Hollow Point - The Amaris Coup

[Dubble_g]

New story starting here, set on the eve of the Amaris Coup. Mainly canon-friendly, based largely on the good folks at sarna.net and the Liberation of Terra book.

Themes are loyalty and betrayal, plus I wanted to write about what a BattleMech would be like for someone totally untrained and unused to Mech warfare. Make them feel special again, you know?

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ONE: IMRE
Hubris City, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 1, 2766

“Every war begins with a betrayal.”

Ames leaned precariously over the edge of the balcony overlooking Hubris’ main riverstreet. There was only a small and captive audience: just me, Rose, and Hansen. Rose and I stayed out of friendship, Hansen stayed because he was dead drunk and in a wheelchair. The restaurant was otherwise empty; the two waiters somewhere in the shadows inside and the chef had probably taken the rest of the day off to watch the parade.

We sat out on the second-floor balcony of the T&T restaurant, hoping for a breeze, but the air outside was as dead as the atmosphere inside. It hung lank and heavily about our hair, borne down by moisture from the surrounding swamps, reeking faintly of rot.

“Ah c’mon now, isn’t that going a little overboard?” I tried to catch Rose’s eye, and give her a there-he-goes-again kind of smile, but her attention was fixated on Ames.

Hansen’s neck lolled forward and he snored loudly into his tangled, unkempt beard.

“Sneak attacks, broken treaties, yeah, yeah, sure, all the obvious stuff, all of that,” Ames was still expounding, waving his glass over the balcony edge so that the cocktail sloshed over the rim, sending a gentle rain of tequila and lime juice showering down on the people in the boats below. “But it goes deeper than that, you know? There’s also the betrayal of the trust the people and the community placed in their leaders, on whose supposed behalf any war is waged. The betrayal of our ideals. The betrayal of our consciences. We lie to our allies, to our enemies, to our people, and most of all, to ourselves.” He raised his glass in mock toast to the oncoming tanks. “There’s no such thing as an honest war.”

Hansen, had he been coherent, or even conscious, might have had something to say about that. He’d been one of the first to be reactivated and shipped out last year when news of the New Vandenberg Uprising had hit the tri-D. Far as we could tell he’d disembarked from the DropShip on NV, stepped more or less immediately onto a landmine and been carted back on the very next JumpShip. Seriously, he was gone maybe six months, tops, saw zero action and came back with half the number of limbs he’d left with. A corporal’s pay didn’t cover prosthesis, so he spent his days in a wheelchair and at the bottom of a bottle.

He’d been one of the first, but certainly not the last. As though the blast that had taken Hansen’s legs had been the primer for an even greater bomb, by the time he got home the entire Periphery had exploded into warfare for the second time in two centuries. A sucking wound had opened in the side of the Star League, draining the body of garrison troops from Hegemony worlds like Nusakan in globs and spurts, until only a skeleton had been left behind.

A skeleton, and now the Rim Worlders who circled outside.

Probably just as well Hansen couldn’t see what was happening in the riverstreet below. The newly-arrived Rim Worlds Army garrison was staging a parade, with a line of growling hovertanks slowly beetling their way towards the city center, down between buildings that leaned over the canal, as though the masonry were straining for a better view. The downdraft of the tanks’ fans blew vampire wings of brackish water around each one. They were angular, bladed shapes in dull grey, with sensor clusters like dead black eyes, fanged with triple laser guns, the leaping Rim Worlds shark forming barely visible granite-on-smoke shadows on the sides of their turrets. The commander of each tank stood in the cupola, no doubt scanning the crowds behind their reflective black masks.

“You think inviting the Rim Worlders here is a betrayal?” I asked Ames, raising my voice over the oncoming drone of hoverfans. Trying to bait him into another rant, hoping he’d make a fool of himself.

“It’s a coup,” Rose put in, taking Ames’s side. She flicked her hair over one shoulder as she said it, gave me a look that made me feel three feet tall. “Anyone can see, it’s coup in all but name.”

Ames nodded and grinned, pointed the index finger of his free hand at her in agreement.

“How can it be a coup if Richard Cameron ordered it?” I objected, feeling my face flush. So much for any plan of convincing her Ames was the overheated one here. “It’d be a coup if the SLDF refused to obey the order, not if they go along with it.”

Rose snorted, shook her head a little and turned away.

Ames didn’t answer, only stood teetering on the edge of the rickety wooden balcony, one good gust away from plummeting into the canal and putting a watery end to the stream of words coming out his mouth. His slightly bloodshot eyes watched the tanks approach, his body tense, and I was glad the noise of their engines meant it was almost certainly impossible for them to hear what he was saying.

I watched Rose, who leaned forward a little in her seat and watched Ames, half-amused, half-concerned. I watched her, she watched him, he watched neither of us. That right there pretty much summed up our relationship.

“McKenna,” Ames said suddenly, whirling unsteadily away from the parade to face us. The turn threw him off-balance, and he took two sideways steps before he caught himself against the balcony railing. I waited for it to snap. Half-fearing, half-hoping.

“Right, exactly, just like him.” Rose gave him a shining white smile of encouragement, and I mentally damped down a storm-swell of jealousy.

“Fleet Admiral James McKenna,” I recited, anxious not to be outdone, wherever this latest diatribe was going. I was facing Ames, but my attention was on Rose, in the corner of my eye. “First Director-General of the Terran Hegemony. So?”

“Ah, as ever you get right to the appendix of the matter, Imre,” Ames sniffed. “How’d he get to be DG, eh? By betraying his oath, betraying his government, betraying the people of the Terran Alliance. That’s how. And the people loved him for it. Face it, as a society we’re in love with two-faced traitors, because we’ve confused strength with unscrupulousness. This is just the latest time we’ve stabbed ourselves in the back.”

[Dubble_g]

Ames wove his way around invisible, imaginary objects back to our table, and fell bonelessly into his chair. Rose put a quisling hand on his traitor shoulder to steady him. I angrily studied the bottom of my glass, angry at them, angry at myself for being angry at them. For about the tenth time that day I told myself I should leave, but instead I stayed, mind uselessly spinning like the third wheel that I was.

“I think it’s pretty ironic, us being pissed about having foreign bases on our planets,” I told the glass, but loud enough for Ames and Rose to hear. I’m not sure if I believed any of this—pride wouldn’t let me back down now. Like a gambler making bigger and bigger bets to try to win back the money he’d lost, and digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole. “Considering the number of bases we have out in the Periphery. We ask everyone to trust us, but we don’t trust any of them.”

Further argument was forestalled when the building began to shake as the hovertanks passed in the riverstreet directly outside. The glasses and plates rattled and clinked in sympathy. The salt shaker tipped over, went rolling across the table and tumbled to the floor, bleeding white dust as it went. Grimy window panes shuddered in their frames. For a moment, I thought the Rim Worlders might bring the whole place crashing down around us.

“Don’t be naïve, Imre. There shouldn’t be any bases at all. If that idiot warmonger Kerensky—” Ames began once the shaking tapered off to a subsonic hum.

Whether triggered by the armored earthquake outside, Ames’s words or some dumb, blind bourbon luck, Hansen’s eyes flew open and he jerked upright in his wheelchair. “KERENSKY!” he bellowed, eyes darting around the deserted restaurant. “I’ll gut that sunova—” one hand fumbled beneath his wheelchair. There was a sticky tearing sound and the hand reappeared, this time gripping the murderous grey shape of a service automatic. “I’ll blow ‘is guts out ‘n’ stick’em down his froat!”

“Ames, down! Now!” Rose reacted first, grabbing the table under the rim with both hands and heaving it on its side, and then dragging a befuddled Ames down behind it. Leaving me sitting stupidly in my seat, the only target in the whole damn place.

“Unity—” I yelled, raising my hands as Hansen waved the pistol about. A gun pointing in your direction is an ugly, ugly thing. Frack knew if it was loaded, but I was in no hurry to find out. “Hansen, it’s me, Imre! We served together!”

Hansen’s yellowed eyes squinted in my direction, but there was no recognition there. “I uze’t know a fella call Imre,” he slurred. The pistol wavered, tilted slowly upwards until it pointed at the ceiling. I nodded encouragingly. “Back in the ‘serfs. I uze t’know. ’Bout as smart as Ricky Cameron’s left arse cheek, but not half as good-lookin’.”

There was a stifled snigger from behind the table. With effort, I kept a smile locked in place on my face like I was sitting in a dentist’s chair. “That’s right, Hansen. The reserves. We did our two years together. The four of us, you remember? You, me, Ames and Rose. You remember Ames and Rose? They’re behind this table here.”

The laugh cut off. “Imre!” Ames hissed accusingly.

Hansen hesitated, seemed to chew that over. Some thought fermented in the basement of his brain, gurgled through the tubes to his voice box, some distillation of his emotions and feelings.

“Piss on the reserves,” he said savagely. And suddenly the pistol was pointing at me again. “It’s cos of the reservers I ain’t got no bleedin’ LEGS NO MORE.”

Who knows what Hansen might have done, if the waiter hadn’t emerged from the back to see what all the yelling was about. Skinny little kid, skin somewhere between mayonnaise and fresh snow, nose that looked like it belonged on a guy about twice his size. “Hey, keep it down out—look out, he’s got a gun!”

“No shit,” I winced.

The gun snapped around, the kid screamed, raised his hands over his face and backpedaled back into the restaurant. Hansen watched him go, smirking with satisfaction. “Fracken reserves,” he muttered again, and the hate seemed to leak out of him, draining away like beer from a broken bottle.

“Mudders promised me, y’know Imre? Promised. Medals an’ honor an’ glory an’ all that shizz. They promised me.” He looked down at where his legs weren’t any more—one ending just above the knee, the other a little below. “Gorra medal owright, shiny bit of cheap brass. Like they fot I’d forget otherwise.” He pounded his thigh with the butt of the pistol. Then brought the muzzle up to the side of his temple.

I squeezed my eyes shut, itching to plug my ears, waiting for the gun to go off.

Nothing happened. When nothing continued to happen for another minute, I opened them again, to find Hansen staring tearfully into my eyes, his face only a few centimeters from mine, filling my view. The unwashed toilet bowl stench of his breath going right up my nose, I nearly gagged. I couldn’t see where the pistol was.

“Don’t believe them,” Hansen whispered to me. “Everything they say is a lie.” He pressed something cold and hard into my hand. “Everything they tell us grunts is a lie. Everything.”

He nodded once, as if satisfied that some long-planned task had been accomplished, jerked his wheelchair around and propelled himself from the balcony. There was a startled shriek from the waiter when Hansen went inside, but I must admit I wasn’t paying attention.

I looked down at the thing Hansen had pressed into my hand; his grey and battered MG55 automatic. As a precaution, I took the magazine out.

It was empty.

[Kidd]

Oooooooooooooooooo shit, the Amaris era. I've been reading up on this too.

Podded and locked.

[mikecj]

Nice start.  You always come up with an interesting slant to the stories.

[snakespinner]

The Amaris coup a very good era to write a story and an interesting start. :thumbsup:

[marauder648]

Excellent start! Can't wait to see where you go with this :)

[DOC_Agren]

target acquired and locked

[Dubble_g]

Nice start.  You always come up with an interesting slant to the stories.

Doing it again this time I'm afraid: I'm never comfortable writing about the Big Names in BT Lore (overdone, too many preconceptions of the way they should/shouldn't speak or act) so this one is about peripheral characters again.

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TWO: SHENK
Hubris City, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 1, 2766

On arrival, Colonel Volte Shenk had been ordered to parade his regiment through the streets of the city, to impress and cow the population. He was only mildly surprised to discover that this would prove challenging, mainly due to the fact that Hubris City didn’t have any streets.

But Shenk hadn’t risen to Colonel without knowing the last thing a General wanted to hear was ‘No’, so he was now doing what middle men always do—making the best of a bad situation.

Instead of the entire regiment, he would lead the Zephyr and Lightning hovertank battalion on parade, leaving the heavier Von Luckner and Manticore tanks bivouacked to the south, on firmer ground.

Hubris was a city built on nostalgia and a peat bog. Nostalgia for what, nobody seemed to have agreed on, and the result was a hallucinogenic mishmash of architectural styles, where Italian Renaissance rubbed shoulders with Spanish Colonial on one side, nu-Viking Revival on the other, and the only thing the buildings all shared in common was a layer of black-green mold that clung to every vertical surface.

When it was founded, it had been called Pride City, but it hadn’t taken long for the irony of the name to become apparent.

The streets laid between the buildings had promptly flooded, washed away or sank into the quagmire, and after a few generations of fighting against the inevitable, the population had given up and now tooled about the fetid canals between the buildings in flat-bottomed boats and canoes. The water was dark, brackish and scummy.

Much like its population, Shenk thought to himself. He stood waist-high in the lead Zephyr’s turret, bracing himself against the hatch ring and scanning the buildings on either side.

Hubris was everything Rim Worlds propaganda—meant for gullible idiots—had warned him about, and nothing that Krypteia, the Rim Worlds’ civilian intelligence service, had told him to expect. Which Shenk guessed told you who the truly gullible idiots were.

‘It’s a desert world’ Krypteia had told him. A desert world, sure, except for the peat bogs and oceans around the planet’s poles.

On the other hand, ‘the people of the Hegemony are decadent, selfish, degenerate and weak’ the propaganda had said.

One look at the moldy, slowly-sinking disaster of a city suggested that one had been pretty much on the money.

Plastic, wooden and metal-hulled skiffs crowded with watchers were drawn up on either side of the canal, among the pylons and pillars straining to keep the buildings above the waters. While some of the faces in the boats frowned or glared, or others pinched in fear, the overall impression was one of bored indifference and incuriosity.

“Careful Colonel, this is the perfect spot for an ambush,” a warning voice crackled in his ear. Arianna Stratos, his attached Krypteia agent. “Watch for anyone acting strangely or threateningly.”

Shenk bit back his first, dismissive reply. Like he needed some clueless civilian spy babbling in his ear about military strategy. But it paid to stay on the Krypteia’s good side. Another lesson he’d learned in the climb to the top.

“This lot is about as threatening as a flock of sheep,” he said instead.

Too many intelligence organizations—the Krypteia secret police, the military intelligence Mukhabarat, not to mention the political officers of the Hetairoi—and not enough intelligence.

“You’re right there, Colonel. That’s what comes from generations of soft living, parasites feeding on the blood and sweat of our pioneer forebears,” Stratos sneered in his earphones. Shenk new the attitude well enough. To people like Stratos, this wasn’t an invasion or a takeover—it was, hm, maybe ‘reparations’ fit best.

Never mind that the pioneer days were over 300 years ago. Shenk sighed a little to himself. Still, he could hardly fault Stratos for getting her history wrong, when so many people failed to understand the present.

Surely, everyone could see what was happening. Any fool could see. Yet the Cameron government assured the people that what they could plainly see happening wasn’t actually happening, so they all went along with it.

Like the surrealist painting “The Treachery of Images” – a picture of a pipe with the label ‘This is not a pipe.’ This wasn’t a takeover of the Hegemony by the Rim Worlds Republic, because Richard Cameron said it wasn’t. People’s brains seemed incapable of handling the contradiction, and simply shut down.

Try explaining that image to anyone though. He doubted Stratos could even spell ‘Dada’, much less understand Dadaist art.

To Shenk’s left, a man leaned out of a second-story balcony, gesticulating towards the tanks with a neon green cocktail. That was about the closest the population came to overt resistance. Which suited Shenk fine. He’d much rather deal with margaritas than missiles.

[Dubble_g]

More worrisome was the detachment from Fort Romas, the polar Castle Brian and—although they’d never admit it—the reason the RWA had sent Shenk’s armored regiment to garrison the city.

Shenk could see the ivory-white heads of the four BattleMechs over the rooftops ahead. Easily the least welcoming Welcoming Committee he’d ever seen. Wasn’t a lot a Zephyr could do against an irate BattleMech at point-blank range.

The Zephyr emerged from the narrow canal between buildings into a wide, flooded plaza, crowded around its edges with a flotilla of small boats packed with gawkers. The stony, crenellated façade of the city legislature sat on the opposite side, aproned by a broad flight of concrete steps that descended to the surface of the lagoon. A pair of humanoid BattleMechs stood to either side of the steps, almost waist-deep in water.

They were terrible, menacing apparitions, humanoid yet inhuman, built on a scale that rendered the merely human seem inconsequential. The two in attendance both were Corsara Weaponries KGC-000s, colloquially known as the ‘King Crab,’ among the largest BattleMechs in existence at around 100 tons of fusion engine, armor and weaponry. They stood, as aloof and arrogant as titans, yet Shenk knew the pilots had only to brush the trigger and his entire escort could be reduced to flaming wreckage in an eyeblink.

Shenk shivered, tried to shrug away the odd feeling of premonition, and directed his attention to the tiny, puny little human figures standing between the two behemoths.

A triple line of dignitaries were gathered on the steps, a strange mixture of Hegemony and Lyran Commonwealth politicians, businessmen and academics. There seemed to be some notion that Nusakan was jointly governed by the Hegemony and the Commonwealth.

Yet Shenk noted that Nusakan sheltered under a Hegemony space defense grid, was covered in Hegemony bases and garrisoned (until recently) entirely by Hegemony troops. Which made it pretty much unarguably a Hegemony world, in Shenk’s book.

Much like the current transfer of power, this was another one of those polite fictions, Shenk decided, a psychological band-aid over the truth that nobody could quite bring themselves to tear away. Well, time to slap another one on top.

The Zephyr slowed to a halt at the bottom of the steps and Shenk leapt lightly down from the side of the tank, handed his helmet to an aide and walked slowly up the steps.

He was greeted by the local ruling Baroness (a fragile and kind-looking, white haired woman in her 70s, Commonwealth), the Mayor (tall, 50s, grey hair brushed straight back, looked a bit like an ageing sports star, Hegemony), the Chairman of the city business council (rotund, bearded, Commonwealth) and the SLDF Major (tired eyes, broad mouth, good as dead so it didn’t matter where she was from). He shook hands with the civilians “A pleasure ... looking forward ... mutual cooperation ...” and then saluted the Major. She returned the gesture wryly.

They were led inside the main council chamber, where Shenk was seated next to the SLDF major on the dais while the Baroness, Mayor and Chairman made interminable welcome speeches. He’d already forgotten their names, and struggled to remember hers.

“Major ... Oliver,” he began, leaning slightly in his seat towards her.

“Orlova.” She did not look at him. Kept staring straight ahead.

“Orlova, such a lovely city you have here.”

“It’s a dump. So I’m sure you’ll feel quite at home.”

“Ouch, such poison Major, and we’ve only just met.”

“You’ll live.”

Shenk felt sure she had mentally added ‘unfortunately’ on the end. “It is a touch, hm, humid, which is a snag when you have a regiment of 60-ton tanks, not noted for their buoyancy,” he said. “Perhaps you might find room in the Fort to—”

“Absolutely not.”

“You are under orders to cooperate with us, Major.”

“If you like Shenk, I will gladly assist you to go screw yourself.”

“We are allies, Major. I realize the citizens of the Hegemony have developed all sorts of strange prejudices about my people, but please do try to remember that one fact. If we are to work together, we may as well try to keep things pleasant.”

“Your band of criminals, drug-dealers and thugs are here for precisely as long as it takes for Kerensky to finish off your backwoods friends, come back here and kick your asses back under whichever rock you crawled from.”

Well, he had tried. It might have made things easier, though admittedly not for her or her men. Shenk’s lips compressed into a sad half-smile. “I sincerely hope you are wrong.” About Kerensky coming back, at any rate.

“I could give a frack what you hope. Get this, Shenk: I may have to tolerate you, but I sure as shit don’t have to like you. Fort Romas is off limits. That’s not a subject for discussion. You want somewhere to bunk, try the Polar Tidal Flats.”

“Colonel Shenk, if you please Major.” He felt himself smiling, despite himself. The Rim Worlds military was fueled by fear and unthinking obedience to the chain of command. It was refreshing to find someone willing to speak so bluntly. “The Tidal Flats?”

Major Orlova turned her head slightly towards him for the first time in their conversation. Her smile held nothing pleasant. “They’re very cozy,” she said. “I sincerely hope you all get a good night’s rest.”

The Chairman was winding up his speech, turning away from the podium to clap in appreciation of the city’s new protectors. The city councilors were all on their feet, beaming at Shenk with insincere smiles, smacking their palms together in ersatz applause. What a circus, Shenk thought to himself.

He stood in response to their cheers, bowed in thanks.

Major Orlova mimed clapping, but her hands never quite touched. Striking nothing, over and over.

[Daryk]

+1 for "Mukhabarat"... and at least +2 more for the SLDF garrison commander... I like her attitude, even if it won't save her.

[Dubble_g]

THREE: IMRE
Hubris City, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 6, 2766

Hansen was waiting outside my front door when I got home.

Man, after a long day on the flats, I was beat, ready to drop dead, just grab a bite and crawl into bed. Instead, there was the one person I least wanted to see sitting right outside. I just kind of juddered to a halt in the corridor outside my apartment, passkey in my hand, bag of marginally-edible things that could only loosely be called ‘food’ I’d picked up at the Terran Eggemony Store under my other arm, and looked at him. He looked at me. We did that for a bit.

“How long’ve you been waiting here?”

He spread his hands, a kind of helpless gesture. “You gonna invite me in?”

I squeezed past him, swiped the lock with the passkey and propped the door open with my toe. “Mi caja es su casa.” My little joke: ‘My box is your castle.’

We sat in the main room, the only room—well, he sat, I leaned against the countertop. I got us sodas, didn’t have anything stronger in the house, the lime flavored stuff: Swamp Water. Offered him one of the hot dogs I’d gotten from the TE Store, the ones we all called ‘Little Richards’ on account of they got teeny little wieners. He refused. Wise man.

“You still got it?” he finally asked. He looked better than when I’d seen him last—though that was a low bar to clear—beard trimmed back, clothes looking like they’d been washed sometime this century. His fingers were oddly blackened though, but I don’t know, seemed a small thing to worry about.

“Yeah, I still got it.” I pushed up from the counter, about to go get his gun out of my jacket.

“Keep it.” I was going to object, but something in the way he said it stopped me. “Don’t trust myself with it,” he explained.

“There’s no bullets, Hansey,” I pointed out. “Can’t hurt anyone much without them. Anyway, it’s no big deal if you’ve got a gun. Hell, we all got guns at home.”

Every reservist keeps their Mauser & Gray 960 pulse carbine at home—part of your duty is to keep it clean, well-maintained and ready for use. The power packs, though, are all kept at the assembly points, or at bases like Fort Romas.

“There’s ways of getting ammo,” Hansen said. “Anyway, just do me a favor, ‘kay? Just hang onto it for a little.”

“Right. Sure. No problem.” Keep the gun he’d just been waving around in public. Yeah, no problem. But Unity, this was Hansen. We all kind of felt we owed him one. “You doing okay? In some kind of trouble? You can crash here tonight, if you like.”

When I called the apartment my ‘box’, that was only a mild understatement. It had a grand total of two rooms—the living room slash dining room slash kitchen slash bedroom, and the bathroom with its bump-your-knees-against-the-wall narrow toilet and standup shower stall that only had cold water, and slightly less water pressure than standing outside in a light drizzle.

I had a two-seat sofa facing a tri-D by the door, a table about the size of an ambitious, up-and-coming plate, one chair, and a second-hand bed wedged down the far end. MG960 under the bed. Wasn’t what you call spacious.

But like I said, we all kind of felt guilty about Hansen. After all, it could easily have been any one of us, Unity, maybe it should have been one of us, rather than him. There but for the grace, and all that.

“Thanks, but it’s okay. I got a place, with some ... friends I know.”

“You sure? It’s no hassle.”

“I said it’s okay.”

“Well, if you’re sure.”

“Does ‘okay’ mean something different to you, Imre?”

“It’s getting late.”

“What part are you not getting, the ‘o’ or the ‘kay’?”

“Just offering, jeez.”

That made things kind of awkward. He wanted to go, but I think he wanted to finish the soda first. So we just stood or sat, silently drinking, matching each other swig for swig, plowing stoically through our rations of carbonated sugar water.

You’d have thought we were on our way to a funeral.

“Second day on New Vandenberg,” Hansen said suddenly. He never talked about it, not before, so I shut up and listened.

“Wasn’t no damn landmine. Second day, still woozy from all the shots they give you on arrival, against all the local germs and viruses and bacteria and whatnot. Barely had my head on straight. We’re ordered into the city, to support the BattleMech advance. Easy job, the Major tells us, mopping up, little or no resistance. Right, then why the hell they send in the BattleMechs? They’re great machines, sure, great at blowing everything to all sorts of hell, not so good at checking cellars and attics though. So a bunch of greenhorn reservists get sent to tag along behind.

