Текст книги "Natural Selection"

Автор книги: Michael A. Stackpole

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15

Zhongshan

Federated Commonwealth

13 May 3055

 

Nelson Geist looked up as the Red Corsair entered the room he'd been assigned at the temporary raider base on Zhongshan. She wore an olive jumpsuit similar to the one draped over the foot of his bed. Even by the half-light coming through the open window, he could see the red stain already beginning to show near her left shoulder. He could also smell a cooling vest coolant leak.

Her eyes blazed. "How dare you!"

"Dare what?" He tore his blanket back, and despite being naked, stood to oppose her.

"You told people I ordered the diversion" of foodstuffs to a ComStar hideout south of here."

"I did." Images of his grandsons hovered in the back of his mind. "The food you take feeds us slaves. That ComStar center was being converted into a home for orphans. I sent the food because we can't use all we have liberated here and you were going to put the rest to the torch."

The Red Corsair struck without warning. Her stinging backhanded slap knocked him back onto the bed. Lunging forward and straddling his chest, she pinned his arms to the bed with her knees. "I am the leader here. You are less than nothing. If you give orders in my name, they will be obeyed. If you give false orders in my name, you will be punished."

Nelson tasted salty-sweet blood from his split lip. "I understand. Punish me, then, if you want. Make war with me, not children."

"I do not make war on children," she spat out contemptuously. "We have slain all the warriors worthy of the name on Zhongshan. I would have slain you if you had made the warrior's choice." She slapped him again. "You are a freebirth nothing. I have ordered the orphanage razed."

Fury pumped power into his muscles. His stomach knotted and he heaved upward. The Corsair leaned forward to use her weight to keep him pinned, but the movement allowed him to slip his right arm free instead. He struck out blindly at her head, but the blow missed, and he ended up driving his steel bracelet into the wound in her shoulder.

Coolant mixed with blood splashed up from the wound. The Corsair slid off his chest and fell back on the floor. She landed hard, with a thump, then lay there with her knees drawn up and her head lolling to the right.

Nelson sat up on the bed, then slid to his knees beside her. He reached up with blood-spattered fingers to snap on the bedside lamp, then tore open her jumpsuit and saw the hole in the cooling vest. A jagged piece of shrapnel had slashed open at least three coolant lines. The fluorescent yellow-green liquid oozed from the tubes and mixed with blood to become the color of a squished caterpillar.

"Stupid warrior." Nelson stripped the jumpsuit down to her waist and tied the sleeves around her like a belt. He unlaced the cooling vest and tossed it aside too. Then he tore a chunk of cloth from the sheets, using it to dab away at the wound. It looked fairly clean, but Nelson knew that told only part of the story. While coolant might keep a warrior alive in the cockpit, the stuff was only slightly less toxic than snake venom if taken internally.

He tore off another piece of cloth and wadded it into the wound. The Corsair moaned in pain, and he was half-tempted to make sure it was set in place very well, but he refrained. She might not think of me as a warrior, but that's what I am. Torture is not part of the job—at least not for me.

Lifting the Corsair up bodily, Nelson placed her carefully on the bed. Next he stepped quickly into his jumpsuit and boots, then wrapped her in his blanket and picked her up again. He carried her out to the elevator and down two floors to ground level at the Zhongshan Militia base. Back to the right and around the corner, and he reached the infirmary the raiders had appropriated.

A raider doctor looked up. "What is this, now?"

"The Red Corsair. She took shrapnel in the shoulder." Nelson kicked an interior door open and laid her down on a paper-swathed examining table. "She's been getting coolant in the wound. You'll want to wash it and start chelating agents to get rid of the coolant."

The doctor, who had followed Nelson into the room, reached for a wallphone. "I will have to inform Bryan that he is now in command."

Nelson pulled the man forward with his good hand and shoved him around toward the table. "I will call Bryan and give him the news. You just take care of her."

