Sword of Sedition

by Loren L. Coleman

  “I would think so,” Yori said.

  Kisho spread his hands out of his lap, as if she had answered her own question.

  “We observe,” he reminded her. “We allow ourselves to think about what we see and experience. It is nothing more than that.”

  “Nothing more?” Yori asked, uncertain if he believed it himself.

  “Nothing!”

  She almost left him then. Isolation was nearly preferable to his reined anger. Nearly. “So you are here to observe,” she said, as if explaining his presence away with so simple a statement. She did not mean for it to sound belittling.

  “That is enough.” His tone was short. Obviously, he had read more into her words than she had meant. “But what are you here for?”

  The blunt question caught her off guard. Especially as Yori had wondered the same thing many, many times since leaving Luthien. “I believe I may be here for the opposite reason. To be seen. Or not, as the case may be.” She plucked up a complete cherry blossom that had fallen into her lap. Twirled it back and forth like a tiny umbrella. “Most of the others look away from me. The coordinator, he stares right through me, as if I do not exist.”

  “And Warlord Toranaga?” Kisho asked.

  “He sees something in me that might be worthwhile. Whatever my grandfather’s transgressions, he overlooks them. I can only try to be worthy of his attention.”

  It was a difficult admission, especially to a near-stranger. But Yori felt she owed something to the mystic, who twice now had come forward to involve himself with her affairs when it was not required. Such people were rare in her life. She often had to fight the inclination to push them away. She did not push him, because she knew he had no power to hurt her.

  For his part, Kisho simply thought about her comment a moment. Then he uncoiled, rising to a kneeling position to face her at an even height. “Everyone sees you, Kurita Yori-san. What they see you as, that is the question you should ask yourself.”

  She felt a hesitant tug at the corner of her mouth and nearly smiled. Might have, if his words hadn’t sounded so sad. Pity, she did not need. “Is that a vision?” she asked pertly.

  Kisho shook his head. “An observation. And now I observe it will be dark soon. I will go eat.”

  He rose to his feet in one fluid motion, looming above her, then ducked out from beneath the cherry trees without another word. Blossom petals trailed down from his hair and shoulders. His shoes scuffed the first few stones. He had been sitting for at least as long as Yori had been walking. His gait was stiff and awkward, but loosened up fast.

  “Kisho!”

  Her call stopped him only three or four strides down the flagstone path. It pulled him around slowly, as if against his will. Very nearly she did not ask. She wanted to know, but then didn’t at the same time. It was the kind of question that might allow him to hurt her. But how often did you get the chance to ask outright?

  “What do you see me as?” she asked.

  Kisho held her gaze evenly, staring back along the path and beneath the fall of blossoms. “As whatever you would like to be,” he said. Clipping off the words as if talking to a stranger.

  Then he turned and walked off.

  Some mystic he was. Ready with overtures of friendship but too caught up in his own problems, really, to make much more than a hesitant offer. What did he really know of her life? Only as much as she had told him, and while more than most others had bothered to learn it was still hardly anything at all. And it still explained nothing of the fluke of birth that had brought her to Terra as part of the coordinator’s entourage.

  Yori shook her head.

  Whatever she would like to be. . . .

  “As opposed to what?” she called after him. Expecting no answer.

  Receiving none.

  18

  Paladin Victor Steiner-Davion has been known for many things in his life, but primarily as a patriot and a true citizen of the Inner Sphere entire. Whatever his faults, whatever his methods, I am confident he meant nothing but the best for The Republic. And what the Senate says be damned!

  —Prince Harrison Davion, Terra, 18 April 3135

  Terra

  Republic of the Sphere

  19 April 3135

  Conner Rhys-Monroe stalked his Rifleman across what was left of Basel’s southernmost bridge across the Rhein, following the one hoverbike that was all he had left of his personal lance. They’d been caught halfway across by overlapping artillery barrages, pinned down inside a hellish nightmare of flame and shrapnel and twisted steel. He’d watched an APC ripped apart from a direct hit, sides bulging as a shell gutted the interior. A Legionnaire had disappeared through a sudden rent in the paved surface, swallowed by the deep waters far, far below.

