BattleTech: Counterattack (BattleCorps Anthology Vol. 5), page 28
That’s what the ComStar operative had said to Webb when he hired the Star Seeds to go to Orestes, and it nearly gave Webb a heart attack. But then the operative clarified herself.
“We know what your people did at Tomans. Show us that kind of skill and you will see how grateful we can be.”
The unity the Star Seeds had established after the capture of the Silhouette was tested by the Orestes mission. Some of the soldiers were unabashedly positive—they couldn’t leave soon enough. Others were more reluctant.
“Do we really want to get in the middle of this?” Vrane asked. “I know how some people feel about this, and I understand. But if we plunge right back into that whole thing—I don’t know. Maybe it’s just too soon. Couldn’t we think about it a little more?”
“No,” Webb said, and left it at that. The number of offers the Star Seeds received since Tomans had significantly increased, but, for one reason or another, many of them were jobs the unit just couldn’t accept. There were some hitches in this Orestes job, but compared to the complications some of the other efforts offered, the Orestes job was—well, possible.
There was no surprise in the kind of job the Seeds were hired to do, but that didn’t mean everything went as planned. The trouble started when they approached the True Blood. The DropShip had already been softened up, and the Seeds were in their suits, drifting through space. Webb still found this part a little nerve-wracking—the sheer size of the lasers flying through space made him feel like an ant, waiting for a giant magnifying glass to focus beams of sunlight on him. Logically, he knew it couldn’t happen—they’d waited to move until they were out of the main weapons’ firing arc. But logic didn’t make the huge lights flashing in front of him go away.
But they made it to the hull of the ship, and all was well. The threats he was about to face would be just as deadly as the laser, of course, but smaller. He didn’t know why that was comforting, but it was.
Now that they had survived the journey to the hull, the next trick was getting in. Unfortunately for Webb, his two best options weren’t available. He couldn’t use a ramming attack—they had done that on Tomans, the Blakists would be waiting for that. And he couldn’t scare them into surrendering the ship by threatening to blow it up, since extremists were often unimpressed by extreme gestures from others.
That left the air locks. The Seeds divided into four teams, each hitting an air lock. They set explosives to blow at the same time, then moved back, floating in crack coordination. The explosives blew in beautiful synchronicity, and pieces of metal drifted away from the ship. There was no noise, but Webb imagined he could hear klaxons going off in the ship. Once the boarding officially started, the Blakist DropShip moved to a higher level of alert.
But the boarding didn’t start where they thought it would be. Webb and the rest of the Star Seeds were already moving away from the blown air locks. If the Blakists had a vulnerability, it was that they didn’t think enough about escape.
The Seeds moved as quickly as the slow-motion vacuum would let them, cutting a hole into the bay holding the escape pods, then breaking into one of the pods and using that as their entry into the ship.
It wasn’t unguarded, of course, but it might have been the easiest way into the ship. And they moved fast, each person doing their part, cutting here, pulling there, then moving forward. The Blakists were waiting, filling hallways with frangible rounds and not giving a step unless they were dead.
But Webb had learned one more thing from Blakist thought: The side that takes the bigger chance can get the upper hand. The Seeds went into the DropShip with no specialist rounds. They fired lasers and bullets. They drifted through the halls, herding Blakist troops before them, taking shots only when they thought they would hit someone. The vast majority of the time they were right.
The corridors of the DropShip had been dark except for a dim red light. The Blakists wanted it dark, and Webb obliged them. If they shone lights, it would only let the defenders know where they were. The Blakists would have the advantage because they knew their ship, but Webb would give it to them. He had the advantage of his people, gliding through corridors in smooth uniformity.
The Blakists fell back and regrouped at the ship’s critical locations, so the Seeds stayed away from those. They went to the forward crew areas, floating fast and slamming doors open, shaking out whatever troops they could and taking them down. The Blakists dug in to their positions, waiting for attacks that they thought would come soon.
It took a long time. There was a lingering worry that some outside Blakist help would come while the Seeds were whittling the inner defenses away, but DropShips didn’t just appear out of nowhere. The Seeds had checked carefully, and they knew there wouldn’t be a new arrival until long after the fight was over.
