Tactics of Duty

by William H. Keith

  "Do I detect some bitterness at that? Or is it jealousy?"

  "Jealous? Of my father? I don't think so."

  "Bitter, then. About having him come and rescue you, as you put it."

  "Maybe. Maybe that's it." He sighed. "I think, Ellen, that I'm just very, very tired. I'm tired of trying to live up to the image expected of the son of the great Grayson Carlyle. I'm tired of living in his shadow, tired of trying to live up to the standards of tactical brilliance and leadership he set years before I was even born, tired of being compared to him, tired of never, never being quite good enough...."

  "There is another explanation, of course."

  "Oh? And what is that?"

  "That you're feeling sorry for yourself."

  "Maybe that too." It was too much trouble to refute the charge. Besides, it didn't matter much, one way or the other. Nothing seemed to matter much, anymore.

  "You thought about chucking it? About giving the whole thing up?"

  Alex turned his head, trying to focus on Ellen. Somehow, in the past few moments, the room's decor had been returned to the blue-green movements of the Tomo abstract. Had he ordered that? He couldn't remember. Still, it wasn't unpleasant anymore. It was almost ... restful ...

  "What ... do you mean?"

  "Just wondering." She was continuing to study the readout pad in her hand. "I mean, if you're not happy piloting a 'Mech, what else would you want to do?" When he didn't answer right away, she pushed ahead. "After all, Alex, it's not as though you have to live up to your father's ideals, your father's plans for your future, is it?"

  "He didn't make me become a MechWarrior," he replied. But was that strictly true? The son of Grayson Death Carlyle and Lori Kalmar could hardly help but soak up the mythos, the language, the very atmosphere of what it meant to be a mercenary MechWarrior. Surely, there'd been the unspoken assumption all along that Alexander Carlyle would pilot a 'Mech someday. He could remember playing in 'Mech simulators when he was six years old and sitting around in the regiment's barracks lounge listening to the vets' war stories. He'd wanted to be a MechWarrior for as long as he could remember, not so much out of any thirst for glory or love of danger, but because he quite simply knew nothing else.

  For several months, though, ever since the end of the Glengarry campaign, he'd been wondering if it might not be better to strike out on his own, to get away from the Legion—away from his parents, away from the men like Major McCall who'd been his mentors and his role models almost since he'd learned to walk. He'd thought about that a lot. He had some money—probably enough to buy passage to Galatea or one of the other big, mercenary hiring centers ... maybe even Outreach. Forget about all that officer stuff and the responsibility of command. He'd hire out as an enlisted MechWarrior in some other merc unit, or even sign with a House unit.

  Of course, he'd have to change his name....

  Damn it, could he ever escape his past, escape who and what he was?

  It was possible. The three-dimensional volume of space known as the Inner Sphere was enormous beyond human comprehension. With a thousand worlds or more to choose from, he ought to be able to find a place for himself, a place where he was not known as the Hero of Glengarry ... or as Grayson Carlyle's son.

  More worrisome by far, though, were the conflicting thoughts raised by Ellen's question about what he would do if he were no longer a MechWarrior. On the one hand, he knew nothing else, could imagine doing and being nothing else. On the other, though, was the secret dread—one rarely examined and then never at all closely—that the seven months' campaign on Glengarry had crippled him emotionally. What had Ellen called it? PTSD? "Combat fatigue" sounded more to the point.

  He felt, quite frankly, like he'd lost that vital warrior's edge, the keenness of mind and reflexes and senses that alone allowed a man to pilot a 'Mech in combat and survive. Recent training runs in the Legion's simulators had not been encouraging at all. The readouts indicated that he'd slowed by nearly twenty-five percent, that he tended to think about things now instead of reacting by training and battle-honed instinct. A skilled 'Mech pilot acted as though his Battle-Mech was his own body. "Don't think so much!" Vernon Artman, the regimental weapons master, had told him time after time. "You've got to be one with your 'Mech!"

