by Victor Milán
"Um," Cassie said. Was that a glint of humor in Mason's eyes? She was thinking, Enrico Katsuyamal Abdulsattah had briefed the Caballeros on him; he had directed the propaganda war against the Seventeenth while the Internal Security Force was trying to kill Uncle Chandy back on Hachiman a year and a half ago. He was chief assistant to Takura Migaki, the raffishly elegant head of the progagandist Voice of the Dragon. Which meant that Katsuyama was a high-ranking officer in the ISF. Unlikely as he appeared for that role.
He was standing there blinking moistly up at her. "I'm pleased to meet you, Ernie," she said. For lack of anything better to do Cassie stuck out a hand.
He caught it up in a limp two-handed grasp and worked her hand like a pump handle. "Great to be here. Is this Towne?"
"We must go now," Mason said. "For your sake more than ours."
He shook hands with Cassie too, a firm forearm to forearm grip. "Farewell," he said. "May you bid wisely and well."
"You too," she said, throat dry. She had never in her life expected to wish well to a Clanner. They had taken Patsy from her—
The three Clanners turned to go. "Bye, you guys!" Ernie called after them. They turned back to wave, not unkindly.
"Nice people, those," Ernie said to Cassie as the Clansmen vanished back into their ship. "Don't think they're Draconians, and I don't think they're F-Cs, either. Could they be from the Periphery somewhere? Some of them were pretty big."
She stared at him. Was it possible that an Associate Director of the all-knowing ISF was so ingenuous he didn't know Clanners when he saw them? Even though their garb, as far as he could see, had borne no Clan identifications—unusual of itself—their identity had been obvious to Cassie.
From her brief but already exhausting acquaintance with this man, she could believe he was that innocent ... almost. Had Uncle Chandy revealed the deadly secret of his Clan dealings to the Smiling One? Oh, what kind of game are you playing, Grandfather?
She could only hope the fat man knew what he was doing.
The ramp closed up into the hull, sucking up the light with it. Ernie smiled slyly and stuck a hand inside his coat. He had a big gap between his two front incisors.
"Now that they're gone," he said, "I have a present for you. It was entrusted to me by a redheaded friend of yours."
He brought out a data disk and waved it under her nose. She shied back. Ninyu Kerai sent this? She snorted. Likely it was smeared with topical poison. She wasn't naive enough to believe he was sending her a love-gift. Their brief affair meant nothing more to him than would have snuffing out the life of a minor nuisance to House Kurita.
The turbines of the Broadsword's in-atmosphere jets began to whine up the scale. Reluctantly she took the disk, then grabbed Ernie by the hand. "They're getting ready to lift, Mr. Katsuyama," she said. "Maybe we should go stand behind those trees."
* * *
Twenty minutes later a Karnov landed amid an upside-down snowstorm. Zuma Gallegos and a number of his astechs emerged and swarmed over the containers the Clanners had left sitting in the snow. Cassie clambered aboard with Ernie trailing after.
The pilot was a thick, middle-aged Ranger she didn't know. She introduced her charge to him as Ernie.
One of Zuma's assistants stuck his head in the side hatch. "Hey, Cass, ¡mira! he called. "These crates all got the Ghost Bear chop on 'em."
He turned his head and spat. The Caballeros regarded Clanners, quite literally, as evil beings.
"Recovered Clan tech," she told him. "Spoils of war. Courtesy of Teddy the K."
"Hijo la. Good to have friends, ¿qué no? Still, I'd rather have a company or so of those DEST spooks."
"Pablito, you don't know what you're asking for. Now shag ass and get those crates aboard before the orbital patrol spots us and sends a Sholagar down to check us out."
* * *
"He's nuts," Mariska Savage said, coming into the room.
Cassie looked up from the deskcomp Astro Zombie was hunched over, trying to coax Ninyu's "present" to give up its secrets. She was one of half a dozen 'lleros packed into the little spare bedroom of a timber-camp operator's house that was serving for the moment as the regiment's Permanent Floating Headquarters.
"What say?" she asked the black Caballera.
"Katsuyama. Ernie," Risky said. "He's crazy as a Mason jar full of blue-bottle flies, to quote a favorite Southwestern phrase. But he knows his stuff."
