Hearts of Chaos

by Victor Milán

  "They're not my BattleMechs." He shrugged. "But we like to feel that our planes are close to those crude wood-and-fabrip ships—closer than fusion-driven spacecraft in spirit, as we're closer to wind and weather in fact. And we all, men and women, feel close to those pilots from long ago."

  He had lowered himself to a seat on the grass as he spoke. "Do you need a bit of a break? I don't want to wear you out."

  It was her turn to laugh. "I'm a scout," she said. "I don't make my living sitting on my butt in cockpit."

  He clutched his heart and rolled half onto his back, canted to one side by the slung hamper. "Cut to the quick! My manhood's impugned! Now there's nothing left for me but to turn into a thermoworm and crawl off to spend the rest of my wretched days in a mud-pit."

  "We could race to the boulders up there," Cassie suggested, "and I could let you win."

  He looked at her upside-down, cocked an eyebrow. "Now you've got me wondering if it's you who don't get out much, with such a tongue on you."

  "Sorry. I'm sorry! I didn't mean—" He rolled over and sat up. "Did your pretty little leg come off in my hand? I'm just teasing."

  He tapped his nose. "Have you noticed, child, when you like a man your victim-reflexes kick in? Watch that close, girl, or someone whose intentions are less straightforwardly dishonorable than mine may take advantage."

  She felt her cheek muscles tighten. He was talking just like Lady K. Before she could find anything to say he'd gotten to his feet and started off up the slope again.

  Just to get a bit of her own back, she pushed him, forcing him to pick up the pace to stay in the lead. By the time he clambered over the lip of a granite shelf and stood up with hands on hips he was sucking wind. He gave her a rueful grin as she climbed up alongside.

  She stopped. "It's beautiful."

  He put his arm around her shoulder. "Ah. This time it sounds as if you mean it."

  Almost at her feet lay a stone-sided pool of clear water. Soft grass fringed it. They had climbed out of the sulfur-stench of the ealdera floor. The dominant smells were water, so warm Cassie could feel its heat on her face, and the brisk scent of the conifers that surrounded the pool on three sides.

  "The pool's fed by a hot spring that rises about twenty meters upslope," Tim said, pointing to where water trickled down a pile of boulders, as picturesque as a fountain in a Japanese garden. "It may not be paradise, but it's as close as I expect to get in this life. And any other, perhaps."

  He swung the hamper down to the grass by the water. "If I were a smooth-talker, I'd say it was never closer than with you here beside me. Would you believe me if I told you that a beautiful woman's presence brightens any scene?"

  She laughed. She did that a lot around Leftenant Tim Moon. She did it a great deal during the meal they shared on a blanket spread beside the pool.

  When they'd eaten their fill, and Cassie had drunk enough Stygian wine to feel warm all over, he reached out a hand and gently stroked her cheek. To her own surprise she took his hand and kissed the palm.

  He smiled, and there was sadness in his large dark eyes. "Before we start, my beautiful one, there's something you should know: I'm no good, for you or any woman born. I'm always true in battle, but never in affairs of the heart. That's the way I am, and if you have no stomach for it, why, say so now and I'll never be blaming you. It's still a lovely spot for a picnic."

  Cassie looked straight into those eyes. "Are you going to make love to me?" she asked.

  "Ah, but that's the general idea." He cupped her chin in his hand and raised her face. "And has anyone ever made love to you before? It's bad luck to deflower so beautiful a woman."

  "I've had sex before," she came back, tartly.

  "That's not what I was asking."

  "What's the difference?"

  "If you insist," he said, "I'll show you." And his mouth moved to cover hers.

  * * *

  "More cocoa, Cassie?" Niko Papandreou asked.

  Southwestern-style she waved him off, moving her opened and vertical hand up and down above her cup. Then she checked her watch again. It was a wrist watch with a Velcro flap. Outside of her personas she never wore a finger watch, or rings of any sort. They tended to hang up on things.

  Where's Kali? Cassie wondered, also not for the first time. It wasn't like her friend to keep her waiting like this.

