Bred for war Read online

  "I thought I did."

  "So did I, but that was before she let you die and before we uncovered evidence linking her and Ryan to my mother's assassination." Victor turned to face Galen and was surprised to see his friend looking slightly pale. "Anything new on that front?"

  Galen shook his head. "Unless we can decrypt some of the records we seized from Ryan's office after his death, I think we have as complete a picture of the plot as we're going to get. The assassin was paid with the proceeds of a land deal in which worthless property was bought at an inflated price. The land was then donated to the state for rehabilitation as a wetlands habitat for birds. The corporation got a big tax write-off and the CEO of the company, at your sister's behest, was given a title and a land grant."

  Victor slammed a fist into the arm of couch. "My government paid for the assassin who killed my mother."

  "A point I'm certain your sister would make much of if we tried to accuse her of complicity."

  "Which is exactly why we won't do that. No, we've got to let her hang herself, and we've got to give her time enough to manufacture the rope to do it. She's going to have to come after me somehow."

  Galen nodded. 'True, but right now she has to calm the Isle of Skye worlds and that's going to take a lot of her attention. The victory of the Gray Death Legion over the rebels on Glengarry has taken the steam out of the uprising. Some people in the Skye March are still scrambling to pick up the pieces of Ryan's organization, which leaves the door open for trouble in the future. In the meantime we've pulled most of our troops, which means Katherine will have to reinforce any hot spots with her own people. The latest reports from Tharkad indicate she's concentrating on sponsoring repair and recovery programs, which should help."

  "Good. She's got my mother's gift for bringing out the charity in others. A clever strategy." Victor frowned with concentration. "Has she had any visitors of interest?"

  "No one incriminating. Just the usual functionaries. Caitlin Kell is staying with her. Do you think Katheririe's trying to get the Kell Hounds to align with her instead of you?"

  Victor waved that idea away. "No, that's not a worry."

  "But they did refuse to accept a contract with the Federated Commonwealth about a year ago. They still have no contract."

  "I know how that looks, Jerrard, but I'm not worried. Morgan Kell knows me. Dan Allard knows me. They'll never turn against me. Like all right-thinking folk, in fact, they're staying focused on the Clans, and we should be doing the same. Unfortunately, I have concerns that range beyond the Clans and my sister's treachery. Reports from the Sarna March?"

  "Sun-Tzu Liao is stepping up his trouble-making in the Sarna March, just as we anticipated when Kai took over the Free Capella movement from good old Uncle Tormano. Kai seems determined to use Free Capella as a means of social reform and advancement, while Sun-Tzu's people are making it difficult to access the services offered. The Zhanzheng de guang guerrillas have increased their activities on Styk, Gan Singh, Zurich, and Liao, with new cells operating openly on Acamar, Fletcher, and Nanking. Their activities range from graffiti and vandalism to bank robberies and shootouts on Zurich and bombings on Styk and Fletcher."

  "Those are all old Tikonov Commonalty worlds. Trouble is to be expected there. As we pull troops out of Skye and send them into the Sarna March, Sun-Tzu will have to back down. Kai doesn't want to have to arm the people, so if we supply the troops to keep Sun-Tzu quiet, Kai can lay a good foundation that will stabilize the area. My mother had been doing that before the Clans came, but the Sarna March has been neglected since their invasion."

  "Kai's efforts and our reinforcement of that area could prompt Thomas Marik to strike against us if he fears an attack."

  "Never happen—we have his son." The Prince pressed his hands together, fingertip to fingertip. "Sun-Tzu has to be pressuring Thomas to act, and Thomas has fended him off. We have to assume Thomas is walking a tightrope there and he doesn't want anything to upset his balance. Any more word about his wife?"

  "It now seems that she wasn't on the train when the chemical cars at the Semidam Station caught fire. She was in Semidam itself, but was downwind of the fire at a school. Sophina helped get the children into a civil defense shelter, but then she collapsed. She's had allergic asthma all her life and the gases must have seriously damaged her lungs. She's recovered, but can barely breathe. She's not a good candidate for a transplant and apparently was raised in a tradition that wouldn't accept that option anyway."

