BattleTech: Prometheus Unbound

The Proliferation Cycle, Part II

Herbert A. Beas II

Prometheus Unbound

TERRAN HEGEMONY BATTLEMECH COMPLEX

HESPERUS II

LYRAN COMMONWEALTH

7 FEBRUARY 2455

1903 HOURS TST

Thuh-whump!

Ever since accepting this mission, even before five months of intensive training, the dreams—the nightmares—had haunted Colonel Simon Kelswa nearly every night.

Thuh-whump!

They played out like some horribly scripted holovid. The hyperrealism of the dreams—with vivid colors, echoing noises, even the icy chill of the wind—all magnified in his mind. Enhanced. Fused with importance. Ensnaring his thoughts while at the same time telling him they were not real. Not real at all.

Thuh-whump!

But this time, the colors were half-cloaked in shadows. The echoes came from the distant rumble of explosions and wailing sirens. The wind carried heat, fire, smoke, a stench of burning chemicals.

Thuh-whump!

But now the thumping was real. Far more real than even the holovid intel reports he saw years before. Real enough to shake the earth and rattle windows. Now, in the midst of a burning complex, the memory of those first images faded, replaced by the mind-blanking numbness that anchored Simon to a patch of rubble-strewn pavement. Stranding him in the midst of massive buildings wreathed in fire and smoke.

The monsters were coming!

Even Simon’s nightmares failed to compare. The pounding, clanking symphony of death heralded an avatar of metal, one he had hoped never to see this close, even when he accepted this assignment.

Thuh-whump! Thuh-whump!

Each footfall of the lead monster shook the earth, raising a cloud of dust from the ground all around him. Larger bits of debris danced to the rhythm. The sound reverberated across the manmade canyon of office buildings, stopping Simon’s heart with every world-crushing impact. Over the din, he was dimly aware of someone shouting at him, calling out his name in angry, urgent tones.

But it was too late.

The monsters were upon them.

Thuh-whump!

With one more bone-rattling footfall, the first monstrosity of metal, its desert-mottled hide harshly outlined in orange light, finally rounded the corner. Backlit by licking flames and flickering streetlamps, with its legs and lower torso wreathed in a low-hanging cloud of gray-black smoke, it looked for all the world like a titanic wind devil, emerging from the Inferno itself.

Simon’s eyes, dry and stinging, bulged at the sight. Of their own volition, his lungs drew in another gulp of searing Hesperan air through clenched teeth, mindless of the choking taste of scorched metals and ozone.

The monster’s shoulders brushed past three-story office buildings and warehouses as casually as a man strolling through a crowded parking lot. Its head, a bulb of metal atop a mountain of armor, presented a round portal of infinite ferroglass blackness for a face, an eye that swept across the grounds as it turned.

That eye of gleaming darkness, seeking prey, froze Simon in place like a Tharkan gazelle in the headlamps of an oncoming hovercruiser.

It sees me!

MARIA’S ELEGY SPACEPORT (TERRAN HEGEMONY COMPLEX)

HESPERUS II

LYRAN COMMONWEALTH

1 FEBRUARY 2455

1137 HOURS TST

“Highness, you don’t need to remind me how bad it looks out there, but is this really the answer? The Combine and the League are pressing us hard enough, and the armchair generals we have running the show have their hands full—no offense intended. This plan of yours…I mean, do we really want to risk opening a new front now?”

Six days earlier, as he and his team took their first steps down the creaking, metal ramp of the drop shuttle Firebringer and into the blazing heat of Hesperus II’s Terran Hegemony–owned spaceport complex, Simon’s conversation with the Archon still echoed in his mind. He buried it at once. Here—for the moment, at least—there were no colonels or Archons. Just another group of semi-skilled off-world laborers sent by Commonwealth Mining Corporation for their Hesperan outpost, CMO 7.

Naturally, they had not rated the first-class, air-conditioned accommodations of the more connected executives and VIPs at the primary spaceport. Instead, a pair of dark-blue, dusty and dented ground trucks met them at their remote landing pad, far removed from the main buildings. Escorted by a couple jeeps, all four vehicles bore the three-star logos of Maria’s Elegy Spaceport Security, as well as the more familiar solar-system insignia of the Terran Hegemony. Their crews, of course, had come to subject all twenty-five of Simon’s men to a cursory weapons and contraband scan before shuttling them off to the outer terminals and the CMO-provided taxis beyond—security and welcome wagon all rolled into one.

Time for the show to begin.

“Colonel—Simon, you know the score, as well as I. We’ve lost a fifth of the Tamar Pact to the Dracs already, and Marik is pressing us hard. We need any advantage we can find, and one is sitting in our backyard as we speak…”

True to security protocols, the guards ordered Simon and his crew well clear of the relatively cool shade provided by the Firebringer, their boxy, aging, 1,000-ton shuttle. As the Terrans performed their duty, never once cracking a smile or engaging the Lyrans in anything approximating conversation, Simon felt a burn slowly spreading across his bald scalp. The harsh, Hesperan sun seeped into his skin, drawn by his naturally dark complexion.

Chewing on a wad of sour tobacco, he waited, feigning indifference and scratching at the side of his broad, clean-shaven jaw, while his deep hazel eyes measured up the security troops and reviewed his own men, handpicked by the Archon himself only five months earlier.

All of them—male and female alike—maintained the perfect show of professional discourtesy one might expect from a bunch of roughnecks. A few even enjoyed it, and Simon could tell which just by the looks in their eyes, that genuine gleam of cruel mirth as they shot back curses and glib replies to a battery of standard questions. Johann, the shuttle’s pilot, gave his female inspector a lewd wink as she approached with her metal detector, and made a point of thrusting his groin forward just as the wand reached mid-level.

“Drekking low-life,” she grumbled back.

“But, this is a straight infiltration mission, Highness. Surely, this is a job Intelligence can—”

“The Corps has had its shot, Colonel. They’ve had many shots, in fact. And they’ve cost us fifteen years of wasted effort. This plan calls for a team capable of bulling its way past any obstacles while simultaneously minimizing casualties all around. They need to be able to fight with maximum effect, but only when absolutely necessary.”

“A surgical strike, then?”

“Yes. A surgical strike.”

“Name and badge, please?”

It had to be the fifth time someone had asked him that question since the Firebringer arrived in system, and with each repetition, Simon wondered at how it verified anything at all.

“Look, jefe,” he growled at the guard, “How many times you gotta ask us this shit? Ain’t the logos and thumbscans we supplied you enough already?”

The Hegemony officer stood easily a head shorter than Simon and weighed probably all of forty-four kilograms dripping wet (not counting the thin sheen of sweat already pasting the tips of sun-bleached hair to his forehead). His iron gaze, delivered by emerald daggers, however, spoke of equal willpower—if not physical strength—to the man now looming over him.

It was enough to earn a notch of Simon’s respect—not that he could afford to let it show.

“We can stand out here a few more hours if you like, Mister,” he shot back. “I’m paid by the hour, and I need to work on my tan anyway—whereas I reckon that you and your smart-ass buddies here haven’t even punched in yet.”

Outwardly, Simon sighed with exasperation and spat the last of his tobacco onto the charcoal gray of the tarmac ferrocrete. Steam rose from the splatter.

Inwardly, he took note of the guard’s name, and applauded his audacity. “For the twentieth freakin’ time,” he snarled. “The name is Lorenzo. Augosto Lorenzo. And the badge is Charlie-Michael-Charlie zero-three-four-one-six-freakin’-Baker.”

The guard—Daelun, according to his dusty blue fatigues—smirked back, briefly exposing a set of gleaming white teeth as he recorded the numbers and snapped shut his noteputer. “Well,” he said. “That wasn’t so hard, now, was it, Mister Lorenzo?”

“I’ve already picked out the best men for this assignment, Colonel. Frankly, I can think of no one better to lead them than you, a man who knows the value of human life, a soldier who can still be subtle in combat. The proverbial phantom in the mist.”

“I’m honored, sir, but a mission like this, without adequate intelligence—”

“God’s sake, man! Give me a little credit, would you? Although I have little faith in their ability to carry out an operation like this on their own now, I did see fit to give you one man who is an expert on this particular objective.”

“Hey!” a voice bellowed, filled with indignation and outrage.

Simon looked over to see Kirkpatrick a few steps closer to the DropShip’s ramp. A harsh and soulless glare from the dark pools he called eyes now focused on the hapless guard who had dared to reach for his duffel. “That’s private property, you Terrie Schweinehund!”

An involuntary belch rumbled up the back of Simon’s throat at the sound of the man’s voice, mixing the aftertaste of tobacco with stomach acids and last night’s stale MRE. The burn inflamed his mouth and nostrils, and he swallowed hard.

Kirkpatrick’s gaze promised certain death for any who understood it, and after months of training with him, Simon understood it well. He had that combination of the veteran’s thousand-meter stare and the hungry, eager gleam of a predator stalking prey. Chosen by the Archon for a mission that demanded as little bloodshed as possible, Agent Brian Kirkpatrick had the highest kill ratio of his team in each training exercise.

“He’s the only operative who ever got inside the Hesperus facility. Gave us a basic map to go by, likely targets for the mission. The Hegemony sniffed him out eventually, but we pulled him out before they could make a capture. Since then, he’s been…reconstructed, transferred to CTD.”

“CTD? Highness, I dealt with some of those thugs before. They’re pure killers, agents of chaos!”

“Heh. Well, Simon, I won’t argue with you there. But to pull off this plan, you may need a little chaos to cover your tracks. And, as I said before, this man knows the terrain. You’ll need him, but you’ll also have to watch him very closely.”

Why did the Archon’s “expert” have to be from the Corps’ Counter-Terrorism Division?

The Hegemony guard, of course, could not know he was dealing with a man who’d love to tear off his head and eat it.

“Hand it over now, or you can just hop back on your transport and get the hell off my planet.”

“Last I checked, you Terrats only paid the rent here. This is still a Lyran planet, bud!”

With an angry snarl, Daelun spun away from Simon. “Franks! What seems to be the problem here?”

Nostrils flaring, “Franks” didn’t take his eyes off Kirkpatrick for a second. “I got a read on this one’s carry-off, Captain.”

“That so? And what’s your name, mate?”

Kirkpatrick’s gaze remained cool and hostile at the same time. His voice was cold enough to freeze even the Hesperan air. “Don’t ‘mate’ me, Scheißkerl! The name’s Easton, and I don’t take kindly to your mongrel here trying to get into my personal business.”

“I’d watch my tongue a little better if I were you, Mister Easton. You happen to be on Hegemony property, not Lyran soil, and we don’t take kindly to foreigners coming in with weapons they should know enough to leave under lock and key.”

