BattleTech Legends: The Blood of Kerensky Trilogy, page 81
Then a nova exploded outside the door.
Seeing the fireball blossom in the launch tube, Shin thought it must be an SRM starting on the path that would obliterate the bunker. Fire streaked out the back of the launch pack as he had always seen it do, but flaming tendrils also curled out the front and sides of the pack. In a second the top corner of the launcher evaporated in a white-gold flash, then a series of thunderous detonations ripped the Elemental apart.
The explosion boosted the bodies of the dead Elementals into the room and drove debris back in a narrow cone starting at the door. One Elemental bounced into a set of data relay banks, scattering them like tenpins while the other cartwheeled straight back like a zombie acrobat, hitting the wall beside Hohiro’s shelter.
Shin tried to scramble out of the way as the data relay banks fell, but his whole chest felt as though it was collapsing as he clawed at the floor for traction. One cabinet dropped across his legs, pinning him in place in time for a second to slam into his ribcage. Shin screamed as lightning ripped its way through his body, then stopped fighting the darkness and fell unconscious.
A throbbing sound he couldn’t identify greeted Shin’s return to awareness. Opening his eyes, he saw himself strapped to a stretcher about to be hoisted into a helicopter. As confusing as that was, seeing Hohiro standing at the foot of the stretcher made even less sense. “Sho-sa, what has happened? Where am I?”
Hohiro smiled at him. “I’m having you medivaced to the DropShip. You’re heading back to Luthien.”
“You’re not coming?”
The Warlord’s son shook his head. “I relieved Tojiro and Kwi-Nam of their commands. I’ve scattered our troops and am sending them to ground. We will fight the sort of war we should have been fighting all along. I want to stretch things out and make the Clans earn their pay.”
Shin tried to get up, but the tightness in his chest stopped him. “Sho-sa, do not send me away. These broken ribs are nothing. Let me stay here with you. Let me help you.”
Hohiro smiled gratefully. “You have to go. I need you to act as my personal envoy.” He lifted his end of Shin’s stretcher and helped deposit it on the deck of the helicopter. Sitting chained to a bench with scowls on their faces were Tojiro and Kwi-Nam. Both were drenched in blood, but Shin instinctively knew it was not their own.
Hohiro crouched down and shouted into Shin’s ear over the competition of the helicopter’s rotor. “Those two are under arrest and are in your charge. The DropShip and JumpShip captains are your people. These two will not be able to subvert them. I would have shot them here, but they demanded the right to see my grandfather.”
“They will make trouble for you, Sho-sa.”
“They will try, Shin. You must see to it that they do not.” Hohiro rested his right hand on Shin’s right shoulder. “It’ll take you a month to get back to Luthien. Tell my father I will need another regiment and a half to take this world or to evacuate it in good order. I can hold out for the time it takes for your total round trip, but be quick. Anything much over four months is going to put me in a bad way. As I said before, we will go to ground and just harass the Clans until reinforcements show up.”
“I will do as you ask, Sho-sa.” Shin forced a smile. “And I will be back with reinforcements as soon as possible.” He glanced at the two men Hohiro had deposed. “I will bring you help even if I have to strike a bargain with all the demons in the Christian Hell to do so.”
Hohiro nodded solemnly. “I know you will, my friend. I am counting on it.”
The rotor’s pitch increased as Hohiro stepped away from the helicopter. Shin tried to turn his head to watch Hohiro until he vanished in the distance, but his restraints prevented him from doing so. He thought he heard his commander shout a final “Sayonara,” but he could not be sure.
Somehow, deep down, Shin felt a dread that no matter how swiftly he returned, he would never see Hohiro Kurita alive again.
5
ALYINA
TRELLSHIRE
JADE FALCON OCCUPATION ZONE
19 JANUARY 3052
Lean and hungry, Kai Allard crouched beside the roadway. He waited until the truck’s taillights vanished around the curve through the forest, then sprinted to the other side. Clutching the ragged swath of camouflage sheeting around him like a cloak, he knew anyone near enough to see him break from cover would probably think him a terrifying ghost.
