by Unknown
It’ll be Liao all over again, he thought, if we can’t stop it in time. Death everywhere, and blood ankle deep in the streets . . .
. . . the night sky an ugly red-brown in the lurid glow of the burning DropPort . . .
. . . a man’s high-pitched screams, going on for long minutes without stopping . . .
. . . silence, worse than the screams . . .
. . . bodies scraped up like garbage and tipped by the ’Mechload into mass graves. . . .
Helpless against the onslaught of memories, he closed his eyes and let the rush of images bear him away once more into nightmare.
6
City of Chang-an, Liao
Prefecture V, Republic of the Sphere
October 3111, local summer
Twenty-two years before, the night sky over Chang-an had been a lurid red, shot through with yellow and streaked with black. The wind that blew across the city stank of smoke and spilled fuel and the sour nose-prickling smell of Gauss rifles in prolonged use. It carried with it the heavy crump of explosions, the crash of structures collapsing into rubble, the tumult of voices shouting and screaming.
He was running, dodging through the streets, trying to make it home on foot. He’d seen the Liao Conservatory of Military Arts go down, seen the main building collapse into itself when the missile hit, seen the pillar of smoke and flame rising into the sky. The deed was necessary, he knew, for those on the other side—the cadet corps had been holding the Conservatory in force with small arms and at least one autocannon. Still—minutes ago the school had been there, and now there was nothing where it had stood except craters and a pile of rubble.
He was out of breath, stumbling as he ran. He’d come on foot all the way from the DropPort. Hours and hours it had taken—walking fifty paces, running fifty, walking fifty again, as he’d been taught in his military training to reserve his strength—and he hadn’t dared to grab a vehicle for any of it, because that would have made him too good a target.
The streets were blocked by people trying to escape the city, and choked with Liao defense forces coming in, while the invaders poured from the DropShip and spread out into the city like ink into water. When he’d seen on the news-screens the path the invaders were taking, and the places where resistance was gathering to meet them, he knew that he had to go home. Not to his own small bachelor apartment near the Port, but to the house he had grown up in, where his parents still lived—right along the path where the forces would collide. Were now colliding.
He saw Xin Sheng Boulevard ahead at last, a broad avenue running through the heart of the city from the business district to the Hall of Civic Governance. He had to cross it, one way or another. Home lay beyond, in a city neighborhood of town houses grouped around open squares. His parents had chosen to live in that district because of him—children could play safely in the squares, watched over by parents and nannies and the vigilant local police.
Now Xin Sheng Boulevard ran like a river of destruction in his path. He crouched in the shelter of a flight of concrete steps leading up to a first-floor office—the nameplate next to the door readHARMONIOUS
VOYAGING TRAVEL AGENCY . The office’s windows were all broken, and the room inside was dark.
Laser flashes of rifle fire came from the upper windows across the avenue, and more flashes answered them from the windows above his head.
A squad of Capellan Confederation soldiers crouched in the shelter of a public transit stop, firing at the windows on the far side of the avenue. One of the CapCons threw a dark green smoke grenade, and in the next instant the air roiled with throat-clenching white fog. The CapCons shouted and rushed into the street, moving like shadowy figures through the smoke. More laser fire came flashing down; some of the shadowy figures fell, but the others kept on running. The smoke scattered the laser fire, making a light too brilliant to look at.
Then he heard the rumble of engines and the sound of metal thudding on concrete in regular, titanic footfalls.
He looked to his left. Down at the Hall of Civic Governance end of the avenue, a looming anthropomorphic shape strode around the corner of the building, one massive arm punching out and into the third-floor windows as it came: a Thunderbolt BattleMech, swinging into action. He had no chance at all of crossing the avenue now.
In desperation, he backtracked a block to a transit tunnel entrance, and plunged down its steps into the dark. He paused at the bottom to let his eyes adjust—as he’d hoped, the battery-powered emergency lights were on, and the tunnel was illuminated by their crimson glow. He didn’t see either CapCons or defenders anywhere nearby. If the transit cars were no longer running, he could follow the tunnel down one—no, two—stops, then go up and through the Governance Center subterranean concourse to get out, and make it home that way from the other side.
Please, he thought, let them have gotten out in time.
He lowered himself off the platform and down onto the tracks, taking care to stay away from the electrified rail in case the power should unexpectedly return. That was not the way he wanted to go out, stumbling onto his death by mistake, not with his city, with his entire planet, being murdered wholesale overhead. The air down here was hard to breathe, heavy with chemicals and foul-smelling smoke. He couldn’t feel any vibration in the rails underfoot—as he’d hoped, all the trains were either stopped or dead.
He trotted down the tunnel, from one dim patch of red light to the next. A platform opened out ahead—the first stop—he kept moving, going on into the dark. At the second stop, he swung himself up onto the platform, barely noticing the pain when he banged his knee against the edge, and climbed the frozen steps of an escalator into the Governance Center concourse.
