Close quarters

by Victor Milán

  He nodded, smiled. "Your wisdom increases, little one. Now, how is it that you came to be scout for these mad men and women from the Trinity?"

  21

  Masamori, Hachiman

  Galedon Diistrict, Draconis Combine

  22 September 3056

  Cassie was walking across the black dirt of the HTE Sportsplex outside Masamori, flattened to the consistency of cement by the passage of 'Mech feet, when her peripheral vision caught something flying at her face from the right.

  It was too late even to draw Blood-drinker. All she could do was wheel into a twisted pentjak stance, hands open and raised to defend.

  A red plastic ball covered in blue and yellow polka dots flew into her hands.

  "Hi, Cassie!" a little square brown girl in a pink smock and jet black pigtails called. "Nice catch!"

  She grinned. "Thanks, Nopalita. How's it going, gang?"

  The dozen or so children from the day-care group crowded around, bouncing up and down and hugging Cassie. Little ones loved Cassie. She wasn't afraid to play with them.

  "Gotta run now," she said shortly, disengaging herself from the pack. She waved to Diana, another of their favorites, who spent most of her free time working the Regiment's day-care center—and headed off for the rec hall.

  Even before she got there Cassie could hear the shouts and cheers over the musicbox caterwauling that ancient favorite, El Camino Real de Guanajuato. It sounded as if something more spirited was going on than the usual debates of the merits of singing-vaquero star Tino Espinosa over Johnny Tchang, the martial-arts holo god who'd defected to the Federated Commonwealth from the Capellan Confederation in '49, just before the Clan invasion erupted.

  She stepped inside to find the Ping-Pong table stacked against a wall and a space cleared where two men, stripped to the waist, faced each other with knives. The holo set was playing in the corner, a kickboxing match from Luthien that was being ignored as comprehensively as the musicbox. Archie Westin, boy reporter, was hopping around the fight's perimeter like a nervous terrier.

  "Ah, Leftenant Suthorn!" he said, spying her. He bounced to her side. "You've got to do something!"

  "Why me?" Cassie said, watching the combatants circle each other. One was Macho, weaving a slim-bladed knife out in front of him. The other was a Kiowa from Captain Santo's Infante Company who went by the name Metalhead. He was a great big man, with a round dark face, hawk nose, and something of a gut, who was currently holding out a huge-ass Bowie, blade up. "Father Doctor Bob and Lady K both have rank on me."

  The Jesuit was standing to one side with hands stuck in his pockets and a slightly glum expression. Kali MacDougall stood at the edge of the combat ground with her back to the wall, holding a pool cue in her hands.

  "They're no bloody help," Westin said, distressed. "Captain MacDougall is actually officiating."

  Cassie nodded at Mariska Savage, who was ducking and weaving like a boxer, working the angles with her holocorder. "At least your faithful camerawoman is getting it all down on disk. Be a good show for the folks back home; you haven't had much exciting to show them since the mock battle."

  "Good afternoon, Cassie," Father Garcia said, materializing on her other side.

  "Buenas, Father. ¿Qué pasó?"

  "I'm afraid our young friend from the Commonwealth is distressed by the barbaric side of our character."

  Cassie made a face and shrugged. "They're letting off steam. Could be worse; might be settling their differences with Shimatsu forty-twos."

  "Your Colonel permits this?" Archie asked, his brows horrified arches.

  "He encourages it, discreetly," Father Garcia said. "MechWarriors—especially those from the Trinity—have a way of insisting that honor be satisfied. And the damage they can do to each other with knives, or even machine pistols, is nothing to what would happen if they squared off in BattleMechs."

  "Oh," the reporter said, with the air of one over whom a light is belatedly dawning.

  "Even the Kell Hounds and Wolf's Dragoons have their duels," the Jesuit pointed out. "We try to keep things somewhat less intense."

  A wolf-howl from the crowd. Archie and the others turned to see Metalhead lift his hand from a long, red-dripping slash traversing his paunch, and Macho grinning all over his dark face. Archie turned green beneath his freckles.

  "It seems adequately intense to me," he said.

  "Risky's getting right into it," Cassie said, using the nickname the unit had hung on the FCNS camerawoman. "Better watch it, or she'll throw you over to cover the underground free-fight circuit in Capellan space."

