Warrior: En Garde (The Warrior Trilogy, Book One): BattleTech Legends, #57

by Michael A. Stackpole

  As the green light flashed on Justin’s control panel, he looked up through the cockpit canopy to see the massive bronze doors opening before him. The arboretum’s muted light writhed over the Chinese ideograms and symbols cast into the doors. It also revealed the damage done by stray missiles. Such wanton destruction of rare and ancient artifacts brought a new throb of anger to Justin’s pulse. Once more, he caught and subdued the emotion.

  As in the Factory, the Cathay arena had been built with holovision in mind. Scattered throughout the massive forest were holovision cameras that would record every instant of the coming battle. Hidden in the brush or disguised by vines and Spanish moss, the cameras relayed everything to a legion of editors, who fed their pictures to the master editor. He, in turn, sculpted an exciting program and sent it out for broadcast.

  Justin stepped the Centurion forward and shivered involuntarily. So like the rainforests on Spica! He adjusted his scanner controls so that the magscanners would operate, but would only overlay images of anything ’Mech-sized. He did not want holovision cameras appearing all over his screens.

  From what he’d seen of Wolfson’s earlier fights, his foe would probably be coming at him from almost directly across the arena. Justin quickly studied the narrow path leading into the thick rain forest and believed that he recognized Wolfson’s position from one battle vid. South here, and I’ll hit that broken canyon area.

  He turned the Centurion south and hurried through the low brush. He squeezed his ’Mech between some tight tree stands, then loped out onto the low ground. The groundskeepers had provided a sandy riverbed to break up the area between large islands of greenery. A perfect place to play hide and seek, Justin thought, with a knowing smile.

  Suddenly, his sensors exploded and burned the Rifleman’s yellow silhouette onto his forward screen. The ’Mech sprang from behind a hillock and leveled its arms at Justin. The large laser on the Rifleman’s right arm bathed the Centurion’s right arm with its scarlet fire. Armor boiled and melted on Yen-Lo-Wang’s limb, but held even as the Rifleman’s autocannon ripped chunks of armor away from the same arm.

  Justin, ignoring the medium laser that flashed at him and missed, brought up his autocannon. He dropped his jaw and opened a radio line to Wolfson. “It’s all over, Billy. At this range, you’re history.”

  Justin tightened his finger on the autocannon’s trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  Chapter 31

  SOLARIS VII

  RAHNESHIRE

  LYRAN COMMONWEALTH

  20 APRIL 3027

  “Gray!” Kym’s silvered fingernails sank into Noton’s arm. “What’s happening?”

  Noton’s drink splashed to the ground, forgotten. He leaned forward, ignorant of the pain in his arm, to better see the image on the viewing screen. “The autocannon! It’s jammed!”

  “Oh, God!” Kym’s breathless whisper was trampled beneath the stampede of comments from the other spectators in Shang’s private box. “He’s got nothing else!”

  Noton wrinkled his forehead as he strained to see. “No, he has those titanium nails,” he murmured. Like some half-remembered invocation, he repeated the words, “The nails and his brain.”

  Jammed, dammit! Justin spun his Centurion back behind a hill as the Rifleman’s left arm appeared. He saw the flash of the large laser reflected from a thousand shiny leaves. The staccato bark of autocannon fire hammered through the jungle, but neither weapon touched his Centurion.

  Blake’s Blood! Justin watched as his helpful computer outlined the Rifleman’s capabilities. Their speeds matched exactly, but the Rifleman’s weaponry grossly outclassed the Centurion. Even if my damned autocannon worked!

  Justin sent his Centurion sprinting north. He worked around the tight spaces, then swung back into line with them in case Wolfson decided to follow on a direct line. Behind him, Wolfson sent bolt after bolt of coherent light burning through the forest. None of it touched the Centurion, but Justin had the distinctly unsettling feeling that Wolfson merely wanted to bracket him.

  He’s playing with me. Idiot…he should finish me.

  Justin glanced at his own heat levels and saw that his ’Mech was handling the buildup admirably. His status monitor showed the blinking outline of an autocannon shell in the Pontiac 100’s breech. He lifted the ’Mech’s right arm and rotated it. Damn! Armor melted over the gas exhaust port!

