by Victor Milán
Draconis March, Federated Commonwealth
19 December 3057
Breath coming in white puffs of condensation, Cassie ran along the frozen floor of a narrow canyon of the night. From time to time, when she was sure of her footing for the next couple of steps, she glanced back. Her back had been clear for two blocks now, though she doubted her pursuers from the diner had given up on her. As far as she could tell, they were all men, all on the large side, and as far as she was concerned that was a plus. Even if they spent a lot of time grunting in a gym, such types rarely had the stamina for a long haul, especially over such an obstacle-course race as Cassie could lead them. Her breathing wasn't even labored yet, which pleased her; she knew how easy it was to overheat, even in the coldest weather, by exerting yourself while wearing heavy winter clothes.
It wasn't surprising to her that she wasn't being seriously pressed. She'd been an expert at being chased down alleys since before reaching her teens, long before Guru Johann found her and took her under his wing, training her to inherit his mantle as master of the ancient, esoteric art of pentjak-silat.
What was mysterious was why she was being chased.
* * *
Millennia ago, back before the Star League or the Age of War or the Terran Hegemony, before the Exodus from Terra, back even before the long-ridiculed Kearny-Fuchida experiments were verified to the embarrassed surprise of the global scientific community, a system of digitally lined optical telescopes orbiting throughout the solar system to form, in effect, one giant viewing device had begun detecting Terran-sized planets in surrounding solar systems. One of these was named Towne, for a Terran Parliament senator whose support was needed for a vote on a new appropriations bill for the project.
Before many years passed, thanks to the Kearny-Fuchida drive, humans were colonizing those Terralike planets. Late in the twenty-second century an expedition mounted by trillionaire C. Augustus Pons settled Towne.
Pons was an eccentric plankton magnate. One of many ways his eccentricity manifested itself was in his lifelong addiction to archaic fantastic fiction. He was particularly fond of, not to say obsessed with, the works of the early twentieth-century writer Robert Erwin Howard, especially his stories of a barbarian adventurer named Conan. That was how Pons had come to name the planet's single large moon Conan, the sprawling continent that dominated its northern hemisphere Hyboria, and the first city, nestled at the mouth of a river opening into a bay formed by the crater of an eons-old meteorite strike (whose shape guaranteed it would be named Circle Bay, obsession or no obsession), Port Howard.
Even after Pons's death, early settlers, many of whom were likewise North Americans, had gone along with the gag, so that the far southwestern reaches of Hyboria were named Turan, the south Stygia, the great backbone mountain range the Eiglophians, the island-continent southwest of Turan, which extended from the northern temperate zone into the tropics, Almuric, and so on. A later wave of settlers who settled in the southern hemisphere, hailing primarily from Brazil, Australia, the Caribbean, and Polynesia, paid no attention to Pons's conventions at all and called things whatever the hell they wanted to.
Towne's primary, a yellow-white F-class sun, was hotter than Sol. Towne also orbited farther out than Terra from its sun, which resulted in its being slightly cooler, despite receiving a similar amount of solar radiation, the shortfall being made up in a greater percentage of highly energetic ultraviolet radiation. The world was smaller than Terra, but rather denser, so that gravity was only slightly less. But Towne was also younger, geologically speaking, so everything seemed bigger. It boasted big storms, big mountains, big volcanoes.
And also Big Beasts. Biologically, Towne was in an epoch roughly analogous to Terra's Pleistocene, with generally lush terrestrial ecosystems, thanks to the extra UV energy, and some species of warm-blooded megafauna, notably the six-legged, shaggy, and amazingly dim Eiglotherium of the central Hyborian plateau, beasts that stood ten meters tall at their foremost shoulders.
Towne was a proprietary planet and colony, which helped explain why Pons had managed to make so many of his names stick. The shareholders' desire to keep their property as pristine as possible had spared Towne most of the ravages of runaway industrialization as the governments of the so-called Outer Reaches worlds geared up to break away from the Terran Alliance. Also, Towne was more than amply supplied with water—upwards of seventy percent of the surface was covered in it—which meant its owners hadn't needed to make onerous payments for ice to the Ryan Cartel. Finally, a still-unexplained freak of world-formation had planted most of the planet's abundant metallic ore deposits securely beneath its oceans. Towne had access to ample resources to build a comfortable and fairly modem low-population-density society, but not to sustain gigantic war industries.
