Heir Apparent

by Michael Stackpole

  From behind and below him, scarlet beams stabbed out. Designed to melt thick sheets of ferro-ceramic armor on a BattleMech, the Trebuchet’s medium lasers burned through simple uniforms in a nanosecond. Flesh and bone were as nothing. Even a close miss with one of those beams turned a man into a living torch.

  Walter reached the Blackjack’s shoulder and crouched. Destrier, washed in gold by the campfire and a trio of new fires, turned right. Coruscating red beams lanced through the night and pierced the underbrush. They scorched a path to a Packrat LRP vehicle. In a flash they cored through the vehicle’s side armor, transforming the interior into an inferno. The vehicle exploded, the shrapnel killing any of the men who’d somehow escaped a fiery death.

  Walter dove into the cockpit and strapped himself into the command couch. He pulled on his neurohelmet and glanced at his secondary monitor’s local map. He immediately keyed the radio. “Spurs, cut northwest for a klick, into that ravine. Get low.”

  Destrier broke right, then back toward the northwest. Walter’s Blackjack backed to the west. He studied their back trail for any other signs of life. He saw nothing but small fires, but that did little to quell the roiling in his belly. If those fighters come back right away, we’re dead.

  Walter spotted Destrier beginning its descent into the ravine he’d mentioned. “Spurs, you need to pull your radio and transponder. We don’t want the fighters coming back and tracking us by comms traffic.”

  “I don’t know how to do that, Rail.” Nerves sent a tremor through Ivan’s voice. “I’m lost here, completely lost.”

  “You’re not lost, Spurs. You did great.” Walter pounded a fist against the arm of his command couch. “It’s going to be okay. Right now, open the panel below your communications console. Third circuit board from the left. Should be edged in red.”

  “Got it.”

  “Good, pull it out. It’ll kill communications, but also our transponders. Do it before the fighters come back.”

  Ivan must have complied because static crackled through the helmet speakers.

  Walter pulled the same circuit board and silence filled the cockpit, giving him a moment to think. The fighters had likely come in with only passive sensors employed, so they wouldn’t tip off the strafing run. With any luck the fighters will believe they got us on that first attack, and none of their boys survived to tell them any different.

  He sighed. The troopers Ivan had killed had likely been stationed in the area to confirm the kill, or finish things off if they needed to. We likely have ten to twenty minutes before the fighters worry about lack of ground confirmation.

  The mercenary followed Destrier into the ravine. If the aerospace fighters came back, the ravine’s narrow opening meant that no matter which set of sensors the pilots employed, they’d get only a momentary flicker of a hit. At speed, the fighters would need at least twenty kilometers to loop back, carrying them all the way to Rivergaard before the return trip. It wouldn’t take them that long, but it would be sufficient time for Walter and Ivan to move into a side branch of the ravine. There they might not be detected at all or only as a random reading.

  Hiding and running isn’t a game that can be played for a long time. Walter had to assume that whatever cabal fielded the fighters and soldiers had likely also deployed BattleMechs. It only made sense, and even lacking evidence of ’Mech deployment, Walter’s only prudent course was to assume they were actively being hunted. He racked his brain trying to recall any location that would give them a fighting chance of survival.

  Is there a safe haven?

  Destrier stopped ahead of him and raised his closed left fist to signal a stop.

  Walter complied, pointing skyward with the Blackjack’s left arm.

  Destrier pointed at a spot a hundred meters further on, then waved Walter toward it. The mercenary couldn’t see anything special about that location, then shifted over to magnetic resonance. Oh, clever boy.

  The Concordat-Magistracy War may have ended a hundred and ninety years ago, but Maldives still bore proof of the fierce fighting that had characterized the conflict. Ample amounts of wreckage still littered the landscape. Time had allowed nature to heal most of the scars, but huge chunks of metal still lay buried beneath the forest floor. The spot to which Destrier directed Walter showed up like a giant dinner platter on magres scanners.

