Crass.
Yeah, that was supposed to be the humor of the situation. The Keeper of the Family Honor of the traditional, conservative Japanese Kuritas not being this fragile, delicate little cherry blossom, but a blunt, foul-mouthed ball-breaker.
Oh, Constance Kurita played by Shohreh Aghdashloo. This is glorious.
Oooh, that's a good angle. I was thinking more the Madonna, Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian, Mariah Carey sort of celebrity diva when I wrote it (someone so rich and powerful they make their own rules), but now I'm not going to be able to get that image out of my head! Perfect, exactly what I was going for!
Anyway we're back to the merc thread today.
* * *
While Galatea might have been famous as the “Mercenary’s Star”, it was far from the only home of the mercenary trade in the Inner Sphere. Galatea was not especially centrally located, nor really on the way to or from anywhere, and anyway off-limits to anyone the Lyrans considered
persona non grata within their borders. The Mercenary’s Star was accordingly orbited by a number of satellite hiring halls scattered about the galaxy, of which the one on Keid was easily one of the least notable or distinguished.
While Galatea paid court to the big hunters like Wolf’s Dragoons, the Blue Star Irregulars or 12th Star Guards—either in person or through intermediaries—Keid was infested with swarms of company or smaller-sized units that buzzed the Terran corridor, picking over the bones of contention among the five successor states, feeding off the bodies of long-dead feuds and hatreds.
The hiring hall squatted in the center of the foreigner’s quarter, a decaying sprawl of concrete and plastic, surrounded by a six-meter high wall along its perimeter. For your own safety, the Capellans explained. To prevent any ‘misunderstandings’ between the foreigners and the locals, they said. The fact that the Home Guards patrolling the wall kept their guns pointing inside, rather than outside the wall, was not lost on the inhabitants.
Within the quarter lived the Lyran, Combine, League or even Federated Suns merchants and traders, expatriates and refugees, as well as a motley collection of private contractors—ranging from everything from German or Chinese interpreters, to private military and security firms like the Anything Associates. Access to the rest of the city was tightly controlled, and even unaffiliated units between contracts were assigned a ‘Guide,’ a Maskirovka minder, in a fairly transparent effort to keep them under surveillance.
A paranoid police state like the Confederation wasn’t going to be happy having armed men who weren’t under their control on any of their planets. The mercenaries, for their part, knew better than to give a regime that could happily massacre its own populace their unreserved trust. Guarded suspicion, that was the name of the game.
Mercenary BattleMechs were stored in a row of warehouses adjacent to the spaceport, where the Home Guard presence was especially pervasive. Heavily-armed squads of brown-and-green uniformed men stood at each intersection, while others walked endless laps around the buildings.
“Evenin’ boys,” Sebastian smiled and waved at the squad outside the warehouse as he walked past. He was met with dull stares of thinly-veiled hostility. One man spat noisily into the darkness. “Pleasure as always.” Sebastian ducked inside.
Inside the warehouse were the machines from half a dozen different units, all of them weather-beaten and dirty, with patchwork armor plating and a casual chaos of paint schemes, ranging from the impractical to the improbable.
The Anything Associates’ BattleMechs were enough to give most battle computers a nervous breakdown. None were in their original configuration, and indeed, each one’s configuration tended to depend on whatever salvage they’d recovered in their last engagement.
Sebastian’s own
Black Knight was a relic, a downgraded BL-7-KNT that hadn’t been produced in the Inner Sphere for nearly 200 years. Next to it was a
Blackjack sporting a pair of heavy lasers instead of autocannon. A
Catapult with its missile launchers replaced by massive particle cannon, a
JagerMech with twin drum arms housing massive missile launchers, a
Locust with quad machineguns. And so on.
At the foot of the
Catapult, the company’s three lance commanders were seated around a rickety, round metal table, a loose pile of cash of various denominations and nationalities in the center, clumped tiles of face-down playing cards around the periphery.
“A pair of threes? Ahd jes’ fold, if Ah was you Zeke,” Sebastian said from behind Zeke Fallon, looking down at the man’s cards from over his shoulder. “Oh, sorry. M’Ah innerupting somethin’?”
Zeke Fallon, big, well-muscled, with a full beard and Mohican dyed white, threw his cards down in disgust. “Well, look who crawled out of his bottle,” he said over his shoulder.
“Ahm hurt, Zeke,” said Sebastian, clapping his hand over his heart. “That was mighty hurtful.”
“You’ll live,” Zeke snorted. “Unfortunately.”
“Ahm a generous man, so Ahm gonna let you take that back Zeke, once you hear the good news,” Sebastian grinned, grabbed an empty chair and turned it around backwards.
Zeke’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What news?”
Sebastian sat down, arms folded across the back of the chair. Looked slowly at each of his lance commanders in turn. Enjoying the moment. “Ah got us a job. A real job, a raid, none of this garrison BS. Better yet, it pays double our usual rates, in cash, all in advance.”
“What’s the catch?” asked Vinny Woods, a tall, gaunt, almost skeletal man with a smoothly shaved head.
