The Governor's office announced late yesterday that the general martial law order had been extended until at least next week, but that citizens should remain calm and cooperate with the government authorities. "The situation is now well in hand," a spokesperson for the Governor said. "The worst of the crisis is behind us now, and I know all of us want to work together with Governor Wilmarth to see law, order, and peace restored to our world."
McCall scanned down the lines of text twice, then requested a replay of the images that accompanied the words. It was hard to distinguish much. Most of the shots were of a large crowd filling the elliptical stadium that was New Edinburgh's Malcom Plaza. He estimated that there might be as many as five or six thousand people there—a fairly sizable turnout when you remembered that New Edinburgh was small for a planetary capital, with a population of only eighty or ninety thousand. Some close-ups showed women and children, and none of the people visible, not even the young men, appeared to be armed. A variety of placards, banners, and signs were in evidence, however. "The Day Is At Hand" was one popular slogan, as was the rather cryptic equation, "Machines = Death." There'd always been a strong Luddite strain to Caledonian demonstrations. "Freedom of Thought; Freedom of Spirit" was another frequent message, a Jacobite slogan old when McCall had been an active member of the movement.
It appeared the report that the demonstration had been essentially peaceful was accurate. The crowd seemed orderly and well-behaved, if noisy. But then the crowd scenes were replaced by ominous long-ranged views of armored vehicles, including several BattleMechs, moving through the familiar gray streets of New Edinburgh. The crowds began scattering the moment the 'Mechs appeared, but the press of the mob was so large that the plaza couldn't be emptied immediately. McCall wished there were sound with the images. Had the authorities demanded dispersal? Surrender? Or had they simply arrived and opened fire?
He couldn't tell from the news broadcast, and he suspected that the content had been censored by the government authorities on Caledonia before transmission, for there were no scenes of any actual gunfire or civilian deaths.
Almost none, at any rate. Some scenes had evidently slipped past the censors, for there were a couple of shots, brief and almost furtive, of bodies lying in a deserted street.
One small drama, though, arrested McCall's attention. The shot was wavering, as if from a hand-held camera shooting through a telephoto lens at considerable distance, so very little detail could be made out. McCall could see, though, that the 'Mech in the scene was an ancient and much-patched Wasp, painted black with bright yellow stripes, but with several panels and armor plates missing and a limp that suggested to McCall's mind a faulty hip actuator assembly. As it advanced with slow, almost mincing steps into Malcom Plaza, it was momentarily stopped by a lone man in a white tunic and dark trousers, who stood in its path.
The confrontation was so brief that McCall almost missed it, and perhaps that was why it had slipped through past the censors. As it was, he had to replay the clip several times, using the comm system's enhancement controls to get a better view.
As near as he could tell, the man momentarily blocked the Wasp's advance, shaking his fist up at the ten-meter giant before him. Most of the crowd had fled by that time, but this one man seemed determined to face down the government militia armor. Perhaps he wanted to force a confrontation for the benefit of cameras he knew were watching; possibly he was simply lost in fury and blood-lust. For perhaps three seconds he stood there, an unarmed and unarmored man facing down twenty tons of steel and ceraplast.
Suddenly, the man stooped, plucking something—a rock, McCall thought—from the pavement, then leaned back and let fly, hurling the object as hard as he could. The transmission was too blurry for McCall to see whether or not the missile struck home.
The Wasp paused only a moment, as though considering how best to go around this defiant mite before it. Then, almost casually, it lifted its left foot and set it down once more. McCall winced and briefly turned his head. "Och, laddie," he said quietly. "Tha's nae way tae take oot a 'Mech!"
As the machine strode on into the center of the plaza, little remained of the defiant man but a red and white smear on the pavement. The censors had, apparently, missed that pathetic bit of gore.
Or maybe they'd left it in as a warning of some sort, while excising shots of mass murder that might invite outside interference in Caledonian affairs. As always, the bureaucratic mind was a total mystery to Davis McCall.
