Текст книги " The Price of Glory"
Автор книги: Уильям Кейт
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34
"This can't go on much longer," Garth said, looking at his wrist computer. "Are they going to smash each other to pieces? What about the DropShips?"
"What about them, Your Grace?" Langsdorf asked, with barely concealed contempt. "We can't approach them until the enemy has been beaten, which, at the moment, he most obviously is not!"
The general's aides cheered. Another enemy 'Mech was down, the big, combative Wolverine."Yah!" One junior lieutenant yelled as a comrade tugged the binoculars away from him. "Step on the pilot! Step on the pilot!"
"Damn! The bastard got away! Maybe our boys should start potting at those hovercraft!”
“Hey, another one's burning!”
“Idiot. It's one of ours!"
"No, no! That one! One of the merc’s Stingers!Ho! Man! Did you see that? What PPC fire does to a Stingeris notto be believed!"
Langsdorf turned at the sound of a hovercraft approaching at high speed from behind. The maneuverable little transport slowed as it approached the Warhammerand the coterie of officers. There was a single man at the control stick, his Adept's robes soaked with blood.
"Here . . . what's this?" Kleider said. "What are you ..."
Before he could finish the phrase, the Adept vaulted over to the side of his vehicle as it came to ground on its plenum skirts, and stalked toward Langsdorf. The blood that stained his robes, it seemed, was not his own, yet his face showed the mark of some terrible, inner wound. The personal escorts of Kleider and Garth stepped forward, their weapons up, blocking his way.
"Let him come," Langsdorf said. "It is one of the ComStar Adepts."
At the sound of a dull, hollow boom signaling some enormous explosion. Langsdorf turned and raised his binoculars. A Marik Wasphad exploded, sending a huge ball of fire rocketing into the sky, and scattering burning chunks of metal across the battlefield.
The explosion seemed to mark a breaking of the Marik force's will. Langsdorf noted Captain Tarlborough's Warhammerleading the rest of the Marik 'Mechs as they splashed through the broad, shallow water of the Vermillion toward the rear. The mercenary 'Mechs advanced to the water's edge and waded in, taking advantage of the water to cool their hot drive and combat systems. The Marik 'Mechs formed up on the north side of the river, milling about uncertainly. Some of them appeared to be in bad shape.
Langsdorf turned back to the Adept. "Can I help you, Adept? We're a little busy right now ..."
The Adept scarcely looked the part. His cowl was back off his head, and his wispy, straw-blond hair was matted across his forehead in sweat and grime.
"Colonel Langsdorf . . . ?"
Langsdorf nodded.
"I am Adept Larabee, of Comstar's Helmdown Station. I ..." He hesitated, suddenly unsure of himself. "You . . . you must stop the battle, Colonel!"
"Nonsense!" Kleider pointed. "Arrest this man!"
"Touch me and you risk a ComStar Edict!"
Kleider's troops froze where they stood, bewildered. A ComStar Edict could deprive a world . . . or a number of worlds ... of the services of the ComStar HPG transmitters. Loss of access to an interstellar communications network was of little personal import to the soldiers who stood there, but they knew Edictas a near-magical word of curse and dread. They looked back toward their leaders, uncertain.
"This . . . this ..." Garth sputtered, then brought his tongue under control. "This Adept has no authority here, Colonel!"
"Perhaps," Langsdorf said, in a low, almost deadly calm tone. "But I think I'd like to hear what he has to say."
Larabee pointed toward the battle plain. "Colonel, this whole operation was mounted to destroy the Gray Death, an outlaw mercenary regiment"
"Yes."
"But they're not outlaws! The city of Tiantan on Sirius V was destroyed on the orders of Precentor Rachan! This whole thing was hisdoing! Heis the outlaw!"
"Lies ..." Garth began, but the Adept cut him off.
"We met a senior Tech in the caverns, trying to save a Star League library."
"Library?" Kleider looked startled. "What library? What does a library have to do with this?"
"Everything! Rachan brought me and my brothers here to copy the data stored in a Star League computer, and he planned to destroy the computer when he was done! But we met a senior Technician who had been on Sirius V. He knew that Carlyle's regiment had not committed the atrocity. And Rachan admitted it!"
"Seize him!"Garth screamed. A Marik soldier reached for the Adept, who twisted away. A second soldier swung his rifle, knocking Larabee to the ground, senseless.
"Stop!" Langsdorf barked, bringing his sidearm, a large-caliber automatic pistol, out of its holster. "Everyone, stop!"
Kleider pointed toward the battle. "Listen, man! Never mind this lunatic! The mercenary force is falling apart. Only six of them still on their feet! One more charge and you've won! Won!"
