Close quarters

by Victor Milán

  Tai-sa Eleanor Shimazu had assumed the pose she always took when thinking about things in general: legs well apart, one palm on her temple clutching her mop of uncontrollable red hair. Dressed in khaki riding pants and a black vest over a white man's shirt, she would have been a striking figure even if, at 172 centimeters, she didn't tower over the predominantly diminutive population of Masamori.

  She didn't pay any mind to the young lieutenant. Offhand, she couldn't even remember his name. He looked pretty flash in the cockpit of his 'Mech. But he hadn't earned his Golden Bullet yet, so the hell with him anyway.

  Standing behind her left shoulder, Captain Buntaro Mayne chuckled. "You think the Smoke Jaguars gave that merc oyabun a Mad Cat as a gift?"

  The new boot colored to his purple hairline. Mayne would have been as handsome as the newbie, but for the patch over his right eye. He was also a full two years younger. But Mayne had fought the Clans and lived to tell about it. To prove it, he wore a single round of live assault-rifle ammunition, vacuum-plated with a one-molecule thick coat of pure gold, on a thin chain around his neck.

  "Look at that," the new man said, pointing, hanging gamely in there. "That Locust has trash all over it."

  Following the heavyweights—the Mad Cat, an Atlas, a smaller but still substantial Shadow Hawk—came a little Locust bird-legging along. Many of the merc 'Mechs were painted in fanciful designs. The Locust was something else again. Glued all over it were myriad plastic toys and decorations—doll heads, models of 'Mechs, flowers, fruit—a fantastic encrustation. Garlands of plastic flowers were twined about its limbs and spiraled down the long barrel of its laser.

  "I don't know," Unagi said. "I think it's—"

  "—very mondo," said Usagi, who had a twin's habit of finishing his old cellmate's sentences.

  "It's a shell trap," the samurai kid sneered, by his expression showing that he could still barely bring himself to talk to trash like the ashigaru twins. That was another stroke against him. Trash was what the Ghost Regiments were all about. "A round hits that crud, it'll stick and penetrate instead of glancing off."

  "Nonsense," one-eyed Buntaro said. "The plastic's too soft. The decorations will simply shear away. It's kind of kiza"—the word meant kitsch—"but what the hey? I hear these boys fought the Clans too. They can do what they want."

  "Like us," said a tall blond man.

  The samurai shook his topknot. There was a fine line between tenacity and not knowing when to drop it. He was about to cross it. Maybe it was a further social disadvantage of being raised in the buke, the military caste: immersion in bushido, all that warrior's way jarajara.

  "How much honor can they have if they let a woman lead them?" he said contemptuously. And then, realizing he'd really stepped in it, he added hastily, "Riding a bicycle, I mean."

  Tai-sa Shimazu's eyes were an amazing auburn color, large and fine. When she was gripped by strong emotion— anger, commonly—they turned maroon as the eyes of some exotic beast. The eyes that glared down the purple-haired samurai reject were dark red.

  "She has seen hell," Lainie Shimazu said. "As you have not, No-Name."

  The newbie swelled. No-Name was about as offensive an insult as you could offer somebody of his class. He opened his mouth to challenge her—

  And the air went out of him. The Colonel—Tai-sa—had clearly read his intent, and smiled. The penalty for challenging a superior officer in the Draconis Combine Mustered Soldiery wasn't death just for the offender, but for every member of his immediate family.

  The young samurai knew, with a sudden insight flash, that he didn't have to worry about that. The yaks and Fraks and Hamlet People and other gutter sweepings who made up Heruzu Enjeruzu did not go running to the Assembly of the Grand Inquisitor every time someone farted out of turn. What would happen if he opened his yap was that the woman they called the Red Witch would take him up on any terms he cared to offer, 'Mech to 'Mech, blade to blade, or barehanded, and whatever was left of him would be buried without ceremony in a sandwich bag outside of town. A hell of a way for a samurai to go, Iie?

  The moment passed. The monk-robed giant put out a big soft hand, and without even deigning to look, pushed the young MechWarrior now irrevocably known as No-Name hard on the sternum. The newbie staggered back into a clump of civilians standing at a respectful distance. They squawked and scattered in terror, and the samurai fell on his skinny butt.

