BattleTech, page 10
Major Hanover’s eyes narrowed. “I will take your words under advisement.”
Captain Morse cleared his throat. “Cadet Roux, wait for me in the ready room.”
“Yes, sir.” Nadine pulled herself out of the office, but didn’t shut the door behind her. Instead, she floated to the side of it and listened as hard as she could, waiting for him to close the door himself. He didn’t. He must want me to listen.
“She is the reason I could never teach cadets. Too damn full of themselves.” Major Hanover sounded tired and a little exasperated.
Morse chuckled. “She reminds me of a certain officer I know who does everything she can to get her way.”
“Indeed. Which is why I’m not going to let her push me around.” Hanover sighed. “I still don’t know about this, Daniel. I just don’t know if you, your crew, and my DropShip are worth the risk—nobles or not. But it appears I now have a time limit to figure it out.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Sleep on it. I expect you to do the same. Six hours for both of us. Then we’ll look at the situation and plan again. It won’t take you that long to land. Get those coordinates. We’ll talk about this again in seven hours.”
“Yes, ma’am. Good night.”
“Good night, Captain.”
Captain Morse raised his voice. “Come back in, Cadet Roux.”
Nadine peeked around the door frame, then pulled herself into the room. She didn’t say anything as she steadied herself into a pseudo parade-rest stance. Once more she missed the gravity of Emporia, where she could snap to attention and keep her gaze fixed.
“Antagonizing Major Hanover may not be the wisest thing you’ve done.”
“Sir.” It was a statement acknowledging him, but not agreeing with him. She knew it. He knew it.
“We’ll see in the morning what she decides. In the meantime, you and the other cadets better steel yourselves for the very real possibility that we will not follow your plan. There are bigger things at stake here.”
“Bigger than an entire world, sir?”
Captain Morse shrugged. “In the grand scheme of politics, border fights, and empires…yes. But at least you’ve given her something concrete to chew on.”
“Yes, sir. And sir? I meant it: I’m not going to be the one to tell either Jasper or Countess Ritza we’re abandoning them. That has to be you or Major Hanover. I can’t do it.”
He took a long breath and held it as he regarded her. Then he let it out. “Fair enough, Cadet Roux. Dismissed.”
Nadine saluted before she turned around and left him to his thoughts, knowing that this was the point where she’d either succeeded or failed to save the Ritzas, her brother…and Emporia itself.
14
NEKOHONO’O-CLASS DROPSHIP FUJINAMI
LOW ORBIT, EMPORIA
FEDERATED SUNS
18 APRIL 3150
0500 HOURS
Yoshizawa turned from the screen where he’d been watching Ona, Nagaaki, and Fume sleep. They were the people on this ship who affected him the most. They were the ones who disseminated his will. They were diminished from five to three…and then to two. They were both valued, but not valuable enough.
Would he need a single one of them once he established his empire? Would he want them to help guide him and his small area of space? Or…would he want to wipe the slate clean and start fresh, with new people who had new ideas? Both sides had good and bad points.
His comm chimed a tier-three message, but it was text, not voice.
Another radio call in the clear had occurred. Looking at the time, he knew the cadets had hoped he was asleep and would miss the message. It was a foolish tactic. No one on the planet knew the time on the ships above. Some followed a space standard time. Some did not.
He scanned the transcript his communications officer had made for him.
Baphomet: Tiamat, Tiamat, this is Baphomet. Come in Tiamat.
Tiamat: This is Tiamat. What’s the word?
Baphomet: Operation Barbican is a go. Operation Barbican is a go.
Tiamat: Location?
Baphomet: Five klicks north of Stag’s Head.
Tiamat: Five klicks north of Stag’s Head. Roger that. Time?
Baphomet: Twenty-four hours to pickup.
Tiamat: Twenty-four hours, acknowledged. Number of people?
Baphomet: Exact count unknown. At least one. No more than five.
Tiamat: Roger that. Good luck. See you soon.
Baphomet: Over and out.
It was short and to the point. The kind of planning born of necessity and desperation. It was done by children. They didn’t realize how much they’d revealed to the enemy. He would find out where Stag’s Head was and intercept them before they reached the Davion DropShip. Knowing where the quarry would make it easier to capture Emporia’s heir before he escaped the planet.
It was the perfect job for Fume Aoki and her ’Mech lance. Or it would have been. She was no longer his trusted second-in-command. She was a traitor to his cause, whether she realized it or not.
He considered Ona and Nagaaki. He could send them both down, and the one who returned with Mason Ritza would be promoted to chu-sa and his second-in-command.
There was also the small problem that Fume Aoki’s Suwari lance no longer existed. They had been killed on-planet in an ambush where none of the MechWarriors had survived, and no one knew what had happened to their ’Mechs.
There was so much happening on Emporia he did not know. That lack of intel was a detriment to his plans. It could be the death of the regiment—and him—if he was not careful.
Ona’s words came back to him unbidden. “You have not returned to the planet since you were defeated by the Ritza Academy cadets,” she had said. “You have not seen what you…what the shelling, the plague…has done; the people, the soldiers, killed…”
He shook his head. He did not kill anyone who did not need to be killed. Everything else was collateral damage. Such was the way of war, and why a good leader had to be able to make hard decisions with facts, not emotions.