  Walter planted his Blackjack squarely in the circle’s center. Fifty meters south, Ivan stopped his Trebuchet atop a jagged sliver of metal. Walter flipped through the variety of map overlays available and added two to his secondary monitor while they waited. One map leopard-spotted metallic debris sites over the landscape, and the other used shades of red and yellow to pinpoint areas of ecological interest. We have plenty of magres hiding places, but that’s only going to shield us from satellite and fighter surveillance. If we remain in place, any ’Mechs they have hunting us are going to track us down.

  The pair of aerospace fighters soared by overhead, but no energy beams wrought havoc on the forest. They continued on to the northeast, disappearing within the depths of the forest canopy. By the time echoes of their passage had died in the cockpit, Ivan had Destrier up and moving east. He took the ’Mech from point to point over debris sites and Walter paralleled his course.

  Why this way? Walter looked at the map. Going into the Preserve isn’t going to help us now. Those fighters aren’t playing by civilized rules.

  Ivan pushed his ’Mech as quickly as it would go, taking them across the Preserve’s western border. To Ivan it might have made an odd sort of sense: maybe he thought their enemies would expect that they’d feel committed to remaining outside the nature preserve. But Ivan’s course headed them directly into the ecological red zone, which included a big lake. According to the topographical data, it was as much as a kilometer and a half deep out in the center.

  Despite the seriousness of their situation, it seemed out of character for Ivan to push them into the Preserve. Walter touched his monitor’s screen and data poured onto the auxiliary monitor. Lac du Vallee was the centerpiece of a very fragile ecosystem which was reported to be precariously close to complete collapse. Plants, fish, birds and small mammals all appeared on a list that showed declining populations. As nearly as Walter could make out, just looking at a map of the area was enough to cause a mass extinction event.

  Destrier moved out into the open for the last hundred meters to the lake’s shore. Ivan’s ’Mech raised a hand and waved Walter on after him. Then Destrier marched directly east, water rising up to the Trebuchet’s waist.

  And, one step further, the war machine sank beneath a froth of rising bubbles.

  I’m sure it seemed like a good idea, but . . .

  Walter waded into the murky water behind Destrier. According to the topographical data, the lake became deep gradually. Ivan never should have sunk there. Walter figured the data was old and Ivan was in trouble, so he plunged in after him.

  As his ’Mech sank, Walter hit the external lights. The mud they’d churned walking into the lake reduced visibility to nothing for the first ten meters of descent. Then, in the corner of his holographic display, Walter caught sight of a floating ball marked “10/30.” As he drifted down, a second marked “20/30” greeted him. Twenty meters down, so this is thirty here.

  The jolt as the Blackjack hit bottom surprised Walter. He’d expected to sink shin deep in the same sort of muck as rimmed the lake, but he hit something solid instead. The Blackjack staggered, but Walter kept it upright, gaining firm footing on a ferrocrete landing pad.

  He brought the Blackjack around, following Destrier as it walked to the west. Ivan’s machine began to shrink as it worked its way up a ramp. Walter mounted it as well, and the Blackjack’s head broke the surface of the water. Both BattleMechs emerged into a manmade cavern complete with eight ’Mech bays, all of which stood empty.

  Walter parked t
he Blackjack in a stall next to Destrier, then popped himself free of his command couch and neurohelmet. He crouched beside the couch, pulled a needle pistol and holster from a small compartment, then cracked open the cockpit. He climbed out onto the Blackjack’s shoulder, then leaped the small gap to the gantry. He quickly ran around to Ivan’s stall and extended the gantry there just in time for the Chairman Presumptive to emerge.

  Walter unzipped his cooling vest. He wanted to pepper Ivan with questions, but the Chairman Presumptive stopped on Destrier’s shoulder. All the blood drained from his face. He shivered, then bent over and vomited all over the ’Mech’s back.

