Close quarters

by Victor Milán

  * * *

  Natural athlete though she was, Lainie Shimazu wasn't much more than a competent BattleMech pilot. It was as a tactician that she excelled, the ability to fight her big machine and her regiment effectively at the same time.

  In a flash she assessed her situation. The mercenaries were obviously launching spoiling attacks, trying to damage and disorganize her forces as much as possible before they reached the Compound. She guessed that most of their strength was waiting behind those blank stone walls.

  She judged that the opposition reported by C Company was a screen; her gut told her the real stroke was landing on B from the north. She had two thirds of Third Battalion following in reserve. It was not yet time to commit them. Directing C to halt its advance and wing out to its left to lightly cover A's front, she also ordered A Company to wheel left to support B.

  As far as Lainie was concerned, she was on no set schedule. She had no intention of pressing the attack against dug-in BattleMechs with enemies in her backfield. She would deal with the flank attack, and then she would ram the screening force back against the wall, and then she would assault the Compound proper. And if the precious Earl of Hachiman complained about the time it took, he could clamber into a BattleMech and stick his own pale fanny on the firing line. Until she was killed or relieved, Lainie would fight her own battle.

  It was a gamble, of course. The risk to her career never entered her mind. But she was well aware that the attack from the north might be a feint, with the real stop-thrust about to smash through C's thin front to take her counterattack in flank. Or the mercs might get supremely bold, and sally forth from the Compound for a flank stroke.

  Setting her Mauler in motion up the side street from which the gaijin 'Mechs had ambushed her, Lainie Shimazu smiled in grim amusement. She could give the defenders behind the walls something better to do than plague First Battalion. The tidal bore, driven by Hachiman's moons, was in full booming progress, routinely cresting in five-meter waves. Until that calmed, the Third Battalion company would have to wait to enter the water for the river assault. But Second Battalion had worked its way into the business district south of the Compound. Lainie ordered them to attack at once. That should make the mercenaries keep it in their pants.

  Lainie was a yakuza, and had the heart of a gambler. She was betting on her judgment and on the ability of her hard men and women to smash the current threat before the mercs could pull another trick out of their cowboy hats.

  36

  Masamori, Hachiman

  Galedon District, Draconis Combine

  2 November 3056

  The attack from the north was no feint. It was Bronco Company, and they came to kill. Within the first sixty seconds of contact, Lady K's command left five Ghost 'Mechs smoking at a cost of two of their own.

  This was Kali MacDougall's debut commanding a battle of 'Mechs. She knew in an intellectual way that the exchange had been a good one for the 'lleros. But tell a mother the loss of two children is a small price to pay....

  Firing, she walked Dark Lady past Quicksilver, Joey Sosa's Hermes II. The medium 'Mech was burning fiercely, its autocannon ammo cooking off in fire-tipped lines of smoke sprouting from its back like the fin-spines of an exotic fish.

  No one said this would be easy, girl.

  * * *

  "Tai-sa!" came the voice of the Ninth Ghost's top recon driver, Otenkinagashi, whose callsign meant "weather criminal"—ingo for lookout. He was a thin and quiet little yakuza whose irezumi covered his legs, arms, and torso like an outrageous, swirled body suit. He piloted the other Locust of the light lance that had been walking point and was now covering A Company's right as it marched to support B. "We're being attacked from the northeast!"

  Lainie hauled Revenge around the corner, just in time to see a Hatchetman stove in the little recon Locust's head with a blow of its namesake weapon. The mercenary 'Mech stood over its opponent as the now-uncontrolled Locust toppled to the ground at its feet. Then it stalked up the street toward the Ghosts.

  Behind it the street filled with more BattleMechs. Missiles arced over its shoulders. "Mattaku," Lainie said, "Damn! Samurai, take them. I'm backing you."

  "Hai!" exclaimed the youthful officer leading a mixed medium/heavy lance from the cockpit of his Grand Dragon. From his tone it was clear he thought this was the ideal opportunity to redeem the disgrace that had driven him from home and forced him to serve with lowly eta.

  Well, go for it, Lainie thought.

