"Off the roads, it's different There are places that'll suck a ‘Mech down in the blink of an eye, mud pits that are as good as bottomless so far as a 20-ton piece of machinery's concerned. But you'll make it if you stick with us."
"Well, that's it, then. Will you take us?"
Brasednewic rubbed at the stubble on his chin. "Well..."
Grayson folded his arms. "If you're looking for payment, we don't have much to offer you."
"A proper share of the booty we took today would go right," the rebel said. "Like those tanks over there. We took 'em, your mercs and my boys together. Were you mercs figuring on drafting them into your army?"
Grayson laughed, raising his hands, palms out. "Right now, I've got all I can worry about looking after my own equipment! If that's the coin that will get us to where we're supposed to go, by all means, take them!"
The rebel brightened. "We'll take 'em off your hands, then...”
“And if you want, I'll loan you some of my Techs to get them up and running,"
Brasednewic looked surprised. "You're generous, for a merc."
That again.: "There's more to this than money, friend. At this point, I'm more concerned about turning our two armies into one."
The rebel looked thoughtful, and Grayson guessed he was thinking about the problems that command of such a joint-effort army would create. The man's face cleared, as he no doubt reached the conclusion that such decisions were best left to the Revolutionary Council.
"Right. I'm sending some of my skimmers on back to Fox Island ahead of our main column," Tollen said. "They'll take my wounded and also the news that we've got these tanks on the way. You want to go with them?"
"I don't think so. I'll come in with my people and my ‘Mech."
"Sounds good. Well, that Erudin fellow can go on ahead to let 'em know we're coming. They're a bit touchy about unannounced visits."
"Understandable. I have to see to the fitting of our DropShip first anyway. And..." He looked up past the rebel commander's shoulder and saw a stocky form standing alone further down the beach. "If you would excuse me, I have to talk to one of my people. I've been keeping him waiting deliberately, but I think he's been stewing long enough."
Brasednewic snapped off an informal salute by touching the rolled-up map to his brow. "Right you are, then. But we're going to have to move fast. I'd like to be off this beach and moving by midnight."
"That'll depend on how fast we get that DropShip afloat," Grayson replied, "but we'll certainly do our best. If we're not ready by then, leave us a scout, and we'll follow."
* * * *
Grayson had not been looking forward to his interview with Davis McCall. He liked the lanky Caledonian, liked his cheerful manner and carefree grin. But likeable or not, McCall had a dressing-down coming to him, and the responsibility to deliver it was Grayson's.
"McCall, there are unit commanders who would have you shot for what you pulled this morning/'
"Aye, sair." There were shouts in the distance and the clank of heavy block and tackles being hauled up the flank of the damaged Rifleman. A dazzling pinpoint of light appeared and wavered at the ‘Mech's twin-barrelled arm where a Legion astech was at work with a cutting torch. Sparks danced and showered on the ground.
Since joining the Gray Death, McCall had shown an almost touching affection for his Bannockburn. Grayson could tell from the man's eyes that he longed to be across the beach with his beloved war machine as repair crews cobbled together repairs enough to keep her moving and fighting until she could reach a secure machine shop. McCall remained at attention, however, his eyes focused somewhere within the jungle canopy above the beach.
"I ordered you to ignore ground combat, if necessary, to concentrate on your detectors," Grayson continued. "If that Slayer had been carrying an inferno cluster, we wouldn't be standing here talking about it now, would we?"
"No, sair." The Caledonian flexed his hands, and rallied. "But sair, tha' micklin' wee fighter had gone when his wingman was dooned! Ah dinnae ken..."
"You didn't think, dammit! I can't have people in my unit who have to be told how to think!"
"Sair...ye’re nae boo tin' me oot a' th' Legion..."
"If you mean terminating your contract, no, I'm not." Grayson looked hard at McCall, his gray eyes cold. "The Rifleman is yours and we need your Rifleman, Nor would I turn you loose here with no place to go but the Governor General's camp! Mostly, though. I don't want to lose you. You're a good man, Davis, and good men are more precious than BattleMechs!"
New light rose in McCall's eyes. "Thank you, sair!"
