Operation Excalibur, page 18
part #31 of BattleTech Series
They'd been kept together by a half dozen armed guards, escorted to meals and washrooms as though they were dangerous prisoners. Perhaps their hosts were afraid they would try to strike back somehow. To Alex, it felt as though the fight had drained out of all of them, even McCall, even his mother.
And what he had to do now would just make it harder. On all of them.
Leaning back in one of the seats in the spaceport terminal lounge, he eyed the trooper in charge of the guard detail. He was an older man, forty, Alex guessed, maybe forty-five, and he wore the rank of leutnant.
Many leutnants, Alex knew, never advanced beyond that twilight rank between commissioned and noncommissioned officers within the Lyran military structure. Those who had no ambition to reach a higher rank, or those who for one reason or another were simply passed over for promotion or a chance at command, could remain leutnants for their entire careers.
This one wasn't young, which meant he wouldn't be as stiff or as scared of the system as a newbie might be. His cheeks showed a shadow of stubble and his uniform was rumpled and stained here and there, a clear indication that he wasn't out to impress anyone. If he was still a leutnant after—what, twenty or twenty-five years in the military?—it might be because he was a troublemaker already, or simply because he had no ambition. Either way, he would be more amenable to a bribe than some kid fearful of his CO looking over his shoulder. Alex glanced down at himself. He was wearing civilian clothing, a white jumper, trousers, and leather boots, with a shoulder cloak as proof against the cold. He'd thought it best, that morning, not to emphasize his connections with the Legion. With Alex in civilian garb, the leutnant shouldn't be put off by his captain's rank tabs, even though the man surely knew the ranks of everyone in the Legion party.
Hell, it was worth a try.
The leutnant watched him suspiciously as he approached. "What d'you want, merc?"
"Some time alone with my girl friend," Alex replied, turning to stand next to him. He indicated Caitlin with a sly nod, then nudged the man in the ribs with his elbow. "Just a few minutes ... know what I mean?" He opened his hand just enough to reveal the fifty C-bill note hidden there. "We haven't had any privacy since we got here."
The leutnant hesitated, but Alex caught the avaricious glint of interest in his eye, and the way his tongue flicked once swiftly across his lips. "Hey, kid. What kind of scam you tryin' t' pull?"
Alex sighed and produced a second fifty. The leutnant pursed his lips, then turned his back on the lounge, covertly taking the money from Alex's hand as he pivoted. "Ten minutes, kid." The man jerked his head, indicating a direction. "There's a room over there, through that door. A private room. Make it a quick one. Haw!" He laughed, a salacious guffaw, as he thumbed the two bills, then made them vanish into a belt pouch.
Alex nodded, then hurried over to where Caitlin was sitting before the officer could change his mind or think of an excuse to up the price. He reached out and caught her hand. "Caitlin? We need to talk."
"What? What is it, Alex?"
"Over here. I fixed it with the guards."
The door had a small keypad lock; the leutnant tapped out a code and the door slid open. "In there," he told them, leering. He winked at Alex. "I guess I could let you have twenty minutes, kid. Have fun!"
The door opened into a small storeroom of some sort. It was dimly lit by a single glowstrip up high on one wall and was cluttered with empty boxes, some cleaning equipment, and a stained and dirty mattress lying in one corner on the floor. The air stank faintly of detergent and urine.
When the door slid shut behind them, Caitlin turned to face Alex. "What's this all about?"
The only way to do this, he'd already decided, was to blurt it right out. "Caitlin, I have to say good-bye. I'm staying here."
She blinked. "What ... staying with your father?"
"No, actually. He's going . . . somewhere else. He won't tell me where. He won't tell me anything. But last night, he gave me this."
Reaching into his belt pouch, he extracted the printout his father had given him last night and handed it to her. She read it silently, holding it up slightly to make out the words in the faint, dirty light. "This is a commission," she said, "in the Lyran armed forces...."