  "How long does she have?"

  "A consultant over at the NAIS told me two years without extensive treatment, maybe four if she came and had work done here."

  The Prince nodded. "Set up an audience with the Marik ambassador here on New Avalon. We'll offer to do anything we can to help her." Victor looked up and saw Galen watching him oddly. "Yes, I know it's hypocritical to hide the fact of Joshua's death from his parents, on one hand, then offer to do what we can to save the boy's mother on the other, but both acts move us further from a potential war with Sun-Tzu and the Free Worlds League. If I have to play both ends against the middle to hold off the war forever, I will."

  Galen smiled. "I wasn't thinking you were being deceitful. I was thinking that anyone else—Sun-Tzu, your sister, perhaps even Thomas—wouldn't have hesitated to use Sophina as a new hostage to replace Joshua. But you really want to help her."

  "No one will benefit from a war. If preventing the death of one person can forestall the deaths of many, I'll do anything in my power to save that single life."

  5

  As peace is of all goodness, so war is an emblem, a hieroglyphic, of all misery.

  -John Donne, Devotions

  DropShip WST Starbride, Inbound Woodstock

  Sarna March, Federated Commonwealth

  30 May 3057

  Peering out through the porthole of the DropShip Starbride, Larry Acuff felt a shiver run through him. Woodstock, the world he'd left seven years ago after volunteering to fight the Clans, slowly spun beneath its thin canopy of clouds. Equal parts land mass and oceans, Woodstock was a bountiful world of rich and varied fertility. In fact, the planet's fecundity had created a surplus trade balance that raised the per capita income higher than most worlds in the Federated Commonwealth and considerably better than almost any other world in the Sarna March.

  The day he'd left Woodstock it had been dark and stormy. Crowded into a military DropShip with other men destined for the front lines deep in the Lyran half of the Commonwealth, he'd caught only glimpses of his home planet as they'd headed away from it. The lightning flashes searing through the dark clouds had seemed like the world protesting against the human harvest being reaped by the ship.

  Larry smiled. It was just the sort of fanciful thought that had often come to him while still young and romantic. Back then he'd believed that his journey from Woodstock was the start of a grand adventure. But that was before he'd been assigned to the Tenth Lyran Guards—the same unit of which young Price Victor Davion was a member. He'd spent many hours imagining fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Prince, forcing the Clans off planets they'd taken and sending them back out into the void from whence they had come.

  After the Clans had been vanquished, he would return to Woodstock a hero. There he would find himself a wife and, as his father had done after a stint in the Fourth Succession War, he would settle down and raise a family. He would raise strong children and, should some future war demand that one of them fight for the Federated Commonwealth, he would send that child forth with brave words and a fierce embrace—as his father had done when Larry left Woodstock.

  Touching the innermost glass layer of the porthole, Larry felt the cold of the void and recognized in it the chill of war. Fighting the Clans on Alyina had burned out of him all fantasies about the romance of war and any dreams of a normal life. War was a machine, an engine, that gobbled up human beings, only to belch them out as corpses and cripples; men and women and broken forms of each; cowards and demagogues and h
eroes, grand heroes. War left no one unchanged and when it was done with you, it was waiting to hammer on you and pound you again until you either escaped or broke entirely.

  Larry didn't think war had broken him, but it had come close. After being blown out of his BattleMech on Alyina, he'd wandered for days until the Clans captured him and took him to a ComStar reeducation and labor camp. Though his wounds were only superficial, healing had been slow on the sparse and at times nonexistent diet provided by ComStar. Many captives died from injuries that would have healed easily with proper medical attention and sufficient food.

  From the first day he'd arrived at the Firebase Tango Zephyr camp, Larry had vowed to survive—and on his own terms. The camp's ComStar operators were more than willing to grant privileges to those who wanted to study their quasi-mystical doctrine and accept their ways. Until then, Larry had always believed ComStar to be the benevolent organization that made possible hyperpulse communications between the stars. But at Tango Zephyr they were the ones who guarded the wretched prisoners of war, freeing up Clan troops to hunt down even more Federated Commonwealth troops on the planet. Meanwhile the camp's operators offered their starving prisoners re-education, preaching the superiority of Inner Sphere humanity over the Clans and promising that the Clans would one day be subject to ComStar.

