Black dragon Page 27
Marly softly stamped her foot and bounced her fists in the air in a gesture of teenaged exasperation that Cassie remembered well from her own adolescence, which hadn't been all that long ago. "But this one hadn't buttoned his blouse right. And under it his belly was all covered with tattoos."
Cassie stared at her. With two regiments of Black Dragon troops in the Kurita invasion force, not to mention numerous yak hangers-on who weren't pretending to be soldiers, everybody on Towne knew what irezumi looked like and what they signified. "You're sure?"
The girl nodded. She was practically jumping from one foot to another in agitation. Cassie was surprised that she was able to muster the incredible patience and calm needed to function as a sniper, but she'd seen her do it. When Marly was behind her custom-built rifle, she displayed the same meditative serenity Cassie did at her martial arts practice. Which wasn't necessarily encouraging either.
"Wait one," Cassie said. She quickly pulled on baggy camo pants and a loose print blouse over the DEST suit, shrugged on a jacket to hide the visor and hood that hung down her back. She was amazed by just how much freedom of movement the black ballistic-cloth garment allowed her. It bound her some, but not that much more than her regular clothes did.
Marly perched on a flimsy dresser and watched her. "That's why I did like that," she explained. "They were watching me real close."
Cassie nodded approvingly. From a locked compartment hidden in the base of one of her luggage-trunks she took a spare barrel for her autopistol, two centimeters longer than normal, with the muzzle end threaded on the outside. She quickly swapped that for the one that was in the weapon. Then from the secret compartment she took a long, narrow silencer and screwed it onto the protruding threaded stub of barrel.
She slid the magazine out and checked it, squeezed back the slide to make sure a round was chambered. "Let's go check it out," she said.
The wings of the dorm in which Takura Migaki had ensconced the Seventeenth joined at the mezzanine floor and the lobby. Above those levels they were separate, each served by a single stairwell at the inner end. It was the Drac reflex to control access even when there wasn't any very compelling reason to do so.
Or maybe the Kuritas always liked to be prepared to lock people in their rooms.
Two guards in the cream jumpsuits of Eiga-toshi security lounged by the fire door, smoking and joking in low, harsh voices. They looked pretty slack to Cassie, but that didn't mean much. Cinema City's security guards got their paychecks from ISF, but so did the key-grips and the camera crews. The Internal Security Force had a huge number of trained operatives, none of whom could be spared for tasks such as this. The guards were essentially civilians, not much different from private security guards throughout the Inner Sphere.
Their sloppiness and lack of a razor-edge to their alertness did not mean they were to be taken lightly. One had a Shimatsu-42 machine pistol on a long sling around his neck. The other was squatting with a semiauto Friendly Persuader riot shotgun between his knees.
He jumped up when he saw the two women approach. "Hey! What's this? You're not supposed to be out of your rooms."
"My cousin's sick," Cassie explained in Japanese. She gestured with her left hand at Marly, who didn't understand the language but, briefed in advance by Cassie, was doing a splendid job of looking as if she were about to throw up. Cassie's other hand was concealed behind her back. "She needs attention."
"No exceptions," the other man said. "Go back and wait until we tell you you can come out."
The guy with the shotgun took a drag off his smoke and grinned. He was missing an incisor. "A little tummy-ache won't kill the bitch. And if it does, so what?"
The taller, leaner man with the machine pistol was closer to Cassie, on her right. She sidled to the wall, approached him.
"Here, what're you doing?" he demanded. His scowl started to flow into a leer as she reached for the front of his blouse.
"Looking for your tats," she replied matter-of-factly. She grabbed a fistful of fabric, yanked hard. The top two buttons popped off. Beneath it his skin was swirled with green and blue designs.
"And there they are." As the man cocked a fist to hit her, she placed the end of the silencer against his breastbone and shot him twice. He collapsed like an empty suit of clothes falling from a hanger. Letting go of his shirt, Cassie straightened her right arm across her body, clamping left hand over right in a modified Weaver stance.
The gap-toothed shotgun man was juggling his weapon, drooling down his chin in panic. Cassie shot him once through the center of the forehead. His head snapped back against the all. He slumped to the floor, leaving a stain.
