Close quarters Read online

  It is a truism that the best scouts in the countryside are country-born. Cassie is the exception. She's city-trash born and bred—but she's adaptable.

  The other members of Scout Platoon are true wilderness men and women from the harshest regions of the Trinity worlds of Marik space. What outsiders call the Southwestern worlds: Sierra, Cerillos, and Galisteo, the planets from which the bulk of the Regiment's members spring. Chirica-hua and White Mountain Apache, Acoma and Zufti from the deserts, truchaseños and hillbillies from the arid mountains. They had skills in their home environments that Cassie can, frankly, never match; it is as a whole package that she's unbeatable.

  Compared to Cassie, the other scouts are actually at a disadvantage in this environment. Their homeworlds are dry and hot. Larsha, like this godforsaken Periphery outworld now named New Horizons, is hot and wet.

  She slips into a bayou, stepping carefully to keep from tearing her foot on a snag or dropping into an unseen hole. She must swim partway, holding the bullpup-pattern M23 up out of the water with one hand. The assault rifle is supposed to be waterproof, but Cassie finds it hard to believe that it will survive being filled up with mud and silt and still be able to fire.

  The water is opaque and greasy, but the facets of its ever-dancing surface take the ultraviolet-rich sunlight and blast it at her eyes like tiny laser cells.

  On the far side Cassie slithers up the bank like an otter, making barely a sound as she parts company with the clinging water. She disappears into a bank of dense green undergrowth splotched white with flowers lobed like sea anemones, the branches barely stirring at her passage.

  * * *

  This planet had once been known as Crotch. It had been settled many centuries before by the usual assortment of misfits, outcasts, and outright bandits who came to the Periphery, finding life in the Inner Sphere dominated by the then-Terran Hegemony and the five Great Houses of Liao, Marik, Steiner, Kurita, and Davion too restrictive—or too hot—for comfort. The name Crotch might have suited the world's founders, but their descendants had apparently felt that tug of respectability that so often follows the waning of the roughnecked frontier spirit. Seeking an image upgrade, they had changed their planet's name.

  The Caballeros, as the boys and girls of the Seventeenth Recon Regiment liked to call themselves, felt a lot of sympathy for misfits, outcasts, and bandits. Back in the good old days, the Trinity Worlds had themselves been a bandit kingdom, styling itself the Intendancy of New New Spain. Then the cantankerous three-world alliance had been conquered and absorbed by the Free Worlds League, a major coup that did much to win the fledgling League acceptance from the Southwesterners' long-suffering neighbors. The Caballeros didn't see anything wrong with calling this planet Crotch. Besides, it fit.

  New Horizons was a reasonably remote world across the line from Qandahar Prefecture of the Draconis Combine's Pesht District. Its relative isolation, added to its wealth in water and metals, had enabled it to move from a pirate economy to a more or less trade-based economy. Accordingly, its unredeemed bandit king-style neighbors came raiding from time to time.

  The Dracs, however, had gotten a bellyful of nascent pirate powers such as the Oberon Confederation coalescing on their borders, so when any of New Horizons' neighbors got too overweening, a passel of glory-hunting would-be samurai came booming forth from Qandahar to whack hell out of them. In return, the Planetary Syndicate that ruled New Horizons sent regular tribute to Qandahar Prefecture's military commander. Everyone's wa was on straight.

  Then the Clans came swinging out of coreward space, crunching like an axe into the Combine in their cosmic smash-and-grab raid. Oberon and the other pirate states in the regions of space near New Horizons were smashed.

  The lesser pirate realms on the fringes of the Clan advance splashed.

  Captain Father Doctor Roberto "Call Me Bob" García, SJ, who was, among other things, the Seventeenth's leading history buff, was always happy to fill Cassie's ears with more than she wanted to know about precedents and parallels between current events and Terra's turbulent past. He liked to compare the effects of the Clan invasion of the Periphery to the great Movement of Peoples, pointing out how the eruption of a lone tribe of shaggy, smelly, pony-riding, sheep-eating, bow-shooting barbarians called the Hsiung-nu into Central Asia from the Gobi Desert had sent people flying as far as Scandinavia, Britain, Spain, and even North Africa, all of which Cassie understood to be worlds somewhere in the vicinity of Terra. She never really paid much mind to Father Bob when he was lecturing, any more than when he tried to psychologize her.

