Malicious intent

by Michael A. Stackpole

  Rosendo grabbed a wooden chair and swung it away from the wall, then seated himself with his chest pressed against its back. "Why warn us?"

  "It was only half a warning, the other half was gloating." Marthe stood and began to pace. "Vlad is aware of what we are facing here and how gravely we stand to be hurt in this fight. He wants me to know that if I were to withdraw from Coventry I could block his strike against our territory. By threatening to strike at something I hold dear, he forces me to give up something about which I do not care: Coventry."

  "But that tactic only makes sense if the Inner Sphere were doing it. What Vlad is doing helps them."

  "He is returning a favor."

  "I do not follow you."

  She stopped and stared down at him. "For Vlad to put this pressure on us, he must know two things. The first is the makeup of the Inner Sphere force. He knew in advance that it closely matched our own strength, which is something even we did not know until two days ago. We have not sent that information out of Coventry, so the only source for it is from within the Inner Sphere.

  "Second, he refers to units being trained here. We have not communicated that data to anyone. The Whitting raid, however, made enough information available to the Lyran Alliance that a knowledgeable person could conclude we were using troops that were the product of Elias Crichell's special breeding program."

  "You are suggesting the Wolves have an alliance with Tharkad?"

  "Khan Phelan and his people are at odds with the government. Even Vlad could see the benefit of establishing relations with his enemy's enemy." Marthe closed her eyes and lifted her face toward the ceiling. "From the message it is apparent that Vlad even knows I pledged everything I have to defending the planet. He tortures me with the fact that I will be dezgra if I evacuate Coventry and return home. I shamed him on Wotan and now he shames me."

  "The disgrace is nothing, my Khan. Under the circumstances, retreating is the expedient thing to do."

  She stared fire into his soul. "But it is not the Jade Falcon thing to do. Vlad resented his Wolves being made over in our image. The choice he gives me would force me to make the Falcons over in the Wolf image. I will not. I cannot do this. I will not destroy the foundation of what we truly are just to preserve some crippled form of ourselves in the future."

  "There is no merit in compromise where compliance is coerced." Rosendo nodded slowly. "This leaves us only one choice, of course."

  "The choice we have always had." Marthe smiled solemnly. "Meet our enemy, slay him, bind our wounds, and begin again."

  * * *

  Leitnerton, Veracruz

  Coventry

  Victor looked at the rainbow array of data disks spread over his desk. Each one contained the results of dozens of scenarios pitting the Falcons against the expeditionary force. The outcomes ranged from disastrous all the way up to depressing, with scant room in between. The only scenarios that appeared the least bit hopeful were ones in which the Falcons made hideous mistakes and the coalition forces somehow managed to exploit them perfectly.

  "That's not going to happen." The Prince sat back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. The casualty figures for the scenarios had been uniformly glum, predicting better than fifty percent losses on both sides. That was utterly unacceptable, but the only way to avoid it was to retreat and leave the planet to the Falcons.

  The problem with that idea is that it will be costly, too. If the Inner Sphere force were to withdraw from an even odds fight because the casualties would be too high, the Clans would push forward and continue their conquest of the Inner Sphere. It didn't matter that Khan Marthe Pryde had said her force would go no further—such a display of weakness by Inner Sphere leaders would be like dumping blood into a shark tank. The feeding frenzy would be incredible and the Clans would begin to gobble up worlds.

  Victor knew the Clan reaction to a retreat would in some ways be the least of his problems. Katherine would accuse him of betraying the people of the Lyran Alliance, and he wasn't sure she'd not be right. Forces within the Federated Commonwealth—reactionaries who didn't trust the Combine and didn't like Victor's ties to Hohiro and Omi Kurita— would begin to actively campaign against him. The recent loss of the Sarna March and other worlds the Federated Commonwealth had won twenty-five years ago had already begun to rankle with the people of his realm. Any act that could be branded open cowardice might set off all manner of problems, not the least of which was outright insurrection.