“I know full well whose soil this is, Terrie. And the way I see it, a man’s gotta protect himself when your kind is around.”

“That so?”

Simon swallowed back another belch of stomach acid as he watched Daelun strut forward, bringing himself nose to nose with the enraged operative. Kirkpatrick was Simon’s height but noticeably paler in complexion and only slightly sleeker in build. The size difference between him and Daelun made the confrontation almost comical, except for those penetrating, hateful black eyes he now fixed on the guard captain. Only half an act, the expression of murderous intent was so ingrained in the man’s face that Simon suspected no amount of “reconstruction” could ever truly mask it—though Daelun seemed oblivious.

Kirkpatrick’s stance was that of a panther about to strike. Inwardly, Simon braced for the first swing.

A dull thud shook the ground before another word was uttered. Instinctively, Simon glanced at the dusty security trucks, half expecting to see one of them roaring to life, only to realize the drivers were among the detail searching his men.

Thump.

No, not the trucks.

The distant sound rumbled from across the tarmac. Correcting his gaze, Simon saw the moving silhouette far to the south, a shadow dwarfed only by the hulls of several cargo ships in the foreground. Broad, ungainly, but vaguely humanoid in shape, the shadow stomped again. The deep thump took a full second to reach him.

Simon swallowed dryly.

“I know what you’re thinking, Simon. That look in your eyes is the same one I saw in the mirror the first time mother showed me those vids. There’s no denying that this is the Pandora’s Box of our time.”

“Highness, I don’t think ‘Pandora’s Box’ quite describes this kind of technology. The Hegemony has already blunted five separate incursions into their territory with these machines, these BattleMechs. They’re unstoppable.”

“Nothing is entirely unstoppable, Colonel. You should know that.”

“Well, close enough, sir. The Hegemony’s holo-footage may be propaganda, but our own intelligence files agree on the key details. These aren’t armed WorkMechs we’re talking about. Their armor is far superior to any tank in the field, even at the joints. And they have the weapons to match. Their mobility and flexibility puts any vehicle on the ground to shame, and they can cover just about any terrain. Tanks, fighters, artillery, infantry— nothing can match these things for flexibility, and nothing short of a nuke can hope to touch them in combat without serious punishment.”

“Exactly right, Colonel. And as we speak, the Camerons have them. And every other Great House in the Sphere has spent the last fifteen years trying to get them. So, tell me, Simon: would you prefer to see these weapons in the hands of Lord Kurita first, or the Captain-General?”

The body that slammed into Simon and sent him sprawling to the hot-as-coals tarmac suddenly snapped him back into the moment. A sharp gasp escaped as his hands burned for a fraction of a second. The Terran guard who had fallen against him uttered a muffled curse in a language Simon did not immediately identify before rolling off and regaining his footing.

Alarmed shouts from the other guards and several drawn weapons told the rest of the story, especially with no less than three Waltham L-90 service lasers already zeroing in on Kirkpatrick. What Simon still could not figure out, however, was how Daelun had managed to get ahold of the man’s duffel.

The agent must have made it easy.

“Give that back, now!” Kirkpatrick demanded.

“Everyone stay calm,” Daelun snapped back, his voice cold and level. He hefted the weight of the dingy canvas sack in one hand, and his Waltham in the other. “If this proves to be nothing more than a child’s plaything, you’ll all be cleared to go about your business—”

“Filthy Terrie—!”

“If not, however…” Daelun’s eyes met Kirkpatrick’s in another heroic demonstration of willpower. “Well, if not, you gents are all gonna have your buddy here to thank for getting your asses thrown into quarantine for at least a few days.”

With that, Daelun cautiously set down the duffel and pulled the zipper open.

Simon felt the other guards around him tense as Daelun reached in, instinctively matching Kirkpatrick’s shift while also keeping an armed eye on each of the other “miners” in their midst. Belatedly, Simon worked his way back to a kneeling position, holding his hands apart, fingers splayed.

Sweat trickled down his brow, ran across his lips, and pooled into his collar as the seconds ticked by. He breathed deeply and exhaled slowly, focusing again.

The guards were standing too close, their eyes darting about too quickly. Only one or two of them was calm, he realized. It would be so easy for him and his men to take them all down, even now.

But that was not part of the plan.

Daelun’s expression blanked as his unseen hand found the offending object. When he withdrew it from the sack, the look on the Hegemony officer’s face ran a quick gamut from surprise to admiration, and finally settled on contempt. Lifting the snub-nosed Kawasaki Shuriken-12 auto-pistol, he quickly checked the magazine—discovering the full fifteen-round magazine that Simon already knew sported the telltale blue-tipped noses of armor piercing “cop killer” slugs.

Emerald eyes fixed Kirkpatrick with an icy stare. “Unless I’m mistaken,” he said, “these are contraband even on Commonwealth soil, Mister Easton.”

MARIA’S ELEGY SPACEPORT (TERRAN HEGEMONY COMPLEX)

HESPERUS II

LYRAN COMMONWEALTH

1 FEBRUARY 2455

1152 HOURS TST

The tiny hold in the back of the cargo truck was a simple metal bay that stank of methanol fumes and human sweat. It featured hard, flat benches welded to its reinforced frame, and was painted in a simple black primer. Devoid of ventilation (unless—as Simon doubted—that sealed portal to the driver’s cabin happened to lack the same mesh-reinforced bulletproof glass that let minimal light in through the vehicle’s back doors), the bay contained the Hesperan heat nicely.

And amplified it with the combined body heat of twelve men and women the Terrans had seen fit to pack inside at gunpoint.

Squeezed between Johann’s wiry frame and McCabe’s larger (and far more aromatic) one, Simon did his best to maintain the look of indignation expected of a miner whose new assignment had just been derailed by a colleague’s stupidity. Fixing his glare on Kirkpatrick, it was a surprisingly easy task.

Kirkpatrick, for his part, met the colonel’s gaze with a twisted grin, as if oblivious to the fact that his last, desperate struggle to stay out of the paddy wagon had left a three-centimeter gash across one cheek and a welt over the other eye from any one of the four Hegemony guards who felt a need to “persuade” him further.

“Smooth moves, Easton,” Johann finally said over the rumble of engine.

Kirkpatrick scoffed at the use of his assumed name. “Please, Johnny! I could’ve taken the lot of them any time I wanted to. We’re still on-plan here.”

Simon narrowed his eyes on Kirkpatrick, recapturing the man’s dark pools and receiving a look of equal contempt for his troubles.

“Don’t bother with the lecture, Colonel,” he shot back at the unspoken warning. “They don’t wire their trucks, and nobody up there can hear us through the engine noise. Worry about bugs when we’re brought in for ‘debriefing.’”

“All the same, Easton, this is my show, and we’re all in this together. For the sake of the team, you follow the protocols here, got me?”

“Oh, jawohl, mein herr!” Kirkpatrick sneered. “You know, for a man whose ‘show’ this is supposed to be, I can’t help but wonder how you managed to zone out when I was busy making the scene for our arrest.”

Noticed that, did you?

“You did just fine by yourself, from what I saw, Agent,” Johann challenged, leaving Simon’s own reply stillborn.

Simon jammed an elbow into Johann’s side.

“It got us here, didn’t it?” Kirkpatrick answered. “Now, they’ll run our names, see we’re legit, and put us in quarantine for safekeeping while our CMC buddies work out a deal. Till then, we’re guests of the finest in Hegemony Spaceport Security, just as we planned. So relax, Johnny.”

“And our ship?” McCabe asked, filling the cabin with his deep baritone even though he was straining to keep his voice to a low grumble. “Something far less obvious would have done the job better, and you wouldn’t have had to fend off the billy-club brigade on your way to the paddy wagon.”

“Yeah,” added Leutnant Shandra. Small of frame and with dark skin and hair, she practically vanished among the shadows that collected at the back of the truck, her voice all but disembodied. “You picked a rather exquisite piece of Snake hardware to get their attention, Agent. Likely they’ll be wondering whether we’re smuggling more of them.”

“And risk a diplomatic incident with one of their best trading partners?” Kirkpatrick shook his head in disdain. “Lyran ships remain Lyran soil, even when they sit on Terrie launch pads.”

“Unless there’s probable cause for a search and seizure.”

Kirkpatrick smirked in her general direction. “Another thing for CMC to worry about, ja?”

Simon bit back another remark, reducing it to a heavy sigh instead. The Commonwealth Mining Corporation’s contacts would surely back his people’s claims, thanks to the Archon’s influence and the one other Lyran Intelligence Corps operative who had been allowed to play a role in this mission. But their influence would only provide the minimal support of a legitimate front behind which the commandos could slip on-planet. Though usurped by the national need at the higher management levels, those who would fight hardest for the “miners”—and the sanctity of their transport as private property—were actually middle management. They would ultimately have to make the case for both in the face of Hegemony security concerns, concerns backed up by the Hegemony’s own influence as the big moneymakers on Hesperus II.

Knowing that, Simon realized full well that all it would take to scramble the deal—and to force his men to have to fight their way out when the time came—was the one CMC middle manager with the initiative to place company profits and the need to keep a customer happy above all directives from the corporate office.

Just one concession, in the name of good consumer relations, and the whole mission could become a bloodbath.

A possibility Simon knew Kirkpatrick was just as aware of—and quite probably even hoped for.

“Enough,” he snapped finally. “All of you. We’re here, and practice time’s over. Stay in character, starting now. And you, Easton, had better start showing some more restraint. You’re still under my command here. Malf this up for us, and I’ll kill you myself. Clear?”

A sudden lurch and a break in the grinding rumble of the engine punctuated the words. As the truck idled—undoubtedly at its checkpoint, Simon figured—Kirkpatrick glared back at him.

Agents of chaos, indeed, Simon reminded himself.

Another jolt broke the colonel’s concentration as the entire truck shook without warning. For an instant, the shaking reminded him of artillery fire—shells landing too close to a position no sane foot-slogger would ever take in a front-line battle. Then came the second jolt, followed by a third, and a fourth, taking on a rhythm his mind could finally identify, sight unseen.

Sounds like it’s right on top of us!

The truck lurched and the thumping amazingly drowned in the noise as the engine rumbled to life once more. But the reprieve lasted only for a few seconds, as they drove into the security compound—a few seconds to prepare for the sight of the monster, up close and personal.

Suddenly, Simon realized his hands were shaking. He clasped them together in his lap, but not before seeing the look in Kirkpatrick’s eyes, a look far more dangerous than his barely masked contempt and lethal hostility.

Recognition.

