Battletech innocent and.., p.1
BattleTech: Innocent, and Defenseless, page 1
BATTLETECH: INNOCENT, AND DEFENSELESS
✷ ✷ ✷
THE MERCENARY TALES, #2
JASON HANSA
CONTENTS
Innocent, and Defenseless
Jason Hansa
Notable BattleMechs
Battletech Glossary
BattleTech Eras
The BattleTech Fiction Series
Copyright
INNOCENT, AND DEFENSELESS
JASON HANSA
FORT SILVESTRI, RADSTADT
RADSTADT PREFECTURE
RASALHAGUE MILITARY DISTRICT
DRACONIS COMBINE
2 JULY 2754
Major Rafael Pinho sat straight up in bed as the klaxons sounded, automatically reaching over to the other side to wake his girlfriend.
He flinched when his fingers hit nothing but blankets: they’d been together for three years, riding dozens of alerts out together; they’d get dressed—tossing uniform parts to one another—and then scream out of the parking lot to their BattleMechs in her sporty coupe instead of his SLDF-issued jeep. She’d been promoted and transferred off-world to take over a sister regiment back in January; by May, both had realized a long-distance relationship spanning literal light-years just wasn’t working anymore.
He was just getting over sleeping alone again, but the muscle-memory of alerts was taking longer to break. He quickly threw a pair of olive-drab coveralls over his briefs and T-shirt, and, grabbing a pair of sneakers, raced barefoot through his one-bedroom assigned quarters and out the door. He was a hair behind his neighbor, Captain Jessica Breske, wearing a t-shirt and an olive-drab kilt.
“Riding with me, sir?” she asked as they sprinted for the stairwell: the Single Officer Quarters was a two-story complex resembling a motel, all the doors opening onto a small parking lot. Fort Silvestri was on the south side of the massive Lake Abigail, with the world’s capital, Munich, surrounded by hills on the north side. A wide river, deep enough for commercial shipping, ran east from the lake two hundred kilometers toward the closest ocean; the ring of numerous islands and archipelagos circling the continent calmed the worst of the waves and made the continent’s so-called “moat” a fisherman’s paradise.
Surrounding the inland lake for kilometers were rich, rolling fields, while from Fort Silvestri south ran a thousand kilometers of Radstadt Pine forests, the wood known for turning a shimmering gold when treated. It was a sparsely populated world, which was why only a single battalion of the Star League Defense Force’s 151st Light Horse Regiment stood to defend it. The regiment—the “Dark Horse” regiment—was one-quarter of the Third Regimental Combat Team, commonly referred to in its entirety by its nickname, the “Eridani Light Horse.”
“I will, Jessi,” he replied. “Surprised you’re here, thought you’d be hanging out with Sabine,” he said as the two officers raced down the stairs.
“We just got back,” Jessica said, and sure enough, Captain Sabine Cantã—in a vintage gridiron jersey, an olive-drab kilt that matched Breske’s, and her ever-present Stetson—was already in the open-topped jeep, her bottom-floor apartment right next to the parking spot. “I’d just run upstairs for some wine when the alarm sounded.”
Rafael noticed Sabine was about to move to the rear bench—as befit his rank and position as commander of the Eighth Recon Battalion—but he shook his head and vaulted into the back seat. Jessica fired up the petrochemical engine and, upon seeing a pair of junior officers bumbling out of a first-floor room, Sabine yelled at them to get in while other officers ran for their vehicles.
Slamming the jeep into gear the moment the two lieutenants squeezed in next to Rafael, Breske squealed tires as she raced out of the parking lot toward the ’Mech bays.
Six kilometers away, bikini-clad Lieutenant Minthe Squire danced against her boyfriend, the two of them squished between other dancers on the crowded floor. Outside the gate of Fort Silvestri was Meacham, originally a small logging town that had expanded catering to the needs of the garrison: retailers, restaurants, and tour agencies by day, and the usual collection of nighttime industries when the sun went down.