Langsdorf eyed Kleider bleakly. "Won? Won what, General?"
"Why, victory, man! A glorious victory!"
Langsdorf's gorge rose in his throat, almost making him sick. He pushed past the general and started toward his Warhammer.
"Langsdorf! Where are you going!"
"To give my orders, General." He grasped the rungs of the 'Mech's ladder.
"Excellent! Excellent! I suggest you use your BattleMechs to crush their line, then press on to the DropShips. Your infantry can deal with the survivors! My congratulations, Colonel ... on your gloriousvictory !”
The word made Langsdorf pause, two meters above the ground. He hung there a moment, swaying on the ladder, looking down at Garth and Kleider. "No, General. There is no gloryhere. And no victory!"
"What do you mean?" Kleider shouted.
"I mean, General, that I will not order what is left of my forces to charge. The battle is over. I will not throw away more of my men . . . not for you." He glanced over at Garth, who stood in the Warhammer'sshadow, a dumbfounded look on his fat face. "And certainly not for him!"
* * *
Rachan lay on his back in the dark. The fire that had consumed the library was almost gone now, and the only real light filtered in through the smoke and dust from the smashed-open entrance to the tomb. He had regained his senses and found himself alone. The Marik soldiers who had survived the insane attack by the young merc soldier and the Archerhe had commandeered from Langsdorf's encampment were gone. The troopers must have assumed he was dead and left him here, helpless in the dark.
When he tried to get up, his leg was a leaden, useless thing that pinned him there to the rubble-strewn floor of the cave. Pain throbbed and pulsed in his thigh. Looking down at it, Rachan could see where his upper leg bent off to the left at a sharp and unnatural angle well above his knee. There was so much blood . . .
He heard a noise, a deep and echoing sound from the darkness. He reached out, scrabbling through broken rock, looking for his laser. Suppose the mercenaries were coming back? Suppose they found him? They knew that it was he who had placed the blame for Tiantan on them. If they found him . . . alive . . .
The sound came again, and Rachan stopped searching for the laser. That noise was nothing made by men. It sounded like the roar of some monstrous subterranean animal, echoing up out of the dark. The floor of the cavern moved, and Rachan shrieked in agony. The movement had been sharp enough to twist his leg, reawakening the torture that seemed ready to tear the limb from his body.
The roar sounded again, lower, deeper, a rumbling that went on and on and set the broken stones to quivering and jittering all around the wounded man.
* * *
The fleet of Prime Movers made their way across the river flats toward the battered group of 'Mechs. Grayson watched them from his Marauder,but could muster no emotion. It was as though he watched from an enormous distance, remote and detached.
"I said, this is Ricol!" The voice on Grayson's general frequency repeated itself. "Have your people ready for pick-up!"
Grayson turned his Marauderback toward the north. The enemy 'Mechs were . . . withdrawing. Withdrawing!But another charge would have been certain to overwhelm the remaining Gray Death 'Mechs. Only five 'Mechs still stood with him. His command lance had been wiped out, with the 'Mechs of Lori, Delmar Clay, and Davis McCall all out of action. Fortunately, the pilots had all been picked up, exhausted but unhurt.
Though Khaled's Warhammerwas down, he was alive, but wounded. The two recruits were dead, their Stingerssmashed or exploded. What were their names? Morley and Brodenson. Grayson remembered their faces at the briefing . . . one excited, the other terrified. Neither emotion touched them now.
Koga, Bear, and Sharyl stood to his right. DeVillar and Kent stood on his left. All of the surviving 'Mechs were battered and smashed to the point where they could barely stand. Koga's Archerwas out of missiles and had lost two medium lasers. Grayson's own Marauderwas out of autocannon rounds, and his left arm PPC had gone dead. The cannon on Sharyl's Shadow Hawkhad been torn away, and the laser on her 'Mech's arm had been shattered.
One more charge by the enemy 'Mechs and what was left of the Gray Death Legion would have been smashed flat.
He tried to concentrate on Ricol's words, still coming over the radio. "We're picking up the damaged 'Mechs, Grayson. Our commtechs on the DropShips have confirmed it. Langsdorf is pulling back. We picked up his order. They're retreating. You've won, Grayson! You've won!"
He looked through his Marauder'sforward screen. The tough plastic had been cracked by a near-miss from an enemy missile. Three bodies lay sprawled in the mud a few meters in front of him, infantrymen cut down by machine gun fire as they'd tried to get close enough to an enemy Waspto attack it with satchel charges.
Strange, thought Grayson. It doesn't feel like victory.
