by Victor Milán
Her rank of Force Commander was brand new. Although Red was doing the same job she had done since long-time XO Marisol Cabrera had been killed defending Don Carlos on Hachiman two years ago, she had been held no rank in the Caballeros; she was a civilian auxiliary. That seeming lack of standing had drawn her some static on Towne, even though the Davions were much less strung on titles than the Dracs.
So, Don Carlos swore her in and jumped her to FC. Even among all the Caballero egos, inflated and delicate as bubbles, nobody popped. Red's job was staff level, she did it very well, and frankly, no one else was any too eager to get stuck with it.
Besides, while Red was no MechWarrior, she was a combat vet. There were few noncombatants in the regiment anyway, at least not over the age of eight. Red had traded her share of shots with ill-intentioned strangers, and the fact that she didn't know how to pilota BattleMech didn't mean she hadn't fought in one. Having been trained by chief artillerist Diana Vasquez, she had taken over the controls of the experimental OBK-MIO O-Bakemono—a heavy support 'Mech and knockoff of the Clan Naga—lent the Seventeenth by Luthien Armor Works during the battle of Port Howard on Towne. Her big Shigunga Arrow IV missiles had smashed a key Black Dragon counterattack, saving many Caballero butts and ensuring the fall of the planetary capital. .
Red Gallegos introduced her companions: Cassie and Father Doctor Roberto "Call Me Bob" Garcia, himself recently promoted to captain. The Jesuit was getting some last-minute tips from his new assistant, Lieutenant Senior Grade Daffodil Chu, a small plump woman with short dark hair and a complexion that reminded Cassie of uncooked dough. He excused himself and joined the others in a bent-over dash beneath the feathered blades.
The VTOL leapt into the air. The big bulbous DropShip Uyeshiba and the marching 'Mechs assumed the semblance of toys, glistening with rain.
"Even from up here," Father Doctor Bob murmured, "the Luthien mob looks orderly."
Mishcha, who was sitting on a fold-down seat in the passenger compartment with his guests, showed him a grinful of teeth. "People around here aren't wild like they are in the Federated Commonwealth," he said. "Or even on Hachiman. But we still know how to have a good time."
"I'm sure," Garcia said heartily.
It might have struck the Voice of the Dragon guide strange had he realized the portly priest was the Seventeenth's new Chief Intelligence Officer. Or maybe not. In the Draconis Combine it was taken for granted mat, on any kind of significant expedition, somebody was a spy. And indeed, Father Bob was there to keep his eyes open, but mainly he was going because he was the most sophisticated of the Cabelleros, and the most diplomatic.
The helicopter was flying northwest, passing over the outermost of the blastwall-ringed landing pits of the Takashi Kurita Memorial Spaceport. Ahead lay the southeastern fringe of Imperial City. Here it was mostly warehouses and transport yards, changing to grim compounds with razor-tape loops topping chain-link fences, the buraku, or barracks, in which masses of Unproductives were housed, run by an agency with the arch acronym ETA, which was the word—eta—for the pariahs of old Japanese society. These gave way in turn to the characteristic cement-slab blocks of Worker-class housing. From the center of the great urban sprawl rose a cabochon of glittering black, glass and marble and polished teak, in obsidian contrast to the predominantly drab surroundings.
"There you see the heart of Imperial City," Mishcha intoned, "which is the heart of the Draconis Combine. Truly, this is the Black Pearl."
"It's beautiful," Garcia said.
"Wonderful," Red Gallegos said, angling in her seat for a better view out the port. "Will we fly closer to it?"
"It must be truly breathtaking at night," Father Doctor Bob added.
"Regrettably, our current course will take us south of the city center," Mishcha said, pitching his voice to penetrate the rotor chop and turbine howl, "and we have appointments we must keep. However, you are the Coordinator's guests. If you wish an aerial tour of Imperial City—by day or night, Captain Garcia—"
"Call me Bob."
The guide grinned and bobbed his head. "Sure, Captain Bob. As I say, any questions or requests you have, come right to me and I'll take care of them. Just think of me as your kuromaku."
Cassie's eyes widened. "Kuromaku?" she echoed in Japanese. " 'Fixer?' That's ingo, isn't it?"
