Текст книги " The Price of Glory"

BOOK I

1

Smoke stained an evil, yellow-green sky. There was no way that open flame could exist in the chill mix of hydrogen and methane that made up the atmosphere of Sirius V, but the wreckage and debris of the recent battle glowed white-hot in places, heat sufficient in that subzero chemical soup to precipitate oily, red-brown clouds of sulfur and nitrogen compounds. Those clouds hung, sluggish and sullen, in the dense and alien atmosphere.

Grayson Death Carlyle watched the approach of the city delegation through the main screen of his battle-scarred Marauder.The exhausts of their sealed vehicles glowed brightly against the cold on his main screen, which had been set to display infrared imagery. Beyond the delegation's convoy, the city of Tiantan brooded against a landscape of poisonous desolation. By visible light, it was a vast dome of gray metal crusted over with sulfur compounds and ammonia mud. By infrared, the city dome radiated furiously from a thousand heat sinks and ports, and looked like a fountain of heat set against the lambent skyline.

Grayson was not admiring the display, however.

"Fire lance," he murmured into the pickup at his lips. "Feed me your Sigma-Vee."

"Affirmative, Colonel." Lieutenant Khaled's voice was as dry and taut as Grayson's own throat. "Transmitting."

Four monitors along the side of Grayson's cockpit flickered and danced in static-laden bursts, then steadied into separate views of the convoy approaching from below. Lieutenant Hassan Khaled's Warhammer,Isoru Koga's Archer,Charles Bear's Crusader,and Sharyl's Shadow Hawk—eachviewed the convoy from a slightly different angle. Cameras mounted in each 'Mech's head transmitted that pilot's "Sigma-Vee," his view of the unfolding situation. The transmissions continued to flash and crackle with uneven bursts of static. Sirius, this planet's sun, was a hot, young Al star, and its raw voice easily bridged the 6 AU gulf to its fifth planet, raising periodic havoc with radio and video transmissions there.

Bear's Crusaderwas closest to the column. His screen's flickering data readout indicated a range of 2,000 meters to the nearest tracked, bubble-topped vehicle. Heavily armed and armored troop carriers straggled behind through red mud and ice-rimed puddles of liquid ammonia.

Grayson checked the console display that marked the positions of his other forces on a tactical map—three 'Mechs of the recon lance widely spaced across the rear, a fourth on guard back at the newly captured spaceport, his own command lance backing up the fire lance and deploying along the ridge facing the city.

He switched frequencies. "Command lance. Status check."

"Kalmar, Shadow Hawk.Check." Lieutenant Lori Kalmar sounded taut, expectant.

"Clay, Wolverine.Set." The laconic DelmarClay had his Wolverineon a low ice ridge to the north, where he could cut off the enemy's retreat if necessary.

"McCall. Ma' wee Bannockburn 'sready, sair." The redbearded Davis Montgomery McCall held his Riflemanin reserve, as added insurance against a Liao AeroSpace Fighter strike.

The fire lance monitors all indicated ready status, and the enemy was drawing closer. Grayson's attention snapped back to the view televised from Bear's Crusader.

"Bear! Full mag."

The scene on the monitor obediently expanded, zeroing in on the speck of white that had caught Grayson's eye. It was a white flag rippling from the whip antenna of the lead vehicle.

Grayson shifted command frequencies. "Ramage? What's your TacSit?"

Captain Ramage's voice filtered back through the earphones in Grayson's helmet. "We're in position, Colonel. I've deployed both platoons behind Hill 103, and the men are dug in and ready."

"Good. Hold your fire, and wait for my word. I see a white flag on the lead vehicle. But watch our Six. This couldbe a surrender ..." He let the warning trail off, uncompleted. The Sirius campaign might be on the verge of ending if those vehicles were emissaries of the city sent to parlay for surrender terms.

Grayson would have to be careful, though. The vehicles could also be part of some trap that might lead to a very different outcome for the campaign.

"Yessir. Our Six is covered.”

