LE5665 - Freebirth, page 1
A DEADLY GAME
"Do you give in, Bondsman Horse?" Howell said.
Horse was indignant. "Negative."
"You did not let me finish the rules." Howell chuckled. "You cannot ease out of this exercise by just letting your 'Mech run down or using any escape maneuver. You must run the gauntlet or be murdered dishonorably in your cockpit."
"How can you do that?" came another voice.
"Howell does not have to. But I can. I am allowed by the rules."
The voice coming suddenly from inside the cockpit startled Horse. He looked around. From the darkest part of the cockpit, a partition slid open and he saw a Smoke Jaguar warrior crouched inside. The hooded warrior held a laser pistol and it was pointed at Horse's head....
BATTLETECH
LE5665
Twilight of the Clans IV:
Freebirth
Robert Thurston
ROC
Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd. 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (NX) Ltd. 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published by Roc, an imprint of Dutton Signet, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.
First Printing, February, 1998
10987654321
Copyright (c) FASA Corporation, 1998 All rights reserved
Series Editor: Donna Ippolito Cover art by Bruce Jensen
Mechanical Drawings: Duane Loose and the FASA art department
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If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."
Thank you to:
Andy Platizky, for support and general cheerfulness; Blaine Pardoe, for so generously helping me to clarify some BattleTech matters;
Eugene McCrohan, LAIRE Powerhouse, for his continuing help and insights;
Rosemary, for kindness and understanding above and beyond the call of duty;
Charlotte, for being such a good kid; and Donna Ippohto and the FASA staff, for their cooperation and encouragement.
Prologue
They came from the far reaches of space, from beyond the Deep Periphery. The Clans. The most superior warriors ever known to mankind, genetically engineered to be weapons of destruction. The greatest threat ever faced by the Inner Sphere.
Three hundred years before, General Aleksandr Keren-sky and most of the Star League disappeared into the unknown vastness of space. Then in the year 3050 they suddenly reappeared, so unlike anything ever seen that they were thought to be aliens. But they were the descendants of the Kerenskys come from the Inner Sphere and now they had returned to conquer the Inner Sphere.
They rolled mercilessly over world after world, moving relentlessly toward Terra, the homeworld of humanity. Then came Tukayyid. The scene of the bloodiest battle in the history of mankind. And it ended in the worst way possible for the Clans. A fifteen-year truce.
IlKhan Ulric Kerensky was called before his fellow Khans and accused of trying to destroy the Clans with the truce. In response Ulric and his Wolves fought a Trial of Refusal against the Jade Falcons, who battled in the name of his accusers. By the end of the Refusal War, Ulric was dead and both the Jade Falcons and the Wolves had been shattered.
And yet, the bloody battle was a victory for the Crusader faction of the Clans. By defeating Ulric's Wolves, they rid themselves of the Wardens, those who were against breaking the truce. By the end of 3057, Vlad Ward was the new Khan of the Wolves and Marine Pryde the leader of the Jade Falcons. Neither one hesitated to do whatever was necessary to save their Clans.
When the Khans returned to the homeworlds to elect a new ilKhan, Vlad and Marthe formed an uneasy alliance. First, they plotted to get Lincoln Osis of the Smoke Jaguars elected ilKhan, knowing that he would not last long.
Now they wait. Osis is too short-sighted to ever successfully lead the Crusade to conquer the Inner Sphere. Vlad and Marthe's day will come, and when it does, the moment will be ripe for one of them to become ilKhan. They wait, forging the fires of their Clans. They wait for the day when the Clans will take back what is rightfully theirs.
1
Port St. William
Coventry
Coventry Province, Lyran Alliance
18 June 3058
"What the hell. The hell. This is one hell of a hellish hellhole, quiaff?" Star Commander Joanna shouted as she flung a rock down the slope of the hill looking down on Port St. William and its bay. She was, as usual, in an angry mood.
Horse grunted and squinted up at her. Joanna was instantly irritated by the relaxed way he lay in the grass, propped up on one elbow. Horse always seemed to sense when Joanna was ready to explode, and she suspected that was why he'd dragged her out for this late-morning hike into the hills and then insisted they stop to rest. Why rest? Especially when every Jade Falcon on Coventry was in the midst of packing up to return to the Falcon occupation zone?
Horse responded to Joanna's irritable moods by becoming even more laconic than usual. This time, though, through the use of the ritual interrogatory, quiaff, she was demanding a response.
"I said, quiaff?" She threw another rock, this time in his general direction.
"Aff, Joanna. Whatever you say."
"And what did I say?"
"Whatever you said."
"You do not know what I said. You were not listening.
"Whatever you say."
"That is on the verge of insubordination, Horse."
"I am always on the verge of insubordination. Do not take it to heart." He rolled onto his back and stared up at the sky.
Joanna sighed. An unusual trait among warriors, sighing. She sat down next to Horse, knees drawn in.
"We have the same conversations, Horse. Over and over."
