By Temptations and By War mda-7

by Loren L. Coleman

  By Temptations and By War

  ( Mechwarrior Dark Age - 7 )

  Loren L Coleman

  In the chaos of the interstellar communications blackout, the Capellan Chancellor has sent operative Mai Wa to help freedom fighter Evan Kurst liberate his homeworld. But Mai has betrayed Kurst before, and Evan's biggest problem is knowing who to trust in a world where today's ally is tomorrow's enemy.

  For Peter and Cathryn Orullian.

  Rén bú huì tài duōháo you.

  (One can never have too many good friends.)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  One year of Mech Warrior Dark Age books behind us, I look at the storyline and the way it is developing and see so many new possibilities I’m really not certain where we will end up. I feel I can safely say, however, that Battle Tech lives on through the Mech Warrior line, and that these novels have a long future ahead of them. Here’s to another decade of good fiction, and to the people who help make that all possible for me:

  The WizKids themselves: Jordan and Dawne Weisman, Mort Weisman, Maya Smith, Mike and Sharon Mulvihill, Scott Hungerford, and everyone at the company who continues to work very hard on such dynamic and growing universes. And certainly Janna Silverstein, who continues to push me into being a better writer. Thank you.

  My agent, Don Maass, and his office staff, for their hard work on my behalf. Also Laura Anne Gillman and Jennifer Heddle at Roc. Anyone who thinks too many editors spoil the book have never worked with these very excellent people.

  Allen and Amy Mattila, for their longtime friendship. Randall and Tara Bills, Bryn and Rhianna, who have also made themselves such a large part of our lives. Kelle Vozka, Erik and Alex, who are always welcome at our home. Phil “Skippy” Deluca, who really should come over more often.

  The gang of usual suspects: Mike Stackpole, Herb Beas, Chris Hartford, Chris Trossen, and the mapmaker Oystein Tvedten. Special thanks to Team Battle Tech members Pete Smith, Chas Borner, and Warner Doles who gave so freely of their time this last year. Special acknowledgements for “JT” Yeo Jia Tian and also for Howard Liu for their help with Chinese translations.

  For my loving wife, Heather Joy, who makes everything worthwhile. To my children, Talon, Conner, and Alexia, who get more interesting (and more frightening) with each year. Okay, and the cats. Chaos, Rumor and Ranger. What would I do without them? (Probably much better. I hope they didn’t hear that.) And Loki, who, like all dogs, is happy just to be here.

  Or hath God assayed to go and take him a nation from the midst of another nation, by temptations, by signs, and by wonders, and by war…

  —Deuteronomy 4:34

  PROLOG

  A Dark Night on Liao

  This use of the Emergency Communications System is to inform all citizens and residents of Liao that the local ComStar network has suffered a loss of systems coordination. Precentor Rayburne Belzer, citing last week’s three-day interruption, promises to have the HPG back up as soon as possible. “Disruption will be kept to a minimum.”

  —Station WXU, Alert News Broadcast, 2200 hours, 7 August 3132

  Outside Lianyungang

  Qinghai Province, Liao

  Prefecture V, The Republic

  11 August 3132

  Twilight had come and gone on Liao, and that wasn’t good.

  Evan Kurst paced a tight box around his small moving van, one of four haulers parked in a staggered line atop an isolated bluff overlooking the Cavalry River. He kept to himself, as he’d been taught to do. Kicking gravel against the van’s oversize tires, Evan divided his time between watching the narrow access road that had brought the small cadre of Ijori Dè Guāng members here, and looking at the jewel-studded blanket of velvet sky. Not a trace of sunset’s color bled over the western horizon, and the sky remained crystal clear with visibility at twenty kilometers or better. The worst possible conditions for a clandestine operation.

  “Drive flare!” someone shouted from behind another of the dark-painted vehicles. Evan winced, wondering—worried—how far the shout would carry in the still night. “DropShip.”

  The flare was little more than a bright star moving across the heavens, a thin dagger of hard, white light. Too small for the merchant-converted Union they were expecting. Too high for any kind of approach to the bluff. And actually, wasn’t it close to—

  “Twenty-one hundred hours.” Evan glanced at his watch. “That is the ballistic shuttle from Nánlù.” Liao’s southern continent. “Not our DropShip,” he said softly, to himself.

