The Price of Glory

by William H. Keith

  He leaned back in the chair, rubbing his long, bony fingers down across his eyes and face. He sat there for so long, head thrown back, eyes closed, that Lori thought he might have fallen asleep while talking her. "I came here last night," he said at last. "This morning, rather . . . because what Graff said was nagging at me. We'd heard about the Star League cache from King, of course. I confess I was curious about its never having been found . . . but I had other things on my mind at the time, and I just didn't think about it long enough. Then Graff said that ComStar had that same information, and was . . . interested."

  "Interested enough to try to turn us out in disgrace."

  "Damn it, Lori . . . interested enough to coldly arrange the murder of millions of people, just to establish a legal pretext! God, Lori ... do your realize what that means? ComStar has billed itself all this time as the perfect neutral, above any of the petty politics and squabblings between the major houses! Mercenaries out of every Successor State use ComStar's services as broker and banker in arranging contracts! They control the communications services on every world in their net from Apollo to the Pleiades! Now they callously condone— arrange!—the murder of ten or twelve million civilians . . . to establish a legal pretext!''

  Lori had trouble finding her voice. She had not followed the reasoning behind Graff's words as far as Grayson had, and the meaning was only now dawning in her. "They . . . ComStar . . . must want Helm very badly . . ."

  Grayson looked at her. The dark circles under his eyes were alarming. "It makes me wonder how many other political pies they've had their fingers in during the last few centuries. I have this . . . this picture ... of ComStar as the sixth Great House, unseen, invisible, but working behind the scenes, manipulating the other Houses toward its own ends."

  "What ends?"

  "God, but I wish I knew. Or maybe I don't! If they can order the deaths of twelve million innocent people ..."

  Lori stepped across to a point behind Grayson's chair and circled his neck with her arms. He leaned his head back against her breasts, his eyes closed.

  "It's possible," he said at last, "that this Rachan that Graff kept talking about is operating outside of ComStar authority.''

  "A renegade? An outlaw?"

  "Something like that. But it's also possible we've stumbled across something much larger than the scheming of one man."

  Lori heard the certainty in Grayson's voice, and knew he had already arrived at a decision. "What are you going to do?" she asked.

  "The first thing we have to do is guarantee the security of the regiment. But after that . . .I'm beginning to think we might be able to upset Rachan's ... or ComStar's . . . plans."

  She caught the excitement in his voice. He swiveled the chair around so that he could face her. There was a fire behind those cool, gray eyes that she had never seen in all the time she had known him.

  "Lori! I think I know where the Star League cache is!"

  She looked into his eyes for a long moment. Their feverishness worried her. Is he grasping at any hope ? she thought. He's desperate to save the Legion . . . and so tired! He can't so quickly have found what others have been seeking for so long!

  It was impossible that he, working for a few hours, and without sleep, should solve a puzzle that had apparently been occupying ComStar scholars for years.

  "Gray ..."

  His exhaustion made him vulnerable. She could clearly read the disappointment in his face.

  "You don't believe me, do you?"

  "Gray, you're wiped out . . . exhausted."

  And then she realized he was laughing at her.

  "Think I've punched out, do you? Well, so did I, when I first saw it. Look."

  He swung his chair back to face the terminal and began pecking at the keyboard. Both map displays shifted slightly, expanding to show the broad sweep of plain from the Nagayan Mountains to the shores of the Yehudan Sea. On the left, the Yehudan Sea was green and blue-green, the gray sprawl of the city on its shore an obviously live and growing entity. The faintly red-tinged Vermillion curled across the landscape toward the mountains. The thin, black streaks of ferrocrete roads and skimmer pathways crisscrossed the land.

  On the right, the Yehudan was dry and mineral-encrusted. The city was still an untidy grey sprawl, but it had been rearranged, with a distinctly circular pattern where Kurita's weapons had vaporized the central area and reduced everything beyond the crater to rubble. Sections of roads were still visible, but broken by stretches where dirt had covered the pavement and grass had covered the dirt. The river was visible as a faint ocher track winding west from the ruined city, as dry and empty as the dead sea bottom itself.

