BattleTech: The Spider Dances

The Proliferation Cycle, Part VI

Jason Schmetzer

The Spider Dances

HAPPEN MILITARY RESERVATION

40 KILOMETERS EAST OF BARTER

XANTHE III

FREE WORLDS LEAGUE

17 MARCH 2466

Halle Ostend tried not to watch as Esterhazy slipped the guard a twenty-eagle bill to look the other way while he held the solenoid down. The buzzing door covered her quiet, tittering giggle, which was fine. That giggle was not for anyone’s ears except Esterhazy’s.

She slid her hand into his sweaty palm as the door slid open, and let him pull her through. The guard might have been smiling. She couldn’t see past the strap of his helmet, but his cheek rose.

It was a smile or a sneer. Ostend didn’t really care which—she knew six silent and at least ten noisy ways to kill Esterhazy before he could turn around. The guard didn’t matter.

“We’re not supposed to be back here,” she whispered after the door closed. Esterhazy was taller than she was—maybe a meter-ninety, almost two meters. He was the wrong side of forty, thicker around the middle than he realized, and his temples had already begun the long, slow retreat toward the back of his head. The back of his neck was red—he was usually red around her.

Most men were.

“Who’s going to stop me?” Esterhazy asked. He looked over his shoulder at her, grinning. It made the jowl on his cheek fold over. “I’m senior technician, remember?”

“Fine,” Ostend said, pouting. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

Esterhazy laughed. “I say you can be here, baby.”

Ostend giggled again. She thought about how easy it would be to grab the back of his head by the hair, slip her other hand around his chin, and twist hard. There would be the pop. She shivered.

Esterhazy stopped at a T-intersection. His head went back and forth. Ostend leaned her weight onto his hand, his arm. Her eyes flicked back and forth, noting details. Light fixtures. Whiteboards on doors. Scuffs on the wall.

“This way,” Esterhazy said, pulling her to the right.

“Aren’t the engineers this way?” she asked. Not that she knew—Ostend had never penetrated this far into the secured area of Happen. But she knew there were engineers back here, and they had to be one direction or the other down the hallways. And if they’re this way, that’s good information to have…

“No, they’re the other way,” Esterhazy said. He stopped in front of a door, read the code, and tugged her down one more.

Ostend gasped a little, squeezing his hand. “Robert,” she breathed, leaning in close.

“Here,” he grunted. His fingers clumsily punched the keypad . A shrill tone sounded. He’d entered the wrong code. “Damn it.”

“Robert…” she purred, sliding up his arm. She flicked her tongue against the lobe of his ear, carefully keeping the shiver of disgust in check when she felt the hairs in his ear brush against her tongue. “Now…”

“I know—” The shrill tone again.

“Now—” A nip.

“Oh, god…” He slumped against the doorframe. Beep.

“Let me,” Ostend said. She slid around him, careful to always let part of her body rub against part of his. “What’s the code?”

“Delta-six-niner-echo-seven-four-four-two.” His breaths came in gasps. His hand—those large, clammy, clumsy hands—played across her body as she keyed the code. A chime sounded and the door opened.

“Oh, god, yes,” Esterhazy grunted, and shoved her into the room before him. Her hips hit the edge of a desk, and she let herself drape across it. Her fingers wrapped around the other side. She chewed on her lower lip, eyes flicking around. A desk chair—some stupid print framed on the wall—a glowing calendar—a console. Her eyes narrowed. She ignored Esterhazy’s porcine squeal of delight as the door slid shut behind him. She ignored his hands grabbing her roughly on the hips.

The glowing hibernation indicator glimmered at her. Ostend smiled, widely. She blew her bangs back off her forehead. Esterhazy was fumbling with her skirt, her zipper. He was giddy with pleasure, high-toned squeaks of urgent pleasure whistling with every breath.

Ostend arched, let her eyes unfocus. Esterhazy wouldn’t need her attention for a minute or so—time she spent memorizing the keypad code, memorizing the steps to the doorway, the face of the guard outside. The flash of pleasure that warmed her face had nothing to do with Esterhazy’s hot skin, and everything to do with the inner heat that came with her relishing of the Capellan Confederation’s salvation.

BARTER

XANTHE III

FREE WORLDS LEAGUE

18 MARCH 2466

Hector Little sat on the low-slung chair and stared at the code on the noteputer’s small screen. The flat device sat on the coffee table in front of him, displaying the free mail client and the single open message awash in a sea of spam and come-to-Jesus messages. Little steepled his fingers beneath his chin and stared at the code.

“I’ve got it too,” Nicholas Drake said from across the room. “It’s Halle’s code.”

“Me, too,” Sasha Feodoreyva called from the bedroom. “Both accounts.”

Little exhaled slowly. “Acquisition.”

“Only took her six months to find the right guy,” Sasha said, laughing. She walked in from the bedroom, elbow clamping her own noteputer against her side. She was tall, two meters, with long brown hair and black eyes. Her skin was pale—chalk-white pale, so pale Little saw the blue spider webs of her veins when the light was right. Her fingers were long and scarred. Callused.

Little looked at those deadly fingers. Then he tapped the message closed on the screen of his noteputer and erased it. Two new messages for male enhancement had come in while he’d been staring at Ostend’s cipher.

In the holovids, this would be where he, the intrepid deep-cover spy in the enemy’s lair, would delete the message, close the email account, and then destroy the noteputer in a firepit or basement incinerator. He would then burn the room and walk out, jacket over his shoulder. Little’s small mouth twisted in a grin. In the holovids…

In the holovids, they didn’t talk about the National Intelligence Agency crackers that would follow Ostend’s supposed spam message to every account it was deposited in, and would notice if one or two or four accounts all closed within minutes of reading the message. That would be a flagged event—the little software bots would sniff it out right off. People didn’t close their account after reading spam. They just deleted it and went about their business.

He tapped the noteputer off and stood.

“What about Danilov’s team?” he asked Drake.

“Nothing in a week,” Drake said. “The last report had Kane and Tibbett still on flight ops, and Dan said he thought he had a line on a shuttle. The passenger lists on the outbound shuttles are still pretty tight—we could get two, maybe three spots on one bird. Not all of us.”

Little sniffed. “Well, if Ostend gets the data, we’re going to need to get it off-world. Quickly, if possible.”

“Aerospace fighters are fast,” Drake pointed out. “Kane could do a long-hop, just bug-out for orbit.”

“There are faster fighters than their Dragonfires,” Feodoreyva observed. “Still, it’s not a bad backup plan.”

Drake sniffed sharply and stood up. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We still have to get the package, and we have to get it from Happen to Barter. We have to get it into the spaceport during what is almost certainly going to be a military lockdown. We have to get ourselves through that same perimeter.” He gestured with the slim noteputer in his hand. “One step at a time, children.”

Little grinned at him. Drake was the oldest man in the room—the oldest man on the team. He was near fifty, Occidental, with grayed hair streaking toward silver and deeply-lined eyes. So far as NIA knew, he was a surveyor from Lopez here to help lay telecommunications lines between Happen and Barter. The Mary laborers he worked with knew him as a dab hand with a survey laser and someone they could confide in. Drake just had one of those faces that made people want to trust him.

The Maskirovka loved recruiting people with those kinds of faces.

“So we tell Halle to get it,” Little said. He sat back on the low sofa, putting his right ankle on his left knee. The picture of a man at repose. The thought made him smile. “And we tell Dan and the others to start working on active escape routes.”

Sasha sat down across from him. She sat with her back erect, her knees together. On Xanthe, Sasha Feodoreyva was a has-been holovid actress from Amity. She carried herself with the sneering entitlement of the aristocracy and never—ever—dropped cover. “And we three?”

“Wait. Watch.” Little looked at Drake. “You can push your crew toward Happen?”

Drake smiled. “It’s already on the schedule.”

Little grinned. “Good.”

HAPPEN MILITARY RESERVATION

40 KILOMETERS EAST OF BARTER

XANTHE III

FREE WORLDS LEAGUE

18 MARCH 2466

Parsifal Nehru keyed the admittance signal and waited. The corridor behind him was bustling with uniformed activity, and no one paid any more attention to the young-looking man in the lieutenant’s uniform than they did the potted rhododendron in the corner. Nehru felt his lips twitch in the ghost of a grin, and silently chastised himself. If you cannot even fool the door…

The door slid open, and Nehru stepped through. A corporal was sitting at the desk inside the door, staring at a noteputer on his desktop. He didn’t glance up when Nehru stepped through the door.

“The general’s out just now,” he said. His finger tapped the screen—advancing a page, Nehru guessed—before returning to its former post alongside his lower lip. “If you’d care to come back—”

“I’ll wait, thank you,” Nehru said. “Corporal…?”

The man looked up. Nehru saw his eyes widen slightly when they saw his collar flashes. He saw the edges of the corporal’s mouth flatten. Biting back an obscenity, his mind filled in. The blush began as the corporal lurched to his feet. Nehru saw it coming.

Nehru saw everything.

“Sorry, sir,” the corporal said. He braced to attention, his eyes lifting off the collar flashes and focusing on the doorway behind him. “I didn’t see—”

“Quite all right—” Nehru glanced at the name tape on his breast “—Corporal Platt. The general is out, you said?”

“Yes, sir. He’s on a last-minute inspection in the restricted branch, sir.”

“Indeed.” Nehru glanced around the office. “His aide…?”

“Captain Mallory, sir.”

“Yes, Captain Mallory. The captain is with the general?”

“Yes, sir.” The corporal frowned. “I’m sorry, sir, but was the general expecting you?”

Nehru smiled. “Personally? I doubt it.” He reached into his uniform jacket pocket and withdrew a digital ID card. It read parsifal nehru, lieutenant jg across the top. The insignia of the Forty-ninth Xanthe Grenadiers flickered beneath. When he drew his thumb down the right edge, however, the rank and the insignia shimmered and changed.

He set the ID card on the desk and watched for the corporal’s reaction. “If he’s not a complete moron, however, he’s been expecting someone like me.”

The corporal looked down. The name had not changed. But where it had said lieutenant, now the card read colonel. And the insignia was no longer the wreathed moon of the Grenadiers.

The blood that had fueled the hot flush on the young corporal’s face vanished while Nehru watched.

The insignia was now the crossed swords and lightning bolts of the Inspectorate.

The corporal’s eyes snapped back up and he braced again, his skin turned pale-white.

Nehru smiled. He’d seen the flash of recognition in the corporal’s eyes.

He saw everything.

It was forty-three minutes until the general returned to his office. Nehru spent much of that time in contemplation of the art on the wall behind the desk. He let the corporal sit down after ten minutes; the young man didn’t dare return to his novel. He’d been clicking through message reports like a metronome. There was no chance the man was reading them, but it provided something for his finger to be doing while Nehru stood near him.

The door slid open. “—And tell Moorman I’m not taking any more excuses. He has to get the new Icarus prototype off the floor and onto the range in two weeks. Or else.”

General Vocaine was a large man, with wide shoulders and a waistline that not even his obvious corset was keeping in check. His hair had been red when he was a younger man—now it was high and dry, dirty salt-and-pepper tufts. His cheeks were florid from the exertion of carrying his bulk around. Nehru didn’t let his distaste reach his face.

“Of course, sir,” the younger woman in a captain’s uniform said as she followed him through. “You have a meeting with the base commander in twenty minutes…” Nehru smiled as Captain Mallory saw him. “Yes, Lieutenant?”

Vocaine flinched. He looked to where Nehru was standing near the wall, obviously seeing him for the first time. His eyes gave Nehru a practiced once-over, took in the young face and JG rank flashes and passed on. He keyed the door to the inner office.

“I am Nehru, Captain,” the inspector said. “My business is with the general.”

“Then you can talk to me,” Mallory said. Her brow furrowed. Nehru watched as her mind went through the obvious perambulations; a junior lieutenant with business with a general? One who isn’t obsequiously deferential to the rank in the room? “The general is a busy man.”

The door to the general’s office slid open. The general stepped through.

“Not too busy to be naming classified military projects as he walks down a public corridor,” Nehru said calmly. He might as well have been commenting on the clouds in the sky that morning for all the ire in his tone, but his words had their desired effect.

“Now listen, Lieutenant—” Mallory began, but the general turned back around.

“What did you say?” Vocaine demanded. “I’ll handle this, Tasha.” He stepped right up to Nehru. He was easily ten or fifteen centimeters taller, and forty kilos heavier. Nehru didn’t retreat. He was a small man; he was used to people invading his space. You couldn’t grow up in the favela on Regulus and be touchy about space. “Listen, Lieutenant—”

The desk corporal made a sound. “Sir—”

Vocaine ignored him. “I don’t know what you learned at OCS, but you don’t damned well barge into my office and tell me how to talk in my own goddamn section.” He jabbed a thick finger near Nehru’s nose. There was grease caught beneath his nails, the same grease the technicians used to lubricate the actuators on the new machines. It smelled differently than any other grease, and there was enough of it there for Nehru to smell.

The corporal tried again. “Sir—!”

Vocaine didn’t look away from Nehru. He appeared surprised—appalled, perhaps—that Nehru was meeting his stare evenly. “What!”

“His ID, sir,” the corporal said. He held it out. Captain Mallory snatched it from him and looked at it. Her jaw was set firmly. She read the displayed information and hissed involuntarily. Her eyes looked at Nehru—he saw her in his peripheral vision—and then focused on the back of Vocaine’s head.

“General…”

“Buddha’s balls, woman, out with it!” He spun around. “What?”

Mallory held out Nehru’s ID. He knew the swords-and-lightning of the Inspectorate was still displayed. As was his actual rank. Vocaine took it, glared down at it. Nehru saw the muscles bunch in the back of the general’s neck. He straightened and turned back around.

“This is real?” he asked, more calmly than he’d spoken yet. Nehru let one of his eyebrows rise a millimeter or so. The general shook his head. “Of course it is.” He held it out, then gestured to his office. “May we step inside?”

Nehru slid his ID into his pocket. He nodded and beckoned the general ahead of him. Captain Mallory and Corporal Platt were staring. Platt’s mouth was hanging open. Neither of them had ever before seen a general be deferential to a colonel—especially not a colonel in a lieutenant’s uniform.

Nehru nodded to each of them and followed the general into his office. Their confusion was something he was used to. He was a colonel. Vocaine was a general. But they were not in each other’s chains of command.

And everyone—everyone—answered to the Captain-General’s Inspectorate.

Vocaine sat behind his desk. The desktop was empty, aside from the tablet noteputer the general set down and a stack of datacards he placed next to it. There was no blotter, no writing utensils. Vocaine worked on his noteputer exclusively, then. Or there are drawers.

Nehru stepped in front of the desk and clasped his hands behind his back.

“Sit down?” The general gestured to the wire-frame chair next to Nehru.

Nehru shook his head.

Vocaine lowered his hand into his lap. “So.”

“General Vocaine—”

“You’re here to relieve me, then?” Vocaine cut him off without looking at him. He’d evidently found something of inestimable value to regard under his fingernails. Grease, perhaps. “Because we’re behind schedule?”

Nehru smiled thinly. “No.”

Vocaine looked up. His frown displayed his confusion. “Then…?”

“I am not a courier, General,” Nehru said. “If you were to be relieved, you’d have gotten orders. I am far too valuable to waste delivering orders.” He paused, listening to his own heartbeat. The hum of the air conditioning system reverberated just beneath hearing. He felt it, deep in his chest. “Information is leaking from Happen, General. Information from your project.”

“That’s impossible.” Vocaine’s lips pulled back from his frown, showing his teeth. “Our security is airtight, Colonel.”

“Not so airtight that you’re naming the specific chassis under construction here in the doorway to a public corridor.” Nehru held the general’s stare. “No one is to know what kinds of BattleMechs we’re constructing here, General. No one.”

“My people are trustworthy—”

“No one is trustworthy,” Nehru said simply. His voice was calm, but his tone was steel-tinged. “No one.”

Vocaine opened his mouth to retort, then evidently thought better of it. “You said information is leaking. Not that it might—is. What information?”

“Both the Lyran Intelligence Corps and the Maskirovka know we are constructing BattleMechs. The Lyrans, of course, already have their own. The Capellans do not.” Nehru wetted his lips. “The Maskirovka is on Xanthe right now.”

“You know this? For certain?”

“Of course we know it. They have operatives on all our worlds. Just as we have NIA agents on each of theirs.”

Vocaine leaned over his desk, interlacing his fingers before him. “Then it’s a general threat you’re worried about.”

“No, it’s the team that has almost certainly penetrated this military reservation already that worries me.”

“Penetrated? Happen?”

“Yes, General. Do try to keep up.” Nehru slid a datacard out of his pocket and proffered it. When the general took it out of his hands he spoke. “I dealt with the normal Mask cell on Xanthe three weeks ago. The Confederation still lacks BattleMech technology. Therefore, there are still operatives here. And Happen is the most vital target on Xanthe.”

“I don’t—”

“Our ’Mechs grant us parity with the Steiners,” Nehru said. “And, of course, the Terrans. But if the Capellan Confederation gains access to the technology before we’re able to bring significant numbers of them to bear, we’ll be deadlocked there, too.”

On the wall behind the general’s desk was a framed two-dimensional print of a Mackie BattleMech surrounded by burning tanks. The Mackie wore the Marik eagle—the tanks had no identifiable markings, nor were they identifiable models. Simply made generic enough to represent the enemies of the Free Worlds League being crushed underfoot.

“And you think the Mask has infiltrated my unit?” Vocaine asked.

“It would idiocy to assume otherwise.”

“Then you’re here—”

“To stop them,” Nehru said. “You will alert your security teams. I have protocols for searches to be run. They are on that datacard. Possible responses to be flagged are also appended. On the Inspectorate’s authority, I have warned the governor that I may be halting all traffic to and from Xanthe soon. On that same authority I will shortly visit General Bangs—” the base commander, “—and tell him the same thing about Happen.”

Vocaine looked up at him. “You seem awfully young for a colonel,” he observed.

Nehru smiled. “I am very good at what I do, General,” he said. “If my appearance helps other people to underestimate me, so much the better. Perhaps you think I should have arrived in the black holovid storm-trooper’s outfit, complete with commissariat cap and black-visored goon squad?”

Vocaine shook his head.

“I thought not.” Nehru inhaled sharply, audibly. “Now. Shall you introduce me to General Bangs?”

HAPPEN MILITARY RESERVATION

40 KILOMETERS EAST OF BARTER

XANTHE III

FREE WORLDS LEAGUE

19 MARCH 2466

Halle Ostend looked up and smiled politely as Ned Reyes sat down across from her in the staff cafeteria. She was sitting by herself near the end of the line, smiling and giving little waves to people she knew as they passed, but her attention was—so far as the room was concerned, at least—glued to the novel displayed on her noteputer’s screen.

“What are you reading?” Reyes asked. He slid his fork beneath the slab of suspicious-looking gray meat and sniffed it carefully. His cap was pushed back high on his head, letting a bit of his brush-cut black hair show. The silver tabs on the shoulders of his gray security uniform mimicked military insignia without actually being them.

“Barrett,” she said. “Twice Met by Moonlight.”

“Is that the one after or before Starlight Epitaph?”

“After,” she said. Her eyes and her smile said, “Wow.” Her mind muttered shit. “You read Barrett?”

“When I get the chance,” Reyes said, continuing the game. Every week or so he sat down in the cafeteria across from her. He always asked what she was reading, and never recognized the title. Anyone watching would see a man with a crap job trying to court a woman two steps above his pay grade. “Are you free tonight, Halle?”

“Sure,” she said. “What’d you have in mind?”

“Meet me here, twenty-hundred? Just a cup of coffee, maybe a walk in the courtyard?” He smiled and cut his meat. “Nothing much. I don’t get to talk to many people about books.”

“Me either,” she said. She tapped her book closed and stood up. “I’ll see you tonight then, Ned. I’ve got to get back to work.”

Reyes stood and tipped his hat. “Sure. See you then.”

Halle deposited her tray on the conveyor and walked into the corridor. It was a four-minute walk back to her desk. She spent every second of those four minutes commanding her heart to slow down, commanding her skin to cool.

Starlight Epitaph meant danger close enough to threaten the mission. Not now.

Not when I’m so close!

If NIA was on to them, there was no sign in the cafeteria. Reyes was waiting for her when she arrived, already holding two cups of good Galisteo coffee and smiling. They sat for a few minutes, talking about Barrett’s books.

He was popular on Marik and Atreus—his novels were simple affairs, thrillers who set the fiercely loyal NIA agent Malcolm Rae against the best of the LIC. The Maskirovka, when it appeared in his pages at all, were portrayed as slant-eyed buffoons incapable of discovering the cost of bus fare, much less military secrets. I wonder what he’ll say when he learns the Maskirovka stole the plans for Marik’s BattleMechs?

“Shall we go for a walk?” Reyes finally asked.

“I’d love to,” Halle told him. No one appeared to watch when they stood up and walked out the door to the courtyard. There were several other couples sitting apart from each other already, and several more had preceded them out into the two-square-kilometer park. Happen’s residents—military and civilian—were forbidden to leave except on the weekends. “Walking” in the courtyard was a popular pastime.

“Is this safe?” she murmured when they were down one of the trails and out of sight of the cafeteria building. A Xanthe grass-shredder scritched in the night, calling for a mate. She’d heard them often when she was out at night. Esterhazy liked to come out here in the dark, when she couldn’t convince him how much she liked “christening” other peoples’ desks.

“As safe as can be,” he whispered back. The rustling leaves would give most passive recorders trouble; the trees would block directional microphones. Unless there was a listener hiding in the shrubs—and they both knew how to look for those—they should be safe. “We’ve got trouble.”

