by Victor Milán
"Theodore Kurita is quite possibly the most popular Coordinator in the Combine's history," Abdulsattah said, "and he is certainly one of the most capable. But no ruler is ever truly absolute; his power is circumscribed in numerous ways. Kusunoki is a hero who won much honor for the Combine during the War of 3039 and the Clan campaign. He is immensely popular with the people of the Combine and, more to the point, with the Combine military. Until Kusunoki does something overt, it could be politically embarrassing for the Coordinator to move against him. By the same token, there are many who take issue with the Coordinator's recent alliance with Victor Davion and the Federated Commonwealth. In.such a climate it could be difficult for Theodore Kurita to repudiate the capture of a world from the Combine's former enemies, should such an action be successful."
He smiled bleakly. "A fait accompli is always difficult to counter, and nowhere more so than within the Draconis Combine. In their misguided zeal to serve him, the Black Dragons could place the Coordinator in the position of having to choose between weakening the Combine through civil war, or betraying the allies who helped save Luthien from invasion by the Smoke Jaguars and Nova Cats. Either course must inevitably weaken the united front Theodore is trying to maintain against renewed Clan aggression. And the evidence is mounting that the militants are gaining strength among the Clans and might at any time become powerful enough to renounce the Truce of Tukayyid."
Cassie slouched lower in her seat, crossed her legs, and gave a sidewise glance at Lady K, who flared her finely sculpted nostrils and rolled her eyes. They could both read this sign well enough, and neither liked where it was leading.
"What about the ISF?" asked Bar-Kochba. He had a sunburned, bullet-shaped head, a lordly nose, and a beard that seemed to consist of curly black or white wires driven into his jutting chin. Despite his age he was reputed to have the best short punch in the regiment. "Aren't they gonna have something to say about Pretty-Boy Kusunoki kicking over the traces?"
The Mirza glanced toward his boss. That right there launched all kinds of red warning rockets in Cassie's skull. It was Abdulsattah's style to seem to meet every question square-on, even if it was with a cunningly camouflaged evasion.
The Man Himself finished chewing a grape and cleared his palate with a swallow of wine. "Though the Smiling One has been taking—if you'll pardon the pun—increasingly draconian measures against the Kokuryu-kai of late," he said, "he and his heir-designate Ninyu Kerai"—here he looked at Cassie, who to a flash of self-directed anger felt her cheeks grow warm—"disparage the threat they pose. Why they do that so determinedly I cannot say, and not even my invaluable Mirza is privy to all that passes between those two.
"As a practical matter, the ISF is also greatly preoccupied with monitoring the Clans and keeping an eye on Maskirovka activity in the Combine, which has increased markedly in the last year. Among other things, Sun-Tzu Liao has been trying to whip up enthusiasm for a sort of quasi-pan-Asian alliance against the Federated Commonwealth—a notion the Black Dragons support enthusiastically, by the way, although in their hearts they have as little use for the Liaos as mad, sad, bad Sun-Tzu truly has for us. Abdulsattah-kun advises me that if the Dragon's Breath has not blown out the candle of Tai-sho Kusunoki's ambition by now, it implies it isn't going to."
"And where do we fit in, Don Chandrasekhar?" asked Colonel Camacho, looking more sad-eyed than usual. Tradition-minded Mexicans would happily have matched any Drac in talking around the point. Norteños—Terran ones or their descendants on the Southwestern Worlds—had never much bought into those traditions.
A star on the far edge of the Chaos March, just below the Combine border, turned red. "I've recently purchased extensive holdings on the world of Towne," Uncle Chandy said. "I want your regiment to go there and safeguard them."
"Towne wouldn't happen to be the planet this Kusunoki character's got his eye on, now, would it?" asked Cassie's superior, Captain James "Badlands" Powell of Scout Platoon. His callsign was more appropriate than ever, thanks to the chemotherapy that was waging a losing battle against his stomach cancer, and had cost him his hair, including his once-legendary red handlebar mustache.
Uncle Chandy beamed delightedly. "Of course it would," he said. "Imagine the coincidence." His little black eyes twinkled like obsidian stars.
"What's our real job there, patrón?" the Colonel asked bluntly.
"To liaise with Towne's armed forces; to stiffen their spines and serve as cadre for them, and to defeat whatever Tai-sho Kusunoki and his traitorous handlers throw against them," Uncle Chandy said. "What else?"
