by Victor Milán
Walking out of the dark with Zuma Gallegos alongside, Lady K shook her head. She was dressed in black and carrying a machine pistol, her laser pistol riding in a strap-down holster low on her right thigh.
"Maybe later," she said. "I've got other plans first."
"Everything's off the blimp," Zuma said. His voice was uncharacteristically flat. His wife and children were being held prisoner in the Admin Center—if they were still alive. He was decked out as a commando too.
"Then you people better get a move on before somebody catches a whiff of something he doesn't like," Landrey said.
Lady K stood next to Cassie. Cassie started to move away.
"Are you going to run away from me forever?" Kali asked, following.
"Only if you keep chasing me," Cassie said in a sullen voice, turning to face the taller woman. "If it were up to me you wouldn't be coming with us."
"I reckon I can hold my end up," Lady K said with a grim smile.
"That's not what I'm worried about."
"Is there anything to be worried about, after all this time?"
"Look. I don't want to be around you. Why do you care, anyway?"
"Because we're friends. And good friends aren't something you just toss away like an old candy-bar wrapper."
"Then why'd you do that with Tim?"
"For God's sake, honey, that didn't have anything to do with you. We're all grown-ups, you, me, and him. Nobody put a brand on anybody else."
"But you knew—you knew I—" Cassie felt herself starting to cloud up. This is ridiculous, she thought.
"Knew what? That you were screwing him? I figured as much. And maybe I shouldn't have fallen into bed with him—but that's because I don't have any pressing need for gallant, charming, worthless bastards in my life right now."
"You don't understand." Cassie turned away.
"Sure I do. You got a schoolgirl crush. And that's fine. But you're never going to be a thing to Leftenant Moon but a jolly good time—and neither am I. And no matter how hard you try to convince yourself that anybody who takes you to bed is in love with you, that's how it's going to be."
Wildly, incongruously, Cassie found herself choking back laughter. Me think Ninyu Kerai's in love with me? Come on.
So why do you think Tim Moon has to be?
She frowned. Whose side are you on, anyway? She asked her internal voice.
"I hate to disturb you ladies," the Rooster said, materializing next to them. "But it ain't getting any earlier. Ready for your tour of the scenic storm sewers of Port Howie?"
The Towne Guard company garrisoning Sarnath had gotten halfway through their breakfast in the cafeteria of Fritz Leiber, Jr. High School, where they were billeted, when some of them noticed they weren't feeling so good.
They were not due to start feeling better anytime soon. Parties unknown had dosed their scrambled eggs with lye. Coincidentally, the press-ganged kitchen staff had all vanished.
As the twenty-third of April dawned, it was not a good day to be with the invaders.
But Jeffrey Kusunoki still had the big guns on his side. A few pinpricks did not change the odds.
27
Port Howard
Aquilonia Province, Towne
Draconis March, Federated Commonwealth
23 April 3058
As false dawn rolled like fog over the Gunderlands to the east a train rolled into Port Howard from the south. When it came to the railroad bridge across the Thunder, south and slightly west of downtown, it was shunted east onto a sideline and stopped.
The occupying forces consisted of soldiers and criminals, of varying degrees of pettiness. The collaborationist regime consisted of politicians and thugs. None of those groups was noted for its knowledge of how to ranch, or run a mine, or a lumbering operation. Nor how to run an airship line—or a railroad.
Even in those concerns where the regime had installed new bosses or overseers, most knowledge-intensive jobs on Towne were held by the people who'd held them before the invasion. And the invaders and their friends were not particularly easy to work for.
Kusunoki and Howard Blaylock operated on the principle that it's better to be feared than loved.
The difference between love and fear, from a practical standpoint, is that people still love you even when they don't think you can see what they're doing ...
