Close quarters Page 8

  In this case family tradition had let Tex down. Feliks Dzerzhinskiy was the tractor factory, not Red October. Good thing Father Bob wasn't there to set the record straight, or the honor of Texas and the Gorchakov clan might have undergone further battering.

  "Come on, you guys," came Gavilan Camacho's voice. "Clamp it down."

  "Yeah," Lady K added smoothly. "If your mouths are shut, there's a bigger chance your eyes'll be open. And there's plenty to see."

  Gabby grunted. The Cowgirl's contribution had made him sound more like a leader and less like a whiny child, but he didn't like it.

  Too smooth, Cassie thought in relation to MacDougall. She herself had never stopped looking. Lady K was right again, curse her cornflower-blue eyes. There was a lot to see.

  Cassie knew little about modern manufacturing, and wasn't sure exactly what it was HTE made, other than consumer electronics. She was seeing ranks of long, low buildings that she guessed should be fabrication and assembly structures, but there, off to the left—north—were big, tall hangar-like structures that screamed 'Mech in Cassie's mind.

  What gets matched to the monsters in there? she wondered. Commo? Guidance systems? Control systems? She didn't know. HTE wasn't usually listed as a big military supplier for the Combine. Which just went to show how difficult it was for even the best of the Inner Sphere's intelligence agencies to infiltrate operatives into the Combine. But here, big as life, it looked like you could just climb up to the fourth floor of half a hundred buildings and see the damn sheds, she thought.

  It gave her a chilly little feeling. She was, in a sense, coming home. But it was not a comforting thought.

  Ahead loomed a building shaped like an ancient Japanese castle, with rising tiers and swept, pagoda-style roof-ends. Kurita-kitsch for true, in dark maroon marble veined with gold. Unlike the classic Japanese fortress, which was not intended for easy entrance, this structure had broad steps leading up to a huge doorway with a writhing dragon carved over it.

  Standing at the top of those steps was a fat, bald man in a resplendent scarlet robe. Over that he wore a dark purple vest with dragons embroidered on both breasts and with shoulders that swept out like extravagant wings. Behind him the bronze doors were carved in the same pattern as the main gates.

  The man looked like a decadent Buddha, and as she approached, Cassie could see that he was smiling immensely, as if he had just bet on a Taurian cook's apprentice against Kai Allard-Liao in the Solaris games, and the cook had won.

  Next to him stood an immensely tall thin stork of a man, with long, grave features and receding gray hair. Dressed in conservative gray and mauve, this one looked like a typical Drac elder executive. Rapacious enough in his natural boardroom environment, and harmless outside it.

  Or, so he would appear to most eyes. Cassie's gray-blue ones sized him differently. Chief killer, she thought, as she wheeled her MiG into position flanking the foot of the steps, as she had been briefed to do.

  In spite of everything, she couldn't resist hot-dogging a little. Reaching her assigned spot, she locked up her front tire and threw her slight weight forward over the bars, lifting the thick, cleated rear tire right off the pavement. Balanced on the front wheel, she swung herself 180 degrees around and dropped back down with barely a thump of rubber on asphalt.

  She glanced at the blue boy standing nearest, an arm-stretch away on her left. If his eyes had so much as flickered at her bravura display, she couldn't say. He might as well have been cast in concrete.

  Some mighty strak sons of bitches, she thought. On parade.

  Let's see if they shatter when the hammer comes down.

  Just shy of the foot of the steps, the Colonel's Great White came to a halt. The Mad Cat knelt down like a trained elephant as a hundred powder-blue warriors presented arms, twirled them in salute, then clapped them to their shoulders. The hatch unsealed with a hiss, and Colonel Camacho proceeded to climb down to the ground.

  At the foot of his monster, he stood there a moment, a dark-skinned, stocky man with receding black hair shot through with gray, an ash-flecked brush of mustache, and heavy bags beneath his soulful brown eyes. A ranchero to the bone, bandy-legged, with a potbelly hanging over his belt. But full of dignity, and giving the appearance of calm, quiet strength.

  That appearance was a shell, Cassie knew. Touch him in the right way and it would all crumble and blow away as if his aura of strength were molded from a thin film of ash. He had been strong once, strong as the wind-carved mesas of his native Galisteo. But the strength had been scooped out of him.