  Sitting up, he tried to massage the muscles in his neck and ease their tension, but the pain persisted. Anger flashed through him as he thought of Phelan Kell, his cousin and the one person who might have turned the tide. If you'd come with us, Phelan, we'd have had enough troops to send these Falcons packing. The second that thought came, Victor dismissed it as unworthy. Even so, the thought of Phelan lingered and something about their meeting in space above Arc-Royal began to gain momentum as it moved into Victor's consciousness. Damn, that has to be it. Phelan said to bargain hard and bargain well and what I want to be done will be done. I've been looking at battle plans, but all that is epilogue to the bidding. He realized that there was no way Khan Marthe Pryde was going to make a mistake, which meant she must also realize that the fighting would be as crippling to her force as to his. If there is a loophole, some way that will let her lower her bid, then I can lower mine and neither of us needs to destroy our entire commands in a fight over a planet that means so little to us, but so much to the future of humanity.

  Victor stood and pulled on his jacket. "I hope you're a light sleeper, Ragnar, wherever you are. I'm going to need you wide awake if we're going to find a means to use the Falcons' own ways against them. It may not win us much of an advantage, but anything would be better than what I've got right now."

  40

  Whitting Coventry

  Coventry Province, Lyran Alliance

  16 June 3058

  Dust drizzled itself in a lazy curtain over the motionless hovercar's windscreen, muting the dawn light pouring into the vehicle, dulling colors and deepening shadows. For Doc everything looked unreal, as if warped by memories and hopes into a dream from which he could not escape. Into a nightmare from which there is no escape.

  He found it impossible to believe he was truly sitting there, in the close confines of a hovercar, with the Archon Prince of the Federated Commonwealth, a Wolf warrior who was also heir to the throne of the Free Rasalhague Republic, the Precentor Martial of ComStar, and the FedCom Secretary of Intelligence. Being admitted to the councils of such powerful men was as foreign to him as had been war—and yet he had been able to study war to learn how to handle it. This was something for which he never could have been prepared.

  Subtle tremors had been sending a vibration through the vehicle, but it stopped along with the faint echoes of what seemed distant thunder. That silence means the Titans are in place here in Whitting. The last troops to fight here will be the first to die here when the fighting begins anew. Doc looked up at Victor. "Did you truly want to honor the Titans by making them your honor guard, or are they here to guarantee my compliance with your wishes?"

  Victor's gaze did not waver. "My father might have used your Titans as hostages, but I wouldn't. I do want them honored, which is why they're here. If you required coercion to do what I—what we want you to do—then we're the ones who need to be rethinking our strategy."

  "And we lose nothing by trying it," Ragnar said.

  Doc smiled nervously. "I've heard better endorsements of plans in my time."

  The Prince chuckled. "And I've endorsed better plans than this. Unfortunately, in this case, our options are limited."

  Doc slumped back in his seat. "If I'm being cast as the savior of the Inner Sphere, that much is obvious." A shiver ran through him made up of equal parts of fatigue and fear. His whole experience on Coventry had been surreal, beginning with command of a unit full of misfits that he'd had to transform into warriors to dealing for supplies to somehow keepin
g his command together during three months of a Clan assault on the world. Being awakened in the wee hours of the morning by Prince Victor and then subjected to an intensive debriefing somehow fit in with everything that had gone before.

  What Victor and the Precentor Martial had suggested to him seemed sheer insanity and he'd almost refused to go along with them. He thought they'd gone mad and was about to tell them so, when someone knocked on the office door. When Jerry Cranston answered it, Andy Bick stood there with a pot of hot coffee. He explained that he'd happened to notice lights in the office, so he had gone to make coffee figuring whoever was up at that hour might need it.

  It was probably the hour, and definitely the lack of sleep, but as steam from the pot curled up over Andy's face, all Doc could see was a shattered skull with empty eye sockets. In the whole time he'd been commanding the Titans he'd never let himself acknowledge the horror of what would happen to his command if he made a mistake. He couldn't because he was working too hard to make sure there were no mistakes.