  The bole of a tree exploded on Justin’s left as the Rifleman’s left autocannon launched its cargo of metal. Justin’s phantom left hand dropped the rear laser’s crosshair on target and loosed a bolt of ruby fire at his tormentor. It sliced armor from the Rifleman’s torso, which made Wolfson bring his ’Mech up short.

  I’m still dangerous, Wolfson. Justin smiled and slipped his Centurion deeper into the rainforest. Don’t worry. I’ll be back.

  A smile crept over Noton’s lips as he watched the Centurion vanish amid the thick forest. “Yes, Justin, yes. Get away.” Noton sat back as side-by-side comparisons of the status of the two ’Mechs bled onto the screen.

  “There! The Capellan is in trouble.” A white-haired man whose thick middle and scarlet nose betrayed his area of true expertise, gestured toward the screen with a frothy mug of Timbiqui. “Never should have modified that monster. Armor’s almost gone on the only weapon he’s got. Rifleman’s gonna kill him.”

  Kym shot Noton a worried glance. Noton patted her hands, then turned and stood. “Is that your guess, or your opinion?”

  The drunkard straightened up. “Son, in my day, I blew Centurions apart with glee out there in real battles.” He looked at the others in the room. “Fought with the Tenth Lyran Regulars, I did, and sent Marik Centurions home in pieces.”

  Noton nodded, then leaned forward. His voice dropped to a bass whisper, but no one had difficulty hearing him. “Then you’d not be afraid to accept a bet for one thousand C-bills, would you?”

  The man swallowed hard, but could not resist the challenge. “Done.”

  Noton smiled and surveyed the audience. “Anyone else?”

  Justin examined the autocannon’s exhaust port again. Though the weapon used caseless ammo, it still needed to vent the explosive gases produced when the propellant exploded in the breech. Without the open port, the gun’s built-in safeguards would not allow the weapon to fire. If it did, the gun would burst and could possibly explode all the ammo in the Centurion.

  Hopeless. It’ll take Tung a week to open that tube up again. He’ll probably have to replace it. Justin glanced at his monitors to see if the Rifleman had continued pursuit, but his foe had stayed put. I don’t want to do this, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to carry live ammo for a weapon I can’t use.

  Justin punched a button. A port normally used for loading ammo slid open in the Centurion’s back. Justin flipped a switch, then punched the button again. In a long stream, the autocannon’s shells, all two hundred rounds, shot out over the green landscape. Once the ammo had been utterly evacuated, the port snapped shut.

  Justin glanced at his monitor. Why hasn’t the Rifleman moved? I couldn’t have damaged anything inside. Justin punched up the computer projection of damage done by his laser blast. Ninety percent chance of internal damage… Even so, at best, his engine is kicking out a little extra heat.

  Wait! Justin flicked his scanners over from magnetics to infrared. The jungle faded away into a background of blacks, blues, and dark greens. The Rifleman, where Justin could see it between blue stripes of tree trunks, glowed orange and red.

  Justin almost laughed aloud. Yes, how stupid of me not to have seen it sooner… Wolfson almost fried himself running after me while firing wildly like that. Justin flexed the Centurion’s left hand and looked at the gleaming blades on the last three fingers. Smiling to himself, Justin turned his ’Mech to face in the direction of the Rifleman.

  Ready or not, here I come, Billy Wolfson. One of us has lived too long.

  The Centurion’s loping run carried it around toward the east. Justin a
llowed the Rifleman tantalizing glimpses of his ’Mech as he brought it in closer. If I can just keep the useless right arm covering my flank, he can shoot all he wants. Sweat stung Justin’s eyes. Gotta be close.

  The Rifleman turned. The silhouette pulsed yellow-white on the lower part of its arms. Twin laser bolts ignited tunnels through the green canopy, but neither struck the Centurion.

  Justin watched on his monitors as the Rifleman continued to track his ’Mech. Wolfson kept the larger machine turning slowly to match the Centurion’s orbit. As breaks in the woods allowed, Justin made the orbit decay. Like an errant planetoid, the Centurion slowly spiraled in toward the hottest thing in the artificial arena-solar-system.

