Hearts of Chaos

by Victor Milán

  While Ten Bears tended to the MechWarrior's more obvious hurts at the staging area where the Ranger VTOL had deposited the liberated hostages, Lady K recorded intelligence data until she passed out. Thanks to her the 'lleros knew the faces of their foe. Aside from the Angels, they were up against the BattleMech 15th Dieron Regulars: Devotion Through Combat, the 227th Armored Regiment, known as the Hard Targets, and the 503rd Mechanized Infantry Regiment, nicknamed A Better Tomorrow. All comprised combat-hardened DCMS regulars.

  But the Black Dragon Society had not been idle. They were creating their own secret army, it seemed. They had contributed two units to the Towne invasion: the 1st Spirit of the Dragon BattleMech Regiment, known as The Eight Corners of the World Under One Roof, which in a briefing long ago and far away the Mirza Peter Abdulsattah had informed them was a Kokuryu-ifccw slogan signifying all humanity united under the benevolent rule of the Dragon; and the 1st Dragon's Joy infantry regiment, The Drawn Sword.

  "I think Baird put that bug in Cabby's head," Raven said. She sat with legs crossed by a window opened to the frigid mountain air, smoking a cigarette. Cassie mentally counted down the seconds until she expected the floor nurse to come rampaging in to kick butts and take names. "Gabby's too macho to go for Gordo's notion that we oughta throw in the towel and let the Dracs send us to Outreach—like we could trust them— so Gordo was trying to sow a little dissension between daddy and son. He's a sneaky little ditch-weed."

  "I should put Blood-drinker in his kidneys," Cassie said. "He'll be trouble."

  Man Mountain held up pink-palmed hands. "Now, Cass, don't go talking that way. He means well. He's one of us, after all." Lady K cocked a skeptical eyebrow at him. "You think that means he means well? Earl Willie, you're a lot more naive than I thought."

  The vast black Mech Warrior shrugged, sending tidal surges through his chins and belly. He was famously good-natured. As a 200-kilo Locust pilot, he needed every scrap of cheerfulness.

  Raven blew smoke and started to say something. The door blew open.

  It was Tim Moon, smelling of cold air and wood smoke, his arms loaded with flowers. Without a sideways glance he moved swiftly to hug Lady K. She burst into tears.

  For all her toughness Lady K was still fragile from her experiences. Intellectually Cassie realized that. And this was the first time Moon had actually gotten back to see her since he'd watched her carried away from his Karnov strapped to a stretcher. But still ... her own eyes stinging, she rose and went quickly into the hall.

  Light and sound were muted in the corridor. So were the smells of disinfectants. Ivor Mictlan Memorial Hospital seemed out of another time. It had been built and decorated without reference to thirty-first-century ergonomic theories. The splashboards of the walls were painted olive drab, and above them was off-white, lending the corridor an appearance whose first impact was dismal. Yet as the staff went about their business in their spotless white uniforms, pushing heavy-looking but undeniably solid wheelchairs and carts, Cassie felt the ultimate effect was somehow reassuring, unlike the gleaming sterility of most FedCom clinics she'd encountered.

  A woman with a shabby brown bob and enormous hazel eyes, her slight frame all but overwhelmed by a black rodan-hide jacket, stood leaning against the wall. She glanced at Cassie, tipped her head to one side, smiled shyly.

  "You must be the scout," she said. "Timmy's told me about you. I'm Amy—Sergeant Sandoz, from his Chaos Flight. I was his wing-thing flying in here today."

  "I'm Cassie Suthorn. Hi."

  "Pleased to meet you." Sandoz stepped closer, frowned. "You look like something's chewing you hard."

  She took hold of Cassie's sleeve. Cassie stiffened.

  "It's Tim, isn't it?" the other woman said quietly, looking into Cassie's smoky blue eyes. "I can tell. I know the signs, girl. I've been there."

  Now Cassie did pull away. "I'm O.K.," she said, turning her head.

  "No, you're not. You're in the bag for him too." The slight pilot drew a deep breath, let it blow out slowly.