"Hey!" Marcy said admiringly. "That was crackin'!"
Untwining the sling from around the taller man's neck, Cassie shot her a scowl. "Don't start liking this too much."
"Don't you?" asked Marcy, all innocence.
"Shut up and secure that shotgun."
25
Cinema City, Luthien
Pesht Military District, Draconis Combine
1 July 3058
Grabbing Mariska Savage's right biceps in a steel-claw grip, Tai-i Achilles Daw forced the chunky tech to her knees on the cement floor. Drawing his Mydron, he pressed its barrel behind her right ear.
"You're stalling," he told Zuma Gallegos. "I respect that; I'd do the same in your place. It proves you're a real soldier, not like these tattooed fools. But unless we have thirty-six of your 'Mechs with full weapons loadouts and ready to roll by the time the sun comes up in"—he checked his wrist chronometer—"twenty-six minutes, I'll blow her brains out. Then I'll find somebody else. Do you understand me?"
Eyes sunk back in his head in a look of pure hate, Zuma nodded. "I understand," he said. "Now, why don't you let her up? You don't like how I do, you can shoot her just as easy standing up."
The DEST man gave him a hard, appraising look. Then he hauled Mariska roughly to her feet. "Your boss won you a little more comfort," he told her. "But you're not out of the woods yet. I'm just taking him at his word."
"What are you going to do with our 'Mechs?" asked Astro Zombie.
Daw looked at Zuma Gallegos, who merely shrugged as if to say he had no idea why his subordinate was asking things that weren't his business.
"We're going to assassinate Theodore Kurita and frame you for it," Daw snapped. "Why else would we want your BattleMechs?"
"How are you planning to get away afterward?" asked Stacks Stachiewski, calm as you please. Nothing much got to him, not even being held at gunpoint by DEST assassins.
Daw grinned. "You've been hanging around fantasy-land here too long, pal. This isn't one of your host's kiza action vids; there aren't going to be any long-winded explanations by the bad guys. You've got to allow us a few professional secrets."
He scanned the apprehensive prisoners with his dark eyes. "There isn't going to be any miraculous last-second rescue like in the holos, either," he added in voice that, while quiet, carried to the furthest recesses of the giant structure. "So you'd better all resign yourselves to whatever's going to happen."
He turned to Gallegos. "So what about it, Sparky? The little lady here is running out of air time."
Zuma looked at him. Then he glanced around at his Aztechs, Stacks' armorers, Astro Zombie's people. The Caballeros' technical complement tended to look to him for leadership.
"Do what they ask," he said softly. "It's in Our Lady's hands."
With some dark looks and downcast eyes, the technicians resumed work. Leaving Mariska under Nishimura's watchful eye, Daw gestured Gallegos to his side and led him over to the disproportionately huge rounded feet of an assault-class 'Mech with prominent radiator fins inboard of its shoulder actuators.
"Here we have a Naginata," Achilles Daw said, "pride of the DCMS. One of the most advanced command BattleMechs in the whole Inner Sphere, not to mention one of the newest. It must be the one you relieved the gallant but not very bright Jeffrey Kusunoki of on Towne. What's it doing in the s
hop?"
"General Kusunoki wasn't very interested in technical details and such. So his techs sloughed off. Didn't lubricate the joints regularly. Fried some bearings pretty well. We've replaced them, but the hips still get pretty cranky sometimes. We've got it in for a check, to make sure it'll ran smooth for the parade. Don Carlos wants everything perfect for the Coordinator."
Daw smiled. "A man after my own heart. All right, Lieutenant. This is going to be my ride today. I want you to make sure it's in tip-top condition. And you're going to want that too, because you can just think of the safety of that little lady over there—not to mention your own family— riding right along in the cockpit with me. Wakarimasu-ka?"
Zuma nodded.
"Outstanding." Daw walked away.
With heavy heart Zuma pulled a cherry-picker over to the Naginata's right side, hoisted the pulpit up to the level of the hip. He pulled the access panel with the help of an inertia wrench and peered inside.
