Hearts of Chaos

by Victor Milán

  The next question Kusunoki asked himself was, How long can this go on? His own Naginata was running cool on its hike east, and his double-capacity sinks could handle the full heat load of his Lord's Light 2. But the weapon was not meant to be fired continuously for seconds on end like this. Its heat output was so ferocious that it had special refrigeration units built in; Kusunoki feared the PPC might burn itself out from this abuse.

  Yet still the Atlas came-on, step by infinitely weary step. A dark bar down the front of Kusunoki's self-polarizing neurohelmet visor did not eliminate the glare from the particle beam entirely. His eyes were beginning to hurt.

  How can this MechWarrior stand it? he wondered. He must be made of iron. Even if the machine didn't have double-capacity sinks, it was amply equipped with coolers and was not itself doing anything to add to its heat. But the sinks bled heat out of the system as a whole. They could do little to mitigate the horrific localize heat around and above the impact-point of the man-made lightning of the PPC. The temperature in the cockpit must be soaring.

  And then, when the Atlas was scarcely twenty meters away, it began to slow. The ammunition for its LRM launchers went off, the force of the blast vented out the back by its CASE. He could see other flares and flashes inside the torso of the tortured BattleMech now.

  I've won, Kusunoki knew. That warrior might as well be a light year away. In another few seconds his armature will catch fire, or he'll lose containment on his fusion bottle, and that will be that.

  As if to acknowledge its own futility, the enemy BattleMech reached out its arms to Kusunoki's machine. Kusunoki uttered a guttural cry of triumph.

  Something filled the windscreen before his eyes. He looked up in time to see the little white aircraft with the red-painted nose plow into the Naginata's chest, right between the long-range missile racks, in a full-throttle power dive.

  Flame washed out Kusunoki's forward vision. The flimsy little airplane did not damage the BattleMech's own Durallex Heavy Special plate. But its terrific momentum knocked the Naginata over backward.

  The back of Kusunoki's head slammed hard against the rear of his seat. Bright needles of light shot through his head and his stomach turned over. The air was driven from his body.

  Yellow telltales shone on Kusunoki's board, alerting his consciousness, badly defocused by impact, that the two chest-mounted launchers were in possible malfunction status. Otherwise the machine seemed perfectly functional. If only he could gather his wits, he could get up ...

  The Atlas landed on the Naginata. It crawled forward; Kusunoki could feel the heat emanating from its ravaged chest. Before he could figure out how to meet this highly unorthodox attack, the enemy 'Mech had wrapped its arms around the Naginata's upper body, locking the 'Mech's arms to its sides.

  Then it powered down.

  No amount of abuse to the arm actuators could serve to dislodge the fallen machine from the dormant 'Mech's death-grip. Kusunoki screamed in frustration. It did as much good.

  He popped the canopy and tumbled out, hoping to escape and continue his journey afoot. Perhaps he would even catch this enemy napping.

  His enemy was standing on the curb seven meters away. A woman? he thought, momentarily too stunned to be appalled.

  Her hair had been scorched to a brief, wild nimbus. Her clothing was black and still smoked. Her face was smudged with soot, and where it showed through, the skin beneath was angry red. She had a bundle over her back, wrapped in smoldering towels, and had a machine pistol trained on him from the hip.

  She made an imperative gesture with the MP barrel. He knelt and put up his hands. This was all unreal to him. Surely it could not be happening.

  "Who are you?" he croaked.

  "You've met me," she said. "I'm Cassie Suthorn."

  He goggled. Could it be? Possibly ... if one tried to imagine what she looked like before most of her hair was burned off. He was so off-balance he actually spent the effort.

  "Young lady," he said, more graciously than he had spoken to any woman in many years, "you are a most accomplished MechWarrior, if unorthodox. I apologize; what I first took for your clumsiness was transcendent simplicity of technique. Please tell me, was it from NAMA you graduated, or the Nagelring?"'

  "Neither," she said. "You were right about the clumsiness thing. I don't really know how to pilot a BattleMech."

  He started to suck in a deep breath to vomit disbelieving rage all over her. Then he sat back on his heels and the air came out his mouth till his mighty shoulders slumped.

  "What do you want of me?" he asked.

  For answer she reached behind herself, rummaged in the bundle strapped across her back. She tossed him a smaller bundle, slim, slightly curved, and a little over half a meter long. When he caught it, he realized it was wrapped in a towel soaked in water, presumably to preserve the contents from heat.

