Grayson set his autorifle's safety and stood up, suddenly tired. Brasednewic stood up, too, laser rifle canted across his shoulder. "Congratulations, Captain," he said. "Looks like maybe we can learn some things from you folks after all."
"That's what we came for, Colonel. But let's not underestimate these people."
"Who? The Dracos?"
"No...our people...yours and mine. It was their doing, this raid. They did it...together."
And as Grayson stepped down from the hill, his men—rebels and mercs together—began cheering wildly.
21
This far north, Verthandi's large moon never rose much above the southern horizon. Late in its third quarter, it hung like a ragged-edged orange sickle in an unusually cloudless sky just hours before dawn. The light of Verthandi-Alpha carried only faintly through the window where the man and woman lay in the dark. The man's fingers trailed across the woman's belly, tracing a delicate line from navel to sternum to throat, then circled down again to capture one smooth breast in a lingering caress. In the darkness, Sue Ellen Klein let out a soft moan.
"Hold me, Vincent," she whispered. "Just hold me, please..."
He drew her closer into his embrace. "What is it, Sue Ellen?"
"N-nothing." Her face was wet, the tears glistening by the light of the moon. "You've...all of you... have been so good to me."
"And why not? We're scarcely the monsters the Lyran Commonwealth makes us out to be."
"Oh, I know all that. It's just... oh, Vincent! I killed him!"
He held her tight, his hands exploring the hollows of her back, whispering into her ear until her sobs subsided. When at last she quieted, he said, "Darling, it wasn't you! You know that. But you've got to let go! Jeffrie was killed by that bastard Carlyle...abandoned in a shot-up fighter and left to fry on re-entry. Sue Ellen, you saved him! You kept him from dying a horrible death! Tell me, what if it had been you in the crippled fighter, with your ship melting around you? Wouldn't he have done the same for you?"
"But it's all so confusing. I keep having dreams..."
"About Jeffrie?"
"Some. Mostly, though, I am in the fighter, and Carlyle is outside, watching me burn. And Jeffrie is with him, pleading with him, but Carlyle just crosses his arms and laughs. Or I'm all alone, hanging from a rock ledge, and there's this vast, empty blackness beneath and all around me, and I'm losing my grip..."
She shivered in his arms. "That's the way it feels when I'm awake, like I'm just clinging to the edge, hanging on...and my fingers are giving way and I'm falling into the dark...and now I'm getting it in my dreams, too."
"I've heard you moaning in your sleep."
She drew back far enough to place her hand against his chest, to stroke at the mat of black hair there. "Vincent, if it wasn't for you, I think I'd have gone insane. I mean it. I...I couldn't live with myself for...for a while there. I'm grateful."
He kissed her lingeringly. "And I love you," he said, when their lips parted. "You know, I'm glad to just... listen. If there's anything you want to get off your chest." He dropped his eyes, and smiled. "Such a lovely chest."
In reply, she snuggled closer. "I wish I knew some deep, dark military secret I could get off my chest," she said after a time. "Something I could give to you to help bring Carlyle down for good!"
He stroked her short hair. "I wouldn't mind that myself. Maybe if we could trap him—you and I—it Would lay to rest some of those ghosts for you. Got anything in mind?"
She shook her head. "Nothing. I sat in on planning meetings, of course, but they didn't talk about anything really important. I knew...oh...where they were going to land, but that's not of any use now."
"Military secrets become dated real fast," he agreed. "Still, there might be something else."
"I've told Governor Nagumo's people what I knew about the Gray Death's strength, what ‘Mechs it had, and all of that, but they already knew."
"What would really help would be some clue to where Carlyle might be hiding."
"How could I give that? He knew this planet better than I did...and that's not saying much. All I know is that he was to make contact with members of the Revolutionary Council. That odd little man with glasses—Erudin—was supposed to bring them together."
"Maybe the name Erudin will help. The Governor has extensive files on the names and backgrounds of a number of Verthandi's citizens."
"Well, I already told him."
"Were there any other names mentioned?"
