Bred for war

by Michael A. Stackpole

  The woman's eyes narrowed and Noble sensed a trap. "So everything here is yours? Nothing belongs to Doctor Lear?"

  "To the best of my knowledge, yes, everything here is mine."

  "Then perhaps you can explain this." The lieutenant led him back toward the small bedroom he'd made into his computer room. She stepped to the center of the hardwood floor and her aide took up a position beside the door. Spread out on the canvas army cot he'd been using as a table for computer manuals, Noble saw two packets of Kroner bound with K5,000 bands, a moneybelt from which two gold K10 coins had slipped, and an M&G P30 flechette pistol with four extra blocks of ballistic polymer. "Are these yours?"

  "That's a fortune in Kroner." Noble stared incredulously at the woman. "Where did you find this?"

  "In the floor, under the loose floorboard."

  "A hideaway?" Noble dropped to his knees and started to feel about like a blind man. The aide tapped a board with his toe. Noble slipped his fingernails into the crack and pried it up. "I'll be damned!"

  The lieutenant drew her head back and crossed her arms over her chest. "You're saying you know nothing of this?"

  Noble lifted the long section of board away with his right hand, then stared down at the hole. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then stabbed upward with his left hand, smashing his fist into the giant's groin. A second later, without rising from his knees, he backhanded the board edge against the lieutenant's right knee. Legs buckling, she started to go down.

  Reaching back beneath his jacket with his left hand, Noble pulled out the slender dagger he'd clipped to his belt at the small of his back. The blackened blade slid from the sheath as effortlessly as its six inches penetrated the wilting giant's chest just below his breastbone. Noble angled the cutup, then cocked his wrist to guarantee a fan-shaped wound that would get heart and both lungs.

  Looking back at the woman, he cracked the board down on her right hand as she clawed for her pistol. She screamed, but a blow to the head with the board stunned her enough to reduce the wail to a whimper. Another blow shattered her other wrist. 'The money, the weapons," she gasped. "You're a Davion agent."

  "Could be." Noble stood as he picked up the needle pistol, "but then, if I told you, I'd have to kill you." He pulled the slide back and charged the pistol. "But what the hell, I'll kill you anyway."

  He fired two shots into her chest, then shot the giant once as well. Satisfied that they were dead, he stripped them of their weapons and tossed the guns on the bed along with the money. He also took their identification papers and her noteputer. After wiping his knife clean on the giant's uniform, he returned it to the sheath on his belt.

  Noble debated for a moment whether or not he should try to move the bodies to the storage room in the basement, but the chances of getting caught grossly outweighed any benefits from hiding the corpses. Given that flechette pistols make little noise when fired, and that he'd shot them in the interior room of his apartment in the early afternoon, the chances that anyone had heard the gunshots were low, and of being reported even less. Though the Xu regime was only a day and a half old, Zurich's citizens had already learned to mind their own business and avoid attracting attention.

  Noble stripped out of his bloody clothes and washed the blood from his hands in the bathroom. Knowing he could never return to this apartment, he dressed warmly and even pulled on the parka he'd bought for the winter from Fox's son-in-law. From his closet he took a rucksack and packed it with the security officer's pistols, his spare polymer blocks, and a heavy sweater. In the kitchen he would add to that some tins of stew and chili and a bottle of water. In the side pouches he put all the optical data disks from his computer.

  He fastened the money belt containing the gold Kroners around his waist and tucked his shirt in over it. He broke the K10,000 into packets and distributed them in various pockets and the tops of his all-weather boots. After pulling on his parka and picking up his grocery sack, Noble Thayer took one last look around his apartment.

  Blood had flowed out into the hallway. He shook his head. "Sorry to leave you with such a mess, Ken, but that's what a cleaning deposit is for." Locking the door behind him, Noble Thayer left his home for good and let the streets of Zurich swallow him up.

