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  SHE WAS ALMOST HOME FREE...

  ... when a DEST operator strolled around the corner toward her.

  In a millisecond she evaluated her options. The frightened little girl within screamed for her to turn and flee into the inviting maze of the warehouse, away from the bad man in black. But that was death; it would take Ninyu Kerai Indrahar's ninjas no longer to find her than it would take all the wine to spill from an upset bottle.

  When the frightened child inside her screamed, Cassie's reflex was to snap into "kill" mode. But the agents suit would stop a slug from her pistol, even if there were time to draw it.

  She would have to do this bare-handed.

  BATTLETECH

  LE5429

  CLOSE QUARTERS

  Victor Milan

  ROC

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,

  London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,

  Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published by Roc, an imprint of Dutton Signet, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.

  First Printing, September, 1994 10 987654321

  Series Editor: Donna Ippolito Cover: Boris Vallejo Interior Illustrations: Earl Geir Mechanical Drawings: Duane Loose

  Copyright © FASA Corporation, 1994 All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—-MARCA REG1STRADA .

  BATTLETECH, FASA, and the distinctive BATTLETECH and FASA logos are trademarks of the FASA Corporation, 1100 W. Cermak, Suite B305, Chicago, IL 60608.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES, FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRJTE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN BOOKS USA INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.

  If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."

  To Sean, with thanks for the loan of the research material

  Prologue

  It is the year 3056. The uneasy truce between the Clans and the Inner Sphere has run almost a third of its course. The vast Federated Commonwealth, which once seemed destined to reunify the Inner Sphere for the first time since the fall of the Star League, is feeding upon itself in the frenzy of civil war.

  The Federated Commonwealth's orgy of self-destruction brings little comfort to Theodore Kurita, all-powerful Coordinator of the Draconis Combine. Such vulnerability in the Combine's greatest rival is the answer to the prayers of generations of Kurita rulers before him. But Theodore knows that the turmoil in the Federated Commonwealth creates not only opportunity, but the potential for disaster. The Clan menace has only been stalled, not stemmed. The Successor States must pull together—or face certain annihilation when the Truce expires.

  On Hachiman, wealthiest world of the Combine, Theodore's cousin Chandrasekhar Kurita plays a secret game of his own—a game Theodore's spymaster Subhash Indrahar believes is treason. And a scandal involving a member of the Combine's ruling family might well put paid to any hope the Coordinator has of stopping the Clans when Kerensky's superhuman warriors resume their relentless march toward Terra.

  But that's politics. The real story begins two decades earlier, on a backwater world of the Capellan Confederation. ...

  Part One

  Nightmares

  1

  Kalimantan, Larsha

  Sian Commonality, Capellan Confederation

  6 May 3034

  Cassie was three when the 'Mechs came to Larsha.

  "Mommy, mommy, where's Daddy?"

  A crack like lightning rattled the windows of the small house on the outskirts of Kalimantan, capital city of Larsha, on the distant fringe of the Capellan Confederation. Alexandra Yamaguchi Suthorn shuddered violently but tried to keep the terror from distorting her face and voice as she spoke to her young daughter.

  "He's gone away now, Cassie. He'll be back"—a crash from outside; her blue eyes darted toward the window again—"as soon as he can."

  Cassiopeia Suthorn writhed in her mother's grip. She was a small child with bare brown arms and legs and big gray eyes. All the neighbors—old Mrs. Wu next door, Dr. Bandaryan down the block, the Aungs across the way— never stopped commenting on how intelligent and cheerful she was. Cassie was always happy, always playful, and almost always getting into mischief of some sort. But she had such a pretty smile, such an innocent way about her, that no one could stay angry at her for long. Not even Mrs. Sanders, who lived on the other side of the Wus and was known for throwing rocks at older neighborhood children who tried to pick apples from the branches that hung down over her back wall.

  Cassie wasn't a happy child now, fighting as much to keep a grip on her yellow teddy bear—worn and one-eyed veteran that he was—as to escape her mother's restraint. It was still dark when the sounds awakened her that morning—sounds from the next room—the intense whispers of her parents, who somehow imagined their excited hissing would not alert her keen child's senses. She had crept out of bed in one of her father's undershirts which she wore as a nightgown, peered around the doorway from the hall to see them standing in the middle of the living room, Mother in her robe, Father in his dusty-green military clothes with the darker green leggings and forearm braces and simple yellow tabs of his commander's rank on the collar.

  Immediately Cassie too became excited. She loved when her father dressed up in his soldier clothes. He looked so handsome. And sometimes he took her along to parades, where she would see rank on rank of young men in their swept helmets and pretty uniforms and the big tanks that sometimes—if she were very good—a little girl might get to climb on. And sometimes she might even glimpse a BattleMech gleaming in the hot Larsha sun like a giant, fearsome metal man.

  But the way her parents were acting told Cassie there would be no fun excursions today. They had the serious looks that grownups seemed to get when talking of things they didn't want children to hear.

