Текст книги " The Price of Glory"

Автор книги: Уильям Кейт

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

14

The skimmer resting in the sun-broken shadows of the woods was an ancient one, scratched, marred, and with only the faintest trace of brown-on-gray patterns to show where coats of paint had once been. The engine access panels that had borne the grey-on-scarlet death's head of the Legion had been removed, leaving the grease-black convolutions of the engine visible through gaping openings on either side of the turbine nacelle. More scratches had been added up forward, where a vibroblade had been used to scrape off the battered little craft's serial numbers. The Magna CC light laser and its pintle mount in the cargo well aft of the driver's seat had been removed, and the mounting rack unbolted from its brace struts and folded onto the deck. The craft had been carefully inspected by four of the Legion's Techs, including Alard King himself, to make certain that there was nothing about the vehicle that would call attention to its real identity.

While the demilitarized skimmer had been undergoing transformation, both Grayson and King had been undergoing a similar transformation.

"There's something, I suppose, for going native," King said. He spread his hands and looked down at himself. "But I feel a little out of place, don't you, Colonel?"

Both men wore workboots, trousers, and simple tunics—little more than coarse-woven bags with holes for arms and heads—belted at their waists.

"Oh, I don't know, Alard." Grayson plucked lightly at the front of his tunic. "If our mission doesn't go well, we may have to retire and dress like this all the time."

The men and women of the Gray Death Legion, like the personnel of all but the largest and most prosperous mercenary units, had no one uniform in common. Many wore items of clothing acquired during previous service. Charles Bear, for example, had once been with the 21st Centauri Lancers, and usually wore the gray and green helmet and jerkin that was standard-issue for that regiment, though the unit insignia had been removed or painted over. Delmar Clay still wore the green and brown summer campaign jacket used by Hanson's Roughriders.

Grayson's own uniform varied from day to day. In the nearly four years since Trell I, he had outgrown or worn out the few pieces of uniform left over from his days as a MechWarrior Apprentice. Though he had made an effort to acquire a standard Legion uniform on Galatea after the successful conclusion of the Verthandi campaign, there had not been enough money—or time enough—to carry the idea very far. His usual campaign uniform, then, was gray tunic and trousers with the unit patch on his left breast and upper left arm. When Grayson needed to impress someone—such as a prospective employer-he added a gray shoulder-half-cape lined in scarlet and a black beret from a shop on Galatea to transform his plain grays into service full-dress. For daily wear, Grayson favored fatigues of no single traceable ancestry. Still, their brown and green camouflage pattern defined them as military-service issue. For what Grayson had in mind now, he had to look the part of a civilian. Hence, the rough, almost shapeless local garb.

"I don't suppose we can talk you out of this," Lori said. McCall and the rest of the command lance warriors stood with her. A variety of chirrings and chirpings sounded from the woods around them.

"Aye, sair," Davis McCall said, scratching his reddish beard and smiling. "There'd be aye plenty a' th' lads that'll be wantin' tae go doon t' town, Colonel."

"You're volunteering, I suppose?" Grayson said.

McCall's smile widened to an open grin, and he drew himself up taller. "Aye, sair, for one ..."

"Forget it." Grayson said, shifting to a rough impersonation of Davis's broad Scots burr. "Tha' idea is tae go in wi'oot bein' noticed, laddie! An' how you'd manage tae ask questions wi'oot speakin', I dinna' ken!"

All of them laughed, including McCall, but Grayson could hear the tension behind their levity.

"But why you,Gray?" Lori said as the laughter died. Her anger had receded since the morning, but she still felt irritated at his stubbornness. "Any of us could go. We all know Helm at least as well as you do!"

That again."For one thing, I know some people here ... as so does King. We've been over this before."

His voice carried warning, but Lori's answering expression said, Don't give me that.He turned away and climbed into the skimmer beside Alard King.

During staff discussions of the plan, King had mentioned that he knew several people who might be able to help them, besides the Steiner and Davion contacts that Grayson had in mind. He had been insistent—as insistent in his own way as Lori, and Grayson had finally agreed to his argument that two of them together had a better chance of finding someone who could help them.