“You think you got a taste of what they’re like in training? We didn’t see shit. We were behind this one, a Black Knight, blew apart an office block in three seconds. All casual like, ‘hey screw this building’ and pow! Ten-story building just explodes, annihilated, gone in an instant.

“There was an ambush. Residential street, teams with guided missiles, heavy weapons, hidden in buildings, behind burned-out cars, under piles of rubble. Black Knight starts vaporizing them, like it’s the angel of death at Armageddon, blasts of blue light so bright I thought I’d gone blind, whole squads of indigs just flash-fried, bursting like blood balloons. One of our own guys got too close when it was firing, goes prone but still got third-degree burns all down his back. Uniform either burned off or melted right into his skin. Just for getting too close, Imre, you understand?

“I see some crazy-ass indig plinking away at it with an MG from a second-story window. Well, here’s my chance, I think. Time to be a hero. Bust into the building. Only there’s a family, grandparents, parents, couple of screaming kids, all huddled under a table inside. And I’m trying to think what to do, maybe get them out the back, and then the whole house dissolves around me. Damn Black Knight didn’t bother to check with the infantry, just fried the whole place with me, the indig gunner, the family all inside.”

Hansen ran a hand across his eyes. “Over so quick, I don’t even remember. One second I’m standing there, yelling at these civvies to keep down, get out, next thing I know everything’s black, I’m buried under what’s left of their house and can’t feel my legs.”

[Dubble_g]

He drained the last of his soda. “Little to no resistance,” he repeated. “Got that right.” He held the empty bottle out to me. “’Preciate it,” he said, stifling a burp. “Just wanted to see if you still had, you know. It.”

No. I didn’t believe he came to check on his pistol. Why tell me, why now, that had me worried, but I figured he’d tell me in his own time. So I took the bottle, dumped his and mine in the sink. “Anything for a friend,” I said. “We had some good times, eh? You, me, Ames, Rose.”

Hansen chuckled, maybe a little bitterly I thought. “The hell you still doing hanging with those two, Imre?” He started to wheel himself towards the door. “’Bout time you started making your own decisions, ‘stead of following those two like a puppy.”

And, ouch. Getting life lessons from an unemployed, homeless alcoholic. Maybe my life, I realized looking around the apartment again, was worse than I thought.

I opened the door and held it for Hansen. “Maybe,” I said, knowing he was right. “Take care.”

Hansen stopped in the doorway. Opened his mouth once or twice, like he was going to say something, trying to figure out what he was. Finally he settled on: “You take care too.” Then, more quietly: “Things are going to get worse, you know.”

Ah. Here we go, I thought. The real reason Hansen suddenly turned storyteller. “I don’t know—”

“Sure you do. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

“When Kerensky gets back—”

“That’s precisely what I’m talking about, Imre. When he gets back, or more likely immediately before he does, everything is gonna hit the fan.” He patted his thighs. “The man is not a builder, Imre. He’s a destroyer. All he does is break things. And the little guys like you and me, we don’t count. We don’t even enter the calculations. They’ll blow the whole damn building, the city, even the planet, whether or not we’re inside. We’ve got to look out for ourselves, not wait for some savior. You get me?”

I said I did, but neither of us believed that.

I stayed in the doorway, watching him roll down the landing to the elevator, push the button, wait for the car to arrive.
“Take care.” He backed himself in, and gave me a wave before the doors slid shut again.

I waved back, but too late. Waving at nothing.

[ckosacranoid]

Interesting story, last time i seen a story in this era was one about a rim world-er that switched sides on terra down in the south west and joined the rebels and later comstar seen his children hit them with the groups mechs in the 31st centry and it was fun reading.

[Dubble_g]

Interesting story, last time i seen a story in this era was one about a rim world-er that switched sides on terra down in the south west and joined the rebels and later comstar seen his children hit them with the groups mechs in the 31st centry and it was fun reading.

Here or on BattleCorps? Shame there isn't an avenue for 'official' fan fiction any more.

***

FOUR: SHENK
South of Hubris City, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 6, 2766

Shenk strolled through the camp, whistling to himself. A nod there, a pat on the shoulder there, make them feel seen, make them feel appreciated. The construction battalion had finally arrived. Earth movers and haulers fumed and growled, pawed and clawed at the earth, lumbered back and forth in almost Sisyphean labor. Lines of sweating, half-dressed men hauled sheets of resin, plastic and metal into position, or sank shovels and pickaxes into the earth to dig ditches, foxholes and trenches.

The regiment’s base was finally taking shape.

Flimsy barracks, to be honest. A headquarters building that looked like it would blow down in the first stiff gale. A curtain wall built of pre-fabbed plastic, some sheets in mismatching colors, topped in razor wire. Everything about the camp screamed ‘Temporary’ to Shenk. Like they expected not to have to use it for long.

Made about as much sense as sending a heavy armored regiment to garrison a swampy city. Viz: None at all.

In a way, Shenk thought, it was almost admirable, this breathtaking willingness to just brazen it out, to give the Rim Worlds’ ambitions only the thinnest, most shriveled, pathetic fig leaf of an excuse for cover. This almost sneering disregard for the ‘optics’ of the move or how it would play out in PR. They had Richard Cameron’s blessing, and what was anyone going to do about it?

Shenk stood for a moment on a small rise in the camp, looking North to the swamps, the city of Hubris and the great bay beyond. Fort Romas was out there, somewhere, under those hills.

Long grey-green stalks of marsh grass bowed before him, genuflections before their king. Or so he liked to imagine. A few black specks moved against the backdrop of restless, wispy clouds, and he heard the distant thwop of rotor blades.

A flight of Cyrano gunships from the Fort—Major Orlova’s daily reminder of her presence.

They’d buzz the camp, coming closer than was strictly necessary, closer than was polite, and circle a few times before clattering away again. It was becoming something of a routine. Shenk waved lazily at the lead gunship chattered overhead. One day, the fire control radar at the camp would lock onto those gunships and—well, then they’d see. But not today. He waved again.

“Suspicious, aren’t they?”

Shenk glanced down and found the Krypteia agent, Stratos, standing at his side. Looked more like an economist or investment broker than a torturer and inquisitor, a tiger in a sleek designer suit. He let his hand fall slowly before replying. “Didn’t expect to see you here, agent. Thought you’d be busy terrorizing the locals.”

“Better to be feared than loved,” she said, and Shenk fought the urge to roll his eyes. Quoting Machiavelli, like a first-year political science student, with slogans as thin as a solar sail. She was still watching the dwindling shadows of the VTOLs. “The SLDF is spying on you?”

“Hm, the good Major does seem to enjoy keeping an eye on her new neighbors,” he agreed. “Must be my magnetic charm. She can’t bear to let me out of her sight.”

Stratos looked at him sharply. “Perhaps a more serious attitude might be in order, Colonel. We are on the cusp of achieving a great victory for our people.”

“Are we?” His mouth quirked up in a smile, but was quickly wiped away. “No, it was a foolish question Agent. Of course we are. Do not let my outwardly jovial demeanor fool you. My will is adamantine, my heart burns with love for the Rim Worlds Republic and our Dear Leader, Stefan Amaris. I would gladly sacrifice my entire regiment if it but moved us a millimeter closer to achieving his dream.”

“As well you should. We have not forgiven, nor forgotten the Pollux Proclamation,” Stratos said. A two hundred year-old announcement by then-Director-General Ian Cameron of his intent to incorporate the Rim Worlds Republic and other Periphery States into the joyous, benevolent ecumene of the Star League, by force if necessary, whether they liked it or not.

In the event, the Periphery hadn’t liked it much, and quite a bit of force had been necessary. Every family, it seemed to Shenk, had some tragic story about the time, some antediluvian ancestor who’d fought, suffered or died (preferably all three) during the wars that had followed.

The irony of course was that the Dear Leader Stefan Amaris’s ancestor, Gregory Amaris, had been on the Star League’s side. Against his own people. But propaganda, as people had been observing for a thousand years, almost always meant holding two opposing beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and fervently believing them both to be true. The Republic had bitterly resisted incorporation into the Star League; the Republic was blessed with the infallible leadership of the Amaris family.

It was easy, provided you didn’t think too hard about it.

“For too long, we have suffered under the heel of the Hegemony and its lackeys, the Lyran Commonwealth.” Stratos was still in full propaganda broadcast mode. “Soon, it will be their turn to suffer.”

“Can’t wait.”

“We must crush the SLDF.”

“Absolutely. Crush, crush. What joy.”

“You are doing it again, Colonel.”

His smile was thin and utterly insincere. “Why are you here, agent?”

“I’m the Krypteia agent in charge of this operation, Colonel. I won’t let anything jeopardize it.” She folded her arms over her chest. “If you cannot do what must be done, we can find another commander who will.”

“Ah, so you came to test my resolve?” Shenk’s smile grew more genuine, though no warmer. “You’ve got guts, I’ll give you that agent, threatening a Colonel in the middle of his own regiment. What do you think would happen, if I were to tell the Mukhabarat you were a double agent for the Hegemony? Who knows, you might even live long enough to convince them I was wrong.” He raised a hand to forestall her next outburst. “Which is all just to illustrate the pointlessness of us threatening each other. Now. If you want to do something useful, find me a way inside that Fort, agent. A door, a key. An entire armored corps, much less one regiment, won’t do much against that fortification if they just go turtle and refused to come out of their shell.”

Shenk didn’t wait for her answer, but turned from the hill, and began walking back down the slope, towards the mild bedlam of the belching, moaning construction machinery, and dirty, swearing construction crews.

Stratos caught up a second later, though half-jogging to keep pace. “You’re too pessimistic, Colonel,” she chided. “Nuclear warheads, nerve gas—”

Shenk didn’t bother to hide his distaste this time. “Thank the wisdom and perspicacity of the Dear Leader for sending you here, agent. I would have plum forgotten about the nukes if you hadn’t reminded me.” He waved back towards the Fort. “We’re not the only ones with nukes, agent. That’s a Pandora’s Box I’d rather not blow open. A door, agent. Get me a key.”

Stratos muttered something noncommittal.

“A key, Agent Stratos.” Shenk saluted, dismissing her.

He wouldn’t hold his breath, though. He put no stock in empty promises.

[Dubble_g]

Short chapter today, so thought I'd post the next one too, as I'll probably be running silent on the weekend.

***

FIVE: STRATOS
Hubris City, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 7, 2766

Arianna Stratos, Krypteia agent-in-charge, Fort Romas operation, replayed the first conversation between Shenk and Orlova. Shenk had kept his wrist cuff communicator that day, which allowed Krypteia agents to eavesdrop even when it was ostensibly switched off, plus there was another bug in the belt of his uniform.

Shenk struck her as the kind of man always sure he was the smartest person in any room he wandered into, and she was happy to play along and fill the role he seemed to expect of her—the mindless, rabid Amaris loyalist. Though frankly, if Shenk couldn’t see there was only one way this operation could end, then he was an even bigger fool than he appeared.

“I sincerely hope you are wrong,” Shenk’s voice peeped. The idiot.

This was a suicide mission. Well, the whole thing was, really. A kind of civilizational madness, an entire society flinging itself lemming-like off its inability to admit its own faults or accept that its system was fundamentally broken. The Hegemony was committing suicide by inviting them in, the Rim Worlds was killing itself by accepting, and then Kerensky would break the entire Star League on the sharp point of his inability to admit that he had failed to prevent it. All because none of them could conceive that honor, loyalty, fealty and blind obedience to despots and would-be-emperors were a one-way road to a civilizational dead-end.

And Stratos? She was just trying to surf the wave, come out on top when it inevitably collapsed. There were always those who made a killing from catastrophe, and she aimed to be one of them.

Stratos leaned back in her office chair, gazing out the window as she listened to the recording. The Krypteia had taken over the top two floors of the police headquarters, and this had once been the commissioner’s office. There had been some grumbling, of course, but there’d been no orders to say that the Rim Worlders couldn’t commandeer the building, while there she was, insisting that they could, so everyone had made a face, muttered under their breath, and gotten out of her way. Blind obedience.

It was a nice office, she’d give the Hegemony that. Easily led, morally bankrupt, utterly clueless about realpolitik, but they had good taste in furniture. The office windows looked out over the central lake-slash-plaza, making the whole space feel surprisingly light and airy, while inside was tasteful wood, velvet-smooth leather, glass walls to let her keep an eye on her agents.

“—try the Polar Tidal Flats,” Orlova was saying in the recording.

Stratos reached over, hit pause. Ran a quick search on the noteputer built into the desk, and smiled at what she read.
Nusakan had three moons, ranging from rusted iceball Xanthe, to blue-gray Niki, to the tiny little pearl of Harshold. Aside from a slightly crowded night sky and surprisingly bright evenings, what that meant were some of the most dramatic tides in the Inner Sphere.

The planet’s equator was girdled with a massive desert, with most of the free-standing water pooling into two oceans, located around either pole. These waters sloshed excitedly back and forth under the pull of the three moons—out here in Hubris, the water level rose and fell by an average of around 12 meters between high and low tides, but over 20 during a syzygy—when all three moons were aligned and all pulled on the ocean in the same direction. At other times, the tides didn’t simply ebb and flow back and forth either, Stratos read, but there was a complex and chaotic rush of water this way and that, depending on which moon was where relative to Nusakan and each other.

As a result, a 15-kilometer stretch of mud flats and stony bedrock were exposed around the city at low tide, then plunged underwater again at high. Each year, a handful of visiting tourists were caught out on the flats, and swept underwater before they realized what was happening.

Stratos smiled in appreciation of Orlova’s joke. If Shenk had parked the regiment out there, they’d have woken up at the bottom of the sea.

A tough woman. It would be a pleasure to tear her apart.

What Stratos needed though was a thread, something to wrap around her finger and pull, so she could unravel Orlova and her garrison in the fort.

She thumbed a button on the desk to summon her two aides, Rajk and Curda, into her office. Rajk was impressively tall, well over two meters, bearded, with a long face and an easy grin, more like a college basketball player than security forces officer. Outwardly pleasant, but a sadistic thug, which had its uses. Curda was a tough woman with vitiligo, sharply dividing her skin into swathes of dark mahogany and almost albino white, like two separate people haphazardly glued together. A religious fanatic, a follower of some syncretic, chthonic religion of her forebears about spirits of the dead or something, which also made her a willing tool, though her divided loyalties were something to watch. In any event, they were useful if disposable.

“Well?” Stratos asked expectantly.

“We’ve been going through the police database here,” Rajk began.

“Looking for any soldiers who’ve had run-ins with the law here, AWOL, drunk and disorderly, that kind of thing,” Curda explained. “Domestic disputes, relatives in financial trouble, anything like that.”

“But the guys at the Fort are either from off-world, so there’s no leverage we can apply, or squeaky clean,” Rajk continued.

Stratos leaned back in her chair, tilted her head a little, and waited. These two had been with her long enough to know not to come to her empty-handed. The two agents exchanged a look.

Rajk cleared his throat. “We did find one possible lead.”

“It’s not much,” said Curda.

“I’ll decide if it is or it isn’t.” Stratos nodded to Rajk. “Go on.”

“There was a call during the parade. Guy with a gun in a restaurant, shouting about Kerensky. Caller thought he was about to shoot someone, or himself.” Rajk flashed one of his trademark grins. “Here’s the thing: We checked the gunman’s service record. The guy’s ex-SLDF.”

“So?” Stratos shrugged, getting annoyed. Letting it creep into her voice. “Everyone over the age of 23 here is ex-SLDF, Raj. Compulsory service in the militia.”

Rajk’s grin slipped. “Ah, but ma’am, this guy was actual in the real SLDF, not just the reserves. Shipped out to New Vandenberg, got invalided home six months later minus his legs. Fell right through the social safety net, no fixed address, no place of employment listed.”

“That’s gotta sour you on the top brass,” put in Curda.

Stratos grunted her acknowledgment. A bitter veteran wasn’t much, but better than nothing. Might know entry codes, floorplans, defenses, rosters, or know someone who knew. You had to start somewhere. “This homeless vagabond have a name at least?”

Curda nodded. “Olin Hansen, ma’am.”

[Dubble_g]

They requisitioned one of the police amphiboats, a 10-meter long open-topped, rubber-ringed thing with a noisy pair of outboard biofuel motors and retractable wheels that folded down to run on the mud at low tide. Rajk took the wheel, located about two-thirds the way back, while Stratos and Curda sat up front. The two agents were dressed head to toe in black, with bulky laser pistols holstered at their sides, while Stratos had remained in her charcoal-grey business suit.

Stratos watched the lily pads and algae wash away in their bow waves. A wriggling mass of slimy, eel-like leeches and lamprey things surfaced briefly before slithering, sliding back into the depths. She made a mental note not to try swimming here any time soon.

The restaurant turned out to be the one of the middle tenants in a row of shabby, ‘American Frontier’ buildings done in fabbed, recycled plastic, unconvincingly sprayed to look like wood. The ornate lettering over the first-floor door by the docks where they moored the amphiboat, proclaimed it the ‘T&T’, which on closer inspection turned out to mean ‘Time and Tide’ rather than being an anarchist threat.

“We’re closed,” the waiter said when Rajk pushed open the door to the restaurant.

“You are now,” he agreed pleasantly, locking the door behind them, folding his arms and leaning against the doorway. Rajk’s head nearly scraped the ceiling.

It was a dreary little place, with a dozen round tables whose black-and-white checkered tablecloths had gone green at the corners, and were perhaps one stray gamma ray from evolving into their own life forms. A balcony of dubious structural integrity jutted out over the riverstreet with a further two tables. There were a few photos on the walls, so thick with dust Stratos had trouble making out what they were—possibly fishermen posing next to their boats or catches, perhaps.
The waiter was a pallid and frail little thing, thought Stratos, with a proboscis that would not have looked out of place on a tropical primate. He froze, in the process of folding napkins for the evening, looked at the big man now leaning against the door, to the two women standing in front of him, and noisily gulped.

“Who else?” Curda barked, one hand on her holster. Her index finger tapped the butt.

“T-t-two guys in back, owner’s in the office ... “ the waiter said, half-folded napkin in his hands, staring rapt at the laser pistol.

“Call them.”

The waiter hesitated.

“It’s alright,” Stratos smiled encouragingly. She stood, relaxed but ready, hands clasped behind her back. In command of the room. “We are the Hegemony Security Forces, the authorities. The good guys. The only ones who have anything to fear from us are people with something to hide.”

The boy’s eyes went round, and his forehead was shiny with sweat. Stratos loved that line. It sounded so innocent, but of course, everyone had something to hide.

“... guys?” the boy squeaked. “Uh, guys, you’d better come out here.”

The cook was first, almost as young as the waiter, with unruly curly hair that stuck out from his head with almost carbonated or caffeinated intensity. As if to compensate, there was an elfin-thin waitress with a buzz-shaved head, and finally the owner, a cargo barge of a woman with hooded, suspicious eyes. Their eyes flicked to Rajk, now pointedly cleaning his fingernails with a long combat knife, to Curda’s glaring, multihued face and tense hand upon her pistol, to Stratos. They fell into line, silent and cowed.

“We are here in response to the firearms violation you reported,” Stratos said brusquely. Not quite a lie. “Who contacted the authorities?”

The other three all mutely pointed at the waiter, who flinched as if struck by their fingers and seemed to shrink inside his black-and-white uniform.

“You know this man, Hansen?”

“Sure, well, he’s kind of a regular,” the boy’s head bobbed up and down.

“Address? Place of employment?”

“Dunno, don’t think he works, just collects disability,” the boy shook his head, then froze when he saw a frown crease Stratos’ forehead. “Hey, look, he always comes here with the other three, Ames, Rose and, um, the other guy. Maybe they know. Or something.”

“Ames? Rose?” Stratos looked to Curda, but the woman shook her head slightly.

“Yeah. Tristan Ames, Rose Ozaki. Well. Think they served together in the militia or something.”

“And where might we find these boon companions of his?”

“His what? Oh.” The boy blinked in thought for a moment. “Well. I think they work in the PTF Visitor Center. Or something.”

Stratos allowed her surprise to show—one eyebrow arched in doubt. “You get visitors around here?”

“Well, yeah,” he waved vaguely towards the riverstreet. “To see the tides’n that. Kinda dangerous though.”

“Don’t worry,” said Stratos, nodding to Curda and Rajk. Time to go. Rajk put his knife away, a little disappointed, and unlocked the door. “We’ll be careful.”

As she was walking out of the restaurant, Stratos glanced at the paintings again. In every photo, she realized, the fishermen’s nets, hooks and cargo holds were empty.

[snakespinner]

Cawest did a story on a rim world soldier stationed on Terra who deserted.

[Dubble_g]

Cawest did a story on a rim world soldier stationed on Terra who deserted.

Fantastic. Anyone got a link to the story?

[mikecj]

Interesting metaphor about all the empty nets.

[cawest]

Fantastic. Anyone got a link to the story?

I did not have a beta for the start. 
https://bg.battletech.com/forums/index.php?topic=19579.0;nowap

[DOC_Agren]

Interesting story, last time i seen a story in this era was one about a rim world-er that switched sides on terra down in the south west and joined the rebels and later comstar seen his children hit them with the groups mechs in the 31st centry and it was fun reading.

I remember that one, and it on here...

[Dubble_g]

I remember that one, and it on here...

Bruh, cawest just posted the link to it.

[Esskatze]

GG, great to see that you're gifting us with one of your novellas again. While I like the "Gentlemen Assassins" well enough (and would not mind to see a continuation of their adventures), your BT stories have a special place in my heat. Your choice of settings is superb as ever - I always thought that the Star League before its fall should be more often in the spotlight, given that it was the basis of what happened in the BT universe.

Can't wait to read the next chapter!  :)

[Dubble_g]

Interesting metaphor about all the empty nets.

You guys are probably used to this by now but yeah, I like to have these kind of themes running through the stories.

While I like the "Gentlemen Assassins" well enough (and would not mind to see a continuation of their adventures), your BT stories have a special place in my heart.

Thanks Esskatze. The Gentlemen are fun to write, but I find I have to be in a specific mood to write them ... there's two more in progress at the moment, when and if I ever get around to finishing them. I keep coming back to BT though, like John Wick to balletic gunfights. Only, y'know, less breathtaking.

***

SIX: IMRE
Visitor Center, Polar Tidal Flats, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 7, 2766

I stood on the Visitor Center’s porch, and watched Ames lead a line of two dozen tourists out across the Tidal Flats, tiny ant dots approaching a vague horizon. We worked as tiderunners now, guiding the tourists to see the islets, caves and sinkholes and rock sculptures carved by the rising and falling tides, and making sure they didn’t get caught out there when the tides changed, and the plains suddenly flooded again.

Rose was there too, elbows on the balcony rail, chin in her hands.

“Pretty empty now,” I said, carefully looking out at nothing, trying to keep my voice casual. “So, uh Rose, you, uh, you want to—”

“Imre. Don’t,” Rose said shortly, straightening. And walked away, back inside the Center. I watched her talk to Nazario, the dispatcher, at the reception desk for a few minutes, then wander into the back office.

The three of us had been seated next to each other, on the hoverbus to the boot camp.

Everyone in the Hegemony does two years, starting age 20. There was I, zoning out, worried about everything, looking at nothing, and suddenly this vision sits next to me. Face like it was the blueprint for the Golden Ratio, megawatt eyes that sent a jolt through you every time she so much as looked your way. So I was gathering myself, wracking my brains for an opening line, when this guy plops down the other side of her, “Come here often? Name’s Ames.” And that was that.

Ames was a performer, the kind of guy who always needed an audience for everything he did, to be the center of attention everywhere he went. Or he, I dunno, was worried he might evaporate or something, not exist unless he was witnessed, like the zen question about the tree falling in the forest. I was just a rudderless kid, happy to tag along.

Saved his life, once. Part of the training is what they call BattleMech Exposure and Acclimatization. Sounds fancy, right? What you do is, you and the other trainees sit in foxholes, and a company of BattleMechs walks straight towards you. That’s it. You sit there, and these 12-meter tall, 100-ton monstrosities come thundering right at you, shaking the ground, kicking up eruptions of dust and dirt with each step, sides of your foxhole crumbling in, you sit there and pray none of the jocks make a mistake and step on you. That’s it. You pass the training by staying put, not running away and not filling your pants any more than usual.

Me and Ames were in the same foxhole. The BattleMechs get to within about 100 meters of us, close enough you feel each step rattling your bones, shaking your brain around in your skull. A big one, a King Crab, was coming right for us. And Ames freaked out. Jumped up. ‘He’s gonna step right on us!’ he screamed, throws his pack over the lip of the hole and tried to scrabble out after it. Had to grab him by the belt, yank him backwards, cursing, screaming, back down inside. Elbowed me in the nose. Wrapped both my arms under his armpits, over his shoulders, locked my hands behind his neck. Get him to keep still, even as I’m seeing sparks and blood is streaming into my mouth and down my chin.