The one strategic metal readily available on Towne was copper, which, while vital to the building of BattleMechs and other military equipment, wasn't valuable enough to make it worthwhile for anybody to descend from the skies and just rip the stuff out wholesale. Which didn't mean nobody had tried. Late in the twenty-eighth century, at the outset of the First Succession War, squabbling between the defending Davion 56th Avalon Hussars and the Davion 123rd Aero Interceptor Wing had enabled invading Liao and Kurita forces to turn what was intended as a series of smash-and-grab raids into a protracted occupation, the so-called Towne Debacle.
Once the invaders had been given their walking papers, and a grateful Prince John Davion had rewarded the Townies with their Charter (a cheaper expedient than rewarding them with, say, money), Towne resumed its prosperous, relatively quiet lifestyle, supported by exporting its copper and its outstandingly durable and beautiful native hardwoods.
Otherwise the economy relied largely on ranching— of both the pelagic and terrestrial varieties, and of both native and imported species—and a thriving tourist trade attracted by Towne's emphatic vistas and its riotous geology, climate, and ecosphere.
Or so it had been until Archon Prince Victor Davion had brought down on himself the wrath of Thomas Marik. The Marik-Liao invasion seemed all but over, yet the aftermath of war is often worse than the fighting. The once-proud Sarna March had now exploded into a hotbed of contested worlds, rebellions, and uneasy alliances. Sitting too close for comfort to all this was the once sleepy planet of Towne.
* * *
Finding the ROTM and the Popular Militia had not been hard. Though the Popular Militia had been driven underground by Planetary Government pressure—with wide support from such disparate factions as the Union Party, which agitated for annexation by the Draconis Combine, and the main opposition Reform Party, for which Howard Blaylock was the point man—the Rights of Towne Movement was still legal, and still holding frequent seminars, meetings, and rallies. Popular Militia literature was widely available at all Movement functions, though nobody ever saw who put it there. Of course.
Cassie saw no overt recruitment for the Popular Militia at any ROTM gathering, though she'd attended a lot of them gotten up in various guises after the regimental meeting a week ago. Sometimes she appeared as an Islander from the South, as she had at the demonstration outside the TTC complex. Though Cassie could use colored contact lenses, skin-tones, wigs, and hair dyes as well as anybody and better than most, her only really unmistakably Asian feature was the pronounced epicanthic folds at the corners of her smoky blue eyes. However, in the Great Gene-Plasm Bingo Parlor that was the Inner Sphere, a two-meter-tall snow-blonde woman was no less likely to sport epicanthic folds than was Cassie—or late Coordinator Takashi Kurita—to have blue eyes. So Cassie's most-used alter egos were white.
She went that way because she did in fact encounter racism at Rights of Towne Movement meetings, along with ageism, sexism, cultural elitism, insensitivity, and a wide variety of other colors on the Bad Attitude spectrum the ruling Charter Party accused the Movement of. Most meant little to Cassie, who was as close to apolitical as any human could get and still register on a brainscan. The widespread Townian
hatred and distrust of foreigners bothered her, of course, because they were directed against the Regiment. But race and gender only concerned her as potential disguises and the need to keep from using too memorable a one in case she had to perform radical structural alterations to some persistent bigot in the midst of a crowd of his nominal cronies.
Other attitudes, such as that people were entitled to fight to protect themselves and their property, seemed as organic to her as breathing. From her Capellan upbringing, Cassie found it entirely natural that the government should want to deprive its citizens of personal weaponry, particularly firearms. On the other hand, she found it equally natural, and prudent, that the citizenry should do what it could to hang onto its guns.
