Black dragon Page 28

  "Tai-i." It was Shujin Duchovny, the Spider pilot commanding his scout lance. His area of responsibility was the eastern fence, on the far side from O'Hanrahan's. O'Hanra-han's company was saddled with a disproportionate number of MechWarriors with non-Japanese names, not least its commander, and two women, Flynn and Ito. Such disadvantages were stigmatized even more among the Black Dragons than the regulars. Yet he was satisfied in his people; they were as good as he could make them. And no one, not even the haughtiest DCMS MechWarrior, had ever truthfully been able to criticize O'Hanrahan's skill and courage in a 'Mech. It was his accounting practices that got him into trouble.

  "What is it, Master Sergeant?" O'Hanrahan's pale eyes moved ceaselessly, taking in his HUD, his circle-vision strip, and always his surroundings.

  "We have a semi coming out the gate, onto the road to Imperial City."

  While the Inagawa-faw contingent who had infiltrated Cinema City had secured certain key facilities, including the organic security-force headquarters and its substations and Takura Migaki's residence, they were trying to disturb routine as little as possible, to reduce the risks of raising an alarm. The gaijin money-soldiers were all safely under guard; a tractor-trailer could pose no risks, and might arouse questions if its driver or cargo didn't turn up on schedule.

  "Let them pass. But keep a close eye on them." O'Hanra-han believed in taking as little as possible for granted, and that no one had ever come to grief from being too alert.

  "Hai."

  "Captain!" Despite the fact that he was ensconced in the massively protected cockpit of a 70-ton Guillotine, O'Hanrahan's second in command sounded distinctly rattled.

  "Talk to me, Soldaco."

  "Smoke, Captain, lots of it. Northwest corner of the hangar."

  The 'Wacker was facing the wrong way. O'Hanrahan glanced up at his 360-view screen. Sure enough, the distorted image showed a dirty-gray curtain billowing into the murky pre-dawn light.

  He spun his 55-ton 'Mech around as light as a Locust. Just in time to see an 85-ton Katana, followed by two Chargers and an Awesome, come lumbering through the smoke at him.

  26

  Cinema City, Luthien

  Pesht Military District, Draconis Combine

  1 July 3058

  "Sun's coming up," Talon Sergeant Nishimura called up to Zuma Gallegos, whose cherry-picker was extended all the way up the front of Don Carlos' BattleMech. "You got that thing ready to rumble, or should we let some sunlight into that girl's pretty little head?"

  Zuma turned away from the Naginata's open cockpit. "It's prepared for your commander," he said in a flat voice.

  Nishimura clucked and shook his head as if disappointed. From somewhere outside came a ripple of dull pops, followed by a distant boom, edged with supersonics like a crack of thunder. He spun, clawing for his holster sidearm. "That's a Zeus heavy rifle!" he shouted.

  Zuma quickly knelt. He picked up a heavy metal toolbox and dropped it over the side of the cherry-picker down toward Nishimura's head, ten meters below.

  Firing a huge bullet at several times the speed of sound, a conventional Zeus heavy rifle would have produced such a horrific recoil that even a strong man wouldn't willingly fire it twice. With a wizard compensating system and a tripod weighing over half as much as the weapon itself to suck up what kick was left over, skinny adolescent Marly Joles could shoot it and feel less recoil than when firing her beloved 6mm sniper rifle.

  Marly had grown up with a rifle, as did many children in the Towne wilderness, well-populated with surly mega-fauna. Her father had insisted she become proficient at shooting with iron sights before he permitted her to fire a single shot with a scoped rifle. With instruments at her side giving ever-updated digital readouts of humidity, air pressure, wind velocity, and range charts specific to Luthien, the 800-meter shot from the roof of Sound Stage 3 of the main compound to the entrance leading into the 'Mech-repair hangar was as easy as sticking pins into a doll with her hand.

  Two DEST commandos in full regalia stood guard before the entrance, swords slung over their shoulders and assault rifles in their hands. The one on the right fell onto his back and lay still.

