BattleTech: Blood Will Tell, page 14
Sergeant Austin just grinned. “Not cleared to know that, Cap’n. But I’ll be here when you get out. I’ll lead you to our billet.”
Tom gripped Austin’s shoulder. It had been a long series of overnight blower rides to get here, and he barely knew where “here” was. He’d caught sight of the Grimsbay as they exited the vehicle, so he knew he was somewhere south of Harney, but that was about it. He wanted to shake his head, to say something, but instead he just opened the hatch and stepped through.
The room inside was clearly a command center; a low holotable dominated the room, but there were flatpanel workstations around the periphery with uniformed RAF troopers manning them.
A cluster of four people stood around the tank; he recognized one of them. “Colonel Tobin,” he said, stepping closer and bracing.
The armor regiment commander turned away from the tank, regarded him, then beamed. “Captain Jordan. Good to see you, son.” She twisted back, touching the arm of one of the men with her. “Sir?”
When the older man turned, Tom nearly saluted. “Legate Fernandez,” he said. “I didn’t recognize you, sir.”
“No reason you should have,” the legate replied. Fernandez was a big man, getting soft around the middle and shoulders like most men did as they climbed into middle age. In the prewar Republic, a legate was the highest military authority on a planet, answerable only to the governor or the lord governor of the prefecture. Since the Fortress, the legates’ power had diminished. Tom couldn’t remember Colonel Boyle ever talking about Legate Reed on Elgin, for example. “I’m sorry for the loss of your company, Captain. Trust me—they weren’t spent in vain.”
Tom felt his face flush at the words. He shook the legate’s hand, and met his stare, but he wasn’t ready to think about whether or not his people had fought and died for a reason. He was still stuck on “fighting and dying.” He let go of the legate’s hand and mumbled, “Thank you, sir.”
“He’s not lying,” an older woman interjected. She stepped around the other side of the holotank. “Every citizen of Hall thanks you and your people, Captain.”
“Captain Tom Jordan, meet Governor Yvette Hakima,” Colonel Tobin said, grinning slightly.
“Governor,” Tom said, bowing. This was too much—too much brass, much too fast. He felt like he was dreaming. “Why aren’t you in Harney, ma’am?” he blurted. He knew he should have been horrified, but he felt almost like he was watching himself right now.
Luckily, the governor chuckled. “Because then I’d be obliged to surrender,” she replied. She smiled—not unkindly, but still, a politician’s smile—and gestured with her chin for the legate to return to the holotank.
Colonel Tobin stepped closer, still grinning. “That’s a lot at once.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Tom said. “Ma’am. Any word on the rest of my battalion?”
Tobin’s smile fell away, and she looked past his shoulder. “There are a handful of ’Mechs unaccounted for, Tom. But otherwise, you’re it.”
“Me?”
“It looks that way.”
“From all three companies?”
Tobin nodded. “We have confirmation that Major Crowe and his staff were captured about a week ago. Captain Magnusson is dead. Captain Prideaux’s ’Mech went into the water and never came back up, and Captain Turner was killed during the first skirmish Combat Command Beta fought with the Second Liao Guards.”
Tom looked around for a chair, afraid he was going to collapse.
Tobin must have seen it. She stepped closer, grasping his elbow. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah—” Tom closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and then straightened. “Where are we?”
“The Hole.”
“The Hole.”
“I know, not very original. But it’s what we’ve got.” She gestured around. “From here we can do our best to coordinate the resistance.” When Tom frowned, she squeezed his elbow. “The fight’s not over, Captain.”
“But—”
“We did our job. We bought a month. And now the Louies will relax. Let their guard down. We can strike at targets of opportunity, keep them from getting comfortable, and generally stay a nuisance until the colonel and the rest of the RAF come to kick them off Hall.”
Tom must have looked skeptical. Tobin chuckled, then let go of his arm and pointed to the door. “Get some rest, Captain. Sergeant Austin will show you your hole. He has your first set of orders, but not until tomorrow, okay? Rest first.”
