Hearts of Chaos

by Victor Milán

  Cassie was shaking her head so hard that strands of her long dark hair came free of the complicated knot she'd tied them in, and whipped her face. Tears fuzzed her vision.

  "Yes," Tim said. "You can't stand off the universe single-handed, Cassiopeia; no one can. And with a friend like Lady K ready to take your side, you're blind foolish even to try."

  She was clinging to him as if he had just saved her from drowning, sobbing convulsively. He held her and murmured softly to her, saying nothing in particular, only soothing as he stroked her hair. And when the worst had passed, he put a crooked finger beneath her chin, raised her face, and kissed her.

  For a moment she resisted. Then she threw her arms around his neck and kissed him furiously. She couldn't help herself.

  Yes, I can, a voice said from the back of her head. But I choose not to.

  * * *

  Tai-sho Jeffrey Kusunoki, self-proclaimed Military Governor of Towne, was doing push-ups on his forefingers. His loyal retainers gathered around, clapping their hands and chanting the count: "Forty-five ... forty-six ... forty-seven ..."

  I suppose it should not surprise me that we always seem to have these audiences in a gymnasium, thought Mr. Kimura, standing to the side with an outward serenity that belied his internal state.

  At last the General collapsed, to applause and worshipful laughter from his flunkies. He rolled over and sat up, drank deeply from a squeeze-bottle offered him.

  "Very impressive," Kimura said dryly.

  "You should work out, Kimura-sensei," the General said, flushed with endorphin release. "It would strip years off you."

  "I thank the General for his kind suggestion, but I have no wish to strip away my years. It's taken decades to accrue them." He bowed.

  Kusunoki frowned, then laughed. His retainers laughed too. "I get it. That was a joke."

  "If it pleases the Tai-sho"

  Kusunoki rose and accepted a towel to begin drying his sweat-sodden hair. "You really should relax more, Kimura-sensei. You take life so seriously."

  "I take my responsibilities seriously. And that is why I must disturb you at your exercise."

  The General looked at him a moment, then waved a hand. The beautiful young retainers evaporated. Kusunoki sat down cross-legged, instead of in a traditional kneeling posture, and draped the towel around his shoulders.

  "Well?"

  "We are having problems with certain sectors of the economy. To put it bluntly, some of the people to whom we have entrusted the planet's productive assets are busy looting them to the walls, and in the bargain treating their workers so badly that they threaten rebellion despite the consequences. There have already been incidents."

  "So ka? Most of the people we've given farms and factories to have been the cronies of your boss. Why bother complaining to me?"

  "Ah. Your Excellency is perfectly correct. However, I find myself in a delicate position. I was therefore hoping, in my unworthy way, that you might be able—"

  "You want me to do you a favor?" Kusunoki put back his splendid head and laughed. "Certainly, sensei, certainly. I'll squeeze a few until they pop, and the others will come around."

  Mr. Kimura bowed low. "I thank the General." It was a serious issue and even Kusunoki knew it. If they were to integrate Towne into the Dragon's empire, there must be commerce with the Combine. The Combine was hungry enough for the copper, exotic lumber, and furs the planet had to export, but the seimeiyoshi-rengo had placed the world under virtual embargo to show their loyalty to the Coordinator rather than to the Black Dragon Society. If enough goods could be stockpiled, then some of the greedier kai would not be able to resist coming to buy, and the seimeiyoshi-rengo be damned. But the opportunistic lesser oyabun and hangers-on Toyama-sama had wished on the expedition were stealing everything first.

  Because there was no telling how long the Tai-sho's elevated mood would last, Kimura decided to press another concern.

  "General, I do not presume to advise you on the military arts."

  "That is wise." The good-fellow edge was coming off now.

  "Yet a servant who observes that the house is on fire does not serve his master by failing to tell him of it, no matter how little the master cares to hear it. The struggle with the mercenary bandits wears on, and while your forces are ever-victorious, all they are doing in the long run is spreading themselves ever-thinner across the whole Hyborian continent. And the longer the rebels are able to keep the field against us without being duly chastened, the more the people will be encouraged to consider resistance themselves."