On a typical day, thousands of people passed through the concourse’s vast rotunda; at any given moment, it could hold several hundred. Today, after the fighting had passed through and reduced its stores and kiosks to wreckage, it was empty—no, not quite empty. As he made his way around the perimeter of the concourse, he saw half a dozen people, office workers by their clothing, huddled together inside what had been a coffee shop. One of them at least appeared badly hurt, a business-suited woman lying half across the lap of an older, stouter, secretary-looking female. The clothes of both women were soaked with blood.
He would have gone on, intent on his self-imposed mission, if a young man in a coffee shop worker’s uniform hadn’t pushed himself to his feet and come forward. Here was somebody, at least, who hadn’t left his post—loyalty above and beyond, wasted on “cream-no-sugar” and “double espresso” and
“I’m-sorry-we’re-all-out-of-that.”
The coffee shop worker asked him, “Do you know if it’s safe yet outside?”
He shook his head. “Not yet. There’s fighting all over.”
“Please,” said the secretary-woman. She looked down at the woman who lay across her lap. “She’s dying.
Please, can you call for help, or send someone, or—”
“I can’t,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anybody left to come.”
Another one of the customers spoke up—a businessman, gray-haired and well-tailored under all the dirt and blood. “Do you know if it’s true what they were saying before the news channels went dark? That we were betrayed?”
He felt the bitter anger rising up in him like a poisonous spring. He had not thought he could hate so much.
“Betrayed,” he said. “Yes. That’s the word.”
Hard-eyed, the secretary-woman said, “I hope he burns.”
“Yes,” he said again, and felt a wave of dizziness pass over him—the lack of good air, he told himself groggily, here in the downbelow. Somebody pressed something cool into his hand; when his head cleared, he saw it was the young man in the coffee shop uniform with a chilled bottle of spring water.
“Here. Drink some, pour the rest over your head—we’ve got plenty in the cooler and I don’t think the manager is going to be in tomorrow to check the inventory.”
The w
ater was good; it soothed his throat and cooled his skin. “Thank you,” he said. “I have to go now—my parents, in the Garden Square district—I have to see if they made it out.”
“Good luck,” said the older businessman. “Good luck,” came from the others in a murmured echo.
Then he was running again, around the perimeter of the concourse to the broad marble stairs going up into the light above. He slowed as he neared the street level, taking time to look and listen.
The street was empty, and the sounds of fighting were distant; the invaders had moved on. They had left behind the marks of their passage: overturned and burned-out vehicles; the marks of missile impacts in the cratered road; gaping holes in roofs and walls; trees and bushes shredded into mulch. A man—not CapCon, or local defense, but a civilian—lay dead near the transit entrance, crumpled and bloody in a limbs-not-meant-to-go-that-way heap.
He was running hard now. Two blocks, five blocks. In Allard Square, he saw the turf chewed and shredded by vehicles, and the children’s swings and climbing tower knocked into a pile of timber and twisted metal.
Six more blocks, and he came to the row of gray stone town houses each with their marble steps and downstairs bay window and tiny front garden with flowers and trees in wooden tubs.
There was the house with the green door and the bronze dragonhead door knocker. He ran up the steps.
The door wasn’t locked; it wasn’t even latched. It swung open when he touched—when he half-fell—against it. He stumbled into the front hallway.
The cherry-wood table with the big bronze bowl on it—it had stood there all during his childhood; he used to lean his forehead against the bowl’s cool metal on hot summer days—was knocked over now, the bowl rolled away into a corner and the flowers it had held scattered across the entry hall in a diagonal stripe, and spilled water everywhere.
He saw muddy boot prints on the stairway carpet, going up.
And everything else was silence.
7
The New Barracks
City of Tara, Northwind
November, 3132; local winter
The day after she received word of the Paladin’s imminent arrival, Tara Campbell met with Colonel Michael Griffin in her New Barracks office. The room was small and plainly furnished—all of its contents were standard Regimental issue, and could have occupied an office on any world where the Highlanders had a fighting presence—but it was her personal sanctum, and she had chosen it deliberately over any of the more formal chambers in the Fort proper.
She felt the oppressive weight of history less in these rooms than she did in the historic structures of the Fort, and found them generally more comfortable. The heat in the Barracks office could be adjusted to an individual’s preference, for one thing. The Fort’s environmental controls, by contrast, had a global setting, determined in the secret recesses of the maintenance department by a combination of energy efficiency and ancient custom that Tara had never been able to figure out. She inevitably found the rooms in the Fort proper either too chilly or too warm.
Today, the weather outside her office was foggy and cold; the city was not showing its best face. Tara felt sorry that she wouldn’t be able to spend more of the winter at Castle Northwind, the private residence of the Count or Countess of Northwind and the location of many of her fond childhood memories. She let herself relax for a moment, remembering Castle Northwind’s crackling hearths and forested grounds, and the winters when she would go sledding down the long hill above the lake and make angels in the snow.
“Did you ever make snow angels, Colonel Griffin?” she asked absently, as she pulled up the files she wanted onto her computer screen. “When you were young, that is?”
