Victor Milan - Flight of the Falcon

He hated surprises. The unexpected was disorderly.

“Bring up the visual gain, Ensign, if you please.”

Other novas blossomed: one, two, several, a miniature constellation of sails reflecting the light ofSummit ’s faraway primary. Then all were eclipsed as the bridge computer enlarged the first sail’s image.

“Himmel Herr Gott sei dank!”the white-bearded exec exclaimed, and crossed himself.

“ANightlord,” Ensign Kohl breathed reverently. “The largest of all Clan WarShips. I never dared hope to see one!”

“The Clans?” somebody repeated with a stutter of dread.

Captain Grunblum stared, stunned wordless. He himself had no idea whether the youth’s identification was correct. The Inner Sphere possessed few WarShips at all, and no Clan WarShip had been seen in the Sphere since the early days of the Invasion eighty years before. Yet this JumpShip was unmistakably a ship of war, fantastically huge and bristling with heavy-weapons hardpoints. Upon the inner surface of her sail glowed the bird-of-prey and katana emblem that in all the universe of Man meant one thing and one thing only. Clan Jade Falcon had come toSummit , bringing a full-blown fleet of war.

Jade Falcon Naval Reserve BattleshipEmerald Talon

Summit Jump Point orbit

4 March 3134

“It was an aberration that allowed two sibkin to win Bloodnames,” the giant man said in a voice like shifting boulders, as comrades helped him shed a tunic that bore the insignia of a screaming jade falcon with a naked katana clutched in her claws, set against a blue-shadowed planet. “I intend to rectify that error now, Aleksandr so-called Hazen”

The man on the opposite surface from the nearly naked mountain of bone and muscle, like him standing with the flexible magnetic soles of ship slippers binding him to the empty cargo bay’s bulkhead, would, in comparison to a normal human, be considered extremely tall and imposingly muscled. His physique was well displayed in the brief trunks, which were all he wore. His skin was olive, tanned rich brown, his hair a shaggy hank of raven’s-wing black, so coarse that it stood off his forehead of its own accord. His face was broad-jawed and handsome as a trivid actor’s.

He smiled.

“You are a brave warrior, Star Captain Lopata,” he said, addressing the monster as if it were the huge man who stood at blatant disadvantage. “I salute your courage and your dedication to upholding the traditions of Clan Jade Falcon. Yet you display erroneous beliefs concerning the duties incumbent on a Trueborn warrior. It now becomes my solemn duty to instruct you.”

The Circle of Equals, a few Bloodnamed mingled among the other warriors, kept the chiseled-in-stone impassivity their ceremonial task required. But the Elemental’s supporters, like him officers of the elite Turkina Keshik, scowled and murmured hotly to one another at the smaller man’s astonishing impudence—though in fact he far outranked a Star Captain. The less numerous contingent backing the commander of Turkina’s Beak, the green Zeta Galaxy, hid smiles behind their fists. All except for a red-bearded man even larger than Aleks Hazen’s opponent—his guffaw made the metal hull ring like crystal.

Thinking himself mocked, the Elemental Star Captain bellowed like a wounded ghost bear and launched himself into the air. Halfway to his opponent he wrapped himself into a giant ball, prepared to turn and land on his own magnetic-slippered feet.

A smile still faintly visible on his lips, Aleks stood waiting.

Three meters away the Elemental starfished open his limbs. Having noted the slight ripple of tension among the great muscles of his bare back, Aleks was already moving, gathering himself and springing away at an angle.

Lopata landed with a thud that seemed to the onlookers to reverberate through the great starship’s whole fabric.

The bay was a cube with rounded corners and one rounded surface: the WarShip’s hull itself. Its

cavernous depths seemed to suck up light despite additional floods brought in for the duel. Aleks landed agilely on all fours at an angle above his opponent, light as a spider.

“Flee all you want, little man,” Lopata said. “Disgrace yourself like thechalcas you are. In the end I will do the Falcon the great service of crushing you.”

He launched himself. Aleks awaited him, crouched and grinning. Before the hurtling giant reached him, he leapt again.

“Your knowledge of tactics is flawed, my friend,” Aleks said, standing at an angle to the Elemental with hands on hips as the giant raised himself. He had come within a hair of scattering some of his own supporters—thus breaking the sacred Circle and forfeiting the trial.

That was Aleks Hazen, who loved to ride the razor’s edge.

“As is your appreciation of the meaning of our class. Not merely our lives but our holy quest and the honor of our Clan depend upon our techs. To bully them is foolish—and unworthy of a warrior, who exists to serve those weaker than he, not the other way around.”

“Lecture me, will you?” With startling speed Lopata crouched and shot himself at the normal-sized man like a bolt.

Aleks stood unmoving. Time seemed to stretch as the Elemental unfolded his huge limbs to catch him, bear him down and crush him. Aleks’ warriors shouted for him todo something .

Beyond the last instant, or so it seemed, he did. He stepped aside, grabbing the wrist behind a vast outstretched right hand with both of his. And yanked.

Had he done no more, Lopata would have struck the hull like a flesh meteor, crushing his skull or breaking his monstrous neck. It would have been an acceptable outcome—heroic, even, for a mere MechWarrior facing the apparently impossible odds of bare-handed battle with a mighty Elemental.

But Aleks tucked the arm into his own chest, partially arresting the giant’s momentum.

It was not an untrammeled act of mercy. Lopata bellowed as his shoulder was wrenched from its socket. Then the WarShip hit him slam in the back.

The Elemental’s agonized cry ended in a voiceless gust as all breath was driven from his body. He bounced, floated up again, stunned and inert. Aleks reeled him in, encircled his neck with an arm that looked like a child’s against it and choked out the Star Captain.

He stood up, stepped back and touched a finger to his brow. “I salute you, Star Captain,” he told the sleeping giant. “Perhaps in future you will treat my technicians with the respect due those without whom the mightiest warrior would be but a mud man waving sticks at the moon. If not—”

He shrugged his own not-inconsiderable shoulders. Then as his seconds gathered about him like an asteroid swarm drawn to a giant planet, he threw back his head and laughed, as for the sheer joy of living.

He was Aleksandr Hazen, Bloodnamed, and he was a hero.

Jade Falcon Naval Reserve BattleshipEmerald Talon Jump Point orbit Summit 4 March 3134

“There is no question possible, Galaxy Commander,” Star Admiral Dolphus Binetti said, gazing up into the holographic display of space near the emergence point which floated in the middle of theEmerald Talon ’s semicircular bridge. “The merchantman could not miss us if he were blind and his sensor crew drunk.”

Binetti was a short man, pompous and somewhat stocky, with a black spade-shaped beard around a jaw that remained firm in outline, despite his paunch. Age and declining fitness should have made him unlikely to maintain either high rank or Bloodname, which were generally held as they were won: by combat. But even before decades of enforced peace and, worse, contact with the soft races of the Inner Sphere had brought decadence to Clan Jade Falcon—so he and his hearer both believed—the Clans had realized there were roles even for warriors in which a decline in physical prowess, or indeed its absence to begin with, could not be allowed to trump knowledge and skill. Piloting a BattleMech or an aerospace fighter was not a job for an uneducated clod, but it paled beside the technical knowledge required to run a starship, much less a battlegroup. Binetti would lose his place when his command skills declined, not when someone wrestled him out of it.