BattleTech, page 14
But nothing said he couldn’t eavesdrop.
“Ovum, patch me directly in to the APD feed,” he said while pushing aside the shattered remains of a familiar marble column, one he’d walked past thousands of times. “I want to know everything.”
* * *
50 KILOMETERS EAST OF AMUR SPACEPORT
ORIENTE
ORIENTE PROTECTORATE
FREE WORLDS LEAGUE
2 MARCH 3148
Amur PD Sergeant Alejandra Escudero had been through this drill a number of times: chase down a suspect and apprehend said subject with minimum amount of force. Some of the other officers in her SWAT team relished the kill, the clean shot, bagging the baddie before they can murder hostages or do serious harm to bystanders or infrastructure. But Escudero—she fervently believed in the long path of justice. Killing a perpetrator was easy but ultimately unsatisfying. Taking them alive, putting them through the justified torment of having to confront, own up to, and be punished for their crimes? Much sweeter.
But when her team got called in for this incident, she wanted nothing more than to find this perp and bash his brains in with the butt of her otherwise nonlethal tranq rifle.
Dispatch claimed they had been witnessed fleeing the scene of an explosion at the Captain-General’s estate. Initial reports about Her Grace, the Lady Jessica Marik, were inconclusive. No one was certain whether she was alive, but regardless, an attack on the Captain-General was an attack on the whole city of Amur, on Oriente itself, on the entire Free Worlds League. And en route to the scene of the stolen DropShip’s emergency landing in the countryside beyond Amur Spaceport, Escudero had envisioned doing all manner of violence to this man. This idiot had stolen a shuttle to escape off-world, but local fighters had damaged it enough to force it down.
The area positively buzzed with activity. Amur PD and spaceport security had formed a cordon around the veritable crash site. News vans and reporters had already appeared on the scene. Locals pressed up against the barricade to see what the fuss of the lockdown was all about. Cruiser lights flashed. Commotion and tension filled the air with a tangible ripple of energy. Every spectator, be they civilian, military, or law enforcement, knew the lone KR-61 shuttle out in the middle of this field held a criminal who’d had the gall to attack the very heart and soul of the Free Worlds League. Judging from the tacnet chatter and the outraged expressions on all of the onlookers, no one, not even Escudero, wanted to see this man taken alive.
But this man—this assassin—needed to pay. And her job was to ensure he made it into custody long enough for a federal judge to throw the book at him. The entire book. Hard. Right to the face. Maybe even break his nose.
To that end, she’d armed her team with nonlethal solutions. They were to reach the shuttle, gain access, and neutralize him before the situation could devolve further. APD’s tacnet said that Ducal Guard ’Mechs were en route, but they represented the intimidation option. The final, blow-up-the-ship option.
Which, in her mind, wasn’t an acceptable option.
“Bravo Team,” Dispatch crackled in her earpiece. “You are a go.”
“Roger that, Dispatch.” Escudero used a knife-hand gesture to motion her five-person squad forward, past the police cordon.
Officers Neeley and Richter took point with ballistic shields, and the squad edged closer to the access ramp, which was open for some reason. Strange. Was the ramp damaged in the crash-landing, or was this some sort of trap? Escudero didn’t like obvious chokepoints like this, but there were few options, and time was running out. Plus, she didn’t know whether the target was armed, and if so, with what.
They’d know soon enough.
Neeley ascended the ramp, ducked inside. Richter followed.
The quiet unsettled Escudero.
Just before she passed through the portal, the flash of small-arms fire lit the cabin. She flinched at the reports but followed Richter inside. Then everything happened at once—
—the whisper paff of tranq guns—
—the clatter of Richter’s armored body striking the deck—
—the ear-splitting reports of an auto-pistol—
—a familiar-sounding scream—
—and then Escudero, in a tactical kneel, had the traitorous, murdering vomit stain square in her crosshairs.
She squeezed her trigger.
