Operation Excalibur, page 13
part #31 of BattleTech Series
What Lang could not have reacted to, not yet, was the light dusting powder Yoshitomi had sprinkled over his oiled palm. The powder was so fine it was nearly invisible and certainly impalpable in such small amounts. It was also deadly ... eventually. Absorbed directly through the skin, it would begin breaking down into long-chain proteins as it circulated through the unfortunate Mr. Lang's bloodstream. It was actually harmless in that state—harmless, at least until those circulating proteins began bonding with large amounts of adrenaline. Any strong emotion, any excitement, any arousal, and the protein would bond with it, transforming itself into one of the most powerful vasoconstrictors known. Lang's arteries would literally pucker up, and in the space of seconds the flow of blood to lungs and brain and heart muscle would be sharply reduced. Blood pressure would soar ...
Yoshitomi thought of the blond woman in Lang's lap and gave a faint smile. She was in for a surprise. Sometime tonight, Lang would be dead of a heart attack—or possibly a major stroke. It was impossible to tell in advance exactly what the drag's end effects would be. But one way or the other he would be dead, and Yoshitomi's first Nekekami assignment on Glengarry would be complete.
And by accepting McCall's offer, he'd already begun his second.
11
DropShip Orion, JumpShip Stardancer Nadir Jump Point, Thuban System
Tamarind March,
Federated Commonwealth
1845 hours, 18 September 3057
Sometimes, Grayson Carlyle wished he'd died on Caledonia.
It wasn't that life wasn't worth living any more, but life, his life, anyway, certainly seemed to have lost both direction and purpose. Sometimes, lately, he felt like a rudderless, engineless boat adrift in one of the big coriolis storms that sometimes swept up suddenly out of the Scotian Sea, completely at the mercy of currents and winds that he was powerless to deflect or control.
Colonel Grayson Carlyle, commander and founder of the Gray Death Legion. Mechdrek! What good was a regimental CO who couldn't pilot a BattleMech?
They'd brought him out of the medical coma nearly two months after Falkirk, and months more had followed as he'd learned to use the new plastic and alloy hardware that had replaced his left arm.
Grayson looked down at the new arm, the one hand a perfect match for his other. He could even feel with it, thanks to neural feedback and receptor site boosting, and the micromyomer bundles gave it the feel and strength of a flesh-and-blood arm. What he would never, never get used to was the loss of his ability to pilot 'Mechs.
And now, with his professional life already looking about as bleak as it could, he'd been summoned to Tharkad, together with his executive officer, to face charges.
Charges including treason....
He floated in microgravity in the spacious and tastefully decorated lounge of the civilian passenger DropShip Orion. There were others in the lounge, most of them civilians who, after as much as five weeks out from Glengarry, were familiar faces. He still knew very few of them by name, however. He'd not exactly felt ... sociable.
Others, though, numbered among those closest to him. Lori. Alex, their son. Davis. Jonathan Frye, of the Third Batallion. Caitlin DeVries, who'd come along to be with Alex. As the Gray Death Legion's executive officer, Lori had been directed to accompany him to Tharkad—not that anything could have made her stay away—but the others had come voluntarily. To testify on Grayson's behalf, if necessary.
Or to share his punishment.
He doubted that it would come to that. As regimental CO, he was responsible for the abrupt change of sides on Caledonia, and for the Battle of Falkirk that followed. His actions had prompted Gareth's subsequent attack on the Legion's landhold, and Lori's defense of Glengarry had been justifiable self-defense no matter how you looked at it. If the government needed a proper sacrifice in the name of justice, discipline, and propriety, they would find it in him, and in him alone.
The shutters of the Monarch Class DropShip's lounge viewport were closed, blocking out the intense radiation of this system's primary. Instead, a flat-screen display occupying the entire forward bulkhead had been set to show the view aft, toward the JumpShip's solar collection sail and the twin suns beyond, with filters to step down that brilliant light to an intensity merely dazzling rather than literally and permanently blinding.
