She glanced at the fountain again as she passed, and was once again disappointed to see somebody occupying the spot she wanted. She turned her head, ready to look for a new safe perch, but then stopped and looked back. She recognised the person instantly, and butterflies began fluttering in her stomach.
Lorelei Chen!
Looking out-of-place among the other dignitaries in a dusty, black, battle-damaged combat suit, the woman was backed against the low wall of the pool, throwing quick glances back and forth as she scanned the crowd. She looked disorientated, like she needed help. Kim, who had spent the entire evening feeling directionless, suddenly had a purpose.
It only took three strides for her confidence to return. She wasn’t caught in politics or adjusting to life in the New Dominion anymore. She was back on her own timeline, ready to continue the journey she’d started with Lora eight months earlier.
Ready to get out of here…
“Kimberley!” Chen said, looking out of breath. “It’s good to see you after all this time. Please forgive my outward appearance; I only just arrived here, and jumping between time and dimensions is not something you get used to…”
Kim couldn’t interpret Lora’s expression as she spoke, but she caught a glimpse of horror in the woman’s eyes. Thanks to the noise of the fountain, nobody would hear a word of their conversation, not unless they stood right next to them. “Lora, it’s good to see you too. But… where have you been these past eight months? I’ve been losing my mind here…”
“It’s a long story,” Chen said, looking pained. “Eight months may have passed for you, but it’s been three years from my perspective. Three years of Hell…”
Kim felt nervous. “Three years? What happened?”
“Not here,” Chen insisted. “Let’s find somewhere quiet. Then we’ll talk.”
Half a dozen balconies overlooked the interior of the ballroom, but only one of them had an adjacent outer balcony. The night air had grown cool enough to keep most people from wanting to be outside. Lora and Kim shivered a bit, but they were alone. And they had a fine view of the fireworks that had been going on all night.
“Quite a display,” Kim said. “Do you think many people in there remember there’s a war going on?”
“Many would view the civil war as a cause for celebration,” Chen said, then decided she didn’t like the cynical tone of her own voice. “Chancellor Denigrand was never a close ally of Paramo,” she said thoughtfully. “But he is a warrior, who is willing to fight for his own beliefs. I can respect him for that, at least. I think if you made a complete survey of ball attendees, you’d find people who still worshipped Damarus and people who hated him. And just about every emotion in between. Only thing you wouldn’t find is people who don’t care.”
Kim shook her head. “That room – it’s exhausting. A thousand people who don’t agree on anything, each of them convinced of their own superiority. And willing to do whatever it takes to make others see how superior they are.”
Chen smiled. “Isn’t that the point of one of your Blitzball tournaments? Pummelling people until they admit you’re superior?”
“Now that you point it out, yes, it is. But at least there are clear winners and losers there.”
Chen’s gaze drew distant, her expression serious, her thoughts turning to darker concerns. “Kimberley, we have to leave this point in Time,” she said plainly. “You aren’t safe here anymore. The Combine have redoubled their efforts to find you, and despite my pains over the past three years to hold them off, despite the countless Asterites I have killed and the damage I have wrought on the space-time continuum, I believe they may have finally traced you here. The Overmind has sensed your presence. They could be here, therefore, in a matter of days. Perhaps even hours.”
Kim took a deep breath. No… “So you spent three years fighting Asterites? For me?” she asked.
Chen’s expression was sombre. “Put simply, yes. I have been driven to the brink of insanity by all of this, and risked my life constantly, to protect alternate versions of yourself in parallel universes. It sometimes feels as if though I have lost myself in doing so. Don’t underestimate the resolve of the Combine, nor the lengths I have gone to, in order to keep you safe from them.”
“I don’t. I appreciate everything you’re doing.”
Chen, looking glum, simply nodded.
Kim turned then and looked back inside the grand hall, as the Royal Gong sounded once, loudly. The orchestra stopped playing, and a hushed silence fell over the room. Apparently, King Paramo had an announcement to make. She exhaled heavily, her head spinning with emotion. “How much more can happen before this night is over?” she muttered.
