Pandora's Gambit

by Randall N Bills

  Her mother’s eyes, so often fierce but now shadowed with that something else, finally pulled the answer out.

  “You mean to try to take Marik.”

  Her mother’s brilliant smile let the hidden emotion peek through a little more, sending Nikol’s pulse pounding.

  “Of course.”

  Nikol continued searching. “But that seems too easy. Who wouldn’t want the world? Lester I’m sure does, despite how much he protests otherwise. He has no Marik blood, but that just makes it all the more important that he at least hold the world. Even Duke Humphreys would likely take a stab at it, if it wasn’t several hundred light-years beyond his borders.”

  “I’m sure of it as well, dear.”

  “Then I don’t get it. Why did Anson allow us to travel through his realm to and from Paladin Davion’s funeral? Why allow us to be here at the jump point if it is so obvious? I mean, couldn’t we be spying, or something? Won’t he have marshaled forces here? Or something? What am I missing?”

  “All of that is true, my daughter. But it is the very simplicity of it that is its own surprise. Of course Anson will know that I want Marik. However, he’ll never believe that I have the resources to take it.”

  “Do you?”

  Her mother reached across the table and gently patted her hand. A part of Nikol winced at the memories the action dredged up; her mother comforting her as a ten-year-old. But she chose to focus instead on the fact that they were having another of those frank discussions that still amazed her.

  “That is a conversation for another day, dear. But let’s just say that with Lester and Anson breathing down my neck, they simply will not believe I’m able, much less willing, to commit to such a course of action.”

  They held each other’s eyes for a moment before Nikol responded. “And you are, aren’t you? You’re committed to such a course.”

  “Yes, dear. I am. And when the time is right, I’ll explain more.”

  Though a thousand additional questions pushed to be spoken, Nikol kept her silence as her mother turned her gaze back out to the void of space beyond the metal skin of the ship. Instead, she settled back, sickness almost forgotten for the moment, as she basked in the glow of what she’d seen slowly growing in her mother’s eyes . . . growing since that night at the gala and becoming clearer each day.

  Pride.

  Korituk Bastille

  Padaron City, Tamarind

  Duchy of Tamarind-Abbey

  A breeze off the Parnos River caressed the glass-fluted, sharp angles of the Musée National des Beaux-arts du Tamarind, wending leisurely through the thrumming streets of Padaron City, making its way to the foot of the buttressed walls of Korituk Bastille, up to the parapets and finally bringing the stink of the city to Duke Fontaine Marik.

  Left hand resting on the stone crenellation of the parapet, he inhaled the scents of his beloved city like a man luxuriating in the perfume of a beloved paramour. He glanced toward the main part of the keep, where banners bearing the heraldry of the Marik eagle, along with the tri-leaf symbol of Tamarind, fluttered in the momentary breeze before going limp again. On the central building’s parapets, two guards in burnished armor stood in silent watch, their three-meter lances vertical and rock-steady.

  “How Otho would laugh.” Fontaine spoke softly.

  “To have built such travesty and tradition, only to find it entrenched a century after he was toppled from power by this very thing.”

  “Your Grace?” A page spoke up from behind.

  “Nothing,” he said gruffly, as a piercing cry split the air.

  The cry, soul-soothing to a man seeking refuge, echoed again as a speck in the far distance quickly resolved into a bird rapidly gaining on his position. With joy, he lifted his right hand, encased in a heavy leather gauntlet, then paused and chuckled at the absurdity of deriding “Otho the Cold” only to draw such pleasure from some of the same traditions the deluded man espoused.

  With a last cry of defiance the bird landed amid a whirl of flapping feathers and unique bird scents, mingling with the smell of blood from a recent kill. “You’ve had a fine feast, I see, Jodik. A fine feast.” While they were longtime companions, he was nevertheless careful as usual of Jodik’s razor-sharp, hooked beak as he held out his left hand and immediately felt the hood deposited there by a waiting page. With practiced ease he pulled on the hawk’s hood. “Good for you. Would that I might have such freedom someday. To roam and kill at will.” He chuckled at the indrawn breath of the page. “But such is not my lot in life, Jodik.”