“Orders?”
“Tomorrow, Captain. That’s an order.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
HARNEY
HALL
REPUBLIC OF THE SPHERE
Danai sat at the governor’s desk, looking around the opulent room. Night had fallen, and the Gypsy EOD teams hadn’t found any bombs or booby-traps. She and Mina had taken this office and waited for the last teams to finish sweeping, which had taken the majority of the day. Now Mina sat across from her, hands folded in her lap, staring out the window at the courtyard where they’d waited earlier in the day. Two MAC BattleMechs stood sentry.
“What are you thinking?” Danai asked.
“About generations,” Mina replied. When Danai raised an eyebrow in question, she went on. “It has been 125 years since this planet was Capellan. Enough time for five generations to have been born, if not lived. There are probably not more than a thousand people on this planet who were alive the last time the Capellan flag flew here, and they were children then.”
“A long time,” Danai agreed.
“Daughters, mothers and grandmothers have lived entire lives here, absent from the Confederation.”
Danai recalled what a defeated MechWarrior had once told her, a couple weeks ago. “A planet is its people.”
“Exactly.” Mina blinked and met Danai’s stare. “And here we are.”
“You’re thinking of what comes next,” Danai said.
“Are you not?”
“I was trying not to,” Danai replied. “I’m not looking forward to it.”
Mina frowned, something she rarely did. “Why not?”
“You said it yourself: five generations, these people have been ‘free.’ Free to do whatever they want, sacrifice their gifts, malinger, fail to contribute to the state. They’re going to be loath to give that freedom up.” Danai sat forward, picking at the edge of the inset noteputer in the governor’s desk with her thumbnail. “It’s going to be hard. Probably violent.”
“Not if we do it well.” Mina’s voice was firm.
“And what does ‘well’ mean?”
“I do not know yet,” Mina responded. “But I will figure it out.”
Danai looked at her friend and tried to see the world through her eyes. A brilliant woman, unquestionably, but this was the first time she’d ever been on a conquered planet. She could convince a tree of the brilliance of the Sarna Mandate or the Korvin Doctrine, because she’d devoted her life to it. But she hadn’t been out on these worlds to see that put to the test.
From a certain point of view, the resistance only reinforced the Sarna Mandate and the Capellan castes. The noisiest resistance would come from the hundreds of millions of soon-to-be members of the commonality—what passed for middle class families in the Confederation. People comfortable enough to ignore the staple influence of the state in their lives, who could spend time and treasure crowing about “freedom” without paying attention to where that freedom came from.
But, by and large, they were unwilling to make the hard decisions of the directorship.
Which was why there was a directorship caste.
But getting Hall’s billions to agree to that meant getting most of them to agree that they were wrong in their deeply-held beliefs.
Danai sighed. “I have faith you will,” she told her friend.
But her mind was already turning back to the military situation.
17
FORT LEXINGTON
HALL
REPUBLIC OF THE SPHERE
28 MARCH 3149
Sao-wei Heather Teng of the Second Liao Guards regiment was zoned out. Her Gravedigger stood sentry at the highway exit for civilian traffic into Fort Lexington, with the other three ’Mechs of her lance scattered in a diamond formation around the four points of the interchange. The two platoons of infantry from the First Liao Foot Guards—the leg infantry regiment assigned to support the Second Liao Guards—that were augmenting her lance manned a checkpoint for traffic stops. The lance had been out here for six hours.
Four vehicles had gotten off the highway. Three of them had turned around and gotten back on.
The fourth had a long-haul trucker asleep in the driver’s cab.
“Is it time to go home yet?” asked MechWarrior Enid Ruskaya. Her Roadrunner had spent the last few hours scraping holes in the sand with its right foot. The Liao-green paint was now washed with brown dust and scrapes where she’d ground all fifteen tons of her ’Mech into a rock.
“No,” Heather snapped. “Stop asking.”
“How about now?”
“No.”