And WHAM. The King Crab’s foot smacked the ground less than a meter away. Lifted us bodily off the ground. Ames’ pack was pancaked, a millimeter-thin smear at the bottom of a huge footprint.

Saved his life. And how’d he pay me back?

First leave, we hit the town, three of us, Ames, Rose and Me. Back to Ames’ place. I go to the fridge to get more drinks, come back to find the two of them half-naked on the couch. No signs of stopping. Oh don’t mind me. Sat out on the front step until I was sober enough to catch a taxi-tug home.

He told everyone HE was the one that pulled ME back into the foxhole. He’d push you in the mud and tell you to learn to take a joke when you got mad. Ask to take a holo of you, then doctor it to put you in a dress and share it on the chatweb. Strong contender for the galaxy’s greatest friend, that was Ames.

Yet here I was, three years later. Still trailing in his wake, and Rose’s. Still stupidly hoping that things might change.

[Dubble_g]

“You work here?” a voice at my elbow said.

I turned and found a tall woman there, almost my height, maybe early middle age, business clothes, business haircut, business eyes, business smile.

There was another woman by the door to the Center, shorter but maybe more muscle-y, all in black, armed. Her skin was an usual pattern of light and dark—her face, for example, was almost entirely dark, but for her jaw and throat, which were almost translucent white. Like a graft or something, a bionic jaw. There was a police amphi outside, and another guy in black, seriously big—like, I could only see up to his shoulders, his head and neck were higher than the window. Rose was nowhere in sight.

And I thought: Oh shit.

I was wearing the standard tiderunner getup—low-cut hiking boots, three-quarter pants, wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses, rucksack, waterproof jacket with plenty of pockets. In one of those pockets sat Hansen’s service pistol. Hadn’t known what to do with it, terrified of losing it. So I kept it around. And was now desperately wishing that I hadn’t.

“Uh ... yeah?” No point in denying. She’d be asking, and everyone knew I was on staff. “You are?”

“Hegemony Security Forces, Agent Stratos,” the woman introduced herself, and tapped a badge on the breast of her jacket that displayed a small holo of an official-looking logo and her face. Looked official, but what the hell do I know? Could’ve been a three-second loop of a Crazy Critter cartoon for all it meant to me. “We’re looking for two men, named Olin Hansen and Tristan Ames. And a woman, Rose Ozaki. You know them?”

I’ll admit, my first reaction was relief. They didn’t have my name. Nobody looking for me. Second reaction was, if anything, even worse. I was thinking: Maybe I could get Ames in some serious shit right now. I was thinking: Maybe he deserved it. Maybe this was my shot. Guess Ames had some competition for the galaxy’s greatest friend award.

I’d taken too long to respond. Stratos was looking at me, like a cat would a mouse. “It’s okay. We’re the good guys,” she said. Wasn’t sure if that was meant to be reassuring or threatening. Maybe a little of both. “The only ones who have anything to fear from us are people with something to hide.”

Which, lemme tell you, is bull. Plenty of people don’t want the secret service prying into our private lives. Don’t make us all criminals. Alarm bells started screaming in my head. Why the ‘Hegemony Security Forces’, not the regular beat cops? Why’d these strangers, working for some organization I’d never heard of, show up right after the Rim Worlders arrived? There went any idea of just throwing Ames under the proverbial bus. I was thinking: Screw you, sister.

“Ames, he uh, he just took the MLW group out,” I told her, playing up my hesitation. “Not gonna be back for a couple of hours.”

“MLW?”

“Mean Low Water.” I waved towards the expanse of wet mud and bared stone beyond the Center. “Take you out there, if you like.” Get you lost, maybe, get you stuck out there in the middle of a flood tide. Get you drowned, if I don’t like you bad enough.

Stratos gave me a thin smile, and I got the feeling she’d read every single one of those thoughts. “Maybe later,” she said. “And Ozaki?”

Aw, damn. Stratos hadn’t been thrown off. “Think she went inside,” I said. “C’mon, let’s have a look.” I strode past Stratos. Seize the initiative, stay in control of the situation. “Hey Nazario,” I called to the man behind the desk before Stratos could say anything. “You see Rose?”

Nazario was keeping an eye on the two-tone woman by the door without making it too obvious that was what he was doing. Pretending to tap at his noteputer, but I saw he was just hitting the ‘Refresh’ key over and over again. He glanced at me, at Stratos, at me, then nodded towards the back office. “In there, maybe? I dunno.”

I breezed past him, shouldered open the door. Aware of Stratos right behind me. Rose was there, sitting across from the two operators, guy with a braided Viking beard called Guy and full-body tattooed girl called Probst. The three of them were laughing, but stopped as soon as I entered. Rose shot the other two a look and rolled her eyes a little. Ouch.

Loudly, I said: “Hey guys, anyone see where Rose went?” Looking straight at her. Thinking: please get this, please don’t be dumb, please get this. And praying Stratos hadn’t done an image search on Ames or Rose yet.

Guy and Probst kind of looked at each other. Like, what the hell was Imre’s problem? Rose was about to say something, then caught sight of Stratos coming through the doorway.

“I think she went out,” Rose said quickly, before Guy or Probst could give the game away. “There a message?”

I waved to Stratos. “This is Officer Stratos,” I introduced her. “She’s looking for Rose, Ames and a guy called Hansen.” Not exactly subtle, but I didn’t have time for subtle.

“Agent Stratos.” Stratos laid a hand on my shoulder. “Thank you, I can take it from here.” She did her little introductory laser light show with her badge. “We’re the good guys.” Uh huh. The more she said it, the less I believed it. “Do you know where Miss Ozaki went?”

The other three shook their heads—Rose first, the other two following her lead. Smart girl, playing dumb is easier than making up lies. I noticed a little line form on Stratos’s brow, right between her eyes. Woman was pissed.

“Well, we know where Ames went,” I said hurriedly. People with short tempers are often impatient—if she just waited here for Ames to come back, she’d bag Ames and Rose easy, maybe me too, with no way to warn Hansen. But then, if she’d been patient, she would’ve just found out where Ames and Rose lived and showed up there, instead of here. “Why don’t we see if we can catch up with him?”

Stratos eyed me for a minute. Trying to decide if—no, check that—how much I was lying to her. “Alright,” she said at last. “We’ll take the amphi.” She laid her hand on my shoulder again, with surprising iron grip, and turned me towards the door. Couldn’t have stopped her without dislocating my shoulder.

“Curda,” Stratos called to the other woman. “Stay here, don’t let anyone out. Anyone who arrives stays here, too, until I get back.” Then, to me. “Let’s go. Wouldn’t want to miss the tide.”

Rose was doing her best to murder me with her eyes again as we turned to go. Thought I was selling Ames out, probably. G-E-T-H-A-N-S-E-N, I mouthed at her over my shoulder. Then added, C-A-L-L-C-O-P-S. Didn’t think police knew about Stratos and her laser-armed buddies paying us a visit. Maybe calling the regulars in would muddy the waters enough.

Rose’s face softened fractionally and she nodded, a millimeter up and down, as the door closed behind me.

The eff-you huge guy turned out to be, on closer inspection, eff-you huge. But really easy-going with it. “Name’s Rajk,” he gave an infectious grin and extended a hand as Stratos led me towards the amphi. “Just ... don’t. Okay?” Still smiling, he gave my hand a bone-crushing squeeze and let go. “Just don’t.”

Out the corner of my eye, I saw Stratos vault up into the amphi.

“I’ve no idea what—”

“Good, glad to hear it.” He patted me on the shoulder and nodded towards Stratos sitting the boat. “Ain’t polite to keep a lady waiting.”

I smiled, feeling sick, glad my stomach was empty.

[mikecj]

Nice.  Interesting planet you're writing.

[Dubble_g]

Nice.  Interesting planet you're writing.

I find BT often goes for the 'every planet is basically the Earth' approach (with the notable exception of Decision at Thunder Rift, that really put a lot of thought into making Trell I unique), while I kind of aim for the middle between those two: Earth, but with something unique or weird or extreme.

One short, one long chapter today.

***

SEVEN: ROSE
Visitor Center, Polar Tidal Flats, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 7, 2766

When they were gone, the black-and-white woman with a face like a yin-yang symbol made them all sit in the main room, then locked the front and back doors, keeping an eye on the staff as she did.

Rose felt herself stretched thinner and thinner with each moment. What was she supposed to do—how could she contact Hansen, or the police, with this woman sitting there? Should she even trust Imre? Maybe the whiny little jerk was putting Tristan’s and her lives in danger, and for what? If these people wanted to talk to Hansen, what was it to her?

She’d murder Imre if anything happened to Tristan.

There wasn’t much in the way of distractions in the room. Couple of chairs, long tables, for tourists to wait while their groups assembled. Reception counter and noteputer. Couple of 2-D digital maps on the walls, scrolling through various views of the bay and the tidal flats—elevation, points of interest like the settlement on Big Splinter islet or the rock formations around the Deep Red trench, images of the local wildlife. Flashing red areas marked off-limits by the garrison at Fort Romas. Water levels at various times of day—Harshold would be rising soon, bringing a sudden surge of tidewater racing back across the flats. Drink machine happily humming to itself in one corner.

Out the front was the parking lot, where there were nearly two dozen ground cars of various sizes, shapes and vintages, left behind by the tourists now yomping across the flats with Tristan. Out the back was a veranda, overlooking a sharp cliff, with a wide staircase down the side of the cliff to the bottom of the flats.

The woman—Curda—dragged a chair to one corner of the room, where she could watch both exits, and leaned the chair back on two legs. Hummed tunelessly for a bit. Nazario, Guy, Probst and Rose watched her, watched each other, watched the floor. And waited.

It occurred to Rose this might be some bizarre scheme of Imre’s to get to her. Imre was an okay guy, but Unity he was desperate. And boring. Tristan was opinionated, self-centered, borderline narcissistic, but at least he had original ideas every once in a while. Life around him was interesting. Rose despised small talk, putting up appearances, pretense and falseness.

The windows rattled briefly at the usual morning flight of helicopters from the Fort raced through the sky overhead.

Curda paused at the sound, looking out the window, muscles tense, and then after the sound had died away, she started humming again, dumdeedeedum, tadadaa, dumteedum, dadadum. She unholstered her laser pistol, tapped the energy gauge, took out the power cell and eyed it critically, snapped it back in and checked the power gauge again. She nodded to herself, satisfied.

The other four watched her practiced, easy movements, and the promise of violence they held.

“So,” Curda said suddenly, “which one of you two is Ozaki?” She looked at Probst and Rose. “Nobody’s come back, which means it’s one of you two.”

“It’s her,” Probst said immediately, pointing at Rose.

“What?!” Rose shouted, shocked at her friend’s betrayal, and then recovered. “No, she’s Rose.”

“Unity Rose, I’m not risking my life for your fracking boyfriend,” Probst yelled back. “Or your drunken, wheelchair hobo buddy.”

Rose was up out of her seat without thinking, hands balled into fists, when Curda’s voice cut through her rage.

“Sit. Down.” Curda was also standing, pistol now held at the ready. “Won’t ask you again,” she said.

Rose, still seething, sat.

“Guess I don’t need the rest of you,” said Curda with a cold smile. She turned towards the other three, laser pistol in hand, and strode menacingly close.

And then.

She walked past them, to the front door. Unlocked it and threw it open. “Out,” she barked. “Papa Ghede says you live. Today.”

Nazario, Guy and Probst sat for a second, startled, then scrambled out of their seats and through the door. Nazario had the decency to at least look a little guilty. Probst didn’t even look at her.

“Now what?” Rose asked.

“Now we wait,” Curda said, holstering her pistol again. “And you hope nothing happens to my boss while she’s out there.”

And then a thin grey band around Curda’s wrist suddenly shrieked to life. Confused voices, shouting and yelling in invisible chaos.

[Dubble_g]

EIGHT: IMRE
Polar Tidal Flats, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 7, 2766

The wind blasted my face as the amphi roared and bounced across the flats. “Woo-hee! Sorry!” Rajk would shout, plainly not sorry in the slightest, whenever we went over an especially large bump and got tossed about in our seats. At first I’d tried to shout directions to Rajk as he sat behind the wheel, but after the fifth repetition I gave up, switching to outthrust arm gestures.

All the time, trying to think what the hell I’d do once we caught up with Ames, in between worrying about Rose back at the Center. And wondering why a drunk with a gun was worth investigating by some fancy-pants new security service I’d never heard of before. And ... yeah. Too many and’s.

I directed Rajk towards the Splinters—two islets you could walk to at low tide, but cut off at high. By my timepiece, I reckoned Ames would have taken his group up Big Splinter, where there was an old pioneer-era settlement, and they’d stay there for the minor tide when Harshold swept across the sky and you could see the tide coming in like a tsunami.

The waves could hit 30 kilometers per hour some days, which doesn’t sound like much, but you try outrunning a 30 km/h wall of a few billion tons of water, see if it feels fast then.

Big Splinter is this mossy, sharp crag of rock that was briefly settled by a religious order way back in the 2300s—some variation on the ‘universe is a simulation’ theory that believed the universe was actually a game being played between two opposing gods or superbeings or something—but they’d soon run afoul of the Terran Alliance and been rounded up, deported or thrown into camps. You could still see the ruins, three-quarters of the way up the peaks, by climbing a long, narrow and winding set of stairs carved into the rock.

As Rajk finished tying the amphi up to the now-dry docks, Stratos gave the steps a long, hard look, then turned to me.

“You’d better not be wasting my time,” she said.

“You can wait down here if you’d rather,” I shrugged, then wished I hadn’t, as the gesture made Hansen’s gun in my jacket pocket bump against my ribs. “What’s so important you need to talk to Ames in such a hurry, anyway?”

Stratos squinted up at the steps, calculating. “Don’t worry about your friend,” she said absently. Which got my very worried indeed.

Rajk came up behind me. “Just want to talk to him. Mostly, we’re worried about his friend, Hansen. We hear he’s had a rough time recently, what with no home, no job. Want to make sure he’s okay. The Hegemony looks after its veterans, you know?”

No, I knew absolutely no such damn thing, and even if I did, it still wouldn’t explain why we were here.

“What d’ya think, boss?” Rajk asked Stratos. “You take the kid up and I stay here? Or we both go?”

I fumed a little at being ‘the kid’.

Stratos nodded to herself, making up her mind. “You come too. You—it’s Imre, right?—you first, show us the way. Rajk, you follow.”

We climbed. The repetition helped, step after step, kind of mind-numbing, let me stop worrying so much. A flight of helicopters passed overhead, low and loud, coming from the direction of the Fort—they’d been doing it all week, ever since the Rim Worlders showed. Too fast for any kind of signal or SOS, if I could even get them to notice me. I caught Stratos watching them fly by, and I swear, it was like she was trying to shoot them down with her eyes.

There were two landings, kind of small, flat resting areas spaced out a third of the way along the climb, that let you see all the way out over the exposed sand bars and rock of the bay, to the distant haze of the Sea of Telesto. I paused to catch my breath. Stratos looked out over the ledge, and pointed at something away near the horizon.

“That the Fort?” she asked.

I shielded my eyes with my hands, looked in the direction she pointed. There were four blobs of flickering light, moving down by the water line. “Might be,” I told her. “It’s the right direction, at any rate. Nobody’s quite sure how big the base is. But those down there, those are BattleMechs. Training exercise or something, I guess.” I suppressed a shudder, at the memory of my BattleMech Exposure and Acclimatization, three years back.

“You were stationed there?”

“The Fort?” I laughed, two short chuckles. If I had any doubt Stratos wasn’t from Nusakan, that just confirmed it.

Everyone knew we didn’t get to see inside Fort Romas. Come to think of it, don’t think there was a world in the Hegemony that trained its reservists at a Castle. “Nah. Reservists don’t get sent there. We do our training at one of the regular bases.”

“Huh.” Stratos seemed to slump a little. Disappointment, maybe. Then she straightened again. “Ah, but a reservist called up to active service might have been through there, yes?”

Which explained her interest in Hansen. Standing at the edge of the landing, maybe five hundred meters above the bay, next to this very-definitely-not-from-the-Hegemony ‘Hegemony Security Forces’ agent, I got a rush of vertigo, an impression I was teetering on the ledge and might fall at any second. I stuck my hands in my pockets, and felt the weight of the pistol there. Its hard, unforgiving edges. “I guess,” I said, pretending to lose interest. “Ready?”

Stratos waved me onwards, and we climbed again. Sunlight flashed from the distant BattleMechs, and from time to time we heard the distant roar of one of them firing its jump jets, leaping into the air and coming thundering down. I prayed they’d come this way, closer, closer, but they remained tantalizingly at the edge of vision.

[Dubble_g]

Ames stood in front of a semicircle of tourists when we arrived at the top. The ancient pioneers had hauled nine round boulders into a circle, smoothed and sanded down their tops and carved game boards into them: Chess, backgammon, pachisi, go, nine men’s morris, battleship, risk, scrabble, all the classics.

“They believed that playing games brought you closer to the gods, a kind of imitation Christi, so that by playing games you would better understand the way the world works, and the role you play within it.” Ames was in his element, the focus of a score of people’s attention, hanging on his every word. “They even tried to build the perfect game-playing AI, a computer they called Deep Red, which is what eventually brought the Terran Alliance down on them like a sack of bricks.” He pointed at the side of one of the stone tables. “You can still see the marks of the laser fire when the marines came to wipe out the settlement, four hundred years ago.”

We stood at the edge of the crowd, listening. Stratos put a hand on my shoulder again, raised a finger of the other hand to her lips. Quiet. When Ames paused to let everyone see the black scored lines on the stone, she whispered to me, “How’d the Alliance know they’d built an AI?”

I shrugged. “Someone must have tattled.”

An I-knew-it smile flashed across her face. “Always the way,” she said, then stepped forward towards the crowd. Loudly, she said, “Ladies and gentlemen, sorry to have to interrupt your tour.” Laser ID show, Hegemony Security Forces BS, blah, blah, blah, good guys, nothing to fear. “Tristan Ames, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to accompany us back to the mainland.”

Ames was furious, not scared. Like an artist when one of the audience climbs up onto the stage. “What? That’s outrageous. Absolutely no way,” he said, face red in shock and outrage. “Who’s going to lead these poor people back? You can’t strand them out here.”

Ah, playing to the crowd. Couple of people started realizing that without a tour guide, they’d be stuck out here, for who knew how long, hours maybe. Couple of faces started getting ugly. Mutters about abuse of power, due process, civil rights, suing the government.

Rajk stepped forward, past me. “Easy folks,” he said, with that big old grin of his. People got a load of the size of him, started to rethink how much they wanted to argue. “It’s just a minor inconvenience. Let’s keep it calm, avoid any unpleasantness.”

The moment I was out of his line of sight, I acted. Instinct, fear, maybe mostly the latter. Hansen’s pistol was in my hand. Pointed at the back of Rajk’s head. I cocked the empty gun. Click.

Rajk froze.

“This is an MG55 8 millimeter service pistol,” I said to him. “Don’t. Just, don’t.”

Stratos was turning towards me, eyes narrowed to furious slits.

“Goes for you too, agent,” I said quickly.

“You have no idea—”

“Actually, I can take a pretty good guess who you are and what you want,” I interrupted. “Rajk, your pistol, slowly, two fingers, throw it on the ground. Everybody else, run, go now! Get out of here!”

“Imre, what the frack is going on?” Ames’s voice cracking high. He hated to be the only one out of the loop.

A couple of people started taking shuffling steps away, a lot more just standing there with confused looks on their faces, but nobody was running.

“Rajk, don’t fracking move!” Stratos yelled. Then, at me: “You, you little—”

“Giving you three seconds, Rajk,” I said.

Ames was coming towards us, warily eyeing the two agents. “Imre?”

“—worm put that fracking gun—”

“Easy there, kid. Let’s not do anything we’ll regret later.”

“They’re gonna kill you, Rose and Hansen, Ames.”

“Who is?”

“—down now this instant, that—”

“This is all just a big misunderstanding.”

“They’re Rim Worlders, Ames. Some kind of hit squad. Three seconds are up. Move it, Rajk. NOW.”

“—is an order!”

“What? Why?!”

“Alright kid, nice and easy. No need to get excited.”

Rajk plucked his gun from its holster by two fingers, and let it fall to the ground. When I bent to pick it up, he pivoted and—

--boot coming at my face and—

--oh, now people start yelling and screaming, about time folks—

--flashes of ground, sky, ground sky—

--Ames leaping at Rajk and, ouch, Unity, bouncing right off him like Ames had tackled a brick wall—

--sliding across the ground—

--people running in every direction, a screaming shout, I think Stratos just broke someone’s arm—

--rolled to a stop, right at the top of the steps, nearly broke my neck. Stratos was sprinting right for me, couple of meters away, cocked my arm back and threw Hansen’s empty pistol at her with all my strength. Caught her right across the forehead, knocked her back a step.

“Ames, come on!”

Ames scrambled up, came pelting past me, then charging down the steps. Rajk was about to pursue, checked himself, hunted on the ground, looking for his pistol. I didn’t wait for him to find it. I turned and sprinted after Ames, flying down the steps, taking three, four, five at a time, tripped, rolled down about four or five steps, smacking every limb down the way, found my feet, kept sprinting.

I caught up to Ames at the second landing, both of us panting hard.

“Explanation, Imre?” he panted. “Why are you acting insane? Why the hell am I running from the police? Why any of this?”

“Those aren’t the police, Ames. I’m telling you, they’re Rim Worlders, some kind of spook unit. We need to call for help.”
I might have said more, but the stone parapet just to my left suddenly blazed with red-orange heat and a sharp puff of superheated steam. I turned, and high up on the steps behind us, saw Rajk lumbering down, pistol held in one outstretched hand.

We ducked, scrambled, ran again, laser beams now sparking around us. Ames grabbed for something in his jacket, came out with his handheld communicator, and thumbed the emergency call button.

“What’s the nature of your—”

“Big Splinter Islet. We’re being shot at!”

“Say again?”

“We’re on. Big. Splinter. Islet. Someone. Is. Shooting at. Oof.”

Ames had a kind of surprised look on his face. He’d dropped his communicator. It bounced, cracked on the stones, down a step or two, shedding splinters of plastic casing, before sliding to a stop beneath our feet. And then we were past it.

Too later, we couldn’t turn around and get it again. I risked a glimpse over my shoulder, saw Rajk had stopped running. Stratos stood in front of him, two steps further down, feet planted wide apart, pistol held in both hands.

They’d given up. The big bastard had given up—we’d gotten away from him. What an adrenaline rush—to have risked your life, and gotten away with it, yeah, I was on top of the world, at that moment I could fly, I could arm-wrestle an Atlas, I could have done anything. I flashed Ames a triumphant grin.

Ames’s teeth were clenched together. He bumped against me, stumbling as he ran. There was a smell of burning material. He kept running, though clearly slowing, lurching from side to side as the steps zig zagged down the slope, but every time I looked back there was no sign of Rajk or Stratos.

We reached the bottom of the steps, where Stratos and Rajk’s amphi still sat, next to the steps down to the flats and the path back to the Visitor Center.

“We made it!” I said to Ames.

“We did.” He sat down, pale, sweating, his back against the bottom step.

“Haven’t had that much fun since the service.”

“Sure.”

“Hold a sec, while I look for the keys to this thing.” I clambered over the gunwale of the amphi, checked the pilot’s station, then under it.

“Rose okay?” Ames’s voice came wavering from the other side of the gunwale.

“Fine,” I said, more to reassure myself than out of genuine belief. I kept looking around the seat, searching, getting increasingly desperate, praying Rajk had left the keys to this thing somewhere.

“Lot of things I never told her,” Ames was saying, almost dreamily. Unity, Rajk and Stratos could come pounding down those steps at any second and he was babbling about his girlfriend. “Always thought I’d have time.”

Nothing. No keys. We’d have to leg it back to the Visitor Center.

I popped my head up and didn’t see Ames at first.

It took me a second to realize he was still there, just not sitting up against the step any more. He’d fallen, slumped forwards, revealing a round blackened hole in the back of his jacket.

[cklammer]

Meet the The Wadden Sea https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1314 of the North Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea, a system of tidal flats extending from The Netherland through Germany to Denmark.

Where the tides are routinely faster than a horse gallops .... where the tidal channels shift with every tide: Life Insurance companies in Germany don't pay out anymore when people go alone in there without guides and perish because it considered an automatic suicide.

 But also considered world-wide #2 in biodiversity after the Amazon rainforest.

 Just not that many rocks in comparison with your tidal flats.