End caps were popped off huge ceraplast culvert sections strapped onto flatcars. People picked themselves off the mattress pads stuffed inside and climbed out, stretching their limbs and rubbing themselves briskly to restore circulation after their cold, cramped, uncomfortable journey. Then they pulled the tarpaulins off the unidentifiable heavy equipment lashed to other flatcars, removed the packing-foam forms that had made a dozen covered BattleMechs resemble unidentifiable heavy equipment, climbed into the machines and fired them up.
Two other trains, approaching from the south and east, stopped out of sight of the defensive perimeter and unloaded the South and Third Battalions of the Seventeenth Recon Regiment.
Don Carlos would have liked to drive his whole force under cover into Port Howard's heart. But that would have been riding luck too hard. The blimp and Harley Company in the train were all he dared try to infiltrate. The 'lleros could only pray that they were strong enough to cut the guts out of the enemy force while their comrades outside Port Howard kept the outward-facing defenders from streaming back into the city to crush them.
And, in a way, the whole BattleMech assault was a diversion.
* * *
With a crack that was painful even through foam ear plugs and Cassie's palms, the shaped charge went off against the curved storm-sewer wall.
"Outstanding," Badlands Powell said.
Two of the strike force members who'd been flattened against the wail to either side of the charge instantly wheeled and knelt at the meter-wide mouse hole, poking suppressed Shimatsus through. On the other side lay the sparsely tenanted parking garage beneath the Admin Center. Two guards in Draconis Combine Mustered Soldiery tans stood gaping from before the elevator bank forty meters away. The pair of strikers killed them with single shots.
"For Diana," one of them said under her breath, then the pair crawled through to take up kneeling positions flanking the hole.
Cassie went through next, moving rapidly to take up position by the elevators and the entrance to the well of the stairs that wound around them. As another pair of operators trotted up the ramp to confirm that the heavy bar-mesh gate was sealing the entrance, several fanned out to scatter finger-charges under the few vehicles parked in the basement. They were set to go off, not all at once, in about ten minutes, that being the longest anybody thought they could stay undetected as they infiltrated the Center. With luck, one or two of the little bombs might blow a gas tank, but that was lagniappe.
Rooster claimed that the shaped charge—hideously loud inside the storm sewer—would not make much noise inside the Center. The most anybody not actually within the underground garage was likely to have noticed was a rumble not perceptibly different from the little earth-tremors that were a daily occurrence in Port Howard. The bandy-legged little man knew his craft, but Cassie never counted on the breaks going her way. She would stay alert.
Others from the mixed Scout Platoon/Planetary Militia strike force trotted up to take over security duties. Cassie moved off to join the Rooster, who was headed for the locked door to the room through which the communications trunks passed. Secret resistance members in the city planning department had provided comprehensive blueprints for the building.
They had provided the key to entry, as well. The occupation forces had not been remiss in failing to guard the storm sewer, any more than they had by not installing security cameras in the underground garage, which was limited-access and under human surveillance. The Admin Center was another artifact of John Davion's post-Towne Debacle program. Among many special features his designers had specified for the complex was that there be no human-passable access between the city's
sewer system and the Center itself. The nearest sewer access was a manhole on Cross Plains Street directly in front of the main entrance—and a pair of guardian BattleMechs.
But a Popular Militia computer gnome had run a comparison of the sewer system and the Admin Center blueprints—and discovered that a major storm sewer passed within half a meter of the parking garage.
Rooster found the door and reached back into his pack. "Now for some high-tech thirty-first-century lockpick gimmickry," he said. He pulled out a folding yellow pry bar, extended it to a meter's length, and popped the door right open.
"Ain't technology wonderful?" he said with a grin for Cassie. He slapped a charge timed to explode in ten minutes onto the thick bundle of wires and shut the door again.
Several commandos were setting up Claymores on reflector-trap initiators in front of the elevator. The reflector trap consisted of a low-power laser shining on an elevator door at such an angle as to reflect precisely to a sensor. If the door slid more than half open, it would pass from the laser's path, the beam would no longer impinge on the sensor, and the mine would go, blasting the elevator cage full of stainless-steel balls.