"That's right. They're offering me the rank of haupt-mann, based on my experience with the Legion. At least it's not a demotion, huh? I'll be serving with a Guards receiving unit here on Tharkad, at least until I get my new 'Mech broken in and my gear squared away. But after that, I've got a straight shot at the First Royal Guard!"
Caitlin shook her head but didn't seem to pull her eyes away from the printout. "I ... I don't understand. You're just ... leaving? Leaving the Legion?"
"I talked it over a bit with my father last night," Alex said with more confidence than he really felt. "Like I said, he's the one who gave me that. Seems this Colonel Schubert, the guy on the adjudication board? He's the one made the offer to my father. Said it was mine if I wanted it."
She looked at him then, over the top of the printout. He couldn't read the expression on her face. When she said nothing, he pushed ahead. "Look, it's clear enough I'm not going to get anywhere if I stay in the Legion, right?"
"Are you asking me or telling me?"
"Telling, I guess. I mean, even before all this happened, there was a big question about whether I was getting promotions and stuff on my own merit, or because of who my father was. He agrees, by the way. He told me I should take the chance and get while the getting is good."
"Damn it, Alex!" Her voice was intense, scarcely above a whisper but as hard and as cold as ice. "How could you?"
His jaw tightened. "How can I do anything else? It's not like I'd be doing anybody any great favors by staying. And it's clear enough that staying here is a dead end."
"And just what do you expect me to say about all of this?"
"Well, I was hoping you'd come along. You're a great 'Mech pilot. I've been checking around, and the word is that the Royal Guard is actively looking for experienced personnel, MechWarriors and aeropilots with good kill records. I'll bet we could find you a billet, maybe even in my new company. I thought—"
"You ... malfing ... bastard," Caitlin said, the words so low Alex almost couldn't hear. "You're actually going to walk out on your family now, when they need you most?"
"It's not like that," he said.
Inside, though, he wasn't so sure. He'd been up most of the night wrestling with this one. Go? Or stay? If his father hadn't been so dead certain that taking the commission with the Guard was a good idea, Alex doubted he'd have been able to make himself leave. This was a tremendous opportunity for him, for any career soldier. Had he been offered this chance under any other circumstances, he certainly would have accepted it, with the idea that after serving a tour or two with the Royals, he'd be able to return to the Legion. Lots of mercenary officers rotated back and forth between their units and regular line regiments that had room for them. The regulars valued the added combat experience most mercs possessed, even when they professed to look down on mercenary warriors as somehow lacking in devotion to any cause but money; the merc units benefited by having men return to the unit with new skills and experience, and possibly new insights into how the line units—and potential adversaries— operated.
Invitations to join the First Royal Guards were not generally extended to mercenaries, however. Damn it, he'd had to say yes.
"Take it, Alex," his father had told him at last during their discussion late the previous night. "You'll never have an opportunity like this again, and you know it. Especially if you stay hitched up to the Legion."
"I don't want to leave the Gray Death," Alex had replied. "Not like this."
"Look, I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that the Legion manages to hold together. If it doesn't, though, it could drag down everyone with it when it goes. If that happens, I'll be counting on you to take care of your mother, at least until she can get on her feet again. Somebody's going to have to pay the bills, and if nobody hires her because she's linked to a blackballed unit, that somebody's going to have to be you."
A blackballed unit. A mercenary unit so disgraced that its members could not find work anywhere, even as freelancers. Surely, it wouldn't come to that.
"Damn it, Dad, you make it sound like you're never coming back!"
"I may not, son. War's like that. You've been there. You know the odds." Then Grayson Carlyle seemed to read his son's expression and chuckled. "Don't worry, Alex. I'll be fine. So will the Legion. We'll survive. And you'll be the best help to yourself and to me and to the Legion if you take this billet with the First Royals."
That had settled it, and Alex had agreed. Simply saying yes, however, had not ended the debate in his own mind.
Nor did it help explain things to Caitlin.
"Caitlin, I don't—"
She slapped him, hard, the blow rocking his head to the right.
"Ow! What was that for?"
"Maybe I'm just old-fashioned," she told him. "But I always figured I owed something to the Colonel. Like loyalty."