  "Now . . . see the difference?"

  She studied the maps, her eyes shifting from one to the other and back again. "The Yehudan Sea is gone."

  "Of course. What else?"

  "Freeport is in ruins."

  "What else?"

  Lori started to say she was too tired to play guessing games, but the words froze in her mouth. "The river," she managed at last. "The river east of the mountains is dried up.”

  “Exactly."

  She stepped over next to Grayson, leaning forward to study the map more closely. "When Freeport was nuked, perhaps the river was blocked off.”

  "Possibly. There is evidence here of some sort of massive construction across the mouth of the river right on Freeport's waterfront, but the blast destroyed whatever it was. But look. The Vermillion River used to flow out of the Yehudan Sea, here." He traced the course with a display pointer on the screen. "The Yehudan is quite a distance above sea level, up here on the North Highland Plains. It flowed toward the Nagayan Mountains and vanished underground, probably into a subterranean cave system. It re-emerges here, on the western face of the mountains and drops—here—nearly 2500 meters to the West Equatorial Sea.

  "What first caught my eye was that if the sea had dried up, then the river would dry up, too." He shifted his pointer to the right-hand map, which showed the area as it was in the present.

  "But right here, we see the Vermillion emerging from underground on the west wide of the mountains. It's not nearly as big as it used to be. You can see that it's only a trickle compared to what it was 300 years ago."

  "Well, the river could have dried up between Freeport and the mountains," Lori said uncertainly, "but the western half is still being fed by melting glaciers or underground springs."

  "Agreed." Grayson nodded vigorously. "Still, it was unusual enough to make me curious. I started examining the old Helmfast map carefully, using full magnification to explore the valley, here where the Vermillion flows off the North Highland Plains and underground." He typed rapidly, and the left-hand map expanded sharply. The red-tinged waters of the river could be seen flowing through a shallow valley. After winding through a kilometer or so of wild and rocky terrain, the river turned sharply right and vanished under a slab of granite the size of a large building.

  Grayson kept typing, and the right-hand map expanded to the same scale, centered on the same area. "And I started examining the map we took from the mobile headquarters, the one made five days ago. The hardest part was using the computer to reconcile two different coordinate systems, so that I can punch one set of coordinates into the terminal and have the same spot displayed at the same magnification on both maps, new and old."

  Lori looked from one display to the other, feeling more and more confused. It was hard to believe that the two were centered on the same coordinate system, as Grayson claimed. The outline of the Vermillion River Valley was clearly the same on both displays. The one on the left had water in it, the one on the right did not, but the general lay of the surrounding land, the shape of the banks, were all clearly the same. The vegetation was different, of course, sparser in the modern view. There was also a building in the modern view that was not on the older one, a low, structure of metal and ferrocrete, set into the side of a hill overlooking the bank.

  Such changes were to be expected in
three centuries, and so were easily discounted. What was confusing was the shape of the land where the river vanished under the rock. In the one view, the river flowed into what might be a cave mouth under a vast slab of stone. In the other, the empty river valley ran up to that same slab of stone-only now, the slab of stone was standing on end, a sheer, polished granite cliff face thirty meters tall. It was as though the river had flowed straight up to the foot of a cliff—and vanished, passing into solid rock. The land around was largely unchanged, except for places where the formerly gentle slopes of the valley walls had become steeper, almost vertical, in the area immediately around the slab. It looks like it's been dug out deliberately, Lori thought.

  "That makes no sense at all," she said. "It looks . . . deliberate! An earthquake? You said there could be earthquakes here ..."

  "I estimate that that stone slab weighs something like ten billion kilograms . . . ten million metric tons. Yes, an earthquake could have moved that large a weight . . . but could it have moved only that slab of stone, and not brought down these cliffs here ... or here? Or made the river banks collapse? What about this building, in the modern view? Maybe it was built after the . . . earthquake . . . but when you put it together with the lack of changes elsewhere in the area, well, I'm having trouble believing in an earthquake that selective."