  “It’s okay, Spurs. Isn’t a one of us hasn’t done that.” Walter held his hand out. “Come on.”

  Ivan wiped his mouth with the back of his trembling hand. “The . . . it . . . they . . .”

  “You did what you had to do. You saved my ass.” Walter waved him forward, then slipped an arm around Ivan’s ribs. “Kind of ironic, huh, Spurs, you saving me. Twice, in fact.”

  “Twice?”

  “Yeah, first time when you cleared them from the camp. Second, getting us here. If not for you, the fighters would have burned us on their second pass.”

  Ivan’s mumbled “thank you” never rose above the level of a whisper.

  “The important thing is that we’re not dead. Important for all the obvious reasons.” Walter guided them down to the hangar deck and to the left, toward a man-sized door built into the wall. “I want to keep it that way. I need to know who knows this place is here and how long will it take them to take another shot at us.”

  Ivan reached out, opening the door. Motion sensors lit up wall sconces along the corridor beyond. “It will take a while, Walter. You’re one of a handful of people on Maldives who knows about this location. To everyone else, including the satellites above, this place does not exist. It’s far enough down that sensors aren’t going to detect it. Short of stumbling onto it accidentally, no one will ever find us. We’ve essentially fallen off the edge of the world.”

  Walter steered Ivan into a small office with a window overlooking the hangar and settled him into a chair. “What is this place?”

  “The future.” Ivan sighed. “And quite likely the reason they want me dead.”

  Walter left Ivan in the chair and scouted around in the base. He passed by a number of doors that were secured with biometric locks. He found two stairwells and a lift that serviced lower levels, but kept to the main one. He located a canteen, so freed up bottles of water and some packaged foods. He hauled them back to Ivan and laid them out on the desk.

  “I don’t feel hungry.”

  “Yeah, well, you need to drink something and eat while you can. Every soldier knows that.”

  The Chairman Presumptive looked up. “But I’m not a soldier, am I?”

  “Close enough that we’re not dead out there.”

  “You’re giving me too much credit, Walter, I wasn’t thinking. I just . . . the only thing I could do was . . .”

  Walter cracked open a bottle of water and handed it to Ivan. “Listen up, Spurs. What you did or didn’t think about, doesn’t mean anything. You took action. That’s good. I’ve known a lot of MechWarriors who never saved anyone else’s skin. Ever. You’re one up on them.”

  “Thank you, I guess.” Ivan drank a little water. “Those men, the ones in the forest, they’re dead, really dead.”

  “It was fast.”

  “We probably weren’t the only targets, were we?” Ivan hung his head. “This is more than an assassination attempt. It’s something between a hostile takeover and a coup d’état.”

  “Seems like an elaborate operation just to off you, Spurs.”

  Ivan’s head came up. “Please, don’t call me that. That’s a warrior’s name. I haven’t earned it. I don’t deserve it.”

  “Hey, everyone gets the nickname they deserve. Half the folks hate theirs; more, probably, but most of us give up hating on it because we’re stuck with it.” Walter’s eyes narrowed. “And you have earned this one. Those spurs, you said your father wore them during his Final Vetting. You’re honoring him and the Augustinian tradition that put us here. Now, whoever tried to kill us, they clearly had no respect for what was going on. So you’re going to embrace Spurs, because your still being alive is going to be a big boot up their asses—spurs and all.”

  “I’m still not a warrior.”

  “You’re still alive, and you’re a lot closer to being one than any of your killers imagined.” Walter tore open a packet of chips with his teeth, then spat the strip of packaging out. “Think about it. They sent two aerospace fighters after us.”

  “I fail to see . . .”

  “It’s as clear as the nose on your face.” Walter pointed at him with a chip. “That’s an insult. They should have sent four at least. Probably a full dozen.”

  Ivan frowned. “You don’t mean that. You’re trying to distract me.”