Still, Ona had used the word “unrest” to describe the soldiers in the regiment. His regiment. The very people he was fighting so hard for.
Without thought, he returned to his computer, picked a camera at random, and watched.
The DropShip ’Mech bay, where only a Hatamoto-Suna and a Wolverine stood. There were still mechanics working around the two ’Mechs. He homed in on a couple of technicians talking by the Hatamoto-Suna’s side.
“I’ve finished the work on its knee-joint actuator,” the first tech said. “That chain did more damage than it first seemed. Should work well now.”
“Good. Not that I expect to see it in action any time soon,” the second tech said as he marked things off a list in his noteputer.
“Well, it’s fixed. Along with pretty much everything else. Why won’t it see action?”
The second tech glanced around and shrugged. “Report to the Wolverine. It still needs work.”
The two techs went their separate ways.
Yoshizawa frowned. Why would they believe my Hatamoto-Suna would not see action soon? Do they really believe me too afraid to return to Emporia? He hated the thought that his crew might think him a coward. In all his long years of service, no one had ever thought that of him.
He selected another camera. This time as a deliberate choice: the infirmary. Even though the lights were dim, he saw every bed was full. He already knew why. Some had been rescued from the destroyed DropShip Inazuma. Many, but not enough. The survivors were a drain on the Seventh’s waning resources.
A nurse stood by the bed of one of the injured patients. She held his hand, head bowed, lips moving in a silent prayer, then glanced up as an alarm beeped next to them. With calm efficiency, the nurse checked the rest of the machines attached to the injured man. Then she pulled open the man’s shirt as a second nurse appeared.
The pair worked on the patient as the man spasmed. Drugs were administered through the IV and then directly into the man’s chest. Nothing seemed to work. After a frantic few minutes, the injured man tensed tight, then relaxed abruptly.
The first nurse, the one who had held the injured man’s hand, turned away. She faced the camera, but did not look at it. “Damn it. Damn it to hell.” She took a visible breath, resettled herself, and turned back to the now-dead patient.
Yoshizawa watched the two nurses bundle the body under sheets and wrestle it onto a gurney. It wasn’t until the body and the nurses were gone that he allowed himself a long pull of his near-forgotten glass of wine. Part of him knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the nurse had been cursing his name. The other part of him insisted that this could not be. Why would anyone, especially a nurse, curse him?
Refusing to think too deeply about it, Yoshizawa had a sudden need to know what the doctors, Chu-i Brian Lo and Dai-i Sumiko Nakata, were doing. He had to look up where Lo’s quarters were. The man had a small pod to himself that was barely bigger than a capsule hotel space.
While the zero-G room wasn’t much bigger than the man, it did have a privacy curtain. It was just large enough to hold two people if they were intimate with one another. Yoshizawa saw Lo asleep, alone, in the capsule, privacy curtain ajar. As expected.
He went looking for Dai-i Nakata. His heart sped up as he found her quarters—small but three times the size of Lo’s quarters—empty. He looked for her in the medbay, then in her office. She was nowhere to be found.
Yoshizawa frowned all the more and began to search methodically through the cameras on the entire DropShip he had access to. He wanted to know where his chief medical officer had gone.
The thump of something hitting the floor outside Fume’s quarters door woke her from a true sleep. She did not move except to slide her hand to under her pillow where she kept two things: her Nakjima laser pistol and a remote control device.
First, she thumbed the remote on. That fed the security monitors an hour’s worth of prerecorded footage of her sleeping. It would continue to loop until she or some other external force turned it off. If this was an assassin coming to kill her, she wanted those watching to be in the dark on whether they had succeeded.
Second, she pulled the pistol from under her pillow and turned over to watch the door to her quarters. Keeping the weapon hidden but ready, she waited. All the while, she catalogued things around the room she could use as weapons, armor, and cover.
The door slid open with a near silent hiss and a slim figure entered. Outside, the body of her door guard sat with his head resting on his knees as if asleep. The door slid closed, and the person pulled a device from their pocket, held it out, and turned it on.
“Fume? Are you awake?”
Fume blinked a couple of times. She recognized the voice of Sumiko, her longtime friend. “What are you doing here?” She didn’t move from the bed, nor did she put away her pistol.
“Officially? I heard you were sick. I’m coming to see if you are. Unofficially…I don’t believe you’re sick, and I’m here to help. I’ve got a jammer to keep anyone from listening to us. But I’m not turning on the light for the moment.”
“Do you know something I don’t know?”
Sumiko shook her head. “I doubt it. But I wanted to make sure if you needed to escape Yoshizawa, we’d have the opportunity.”
Fume sat up, keeping the pistol in her hand. “Escape to where?”
“Your ship, the Akikaze. At least there I know the loyalty of your people would keep you safe.” Sumiko moved deeper into the room. When she saw the laser pistol, she cocked an eyebrow. “Seems you are not feeling very safe right now.”
“I’m not. No one is safe. I’ve been thinking about what to do for hours. What anyone could do about it now.”