"But he told me to go!"
"He gave you an order?"
"Well, no. But—"
"And obviously he's going through a really bad time right now. Maybe he thinks he's doing you a favor. But damn it, he needs you. He needs all of us. And you're just—"
"I told you, Caitlin. It's not like that. I think—"
Suddenly, the door to the storeroom slid open, spilling light across the floor. The leutenant stood in the opening with three of his troopers crowding in behind, craning their necks to see past him. "Hey, you two!" the leutnant boomed. Then, seeing Alex and Caitlin standing next to one another, fully dressed and talking rather than engaged in any other, more interesting activity, his face fell. "Time's up, kid. Get the hell out of here."
"Good-bye, Alex," Caitlin said in a voice that might have had liquid nitrogen behind it. "I'm sure you'll do very well in your new posting." Turning, she marched past the soldiers, brushing by them with a no-nonsense manner that pushed them aside like an invisible hand.
Alex had the distinct impression that she'd just told him good-bye for good.
Great, he told himself. Taking a deep breath, he walked out of the storeroom. He still had to find time to talk to his mother, and he was wondering if that would be any easier. His dad would have already broken it to her, but still. . .
Just malfing great!
15
Planetary Defense Command
Hesperus II, Rahneshire
Lyran Alliance
1975 hours (local), 4 October 3057
Field Marshal Brandal Gareth stood in his office, looking down on the Defiance Industries factory complex and on the city of Maria's Elegy. The sky was as clear as it ever got on Hesperus II, which was to say patches of violet sky showing here and there through the roil of blue, purple, white, and yellow clouds. The factory—one of the largest, busiest, and most important of such facilities in the entire Inner Sphere, was almost, almost his entirely. ... The view was spectacular.
In fact, his office was heavily armored and buried nearly a kilometer beneath the hostile and mountainous surface terrain of Hesperus II, but the wall screen gave the illusion that he was standing high up on the western flank of Mount Defiance, looking down on one of humanity's greatest engineering achievements from something like eighty stories above the world's capital city. Though the greater part by far of the Defiance Industries complex was underground, enough had emerged from its subsurface caverns and tunnels to create a titanic sprawl, a literal metallic forest of cooling, stripping, scrubbing, or fractionating towers, of circulating pumps and storage tanks, of cracking stations and smelters, of warehouses aligned in rows measured by the tens of kilometers, of gantry frameworks and blast furnaces and exhaust stacks and cranes and compressors and dozens of squat, black defensive works. From up here, it all looked a little like some colossal jumble of jackstraws, blocks, and toys dropped in heaps by some wayward giant's child, though with greater order than might have been expected of a completely random scattering of parts.
Maria's Elegy, the planetary capital, appeared tiny, even primitive by comparison, a small tangle of buildings, towers, quonset huts, domes, and other structures tacked onto the edge of the larger industrial complex, a ragtag huddle of disparate parts that looked more like a frontier outpost than a city.
Measured by standard time it was late evening, but the world of Hesperus II, like both Tharkad and Glengarry, had a rotation considerably longer than the ancient rhythm of twenty-four hours to the day inherited from Terra, and the standard calendar had nothing whatsoever to do with the local one. By local time it was 1975 hours—with each of twenty-five hours divided into eighty minutes. On the South Whitman continent, at this longitude, it was late afternoon, and the Hesperan sun was a dazzling pinpoint of diamond blue-white light hanging in the sky just above the Myoo Highlands to the west, setting the tormented clouds aflame.
Hesperus II was a world of mountains, vast mountains, immense, towering mountains, a planet with continental plates in constant, slow-motion driftings, grinding up against one another to raise a labyrinth of crisscrossing mountain peaks and ranges that from space gave the world the look of an apple dried in the sun. There were four major continents and innumerable smaller island chains and archipelagos, and all were heavily crinkled by young, upthrusting mountains, some volcanic, most the product of active plate tectonics. The Hesperan sun was an F2 subgiant, and though the planet was second out from the primary in this system, it was also remote from its star—it had to be, or its surface would have been seared lifeless by the torrent of radiation washing across it. The Hesperan sun scarcely showed a visible disk, so distant was it from its world, yet it was still impossible to look at that intense, laser-brilliant light without special filters or vision-protectors; where it touched the glaciers high up among the tallest mountain peaks, it struck shimmering white fire.