Angry now, he blanked the screen once more and was about to sign off the newsnet when a flashing logo in the screen's upper right corner caught his attention. There was, it seemed, a second news story on the net that included at least one of his key words. What was it?
When he typed in the Accept command, McCall felt a jolt unlike any he'd felt before, worse by far than the kick-in-the-ass ignition of a dying 'Mech's ejection seat.
The article, it seemed, wasn't from the newsnet at all. It was a feature in one of the local Glengarry broadcasts. The date stamp on the image was seven days old. Damn! Why hadn't he heard about this?
"... and the rumor mill is going full out tonight, for you members of the Legion," the pretty blond announcer said with a sexy pout to her lips, though with the audio suppressed, her words appeared only as scrolling sentences across the bottom of the screen. "The word around Dunkeld is that you may be on your way to Caledonia soon, as part of a Federated Commonwealth peacekeeper force! These reports are unconfirmed but come from the usual 'very highly placed sources,' and it's rumored that a sizable retainer has already been paid for the Gray Death's services. At least we can all be glad that the Caledonians speak the same language we do!"
There was nothing else of substance in the report, which evidently had been a light bit of fluff rounding out an evening broadcast on a slow news day. What shocked McCall the most was the fact that he'd not heard word one of that particular rumor. Like any military man since the time of Sargon the Great, Major Davis McCall depended on rumor as the primary means of finding out what was really going on in the unit. And if the rumor had to do with the Legion being transferred to his own homeworld ...
He bit off a particularly vehement Gaelic curse. Likely as not, he'd been excluded from the rumor circuit precisely because he was from Caledonia, either to spare his feelings or because it was assumed he already knew what was happening there. A peacekeeper force to his own homeworld? That was often something of a nightmare for mercenary warriors. What happened when you moved in to break up a riot or an outright rebellion, only to find yourself looking down from a 'Mech's cockpit at your own friends and family?
For some it didn't matter, of course. The pilot of that black and yellow Wasp was probably a native of Caledonia, and that hadn't stopped him from turning one of his fellows into a grim red smear on the street. But for McCall, the thought of having to face his own clan in battle ...
That, no doubt, explained why the rumor had never made it to his ears, might even explain the looks he'd been getting lately and the silences that had fallen a time or two when he'd entered a room. For the first time since he'd joined the Legion, Davis McCall felt isolated, an outsider, and that hurt more than anything else.
The Legion? Going to Caledon? Did that have anything to do with Wilmarth and the popular unrest there? McCall rose to his feet, glanced uncertainly back toward the gaming pit, where two recruits were gleefully shooting one another's holographic BattleMechs into glittering fragments.
"I think," McCall told himself, with a growl like the quiet rumble of a distant, gathering storm, "that I'd better go and see the Old Man about this."
If there was one person on this whole planet he could talk to about anything, it was Colonel Grayson Carlyle.
3
The Residence, Dunkeld
Glengarry, Skye March
Federated Commonwealth
1060 Hours, 10 March 3057
Colonel Grayson Carlyle leaned back in his seat, rubbing his eyes with his hands, then stretched wide a
nd high, trying to get the kinks out. His computer monitor glared at him balefully, as though indicting him for even a moment's pause from his work. He'd been wrestling with this probe for what seemed like ages now, and there was still no resolution, nor even the promise that a resolution was possible.
"How in the cosmos," he groaned, "anyone could get one set of records so drekked up ..."
Timekeeping. He was a MechWarrior, damn it, not a damn timekeeper and not a damn computer programmer. He really didn't need this, just now....
The keeping of time and dates had been a problem ever since humans had first left their homeworld and ventured into space. Since the beginning of the interstellar era at least, starfarers had retained what was known as "Terran Standard" time or, more simply and more commonly, as "Standard" for all timekeeping routines. Based on the natural cycles of Terra, they assumed twenty-four 60-minute hours in a day, an unwieldy 365.25 days to the year, and two intermediate units of time, the "week" and the "month," that seemed to have no basis in logic at all.