Nelson wasn't surprised when a pair of armed guards came to escort him to the DropShip's infirmary. If she had come for him, Nelson knew that the Red Corsair would have shot him on the spot. He knew she'd never assign that job to anyone else; these two were probably called in just so she'd have somebody to haul his body away. When they came for him, he signed to Spider not to wait up for him, then followed the guards without comment.

The guards stopped at the door to the Red Corsair's private room. She looked up at the sound and nodded for Nelson to enter. He went in alone and the hatch closed behind him.

The Red Corsair looked haggard, the chelating agents having given her flesh a grayish cast. Nelson knew from practical experience that the drugs made the patient nauseous, which was a horrible way to endure the rigors of blasting away from a planet. Moreover, leaving a world under greater than one gravity's acceleration was tough even when a passenger was in the best of health.

Her eyes remained bright even though they had a tendency to linger in one place for too long. "I trust you do not expect gratitude."

"What I expect is immaterial." Nelson held his head high and clasped his hands at the small of his back. "A brush with death has not changed you."

"A warrior would have left me to die." She glanced through the viewport and the world receding in it. "You could have been long gone and we would never have found you."

"I did not know, at the time, that the Wolf Clan had a unit on your trail or that they had arrived at the nadir jump point." Nelson kept his voice even and somewhat distracted. "Had I run, your people would have hunted me down on Zhongshan until they found me."

"Had you known you could have escaped, would you have taken that chance?"

"That is a hypothetical question. What's the point in worrying about it now? What is done is done."

She slammed her right fist into the bed. "No! It is not done." Her eyes burned with an angry light and tracked him carefully. "It's not a hypothetical question, Nelson, and I know the answer to it. The answer is no. You would never have left me there."

Is she right?He shook his head, as much in answer to his internal question as to contradict her statement. "Never is too absolute. I could have left you there."

"No." She remained adamant. "It is your weakness, you people of the Inner Sphere. You cling to the warped view that compassion toward the enemy makes you morally superior. If you cannot win by force ofarms, you can claim a moral victory by doing something kind and sweet and honest for those who subjugate you. And you can atone for the savagery of your attack by having mercy on its survivors."

The speech left her breathless, but Nelson said nothing to fill the void. The words rang true to him. Compassion to the vanquished and the weak was lauded as a traditional value. Even the fierce martial society of the Draconis Combine held that the wise man could balance ninjoand giri,compassion and duty. The Federated Commonwealth clung to the same ideals in the twin facets of medieval chivalry embodied by King Arthur, Frederick the Great, and other heroes from millennia before.

It struck him that while the militaristic traditions of the Inner Sphere sought to balance these two concepts, the Clans had stripped away compassion in their drive to create the perfect soldiers. Ultimately, Nelson acknowledged, a warrior who could kill quickly and without remorse would be superior. He would also become a nihilistic machine that killed and killed until he was stopped or until he had reduced everything to anarchy and death.

He realized that this singleness of purpose was what had attracted him to the Red Corsair and also what made her repulsive. By abandoning compassion perhaps she showed him what he might have become had destiny not maimed him, had he never been forced to hold back. She was at the pinnacle of what he had once hoped to achieve when dreaming of glory as a warrior. He thought he had grown beyond those dreams, maturing along with his understanding of compassion, but someone inside of him– the hunter, the stalker—hungered for release.

Yet Nelson feared that release. He hated the lack of control and was afraid that he would fail and die. He also feared what he would do in the throes of a killing frenzy. War was brutal enough without any brakes on the savagery. Because he feared the hunter within himself, it repelled him to see his secret desires reflected in the Red Corsair's eyes.

Her voice returned in a harsh croak. "Bryan reported to me that he successfully countermanded my order to have the orphanage destroyed. He commended you on your diligence in passing my final order on to him."

Nelson managed to keep the smile off his face.

The Red Corsair pushed herself higher up in the bed. "I have not told him that you duped him. If I did, he would demand your death in a Circle of Equals. I will not allow that."

"Afraid Bryan would die?"

She laughed hoarsely. "Success makes you cocky, Nelson. No, Bryan would rip your heart out and let it drip blood into your eyes as you died." She closed her eyes and smiled in pleasure at the prospect. "But you have given me a tool to use against Bryan, and you are the sop I can throw him if I need to deflect him."

