Free A Silence in the Heavens by Unknown Page B

freezer, poured herself a tall glass and knocked it back. Imported Terran vodka, the real thing, a shame to waste that way—but she was a bearer of the Kerensky Bloodname and she would do as she damned well pleased. Terra’s fruits of vine and field should have been hers anyway.
    It was all meant to be ours, she thought. The Star League—the true Star League, not this cobbled-together latecomer called The Republic of the Sphere—was what the Clans had been created to restore and to serve, after all the rest of humanity had abandoned the ideal. People were fools if they thought that the mission had been abandoned just because some part of the Clans had accepted, for a while, the words of Devlin Stone.
    Kal Radick had listened to those words. Kal Radick said now that he had forgotten them, and claimed that he was trying to lift the Steel Wolf Warriors back up to their former glory. As if he’d know a real Clan Wolf Warrior on sight.
    Anastasia Kerensky poured another shot of vodka and slammed it back.
    Kal Radick did not speak the truth.
    If he were truly interested in taking back Terra, she thought, he would stop sabotaging her efforts during the batchall. Three times now, he had set the cut-down for the bidding cautiously high, encouraging his favorites to bid below the mark. Twice it had worked, if barely—both times, the leaders had needed to call for reinforcements to achieve their objectives, and had suffered no loss of their commander’s good opinion thereby. Kal Radick had continued to allow them to bid in the batchalls, and had allowed—one might even say, had encouraged—them to undercut Anastasia’s own bid every time.
    This time, Kal Radick’s policy had led not just to embarrassment, but to disaster—defeat and humiliation, ending in a retreat to the DropShips and a run back home, on a world that she, Anastasia Kerensky, could have taken with no BattleMechs at all.
    Anastasia knew the dark mood that had over-taken her. It made her dangerous, to herself as much as others, and made her liable to do rash things. The last time she had been in such a state of mind, she had ended up leaving Arc-Royal for The Republic. That decision had proved not so bad, in the long run—but it could have been bad, if her luck had been worse, or if the long DropShip passages had not given her the opportunity to stop and think and plan.
    I need to work this off right now, she thought, before I do something stupid and ruin everything.
    She looked about her apartment. She had chosen to live on her own outside the Clan enclave on Tigress for a reason. She had guessed it might come at some point to this. It was time to call on an expert at having the kind of fun that would ease her mind and burn away some of the physical need that threatened to push her off the true path.
    It was time to bring out Tassa Kay.
    Anastasia turned to her closet and found the clothes she needed. She laid them out on the bed, item by item: the black leather breeches, cut to fit snug against the skin; the black silk shirt; the black leather jacket with its patches from Dieron and Achernar; the boots, polished black leather rising up past the knee.
    And one more thing—a knife in its sheath, designed to be hidden up her sleeve. She had not needed the knife on Achernar, among comrades-in-arms; and she would have scorned to wear it on Tigress, among the Wolves. But the knife had come in handy more than once on the journey from Arc-Royal, and Tassa Kay liked it very much.
    She dressed quickly, then left her apartment and headed for the Strip. Every DropPort had a Strip, regardless of what name the district might actually carry. It was the part of town where the entertainment establishments stood open all night and all day, where there were always bright lights and loud music, and where the law walked carefully if it entered at all. The Strip was full of places to spend money and blow off the mingled tension and boredom of long DropShip passages.
    One would