Horse gave his gruff laugh. "We have known each other so long we are beginning to sound like coffin-mates."
Joanna shuddered. Coffin-mates was a term known to most of the seventeen Clans, though rarely used. By Clan standards it was one of the most obscene insults one Clansman could utter to another and still survive— which was Why Horse had used it. It referred to two people who formed a lasting relationship. Such relationships, including legal arrangements like (ugly word) marriage, only existed among the lower castes, especially in the rural areas. Members of the Jade Falcon warrior caste, of course, found the idea of lasting relationships disgusting.
The archaic term coffin-mates suggested a relationship so permanent it would last to the grave and beyond. Jade Falcon warriors did not accept the notion of graves or any permanent sites for body disposal. Their desired fate was to be recycled after death for various uses. The highest honor for a warrior was for his or her genetic material to become part of the Clan's gene pool for use in the genetic engineering of new warrior sibkos. Thus, burial was undesirable and even repellent to the warrior caste. The sight of a village graveyard nauseated warriors.
The burial custom harked back to a pre-Clan era on Terra, humanity's planet of origin. The humans of the past had been extremely wasteful when they buried their dead. Too much of the planet had been taken up with wasteful graveyards. But Terra had at that time been a wasteful planet, populated by wasteful civilizations whose greed and careless practices had nearly destroyed it in the time before her people made their way into space.
Space travel, with its tight confinements, and colonization, with its extreme hardships, made humanity alter its tendency to waste materials.
Sometimes Joanna wondered why there was such an urge among the Clans to reclaim Terra. Even if the first Clan to set foot victoriously on Terra would have the honor of becoming the ilClan, the Clan commanding all the other seventeen Clans, what would they be reclaiming? Terra held little allure for her, yet she knew it was the aim of the biggest military operation the Clans had ever undertaken—the invasion of the Inner Sphere.
After Horse had called them coffin-mates, she had an unwelcome image of the two of them being put to their final rest in side-by-side coffins, lids slipping open, skeletal hands reaching for each other and missing, winding up drooping from skeletal wrists. A bad way for a warrior to end. Her image of a good death was to go out in flames in the cockpit of her 'Mech, leaving in her wake about a hundred other smashed and burning 'Mechs.
Horse and Joanna had served together for many years, through many arguments. Somehow the arguing had brought mem closer, but not too close. There had never been a sexual moment between them. Joanna, impatient when the need was upon her, generally chose the closest available male warrior, but she had never chosen Horse. He had never selected her, either, though she had not noticed him going off with anyone else. His apparent celibacy may have been governed by his caste. As a free-born he could not easily approach a trueborn for the purpose of coupling, so his choices would have been limited to the few freeborns among the Falcon Guards or to members of the lower castes. Joanna, for her part, could not even bear to touch a member of any caste below warriors.
"You know, Horse, I always thought of you as a low freeborn bastard, but you are worse than that—you are beneath the lowliest of the low, scummier than dirty oil trapped in a 'Mech joint, lousier than—"
"Joanna, I get the point This does not work anymore, this more trueborn than thou attitude."
"Well, of course I am more trueborn than you, lousy freebirth."
Horse stayed silent, gnawing on his lip, a gnawing that showed even under the abundant growth of hair on his face. Joanna squinted at him through steel-gray eyes. He simply stared back at her. She could only imagine what he saw when he looked at her. Freeborn warriors resembled trueborns in one way: both hated signs of age, in themselves and in others.
The signs of age were increasing for Joanna. She was already past the time when warriors got sent off to the trash heap of some solahma unit. She had just barely missed that fate six months back, when her orders to return to the homeworlds had been revoked at the last instant.
Clan warriors did not really expect to grow old. A true warrior did not fear death, but sought it by trying to go out in a blaze of glory on the battlefield. Those who did not die soon enough on the field battled a shame that grew with every passing year. Joanna had endured slurs about her age and her survival, snide implications that her skills were over-rated. Yet even her enemies had to admit that there were few warriors who rushed into battle so recklessly, who slew their quarry with so much ferocity. Her defeat of Natasha Kerensky of the Wolves, achieved by incinerating the fabled Black Widow in the cockpit of her 'Mech, was already legendary. It was for killing the Black Widow that Joanna had won the reprieve that let her remain here with the Falcon Guards. She had even won some lines in The Remembrance.
It was now rumored that she was so hated by Clan Wolf that many Wolf warriors had vowed to seek her out and destroy her the next time the two Clans met in battle. But that did not matter to Joanna. What had she to fear from the Wolves, or from death? What mattered was that killing the Black Widow had redeemed her from the shame of being shuffled back to the homeworlds as a canister nanny. Star Colonel Ravill Pryde was the one who'd given the order, stating that she was "past her prime." Joanna let out a low growl at the thought.
