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 Join Gisel Matah as she gallops over battlefields at the head of Iskander’s 3rd Cavalry in this sequel to "Deadly Enterprise".
While the Iskander_Felger partnership increases in power and influence, and her lover Yohan extends their transportation network up the Lubitz River with a fleet of steam tugs, Gisel becomes involved in a bold strategy to end the Empire’s siege of neighbouring Leki.
Undercover intrigue opens the adventure when an agent of hers is murdered aboard one of their own vessels. Then she has to lie to friends to protect the fledgling Radical movement she hopes may one day lead their allies to more egalitarian governments. Her relationship falters when both she and Yohan keep secrets from the other because the Baron has Yohan smuggle a steam engine to the Empire.
Her old enemy Zagdorf lurks in the background to harm her and Iskander, but the greatest challenge she must meet is facing down the psychopathic Crown Prince of Skathia who threatens them all with destruction. Iskander’s steam engines and artillery are coveted by both enemies and friends. Some see Iskander’s technology as a liberating force and some fear it as a demon. Who knows better how their hopes and fears for the future will fare than Gisel, regarded by the superstitious Prince as ’daughter of the man who mates fire and water’?
Her old lover, General Lord Ricart, causes her and Yohan a terriffic row when he offers her a cavalry command. Yohan strives to calm his jealousy and his fear for her as she goes to war, and even plays his own part in the action. The future of many nations hinges on her tactical and negotiating skills in a confrontation along the Makberg River, not far from the location at Abersholm that determined her fortunes in "Deadly Enterprise". New friends, allies, and enemies as well as all the old ones fill the pages when Major Gisel Matah sets out to gain "The Wildcat’s Victory".
Prologue
Robert Matah looked up from the keyboard when he heard a warning chime transmitted from somewhere in the bowels of the starship Iskander. A caution signal - with the overhaul of the Intruder complete, the workers were clearing the hangar in preparation for a launch.
He stared at the viewport across the empty control room. Below the starship’s stationary orbit the distant globe of Gaia shone like a turquoise jewel in full sunlight. It looked a lot like his Earth, but with a few big differences - no signs of space traffic, no huge grey blotches of cities, no Twenty-second Century bustle. This Earth was primitive, a world cast back in time -- the nearest guess they’d been able to make suggested five hundred years back. Nothing but sailing ships and cannon here, until his father got the steelworks and factories going.
Robert hated visiting the surface, resented losing the sophistication and stimulation of the world he’d grown up in. He and his sister, Gisel, had come along with their father on a mission to develop industry and resource extraction for a new colony called N-3 in their own galaxy. Intended as a ten-year stint, they’d go home with enough salary banked to set up any career they desired. Instead, they’d wound up here -- another Earth, but one with a different history. Five goddam years wasted so far! Somehow the Iskander had jumped right out of their own reality and wound up in something he’d believed was only a wild theory -- an alternate universe.
He glanced at the Situation Screen, almost the only instrument in the control room they hadn’t transported down to their base on the surface. It showed a map of the world, oh so similar to the map of home, but with enough differences in place names and coastlines to make it foreign.
He’d built up the map with individual strips of spectroscopic imagery from the low orbit satellite system he had charge of. The Intruder would launch one more of the satellites on its way down to the surface. One more with imaging capability as well as communications and navigation systems -- all brought from Earth to be used around N-3. Hope those folks were okay without them. He’d had to calculate an orbit that would allow this satellite to keep checking on a huge army headed their way from the Skathian heartland.
More goddamn trouble, it looked like -- as if they hadn’t enough. Gisel, the crazy one of the family, lapped this world up. Who would have thought the gawky little gymnast kid would blossom into their best agent, and damn-near best officer too? He had to admire her, if only begrudgingly. She’d switched from competition gymnastics to foils when she hit thirteen. Talk about landing in a pile of gold dust. Turned out, swordsmanship was the one damned thing they’d needed to make their way when they arrived. She’d been every crew member’s instructor. If you could carry a rapier, and at least keep from getting spitted, you were counted a gentleman among the locals. Lady? Not so sure, but Gisel carved her own way. Status was everything -- too bad he couldn’t even draw steel without damn-near cutting his own fingers off.
