by Victor Milán
"The Federated Commonwealth is not our enemy," Ninyu said, "for the moment."
Katsuyama bobbed his head. "Indeed not, lord. But it is the Commonwealth lifestyle our people are most likely to envy. These events give us the opportunity to show that their ways are tainted with disorder."
Ninyu scowled. "But we're not trying to hide the fact that the attackers were Word of Blake terrorists—we're relying on that to mask our own involvement. What does the Word of Blake have to do with the Federated Commonwealth?"
"Why, nothing, lord. And what of it? We show the public one thing, and tell them another, and no one suspects a thing." His eyes shone. "It's a technique perfected by the early masters of the twentieth century."
Ninyu made a sound low in his throat and gestured at the display. A mercenary Archer was holding up its hand, while a trapped Worker woman with an infant in her arms stepped from the balcony of a shattered building onto its palm.
"They're making Chandrasekhar Kurita's foreign hirelings look like heroes," he said. "Did you clear this?"
"Why, yes, lord," Katsuyama smiled tentatively. "We will turn this to our advantage in the second phase of our operation."
The second phase ... The man said it so blithely. As if last night's failure had been expected, deliberate even, merely a steppingstone along the way.
Ninyu paced to the window-wall. The sea's surface was black. The tips and the edges of the chop were gilded by the light of the setting sun, making the water look like the background of an ancient oil painting, laced with a craqueleur of flame.
What made it worse was that the lumpy little media doctor's assessment was reinforced by the hyperpulse message Ninyu's adoptive father had sent him that afternoon. Think of it as a reconnaissance, my son, Subhash Indrahar had written. We needed to know the strength of our target's defenses. Now we do, at negligible cost.
It had, in fact, cost the lives of more than a hundred Word of Blake raiders, which of course meant less than nothing to Ninyu Kerai Indrahar, or his father. But it was harder to write off the thirty-six DEST commandos lost. Ninyu understood that their lives were coins, to be spent without thought in the Dragon's service; it was even so with his own life, and that of his adoptive father. But it aggrieved him to waste so much for so little apparent gain.
They had inflicted scandalously few casualties on the barbarians, a fact that Ninyu experienced as bone-deep shame. Yet, despite the missile-launchers the ISF strike team had carried, it was never intended that they would battle toe-to-toe with BattleMechs. They were supposed to get in as quietly as possible, assassinate Chandrasekhar Kurita, and withdraw as best they could. The plan had been compromised, however, and the team members butchered by foes even they could not overmatch.
One way to expiate the shame that burned within him was suicide, of course. But his father's message precluded that option, making it very clear that seppuku would only be shirking his duty to the Dragon. Ninyu accepted that, as he accepted everything his father laid upon him.
So his option was rage. A rage that he would slake in full against that ludicrous fat fool Uncle Chandy. And his pet barbarians.
"Lord," Katsuyama said respectfully, "look at this."
Ninyu glanced at the holostage. The anchorwoman's face had reappeared.
"Just a few hours ago," she was saying, "the tragic and horrifying events in the capital city were overshadowed—or rather, outshone—for residents of the southern hemisphere city of Hawthorne, whose nighttime sky was illuminated by a remarkable pyrotechnic display."
The image changed to a starry sky. Something resembling a giant meteorite—a flaming freight train, more like—blazed a lurid trail across it.
"The fiery spectacle was itself sign of tragedy," the anchorwoman said gravely, "the catastrophic re-entry of the DropShip Peggy Sue, off the Davion-registered JumpShip Daisy Belle. The DropShip was lost with all hands. Such accidents are extremely rare"
"Now where did that come from?" Katsuyama said.
Ninyu shook his head. He didn't care how many DropShips fell from the sky.
He had a fireworks display of his own to arrange.
27
Masamori, Hachiman
Draconis Combine
17 October 3056
The smell of humidity and potting soil hung like thick damp curtains in the greenhouse. "Well, daughter," Chandrasekhar Kurita said, "Ninyu Kerai has tested our defenses. And found them strong, thanks to you and your friends."
