Close quarters Read online

  "My Ghosts yield to no one in matters of honor," she said stiffly.

  "Ah, but you must learn to yield, my child. That is the problem with you young ones: you think you know it all, and seek to oppose your will to that of your elders. This is not in accord with the Dragon's ideals of harmony."

  He shrugged. "And see what happens? You have made the Organization lose much face, consorting with these koroshiya."

  Lainie didn't bother to point out the irony of his referring to the Seventeenth as "hired killers." She knew with sick certainty what was coming next.

  "Hazukashii," the oyabun intoned. "I am ashamed. Your behavior has brought this shame upon me."

  She felt Sutton and Emma looming suddenly on either side of her, crowding her. She swallowed. Her throat was dry.

  "I trust you will follow the course jingi requires." Jingi: the yakuza concept of righteousness.

  Her lips peeled back from her teeth. "I'll do what must be done."

  He nodded. He pulled open a drawer, reached into it, brought forth a tanto in a black sharkskin sheath.

  Sutton leaned past Lainie to spread a white towel across Sumiyama's desktop. Smiling, he held out a strip of white cloth to her.

  She took it, wound it around her left hand. Wound it cruelly tight, to restrict the circulation as much as possible.

  She held the dagger up before her eyes, pulled it from its scabbard. She placed her left hand palm-down on the towel, fingers splayed wide, and leaned onto it.

  "Through my actions I have brought disgrace upon my oyabun," she said through clenched teeth. She laid the edge of the knife on the base of her left little finger.

  "In this way I shall atone."

  She pressed the dagger down with a quick decisive motion. Sumiyama drew back blinking as her blood spattered his face and the front of his suit.

  Sutton handed her another bandage, with which she quickly bound her bleeding hand. Sumiyama smiled up at her.

  "It is good to see you display the proper respect."

  She gestured toward her severed finger, lying on the bloody towel like a snack before him.

  "Keep it packed in dry ice," she gritted.

  He laughed delightedly. "And so I shall." He looked at his two retainers. "A wonderful idea, is it not? And when you redeem yourself by crushing your former associates, you can have it back. You'll have earned it, certainly."

  "That I will," Lainie Shimazu said. "That I will."

  * * *

  In the dark of her quarters, Cassie clutched the stuffed bear to her chest and cried. She had often cried before, alone, in the dark, but never like this. It was as if the grief were being squashed from her by a great hydraulic press; as if someone had taken a big steel hook on a hawser, fed it down her throat, hooked it to her grief, and was reeling it out of her with a power-winch. She moaned and writhed and streamed tears like a hydrant.

  At some point, she simply passed out, without marking the transition from consciousness. When, less than two hours later, a Scout Platoon private came to rouse her from sleep, she came awake feeling entirely refreshed and filled with the warmth of purpose.

  Part 5

  Day of the Dead

  34

  Masamori, Hachiman

  Galedon District, Draconis Combine

  2 November 3056

  The last stars of night hid themselves behind low, sullen clouds. Winter had swooped down on Masamori like a Clan invasion, the air become brittle and sharp as a shard of glass.

  A few flakes of snow drifted down between raked bronze towers, dusting the heads and shoulders of BattleMechs ranked along deserted avenues. Tai-sa Eleanor Shimazu's Mauler straddled the fountain in the traffic circle where Tai-sho Dalton Way met four other streets. Around her, First Battalion gathered for the assault.

  One way in which the largely yakuza Ghost Regiments resembled those other eta of old, the ninja, was the service they provided the samurai: they could fight dirty without impairing their honor, since in buke eyes they had none.

  It was universally, if tacitly, known that that was why Theodore Kurita had formed the Ghosts. While the Dictum Honorium was less restrictive than the Clans' code of honor, there were some things the DCMS couldn't do, at least not without a crisis of conscience. And while giri always overcame ninjo, at least in theory, giri versus giri conflicts could produce deadly hesitation.

  Lainie grimaced. She had her own codes. Duty bound her to fight, but she would do it her way.