  It occurred to him that refusing Victor's request might be the biggest mistake he could make. As Andy set the tray down and retreated from the room, Doc thanked him, then told the Prince that he would do what Victor wanted.

  Jerry Cranston leaned back from the driver's seat and showed them his chronometer. "0645 hours. They'll be here soon."

  Victor slapped Doc's leg. "Let's go."

  Doc cracked the door of the hovercar and immediately caught a blast of dust in the face. He coughed, then wrapped a muffler around his mouth and nose. The scent of the dust combined with the musty odor of the wool to fill his head with an earthy aroma. He tried to think of it as normal and healthy, but its lifelessness somehow brought the image of a desert filled with bleached bones to his mind.

  He settled goggles over his eyes, then took his first daylight look at Whitting. The gentle winds once famous for rippling through endless fields of golden grain had long since sucked all the moisture from the 'Mech-churned top-soil in and around the town. The wind streamed and eddied over the broken ground, picking up dust and whirling it down the streets. Piles of dying sod formed spiky tan towers that quivered and toppled as the winds undermined them.

  Someone—Doc cynically decided it was some member of the Eleventh Lyran Guards—had been up early stringing light blue and gold pennants from building to building in the town square. They fluttered and snapped, calling attention to themselves. Whoever had put them up must have thought they would add dignity to the momentous occasion of the bidding for Coventry, but Doc found them as appropriate as clowns at a funeral. They were a gaudy invitation to a holiday in a ghost town at the heart of what could quickly be transformed into a ghost world.

  Having seen the town previously in the strobing light of muzzle-flashes and missile explosions, Doc had taken for shadows the black fire-stains on most of the buildings. Standing on the ground he could look into their charred interiors and see gray sky where roofs should have been. Even the tan dust clotting each crack and crevasse of charred beams and half-burned furnishings couldn't make things seem more benign. The fires might not still be burning, but Doc heard their crackle and snap in the sounds made by the pennants.

  He looked over at Victor. "This is it, isn't it? Whitting is what Coventry will become if we don't succeed."

  The Prince, wrapped in a cloak and also wearing a muffler and goggles, nodded slowly. "This is why we have to sueceed." With each nod a little dust drifted down from his hair like smoke from the burning cockpit of a dead 'Mech.

  New vibrations came up through the ground and grew stronger as time passed. Everyone on the Inner Sphere side of Whitting's main square knew that the sounds marked the arrival of the Jade Falcons. Doc glanced back over his right shoulder, past Victor and the Precentor Martial, to where the leaders of the coalition force stood in the lee of a canvas windbreak. The angle of their poses betrayed their tension and anxiety. Though trying not to be obvious, no one could keep his eyes from the southern edge of the town, waiting to see the shadowy silhouettes of war machines moving through it.

  They're waiting for the first glimpse of the people who might be their death. Doc shifted his gaze to Victor. "They know nothing of our opening bid, do they?"

  Victor shook his head. "You deal with the Clans, I'll deal with our allies."

  Doc smiled under his scarf. "I guess if I have to have someone guarding my back, I don't mind if it's you."

  The Prince nodded. "Just pray they shoot low."

  "I think I'll pray you shoot first."

  "Another fine option."

  Doc saw distorted shapes through the edge of his goggles and turned to see the fearsome BattleMechs of the Jade Falcons approaching. Heavy footfalls pounded cobblestones into gravel and sent slate shingles sliding from partial roofs to shatter in the streets. The Clan 'Mechs had an alienness about them that had not fully struck Doc before he saw them lumbering ominously forward within the confines of the village. On the battlefield they seem perfectly in place, but here, in a town that should be filled with the sounds of ordinary life coming and going, of children laughing, of men and women going about their day-to-day joys and sorrows, they just seem malevolent and malignant.

  The Falcon 'Mechs stopped one street before the central square, but Doc harbored no illusions that they did so out of fear of tearing down the pennants. The positions they took up were all behind cover. Unlike the way the Titans stood out in the open, arrayed for ceremony, the Jade Falcons were in place for war. Their presence mocked the pennants, the people who had strung them, and whatever frail hope could make anyone think they were appropriate at a time and place like this.