Chen motioned her back inside. “Come on.” They walked back onto the inner balcony, where she scanned the shimmering forms on the floor for several seconds. Then she pointed.
“There,” she said. “Look.”
Paramo stood on a raised dais in the centre of the room, preparing to address the crowd. Esme stood beside him, looking elegant and beautiful as she usually did, wearing a curve-hugging gold-sequined dress made from see-through linen that hugged her youthful body from below the bust to the ankles. As was the tradition, she chose to remain silent, allowing her elderly consort to speak instead. It was this silence that usually left those who met her ‘struck with awe’.
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” Paramo said. “It is with regret that we must cut short the evening pleasantries. It has come to my attention that a Denigrian assault force is massing south of Laputa, preparing to march on the Silver City. Chancellor Denigrand himself wishes to steer a course of dangerous recklessness by attempting a siege of our capital.” Paramo’s voice had risen as he spoke, his long-leashed anger and frustration running free. Catching himself, he paused to regain more control before continuing. “Of course, the First Faction and our allies will not allow this attack to proceed. We will strike back at the assault force immediately. The Queen and I request that all military personnel take immediate battle stations; Warmaster Itsyamin will brief you all fully. My civilian and diplomatic guests, please take refuge and prepare to evacuate. A faction-wide alert is being transmitted as we speak. Thankyou for your swift cooperation in this matter, and I apologise for this inconvenience.” He drew himself up to his full height then and saluted, striking his chest with his clenched right fist in the Laputan fashion. He executed a swift bow and turned on his heels, then put his hand on Esme’s tanned shoulder and led her from the chamber through waiting doors. They looked neither left nor right, ignoring the outraged calls of their assembled guests.
As the doors closed behind them, the crowd erupted into panicked chatter.
“Almost makes me want to stay here and fight,” Chen said with a sigh.
“This is your world,” Kim said empathically, “your time. It’s only natural that you would want to defend it. If you decided to stay and help your friends, I wouldn’t be offended.”
Chen assumed her most regal, fearsome attitude. “We can’t stay. We have more urgent matters to attend to.”
Kim reached out and lightly touched Chen on the arm. Her fingertips merely brushed Chen’s flesh, but Lora jumped back as though she’d been lashed with a neural whip. Her eyes flashed and her hands knotted into fists, but Kimberley’s unwavering stare cowed the older woman and held her at bay. “I was wrong about you, Lora. I always took you for a heartless monster, but now I know… you are probably the most selfless woman I have ever known.” The softness of her voice was soothing. “Perhaps it is not my place, but the intensity of this discussion has become so painful that I would ask, please, that we postpone leaving until later. At least until after the upcoming battle. For your own sanity, at least.”
Chen smiled and deflated back into her normal posture. The memory of her normal life that she’d somehow managed to forget over the past three years came back, and she remembered what Paramo, Esme and the others meant to her. Her eyes welled up with tears. “You’re right,” she sa
id. “We’ll stay here for a while, then. But only a day or two, at most. We cannot risk any more than that.”
They talked for a good long time, neither one of them bothering to bring up the subject of the Combine or time travelling, or killing Kim’s father. As with many of the other people down on the ballroom floor, the tension of the situation should have trumped personal friendship. But for the time being, it didn’t.
12
HIGHLAKE BASIN
233 MILES SOUTH OF LAPUTA
Sporadic artillery crumped along Ammold Paramo’s rearward flank: twenty-pounders. They stomped large craters through the crusted, cracked-mud surface of the Highlake Basin, scuffed blackened earth and embers of burning grasses into the air, and occasionally kicked over an infantry position, forcing survivors to scurry like armoured ants reforming injured lines.
