made polished and orderly, and set up to look its best. It was as if the family had gotten ready for the visit of a well-regarded stranger, instead of the homecoming of a son and a brother.

  Ruth’s husband John Fletcher was in the dining room already, along with Annie, Isobel, and young John. Jean Elliot brought in the leg of lamb from the kitchen and set it in the center of the table, then gave Will a tight hug while her three grandchildren looked at him with admiring eyes.

  There was a place set for him at the table. He took his seat and Ruth’s husband began carving off slices of lamb. Will found that he had to work hard not to eat too fast, after so many meals lately spent eating quickly and moving on to the next camp, the next fight. He needed to set a good example for the children, he told himself sternly, and not forget his manners.

  They all spoke at first of little things, weather and school and John Fletcher’s work as a long-distance trucker, but after a while his mother said, “It’s good to have you with us again, Will. I’ve been that worried.”

  “You shouldn’t be,” he said. He laid his fork down long enough to tap his Sergeant’s stripes with one finger. “They made me a Sergeant. That means I’m a deal too canny to
let myself get killed.”

  His sister Ruth gave an eloquent and disbelieving sniff, and Will shot her a warning glance: Don’t say something and get her upset. For a wonder, Ruthie caught his meaning and held her tongue.

  Young John was still in primary school, and full of a newly discovered hero worship. “Did you fight in the city?” he asked. “The news channels all say that it was fierce.”

  Will shook his head. “I came up from Kearney with General Griffin, but I never got as far as Tara.”

  “What happened?” asked Ruth’s husband.

  “I went to Castle Northwind instead.”

  There was a long pause. Then young John broke the silence. “Is it true what everybody says, that the Countess blew up the castle herself on purpose?”

  “Is that how they’re telling the story?” Will laughed a little, not in amusement, but in rueful acknowledgment of how things worked. “The Countess gave permission, true enough, but it’s those of us who were there who set the charges, chose the time, and brought the whole place down.”

  His mother said wistfully, “It was always a beautiful place in the pictures.”

  “Aye, it was.” Will was silent for a moment, remembering the gray stone castle cupped in its mountain valley. “Too beautiful to leave for the Steel Wolves. Better to break it apart ourselves first.”

  There was another pause, longer this time. Will found that a good dinner made an excellent excuse for not talking. His sister Ruth was a fine cook, and his mother was a better one. Between the two of them they’d made the best meal he’d had in months. He finally looked up from his berry tart with heavy cream to ask, “What about the house in Liddisdale?”

  Ruth said, sharply, “What about it?”

  “It’s half rubble, that’s what about it, and it’s been standing open to the weather since before the start of winter. If it isn’t rebuilt soon, it’s not going to be good for anything but selling for the land under it.”