Harsh light exploded inside the bay once more as the spaceport guards threw open the doors and covered their new charges with half a dozen laser muzzles. Blinking away the stars, Simon nudged McCabe away when Daelun’s voice ordered the “detainees” to come out.

“C’mon, mates,” Daelun barked over the din of engine noise and stomping feet. “We haven’t got all day.”

Joints creaking despite the short trip, Simon avoided contact with Kirkpatrick on his way out, and his feet struck hard pavement before the scene of a spaceport-turned-military camp. Small, desert-camouflaged VTOLs lingered on the tarmac nearby, sporting security logos and Hegemony insignia. Armed, dusty blue jeeps drove a lazy circuit around a perimeter defined by chain-linked fences six meters high and topped with electrified razor wire. A few guard towers were even visible from their vantage point, their gunners already taking a keen interest in the new arrivals who once again baked beneath the harsh rays of the Hesperan sun. Arrivals who—now liberated from the ovens of the claustrophobic truck bays—paradoxically reveled in the almost nonexistent breeze.

And, towering above all but the larger structures of the spaceport hangars themselves, marched a monster of armor and weapons, a bulbous, bipedal construct that Simon had only seen before in grainy flatpics and amateurish holovids. With each halting, lumbering step, the machine—colored in a semi-flat desert camo scheme and proudly displaying the solar system insignia of the Terran Hegemony on its right “shoulder” weapon blister—shook the ground with explosive force, even though it could not have been marching closer than two hundred meters away.

“All right, you roaches. Eyes front, mouths shut, and listen up! The Archon, in his infinite wisdom, selected us all for this mission because he has some kind of misplaced faith in our abilities, so I’m not gonna waste my breath with the usual pep talk about how you’re the best of the best of whatever. What I am gonna do is direct your collective attention to the vid, where you will find our objective. I’m sure you all recognize them by now. Hades knows that the Terries let us know they got ’em often enough.”

“You’ve got to be kidding us, sir!”

“Rest assured, Hauptmann Daschale, I am not. You are looking at a BattleMech, the Terran Hegemony’s ultimate weapon for the last fifteen years. The model shown here is their MSK-6S Mackie design. Weighs in at a hundred tons and has been clocked at a land speed of about fifty-five kilometers per hour. It’s as deadly as it is ugly, and we’ve all seen what those weapons it carries can do to a tank company. Since they first appeared in combat, Mackies have accounted for over half the Hegemony’s battlefield victories against all the Great House armies combined. Only five have ever fallen in combat, and of them, none has been captured for study—by anyone.”

“So the Archon expects us to accomplish what entire regiments have failed to do?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

“Impressive, isn’t it, jefe?” Kirkpatrick’s voice hissed in Simon’s ear, adding special emphasis to the last word in parody of his Spanish accent.

Blinking, Simon faced him, but his eyes could not manage to focus right. The Corps agent sneered back.

“That’s one of the newer ones, I’d say,” Kirkpatrick added, his voice still low. “Baby of the litter.”

Simon nodded numbly, his mind recalling the statistics. The “baby” did not even have an official name yet, so far as anyone knew, but reports estimated its weight at around 60 tons—maybe 70—making it the smallest of three distinct models now in the Hegemony arsenal. It was slimmer, but no less ugly than the Mackie, with a cockpit module that rose above its torso like a bubble of black ferroglass and was flanked by thick blast shields that sprouted up from the shoulders and somehow reminded Simon of the blinders riders often put on Terrestrial horses.

Its right-arm blister resembled nothing so much as a twin-barreled turret, which intelligence reports believed contained high-powered lasers, each easily capable of coring away the thick armor of a main battle tank. Its left arm seemed to house a multi-tube missile-launch system, contained in a simple barrel-shaped housing. With a top speed—according to observations of its Hegemony trials—somewhere just over sixty kilometers per hour, Simon suspected this one was intended to act as more of a scout or interceptor, able to run down even mechanized infantry and light tanks over the most hellish terrain imaginable.

None had been seen in combat yet, but in simply looking at it, Simon could already guess at its power.

“Make no mistake about this, ladies! The BattleMech is nothing like the WorkMech you see behind me. It stands taller, walks on two legs rather than riding on tracks, and uses a far more complex series of advanced myomers than even the top-of-the-line Constructors we have today. But even more significant is the neurological interface system they use to control them, rather than the wheels-and-joysticks approach of a common LoaderMech. Combined with the humanoid configuration, this system effectively allows just one crewman to operate the machine and its heavy arsenal with the same ease as a well-equipped soldier in the field—and all with just about the same speed and coherence of action as raw human reflex will allow.

“It’s like turning a man into a giant.

“An armored, heavily armed giant. One capable of withstanding all manner of small arms, and even the best conventional heavy weapons on the market today. Even the joints are well protected; entire Drac tank companies have massed their fire just to saw off a leg of one of these beasts. And we will not be bringing that kind of firepower with us to the objective site.”

“In short, under no circumstances are we to attempt to engage a BattleMech in combat, is that it?”

“Exactly, Shandra. If anything, we are even more vulnerable to BattleMechs than armored vehicles. Last year, some Feddie grunts tried to climb one of these things in the middle of a firefight, presumably to plant some kind of charges on the legs or joints. The Terrie didn’t exactly oblige them. Rumor has it the Hegemony technicians had to spend little more than half an hour cleaning the blood and gore out of the knee joints for all that effort. Simply put, there are no infantry tactics that have been proven to combat these machines in a straight fight.”

“Unless you want to end your career as an ugly red smear, that is.”

“Precisely, Agent Kirkpatrick.”

“Move it already, people!” snarled an angry voice as Simon felt the insistent nudge of a rifle butt at his back. Raising his hands slightly to show compliance, he marched forward at last, forcing his eyes away from the “baby.”

Rolling his tongue around, he tried to swallow some of the dryness out of his mouth, and returned his gaze to his men. Twenty-five of them in all, counting himself, all being herded toward the nearby barracks of dust-covered aluminum, escorted by a dozen well-armed Terran security troopers.

And in the middle of that crowd, a cold, dark pair of eyes glared back, knowing and contemptuous.

It seemed so real at the time…

Rounding the corner on “three,” Simon took the high ground, bringing the Mauser & Gray SP-7 submachine gun up to eye level and peering down the sights at another empty corridor. To his right, Leutnant Federico Satori ducked low and did the same from the opposite side of the passage. Simon turned just enough to catch his peripheral vision despite the goggles and issued his commands with a simple nod. All clear. Move out!

With absolute precision and utter silence, Satori moved down the corridor, clinging to the wall and matching Simon’s movements pace for pace. Ducking low under office-door windows—with barely a moment’s hesitation to be sure no one stood just inside—they followed the corridor to a branch, where a pair of thick double-doors stood, closed and magnetically locked in case of fire.

Reaching up to his earpiece, Simon tapped the device twice, sending two barely audible clicks over the team frequency, and was rewarded in less than a second by a series of alternating tones, a chorus of all-clear signals.

So far, so good.

The primary plan had maintained that the offices would be evacuated for a minimum of forty-five minutes as the distraction outside tied up security and disaster-control resources. The eggheads in the factory’s tech department—all too close to the “crash” at ground zero—would have to be cleared out for the rest of the night, just in case things got worse. That would assure that the brains behind the construction of the worst weapons seen since the H-bomb could survive to build more of their metal monstrosities tomorrow.

Of course, in their haste to save their own skins, they would have to leave their computers behind and relatively unguarded.

But only for a little while.

The “wreck” that served as their diversion, naturally, had also cut power and communication lines to this sector. Even though emergency generators kicked in to provide some illumination, other key functions—including video surveillance—were down throughout the offices. The intrusion, assuming all went according to plan, would thus go unnoticed.

As long as they did not encounter the handful of guards still expected to be around, that is. After all, to protect a secret of this nature, someone would have to stay behind, patrolling for possible intruders or workaholic employees too distracted to have run for shelter—no matter how dangerous the situation outside.

Satori slung his SP-7 back and drew his security codebreaker from a thigh pocket, unraveling the interface cable belt with a subtle flick of the wrist. Inserting the card interface into the door’s key-card slot, he strung together the cables in a flurry of motion. Seconds later, red LEDs flashed on the handheld device as the smaller, olive-skinned commando deftly worked the knobs, dialing until all five lights burned green. A soft click from the door itself signaled the alarm-free disengagement of the magnetic clamps that held it securely closed.

Simon waited for Satori to stow the codebreaker and unsling his submachine gun before giving a nod and nudging the door open with his knee. Once more, three splayed fingers counted off the seconds before both men swung around to cover the now-open hallway, this time with Simon taking the “low road,” while Satori’s weapon covered the high ground.

Once more, a dimly lit and very empty hallway revealed no hostiles.

According to the signs, the section Simon and Satori now entered was a data-storage wing for classified projects, one of only two known to exist in this part of the complex, and the one intelligence believed most likely to contain the information the commandos were after. Somewhere down this hall, then, lay the computer stations that could contain the objective information, and to retrieve it, every other operative carried a portable power-supply unit and a package of storage discs on which to copy the data—encryption and all. Code breaking would not be required, as one package could “snapshot” the entire contents of a standard hard drive without bothering with the fine points of password protections and retinal scans—all in less than two minutes.

Luckily, the Terries had not searched the Firebringer closely enough to find all these toys.

Unfortunately, the team had only twenty minutes left to reach the computers suspected of containing the data and make the downloads—a process that could not be rushed if secrecy and subtlety were to be preserved.

Satori found the door to the primary station a fraction of a second before Simon noticed the sign, and peered cautiously through the tiny window. Shaking his head, he stepped silently to one side, leaving Simon to cover the other, and on one more count of three, Simon grabbed the handle and shoved it back. Unlocked, the door slid to one side, exposing a room full of personal workstations that the colonel reckoned to be just about half the size of a starship’s bridge. As he and Satori covered it, his eyes darted among the red-tinged shadows cast by the emergency lighting, finding nothing.

With a nod, Simon sent Satori into the room and his hand once more reached for his earpiece, when an urgent wail issued forth, nearly piercing his eardrums.

Damn it!

Satori ducked down reflexively, and Simon rolled back behind a mainframe, keeping eye contact with his partner as he clicked his earpiece feverishly, trying to ignore the alarms.

Three short, low tones prefaced the reply, identifying Hauptmann Daschale’s team—the one he’d assigned Kirkpatrick to partner with. Daschale reported the situation in a clipped pattern of long and short tones while Simon’s heart sank.

“Hostile contact. B Sector. Hostiles engaged.”

Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!

A dozen patrolling guards in total, randomly spread across three buildings, and Kirkpatrick’s team again finds it impossible to avoid a run-in!