  One with his 'Mech? For months now, Alex had been driving his huge machine rather than becoming the perfect fusion of organic brain and steel-armored machine that was expected of any good Mech Warrior.

  What he had not dared to mention to anyone—especially Anders—was that every time he'd climbed into a simulator in the past four months, he once again heard Davis Clay's dying screams.

  He never noticed when Ellen Jamison removed the circlet and left the room; he slept soundly for a time.

  In fact, the dream didn't wake him again until it was very nearly light.

  2

  The Residence, Dunkeld

  Glengarry, Skye March

  Federated Commonwealth

  0915 Hours, 10 March 3057

  "Tha' bluidy wee Sasunnachs!..."

  Davis McCall slumped back in his chair, his normally ruddy complexion gone so pale that the thick mottling of freckles and age spots across his face seemed a dark, sharp-edged brown by comparison. He reached up with one meaty hand and ran his fingers through his brush of red beard and hair, hair that long ago had begun shading to silver at the temples and around the ears.

  He was in the lounge of the Legion's recreation area, a broad, low-ceilinged room with a sunken gaming area in the middle and numerous partly enclosed telecom stations around the periphery. At his back, a small group of Legionnaires was engaged in a vigorous exchange of good-natured insults and wagering as two of their number guided holographic images of a pair of BattleMechs in electronic combat with one another.

  They seemed to be paying no heed to the big Caledonian with his considerable bulk squeezed into one of the communications cubicles.

  Good. McCall continued staring at the legend glowing on the large vidscreen in front of him.

  END HPG TRANSMISSION

  CHARGE CB 932

  THANK YOU FOR USING COMSTAR

  "Angus, Angus, y' wee scoundrel," he whispered softly. "Wha' kind a' dragh hae ye gotten y'sel' intae noo?"

  Major Davis McCall rarely lapsed into the Gaelic-laced dialect of his native Caledonia, reserving the luxury of such displays for times of great stress. In particular, he disliked the comment he got when he referred to any unpleasant person as Sasunnach—literally, an "Englishman," a verbal relic of peoples and feuds buried more than a hundred light years distant in space, and a thousand years distant in time.

  Almost guiltily, he glanced around. Satisfied that no one else in the room had heard his quiet outburst, he tapped out a command on the keyboard in front of him.

  REPLAY TRANSMISSION

  ACCESS: 3937

  The screen blanked for a moment and was replaced seconds later by a repeat of the ComStar logo and a new message.

  HPG TRANSMISSION

  10 MAR 3057

  ONE WAY, NON-PRIORITY

  CALEDONIA TO GLENGARRY,

  VIA GLADIUS RELAY 3

  5

  The "5" on the screen was replaced by a "4," and at one-second intervals the numerals continued to count down to "1." The screen dissolved once more, then reformed into the creased and age-worn face of an old woman.

  "Son," she said. "It's your mathair. I'm sorry to gi' ye th' charges a' this call, but it's a matter most urgent, y'ken, an' ah hae nae C-bills for th' charges."

  Clara Stuart McCall was eighty-one years old. Her silver-blue hair, once flame-red, was so thin now that Davis could see the freckled skin of her scalp beneath it. Once, centuries ago perhaps, during the golden age of the fallen Star League, genetic regenerative techniques and advanced medical therapies had extended the human life span to perhaps twice or even three times its ancient Biblical three score and ten. That, like so very much else, had been lost or deliberately sequestered in the past three cen
turies of unremitting and unrelenting warfare. There might be some few people within the Inner Sphere—the rich and powerful able to command luxuries denied to common folk—who might live 150 years while still looking and acting 50. On Caledonia, however, 81 was old....

  "Is tha' damned contraption recordin'?" she asked suddenly, looking to the right. Caledonia was fairly backward in technical areas, with only minimal electronics in most homes, and even computers were rarely found in ordinary households. Davis McCall's mother had never trusted such devices, and had apparently not changed one iota in the nearly ten years since he'd seen her last.