Thuban—Alpha Draconis, a name drawn from a constellation visible in the northern hemisphere skies of Terra and therefore having absolutely nothing to do with the far-flung Draconis Combine—was a type AO double star, both components blue-white in color and demonic in their radiation output, circling one another at a distance of thirty-two million kilometers with a period of fifty-one days. Even at the distance of the system's nadir jump point, the radiation levels were uncomfortably high; they would be higher still on the surface of the system's inhabited planet.
Not that that was a problem for the inhabitants. The world called Thuban, Carlyle had read, was a manmade world, one of a number of engineered planets scattered across the Inner Sphere. Originally it had been an airless, radiation-blasted rock the size of Terra's moon, but its core had been hollowed into a vast, rock-enclosed cavern, its spin hastened until the centrifugal force of its rotation provided an artificial, out-is-down gravity, its interior filled with a breathable atmosphere distilled from native ice and rock. Like numerous other planets throughout the Inner Sphere, it was an inside-out world, an enclosed environment you entered through an airlock, a place where you could stand on the ground and look up at farmlands and forests and small, landlocked seas spread across a floor that steadily rose ahead and behind into walls that, in turn, merged with the distant, cloud-hazed ceiling; where the "sun" was a thin, intensely radiant thread across the land-encircled sky that literally piped light in from outside, as needed. A world created by the hand of Man ...
The engineers of the old Star League had practiced numerous varieties of large-scale terraforming, from the crude dropping of moonlets of solid water ice onto barren, frozen desert worlds to warm and wet them into bloom, to hollowing out moons or asteroids like Thuban and shaping them to their will. Many, perhaps most, of the inhabited worlds of the Inner Sphere had been engineered to one degree or another to make human life possible on them. Nowadays, though, humankind was hard-pressed even to survive on worlds as perfectly suited to it as Terra herself; war, it seemed, had a way of undoing everything humanity had won, as it ground on and on for year after year after destructive year.
Such technology as that required by terraforming, Carlyle thought glumly, was now far, far out of man's reach. How much more would be lost to the idiocy of continuing war?
The subject had always been guaranteed to raise Grayson Carlyle's passions. Lostech, the technology and the science and the learning vanished in the centuries since the fall of the old Star League, had occupied his full attention more than once in his career. But somehow, even that just didn't seem important any longer.
He stared at the display screen, watching the dance of shifting shadow and blue-white radiance as the sail's thrust aperture rotated slowly beneath the JumpShip's fractional-G boost.
It had been a long voyage. Glengarry to Laurieston. Laurieston to Jaumegarde. Jaumegarde to Callisto V. Callisto V to Thuban, and with a four-to-eight day wait at each system, as the JumpShip recharged its drive coils. Grayson and his companions had been aboard ship for over a month now; with one more jump scheduled in another four days, from Thuban to Tharkad, plus an eight-day DropShip transit time from jump point to Tharkad, they should make planetfall on the capital of the old Lyran Commonwealth by the end of the month. They'd left Glengarry aboard the Orion on August 10, and Grayson Carlyle was becoming sincerely sick of the Monarch Class DropShip.
The ship was certainly comfortable enough. To a man who'd spent a hefty percentage of his whole life aboard one DropShip or another in passage between the stars, it seemed downright luxurious, a slender leaf-shape aerodyne with a smoothly sculpted central fuselage, massing five thousand tons total and with space aboard for 266 passengers. Her mass was better than eighty percent that of a Fortress military DropShip, but she mounted little armor, no facilities for transporting BattleMechs, in fact, no weapons at all.
That had been one of the provisions in the orders. Grayson and Lori Carlyle had been directed to take civilian passage to Tharkad, there to stand trial for the events on Caledonia and Glengarry the previous April and May. FedCom Military Command seemed to fear what might happen should one or more of the Gray Death's military DropShips be allowed to ground at Steiner Spaceport.
At the thought, Grayson gave a thin smile empty of humor. Some of the men and women in the Legion were about ready to march on Tharkad and take the place apart with their bare hands, so strongly did they take exception to the orders requiring Grayson and Lori to stand trial. It had taken an explicit directive from him personally to ensure that they didn't try it, or something equally harebrained.