“How much trouble?”

“We need to go tomorrow—or else abort.”

Halle stopped walking. She slipped her arms around Reyes and leaned in close, as if she were going to nuzzle his neck. His hand came up automatically, pressing against the back of her head. “Are we burned?” She smelled the coffee on her breath as it was reflected back from his neck. Reyes shivered. They might only be acting, but a woman’s breath on a man’s neck usually provokes a common reaction.

“The Inspectorate is here.”

Halle hissed a curse. “You’re sure?”

“Bangs called us all in and told us himself. They suspect.”

“Us?”

“Does it matter?”

Halle squeezed his shoulders and leaned back. “Tomorrow, then?”

“Can you be ready?”

“I think… Yes.” She considered. Esterhazy had been getting insistent lately. She’d put him off since their last visit—demurely, to be sure—and he was getting anxious. It shouldn’t be any trouble to urge him to retrace his steps. She named the corridor junction where she’d seen the guard. “Can you take his place?”

Reyes nodded. He tipped his head down, as if he were going to kiss her. She smelled the coffee on his breath now. “I’ll signal,” he said. “You have a plan to get out?”

Halle smiled. “I’m going to ride out through the front gate.”

Reyes smiled back. “A diversion, then?”

“Tell Quinn we need the big one.”

Then she kissed him. Just in case anyone was watching.

XANTHE RESERVE MILITIA AERODROME

BARTER STARPORT

XANTHE III

FREE WORLDS LEAGUE

19 MARCH 2466

Fyodor Danilov looked at the message displayed on his noteputer and frowned. Tomorrow? He cleared the message and stuck his head into the next room. “Edgar. Tomorrow?”

Edgar Tibbetts was reclining on a cot, skimming through the day’s news. He set his ’puter down and stared at Danilov. “Tomorrow?”

“That’s what it says.”

“Shit.” Danilov watched the other man think. “No. Day after next. Best we can do.”

“Little won’t like that,” Danilov said.

“Little’s not in charge of getting us wings,” he said. “There’s nothing tomorrow. Military flights. We’re not getting on those.” He looked down at his ’puter and tapped the screen a few times. “Day after we got three liners and half a dozen shuttles. Easier.”

“I’ll tell him.” Danilov nodded and pulled the door shut as he went. He tapped the message screen open and sent two words: day after. Then he closed the messenger and slid the noteputer under his arm. At the other end of the corridor he stopped in front of a door with an electronic keypad. The sequence was the same, and the door slid open. Two men in uniforms looked up as he entered.

“Feel better, Dan?” one of them asked.

“Yes, sir,” Danilov answered. He went to the third console, the one marked flight controller, and sat down. “Sorry, Captain. Really had to hit the head.”

Captain bar-Danan shrugged. “Nature calls, right?”

“Right, sir. Any traffic while I was away?”

The officer shook his head. “Nothing. We had a memo from higher, though. The governor sent a warning order that he might have to close the port sometime next week, though. Just the off-planet stuff—the air-breathing stuff can continue.”

Danilov nodded as he slipped his headset back on. “Sounds like easy work for us then,” he said.

And next week is just fine, he thought. We’ll be long gone by then.

HAPPEN MILITARY RESERVATION

40 KILOMETERS EAST OF BARTER

XANTHE III

FREE WORLDS LEAGUE

20 MARCH 2466

Reginald Bangs was a tiny man. He stood a meter-sixty in his dress boots, but Nehru suspected there were several centimeters of lift in those boots. He stood behind a bank of hunched-over men and women who were all intently massaging data from a string of consoles.

Nehru stood near him, eyes mostly unfocused, letting his ears listen and his peripheral vision watch for the telltale jerk of someone finding something unexpected.

“You could have come straight to me,” Bangs said quietly. “I’ve dealt with your office before. You needn’t have surprised Vocaine that way.”

“General Vocaine needed surprising,” Nehru said, not looking at the small general. “He was getting complacent. Complacency breeds mistakes, and the Maskirovka needs only one mistake to succeed.”

“It might help if you told us what we’re looking for,” Bangs said a moment later.

Nehru resisted the urge to sigh. He hated sighs. There was no more useless sound than a sigh—it said, “I’m disappointed, but not enough to actually speak.” Instead, he blinked his eyes back into focus and turned to regard General Bangs. “I have given your security analysts a series of checks to make. They will determine if there is more to be done.”

“Checks?”

“Facial recognition, mostly.”

“You know what these spies look like?”

“No. But I have security recordings of everyone seen near the safehouse we raided to eradicate the long-term Mask team on Xanthe. Right now your computers are comparing those faces to the faces of your staff and soldiers.”

Bangs ogled. “But that’s—”

“More than six thousand people,” Nehru said. “And the cameras caught nine thousand discrete faces.”

“That’s…”

“A lot of faces,” Nehru said. “You might return to your duties, General. I’m more than capable of standing here alone.”

“But if one of them pops up—”

“You’ll be the third person to know.”

Bangs frowned. “Third?”

Nehru blinked, keeping his eyes closed perhaps an instant longer than necessary. “The first person will be the technician sorting the data. I will be the second. You will be the third.”

“Oh.” Bangs glanced both ways down the rows of analysts poring over screens and noteputers. “Then—”

“Sir?”

Nehru spun. A young woman at the far end was holding up her hand halfway. Her attention was still on the screen in front of her. Nehru strode over to stand behind her. Bangs followed.

“Soldier?” Nehru prompted.

“We’ve got a match,” she said. She toggled the screen out of the waterfall display of searched comparisons and brought up one that was blinking.

A grainy security camera image filled the left side of the screen; on the right was an ID card mug shot. Nehru watched the flickering traceries as the computer illustrated points of congruence—cheekbones, chin, distance between the eyes. It was the same man.

Nehru straightened. “Tell me, General,” he said. “Where might I find civilian auxiliary Ned Reyes?”

Esterhazy was slobbering, he was so excited. He followed Halle down the corridor, toward the same armored door as the other evening. She made sure to put a sway into her hips, but moved fast enough that he couldn’t get a finger under the seam of her skirt, despite his determined attempts.

It was mid-morning. The first shift would be just about into their coffee break. When she’d first discovered the console, Halle had planned to come back during third shift, when no one but the manufacturing crew was on. The design and testing teams kept a more normal schedule, but production ran around the clock. She was a little concerned that the man whose office they intended to…borrow…would be in it. But Esterhazy said he’d take care of that.

“Senior technician, remember?” he’d boasted.

It had been ridiculously simple to get him to agree. All she’d had to do was wear the herringbone skirt and her hair back. A judicious lean over, a loose button on her blouse, and a lascivious whisper in Esterhazy’s ear had been all that was required to bring the large man away from his break-room snack and into the corridor.

“Again,” she’d moaned.

“What, now?”

“Now.”

Esterhazy had glanced both ways down the corridor. “Where?”

“The same place as before.” She’d stepped close to him, close enough that her shoes had touched the edge of his boots; close enough that her breasts had pressed against his stomach. “It was so amazing, Robert. I need it again. Now.”

That was all it had taken.

They were getting close. Halle turned the last corner and saw Reyes standing the guard post. He was judiciously ignoring her, but he braced to attention when Esterhazy stumbled after her. She smiled at him from beneath her bangs and spun around, falling backward against the door.

“It’s a different guard,” she whispered to Esterhazy. “Can we still…?”

Esterhazy grinned. “Of course we can.” He ignored Reyes and keyed his code into the keypad. The door slid open. Halle stepped through backward, her left hand clutching the lapel of Esterhazy’s coveralls. The technician followed her through, and the door slid shut behind him. He pushed her back farther, against the wall, and pressed himself against her. Then he kissed her. He tasted like two-day-old corned beef.

Halle shuddered. He would think it was excitement. Excitement and revulsion were two heads of the same coin. She twisted away from him and started down the hall. “Now, which room was it…?”

“Eight-Bravo,” Esterhazy said. He pointed. “There.”

“The door…”

Esterhazy stepped past her and hit the door announce. The sound of the chime carried through the thin extruded plastic. He waited. Halle leaned in behind him and breathed on his neck. He moaned almost inaudibly.

“Knock, knock,” she whispered.

He signaled again. No one came to the door. He grunted and keyed a combination into the keypad. The door slid open.

He half turned, grabbed her hand, and twisted, flinging her into the room before him. Her thighs hit the desk hard and she fell across it, just like the other night. She heard the door slide closed behind her, straightened up, and spun around to sit on the edge of the desk. She slid back so the backs of her knees were against the edge of the desk. A blotter and a noteputer shifted beneath her.

Esterhazy was still by the door. He was wringing his hands in front of him, watching her. His eyes flicked from her face to her chest to her knees and back, a half second at each point. As if he couldn’t decide what he wanted to look at.

She moved her knees apart and smiled.

Nehru was forced to give the man his due. They’d found Reyes standing his assigned guard post, just outside the restricted section of the east wing. He’d shown only the confusion one would expect from a guard pulled off his shift by a group of armed military police. Nehru hadn’t seen any indication that Reyes suspected why they’d picked him up. That either meant there weren’t any indications to see, because Reyes was innocent…

…Or it means you’re not seeing it.

They’d taken Reyes to a detention room in the military wing. His hands were free, although they’d taken his equipment belt. He was watching his own reflection in the one-way glass. Nehru watched him through it. The noteputer in his hand held Reyes’s complete employment history. An analyst was searching the Xanthe net for his records—all of his records.

“How long will you make him wait?” General Bangs asked. The base commander had mobilized his MPs in record time—Nehru had no complaints on that—but he’d remained, intent on watching the interrogation. He was standing to the side, as if Reyes could see him through the mirrored ferroglass.

“Not long,” Nehru said. Was he too calm? Was that what was making the hairs on the back of Nehru’s neck rise? “If for no other reason than if he’s not who we’re looking for, we’re wasting time.”

Two base MPs stood behind Reyes, hands crossed in front of their belts. They wore helmets and body armor, but their only weapons were batons. Unless Nehru sent them out, they’d remain while he spoke to them. What if one of them is a Mask spy?

A rare chuckle escaped his lips. Bangs flinched. He’d been staring at Reyes.

Paranoia is my business. He stepped toward the door, holding the noteputer out to Bangs. The general took it, frowning.

I can’t very well suspect everyone.

Esterhazy rushed toward her. Halle held out her arms, encircling his neck as he slammed into her and the desk together. He grunted with the impact, but his hands were already fumbling with his belt. She squeezed his neck tightly, putting her mouth near his ear. She exhaled.

“Oh, god yes,” he burbled.

“Robert…”

“Yes…”

“You disgust me.” She felt him stiffen and try to pull back. She moved her arms in a certain way, a way she’d been trained in many years ago, and applied the pressure and torque just as she’d been taught. There was a crackle, like a door opened too far for its hinges. Esterhazy collapsed. His feet kicked spastically, and a wet spot appeared on the front of his coveralls.

Halle pushed off the desk and stood over him, looking down. Despite the angle of his shoulder, his face was looking up at her. His mouth opened and closed. His eyes darted frantically back and forth.

She leaned down, again placing her mouth near his ear. “Xiexie,” she whispered. “The Chancellor thanks you.” Then she stood up. His eyes were staring.

She kicked him as hard as she could in the lower back. His head flopped over to face the other direction.

Laughing, she stepped over his corpse and to the console. The datacard from her bra was already in her hand. The software worms knew exactly what files to look for. Halle keyed the card in and looked up at the door. Her mind was already tracing her steps out of the restricted section.

Nehru sat across from Reyes, not speaking. The two men regarded each other. Reyes’s face was earnest, innocent. He was sitting upright, not slouching, with his hands clasped in his lap. Nehru sat the same way. They could have been two men waiting for the tram at the stop.

“Do you remember being on Galveston Avenue in Barter several weeks ago?” Nehru finally asked.

Reyes frowned. “I’m on Galveston Avenue a lot, sir. It’s on my way home, when I get out of here for the weekend.”

“Home?”

“I keep a flat on the west side,” Reyes said. He named the address. “It’s just a little loft, but I like my own space, you know?” He glanced to the side, not far enough to see the guard behind him, but Nehru knew that was what he was looking for. “Sir? Is something happening in Barter? Is that why you’re talking to me?”

“No, Mr. Reyes.” Nehru smiled thinly. “Nothing in Barter.”

Reyes frowned. “Have I done something wrong?”

“Do you think you have?”

Reyes shrugged. “I don’t think so. I mean, I traded Johansson his shift today, but he said he wanted the late shift and—” he smiled “—well, I’ve got a date tonight, sir.”

“Are you usually assigned to the post you were holding today?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you know what’s on the other side of that door?”

“Sir?”

Nehru squeezed his hands together, beneath the level of the table. “Do you know what goes on in the restricted section?”

Reyes leaned back. “I’m not cleared to go in, sir,” he said. “No, sir. The scuttlebutt—” His eyes widened, and his mouth closed.

“‘Scuttlebutt’?”

Reyes swallowed. “Rumor has it it’s ’Mechs, sir.” He twisted to look at the guard behind him on his left, but the guard might have been made of stone for all the reaction he showed. “It’s just a rumor, you know? What the guys talk about in the break room when we’re not talking about women?” He laughed—it only sounded half-forced. “Heck, sir—you know how it is. Some days you hear the Captain-General himself is behind the bulkhead.”

Nehru smiled thinly and nodded.

“Sir?” Reyes slid his hands up on the table, holding them together. “Can you tell me what this is about?”

Nehru stared at him. He opened his mouth to answer—and then he saw it.

The corner of Reyes’s mouth twitched. It might have been a tic—it might have been a trick of the light. But Nehru saw it. And something about the tiniest of movements made his mind go click. He knew what the micro-expression he might have seen was.

The tiniest of smirks. As if Reyes knew what he was suspected of. As if he knew there was no way Nehru was going to make him. As if Reyes had won.

Nehru spread his palms flat on the table.

“Tell me,” he said quietly, “about the Maskirovka.”

Reyes was gone.

Halle had the data. She had it, on the datacard in her bra. The worms had done their work and downloaded the files they’d been sent for. It was a library of information. The datacard was the size of her thumbnail. No one would see it unless they peeled her out of her lingerie. She giggled. That hadn’t turned out so well for Esterhazy.

But Reyes was gone.

The armored door out of the restricted section had opened when she was walking toward it. If all had been going to plan she’d have found Reyes waiting outside. He wouldn’t have commented on her lack of security pass to be inside. She’d have moved to the next part of the plan, and no one would be the wiser until they found Esterhazy’s body.

Instead, she saw the black-armored shoulder of a military policeman. He was standing in Reyes’ place, but he didn’t appear to be checking IDs. Of course, the mousy-looking man who’d just entered had known the keycode. There’d be no reason to check his security. But a woman who obviously wasn’t a scientist coming out? That would be something to pay attention to.

Halle glanced back the way she’d come. She could go back, palm Esterhazy’s ID. That wouldn’t do her any good if the guard was at all paying attention, and she’d only need it if he were doing so.

The man who’d entered nodded at her and moved in the other direction. The door slid closed.

What to do…

She could trip the diversion. Her finger caressed the slim rectangle of her communicator. Quinn’s little surprise would get the whole complex’s attention—but if she used it now she wouldn’t have any way to get out of the front gate. The entire plan depended on her getting the datacard out of Happen and to Barter. It was Danilov and the others’ responsibility to get it off Xanthe.

Shit.

She couldn’t trigger the diversion yet. Halle stepped toward the door.

Luck was with her. The door slid open as she walked closer. Another lab-coated scientist was returning from his morning break. Halle stepped more quickly, angling to slide through the door at the same time as the man was trying to come through. He flinched and stepped to the side, gesturing her out before him.

“Thank you,” she said, smiling brightly. She reached out and touched the scientist’s shoulder briefly before turning and walking down the corridor away from the MP. Her steps were sure and even. She held her shoulders level and put a bit of sway into her stride. If the guard was looking at her, she wanted him looking at her ass and thinking damn, not looking at her back and thinking did she have a badge?

Every step toward the corner was an ocean of time. Halle’s heart thudded in her chest, and she felt her face flush despite her best efforts to remain calm. When her left leg moved forward she felt the strap of her bra pull and the fabric atop the datacard shift micrometrically.

She turned the corner.

She smiled. Now for the hard part.

Reyes blinked. “The Maskirovka?”

“How long have you been on Xanthe?”

Reyes stared at Nehru, shaking his head slowly. “I think there’s been some kind of mistake,” he said. “I’m from Loyalty.”

Nehru tapped his index finger against the tabletop, once per half second. When he spoke, he bit the words out at the same rate, as if his fingertip were punctuating. “You are part of a Maskirovka cell. You were on Galveston Avenue because you were coming from, or going to, the safehouse we raided three weeks ago. You have accomplices here in Happen, and likely other operatives in Barter.” He leaned forward. “You. Will not. Succeed.”

Reyes frowned. He blinked. He shook his head. He looked every centimeter the innocent, confused man accused of a horrible crime he hadn’t committed.

Then he moved.

The table and the bench Reyes sat on were both stainless steel. Both were bolted to the floor, and both had rounded edges. Reyes’s hands were free. He stood up quickly. Nehru jerked back. The two guards behind Reyes lurched into motion like stone gargoyles shedding the day’s skin. They weren’t fast enough.

Reyes hopped like a man might a jump rope. He pulled his feet up and then slammed them down against the back side of the bench he’d been sitting on. That launched him backward toward the right-side guard like a man-sized rocket. He ducked his head forward, hitting the guard in the chest and slamming him back against the wall. Even with his body armor, Nehru heard the air whoosh out of the large man’s chest. The two of them collapsed, Reyes atop the paralyzed guard.

Even as he fell, Reyes’s arm snapped out, catching the second guard near the collar rim of his body armor. The arm recoiled, using its muscle and the momentum of the two men falling to pull the second guard down atop of him.

Nehru stood, his hands flat on the tabletop. His shoulders and forearms tensed as he prepared to fling himself over the table.

Reyes’s arm snaked around the second guard’s neck even as that man slammed his hands down to try pushing back. Nehru saw the corded muscles in Reyes’s forearm bunch and flex—he heard a pop—and the guard flinched and went limp. Nehru leapt over the table.

It had been maybe three seconds—maybe less—since Reyes moved.

By the time Nehru’s boots struck the floor Reyes had shoved the corpse of the second guard off him and thrust himself back, using his legs and the wall as a fulcrum to shove himself upright. He was grinning like a madman, his eyes wild. Nehru’s left foot swept back, looking for balance as he prepared to kick.

Reyes’s foot flashed up and then back, driving his boot heel into the diaphragm of the first guard. The man wheezed, a high-pitched sound that didn’t sound like it could have come from a man, and retched down the front of his body armor. Reyes chuckled.

He blocked Nehru’s kick with his hands, directing the colonel’s foot away from his stomach even as Nehru tried to withdraw it. For an instant he thought Reyes would hold on, to try twisting his leg and popping his knee. He set himself to jump and twist, to keep the spy from finding the necessary torque to break the joint, but his foot came back down to the floor beside him.

“Not enough,” Reyes said. “Come on, Inspector.”

Nehru snarled. The door to the interrogation room burst open and more guards crowded the door.

Reyes looked that way, eyes narrowing. His upper lip curled into the beginnings of a sneer. Nehru sucked in a breath, searching for balance. The first guard shoved through the door, stun baton held high and ready.

Reyes grunted. He brought his hands together in front of his chest. Nehru recognized the move—he was going to sweep the guard’s chin with the sharp, hard bones of his elbow. Reyes moved fast enough; he’d get inside the guard’s reach before the big man could bring his arm down. And his elbow, with Reyes’s obvious muscle behind it, would kill the guard if he struck in the right spot.

Damn it!

Nehru stepped away from the door and away from Reyes. His hand dipped to the small of his back even as Reyes drove his shoulder into the guard’s downward-moving arm. The impact deflected the baton’s blow away from Reyes’s head and down his back. It would hurt—the baton’s voltage would hurt no matter where it struck—but it wouldn’t drop him. Nehru’s fingers closed on the butt of the small hold-out pistol nestled there. He drew it as quickly as he could.

Reyes’s arm snapped around, as if he were punching himself in the chest. His elbow took the guard along the side of the neck. There was a wet crackle and the guard collapsed, hands grasping at his throat. Reyes stamped his foot down on the guard’s knee. A hoarse, choked-off scream whispered through the room.

“Reyes!”

The Maskirovka agent’s head snapped around.

Nehru fired.

The bullet entered Reyes’s head through his right eye and punched through the thin bone behind it. The caliber was too low and the round too slow for the bullet to exit. Reyes’s other eye bulged as the hydrostatic shock increased the pressure inside his head for a moment. Then he collapsed.

“Damn it,” Nehru whispered. He lowered the gun. More guards crowded the room. The first pair knelt beside the wounded man in the doorway. His fingers, still clutching at his swollen throat, were growing feebler.

Reyes’s body shuddered as its bowels released. The stench of shit and blood filled the small room. It combined with the burned-gunpowder taint to scratch at Nehru’s sinuses. He watched the stain of urine spread across the corpse’s pants.

I was right. He slid the small gun back into his holster.

They are here.

The medic’s uniform was hidden where Reyes had said it would be. Halle pulled it on after taking her communicator out of her pocket and setting in on the seat of the ambulance. The keycard was in the front seat, and the engine caught on the first try. Halle left the ambulance in park and picked up her communicator, thumbing through her contact list until she found the one she was looking for.