  Someone out of the pick-up range must have assured her that she was, indeed, on. Turning to face the camera once more, she nodded and said, "Och, aye. I'm sorry tae hae t' tell ye this noo, son, especially after all that's passed afore, but there's been trouble here, vurra bad trouble. Your brother Angus has been taken by the Blackjackets. Ah vurra much fear tha' the governor here means tae execute him, along wi' all th' others."

  "All the others," McCall repeated thoughtfully. "Now wha' the divil does she mean by tha'?"

  "There's nae we can do. Ben an' Robert both hae been tae th' Citadel tae plead wi' the governor, but he threatened tae hae them up on charges as weel. There's tae be a trial, all according tae FC law, fit an' proper, but we all ken tha' tae be a sham. Wilmarth, tha' bastard, is nae—"

  And with a cold suddenness, like a punch to the gut, Clara McCall's face vanished from the screen. After a moment, the 'Transmission terminated" screen came up, as unhelpful as before.

  END HPG TRANSMISSION

  CHARGE CB 932

  THANK YOU FOR USING COMSTAR

  Caledonia was twenty parsecs from Glengarry—over sixty-five light-years—but in an instant McCall's mind was there once more, looking down on the sun-sparkling Firth of Lorn from the weathered hills above Mull, with the two Caledon moons riding low in the western sky, huge and silvery Stirling, small and golden Bannochburn. McCall's family had lived for generations in Dundee, an agricultural community on the outskirts of New Edinburgh, Caledonia's rather rustic and isolated planetary capital. The Citadel his mother had referred to was an old Star League fortress, once the housing for the charged particle weaponry banks of planetary-defense batteries looming from the cliff tops of Mount Alba, now the Governor's residence.

  McCall rarely let himself think about his family anymore. He'd left Caledonia decades before, and the parting with them had not been a pleasant one. Davis McCall was a second son, and by long and old tradition, the family landholdings were to pass to the oldest son and heir.

  In the case of Davis McCall, those old laws of primogeniture, transplanted from Terra to Caledonia, had served to spawn another soldier, as they had so often in the past. "Ah dinnae ken how ah can stomach bein' naught but a wee showpiece," he'd told his brother in that final confrontation over thirty years before. "I'd rather be a real warrior than a toy soldier in't pretty uniform."

  Angus, his older brother, would have taken fine care of him, of course. Davis would no doubt have been given the position of Master of the Guard and remained a valued part of the McCall household.

  But Davis McCall had always detested the idea of being kept... of depending on someone else for room and board. He'd elected instead to become a mercenary warrior—and for that his family had never forgiven him.

  It was a situation that had been played out endlessly throughout history. Second sons had abandoned ancient Scotland, on ancient Earth, for the promise of riches, lands, and a future across the sea in the New World. Later, second sons had carried old Scotia's culture and ideals across another kind of sea, colonizing worlds like Glengarry and Caledonia that still, centuries later, bore the place names and the musical Celtic cant of Scotland.

  McCall, for all the pain arising from his split with his family, was still fiercely proud of his Scot's heritage. He'd remained a Jacobite—a member of that radical and far-flung Scottish political party that drew many of its ideas from the ancient Libertarians of Terra while somehow managing to mingle them with notions of a revived constitutional monarchy and a royal succession. He'd remained a Jacobite, in fact, even after becoming disillusioned with the power politics the current leaders had been indulging in for the past few decades; the bickering and in-fighting within the party had been almost as much the reason he'd decided to leave Caledonia as the trouble with his family. Angus, of course, had been a Jacobite as well, an ardent supporter of the current party leadership.

  The real problem, though, had been young Davis's determination to strike out on his own and become a mercenary. Caledonia had suffered in the past in raids mounted by merc units, and the McCall family had lost several members, including McCall's grandfather on his mother's side, in the defense of New Edinburgh. It was a kind of treason for him to leave his family and seek the money-for-blood life of a merc.

  When Davis had left Caledon, he'd been on speaking terms with few indeed of his relations.