  He unwrapped it. It was the wakizashi from his own dai-sho, the large-small sword set he had been given upon graduation from Sun Zhang Military Academy. Around the scabbard was taped a piece of rice paper, slightly damp.

  He stared at it. "What's this for?"

  "You know."

  With fingers that felt like socks filled with sand, he undid the piece of rice paper and unfolded it. A poem had been scrawled on it in hasty yet rudely sincere kanji.

  False Dragon believes He alone is capable of surprising foes

  He looked up at her.

  * * *

  A helicopter settled onto a lawn covered with well-tracked snow half a block away. Dilonna Saunders emerged, prodded by the Shimatsu-42s of two Caballero Aztechs. Enrico Katsuyama arid Risky Savage climbed out after her.

  Hoisting a portable holocam to her shoulder, Risky pointed to the tableau where Cassie stood facing the defeated Kusunoki.

  "You're going to broadcast this to all the people of Towne, honey," Risky said. "Make it as pretty as you did for Howard when he murdered Diana. Or we'll hand you over to the mothers of the kids who were killed when your pals attacked Camp Mariposa."

  For a moment the news reader stared at her with the wide eyes of an animal, hunted and trapped. Then Saunders took a deep breath and visibly composed herself. When she walked forward, she was every centimeter the cool, professional newswoman.

  "I'm coming to you live from a Port Howard street, in which Tai-sho Jeffrey Kusunoki, defeated in 'Mech-to-'Mech combat by a young woman who is not even a trained MechWarrior, prepares to perform the final act of his long and colorful career ..."

  Cassie unslung the bundle from her back, shook off the covering. Inside was the General's katana.

  Jeffrey Kusunoki stripped off his cooling vest, opened the top of his sleeveless and legless body suit and peeled it down to his waist. He unsheathed the wakizashi and gazed down at it thoughtfully.

  With a sliding-singing sound, Cassie unsheathed the longsword, and stood above him with the blade aglitter in the sunlight.

  It Seems That the Dead Are Here

  If one has not given everything, one has given nothing.

  —Georges Guynemer

  Epilogue

  Port Howard

  Aquilonia Province, Towne

  Draconis March, Federated Commonwealth

  23 April 3058

  The robed ComStar acolyte looked at the sodden red handkerchief the old man was pressing to his chest. It was actually dripping blood on the tile in front of the counter at the HPG station.

  "Young ... lady," Mr. Kimura said with obvious effort, "will you please see that ... the following message ... is transmitted to Mr. Hiraoke Toyama of Dieron, the Dieron Military District, Draconis Combine? He will pay on receipt. He has an account."

  It seemed that she moved her lips for several seconds before the word "yes" escaped.

  Mr. Kimura pulled a pad and pen toward him across the countertop and wrote a final message to his oyabun. He slid the pad toward the young Woman, who stared at it as if it might possibly be alive, and venomous.

  He smiled encouragingly a
t her, unaware that his gums were red with blood. She grabbed up the pad and scurried away into the back. Courteously, he tipped his hat, then turned and teetered out into the bracing air.

  His legs were definitely beginning to fail. He made it across the street to a wrought iron bench at the edge of a little park, into which he lowered himself with a sigh of relief.

  He looked up at the sky. The midday sun was burning the overcast away. It would be a beautiful day.

  He removed his hideout pistol from a pocket of his blood-stained tail-coat, stuck the brief barrel up under his chin, and pulled the trigger.

  Port Howard

  Aquilonia Province, Towne

  Dracon's March, Federated Commonwealth

  26 April 3058

  Cassie became aware of a floating sensation, and an infinite whiteness. With a combination of terror, annoyance, and relief, she decided she was dead.

  Then she heard voices discussing what gown one should wear to an important State ball. It was ever so vital to make just the proper impression on young Duke Athelstan. He was ever so handsome ...

  Deciding people didn't talk that way in Heaven— had she been thinking clearer she might have decided she had gone the other way—Cassie opened her eyes."

  The room was painted white. The sheets and pillowcases surrounding her were white. The holotank bolted to a little metal shelf hung off the wall by a chain was showing Royals' Pride. Cassie groaned. Now she knew she wasn't in Heaven. Royals' Pride was an impossibly treacly soap opera based on a fictional version of the royal family who ruled the Federated Commonwealth. It was popular all over the Inner Sphere, and had been since before Cassie was born. She wasn't even sure it was still being made; this episode looked vaguely familiar, but then, they all did whether she had seen them before or not.