  Again and again, Wolfson lashed out at the Centurion with his large lasers. The beams continued to miss the swiftly moving Centurion, but succeeded in burning an open kill zone 300 meters around the ’Mech. When heat made using the larger lasers impractical, Wolfson blasted away at the Centurion with his autocannons, though their voracious appetite for ammo soon tempered their use.

  Justin tightened the circle again, and Wolfson reacted as though Justin were a moth to flame, never imagining that his Rifleman might be a neck to Justin’s noose. Justin’s view of the Rifleman flared and vanished, but he saw what he had been waiting for. Now!

  The white-haired warrior thrust a fist in the air. “Yes, the Centurion dies now!”

  Noton stared unbelieving at the screen. Justin’s Centurion appeared on the fringe of the kill zone. He circled fast, while the Rifleman, turned at the waist, tracked centimeters behind him. “No, God, no!” Noton slammed his right fist into his leg, and felt Kym’s hands tighten on his left arm. “Not again, Justin! Not what I did to you.”

  The Rifleman’s arms tipped up and came around behind as the torso twisted back. The old man laughed in triumph, and the first tears sprang to Kym’s eyes. Noton tasted bile at the back of the throat. “Better I had killed you, Justin.”

  Justin saw the Rifleman’s arms swing toward the sky. He planted the Centurion’s left foot and cut sharply to the right. He raced straight in at the Rifleman’s back, making himself an easy target.

  The Rifleman’s arms snapped down easily, and Wolfson brought all four weapons to bear on the suicidal Centurion. One heavy laser washed the remaining armor from the right arm of Justin’s ’Mech, locking the Centurion’s shoulder in a tangle of fused myomer muscles. The second laser vaporized armor on the Centurion’s left thigh. The right autocannon’s hail tore armor from the Centurion’s left breast, while its twin ripped jagged scars across the ’Mech’s right thigh.

  Undaunted by the damage the Rifleman had inflicted, the Centurion stiffened its left hand into a spearhead. Safely inside the firing range of the Rifleman’s long arms, Justin hesitated just long enough for Wolfson to realize his error. Tightening the grip of his phantom hand, Justin stabbed the ’Mech’s left hand into the Rifleman.

  The titanium blades slashed like a meat cleaver through the Rifleman’s inferior rear armor. Coolant shot out in glowing yellow-green geysers as the nails slashed heat sinks apart. Effortlessly, they punctured the Rifleman’s engine shielding.

  The heat of the resulting explosion washed silver fire over Justin’s screens, but he merely flicked off the infrared without a thought. He closed Yen-Lo-Wang’s left fist around the Rifleman’s gyrostabilizer—snapping the titanium nails off—and ripped the crushed mechanism free of the dying ’Mech’s body.

  Wolfson’s ’Mech tottered and fell, even as Justin threw his Centurion backward. Like a vengeful djinn freed at last from its bottle-prison, the plasma powering the Rifleman blossomed into a gold-white ball of roiling energy. It lifted the Rifleman up as though the sixty-ton ’Mech were a toy. It sucked the soul from the jerking, twitching machine, then dripped what remained into a fiery puddle at the feet of Justin’s Centurion.

  The announcer turned and stepped away from Justin Xiang. The holovision camera and its harsh light tracked the “personality” and let shadows cloak Justin. The commentator smiled and stared into the camera, despite its dazzling glare. “There you have it, fight fans. Justin Xiang’s exclusive post-fight statement, and what a scathing condemnation of Federated Suns fighters it was! Only on TBC, the Home of Champions!”

  Justin scowled and fought his way through the crowd of media people. He nodded at the twin mountains of muscle the Liao arena had posted as guards by his dressing room. One of them opened the door while the other kept the crowd at bay.

  Safely inside, Justin leaned against the door and relished the steel’s chill. Sweat still dripped from his black hair and ran in streams down his temples and neck. He smiled, then levered himself away from the doorway. “Ever come that close, Gray?”

  The bald MechWarrior shook his head. He tossed Justin a thick white towel, and waited for him to wipe off his face before answering. “No. You came closer than any MechWarrior I know.”

  Justin snorted and raised his artificial fist. “But not closer than I’ve been before.” He patted his neck with the towel. “That tactic, the one Wolfson used, was the same one that Rifleman used against me on Kittery. Wolfson didn’t realize that the tactic is flashy and looks great on vid, but it has a flaw.”