* * *
And there you have it, Cassie thought, jogging around the gravity deck as it turned and turned about the Finnigan's Wake's long axis. She wore a sleeveless ribbed white top over running shorts and matching athletic shoes. Her long dark hair was pulled back tightly and knotted at the back of her head.
Dressed in white tee-shirt and canary-yellow trunks, Kali MacDougall pounded grimly along at her side, a vee of unaccustomed frown furrowing her brow. Lady K hated exercise as much as Cassie relished it. Pride—in her slim leggy beauty as well as her concept of the kind of shape a top Mech Warrior should stay in—kept her to it. Cowboy Payson, whose view of the demands of the 'Mech jock's craft was decidedly different, had declined to join them. Which, as Kali pointed out, was another great impetus to exercise.
For more like the hundredth time than the dozenth, Cassie had replayed the briefing in her mind. Here lay the root of her moodiness and discomfort: la familia was heading into a situation she feared was flat impossible, at least as desperate as the fighting retreat against the Clans on Jeronimo.
"At least this time we're walking in with both eyes open, hon," Kali said. Cassie frowned. She hated it when her friend read her like that. "On Hachiman you were about the only one who saw the thorns waiting in our bed of roses."
"What's the good of spotting a trap if you go ahead and walk right into it?"
"Because that's what we get paid the big C-Bills for," Lady K said, breathing much more easily than her avowed distaste for exercise would seem to predict. "It's our job. If we really thought we'd be happier working as checkers in a grocery store, we'd be doing that, wouldn't we?"
Cassie grunted. She couldn't envision the tall blonde Mech Warrior whipping canned hams and disposable diapers past a laser scanner any more than she could see herself doing it.
"It's the life," Kali said. "You get caught up in it, you don't want to let it go. Sooner or later it takes you. But what the foxtrot? Life's fatal in all known cases."
A great double puffing and slap of half-gee footfalls warned the two women that parties were overtaking them from behind, probably male by the sounds. Cassie glanced surreptitiously back to see the lanky form of Gordo Baird closing up. She had no love and less respect for him, but he did keep himself in pretty decent shape, even if he was sucking wind a bit now. Beside him trotted Gabby Camacho.
Despite the fact that the younger Camacho was a favorite with the wild-ass noteño bravos who'd been snarling and bristling so much at their Cowboy counterparts of late, he and the older S-2 seemed to get along. Baird had history with the Camacho clan; he had saved the Colonel's life, long ago when both still fought for House Marik, back before Don Carlos had backed the wrong horse in the Marik dynasty races and been compelled to travel for his health. It was why Baird managed to hang onto his job in spite of what Cassie considered an overwhelming lack of performance: el Coronel normally had a keen eye for ability, and made personnel decisions accordingly, but he was also a hacendado and a Knight of Galisteo—a literal caballero. Honor overrode all, and the heart of honor was loyalty. He gave back to his people what he demanded of them, unswerving loyalty, and they loved him for it. But sometimes that loyalty imposed costs of its own.
Of late Lieutenant Colonel Baird had been spending an unusual amount of time with Gabby Camacho. Though Cassie kept herself as isolated from regimental politics as possible, her scout's eye had not been able to
avoid noting that datum. She still tried not to analyze what it might mean. Analysis of what made people tick was for marks. Cassie's world was divided into marks and la familia, and if ever the twain should meet, she feared on some preconscious level that her center could not hold.
"Buenas tardes, Cass," Gavilan Camacho said as the two men drew alongside. There was no missing the look in his eye, either: Cassie's pert nose and perfect butt gave him a short-circuit in the cooling trunks, and no mistake. That was NBD; she had an array of evasions for that sort of thing, carefully graduated from playing stupid to sudden death, and had in her time used them all. Fortunately, Gabby had soaked up sufficient sense of Command Responsibility from his days at House Davion's New Avalon Military Academy that he'd never pushed the issue far enough for Cassie to break anything.
"Buenas, Gabby," she said in a neutral voice. Treating him as a none-too-well-liked sibling usually seemed to serve her best.
"Good afternoon, Captain ... Lieutenant," Baird said in cordial tones. The women gave him back polite replies.