  "Cassie—Leftenant Suthorn—I hate to be the one to tell you this. But you don't fall heavy for Leftenant Timmy Bloody Moon. His callsign's not 'Bad' because we couldn't think of anything else."

  Cassie shook her head as if trying to dislodge a droplet of water from her inner ear. This doesn't mean anything, she told herself. The girl's just jealous, she admitted she had a crush on Tim herself....

  "You don't know, do you?" Shaking her head, Sandoz stepped back a pace or two. "Tim and that long-legged Captain of yours were in bed when the Dracs hit Port Howie. As in together, and not logging Z's. That's why it took him so long to hit the sky—and I'd guess it's also why she got caught, though I bet she's in denial about that as big-time as Timmy is—"

  Cassie couldn't hear any more for the roaring in her ears. She turned and ran down the hall, almost bowling over an old man in a flannel gown who was pushing a wheeled IV rack along before him.

  22

  Ham's Farm

  Nemedia Province, Towne

  Draconis March, Federated Commonwealth

  26 February 3058

  "We've all heard the expression, 'that government rules best which rules least,' " Father Doctor Roberto "Call Me Bob" García told the attentive faces gathered in the farmhouse dining room. The room was cheerful from the sunlight spilling in at the windows. Though it was just two days past the midwinter festival, the sky was clear and painfully blue.

  As he'd anticipated, his score of Townian students grinned and bobbed their heads, concurring with the statement. "One of the great paradoxes of political history," he continued, "is that that government which attempts to rule most actually rules least."

  That quieted the group and made them swap puzzled looks—also anticipated. "Our enemies are trying to impose their own brand of order on the planet Towne," he said. "We don't have the military force to defeat them outright—not yet. So we must make, ourselves ungovernable. That means we meet their attempts to impose order with chaos—from which, in time, our own order will derive."

  —It was as if a relay clicked in his head as he spoke. He stopped, gave his head a quick shake.

  It's true, he thought. They never say anything with just a single meaning. And I never saw it until the words left my mouth.

  * * *

  He didn't remember what errand took him to the HTE Citadel that day, a week or so before the Seventeenth shipped for Towne. He was walking alone along a corridor whose lighting was at once ample and subdued when he encountered the looming form of the Mirza Peter Abdulsattah.

  The Mirza greeted him with the lone word: "Ishq."

  The word meant love. It filled Father Doctor Bob García with a weird transfiguring thrill as be uttered the ritual response, "Baraka, ya Shahin." Which meant, approximately, "Blessings, O King."

  The exchange was the ancient recognition sequence by which Sufis identified themselves to one another.

  "How did you recognize me?" he asked the Mirza. He couldn't meet the taller man's gaze.

  Abdulsattah chuckled, low and dry. "I read your baraka." In addition to "blessing," the word could mean holiness, or mana, or any number of things García was sure he wasn't within parsecs of grasping yet.

  "Surely that is small, and pale, Teacher," he said.

  "Surely you have far to go before you attain to the status of Perfected Man. But even one who travels through darkness is still traveling."

  García sighed. It was what he would expect from a dervish Adept. He had advanced far enough along the Way to know that During his studies at the Lyceum run by la CompaHia de Jesus on Galisteo the young Roberto García had become fascinated with the Sufis. They were usually identified as Muslim mystics—and yet they denied they were engaged in mysticism as commonly understood. And while their sages included men such as El-Ghazali, known to the ages as the Authority of Islam, they disavowed connection with any formal religion. Al-tariqa, the Way, lay open to men and women of all religions. Or none.

  T
hough the Company didn't actively teach the fact, the inquisitive young García had long since learned that the Jesuits' founder, Inigo de Loyola, had borrowed many of his indoctrination methods and arguments from Hasan i Sabah, the Old Man of the Mountains, who founded the Hashishin—the original Assassins—arguments the Jesuit-trained Rene Descartes in turn would try to pass off as his own, when presenting his own philosophy in the seventeenth century. While Sabah was no Sufi, his close friend Omar Khayyam was.

