I am Jade Falcon

by Robert Thurston

  * * *

  In the cold Dogg evenings, the solahma warriors performed a number of stunningly comatose activities. Some of them sat around the fire, murmuring tired tales of former days—of ancient battles and raids, of training as it was performed before the invasion of the Inner Sphere, of old BattleMechs that had probably gone to the scrap heap long ago. Others wrapped themselves up in ragged coverings or patchy fur and lay on the ground as if to retire early, but Joanna noticed that the eyes of many remained open but blank. A few did rudimentary exercises, but their diminished physical conditioning made their efforts painful to watch.

  There was even one old warrior who sat staring into the flames, the light glinting off the metallic sheen of the neural implant tattooed over his face. He was one of those Jade Falcon warriors who had taken the short cut to glory, only to have his brain fried to a crisp within a matter of a few years. Joanna never heard the man speak a word, never saw him do anything except sit and stare, unseeing, perhaps unfeeling. The others laughed at him, joking that the only way anyone could get Pytor to move was to put a gun in his hand.

  Even though it was a solahma unit, Joanna did not want to believe that this group was typical. Evenings in any Jade Falcon unit were usually quite lively. At the very least, warriors would prod or challenge each other in minor ways. Exchanges about warfare and strategy would go on until the early hours of morning. Arguments would break out and sometimes a tussle or two, all of it contributing to a noise level that was often deafening to anyone who did want to sleep. But it was always exciting, never had it been as enervating as the inactivity of this rickety bunch. They seemed to have lost all hope, all desire. There was not even any singing of the Remembrance.

  Joanna could not stand the morose atmosphere right now, not with her mind racing madly with the previous night's mysteries. There were odd tensions in her arms that felt as if they would explode.

  Karlac stood alone near the edge of the encampment, looking contemplative as she examined the charge level of her laser pistol. What in the name of Kerensky could she be looking at all this time? Perhaps she was merely faking while inwardly working out her own set of private mysteries.

  Joanna strolled toward her, trying to look casual, just another decrepit solahma warrior seeking some relief from the constant boredom. She stopped as if to exchange a few words with Karlac—and, in fact, a few words were all she did say.

  "It is time. Meet me-where we met last night. About an hour from now when the rest of these walking corpses finally get to sleep."

  "What is this all about?"

  "Truth."

  Karlac eyed her suspiciously, but nodded agreement. Joanna walked away. She noticed that her rate of breathing had increased and the tense feelings in her arms seemed changed—excited and not agitated, thrilled but not bothersome.

  Before slipping out of camp, she made a careful survey of the pitiful scene around her. The only thing that seemed worthy of note was the fact that Bailly was nowhere to be seen.

  21

  Jade Falcon Warehouse 893

  Dogg Station, Dogg

  Jade Falcon Occupation Zone

  3 November 3057

  No techs were in sight when Joanna and Karlac approached the middle warehouse, but Karlac kept watch while Joanna tried the main door and found it locked. They had more luck with one of the windows near the rear of the building. Karlac wriggled in ahead of Joanna, who thought the aging warrior quite nimble for her age. How many others in this solahma unit could perform with more agility than they showed, she wondered.

  Grabbing the ledge of the window, Joanna hoisted herself up and through the opening to the other side, which turned out to be a storeroom filled with small cartons. Labeling on the boxes indicated that they contained dehydrated food, the kind of rations that in their drab way satisfied hungry warriors long out in the field.

  "That way," Joanna said, pointing to a door at the far end. It was locked, but Karlac managed to nudge it open easily.

  "You show some skill at breaking into places," Joanna whispered to her as they stepped cautiously out into an empty corridor.

  Karlac seemed taken aback by the remark. "In my sibko we often had to sneak around for supplies. Our falconer was trying to starve us, it seemed."

  "Oh? I was a falconer once. The last thing we would do was deny trainees their rightful meals."

  "Yes, well, I suppose different falconers use different methods."

  "Ugly.'

  "Yes, we thought so."

  "You go first. You have been in this building more than I have."

  "I never found anything before."

  "You did not have me with you before."

  "Are you always so confident?"

  "Confident, and meaner than a cave bat. Let us go."

  Passing through the storeroom's single exit, they came to a dark hallway with office doors on either side. Karlac tested several of the doors. All were locked. Too bad, Joanna thought, we might find out more from computer records than poking around in the dark.

  Then they came to a double door, which opened into a vast area of storage cubicles that reminded Joanna of a battlefield cluttered with corpses and battered machinery. As they passed through the narrow aisle between the cubicles, Joanna noted that they were stuffed with tottering piles of moldy cartons marked with the Federated Commonwealth starburst, rusting metal parts apparently flung without logic into rusting bins, boxes bulging with computer printouts, decaying Inner Sphere weapons that—from the look of them— were also unserviceable, one strange cubicle piled high with cracking, lusterless ComStar infantry boots, another with nothing in it that Joanna could recognize. After a while, she did not bother to try to identify the contents of the individual cubicles. What she saw instead were abstract patterns, blobs and shapes with ragged borders.

  Nothing in any cubicle offered any clue to the whereabouts of the storage tanks carted in with so much effort the previous night.

