The Last Charge

by Jason M. Hardy

  “Bloody hell!” Anson yelled, his voice shaking off rust like machine gears that had been long idle. “Goddamn that woman and her shit-brained family and her bloody advisers and her worthless, piss-brained people! I would cut out her eyes and fill her skull with maggots if she was here! She is a blight, a boil, a festering pustule on the Marik name! Damn her and her worthless children straight to the hottest hell there is!”

  “It’s good to have you—” Daggert started to say, but Anson Marik was not done.

  “Children!” he said. “Stupid bloody children playing with toys! Playing stupid goddamned bloody games! What are they worth? What the hell are they worth? They are useless as rulers, useless as human beings! Rip off their limbs, grind their goddamned bodies into paste and feed them to pigs, because that’s all they’re good for! What are they? What in holy hell are they? Infants! They’re all infants! Infants crying for their toys, infants complaining if they don’t have their bloody way! That’s how this place is run, that’s how every bloody place everywhere is run! By infants! There are millions, there are billions of bloody people out there, and they’re nothing to them! They are grist for the mill! They are bloody pavement stones for these arrogant pieces of shit to walk on! They pave the Inner Sphere with the bodies of these people, then call themselves great. What have they done? They kill and steal, they play their games and they call themselves noble! They call themselves heroes! And they talk to their people, and they tell those idiots, those sheep, that they’re doing it all for them! They make the goddamned fools believe it! And they rejoice, the idiots and the morons and the bloody goddamned infants they call their leaders, they rejoice because some of them get to kill, and some of them get to die, and all so they can put a piece-of-shit name on a piece-of-shit planet! And that’s what they do, playing their games, working on their reasons, always telling themselves we need to do this, we need to do this. Always creating their need, always finding an excuse, always making like they’re bloody sorry to be at war when the one thing, the only thing these rotten pus-brained dirtbags fear is peace. They hate it! How do you give out medals in peace? How do you prove who warriors are in peace? We can’t have peace—we don’t have any bloody idea what it’s worth! We don’t know how to survive it. We only know how to kill, we only know how to tell other people to die. We’ll tell ourselves to die if we need to, because that’s what we do. Because we’re bloody children. Because we have never, ever discovered anything to do besides fight over our goddamned toys. To make the Inner Sphere a gigantic damned toy box, and pull planets back and forth between us. We think it’s all a game, we think we can bloody win! Kill enough people, and you win! But those people want to kill you, and they want to win too, and everyone wants to kill everyone else, and that’s the way it’s been for centuries and that’s the way it is now and that’s the way it will always be because we have no goddamned idea how to do anything else. We act like we are the cream of the goddamned crop, the best people there are, the only people with the vision to lead the idiots under us. What vision do we have? We have visions of death. We have visions of killing, of killing, of killing, of killing enough to get what we want. That doesn’t make us noble. That doesn’t make us brave. It makes us cowering goddamned bloody animals!”

  Daggert didn’t realize his mouth was hanging open until midway through Anson’s tirade, and even when he noticed it he didn’t get around to closing it for a few moments. Anson’s anger built like a whirlwind, his voice echoing and swirling around the room and gaining power with each word. He roared in a way Daggert had never heard, even though he thought he had encountered every bellow the captain-general had in him. But there was something in Anson’s voice that Daggert had never heard before, and he didn’t place it until just before the captain-general finished speaking. It was something very like grief.

  Daggert didn’t speak for a few moments after Anson fell silent. He waited for the room to be silent again, waited for some of the ringing in his ears to fade. When he spoke, he spoke quietly, in a conscious effort to balance the volume of Anson’s rage.

  “You are unfair,” he said. “Wars in the Inner Sphere have been fought for every reason there is, the noble and the ignoble. There are leaders of greatness, and leaders of weakness. It is not all as you say it is.”

  When Anson replied, his voice was petulant. “It seems that way to me.”

  A reply jumped to Daggert’s lips, but his sense of decorum stopped it. Then he remembered that he wanted to quit anyway. He had more freedom to speak than anyone under Anson Marik ever had. And freedom was quite useless if it was never employed.

  “The reason it seems that way to you,” Daggert said, “is that is all you have ever been. You have always ruled as a child, and so you can’t understand that other people have ruled in other ways. Most of your anger, most of your words, are directed at yourself.”

  Anson was silent for a long while. When he finally spoke, it was with a weight of authority.

  “Are you trying to get yourself fired or executed?”

  Daggert smiled wanly, in spite of himself, in spite of everything. “Fired, preferably. But firing me or killing me won’t change anything either of us said. You know why you said it. And you know what you were thinking when you did.”

  Anson was quiet again. He wiped his hand across his forehead, and left a trickle of blood smeared there. He had damaged his hands in tearing apart his desk.

  “I can only rule the way I’ve ruled,” he said. “I only know what I know. Fight for my name. When we are hit, hit back. Keep your enemies in fear. That’s all.”

  “That’s not enough.”