Emergency.

She entered a series of numbers and pressed send.

Nehru watched as the orderlies lifted Reyes’s body onto the gurney. General Bangs stepped past them, one hand covering his nose. He watched the body as he moved, as if afraid it was going to come back to life and attack him. Nehru watched him set his shoulders as he turned to face the Inspectorate officer.

“Are you all right?” Bangs asked.

“We need to get back to the security room,” Nehru said. “I need to know everyone Reyes has been in contact with in the last three weeks.”

“But—”

“But nothing. He’s dead.”

Bangs stared. “I know he’s dead. You killed him.”

Nehru closed his eyes. Despite every effort, his mind showed him the fantasy of actually asking who tied Bangs’s shoes for him in the morning. How anyone so inanely thick could rise to general’s rank—and be put in charge of this base, of all of them—Nehru opened his eyes. He reined in his thoughts.

“There will be more than one,” he finally said.

“But—”

“But nothing! God damn it, General—” Nehru stopped. He closed his mouth. His fingertips were tingling. He wondered if that was leftover adrenaline from the fight or new adrenaline from the instant’s fantasy he’d just played out in his mind where he shot Bangs, too.

A muffled thump echoed through the wall. Nehru felt the floor shake in a minuscule tremor through his boots. Alarms screamed to life. Nehru looked at the ceiling, ordering himself to calm down.

“There’s been an explosion!” one of the guards said. He was holding his hand over his earbud. “Near the motor pool—a petrol tank.”

“An attack?” Bangs asked. He was watching the ceiling, as if afraid it was going to fall. “But he’s dead!”

“More than one,” Nehru repeated. Bangs looked at him. Then he twisted around to look at Reyes’s body.

“You think—?” Bangs looked back and forth between the gurney and Nehru. Nehru watched him.

Nehru said, “General, perhaps it is best if I continue with General Vocaine. You must see to your base.”

“What?” Bangs blinked and focused on him. “Yes, of course. Vocaine can help you with the security feeds.”

Nehru nodded and stepped past him. The hallway was crowded with guards and medicos; all of them were standing around, looking at the walls and each other. This is what passes for emergency response on Xanthe, Nehru thought. The loiterers spread out of his way like he was a plague-carrier despite their distraction.

More than one, he thought. Then he stopped. An explosion. Nehru spun, reaching for the nearest radio on a guard, shouting that the gates be sealed.

They were here.

Halle looked in the rear camera screen and watched the Barter-side gates of the Happen military reservation dwindle behind her. The badly burned man in the back of the ambulance moaned, but Halle ignored him. She was feeling good, riding an endorphin high that no drug could match.

She had done it.

The privates on gate duty knew they probably should’ve been more alert than to pass just anyone leaving Happen when there’d just been an explosion. That’s why Halle had stopped to find a body before she headed for the gate. When they had planned this extraction, she’d worried it might take her too long to find a suitable diversion.

But Quinn had done his job with the bomb well. There were plenty of bodies lying around.

Halle put her foot down on the accelerator, whistling softly under her breath.

The datacard was still in her bra.

BARTER, XANTHE III

FREE WORLDS LEAGUE

21 MARCH 2466

It was evening before Quinn’s message came through. Little was skimming the latest batch of spam in his inbox when it pinged. He opened and scanned the codewords, then keyed the noteputer off. Halle Ostend and Sasha Feodoreyva stepped out of the small kitchenette.

Little looked up at them. “He’s coming here.”

“He, who?”

“The Inspector.”

Sasha muttered a curse. “Quinn’s okay?”

Little gestured to the now-dormant noteputer. “He’s going to try slowing him down.”

Halle hissed. She opened her mouth, but then closed it. A moment later, “Is that wise?”

Little shrugged. “We need every second.”

The two women went back into the kitchen. Hector Little stood and went to the small balcony window of the apartment. It was a different one than the suite where they’d first gotten Halle’s coded message. He touched his pocket, where a datacard with the stolen data rested against his thigh. They all had a copy. He grinned. There were dozens of copies.

The Maskirovka’s commitment to stealing the Mariks’ BattleMech technology was total; every agent sent was expendable. No plan was too risky. No tactic was off the board. It was the Confederation’s life to get the secrets of the giant walking war machines, just as it had been for the other major polities. The Hegemony opened its lead in technology every day. The Confederation’s enemies loomed ever closer on every border, with more and newer BattleMechs. The plans must make it back to the Confederation.

The best way was for Little’s team to carry them back into the Confederation. To that end, each of the team members in Barter had a copy of the plans. Several copies. One on their person; one in their luggage. One hidden in secret folders on their noteputers. There were ten separate datacards hidden around this safehouse, and Drake was across town dropping others. He had been gone all day.

Even if every member of Little’s team was slaughtered by morning, the data would be safely hidden. Buried emails and advertisements broadcast the hides to other Maskirovka agents. Even if they died tomorrow, they had gotten the data out of Happen. The next team would only have to get as far as on-planet and find one of the copies that Drake was more or less littering the city with.

That was the worst-case option, of course.

Little rubbed his hands together. The calluses on his trigger finger scratched against the thick ones on his opposite hand.

Tomorrow.

The firing had mostly died down by the time the guards let Nehru up. He stepped away from the ferrocrete wall of the entry alcove. Across the way, the sniper’s remains were afire—one of the guards had been carrying a grenade launcher with incendiary grenades—but that didn’t stop the others from burning through magazines.

He’s already dead. Nehru supposed it was impossible to keep the simple-minded from asserting their manhood. Especially when it was done so impotently.

“Are you all right, sir?” the sergeant of the guard asked.

Nehru nodded. “We need to go.”

The sergeant dithered. “There could be more of them—”

“Now.”

Nehru stepped around him, or meant to. The shoulder boss of his plate ballistic armor caught the sergeant’s shoulder. It was like bouncing off a steel I beam, for all the sergeant jerked away as soon as the contact was made. Nehru snarled at the unaccustomed weight, but he had to admit that recent events had made it wise.

Bangs’s security chief had insisted the inspector wear full body armor when he left the building. He’d been adamant, completely unafraid of Nehru’s Inspectorate authority. The man’s face had been a study in contradictions; shame that he’d failed his task and allowed the Maskirovka into Happen; and resolve that there would be no further breaches of security. Nehru approved of his paranoia. Especially now.

Esterhazy’s body had been found barely half an hour after the explosion. It hadn’t taken Bangs’s security geeks more than ten minutes to confirm the complete schematic and base data file for the BattleMech program had been downloaded. The man whose office had been penetrated was taken to a security cell.

Bangs had looked like the hangman was behind him when he brought Nehru the news.

“It’s out,” he’d said. “The cameras were disabled. Reyes, we think.”

Nehru had breathed slowly, consciously, through his nose.

“Senior Technician Esterhazy is dead.” Bangs’s lower lip trembled for a half-instant. “Murdered, it looks like. His neck was broken.”

Nehru had nodded.

Bangs swallowed. “What do we do?”

Nehru licked his lips. “We go,” he began, as if he were speaking to a mentally retarded house pet, “to Barter. And we find them.”

Which had led to this convoy into the city. And a sniper’s attack on the security private dressed in the black Inspectorate uniform that had preceded Nehru out of the ferrocrete alcove. He didn’t know the private’s name. That rankled him—it hurt in his gut, somewhere beneath his stomach. He’d have to learn the boy’s name, after. When there was time.

The sergeant opened the door of the armored executive car. “We’ll get you into the city, sir,” he said. “The escort is spooling up now.” He gestured behind him. As the firing finally died down, Nehru heard the first whop-whop of a helicopter spinning up its rotors.

Nehru slid into the back seat of the car and looked at the two men already sitting there. One was General Vocaine, who’d been co-opted from his position as head of the ’Mech bureau and assigned to liaise with Nehru and the Barter military. The other was Force Commander Bateson, the Happen base security officer. He was pale, even in the poor light.

“Sir,” Bateson said, “I must offer my resignation. To have such a blatant failure—”

“Quiet,” Nehru said. He looked to Vocaine. “What news?”

“We know what the link was between Reyes and Esterhazy,” Vocaine said. His cheeks were even more flushed than they had been the first time they’d met in Vocaine’s office. “A girl from the secretarial pool. Halle Ostend.”

Nehru raised an eyebrow in question.

“The date that Reyes mentioned? That was Ostend.” Vocaine tapped his noteputer’s screen and turned it so Nehru could see. “She was also boffing Esterhazy.”

“Arrest her,” Nehru said. He tapped the intercom for the driver’s compartment. “Let’s go. Barter. I’ll have an address sent up.” He looked at Vocaine. “Send him her address in Barter.”

“She’s not here,” Vocaine said.

Nehru stared at him. He looked at Bateson, who was trying very hard to sink back into the plush leather seats. Back at Vocaine. “Do we know where she is?”

“She drove an ambulance out right after the explosion.”

Before I closed the gates. Nehru reached up and wiped his eyes with the back of his left hand. “An ambulance.”

Bateson spoke up. “I already spoke to the guard on duty. She had a casualty in the back—still alive. Told him she was headed for the trauma center in Barter.”

Nehru looked at Vocaine. He shook his head. “Never arrived. They found the ambulance in an alley. The trooper in the back was dead of his wounds.” He licked his lips. “Burns. Very painful.”

The urge to throw up his hands nearly overwhelmed Nehru. He looked at Bateson. “Are you a Maskirovka spy, too?” He grimaced. “Never mind.”

The car lurched into motion. When Nehru put his hand on the sideboard, he felt both the car’s engine’s vibrations and the rhythmic thumping of the helicopter. His mind was abuzz with six different tangents at once…

“Call the governor in Barter,” he said a moment later. “Remind him the ports should be closed. I don’t want anyone getting off this planet.”

“All civilian and merchant traffic has already been frozen—”

Nehru cut Bateson off. “No. Everything.”

“But we need the military patrols—” Bateson stopped. “You don’t trust the garrison in Barter, either?”

Nehru speared him with a glance. “I trusted your people,” he said harshly.

Bateson deflated. Vocaine frowned. “That’s not—” he began.

“That is,” Nehru said. “Until I have that data back in my possession, no one is above suspicion.”

Danilov watched Captain bar-Danan stare at the mouthpiece of his headset telephone. The tower was quiet with all the traffic halted. Most of the civilian liners were empty—it had been hours—but he knew if he tied into a channel showing the starport concourse it’d be overrun with shouting civilians and screaming children. Starports like the one in Barter were small enough that they never appeared that busy, because the steady trickle of people was always moving through it. Plug one end of that trickle, and it quickly became a torrent.

“Repeat that last, please,” the captain ground out. The edges of his neck burned red with restrained emotion. Danilov touched a key on his console that sent the channel bar-Danan was speaking on to his headset without activating his microphone.

“—All traffic is grounded. That includes the interdiction flights.”

Danilov frowned. Bar-Danan closed his eyes.

“How, may I ask, are we to ensure the airspace remains closed with no fighters in the air to close it?” bar-Danan asked quietly. His voice was far calmer than Danilov’s would have been in the same situation.

“Orders,” was the reply.

Bar-Danan glanced at Danilov and shook his head. “Listen. You tell the governor—or whoever—that we’ve got the port locked down. For whatever reason that he doesn’t deign to tell us mere mortals. You further tell him that it will be impossible for us to maintain that security once we’ve grounded all of our own squadrons. So I—me, personally—will not be held responsible, nor will anyone in my department, when—not if, when—whatever the hell is so important escapes into the open, clear skies.”

He clicked the line closed. Then he looked at Danilov.

“Was that wise?” Danilov asked.

“I don’t care.” Bar-Danan pulled the headset off and dropped in onto the counter in front of him. “It needed to be said. Eventually one of the bureaucrats will learn that you can’t just say something and make it come true.”

Not likely, Danilov didn’t say. Instead, he said, “What are they looking for?”

“No idea.” Bar-Danan placed his handset back in its cradle and stood to stare out of the ferroglass at the frozen starport tarmac. Shuttles and freighters sat in blast pits. Danilov stood up to watch as the steam vents closed, cutting off the wisps of waste heat that showed a vessel getting ready for launch. Nothing moved on the runway.

“Whatever’s going on,” bar-Danan said, “I hope they catch them quickly. This idiocy will gut the economy.” He glanced at Danilov with a wry grin. “And of course, the HV news is going to crucify the governor.” He chuckled. “Maybe it’ll be over faster than I think.”

Danilov grunted. A few minutes later bar-Danan walked out, leaving Danilov alone in the tower.

He sat down and toggled his noteputer live. When the text-message program had loaded he typed in a number and sent one word.

Then he closed the program and triggered another program that would reformat the noteputer back to its factory settings. Six times in a row.

BARTER

XANTHE III

FREE WORLDS LEAGUE

22 MARCH 2466

The sound of Sasha Feodoreyva’s hand striking the composite countertop was sharp. Had the countertop been glass, it might have broken.

Hector Little ignored it. He stared back at her, carefully not looking at the others through the small alcove in the kitchenette.

“There’s no other way,” he said.

“There’s always another way,” Sasha spat back.

“Dan is the only one who’s never been here,” Little told her. “We’ve been very careful to make Tibbetts his only contact. There’s no way they can tie him to us. We’re going to get made, probably by lunchtime. The cameras around town will have caught Halle coming here. They will have caught all of us coming and going. They have our faces.”

Halle Ostend made a slight sound. “That’s a lot of data to sort,” she said. “Maybe we can wait—”

“No. We can’t.”

“Why not?” Sasha demanded.

“Because the Inspectorate will not open the port until he catches us.” Little stopped speaking and closed his mouth. His right hand touched his trouser pocket, where the little personal communicator was still nestled. The text message would be displayed on the screen if he opened it. The one word that damned them all.

MASADA.

“So we let him find one of the datacards—” Halle began.

Little cut her off. “No.”

“But—”

“It’s not enough,” he said. “Even if the Inspectorate finds the card, they’ll still need to catch us. This inspector, this Nehru, he’s not going to stop until he has us in a cell or our bodies in the morgue.” He looked up, meeting each of the women’s eyes in turn. “And we’ll still have to give him most of the datacards.”

“I still think—” Sasha started.

“No, you’re not thinking. You were there when we made the contingencies. You knew this was an option.” He waited, but neither of them spoke. After a moment he looked down. “A few of us might make it, if…”

“If what?”

“If we make the Leaguers believe they caught us all.” He sniffed sharply and stepped away from the counter. “Masada means Dan is the ace in the hole. They’ll probably get Tibbetts, but they can’t very well arrest everyone he’s ever talked to. Not when the governor will be crying to get the ports open and travel resumed and they’ve got enough bodies to fill six morgues.”

Sasha chewed her lower lip, then crossed her arms. “Our lives, our souls, our sacred honor…”

“That was the deal when we started in the business.” Little felt his stomach tighten. He clenched his belly muscles, willing his gorge to stay down. It wouldn’t do to throw up in front of everyone. It wouldn’t do to throw up at all. He exhaled slowly. “I’ll go first, make a big noise. Maybe that’ll be enough.”

“Big noise?”

Little smiled. “We’re trying to escape, remember? I’ll go steal a shuttle.”

Sasha touched his hand. He looked down at her pale fingers on top of his. “Ssu-ma could do that. He’s already in the aerospace pool.”

Little withdrew his hand. “If Kane is the one to shoot me down, maybe he can get away after. And then all of you.”

The door to the safehouse apartment—the last safehouse—opened, and Drake walked in. He was wearing surveyman’s fatigues that were caked with mud to the waist. He dropped his hard hat on the table by the door and took in the scene in the kitchenette: Little and Feodoreyva inside the cooking area, standing close together, and Ostend standing outside the alcove, hands wrapped around herself. Little could imagine the string of causalities going through Drake’s mind.

“I’ve been shopping,” he said, closing the door behind him. Two pistols appeared in his hands as soon as the door closed. He reversed them and offered them butt-first. “Fire-sale prices, even.”

Ostend shook her head and walked into one of the bedrooms. Sasha ignored Drake and looked at Little.

Little looked back. Then he stepped around her and took one of the pistols.

25 MARCH 2466

Nehru stood in the small apartment’s living room, next to the plastiform coffee table, with his arms crossed behind his back. Behind him a team of infantrymen from the Barter militia were tearing out the walls and stabbing knives into the mattresses. He ignored them, instead letting his mind wash around the room, absorbing details.

They were long gone. No one had entered this apartment for three days.

But did they make it off-world?

No. They hadn’t had enough time. They’d left this safehouse before Reyes was dead. Which meant before they knew they had the ’Mech data. Behind him a glass-top coffee table broke with a crash as two soldiers dropped the contents of a drawer on it. Vocaine cleared his throat. Nehru blinked and looked at him.

“We’ve got people on all the approaches,” Vocaine said. The whisker-thin earpiece headset was barely visible. He’d be talking to Bateson, who Nehru knew was just a bit too scared to be in his presence right now.

“Move them,” Nehru said. His eyes focused behind Vocaine’s bulk on a clock set on a table near the doorway. “Send them to support the team at Ostend’s apartment.” He sucked in a deep breath. “What are the people at Reyes’s flat saying?”

“Nothing.”

Nehru looked back at him. “You haven’t heard from them?”

Vocaine shook his head. “No—sorry. They haven’t found anything. The landlady says she hasn’t seen anyone go into Reyes’s place before we did.” He glanced around at the soldiers steadily demolishing the rooms. “They could be anywhere,” he said quietly.

“Yes, they could.” Nehru smacked his lips and stepped closer to the general. An infantryman dropped a vase on the floor to shatter before kneeling to pick through the fragments. “We know they were here, though. We should be able to guess where they’re going from here, too.”

“We can?”

Nehru nodded. “Is the command post at the port up yet?”

“Two hours,” Vocaine said, without checking. “Ninety minutes, if we’re lucky.”

“Let’s go.” Nehru stepped past the general toward the door. “We’ve got a lot of sorting to do.” If the computers and the specialized sorting software he’d provided could be brought online quickly enough, they might be able to find the needles of the Maskirovka team’s faces in the haystacks of Barter’s street cameras. His mind was clicking through scenarios.

If…

If they’re not already gone.

No flights had left Barter.

They could have driven out.

Why? Barter was the only interstellar port on the planet. All the others had been shut down for years—since the ’Mech operation started. Going to ground at this point only favored the pursuers. Their only chance was to get away with the data.

What if they’re smarter than me?

Nehru smiled and started down the stairs toward the waiting car. Then I lose.

A private opened the door for him, and he heard Vocaine’s heavy footsteps trudging down the extruded stairs.

But I haven’t lost yet.

The security guard at the starport departure terminal held up his hand as Hector Little pulled the van up to the curb. Hector toggled his window down and leaned out, already holding up his hand. “I know, I know—the flights are all canceled.”

The guard nodded. “So just keep going, buddy.”

“The terminal is still open, though, right?”

“Yeah, if you want to sleep on plastic seats and eat rehydrated food that tastes like it was sealed about the time McKenna brought Dreadnought home.” The guard leaned around to get a look at Sasha Feodoreyva and Halle Ostend in the back. “Trust me, friend. Go home. Watch the HV. I’m sure it won’t be long, and the lines will hold your tickets.”

“And the jump series in the next system?” Sasha snapped from the back seat. Her accent was pure Atreus. “Will they hold all those JumpShips so we make our rendezvous?”

The guard smiled. “Now, ma’am, I’m sure every effort will be made—”

“I’m sure too,” Sasha snapped. She triggered the door open. “Come along, dear. We’re going inside. The moment the port opens, we’ll be on the first shuttle off of this hellhole.” She slid out, long legs and short skirt. Her skin was pale as ice. Her eyes flashed.

The guard watched her get out, then watched Halle hand out their luggage and step out behind her. Then he looked at Little.

Little shrugged. In the unspoken code between men, it meant you try and argue with her, pal. The guard looked at the women, then back at Little. Then he raised his eyebrows and stepped back. Little smiled at him, then leaned the other way and toggled the passenger-side window down.

“I’ll just park and be in, honey,” he said.

Sasha waved a hand and kept moving, marching through the sliding doors. Halle followed behind her, head down, both hands behind her on the toggle-strap for her luggage. The very image of a quiet child following her imperious mother.

Little toggled both the windows up and checked his rear monitors for traffic. A moment later he accelerated into the thin flow of cars and taxis. He watched the rear monitor with half an eye, until the guard tried to stop the next vehicle.

He smiled. Maybe he’d make such a ruckus the two women might make orbit, after all.

Maybe.

Sasha Feodoreyva watched the van pull away from the corner of her eye while she pretended to sneer at the departure boards. Every line was marked canceled, but the port terminal was still crowded with people doing exactly as she’d told the inept guard they were doing: trying to wait out the emergency and get the first flights out.

Halle stepped closer behind her. “I’ve seen two guards already,” she said, barely above a whisper. “Weapons will not be a problem.”

Sasha didn’t let her grin show. Instead she made a small signal of assent with her fingers and sneered in the other direction. All they had to do was wait for Little’s distraction to open the port. The van was already gone.

So was the man driving it.

Motorcycle-mounted police blocked all the side streets as Nehru’s small convoy entered the starport. He ignored the quiet chatter of Vocaine speaking into his headset. His mind was sorting details, trying to fit pieces together, seeing what fit and what didn’t. He was trying to stay out of his subconscious’s way as much as possible while he was, well…conscious. His eyes flicked over to the window, watching the traffic. Even when the port was closed—it was on every news channel, in a crawl on every HV footer, and posted on every board—people still tried to get around the restrictions. Nehru smiled absently. People are predictable.