  He's our mind and soul, she thought. Too bad the tigres cut our heart out on Jeronimo.

  Two 'Mechs came to a halt winged out on either side of Great White and just behind. One of them was Gabby's Shadow Hawk. The other, moving somewhat stiffly, was an Atlas borrowed for the occasion. It discharged the Colonel's chief aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Colonel Marisol Cabrera. La Dama Muerte, she was called: the Lady Death. Small, wiry, her features age-lined but still attractive, her hair auburn frosted with white. She was 'Mech-qualified but not current.

  From it also climbed a tall, lean figure with an incipient paunch spoiling the lines of his flawless dress uniform, white with maroon trinu old-gold collar, and jackboots. This was Lieutenant Gordon Baird—"Gordo"—the Regiment's S2. His face was well-weathered, his hair silver, and he looked grand as hell.

  They marched forward to take up formation on Don Carlos: Gabby at his right shoulder, the Lady Death at his left—the latter shooting Cassie a poisoned look behind the Colonel's back for that little show there at the end—Gordo Baird looming behind. As Don Carlos approached the steps, the others followed close behind.

  At the foot of the broad steps Camacho stopped. "I am Colonel Carlos Camacho, commander of the Seventeenth Reconnaissance Battalion, patrón of the hacienda of Vado Ancho and Knight of Galisteo." He knelt. "My people and I are at your service."

  The fat man in the robe beamed even more broadly, which Cassie would have sworn was impossible. "I am Chandra-sekhar Kurita, Chief Executive Officer of Hachiman Taro Enterprises," he said in a soft and pleasant voice. "This is the Mirza Peter Abdulsattah, my chief of security."

  The tall man beside him nodded his long thin head. His features were as ascetically drawn as his master's were round, his nose aquiline, his eyes dark and heavy-lidded.

  "It is my great pleasure," the Kurita said, "to bid you welcome, Colonel."

  He turned with a sweeping gesture of his scarlet-clad left arm. Somewhere a gong bonged. The great doors swung open.

  Stately slow, Chandrasekhar Kurita entered his stronghold. His old retainer and his new ones followed him in.

  9

  Masamori, Hachiman

  Galedon District, Draconis Combine

  27 August 3056

  It was a working-class bar two streets down Tai-sho Dalton Way and around the corner from the main gates of the HTE Compound. A handful of men and women in drab Laborer's garb looked up from their bottles of Borstal Boy beer as the door blew open as to a mighty wind.

  Standing there was a tall, skinny gaijin in a leather jacket and baggy camouflage trousers, his thumbs hooked into a web gunbelt. On the heel of his right boot he wore a single silver spur. The outlandish figure's prominent Adam's apple traveled up and down with great deliberation as he tipped the toothpick he was chewing upward until it almost touched his long gaijin nose.

  "Howdy," he said, and stepped inside the Permissible Repose Lounge.

  He was followed at once by a mob of outside-folk, dressed with the studied roughneck casualness of the off-duty MechWarrior. The newcomers drifted to the bar and unoccupied tables and set the proprietor's three chubby daughters hopping to fill their drink orders. Being a gaijin mercenary was thirsty work, it seemed.

  Tinkly music and shrill-sweet adolescent girl voices bubbled out of the musicbox in the corner. Images of the group, a current fave from Luthien called Purple Tailfeathers, danced upon the box's top with uncanny hologram precis
ion: three adolescent girls, seeming to consist entirely of long legs, white teeth, big eyes, black bangs, and the eponymous purple feathers, alike as clones. It was what entertainment was coming to under the new relaxed regime. There were some who said the old dragon Takashi was turning over in his grave.

  The sentiment seemed to be shared by the dark-haired gangly gaijin who'd violated the sanctity of the Permissible Repose. He went stilting over to the box and leaned his forearms right through the dancing doll-figures. He stood listening for a moment, his long gaijin upper lip curled in contempt. A moment more and he banged a fist down on the box.

  Purple Tailfeathers missed a beat. A scan line flickered through their images. He struck again, harder, and the little-girl ensemble went wherever things like that go when they finally stop.