Mishcha grinned still wider. Despite his first name he had a very Japanese appearance, oval face, pronounced epican-thic folds at the corners of his dark eyes, wheat-colored skin. "That's right. Sorry. Yakuza slang is very popular on Luthien right now."
A look of appraisal came into his eyes. "You must be the scout. Lieutenant Senior Grade Suthorn. They told me about you."
"So ka ? What did they tell you?"
"Mostly that you spoke flawless Japanese—which you do."
"Domo." Thanks.
"Do-itashimashite." You're welcome. "They also told me under no circumstances ever to let you out of my sight." Cassie grinned.
She looked across the compartment to see Red watching her with a suspicious look in her eyes. The XO looked away when Cassie noticed her.
Cassie pushed her chin forward, crossed her arms and let her back slide down the padded interior of the compartment. The chopper smelled of sweat and lubricant and the eye-watering formaldehyde tang characteristic of alcohol-burning Combine internal combustion engines.
It wasn't that Red thought Cassie might be hatching some betrayal scheme with their guide; the scout had proven her devotion to the Caballeros in blood and hardship many times over. Red disapproved of Cassie on general principles, as had her predecessor Marisol Cabrera, and she also did not like the fact that Cassie was close friends with her husband Richard, a.k.a. Zuma, the Chief Aztech. Had she been a more traditional norteña of the Trinity worlds she might well have shot the scout for spending so much time with him. But as defiantly— sometimes pathetically—as the 'lleros tried to cling to their cultural identities, they had to accept some measure of compromise to function as Caballeros. The regiment was la familia for everybody, and when all was said they all were every bit as cut off from their homes as Cassie herself.
Unlike Cabrera, Red Gallegos did not allow her disdain for what she saw as Cassie's scandalous character to color her assessment of Cassie's abilities. Each woman respected what the other did for the regiment, and so they could work together smoothly.
Beneath them the city ended as if severed by the stroke of a katana. Below them a river valley flowed away to the west, its steep walls rising to rolling hills, green parkland and forests surrounding occasional industrial islands bounded by high cement walls. The ride smoothed as the chopper left the great urban heat sink behind.
"That's the Kado-guchi Valley down there, isn't it?" Garcia asked. The shine in his dark brown eyes showed there was nothing pro forma about his interest now. He was a passionate student of history, and history had been made below.
"That's right," Mishcha said proudly. "It was right beneath us that our Coordinator stopped the Clans cold in 3052. Many brave deeds were performed by both sides, and many great warriors fell like cherry blossoms."
Red Gallegos's thick lips curled in an expression of disgust. "Los ateos," she murmured in tones of malediction.
Mishcha looked at her with his head cocked like a curious bird's. He was either well-briefed on foreign body-language and intonational nuance or spoke Spanish, or both.
"You disdain the Clans? It was my understanding that you Southwesterners gave honor to a brave foe, as do we of the Combine."
"Men," Red said with unaccustomed shortness. "Not devils." The way she said devils made it clear she was not speaking metaphorically.
"The characteristic, ah, Clan means of reproduction," Father Doctor Bob said in his best pedantic mode, "is very disturbing to the Southwestern psyche. It strikes many of us as actively blasphemous. Our warriors commonly refer to the Clanners as 'mudheads'."
"Ah, yes, I have heard of them," Mishcha said. "They are supernatural beings often
represented by actors in ceremonies held among your Indian peoples. They are clowns, yes? Figures of fun."
Cassie laughed. She would dearly love to see the ISF's dossiers on the peoples and cultures of the Trinity. Trying to make them intelligible to analysts deep in the heart of the Dragon would fry the mind of any self-respecting Metsuke agent.
"Clowns, yes," she said, "figures of fun, no. They're sinister beings, something mothers use to frighten bad children. They're the products of incest among the gods."
