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  "And whom will you replace me with?" Theodore asked calmly.

  "We were going to replace you with your none-too-bright but highly pliable cousin Angus. Unfortunately, my superior Subhash Indrahar, that meddlesome old beast, managed to make an end of him not two hours ago—removing himself from the picture as well." He shrugged his broad shoulders. "Still, we'll come up with something. The important thing is that your time is through."

  One of the two surviving Otomo guards on the podium with Theodore uttered a bellow of rage, brought up his shotgun and fired a burst at the DEST commander. Kiguri rolled to the side, came up to one knee, flung out his left hand. A shuriken shaped like a swastika with rounded arms struck the guard under the right side of the jaw. Blood from a severed jugular vein pulsed between the Otomo guard's fingers as he grabbed at his neck. He toppled off the platform.

  "Take him," Kiguri ordered his commandos.

  * * *

  The two assault 'Mechs met with a terrible clang. Though his machine massed a mere five tons less than her Mauler, Lainie's rush had taken the Otomo leader off guard. His Sunder staggered backward.

  Ignoring the red lights that had flared to life in her display, Lainie raised the Mauler's arms and fired its large lasers point-blank into the Sunder's chest. Armor melted and splashed away from the dazzling beams like water thrown up by stone. She threw her 'Mech into motion at once, slamming into the Omni with another impact that threatened to detach her retinas.

  Around her a dogfight swirled, too confused to make sense of even if she'd had time for anything but her deadly dance with Hideyoshi. The traitor's 'Mech had heavier frontal armor, hers the greater firepower. With his potent pulse lasers neutralized, Hideyoshi would probably lose a face-up blasting duel. But that would take time.

  Lainie wanted this done now. The longer the fight went on, the greater the risk one of die would-be assassins would manage to blast through the transpex shield—or jump high enough to shoot down over the top of it—and kill the Coordinator.

  Another shattering collision. Lainie's HUD flickered once, came back. A warning buzz and red telltale told her she had lost her targeting system. I don't need the computer for this, she thought. She raised her 'Mech's right arm and fired its laser into the Sunder's cockpit.

  * * *

  "Looks like your friends got here in time," Johnny Tchang said as me Warrior swept along the south wall of the Palace—any aircraft that overflew the grounds would be fired on by radar-aimed robot flak emplacements—and out over the battle raging in Unity Square.

  "It's a little early to celebrate," Cassie said, "since it looks like they haven't won yet by a long shot. Whoa, Migaki-sama! Can you take us back over the grandstand? Something's going on behind it."

  The VTOL heeled over, circled over the struggling 'Mechs and crossed the stands, which had gotten deserted in a hurry. Black suits were swarming up the back stair to the podium, to be met by a man in dress uniform wielding a sword. Several figures fired down at the attackers from beside him.

  "More Ninja Boys," Cassie said in disgust.

  "That's General Kiguri down there," Migaki said, pointing with his chin. "The bare-headed one."

  "I don't suppose you've still got guns on this thing?" she asked.

  Migaki showed her a taut smile. "Not much call for them in my line of work," he said. "Not that I don't miss them occasionally. But not even an Associate Director of ISF gets to machine-gun recalcitrant actors."

  "Thank goodness for that," Johnny Tchang said.

  "If you can hover right over the platform, here," Cassie said, coming out of her seat and racking back the action on the shotgun far enough to confirm a round was chambered, "I can give Teddy a little timely fire support."

  Red glare filled the cockpit, accompanied by a crack like one of the sequoias in the park being snapped by a giant, and the stench of hot metal and burned lubricants. The helicopter lurched and began to sink.

  "Hovering's out," Migaki said calmly through silence loud as a shout. "Laser beam just took out our engine."

  Epilogue

  Mujo

  I feel sure that Heaven intends to use your master as a wooden bell.

  —Confucius, Analects, 3:24

  33

  Unity Square, Imperial City

  Luthien

  Pesht Military District, Draconis Combine

  1 July 3058

  "Coordinator!"

