LE5790 - Illusions Of Victory

by Loren L. Coleman

  Drew Hasek-Davion quirked one eyebrow, his only sign of surprise, then nodded. Once. High praise from the owner of Blackstar Stables, a man always quicker with criticism than compliments. Respect, now that felt good.

  Massaging the bruised knuckle on his right hand, Michael turned to the window and smiled out at the rain-soaked city.

  There were times he really enjoyed this world.

  2

  The Coliseum, Silesia

  Solaris City, Solaris VII

  Freedom Theater, Lyran Alliance

  12 August 3062

  The Caesar's nickel-ferrous gauss slug smashed into the Striker's left shoulder, crushing ferroceramic armor. Broken plates fell away amid a rain of shards and splinters, showering the BattleMech's protection over the sandy floor of the Coliseum. A fair percentage of the crowd roared with delight at the blow, probably because they'd bet against the 'Warrior piloting the Striker in this Day Two Grand Tournament match.

  Hearing the cheer even from inside his insulated cockpit, Victor Vandergriff ground his teeth in fury as he rode out the brutal shove imparted by the gauss slug. His restraining harness held him securely to his seat, while the massive gyroscopic stabilizer set into the Striker's lower torso fought gravity to keep the eighty-ton 'Mech upright. Neuroreceptors built into his bulky helmet fed his own sense of balance down into the stabilizer in a feedback loop that let the pilot worry less about walking around in a bipedal war machine and more about his opponent.

  Right now Victor Vandergriff was very worried about his opponent, Davion dog though he was.

  The arena's main partition was already rising again, about to conceal the contenders from each other. Victor wrenched hard on his control sticks, dragging the red targeting cross hairs across his cockpit viewscreen and settling them over Stephen Neils's Caesar. The reticle flashed between red and gold and then burned a steady golden hue as the computer acquired a hard lock. Mashing down on both thumb buttons as well as his right-hand trigger, Victor lashed out with the Striker's three main weapons. The sapphire beam of his large laser cut into the Caesar's left arm, sloughing away a half-ton of armor. The blue lightning of his particle projection cannon scored next, carving into the other 'Mech's left side, but his autocannon missed low, spending its depleted-uranium slugs against the rising barricade.

  The temperature in the Striker's cockpit shot up as the 'Mech's fusion reactor spiked to meet the power demand. Nothing to be too concerned about, not in this kind of fight. The heat levels would drop quickly enough. Meanwhile the coolant flushing through the small tubes of his bulky cooling vest helped keep down his core body temperature. Victor would have preferred one of the new full-body coolant suits, maybe even one with built-in neuroreceptors that did away with the antiquated neurohelmet, but that technology was still too expensive for Lynch Stables. Besides, the brief rise in temperature was only enough to raise a light sweat.

  Although hurt by the Striker's weapons, Neils wasn't about to surrender his advantage so easily. With the barricade almost up, his Caesar extended its right arm to angle one last shot at Victor. The hand-held PPC flared another cascade of manmade lightning across the field, burning into the Striker's midline and carving a new molten-edged scar into the BattleMech's chest. One more hit and Neils would be through the armor there. Victor swore silently, though the stadium crowd went crazy with the hard-hitting exchange. Protected now by the barricade, he allowed himself a glance in their direction.

  The Steiner arena was Silesia's pride. Built to resemble a giant Roman-era coliseum, its center was an open expanse where the BattleMechs 'fought. Surrounding the combat area were row upon row of seats from which the fans could watch the action live rather than by closed-circuit video. The sandy floor could be left wide open or confused with pop-up barricades like the kind chosen for tonight's tournament bout. Three stories above the ground and just over the heads of most 'Mechs, two levels of private boxes ringed the arena for those wealthy enough to afford such luxury. Above them the general seating was packed with forty thousand riotous fans, all of them infected with the tension of tonight's battle, the Grand Tournament's second Steiner-Davion match-up. Some pressed forward against the ferroglass shields, hammering on it with their fists as they shouted support or derision for one or both gladiatorial Mech-Warriors.

  Victor Vandergriff despised them all.

