Hearts of Chaos

by Victor Milán

  The flat metal surface beneath her lurched and swayed like a trawler deck in a gale as the Battle-Master cocked its left fist and slammed it into the Palace facade. From below she heard the stutter of a submachine gun, a rattle of hailstone impacts as bullets bounced off the canopy. Ninyu, you can stop shooting now, she thought grimly. The only thing you can put holes into is me.

  A crack and eye-searing ruby flash. Too late, Cassie snapped her lids shut. Green afterimage streaks glowed behind the lids as the tang of ozone probed clear to her sinuses. The burst against the windshield had gotten the pilot's attention, and the 'Mech jock had responded with one of the BattleMaster's four forward-mounted Martell medium lasers.

  To her amazement, Cassie caught herself hoping—in passing—that the death-beam had missed Ninyu Kerai. She felt herself start to slide again, this time away from the BattleMech. Scrambling furiously, she flung herself over the edge and slipped down between the launcher and the BattleMaster's round head.

  The 'Mech's canopy had a nominal locking system to keep Inner Sphere infantry in jump-capable armor— and, more recently, Clan Elementals—from getting at the pilot. That was small deterrent to Cassie, who studied every detail of the major BattleMech designs the way Scout Platoon snipers studied ballistics tables. Rescue crews needed to be able to pop the canopy top to extract unconscious MechWarriors. From long sessions with "Zuma" Gallegos, the Seventeenth's chief tech, Cassie knew just how that was done. With the base of her fist she punched open a concealed access panel just behind the canopy and yanked the D-shaped pull inside.

  With a pop and a hiss of escaping air the canopy swung open. The MechWarrior turned in the padded pilot's seat. Through the helmet's faceplate and the green bars that still glowed across her field of vision, Cassie saw the warrior's mouth form an O of astonishment. A woman, she realized. It made no difference to her.

  The BattleMaster pilot had great presence of mind. After only a heartbeat's gaping she clawed for an auto-pistol holstered beneath her left arm. Cassie had already drawn the vibrodagger from between her teeth. She switched it on. As it tingled to life in her hand, she stabbed it icepick-fashion through the front of the MechWarrior's cooling vest, once, twice, three times. Blood sprayed Cassie's face, already freckled with the gore of the first raider she'd killed. The pilot slumped back into her seat.

  Leaving the dagger buried in the base of her victim's throat, Cassie hit the quick-release catch to her safety harness. With a frantic heave of effort she toppled the body, limp as a soft-cloth bag of flour, out of the cockpit. Then she settled into the command seat—sticky with rapidly cooling blood—and flipped the toggle to shut the canopy.

  It closed like jaws, abruptly biting off the cold wind, the screams from below, the battle-clamor growing rapidly closer behind. Wrapped in a womb of transpex and Durallex plate, Cassie drew diaphragm-deep breaths and tried to control her racing heart-rate.

  This wasn't like permitting herself to be swallowed by a monster from her childhood nightmares, it was permitting herself to be swallowed by a monster from her childhood nightmares. As a child on Larsha she'd watched a pirate Atlas kill her father—or so she'd always believed—and demolish her home. Since that time she'd feared and hated BattleMechs more than anything in the universe; it was why she'd consecrated herself to destroying them. What she felt now was dislocation made more twisting by an eerie familiarity: though she'd never been inside a 'Mech cockpit before, Cassie knew them as intimately as any Mech-Warrior from her obsessive study.

  A flash lit the battered pagoda before the giant machine. Got to do something, she told herself. She hit the switch that would bring radio traffic up.

  "Sword of Compassion Three, this is Sword Two," a woman's voice was saying. "Sword Three, please acknowledge. Sword Six, she still doesn't answer."

  "Sword Two, Six. Keep trying. Over," a man said.

  "Sword Six, this is Sword One," another man said. "I see Sword Three now. My instruments say all her subsystems are nominal, but her 'Mech isn't moving. Could her main computer be down, Precentor?"

  "Do I know?" Sword Six said. "Just keep moving. If our quarry's in the Palace, we don't want to let the heretic escape."

  The gruff words jolted Cassie out of her fugue. She made her eyes focus on the view-strip in the 'Mech's heads-up display, which compressed a full 360 degrees into 120. It took a fair amount of practice to learn how to process such visual input correctly. Cassie, who had to know what her giant foes could see because her life depended on not being seen by them, had put in that practice.