"He'll be back," Cassie said flatly.
The fleshy blooms of orchids surrounded them, like polychrome explosions frozen in time. Uncle Chandy tamped peat moss into a pot beneath an orange and black blossom, turned to Cassie, and smiled.
"Of course he will," he said, looking like Buddha in a gardener's apron. "The question is, what are we going to do about it?"
"Take the initiative," Cassie said.
Uncle Chandy laughed. "Truly, your presumption is wonderful, girl. Seizing the initiative from a man like Ninyu Kerai is like trying to snatch fresh meat from a starving banth."
In known space there were two dozen animals known as banths. All of them were predators.
Cassie tossed her head, flipping a loose strand of hair from her eyes. "It's that or wait passively for the knife," she said.
Uncle Chandy had picked up a trowel. He turned and stood gazing at her with those thick-lidded amphibian eyes, turning the implement over and over in his hands. Cassie was taking a risk in lecturing him, and knew it.
He smiled. "You are wise, my daughter," he said. "In your perceptions, if not always in your demeanor."
"You've got plenty of people to tell you what you want to hear."
He boomed laughter. "It is truly amazing how often the price of competent help is impertinence," he said. "How fortunate for us all that I—unlike so many of my peers—find myself willing to pay such a price. Otherwise how many valuable resources would be wasted?"
He gave the word wasted a certain emphasis. Cassie refused to quail.
He turned back to his plants. "What about the Daisy Belle?" she asked.
"The Mirza's people are looking into it. It is of secondary concern at the moment."
"The Clanners—"
"Seem unlikely to pose as immediate a threat as Ninyu Kerai Indrahar, eh?" Cassie bit her lip. She nodded.
"I have a specific task in mind for you," he said, reaching up to a rack above his head. "That is, if you are truly serious about seizing the initiative."
"My street contacts—"
"Will not suffice. What chance have we of defeating Ninyu in the long run?" Cassie paused, calculating odds of survival. Her own, if she told the unpalatable truth; the odds Uncle Chandy was inquiring about needed no calculation.
"In the long run," she said, "none."
Uncle Chandy took down a pot with an extravagant green, orange, and purple flower hanging from it. "This strain was developed in the late twenty-eighty century by Filbert Fujimori, who was subsequently put to death," he said. "Nothing to do with horticulture, as it happened; he wrote a scurrilous haiku about Coordinator Jinjiro—understandable, to be sure, but scarcely prudent. This orchid has always been a particular favorite of mine. I don't know why; it's in truly frightful taste. Perhaps I have a yen for the perverse."
He set it carefully on a long table with a metal-mesh top and set about repotting the garish plant. "What we need to do," he said, "is make Ninyu Kerai lose interest in us. You needn't bother protesting that this will not be easy; as long as he lives, he will pursue us, and should he die, his adoptive father will surely avenge him."
Cassie turned away. She did not want Uncle Chandy to see the sheen of desperate tears in her eyes.
"So what can we do?" she asked, the words nearly choking her. She was admitting powerlessness—and in the face of her new nightmare, the red-haired man. It was as painful a thing as she could remember since Patsy died.
"Demonstrate our innocence."
"I didn't think the ISF gave a da
mn for that sort of thing."
"The ISF assumes guilt from the fact of suspicion. Not the same thing, not the same at all. Neither the Smiling One nor his heir presumptive operates on a basis of animus. If we can show him the real culprit, he will turn his rage aside from us."
Cassie sat back against a shelf. "And who is the real culprit?"
"Tanadi," Uncle Chandy said. "Who else can it be?"
Someone ruthless enough to murder a DropShip crew to cover his tracks. "Do you know that?"
"The Mirza believes so, on the basis of what his inquiries have revealed."
Cassie shrugged. "Has he got evidence that will convince Ninyu?"
"Sadly, no. That's where you come in."
"You want me to get inside?"
The great smooth head nodded. Artificial daylight slid back and forth across it. "What's the Tanadi CEO like?"
