BattleTech, page 13
It had come from the direction of the audience chamber.
In just a t-shirt and sweatpants, Nikol threw open her door and stumbled into a corridor choked with thick black smoke and a stampede of panicked people. Coughing and screaming servants bumped into and ran past her, away from the hellish scene at the far end of the hall.
Where she expected to see the massive centuries-old door leading to her mother’s audience chamber, instead Nikol saw a collapsed roof. Age-old wood reduced to matchsticks. A torn wall of spilled granite and marble debris. Tongues of flame licking at anything flammable that had survived the initial blast.
Common sense told her to beware further collapse or backdrafts or secondary explosions, but one notion killed all care for her own safety:
Mother.
Mother is in there…
It spurred her toward the wreckage and conflagration. How many soldiers had she saved from life-or-death battlefield situations? How many souls had she pulled out of collapsed buildings or burning wreckage? If she could just get through the collapse…
A Ducal Guardsman in a soot-blackened uniform caught her by the arm, tried to sweep her away from danger, but she wrenched away from his grasp. Greater things were at stake than her own welfare.
Heedless of the heat and smoke, Nikol grabbed wooden beams from the ruin and yanked them free with her bare hands. She picked up infant-sized chunks of stone and heaved them over her shoulder. One piece of debris at a time—she’d dig her mother out if it was the last thing she ever did. Fire scorched her hands and fingers. So much smoke filled her lungs.
Her vision faded in and out—was it the smoke? Fever?
“Warden-General!” a voice shouted from behind. “Get back!”
“My mother is in there!” she shrieked.
“She’s gone! We need to get you to safety!”
The world shifted as two Guardsmen strong-armed her away from danger. Had it been any other day, had she the full command of her body, she would have fought them, seen them court-martialed for disobeying her military authority. But the adrenaline left her with a sickening, icy shudder. Fever, fatigue, sickness, and trauma all destroyed her will to resist.
All she could do was let go, let her protectors ensure this catastrophe did not claim her as well.
Through the haze of tears and illness, behind her Nikol saw more than just a ruined wing of the Halas family estate. Yet another tragedy had befallen her family. She saw her nightmare made manifest. Without her mother—without Captain-General Jessica Halas-Hughes Marik—the Free Worlds League would surely collapse into anarchy.
Part II
Fox Hunting
21
HALAS MANOR
AMUR, ORIENTE
ORIENTE PROTECTORATE
FREE WORLDS LEAGUE
2 MARCH 3148
Sitting in his office and poring over staffing reports, General Wilburn Kirkland felt the explosion all the way to his bones.
His first impulse wrote off the tremor as a blown transformer, or maybe even a sonic boom from an overhead suborbital shuttle. But the transformers in the vicinity of Halas Manor were buried underground, and suborbital flights usually did not fly over the Captain-General’s Oriente estate.
Something was wrong.
Within seconds of the explosion, Wil was on his feet, barking into his perscomm, heading for his office door. “Eagle’s Nest, this is Eagle Prime. What’s the situation?”
The hall shook with another tremor, a weaker one that didn’t quite sound like an explosion, but the sudden shake unbalanced him. Wil fell sideways, had to brace himself against the wall of plaques denoting past COs of the Ducal Guard from the years when the regiment was a provincial outfit, not the federal one it had evolved into since Jessica’s rise to Captain-General. This second boom was close—too close—and not for the first time did he wish there were windows in this part of his HQ.
“Eagle’s Nest, get me a report, now,” he growled.
A response crackled into his earpiece: “Eagle Prime, this is Ovum. Eagle’s Nest—” A choked-up sob wracked the commline. “Eagle’s Nest is gone, sir.”
Only decades of training and discipline kept his legs moving down the hall toward his command center. Any lesser soldier would have stopped in their tracks to let that gut punch sink in. But shock was not an option. Emotions threatened to well to the surface, but Wil suppressed them. He had a job to do, and by God, he would do it.
“Gone, Ovum? What do you mean ‘gone’?”