  From the counter she glanced around the Old New Mexican Café. The smattering of customers were all local civilians. It was a little unusual in and of itself that there were no Caballeros in here at this time of day, early afternoon. Cochise Company was in the hot seat right now, Adelante and pravo stood down. There were no exercises scheduled for today that she knew of. Hauptmann-General Marrou of the Towne Guards was sulking again, and even though, true to their word, the Towne Air Rangers had helped the Caballeros establish communications with the Popular Militia inside Port Howard as well as out, no tangible results had yet resulted. The Seventeenth and the militias were still at what Lady K termed the "sending flowers" phase.

  Sending flowers. Tim Moon had sent Cassie flowers after he returned her to Port Howard from their idyllic trip to the Vale of Shamballah. Plenty of men had sent her flowers. But they never meant anything before.

  She glanced out the window. A little guiltily, Cassie realized she wasn't really hoping to see Lady K, their appointment notwithstanding. She was looking for Tim Moon to walk up to the door at his familiar easy amble. He was supposed to be flying in today; despite the Planetary Government's overt hostility, the Rangers had begun transferring planes to a private airfield northeast of town for their own get-acquainted exercises with the 'lleros. Outside the sky was overcast. But to Cassie, who had some experience judging how weather might affect aerial operations, it didn't look like anything to deter a daredevil like Tim.

  High up on one wall, near the entrance to the rest-rooms, a holotank was turned on. Cassie let the newsreader's plastic-smooth and nominally masculine features and voice drift into focus:

  "Port Howard labor union leaders met with Planetary Government officials today to demand the disarmament of what they termed 'Drac hirelings and union-busters.' They were referring to the mercenary Seventeenth Recon Regiment, employed by mysterious Combine tycoon Chandrasekhar Kurita, rumored to be the uncle of Coordinator Theodore Kurita. Reform Party spokesperson Howard Baylock had this to say—"

  And before Cassie could hear exactly what it was the esteemed Assemblyman had on his mind, the windows blew in with enough sound and fury to wake the dead and terrify the living ...

  PART THREE

  Here's a Toast to the Dead Already

  Take the cylinder out of my kidneys,

  The connecting rod out of my brain (my brain!)

  From the small of my back take the camshaft

  And assemble the engine again.

  —Royal Flying Corps Mess Song, First Terran World War

  15

  Port Howard

  Aquilonia Province, Towne

  Draconis March, Federated Commonwealth

  23 January 3058

  Cassie never for a moment doubted what had happened. Port Howard's strict air-traffic control laws forbade any craft to go supersonic above the city.

  Leaving Papandreou staring with rag in hand she ran out the front door. On the sidewalk she shook her fist at the clouded sky and screamed, "Kusunoki, you no-good bishonen bastard! You weren't supposed to come so soon."

  Standing a short way down the street from the door were the inseparable pair of Buck Evans and Cowboy Payson. Cowboy still had his hands pressed over his ears. "I'm glad it's not our arrival you're reacting to that way," Buck called out to Cassie.

  A car with a retractable polymer top had jumped the curb almost in front of Papandreou's little restaurant. A citizen leaped out with his tie askew and started looking wildly around. "What was that? What? What?"

  Buck Evans pointed to the sky off to the west, where a white disk with a protrusion from the leading edge was curving out
over the bay. "A Sholagar," he said. "Unless of course the Dracs got themselves a Thrush."

  "Or maybe the Capellans came to join the party," put in Cowboy.

  Buck gave him a sour look. "You sure got a way of looking on the bright side, boy."

  More sonic booms cracked the air. Nikos Papandreou came out onto the sidewalk, wiping his hands frantically on his apron. "What's going on?"

  White explosion clouds blossomed from the city center. "Well, to the south there, you see your basic Union Class DropShip descending on Prince John Spaceport," Buck said, waving a hand. "And up there—"

  He pointed almost directly overhead, where scores of bright sparks drifted down from the clouds like flame snowflakes. "—you see maybe a company of BattleMechs, dropped by another DropShip, wafting their gentle way into your life."

  The distraught motorist was digging his fingers under his eyes so hard Cassie expected to see blood at any moment. "But what does it mean?" he asked in a clotted voice.

  "You know that Drac invasion y'all didn't believe was coming?" Cowboy said as the sound of distant explosions marched over them like thunder. "Well, it's here, and runnin' way the hell ahead of schedule."