  At the warning cry from his last surviving Otomo guard Theodore Kurita looked up to see a helicopter flash overhead, then autorotate to a crash landing on the grandstand twenty meters north of the podium. He heard a strangled cry, turned his head to see Shigeru Yoshida staggering back from the stairs, blood from a deep slash across his chest turning his dress tunic crimson. Theodore caught him in his arms.

  "Tono ... I apologize for ... failing." Yoshida's eyes rolled up in his head, and his body became dead weight.

  The commando who had struck the man down was a woman. She leapt at Theodore, katana raised. Laser beams from Uncle Chandy's guards converged on her. One burned through the armor cloth enclosing her chest, and she fell almost at the feet of the man she had slain.

  More commandos were lunging up the stairs to the attack. Theodore wrested the sword from Yoshida's slack grip and stood to meet them. It was an ancient blade from Terra itself, an heirloom granted the Yoshida family by a grateful Coordinator three centuries before. Not that that mattered particularly; the Draconis Combine had never adopted the practice of their World War II Japanese predecessors, of stamping swords from pot-metal by the tens of thousands so their officers could carry symbols of traditional authority that were useful for damn-all else. The classic art of sword-smithing thrived under the Kuritas, and every blade carried by one of the Dragon's servants was a finely crafted piece of work. But age lent soul to a blade, which a swordsman as accomplished as Theodore was well-attuned to. Yoshida's katana felt light in his hands, and while it was no vibro-blade, it seemed to him to quiver with eagerness to avenge its fallen owner.

  Granting its desire required no thought, no intention. Theodore flowed forward to meet the next commando up the stairs. As of its own accord Yoshida's katana caught the descending blade flat-to-flat, swept it harmlessly down and past Theodore's left shoulder, reversed into a backhand slash across the throat. The ancient blade parted black armor cloth and pale flesh beneath. Hot blood sprayed Theodore's face and chest. The commando tumbled back into the red visors of his mates crowding behind him.

  "Not bad," called Kiguri from the podium where he stood behind a phalanx of his commandos shielding him from gunfire. "You haven't forgotten what to do with a sword, Tono."

  The female commando who stood immediately to Kiguri's left suddenly threw herself against him. Despite the General's greater mass and fine natural balance, the unexpected assault knocked him a meter to the side.

  The commando's body jerked as to the impact of a sledgehammer. Blood, visible only as dark wetness against the black, flowed from a sudden hole in her sternum. She collapsed.

  * * *

  "Hijo de la chingada," Cassie cursed. She'd had that bastard Kiguri dead-centered in her ghost-ring sights. His hand-picked minions were not as good as they imagined they were, but they were damned good—and fanatically devoted to their leader. They proved it by closing ranks to shield him from attack from this unexpected direction as she moved the barrel of her shotgun to target him.

  Cassie, Johnny, and Takura Migaki—still nattily unruffled, despite the crash—crouched on top of the grandstand, using the transpex shield for cover in case the commandos produced ranged weapons and tried to fire them up. The actor held an autopistol before him in a very professional two-handed grip, which Cassie knew was more a testimonial to his coaches and acting skill than real combat-pistol prowess. Migaki had produced a neat little holdout piece that he held with apparent negligence in one hand. Something about his manner suggested he did know what to do with it—such as not waste bullets shooting at armored targets
at any kind of range.

  "The fop, his pet actor, and the mercenary scout bitch who's made so much trouble," Kiguri called from behind his volunteer human shields. "Like anyone without honor, you seek to live by the gun. But you'll die by the sword. Take them as well!"

  A dozen katana-armed commandos rushed them. Cassie dropped two with body hits by her penetrator rounds. Johnny Tchang blazed away enthusiastically but without apparent effect. Kiguri waited calmly.

  From the corner of her eye Cassie saw Theodore dueling with another commando on the stairs while the Otomo guard and Uncle Chandy's two retainers fired from the sides at others attempting to join the fight. Half a dozen dignitaries and aides, unarmed, milled in the background, dividing their attention unhappily between the struggle for the stairs and the still very undecided 'Mech battle going on beyond the transpex shield, which had now been punctured twice by hits. Behind Migaki, fresh DEST commandos were emerging from the door into the Palace grounds.