“We’ve lost contact, sir. There’s been an explosion on the premises. Situation unknown. Eagles Five and Six are unresponsive. Eagles Nine through Twelve—their communicators are offline.”
Wil blinked at the news. Any number of plausible, non-hostile explanations could be at fault for the explosion, but six unresponsive Guardsmen meant something catastrophically wrong. Eagles Five and Six were today’s rotation for the standard around-the-clock patrol duty on the Halas estate grounds; Seven and Eight, the balance of their lance, were scheduled to relieve them at 1600 hours. Eagles Nine through Twelve served as the Captain-General’s honor guard during the meetings with the Andurien ambassadors. Had the blast taken out communications relays?
As he neared the command center, all manner of worst-case scenarios rampaged through his head: a Capellan deep strike seeking to take advantage of the meeting of envoys; the Anduriens sending a fake ambassadorial team as a distraction while Andurien forces dove in for the kill…
“Understood. Maintain station and—”
“Prime, we have visual confirmation: Eagles Five and Six are down.”
Down? Wil fought to maintain his swift stride. What could topple two Hermes IIs so quickly? And where is the opposition? This close, shouldn’t he have felt the heavy footfalls and reverberations of other ’Mechs? And if they were under attack, how could an opposing military force have gotten this close to the manor without any prior warning? There’d been no reports of hostile naval traffic, no notice of recent troop movements near the Regulan, Capellan, or Andurien borders.
How long has this attack been planned?
No. There was no use catering to imagination. Hard facts were needed. And if the manor was under attack, he needed to lead the defense from a ’Mech cockpit.
He darted down a different corridor and contacted Ovum again: “OpFor?”
“Unknown.”
Wil nodded. “All right, get Seven and Eight on station, now. Put Two through Four back out of the barn. I don’t care how not-ready they are. I am on en route to the ’Mech bay. Will be there in two.”
As the general of the Ducal Guard regiment, Wil knew how long it took to get everywhere on the Guard’s base at a brisk pace. Even a few seconds could mean the difference between life and death, so he could quote down to a thirty-second window how long it would take him to arrive.
Exactly one hundred and ten seconds later, he arrived in the manor’s ’Mech bay. Before he’d even reached the foot of his ’Mech—a towering, 90-ton JLN-5A Juliano—members of his tech crew already had his MechWarrior boots, shorts, and cooling vest ready to hand him.
His lead tech, Master Sergeant Layne, briefed Wil on maintenance issues while he dressed in cockpit-appropriate attire. “General, only half of your SRMs are loaded. If we had more time—”
“Emergencies wait for no one, Sergeant,” Wil said, fastening the clips on his boots. “I just pray that I am wrong about what’s going on.”
Layne handed Wil his neurohelmet. “I will light a candle to the saints. Good hunting, General.”
On any other day, Wil would have taken the lift to the top of the scaffolding, but this time he opted for the fast route: climbing the chain ladder leading to the ’Mech’s cockpit. Sergeant Layne, thankfully, had known he was coming and had already initialized the ’Mech’s systems. All Wil needed do was state his security passphrase for the voiceprint ID to unlock all tactical and weapon functions.
“‘To everything there is a season,’” he quoted while securing each buckle of his five-point-safety harness, “‘and a time to every purpose under the heaven.’”
All of the dimmed screens flashed to life, and he felt the fusion engine at the heart of this BattleMech throb with the power it contained. Communications were patched in, armor and damage readouts were pristine, weapons showed the emerald of ready.
The moment he got the green light, he steered his Juliano out of its maintenance cubicle and toward the ’Mech-sized doors leading out to the manor grounds. Eagles Seven and Eight, piloting an Orion and a Thunderbolt, had already jogged outside ahead of him, and IFF transponders denoted One through Four powering up in the ’Mech bay behind him. Between the seven of them, they would have to be enough to secure the manor and hold the line against hostiles until the rest of the Ducal Guard on the premises could activate and join them.