"You seem preoccupied, Lieutenant," he said, looking hard at Cassie.
She stared back at him, making a serious effort to keep from showing more reaction. She didn't give him credit for that much perception.
"I'm thinking about the mission, Colonel."
"That's to your credit," Baird said. "You worried?"
"Always."
He squeezed out an indulgent chuckle. "I can certainly see why. But you might as well put your mind at ease for the short term. We're heading in to lend Towne a hand it's badly going to need."
He smiled. "What a relief it's going to be to go in somewhere the locals will welcome us with open arms."
PART TWO
A World of Lies
The world is a vast temple dedicated to Discord.
—Voltaire
7
Turanian Transport Company Complex, Port Howard
Aquilonia Province, Towne
Draconis March, Federated Commonwealth
12 December 3057
It didn't surprise Cassie that Gordo Baird turned out to be dead wrong.
"DEATH TO THE DRACS!" the loudspeaker blared, words seeming to echo off the hanging overcast of Port Howard. "DEATH TO THEIR SCUMBAG MERCS!"
Hands thrust deep into the pockets of her parka lined with hexwolf fur, Cassie hung near the rear fringes of the mob gathered before the front gates of the sprawling Turanian Transport Company complex, on the north bank of the Thunder River where it emptied into Circle Bay. The crowd was mostly male, ranging from young to middle-aged, and dressed more according to the dictates of budget than fashion. The Caballeros had just barely arrived on Towne, and Cassie was out on the street doing what she did best. Noting the hands of people around her as she slipped through the mob, it looked to her as if their owners must have once been truly employed in some manual trade.
Construction and contracting were depressed in Towne's urban areas, and had been since most offworld investment and a great deal of domestic capital had followed the Fifth Lyran Guards, who'd returned home to Katrina Steiner rather than become involved in her brother's war with Thomas Marik. The septuagenarian Marquis of Towne had also turned tail, repairing for an apparently permanent stay at a villa he owned on New Avalon. That went a long way toward explaining why so many laborers had the surplus ill-will and free time to engage in potentially violent demonstrations. It did not exactly explain why both were directed so furiously against Uncle Chandy. The Kurita magnate's arrival-by-proxy had brought wads of fresh capital, and not just the promise of spanking new jobs but the actuality.
Despite last night's hand's breadth fall of snow— since churned to gray mush beneath several thousand protesting boots—the wind blowing up Starry Wisdom Street, warmed by the Valusian Current, was nowhere near chill enough to account for the touch of ice in Cassie's marrow.
"THOMAS MARIK AND HIS LIAO LACKEY HAVE RAPED THE FEDERATED COMMONWEALTH," the amplified voice proclaimed. "NOW A KURITA WANTS HIS TURN TOO. HE'S A SNAKE IN THE GRASS. FIRST HE COMES TO TAKE OUR JOBS. SOON HE'LL WANT TO TAKE OUR LIVES ..." The speaker, standing atop a delivery van mob-bound across the street from the compound gates, was a man in his thirties with a big neck and rough hair, dressed against the uncold breeze in a red plaid shirt, baggy dark-indeterminate trousers, and half-fastened galoshes.
He was partly right, Cassie thought. Some worlds were still engaged in scattered fighting, but mostly it was all over. Marik and Liao had gotten what they'd come for, winning back the worlds their empires had lost decades before. Victor Davion still claimed the region as the Federated Commonwealth's Sarna March, but in reality it was a no-man's land that almost everyone had begun to call the Chaos March.
As a rabble-rouser the man was middling. As a survivor he didn't impress Cassie much. Growing up on the Liao world of Larsha, she'd known some serious civil disturbances. Also some serious suppression of same, courtesy of the brutal Maskirovka Guards. Even the stupidest Maskirovka leg-breaker understood that if you wanted to take the starch out of a mob, you took down its leaders. This fool might as well have been projecting a holo of a big arrow pointing down at him, accompanied by the words, "Bust my chops."
Or maybe civil disturbers didn't have to learn low-profile reflexes to survive in the relatively open Fedrat society. At any rate the holocameras, out in force today despite inclement weather, could get a good look at him.