With an angry gesture, Simon sent Satori to work anyway, going through the motions of salvaging the operation before it became a total bust, but after seven such simulations, he knew better already. In his mind, he was already replaying the post-exercise debriefing, already seeing that cocky grin on the face of an LIC agent who seemed to take this whole mission as a kind of game with the Hegemony. How many “hostiles” would he claim kill credit for this time? And how many of the infiltration team would get “killed” on the way to the dust-off sites?

Then came the sudden lurch, like a grenade blast just beyond the office door, making the computer stations rattle and sending a shower of dust and broken ceiling tiles cascading into the room. Rolling forward, Simon covered his head and felt a tile bounce off his backpack.

What the hell—?

Another lurch, and this time, he felt the floor shake as well. The noise almost drowned out the blaring intruder alarms and brought Simon to his feet. Back in the open, he looked toward the rear of the office, toward the computer node where Satori—

Where was Satori?

A third lurch, and the east wall collapsed inward, sending sheetrock panels and metal supports inward, crushing computer stations—chairs, desks, monitors, and all. Rolling away from the collapse, Simon’s mind reeled.

This isn’t part of the exercise!

“Satori!” he shouted, but his voice echoed strangely.

The east wall came away, filling the room with harsh, blinding light.

The final lurch was deafening, as Simon’s eyes finally registered a monstrous silhouette beyond the missing wall. A mammoth metal claw—easily twice his size—ripped into the room, reaching for him with lightning speed…

HEGEMONY SPACEPORT QUARANTINE CENTER

HESPERUS II

LYRAN COMMONWEALTH

2 FEBRUARY 2455

0300 HOURS TST

A man’s scream—his own?—heralded the sudden return of darkness as Simon Kelswa sat bolt upright on his hard cot.

His clothes were drenched in sweat. The air was hot, stale, and musty. There was no office here. No Satori. No monstrous, metal claws. His hands flexed, finding no weapon in their grip. There were no screaming alarms.

But the thumping remained, hard and pounding, receding into the distance, allowing his racing heart to fill the silence.

Where am I?

The universe refocused again, slowly. Hesperus II. Spaceport quarantine. The exercises were over. The thumping was real, though. Another one of those monsters. A BattleMech.

Simon swallowed dryly, eyes casting about in the darkness. Three other bunks in his cell, all occupied. Bodies stirring only slightly in the shadows, their fitful dreams disturbed by the passing patrol as well. But they did not awaken the same way. They did not hear the scream. Only he did.

Or so he hoped.

Simon forced himself to swallow again, working salty saliva back into his throat. He breathed in another lungful of stale air. The stomping continued to recede. The monster was leaving.

No, not a monster. A BattleMech. A weapon. A tool of warfare. A machine. An objective. The objective.

His hands flexed again as his breathing slowed. His heart continued to race, however, its pounding making up for the departure of the unseen machine. A soft tapping, coming from the hall outside, revealed another soul awake in this quarantine center. A night guard, making his rounds.

We’re right where we need to be, Simon remembered at last, thoughts finally coalescing again. Hesperus II Spaceport Quarantine. The exercises are over. Phase One complete. I’m in control. Everything is proceeding on-plan.

I’m in control.

“Sir…?” asked a weary yet very alert whisper from the bunk beside him. In the darkness, it took him a few moments to identify Johann among the shadows and lumps cast by his coarse bed sheets.

“It’s okay, amigo,” Simon whispered back. “Just a little insomnia.”

HEGEMONY SPACEPORT QUARANTINE

HESPERUS II

LYRAN COMMONWEALTH

7 FEBRUARY 2455

0945 HOURS TST

It took Commonwealth Mining Corporation’s bureaucratic machine all of six days to argue about the disposition of the twenty-five miners who the Terran government “wrongly imprisoned” at their Maria’s Elegy Spaceport. For six days, Colonel Simon Kelswa and his men maintained their roughneck charade by simply being themselves, giving their “guardians” a hard time that consisted of crude innuendo, inappropriate catcalls and wolf whistles (as gender and sexual preferences permitted), and the occasional threat or shoving match during meal times.

For six days, the commandos hidden beneath that callous veneer waited, tensely, for the signal to action, eating the bland selection of protein bars and mystery-meat stews, and drinking metallic, filtered water to prevent dehydration. Idly wondering all the while whether their cover would be blown.

For six days, they watched and waited, while the thunderous stomp of massive, metal-shod feet resounded outside, more powerful than any bass rhythm Simon had ever experienced (even counting the liberty he’d once taken in New Glasgow’s downtown ghettos).

After six days, it almost surprised him that the crushing beat of those armored legs still kept him awake at night, reviving the nightmares and recollections of the Drac and FedSuns foot troops crushed beneath the armored giants.

As expected, the Hegemony security apparatus had taken no chances. The appearance of a loaded handgun known by experts to be a favored sidearm of the Draconis Combine’s elite commando forces—however its current wielder came by it—was a red flag the nearby factory administrators simply could not ignore. Though the miners’ backgrounds had checked out, thanks to the CMC’s cooperation and—Simon was sure—some added effort on the Archon’s part, the specter of doubt was enough to make the Terries worried.

Worried enough to insist that the miners be transferred away.

CMC’s customer-service suits, of course, were only too eager to accommodate the request. After all, it was only twenty-five miners to be moved around like checkers on the interstellar corporate chessboard. The paperwork would be a pain, but the company had more than enough white collars for that as well. At worst, the offending miners would be looking at a month’s worth of docked pay for their gun-collecting colleague’s indiscretion.

Phrased in the appropriate mixture of wounded corporate pride and obsequious requests for forgiveness (from both the Hegemony officials and their own inconvenienced “employees”), the CMC communiqué was legitimate as far as Simon could tell. Its code phrase, hidden throughout the text in two- and three-letter snippets, quickly assembled in his mind as he applied the memorized key:

“Prometheus Unbound. Good hunting.”

As he read the message three times more to be certain, Simon swallowed back the stale aftertaste of Hesperan lizard stew. His heart began to race again.

Looking up, he found, with some relief, that the guard who delivered it had long since departed. Sweeping his gaze across the small, paved, sun-worn courtyard that the Terrans permitted for their detainees’ exercise, he immediately caught the eyes of the man who had not stopped watching him for six days. Despite the chaos of an improvised rugby game raging between them, he gave a subtle nod to Kirkpatrick, knowing the Corps operative would catch it.

Phase Two is a go…

TERRAN HEGEMONY BATTLEMECH COMPLEX

HESPERUS II

LYRAN COMMONWEALTH

7 FEBRUARY 2455

1825 HOURS TST

Smack in the middle of a compound full of plain-looking offices and towers, surrounded by a halo of fire and smoke, the first thought that struck Kelswa as he emerged from the Firebringer’s hold was a cliché:

Any landing you can walk away from, and all that…

Attempting a confident stride on legs of rubber, Colonel Simon Kelswa swallowed back another acidic belch, trying to extinguish the rancid taste of bile with the half-chewed remains of the protein bar that had miraculously survived repeated mashings from his crash harness. At the moment, even the hot, dry air of Hesperus II felt amazingly cool, and a chill ran along his spine as the sheen of sweat covering his entire body soaked into his coal-black fatigues or dried in place.

Around him swirled a gray haze of smoke, carrying the chokingly noxious fumes of scorched metals and molten polymers. It obscured everything but the remains of fencework and other unidentifiable objects now defined only as halos of flickering firelight. Meanwhile, his ears still rang, robbing sound from the crackling flames, but only muffling the insistent blare of emergency alarms echoing all around him.

Even as a small part of his mind still insisted that he had not survived the wreck that continued to spew flames and dark clouds into the night sky, Simon hefted his SP-7 and proceeded at a hunchbacked jog, waving the rest of his team to follow. Behind him, he sensed twenty of his men plunging into the shadows in three tight groups. Two of them melted immediately into the night, one to his left, and another to the right.

Ahead, half-shrouded by low-hanging clouds of smoke, lay the now-emptied and completely darkened offices of the Hegemony factory complex.

Sparing a moment’s time to glance back at his own team, Simon assured himself that all six were alive and mobile, their fatigues, face paint, and gear packs transforming them into low-slung demons of pitch blackness against a flickering, light-gray twilight. Now void of faces and distinguishing marks, only the difference in one gait—a clumsy, stumbling shuffle that betrayed crash-course training in hot-drop missions—revealed which of the demonic shadows belonged to Agent Brian Kirkpatrick.

Leutnant Harrison Johann and four others remained behind, to guard the Firebringer and keep her ready for liftoff when the teams returned. Her crash had been but one diversion; her departure again would be quite another, providing chaff for the departing teams when the time came.

Until then, Johann and his team were to make the ship look as dead as possible, keeping the fires burning, the smoke pouring, the local power junctures disabled—and the curious away.

Only twenty-five minutes ago, Simon and his team had been aboard the 1,000-ton shuttlecraft as it rose from the Maria’s Elegy spaceport tarmac on columns of white-hot plasma, a mere kilometer away from where they now skulked. Cleared at last to leave, to take its cargo of security-risk miners away to a CMC outpost on the planet’s far side, the Firebringer had launched seemingly without incident. Then, exactly twelve minutes and four seconds later, with a bright, orange light and a tremendous rumble that no living being in a thirty-kilometer radius could possibly have slept through, specially shaped charges concealed along the aft-port hull erupted in a combined blast measuring—Simon guessed—at least a tenth of a kiloton in raw force.

Over the next forty-two seconds, Johann, acting as the shuttle’s commander, struggled to keep the ship aloft and moved to return to the spaceport pads, when a secondary explosion, followed by a gout of flame a hundred meters long, heralded the loss of the third primary engine and half the maneuvering jets. As panicked ground-control operators tried to feed instructions to the doomed ship, Johann set the Firebringer on a gradual but believably out of control course toward the Hegemony factory complex—begging for help all the way down and “heroically” firing what remained of the ship’s retros in an effort to slow the descent.

The plunge took less than ten minutes, but it proved a far wilder ride than any parachute HALO or combat drop Simon had ever taken in his twenty-two-year career—real or simulated. By the time Johann finally fired the full brace of the ship’s landing thrusters, in fact, easily one third of the entire platoon—accomplished veterans all—had either passed out from the stress, or emptied the full contents of their stomachs on one another.

Getting out of a drop shuttle’s iron womb had never felt so desperate to Simon as it had at that moment. The stench of vomit added a new level of urgency to his fevered effort to retrieve his concealed weapons and tech gear from the ship’s hidden floor compartments, to affix the silencer and flash suppressor to his SP-7—all the while fighting back the wave of bile that built up in the back of his own throat.