"Hardly the sort to slip a twenty H-bill note inside one of the red shoes that comprise the bulk of your costume at Torashii Gyaru," Uncle Chandy said. Cassie made a face at him. "Redmond Hosoya is a man of probity, after his own fashion. His vices, while deplorable enough, are carefully monitored by his security staff. He allows no one to get close to him without careful screening—more careful than we can prepare you to survive, given the limited time in which we have to work."
He turned to her, brushing black soil from his hands, and smiled. "Fortunately, not everyone at the higher ranks of our society is so discriminating."
* * *
"We must act quickly," Force Commander White Nose Pony told the officers packed into the Compound commissary set aside for mercenary use. "We need to move our remaining forces, and our dependents, within the walls of the Compound at once."
It was what the 'lleros called a Council of Elders. Such gatherings were called on matters of policy pertaining to the Regiment as a whole; strictly military concerns were dealt with by a Command Council. In the wake of the attack, with further trouble almost certainly in the offing, the more general voice seemed called for.
The council consisted of commanders from company level up, senior staff and support personnel, and people whose words for one reason or another commanded respect within the Regiment. Zuma was there, as were Diana and Dr. Ten Bears. The various chaplains were also present. So was Third Battalion Crusader pilot Teresa de Avila ChaVez, la Guadalupana, who—though a mere Lieutenant Junior Grade—was present because the Virgin of Guadalupe frequently appeared to her. The faithful back home in the Trinity avidly followed her exploits, particularly on Cerillos, where she was especially revered.
Tables had been pushed together to create one giant table with Don Carlos at the head and his officers flanking him down the sides, in order of descending seniority. That meant junior officers had to yell to make themselves heard. Caballeros were not backward about that sort of thing.
"That's lay-about-the-fort thinking," said Lieutenant SG James Kicking Bird, CO of Geronimo Company. A full-blood Comanche, he was perpetually disgruntled that his command was named for an Apache. "Relying on walls to defend you."
White Nose Pony turned him an impassive obsidian gaze. "We're contracted to defend the Compound, not the Sportsplex," he said. "This is where further attacks will come. That being so, is it wise to gather our warriors and leave our flocks and children exposed?"
Kicking Bird scowled. He didn't have much of a comeback to that. The Singer didn't say much, but when he did, he was hard to answer.
"So we concentrate our forces," said Captain Bobby Begay firmly. Singer did not look pleased at the apparent support. "That's decided. There's another question we have to face: whether Colonel Camacho is still fit to command us."
Silence fell like a toppled Mauler. "What are you saying, evil thing?" Singer asked.
Bobby the Wolf's handsome face turned to color of boot leather and he started to rise. Seated at his father's right, Gavilah Camacho leaned forward. "Take it easy, Bobby," he said quietly. "It doesn't mean a thing."
Glaring, the Cochise commander sat down again.
"I smell a setup," Kali MacDougall said.
Heads turned toward her. She sat back in her chair with a sour smile. "Looks to me as if some of our young Turks reckon it's time for a change."
A tumult of questions, comments, and arguments spread like prairie fire through the commissary. "Colonel Camacho failed us during the terrorist attack," Vanity Torres said loudly, trying to be heard above the noise.
"You behind this, Gabby?" Lady K asked.
The young officers were beginning to look uneasily at each other and then back at the tall, blonde Captain. Nobody was quite prepared to confront her.
"No one doubts my father's bravery," Gavilan said. "Not to my face, anyway. Yet his conduct in the last battle has raised questions nonetheless." He hesitated. "Even in my mind."
"He froze," Bobby the Wolf said. "He didn't command us when we needed him. He dwells too much in the past."
"We won, remember?" Lady K broke in. The dissidents glared at her. She kept asking questions they didn't want asked, making points they liked less.
The Colonel's head was hanging as if it had turned to lead. "You have reason," he said in Spanish. "I could not focus my mind in combat."
He looked up with visible effort. "Such behavior is unacceptable in a commander—"
"Don Carlos."
