by Victor Milán
He fished in the snake-mating ball of wire, plucked out a loose yellow end, held it up for Cassie's inspection. She could plainly see the marks of the tiny teeth that had haggled it raggedly off.
"I was just about to go shove this up Astro Zombie's pointy gringo nose when you arrived," Zuma said. "He's a smart boy, but he looks for complicated causes for everything, you know? Spent too much time in that Santa Fe college." Captain Harris had in fact attended university in Santa Fe, capital of Sierra and once upon a time of the Intendancy of New New Grenada. But Zuma was using the term Sante Fe in its larger sense, signifying the rural Southwesterners' distaste for their urban cousins, whom they considered oversophisticated wimps.
He reached in to snip out the damaged section with a pair of wire cutters. A voice said, "Cassie," from below.
She turned, frowning. "Kali," she said sullenly.
The tall Mech Warrior stood with magnetized boot-soles mated to the deck between the 'Mech's big square feet, hands on hips. "I was just wondering what I'd done to torque you off at me," she said. "Goes against my grain to make people mad by accident."
Cassie bit her lip and wished she were sneaking through enemy territory with her face blacked out, a Shimatsu-42 assault rifle strapped across her back, and Blood-drinker strapped to her thigh. Life was so much simpler then.
"It's not you, Kali," she said. "I'm just not too comfortable right now."
"Everybody's getting crosswise at each other," Kali said. "We've been cooped up on garrison duty back on Hachiman way too long, and that always gets under everybody's skin. But you've been edgy as a cat waitin' for a weekend at Club Rottweiler. Are you sure I'm not contributing?"
"Hey there, little ladies," a masculine, Cowboy-twangy voice floated up through the well in the center of the deck. A moment later a head followed it, with a ski-slope nose, smarmy-ingratiating smile, and dark hair greased back in a duck's-fanny do. "I just meandered along to ask Lady K to sneak off for a late lunch with me, but what the hey? The more the merrier, I always say."
6
Jump Ship Finnegan's Wake
Zenith Recharge Station, Motor System
Benjamin District, Draconis Combine
10 November 3057
The rest of the head's owner, a tall, gangly, and unlikely proposition, floated up into view. It snagged a scuffed banth-hide boot toe on the lip of the well to arrest its upward progress, then strolled forward, letting the magnetic skids clamped under the bootsoles hold it down.
"There's part of the problem there," Cassie said.
Lady K looked exasperated. "Just what part of, 'we're through, Buckaroo, so hit that lonesome highway' don't you understand?"
Lieutenant Junior Grade William Payson, callsign "Cowboy," grinned hugely. "All of it," he declared. "Nearest highway's a whole mess of AUs in-system, and anyway, my momma didn't raise me to take 'no' for an answer."
"How about the toe of my boot where it'll do the most good?"
"I still can't believe you went with him in the first place," Cassie said.
Her friend shrugged. "No excuses, hon. Guess garrison life just got to me, too."
Cassie had always been wary of becoming engaged with people, of allowing them inside her defenses: that led to pain. That was why she'd resisted so savagely when Kali MacDougall began to work her way into her life right after the Caballeros arrived on Hachiman— and why Cassie was still wary and prone to sulks where her friendship with the tall blonde 'Mech jock was concerned.
But she had learned to read people expertly, a skill which, while it could help you get close to someone, had nothing to do with letting them get close to you. Unspoken were the words Kali would never say, precisely because they were—however true—an excuse: it's better than drinking again.
Cowboy was looking elaborately pained, which made him resemble an overgrown fourteen-year-old dressed up as an off-duty Mech Warrior for Halloween: bulky insulated boots, black-gray-white urban camouflage pants, scuffed black leather FWL dispatch-rider's motorcycle jacket worn over a torn black tee-shirt bearing the skull-and-crossbones logo of the crash-metal band Slow Russian Death, and of course, a worn web belt with a Kali Yama autopistol riding low on his skinny thigh in a tie-down holster.
"Aw, Kali," he whined, "you can't blame a guy for tryin'."
"Sure I can, after the two-hundredth time or so."
He shook his head slowly, like a chastised child. Then his gloom fell away and he looked up at the BattleMech the others were working on.