As he did, he became aware of a persistent tingle in the right breast pocket of his coveralls.
* * *
"Hijo de puta," muttered Jimmy Skowron, a communications specialist who was working the command radio-set in Don Carlos' room on the top floor of the dorm. He was a redheaded wisp from Sierra who was a good ten years older than he looked. "Zuma says the hangar's full of DEST commandos and Black Dragons."
A mutter pulsed through the 'lleros jammed into the room, which was no bigger than the ones anyone else got. More than half crossed themselves, including Father Doctor Bob, who blushed and looked around as if hoping no one had noticed. "Keep it down!" Jimmy hissed. "This damn binary code's hard enough to translate on the fly without everybody talking."
Cassie pulled aside a corner of the blanket hung over the window to hide the dim red glow of field blackout lamps. She could just see the four "security guards" out in front of the main entrance. Several similarly clad groups were visible by the glow of lights dotted on tall standards here and there across the wide compound. Almost certainly they were Black Dragons too.
The interior of the dormitory, with the exception of the lobby, had been quickly and quietly recaptured by the Caballeros, thanks to the fact that the Black Dragons had been guilty of seriously underestimating them.
The inagawa-fcii yaks who had been infiltrating Eiga-toshi over the last ten days—under the guise of trying to muscle in on the Old Cat's lucrative business of providing grunt-tech services to the movie-making operation—had searched the mercenaries' rooms thoroughly on the pretext of performing the usual cleaning chores. They had confirmed that, as reported, the gaijin kept no weapons to themselves. Indeed, their arms were safely under lock and key in the main security station.
Back when she was a street kid on the cracked and muddy streets of Larsha, Cassie had learned that nobody was easier to scam than a scammer, nobody easier to rip off than a thief. The yaks were proving that in spades. It didn't occur to them that most of the Caballeros had spent most of their adult lives fighting the Draconis Combine, and that almost all of them were descended from long lines of smugglers, bandits, and general hellions. Though they'd had to surrender most of their personal ordnance to Voice of the Dragon security, more than a few of them had held back life preservers—just as Cassie herself had.
The yaks also overlooked the fact that everybody had a personal communicator. So the phony security guards stationed in the stairwells and corridors had gotten jumped pretty much simultaneously in a savage surprise attack. The Black Dragons had killed one 'Hero and wounded three, but none of the guards survived. Long.
Nor had the alarm been given. The guards downstairs and out front didn't suspect a thing, unless they were better actors than Cassie was ready to give them credit for.
With the safety of the kids and other noncombatants in the dorms occupying everybody's attention, it wasn't until the brief spasm of the recapture was complete that anybody thought of checking in with Zuma and the rest of the crew in the repair hangar. It was a call from his comrades in the dorm that had given him a tingle in the breast pocket of his coveralls, the pocket where he kept the comm unit. Now Zuma was managing to talk back by hitting the transmit button—"breaking squelch"—surreptitiously as he worked, tapping out an ancient dot-dash code that a lot of techies still learned as a sort of caste ritual.
"O.K., I'm on the roof," came the dry and slightly ironic voice of Daniel "the Rooster" Morgan from another speaker of the portable command set. "We've got worse trouble than a hundred ISF storm-troopers in the repair hangar."
Maccabee Bar-Kochba gestured the 'lleros to silence. "What would that be, son?"
"A dozen BattleMechs watching our machines like hawks around a henhouse. One's a Guillotine; rest seem to be mediums and lights. Whoa, though, check this—that's a Bushwacker there. Wonder where they came up with that hound-pup?" The Caballero 'Mechs were parked just north of the repair hangar in an area fenced in by high mesh wire and topped with razor-coils.
"What difference does it make?" asked Bobby Begay. It still made Cassie queasy to see the transverse bars of a Force Commander on his collar, and not because he had hated her since she'd won admission to the regiment by downing his 'Mech in the streets of Kalimantan. "They have a company. We have a regiment!"
"They have our 'Mechs, Bobby," Raven said. "That tends to kind of devaluate our big numerical advantage. Bite the reality sandwich."
