CHAPTER THREE

Richard drifted past the cab of a cargo truck. He reached inside the vehicle’s open window to snare the steering wheel and arrest his flight. For a moment, he hung there, stunned.

What had just happened?

And then Corinne tumbled into him. For a moment she was just there, the warmth of her body pressed against him, her limbs tangled up with his, her face so close that he tasted her breath. She was haggard with fatigue and pain, her face greasy with sweat. But she smiled and she had never looked lovelier.

“Richard,” she whispered.

She was glowing.

With victory, Richard suddenly thought.

She was glowing with victory.

She saw his expression and the smile slowly faded from her face, replaced by something harder, more appropriate to an officer of Clan Ghost Bear.

Richard untangled himself, gently, but firmly, pushing her away.

“I congratulate you, Star Captain,” he said stiffly. And then he let go of the steering wheel and snapped off a perfect salute.

She stared at him for a long moment, her visage a mixture of the different emotions she must have been feeling, joy at her victory, the hardness of a commander who has to deal with a difficult subordinate, and something else, a trace of sadness or maybe…

Pity.

Suddenly Richard hated her, hated her with a savagery he had not known he was capable of.

She must have read his face, because her own expression tightened and she snapped off a tight salute and turned away from him, pushing off against the truck’s grill, going to accept the congratulations of the officers of her Trinary.

Her Trinary.

For a moment he floated there, watching her go, her back to him as she went to accept the honor, the future, that should have been his. There was nothing Richard wanted more than to leave that space and go to his closet-sized stateroom.

But the nearest egress was through the cluster of MechWarriors now crowded around Corinne and he did not have the stomach to make that trip.

Humiliation burned in Richard like a flame.

He punched out an angry breath and levered open the truck’s driver-side door, slipped inside the cab. He sat down and closed the door. He found that his view of the celebration was blocked by a pallet of lube oil barrels.

It was the best he could hope for.

When he had awoken that morning, the whole universe had been his. Now, he congratulated himself on finding an obstructed view.

Somewhere in the distance he heard an alarm. An alarm saying something about a jump in two minutes.

She had destroyed him. Richard sat in the truck, clad only in a pair of sweaty, bloodstained shorts, his mind reeling from his defeat.

From his destruction.

He was a Star Commander. A moment earlier, that had been a proud rank, a measure of his accomplishment in such a short time. Now it was a mark of failure. A ceiling he could never surpass.

A hand touched his shoulder and he flinched. He twisted around to see who had dared to disturb his solitude—

It was Corinne, reaching through the open window.

“What do you want?” he snarled, shrugging off her touch.

She withdrew her hand. “Star Captain,” she said, and her voice was as hard as steel.

He just stared at her.

“I think what you meant to say was, ‘What do you want, Star Captain?”

“Have you come to rub my nose in your victory?” Richard asked. “I would appreciate it if you would not do that.” He touched his broken nose and treasured the agony that lanced through his face. “Right now my nose is a bit sore.”

“And out of joint,” said Corinne. She shook her head. “I came to tell you, we do not have time to report to the ‘Mech Bay.”

It was a tradition of the Third Bear Striker that a warrior’s jump station was beside his BattleMech. Most of the Cluster would be down in the ‘Mech Bay.

“We will ride out the jump here in the cargo hold.”

“And you wish me to join the Trinary?” He paused. “Star Captain.”

She shook her head. “I think Star Commander Bjorn can take charge of the Trinary this one time. I wished to speak with you.”

Richard clenched his jaw and sucked in a deep breath through his teeth. Would this humiliation never end?

“Do you know how I defeated you?”

“Because I showed you mercy,” Richard snarled.

“Exactly,” Corinne snapped. “If you had slammed my body to the deck when I passed out, I never would have had time to recover. You would have defeated me.”

Richard said nothing. If only he could have that moment back.

“Mercy is not the way of the Clans,” she said.

“And now you have destroyed me, just as you promised.”

She shook as her head. “Your destruction was never my goal. I only wished for victory. It is regrettable that I could not have one without the other.”

“How shall I function as a warrior without hope for glory? How can I possible serve my Clan, my commander, if I am not permitted to excel?”

She looked at him for a long moment, those dark blue eyes marking his face. “Perhaps, one day, war will claim my life. Then I will be removed as an obstacle to your success, just as today you were removed as an obstacle to mine.”

“And that is what I am left with,” said Richard bitterly, “hoping for your death?”

“Tell me of a time when you did not press your advantage on the battlefield.”

Richard sat there in the cab of the truck and said nothing. He had nothing to say. There had never been a time on the battlefield when he had not used any tactical advantage he had to torment his enemy.

Just as Corinne was doing now.

She reached through the window again, this time her fingertips gently tracing the line of his jaw. “We have shared much, Sibkin,” she said softly. “No one knows me half as well as you. Maybe…” Her voice trailed off. “Maybe you would share the pleasure of your body with me after the jump.”

“You want me to couple with you?” Richard echoed. “After all this, you actually think I would couple with you?”

“No,” said Corinne dully, and she pulled her hand back, dropped it to her side. “I suppose I am a fool to think that could be possible.”

The shrill call of an alarm sounded throughout the cargo deck and Richard heard a voice say over the 1MC: “This is the captain. All hands, prepare for jump.”

A moment later, Richard felt spacetime bend and twist as the WarShip’s Kearny-Fuchida drive ripped a hole through reality. Massive energies propelled Bear’s Den across twenty-five light years of space.

The jump seemed to last for an instantaneous flicker of time.

The jump seemed to last forever.

And then they were through and nothing had changed. Corinne was standing there, a Star Captain, and Richard was nothing but defeated.

“We are no longer sibkin,” he said bitterly.

Her head jerked back as if she had been slapped, and he saw more pain in her face in that moment than when he had broken her foot. She closed her eyes and looked down, seeming to gather herself. Then she looked up. Richard was startled to see that there was ferocity carved into the lines of her face, but somehow there was also tenderness. He did not understand how both could be there at once.

“You have never before been defeated, Richard—not really. So let me explain something to you. Defeat does not change who you are. Whether you like it or not, we will always be sibkin.” Her voice softened. “Perhaps there will come a time when you will realize that you still want—”

And then everything happened at once.

A titanic force wrenched Richard forward. The world was filled with the gunshot sound of exploding tie downs, the rumble and roar of a deadly avalanche. He had just the barest flicker of time to see everything in the cargo deck flying forward as if the DropShip had been turned on her side and everything—boxes and crates and pallets and barrels and jeeps and trucks and everything—was falling.

He had just the barest flicker of time to see Corinne’s eyes widen before she was jerked away from him.

And then the truck’s air bag exploded and Richard’s face punched into a billowing white cloud of nylon and he—