The fortnight since his stranding on Alyina had not been kind to Kai. He had moved as far as possible from the battlefield where he’d looted Dave Jewell’s ’Mech on the first night, pausing only to rest or when he heard people moving. As he headed inland from the peninsula, the amount of destruction decreased. He had not thought himself following any specific course, yet eventually he came to the place where his lance of ’Mechs had waited for the Clans to make landfall.
The tattered piece of camouflage he carried with him had initially hidden Yen-Lo-Wang from infrared and magnetic resolution scans, but now did little more than keep him warm at night. That was no small grace, however, because the monsoon rains soaked him to the bone every afternoon and morning. The camouflage helped keep some of the rain off, but Kai found it too bulky to wear all the time, especially if he wanted to move at all quietly through the rain forest.
Initially, he regretted having stressed to his men the necessity for maintaining a tidy camp because now he found little or nothing to salvage beside the ’Mech camo from the Icestorm lance area. Moving a bit north along the line established for the Tenth Lyran Guards, he had more success plundering Frostfire lance’s garbage midden, but he was careful in his scavenging to leave no clue of his passing.
From the first, his caution was rewarded. Several Clan patrols swept through the area, picking up stragglers who had not been as lucky as Kai. The Elementals, both in their armor and out, impressed Kai with their size and strength. He breathed a silent vow to avoid tangling with them if at all possible. By taking refuge high up in trees during the day, he frustrated the searchers. After ten days, the patrols dwindled.
His rations lasted for the first week, and then hunger forced him to expand his foraging range. The Clans, he discovered to his dismay, pressed captive warriors into service as clean-up crews. They salvaged their own ’Mechs, but left the enemy machines behind where they fell. They also cleaned up any deposits of material that fugitives might find useful. When small supply caches began to show up in places Kai had never seen them before, he knew they were bait for a trap. No matter how tempting they looked, he avoided them.
Watching one such crew of captives, Kai noticed that the Elementals guarding the crew did not treat them harshly. Each captive wore a braided bit of white cord on his right wrist and seemed to receive a certain amount of respect. He heard the Elementals address the captives as “bondsman,” but he attached no real significance to that title. It did strike him that he saw far fewer captive warriors than he would have imagined, given the haste of the FedCom retreat. There must be more hiding somewhere.
Watching other captives started Kai thinking about his chances of liberating compatriots and leading them in a revolt. None of those he saw looked mistreated or malnourished, so he imagined them still to be in fighting trim. Yet most of the captives were MechWarriors, and hardly schooled in the tactics of an irregular infantry.
Seeing no way to organize a force that could throw the Clans off the planet, Kai decided his real duty was to remain free, and if the chance arose, report back to Hanse Davion and his father about the military situation on the world. He knew that if he could get them credible intelligence, they would send a force to liberate Alyina and to rescue him. Gathering that information would mean traveling around enough to see what the Clans had left on the world, and then reaching a ComStar facility from which he could send his message home.
On the far side of the road, Kai ran down into a small gully and walked along in the chilly stream running through it. Fifty meters downstream, he exited onto a flat bed of rock and went up the far side of the gully into a finger of forest. He waited, listening and watching for any signs of other life, then slowly but surely worked his way forward. Stopping in the shadows of thick pines and carefully avoiding stepping on anything that would make noise, he picked a zigzag path through the woods to the garden he’d harvested two nights before.
Stepping over a low fence made of chicken-wire, Kai dropped to his knees beside a patch of tomatoes. Just as he reached out for one, a light flashed on, accompanied by the sound of a shell being racked into a pump-action shotgun. Kai froze, narrowing his eyes against the harsh glare of the flashlight strapped to the gun’s barrel.
“Told the wife raccoons didn’t brush away their footprints when they left.” The voice came gruff from the big silhouette, but Kai heard no hostility in it. “Your name Jewell?”
Kai started to shake his head, but nodded as he realized the man with the gun was reading the name off the breast of his jumpsuit. “Yeah, Dave Jewell, that’s me. Now that you’ve caught me, what are you going to do with me?”