  “Damned right.” Walter offered him the open bag. “Only thing’s going to defeat you right now is if you try not to feel anything. They want you dead. They want your family’s company for themselves. If that’s not a reason to be angry, you’re never going to be angry.”

  “Emotion isn’t going to help me think straight.”

  “In the heat of battle, too much thinking can make you dead.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement.” Ivan stood. “But now, I do need to do some thinking. So do you.”

  “About?”

  “Come with me. It’s time.” Ivan turned toward the door. “You have a right to know why they want us dead.”

  Chapter Nine

  Lac du Vallee, Nyqvist Upland Preserve

  Maldives

  6 November 3000

  Ivan Litzau led Walter deeper into the underground complex. The tour took them beyond the canteen, to one of the doors secured with biometric locks. Ivan placed his hand on a dark glass sheet. Light flashed once, then the door withdrew into the wall.

  “This way.” Ivan waved him into a large, amphitheater-style room. They entered at the topmost row, then descended down the stairs on the left. The far wall remained dark, but contained a number of large monitors. Several computer consoles lined the base of the wall. Ivan touched another dark panel and the computers woke from sleep. Strings of numbers and letters flashed up over the screens, but Walter could make no sense of them.

  He folded his arms over his chest. “This looks like a command center.”

  “It is, but likely not in the way you think of it. Please, be seated.” Ivan waited for Walter to plunk himself down in a chair before he continued. “You’re in the heart of a project that my great-grandfather started a century after the war. As I said before, you are one of a handful of people who know where this is located. Those who have worked on it, save for members of the Litzau family—and not each and every one of them—are drawn from other worlds. They work here as part of their education. Once they are finished, they go out there, to the other Successor States. All of them have knowledge, but research is compartmentalized so none of them truly know what is going on.” Ivan shrugged. “And, I suspect, even if they did know, they’d just think it’s the madness of a Periphery corporate marketing-and-research department.”

  Walter sat forward, resting elbows on knees. “I appreciate the context, but I still don’t understand.”

  “A bit more, then you will.” Ivan seated himself before one of the consoles. “When the war happened, the Dhivi tried hard to not choose sides. We feared that if we backed the wrong side, the victor’s retribution would be fearful; and if not, our contribution would be ignored. As it turned out, our worst fears were realized as the war killed our people—purportedly by accident—crushed our economy, and poisoned our environment. For the survivors, it seemed as if the whole world had turned against the
m.

  “This is when the most powerful among them enhanced the power of the First Family Councils. They tightened regulations governing corporations to keep wealth and power concentrated in certain hands, believing that those who had wealth were best suited to managing stewardship of the world. And, indeed, the Preferred and even some of the Holders worked tirelessly through the Planetary Board for the next couple generations to rebuild and revitalize their corporate fortunes and the world. If not for their efforts, Maldives would have long since died.”

  Walter raised an eyebrow. “Let me guess. The third Preferred generation, born into privilege and wealth, decided what they had was a birthright, not an obligation.”

  “True, yet everyone feared instability so much that they allowed the First Families to continue to regulate the corporate structure. Dissenters found themselves frozen out when it came to acceptable matches, stripped of their Proxies or married off to families elsewhere, like Itrom. Some even . . . well, let me show you.”

  Ivan typed in a series of commands. What appeared to be a family tree flashed on one of the monitors. “Keep your eye on the branch there in red as I scroll up through time.” A counter in the corner of the string totaled up the years. Twenty years from the point where Ivan had started, the red branch disappeared.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The grandson in that line, he was very vocal in his criticism of the First Families Corporate Personnel policy. Even though he was of the Preferred, the Planetary Board literally went back and retroactively sanctioned his family, stripping them of Preferred and Proxy status.” Ivan pointed at the screen. “They allowed him to sell off his family’s corporate holdings and take his kin off to another world. That family was by no means unique, but most often the mere threat of sanction was enough to keep people quiet.”

  “I understand.”