by Victor Milán
Off to the left she saw the crowd giving way briskly to the motorcycle, which was prudent, since at almost half a ton in the local gravity the bike was more than capable of forcing its way through. The rider was swaddled in condensation-sheened black leather, faceless in a black-visored helmet. The figure steered with a gloved left hand. In the other it carried—
Cassie popped her goggles up her forehead to get a better look. In his right hand the rider was carrying the unmistakable fat double tube of a portable SRM launcher.
Grasping the synthrubber grips of the snub-nosed revolver she carried in a hidden holster sewn into the parka's right pocket, Cassie started forward through the crush. With her other hand she held a pocket communicator to her mouth, broadcasting a warning on the Adelante company freq. She already knew she'd never get close enough for a shot at the black rider in time.
The security guards saw the huge bike bearing down on them. They scattered even as Pipiribau Was turning his Locust to face the interloper. He either spotted the weapon or thought the HIM was going to try to crash the gate, because he triggered off the water-cannon. The motorcycle swerved around the hissing stream and made straight for the 'Mech.
The 'Mech's Sperry cut loose with a snarl. Cassie saw pale tracer pulses in the gloom as bullets chewed blacktop to either side of the cyclist. The rider laid his big machine down on its left side.
Cassie stopped. Her reflex sigh of relief stuck in her throat. The rider in black wasn't abandoning his bike. Instead he stayed with it as it skidded amid a bow-wave of sparks, right between the Locust's legs. As he passed beneath the 'Mech he triggered both tubes of the launcher straight upward.
A double blast shattered the little 'Mech's right hip actuator. It toppled forward and to its right, collapsing a section of three-meter-high chain link fence as it crashed down.
Ditching the spent launcher and pushing off powerfully with a black-leather-clad leg, the rider used his bike's momentum to get it back upright. It skidded through a full circle and got its wheels pointed forward again. The HIM wobbled twice and then peeled but with a defiant snarl of its engine.
For a moment, Cassie and everybody else in eyeshot just stood and stared. The motorcycle hung a knee-scraping left inland off Starry Wisdom and disappeared.
With a happy, savage shout the mob surged forward. They were going to roll the hapless security guards out flat. They were going to bust down the gates and go pouring into the compound. It might even occur to them to try to pry El Pipiribau—who was likely stunned but unhurt by his tumble—out of his 'Mech.
And then they were going to start doing some serious dying. The other Adelante 'Mechs stationed discreetly out of sight within the Turanian Transport Company grounds would charge into action. Now that heavy ordnance had been unleashed—-and one of their own down—all restraint would be out the airlock.
"Adelante, this is Abtakha, come back, over," Cassie was saying desperately into her pocket comm. The white-helmeted security men and their baldheaded CEO stood with their backs to the gate, awaiting death. Behind them Cassie could see the round transpex-covered "face" of Macho Alvarado's BattleMaster swaying ominously as the vast 'Mech lumbered toward the fence. A Phoenix Hawk, the beautifully airbrushed painting adorning its breast and belly armor an indistinct blur in the drizzle that had begun to fall, soared high above the compound on its Pitban jump jets. That was unmistakably LieutenantJG Jesse James Leyva, callsign "Outlaw."
"Frenchfry, Raven, Macho, Outlaw—anybody, please come in," Cassie said urgently.
What she could tell them if they did come in she wasn't sure. If her blood hadn't been singing with fear and anger—la familia is threatened!—Cassie would have admired the setup's cold-blooded perfection. Thanks to the bold mystery rider, the Caballeros were about to massacre several hundred of the very people they'd come to save. In a matter of heartbeats, a task that was already proving near-hopeless—rallying Towne's defenses against the coming attack—would become irretrievably impossible. And instead of winning allies, the members of the Seventeenth Recon Regiment might find a whole planet howling for their blood.
With a multi-throated growl the crowd started forward. Cassie drew the snubby from her pocket and got ready to fire it into the air—anything to break the spasm, head off the coming catastrophe. It wouldn't work, of course.
The gate opened. A small, slender form stepped out.
