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  Kali popped the hatch on the 'Mech's left side. Reminding herself to be grateful for keeping up with her exercise regimen no matter how much she hated it, she pulled herself up one-handed into dull orange dawnlight.

  Having blown the leg off her 'Mech, the Guillotine had lost interest in her and was shooting again at the Caballeros trying to break through the fence. Raven had dodged in among the dormant BattleMechs, and a Hornet was trying to pick her off with its medium laser. Kali swung her long legs up and over, then dropped to the ground. She drew the laser pistol from its tie-down holster on her thigh, quickly checked it. The self-test light glowed green: ready to fire. She began to run.

  * * *

  Cassie half-rose to fire a dead operative's machine pistol over a bin of assorted metal junk that was used to build and maintain the superstructures on Migaki's AgroMechs. Then she turned and hunkered down with her back to the bin. The square tsuba, handguard of the vibrokatana strapped across her back scraped against the metal.

  "What are you doing here, anyway?"

  Johnny Tchang crouched beside her. "There's something I've got to tell you."

  Cassie felt a dancing sense of urgency, but had no idea what to do about it. The fight inside the compound had devolved into a mutual cat-and-mouse hunt through the clutter and between the legs of quiescent BattleMechs. The Black Dragon foot soldiers were mostly yak kobun and didn't amount to much, although their guns could kill you just as dead as any Jade Falcon Elemental's. The renegade DEST troops, of whom there seemed to be about seventy—half, it seemed, tasked to carry out the actual assassination of Theodore in the Seventeenth's 'Mechs, the other half detailed to stay back to secure Eiga-toshi and, of course, the mercenaries—posed a bigger threat, with their armor and sensory systems.

  But the DEST commandos could not afford to hang and bang; they had places to go and people to do, and the longer they were delayed, the more likely somebody would discover all was not right at the Voice of the Dragon cinema complex. And the Caballeros outnumbered them considerably. The Seventeenth had only about two hundred qualified MechWarriors, including Dispossessed and aspirants to their first machines and desk-jockeys like intelligence chief Garcia. But because the 'lleros carried their own techs and assistant techs with them, as well as their families—and there tended to be considerable overlap—and because almost every Caballero over the age of twelve was prepared to bear arms in defense of lafamilia, the raiders would inevitably be overwhelmed—iIthey could be prevented from getting into the cockpits of the 'Hero BattleMechs faster than the 'lleros could.

  Cassie peeked up again. A female commando was climbing up the mounts along the side of Buck Evans' Orion. She had almost reached the cockpit. Cassie aimed and gave her a short burst in the small of the back, where the kidneys lay close enough to the surface that the tough but flexible armor would offer little protection. Something produced the desired reflex spasm; the woman fell.

  Cassie pulled her head back down in time to avoid most of the spray of vaporized metal from a laser-beam strike that hit the bin rim near her head. Johnny Tchang brushed out a patch of her poor hair—just starting to really get some length again after all being burned off in her 'Mech fight with Jeffrey Kusunoki on Towne—that had been set smoldering. Then he popped up and blazed madly away with a pair of pistols, one Cassie's, one he'd turned up the Brown Virgin knew where.

  Cassie grabbed him by the seat of his black trousers and pulled him down. "What the hell's the matter with you? You can't hit anything that way."

  Johnny Tchang gave her that boyish grin that had made him the darling of a thousand worlds. "It always works in my holovids."

  She gave him a sour look.

  The situation had set into stalemate. Their training and equipment gave the DEST commandos advantages, but the Caballeros were no pushovers. MechWarriors as well as support troops had grown up poor but surly on hardscrabble planets, and they had the marksmanship of rural poor who often had to rely on hunting skills to put food on the table, where a single shot could make the difference between eating and starving—not to mention the risks entailed by wounding rather than dropping the Southwestern worlds' notably cranky game animals. In the Seventeenth, not only was everybody ready to fight, everybody had, and even the haughty 'Mech jocks had tasted down-and-dirty combat just like this.

  A flurry of shots, screams, grenade cracks. Something was going down off to the left. Cassie risked a look up, but could see nothing for the parked 'Mechs and clutter in the short interval before the unseen sniper cracked another beam over her head.

