BattleTech

by Loren L. Coleman

  McDonald was coming. And if Jonathan was with his regiment? Or if he lay dead on the battlefield? How would she know? She felt helpless and so small she wanted to curl up into a little ball and hide.

  Stanton’s Zeus stood a kilometer from the camp: a brooding, hulking, silent machine.

  • • •

  No casualties arrived the next morning. The bank of clouds that Trainer had seen advancing the day before filled the sky. Their underbellies were heavy and gray. By ten, McDonald’s forces were spreading across the Plains, like a wall of advancing water: two Banshees, a Berserker, and lastly, a King Crab. Foot soldiers and armored tanks milled around the legs of the ´Mechs.

  The camp had a deserted feel to it. The patients they couldn’t move were gathered into three Quonsets. Sidearms were distributed. Trainer put hers in a desk drawer. Ramsey strapped his holster around his waist. Trainer arched an eyebrow when she saw that. “I thought you didn’t want to get shot at.”

  Ramsey shrugged. “Never hurts to be prepared.”

  They stood together, watching the machines and soldiers come. Trainer craned her neck. “I don’t see any of our ´Mechs.”

  “That’s because there are none left,” said Ramsey. He turned aside and spat. “Hell.” And then he shaded his eyes; it wasn’t very bright out, but the gleam of the diffuse light of the morning off the advancing ´Mechs set up a white glare. “Oh, Jesus.”

  “What?” Trainer squinted. “What is it?”

  Ramsey pointed. “Look.”

  Trainer’s gaze followed in the direction he indicated, and then she gasped. “Oh, my God.”

  It was Stanton, sprinting for his ´Mechs , too far away for anyone to stop him.

  “Stanton!” Trainer screamed. They’ll think we’re going to put up a fight! “Stanton, stop! It’s too late for that! Not now, not now!”

  But either Stanton couldn’t hear, or didn’t care, because in a few moments, he disappeared into the bowels of his Zeus. Trainer waited in an agony of suspense through a minute, then two. There was a loud whirr, and then the Zeus quivered to life.

  Horrified, Trainer watched the huge machine’s cockpit pivot in a hot start protest of metal and gears. Its huge legs creaked, then pedaled in a backward walk. It lumbered around to face the oncoming army, its arms up and extended. There was a flash, and then Trainer was nearly blinded by a ruby-red blaze of laser fire from the Zeus’s left torso. The laser ripped across the right leg of the nearest Banshee. There was that peculiar shriek metal makes when it’s being torn in two, and a smell of ozone in the air, and then the Zeus followed with another sizzle of laser fire that cut a swath across the Banshee’s chest. Caught off-guard, the Banshee teetered back and slouched right, its weight buckling its damaged right leg. But then there was a high hum, and Trainer watched as the Berserker put on speed and flew forward, its massive titanium hatchet upraised.

  “Run!” Ramsey shouted.

  Trainer felt as if she’d been jolted awake. She spun on her heel just as the Berserker reached the Zeus. A lance of laser fire from the Zeus went wide, and then the Berserker’s hatchet came smashing down, caving in the Zeus’s right shoulder with the first blow.

  Suddenly, there were shouts; medical and support personnel went flying off in all directions; and the air was filled with laser and weapons fire from the advancing soldiers. Slugs whistled by her ears. My God, McDonald thinks it’s a trap, that we’re trying to trick them! Trainer’s burning lungs pulled in air that was choked with smoke and the scent of burning flesh, and she sprinted for the far side of the camp, aiming for the relative safety of the medical Quonset.

  She almost made it. Then, suddenly, she felt a blossom of pain bloom between her shoulders. Screaming, she staggered, and then another burst of weapons fire caught her in the back and chewed her flesh. The force of the blow spun her around. She crumpled to the ground, blood gushing from wounds that had pierced her back and exited through her chest. In a few seconds, the front of her uniform was soggy with bright red blood.