  The rich and the poor. Stable owners, nobles, merchants, laborers. The gamblers wagering money they did not have and the few "peekers" out there pretending to have large sums riding on the outcome of the battle. Even other MechWarriors were included in his wrath. Victor hated them because he was dependent upon them, and because he could remember a time when that wasn't so. A time when he'd fought for himself, one of the best 'Warriors on Solaris VII and destined for great things.

  And then something went wrong, right about the time he'd lost the big fight against Allard-Liao and that Davion puppet Galen Cox. He'd lost before, but never with so devastating an effect on his career. The fans deserted him, many turning on him overnight and others drifting away slowly over the years as more defeats plagued him. A "zombie," that was what they called Victor now. One of the walking dead. Never mind that Theodore Gross, current Champion of Solaris defending his title for the fifth year, was three years older. Now Gross was on top of the world while Victor had fallen from favor.

  Vandergriff had never climbed higher in the rankings than twelfth before starting his backward slide. The Skye Tigers stable had traded him as a bad investment despite his ranking, and Trevor Lynch had picked up the contract because he desperately needed a high-ranking fighter. Now Victor held on by his fingernails and a certain amount of desperation in his fighting style to the last spot in the vaunted Top Twenty. He might never make the Championship finals, but he could still claim to fight among the best the Game World had to offer. He had that, yes, but it didn't keep the knowledge that he'd fallen so far from eating away at him.

  He'd stayed at the party too long. And now the party was all he had left.

  The X-shaped partition that divided the arena into unequal quarters dropped again. Never so far that the competitors could cross it in the scant few seconds before it rose again. To try and reach point-blank range, Victor would have to run around the ends, while Neils would simply counter by walking the Caesar away. It was at the request of White Hand stables that Coliseum officials had reluctantly agreed to use the barricade to make up for the ten tons Victor's Striker had on Neils' BattleMech. No doubt they would have preferred to give Victor, the Lyran fighter, the edge, but in the Grand Tournament any match where an obvious inequality existed had to be handicapped.

  With the barricade still falling toward the waist-high level it would maintain for a few desperate seconds, Victor and Neils were already positioning their 'Mechs for the best angles they could get. The Caesar's right arm came up, mirrored by the Striker's left. Neils was a touch faster on his PPC, which flayed away more armor from the Striker's right arm. Melted ferroceramic composite runneled to the ground, splashing into the sand. In return, Vandergriffs forty-millimeter autocannon chewed into the side of the Caesar's wedge-shaped head. Not enough to penetrate the armor but exacting some small measure of revenge as it rattled the warrior inside.

  The barricade stopped while still at a height of five meters. His left-side armor hammered into memory, Victor throttled his Striker into a walk to the left while twisting his torso back to the right to fire. The move partially protected what was left of the savaged armor over his autocannon ammunition bin. He stopped just short of the end of the barricade. Just as he'd guessed, Neils countered by moving his Caesar to its left. There followed another exchange of weapons fire, Victor's laser and PPC answering Neils's gauss rifle, which tore away the Striker's right arm at the shoulder joint. The loss threw the Striker severely off balance, past the gyro's ability to automatically compensate, and Victor had to fight his controls to keep the 'Mech on its feet.

  The partition rose before he could recover, and a
parting shot from Neils' energy cannon slashed another scar along his right side. The commline crackled to life immediately after, fighting off the interference from the PPC as Neils's voice whispered into his ear over the open channel they shared for trading insults.

  "Haven't you got anything better to give, zombie?" Neils sneered.

  The fans were on their feet screaming. A major fight had broken out in the stands between FedRat supporters and their Lyran rivals and was quickly spreading to other sections. Victor could well imagine the despair of the pro-Steiner fans, watching tonight's defender of Lyran honor being beaten down just as the despised Michael Searcy had smashed Jarman "The Farmer" Bauer the day before.

  Sweat beaded on Victor's face, and he knew it was more from fear for his life than for the Striker's heat levels. Furious at this sudden weakness, he almost targeted the upper stands. In the back of his mind he knew it would do no good. The arena's detonator grid protected the spectators, bleeding off energy weapons and deflecting any stray missiles or autocannon fire that might endanger the crowd. The grid, a rare piece of los-tech, was the only thing that made direct-view seating possible.