  Johnny was gazing at her, his expression grave. "Cassie—"

  "Johnny," she said, trying to peer around the left end of the bin to where the spasm of battle was continuing, "you're a nice boy, I like you, and thanks for saving my life. But this isn't a great time to talk."

  "You need to know this," he said persistently. "My defection from the Capellan Confederation was faked. I'm a Maskirovka spy. I was sent here to observe, and if necessary help with, the assassination of Theodore Kurita."

  * * *

  Ninyu Kerai stood alone in Subhash's office. The lights of the holodisplay played across his face in the gloom.

  "My son," the image of his adoptive father said, "I have misled you. I have sent you on what gaijin might call a 'wild-goose chase.' Franklin Sakamoto is blameless; evidence suggests he may be a captive of the true conspirators against the Combine, our Coordinator, and, incidentally, both you and myself.

  "The head of these conspirators is General Hohiro Kiguri, commander of the Draconis Elite Strike Teams."

  * * *

  "What is he saying?" Tai-sa Charles Ohta demanded. "Who's going to die?"

  Subhash Indrahar smiled benignly. "All of us," he said sofdy.

  "Shoot him!" Toyama screeched to the guards.

  The guards stared in confusion. It didn't matter. Any action they could take was already too late.

  The Smiling One threw back his head and laughed. It was a robust laugh, the laugh of a strong young warrior.

  Panels on both sides of the wheelchair snapped open. From each side a double-tube man-portable short-range missile launcher emerged. Both pivoted upward on their mounts. Fire flashed and the chamber filled with choking smoke as a volley of rockets streaked toward the large port overhead.

  The transpex dome was proof against small arms, and sealed against the one-atmosphere pressure within the ship. But it was never designed to resist the assault of four rockets with powerful armor-piercing warheads. It shattered and exploded outward in a glittering cascade.

  At the abrupt pressure drop, heavy metal panels slid in-stantiy across the entrances to the great compartment. They saved the rest of the ship. But they did no good for those inside.

  Air rushed out into space with a whistling roar. Still laughing, Subhash Indrahar was whirled up with it, and Angus Kurita with him, and Ohta and Banzuin the false monk and Tomita the professor and the guards, irresistibly, up and up and out into infinite night.

  28

  Unity Palace, Imperial City

  Luthien

  Pesht Military District, Draconis Combine

  1 July 3058

  "I am now dead, my son," the image of Subhash Indrahar declared. "You are now Director of the Internal Security Force. You shall serve House Kurita well, and bring honor to my memory.

  "One final word: do not avenge me as such. Instead, consider the opportunity these events present, and exploit them fully, that my legacy shall be a Dragon—and House Kurita—stronger than at any time in our glorious history. And in cleaning our own house, make certain that you do not leave it bereft of leadership. Expunge only the guilty, not from any abstraction of 'justice,' but of necessity: the necessity that ISF be strong and capable for the turbulent days ahead.

  "And now, goodbye. I love you, my son. You make me proud." The image blinked to nothingness.

  Ninyu Kerai threw back his head and screamed, "No!" And his cry echoed through the roots of Unity Palac
e, and up and out, as far as the trailing Trojan point of the outermost moon of Luthien, where his father's body, mummified by vacuum, orbited eternally.

  In time it would spread to shake the entire Draconis Combine and beyond.

  * * *

  In the midst of the fighting occuring all over Eiga-toshi, Cassie had the muzzle of her Shimatsu 42 aimed at Johnny Tchang's lean midriff. "Can you give me a good reason not to snuff you right here and now?"

  "There's my boyish smile," he said, and flashed it at her.

  "Not good enough."

  "Of all the women in the Inner Sphere, I have to fall for one who's immune to my charm."

  "That's not necessarily true. But while honeyed words are nice and everything, these bullets'd sure make a mess of that washboard belly of yours." The crack of a grenade, screaming. "And I don't have much time—"

  He held up his hands, empty. "All right. I told you what I was sent here for. If I meant to do you harm, would I have even come?"

  "Maybe you want to take me out, help the cause a little."