  It wasn’t coming. Something had gone wrong, again. He dried his palms against his jeans. Evan knew only one of the other six recruits. Mai Wa wasn’t here, the needler pistol weighed his hip down awkwardly, and they were fifteen kilometers outside of Lianyungang—the city’s lights were a muted glow above the forest to the northeast—with no good safe house to run for should the local constabulary swoop down.

  “And I have a military history test on Monday.”

  That bothered him more than it probably should have. A member of the budding Ijori Dè Guāng, Liao’s newest band of self-proclaimed freedom fighters, should not be worried about his position within The Republic’s militia. But he was. Evan had worked too long and hard for this chance to become a MechWarrior. With his recent transfer to the prestigious Liao Conservatory of Military Arts, his personal honor demanded that he make his mark above the line set by any citizen student.

  It almost made him laugh. “What I could tell them now about the end of the Capellan invasion in 3112 would qualify as Master’s level work.” Doctorate, even. A few history books would have to be rewritten.

  But he wouldn’t tell. The secret he’d been entrusted with was too big to share with anyone save Mai Uhn Wa, Evan’s sifu in all things seditious. Mai would know what to do with such a secret.

  If Mai ever arrived.

  If the DropShip came.

  Too many ifs.

  A warm breeze smelling of pine trees, wildflowers, and the day’s moist heat ruffled Evan’s mop of dark hair. The warm, wet climate made Qinghai Province one of the planet’s best agricultural centers. Rice, peppers, sweet naranji: everything grew well here. Nánlù and the once-more inhabitable regions of Anderia were Liao’s industrial heart, but Beilù, the northern continent, was Liao’s breadbasket.

  It was also the seat of occupation by The Republic of the Sphere, and the very heart of all resistance to Devlin Stone’s “benevolent” despotism.

  Devlin Stone. The “devil” Stone. Evan Kurst looked up into the starry heavens, found the suns of Nanking, Tigress, and there, on the horizon, valiant Tikonov. Capellan systems, all, and along with Liao once belonging to the mighty Capellan Confederation, one of the Inner Sphere’s five Great Houses.

  In the local constellation of Qu Yuan, the poet, Evan located the sun that looked down upon Terra. It was from that cursed star system sixty-five years before that the Word of Blake launched its Jihad against civilization, bringing the Inner Sphere to its knees in ten brutal years of scorched-earth warfare. Devlin Stone led the resistance that finally cast down the Armageddon worshippers. Then liberator turned conqueror as Stone bargained for a new realm centered around Terra, taking as spoils of victory a territory spanning a hundred-and-twenty-light-year radius around mankind’s birthworld. Which was how Liao and over fifty other Capellan worlds became part of the new Republic of the Sphere.

  Whether they wanted to or not.

  “You see somethin’ up there, Kurst?”

  Whit Greggor stepped up next to Evan. Greggor was the one Ijori Dè Guāng member present tonight that Evan knew. The large man had a voice that rumbled up from deep within his chest, broad, Slavic features, and crew-cut reddish-brown hai
r turning premature gray. Too old to be a student, full of ideals. Too young to remember life under the Confederation, fifty-some years before. Evan pegged him as a thug. Mai Wa probably recruited the tough out of a dark alley somewhere.

  Did Evan see something? More than Greggor could imagine.

  “Freedom,” he finally said. “I’m enjoying sunlight that never looked down on the Word of Blake… that never knew Devlin Stone.”

  “I’d rather catch the drive flare of our ’Ship. We need more weapons.” He cracked his scarred, oversize knuckles. “Then we can ram real freedom down the throats of all these paper citizens.”

  “Spoken like a true patriot.” Crude and boorish, the sentiment summed up Greggor quite well. Evan considered it very likely that there was a bridge somewhere missing its troll. Would a man like this even care to understand what he was fighting for?

  “You sayin’ we don’t need more weapons?”

