“I have heard of no troop movements toward this world from the Marik-Stewart Commonwealth,” Rikkard said abruptly. “As for my own reinforcements, even if they were only a day away, I would hardly share that information with you, lady.”
She nodded her head in response to the obvious truth of this statement.
“More to the point, we have never had a good relationship with a spheroid government. You offer friendship and potential support from an empire that would profit more than most others from possession of the world of Marik. It would be all too easy for you to slide into our rear arc and eliminate us with a quick salvo of betrayal.”
“How dare you—” she began, but he brusquely cut her off.
“Please, lady. Do not think we are so naïve as your history books portray us. We have learned much in the long decades we have spent in the Inner Sphere.”
She dropped her false anger and gave a grudging nod.
“If that is all you have to say, then we are done here.”
“I will remain on-world,” she said quickly, as he turned away.
“Why?”
“Because things change quickly in war, Star Colonel. And because sometimes an offer of friendship is just that. My offer stands as long as I am here on Marik. Please consider it.”
Mountain Retreat
Paltos, Atreus
Marik-Stewart Commonwealth
“Thrice-damned ol’ man!” Anson Marik bellowed his fury into the wintry air, shaking his massive fists above his head. Snow fell lightly on his bare arms, but the heat of his anger kept him warm.
“My lord,” a guard said quietly from the doorway. “You should not shout on the veranda. You might be heard.”
Anson leveraged his frame around to face the guard, who blanched at the intensity of his focus. “Haven’t you got a full battalion of troops secreted across the ten thousand acres of this estate?”
“Yes, my lord,” the guard responded, eyes wildly seeking an escape route.
“And you’ve got overlapping remote sensors set up, with corresponding monitoring stations.”
“Yes, my lord,” the guard responded, his voice growing softer.
“And you’ve even got a Schatten surveillance air-ship covering the entire area during the night.”
The guard nodded mutely.
“Then by God I’ll scream on my own veranda if I wish, and be damned with this hiding. The ol’ man did this on purpose!”
The guard managed to snap to attention while simultaneously wilting, his face averted and eyes closed as though praying he might be anywhere but here, receiving the full brunt of his lord’s ire. Anson turned back to face the beauty of the landscape beyond the deck, though he didn’t see it. His hands trembled as he scanned the document again, though the words already were burned into his brain.
How dare you waste so much time, ol’ man? You squawk about security, send your message by a circuitous route using a special self-destructing verigraph courier. “That our enemies not discover what we are about.” Anson’s chest heaved, his exhaled breath an explosive white column torn to wisps by the weight of its moisture.
Months I’ve waited. Months I waited for the stinking ol’ man to fulfill his part of the bargain and when he finally responds, he whines about security concerns? I’m losing our ancestral home world to upstart tincanners and he’s worried that someone will find out we’ve been talking to each other? And to top it off,he’s only willing to rattle his saber on the border . . . and he’s sending an old man, three women and a dog!
The cool breeze off the frozen mountain lake a kilometer distant ruffled his hair and tugged at the whiskers of the beard he’d begun to grow. A new thought occurred to him. “It’s not your home world, is it, ol’ man?” he ground out between clenched teeth. “You make claims on being captain-general, but you’ve not a drop of Marik blood in your body. If Marik burns, it doesn’t matter to you! You’ll pay for this, ol’ man. I’ve got our agreement in writing. Right now I’ve got to slap down some thrice-damned Clanners. But I’ll not forget this. Mark my words, ol’ man.
“I’ll not forget.”
Chateau de Leon
Julon Mountain, Clipperton
Regulan Fiefs
In their busiest season, when tourists traveled from nearby worlds for the Fief-class skiing all along the Julon Mountain range—and to marvel at the majesty of the spectacularly appointed Chateau de Leon lounge and dining hall, which hung over a thousand-meter precipice—supplies were packed cheek by jowl along both sides of the corridor between the cargo docking bay and the kitchens of the Chateau de Leon (directly under the dining hall and hotel), causing the constant flow of employees to constrict.
Jason moved with fluid grace despite the hubbub, never bumping into anyone. His waiter’s vest bleached brilliantly white and his black pants pressed until the front crease could double as a razor blade and his shoes buffed until he could see his reflection—he carried himself with the assurance of an employee long accustomed to his job, knowing exactly where he needed to be. The only element out of place in his appearance was the satchel he carried over his shoulder; it was not time for a shift change, and so some of his fellow employees thought it was odd that he was still carrying an outside bag if he was already working the late-morning brunch. But his confident stride, pleasant smile and sincere blue eyes consistently discouraged anyone from questioning him.
Despite his long limbs and easy pace, he took an inordinate amount of time to traverse the entire length of the underground corridor. A stop to adjust the satchel; to remove a rock from his shoe; to scratch his calf; to pull out and check his schedule; to retie his shoe: each time he stopped he balanced himself against a crate, or a bundle of bags, or a rolled and heavily taped package.
By the time he reached the end of the corridor and neared the intersection of three conjoining corridors— one that led directly into the kitchens, another to the staff area and the third up into the Chateau and hotel proper—his bag was significantly lighter, but not noticeably so.