  * * *

  At last the cowards stand and fight! the young samurai exulted inwardly. Confidence bolstered by his double-capacity heat sinks, he was hammering the advancing BattleMech with his full forward-firing armament of PPC, heavy laser, and chest-mounted LRM cluster. The other 'Mechs in his lance were also focusing fire on the Hatchetman. His audio pickups bristled with the crack of laser beams and supersonic autocannon rounds.

  Another sound also reached his ears, a guttural chant booming from the advancing machine's loudspeakers. He did not recognize it for the death-song of a warrior of the Chihene, the Red Paint People of the Chiricahua. He thought it was mere barbarous babble.

  The Hatchetman was firing back with its Defiance LB-X autocannon and its three medium pulse lasers. But it was hopelessly overmatched, and blocking effective fire from its comrades behind.

  "Chu-i," the Ghost in the Whitworth to the samurai's left said, "what does he think he's doing?"

  "I don't know." What the gaijin was doing was dying. Projectiles knocked man-sized chunks of metal from the mercenary 'Mech's torso. Ferro-fibrous armor puffed away from energy-weapon hits in glowing vapor, ran in molten yellow streams from its wounds, like lava, like blood. Still the Hatchetman came on, irresistibly closing the range, two hundred meters, one-fifty.

  The autocannon ammo stored in its right torso detonated, its CASE system venting the force of the blast out its back in a sudden gush of yellow flame. And still the BattleMech kept coming.

  It had already gone past the point the young officer would have imagined possible. Surely it must fall soon! he thought. Its autocannon and lasers were slagged. With almost all the armor burned from the 'Mech's legs and left arm, the exposed myomer muscle bundles were beginning to curl and smoke.

  At fifty meters the Hatchetman cocked its right arm and threw its hatchet. As it released, the arm fell off. The BattleMech then stumbled to its knees and fell forward in the street, swathed in smoke.

  "Masaka!" the samurai exclaimed as the hatchet grew larger in his sight. It was pierced and jagged from the fearful barrage—but still a lethal three-ton projectile. "I don't believe it! These gaijin do know how to die!"

  And so did he, because a heartbeat later the hatchet smashed through the low domed skull of his Grand Dragon and crushed him to red jelly.

  * * *

  As the samurai joined the Hatchetman pilot in death, a horizontal storm of fire blew up the street into the faces of Lainie and A Company. Realizing how seriously she had misjudged the mercs' valor, Lainie now knew that her First Battalion was caught in a vee-shaped trap. She made a fast, tough call.

  The military pundits of Sun Zhang MechWarrior Academy considered it poor form to commit reserves early in battle, subtracting major points if an officer did so in exercise. But this was no exercise, and as far as Lainie was concerned, the only referees were Victory and Defeat.

  "Third Battalion," she ordered, "advance to support B Company. Sideslip two hundred meters north; try to catch the gaijin on the flanks. A Company will attack to the northeast."

  * * *

  "Who-ee," Staff Sergeant Willard Dix said, peering out the crack of the manhole cover he was holding open with one hand. "That's one mighty expensive bonfire they got goin' out there."

  Reeking, frozen, and tired, Cassie's little commando team had managed to make it a little more than halfway to their objective before running out of sewer pipe both big enough to negotiate and headed anywhere near the hotel where Ninyu Kerai Indrahar had his comman
d post. As it was, they had been forced to duckwalk in shin-deep filth the last two hundred meters. Even Cassie felt as if her thighs were about to split open, which she attributed to the inability to maintain the customary pace of her workouts during her stint as the Earl of Hachiman's house guest.

  Monkey-like she swarmed past Dix up the side of the manhole's steel-rung ladder to peer out. The overcast morning light seemed blinding after the sewer darkness. Blinking into the glare, Cassie could see that the sergeant was right.

  The heart of Masamori was ablaze. PPC beams, shell-bursts, lasers, and missiles had set off scores of fires. Though Hachiman's capital had been built to be fireproof, a quick glimpse showed Cassie a half-dozen buildings fully swallowed up in infernos, including a hundred-story bronze behemoth. Down below several of her troopies coughed as the amazingly varied smokes of urban battle rolled in through the manhole opening. There was the nose-pinching smell of burning rubber, the astringent chemical stench of burned plastic and polymer, the husky smells of paper and furniture burning in habitations and businesses. Overlying everything was the sweet, down-home barbecue tang of burning human flesh.