The feedback through his neurohelmet brought a strange, queasy sensation through his middle ear. He worked with his controls a moment, trying to isolate the problem.
Three must be battle damage to theMarauder 's sensors,he decided. It feels like the ground is moving.
* * *
Colonel Langsdorf sat in his Warhammer'scockpit, struggling with the heavy machine's controls. His neurohelmet was transmitting sensations of vertigo and unsteadiness through his middle ear, sensations that made him feel as though the ground were shifting beneath his BattleMech's feet.
Soldiers were running past him, and hovercraft skittered off toward the north. Garth, Kleider, and their escorts were long gone back toward Helmdown. Once Langsdorf had reached his 'Mech's cockpit and given the order to withdraw, there had been nothing more they could do.
Nothing they could do here, at least,the Colonel corrected himself. But my career is finished.Court-martial and death by firing squad awaited him. It all seemed distant and unreal.
"Colonel Langsdorf!" A voice came through the radio. "This is Boomerang Two!"
"Recall, Boomerang Two," Langsdorf said. "Land at the encampment, and prepare your aircraft for evacuation."
"Sir! Sir . . . you've got to see this! Open one of your monitors for a video feed!"
Langsdorf turned his main monitor on. After flickering with static for a moment, it then cleared to show the image transmitted by a camera in the belly of the little spotter plane circling high above. It took Langsdorf a moment to figure out what he was seeing. It looked like a geyser, a column of steam and boiling water mounting in a white pillar toward the sky. How very curious, he thought. Then he caught sight of buildings at the pillar's base, and the scale of the thing made itself clear. Langsdorf sucked in a sharp intake of breath. "Boomerang! What is that thing!"
"Those buildings you see . . . that's part of the ruins of Freeport! I'm east of the mountains, circling above our encampment. That geyser started up a few seconds ago!"
"It's . . . huge ..."
"The water jet reaches two thousand meters, Colonel! There's steam shooting up farther than that! The geyser is four hundred meters across the base!"
The ground was definitely shaking under the Warhammer'sfeet, and there was a growing, subsurface, almost subsonic rumble that transmitted itself through the ground and into the body of his 'Mech. "But where is it coming from?"
"From the ruins of Freeport. It's as though a huge body of water underground started turning to steam! It started coming up through a spot on my map that looks like some sort of dam or flood-control equipment, down where the river bed meets the dry sea floor!"
Langsdorf watched the explosion of steam and water mount higher into the sky.
The Yehudan Sea was returning to the light.
35
Rachan screamed. The pain in his leg was unendurable as the ground shook and rumbled with accelerating fury.
He had not seen the records of the Star League's underground facility's building, had not seen the survey plots of the huge system of pipes that the League engineers had built beneath Freeport in order to drain the eastern half of the Vermillion River and open the cavern into the mountain.
The water had been rerouted, channeled into Helm Pit, an ancient faultline fissure that plunged for kilometers into the planet's crust. Later, when Freeport was destroyed, the channels had been opened, and a large portion of a small sea had funneled into the pit.
For three centuries, a small sea had existed at the core of the Nagayan Mountains. In a geologically active area, this could have created considerable problems, but fortunately, no large magma pockets or other thermal sources existed in the area. The area had once been much hotter, too, the site of considerable tectonic activity as the continental plates that had bumped and forced the Nagayan Mountains up from an ancient ocean continued to grind together. But the area had been quiescent for millions of years.
For three centuries, the Star League base's fusion pile had remained quiescent as well, providing the trickle of power necessary to keep the library's memory alive, and to be ready to open the Eastern Gate when the proper code was received. There was always the possibility, however, that someone would come who did not know the code, and would simply blast down the Eastern Gate rather than use the computer to unlock the door. Even a wall of granite weighing ten million metric tons could not keep out a determined invader. Major Keeler, the engineer who had created the whole system, knew very well that a few properly set charges of plastic explosives or a determined application of heavy lasers would smash the wall down, or burn through it.
He had, therefore, set other monitoring devices to watch over the integrity of the Eastern Gate, and other places throughout the complex. If the gate were ever smashed or the library destroyed, it would mean that it was not Star League personnel who had returned, but barbarians. Barbarians who must not be allowed to rifle the storehouse's treasures.
Deep below the mountain, the fusion reactor was generating heat normally found only at the core of stars. As it grew hotter, an underground sea turned to steam, and an eons-old balance of geological forces was overturned.
The crust of the planet moved.
* * *
Rachan could know none of this, of course. All he could tell was that the rumbling from beneath the mountain was louder now, with quake-loosened stones splattering down from the ceiling of the cavern in the darkness. The stones grew larger, as head-sized rocks broken fresh and jagged-edged from swaying cavern walls smashed to the ground around him.