  Now the fire-scorched bridge structure groaned and buckled under his BattleMech’s sixty tons. It shifted on a broken support column, shaking him with a small quake as he labored through each careful step. Pieces of superstructure crashed down around him. One girder smashed into his shoulder, crushing armor and clanging down his side in sharp, angry peals.

  Conner swallowed dryly, his hands sweat-slick on his controls.

  “Striker Team . . . is Able-three.” His comms system crackled to life with a clear, strong voice broken up by a wash of static that could only be caused by particle cannon discharge. “We have gained the northern bank. Two down, one dead. Pressed . . . the river.”

  Conner edged carefully around another rent in the bridge’s paved surface, coming close to the western side. “Copy that,” he said. But his team wasn’t out of this yet.

  Below, skimming over the river, were a number of Republic hovercraft dancing across the Rhein’s wide waters. Two Regulators hammered down the river, strafing the northern shore with their gauss rifles. A pair of Fulcrum heavy hovertanks trusted their gunners less and their armor more. They trailed lazily back and forth, working over the loyalist’s entrenched positions with scarlet lances of laserfire and flight after flight of long-range missiles.

  Conner saw a few loyalists making for relative safety in the nearby stretch of the Schwarzwald—Germany’s landmark Black Forest. Sir Cray Stansill limped his battered Griffin after a JI-100 recovery vehicle. A Hasek APC guarded his flank, surrounded by half a dozen Infiltrator armored infantry. Two Po heavy tanks trailed behind, one slapping at the ground with a stretch of broken tread.

  The forces Conner had rescued at the request of Senator Derius. Safe enough.

  Battered and busted up, the Legionnaire that had fallen earlier struggled up from the river’s deeper waters near the northern bank. Its autocannon broke the surface first, looking like the deadly snout of some dark river beast, then the cockpit and shoulders of the tall BattleMech.

  It waded up onto the bank, climbing for safety, protected by a pair of Schrek PPC carriers that kept up blazing salvos against the river-born targets. The armored vehicles on both sides of the shooting engagement bore the Roman profile crest of the Tenth Principes Guards, and Conner’s HUD was a tangle of gold icons with the IFF transponders all reporting “friendly” units.

  It was as surreal as it was likely to get for the ex-knight.

  Conner had armored troopers scattered over the rocky banks as well, these from the First and Tenth Triarii Protectors. They bounded from one large boulder to another, or hunkered down inside small stands of willow and alder, waiting for their shots. Four squads with their APCs crouched behind some riverside warehouses. The Schrek PPC carriers. It was all he had this far south.

  He would need a great deal more down here very, very soon.

  Toggling comms for his small team, Conner brought the Schreks right down to the edge of the riprap in order to cover the Legionnaire’s slow climb up the treacherous bank.

  “Full force and damn your heat,” he ordered when one PPC carrier started alternating between weapons, firing the two outboard cannon and then the inside PPC in a two-one-two arrangement.

  It had to be hellishly hot inside those vehicles.
But he’d push men to heatstroke before he saw even one more of his soldiers dead beneath Republic weapons fire.

  The bridge trembled and buckled again, taking a severe list toward the western edge. Conner had no time to wait, sending his remaining hoverbike flying forward and edging his Rifleman into a faster walk. Another artillery strike would finish off the bridge. And him.

  Fortunately, he’d called up a squadron of Stingray aerospace fighters to reinforce Stansill’s wounded VTOL support. The battle for air superiority had been fast and brutal, with two Hellcats down on the “Republic side” of the Rhein.

  Two quick strafing runs had silenced the artillery positions barely a moment later.

  Not that he was out of the woods (or into them, actually) yet. Hell, even a good nudge by one of the Fulcrums would have done the trick, sending Connor plummeting into the dark waters of the Rhein. At best, he’d have flooded actuators or a cockpit leak to deal with. At worst . . .