That they were lucky to have survived the crash at all was something Simon did not intend to dwell on.

Now, as he led his team to their assigned offices, the dry heat of the smoke-tainted Hesperan air felt as refreshing as a cool ocean breeze.

Coming to the door of his team’s target, he instinctively hugged the wall to one side, waiting for Satori to take his position opposite. SP-7s at the ready, he signaled off three seconds and nodded. Satori kicked and they both swept the entryway with weapons and low-light goggles.

Nothing but the muted glow of red emergency spotlights filled the corridors. The vid cams, as expected, were dormant.

All clear.

Stepping inside first, Simon shuddered slightly at the rush of cool, freshly conditioned air. Gesturing the others to follow, he walked slowly, silently, eyes darting about for any signs of motion. His weapon muzzle followed his gaze. The hollow, electronic whine of evacuation alarms echoed throughout the empty halls, which extended forward a dozen meters before branching off in two directions.

That the layout did not match the offices they had practiced on hardly surprised Simon. Intelligence—Kirkpatrick in particular—had never actually penetrated the Hesperus factory offices themselves, nor had they succeeded in doing so at any of the suspected Hegemony BattleMech construction sites in the Inner Sphere, despite fifteen years of trying. The arrangement of these R&D offices thus was wide open to speculation and guesswork.

But just how different could a white-collar cubicle hive be?

Simon forced his lips apart for the first time since walking away from the Firebringer’s plummet and let out a dry, heavy sigh. Glancing back quickly, he tapped a quick code into his earpiece, transmitting news of their successful entry to the other teams. With most channels intermittently scrambled by radiation pulses from their crashed vessel, the pops and chirps of their pseudo-Morse codes would go unnoticed to all but those trained to expect them, while any patrolling Hegemony guards would be hard-pressed to maintain a conversation outside of a line of sight.

To further reduce the chance of detection, only three men in each seven-man team even possessed communicators, a fact that also left the rest of the teams open to act as computer hackers and a more alert set of unencumbered ears.

Almost instantly, a series of pops and clicks came back to Simon, breaking through the dull ringing that still lingered in his ears. The news was good: all entries successful; no hostiles encountered.

So far, so good…

“Satori, Manikov, Shandra, Jacobi,” Simon rasped, “take the left. Faisel, Kirkpatrick, with me on the right. Let’s get hunting.”

TERRAN HEGEMONY BATTLEMECH COMPLEX

HESPERUS II

LYRAN COMMONWEALTH

7 FEBRUARY 2455

1836 HOURS TST

The hunt had been on for only five minutes, and already Simon’s jaw ached from how tightly he kept it clamped shut. Agent Kirkpatrick, Leutnant Faisel, and he had already swept through a full computer lab without incident, only to find that its databanks contained personnel records for factory employees. Though some signs had indicated they were near a restricted-access wing, already a promising branch and the ticking clock in the back of his mind had forced Simon to order Faisel down another corridor.

Leaving him alone with Agent Kirkpatrick for the first time since the end of the training exercises on far away Tharkad.

Tapping quickly at his earpiece, Simon sent his fifth sitrep request along to Johann, keeping a mental eye on the crowd that even now reportedly converged on the site of the shuttle’s “crash.” Flames and smoke still kept them at bay for now, but as rescue vehicles drew near, it was only a matter of minutes, he figured, before the braver among them would dare to pass the barrier of burning debris and look for possible survivors.

As if sensing his thoughts, Kirkpatrick glanced up from his work—scanning another hard drive in what appeared to be an executive office. Though doubt had long since set in that any of these offices would have access to the restricted data, Simon found it safer to keep the Corps agent’s mind focused on the job rather than deal with his expectant stare.

Or worse, his conversation.

“They’ll be on the ship any minute,” Kirkpatrick said, his voice so low and tense that Simon almost had to strain to hear him over Johann’s answering clicks. “Has anyone keyed in?”

“Let me worry about that,” Simon snapped back.

His eyes hidden beneath low-light goggles, Kirkpatrick’s squint was betrayed only by an increased wrinkling around the temples. He had been silent for a few minutes after they entered the building, no doubt still recovering from the savage, gut-wrenching nausea that had so disabled him after the landing—perhaps the only sign of weakness Simon had ever noticed in the man. Now, he gripped his computer and his sidearm much more confidently, and the intensity of his stare—even through unseen eyes—had returned.

“As we’re all in this together,” he said, “you wouldn’t mind if I shared your concern, would you?”

Simon ignored the remark and listened. Johann’s news was as expected. Rescue vehicles were working their way through the maze of buildings, but had yet to get too close because of the flames kept burning through his subtle and judicious use of chemical charges. To keep the truly curious at bay, the pilot had added in a few more explosions, erratically setting off small incendiary charges to mimic the pyrotechnic effects of whatever secondary blasts one might expect from a burning shuttlecraft.

For now, it was working.

Kirkpatrick’s angry snort punctuated the silence as he removed his datapad from the workstation. An irritated shake of the head announced another fruitless search for anything of value and prompted Simon to check the hall again before moving on to the next room.

“We’re behind schedule,” Kirkpatrick muttered as he came up behind him. “If I were the Terries, I’d have put another platoon of security in these offices by now, just in case.”

“Bet you’d like that, Agent,” Simon muttered back, gesturing to another door farther down the hall. “Another chance to add a Terrie Waltham to your collection, huh?”

Though he nodded and followed, Kirkpatrick continued as though he had not heard. “Matter of fact, I’m surprised they haven’t scrambled a Mackie or two by now. Between their armor and sinks, they can certainly weather a little fire, I’d say. Might consider the secondary dust-off, Kelswa. Scrap the first and get Johann out of there.”

Simon narrowed his eyes. That had to be the third time since the quarantine that Kirkpatrick had raised his discomfort about the primary dust-off, the Firebringer itself. Of course, assigning Kirkpatrick to his own team at the last minute had probably added to the urgency, reminding the Corps agent just how vulnerable the ship would be once the extraction began. Odds laid even money that the shuttle would escape Hesperus intact, of course, but deep down, Simon knew it was the best way to ensure the Terries were looking the wrong way when the real data got out.

And Kirkpatrick did not much care for being on board the bait.

Well, well, Simon thought. Looks like there is a limit to that bravado, after all!

At that moment, a faint sound—a footstep?—somewhere behind them sent Simon spinning on his heel, weapon raised to an intersection down the hall while his raised fist signaled Kirkpatrick to hunch down. Instead, the agent whirled about as well, silenced SP-7 muzzle instantly pointed toward the unseen source of Simon’s worry, finger tense on the trigger.

But there was nothing there.

Kirkpatrick waited a few seconds more, then Simon saw his head turn slightly, cocked to one side as if to ask a question.

“All clear,” Simon grumbled, lowering his weapon. “Move out.”

Kirkpatrick turned fully, his face a dark scowl as met the commando’s goggled gaze again. For half a heartbeat, both men froze like that, before it registered in Simon’s mind.

Kirkpatrick expected an answer.

“We stick with the plan as is, Agent,” Simon growled. “My call.”

Kirkpatrick squinted again, hesitated, and turned toward the next office, quickly but silently heading to the workstation there. Once more, the room proved to be little more than an executive’s suite; only one computer to hack into and scan. Kirkpatrick plugged in his reader to the external port, briefly supplying enough power from a secondary cell to make its hard drive run. His datapad immediately went to work, scanning folders, checking file sizes, correlating any diagrams, specifications, or keywords, and returning a simple likelihood of success.

Simon stayed by the door, SP-7 at the ready, just in case the sound had not been in his head.

“Now is no time to lose focus, Colonel,” Kirkpatrick blurted out, giving the display only half of his attention this time. “I’ve seen how you react to them. I know what you’re afraid of.”

Simon’s eyes widened not so much at the man’s ability to identify the source of his unease, but at his audacity in calling attention to it. The words hung like a threat in the air. There was no need to ask what “them” Kirkpatrick was referring to. Already, in his mind’s eye, the veteran commando could imagine the thundering march, each footfall an explosion of power and death. Surely the Hegemony’s monsters were on their way, just as the agent predicted. Surely they would be here soon, and each second he and his men lingered brought them a second closer to those metal giants.

Giants they could not defeat. Giants no sane man would not fear.

Simon’s mouth was bone dry, and he half expected to spit out sand as he opened it. But he would be damned if would let a remark like that slide.

“Now, look, Mister—”

An insistent series of tones sounded in his earpiece, killing the rest of Simon’s retort. Kirkpatrick paused for a moment, then let out a snort and turned his attention back to his datapad.

Charlie Team—McCabe’s group—was reporting in now. Signaling another successful entry. No hostiles encountered. But with a few extra clicks, Simon found himself releasing a heavy sigh of relief that recaptured Kirkpatrick’s attention.

Spark located, McCabe’s message said. Lighting torch.

Pay dirt!

“They got it?” Kirkpatrick’s voice betrayed his disappointment.

Simon gave a sharp nod and held up his hand as he began to tap at his earpiece, first requesting McCabe’s location, then forwarding that to all teams. They would need to regroup, to download copies into each team’s noteputers. Other computers nearby could be searched as well, giving them all one last chance to mine any more data of value as long as they dared risk. Then they would finally disperse—hopefully as quietly as they came—with two teams making their way to the secondary dust-off site while the third—Simon’s—bypassed the gathering crowds and took the Firebringer.

The shuttle, of course, would become a target the instant it rose above the factory again, a diversion that would focus the Terries’ attention completely away from the real getaway.

It was a risk Simon knew he could not allow any of his men to take alone, one he had forced Kirkpatrick to share with him, to assure the others made it out without incident. Their fate would be decided once more by Johann’s superb piloting skills. Given the surprise factor, odds were an even bet that they would get shot down by Terrie batteries or an aerospace patrol during the escape. And above, a JumpShip of Rim Worlds Republic registry—a final touch meant to further throw the Hegemony off the trail—would await them. If they survived.

Still, taking the risk aboard an armored shuttle to meet up with a bogus pirate ship beat getting stomped into a greasy red paste beneath metal feet any day of the week. Kirkpatrick—of course—had not thought to complain about that part of the plan until after he had been assigned to Simon’s team, an act that put him on the Firebringer.

McCabe’s and Daschale’s teams would meanwhile depart far less conspicuously, stowing themselves aboard other unsuspecting daily transports out of Maria’s Elegy the following morning. Their escape would guarantee that at least one copy of the data made its way back to Tharkad.