  "Check across the way, bancho," Shig Hofstra said, pointing with his sharp chin between the legs of a passing Wolverine with the curious name of Skin Walker painted on it. "Candy-stripers mad-dogging us."

  Lainie looked. A pair of Friendly Persuader police were eyeing the Enjeruzu, fingering their riot guns. She made sure they saw her as she laughed at them.

  "Let 'em come," she said. "Let 'em bring all their friends. And we'll leave them alive so the Grand Inquisitor can pull them apart for daring to cross members of the glorious Mustered Soldiery."

  The Ghosts all laughed at the cops then. When they'd been enlisted, Theodore Kurita's reps had pulled no punches: You're scum, said they, and born to die for the greater glory of the Dragon and House Kurita, amen. But if you sign on the line, you get to wait until the enemies of the Combine carry out your sentence. Still, there were advantages to being a Ghost and life member of the Order of the Golden Bullet. One that many of the boys and girls savored most was that the harness bulls of the Civilian Guidance Corps could not lay a gloved finger on them.

  The cops saw. And glowered. And found somewhere else to go. The BattleMechs marched by like legendary giants made metal.

  A middle-aged man built like a brick offered the fallen samurai a scarred blunt hand. No-Name stared at it a moment in distaste. The man was named Moon. He was sabu, sub-chief, to Lainie's bancho. He had been a member of Tosei-kai, the Voice of the East Gang, before coming to the Regiment. That meant he was of Korean heritage as well as a dirty eta yak.

  "Mujo," the older man said. It was an ancient Buddhist term for the transience of life. In the unit it meant, roughly, it don't mean nothin'. It also meant life is transient—so watch it.

  The samurai took the hand and let Moon pull him upright.

  The Korean went to stand behind his commander in his customary position, where he could speak soft-voiced and only she could hear.

  "A curious coincidence, is it not?" he murmured.

  "Is what?" she asked.

  "That Uncle Chandy should import a regiment of foreign mercenaries to protect his factories only days after our complement of 'Mechs has been brought up to full strength for the first time since Tukayyid."

  "And?" Lainie Shimazu said.

  "Hachiman is far from the treaty line," Moon said. "Do our masters contemplate that the Clan truce will be broken soon? Or perhaps that trouble will sprout from the soil of this world?"

  "It could be what you called it," Lainie said. "Coincidence."

  "It could," the compact man agreed, in a tone that said pigs might also fly—if they had wings.

  8

  Masamori, Hachiman

  Galedon District, Draconis Combine

  27 August 3056

  Cassie had never heard of the Catalan Company, and would have told Father Bob to put a sock in it had he tried to tell her about it. That was how she was: blunt to the point of rudeness, if not well beyond. But somehow no one much held it against her. Perhaps it was her smile.

  Her wiry-strong legs pumped without effort. She leaned forward, letting arms braced on the straight bars take her weight for the moment, though the heels of her hands were starting to get weary. Her tailbone ached from the ride across the Hohiro Kurita bridge; those sleepers were bumpy. The ride into the Murasaki district was, by contrast, a piece of cake. Masamori was built in a wide valley above the bay from which the Yamato River emptied into the Shakudo Sea. That meant it was mostly flat.

  Their prearranged parade route had parted company with the river not long after entering the city proper, exactly as she'd been briefed b
y Lieutenant Colonel Marisol Cabrera, Colonel Camacho's chief of staff. Cassie had led the procession first north, and then east into Murasaki. It took effort to resist the temptation to lead the column on a winding ramble through Hachiman's capital, spooking the straights and crunching up the pavement, but resist she had. Not for fear of the blood-curdling consequences with which la Dama Muerte Cabrera had threatened her if she pulled such a stunt. But out of respect for the tired old man in the Mad Cat trudging stolidly behind her.

  The Murasaki district was mostly offices, with restaurants and small shops at street level. Though Cassie had no memories of life within the Combine, the area was a good deal more cheerful than she'd expected. Her impression had always been that life in the Draconis Combine was grim, and not just because of her years spent listening to official Federated Commonwealth propaganda and to the horror stories of the Combine emigres among whom she'd been raised.

