Mailyn felt a hand on her shoulder. Starting, she looked up and back, her face flushing with embarrassed recognition.

“He is his father’s son, it would seem.”

“Mother,” Mailyn blushed, her voice embarrassed. “I—”

“It is alright, Mailyn,” her mother told her softly. “Evie has her other sisters to keep her company. Only you can say where you feel most needed.”

“Mother, I’m...” Mailyn hesitated. “What do you mean, his father’s son? I don’t understand.”

Wei Entigh smiled softly down at her youngest daughter. “He is not who you think him, Little One,” she said. “Not he nor his father.”

Mailyn didn’t understand. She looked from Dar’s sleeping face to her mother’s concerned one, questioningly.

“You see him as a pretty boy with strong muscles and sparkling eyes,” Wei told her. You remember playing and exploring with him. Those are not the things that define him, though, Mailyn.

“Go downstairs and look at the kitchen,” she advised. “That is who he is. It is who his father was before him. It is likely what his sons will be after him, for that is what calls to their blood.”

Mailyn’s face clouded as she listened. Her confusion grew. She’d always thought that her mother liked Darnan. But here, now.... “But he was saving Evie’s life, Mother—”

“As his father saved your father’s in his time,” Wei nodded. “And mine. And in much the same way.

“I am grateful for them both, Mailyn,” her voice was calm. “But I do not fool myself into thinking them what they are not.”

“He’s only Darnan, Mother,” Mailyn insisted. “The same Darnan you’ve known all his life.”

“No,” Wei demurred. “Not any longer. He has taken lives, Mailyn, however justified that taking was. He is a man, now, and a man who will follow in the bloody footsteps of his ancestors.”

“But his father—”

“Is a warrior, as was his father before him. As Darnan will be.”

“But—”

“But you love him, yes?”

Mailyn blushed furiously, her eyes moistening. Her nod was barely perceptible.

“It is a difficult thing to love such a one,” her mother warned. “Are you sure that you are willing to venture down this path?”

The nod again. “I don’t know what else to do.”

Wei smiled again, clearly not angry. “Your father,” she said, “was once a warrior.”

Mai’s eyes widened.

“Oh,” Wei shook her head gently. “Not such as Martin or some of his comrades, but yes, a warrior. And great in his own right. Have I never told you our story, Daughter? Our true story?”

Mailyn frowned. “True story?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” Wei assured her. “A grand story it is, too, filled with adventure and struggle. Would you like to hear it? Perhaps it might tell you something of what you are getting yourself into.”

She glanced over to see that Darnan was still sleeping, and pulled a chair up beside her daughter. “It was back on old Earth,” she began. “Hong Kong, in the Kowloon Walled City. the year was 1923, and I was a kitchen girl at Madam Wu’s....”

* * *

“Are you trying to get us all thrown in prison?” Henry demanded angrily as he tried to keep up with the small convoy of Royal Marine armored cars in Doc Singh’s old Vauxhall.

“What makes you think we’d live long enough to go to prison?” Martin asked calmly, his head leaning against the open window frame, his left arm braced on the door, elbow in the breeze.

“Gottdamnit, Marty!” Henry seethed. “That’s what I mean! What happened to keeping a low profile?”

Marty Palin —for that was who he was now, fully returned from the grave— turned to look over at him, face serene. “Guy just rubbed me the wrong way, Henry,” he said.

“Rubbed you—” Henry shook his head hard enough to rattle. “Who was it that used to talk about poking bobcats with a short stick?” he asked.

Marty raised the hand not resting on the doorframe. “Guilty,” he smiled.

“Need I remind you, Marty,” Henry scolded, “that we’re both supposed to be dead? Cold in the ground for longer than any of our kids have been alive? Moldering bones? Dead?”

Marty nodded.

“At least I have some decent papers,” Henry went on. “Your lot made sure of that, back when they still had power. But what have you got, Marty?” his voice rose. “What have you got?”

He had a point. Marty Palin hadn’t so much died as he’d gone missing. He’d flown off on a pointless, make work mission one early autumn morning, well after hostilities had apparently ceased, and had never come back.

A search had followed, of course. All according to Standard Operating Procedure and for the length of time set forth in SOP. It had been curtailed when enough time had passed, as per SOP. And then Major Martin Finn Palin, United States Army Air Service (det.), had ceased to be.