The whole thing took almost thirty hours. The Blakists weren’t ready to wait that long, but the Seeds were—complete with IV nutrients that kept them well fed in their suits. The Blakists weren’t exactly starving when the Seeds burst in on them, but they weren’t at their peak, either. When they broke in the bridge, the Seeds actually waited before firing, absorbing the first wave of fire from the Blakists while still moving forward. They held formation and found targets, using lasers, picking targets and taking them down. The Blakists’ shots grew increasingly wild, bullet fragments floated in the air, and more and more of them fell. They waited for help that didn’t come—the Blakists had become so worried about their individual areas that they forgot to help each other out, and their defense wasn’t as coordinated as it would have been if the attacks came a day earlier.
No ranking Blakist formally surrendered the ship to the Star Seeds, but eventually there weren’t enough of them left to mount a credible defense. Webb had the survivors loaded into escape pods and shot out of the ship, which was far more generous than many of his crewmembers wanted. Webb watched as some of the prisoners were being led away, and he saw one of them looking around frantically, from Star Seed to Star Seed, his eyes growing wider.
“I know you!” he said. “I know who you are!”
One of Webb’s troops—was it Krantz?—kicked the Blakists in the back, pushing him into an escape pod.
“No, you don’t,” Krantz said.
It made Webb remember how he had almost corrected the ComStar operative when she had briefly seemed to know more than she really did about his unit.
“You don’t know who we are,” he had been about to say. “All you know is what we can do.”
Afterward, when Webb had gathered everyone together and laid his cards on the table, Vrane and Krantz decided to use Bennett as their test case. He was young, impetuous, and headstrong. If Webb made an impact on him, there was a good chance he’d affect plenty of other troops too.
They were in Vrane’s room, eating a pizza they’d picked up on the way back from Webb’s meeting. Usually a laconic man, Webb had taken a while to get to the point of what he wanted to tell everyone, and the gathering of the Star Seeds had gone on for an unusually long time.
“The question I have,” Vrane said between bites, “is why anyone would leave DEST in the first place. I mean, you don’t get to join unless you’re pretty committed to the Combine in the first place. And I know the jobs are tough, but it’s big-time work—the stuff they make holovids about. Why leave?”
“Maybe it got to be too much for him,” Krantz said. “Maybe the jobs were too big.”
“Too big for Webb?” Bennett said. “I don’t believe it. Have you guys ever seen him intimidated by anything?”
Vrane and Krantz both shook their heads.
“That’s what I’m saying. If he was going to back down from things, he wouldn’t be leading this unit. He wouldn’t have led us onto the Silhouette. It has to be something else.”
“What?” Vrane asked.
“I don’t know,” Bennett said. “Something about the lifestyle chafed him, maybe. Look, who was it that tracked him down? Order of the Five Pillars, right? With all their ‘think this way, don’t think that way’ crap? It’s bad for plenty of Combine citizens, but how much worse has it gotta be for DEST commandos? They’ve got all the abilities in the world, but they aren’t allowed to think for themselves. What if it were you? Don’t you think that might push you to the edge?”
“Maybe,” Vrane said.
“That’s right,” Bennett said. “And that’s probably what happened to Webb. Look what he’s got now. His own command, where he can do crackerjack, DEST-type missions, but he can think for himself. Be his own man. How much better is that?”
“You sound like you’ve become pretty pro-Webb since we were talking about going to Bountiful Harvest,” Krantz said.
“Why shouldn’t I be? The man just stood in front of us and gave enough information to turn him in and probably collect a nice-sized reward. That’s trust, isn’t it? That’s what this unit’s been missing, and now Webb’s given it to us in spades.”
Vrane was nodding slowly. “You’re right,” he said. “And it can’t stop here.”
“What do you mean?” Krantz said.