The light flashed off. “Take you to the house. Clanners can’t punish us more for having two Feds under our roof than they can for one, jal. C’mon.”
Kai stood slowly and stepped back out of the garden. A voice inside him screamed that he should be running away, or at least disarming the man, but he held back. The farmer gave him a fair amount of room, but Kai knew the shotgun was his any time he wanted to take it. He nodded and let the farmer lead the way.
The small, two-story wooden house his guide led him to showed yellowed lights around the edges of drawn shades. Enough of it spilled out across the porch to show Kai which loose, weathered boards to avoid. It also gave him a brief glimpse of his grizzled host, but he could not remember ever having seen the white-haired old man before. Still, by the ease with which the man held the shotgun in one hand, Kai guessed he’d seen military service.
The farmer waved Kai into the building. To the left of the door, a small lamp burned on a dining table surrounded by six chairs. Beyond it, in the far left corner was a kitchen with a woodburning stove that kicked out wave after wave of welcome warmth. Dominating the center of the room, a staircase led up to the second floor. Off to the right side of the door, a group of chairs had been arranged around a circular carpet to form a comfortable conversation nook. Back in the far right corner, the walls were stacked with shelves containing both old, real-paper books and a host of holovid books along with a reader.
“Welcome to our home, Mr. Jewell.” The farmer set the shotgun in a rack beside the door. He turned and pointed to the white-haired woman by the stove. “This is my wife, Hilda. I am Erik Mahler, formerly a MechWarrior in the service of the Archon of the Lyran Commonwealth.”
Kai smiled and accepted the man’s hand. “David Jewell, Tenth Lyran Guards.”
“Tenth Guards?” Hilda smiled and wiped her hands on her apron. “Then you will know our other guest.” She walked to the stairs and called softly. “It is safe, my dear. Come down.”
Kai loosened the string tying his camo around his neck. Letting the sheeting slip to the floor, he started to remove his backpack, but it hung forgotten as the Mahlers’ other refugee descended the stairs. She was tall and slender, with short black hair that barely brushed the collar of her flannel shirt. The yellow discoloration on her brow he put down to the last vestiges of what must have been a nasty bruise. Her blue eyes lit up with surprise when she saw him. “Kai!”
Stunned, Kai dropped his pack. “Deirdre? Didn’t you get off with the others?”
She stiffened. “The Clans overran our hospital. I fled with the others.” Her right hand rose to touch the bruise above her right eye. “I hit something, I don’t remember what. I don’t remember anything until I woke up here.”
Erik smiled. “This far was the eye in a nasty storm. The battle raged all around, but no one came here. I found Deirdre wandering through the woods and I brought her back here.” His right eyebrow arched. “She called you, ‘Kay.’”
Kai nodded, “It’s a nickname that stuck since my time at the New Avalon Military Academy. I used to say ‘okay’ so much that my classmates started calling me ‘Kay.’ The regiment picked it up. Some folks think my name really is David K. Jewell.”
Deirdre’s expression of pleasure at seeing Kai began to drain away, but she gave no indication she would betray his deception. Mahler, looking from Kai to Deirdre and back again, either noticed nothing or decided to disregard whatever conclusions he was drawing about the two of them.
Hilda seized the opportunity offered by the momentary silence. “Kay—if you do not mind me using your nickname—you can wash up and I will get you some clean clothes, if you like. Then you can eat something.”
“Bitte.” Kai smiled.
“Deirdre, why don’t you take Kay to the pumphouse out back and show him how to fill the tub.” Erik Mahler shrugged with notable stiffness in his left shoulder. “After years of service, I retired and determined to get back to the land and avoid the technological trappings of society. I find it more relaxing. And with the Clans cutting down on the amount of power available to outlying areas, we are less affected than others.”
Kai smiled politely. “Having lived off the land for the past two weeks, your home looks to me like a lost Star League depot of stuff.” He picked up his cloak and pack, then turned to Deirdre. “If you will lead the way, Doctor, I will become more human.”