For once the Wolf refrained from snarling back. His dark eyes gleamed. He clearly foresaw some serious madness upcoming. That was his element.
* * *
"You're sure taking your time up here."
Zuma didn't jump at the sound of the voice; he'd felt the thump as the man climbed up into the pulpit behind him. It was the black second-in-command, come to peer over his shoulder.
Zuma dropped his hand away from his breast pocket as if he'd just been scratching. A moment, and sparks leapt from the exposed machinery at the commando's face.
"You want me to do the job right," Zuma said without looking around, "don't come up here and jog my elbow. See what happens when you startle me?" More sparks flew.
The DEST man recoiled. "All right, all right. Just make sure you finish on time." He clambered back down.
Zuma allowed himself a relieved sigh. Then, as he worked, he began to transmit once more.
* * *
"Zuma says the commandos're gonna use our 'Mechs to dust Teddy," Jimmy reported. "They have our folks hostage."
Cassie felt sick to her stomach. I've failed, she thought. I should have foreseen this, should have found out about it. It would have been simplicity itself to snag one of the Inagawa people coming to work at Eiga-toshi, flex him until he broke like a wire, then get the straight from him. But Cassie had let herself be lulled, accepted the going explanation that Inagawa's encroachment was a pure yak power-move.
She felt a hand on her shoulder. She jumped, looked back to see Kali, who nodded wordlessly. Cassie frowned. She didn't want to be comforted.
"What're we gonna do?" somebody asked.
"Whatever it is, it better be quick," Buck Evans said. "Sun's about to come up."
Don Carlos looked around. Even in the red animal-eye glow of the blackout lights, Cassie could see a shine to his dark eyes that had been missing since his beloved Diana Vdsquez had been murdered in Port Howard.
"I have a plan," he said, deep voice low and confident. "It is very risky, but if we don't take risks, we lose all. Now listen—"
* * *
The Caballero BattleMechs stood in four battalion-size blocs in the fenced-in area just beyond the repair-hangar, which itself loomed north of the Eiga-toshi compound wall. The tall silent machines were surrounded by mesh fences at least three meters high and topped with razor-tape coils. Black Dragon armorers moved among the 'Mech bloc nearest the hangar, checking weapon loads.
Tai-i Terence O'Hanrahan paced his Bushwacker restlessly along the perimeter of the fence. Around him the land was clear and mostly flat for 500 meters to a
kilometer before breaking up into trees and low, mist-shrouded hills. Aside from the high wall of the holostudio compound, he had excellent visibility and unrestricted fields of fire.
Despite that he had a bad feeling about this mission; it had been gnawing his belly like a rat since their DropShip had deviated from its landing path—while traffic controllers, bribed or coerced by Kokuryu-kai, looked away from their screens in the control tower at Takashi Kurita Spaceport—to discharge his medium company into the woods southwest of Basin Lake eight hours ago.
It wasn't just that the main plan depended on Daw and his DEST team—arrogant dilettantes who imagined that being checked-out in BattleMechs made them Mech-Warriors. Their mission was murder, after all, not combat. With total surprise on their side, they weren't liable to encounter serious opposition tp anything but their getaway. And even if they failed, the Society had its fall-back plans.
Nor was it the fact that his unit's mission was to contain an overstrength BattleMech regiment—a disadvantage of a mere twelve to one. Their enemies were only gaijin money-troopers, after all, and more to the point, they were separated from their 'Mechs. Mech Warriors without BattleMechs were helpless as newborn lambs.
Finally, his unease didn't spring from being twelve 'Mechs against, not a gaijin regiment, but potentially a whole planet, including several times as many 'Mech and other regiments as normally garrisoned the Black Pearl. Only a couple of his Mech Warriors were veterans, and none so much as he himself, who had fought the bloody Clans for two years, and then been cashiered from the Fourteenth Legion of Vega over a trifle of peculation. But even unseasoned Kokuryu-kai MechWarriors knew how to die, as their comrades had proven on Towne. Terence O'Hanrahan was ready to die for kai and Combine.
All these things contributed to, but did not entirely explain, his lingering unease. He had a sense of wrongness, somehow, that would not go away.