  "Would I have warned you, then?" He shrugged. "Cassiopeia, if you really believe I'm your enemy, go ahead and squeeze the trigger. That'd probably be the best thing in the world that could happen to me."

  She looked hard at him two heartbeats more. Her eyes had lightened until they were almost colorless.

  Then she half-rose, turning, sinuous as smoke, and fired a burst across the top of the parts bin. A DEST commando who had been creeping forward across a bare patch of cement yelled hoarsely behind his visor and sat down hard. Cassie kept squirting him with quick bursts until he rolled over and scrambled back over a stack of unformed armor-plate sections to safety. She blasted his heel with the last of the magazine, then popped it from the well and replaced it with another from a pocket of her outrageous jacket as she sat back down.

  "That pendejo Kiguri doesn't train his people for Sierra—scuffling his feet like that. Ninyu Kerai will mop Impy City with these clowns when he finds out what's going on." She looked to Johnny. "Give it to me straight—and quick."

  "Not much to tell. I have a sister whom I love very much—all the family that means anything to me, since my parents sold me to the opera company. The Mask has her. My defection was their idea. Since I was so popular in the FedCom anyway, they figured if I seemed to jump the fence I'd be even more of a hero, and no one would think to question whether it was real."

  "Go on," Cassie said, listening carefully.

  "I've done minor spying jobs for them, nothing major—I think they're not quite sure what use to make of me. I have a feeling Sun-Tzu Liao considered using me to assassinate Prince Victor, based on hints my handlers dropped, but I've no definite knowledge."

  "How did the Mask get tangled up in a plot against Theodore?"

  Bullets clanged among the parts in the bin like giant metal bees on speed. Two punched through between Cassie and Johnny and went tumbling away with harmonic whines.

  "Damn, I'm getting sick of this." She pulled a tear gas grenade from the sneaksuit's web belt, handed it to Johnny. "Here. Twist this cap hard till you feel something snap to initiate it. Torque it and toss it when I tell you to."

  He looked quizzically at her. She ignored him. Instead she pulled out a second gas grenade and tossed it over the bin without twisting the cap. Then she reared up and cut loose with her Shimatsu.

  Not knowing what kind of grenade had been thrown into the patch of clear concrete, the two DEST operatives ducked. Which was what Cassie intended. She emptied her magazine over the top of the stacked armor plates, into a row of barrels of yellow synthetic.

  "Now," she called to Johnny. "Toss it in behind 'em."

  He did so. Stood looking. She dragged him down again just as the commandos opened fire once more. "Damn it, it's Dracs who're supposed to be in love with suicide, not Capellans!"

  Before he could respond to that, the gas grenade went off. Tear gas grenades burn very hot.

  The solvent stored in the drums Cassie had punctured burned hotter.

  Flaring orange light danced on the hangar's walls. At the demoniac screaming and thrashing from behind the armor plates all the color drained from Johnny Tchang's face.

  "Special forces," Cassie said contemptuously. "Big-time commandos—yeah. A scout never forgets her surroundings."

  She looked sidelong at Johnny. "Never killed anybody before, huh?"

  "Not that I know of. And not—like that."

  The screaming subsided. The firefight, which seemed to have been suspended, broke out again full force. "O.K. I believe you. Hard-core Maskers get off on pain—ISF're a bunch of thugs, but they don't go out of the way to recruit crazies and sadists the way Maskirovka does. You're a good actor, but you're not that good."

  "Thanks. I think."

  "So what does Sun-Tzu have against Theodore Kurita?"

  "Jealousy, I think. That's the real thing. The ostensible reason seems to be that he finally realized the Coordinator was never going to go for the Pan-Asian alliance the Liaos kept proposing against the rest of the Sphere, but that Sub-hash Indrahar has been using to string him along for years."

  "How did you get mixed up in this, then?"

  "Well, Word of Blake has been working with Kokuryu-kai for several years."

  "We've noticed."