  But these streets were broad and clean, the colors bright, and the sararimen and secretaries who made up most of the pedestrian throngs held at bay by Civilian Guidance Corps police, with their helmet-covered cowls and riot shotguns, were scrubbed and cheerful. The enthusiasm with which they greeted the mercenary procession was probably being carefully orchestrated by cadres within the crowd—that was the Combine way. In truth, the crowds seemed happy enough, probably because of sheer love of spectacle.

  Many of the buildings were out and out skyscrapers. They tended to be built in the Yamato style, named after old Admiral Kurita's flagship from Terra's Second World War, a style that had been popular in the Combine in the late twenty-nine hundreds. The stylization was apparently based on some twenty-ninth-century architect's idea of what the Yamato's superstructure might have been: shapes vaguely like monstrously attenuated shark-fins, one terraced face slanting back toward a sheer vertical wall as if for streamlining, gleaming towers of glass and metal turned to bronze by the light of Hachiman's yellow-orange sun.

  Cassie knew all this because she'd read a guidebook, which, along with a cursory pre-landing briefing by Rabbi Bar-Kochba, CO of Second Battalion and unit planetologist, was the Caballeros' only advance information about the terrain.

  Her interest was not idle curiosity. Though Don Carlos may have been trying to honor her by letting her lead the parade, to Cassie, it was only doing her job: leading the Regiment into hostile terrain.

  If these buildings go right up to the Compound, she thought, snipers could sure have a heyday. Some of the structures looked sturdy enough that light and maybe medium 'Mechs might even be able to get high up inside them. Which could be nasty if it ever came to a crunch.

  Cassie had no idea who a crunch was likely to come from—yet. As a scout she was damned if she was going to take for granted that none would ever materialize simply because the unit was ump-many parsecs away from the nasty Periphery and even nastier Clans. A good scout always thought in terms of threats, no matter how much the brave Mech Warriors pooh-poohed the possibility.

  Cassie was used to keeping those boys and girls alive in spite of themselves.

  The far side of the intersection ahead of her was blocked by a traffic barrier manned by cops in red-and white-striped greaves and armpieces. If I wanted to bust that barrier, you bully-boys'd hop real pretty, she thought, but then let it slide.

  Backed up behind the candy-striped sawhorses were a bus and a throng of lorries and boxy little private vehicles that had apparently been caught en route when the Friendly Persuaders popped up to close off the street. The ordinary Kurita people were used to that kind of inconvenience. The vehicle occupants had all crowded forward to gape at the approach of the giant, manlike war machines, to clap their hands and chant with expressions of delighted amazement— all carefully orchestrated by claques dispatched by Planetary Chairman Percival Fillington, the young Earl of Hachiman.

  Oh, well, Cassie thought, not without sympathy, at least they're getting a show for their trouble. She hung a right, as indicated, onto Tai-sho Dalton Way.

  The four-lane street slanted gently before her, stretching five hundred meters to gates that looked like real bronze and which were cut into forbidding ten-meter stone walls. The sun's falling light caught the designs raised on the metal gates and made the loops of razor tape topping the stone walls gleam like copper. Cassie bit down hard on the impulse to flatten herself over the handlebars and her strapped-down M23, slam-shift into high, and jam downhill as fast as legs conditioned by years of busting brush on a dozen hardscrabble worlds could take her.

  But she resisted that impulse too. The Caballeros lined out behind her knew why she rode where she did, and like her, they generally did what Don Carlos wanted, even without his having to speak his desire, because Colonel Camacho was the Caballeros, their mind and soul. If they had a problem with the order of march, they could gripe about it, just as troopies always did.

  But Southwesterners despised bicycles. No matter that bikes were an ideal low noise-heat-visual-signature scout vehicle, capable of going places not even the most agile Rat car could reach; their tiny Mech Warrior minds didn't register considerations like that. To them bicycles symbolized the soft, urban, more-money-than-sense lifestyle affected by Trinity city-dwellers, people who looked down their noses at the rednecks and bandidos and wild bare-ass Indians who were the true Caballeros. If she put the pedal to the metal, the 'Mech jocks behind would regard it as a challenge of honor, something they could no more resist than a Clan mudhead could. Then they'd put the hammer down, racing their leviathans downhill, gyros whining to keep them from toppling forward, in a rush as undignified and out of control as first-graders heading for the play yard.