It didn’t have to be done exactly like this, of course. They’d spent years preparing, lining up the careful deliveries through half a dozen different companies, spreading a net across nearly two dozen worlds. But Jason wasn’t a man to leave any detail to chance. And this would be his crowning achievement. The one that would put him into the history books. They would talk about this for decades to come. Study it in every nuanced detail.
Perhaps even centuries.
He leaned against the wall, and now people did notice him, for he wore a strange expression on his face; even more unusual, however, was the sight of a waiter in his bleached vest with his back against the none-too-clean ferrocrete wall.
One of the older waiters began to make his way through the swirling stream of people toward Jason, intent on bringing the young man up to snuff. Jason smiled sweetly at him and depressed the initiation key in his pocket.
The key—which would only work at close range— launched the triggering devices he’d placed on half a dozen packages the restaurant had received in the past week, which transmitted microbursts of encrypted electrons that tripped safety measures, allowing micro-battery packs to engage and ignite fuses, which sparked in a microsecond display of unseen twinkling blue lights buried deep among cartons of dried fish, bails of fresh linens, shanks of imported calloway wildebeest and more: nearly a ton of high-grade pentaglycerine explosive detonated in almost perfect unison.
The occupants of the hallway were obliterated instantly as the explosives received a huge force multiplier from the heavily reinforced ferrocrete columns and corridors of the chateau. The expanding blast wave rushed back along the direction Jason had traveled and tossed around the heavy hover trucks in the bay like so many children’s toys, turned the walls leading into the kitchen into a storm of superheated ferrocrete shivs that killed nanoseconds before the crushing overpressure pulverized flesh and the firestorm incinerated bone. No perceptible time passed before the blast disi
ntegrated the ceiling and exploded upward into the packed dining hall, wreaking unimaginable horror.
Perched like a raptor’s nest on the precipice, the Chateau de Leon underwent years of rigorous computer modeling before the government granted a license to build the extensive facility, including a thousand-room hotel behind the dining hall and lounge. But no engineering test could conceivably have taken into account the forces thus dropped into the heart of the structure. Its mooring pillars, driven meters deep into the cliff’s edge, were shorn off as first the dining hall toppled and then the very cliff face itself, damaged beyond structural limits, collapsed as well, carrying most of the hotel with it.
In the instant Jason died, he knew nearly ten thousand people would meet their various gods on the same day.
Yes, they’d talk about it for centuries. . . .
20
Dormuth
Mandoria, Marik
Marik-Stewart Commonwealth
2 January 3137
Rikkard glanced wearily at the monitor, trying to make sense of the deluge of images that washed the screen. The sounds of explosions tickled the back of his mind, but he swam through a malaise of fatigue and frustration and the weight of his dream fading day after day.
A warning Klaxon snapped him out of one of his all-too-frequent spells as a brace of missiles rained down metal hell across the lower extremities of his Shadow Hawk IIC. Moving too quick for him to identify it, the vehicle vanished down a side street five hundred meters farther down the street. Rikkard shook his head to dislodge the cobwebs and jerked his targeting reticule to the right as another warning Klaxon signaled incoming enemy fire. Two short-range missiles from a battlearmor caught him just below the chin of his machine. The concussive blast did very little damage against the tough center-torso armor, but the feedback from the near hit to the head spiked his adrenaline, burning away the last remnants of fog in his brain.
He lined up a shot as he watched a battlearmored infantry expertly make contact some twenty stories up the side of a nearby building and ram its huge battle claw into the ferrocrete, anchoring itself in position. It reoriented to him, drawing a bead with the laser mounted in its right arm to fire off a series of short, coherent ruby beams that nipped at his flanks like a pup intent on pulling down a beast ten times its size.
Rikkard manipulated his joysticks, brought both arms to bear and let fly with a flurry of emerald darts that pulverized the battlearmor and even detonated part of the wall as moisture just below the surface vaporized under the hellish energies; as the wind cleared away the dust he could see that only the clawed arm, severed at the elbow, remained attached to the wall.
A battered Nova Cat hove into view from an adjacent street five hundred meters away, battlearmor swarming it like gnats. Rikkard automatically moved his targeting reticule over the armored troopers; under normal circumstances, he would attempt the difficult shot required to pick off the offending enemy without damaging the ’Mech. In this situation, however, he knew such aid would be violently rejected.
If you are the nova cat spirit incarnate, as you preach since your resurrection from deep beneath the collapsed building, then you cannot be killed and I will not help you, Janis. Bile threatened to rise into his throat as he contemplated how her death in battle would make his situation less complicated.
He methodically worked the pedals to swing his ’Mech around to its original course and throttled it to a walk, arms automatically sweeping for enemies he knew would appear at any moment. Knowing that despite the daily losses he must continue to launch attacks around the heart of the city or lose the initiative completely. Recognizing that his command was slowly slipping away as Janis undermined his authority. Bitterly accepting his own growing doubt of the truth of his vision.
Galaxy Commander, why do you not come?