  The ISF's elite assassins were trained to react instantaneously to danger. But this was utterly unexpected. The DEST trooper still standing heard a meaty whump and then turned as his partner went down. He stared at the unmoving form in black for an instant, then spun back toward the compound, kneeling as he brought up his rifle.

  The heavy bullet traversed the distance between rifle and target in under a second. The sound of the shot took almost three. It took two seconds for Marly to recover from her first shot, line up the second target, and squeeze off her second shot.

  She showed her inexperience by not allowing for the chance her second target might kneel. She had aimed for his center of mass, which meant that instead of his sternum, the bullet hit him in the red visor. The bullet punched through it as readily as the other shot had the first man's body armor.

  Which meant that by the time the noise of the second gunshot reached him, the commando was dead.

  Even before his slumping body hit the ground, Cassie had reached the door at the head of a hundred Scout Platoon troopies, support personnel, and profoundly pissed-off MechWarriors.

  * * *

  Demolitions ace that he was, with the true master blaster's love for things that went "boom" as well as mtimate knowledge of them, the Rooster had found his way to the Cinema City pyrotechnics locker within two hours after the Caballeros reached the place. With that affinity among experts in the same field that transcended all cultural and political barriers, the special-effects techs—who despite being nominal employees of the Internal Security Force didn't give a mouse fart for politics—were only too happy to show him all their toys. Which included a breathtaking array of smoke bombs of sundry colors and sizes, and cool little fireworks-mortars for lobbing them about.

  The pyro shack was well and sturdily locked, of course. But to a military unit that had to be prepared to rescue 'Mech pilots trapped inside a dozen or more tons of armor, nothing short of a bank vault was anything more than a momentary inconvenience.

  Producing the smoke screen that had so alarmed Chu-i Soldaco was no problem. What was hard was the part that came next: dying a lot.

  * * *

  Across the hangar from Tai-i Achilles Daw, gunshots rang out and gas grenades detonated with dull cracks. He turned and stared. Behind him there was a heavy thump, followed by a clatter.

  He spun. Talon Sergeant Saburo Nishimura lay on his back in a spreading scarlet pool. A toolbox lay beside him. His forehead was caved in.

  Daw drew his own sidearm, fired twice with perfect Zen no-intention. The gaijin tech slumped onto the railing of his cherry-picker.

  I thought he was soft, giving in to save the life of a mere woman, he thought. I was wrong. With a touch more force than necessary he yanked the lever to start the cherry-picker's extensor arm descending.

  * * *

  "BattleMechs approaching from the south," Terence O'Hanrahan rapped out from his position near the fenced-in gaijin 'Mechs. He saw light 'Mechs pacing rapidly to his right, winging out to flank his lance. All his misgivings were vindicated. We've been set up! "Bates Lance, move west and turn south to support my right flank," he called into the commline. "Duchovny, form up facing south and prepare to defend. My lance—"

  Before he could finish the thought, a swarm of light trucks and utility vehicles broke through the smoke and streaked toward the fence. The insignificant little machines barely registered on O'Hanrahan's consciousness. He was staring down death's throat. He swallowed. "Open fire."

  Well kitted-out with double-capacity heat sinks, the Buskwacker could run and fire all its weapons without overheating. Not that it mattered; the monster 'Mechs coming at him were already inside minimum range of his Federated five-shot LRM launchers, and his probable lifespan was reckoned in seconds anyway. Figuring the Katana for the most dangerous enemy, he laid his pip
per on the armor slab covering its right knee and triggered off the autocannon in its right arm and the large extended-range laser in the snout of its narrow fuselage. For good measure he fired the machine guns flanking the laser as well.

  Chunks flew from the assault Katana's kneecap. Flame jetted, the knee buckled, and the huge assault 'Mech plunged forward on its face, throwing up a cloud of smoke and dust.

  "Yes!" O'Hanrahan pumped a gauntleted fist in the air. He'd downed a BattleMech massing thirty tons more than his own machine with his first volley. It was a fantastic honor... if anybody lived to tell about it.

  He frowned. In fact, it was too fantastic, if you thought about it. Before he got a Chance to do much of that, swarms of short-range missiles blasted away from the 'Mechs still charging him, drawing twisty smoke-trails that converged toward his face.