From there, of course, the universe would change…

Kirkpatrick suddenly broke his connection to the computer, but as he did Simon discovered a new manner in the Corps agent’s movements now. There was more hesitation in his actions, an almost distracted drift in the way he hefted his SP-7 and waited for the colonel to lead on.

There was a familiar shape to his expression now. It was one Simon knew well, face paint and goggles notwithstanding.

The Archon’s words flooded back to him, unbidden: “I know what you’re thinking, Simon. That look in your eyes is the same one I saw in the mirror the first time mother showed me those vids…”

Fear!

Simon blinked as something clicked inside his head, and a grim smile came to his face. Suddenly we have something in common, Kirkpatrick!

Kirkpatrick’s expression betrayed a moment’s confusion, and Simon nodded his own understanding. Melting into the corridor, they darted back down the halls silently, gathering up Leutnant Faisel, working their way toward the exit.

We’re all just choosing our deaths here, aren’t we? The thoughts echoed as they slinked through the shadows. I fear those Hegemony monsters, and you fear burning up on a plunging shuttlecraft. No way to fight back. No way to take the bastards with you. You know my fear, Agent? Well, now I know yours, too!

Simon focused on the moment as he led his men around another bend and spied movement in his lowlight goggles. Instinctively, he brought his SP-7 up and felt Kirkpatrick and Faisel do the same. At the far end of the hall, two more commandos in black fatigues, face paint, and goggles mirrored their action.

Leutnant Satori grinned back over the muzzle of his weapon, his teeth flashing white-green in Simon’s lowlight vision. Weapons lowered as Satori waved his partner to follow.

Two more corners from the exit, and Simon’s entire team had fully regrouped.

Less than ten seconds later, all seven men emerged from the cool, red-lit darkness of the building, and plunged headlong into the oppressive, dry heat of the Hesperan night, and the flaming complex around them.

So far, so good…

Simon motioned the team ahead, directing them toward McCabe’s building, when an urgent clicking in his earpiece sounded over a distant—and all too familiar—thumping. The first clicks identified Johann immediately.

Contact!

The clicking suddenly became a high-pitched squeal as suddenly night became day, and the ground shook in time with an explosion that sent the entire team scrambling for cover behind the walls of the nearest buildings.

Simon felt hands seizing him, tossing him toward a low barrier behind a parked security truck, a fraction of a second before the shockwave hit.

What in the bloody hell—?!

The rumble subsided quickly enough, but Simon could not see a thing as a superheated wave of hurled dust and debris overcame him.

Coughing up sand and soot, and wincing at a numbing pain now running all along his right arm, he became aware of a second body beside him, even though a thick cloud of smoke enveloped them both.

Johann? Where’s Johann?

He tapped his earpiece with numb fingers, but could hear nothing.

Dazed, he struggled to stand, but found his head spinning.

What happened? What went wrong?

He blinked again, still seeing nothing.

He tore away his goggles, and a surreal scene of devastation sprang to life around him. Fire licked at the wreckage of an overturned security van now fifteen meters to his left, blown somehow over him from the other side. The entire façade of the office building beside him—the very same one his team had just evacuated—was now a warped steel grid laced with cracked and shattered windows, half of which glowed from internal fires. He was lying in a street filled with shadows, debris, and smoke, while a secondary office building ahead and to his right burned along its far right side.

All that had spared him from the blast was a black-scorched ferro-concrete barrier lining the side of a parking area, and the man who now assumed a crouching position beside him, his cold, dark eyes taking stock of the colonel’s condition.

Kirkpatrick.

“What happened?” Simon shouted.

“The Firebringer exploded,” Kirkpatrick said, his voice deadly calm.

“Impossible!”

“I assure you, Colonel. Someone must have gotten too close.”

“Too close?”

“We have to get to the secondary dust-off site!” Kirkpatrick snapped. “The fires will force the Terries to scatter their people all over. We’ll be discovered if we stay too long!”

“No!” Simon yelled, shrugging away Kirkpatrick’s hand in the middle of the other man’s effort to drag him up. His eyes darted around, looking for his SP-7, suddenly aware the weapon no longer lay in his hand.

Did I black out?

Simon struggled to push himself up on his own, pulling his legs beneath him and shaking off a wave of nausea, assessing a possible concussion from the blast. “What are you saying, Agent?” he breathed out. “What do you mean someone got too close?”

“Damn it, Colonel,” Kirkpatrick roared over the sound of a secondary blast, “there’s no time to explain—”

Realization struck Simon like another blast wave, even as his vision swam from the heat and concussion of the first. Rage suddenly took over, blocking out all pain and all sound. He scrambled to his feet, fighting back a new surge of nausea, and hurled himself at the agent standing so smugly before him.

“You—!”

Kirkpatrick’s instincts, honed as sharply as his own, kicked in instantly—unfettered by either shock or concussion. A savage swing of his arm smashed the butt of his SP-7 across the side of Simon’s face, followed almost immediately by a hammer blow to the stomach as his knee came up.

Vision turned bloody, Simon doubled over, and he coughed up a mass of half-digested energy bar. He stumbled back a step but did not fall.

“You sabotaged our ship?” he heard himself say. “Our men were on board!”

“I told you we should have gotten Johann out of there!” Kirkpatrick yelled back. “The charges were set to explode only if someone without authorization managed to penetrate the hull. Some Terrie guard or SAR trooper must have gotten under Johann’s radar.”

Simon stepped back again, felt the world spinning around him. His vision was blood red and blurred. Three Kirkpatricks stood before him now, black, demonic shadows against a backdrop of smoke and flames. A ticking noise sounded in Simon’s ear that he only half heard, Satori—or someone else—requesting his location, a sitrep.

They could wait.

“Gutless terrorist chupaverga!” Simon shouted, each word punctuated by a throbbing pain in his temples. He moved drunkenly to the side, watching the shadows of Kirkpatrick follow, getting his bearings, trying to focus again. “Those were our people on board! I knew you were afraid of going back, but to do this?!”

“It was your idea to use the Firebringer as a diversion, Kelswa! It was you who thought taking the same ship in and out again was a smart idea! You can be as noble as you want about it all, but in the end, it’s you who put our men in danger! You did this!”

The three Kirkpatricks were coalescing into one, but Simon was done waiting already. Once more, he lunged at him, this time aiming for the man’s gun arm. Five months of training exercises had revealed which one the Corps operative favored. Five months had taught Simon the man’s preferred hand-to-hand style. A true animal, Kirkpatrick would try to deliver his most devastating blow short of firing the SP-7.

At least so long as he considered Simon a minimal threat, anyway.

As Kirkpatrick swung his weapon around again, Simon seized his arm, wrenching it back and down. Balance thrown off, Kirkpatrick stumbled a step backward, and the SP-7 fired. Silenced bullets belched out in a strobe of muted yellow-white licks. Sparks flew from where the bullets bounced off the street, but already Simon was swinging a fist up to crack across Kirkpatrick’s face.

The SP-7 clattered to the ground.

Stunned, Kirkpatrick stumbled back another step.

“Schweinehund!” he snarled. One hand reached for his web belt.

Simon lunged forward and swatted the hand back with a wide kick, intercepting Kirkpatrick’s combat knife before the agent could bring it to bear. The blackened blade vanished in the darkness and smoke, clattering distantly on the pavement.

“Murdering bastard!” Simon roared.

His open-handed blow snapped the agent’s head around. Stunned for the moment, Kirkpatrick stumbled back a step, one arm instinctively reaching out to find support from the same flame-scorched barrier that originally protected them both from the Firebringer’s explosion.

Pressing his advantage, Simon leaped forward, knocking Kirkpatrick back over the barrier. Needles of pain shot through his knees as both men slammed into the pavement, but the agent’s body bore the brunt of the fall. All the wind escaped his lungs in a short, barking cough.

Hissing an unintelligible curse, Kirkpatrick whipped his head upward before Simon could draw his back. Simon took the blow on his chin; stars swam across his field of vision, and the coppery taste of blood in his mouth made his wounded tongue recoil. A new wave of nausea followed as a cloud of smoke and fumes washed over them, once more inspiring a rebellion in Simon’s stomach.

Kirkpatrick heaved, finally tossing him to one side with a feral growl.

“Damn it, Colonel!” he croaked, coughing as he forced air back into his lungs and rolled away to find his legs again. “Would you rather have had a firefight at the dust-off site? Have the whole mission blown by some Terrie rent-a-cop too nosy for his own good? Are you so soft and stupid that you honestly think you could do what everyone’s been trying to do for fifteen years and not take a few lives along the way?”

Simon fought the urge to groan as he quickly drew back and forced himself to rise again. The ground was spinning, shaking. His legs felt unsteady, as though he had just stepped away from the shuttle’s crash-landing again. He spat out blood and bile, drew in a fresh lungful of contaminated air, and continued to ignore the ticking in his ears.

A new cut just above Kirkpatrick’s left temple dribbled a thin line of blood from hairline to his jaw. His breathing was heavy, and he held his right arm close to his side, fingers flexing. He took a cautious step back, matching Simon’s moves as they now circled each other.

“This was my show! LIC had its chance—”

“This isn’t about the Corps, Colonel,” Kirkpatrick shot back. “We’re out of second chances here! The Archon spelled it out enough for even a self-important, holier-than-thou jarhead like you to figure out! Botch this, and the Commonwealth faces a threat on three fronts, not just two!”

“The Archon would never have authorized—”

“Think again, Arschloch!”

Simon narrowed his eyes, trying to regain focus. The ground kept shaking, but at least there was only one Kirkpatrick now.

“The Firebringer was a direct link to the Commonwealth, no matter how well your plan worked out,” Kirkpatrick barreled on. “Do you really think the Archon would have wanted you to risk a third front against the Hegemony for the sake of one more diversion and a glorious death? You’re good, Colonel, but don’t tell me you’re that naïve!”

The shaking was getting worse, like turbulence in a storm. Simon struggled to stay standing, to reclaim some semblance of control.

“The Archon wanted no bloodshed!”

Kirkpatrick glanced up, angry eyes searching the skies for a moment before returning to his. “If he wanted no bloodshed, would he have given soldiers a job for Intelligence? Would he have sent me along for the ride?”

The clicking in Simon’s ears returned yet again, and a dull rumble penetrated his awareness at last, punctuating each shake of the earth. There was a rhythm to it all, and a sensation of growing urgency he could not quite place.

“Colonel!” Kirkpatrick snarled. “We’re out of time, and we’re in a hostile combat zone! You plan to argue about this further, or will you act like a soldier and lead your troops to the secondary dust-off as planned?”

The clicking in Simon’s ears finally resolved into codes his brain could understand, echoing in his thoughts alongside Kirkpatrick’s challenges.