“You’re just encouraging her, Sao-wei,” interjected MechWarrior Stan Beatrice. “Girl needs to be taught a lesson.” Beatrice’s Roadrunner had stood still the entire day.
“Children…” Heather warned. She put a tone in her voice, but this was an old game.
“I hate it when mommy and daddy fight,” said the fourth MechWarrior in the lance, Si-ben-bing Pasha Voltikov. Voltikov’s Anubis was well back from the others. Armed with long-range missiles and light PPCs, swathed head to toe-claw in stealth armor, the 30-ton ’Mech was the lance’s backstop.
Not that they’d needed a backstop out here.
Heather checked her long-range sensors again. The only inputs were the big tracking systems behind her at Fort Lexington and the scrolling icons of civilian ground traffic along the highway. Nothing was going on.
Just like the last couple weeks.
Since the Second MAC had taken care of the Principes ’Mechs, the Rep defenders had gone to ground. The Capellan liberation force—Heather was smart enough to snort at the euphemism—had moved immediately to occupy Harney and other important strategic sites on the Wass continent. The local Rep government had fled, and they’d all seen the pirate HV and net broadcasts of the Hall Republican government-in-exile.
“Right out of the playbook,” Sang-shao Liao-Centrella had declared when she spoke to the officers of Heather’s battalion two weeks earlier. The Chancellor’s sister had gone on to tell them that the fight for Hall was just getting started; the Reps still had a fair amount of conventional forces unaccounted for, true, but the real battle was theirs to fight every day: the battle for the hearts and minds of the new Capellan civilians on Hall.
“These people are our people now,” Liao-Centrella had said. “They’re learning their way back into the bosom of the state. It is a huge change for them, and change is difficult. It causes pain, and pain make people lash out.” She’d stopped then, looking each of the young officers in the eye. “These people are now as much a part of the state as the people of Sian. It is now your job to protect them. Even from themselves.”
Heather had listened attentively to the sang-shao’s words. Danai Liao-Centrella, for all her closeness to the Celestial Wisdom, felt more real to people like Heather Teng. She was out here, with them, fighting to make the Confederation stronger. And not just figuratively. Heather had friends in the tech staff, and the technician teams of the Second Liao Guards were friendly with their counterparts in the 2/MAC. She’d seen the raw HV of the sang-shao’s battered ’Mech coming back in from the field.
She fought.
Heather was not a person who really thought in terms of role models, but Danai Liao-Centrella was someone she wanted to be when she grew up.
“Guess nap time is over,” Beatrice commented.
Heather checked her HUD; movement was careted. The sleeping truck driver had awoken and was walking toward the refueling station a couple hundred meters away from the highway, off the interchange.
“Maybe he has to pee,” MechWarrior Ruskaya said. “I sure do.”
“Use the relief tube,” Beatrice snorted.
“Easy for you to say,” Ruskaya shot back. “You’re a guy. It’s easier for you to hit a target.”
“Children,” Heather muttered. She watched the truck driver out of the boredom of nothing else to do. He got to the parking lot, stepped over the curb, and started over toward the small restaurant.
“Little after-nap snack, I guess,” Ruskaya said.
Heather shifted her attention to the small number of vehicles, both ground and air-cushion skimmers in the parking lot. Most of them were cold; they were belonged to the station’s staff. One or two were hot; new arrivals from the boonies around them.
As she watched, a hover truck spun up its fans, bellied backward from the recharging post, and scuttled around. It pointed it nose north, away from the interchange and the ’Mechs, and accelerated away.
Two more vehicles, both three-person skimmers, followed almost immediately.
All three went north.
“Is it time to go home yet?” Ruskaya asked.
“No,” Heather told her. “You and Beatrice, switch positions.” Beatrice’s Roadrunner lurched into motion immediately, adjusting its course so that it wouldn’t crash through the parked truck.
“Are you putting me in the corner?” Ruskaya pouted. “Is this time-out?”
“Just move your ass,” Heather growled. She was grinning, alone in her cockpit. But she didn’t let any of that into her voice.