Grayson smiled at Lori. "Hey, look! There shouldn't be any danger. We're just a couple of farmers, in from the boonies for some sightseeing. Right, Alard?"

"You got it, Colonel."

"You'd better lay off that 'Colonel' stuff," Lori said, looking straight past Grayson at the senior Tech. "You get this guy killed and you'll answer to me!"

King looked as though he were going to make a joke of it, then changed his mind. "We'll be back, Lieutenant. Both of us. I promise."

She turned to Grayson. "Gray, what do you hope to find out?"

"I'd like to know what's going on, mostly. What we've found so far just doesn't make any sense." . . . House Marik line BattleMechs operating under the assumption that the Gray Death Legion was a renegade unit—outlaws, pirates, or worse.

"Well, it doesn't make sense for you to get yourself killed."

"Lori's right," Delmar Clay said. "If you two get captured ..."

"If we get captured, we might learn what this insanity is all about!" Grayson said. "But we won'tbe captured. Even if this is a full-fledged invasion, they're not going to be rounding up farmers. Even invaders have to eat, right?"

"The Conventions again, Gray?" Lori's eyes were bleak. It looked as though she'd been crying.

Grayson was certain that the Marik troops would not bother a pair of farmers if their commanders had taken it into their heads to invade one of their own planets. By the conventions of warfare that had held throughout the past century—with isolated and instantly condemned exceptions—civilians were safe from attack by soldiers, so long as they stayed out of the fighting.

That had not always been the case, Grayson knew. Once, whole civilian populations, whole countries, even whole worlds had been held hostage, subject to annihilation in war as the enemy sought to smash the target government's supply lines, destroy its communication centers, and batter down the will to resist through stark terror. The 25th-century Ares Conventions had risen above that barbarism, declaring that only military targets were legal game on the battlefield, that civilian populations were to be spared. Those accords had also made warfare a way of life, but they did offer some hope of mitigating the savagery of war.

The horrors of the First and Second Succession Wars had reintroduced the nightmare of blood-soaked, unrestricted warfare, with whole worlds laid waste and genocide occurring on a planetary scale. The Kentares Massacre was perhaps the most infamous of these atrocities, but there had been others.

So far, though, in this third round of struggles for supremacy among the five Successor Houses, something akin to the old Ares Conventions was once more in force. It was as though a war-exhausted humanity had now tacitly agreed, for perhaps the first time in its bloody history, that the proper occupation of warriors was to fight other warriors, and that civilians should be spared whenever possible. The practical reason behind this was the brutal fact that if all the cities and trained mechanics and 'tronicists were dead, if all the BattleMechs and vehicles and DropShips and JumpShips were destroyed or broken down from lack of trained hands to repair them, there would, quite simply, be nothing left to fight over.

The neo-feudalism that was rising throughout the worlds occupied by humanity was, like the feudalism of 2,000 years earlier, based on ownership of the land—in this case, whole worlds. Even a green and verdant world, one with clean, breathable air, and plenty of fresh water—even such a paradise was worthless to the Duke who controlled it unless there was a population to make it productive. Throughout the Successor States, it was the MechWarriors who bore the mantle of honor and glory, like modern knights who fought for their Lord's cause. It was the Techs who worked the magic by which technic civilization survived, piecing together the bits and pieces of an earlier, more advanced science in a struggle to keep the machines—and the culture—alive. But it was the peasant farmer, the laborer, the astech, and the craftsman who made civilization possible at all.

As Grayson had reminded Lori, even soldiers had to eat. Few MechWarriors knew much about planting crops or harvesting them. Fewer still were in a position to transport those goods, or to see that they were distributed on a planetary—on an interplanetary scale. No duke, no army, however greedy for land or worlds or power, would destroy the population on which that power rested.

"Believe me, Lori," Grayson said gently. "We'll be safe. We'll be careful not to attract attention to ourselves."