The dozen tan-jumpsuited Turanian Transport security guards lined shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the gate faced the demonstrators across a forty-meter half-moon of ground with riot batons held across their hips. Their faces grim beneath the white-painted hard-hats they'd crammed down on top of their customary indigo berets, it was obvious that they weren't accustomed to such a state of affairs. For sure they weren't comfortable with such a state of affairs. From their postures they seemed to be deriving no more by way of spine-stiffening from Lieutenant Leo "El Pipiribau" Archuleta's Locust standing at their backs than from, say, the heavy-hauler blimp whose yellow bloat was visible above the fence as it offloaded its cargo of Eiglophian Mountain bloodwood logs onto a surface freighter moored on the Thunder.
A man in a brown jacket stood right in front of them, trying to calm down the crowd through his own bullhorn: "Look, you all know me. I've lived and worked here all my life, just the same as you ..." He was losing the volume war to the man on the van. His bald head shone with more sweat than the temperature—it wasn't warm, either—would account for.
A beer bottle arced out of the crowd over his and the security cordon's heads to shatter against the Locust's flat transpex windscreen. Somebody's got a live arm, Cassie thought. Somebody also had what Kali MacDougall would term more sand than sense to get that fresh with a BattleMech, even one as tiny as Pipiribau's ride. Twenty tons was still a lot of weight to throw around a street crammed with bodies armored mainly in flannel and ripstop.
Or maybe these citizens were so spoiled by the free and easy FedCom life that they didn't think any 'Mech jock—even one whose checks were signed by a Kurita snake-in-the-grass—would dare start stomping them into red paste.
The truth was they had a point. Courtesy of Zuma Gallegos's tech wizardry, the large laser boasted by Pipiribau's LCT-1V had been temporarily replaced with a water-cannon for crowd-control work. Though the 'Mech still sported its arm-mounted Sperry Browning machine guns, the Peep was a happy-go-lucky goof from Frenchfry Ames' Adelante Company, who hadn't really needed any hair-raising warnings not to light them off at people except under direst necessity. Pipiribau's frame of mind was indicated by his habit of gluing toys, party decorations, painted plates, and thimbles—all kinds of colorful magpie junk—all over his Locust in the ancient Tijuana Taxi style, giving the machine a weirdly fuzzy appearance. When the clutter was blasted off in combat, he set to work replacing it the instant the smoke cleared.
The crowd cheered the bottle-lobber. "It's great to be welcomed with open arms," Cassie murmured under her breath.
Nobody looked her way. They couldn't hear her for their own commotion, much less the Battle of the Bullhorns. Nobody was paying her much attention at all, in fact. The bulky parka and a pair of bulbous polarized goggles obscured her striking looks, and though the crowd was predominantly white, the Islanders from Towne's southern hemisphere were of mostly Black, Polynesian, or Asian extraction, and she could easily pass for one of them.
One thing she especially noticed was the lack of student-activist types. Gymnasium and college-aged Townie kids who came from families affluent enough to allow them to worry about saving the world tended to affect working-class dress. Street-kid Cassie could spot the posers a klick away. In the ten days the Seventeenth had been planetside she'd learned that solidarity with working men and women was a currently fashionable campus fad. Going out and rubbing actual elbow with actual workers was apparently less trendy.
As she filed those data away, though, she noticed a man moving through the throng near her. He was slightly older than the undergrad types she'd been thinking about, and his hair was just a touch too smooth and he looked just a hair too uncomfortable in a green and black-checked lumberman's jacket a size too big for him to altogether blend in. He was stopping now and then to say something to various demonstrators, individually or in groups small enough to hear words spoken in a normal tone of voice, touching the occasional arm and nodding frequently toward the compound gates. Working the crowd, Cassie thought. Who and why?
She'd just started to drift over to where she could listen in on his patter when the snarl of about 1600 ccs of unmuffled engine cut through the crowd-clamor like a chainsaw.
Cassie'shead snapped around. In all the Inner Sphere she knew only one machine to make that snarling farty sound, a big-ass V-Twin outlaw bike from the Harley-Indian-Messerschmidt factory on Atreus—a ride which, coincidentally, enjoyed near-sacramental status among all the ethnicities of the Southwestern Trinity. HIM cycles were not unknown outside the Free Worlds League—they had just begun to enjoy a vogue as the status ride of Hachiman's upper-middle-class dekigow-zoku kid gangs when the Caballeros left for Towne—but this was the first one Cassie had encountered here.
