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  CASSIE CAME UP FROM BEHIND,

  grabbed a fistful of his green-and-black jacket and rammed the barrel of her revolver into his kidneys so hard she felt his knees sag at the unexpected shock of pain.

  "Keep that up, Sierra-for-brains," she hissed in his ear, "and I'll blow your guts out your belly button."

  To his credit, the agitator froze. She could almost feel his eyeballs straining in their sockets, trying to track far enough to get a glimpse of her. But he didn't try to hand her a milligram of see-here-little-girl-you-might-hurt-somebody guff, which showed he either had some native smarts or was a trained operator. What she'd told him wasn't a threat but a promise. At the next sound out of his mouth she would happily make good on it....

  BATTLETECH

  LE5523

  HEARTS OF CHAOS

  Victor Milan

  ROC

  Published by the Penguin Croup

  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, Ontario, 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, June, 1996

  10987654321

  Copyright © FASA Corporation, 1996 All rights reserved

  Series Editor Donna Ippolito Cover David Mattingly

  Mechanical Drawings: Duane Loose and the FASA art department

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  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

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  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."

  For Pat & Scott

  Señores, Señoras, y Señoritas, Radio KATN, la Super Cadena, presents con mucho gusto, los Caballeros de Coronet! Carlos Camacho!

  *APPLAUSE*

  PART ONE

  We Meet 'Neath the Sounding Rafters

  If you are ambushed, your survival depends entirely on the inadequacy of your attacker.

  —Damon Fay, late 20th-century tae kwon do instructor and law-enforcement officer

  1

  Masamori Hachiman

  Galedon District, Draconis Combine

  24 December 3056

  Regretfully, Mr. Obata took off the headband.

  Beyond the white fiberboard walls of his cubicle, the seventy-seventh floor lay silent. The only sounds were the hum of ventilators circulating warm air through the skyscraper—harmonic throb of fans out of alignment—and the buzz of the few fluorescents remaining on high overhead, their light falling like polluted sleet over the cubbyholes that served as offices for the middle managers of Tanadi Computers. Most of the staff, from the Workers in the factories to the Middle Class administrators and executives who, like Mr. Obata himself, worked in the corporate high-rise headquarters in the heart of Masamori, had already left. It was scandalously early; the short-lived winter sun had not yet fallen into the Shakudo Sea. But it was Chairman's Day Eve, and the celebrations were already breaking out on the streets of Hachiman's capital and across the planet. Even a man as devoted to tradition as Mr. Obata saw the need to allow the people the essentially anarchic release of their matsuri, their festivals.

  And Mr. Obata, like the late head of Tanadi, the Marquis Redmond Hosoya, took tradition very seriously indeed. Seriously enough to die for.

  The hachimaki in his hands was simple enough: a strip of white cloth embossed with a black dragon against a red disk. Not the stylized dragon's head that was the proud symbol of the Draconis Combine, but the Dragon whole, rampant. Flanking it was a slogan drawn in kanji: Ten Thousand Lives for the Coordinator.

  Mr. Obata felt tears fill his eyes as he held the cloth in his hands.

  It would mean premature death to wear that ancient, sacred symbol on the spy-filled streets of Masamori. So far had the rot penetrated, he bowed a final time toward the figure of the Dragon in its office shrine, breathed in the sweetness of the incense sticks he had set to smolder on either side of it. Then he put the headband back into his open briefcase, setting it atop the false bottom that concealed an even more controversial object, shut the briefcase, and reached for his coat.

  * * *

  Naked from the waist up, his chest and big white belly emblazoned with a tattoo so new it still bore scabs—of the Virgin of Guadalupe standing on her crescent moon—the man hobbled on his knees through the deep layer of snow that carpeted the ground of the Hachiman Taro Enterprises Compound, snugged up against the Yamato River in the guts of Masamori. A half-dozen newsfolk followed him at a distance of several paces, training an impressive arsenal of still and full-motion holocameras on him and keeping him pinned in the glare of spotlights boasting only slightly less candlepower than a Guillotine's Sunbeam laser. At every step the man whacked himself across the shoulder with a bundle of indigenous thorn-bush branches, alternating each time, as he chanted, "Hail Mary, full of grace."

  This was one human-interest story the Federated Commonwealth News Service team assigned to the Seventeenth Recon Regiment, Camacho's Caballeros, wasn't covering. Instead the pair stood in the middle of the Compound, one half confronting the other in the lightly falling snow.

  "You're what?" Archie Westin asked in disbelief.

  A snowflake struck smack in the center of his cam-erawoman's smooth, chocolate-brown cheek. She smiled and didn't try to brush it away.

  "I'm staying, Archie," she said. "And to save you the trouble of saying 'you're what?' again, I'm pregnant."

  "You're what?" Archie said again. He was a trim, theatrically handsome young man, with a pencil-thin mustache arid wavy blond hair showing just a hint of red. His accent, like that of his assistant, was the British of the Davion planet of Northfield.