Ruskaya’s Roadrunner kicked one more puff of dirt and dust into the air, like a petulant five-year-old, and then stepped off toward Beatrice’s position. Where the quieter MechWarrior was passing in front of the truck, Ruskaya angled to go around the rear.
Heather expected the young woman to blow Beatrice a raspberry over comms as they passed. She waited, channel opening, listening to Ruskaya breathe, waiting for it.
“Hey Beatrice—” Ruskaya called as she neared the truck’s trailer.
The trailer exploded.
HARNEY
HALL
REPUBLIC OF THE SPHERE
Mina leaned close as the servitor moved to open the door. “Keep your temper,” she warned Danai, who rolled her eyes and refused to deign to respond. Instead, she focused on folding her hands in her lap and getting her shoulders placed comfortably in the governor’s palatial chair behind her desk. She’d seen holos of Governor Hakima; she wasn’t a giant. Why she had a giant’s chair was just one of the questions Danai was looking forward to asking her once she was finally captured.
The last few weeks had been quiet; the remaining RAF regular forces had vanished into the wilderness. Danai fully expected them to begin an insurgency as soon as they could, but she’d still taken advantage of the precious time they’d given her.
Detachments from the Second Liao Guards had been spread around the Wass continent to disarm and register the various municipal militias and begin the process of converting the planet’s defense systems to a Capellan system. She’d given them very specific orders regarding the treatment of Hall’s people, and so far, aside from a few minor incidents, it had gone well.
The absence of Hakima and her government meant a formal surrender under the Ares Conventions, the centuries-old agreement that governed how warfare was conducted, was impossible. It was more tradition than law—most Successor States, including the Confederation, had put the Conventions aside at the fall of the Star League—but it was still a tradition that held weight.
It was the other thing that made Danai sure there would be an insurgency. Hakima had kept herself out there as a rallying cry, she was sure of it.
But the woman had been oddly silent. And it’s hard to rally behind nothing.
The door to the office opened and the servitor ushered in a man in late middle age; his skin was dark, but his hair was going ashy, and Danai could see the losing battle he was fighting with his waistline. Still, he carried himself with a military bearing. His suit was civilian, but cut with military lines. He nodded to the servitor, marched to a measured distance from her desk, and bowed.
Danai resisted an urge to smirk. Everything about this man screamed “soldier.”
“Your Grace,” he said. “I am Themba Olatunde.” He glanced at Mina, then met Danai’s gaze. “I was told you wished to speak with me.”
Danai smiled politely. “I did.” She gestured him to a chair. “I was told it was Sir Themba,” she said as he sat down.
Olatunde settled himself with a smile. His voice was strong and precise, and if he was uncomfortable, he didn’t show it. He folded his hands across his stomach. “It was. But I have been mayor of Harney longer than I was a soldier.” He glanced past her, out the palatial windows. “There was some early noise about recalling me, but I quashed it. I can do more good as administrator of this city than I could in a tank.”
“It is a difficult thing to give up,” Danai said, watching him carefully. “The life of a soldier.”
Olatunde shrugged. “Not for me.”
Danai grunted agreement to fill the time while her mind raced. Her intelligence shop, including Noah Capshaw, believed this man had to be involved in the coming insurgency. He was a former Knight of the Republic, a leader who commanded respect across Hall. His position as senior civilian official of the planet’s capital city gave him access to immense resources and contacts.
Her official Maskirovka contingent had died in the landing zone attack, so the resources of the regiments were all she had for now. And she was unused to it.
All the worlds she’d fought on during the actions against the Federated Suns were swarming with hidden Maskirovka assets, from quiet little intelligence gatherers to covert teams of assassins from Zang shu jian, the Chancellor’s Sword. All she’d had to do was have Noah put a recognition signal in a specific place in his files, and sooner or later a Mask operative would show up. Even in wartime there is commerce, and the Mask had centuries of institutional knowledge on how to insert operatives.