  The Tai-sho cocked an eyebrow at him. "So you suggest I find a way to bring the foreign money-soldiers and their deluded lackeys to a pitched battle and crush them?"

  Kimura bowed. "Your Excellency expresses it so much better than my humble powers allow me to."

  Kusunoki sprang to his feet. "I would deem your suggestion impertinent, Teacher," he said, "had I not this very day set in motion a plan to carry it out." And he threw back his head and laughed at the old man's look of astonishment.

  25

  Camp Mariposa

  Western Eiglophians

  Gunderland Province, Towne

  Draconis March, Federated Commonwealth

  18 April 3058

  They were coming out from hearing Mass said by Father Montoya in the Copper Queen commissary when Richard and Dolores Gallegos' youngest child, Natasha, tugged at Diana Vásquez's hand and pointed upward.

  "Look, Diana," she said. "It's another sun, coming down to visit us. Is it Our Lady, like at Lourdes?"

  Diana looked up. She knew at once the brilliant light piercing the high overcast was not an apparition of the Blessed Virgin. It was the drive flame of a DropShip. As she looked, a dozen other lesser fires appeared through the clouds: BattleMechs descending on strap-on jet-packs.

  "Run to the shelter, Natasha," she said calmly. "The rest of you children follow. Hurry!"

  The sky split open overhead to the supersonic passage of a lance of Sholagars. A moment later explosions began to blossom across the vast pan-shape of the open-pit mine. Why they were bombing the pit Diana could not say—unless they intended to show the defenders that resistance was futile.

  The other children obediently dashed for the entrance to a subterranean bunker forty meters ahead. Natasha Gallegos clung to Diana's leg. Overhead still more 'Mechs were dropping through the cloud cover.

  "Come along, honey." Holding Natasha by the hood of her jacket, Diana rushed to an ore-carrier parked ten meters away. The monstrous dump-truck could carry an Atlas in its bed; it was designed to accept the 100-ton bites the giant power shovels took out of the earth at each stroke. Though not armored as such, it would provide excellent protection.

  Hunching over to shield the trembling five-year-old with her own body, Diana looked up in time to see 85 tons of a Drac Katana plummeting uncontrolled toward the surface.

  * * *

  "That's one to you, Nitro Three," Leftenant Sondra Prynn said, banking right to avoid a PPC lightning-bolt from a descending Panther 'Mech. Her voice was as uninfected as if she were asking to borrow a stapler. Her fellow Rangers didn't call her "Ice" for nothing.

  "Thanks, Nitro Leader." Nitro Three's voice rang with triumph. She had just blasted loose a dropping Katana's jet pack with her machine guns. "This is what you call a target-rich environ—"

  The voice broke off in a piercing pop of static. Ice never looked over. Instead she kicked the rudder and hauled her little Voss through a barrel-roll to the right that brought her nose pointing toward where her wingie had been a moment before.

  All that was left of Three's Voss was a cloud of smoke and drifting debris. Annunicators shrilled in Ice's ears as the seeker-heads of her missiles locked on to the drive-flame of the Sholagar that had killed her wingie. She pressed the firing-stud. Once.

  She had plans. They definitely included glory. Though not survival. Already she was all that remained of Nitro; Four had been shot down trying to take off, and her u
sual wingman's plane had been destroyed on the ground.

  She had six missiles. She would spend them like a miser. And hope to die with empty racks.

  The seeker flew straight, hot, and true. Its explosion shattered the ceramet venturi that channeled the blast from the fusion drive. The circle-winged fighter began to slew left as incandescent gas vented at an angle to its line of flight. Then it vanished in a white flash as its containment-field failed and the plasma of its fusion engine ate it.

  Ice allowed herself one of her rare smiles. First kill! Her whole life had been aimed like a bullet at this moment—

  She knew—didn't sense, knew—that another enemy was diving on her. She was still slow from her barrel-roll. She brought her wings level, kicked the pedals again and let the two extra-large rudders she had painstakingly installed herself snap her around in a non-banked turn.

  It was a maneuver that would likely have sent an aircraft without the Voss's canard foreplanes into a flat spin. It took the Shilone jock making a firing pass at her completely by surprise. The pink beams of the big nose-mounted laser and the smaller pair on the aerospace fighter's wings missed the Voss as Ice pulled her pipper onto the heavy machine's cockpit and triggered a long burst from her machine guns.