  Jonathan. With the last of her strength, she turned her face to the sky. Her vision was constricting now, the world shrinking down to a narrow pinpoint. She felt unbearably cold, and then she began to shake as her blood pumped out onto the dry, black, thirsty earth. She couldn’t move. Even blinking was an effort. Her mind felt sluggish, as if she were winding down like an old clock whose gears had simply worn out. In a few seconds, and probably less, she knew that she would slip into a deep, long, dreamless sleep, and she wouldn’t wake up.

  The last thing she saw were the dark underbellies of the clouds, avatars of the approaching storm.

  • • •

  Colonel Linda McDonald’s boots crunched over the ruins of the medical unit. She’d dismounted her King Crab as soon as she’d reached the medical complex. Anger boiled in her gut in counterpoint to the water bubbling in the steam vents beneath the black basalt plain. What a waste of lives! Even though she’d realized that the Zeus had been the only bit of ´Mechs weaponry, it had taken her too many precious moments to relay orders. By then, the damage had been done.

  She’d already made a survey of the casualties on the volcano itself, lumbering over the hardened lava flows in her King Crab. She’d picked her way over and around ruined bodies and machines on a battlefield, but that had been a real fight.

  But not this. This was a massacre. McDonald’s jaw firmed as her gaze swept over the debris and the broken, shattered corpses of patients and medical personnel flung into haphazard piles of bedding and bloodied bandages. Her people were already going through, recovering remains and zipping them away in black bags. There were some prisoners—patients, mainly, although she spotted one physician, male, red-haired, his uniform soaked with the blood of those he’d tried to save. But it looked to her as if the rest of the command personnel were dead; McDonald had already seen the body of the unit commander, a colonel she didn’t know (a blessing), bundled away. Just beyond, and to the right, next to a smashed Quonset, was the body of another officer: a woman, her long blonde hair dyed to rust with blood. A physician, from the look of her uniform.

  She directed her gaze toward the destroyed Zeus. The maniac who started this mess. The ´Mechs lay on its side, the cockpit caved in and its belly ripped open by laser fire. God, if she’d only gotten control of the situation sooner, they might’ve been spared all this.

  She heard the crunch of boots and turned to see one of her best pilots—the one who had piloted the Berserker that had destroyed the Zeus. “Peterson,” she said. “You have a report?”

  Holding his neurohelmet under his left arm, Peterson, a swarthy man with intense blue eyes and black curly hair, saluted with his right. “We’ve secured a perimeter, Colonel. I think it was just this one ´Mechs . I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault. You were fired on; you returned fire. How were we supposed to know?” And then, because she couldn’t stand the taste of her own anger, she said, “God, what a waste! The Twenty-Third had to know that leaving their wounded…” She stopped when she saw that Peterson’s gaze had flickered right, toward the ruined Quonset. “Captain?”

  She watched Peterson take a single, unsteady step forward, then two, like a BattleMech with a faulty gyro; his neurohelmet dropped, unnoticed, to the shattered earth; and then Peterson broke into a run.

  “Captain?” she called again. “John?”

  But Peterson didn’t stop. He reached the body and then stood there for a long moment, looking down at the woman. And then it was as if his strength gave way because he swayed and tottered. His knees folded, and he sagged to the earth. He gathered the body of the woman into his arms and then McDonald saw his shoulders begin to shiver.

  She came up behind Peterson. “John,” she said, and put her hand on his shoulder. She felt a long shudder ripple through his body, and even though she couldn’t see his face, she knew that he was weeping.

  “Oh, Liz,” she heard him say, his voice clogged with grief. “Oh, no.”

  Understa
nding blazed through McDonald like a shaft of sun piercing thick clouds. Dear God. McDonald looked down at the woman in Peterson’s arms. Her skin was white as marble, and her lips were parted slightly, as if she were about to speak. Her chest was shredded and so saturated with blood and gore that McDonald caught the odor of wet copper. Through the blood, she saw the sparkle of a diamond in the shape of a single tear.

  Slowly, McDonald turned and walked away and gave Peterson the privacy of his grief.

  Overhead, lightening flashed. There was a roll of thunder that echoed through the ruins and shook the ground. And then it began to rain.

  EIGHT NINE THREE

  by Steven Mohan, Jr.

