Close quarters

by Victor Milán

  Most military units weren't comfortable permitting their personnel to act as individuals, let alone encouraging them to do so, but people from the three dominant cultures of the Southwestern triad were individuals and damn anybody who tried to treat them differently; the secret to commanding them was to get them to cooperate and behave most of the time.

  Scout Platoon was a repository for troops who were, even by Caballero standards, by and large cantankerous individualists. But troops like that tended to be self-reliant and self-contained, with both the skills and the mentality to let them spend days or weeks isolated in country hostile both in terms of enemy presence and, like as not, its own nature.

  Badlands Powell, who took his callsign from the volcanic region of Cerillos which was his home, was more baby-sitter and director than actual commander of Scout Platoon. He knew and accepted the fact, and handled the job well. The natural leader for such a mob—to the extent that wasn't oxymoronic—was, of course, Cassie Suthorn.

  He knew she'd agreed to accept promotion to officer after liftoff from Jeronimo only because Don Carlos had insisted. Cassie would do just about anything for him—especially with Patsy's death become a raw, gaping wound in his soul. She was the dominant personality in Scout Platoon; Badlands accepted that too. His wayward people might not be team players, but despite his own considerable gifts as a scout, he was.

  Cassie's companions had come along mainly out of idle curiosity or just plain boredom. They obviously didn't expect much call for their services here in the heart of a metropolis, and were looking forward to getting back to the sport complex outside town where the other two battalions were bivouacked. There they could at least stretch their legs or get in some hiking and hunting. They didn't share Cassie's sense of urgency about scoping their surroundings, her obsessive drive to perform.

  That was fine with her. No one she'd ever met could match her single-mindedness. Which had been to her benefit in encountering numerous enemies, and was a major reason she was still alive and they were not.

  Cassie gave a quick glance around the floor to see if any of her buddies were slipping slim-jims into the windows of any of the parked and locked vehicles. Negative. She had promised to hurt anybody she caught boosting from the citizens on this little field trip. Even the biggest, baddest male chauvinist in the platoon—or the entire Regiment, for that matter—knew that Cassie was eminently capable across-the-spectrum of delivering on that threat. So they were behaving their little selves.

  She turned to the dark little round-headed guy with big round glasses and an Aloha shirt who hovered by her elbow. "Yo, Preetam."

  Preetam Masakawa, the HTE gnome assigned to be her guide on this little recce, bobbed his head and said, "Please?"

  "We seriously gotta do something about this. You have any idea who owns this building?"

  "Of course," he said proudly. "Uncle Chandy!"

  "Uncle Chandy?"

  "Sri Chandrasekhar Kurita. The big boss man." That gave her a blink; sri was a common honorific back on Larsha, too.

  A light dawned, slow as the primary squeezing its way out of Sodegarami, the ukiyo district east across the Yamato. "Who owns the buildings either side of this one?" she asked.

  "Uncle Chandy. He owns everything fronting on the Compound."

  Scooter Barnes whistled. The half-Kiowa Cowboy sniper was a bit more sophisticated than most of Cassie's mates in Scout Platoon, having spent some time coming up in cities.

  "Piece of real estate like this'd go for a pretty penny," he said. "Single building'd cost as much as a BattleMech, sure."

  Preetam laughed. "As a battalion," he said. "Jesus," Billy Huckaby said.

  That certainly explained a great deal. They had pretty much cruised where they chose on this reconnaissance run, with Preetam occasionally ducking aside for a few quick words with building security. Cassie had figured Uncle Chandy must have spread some jelly around with the neighboring landlords—or done some hard leaning; he was a Kurita. But all along the grease had been the fact that Chandy was the landlord.

  "All right," Cassie said, turning away from the parapet to face Preetam, who was actually shorter than she was. "Now you take me to Uncle Chandy."

  The little local was scandalized. "You no see Uncle Chandy! Why you want to see Uncle Chandy?"

  "To ask for a raise."

  * * *

  No matter how highly she thought of herself, a drag-tail abtakha merc looie did not get to see Uncle Chandy just by asking, but Cassie operated on the principle of you never know what you can get till you ask for it, surprising plenty of people with what she'd gotten in the past.