  * * *

  Shots, explosions, and screams echoing around him, Achilles Daw picked up the dead man's switcher, then unceremoniously rolled the gaijin's body out of the cage. He activated the cherry-picker, and its pulpit immediately began to descend toward the cockpit of the boxy Naginata. Releasing the control box so that it hung from the safety rail by its yellow cord, he then climbed into the cramped space of the cockpit. He never bothered to switch off the controls.

  One of his men was holding a dozen captive foreigners at gunpoint, including the black woman Daw had threatened earlier. "Kill them!" he called to the trooper as the cockpit hatch closed behind him.

  * * *

  With more courage than sense a Black Dragon trooper popped up from behind half a dozen green plastic barrels of solvent, tears streaming down his face from the bite of tear gas, and leveled a shotgun at Cassie as she charged past him into the hangar's heart. She shoved her left hand out to her arm's extent and fired four quick shots from her autopistol. Two bullets punched through the man's unarmored chest. The yak screamed and fell backward.

  The very nature of the task that the intruders had set their captives meant it was impossible to guard them closely, much less keep them all together. The best they could do was keep an eye on the 'Hero technicians as they worked. With reflexes bred in by unbroken generations of banditry and smash-and-grab raids, the Seventeenth's techs went in-standy to ground at the first sign of trouble, losing themselves in industrial tangle or behind the big, thick, armor-clad legs of parked BattleMechs. Some of them were clumped, though, and therefore exposed.

  Because they hadn't had a whole lot of time to map, rehearse, and deploy for a classic hostage-rescue mission. Cassie—whom Don Carlos had put in charge of this phase of the counterattack—had reckoned on flat-out speed and shock as her best allies. A surprise attack wasn't likely to make the DEST goons wet their sneaksuits, but did stand a good chance of throwing most of the Black Dragons into panic mode.

  Ahead and to her right she saw a black-clad figure trying to scale the right shin of a Victor to get to the cockpit, and not having much success. As she ran past she slashed him across the lower back with the other gift Subhash Indrahar had sent to her: a vibrokatana. The tough black ballistic cloth parted like a sheet of rice paper dropped on an ancient Muramasa blade. The commando screamed and fell to the cement floor.

  So that her buddies wouldn't hesitate to shoot when they saw somebody dressed all in black, Cassie was wearing a short-sleeved migraine-red silk jacket over her sneaksuit, which she thought made her look like a cheap technokink hooker. She had her hood and visor on, both to ward the tear gas from the grenades her people were strewing liberally about and to keep off high-velocity particulate pollution, i.e., bullets. She regretted it despite the risks of going bareheaded. Having her head enclosed during combat made her insides twist with claustrophobia. Despite hours spent familiarizing herself with BattleMech displays, the circle-vision strip inside the visor was hard for her to see, much less make sense of in the press of the moment. And despite what the propagandists said, outside the Combine as well as in, the sensory input provided by the sneaksuit's audio-visual suite was not the same as seeing with your own eyes and hearing with your own ears, only better. The visuals were murky and the sounds unnatural, all either amped up or stepped down, making it impossible for her to maintain her customary multisensory image of her surroundings.

  Which was probably why she had no warning when a DEST commando stepped out from behind the leg of another BattleMech and blasted her with a burst from a machine pistol.

  * * *

  Flame and smoke washed out the world beyond the 'Mech's windscreen as the SRM volleys slammed home on O'Hanrahan's Bushwacker, which, to his amazement, barely rocked back. No red damage-warnings came to life on his board. Miraculously, not one of the missiles had breached the 'Mech's armor.

  Miraculously ... or maybe not. The smoke parted reluctantly, in time for him to see the Awesome take hits from Soldaco's Guillotine's laser battery. The blocky torso, with its flared shoulder-actuator housings and fin-like baffles protecting them, simply flew apart in a black and orange explosion.

  Striding steadily ahead came the AgroMech that had been concealed inside a superstructure mimicking the assault 'Mech. A reflex follow-up volley of short-range missiles from Soldaco's chest-mounted Irian Weapons Works launcher blew the poorly armored machine apart.