King grasped the skimmer's tiller. When he switched on the turbines, the little hovercraft's engine keened into life, spilling clouds of dust from the scarred plenum shrouds. The vehicle shifted, skittered to the right until King could bring it under control, then dipped its nose and accelerated out from under the dappled sunlight and shade of the woods.

Considerable thought had gone into their disguises. Helm had no export industry to speak of, and little in the way of textile manufacturing. Though there were a number of mechanics and machine workers who kept those pieces of machinery native to the planet functioning, the majority of Helmans were farmers. An AgroMech plant outside the capital of Helmdown turned out small, four-legged Harvester and Planter 'Mechs that were used locally, and hovercraft similar to the disguised skimmer were still manufactured in small numbers in Glovis, south of the Nagayan Mountains. Production of this equipment was fairly limited, however, and provided machines only for local use. The Kurita raid that had smashed Helm over two centuries before had so thoroughly leveled local Helman industry that only now was it struggling back to a shadow of its former life. To look the part of native Helmans, Grayson and King had decided on the disguise of peasant farmers come to town in their centuries-old hovercraft to buy supplies.

The trip took almost two hours.

Helmdown, an untidy sprawl 400 kilometers northwest of Durandel, was more village than city, but it functioned as both principal starport and capital for the planet. What little industry did exist on the world was centered here, and it was where trader DropShips came infrequently to barter offworld manufactured goods for wheat, ice plums, and ferris grass from the Highland Plateau. The population numbered 50,000, if the census included the farmers who lived in the rural communities within fifty kilometers of the town's dusty streets and whitewashed ferrocrete block buildings. The AgroMech factory on the outskirts of town provided work for perhaps a quarter of the citizens of Helmdown proper. The lives of the rest revolved around the spaceport and the freighter Drop-Ships that made their infrequent calls there.

For once, business was good in town. It looked as though the fleet was in.

Helmdown's starport was a dried lakebed that had served as landing field for space-borne commerce in the days of the Star League. In those times, Helm's principal port was Freeport, some five hundred kilometers to the southeast. Helmdown had had a port of its own, too, one that needed that expanse of lake bed to handle the merchanter ships from space. With the grounding of the Marik DropShips, it seemed as though the prosperous times had returned. Grayson and King stood beside their skimmer, staring through a chainlink fence at six massive UnionClass DropShips.

"They've got their guard posted," Grayson said. Even at a distance of over a kilometer, he could identify the massive, insect-like silhouette of a 70-ton Archer.

"O.K.," he continued. "We accounted for eight at Durandel . . . and we ran into twelve at Cleft Valley . . . twenty. One more here. Six DropShips means they could have a total of seventy-two 'Mechs on Helm ... or fifty-one more we haven't seen."

"You use a pessimistic version of arithmetic," King replied. "Some of those DropShips must have brought in the infantry we ran into."

"Agreed, but we don't have a good estimate on how much infantry they have here, either. They could still have another twenty . . . thirty 'Mechs down. Not good odds."

"Not the sort of odds I'd care to face." King looked thoughtful. "I suppose it could still be a rebel faction claiming to be the Free Worlds League government."

"Possibly ... if Janos Marik was dead, and his two top generals were at each others' throats, squabbling for the title of Captain-General. But you'd think they'd identify themselves as one faction or another, just to avoid confusion."

"We should probably move on into town. They'll have perimeter security people out." King nodded toward the distant heavy 'Mech. "And thosethings, too."

* * *

Helmdown was crowded. The streets and mallways between the low, white buildings were crowded with native Helmans, most in the baggy, coarse-woven tunics that King and Grayson also wore. Some native vehicles were evident, but most Helmans were on foot. Interspersed through the crowd were crewmen and soldiers off the Marik ships. The soldiers' pale green trousers, light torso armor, and soft purple caps made them stand out in the crowds. Most of them armed, but their weapons were holstered, and the way they walked in small groups through the crowds, pointing and talking among themselves, suggested that they had come to town more to see the sights than as an invading army. Occasionally, Marik skimmers or wheeled vehicles made their way slowly through the throng on some errand or another, but the sense of an official presencesuch as a conquering army would bring, was absent.