"Huh? Oh, I guess so, but I don't really remember. The names of people isn't going to help locate Carlyle now, is it?"
"I don't know, darling, but who knows what might help? Anything you remember—a name, a meeting place—anything might help."
She sighed. "Well, I know we were to meet the Revolutionary Council out in the jungle someplace. That seemed strange to me at the time. I had this picture of us all standing around knee-deep in mud. Erudin laughed when I asked how we were supposed to move ‘Mechs through the mud. He said Ericksson's place was all dry land and full of sur...What's the matter?"
Mills was staring at her with nearly savage intensity. "Ericksson? Who is this Ericksson?"
"Someone we were supposed to meet. Why? Do you know the name? Is it important?"
"I don't know, Sue Ellen, but a lot of the Old Families on Verthandi are Scandanavian, with Scandanavian names. If Carlyle was supposed to meet with one of the Old Family people, it's possible...just possible..."
"Wait! Where are you going?"
Vincent Mills threw back the covers and groped for the trousers he had flung over a chair earlier. "Darling, you may have just given us the one bit of information we need to burn that bastard Carlyle once and for all."
"But..."
"You go back to sleep, my love. I've got to talk to someone about it, fast!"
* * * *
Governor-General Nagumo knew about the name Ericksson even before Captain Mills had finished putting on his uniform. They had not told Mills about the microphone installed in the bedroom because Dr. Vlade and others feared that it might make the young captain self-conscious during his sessions with the young prisoner.
The technician monitoring their love-making that night had a call into Nagumo's office almost at once. Normally, the major on duty would have had to decide whether this bit of information was important enough to warrant waking Nagumo in his quarters, but this night Nagumo was still in his office, going over the reports of that afternoon's fiasco in the jungle.
By the time Mills had crossed the central compound of Regis University and asked to see Nagumo on urgent business, Nagumo's computer Techs had pulled Gunnar Ericksson's dossier from their files on prominent Verthandian citizens.
Nagumo began issuing orders, assembling his forces. His final order dispatched two men from his personal guard to Captain Mills' quarters. The Klein girl had served her purpose, and she could not be trusted. Better to bury her below the Tower for the time being.
Nagumo forgot about Sue Ellen Klein almost as soon as he gave the order to pick her up. He was already engrossed in the display map on the wall of his office. Yes, there it was, right where the computer had located it.
Fox Island...
* * * *
There was another romantic rendezvous that night, this one deep in the shadows that edged the perimeter of the Fox Island plantation. Here, too, the orange sickle of Verthandi-Alpha illuminated sky and trees with ruddy light, though the moon's sweep was bisected by the black shadow of the forest and the bulk of the Basin Rim cliffs.
These lovers' conversation also turned to the subject of Grayson Carlyle.
"Is it that you don't trust him?" the woman asked as she snuggled closer within the curve of the man's arm. They lay together on a mossy hummock well away from the plantation clearing, under the spreading blackness of the forest canopy. Moonlight edged her profile and the leaves overhead.
Carlotta Helgameyer often met her lover in this spot, because there were reasons�
�political reasons—why they could not openly admit their love.
"I supposed it's that I don't understand the man," Tollen said. He paused for a moment, his teeth grinding in unconscious habit while he thought. "I trust him, I think...but I don't understand him."
"What is there to understand?"
"He's...He doesn't act like a mercenary."
"You mean, he doesn't act like you think a mercenary ought to act."
"Well, yes. I suppose. But he's thrown himself into his mission here with such...such energy. As though there's more to it for him than the money."
"I would have thought that was obvious."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, it's obvious he cares for his people."
"I think there's more. He shares our hatred of the Dracos."
"And that's wrong?"
"I didn't say that. Of course it's not wrong...not from where we are! But we probably should have tried to find out more about the man before we hired him."
"Most of us on the Council were against the idea, you'll remember."
Tollen laughed. "It was Erudin's idea, wasn't it, Carlotta?"