The noise quieted. Force Commander Bar-Kochba had not raised his voice. As usual he didn't need to.
"We are in a mighty dangerous situation," he said in his slow drawl. "You've pulled us through many a narrow time before, Colonel. I think we need your judgment and experience to pull us through this one." He gazed around the meeting chamber, eyes fierce. "If Colonel Camacho were to retire, I'd have to think mighty hard about joining him."
"Are you a coward, then, to turn your tail in the face of danger?" Gavilan flashed.
Deliberately as an Atlas twisting its torso, Bar-Kochba traversed his balding head until his eyes—so blue they were startling in the tanned and grizzle-bearded face—bore on the young Force Commander like PPC muzzles crackling at the brink of discharge.
"In the interests of the Regiment," the Rabbi said slowly, "and out of respect for your family, which has long been allied with mine, I shall pretend you never said that."
Gavilan went pale behind his mustache. The boy was no coward. Neither was he a total fool—quite.
Bar-Kochba was among the Regiment's most respected members for his calm wisdom under the most trying conditions. He was also respected for the nearly badgerlike savagery he could display with his back to the wall, and for his skill as a Mech Warrior. He was not a man to provoke lightly.
Forbearance in the face of provocation did not come naturally to his people. Unlike many Jews of the time, his ancestors had not opposed the measures of Israel's militant regimes in the twenty-first century. They had rejoiced in their country's reputation for militant truculence, and generations after the great Reconciliation had carried it proudly with them to the outlaw Intendancy of New New Spain. There they were adopted into the Cowboy ethnic affiliation, took for themselves the defiant sobriquet of Jewboys, and settled into lives of happy piracy with the rest of the Caballeros. They still named their children for Moshe Dayan and Ariel Sharon and Golda Meir and other heroes of Israel's early days, and they worked hard to maintain that tradition of ferocity that in Old Testament times had inspired conquerors to plant Hebrew settlements along their borders to deter intruders, like hedges full of thorns.
Gavilan bowed his head and held his tongue.
"This was not an isolated incident," Regimental intelligence officer Gordon Baird said. He always sounded strained, as if he had to squeeze the words out of his throat. "Everyone knows I'm an old comrade in arms of Colonel Camacho; I yield to no one in my respect for him. But—" He sadly shook his immaculately groomed gray head, milking the elder-statesman role. "The fact is, he has been distracted and neglecting the Regiment's affairs for quite some time."
"It's true."
/>
The quiet female voice from the Colonel's right hand could hardly have produced a greater effect had it been loud as a stun grenade. The rising clamor cut off. Everybody stared at the woman who now stood next to el Patron.
"For some time Don Carlos has found himself unable to attend to his responsibilities. I have covered for him. Now I fear the situation has grown too grave to do so any longer."
The Colonel stared at Marisol Cabrera, dumbstruck. His expression of passive resignation had vanished. Now he looked angry.
He rose. For a full minute he stared at her, while the room seemed suspended in a cargo net of silence.
"Lieutenant Colonel Cabrera," he said, when his face had gone from white to red, "you are relieved as my aide-decamp." He stalked from the hall.
La Dama Muerte's ironbound facade cracked like armor plate hit by a Gauss rifle round. She covered her face with her hands and fled weeping out the door.
The commissary erupted in wild clamor. Everyone was yelling. Half the 'lleros were on their feet. Some of them were squaring off, cocking fists or dropping hands to gun butts.
In the confines of the room, the crack of ionized air fleeing a laser bolt was grotesquely loud. Everyone shut up, listening to their ears ring and staring toward the table's head.
Captain Kali MacDougall holstered her laser pistol. "I'm sure glad these buildings are hardened," she remarked. "Hate to shoot somebody upstairs in the fanny."
She looked around. "I think y'all are forgetting one teertsy little detail."
"And what might that be, Kali dear?" Vanity asked in tones of silken bitchiness.
"We're under siege, right here and now. For all we know, we might find this whole danged world outside the walls rising up against us. All we got's each other. We can't afford to go fighting amongst ourselves."
