by Victor Milán
A strong hand gripped her left shoulder from behind and spun her around. The guy had his face open, but it was a blur to Cassie. She was already dropping, adding the power of her own spring-steel leg muscles to the momentum he'd imparted. Even as she dropped, she turned and swept his legs out from under him with her scything right leg.
He fell against a table with a crash and a grunt of pain. The table fell over, depositing him on the floor and gouging a bloody groove in his forehead as the metal napkin-holder fell on him. Cassie came up facing the other guy.
He was quick, already on top of her. Surprised by the way she popped up, he grabbed her by the neck with both hands, but did not apply crushing pressure with his thumbs.
"Hey, now," he began, smiling. "No call to go off—"
She grabbed his left hand with her right one, just to muscle-read his intentions. At the same time she slipped her other arm up between his, then cocked it over his left arm. Feeling in control of the situation, with both hands firmly locked on a slender woman's throat, he was still talking to her as if soothing a frightened child when she slammed her right elbow into his jaw. Stunned, he relaxed his grip on her throat. Reversing her hold on his wrist, she yanked his arm out straight while seizing the back of his neck with her other hand. She slammed his face down into her knee, feeling his nose break with a soul-satisfying crunch, then pivoted and ran him toward his partner, who was just climbing off the floor.
Cassie was blowing out the door before the second man hit the first and knocked him back down in a cursing tangle. Normally she would've made sure of her opponents; she hated leaving foes still functional in her backfield. But she didn't know if her little pals had other little pals who might be closing in even now, and that made evaporating imperative. She took a right down the street and began to run through lightly falling snow. The heavier coating that had fallen earlier in the evening was now churned slushy enough by foot traffic that her tracks would be hard to make out.
Two quick shots behind the ear from her snubby would have added no appreciable time to her leave-taking. Had this still been Hachiman, she would have taken that time without hesitation or remorse. But she'd worked among the FedComs before, and they were different from the people among whom she'd grown up. In neither Liao or Combine space did people or government pay much heed to the concept of the rule of law. It was no accident that the Kuritas' main domestic code was a book of aphorisms. The Davions, on the other hand, took law seriously—and unlike their counterparts in the Combine or the Capellan Confederation, FedCom citizens generally believed that the authorities were their friends.
Cassie's present persona was not that far from her own real appearance; the simpler the better was a prime rule of disguise. It would not be optimal to have the local heat looking for a woman of her general description on a double-murder rap. And cops in the Federated Commonwealth were a lot more efficient at criminal investigations than their counterparts across the line.
As she ran she glanced over her shoulder. A pair of dark forms two blocks behind broke into a run after her. She put on an additional burst of speed, angled across the street and raced left into an alley.
* * *
She was now at least ten minutes away from the diner, moving at a jog she could keep up forever. She was a little surprised the bird-dogs had stayed with her this long. Then again, she hadn't yet made any serious moves to break contact and separate for good. And though her pursuers were still on the trail, they hadn't shown any sign of being able to run.her down, though she thought she'd made two foot teams and one car after her. She was minded to string this out a little while, see what she could see. Sooner or later she would double back on them, cut out an isolated pursuer—the pursuit always got strung out if the chase went on long enough—and ask a few pointed questions in some alley.
That she might blow—might have blown—the gig never entered her calculations. Maybe the scene had been going down straight, and the Popular Militia had wanted to strong-arm the newbie a little bit, just to establish who was who. It wasn't Cassie's way to let herself be used as a practice dummy unless the mission very specifically mandated it; and Don Carlos's stiff-necked Galistean pride would have met him approve any action that might give the PMers the idea 'lleros could be pushed around. If they wanted to engage in the time-honored rituals of testing each other through recreational combat, that was another matter. Kidnapping was no part of the code.
She dodged wide of a dumpster, then ran out the center of the alley mouth. You never took a corner close. Three blocks to her left, where the street began to slope down to the bay, a pair of figures rounded a corner and pointed at her. She turned right and sprinted through an intersection.