  Cassie was not concerned with precedent; she was concerned with fact. The relevant datum was that one sizable glob of human detritus sent flying by the Clans had smacked spang into New Horizons. They brought with them the rapacious values of a true pirate culture, combined with the vicious and gratuitous cruelty of a defeated army—something Father Bob's history books never liked to talk about, but that Cassie herself had witnessed again and again in her nine years with the Regiment. These pirates worked hard to earn the name the Caballeros gave them: basura. It was Spanish for trash.

  That was fine with Cassie. It made her job all the easier.

  The New Horizons Defense Force had pretty well burned itself out fighting the original influx of pirate refugees. They had been overjoyed to let the Caballeros—themselves human flotsam from the Clan invasion—take on the job of digging the surviving pirate gangs out of the strongholds where they had gone to ground.

  For its part, the Regiment had suffered severely fighting the Clans under the banner of the Federated Commonwealth. They were in sore need of rest and refit. This gig offered a nice chunk of change in return for a relatively low-intensity mission.

  After going head-to-head with the Clans, it was a vacation.

  This basura band had gone to ground in the Great Murchison Swamp on New Horizon's largest continent. They had 'Mechs, a dozen of them, all crouching down at the bottom of a big, stagnant lake off a bayou. Mostly they left them there, where murky water and substantial iron deposits beneath the lake bed made it tough to pinpoint their location with remote-sensing. The pirates issued forth mostly on foot, in literal pig-and-chicken stealing raids against the local Swampers. They didn't neglect the usual atrocities: torture, rape, and the burning of the Swampers' stilted shanties.

  That let Cassie bring her special street-kid skills into play. Most of Scout Platoon were asocial loners, even more uncomfortable with outsiders than the average Southwesterner. Cassie, on the other hand, had come up a scammer and a hustler. The human environment was one through which she swam with ease and comfort.

  She had been a busy girl these past two weeks, scouting the basura camp and making preparations. The Swampers—an ethnic admixture of Cajun and Filipino negrillo, leavened with a bit of everybody else—had been very helpful.

  * * *

  Cassie crouches in a world of shades of green: dusty green, pale green, green so dark as to be almost black, green so pure and rich it makes the eyes ache. But she is there for the view, not the scenery.

  From her cover in the dense, prickly undergrowth she looks out over a broad expanse of water. It stinks of stagnation and organic decay, the reek tinged by the scent of camp-fire smoke. On the far side of the dead lake a stand of silura trees bob shaggy heads above smooth, thirty-meter-tall trunks.

  At the base of the silura grove the underbrush has been hacked back. Like multicolored fungus, a clump of settlement has grown up there: fading, once-colorful tents looted from the department stores of Medwick and Fiasco, New Horizons' largest cities; big white polymer boxes used for containerized cargo; shacks cobbled together from oddments of tarpaper and polymer; even huts of grass and native timber.

  An outsider's eye might find it hard to tell the basura camp from the Swamper's rude dwellings. To Cassie there is no similarity. The Swamper shanties are rough in appearance, but they are highly efficient at keeping off the worst of the region's fierce weather, while not opposing
too directly the strength of wind and water. They have an organic appearance; they fit the surroundings.

  The basura shacks are the half-hearted improvisations of people so demoralized they can barely care about their own comfort. They stand out like a tumor on an MRI scan.

  Moving without haste Cassie slips off her light pack. She lowers it to the spongy earth, unzips it. From it she takes a head-sized black box, sets it down beneath the sweep of a wall-eye bush, opens covers and presses buttons. Various pilot lights open like red rodent eyes.

  "Diana, this is Abtakha," she subvocalizes.

  "I read you, Abtakha," comes the voice of Lieutenant Senior Grade Diana Vásquez. The voice of the Caballeros' long-range artillery support. As sometimes happens in the Regiment, her call sign is the same as her name. "Go ahead."

  Vásquez has the voice of a delightful little girl. The manner, too, despite her deadly job as pilot of one of the unit's Catapults. She is shy and sweet, a slight, pretty woman with hands like brown doves, who likes to wear the extravagant local flowers in her hair. She is utterly different from the typical 'Mech jock, which is what makes it possible for Cassie to almost like her.

  "Your beacon is in place and online," Cassie says.

  "I have it on my screen now, Abtakha. Thank you."