He shook his head. “I grew up on the Oilfield Coast, in Kearny. No snow—”
“That’s too bad.”
“—but a great deal of sand and sunshine.”
He sounded as if he missed it, and she made a note of the thought. The long, gray winters in the capital affected some people adversely, and perhaps the Colonel was one of them. She’d never hear it from him, though, if that were the case. He had the look and manner of one of the old-style Regimental officers—the ones who would consider it bad form to mention that they were mortally wounded and bleeding to death in their boots. Such stoicism was useful to a commander in desperate times, when nothing could be done about the problem, but less so when it could mean losing a good officer to the slow erosion of a treatable malaise.
Right now, however, other problems demanded Tara’s attention. She opened the topmost file on her computer and turned the screen around so that both she and Colonel Griffin could see it.
“I wanted to talk with you,” she said, “about the Prefectural Intelligence report.”
Griffin didn’t glance over at the display screen, although Tara could tell—from the way she could see him actively not looking at it—that she’d already piqued his curiosity enough to make him want to do so.
“I’m afraid I’m not cleared at that level,” he said.
She snorted. “I’m the Prefect. If I say you’re cleared, you’re cleared. And I want you to see this because it concerns Northwind directly.”
“In what manner, ma’am?”
The Colonel still hadn’t looked at the screen, but his entire bearing had changed at her words. He was now projecting firmly restrained eagerness to be about the work she was undoubtedly planning to assign to him.
Tara suppressed a smile. Griffin was one of the old style, indeed.
“Prefectural Intelligence,” she said, “believes that one or more of the factions that have arisen in the aftermath of the HPG net breakdown is likely to make a try for the conquest of Terra. By way of Northwind.”
Colonel Griffin’s expression changed again. “That’s . . . not good,” he said.
Tara wondered if that masterful piece of understatement meant that he was thinking the same thing that she had thought when she first read PrefIntel’s report. An invasion, if it came, would mark the first time in living memory that there had been war on Northwind.
Nobody on this world was accustomed to war anymore. They didn’t know what a city park smelled like after foot soldiers with Gauss rifles had been killing each other in it for seven days, or what a once-charming country villa looked like after its roof and walls had been crushed under the foot of a ’Mech. The Vale of Flowers on Sadalbari had been a lovely place until the Black Dragon pirates set up shop there and The Republic decided to root them out.
Tara herself had come out of that campaign with a brightly glowing reputation. News sources across the Sphere fell with eagerness upon the story of the “Angel of Sadalbari,” the young officer who had saved the day when her Colonel was taken out of action by ’Mech failure in the midst of battle. She’d even been featured on the cover of Republic Today —although the article inside had made the fighting on Sadalbari, and its aftermath, sound a great deal cleaner and more romantic than she recalled.
“ ‘Not good’ sums up my reaction as well,” she told Colonel Griffin after a moment. “This report gives Prefectural Intelligence’s assessment of the relative likelihood of attack by the various known factions. When you read it, you’ll see they give the best odds to the Dragon’s Fury, the Steel Wolves, and Duke Aaron Sandoval and his Swordsworn, in that order. I want you to read the report and give me local intelligence’s opinions on the same issue.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “If I may?”
He reached over and tapped out the command to transfer a copy of the file to his own computer.
Tara continued. “I have to tell you, Colonel, that I already agree with PrefIntel on at least one thing: This world is in grave danger. And I believe that we must take steps to protect it.”
“Do you have any plans?”
“There’s a lot of things that we can’t do until we know for certain who the enemy will be,” she said. “Other things, though . . . we can up the strength of the Regiments. I’ve already autho
rized a heavy recruitment drive; I can do that much on my own, by virtue of my position as Countess of Northwind.”
Tara saw that the Colonel was nodding as she spoke. He was on her side in this, definitely. That was good.
She was going to have to push the recruitment drive through the full Council, and the long years of peace had left its members less than entirely willing to increase the size and strength of the Regiments. She couldn’t share the most telling details of PrefIntel’s report without compromising the intelligence that it contained.
Under those circumstances, a strong voice on her side would help.
“What about equipment?” Griffin asked. “Recruiting alone isn’t going to be enough.”
“True,” she said. She called up another file. “This is our best estimation of current needs. As you can see, due to our recent deployment of forces on Addicks and elsewhere, we have a grand total of two BattleMechs currently available on-planet: my own Hatchetman and the Koshi belonging to the planetary reserves. Any invasion force we encounter is almost certain to bring more ’Mechs than that into play.
Suggestions?”
“Word from our off-planet intelligence sources is that local defense forces across the Sphere have begun making effective use of converted ForestryMechs and IndustrialMechs. We have a good number of those available, as well as MiningMechs and ConstructionMechs.”
“Yes,” she said. “But we can’t commandeer all of them. There are people relying on those ’Mechs to keep their businesses going. If we save the planet from invasion only to have the economy crash afterward, we won’t have helped things very much.”
“If we can’t save Northwind from invasion, the state of the economy isn’t going to matter,” Griffin pointed out.