Battletech break away th.., p.1
BattleTech: Break-Away: The Proliferation Cycle #1, page 1
BattleTech: Break-Away
The Proliferation Cycle, Part I
Ilsa J. Bick
Contents
Break-Away
More BattleTech Fiction by Ilsa J. Bick
The BattleTech Fiction Series
Break-Away
“Naw, naw, we got that beat. Battle of Tybalt, Amanda and me did this break-away thing. Snuggled up real close. Meter, maybe. But, see, when you get painted, you look like one guy on GCI, right? So we’re going speed of heat, and then just outside visual, Amanda slid out and did this roll, pulled real hard into a split-s, ninety degrees, and she’s booming, peeling angels, and I’m playing the music so the Capellans lose the bubble. Then when I yell “Go!” she does this righteous bat turn. Thing of beauty: one-eighty roll, wings-level pull-out, hooking into their bellies, and then I’m loading angels, and the Capellans are loading angels, and they’re so busy looking up at me, they never see her coming from below until she rips them a new asshole. Wingman vaporized and the lead bails, but no nylon letdown we could see, poor bastard.
“Anyway, yeah, break-away. Crazy damn stunt. Never works twice.
“But you know? You live for that kind of shit.”
Colonel Charles Kincaid, as overheard in the Double Ugly, Terra, 19 October 2435
SIGNAL MOUNTAIN
TERRA
22 DECEMBER 2438
2030 HOURS
Hackett took sixty seconds to die, ten more than the colonel expected, and he bled like stink: twin ropes of dark blood spattering on icy rock, like water gurgling on concrete. Hackett’s eyes went glassy, and as his knees buckled, the colonel stayed with him, playing a wash of yellow light from his flash over Hackett’s face: the star in the spotlight of a terminal drama. Wisps of blood steam curled in delicate fingers, misting the chill night air. Hackett’s mouth was open, gawping like a fish as he tried to breathe, but the cut was deep and had sliced his trachea in two. A saving grace: he would suffocate long before he drowned or his body drained of blood. He would lose consciousness even before that. Then, Hackett toppled face-first and very hard. A dark red pool bloomed, spreading like dark machine oil chugging from an overturned bottle. Then the flow of blood dwindled as Hackett’s heart failed. Stopped.
The colonel released a slow breath that coalesced in a miasma, a kind of giving up of the ghost. His knife hand—the right—was tacky, and he caught the scent of wet rust, like the bed of an old wagon left in the rain. The knife was a standard-issue Hegemony Armed Forces KA-BAR, black on black, with a straight edge seventeen centimeters long, and oily with blood. He cleaned his hands and then spent five minutes on the knife, cleaning and then applying a thin film of boot oil to the blade. When he was done, he slipped the knife into a sheath riding his right hip and secured the thumb break over the black-leather grip. His fingers lingered over incised initials on the KA-BAR’s bolt butt: C. K.
Squatting, he searched Hackett. The man didn’t have much, but this was standard for a Level-C SERE exercise: Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. He took the major’s rations, a jackknife. Didn’t need the axe or the major’s KA-BAR. Instead, he peeled back the collar of Hackett’s parka and then his BDU tunic, thermal, and olive tee. His flash picked up a glint of chain. The chain was blood-slicked, but Hackett’s identifier tags were a metallic blue, like the color of aluminum exposed to a flame. Unzipping the parka, the colonel jerked the tags from Hackett’s neck then dropped them into a radio-opaque pouch that nestled against his own thermal tee to keep the tags warm. The metal chinked.
Thumbing off his flashlight, he fitted a pair of night-vision goggles over his eyes. He’d made excellent time these last few days, but had kilometers to go before he slept. He raised his left wrist, depressed the stem of something that looked like a wristwatch but wasn’t. In an instant, there was the glow of red digits. He tapped in a command and received more numbers, a bearing.
So he set out, slipping in and out of shadow, here and then as quickly gone: the avatar of a gathering storm.