"Don't thank me. Prove your gratitude by following orders next time, and by using that thick Caledonian head of yours! Forget it, now. What's the damage?"
"Och, man puir, wee bairn wa' snickered good! Ma' Bannockburn's left arm actuators were junked, an' both legs tookit a lo' a' damage."
"Never mind the details. How long to fix it?"
"Well, sair, her port arm actuators are killit, and tha' D2j detector antennae needs replacin', too. Captain, tha' Bannockburn needs a refit a'..."
"We don't have a repair facility, dammit! We don't have anything but what we've brought off the Phobos! How much to get her underway again?"
"She'll move noo under her ai 'n steam, Captain. Tae get her intae fightin' trim, oh...och, aye, another ten hours. But tha' puir lassie'll nae be usin' her port arm o' weapons until we gi 'e her a new actuator group. An' tha's something we nae ha'e here. An' her fire control'll be by guess an' by gosh until we replace her D2j."
"That 'poor lassie'll' have to make do until we get her to a heavy machine shop. But you’ll have your ten hours when we reach a rebel base. And maybe we can see about actuators when we're there. I understand there are a lot of AgroMechs produced on this world, and we might be able to adapt one to your needs."
"Aye, there's tha'. Wi' tha' right tools, ah could tinker somethin' tae makit do."
"Good. You're pretty good at...'tinkering', aren't you?"
"Oh, aye, aye. It helps havin' Sco'ish ancestors, ye ken."
"Well, I'm delighted to hear it. As of now, I'm pulling you off of Bannockburn."
"Sair!" Shock marked McGall's face, and he cast another worried, longing glance at his crippled ‘Mech.
Grayson shook his head. "Those Techs over there can get her ready for the march to the rebel HQ. I'll put my own Tech, Tomlinson, on the crew. Right now, I want you out on the Phobos, helping rig her to pump and heat sea water."
"Sea water, sair?"
"Sea water. You're going to help teach the Phobos to swim. You can consider that your punishment for disobeying orders!"
Grayson returned the astonished MechWarrior's salute and walked over to where Brasednewic was waiting in the shade near the treeline at the far edge of the beach. Everywhere, men and women struggled with heavy equipment or wandered in seemingly aimless patterns across a beach strewn with debris and the refuse of a small army. From further up the beach came the grumbling of diesel motors as the Galleon tanks were fired up and sent clanking down a trail that a rebel guide had pointed out in the forest. The rebel army, uncertain what to do in the midst of this purposeful chaos, lounged in small groups in the shade of trees, dicing, playing cards, talking, sleeping, or simply watching the frantic activities of their unexpected new allies.
Somehow, Grayson was going to have to transform this chaos into a fighting army, or the Gray Death would never leave Verthandi again.
12
It stormed during the night, but throughout the rest of the long, Verthandian day, Grayson's people had worked to refit the unit's BattleMechs, to unload necessary supplies and equipment from the Phobos, and to ready the DropShip herself for the sea voyage.
The conversion of a gut-torn DropShip into an unwieldy and practically unsteerable, steam-powered boat was risky enough that Grayson wanted to salvage all the equipment he could before consigning the vessel to the mercies of the Azure Sea. The actual refitting of the pumps and conduits that
would gulp in sea water took only a bit more than five hours, speeded up with the help of ‘Mechs able to lift massive sections of hull plate or machinery weighing nearly as much as they did. The longest part of the refit was the transferral of bulky ‘Mech harnesses, booms, and repair rigs from the ‘Mech bays to the shore.
It was two hours past dark when the Phobos was ready to set sail. It was already raining, with winds gusting in wave-flattening bursts that caused the lightened DropShip to shudder. The motion aboard was queasily uncomfortable as the DropShip moved with the slap and lurch of the waves. The tide was in now, and lightening the ship's holds had brought her up off the bottom. The motion was made worse by the fact that selected outboard holds along one side of the cargo deck had been pumped full of water, giving the ship a twenty-degree list. Movement along her decks was treacherous and accomplished by slowly and carefully planting feet and hands with each step.