A brown-painted van was waiting to turn into the parking garage. The yellow blinker strobed barely inside Nehru’s awareness. He looked at it, not really seeing it, and sighed.

Where are you?

A compact three-wheeler pulled up behind the van as Little climbed out. He locked the doors and then dropped the remote on the stained ferrocrete. It might go off if he stepped on it. Nicholas Drake grinned at him from the trike’s driver seat, then leaned over and slid the passenger door over. Little climbed in, and the little machine jerked into motion with the drone of electric motors.

“Inconspicuous,” Little observed, eyeing the cramped passenger compartment. Drake chuckled and slid into the exit lane. “Goodies in the boot?”

“Yep.”

Little grunted. “Good.”

A minute later, they were through the checkpoint and on the interstate highway back toward Barter. Drake signaled and took the first exit, following the signs for Crandall Field—the Barter Militia side of the starport—but drove right past the entry gate. Gray- and purple-clad MPs in the second-class uniforms stood at the head of the queue of vehicles waiting to get inside, checking IDs and datacards. Little watched them as they passed, but none of them appeared to look up. If they were on alert—more alerted than the port being closed, anyway—it wasn’t apparent. In the Confederation there’d have been a squad of armored vehicles just inside the gate with turrets buttoned and guns trained. Just in case.

Just in case means just in time, Little thought. He smiled again. I haven’t thought about that line since the Farm. His fingers were rubbing the knuckles of his other hand without him thinking about it. Then he realized what they were doing.

“Through the fence?” he asked.

Drake grunted. “May as well.” The driver glanced at him with a wry grin. “Give ’em what they expect.” He cycled the trike into a lower gear as it started up the low rise of an overpass. The road crossed one of the taxiways for air-breathing aircraft.

“You got word to Tibbetts and Kane?”

“I did.”

“Good.” Little rubbed his kneecaps where they rested nearly at the dashboard. “Good.”

Drake let the trike idle down the other side of the overpass. “Hector…”

Little chuckled. “It’s the smart move.”

“I know it is.” Drake’s voice was as even as wet sand. “I—I think I should do it, is all.”

“I was the last person to see Halle outside,” Little said. It didn’t require much thought to work the logic out. He’d already played the sequences through in his mind for hours. A lifetime’s worth of hours. “They’ll get my face in a bit, if they don’t have it already.”

“It’s worth it,” Drake said after a moment.

Little laughed, a little bark more of surprise than amusement. “I know it is, Nick.”

“Yeah.” Drake pulled to the side of the road and stopped the trike. “But you should hear it from someone else. It’s worth it, what we’re doing here. It maybe means life for the Confederation.” He held out his hand.

Little took it. “If it means life for Halle or Sasha, it’s worth it,” he said. “Even you, I guess.”

Drake’s wry grin returned. He let go of Little’s hand, pressed the stud that unlocked the boot with a thunk, and pointed past Little’s shoulder. “In that case,” he said, “get out.”

Little looked where he was pointing. A vine was creeping up the military-link fence. Beyond it, across half a kilometer of brush and dead space, was the squat, gray, weather-streaked dome of a shuttle hangar. Little smiled and slid the door open.

Little had barely gotten the bag out of the trunk and slammed the lid when the little three-wheeler accelerated away with a whine. He watched it long enough to see Drake’s hand stick out the window, middle finger raised. Then it was around a curve and gone.

He smiled as he walked toward the fence.

BARTER STARPORT

XANTHE III

FREE WORLDS LEAGUE

22 MARCH 2466

Fyodor Danilov was in the control tower when the alarm sounded. He stood up from the solitaire game on his console and looked out the ferroglass windows with bar-Danan and everyone else. A shuttle was taxiing toward the runway. It was a civilian job, something like a Traveler-class mail boat. Danilov was too far away to tell the difference, and all the binoculars were taken.

“Who is that?” Bar-Danan demanded.

“No one is scheduled,” Danilov said without checking. Of course no one was scheduled. The port was closed. As soon as he said it he felt like an idiot. Maybe he’d be able to tell someone what color the sky was, too.

“Alert Crandall,” bar-Danan said. He glanced at Danilov. “It’s not like we can do anything here.”

“Do you think—?”

“I think you should alert Crandall Field,” bar-Danan said. “And then, yeah. Maybe wake up the militia pilots. If he gets off the ground we might have to send someone after him.”

Danilov turned away from the window and the shuttle, and picked up his headset. His voice was urgent, earnest even. He was shouting at the corporal on the other end of the phone. He was sure he sounded like a civilian puke caught in the middle of an emergency. That was okay.

No one would know the tension in his voice wasn’t panic. No one would know it was the tension of man watching a friend—a brother—going out to get killed on purpose.

Vocaine was shouting into his headset. Nehru watched red spots form on his florid face, watched the beads of sweat well up on his forehead. In a moment, the armpits of his uniform would be wet. He tuned out the big general’s words after the first couple—the most important. Anything he said after “Stop that shuttle!” was just detail Nehru didn’t care about.

“Too easy,” Nehru murmured.

“Easy, hell,” Vocaine said, suddenly standing next to him, watching the monitor. “We grounded all the planes, remember? If he gets off the ground, it’ll be orbit or transit before we catch up. If then. In space he can be a rock, and we’ll never find him.”

Nehru blinked. There’s no pursuit. He looked past Vocaine and speared a finger at a commo tech. “Contact the field CO. Block the field. Trucks, tanks, I don’t care. Tell him I want fighters in the air as soon as possible.” He looked back at the monitor. The shuttle was turning toward the runway—still several minutes away, but it could have been light years. Damn it. DAMN it. I’ve never been so stup—

“Sir!” Nehru looked. One of the technicians at the face-recognition stations was standing, waving at him. “We’ve got a match!”

Nehru glanced back at the shuttle on the screen, then at the tech. The need to know overcame him. He stalked down the narrow aisle, behind technicians who were already hunched over screens. The technician smiled like a child who’d just been patted on the head and stepped back, pointing.

Two images were on the screen. One was a grainy 2D surveillance still from a traffic camera. It showed a woman, clearly Halle Ostend, walking with her arm through the elbow of a taller man. He was half-twisted, looking at something behind him. And, coincidentally, directly at the camera. The second image was an identification photo from the Barter traffic database. The name underneath it was Hector Little.

A sudden roar went up from the other end of the room. Nehru flinched back and looked. The staffers around Vocaine—and the general—were on their feet, watching the monitor, with arms upraised and fists clenched. While he watched, another roar—approval, his mind told him—erupted. Nehru flinched, thinking to run back down the alley behind the technicians and see what they were seeing. Then he looked down.

He stabbed a control. The left-hand security image disappeared. Another control. A graph of something appeared. He snarled and slapped the keyboard with the palm of his hand. A help icon appeared, smiling the same smarmy smile IT geeks had been programming as a sick joke for a thousand years. Nehru jerked back.

“Make this—I need—the monitor, woman!” The technician blinked and reached past him, toggling a switch. The shuttle appeared on the runway tarmac, accelerating. The camera was unsteady, shaking as it followed it. Nehru frowned.

The camera zoomed out. On the runway in front of the shuttle appeared the bulk of an emergency sprayer truck. The lights were all on. The ladder-arm that reached up to spray deicer or fire-retardant foam over an aircraft was raised, like an arm trying to catch a ball. The truck was obviously going full-out. While Nehru watched, a man bailed out of the passenger side of the cab, heavy fire coat flapping like a cape. He hit the tarmac with a crunch that was soundless but no less sickening and disappeared into the wash of heat and disturbed air behind the shuttle. The shuttle angled slightly to the left, trying to get around. One of the wingtips stuttered. It had almost enough lift.

The driver of the truck heeled the wheel over, sending the truck angling to the shuttle’s landing gear at the last second. Nehru saw the truck start to flip onto its side—

—saw the shuttle’s nose landing gear bend as it struck the thick torso of the truck—

—saw the nose come down in sparks—

—a flash of light—

—the walls of the hangar they’d appropriated shook.

Nehru looked down toward Vocaine. Every man around him was screaming, waving their arms. Smiling. Nehru exhaled a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. He elbowed the technician aside and collapsed into the chair, letting his face fall into his palms.

The console beeped. Nehru jerked back. What did I touch—?

Another photo was on the screen, overlaying the burning wreck of the shuttle. It was Halle Ostend’s face, from her Happen security file. A second photo pulled up next to it. It was a static security camera, looking over the shoulder of an attendant of some sort. Nehru frowned. Ostend was standing behind an older, pissed-off looking woman who was haranguing the attendant. She was clutching the come-along strap of a luggage set.

Nehru lurched to his feet. “Vocaine!” His voice didn’t get more than two meters past the cheering. He looked at the general, still stuck in the middle of the celebrating officers. Then he looked back down at the screen. The timestamp on the image was barely an hour old. “VOCAINE!”

Nothing.

Another beep. He barely heard it. The image of Ostend at the airport terminal repeated itself, but this time it was centered on the woman doing the complaining. Then a second security image popped up, dated three weeks ago. It was the haughty woman and Hector Little, at a cafe somewhere in Barter. A moment later another window opened, showing another Barter ID photo. Sasha Feodoreyva.

Nehru tried to swallow. He couldn’t. He looked at Vocaine. Nothing. He looked around. The chair. He picked up the chair he’d been sitting in and spun, slamming the wheeled feet against the thin metal of the wall. The technician dropped to her backside, screaming and holding up her hand. The entire wall shook as he slammed the chair against it again and again. The shouting died down. Nehru kept slamming the chair, until he was conscious of the silence. He dropped the chair.

“Sir!?” Vocaine shouted. He was shouldering his way through the people struck motionless at the sight of the Inspectorate officer—the cool, collected, never-has-a-moment-of-not-eating-your-ass Inspectorate officer—having a breakdown.

Nehru pointed at the screen. His chest heaved. Vocaine reached him, eyes drawn together in worry. He looked where Nehru was pointing.

“Terminal,” Nehru gasped. “They’re in. The terminal!”

Vocaine frowned at the screen. He looked from the screen to Nehru then back to the screen. He whispered, “Buddha’s balls.”

Nehru gasped for air, unable to speak but screaming in his mind.

Vocaine stood. He looked at Nehru, nodded once, and spun. “Captain Mallory!” he bellowed, striding back the way he’d come. “Get me the sergeant of the guard!”

Nehru looked back at the images of the two women, overlaying the still-burning wreck of the shuttle. His lungs felt like they were going to explode. “Too easy,” he whispered. Then he lurched after Vocaine.

When Halle came out of the lavatory, it took her a second to find Sasha. The tall woman was standing among a crowd of people at one of the four-meter-tall ferroglass windows, holding her hands over her mouth in shock.

Halle frowned. She hadn’t known Sasha Feodoreyva could feel shock—but then she realized all the other women around her had the same expression. They were all looking at something. Halle walked over, keeping a careful distance.

She had to. People may have seen the blond woman enter the lavatory, but a brunette had come out. She’d darkened her exposed skin, and brown contacts obscured her eyes. Shaped pads rubbed at her gums when she clenched her teeth, but they pushed the outline of her cheeks out. No one who wasn’t an expert would see the blond Halle in the new one—unless she ruined it by going right up to Sasha and talking.

A pall of smoke was rising from behind a low building. The runway to the left was scattered with burning patches. Halle stopped. Hector. She looked around for the security guards, but most of them were along the windows, too. Halle walked over to one.

“What happened?” she asked. Her accent was backwoods Sierra, to go with the clothes she’d changed into: rustic leathers and homespun. “I was in the can.”

“Crash,” the guard said, without looking. “Looks like a shuttle was trying to get off, and a fire truck got in the way.”

“That’s horrible,” Halle said. She craned her neck, trying to see past the guard. That’s what a girl from Sierra would do. “Was anyone hurt?”

The guard looked at her in disbelief. “You don’t see the fires, lady?” He rolled his eyes and looked back at the runway.

Halle made a moue and glanced toward Sasha. The older woman had lowered her hands to her chest. She waggled her ring and pinky finger a bit.

Halle glanced down at the pistol buckled to the security guard’s belt.

You bet I’ll stay close to the gun.

Vocaine had turned even redder. Nehru watched him listen to his headset as the infantrymen around him geared up. Purple-flashed body armor clacked against each other, while the angry buzz of stun rifles being charged permeated every low-amplitude sound.

Vocaine slammed his fist into the wall. “I don’t care what you want, Captain. You will alert your guards. You will tell them to be on the lookout for the two women whose images I just forwarded you. You will tell them to arrest the women on sight, and consider them very dangerous. And you will not, under any circumstances, allow them to destroy any of their own possessions.” He listened for a moment, eyes on Nehru. “No. Every person in that terminal is expendable.” Listened. “Yes, you sack of shit, that includes you.” He tore the headset out of his ear and flung it across the room.

For a moment Nehru saw the man who’d been appointed general officer of the ’Mech program on Xanthe. Then he flicked his eyes to the side and brought his attention back.

“A massacre would be bad,” he murmured.

“No as bad as that data getting off-world,” Vocaine blurted. “Or them destroying it before we can confirm—”

“Sir!”

Both Nehru and Vocaine spun. The building shook as a screaming sound reached through the concrete walls of the terminal. Nehru clawed for the nearest communicators—a guard nearby had one on his shoulder—and shouted.

“Fighters! Now, get the fighters up!”

A gasp rippled through the crowd an instant before Sasha Feodoreyva saw it. Another shuttle clawed its way over the wreck of the first, burning vortices through the pillar of smoke and flame, and angled into the sky. Cursing erupted as every security guard in sight clapped a hand over their earbuds. Someone’s just shouted—Sasha looked back at the shuttle.

Nicholas. Her hand went back to her mouth. Drake had followed Hector Little and used the distraction of his death to steal his own shuttle. And he’s off the ground. Sasha couldn’t help it—she looked over the where Halle had been standing, feeling the smile threaten to break through her famously iron control. And so what if it does—

The guard next to Halle was staring at Sasha. He blinked, then looked down at the small screen of his pocket communicator. Then he dropped the comm and slapped his holstered pistol.

“That’s her—urk!” His shout cut off as Halle’s elbow took him in the throat. Sasha knew from experience the sound the guard’s hyoid bone had made when it broke. He’d be a couple of minutes dying. Painful minutes.

Halle’s hand scooped the pistol out of the falling guard’s holster and spun around. Travelers around her yelped and leaped back. One woman—she had to weigh two hundred kilos if she was a gram—just stared at Halle, jaw agape. The pistol came up, slid past the fat woman’s nose, and cracked. Sasha saw the muzzle flare brush tufts of the fat woman’s hair up, but the round tracked true to enter the next guard’s forehead. He dropped like a discarded toy. A woman screamed.

The scream jerked Sasha out of her reverie. She sprinted forward, luggage forgotten behind her, toward the dead guard. Halle was running ahead, trying to reach the next corner. Sasha slid on her knees next to the dead guard’s body. He’d fallen on his holster. Sasha gripped his shoulder and hauled.

The bam-bam-bam of an assault rifle cackled through the concourse. Sasha looked up even as her fingers unsnapped the guard’s holster. Halle was falling back, arms outstretched. Her head hit the floor with a thunk that Sasha heard from ten meters away. The brunette wig came loose and skittered across the polished floor like a macabre creature. Blood splashed parts of Halle’s platinum hair red.

Sasha fired four rounds into the wall past the corner. The pistol’s report was short and sharp, and her nose crinkled at the familiar scent of spent gunpowder. With her free hand she reached into a pocket and grabbed a handful of datacards. She reversed the pistol, holding it by the barrel—her fingers burned but she ignored them—and slammed it down on the first datacard, shattering it.

Bam. Another one flattened.

Her mind was filled with a mantra. They’ll find Halle’s cards. Mine will be gone. They’ll see me destroying them. They’ll find hers. They’ll think that’s it. Hector is dead. Nicholas is in the air. Halle is dead. I’ll be dead. That will be enough.

Bam. Bam.

She looked up. The barrel of an assault rifle poked around the corner at ankle height. A moment later the edge of a combat helmet appeared. Two datacards left. She looked down. Her peripheral vision caught the flare of the rifle firing. Two rounds whistled through the air next to her head. Bam.

One more card.

Sasha raised the pistol butt—

Nehru stepped carefully around the blood pooling behind the body and picked up the datacard. Several more were smashed to bits of plastic around the woman’s body. Vocaine’s men had already turned up half a dozen on the other dead woman. The big general was beyond the dead woman’s body, kneeling beside the gurney where a medic was treating the gunshot wound in the leg of an obese woman who’d been hit by stray shots. Vocaine said something and stood.

Nehru turned the datacard over in his hand. When Vocaine was near he brandished it. “Such a small thing, isn’t it?” He looked at it. “Have your people confirm the data is on here. I expect those—” he pointed to the other body “—will prove to be copies.”

Vocaine looked at the datacard, then at Nehru. He raised an eyebrow. Nehru handed him the datacard. Vocaine looked down at the tiny card in his meaty palm. “We got it back.”

Muted, but still loud, the scream of a fusion-powered aerospace fighter’s engine penetrated the concourse’s sound-proofing. Nehru turned and looked out the window. A pair of militia Dragonfire fighters whipped down the runway and hurtled into the sky with the rapidness that only a torch fighter could achieve.

“Almost,” Nehru whispered.

Then he turned and started walking toward the stairway that would take him to the control tower.

BARTER STARPORT

XANTHE III

FREE WORLDS LEAGUE

22 MARCH 2466

“There’s another one!”

Danilov spun around from the display console, half-lurching out of his chair. The red radar dot of the second shuttle was still receding as it gained distance from the starport. A monitor mounted above the window showed a display of the tarmac; a third Dragonfire was taxiing past the wreck of the first shuttle. He sat back. The cold pitons of fear that had shot into his stomach at the shout receded a bit. Not another shuttle.

Captain bar-Danan slammed his headset down and cursed. “The order’s confirmed.” He glanced at the roomful of controllers. His eyes settled on Danilov. “Dan, I want you to steer the fighters. The orders are to force it down if possible, shoot it down if not.”

Danilov nodded and turned back to his console, dialing for the fighter frequency. Behind him, he heard the door slide open. “Dagger Lead, this is Barter Control. Your target is angels forty and climbing. Bring it back or shoot it down.”

Ssu-ma Kane’s voice came back. “Roger, Control.” His voice was even, just like Danilov’s had been. Maybe a bit excited, but that was expected. No one would know the two men were talking about killing a friend.

A woman’s voice rose above the hubbub behind him. “What?” Danilov hit the mute button on his headset and twisted around to look. A black-clad officer and a huge man in sweat-stained general-officer’s purples stood just inside the door. Captain bar-Danan stood near them, frowning. The woman who’d spoken was half out of her chair. The black-clad officer said something Danilov couldn’t hear. He heard the reply.

“You let those animals shoot in the concourse?”

The pitons shot back into his stomach.

“We got them,” the big general growled. “It’s over.”

The small, black-clad man held up a hand and pointed out the window. “Almost,” Danilov heard. He turned back to face his display. The paired green carets of the Dragonfires of Dagger Flight were closing with the red caret. He watched the distance lessen.

Sasha and Halle were dead.

Ssu-ma Kane grunted as the Dragonfire’s thrust shoved him deeper into the padded cockpit seat. His g-suit inflated, pushing blood back up into his torso and head, and the warbling tone of the fire-control computer searching for a lock began to pulse in his ears. He toggled his comm.

“Two, Lead. My shot, over.”

“Lead, Two. Roger, your shot.”

Kane dialed his radio to transmit on the emergency frequency. “Unidentified shuttle, this is Dagger Flight of two aircraft, approaching from your six o’clock. You have violated a no-fly order. Return to Barter Starport immediately, or we will force you down.”

He waited. The Dragonfire’s missile launchers cycled and announced their readiness, but the fire control computer was still beeping an intermittent lock. He waited, and then pushed the button to replay his recorded transmission. His mind was in another place.

Drake. It has to be Drake. Kane knew Little would have taken the first shuttle himself on the tiny chance that his sacrifice was enough. He’d been expecting it since Little confirmed Danilov’s Masada call. It was the end-all plan, the one that said they were all expendable except for Danilov himself, who they’d been careful to isolate from themselves as much as possible. Drake would have followed Little in and taken advantage of the first shuttle’s destruction.

It might have worked. Except for the alert call.

And the fact that with the whole world watching, Kane would have to shoot him down. He looked at his tactical display, eyeing the green icon of Dagger Two. I’m already halfway to orbit… There was a datachip in the thigh pocket of his flight suit. It’d be a long haul to the jump point, and a DropShip might catch him, but he could do a Dutchman for part of the ride and keep from broadcasting—okay, he’d be dead, but the fighter and the chip would make it… but how would the Liao JumpShip know to pick up the derelict? Would they have shuttles fast enough to catch it and slow it down?

The radio beeped. He toggled the circuit live.

“You might as well go back.” Drake. “I’m not turning around, and you’re not shooting down a defenseless shuttle in front of God and radar. By now the media will be all over the port.”

Kane smiled. “Descend now, or you will be fired upon.” I’m sorry, brother.

“You can’t intimidate—”

Kane triggered his missiles. The flight was off-target, passing several kilometers in front of the shuttle. The shuttle’s course didn’t waver in the slightest. The reload mechanism made the entire aircraft shiver as a new cassette-round of missiles chunked into the launcher.

“Nice warning shot,” Drake said.

“The next one eats your exhaust,” Kane said. “Turn and descend, shuttle.”

“I told you—”

Kane shut off the radio.