  Noton narrowed his eyes. “Weak back armor on a Rifleman.”

  Justin smiled. “Yeah. I’d not thought about it, really, until I stopped running. My brother Dan—he’s with the Kell Hounds—described a move an aerojock named Seamus Fitzpatrick pulled in his Slayer. He did an Immelmann and blasted the back of a Rifleman while it was still shooting at the rest of his flight.”

  Noton smiled. “Fancy flying.”

  “Fancy, indeed.” Justin shrugged. “Anyway, Billy must have learned about the tactic that got me and tried to repeat it. But you know what they say…”

  “Yes?”

  “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Justin pulled off his cooling vest and tossed it in a hamper. “Where’s Kym?”

  Gray smiled. “She said she’d catch up with us later. I’ll be your transport until we find her. I think she has a surprise for you.”

  “Great!” said Justin as he turned on the shower and a steaming curtain passed between them. “I love surprises.”

  Chapter 32

  SOLARIS VII

  RAHNESHIRE

  LYRAN COMMONWEALTH

  20 APRIL 3027

  “Report.”

  Kym stretched and sipped her coffee. “This goes directly to the minister. Tonight I heard Gray Noton say that he was the one who wounded Justin. Justin Xiang is innocent.”

  Static popped in the speaker, then the male voice spoke with its customary emotionlessness. “Explain.”

  Kym smiled at the server and waved away the coffee refill the girl offered. “In his most recent fight, Xiang found himself in a situation that matched his report of his wounding on Kittery. The Rifleman used the same tactic—tracking right, inverting the guns, and tracking left—that got Xiang previously. As all that was going on, Noton said, ‘Not again, Justin. Not what I did to you. Better I had killed you…’”

  The discarnate voice slowed. “Implication: Noton was the Rifleman pilot who wounded Xiang on Kittery. Noton was off planet at that time. Conclusion: your deduction is probably correct.”

  Kym licked her lips. “Do I tell Xiang?”

  Another static-punctuated pause answered for her. “No. Not on my authorization. Information will be forwarded fastest by ComStar. Proceed normally.”

  Kym nodded. She lingered thoughtfully over her coffee even though the meeting had ended. I am his mistress. Though he tries to hide it from me because I am from the Federated Suns, I can see how bitter he is. She shivered, remembering what he had told her. He’s giving back as good as he got in his trial, but it will consume him.

  She finished her coffee and glanced at the hidden speaker. I hope I can tell him soon. It may be the only chance to save Justin Allard from Justin Xiang.

  Kym buttoned her overcoat and raised h
er collar. The usual evening mist had actually become a drizzle. Retracing her steps toward the alley, she stayed beneath as many awnings as possible to keep the oily moisture from her clothes. Thinking of little more than that, she entered the alley.

  Shadows swirled around her as a hand seized at her from the darkness. Kym was too fast for it, however. She grabbed the thumb, locked the wrist, then gave it an added twist that splintered it with a wet crack. Then she spun her attacker off into the shadows. As she began to step forward to finish him off, something heavy slammed into the back of her neck and the world exploded.

  Stunned, Kym pitched forward and splashed helplessly into a scummy puddle on the alley floor. The tepid water clung to her face and hair like vomitus. Rough hands grabbed her by the armpits and dragged her deeper into the alley. Where it widened to form a small ferrocrete court behind the apartment building, the men tossed her at the steps like a sack of wet laundry.

  A booted toe slid roughly beneath her right shoulder to flip her over onto her back. “You see, Justin. I told you she had a surprise for you.” Noton’s words had an ominous undertone. “Sneaky as a Javelin, this one.”

  Kym looked at Justin, but the alley’s feeble light backlit him so that only his silhouette was visible. Yet, she almost felt Justin’s fury. Rage gathered in his dark outline like lightning within a thunderhead. He hugged his left arm to his chest. My God, she thought. He’s the one who hit me from behind. That hand!

  There was agony in Justin’s halting words. “Where were you just now? What were you doing?” His voice begged for any shred of a believable story, but the anger that shuddered across his shoulders threatened to mock anything she might offer.