  And this time what she got was an interview with Mirza Peter Abdulsattah. It wasn't The Man himself, but it was impressive enough.

  The Mirza raised his long narrow head to bring his gaze to bear on her while dismissing Preetam with a wave of spidery fingers. There was something in his manner, and Preetam's parting bow, that set little bells to ringing in Cassie's skull and her brain to wondering whether the guide was in reality the comic-relief goofball he seemed to be. Because Abdulsattah was a hard-core spymaster for true, and those appropriately spider-like fingers were meant to set marionettes dancing in the least expected of places—or else all Cassie's instincts lied.

  If they lied, she died. This Mirza bore watching. So did little Preetam.

  Abdulsattah rose up from behind his desk—and up; he must have been nearly two meters tall. He was gaunt as a skeleton, his olive skin drawn almost tight enough to burst over the fine ascetic bones of his face. He wore a skullcap and had a neat graying beard.

  "You are the young woman who performed that caracole on her bicycle, out in front of the steps," he said, his voice startling deep.

  "That's me," said Cassie, who was not one to be intimidated, by rank or height.

  "Preetam said you had security matters to discuss with me.

  "I'm surprised you agreed to see me," she said. "Women don't rate too highly in the Combine."

  "Your Colonel speaks well of you," the Mirza said. "Please sit, if you've a mind to."

  She did. Better, it got the HTE security boss to fold his length back into the leather-covered chair behind his modest hardwood desk.

  "You speak with authority on Combine culture," he said. "Surely, your time within the Combine was too short for you to have learned much. I suppose the exile community on Larsha provided your education?"

  "Peter-sama, with all respect, you don't suppose. You know."

  The lids lowered over Abdulsattah's black eyes like impact-resistant shrouds. He gazed at Cassie a moment, his fingers dancing on the tabletop like a spider doing a jig.

  She held his eyes steady with her own.

  "You are a remarkable young woman," he said at length. "Your courage is proven by your record. But a word of caution, for your comrades as well as yourself: you are a long way from your homes."

  "Is that a threat?" Cassie asked.

  The Mirza shook his long, fine head. "Only a simple statement of fact, Lieutenant. I am not exactly a conventional Combine executive—"

  Tell me something I don't know, Cassie thought. But she kept the thought quiet. She was a scout—cocky, not stupid.

  "—and Chandrasekhar-sama is an even less conventional Kurita. But he is still a Kurita, and you and your people will encounter many here who are far less forbearing than either of us."

  For a moment longer Cassie kept her eyes leveled at his. Then she nodded. "I bow to your wisdom, Peter-sama."

  "Somehow I doubt that," he said, with the merest hint of a smile. "But as with so many things in life, you will either learn, or die."

  Cassie put an arm over the back of the chair and settled into it. She felt no pressure from his words. Learn or die were the terms under which she'd lived since the age of three.

  The Mirza rose and went to stand in front of what looked like a picture window opening onto a lush, sun-based oasis surrounded by dunes of gypsum sand so white they seemed to glow with their
own light, as though heated in a furnace. It was an illusion, of course. Abdulsattah's office lay well within the Citadel, HTE's castle-like main administrative center. Had it possessed windows, they would have given out over the perpetually busy Compound.

  Of course, windows would also offer a convenient way for foes to target the Mirza. Cassie wondered whether the precaution was merely prudence—life in the Draconis Combine tended to be a lot more turbulent than outsiders thought, particularly at the higher echelons of business and state—or whether there was a deeper game in play.

  Abdulsattah gazed at the hologram for a moment, as if his hooded dark eyes could see beyond the horizon of that fantasy world, as if his vision were not limited by the scope of the lasers that had captured the image.

  "What does mirza mean, Peter-sama?" she asked his back.

  "It means 'prince' on my homeworld," he said, turning back to her.

  "You are an Arkab?"

  "Of a sort." He smiled. It seemed genuine enough. "Now tell me why it is a junior officer who requests a meeting regarding our security arrangements instead of your lieutenant colonel of intelligence?"