  At almost the same instant Duchovny called, "Tai-i, wait! These aren't real BattleMechs! They're fakes!"

  Belatedly, O'Hanrahan noticed that men and women had spilled out of the small vehicles and begun attacking the tall fence with cutting tools and explosive charges. The wire was already breached in several places.

  "Forget the 'Mechs," he commanded. "Get those people on foot. They're trying to get to their 'Mechs!"

  * * *

  The DEST trooper who Daw had ordered to kill the group of a dozen prisoners turned a blank red faceplate toward his intended victims. Behind him the fearsome Naginata with Achilles Daw at the controls creaked and rumbled into life.

  Hohiro Kiguri trained his commandos to instant obedience. But whether it was uncharacteristic hesitation at shooting down unarmed people—not normally a problem for ISF agents—a desire to gloat, or merely a polite inclination to wait until his superior had cleared the area before carrying out his instructions, the DEST man did not fire immediately. Instead he stood like a statue symbolizing menace, his assault rifle leveled from the hip, while the Naginata began to stride toward the north side of the hangar with a squeal of metal on cement. The prisoners stared back at him with eyes as expressionless as his bulletproof visor.

  The body of the cherry-picker was not large, but to counterbalance its long arm and keep it stable, it contained a battery and lead ballast weighing a total of five tons. Its electric motor was very quiet, so that with a firelight in progress around him the first warning the DEST man had was when it smashed into his back. It was moving very slowly, but the impact knocked him to the concrete. - Even a Draconis Elite Strike Team commando could not contain a scream when the cherry-picker rolled over him.

  The captives he'd been ordered to execute scattered. Mariska Savage stooped briefly to recover the assault rifle before taking cover. The cherry-picker, with the now-lifeless form of Zuma Gallegos slumped on the platform, continued through the wall of the hangar and out into the first rays of dawn.

  * * *

  Staff Sergeant Tony Martinez of the Caballero quartermaster section was a short, dark man with almost as many tattoos on his muscular arms as a yak. He had been a long-haul truck driver on the planet Sierra before the urge to see the Inner Sphere overcame him—rumor had it, after a misunderstanding with the law. Of course, those rumors were told of a lot of 'lleros. They were pretty often true, too.

  He was behind the wheel of the commandeered tractor-trailer the Black Dragon light lance had spotted leaving by the Imperial City gate. As soon as the enemy 'Mech jocks had spotted what was apparently a heavy lance attacking from the south, Martinez had whipped his rig off the road to the left, as if fleeing the approach of the humanoid metal monsters. The Black Dragon pilo
ts, with MechWarriors' characteristic disregard for anything that wasn't another BattleMech—and, in fairness, with what they took to be some pretty serious BattleMech attackers on their minds— ignored him. He drove north past them as they deployed into a ragged line to face their opponents.

  Even unloaded, though, the semi was anything but ma-neuverable. Martinez had just got it wrestled around to point at the fence and then bouncing along cross country when Master Sergeant Duchovny realized they were being scammed by tarted-up AgroMechs. There were still a hundred meters between him and the fence when all four light 'Mechs—Duchovny's Spider, an UrbanMech, and two Hornets—turned on him and opened up with everything they had.

  Martinez twisted and wove the unwieldy vehicle with skill and desperation. The Black Dragon MechWarriors weren't the most skillful marksmen in the Inner Sphere, and kept getting in each other's way. Still, the range was short, the firepower brought to bear on the semi formidable.

  A burst from the UrbanMech's Imperator-B autocannon peeled open the tractor's coffin-like snout and raked the cab. A flick later, laser strikes pierced the cab and set off the fuel in the tanks. Pale alcohol flames enveloped the rig.

  Blazing like a comet, Marinez and his tractor-trailer smashed through the fence. The tractor struck the leg of a parked Flea and exploded, toppling the little BattleMech.

  And with that, Caballero Mech Warriors in cars and on motorcycles sped madly for the breach.

  * * *

  Impacts from the DEST commando's machine pistol slammed Cassie's ribs. Lances of red light seemed to flash from her chest to her brain. She sat down hard onto the cement floor of the hangar.