  Cassie grins. Diana, of all MechWarriors in existence, would think of thanking her for doing her job.

  She stiffens, hearing the rustle of undergrowth, the thump of careless footsteps, a mutter of sullen voices. Then comes a shift of wind carrying the smell of cigarette smoke and unwashed bodies to her.

  Damn, she thinks. The basura are habitually shiftless and lazy. Why this morning, of all mornings, do they have to send out a foot patrol? And why does it have to come this way?

  She moves a few meters away from the live beacon. Most of the little surprises she has sown into the woods surrounding the basura camp are too well-concealed for chance discovery by a resentful, inattentive patrol. But if somebody trips over the homing beacon, hell will truly be out for noon.

  She spots them, not thirty meters away and coming right at her: four of them, a woman and three men. Two actually have their assault rifles slung. Another carries his rifle by the foregrip, muzzle-down, like a good ol' boy coming back from a day's hunting.

  Naturally, their left-flank man, the one walking straight as Cassie, is the only one who looks as if he has a clue as to what he's about. A bandy-legged, bearded little guy in a filthy tan tunic, shorts, and outsized jungle boots, with a DCMS jungle képi on his head and his assault rifle at patrol position. He might even be a Drac deserter.

  The patrol slogs through a finger of marsh. Over the splashing, the woman's voice rises in a mosquito whine, complaining about the injustice of it all. Cassie grins. Keep bitchin', sister.

  She sidesteps, becoming one with a flowering shrub, waits. The man in Drac cast-offs passes right by the bush, managing to make at least a trifle less noise than an Atlas with a bad hip bearing.

  Making none, Cassie moves. Her left arm slides around his throat from behind, fingers clamping on the bearded chin and forcing his mouth shut. Her right pushes Blood-drinker through the side of his neck, a forehand stab. His body arches in agony. Keeping her grip, she pushes the wavy blade out the front of his neck in a god-awful gusher of blood.

  In the holovids people die quickly and quietly from knife wounds. It isn't so. Cassie pulls him back down with her, rolls him over onto his face so that any sound that manages to get out his mouth—or the hiss of air escaping from his violated trachea—will be swallowed by the spongy earth.

  His thrashings subside. Cassie poises atop him, listening, ready to spring up at the slightest hint that the man's comrades have overheard his death throes. They just keep grinding at each other, making more than enough noise to cover.

  "Cassie?" Diana says. "You all right? I heard a noise."

  She is scuttling on all fours back to the bush where she left her pack and assault rifle. "I'm fine, Diana. Tiburón? Abtakha."

  Cassie cleans the kris blade with a flick of her wrist, then sheathes it. She pulls a hand unit the size and shape of a personal communicator from her pack.

  "Tiburón here," someone answers. Deep and Spanish-inflected, it is the voice of a powerful man in late middle age. To Cassie's ear, it is also the voice of one both tired and sad. "Go ahead, Abtakha."

  "You ready?"

  The female basura has stopped twenty meters away. "Leo?" she says. "Leo, where'd you go?"

  "Affirmative, Abtakha," replies "Tiburón," otherwise known as Colonel Carlos Comacho, commander of the Seventeenth.

  The woman walks toward the shrub under which Leo's blood is pooling on already-saturated black dirt. "Where'd you get off to, Leo? You off takin' a leak somewhere?"

  Cassie flips open the hard plastic cover on the unit in her hand. "Then let's take out the trash," she says. She presses a button and all hell breaks loose.

  Numerous rockets suddenly hiss away from launchers concealed deep in the woods surrounding the basura encampment. Trailing streamers of white smoke, they arc across the clear blue sky and plunge into the dead lake, where they make big bangs and raise geysers of ugly water. It's all just pyrotechnics, mere skyrockets, but it sounds like an incoming barrage of long-range missiles.

  From the bushes near the scatter of hootches and dome tents erupts the sound of machine-gun fire, the boom of grenades. These are more fireworks, firefight simulators emplaced by Cassie on one of those midnight belly-crawls through the muck that have become her specialty on New Horizons. Pirates explode from the dwellings like so many quail. Some carry rifles, machine guns, rocket launchers. Others are shrugging on MechWarrior cooling vests as they dash for the lake.

  Cassie rolls up to one knee, bringing her M23 to her shoulder. Barefly four meters away, the woman stands gaping at her, rifle still slung. Tough luck. Cassie fires a single shot as her front sight rises past the buckle of the woman's cammie pants to bear on her bare midriff.