  It would have taken the puny Kicker MGs a long time to chew through the thick, slanted transpex of the Shilone canopy. But the sudden brutal impacts right in front of his or her face added to the enemy plane's weird maneuver, convinced the Drac pilot to want no part of this. The pilot cranked the big flying wing into a thruster-assisted maximum-gee turn.

  Ice unloaded, dove scant meters beneath the fire-stream from the Shilone's engine—no less lethal than its weaponry—pulled up long enough to take an easy deflection IR shot at the huge flare. Short-range missiles leapt from the Thornbush rack in the aerospace fighter's tail. Ice dove and they streaked harmlessly overhead.

  The missile blew Off a chunk of the Shilone's right rudder and cracked its exhaust nozzle. The flying wing went into a flat spin and took out an ore-crusher as it crashed.

  Ice traded height for speed, streaked low over the great Copper Queen compound. Most of the enemy 'Mechs had already reached the ground and blown the explosive clamps to jettison their thruster-packs. Kusunoki had pulled out all the stops—there had to be at least a battalion in the assault, plus what Ice thought of as an aerospace group. The miserable two lances of mercenary 'Mechs assigned to ground defense, plus the weird pseudo-Naga, didn't stand a chance.

  Up here it had only begun.

  She began to climb. The sky was so full of Drac fighters that they were spending most of their attention on not getting in each other's way. As arrogant in their way as any MechWarrior, many of the aerospace pilots literally didn't see the tiny shard of Ice's Voss. And not just because of its low-visibility robin's-egg blue paint scheme: in the aerojock's world view, a ludicrous little bass-awkward prop job like hers could not possibly pose a threat.

  But now the impossible had happened, not once but twice. She'd been noticed.

  Suddenly the fire-trails were weaving all about her, above, below. She dodged, dipped, jinked, and soared.

  She was the focus of attention of at least six Sholagars and two Shilones. Laser beams split the air around her. Streams of tracers sought her, came perilously close to Drac machines. She smiled tightly, imagining the enemy pilots choking their frequencies cursing each other for the near-misses.

  The Drac pilots had to worry about more than shooting or running into one another. Ice still had four missiles riding beneath her wings. The aerofighters couldn't take long-range shots for fear of fratricide, but they had to make close-in passes without getting out in front of the poky little Voss. Which wasn't possible. She fired her heat-seekers as she got strong tones, forcing the targeted pilots to abandon thought of anything but losing the hatefully persistent hunter-killers.

  A Sholagar broke hard right to avoid her next-to-last missile. Its pilot was canny enough to cut the drive, depriving the seeker head of its glaring target and causing it to go ballistic, flying on until it plowed harmlessly into a beam. Unfortunately, that inspiration so preoccupied the pilot that he didn't notice the Shilone diving on Ice from her two o'clock. The two fighters collided in an enormous yellow fireball.

  The blast tossed the Voss like a leaf. Ice let the overpressure take her where it would, confident in her skill and the little plane's sky-keeping capability. It was all but impossible to stall one of the little rear-engine craft—and she knew the envelope of hers as she knew the contours of her own compulsively fit body.

  She found herself almost face-to-face with another Sholagar that had chopped its drive and was firing full retros, trying to keep the Voss in the firing arc of its forward-firing armament long enough to kill. Ice switched to machine guns again, held a bullet stream on her enemy's windscreen. The two craft were closing at a negligible rate, barely making headway. Ice felt her wings beginning to lose their grip on air; in a heartbeat her craft's nose would drop, and it would dive of its own accord until it picked up enough speed for the wings to lift. The Sholagar jock was wringing maximum effect from the lift of its circular wing— high for an aerospace job—and counting on his rockets to save him from a fatal stall when that lift failed.

  What failed was the transpex canopy. The Sholagar pitched down, its left wing laser slicing off the tip of Ice's starboard wing, passed beneath her and flew straight into the ground.

  I'm an ace! Ice exulted. Annunciator whine pierced the adrenaline buzz in her ears. She launched her last missile, uncertain which of the swirling enemy craft was the target.