  "Evenin'," the gaijin said. "Name's Cowboy. Y'all can call me sir. I'm declarin' this here boom box to be the o-ficial property of Radio Station KATN."

  With the abrupt demise of Purple Tailfeathers, a few of the burlier Workers had started to their feet. Cowboy fixed them one at a time with the briefest of glances. "Y'all got a problem with that?"

  The Workers one and all sat down. No, it seemed; there was no problem.

  "Good," Cowboy said with a happy-goofy nod and grin. "Now, Zuma, whyn't you straighten out Mr. Barkeep over there on a thing or three. Like gettin' us some real tunes in here."

  The intruders raised glasses and bottles and cheered. A few of them also threw back their heads in coyote-yips or trilling cries that ended with a nasalized "aft-ha!" A drink of water even longer than the one called Cowboy, with a single long braid extending down his back from otherwise close-cropped blond hair, rocked the walls of the Repose with a rousing rebel yell.

  A little bandy-legged man with a neat black mustache and Mongol eyes, who had entered a few steps behind the herd in the company of a striking young woman with a long black braid, detached himself from his companion and walked over to where the bartender stood wringing his hands in his apron. The barkeep and proprietor was a tall, stoop-shouldered man with a long, saggy face and a tic that twitched the outside of his starboard epicanthic fold. Tonight it was fluttering like a shopman's awning in a stiff breeze. The Mongol-looking stranger touched him on the arm, then spoke with smiling earnestness.

  After a few moments, the publican's eyelid almost ceased to flutter. He called for his stock boy, sent him scuttling out the back door into the alley. Then he straightened and looked around, and you could see him totaling the night's take by the gleam rising in his eye—despite the fact that most of the regulars had by now found cracks in the tatami-covered wood floor and sort of dissolved away through them.

  Having finished his musicbox oration, Cowboy Payson hung an arm tipped by a bottle of Borstal Boy over the bush jacket-clad shoulders of Archie Westin. "So whaddaya think, Limey?" the MechWarrior asked.

  A slight smile twitched the ends of Westin's mustache. "I think you lot certainly know how to make an entrance."

  Cowboy laughed. "That's what it's all about, ain't it? Making your entrances count—and your exits, too."

  He guided the reporter to the bar, against which Sawbuck Evans—the tall blond man with the tail—leaned with a bottle of Hotei Black Label whiskey clutched in his scarred fist. Beside him sat a third Cowboy, bearded to the others' cleanshaven but equally tall and lean. Tipped back over a mass of taffy-colored curls was a straw hat with a tattered red firebird feather stuck in the band.

  "Right now, son," Payson said to Archie, who guessed the Caballero as maybe a year older than him, "I wanna introduce you to my brawlin' buddies Buck Evans and Rebel Perez."

  He clapped the bearded man on the shoulder. "Don't let the name fool you, gringo. Old Reb here's a Jewboy through and through."

  Archie felt his eyebrows crawl like blond caterpillars toward his hairline. "Jewboy?"

  "Jewish Cowboys," Buck said. "Worst of a bad lot—mean as a Nova Cat who just found out he had a mother."

  Reb touched the lip of his beer bottle to the brim of his hat. "Howdy," he said, in a voice like sand in a BattleMaster's hip actuator.

  "A pleasure," Archie said faintly.

  "You're lucky old Cowboy dragged you away from Father Doctor Bob," Buck said. "He'll bend a body's ear till it breaks if you let him."

  "By the way," Archie asked, "what do the letters 'KATN' stand for?"

  "Kick Ass—" Cowboy began.

  "—and Take Names," Rebel finished for him.

  "Now," Cowboy said, "we're gonna buy you some drinks, and then we're gonna teach you how to talk to us Southwestern sons and daughters of bitches."

  * * *

  Holding a bottle of Hotei Black Label by the neck, Cassie left Zuma talking to the barkeep. Gentling the man like a frightened horse was more like it. She headed for the corner table, over by the currently quiescent musicbox.

  As she was passing by, the Federated Commonwealth reporter with the blond hair and mustache came marching up to the bar where some of the norteño Mech Warriors stood drinking and swapping lies, then said, right into the dark and handsome face of Macho Alvarado, "Odale, cabron," in a horribly bright voice.