  The basura falls kicking and screaming. Even over the general commotion, the gunshot attracts her buddies' attention. They spin toward Cassie, fumbling to get their weapons to firing position. She chops them down with quick, slashing bursts.

  Cassie is no longer a poor shot. She's learned much in her time with the Regiment.

  She moves again to the brush on the verge of the lake to see that its surface has begun to boil. LRM simulators are continuing to sputter into it sporadically, but that's not what causes the disturbance: monsters are rising from the depths.

  Cassie smiles as a Locust springs forth in a shower of grimy spray. Lazy as they are, the pirates keep pilots in some of their submerged 'Mechs 'round the clock—as the NHDF found to their dismay on two disastrous raids before they gratefully signed the problem off to the mercs. The little hopper is still a good half-klick away, clockwise around the lake to Cassie's left. Not a problem yet.

  "They're rising to the bait," she calls in. "Right on schedule. Get ready, Diana. Everybody else stand by."

  She barely hears the acknowledgment. The surface has begun to churn for true. The big boys are rising, rising.

  Adrenaline sings like a demon lover in her ears. That fear, that age-old fear, is rising with the pirate 'Mechs. Cassie has never conquered her little-girl's fear, her three-year-old fear, but she has learned to use that fear. It is her companion in arms, her goad and her guide; it is blasting into her now like a happy-drug into the veins of a Clan Elemental in a ruptured battlesuit.

  A Quickdraw rises next, muck cascading from the sagittal crest fore-and-afting its round head, arms raised to pump dazzling laser pulses at phantom foes in the woods. Tree trunks explode in steam as the 'Mech rises high on its jump jets.

  Cassie laughs out loud. "Diana, fire for effect."

  "On the way, Cassie." Cool and confident in the cockpit of her hundred-ton 'Mech, Diana sometimes forgets to use call signs. It is appropriate that her style of warfare is to reach out and touch her foe from a distance
that never lets her see him die. She could not withstand Cassie's style of war, where an enemy's lifeblood mingles with the dirt you and he have rolled in to form sticky, black, iron-smelling mud.

  Diana's Arrow IV long-range missiles tear the sky as if it were a swatch of muslin. It is truly time to go; a short round will vaporize Cassie, leaving nothing but a memory. She doesn't care. She trusts Diana. And should a missile drop on her, it'll be over quick, ending Cassie's nightmares at last.

  Her heart is singing now. Because that's her 'Mech rising now: the Marauder whose filled-in print she came upon. The long autocannon mounted on top of its hunched head-torso, muzzle covered with a red polymer cap, swivels back and forth like a finger looking for someone to accuse as the monster climbs from the lake floor.

  "Yes," she whispers. "Yes."

  No. It is not to be. An Arrow IV from Diana's first salvo lands directly on the MAD-3R's head, bursting it open like a potato in a microwave. Cassie utters a jaguar scream of fury and frustration as the Marauder sinks, gushing smoke and steam and then bubbling as the water closes back over its shattered carapace.

  A rebel yell shrills in Cassie's ears as the Arrow thunder rises about her like a Larshan typhoon. "¡Santiago y adelante!" a man's voice yells. Saint James and at them! Coyote-yips and cries of "Ca-ba-lleros!" actually give the heavy warheads some competition. Somewhere Hachita chants his death-song as his Hatchetman wades down a bayou, axe hungering to split white-eye skulls. But at least he has the decency to do it offline.

  Commo discipline is not among the Caballeros' strong suits—nor are most other kinds of discipline. Nonetheless, the war-cries quickly subside to let combat traffic through.

  "First Battalion moving in," Tiburón says unnecessarily.

  "Time to clear out, Abtakha," Badlands adds.

  Cassie smiles. "Tiburón, make sure your people keep to the paths I marked," she says. There's not much soil in the Great Murchison firm enough to take the weight of even a small BattleMech. It's only because a shelf of bedrock lies under the lake bed that the outlaw 'Mechs can hide down there. That was one reason the government 'Mechs got themselves wasted wholesale when the NHDF tried to clean out the basura: the pirates had little beacons to mark usable trails. The Defense Force didn't. Their 'Mech jocks walked their machines into deep mud, then got mired while the basura slaughtered them.