  "That is the same rock, only turned on end?"

  "I'm convinced of it. It's not very thick, actually, from what I can see. It looks like it was deliberately pulled up and stood on end. I've been wondering if it wasn't trimmed a bit to fit here, across the river valley. And it looks to me as though the river valley itself was dug out some, to make the stone fit."

  "Then what you're saying—." She stopped. He's right! He really has found it!

  Grayson set the pointer on the enigmatic, vertical rock cliff. "Lori, my love, I think that what we are looking at here is a door. A very large, very strong, and very deliberately placed door."

  'The Star League weapons cache."

  "Makes sense," he said. "It's only about a hundred kilometers from Freeport. The fact that the river flowed down into the mountains suggests that there was some sort of a cave entrance there. I think that Star League engineer . . . what was his name?"

  "Keeler."

  "I think Major Keeler and his people diverted the river somehow, maybe by damming it off in Freeport. The river bed went dry, and left a large, clean, dry cave or tunnel, right through the mountain. When things were getting bad, and the Star League was falling apart, he moved the weapons cache up here. Put it into that tunnel, then sealed off the entrance by putting a cliff across the front of it! Minoru Kurita comes along a little later, looking for an old Star League cache, and finds it's gone. He searches all over, but can't find a clue. He would have made satellite recon maps at the time that would have shown the dry river bed, even the cliff, but he wouldn't have had older views showing that the river had actually been flowing here or that the cliff here was different, only a few months or years before!"

  "So he destroyed the world ..."

  "And in doing so, probably killed everyone who actually knew the secret of where the weapons were."

  "So how come ComStar couldn't figure this out?"

  "I doubt that anybody thought to compare the two maps, side by side. Maybe they worked with old maps that showed things as they were before the cache was hidden. They probably worked mostly with maps made after the destruction of Freeport. But you have to see them both, side by side, to realize that that"—he used the pointer to indicate the out-of-place cliff—"simply doesn't belong there!"

  "Next question. How do we get at it? That is your idea, isn't it?"

  He smiled, but exhaustion distorted the smile into something closer to a grimace. "How does brute force sound?"

  "I can just see you walking your Marauder up to that cliff and kicking it in."

  "I doubt that would do the trick. But we do have a healthy supply of explosives from the storehouse down in Durandel. And we have a former mining engineer who knows how to use it."

  "You think we could bring down the cliff?"

  Grayson used the pointer again. "I don't know geology that well, but I'm engineer enough to know that this cliff has to be supported . . . braced somehow . . . and it looks to me like that might be here, and here, on top of the cliff and at opposite sides of the valley. Or maybe our real engineer can come up with something better. And if DeVillar can't take three tons of high explosives and bring that cliff down, I'll be willing to tunnel in using a spoon!"

  "But why? Oh, sure ... we could use some new 'Mechs . . . and there're spares and repair facilities in there, certainly. But we can't use all that stuff, and I doubt that Langsdorf will give us time to enjoy it. All the equipment on Helm won't help us if all we have is our under-strength regiment . . . and no time to work out a decent defense."

  "For whatever reason, ComStar wants those weapons, Lori. I daresay they've promised a share of them to the Marik people working for them. Garth, for example, must be convinced he's going to get something out of all this, and that something would have to be pretty valuable."

  "Like a regiment or so of mint-perfect BattleMechs."

  "Right. Whether it was ComStar or Rachan working on his own, millions of people were slaughtered simply to get us out of the way, so that they could get their hands on that stuff." Grayson's mouth set again in an unyielding, bitter line. "They will not get away with that. If the cache is that valuable, let's see to it that they don't get it!"

  "You're going to destroy it?"

  "We'll see what Lieutenant DeVillar says. I suspect, though, that we'll either be able to break in, or we'll be able to so smash up the face of that mountain so that no one will ever get in. If we can enter, perhaps we'll be in a position to bargain with Langsdorf, and still cut out ComStar so that they don't profit from . . . from Sirius V. If we can't get in, we'll ruin it so that neither Marik or ComStar will ever find a way to get at the cache.