"That explains why he will not get to fight me." Nelson watched her closely. "Now why will I not get to fight him?"

"Because you would like to die to escape me, quiaff?"

She paused and caught her breath. "You saved me so I would be in your debt, then you disobeyed me so I would have you destroyed. I can read you too well, Nelson."

"You assign me motives you would like to see in yourself." Nelson shook his head. "I saved you for the same reason I countermanded your order. When a warrior takes life, it is to prevent an even greater number from losing theirs. You may live for war, but I live to guard against the necessity of war."

"Did you think to educate me by saving me?"

"No, for I did not think at all. You were wounded and could have died. I acted to deny death another victory." He looked down. "I acted because I did not want to see you die."

Her smiled broadened in a most disquieting manner. "You will think better of such impulses in the future, I believe."

Though she tried to put her words coldly, Nelson heard a hesitation that he could not put down to fatigue. He looked up and caught her watching him. In an instant he knew what she was thinking and it gave him a glimmering of a future he did not like at all.

She is as much intrigued with my ability to be compassionate as I am with her capacity to be utterly ruthless. We are matter and anti-matter locked in a spiral course down a gravity well. Things will move faster and faster until we come together and mutually annihilate each other.

"You don't own me." Nelson hardened his eyes. "You never will."

"I've owned you from the first moment we saw each other." Her eyes focused distantly. "We are soul-mirrors, Nelson Geist. In one another we will each live out our destinies and greet our fates."

16

DropShip Barbarossa , Zenith Recharging Station Garrison

Federated Commonwealth

17 May 3055

 

Victor watched the screen as the Clan Masakaricame in at his Prometheus.He winced—which he told himself was better than flinching—as the image shook and his 'Mech went down. Ranna is not even Bloodnamed yet. The Wolf Clan is nastier than all hell.

Galen paused at the hatchway and rapped on the bulkhead. "You will want to see this, sir." He held up a holodisk and its mirrored surface split the light into rainbow fragments. ComStar got some homemade h-vid off Zhongshan. Besides, you'll go blind if you watch those battle ROMs anymore."

"Wouldn't do any good. I'd still see Ranna coming after me in my dreams." Victor punched the Eject button and the holovid disk made from the battle ROMs on Arc-Royal came out. He slipped it back into a protective sleeve while Galen put the next one into the viewer.

"I don't think I'd mind too much having Ranna come after me in mydreams, but we're probably not working from the same basic premises, Leftenant-General." Galen hit the Play button. "ComStar here on Garrison sent this our way because they thought you'd want to see it. Their people shot most of it, but it's unedited and a bit rough."

The gray static on the screen melted away into a black scene lit only by a view of distant fires burning in a town. Flames guttered up through window casements, and white streaks of tracer rounds shot into the hills from out of the darkness of the town. Most died on the way, but a few hit something that made them ricochet into the sky.

The return fire was devastating. Beams, both PPCs and lasers, answered the light autocannon fire. Lancing indiscriminately through the town, the beams touched off strobing explosions whose light showed buildings melting. Big fireballs launched themselves into the sky, and yet more houses and shops were set ablaze.

Victor glanced at Galen. "Not too concerned about keeping the fighting away from noncombatants, are they?"

"No, sir. It looks like they hammered a militia unit in the field, then closed on the town of Nyrere somewhat quickly. Scattered resistance incited this sort of pounding."

The scene shifted to morning. A thick gray mist hung over the town, as viewed from the heights where the fighting had been recorded the night before. Leaking smoke, fire-blackened buildings stuck up out of the dirty fog like weathered gravestones. Except for the seemingly random movements of five BattleMechs patrolling the streets, the entire town looked dead.

Another shift and the recorder appeared to be in the middle of the city. Victor could tell from the shadows and the white ball the sun projected on the fog that a goodly chunk of time had passed since the camera had last showed the town. Now the camera was on the ground, moving through the ruins, showing images that confirmed the earlier graveyard scene.

