Principles of Desolation

by Randall N Bills

  She found organizing, cutting and rerecording her thoughts painful, especially having to watch herself in the video looking so weak and scared. The words came out of the holovid like bursts from a needier, each sentence a nest of stings. But she hadn't flinched while she said it all, and so she didn't flinch when she played isolated snippets, trying to find a way to integrate them into something coherent.

  "... and I just lay there, and I struggled a little, of course, but not enough, I didn't fight hard enough, and I tell myself now that it was because he had a knife and I wasn't armed, but since when was a knife enough to paralyze me? And when it was over, he walked away. I let him walk away! He should have been lying on the ground, rolling in pain, his hand grabbing for the bloody mess where his balls used to be. But he walked away, and I just whimpered on the ground like some damned dog. How could I?"

  * * *

  "Daoshen will never feel any blame for what happened on New Hessen. It's not in his nature. He would never admit to any mistake, especially a military mistake, so in his final evaluation, he will come off as exemplary. As always. So who gets the blame? Me. I'm sure of it. I could try to apply to him, saying I'm sorry we couldn't deal with the Swordsworn when they came in to help out, but gosh, I was busy being raped at the time, but will he care? Will it make any difference? Of course not."

  * * *

  "I see it now, the nature of men, more clearly than I ever did. Not that I ever doubted you, Erde. I always believed what you said, and of course I've had plenty of chances to see the baser instincts of men at work. And sometimes those instincts work out well for us. But I'd never seen it like I saw it in Caleb ... his complete and total weakness. A slave to his instinct and passions. Barely above an animal. Everything that's flawed about his gender. But somehow, he and his kind convince so many realms that they, not women, deserve to reign, simply by virtue of their viciousness. When, how, when did savagery become a virtue?"

  * * *

  "I know. I know, I know, I know. I know who to blame for this. I know who did this. But still, I know what I did, what I didn't do. I know my mistakes. I didn't fight hard enough. And I flirted with him, and I was—well, wasn't there a time when maybe that was where I wanted things to go? So they went there. Isn't that, isn't some of that, my fault?"

  * * *

  She had watched that last part, frozen the playback, walked into her lavatory and thrown up. Her own image revolted her. She wanted to grab the floating duplicate of herself and shake some sense into it. Such a mewling little victim. So pathetic.

  The recording and editing process continued until the first jump to Buchlau. While the JumpShip was recharging, Danai made arrangements with a courier she trusted to get the holovid to Sian. She encrypted it using every technique she knew to make sure Erde was the only one who would see it, then she let it go. And it was gone.

  For a day or two after she sent it off, she kept thinking of something else to say, something she should have added or something she should have expressed differently. But before long she resigned herself to the fact that she could make no more changes. The final holovid was what it was. Now she had to do something else with her time.

  It took a few days before she felt like leaving her quarters, but after spending enough time walking in small circles around her berth, she finally got stir crazy.

  So four weeks after leaving New Hessen, as her JumpShip sat recharging in the Ningpo system. Danai left her quarters to see what else the ship contained.

  After a quick walk, she already missed the private JumpShips she'd taken to and from Terra. Military JumpShips seemed to carry four times as many people, with an equivalent reduction in amenities. This ship had no five-star restaurant on board—instead, it had a military mess and an officers' club. Since she felt more like drinking than eating, she headed for the officers' club.

  Most of the JumpShip's interior looked utilitarian. Pipes and vents were left exposed, metal handrails were painted primer gray, and most of the walls were actually wire-mesh fences. The echoing voices of soldiers two or three decks away, and the noise of them pulling themselves along the handrails toward the gravity deck, sounded as if they were right behind her, making the near-empty corridors seem crowded with ghosts.

  She returned the salutes of the few soldiers she passed without saying anything, or even glancing in their direction. After a few more turns and an ascent up a narrow staircase, she stood at the hatch of the officers' club. She took a deep breath and walked in.