  This isn 't good, Cassie had time to think. Then a series of violent explosions rocked the grandstands hard on the other side of Migaki's chopper. She flinched and looked that way as Takura Migaki threw himself as flat as he could down onto the terraced stands. Boards and splinters were whirling into the air; the Warrior, which thanks to its double rotors' autorotation and Migaki's piloting skill, hadn't been damaged too badly on impact, slid forward with a grating noise into the gap between stands and wall and began to burn.

  Johnny alone looked unaffected by the explosions. He met Cassie's eye and gave her a quick grin and shrug, as if to say, I'm used to loud noises. All part of my job.

  "Those aren't skyrockets," she snarled. "Those were SRMs." His handsome face went pale.

  The DEST commandos hit the wooden frames that supported the grandstands and began swarming up them like squirrels. Cassie fired off two more sabot rounds and missed, dropped the mostly empty magazine and slammed in a box of buckshot rounds. A red visor appeared over the edge of the stands. Cassie dropped her weapon to the hip and fired into it.

  The visor shattered. The black-helmeted head whipped back. The commando fell limp as wet laundry to the pavement, his neck broken.

  Another popped up to Cassie's right. Migaki dropped into a two-handed stance and snapped two quick shots into the DEST trooper's faceplate. That visor didn't break, nor did the man's neck, but he overbalanced and toppled backward off the stands.

  Having emptied his pistol without doing visible harm to anybody, Johnny Tchang tossed it aside as a commando scrambled up to the right of the small group. He pivoted, skipped forward, snapped a kick into the faceplate, dislodging the DEST agent. Belatedly he saw it was a female. "Sorry," he said as she landed hard flat on her back, and immediately felt foolish.

  He didn't have long to be embarrassed. A male operative, trying a flank approach, gained the top of the grandstand and rushed at Johnny, swinging his katana.

  Johnny counter-charged him, catching his right arm at wrist and elbow, locking-out the arm and using it as a lever to shove the commando faceplate-first into the stands' second tier. A second one came swarming over the top at him. Not relinquishing his hold on the first's arm, Johnny went down to one knee and side-kicked his assailant in the belly, launching him backward into space. Then he let go the captive elbow, twisted the sword-hilt out of the hand he still held, and kicked the unfortunate commando rolling down the steps. Then, holding the sword above his head, blade up and tip forward, he dropped into a sideways horse stance to await fresh attackers.

  Cassie blasted two more attackers. The second managed to get a gloved hand around the barrel of the shotgun before Cassie shot her away from it. A third swung a katana at her almost simultaneously. She had to throw herself into a backward somersault that carried her down three rows to escape.

  The shotgun stayed with the last attacker she'd shot.

  The commando who had slashed at her jumped down onto the seat-tier above her, cut downward at her as she lay on her back. She whipped the vibrokatana from the scabbard across her back just barely in time to parry.

  The commando had only a heartbeat to stare in amazement—his expression hidden by bis visor, but his body language unmistakable—at the stump of his sword before Cassie sliced her humming blade through his chest.

  * * *

  "Damn! Lost my right laser," Lainie muttered. Her cheeks tingled as if sunburned from a hit by one of Hideyoshi's beams that had burned through her canopy but mostly spent itself in the process.

  "All systems are dead," Sari DeLeeuw said in her ear. "Nothing's responding, and my onboard computer reports a fire in my antimissile system ammo bay."

  Firing her left-arm laser into her own opponent at almost touch range, Lainie flicked a glance at her circle-vision strip. She had an impression DeLeeuw's War Dog had been engaged with the Avatar and the Black Hawk Ho's Pillager hadn't taken out. The Avatar was a gutted wreck, its LB-10X right arm and double-pulse laser supported by mere vestigial wings that were all that was left of its torso after a shot from the War Dog's Gauss rifle destroyed the containment field of its fusion engine. The BHKU-0 looked to be mostly intact, and now stood behind the immobilized Dog, firing its fearful battery of twelve lasers into it as fast as heat build-up permitted.

  Her anti-missile stowage doesn't have CASE! Lainie thought. "Punch out," she ordered. Being resolved upon death herself made her irrationally afraid of losing any of her people, and she was certain she'd lost three already, Buntaro Mayne in the Stealth, Sato in the Hitman, and one of her Owens pilots, Denzel.