  The noise was mind-numbing. It seemed to stab in between the lip of the manhole and its cover like blinding sunlight through cracks in a wall. There was no sense to the din, no sense of the individual noises that composed it. Just a constant roar beyond white noise, rising and falling to the rhythmless beat of heavy-metal battle. If not for the bone-conduction speaker taped behind her ear, Cassie would never have heard the sergeant's comment.

  She slapped Dix's shoulder, pointed. He nodded, flowed out onto the surface like oil in reverse. For reasons best known to themselves, the Masamori city planners had put their manholes dead in the middle of intersections, at least in this part of town. Dix raced for the intersection's northwest corner, where mannequins dressed in the latest fashions watched the battle from behind glass, frozen into postures of synthetic gaiety. Cassie came right behind.

  The rest of the squad was close on their heels. Barnes and his sniper team had already split off. The other eleven sprinted in ones and twos to join their fellows crouched on the sidewalk, with the largely illusory protection of the building corner between them and the battle.

  They were way too close for comfort. Cassie could see part of the Adelante force that had taken Colonel Shimazu by surprise, slugging it out with Ghosts less than half a klick distant. There were 'Mechs down; rising from one smoldering pile of ruin she could just make out the finned-banana shape of what she feared was the head of Benito Delshay's Hatchetman.

  Adelante seemed to be trying to fade back. Cassie saw Gabby Camacho's Shadow Hawk riding high on its jump jets, soaring away over a three-story structure as lines of fire converged on it. Reb Perez' Awesome stood square in the street, apparently covering its mates' withdrawal. His slab-fronted assault 'Mech was taking a beating, drooling smoke from its flared shoulder housings. But the defiant Cowboy was giving his twenty double-capacity heat sinks a workout, blasting with his fearful main armament of three extended-range PPCs and a medium pulse laser as fast as the weapons would cycle.

  Down the street a Drac 'Mech exploded. Overhead glass shattered as a freak blast-wave reflection slammed upper-story windows. The fragments fell among the Scouts like razor snow. Cassie looked in horror at the great display windows directly above her; if they went, the resulting sheets of sharp glass would fall directly on top of the little clump of Caballeros. It would be like a mortar round going off in their midst.

  The big windows shivered and boomed with musical-saw dissonance, but held. The rising popularity of dekigoro-zoku gangs, youngsters who roved the streets in search of opportunities for vandalism, smash-and-grab theft, and the occasional head to crack, had made it expedient for street-level shop owners to shell out for transpex windows.

  It was the sort of battle that contributed so greatly to the thirty-first-century footslogger's sense of helplessness in the face of the armored leviathans who ruled the battlefield. Even if the Scouts had been participants, instead of unwilling spectators, in the combat, the BattleMechs wouldn't have deigned to pay attention to them.

  But even without intention, 'Mechs were lethal to puny humans. As the last scouts emerged from the manhole to dart for cover, the Ghosts charged, firing furiously at Perez' stricken Awesome. One heavy laser missed the 'Mech and brushed the running scouts like the wings of the Angel of Death.

  Contreras the truchaseno simply exploded like an insect that had blundered into an electronic bug zapper. Billy Huckaby, the Black hillbilly who was the baby of the platoon, fell down screaming, hair and jacket on fire, polymer armor melting to his flesh.

  Petie McTeague, who came from a non-landholding Cowboy clan and so was regarded as just as no-account as any hillbilly, started forward to help. Cassie grabbed the pants-leg Moused above his right boot and tackled him.

  "You can't help him!" she shouted, though she knew he couldn't hear her.

  Overshot autocannon-fire splashed the intersection. Billy Huckaby's body was torn to pieces as though by invisible fingers. McTeague turned and rolled back into cover, sobbing and holding his face, which had been peppered by fragments.

  The Awesome exploded. Perez didn't eject.

  * * *

  Standing in a side street, Cowboy Payson saw his sidekick's 'Mech go. Bellowing rage, he started his little Wasp back toward the fight.