I just hope we are not too late…
As his cockpit breached the protection of the hangar, a waterfall of smoke eclipsed his entire field of view. Gray clouds ruled the entire visible swath of sky ahead, and the glow of orange and yellow tongues of flame suffused the murk. It was hell itself, a startling scene that made it seem as though dusk had arrived early. Wil relied on his decades of training to fight down the panic threatening to seize him, but amid the wreckage, he could see nothing on visual sensors through the choking pall of dust and debris that had been one wing of the manor.
As if a specter emerging from early evening fog, a recognizable shape coalesced as the smoke whirled aside: the crumpled form of a Hermes II’s head, torso, and arm, partially buried beneath heavy stone, shattered timbers, and other construction debris.
Eagle Five.
A few steps later, the veil of dust parted enough for a shadowed glimpse of another fallen Hermes II in a similar unmoving disposition. Eagle Six.
Wil’s stomach tightened as he flicked over to infrared sensors then over to magres to search for shapes of enemy ’Mechs in the vicinity. He saw none, not even retreating shapes. No armor platoons. No infantry squads. Nothing.
Only one thing was perfectly clear in this murk: “Eagle’s Nest,” the entire audience wing where the Captain-General was entertaining Andurien diplomats—was gone. Reduced to broken stones and toothpicks.
No one could’ve survived such an event.
Wil stopped breathing.
He’d witnessed combat deaths before. He’d been shot at more times than he could count. Death was a familiar bedfellow for seasoned, professional soldiers such as he. But nothing could have prepared him for this.
The Captain-General, his primary charge, was dead.
Every worse-case contingency plan blasted through his head. Maps. Escape routes. The whole nine meters.
He inhaled. Keyed his neurohelmet mic.
“Ovum, this is Eagle Prime,” he said, amazed at how calm his voice sounded despite the fury of despair and abject failure raging inside his skull. “Execute Plan Omega-Six.”
“Omega-Six confirmation, sir.”
Omega plans all involved the death of a primary asset. Plan Six specifically dealt with the death—or suspected death—of the most primary asset in the entire Free Worlds League; there was no Omega-Seven. The minute the Ovum commtech had keyed off her radio, Wil knew that orders were going out for the entire estate to be put on lockdown and surrounded by a perimeter of Ducal Guard ’Mechs, armor, and infantry. The city of Amur would be put on high alert. City police would be on watch for any suspicious activity whatsoever. The spaceport would also be locked down, and not even authorized departures would be permitted off-planet for an indefinite period of time.
With every footfall of his Juliano, the same refrain echoed in his skull.
I failed her.
I failed her.
He had already failed Jessica’s husband—accident or not. Now he had failed Jessica as well. Was Nikol even alive? Her schedule placed her alongside her mother all day long, so he’d ordered double the usual honor guard just in case…
“Ovum, what’s the status on Fledgling?”
The comm’s extended silence twisted Wil’s guts into blacksmith puzzles. If Nikol is gone too…
“Ovum,” he repeated, “status on Fledgling, ASAP.”
The channel clicked back on a few agonizing seconds later. “Fledgling is accounted for and en route to a safe location.”
Wil nearly wilted with relief in his command couch. “Good to hear, Ovum,” he replied. “Now get me a sitrep. Tell me what we’re dealing with here.”
“Unknown, Eagle Prime,” the commtech answered. “Zero confirmation of any hostile forces in the area.”
“Bandits? Artillery?”
“That is a negative, Prime.”
Wil bashed a gloved fist onto the instrument panel. He needed something to shoot. A clearly defined enemy to pin the blame to. But the only culpability he could find in this scenario was his own…
Wil shook his head to clear it.
The best way out was through.
Step one: contain the situation.
Omega-Six would go a long way toward that long-term goal, but the immediacy of what lay in front of him took precedence. If there were any survivors amid the rubble strewn about…
Odds were slim that anyone could have survived the wing’s collapse, but he could not be like Dante and abandon all hope entirely. Not yet.
