The Wildcat's Victory

The novel opens at night aboard the Swift, a small steam packet of the Partnership that runs a commercial service between Skrona and Lubitz on opposite sides of the Baltic, (called the Inland Sea on Gaia). Gisel meets one of Colonel M'Tov's agents and wants to know what he has been assigned to do. The two parts of Iskander Security, M'Tov's and the Matah's, do not always work together, reflecting the policy arguments in the Iskander administration. While they talk a splash is heard and Gisel sees a hand in the moonlight, someone has been thrown overboard.

She spends the whole night investigating what turns out to have been a murder. Someone has killed a Felger workman who was on the way to assemble steam engines in Lubitz...either for the Partnership or for the covert steam engine that is believed to be on the way to the Empire. This man was one of the Matah's and Gisel must investigate...was this an act of the Empire...or worse, the Felger's?

The investigation causes terrible tension between Gisel and Yohan, and to save their love affaire she hands off the job to another agent and plans to leave Lubitz. When an earlier lover of hers, General Lord Ricart of Amberden, asks her to take command of a force of cavalry to screen his advance against an Imperial city she takes on the difficult task. That causes enough trouble between her and the jealous Yohan as it is.

So the novel develops two main threads...the spy investigation and the military action. Gisel's cavalry action is almost a war-game for the reader...what equipment and tactics must she use to carry out her task against the much larger Imperial forces. She has tricked Ricart into attaching a battery of the new quick-firing field guns to her battalion and uses them as a force-multiplier against the cannon armed Imperial forces. Think of it as a battery of Maxim-Nordenfeldt guns that so troubled the British Army in the Boer War let loose against an army of Louis XIV in the eighteenth century. All war-gamers love 'what ifs'.

The final fight against the Empire forces leads straight into a murderous meeting in a nomad's yurt where Gisel has to confront two enemies at once while she struggles to save both Iskander...and her own life. This is the ultimate "Wildcat's Trick".

Dettagli