Victor had a hard time believing that so small a town could produce so much rubble. Torn and bloated bodies clogged the streets. Water geysered up out of shattered fire hydrants, and lakes formed where bodies choked off the sewer outlets. Dogs ran in packs through the streets, while frightened-looking people sat dazed on stoops with no buildings. Others picked through rubble and repeatedly called the names of those they must have believed trapped within.

The scene shifted to another broken city, and Victor turned to Galen. "Looks like the bandits did on Zhong-shan what they did on Pasig and Kooken's Pleasure Pit."

"Yes, but not as bad. They left prematurely and only took foodstuffs and some other basic supplies. The water purification plant had a six-month supply of spare parts laying around. Stuff worth millions, but the bandits didn't touch it. They didn't even take time to loot the World Treasury Archives."

The Prince shrugged. "Would it have mattered? The stuff they took from the Pit and Pasig was junk. Pasig reported that the bandits looted a display of counterfeit works, labeled as such."

"I'm not an art critic, sir."

Victor smiled. "So why do you think they headed out early?"

"ComStar reported that the Thirty-first Wolf Solahma arrived in the system on the thirteenth. That was three days into the attack and a day after the first footage. The Clan troops beamed a challenge directly to the raiders, which ComStar monitored. It seemed to be a straight challenge, but the raiders decided not to fight."

The Prince raised his left eyebrow. "That's a good sign."

"Yes and no." Galen pointed to the footage playing across the screen at that moment. "This may have been the reason. It looks like the Red Corsair got hit."

The holovid showed a woman with long red hair being carried on a stretcher to a DropShip. An obvious member of the Corsairs held the stretcher at her feet, but a man dressed in an olive jumpsuit was holding the other end. He lifted the stretcher up into the DropShip, and Galen froze the frame on him as he turned away from it.

"This guy here is a real enigma." He tapped the screen at the man's right wrist. "He has a steel band, which ComStar estimates is the pirate equivalent of a bondcord. It confirms the suspicion that a significant number of them are Clan renegades."

"Okay, they're taking bondsmen or slaves. What's so enigmatic about that?"

"Well, ComStar identified this guy as the one who gave the orders that a shipment of food be diverted to one of ComStar's orphan relief centers. A bondsman doesn't give orders, much less have them obeyed, unless he works for someone very important. After putting the Red Corsair on the DropShip, this guy got out a message to the local ComStar rep to move that center fast because it had been ordered destroyed. He said he had bought them some time, but couldn't be sure the order wouldn't be reinstated."

"Was it?"

"Not as of the time the raiders left."

Victor stared at the man's face. "Any ID on him?"

Galen nodded. "I looked through the pictures of the folks listed missing after Kooken's and Pasig. He looks like Nelson Geist, who was maimed on Wotan four or so years ago. He recovered on Kooken's Pleasure Pit and joined their militia. He was reported missing after the raiders hit there."

"Geist." Victor looked down. "Was this guy any relation to Jon Geist? Jon died on Teniente."

"Yes, sir. Jon was Nelson's son."

The Prince shook his head. "There's no way a man like Nelson Geist could be working with the raiders, is there? The Clans maimed him, they killed his son, the raiders attacked his home."

Galen shifted his shoulders uneasily. "On one hand, given the number of Clanners we suspect to be raiders, I would say no to your question. On the other hand, though ..."

"What?"

"Well, sir, I'd have been the last person to suggest someone like Prince Ragnar would go over to the enemy, much less Phelan Kell."

Victor felt his stomach begin to knot up. "I see your point. This Geist lost a lot to the Clans. Maybe his spirit was broken."

"And if it didn't happen like that, there'd be other ways to accomplish the same thing." Galen started the holovid moving again. "It could be that he resented his maiming and the loss of his son and somehow blamed his troubles on you and the Federated Commonwealth. Many of those who fled the Tamar Pact worlds resettled on Kooken's Pleasure Pit, so there would be plenty of people there to help nurture such a view."

