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"I acknowledge your bravery," he said. An angry burn glowed on his right cheek, and if you looked close you could see his close-fitting black garb had dark stains here and there, but by and large he had come through the evening remarkably unscathed. "Also your resourcefulness and skill. Few men could have done what you did. And few would have been foolhardy enough to attempt it."

  With that something inside Cassie broke. She found herself on her feet, clinging to the redheaded man in black, sobbing uncontrollably as it all came flooding in on her: the shock of seeing Percy gunned down, the mad scramble across an icy roof, the narrow escape from the doomed BattleMaster. What she'd done was insane, arid yet she hadn't seen any other choice.

  Maybe that summed up the whole of her life, since that day on Larsha when a 'Mech destroyed her childhood.

  At first Ninyu Kerai stood there like a wooden plank, unyielding. Stiffly he raised a hand to the back of her head, then dropped it to her shaking shoulders. Incrementally he relaxed, until he was holding her almost as one normal person might hold another.

  And suddenly a hunger welled up in Cassie, a need for reassurance, a need to conquer fear—or at least come to terms with it, to call a temporary truce. She reached up and put her hands behind his head, drawing his face to hers. The blanket slithered to the ancient Bukhara carpet on the floor. Beneath it she was naked.

  For a moment he resisted, frowning. Then he locked his arms around her and kissed her with a savage intensity that would have terrified her had she not already been beside herself with emotions she could not name.

  5

  Jump Ship Finnegan's Wake

  Zenith Recharge Station Motor System

  Benjamin District, Draconis Combine

  10 November 3057

  "Chikusho!" Cassie cursed as she tore the neuro-helmet from her head. At the same time she hit the release of the safety harness holding her into the simulator. The violence of her motion spurted her out of the mechanism like a slow-motion cork from a bottle.

  As she shot past Lieutenant Senior Grade Bogdan Michael "Stacks" Stachiewski in the zero-gee of the DropShip repair bay, the Caballeros' chief armorer shook his head and rubbed his bearded chin. "Maybe you should try an easier mission."

  Floating in free-fall repose beside Stacks, languidly gripping a handhold welded to the bulkhead, Kali MacDougall made a long arm and snagged her furious friend. "Easy does it, hon," she said.

  Cassie just managed to contain the urge to bat the tall blonde woman's hand away. Instead she wriggled like a worm on a hook. Kali let her go with a shrug, and Cassie floated across the slight remainder of the compartment, reversing herself so her feet struck the bulkhead first, allowing her sinewy legs to soak up her momentum.

  Bobbing slightly in midair, she crossed her arms over her chest and frowned ferociously, the deep brown of her legs and midriff revealed by the cut-off T-shirt and black synthetic shorts that was all any pilot wanted to wear in the stifling heat of a 'Mech cockpit. Her black hair was done up in a complicated set of braids.

  After a—blessedly uneventful—year of garrison duty with HTE on Hachiman, the Seventeenth Recon Regiment was now on its way to a new assignment. Though they were still in the employ of Chandrasekhar Kurita, their destination was the world of Towne, a Davionist planet lying on the fringes of the Sarna March. For the past two months that embattled region of Federated Commonwealth space had been under invasion by the forces of Thomas Marik's Free Worlds League and the Capellan Confederation of Sun-Tzu Liao. Having caught Prince Victor Davion by surprise, Marik and Liao were swiftly retaking many of the planets the Prince's sire had seized from them in another surprise invasion thirty years before.

  Governments had been rising and falling, planets changing hands, rebellions failing and erupting, battles won and lost as a state of chaos overtook the region. The invaders had yet to penetrate as far as Towne, but Uncle Chandy's wholly proficient intelligence service believed the planet's respite was due to end soon. Towne's planetary ruler had already fled the world for the safety of Davion space. The Fifth Lyran Guards had also abandoned Towne to its fate, having lately returned to the Steiner half of the old Federated Commonwealth after Katrina Steiner-Davion called her loyal troops home.

  In the midst of all this, Towne had become the target of another enemy—renegade elements of the Draconis Combine Mustered Soldiery. And the job Uncle Chandy had assigned the Caballeros was simple: turn back a possible invasion by this renegade force.