"That old Naga looks like a gas-station openin' with all that laundry hanging from the guy-lines," he said. "Too bad it's such a bitch to get it running."
"It's not a Naga," Cassie corrected. "It's a Luthien Armor Works OBK-MIO O-Bakemono."
"Well, it surely looks like a Naga."
And so it did, and the resemblance wasn't coincidental. In a top-secret crash program overseen by Theodore Kurita himself—similar to the NAIS initiative that had produced the Rakhasa, the Federated Commonwealth's Mad Cat knock-off—Luthien Armor Works was building its own copies of captured Clan BattleMechs. The 'Mech being worked on so diligently by Astro Zombie, Zuma, and the rest was a prototype, assigned to the Seventeenth for field testing on its upcoming mission.
Which was worrisome. With the exception of Chandrasekhar Kurita, who was probably the richest man in the Combine and quite possibly in the whole Inner Sphere, Kuritas were not known for their largesse. And while Coordinator Theodore Kurita had made a point of ignoring the centuries-old Combine tradition of contempt for mercenaries, it was still startling that such a valuable and secret piece of machinery should be entrusted to gaijin. Particularly ones who had spent much of their lives fighting against the Draconis Combine.
To be sure, Uncle Chandy, as a magnate, a Kurita, and a favored relative of the Coordinator, could throw around mass disproportionate to his famous Buddha bulk. But even in a corruption-riddled society, in which personal influence and family ties counted for almost everything, there were limits. And in the normal course of events the most cherry of the DCMS's new technotoys should lie far beyond them.
Add to that, then, the datum that one of the nervous techs who'd accompanied the tarp-shrouded 'Mech from the Combine capital had let slip to Zuma during a walkaround: there was at least one other complete OBK-MIO prototype in existence. Which suggested to Cassie's scout-paranoid mind that this one was considered expendable.
And there was what was really making her moody and on-edge: the mission.
* * *
It had all started in a briefing room in the guts of Chandrasekhar Kurita's Citadel in the middle of the HTE Compound back on Hachiman.
The image on the holostage was of a man who appeared to have fallen forward from a kneeling position, so that his cheek was pressed against a scuffed synthetic-tile floor. He had a white cloth band tied around his head. From the amount of blood pooled on the floor, it was probably best for the composure of certain onlookers that the shot was a fairly extreme close-up. Spilled blood meant nothing to Cassie, but MechWarriors could be a squeamish lot. They weren't used to seeing the human results of their handiwork up close and personal.
"Conventional histories state that the Kokuryu-kai was formed on Terra early in the twentieth century," said the man standing on the dais beside the stage. Cassie knew him well—the Mirza Peter Abdulsattah, Uncle Chandy's security chief. "Allegedly the name meant 'Amur River Society,' but it can also be taken to mean 'Black Dragon Society.' Certain sources claim that the latter meaning is the correct one, and that the organization is older by far."
He adjusted controls hidden in his podium. The image rotated and tightened until the symbol in the middle of the headband dominated the display. It was a black dragon rampant on a red circle, differing from the familiar red and black symbol of House Kurita and the Draconis Combine in that it displayed the whole dragon.
"You have already, unwittingly, had dealings with Kokuryu-kai," he said. "The Internal Security Force took these holoimages
of the man who killed the traffic controllers in the Yoshi-Town Spaceport last Chairman's Day Eve, permitting the Word of Blake raiders to land without warning and attack and kill Planetary Chairman Percival Fillington. This man's headband bears the symbol of the Black Dragon Society."
The listeners shifted and murmured in their seats, ranked on terraces carpeted in light gray-blue mingled with white. They were the usual mixed bag for a Seventeenth Recon briefing: Colonel Carlos Camacho, stocky and mustached, heavy black hair in retreat and rapidly being overtaken by gray, full eyelids droopy with long-accreted fatigue; his chief intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Baird, tall, lean, and distinguished in an immaculately tailored Free Worlds League-style undress uniform; his three battalion commanders, including son Gavilan, dark, lean, and handsome, with a flamboyant mustache and just a hint of self-doubt in his eye; the various company commanders; assorted dignitaries—mainly clergymen—and one lowly scout, Lieutenant Senior Grade Cassiopeia Suthorn.