Grayson picked his way across the Phobos's bridge. Martinez was in her control seat, strapped in against the increasingly violent efforts of wind and wave.
"A storm is up, Captain,'' he said.
"It is, indeed, Major," she replied. Now that the Phobos was again a ship in the purest sense of the word, Grayson had his honorary, if temporary, promotion back."That could be bit of good luck."
Grayson nodded. "It means the Dracos won't have recon aircraft up tonight, and you'll certainly be screened from enemy satellites. Their patrols won't be close enough to pick you up on infrared scan, either."
"Hell, it means they'll think we broke up and sank in the storm! Well, it's about time our luck changed!"
"I'm glad you feel that way. Captain, because you've got to sail this thing in weather I wouldn't care to face inside a Marauder!"
Martinez touched a panel on the armrest control block. One of her console monitors came on, displaying a computer-generated map. It was based on the Azure Sea charts they had been studying earlier in the day. She used a stylus to trace across an arm of the sea to a convoluted thrusting of water into the land. "The Skraelingas River. Any idea what's there?"
"None, beyond what Brasednewic was able to tell us," Grayson replied. “There are plantations nearby, and he says their owners support the revolution. You should be able to trade machine parts and such for food."
"Food doesn't bother me. It's hiding from the damned Dracos! This storm won't last forever, and a DropShip'll show up to a satellite like a big fat bug on a dinner plate!"
"Only if they catch you at sea. Captain, under clear skies. The cove Brasednewic told us about...here...you should be able to ground the Phobos there, where the tide won't move her. Though you might have to wait for high tide to do it. It's close in under the rocks of these cliffs, just inside the mouth of Ostafjord. You've got camouflage netting enough to hide the ship, as long as you douse your reactor to kill your infrared signature."
"I'm not doubting the analysis. We just don't know what it's really like there. Suppose those rock cliffs are too low or there are unmapped sand bars that keep me from getting close? Suppose I can't get the Phobos close enough under the cliffs? Suppose... oh, the hell with it. I'll worry about it when I get there." She looked at Grayson, her dark eyes somber under their tatooed wings. "I wish you well, Grayson," she said, the formalities of command forgotten for the time. "I hope to see you again...soon."
"You've got a skimmer ready in your number three hold. If you start to founder, let the old tub go, and abandon ship. We can join up later."
"It's not me I'm worried about. Major. It's you! I'm not sure I trust these Verthandians yet And you folks have got a long way to go." She laughed. "I'd rather face five hundred kilometers of open ocean in a storm than that damned, Kurita-infested jungle!"
He smiled and extended his hand. Use took it gravely. "I'll get word to you somehow," he said, shaking her hand. "Just as soon as we're set up with a decent headquarters, supplies, repair facilities, and so forth. Then we can see about getting the Phobos spaceworthy again."
"For now. Major, I'll just be happy if she stays seaworthy!"
The rain was driving up the beach in sleeting walls, pelting at Grayson's face and hair with savage fury. He heard the DropShip's engines throb to life, a deep, rumbling sputter that carried above the pounding of the surf and the roar of wind and rain. Visibility was so low, however, that he couldn't make out the ship as she got underway. Good. That meant that other eyes in the jungle wouldn't see her departure, either.
Moments later, the combined column of rebels and mercenaries set off into the jungle on their own voyage. The rain offered advantages to the land party as well as to the seagoing Phobos. Rebel forces travelling through the jungle were always threatened by Kurita satellites or orbiting spacecraft spying down from two hundred kilometers overhead. Though Verthandi's skies were frequently cloudy and the jungle canopy provided nearly unbroken cover across most of the Silvan Basin, there were frequent clearings and stretches of open ground. Even a fragmentary patch of blue-green sky might be enough for a satellite to catch sunglint and the movement of a hovercraft column. BattleMechs pushing along the jungle paths were harder still to hide. The rebels had long ago learned to move through the jungle by night and to take advantage of the blessed natural invisibility offered by clouds and rainstorms. The secret rebel base and the Verthandian Revolutionary Council lay across almost four hundred kilometers of jungle, and it took all night to get there.