Four blocks ahead, a car turned onto the street toward her. As soon as its lights hit her, it accelerated. Realizing things were getting serious, she crossed the street and dove into the next alley.
Something's strange here, a voice was saying from somewhere in Cassie's head. She had come to recognize two such little voices. One of them she had learned from Lady K to ignore. The other Guru Johann had taught her always to heed. He was right too. Maybe the hardest lesson she'd yet learned was to distinguish between them.
This was Voice Two, loud and clean They've got the manpower to've tried to cut you off long since. It's almost as if they're herding you.
To think that was to act. The tag end of a fire escape hung down to Cassie's left a tantalizing three meters in the air. She dodged to the right side of the alley, and then without breaking stride pivoted to run almost straight into the brick wall beneath the bottom stair. Momentum carried her two steps up the wall. Her fingers closed on chill, ice-slick metal. A heave of legs and shoulders and she was running up the metal stairway like a monkey.
A figure stepped into the center of the alley's far end. It was featureless, deeper black against an un-lighted intersection, and some kind of thick jacket bulked out the upper torso. But something in movement and stance and the curve of hips into powerful thighs told Cassie the figure was a woman.
The flame and thunder of a machine pistol on full-auto erupted from the middle of it.
11
Port Howard
Aquilonia Province, Towne
Draconis March, Federated Commonwealth
19 December 3057
Copper-jacketed slugs didn't spark as they ricocheted off the iron steps and railings of the fire escape the way they did in adventure holovids, but they made a Krishna-almighty racket. Being fired up on full rock'n'roll wasn't something you got used to, really. But like most of the bitch-goddess Danger's many faces, it invoked the old fight/flight clauses of the genetic code, and those you could learn to deal with. Cassie was so used to riding the adrenaline surge like the wave that it was that she only really felt safe and secure when the hammer was coming down.
But safe and secure are relative concepts. She ran up the fire-escape stair as fast as her legs could piston. Her snubby was in her hand and blazing, but it would taken an entire miracle to tag the pistolera coming after her. Cassie was only trying to make her flinch, throw off her aim, maybe dazzle her with muzzle-flare.
Speed, dark, distance, and the fire escape made the shooter's tracking solution tricky. But Wolf Girl, as Cassie was marrow-sure her pursuer was, knew her stuff, pulsing out bursts of no more than five or six shots. From upwards of sixty meters she, too, would have to be lucky to score a hit.
But she'd have to be a whole lot less lucky. It was time to change a few more targeting variables.
The windows in this neighborhood seldom had bars on them, bless these trusting little Davion souls. Coming up on a switchback Cassie crammed her snubby back into its holster while ripping her coat open with her left hand. Then she hauled out the bigger Sperry-Browning autopistol and fired two shots at an upward angle through the window, to ensure it wasn't shatterproof.
It wasn't. It shattered just fine, glass shards cascading down around her like big triangular snowflakes. She just had to hope like
hell her rounds hadn't intersected any sleeping citizens in their flight.
Two steps shy of the landing she stopped. Wolf Girl, running toward her along the alley's far wall, fired a burst straight into the now broken window. Cassie poked her pistol over the rail and blasted off five quick shots as the glowing tritium-painted sight dots lined up. Wolf Girl threw herself into a forward dive, tucking a shoulder, rolling, and coming up shooting.
By that time Cassie had grabbed the rail and swung herself through the window. She was in a cramped bedroom heavy with heat and the smell of human presence. Her peripheral vision picked up two human-sized lumps cowering on the floor on the far side of the bed. Smart people.
"Take everything," a timid voice called as she blew past. "It's not worth our lives."
"Police pursuit!" Cassie yelled. "Call for backup."
Then she was out the door, and gone.
* * *
"We should split up," said Force Commander Peter White-Nose Pony. "All in a lump like this, we just make ourselves a target."