Desperately, one hand clenched in agony around his shattered leg. Rachan began to drag himself toward the opening in the wall. A searing, claustrophobic fear possessed him in the roaring darkness, throttling him with the same intensity as the fire searing his leg.
A new sound ground through the dust and dark, the sound of stone splitting. As light burst suddenly down upon the ComStar Precentor, he looked up and shrieked.
The Wall across the mouth of the river-carved cavern had been severely weakened when Rachan ordered that its support struts be cut. It had been weakened further by the movements of the Archer.The earthquake shattered the last of the aligned-crystal steel braces, and sent ten million tons of granite toppling into the cavern opening.
The roar of tortured rock continued long after it had cut off the man's single, sharp scream.
* * *
The DropShip fleet accelerated at 1G, outbound from Helm. Under acceleration, Grayson could walk normally on the 'Mech Bay deck, talking to the tired and dirty men and women gathered there. All were exhausted, yet suffused with the flush of victory.
Lori and Alard King walked with him. As they approached a group of refugees, a ComStar Adept named Larabee stepped forward, his robes still bloodied from the fight in the Star League cave.
"Adept Larabee," Grayson said. "I heard that it was you who found Alard King and brought him to the ship. I was busy seeing to the boarding operations and hadn't heard the full story. I wish to thank you personally."
The Adept took Grayson's hand and shook it. "My pleasure, Colonel. I was on my way toward your ships anyway, in a transport hovercraft. I found your people– King and five of your soldiers—making their way down the slope of the mountain."
"Ha! It was more like we were clinging to the side of the mountain, waiting to die," King said. "The quake was going full-force then, and we couldn't even stand. He saved us, Colonel. I know damn well he saved Janice, that young corporal in charge, because she would have bled to death if we hadn't been able to get her back to the ship in time."
Grayson looked the Adept in the eyes. "I ... I don't agree with what ComStar was doing on Helm, Larabee, but that doesn't lessen the importance of what youdid, for me . . . and for my people. I appreciate it."
Larabee studied Grayson's face for a moment. There was still an inner pain there, a bleakness that victory and rescue had not erased. "Listen, Colonel ..."
"Yes?"
"I don't want you to judge the Order by the actions of one man."
"Rachan?" Grayson shook his head. "We'll probably never know the whole story. It's possible he was working alone."
Larabee looked torn, indecisive. "I tell you the truth, Colonel. I don't know if he was working alone or not. It's almost impossible to believe that such a hideous, evil plot could have been concocted by one man, but neither can I believe that the Order to which I have dedicated my life is capable of such monstrous deeds!"
"Whatever happened," Grayson said gently, "it is a failure of your Order's system.The power that ComStar wields, concealed by its mysticism ... it is enough to corrupt an army of men like Rachan."
"I swear to you that I knew nothing of it, Colonel. I swear to you, too, that your name, and the name of your regiment, will be cleared! If the plot was something concocted by men high up in the ComStar hierarchy, they will not dare to admit it, for there are too many people alive who know what really happened. They will find other scapegoats for Tiantan . . . Kleider and Garth, to begin with."
A fierce light burned in Larabee's eyes. "I will speak with my superiors on Terra. I think they will publicly support the . . . the theorythat Rachan was an isolated madman, that Tiantan was his idea alone, but carried out by the Duke of Irian in exchange for the promise of loot from the Star League cache. You, Colonel, will no longer be considered a renegade."
Grayson nodded. "That's . . . good. It doesn't much help the people who died on Sirius V, though. And it doesn't help Morley, Brodensen, Dulaney, or the others who died."
"Never forget the living, Colonel. There are alwaysthe living."
The living. Ramage was alive, barely, recovering now under the ship doctor's care. Clay had his arm in a sling, but was happily reunited with his wife and son. Janice Taylor was alive, and Lori. Grayson reached out, putting his arm around her waist, drawing her close. Lori is alive!he thought joyfully.
"Yes, there are the living," Grayson repeated. "And for that, we have to thank you, Adept Larabee. We cannot repay you."
"But you can. Alard King explained to me your suspicions concerning ComStar during the ride to your ship." Larabee looked down at his hands. "Perhaps I can settle some of my own doubts on that score if I know you are carrying out your original plan . . . allowing that library data to be spread across the stars." Larabee turned his hands, examining them. "I just wish I knew."
"Knew what?"
"I wish I knew whether, by helping you, by helping to spread that data ... I will be helping to make up for the evil done by one, mad renegade of my Order ... or whether it will make of methe renegade ..."