It wasn't all Clan tech in the crates the DropShip had left behind. Some of them contained some very spiffy communications tech of evident Inner Sphere origin. Risky and Astro Zombie had been impressed; they didn't think the spotty Kurita tech-base had it in it.
"I majored in mass communications," Risky said. "I always liked the techie stuff, and it turned out to be the way to go to get a good job in the industry. But I got the whole package, and I assure you, Ernie knows his stuff. He's a genius—or maybe an idiot-savant."
Cassie shrugged. "Migaki's pretty sharp, I hear—"
"Indeed he is. He's the one who concocted that smear campaign portraying Hanse Davion as the 'Black Knight.' A pretty piece of bastardy, that."
"And I'm sure the Smiling One would've vetted him thoroughly before OKing him for the job. So I guess he must have something on the ball."
"He and you got up pretty brown on Hachiman, if I recall," Risky agreed. "I'm going to ask Himself there"—she bobbed her head at Astro Zombie—"if I can work as Ernie's assistant. He's all thumbs when it comes to the technical end of things, but the things I can learn!" Her cheeks were flushed and her big dark-chocolate eyes glistened.
"Yee-HAAAW!" The rebel yell bulged the walls of the little room. Cassie went thirty centimeters in the air and came down with her snubby hideout pistol in both hands.
Marshal "Astro Zombie" Harris turned from his monitor and blinked to find himself peering down the muzzle of every sidearm in the room but his.
"What?" he asked.
"Why'd you make that awful noise?" Cassie demanded. "What the hell's wrong with you?"
"Well, excuse me for existing, Lieutenant," the Chief Tech said with a sneer. "I was just overcome with joy at my discovery. Forgive the hell out of me for indulging in a little human emotion."
"Well, we don't want to discourage that, now, do we?" Risky said, returning her Federated autopistol to safe and tucking it back in its holster.
Cassie reluctantly tipped the revolver's short barrel up, off-line with Astro Zombie's pointy nose. "Only you can talk that way and live, Marshal," she said.
"So are you going to tell us what's in there," Raven asked, "or do we get to beat it out of you?"
"Only a nifty little software routine that looks like it can override just about any BattleMech security program in the known universe," Astro Zombie said smugly. "And as hot as this little mamacita is, in the unknown universe as well."
"I like him better when he sticks to nerd-speak," Raven remarked.
And then it hit them all.
"Jesús, María, y José," Zuma breathed. "It's the Ultimate Hot-wire Program!"
He spoke of it as if it were the Grail. Which in a sense it was. Somebody equipped with such a routine could seize total control of any BattleMech he could get physically inside.
"I guess that means Cowboy and Kali and the rest of them can get their rides back," Raven said. "Provided, of course, that the Snakes let us at 'em."
"When the time comes," Cassie said, "they will."
24
Seventeenth Recon Permanent Floating Regimental HQ
Southern Eiglophians
Koth Province, Towne
Draconis March, Federated Commonwealth
18 April 3058
Don Carlos's face brightened as Diana Vásquez appeared on the screen. "Ah, mi amor! It is good to see you."
She smiled briefly, then her expression turned sad. "I heard the news about poor Peter," she said. "I'm so sorry."
Don Carlos crossed himself. "May Our Lady keep him in peace," he said.
To the Caball
eros' surprise, the Towne Air Rangers in their eccentric aircraft had more than held their own against the invaders' aerospace fighters. Maneuverability, supreme skill, and heat-seeking missiles had kept the small propeller-driven craft competitive against their bigger, faster, fusion-powered cousins. Fighting an almost exclusively defensive battle, the Rangers had prevented the Dracs from gaining air supremacy.
But the renegade Kurita pilots were tough and courageous. And sometimes they got lucky, as they had the day before when a Desolation Angel aerospace lance caught Third Battalion Commander White-Nose Pony flying back to his command in Nemedia in a Ruedel two-seater. The Dracs had bounced the Ruedel and its two Voss escorts, shooting down all three. The Voss pilots ejected safety. Neither the Singer nor his pilot made it out.
"We're lighting many candles for him here at Mariposa," Diana said. "We miss him."
Don Carlos looked away. "We'll miss him worse when the fighting starts."