  "All right, I know it isn't great art," said a familiar voice from her right. "But it kind of reminds me of poor Annie Sue Hurd."

  Cassie tried to sit up. She lacked the strength. She turned her head, pushed it far enough to the side that she could see past her pillow.

  "Lady K!"

  "Guilty as charged. Lord, hon, we've been waitin' three days for you to wake up. And you managed to wind up looking worse than I do!"

  Since what she could see of Kali MacDougall had a metal splint taped down the nose, two enormous black eyes, and a right shoulder so wrapped in bandages it looked like the shoulder-housing of a Grand Dragon, Cassie might have been perturbed at the thought of looking worse than her friend. But she didn't especially care how she looked.

  "You're alive!" she exclaimed.

  "Don't ask me how I feel about that for a few days," Lady K said. "I got off light: busted snout, half stove-in ribs, and sort of bag full of pea gravel where my right shoulder joint ought to be, if I got the medical lingo translated correctly. Could be worse: I could have an abscessed tooth."

  Cassie wasn't always sure whether her friend was joking or not.

  "How is the Regiment?" she asked.

  Lady K briefly shut her eyes. "For now let's just say most of our friends made it through. Some of 'em a little worse for wear, though—when Raven found out Frenchfry only had a few bruises from being shot clean out of the sky, she busted his nose on the spot. He's a couple doors down; Those two are cute, but I think they got some issues to work out."

  "Marly?" For some absurd reason she felt almost responsible for the girl.

  "Fine. Physically, anyway. She got to pop some PPs, which made her happy as a blue goose. And all the Gallegos' who were alive when we got our tickets punched are still that way, and the Colonel and Gabby. Buck Evans, too mean to die. Cowboy, too stupid to. Right now he's shacked up with some Drac flygirl who got shot down right over TTC. Seems like she was about ready to switch sides even before she found out what kind of bill of goods old Pretty-Boy Kusunoki sold 'em about what Teddy the K really wanted."

  "Badlands?"

  Kali shook her head.

  Cassie felt her eyes fill with tears. She started to speak.

  "Hon," Lady K said gently, "we got enough grievin' ahead that we'll have to do it in shifts as it is. And I know I'm not helping by bringing poor Avengin' Annie into this. But it's getting a mite crowded in here as it is. Let's give some of the ghosts a chance to move on, why don't we?"

  Cassie nodded, understanding. But the tears flowed free, and she had to ask, "Tim?"

  Lady K sighed. "That was his last bow that you saw, hon. He didn't eject before he hit the Naginata."

  Cassie turned her face upward and cried bitterly. When she could speak—sort of—she said, "He saved me. He saved all of us."

  "Cass, he prob'ly saved you. But I really think you would've made the old battered Lady walk that last few meters, even if you had to carry her yourself. You would've died, I reckon, but you would've taken Pretty-boy with you. Your pride would've carried you. And love."

  After an interval of sobbing, Cassie said, "I really did love him."

  "Me too, hon," Lady K said. "Life's just that way sometimes, ain't it?"

  Cassie found that by stretching her hand way out to the right, she and Lady K could just clasp fingertips. And doing so, she slipped back into sleep.

  About the Author

  Victor Milan has published nearly seventy novels, including The Runespear, co-authored with Melinda Snodgrass, and the award-winning The Cybernetic Samurai and its sequel, The Cybernetic Shogun. Recent books include a technothriller, Red Sands; a Star Trek® novel entitled From the Depths, and Close Quarters, a very popular Battle Tech® novel. His dark military SF novel CLD was recently published by Avon Books.

  The WASHINGTON POST has called Milan a "contender for major stardom" in science fiction. He is a charter member of the New Mexico-based Wild Cards Mafia, creators of the highly acclaimed SF shared-world anthologies.

  Milan's house is infested with dogs and ferrets. He enjoys birding, playing games of various sorts, walking by the Rio Grande, and exploring the ancient network of irrigation ditches by mountain bike in Albuquerque's North Valley. He also practices taekwen-do.

  He finds himself living in the science fiction world he read about as a kid and generally, he's pleased.

  Black Dragon, another great Battle Tech® novel by Milan, will be published in November of 1996.

  Table of Contents

  Kimura-