Many of the bars were favored by one branch or another: the ’'Mech jocks had their bars, the infantry tended to drink elsewhere, and so on. Side Skirts was a two-story tiki bar and dance-club right on the beach of Lake Abigail. It was popular with not only armor crews, but often received traffic from the kayak and white-water rafting tour companies to either side.
Side Skirts was flooded with tank memorabilia; during good weather, they’d open up the walls. Customers, attracted by the tiki torches in the sand, would float into the first floor from either the main road out front, or more often from the lake and tourist companies next door. Littering the first floor were unit patches and insignias, paintings, tank parts both familiar and mysterious, all of it anchored by a long Radstadt Pine bar that gleamed gold in the firelight.
Upstairs had another bar: also made of Radstadt Pine, no one saw it shimmer because the second floor was lit only by lights for dancing. What kept the dance floor of Side Skirts exclusive were the bouncers that enforced a “bathing suits, skirts, or kilts” dress-code, making the darkened room not much more than arms, legs, and abs gyrating to the loud music.
Minthe and her boyfriend, Captain Paik Sun, commander of Fifth Recon Company, were usually at the club every Friday and Saturday night. Sun was an outdoor-fitness freak, while Minthe loved the water, so this Friday—like usual—they’d been on the lake until the sun went down, and had been dancing and drinking ever since.
She felt a hand grab hers and she spun around to grab Paik’s hip, swaying against him. Minthe was small and slight of build, with a bikini top needed more to obey dress codes than any biological requirements: all useful traits for a tank commander. Paik was tall and thin, with muscles of wired steel from climbing his BattleMech on-duty and mountainsides in his off-time. Paik’s hair was jet-black, while Minthe bleached her hair pure-white; when they’d started dating, she had dyed her tips black to match him.
They danced, hands on hips, bodies pressed against one another; the music was by Gochujang Valkyrie—the stage name of a Munich-based artist that mixed her original nu-Metal with the latest Korean pop-hits from Terra—and the speakers roared, the floor was thumping from the bass and it all came to a screeching halt, everyone blinking and shouting in annoyance when the bar’s overhead white lights came on.
“Alert!” screamed an MP as he clambered into the DJ booth. The DJ turned on the microphone and the MP leaned into it. “Alert,” he repeated, “this is not a drill. Rally at the bays, I say again, this is not a drill,” he finished, stepping away.
“Just like the drills, people,” Paik’s voice sounded above the crowd. “NCOs, keep the flow smooth and throw anyone too drunk to double-time into a cab with a battalion chit,” he ordered. Looking at Minthe, he added, “Lieutenant Squire, grab some help and clear out the latrines.”
“Sir,” Minthe replied, pushing toward the back wall as the crowd started to move to the stairs. That was the rule about dating inside the battalion: you couldn’t date inside your own unit, and you couldn’t let it get in the way of duty. She was a lieutenant, even when off-duty, and she might have been half-drunk wearing only beach shoes and a bikini, but her boyfriend was a captain who’d given her a job to do, and that was that.
As she moved, she saw fellow soldiers carrying their more drunk compatriots to the door: the relationship between the Star League and the Draconis Combine could best be described as strained, with garrisons barely tolerated on most Combine worlds. It wasn’t unheard of for lone soldiers to get ambushed and beaten by Meacham toughs in the kilometer-long drinking district, so troops moved around in at least pairs and carried chits to pay for taxi-rides home: the battalion covered the up-front cost to get them home safely, the price of the taxi later deducted from their pay.
One of the tank commanders in her platoon, Corporal Peter Scavone, swung in on her flank, also heading toward the latrines. She flung open the women’s door and chased out a pair of stragglers fixing their makeup who hadn’t heard the news. Hearing Scavone clearing out the men’s room, she moved down a service corridor she knew partners sometimes ducked into for some privacy. Seeing no one, she opened the supply closet just to check, and, sure enough, there was a pair wrapped up in each other’s arms.
“C’mon you two, alert call and holy crap, Corporal Black?” she shouted in astonishment, which quickly changed to anger when she saw who was in there with him. “Sambora?”