“Six" was a long-accepted battlespeech term meaning a unit's rear. Ramage's ground forces had been deployed to cover a possible enemy thrust from that direction—a good possibility if the convoy was not what it seemed.

The vehicles pulled to a halt 150 meters ahead of the fire lance, the white flag flicking this way and that in the fitful air. An amplified voice, heavily accented and carefully enunciated, echoed from a speaker in the lead machine. "This is Ambassador Gregar Chandresenkhar, Special Diplomatic Liaison of the Lyran Commonwealth to the planetary government of Sirius V. As an officially registered neutral in the hostilities between House Marik and House Liao, I have been asked to serve as Special Envoy for the City Fathers of Tiantan. I claim Privilege, sir."

Grayson flicked a switch, opening a mike to his own external speakers. "This is Colonel Grayson Carlyle," he replied. "Commander of the Gray Death Legion, in the service of House Marik and the Free Worlds League. Privilege is granted you, sir."

"Privilege is accepted, sir. May I advance?"

Grayson took a deep breath. It was unlikely that they would violate Privilege. Still . . .

"You may advance, Mr. Ambassador."

The lead vehicle stirred into motion once more, approaching the silent line of fire lance 'Mechs, meeting it, passing through. Grayson guided his massive Marauderforward a few steps so that the envoy would not mistake who was the Gray Death commander, then locked his machine in place.

Realizing that much would depend on the events of the next few moments, Grayson opened a private channel. "Lori?"

From her battle-stained Shadow Hawk,his company Exec acknowledged, "Here, boss. Are we going to trust them?"

"We have to, Lori. They've claimed Privilege.”

“We never used that much, Beyond.”

“Mmm. Maybe not."

Lori Kalmar had been born and raised on Sigurd, one of the half-barbarian wolf worlds in the vast Periphery beyond the Inner Sphere. For her, war had never been balanced by civilized conventions until she'd joined the Gray Death Legion.

"What's the matter?" he joked, but with a voice still taut from command. "Is warfare becoming too civilized for you?"

"No, it just makes me wonder who to trust. Heads up, Gray. Here he comes."

A lone figure stepped from the ground car, the man's face muffled by the goggles and mask humans needed to breathe in the cold, deadly Sirian atmosphere. He looked very small next to the bulk of the vehicle, and then smoke boiling from the twisted wreckage of a Vindicatorlying crumpled on the icy gravel momentarily hid the man from view.

"Time to go," Grayson said. "Keep an eye on things, Lieutenant."

He removed his neurohelmet and hung it on the support rack above his chair, unstrapped himself, and squeezed his way aft toward the dorsal hatch, past the instrumentation that filled the Marauder'scockpit. Maraudershave several points of entry. In the field, the one most commonly used is located on the upper back of the fuselage, just ahead of the autocannon mount. Grayson's lanky height made for a tight squeeze between the storage racks of 120 mm cassette rounds for the Marauder'sdorsal cannon, even though his supply of AC ammo was more than half-depleted. It would be the same throughout the regiment, Grayson thought. If the Liaos elected to continue their fight, the Gray Death Legion was going to have to pull back their DropShips to restock ammo stores.

From a small locker, Grayson removed a lightweight environmental suit and mask and began to perform the contortions necessary to don them in such cramped quarters.

So far, the Gray Death Legion's campaign for Sirius V on behalf of their current employer had been swift and unrelenting. They had been onplanet for almost two weeks now, had fought three major battles and innumerable skirmishes, and not once had their line broken in combat. This final encounter had been fought at the very gates of Tiantan—the "Heavenly Palace"—and had left the defending 'Mech force beaten and scattered.

The war should be over, and yet Grayson had to shove a deep and persistent unease from his mind. The campaign is over,he thought. Now to make peace for our new lords and masters up there in orbit . . .