Horse did not often look directly at Joanna. When he did, as now, Joanna was sure that the lines radiating around her eyes and creasing her forehead were obvious, particularly in this bright sunlight. When she looked in a mirror, which wasn't often, she noticed the tight thin line her mouth had become, the sallow valleys in her cheeks, the mottled leatheriness of her skin, the half-hidden age-lines of her neck. A few warriors dyed their hair, as if to put off oncoming age, but Joanna could not abide such fraud. Her dark hair was now streaked with wide bands of gray.
Again, Joanna sighed and looked off into the distance, past the golden aspen on the hilltop and down into the valley. She watched where techs worked diligently on 'Mechs damaged in the brutal fighting on Coventry. By order of the Khan they had to work fast, so that the Jade Falcons could pull out in just three days. With the abandonment of Coventry and the expanse of repair (fallen 'Mechs looking like corpses, techs scrambling around them like insects), Joanna's description of Coventry as a hellhole seemed apt The scene below even had specific hellish elements in it. Fires burned and sparks flew from 'Mech surfaces. Some fallen 'Mechs lay in distorted positions, like suffering sinners, with the repair crews in the role of minor spirits whose job was to torment them. Some techs roamed the battlefield, searching and supervising, discovering new ways to punish the sinners. Those who were not working on damaged BattleMechs were on salvage duty, making sure that usable parts of unusable 'Mechs were not being wasted.
Studying the scene, Joanna felt a familiar rage. Two days ago she, along with the rest of the Jade Falcon warriors on this planet, had been primed for battle against fresh troops arriving from the Inner Sphere. After the Jade Falcons lost half their numbers in the Refusal War against the Wolves, Khan Marthe Pryde had needed to prove to the rest of the Clans that the Falcons were as fierce and potent as ever. Otherwise, they risked Absorption by a stronger Clan.
Led by Marthe, the Falcons had thrust boldly into the Lyran Alliance, in just six weeks cutting a path across many worlds. But they did not try to hold any of those planets. All they wanted was to reach their target—the planet Coventry, which lay almost on top of the truce line.
In early March, they struck, first hitting Port St. William, Coventry's principal city. They took the city, then went on to defeat the planet's defenders in nearly simultaneous battles occurring at other key locations. Some of the most desperate, savage, and bloody fighting of the campaign occurred at the Coventry Metal Works, the single most valuable prize on the planet. Gyrfalcon Eyrie Cluster won the battle, but sustained serious casualties while Coventry's defenders withdrew to the hinterlands.
Joanna knew that Gyrfalcon Eyrie was one of five unblooded Clusters Marthe Pryde had poured into the conflict. It was, of course, not the way of the Clans to place untested warriors among the ranks, much less send them into combat. But Joanna thought she understood what Marthe was up to. How else could the Falcons be brought back up to strength without waiting ten or fifteen years for enough young cadets to come of age?
The Inner Sphere had dredged up reinforcements, including the hated Wolf's Dragoons—Clan traitors every one of them. By the end of May, the Falcons had fought them to the wall. The Coventry defenders were on the run, and Joanna was sure the Falcon Guards would be part of the final push to clean them up. But then Khan Marthe had done the unthinkable. She had allowed safcon to newly arriving Inner Sphere reinforcements—this time headed up by that cocky little Victor Steiner-Davion.
Safcon allowed Davion's force to land on Coventry's surface and join the planet's nearly defeated defenders without any sort of Clan retaliation. They had achieved this privilege because their leaders had invoked a revered Clan custom by which one Clan honored an enemy with safe passage onto the battlefield.
Joanna's eyes narrowed as she thought about it for the hundredth time. How could Inner Sphere surats even know about the custom? Perhaps Marthe had agreed to safcon because it had been invoked by Anastasius Focht, commander of the Com Guards and victor of the bloody battle of Tukkayid. Marthe was first and foremost a traditionalist. Honor was everything to her. But was it necessary to be honorable with filth so low they do not deserve to live? Joanna picked up the biggest rock within reach and flung it with a grunt.
What happened next was even worse, at least according to Joanna. Marthe had committed everything she had to the battle, and the newly arrived force made the two sides evenly matched. Any battle victory would be narrow, with serious losses on both sides. Marthe should have fought to the last Falcon, that was the way of the Clans.
But two days ago, she had met with the Inner Sphere commanders and accepted their offer of hegiral To Joanna this was even more shocking than the granting of safcon.
Hegira was another Clan custom, very much like the other side of safcon. By means of hegira, a victorious Clan could permit a respected enemy to withdraw from the battlefield with honor. It was rarely invoked among the Clans, for whom a fight to the last 'Mech was more venerable, and it had never been used before by any force that was not Clan. Horse had told Joanna that the word hegira came from ancient Terra, where it stood for some kind of flight. Flight for the enemy, Joanna assumed.
"Hegira!" she muttered.
"Not this again." Horse groaned and rolled away from Joanna, ending up on his stomach a few steps away, perusing the valley below. "You know as well as I do that it was the right decision."