He stared down at the jumble of numbers on his computer screen, that he’d hoped would show how they’d wound up here. Another false trail -- nothing here to explain the jump out of their own universe. Best he get back to his other priority project. He was debugging the routine he’d written to decipher the Trigon Empire’s primitive radio messages they’d intercepted. It had to be in some language nobody had heard of. If only he had the key to it.
President Scopes -- plain old Dirk Scopes, intended to be N-3’s administrator five years ago -- had given him the task of piecing together all the data they’d gathered on the mysterious rulers of the Empire. He was damned certain the Trigons were also off-worlders who had wound up stranded on Gaia as well. Hardly anyone believed him, except Gisel. She’d sent him an account of an empire based around the Mediterranean, that the Trigons had conquered two hundred years ago.
That empire had probably descended from the Carthaginians -- seemed there’d never been a Roman Empire here, nor any of the institutions that had grown out of it. Nobody knew where the Trigons had come from, but rumors of some weapon called the Sky Thunder abounded. A spaceship? If it was, it seems it had crapped out in the intervening years; the Trigon Empire now enjoyed the same technology any other Seventeenth Century nation would have -- except for their analog radio.
The Emperor and his Trigon cohorts ruled this Empire with a heavy hand. They allowed no one to make a voyage of exploration or invent anything -- not even a mousetrap -- without Imperial say-so. Until the Iskander arrived.
As a team of resource scientists and engineers sent to develop the technical infrastructure on N-3, it had been a foregone conclusion they’d set themselves up to do the same here. They’d landed in Sweden -- called Tarnland on Gaia -- and intervened in a war of independence to ingratiate themselves with the Autarch and his nobles. Now his father, Henrik Matah PhD PEng, ran a modern steelworks and factory complex -- well almost modern. The Old Man had decided on a gradual development in order to train the locals to carry on the Iskander legacy. These people could learn steam engines and iron founding; whereas semiconductors, nuclear physics, and bioengineering were right out of everyone’s league. Damned hard to find enough of these dumb Gaians who could learn to swing a wrench without stripping every thread in sight. And even half the Iskanders were lost in anything more complex than matrix algebra.
So the Empire was out to get them. Gisel had experienced trouble with some heavy called Zagdorf, and the Imperial army had intervened in the war Iskander was helping its Tarnland ally win. Whomped the bastards at sea, though. The Empire ships were small sailing ships armed with a mess of mismatched cannon, so Father’s updated warships from the Napoleonic era had swept them from the Inland Sea. Baltic, that was. Yeah, sailing ships -- all the locals knew, except for the few steamships Iskander and the Felger Partnership had put to sea in the past eighteen months.
In the past year they’d made a big jump in production, now they had the Felger family enterprise to help move the products of Iskander factories. The Felgers were locals who owned the biggest trading, banking, and mining business in European Gaia. Gisel had been instrumental in getting the family on their side, probably because she could twist the Baron and his nephew Yohan around her little finger. Yohan was her new lover, the third she’d had since hitting the planet, and she insisted she was going to marry this one. She’d said that before. Good luck to the girl. She certainly carried more than her share of the load down there on the surface.
The warning chime came again; that meant the Intruder was about to launch. He’d better get back to work and quit staring out at Gaia floating amid the stars. With only six people who could work on the space plane, out of a hundred off-worlders, it had taken two months to complete a thousand-hour overhaul. Intruder was their lifeline, the shuttle between the Iskander in its stationary orbit and the surface. He hated the surface, so why did he feel so claustrophobic whenever Intruder left? If anything happened to it, he’d be even more stranded than his sister below, immersed in Gaian society.
Iskander had no fuel to move out of orbit, and couldn’t enter the atmosphere. Father had said it would take at least ten years to build and send a rocket up from the surface -- and he had no people to spare to work on such a project. Every person they had was stretched to the limit keeping what infrastructure they already possessed working. With only a hundred people trying to make over the whole world, they hit their heads against a wall as often as they made a breakthrough. Every small movement was a victory.
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