  Though the thirty-first century Society of Jesus professed no policy on the Sufis, at least insofar as García knew, their libraries and databases contained all known Sufi writings and a huge amount of ancillary information on them. The two groups were similar in many ways, to be sure: secretive groups exerting unseen influence to bring humankind into closer accord with divinity. That the Jesuit leadership, which was very specific in its opposition to, say, ComStar and subsequently the Word of Blake, as well as the Draconis Combine, remained mute on the Sufis intrigued García. He even toyed with the idea that the Company was itself a Sufi front. It had been founded in Spain, after all, which before the Reconquest had been a fertile garden of Sufism and Muslim illuminism.

  Not long after his graduation he had begun to search for Sufi teachers, and set his feet upon al-tariqa. He told himself there was surely no harm in it; and perhaps he might gain wisdom of use to the Company.

  Jesuits were nothing if not adept at rationalization, after all.

  He had found teachers, learned from them, and passed on, as was the Sufi way. For years he had heard nothing from them. Nor had they ever asked anything of him.

  Until now? he wondered, gazing at the Mirza with awe and dread.

  "Have you teaching for me?" he asked.

  "I have amal, the Work." A great Sufi catch-phrase, amal. It meant the work of development, both of the individual and human society. "And as order is often engendered by chaos—and vice versa—you may find in confusion, further knowledge."

  Peter Abdulsattah smiled and nodded, and appeared ready to end the interview on that unsatisfactory note. "I want certainty!" García almost bleated.

  "That you must earn. This is amal."

  * * *

  And now, in this farmhouse in what in summer would be lush Nemedian growing land, the Mirza's words came back to García: "As order is often engendered by chaos—and vice versa ..."

  He knew. The certainty—there was one for him— both reassured and shook him.

  "Dr. García?" a young woman asked tentatively. "Are you all right?"

  "Oh, certainly, certainly. Just a touch of premature spring fever. I'm from a desert world. I'm not used to winters this harsh. This sunlight throws me into wishful thinking."

  His students laughed politely. "Dr. García," a young man asked, hesitantly raising his hand, "how can a government rule less by trying to rule more? I don't get it."

  "Have you ever picked up an armload of kindling? A really huge load?" The young man nodded. "And did you ever give in to the temptation to pick up just one more little piece, so as not to have to make a second trip?"

  Again a nod. "And what happened?" García asked.

  The young man glanced sheepishly around. "Stuff went all everywhere. I dropped it."

  García nodded. "Just so. And so it is with power; there comes a point at which, in trying to grab still more, a government loses its grasp, too."

  That brought an appreciative murmur, and what he hoped was a touch of enlightenment to a few faces. It wasn't exactly a Subtlety of the Mulla Nasruddin, he thought, but perhaps the point got the point across.

  "We can hurry the process along, both in terms of making it harder for the invaders to hold onto power and of making them want to grab more as rapidly as they can, by injecting the system with a hearty dose of chaos. Thus their order engenders our chaos—which, if all goes as we wish, will lead to you creating your own order."

  The students made noises of happy comprehension. Yet some key points remained beyond them—and he, cynically, would make no attempt to enlighten them.

  Would you show such enthusiasm if you knew how many lives the process will cost? he wondered.

  And will you truly like the order which eventually emerges from this chaos we're going to spread?

  * * *

  A week later Cassie was high up in the Gunderlands carrying out some instruction of her own, her class consisting of a dozen Townie would-be guerrillas. They were seated on and among a clump of granite boulders overlooking a road that wound along the edge of a two-hundred-meter drop.

  "Here they come," a voice said in the little phone taped to the mastoid process behind Cassie's right ear.

  She touched the transmit button of her personal comm. "Abtakha acknowledging. Stay low, stay ambient, and try not to breathe too heavy."

  The lookout acknowledged and fell silent. Cassie turned to face the group.

  "People are intimidated by war machines," she told them, pitching her voice to penetrate the wind that tried to whip her words away. "That makes sense, kind of. Those machines can put out a lot of hurt. But the key thing is, they aren't invincible. Any of them."

  The students sat quietly alert, glancing nervously now and again at the road where it curved into view around a giant basalt promontory half a kilometer to the northeast. Cassie didn't look that way. Her lookout was from the Seventeenth's own Scout Platoon. She had full confidence the woman would warn them before the Drac column rounded into view.