  Doc first saw the members of the Clan contingent when they entered the alley between the town hall and the toasted ruin of the building next to it. In the darkened alley they were protected from the wind, so it was not the wind that gave a sway to their green cloaks but the purposeful strides of their strong legs devouring the distance to the street. Once they emerged, the fierce wind pushed their cloaks back away from their bodies, but the two Falcons seemed not to notice, their pace not slowed, their heads unbowed by the sting of blowing bits of dirt.

  It is as if they're in league with something more powerful than the elements. Doc shook himself, spraying a cloud of dirt from the folds of his gray cloak. The wind buffeted him, wrapping the cloak around his legs. If he took a step forward he would go down in a tangle of cloth and limbs, not at all the image the Inner Sphere force would want to present before the Clanners.

  The pair of Jade Falcons came to a stop in the center of the desolate sandpit that had once been the grassy emerald set in the heart of Whitting. Doc found himself entranced with the tall woman moving to the fore. The wind played with her cloak, revealing the green jumpsuit she wore underneath. While the garment was never intended to be revealing, it was cinched tight enough at the belt to give shape to her slender form. She walked forward with a commanding grace that summoned even more admiration than her beauty, and her continued resistance to the vagaries of the wind marked her iron will.

  In her wake trailed a shorter man, though not so short when compared to the Prince of the Federated Commonwealth. Stocky and strong, the fair-haired man seemed to be taking in every detail of the square and the people gathered there. His easy, loose-limbed stride might have made Doc think the man viewed the meeting as a lark, but his sharp, hawklike gaze suggested otherwise. He took a position slightly upwind of the woman, and used his body as a bit of a windbreak for her.

  The woman challenged Doc and the others to approach with an intense stare that the bubble-goggles she wore could not diminish. The Precentor Martial and Prince started forward, but the cloak still constricted Doc's movement. The woman oriented on him and waited, not impatiently but expectantly. She will judge me by how I handle this. She pays the wind no heed, is somehow more powerful than it is. It holds me fast, making me her inferior.

  Keeping his eyes locked with hers, Doc shifted his right shoulder back and
brought the other one forward. The wind slid along his body and into the opening of the cloak at the front. It filled the garment and billowed it out, freeing his legs. He let it peel the cloak away from the right side of his body, yet caught enough of it in his left hand so it would not fly away and carry him off with it.

  I do not need to be more powerful than the elements, I merely need to be smart enough to turn their strength to my advantage.

  The woman gave him a curt nod, then looked at the Precentor Martial as Doc closed the gap with the rest of the group. Both parties stood with but a few steps separating them. No one made any attempt to bridge the distance with a hand offered in salutation.

  The woman bowed her head to the Inner Sphere contingent. "It is time for the bidding to be done. I am Khan Marthe Pryde of the Jade Falcons. This is Galaxy Commander Rosendo Hazen, my second in command on this world."

  Anastasius Focht acknowledged Hazen with a nod. "I am Anastasius Focht, Precentor Martial of ComStar. This is Prince Victor Ian Steiner-Davion, my second in command." He held his left hand out to wave Doc forward. "And this is Hauptmann Caradoc Trevena. He has lately been attached to my staff. He has been here on Coventry since your attack began."

  Focht waved his right hand around the square. "It is his handiwork you see here, and his unit behind us. Hauptmann Trevena was the planner, executor, and commander of the Whitting raid."

  Doc felt color flooding his face as the Falcon Khan gave him an openly appraising look. He felt as if he'd been stripped naked and put on display before an audience that could not marry his image to whatever preconceived notions they'd formed about him. He forced himself to breathe calmly and he held her icy stare when her eyes found his.

  "So, you are the leader of these light 'Mechs, quiaff?"

  "The Titans, yes."

  "The Titans." Marthe Pryde smiled, again giving him a nod. "The irony is not lost on us. Your actions slew many dreams of glory."