Private Elina Sambora, a small, dark-haired woman with visible tan lines, shrank under her glare as she shrugged her crop-top and Light-Horse yellow kilt back into place. “Sorry, ma’am, it was my fault, he was cute and—”
“Stop. Not your fault,” she said curtly. “Scavone’s by the latrines, link up with him and get to Fort-Ess.”
“Ma’am,” she replied, sliding past Minthe and sprinting down the hallway, yellow kilt flapping around her thighs. The previous SLDF garrison had a tradition of wearing wool kilts, and several of the Meacham shops sold locally-woven ones. When the Eighth Recon Battalion arrived, they more-or-less adopted it as a local tradition; the stores quickly switched their products to ELH-friendly designs, and the most popular among the enlisted was the insignia-yellow tartan with black and olive-drab cross-hatching. NCOs tended to wear either the yellow or the reverse—yellow and olive on black—while officers threw on either an olive-drab base with y
She turned her glare on Corpora Black. “Sergeant Macleod’s driver? Are you out of your damn mind?”
Corporal Gulliver Black just shrugged in his cocky way as he adjusted his board-shorts. Muscular, fit, with the profile of a Greek God and a shock of raven-black hair, he was handsome enough to make almost anyone look him over. However, he’d been assigned as her gunner a year ago: twelve months in each other’s pockets in the tight confines of a 40-ton Zephyr hovertank, smelling each other after days without showers, the burps and the farts and the same stories over and over and over ensured she saw him as nothing but a trooper, and thus had absolutely zero hesitation in chewing him out.
“You know the rules, Corporal!” she yelled, grabbing him by the shoulder and shoving him down the corridor. He broke into a quick jog with her on his heels, still shouting. “Not within the platoon: besides the fact she’s a private, she’s Macleod’s driver!”
“She’s cute,” he said by way of explanation, heading down the stairs two at a time; they were the last of the Light Horse inside, a half-pack of civilians still milling aimlessly on the brightly lit dance floor.
“Not an excuse, Gulliver,” she replied as they hit the ground floor and sprinted for the road. “We’ll talk about this later in Chop Shop.”
Her platoon fell under Captain Cantã’s “Chinook” company, so every vehicle in the company—including her four Zephyrs—had nicknames starting with the letter C. They fell into an easy pace, double-timing down the dark street with the rest of the battalion as the MPs continued clearing each building.
Ahead, they could see the Fort: one of the massive, fifteen-meter-high ferrocrete gates was already closed, but one was left open as the Light Horse jogged in, armed MPs checking IDs under the watchful eye of two machine gun-armed APCs.
By the time Minthe and Black got to the gate, the traffic had thinned out behind her; turning around, she could see the MPs walking down the boulevard, looking for stragglers. Once they got everyone in, they’d seal the vehicle gate and only leave open the heavily guarded pedestrian entrance. She pulled her ID out of the thin waterproof wallet strapped to her bicep, and once past the MPs, looked for the Chinook-company trucks.
“C’mon,” she said to Black, sprinting for the six-wheeled vehicle right where it was supposed to be. Just like the drills they practiced every thirty days or so, the logistics regiment’s olive-drab trucks were already arriving at the gate, parking in the pre-designated areas for each company. The driver, a lanky man with a prominent Adam’s apple, was about to raise the tailgate when everyone onboard yelled at him to wait.
“Give me yer hand, ma’am,” said the huge man on the end through a thick Scottish brogue, reaching down with would almost be better described as a hairy paw. Sergeant Christopher Macleod—one of the few members in the Light Horse with a brogue hailing from Scotland, Terra—was a mountain of a man with muscles so thick it was said they could stop small arms fire. Wearing black boots, his green and black clan tartan, and a battalion t-shirt, he’d most likely been down at Breaking Track, an armor-themed billiard-hall where the rotgut was cheap, the cue-sticks were warped, and the serving staff wore little.