Before the line of guards could react it had slipped past them and was walking toward the advancing mob, raising a megaphone to its lips. Black hair glistening with moisture hung to the shoulders, framing a perfect heart-shaped face.
"Outlaw, Frenchfry, Raven, anybody," Cassie said urgently, "don't shoot. It's Diana."
Outlaw Leyva's jumping Phoenix Hawk, which seemed to be aiming for touchdown smack in the middle of the mob, braked in the air and settled to a roaring landing just inside the gate. The wash of its jets whipped Diana Vásquez's hair around her face. Frenchfry's Stinger and Cowboy's black and yellow-striped Wasp touched down flanking it. Frenchfry's wife Raven hung the drooping beak of her 'Mech—a Raven—over the fence like a curious bird.
"People of Port Howard," Diana said through the megaphone, her voice smooth and soothing as a mother's breast, "Townians, please listen to me. We haven't come to hurt you. We're here to help."
The front-runners of, the crowd faltered, slowed. The lone woman looked so fragile and vulnerable, and yet projected such utter serene strength, that no one had the will to raise a hand against her. Cassie glanced toward the van, where the mob orator stood with his own bullhorn lowered and his jaw slack, a stricken look on his face, as if asking himself, What did I almost do?
From a few meters away Cassie heard an unampli-fied voice raised: "Don't listen to the bitch! She's a Drac spy! Kill the slut—"
Cassie grinned a wolf grin. Here was something she could do. She glided forward and to her right, flowing between hulking demonstrators as unnoticeably as a shadow. The sleek-haired agitator she'd spotted just before the balloon went up was standing with his back to her, shaking his fist and shouting for Diana's blood.
She came up behind, grabbed a fistful of his green and black jacket and rammed the barrel of her revolver into his kidneys so hard she felt his knees sag at the unexpected shock of pain.
"Keep that up, Sierra-for-brains," she hissed in his ear, "and I'll blow your guts out your belly button."
To his credit the agitator froze. She could almost feel his eyeballs straining in their sockets, trying to track far enough to get a glimpse at her. But he didn't try to hand her a milligram of see-here-httle-girl-you-might-hurt-somebody guff. Which showed he either had some native smarts or was a trained operator, because what she'd told him wasn't a threat but a promise. At the next sound out of his mouth she would happily make good on it.
Touching somebody with a firearm was seriously bad policy—most times. Hence the deathgrip on the back of his jacket. If he tried to pivot out of the way she'd wrap both strong legs around his waist and blow him in half anyway. She was utterly confident in her ability to do that no matter how good he was. She'd done it before. A mongoose had nothing on Cassie.
By now the impressive mass of Macho's Battle-Master was looming up behind the gate, with Buck Evans' Orion right next to it. Even quiescent, the awesome firepower of half a dozen BattleMechs, including an assault and a heavy, was enough to quench the hot flash the Locust's fall had ignited in the crowd. The crowd, which had stopped ten meters shy of lonely Diana, now began to.back up as if all those guns and missiles and energy weapons were giving off some kind of magic repellor field.
Moving with a purpose, demonstrators washed back into Cassie and her captive, jostling them. A quick hip-twist torqued the jacket out of her grip. She stepped quickly back, pulling her pistol back to her hip in case the agitator made a grab for it. But his intent was escape and evasion; he sidestepped to put the breadth of a dockworker between him and the snubby. For a moment, burning dark eyes caught Cassie's and held them pas
t a butte of shoulder. Then the man was gone.
She made the little revolver vanish. Then she did the same.
8
Palace of the Marquis, Port Howard
Aquilonia Province, Towne
Draconis March, Federated Commonwealth
12 December 3057
"We don't need your help,!"
The woman standing at the far end of the table had lank blond hair and a thin face. But for the pink spots glowing high on either cheek, her skin was dead-pale in the gray light filtering through high narrow windows in the gray stone walls. Colonel Carlos Camacho wondered if she were really entitled to the Hauptmann-General rank badges pinned to the epaulets of her undress tunic.