  "—just an alert," Commander Manoc Suthorn was saying. His handsome mouth tightened. "We're forbidden to evacuate, the orders say. They don't want to spread panic."

  Cassie's mother clutched his arm. "Is there any chance the fighting will reach us here?"

  "I don't know." Her father shook his head. "I wish we'd dug a shelter below the house."

  "Don't blame me!" Alexandra Suthorn's voice shrilled and almost broke. "You can't blame me! We had other things to spend the money on, and never enough—"

  "There was always enough for the party dresses, the whole round of you and all the other refugees trying to recapture the status we knew back in the Combine." Gently he detached her fingers from his arms. "Yes, yes, I know ... the status I lost for us ..."

  He kissed her forehead. "It's too late for blame now," he said, "and if there is any, it's mine as much as yours. Take care of Cassie."

  And then he turned and saw Cassie standing there, the child no longer making any attempt to hide,
her bear dangling from one small fist. And he swept her up and crushed her in his strong arms and called her his little girl and told her to be good. Then he was out the door.

  It was two hours later that the sirens began their banshee wail, rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall. And then a rushing roar across the sky, like a mighty windstorm passing, and Cassie's mother with a death grip on her daughter's arm to keep her from going out, tear tracks gleaming against the smoothness of her ivory skin.

  Another crack. A red flash lit the street, followed by a whoomp. The smell of ozone and then the spreading Sandusk olive tree in the Suthorn's tiny front yard crashed past the window, branches burning. Alexandra let go her grip on her daughter, raked her flawless cheeks with her nails and screamed.

  There were men moving up the block, men in the Aung yard across Resplendent Glory Lane. Men in the distinctive olive uniforms and helmets Cassie knew so well. "Daddy!" she shouted, wriggling with redoubled energy. "It's Daddy."

  "No, dear, no," her mother said, somehow fighting down her panic. "Those are just soldiers dressed like Daddy. You can't tell—"

  What cut off her words was a bolt of blue hitting the ground in front of the Aung house, the blue fire momentarily blanking Cassie's vision. Through great maroon clouds of afterimage she saw the big front window shimmer and simply melt away, felt a rush of heat on her face like the hot breath of air when she squatted too near while her mother slid her baking in and out of the oven.

  In the Aung yard, men were on fire. Cassie uttered a shriek that seemed to tear the lining out of her throat. Dropping her bear, she broke from her mother's arms and ran out the front door.

  The burning men had fallen to the ground. The whole front of the Aung house was in flames. Next to Cassie the fallen tree was ablaze with popping sounds.

  From somewhere came a heavy pounding, like slow footsteps, but magnified a thousandfold. Out of the house ran Alexandra Suthorn, tail of her robe flying. She swooped Cassie up into her arms and carried her across the street at an angle away from the burning house, into the Fabricants' front yard. Then she was down on all fours, dragging Cassie along, burrowing like an animal into an azelia bush, hung now with wilted yellow-orange blossoms.

  The hammerfall sounds drummed closer. Again Cassie escaped her mother, crawled out to stand upright on the Fabricants' lawn, staring back at her house.

  An enormous figure suddenly loomed up behind the house. With a great splintering crack, it shouldered aside the evergreen oak that Cassie, to her mother's despair, loved to climb. The little girl stared up at the giant as it raised a giant metal hand, then smashed it down onto her house.

  "Teddy," she said in a lost and tiny voice.

  The giant BattleMech gazed down at her, its death's-head a gleaming metal parody of a human face. Slowly it raised its left arms, until Cassie was staring directly up the huge tube mounted on the end of it. Deep within the black tunnel, rings of blue light began to glow. Crouched behind Cassie, her mother began to whimper.

  Whatever the giant machine was about to do didn't happen because the next moment a rocket slammed into the side of the 'Mech's head with a ringing sound like God's own sledgehammer. The metal monster rocked, turned. The blue lightning from its left arm hit the next street over, sending a rush of debris riding skyward on an orange fireball. But the giant was not felled. The 'Mech caught its balance, lowering its right arm to send an eye-hurting column of ruby light stabbing into the rubble of Cassie's house, followed by an immediate gush of fire. By then the monster was already striding away, wading through the Wu house and buckling the blacktop of Resplendent Glory Lane with its awful weight.

  Cassie Suthorn stood and watched the gigantic beast that had destroyed her life as it lumbered off, heedless of the destruction it left behind. Tears streamed from her eyes; blood streamed from eardrums ruptured when the missile struck the BattleMech's head.

  Little Cassie began to scream.

  Somewhere deep inside, she never stopped.

  2

  Kalimantan, Larsha

  Sian Commonality, Capellan Confederation

  19 July 3047

  Cassie was sixteen when the 'Mechs came back to Larsha.

  "Hey!" Rat called from a corner of the darkened store. "Royals' Pride is on!"