  Victor held his fire. He knew it wasn't the fans that had raised his ire. Not even the Davionists among them. It was Neils.

  Stephen Neils, who was trying to kill him!

  The request for a low barricade and the pattern of the Caesar's attacks now seemed to fit into a devious scheme meant to shame and possibly kill Victor Vandergriff. While the barricade dropped or rose, he stood at a disadvantage, able to use his arm-mounted light autocannon against the superior power of Neils's PPC. When it was down, Neils abandoned his energy cannon to make carefully aimed attacks with the Caesar's torso-mounted gauss rifle. One of the heavy gauss slugs would eventually punch through the head of the Striker, smashing the BattleMech's sensors, controls . . . and cockpit. No 'Mech design in existence could protect its pilot from that kind of destructive power.

  Rage flooded over Victor as he wrenched the Striker around to the left and maneuvered it toward the end of the barricade's first arm. Rage, and contempt for the treachery of his Davionist opponent. He heard the dull roar of the fans—either cheering him on, warning their own champion, or shouting amid the brawl—but no longer cared. He raced forward, gambling for as much ground as possible as the partition began to drop again. He wouldn't make it. The second arm was too far, just out of reach. And when Neils saw him closing, he would slip around to the other side of the arena and again hammer at Victor with that deadly gauss rifle.

  If Victor gave him the shot.

  It was a strategy born of desperation, the kind that had become a Vandergriff trademark these last few years. Still at a full run, Victor rocked forward quickly to throw a tremor into his gyro as the neurofeedback loop read his sudden shift of balance. Then he reached forward, overbalancing the Striker, which toppled headfirst toward the ground. The 'Mech hit hard, its armor crushed in the impact of eighty tons meeting unyielding floor, its momentum driving it forward in a parody of a baseball slide.

  The move almost completed Stephen Neils's earlier work, mercilessly shaking Victor in the grip of his harness. The Striker's head scraped against the arena floor, digging through the sand and treating its pilot to an even rougher ride. Victor's neurohelmet smacked hard into the back of his seat, and his mind swam at the edge of consciousness. The Striker piled up against the lowered barrier, its chest nearly stripped of armor.

  Victor had five precious seconds to shake off the effects of the fall and another five to work the Striker back to its feet. Seconds were eternities in a 'Mech battle, especially in the Game World arenas. Winning and losing—sometimes even living and dying—often hinged on a crucial instant or two. He worked the Striker's single arm under its own heavy body and used it to rock back to one knee and then to his feet just as the barricade completed its return to full upright.

  Now Victor needed to know what Neils had done when his Striker had dived out of sight. MagRes imaging wouldn't have helped, not in the shadow of a barricade. Thermal might have showed enough waste heat bleeding into the air to tell Neils where Victor had ended up, but had Neils thought of that and made the switch in time? Victor could see fans in the main seating pushed up to the glass and gesturing, but some were pointing at him while others pointed the way they thought Neils should move. He didn't think Neils would find much help there.

  It had become a guessing game. Neils must have thought Victor would move to the right, trying to shadow his Caesar. He'd countered by moving to the left. Neils had guessed wrong.

  When Victor came around the side of the barricade, there was Neils in his Caesar standing just opposite him. Neils was quick to act, twisting his 'Mech around on its turret-style waist to bring the right-arm PPC to bear, but still too late. The energy whip drilled into the right side of the Striker, but found no critical components that could turn Victor's newly claimed advantage.

  Victor fired back with his laser, the sapphire beam slicing into the Caesar's back, biting deep through armor and the titanium substructure to carve away the bulky engine shielding of its 280XL engine. His PPC scored a long gash along the back of the Caesar's left leg, but the autocannon made the hit that counted. Its depleted-uranium slugs hammered in behind the laser wound to smash the energy-storing capacitors of the gauss rifle. With a brilliant blue flare, the capacitors dumped their pent-up energy straight into the Caesar's heart, gutting the right side. Engine shielding collapsed, threatening release of the raw power of a fusion reaction.