A twitch of his hand brought the reticule on the HUD over the shuttle’s icon. The launchers in the Dragonfire’s wings signaled ready. A tap on his weapons selector brought the two lasers mounted under the fighter’s delta-shaped wings hot. He throttled forward, closing the range, and fired.

The lasers struck first, of course, burning away most of the meager anti-meteor armor over the shuttle’s aft fuselage. Moments later, even as the wounded shuttle floundered in the thin air, the missiles arrived and pounded it into two pieces. Kane pulled back on his stick, guiding the Dragonfire over the pall of smoke and away from the debris fall, then angled around to come back toward Barter.

Anyone watching would see a professional fighter pilot who’d done his job.

No one could see the small knot of anguish at what his duty required in the core of Ssu-ma Kane’s soul.

Nehru watched the red caret blink off of the repeater console and smiled. Around him the control room erupted with cheers, although he knew most of the technicians and controllers had no real idea what they were cheering for. To them it had been an exercise in keeping a no-fly rule enforced; they didn’t realize that they might have just saved a vital military advantage over the Capellan Confederation from escaping Xanthe III.

He wasn’t about to tell them.

Instead, he turned to Vocaine and gestured the big man closer. “I want the bodies to go back to Happen. And any evidence we recover from the shuttle wrecks.”

Vocaine nodded. His face was smiling, but something rubbed Nehru the wrong way. Something that niggled at the edge of his awareness, like a name half-remembered or a task left undone.

His communicator beeped.

Nehru frowned and pulled it out. He’d left strict orders that all communications were to pass through Vocaine. The code displayed was for the technical section. He flipped the comm open and held it to his ear, blocking his other ear with his free hand to keep out the noise of the control room. “Nehru.”

“Sir,” a female voice said, “we’ve had more action on the facial recognition.”

Nehru smiled. “Excellent. We’ll be able to match the last shuttle pilot. Send the pilot’s data to Happen. We’ll do the after-action there.” He looked back at Vocaine.

“Which one’s the pilot, sir?”

“What?”

“I’ve got two more confirmed hits here, sir. Two men.” There was a pause. “I’m sending them to your noteputer, sir.”

Nehru froze. “Names.”

“Nicholas Drake and Edgar Tibbetts, sir.”

Nehru closed his eyes. “Damn it.”

“Sir?”

“Nothing. Send me the data. Keep looking.” He snapped the comm closed and looked up at Vocaine. “It’s not over.”

Vocaine blinked. He waved an arm at the monitors. “What do you mean, it’s not over? We’ve got half a dozen bodies. Two blown-up shuttles. Handfuls of datacards.” He chewed on his lower lip for a second. Nehru watched his eyes flick to the Inspectorate insignia on Nehru’s collar and then back to the Inspector’s eyes. “How many of these bastards are there?”

Nehru restrained the semi-helpless shrug he felt. “More.” He turned back to the local tower commander. “Captain bar-Danan, thank you for your help. Please inform your staff that I appreciate their help as well.” The local officer looked up from where he’d been hunched over the back of one of his controller’s seats, indicating something with his hand. Bar-Danan nodded and then went back to his perusal.

“Now, General,” Nehru began, but a voice cut him off.

“Captain?” one of the controllers on the end raised his hand. “One of them isn’t coming back.”

Danilov hated himself.

Captain bar-Danan came to stand behind his chair. Danilov looked up at him, then back down at his console. He pointed. “Dagger Lead, sir. He was headed back, but now he’s broken formation and is headed for orbit.”

The captain reached past Danilov’s shoulder and stabbed the comm switch. “Dagger Lead, Barter Control, over.” He waited. Danilov watched the green carets separate. Kane’s fighter had broken away from its wingman without alerting the other pilot—and that meant he was far out of weapons range, even if Dagger Two was inclined to shoot down his wingman. The planes were identical—one wasn’t going to catch the other.

When next Danilov looked up, there were two more men behind bar-Danan. The black-clad man’s nametape read nehru. The general’s tag said vocaine. Both of them ignored him, their eyes intent on the two separated green carets.

“Dagger Two, Control. Respond, please.”

“You think it’s him?” Danilov heard Vocaine ask quietly. Him? Have they broken Kane’s ID already?

“Control, Dagger Two.”

“Two, how read, over?”

“Five-by, Control.”

“Two, where’s your pal going?”

“No idea, Control. He just took off. He’s not answering my comms, either.”

Bar-Danan bit back half a curse. He glanced at Vocaine and Nehru, then stared down at Danilov. Danilov met his stare but said nothing. He might make it. He might—and then I can wait, and there’ll be no danger—

Bar-Danan straightened. “Two, can you get him?”

“Control?”

“Can you catch him? Can you bring him down?”

“Sir—”

“I asked you a question, pilot.”

The anger in the pilot’s voice was palpable even across the radio. “Sir, his plane is just as fast as mine. Unless he turns, no. I can’t catch him.”

Bar-Danan closed his eyes, then opened them. “Roger that, Two. Keep on him.” He toggled the microphone off and, after shaking his head at Danilov, turned. “Sirs, there’s nothing I can do. Perhaps if we’d had high-orbit interceptors standing by—”

Nehru cleared his throat. “If I may, Captain?”

Bar-Danan blinked, then shrugged. “If you can change the laws of gravity, Colonel…”

Nehru smiled, then looked down at Danilov. He had piercing eyes—not colorful, just smart. Eyes that didn’t miss things. His voice, when it was directed right at you, was modulated in just a way that you didn’t want to say anything against it. “Might I borrow your console?”

Danilov slipped his headset off and stood. “Of course.” His mind was racing. What could he do? Kane was free. Unless there was a navy ship in orbit he didn’t know about. Or some secret flight of Inspectorate super-pilots.

Nehru called up the information on Kane’s fighter. He selected the airframe’s maintenance designator and copied it to a clipboard, then opened a new communication window. Several keystrokes later—keystrokes that Danilov, who’d worked that console every day for months, couldn’t follow—a black-backed, lightning-bolt-and-sword insignia splash screen flashed, and then a small window appeared. Nehru copied the airframe data into the new field and pressed execute. Then he cleared the screen and sat back, crossing his arms. Only the radar tracking screen remained, with its two green carets.

One green caret.

Danilov stared.

“Control!” Dagger Two shouted. “Dagger Two! Dagger Lead just exploded!” There was a pause. “I just checked the recording. No missiles, no other contacts. He just—blew the hell up.”

Danilov looked down at the back of Nehru’s head. For an instant he saw himself snatching the man’s head with both hands and twisting, listening for the crackle of bone snapping. He could do it. He was fast enough. The Maskirovka had trained him how to move like that—

He exhaled. There was a datacard in his locker. It had to get off Xanthe.

Had. To.

“Sir,” Captain bar-Danan said quietly. “What just happened?”

Nehru stood and straightened his uniform jacket. “The fighter’s anti-capture failsafe just activated.”

“You mean—”

“I triggered its self-destruct.”

Bar-Danan frowned. “That can’t be done remotely.”

Nehru inclined his head. “It can if you’re the Inspectorate.” He glanced at Danilov, who stood back and tried to focus on a spot on the wall above his console. The Maskirovka would be very interested in that information, too—assuming he survived to deliver the report.

Captain bar-Danan’s mouth worked. “I don’t—”

“You don’t need to, Captain,” General Vocaine broke in. “Any inquiries can be directed to my office at Happen. Or to General Bangs.” He looked from bar-Danan to Danilov, then back. “The colonel-inspector was never here.”

“Sir—” bar-Danan began.

“Captain,” Vocaine growled, but Nehru held up his hand.

“You’re concerned about my authority to do such a thing, Captain?” Nehru asked. There was very little more than pro forma question in his tone. “I assure you, it is well within my jurisdiction when treason is suspected. If Tibbetts or Drake had been able to get out of the atmosphere—”

“Tibbetts or Drake?” Bar-Danan looked to Danilov. “Who was flying Dagger Lead?”

“Kane, sir.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw Nehru blink.

“Kane?” Nehru looked at Danilov.

“Ssu-ma Kane, sir,” he said. “Flight lieutenant.”

“Is that confirmed?”

“I recognized his voice, sir,” Danilov said. “We’ve done a lot of training ops with the boys over at Crandall Field the last few months.” He kept his voice level, but his gorge was threatening to rise. He knew what he had to do. The instructors had warned him about this scenario all the way back to the Farm. There was nothing more important than the mission. Nothing. Not friends, not family, not even the love of his life.

Nothing.

Which meant there was nothing else he could do. Not with the Inspectorate itself standing a meter away and his chance to direct suspicion away from himself right there—

“Then one of them flew the shuttle,” Nehru said to Vocaine.

“Tibbetts or Drake,” Vocaine said.

“Yes—”

Danilov heard his own voice and hated it. “I’m sorry, sir—but Edgar Tibbetts, is that who you mean?”

Nehru looked at him. “How do you know that name?” he snapped.

Captain bar-Danan opened his mouth, but Danilov kept going. “I know him, sir. He works down the hall.” He pointed at the hatch. “In the commo room.”

Nehru and Vocaine both turned slowly to look where Danilov pointed. Bar-Danan was watching Danilov, a pained look on his face. Not angry, Danilov didn’t think. Hurt—but not hurt by Danilov.

That’s right, a cold, evaluative, absolutely loathsome part of Danilov’s mind said. Suspect him, not me.

“Down the hall,” Vocaine murmured. “Buddha’s balls…”

Nehru knew what adrenaline felt like. He’d felt it often enough—even recently, when Reyes had attacked him in Happen, or when the sniper shot the guards in front of him. But the feeling he felt now was new. It was adrenaline mixed with fear. Not fear for himself—he’d either be good enough or he wouldn’t, and he’d made peace with that decision years ago. What scared him was that he might have made a mistake.

Nobody knew about Kane.

He touched Vocaine’s shoulder and pulled him toward the door. “Right now, General,” he said. “We’re taking him right now.” He looked at Captain bar-Danan. “You have a sidearm? Give it to me.”

Bar-Danan pulled a black service automatic from his holster and handed it over. Nehru checked it, then looked at Danilov. “The commo room?”

The traffic controller gestured with his chin. “Third door on the left.” He swallowed. “There’s a sign.”

Nehru nodded and turned away. He heard Vocaine behind him. “Keep your people here, Captain.” Then he felt rather than saw the reassuring bulk of Vocaine’s body behind him. The large general was breathing softly but heavily.

“You should let me, sir,” Vocaine said.

Nehru smiled. “Colonels before generals, General.” He almost giggled. Another datum filed; he hated the combination of adrenaline and fear. The door to the control room slid open and he stepped through, pistol leveled. The door closed a moment later behind Vocaine. It was child’s play to find the third door on the left—they were a meter apart. That means small rooms.

The door was unlocked. He touched the stud to open it and led with the pistol.

The first shot took Nehru in the arm. He spun away, crashing into the other side of the door and falling into the corridor. Vocaine rushed forward and bent down to grab him. More shots rang out, reports crashing against the thin metal walls. A wet-sounding thunk clashed with the ringing in Nehru’s ears, and Vocaine’s bulk collapsed on him.

Nehru ignored the pain in his arm and pointed the pistol into the room. He fired six shots, each one punishing his eardrums. Hands gripped his ankles and yanked him back—his last round whanged past his ear as it ricocheted from the doorframe.

More shots from inside the room. Nehru looked toward his feet.

Danilov was dragging him backward. The controller’s face was a mask—fear? Excitement? All the emotions one expected a semi-civilian in his first firefight to show.

Bar-Danan was next to him, struggling with Vocaine’s feet. The big general was dead weight. Nehru gestured madly with in his one working arm. The one holding the gun.

“Get out of here,” he hissed. “He might—”

Bar-Danan stepped around Vocaine’s body and plucked the pistol out of Nehru’s hand. He ejected the magazine and replaced it with one from his belt. The expression on his face was set but distant. Nehru frowned. He’d seen that face before—determination. Stop cataloguing, his mind told him. You’ll most likely be dead in a minute—

Danilov knelt and grabbed the hole in Nehru’s upper arm. He nearly bit through his lip at the pain. “Hold on, sir,” Danilov said. “Medics are coming.”

“Bugger the medics,” Nehru said. “We need a tac team—”

Reports from bar-Danan’s pistol banged against the corridor walls. He was crouched next to the doorframe, his hand extended around the edge. He burned through his entire magazine as fast as he could and leaned back. His hands were replacing the empty magazine as more rounds from inside the room hit the opposite wall.

“Missed him,” the captain murmured.

“Just wait—” Nehru gasped.

Bar-Danan slid his hand around and triggered two rounds. Then he pulled his hand back, waiting. Another fusillade of shots hit the far wall. I wonder what’s on the other side of that wall? Nehru blinked and tried to look down at his arm. First the adrenaline, then the fear, now being shot—what the hell was he thinking about?

The sound of the last shot from inside the room was still bouncing off the walls when bar-Danan stood and swept into the room, leading with the pistol. Nehru opened his mouth to shout—bam-bam—and closed it. There were no more shots.

Bar-Danan stepped out of the room, the pistol hanging loosely at his side. “Got him on the reload,” he mumbled. Then he sat down. The pistol clattered to the floor.

“Captain?” Danilov asked. His hand shifted on Nehru’s arm. The Inspector gasped and nearly wrenched his arm out of the controller’s grip. That made the pain worse—

Danilov felt the muscles beneath his fingers relax as Nehru passed out. He looked at bar-Danan, but the captain was still sitting, staring at the floor. He didn’t appear hurt—just out of it. First kill. Danilov looked down at the Inspector.

I could let him bleed out.

No.

That was the wrong play. He’d be a lot safer as the man who saved him than the man who let him die. Right now the mental image Nehru had of Danilov was a man who helped. Even if the undoubtedly still-running facial recognition matched him with Tibbetts, it would only be here at the port. And Nehru already knew they worked together.

And I fingered him.

I’m the reason he’s dead.

But no. His training took over, shuffling that thought into the folder of things thought but not true. He looked down at the sword-and-lightning flash on Nehru’s collar. That’s the reason he’s dead. The reason they’re all dead. He shifted his grip.

Nehru’s eyes fluttered open. “Danilov…”

Danilov leaned closer, trying to hear. “Tell Vocai—” Nehru stopped, and frowned. His head twisted around until he could see Vocaine’s body. “Tell the governor. It’s over. We got them.”

“I will,” Danilov said. He forced some earnestness into his voice. “I’ll tell them. Rest now, Colonel.”

Nehru let his eyes close but stayed conscious—mostly conscious, anyway. His mind was aflame, burning with the pain of his arm and the exultation of completion and the sheer unexpected complexity of the thing. The Maskirovka had been everywhere—at Happen and here in Barter. In the militia, as a bloody pilot no less. They’d stolen shuttles under military lockdown, and infiltrated the control tower apparatus. And when they were discovered—

—they fought.

Reyes had died fighting. The sniper—Quinn, hadn’t his name been?—had died fighting. The two women in the concourse. The two shuttle thieves. The fake militia pilot—all of them had died trying to get away with the BattleMech data. They had all died. Killed themselves, almost. None of their schemes had much of a chance of success. His mind was already turning over the logic for his report—tactics would have to be changed. The Mask had always been brutal and fanatical, but this was a whole new level. To sacrifice an entire team—

Danilov’s grip shifted on his arm. Fresh pain washed across his awareness, and he surrendered to it.

The whole team.

They’d almost gotten away with it.

Danilov stepped back as the medics raced out of the lift and knelt next to Nehru. One of them looked at him and reached out, but Danilov held up his hands and shook his head. “I’m fine,” he said. The medic ducked toward Nehru. Another one roused bar-Danan.

“I’m okay,” the captain said. He pushed himself to his feet, his earlier malaise seemingly forgotten. He looked down at Danilov. “He said it was over, right?” Danilov nodded. Bar-Danan nodded back. “Then I’ve got a port to open.”

“I’ll be right behind you,” Danilov said. He gestured toward Nehru. “I want—”

Bar-Danan nodded. “When you’re done.”

When the medic loaded Nehru onto the gurney and into the lift, he went with them. They got out on the concourse level, but he stayed in the elevator. The lockers were on the bottom level.

The datacard was in his locker. With another clean ID.

And enough cash to buy a spot on the first ship off-planet.

Coming Soon: Redemption Rift

A BattleTech Novel by Jason Schmetzer

ON THE HUNT AGAIN…

It is the Dark Age—3139—and the famed mercenary regiments of Wolf's Dragoons have returned to the employ of House Kurita after a century of bitter enmity. Somehow, mercenaries and Kuritans must find a way to work together in a combined invasion of the Dragon’s oldest enemy, House Davion.

Thrust into the middle of this new conflict, Colonel Henry Kincaid is surprised by the commonalities—duty, honor, expediency—the Dragoons and Combine forces share.

But as the Dragoons’ lightning tactics and unstoppable drive brings world after Davion world under the Dragon’s banner, old hatreds arise anew, and with them come insidious plots engineered to cause the mercenaries’ downfall.

Throughout the campaign, General Kincaid struggles to rectify what he thought he had always known about the Kuritans with the truth he discovers while fighting alongside them. But when his forces are trapped on a Davion world with no way to escape and the enemy forces closing in, can he pull another bit of genius from his hat, or will the battalions of Wolf’s Dragoons be destroyed?

HASLET SPACEPORT

GANDY’S LUCK

DRACONIS COMBINE

2 JANUARY 3139

The hull of the DropShip Jaime Wolf shuddered as it came to rest against the hard ferrocrete of the port’s tarmac, but not so much as it had when ringing under the fire of a Jade Falcon autocannon. Then it had rung like a tocsin, while here it only rumbled.

Colonel Henry Kincaid—Hack to his friends—reflected on the difference, since every fiber of his being screamed that this was no less enemy territory. Dragoons blood wet the soil of the Combine worlds near here—red blood, legendary blood.

“It’s not that bad, Colonel,” Captain Nina Slade murmured. He opened his eyes and glared at her where she was strapped into the next couch. “No one’s shooting at us.”

“It doesn’t feel right,” Hack said.

“It never does,” Slade said. She looked away, at the hatch. Hack stared at her. She was a good jock, maybe the best assault ’Mech pilot he’d ever seen. She wielded her Hellstar like it was the sword of an angry god. She kept his flank clear on the field, every time. The colonel’s bodyguard.

Not just on the field, either, he told himself.

Hack knew he was being unfair. The Dragoons were mercenaries—hired soldiers, the best in the Sphere. They’d worked for the Lyran Commonwealth since it was the Lyran Alliance, since the Robes had razed Outreach and killed the Old Wolf himself—Jaime Wolf, the DropShip’s namesake and founder of the Dragoons. He had been the Wolf in Wolf’s Dragoons—not the Clan Wolf, their parent masters. It had been Jaime Wolf who had held the regiments together for half a century, across every realm of the Inner Sphere. The Old Wolf’s death in Harlech had signaled a change in the Dragoons, and losing Maeve soon after had changed even more. There were no more Wolfs—no one accepted the Honorname, and all of Jaime’s blood kin had chosen other paths.

But Kurita—House Kurita, rulers of the samurai-laden Draconis Combine. The feud had kept the Dragoons away from House Kurita for more than a hundred years. But now they were here—back on the Davion border, back under the red-and-black Snake flag. Hirelings of the Dragon.

Unity, he thought. I’ve got to get this under control.

A chime sounded Jaime down and safe, and Slade and the other four officers of his command Star unbuckled and rose. All wore the slacks and undershirts of the Dragoons dress uniform, and each moved toward the lockers with the jackets and swords. Hack undid his restraints, but remained seated. The others filled the small space, and his mind was still elsewhere.

“Hack,” Slade whispered, leaning down. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” he said, blinking.

“It’s time,” she said.

“I know.” He clambered to his feet and thumbed his locker open. The dress jacket was heavy, and he was thankful the last redesign had nixed the cape that had been standard. Dark blue, with rampant wolf’s heads on the shoulder and rank stars on his breast—the three full stars of a colonel—the Dragoons dress blues were elegant but simple. He was entitled to a saber, but he forewent it. He carried an oiled blue-steel automatic in a thigh holster instead.

“The general’s going to make you take that off,” Lieutenant Alicia Ramsay said, sotto voce. She was one of the Linebacker jocks in his Star, together with Lieutenant Caitlin Roth. The two of them stood near the hatch, shoulder-to-shoulder, regarding their colonel with near-identical expressions of resignation. In combat they were a hellish team, using their heavy Omnis’ speed to move under Slade’s supporting fire and savage an enemy.

In person, they were quite different—Roth, tall and lithe, with blond hair and chocolate eyes, where Ramsay was café au lait in complexion with straight black hair. They were near-inseparable. Slade liked to say they shared a brain.

“No provoking the Snakes,” the final Starmate put in. Lieutenant Abigail Thistle drove the Star’s sole light ’Mech, a nimble Pack Hunter she’d won from a Kell Hound in honorable trial.

“You can’t call them Snakes to their face,” Slade said.

“No provoking the Kuritans, then,” Thistle said.

“Ladies,” Hack said, gesturing toward the hatch. “Can we get this over with?”

“Sir,” Slade said, clicking her heels together. Thistle pulled the hatch open and stepped outside, nodding to the marine guard. Hack did the same as he filed out, taking an instant to let his eyes flicker over the marine’s impeccable dress blues. The entire crew was in their dress, unless they were on necessary duties. Just in case their employers wanted a tour.

Kuritas.

“Hack!” General Brubaker called as soon as the group reached the boarding lock. “I told you about the pistol.” The commander of all Dragoons slapped his hand against the pommel of his dress saber. “Swords or nothing.”