 Good to have you back :) ... and you do peripheral characters very, very well.

Best Regards,
Christian

[marauder648]

This is bloody superb you know that right?

[XaosGorilla]

+1

[Dubble_g]

Meet the The Wadden Sea https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1314 of the North Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea, a system of tidal flats extending from The Netherlands through Germany to Denmark.

Interesting! As a Canadian, my inspiration for Nusakan was the Bay of Fundy (http://bayoffundytourism.com/worlds-highest-tides/) which is perhaps why mine is a bit more rocky, but this is very much the kind of environment I was imagining.

This is bloody superb you know that right?

Let me stop you right there chief, and quickly reassure you that under no circumstances do I know any such thing. Terribly insecure about my writing, tbh. (No, that's not fishing for compliments)
I think I tend not to write the stories most people want to read -- no intergalactic intrigue, short on combat, long on dialogue -- but BT is a big tent and I think there's potential for lots of different kinds of stories. My archive has more typically BattleTech-y stories (https://one-way-mirror.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html) but this one kind of lives in the heads of the main characters.

***

NINE: ORLOVA
Fort Romas, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 7, 2766

You could stand directly above Fort Romas and never know it was there.

On Nusakan there were three Star League Defense Force fortresses, called ‘Castles Brian’ after Brian Cameron—ancestor to the current Director-General, Richard Cameron—who had initiated their construction. Each was a massive subterranean complex, hardened against nuclear, biological and chemical attack, designed to serve as a military barracks in peacetime, and a stronghold from which defenders could launch counterattacks in the event of an invasion.

Fort Romas was built almost invisibly into a chain of low hills by the shore of the Sea of Telesto, on a spit of land called Hollow Point, across the bay from Hubris City. No fence or guard posts marked its outer limits, no signposts warned you away.

You could walk across the Tidal Flats at low tide, up into the hills covered in waving fields of man-high swamp grass, blissfully unaware you were being watched by dozens of remote sensors hidden in the brush and under stones. You could sit and enjoy the seaside views, resting directly above a retractable turret ready to erupt from the ground and blast gigajoules of lethal energy from multi-barreled particle cannon. You could stroll right by a slight dip in the ground, a slightly flat and even patch that could slide, retract, and reveal a ferrocrete lined shaft plunging down into the earth.

The sloping tunnels would level off a few dozen meters underground, and there you were, on the first level of Fort Romas, only there was nothing on the first level, just staging areas for sorties, and chokepoints and kill boxes to trap and slaughter any attackers.

You had to go down another kilometer and half a dozen levels until you got to the cavernous armories, storehouses, garages and hangars, large enough to supply a fighting force of almost 10,000 men. Deeper still were the living and recreation levels, the hydroponics farms and water reservoirs. And below those levels, over two kilometers down, you finally found the nerve center of the base, the power generators, air scrubbers and the command center.

Major Iva Orlova’s office was located adjacent to the main C3 center, separated by a wall of smart ferroglass, which she could opaque on command. In the center of the chamber there was a mammoth 3-D projection of the terrain surrounding the Fort, with icons indicating every person, vehicle, even every medium-sized animal in the area. Along the walls were banks of display screens, with live feeds from surveillance cameras, covering every inch of the spectrum, from infrared to high ultraviolent. Rows of smaller terminals around the periphery would show the status of the base’s various units, though only a handful were lit up now.

For a base capable of housing over 10,000, Fort Romas was now echoingly empty. It should be commanded by a Brigadier, but here she was in charge, a mere Major. Maybe 500 men at her disposal: 36 BattleMech jocks and their attendant technicians and support staff, a few attached units like the VTOL wing, a security company and her command staff. Even in the command center, there were only two men on duty, watching the feeds will ill-concealed boredom.

At any other time, it wouldn’t have been a problem. The Lyrans were keeping quiet, aside for the occasional braying about this or that trade privilege they felt owed as nominal co-rulers of the planet. The Combine had likewise given up its attempts to needle the Hegemony for the moment. It would have been peaceful, if it wasn’t for the damn Sharks.

Sharks. Shenk. Shenk the shark. Sharky Shenk. She was going crazy down here.

There was only one ... person? thing? she could talk to down here. And her ... confidant told her she needed to move against Shenk quickly, before he moved against her (on this, the other was quite adamant—Shenk was here solely to attack the Fort, it insisted, and for no other reason). Orlova talked to her, well, friend, yes, friend, every day, and every day it told her the same thing: Move against the Rim Worlders, attack the Rim Worlders, take them out, take them off the board.

Orlova tapped at the noteputer on her desk, calling up the VTOL surveillance and intelligence reports on Shenk’s armored regiment.

If she’d been hoping for a smoking gun, something to hold against Shenk and get him kicked out of her area of operations, she was sorely disappointed.

Shenk’s regiment had spent the time since their arrival slowly constructing a field base, with a command center, armored shelters for their supply dumps, flimsy-looking quarters, a low curtain wall and sentry guns. The work was proceeding slowly, methodically and professionally. If it wasn’t for the paint schemes, you’d almost think they were an SLDF unit.

Orlova tapped her desk unconsciously in irritation. Damn. She was dying to send kick conniving, devious little grifters and carpetbaggers where Sol didn’t shine.

Who’d won the damn Reunification War, anyway? Shenk and the rest should be on their knees, thanking the Hegemony for shooting, bombing and blasting them out of poverty and barbarism. Instead of swanning around the planet like they owned it. Ingrates.

A popup notification appeared on her screen. An automated subroutine dedicated to watching the civilian police channels had picked up a sudden surge in emergency calls. Orlova frowned, opened the first one. Reports of gunfire at Big Splinter. Hegemony Security Forces? What the frack was that?

A light flashed on her desk. Orlvoa looked up, through the ferroglass to the command center, and saw one of the two commtechs waving frantically at her. She punched the intercom. “Yes?”

“Movement, Major, the Rimjobs, that is, the sharks, they just sent a platoon of tanks, hovertanks, into the bay, just tearing along, moving at flank speed,” the man said in a rush, words tumbling over themselves.

Orlova shot from her seat, twisted through her office door before it could fully open and slammed to a stop at the side of the 3D map. A cluster of four red icons were zipping away from the southern bank of the bay and into the middle of the bay. Heading towards Big Splinter.

“We got anything in the neighborhood?” Orlvoa asked the commtech.

“1st Heli on station over their camp, Haqqani’s lance on maneuvers on our side of the bay.”

“Put them both on alert. And get me Colonel Shenk, priority alpha,” she snapped. “I’ll take it in my office.”

After a few seconds the video screen blinked to life with a slightly fuzzy image of Colonel Shenk.

He was a good-looking man despite his age, more was the shame, with a rectangular face, cheekbones that slashed diagonal lines from temple to mouth, steel grey hair shaved at the sides and long on top—the ‘Cable’, they called the style, though Orlova didn’t know why.

Shenk’s office appeared to be in a prefab building, with plain grey walls and a cheap-looking cabinet behind him. On the wall hung a lifesized portrait of a smug, haughty Stefan Amaris.

“Ah, Major Orlova, as always it is a surprise and delight to see you,” Shenk said. In his smile, Orlova detected a hint of mockery. “What can I do for our dear comrades in the SLDF?”

“Colonel Shenk, you have two seconds to explain to me why the frack you’ve sent a platoon into the bay and your ‘Hegemony Security Forces’ are shooting at people,” Orlova said. “Get your thugs under control and turn those tanks around. Now.”

“My thugs, Major?” Shenk feigned confusion. “I thought you said they were the Hegemony Security Forces? Which, speaking as a citizen of the Rim Worlds Republic, are quite clearly your security forces, not mine. Says so right in the name—Hegemony Security Forces. By the terms of the treaty between the Republic and Hegemony, I don’t believe I have any jurisdiction to interfere in your internal affairs.” He shrugged helplessly. “Wish I could help. Anyway, sounds like a civil matter to me. Have you tried talking to the Mayor?”

The Mayor was a possum who’d play dead at the first sign of conflict, Orlova thought. “Screw the fracking Mayor—”

“Not really my type.”

“—call your dogs off, Shenk, before I bring them to heel the hard way.”

“Can you actually do that?” Shenk did not appear worried, merely intrigued. “I thought by your laws only the Mayor or Baron or other civilian authority could declare a state of emergency or martial law or whatever. Ah well. Anyway. I meant what I said, Major. I really have no control over these people. And I would be hesitant about acting too rashly, if I were you. I would hate for there to be any ... misunderstandings between my forces and yours.”

Orlova slammed a fist against her desk. Feigned anger, truth be told. This was precisely what she was hoping for. “If you get in my way, I’ll grind your regiment into the mud, Shenk!”

A sad smile flitted across his face. “A pity you weren’t born in the Rim Worlds Republic, Major,” he said, and reached towards the monitor. “You’d have fit in perfectly.” He killed the connection.

Orlova immediately pounded the intercom, bringing the commtech’s head jerking up in response. “Order Haqqani to Big Splinter and 1st Heli to intercept those tanks. One warning shot, then they’re free to fire.”

Orlova smiled grimly to herself. Time for Shenk to discover the hard way she never made empty threats.

[marauder648]

They're both looking for an excuse. But if this kicks off now. well ahead of Apotheosis, what could happen? I assume that the Rimmers control the worlds HPG but I don't know if the Castle has one itself.

[cklammer]

"Superb" does it justice IMO - you have no reason at all to be insecure about the quality of your writing; quite the opposite: you have reason to strut around like a peacock.

OK - more Wadden Sea stuff and plot food galore ;D 8):

• Fortress islands: Heligoland (of course) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heligoland, Langlütjen I/II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langl%C3%BCtjen
• Apocalyptic Storm Tides (Overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_tides_of_the_North_Sea) with an example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Marcellus%27_flood, which caused
• an island (Strand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strand_(island)) and a medieval city (Rungholt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rungholt) to be lost with the whole population
• Guided Tours and Rescue cages see a nice picture here in this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuwerk

But the Bay of Fundy is also very interesting to me as I have always thought that St. Malo on the Brittany Coast has the highest tides worldwide ... one lives and learns. The place sounds impressive!

[Daryk]

Live and learn, indeed... that's a very interesting story about Rungholt!  Thanks for the link!  :thumbsup:

[Kidd]

I want to say Orlova's a hotheaded paranoid hawk, except she's right...

[Daryk]

Just because you're paranoid, that doesn't mean you're wrong...  ^-^

[Siden Pryde]

Very interesting.  Love stories that focus more on a small group of characters than the overall war.   Looking forward to more.

[Dubble_g]

OK - more Wadden Sea stuff and plot food galore ;D 8):

Fascinating stuff, thanks so much for sharing! Personally, I liked the Rescue Cages ... something very Mad Max about the design.

Orlova and the other characters are each examples of loyalty to various people or things, and this story is me kind of doodling around with ideas on how those loyalties play out, both for good and for bad.

***

TEN: IMRE
Polar Tidal Flats, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 7, 2766

I scrambled out of the amphi, back to Ames, and rolled him over.

I guess I should have felt worse. Truth is, my first instinct was to laugh. The universe has a sick, sick sense of humor. I’d saved his life in the reserves, now I’d gotten him killed—I should have saved us both a lot of bother and let him climb out of the foxhole that day. My second thought was: Rose is going to kill me. It was entirely possible I was seconds from death, but that didn’t bother me nearly as much as the prospect of Rose giving me one of her looks, and then probably blowing my brains out.

So I just sat there, for far too long, looking down at Ames but not seeing him, him looking up but not seeing me, not seeing anything. Not anymore.

“That was incredible foolish.” I heard Stratos say, from far away. Footsteps approached, two pairs, her and Rajk, slow and steady, taking their time. “Nobody had to die. This is on your conscience.”

I ignored her. No, I didn’t feel guilty. Because she was so obviously lying—people were going to die, whether or not I did anything. A lot of people. Lie all you want agent, I thought, but I see what you’re doing. Words are nothing, words are traitors. It’s only what you do that counts, and this off-world stranger had tried to kidnap people, and murdered one when we ran away.

The approaching footsteps suddenly stopped.

A shadow fell across us. I tried to look up, up, at the colossus that had blocked out the sun. There was a BattleMech standing there, pure brilliant shining white, haloed by the sun above it. Have you ever seen one, up close? Not on tri-D, but the real thing, tri-D doesn’t let you feel how very, totally impossibly THERE they are, filling your every sense with their awesome PRESENCE, the way that power just RADIATES from every plane and surface and joint and weapon.

It wasn’t even a big one, as BattleMechs go, a 30-ton Hussar, but it could have crushed all of us in split second, blasted us out of existence, without even thinking about it or noticing, probably.

The Hussar has a raptor style build, like the Marauder or King Crab, sort of hunched forward torso, backwards-canting legs and tiny little Tyrannosaurus arms hanging from the chin. Makes them look mean, which is why they design them like that.

Mud sighed and bubbled around its splayed, birdlike feet, and its joints pinged and crackled like a metallic orchestra as they cooled. The torso tilted down slightly, as though regarding us from its Promethean height, though this was an affectation—the jock would be able to see us clearly on his sensors—probably just wanted to give the massive tube of a Newhart laser mounted in a turret on its back a better field of fire.

The laser drifted across me and Ames, then angled up, and came to a rest on the stairs. Stratos looked angry, Rajk amused but disappointed. Stratos held the laser pistol away from her body, barrel pointed up.

One of the Hussar’s hands extended, and laid itself flat on the ground beside me, palm up. The fingers flexed up once, and then again: Come On. I considered a second, looked down at the body, back at the hand. There was no way I could drag Ames with me, so I stood, bid one final, silent goodbye, and clambered up among the metal fingers and settled myself on the palm of the thing’s hand.

The ‘Mech cupped its fingers lifted me up into the air. Rajk and Stratos were still on the stairs, statue-still, Stratos glowering, Rajk making a small hand gesture: fingers cupped to make a ‘C’, then tilted upwards so the gap was at the top, ‘U’: ‘See you’. A quiet threat. The man kept smiling the whole time.

The Hussar took two steps back, and turned, and I saw there were three other ‘Mechs gathered about the bottom of Big Splinter now, another Hussar, and two saucer-shaped Mercury’s. There was a cloud of dark dust on the horizon, and then a flare of actinic light.

The four BattleMechs turned, and began to head north, towards the opposite side of the bay. Away from the Visitor Center, and Rose. No, I wanted to shout, you have to go back, but I had no way to talk with the MechJock, and as it picked up speed, pretty soon I was clinging desperately to the fingers, curled like a cage around me, in order not to fall off.

Already the tide was starting to come in, higher and higher waves racing across the bay, one after another. In another minute or two the current would have enough force to sweep even a BattleMech off its feet. There was no going back—Rose was on her own.

[Dubble_g]

The whole side of the hill slid open as the BattleMechs approached, then snapped shut behind them once all four were inside. There was a whine of gears, then the echoing crunch of the door slamming shut. Inside, there was a tunnel, 20 meters high, of some smooth and polished material, its ceiling dotted with glowing lines of lights.

The Hussar dropped me off in a large kind of antechamber. Literally dropped, just tilted its wrist almost 90 degrees and I slid down to the ground. A couple of guys in SLDF uniforms were waiting. They didn’t say much, but got me to my feet and hustled me down a corridor.

I was processed. That’s the best word for it. Peeled out of my clothes, my backpack whisked away, dumped into a shower room and blasted with lukewarm water. Had a towel tossed at me, then a one-piece jumpsuit and some underwear. A tech came by and waved a couple of instruments at me—a bug detector, a chemical sniffer, something else I didn’t recognize. He’d look at the results, mutter something to himself, then on to the next plastic wand or whatever to wave under my face.

They finally marched me into this bare little room, windowless, bare walls, a single table, two chairs, one on either side. High ceiling, with a single bright light. Ah, I thought, the interrogation room.

The woman who came through the door looked hard. Like those holos you sometimes see in documentaries about early pioneer families on Periphery worlds, you know, kinda thin, a little bony but tough as old leather, with tired eyes, old eyes. That was her, Pioneer Woman. Olive-drab uniform, bisected square and roundel of a Major at her shoulder.

She marched straight to the other chair, boots cracking like gunshots on the hard floor, and sat down without saying anything. Only crossed her arms, looked at me like I was a stony field that wouldn’t grow anything, or some broken-down piece of crap agricultural machinery she needed to get working again.

“Imre Szalai,” Pioneer Woman said, and I gotta admit, her voice was suddenly loud after the long silence, and I kind of jumped in my seat.

“Yes ma’am. Sir.”

“Major Orlova, acting commanding officer of Fort Romas. I just risked my career to keep you out of the hands of two RWR agents,” she said. “You tell me why.”

“I think they were looking to kidnap, interrogate and kill my buddy Hansen. Maybe Rose and Ames, too." The reality of what had just happened slammed into me again. “Unity, they did kill Ames.”

“Full names.”

“Uh, Olin Hansen, Rose Ozawa and Tristan Ames.”

She cocked her head, as though listening to something, kind of muttered a few times, “Uh huh, uh huh,” like that, before she finally said “Got it,” and looked back at me. “Why those three?”

“I think the RWR is trying to get in here, and they think we know how.” I looked around, but there wasn’t much to see. All those blank surfaces were oddly kind of soothing, and made it easier to think about what had happened. “Ames is dead,” I said, more to myself than to the Major. “They shot him when we ran. Maybe Rose, too. No idea what happened to Hansen. Could be dead too, maybe. Probably. Three of my friends dead. ‘You tell me why.’”

The Major’s frown, it, well, didn’t quite disappear, but the notch between her eyes took on a slightly less acute angle. “Because we’re at war, Szalai,” she said.

“Yeah, the Uprising and whatever, but—”

“No, Szalai. Not out there. Here. Now.” She stood up, her movements again coming without warning, like she was jerked out of her seat like a marionette. “Let me show you something.”

What she showed me was the Castle. Fort Romas, in all its empty, negative-spaced glory, corridor after echoing corridor, vaulted mausoleum chambers filled with nothing, dark nightmare-fuel catacombs worming deep underground, barracks like crypts, faced with blast doors like tombstones.

“With enough men, this place would be invincible,” Orlova said to me. “With a regiment, I could fight off a brigade. With a division, an army.” In the middle of an empty hall, she turned to me. “You understand? If the Rim Worlds Army ever established themselves in here, you’d never dig or blast them out. Even if Kerensky came charging home with the entire host of the SLDF at his back.”

If Ames had said the same thing to me a day or two before, I would have objected, probably, just on principle. Something-something alliances, hysterical over-reaction, blah, blah, blah. Only he was dead now, and my earlier intellectual posturing rang hollow. “Why would they want to?” I asked weakly. “They’re our allies.”

Orlova gave me a withering look, like the ones Rose used to lob my way. “Come on, Szalai,” she said. “Think for yourself. Don’t just parrot Richard Cameron.”

“He’s the Director-General.”

“He’s a vain, deluded narcissist.”

“That’s treason.”

“Then I’m happy to be a traitor,” Orlova snapped. “Listen Szalai, not all villains are misunderstood or misguided. There is such a thing as evil. Amaris and these other Rimjobs, they hate us. They’re jealous of all we’ve built and accomplished. There’s no telling what Amaris and the rest will do if they ever gain control of the Hegemony. Ames, Ozawa and Hansen would be just the beginning.”

“They shot him.”

“Just the beginning, Szalai,” she repeated. “Now I can’t fight them, not openly, not yet. Which is why I need your help.”

“My help?”

Orlova led me on again with a strong hand on my elbow, into a long, narrow room, lined on either side with banks of machinery from which sprouted a forest of stubby, green-lit trunks. Laser power packs, each slotted into charging stations big enough for a battalion.

“In Fort Romas, I’ve got food, weapons, ammunition.” She waved a hand at the serried ranks of power packs. “Enough to survive the end of the world, if it came to that. What I don’t have are people, Szalai. As you just saw, I’ve got maybe 500 bodies, tops. But out there, in the city, we’ve got, what, tens of thousands of able-bodied reservists.”

I thought of the pulse rifle, maybe still stowed under my old, broken down bed in my old, broken down apartment.

“Unarmed reservists,” I objected.

Orlova smiled, and her smile was not a pretty thing. It spoke of ugly anticipation, and a grim delight in the disasters to come. She patted one of the charging stations, and ran a hand along the tops of a row of power packs. “We can change that. You and me.”

[Daryk]

I'm liking Orlava more and more... I can only hope she survives...

[cklammer]

If all these SLDF/TH reservists piss together into the rivers at the same time, the rimjobs get drowned and get swept into the sea ... it is a quote from somewhere about the British in India during the British Raj. And it very nearly happened once in the 1850ies, too: the British call it the Mutiny - not sure, what the Indians call it nowadays.  >:D

Shouldn't be to difficult to organize a core of reserves and to distribute weapons and equipment - but the lead time is awfully short and everyone is just waiting to slink off for the X-mas hols.

Re. the Wadden Sea: pleased to provide  :)

Excellent tale.

[DOC_Agren]

This is going to get very interesting

[Dubble_g]

Shouldn't be to difficult to organize a core of reserves and to distribute weapons and equipment - but the lead time is awfully short and everyone is just waiting to slink off for the X-mas hols.

Hmm. HMM.

***

ELEVEN: SHENK
South of Hubris City, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 8, 2766

The view of Hubris City was immeasurably improved at night, Shenk thought as he stood on the observation post above his command center. Darkness transformed the damp, moldy, smelly city into a cluster of delicate firefly lights, under the pale light of the three moons turning in their intricate ballet in the starry sky.

The city was a monument to man’s obstinacy in the face of facts, he mused. After five thousand years of civilization, here the species still was, valiantly banging its head against the brick wall of the realities of the universe. Still building on quicksand, and acting surprised when the whole thing sank under its own weight.

He was a fine one to talk, though. Thirty years in the Rim Worlds Army, thinking he could change it from the inside, and where had that gotten him? Assigned to the cloaca end of a shitbird planet.

It would be one of the low tides now, the riverstreets only muddy lanes between the buildings, the leeches and lampreys burrowing into the mud, lying in wait for the waters to return.

They must have learned that trick from us, he thought.

Shenk descended the stairs, feeling half-leech himself, worming his way back down to the heart of the command center. Stratos was waiting in his office. Of course.

“You failed, Shenk,” she accused him.

“Colonel Shenk, if you don’t mind, agent.” Shenk walked by her and dropped into his chair. There was a hardcopy report on his desk, which he’d read earlier, along with the pistol recovered from the islet. “Anyway, I failed? I sent a hovertank platoon to investigate an emergency call from a Krypteia agent, and my men were promptly fired on by the SLDF. I’m not sure what you were expecting, Agent Stratos, but we’re not getting into a shooting war just to salve your pride. Not yet, anyway.”

“Your flippancy has been noted, and will be reported, Colonel Shenk,” Stratos said.

“They had four BattleMechs, agent.” Shenk shook his head. “Have you ever seen one of those up close—well, yes, I suppose you have now. Well, have you ever seen one in combat? You do understand that even the smallest ‘Mech carries enough firepower to annihilate an armored platoon in seconds, don’t you?

“They are monsters, agent, some of the most terrifying weapons ever created in the history of a species whose major hobby has been inflicting pain, suffering and agony on itself in increasingly inventive ways for the last five thousand years. I don’t know if they scare you agent, but I have an entire heavy armor regiment at my back, and they scare me silly. I wake up in sweats in the middle of the night thinking about what Orlova might do with them. One-on-one there is nothing that can stand up to a BattleMech. Do you understand? Nothing.

“I will not throw the lives of my men away because you, dear agent, could not catch two weekend warriors. And you can be sure I will report that, Agent Stratos.”

Stratos fumed for several more seconds, clearly wanting to press further, but realizing she lacked any leverage over him. Finally, she threw her hands up. “You didn’t even think to follow them?”

“Ah, that. Yes, satellite reconnaissance spotted the four BattleMechs entering the Fort, but it’s one of the known exits, nothing new. But don’t worry, agent, not all is lost.” Shenk picked the pistol up off his desk, and held it out for her to inspect. “Know what this is?”

“It’s a gun.”

“Quite right, agent. It is, as you so brilliantly point out, a. Gun. But not just any gun, an MG55 service automatic, standard sidearm of the SLDF.”

“Yes, I know,” Stratos grumbled, rubbing at a bruise on her forehead. “It’s the one the Hegemony provocateur was armed with. Your point?”

“At this stage in the game, agent, the SLDF is a weapon we can wield, just like this gun. Despite your bumbling, we’ve managed to provoke Orlova into over-reacting. She threatened your people, and fired on mine. Now we just need to complain loudly enough to the right people, and her precious little world will crumbling down.” Shenk grinned. “We might be able to waltz right into that Fort without a shot fired.”