Dormuth
Amur, Oriente
Oriente Protectorate
Commander Casson concluded the presentation of his plan for the invasion of Marik. He clicked off the holoprojector and the lights in the secure room automatically came up, lighting the faces of Lady Jessica Marik and her youngest daughter, Lady Nikol Marik. He stood at attention, respectfully averting his eyes from their nearly identical expressions. Peas in a pod, those two.
As the minutes passed he subtly clenched and relaxed his leg muscles so that he could remain strictly at attention until they were ready to comment. He was not nervous; he respected the intelligence of both women and knew they thoroughly understood his plan. Now they were attempting to poke holes in it.
“Nikol?” Jessica finally prompted, drawing Casson’s eyes first to the mother and then to the younger copy cast from the same physical mold.
“We don’t have that many forces available at this time.”
“Correct.” Casson nodded. “This would require at least three months—I’d prefer six—to reposition troops.”
“Even then you’re leaving our borders dangerously exposed.”
He nodded in agreement, gratified by Nikol’s intelligent analysis. You’ve grown up overnight, my lady. Happy to finally see the lady Jessica and one of her heirs. “My lady,” he began, nodding toward Jessica, “this proposal is based on two premises. One. That we need to capture Marik, and that goal is our highest priority. Two. That our border with the Anduriens is secure as a result of the agreement reached with House Liao. A security, by default, that extends to our border with Liao.”
“Never trust a Liao farther than you can throw a branth, Commander,” Nikol advised him. He fought to conceal a smile at the acerbity in her voice.
“I live by that principle, Lady Nikol. However, I was provided with two basic premises and have formulated a plan accordingly. I have not repositioned everything from those two borders, but I’m well aware that I’ve significantly weakened our defenses there.”
“You’ve stripped too much from our borders with the Fiefs. They’ll know when we move such a large continent.”
“Yes, they will.”
“And this is your best plan?”
He took no offense at her rebuke. So glad to see the lady Jessica in you. “No.”
“No,” she said, eyes clouding as her forehead creased. “I don’t understand. Why would you deliver a faulty battle plan?”
“It is by no means faulty, my lady. This is a viable option, though it does entail significant risk.”
“But you say you have a better plan.”
“I did not have a better plan until yesterday, my lady.”
Nikol’s forehead creased even more; then it smoothed as she slowly turned to look at her mother; even Casson’s long association with the family provided insufficient insight for him to read the conversation taking place behind the inscrutable look both women now wore. With the skill of any military man who dealt extensively with the nobility, he once more found something interesting on the back wall to occupy his time, surreptitiously scratching an itch on the back of his hand against his pant leg.
“Spit it out, Mother.” Nikol finally broke the tableau. “I’ve already figured out the Spirit Cat angle. It’s where you sent Julietta, after all. If we can ally with the Spirit Cats, we’ll significantly lower our resource requirements for the invasion. But that still leaves several worlds we need to capture in the interim to cut off Marik and keep Anson from reclaiming the world. What else have you got up your sleeve?”
“I never reveal everything up my sleeve, my dear. You of all people should know that by now,” the lady Jessica responded, voice lilting with suppressed humor.
“Fine. But you’ve got to reveal some of it.”
“I do?”
“Yes. Like the fact that you’ve already moved some troops near the border over the last year.”
From the corner of his eye Casson saw Lady Jessica’s eyebrows arch.
“I have?”
“Yes, Mother. You have. You’ve been working at this for too long to not have made such preparation. What I don’t understand is how you expect to kee
p the Fiefs occupied if they realize how dangerously exposed you’ve left our border.”
“Something for you to think about in the coming weeks. Are your preparations complete?”
“Of course.”
Despite her cool words, Casson detected the excitement just below the surface and suppressed a smile.
“Commander Casson,” Jessica said.
“Yes, my lady,” he responded smartly, looking her square in the face before adjusting his eyes to her chin as was appropriate.
“You have two important duties in this coming campaign.”
“Aye, my lady.”
“Which is the most important?”
“My blood for yours, my lady,” he responded instantly, his fervor completely unfeigned.
“Very good.”
Nikol tried to not bounce in her seat as Janos walked into the small sitting room. Despite her occupation with the fueled DropShips sitting on a tarmac waiting for tomorrow’s launch, her brother’s face shocked her back to the here and now. You look so old, Janos!
“Welcome, son,” Jessica said, indicating the only unoccupied chair in the room.
Nikol tried to gauge from her mother’s voice and expression whether she could see the change in Janos, but her mother was as inscrutable as ever.
“Mother,” Janos said, easing into the chair as though he really had aged ten years in the months he’d spent touring the independent border worlds. “Nikol,” he continued, nodding perfunctorily in her direction before returning his attention to their mother.
I love you too , brother.
“How was your trip, my son?”
“It did not go as well as we’d hoped.”
“No?”
“No. Though I was well received in every system, a common undercurrent ran through every reception. Though only one or two rulers harbored real animosity toward Oriente, even those most inclined to ally with you seemed reluctant to be too open about their feelings.”
Pandora's Gambit Page 18