Temperatures were intolerable for unprotected humans near the Hesperan equator, where swamps steamed and native life adapted to eighty-degree-Celsius-plus temperatures and atmospheric pressures of three bars plus thrived in its hot-blooded, sulfur-metabolizing way. Centuries before, human xenobiologists had classified the highest forms of native Hesperan life as reptilian, but that was only because their most recognizable features—scales and claws, flat heads and toothy jaws and questing, air-tasting tongues—seemed more reptilian than any other variety of safe, homey, familiar, known life.
Humans rarely ventured into the Hesperan Equatorials, and then only in specially designed exploration 'Mechs, heavily armed, armored, and refrigerated, equipped with ranked batteries of heat sinks to deal with the oppressive temperatures. Of those exploration 'Mechs that had ventured into the Hesperan swamps, fewer than thirty percent had ever returned. The last expedition had gone north from Point Vallejo nearly two centuries ago, which made it considerably overdue. Since Hesperus was primarily a commercial venture, a partnership between government and industry, there seemed little point in wasting precious resources on scientific research.
North and south of the Equatorials the climate was milder, especially at altitudes above three thousand meters where the air pressure was close to one standard bar and the temperature hovered around thirty Celsius. There were even glaciers at the highest altitudes, say, at six thousand meters, though the air up there was too thin for breathing. Back in the twenty-sixth century, human terraformers had attempted to remake the world into something more pleasantly livable by importing various native Terran and gene-engineered varieties of microbes, plants, and animals. The project had been, at best, only partially successful and only at those higher elevations where humans could live without special protection. The deep valleys, the oceans, and the Equatorials remained unexplored, for the most part, the domain of the great Hesperan "reptiles." In the uplands, weaker, native Hesperan forms had given way before the alien invasion of hardier, more adaptive gene-tailored life forms; even so, there were still precious few places anywhere on the world suitable for human habitation. The only regions available for cultivation—requiring as it did fertile soil rich with nitrogen-fixing bacteria—were the breathtaking Melrose Valley complex stretching across nearly a thousand kilometers of the Sulden Uplands and the heavily terraced mountain slopes around Maria's Elegy, here in South Whitman.
There was really no need for more arable land, however. The Melrose Valley and the region near Maria's Elegy provided food enough to feed the planet's population, which had never numbered much above fifty million, if that. Hesperus II was a world with only one industry and one export, and that was military hardware— BattleMechs, especially,
BattleMechs, or, more specifically, the factories and casting plants and smelters and assembly lines needed to fabricate them, were the only reason people stayed on this hellhole. Defiance Industries had been founded in December of 2577, its ownership passing to House Steiner with the fall of the Star League. Over the years, no fewer than fourteen full-scale attacks—and numerous raids— had been mounted to capture or destroy the industrial facilities on Hesperus. The primary factory, occupying as it did level upon level upon labyrinthine level of a vast cavern complex hollowed out beneath the Myoo Mountains, was a warren of hardpoints and sophisticated defenses, laser cannon and PPCs, missile launchers and radar networks, so tightly interlocked that the proverbial gnat would be hard pressed to make an unauthorized landing at Morningstar Spaceport.
Gareth stroked his chin as his eyes traced a line of ferrocrete abutments and walls up the flank of a mountain to a battery of laser turrets a kilometer from his position. Defending a world against an invasion or a raid from space was never easy. As had been the case at Glengarry, there were always plenty of landing sites to choose from, whether they were empty forest clearings, a wide stretch of beach, a wind-polished stretch of glacier, or a smooth patch cleared by chance in a boulder field. Even a world as rugged as Hesperus II had an abundance of such spots.