It was Hauptmann McCabe, requesting a sitrep from all surviving team leaders.

Satori was answering.

Kirkpatrick was MIA.

Simon was MIA.

His men were leaderless; he had ignored them for too long, and they thought he was gone!

And—something else…

The rumble accompanied the last, an ominous metallic thumping that made the message redundant.

A monster was coming.

No, not just one monster; the pounding was too quick, like the thunderous rumble of an oncoming stampede of steel-footed cattle.

One was louder than the rest, closer than he ever felt before.

Thuh-whump!

As if in a trance, Simon turned toward the sound, and everything else seemed to vanish around him…

“…I know what you’re thinking, Simon. That look in your eyes is the same one I saw in the mirror the first time mother showed me those vids…”

“…Highness, I don’t think ‘Pandora’s Box’ quite describes this technology…”

“…You are looking at a BattleMech, the Terran Hegemony’s ultimate weapon for the last fifteen years…”

“…Under no circumstances are we to engage a BattleMech in combat, is that it…?”

“…Unless you want to end your career as an ugly red smear, that is…”

“…‘Pandora’s Box,’ the Archon calls this, Johann. But there’s another expression that fits it better, one that some ancient Terran scientists first uttered when they tested the atomic bomb for the first time. The kind of thing they must’ve longed to make reality ever since, or we wouldn’t be facing these things now.

“‘I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.’

“That’s the phrase. And now, just one of these machines, Johann, can turn any soldier into Death itself, can turn any man into an unstoppable world-killer…”

Thuh-whump! Thuh-whump!

Each footfall of the lead monster shook the earth, raising a cloud of dust from the ground all around him. Larger bits of debris danced to the rhythm. The sound reverberated across the manmade canyon of office buildings, stopping Simon’s heart with every world-crushing impact. Over the din, he was dimly aware of someone shouting at him, calling out his name in angry, urgent tones.

But it was too late.

The monsters were upon them.

Thuh-whump!

With one more bone-rattling footfall, the first monstrosity of metal, its desert-mottled hide harshly outlined in orange light, finally rounded the corner. Backlit by licking flames and flickering streetlamps, with its legs and lower torso wreathed in a low-hanging cloud of gray-black smoke, it looked for all the world like a titanic wind devil, emerging from the Inferno itself.

Simon’s eyes, dry and stinging, bulged at the sight. Of their own volition, his lungs drew in another gulp of searing Hesperan air through clenched teeth, mindless of the choking taste of scorched metals and ozone.

The monster’s shoulders brushed past three-story office buildings and warehouses as casually as a man strolling through a crowded parking lot. Its head, a bulb of metal atop a mountain of armor, presented a round portal of infinite ferroglass blackness for a face, an eye that swept across the grounds as it turned.

That eye of gleaming darkness, seeking prey, froze Simon in place like a Tharkan gazelle in the headlamps of an oncoming hovercruiser.

It sees me!

The titan paused for a moment, lord of all it surveyed. Its boxy torso swiveled slightly, correcting its balance to maneuver within the tight confines of the rubble-strewn street.

Then, with another soul-smashing crash, it began to move again, straight toward the terror-stricken commando standing just fifteen meters away.

One last time, the expressionless voice yelled out to him, even as the great, metal-shod foot—easily the size of a truck and trailing flakes of pulverized concrete—swung forward in slow motion.

The last thing Simon remembered was a dark shape flashing before his eyes before he was sailing through the superheated Hesperan air.

And then, with a thunderous crash as 100 tons of metal slammed into the ground, the blackness took him at last…

MCQUISTON-CLASS CARGO SHUTTLE PYGMALION

OUTBOUND TRAJECTORY, HESPERUS II

LYRAN COMMONWEALTH

9 FEBRUARY 2455

0916 HOURS TST

“Welcome back to the land of the living, Colonel.”

The low voice, barely audible above the rumble of the shuttle’s drives that even now banished the memory of his fitful dreams and nightmares, contained no warmth or camaraderie. Simon did not even have to open his eyes to know to whom it belonged, but the pain resounding within his head—and the cargo harness apparently thrown across him to keep him in place through the launch—forced him to remain still, rather than lunge for the man’s throat.

Instead, he simply tried to take in his surroundings.

He was lying inside a shuttle’s cargo hold. A dank one, filled with shadows. As per the plan, the men must have stowed themselves aboard one or more of the outbound ships from Hesperus, like hoboes on an interstellar freight train. Though the air was stale, tinged with the scent of metals and exotic lubricants, Simon could not help but notice its chill.

They had left Hesperus II behind.

And looming over him sat the shadow of Agent Brian Kirkpatrick.

“What’ve you done?” he slurred, closing his eyes again.

“As if you need another explanation,” Kirkpatrick’s voice tore at him. “I saved your ass from becoming another red stain on a Terrie BattleMech. You’re welcome, by the way.”

Simon opened his eyes again, tried to spear the Corps operative’s silhouette with his glare.

“My men?”

“Yours and Satori’s team are safe and sound aboard this lovely rattrap CMC calls a ship, and this little closet is your room, since you’ve been under the weather. We linked up right after your little episode. Hauptmanns Daschale and McCabe managed to stow away on two other ships.”

“Episode?” Simon hissed. “You knocked me out and dragged me here! How can I even trust you now?”

“You’re alive, aren’t you?” Kirkpatrick asked without a shred of sympathy. Simon could feel the man’s eyes boring into him now. His hands—which he realized were not bound—longed to reach out and seize the agent’s throat, but they had no strength.

“I could’ve killed you at any time, Colonel,” Kirkpatrick went on, answering the unspoken question without missing a beat. “Hell, I still can. And back there, I could have simply allowed you to die, and the Terries would have still been none the wiser. That Mackie pilot probably never even suspected you were there, the way you stood still and waited for him to stomp you into the ground.”

The memory flashed before his eyes anew. The thunderous stomping. The whirling clouds of smoke. A titan of metal, its face an unreadable void of nothingness. The looming, final footfall. Kirkpatrick, leaping forward…

“Then, why?” he finally asked.

Kirkpatrick’s shadow approximated a shrug. “You were mission leader, even if you didn’t act like one when push came to shove. And—contrary to your opinion—I am neither heartless nor a coward.”

“You killed four men—”

“You missed the hundreds of Terrie bystanders, Colonel. All necessary. All casualties of war. Don’t even pretend that you can’t understand that, in your line of work.”

His vision adjusted to the dim lighting, Simon suddenly found that he could see Kirkpatrick’s intense stare once more. In those eyes, there was no apology. No request for forgiveness. Merely an acknowledgment of a wanton act of murder deemed necessary for operational security.

“I’ll see you hang for this—”

Kirkpatrick’s short laugh rang loud in the small hold. The harsh sound, so totally alien to Simon’s ears, made him twitch, and drove shooting pains into his temples.

“I doubt that very much, Colonel,” the LIC operative said coldly. “In fact, I imagine that once this is all over, your dear Archon will sing praises to both of us, for doing our bit for king and country.

“Because, in the end, we both managed to save the realm. You managed to bring back the plans to the worst weapons ever devised, and I managed to survive your plans to make penance for it.”

With that, Kirkpatrick finally moved, crawling to his feet, heading for the bay door just beyond Simon’s field of vision.

THE TRIAD

THARKAD CITY, THARKAD

LYRAN COMMONWEALTH

26 MARCH 2455

“…I had lost consciousness by then, Highness, but from what I’m told, Agent Kirkpatrick—” the name fairly hissed through Simon’s clenched teeth, “—managed to drag me along until Hauptmann Daschale found us. The platoon then hiked the rest of the way to the spaceport, using cover of night to infiltrate the landing pads and stow us away aboard the outbound shuttles.”

Archon Alistair Marsden Steiner sat behind a rich, stained-oak desk that would have dwarfed a smaller man. He wore a simple blue-twill jacket of military styling, adorned only with gold braid and a silver chain from which hung a medallion engraved with the defiant fist that served as his family crest, the same defiant fist that only recently replaced the three-stringed lyre of the old days. The uniform made him seem more like a fellow soldier than the ruler of a mercantile alliance.

Only Steiner’s eyes—ice-blue and ever inquisitive—betrayed the Nordic ancestry that had made his mother such an icon of beauty and poise. The rest of his features and manner were his father’s, including the square set to his iron jaw, and the brutally close cut of his dark auburn hair. Large, strong hands—the hands of an experienced fighter—folded across one another on the dark blue blotter before him. Beneath them lay a sealed folder, simply labeled streng geheim—top secret.

For a moment, the man who ruled an interstellar empire of billions said nothing at all. For his part, Simon felt another shiver crawl along his back, still unused to the frigid temperatures of the Tharkan winter that even seemed to penetrate the controlled environment of the Archon’s inner sanctum. The scent of freshly brewed chamomile—a Donegal blend thoughtfully provided by eager palace servants—wafted past, making the colonel’s mouth water just slightly.

One of millions of sensations he’d never thought to feel again since Hesperus.

“There is more you want to say, Simon,” the Archon finally said.

The words came with no trace of hostility. No accusation. Merely a statement of fact. Simon suddenly realized his gaze had fallen almost to his shoes, like a frightened child expecting his father to scold him for some grievous offense.

Squaring his shoulders anew, he looked up again, once more meeting the eyes of his commander-in-chief.

“The rest is in my report, Highness,” he said. “Although he was not officially part of my command, I found Agent Kirkpatrick’s conduct reckless at best and treasonous at worst. Four of my—our men died needlessly in that blast, along with over a hundred Hegemony innocents. Were it not for the classified nature of our mission, I would recommend charges be filed and that he stand before an official tribunal.”

The Archon nodded sagely, his mouth a grim line. He had read the report, of course; he simply wanted to hear Simon’s words in his own voice, the voice of a commander whose mission nearly failed.

“You know, of course, that no such charges will be filed, Colonel?”

Simon blinked. “Highness, with respect—”

Alistair raised his hand. “Simon,” he said, “I have the utmost respect for your judgment, but on this I’m not going to budge.”

“May I ask why, Highness?”

“You already know, Colonel. You probably knew it, deep down, even when the Firebringer exploded. Once you landed in that ship, you knew there was no way you could lift off in it again, not without compromising the illusion, and leaving the Hegemony to believe that the entire affair was the accident the newsvids claim it was. The ‘Rim Worlds JumpShip’ we parked in orbit to pick you up would not have held up to any scrutiny once it was linked to a Commonwealth shuttle, but it may muddy the waters a little more being there on its lonesome.”

“I took a calculated risk, sir.”

“Risk is part of the job, Colonel. I won’t fault you for that. But the LIC—and in particular, the likes of the Counter-Terror Division—love to contain risk through the harshest means possible.”