YAKIMA PROVING GROUNDS
TERRA
24 DECEMBER 2438
0800 HOURS
The hot, humid air of the inner habitat was musty, with a lingering, ripe stink of feces mingling with mashed jackfruit. The smell always reminded Dr. Carolyn Fletcher of a cross between a New York City sewer and a cow barn.
A slow rivulet of sweat trickled into the hollow between her breasts. She’d been at the target range first thing that morning; popped off two, three mags from her Prestar-Glock 90 just for something to do. Pretty darned cold outside, and she’d worn her black cashmere sweater, jeans, and black cowboy boots: exactly the wrong clothes for the inner habitat. She felt wilted.
Her boss, Dr. Htov Gbarleman, had given the entire neuroscience staff a week off. Christmas, and all that. The military guys skedaddled like they had rockets attached to their butts. Unfortunately, her only standing invite was San Antonio and a ninety-year-old aunt with purple hair from a bottle. So, after tossing the PG-90 in its case into the well behind the driver’s seat, she opted for the lab. Data to collate, neural inputs to study. Yada, yada, yada. Busywork.
The neurohelmet worked. No question. But the system made her nervous. Tricking the brain into churning out more neuropeptides than required… She hadn’t liked it before, when the assistant director—a military type, natch, but hell of a good-looker—had strong-armed Gbarleman into the augmentation loop seven months ago.
The colonel liked it just fine. Kincaid racked up a slew of kills; got a real hard-on in the sims—hooting, hollering and carrying on like a bronco-bustin’ cowboy racing after the steer that got away. A shoo-in for the Mackie. Best man. Hegemony Special Forces Sniper Champ and all that crap. (Someone said there was a whole bunch of very pissed-off Blackhearts; just totally ticked that one of their own hadn’t won. Seemed kind of dumb to Carolyn; if the Blackhearts didn’t want anyone winning but HSF, they shouldn’t open up the competition to every branch. Dumb. But that was another one of those military-intelligence oxymoron things.)
Call her sexist, but Carolyn was rooting for Major Cunningham. Not that she knew the pilots more than just to say hello. (Carolyn was hired help: a simian neurophysiology specialist, and pretty much invisible.) Amanda Cunningham’s numbers were darned good, and she was more under control emotionally. Racked up kills but without the hoo-hah swagger, joy-of-killing crap. Kincaid might be the best man, but Amanda was a better woman. Except there was all kinds of politico mumbo-jumbo going on, Jacob Cameron’s fingers in the pie, the Kincaid family in all kinds of industries, most of which had spent a pretty sizable chunk of change on the project, blah, blah. The final decision would be like, you know, really fair.
So, Carolyn had been in the central lab, scrolling through numbers, blah, blah blah. Not really paying attention but eyeing her reflection: chestnut hair tacked to her scalp in a sensible bun with a forest of bobby pins; the illusion of a heart-shaped face accentuated by a widow’s peak. Thinking maybe her eyes—large, deep brown-black—were her best feature, and about how if that’s all you got going it’s, like, hopeless.
Then sounds seeped into the periphery of her awareness the way water bleeds into paper. She pulled out of her slouch, listened hard. The sounds were screams, but not from people; not a person screaming; the screams were…
Oh, my God. She tore out of the lab and clattered down an access corridor, boots banging linoleum like gunshots, but by the time she keyed in her combination code, did the retinal scan and cracked the seal for the inner habitat, the screams had stopped.
Now, she glanced over at the females huddled on a wooden platform three meters above ground. Lucy, Betty, Shana. They were still wild with fear; their brown eyes were wide, whites all around, rolling in their sockets. Tongo, Shana’s infant and Jack’s son, looked like he was trying to melt into his mother’s chest. Linus, an easygoing adolescent male and Shana’s firstborn, was high in one of two sycamores that topped out near the removable ceiling grates. That was wrong.
Jack was wrong, too. The alpha male, Jack wasn’t a huge chimp. Sixty kilos, a little wiry. Very sociable. Always came over for a hug. Not that aggressive, but smart. The way he’d gotten to alpha male, for example. Instead of an out-and-out fight, Jack had scrounged three plastic jugs and charged the dominant male and his buddies while screaming and juggling the plastic jugs, making a hell of a racket. The other males scattered. Pretty smart chimp. Today, though, Jack was jammed in a corner like he’d been sent to time-out. Hadn’t looked around, hadn’t made a sound. Wrong.