  At worst he’d never return home. At worst he’d suffer the same fate as his second Schrek carrier, which took a pair of gauss slugs directly through the crew cabin even as he watched.

  Gauss slugs accelerated to near hypersonic speeds tore through the PPC carrier with devastating power, both Regulators out on the river getting lucky at the same time. Raw kinetic force rocked the eighty-ton tank up on its hindquarters, as if it were sitting up to beg for a treat. The turret spun off its track, torn away and flipping end over end against the riverbank. Then the tank slammed back down on both wide-spaced tracks, rocked back and forth a few times, and finally settled.

  No fires. No huge explosion. Just silent oblivion for the men Conner had called out from their barracks this morning.

  Swinging his Rifleman at the waist, Conner drew a quick line of sight on the retreating Regulators and pulled into his rotary autocannons. Both RACs ate deep from his ammunition bins, the hot metal tipped with depleted uranium for vehicle-stopping power.

  Water geysered up in twin lines, drawing straight up to and across one of the Regulators. The shots crisscrossed its flat body, tearing into the armor and blowing a few holes into the hovercraft’s lift skirt. Not enough to bring it down.

  “Infantry teams, fall back over the bank. Someone check that carrier for survivors.”

  He knew there wouldn’t be any. The concussive force alone would have snapped necks and pulped bodies against bulkheads.

  “We’ve paid a high price. Let’s get out of here.”

  But The Republic’s military force wasn’t finished. The Fulcrums drifted across the river below with an almost casual disregard for the hot fire zone. The same kind of disregard the exarch’s attack dogs had shown in hounding Gerald Monroe to his death. The same that Levin himself had proven in trying to disband the Senate. As if his word was enough to strip the nobles of their birthright and end centuries of enlightened rule.

  To end the responsibility carried by generations of men and women.

  One Fulcrum drove up very near the northern bank, angling in at the back of the struggling Legionnaire. The remaining PPC carrier torched it with a trio of particle cannon. Armor runneled off the tank’s sides in fiery streams, feeding the Rhein’s dark waters. Where molten composite splashed into the river, the water hissed and steamed grayish wisps.

  But it kept up its hammering attack, drifting slowly down the river’s course as it sent flight after flight of LRMs at the retreating BattleMech, slashing with the red-hot fury of its single large laser.

  Drifting down to the bridge.

  No time to attack the side of fresh armor facing him, to take the chance that he might—might—drive it away under the threat of his rotaries, Conner acted more out of instinct than any concerted plan. Using the long barrels that made up his Rifleman’s arms to batter aside a few suspension cables, snapping the overstressed wires with gunshot echoes, he gauged the drifting Fulcrum’s progress completely by eye and then stepped off the high bridge at the moment it was about to pass beneath.

  For a nonjumping ’Mech, the Rifleman had extremely strong and well-armored legs. As its double-bladed feet slammed into the top of the Fulcrum, crushing the missile launcher and one of the tank’s pontoonlike skirts, Connor worked his controls to maintain some order of balance—to stay on top of the hovertank as he shoved it down into the river’s grip.

  High-speed vanes chopped against the water, pieces shattering at flaws and hairline cracks in the long blades. The struggling fans growled and snarled in an attempt to lift the Fulcrum’s body clear of the river, but it was impossible with an extra sixty tons sitting atop the craft.

  After one hitching gasp, the Fulcrum completely disappeared beneath the Rhein’s surface, driven down into the muck and mud at the bottom of the river.

  Conner stumbled his Rifleman forward, stepping off onto the bank of the river without getting much more than one leg wet up to the hip and the other to the knee.

  Between his rotary autocannon and the Schrek PPCs, they drove off the remaining Fulcrum. The Regulators slid back, supporting the tactical retreat, but their comrades’ quick, watery deaths made them think twice about another reckless charge.

  “That’s it. Everyone back into the Schwarzwald. Infantry, clog up the rear lines in case one of those hovercraft tries to follow too close.”