* * *

The thought held no bitterness for Grayson Carlyle. The fortunes of his mercenary Gray Death Legion had improved beyond all expectations, beyond all reason or hope, since the successful conclusion of their last campaign on far Verthandi. The pathetic, forlorn revolution against the might of the Draconis Combine had ended with the impossible—independence for a people too stubborn to sit quietly while Kurita's legions raped their world. The Gray Death Legion's victory had made the unit wealthy in BattleMechs—the hardest, most secure currency that existed within the unraveling fabric of galactic civilization. Their share of the spoils taken on Verthandi had raised the Legion's 'Mech force to a full operational company, with parts and reserve 'Mechs for a company more. They also had enough captured tanks, recon vehicles, personnel carriers, and infantry weapons to create the bare-bones framework of an entire regiment. When the Gray Death returned to the mercenary hiring centers on Galatea, they found that word of their victories had preceded them. There had been no lack of volunteers for either Grayson's BattleMech or infantry companies. Every unattached mercenary warrior, it seemed, wanted to share in the Carlyle luck.

And so, it seemed, did House Marik.

Grayson squeezed into the tiny, metal-walled cubicle that served as his Marauder'sairlock, checked again the fit of his breathing mask, and cycled the outer hatch open. They hadbeen lucky, he thought. After Verthandi, the Gray Death mercenary combined arms regiment had had its pick of prospective employers. Of the five great Houses, both Steiner and Davion had offered more-or-less standard contracts that would have continued to pit Grayson and his people against the implacable red dragon of House Kurita. Both houses had also offered tempting terms: money, of course, and the far sweeter coin of vengeance.

After Verthandi, however, Grayson found that his driving hunger for vengeance against the murderers of his father had diminished, replaced now by a vague, uneasy emptiness. Hate, it seemed, was difficult to sustain year after year. After leading his forces in a crushing victory over his old foes on Verthandi, he felt not satisfaction, but the weary realization that his personal crusade would never halt the march of evil directed from dread Luthien's Imperial Palace.

In the end, only one great House had offered what Grayson and his people could not refuse, what all of them sought with a hunger greater even than the craving for vengeance. House Marik had promised them a place, a homeworld of their own.

The victory the Gray Death had won this day would seal their right to the Legion's landhold at Helm.

A viciously cold, thin wind whipped and tugged at Grayson's protective clothing as he swung his legs out of the narrow airlock hatch and sat astride his Marauder.He kept one gloved hand against the support of his 'Mech's dorsal-mounted autocannon while the other hand freed a chain ladder from its storage compartment, then unrolled it in a long, clattering fall toward the ground. The air of Sirius V was primarily hydrogen and nitrogen, the "water" was liquid ammonia. With a surface temperature that rarely rose above -40 degrees C, water was always a solid here. Mountains of the stuff stretched across the stark, yellow-green skyline, glittering harsh in the actinic glare of distant Sirius.

Grayson stepped from the dangling ladder onto cold rock. Now that he stood unsupported, rather than lying back against the cushioned cockpit seat of his Marauder,Grayson felt the pull of the planet's 1.5 G gravity dragging at his knees and back.

Sirius V was empty of life, save what men had imported here early in the history of human expansion to the stars. At a distance of 8.7 light years from Terra, Sirius was one of old Earth's nearest neighbors in space. The first manned outpost on this frigid, barren landscape had been established some nine centuries ago, not long after faster-than-light travel had become possible. Stars as young as Sirius were not even supposed to haveplanets, according to the astrophysical understanding of those long-gone times, and so the sole purpose of the first Sirian colony was to research the improbabilities of the Sirius system. It took nearly a century before Sirius V's considerable resources of heavy metals and transuranic minerals were discovered.

The world was now a minor fief of House Liao's Capellan Confederation. Chinese warlords serving the Terran Hegemony had constructed the industrial and city complex known as the Heavenly Palace in the 26th century in order to exploit the planet's resources. Liao had taken over Sirius at the outset of the Succession Wars. The world had been a target for Marik raiders and tactical strikes during the ongoing, deathlock embrace between the two houses ever since.