She touched the base of her throat apprehensively. "Is the time near?"
Don Carlos sighed and shook his head. "Much remains to be done. But we've made good progress. Many of our allies are in place for the final stroke. And this man from Luthien, Enrico Katsuyama—he's working wonders, if Howard Blaylock's response is any indication."
"I've seen some of Señor Blaylock's broadcasts. The poor man should have a care for his blood pressure."
With the help of Mariska Savage and a horde of local electronics buffs, Ernie Katsuyama was making use of much more than the bag of tricks he had brought along from Luthien. One tool was the means by which this conversation, untraceable and secure, was taking place between Don Carlos in his temporary headquarters and Camp Mariposa two hundred kilometers away: the Towne communications-satellite network. The sats had been designed, to the annoyance of the former Planetary Government as well as the current regime, to make it impossible to trace or block traffic through them. Masercast uplinks cost very slight power-draw, making it hard to triangulate them with radio direction-finding equipment. But the government couldn't tamper with them without bringing the planetary economy to a screeching halt.
Another ploy was faked seditious broadcasts by established air personalities, fabricated on Katsuyama's special Voice of the Dragon mixing board, and which he slipped into genuine holovid and radio broadcasts through plants at the stations. Ernie and Risky were especially fond of that one. Even when the broadcasts were proven to be phony, a certain taint of suspicion still clung to the victimized broadcaster. It was an excellent way to pay back particularly obnoxious news readers.
What had elevated Blaylock's blood pressure to dangerous levels most recently was short-wave radio broadcasts to Towne's farflung network of ham-radio enthusiasts. Cheap little remote transmitters whipped up by local techies were scattered all over Hyboria— and beyond, with the help of Kommandant Trevor Waites, who had headed back to the southern archipelagoes to stir up trouble. These sucked down satellite feeds from Ernie's propaganda workshop and sent them out over the air for anybody to hear. Government forces could RDF the drones and destroy them, but Radio Direction Finding couldn't choke off the broadcasts.
Programming included nasty satire, exposes of PG misdeeds and incompetence, and highly detailed how-to segments on sabotage, guerrilla warfare, and covert resistance. What yanked the Planetary Chairman's chain in particular was an announcement of the results of a contest whose entrants had submitted their most ingenious suggestions as to the best way to execute Howard Blaylock once the Drac invaders were booted off-planet ...
"How are things there?" Don Carlos asked.
"We had an outbreak of runny noses among the children in the nursery, but that seems to be nothing but colds, not serious. Otherwise, we're well. Leftenant Prynn is chafing to get into the fighting, but she's being very gracious about her flight being stationed here, under the circumstances. I'm still teaching Dolores Gallegos how to work El Cuco." El Cuco—the Bogeyman—was what Diana had christened her experimental O-Bakemono.
"How is she doing?"
"I'm afraid I'm not up to the standards of the instructors at the New Avalon Military Academy. But basic 'Mech operation isn't hard to pick up. And it's not as if she'd be doing any dogfighting." The powerful and extremely long-ranged Arrow IV missile system was designed for artillery support, engaging targets well beyond line of sight. A MechWarrior driving an Arrow-equipped machine was never supposed to see an enemy BattleMech. The OBK-M10's close-in armament, three small extended-range lasers, was purely nominal, good mainly for discouraging ground-pounders from attaching shaped charges to its foot actuators.
"It's mostly a way of keeping me sharp, and continuing to shake the Bakemono down," Diana admitted.
"You are wise as always." Having made the command decision to withhold his 'Mechs from combat as much as possible for the time, Don Carlos was determined to keep the prototype OBK well out of harm's way. Especially since the Luthien Armor Works designers had been unable to build a machine capable of moving as fast as the original Naga.
The Colonel thanked Our Lady that military considerations and the desires of his heart alike dictated the same thing: that Diana stay well behind the lines for now.
The Colonel sighed. "I must go now, my love. But before I do, I should warn you to keep an eye out for Gordon Baird. I'm sending him to Mariposa to rest for a while."
Despite the fact that the long-range plan seemed to be progressing well, the Seventeenth's intel officer had never let go of his notion that they were doomed, that they could never hope to beat the numerically superior invaders. Don Carlos had come to the reluctant conclusion that his old friend had lost his nerve. He thought it best to put him among the noncombatants where his worries couldn't do much harm.