  The club was nicer than the ship's corridors, but still far from luxurious—this was a Capellan military vessel, not a Canopian pleasure circus. The bar was dark stone on burnished gray metal, brown industrial carpeting covered the floor and the chairs had black padding on the seats but only hard metal on the backs. Danai found an empty table near the bar and waited for someone to bring her liquor.

  A young man in a black jacket buttoned up to his chin walked over. "How may I serve you?" he murmured. The club was only a quarter full and quiet, so she heard him easily.

  "Mao-tai. Straight," she said. "Make it a double."

  The waiter bowed quickly and walked behind the bar. He was back in thirty seconds with a glass half full of dark brown liquid.

  Danai's hand jumped toward the glass. She wanted to throw every last drop of the liquor down her throat in a single, pleasurable gulp. The alcohol content of mao- tai, however, made that seem like a bad idea unless she wanted to spend her first moments out of her cabin plastered on the floor of the officers' club. The last thing she needed was humiliation, so she contented herself with a good sip.

  The drink tasted a little salty, a little sweet, a little earthy and quite fermented. The alcohol went right to work in her system, and she felt mild goodwill toward the universe. She hadn't felt that way in a month.

  It wasn't right. She shouldn't feel good. She took another sip, then another. She didn't want to down the drink too quickly, but she was anxious to get to the part of inebriation where she became belligerent and angry.

  A shadow fell across her table. She didn't look up. The shadow didn't move. She hoped it was just the waiter hovering nearby, and that he'd move soon.

  A voice, a little raspy and edged with amusement, addressed her. "Insert cheesy pickup line here."

  The words were so odd that Danai couldn't help but look up. A man with black hair, green eyes and a cocky, sideways grin stood over her. His face was narrow and convex, as if a normal head had been put in a large vise and squeezed. The blue triangle on his shoulder indicated that he was a sang-wei, like her.

  "Pardon?" she said.

  "That's all I've got," he said. "I thought of a bunch of lines, but they all sounded stupid to me, and I couldn't choose between them. So I thought maybe you could pick for me. Just pick a stupid pickup line, pretend I said it and then we'll move on."

  "Go away," she said.

  "That's it!" he exclaimed. "That's the spirit! Right, that's exactly what you'd do. Now, I grin my charming grin"—he grinned, apparently attempting to turn on the charm—"and I apologize for being inept, but then I say it must mean something if I was willing to look so idiotic just to meet you. That has to be worth something, right?"

  "Go away," Danai repeated.

  The man frowned. "Hmm. Okay, disarming honesty didn't work. How about . . ."

  Danai stood quickly. Her chair toppled onto the carpet. She pounded the table with her fist. The metal top rang.

  "Go away!" she yelled.

  All noise stopped. All eyes looked at Danai. She righted her chair, sat back down and stared at her drink, but didn't grab it because her hands were still clenched into fists. Ah, there it is, she thought. There's the belligerence I've been waiting for. The mao-tai's doing its work.

  She listened to the ragged rhythm of her breath and stared at a single bead of water running down her glass. She didn't see the man leave, but she assumed he didn't stay long after her outburst. She also didn't know how long the other people in the club stared at
her, and she didn't care.

  She sat for a while, her back hunching more and more until she was slumped on the table. She felt nauseous, stiff and angry, but at least she was out of her berth. She knew this was supposed to represent progress, but she couldn't remember why.

  13 October 3135

  She eventually drank herself into oblivion, which, she finally recalled, had been the point of the endeavor. Or at least, if it hadn't been the point when she entered the club, it quickly became the point when the first drops of mao-tai rolled over her tongue. She'd made it back to her berth somehow, collapsed on her bunk, plunged into unconsciousness and stayed there for a good, long time.

  It had worked so well that Danai was tempted to repeat the whole performance today, but she had two good reasons not to. First, drinking herself into a stupor didn't conform to her great-aunt's advice about confronting problems head-on. Second, she had a briefing to attend, and it wouldn't do to be tipsy. Being hung over was bad enough, but she was pretty sure she'd manage to lick the worst of the headache by the time the eleven o'clock briefing began.