  "A fighting machine is real complex, but you can still break it down as a set of a few basic systems—and I mean, 'break it down.' It'll have a propulsion system, an offensive system, a defensive system, a sensory suite, and some kind of life support for the pilot. People tend to focus on the strength of the defensive system, which usually means armor and the offensive firepower. That tends to freeze them up."

  The saw-edged cry of a hunting rodan—they were much smaller here than in the Eiglophians, her students assured her, sporting a paltry four-meter wingspan— drifted down the wind. "The fact is, you don't have to bang your head off armor plate. If you defeat any of those systems, you'll defeat the machine. Meaning, you'll take it out of the fight—don't get too fixed on wanting to see pretty explosions. If the thing can't see you, it can't shoot you. If its weapons are out, it's not likely to be able to hurt you. If the life-support gets canceled"—she shrugged—"it's a paperweight."

  Now she did glance up the road. Still nothing. "Just as the defensive system for most fighting vehicles— tanks, hovercraft, BattleMechs—is, obviously, the toughest to .attack, the propulsion system is easiest. Disabling the propulsion doesn't always mean the thing's out of the fight; a tank with a busted tread can still kill you. But sometimes you can produce side-effects to immobilizing a unit that incapacitates it in other ways."

  "Abtakha, they should be in sight of you in one-five seconds," the lookout reported.

  "Places," she told her students calmly. They moved unhurriedly to their preassigned hiding-spots. They had practiced going to ground all morning. After all, that was at least as important a facet of the scoutcraft she was teaching as overtly destructive skills. Lesson One: If they can see you, they can kill you. Don't be seen.

  As she flowed in behind a rough-surfaced boulder she shot a look toward a man crouching several meters to her right. He was small, shorter than she was, wiry, with stiff red hair and a face like an elbow. He called himself the Rooster. While he had nominally come to her as part of her class in 'Mechbusting 101, his status wasn't all that clear.

  In some ways he was instructing her. Cassie was conversant with explosives, but he was a master of them, having worked as a blaster for sundry mining and construction companies. He'd held down a lot of odd jobs, to hear him tell his stories, lumberjack, ranch-hand, miner, hunting guide. Though he never made a big deal of his own role in his tales—some friend or sometimes enemy of his was always the star—when the occasion arose he demonstrated competence in a wide enough range of skills to back his employ
ment claims. In fact, as quiet and steady as he was in the field, Cassie half-wondered if she wouldn't find a stint as an agent of House Davion's Rabid Foxes if she ever got a real look at his resumé.

  He gave her a squinty wink, jutted his jaw and nodded. He'd helped her set up today's demonstration, working explosives into a gimmick that required different mechanical means, and substantially greater risk, than she'd used before.

  "Attacking the leg joints and legs is usually the quickest way to bring down a BattleMech," she said, not lowering her voice. The Drac patrol would be making sufficient noise that they wouldn't hear her if she shouted. "Just knocking one down won't necessarily take one out, even if you cripple a limb. But sometimes a fall will stun or even kill a Mech Warrior. And, don't forget, the things are a lot more fragile than you think. Bang a machine that complex around enough, it will break even if nothing ever gets through the armor.'' Credit Zuma for that wisdom. "And if you do cripple it, at the very least it will have a harder time bringing its weapons to bear on you."

  Though the wind was blowing away from the little group, they all abruptly heard the creaking actuators and thudding footfalls of an approaching BattleMech. Everybody hunkered down a little lower into cover as a 60-ton Grand Dragon, the Draconis Combine's workhorse 'Mech, lumbered into view around the giant basalt knee.

  The heavy 'Mech bore the Kurita dragon-in-a-circle on its right shoulder housing. Its slablike left shin also displayed the Black Dragon insignia. Behind it trundled a number of stakebed trucks laden with infantry, escorted by several wheeled APCs. Today's "lesson" was twofold. One purpose was to teach her students a way of taking out even the mightiest BattleMech without heavy 'Mech-style weapons. The other was to teach the Dracs who'd invaded Towne that the mountains were not theirs.