The Mirza himself was a handsome man, two meters tall and little more than bones, with a great blade nose and a narrow skull topped by a small embroidered cap. Beside him reclined the man who employed everybody in the room, Chandrasekhar Kurita, a great fat glistening Buddha in robes of purple silk, lolling amid a pile of cushions. He ate fruit and drank wine off a carven silver table as he listened to the briefing.
"Whatever the original meaning of its name, Kokuryu-kai has long been known for extreme conservatism and a taste for military expansionism, first of the Japanese empire and subsequently of the Draconis Combine," the Mirza continued. "It has throughout most of its existence been nominally outlawed, though governments, or at least certain agencies, have traditionally been happy enough to make use of Black Dragon assets, including the often deadly zeal of its members and supporters. These tend to be drawn from three rather disparate groups: industrialists, the military, and the yakuza."
Lieutenant Colonel Baird frowned and shook his stylus at the air. "I thought the Combine military felt only contempt for civilians," he said. "Especially tradesmen and crirninals."
"Don't think, Gordo," a voice said from somewhere behind him. "You ain't cut out for it, ese."
Cassie snickered. The intel officer twisted in his seat and glared at ranks of faces suddenly turned stone. Beside him, young Gavilan Camacho's blade-lean face went dark. First Battalion's commander was spending a lot of his time with Gordon Baird these days.
When Baird faced forward again the ripple of muted laughter had a nasty edge. Ethnic tensions between Cowboys and norteños had been bubbling to the surface once more, exacerbated as usual by the boredom of garrison life. Not even Gordon's apparent alliance with the younger Camacho, who was popular with the norteño hardliners, won him any slack. Then again, most 'lleros of whatever flavor thought the S-2 was a fool.
The Mirza went on as if there had been no interruption. "I believe it fair to say, Colonel, that those groups found common ground in their views—including the confidence each had in its ability to manipulate the other two."
"Well, at the risk of having people laugh at me, too," said Lady K, her 174 centimeters sprawled in the seat next to Cassie's at the chamber's rear, "it seems to me you just named off two of Teddy Kurita's staunchest sets of supporters."
Nobody laughed this time. The commander of Bronco Company was well-respected among the Caballeros, as the pompous pinch-voiced Baird was not. Besides, Kali was as lethal with the laser pistol nestled in its tie-down holster on her thigh as she was at the controls of her 100-ton Atlas, Dark Lady.
"You are correct, Captain MacDougall. But do not fall into the error so prevalent outside the Draconis Combine: no society is monolithic, not even the Combine's. There are elements within the Pillar of Steel who believe that the only virtues worthy of a Kurita are those of the sword. And the Coordinator's support among the yakuza is strongest with their younger members. Many of the older oyabun are highly conservative, and consider themselves guardians of the Dragon's traditions.
"For centuries, roughly the period from the Age of War through the collapse of the Star League and the Succession Wars, the Black Dragons lay dormant; they found little to complain about in the rule of Coordinators who were almost uniformly iron-handed at home and imperialist abroad."
That elicited an uneasy rustle of butts shifting in seats from the audience. Those Coordinators had all been Kurita, even the usurping—and rapidly extirpated—von Rohrs of the late twenty-fifth and early twenty-sixth centuries. People who bore the name Kurita were not noted for their fondness for those who spoke invidiously of others who bore that name. But Uncle Chandy just swilled wine from a golden goblet. He was an unorthodox Kurita in more ways than one.
The Mirza spoke on as if unaware that he had said something that might cost him his head—and as far as Cassie could tell, very little went on that Peter Abdulsattah wasn't aware of. "In 3034 then-Coordinator Takashi Kurita permitted most of the Rasalhague Military District to secede. As is widely known, that provoked the Ronin War, in which DCMS hard-liners, under the leadership of Warlord Vassily Cherenkoff and the ever-troublesome Marcus Kurita, tried to reconquer the breakaway Free Rasalhague Republic. As Gunji no Kanrei, Theodore Kurita himself led Combine forces to the KungsArmé's aid. The ronin—as some of you know, the word means 'wave-men,' implying masterless warriors—were quickly crushed. The Free Rasalhague Republic's survival was assured."