  Macho turned ashy-pale. The next thing he had a knife in hand, slashing for the reporter's startled face.

  The next thing was his skinny butt thumping on the rice-paper mats on the floor as Cassie, still holding her bottle, swept his legs from under him with a kick.

  To those who later told the tale, Cassie reacted with her almost-mystical mongoose quickness. Since she never belied any of the legends about her, she never tried to set the record straight. The real reason she'd been able to respond so quickly when Macho pulled that knife, rattlesnake fast, was that she'd already been responding to what the stupid gringo had said. She'd known what Macho was going to do even before he did.

  In an instant she was straddling the raging 'Mech jock with a forearm bar to the throat. "Macho, shut up and listen to me!" she shouted over his torrent of abuse in Spanish, English, and a couple of Indian tongues. "The pendejo gringo didn't know what he was saying. He was set up!"

  Macho gathered himself. Cassie weighed maybe forty-five kilos even with her long hair full of water; he could outright launch her with one good buck. She read his body language, crossed the forearm bar with her other arm, got a good grip on the collar of his leather jacket, and blipped him out with a sleeper hold.

  Then she climbed off him, picking up her bottle from where she'd set it upright on the floor as she went into the sweep. "Chango," she said to the nearest of the now-sleeping Mech Warrior's buddies, "get him the foxtrot out of here. If he's still feeling peckish later, he can look me up. But if he messes with the gringo again he's gonna be eating Sierra Madre oysters for breakfast, and he knows where they're gonna come from."

  Chango was a young stud as tough and full of himself as Macho was. But he just nodded and said, "Sure, Cassie," in a perfectly polite voice.

  As Chango and friends scooped up Macho and dragged him out the door, Cassie turned to survey the Permissible Repose with eyes gone sky-blue. She caught sight of Cowboy Payson, Buck Evans, and Reb Perez sitting a ways down the bar, looking anywhere but at her, the very pictures of innocence.

  They didn't so much as glance at her as she marched up and plunked her bottle on the bar. "Which one of you yokels pulled that little stunt on the Feddie?"

  Payson was sitting on a stool between his cronies with elbows braced on the bar, hanging his bony face over a beer bottle. "Shoot, Cassie, I sure don't know what you're talking about—"

  She kicked the stool out from under him. Payson's face banged the bar edge as he went down. Cassie's right hand caught him by his unruly brown hair.

  As Evans stood to face her, Cassie's left hand came up, and all at once Blood-drinker was pricking the lanky blond Cowboy's Adam's apple.

  Evans held his palms up. "Hey, no troubles, Abtakha."

  "Damned straight. What got into you pinheads? If we kill off a gringo holoreporter, it'll make the
Colonel look bad."

  Despite her grip on his hair, Cowboy was trying to rise. Not too successfully, because his feet were tangled in the stool legs. He was feeling his face. "HDLC, Cassie," he whined, "what'd you have to go and do that for? You busted my damn nose."

  "No, I didn't." With a quick savage thrust, she rammed his face into the bar again. There was a resounding crack.

  "Now I did."

  "Owww!" Cowboy wailed as he collapsed and covered his face with his hands. Blood streamed between the fingers.

  Cassie glared at Buck Evans, who shook his head and stepped back. She tossed a glance toward Reb on Payson's far side. He just sat there chuckling into his beer. The kris went away.

  "Come on," Cassie said to Archie. "Before I have to incapacitate any more of our manpower." She recovered her bottle and walked away.

  "That gal wants me!" Cowboy sang out after her back. "This just goes to prove it. Oww."

  She turned and gave him a feral smile. "Keep dreaming, Payson. Your own right hand would reject you, if it could figure out a way to chew its way free of your arm."

  The audience applauded as the bolt struck home. Cowboy's blood-streaked face became a stricken mask. "You mean I'm ... coyote ugly?" he said in tones of over-amped tragedy.

  "You got it, Red Rider."

  Cowboy clutched himself over the heart with both bloody hands, fell back onto a stool with his back against the bar. "Shot through the heart!" he exclaimed. Cassie turned away. Payson swiveled to drop both elbows on the bar, covered his broken nose with his hands, and moaned.