  He turned around, ready to hand off the bird to a second page waiting with a similarly gloved hand, but leaned in to whisper a last good-bye to the hawk. “But thank you for the momentary dream.”

  Fontaine walked along the parapet to a heavy steel door, which he entered, immersing himself immediately in the all-too-familiar sights and sounds of his office. Since his wife passed away last year, he found comfort here more than in any other room. “Fallen asleep too many times to count,” he said, patting the back of his oversized chair near the fireplace. Winter or summer, it simply seemed appropriate to end the day next to the fire with a glass of brandy. He couldn’t even remember when he and his precious Karli started the tradition, but after all these years—not to mention in her memory—he wasn’t about to stop now.

  With the sun close to setting, he glanced at the fireplace and annoyance wrinkled his brow. Wood should already be ready. On the verge of calling the page, he abruptly changed his mind and made his way to the fireplace. With creaking knees, he began pulling the slime logs from the metal tray to the right of the opening, laying each in carefully and then making sure the flue was properly opened.

  No fire like last year, thank you very much.

  A handful of minutes later, he gave up his effort to find something else to do and made his way to his desk. “How is it this pile of paperwork never seems to go away?” His throat tightened when no soft voice chided his querulous words, and his hand shook as he quickly poured himself a large draft of liquid into a brandy snifter, ignoring the echoes of dark looks that seemed to haunt such moments. “Just a little before the fireplace, my dear,” he managed in a hoarse whisper before tossing back the entire glass without so much as a single swirl or whiff.

  He fell more than sat down into the chair at the desk, and stared blankly at the paperwork for what seemed hours before long years of habit reasserted dominance and he found himself looking at a request for Christopher Marik to enter Tamarind-Abbey. His eyes suddenly focused as he realized this could only be the Hughes boy, and his nose wrinkled at the holovid news he’d watched the other night during one of his frequent bouts of insomnia. Recently brought by a tramp merchant JumpShip, it included several incendiary articles and holocasts describing the travesty known as “Hellion Hughes.”

  “And you wish to continue to accost the good public and nature with your games, boy.” His fingers twitched, vibrating the page, and he purposefully didn’t look toward the cigar box aligned at the edge of the table. Not like it’s filled with Niihau’s finest export, anyway. Closed his eyes, then dropped the paper and reached for the brandy and snifter again. “You only wished for me to quit smoking, my dear. One wish and I’ll keep it, by heaven.”

  Her voice softly remonstrated that he was keeping the letter of the law while breaking the spirit of it, trading smoke for drink.

  “I’ve not neglected my realm, my love.”

  Not yet.

  This time the glass shook so much he couldn’t bring it to his lips, and he finally set it back down, eyes finding the sheet he’d allowed to drop to the desktop. “What a waste, boy. A life to serve your realm and you waste it. Waste it all!” He coughed thickly, reaching for a pen to scrawl a dismissal, only to hear Karli’s voice chiding him once more; he was being too harsh, and boys will be boys.

  He closed his eyes. “If the braggart Anson allowed the boy into his realm, then I’ll not do different. If you want to kill yourself so far from
your home, so be it, boy.”

  He signed the paper, managed to take another long drink, then reached for the next report, habit and inertia more than anything driving him forward.

  9

  Orbital Insertion

  Park Place

  Former Prefecture VI

  15 December 3135

  Force Commander Casson massaged the controls of his Sun Cobra. Feathered the jump jets to bring the yaw under control as he plummeted through the lower atmosphere, having jettisoned the ablative cocoon. Fell toward a plateau on the world of Park Place; hurtled toward it at terminal velocity.

  “We’ve got bogeys angling in for another pass, Commander,” the voice of Senior Grade Lieutenant Jacobs spoke into his neurohelmet.

