Battletech, p.4
BattleTech, page 4
Aden had changed his entire wardrobe, now only wearing clothes manufactured on Son Hoa and growing his hair out in the local style. The RSIS team had set him up with an apartment a block from Madam Pascal’s, and shown him how to make it to their building through the front door. They’d assured him he was getting better at blending in with the local populace, but he’d still stick out to others in the intel trade.
Be careful, be invisible, Wayne had reminded him over and over again, and then said it one more time over the radio before continuing, “Go in, grab a beer, order snacks—I’ll be in five minutes after you to link-up with the Lyrans.”
He nodded once—he knew Wayne could see it from his location—and pushed open the bar’s heavy wooden door. This quarter of Xiang, like most of the areas Aden and his team moved through, was old and run down, most of the buildings made of thick, locally fired brick that would insulate the occupants from the depths of Son Hoa’s brutal winters. Though the world had recovered from Fimbulwinter, the local term for planet’s long years of nuclear winter, neighborhoods like this were reminders that the past was never that far away.
The bar—Corky’s Pub—was narrow but long, trimmed in dark wood and recessed lighting. Green neon lights and stock art of the island of Ireland gave the pub an old-Terra feel. The place was moderately full, with serving staff of all genders wearing short shorts and midriff-baring green T-shirts carrying trays of food and drinks.
Aden found an empty place at the bar and signaled for a drink. The bartender, wearing a tight black T-shirt and a matching leather skirt over a pair of shapely legs, quickly looked him up and down. While many locals carried holstered pistols, Aden avoided it because obvious weapons drew attention. Be invisible.
“Whatcha havin’?” she asked.
“A dark lager and a menu,” he replied. Because of its odd seasons, Son Hoa’s microbrewery industry specialized in numerous varieties of beers, and he admitted one of the most enjoyable parts of maintaining character was slowly working through them all. He surreptitiously watched the pour—as he was taught—wary of any dangerous additions, and she brought it back to him with a stylish paper coaster and a menu.
A few moments later—while he waited on an order of deep-fried mushrooms—Aden saw Wayne enter the bar and head toward the staircase against the far wall. He didn’t meet eyes with his RSIS counterpart, instead watching a BattleMech arena match on the holo and tracking him through the mirrors behind the bar.
Just as Wayne disappeared, the food arrived. Despite it being the height of summer, Aden worn a featherweight dark windbreaker just in case he needed to disappear into a shadow. Adjusting it to a comfortable position, he grabbed a handful of mushrooms. Just as he bit into one, a woman slid in next to him on his right side, leaning on the bar and facing out.
“Hi!” she chirped. Short, with curly red hair and a splash of freckles on her nose and cheeks, she was in a green tank-top raggedly trimmed just beneath her breasts, a matching green tartan, and knee-high dark brown boots. Her closest arm was real, but her left arm was prosthetic from the elbow down. Her right arm was tattooed, a swirling, artistic blend of white, blue, and gray clouds running from shoulder to elbow, and he could see the tiniest hints of scars artfully hidden by the design.
“Do you mind?” she asked, nodding toward his food. When he shook his head, she reached over with her left hand. Mother-of-pearl in color and translucent, he could see the myomer fibers inside contract and flex as she grabbed a mushroom and popped it into her mouth.
He caught her scent as soon as she’d started talking—Lavender, he thought—and when she smiled, he smiled back. Do I know her? he thought, his thoughts seeming a bit muddled.
She lowered her voice and put her head near his. “My friend Astrid said you were the guy offering hard stones for tips, yeah?” she quietly asked. At his nod, she smiled again. “C’mon. I have something in the basement I want you to see.”
She glanced at the bartender. “Can I use the office?”
The bartender frowned. “Echo, you know the boss is upstairs.”
The redhead pouted in a way Aden decided he kinda liked, and he polished off half his beer while watching her out of the corner of his eye. He heard a whisper in his earpiece, too fast to catch, but his attention was focused on the redhead—Echo—as she said, “No, I meant the downstairs office.”
The bartender frowned again, but nodded. The redhead grabbed his hand with her flesh-and-blood one and started leading him through the crowd, Aden following the lavender scent.