The guide goggled at her. Cassie hadn't been much closer to the worlds of the Southwestern Trinity than he likely had. But the Pueblos among the Caballeros kept up their rituals as assiduously as did the unit's Catholic majority. She had witnessed kachina ceremonies herself often enough, at least those open to outsiders. The secret ones were guarded as jealously from fellow 'lleros as from the rest of the universe. A Caballero foolish enough to try spying would simply disappear, and the loss would be accepted by comrades and relatives with no thought of payback, despite the fondess for the blood feud typical of most Southwestern cultures. It was part of the web of paradox and complexity that made Southwestern society so hard for outsiders to grasp, much less integrate themselves into. Which was why, after eleven years, Cassie was still referred to by her comrades in the Seventeenth by the Clan word of Abtakha— outsider.
The helicopter cut south from the river valley. It crossed a line of hills and emerged over a broad basin bordered by forests of tall conifers. A walled compound occupied the center of it. A road spooled away east over a brushy ridge. To the west tall, vaguely humanoid figures glinted in fugitive sunbeams as they lumbered toward one another.
"BattleMechs?" Red said. "It looks like they're fighting."
"Filming would be a better word, Force Commander," Mishcha said. "They're shooting a battle scene for the new Johnny Tchang holovid—the story of the Clan attack on Luthien a few years back. Welcome to Eiga-toshi—Cinema City, as you would call it." The Seventeenth would be housed on the grounds of the holovid studio, which possessed dormitory-like housing sufficient to a group the size of the Caballeros and their families. Their 'Mechs would be parked in a big prefab hangar annexed to the north side of the compound proper, just outside the wall that surrounded the Cinema City complex.
Cassie stared out the port as the pilot swung west to give them a better view. "That looks like a Vulture down there. And that's a Thor, got to be." She frowned at the guide. "The DCMS isn't letting go of captured Clan machines for a silly holovid, is it?"
Or maybe, she thought, the gnomes at Luthien Armor Works let go of some more of their Clan-knockoff prototypes, like that O-Bakemono they lent us for poor Diana to try out?
"Ah, no. Give the credit to our glorious Coordinator himself, As Gunji no Kanrei, during the fight at Basin Lake north of here, he thought to lure the Jaguar Guards into a field sown with vibrabombs to serve as mines. To do so he ordered technicians to build sheet-metal superstructures to make common LoaderMechs appear to be actual BattleMechs such as Thunderbolts and Archers. The Jaguars believed the trick, and the Otomo caught them in the minefield and gave them a fine beating."
Mishcha laughed. So did the Caballeros. Too bad we didn't have that trick on Towne, Cassie thought. We'll have to keep it in mind.
"What worked for the so-clever Smoke Jaguars will surely work for holovid audiences, yes? So behold, we have all the OmniMechs we want at our disposal."
The compound itself was huge, at least a square kilometer. It encompassed vehicle parks, ranks of prefab structures, hangar-like studios, a Japanese-style garden, and an archaic village of huts with thatched-reed roofs and paper walls. The helicopter swooped low over a procession of men dressed in oddments of ancient Japanese armor, trudging back from a shoot with plastic weapons slung over their shoulders, and landed in front of a sandy-colored oblong barracks.
"They aren't in the same picture as the battling 'Mechs, are they?" Father Doctor Bob asked their escort as they dismounted, with a wave at the marching spearmen.
"Oh, no. We're also doing a historic epic. Chushingura. Very stirring subject for my people."
"The tale of the forty-seven ronin?"
Mishcha beamed. "You are familiar with the story? You are a very educated man, Captain Bob."
With Red by his side he set off toward the barracks, which would house the Caballeros during their several-week stay on Luthien. Cassie hung back, giving the black sleeve of Garcia's cassock a discreet tug.
"Hang a moment, Captain Bob?" she suggested sotto voce.
He nodded. "Captain Bob. You know, Cassiopeia, I rather like the sound of that."
"I don't like the sound of Cassiopeia," she reminded him, not that she expected it to do any good. They began walking toward the building more slowly than the lead pair. "Just wondering if you noticed the road cutting east of here?"
"Why, yes, certainly. What of it?"
"Cut right straight toward the spaceport, didn't it?"
He blinked. "Why, so it did. You know, I wondered whether our BattleMechs were going to have to march here by way of Imperial City proper."
"I wonder why we flew that route. Could be our hosts just wanted to give us a better snap on their pretty city. Or—"
He nodded. "Or there might be something on the more direct flight-path they didn't want us to see. D'you think that's significant?"