Grayson stepped from beneath the shadow of his Maruaderand onto the sunlit plain. Sirius's light held a distinctly greenish cast, filtered as it was by the planet's atmosphere, but he kept his eyes turned away from its blazing intensity. Though nearly six times farther from Sirius V than Sol is from Terra, the tiny eye-searing disk of Sirius was a danger if gazed at directly, even through polarized goggles. Close to the horizon ahead and just above the gray domes of Tiantan, Grayson could just make out a tiny but brilliant pinpoint of light, like a planet gleaming low in an evening sky. That, Grayson knew, was not a planet, but the white dwarf companion to the far larger sun above him.

Grayson had learned during his pre-mission research that the white dwarf looped about Sirius A in an elongated orbit that brought it to within nearly 10 AU of the primary sun once every 50 years. The last such close passage had been in 2993. The next would occur in another seventeen years. The white dwarf did not add appreciably to the heat shed by Sirius A during its passage, but it was dangerous to look at the sky in those years when Sirius B was at its closest. Those twin sources of ultraviolet radiation could fry a man's retinas, despite the frigid atmosphere of this planet.

What kind of world is it, where men fear to look at the sky?Grayson wondered.

The chosen ambassador of the Tiantan Fathers stood thirty meters away, tiny against the vastness of the chill landscape and the hulking vehicles behind him, bundled like Grayson in an environmental suit and mask against the cold and poison air. The wind snatched at the man's cloak, which he had pulled around him for extra protection against the chill.

"Com check," Grayson said, speaking into the command circuit of his headgear with a voice muffled by his breathing mask.

"We hear you, Chief," Lori's voice answered in his headphones. She sounded . . . warm, just as Grayson was beginning to realize how cold were his feet, despite the heavy insulation of his boots. "We're recording. And we've got him targeted six ways."

"Right. Hold your positions. I'm going in."

He stepped forward again, willing his knees to continue to hold him up against one-and-a-half times his usual weight.

The speed of the Legion's victory over this Liao world had been surprising. Certainly, Lord Garth, Duke of Irian, Lord Commander of the Marik support forces in orbit above Sirius V right now, had been astonished at Grayson's last combat report. The final Liao battleline broken before the city walls,that message had stated. This world is yours, your Grace.

Some members of Grayson's regimental command staff were of the opinion that Lord Garth had been deliberately throwing the Gray Death against Liao strongholds in an effort to wear the Legion down. Indeed, this last campaign had been the roughest yet, for all its brevity. The regiment had lost over fifty combat infantry, and three of its new MechWarrior recruits. During the entire struggle, Lord Garth and the full battalion of Marik Regulars under his command had remained safely in orbit, maintaining aerospace superiority, and feeding satellite recon intel to Grayson's staff, but well beyond the reach of Liao's ground defenses.

There was nothing wrong with that, either. The Gray Death mercenaries had been hired specifically to smash Liao defenses on several key worlds such as Sirius V. From the point of view of the Marik high command, military resources were precious, and it was often cheaper to hire mercenaries to expend theirresources than to waste irreplaceable 'Mechs and equipment.

Still, it was hard to fight and die, all the while knowing that reinforcements capable of tipping the balance in your favor were only a few thousand kilometers away . . . watching it all on their long-range scanners. It was harder still to hear your own people dying beside you. Jenna Hasting's choked screams as the planet's cold and poisonous atmosphere had flooded her Centurion'scracked canopy were still raw in his ears. Sirius V was starkly and brutally unforgiving during combat in a way that even enemy MechWarriors were not. There had been very few wounded on either side during the past two weeks. Breaches, however small, in combat armor or Battle-Mech pressure walls were almost invariably fatal. When oxygen spilled into this hydrogen-rich atmosphere, and heat or a spark was added . . .

Grayson stopped ten paces away from the lone man. The other, as supplicant, gave a slight, stiff bow.

"Ambassador Gregar Chandresenkhar," the man announced formally. "Special Diplomatic Liaison of the Lyran Commonwealth to the planetary government of Sirius V and the Capellan Confederation. I have placed myself at the disposal of the Tiantan City Fathers, to act as their representative. Is that acceptable to you, sir?"