“One, Four’s in trouble,” he heard someone call over the earpiece. His mind felt foggy and separated: it was as if part of him was yelling and trying to get his attention about something from behind a wall, but the rest of his mind was ignoring it.
The redhead led him down a short staircase and into a narrow, concrete passageway. The smell of lavender was almost overwhelming in the tight corridor, and he coughed once and asked her, “Is your name really Echo?” He heard footsteps coming down the stairs behind them but shrugged it away.
She opened a wooden door and pulled him inside. “More of a nickname, really,” she said as she flicked on a light switch. “We don’t like to use our real names.”
The room was about five-by-five meters, made of dark, smooth concrete, with a drain in the middle of the floor. There were large hooks and mounted brackets holding various lengths of chain on the walls…and in the middle of the floor was a chair with leather straps.
Aden’s blood ran cold, and his memory immediately clicked back to training.
The roughest forty-eight hours of Watch training was the interrogation class. Twenty-four hours of torturing their classmates, and twenty-four hours as the prisoner. It was brutal and painful, and he still had nightmares about both halves of that lesson. The sight of the chair flooded adrenaline into his system and cut through his foggy haze. He pulled his right hand out of her grip and threw a left-cross at her, sliding into a guard stance as he did so.
Her smile froze for a split second. “Dammit,” she said as she blocked the punch, then pushed his follow-up snap-kick aside. “I’d hoped I could get you into the seat before the effuser wore off.”
Pheromone effuser! I should have realized. Aden blocked a pair of palm strikes from her, then dodged a high kick, the heel of her boot missing his jaw by centimeters. Two large men appeared behind him in the doorway, one cracking his knuckles as they approached. I have to get out of here.
He threw another punch at Echo, who blocked it; she threw a quick jab that missed and then another high kick with her right leg. This time Aden grabbed her ankle with his left hand and pulled, leaning her forward. He rotated into her body, facing her foot; he slammed his right elbow into the meat of her thigh, and then threw his right fist up and backward, breaking her nose and drawing a shriek of pain from her. He shoved her to the right, and as she fell bodily to the hard floor, Aden swung back into a guard position.
The first man was already within striking distance. About two meters tall and half-again as wide, he was tan and with a face well-worn from punches and abuse. He fired a quick boxing-style one-two-one-two combo at Aden, who blocked the first two but barely caught the third. The fourth punch, however, slipped through his defenses and struck his jaw, making him see stars and sending him to the floor.
Years of muscle memory spun him away from the kick he knew was coming. He felt the familiar fire in his belly, the energy of ten thousand fights racing through him. He was a Watch agent now, but he’d been raised a Clan MechWarrior. Ten years in the shiver, learning to punch, to kick, to fight, brawling for every advantage, for every centimeter of ground, then six more in the touman before joining the Watch, fighting for rank, for positions, for honor. The Inner Sphere and even some of the other Clans looked down on his Clan because their focus was merchant-centric, but they forgot—everyone always forgot—that Clan Sea Fox was still Clan.
The kick missed, and Aden grabbed the man’s ankle, holding it as he surged to his feet. The large man was pulled off balance and fell to the ground. Aden could only kick him once—hearing a rib break—before the second man was on him. About Aden’s size and with a pair of glowing red bionic eyes, the man’s shirt was missing his right sleeve, showing off the steely, rippling bands of a thick, prosthetic arm.
“Maybe after this,” Aden gasped, “you guys can set me up with your arms dealer.” Voices screamed for updates in his earpiece as the rest of the team screamed for updates, but Aden blocked the rest of his team out to focus on his opponent and catching his breath.
Redeyes smiled. “A funny Clanner? Thought you went extinct,” he replied, and then threw a pair of jabs with his real hand that Aden blocked, then a right-cross with his prosthetic Aden couldn’t stop.
He rolled with the punch. Hits as hard as an Elemental, but I have fought Elementals before. He shook off the blow and closed the distance, grappling Redeyes and throwing a pair of sharp punches into his gut. Redeyes pushed at him with his prosthetic arm, opening up the distance, but Aden had expected that. Grabbing his opponent’s prosthetic hand, he spun around and used his momentum to swing Redeyes into the wall.
