by Victor Milán
The rest of the party taking a walking tour of the Ranger home base was filled out with odds and ends including Father Doctor Bob; Don Carlos's confessor Father Elapido Montoya, who didn't pilot a 'Mech and was accordingly looked down on by most 'lleros; the usual suspects Cowboy and Buck; and Cassie and Lady K. The latter two had been included, it appeared, at the special insistence of Leftenant Moon, who had driven the sleek, arrowhead-shaped passenger plane that carried them to Python with the air of a racing jockey driving a beer cart. The sun was falling toward the Gunderland peaks to the west; twilight came early in a place like this. A fighter plane dropped out of the sun's eye, coming in for a landing with the whine of a reciprocating ICE. Tim Moon put his arms around Kali's and Cassie's shoulders and gently turned them to watch. For some reason she couldn't name, Cassie didn't pull away. She did find herself wishing he wasn't holding Lady K. She wondered why.
It was an arrowhead like the plane that brought them here, white painted, with the propeller—actually two, driven by the same engine but contrarotating— mounted in back, and a bone-in-nose canard up front. Cassie thought it was a pretty toy.
"A Voss," Moon said. "A real fighter, pure air-to-air. What I pilot."
"I hate to tell you this, Timmy," Lady K said, "but it looks like any self-respecting aerospace job, even a crummy little Seydlitz, could eat that puppy for lunch and have room left over for a plate of ribs with all the fixins."
The pilot laughed. "Looks can be deceiving, Kali, my dear. In space the blowtorches rule, and they can do a lot of damage to those big, slow, oh-so-visible tin men you ride around in. But down here in the atmosphere, down here with the ground seldom more than an eyeblink away, our little fan jobs pack some nasty surprises."
Lady K gave Cassie a look past his chest—angled downward; he was a couple of centimeters shorter than the blonde 'Mech jock. Cassie's return look was neutral. She loved Lady K, however reluctantly, but her friend was still a Mech Warrior, with some of the prejudices of that breed. For her part, she saw nothing farfetched about humble low-tech bringing down mighty fusion-powered monsters.
"The Air Rangers are covered by the Towne Charter," said Ranger XO and public relations officer Kommandant "Dandy Don" Coryander. He was a tall black man with a nervously eager manner who served a mining company as PR man in everyday life. "We used to get some support from the AFFC, but that's dried up since the Fifth Lyrans pulled out. But mostly we get along the way we always have: we get grants from certain companies, we do air shows, barnstorming kind of things. And a lot of our pilots own their own craft."
"Our pilots are working pilots," Stephanopoulos said, sticking a big Coventry cigar in his mouth. "Being a fighter jock is only a hobby for most of 'em. But don't let that give you the notion we're a bunch of crummy dilettantes. When they're not doing this, our boys and girls are airline pilots, cargo jocks, postal delivery, wilderness SAR, what have you. They fly commercial for a living, and that means they spend a lot more time in the saddle than any death-or-glory aerojock."
"We're proficient, and proud of it," Coryander added.
They stopped to watch the little Voss taxi past them on the way to his hangar. Up close its sleek functionality was undeniable. But even Cassie had to acknowledge that it didn't look like much to pit against a torch-driven aerospace ship.
They walked on. A little way ahead a group of techs and pilots were playing basketball on a cracked patch of blacktop, some of them stripped down to T-shirts despite the chill. A security officer stood watching with an Imperator submachine gun slung across her back.
"Why is the Planetary Government so opposed to you?" asked Father García.
"They think we're too militaristic," said Kommandant Jeanne "Silk" d'Aubisson. A thin woman with fine white-blonde hair worn long and straight, she commanded the Rangers' Able Group. "They think we're an anachronism. Like the Charter."
"I hope it's not disrespectful," Don Carlos said, "but why is it you take us seriously, when no one else does?" The Colonel was troubled by the lack of support the Caballeros were finding among the locals, and he missed Diana Vásquez.
D'Aubisson laughed. "Maybe we are an anachronism. Maybe we're just looking for a chance to live out our fantasies."
