“Yes, I have a better idea," Angelica said. "We can just go to where my mech is. It's about six miles that way." She pointed.

I resisted the urge to facepalm. Of course, she could sense where her mech was all the time. One of the perks of the magical bond between a rider and their mech.

We dug through the glove box for some maps and came up empty. Then I tried to drive from memory, but eventually resorted to stopping in a nearby town and asking for directions. That still didn't put us right at the gunship, but it got us close. Finally we found ourselves on dirt track through the forest. The brush on either side was almost as thick as Alabama kudzu. Angelica could sense we were almost there. It was quiet except the rumble of the engine. We hadn’t seen Hiroshi in hours. We arrived at the gunship a short time later without incident. They were landed in a tight little clearing in deep woods.

We gave the crew a cursory debriefing and crashed for a quick nap before reassembling to discuss our options. Yeah. The wardroom was a postage stamp designed for a handful of officers, but we still didn't fit even with our reduced numbers, so we gathered outside in a camp the others had established. They had been busy. There were a number of wooden chairs and the cook pot over a fire. It looked like they were planning on setting up long-term residence here. I didn't ask where they got the chairs.

I wasn't sure coffee had as much effect on this body, but I still liked drinking it first thing in the morning. Especially when I was as tired as I was.

Angelica, Tamara, and Captain Lewis were having a vigorous discussion of methods we might use to free the Colonel and the Tsar, with a few points interjected by Wysocki.

I stared at the fire, sipped my coffee, and tried to get my thoughts in order.

"Wait a minute," I interjected after this had gone on for some minutes. "What is our real goal here?"

"To get the Tsar back," Angelica answered immediately.

"I don't think it is. He's with his own people, right?"

Tamara shook her head. "Not ones that can be trusted."

"Yes, but is that really our problem?" Angelica opened her mouth to respond, but I plunged on. "We're here to stop a war, and for that, we want to get in his good graces, but also we want to discredit his foes. We already know how to do that. So, I think we should focus there. Look, we're not going to be here forever to rescue him from the clutches of every one of his supposed followers that proves to be disloyal. He's going to have to handle some of that on his own when we're gone. We set out to weaken his biggest enemies politically, and if we can do that, he should be able to take care of the rest. That was the colonel’s plan. I think we should stick with it.

I shook my head but said maybe. "First, we need to see if we can spoil his mech review. I think we should do that and look for an opportunity to attack him directly."

Angelica was eyeing me suspiciously. "And the colonel himself? Where does rescuing the colonel fit into your plans?"

I shrugged. "I think the colonel can take care of himself."

Angelica didn't let up. "And you're not just saying that because he left you in Lenin's clutches?"

"He left you as a prisoner with the communists?" Frank marveled. All eyes were on me. I shook my head slowly and carefully.

"No, it's not that." I was lying, it was a little bit of that. But also, that guy kept showing up when we least expected it, having all the answers. I kind of wanted to see if he had the answers to this one. And I was telling myself that wasn't being vindictive. His reasons for leaving me were sound enough, but so were my reasons for leaving him.

"Look, we have a mission. It's the one he gave us. Discredit General Petrov, and put the tsar into the hands of his supporters. It turns out his supporters were a treacherous den of snakes. So we don't know who we should leave him with. The police seem as safe as anyone. And if the tsar can't rally those guys to his side, then he doesn't deserve to be tsar."

Tamara shrugged and made an ‘that makes sense’ kind of expression. The others were still thinking. So I pressed a little harder. "Look, either those are regular police, and so the tsar should have him and Mazur out of there in no time, or they're being turned over to someone else. Which would be bad, but it also means we'd have no idea where they're being taken. If we waste time trying to search for them, we miss our chance at doing the mission the colonel gave us. We are trying to end a war. The colonel made it clear any one of us is not as important as the mission."

I looked around the camp. No one would meet my eyes.

Angelica finally sighed. “I don’t think we can pull off the colonel’s plan anyway. We were hoping to work with the communist rebels to disrupt General Petrov’s demonstration. Without their help we don’t have the forces to pull it off. We don’t have enough explosives to blow up their mechs, don’t have access to sabotage them and almost certainly can’t beat them in a straight fight with what we have available.”

“What about an ambush?” Frank asked.

Angelica threw out her hands. “Maybe if we had time to plan and knew more about the area around the site. But in this little time…”

Somehow this all didn’t seem like the colonel’s level of planning. “He didn’t have a backup plan?”

Stolen novel; please report.

Frank’s face went sour. “We did. It involved Veronica. With her gone…” He trailed off. “We discussed having her infiltrate the demonstration and steal one of the German mechs.”

“We could still do that!” Hannah leaned forward eagerly. “I volunteer.”

Angelica looked surprised at her offer. I certainly was. “How would we get you in there?”

Anastasia had been quiet up until this point but now she stirred. “I could escort her. The pilots were all supposed to be volunteers. We could probably we could talk our way in.”

Tamara, who had been sitting and sipping her own coffee, spoke up, a challenge in her voice. “You would give up your mech? I thought you liked flying.”

Anastasia shook her head. “Not me. I would just go with her, do the talking.”

Angelica addressed Hannah directly. “You would break your bond with your mech for this?”

“If there is a chance of getting something better? Absolutely.” Hanna closed her eyes. Her expression seemed odd in the middle of a conversation. We all stared at her for a moment. Then she gave a kind of whole-body shudder and opened them again. For a moment she looked like she had bitten into something sour, and then her expression cleared and her smile came back. "There. Now I'm ready."