Redeyes bounced off, staggered, and Aden threw a kick into his abdomen. The man fell, and Aden reached for a chain, but was tackled from behind. His forehead slammed into the wall, and Echo’s real arm wrapped around his neck in a chokehold while his kidney was slammed three times by her prosthetic fist.
He cried out in pain, and felt his vision tunneling. From the doorway, he heard a loud "Everyone stand down!” The pressure on his throat released, and he took in great gasps of breath as he turned.
In the doorway stood Wayne, looking around the room with a raised eyebrow, next to a tall, pale woman Aden didn’t recognize. A pure white suit complemented her shoulder-length blond hair, and he could see her sapphire eyes flashing in anger from halfway across the room.
“Echo, what in the hell is going on in here?” she demanded. The two men groaned as they slowly stood, and Echo moved in front of him. Her nose was disjointed from when he broke it, and her face, chin, and neck were covered in blood.
“He’s Clan Watch, ma’am, and, uh…we were gonna question him,” she said thickly.
The blond shook her head and sighed deeply. “Did it occur to any of you that, perhaps, he was Wayne’s backup?”.
“He’s actually the acting team lead,” Wayne said to her. “It’s complicated.”
“Of course he is. Of course it is…” She sighed. “You have my apologies,” she said, looking at Aden.
“Helluva strong kick you got me with,” the large man said, rubbing his side.
Aden glanced at Wayne, who shook his head, a slight smile on his face. Right, he thought, I guess this happens all the time.
“Your left came out of nowhere,” he replied with a graciousness he wasn’t sure he entirely felt, “and I think you knocked one of my molars loose. Call it even?”
The man chuckled, comradely thumping him once on the shoulder.
Echo rolled her eyes, and, after using her kilt to wipe the blood off her hand, she stuck it out. He took it.
“Sorry,” she said with a slight shrug. “I’m Echo, and we’re LIC Molehunters.”
“LIC?” Aden asked incredulously, turning toward Wayne. When Wayne said they were meeting Lyrans, he hadn’t realized the other man meant the Lyran Intelligence Corps.
The large man nodded. “We have our own agendas, but occasionally when there’s some overlap, a little teamwork can go a long way.”
“Not how I thought introductions would go,” the blond said, shaking her head. “But we can work with this.” She turned and waved a hand toward the hallway. “Everyone, upstairs, my office. We’ll have burgers and a bottle of whiskey sent up, and we’ll hit restart on the night.”
VIHN
MUONG HOA VALLEY
LAO QI CONTINENT
SON HOA
THE PERIPHERY
22 SEPTEMBER 3151
The bullet train stopped at Vihn station just long enough to pick up passengers before departing again. Running at night, as soon as it left the station, the train’s interior lighting clicked off to let passengers sleep, leaving nothing but dim, indirect lighting to illuminate the car and glowing strips to define the aisle.
Aden was sitting in second-class, next to an elderly man quietly snoring against the window. Wayne was in the car ahead, Mika and Daniel were two cars back: it was an all-hands mission, but, if it went well, it could possibly net them an intelligence windfall.
Shortly after the bar meeting with the Lyrans, they’d come to Wayne asking for assistance. As Molehunters, their primary mission was to track down and eliminate leaks within the Lyran government. Someone was feeding Lyran troop information to SAFE, the Free Worlds League’s intelligence agency, and they’d been tasked to hunt them down.
Which they had. However, the leak had managed to get a last burst of information out to one Mister Phan Son, local businessman. Phan was supposed to meet the League agent in Yen Bai after the main arena fight, and the Lyrans wanted to eliminate the SAFE agent’s entire network. They’d identified the small web of informants the agent had built around himself, and had planned to simply kill them all, due to a lack of resources to do otherwise.
“Not to diminish what Echo can do,” explained the blond-haired woman everyone called Garnet. “But you do have an infiltrator. With your help, perhaps we can take the SAFE agent alive—he’s worth a lot more to both of us that way.”