Others secured the stairways, preparing booby-traps to keep people from wandering down from above. Since they hadn't been able to learn where the captives were held, the strike team was going to have to clear the building from the bottom up. And they weren't yet on the bottom.
Like many public buildings of the age of the Succession Wars, the Admin Center had been built with an eye to the occasional arrival of smash-and-grab BattleMech raids. That meant it was designed to permit key personnel to fort up inside it for a few days and wait for the bad guys to go away. It boasted living quarters, commissaries, laundry, exercise, and entertainment facilities.
Though it was reasonably defensible, and hardened enough to keep the occasional shrapnel-spray or random laser beam away from the clerical staff, it had not been constructed to withstand full-scale bombardment or 'Mech assault; that would have been much too expensive for even the ambitious Prince John. If somebody was really intent on seizing the seat of government, or flattening the city core, key officials could instead repair to the three subterranean bunker levels, which contained more apartments, medical facilities, and food and water stocks for a month. The massively reinforced cement floor of the parking level served as additional overhead protection.
While the raid planners doubted that the captives were being held down in the bunker, they couldn't take the fact for granted. So unless the strike team could learn the captives' location some other way, they would have to descend to the lowest level and work up.
The team broke into two, preparing to go down the locked stairs at either end of the garage simultaneously. Marly Joles joined the element led by Badlands and Cassie. The girl had her 6 mm sniper rifle slung and a Rorynex SMG with screwed-on suppresser in her hands. Sticking close to her was her spotter, a square-built Zuni woman from Sierra, armed with a Federated assault rifle with a single-shot grenade launcher slung beneath the barrel. The peculiar construction of the Center, with its large courtyard, meant that Marly might get the opportunity to do some good work with that nail-driving piece of hers.
A few blocks back the team had left off Deadeye Barnes and his spotter beneath the Arkham Arms Hotel, which at twenty-five stories dominated Port Howard's not altogether prepossessing skyline. Scout Platoon's top sniper, Deadeye had once scored a confirmed hit on an enemy at 3,000 meters—and even at that range a hit was almost certainly a kill for his Zeus heavy rifle—so he reckoned an upper story of the Arkham was a good place to be. Except for dead spaces behind buildings, he could cover all of downtown, Harley Company's debarkation point across the river, and the eastern ends of the TTC yards where the captured 'Mechs were parked.
Depending on the success of the other teams headed for enemy 'Mech parts in several different sections of town, he could be the only support any of them could depend on for a long, hard time.
Across the room Cassie saw Zuma Gallegos, and beside him the distinctive long-legged form of Kali MacDougall, both waiting to go down with Rooster's team. Though he had no formal rank within the Popular Militia, as far as anybody knew, the little red-haired man was clearly most qualified to lead, and as far as the Caballeros were concerned, rank was just words when the hammer came down. He could do the job, so he would do the job.
She saw Kali looking fixedly at her and then wave.
Cassie looked quickly away.
Staff Sergeant Willard "Drygulch" Dix popped the locked fire door with a pry bar. Cassie burst down it, leading with her shouldered Shimatsu-42 as she ran down the steps to the landing. She spun, let inertia slam her back against the wall to brace her as she covered the switchback. Badlands Powell pelted past, dashed to the next floor, pressed his back to the wall on the hinge side.
"You O.K.?" Cassie asked as she thrust up against the knob side.
He showed her a brave grin. "Never better," he said. His wheeze belied his words.
Not my problem, Cassie thought. The Scout Platoon commander did not look as if he were in danger of imminent collapse, and as long as he had his pins under him there was nobody she'd rather have backing her up going through a door.
Powell reached forward, whipped the door open. Cassie popped through. Two tan-clad Drac guards were standing at a cross passage thirty meters away. She dropped the man on the left with one quick burst to the chest, chopped the other's legs out from under him with a second.
"For Diana," Cassie whispered.
The rest of the group emerged from the stairwell. "Luck," Cassie told them quietly, hunkering down to cover the doors giving onto the corridor. "We got a live one. He should be able to tell us where the captives are."