“Thorvald thought he was trying to arrange some sort of power play against the Old Families. Old Gunnar Ericksson was the one who finally decided to bring them in, and told Devic to go ahead and try out his plan. That shook Thorvald. He thought Gunnar would go along with with the rest of us. He wanted to kick Devic off the Council anyway."
He squeezed her tighter. "Yeah, well, you Old Families had better watch yourself now that us latecomers have the Gray Death on our side!"
"It's not funny, Tol."
"I know. I'm sorry. But this hiding what we feel for one another. It...gets to me."
"Me, too. Maybe things will change after the war's over.”
“That'll be the day."
She remained quiet for a bit, then decided to change the subject. "Our people and the mercenaries did pretty well in the battle yesterday, didn't they?"
"Yes." He thought about it, teeth grinding once more. By any standards, the ambush had been a splendid success. They'd captured two of the four enemy ‘Mechs, the Stinger and the cripple-legged Trebuchet, killed twenty-two Kurita soldiers and taken another thirty-six. Their own losses were only two killed and five wounded, and three of those wounded had been injured by their own explosives rather than by enemy fire.
They'd sent the Stinger and the prisoners back to Fox Island, while a band of rebel and mercenary Techs descended on the Trebuchet and on the hulks of the three bombed-out troop transports. With a few hours' grace, it was possible that the Trebuchet would be moving under its own power again. It had taken the Techs only minutes to strip the hovercraft of circuit boards, wiring, weapons, instrument fittings, engine housing, and an endless stream of useful items that might be handy later, in unlikely places or vehicles.
"They did very well, indeed," Tollen said, "and I have to admit that that youngster knows more about combat than I ever will. I don't know if it's just that he knows all the tricks or if he's some kind of tactical genius."
"Then it's good he's here. We haven't had such successes in the whole ten years of the war."
"Yeah, but it's become his war, somehow. Is that right, that we should step aside, and let him win the war for us? And what about afterward? Are we going to be able to get rid of him?"
"I thought you trusted him."
"I don't know what to think anymore. This idea of his, to carry the war to the villages..." The teeth-grinding noises came again. Carlyle had said that the enemy had to be hit again and again, he had to be kept off-balance, kept inside his containments and garrison camps. More important, he insisted that the people must be enlisted in the fight against the invaders. Tollen knew that meant more towns like Mountain Vista would be reduced to rubble before this was over. More of his people would die in fire and horror. What was right?
"We're leaving tomorrow," he said at last.
"I heard."
"We're heading west. A raid in force, Carlyle calls it. To Scandiahelm. There's a Kurita garrison there."
Carlotta ran her hand along his chest. He could sense her compassion for his own pain, his uncertainty. "You'll come back to me?" she said.
"Carlotta mine," he whispered, sweeping her close, inhaling the scent of her, enfolding her warmth. "Nagumo's whole army couldn't keep me away, beloved..."
* * * *
Lori, too, was thinking about Grayson that night, but the thoughts were not pleasant. She came awake in her quarters in the rebel compound, her skin glistening with sweat, the paralyzing fear of the nightmare still close. In the moon-spilled darkness, she sat breathing hard, trying to collect herself.
Rather than face sleep and the terror of more dreams, she decided to get dressed and give her Locust another check-through. As she pulled on her clothes, Lori's movements were sluggish. She'd thought the nightmares had gone for good. It was depressing to know that her fears and self-doubts were rising, hydra-headed, once more.
* * * *
Grayson had the guerrilla-mercenary force in motion an hour before the sun came up. Their ‘Mechs re-armed and re-equipped, the worst of the battle damage repaired by Techs who had worked furiously through the night, the raiding party set out along forest trails and logging roads toward the west. The group consisted of sixteen rebel ‘Mechs led by Montido in his fully repaired Dervish, as well as all six of the mercenary ‘Mechs.
Those rebel ‘Mechs too badly damaged or too uncertain in their jury-rigged repairs or weaponry to survive a long, hard march would remain at the Fox Island cave. The rest started off after Grayson's mercenaries, moving swiftly by jungle trails and backwoods roads in the same westerly direction. Riding in hovercraft and swamp skimmers, Brasednewic's infantry accompanied the column, a force of perhaps 500 men and women in all. Because they were slower, the rebel Galleon tanks and other wheeled or tracked vehicles would remain behind.