  "Hail Mary, full of grace." Whack. "Hail Mary, full of grace." Whack. The HTE Compound was largely deserted. Its CEO and sole owner of any consequence, Chandrasekhar Kurita, had demonstrated his scandalous liberality by letting all his people off at noon today, except for a skeleton crew, some of whose members stood at a polite distance gaping at these typically inexplicable gaijin goings-on. Most of the Caballeros serving as security garrison for the Compound were off preparing for their own Christmas Eve celebrations.

  "Hail Mary, full of grace." Whack! By accident or design, the penitent's path carried him so close to Archie Westin that he almost brushed the young reporter's khaki-clad calves.

  Archie spun and kicked snow at the man. "Leave off with it, you bloody lunatic!"

  The man beamed at him from a face whose cheeks were beginning to sag from rapid fasting-induced dimin
ution of the flesh beneath. His brown crewcut, two months untended and penitentially unwashed, had long gone to lank tendrils, like kelp.

  "Bless you, brother," said Tommy Joe Poteet, the Seventeenth's erstwhile Baptist chaplain and newest convert to Catholicism. Behind him, the holovid news crew glared daggers at Archie.

  The former Reverend Tommy Joe continued on his way, whacking and hailing. The low overcast threw the sounds back down in his wake as muffled echoes. The news crew trooped after.

  "Who are those bloody people, anyway?" Archie stormed, kicking another clump of snow after them.

  "The Noticias de la Trinidad news team from Galisteo," his assistant Mariska Savage said. "Remember when poor Terry Chavez bought it in her Crusader during the Ghost Legion attack, and some of the 'llero 'Mech pilots swore they saw angels swoop down to bear her soul up to Heaven? Apparently word got back to the Southwestern Worlds, away back in the beyond of the Free Worlds League. Noticias pulled a team back off the Clan truce line to cover the story."

  "They did what?"

  "Miracles are big news in the Trinity, Arch. Since Mr. Poteet was a Protestant, and a minister, no less, they're especially fascinated by him."

  Archie took his head in his hands and shook it, as if making sure nothing rattled. He and Mariska had been with the Caballeros since arriving on Hachiman back in August. Despite the constant and generally well-intentioned efforts of the 'lleros, he had yet to make the slightest sense of the bizarre tripartite culture of Galisteo, Cerillos, and Sierra, the so-called Trinity or Southwestern Worlds, from which most of the Seventeenth hailed.

  "Never mind all that," he said. "What you're telling me—how? Why?"

  "Aren't you forgetting 'where,' and 'when,' not to mention 'who'?"

  He stared at her. "When did you develop a sense of humor? Not that I'm complaining, mind."

  "When I started getting to know these people, Archie. When they helped me start to get to know me. When they gave me the nickname 'Risky' and I started wanting to live up to it."

  She reached up and gently touched his cheek. Mariska was in her late twenties, a black woman with straight dark hair framing a broad, pretty face. She was of medium height and wide, solid build, but in her case, "large bone structure" was not a euphemism for "fat." She wasn't fat, but quite handsomely proportioned. Her proportions were simply broader than usual for women—as though she hailed from a high-gee world, although Northfield's gravitation was less than ten percent stronger than Terra's.

  "You've been a wonderful boss, Arch, really a love. And you're a sweet boy. But you never, in all the years we've been together, really got to know me."

  He blinked at her through the snowflakes adhering to his eyelashes. It was too true, he realized with a shock. His assistant had always been capable, willing, indomitable, and deferential. He'd taken her for granted—as he took for granted that she would always be there. He felt a pang of betrayal: I always assumed you were in love with your boss. Tears stung his eyes.

  "As to how and why," Mariska went on, "if you mean my condition, in the usual way, for the usual reasons. If you mean not going back to the Federated Commonwealth with you now that you've been recalled"—she shrugged—"these people have taken me to their hearts. I feel at home with them, as I never did back on Northfield. Even among my own family."

  "But you'll never truly be one of them, Ris— Mariska," Archie said. "They still call Cassie Suthorn 'Abtakha', and she's been with them for nine years and pulled everybody's fat out of the fire at least twice over."

  "Maybe I'll always be a gringa to them, but they've made me welcome."

  "But whatever will you do?"

  "I've talked to Astro Zombie about signing on as a commo tech. He's quite enthusiastic. And so am I. He really is a wizard technician, if a trifle odd."

  Archie felt himself deflate. "And what am I going to do without you?"

  "You'll be fine. Your uncle is Ian Cromwell, after all. And your mother will make sure he doesn't let the Stealthy Foxes assign you to anything too madly dangerous."

  Archie stared wildly around through the snow. Ha-chiman's primary was a bright band in the grayness along the top of the Compound's western wall. "Woman," he said in an exaggerated whisper, "watch what you're saying! We're in the heart of Kurita space. You don't know who might be an ISF spy!"

  "Come off it, Archie. Street urchins in Sodegarami know you're with Davion Military Intelligence; discretion was never your strong suit. Meanwhile, Chandrasekhar Kurita is the Coordinator's cousin, and the second-in-command of the whole Internal Security Force still spends half of every day conferring with good old Uncle Chandy between these very walls. They already know you're an MI4 plant."