  23

  To delight in war is a merit in a soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

  -George Santayana, The Life of Reason

  Avalon City, New Avalon

  Cruris March, Federated Commonwealth

  19 September 3057

  Victor Davion, First Prince of the Federated Commonwealth, sat behind the huge desk his father had always used when addressing the nation. He had no prepared text, only notes, and these he had transcribed onto index cards. He laid them out at the top of the blotter and folded his hands so he would not fiddle with them while speaking.

  Despite protests from Galen and warnings about an anti-Lyran backlash from his pollsters, he had chosen to dress in the blue and gold uniform of the Tenth Lyran Guards. The Tenths was his unit, and Victor knew that after all they had been through in service with him, they would remain loyal. He would never wish to dishonor them by shifting to the uniform of a unit more closely associated with the Davions.

  He also knew that even if Katherine had decided to split away from the Federated Commonwealth, he could never relinquish his claim to that territory. It would be simple to use her action—betrayal, as others had termed it—to bolster support for himself, but he didn't want to see the situation polarized any more than it already was. Victor wanted to focus his people on the problems of greatest immediacy without doing anything that would make his long-term goals more difficult.

  The lights went on and the director pointed at him.

  "My fellow citizens," Victor began, looking straight into the camera, "we are at war. It is not the Clans who have broken the truce, but old enemies who have decided to exploit our fight against the Clans to their own gain. While neither of those two nations possess fighting forces as brave or tenacious as the Clans, they are even more dangerous foes. This is, quite simply, because their leaders are not warriors, they are statesmen.

  "Statesmen do not understand war. They see war as a legitimate arm of national policy. To them it is a tool, like a law or a treaty. They do not realize that war is a great bloody business that destroys people and worlds, families and lives. They only know that war can gain them worlds and build coalitions to oppose an external threat. In this our old enemies see value, so they have started their war."

  Victor made no attempt to keep the anger and outrage from his words or his eyes, but neither did he allow himself to rant. He needed to infect his people with his anger, but also show them that he was in command of the situation. His other concern was not to stir them so deeply that their emotions would fun rampant. That could rekindle factional fights within the Federated Commonwealth and create further divisions.

  "Thomas Marik has accused me of substituting another boy for his dead son. He confirmed this fact by having a spy steal a blood sample from Joshua, then test it and determine that Thomas and Joshua were not father and son. Were I the sort of monster Thomas paints me to be, I would deny the validity of this test, and produce other proof that Thomas was either mistaken or misled by an agent.

  "I am not a monster, even though this charge is true. I come before you today to offer an explanation for why a double was put in Joshua's place. At the time Joshua came here for treatment at the NAIS, the antidotes being prescribed by his father's own physicians were killing the boy. I remember meeting him on Outreach, where all the leaders of the Great Houses had come to consult and plan our response to the Clans. Despite his illness, Joshua was a happy boy, and a surprisingly quick one as well. To have met him was to like him—and no one I know ever pitied him, because he was not the sort of child to be pitied.

  "My father, Hanse Davion, knew that the NAIS was Joshua's only hope of survival, and he was ready and willing to make treatment here
available to the boy. Though Thomas Marik participated in the Outreach meetings on how to oppose the Clans, he was at that time reluctant to contribute to the defense of the Inner Sphere. Though my father and Theodore Kurita's grand plan for stopping the invasion included gifting the Free Worlds League with the fruit of years of research to bring his forces up to par with ours in the blink of an eye, he balked. And yet, Thomas knew that only his realm, untouched as it was by the Clans, could supply our troops with the equipment needed to defeat the Clans.

  "As would any statesman, he saw an advantage in this, and he pressed it. He demanded territorial concessions. He demanded material concessions. He demanded payment, all before he would give us the things we needed. The Federated Commonwealth and the Draconis Combine had their backs to the wall. They needed that materiel, and the League was their only supplier."