"It's unfortunate, but what you're saying makes sense." Victor watched Geist walk back toward the building from which the Red Corsair had been carried. "I still don't know if I buy his working with them, though. His action with ComStar shows he has some feeling for the refugees displaced by the fighting."

"There's not a soldier in the Revenants who would make war on children, Highness."

"Point. So, worst case, we have a man with considerable experience in the Inner Sphere military who has the ear of the Red Corsair."

"Right." Galen nodded solemnly. "And, best case, we have an experienced warrior watching how the Red Corsair works."

"No, the best case is that he'll get fed up and kill her." Victor rubbed a hand over his jaw. "The Wolf Clan didn't even engage them with aerospace fighters as the raiders left?"

"Not possible. The Wolves came in at the nadir jump point because it had a recharge station. The raiders had come in at a pirate point above the plane of the elliptic and another day beyond the planet for the Wolves. At best they could have chased after them and possibly inflicted some damage, but that would have involved sending DropShips out at three gravities and not recovering them for two more weeks. The fact that the Solahma bid away their fighters really hurt them in this situation."

Victor studied another combat sequence shot from far above a battlefield. The raiders obviously controlled the battle and forced the militia back with ease. Still, as Victor watched it, he saw the raiders make some mistakes. You're good, but you're not invincible.

"Galen, you've been reviewing the information we've gotten from Kooken's Pleasure Pit, Pasig, and now Zhongshan. What's your guess on these raiders? Could the Revenants take them?"

Galen sat back and sank deeply into the thickly padded chair. "That's a hard call. The raiders rely heavily on beam and energy weapons. That means they can hang on for a long time in a campaign. Of course a long campaign is the last thing they want when they're so far from their home base and when we're in such a good position to bring heavy numbers of troops against them. Still, it means they aren't tied to supplies the way we can be."

"So, are they using OmniMechs?"

"Not that I can see. It looks as if they're just using refits of our Inner Sphere designs. But they do employ Clan-type technology. The Kell Hounds have some similar 'Mechs built out of salvage from Luthien. That gives them some added punch andmakes them look deceptively soft. Even so, we're fighting close to even on that account."

Victor frowned. "As always, they have the advantage because they know where they're going to hit. The lithium-fusion batteries in our JumpShips give us increased mobility, which lets us jump in on them from a long range. But if we jump in when they arrive, they might be able to jump right out again."

"And if we wait until they commit to an attack, we find ourselves in the same position as the Wolves did."

"Right." Victor pounded his fist against his leg. That hurt and he stared at his offending hand. "Someday I will learn."

"Yes, Leftenant-General."

Victor ignored Galen's sarcasm. "It seems rather obvious that one unit alone isn't going to be able to catch these bandits. If we deployed the Revenants forward, we could coordinate with the Wolves and catch them."

Galen shook his head. "I think that assessment is premature. The Wolves didmanage to find the bandits, and forced them away from Zhongshan. Another two days or a little more piloting intelligence and they could have had them."

"You don't think I should bring the Revenants up?"

"It's not that at all, Victor. Yes, get us into position to help out, but we have more than military considerations here, don't we? Didn't Phelan tell you that the Jade Falcons are just waiting for the ilKhan to fall flat on his face in this? If we use one of our units to destroy the bandits, we flaunt his help. If, God help us, we have to chase them back into Jade Falcon territory, it could serve as a rallying call to unite the Clans against us again. The ilKhan would be forced to side with them against us, too. Boom, we've got full-scale war once more."

"As always, you tend to think a bit more about the auxiliary concerns than I do. Thank you, Galen."

"My pleasure and duty."

Victor sat back and pressed his hands together, fingertip to fingertip. "I think we need to learn as much as we can about the bandits. Let's run some computer sims between their apparent strength and that of the Revenants."

Galen stood and nodded. "Works for me. Anything else?"

"Yes." Victor chewed his lower lip. "Get me a file on Nelson Geist. If he's close to the Red Corsair, I want to know how he thinks and what makes him tick. If he's still loyal to the Federated Commonwealth, we can use him. And if he isn't, we'll know who to notify when we kill him."