  Sure enough, when eleven o'clock rolled around, Da- nai's mind felt fairly sharp, though still veiled by a difficult-to-locate ache. It would be enough to get through the meeting.

  The briefing room wasn't far from the officers' club, and she felt a slight twinge when she passed the club entrance. But she soldiered on.

  The briefing room held about a dozen people, most of whom she knew quite well, along with a few new faces. One of them was the dark-haired man from the club last night. He didn't look at her when she entered, so she didn't bother to look at him.

  Chairs sat around a white holovid projector, and Danai found a place between two of her fellow officers. She nodded politely at each one but did not exchange pleasantries.

  Sao-shao Leong entered the room and commenced the briefing without wasting a moment on small talk. At other times Danai had found Leong's businesslike air off-putting, but today she felt grateful for his direct approach.

  "The Confederation's military has been busy since our involvement on New Hessen," Leong began in his deep monotone. "Our journey should provide all the rest we will need, for it seems likely we will all be thrown back into action shortly. McCarron's Armored Cavalry is never left to rest for long."

  He turned on the holovid, and an image of the systems in the Inner Sphere appeared. Most of the planets were navy blue, dim and hard to see. Capellan planets, by contrast, showed up in bright red.

  Danai saw it immediately. The shape of the Confederation had changed, extended on the coreward side. Daoshen had been on the move.

  Of course, she couldn't be sure what criteria were used to mark a planet as Capellan on the map. Knowing

  Daoshen, it might mean nothing more than that someone of Capellan blood had managed to land on the planet and stay alive for longer than a week.

  "The military buildup enabled by the chancellor has come to fruition," Leong said. "We have launched attacks across our coreward border, and seen success on almost all fronts. Ningpo is ours. Genoa, Algol, Azha, Slocum, Acamar and Nanking have been hit, and all are bound to fall." As Leong spoke, the holovid of the Inner Sphere seemed to move forward, planets growing larger as the image zoomed in on the recently expanded border of the Confederation. The scope of the offensive impressed Danai, as it struck much closer to the heart of the Republic than she had thought possible.

  "What was once Prefecture V of the Republic of the Sphere is increasingly returning to our hands, where it should have been all these years," Leong said. "These attacks are largely the natural result of the chancellor's efforts, and the events of yesterday will only encourage our own efforts to rebuild our nation. Most of you have not seen this yet. I urge all of you to pay close attention to an announcement that was recently released across the Inner Sphere."

  The image of a planet blinked away, replaced by Exarch Jonah Levin of the Republic of the Sphere. His face looked drawn, his eyes exhausted. Just the way he should look, Danai thought.

  Still, as Levin spoke, Danai felt a peculiar sympathy for him. He had inherited a mess not of his own making. Enemies on all sides were closing in on a state that never should have existed. The Republic was an oddity, an anomaly, and soon it would be nothing more than a blip in recorded history. Yet Levin clearly cared for it, obviously hoped that somehow it might still have a future. She could imagine what it felt like to have huge portions of your nation seized out from under you—as a Capellan, she was all too familiar with that feeling.

  The content of the speech amazed her. The Republic was in full retreat, locking down in its core. Crawling into its shell like a turtle. The vulnerability of all the planets not included in that shell left a gaping void, and Danai fully expected Daoshen to rush headfirst into the opening left by the Republic's weakness.

  Levin finished speaking and his image disappeared. The map, still zoomed on the volatile Capellan-Republic border, reappeared.

  "Do not let this speech deceive you," Leong said. "The Republic may be concentrating forces inside its core, but the remaining planets are far from defenseless. By all appearances there simply was not enough time to pull all forces into the core, even had Levin wanted everything beyond the core to be abandoned. Many forces, some of them elite, remain, and they seem determined to preserve what scraps of the Republic are in their possession.