  It wouldn’t happen. The fight had gone out of The Republic’s attempt to contain the loyalist forces. The hovercraft skated back to their side of the river, patrolling for stragglers or simply setting themselves on guard against any attempt by Conner’s team to return. But he was done with Switzerland, just as he was done with The Republic.

  Though looking back at the Rhein’s still waters, where he had buried the tank and crew in a watery death, Conner knew.

  The Republic was hardly done with him.

  “Is the boy mad?”

  Jonah Levin stomped through the Chamber of Paladins, eschewing his high seat and circling the array of monitors where the paladins often met, discussed, voted and planned. His footsteps echoed back from the empty corners of the grand room. All but four stations were dark at the moment. At the manned consoles, only one face looked up from her work to answer what should have been a rhetorical question.

  “Angry, yes,” Heather GioAvanti said. Her voice was calm, but far from soothing. “But not insane. That we could deal with far more effectively.”

  David McKinnon never bothered to look up, but his weathered voice carried through the room easily enough. “We can handle this. I can haul the Seventh Hastati Sentinels back to Terra within the month.”

  Escalating the struggle quickly past a point the nobles could not match. That was always McKinnon’s advice. Victory at any cost. The Founder’s Movement—of which the venerable paladin was an open supporter—did not hold with half measures.

  Ad Securitus Per Unitas. Through security, freedom. The Republic motto taken to its extreme conclusion.

  Even in the face of the attempted assassination against him, Jonah had refused such a solution. Disbanding the Senate had edged The Republic right up to the brink of disaster, where the exarch had hoped to bring his fracturing realm back under control. The only other option had been to accept a decentralized government with no clear voice or direction, at a time when outside forces threatened The Republic of the Sphere with invasion and conquest. Ten individual Prefectures, governed by the greediest nobles, looking out for themselves rather than the common good. That way lay disaster. That much he recognized.

  To paraphrase Victor Steiner-Davion: The Prefectures must hang together, or they would certainly hang separately.

  So Jonah continued to ground his frustration into shards and splinters beneath the heels of his dress boots. He felt the crushing weight of so many troubles and so little sleep riding on his back, adding to each heavy footfall until they might have been the thunderous, mechanical steps of a BattleMech. A wounded one. One day he’d simply stop; his feet welded to the floor wherever he had finally come to rest.

  They could winch hi
m out into Magnum Park and set him as a statue. A warning for future exarchs.

  Beware an excess of optimism. No good deed goes unpunished.

  Having stormed quickly through the dregs of anger and self-pity, Jonah was finally able to thrust aside his black musings for a clearness of thought. He needed those dark moments, at times. They reminded him of his own weaknesses, but also his strengths. They made him think about the kind of damage another paladin, one with less pure designs on The Republic, might have wrought.

  Not that they wouldn’t have all likely ended up in the same place anyway.

  “All right,” he conceded. “We’ve already lost or are likely to lose . . . what? Half of the Tenth Triarii and nearly the same from the Principes Guards? And ten . . . fifteen percent of the Tenth Hastati?”

  “Twenty,” McKinnon promised. He would know. After Victor Steiner-Davion, he had the most experience with military coups and the fracture lines that built into civil wars.

  “Terra’s garrison is a prestige posting for half of the sons and daughters of The Republic’s nobility. The Senate loyalists have gut-shot our officer corps on planet and all but shattered the chain of command.”

  It still seemed wrong, turning the Chamber of Paladins into a command post. But as Gareth Sinclair had demonstrated, it was a too-convenient rallying spot. From here, GioAvanti worked on the logistics of isolating and dealing with senators and their forces still on planet. Maya Avellar and Otto Mandela ran simulations to predict the likely outcome of any hard fighting. And McKinnon extrapolated on their findings to other worlds and Prefectures, working with the chaos swarming throughout the rest of The Republic.

  And Sir Gareth Sinclair had been looking into wild-card stunts, off-the-wall solutions that didn’t fit into the expected responses. At the moment, however, he was taking his watch over Victor Steiner-Davion’s body at the Republic Cathedral. The paladins took all of their duties very seriously.