  The general mess did make this warehouse, which Joanna had never entered until now, different from those whose interiors she had seen. The others were well-organized, arranged with the usual Jade Falcon sense of order. This area looked more like a terrifically extended version of Joanna's own normal quarters, that is, when she'd had quarters instead of a patch of hard ground.

  But perhaps the mess was part of some larger purpose,

  Joanna thought. Perhaps it was meant to persuade the typical Jade Falcon observer that nothing of value was there. Just the refuse and debris of defeated Inner Sphere armies.

  A sudden noise came from a cubicle ahead of them. Both Joanna and Karlac reacted quickly, ducking into another cubicle whose contents were not identifiable but were certainly odorous. Nearly gagging on the smell, Joanna bumped against something so mushy that she didn't dare contemplate what it was.

  The noise they'd heard had been a grinding sound. It was followed by some grunts of machinery, the sound of a door sliding open, then shut. This was followed by steps, at first muffled, then sharp as someone entered the aisle.

  The two warriors huddled deeper into the cubicle's darkness. Joanna listened to the footsteps trying to tell how many people were coming. Only one, as it turned out, someone who hurried quickly past their hiding place. Joanna risked poking her head out beyond the partition to watch whoever it was go down the corridor.

  "Bailly," she whispered as she ducked her head back in.

  "What?" Karlac said. "Bailly what?"

  "It was Bailly. I recognized him as he went past."

  "You must be mistaken. Bailly could never walk that fast."

  "You do not know Bailly then."

  The moment she spoke, Joanna regretted it. Karlac wanted to know what she meant, which required telling her about last night's sighting of the less than aged version of Mech Warrior Bailly.

  "But why would he be faking his identity?"

  "I do not know."

  Joanna could not, of course, tell Karlac the full story. Nobody must know that she he
rself was here on a mission for the Watch.

  "Maybe we should get out of here now," Karlac said. "Go if you wish. I want to check out the cubicle he came from."

  "Can you tell which one?"

  "No, but how many possibilities are there?" The first cubicles they inspected yielded nothing noteworthy, then they came to one stacked with high piles of paper and boxes of used disks from outmoded computer systems.

  "This is Inner Sphere garbage," Karlac said. "They must have left it behind when our troops attacked. I cannot figure why we keep it around."

  "Perhaps that is the point. Nobody can use this material anyway, so why would anyone bother to come poking around in here?"

  "But—"

  "No more talking. Let us have a good look around."

  Joanna went over to a box full of printouts and pulled one out. As Karlac had suggested, they were indecipherable. Karlac held up some disks, arranging them in her hand like playing cards, and shook some dust off of them.

  "These are no doubt coded, but by now the information would be useless to anyone."

  "I know Jade Falcons are by nature against waste, but keeping such useless garbage around is—what are you smiling at, Karlac?"

  "You. You have not given up. At heart you cannot be a solahma warrior. It means accepting your fate. But you question everything. I have noticed that ever since you came here."

  Joanna was not sure how she felt about these words. On one hand it meant she was doing a good job of deceiving other people about how and why she had come to Dogg. On the other hand she was too much of the Clans not to be revolted by the idea.

  "I am like that, too," Karlac continued. "I should be calmly looking forward to my death, the way the rest of them do. Not for me. Or for you. I see defiance in you, a refusal to accept our fate, to accept being consigned to the solahma heap. I am, I think, much like you."

  "You do not know me."

  Karlac looked startled, perhaps slightly wounded, by Joanna's abrupt response. Even Joanna was surprised at her sudden irritability.

  Now silent, they worked on. Joanna wanting to investigate what was behind the boxes. When she tried to move one, however, it would not budge. She tried another. It, too, was immovable. It was obviously attached to the one below it. Then she tried to shift a middle one out. It was not merely wedged in between others, it was secured to them. Whether the bonding was some kind of glue or through mechanical means, she could not tell.

  Putting her arms around a higher carton, Joanna pulled at it with all her strength. Her grunting echoed through the massive storage area.

  "Be careful, Joanna," Karlac whispered. "If that heap of cartons fell, it would make a noise that—"

  "But that is the point. It cannot fall."

  She explained to Karlac about the immovability of the cartons.

  "But what is the point of joining all these boxes together?"

  "Exactly. That is what we must find out.”

  “I think we should get out of here before anyone comes.”

  “I thought you said we were alike. Defiant, curious—wait, look at this."

  Joanna pointed to a slight break between two piles of cartons. It was thin, not big enough even to insert a finger, but it could be discerned.

  "However you get into this, you go through there," Joanna muttered.

  "However you get into what?"

  "I do not know what. But I am certain Bailly came out of here. Somewhere behind is something ..."

  She tested the surfaces of several boxes on each side. Nothing happened. She pushed at the boxes. Again nothing happened. She tried to pry them apart. Nothing.

  "Maybe there is some kind of combination," Karlac suggested. "You know, touch the boxes in a certain order and—"

  Joanna stared again at the boxes. "Well, your idea has potential. Let us see."

