A Silence in the Heavens Read Free

Macallan.”
    “That isn’t fair.”
    “Nobody’s pretending it is.” He put on his parka and slipped the brown envelope into an inner pocket before sealing up the front. “Take my advice and marry Robbie,” he said. “That way you’ll be safe if Old Angus starts worrying that there won’t be enough business left to pay the office help.”
    3
    The New Barracks
    City of Tara, Northwind
    November, 3132; local winter

    T ara Campbell exited the ’Mech simulator as rapidly as possible, stripping out of the bulky cooling vest almost before her feet hit the floor of the armory.
    She was glad she’d had the foresight to bring the plain dark changing robe with her. If the news Colonel Michael Griffin brought was important enough to drag the Prefect of Prefecture III out of a training simulation, then she didn’t have time to go back to the locker room and change—and she didn’t care to hold an emergency conference with the man while wearing only a snug pair of trousers and an undershirt gone nearly transparent with perspiration. Such an encounter would lack dignity, and a Prefect whom everybody—including the Prefect herself—suspected of being too young for such a high position needed all the dignity that she could scrape together.
    She pulled on the robe and belted it tight around her waist, then hurried across the polished floor of the armory to meet Colonel Griffin. She would have preferred the chance to shower first, because even in a simulator a MechWarrior inevitably worked up a heavy sweat. But the officer had said that his news was urgent, and she wanted to make it clear to everyone that she took such messages seriously. Filling Duchess Katana Tormark’s elegant samurai shoes was going to be hard enough without alienating the very people who were supposed to be helping her do the job.
    Colonel Griffin was a lean man with close-trimmed light brown hair and a brushy but well-maintained mustache. His uniform was fresh and crisply pressed, and the medals on the breast of his tunic spoke of an eminently respectable though not flamboyant service career. In the yellow sunlight that slanted down from the windows high under the armory’s vaulted ceiling, he could have passed for an artist’s depiction of old style military spit and polish. Seeing him, Tara felt even more conscious than before of her own sweat-flattened hair and informal garb.

    She put her chin up. She was a MechWarrior and a Campbell of Northwind, whatever she was wearing, and no mere Colonel of infantry was going to stare her out of countenance—though she suspected already that it was not Griffin’s position as a field commander that had brought him to the armory this morning, but his secondary assignment as the officer in charge of the Regiment’s intelligence network here on Northwind.
    “Colonel Griffin,” she said, giving him her most practiced gracious smile. A precocious childhood as the diplomatic community’s poster darling, she reflected, had its occasional uses even in her current position.
    When she absolutely had to, she could charm almost anybody. “I’m afraid the simulator isn’t very good about picking up external voices—you said something about important news?”
    “There’s a DropShip coming into the spaceport in a few days,” Colonel Griffin said. “They sent word ahead.
    They’ve got a Paladin on board, coming to help us out here on Northwind.”
    Tara felt her smile turn cynical, and couldn’t help but feel a twinge of regret at her own reaction. There had been a time when word of a Paladin’s imminent arrival would have caused her to feel a surge of anticipation that was almost hero worship, even though the newcomer’s identity remained as yet unknown. But that was before Katana Tormark’s betrayal had left her with the responsibility for keeping peace and good order in Prefecture III—under the current circumstances, such a gift from the Exarch, coming unasked-for as it did, was likely to prove in the