"Calm down, Janice," said the man sitting halfway down the table on the Colonel's right. He was a slim, handsome officer who was unquestionably entitled to the Leftenant General's badges he wore. Though his face and manner were youthful, accreting years bad begun to turn his trim blond mustache the color of wood ash. The General had graciously yielded primacy of position to Don Carlos, but he was in fact hosting this meeting in a ground-floor building of a smartly turned-out barracks complex set in a corner of the absent Marquis of Towne's palace grounds. "We'll gladly take all the help we can get."
The lank-haired woman glowered at the slim, mus-tached man while the woman in the plum suit sitting across from him leaned clasped hands on the table and favored him with a plump, unpleasant smile. "Now, Sir Osric, let's not be hasty," she said. "This is a democratic society, need I remind you? Since the Marquis' departure, your Fusiliers aren't exactly in any position to dictate to the rest of the planet. And, I must say, the Planetary Government is inclined to agree with Hauptmann General Marrou's assessment. If a threat exists—and the PG is far from satisfied that such is the case—surely our domestic resources are sufficient to handle it."
"The PG can shove its assessments up its bum," muttered the man sitting to the right of Osric Gould. '"Unless, Of course, the Snakes do it for them."
"I beg your pardon, Kommandant Waites?" the woman in the plum suit said sharply.
"I said, if the PG's wrong, our situation will be rum," Waites told her blandly. He was a wiry man with wiry dark-blond hair, whose skin was brown by birth and rendered almost black by a deep-water tan that contrasted almost shockingly with his crisp whites. An Islander from the southern hemisphere, he was meeting with Colonel Camacho as representative of the by-the-Virgin blue-water Navy. As such he was the only member of the regular Armed Forces of the Federated Commonwealth present.
Leftenant General Sir Osric Gould commanded the Marquis of Towne's Own Fusiliers, or what was left of them after the Marquis pulled his bunk for New Ava-lon, taking his Own First Battalion with him. Sir Osric's rump force were household troops—armor, infantry, and some aerospace fighters mixed in with maybe two companies of 'Mechs all told. Hauptmann General soi-disant Janice Marrou headed up the Towne Guards, a planetary militia unit auxiliary to the AFFC. The Guards boasted a paper strength of seven battalions. Their actual strength, according to reports, amounted to maybe four battalions, mostly infantry, leavened with armor, artillery, VTOLs, and about a company of 'Mechs.
The Fusiliers were regulars in any meaningful sense. Sir Osric was a much-decorated soldier, as were many of his remaining officers, and a reasonable percentage of his troops were AFFC vets who'd opted to serve closer to home in the wake of the formation of the Lyran Alliance. Their equipment was not bleeding-edge modern—neither was the Caballeros'—but it was well maintained and the Fusiliers acted as if they knew how to use it. How well their morale was holding up under the flight of the man whose body their ostensible purpose was to guard and the recent breakup of the Federated Commonwealth was an open question.
The Towne Guards were a different proposition. Unlike the Fusiliers, who were scattered across most of the major northern continent of Hyboria, they were mostly concentrated in the capital city of Port Howard. Caballeros who'd gotten a look at them were not overly impressed. They were slovenly, even by easygoing Southwestern standards, and the antecedents and current battle-worthiness of their BattleMechs were as mysterious as those of their commander.
"I'm not altogether sure," the Planetary Government representative said, "why we're having this discussion at all. The Seventeenth Recon Regiment, as I understand it, has been retained as security guards by a plutocrat from the Draconis Combine who recently saw fit to purchase substantial holdings on Towne. Why they should be engaged in talks with our defense forces isn't clear to me."
"We've all seen the evidence Colonel Camacho has presented," Sir Osric said. It cost him no visible strain to maintain his cordial, reasonable air, a fact Don Carlos admired. "He has convinced me and my staff that, in some four to six months' time, we're due to receive some rather unwelcome visitors from the Combine side of the border."
"Evidence he admits comes exclusively from Drac sources," Marrou said. "Even if he's playing us square, who's to say they're not feeding him false information?"
"What in God's name would Subhash Indrahar and his people stand to gain by us going to alert status?" asked Kommandant Waites. "A good belly laugh?"
Marrou gave him a pale-eyed glare and fell silent.