Stephanopoulos dug into a hairy ear with a broad fingertip. "Silk's just yanking your chain. We been staring down the Dragon's throat too long not to know that the breakup of the FedCom and the Chaos March going up for grabs gives the Drac hotheads an opportunity they can't resist. I figure this Teddy the K's as straight a shooter as any Snake can be. He's done all right by our Prince Victor. But, hell, this wouldn't be the first time some samurai hotshot got a wild hair up his butt and decided to take off on his own for the greater glory of the Dragon. Just like 3034."
"Well, whaddaya know?" Buck drawled. "Somebody who knows a little history."
"How come y'all don't think we're just frontin' for the Dracs, then, General, sir?" sang out Cowboy.
"Why on God's green Earth would you be busting your butt trying to get everybody to wake up and look to their guns if you were doing that?" Stephanopoulos burst out. "Only a halfwit'd think something like that."
"The Popular Milita certainly seems to," García said.
"Point proven." Stephanopoulos chopped air with his hand. "Don't get your shorts in a bunch over what a bunch of Port Howard buttheads say. We can put you in touch with the real militias. The country folk. They're ready to listen to what you got to say. Only Port Howie isn't too healthy for them, these days."
They came to the top of a low rise, looking out over a shallow basin between runways. A wooden water tower rose from the center of it.
"Now I'm sure you're all wondering just what a bunch of weekend warriors and warriorettes in little bitty prop-driven atmospheric craft can do to big, bad BattleMechs. Well, let me point out to you that our ships are small and hard to spot—and not just for the Eyeballs, Mark I, that God issued to you. They're mostly polymers and ceramic, even their engines, so they don't have a radar signature worth diddly. And their exhaust is cool, which means an infrared missile has the devil's own time seeing them—unlike their big noisy aerospace cousins, I might add. Besides, as the saying goes—"
A two-engine aircraft that was a smaller version of the one that had brought them here burst out of a fold in the plateau no one had even spotted, and howled over their heads. "—it's not the machine, it's the person inside. Our jocks are experts at daisy-cutting. They can use the strong relief of this world of ours to best advantage. And as Dandy Don told you—"
The airplane rose, banked, turned, and dove back down at the water tower. Cassie saw something elongated fall from its belly, and then the water tank burst in a cloud of spray and splintered planking. The Caballeros cheered.
"—we're proficient. That was a cement practice bomb, ladies and gentlemen. But imagine the effect had it been live, packed with five hundred kilos of high explosive—and that tank a BattleMech's head."
Cowboy pushed out his lips and nodded. "Now, that's downright impressive, General. But lemme show you something."
"Payson—" Baird began in a warning growl.
Stephanopoulos waved him off. "Let the boy have his say."
The lanky Cowboy turned and walked back down the hill to the basketball court, where the teams were setting up for a pair of foul shots. He went to the watching security patrolwoman.
"Pardon me, honey," he said. The shooter sank his first free throw. "Mind if I borrow this?" Before she could respond he had slipped the subgun sling off her back, clicked off the safety, and jacked the bolt.
The player cocked his hands back for his second shot. Cowboy leveled the subgun from the waist and fired a burst into the blacktop right behind him.
The other man's throw sailed clean over the backstop as he and his fellow players scattered for cover.
"You see, General," Cowboy said, turning up the hill to face the astounded group, "making those fancy shots is one thing when there ain't no pressure on. But wh
en the bullets start to fly, everything gets just a mite tricky."
He put the weapon back on safe and handed it back to its owner. "Thank you kindly, ma'am. Much obliged."
14
Vale of Shamballah
Gunderland Mountains, Towne
Draconis March, Federated Commonwealth
11 January 3058
Starboard wing dipped, the Ruedel attack plane circled above a vast bowl of mountains filled with fluffy white cloud.
"Welcome to the Vale of Shamballah," Tim Moon's voice crackled through Cassie's headset. She was in the rear half of the cockpit, the GIB seat. In combat the "Guy in Back" operated sensors and kept an extra set of eyes peeled. She suspected Moon was pulling her leg with the terminology, but every Towne Air Ranger she asked about it solemnly assured her it was technically correct.