"Leastways until the Clans came callin'," drawled Lieutenant Senior Grade Aharon "Barak" Ben-Yisroel, Dayan Company CO, in his exaggerated Cowboy accent. A wiry young Mech Warrior with a face as dark as any Indian's, a hook nose, and an unruly brush of curly black hair, he was more overtly countrified than his superior, Second Battalion commander "Maccabee" Bar-Kochba, the Seventeenth's planetologist and a man as well educated as he was battle-seasoned. Both belonged to the ethnic sub-grouping that called itself by the defiant nickname "Jewboy." Refusing to be assimilated into the Roman Catholic Church in the twenty-first century along with most of Judaism, their ancestors had eventually found their way to the three then-Periphery worlds of the outlaw Intendancy of New New Grenada, where they settled down and devoted themselves to out-Cowboying the other Cowboys.
Imperturbable as always, the Mima nodded. Like his employer, he was unfazed by the rude and abrupt habits of these gaijin hirelings. Cassie suspected that the tall, gaunt man found them, secretly, as amusing and delightful as his boss so overtly did. Which highly un-Kurita taste had likely saved Uncle Chandy's life: when the Word of Blake raiders attacked poor Percy's holiday bash last year, Chandy had been back home in the Compound, hugely enjoying his mercenaries' to-him barbaric Christmas Eve revelries.
"Less widely known was the fact that, despite the Kanrei's overwhelming popularity within the army, certain elements of the Combine military secretly resented what they considered the sellout at Rasalhague. And less known still was that the Black Dragon Society, outraged, awakened from its long slumber.
"Since then Kokuryu-kai's influence has grown in leaps and bounds. Now the Society has all but gone public with its demands that the Combine—like the Free Worlds League and the Capellan Confederation— take advantage of the dissolution of the Federated Commonwealth."
The image of the dead Black Dragon dissolved into stars. "As you all know, the Federated Commonwealth is no more, ever since Katrina Steiner-Davion claimed rulership of the old Lyran worlds and renamed her new state the Lyran Alliance. There wasn't much Prince Victor could do, preoccupied as he has been trying to defend the worlds of the Sarna March from predation by Marik and Liao. As you are also aware, Katrina refused to help her brother fend off the invasion, even going so far as encouraging the various pro-Lyran units to leave their posts on the Sarna worlds and other border planets. Many of these units have returned home to the Lyran Alliance by now, leaving numerous Federated Commonwealth worlds poorly defended."
A swath of stars along the yellow-glowing line marking the frontier shone suddenly brighter than the rest. "I
ndeed, Katrina Steiner has even agreed to the presence of Combine troops as peacekeepers on the worlds of the Lyons thumb, a responsibility which our Coordinator, not without reluctance, has accepted."
Uneasy stirring and cicada-rustle of behind-hands comment ran through the audience. Most of the Seventeenth's members were veterans of the Marik armed forces, whether their separations from service had complied with all the formalities or not, but they had spent most of their careers as mercenaries fighting against the Combine for the Federated Commonwealth.
Uncle Chandy was a popular employer with the regiment, and most of its more sophisticated members harbored at least grudging respect for his cousin Theodore; he seemed to be the only Inner Sphere leader who wasn't permitting personal or House ambition to blind him to the Clan threat, with the clock constantly ticking on the ever-precarious Truce of Tukayyid. But the Caballeros held little love for Dracs at large. Despite their pose of mercenary indifference, they felt a certain general sympathy for FedComs, at least as opposed to the Ktiritas. The thought of the Snakes taking up posts on F-C worlds made many of them uncomfortable.
"Our intelligence"—the Mirza had no need to explain that he was speaking of HTE's farflung corporate intelligence service; that was taken for granted— "indicates that the Black Dragons are preparing to do more than agitate for an incursion into FedCom space. They have recruited the recently appointed commander of Al-Na'ir Prefecture of the Dieron Military District, Tai-sho Jeffrey Kusunoki, to their cause. With their aid, he is preparing to invade a world the Federated Commonwealth claims, a vulnerable planet on the fringe of what many are now calling the Chaos March."
"Why doesn't the Coordinator stop them?" asked Third Battalion's leader, Force Commander Peter White-Nose Pony. A sturdy, quiet man with skin the color of well-tanned leather, his callsign was "Singer," reflecting his secondary job as chaplain of sorts to the Seventeenth's sizable Navajo contingent. "He's Victor Davion's ally these days."