  Touching one box after the other, first in one pattern, then another, Joanna was almost ready to give up when suddenly the touch of her hand produced first a deep rumbling sound, followed by the box-piles starting to separate from one another. There was a sliding sound at floor level as the opening widened to a few centimeters, then stopped.

  Neither warrior could get through the opening. Joanna put her head up against it to look in with one eye.

  "What do you see?" Karlac asked.

  "Not much. It is pretty dim. But one thing it is not is more boxes. It is open in there. Some kind of passage probably."

  "It could be just a hiding place, a place to hide in case of attack."

  "That is for cowards. No warrior would hide during combat."

  "I just meant that there might be—"

  "Does not matter what you meant, unless we can get in there and see what it really is. And I do not think we—"

  Out of frustration, Joanna kicked at one of the bottom boxes. The result of the kick was another rumbling sound from beneath the pile, followed by a soft beeping sound. The crack leading into the dark space slid all the way open with the same kind of grinding and grunting of machinery that Joanna had heard before.

  Before them was a dimly lit elevator, its bottom raised just slightly above that of the warehouse floor. On one side a panel indicated three levels of destination. In the rear was a narrow bench.

  "He came up here in this," Joanna said.

  "What is down there, do you think?"

  "That is what we will find out—"

  "Joanna—"

  "Come with me or not, Karlac. But I am going."

  Karlac stepped into the elevator ahead of Joanna. "I would not let you go alone. I am cautious, yes, but I never back away from a good fight. And that is what I suspect may be down there. A good fight."

  "Nothing would please me more," Joanna said, stepping into the car and pressing the bottommost button. The elevator started up with a muffled roar. As the car started to descend, they saw the portal of piled boxes closing up again.

  * * *

  Joanna and Karlac stepped into the next level down with weapons drawn, but it turned out none were needed. Extending away, lit only by the glow tubes of the elevator, was a long tunnel obviously in disuse. Joanna could just make out some rockpiles forming steep slopes down from the rock walls as well as a set of tracks going down the tunnel. In the dim light, she thought she saw the tunnel split into two more some twenty or thirty meters in the distance.

  "Mining," she muttered.

  "What?" Karlac asked.

  'This tunnel, a mining tunnel. The elevator must have been used by the miners."

  "Then it was concealed because the mines are not functioning anymore. We can go back up."

  "No."

  "But why not?"

  "I am sure that Bailly came out of that elevator. There must be something down here on one of the levels. And I want to check every one. Are you game, Karlac?"

  "If you say so, Joanna."

  In the eerieness of the cavern, the dimness shadowing their faces, Karlac's voice echoed strangely. It had a hollow sound to it, as if she were not quite convinced.

  "We will check level by level," Joanna said. "No point in going any further into this one, so—"

  As Joanna turned to reenter the elevator there was a thunk so loud its echo seemed to go up and down the tunnel many times. The thunking was followed by a now-familiar grinding noise as the elevator doors began to close.

  With a gasp of fright, Karlac leaped forward, just squeaking through the closing doors.

  "Karlac, no, that is—"

  Joanna's move toward the doors was too late and the two sides clanked shut, it seemed, in front of her nose. She banged a fist against it at the same time she heard another sound of machinery, the signal that the elevator itself was moving. From the sound, the car seemed to be going up.

  Frustrated and angry, Joanna leaned her forehead against the cold metal door and felt the vibrations of the machinery against her skin.

  22

  Jade Falcon Warehouse 893

  Dogg Station, Dogg

  Jade Fa
lcon Occupation Zone

  3 November 3057

  Joanna had been in some pretty dark places in her life, but none like this one. This darkness was absolute. For a moment she was afraid to remove her hand from the security of the cold metal door, where she could still feel a slight vibration, even with the elevator gone to another level. Keeping her body against the door for orientation, she holstered her pistol, but only with difficulty. She had to hold the side of the holster while slipping the weapon past her fingers.

  Thinking that someone might come looking for her any moment, Joanna knew she had to locate as many points of reference as she could. Moving to the left side of the door, she ran her fingertips lightly up and down its rim. Nothing here. Careful to keep one hand on the door at all times, she moved to the other side. Nothing there either. Yet people on this level had to be able to summon the elevator. There should be a button, or palmprint scanner, or something. If it was not along the rim, where was it?

  Making the same fingertip inspection outside the rim, Joanna came upon a thick cable attached to the wall. Following the route of the cable, she found what felt like a panel with shallow circular depressions. That had to be it, the control panel. She felt better—at least there would be a way out if nobody stopped on this level. She could wait a while, then summon the elevator.

  But if anyone discovered Karlac in the elevator car, would that not make somebody suspicious enough to check all levels? Maybe not, if Karlac covered well. But Joanna could not be sure what she might do in any situation. Karlac was, after all, solahma.

  Finding her way back to the security of the elevator door, she leaned against it and tried to collect her thoughts. Karlac's sudden vault into the elevator had caught Joanna by surprise. Karlac was a Jade Falcon warrior, not someone who should be struck by sudden panic. Joanna wondered if maybe fear of the darkness could make even a Jade Falconer behave uncharacteristically. But this pitch blackness did not send Joanna into a panic, so she found it hard to understand how it could frighten a hardened, battle-tested warrior like Karlac.