by Victor Milán
* * *
"But all is not sweetness and light in the mercenary camp," the plastic-pretty face said from the little holotank stuck to the wall of Don Carlos's office. "We spoke to Captain Angela Torres about the situation of women inside the so-called Seventeenth Recon Regiment."
Vanity's face appeared, seeming to float in midair in the half-lit office. "Well, there's a lot of male chauvinism, you know?" she said to the holocam. "I mean, just look at the evidence. There's no female batallion commanders. There's only two female company commanders—"
The Colonel held up the remote and clicked off the set. "And unfortunately you're one of them," said Gordon Baird, who sat perched on the end of a clunky green-enameled metal desk that looked as if it dated from the years right after Kerensky's Big Bug-Out. "Thanks so much, Vanity."
Don Carlos rubbed his face with his hands.
"Watch you don't put pressure on the eyeballs," Baird cautioned. "You can actually put a dent in them if you push too hard. Doesn't do much real harm—just squeezes some fluid out of the tissues, takes a while for things to equalize again—but it looks pretty alarming. Whiskey?"
Don Carlos sighed and dropped his hands to the desktop. "Go ahead."
Baird went to a wooden cabinet bolted to the wall, opened it, took out a jigger and a bottle of Hotei Black Label they'd carted all the way from Hachiman. He poured himself a couple of fingers and put the bottle back.
"Salud," he said, tossed back the drink, then wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. "Ahh. You should have taken Blaylock up on his offer, old friend."
The Colonel shook his head.
"I'm serious. I hate to second-guess you, Carlos. But we're a long way from home, and friends are precious few and far between. Things are getting ugly. I know you haven't forgotten Janny Esposito."
A wave of pain passed over the Colonel's face. For a moment he looked impossibly old in the light of the one green-shaded lamp on his desk, his face deep shadows and sagging masses.
"No, my friend," he said. "We are not here to get involved in local politics."
Baird shook his head. "Look, I know what Old Man Chandy told you. But he's not on the ground. We are. This wouldn't be the first time we've reshaped a mission profile to conform to ground truth."
Don Carlos gave a sad chuckle. "Sometimes you talk as if you were fresh out of SAFE intelligence school all over again," he said. "Ground truth."
He shook his head. "No, I'm not forgetting our employer's instructions, but they're not what I'm talking about. I'm saying, we're not being paid to get tangled up in politics here. And that's too risky a job to undertake for free."
"Even if survival's at stake?"
The Colonel looked up sharply. "You think I forget about survival? Do you think I don't light a candle every day to the memory of poor Mariposa? You think that, each and every night, I don't lie awake in bed until I've asked the Blessed Virgin to look after each and every soul the regiment has lost over all the years I've run it?"
"Carlos—I'm terribly sorry. I didn't think—" The Colonel waved a hand. "It is I who owe an apology for letting my grief and frustration spill onto you in the form of anger."
"I understand. Now will you please just reconsider—"
"No. Tonight I'm too tired to wrangle anymore. Speak to me of your concerns and recommendations tomorrow, if you must.
"But please understand me: I've made my decision. And may la Virgen de Guadalupe show mercy on her poor lost children."
* * *
It was a third-floor walkup apartment on Irsei Street south of the river. It wasn't in the best of neighborhoods. Neither was it the worst—but only by virtue of the fact that there's always something worse.
The flat was empty. Just a blanket rolled up neatly against the molding along one wall, a communicator set on the bare hardwood floor, a couple of fast-food containers awaiting disposal. What light there was came from a kerosene lantern turned low. What it was used for Talbot and Lumlee didn't even care to speculate on.
The door stood open to a corridor lit by a single bare bulb hanging from a cord several doors down, the passage so dank and fly-stained to begin with it was hardly worth bothering to illuminate. The open door made him nervous. But that was the way she always did things.
"You have something for me?" the woman asked.
It seemed to Talbot that he'd never seen her in good light. They mostly met with her at night, out on the street away from the lights, or in the passage to the john in some dim dive where, if a man wasn't known, he could be stabbed fifty or a hundred times in the middle of the room, then rolled out into the gutter to bleed to death, and nobody would have seen a Goddamned thing.