Grayson returned the bow. "Perfectly acceptable, sir. I am Colonel Grayson Carlyle, Gray Death Legion, under service to the Lord Garth, Duke of Irian, and Lord Commander of the Marik Fifth Expeditionary Force. Under all accepted conventions and protocols of war, I have the authority to treat with you, and those you represent."

"I have been directed to ask for terms," the Ambassador said. "The City Fathers are willing to concede defeat."

So. The campaign wasover. The thought held no thrill no sense of victory. It was simply that the fight was over.

"All resistance will cease everywhere on Sirius V, and throughout the Sirius system," Grayson said slowly. "All military electronics, including electronic scanning, radar, and countermeasures, are to be shut down at once. Capellan military command frequencies will be restricted to orders to cease resistance, and for emergency use alone. I am authorized to inform you that units in the service of House Marik will arrive within thirty standard hours of formal cessation of hostilities. Local civilian and government officials are to cooperate with them fully."

"Of course." That cooperation was, after all, basic to the formal protocols of war. "Is Sirius V to be permanently transferred to Free Worlds's control?"

He wants to know if this is a raid or an invasion.Grayson thought. I guess I’d want to know the same thing myself, in their boots.

He shook his head. "I'm afraid I don't know, sir. I'm sure His Grace, the Marik Lord Commander, will have his own list of demands. The City Fathers are to appoint a council to receive His Grace and the League officials to discuss their requirements."

"Is that all?"

"That is all I have for you under the flag of House Marik. I have requests to make in my own name.”

“Yes?"

"Nothing beyond the protocol of the Conventions, Mr. Ambassador. I will need supplies, repair parts, if possible, the use of local recreational facilities for my people. I will guarantee their behavior, of course."

The ambassador nodded. "I'm sure that can all be arranged. Is there more?"

"Liao troops within fifty kilometers of Tiantan are to turn over their weapons immediately. If there are no violations, there will be no need for registration or internment."

Chandresenkhar bowed again. "That is good of you, Colonel. The gesture will be appreciated."

"You understand that I cannot speak for the Lord Commander," Grayson said. "His Grace may require internment, and that is entirely within his rights under the Conventions. But until then ..." Grayson shrugged. "If Tiantan's people behave themselves, I see no reason to lock any of them up."

"I understand." The ambassador hesitated, as though listening. The man would be linked, no doubt, to the Tiantan Fathers themselves, through a commlink in his environmental suit. "Sir, the City Fathers have asked me to convey to you their complete acceptance of your terms . . . and to thank you on their behalf for your generosity. They count themselves fortunate to have been bested in war by the illustrious Grayson Death Carlyle."

* * *

In a sealed and heated communications vehicle nearly ten kilometers from where Grayson and the envoy were speaking, a dark man with brooding eyes leaned back from the radio console, setting aside the device he had been holding against one ear. "That's it, then," he said, the words slow and thoughtful. The four men crowding around him in the narrow compartment listened attentively. "They've agreed to Formal Peace. The Sirius campaign is over."

"We can begin, then," one of the four said. His environmental suit was open enough to show the bulky padding of a BattleMech cooling vest across his chest. The insignia on his breast patch was a grinning gray and black skull against a scarlet background.

The first man nodded. "I never thought anyone would be able to move as fast as Carlyle did. In a way, it's a shame ..."

"What is a shame, Precentor . . . ?"

"Nevercall me that! Not even here!"

The MechWarrior's eyes widened, and he struggled visibly to swallow. "I . . . I . . . Forgive me, Lord."

"Forgiven," the man said simply. "But don't forget again. Your role in the events to come is most important. You cannot afford a careless word or thought. It would be most . . . unfortunate."

"Y-yes, my Lord. Thank you, my Lord."

"Good. You may ready yourself." He nodded toward the other three. "All of you gather your men. The Duke will be here in thirty hours. It is time we began."