Angelica gasped in shock. Frank and I were not as quick on the uptake. Everyone else had expressions of horror and curiosity. "Did you just..."

Hannah nodded as Tamara finished the sentence. "Sever your link?"

"I didn't know you could do that," Frank said.

Angelica's frown was deep enough to be a glare. "It's easy enough, but who would consider it?”

“For a chance at an advanced German mech?” Hannah said with a smile that didn’t touch her eyes. “That's an easy choice."

"For a chance," Angelica said, emphasizing the word. "For just a chance you cut your bond?"

Hannah shrugged. "It's only a machine." "And now I can get a better one."

It took a while after Hannah’s little bombshell for the conversation to get back to planning.

In the end the plan was as audacious as it was simple. Hannah would infiltrate the group of Russian pilots. She was confident she would be able to do this, and Anastasia was going with her to help her blend in. Once they were confident of her integration and the timing of the demonstration, we would spring the second part of our plan. The gunship was going to drop into St. Petersburg and unload all four mechs we had available. We would then do battle with the Germans' prototypes on the streets of St. Petersburg.

That was it. We had a coordination plan and everything relied on those two to be able to accomplish their infiltration and to meet up with us.

We didn't have confidence that the older-generation mechs of Poland or the two Russian air mechs would be a serious challenge for the new German models. But with Hannah working against them on the inside and the element of surprise, it seemed like there was a solid chance. And our only real objective was to humiliate General Petrov. Once that was accomplished, we would all evacuate and get out of there, the air mechs providing cover in case any aircraft had been scrambled.

I had reservations about what the point of it all was. Were we really going to humiliate General Petrov, or were we merely going to give his fancy new toys some punching bags, thereby showing off how superior they were? It would all come down to Hannah's infiltration. And of course, the forlorn hope that there would be no other surprises.

I didn't know if Hannah was up for the task. The timid, scared hussar I had met when I first awoke. I wouldn't have given any odds on her pulling this off. But Hannah had changed. Since Transylvania, she had had a more focused and cutthroat attitude. Had that translated to success in something like this, I had no idea.

Since the meeting was wrapping up I went down to perform mech maintenance. I had performed service on the mechs when we were enroute from Crimea. So they were in as good a condition as they could be. Hannah's mech was eerily still. None of my downloaded knowledge said mechs should give off any indication when they were bonded or not. But there was something subtle to one whose systems were bonded with a rider. An undefinable hum of life about it. And Hannah's mech was dead now. She had severed the link before she left. The other mech riders had all seemed shocked by how casually she had done it. Not that doing it was hard, It was just a little matter of will, but that she had done it without hesitation once the plan to steal the German mechs had been proposed.

I was greasing some fittings that didn’t need it when Angelica arrived in the bay. "Sergeant do you have a minute?"

There was a concerning note in her voice so I started buttoning up the access panel

“Certainly Captain.”

"I didn't tell you everything about what happened in there. I think the tsar sold us out."

I felt a pang of surprise. I glanced over at her and she seemed serious.

"Are you sure?"

"I don't know. They didn't put us in handcuffs. He didn't seem concerned or surprised by the police arrival. I think he made a call while you were out."

"You weren't keeping an eye on him?"

"For the most part, but not every minute. I wasn't trying to keep him from signaling anyone."

"So, what's your concern?" I was trying to figure out why it is she had made me pull over here. What advice did she need?

"I'm worried about telling the others. If it really was the tsar who tipped them off, then our mission is a bust. There's nothing we could do to make him sign a peace treaty. Is there?"

I considered this. A captain asking me for advice was rare, but nothing new. Sometimes an officer just needed a sounding board from someone who was more or less sworn to secrecy. Someone who had the experience to second-guess their decisions, but not the mandate. It's difficult to explain, but sometimes a senior officer or a captain who's been in the service for a long time can be a safe ear for a junior officer.

"Well, Captain, it's like this. I don't think the colonel trusted him. Mazur is no fool. If he thought this was our best course of action, then I think we should go through with it."

"Even if it means sending our people to their deaths for nothing?" She was showing me uncharacteristic vulnerability, and I respected that. As soldiers, there's always a chance that what we do won't matter in the long run. It isn't our place to think about that. We can't. Only history can decide that. We can only follow orders and trust, hope, that those in charge know what they're doing. We pretend they know what they're doing because that's all we can do.

“But now I'm the one in charge.”

"True," I said. "But we know the colonel's plan, and nothing has changed that yet. Let doubts get in your way. Keep a clear head until the plan is so foobar that you have no choice but to change it."

"Foobar?" she asked.

Due to my golem constitution, I didn't blush. "F.U.B.A.R. Ma’am. Fucked up beyond all recognition.:”

"Ah. Yes, I haven't heard that one. It's a good one.

“I suspect your army...our army... kept some of the best acronyms from the ladies."

"You might be right." The cheerfulness was back in her voice. Which relieved me to no end. Nothing makes an NCO's world tremble quite as badly as an officer with doubts. Right or wrong, we needed them to sound confident. We wanted them to sound confident. We needed them to sound confident. Even when we were sure they didn't know what they were doing, somewhere deep inside we wanted to believe that they did. It wasn't nice to get confirmation that they were as human as anyone else.