“Sir,” Hack said, unbuckling his gunbelt and handing it to a crewman.

“You okay for this?” Brubaker asked, taking Hack’s arm and leaning in close.

“I had my say, sir,” Hack said, frowning. He let the general steer him a few steps away from the rest of the party and ignored the indignant look on Colonel Crews’s face. The Gamma Regiment commander was the soul of propriety—powwows in the lock before debarking were poor protocol.

“I need you out there,” Brubaker said. The general was short for a MechWarrior, a product of his genes. Hanson Brubaker, the line’s founder, had been an infantryman before he became a MechWarrior, and a damn good one. His progeny still displayed great aptitude in that realm, but Thomas Brubaker had translated that aptitude into a tenacity for ’Mech combat that had earned him the general’s diamond. “We have to be together on this.”

“The contract’s signed, General,” Hack said. “I think it’s a mistake, but it’s done. I’m a Dragoon. I’ll do my duty, you know that.”

“We need this, Hack,” the general said. “We have to get out of Steiner’s shadow. We have to get away from the Kells. They used to come to us for help, damn it. This contract will show the Sphere we’re back in shape. And Unity knows in this climate we need all the good press we can get.”

Hack grunted agreement and the general moved back to the head of the procession. A dozen people, with two dozen more lined up in the corridors behind, waiting for the terminal gate to seal against Jaime’s hull.

We need it, he says. Hack tried to put the old arguments out of his mind. He knew the situation. With the Republic gone—or as good as gone, locked behind their Fortress wall—war was spreading, and mercenaries made their fortunes in war. The Dragoons had been the preeminent mercenaries once. They were ready to become so again, but decades of holding the line against the Jade Falcons had made them specialists in that and little else. Many Dragoons, younger Dragoons, had been agitating for years for new action, new contracts. Spurs, they were called—hot-blooded young warriors, always eager to give the hot spur, always pushing. Aggressive jocks. Good Dragoons, men and women with attitudes Hack found himself agreeing with.

But Kurita…

One of the tenuous knots that had held the Dragoons together in the death-filled years of the Jihad eighty years ago had been tradition. They were Dragoons, and even when it was only the Black Widows out earning the name, the Dragoons were still alive. The survivors had bent to rebuilding using that tradition as a benchmark. New Dragoons were inculcated. Orphans—more than ever, thanks to the insanity of the Word of Blake—were raised with Dragoons legend. New battalions formed, old regiments re-formed. Even the drawdown of the ’80s and ’90s couldn’t kill them, not with the Jade Falcons still out there. The Dragoons survived—the Dragoons endured. And, in small steps along the way, the Dragoons prospered. But prosperity in the mercenary trade meant new blood—new recruits to temper in combat, and new enemies to hone the edge. The Dragoons knew the Jade Falcons.

It was time to learn war again—this time against the Davions.

The hatch creaked open and Hack’s ears popped as the pressure equalized to the atmosphere of Gandy’s Luck. From the expressions around him, his ears weren’t the only ones affected. Nina Slade was making chewing motions, frowning. Hack smiled faintly—she hated anything happening without her control. It kept her from a company command—she couldn’t delegate for anything.

As light bled through the steadily increasing gap, Hack drew in a deep breath and squared his shoulders. Time for the dog and pony show.

“Chun! Get your ’Mech back in line!”

Captain Nathan Castle squeezed the controls of his BattleMech with sweaty hands, watching the third ’Mech in his Star bobble from foot to foot. The Elementals anchored to the Omni’s torso swung precariously, thrown off-balance by the unexpected motions. Castle stifled a curse and glared.

“Sorry, Skipper,” Chun said. “I got it now.”

“One minute, Captain,” radioed Jaime’s officer of the deck. “I’m cracking the hatch in twenty.”

“Roger that,” Castle replied. He checked his chrono, then looked into his heads-up display, checking the rest of his company.

Charlie Company, Spider’s Web Battalion, was a standard striker company: five OmniMechs, twenty-five Elementals, and fifteen armored vehicles. The fighter squadron was still in orbit, shepherding the dependents’ convoy through the orbital defenses. The rest of Charlie would shortly be parading for the Dragoons’ new employers. It was Castle’s first op as company commander. He was sure Major Chan hated him.

Behind his ’Mechs, the Regulators spun up their fans. They were old hovertanks, first-model craft bought secondhand, but still powerful and fast. Each was painted like the ’Mechs and battlesuits of Charlie Company: low-sheen black with red trim, with white spider webs draped across the left shoulders of the ’Mechs and battlesuits, or across the left side of the Regulators’ turrets. The Dragoons’ wolf-head was painted red in reverse on their right shoulders or sides.

We look good, Castle knew.

“Captain Castle,” Major Chan’s voice made him flinch. “All set?”

“We’re good, sir,” he said, glaring at Chun’s Thor. The jock had gotten the recalcitrant ’Mech back in line, but the Elementals were still settling themselves.

“No surprises, Captain,” Eleanor Chan said. She was with the rest of the brass on the boarding dock, so Castle doubted she’d seen Chun’s stumble. “Make a good first impression.”

A tone sounded in Castle’s cockpit. The time was up. “Roger that, sir,” he said. He pushed his throttles forward as the channel clicked closed. Light splashed across his ’Mech’s feet as he started down the ramp at the head of his company. His sensors immediately registered fifty or more contacts before he shut them down—other DropShips, orbiting VTOLs, even ’Mech signatures. All DCMS-tagged.

The Dragoons’ employers.

Once his ’Mech was on the tarmac, Castle moved a dozen or so meters away from the base of the ramp to clear the way for the rest of his Star. The Elementals of Lieutenant Parke’s Point were rock-steady on his Cauldron-Born’s torso, secure in their mounts. The twin barrels on the ends of the squat Omni’s arms—paired PPCs and pulse lasers—were dark maws even powered down.

As his Star formed in a diamond behind him, he took a second to look around. The terminal bridge had coupled to the DropShip’s hull, covering Jaime’s boarding lock and hiding much of the terminal from view, but from what Castle could see through the windows, the terminal was packed.

“Aren’t we popular,” Chun muttered.

“New toys,” Castle said. “Quiet.”

The first of the cavalry squadron’s hovertanks nosed down the ramp, lift fans driving a dark cloud of dust and grit before them. A beacon appeared on Castle’s HUD, blinking the prearranged code. He uploaded the navs to the company net and set his ’Mech in motion. The parade ground was on the other side of the terminal, and it took the company a minute or to get around the massive bulk of the Overlord-C-class DropShip. The unit moved in precise formation—close order was a big deal in the sibkos, and in the training companies.

“Unity,” Castle breathed as he cleared Jaime’s aft-right landing strut and saw the terminal face. The entire face of the building was ferroglass—nothing else could be used near the punishing throb of fusion engines—and the terminal was three floors high. Every floor, every centimeter of window space, was filled with civilians pressed against the glass. On the top floor he saw a knot of people in the black of DCMS uniforms, and a smaller group of blue-hued Dragoons dress.

He halted the Cauldron-Born and checked his sensors, noting carefully the distances between himself, the DropShip, and the terminal. “Initial point,” he said. “One minute to show time.” He switched channels. “Parke.”

“We’re ready, Nate.”

“Don’t scratch my ’Mechs.”

The Elemental’s laughter filled the flat transmission, tinny in his speakers. “Just stand still when you’re supposed to, Captain. We sibs can play nice.”

Castle laughed and cut the channel. With his timer showing forty-two seconds remaining, he tripped two switches. The first sent a prearranged comm burst on Dragoon frequencies. The second pre-heated the large pulse lasers built into the Cauldron-Born’s arms.

Hack ignored the initial hubbub as the general met with the senior Combine muckety-muck and exchanged credentials and contracts. An almost-unheard beep sounded behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw Nina Slade touch the radio bud in her right ear and nod at him.

“Forty seconds,” he murmured. He turned to look out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the small Dragoons force on the tarmac. A DCMS officer—a tai-sa, or full colonel, from her collar flashes—stepped beside him.

“A most impressive vessel,” she said. “Overlord-C?”

“Taken from the Jade Falcons,” Hack said.

“By troops you command,” the Drac officer said. She didn’t look at him, even when he glanced toward her. Her dark hair was cut short, short enough that it could be tucked behind her ears to keep from blocking a neurohelmet’s contacts in the cockpit. Her skin was flawless, olive-shaded. She had a remarkably sharp jawline, terminating in a pert chin.

“By Dragoons, yes.”

“Your modesty does you credit, Colonel Kincaid,” she said, and Hack thought he saw her eyes flicker toward him. “It was your battalion—that battalion, in fact, the Spider’s Web—that defeated the Falcons on Great X for the DropShip. The first of four DropShips you claimed while you were a major.”

Hack stared.

“We needed the hulls…” he began. “How did you—”

“I am familiar with all the Dragoons officers above the rank of captain,” she said. Hack could have sworn he saw a grin tug at the corner of her mouth.

She turned away from the window and faced him. “I am Tai-sa Tori Ishihara of the Ryuken-go.” She offered her hand, which Hack took. Her grip was firm, but without the fragility of civilian women or the crushing overcompensation of some female soldiers. There was confidence in it.

“Henry Kincaid.”

“You are called Hack, neh?”

Hack grinned. “I am, yes. Since I was in the sibko.”

“A hack is a subpar performer, is he not? Is that not the English definition?”

This time he laughed, a full laugh that boomed across the terminal, interrupting conversations. General Brubaker looked over, his face questioning at first and then softening to a grin when he saw Hack’s expression.

“That is the English definition, yes. Maybe someday I’ll tell you how a hack became a colonel of the Dragoons. But for now—” Hack inclined his head toward the window. “—you’ll want to watch the show.”

On the tarmac, at no signal anyone in the terminal could see, Charlie of the Spider’s Web burst into motion.

The Cauldron-Born rocked as the timer reached zero. As one, the five Elementals limpeted to the ’Mech’s torso swung themselves up and over, landing atop the Omni’s broad shoulders and upper hull. They did it with pure momentum, not once firing the integral jump jets in their armor’s calves and back. Five tons of moving metal kicked enough inertia into the Cauldron-Born’s hull to rock it, but not enough to make Castle clutch his controls and steady it. Instead, he spread the ’Mech’s arms wide.

An Elemental clambered out to the end of each of the Cauldron-Born’s arms, carefully balanced. Two more moved to the ’Mech’s shoulders, and Parke put his battlesuit atop the Omni’s cockpit housing. Castle heard the clang of Parke’s tough boots hitting the armor over his head.

Secondary screens showed him the rest of his Star. The other four Points of Elementals had dropped straight down, landing again without jets, crouched on one knee. Behind them the Regulators spun up their fans.

“It’s like dancing,” Castle whispered. His fingers were sweaty on his controls. He’d never been able to keep time.

Ishihara gasped as the Elementals on the Cauldron-Born hit their jets and leaped thirty meters into the air, each on a different trajectory. Behind them, five of the Regulators burst into motion, darting forward in clouds of dust and halting in a clang of sparks where steel skirts met the tarmac. The Elementals fell, braking hard on their jets, each alighting atop one of the Regulators.

“Very precise,” she murmured.

Hack listened, watching her more than the show. He’d seen the rehearsals. Castle was a good jock—his people would get it right.

“Wait,” Hack whispered. Ishihara turned her head, but Hack just pointed at the tarmac. She looked back, just in time, as twenty more suits of powered armor left the ground, and ten more hovertanks burst into motion.

As the rest of the Elemental Star and the cavalry squadron arranged themselves to repeat the performance of Parke’s Point in greater numbers, the ’Mechs of Charlie’s Star lurched into smooth movement.

Castle guided his 65-ton ’Mech backward ten meters, bringing it even with Garcia and Chun. Behind them, Wagner and Fraser brought their Omnis forward, filling the gap and leaving not more than two meters between each ’Mech. Castle raised the Cauldron-Born’s arms until they pointed directly overhead.

“I hope the airspace is cleared,” he muttered.

“Oh,” Ishihara said quietly.

The five OmniMechs of the Charlie Star were in a precise review line, and the Regulators were in motion. Each of the second ten to move carried two Elementals on its hull, and those craft spun into place in line in front of the ’Mechs. The initial five, with Parke’s Point aboard, lifted and slid into place echeloned in front of those. The turrets of all fifteen tanks were aligned directly ahead, long snouts of the Gauss rifles dark and hungry.

On an unseen cue, all twenty-five battlesuits dropped to one knee atop the tanks. All fifteen tanks cut their fans and dropped to the tarmac in a unified clang.

Castle’s Cauldron-Born rippled a burst of green laser fire at the sky from both arms, flickering the terminal in a green-tinted strobe for two instants.

All of that happened in less than a second.

There were several precious moments of disbelief. No one moved in the field of Hack’s vision, nor did any sound filter from the other floors. Everyone in sight of the Dragoons company was transfixed.

“Very acrobatic,” the nobleman standing near the general said, finally.

The entire terminal burst into cheers, ringing against the glass and reverberating off the cold ferrocrete walls. Hack clapped with the rest of them, aware that Ishihara was clapping as well.

After what must have been a full minute, the applause tapered off and was replaced with the susurrus of exclamations. He nodded to Slade to signal Charlie to stand down and turned back to Ishihara.

“That was amazing,” she said. Her mouth was flat, but her eyes were smiling. Hack smiled at her and shrugged.

“We practice close-order in the Dragoons,” he said. “It instills discipline and careful control of your tools.”

“We do the same,” she said, looking over his shoulder at the now-quiescent ’Mechs and tanks. “But I cannot say my Ryuken could do the equal.” She looked over his other shoulder and her expression changed. “It appears we are needed,” she said.

Hack looked over to where Brubaker beckoned.

“Hack,” the general said when the two had threaded through the crowd, “this is Count Ruiz. My lord, Colonel Henry Kincaid, commander of my striker battalions.”

Hack shook the nobleman’s limp hand and nodded.

“I see you’ve met Tai-sa Ishihara,” Ruiz said. The Kuritan officer nodded to Hack and shook Brubaker’s hand. “She is to be your liaison officer, General, as well as commander of the Ryuken assigned to your mission.”

“Our mission?” Brubaker asked. “I understood we were to be given garrison posts along the Davion border while we worked up to several projected raiding missions.”

That wasn’t exactly what Hack had read in the briefing documents, but the vague information presented about their duties had been one of his bones of contention when they’d discussed the Combine offer.

“The gunji-no-kanrei sent my regiment here with orders,” Tai-sa Ishihara said. “We are to assist you in conquering the Rift.”

“The Reach?” Brubaker said. Hack’s mind was scrolling across a mental map. The Reach was ten worlds along the Combine-Federated Suns border, disputed worlds that had been fought over so long they were now claimed by both governments.

“For too long the Davions have disputed our claim to those worlds,” Ruiz said.

“But ten worlds—”

“The Dragoons, assisted by the Ryuken, will be the assault forces,” Ishihara said. “Once the defenders have been reduced, pacification units will arrive to relieve us.”

“Us?” Hack asked.

“Ryuken-go will assist.”

“And just what form will this assistance take, Tai-sa?” Kincaid asked, his earlier informality forgotten. They’d been on-world for less than an hour, and already the Snakes were getting ready to pull the rug out from under them. I was right all along—

“That is up to your general,” she said, looking at Brubaker. “In matters of theater-level and below, my chain of command runs through Wolf’s Dragoons.”

“What?”

“I am officer-in-charge of your Professional Soldiery Liaison, Colonel,” Ishihara said, looking back at Hack. “Which means I carry the orders of my Warlord to your general, and your concerns to my Warlord.”

“Hack—” Brubaker began.

“In all other matters, however,” Ishihara continued, cutting him off, “my Ryuken answer to your Dragoons. We have been unable to recapture the Reach worlds. It is now your task, that of your Dragoons. It is our duty to assist you.

“However you would have us do so.”

Chapter Two

FAVOR BARRACKS

MARLOWE’S RIFT

THE REACH

14 FEBRUARY 3139

Colonel Robert McShane blinked hard and tried to ignore the pulsing between his eyes as the alarm played a timpani on his sinuses. He slammed the command center hatch closed behind him and shouted. “Turn that damn alarm off!”

The clanging died immediately as one of the techs tripped the cutoff switch, but the clamor that rose to replace it was just as painful. McShane knew it well, both from exercises and the odd Drac raid. It was the clamor of excited officers and men riding high on adrenaline, shouting over each other, each certain in the knowledge that their bit of information was the most important to the entire room at that precise instant. McShane ground his teeth and stalked to his own multi-paneled station.

A red button was caged with a clear plastic cover. He uncaged it and blipped the alarm again for a half-second. When it stopped, everyone in the room was staring at him. The only sound was the bleeping of radar repeaters and the whir of cooling fans.

“Everyone take a breath,” he said, “and settle down.” McShane looked around the room, trying to meet everyone’s eyes. “Good.” He sat down.

“Report.”

“Polar radar picked up a DropShip falling out of orbit,” his XO, Major Gerald Horton, said. “No IFF and a steep burn.” The pale officer glanced around the room, gauging the mood. “Looks like Drac raiders, sir.”

“Jump points?” McShane asked. Interstellar travel was carried out by spindle-hulled JumpShips, which in turn carried the thick-bodied, heavily armed DropShips that actually landed on planetary surfaces. Because of their delicate Kearny-Fuchida drives, JumpShips rarely ventured outside of the so-called jump points, gravitational nulls at the zenith and nadir points of a star system. A military force could conceivably enter a system at a non-standard jump point, a temporary null formed by planetary alignments, for instance, but using the so-called pirate points was dangerous.

“Zenith has a trio of freighters,” a different officer said. “Two Federated Suns–flagged vessels and the Magister.”

McShane grunted. The Magister was a Republic of the Sphere–flagged merchantman, trapped outside of the Wall of Prefecture X when Levin’s Fortress Republic went into effect. It had spent the last year cycling between the worlds of the Reach, carrying the odd cargo to earn its upkeep.

“And the nadir?”

“Clear, so far as we know.”

“So far as we know,” McShane murmured. Like several of the worlds of the Reach, the monitoring satellites traditionally kept at the jump points were easy targets. The Combine destroyed them as a matter of course when they raided the worlds, as did the Suns when they raided the Combine enclaves on Misery and Huan. Wapakoneta and Harrow’s Sun boasted permanent recharge stations, as did Marlowe’s zenith point, but the nadir was a blind spot. Unless there was friendly traffic there, McShane had no way of knowing whether it remained empty space or if there was a full-on Combine invasion fleet.

“The DropShip’s course?” he asked next.

“Toward us,” Horton said. “The polar station lost the track quickly—”

“New contact!” a sensor operator shouted. Every head in the room turned to look at the tech-rating manning the console. “Deorbit burn!”

“Where, son?” McShane asked.

“Air search radar has it on the edge of its envelope, sir,” the tech said. McShane half stood, looking. The tech was leaning toward his screen, head bent, tapping a light pen on the screen. “It’s headed for Galway.”

McShane sat down, frowning. Galway was a transit stop, overflow for the main spaceport at Ashoka during the boom years of the 3110s. It wasn’t quite derelict—there was a detachment of his militia there, a half squad of atmospheric fighters and some infantry sentries—but it hadn’t been used for anything serious in a decade.

“What’s in Galway?” Horton asked.

“Nothing,” McShane said. “It’s a tarmac and some warehouses.” He looked up. “Which is why they’re going there.”

“Sir?”

“It’s a cold landing zone, Major,” he said. McShane keyed his console, grimacing as the screen flashed bright light before settling to a blinking menu. “From there they can strike out for Ashoka or here at Favor. It’s only forty kilometers to the city, and barely half again that in a direct line to here.”

“So its raiders,” Horton said. “For sure.”

“Anyone else would’ve been squawking IFF,” McShane said. He used a light pen to select an option and then tapped a prearranged order out. “Call out the militia, Gerry. We need to get in front of them.”

A new clangor burst to life as Horton nodded and stepped away, directing orders into his headset. McShane used his screen to call up the projected landing site again, mind racing. Only a single hull, he thought. It won’t be an invasion, then. It wouldn’t be a snatch-and-grab, either. If it were, they’d have come down more direct, and there’d be a few cargo hulls with them to carry off the booty. This was a pure raid.

Which meant anything could be the target. McShane closed his eyes and rubbed his temples, wishing for the sixtieth or so time in the last hour he’d left the governor’s reception an hour earlier. Combat with a hangover was no fun, and he wasn’t looking forward to trying to sync his neurohelmet to half a brain’s worth of dehydration.

GALWAY

MARLOWE’S RIFT

THE REACH

14 FEBRUARY 3139

It was Nina Slade who bagged the last Feddie recon skimmer, her PPC tagging it in the rear as it sprinted for the hole torn in the fence surrounding the tarmac. The shot destroyed the rear half of the light craft and sent the rest into a tumbling fireball that skidded almost a hundred meters before stopping.

Hack Kincaid brought his throttle back, slowing his BattleMech’s run, and touched his comm.

“Any word, Nina?” he asked, twisting around. His sensors played across the port, tagging burning wreckage and active Dragoons tanks and ’Mechs. They’d managed to ground almost unopposed. The Dragoons aerospace fighters had caught the half dozen air-breathing interceptors on the ground and destroyed them. It wasn’t particularly sporting of them, but Dragoons were taught to loathe fair fights. They were taught to win.

“Air says there’s a column moving from Favor toward us, mostly likely the militia coming to block us from our attack on the capital.” Hack heard the amusement in her voice and couldn’t keep the grin from his face. “Captain Henning also says the Drac maps seem to be accurate.”