A cottony crimson puff sprouted from the young, black-haired suspect’s unprotected throat, and he fell back against the bulkhead to steady himself against the flow of drugs coursing through his system. As he staggered from side to side, managing to keep his footing, a second dart-puff stuck into his thigh.
Escudero’s eyes boggled. The perp likely had enough tranquilizers in his system to put down an adult Calloway wildebeest…
His smoking auto-pistol pointed right in her face—
She tranqed him again, purely by adrenaline reflex. Struck him in the shoulder.
His shot went high. The air disturbed in its wake tickled her ear.
The suspect’s eyes glazed over, and he slumped backward. The drugs finally took hold, and gravity dragged him to the ground.
He lay there in that slumped position, head and limbs limp, the fallen pistol out of reach. But those too-bright hazel eyes still stared straight into her soul—shook her nerves even deeper than the icy sting of adrenaline shivering through her body.
For one concrete moment of clarity, his eyes cleared of drug fog, and he regarded her with all seriousness. Then he spoke words that would haunt her for the remainder of her life:
“House Selaj sends its regards…”
White foam oozed from his mouth, and seizures wracked his body.
Panic spurred Escudero back into action. “Pham! Stick something in his mouth! He’s choking on his tongue!” She then keyed her comm and said, “Dispatch, Escudero. Get poison control up here on the double, or we’re gonna lose him!”
And then she took a step back in disbelief, away from the assassin, letting her own eyes unfocus as Officer Pham tried to save the man’s life.
This man spoke of ghosts. Bloody specters her parents once invoked to frighten her whenever she misbehaved as a child.
The Selaj family—they had once ruled Regulus several long centuries ago, and their feuding rivalry with House Marik was the stuff of legends. In 2678, House Selaj and a terrorist group known as the Scourge of Death had used a bomb to assassinate then-Captain-General Terrence Marik IV, and that sealed the Selaj family’s fate. The Mariks had transferred stewardship of Regulus to House Cameron-Jones, and proceeded to hunt down and exterminate every single member of House Selaj until the entire House was erased from the Inner Sphere.
Or so the Mariks had claimed.
Escudero’s parents used to tell her stories of House Selaj, about how the Mariks had missed a family member or two. According to these ghost stories, all of House Selaj’s secret descendants were biding their time, waiting for the right moment to reveal themselves, to rise up and attack the Mariks, oust the Cameron-Joneses, and reclaim their rightful place as the rulers of Regulus. Then they’d rechristen the nation as the Principality of Regulus and reinstate the title of prince to their head of state.
Her parents, Regulan ex-pats with delusions of grandeur, were obviously full of shit. Nearly five hundred years was a long time for anyone to wait for revenge, so Escudero had never believed a word of it. These secret Selaj descendants could’ve easily shown up during the Word of Blake Jihad, when Regulus and the League was at its most vulnerable. They could’ve shown up after the League fractured in 3079, maybe even taken credit for its dissolution and thumbed their noses at House Marik. They could’ve actively thwarted the re-formation of the Free Worlds League. They could’ve done all of that—but they didn’t.
Because they. Didn’t. Exist.
Period.
So then why was she staring at a man who had just invoked the name of the long-dead House?
The League was openly at war with Regulus. A bald-faced attempt had just been made on the Captain-General’s life. All of these circumstances would have furthered the aims of House Selaj.
Had her parents’ cockamamie conspiracy theories been right this whole time?
And if so, what did this mean—for her, for the League?
Escudero inhaled and studied the unconscious assassin’s slackened face as an APD medic rushed past her to stabilize him. Regardless of the situation, she crossed her fingers and prayed that this coward would survive long enough to stand in front of a firing squad.