Kai stripped off his soiled jumpsuit and tossed it onto the pumphouse bench. His almond eyes and bronze flesh bespoke his Eurasian blood, though his dirty face and hands were dark enough to suggest African origins for his family. Catching sight of himself in the door mirror as he pulled off his cooling vest, Kai saw that he’d lost what little fat he’d been carrying. He combed his fingers back through his short black hair, pulling at two snarls, then shuddered. His fingernails were as black as his hair.
His mirror-image slid away as Deirdre opened the door. “A bit underfed, but you look healthy.” She placed the towels and soap she was carrying on a stool next to a huge wooden cask. Her voice grew a bit distant. “Am I allowed to ask why you’ve appropriated the identity of another member of the Guards, or is that some secret you nobles keep to yourselves?”
The ice in her voice stung Kai, but he reined in his hurt. “Mahler saw the name on the jumpsuit and figured me to be David Jewell. As he had a shotgun on me at the time, I decided going along was easier than explaining the truth.”
“Really? Or is it that you think a disguise will make you less valuable as a hostage when the Clans capture you?”
Kai pulled off his own dog tags and tucked them into the small pocket inside the waistband of his shorts. “I don’t intend to be captured.”
Deirdre gave him a hard stare. “What happened to Jewell?”
He suppressed a shudder as he recalled climbing into the Wolverine’s cockpit and looting it. “He was killed in battle. He died protecting Prince Victor.”
“Of course.” A sour expression sharpened her face and scored lines at the corners of her eyes, but those eyes reflected sadness. “What happened to you?”
Kai crossed to the silver pump beside the tub and began to work the handle up and down. “I was left for dead after it looked like my ’Mech had been destroyed.” As water gushed into the tub in frothy pulses, Kai felt his anger getting the better of him. He decided to change the subject to something more neutral. “You said the Clans overran your hospital. What happened?”
Deirdre’s face took on a dazed expression and she lowered herself like a zombie to the bench. “It felt like a replay of Twycross. Elementals came into our area and began to shoot up what vehicles we had. Meanwhile, the veterinary hospital we had converted into a clinic offered no cover. Things just started exploding and there were fires and glass flying everywhere.”
She covered her face briefly with her hands, as though the memory were too painful. “So much blood. I was working on a boy who’d been hit in the chest and we couldn’t stop the bleeding. And then one of my nurses got hit, and I realized they were shooting at the hospital.” Tears rolled from her red-rimmed eyes. “I told someone to call for you on the radio because you’d told me you had our sector and that you would protect us.” Her hands curled into fists and she stared defiantly at him. “I should have known better.”
Kai ground his teeth. “Victor was in trouble. The Clans had trapped him. I was on the way to help you, then his call came through. I knew I was the only one who could reach him in time. I had to go to him.”
“Blue blood is thicker than red, isn’t it, Leftenant Allard-Liao?” Her lip curled up in a snarl that blasphemed her beauty.
“Come off it, Doctor!” Kai posted off the top of the pump and leaped over the tub. He grabbed her by the shoulders and dragged her to her feet. “It was triage, just the same as you practice in your hospital. Yes, I’ll say it, Victor was more important than a whole DropShip full of wounded men. Do you know why?”
“He’s an adventuristic noble who leaves broken and bleeding bodies wherever he goes.” Her eyes blazed with fury.
“No!” Kai shook her roughly. “No, the reason Victor was more important than your wounded men and women is because he is important to all of them. If Victor died, or was captured, we’d all lose the heart to fight. Every one of those people who died in your hospital had been fighting with Victor to oppose something they felt was evil, something destroying their way of life. Saving Victor gave their sacrifice meaning.”
“Dead is dead, and there is no meaning in it!” Deirdre pulled away from him. “Damn you and Victor and Hanse Davion and the Clans and everyone. You all see wars as the place where glories can be won. You all brag about courage and bravery and sacrifice as if that ennobles the death of some half-trained schoolboy who’s blown apart while carrying a gun. That’s obscene, because it fosters the mistaken idea that life is cheap enough to waste if the cause is right or just.”