  The motorist uttered a strangled squawk and took off down the street at a wild stumbling run. He fell down in the gutter twice before rounding a corner and disappearing. Meanwhile the invading 'Mechs were dropping into the heart of Port Howard.

  Papandreou took off his apron, wadded it, and threw it down in disgust. "Well, I'll be God-damned. You boys were telling the truth all along."

  "What did you think?" Cassie asked.

  The restaurant owner shook his head. "I believed the Popular Militia when they said you were the spies," he said. "Shoot. I was helping 'em set up a strike on you."

  Buck slapped him on the shoulder. "Well, old son, let's both be glad you didn't go and do something we'd all regret."

  "What do I do now?" Papandreou's other customers had emerged to stand staring open-mouthed at the skies, like so many turkey chicks beneath a dripping eave.

  "Well, unless you want to add sushi to your menu," Cowboy said, "I'd suggest you think about takin' a long vacation in the country."

  "What about us?" Cassie asked.

  "Don't tell me we all came on bikes," Buck said, looking up and down the block.

  "You too, huh?" Cassie said.

  "This is a mighty poor time to get split up," Buck said.

  "Hey! What're we gettin' ourselves all lathered up about?" Cowboy raced to the car that had run up into the curb, jumped into the driver's seat. The top folded back into the trunk, revealing his grinning face.

  "Check it out! Engine's even still runnin'."

  Cassie looked at Buck. "I don't think Mr. Hymel's coming back for his car," Papandreou said.

  Buck slid in next to his partner. Cassie vaulted into the back seat. "Yee-haw" Cowboy yelled. He bounced the car off the curb, squealed it into a U-turn that left rubber on the far curb, and accelerated down Melni-bone. Papandreou stood on the sidewalk gazing after them with a distracted expression.

  The convertible sped toward the central business district. The noise of explosions grew until it became a constant fabric enfolding them. Cassie bounced in the back seat, barely able to contain herself in her frenzy to be back with the regiment doing something. Just what that might be was not clear, even to her resourceful mind.

  "How'd they drop in on us so damned fast?" Cowboy shouted over the unending thunder and the noise of their passage as the convertible flew over a rise and bottomed-out on its suspension with a squeal of metal on blacktop. "Same trick they pulled in that Christmas raid?"

  "No way," Buck yelled back. "A raiding party might get through jump-point security disguised as regular traffic. Not an invasion force."

  "Pirate point," Cassie said. She had her pocket comm out and was trying to raise the regiment. "They jumped in somewhere close to the planet."

  "This Kusunoki's a ballsy son of a bitch, then," Buck said.

  "That's the word on him. Damn these atmospherics! The primary's screwing up the comm net again." Towne's high-energy sun was as prone to storms as the planet was, and the solar storms disrupted broadcast communications severely. A fusion-driven signal could punch through—but the reactors in the embattled 'llero 'Mechs had other demands on their output right now.

  They could see 'Mechs hopping and popping, rising into the air on jump jets to duel with each other over downtown and off to the northwest where the Palace of the Marquis stood. Aerospace fighters were battering the north bank of the Thunder near where it emptied into Circle Bay.

  Cassie pounded her fist on the back of Buck's seat. "They're bombing the TTC yards!" she cried in anguish.

  "They're gunnin' for our 'Mechs," Cowboy said. Most of the 'lleros still in Port Howard were stationed inside the great transport complex. Cowboy's Wasp and Buck's Orion were both parked there.

  "How did they know?" Cassie cried. She struck her comm unit with the heel of her hand in frustration.

  "Inside job," Buck said. "Somebody shopped us for true."

  They passed several shops with broken windows, then a convenience store blazing merrily, big gobs of orange flame rolling out the windows. "Fighting must've moved mighty quick," Buck said.

  "This isn't 'Mech damage," Cassie said. "Too many buildings are standing."

  "Yeah, and I don't see any stepped-on cars," Cowboy said, swerving to avoid a burning van with all its doors standing open and a body sprawled beside it.

  "What's anybody packing?" Buck asked.