  Because in Gordo's case, "military intelligence" truly is a contradiction in bloody terms, she thought. But again she didn't voice the thought. There were few rules in the Caballeros. Don Carlos allowed his troops to do pretty much as they wished, as long as they performed; those who didn't soon found themselves dumped with a cold-water ruthlessness that left them gasping. That was the way the unit had always been run, not a result of Colonel Camacho's withdrawal into himself in the wake of Patsy's death. It suited Cassie to the marrow.

  But there were rules, mainly unwritten ones. And those Cassie honored—mostly. Foremost was the iron law of the Trinity: when the hammer comes down, it's us against the Universe. That law Cassie believed in passionately. Because it meant that when the hammer came down, she was no longer a gringa, she was a Caballero. They might call her Abtakha, but she belonged. It was a sense she had never known, except when she'd been with Guru Johann. She clung to it with a drowner's grip.

  That law meant, among other things, that you did not criticize a fellow 'llero in front of outsiders. No matter how big a ragbag he happened to be.

  "Lieutenant Colonel Baird's a busy man," she said in a carefully neutral voice. "And he concerns himself mainly with electronic intelligence-gathering."

  The Mirza's dark eyes bored into her like laser drills. She did not shy from the scrutiny; she knew that even the most penetrating probe could go only a certain distance into her skull, and no farther. But this truth was not buried that deep.

  "Indeed," Abdulsattah said, resuming his chair. "What exactly did you wish to speak to the Chief about, Lieutenant?"

  "I understand you—HTE—own the buildings that front on the Compound."

  "It is so. The Chief felt they might prove a worthwhile investment." Was that a sparkle of merriment flickering well back in those anthracite eyes?

  "Seems to me," Cassie said, "that there are some preparations that might be made inside those buildings. Some surprises for the bad guys, just in case somebody with hostile intentions were to happen along. Sensors, booby-traps—I'm sure I don't have to tell you."

  The Mirza laughed—not the nervous-seeming titter Cassie associated with the few Arkabs she'd known, or most of the Masakko she had encountered, for that matter. It was a fullout laugh that seemed to come bubbling from the center of him.

  "Indeed you do not, Lieutenant," he said, when the laughter subsided. He leaned forward and clasped his hands on the desk. "Perhaps this will surprise you, but neither Mr. Kurita nor my humble self have entirely overlooked the possibility that the property surrounding the Compound might prove useful for inconveniencing the ill-intentioned. The investment I spoke of was not entirely fiscal in nature."

  Cassie shrugged. No, it wasn't a surprise. But she hadn't lasted this long by taking anything for granted.

  "Still," the Mirza said, "hard as you may find this to believe, neither Chandrasekhar Kurita nor myself believe we know everything. I would like to hear what 'surprises' you have in mind, Lieutenant." Again that hint of amusement in almost impenetrable eyes. "I understand that surprising enemies is rather a professional specialty of yours."

  11

  Masamori, Hachiman

  Galedon District, Draconis Combine

  2 September 3056

  "Leftenant Suthorn?"

  Walking from her appointment with the Mirza with her hands in her pockets and her head down in thought, Cassie hadn't noticed the Federated Commonwealth newsie trotting after her. Great, she reproved herself. Get caught up in your own thoughts and lose track of your surroundings. It was under just such circumstances that she might have expected Guru Johann to come popping up out of nowhere to whack her upside the head for inattention.

  The handsome young reporter was striding toward her with his hair gleaming gold in afternoon sunlight, his stocky black camerawoman trotting after.

  "What can I do for you, Mr. Westin?" she asked.

  He beamed, a real toothpaste-ad smile.

  "Archie, please. I was wondering if you might be kind enough to show me around."

  Cassie nodded at the camerawoman, a shy young woman with broad, pleasant features. "Scoping our dispositions, are you?"

  He blinked, tittered nervously. "Nothing of the sort. Just doing my job."

  She snorted. "Yeah. Well, I'm wandering over to see the astechs. No harm in you coming along."

  They set off. The Compound was alive with purposeful bustle, the huge facility alone probably worth more than many a Periphery world. One of the effects of its size was that HTE workers were not forced to work in the desperately cramped conditions suffered by most Combine laborers. The actual assembly floors and production areas were more spacious than the norm; and on periodic rest-breaks HTE employees could actually go outside and stretch their legs.