Grayson and King left their skimmer in a dirt lot filled with similar vehicles several streets away from the main thoroughfare.

"Not much of an invasion," King said.

"I was just thinking the same thing."

"We've got to find out what's happening. Now, you have your contact on Hogarth Street ..."

"Hey, when you want to know something," Grayson said. "You go to the source and ask."

He left King on the walkway and made his way toward a lone Marik soldier he had already spotted a few meters away.

"Hey, soldier!" Grayson said. He had considered affecting the slight drawl of Helman speech, then thought better of it. Caricatures of speech were easily recognized as such, and the local speech patterns were not that obtrusive.

The soldier turned at Grayson's call and watched him warily, but without evident hostility. He kept his hands on his hips, however, his right finger close by the butt of the holstered sonic stunner. "You talkin' to me?"

"Yessir. Ah, you see, I just got into town, and I was wondering what all the fuss was about."

Grayson was watching carefully for signs that he had said the wrong thing—the flaring of nostril or pupil, the tensing of muscles in hand or shoulder—but the soldier just grinned, his teeth very white through his beard. "You must be from the other side of the damned planet," the man said.

"You boys come in for maneuvers? I don't think we've seen this many spaceships landed all at the same time out there on the lakebed for years." Grayson's choice of words was deliberate, though casually spoken—he hoped.

Spaceshipinstead of Dropship. Landedinstead of grounded.The differences should mark him as a grounder, a farmer who had done more than look at the stars in the night sky.

The soldier snorted. "Maneuvers? Yeah, I guess you could say so. You got your papers?"

The words were spoken so casually that it took a fractional moment before Grayson registered. "Papers?"

The soldier's hand was out, gesturing. "Yes, grounder, your papers. The notices have been posted all over the district for a week. Let's see 'em."

Grayson had a choice. He could pretend to reach for nonexistent papers while watching for an opening to break and run, or he could claim blank innocence. Thinking quickly, he elected the second course. He might be able to learn something more that way.

He set his jaw at what he hoped was a stubborn angle. "I ain't seen nothing about papers. What kind of hustle are you trying to pull on me?"

Grayson had half-expected the man to pull his gun, but the soldier simply looked tired. "No papers?"

Grayson decided to try the offensive. He leaned back on his heels and bellowed. "Whatdamned papers?"

Throughout the crowd, heads turned toward them. The soldier reached forward, dropping one hand on Grayson's shoulder. Grayson tensed, ready to counter or deliver a blow, but something in the Marik trooper's manner made him hesitate. The man was relaxed . . . and wide-open for a killing hand-to-hand attack. And he was smiling . . . !

"Look, see that flag up the street?" The soldier pointed toward the center of town. "What used to be the Planetary Council's offices? That's the Planetary Administrator's headquarters now. Right in front, there's a booth set up. You go talk to the officer there, and he'll give you your papers. O.K.?"

"I see it. Now would you mind telling me what it's all about?”

"The planet of Helm is under the direct rule of House Marik, now. The Captain-General has appointed an Administrator to run things for the duration of the crisis."

"The Captain-General . . . Janos Marik?"

"You know another Captain-General?"

"Uh . . . no, I just don't have the damnedest idea what's going on. Crisis? What crisis?"

"You just go talk to Captain Biggs at that booth in front of the Helm Council building. He'll tell you all about it."

The soldier's tone suggested that he thought Grayson might be simple-minded, and Grayson decided not to press the man further, or to disabuse him of his notion. "Yessir," he said.

King was waiting where Grayson had left him.

"Well, I suppose that's one way to remain inconspicuous," the Tech said. "Scream and shout and get everybody looking."

"It seemed like a good idea at the time." Grayson sketched in what little he'd learned. "Looks like Janos Marik is still in power, and these troops are loyal to him. They've moved in to run things during the . . . crisis, whatever that is. Damn! I wish to hell I knew what was going on!"

"Think it has something to do with us?"