Those bright, orange-tipped flashes shattered the deepening twilight and cast brief shadows forward of Paramo’s ZEU-X Zeus as he stalked the two-hundred-fifty-ton, prototype Assault-Class Mech into the no-man’s-land separating his forces from Chancellor Charal Denigrand’s. From three stories up, his cockpit placed as a head on the humanoid-style war machine, Paramo stared out through a bioglass shield to study the battlefield. Armoured vehicles and MAWLR units floated and dodged through the killing zone, their autocannons and railguns stitching the air with white-hot tracers. Purple plasma bolts splashed armour into molten puddles. Flights of missiles arced up on fiery plumes, falling over into hard-hitting showers that blasted into the ancient lakebed and ripped open armour and flesh where they found it.
Two gutted MAWLRs, both of them Denigrand’s, burned at the edge of the dry lake basin, roiling black, greasy smoke into a charcoal sky.
He felt a loose smile creep over his face. Those two units didn’t make up for his lost Marksman, a blackened husk left at the foot of the Tai’bek Hills, but with a bit of luck Denigrand would have failed to deploy his own Rãvier infantry in time and that would put him at a severe disadvantage.
“The time when kings go forth into battle,” Paramo muttered to himself, quoting an old book he’d once read. Despite being the King Consort of Laputa and a Chief of State of the Terran Alliance, he was still a military man at heart, even at ninety-two years of age. He had been a warrior his entire life; first as a Paladin, then a mercenary freedom fighter, and finally Warmaster. He refused to let his political role interfere with that legacy. Like the medieval kings of old, he rode into battle with his warriors, leading the charge against the enemy threat.
After two hours in the hot seat with his Rãvier suit connected symbiotically to the Mech’s systems, muscles strained and sore, and his hands sweat-slick on the Mech’s manual controls, Paramo didn’t mind asking for a touch of luck as his carefully-laid battle plans began to unfold.
“Raven-one through six: advance and engage,” Paramo commanded his carefully hoarded infantry. The Rãvier-suited warriors leapt out of hiding from jagged-edged craters or spilled from two Bestower—class biotransports. A few bounded up on antigravitic thrusters. Most swarmed forward in short, erratic sprints. Paramo could hope that one squad might actually make a battlefield capture, but if nothing else, he decided, they would draw fire away from him while he went for Denigrand himself.
It wasn’t soon enough, though. A particle projector cannon scorched the air just over his Zeus’ left shoulder. Paramo ducked away reflexively. He stutter-stepped his Mech several cautious paces to the right where a Tactical Missile Carrier fell under his sights, branded in enemy-red on his augmented-reality Head’s Up Display.
He checked his ammunition reserves in a glance – down, but not critically low – and set his crosshairs over the Carrier’s dark outline. The Zeus’ targeting computer painted a shadow-reticle to the right of the bioship, adjusting for relative motion. Paramo corrected his aim, swinging over the Mech’s arm to lead the Carrier by several metres, and then pulled into his only weapons trigger.
His rotary autocannon spit out a long tongue of fire and fifty-mil rounds tipped with depleted uranium. The slugs punched into the bioship’s right side missile launcher, chewing through biological armour as the vehicle slewed sideways. A weakened support arm twisted under the launcher’s weight, buckled, and dropped the boxlike launcher into the full stream of hot, angry metal and biomatter. Missiles ruptured, their solid fuel boosters catching fire and cooking off several warheads before the tank crew could dump the ruined ammunition, and the launcher disintegrated into a blossom of fire.
The explosion rocked the bioship up on its skirt and spilled away the supporting cushion of air. The thing tipped up and over, coming down on the overhead launcher, which discharged in a sympathetic detonation. Armour panels bulged on all sides, then burst apart.
Enemy icons spilled onto Paramo’s Head’s Up Display then, laser-projected across the upper third of his cockpit’s bioglass shield. Their short tag lines of information tangled in among Alliance codes for his own skirmishers. In his mind, the coded tags resolved into three forces of similar troops, spread out over the dry lake basin. Armoured vehicles chewed up the ground with belted treads and knobby tires. Bioships glided along with deadly menace like wolves among sheep. MAWLRs marched on giant mechanical crab-legs like impossible, three-thousand-ton crustaceans. If Paramo held an edge it was in raw firepower, although Denigrand made up for that with superior mobility.