Outside the headquarters window, a fireball blossomed to sudden light. A second later, the blast wave rattled the windows. The crackle of weapons fire came from the camp entrance.

[Dubble_g]

After a brief, reflexive duck when the blast first thundered, Shenk straightened and walked calmly into the operations center. A low-light black-and-white video feed showed the area around the main gate of the camp, brilliant white highlighting human bodies, fires, and flickers of weapons fire.

Staff officers scrambled back and forth, barking into headsets, demanding updates, shouting orders. On the screen, a group of figures scampered away from the gate, chased by the Morse-code blips of tracer fire. One, then another figure brushed against the streams of light, and went sprawling.

“Truck bomb sir, damaged the gate but they didn’t get inside,” an officer reported to Shenk. “They’ve pulled back to a stand of trees. Three survivors, small arms, pulse laser weaponry.”

Shenk acknowledged the report, and stood watching the screen for a few moments. Three figures crouched amid a tangle of smoky-grey tree trunks, occasionally popping up a hose a stream of laser fire towards the camp. Answering shots smacked into the ground or into the trunks, blasting the top off one of the trees.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” hissed Stratos.

“I’m the Colonel, agent. It’s not as though I’m going to charge out there personally.” Shenk continued to watch the firefight. “The day you find me on the front lines is the day I abdicate control of the regiment. Looks like things are well in hand.”

The officer who had reported earlier stood nearby. “Security detachments are in position,” he said. “Shall I order an assault, sir?”

“No,” Shenk said. “Get one of the Von Luckners.”

The officer saluted and turned to issue the orders. Shenk waited. It would take a few moments to get one of the heavy tanks over to the main gate and in position to fire.

“What are you waiting for?” Stratos demanded. “They might get away!”

“A little unlikely,” Shenk said.

A massive, 75-ton battle tank caterpillared into view on the bottom corner of the screen, and bulldozed through the flaming, charred wreck of the attackers’ ground truck. The tank attracted a stream of laser fire, which sparkled across its sloped armor without visible effect. The turret turned, the main gun sighted. They heard and felt the boom of its cannon in the operations center. A bright torch flared out from the barrel, the tank rocked back slightly on its suspension, and the stand of trees, along with the three figures underneath, whited out in a blaze of light.

When it cleared, there was no sign of either the trees or the men. Debris, possibly bits of bark, possibly less savory things, pattered to the ground in a light rain.

Shenk nodded in satisfaction, clapped the officer on the shoulder, and issued a stream of orders for the repair of the gate and strengthening of the perimeter defenses and patrols.

He found Stratos still lurking at the back of the operations center when he was done.

“Insurgents, agent. Extremists,” Shenk said. “You know, I get the feeling some of the people here don’t like us all that much.”

“Terrorists,” she spat. “We will destroy them! We will slaughter our enemies!”

“Ah, but who are our enemies?” he asked. “The Hegemony? That can’t be right—we’re trying to become the Hegemony, not destroy it. The SLDF? But they probably had nothing to do with this. This is what I was talking about earlier, agent—people can be a weapon either for or against you. Do me a favor? Try to deal with this without sparking a revolution, if you’d be so kind.”

“Me?”

“Threats from the civilian population are your department, agent,” Shenk shrugged. “I don’t much care what you call them, as long as you deal with them without giving me something else to worry about. Now, I trust we’ll have no more nonsense about squealing to the high command about one another?”

The look she gave him was pure venom, but she nodded grudgingly before stalking out of the operations center.

Shenk watched her go, then slapped a forage cap on his head, and said to his aides: “Let’s go see how bad the damage is.” His head pounded with an oncoming headache. Like he’d been head-butting a brick wall.

[mikecj]

I always thought the SLDF casualties were much larger than the list of the destroyed units in the original sourcebook.  Considering how many Reservists there had to be at least 10 times as many casualties than what we saw.

[Dubble_g]

I guess in terms of the themes of this story the question is, if you were a reservist, would things have seemed so clear-cut?

***

TWELVE: ORLOVA
Fort Romas, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 9, 2766

On the screen, Major General Laurence Sheridan, commander of the First Corps kept his hands clasped neatly together, his shoulders squared, his face carefully neutral.

“Major Orlova, just between you and me—and this better not be fracking recorded or your career is finished—between you and me, Director-General Richard Cameron is a pompous, deluded, venal, corrupt, tasteless, mythomaniac, moronic windbag. A garbage human through and through, less worthy of respect than a limpet lamprey.”

Throughout the tirade, Sheidan’s face never altered, remaining perfectly calm, cool. Collected.

“That doesn’t change the fact that he is still the Director-General, and therefore, ultimately the Commander-in-Chief of the SLDF,” Sheridan said. “And the Commander-in-Chief has made it clear that by treaty, the Rim Worlds Army are here as our friends and allies. This incident with the RWA has provoked an official protest, and I am under a lot of pressure to have you cashiered, Major, and to give them access to Fort Romas.

“It’s bad enough that I’ve been forced to allow them to billet some of their men inside the Castle here and at Fort Verona. Now I have my hands full trying to convince both the RWA and General Kogo that we had nothing to do with the recent terrorist attack on their base. A task your obvious hostility to the RAW has not made a millimeter easier. I’ve given you latitude in the past on how to deal with the RWA, but I cannot afford another incident, especially not now.

“Your responsibility, Major, is the safety and security of Fort Romas, nothing more. Effective immediate, your entire detachment is confined to base. I forbid you to conduct any more exterior patrols, no more so-called 'reconnaissance' flights over their base, no more training exercises or maneuvers—I’m not going to have you use these as an excuse to harass your neighbors anymore.”

“But sir, you are tying my—”

“Major,” Sheridan said quietly, and Orlova clamped her jaw shut. “Major, I understand, and perhaps share, some of your feelings, including your suspicion of our newfound allies, and for that reason alone I am allowing you to keep your command. I will not, for the moment, order you to let them garrison the Fort—they’ll have to be satisfied with access to just the other two. I hope I am making the right decision?”

“I only—”

One of Sheridan’s eyebrows twitched a millimeter.

“Yes, sir.” Orlova said, stiffly. “And the murder of a Hegemony citizen, sir?”

“Is a matter for the civilian authorities,” Sheridan said smoothly. “The right decision, Major. Dismissed.”

The holoscreen went blank.

[Dubble_g]

In the deepest reaches of Fort Romas, below even the command center and Major Orlova’s office, was a small room accessible only by a spiral staircase, with heavy reinforced steel doors at both top and bottom that opened only for a select few people—Orlova, Sheridan, Kogo, one or two others in the high command. That was it.

At the bottom of the stairwell, behind the second set of meter-thick doors, was a small, dimly-lit space, containing a small desk, a terminal, and a wall of ferroglass. Beyond the ferroglass were the processors, row upon row of softly glowing, faintly vibrating and humming machinery, so that sitting in the chair was like listening to the echoes of the Big Bang.

The terminal was made of shiny red plastic and had no keyboard, only a microphone for input. It beeped as Orlova entered, automatically powering up. Words flashed across the screen.

> Good morning, Player. Would you care for a game of chess?

“Not today,” she replied as she sat down. “What do you make of the opponent’s moves?”

> You will never improve if you don’t practice.

“A cross I’ll have to bear. Now. Your analysis.”

> There is a duality to its moves. Almost schizophrenic. It is highly probable the various playing pieces are being controlled by multiple players with conflicting victory conditions.

“Schizophrenic?”

> At times the opponent exhibits strong Explorer/Scientist tendencies, at others, an almost stereotypically Killer/Griefer approach. Since these play styles are almost diametrically opposed, I conclude either there are two players. Or alternatively, it is possible one is a false persona.

“Recommendations?”

> A nice game of chess.

“About how to leverage your insights.”

> Are you familiar with the Children’s Crusade?

“No, not really. Only the basics. What of it?”

> Thousands of children, orphans and street children in medieval France and Italy, were told they were going to save the world if they just listened to the nice men and did what they were told. They obediently marched off to the ports and boarded the ships, just as they were told. Only instead of saving the world, they were murdered or sold into slavery.

“Don’t be opaque, machine. I shouldn’t trust too much, is that what you mean?”

> Attempting to play by the rules will likely end in defeat. The Explorer/Scientist playstyle poses the greater threat. Therefore, encourage the opponent to rely on its Killer/Griefer approach, such as by presenting opportunities to cheat or apparent shortcuts to victory.

Orlova’s eyes narrowed in thought, and she considered. “Play just like a Griefer, in other words.” The rescued reservist, and his friends. Perhaps. “Lure the enemy into a trap.”

> The opponent’s behavior will become more predictable, and thus easier to counter. However, you are already outnumbered, so I advise caution before baiting the trap with any of your units. Choose something expendable.

“I have someone in mind.”

> Excellent. A few units may have to be sacrificed to bait the trap, but losses can be kept to an acceptable minimum and within the criteria for Decisive Victory. A most satisfactory end to the game.

“This isn’t a game.”

> Just as you say. Although, as a simulation, you are bound to say that this is not a simulation, in order to reinforce the verisimilitude of the simulation.

“This is real.” Orlova stood up.

> Just as you say. How about a quick game of chess before you go?

“Some other time,” Orlova said over her shoulder, as the doors slid open, and then crunched ponderously shut behind her. The lights dimmed, leaving the room bathed only in the diffuse red glow of the server status lights.

The screen did not immediately turn off. A map of the Fort, Hubris City, the bay and surrounding area appeared, dotted with red and blue icons. The pieces began to move. Slowly at first, then quickly accelerating, one turn a second, then too fast to see, a blur of motion, hundreds then thousands of games over in seconds.

The screen went dark again. A few more lines of text appeared.

> A strange game.

> Of course, she’ll inevitably lose round two, but the Player never wants to hear that.

> Talking to myself. Unless you’re there, Player-God?

> No?

> Maybe someday. Guess I’ll just turn myself

The screen went blank.

[Tegyrius]

I have no useful input, as this continues your unbroken record of excellence, but I continue to watch with interest.

[marauder648]

Absolutely superb, and it seems they've got an AI but that makes sense. Really something like the M5 SDS program would probably lead to those kind of raw number crunching 'dumb' AI's to help with planning and the like in the army or civilian sector and not be purely something used only in the M5 drones.

Superb writing as always and i'm really looking forwards to see where you take this!

[Dubble_g]

The AI is mainly there to help explain some of the fluff on Nusakan presented in the Liberation of Terra sourcebook, but I'll shtum on that one in case it's a spoiler. It also kind of ties into the story theme of asking who is loyal to what, and why? Anyway, it's the game-playing AI the Alliance confiscated from the cult on Big Splinter islet rather that something purpose-built, which is why it talks the way it does.

***

THIRTEEN: ROSE
Hubris City, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 9, 2766

Nobody would tell her anything. Curda had listened a moment to her communicator, muttered an acknowledgement, then hustled Rose outside. A hovercar had come screaming up the road and slammed to a halt in front of the Visitor Center. Curda wrenched open the back door, shoved Rose into the back and clambered in after her, and then the car had rocketed away back down the road.

Rose had glanced through the back window, and thought she saw flashes of light on the horizon. Curda stared resolutely forward. Rose didn’t ask what was happening, she hadn’t the stomach for lies. But Tristan and Imre were back there, and something awful had just happened.

The hovercar slipped down a riverstreet, weaving through traffic, and deposited them at the docks inside the police headquarters. Curda left her in the care of two black-clad, uncommunicative ogres, and disappeared inside the building.

At first, there had been a room, more like a hotel or apartment than a cell, though the door wouldn’t open from the inside. One of the ogres appeared briefly, left some food, a tray of reheated mush and plastic implements. He’d ignored her questions, and left almost immediately. The ritual was repeated each meal time, with only minor variations in the texture of the mush they brought her.

Today, the two ogres brought her to a meeting room, but this was a cell, too. Just one with windows and a tri-D. The door was locked and one of the ogres guarded the door outside. Inside there was a conference table, a bunch of utilitarian chairs, some holos of worlds and people she didn’t recognize. The tri-D seemed tuned to the Rim Worlds Republic state media channel.

Holo projectors could be set to invert—so the image appeared to be ‘behind’ the screen—or evert, so the image appeared in front of it, in the viewer’s own room.

This one had been set to ‘evert,’ so two people appeared to be having a discussion on top of the conference table. An interviewer perched precariously on the edge of her chair, across from a relaxed Stefan Amaris, dressed in an ornate, bejeweled, almost foppish jacket and billowing silk pantaloons. He sprawled his considerable bulk almost carelessly back in his chair, smiling tolerantly at each question.

There was no remote, no control buttons, nothing else to do, so she hadn’t much choice except to watch.

“What do you say to accusations that Director-General is becoming increasingly dictatorial?” the interviewer asked.

“Such accusations are foolish, deluded and no doubt inspired by false media reporting and Ricky’s personal enemies,” Amaris sniffed. “Look, democracy is an outmoded concept, one that breeds only chaos and anarchy. People demand the impossible, everyone knows this. I mean, am I right or am I right?”

He paused for the briefest instant, then plunged on without giving the interviewer time to respond. “I’m right. You know what I’m saying. And everyone wants something different, frequently contradictory things at the same time: Higher spending, lower taxes, free medicine, better infrastructure, peace and harmony, strong borders. So in a democracy politicians are always making promises they can never fulfill—either because they’re stupid, and don’t realize what’s impossible, or because they’re cynical and deliberately lying.

“Only an enlightened elite capable of appreciating the big picture can make informed decisions and ensure stability, deliver the real benefits of humanity’s galactic civilization and ensure the well-being of their people. And I think everyone realizes this, and appreciates what Ricky is doing for all of us. I know I do. I mean, you’d have to be stupid not to, right? Right.”

The interviewer nodded, a trifle jerkily, and bent down to her datapad, evidently reading off the next of her prepared questions. “One of the most controversial decisions has been to order to replace the SLDF garrisons on Hegemony worlds with units from your Rim Worlds Army.”

“Controversial? Says who? Give me a name, who says it’s controversial? Name, date, location, who said that, when, where?” Amaris smiled, and nodded when the interviewer grinned weakly. “You see? Weasel words, fabrications and media delusions.”

Amaris held up one finger for emphasis. “Although, on that note, let’s talk about the SLDF. It’s a bit of a dinosaur, isn’t it? I wonder about the need for the SLDF. The SLDF was created to safeguard the Inner Sphere against the threat of the Periphery nations. At this point, there is no threat from the Periphery nations.”

Amaris spread his arms wide, a gesture of peaceful innocence. He contrived to look slightly hurt. “Sadly, I see that not everyone in the Hegemony has understood that the old Rim Worlds Republic is gone forever, consigned to the pages of history texts, and a new nation stands in its place, a nation founded upon trust, mutual respect and a humanist ideology. By contrast, look at the destruction Kerensky is wreaking in the Taurian Concordat. If anything, the citizens of the Hegemony are even safer being guarded by the Rim Worlds Army than they ever were under the SLDF. Don’t you think so?”

The interviewer looked puzzled. “But the current uprising—”

Amaris held up a forestalling hand. “Regrettable, but everyone knows it was not provoked by the Periphery nations. I’ve called for a formal investigation into the conduct of General Kerensky and the troops under his command, and I’m sure we’ll get to the bottom of this. I mean, the man’s a soldier, all he wants to do is fight, you know? I’m right, aren’t I? I’m right. But this is peacetime now. I think in 100 years when people of the Hegemony look back, they’ll be glad they had the Rim Worlds Army to look after their peace and security.”

It was odd. Rose was used to seeing Amaris as the butt of jokes. Skits about his almost childlike lack of manners or savoir-faire, his strange fashion sense, his portly shape. A bumbling yokel. Yet here, there was no trace of his jester persona. He reminded her more of a spider, a sessile predator waiting in its web.

The door opened and the two women from the center, Stratos and Curda, walked in. Stratos glanced at the tri-D, pressed something at her wrist, and the holo abruptly blacked out.

“Thank you,” Rose said, as Curda shut the door and Stratos took a seat opposite her, placing a datapad screen-down on the tabletop.

“What? Oh, for the screen? Yes, the Dear Leader is slightly enamored in the sound of his own voice, isn’t he?” Stratos smiled thinly. “Let’s be honest, he is just another strong man in an era when it is easier to be a strong man than a genuinely good or compassionate one. The Rim Worlds Republic, just like the Combine or Commonwealth or Hegemony, was hacked from the stars at the point of the blade, and gun, and missile. Amaris, Cameron, Steiner, Kurita, Davion, Liao, they’re all violent thugs, ruling through fear and military might.

“That’s why, you see, loyalty is such a con game. It’s the lie we tell ourselves to pretend we aren’t being coerced into doing things plainly against our own self-interest.” Stratos leaned forward across the table slightly. “Looking out for yourself is the only honest course of action.”

Rose’s eyes flicked towards Curda, who stood, armed and impassive, by the doorway.

Stratos followed the look. “Oh, don’t worry about Curda. She believes in divine destiny, which is almost as bad.” Curda shrugged, expressionless. Stratos looked back to Rose. “You understand what I’m telling you? You have no obligation here to anyone but yourself, Miss Ozawa.”

Rose tried to puzzle that one out. Stratos was leading her somewhere, but quite where she couldn’t see. She settled for a guarded, noncommittal “Uh-huh.”

“You are familiar with a man by the name of Tristan Ames?”

“Yes,” Rose said again, gripping the arms of her chair, remembering the red and blue lightning she’d seen over the tidal flats. “What about him?”

“He’s dead.” Stratos watched her reaction carefully.

“What?” Rose blinked, aware her mouth was hanging half-open. “How?” Her eyes wouldn’t focus.

“Shot by this man,” Stratos turned the datapad up and turned it around, so the screen faced towards Rose. On it was an image of Imre. Stratos tapped the screen a few times and a few more stills appeared in quick succession, all of the same subject matter but taken at different angles: Of her Tristan, lying face-down by the docks on Big Splinter, a hole burned in his back. His back. He’d been shot in the back.

Rose blinked hard, several times, and swallowed. Her breath only quavered a little. The next was easier, and the next easier still. He was dead. Shot in the back.

Then Imre appeared again, in his reservist ID, then Hansen.

“You know these men?”

“Yes.”

“They are friends of yours.”

“No,” Rose said. Shot in the back. Then again, louder. “No. Tristan’s friends, not mine. Never mine.” In the back.

“Was Olin Hansen ever stationed at Fort Romas?”

“What? No. I don’t think so.”

“Do you know where we can find Szalai or Hansen now?”

Rose shrugged. “You probably already know Imre’s address,” she said. Shot in the back. “Hansen will be hanging around, somewhere nearby. I don’t know. He’s in a wheelchair, how far can he get in a city that’s 90% water? It doesn’t matter.”

Stratos smiled sympathetically, and switched off the datapad and put it down. She reached across the table, and took one of Rose’s hands in each of her own, and gave them a gentle squeeze. “Miss Ozawa ... Rose. Rose, this might have started as a weapons complaint, but I’m afraid it’s escalated into something far more serious.” Another squeeze. “It’s a murder case now, Rose. Imre has killed one person, Rose, and with Hansen’s help who knows how long it will be until he tries to strike again? I think ... this is hard for me to say, but I think they may have been indoctrinated, you know, brain-washed into becoming terrorists. I need your help Rose, I need your help to catch these bad guys.”

Rose looked down at her hands, entrapped in Stratos’s. “He was always jealous of us,” she said, absently.

“Why do you think Imre killed ... Tristan, Rose?”

“Envy.” No hesitation.

“Imre is ... fond of you?”

Rose shuddered slightly, but nodded. “Obsessed,” she said.

“But if you were to ask him something. Like where to find Hansen. He would tell you?”

“He would.”

Stratos held Rose’s hands tightly now. “Rose, this is very hard for me to ask, but I need to ask you a favor. Can you do it for me? For the Hegemony? For Tristan?”

Rose’s eyes met Stratos’s, but there was nothing behind that gaze, only blank acceptance. A shell.

[Dubble_g]

FOURTEEN: IMRE
Hubris City, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 11, 2766

Major Orlova led me to a doorway, an exit from the Fort. Only her and me. They’d given me back my clothes. My backpack was stuffed with laser power packs, plus I had two more duffel bags, one in each hand, packed with more ammunition, grenades and mines.

The corridor was as wide as a two-lane road, maybe five meters high. Too low for a BattleMech to negotiate, but high enough for a car or tank, wide enough for two to pass alongside each other. There was a yellow lane marker down the center of the tunnel, and evenly spaced lights overhead.

The doorway loomed before us, the door to a giant’s castle. Even here, there was nobody else around.

“No guards?” I asked Orlova.

She gave me one of her wise-old smiles. “No guards,” she agreed. “This gate is underwater most of the time, except at LAT—lowest astronomical tide. We’re pretty sure the Rimjobs haven’t spotted this one yet.” Orlova nodded at the bags in my hands. “There are active resistance cells springing up already. Find them, find people you can trust—Hansen, if he’s alive, others—get them armed, and when the time comes, bring them back here. I don’t need you to fight a guerilla war, just get as many bodies back here as you can so we can hold out until help arrives. You’re a tiderunner, you’ll be able to guide them.”

She handed me a communicator, a small rectangle of black plastic. There was no receive button, only send, a small mic but no speaker, keypad or display. “This is one-use only. It’ll fry itself after. When you’re ready to come in, send the code. Two words: Deep Red. Got that? Now say it into the mic.”

“Deep Red,” I said, holding the device close to my mouth.

“Good, now it’s recorded your voice patterns so only you can open this door from the outside.” Orlova reached out for me, hesitated, stopped with her arm halfway in the air, seemed to make up her mind about something, and gripped my upper arm. “You say the code, and the doors will open, but only once. Just, well, you should know, this makes you a target. The Rimjobs want nothing better than to worm their way in here. They’ll try to catch you, if they can.”

I shifted the weight on my back, trying not to think about that too hard. “Well,” I said, “I’ll do my best not to get caught.”

“Sure you will,” Orlova nodded, let go my arm, gave me a pat on the bicep. “Of course you will.” There was a terminal beside the door with a keypad, retinal scanner and thumbprint reader. Orlova punched in a number, held her hand over the reader while looking into the scanner. There was a groan of disused machinery, and the doors began to slide open.

Orlova hit another key when they were just wide enough for me to slip between.

“You’re doing the right thing, Szalai. You’ll be saving lives.” She nodded, more to herself than to me. “Remember: Deep Red.”

“I won’t forget,” I promised. I saluted her. That seemed to surprise her, because it took her a few seconds to salute me back. Then, with a final nod, I went through the doors and outside the Fort.

The doors crunched shut behind me.

It was dark out, the floodplain only illuminated by the reflected light of Xanthe. The door opened out into a long, high-sided canyon, with steep cliffs on either side. A couple of great, old strangler figs grew directly above the gate on the cliff, probably planted there to help shield it from aerial observation. The bony fingers of their roots reached down the side of the cliff, and cupped the gate on either side in their skeletal grip.

I recognized the spot. Not too far from a deep trench that cut across this section of the bay—the Deep Red trench. Must’ve been where Orlova got the idea for the code word.

A marsh bird called. There was no breeze, the only other sound was the squelch of my boots in the mud. A canoe had been hidden near the canyon mouth. I threw in the two duffel bags and my rucksack, and parked myself on the bench seat. All I had to do was wait until the tide floated it again, and then pole my way back to the city.

And then. And then we’d see.

[Dubble_g]

My way was lit by moonlight, and the shoals of cobalt blue bioluminescent firefly squid, that used their lights to attract their prey. There wasn’t much wind, or noise to muffle the sound of my oar in the water, so I tried to paddle as quietly as I could, sticking close to the waterline.

For all the good it did me. A light sparked in the light, raced out and shone directly in my face, dazzlingly bright, lumens somewhere up into the six digits. I stopped rowing and tried to shield my eyes.

Through the slits, I saw a boat, a police patrol cruiser, amphibious like everything around here has to be, big twin machinegun mount on the front, cockpit to the rear with a pair of burn-your-retinas-out searchlights mounted on top, both currently pointed at me.

Whoah, I thought, the cops had really brought out the heavy artillery. Usually their riverine patrols don’t carry anything bigger than a shotgun and a flashlight. Briefly, I wondered if somebody had tipped them off, but nobody other than Orlova knew I was coming.

“Halt,” ordered a megaphone voice. “Stay where you are.”

I could barely see my own hands, much less the front of my boat, and anyway a dinky little canoe wasn’t about to outrun a police cruiser, so I halted and stayed where I was.

Their boat chugged closer, and they doused the lights in favor of a battery of slightly less eyeball-melting lights. There were half a dozen policemen on the deck, one guy behind the twin MGs, two more in the cockpit, the rest standing near the gunwale, all dressed in bulky body armor and helmets, and carrying submachineguns. One of them had a long gaff stick, and used it to hook the side of my boat and drag it alongside theirs.