The system worked fine, however, for ships in transit between the stars. For time out of mind it had been the responsibility of ComStar to keep the necessary standards of time measurement and to broadcast them through the medium of the hyperpulse generators that formed the communications net linking the great states of the Inner Sphere worlds together. Since ComStar had always been headquartered on Terra, this made perfect sense. But ever since the once powerful organization had lost much of its old authority, it was feared that timekeeping, like so much else, would soon be the responsibility of individual systems or governments.
And that would, of course, mean chaos, for the myriad worlds of the Inner Sphere could, quite simply, never agree on anything, not even what day of the week it happened to be.
There was chaos enough, Carlyle thought with dark humor, every time starfaring people ended up living on one particular world for very long. No Terra-based system could easily adapt itself to the day-night or days-per-year cycle of any other world, and Glengarry was a case in point. Circling a Kl-class star cooler and smaller than Terra's Sol, Glengarry orbited its primary at a pleasantly cool .577 of an astronomical unit—the "A.U." which was itself a relic of Terra, the distance between Terra and its sun. Glengarry's year, then, was just less than half of Terra's year in length ... 179 Terran days long.
That much wouldn't have been so bad. It was easy enough to make a simple conversion from standard to Glengarry years. But things got more complicated with the fact that local days had nothing to do with Terra's days of twenty-four hours. Closer to its sun and subjected to stronger tidal forces as a consequence, Glengarry rotated on its axis once in thirty-two hours, fourteen minutes, twelve seconds, for a year that was only 133.28 local days long. By a system going all the way back to Glengarry's first colonists late in the twenty-third century, the local year was divided into nineteen 7-day weeks, which in turn were grouped into six 3-week "months." The left-over week at the end of the year was an intercalary festival period, with the last, year-end day given an extra nine hours to bring the calendar up to date with the planet's year. The months, in keeping with Glengarry's Gaelic heritage, were named after figures out of ancient Celtic mythology: Nemain, Myrddin, Mab, and others.
Today—Grayson had to check his wrist computer to be sure—was the sixteenth of Dana and late in Glengarry's autumn. By standard dating, though, it was early spring, March 10.
The point was, the two calendar systems didn't mesh. They couldn't mesh, and sane people didn't even try to make them work together. In practice, units like the Gray Death Legion adapted to the local time system as necessary for work that demanded it, and maintained their own Terra-based calendar and timekeeping system for everything else. For most day-to-day activities, the eighty-minute Glengarry "hours" worked fine on a standard twenty-four-hour clock, plus a middle-of-the-night quarter-hour add-on to make things come out even.
Carlyle sighed as he checked the time display on his wristcomp. Eighty-minute hours did make for long, long mornings. Harder, though, was the fact that humans weren't designed to handle thirty-two-hour days. Most people ended up working eight- or ten-hour shifts, which meant their sleep periods alternated with day and night. Others, like Carlyle, preferred to put in longer days of twelve or sixteen hours, followed by an equally long downtime. Unfortunately, when there was as much work to do as was inherent in running a mercenary BattleMech regiment, the work still managed to spill over into the supposed downtime, making for very long and tedious days indeed.
Especially in cases like this.
A new recruit, a young woman from Dunkeld who'd signed up with the Legion late the previous year, had been assigned to the logistics office at Legion Headquarters after completion of basic training. Two months ago she'd begun entering Form 1290s into the regimental data base, each a description of a particular item of equipment, food, or other expendable purchased in bulk on a regular schedule from the local community. Once entered into the data base, these forms triggered the automatic purchase from various suppliers of such routinely necessary goods as cooking supplies, frozen sides of crogh—the principal source of meat in the Dunkeld area—boots, weatherproof ponchos, and office supplies. The regimental commissary officer could, for example, expect the arrival of four hundred sides of frozen crogh once each month.
Once each standard month.