Some sort of court of inquiry or court-martial had been inevitable, of course. The entire system of using mercenaries throughout the Inner Sphere demanded some guarantee against mercs accepting one government's money, then immediately switching sides, whether out of conviction or simply for profit. From the moment he'd made his choice on Caledonia, Grayson had known he'd one day have to face retribution, either from the Mercenary Review and Bonding Commission on Outreach or, possibly, from the Federated Commonwealth itself. Being called to Outreach could have resulted in fines and hardship for the Legion, but being called before a military tribunal on Tharkad promised more serious punishment.
Grayson might have protested that this was a matter for the Mercenary Review Commission, but in point of cold, steel-edged fact, he didn't really care what happened to him, not any more. He would fight with all of his strength to save Lori and Alex and Davis and the rest from the consequences of his actions, but if the FedCom military tribunal decided to shoot him, it just wouldn't matter much to him one way or the other. He cared about nothing anymore, nothing beyond the security of those he loved, and the good name of the Legion.
Grayson turned, positioning himself so he could watch Lori for a long moment. She was several meters away, floating at one of the rec lounge tables, talking with Alex, Caitlin, Jon Frye, and McCall. Once, she shot him a quick, almost furtive glance; when her eyes met his, though, she replied with a warm, if somewhat worried smile.
It had been damned rough for her, he knew, having him come back from Caledonia ... crippled. Half-crippled, anyway. He knew well how worried she'd been before he'd woken up from his medical coma back at the Castle Hill dispensary, yet somehow in the past couple of months they'd drifted apart, become more distant. It was harder to talk, harder to share things with her.
Hell, a lot of it, he knew, was his own inability to accept what had happened to him, which tended to make him moody and distant to begin with, but there didn't seem to be much he could do about it. It would require more caring than he was really capable of just now.
He turned his gaze back to the display, where Thuban glared balefully beyond the drive aperture of the sail. Grayson knew the numbers by heart. At an AO-class star's jump point, the Stardancer's solar sail would require 161 hours to recharge the Kearny-Fuchida coils, just under one full week. They'd arrived insystem three days ago; they would be able to make the final leap to Tharkad in another four days.
Then an eight-day passage from jump point to world, and after that it would all be settled, one damned way or the other.
"I'm not going to offer you a C-bill for your thoughts," a voice said at his side. "Judging by the expression on your face, I have the feeling you'd be shamelessly overcharging me."
Grayson turned, looking the other up and down. "Hey, Jon," he said, voice dull.
Major Jonathan Frye was a tall, lean, leathery-skinned officer in his mrd-fifties, a bit on the balding side, gray-mustached, and possessing the twinkling, catch-all eyes of some improbable bird of prey. Commander of the Third Battalion, he'd been with Grayson at Falkirk, commanding his unit from the cabin of a Pegasus hovertank.
He'd insisted on being with him now.
"So, what do you think?" Frye asked, gesturing to a newscast showing on one of the smaller displays. He paused to take a sip from the drinking bulb he held in his right hand, then eyed Grayson speculatively.
Grayson shrugged for answer and turned his attention 7toward the screen. He'd been following the political news lately with less than intense interest, with an apathy, in fact, that was completely atypical of him. Normally, he studied political developments quite closely indeed, if for no other reason than that wars and rumors of wars were the mercenary's literal bread and butter. The Legion was always employed when the various Great Houses were busy rattling sabers at one another.
And the current situation was a beaut, a guaranteed widowmaker. The Federated Commonwealth had been under joint Steiner-Davion rule for thirty years now, in a political union that had never been entirely embraced by the people of either of the former states. Marriage between Melissa Steiner and Hanse Davion had sealed the alliance, and now it was two of their children who were threatening to tear it apart.
Last year when the worlds of the Skye March had risen up against FedCom rule, the rebel leaders had accused Prince Victor Davion, among other things, of assassinating his mother. In the midst of all this, Ms younger sister Katrina had suddenly emerged as a potent force, offering to serve as peacemaker. This only served to heighten her enormous popularity among the Lyrans, while Victor's continued to plummet. The Skye Rebellion had been put down, of course, but Victor still lived in the shadow of suspicion and the Lyrans continued to chafe under his rule.