  "They will make staunch foes, but weakened ones. The chancellor intends to use this opportunity to take back what the Confederation never should have lost. You will all be a part of this effort. Specific assignments will be forthcoming shortly.

  "Officers should maintain the following protocols as we draw nearer to battle territory. First, all enlisted personnel should . . ."

  Danai let Leong's voice gradually fade from her consciousness as she stared at the map. Her brain shifted gears, and all the hours she had spent studying tactics in the academy and on the battlefield became useful. The planets, she thought, would tell far more about Daoshen's plans than Leong would, and the cold act of analyzing them would make a welcome change from what she had been doing up to this point on the journey away from New Hessen.

  It didn't take her long to see it. The pivotal acquisition seemed to be Nanking. The other planets being attacked might be nothing more than stepping stones to that prize, a planet with 'Mech production facilities that lay quite close to the border of Prefecture X—the border behind which, according to Levin, the Republic had sealed itself.

  With Nanking and the other nearby planets in hand, much of Prefecture VI would be vulnerable. A small pocket of a half-dozen planets scattered around New Ar- agon could be isolated, left to wither until they finally surrendered. The Confederation could reclaim worlds such as Aldebaran and Zurich, worlds that rightly belonged to it, worlds that had played a crucial role in the rise of the Liaos and of the Capellan state. Then, with so much of the Republic of the Sphere in his pocket, Daoshen could once again take aim at the prize that, due in part to Danai's failure at New Hessen, currently lay out of reach—Tikonov. The current offensive push, if sustained, could net the Confederation two prized 'Mech-production facilities.

  As she pondered the map, grasping what Daoshen must be up to, she felt like fighting again for the first time in a month. She wanted to climb into Yen-lo-wang's cockpit and take part in this wave of attacks, to take back planets that had a deep connection and long history with the Confederation and with House Liao. She could see herself on the battlefield, envision herself pushing her enemies—the enemies of the Confederation—back, watching them stumble under the force of her charge, watching them flee. She could, for the first time on this particular journey, imagine circumstances where she wasn't being overwhelmed. Where she was victorious. The vision of conquest had a tenuous hold in her mind, and she saw dark edges around it as other forces gathered to cloud the image into darkness. But she could see it now, and she would hold on to it as long as she could.

  Returning her attention to the map, Da
nai noticed at least two big hitches in Daoshen's plan, or at least in the version of it she had cobbled together. First, going toward New Canton would mean opening up a new front in the war, and that often led to trouble, even against a foe as battered and disorganized as the Republic. Second, New Canton still contained a strong military presence, including the Triarii Protectors. Sometimes scorned as nothing more than a colorful parade unit, the Triarii were nevertheless highly disciplined, and each prefecture's regiment was led by some of the most promising minds churned out by the Republic's military academies. New Canton lay only a jump away from Zurich and Aldebaran, two jumps from Nanking. Any move toward New Canton would bring out the Triarii, and that would keep the invading troops occupied. If the battle didn't go Daoshen's way, he might even end up losing Nanking, as the Triarii would surely press him as far back as they could if they gained any advantage. Daoshen might want to reclaim Zurich and Aldebaran, but those battles would likely have to wait.

  Danai saw several possible solutions to the problem, but at the moment, based on the limited information emanating through Leong's drone, she couldn't pinpoint which option Daoshen might choose. Whatever he decided, though, she would be a part of it. She'd see to it.

  The briefing ended and Danai joined the others filing out, her head high. The dark-haired man from the previous evening slipped into line just behind her. She kept her gaze locked ahead, straining to believe that nothing out of her line of sight actually existed.

  "Look," he said, in open defiance of her attempts to deny his existence. "I'm sorry about yesterday. If I had known you didn't want to talk. I wouldn't have talked. I was just, you know, being sociable. I just saw you and thought I should . . . well, don't get the wrong idea, it wasn't all just that you looked good or anything—not that you didn't look good . . ."