  "But Lainie—"

  "Now!"

  The War Dog's canopy popped open and DeLeeuw soared up into the hot blue imperial City sky. The Black Hawk turned back toward the grandstand—and was rocked by a ferro-nickel slug from the Dragon Fire's Gauss rifle as Billy Dragomil, having finished off a Blackjack, raced back to his fiancee's rescue.

  Hideyoshi fired his lasers into the body of Laurie's Mauler. She smelled smoke as alarms shrilled in her ears. That one got through!

  This was taking too long and she was taking too much damage. Lainie thought of her friend Kali, who could make her lumbering old Atlas do things Lainie had never imagined possible. What would she do now?

  Something totally off the wall, Lainie realized.

  To think was to act. She swiveled her 'Mech's torso clockwise and charged past the stub of the Sunder's right arm. She planted her right foot behind that of Hide-yoshi's Omni, then rotated Vengeance's torso hard counterclockwise, smashing her useless right laser-arm into the Sunder's prow. The OmniMech fell backward with a resounding crash.

  She shoved the muzzle of her left laser against the prostrate Sunder's cockpit for the coup de grace. And heard a voice both through her radio and audio pickups commanding, "You in the Mauler—hold your fire or be destroyed!"

  * * *

  Takura Migaki fired off the last round in his holdout pistol, threw it at a red faceplate. A DEST commando aimed a transverse slash at him. He wove his upper body lithely out of the way, then grabbed the wrist of his attacker's sword-hand with his right hand. Pivoting clockwise into the swordsman, Migaki pulled the arm over his shoulder and snapped the elbow with a savage downward heave. Then he caught up the katana that dropped from limp fingers and cut down the injured man.

  Cassie held off two commandos who were respectful of her vibrokatana's ability to slice through their blades and their armor. From the corner of her eye she saw Theodore fighting masterfully at the top of the stairs. Blood streamed down his left cheek, and the front of his dress tunic had been slashed twice, but despite his lack of armor he had taken no serious wounds—yet.

  To her other side Johnny Tchang was in his element, fighting now with two captured katana as if they were butterfly swords. The commandos were highly trained in kenjutsu and the Dragon School of unarmed combat. But Johnny Tchang had been schooled rigorously in the martial arts from earliest childhood. His whole life had been shaped toward the goal of making him the Inner Sphere's finest marti
al artist.

  His many critics said his holovids were pure box-office. Yet the way he seemed to dance among the black-clad waves that broke over the rear of the grandstand, blocking and slashing with his blades, lashing out with his black-slippered feet, Cassie wasn't so sure he hadn't made it. Wonderfully fluid his moves were, but there was no make-believe in the effect they had on his opponents.

  To no end. The outcome was no longer in doubt. Kiguri's renegade DEST operatives had been reinforced; sooner or later they would overpower the Coordinator's defenders, and finally Theodore himself.

  So much for the Inner Sphere, Cassie thought. In savage anger she punched the tip of her vibrokatana through the faceplate of the opponent to her left, then severed both hands of the one on her right as he raised his sword overhead for a killing stroke. Then she ran to the top of the stands and looked down.

  Her heart dropped in her ribcage like a wingshot dove. A veritable flood of black-clad shapes was pouring out the door into the Palace grounds.

  And falling on Kiguri's henchmen from the rear with gleaming swords.

  * * *

  Lainie froze. Her 360-view strip showed her what looked like a whole regiment of BattleMechs advancing across Unity Square from the east. From their differing paint schemes and insignia she gathered they had been cobbled together from various units on hand for the festivities.

  The lead 'Mech was a battleship gray Naginata with the Kurita dragon prominently painted on the LRM launcher set into either side of its chest. There was no mistaking the machine. This was the 'Mech belonging to Tomoe Sakade, wife of the Coordinator of the Draconis Combine and commander of Kagoshima Prefecture of the Pesht Military District, in which Luthien was located.

  "Tai-sho Sakade," Lainie broadcast on the general comm freq. "I am Tai-sa Shimazu, commanding the Ninth Ghost Legion."