  The workers who strode by them in pastel HTE uniforms, the colors denoting subtleties of department and shift that Cassie had yet to untangle, held their heads up and moved in a way the Voice of the Dragon wanted outsiders to believe all Combine workers did, all aglow with aisha seishin, company warrior spirit. Normally that was just propaganda. Not here.

  "Curious accent you got there, Archie," Cassie said casually, though she did consider the question mere abstract curiosity. Information about a person's background gave you clues to them, helped your threat assessment. And to Cassie, anyone who wasn't Regiment was a threat. Not that everybody in the Seventeenth wasn't; among the Drac exiles back on Larsha she had often heard the epigram; tanin—hostile strangers—begin with one's own siblings.

  He laughed again, more relaxed this time. Mariska Savage hung back, discreetly out of the conversation, more as if she really didn't want to be included than as if she didn't think it was her place.

  "Northfield was founded by people from the British Isles, you see," he said.

  "So you're a Davion." Northfield was near New Avalon, capital of the former Federated Suns.

  "I am a loyal, not to mention happy, citizen of the Federated Commonwealth."

  She gave him a slantwise look out of those long, smoky eyes, the sort of look to make a man's heart skip a beat even though it was devoid of conventional coquetry. "Not too many of those these days."

  An expression that might have been pain writhed across Westin's sculptured features like a sidewinder. "Perhaps not. StilL Westins have served House Davion loyally for generations, whether or not it was the fashionable thing to do. And now we serve House Steiner-Davion—in our own way."

  They walked a while in silence. "If I may say so," Archie said, casting about for a flying subject change, "your own accent, while quite charming, is hardly orthodox. Those twangy American Western vowels, the somewhat staccato cadence of your Mexican comrades, mixed in with a sort of ... well, music."

  It was her turn to laugh—a sound Archie found quite enchanting, and indeed musical.

  "I grew up in th
e Regiment," she said. "Not surprising that I talk like them. For the rest—" Cassie shrugged. "I lived on Larsha before."

  "Before—?"

  "Before I was captured," she said, her tone going flat.

  "You're joking."

  "No. I was in the militia. I was a street kid—we all were. Got trolled in on a random sweep, made for a couple robberies I didn't even commit."

  "You ... did commit robberies, then?"

  She laughed. "Sure. I'd been on my own since I was twelve. Did a lot of things." A headshake. "Anyway, I got dumb, or unlucky, and I got caught. So they gave me an old bolt-gun and said I had to be a soldier. And then the Seventeenth hit town. Larsha's a border world, near both the Periphery and Davvy space—"

  "I am familiar with it, yes."

  "—and the Capellans had been launching border raids into the Federated Commonwealth, so the F-C sent a merc regiment in to teach them not to do that. I knocked down one of their 'Mechs—Bobby the Wolf's old Wolverine, before he got that Griffin he drives now."

  Westin stared at her. She had to repress a giggle at the way his red-blond eyebrows arched, like caterpillars. "You defeated a BattleMech? A sixteen-year-old girl with a rifle?"

  "A cut power line, actually. Spot-welded the knee."

  "I say, they actually have above-ground power cables in the Confederation?"

  "Did on Larsha. Anyway, Bobby was fit to be tied. He still hates me, not that he likes anybody else in the Sphere. And Patsy—the Colonel's daughter, she was a senior lieutenant and a Phoenix Hawk pilot then—she kept him from killing me. She's the one who asked if I wanted to surrender." Cassie shrugged. "They had me surrounded with three 'Mechs, so what could I do but say yes? It meant leaving Larsha, but it wasn't like I had anything keeping me on that hellhole."

  She shivered then, keeping the gesture so small he didn't notice, or seem too. "Not since Guru Johann died."

  "I see. And where is this Patsy Camacho now? I don't believe I've been introduced—"

  "She died." The words cut across Westin's chatter like a cleaver chopping a rabbit's neck. "On Jeronimo. Fought five Smoke Jag Omnis. Smoked two, damaged the others, but they took her down."