  Anson laughed, a short, bitter, joyless sound. “Nothing is going to be enough. You know it as well as I do. We can make all the preparations in the world, and it’s not going to be enough.”

  “We don’t know that,” Daggert said, and he tried to sound confident.

  “Listen, Daggert, if I need someone to blow smoke up my ass, I’ll call in Krist. I kept you on because you always give it to me straight, and I figured you’d be even more blunt when you didn’t have to pretend you liked me. Don’t act like the impossible is possible. Don’t stand there and lie to me.”

  And then, suddenly, in a burst of light that no one else could see, Daggert understood. He understood everything. He knew why he was there. He knew why he hadn’t been allowed to resign, and the reasons had nothing to do with Anson Marik. There was something else directing his path—fate, destiny, God, whatever—and Daggert finally understood what it was up to. He knew what he had to do, and he knew exactly what he had to say to Anson Marik.

  He looked the captain-general square in the eye, and he saw a little surprise flash on Anson’s face. He had likely never seen such intensity from his tactical adviser before.

  “We can win this battle.”

  Anson was not easily swayed. “You’re full of shit,” he replied.

  “No. I’m not. We can win. It will not be the victory you might expect, or the victory you want. But you have a chance. A new opportunity. You can grab a victory no one will be expecting you to grab.”

  “I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.”

  No, I wouldn’t expect you to, Daggert thought. Aloud, he said. “Give me some time. I’ll explain it to you as soon as I understand it myself.”

  “Fine. Do whatever you want,” Anson said. “If you think we can win, I’ll listen.”

  “Thank you, my lord,” he said. Then he left.

  He would have to hurry. There wouldn’t be much time to sleep or eat. The education of Anson Marik had begun. And Daggert only had a week or two to finish it.

  20

  Helmdown, Helm

  Lyran Commonwealth

  22 May 3138

  It had been at least four days since a unit commander had last told Trillian, “We’ll be leaving in a day. Maybe two.” A seemingly unending series of supplies had been packed into DropShips, ’Mechs had been repaired and rerepaired and then polish
ed a few times, and the soldiers on the ground had convinced themselves, as soldiers tend to do, that the terror and chaos of the battlefield were somehow preferable to the interminable waiting.

  There was no question what the next destination would be. Not since word had gone out that Anson Marik had bought his way onto Stewart, and that he was trying to rally his troops around him. The leader of the Marik-Stewart Commonwealth was waiting for them a single jump away—where else should they go?

  All three commanders now knew they were going to take their respective armies to Stewart. There was no mystery. But still, no one left.

  Trillian was as tired of sitting around as any of the grunts. The political situation on the planet was stable. It seemed certain that the forces would attack Marik troops before they attacked each other, and that was about as good as things were going to get. If they got off this bleak gray rock and did some fighting, there would be winners and losers and a whole new political situation for her to play with. She had spent enough time waiting for the movement to happen; the time had come to push things forward. So she started with the one commander she trusted.

  “Why are you still here?” she asked.

  Roderick looked around her small, dingy office. He sat in a plain wooden chair, slouching like it was actually comfortable. “Because you asked me to come here.”

  “No, no, no, not here, here.” She pointed out her window, which provided little more than a view of a dingy brick wall of a neighboring building. “On Helm.”

  “Because no one else has left yet.”

  “So?”

  Roderick twisted his chair lightly from side to side. “It doesn’t make much sense for us to go there alone. Why face the Silver Hawks and whoever else they’ve lined up by ourselves, when we could do it with two other perfectly capable armies?”

  “That makes sense. Have you asked Vedet and Alaric when they’re leaving?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did they say?”

  “They wouldn’t give me any specific information.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  Roderick shrugged. “I don’t know. It might be an ego thing. Each commander wants to be the one to order the charge forward, and if they adopt someone else’s departure date, that will make it seem like they’re following someone else’s plan.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “And also highly probable.”

  Trillian dropped her head, letting her forehead rest in her hands. “Is this the way grown-ups fight wars?”

  “Grown-ups avoid wars,” he said. “But when they’re forced to fight them, the truth is, yes, it often ends up this way. Occupational hazard, I guess.”

  “Great. All right, for the record—if I could get one or both of the others to settle on a date to leave, you would be able to somehow set aside your ego and leave on the date they chose, right?”

  “In a heartbeat.”

  “And I can quote you on that?”

  “Feel free.”

  “Okay. Would you like to come with me to talk to the others?”

  Roderick smiled and slouched a little more. “Not on your life. But you can tell them I said hi.”

  She smiled wanly. “Great. Okay, you can go.”

  He stood, and a little of his nonchalant demeanor went away. “I know you’re in a vise here, Trill. I know you’ve been put right in the middle. Honestly, if I thought there was anything I could do to help, I would.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Trillian said. “You’re the nice one. Got it.”

  “Just so long as that’s noted,” he said. “Good luck.”