"It must. Those were Marik regulars at Durandel. We've got to find out why ..."

"Watch it!" King's eyes flashed warning, staring past Grayson's shoulder. "Company!"

Grayson turned and saw the bearded Marik soldier he'd been talking with moments before coming toward them.

"I was just telling my friend . . ." Grayson began.

"Right, I saw that," the soldier said. "I just thought you'd like me to walk you up to the documentation center myself, so you wouldn't get lost."

"That's kind of you," Grayson said, smiling. "We know where it is, and we aregoing . . . right now."

The soldier's right hand rested lightly on the butt of his holstered stunner. Grayson noticed that the safety strap was off, permitting a fast draw, if needed.

"I assure you it's not necessary."

"I insist." The soldier's friendliness was gone now.

If Grayson and King were taken as far as the documentation center, their chances of escape would be considerably reduced—possibly to nil. There would certainly be more soldiers there, soldiers better-armed and more watchful than the isolated bands of soldier-tourists that dotted the crowds around them. The time to make a break for it was now, before this trooper became thoroughly alarmed, and before they ended up someplace where their chances of escape were as nonexistent as their papers.

"Well, fine, then," Grayson said. He exchanged glances with King and was certain from the Tech's guarded expression that he had assessed the situation and arrived at the same conclusion as Grayson. "Shall we go?"

Grayson turned to go up the street in the direction of the Council House, but the first two steps he took also brought him closer to the soldier, and to the man's left. King also started in the same direction, but he stepped to the right on a course that would take him behind the soldier as he walked past.

Realizing that the two other men were splitting up, the soldier took a quick step backward, and turned to his right to face King. The stunner slid from the holster, as the soldier started to say, "Now, hold it right there ..." He never finished the sentence. Grayson lunged forward, shoving the Marik soldier hard toward King.

The Tech had already moved by that time, and his booted left foot was sweeping the air in a stiff-legged roundhouse kick that landed squarely behind the Marik soldier's ear. Grayson had been trained in hand-to-hand combat as an apprentice, but there had never been reason or time to sharpen his skills with much practice. It looked as though Alard King had had plenty of practice, for he moved with lighting speed and precision. The fight was over before it had even properly started. The soldier lay sprawled on the pavement, face down. Grayson picked up the man's sonic stunner, which lay close by, but dropped it when he realized it was still attached to its owner's belt by a wire-bound dummy cord.

"Let's move it!" King's said, his voice low but penetrating.

Grayson nodded. The disturbance had impinged on the crowd around them like ripples from a pebble thrown in a pond. Most of the civilians were crowding back and away from the two warriors and the Marik soldier's still form, while other Marik soldiers were forcing their way in against the flow. Grayson saw several guns already in hand and plainly in sight. The soldiers weren't close enough to see the unconscious soldier yet, but a few moments more, and they would be.

"We'll split up." It would be safer traveling separately, Grayson decided quickly. One of them, at least, might be able to make the inquiries they needed. "Try to meet me at the skimmer lot in . . . five hours. We each wait an hour, and if there's no rendezvous, we make our own way back to the camp."

"Right! Five hours! Wait an hour and then we're on our own!" Then the Tech was gone, fading into the crowd with a suddenness that startled Grayson. Not only was Alard King an ace Technician, but he seemed to be skilled in other arts as well. Grayson hoped King would make it as he himself twisted away into the crowd in another direction.

"You! Stop where you are!"

The new voice had the snap of authority behind it. Grayson didn't bother to look, knowing full well that the soldiers had spotted him walking away from the first soldier's body. He threw himself past the corner of a building, dodging through a deserted alleyway lined with refuse cylinders, a cool, dank semi-darkness leading down a slight hill toward the next main parallel street.

"Stop! Stop!" came the shouts, but fainter now. The mouth of the alley opened ahead, bright with sunlight and the moving figures of civilians. A quick turn into that next street, and . . .

Shadows moved against the light, blocking the way. One dropped into a crouch as the figure whipped a gun to bear on Grayson's chest.

"Halt where you are, grounder!"