More than made up for it, in fact, as a green-haloed square on his HUD burst in a flare of emerald light. At a glance he read that a squad of Denigrand’s hoverbikes had overpowered and destroyed his remaining Demon-class tank.
Paramo cursed the Highlake Basin, and then cursed himself for not anticipating Denigrand’s early move out of the Tai’bek Mountains, the jagged edge of the northwest horizon. Swallowing back the dry, metallic taste of his anger, he sent out a mental command, opening the frequency for his computer-controlled vehicle commanders.
“Alpha group, spread north-northwest. Beta, spread northeast.”
These were his two primary battle group formations of heavy armour. By cupping them around Denigrand’s advance forces, supporting his infantry drive, Paramo hoped to fold the enemy into a pincer. If nothing else, he might be able to thin out the middle of the field, allowing him to push through and finally come to grips with his opponent.
“Delta group,” he called up his reserve line of armoured vehicles, holding defensive positions behind him, “shake out into a skirmishing wedge.”
The HUD’s chaos of icons thinned, but not so much that he would get an easy push through at Charal Denigrand. He’d have to fight his way through, which was exactly what Denigrand wanted of him. The entire confrontation so far, the enemy had commanded from a support position while Paramo always stalked the forward edge of battle. Denigrand was waiting for Paramo to soften up his defences on his stinging probes – waiting for him to make a mistake. The first commander to fall here wouldn’t end the battle, no matter how far ahead they might be. But it would give the other commander free reign to leisurely destroy the opposing force, down to the last man, and effectively win the civil war.
It all came down to this decisive skirmish. Paramo’s gambit to draw Denigrand out of hiding would be remembered in history as either his greatest triumph, or his greatest mistake.
As if summoned by that dark thought, a pair of MAWLRs marched out of the enemy pack, hunting him. Paramo pulled back behind the defensive line he’d set with four Cerberus-class Jousts, counting on the threat of their large lasers to hold back the gigantic decapedal enemy units. He knew better than to close with a MAWLR’s Mech-killing railguns, and Denigrand knew enough not to challenge an entrenched line. The enemy units fell back, their vast legs pushing them on toward better prey, and Paramo stalked northwest to mirror the sudden movement of Denigrand’s superheavy SHP-4X Omega.
Denigrand had made the first mistake, and Paramo would be there to catch him. He allowed for no other possibility.
Fighting in battles like this was all Ammold Para
mo had dreamed of as a teen, whether sitting with his father through their seventh screening of an Immortal Warrior holovid or in his school studies of the New Dominion’s military history. It didn’t matter that there were no longer any real wars to fight. Granted, there were always conflicts going on that required some fighting, but not much compared to the previous century, when the three Bellum Sacrum wars raged. Those bloody crusades had brought relative peace to the world and throughout the Inner Sphere, where the fledgling Terran Alliance grew.
The allure of fighting, though, was one that refused to pale. It spoke to Paramo in the reverent way people referred to gladiators of old, or knights of legend. His career in the Holy Guards was the only logical step for him as a young man. No one was able to stand in the way of that dream.
He searched through his cockpit’s bioglass shield for a new target.
Charal Denigrand found him first.
A storm of tracers skipped off Paramo’s cockpit shield and then drifted down over the Zeus’ torso as Denigrand reached out from long range to walk a line of destruction from head to hip joint. Bioglass cracked into the legs of two long spiderwebs, barely holding up under the assault. The Mech trembled violently, shaking Paramo against his five-point harness – hard enough to leave deep bruises across his shoulders and abdomen. His neurohelmet slammed back against the seat’s headrest, cracking one of the support posts.
The Zeus’ massive gyroscopic stabilisers relied on Paramo’s own sense of equilibrium, linked through both the pilot’s neurohelmet and Rãvier suit. Shaken, Paramo blinked back a wave of dizziness and the sensation of sudden vertigo as his Mech balanced on uncertain footing.
The Complete New Dominion Trilogy Page 64