  It was a desperate situation. Only Southwestern pride—and the most un-Kuritalike wages paid by Uncle Chandy—had persuaded Colonel Camacho to agree to take it on. Dread of what her adoptive family was getting itself into was eating Cassie alive, and she was trying to distract herself by continuing the informal MechWarrior training she'd been taking sporadically since her impromptu turn in the BattleMaster at poor Percy's final do.

  "That damned Uller just popped out of nowhere and blasted me from half a klick away," she said.

  Stacks scratched a broad cheek. "Well, you insisted on piloting a Jenner. That Alternate-A Uller's extended-range medium lasers have half again the range of your medium and short-range missiles, and its Gauss rifle has about two-and-a-half. Face it, Cass, not too many seasoned 'Mech pilots from the Inner Sphere care to take on a Clan Omni with only a five-ton advantage."

  "I have to be the best," Cassie snapped, realizing as she said it how foolish she sounded. "Otherwise, why even try?"

  "Are you setting yourself up to fail?" Lady K asked gently.

  Cassie felt her cheeks grow hot. "I—" she began, raising a hand knotted to a fist. "I don't know. I don't think so. I don't want to be coddled or eased along. That'll do me no good when things start turning real."

  Stacks hung in midair, secured to a handhold by a half-meter of line unreeled from a spool clipped onto his crowded utility belt. He was a short, stocky man with thinning curly brown hair. He wore his customary faded yellow jumpsuit, open to reveal a white tee-shirt and grizzled chest hair.

  "You could try moving up to a larger ride," he suggested. "The Shadow Hawk's a good one, though maybe a little tricky for a novice. And there's always the good old BattleMaster, like the one you snagged us back on Hachiman. That 'Mech just about pilots itself."

  "No! I don't like big 'Mechs."

  "You don't like any 'Mechs," Kali observed.

  "Cassie," Stacks said, taking a rag from his back pocket and scrubbing imaginary propellant residue from his square capable hands, "you've got thirty-five confirmed kills to your credit, counting those three from poor Percy's Christmas party. That's a score any Mech Warrior would be proud of. You've destroyed more BattleMechs more or less barehanded than anyone in history, so far as I know, and I know a lot. Maybe you should stick to what you're comfortable with."

  Cassie turned away—a futile gesture in this confined space—leaving her with her snub nose a handspan from the yellowing buff paint that covered the metal bulkhead. For one thing, it was something of an overstatement to say she was comfortable with anything in her life—a fact that Kali MacDougall had done a lot to help her change in the last year and a half, to her frequent irritation.

  She knew why she'd given in to the urging of many Caballero MechWarriors and begun training in 'Mech piloting herself. Ever since pirate 'Mechs had destroyed her family, home, and childhood she'd been obsessed with hunting and killing the metal monsters. That entailed learning everything she could about them. Including, to her vast distaste, how to operate one herself.

  She found that sentiment impossible to articulate. Not to Stacks, though he was calm and non-judgmental for a male Southwesterner. She could talk about it to Kali, and had; she would have been able to discuss it with Patsy Camacho, the Colonel's daughter, the one truly elite MechWarrior the regiment had ever boasted. But the Smoke Jaguars had killed la Capitana on Jeronimo. Don Carlos himself hadn't taken Patricia's death much harder than Cassie did.

  Cassie had never found it easy to talk about herself. Patsy's abandonment had mad
e it all the harder.

  "Call it pride, Stacks," she heard Lady K say, "and let it go."

  "Sure, Kali. Uh—want to do some zero-gee handball sometime?"

  "I'd love to," Kali said, "if you'd actually remember to show up."

  Stacks laughed ruefully. "Well, something always has a way of coming up. But I mean to do it." He patted his paunch. "That should count for something, shouldn't it?"

  Cassie gathered her legs and pushed off gently for the hatch.

  * * *

  She floated in narrow spaces between monsters.

  The 'Mechs of First Battalion stood in their cocoons within the main bay of the Overlord Class DropShip Tokugawa Iyeyasu, ranked in six tiers of six around a central well. Cassie liked to come in here when she wanted to feel the nearness of people, lafamilia, without actually having to deal with anybody.