  For answer Cowboy whipped out his Sunbeam laser pistol from the tie-down holster low on his right thigh. "Keep both your damned hands on the wheel, boy," Buck said. "I got my 12 mike-mike, Cassie's got that baby hammerless wheel gun. This isn't gonna do. We're at a serious social disadvantage here."

  "Who cares?" Cassie demanded. "Just get us downtown. Then you guys can get to your 'Mechs and I can do something."

  "Don't get tunnel-vision fixated on BattleMechs, Cass," Buck said. "It might not be too easy to get to where the big boys are playing, if the Dracs got troops on the ground—or if lovely Port Howard is beginning to experience civil disturbance, as seems to be the case."

  The popping-corn sounds of firelights came sporadically from either side, though they were still several klicks from the major battle raging downtown.

  "Damn you!" Cassie raged at her communicator. "What's going on dbwn there?"

  "Offhand," Cowboy called breezily, "I'd say the home team's gettin' its butt kicked."

  "How can you sound so cheerful about it?" Buck asked.

  "Ain't our butts bein' kicked. Yet."

  A whistling roar and swooping shadow made them duck, even as Cowboy cranked the wheel hard left to avoid a mass of abandoned cars completely blocking the street ahead. Dragon's breath washed over them and Cassie looked up into the dazzling plasma glare of two fusion-driven exhausts. Less than 500 meters overheard, the Fusiliers' lone Stuka, bleeding gray smoke, was jinking frantically from side to side, as much trying to bring its two rear-firing Martell lasers to bear on a boomerang-shaped Shilone in pursuit. The 65-ton Shilone was riding the Stuka's tail as if the larger fighter were towing it, hanging so close it had to dodge the thruster flames as much as the laser beams.

  As the two craft streaked out over Circle Bay, the big Diverse Optics laser in the Shilone's nose stabbed out. Cassie saw a white puff of armor sublimating away from the root of the Stuka's left wing. The Stuka nosed up and suddenly banked in a violent high-gee turn to the left. The maneuver caught the Shilone jock by surprise; the Drac couldn't match-the turn without blacking out from gees. Instead it banked right, flipped through a barrel roll that brought it back to the same line of flight as its larger flying prey. Then it fired a spread from its long-range Shigunga rack at the Stuka, which was blazing south at full thrust.

  Cassie saw at least two flashes as missiles struck the big fighter. Debris streamed briefly from it. Then the Stuka seemed to strike
an obstruction in the air and go cartwheeling into an end-for-end tumble, still shedding parts. The pilot, dead, stunned, or trapped by the centrifugal force of its death-spin, never punched out. The Stuka struck the base of the peninsula that curved out from below the Thunder mouth to form the lower boundary of Circle Bay and blew up in a sun-bright yellow-white flash. The Shilone, which had climbed almost vertically after launching its LRMs to avoid foreign-object damage from wreckage, pulled through onto its back, did a slow barrel roll, and vanished into the clouds.

  "Foxtrot hot-dog," Buck muttered.

  "Long-range and low-heat," Cowboy said. "So much for the pride and joy of the ol' Marquis's aerospace boys."

  "Wait," Cassie said, "I'm getting something." She held her com between Cowboy and Buck as Cowboy turned west again and started up a hill.

  "Peaches! Watch that Marauder at nine o'clock!" It was Captain Bobby Begay, callsign "Navajo Wolf" and commander of Cochise Company.

  "I'm on him, Wolf! ¡Santiago y Sierra!" Frank Gomez's battle cry invoked his homeworld and its patron saint "I got him! I got him! Yo—"

  The transmission broke off in a sudden snarl of static. They heard Bobby the Wolf scream Gómez's name and then break into Navajo.

  Cassie pounded a fist on the back of Buck's seat as tears streamed down her cheeks. It wasn't for Gomez—she hardly knew him, felt little for him; he was just another 'Mech jock to her. It was for what was happening to la familia.

  "Guess Frank Gómez pulled that Death from Above trick once too often," Buck said.

  "Downin' a Marauder in a Phoenix Hawk ain't shabby," Cowboy said.

  "Oh, no," Buck said. "This ain't good. We got two more DropShips corning down, one out by the Palace, looks like, and another comin' down at the spaceport." Bright thruster flares descended through the clouds to south and northeast.