"Just for the sake of argument, Colonel, could you refresh my memory as to the exact statistics you quoted us?" said the woman in the plum suit, her tone indicating she hadn't bothered to look at the digests originally prepared by the Mirza Abdulsattah's staff, and wasn't going to pay attention to what she was told now, either. Hermione Finzi-Grich was the personal emissary of Towne's head of state, Chancellor Martin Cortese.
"Certainly," the Colonel said. "We expect that, within the time-frame the Leftenant-General mentioned, one Jeffrey Kusunoki, commander of the Draconis Combine's Fifteenth Dieron Regulars, will lead an estimated two to three regiments in an invasion of Towne. An attack which, I repeat, is not in any way sanctioned by Theodore Kurita."
Finzi-Grich shook her head. "I find it hard to believe that anything of such a military nature could be contemplated, much less undertaken, without the full knowledge and approval of the Coordinator of the Draconis Combine."
Don Carlos tried not to scowl. It would be both impolite and impolitic. And anyway, not so very long ago he'd had plenty of misconceptions of his own about the Combine being a monolithic entity, instantly and unanimously obedient to its rulers' will. His regiment's time on Hachiman had graphically shown how silly that notion was, but most citizens of the Federated Commonwealth and the Free Worlds League still accepted the idea religiously.
"The Coordinator has his hands full with the Clans, ma'am," explained Gordo Baird, who sat next to the Colonel.
Father Doctor Bob García, sitting to Don Carlos's other side, leaned forward. "Perhaps we could discuss scheduling joint exercises, between your units and ours," he said pleasantly. "Surely there's no objection to that? Even if this Combine threat proves chimerical, don't you agree that it would be beneficial to spend time training together?"
Don Carlos's face remained impassive, but inwardly he smiled. In a more rank-conscious outfit a mere Lieutenant Senior Grade would not likely be tapped to participate in meetings at this level, and certainly not to contribute at will. The Caballeros didn't work that way. As a psychologist and a historian—not to mention a Jesuit—García was adept at handling people in difficult circumstances, at smoothing over confrontations. He was not, alas, a very skillful Mech Warrior, although none could question his courage in battle. But Don Carlos had long ago learned that, to keep the large and essentially vulnerable organism that was his regiment alive and intact in the hostile environment of the thirty-first century, he needed to be able to call upon a vast array of talents, not just war-craft.
Moreover, he had a traditional Galistean aristocrat's respect for the clergy. And after all, didn't the existence of little Bobbi Savage prove Father García wasn't a maricón, as the young bravos used to laughingly claim behind his back?
Leftenant Gener
al Osric Gould turned a toothy, engaging smile on his opposite number from the Towne Guards. "That seems fair enough, doesn't it, Janice? Our lads and lasses could stand some touching up, to be sure."
Hauptmann General Janice Marrou scowled. "My people don't much hold with money-troopers."
For just a flash Sir Osric's mouth thinned to a line. "Are you aware of the service record of the Seventeenth Recon Regiment, General?" he asked quietly. "They've fought a great many brave battles for the Commonwealth in the last twenty years and more."
"That hasn't stopped them taking Drac coin."
"Those of us who fought the Clans did so alongside the Draconis military," Gould said. "Our own Prince Victor personally led the raid that freed the Coordinator's son from Clan captivity. We're not currently enemies of the Combine, ma'am; and should these. Black Dragon renegades in fact materialize, it will be greatly in the interests of both Combine and Federated Commonwealth—not to mention our own—to resist them as effectively as possible."
"Not wishing to dampen anybody's boyish enthusiasm," Finzi-Grich said, "but it looks like it's time for a reality check. These war games you're all talking about so blithely cost money, at a time when a reactionary segment of the populace is already groaning about paying their fair share."
"Our operational budget—which, I hope it's not presumptuous to add, comes out of the Marquis' household funds—already allows for such exercises, Ms. Finzi-Grich."
"Perhaps it's time for the Assembly to take up the question of how big a percentage of our planetary income we ought to devote to enriching an absentee nobleman," Finzi-Grich said grimly. "And I might mention, Father García, that I'm personally shocked to see a man of the cloth associating himself with violent enterprises, particularly for pecuniary gain."