"Probably not. Just something, y'know, to keep in mind."
He colored and hung his head. "I'm not suited for this job. I've said so all along. I'm not cut out to be a spy at all, must less a spy-master."
Cassie patted him on the arm—tentatively, so as not to give him ideas. He was a man of ideas, was Father Doctor Bob. "Here, now, here," she told him. "Don't take it that way."
"But I just don't know what I'm doing."
"None of us is trained in Intel. That's why Don Carlos hired Lieutenant Chu to be your head assistant. She is trained, and she worked a lot of years for Davy M1I4. Shoot, she's still a Stealthy Fox spy, only we're not supposed to know that."
"The Colonel should have made her intelligence chief, not me."
"Get real! We're not going to have an outsider for S-2." The word outsider kind of stuck coming out. "Besides, you've got all that shifty Jesuit training under your belt. You're a trained shrink; you know how people work. And you know all that stuff about other cultures and history and things. Unless all that doesn't really matter as much as you always told me it did—"
She gave him a look from the corner of her blue-smoke almond eyes. He liked to trap her and lecture her on history, a subject that only interested her when it impinged on her chosen craft of killing men and 'Mechs. He was big on urging her to broaden her horizons. By that he meant, her sexual horizons, with middle-aged members of the clergy. Catholic priests everywhere still took vows of celibacy, but to a Southwesterner that didn't mean quite the same thing necessarily as it did to everybody else in the Inner Sphere. Which was the way of most things. You had your Trinity, and then you had your rest of Creation.
He nodded slowly. "Those things do matter, Cassiopeia. In fact, if you'd only let me, I could help you see for yourself the wonders—"
She started walking farther away from him. He was getting a dangerous shine to his eyes.
"Not right now. For the moment, just focus on the fact that I wasn't trying to shoot you down. Just help with a bit of on-the-job-training. ¿Comprende?"
"Sí." They walked up the cement steps and into the dusty cool dim.
* * *
Off-duty cast and crewfolk all came to hang by the big main gates of Eiga-toshi when the Caballeros arrived. The make-believe BattleMechs had long since been put to bed. Now it was time to gape in awe at the real thing.
As Buck Evans' big Orion lumbered into the compound a hovercraft wove around its right leg, cutting it dangerously close. Buck let a couple of blasts from the air horn he had mounted atop the combo SRMINarc-pod launcher on the 'Mech's right shoulder. In response, someone in the open-to
pped vehicle vented off a shrill rebel yell that would have done credit to any Cowboy.
The hovercar slowed, straightened, and made right for where Cassie stood in the front row of onlookers. Extras, grips, production assistants, and minor execs scattered. Cassie, Red, and Father Doctor Bob held their ground. Cassie unsnapped the buttoned breast pocket of the olive-drab FWL fatigue blouse she wore under her battered leather Aero-Space-jock jacket and reached inside.
At the last possible instant the blower jock threw his machine into a broadside skid, hurling an ocher-dust tsunami over the Caballero trio. Red and Garcia threw arms up before their eyes. Cassie smoothly consummated the act, already begun, of slipping on a pair of wraparound shades.
With a dying whine of twin driver-fans the hovercar settled to the packed earth of the compound. A lanky familiar figure with a black topknot and a black patch over one eye popped up from the driver's seat and scrambled like a monkey over the windscreen.
"Buntaro Mayne," Cassie said. "What's up?"
The Mech Warrior took skittery baby-steps down the flat sloping snout of the hovercar and jumped to the ground. He had a gold assault-rifle cartridge slung on a chain around his neck.
"Happenin', Cass?" he said. They exchanged the complicated Secret Handshake that had evolved over the Hachiman garrison months between the 17th and the 9th Ghost Regiment during the Caballeros' tenure on Hachiman, involving a forearm bash, a bump of fist-base against fist-base, and high, medium, and low fives. The two units had become fast friends back during the Seventeenth's stint on Hachiman two years before.
The Caballero BattleMechs continued to lumber by as Heruzu Enjeruzu piled from the hovercar like baby scorpions from Mommy's chitinous back. They mobbed the three 'lleros for a boisterous reunion with longtime friends and ersTwhile—and unwilling—enemies.