  “We need something,” Evan agreed. Weapons. Resources. Leaders. The people of Liao longed to slip The Republic’s harness. Mai Wa prophesied that once the landslide began, it would sweep the world.

  Evan believed now more than ever.

  “So what’s the holdup, you think? The new ComStar blackout?”

  “Could be.”

  The man hawked, spat to one side. “What else, ya think? The oubluduk cowlheads’ve never had their shit in one sock.”

  Greggor’s speech was often laced with Russian curses and colorful stock, but his analysis did not differ much from Evan’s. ComStar’s local service had gone down again, disconnecting Liao from the rest of the Inner Sphere for the second time this month. Without faster-than-light communications provided by the organization’s network of hyperpulse generator stations, disruptions occurred in everything from shipping schedules to interplanetary market trades. Once had been a costly anomaly, virtually unknown since the agency’s inception.

  Twice? Evan wondered.

  “The JumpShip could have had technical problems,” Evan finally said. “Customs maybe stopped the DropShip in orbit.” Besides the HPG network, so much relied on the tenuous fabric of interstellar travel: jump-capable vessels that moved thirty light-years at a leap and DropShips ferrying goods and people between worlds.

  Greggor wasn’t satisfied with that. “I still say it’s ComStar. Got us all frigged up again. Filthy vrebrachneys.”

  Evan shrugged. Greggor’s black moods could be contagious. A shout from another cadre member saved him from any reply.

  “Lights! Lights on the road!”

  “Truck,” someone else called out. “Hovercraft.”

  This time Evan didn’t worry about the noise. He worried about who was arriving so late to their party. A chill took him as he drew his needler pistol, felt its uncomfortable weight in his hand. His efforts in the Ijori Dè Guāng so far had been limited to “liberating” supplies from remote military compounds and sabotaging public transportation services. Military academies taught MechWarrior cadets basic small arms handling—laser pistols, for example—and those he wasn’t allowed to carry outside the firing range. The needler was a more vicious weapon than any he’d trained with.

  Perspiration warmed under Evan’s arms as he took cover behind his rented haulers, extending the weapon in a two-hand grasp over the vehicle’s hood and waiting for confirmation of sight, fight, or flight.

  The open-bed hovercraft flashed its lights twice, once, twice.

  “Mai! It is Mai Wa.” The resistance leader. Liao’s best hope.

  Relief flooded Evan with a cold touch, like an aftertaste of the regret that came after any compromise. Part of him had looked forward to pulling the trigger, he realized, placing himself apart from those who talked, and among the company of those who did. Even the Cult of Liao, Evan had discovered recently, honored action over rhetoric. In that, the underground political movement had more in common with the forming Ijori Dè Guāng than most people thought.

  The hovertruck cut its lights and lift fans just short of the gathered haulers, settling to the ground as its air cushion spilled out from beneath rigid skirting. The dying whine of its lifters reminded Evan of this morning’s visit to the Cult of Liao shrine, and the humming of its generator, which echoed off stark, barren, bunker walls.

  Mai Uhn Wa slid out from the cab, pouring himself to the ground with a fluidity which Evan had come to envy. His shaved head was tanned to a leathery brown, his mustache oily black and obviously dyed on the fifty-odd-year-old man. Small and compact, rarely given to exaggerated gestures, Mai Wa might have been any Capellan-descended citizen you passed on the street if you never noticed his eyes. Black and hard, and never blinking enough, they were eyes that had seen—and still saw—too much.

  Yet Evan would show his mentor something the other man had never dreamt to look upon.

  The thought warmed him, buoyed his hopes, until Mai Wa looked over his assembled cadre and shook his head slowly. Once.

  “The DropShip will not arrive,” the elder man informed them straightaway. “Our off-world network is compromised.”

  “Compromised?” Greggor sounded as if he was struggling with the meaning of the word. “How? Who?”

  Evan had never asked about Mai’s off-world contacts. In a resistance cell organization, the less you knew the better. Evan already knew more than he should about Liao-based operations, including the names of other cell leaders, which he put down to being a prominent Mech Warrior candidate. Among more common members Evan carried influence, which Mai Wa had used in this last year.