  Archie arched an eyebrow at her. "You're joking, surely." Nonetheless he cast a worried glance at his photographer.

  About that time Metalhead slashed toward Macho's face with a speed that belied his mass. Macho leaned way back, whipping up his smaller blade to parry. The Kiowa lashed out and swept the norteño's lead leg right out from under him, then swarmed into him, straddling him and pinning his knife-hand to the bare wood floor.

  "Life is worth nothing in Guanajuato," the mournful musicbox sang.

  With a howl of triumph Metalhead reversed his grip on the Bowie and reversed it to plunge into Macho's chest. Before that could happen, Lady K's pool cue came whistling around and whacked the inside of his wrist with a savage crack. The knife spun from his fingers.

  "That's enough, boys," Kali said cheerfully. Dressed in sky-blue jeans and a barely blue shirt tied just above the midriff, she looked like a country girl off for a ride in the hills on a warm spring night. "Honor's satisfied. Time to shake hands and call the deal done."

  "Who says?" Metalhead snarled, and lashed at her. Kali didn't dodge the roundhouse swipe; instead the butt of the poolcue smashed into the Kiowa's lantern jaw and threw him flat on his back. Before he could get up, Bronco Company's commander was standing over him with the tip of the cue at his throat, socketed in the notch of his collarbone.

  "I says," she said. "You accepted me as ref, you accepted any decision I made in advance. You got that, or do you want to spend the last couple minutes of your largely wasted life tryin' to learn how to breathe through the other end of your alimentary canal?"

  Metalhead held his big hands up. To Archie's astonishment he laughed. "No problem, Yellowhair. Heat of the moment, y'know?"

  She nodded, reaching down with one hand to help him up. Cassie saw Archie wince as the warrior took it and rose to his feet.

  "Now what's the matter?" Cassie demanded.

  "I—" He moistened his lower lip with his tongue. "I felt certain that individual would try something desperate when the Captain offered her hand."

  "Why?"

  "I suppose—I suppose because that's what happens in the holodramas all the time."

  Father Doctor Bob laughed and laid a hand on the reporter's shoulder. "We Caballeros take our honor seriously."

  "Besides," Cassie said as Metalhead was led off to have his cut dressed, "this is play to them."

  Archie shook his head. "I admit it; I'm perplexed."

  "By what?" Lady K asked, walking over. She had returned the cue to the rack. "By our occasionally bizarre play behavior? Hey there, Cass."

  She and Cassie traded hugs. "Let's sit down and take a load off," she said. The four of them settled down at a table, one as far as Lady K could get from the musicbox.

  "You ladies both used the word play," Archie said seriously. "It does strike me appropriate, considering the names you give yourselves and your machines, the fanciful costumes some of you affect, the decorations plastered all over one of your 'Mechs. I know too that MechWarriors traditionally use callsigns, but with so much that you do, there does seem to be an aspect of, well, unreality."

  "I believe the word you're looking for is make-believe," Father Garcia said.

  Lady K nodded and took a swig from a half-liter bottle of juice one of her Bronco jocks had brought her. "It's like this, Arch," she said. "All around the known galaxy, to this very day, kids grow up playin' cowboys and
Indians. Right?"

  Archie looked at her sideways for a moment, as if suspecting a trap. "Yes," he agreed cautiously. "I played it myself, growing up."

  "Well, see, hon, we are Cowboys and Indians. So we figure that gives us license just to go on being kids forever."

  The reporter blinked at her, uncertain how to respond. Finally he grinned gamely.

  "You know, Captain, that explanation almost makes sense."

  "Speaking as a trained sociologist," Father Doctor Bob said, "it's as good an explanation as you're going to get."

  "So all this make-believe—you're simply playing a role?"

  "We're all born to die, Archie," Lady K said. "The Trinity's a violent kind of place, at least out in the desert and chaparral and mountains where the real Caballeros roam, norteho, Cowboy, and Indian alike. We all know from early on that no one gets out of here alive." She shrugged. "So, long as you're taking a one-way trip across the stage, might as well make the show as good as y'can, ¿qué no?"

  While Archie struggled visibly trying to digest all that, Mariska Savage came up, excited as a new Lab puppy. "Wasn't that something, Archie? I got it all down. Hi, Lieutenant."