“We may not know why we’re going to Arcturus,” Vrane said, “but we can guess. We at least know who the target’s going to be. We’re going to hit the Word. We all know it. I think that’s one reason why we weren’t that hard for Webb to convince. So what if we tell everyone who we are? Tell them about our past? Put it all out there and tell them just how much we want to hurt the Word of Blake, and why?”
Bennett was looking back and forth quickly, his movements rapid and jerky. “I don’t think we can tell anyone everything.”
“It’s all about trust,” Vrane said. “Just think if they knew why we’re here. Why we want to fight. They’ve already fought beside us, they’re comrades-in-arms. When we make it personal—and we all have stories that can make any fight against the Word look plenty personal—they’ll hate the Word as much as we do. They’ll hit them as hard as we want to.”
“I don’t know,” Bennett said.
“What? What don’t you know?”
“Telling stories to get people all angry—I don’t know about that. Things could get ugly.”
Vrane laughed. “Oh really? Then you’ve forgotten the absolute hell we came from. Things already were ugly, as ugly as they could get. Look, you know I haven’t always wanted to get back in the middle of all of this, but how much longer can we wait? We have to do something, if only to pay them back. They have it coming. No matter how bad it might get when we strike back at the Word, no matter what we can do to them, it could never be as ugly as what they have done. Time and time again.”
Bennett looked even more nervous now. His shoulders were hunched, and his hands were clenched, buried between his legs.
“All right, that’s enough for tonight,” Krantz said. “You’re going to give the boy flashbacks.”
Vrane blinked several times. “Right. Right. Sorry, I forgot myself. Got a little carried away.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Krantz said. “We should all get some sleep. Come on, Eddie, get up.”
Bennett stood, still looking everywhere, his head darting like a bird trying to keep its eyes on a predator.
“Sorry, Eddie,” Vrane said. “Didn’t mean to get you all keyed up.”
“It’s okay,” Bennett said, but he didn’t stop looking around.
Bennett’s jerky movements continued until Krantz and he left the room, turned a corner, and were out of sight of Vrane’s doorway. As if a switch had been flipped, he walked smoothly and calmly next to her.
Neither spoke until they were in Krantz’s car. As soon as they sat down, Krantz started the engine, then pushed a button. The car was filled with white noise.
“Do you understand now?” Krantz said.
Bennett nodded.
“I like Vrane. I understand how you feel. He was an asset, and I know you want him to be an asset again. But you saw how he spoke.”
“He will never return,” Bennett said, his voice barely above a whisper. “He will never return to the truth.”
“Exactly. He is lost to us. And like so many apostates, he will fight against us to his dying breath. Even more strongly than someone who never was a part of us.”
“He will need to be taken care of,” Bennett said. “Should we do it here? Now?”
“No. Too many people know we were with him.” She thought for a bit. “It should probably be on the battlefield. If he dies before then, too many suspicions may be raised. It could interfere with our work. Besides, he will likely be a good source of information. And the more information we learn and disseminate about this Arcturus mission, the better.”
“So what do we do until we get to Arcturus?” Bennett asked.
Krantz smiled as she watched the road ahead. “We do what Vrane said,” she said. “We work to get everyone in the unit to trust us.”
GODFATHER
Jason Schmetzer
Dunnin Badlands
Berenson
Free Worlds League
24 October 3014
Nathan White struggled to keep his Rifleman on its feet as the sixty-ton BattleMech rocked under the impacts of a quintet of long-range missiles. He gave up trying to keep a target lock on the rebel Trebuchet and concentrated on staying upright. The Rifleman’s broad feet crushed the soft earth to the bedrock with each step. The high-pitched whine of the gyro buried in the Mech’s massive chest filled the cockpit as it compensated for the sudden imbalance, and the gentle vibration of a loose cooling fan in his neurohelmet kicked to a higher notch. The ’Mech’s computers were feeding from Nathan’s own sense of balance to keep the machine upright, and it was a losing battle.
“Get it in gear, White,” Sergeant Ramirez said. The sergeant’s blocky Hunchback stepped closer and grabbed the Rifleman by the shoulder. “You got to keep shooting, son. I can’t reach the devil.” The fifty-ton ’Mech moved back to cover as soon as the Rifleman was steady. Nathan took a deep breath to get his bearings before he brought the Rifleman’s cannon-barrel arms up again. The sergeant was right.