He knew what she looked like, though, as well as if he'd spent hours poring over her hologram. She was about 170 centimeters tall, big in shoulders, bust, and hips, not much narrower at the waist, although very little of her body weight was fat. The black megathere-hide jacket she wore over her torn black tee-shirt exaggerated the heft of her shoulders and added meat to her menace. Her face was broad, high-cheekboned, with a short nose and slanting eyes that were russet brown with a hint of red highlight in the lantern-glow. Her hair was brown too, graying prematurely—she could be no older than her early thirties, Talbot guessed—brushcut short but for a skinny tail hanging down to her well-muscled butt in back.
She was handsome, and might've made it over the line into beautiful if she'd ever smiled—or ever looked at a man, or any creature at all to Talbot's knowledge, as if he was anything but a piece of meat. Even if he hadn't been sweat-scared of her, he wouldn't have called her a dyke to her face; he liked to think of himself as a sensitive kind of guy. But in fact he wasn't sure she liked women either. Or anything at all.
They didn't call her Wolf Girl for nothing.
He looked meaningfully to his partner. "Uh, yeah," Lumlee said, unslinging the pack. "We saw that spy again tonight, the one that got away from you last time—"
Talbot winced. Way to go, butthole. But if Wolf Girl took offense at being reminded so bluntly of her failure, her face showed no sign. It might as well have been carved from soapstone.
"Look," Lumlee said, holding the pack out toward her. "Get a load of what's in here."
* * *
Cassie was sitting with her kickstand down and her elbows folded across the handlebars of her stolen Cyclops 650 bike when the second apartment from the end on the top floor of the low-rent block across the street blew up.
It was very satisfactory, with glass-shard storms, a noise fit to make the dead call the cops to complain, big gushers of flame roaring out the windows, and a rolling overpressure that slapped Cassie's face like an angry hand and rocked the big bike on its suspension. The blast blew out most of the other windows on both sides of the block, for good measure.
Almost at once sirens fired up off in the distance. The Davion cops were efficient, you had to give them that. She centered the machine, kicked up the stand, gunned the engine into a purr, turned around and rode west. It would be too hot trying to cross the bridges across the Thunder for a while.
It wasn't about revenge. She kept telling herself that. Wolf Girl had proven herself an immovable obstacle to making contact with the Popular Militia. She had also proven to be a direct—and deadly—threat to the Regiment.
Cassie didn't know Wolf Girl was responsible for the attack that killed Mariposa; she was merely soul-certain without real evidence. But Wolf-Girl had tried to spark a riot that could've cost Caballero lives, not to mention those of a few hundred of her own pals.
And she had John Satterthwaite's blood on her hands too.
Even when purely incidental, vengeance was sweet.
Laughing, Cassie opened the throttle wide, and let the icy night air fill her body like the rush of some powerful drug.
13
Port Howard
Aquilonia Province, Towne
Draconis March, Federated Commonwealth
3 January 3058
The black-m
ustached man's fist crashed into Cowboy Payson's face, knocking him all asprawl into the gleaming light-bedizened face of the jukebox. The miniature mariachi combo performing in the little holotank on top never skipped a beat.
Kali MacDougall looked at Cassie through the steam rising off her hot chocolate and shook her head. "I don't know why we hang out here. It's a nice enough little place, but it attracts the wrong kind of crowd."
From his stool by the counter near their table—Buck Evans and his buddies weren't the sort to sit at tables—Evan let out his rock-polisher chuckle. "Boys will be boys," he said. "They don't mean nothing by it. They just don't wanna let go of their New Year celebrations."
Cowboy shook his head, once, twice, and launched himself in a tackle that took his opponent around the waist. They went flying back across the little restaurant in a whirl of limbs, slammed into an unoccupied table by the window, and knocked it over with a bang and a musical clatter of silverware and plastic glasses on fired-clay tile.
Outside the window the light of a rare sunny day turned the snowy Gunderland Mountains to the east blinding-white, made them seem to hover over the city. The restaurant was on Melnibone Drive outside of downtown proper, well away from the Caballeros' usual stomping grounds. But it served Mexican food that was acceptable—if mainly as a source of heated debate over how it should really be done-played mariachi music—one of the Trinity trinity of country, Mex, and metal—and the owner spoke Spanish. As such it seemed an inviting oasis in a desert of surly gringos.