  Victor paused for a moment. He'd built to a dramatic climax, and wanted to give his listeners time to fully absorb what he'd said. Satisfied that he had done so, he lowered his voice. "My father offered Thomas something he would have given him under any circumstances: the life of his son. Hanse Davion offered to take Joshua to the NAIS, where the finest physicians in the Inner Sphere would try to cure him. We all knew Joshua's chances of survival were slim—as slim as those of any line unit facing the Clans—but Thomas had to give his son that opportunity. In doing so, he enabled many others to live, to return home to our loved ones, to stop the Clans, so that we would still have homes to which we could return.

  "My father knew Joshua's life hung by a thread. He knew his prognosis was poor, so he found a child who resembled Joshua and groomed him to be Joshua's replacement. Without Joshua at the NAIS, there was no way to guarantee the supply of weapons we needed to stop the Clans.

  "Of course, this was all before Tukayyid and the signing of the truce. Had I known of the double program, or had my mother been informed of it, it would have been stopped right then. I did not learn of it until after my mother's death, at which time I had a rebellion in Skye and Sun-Tzu Liao's agents terrorizing the Sarna March to occupy me. It was about that time that Joshua took a turn for the worse, and I chose to use the double to buy time. I wanted to calm Skye and cool down Liaoist activity in Sarna before having to deal with Joshua's death."

  Victor frowned. "Those were my intentions. Joshua's body was preserved and has been treated with the utmost of respect. He also gave our researchers a chance to get another step closer to curing leukemia. Because of Joshua, countless children will live."

  His voice became cold. "And because of his father, the statesman, countless children will die. Had Thomas thought more about his realm than himself, he would not have dishonored his son's memory by launching attacks into our territory. Though no material gains could replace his son, the fact is that I would have agreed to negotiating a settlement with him because of Joshua's death. Even though our people at the NAIS did their best to save his son's life and even though we all knew Joshua would have been dead four or five years ago had he not been brought here to New Avalon."

  Victor glanced down for a second, then lifted his head again with a look of serious concern. "Many of you will wonder that your leader could hide the fact of a boy's death from his father. I can only tell you that I did so to prevent exactly the sort of slaughter that will take place when Thomas' troops land. And I would do it again had I to relive those decisions because I still believe they were the best choices facing me under those circumstances.

  "We have no need to feel shame about the kind of people our society produces. The Federated Commonwealth is a nation that creates heroes. Lying in the NAIS Medical Center right now is a woman, a volunteer at the hospital, who is just such a hero. She worked in the ward where Joshua was being treated. Five days ago, when a terrorist group in the employ of Sun-Tzu Liao—a group akin to the one that threw a grenade into a group of school children on Zurich—came to the hospital to kill and maim, she intervened. Bravely, selflessly, she stopped them and was shot multiple times. Her assailants died and she was the only casualty because she acted in defense of the children in her care—including the youth she believed to be Joshua Marik."

  Victor nodded toward the cameras. "Her name is Francesca Jenkins and I hope you will all remember her in your prayers."

  Again he hesitated briefly, but brought his head up and let the solemn concern drain from his voice, leaving only a bleak firmness in its place. "Many of you have heard it reported that my sister Katherine has withdrawn what she now calls the Lyran Alliance from the Federated Commonwealth. You fear this means civil war, but it does not. Katherine is doing what she believes she must to preserve her half of the Commonwealth. Unlike Thomas and his minion Sun-Tzu, Katherine realizes that war should be a last resort, and she wished to keep her realm out of this conflict. Unlike Thomas and Sun-Tzu, she also realizes she must be ready to hold the Clans at bay, and if making a deal with the lesser of two evils will enable her to cope with the larger, I cannot, in good conscience, oppose her.

  "Thomas, as a statesman trained in governing and mystical philosophy by ComStar, does not understand war. If he did, he would order his DropShips back to the Free Worlds League. He would cease supporting illegal revolutions in the Sarna March. He would stop supplying Sun-Tzu with equipment and materiel for his invasion. He would get out while he can."