  That did not strike Larry as a bright future because nowhere did that message speak of freeing Inner Sphere humans who did not submit to ComStar. He'd resolved never to bend to their will and even made plans to escape, but the paucity of food and the prevalence of informers among the prisoners made any escape attempt difficult. Punishment for attempting to flee was confinement in a small cage left open to the elements.

  Throughout the three days of his stay in a cage, it rained cold and hard. Larry got sick, very sick, and his ComStar captors did nothing to help him recover.

  He should have died, but he didn't. What did die were all the romance and optimism of his youth. Larry decided that a descent into the bitter self-pity he saw in many of the other prisoners would be a victory for ComStar, so he promised himself that someday he'd have his freedom, and his freedom would come in a universe very different from the one his captors described.

  Then Kai Allard-Liao and a Clan Elemental, Taman Malthus, came and liberated Tango Zephyr. They helped the survivors bury their dead and arranged for their transfer off Alyina and back to the worlds of the Federated Commonwealth, back to their life before the Clans.

  But Larry knew the Clan invasion had changed him and he could never go back.

  "We'll be landing in a half an hour, Mr. Acuff." The flight attendant in the Woodstock SpaceTran uniform smiled at him. "I trust you enjoyed your trip with us?"

  "Very much, thank you." Larry smiled at her. The Starbride had come to meet the JumpShip Luxingzhe at the nadir jump point of the system's star, from there to shuttle the passengers to the fourth planet in the system. Larry was actually on his way to St. Ives for Kai Allard-Liao's wedding, but he had decided to stop at Woodstock for a reunion with his kin.

  "If you don't mind me asking, are you coming to Woodstock for fights?"

  He shook his head. "No, ma'am, just for family. I've got a cousin who's marrying one of the other recruits I knew here on Woodstock. I hear there's a new municipal arena in Charleston, but I won't be doing any fighting."

  She nodded, then blushed a bit. "I'm sorry to have pried, but another flight attendant and I have season tickets for the 'Mech duels there. The local talent isn't bad, but it's not quite the same thing, you know, as on Solaris."

  "Have you been to the fights on Solaris?"

  "No, but I've seen a lot of the holovids. I saw your fight with Jason Block. I thought you were going to win that one.

  "So did I"—he glanced quickly at her name tag—"Ms. Hoglind, so did I. Jason, he had other ideas."

  "Call me Meta, Mr. Acuff. I think you'll get him next time."

  "Then call me Larry. I hope so. We've got a re-match scheduled for September." Larry reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a holograph card. "If you can make it to the fight, let me know. I'd be honored to have you as my guest in the Cenotaph Stable box. We'll be fighting in Boreal Reach, in a blizzard, so I think it should be interest-mg.

  "Thank you very much." Meta Hoglind slipped the card into her uniform smock pocket. "I've got some free time coming, so maybe I'll be there."

  "Good."

  Larry watched for a moment as the young woman moved forward in the cabin to check on the next set of passengers, then smiled and turned back to the view of the planet Woodstock filling the porthole. The Larry Acuff that had left Woodstock eight years ago would never have spoken with someone as beautiful as Meta Hoglind, not even someone half as beautiful. It was less a question of nerve than of not being the sort of man who would attract such a woman's attention. Though Larry had once dreamed of being the hero of a romantic epic, he'd never been more than just an ordinary man. Maybe there was nothing wrong with that, but nothing special about it either.

  When the truce came, he'd avoided coming back to Woodstock, realizing he'd always wanted to return as a hero. He knew, deep down inside, that what he'd done was as heroic as many of the acts that earned medals during the Clan War, but his experiences had none of the obvious glamour of conspicuous gallantry in combat. Survival—the primary goal of every soldier in any war—was not as valued by noncombatants as committing a foolishly self-destructive act and dying because of it. The fact that he'd been taken prisoner seemed less than glorious, and he resisted returning home where his family would feel constrained to make excuses for his performance on Alyina.