"It's beautiful," she said. She was mostly being polite, trying to make appropriate noises—and why did it matter to her to please this young man, anyway? She wasn't very susceptible to the wonders of nature, as a usual thing. But in fact this vista was so grand, on so awesome a scale, that it stirred something inside her.
"You ain't seen nothin' yet," Moon said. He put the nose down and dove for the clouds.
* * *
The Caballero contingent had spent the night of their tour at Python Base. Alarming as Cowboy Payson's demonstration had been, their hosts had taken it in good part. At dinner that night, the recipients of the demo generated roars of laughter in the Ranger mess hall, telling the tale. It was the sort of thing they wished they'd thought of themselves.
Python Base was rustic in appearance if not in its comforts. In their private lives, as Wombat said, the Ranger jocks were mostly skilled professionals, and the timber and mining companies that employed most of them had deep pockets. They didn't stint themselves where they could help it.
The mess hall was a huge, prefab, stressed-cement half-cylinder dropped whole into place by a heavy-lifter airship. Well insulted against the icy breath of the storm that had swept over the plateau shortly after sunset—but not so soundproofed you couldn't hear the howling fury of it—it was paneled on the inside with rough planks of native hardwood. Dimly lit by recessed yellow lamps, it looked and smelled and felt like an enormous barn.
Kitchen staff kept platters of food coming: great smoking ribs and joints of several species of herbivore native to the region, bowls of fruit, wheels of bread with hard brown crusts and insides soft as a kiss, pastas, cabbage, corn on the cob, mashed potatoes, local vegetables the 'lleros could put no names to yet. The drink flowed free as well. Seated with Cassie on one side of him and Lady K on the other at a long rough-hewn plank table, Tim Moon put down large amounts of beer in a big fired-clay stein showing the Towne Air Rangers insignia—a stylized white-clad cowboy with a black domino mask and a big star on his chest waving from the cockpit of a cartoon airplane with the prop up front. He didn't push Kali when she chose to drink the rich, dark apple juice with bits of peel floating in it that was offered in place of anything alcoholic.
He did encourage Cassie to drink more than she was accustomed, making her lightheaded—a little. When she felt her control slipping, she usually stopped. When she wanted release, she found it elsewhere, mainly the practice of pentjak and other survival arts. She had a horror of losing command of herself and her surroundings, and was surprised when she did feel herself start to float.
The guests were introduced to gales of applause. Then various Ranger dignitaries stood up to be recognized: d'Aubisson and her fellow Group commanders, Ed Zollinger and Zane Saldano; squadron commanders such as Hauptmann Angela Chistaki, an astringent-looking woman with a single fierce black eyebrow, and Fritz "Krauthead" Moellwitz, blond and blunt-faced; and flight leaders including Leftenant Sondra "Ice" Prynn, tiny, severe, and even paler than Silk, and Tim Moon, whose callsign was simply "Bad."
When the food was served, conversation diminished—country Townies took eating as seriously as Southwesterners, it seemed. After the second or third wave of reinforcements were dealt with, chairs were pushed back and more than a few trouser-fasteners discreetly loosened. The base's security chief, Sergeant Major FitzGerald—who had had to be restrained from doing bodily harm to the unwary guard Cowboy had so readily disarmed—stood up and bellowed for quiet.
A space was cleared on the head table, where Wombat sat with Don Carlos and Gordo Baird. The Rangers' youngest pilot, a Sergeant Jerry Wilcox, with short-sheared red hair and ears like jug handles, was chivvied up onto the tabletop, where he stood at quivering attention.
The boy put back his head and sang in a trembling but serviceable tenor
"We meet 'neath the sounding rafters,
The walls around us are bare;
They echo the peals of laughter;
It seems that the dead are there.
So stand by your glasses steady,
This world is a world of lies.
Here's a toast for the dead already;
Hurrah for the next man who dies."
"What's going on?" Cassie whispered to Moon, and was shocked that her words were slurred.
"Tradition," he said. "Hush, now, there's a dear girl."