  She never saw it miss its target. Her enemies seemed to solve their targeting problems all at once. Short-range missile salvos and laser pulses converged on the tiny white arrowhead.

  The Ranger planes bought their maneuverability at a high cost: no armor to speak of. Ice and her Voss disappeared in a compound flash.

  On the ground, the invaders were already beginning to round up their prisoners. The one-sided fight was done.

  * * *

  The face on the flatscreen was so perfect it was almost nondescript, framed with a faultless blonde hair helmet. "This is Dilonna Saunders, coming to you live from the courtyard of the Planetary Government's Administrative Center in Port Howard ..."

  Dozens of Caballeros were jammed into the barn of the farm that was serving as the current venue of the Seventeenth's Permanent Floating Headquarters, watching in tense silence. Don Carlos had moved his HQ down onto the Nemedian plain between the central range and the southern Gunderlands to counter an aggressive move by Kusunoki, who had occupied the provincial capital of Numalia with a company each of Draconis Combine Mustered Soldiery armor and infantry, stiffened by a Black Dragon BattleMech lance. The Colonel hoped to hand the invaders a showy ground-grabbing victory to encourage the Tai-sho to drain Port Howard even further of troops.

  Then Camp Mariposa fell, and all calculations zeroed out.

  The image switched to a diminutive woman standing with her back to the gray stone facing of the courtyard wall, head held high against the light rain, black hair streaming unbound down the shoulders of her orange denim jumpsuit. Her beautiful face radiated serenity. A name ran like an electric charge through the watchers in the barn: Diana.

  * * *

  On one side stood dignitaries, Tai-sho Kusunoki and his retinue, Mr. Kimura watchful and silent beneath his umbrella, Howard Blaylock all aglow and twice the size of life in his role as master of ceremonies. On the other side huddled twenty of the Caballero children captured at Mariposa, weeping, clinging to each other, crying out to the solitary captive. An electrified cordon and Planetary Policemen with stun batons kept them from rushing to her side.

  A commotion. Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Baird pushed forward through a throng of journalists to confront Blaylock, two DCMS troopers trailing ineffectually behind.

  "What's going on here?" he demanded. "You promised they'd be well treated! I kept my part of the bar
gain. I gave you the camp, and you only took casualties because your air-jocks were too incompetent to deal with a lone fanatic woman in a museum piece."

  Kusunoki's frown at the interruption turned to a mask of rage, like an ancient samurai's mempo designed to dishearten foes on the battlefield. As a result of Sondra Prynn's farewell performance he had already ordered that any DCMS pilot who survived being shot down by a Towne Air Ranger aircraft should be stripped of rank and sent to the line infantry to atone for the disgrace.

  Howard Blaylock pursed his lips. "This is a solemn moment here, Gordo. Back off."

  The soldiers grabbed the tall man's arms. Irritably he shook them off. "You can't do this! It's inhuman!"

  From the small of his back, beneath the tails of his dark suitcoat with the padded shoulders, Blaylock pulled a short-barreled revolver. He looked at it a moment, as if surprised to find it in his hand.

  "You know," he said, "I never used to carry a gun. It was a question of prestige ... I figured I was too good for that. If I needed it, I had plenty of people to do the shooting for me.'.'

  He looked Baird in the eye. "Funny how times change," he said. "I never shot anybody before." And he shot Baird through the forehead.

  "Don't ever tell me what to do," Blaylock said quietly.

  Some of the journalists screamed and jumped back. Others crowded forward, thrusting forth lenses as if to scoop up the scene. Blaylock turned to them, waving his gun hand in the air. "No pictures! This never happened. The real show's over there."

  Green uniforms bustled forward to herd the journalists back to their places. They dutifully returned their attention to the woman and the wall.

  The young Chu-i in charge of the firing-party had been chosen because he was a DCMS regular, he was very Japanese-looking, and he was male. These considerations were very important to Jeffrey Kusunoki, and while this was all Blaylock's show, General Kusunoki was footing the bill. The youngster's complexion was anything but a normal healthy wheat-color today; it was sick-pale beneath the black strap of his cap, cutting into his lower Up. He wore a MechWarrior's gray jersey with red stripe, and held a katana naked to the rain.