  The six 'Mech decks were alive with activity above her and below: people gambling, arguing, snoring, laughing, singing off-key to the music that blared from the score of personal players—country, mariachi, or heavy metal, reflecting the tastes of the Southwestern Worlds' three dominant cultures—or in competition with it, as circumstances went. Now and then a dog barked in hopes of being let out of its padded carrying-cage for a null-gee romp, or a hungry baby cried peevishly until its mother, preoccupied with gossip or the work of keeping the vast organism that was the regiment alive or—most likely, both—could unlimber a breast and pop it into its mouth. Notable for its absence was the happy racket of children at play; the young Caballeros spent most of their time in the half-gee environment of the JumpShip's ever-rotating gravity deck, lest weeks in weightlessness hamper musculoskeletal development.

  The deck space unoccupied by massive 'Mech feet, the ship's round hull, even the giant metal men themselves were crusted with lumps of possessions secured by colorful polyfiber nets. Wash-water was rationed on a JumpShip in transit, and laundry, mostly underwear, was stretched out to dry on lines that ran from 'Mech to 'Mech, making the Iyeyasu's 'Mech bay look inhabited by a gigantic spider with garish taste in decoration.

  More than anything the scene resembled a boisterous, crowded tenement on a none-too-prosperous Inner Sphere world.

  Unlike Wolf's Dragoons, the Caballeros didn't have a planethold of their own. Nor would they leave their noncombatants behind as tenants on the Dragoon world of Outreach. They hailed predominantly from the Marik planets of Cerillos, Galisteo, and Sierra, the so-called Trinity of Southwestern Worlds, once the bandit Intendancy of New New Grenada. For reasons generally having to do with the Free Worlds League's current politics, religion, or criminal justice system, few of them were willing or able to return home. Instead the regiment took its families, and its home, with it wherever it went. Even crammed into the nooks and crannies of the overcrowded JumpShip Finnegan's Wake and the three great DropShips that clung to it like bloated young.

  Thus the Seventeenth Recon was lafamilia, the family, which Cassie—Combine-born, Liao-reared—could never entirely be part of, and which she could never be entirely separate from. She could not survive without her family. Nor would it have survived without her.

  She floated upward, through bands of smell: cooking, heavy on oil and garlic; cheap tobacco; imperfectly washed bodies, to the bay's uppermost deck. To her left stood the fearsome shape of a Mad Cat, very symbol of Clan military might, its blunt-pointed snout painted with a shark smile. This was Great White, Don Carlos Camacho's personal ride, the machine that had killed his daughter Patsy on Jeronimo. Next to it stood what appeared to be another Clan OmniMech, an 80-ton Naga. But it wasn't what it seemed—quite.

  Bungees were strung across the central well to serve as maneuver lines, and of course had been coopted as clotheslines. Cassie grabbed one and let it snap her gently toward the assault 'Mech's head, between the flanges of its torso that swelled at the ends into boxy Arrow-IV missile launchers. Two figures clad in the tan jumpsuits of the regiment Technical Support team floated beside the open cockpit. One was a tall, skeletally thin man with big, round, bottle-bottom glasses, skin so pale it was almost blue, and dark blond hair cropped in a bad brush-cut that made his tall cylindrical head look as if moths had been at it. He held this unprepossessing appendage thrust forward and down, in front of curiously hunched shoulders.

  As Cassie approached, air friction slowing her to near-motionlessness, the tall man pulled his head out of the open cockpit and swiveled it to look at her. The lenses of his glasses made his blue eyes alarmingly huge.

  "Go away, Lieutenant Suthorn," he said in the flat urban-Cowboy twang of Cerillos. "We're busy here right now."

  Kiss my fanny, Astro Zombie, Cassie wanted to say, but quashed the impulse. She knew it would be wasted on Captain Marshal Harris, the Caballeros' prickly Chief Tech.

  The other jumpsuited figure looked up from a comp pad, dark face lighting with a smile. "What Captain Harris means to say is we're glad you stopped by, Cassie," said Mariska Savage. "He's just a bit frustrated right now."

  Cassie grinned back. She liked Risky Savage, who in a little less than a year had worked her way to the position of Astro Zombie's chief assistant. But then, Risky wasn't a BattleMech jock.

  Astro Zombie glared at the intruder a moment longer, then grunted and peered back into the cockpit again. Risky gave Cassie a wink behind his back. She was widely credited in the Seventeenth with actually beginning to civilize the truculently nerdish Chief Tech, though Cassie didn't see much evidence of it. She was also claimed to be sleeping with him, having let her liaison with Father Doctor Bob García—to the Jesuit MechWarrior's intense relief—lapse to purely friendly status. Cassie neither bothered to confirm nor deny the rumors; she never involved herself in the comprehensive Caballero gossip-net in any way.