  She watched him go, then frowned at dust dancing in the faded sunlight pushing its way through the small, thick window to her right. This all felt like déjà vu to Trillian—cycling between the three camps, trying to track down each commander to convince him it was time to move. Vedet and Alaric had a deep and understandable mistrust of each other, and getting them to collaborate, to work together and trust each other, was a task that seemed impossible at best….

  She jumped to her feet. “Good hell!” she said out loud. How could she be so dense? Why had it taken her this long to figure it out?

  She stormed out of her office, cursing herself as she walked. It was so obvious, now that she understood it.

  She’d been trying to get Vedet and Alaric to trust each other, but that wasn’t her job. Her job was to get them moving while hopefully keeping them from killing each other. That was it. And in diplomatic work, it was always better to work with the tools you had in front of you than to try to forge new ones.

  She had the two men’s mistrust. It was beautiful in its consistency and completeness. And she had failed entirely to use it.

  She kept cursing at herself as she made her way to the Clan Wolf camp, but at least she knew the campaign would continue before the week was out.

  * * *

  A good intelligence officer gets his operatives to give him the information he wants. A great intelligence officer can do the same thing without the operatives ever knowing who they were working for or just what they were doing.

  Trillian was not an intelligence officer, but she’d spent enough time in the information arena to know some of the tricks. It helped that she wasn’t gathering information—she was planting.

  The air smelled cleaner, fresher to her. She walked with a new spring in her step. Being freed from the burden of making people like you or trust you was liberating; being disliked was so much easier.

  She looked for Clanners with the Alpha Trinary insignia on their uniforms. She didn’t want to use Star Captain Xeno for this particular task—she wouldn’t say they trusted each other, but her relationship with him was less hostile than with any other member of Clan Wolf. It wouldn’t do to have that relationship destroyed too quickly.

  So she looked at some of his subordinates. She didn’t need to know their names; she just needed them to walk slow enough to let her talk at them.

  She caught up with the first one she saw, a woman whose chin was level with Trillian’s forehead. Trillian didn’t bother with a wave or a smile or small talk. She plunged ahead as if they knew each other and had already been talking for a while.

  “Securing New Edinburgh will be a bitch compared to this, right?”

  “We are not there yet.” The voice was flat, dismissive, trying to end the conversation before it started.

  “But it’s good to plan ahead, right? I mean, quiaff?” The Clanner responded with a cold glare, and Trillian felt the familiar thrill of successfully being underestimated.

  “The thing is, it’s going to be a question of supplies as much as anything. You invade a city, you tend to break it pretty good. If you want the people you just conquered to relax a little, to feel, you know, positive toward you, then you need to fix what you broke, and hopefully fix it right. That’s not the kind of supplies we normally have, right? Fighting supplies are different than fixing supplies.”

  The Clanner was walking faster, and Trillian was almost jogging to keep up.

  “I still do not have a reason to be interested in what you are saying,” the Clanner said.

  “Well, it’s a matter of timing, isn’t it? Look, if you go from the start and say you’re leaving in two days, then estimate the initial invasion will take…”

  She saw the expression on the Clanner’s face and knew the fight was almost over. “I’m sorry,” Trillian said. “Did I say something I shouldn’t?”

  “The timing of our departure has not been decided yet,” the Clanner said.

  Trillian kept her face blank and blinked a few times. “Oh, right, right, you probably haven’t heard. Well, information gets out slowly sometimes. But look, assume I know what I’m talking about. Now…”

  The conversation didn’t last much longer. The Clanner had clearly become distracted, and she hadn’t been that interested in talking to Trillian in the first place. Trillian let her walk away, and turned her sights on another member of Alpha Trinary. />
  Spreading rumors would be a lot easier if the Clans liked gossip, she thought.

  * * *

  She was ignored many times, dismissed almost as many, but eventually she—and Klaus, who was also wandering through the Wolf camp—planted their seed in enough Clan minds to fulfill their purpose. People would be talking now, and some of them would be convinced that they knew what they were talking about. Now all she had to do was make sure someone was listening.

  She had styled herself in what she always thought of as her executive domanitrix look—shiny leather boots, high-collared, uniform-like blue blouse and hair slicked back and pulled tight. She always wanted to carry a riding crop when she dressed like this, but she thought that would be over the top.

  The look suited her purposes perfectly—the duke would think she was trying to order him around, but would still assume she was a lightweight and would be dismissive. His arrogance would play right into her hands.

  When she walked into his office, his face showed only dismay. Which was just fine. She walked toward his desk and stood across from him.

  “Duke Vedet, I’m here in an official capacity as a representative of the archon. It is time to move to Stewart, and she requests that you tell her exactly when you plan to depart.”

  “I haven’t decided the date of our departure yet,” Vedet said primly.

  “Right. And the archon’s telling you to do it. Now.”

  Vedet clearly did not like looking up at her, so he stood as well and moved from behind the desk, walking closer to Trillian. “The archon has been in power long enough to know that when she doesn’t have the power to enforce an order, it’s usually not going to be followed.”

  Trillian spoke harshly, trying to punch each individual word out of her mouth. “So you will not choose a date?”