At the far end from Buck, Father Doctor Bob García was hunched over the counter conducting his field-work, as he put it, which in this case involved drinking coffee sweetened to near the consistency of molasses and shooting the breeze with the proprietor of Salazar's Old New Mexican Café.
"It's funny, you know," Abenicio "Nikos" Papandreou was saying to his new friend. He used his mother's maiden name and cultural heritage for his establishment because, as he explained, he hated Greek food. "People around here, in Port Howard, you know, they make a big thing out of how unprejudiced they are. But if you're what they call a minority, if you don't act according to their expectations of how you're supposed to act, they get seriously bent out of shape."
Father Doctor Bob smiled. "I've noticed that already." The Caballeros had a long history of upsetting expectations, along with sundry other apple carts.
About that time Cowboy and his playmate upset the table. Nikos came bustling out from around the counter, a dark fireplug of a man with frizzy hair beating a premature retreat from his scalp. "Hey, now," he said. "I don't mind you boys playing. But you got to place nice. Don't go busting up the physical plant."
Cowboy's opponent eeled out from between Cowboy and the wreckage and popped to his feet as if spring-loaded. He was a handsome norteño devil, 178 centimeters tall, dark, with flashing green eyes. The teeth he displayed in a grin were so white they looked self-luminous.
"Sorry for the destruction, carnal," he said. "If any-thing's busted, mi vato here will pay for it. It was his clumsiness that caused it."
"Don't call me 'vato,' you low-down owl-hoot. We'da never knocked that durn table down if you'd've been watching where I was pushing you."
"Why don't you two boys sit the hell down and shut the hell up?" suggested Buck Evans from the counter.
Cowboy and company ambled to the counter. Cowboy's playmate was Lieutenant Junior Grade Jesse James Leyva, callsign Outlaw. Dispossessed during one of the Regiment's Periphery gigs following its disastrous Clan campaign, he'd moved into the Phoenix Hawk piloted by Adelante's former CO Juan Pedro O'Rourke after O'Rourke was killed by ISF operators masquerading as Word of Blake terrorists in an attack on the Hachiman Taro Compound.
In most outfits Frenchfry Ames would, as a matter of course, have taken over the PH, a machine recognized for its capabilities as a command 'Mech and a substantially larger, more powerful machine than his 20-ton Stinger, when he took over Adelante. But while the Seventeenth Recon was technically a "medium" BattleMech regiment, meaning it had some of all four classes of 'Mech, Caballeros grew up hot-rodding little AgroMechs, and had a strong cultural predisposition to hit-and-run raiding tactics, so no stigma attached to the lighter machines. Leyva had been a PH pilot before, so he took over the Phoenix Hawk and Ames kept his Stinger.
"Maybe now that the atmospheric testosterone count is goin' down in the room we can actually talk," Lady K said as the recent combatants sat down at the counter with Evans. Outlaw was Cowboy's norteño counterpoint. Of course they got along famously, but they had an unusual way of showing it.
Cassie shook her head. "It's nothing."
Her friend looked stern. "You've been hanging around me like you're just dyin' for me to pry something loose before you bust. But it's your choice, hon. You can talk, or you can stay closed up till you bust."
"It's—oh, I don't know!"
"Yes, you do," Kali said quietly. "It's that old man who got killed."
"It's not! It has nothing to do with that. It's just..." Cassie's voice trailed away and she felt tears weigh down her eyelashes. What's wrong with me?
Lady K reached across the table and took her hand. "Grievin's one of those things that's best gotten over and done with. You try to hide from it, it'll eat you up inside. Just like being mad."
"I'm not grieving for anybody." Cassie pulled her hand away. She felt Kali's blue eyes on her, would not raise her own to meet them.
"He was just a mark," she said in a soft voice. "I can't care what happened to him. Don't you see, I can't?"
She looked up at Kali. "Once you start to care-about the marks, that's it. You're through. Game over. You can't scam people you care about."
"You're worrying about that human thing again, aren't you? Well, hon, the god-like detachment of the true sociopath just isn't for everybody. Speaking strictly for myself, I'm glad it's turning out not to be for you."