  She clicked her communicator to the standard HTE frequency. "Attention, men and women of the Seventeenth Recon," she said in English. "I am Tai-sa Eleanor Shimazu, commanding the Ninth Ghost Regiment."

  She paused. Her mutilated hand throbbed inside the thick insulated glove. She ignored it. Ignoring pain was no novelty to her. What hurt was saying the next thing.

  "If you do not lay down your arms, immediately vacate all BattleMechs and defensive positions, and surrender, we shall be forced to attack and destroy you."

  "This is Colonel Camacho." It was the voice of a man old beyond his years, aged by worry and loss and pain.

  "Colonel, I greet you. Now I must ask you for your surrender. You will be treated honorably."

  "Can you guarantee that, Tai-sal"

  Lainie clenched her teeth. No. I can't. Not with that devil Ninyu here. She regretted that her Ghosts had kept such contemptuous distance from their street-yakuza brethren of the Sumiyama-kai. She had only just discovered what the kobun had known for weeks: that the Smiling One's heir was on the ground in Masamori, playing an active role in this lethal farce.

  "Your hesitation speaks eloquently, Tai-sa," Camacho said. "It does not matter. We have our duty. We have taken Lord Kurita's coin, and we will protect him to the death."

  At this juncture Lainie was supposed to make noises about how the Ghosts were coming to rescue Chandrasekhar Kurita. Stuff that, she thought. What can they do? Shoot me?

  "I have no enmity toward you personally, Colonel," she said formally. "You are men and women of honor. But giri obliges me to take your lives."

  "I thank you for your polite words," Don Carlos said. "Let us proceed."

  There was a click as he signed off. Lainie switched to the Ghosts' general freak.

  "All Ghosts," she said, "this is Red Witch. It's time for the chi no matsuri: the festival of blood."

  With a moaning of servos and a shuffle-thud of heavy metal feet, the 'Mechs of the Ghost Regiment swung to the attack.

  * * *

  "The culebras are approaching, Cassiopeia," Colonel Camacho said. "The attack begins. Time for you to go."

  They were alone in the Colonel's office. Cassie had heard the exchange with the flame-haired Ghost commander.

  The Mirza's outfitters had made a wide range of equipment available to the hand-picked squad of scouts who would accompany her on the raid, including assault-armor vests combining ballistic cloth with steel-ceramic inserts that would stop almost any conventional small-arms round. Cassie Suthorn preferred to go to battle unencumbered, as near to frankly naked as possible.

  To her mind, mobility was life to a scout, and all else was deadly illusion. Today, because there was going to be a lot of particulate pollution in Masamori's comparatively clean air—mostly fast-moving chunks of lead and occasional grenade and shell splinters—she'd consented to wear a simple ballistic-cloth vest beneath a black woolly-pully sweater. Loose black trousers and black athletic shoes rounded out the outfit. As a final touch she had tied a black silk strip around her forehead in imitation of the hachimaki headbands many of their opponents would be wearing today, simply because she liked the way it looked.

  She also wore a ripstop vest of many pockets, for magazines and other useful items. Blood-drinker hung diagonally across her chest, hilt-down to the right, the way the Rabid Foxes wore their combat knives. She had a bullpup machine pistol slung over her right shoulder and a big Nambu-Nissan autopistol holstered beneath the left, both firing the same 10-mm rounds. On her back she wore a l
ight ruck containing the all-important disk and a player-projector, along with more ammunition. She looked like a little girl got up to play terrorist at a costume party.

  Don Carlos held out his arms. "Come to me." As they embraced, he said over her shoulder, "You have been as a daughter to me, Cassiopeia. Be most careful. Strange times are coming to the Inner Sphere. The Regiment may need you more than ever once ... once this thing is done."

  They broke apart. She frowned at him. "It doesn't sound as if you're planning to survive this fight, patron."

  His eyes fell away from hers. "I failed my people in the terrorist attack. Bobby Begay and the others—Baird, Vanity, Marisol—are right. My time is past."

  "If that's the way you feel, why not retire back to the hacienda, the way you always said you would?"

  He shook his head. "It's no good."

  "What do you mean? You're not going out there to get yourself killed, are you?"