  Com Guard—and therefore the renegade Word of Blake—used a six-'Mech unit as their basic element of maneuver. Following an ancient military custom, the commander of such an element—a "Level II unit" in Com Guard parlance—used the number "six" in his call sign. What that meant to Cassie was five enemy BattleMechs about to march up her back.

  Two of them were right behind her, a tall Black Knight a hundred meters back and a pointy-headed Whitworth descending on its Jetlift jump jets. Half a klick back the other three 'Mechs of the Level-II waded through the district's noble villas. The secondary display thoughtfully slugged them with type, weight, and call sign: Sword Four, a 30-ton Hussar, another 45-ton Wyvern, and Sword Six, a 100-ton King Crab boasting a load of firepower worthy of a Clan Omni.

  Cassie felt her throat tighten. The Palace and everybody inside were in for some serious hurt unless local forces could get there soon. As for her, she had the most secure seat in the house. Assuming that their comrade was out of the fight for whatever reason, the Blake warriors would ignore Sword Three unless it showed signs of coming back to life. The safe thing to do was to sit tight and watch the fireworks.

  But if Cassie had always done the safest thing, she'd have died nine years ago, shot down by Maskirovka Guardsmen in a little electronics shop in Kalimantan.

  On the other hand, what she had in mind to do was mad even by the standards of somebody who would jump half-naked out a fifth-story window to attack an 85-ton BattleMech with a dagger.

  Cassie leaned forward to study the garden below. Fortunately the BattleMaster's head was tipped forward. Next to its massive left foot she saw the ornamental pond, a three-meter hole punched through its thin scum of ice and a body floating face-down in the center of it.

  The Whitworth descended to her right in a blaze of jump jets, crashing through the branches of a thirty-meter-tall Brahma cedar, a carefully stunted version of the kilometer-tall monsters of the Trimurti Range. Snow from branches and garden surrounded the Whit in a white swirl as it settled with a flexing of its myomer-muscled legs.

  As the triangular head swiveled to peer into the BattleMaster's cockpit, Cassie pressed herself back into the form-fitting seat and wished she'd thought to keep the neurohelmet for show, even though she lacked the interfaces to operate it. Apparently satisfied by what he saw, the Whit pilot turned the 'Mech's head back toward the Palace. The Intek laser in its head flashed red, boiling stone from the Palace facade in a quick pulse. Apparently the Blake 'Mech jocks were still concerned about frying their ground-pounder comrades inside, a solicitude unusual for MechWarriors, not to mention religious fanatics on a jihad high.

  Without a neurohelmet, Cassie had only the nominal control provided by the 'Mech's manual overrides. They did, however, give her the ability to move its limbs, haltingly and imprecisely. She keyed up the right arm override.

  With crunching footsteps she could feel transmitted through the BattleMaster's metal skeleton, the Black Knight walked up on her left, on the other side of the pool. She felt the uncomfortable nearness of the Hellstar PPC mounted on its own right arm. With better containment-field focusing than a conventional PPC, the extended-range version, lacked the minimum-range restrictions of the older weapon. At point-blank range, that Sunspot could blaze through even a BattleMaster's tough armor in seconds.

  Cassie quickly rehearsed in her mind the sequence of movements she was about to initiate. She would have a window no thicker than a bubble's
skin to act in. She drew a deep breath.

  Slowly the BattleMaster's right arm began to rise. Cassie made herself hear the words of her old guru back on Larsha: If you control your breathing, you control yourself. If she let herself go tense, she would lose the instantaneous responses that were the only thing that might keep her alive.

  Neither BattleMech showed any sign of awareness that its apparently dormant comrade was stirring. Degree by degree the arm rose—and with it the Fusigon Longtooth extended-range PPC clutched in its hand. Though she could work it manually, Cassie dared not invoke the Watchdog targeting system. The Whit's own electronics suite would instantly alert its pilot that it had been targeted.

  "Sword One," an excited voice spilled from the cockpit speaker, "Sword Three is moving! She's—"

  The PPC was aimed where Cassie wanted it: at the left side of the Whitworth's back, where its armor was thinnest—and right over a magazine holding the reloads for one Longbow long-range missile launcher. She thumbed the trigger.