"I don't know," said a black militiaman named Stans.
Cassie gave him a look. "He'll talk," she said.
* * *
Dark figures flitted among the twelve BattleMechs standing silently in the Dunsany Sports Palace Stadium in the northeast quadrant of town. They belonged to a stood-down company of the Devotion Through Combat BattleMech regiment, most of whose MechWarriors were asleep in an apartment complex across the street from the stadium.
The foot-patrol guards were already down with their throats cut. The techs at work by spotlight maintaining the machines, and the standby lance of 'Mech jocks asleep in a tent pitched among the dormant metal monsters were downed with noise-suppressed weapons. Then they were shot In the head. At that they were lucky that time was too short for torture.
The Caballeros were not fighting for money, nor honor, nor even survival.
They were fighting for revenge.
* * *
False dawn paled out the sky above the Gunder-lands. Cowboy Payson admired the view through the faceplate of his neurohelmet as he rode the cherry-picker up to the cockpit of Yellowjacket, his Wasp. He hummed the latest hit by singer Sarah McCandless. That was a compensation about this Towne gig: they had some decent country-music stations here. They had Sierra for mariachi music, which was tough on the norteños, but no skin off any part of his anatomy. He hadn't inherited the taste from his mother.
"You, there!" an amplified voice boomed across the windswept Turanian Transport Company yards. "What are you doing by that 'Mech?"
Cowboy's head snapped around. Coming around the corner of the airship barn was a Hunchback, the security-detail 'Mech lumbering into a run toward the parked war-prize BattleMechs. "Oops," he said, and reached up to key his personal communicator, already tuned to the emergency-alert frequency.
"All poor little lambs," he said, "Big Bad Wolf. The sequence is Big, Bad Wolf. Baa, baa, baa."
Having transmitted the code-phrase meaning the op was compromised—with his own distinctive addition—he started tapping gauntleted hands nervously on the guard rail. "Come on," he muttered. "Hurry this bucket up. That booger's getting close."
Apparently he wasn't the only one who felt that way. The lift stopped. Cowboy leaned out over the
railing to see the cherry-picker operator rabbiting for the shelter of some office buildings away from the onrushing Hunchback.
"I hate it when that happens," Cowboy said
Ruby flashes flickered from the little Sunglow pulse laser mounted in the Hunchback's head. Brilliant light-needles stabbed past the cherry-picker with cracks of displaced air, filling Cowboy's nostrils with the stink of ozone. He cringed down in the bucket. "Jesus!"
The front of the charging 'Mech exploded beneath a long-range missile volley. Chunks of Durallex armor fountained in all directions. The giant machine staggered, slowed. The armor plate had been peeled almost entirely away from the right side of its torso, exposing titanium-alloy skeleton and myomer pseudomuscle. The air sizzled with the sound of a light Ultra auto-cannon fired on overdrive. A sparkling cluster of explosions carried away the boxy Kali Yama autocannon that gave the 'Mech its namesake hunch.
Cowboy turned to see a Shadow Hawk with a red-tailed hawk—wings and talons extended, beak open in a defiant cry—painted across its frontal armor arcing down on its jump jets. A medium laser flared from its right forearm.
"Way to time it, Gabby," Cowboy muttered. Gavilan Camacho was pulling out all the stops, taxing even the double-capacity heat sinks retrofitted onto his ride on Hachiman. But nobody ever accused him of not being able to pilot a BattleMech—even if he was still hung up about not being the genius 'Mech jock his late sister Patsy had been.
The Hunchback gamely returned fire from its arm-mounted lasers, but its exposed innards were sparking and smoking like fireworks. As Cowboy glanced back its way the cover of the CASE system in its left torso blew off the 'Mech's back as the stored ammo for its lost autocannon cooked off.
Cowboy shook his head. "How do I get out of this chickensquat outfit?" he asked the air, and began to scale Yellowjacket's sloped right breastplate.