  "I killed my daughter," he said quietly. "I can no longer bear that burden."

  "Sierra Foxtrot, you killed your daughter! Patsy killed her own stupid self!"

  For a moment life returned to Don Camacho's eyes in the form of rage. He raised a hand as if to strike her. and Cassie raised her face to accept the blow.

  He sighed and dropped his hand. "I made her do it. She wanted to please me, but the harder she tried, the worse it became, the worse she made her brother look. I could not accept that she was the greater Mech Warrior; my son must be numero uno. And so I forced her to die, and forced Gavilan to spend the rest of his life trying to match her."

  "Forced her? You forced her?" Cassie's strident, unbelieving laugh rang like a trumpet in the tiny room. "When in her life did you know anyone to force Patsy to do anything?

  "Colonel, listen to me, please. I honor your daughter's memory. I loved her as much as you did. She was my only friend, dammit! But face the truth: she chose to throw her life away against the Smoke Jaguars. There was nothing you could do about it then. There's less you can do about it now!"

  He covered his face with his hands. "Patricia—"

  "You don't have the luxury to be a martyr now, Don Carlos. The Regiment needs you. If you go out there to die, you'll be throwing away the lives of all of us."

  She grabbed his shoulder. "Let it go. Let Patsy go. If you don't, everything you've done—keeping us together, keeping us alive—it all goes up in flames." Tears poured freely down both their faces. "Don't you understand?"

  He drew a breath, nodded.

  The door opened. The young norteño staff officer who had served as his aide-de-camp since Cabrera's banishment stood blinking nervously at them.

  "Sir," he said, "Adelante reports contact with the enemy."

  Cassie kissed Don Carlos quickly on the cheek. "I have to go." She looked a question at him.

  "I will do my best to survive, mija," he said. "For the Regiment and for you."

  A faint smile raised the corners of his mustache. "But it may be out of my hands. Out of all our hands."

  * * *

  Fifteen men and women of Scout Platoon stood or sat in clumps in the pumping station, bristling with weapons and swollen with body armor. The small square structure concealed an entrance to the Masamori sewer system that Uncle Chandy had instructed his architects to build in. A foresightful man was Chandrasekhar Kurita.

  Cassie looked around. The scouts responded variously, some with smiles of confidence, some with militant scowls, others with sullen stares. All masks they wore to cover fear.

  Cassie was afraid too. Yet somehow she wasn't. She had the adrenaline edge honed to her senses, but deep in the center of her, where storm clouds of fear had raged almost all her life, were only clear skies and calm.

  She had no time to contemplate her unfamiliar emotional state. Now was the time to number the odds, which weren't encouraging. Fifteen was either too many for the job at hand or too few. But there had not been much time to plan. In any event, three of them—Scooter Barnes, accompanied by his spotter and security woman, and with his huge Zeus sniper rifle slung over his shoulder—would be peeling off well short of their objective to take up station in a building facing Ninyu's command post to provide long-range covering fire. The remaining twelve would go in with Cassie.

  Muffled by distance and the station's cinderblock walls, the unmistakable sizzle and crack of big energy-weapons sounded. A moment later, from closer by, came the whoosh-roar of Diana's Catapult firing its big Arrow IV homing missiles.

  Cassie looked out the door to the west. All she could see was the wall, but in her mind she looked beyond.

  I didn't get to say good-bye, Lady K, she thought, but I wish you luck, my friend. I accept the gift you gave me.

  Cassie only hoped it wasn't a parting gift.

  A single tear rolled down her cheek. She brushed it away.

  "Let's go," she said.

  * * *

  Sunlight lances stabbed down among the towers of bronze like PPC bolts. As Lainie's Mauler crested the rise east of the traffic circle, the tip of the primary's molten-copper disk was just rising above the walls of Hachiman Taro Compound, almost two kilometers away.

  Broad Tai-sho Dalton Way was eerily deserted. So were the side streets and alleys. The street-level businesses were shut down, shuttered and dark. The Earl of Hachiman had sealed off everything east of the river within two thousand meters of the Compound—all of Murasaki and beyond, a gigantic bite out of the very heart of Masamori's business district. Win or lose, this would be an expensive day.