Hack chuckled. All of the intelligence on Marlowe’s Davion defenders had come from the Combine’s Internal Security Force. ISF had a fearsome reputation across the Inner Sphere, but Hack had been on too many raids into Falcon-held space using Lyran maps of the worlds. Never mind that they’d been Lyran worlds for two or three centuries. They still got the elevations wrong, or the track of a river, or the placement of mountain passes.

“So far,” Hack allowed. “We ready?”

“Jaime reports the jamming held,” Slade said. “Alpha and Bravo left ten minutes ago, and Charlie Company has port security. We need to get going if you want to join the companies before they get in range of the Feddies.”

Hack brought up the correct navs and set his course. The 70-ton Guillotine IIC lurched into motion, and the other four ’Mechs of his command Star fell in behind him. Ashoka, Marlowe’s capital, was forty kilometers almost due north, but the only road connecting them cut through a mountain pass about fifteen kilometers to the east. The main militia force was garrisoned at Favor, to the east. Both of them were south of the Ironridge Mountains.

It was a race.

“Let’s go.”

Long experience let Hack move his ’Mech along the prearranged nav points with only half his attention. His Star was well trained: Thistle, in her Pack Hunter, led the way on point, and she’d break squelch on the Star channel anytime there was an obstacle or something that didn’t appear on the ISF maps. Hack let half his mind keep the Guillotine from stumbling while the other half toyed with the situation.

Marlowe’s Rift was nominally Federated Suns space. Although both the Combine and the Suns claimed the world, just like the other nine Reach worlds, on Marlowe they could claim to actually control it. The Kurita presence on Marlowe was limited to demonstrators and a healthy ISF contingent.

Because of that unity, the Marlowe planetary militia was a somewhat formidable force. They maintained a full two companies of ’Mechs at Favor, although only ten of the machines were true BattleMechs. The rest were ’Mech MODs, IndustrialMechs retrofitted with armor and weaponry. Another mechanized battalion mixed armor and infantry as a reaction force, and both Ashoka and Favor had municipal-level defense forces comprised of armor and more infantry. If they’d retreated behind fortifications, Hack would have needed a lot more than just the Spider’s Web Battalion to dig them out.

If they’d retreated.

The Dragoons plan had depended on them looking just like another raiding force. That was why he’d brought only the Spider’s Web in from orbit, despite the fact that their sister battalion, the Tarantulas, and the bulk of two battalions of line dogs in Gamma Regiment drifted in zero-G, waiting.

ISF and DCMS records both agreed that Marlowe’s defenders—led by a man named McShane, if the records were accurate—had brought his units out of fixed defenses four times out of five in the last three years when faced with a raiding party. Hack didn’t disagree.

In McShane’s place, he’d do the same to prevent an enemy free run of the countryside. Fixed defenses were great when you knew the enemy’s target, and especially great if you were the enemy’s target. But if you didn’t know, you had to go out and force him to leave.

Not that the Dragoons were leaving.

“We’ve reached the pass.”

Colonel McShane breathed out a breath he’d been half holding the entire march. He led the main column from Favor toward the pass in the Ironridges, where the I-43 cut through them on the way to Ashoka.

“No sign of the Dracs.”

McShane frowned and toggled the radio on his console. “This is Able-Six. What word from the scouts, Captain?”

The advance force commander’s response came instantly. “We’ve had no contact with any scouts, sir.”

“I sent a scout platoon toward Galway an hour ago,” McShane said.

“We haven’t seen nor heard them, Six.”

McShane’s stomach clenched. He swallowed, hoping the Warlord’s wading gait was getting to his already-unsettled stomach, but that wasn’t it. A platoon of hovercraft should have been to Galway and back already. Drac raiders shouldn’t have been able to get all of them, not without at least one getting out a burst transmission. Unless they were being jammed…

“Hold what you’ve got, Captain,” McShane said. “We’re coming.” He checked his nav panel, then his chronometer. “Fifteen minutes.”

McShane cut the channel and guided his Warlord around a boulder. The APCs and tanks of his force were pacing them on the four-lane I-97, but he was unwilling to destroy the highway’s ferrocrete by marching his ’Mechs on it. Unlike the vehicles, the ’Mechs were just as fast overland as they were on roads—in some conditions, even faster. His small force—small, for being nearly two-thirds of the Davion combat power on Marlowe—was making good time, limited by the slow speeds of the MODs. He searched his HUD until he found them, clumped together at the rear of his formation.

Fourteen ForestryMech MODs were all he had the resources to convert, although he had weapons on order from the Suns. Fourteen mobile cannons was a respectable bulwark of fire, even if they were slow and thin-skinned. If he could get them to the pass, they’d form a nice shield wall for his BattleMechs to maneuver behind.

If he could get them to the pass.

Fourteen minutes and sixteen seconds later, he turned the Warlord and waved the rest of his force past. The advance company had done good work—the two BattleMechs had felled a number of trees and begun barricades designed to slow advancing armor. There were still wide lanes for his vehicles to cut through, and there wouldn’t be enough time to fell enough timber to block the whole pass. It was almost a half kilometer across at this point. It was a good start, though.

McShane waited until the last of his MODs had passed and then beamed a comm at the advance force commander’s tank. “Still nothing from the scouts?”

“Negative, Six,” the captain said. “We monitored some jamming from the south, though. Strong jamming. They might still be out there.”

McShane cut the channel. Horseshit, he thought. If they were jammed, they’d be back here already. He let his eyes walk across the position and barked a couple of quick orders, reinforcing a fighting position and having one of his ForestryMechs cut a section of timber aside to make a fighting position for a squad of infantrymen.

We made it here, he told himself. Now to hold them.

“Contact!” a voice shouted.

McShane jerked the Warlord around, facing it to the south. His HUD pinged as his sensors located the hostile target. Targets.

Jesus, they’re fast.

Hack’s command Star was a half klick back when the forward elements of Bravo’s cavalry squadron reached the pass and found the Davy militia waiting for them. He touched a control on his command console that echoed the Bravo command channel and listened to the orders Bravo’s CO was giving. After a moment, he touched the control again and nodded slightly. Good kid.

“Looks like the whole force,” Lieutenant Ramsay said. She double-dipped her duties in his Star, acting as his de facto intelligence officer. She had an uncanny knack for keeping track of what was going on around her, a trait that Hack had made good use of on more than one occasion.

“Of course it is,” he said. “They can’t just let us walk into the capital, can they?”

“Think there’ll be any left for us?” Caitlin Roth asked.

Hack swallowed a smile and glanced at her ’Mech in his HUD. The Linebacker was practically shaking with anticipation, mirroring its pilot. Roth lived for combat, and she was as deadly at it as any Clansman Hack had seen.

“If we make it in time,” Hack replied.

Ahead, his external mikes picked up the first cracks of the Bravo squadron’s Regulators firing. Each of the tanks carried a turret-mounted Gauss rifle, a weapon powerful enough that even BattleMechs took it seriously. He quickened the Guillotine’s pace, and the rest of his Star kept up.

“Permission to scout ahead, sir?” Thistle asked. Her Pack Hunter was still a hundred meters ahead of them.

“Go ahead,” Hack said.

The Pack Hunter leaped into the sky on its jump jets. The ground where it had last touched was aflame. The grass burned purple-white, Hack saw, and the smoke was an acrid green. Strange.

A minute or two later, he reached the small depression where the five OmniMechs of Bravo First waited. The company commander’s Black Hawk raised an arm in welcome, but made no other signal. Hack and his Star did likewise, waiting.

There was little chance that the sensors on the Davy ’Mechs would fail to pick up the fusion reactors of the ten Dragoon ’Mechs hiding in plain sight, three-quarters of a kilometer from their lines. That wasn’t the point. Hack and the others stood still because they knew from experience that the Feddie troops would be looking at the fifteen hovertanks racing around, firing huge balls of iron at them at speeds many, many times the speed of sound.

Ten icons on a HUD, out of effective range, and not moving? Ignored.

A timer on Hack’s HUD began to blink red, once per second, as it cleared ten seconds and continued to fall. A single beep sounded in his headphones when it reached zero, but a separate light on his panel stayed unlit. He frowned. The counter reached minus five, minus ten. Hack ground his teeth.

The indicator lit. He slapped his comm.

“That’s it,” he said. “Let’s go.”

As one, all ten ’Mechs climbed out of the depression and started a leisurely advance on the Davion line. Hack grinned inside his neurohelmet, his fingers tightening and loosening on the Guillotine’s controls. Bravo squadron’s fans had raised a massive cloud of dust, making it difficult to see the Davy position, but his ’Mech’s sensors cut through it pretty well. They were fully invested with the hovertanks.

Tones sounded as his HUD began to paint new contacts behind him—twenty more, three-quarters of them moving incredibly fast. Hack’s teeth drew back from his lips as his grin widened. He shifted his eyes to the range indicator on his HUD. Seven hundred meters to the Davion line. Six-ninety. Six-eighty.

The rash blue icons overtook his position on his tactical map, and his ’Mech shook as the directed wash of fifteen Donar assault helicopters washed over her. Alpha’s air cav raced toward the Davy lines as the Alpha ’Mech Star joined the Bravos and Hack’s command Star.

“Boys and girls,” he radioed, “let’s get it stuck in.”

“God in heaven,” McShane swore as his Warlord rocked. One of the black-painted Regulators had slammed a Gauss round into his assault ’Mech’s right thigh. He brought the ’Mech under control and thrust out its left arm. His reticle flickered gold and he squeezed the trigger, suffusing his cockpit with heat even as blue-white light reflected through his cockpit canopy.

The Warlord was a powerful BattleMech, capable of facing nearly any other ’Mech on the field one-on-one and giving a good accounting of itself. The Magna Hellfire heavy particle projection cannon in its left forearm demonstrated why, blasting the nearest Regulator’s bow armor and shoving the hovertank’s forward skirts into the ground. The tank skidded for several meters, steel skirts striking sparks from rocks in the ground, before the lift fans regained control and lifted it free. It wasn’t destroyed, but its forward armor was nearly denuded, and the tank commander wisely chose to retreat toward the rear of the group.

McShane nodded. “We can do this,” he murmured.

The ten ’Mechs he’d detected farther afield had just begun to move, no doubt hoping he’d be distracted by the stinging hovertanks and not notice them until they were on him. He oriented the Warlord to face them and tapped a key on his console.

“Prepare to receive ’Mechs,” he ordered, speaking on the MechWarrior channel.

The dust from the hovertanks obscured his vision of the advancing enemy force, but his sensors were able to start cataloguing them. Pack Hunter. Black Hawk. Thor. Hellstar. All powerful ’Mechs, all Omni or at least Clan-designed chassis. A powerful force—more powerful than he usually saw from Combine raiders.

McShane looked at his display and out his canopy, gauging his own troops. The rest of his BattleMechs were maneuvering like he was, not really leaving their positions, but moving around enough to make them more difficult targets. The ForestryMech MODs had clumped into two groups, and each was laying down a curtain of cannon fire whenever a hovertank strayed too close to the line.

At the front of the line, the anvil of his force was as dug in as he could make them with a bare hour’s notice: sixteen main battle tanks, ranging from the battered old DI Morgan to a pair of dilapidated Brutus assault tanks and several Marksman M1s. Infantry was dug in around them, waiting for the enemy to come into range. It was a good line, and with the Condors and SM1s of his reaction force marshaled in his backfield, he could stand against ten OmniMechs and throw them back.

Except that now there were fifteen hostile ’Mechs. McShane frowned, punching up another sort on his secondary monitor. More Omnis. Where the…

Alarms blared as even more red carets appeared on his HUD. Aerial contacts—VTOLs, from the rate of closure. He looked up into the cloud of smoke and dust the Regulators were throwing up in time to see the first wasp-like shape of a Donar gunship appear, rotors tearing great vortices in the smoke.

They were black—blank, on IFF—and moving fast.

They fired.

Thistle’s Pack Hunter fell back, rejoining Hack’s command Star for a moment as Major Chan’s Bravo Star took the lead. The major led from the front, her Black Hawk’s arm-mounted laser batteries firing as she came into range of the heavy armor in the Davy lines. Her lasers played across the thick frontal armor of a Marksman tank, scarring it deeply but not penetrating. The tank’s return fire flickered past her 50-ton Omni, missing cleanly.

Hack switched his gaze to the Davy line. He had to give them some credit—even with fifteen Omnis charging and hovertanks swirling around and a swarm of attack helicopters circling around them, the Feddie troops didn’t break. His comm suite monitored a barked command from Major Chan as the Feddie fire began to land. The Elemental Points clinging to Alpha and Bravo’s OmniMechs let go of their carrying positions and dropped, using their integral jump jets to soften their landing. Hack grunted assent, alone in his cockpit. This close, the armored infantrymen could fend for themselves.

A Dragoons striker company operated as combined-arms team: the OmniMechs—and they were always OmniMechs, since they had to be able to carry a Point of Elementals—were the shock power of the company, while the hovertanks and VTOLS of the cavalry squadrons were the fast-action troops. The Elementals went wherever they were needed, into cities or forests or even open-field battles like this one. Each company included on its TO&E a squadron of aerospace fighters as well, but all the Spider’s Web fighters were over the capital dealing with the militia’s atmospheric wings.

They were not invincible, of course. Hack watched as a gout of ions from the big Warlord in the Davy reserve annihilated one of the Bravo Elementals in a single blast. One moment the armored infantryman had been bounding ahead, the myomer musculature of their battlesuit thrusting them forward, and the next they were a smoking ruin of scattered limbs. The ravening PPC had devoured almost all of the trooper’s chest and helmet armor—and the Dragoon inside.

The range fell quickly, and Hack was forced to concentrate on fighting. His Guillotine shook as a JES carrier lit him up with a full barrage. Only half the machine’s long-range missiles connected, but that was still fifty warheads, and the combined explosion staggered the ’Mech. He jerked his controls, reasserting control over the 70-ton ’Mech’s course, and brought his own weapons to bear on the line.

Paired arm-mounted large pulse lasers scattered damage across the forward armor of the Marksman that Major Chan’s ’Mech had already struck. His first shots degraded the armor further, but the second penetrated. Secondary explosions tore the tank’s turret off, throwing it twenty meters into the air before it crashed down behind the now-burning tank.

“You okay, Colonel?” Nina Slade asked.

Hack glanced at his HUD. Her Hellstar was radiating waste heat in infrared, despite the huge array of heat sinks built into the angular ’Mech’s body. He searched the Davion line until he found what he was looking for—a Davy ’Mech sprawled on its back, armor smoking as latent static arced between its limbs. The ’Mech shuddered and scrambled to its feet, but Hack knew the Davy jock knew he’d been kissed. Four Clan-made PPCs made for a serious peck.

Hack grunted into his comm and jerked the Guillotine into an oblique course toward the right flank of the Davy line. Slade and Ramsay stayed with him, weapons ready. Hack let his heat sinks drain off the waste heat his lasers had generated, and he eyed the line.

Alpha’s Donars were strafing the Davy backfield, keeping a clump of a half dozen or so ’Mech MODs busy. The first Dragoons Elementals had reached the line and vaulted the felled timber barricades. Davy infantry—unarmored, for the most part—resisted, but a man with a rifle and body armor is at a significant disadvantage against a warrior encased in ferro-ceramic powered armor with a machine gun or heavy laser in their right gauntlet.

But they fought. Hack found himself admiring the Davy troops—they fought.

Hack turned his ’Mech back toward the center of the line. He opened his mouth, but a sledgehammer struck his Guillotine before he could speak. It was all he could do to keep the ’Mech upright as a second hammer hit moments after the first. He heard Slade call out, but her voice was distant beneath the clamor of alarms.

McShane snarled in satisfaction as his PPCs found the raider Guillotine’s torso. Heavy PPCs were as powerful as any particle projection cannon in use, if shorter-ranged, and nobody—not even an Atlas pilot—would ignore two of them. He angled the Warlord around the wreckage of a burning JES carrier and stepped closer.

The Guillotine wasn’t alone. The hulking Hellstar that had blown Johansson’s Shockwave off its feet was still there, dual-barreled arms coming around. He shouted into his comm. “The Hellstar!”

At his ’Mech’s feet, two teams of SRM infantry rose from concealment and ripple-fired a barrage of fat-bodied missiles. They were at extreme range, and the teams ducked back under cover the instant the missiles left their tubes, but four rounds found their target, blasting divots from the Hellstar’s armor.

Two Brutuses, ahead and to the left, flashed laser fire at the same raider ’Mech. Four beams of ruby-red light flashed against the monster’s leg and torso armor, staggering it. The Linebacker on the Guillotine’s other flank flashed a laser into one of the Brutus’s tracks, popping the heavy tank loose from its treads, but the missile-launcher in the turret still belched fire and scattered a dozen or so missiles against the Hellstar’s armor.

“Keep it on ’em!” McShane screamed.

The recharge indicator for his PPCs flickered green but he held off, still guiding his 80-ton ’Mech closer. The Warlord also mounted a deadly array of lasers, and at this close range he could do more damage with those.

Crosshairs flashed green and then gold and McShane squeezed the trigger, painting the Guillotine in ruby-red light. The ’Mech’s pilot had gotten the machine under control after the beating of the heavy Magna PPCs, but the loss of so much armor from the laser attack made it stumble again. McShane’s teeth pulled back into another triumphant snarl—

—just as the Guillotine’s pilot ducked the ’Mech’s shoulder, took another step, and slammed a PPC shot into the Warlord’s chest. A fusillade of light from a large pulse laser stripped more armor from his left arm, nearly unbalancing him.

“I need some support over here,” he radioed.

“We’re hip-deep in ’em, Colonel,” his captain replied. McShane heard the bam-bam-bam of the SM1 tank destroyer’s big Type-10 cannon firing. “I don’t know if I can break anyone loose to—”

“—damn it, Captain, I’ve got three heavies over here, and they’re pushing into the lines!” McShane backpedaled, putting the two Brutuses he’d just passed between him and the advancing ’Mechs.

“I’ve got four, sir,” the captain snapped.

“I only need—” McShane stopped. The captain was a good officer. If he said he didn’t have troops to send, he didn’t. McShane was too deeply involved in his own battle to keep track of the whole engagement. A glance at his tactical screen showed red and blue icons intermixed all across the area where the two highways met.

“Six, out,” he sent.

He’d just have to do this himself.

Hack swallowed bloody spit and pushed the Guillotine after the retreating Warlord. He’d bitten his lip when the second PPC hit, but a little blood was nothing compared to the armor the Warlord’s attack had scoured from the Guillotine. Nearly three tons were gone, two of them in less than three seconds. Slade’s Hellstar had been hit almost as badly.

“How are we doing?” he asked Ramsay while he checked on the Guillotine’s status. A wireframe schematic showed several yellow spots where the ’Mech’s armor had been seriously damaged, but no red scars were flashing yet to show where it had been breached.

“It’s a brawl, sir,” Ramsay replied.

“Well, let’s get in there, then.”

Smoke blew across the field, driven by both the hovertanks’ fans and the VTOLs’ rotors. The Warlord disappeared behind a wall of it, and Hack looked for other targets. He was inside the Davy lines, past the felled tree trunks. He nearly turned the Guillotine’s ankle when he found a stump. The ’Mech had crushed it flat, of course, but the momentary resistance had been enough to stress the actuator housing on his right ankle.

A Davy Condor hovertank came blasting down a lane cleared in the barricades. Flame spat from the barrel of its autocannon as the ’Mech slammed shells into the Guillotine’s still-thick torso armor. Hack twisted the ’Mech at the waist and squeezed a secondary trigger. Six short-range missiles burst out, chasing the air-cushion vehicle. Two fell short, blasting green, smoky geysers in the soil behind the Davy tank. The other four connected, one punching through the tank’s skirts and destroying a drive fan. The tank skidded, its turret spinning wildly as it slid on its bearings.

Slade’s Hellstar burped a pair of PPC blasts at the immobile Brutus that had targeted Hack a minute ago. The tank’s crew was still inside, cranking missiles out of the launchers as fast as they would reload. Slade’s blast immolated them as the tank exploded into flames.

A ForestryMech MOD staggered out of the smoke in front of Hack and he snapped the Guillotine’s arm up, ready to fire, but a blue crosshatch appeared on his HUD. He lifted his finger away and watched a Dragoons Elemental use their battle claw to tear away the sheet armor protecting the MOD’s pilot. There was a flicker of laser light, and then the Elemental leapt away on plasma jets as the ForestryMech collapsed.

Lieutenant Thistle’s Pack Hunter fell out of the sky, jets flaming like a larger version of the Elemental suit. The ’Mech crouched as it landed, its torso-mounted PPC tracking a Davy SM1. The bulbous hovertank banked and spun, trying to use its drive fan to turn at too high a speed. The maw of its cannon belched fire even as Thistle’s PPC flickered actinic blue.

Her PPC struck the tank destroyer amidships, blasting through what was left of its armor and crushing the Type-10 Ultra-class autocannon. The tank exploded into a ball of flaming wreckage that skidded for a dozen meters before stopping.

The SM1’s final burst tore the Pack Hunter’s left leg off at the knee. Thistle collapsed out of her crouch, using her slender ’Mech’s arms to catch herself before she went fully to the ground, but Hack saw armor deform and then pop free from her wrist actuators as she did so.

“You okay?” he radioed.

The Pack Hunter fired again, using its hands to support itself. Her target was obscured from Hack’s view by the smoke, but a secondary explosion ballooned out of the miasma. Hack grinned—even without a leg, Thistle was still in the fight.