  "What's happening, Risky?"

  The camerawoman beamed. She claimed she'd never had a nickname before, but no one knew whether she was joking or not. Even though the Caballeros' subversive campaign to pry her out of her shell was slowly working, they still couldn't read her.

  "No underground fight circuit for you, Ms. Savage," Archie said sternly.

  "What?"

  "The Capellan free fights are out, young lady. They're no place for a well-brought up person such as yourself."

  "Archie, what are you talking about? Did you bump your head on something?"

  Cassie caught Lady K's eye. "Talk to you a minute outside, Captain?"

  Kali nodded. Archie turned to look stricken as the two women rose. "Lieutenant Suthorn! Must you rush away so soon? I'd really like to interview you about your mysterious comings and goings since your Regiment arrived—"

  Lady K gave him a sweet smile and patted his cheek. "If she told every holonews reporter in the Federated Commonwealth about them, they wouldn't be mysterious anymore, would they? Don't fret, hon. We'll be back directly."

  "Cassie—" Archie sputtered, but she was already gone.

  The Jesuit laid a fatherly hand on his forearm. "Listen to the Captain, son, and don't get your insides in an uproar, as our Cowboy brethren would so picturesquely put it." He looked after the two, and he seemed rueful too. "Might as well try to catch the wind in your hands as try to hold on to that one."

  * * *

  Outside the sun was a gigantic molten-bronze ball about to drop into the unseen Shakudo Sea. A Hunchback strolled along the western perimeter, in silhouette looking as if its head was lowered in contemplation. Diana Vásquez had shepherded her charges back inside.

  "What's on your mind, Cass?" Kali asked. She stepped to the side of the doorway, started to lean her shoulders back against a wall that looked to be made of wood planking, hesitated, and then went ahead and leaned. Their ever-helpful liaison Preetam Masakawa had proudly informed them at the dorms and auxiliary structures at the Sportsplex were made from panels of a synthetic processed out of sterilized human waste at an HTE-owned sewage treatment facility. Further evidence of Hachiman Taro's unusual interest in environmental preservation, not to mention Uncle Chandy's resourcefulness.

  Lady K, like all the Seventeenth's ranking officers, had grown accustomed to complaints about the smell. Preetam insisted there was no smell. Kali had just about decided it was all in everybody's mind, but every now and then she caught a whiff of, well, something.

  "That going on a lot?" Cassie asked.

  Kali frowned, and suddenly she was a company commander confronted by an impertinent question from a lieutenant JG. Cassie braced herself for the blast. See? the taunting voice within her jeered. You opened yourself to her, and she's going to treat you like dirt. Solitary means safe.

  Instead, the stiffness went out of the Captain, and she nodded. "More and more. Usual garrison-duty fever. Only so many holo games a body can play, only so many times you can watch Tino Espinosa singing his handsome little heart out as the bad guys close in for the kill."

  "Is it just that?"

  Lady K started to bristle again, then sighed. "Good thing we're a family," she said, "and you're such a long-range, low-heat scout. You'd drive the brass crazy in most outfits."

  "You think you wouldn't?"

  Kali laughed.

  Long-winged nightgaunts flitted around them, uttering mournful croaks as they feasted on the twilight swarms of late-season sedge midges. In a few weeks first frost would come, and the insects would disappear.

  "It's more than just the usual boredom," Kali admitted. "We've had a lot more dust-ups, and the casualties are getting worse. Ever since you brought us the cheerful news about the ISF taking a close personal interest in our favorite uncle, the boys 'n' girls have got to feeling as if we're sitting smack in the middle of the V-ring, waitin' for ol' Ninyu to drop the hammer on us."

  Cassie kept staring at her. The ends of Lady K's mouth cut slowly back into her cheeks in an expression that wasn't a smile.

  "You could cut me some slack, here, Lieutenant."

  "You forced your way into my life, and made me take that damned bear. Forget about slack."

  Kali laughed humorlessly. "All right. Yeah, Don Carlos has been sunk even deeper than usual into a funk lately. All this inactivity gives him plenty of time to brood about Patsy. People are starting to wonder if he's lost it."

  "El patrdn's still got more on the ball than any self-obsessed 'Mech jock in the Regiment!" Cassie said heatedly.