"Cut off from the land that bore us,
Betrayed by the land that we find—"
"Sounds like us," Lady K said to Cassie. Cassie's lips tightened. Her friend felt like an intruder.
"The good men have gone before us,
And only the dull left behind.
So stand by your glasses steady,
The world is a web of lies.
Then here's to the dead already—"
And somehow the whole mob, 'lleros as well as Rangers, even Cassie herself were all on their feet, to roar in unison the final line:
"AND HURRAH FOR THE NEXT ONE WHO DIES!"
* * *
Cassie had felt tears streaming down her face that night, and looking around by the false lantern-light she saw she wasn't the only one. Now, though, ten days later, what she had was her stomach in her throat, evidently trying to escape, as the Ruedel plunged into an apparently solid bank of clouds.
"You're not nervous, are you?" Tim's voice said jauntily in her ears, as all the world turned to cotton batting around them.
"Of course not," she said in a voice of metallic calm. How can you see to pilot this thing? "You bastard."
He laughed. "That's my Cassie-girl. Never let anyone get the upper hand on you. And good for you."
They broke through the bottom of the clouds with an almost physical impact. Or maybe Cassie had just been expecting impact of a much more tangible sort. She glanced down at the ground, then stared.
Below them the land indeed resembled a shallow bowl, one almost empty of snow. It was an expanse of dark rock and grass, green in patches, interspersed with brown pools.
"Even in the bitterest winter, snow seldom sticks here," Tim said. "The volcanic-mud pools provide plenty of heat, and the perpetual cloud-cover holds it in."
Cassie's nose wrinkled. "What's that smell?"
"Sulfur. From the mud-pits. The stink is what keeps this place from being Paradise. Most of it."
She turned to look all around. With the canopy paired to the fuselage behind, she had mostly unobstructed vision in all directions. "Why is the valley so round?"
"It's not a valley. It's a caldera—the cone of an extinct volcano. This is what's left of a peak that blew its top about fifty thousand years ago. Just yesterday, geologically speaking, so don't get too relaxed."
He circled around toward the north side of the crater. A landing strip had been laid out in crushed lava near where a stream trickled down from the hills that formed the rim-wall. The Rangers had proudly told the Caballeros that even under full armament load-out, their prop-driven craft could take off and land from a regular paved road, and unladen could use dirt roads or even grass. The Ruedel touched down with a squeak and crunch of rubber on volcanic gravel.
Tim popped the canopy, helped Cassie down from the coc
kpit. She was still a little surprised that she was in no hurry to pull away from the contact when her feet were on the ground. He gave her that grin of his, then climbed back up the rungs molded to the side of the fuselage and drew a hamper encased in blue ripstop synthetic out of the cockpit.
Cassie was holding her nose. "So this is your idea of a romantic getaway? You must not get out much."
"Less than I'd like to, to be sure." Moon laughed. "Patience is a virtue, little one. Come along."
He slung the hamper's carrying-strap over one shoulder and started hiking uphill along the stream. It seemed to spill down from a jumble of boulders. Cassie followed.
"That song that first night, back at the base," she said to his back. "What was it?"
"Our unit song," he said. "A thousand years and more ago it was the song of a group of very brave, very romantic, and mostly doomed young men called the Lafayette Escadrille. Young men only, I'm afraid; they didn't know how brave women could be in those days, you see."
"A thousand years ago. That must've been before BattleMechs were invented."
"To be sure. It was before a lot of things— spaceflight and fusion and holovid. There were no armored land vehicles to speak of when that war began, and only in its later years did they start sending farm-tractors with armor plates bolted onto them into battle, code-naming them "Tanks' for reasons of security. And it was the first large-scale war in which men in aircraft fought each other."
She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. "I guess their planes were a lot like that one, huh?"
He stopped his upward progress to look back at her with a wondering expression. Then he smiled. "I'm not sure whether to be honored or insulted on behalf of our proud birds. That was real flying in those days, in fragile box-kites with open cockpits, whose pilots kept them aloft mostly by sheer force of will. In some very meaningful ways our airplanes are as far advanced beyond those first warcraft as your mighty BattleMechs are beyond those first crude armored crawlers."