  He opened his mouth to. berate her. Then he shut it. "You've never talked back to me before," he said in tones approaching wonder. "You know, I'm really going to miss you."

  "And I you, Archie."

  From north across the river came a series of rapid explosive pops. Archie ducked his head slightly down into the collar of his Burberry. Most probably the sound was a string of firecrackers being lit off as part of the matsuri already underway in the Floating World district of Sodegarami. But it might just as easily have been full-auto gunfire: the Masakko took their holiday-making seriously.

  A figure resolved out of the murk and snow-swirl: a man of middle size, dressed in a black cassock, with black hair turning distinguished-gray at the temples, a black mustache, heavy-lidded Hapsburg eyes set in a handsome if somewhat pudgy face. Mariska Savage's face lit when she saw him.

  He slipped an arm around her and kissed her cheek. "Hadn't you better start getting ready?" he asked. "The banquet our employer is giving us starts promptly at seven, so the debauchery will be over in plenty of time for midnight Mass."

  "Archie, I've got to run," Mariska said. "Really, I'm sorry. But it's for the best."

  Archie's jaw was dropping toward his breastbone. "Father García?"

  "Call me Bob, son. We've been friends long enough." Lieutenant Senior Grade Father Doctor Roberto "Call Me Bob" García, SJ, the Seventeenth's psychologist and historian, as well as a Crusader pilot himself, had taken the FCNS team under his wing when they first began to cover the Caballeros.

  Archie's head traversed back toward his former assistant. "You mean to tell me," he said in disbelieving tones, "that you've gone and got yourself put preggers by a bloody Jesuit?"

  Mariska Savage merely smiled and snuggled closer to Father Doctor Bob.

  * * *

  "What brings you out on this snowy Chairman's Day Eve, Obata-kun?" asked the Port Authority guard as Mr. Obata key-carded his way through the ground-floor entrance to Yoshitsune Spacesport Traffic Control.

  Mr. Obata controlled the urge to snap at the green-uniformed man for familiarity. The Masakko— residents of Hachiman's capital city—were notorious for their boisterous irreverence, even by the planet's own standards. And this was a holiday to boot. Besides, he reminded himself, now of all times he couldn't afford to create an incident.

  He held up the briefcase. "Preventive maintenance check," he said.

  The security guard's eyebrows rose toward the short bill of his cap. He always knew Tanadi was a stickler, but this ... He waved Mr. Obata into the half-lit foyer.

  By the time he'd finished climbing several flights of stairs, Mr. Obata was winded. He tried to keep up the regular practice of judo to set a good example for the lower classes, but his duties as Associate Director for Support Services left him little time. Tanadi products were excellently designed, but quality control left much to be desired. It was another sign of the decline he had pledged himself to fight, Mr. Obata thought— not realizing that standards had been improving steadily since Theodore Kurita had long ago begun instituting the reforms Mr. Obata found so distasteful.

  The door to Traffic Control was shut. The corridor outside was deserted. That was good. Mr. Obata leaned for a moment against a wall, breaming from his diaphragm, both to recapture his breath and to summon his
ki.

  He removed his coat, folded it, and laid it on the floor. Kneeling down on the thin lime-green carpet, he opened the briefcase and took out the hachimaki, which he knotted around his temples. Then he unfastened the case's false bottom.

  Holding his right hand out of sight behind his thigh, Mr. Obata pushed through the unlocked door into Traffic Control Central. The Draconis Combine was poor, as certain of its leaders never tired of reminding the people, especially when those people started agitating for higher wages. Even though Hachiman was the richest planet in the whole Combine, just this one facility handled space and atmospheric traffic for both spacesport and capital. Despite that fact, there were only two operators on duty tonight.

  The one sitting farthest from the door never looked up from the radar display that lit his features in rhythmic splashes of ghostly green. A voice spilled from a speaker in the console before him: "—DropShip Eia Panice, out of Kawabe, Union Class, thirty-five hundred tons, putting in for scheduled groundside overhaul, requests clearance to land at Hachiman Technical Institute—" The Institute, which provided hands-on classes in repair of BattleMechs, aerospace fighters, and DropShips, lay across the port proper from the tower.

  The other controller took off his headset, rose, and came over to meet Obata, presenting his hand and a mouth of laughing teeth as he saw the headband. In the calculated dimness, lit by red and amber displays, he mistook the hachimaki for something more festive. "Obata-san! Have you come to help us celebrate?"

  Mr. Obata felt his own lips drawing back into a grin that threatened to split his head in two. He raised his right hand from its concealment and shot the man through the forehead from a range of about two centimeters.

  The pistol was a special covert-operations model, the ancient but enduringly popular .22 Long Rifle, with a built-in sound and flash suppresser and a capacity of twenty-four rounds in a double-column magazine in the butt. It was of a type originally developed by SAFE, House Marik's intelligence service, but the design had been copied by the other Great Houses and several lesser powers and was consequently untraceable. It made no more noise than an emphatic spit. The other operator, hearing muffled by his headset and the effort of understanding the gaijin radio operator on board the freighter, didn't realize anything was amiss until his peripheral vision caught his partner slumping toward the floor like a dropped handkerchief.