For a week, the RSIS team and Aden had followed Phan. Daniel hacked most of his electronics while Mika built a duplication kit and learned his mannerisms to replace him in the meeting. The only thing left to do now was conduct the swap.
The monsoon season had begun on Son Hoa, the month of torrential downpours that slowly became snow as September bled into October. After three weeks of constant rain, the Muong Hao Valley was now an inland lake, the rail line constructed ten meters above the water as the train screamed from Vinh to Yen Bai.
“Two, this is One,” Aden heard Wayne say in his earpiece exactly sixty seconds after departing Vihn. “Confirm line status.” He had deferred to Aden more and more for administrative issues—Aden’s Sea Fox upbringing meant he was excellent at routine upkeeping of bribes and such, and he’d even found ways to improve the profits of their legitimate front companies—but in the field, Wayne was still firmly in command.
“Line is green,” Daniel replied. He’d hacked into the train’s onboard systems, and could now control what the diagnostic computers would and would not see.
“Three, Four, confirm status.”
“Three is green,” said Mika, her voice altered to sound like Phan.
“Four is green,” Aden subvocalized, just loud enough for the tiny microphone implanted in his jaw to pick up.
“One is green,” said Wayne. “Execute.”
Aden got up from his seat, stretched, and headed toward the rear of the car, as if going to the refresher. Instead, after a quick glance around to make sure no one was paying attention to him, he opened the door and moved into the next car.
Phan was alone in a four-seat first-class cabin, the three unoccupied seats purchased by Aden courtesy of the Sea Fox Watch’s credit line. He could hear the man snoring from outside the cabin as he waited.
Behind him came Wayne, pulling a large suitcase, and in front came Mika, disguised as a man. Using a series of prosthetics that attached to her skin using subdermal magnets, Mika could appear to be almost anyone. She’d cosmetically dyed her skin tan to match Phan, and while not looking like him identically yet, anyone seeing them side-by-side would think they were practically brothers. She was in a simple mechanic’s set of gray overalls, and as she reached the door, she pulled out a syringe and uncapped it.
“Two, this is One, breaching,” Wayne subvocalized, though, in this case, breaching simply consisted of Aden placing a duplicate key Daniel had created over the electronic lock.
The door unlocked and Aden slid it toward him, allowing Mika to streak in. By the time Aden entered, just a second behind her, she was already squeezing the syringe into Phan’s neck. Their target fell limp on the fold-out bunk as Wayne pulled the suitcase in after them and closed the door.
“Still breathing?” Wayne asked.
“Yes,” said Mika. She moved off to the side and started to unzip her overalls, while Aden went to Phan’s side and pulled off his shoes, and then unbuckled the unconscious man’s belt.
“Was this everything they told you life as a spy would be?” Wayne asked quietly as he leaned Phan forward like a ragdoll to pull his shirt off over his head.
“Telling me I’d be undressing men on trains did sound a lot sexier in the recruiting pitch,” Aden said with a smile, and Wayne laughed. Within minutes, they had Phan stripped, and Wayne unzipped the large suitcase that contained nothing but a kettlebell and a pair of handcuffs.
Cuffing Phan, Wayne then cuffed him to the kettlebell and then, together, Wayne and Aden stuffed Phan into the suitcase, along with Mika’s overalls. Standing, Aden turned around and his jaw dropped. Mika had swapped her prosthetics while they’d worked and put on Phan’s clothes: had he not known Phan was in the suitcase, Aden would have sworn he was standing before him.
“C’mon, Four,” Wayne said. Aden followed him out into the corridor, turning left to the closest exit. Placing the suitcase directly in front of the exit door, they both looked up and down the passageway to make sure no one had left their cabins.
“Remember, less than two seconds,” Wayne said as they both squatted next to the suitcase, each grabbing a bottom corner. Aden nodded. “Two, open door seven,” Wayne ordered, and, to Aden’s left, the exit snicked open.
The wind howled and rain lashed through the door, driven by both the monsoon and the train’s speed, and Aden instantly lifted the suitcase with Wayne and threw it out the exit.