  And so Larry had headed for Solaris, the Game World, where MechWarriors fought each other in BattleMech duels that some called sporting events and others viewed as pandering to a people addicted to sanitized violence. For Larry it was the logical place to prove his mettle. Although he was a member of the Reserve Armed Forces of the Federated Commonwealth, he was sure the RAFFC wouldn't reactivate him. On Solaris, he could turn the skills that had let him survive on Alyina into a way of restoring his reputation and self-esteem.

  When he reached Solaris, he discovered that Kai Allard-Liao had also made Solaris his haven. Kai gave Larry a warm welcome and offered him a spot in Cenotaph Stables—the newly renamed corporation that had been on Solaris since Kai's father had been champion in 3027. Working his way up through the Solaris arena system, Larry soon become a headliner in Solaris City contests, and his fame had spread throughout the Inner Sphere.

  Though Larry was quiet and often shy by nature, his new celebrity status meant that people he'd never have dared approach now came up to approach him! He knew of course that most of them only wanted a piece of his public persona: Larry Acuff, 'Mech combat fighter, but he also realized that many mistook the public person for the private one.

  His return to Woodstock left Larry sorting out the paradox of who he had become. There was no doubt that he was decidedly changed from the naive young man who'd gone off to war from Woodstock. By the same token, he was not the person most people perceived him to be. He dwelt somewhere in the middle, but on Woodstock he was bound to encounter people who would expect him to be one extreme or the other, not the person he was.

  As the aerodynamic DropShip lowered its landing gear and swooped down to the darkened runway on the outskirts of a nightclad Charleston, Larry nodded to himself. Here begins the last battle of the Clan War. I left Woodstock to guarantee its people the freedom to live the life they've come to cherish. In defending them, did I lose them?

  Meta came back to where Larry stood in the gangway to the spaceport terminal. "All clear, Larry. Not a scandal-vid reporter or holovid cameraman in sight."

  "Thanks, Meta. And remember, let me know when you're on Solaris."

  "I will."

  Hiking his transit satchel over his shoulder, Larry headed toward the reception lounge. Because Solaris' gravity was slightly heavier than Woodstock's, he felt surprisingly energized even afte
r weeks of space travel. Coming around the corner he saw the four people waiting for him and broke into a grin. His mother waved and his father threw him a casual salute. Beside them, Hauptmann Phoebe Derden—a comrade from the Tenth Lyran Guards—and his cousin, George Pinkney, stood linked arm in arm.

  He hugged his mother first, then his father.

  "Good to have you home, son."

  "Thanks, Dad. It's good to be here." Larry hesitated a moment, trying to figure out if he'd said that because it was true or because he wanted to put his parents at ease. He decided the answer was yes to both. "And it's good to see you both looking so well too."

  "Your father has a touch of arthritis now in his back." His mother gave Larry a critical look. "But look at you—you're too skinny."

  "Anne, for heaven's sake." Larry's father tugged with irritation at the bill of his Nebula Foods cap. "He's got to maintain a fighting weight. Right, son?"

  "Right, Dad. Cockpits are cramped enough as it is." Larry turned to his cousin and friend. "George, you're a very lucky man getting Phoebe to agree to marry you." He offered his hand to George Pinkney, whose grip was a bit stronger than Larry remembered. The cousins were both of average height and slender build, and resembled each other enough that in the old days they were often mistaken for twins. George had grown a bit taller since then, and his brown hair had begun to thin. But what impressed Larry more were the confidence in George's smile and the firmness of his grip.

  "Lucky I am, Larry." George winked at Phoebe. "I got my doctorate earlier this year and Phoebe has agreed to marry me, so I'm a happy man."

  Larry shook the hand of the trim blond woman standing beside his cousin. "Went for a man of letters did you, Phoebe?"

  "A man of science, Larry." She shook his hand, then leaned in to kiss him on the cheek. "How have you been?"

  "Good, really. You and the rest of the Tenth did a great job rescuing Hohiro Kurita from the Clans on Teniente."