Normally she never approached the chimps. Better they come to her. So she was cautious. Moved slow, made sure she had a straight line to the door. “Jack,” she said, from about a meter away. “Jack, what is it, boy?”
This time, for whatever reason, Jack answered. No, strike that. He cried: an owl-like hooting, a call Carolyn recognized but didn’t believe because it made no sense.
Chimpanzees cry, but they do not weep. Their sorrow is vocal: Hoo, hoo, hoo-hoo-hoo. Jack’s was a slow crescendo that built in volume and frequency, crested. Fell. Eerie.
She reached for him, blindly, the way a mother consoles a child. When her fingers brushed his coarse, dry fur, he shuddered like she’d sent an electric charge sizzling into his bones. His fingers moved in a palsied tremor that was oddly, uncannily familiar. And then Jack pulled his head around, and she saw his face. That’s when everything went t
Because Jack was weeping.
SNAKE RIVER
TERRA
24 DECEMBER 2438
0845 HOURS
Job one after the kill? Get rid of the frigging body.
Major Sarah James did everything by the book. Take sniper shots. You had to clamp down on every little twitch no matter how bone-cold you were, or that your nose was icier than a brass button. (Thank heavens, the weather was freakish, and snow hadn’t arrived in the Tetons yet.) So she kept still, let her heartbeat slow. Tried not to think about the way her stomach was one big, sharp, ripping cramp, like a cat’s claw snagged on skin. Plus, she reeked. Hadn’t seen a hot shower for three days, and was pretty sure her BDUs would stand up on their own.
None of that mattered, though, because there was the colonel on the west shore of Snake River and looking one-eighty in the wrong direction. Charles Kincaid: HAF Certified Rock Star with a head of blond curls and blue eyes to die for—and the one to beat. She was dying like hell to whip Kincaid’s tight little ass.
She peeked through her scope to double-check. Watched as her targeting crosshairs glowed crimson and her IFF read the identifier tags:
Kincaid, Charles
Serial# 11031902
FOE
All right. Figure, maybe, seven-three-oh meters. James emptied her lungs, the warm moist air jetting from her nostrils. Waited for the pause between heartbeats.
Beat. And…Amanda Cunningham, eat your heart out… Beat. She fired.
A mosquito whine and then the ruby red of laser fire cut a seam in the air. The laser needled the colonel’s back, and Kincaid flinched, jerking like a fish flipped out of the water. And he went down.
And the crowd goes wild; they are celebrating in Times Square tonight. James waited a few seconds, then trotted over.
Kincaid was facedown, left arm flung to one side, his right folded under his stomach. His laser rifle lay just beyond the outstretched fingers of his left hand. As a precaution—and because she knew every little thing counted—she kept her weapon at the ready and gave the body a wide berth, kicked the rifle to one side, out of reach.
The colonel was playing it to the hilt. Rules said to fall down and play dead, not hard to do when you’d been pretty much semi-Tasered. Not as bad as the real thing but still laid you out a couple seconds. She shouldered her rifle then nudged Kincaid’s right leg with the toe of her boot. “All right, Colonel, show’s over.” And then she grinned, because she was that much closer to piloting the Mackie. “And if you don’t mind my saying it, sir…you is one dead mother.”
In response, the colonel stirred. “Naw, not me,” he said. He rolled left, and then he was on his feet, hood flipping back, his right hand moving up in a single, smooth arc—and James’s mind did this little stutter-step of surprise because now she was staring into the huge black o of the business end of a silencer.
“But you are,” he said, and fired.
The slug rocketed at a speed of a half klick per second along eleven centimeters of barrel plus silencer and zipped the scant ten centimeters between James and the muzzle before the pfft ever reached her ears.
But, by then, well…her skull had exploded.