With them was Jaleg Yorulis, his Stinger assigned to one of the Verthandian ‘Mech trainees. Grayson had decided it wiser not risk him in combat.
22
As Grayson and his forces moved westward, the land rose steadily, tree cover growing thinner until the forest gave way to scattered patches of woodland among bluegreen meadows and cultivated fields. Their destination was on Perres Point, a Kurita watch station at the very edge of the jungle and above the village of Scandiahelm. Here, the Basin Rim was a relatively gentle, forested ridge. The region above the ridge was part of the Bluesward Plateau, tucked in between the Silvan forest and the Uppsala Mountains. Villages dotted the rolling countryside, interspersed with blueleaf plantations and gavel farms.
The Dracos had built watchstations on Verthandi wherever there was a sizable local population to control or an important resource to guard. At Perres Point, it was the inhabitants of the nearby villages who were held hostage. Several hamlets and farms had been burned already in retaliation for attacks on Kurita personnel in the area. The station itself consisted of a small supply depot and maintenance facility, a platoon of sixty soldiers, and one lance of BattleMechs of the Third Strike Regiment's Second Battalion, Company C.
The combined mercenary-rebel force hit the watchstation at dawn, catching the Kurita ‘Mechs unmanned, the soldiers at breakfast Less than two minutes after Grayson's Shadow Hawk crashed through the perimeter fence, the Kurita troops were throwing down their weapons. Four ‘Mechs—a Wolverine, a Phoenix Hawk, a Panther, and a Wasp—had fallen into rebel hands. As had tons of supplies, rations, ammunition, and spare parts, a literal treasure for the ragged little army, purchased without a single death.
* * * *
Grayson wished his next task would be as easy as ambushing the Kurita watchstation garrison. The rebel forces were still rounding up prisoners and loading captured spare parts and stores from the base and the nearby supply dump when a delegation of townspeople arrived from Scandiahelm. He received them inside the watchstation complex, in a bombproof chamber that had served as a mess
hall. The delegation consisted of Scandiahelm's chief proctor, a graying, worried-eyed man in his fifties, and two companions. Grayson stood behind the mess table, flanked by Lori and Brasednewic. He smiled and extended a hand, but the proctor ignored it.
Instead, the man dropped a packet onto the messhall table in front of the mercenary commander. Grayson opened it, pulling out a sheaf of flat holos. He held up each in turn, letting the light from the overhead fluoros catch them. Each detailed some horror of war. Rubble spilled across a street. Bodies, sprawled and crazily twisted, lay in black pools. A forest of orange flames silhouetted a skyline. The unmistakable form of a Marauder rose against flame and blackness, its heavy forearms leveled above the crumbling ruin of what might have been a church. A tiny human figure clung to one arm, legs wildly flailing.
Grayson looked up from the holos, eyebrows arched. "What's all this?"
The proctor's mouth tightened. His face was pale above the high-collared black and scarlet jacket he wore. "That is...was the town of Mountain Vista. We thought you should see these."
"Yes?" Grayson remained impassive, but he knew what was coming next.
"Mountain Vista lies on the Other side of Regis from us," one of the other Verthandians said. He had a bushy mustache and shared the proctor's look of fear and disapproval. "But it's not so far from Scandiahelm. Some misguided youths shot and killed a Kurita guardsman there. One BattleMech—only one, this Marauder—did all this to the town."
"I don't think I understand," Grayson carefully lied. How was he supposed to handle this? "Whose side are you on?"
The proctor's frown deepened. "We're not on anyone's 'side', as you put it! By attacking this base, you have put Scandiahelm and every other nearby town in grave danger! Do you know what the Governor will do to us when he learns of this raid of yours?"
Grayson glanced at Brasednewic. The rebel leader stood, arms crossed, his face carefully neutral.
Mercenary's Star Page 22