  Gaines, Altais

  Lyran Protectorate

  June 3039

  Hikotoro Yamashita strolled toward the front gate of the Gaines Port Authority, nodding and smiling pleasantly at his death as if it were his oldest and dearest friend.

  Right now his death was dressed up like a Lyran soldier, a twenty-year-old boy with hard eyes and a suspicious hand on the holstered needler at his hip. The soldier stepped out from a small guard shack. “You there, stop.”

  Yamashita obeyed, carefully lowering to the ground the burlap sack he carried. The bottles inside clinked together as the sack shifted. “Ohayo gozaimasu.”

  The soldier’s face twisted in confusion. “What?”

  “Sumimasen, uh, excuse me, uh, Sergeant.” Yamashita said, deliberately misstating the man’s grade.

  “It’s corporal,” the man snapped.

  “Oh. I apology. I didn’t—”

  “Your name,” the soldier said brusquely.

  “Watanabe,” said Yamashita cheerfully, handing the man his forged papers. “Kiichi Watanabe.”

  The soldier took a couple steps back before he glanced down at the papers. Smart.

  Yamashita was careful not to glance at the gate as the soldier examined his papers. Instead he looked up at Big Smoker, the immense cinder cone that loomed over the horizon. A wisp of gray smoke curled away from the volcano’s summit. Yamashita sensed the mountain’s anger, smelled it in the sulfurous stink that soured the perfume of a late spring day, tasted it in the fine grit carried on the wind.

  It was an evil portent.

  Ukawa would’ve said this was a stupid stunt. But then Ukawa was dead, killed when a Lyran tank’s PPC bolt blasted through the bulkhead of his APC, turning everyone inside into a fine red paste.

  Most of Yamashita’s comrades were dead. The rest were gone: the last DCMS unit on the planet had been evacuated the week before, leaving Altais to the Lyran Commonwealth. Yamashita was stranded on an enemy-held world. The smart thing would’ve been to go to ground.

  Yamashita was never one for doing the smart thing.

  He glanced at the corporal. The soldier was dressed in well-worn fatigues, the patch on his right shoulder marking him as a member of the Eighth Donegal Guard. Yamashita noted other things about that uniform: the astringent smell of Altaisian mud, a scorch mark on his left boot, a faded brick-colored stain over the right arm.

  This guard was a combat soldier, one who’d survived this long by being careful and smart. He wasn’t going to stop now just because his officers had stuck him in front of a gate.

  This was going to be hard.

  “OK,” said the soldier, handing the papers back, “what’s your business here?”

  “I’m here to see the Port Commissioner.”

  The soldier studied “Kiichi Watanabe” for a moment. Yamashita’s hair was slicked back and he wore a dark suit jacket with long sleeves, a garment obviously too hot for the day. “Watanabe” looked like a shady businessman.

  Which was not so far from the truth, after all.

  “Is he expecting you?” the soldier finally asked.

  The question was a trap, an invitation to lie.

  Yamashita played his only card. “No. But I guarantee he’ll want to see me.”

  The soldier’s eyes flickered to the sack resting on the ground. “What’s in there?” He bent down.

  “A gift for the Commissioner. Four bottles of New Ross Private Reserves, the finest wine on Altais.”

  “Four bottles?” asked the soldier, obviously noticing the fifth bottle in the sack.

  “Hai, four.” Yamashita smiled gently. “Each worth a couple hundred C-bills.”

  The soldier’s gaze flickered back to the guard shack. Perhaps he wondered if there was enough to share with his comrade. The soldier pulled a bottle from the sack and held it up. Sunlight filtered through the ruby-colored wine. “I’ll need to verify your identity.”

  “Of course,” said Yamashita easily.

  He’d make it through a fingerprint analysis or a retinal scan, but there were other checks, more basic checks, and if the soldier realized Yamashita was a soldier of the Draconis Combine, he would meet a sudden and violent end.

  If he was lucky.

  This thought didn’t trouble Yamashita overmuch. He had learned to live with the reality of his death as one learns to live with the weather. Some days it rained and some days it did not and since you could never tell beforehand which it would be, the wise man was always prepared for both.