Cassie was perched with her butt on the back of a sofa shoved against the wall of the second-story lounge in the Markbreit, her feet on the seat. Nobody told her not to do that, la Dama Muerte being long gone. South-westerners generally didn't take kindly to being told to keep their feet off the furniture and go clean their rooms. No one here knew about her wild chase through Port Howard's darkside last night, and she wasn't about to tell them.
"That's ridiculous," retorted Gordo Baird. "If we spread across a whole planet we'll be lost like grains of sand in the Chiricahua Desert back home."
White-Nose Pony studied Baird calmly for a moment. "I'll pretend I didn't hear that," he said evenly.
Cassie was rocking back and forth, almost vibrating. She was paying little attention; Gordo was being a butthead, of course, but that was SOP. White-Nose Pony was too cool a customer to go off on him for letting his mouth run. He'd settle for reminding the S-2 to tighten the reins.
Despite Don Carlos insisting she be present, despite the fact the regiment's safety was at issue, Cassie was having trouble focusing on the here and now.
"Nobody's talking about covering the whole planet, Gordo," Lady K said. She sat on the sofa next to Cassie, her body leaned back and her long legs stretched all the way out. "We can't do it, even with the Fusiliers and the Gourds. Shoot, the culebras couldn't do it if they drained the whole frontier from Dieron to Proserpina of troops. We don't even bother with the southern hemisphere, for starters: let the Dracs play with toy boats. What we're talking is splitting up to cover a few strategic points, places the Dracs can't say they've won unless they have hold of them. You don't have to've read Clausewitz or Sun Tzu to figure that angle."
Baird stiffened. He hadn't read either, but he knew Kali had. Cassie too, but she was only peripherally aware of the by-play. All she could think about now was John Satterthwaite, whose body had been found on an abandoned pier by Circle.Bay, shot through the back of the head. Inside, she boiled with feelings she couldn't name.
"I can't believe we're so scared of a few culebras that we're going to flee like quail at the very thought of them," said Gavilan Camacho, who sat near his father with legs extended and arms folded.
"This isn't a macho thing, Gabby," Lady K said. "It's war."
Gabby didn't flare back at her. The prospect of real enemies had pretty well damped out the intramural norteño/Cowboy squabbling.
"I'm not talking about macho," he said reasonably. "I'm talking about concentration of forces. We have the Towne Guard to back us up. Two regiments, even three, we can meet and beat. If we're not scattered to the four winds."
Lady K shrugged to acknowledge the point. "We can't just sit back and take for granted we're not going to face any more than three regiments," said the Rasalhaguian commander of Harley Company, Captain Erik "Gringo" Johansen.
"How many can they spare?" Gabby demanded. "The Combine's border with the FedCom is down to the bone as it is. With all this bullicio going on in Clan-occupied space, they need as many troops up guarding the truce line as they can get."
John "Frenchfry" Ames scratched behind his ear. The hair hanging sheep dog-like in his eyes was unwashed and lank, and those eyes were sunk deep in his long, lined face. He and his wife Raven had been fighting even more than usual of late. She thought he'd been paying a little too much attention to Janine "Mariposa" Esposito, a Valkyrie driver from Bobby the Wolf's Cochise Company, widowed in the fight with the Ghosts. Raven had recently issued an ultimatum, the rumor mill said.
"What about our families?" Frenchfry asked in a voice which, like his appearance, hinted that sleep and he had been strangers for a spell. "I don't like having my two kids stuck in the ten-ring night and day. And I'm not just talking about the Dracs, either."
That brought a rumble of assent. Though the rioting Diana had headed off had not recurred, protesters thronged in front of the Turanian Transport Complex gates every day. The occasional anti-foreigner sign appeared on the street outside the Markbreit, too, though they didn't usually linger. The hotel management kept the local precinct well-bribed, so that the cops usually came and told the demonstrators to move along. The constant presence of one or two light Caballero 'Mechs on the roof helped make the point.