  Neils was able to drop the dampening fields into place, shutting down the power plant and saving his life and his 'Mech. The fight, however, was lost. Thrown off-balance by the massive strike and now without the power needed for the gyro to stabilize the machine, the Caesar toppled forward like a titan's discarded toy to smash face-down into the arena floor.

  "You asked for it," Victor said to himself, not bothering to key open the transmitter.

  The barricade dropped away, leaving Victor Vandergriff and his Striker commanding the Coliseum floor in plain view of every stadium patron. The arena officials piped in roars of Lyran approval even as the Davion-Steiner brawl continued to spread among the stands. And for all his earlier cynicism about the fickleness of fame, Victor Vandergriff soaked up the adulation.

  It was, as he knew, all he had left.

  3

  The Coliseum, Silesia

  Solaris City, Solans VII

  Freedom Theater, Lyran Alliance

  12 August 3062

  "A spectacular upset by Lynch Stables' Victor Vandergriff, one of Silesia's own. Everyone was hoping he had it in him, and tonight he certainly delivered."

  Julian Nero stabbed at the mute button to keep his voice from going out over the closed-circuit channel. Then he elbowed the video controller sitting beside him. "Cut away from Vandergriff and give me a feed of the crowd, will you? No, not the Mechbunnies cheering. Give me that fight in the stadium's upper levels."

  The match was over, and Julian knew that anyone paying attention to the closed-circuit video for his commentary wouldn't care much about Vandergriff's history or hopes for the future. The fact was that Vandergriff didn't have much of a future left on the Game World. If Julian was going to get any extra minutes picked up on the syndicated broadcasts, it would be in clips of the brawl quickly turning into a riot.

  Julian also had his reputation to protect, having moved in the last few years from "your man in the know" to "the man in the know." It would be foolish to focus on Vandergriff, who was basically a loser. Nero remembered when Vandergriff still fought for the Skye Tigers back in '56. He'd teamed up with the great—and late—Glen Edenhoffer to battle Galen Cox and then-Champion Kai Allard-Liao. What a disappointment. And with five days to go in this year's Great Tournament, the odds were long that the aging Mech Warrior would make it to the finals. He never had.

  Better to segue into the brawl. The fighting in the arena stands was particularly vicious, with several brawlers alr
eady lying unconscious in the aisles. Nero knew that fights like this often spilled out into the streets of Silesia. He'd seen it before. He nodded a quick decision; there was his lead-in . . .

  "I've seen this happen before," he said. "Anyone in the stadium who's not yet caught up in the fighting should find a place near a security station and ride it out. There's a full-blown riot starting up in the northeast section of the main seating. From what I can see, the Federated Suns supporters had the upper hand at the start of the brawl, but the Lyran fans are holding their own now."

  How easy it was to slide from 'Mech battle commentary to covering the growing riot. He doubted the people glued to the closed-circuit holovid footage would even notice. They had paid for an evening of destruction and mayhem. Did the specifics matter so much?

  "I count ten—make that twenty—bodies already unconscious," he went on. "No fireworks, none visible anyway, but that doesn't mean someone out there isn't concealing a hold-out laser."

  Julian was barely warming to his subject when the image cut off unexpectedly, leaving him at a loss for words until the video controller fed him a new signal. It took a few precious seconds for him to roll with the new feed. When Julian finally saw what was going on, his mouth ran dry with excitement and some small measure of dread.

  "As always, we stay right On top of the latest developments." Julian shot the video controller a hard glare for the lack of warning. "What you see here are the paramedics crowding around the head of Stephen Neils's fallen Caesar. It looks like they're having trouble extracting him. The egress hatch is open, but Neils could already be injured from that stunning fall he took. In your lower left-hand corner you can see a medic signaling for more help."

  A dark shadow fell over the tech team, and Vandergriff's Striker leaned into the picture. The video controller panned back to get the big BattleMech into the scene. Was Vandergriff about to deliver a coup de grace? Headhunter actions were frowned upon in the arenas, but they happened anyway. And this one was coming a bit late. Attacking Stephen Neils now could easily make Vandergriff liable for criminal charges. Harassment. Battery. Even assault with intent.