22
HALAS MANOR
AMUR, ORIENTE
ORIENTE PROTECTORATE
FREE WORLDS LEAGUE
3 MARCH 3148
Deep in the clamor of the war room in the estate’s subterranean bunker, Nikol remained a quiet eye in the hurricane of various Ducal Guard personnel. As the world rushed along around her in her feverish state, she found only the wherewithal to stare at her bare hands resting numbly in her lap. They should have been covered in extravagant white charmeuse gloves that complemented the lavender gown she’d planned to wear to the gala the Captain-General was throwing to honor the Andurien envoys. Instead, her hands and forearms—burned and scraped from trying to dig through the fiery wreckage—were slathered with ointment and wrapped in bandages, and she was wearing FWLM service dress, a spare uniform she had on hand for emergency duties like this. It was ill-fitting—she had gained a few stress-kilograms since last donning it—and it was rumpled, much like her current state of mind. Not even the most slovenly FWLM rookie would be caught dead in such a state, but no one would dare point out the Warden-General’s regs violations. Especially after everything that had happened.
In fact, most of the Ducal Guardsmen in the room gave her a wide berth. They acted like she was a delicate piece of Atrean china, like stepping too hard around her would knock her off the shelf. But she was not fragile. Sick, grieving, yes—but not fragile. She was raised and tempered by far too strong of a woman to ever be fragile.
The dizziness of Branthian fever, the worst of which would run its course in about a week, had robbed her of her foremost faculties. Many of her senses had numbed from her body fighting off the infection, but she could still feel the full knife-stab of grief all the way to her core.
Mother is dead.
It rang through her aching, fever-addled brain over and over again, a klaxon she could not turn off.
Mother is dead.
After the audience wing collapsed, Nikol had had been escorted to her room, where she had raved and screamed about trying to dig through the wreckage to save her mother until the medicos administered a mild sedative to help her calm down. But Kirkland, bless his soul, had spent the rest of the day overseeing the rescue operations around the collapsed wing, until a final tally was declared.
Fifty-three dead. Six Andurien ambassadors. Twelve Andurien attachés. Eight Ducal Guardsmen. Twenty Halas Manor staff. Six of the Captain-General’s aides.
And one Captain-General.
One leader.
One mother.
The death toll was, by all measurements, not an exceptionally large number. Not even a statistical rounding error, in the scheme of the League’s total population of countless billions. But the implications of those deaths—those murders—would have far-reaching repercussions beyond this planet, this province, even this whole nation. And the waters of culpability remained muddied.
Someone nearby cleared their throat to get her attention. She glanced up through the haze of sickness and grief to see General Kirkland and Torrian Dolcat, her mother’s intelligence director, waiting to address her.
“Warden-General,” Kirkland said, “I’ve just received word from our holding facility. The suspect was confirmed deceased just a few minutes ago.”
She wanted to show elation at this news, but grief and Branthian fever had drained all of her energy. She nodded. “How?”
“Poison capsule hidden in a tooth. Amur PD’s SWAT team tranqed him before he could swallow the full dose, but the shock to his system was too much in the long run. Medicos say he was probably brain-dead before help even arrived.”
Nikol’s gaze shifted back to her bandaged hands. Hands that would never be able to strangle the life out of the man who had stolen her mother from her. “So the only person who could have shed light on all of this is dead? Is there anything to hint at motive? Or whether this is part of something larger? I need to know if the rest of my family will be safe…”
“We do not have a lot to go on just yet,” Kirkland said. “Just a few small pieces to what we believe is a much larger puzzle.”
Nikol nodded. “Go ahead.”
“First off, chemical analysis detected residue of explosive compounds on the suspect. This matches the same traces found at the site of the explosion.”
Site of the explosion. Such a tidy way of describing the place where her mother and fifty-two others had been violently murdered.
“This means that the suspect was either directly involved in or had association with the explosion.”
“Agreed.” Torrian, a handsome, clean-shaven man with honest eyes, brandished his own noteputer. “My team identified the suspect as one Carsten Valentini. Regulan. From Clipperton, specifically, according to our records.”