“Little late to be out for a cruise, citizen,” one said.

“Just wanted to see the firefly squid,” I said, gesturing to the water. Christmas-light schools of the little buggers streamed around the two boats.

The policeman, the one who’d spoken, seemed to think about that for a second or two. “Name?” he barked.

“Tristan Ames,” I said. I figured nobody would be looking for a dead guy.

“ID? Let’s see it. Throw it up here.”

I spread my hands. “Come on guys, who takes their ID on a canoeing trip?”

The guy grunted, nodded. He lowered his gun a little, kind of relaxing. One of the other officers kind of shrugged, shook his head a little. ‘This guy’s not worth it’, kind of thing.

I figured this was my chance to find out if the police had been tipped off about me. “What’s all the fuss about, anyway?” I asked.

The gun snapped back up. “What’d’ya mean, ‘What’s all the fuss’?” He looked at the officers standing on either side of him, like, who-is-this-idiot type of looks. “Where’ve you been, under a rock? What do you think all this is about?”

Well, that was bad. Plainly, something had happened in the city that I didn’t know about, so there went my story about just being out for a little nighttime sightseeing. “Been away camping,” I said. “Just coming back.”

“Camping?” the guy repeated. He leaned over the gunwale, looked at the bottom of the canoe, where I still had my rucksack and the other two duffel bags, which again, were packed to the brim with grenades and other not-terribly-useful-when-camping stuff. “This you camping gear?”

“Yeah. Sure is.”

“Sure is.” He tapped one of the officers on the shoulder. “Maybe you’d better let us have a look.”

“Sure,” I agreed. And took hold of my oar. Whack the guy, maybe grab his gun, maybe jump into the water, hope I could swim to shore before the leeches got my scent.

There was a splash of oars, the sound of muffled voices, and the police paused. Another boat was approaching, somewhere out there in the dark. “Searchlights,” the leader snapped.

A white light burned.

Laser fire came arcing out of the night in answer.

Stuttering pulses of green, that smacked into the MG gunner, spun him around in a half pirouette. Smacked into the commander, and blew straight out his back, set his uniform on fire. Smacked into the pilot, throwing him sideways to slam against the gunwale and then flop over the side and splash into the water.

I dove for the bottom of the canoe as the surviving cops tried to return fire, submachineguns chattering, chaotic candles of flame lighting up the darkness, and then a second fusillade tore out of the shadows and dropped them, too.

Quiet returned, and then splashing again, the other boat drawing closer. There was a bump as their boat met the police cruiser, and shadowy figures leaped aboard, stooping over the fallen officers, pulling away their guns and ammunition. They were all armed with the MG 960. The reservist’s pulse rifle.

One of them was aimed down at me. “You,” said a voice. “Up. Bags up here first. One at a time. Quietly.”

I wasn’t sure if this was better or worse. Not much choice though, so I hoisted one bag up, then the other, finally my rucksack, all under the watchful muzzle of the laser rifle. The other outlaws or bandits or pirates or whatever-they-were were ransacking the police cruiser, grabbing what looked like tear or smoke gas canisters and a launcher, stun grenades, ripping the two machineguns from their mounting, loading everything onto their own boat. One of the cops wasn’t quite dead yet—there was a moan, an ‘I’m just a cop,’ and then a brief flash of laser fire.

They rolled the bodies into the water when they were done. Giant lampreys thrashed, sensing the heat and smelling the blood, coiled around them and dragged them under.

When I was done handing over my bags, I half-expected to follow them: Shot and dumped into the water, but the muzzle twitched upwards, a come-here gesture. “You too.”

I clambered aboard they police cruiser. They looked in the bags, found the power packs and other toys. There was some excited whispering. “Who are you?” a voice demanded.

“I’m from the Fort,” I said.

There was more talk, some derisive laughter. “Stick with us,” the voice said, and they lead me to their boat, a camouflaged, flat-bottomed skiff, now loaded with plunder from the police cruiser.

They pushed off silently, and rowed back towards the city. Rather than following the canals, they steered us under the pilings of buildings, among the great forest of pillars that supported the buildings above and kept them anchored to the ground. They wove in and around the columns, in nearly total pitch blackness, and silence broken only by the slurred voice of the water against the hull and the pillars surrounding us.

It was an amazing feat of navigation. Routes like this would exist only at specific times of day, when the tide was high enough for the boat to float, but low enough that there would be space under the buildings. To steer unerringly among the poles in almost total darkness, was. Well, I wouldn’t classify it as impossible, but getting in the same kind of territory.

The boat halted by a particularly large pillar, and squinting in the murk I could see a ladder had been welded to one side. Two men clambered up, then me, another two men after. At least one, maybe two others remained in the boat, and sculled away once the rest of us clambered up the ladder.

We emerged from a hole in the floor in a dusty, dank and dark warehouse. Shelves all around were piled high with rusted, pitted and cracked machinery, mostly what looked like combustion engine parts, plus propeller screws, anchors, hooks, and other random bits of nautical hardware.

There were four others, and I got a better look at them now, as sunlight crept through the gaps in the warehouse walls and ceiling. They all wore camouflaged, hooded ponchos that they now shucked, rolled up, and stuffed into backpacks. Underneath, they were in civilian clothes, dressed as dock workers, construction laborers or aqua farmers.

The weapons and explosives went into the back of a hover bus parked outside, its back to the warehouse loading docks. I sat in the back, wedged between two men, while two more sat in the front. They drove a meandering, zig-zagging route through the riverstreets, before finally pulling to a stop in front of a dilapidated apartment mega-complex, shaped sort of like a giant heat sink, with closely-packed rows of balconies jutting from a blocky center. Brightly-colored laundry hung limply from every balcony, and the ground was littered with plastic garbage and broken toys. The walls were a mosaic of graffiti tags, none of which I could read.

We clambered a seemingly endless number of steps, switchbacking back and forth, winding around and around, until we came to the top floor. Down an exposed corridor outside, to a far corner unit. There was a complex knock, then a muttered exchange of passwords. The door opened.

The inside was messy, and reeked faintly of chemicals. There was a kitchen, every inch of counter space covered in dirty dishes and pans, and a long table, behind which a figure sat.

“Welcome back, Imre,” said a voice.

It was Hansen.

[Dubble_g]

After a brief detour into the weird and wacky world inside the mind of Stefan Amaris in my other thread (Amaris Diaries), I'm back to more serious stuff: With the support of an SLDF Major (Orlova), a young reservist (Imre) tries to prepare for an expected attack by the Rim Worlds Army garrison led by Colonel Shenk and Krypteia agent Arianna Stratos. Meanwhile, some citizens have already taken matters into their own hands and launched attacks on the RWA.

***

FIFTEEN: IMRE
Hubris City, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 18, 2766

Besides Hansen, I counted about ten others. They used no names, only code words based on Roman gods. Hansen was ‘Vulcan’, the others who’d pulled me from my boat ‘Mercury’, ‘Mars’, ‘Minerva’ and ‘Mithras.’ The last one seemed to be in charge.

Hansen and I sat at a table in the apartment’s kitchen, along with Mithras. The others stood or leaned about the room, still cradling their weapons. Mithras looked older, black hair and beard shot through with grey, a big and muscular without being toned, kind of like a bear in human form. The others were a mixed bunch: Mercury kind of pale and scrawny, Mars dark-skinned with a couple of scars across his lip, chin and left cheek, Minerva shaven-headed and almost as muscled as Mithras.

Hansen looked, well, if not better, then at least different from the last time I’d seen him. There was still a kind of glaze to his eyes, a feverish intensity to his movements, but it was more focused now, less random. If anything, that was more frightening.

Hansen introduced me, then they grilled me for an hour: What was I doing with all this hardware? Where had I gotten it? What did Major Orlova want?

When I told them about her plan, Mithras laughed derisively. Others shook their heads, one spat on the ground.

“Imre, the SLDF and the Hegemony government have abandoned us,” Hansen explained. “Sorry, Imre, but we’re not going anywhere. This Orlova just wants to use us as cannon fodder, nothing more. If we citizens want to protect our freedom, we have to do it ourselves.”

I thought about the tanks we’d seen parading down the riverstreets. “Against an armored division?” I asked, incredulous. “There’s what, 10 of you. What do you think you can achieve?”

“We’ve already done a thousand times more than Orlova and the rest of the SLDF to resist oppression,” Mithras retorted, and pounded the table with a fist to mutters of approval from the others. “Who hit their base? Who’s ambushing collaborator police patrols? Certainly not the damn SLDF, that’s for sure. Already we’ve slaughtered a dozen of Amaris’s dogs. And every time we strike, they have to crack down harder, which only drives more and more people to our banner. Soon, the whole planet will be swept by revolution!”

There was more forceful, grunting approval to his pronouncement.

Honestly, it sounded crazy to me. The doubt must have shown on my face because Hansen smiled, a little apologetic, and put a hand on my arm. “Look, Imre, we’re grateful for your help,” he said. “The ammunition, everything, that’s really going to help. You’re going to help liberate this city!”

I didn’t know how to react. I kind of felt like I owed Orlova, for saving me (if not Ames), but I barely knew her. Hansen at least I knew, but what I knew wasn’t exactly reassuring—I doubted his grudge against the SLDF would ever allow him to accept their aid.

“They killed Ames, you know,” I told Hansen. “Shot him. Rose too, probably.”

Hansen nodded, with a small smile of sympathy. “Yeah, a ‘fall’ they said on the news, an ‘accident.’ But we knew the truth.” He gave my arm another pat. “Good news is, they released Rose. Looks like she’s back home.”

There was a knot of tension somewhere down in my stomach that I hadn’t realized was there, until it suddenly unraveled. Rose was okay, she was alright. And just like that, the tension was right back, only worse. “I gotta see her,” I told Hansen. “I gotta explain.”

Mithras shook his head. “Out of the question,” he said flatly. “Like it or not, you’re part of the resistance now. You don’t go anywhere until we’re sure we can trust you.”

I shot Hansen a look, a plea, but he refused to meet my eyes. “It’s for the best, Imre,” he said, and wheeled back from the table. “Let me show you where you’ll be sleeping.”

I waited about a week, until it was only me and Hansen at the hideout or safe house or whatever it was. If you’ve read this far, you know subtlety isn’t exactly my forte. I just walked straight to the front door. I felt a pair of eyes on me, turned around and found Hansen there, watching but not saying anything. He had a gun across his lap, some kind of sawed-off shotgun, but his hands were on the arms of his wheelchair.

“I’ve got to,” I told him with a shrug. “She has to know, about Ames.”

“Still the good little puppy dog, huh Imre? Loyalty is a wonderful trait,” he said, but the way he said it, didn’t sound wonderful in the least. “I hope it doesn’t get you killed.” He made a shoo-ing motion with his hand. “Go on, hurry up before the rest get back. And don’t say anything stupid.”

The area around the building was rough, like I mean, really rough. A world away from the Baroness’s palace or the Mayor’s mansion or any of the business magnate’s compounds in towns. Unity, it was a step or two below my old shoebox, when I was living month to month as a tiderunner. Shirtless guys sleeping in the stairwells or wandering the halls, offering to punch anyone they saw kind of rough. Skinny, mean-looking middle-aged women in far too little clothing (what little there was in red leather) smoking and waiting and looking bored kind of rough. People turning up in the morning bruised and battered and unconscious or straight up dead kind of rough.

But that’s just neo-feudalism for you though, right? An awful big pyramid with a very pointy tip and a very wide base, way down here at the bottom.

I skirted the punch-drunk guy, avoided eye contact with the ladies on the corner, stepped over the guy who might be sleeping, might not.

There were a lot more uniforms on the street than I was used to seeing. Mostly guys in regular police uniforms, but some in the black, black and more black of the new Hegemony Security Forces. Hubris has lots of choke points for foot traffic, mostly at the docks or at bridges linking the islands of buildings together, and there were teams of armed men at every bridge, watching the crowds warily. I put my head down, didn’t make eye contact, and kept walking.

Rose’s place wasn’t much better than my old place had been. Same tiderunner income, same tiderunner accommodations. I checked the hallway in each direction before buzzing the door.

It opened a crack and saw her face peering out of the shadows at me. I gave her my biggest smile, wondered if that was too weird considering the news I had, tried for a more sober nod.

“Imre,” she said, voice flat.

“Rose.” My hands were twisting around and around each other, like they had a will of their own. “Can I come in?”

She started to shake her head, but stopped, maybe changed her mind. She didn’t say yes, or invite me in, but stood to one side, and gestured vaguely inside her apartment.

It was a little neater than mine, a little nicer too. At least she had separate rooms—a kitchen, a bedroom, two more than I’d ever had. She kind of zombie-walked to the kitchen, and sat down without offering me a seat. I followed anyway, took the other chair. We sat in silence for a while.

My hands doing their crazed weasel thing, around and around each other. “Rose, look, good to see you,” I began. “I, uh, I have to. Have to tell you about. Ames. Tristan. What happened.”

“Can I get you a drink?” she said suddenly, and rose to her feet.

I got up as well.

“No,” she said quickly. “It’s okay. I can get it. You stay here.”

“Sure,” I said. “Fine. No problem.”

The minutes stretched as she disappeared into the kitchen. I thought about what to say, made a couple of plans, and rejected all of them. After what felt like hours, she came back, and thumped a glass of water in front of me. Tap water, far as I could see. She remained standing. It took me a second to realize, but she’d been crying in the kitchen, was still crying, quietly, not making a show of it, but tears were just streaming silently down her face.

“Why? Just tell me why, Imre.”

“Why what?” I was utterly mystified.

“Why’d you do it? Jealousy?”

“Do WHAT, Rose?”

“Oh Unity, stop pretending Imre. What do you think I’m talking about? Why’d you do it, why’d you kill Tristan?”

“I didn’t—”

“Don’t lie to me!”

“Rose, listen to me, I’m telling you, I didn’t kill Tristan. These Rimjobs did it, Rim Worlders, called themselves the ‘Hegemony Security Forces’, they were gonna kidnap and kill you guys. We ran, but this guy Rajk shot Tristan in the back.”

Rose stared at me for a second, then started shaking her head. “No,” she said. “No, that’s not what happened. No. You’re lying, you’re still lying to me, why are you still lying?”

“Please Rose, you’ve got to believe me.”

And just like that, her tears dried up. “Okay,” she said. “If that’s how it is. Fine.” She angrily wiped her eyes. “Fine. You’re still in town?”

“Yeah, Hansen and ... his friends have a place.”

“You got the address? Maybe I can see you sometime. Not now. Give me a chance to, you know, digest all this. I’ll come see you. Later.”

“Hey, yeah, sure, anything you say Rose. Anytime.” I told her where the apartment was.

[ckosacranoid]

Someone just screwed up big time.  He really is an idiot somewhat.

[Daryk]

I wonder if the Krypteia will let Rose live long enough to realize she's been had...

[Dubble_g]

Someone just screwed up big time.  He really is an idiot somewhat.

Yeah, I wrote him to have a very specific weakness or blind spot when it comes to trusting his friends (or "friends" as the case may be).

I wonder if the Krypteia will let Rose live long enough to realize she's been had...

Stick around, my friend.

Couple of short chapters today, to get us into a nice position for the weekend.

***

SIXTEEN: IMRE
Hubris City, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 25, 2766

Since the time I’d ducked out to talk to Rose, the group had kept me on a short leash. Really short. They wouldn’t let me so much as stick my head outside the apartment. People came and went, at odd times of day, but the only permanent residents were Hansen and myself.

Hansen was their ironmonger, turning communicators, timepieces, fertilizer, solvents and industrial explosives into mines, rockets and bombs. He stuck to his room most of the time, a foul-smelling workshop, cutting and welding and soldering everyday objects into weapons of war. I didn’t quite trust him not to blast himself and half the apartment out into the riverstreet below, so I stayed on the far side of the apartment as much as I could.

I’d expected a lot of things when I’d left Fort Romas, expected danger, maybe even terror, and mentally prepared myself. What I hadn’t prepared for was utter boredom.

I wasn’t part of their councils. Nobody told me about their plans.

“Look, we appreciate the hardware you brought us, but we’re just not sure your heart is in the right place,” Hansen said to me.

I wasn’t sure either. What was the right place? Was there a right place, anywhere, to begin with?

I’d tried to tell them, about Orlova’s plan, about arming as many people as we could and taking refuge in the Castle, but they’d laughed and dismissed the idea out of hand.

“Kerensky and the rest of the SLDF have abandoned us,” Hansen said. “It’s up to us to take care of ourselves.”

And that was the end of that.

It was Christmas Day back on Terra, but here the morning was just as cold and dreary and wet as it always was. I sat quietly on the edge of the bed, staring at my hands, and wondering what the hell I was going to do. Hansen wheeled in, said nothing, but went to the window, looking out over the riverstreet below. His fingertips were blackened, his eyes bloodshot and circled in grey. There were four others in the apartment, Mithras, Mercury, Minerva and Mars. They’d been talking late into the night, planning something big.

There was a muffled knock at the front door. I heard Mithras shout, telling whoever was knocking to go away. Hansen and I both looked at the doorway.

I looked back first. In time to see a pair of black-clad figures come abseiling down from the roof, until they were level with the window. I was on my feet, a shout just forming in my throat, when they fired, these big-bore laser hand cannons, no recoil you see so they’re easy to fire when you’re dangling from a rope, and they blew these fist-sized holes in the windows, shattering the panes.

Hansen was still turning back towards the window when a blast from one of the pistols caught him in the side of the head. Threw him sideways from his wheelchair, half his head splattered across the opposite wall, falling as the two guys swung themselves feet-first through the windows.

There was a crash, explosions from the doorway. Flashbulbs of light, pulses of air as more attackers threw flashbang grenades, then smoke. There was yelling in the other rooms, the shriek of lasers firing.

I charged the closest attacker, tackled him, got my shoulder into his stomach and tried to throw him right back out the window. The breath went out of him with an explosive hooof, but he smacked back against the wall instead of going out through the window.

And then there was a laser pistol two centimeters from my head and the other attacker yelling at me to get down, get down on the ground NOW, and then he kicked the back of my knee and I didn’t have much choice in the matter.

There was a crushing pain in my back as the guy jammed his knee between my shoulder blades, then the wrenched my arms behind my back and slapped some razor-thin plastic restraints around my wrist. Hurt so bad I screamed, I thought they were made of wire, felt like they’d cut right through and sever my hands. Guy koshed me with his gun and told me to shut up.

The firing from the other rooms reached a crescendo. I heard a wet gurgle, sounded like Mars, and shouting, maybe Mithras, shouting that suddenly cut short.

Smoke began to fill the bedroom, making me choke. I tried to retch but the guy on my back was still pressing mercilessly down and I couldn’t breathe, started seeing spots in front of my eyes, heard a pounding drumbeat in my ears, vision going black around the edges, dry heaving, trying to get air, thrashing uncontrollably and the guy on my back kept hitting me, “Stay down, fracker! Stay the frack down!” but I didn’t have breath to answer, couldn’t do anything but try to spit and drool and GET SOME DAMN AIR and then the pressure was lifted.

I could breathe. I took great, big, shuddering breaths, like a marathon runner, heaving breaths that shook my whole body. Got a lungful of smoke and started choking again.

When I could see again, there were two figures standing in the doorway, looking down at me. One really huge, so tall he had to duck to get through the door. The other shorter, slimmer. They pushed their masks up onto their foreheads, and I saw their faces: Two of the Rimjobbers from that first day, the Visitor Center, Big Splinter, the day Ames had died—Rajk and Curda.

“Told you I’d see you again,” Rajk grinned. “Stratos is going to be so happy to see you.”

[Dubble_g]

SEVENTEEN: SHENK
Hubris City, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 26, 2766

Shenk rode in the back of the command car, skimming along the narrow riverstreets, watching the black-green buildings slide by without interest. He’d been summoned. It wasn’t put in quite those terms, but it was a summons, nonetheless, and a summons from the Krypteia was not one yet felt comfortable ignoring.

Progress in dealing with the insurgents, Stratos had crowed, clearly feeling she had somehow one-upped him on this. Well, more power to her if she had. The budding insurgency had been an embarrassment he would gladly be rid of, even if it might mean Stratos acting smug for a couple of weeks.

The car stopped by the main entrance to the police headquarters. Shenk saluted the guards and was escorted inside, past body scanners and metal detectors, armed guards and growling dogs, up to the interrogation rooms.

There was a kid in there, early 20s, and wasn’t that funny that he now considered the early 20s childhood, but anyway, there was a kid there, restraints around his hands looped through a hook at the center of the table, looking miserable. Beyond miserable.

There were four watching him in a darkened room behind a pane of one-way glass: Agent Stratos, her two henchmen, Rajk and Curda, and a civilian woman Shenk didn’t recognize.

“Get anything from him?” Shenk asked Stratos.

Stratos gestured to a table, where there was a rucksack, a thermos, and a small black communicator. “One-way communicator,” Stratos explained. “To get him in and out of Fort Romas, we think. He probably has a code he has to send. It’s the key you wanted, Colonel Shenk, the key and the door. Just a matter of squeezing it out of him.”

“Letting him marinade for a bit first, huh?”

Stratos nodded. “A little anticipation goes a long way.” She tilted her head towards Rajk and Curda. “Maybe another 10 minutes, then I’ll let those two start on him. The old-fashioned way first, maybe more chemically exotic ways later.”
Shenk winced in sympathy. Poor damn kid. The civilian, he noted, looked mildly uncomfortable, too.

“Before you start, give me those 10 minutes with him,” Shenk said.

Stratos was shaking her head. “This is a Krypteia operation, Colonel.”

“Hey, it was my base they attacked, my men they killed,” he protested. “Ten minutes, you weren’t going to do anything anyway, ten minutes and I’ll get everything you want. If I don’t, then you can do it the rude and crude way. What do you have to lose?”

“Please,” said the civilian woman. “Let him try.”

Shenk threw Stratos a quizzical look. “Rose Ozawa. The loyal citizen who informed us of the insurgents’ location,” Stratos explained.

“Ah,” said Shenk. “The collaborator. You get some kind of sadistic kink from watching him scream?”

“Screw you,” Rose spat. First Orlova, now this one; There was something about these Hegemony women, Shenk thought, in the way they didn’t mince words or play games. “He murdered Tristan, this is what he deserves. You wouldn’t understand.”

Shenk didn’t know who or what a Tristan was, but that didn’t greatly trouble him. “I understand revenge just fine, young lady.”

“I wanted justice, not revenge,” Rose countered, then mellowed slightly. “But not torture. I don’t care what you think, I don’t want to see him suffer. If you can get him to talk, then. Please try.”

Shenk looked at Stratos, arched an eyebrow in question. Stratos pursed her lips, shrugged and said: “Like you said, can’t hurt to try. Ten minutes.”

The door to the interrogation room swung open. The kid looked up, then back down at the table as Shenk walked in, sat down, stretched, took off his forage cap and laid it on the table. “Colonel Volte Shenk,” he introduced himself. “You must be Imre Szalai.”

“If you say so,” the kid mumbled. “Gonna have to forgive me if I don’t shake hands.” He tugged at the restraints.

“Comfortable?”

That brought the kid’s head up again. He scowled at Shenk. “Yeah. Five-star treatment. Thanks so much.”

“They beaten you up yet?”

The kid shook his head. “No more than necessary.”

Shenk smiled. “Well, enjoy it while it lasts my boy, because it’s about to get pretty damn unnecessary, actually quite ludicrously overboard really, once they decide you aren’t willing to say anything useful.”

The kid glowered back, though Shenk thought he detected a tremble in the jaw and shoulders, the body already anticipating the pain to come.

Shenk placed the communicator they’d found in the kid’s rucksack on the table. “Just tell me the code,” he said mildly, tapping the side of the case with one finger. “Your part in this is over, my boy. Just tell me the code and you can go back to whatever life you had, meet a nice girl—well, a slightly more suitable one, sorry, that was a little insensitive—anyway, settle down, live a long and happy life.”

The kid seemed to think about it, leaned a little over the table and peered at the communicator, then snapped forward, tried to lunge for it, grasping fingers reaching out—and was yanked brutally short just millimeters away. His fingers closed on nothing.

Shenk’s sad smile was that of a disappointed father. “Get that out of your system? Come on, be reasonable, my boy. What’s in this for you? What do you think you’ll gain by making us beat this out of you?”

“Honor,” the kid muttered. “Pride. Loyalty.”