  His eyes found his secondary screen and toggled to the radar map, which brought up the familiar fluorescent green line and its endless circling, along with the blips showing incoming with relative speed and location. Incoming, fast. He clenched his jaw to open a general commline.

  “Okay, people, they got one free shot at us, let’s not give them another. They want to take some armor off us? Make ’em pay.”

  A chorus of enthusiastic responses clogged the line momentarily as he checked his own damage schematic. While the pair of Stingray medium aerospace fighters had splashed only a half ton of armor off his center torso on their first pass, he knew not to take the fighters lightly, especially because he was a sitting duck while he fell. With his attention split between trying to hit a target moving at extreme angles of deflection— something a snot-nosed flier could do without blinking an eye, but it required a little more work from the gray matter of a MechWarrior—and making sure he didn’t pass the point of no return on his downward plunge and forget to kick-on full thrust from the detachable jump jets mounted to the back and legs of his ’Mech before he hammered into the ground with enough force to crack—

  “Whoa, there, Casson,” he chided himself, softly enough to keep the commline from opening. He pulled in a deep breath filled with the funk of sweat, fear and exhilaration permeating the cockpit in an effort to calm his racing nerves. His eyes tracked the bogeys again, then slid to a third monitor displaying the schematic that showed both his Johnston highspeed extended-range particle projector cannons were fully charged and operational. “Let’s make this work.”

  It wasn’t just a case of this being his first combat since the debacle on Wyatt. No, he also carried the weight of history on his shoulders. He just had to go digging into some history books while studying the geography of Park Place. Just had to discover that the Free Worlds Guards had an entire battalion captured by the Fifteenth Dracons mercenary unit in 2940. It shouldn’t have made a difference. No difference at all.

  Yet it did. For him, this moment now seemed a stepping stone in the path of his life. His unit was attacking a world on which the Free Worlds League had suffered an ignominious defeat. And here he was, almost two centuries later, ready to make it right. To erase the black mark from history and raise the flag of Marik high once more.

  Warning Klaxons blared as the Stingrays angled near. Grabbing his right-hand joystick—eyes flicking continually back to the altitude readout—he centered the targeting reticule on the forward viewscreen on the fast-approaching fighters. His brain screaming through math he was never very good at, he made a last-ditch decision, brought the reticule forward to lead the fighters by several centimeters on the HUD and flexed his index finger.

  Twin beams of coruscating energy ate the space between his Sun Cobra and the passing fighters in an instant, as a return swipe of azure and ruby energy slashed from the nose and leading wing edges of the Stingrays. Heat eddies spiked, the heavy hair on his legs moving with the flow of the thick air.

  “Damn it!” Both beams missed. The enemy pilots had better luck, as two large lasers slashed across his ’Mech’s torso, vaporizing armor; almost a ton of metal sublimated away in the hellish wind. The Sun Cobra rocked under the assault, the keening whine of the mammoth gyroscope in the bowels of the ’Mech announcing that the machine was tapping his internal sense of balance through the neurohelmet to keep itself upright and in position, to not pulverize itself into the ground.

  A wicked grin spread over his face as an eyeblink later a veritable latticework of energy darts and streams of autocannon rounds crisscrossed the sky from a company of dropping ’Mechs. Enough found their mark to completely tear away the right wing of one Stingray, sending it spiraling down to its doom; the other, whether intimidated or low on fuel, quickly fled.

  His altitude reached the appropriate level and he braced for another spike of heat in the cockpit; stomping down with both feet on the pedals, he began blasting short bursts from his jump jets to bleed off velocity.

  “Looks like some ground bogeys have replaced the flyboys,” Jacobs said.

  Casson nodded, already zeroing in on the mixed light company of vehicles, ’Mechs and what appeared to be battle-armored troops at about ten klicks. Even at this distance the tail of dust behind the small armored column spoke volumes. “Heading our way. It appears they’ve brought out the welcome wagon, people.”