Verthandi, was, above all, an agricultural world. There was heavy industry centered near the principal cities, of course, and petroleum and various metal ores. Chromite, principally, and bauxite, were dug or pumped from the edge of the deserts to the south. It was the fertile land along the jungle basin slopes that was Verthandi's most important economic asset, however.
Paradoxically, the soil of the lush jungle floor was impoverished, leached beggar-poor of minerals by constant water erosion. In most places, the jungle canopy was so thick that not enough sunlight entered to support undergrowth, resulting in surprisingly little dead vegetation or humus. The swamps were another matter, bottomless layers of muck and ooze stinking with decay. Neither terrain was suited to farming.
Verthandi's fertility existed in the area known as the Silvan Basin, which had been formed in ages past when a massive asteroid had smashed out a depression in the planet's jungle belt. The land sloped down sharply from the encircling high ground plateaus and rugged mountains. At the northern base of the slope, in a narrow circle clear around the world's pole at roughly 60° north, was a fertile zone where erosion from the southern slopes combined with runoff from the spring floods on the high plateaus. The land here was wet, laced with swamps and stretches of tropical undergrowth far more impenetrable than any true jungle. Scattered here and there among the bogs were islands, solid ground where plantations raised kevla, blueleaf, and garlbean as well as bananas, sugarcane, cotton, and grovacas. Further into the swamps were clearings for rice, rubber, and jute. High along the basin slopes, the steep-sided jungle ridge called Basin Rim, there were plantations that grew coffee and cacao.
Despite the war, the Dracos had attempted to keep up the flow of the world's lifeblood of commerce. Verthandi's puppet government in Regis continued to collect taxes in the form of a percentage of each harvest, and DropShips loaded with jute, rubber, garlbean, cotton, or blueleaf periodically roared skyward from the prairie north of Regis to freighters waiting at the system's jump points. The image of trade and a productive economy was largely show by this time, however. All across Verthandi, many abandoned plantations had fallen into rot and ruin, while villagers went to war against one another. Like all revolutions, the war on Verthandi was as much a civil war of neighbor against neighbor as it was a revolt against foreign masters.
Grayson had learned or guessed much of this from conversations with Erudin on the voyage from Galatea. He learned more in the night-long march through the jungle, speaking with Tollen Brasednewic on a short-range, directional microwave com circuit that allowed them to question one an
other without alerting possible eavesdroppers on the mountain ridges above. He was, therefore, somewhat prepared for it when the rebel hovercraft led the mercenary ‘Mechs and hover transports across a shallow stream and into the village.
Fox Island was a large and fertile wedge of solid ground lying at the confluence of a pair of rivers flowing from the foot of the Bluesward Plateau. The Ericksson family had owned and operated the Fox Island Plantation since the world was first colonized by Terrans of Scandanavian descent, over six hundred years before. Gunnar Ericksson was clan head and owner now, and his landhold was a fair-sized village tucked away in the verdant blue-green of the jungle-shrouded island.
Everywhere, knots of people busied themselves uncrating supplies or disassembling machinery. The knocking of hammers could be heard farther back among the trees where a new warehouse was being hastily constructed. High in a treetop, a pair of rebel troops stood on anarrow camouflaged platform, TK assault rifles cradled in their arms. Not that the rifle or the lookouts would be of much use in a sudden airstrike, but the discipline was necessary and the routine Of military duties comforting. Indeed, the whole camp had a reassuringly professional but relaxed atmosphere. Erudin reminded Grayson that these rebels had been fighting Kurita soldiers and the troops of the Kurita puppet government on Verthandi for nearly ten years, and those who had survived this long were very good at what they did.
They fought to keep their world from dying, for the Draconis Combine was systematically stripping the world bare. The government DropShips that ferried goods skyward were carrying them to freighters bound for Luthien and other worlds of the Combine. When the ships returned, they brought back, not machine parts or automated equipment, but Kurita soldiers and BattleMechs. Propaganda had it that the legitimate Verthandian government had "hired" these as protection from attack by the Lyran Commonwealth or the rebel bandits who skulked in the forests of the Silvan Basin.
Mercenary's Star Page 12