And now his most recent political machinations had led to outright war with two other Great Houses, the Free Worlds League of Thomas Marik and the Capellan Federation of Sun-Tzu Liao. Just two days ago, Thomas Marik had stunned the Inner Sphere with the announcement that he would invade the Federated Commonwealth to take back the worlds his realm had lost to Hanse Davion thirty years before. Joining him was Sun-Tzu, who intended to recapture planets the Capellans had lost in the same war. Even as Marik was making the announcement, Marik and Liao DropShips were already on their way to hit a number of those FedCom worlds.
"That's no answer," Frye said, persisting. "Come on. What does the great Grayson Carlyle say is going to happen to the Federated Commonwealth?"
"Victor's got his hands full—as usual," Grayson said with another shrug. "And it's his own damn fault for trying that wild scheme to hoodwink Tom Marik. Who can blame Marik for turning on him?"
"No argument there. What about Katrina, though?"
He sighed. "God knows what the Steiners are going to do with this. If they could disown Victor, I think they would."
"Yeah, that's what we were talking about over there." Frye gestured toward the table where Lori, Alex, Cait-lin, and Davis were continuing an animated conversation. "Care to come over and join us?"
"I don't think so. Katrina's going to make up her own mind, whatever we might think."
"We were considering the possibility of a civil war. Lyrans against Victor."
"It'll never come to that."
"No?"
"No offense, Jon, but I really don't have much to say about all this. I couldn't care less what Katrina or Victor do, say, or think."
Frye's mouth tightened. "You'd damn well better start caring about something, man. Or are you feeling so sorry for yourself that you've decided to abrogate all responsibility?"
The words stung. "I'm not feeling sorry—"
"The hell you're not! Look at yourself, Colonel. You've been in a clinical depression since they woke you up. What is it? The arm?"
Grayson glanced down at the arm, flexing his hand, feeling it. "It's not the arm and you know it," he said quietly, daring at last to admit to himself what the real trouble was.
"It's your ear, isn't it? And not piloting 'Mechs again."
"Damn it, Jon," Grayson said softly. "I'm feeling so damned useless."
"I know." Frye nodded slowly. "I've been there too, remember?"
Grayson scowled and looked away, his fists, both of them, clenched hard. Frye, too, had been badly wounded a few years back, losing his left audio nerve in a firefight. There were MechWarriors, Grayson knew, who'd lost legs and arms in battle, had them replaced with bionic substitutes, and kept on piloting 'Mechs as though nothing had happened. He continued to look at the arm, turning the hand over, studying the fine crafting of the hand and fingers, the skin, even the fine hairs on the back of his hand and between the second and third joints of his fingers as natural-looking as the real thing. A perfect replacement, as perfect as modern medical technology allowed.
But with all that medical science knew, it still couldn't stimulate dead or severed nerves and make them grow, and a MechWarrior needed both left and right audio nerves to translate the signals from his neurohelmet into something his body could sense as balance, enabling him to pilot a 'Mech from a tiny cockpit ten meters off the ground and not fall flat on his BattleMech's face.
"I'm sorry, Colonel," Medtech Ellen Jamison had told him in the recovery room back at Castle Hill. "There's just nothing we can do. The nerve damage in your left ear can't be repaired. Without it, I don't think you're ever going to be able to pilot a BattleMech again."
Grayson shook his head, the thought painful. Never pilot a BattleMech again? Hell, he'd learned to pilot 'Mechs as a young apprentice to his father's old mercenary 'Mech company, Carlyle's Commandos, out on the Periphery more years ago now than he really cared to think about. It was what he did, a hell of a lot of what he lived for. He wasn't ready to be retired to some staff position, pushing holographic images around the tactics table back in Ops.
"I know it seems like damn near the end of everything," Frye said. "Take my word for it, Colonel. You'll live. And you'll get over it. If you don't let it drive you out of your head now."