Stepping onto the tailgate’s pre-formed footrest, she grabbed his hand and was less assisted and more hauled up the meter-and-a-half to the truck’s bed. Thanking him, she squeezed in between two MechWarriors on the wooden bench opposite Macleod as he then pulled up Corporal Black. Black thanked him and slid in next to Sambora.
Minthe glared at Black, but, seeing an empty truck pulling alongside them in the Chinook company area, she called to the driver, “let’s go, Private, that truck can bring the next batch.”
The driver slammed the tailgate up and ran to his seat: with the pop of released air brakes and a puff of coal-black exhaust, the truck roared onto the pavement, turned sharply—throwing everyone into one another—and raced to the Chinook-company ’Mech bay.
Like everyone in the battalion—and across the entire regiment, since it was a directive from above—Rafael kept a fully-packed alert bag in the bay. Within moments of arriving, he’d changed into his MechWarrior cooling suit and placed the bag next to the foot of his 60-ton Ostroc BattleMech: when he rode the lift up to the cockpit, he’d stow it in the ’Mech’s small storage locker. Because everything a BattleMech did—even just walking—generated waste heat, MechWarriors wore cooling suits in the cockpit. An olive drab, skintight suit of mixed cloth and aramid, cooling suits were interwoven with small piping that shunted coolant over his core and limbs, keeping his body temperature down. Because the cooling suit was designed to shunt heat—not trap it—he’d also shrugged into his mid-thigh-length field jacket to block the wind whipping through the bay.
From his Ostroc, he walked down the designated safety path against the wall and behind the BattleMechs, keeping the central area open so the command and security lances could scramble. He did not run: Never run, his first commander had instructed him, when officers run, the troops worry they should run too. But Rafael did allow himself to walk quickly.
He glanced over as Sergeant Hemphill stepped forward in her Wolverine, that first, thunderous step echoing through the ’Mech bay. Between eight and twelve meters tall, BattleMechs could go where tanks couldn’t, and could kill entire regiments of infantry on their own. The apex predators of ground combat, it was a truism widely understood that the only thing that could stop a BattleMech was another BattleMech.
The four regiments of the Eridani Light Horse, however, weren’t meant to go toe-to-toe with enemy regiments. Oh, they could, of course: because of the recently ended Pirate War, the Third Regimental Combat Team was experienced and combat tested.
But, by doctrine, they were reconnaissance units: the main combat element of the Star League Defense Force was the division, each a massive organization with brigades upon brigades of BattleMechs. Divisions were organized under corps, and an Army Commander would assign independent regiments—or consolidated teams, like the Light Horse—to the Corps Commander. These units were the eyes of the corps, meant to scout ahead of the divisions or screen their flanks: cavalry doctrine, as old as the first domesticated horses, and the Light Horse was very, very good at it.
Mission drives equipping, as it so often did, so Light Horse regiments were built differently: instead of a dozen BattleMechs in three lances per company, they had eight BattleMechs in two lances. However, each company then added a pair of aerospace fighters and two platoons of support elements: the Eighth Reconnaissance Battalion, specifically, used two platoons of hovertanks per company. Pinho also kept his battalion quick and nimble: he’d refused any equipment that couldn’t hit at least eighty KPH, eschewing many of the common heavy-hitting BattleMechs in the SLDF for quick skirmishers.
Including his command lance, he had only eight lances of BattleMechs in his battalion, twenty percent less than the nine-plus-one configuration common across the Inner Sphere: however, with their vehicles providing constant observation, the battalion’s higher speed allowed Rafael to dictate the conditions of nearly every battle.
He pushed open the door to the Emergency Operations Center: once the battalion took to the field, the main headquarters in the heavily-fortified command bunker would take over. The EOC, however, was manned twenty-four hours a day, and managed the critical first hour of an emergency. The room—not much more than a small conference room with a holotable in the center and screens on every wall—was abuzz with activity, the holotable showing a representation of three spherical DropShips in a tight formation approaching Munich.
“Unions?” asked Rafael. “I’m impressed, you usually don’t see pirates in ships only fifty years old. Where’d they come from?”
Master Sergeant Natalie Egorshiva looked up at him from her position at the holotable.