  Now he regretted not asking. His ability to advise would be limited.

  “Customs Security on Genoa halted all outbound traffic three days ago,” Mai Wa told them. “In the process of routine management, some …discrepancies were uncovered. The DropShip was destroyed trying to flee authorities.”

  Like dominoes poised to topple, no doubt a great deal of Mai Wa’s network stood exposed. How bad was this setback? And why halt all outbound traffic? The disruption such a decision caused… would pale next to any larger disruption already occurring.

  “The blackout,” Evan said, spitting out the word like a mouthful of rancid naranji pulp. The timing could not be coincidence. “Genoa noticed that we were off the HPG net again.”

  “Yes,” Mai said. “And no. And not exactly.” The small man seemed to be carrying an extraordinarily large burden, and now simply heaved it aside in the most direct manner possible. “Four days ago, Genoa witnessed something we were spared. In a way. They saw nearly every world go dark. In a six-hour period, they lost HPG contact with all star systems but one, New Aragon, which reported much the same thing.”

  The implications rolled over Evan Kurst like an assault tank. HPGs reached out fifty light-years. Two worlds reported a complete loss of signal from almost every other station within that distance?

  “Arboris?” someone asked. “Ningpo and Gan Singh?” Neighboring worlds. “New Canton?” The capital of Prefecture VI.

  Mai had little left to offer. “Only a single JumpShip has come in bearing any news so far. Shipboard rumor claims that sporadic contact has been made with New Canton, yes. And with Achernar in Prefecture IV. But we may be looking at over ninety percent loss of the ComStar network. If that extends into any of the Great Houses at our borders…”

  Hundreds. Thousands of worlds. Dark. Evan grasped at the full implications. Missed. “Our work here,” he asked, “what of it?” The awaited supplies were everything they needed to flesh out a true resistance force. To make the Ijori Dè Guāng something other than one more small-time movement. Evan felt their work slipping away into nothingness.

  “It is finished,” Mai admitted, “for now. Chaos reigns outside of this system, and likely will be here in very short order. If we were prepared, it would be a golden opportunity.” For a moment, a flash of fire lit up the other man’s dark eyes. Then, “But we are not.”

  Angry now, Evan stepped forward. His hand itched to grab something, and his needler came to mind. “We
are out here, all of us, because of you,” he accused Mai Wa. “You made promises.”

  “And it is no longer possible to keep them.” As if speaking to someone in the distance, the Ijori Dè Guāng leader added, “It will not be the first time I have had to break such promises.”

  What was one more person to fail the Capellan people, and Evan? Raised as a ward of the state, Evan had hardened himself against most disappointments. But for the first time in years, he felt betrayed. Felt it deep down near where the fires of hope had burned hot not many hours before. If the secret he carried might change things, Evan would have spilled it in front of all. But it would not. He heard the sound of defeat lurking behind Mai Uhn Wa’s words. The movement’s sifu was crestfallen—emptied, and hiding it.

  Evan turned away, ignoring questions that Mai would deftly deflect. He walked to the bluff’s edge, staring out over the dark valley as, behind him, cadre members abandoned plans and each other in their empty haulers.

  Then all was silent. For a time.

  “You are angry.”

  Evan knew that Mai Wa had not left. The rebel leader’s eyes had never left the back of his neck. They burned there, drilling holes.

  “Anger has its uses, Evan Kurst, but if you let it guide your next actions, you will be lost.”

  “I no longer need to listen to you, Mai Uhn Wa. What I do next is my own business.” To stand alongside people who do, and not people who make excuses.

  “If you think I enjoy seeing years of my work destroyed in a single night, you are greatly mistaken, and not the man I thought you would become.” Evan noticed that Mai held back from saying “the man I thought you were.” Mai stared through Evan. “I have more important people than you to whom I will answer for this failure. This time I gambled and I lost. Liao is on its own.”

  Evan couldn’t trust anything the other man said. Mai Wa claimed ties to the highest authorities. To have been involved in several uprisings on Liao over the years. He did put together the Ijori Dè Guāng, and now he abandoned it—that was what Evan knew. That Mai thought it necessary made no difference to Evan.