INSPIRATION POINT
TERRA
24 DECEMBER 2438
0850 HOURS
Major Amanda Cunningham perched atop a hummock of granite called Inspiration Point that overlooked Jenny Lake, directly behind and to the east, and the craggy, snow-covered peaks of Grand Teton and Mount St. John due west. She wasn’t admiring the view. Instead, she was whittling a fishhook out of a supple whip of stripped aspen. She didn’t need a new hook; it was just something to do. She’d snagged a fair-sized brook trout out of Jenny Lake just as the sun was coming up. Best time to ice-fish, first thing in the morning. She bled, scaled, scooped out all the fish guts. Buried the guts as far into the frozen earth as she could (not much) because of animals, and if a squad came by, to make it look like no one had been around. Couldn’t make a fire. Smoke was a big no-no, kind of empirically obvious if you were trying really hard not to get caught. So she ate the fish raw. It was okay. Hey, people paid a lot of money for that stuff and called it sashimi.
Raw fish, whittling hooks, watching her ass: what SERE was all about. Big field manual on the thing. Playing by the rules, Amanda ought to be on the move, heading for Death Canyon, twenty-odd klicks southwest. (There was probably some irony there.) Up at Death Canyon, there was a radio she could use to vector in a rescue chopper. Deadline was midnight December twenty-fifth, and a Merry Christmas to you, too.
That same manual also said that come daylight, you get a move on. She bet that’s what Hackett and James and Kincaid were doing because whoever got to Death Canyon first won. The trick was not getting captured, and staying alive.
But this was the fubar part. Not only were there enemy squads gunning for your butt, you could take out the competition. Show you had grit, and all that crap. Taking out your own people was stupid, even if you were competing with them. Amanda hadn’t survived this long playing by rules that made no sense. It wasn’t like she wasted a lot of time and energy feeling bad about doing her job. She was a soldier and a realist. Some soldiers gazed at their navel, wondering if killing the enemy was like, you know, moral. Screw morality. You think the enemy’s getting all existential? Don’t want to kill people, be a writer.
On the other hand, some rules existed because only some people could break them and not end up vaporized. Like Tybalt three years ago, that break-away, a stunt you bragged about in a bar. Won ’em a couple of medals, and then she and Kincaid had celebrated in bed for a solid day, giddy with relief and tickled to be alive.
At the thought of Kincaid, a whiny little voice seeped up from some dark Neanderthal crevice of her brain: That’s what’s really eating you, isn’t it, sweetheart? Hard enough Kincaid’s got his eye on the Mackie, but having to train with him, watching him ace those simulations. Not enough that he knows more about slug-throwers than any guy living and has the medals to prove it. But seeing him do it with that kind of weird energy he gets so you know that he’s happier shooting almost than flying…got you going, huh, baby doll?
“Shut up, you moron.” Suddenly furious, she jabbed a knothole with the tip of her jackknife and twisted, popping it out like an eye. “You think the two of you would live happily ever after? Not when there’s a Cameron in the picture, right?”
She remembered the day everything went to hell. This year, a Thursday afternoon in early July: the heady, too-sweet aroma of day lilies swirling through an open window and over their bodies on the warm fingers of a gentle wind as smooth and soft as velvet. She’d been his wingman for four years, and his lover for most of that. They just fit together. In bed, out of it, and when they made love, she could pretend that Colonel Charles Kincaid wasn’t destined for great things—and that one of them wasn’t Isabelle Cameron, the Director-General’s third cousin.
They’d lain in a tangle of sheets, Kincaid on his stomach along her left side, thigh to thigh. He was a leftie, and that was his side of the bed because he hated reaching across and fumbling around the nightstand for something. As much as she wanted him, she had to know. Call it perversity. Or maybe self-defeating. But she said, “So you’re marrying her.”
She expected him to be angry. Maybe that’s what she wanted. Nice big fight, maybe break a couple things. Then losing him wouldn’t hurt so much.
Instead, he rolled up on his right elbow. Kincaid’s eyes were very blue but dark, like the sky at twilight. “You know I don’t have a choice.”
“You have a choice. Just say no.”
Kincaid sighed. “Amanda, we’ve been over this and over this. My family has connections…”
“Who cares which uncle served under whom? I know your family’s been in service to the Hegemony for a long time.”