  "HDLC, hon, don't hang the messenger. I'm just passing the word on what's been happening on the home front while you've been out snoopin' and poopin' and trading in fallen women."

  "Sorry," Cassie said. "It's just that Don Carlos has done so much for us. He's the only thing that's brought us this far."

  "Yeah," said Kali, "and you can go ahead and skewer me with that wavy-blade toadsticker of yours for saying so, but he's not gonna bring us much farther if he doesn't pull together and get a grip."

  Cassie turned away. Unexpected tears stung her eyes. To her Don Carlos was not a commanding officer, not an authority figure. He was the sole element of stability in a universe of uncertainty and destructive change.

  "Hey!" a voice yelled from inside the rec hall.

  They poked their heads back in through the door. It was Cowboy. He and Macho's other sidemen had gathered by the bar, consoling their fallen champion. The lanky Cowboy was pointing at the holovid display.

  "Check it out," Cowboy said. "Our boss made the nightly news!"

  The Masamori Broadcasting Company evening news was on. MBC was supposed to be private—it was a Tanadi subsidiary—but of course, all media in the Combine danced to the tune the Dragon called. The young woman reporter, who had undoubtedly been selected for her wholesome, earnest-yet-cheerful appearance, was saying, "According to reports from elsewhere in the Inner Sphere, Masamori's own Hachiman Taro Enterprises is on the verge of announcing a breakthrough in faster-than-light communications technology."

  * * *

  "This advance would complete the breakup of the monopoly on interstellar communications long enjoyed by ComStar's hyperpulse generator network already begun by Federated Commonwealth research into recently recovered technology," the earnest yet cheerful six-square meter face said from the wall of Uncle Chandy's pleasure dome.

  Chandresekhar Kurita sighed, a sound like a two-moon tidal bore rushing down the Yamato. "So that's their angle of attack," he said.

  Standing by his master, the Mirza Peter Abdulsattah nodded solemnly. "The Word of Blake has not accepted that the loss of the hyperpulse monopoly is inevitable," he said. "Their fanatics will be swarming here like flies to a honey pot to put an end to our heresy."

  "With a little covert help from Ninyu Ker
ai Indrahar, no doubt." Kurita steepled his fingers before his pursed pudgy lips. "Have you any of those clever and illicit tales of your Mullah Nasruddin to cover this set of circumstances, old friend?"

  "None suggests itself, my lord."

  Chandrasekhar Kurita nodded. "We must step up our precautions. Order the mercenaries to recall some of their troops from the Sportsplex." Abdulsattah paused. "If the Chief Executive permits—"

  "Out with it! Why should I take the risks entailed in employing a member of a forbidden sect, if not to avail myself of his full range of abilities? I depend upon your candor, my Sufi friend."

  "In military circles—if not always in the DCMS—it is considered the best command form never to command."

  Kurita stared at him. His black eyes were matte, impermeable. After a moment a smile extended itself across the vast-ness of his face.

  "You suggest I voice my concern, and allow my ferocious gaijin to take the initiative by boosting their forces within the Compound?"

  Abdulsattah bowed. "You have suggested it yourself, Chandrasekhar-sama."

  Uncle Chandy laughed uproariously. "You are a clever charlatan, Peter."

  "I am, as you say, a Sufi, Lord."

  22

  Masamori, Hachiman

  Galedon District, Draconis Combine

  23 September 3056

  The red-haired man stood on the terrace of Stormhaven, the Fillington ancestral estate set high against breathtaking rock cliffs towering a hundred meters over the self-devouring surf of the Shakudo Sea. Whoever had built the place had sited it excellently for defense.

  Presumably his host had nothing to do with that.

  The wind ruffled Ninyu's hair like fingers heavy with the scent and slightly tacky feel of salt water, tinged delicately with the smell of autumn-flowering blooms in the Earl's gardens. The sun was setting, the, western sky banded in slate and indigo and fire. Field crickets trilled uncertainly, warming up for their nocturnal concert.

  It was not in Ninyu's nature to appreciate such things. That was something his adoptive father was trying to teach him. You are not a bushi, a warrior, you are ninja. Yet you must learn from the samurai, for all their posturing and self-deceit. And one thing you must learn is that a warrior without appreciation for beauty is like a blade without an edge.