  Blue lightning flared, so brilliant the canopy darkened automatically to prevent the pilot from being dazzled. Gobs of glowing metal sprayed the BattleMaster; a half dozen striking the canopy, where they clung, glowing like yellow stars. Frantic voices yammered from the speaker and then the Whitworth's ammo storage blew, the 'Mech's upper torso vanishing in white brilliance. Shockwave and hard-driven fragments hammered the BattleMaster, rocking it back and to the left.

  Cassie felt her stomach lurch with terror that the gyros might let go as something smashed a head-sized hole into the canopy.

  The huge assault 'Mech teetered violently, then settled back onto its feet as far-weaker secondary explosions wracked the 40-ton Whit. Warning lights danced like ruby fireflies on the BattleMaster's damage display. Its PPC had been shattered by the blast. Black smoke concealed the smaller machine from the chest up, but its head and shoulder seemed to have been blown utterly away.

  Cassie had kept enough command of herself to let the Longtooth's trigger go when the Whit erupted. It was hell-hot in the cockpit. Smoke and heat choked Cassie, and the silk of her gown seared her skin like acid.

  But she kept going, hands moving without thought, without intention, as they always did when the hammer was descending. The BattleMaster was already cranking its upper torso widdershins, toward the Black Knight twenty meters to its left.

  The smart thing for the 75-ton Knight to do would have been what Cassie did to the Whitworth—instantly raise its right-arm PPC and cut loose from touch range. Instead Sword Two did the human thing. He turned his 'Mech's torso to face her.

  For an instant the two viewports in the Black Knight's armored faceplate stared at Cassie like disbelieving eyes. The right arm began to rise.

  Too late. Cassie pressed another firing trigger, held it down to chain-fire the six missiles waiting in the BattleMaster's shoulder-mounted launcher. Unaimed though they were, at least three of the missiles smashed into the Black Knight's faceplate. Cassie threw her hands over her face as the Knight's head erupted.

  When she lowered her arms the BattleMaster's cockpit looked as if it had been blasted with giant buckshot. At least it was tolerably cool in here now. The Black Knight was nowhere to be seen; apparently it had fallen down. Her left arm ran blood, and Cassie thought she caught the gleam of bone in the glow of the red and yellow lights that were telling her that her ride was in bad shape.

  But bleeding out through a deep cut was going to be the last of her worries. "Attention," a female voice said. "You have been locked-onto by a Dalban Hirez-B targeting and tracking system from a range of 373.3 meters."

  "Damn!" Cassie said. The Battle Master's computer was talking to her. Sword Six was about to bestow an admonition upon his errant underling. And that meant—

  "Right-hand Gauss rifle charging," the voice said. "Left-hand Gauss rifle, charging. Discharge in ten seconds. Eight."

  Cassie reached down, grabbed a D-shaped pull, braced herself, yanked.

  Nothing happened. "Ejection system malfunction," the voice said, maddeningly neutral. "Six seconds. Five—"

  "Tell me something useful, you bitch!" Cassie screamed. She hit the toggle to open the cockpit canopy.

  "Enemy firing," the voice said.

  As the canopy seal broke with a hiss, a hammerblow struck the BattleMaster from behind. Cassie was thrown about in the cockpit amid a sound like Vishnu the Destroyer Himself had given the world a kick. The BattleMech swayed alarmingly forward under the impact of the Gauss rifle round.

  Clumsy and slow and less powerful than the 100-ton titans of the 31st-century battlefield, the BattleMaster was still among the most-beloved designs in the Inner Sphere. 'Mech pilots loved it for its toughness, which was out of proportion to the weight of armor it carried.

  The BattleMaster still did not go over. But tough as it was, the awesome 'Mech had limits. And they had been surpassed.

  With a volcano roar, the 'Mech's back blew open. "Catastrophic event in left-torso ammunition containment unit," the female voice said. "CASE successfully engaged. Recommend immediate ejection."

  Cassie picked herself up. The cockpit was crowded with stinging smoke and searing heat. Tiny lasers painted the HUD on her face and neck. The canopy had winched itself open about the span of a big man's fingers fully outstretched.

  Good thing I'm skinny, she thought as she began to squirm through the left side of the opening.