A series of dull, distant thuds announced Eagles Two through Four—his lancemates, Hassan, Wakefield, and Cruse—now en route to establishing a perimeter around the estate. Wil also heard rhythmic sounds of a Karnov VTOL firing up its rotors back at the Ducal Guard base. Comm chatter told of fire brigade resources coming to combat the blaze and contribute to rescue efforts. Amur PD had already taken measures to secure the streets in and out of both the manor and the city.
Through a curtain of disbelieving heartache, Wil saw all of the moving pieces around him, and his chest swelled with pride. From all corners of Amur, first responders were charging into potential danger to help. Most of them could not know that the Captain-General lay somewhere beneath all of that rubble, but they all came regardless.
This…this is how the Free Worlds League operates. We may bicker about unimportant matters, but we all pull together when it counts. This is the national spirit Jessica fought so hard to maintain… This is the legacy she would want us to remember…
An incoming medevac VTOL’s downdraft chased away enough of the billowing smoke to help Wil’s attempt to scour the ruins for survivors. Together, he and Seven levered aside a massive chunk of marble façade from the mountain of debris, only to find multiple crushed, soot-blackened bodies beneath.
Wil wanted to weep for the loss, but there was simply no time. Ducal Guard forces were pouring into the estate grounds, along with newly arrived fire brigade IndustrialMechs, and a second Karnov anticipating further casualty evacs. Numb from what he’d witnessed, he hyper-focused on the task at hand, responding only to tacnet communications when necessary. While firefighters hosed down the worst of the persisting flames, Wil and his MechWarriors displaced and dug through as much wreckage and debris as they could. Even though Wil’s ’Mech lacked hand actuators to efficiently move rubble, he could still assist the recovery efforts. He knew the schematics of the estate well enough that he could’ve drawn any wing of the manor from memory. He knew exactly where Jessica’s political offices were situated, where the audience chamber lay. He could even imagine exactly where in the chamber she had been sitting when the wing collapsed. If there were any survivors, he knew exactly where to look.
His ’Mech’s stubby forearms shoved aside destroyed bits of mansion one piece at a time, working his way toward where he knew Jessica Marik would be. He told himself she had moved in just the right way, at just the right time; a fallen piece of rafter or roofing had surely landed at precisely the right angle to shelter her from the debris above instead of pulverizing her. He repeated it to himself and kept right on working, because to stop working would invalidate that lie…
He had carved a path through the debris halfway to the audience chamber when the tacnet clicked back on long enough for him to register it. “Eagle Prime, this is Ovum. Amur PD reports they are in pursuit of a person of interest.”
Wil blinked to break out of his work trance and give the transmission his full attention.
“Suspect was seen leaving Vasilias Boulevard to the west of the estate grounds, from inside the Omega-Six perimeter,” the commtech clarified. “High-speed chase has ensued. Suspect is headed southbound on the one-oh-five. Police dispatch believes they are headed to Amur Spaceport.”
A suspicious individual running from police inside the Omega-Six cordon was someone worth investigating. If there were no obvious hostile military forces in the area, then saboteurs, arsonists, and assassins were the likely answers. A gas leak or other natural mishap could never account for so much damage.
If they plan to steal a shuttle to get off-planet, they’ll be horribly disappointed to learn of the Omega-Six lockdown at the spaceport, Wil thought, allowing a wry smile to creep in through the despair. “All right, Ovum. Keep me apprised of the situation. I’ll keep doing what I can here in the meantime.”
“Eagle Prime, stand by,” the dispatcher said.
Wil’s brow crinkled in irritation as he used an SRM launcher to push another fallen timber aside. What was going on out there?
Nearly a minute passed before Ovum replied: “Person of interest is on the spaceport tarmac. Amur PD officers on the scene.”
As much as he longed to be on the scene and learn exactly how this person of interest might be involved with this whole incident, Wil’s rational side won out. For all his failings in this whole fiasco, he could do more good here. He had to trust the police to do their job while he focused on his own. If there was even the slimmest chance that anyone survived beneath this ruined mansion wing, he would do everything under every sun to ensure that they lived another day.