"But it's what I do. I'm a scout."
"You're a human being, you're a woman, you're a member of the family," she said. "Scout's just a job."
"They still call me 'Abtakha' after all these years." Cassie's callsign was a loan-word picked up from the Clans. It meant an outsider taken into a Clan.
"You can be adopted into the family," Lady K said, "but you got to be born a Southwesterner. You're a true Caballera. Nobody questions that, and you know it.
"And you're doing your scout thing and leading us down a false trail. Cass, you have plenty of skills, at a level not matched by anybody I've even heard of. If you get so you can't just use people up and toss 'em away like old candy wrappers, that still leaves you a pretty wide repertoire. And if you ever decide to toss over scouting, you think the universe will come crashing to a halt? Plenty of other things you could do—like be a top-ranked MechWarrior, if you put more'n half your mind to it. Or even spread your wings and fly away beyond the Seventeenth."
Cassie clutched her hand convulsively. "No!"
"Hey, hey, I'm not saying you have to leave the nest. I just want you to realize how many options you got open."
Cassie put her head down on the table and wept. Lady K stroked the back of her head. From the counter, Cowboy glanced over at her. Buck cuffed him upside the head. "Don't go stickin' your nose where it don't belong, boy."
"Let it go," Lady K murmured. "You been holding back grieving for poor Percy for a year now, and that's been making you crazy. Just get it out and get on with your life."
Cassie raised her head to deny that she had any grieving to do for Percival Fillington. But all that came was more tears.
The front door opened, ringing silver bells hung from the latch by a leather strap. A man walked in. Slim and somewhere between medium-height and tall, he wore a heavy, scuffed jacket of megathere hide. He had coffee-with-cream skin, a halo of kinky dark-blond hair, and the devil in his chocolate eyes.
"Check it out," Lady K said to Cassie, sotto voce.
Cassie was already looking—scout reflexes. He was pretty, there was
no denying that. Not that it meant anything to her.
"I was told I could find some folks from the Seventeenth Recon Regiment here," the newcomer said.
Things got abruptly tense in the Old New Mexican Café. Cowboy and Outlaw, who had strapped their gunbelts back on after their sparring match—Nikos let them carry openly in here, in spite of Port Howard law, which was another attraction to the place—dropped hands to pistol grips, as did Lady K. Cassie already had her hand on her snubby. The current Captain-General—of the Society of Jesus, not Tommy Marik— deemed it inappropriate for a Jesuit to bear a weapon openly. But not to carry a sneaky-pistol—Father Bob had his hand in a trouser pocket.
"Who wants to know?" Buck Evans asked, leaning back against the counter. He went with 'Mech jock custom and wore his piece in a shoulder-rig, even when he wasn't in the cockpit.
"My name's Tim Moon. Leftenant, Towne Air Rangers, straw-boss of Chaos Flight. I understand you folks are looking for somebody to help you kill Dracs."
* * *
"Reason we got our base way the hell out here in the ass-end of nowhere," said Leftenant-General George "Wombat" Stephanopoulos, waving a blunt instrument of a hand at the snow-encased peaks surrounding the plateau on the eastern side of the Gunderlands, "is that the weenies in Port Howard keep trying to break us up, Charter or no Charter. We figure, out of sight, out of mind."
"And the way the folks back in Port Howie are acting lately," sang out Tim Moon from the back of the pack, where he was walking between Cassie and Lady K, "they're definitely out of their minds."
Wombat chuckled. He was about as wide as he was tall, with grizzled wiry hair and beard and body hair so profuse it came crowding out the neck of his coat. The 'lleros in the party looked at each other. An outfit where a lousy looie could crack a joke and a general could crack a smile was their kind of operation.
The Towne Air Rangers had flown a group of Caballeros out to Python Base on the Morrison Plateau to get acquainted. Don Carlos had come along, as had Gordo Baird; Gavilan was back in Port Howie overseeing the dispersal of Second and Third Battalions to various other Chandy-owned locations on Hyboria, under the watchful eyes of Red Gallegos and his two fellow battalion commanders, White-Nose Pony and Maccabee. It was a sort of character-building exercise for Camacho Junior, who had strenuously opposed the move to the last.