“Well, if that ain’t the darndest thing,” Sebastian said. “Someone wants very badly for us to believe Natasha Kerensky is hirin’ contractors for a hit on the Snakes.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” objected Danica Smallwood. “The Dragoons work for Kurita. Why’d they want someone to attack them? Not like they need to fake an attack to make themselves look good or drum up business.”
“See, the way this Kerensky-person tells it, the Snakes are screwing with the Dragoons. Red tape. Impounding or confiscating their supplies, stuff like that. All very by-the-book but it’s clear the Combine is yankin’ their chain. Now, the Snakes technically ain’t doing nothin’ against the contract, so the Dragoons cain’t complain, but Kerensky here, she’s had enough. We pose as a pirate or bandit outfit, hit one of the impounded supply shipments, steal or blow up everything. Leaves Kurita with egg all over his face, lookin’ too weak to look after the supplies he’s guarding, and gives the Dragoons leverage to complain, insist on new rules.”
“Sound risky,” said Vinny. “If we get paid in advance, why bother? Why don’t we just turn this story straight over to the Dracs?”
“Well, for one, the Dracs ain’t gunna believe us, nor reward mercs for snitching on mercs. To them, we all the same. For ‘nother, I really don’t wanna make an enemy oudda the Dragoons.”
Vinny was shaking his head. “
If it is the Dragoons. This job stinks, Seb. Natasha Kerensky, the most recognizable MechWarrior in the Sphere, here on Keid? And she wants to hire us for some job, with no paperwork, no record, no proof of anything. Stinks. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”
“Aw, y’all fold faster than Zeke here,” Sebastian shook his head. “It’ll be fine. You’ll see.”
“You already said yes, didn’t you?” Danica asked quietly, closing her eyes as though to wipe the image of Sebastian away and make him disappear. “You … malfunctioning jump drive. You delayed salary payment. You unexpected ammunition explosion. You total, absolute, utter Great House contract negotiator.”
“Now, now, Danny, language.” Sebastian raised a placating hand. “Y’all feel better once you look at your bank balances. Anyway, love to jaw, but I got a raid to arrange. Gotta get us a berth and lift-off time. Any you folks seen Mutai?”
“Wiped out again,” said Danica disgustedly, waving her hands towards the unit’s temporary quarters, on the upper level of the warehouse.
Capellan Confederation mercenary liaison Commander Abel Mutai was sitting cross-legged in the center of his room, naked from the waist up. Eyes starting at nothing in particular, a slight smile touching the corners of his mouth. A sheet of paper lay on his lap, an empty syringe on the floor by his knee.
Sebastian pushed the door open when Mutai didn’t respond, walked in and crouched by Mutai’s side. Mutai didn’t react, just kept staring blissfully straight ahead.
“Mutai, ole buddy. You been shootin’ Bleach again?” Sebastian toed the needle with his boot.
“Yeah.” Mutai didn’t look at Sebastian, just smiled kind of dreamily.
Bleach, or Wipe as it was also known, had started its pharmaceutical life as a fairly benign antipsychotic drug, which calmed and induced lethargy, as well as an almost blissful, zen-like acceptance of pretty much everything. Your worries and fears were just forgotten, shrinking into insignificance next to the feeling of oneness with creation. The only side-effect was some short-term memory loss. Taking a larger dose extended the length of relaxed forgetfulness, but also increased the severity of memory loss. Didn’t take long before criminal groups saw its recreational potential.
Mutai had come to Sebastian and the Anything Associates as a hard-ass, obsessed with details, a stickler for paperwork. After a few months of them introducing him to Bleach, Mutai now had trouble remembering his own name and job, much less any rules governing mercenaries in the Confederation.
“Terrible habit you got there, Mutai.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s that?” Sebastian pointed at the paper on Mutai’s lap.
Mutai slowly registered Sebastian’s finger, followed its invisible trajectory down to his own lap. Looked down, looking at the paper blankly for a moment. Then a smile filled his features, a look of triumph, of long-lost memory recovered. Mutai looked back up at Sebastian. “Paper,” he said.
“Still got the ole Mutai magic, I see. Mind if I take a gander?” asked Sebastian, already lifting the paper.
“Sure.”
Didn’t take Sebastian long to grasp what he was looking at: An order for his own arrest, dated that day. The Ingress op, the civilian casualties—looked like the Capellans had decided they needed a scapegoat, and after much soul-searching, they had bravely decided to blame somebody else: the Anything Associates, the “out-of-control foreign mercenaries” who’d done the deed.
“You know what this is?” Sebastian asked Mutai, shaking the paper in the other man’s face. Then rephrased: “You know what it says?”
“Yeah.”
“They coming? Internal security? Home Guard? Coming here?”
“Yeah.”
Sebastian whistled through his teeth, and tossed the paper back onto Mutai’s lap. “Fantastic. Outstanding.” He stood up, reached for his Python. “Been a great help Mutai, thanks. Time to go though. Goodbye.”
“Bye.”
There was a single gunshot from Mutai’s room, and then Sebastian was storming out the door, bellowing for the rest of the Associates.