Now to see to the rest of them.

It was time to go.

McShane looked at his chronometer, unwilling to believe it had only been four minutes since the hovertanks had rushed his line. He stalked the Warlord past the wreckage of an SM1 tank destroyer and eyed the insignia still visible on a section of flame-blackened hull. The captain wouldn’t be reporting in ever again.

“All Able units,” he said, “this is Able Six.” He stopped, distracted as a flight of missiles screamed past his cockpit canopy without connecting. “The signal is Jericho.” He swallowed bile as he said it, but there was nothing else to be done. “I say again: Jericho.”

Jericho was the code word for a rout. In the operational plans it was termed “independent withdrawal under fire,” but McShane knew it was a rout. It was the signal for every militia unit to disengage and make best time away from the battle. Run away, in other words.

While they still could.

“Make for Ashoka,” he continued.

“But sir—” a voice began.

“I know, son,” McShane said. “I’ll see you there.”

McShane turned the Warlord back to the south. There was little chance he was going to get away, not when eighty tons of assault ’Mech barely passed fifty kph and the Regulators could do three times that.

I can hold them while the others get away.

As if summoned, one of the raider hovertanks sped toward him. The Gauss rifle in the Regulator’s turret flashed, but the slug crushed a furrow in the ground before skipping between the Warlord’s legs and disappearing behind him. McShane brought his arms up and squeezed his trigger.

Both heavy PPCs took the Regulator in the bow, devouring the armor quickly and destroying the frame beneath it. McShane imagined the tankers’ expressions as the bulkheads in front of them went from warm to vaporized in a fraction of a second but didn’t linger. The tank came apart in smoke and flame. The heavy turret skidded to a stop barely a meter in front of the Warlord’s foot. He crushed it with an offhanded step as he moved forward.

His radio faithfully transmitted the signals as militiamen made a break for the highway. The first to go were the hovertanks, whose speed allowed them to retreat quickly and get away. The wheeled tanks were next, those that weren’t blocked by felled trees or immobilized by damage. A couple APCs sped past the Warlord’s feet, treads churning at the earth while infantrymen clung to the outside.

The heavy main battle tanks didn’t move. Technically they were violating orders, but McShane didn’t say anything. They weren’t any faster than his Warlord. They weren’t getting away either.

A pair of ForestryMech MODs stepped up beside him. “We’re slower than you are, sir,” one of the pilots beamed.

“Glad to have you,” McShane replied.

Wind picked up and started to clear the smoke from the field. The sounds of combat slowed, although there was no stillness. McShane’s externals picked up the screams of wounded men and the pounding of ammunition gang-firing in destroyed vehicles. His HUD painted more red icons in front of him.

The Guillotine stepped out of the smoke, stopped.

McShane studied the machine. It was black, flat-black, with red trim, but it didn’t wear any unit insignia. The Warlord’s sensors queried it, but no IFF returned. Not regular Dracs, then. Maybe not even Dracs at all.

“Do we surrender?” a tanker asked. The Warlord’s comm painted a disabled Challenger tank as the sending unit. Both its tracks had been disabled but the gunner, at least, was still in his turret.

“If we do that, they’ll just go around us and chase down those that got away,” McShane said.

He was oddly calm. He’d been a soldier for forty years, lucky enough to be a MechWarrior in Harrison Davion’s service when the Republic and its proponents were making ’Mechs more and more rare. He hadn’t expected to meet his end here, on a world not even officially Davion, against an enemy he couldn’t even put a name to.

“So we—” the tanker began, but McShane saw movement.

A pair of Regulator tanks zipped out of the rapidly clearing smoke a hundred meters to the Guillotine’s left. They saw the waiting Davion troops and angled farther away but didn’t slow down. McShane jerked his controls, snapped the Warlord’s right arm up, and fired. His shot missed, but the tanks didn’t stop.

The Challenger crew fired, a long rolling burst that slammed high-explosives into the Guillotine’s left leg. The ForestryMech MODs fired as well, adding their weight to the fray. More raider ’Mechs appeared and returned fire.

So we die, McShane finished.

Hack cursed and snap-fired his lasers into the Challenger’s forward hull. The tank’s cannon fell silent, but the damage had been done. The whole Feddie line erupted into fire, and his Dragoons returned it.

So much for getting them to surrender.

“Major Chan,” he said. “Make sure the Donars are harassing that column that gets away. I don’t want them decisively engaged, but if the couple that make it to the capital are scared to death, that’s just fine.”

Chan acknowledged the order, and moments later the thirteen remaining attack helicopters lifted away and accelerated. Hack knew the big seven-centimeter lasers slung under the Donars’ nose would make harassing the column easy, but he didn’t want to take any more losses than absolutely necessary.

The big Warlord was moving, perpendicular to the Davion line. Nina Slade trundled past Hack’s ’Mech, arms leveled. He grimaced as she unloaded four deadly PPCs that each reached out for the Warlord. Two combined to savage the armor from its chest, while a third missed over the assault ’Mech’s shoulder. The fourth tore into the ’Mech’s right knee housing, fusing the joint straight and hobbling the already-slow machine. It staggered, overbalanced.

Caitlin Roth’s Linebacker sprinted past Hack’s Guillotine, weapons flashing. She split her fire between the two ForestryMech MODs, but it was enough. In a masterful display of gunnery she smashed both of them to the ground. One exploded, showering burning diesel fuel across the area and sending greenish-black smoke into the sky.

Davion return fire was sporadic and quickly silenced. Alpha and Bravo’s ’Mech Stars moved up from the right flank and obliterated a pair of holdout Marksman tanks, and the Elementals of Bravo-Third cracked the hatches on a DI Morgan tank and captured the crew alive.

The Warlord was the final holdout. Slade held her fire after her initial salvo, letting the Hellstar’s heat systems regain control. PPCs—especially the extended-range models the Hellstar mounted—were one of the most effective—if not the most effective—weapons a BattleMech could carry, but their price was a truly infernal cost in waste heat. Heat was every MechWarrior’s bane, deadly heat that could fry circuits, force uncontrolled shutdowns of his ’Mech’s fusion engine, even explode ordnance in its magazines. Four PPCs was a salvo that had destroyed more than one ’Mech in a single barrage—but it was almost as dangerous to Slade.

Roth’s Linebacker was closest, after her charge toward the ForestryMechs. The Warlord slammed a heavy PPC shot into the Linebacker’s high shoulder, and Roth replied with a laser that cut the Feddie ’Mech’s right arm off at the elbow.

“Try to get him alive,” Hack ordered.

“Sir,” Roth said. She scampered her Omni closer, firing smaller lasers. The Warlord twisted under her fire and replied in kind, slagging armor from the Linebacker’s legs. Hack heard Roth curse under her breath, her open comm line forgotten. She set her ’Mech’s feet and presented her weapons.

“Surrender,” she called, on an open frequency.

The Warlord charged.

The two ’Mechs were by now barely 150 meters apart. Even with a gimped knee, the Feddie ’Mech was still eighty tons of mass moving at speed, and the impact would damage both ’Mechs pretty heavily, although Roth would get the worse end of the deal. If she let him connect. Hack waited for her to sidestep and use the Linebacker’s superior speed to get out of the way.

She fired instead, lasers filling the space between the two ’Mechs.

On his secondary screen the Warlord’s infrared signature flared. Hack swore and kicked his throttles into reverse—Roth’s attacks had destroyed the magnetic shielding around the Warlord’s fusion reactor.

“Get clear!” he shouted, an instant before the world went white and a shockwave rolled over his Guillotine. When he looked again, all that remained of the Warlord were the stumps of its feet—the ’Mech was gone from the knees up. Roth’s Linebacker was lying twisted on its side, but it was already moving, trying to regain its feet.

Hack looked up.

The jerk when his chute opened was jolt enough to shake McShane from his fugue. He rode out the buffeting when his ’Mech blew. He’d never understood the precise physics that dictated how a fusion engine lost containment and exploded without going totally nuclear, but he was thankful that the math worked even if he didn’t understand it. Despite his previous thoughts he was thankful to still be alive.

Black-painted battlesuits were waiting for him when he fell to earth, anti-personnel machine guns leveled. The lead trooper waited until he had released his harness and disentangled himself from his chute risers, then stepped forward.

“You are our prisoner, sir,” the digitized voice said.

McShane nodded. He didn’t wear a sidearm in the cockpit, so he didn’t have a token to surrender. He just sat down. The wind had blown the worst of the smoke and dust away. There were only the pyres of the destroyed vehicles remaining, each sending a column of smoke into the sky.

“Soldier,” McShane said a short time later. He was distracted by tracks in the atmosphere high above him. DropShips, he realized. A lot more than one.

“This isn’t just a raid, is it?”

“I can’t tell you that, sir,” the Elemental replied.

“It’s an invasion?”

“I can’t—”

“—tell me that, I get it.” McShane rubbed some of the soil of Marlowe between his hands. The grit tugged at the soft skin of his palms. I used to have calluses. “Can you at least tell me who you are?”

The Elemental suit turned, and the trooper inside cracked his helmet seals and cranked the bulky headpiece back. He was blond and pale, with eyes so brown they were almost black, and an expressionless face. He looked up at the DropShips, following McShane’s gaze, and then looked back down at the captured colonel.

“Wolf’s Dragoons,” he said.

MORE BATTLETECH FICTION BY JASON SCHMETZER

If you enjoyed this BattleTech novella, you can find other tales by Jason Schmetzer in the following books:

BATTLETECH: EMBERS OF WAR

For Ezra Payne and the Stealthy Tiger mercenaries, professionalism is everything. Hired to assist in the bitter, bloody fighting on the planet Hall, they quickly earn a decisive victory for their employer. They settle afterward in for a needed period of rebuilding, and a few months’ peace before moving on to the next contract.

But their respite does not last. More mercenaries, hired by the Allied Mercenary Command itself, land on Hall. They believe the Tigers’ employer to be league with the Word of Blake, a shadowy interstellar organization that worships technology, and which has been building its own empire among the worlds around Terra.

The Tigers want nothing of this battle, but war rages across the Inner Sphere. The hard-fought ceasefire cannot last, even on Hall, and when every faction is embittered and fueled by fervor, peace has no chance at all.

As a new conflict erupts, will the Stealthy Tigers’ BattleMechs be enough to save them? Or will the looming threat of renewed war engulf them in its fiery embrace?

BATTLETECH: OPERATION ICE STORM, PART ONE, THE FROST ADVANCES

It is 3071, and holy Jihad rages in the Inner Sphere. Safe on worlds claimed two decades earlier, Clan Jade Falcon watches its enemies tear themselves apart. But a new threat is bearing down on the Falcons. Clan Ice Hellion, another of Kerensky's Clans, has traveled the winding Exodus Road to attack its warrior brethren—for while the Clans hunger to conquer the Inner Sphere, they are warriors, and they have little qualm warring amongst themselves for advantage.

Khan Connor Rood of the Ice Hellions knows his Clan is taking a desperate risk. Victory over the Jade Falcons will give the Hellions a place in the Inner Sphere, new worlds to conquer and exploit. It will place them among those rarified Clans who are not trapped on the distant Clan homeworlds. It is a bold plan.

It could easily fail.

For the Jade Falcons have been warned of the Ice Hellions' approach, and powerful and veteran Jade Falcon BattleMechs are turning to meet them. Can Rood and his Hellions defeat the forewarned Falcons? With Jihad raging in front of them and genocidal wars of Reaving consuming the Clan homeworlds behind them, can the Hellions survive?

BATTLETECH: OPERATION ICE STORM, PART TWO, WINDS OF SPRING

It is 3071, and holy Jihad rages in the Inner Sphere. Safe on worlds claimed two decades earlier, Clan Jade Falcon watches its enemies tear themselves apart. But a new threat is bearing down on the Falcons. Clan Ice Hellion, another of Kerensky's Clans, has traveled the winding Exodus Road to attack its warrior brethren—for while the Clans hunger to conquer the Inner Sphere, they are warriors, and they have little qualm warring amongst themselves for advantage.

Khan Connor Rood of the Ice Hellions knows his Clan is taking a desperate risk. Victory over the Jade Falcons will give the Hellions a place in the Inner Sphere, new worlds to conquer and exploit. It will place them among those rarified Clans who are not trapped in the distant Clan homeworlds. It is a bold plan.

It has failed.

The battle-proven Jade Falcon Clusters have shattered the Ice Hellion assault. The worlds the Hellions captured are being lost to the Falcon reconquest, and Hellion MechWarriors are dying in the loss. Khan Connor Rood knows he must find a way to save what is left of his Clan. He knows he has to bring the Falcons to one final, decisive battle and earn a chance to escape. But the legacy of Khan Raina Montose’s bad decisions linger…and the circling Jade Falcon forces have been joined by the hungry herds of the Hell's Horses Clan. Is Rood’s desperate plan to rescue the Hellions he has left doomed to fail?

BATTLETECH: VENGEANCE

When the armies of the Draconis Combine killed his parents, Galen Cox swore vengeance. Now an elite MechWarrior with the Armed Forces of the Federated Commonwealth, Galen will have a chance to exact his justice when the Combine raids the planet Ryde with a BattleMech battalion. As two armies clash on this snow-and-ash covered world, two men will be forced to examine exactly why they're fighting even as they both strive for victory and absolution.

BATTLETECH: HECTOR

Since their appearance in the Inner Sphere in 3005, the mercenary regiments known as Wolf’s Dragoons have proven themselves the masters of the battlefield, the equal of any regiment of any of the five warring Successor States.

Now under contract to House Marik’s Free Worlds League, the Dragoons have undertaken their most daring mission yet: an attack on House Steiner’s impregnable Hesperus II BattleMech factories. Success on Hesperus will make the Dragoons into living legends…but few enemies have survived House Steiner’s fanatical defenses. The Steiners know how important the ancient BattleMech factories are to their nation—and not even the fearsome reputation of Wolf’s Dragoons will make them blink.

BATTLETECH: ECLIPSE

It is 3072, and holy Jihad rages in the Inner Sphere. Soon after they launched their war in 3067, the mystical Word of Blake sprung out from their base on Terra and claimed dozens of worlds, creating a Word of Blake Protectorate. While many of those worlds joined voluntarily, some others hosted resistance movements. On one such world, Ruchbah, the resistance hired mercenary help.

Captain Jeremiah Youngblood and his Crescent Hawks have an enviable legacy to live up to. Not only are they trying to find their own place in the Inner Sphere, outside of the deep shadows cast by the elite Kell Hounds, but some still remember another Jeremiah Youngblood and another group of Crescent Hawks. Can the new live up to the reputation of the old? Can they survive, almost alone on a hostile world where the Word of Blake holds almost every advantage?

BATTLETECH: SNIPER

It is the year 3027, and the Inner Sphere is at war. Centuries of near-constant warfare have left the feudal realms exhausted and near collapse, but none will surrender. National armies clash on hundreds of worlds, and hired proxies—mercenaries—fight on countless more. Mighty MechWarriors lead their BattleMechs like the ancient knights of old, but they are not the only soldiers on these brutal battlefields.

Fusion-powered tanks, heavily armored and nearly as powerful as ’Mechs, roam the battlefields, and few are as deadly as the ones in Halsten’s Brigade, in the service of House Steiner’s Lyran Commonwealth. Even fewer are as deadly as tank gunner Private Frederick “Sniper” Jones, the man even MechWarriors fear. Put him in a Schrek PPC Carrier, point him at the enemy, and he'll take them down. Leaving him with nothing but dreams of how things could have gone wrong, until the next enemy comes along...

Sniper collects two previously published short stories: “Sniper” and “Panzer.”

BATTLETECH: EDGE OF THE STORM

The Inner Sphere is a realm of constant combat, as the Successor States to the mighty Star League vie for the ancient and conflicted First Lord’s throne. Their ancient feuds are thrown into even greater conflict with the coming of the Clans in 3050, invaders from beyond the Periphery.

Not even the hundreds of worlds of a Successor State can field an army large enough for their leaders’ egos, and so legions of mercenary armies ply their trade across the Inner Sphere. From lone paladins in a single BattleMech to multi-regiment mercenary brigades, soldiers of fortune often turn the tide.

The band known as Lennox’s Light Horse is one such band. And on the eve of one of the largest conflicts in the Inner Sphere’s history—the Word of Blake Jihad—Andrew Lennox’s mercenaries are just trying to survive and prosper.

At the Edge of the Storm gathers four previously published short stories from BattleCorps.com: “The Gulf of Reason,” “Sound and Fury,” “Monster,” and “Toil and Trouble.”

ONSLAUGHT: TALES FROM THE CLAN INVASION

This anthology features the story “Fourth Form”: The BattleMech and the MechWarriors who pilot them are recognized as the kings of the thirty-first century battlefields, but they are not the only combatants—and certainly not the only soldiers of honor—as the Smoke Jaguars discover fighting against the cadets of the Almunge Infantry Academy.

BATTLETECH: FIRST STRIKE (BATTLECORPS ANTHOLOGY VOLUME 2)

This volume includes the following stories:

“On the Square”: Facing pirate ’Mechs during a raid on their city of Sawyer, Corporal David Talbot and his infantry unit experience their first combat action. When it comes down to the infantry vs. a Phoenix Hawk, it’s man vs. machine in a brutal showdown only one will survive.

“Pack Hunters”: What hope does a company of helicopters have against a medium, two heavies, and an assault ’Mech? Plenty, as mercenary Lieutenant Ivan Sharpe proves during his delaying action against just such a ’Mech lance.

BATTLETECH: WEAPONS FREE (BATTLECORPS ANTHOLOGY VOLUME 3)

This volume features the following stories:

“Sniper” (also available in standalone ebook, see above)

“The Gulf of Reason”: Reason tells a commander that soldiers die in combat. But that’s not good enough for Captain Andrew Lennox. Even when reason demands otherwise, if something—someone—threatens his men, then that becomes target number one. And when a war pits family member against family member, sometimes the battle can only end with one dead and one alive. (Also available in Edge of the Storm, see above.)

“Making a Name”: New Avalon, 3008: A Wolf’s Dragoons MechWarrior facing execution for desertion gets an unexpected last chance—to be thrown back into the meat grinder in the unit no one ever expects to survive—Zeta Battalion. They pilot assault ’Mechs and get the jobs no one else can do. And they will execute every mission, no matter what the cost.

“The Last Day of Zeta”: Zeta Battalion, Wolf’s Dragoons (3000–3067). In the sixty-odd years since Zeta’s first Inner Sphere deployment on Halloran V, only a handful of units had ever stood against the Battalion's full fury. On 9 December 3067 they issued their final test to the Word of Blake forces on Mars. Colonel J. Elliot Jamison proudly led Zeta Battalion across the plains of Chryse Planitia in what ended up as the last day of Zeta Battalion…

BATTLETECH: FIRE FOR EFFECT (BATTLECORPS ANTHOLOGY VOLUME 4)

This volume contains the following stories:

“Case White: By the Sword”: Four years at the Sandhurst Military Academy have given Thomas Abbott a chance to shine. Top of his class, an able MechWarrior, and all without breaking a sweat. But when ComStar comes to Terra, Abbott realizes that not everything can be learned in a classroom—that that sometimes you can't just go by the book. That you need to go by the sword.

“The Day After”: For over a year, the Wolf's Dragoons have been camped out on Arc-Royal. General Maeve Wolf knows she needs to get her forces back into fighting trim. Knows she needs to show the Inner Sphere that the Dragoons weren't destroyed on Outreach, appearances aside. She picks Captain Stacy Church for a particular job of reconstituting one of the Dragoons’ most storied units—but after her losses on Outreach, Stacy’s not sure she’s up to the job…

“A Thing to be Done”: A suicide mission against savage fighters in a bloody wasteland. Captain Alfred Walker, one of the last surviving mercs from the obliterated unit once known as the Dismal Disinherited, is ordered to go on a escort mission to help Wolf’s Dragoon civilians escape from their Word of Blake captors. Walker has already faced the Blakists—the ones who had slaughtered his fellow mercs—before, and has little desire to do so again. But orders are orders…

“The Shaded Light”: Gibson Prow doesn’t much care about the reasons behind the internecine warfare between Com Guard and Word of Blake; he just cares about the paycheck the Word gives him and his unit to hunt down Com Guard stragglers on Terra. But when he’s finally able to interrogate a Com Guard prisoner, Prow finds that his Word of Blake contact may have been shading the truth of the conflict…and that the reality is much, much worse than he could have ever imagined.

BATTLETECH: COUNTERATTACK (BATTLECORPS ANTHOLOGY VOLUME 5)

This volume features the following stories:

“An Ill-Made House (Parts 1 and 2)”: The Star League is remembered as the greatest testament to human ingenuity in history, a period of peace and growth…but all peace must be defended, and even the most important growth is never without pain. Betrayed by their comrades and forced into hostile territory, can one company of the Star League Defense Force survive long enough to summon help and escape?

“Godfather”: There are few wars more brutal than a civil war, and no realm is more familiar with them than the Free Worlds League…but in warfare, not even a brother is as important as the trooper next to you…as an officer in the Marik Militia is about to discover.

“Feral”: Feral, the order that, when given, strips all the rules away. There is only Dragoon and target. No mercy, no surrender. Those on Outreach learned this swiftly and painfully. But Feral is not a localized order…Feral is all.

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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

Kell Hounds Ascendent by Michael A. Stackpole

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.

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BATTLETECH: THE SPIDER DANCES (THE PROLIFERATION CYCLE, PART VI)

Cover art by Franz Vohwinkel

Design by Matt Heerdt & David Kerber

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