  Economics were not Lainie Shimazu's concern. Tactics were. Even without taking her little side-trip to humiliate herself and amputate her own finger without anesthetic into account, she had been given insufficient time to plan a detailed or subtle assault. If there was a subtle way to assault a giant urban fortress.

  The ten-meter walls of the Compound didn't mean that much in a clash of 'Mechs, not with jump jets and heavy weapons. Mounting the firing-step did give added protection to defending BattleMechs. But mainly what the walls did was guarantee that any attack would be a frontal one: the worst possible for the attacker.

  She had done what she could. Second Battalion she had sent around to attack from the south. The north, with its complex housing HTE employees, she was leaving severely alone.

  Her perception of Chandrasekhar Kurita was much closer to street-level than the Planetary Chairman's or Hosoya's, and untainted by personal hatred, unlike Sumiyama's. She did not dismiss him as a sybaritic fat fool. Her assessment of the semi-disgraced Kurita was that he was a tough, shrewd, and thoroughgoing bastard, who missed damned few bets. If she were the HTE chief, she'd have had the Workers' housing salted with pitfalls, tanglefoot 'Mech traps, and missile infantry.

  Such measures could not hope to stop a 'Mech assault, but Lainie knew she was operating on the razor edge of absurdity as it was. A handful of commando teams firing man-portable SRMs at back armor or vulnerable leg actuators could cause confusion totally out of proportion to the damage they inflicted—and she couldn't afford the damage to her BattleMechs, either.

  Third Battalion was being held back in reserve. The exception was I Company. Supported by a pair of LRM-firing Stalkers, already in position in Sodegarami across from the HTE Compound, they would try a probe from the river itself. With heavy irrigation upstream, the Yamato was not terrifically deep or fast this time of year, but the complex tidal system made a riverine assault tricky. Nonetheless I Company would wade up from the south to test the eastern defenses, in the distant hopes of taking the mercs by surprise. If anything favorable developed, she could commit the rest of Third, and even detach some of Second.

  First Battalion, under her personal command, was going in by the front door, screened by lances of Locusts and Jenners to act as tripwires in case the Caballeros wanted to try forward defense instead of sitting passively behind their walls.

  And that was exactly what the gaijin wanted. A beak-snouted Raven, looking smaller than its 35 tons, popped out o
f a side street to the right, 700 meters ahead of Lainie in her Revenge, and launched a pair of missiles right over the heads of the leading Ghost light 'Mechs. One of them crashed through the third-story of an office building. The other hit an A Company BattleMaster on the left front glacis, right below the laser mounts high on its torso. The huge BattleMech rocked back slightly at the impact, but no explosion ensued.

  "Narc pod!" Lainie exclaimed. "Taifun, get off the street! Now! Now!"

  The whole lead company opened up on the Raven, muzzle blasts from heavy autocannon punching in windows like invisible fists. Glass and structural steel puffed away from laser and PPC caresses in vapor; brick and granite blew apart in blossoms of dust.

  The mercenary 'Mech had already ducked back out of sight. The point-walking light lance pounded in pursuit.

  The BattleMaster pilot had turned her machine and was trying to get back to the nearest cross street, hoping to interpose a skyscraper's bulk between her 'Mech and what was coming. By luck or design, her 'Mech had been caught in mid-block. The big machine had to get around its brethren to find cover, and it was not agile.

  Away in front, two vines of white smoke rose up into the dawn haze from beyond the walls. "First Battalion, two missiles incoming, oh-nine-five, engage now-now-now."

  The Ghosts opened up with everything they had as the two missiles nosed over and streaked down toward the lumbering BattleMaster. The Ghosts were hoping to put enough lead and energy into the sky for a one in a thousand hit against the missile. Desperate, but sometimes desperation wins out.

  One missile was hit and went ballistic. Slewing off course, it crashed sideways into the seventh floor of a Middle-Class apartment complex. The warhead didn't detonate, but unburned propellant spilled out and ignited a raging fire.

  The other struck the BattleMaster square on the left shoulder. Head and actuator vanished in a white flash.