  His other pal Buck Evans blocked him with the medium laser that made up his Orion's right forearm. "Nothin' you can do now," the older MechWarrior said, " 'cept throw your life away. Just tell yourself it don't mean nothin'."

  Payson's 'Mech almost seemed to sigh. "Yeah," he radioed back in a jagged voice. "It don't mean nothin'."

  They faded north. They weren't done fighting yet.

  * * *

  Cassie glared at the approaching Ghosts in hatred so fierce it seemed to squeeze from the pores of her skin like oil. Arrogant bastards! They think the only infantry that can hurt them is Elementals!

  She would show them. Cassie had nothing but disdain for the outsized Clan foot soldiers that the warriors of the Inner Sphere had nicknamed "toads." What Elementals only dared to do wrapped in their massive powered armor, she dared do naked—and had. These Dracs would see—

  A touch on her arm. "Cassie," Dix said. "C'mon. It ain't our fight."

  She shook herself. The sergeant was right. The driving need to punish BattleMechs and their arrogant pilots faded within her like the voice of someone falling down a well. She wondered whether that was a result of Lady K's counsel, or of the fact that she had an appointment with the red-haired man.

  The Ghosts had started taking flanking fire from the north, were facing left to deal with it. The din of battle dimmed.

  Cassie looked at her squad. "Listen up, people. I'm a hunter, a lone-wolf killer, not a leader. Win or lose, I'm going to get most of you killed."

  She took a breath. "If you want out, go now, any or all of you. I'll go in alone if that's what it takes."

  Yvonne Sanchez, the blocky little blaster from New Acoma on Sierra, grinned at her. "Shoot, Cass. You can't get rid of us that easy."

  Cassie looked around at the others. One by one they nodded.

  "Your funeral," she said with a shrug, and led off to the northwest.

  * * *

  Force Commander Gavilan Camacho screamed like his namesake in helpless rage.

  Deep inside he still burned with shame for his failure during the fight with the terrorists. Even though the young-Turk faction called him the hero of that action, what he remembered was going face-first into the Fab building.

  And during the abortive coup against his father—when the core group had come to him, Vanity and Bobby the Wolf and Baird and, astonishingly, his father's faithful shadow la Dama Muerte, he had bravely professed a total lack of desire to supplant his father. That was a lie, of course, and he had proven it by not telling them straight out to forget it. He had betrayed his father in his heart. It was
a sin he had not dared confess even to Father Montoya, who was, after all, also his father's confessor.

  Patricia would never have crashed her 'Mech. And she would have cursed Gordo and the rest for the faithless dogs they were. Don Carlos was right, Gabby knew, to have favored her all those years. Though she was only a woman, he knew miserably that she had been twice the man he was.

  But he could redeem himself, in his own eyes and—with the help of the saints—his father's, if he could only prove once and for all that he was a worthy Mech Warrior.

  In Adelante Company's slashing attack in conjunction with Bronco, he had killed two enemy 'Mechs, an Urban-Mech and a Whitworth. But he had paid a price, blazing off the whole ammo load for his Imperator Ultra autocannon. The Martell medium laser mounted on his right arm had been burned off, and a swarm of SRMs had pounded the Shadow Hark's head and upper torso, filling his cockpit with sparks and the stink of burning insulation. Now all his weapon-control systems were dead. He couldn't even get a display to tell him the Imperator had run dry.

  "Gavilan," his father's voice said. "What is it, my son?"

  Gabby ground his teeth so hard they creaked. "My weapons have all been knocked out, Father."

  "Then return within the walls at once. Captain MacDougall will take over the battalion."

  "No!"

  "Do it, for God's sake," came the voice of Lady K. "No point in you getting killed."

  Gabby's lips curled in a soundless snarl. Part of him tried to believe that the tight-assed bolilla bitch was trying to grab his job, but his heart knew that wasn't true. If he stayed in the fight unarmed, he'd be a liability, not a hero.

  He punched up the general freak. "Attention, First Battalion. This is Force Commander Camacho. My 'Mech is disabled." A pause. "I'm turning command of the Battalion over to Captain MacDougall and returning to base."