Simon blinked again, and felt his pulse racing. “Highness, are you telling me you condone—”

Alistair’s expression darkened, but he did not rise or raise his voice.

“Don’t be foolish,” he said coldly. “Of course I don’t condone it, but I understand it, and I acknowledge that, in the final analysis, it served the Commonwealth better than the original plan. Hegemony search-and-rescue teams would have been far more suspicious if they found an empty shell than the charred remains of Lyran citizens within. For now, the deaths of those men will seal the secret, long enough for our scientists to get to work on the data you retrieved.”

Simon shook his head slightly, discovering once more that his gaze had drooped again.

“Simon,” Alistair went on, “I know it’s no consolation now, but you and I have both been there. We’ve both done our service for the Commonwealth, and we’ve both lost good men in the bargain. Yours—like mine—knew the risks going in. They gave their lives for the Commonwealth.”

The chill that ran along Simon’s spine felt as though it had begun to seep into his very veins as he met the Archon’s gaze one more time.

“Highness,” he said slowly, “I can understand that, from the Commonwealth’s point of view, but Johann, Gilespie, Armheidt and Schmidtt deserved better.”

With a heavy sigh, Alistair nodded.

Drawing a deep breath of his own, Simon closed his eyes for a second. It’s now or never, he thought. Best to get it over with.

“With all due respect, sir,” he said at last, “I would like, at this time, to resign my commission and stand down.”

Now it was Alistair’s turn to blink. “What?”

“The loss of four men—good soldiers, all—notwithstanding, I submit that I panicked under fire, sir. The presence of the Hegemony BattleMechs repeatedly caused me to lose focus at several critical junctures during the mission, even though I should have been prepared—”

Alistair rose at last, coming to his feet at just a centimeter or two shorter than Simon. His arms, no longer anchored to the desk, crossed now in front of him, and his face became a mask of almost paternal disappointment. Simon fought another urge to inspect his shoes again.

“You refer to the shock of seeing the BattleMechs up close, Colonel? Do you really think anyone else would have behaved differently?”

Kirkpatrick did, didn’t he? was the reply that first leapt to mind.

“I was the mission commander, Highness. I lost focus.”

“Regardless, the mission succeeded. You—together with all of your men—will be handsomely rewarded for the effort—though no ceremonies will be held, as you can well understand. However, I will not accept your resignation on top of all that.

“I still need you, Colonel. Indeed, the Commonwealth still needs you.”

“Highness, begging your pardon, with those…monsters…you won’t need an old warhorse like me.”

“Oh? I beg to differ, Simon. You see, regardless of your fears—fears no sane man would not feel with a twelve-meter-tall, hundred-ton machine stomping over him—you are still among the best spec-ops troopers we have in the LCAF, and I say that counting myself in the ranks.”

“Highness—”

“I’m not finished, soldier,” Alistair said sternly. He had begun to pace now, coming around his desk to stand before his officer. The fatherly quality in his tone, despite their similar ages, still made Simon want to avert his stare, but this time, he maintained his bearing.

“I am talking about finding the weaknesses in these BattleMechs, these monsters as you call them. For that task, I am assigning you, as the man who extracted their design for the Commonwealth. You will be assigned to assist the teams who will use that data. You will get an inside look of the development and construction of these machines, and will learn their strengths and weaknesses inside and out. You will demystify these demons, show us how they can be defeated, and teach us how to make ours better.

“Nothing is truly unstoppable, Colonel. And if anyone can find the weakness in BattleMech technology, I have every confidence that you are that person. Would you really leave this task to the likes of anyone else?”

Simon stared back at the Archon, feeling numb all over. His mouth felt frozen shut, even though he could still feel his heart racing.

“It’s time for those nightmares of yours to end, Colonel,” Alistair Steiner said after a while, extending a hand toward the colonel. “And it is time for the Commonwealth to command its own destiny again. Will you help us?”

In a dreamlike trance, Simon extended his own hand, felt Alistair seize it in grip both strong and surprisingly warm.

“Highness,” he said finally, “I accept.”

MORE BATTLETECH FICTION BY HERBERT A. BEAS II

If you enjoyed this BattleTech novella, you can find other stories by Herbert A. Beas II in the following books:

BATTLETECH: WEAPONS FREE (BATTLECORPS ANTHOLOGY VOLUME 3)

This volume features “Growing Up,” in which the would-be Baron Hasseldorf must win a duel on Galatea to earn a command position in Kirkpatrick's Bandit Killers.

BATTLETECH: FIRE FOR EFFECT (BATTLECORPS ANTHOLOGY VOLUME 4)

This volume contains two stories by Herbert Beas. The first, “Case White: To Serve and Protect,” is set during the climactic Case White operation, where a TerraSec officer learns the difference between upholding the law and fighting a war. The second story, “Forgotten Worlds: The Hunt for Jardine,” follows treasure hunter Brooklyn Stevens in her quest to locate one of the Hidden—rumored secret planets controlled by the fanatical Word of Blake.

LOOKING FOR MORE HARD HITTING BATTLETECH FICTION?

WE’LL GET YOU RIGHT BACK INTO THE BATTLE!

Catalyst Game Labs brings you the very best in BattleTech fiction, available at most ebook retailers, including Amazon, Apple Books, Kobo, Google Books, Barnes & Noble, and more!

NOVELS

Decision at Thunder Rift by William H. Keith Jr.

Mercenary's Star by William H. Keith Jr.

The Price of Glory by William H. Keith, Jr.

Warrior: En Garde by Michael A. Stackpole

Warrior: Riposte by Michael A. Stackpole

Warrior: Coupé by Michael A. Stackpole

Wolves on the Border by Robert N. Charrette

Heir to the Dragon by Robert N. Charrette

Lethal Heritage (The Blood of Kerensky, Volume 1) by Michael A. Stackpole

Blood Legacy (The Blood of Kerensky, Volume 2) by Michael A. Stackpole

Lost Destiny (The Blood of Kerensky, Volume 3) by Michael A. Stackpole

Way of the Clans (Legend of the Jade Phoenix, Volume 1) by Robert Thurston

Bloodname (Legend of the Jade Phoenix, Volume 2) by Robert Thurston

Falcon Guard (Legend of the Jade Phoenix, Volume 3) by Robert Thurston

Wolf Pack by Robert N. Charrette

Main Event by James D. Long

Natural Selection by Michael A. Stackpole

Assumption of Risk by Michael A. Stackpole

Blood of Heroes by Andrew Keith

Close Quarters by Victor Milán

Far Country by Peter L. Rice

D.R.T. by James D. Long

Tactics of Duty by William H. Keith

Bred for War by Michael A. Stackpole

I Am Jade Falcon by Robert Thurston

Highlander Gambit by Blaine Lee Pardoe

Hearts of Chaos by Victor Milán

Operation Excalibur by William H. Keith

Malicious Intent by Michael A. Stackpole

Black Dragon by Victor Milán

Impetus of War by Blaine Lee Pardoe

Double-Blind by Loren L. Coleman

Binding Force by Loren L. Coleman

Exodus Road (Twilight of the Clans, Volume 1) by Blaine Lee Pardoe

Grave Covenant (Twilight of the Clans, Volume 2) by Michael A. Stackpole

The Hunters (Twilight of the Clans, Volume 3) by Thomas S. Gressman

Freebirth (Twilight of the Clans, Volume 4) by Robert Thurston

Sword and Fire (Twilight of the Clans, Volume 5) by Thomas S. Gressman

Shadows of War (Twilight of the Clans, Volume 6) by Thomas S. Gressman

Prince of Havoc (Twilight of the Clans, Volume 7) by Michael A. Stackpole

Falcon Rising (Twilight of the Clans, Volume 8) by Robert Thurston

Threads of Ambition (The Capellan Solution, Book 1) by Loren L. Coleman

The Killing Fields (The Capellan Solution, Book 2) by Loren L. Coleman

Dagger Point by Thomas S. Gressman

Ghost of Winter by Stephen Kenson

Roar of Honor by Blaine Lee Pardoe

By Blood Betrayed by Blaine Lee Pardoe and Mel Odom

Illusions of Victory by Loren L. Coleman

Flashpoint by Loren L. Coleman

Measure of a Hero by Blaine Lee Pardoe

Path of Glory by Randall N. Bills

Test of Vengeance by Bryan Nystul

Patriots and Tyrants by Loren L. Coleman

Call of Duty by Blaine Lee Pardoe

Initiation to War by Robert N. Charrette

The Dying Time by Thomas S. Gressman

Storms of Fate by Loren L. Coleman

Imminent Crisis by Randall N. Bills

Operation Audacity by Blaine Lee Pardoe

Endgame by Loren L. Coleman

A Bonfire of Worlds by Steven Mohan, Jr.

Embers of War by Jason Schmetzer

Betrayal of Ideals by Blaine Lee Pardoe

Forever Faithful by Blaine Lee Pardoe

Redemption Rift by Jason Schmetzer

YOUNG ADULT NOVELS

The Nellus Academy Incident by Jennifer Brozek

Rogue Academy: Iron Dawn by Jennifer Brozek

NOVELLAS/SHORT NOVELS

A Splinter of Hope by Philip A. Lee

The Anvil by Blaine Lee Pardoe

Not the Way the Smart Money Bets (Kell Hounds Ascendant 1) by Michael A. Stackpole

A Tiny Spot of Rebellion (Kell Hounds Ascendant 2) by Michael A. Stackpole

A Clever Bit of Fiction (Kell Hounds Ascendant 3) by Michael A. Stackpole

ANTHOLOGIES

Shrapnel: Fragments from the Inner Sphere

Onslaught: Tales from the Clan Invasion

The Corps (BattleCorps Anthology, Volume 1)

First Strike (BattleCorps Anthology, Volume 2)

Weapons Free (BattleCorps Anthology, Volume 3)

Fire for Effect (BattleCorps Anthology, Volume 4)

Counterattack (BattleCorps Anthology, Volume 5)

Front Lines (BattleCorps Anthology Volume 6)

Legacy

Kill Zone (BattleCorps Anthology Volume 7)

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

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.”

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the authors’ rights is appreciated.

BATTLETECH: PROMETHEUS UNBOUND (THE PROLIFERATION CYCLE, PART II)

Cover art by Franz Vohwinkel

Design by Matt Heerdt & David Kerber

©2005, 2019 The Topps Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. BattleTech & MechWarrior are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of The Topps Company, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries. Catalyst Game Labs and the Catalyst Game Labs logo are trademarks of InMediaRes Productions LLC. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the Copyright Owner, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

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