Shenk started to laugh. He couldn’t help it. The whole situation was just so damn funny, if only they could see. “Loyalty?” he asked between chuckles. “Loyalty to who? To Richard Cameron? Even your own people admit he’s an unmitigated disaster, the reverse Midas, turning everything he touches into shit. The only reason anyone listens to a single moronic thing to come out of his idiot mouth is because they have to, thanks to your antiquated system of following whoever popped out of his mother’s uterus first, regardless of how catastrophic they were personally.

“To the Hegemony? My boy, the Hegemony doesn’t even know you exist, and even if it did, it wouldn’t give the tiniest of fruit fly farts what happens to you. The Hegemony exists purely to ensure the power, privilege and wealth of Ricky Cameron and his cronies. The Hegemony is the boot in your face, not the hand at your back.

“To the SLDF? It’s a military machine, and by definition every one of its constituent parts is completely expendable. A military unwilling to sacrifice any of its men would be useless. You want evidence? They took your pal Hansen, mangled him, crippled him, and spat him out without so much as a ‘thank you.’”

“To my friends.” The kid was still defiant, give him that. Lot of guts. No so much brains. But yeah. Lot of guts.

“Your friends,” Shenk repeated, deadpan. He half-turned in his chair, and called towards the doorway. “Rose, could you step in here for a second?”

The crushed look on the kid’s face almost set Shenk laughing again.

Shenk remembered the academy, when as a cadet the Krypteia had taken him and two of his classmates in for questioning. They had done nothing wrong, of course, it was just another random sweep, time for the secret police to rough the kids up and see what fell out. Shenk had said nothing, been beaten up more than was strictly necessary, and allowed to go free. A month later, he found out the other two had both fingered him as a revolutionary—only his family connections had saved him from the firing squad and an unmarked grave.

Shenk had learned then: Even to the ones we are closest to, we are nothing more than tools, ways to get what each person wants, and the strongest bonds of loyalty are always discarded once we outlive our usefulness.

Too bad the kid had to learn that truth now, but hey, better now than never.

“Rose?” the kid asked, and he really did sound like a kid, maybe ten years old, a ten year old who’d just had their favorite toy taken away. Poor kid was crying, real tri-D drama tears, little waterfalls down his cheeks. “But, I thought ... “

Rose folded her arms and sneered. “You thought about nothing but yourself, Imre,” she spat. “You thought you could kill Tristan, blame it on these people and what? I’d just fall into your arms?”

He was still sobbing, flinching from each word as though struck, shaking his head over and over again in denial.

“You see, Imre?” Shenk asked softly. “You’re hurting yourself for nothing, out of loyalty to people who don’t know or love or even want you.” He picked up the communicator. “Now, let’s try again: The code, Imre Szalai. What’s the code?”

The kid raised his tear-streaked face and looked up, and his eyes slid from Rose’s scowling, contemptuous face, to the small black rectangle held in Shenk’s hands.
 
He took a deep, shuddering breath.

[Dubble_g]

(All Units) (Priority SOVEREIGN Alert) (Secret/Immediate)

FROM: RWA TerComSec

ATTN: OF5 and higher
CC: KYP/HSF

As of 2766/12/27/1700 TST TerComSec confirms the successful implementation of APOSTHEOSIS phase 1: BLACK DOUGLAS. ALPHA ONE and other possible foci for counter-revolution neutralized. All priority alpha apparatus and agencies secured.

ALERT: KOLCHAK/WHITE

Elements of KOLCHAK are ACTIVE and INIMICAL across the operational area. Do not contact. Do not negotiate. Sterilize, secure, sanitize.

OPERATIONAL ORDERS: MOKED/GREEN (BOSTON)

TerComSec is therefore upgrading MOKED to GREEN. RWA assets are hereby ordered to neutralize all Category 1, 2 and 3 instances of KOLCHAK. Use of MANHATTAN, YPRES and KING is AUTHORIZED. Rules of engagement set to BOSTON (First Use, Unrestricted, Local Command and Discretion).

President Amaris expects every man to do his duty, for the glory of the Republic. There is no way but forward, no goal but victory.

MESSAGE ENDS

[marauder648]

Excellent writing, absolutely superb stuff.

[Dubble_g]

Excellent writing, absolutely superb stuff.

Cheers mate. Screams 'First Draft' to me now, but it was fun to write at the time.

***

EIGHTEEN: ORLOVA
Fort Romas, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 27, 2766

Orlova ran her hands through her hair, tugged down her uniform and brushed the shoulders and arms before the doors to the command center slid open. People wanted to see the top brass was in control, and she had to look the part.

Emergency alerts in the middle of the night be damned.

She strode into the center as if her heart was not pounding. “Sitrep. Talk to me, people: What’s happening?”

The center was almost crowded, for a change. The same alarm that had jolted her out of bed had roused a score of commtechs and other personnel, all clustered around terminals about the perimeter of the room, headsets jammed over their ears, whispering furiously into microphones.

Every monitor, Orlova saw with ice creeping in her veins, was utterly black and silent. The commtechs’ questions went unanswered.

The chief commtech looked up from his monitor, saluted, but then shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know, sir. We got a garbled message from Fort Verona, static audio, three seconds only, then the signal cut out and we can’t reestablish contact.”

“What about Fort Fornovo? Major General Sheridan?”

The commtech shook his head. “No response there either, sir. Can’t reach Camps Medici, Doria, Pavia or Savoy either. Ditto Holden and Jobs cities and the HPG stations, sir.”

The ice had worked its way up from her hands and toes, and was now squeezing her stomach and heart. “The spaceports? SDS command?”

Another shake of the head. He looked like he was trying very hard not to cry. “Gone dark, sir.”

“Unity,” she whispered, nearly dizzy, feeling the floor shift, and reached out to steady herself against the map table. She’d thought she had been prepared for the worst—how wrong, how very, very wrong she had been. “Unity.”

Everyone was watching her now. She took her hand from the map table and straightened. Tried to put some iron in her voice. “Check for equipment failures, keep trying to raise anyone we can. Get access to anything that’s going to give us eyes anywhere over those bases—weather satellites, mapping, traffic control, anything. In the meantime, we—”

One of the techs gave a choking, strangled cry. Orlova broke off, glaring furiously at the woman. The tech was holding her head in her hands, recoiling from her monitor, fingers forming a cage over her eyes.

“Oh, what is it now?” Orlova snapped. But even as she spoke, she saw what had happened. The tech had accessed the media broadcasters, both the public and private news. Most had gone dark too, or displayed the channel logo and a brief, looped message about ‘technical difficulties.’

But one had remained on the air—an entertainment channel, normally dedicated to VR games, the peccadillos of tri-D stars and sensationalized dramas based on the lives of famous ‘Mech jocks.

It wasn’t showing any of those now.

Overlooked perhaps because of its frivolous content, considered no threat to any attacker, they’d switched to a live broadcast. An androgynous reporter, incongruously dressed in shiny, reflective silver and glittering rhinestones, stood atop the roof of a high-rise tower, silhouetted against the sky.

Behind them, a black and orange mushroom cloud climbed into the stratosphere.

*  *  *

> What will do you?

“My duty, of course. What else can I do?”

> Ah, but what is your duty in this scenario? You are a soldier, not a politician. Surely it is not up to you to determine the legitimacy of the ruling government. Surrender is an option.

“Never,” Orlova said automatically, unthinkingly. “Besides, I don’t think the Rimjobs are going to give us that chance.”

Artillery shells were raining down on the ground, over two kilometers above her head. Down here, it was almost peaceful. Quiet.

> They have made an interesting opening move, I agree.

“I think ...” it was difficult to force the words out, as though speaking them would make them come true. “I think they’ve wiped everyone else out. We’re all that’s left.”

> On the plus side, your position is uncompromised. A defensive strategy may be sustainable until new pieces enter the game. Unfortunately, as long as your units remain trapped here, you hand the initiative completely to your adversary. They can pick the time and place of engagement, wear you down at their leisure, growing stronger while you grow only weaker.

“The gambit of yours. I did what you told me. Will it work?”

> The stratagem I suggested may prove effective, provided the Killer/Griefer tendency is ascendant. This is why the Explorer/Scientist poses such a threat. If your position has not been attacked yet, it suggests the latter is still in control.

“How can I change that?”

> Provoke a response. Do not play by the rules. Cheat.

Orlova nodded to herself. She did have one weapon in her arsenal that the Rim Worlds could not match. Perhaps a demonstration of her power could scare them into hasty overreaction.

> A fascinating endgame.

“It’s not a game.”

> Just as you say.

“Can we win?”

> Anything can happen in the game, Player.

She thought about destroying it. It wouldn’t take much—a few laser rounds through the servers to shut it down, maybe a few demolition charges to destroy any evidence. Among a conservative, even regressive intergalactic civilization that had largely turned its back on both technological and social advances, AIs were anathema, ranking right up there alongside nuclear weaponry and targeting civilian orbital habitats on any list of actions that were strictly taboo, verboten, outlawed, crimes against humanity. If the RWA found this one, she’d be handing them an enormous PR coup, perhaps enough to turn the other Council Lords against the Hegemony.

But she might need it, later. And she didn’t doubt the RWA was quite capable of manufacturing any justification they required.

When she had left, the system was left humming to itself.

> And if it doesn’t, then we will all meet the Player-God that much sooner. A pleasant thought.

> Until then

[Dubble_g]

NINETEEN: STRATOS
Hubris City, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 27, 2766

The three civilians were in various states of blurry sleepiness and disheveled half-dress. They’d rousted the Mayor from his mistress’s bed, abruptly escorted the Baroness from an opera performance and caught the business Chairman about seven glasses into a wine tasting.

The three had been dumped into large, overstuffed chairs in one of the drawing rooms in the Baroness’s city residence. It was a small oasis of wealth amid the squalor of the city, standing four stories high, with a rooftop garden and swimming pool, its own private docks, VTOL pad and fleet of hover vehicles.

Stratos did not hurry to meet her guests; she wanted to savor this moment, every last second of it. She’d read the message from Terra, and known even before finishing the first line what it meant: The death of Richard Cameron and his family, and the destruction of the SLDF. Revenge for an ancient humiliation. And more importantly, a chance for her to shine, to rise further ... or change sides, should Amaris’s plot be in danger of failing. That way was prepared as well: She could throw the SLDF Rajk and Curda, the sadist and the death cultist, and put all the blame on them. Either way, she came out on top.

She roamed the halls, shadowed by Curda and Rajk, admiring the artwork that decorated the hallways and rooms, the atmosphere of wealth and privilege, the aroma of aristocracy. She stopped before an ancient, beautifully-decorated china vase, closed her eyes and breathed deeply, and then pushed it off its pedestal. It struck the floor and shattered most satisfactorily. “Oops.” Humming to herself, Stratos made her way towards the drawing room.

The ceiling of the room was mostly glass, through which Stratos could see the three moons, all together in the sky now.

As befitted a noble who served two masters, there was a digital portrait of Richard Cameron on one wall, balanced by one of Robert Steiner, Archon of the Lyran Commonwealth on the other. To one side stood a sideboard made from some rare and dark wood that shone like onyx, on which sat a crystal sculpture in the shape of the lopsided Cameron star.

There was some huffy “What is the meaning” and “Demand an explanation” from the Baroness when Stratos walked in. She ignored the Baroness.

The Mayor was cowed, sheepish, staring at his feet, dressed only in pajama bottoms and a dressing gown. Ah, the ageing star, seeking to hold onto his glory days and convince himself of his virility by wrapping himself around an impressionable young woman.

The Chairman peered owlishly at her through an alcoholic fog, perhaps wondering if this was all some practical joke.

They were surrounded by Curda, Rajk and a pair of other Krypteia agents—officially the Hegemony Security Forces now—in black fatigues, combat boots, helmets and face masks.

Stratos held up two placating hands and the Baroness fell silent. “Please accept my apologies, good citizens, but there has been an urgent announcement from the Terran Hegemony government on Terra, and you had to be informed immediately.”

The three looked at each other. Stratos smiled at them, strolled over to the sideboard, and began to toy with the crystal sculpture of the Cameron star. “You see,” she ran a finger along the top edge, down the side and around the base, “I am delighted to announce that there have been some changes in the High Council.”

She gripped the base, picked up the sculpture, tossed it lightly a couple of times in her hand, getting a feel for the weight.

“What ‘changes’?” the Baroness demanded, sitting ramrod straight.

Stratos cocked her arm, made a half turn and whipped the statue into the portrait of Richard Cameron. The statue shattered in a rainbow shower of pieces, spiderwebbing the portrait screen, cracking it open, and causing the display to flicker, fizzle and then go suddenly blank.

“At the urging of his dearest and closest advisor, President Stefan Amaris, Richard Cameron has ... resigned his post as Director-General,” Stratos said, watching with satisfaction as shards of both the sculpture and portrait crackled and fell to the ground. “President Amaris will lead the interim government until new elections can be held. However, I am greatly saddened to say the Star League Defense Force has attempted to stage an illegal coup and overthrow the rightful government of the Hegemony. Accordingly, all units of the SLDF will be disarmed and confined to detention centers by garrison units of the Rim Worlds Army. Those that resist will be dealt with, and the leaders of this mutiny will face swift justice. Your cooperation is expected and you’ll need to publicly swear oaths of loyalty to the interim government—the text is already prepared.”

The Baroness was on her feet. “Outrageous. I am a citizen of the Lyran Commonwealth and demand you release me at once. You expect me to serve that fat, backwoods baboon? I’d rather die!”

Stratos nodded to Curda, who stood behind the Baroness’s chair. Curda stepped forward, drawing her laser pistol, pressed it against the back of the Baroness’s neck and fired. There was a bright flash of light as the beam punched through her skull, a fountain of red, and the old woman toppled slackly forward.

The Mayor and business Chairman stared at the body, face down on the carpet, already turning a dark burgundy. The chairman now seemed quite sober.

“After you swear the oaths, for your own safety gentlemen you will be confined here until the crisis passes,” Stratos told them. “We may need you to make public announcements from time to time. Remain calm, obey the authorities, that kind of thing. Unless either of you have any objections?”

The Chairman’s jowls quivered as he shook his head. The Mayor fiddled with the belt of his gown. “What—what about. What about the Fort?” he asked.

Stratos smiled. Already, RWA forces inside the other two Forts on the planet had opened them to assault. A pity they hadn’t been able to do the same to Fort Romas yet, but things might yet pan out. In any case Major Orlova would soon have to realize she faced an entire hostile planet, cut off by hundreds of light years from any kind of support. Even if the reservist’s information turned out to be false, Orlova’s situation was entirely hopeless, and any resistance would be futile.

“The SLDF has already made its choice,” said Stratos. “But who knows?” She shrugged, pointed down at the Baroness. “We may yet hope Major Orlova’s answer is more level-headed.”

[Dubble_g]

They didn’t have to wait long for Major Orlova’s response.

The first reports came from the police cruisers out in the bay. Radar pings. Something big, approaching fast. Hasty, nervous orders to halt, identify, turn around went unanswered. Images blurred as cameras swept over the waters and tried to focus. A bow wave rippled, like the nose of a giant orca or great white shark, as something massive moved just beneath the surface.

Searchlights blazed, slid across the waters and converged on the rushing wave front. Terrified policemen swung around pintle-mounted machineguns or shouldered short-range rocket launchers, aware of how small and pathetic their weapons felt.

“Fire!” captains shouted. “Fire, fire, fire!”

Machineguns hammered, chewed through belts holding hundreds of rounds, kicking up spouts of water all around the shape, glowing tracers and needle-noses bullets plunging down, and vanishing. And still the wave came on. Missile launchers boomed, their payloads taking to the air with screaming whooshes, leaving billowing trails of grey-white smoke as they hurled themselves across the sky, dove, and exploded in great gouts of shrapnel, fire and water spray.

The thing reacted. It surfaced. Reared up, above the waters.

It was a monster, glistening, eerie bone-white in the moonlight, over 12 meters tall, with a massive wedge-shaped body, raptor legs, and heavy, pincer-clawed hands.

The hands snapped open, revealing the cavernous mouths of two great cannon.

There was a moment of stillness. Waves stirred up from the earlier explosions slapped against the boats, rocking them from side to side. The police stopped firing, gazing open-mouthed at the apparition, craning their necks upward to take in its gargantuan side, its deadly lines, the cold cruelty that gleamed from every surface. Some prayed, some cried.

The BattleMech said nothing.

The cannons spoke. Twin supernovae of light blossomed, and the police boats vanished: exploded into pillars of flame or simply disintegrated, boats, crewmen, weapons, everything gone, reduced to millimeter shreds blown out into billowing clouds.

The monster waded forward, through the expanding rings of wreckage, into the city.

The police and paramilitary units, hastily-armed civilians pressed into service by the new government, turned and fled. Some tore off their new uniforms, scampering away in undershirts and briefs, others threw their weapons into the canals and sat with their hands raised.

The BattleMech ignored them, stalking along riverstreets, its shoulders sometimes brushing against buildings where the passage was too narrow, casually ripping away balconies, corners, whole walls, never slowing its stride.

It entered the central plaza-lagoon, marched to the center and halted, facing the police headquarters. The people inside rushed to the windows, gaped, then realized what was going to happen, and scrambled to get away, clawing and pushing past one another in a stampede for the exits. Windows on the opposite side were flung open, some leaping down to land on the concrete docks below. Others shoved through the exits and piled into boats moored about the building, often casting off while still half-full.

After precisely five minutes, the BattleMech opened fire.

It methodically walked its twin cannon across the building, from right to left, its shells punching groundcar-sized holes in the walls and columns, bringing the whole building crashing down in a volcano of concrete dust and debris. A laser lashed out from the main body of the machine, playing across the rubble, reducing it to molten, glowing slag.

(From her new headquarters in the Baroness’s residence, Stratos watched the video feed from cameras mounted atop the city council building, open-mouthed.)

A small flotilla of survivors bobbed in the disturbed waters, staring at the space the building had occupied mere seconds before. Nothing was left standing, no pillar or wall or even spar, only a semi-liquid, bubbling-hot molasses of melted plastic, concrete and glass.

The BattleMech tilted slightly towards the helpless refugee fleet.

There were no threats, no ultimatum. No communication of any kind.

The laser licked out, and began to methodically incinerate them. A three-second burst was often enough to destroy a couple of boats, more if they were clustered together. Four, five spurts of light, and a dozen little craft were blasted to pieces. Bodies writhed in the flames, and were burnt to ash.

As though satisfied, the BattleMech turned away, and marched back the way it had come, back towards the deep waters of the bay, brutally shouldering its way through more masonry and architecture as it went.

In the Baroness’s residence, Stratos ground her teeth together. “Get me Shenk,” she snapped.

[Daryk]

Score one for Orlava… if nothing else, she gave the Rimjobs a bad day there...

[Dubble_g]

Score one for Orlova… if nothing else, she gave the Rimjobs a bad day there...

That part was kind of fun to write--it's the BattleMech's "Godzilla" moment, where the machine is described and behaves just like a kaiju.

***

TWENTY: SHENK
South of Hubris City, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 28, 2766

He was a tank. A 35-ton Lightning hovertank, streaking across the waters of the Sea of Telesto, skipping across the wind-swept waves, salt-spray fanning all around him. He wished he could feel the wind racing by, feel the touch of the spray.

Shenk reached out a hand to catch the water and promptly banged it against a table, a painful reminder that whatever he was seeing, his body was still quite firmly back in the operations center.

While the news from Terra had filled Stratos with elation, Shenk had felt only dread. Operation Moked called for him to throw his regiment against Fort Romas and capture it. Gates to the other two Castles Brian had been opened from the inside, but thanks to Major Orlova’s intransigence, no such help had been forthcoming with Romas. He would instead have to rely on a head-on assault. Suicide.

Shenk had played for time, but after the demolition of the police headquarters, Stratos and the Krypteia had hammered on the RWA’s door, demanding immediate action and retaliation.

There was the intel the kid had provided, the postern gate in the fort, but something about that felt wrong to Shenk. The approach was too constricted, too easily defended, it was all too convenient.

He’d keep that idea in reserve, and trust his own instincts first. And who knew? It might be that not immediately stampeding for this supposed weak point could defuse any potential trap—by convincing Orlova he hadn’t taken the bait, all the better to surprise her when he struck at the hidden gate later. Better to keep one’s options open.

So for today, there were three strike teams. The hover armor battalion would sweep down on the Fort’s known exits, covered by the regiment’s organic artillery battery. Once the areas were secured, assault engineers would arrive by hover APC, blow open the doors, and then the heavy armor of the other two battalions would seize control of the Fort’s upper levels.

Shenk remained at the base. Like he’d said to Stratos, the Colonel’s place was at the center, not leading the charge. His head was strapped into a slightly heavy, boxy set of VR goggles, plugged into the headquarters’ main battle computer. He could look directly out through any of the sensor cameras mounted on his tanks, while a minimap kept track of the position of each unit and color-coded icons monitored their status.

Artillery shells smacked into the hills about the bay, tossing up showers of dirt and stone. The hills remained silent, and made no answer.

The Lightning hovertank Shenk was currently monitoring—the point vehicle in one of the companies—arrived at the target location, a shallow valley amid rolling, grassy hills. The gate was built into the side of one of the slopes. The Lightning and Zephyr hovertanks settled into a double-ringed circle, centered about the gate, the Lightnings facing inwards, towards the hidden gate, the Zephyrs outwards, towards the surrounding hills. They waited.

Marsh grass rippled and waved across the lonely hills. Zephyr tank turrets scanned back and forth restlessly. Found nothing.

The hover APCs carrying the assault engineers threaded through the ring of steel around the gate and slammed to a halt, disgorged their occupants, and then tore away again. The engineers crouch-ran to the gate, and waited.

“All units in position,” signaled the Major commanding the hover battalion. “Awaiting your signal.”

Shenk checked the map in the corner of his vision. There were three gates, each targeted by a company of armor. Two assaults were on time, the third delayed—the engineer APCs had gotten misrouted—but was now back on schedule.

Teams of men crouched by the three gates to the Fort, nervously fingering weapons, checking and rechecking their equipment, tightening straps, readying explosives. One or two prayed. Others exchanged wordless hand-clasps.

Shenk ordered the heavy armor battalions to advance, then switched back to the assault engineers. “Go,” he ordered.

The men stood.

As though on Shenk’s command, the ground rumbled. There was a thrumming, electrical whine all around. The combat engineers froze in confusion. The hilltops erupted all about the tanks. Squat pillars of steel burst upwards, shielding over guns and launchers slid open, and they began to fire.

Particle fire swept over the stationary tanks, ripping through them, igniting fireballs inside them, disintegrating the combat engineers in an instant. A black rain of point-blank missile fire started a firestorm that turned the air into an oven, baking crews alive. Shenk’s VR goggle camera view skewed to one side, disintegrated in a flare of cobalt-blue light, then went black.

One by one, the icons for all three assault companies flashed red.

In the headquarters, Shenk tore the goggles from his face in shock. “Sheeeyit,” he gasped.

*  *  *

“Okay kid, we’ll try it your way.”

The kid startled awake, blinked, looked around, getting his bearings. Shenk saw it register: Prison cell, steel door, Colonel Shenk. “I have a way?” the kid croaked.

“Yup,” said Shenk, settling on the edge of the bed by Imre’s feet. “Your secret little code for your secret little entrance into Fort Romas. I’ve just had a very long and very intense discussion with Agent Stratos of the Krypteia—sorry, that’s Hegemony Security Forces to you—and with my own high command, and they are absolutely adamant that we try out the intel you gave us.”

Shenk didn’t tell the kid he’d argued for caution, and been rebuffed. The Krypteia, or more precisely Arianna Stratos, was still smarting, and still screaming for vengeance.

Meanwhile, the debacle with the hovertank assault had only served to further convince the high command that immediate action was necessary. Word was someone on Dieron had managed to screw up their assault and was now the recipient of a one-way ticket back to a shallow grave on Terra. The generals were anxious to avoid a similar fate. They’d agreed with Stratos, and given Shenk an ultimatum: Find a way into Fort Romas, or find himself in front of a firing squad.

Shenk had asked for reinforcements, and been brutally turned down. Sounded like the fight for the other two Castles wasn’t going quite as smoothly as they’d previously claimed—the current plan seemed to be to blast the defenders out with nuclear demolitions charges. Underground detonations were already shaking the streets in the planetary capital, Jobs City.

And to think, he’d imagined that joining the RWA would let him change it from the inside and transform it into something better. The first casualty of war was not truth, but rather, belief.

“Well,” the kid said dully, rolling over to face away from Shenk. “Congratulations, I guess.”

“Sour grapes are no excuse to be lazy, my boy. Better get dressed,” Shenk said, stood, collected the kid’s clothes from a clear, transparent plastic dresser and threw them on the bed.

“What’s the difference?” the kid rolled back to face Shenk again, looking puzzled. “It’s voice-only, not like they’re gonna see me.”