Oh, there was, no doubt, still some file somewhere with his photo and fingerprints in it, listing his military record, his citations, and medical history. The basics of his life and his unknown fate. All duly recorded for posterity. But all that physically remained —if anybody ever found it— was a broken Curtiss biplane at the bottom of the Gulf of Aqaba. Or more likely, just a rusting engine and some bits of rotting tire.

Marty Palin had ditched, but it had been Martal Palanna who’d washed ashore on the coast of Palestine, waterlogged and nearly dead. Less than a month later, he’d been huddled with his pregnant bride in a loaded cattle car surrounded by lowing cattle and trundling through the portal onto New Victoria and what they’d hoped was to be a future free of endless warfare. New names, new home, new lives.

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No visas, no emigration papers. No documentation at all. For either of them, for by following Lizbet Palin, né Tall Pines, they’d have been able to track Marty Palin as well. A fresh start in a fresh land.

It wasn’t all that unusual, really, for immigrants to shed their old identities for “Victorianized” names. The Palannas didn’t stand out. The major difference between them and most of the others was that those others, somewhere in Colonial House, had records with their old names on them. Martal Palanna had none such. Nor had his wife, Lissenne.

Until this morning, the danger of discovery had been remote. The sheer mass of documentation housed within Colonial House’s archives provided a shield that was all but invulnerable.

Invulnerable, that is, from accidental discovery. Invulnerable unless someone took a directed and active interest. Darnan, they’d find easily enough. The girls. Of Martal or Lissenne, there’d be nothing — not a note pointing to their old names, nor even a pair of blank lines in the ledger. That was a problem.

Henry continued to glance over at Marty, dividing his time between the road and his silent friend. He could see the clouds on Marty’s face as the man opened the memory vaults and browsed their long suppressed contents.

He’d been there for some of it. Hell, the cattle the Palannas had hidden amongst had been his. The bribes to ensure that no one would see the smuggled couple had come from his own pocket. It had been the least of the debts he’d owed the man. And he’d not been disappointed in his choices. Not in all these years. Martal Palanna had been a model, if not particularly gregarious citizen. But that was Martal Palanna.

Pale Horse Palin was an altogether different sort of beast, and he was endangering more than just Marty here. More even than just Lizbet.

“Well?” he demanded.

Marty started at the shout, seeming to come awake as from a dream. He looked over and frowned, but remained silent. It was two more transitions from road to passenger before Henry got his answer.

“I think that cat crawled out of the bag when you asked for my help yesterday, Henry,” Marty said matter-of-factly.

Henry blinked deliberately. “You’re blaming me?” his voice rose. “I’m not the one who called out a Royal gottdamn’ Navy Commodore!”

Marty shook his head. “Henry, I could have stayed home, or I could have jumped up on the table and pissed on his papers and it wouldn’t have made a difference either way.”

Henry glared.

“They sent a carrier, Henry!” Marty looked him in the eye. “This isn’t about a pirate attack on a homestead. That guy couldn’t care less about you or me or your daughter or the stead. They don’t send a carrier for that. They send a carrier to shine bright lights into dark corners. They send a carrier to keep shining those lights until something flushes.

“Did you even see any of the escorts?” He shook his head. “That’s another thing they don’t do, Henry — they don’t send carriers out without a dozen or so escorts. So where are they?

“No, Henry, there’s big fish in the water now, and all us minnows are gonna get caught out before they’re done.”

Another mile slid beneath the tires before Henry spoke again. “So what now?”

Marty shrugged. “Remember Taihoku?”

“NO, Gottdamnit!” Henry shouted. “No, I don’t! You know why I don’t? Because I’ve deliberately erased it from my mind!”

Marty’s eyes sparkled. “Too bad, then, Henry,” he smiled. “Because I think this is shaping up to be a little like Taihoku.”

Henry pounded angrily on the steering wheel. Trouble was, he did remember Taihoku. Life scarring nightmares were like that. And in Taihoku, they’d had backup a couple of hours away and their adversary had been a local warlord with a few hundred troops, not the whole of the British Gottdamned Empire!

* * *

The convoy cleared the tree line and entered the clearing before the Pascal stead. The lead vehicles peeled away, angling to right and left respectively before coming to a halt, gunners at their guns. This to the considerable consternation of the two militia standing guard at the gate. The following vehicles, including the commodore’s armored staff car, rolled in past these first two, coming to a halt before the closed doors.