“On target,” he murmured, watching his heads-up display. The Trebuchet was about four hundred meters away, edged around a bristly patch of briarwoods while its arm-mounted long-range missile batteries cycled. The medium support ’Mech massed fewer tons than Nathan’s Rifleman, but just about matched him in armor. The Garret D2j targeting computer painted a red crosshair across the Trebuchet’s purple-highlighted frame and then shimmered it to gold. Nathan squeezed the triggers beneath his middle fingers.
On either arm, the lower of the paired weapons barrels exploded into three-meter gouts of flame as the sixty-millimeter autocannons spat depleted uranium slugs downrange. Both streams of high-velocity metal exploded against the Trebuchet’s torso armor, staggering the medium ’Mech. Nathan shouted in triumph as the insignia of the Third Marik Militia was erased by his fire, leaving only tattered armor and smoke behind.
“I’ve got him now,” Gerhard called. The rookie MechWarrior brought his forty-ton Whitworth next to the Rifleman and took a settled stance. Panels on the Whitworth’s shoulders flipped open and a score of long-range missiles streaked across the field. One bunch missed to the left, annihilating the briarwood patch, but the other capitalized on the damage Nathan’s fire had done, knocking the Trebuchet backward and out of sight behind the smoke from the briarwood pyre.
“Nice shooting, children,” Sergeant Ramirez said. “Now if you’re done using up all the ammunition, can we get out of here?” The Hunchback didn’t wait for a reply, but instead stepped from cover and started down the well-worn path through the Badlands the rest of the Fifteenth had taken to withdraw from the engagement. They were the last, but the Third didn’t seem eager to follow.
Nathan started the Rifleman walking backward, splitting his attention between the center and the edges of his 360 degree vision strip in the HUD—between the enemy in front of him and the terrain behind. There was no movement from where the Trebuchet had fallen. Maybe it’s down for the count. Gerhard locked into step beside him. Nathan snorted. That kind of show of bravado after a single barrage was just what he expected from a Regulan.
“Nothing I can scan,” the fourth member of Ramirez’s lance radioed. Light flashed from the bluffs above them before Magdaleno’s Valkyrie descended on silvery plasma thrusters. He’d been on overwatch, trying to keep track of the Third’s advance while the rest of the lance held the ground. “And I can’t locate the Trebuchet you guys put down.” The Valkyrie fell into the reverse step with the other two support ’Mechs while Ramirez’s Hunchback—and its big Tomodzuru autocannon—watched for trouble in front of them.
“I can’t believe we’re fighting the Third,” Gerhard said.
“Believe it,” Ramirez said. Nathan chanced a look at the Hunchback’s back in his HUD. The sergeant’s voice was rougher than usual. “They’re the reason I’m here playing nursemaid to you support troopies instead of in an assault lance where I belong.” The Hunchback twisted at the torso and burned at a briarwood copse with its medium laser. Nathan had never seen a ’Mech sulk before.
“The Duke of Procyon sure stepped in it this time,” Nathan said.
“Little Anton!” Magdaleno spat.
“Anton Marik didn’t kill my lancemates,” Ramirez growled. “It was those devils across the way in the Third.” The Hunchback’s torso swung back to true and the medium ’Mech stalked forward, kicking his speed up another notch. “Keep up, children,” he said.
Nathan turned his reverse into an about face and brought the Rifleman up to speed, trailing the Hunchback by a hundred meters or so. He saw Magdaleno do the same but he was distracted by a short-lived flash of red on his HUD. Throttling back, Nathan began to key the Garret for a more detailed scan. He opened his mouth to call a warning, but Gerhard beat him to it.
“Sergeant?” Gerhard said. The doubt in his voice was palpable, even across the radio. “I had a contact for a moment, but it’s gone now.” Nathan understood his hesitation. No one wanted to be the one telling Old Man Ramirez he was seeing phantoms.