  The sudden murmur of voices from the holovid set perched on a shelf of the electronics shop was interrupted by a crash and tinkle of coins as Pachinko and Rusty finally pried open the register's cash drawer with the ludicrous sword-bayonets issued them along with their bolt-action rifles. In their enthusiasm they popped the drawer all the way out, so that it crashed onto the floor, scattering money across the scuffed tiles.

  Recruit Cassie Suthorn sat in a corner formed by a glass display counter and a wall of shelves holding portable holo viewers and recorders. Her drab uniform was several sizes too large for her and hung on her skinny frame like a sack; the rifle propped in the corner next to her was almost as tall as she was. She was chewing on a mango she'd found in the back room, ignoring the antics of her compatriots as they scuttled around the store, scooping handfuls of green and orange Capellan currency off the floor.

  "C'mon, Cassie," Tango called. "Free money! Grab your share." He held out a handful of bills. He was always trying to please her.

  She snorted. "What for? Use it to wipe yourself and all you get are smudges on your fanny. Anyway, it's too scratchy." Cassie might not understand the concept of inflation—though House Liao assuredly did—but life on the streets had taught her enough about its effects. Just as it had taught her so much else she lacked the experience or education to understand in depth.

  Tango shook his head at her inexplicable indifference to this newfound wealth, which, as far as he was concerned, had fallen from heaven into their laps. He stuffed it into the blouse of his threadbare, hand-me-down battledress and turned away.

  Cassie's nostrils flared in amused contempt. It was no surprise to see the troopies of Glorious Redemption Detachment 325 thinking and acting like small-time crooks. That was, after all, exactly what they were.

  The Capellans were poor people, government propaganda said, kept that way by the selfishness and invidiousness of their neighbors, specifically evil House Davion of the Federated Suns. Capellans could not afford to throw anything away. Not even their criminal scum.

  The front window suddenly rattled to an explosion, and Cassie felt the muscles between her shoulder blades go tight. For a moment she was back in that long-ago day when her whole world died....

  Rusty looked out the window and bit her lower lip. "Wonder if the gweilu'll come this way." Rusty herself was fair-skinned, with red hair and blue eyes that lacked the epicanthic fold, but she saw nothing incongruous in calling the raiders "round-eyed devils." She was Capellan, and they were Davions.

  Ba Ma shook his head, his ears sticking out from under his helmet like jug handles. "No," he said in his standard, authoritative way. "They're hitting the 'Mech base east of town. They won't come into the city."

  "Then what's that?" asked Snake, pointing her grubby finger out the front window. "A hopping ghost?"

  What looked vaguely like a man made of pewter had risen above the skyline to the north and was sailing across the dirty overcast in an upright posture. A lance of red light pulsed from its head. Then it sank from sight again on jump jets that flared from its club feet.

  "Wolverine," said Rusty. The stocky recruit was something of an aficionado of BattleMechs, as well as an accomplished smash-and-grab artist.

  Cassie felt the back of her throat fill with stinging vomit. Thirteen years of nightmares rose up yammering to crowd her skull.

  "Ours or theirs?" Tango wanted to know.

  Rusty gave him a pitying look. "Confederation don't make no Wolverines" she said, "and the Ever-Conquerin' Army sure didn't take it as battle honors—'cause we never win any battles."

  Cassie threw aside the half-eaten fruit and clutched her rifle across her chest, knowing how futile the gesture was. Even a
full-automatic rifle would have been small protection against one of those metal monsters, while all she had was one of the bolt-actions issued the members of the Glorious Redemption Detachment. Even if the guns weren't—as scuttlebutt would have it—more than a thousand years old, the design probably was. But they were cheap, and expendable ... like the jailbird troopies of the GRDs.

  She forced herself to breathe as Guru Johann had taught her: slow, deep, controlled, mastering panic. The wavy-bladed kris he had presented Cassie on her twelfth birthday seemed to pulse with a heartbeat of its own in its hiding place beneath her battledress blouse. Indeed Guru had assured her the weapon was alive and that it remembered every moment of its history from the day of its forging in Terra's Malay Archipelago twelve centuries before.

  Cassie loved her guru and honored his memory. But that didn't mean she believed everything he'd told her. Still, Blood-drinker's presence reassured her.

  If nothing else, she could take her own life with it before the metal monsters took her.

  "Hey, you clowns, quiet," Pachinko called. "I wanna hear this. Archon Alison is confronting her wayward daughter."

  " 'Confronting her wayward daughter'?" Ba Ma repeated. "You been watching too much vid, man. You're starting to talk like somebody in a story."

  "Who cares about that gweilu garbage anyway?" Snake sneered.

  "I do," Pachinko said stubbornly. "I used to watch this show every day even when I was on the street."

  Why a Davion-made dramatic series—especially one about mythical royalty of the alliance recently forged between Houses Steiner and Davion, now jointly known as the Federated Commonwealth—should be wildly popular on Larsha, a fringe world of the Capellan Confederation, was anybody's guess. An even greater mystery was why House Liao's censors let it be imported via ComStar's interstellar communications network, let alone broadcast.