  When those rambunctious little kids had an average weight of sixty metric tons, that was more than just undignified. It meant that even the specially reinforced pavement underfoot—presumably the reason for the officially designated route—would buckle under pounding monster impacts. And the racing Mech Warriors would jostle each other exactly like rambunctious children, banging one another off building fronts at speed, which meant glass and stone and cement spraying into the street, and, not unlikely, a fair number of the spectators who had their faces pressed pale against lower-story windows.

  That would not do. It could put a strain on relations with their new employer—which might not be that hard in any event, since he was a by-God Kurita, though distant from the all-important Line of Succession. Worse, it would make Don Carlos look bad in front of a passel of Dracs.

  Cassie, behave. You've got to set a good example.

  So she rode at a walking pace for the metal monsters, controlling speed with quick alternate flicks of front and rear brakes, coasting for the most part, though that was bad discipline indeed for a rough-country thrasher.

  As she got close to Celestrial Splendor of the Dragon Boulevard, the broad avenue that ran parallel to the river along the compound's west wall, she began to gather a sense of just how big the place was. Those looming walls stretched out for a whole kilometer in either direction.

  Now she could also make out the designs beaten into the metal of the gates. On the right was the Dragon-in-circle symbol of House Kurita and, by extension, the Draconis Combine. On the left was a samurai helmet with odd designs flaring like stylized antlers above, and below a mempo mask, features distorted by what might be martial fury or plain old mad laughter.

  With a whine of servomotors and a creak of hinges, the gates swung inward before her.

  Inside the walls, the HTE security forces were lined up to either side of the street in their powder-blue jumpsuits and helmets, assault rifles held in white-gloved hands at present-arms before their chests. Cassie rode between the silent ranks, still only beginning to grasp just how vast the complex was.

  "A city inside a city," a voice murmured in the bone-conduction speaker behind her ear. Until now, she'd been ignoring the chatter off the 'Mech pilots' push. But this was the twangy Cowboy voice of Captain Kali MacDougall, Bronco Company's new boss, who happened to push about as man
y of Cassie Suthorn's buttons as was possible for a single individual. Her voice always went up Cassie's spine like nails on a pane of glass.

  "Wonder if they got cathouses in there?" a male voice pondered. "Didn't see nothin' promising outside."

  "Thinking with your small head again, Cowboy?" MacDougall asked. Cowboy was Lieutenant Junior Grade William James Payson's callsign as well as his ethnic affiliation. In the Caballeros you used the callsign your buddies gave you. The nicknames might not always be imaginative, but they usually were descriptive.

  "Got my priorities straight, ma'am," the Wasp pilot replied with mock humility.

  "And that's the onliest thing," came the voice of his buddy and mentor, Lieutenant Senior Grade Buck "Saw-buck" Evans, from his Orion named Buck's Bronc. "Least you got sense to think with the head has the brains in it."

  "The one stickin' outta my collar."

  "Not hardly."

  "That is my small head," Cowboy announced triumphantly.

  "Only in terms of utility," MacDougall said.

  "I love it when you talk dirty, Lady K. Over."

  "Krasnyy Oktyabr," said Lieutenant JG Gorchakov.

  "Gesundheit," Evans and Payson said simultaneously.

  "No, no," Gorchakov said peevishly. "It means 'Red October.' It was this big old tractor factory the Germans and the Soviets fought over during the battle of Stalingrad. First time a battle was ever fought in a giant industrial plant. It was big as a city, too, just like this place. One of my ancestors fought there."

  "You puttin' on airs again, Tex?" Cowboy asked suspiciously. "Reckon I'm gonna have to pummel you some."

  Older and wilier, Evans scored with, "Which side he fight on, peckerwood?"

  That reduced Gorchakov to incoherent fury, as usual, sputtering about his illustrious forebear's heroism in the service of the Motherland in the long-dead Great Patriotic War. The Cowboys and 'girls tended to pick on Gorchakov, not because his family (one of the richest Cowboy households on Cerillos) still spoke Russian at home, but because they were descended from Texans. The bulk of Trinitarians, red, white, and brown, descended from residents of the ancient Terran states of Chihuahua, New Mexico, Arizona, and Sonora, all regarded Texans with the same fondness owls reserved for crows. Which was none.