But though she did find it worthwhile to change her apparent ethnicity—she didn't think circumstances warranted her trying to pass as male—she didn't encounter any great number of racists. Anybody publicly making racialist statements would find scores of other speakers crowding forward to rebut him. And though a heavy-handed male-chauvinist condescension wasn't uncommon, the selfsame male chauvinists were among the readiest to step chivalrously forward and perform attitude adjustments on the few offenders who seriously crowded Cassie.
As for the widely held anti-foreign sentiments, they were usually promulgated by speakers who didn't quite fit in. Though these individuals generally affected workingman or woman's dress, they tended to be younger, sleeker, and softer than the authentic laborers. And they tended to sound alike, as though their rhetoric all came out of the same can. They reminded Cassie disturbingly of the agitator to whom she'd given the kidney-massage with the barrel of her hideout pistol.
But finding out who was pulling the strings of the resistance wasn't her mission right now. Getting in touch with the Popular Militia was.
The Movement meetings often featured people talking about the various militias. Some spoke quietly in groups, off to the side where they thought no one could overhear. Others were loud about it, brash, almost aggressive.
Cassie wrote the latter class off as agents-provocateur. The alternative was that they were wannabes, a group about equally as deadly to an operator in her position as to authentic militia members.
The discreet ones she paid closer attention to. Closer than they seemed to think possible, as it happened. Amateurishly, they overlooked the possibility of people with unusually keen hearing, like Cassie. Also of people equipped with small, highly sensitive, directional and concealable listening devices, also like Cassie. Their behavior struck no wrong notes; militias were amateurs by definition, and tended to act that way until they'd gotten their noses bloodied good and hard a few times. The Popular Militia was, hypothetically, centuries old—but until the departure of the Fifth Lyran Guards and the flight of the planet's own Marquis, the PM had been little more than a social club.
So they talked in hushed voices, and Cassie listened, even when her attention was apparently focused elsewhere, such as ardent debates as to whether open immigration of Islanders into Hyboria ought to be permitted or not. And she marked who said what, and how, until she had a line on who the authentic Militia members were, who were the merely curious, and who were just a more laid-back species of wannabe. After that, it was just another mark hunt.
* * *
He was in his late fifties, white-bearded, weathered hard, still bigger in the chest and shoulders than he was in the belly. He'd grown up in a timber camp in the Cimmerian foothills east of the Eiglophian Mountains, worked for a time at a mine operating one of the titanic power-shovels that took an Atlas-sized bite out of the earth at every stroke, then settled down ranching slo-mos, a particularly tasty and normally docile native herbivore. He had done fairly well by himself.
Then one day he threw it all over and came to the big city, where after a spell of drifting he opened, of all things, an antiquarian and collectible bookstore. He'd devoted himself to that for the last dozen years, making a modest success of it A genuine frontier man of action and urban intellectual, he was oddly typical of the trail mix that made up the Rights of Towne Movement—and the Popular Militia.
What made him attractive to Cassie, and her to him, was what had brought him to Port Howard in the first place. The slo-mos he ran were anything but aggressive, but they were also massive and nearly blind. When a ravaging hexwolf pack slashed into his herd like a Drac katana one late-winter morning, the resultant stampede had rolled over his sixteen-year-old daughter and her horse before she—or he, watching in helpless horror from the fringe—could react. The death of his sole child soured his marriage. Within eighteen months he and his wife had divorced and the ranch was sold to pay the settlement.
Cassie didn't have sex with him. That wasn't her style, even when she employed a conventionally seductive approach. She just became a little girl fresh up from the Islands—John Satterthwaite hated bigots, and knew little of the South—who wondered just what this Rights of Towne business was about.
Approach was so simple she was almost shamed by it. It was another sound-and-fury ROTM meeting in another rented lecture hall in downtown Port Howard. Cassie stepped on the booted toe of a garage worker she'd spotted for a bigot with advanced testosterone poisoning. He had her by the arm and was just warming to the subject of what he ought to do to her worthless little black ass when a big scarred hand grabbed him by the shoulder of his shirt with his name on the pocket and spun him around.
Racist Boy was tall enough to look Satterthwaite in the eye, and probably had almost four decades' advantage. But Satterthwaite was nearly twenty kilos heavier, not all of it adipose, and while he was the last man in the world to claim to be able to drop a bull slo-mo with one punch, he looked just the man to do it. The pigeon Cassie had jostled beat an abject retreat to the jeers of his cronies.