The first time four hundred frozen crogh carcasses had arrived a week early, Lieutenant Dobbs, the Commissary Supply Officer, had assumed there'd been some minor and one-time mistake and let it slide. The second time it happened, three weeks later and two weeks before scheduled delivery, he'd begun to suspect something major was wrong. He was running out of storage space in the mess-area freezer.
And then the bills from the local producers had begun to arrive in Disbursing.
In effect, the regiment's operating expenses were suddenly twenty-five percent higher than they should be, because that much more in the way of expendable goods was being delivered each month, and the bills were coming due faster. The Gray Death Legion was successful as mercenary units went, but like any such unit, it lived or died by the cash flow. That unexpected deficit in the monthly books could very quickly wipe out the Legion's monetary reserves. Even worse, it might mean they wouldn't be able to afford other supplies such as short-range missiles, that long-awaited replacement power plant for Margo Shaeffer's ailing Enforcer, or a refit on that new lieutenant's aging Zeus. What was his name again? Walter Dupré, that was it.
And all because that programmer newbie had forgotten—or perhaps she'd never realized in the first place—that the regiment operated on the standard calendar as opposed to the one used by civilian Glengarrians. As nearly as Grayson could tell, some two hundred request forms, supply/ logistic, local procurement 1290s had been filled out with future autopurchase dates, but counting in three-week Glengarry months instead of four-week standard months.
Grayson rubbed absently at his beard, once brown, but now gone a bushy gray-white. He'd been up much of the night—and all of yesterday as well—trying to sort out the mess, which had been brought to his attention two days ago. He had a small army of programmers both in Disbursing and in Supply working on it as well, of course, but someone needed to coordinate their separate approaches to the problem, and someone needed to make sure that the confusion wasn't made worse by new mistakes added to the mix along the way. Neither Lieutenant Dobbs nor his boss, Captain Levinson, the regimental supply officer, was as experienced as Carlyle would have liked, and he wanted to maintain close control over the entire operation.
Normally this sort of thing would have been the work of the regiment's Executive Officer, but Lori Kalmar Carlyle was offworld at the moment, attending a conference on Tharkad, and wouldn't be back until the seventeenth. Her last HPG transmission had promised him a surprise when she returned. Knowing Lori, there was no telling what that might be. She could be as unpredictable as she was—still, after all these years—beautiful.
&nb
sp; He ruefully wished the surprise could be a vacation-about six months or so, standard months, not these misbegotten tenth-liter Glengarry months, on some tropical paradise of a world that had not even seen a BattleMech or a DropShip in the last five centuries ...
The depressing part of it all was the knowledge that once this crisis was resolved, there would inevitably be another. And another. And yet another after that. Damn it, he was fast becoming a glorified clerk with a colonel's rank, and that distressed him more than the physical act of wading through these confusing and irreconcilable numbers.
His office door chimed.
He felt something akin to relief. An interruption, any interruption just now, was more than welcome. "Come."
A door at the far end of the room slid open, and the Legion's weapons master walked in. WM Vernon Artman was a muscular, pugnacious-looking black man who'd joined the Legion twenty-five years ago at Galatea, signing on as an ammo handler and working his way up to being the man in charge not only of the regiment's munitions, but of all combat training. Even though Weapons Master was a specialist command rank in its own right, somewhat akin to the warrant officers of ancient, planet-bound militaries, he still preferred to be called "Sarge." He had the hard-edged look of a drill master—understandable, since training recruits was one of his duties; from the impeccably neat, trim black mustache to the crease in his uniform trousers, there was not a speck of dirt, not a hair out of place, and he carried himself with the confident and precise bearing of the long-time military vet.
"Got a minute, Colonel?"
"For you, Sarge, always. Whatcha got?"
"Same as usual, Colonel. Trouble."
"Grab yourself a chair. Talk to me."
Artman gestured to the computer screen, which still showed the avalanche of screenwork. "It looks like I've come at a bad time."
"One of your recent recruits," Grayson said. "A small matter of using local dates instead of standard."
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