  Victor drew in a deep breath and slowly shook his head. "I understand war. I have had my 'Mech destroyed under me. I have watched brave men and women die around me. I have lost friends in battle and even in the aftermath of battle. Worst of all, I lost years fighting in the field, far from my family, not seeing them, not speaking with them, and to return only to greet my father's death.

  "At this point, it is not within my power to say we will not fight. As we saw with the Clans, we cannot surrender to or compromise with aggression. We cannot reward aggression with acquiescence. Like a child who must learn for himself that fire burns, Thomas has reached his hand into the fire of war, and it is our duty to teach him the dangers so he will never again be so eager or willing to write his bold philosophy in the blood of innocent people."

  Victor continued to gaze straight at the holovideo camera. "I will mourn those we lose in this fight as I mourned my parents and even Joshua Marik. I will mourn them as I mourn all who lose their lives to the rapacious ambition of a man who should look beyond himself and his concerns to those of his people. And I will fight such a man in the hopes that someday, someday soon, ambition's thirst will no longer be slaked with blood."

  24

  The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.

  -Ulysses S. Grant

  Colmar

  Jade Falcon Occupation Zone

  24 September 3057

  Phelan Ward stood beside Natasha Kerensky in the battle bridge of the DropShip White Fang. Within the lucite walls of the holotank was projected a ten-to-one scale representation of the battle being waged in Colmar's Marakaa Valley lowlands. The BattleMechs of the 352nd Wolf Assault Cluster sat in the center of the smoke-filled valley using the dry river that snaked its way through the terrain as cover. The Twelfth Falcon Regular Cluster, despite enjoying an advantage in numbers of BattleMechs and the amount of fighter cover they had available to them, had paid dearly for having come up and over the ridgeline from the south.

  Even so, they'd done serious damage to the Wolf Clan forces. Phelan, his arms crossed over his chest, shook his head as a Falcon Turk wheeled wing over wing through the holotank. Its tail assembly disintegrating, the aerospace fighter arced toward the ground, then exploded upon impact. "If the Silver Wolves' pilots were not having so hot a day in the air, things could have been much nastier for our side."

  "Star Colonel Oriega got what he deserved." Natasha said. Her voice seethed with angry delight. "I offered him the honor of battling against my own Thirteenth Wolf Guards, but he opted to fight the 352nd."

  Phelan sm
iled at the older woman. "I'd have made that choice. The 352nd was rebuilt after Tukayyid and has a lot of young Wolf Supremists in its ranks. Even Star Colonel Serena Fetladral is relatively inexperienced."

  "Yes, Phelan, you would have made the same choice, but not out of cowardice or refusal to fight someone of my age. Imagine him calling the Thirteenth Guards a solahma unit."

  "Your Wolf Spiders are more seasoned than most other line unit members."

  Natasha's blue eyes glittered devilishly. "Is that pique over the fact that you're too young to be one of us?"

  "I wasn't too young on Tukayyid, Khan Natasha." Phelan held his hands up to forestall further discussion about his age or the unit. "You did make the right call on the Falcons here, though. By having the 352nd go through the Marakaa, you've brought them in at the Falcons' position at Bright Basin from the south. That is their weakest side in that place."

  Natasha nodded. "Onega knows as well as you and I that a defender in a covered position takes a lot of killing. As opponents of the Grand Council verdict, we had to bid under what he was using to defend, which made it difficult to force him from his position. He made me underbid him on Elementals and on aerospace fighters, though he did allow me an edge in BattleMechs. When I sent Serena and her troops through the Marakaa Valley, it gave Oriega a chance to come over the hills and hit them in the flank while they were traveling in a column."

  The younger Khan had applauded the strategy when Natasha first suggested it. The steep walls of the valley made it difficult for the Jade Falcon aerospace fighters to make strafing runs that didn't bring them straight in at the 'Mech column. While fighters could be devastating to BattleMechs, the 352nd used cover and spread their formations while firing back at the fighters. They only tagged one or two, but the fighters decided it was a more hostile environment than they wanted to play in, and they withdrew to engage the Wolf fighters.