Things continued to run on rails. Cassie spent much of the next few days with the older man—taking long walks by the Thunder, sitting together in his shop conversing in low tones while occasional customers grazed like herd beasts, hanging out till all hours in coffee shops or diners. Cassie knew nothing about Towne politics except what she'd gotten from the briefings prepared by Father Doctor Bob and Maccabee Bar-Kochba, and cared nothing for the issues involved. But she was expert at getting the old man to talk about what he cared about—and then feeding him back exactly what he wanted to hear.
It had, of course, been his own idea to recruit her into the Popular Militia.
* * *
Earlier that evening, Cassie was sitting at the counter of a downtown diner sipping unsweetened native tea, a more characteristically Islander drink than the northerners' favorites, coffee and hot chocolate. Satterthwaite or his militia pals had picked an inconvenient hour for their meeting with Cassie, 0100. Amateurs liked to meet people at night. It added to the cloak and dagger effect.
The diner was wide but shallow, brightly lit, an inviting oasis in the snowshot night. A shabby, derelict-looking guy with fingers poking out holes in his gloves was nursing a hot chocolate three stools down to Cassie's left. A female cabby sat at the right end of the counter with a stool between her and Cassie, talking to the proprietor. Four people, a pair and two solos, were distributed among the booths and tables at her back.
She was, discreetly, wound for sound. Her dark-green stocking cap was a balaclava that could be pulled down to obscure her features. Her bulky coat was lined with lightweight synthetic ballistic-cloth, with ceramet inserts over sternum, belly, and kidneys; the whole didn't add that much weight to what winter on Towne mandated, and swung loose enough that it didn't much encumber her movements. The coat opened down the left side, not the front, and its zipper was a dummy; it was really sealed by a Velcro strip, allowing it to be torn open in a hurry to let Cassie get to the Sperry Browning autopistol holstered in the small of her back. Blood-drinker rode hilt-downward along the left side of her torso, and her snubby was tucked into its pocket-holster.
She kept glancing at the watch on her left index finger, and her foot had a tendency
to tap against the gleaming chrome facing of the counter. Satterthwaite was late, and these manifestations of nervousness fit her established profile. But the truth was, she was nervous. Country folk on Towne, unlike rural Southwesterners, had a very strict sense of punctuality. It was uncharacteristic of her—it took an effort of will to think of him as a mark—to be late.
"Hey, little missy." It was the bum. He had sidled over to the stool one away from hers and was leaning toward her. He smelled like a bowl of rotting fruit. "Got the time?"
She got no threat vibes off him, but like hers, his baggy winter garb could conceal a lot. She let her peripheral vision brush her watch, as her right hand, hidden from his view, slipped down into her coat pocket.
"One thirty-five," she replied. Her character wouldn't use the twenty-six-hour military time system.
Two men walked into the Café behind her. She saw them perfectly; the right side of the order window back to the kitchen was sheathed in shining-clean chrome and served handily as a mirror. The one to her right was white, the other was black. They were both young, reasonably fit, and familiar. She had seen them both passing out pamphlets attacking the Seventeenth at ROTM meetings.
They split up as soon as they cleared the door.
Cassie stood up. The vagrant, who had slid into the stool next to hers, blinked up in surprise. "Hey, missy, don't rush off—"
She wasn't rushing, just moving with a purpose. She cut to her left, a course that would bring her closer to the white guy. She wasn't going to give them a chance to jump on her simultaneously.
The white guy was perceptibly bulkier than his partner, in fact moved as if he was pretty buff despite the masking of his own coat. He was obviously somebody who relied on that strength—"muscle-bound" as a state of mind rather than body—which meant he came in with every muscle taut. That in turn meant he was slow. Cassie could not remotely match either man in main strength, so speed was her weapon. He wasn't much of an operator; the way they'd split had signaled that—as obvious a red-light move as a grab for a holstered weapon. She had actually gotten past him before he reacted.