  But McCall was stubborn too. He'd received his baptism of fire and blood with a mercenary unit on Furillo, and finally ended up, broke and out of work, at the merc clearing house on Galatea. That had been where he'd first met the young Grayson Carlyle.

  Year upon year had passed. McCall was actually the second person Carlyle had recruited; only Lori Kalmar had been with the Gray Death Legion longer. Together, the three of them had forged the new mercenary unit into a company, then a battalion, and finally a regiment. In thirty years, McCall had been back to Caledonia exactly twice—most recently in 3048, to attend the funeral of Katherine, his sister ... the only member of the clan who had still been on speaking terms with him.

  The rest, including even his mother, had few words for him then, save for the curt and coldly austere formalities demanded by ceremony and the situation. A stiff-necked, stubborn, neomule-headed bunch, the lot of them. For his mother to bend so far as to ask his help now, after all these years ...

  Damn! What kind of trouble had old Angus managed to get himself into this time?

  True, his mother hadn't precisely asked him for his help, but what other reason could she have had for calling him? The fact that her transmission had been abruptly cut off suggested that someone at the other end had been exercising a measure of censorship. She'd referred to Caledonia's governor as a "bastard," and an instant later McCall had been staring at an empty screen. She must have been about to ask him for help but been cut off before she could do so.

  He needed more information. He'd tried to keep up with news of his homeworld for years now, not always successfully. He did know that the governor there for the past five years had been someone named Wilmarth. What was this character like, anyway?

  With a sigh, McCall cleared the ComStar Logo from the screen and accessed the com center's newsfeed. Once he was into the net, he entered the key words for a subject search: "Caledonia,"

  "New Edinburgh," and, just on a hunch, "Jacobite," limiting the search parameters to the past three standard months. As an afterthought, then, he directed that the download be presented as text and vid, rather than by voice. He didn't want the others in the room to hear what he was about.

  He frankly doubted that the search would turn anything up. Several private news agencies provided interstellar news feeds through arrangement with ComStar, though human-occupied space was so vast, with so many worlds and a population numbering so many hundreds of billions, that no news service could record and disseminate all that happened everywhere.

  Still, what he was looking for was news of an incident that had happened recently on a world twenty parsecs distant, a system, like Glengarry, that was part of the Federated Commonwealth's Skye March. If he'd been looking for news from some backwater world in remote Luthien space, say, or from the no-man's land of the Periphery beyond the boundaries of the Inner Sphere, there would have been no chance at all. But as it was—

  Yes! One, and only one news entry included all three key words. Indeed, as he expanded the search to related articles
, the short column of text proved to be the only story involving Caledonia in the entire past year. A grainy, digitized vid accompanied the text, which scrolled down the left side of the screen as the images spread across the right.

  2 MAR 3057 (Std)

  Thousands Arrested in Local Unrest

  Caledonia, Skye March (FC)—A peaceful religious demonstration turned violent yesterday as thousands of people rioted in the streets of New Edinburgh, forcing Governor Wilmarth to call out the Planetary Guard. "Martial law is regrettable but necessary," Wilmarth said in a telecast from his press room in the Citadel this morning. "The good and law-abiding people of Caledonia can thank this handful of religious nuts, political radicals, and street rabble for the inconvenience. I assure you all that the martial law directive will be rescinded just as soon as order is restored and decent people can venture into their streets once again."

  There was no word on casualties, though eyewitnesses report that the Planetary Guard's 'Mechs did open fire at one point on a large crowd of protestors. "It was horrible!" one woman, who declined to identify herself, said afterward. "We were trying to leave the square, but there were too many people, and those big black machines were just sitting there, blocking the exits and firing into the crowd. I've never seen anything like it!"

  The demonstration was called jointly by leaders of the resident Jacobite Party and by the Chief Proclaimer of the Word of Jihad movement, calling for civil disobedience against the planetary government. Reportedly, members of both groups are now in hiding and could not be reached for comment.

  "Malcontents, fanatics, and heretics, all of them," Group Leader Terrance Grant of the Planetary Defense Force said after the incident. "Decent people should have nothing to do with rabble like that."