Nikol couldn’t quite see straight, so she clamped her eyes shut for a moment. “So Lester did send him after my mother,” she said with as much venom as her fever would allow.
Torrian held up a hand. “Let’s not jump to conclusions just yet. This man does not appear in any of SAFE’s databases of known or suspected spies, Regulan or otherwise. And we don’t know whether he was acting alone or if he had accomplices, but we are searching his last known residence for further clues. And just because he was Regulan doesn’t mean we can immediately point fingers in Cameron-Jones’ direction.”
“If the shoe fits—”
“We are not ruling out that possibility,” Torrian said. “But for now, I would advise you to let us do our job and uncover the truth before assigning blame. We have known each other for a long time, Nikol. Trust me when I say that General Kirkland and I will do everything in our power to exercise justice in this matter.”
“Director Dolcat brings up a valid point about blame,” Kirkland said. “Which brings us to my next item: the body-cam footage taken from Sergeant Escudero, of the Amur PD.”
Nikol shuddered, scowling—not at these two men she trusted with her life, but at what Kirkland spoke of. “I know what that man said,” she bit back. “And I don’t believe it. It’s a smokescreen. An obvious misdirection. House Selaj and the Scourge of Death are just as much this nation’s bogeyman as are the Word of Blake. They could not have been responsible.”
“We have to at least consider it,” Torrian said. “I already have analysts sifting data for every single possibility that might corroborate House Selaj remnants that escaped notice throughout the centuries. This whole incident already caught us flatfooted. We cannot let that happen again.” He paused and glanced at Kirkland with regret in his eyes before focusing back on Nikol. “We cannot let something like this happen to you.”
Nikol nodded, staring down at her lap. “I…appreciate your diligence, Torrian. Do what you think you must.” She sighed. “What else do you have?”
“We’re…still sifting through the wreckage,” Kirkland said, shifting uncomfortably at what Nikol imagined as the same nightmare that plagued her. “As best we can tell from external and internal security footage and our initial inspection of the debris, there were multiple points of simultaneous detonation across the collapsed wing. These explosives were deliberately placed to ensure that no one in that part of the manor could have survived. How such devices could have been placed without our knowledge is still under investigation. We’ve started interrogating the estate staff, but unfortunately, a lot of them perished in the collapse.”
Creeping tendrils of paranoia wormed into Nikol’s thoughts. Memories replayed from that night when her brother Janos was murdered on these very grounds, of when Julietta was nearly killed as well. Her father had died while on holiday, another suspect of foul play, despite the lack of evidence. Now her mother was dead, and Nikol would’ve been killed with her if not for this dreadful illness burning its way through her body.
Someone was systematically trying to destroy her entire family.
Was anywhere truly safe? Were Elis and Christo, both far away in their own corners of the realm, also at risk?
“Do we know anything else?” she asked. “Anything at all?”
Torrian glanced at his noteputer. “Our current working theory is that the actual explosive devices were hidden inside various items over a long period of time. So far we’ve found traces of accelerant in light fixtures, behind electrical panels, and in untapped wine casks in the cellar. We’re talking metal objects that cannot easily be scanned, items that are hermetically sealed, or fixtures too far out of reach of chemical sniffers looking for traces of accelerant. These devices were placed in strategic locations throughout the wing to inflict enough structural damage in critical locations to collapse the entire wing. This methodology means that this was a deliberate, premeditated act. To pull off such a feat, the responsible party would have needed unparalleled access to the estate grounds for an extended period of time. We’re talking months, or even years here.”
Nikol shuddered. How many times had she walked past one of these explosive bundles? How often had she passed the assassin—or one of his accomplices? She ground her jaw in both anger and terror that someone so close to her had killed the most important person in this whole nation. The most important person in her own life.
She fought through the aching, the fever, the nausea crawling around in her stomach to present her most determined and composed face to the two men. “All right. Torrian, unless you have more to report, then I will leave you to it while I coordinate my security plan with General Kirkland.”