Sumiko looked away. “The plague? I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t tell him, but I lessened its life cycle. It’s still dangerous, but it won’t stay in the planet’s atmosphere like many other engineered plagues. Though, it can mutate, so who knows how long it might stick around.” She shrugged.
Fume got up and walked to the other woman. “Is there a cure? Or an inoculation? Can we save our people?”
“I’ve created something. I believe it will work. I don’t have anyone to test it on.”
“Have you told Yoshizawa?”
Sumiko shook her head.
“Don’t,” Fume ordered and turned to rummage through her closet.
“Why not?”
“We have bigger problems than the plague.” Fume found the uniform top she was looking for.
Watching, the doctor asked, “Should I know what?”
“We were never supposed to be here.” Fume’s words landed on the floor between them like a dead carcass.
Sumiko’s mouth worked, though no sound came out, as a train wreck of emotions passed over her face. She pushed out a strangled, “What?”
Fume repeated, “We were never supposed to be here. I just found out our original orders were for us to be stationed at Robinson.”
The doctor shook her head. “I knew his mind was failing. Forgetting things. Occasionally irrational answers to simple queries. I’d seen it on the medical test scores, but I thought there was time. I didn’t realize his mental state would deteriorate so much or so quickly. I didn’t realize he had—”
Fume interrupted her, “We both have been derelict in our duty. We both saw small signs of his increasing illness and instability. We both are too late to stop what has already happened. However, if I can get to the Akikaze, then to JumpShip Amagi, I can get a message out to our superiors and let them know what has happened, that Yoshizawa lied to all of us.”
“Do you really think that will matter? The Seventh Ghost Regiment has dishonored the Draconis Combine. The best you can hope for is a quick court-martial and a quicker execution.”
Fume stopped shoving herself into her uniform overshirt. She stared at Sumiko, horror dawning on her face. She walked to her unmade bed and sat down on it. Until this moment, she hadn’t considered what the outside DCMS would think of her or her actions—only Yoshizawa’s. Naivete at its best, considering how she came to be assigned to the Seventh Ghost Regiment.
“What did you think they would do?” Sumiko asked. “Order you to arrest Yoshizawa? Tell you that you did good and give you command of the Seventh? Never in this life. We’ll be lucky if they stop at just the top echelon…and that includes me.”
Fume furrowed her brow. “How were you planning to get us to my DropShip?”
“One aerospace fighter survived. It’s spaceworthy. Only has one seat from what I could see from the outside but I’m sure a second person could get in there. It would be…uncomfortable.”
“How were you going to get us access to it?”
Sumiko gave her a bitter smile. “I wasn’t.”
Fume nodded. “You need me.”
The doctor shrugged again. “I don’t know how to pilot it.”
Fume looked across the darkened room to her friend. “Were you actually planning to go to the Akikaze? Or did you want to go elsewhere?”
Sumiko locked eyes with her. “The aerospace fighter wouldn’t make it to the JumpShip—not that that would do any good.”
“The planet is viable…but plague-ridden.”
“I know.”
Fume shook her head as she realized what her friend was implying. “Do you realize what you’re asking? What you want us to do? How dangerous it is?”
“How is it any more dangerous than our situation here? You’re under house arrest and clearly expect trouble.” Sumiko gestured to the laser pistol Fume held. “Once our superiors up the line discover what we’ve—Yoshizawa—has done, we’re dead anyway. Do you want to live a bit longer in an uncomfortable place to become a lesson to those who would deny the Dragon? Or do you want to take a chance to rectify some of the wrong we have done here?”
Fume glanced up at the ceiling. “What is my honor worth?”
“According to the DCMS, our regiment doesn’t have any. We both know that’s not true. Yoshizawa has betrayed and used us all. Me for my skill in medicine. You for your skill in battle and leadership. He has made us guilty in the eyes of everyone who can see us. But we have a chance to save people—theirs and ours.”
“I know. We also have the opportunity to be shot out of the sky by both sides in this war.”
“I know.”
Fume made her decision and rose to her feet. “All right then. We both know what we’re risking. Let’s see if we can escape the man I once believed was the savior of the Seventh Ghost Regiment.”
15
NEKOHONO’O-CLASS DROPSHIP FUJINAMI
LOW ORBIT, EMPORIA
FEDERATED SUNS
18 APRIL 3150
0600 HOURS
“We need to stop by my lab to get as many samples of the vaccine as I can carry. They won’t believe us without it, and I can’t create it in their DropShip. I doubt it will have my specialized equipment. If nothing else, it could buy us time.” Sumiko watched Fume gather the things she couldn’t leave behind.
“Fine.” Fume stared around her quarters. It had been her home on this ship for years when she wasn’t berthed on the Akikaze. She would miss that DropShip. She had intended to shift back to it after this campaign was finished. Now, she would never return to it.
Looking at the backpack that held what she’d gathered, she debated about abandoning it all. If she were going to abandon this life—and she had to because Sumiko was correct, she and every other high ranking DCMS officer in the Seventh Ghost Regiment would be executed for their unknowing dishonor to the Dragon—perhaps she should throw her fate to the wind.