  Comfortably ensconced in a papoose-pouch slung around her mother's midriff by a wide elastic band, Tech Support's newest member, Roberta Archi Savage, snored softly and drooled onto the little stuffed lamb that Uncle Chandy had personally bestowed on her as a parting gift.

  "Cassie?" A woman leaned out from the other side of the open cockpit into which Astro Zombie was leaning and gave Cassie a wave and a radiant smile. She had brown skin, big dark eyes, heavy black hair tied back with a red bandanna from a face as beautiful and serene as a Renaissance Madonna's. "How are you today—if we can call this daytime."

  "Fine, Diana," Cassie said. Lieutenant Senior Grade Diana Vásquez was an atypical Mech Warrior, and Cassie got along with her well enough. But then, everybody got along with her. She was sweet and pious without being cloying; the Caballeros would have called her virginal but for the evidence of her four-year-old son Marcos—and at that, the joke ran, you still couldn't be too sure.

  Despite her demure manner Diana Vásquez was commander of long-range artillery support for the Seventeenth. For years she'd reached out and touched the Caballeros' enemies—Dracs, Clanners, pirates, the Ninth Ghost Legion—with the seriously heavy hand of her Catapult's Arrow IV missiles. Though customarily she operated far behind the striking-tip of the Seventeenth's 'Mech forces, she was one of the most respected Mech Warriors in the regiment. Because even when enemy machines flowed past the front ranks—no rare event on the fluid modern battlefield—she was always calm and on call, always ready with the power, even if dueling for her life with her Catapult's medium lasers, or leaping out of danger on the 'Mech's jump jets.

  But the world turned, and sometimes on its head. Diana had begun to spend a great deal of time in the company of Coronel Camacho, el patrón himself, and tongues were wagging to the effect that they weren't just lighting candles to the saints together.

  "Still can't get the thing to work, huh," Cassie said.

  Diana grinned and shrugged. "A few bugs to work out."

  "Torso actuator's jammed," Risky offered. "The beast might as well be in a body cast." Astro Zombie pulled his head out of the cockpit.

  "Shoddy Drac workmanship," he said. "Luthien Armor Works bit off more than they could chew when they decided to t
ackle Clan-tech."

  "Don't mix metaphors, Marshal," Risky said sweetly.

  Astro Zombie blinked at her. She was the only person in the Seventeenth who used his given name. He went back to work.

  Cassie grabbed the cockpit's nose, gave herself an easy push, floated down the sharp keel-like torso to the BattleMech's midriff. The faulty actuator's upper armature had been removed, exposing myomer pseudo-muscle bundles skeined around the endo-steel skeleton. A small man floated next to the assembly, probing ganglia tangles of gaudy wire with non-conducting polymerized-ceramic forceps. He was stripped to the waist, displaying a large Virgin of Guadalupe tattooed on his muscled chest and washboard stomach.

  "Odale, prima," he said, mustached Mongol-looking face splitting in a grin in response to Cassie's greeting. "¿Quipasa?"

  "Astro Zombie says the culebras aren't up to imitating Clan technology." Culebra was the Caballero version of "Snake," a standard epithet for the Dragon-worshipping Kuritas.

  "Zuma" Gallegos, Chief Aztech—as the 'lleros spelled it—for the Seventeenth, snorted and shook his head. "The Zombie's blowing smoke again. The Dracs can be pretty sloppy, but the Luthien Armor Works boys aren't gonna mess up with Coordinator Teddy peering over their shoulders. This is one 'Mech where all the seams are welded tight, and all the nuts dogged down real good."

  "What do you think's the matter?" Despite her desultory attempts at learning to be a 'Mech pilot, Cassie was mainly interested in what made them not work.

  He laughed. His black hair, straight and cut short, was dusted with gray, as was his mustache. But he had that ageless quality a lot of Southwesterners shared, especially if they had indio blood: he could have been in his twenties or in his fifties or anywhere between.

  "Mice," he said.

  "¿Mande?"

  "The Luthien boys were careful as could be when they built this puppy," Zuma said. "But no matter where you go in the Combine, you got mice. Even on Hachiman where they got robots to cook their rice and live mannequins in the department-store windows. And mice love to nibble on insulation."