“Commodore Wesley-Smythe,” the Marine driver announced over his shoulder. “We’ve reached the farm-stead.”

“Very good, sergeant,” the commodore answered tersely.

The driver set the handbrake and exited the vehicle smartly, coming around to hold the door for his superior.

Wesley-Smythe stepped out onto the grass, setting his cap and smoothing his gleaming white tunic, taking the opportunity to cast his eyes about. He was mad to see the airship in the flesh, but it wouldn’t do to allow the colonials that insight.

There were a pair of surly looking specimens guarding the gate for some reason, but their eyes, hot with suppressed anger, were fastened upon the royal marines setting perimeter guard. No risk there.

But here was the mayor and his mysterious friend, climbing out of the grubby Vaux. The mayor’s head was down and oriented on his companion, but that worthy’s gaze lay steadily upon Wesley-Smythe, an expression equal parts grin, sneer, and challenge upon his ruddy face.

Right, then! Giving his tunic cuffs a final snap, he rounded the armored Bentley and approached the square of tarp-draped bodies laid out as though for inspection.

The tarps were stained and not all of the lumps beneath them seemed to bear the proper form. Someone had been using something rather larger than small arms fire on them, it seemed.

With a wave of his hand, he set a pair of marines to uncovering the still forms, withdrawing a pristine handkerchief from a pocket and bringing it primly to his nose. The sun had been at work on them, and the stench was a force to be reckoned with.

Forty-one of them, there were. He cast a cursory glance up at the red airship and back down at the four rows of corpses. Something less than half her minimum compliment, give or take, if she were who he thought she was. So where were the rest?

If she’d been fully manned, there could be as many as another hundred and forty or fifty men to account for. More still, if she’d been carrying marines. Even given minimum crew to keep her under weigh, though, there were a good many bodies yet to be accounted for.

He walked the rows as though this were indeed an inspection, examining uniforms and wounds. Some of those wounds were alarming, and some few of the bodies were more artful arrangements of parts than actual corpses. Some of the uniforms were charred around the rents.

He cast a speculative eye towards the stout wall surrounding the ranchstead, wondering just what that wall was hiding.

He looked up at an approaching shadow. It was the mayor... Entigh. Alone, at the least.

“Those five,” the man pointed to some of the most badly mutilated, “we found aboard the ship, in the sick bay. We assumed they’d been killed by whatever it was that attacked her before she arrived.”

“And these?” Wesley-Smythe indicated Homer’s victims with the hand clutching the kerchief.

“A local hunter.”

“A hunter?” Wesley-Smythe was incredulous. “These wounds look like they were made with an anti-tank gun.”

“I believe it’s a custom Boothe double,” Entigh rubbed his chin. “.600/475 caliber.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s a wildcat,” the mayor told him. “I don’t know the particulars.”

Wesley-Smythe was leaning over one of the victims, observing the gruesome work critically. “And just what does this blighter hunt, exactly?”

“Rocs, mostly”

Wesley-Smythe’s head jerked up. “Rocs, you say? And he hunts them deliberately?”

Henry shrugged. “Says he likes the meat. I find it kind of stringy and rancid myself. But then, some fellows eat bear, so who’s to say?”

Wesley-Smythe harrumphed and went back to his inspection. He paused for a very long time at the shirtless bodies, noting with some curiosity the nearly identical wounds upon their chests before moving on. Odd wounds. Wounds that, if his suspicions were correct, would bear looking into at some point before this mess was resolved.

Then he came to Heinemann and nearly stumbled. Yes, it was Heinemann. Glancing up once more, he gave the airship a more openly critical examination. So she was Katzbalger. Not exactly what he’d been expecting.

His regard returned to her late captain. The cause of death was fairly obvious, if confusing. “You issue sabers to your militia, do you?” he asked the mayor.

“We do not.”

“Then how do you explain this?” His Yorkshire was slipping just the least bit.

The mayor shrugged uncomfortably. “He wasn’t killed by a militiaman.”

Wesley-Smythe turned to him, very deliberately, eyebrows going up. “Do tell?”

Hendrel Entigh shifted his feet, scuffing at the grass and struggling to keep the ghost of Henry Entmann caged. The commodore had seemed to recognize the dead captain. That was bad. Knowing what he did about the dead man, what did it say about the Royal Navy man?

“That wasn’t really an idle request, old boy,” the commodore prompted, voice hard.