  Besides, there were secrets to be learned, if one had sharp eyes.

  After patting down Yamashita, the soldier pulled an optical scanner from his belt. “Hold still.” He brought the device up to Yamashita’s left eye, pressed a button, and studied the readout. “Kiichi Watanabe,” he said softly.

  The soldier stared at him for a long moment with those hard eyes. Yamashita tensed, waiting for the order to strip to his waist or roll up his sleeves.

  Instead, the soldier turned and bellowed, “Comstock.”

  A Lyran PFC stepped out of the guard shack. “Aye, Bernie?”

  “Take this gentlemen,” he glanced at Yamashita, “to the Commissioner’s office. If he gives you any trouble—” The soldier didn’t finish, instead flashing a tight little smile.

  A cruel smile.

  Neither Yamashita nor the PFC had to ask what that smile meant.

  • • •

  It was a long walk from the front gate to the Commissioner’s office and Yamashita spent every bit of it watching and listening.

  A LoaderMech painted heavy-equipment yellow bent down to pull shipping containers off a line of parked trucks, setting each of them down on the ferrocrete deck hard enough to produce a long, hollow gong. Longshoremen in hardhats scrambled to unload the containers while bored soldiers looked on.

  Most of the containers were marked “Willas” or “New Ross,” meaning they had come from one of the planet’s spaceports.

  But not all of them.

  Yamashita watched the longshoreman unload a series of trucks marked with the seal of the Lyran Commonwealth.

  Working quickly, longshoremen unbolted the shipping container from the first truck. An overhead crane riding on rails fifteen meters above the port’s deck centered itself over the container. Riggers moved in and attached wire cables to the lift points. Then the crane hoisted away, lifting the container smoothly into the air. When it set the box down again, more workers pried it open.

  Yamashita caught a glimpse of what was inside as he and the PFC walked by.

  A rack of short-range missiles

  It was the same drill with the next three LC-marked boxes.

  But not number five.

  The fifth container was moved to a different spot altogether. As a special military shipment it wouldn’t pass through customs.

  Yamashita would’ve bet quite a lot that container number five didn’t hold short-range missiles.

  • • •

  The office was a long, narrow room with one wall fashioned entirely from ferroglass so the Commissioner could look out over the port. Yamashita was careful to take a chair facing away from the window, even though he was itching to watch the port’s activity.

  Because he was itching to watch the port’s activity.

  The Port Commissio
ner, Colonel Rudolf Drescher, seated himself behind a mahogany monstrosity of a desk. The other officer in the room, Hauptmann-Kommandant Angus MacPhail, remained standing, his face carefully blank, his only concession to comfort the fact that he leaned stiffly against the wall.

  “Well, Mr. Watanabe, you talked your way past our guards,” said Drescher. “That’s impressive enough. What do you want?”

  Drescher was a big man, big and soft around the middle, 120 kilos of muscle running to fat, all of it stuffed into a dress uniform. His dark hair was regulation, but only just.

  This was a man who enjoyed the finer things in life. And although he was a Lyran officer, he was not a member of the Donegal Guard. He was a logistics expert, brought in to manage the Altaisian ports.

  Exactly the kind of man Yamashita had hoped for.

  Yamashita shrugged. “What does any man want? The chance to do a little business.”

  MacPhail leaned forward. “And do ya expect us to believe ya have no loyalty to the Combine?”

  Yamashita glanced at MacPhail.

  Unlike Drescher he was a lean whip of a man who wore fatigues without any adornment at all, not even a regimental patch. Except for the subdued insignia that indicated his rank, the Kommandant was a cipher. This was the kind of man who traded in secrets.

  Exactly the kind of man Yamashita had feared.

  He met MacPhail’s eyes. “I don’t know what the war means to House Kurita or House Steiner, but to me all it means is a change in market conditions.” He glanced at Drescher. “One that brings opportunity.”

  Drescher and MacPhail exchanged a look that spoke volumes.

  These two men didn’t like each other.

  “What did you have in mind?” Drescher asked softly.

  “I can get things,” said Yamashita.