Diana smiled and nodded. "I'll make him welcome. He works so hard, a rest will do him good. And you, my love—our enemies are hunting you. Be careful."
"Always," the Colonel assured her. "Yo te quiero."
* * *
"You need to be more careful with these straps," Cassie said, holding up a telltale tag-end from the pack on Marly Joles's back. "They can rattle when you move. A scout has to be absolutely silent."
The girl nodded solemnly. "I'm sorry, Cassie. It won't happen again."
Cassie made a face. The girl took her training seriously, and that was good. But somehow she took it too seriously. Cassie didn't like that.
She glanced at Marly's cherished 6 mm rifle, propped against the bunkhouse wall with its optics capped. Custom built as a highly accurate, flat-shooting hunting rifle, whose low recoil made it suitable for a slight-framed adolescent girl, it had proven itself an excellent sniper's weapon as well. As the ten black tacks driven into the buttstock attested. Marly was taking payment for her father's murder in installments. With interest.
Humming tunelessly to herself, Cassie taped the offending strap down. Around them the rest of the raiding-party prepared for their ambush of a Planetary Police patrol. Cassie would not be going along. Don Carlos—probably at the behest of that interfering badger Sandra Ten Bears—had ordered her to stand down for a while. Ten Bears was afraid Cassie was driving herself too hard. That was nonsense; so what if I've lost a few kilos?
She patted Marly on the fanny. The girl gave her a perfunctory smile and went to squat by the wall, where she reflexively picked up her rifle and began to inspect it. What is it that bothered her about the girl? Cassie asked herself. That she was making an early exit from adolescence? Cassie hadn't had much childhood herself.
Maybe that's what bothers you. The last she heard, very distinctly, in Kali MacDougall's voice. She shuddered.
She was checking another militia volunteer's pack when a voice called from the door to outside, "Cassie, girl."
She looked up, already knowing she'd seen Tim Moon standing in the doorway, lit from behind by the sunlight trying bravely to make a dent in the Gunder-land Mountains snowpack, grinning at her. She turned and walked through the inner door into the main house.
&nbs
p; He caught her in a corridor aromatic from the hardwood planking that made up the walls, grabbed her wrist and spun her around. "Will you keep running from me forever?" he asked.
She covered his hand with her free hand, peeled his fingers from hers, twisted his arm to lock-out the elbow joint and force his face to the rough floorboards. "Don't ever grab me like that," she said.
"Ow! I'm sorry. I admit my mistake. Now kindly let me up."
She released him and stepped back against the wall to stand with arms tightly folded. "What do you want?" she asked.
"You can be mad at me; I've earned it. And you never have to talk to me again, if that's your choice. But you're a fool to allow the likes of me to drive a wedge between you and your friend Kali."
She made an exasperated sound and turned to walk away. "Please. Don't make me grab you again. I can't fly my Voss very well if you break my elbow."
"Look, there's nothing to talk about. Ka—Captain MacDougall was my friend. But that ended with what she did to me."
"But she didn't do anything to you. She did it to me, and very nicely in point of fact—no, please stay, sometimes I let my facetious ways run away from me. But the point is, what happened was between her and me, and not intended to affect you in any way."
"Did you really believe it wouldn't?" she asked bitterly.
"It never crossed my mind, to be brutally honest. The point is, Lady K had made no compact with you to stay away from me. Nor did I ever promise to keep away from her."
Cassie squeezed her lips tight shut and blinked back tears. "You wouldn't understand."
"Of course I do. You're mad at your friend for breaking a promise she never made you. And it's eating you up. Look at you, girl; if you lose any more weight some rancher's wife will nail you to the side of a barn to dry."
"Well, since I'm so ugly now, I don't see why you should bother with me—"
"Oh, stop that. You're not ugly, you're beautiful, only looking a little peaked. And just because I never swore to make you my forever one-and-only doesn't mean I don't care for you."
He grabbed her hands. This time she did not break away. "And I care for Kali, too. And through no fault of her own she's flown into a thunderhead, and it's all she can do to keep herself aloft. She needs you, Cassie. And you need her."