  "Discharge in one second," the female voice said. Cassie swung her right leg over the cockpit rim, then made herself roll out toward nothingness.

  "Weapon discharging," the voice said.

  Cassie let go. Above her the BattleMaster's head exploded as she plunged toward the ice-scummed pool.

  She actually felt her feet strike the ice, had time to think it was too thick, that it was going to drive her femurs up into her belly, that this was death. Then she was through, and the icy water made every molecule of her body ring like a bell.

  The pond was deep enough to brake her fall, and Cassie made it without breaking both legs. She bobbed back up—and felt a stab of panic as the top of her head hit ice. She looked up, and through the flickering glare of BattleMechs dying saw a break in the ice several meters away. She swam toward it, knowing she risked getting seared by the energies being unleashed above, but unwilling to drown on that account.

  Her head popped free. She shook water from her eyes and looked around, expecting to see the Wyvern dropping right on top of her, or even the King Crab looming at the garden verge.

  Instead she saw a hell of a fireworks display lighting the sky in the direction from which the Level-II had approached. Somebody's ammo was cooking off big-time.

  She was deaf—temporarily, she hoped—but transmitted through the bone-breaking cold water she could feel the footfalls of an approaching 'Mech. She sucked in a big breath, made ready to dive.

  But the shape that reared up behind her gutted BattleMaster wasn't the hunched dome of a King Crab, but the erect form of a Mauler, head perpetually hunkered down between the LRM launchers on its shoulders.

  "Cassie?" boomed the electronically amplified voice of Tai-sa Eleanor Shimazu, the Red Witch herself. "Cassiopeia Suthorn? Are you still alive? I know it's you. No one else could loose so much hell without a BattleMech."

  "Lainie," Cassie rasped through a throat that felt as if she'd been gargling lye, "you don't know the half of it." Cautiously, she climbed out onto the ice.

  * * *

  "If it's really that simple to destroy a BattleMech on foot," Ninyu Kerai Indrahar asked, "why doesn't everybody do it?"

  Cassie glared at him. She was perched on a black leather sofa in the modestly appointed office in a part of the Palace that was still intact. She had a blanket wrapped around her and a mug of steaming tea laced with Hotel Black Label whiskey—known affectionately to the locals as Old Stick and Sack, and to the Caballeros as Old Sick and Stack—clutched in both hands. The mixture was singularly nasty, but it warmed.

  "For one thin
g," she said, "it wasn't that simple."

  A shudder wracked her thin body. Her still-wet hair was pulled back, her normal brown complexion had paled to old ivory, and her skin was all over goose bumps. She was still riding the edge of the adrenaline rush that had brought her through the fight, but her mood was starting to oscillate like an aerospace fighter with blown retros that was trying to brake by dipping in and out of atmosphere. Like that fighter, she was hoping to glide to a controlled landing, but she knew that more than likely she was due to tumble and crash at any old time.

  The Word of Blake raiding force had been neutralized, mostly destroyed. Landed by DropShip on Masamori's outskirts, it consisted of two Level-II 'Mech units, equivalent to an Inner Sphere company, and a platoon of infantry. One Level-II had attacked the Palace, another the Compound. Some of the commandos had dispersed through the city to create distractions, and were now being run to earth by the Civilian Guidance Corps, Masamori's police. The rest had commandeered trucks and preceded the Battle-Mechs to the Palace.

  The Blakies had made one lethal miscalculation. _ Though correct in surmising that the city's defenders would be caught up in celebration, they didn't realize just how rapidly the Ninth Ghost Legion and the Seventeenth would react to the threat. Nor had they reckoned on Lieutenant Senior Grade Cassiopeia Suthorn. But she was a wild card in anybody's game.

  Cassie shivered again, gulped a mouthful of tea. "People on foot could take down 'Mechs more often," she said, "if they tried. But everybody's so intimidated by the big metal monsters that they're afraid to. They just assume a BattleMech's invulnerable unless you're in another BattleMech."

  She looked up at Ninyu sidelong. "You did your share. I hear you've taken down a 'Mech or two yourself without riding in a tin man."

  Reflex made him frown, standing over her. He folded the expression back into the normal contours of his face. That he had been a comrade of Theodore's during the Coordinator's young adulthood was no state secret. Nor were his own exploits of the time—at least, not all.