  “Would appear that way, sir,” Jacobs said.

  He increased the tempo of bursts of waste plasma through the magnetic baffles of the jump jet ports, each one pushing him harder and harder into the command couch, the five-point harness pressing uncomfortably on his crotch. “Well, we’d hate to disappoint them. Right, people?”

  Laughs echoed loudly, with plenty of “hell yeah” and “Lord, right” and “Unity!” thrown in the mix. He smiled, the frustration of the fighters taking free shots at his Cobra passing as he gauged what lay below. He ratcheted up the jump jets until their full thrust fought against gravity’s pull, and grunted at the fist of pressure momentarily crushing his body.

  With a final blast of spent energy, the Sun Cobra hammered into the ground. He flexed the Cobra’s knees to take up the excess energy, but Casson knew he’d have bruises to show for the landing.

  Explosive bolts detonated, the sound echoing triumphantly through the cockpit, as he detached the now-useless detachable jump jets. A quick check of his telemetry showed that his ’Mech was fully operational—minus some armor—and he toggled through several preloaded maps to verify the most accurate coordinates with his current location while waiting for the last of First Company to ground.

  He toggled open a new frequency. “ Deathclaw, do you read?”

  “Force Commander Casson,” the voice of newly appointed Captain Tullins answered promptly. “I believe I’ve a package for you.”

  “Two packages, Captain?”

  “Right, of course. Two packages. I’m reading you grounded?”

  “Right. Grounded and heading toward known Park Place defenders. About seventy klicks outside Park City.”

  “Then it would appear I’m set to drop both packages in line between the defenders and Park City?”

  “Confirmed, Captain.”

  “Confirmed, Force Commander. Good hunting.”

  “Of course, Captain. Always is.”

  He signed off the channel while moving the lefthand throttle forward, setting the Sun Cobra into a fast-paced lope to eat up the ground between him and the enemy forces.

  It was playing out exactly as the battle plans had dictated. The on-ground defenders mustered less than two companies, almost all older materiel. And with one company of troops on the ground and the Death-claw about to drop two more companies between those forces and their capital . . . Park Place would fall before the sun set.

  Amur, Oriente

  Oriente Protectorate

  Torrian Dolcat sucked on his teeth as he finished watching the holomessage he’d just composed in his small office buried deep underground.

  With sharp, concise movements, he ejected the message cube, stood and moved over to a wall-mounted counter. A large monitor took up most of the wall above it. Setting the player off to the side, he pulled a cord attached to the wall away from its moorings a
nd snapped it into the back of the small machine. He then tapped on the keyboard inlaid on the countertop, bringing up several programs. The first almost made him laugh; a standard clean sweep. Might as well use an IndustrialMech to open a can of beans.

  Almost before he finished initiating the function, the mammoth computer beeped its readiness and Torrian cycled open the window for the program that required the processing power of the machine into which he tapped. Located several hundred meters from his current position, the stacked mainframes usually slogged through military hologram environments, created by a covert division of Kensai Holographiks, for secret military training operations.

  A smile revealed his perfect white teeth as he slotted the data cube and executed his program. While he might have sat back down to wait, as this operation would take a while, he always enjoyed standing and waiting, peering into the depths of the monitor as though he could see the genius of his work unfolding in endless warps and woofs of threading ones and zeros: contemplating his encryption code at work.

  A standard encryption system used a single complex function applied to the data and key to generate the cipher text. While this was fine for low-level security, it was often all too easy for a would-be code breaker to determine the type of algorithmic function used in the encryption, and a sufficient number of hours with the right computer software would yield a result.

  For top security, a variable encryption system was used. In place of a single encryption function, an exceedingly large family of functions were used, with a randomly determined function applied to the data and key each time, ensuring a duel variable, exponentially increasing the difficulty of breaking an encryption.

  However, for some things in Torrian’s line of work, an even greater level of security was needed—and hence his genius: the integration of a third encryption template across both the data and the key once the cipher text was generated.