  "And they've noticed you too. I guess you know that. Anyway, the Mask is into the Word of Blake ROM like worms in an apple. Blakie intelligence is good at dirty tricks, but they're not a patch on their ComStar opposite numbers when it comes to security. They're pretty gullible, especially where Tommy Marik's concerned, and Sun-Tzu and the Captain-General have been like that the last few years. Anyway, the Maskirovka found out through the Blakies that the Black Dragons had it in for Theodore. They made their own approach, cut their own deal."

  "Which is?"

  "Basically, Sun-Tzu recognizes anybody the Black Dragons manage to stuff onto the Dragon Throne."

  "And where do you fit?"

  "I was to observe, and lend help if Kokuryu-kai asked for it. And I—well, when it was announced that your regiment would be attending the Coordinator's Birthday celebration, the Mask had me suggest putting you up here to Takura Migaki."

  Cassie pursed her lips in a silent whistle. "We got a lot to thank you for, don't we?"

  "I'm hoping to make it up to you."

  She grunted. "Sun's coming up," she said. "We need to make something happen here. You can drive a forklift, can't you?"

  "Uh-yeah. In Police Force 30531 did this scene—"

  "I saw it. That's why I figured you could, 'cause you do your own stunts." She pointed to the wall behind them. "See the forklift parked over there?"

  "Yes."

  "You're gonna drive it where I tell you," she said, "and I'm gonna shoot anybody in black or tattoos who looks at us."

  * * *

  The Bushwacker's snout-mounted machine guns snarled. Strikes flickered against the legs of a Grasshopper. The targeted enemy was already safe behind them.

  "Bloody hell!" Tai-i O'Hanrahan was seriously torqued. The enemy's phony missiles had swathed the battlefield in a thick pall of smoke. Through it the enemy on foot was visible to the infrared receptors in his Bushwacker's sensory suite, which showed them to him as glowing false-color blobs on his HUD. But they were mere wisps, flitting from leg to leg of their parked BattleMechs.

  Who ever heard of people afoot not fearing 'Mechs? Even MechWarriors, dismounted, were no more than rabble-targets, "rugs in waiting" in the usual grim 'Mech jock jest. But these foreign money-troopers, while doing their best to keep out of the way of his company's weapons, were not dissolving into proper panic.

  The problem was, the weapons and sensors of O'Hanra-han's company were suited to finding, fixing, and flaying other giant mobile masses of metal. With a few exceptions such as his own Bushwacker's machine guns—which were rare on 'Mechs these days—they weren't well suited to picking on little darting human targets, for all their awesome capabilities. It ha
d never seemed a problem before.

  On the heels of that thought, a warning light flared on his board, and his circle-vision strip showed him half a dozen missile-trails snaking for the Bushwacker's back.

  "Fool me once, shame on me," he snarled, and returned his tension to trying to scour the confounded mercs out from among their mounts.

  A double explosion rocked the Bushwacker forward.

  * * *

  The phony Quickdraw had broken through the fence about the middle of the Third Battalion square. Kali commanded First Battalion, parked nearest the hangar. That meant her Mad Cat was a good ways off.

  The Sevententh's BattleMechs stood arrayed in four battalion blocs ranged in a line north from the repair hangar. Each lance of four 'Mechs was parked in a small square. Nine such squares in a three-by-three matrix made up a battalion.

  Kali wove between BattleMech legs and gouts of earth thrown up by projectiles and energy weapons. The Black Dragon 'Mech jocks had a MechWarrior's phobia about combat in a confined space, where the terrific mobility and sensory apparatus of a BattleMech was largely neutralized, and even despised groundpounder infantry could pose a deadly threat to the lords and ladies of warfare. The Ca-ballero machines were parked too close together to allow maneuvering among them. So the Black Dragons were hanging outside the fence, sniping at the 'lleros trying to reach their rides.

  Panting for breath, Kali stopped between the legs of a Hatamoto-chi belonging to Eskiminzin Company CO Stretch Santillanes, a White Mountain Apache out of Ceril-los. We got us a tad bit of problem here, she thought. It was the BattleMechs of her own First Battalion that the raiders intended to use to assassinate Theodore Kurita. There were at least a dozen black sneaksuits in and among her parked machines, dueling with other First Battalion jocks who had gotten in through the wire.