  "One way or another, Lori, Rachan is going to pay for Sirius V!"

  22

  Grayson still had not slept, and only the fire burning within his mind and heart kept him moving. He and Lori had returned to the encampment, where he had explained his discovery to the senior people, including all of A Company. The Legion was about to attempt something very difficult, he explained, and it would be good if the men knew just what would be expected of them.

  It had taken him five minutes to sketch an outline of the proposed plan: move south, find the cache, and seize it either as a bargaining tool or to prevent the Legion's betrayors from getting it. When DeVillar saw a printout of the cliff face area from the Marik map, he was confident that it would take only a small amount of explosives to bring it down. What he could not promise was whether or not the collapse would also cave in the cache tunnel. From the exterior, there was no indication of just how well-braced the hidden chamber might be.

  Grayson did not go into details about the possible location of the weapons cache, of course. There was too much chance that someone who knew the cache's secret would be captured, and fall into Rachan's or Garth's hands. Right now, the Legion had a slight head start, and Grayson would need every instant of it. If they could race south to the Nagayan Mountains as they'd originally planned, if they could reach the cliff face where the empty river valley ended, they might claim the mountain's secret before Garth or Rachan even knew what Grayson was up to.

  Whoever controlled Helm's secret would be in a powerful bargaining position and Grayson knew it. He was also tactician enough to realize that it would not be difficult to defend the approaches to that artificial cliff, perhaps making it possible to strike a deal with Langsdorf.

  If Langsdorf can keep Garth and ComStar off our backs, we could agree to split the cache with him, Grayson thought. Or maybe we could make a separate deal with Garth. That thought revolted him, because Garth had apparently been a willing participant in the destruction of Tiantan. It was Garth's report, and holographs taken b
y men in Garth's employ, that had shown the 'Mechs masquerading as Legion 'Mechs among Tiantan's ruins.

  First and foremost, though, he had to do what he could to save the regiment.

  But what is the right thing to do? he wondered. If I can save the Legion by striking a deal with Garth—or even Rachan—should I? Or should I try to use the weapons to strike a deal with someone else ? Who, though ? No one on Helm believes we didn't destroy Tiantan. So far as Steiner or Davion are concerned, we’re outlaws. They won't even talk to us!

  "Colonel?"

  Grayson turned at the sound of Alard King's voice. The senior Tech had moved up so quietly that Grayson had not heard him.

  Or maybe Lori was right, and he was asleep on his feet.

  "Yes, Alard?"

  The Tech looked uncertain. "Sir, I've got to talk to you. It's about what you told us just now.”

  “Yes?"

  "It's . . . well, I may have some additional information for you, something else to figure into your plans."

  "O.K. What is it?" It was not like King to be so indirect. It almost seemed that he was afraid.

  "I'm not entirely sure how to tell you this, Colonel . . . but I'm an agent."

  Grayson looked at him blankly. "Agent? What kind of agent?”

  "A spy, sir. I'm a spy."

  Grayson found himself laughing, somewhat to his own surprise, and certainly to King's. "What's so funny, sir?"

  "It's just that I don't think I've ever seen things get so complicated! Graff was a spy for Marik, then it turned out he was really a spy for ComStar. We've got spies running around in Helmdown that everybody knows about, and spies in the regiment that no one knows about. You and I go off into Helmdown to look for spies, and then it turns out that you're a spy yourself! O.K. . . . who are you spying for?"

  "Duke Hassid Ricol."

  Grayson's smile vanished instantly, his amusement suddenly gone, and even his exhaustion, too. He stared at King with a hard, cold expression. The Tech moved uncomfortably under his gaze.

  Duke Ricol! The man was a Kurita noble, whose power extended across several worlds on the Steiner-Kurita frontier. This gave him the actual power of an archduke, for dukes generally had responsibility for only a single world. Ricol had a reputation as a warrior, though he had not been in combat for many years. Along the Steiner border, he was well known, though, as "the Red Duke" or "the Red Hunter."