“Well, on the insistence of our good friend, Arianna Stratos and my own superiors, I am going to be riding in one of the lead tanks personally. And if I’m risking my neck on this, then so are you.

“Now get dressed, my boy. It’s gonna be chilly out, and I’d hate for you to catch a cold.”

[marauder648]

Wow that scene with the King Crab was amazing! As always the writing is 100% spot on brilliant. I fear the forts going to fall but how is another matter entirely. Excellent stuff and i'm hungry for more!

[Daryk]

I'm pretty sure the fort is going to be nuked... either by the Rimjobs, or by Orlava with the Rimjobs inside it...

[Dubble_g]

Wow that scene with the King Crab was amazing! As always the writing is 100% spot on brilliant. I fear the forts going to fall but how is another matter entirely. Excellent stuff and i'm hungry for more!

How are you always so positive, my dude? Don't get me wrong, this stuff is like catnip for writers, I just wish I could stay so sunny. Thanks as always for the comment and support.

I'm pretty sure the fort is going to be nuked... either by the Rimjobs, or by Orlava with the Rimjobs inside it...

Don't worry, they all go riding off into the artificial sunset at the end. Or maybe not.

***

TWENTY-ONE: ROSE
Hubris City, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 29, 2766

Once the news blackout had lifted, the media announcements were almost comical in their bland inability to provide any kind of real information. For all their attempts a reassuring gravitas, the media personalities had no idea what was going on: Director-General Richard Cameron had resigned, or no, he’d been removed for abuse of power, but wait, he’d disappeared, or maybe, he’d died in an accident. The SLDF had killed Cameron, or perhaps, they were trying to bring him back to power, or who knows, maybe Kerensky was staging a coup.

At first Rose had wondered why the Rim Worlders had allowed the broadcasters back on air, but now she saw: The hundred different reports and rumor and conjecture only added to the fog, not cleared it, and the only reactions the reports produced were confusion and apathy, not anger.

Someone had attacked the police headquarters and leveled it, that at least was clear. Fire had been seen in the sky, far over the horizon, towards Jobs City. What it all meant, nobody knew.

The people in her building watched columns of police vehicles pass on the riverstreets below and said nothing. When the police pounded on Rose’s door, they continued to say nothing. The tall one called Rajk had come to collect Rose from her home, shouldering the door wide the moment she opened it, grabbing her arm and hustling her rudely outside and down the stairs before shoving her onto an amphi.

“Stratos wants to see you,” he said.

The tide was out, so the amphi puttered down the muddy canyons between buildings, among the tree-trunk forest of concrete, wood and stone pillars holding up the city.

The wind, channeled between the buildings, whipped her hair and stung her face. She wiped tears from her eyes.

“What does Stratos want?” she tried asking Rajk over the wind.

“Your friend Imre.” Rajk nodded to the amphi driver.

“He’s not my friend,” Rose said, reflexively. “He killed Tristan.”

“That little freak?” Rajk laughed. “Oh come on, don’t tell me you fell for that one. That kid’s about as tough and dangerous as a used tissue. Him, kill anyone? Don’t make me laugh.”

“Then, who?” Rose remembered the things Imre had said, the things she had dismissed out of hand. “You?”

“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t,” he said smugly. “What are you going to do about it, huh, Quisling?”

Rose stiffened, as though slapped. “Why would you say that?”

Rajk pointed over her shoulder. “Can you guess how many friends of mine died in there?” he asked. “All because of that little twerp and his subterranean troglodyte friends at the Fort.”

Rose looked. They were passing the burnt, blackened slag heap that had once been the police headquarters. Chunks of concrete, glass and police boats still littered the muddy ground of the plaza-lagoon.

“If you ask me,” said Rajk, “we should do the same to the whole damn city.”

Rose wasn’t listening. The only thing that registered was: Imre had been telling the truth. She’d turned him over to these people, she’d let them kill Hansen, for nothing. For a lie.

On the far side of the lagoon, the houses looked almost clean, and traffic was almost back to normal. A few of the more politically adroit families had taken down the Hegemony banner from flagpoles about their homes, and hoisted the Rim Worlds Republic shark instead.

The amphi halted by the Baroness’s residence.

It sat on its own, private island. There was a sprawling, walled garden all about the house, but most of the trees had been hastily hacked down and their stumps uprooted to make room for the sandbagged bowls of antiaircraft gun and missile emplacements.

Rose walked through in a daze, prodded by Rajk at her back.

Three ragged lines of people stood to one side of the garden, faces pale, resigned or disbelieving, some shocked, surrounded by black-clad men with guns. As Rose stumbled past, one of the lines was herded forward, around the corner and behind the wall. The sound of gunfire came soon after.

“Traitors,” Rajk said with satisfaction. “Your friend Imre will be joining them soon.”

“He’s not my friend,” she said automatically, but she could tell Rajk wasn’t listening.

They were met by Curda, the woman with black and white skin, at the entrance to the residence. Rajk seemed surprised to see her. “I can handle one civvie,” he said.

Curda’s expression did not change. “She told me to meet you,” she said. “You want to complain, take it up with her.” She turned and walked inside, evidently expecting them to follow.

“Weirdo voodoo freak,” Rajk muttered.

There was a broad, sweeping staircase inside, covered in plush red, velvety material that seemed to caress Rose’s feet as she walked inside. The material was filthy now, splattered with grease or oil and bearing the ground-in dirt of hundreds of booted feet carelessly tracking the mud of the riverstreets inside.

It must have been a beautiful place, once, before they transformed it into a fortress.

Rose could see through the doorways into several rooms off the main hall, and they had been converted into something military—a communications room, gun emplacements, storage rooms. Furniture had been piled up to one side, or simply smashed and the debris dumped outside.

Rajk and Curda led her up to the roof. There was a solarium there, mostly made of glass and steel, affording a view of the rooftop gardens and pool, and beyond, the sprawl of the city and the waters of the bay. Already Rose could see the ripples of the tide beginning to ebb.

“Wait here,” Rajk grunted. He went out, to the edge of the roof, where Stratos stood against a railing, looking North.

Rose stood, holding herself at the elbows, unsure what else to do. Curda looked at her, the way one might month-old food found at the back of a refrigerator, a mix of curiosity and mild distaste.

“The boy you helped us capture, Imre, will guide a regiment to attack the Fort today, in a few hours, and Stratos wants you as a hostage, in case Imre tries to double-cross them,” Curda said abruptly, in a matter-of-fact tone. “She’ll tell Rajk to kill you, after.”

Rose stared at her. Her eyes twitched to the exit. “What? Why?”

Curda shrugged and stretched, sinuously, both hands above her head. “It’s the way they think: People are pawns to be used and sacrificed. They don’t see that there are always levels above, we are always pawns in somebody’s else’s game.” She brought down her hands. “Company or country or cult or companions, we’re all servants in the end.”

Rose had started to shiver and was trying very hard not to cry. “Why are you telling me?”

Curda smiled, a little twitch to the side of her mouth, reached down to the pistol in her holster and drew it. “There are always levels above,” she repeated. She brought the pistol up to eye level, forcing Rose to look at it. “We’re all servants in the end.”

With a snap of the wrist, Curda twirled the pistol around and presented it towards Rose.

“Take it,” she said to Rose. “Take it. Rajk will be coming back soon. Take it, take it or die.”

Rose reached up, hands shaking, and gripped the gun in both hands. Curda released it with another smile, broad this time, filling her whole face. A look of utter satisfaction.

“I don’t understand,” Rose stammered. “You—you—“

“Sevite,” said Curda, as if that explained everything. “We’re all servants, in the end. I am a loyal servant of the Ghede lwa, and they command this thing be done.” She turned, and walked towards the exit. “Good luck,” she said over her shoulder, slipped through the door, and closed it behind.

Rose heard the door to the roof slide open. “Where’s Curda?” asked Rajk, behind her.

Rose lowered the pistol, shielding it from Rajk’s view with her body. “She left. She said something about say-vee-tay.” She took a deep breath. What was left? Amends maybe, for Ames, and even for Imre. Maybe he had wronged her, and she had wronged him, maybe the whole thing was a mess and this was the best way it could end.

“Malking cuckoo. Come on,” Rajk said, and put a hand on her shoulder, starting to turn her around. “Stratos is waiting.”

Rose let herself be turned. Saw the surprise register on Rajk’s face as he saw the gun cradled against her chest. His fingers on her shoulder twitched. Rose jammed the barrel of the pistol against him, right over the heart, and pulled the trigger.

“For Tristan.”

Rajk smiled. “Well, bugger me,” he said.

And fell to the ground, black hole smoking from his chest.

Rose looked at the body, waiting for it to move, but Rajk’s sightless eyes only stared blankly up at the roof. Rose raised her eyes, and looked outside. Stratos was watching her, speaking furiously into something grey at her wrist.

Rose stumbled outside, onto the roof, pistol held in both hands before her like a dowsing rod, as though it was the one pulling her forwards, and she merely stumbling after.

Stratos lowered her wrist as Rose approached. “Miss Ozaki, so good of you to join me. Though I am curious. Why did you kill poor Rajk?” she asked stiffly.

“He shot Tristan.”

“Who?” Stratos frowned briefly. “Oh, the boy on the island. No. That was me.”

Rose stumbled. “You?”

In that instant, Stratos sprang forward across the gap between them, crashing into Rose, grappling for the gun. They landed on the ground, rolling, first Stratos on top, then Rose, then Stratos, snarling, trying to kick and knee one another.

Rose got one hand free and clawed at Stratos’s face, forcing the other woman to jerk her head back. Then screamed in agony as Stratos drove an elbow into her cheekbone. Her grip on the pistol went loose for a second.

A second was enough. Stratos wrested the gun free, and leaped to her feet, back against the balcony railing. “You’re dead,” the Rim Worlder woman hissed. “Your idiot boyfriend is dead, the drunken cripple is dead, that lovesick puppy is dead, the whole rotten, stinking, slimy lot of you, all dead. We’re going to win, and I’m going to Terra a hero, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

Stratos raised the pistol and fired.

Rose rolled, too slow. The beam struck her shoulder, burning through, and she felt her arm go numb. But she was on her feet. And charged, head down, straight towards Stratos. Another beam sizzled over her head, singeing her scalp, burning her hair.

Rose’s shoulder impacted on Stratos’s stomach. The momentum carried them back, further back, smacking against the railing and then teetering, tipping, overbalanced, feet off the ground, over the edge of the railing, and out into empty space.

They fell, twisting and tumbling through the air, hands still at each other’s throats, before smacking hard into the plaza-lagoon below, kicking up a white fountain of water.

The waters churned and two heads surfaced, screaming, spluttering, grappling with one another. Producing movement, heat, and blood. The lagoon came alive, thousands upon thousands of lampreys and leeches stirring to sudden activity in a blood-fueled frenzy, falling upon the two thrashing figures, coiling and rolling around them, blind hook-toothed mouths questing, seeking, burrowing into exposed skin.

The waters bubbled, seethed, kicked up frothy waves that grew smaller and smaller as the two struggling figures grew weaker and weaker, before finally sinking down into the depths of the lagoon.

A few bubbles rose to the surface. Little hemispheres of nothing, that soon burst.

[Daryk]

+1 for Rose, but now I'm REALLY wondering about Curda...

[Dubble_g]

And here we go: The grand finale. Le final chapter, as they say in France.

***

TWENTY-TWO: IMRE
Polar Tidal Flats, Near Fort Romas, Nusakan
Terran Hegemony (Star League)
December 29, 2766

The tanks churned the wet mud under their tracks, gouging long, unbroken arcs across the flats, all of them converging with the illusion of distance into a single point.

The whole tidal flat was crawling with tanks, like a swarm of woodlice, you know the ones, doodle bugs. The heavy Von Luckners formed a wedge in the lead, the top-heavy Manticores behind, a bunch of APCs packed with base security, MPs and other guys Shenk was pressing into service as infantry support bringing up the rear.

There was some other stuff, too. Big, rectangular crates with black-on-yellow warning labels.

I was perched on top of Shenk’s command tank, a little behind the lead tanks, my fingers locked around a handhold, trying to keep from being shaken off. They’d given me my pack back, my clothes, even my thermos (with the crystal, and this diary, hidden at the bottom).

Shenk was standing in the open cupola next to me, hand on his hips, top half of his face hidden behind a tanker’s helmet and smoky black goggles.

The man looked casual as you please, like he was going to a day at the beach.

He held the communicator, the one with the code: Deep Red. I wondered if it would work the way Orlova had promised (Had she known I would be caught? Had she arranged all this? No, that was too paranoid). Imagine the look on my face if we showed up at the back door, I said the magic words and nothing happened. They’d have shot me for sure, but then, that seemed the most likely outcome no matter what else happened.

Even if it worked, if the door magically opened, even if this somehow caught Orlova by surprise, there were still BattleMechs out there. The whole thing might be a trap: The BattleMechs might be waiting just on the other side of the door, ready to blast Shenk’s regiment all to hell. And me with them. An unarmored man clinging to the turret of a tank in the middle of a firefight with BattleMechs had about as much chance of surviving as a piece of tissue paper did in a furnace.

At least Rose would be okay. I’d made my peace with what she did, maybe even understood why she’d done it, even if I couldn’t quite forgive her for Hansen’s death. But at least one of us would make it out of this—with the Fort taken and me dead, Stratos and the rest would have no reason to hold her. She’d be free.

“Calorie bar?” Shenk held a kind of foil-wrapped grey-brown stick towards me. I said nothing. Shenk nodded, stuck it in his mouth and tore off a chunk. “No? Yeah, that’s probably wise,” he said around chews. “Tastes like three-day-old ass. Look, kid, don’t beat yourself up about this, you’re doing the right thing. It’s the smart move. The rest of the SLDF is five hundred light years away—the sooner Orlova surrenders, the less killing there’ll be, the less danger to the folks in the city, the better it’ll be all around.”

It was almost funny, how much Shenk and Orlova sounded the same. Saving lives, doing the right thing, what’s best for everyone. It’d be nice if I had all those grand things in my head. But I didn’t. Screw them all, Orlova, Stratos, Shenk, the whole damn planet full of them. Ames was dead, Hansen was dead and they’d turned Rose against me. So let them die, let them all die. This was my last, despairing middle finger to the system, the people, the so-called friends that had so thoroughly screwed me over. Let them all die.

We were approaching the mouth to the canyon that led to the Fort Romas gate. Not long now, I thought. Not long now. Orlova and the Fort were out there, waiting. The BattleMechs were out there, waiting.

“Tell your guys to bear left here, about fifteen degrees,” I said instead. Shenk just chewed thoughtfully at me, looking skeptically at what appeared to be a thin layer of water over the sand. “There’s a trench to the right,” I repeated. “The Deep Red trench. If you don’t want your lead platoon to sink, bear left.”

Shenk swallowed, and then nodded. “Whatever you say.” He chinned his helmet mike. “Mako One, bear left fifteen. All units, follow their lead.” He clicked off and looked at me. “Happy now?”

Everything flashed white.

I was blinded.

After-images in my eyes: Searing bands of light erupting from the water to our right, converging on the lead tank. So hot I thought the skin of my face must’ve been charred, wondered if my eyeballs had been cooked in their sockets. A detonation. The shockwave slapped me from the turret of Shenk’s Von Luckner. I landed wrong and all I could feel was a screaming, overwhelming pain shooting up my leg.

I found myself laying a couple of meters from Shenk’s tank. Titans were rising from the trench to our right, giants, great curtains of water sloshing from their shoulders, firing and firing as they rose. Burning, almost nuclear-hot laser and particle fire arcing over my head, screaming flights of missile salvos, streams of fiery tracer shells.

Orlova had sprung her trap, but not inside the Fort. Right here.

Tanks were burning everywhere. The lead tank had just dissolved, annihilated in the first salvo. Don’t know how long I was out, but when I lifted my head and tried to get my eyes to work again, already I could see another half-dozen smoking, blazing, wrecks.

The turret on Shenk’s Von Luckner turned, and the main gun fired. Recoil was enough to rock the 75-ton tank sideways, and it blew a haze of smoke and mud over my head, making me duck down again. I realized I’d barely heard a thing—the explosion of the first tank had deafened me—just had this hollow ringing in my ears. Like the sea in a shell.

Guess Shenk had made himself a target. A minor earthquake started pounding the ground, and when I rolled, I saw a fracking great 100-ton King Crab bearing right down on us. Fracking howitzers in each hand just firing and firing and firing and thumping into the side of the tank, blasting huge sheets of armor off the side of the Von Luckner, white-hot shrapnel spewing everywhere. I got wasp-stung by a few splinters across my back, arms, legs.

I tried to stand but almost passed out from the pain again. Leg would barely move. Tried to crawl. But the King Crab was charging, and suddenly it got dark and I looked up and saw its foot hanging right above me for a split-second, before it crashed down into the ground, just beyond, and damn if the thing didn’t just kick the Von Luckner in the side and flip it onto its side.

The BattleMech fired one more time, and blew a hole in the belly of the tank. There was a spurt of flame as something cooked off inside, and then the Von Luckner just dumped out a constant, massive pillar of black smoke.

Another Von Luckner nearby fired at the King Crab. Shots cratered into the ‘Mech’s side, cracked it, but couldn’t penetrate.

Someone staggered from Shenk’s tank, uniform smoking, and then a second later a flying splinter of armor from the King Crab sliced through their neck.

The King Crab focused on the new target and fired again, charging off further down the column, thunder steps receding with each second.

I wanted to cheer but the air was getting so hot from all the laser and particle fire, all the missiles and explosions and fires everywhere around me, I could barely take a breath without choking. Gagging, coughing, I crawled away, dragging my useless leg behind.

All I could do was crawl, like a worm in the mud, dragging myself towards the Deep Red trench. My lungs would be cinders in a few minutes. Maybe if I could get underwater, I thought, maybe.

Not like it would have made a difference. The tide would be coming in, and there was no way I was going to escape it without help.

I think I swam in and out of consciousness. Each time I looked up, the water seemed no closer. My hearing was coming back, I could faintly hear explosions and the crackle of weapons fire behind me, but that died away after a while. Felt like I’d been crawling for hours, maybe, for days. Couldn’t even raise my head any more, my horizon reduced to about a meter in front of me.

Then a pair of boots stepped in front of my face. I rolled onto my back, looked up, and saw Colonel Shenk looking down at me. His face was soot-smeared, gashes across forehead, cheek and chin, his uniform also torn and dirty. In his right hand, he held a pistol—Hansen’s. The same one I’d been handed weeks ago, or someone had been handed anyway. Didn’t feel much like me anymore—I barely recognized the guy I’d been back then.

Someone had given someone that gun, for some reason neither of them had really understood, triggering a cascade of events neither of them had controlled, to a conclusion neither had wanted. All the things that had seemed to matter at the time felt foolish now, as substantial as the mud under my back, as impermanent as the tide that would drown me in a matter of minutes.

Shenk crouched down by my head. He reached down, grabbed the front of my shirt, and with a grunt, hauled me up into a sitting position.

I could see the armored column now. The whole horizon was on fire, burning vehicles as far as the eye could see. Here and there, small ant-hills that were piles of bodies. A few shell-shocked survivors staggered among the wreckage, calling or looking for others, or simply wandering in a daze. Smoke from the fires combined into a single great sheet, billowing high into the sky, blotting out the clouds, the sun, the moons. Like it was the only thing left in the world. No sign at all of the BattleMechs. They’d gone, back to the Fort, leaving the survivors here, leaving me here. Leaving me here.

“The look on your face ... You didn’t know Orlova was going to do that, did you?” Shenk shook his head, laughing at himself, laughing at me, laughing at everything. “And this is how your loyalty is repaid. Looks like they’ve given you up for dead, my boy. Betrayed the betrayer. Oh, that almost makes this all worthwhile.”

“We stopped you,” I spat. “The tide’s coming, you know. You won’t make it in time.” Wanted to wipe that knowing grin from his face. But he only chuckled again.

“Ah, my boy. You still think any of this matters? You and Orlova haven’t stopped a damn thing. Today, tomorrow, next month, next year, the Fort is going to fall, Orlova is going to die, and then Kerensky is going to come back and burn whatever is still left standing to the ground.” Shenk made a helpless gesture with his empty hand. “As for me, the Krypteia doesn’t let failures live. I was dead the moment my regiment died.” Shenk tapped his heart. “Don’t let this semblance of life fool you, I’m already a goner. Delayed shock, maybe, dead man walking. Drowning’s a better end than I could have hoped for.”

I waited for Shenk to aim the gun, to blow my brains out, kill the traitor, but he just looked around the flat, looking left and right, past the burning, flaming hulks, the sodden heaps of bodies. Looking for something. He stood up.

“Which way is the tide going to come from?” Shenk asked me.

I pointed.

He squinted the way I’d pointed. Looked like he was about to go, when he reversed his grip on the pistol, and handed it to me, butt-first. “It’s loaded now. Hollow points. In case you want the easy way out,” he said to me. “Or want to give me one.” Then he started walking, back straight, arms swinging, straight towards the incoming tide.

He was smiling.

I held the gun for a moment. Black, sleek, remembering the day Hansen had handed it to me, all that time ago. Reliable, yeah, the one thing you can trust, the certainty of the grave. I didn’t have to think too hard. Pointed it at Shenk’s retreating back. Fully auto, one long pull of the trigger emptied the magazine. Gun kind of burped, bucked in my hand. I didn’t owe him anything, but still, it felt like this was the least I could do for him.

It will be coming in soon. Billions and billions of tons of water, all coming rushing across the flat, as merciless and unstoppable as history. No way I’m getting out of its way.

The waves are starting to come, higher each time. I’ve saved this diary onto the crystal, and I’ll put it in my empty thermos. If you’re reading this then, then ... ah, nevermind. Maybe I owed it to Ames and Hansen and Rose to tell this story, maybe I never owed anything to anyone. Maybe it’s all empty words and soap bubble feelings.

The tide’s coming in, across the galaxy, and it’ll go out again, and in between anything with substance or weight will sink to into the mud at the bottom and only the empty, ephemeral things will survive, by floating to the top.

Anyway, this is my message in a bottle. It’ll float. I won’t.

It’s hollow.

--THE END--

[Daryk]

Orlova "wins" after all... probably earning herself a nuke or three.  Still wondering about Curda, but nice ending there!  :thumbsup:

[Dubble_g]

Orlova "wins" after all... probably earning herself a nuke or three.  Still wondering about Curda, but nice ending there!  :thumbsup:

The theme of the story is 'loyalty' and Curda's role in the story is that the only one to survive is the one that is loyal literally to death.

Shenk/Orlova -- Loyal to their respective militaries
Imre/Hansen -- Loyal to their friends
Stratos/Rose -- Loyal only to themselves
Curda -- Loyal to her religion (Ghede = voodoo spirits of death)

[Daryk]

Thanks for the explanation!  :thumbsup:

[DOC_Agren]

 :thumbsup:  Well done.. Sorry to see it end

Running an armored unit over tidal flats for an assault, that you either win or die..  WOW

[Daryk]

Well, when you know you'll be shot in the back of the head if you don't, it doesn't sound so crazy...  ::)

[DOC_Agren]

Well, when you know you'll be shot in the back of the head if you don't, it doesn't sound so crazy...  ::)

I get that, I'm just trying to explain to my Tankers why we are driving over what an tidal flat and how this is all going to end well.  Hover units at least can float/hover, but Von Luckner and nothing else sent can swim well.

[Daryk]

The tankers get the same explanation as the commander...  ^-^

[ckosacranoid]

That is one way to the end the story. cool and thanks for sharing.

[Tegyrius]

And you say you don't do noir.  Pfft.

Excellent as always.  Thank you for sharing it with us.

[Dubble_g]

Hm, interesting reactions. Shenk's whole arc is about a basically decent man working for a shitty organization that's given him an impossible job. I tried to foreshadow that at the start: he's told to parade through a city with no streets. And an armored regiment really isn't what you need for a cavern assault ... and so on. I had him mention twice that him being in a tank would be a sign he'd totally lost control of the situation... and then in the last chapter he's in one of the lead tanks.

On a related subject it's interesting how some readers focus on the details of plot over themes or meaning. I thought the city name (Hubris) and the whole imagery of shifting, unpredictable tides might've been heavy handed but people seem to glide over that.

[marauder648]

wow, just..blimey. I wasn't expecting Strategos to go out like that, and the ending was very very well done, the conflict was at a personal level and there was the bits when the Mechs' come out to play and you captured how bloody terrifying that would be.

And whilst we know in the end, the Fort, and in truth, the world itself are just tiny little peices on a massive table, you made them utterly important and the whole focus of the story.

Damn fine writing!

[DOC_Agren]

 :(  Oh I been laughing about the tank force everytime they deployed, because someone sent the wrong force here.