But in the long run they only served to up the stakes, and everyone in the Seventeenth knew it. A few tentative bonds were being formed with the Marquis's Own Fusiliers, whose continued wariness stemmed more from reflex mistrust of money-troopers than xenophobia. But the mainstream political parties as well as the ROTM fringe were squarely against the 'lleros. Bashing them in the media was the one thing the Charter, Reform, and even Union Parties could agree on.
"Our families, OK," Gabby said. "Nobody wants them in the line of fire when the shooting starts." He had no real family left other than his father, but just like Cassie, like everybody, for him the regiment was la familia. His concern for the children was scarcely less acute than Frenchfry's.
"But let's not lose sight of the point," Baird put in sourly. "Not splitting one's forces is a widely recognized military principle, after all." And he favored Lady K with a triumphant smirk.
"And let's not forget we aren't being paid just to guard Turanian Transport," Maccabee retorted. "Uncle Chandy owns some mining and timber concerns the Snakes might take some interest in. And Port Howie isn't TTC's only yard."
Cassie tuned out. This was all talk—serious talk, but nothing that needed her.
She had plans to lay.
* * *
Cassie wasn't at the hotel later that afternoon when Red Gallegos's quick thinking saved them all. The XO was standing in the lobby holding a quiet but impassioned debate with the front desk over, of all things, linens. The regiment's usage of bedclothes and towels had taxed the Markbreit's outside laundry service to the point of serious overheat. Every alternative avenue seemed blocked by either contract with the service or Port Howard's convoluted union rules.
Like her husband, Dolores was expert in the arts of gentle persuasion—neither had ever struck one of their five children, though their discipline was strict. She was confident that something could be worked out. In her experience that was always true if you just kept talking, and kept the voices down. But before she could slide the day manager past the denial stage, some movement on the street caught the corner of her eye. A panel van had coasted by the entrance as if slowing to a stop.
"Excuse me, just a moment, please," she said to the manager, and walked out through the swinging door. The day was cold and the clouds had come back, but no new snow had fallen since the plows and salt-trucks had come by, and the street was clear. The van had stopped about twenty meters down from the hotel entrance. The driver's door opened. A man in a jacket and nondescript pants climbed out, consulted a noteputer in his hand, and set off down the street. Very briskly.
Dolores turned to the manager, who had followed her outside, puzzled by her abrupt departure. "Get everybody out the back doors," she said matter-of
-factly.
"What?"
She already had her pocket communicator out and pressed to her mouth. "Emergency alert," she said. "Delivery van parked twenty meters north of entrance. All Caballeros begin evacuation procedures now. Emergency alert. Pass it on."
"Señora Gallegos, what on Towne—" the manager sputtered.
Dolores Gallegos waved at the parked vehicle. "That's a bomb. Get clear if you don't want to die. It may already be too late." She turned and ran for the stairs.
* * *
It was standard 'llero practice to leave your personal com on standby at all times in a potential danger zone. Ninety percent of the regiment heard the warning. By the time Red reentered the building, Diana Vásquez had the youngsters from the day-care center, which was on the ground floor against just such possibilities, filing through the lobby and out the back door.
With no prospect of immediate battle and cooperative exercises with the locals still in the negotiation stage, most the Seventeenth's 'Mechs were parked out of sight in the TTC yards. The only unit actually manning its rides was LtSG James Kicking Bird's Geronimo Company, and they were all inside the compound.
Keeping guard over the hotel and its occupants was a strictly volunteer affair.
Down out of the overcast came a Valkyrie, its three Norse Industries jump jets roaring like a gale. It had big cartoon butterflies with polka-dotted wings painted down the right side of its chest armor, the left being occupied by a Devastator long-range missile 10-rack. It was, by coincidence, Mariposa Esposito on watch this afternoon.
The Valkyrie touched down lightly in the street next to the parked mystery van, its thirty tons adding only slightly to the extant potholing. It bent over and seized the van by the box, its medium pulse-laser right hand clamping along the side, the fingers of its left-hand battle-fist digging into the light-gauge metal to assure a solid grip. Then it flexed its legs and launched again in a full-throttle jump south toward the river.