“What in the Chancellor’s great-and-worthy name is going on here?”
Not that anyone paid attention.
Sirens continued to blare in three discordant tones as technicians pulled out procedural manuals and argued over their instrumentation. One man switched his tracking station from direct feed video over to broadband satellite. His female counterpart switched it back. On their shared monitor, the image jumped from the blocky silhouette for a Blackjack OmniMech, rust-red and looking lost against drifted snowbanks and frosted conifers, to a tactical overview of the local taiga. A large, flashing red icon eclipsed one entire corner of the display. Then back to the Blackjack.
Hùn dàn niŭ-kòu tóu-bù! Bastard button heads! Nikolai reached over to the alarm panel and cleared the annoying sirens. Everyone stopped dead as if he had thrown the master disconnect breaker for their brains. The overseer pro-tem switched the nearby station back to satellite and pointed at the red icon.
“What is that?” he asked through clenched teeth.
Jīng-lĭ Fen Xou, the operations manager, bowed perfunctorily. “DropShip,” he said in his usual abrupt manner.
“One of ours?” Meaning one belonging to Ceres Metals or the planet’s military garrison.
Xou shook his head. “Ours would not set off alarms.”
They could, actually. The southern continent proving grounds were off limits on a live-fire day, such as this day with the BJ2-O undergoing its yearly retrials. But if the approaching vessel was a Capellan flight, it was not even trying to broadcast proper IFF clearances. With Warlock sitting so close to the Capellan-Federated Suns border, that likely meant a Davion DropShip.
Didn’t the FedScum have their hands full enough with their civil war? They had to make Nikolai’s life on this ball of ice more difficult?
Nikolai swallowed dryly. Help, he knew, was at least three hours away at the garrison post of Yumen. Where soldiers of the Confederation were treated to such luxuries as cafeterias, nightclubs, and the Canopian pleasure circus currently on-world. Ceres Metals’ usual overseer, Nikolai’s boss, was there as well. No doubt enjoying himself. Which meant that responsibility for this breech would land squarely on Nikolai’s shoulders.
“We have a visual,” one of the techs called out.
Out of reflex, Nikolai looked out the large ferroglass window fronting the room. Snow flurries occasionally pelted the glass, driven horizontally by the sharp, arctic winds. Some of the larger flakes stuck, melting into long runnels that trickled toward the bottom edge. Visibility was intermittent, up to five hundred meters. Any DropShip visible by the naked eye would be landing right on top of them!
He moved to an auxiliary station where the technician had selected for penetrating radar. The computer painted an amber silhouette over the green-black scope.
Spheroid vessel. Military design.
Nikolai scrubbed his palms against the side of his trousers, drying away nervous sweat. Running the Blackjack’s retrials by himself should have been another small stepping stone toward advancement. This was shaping into an administrator’s nightmare.
Then the computer tagged the vessel as an Intruder—at 3000 metric tons one of the smallest spheroid-class assault DropShips one could find.
“They assault Warlock with that?” he asked aloud. A determined band of Capellan space-scouts could hold off any military force arriving in an Intruder. It could not even transport a single BattleMech.
Correction: it might hold one `Mech if the cargo bay was refitted and you didn’t load too much tonnage in the way of spare parts. Which was apparently the case, Nikolai saw, as a large shadow detached itself from the hovering DropShip and landed under its own jump jet power. The computer was having trouble placing it. Identification jumped back and forth between an old PXH Phoenix Hawk and one of the Confederation’s newer 3L Vindicators.
“Where did that monster set down?” Nikolai asked sharply. “Is the DropShip landing anything more with it? Where is our garrison support?”
These people were not military-trained, and had not responded with good Capellan discipline to the emergency. But they knew how to get data when an oversight manager asked for it.
“Two hours for Yumen garrison,” Fen Xou reported, answering Nikolai’s last question first.
“DropShip is standing by. No other forces deployed,” a technician at another workstation reported. “Enemy `Mech is within two kilometers of our live fire range.”
Within two kilometers of Sao-wei Cho Tah Men’s Blackjack, then! “Have Cho move to intercept,” he ordered. Perhaps all was not as dark as he’d feared.
“We are receiving a transmission from the Intruder.” A communications tech held up her hand for attention. “Vessel identifies itself as General Motors Flight One-one-three-eight-special. With…with the compliments of Governor Giovanni Estrella De la Sangre.” She frowned. Then, “Message repeats.”
General Motors? Nikolai sneered. Worse than the enemy, then. It was their competition.
“Whatever game this Estrella De la…whoever…is playing, I want that BattleMech destroyed. ”
The BJ2-O was on the grounds for its live fire retrial after all. And bringing the venerable Blackjack design back to the attention of the Confederation Armed Forces, with the military’s recent infatuation with new technology, could not hurt the reputation of Ceres Metals.
Or his own reputation, for that matter. Nikolai suddenly envisioned this as his ticket off Warlock, the frostbitten zhì-chuāng of the St. Ives Commonality. Away from the snow and the icy winds and the long hours spent proving (or finding flaws in) someone else’s designs. A post on beautiful, warm Capella would not be too much to expect. Even the world of St. Ives itself would be acceptable. With a nice promotion. Surely he could bargain that in as well.
Dreams which lasted until the Blackjack OmniMech finally made contact with the foreign machine.
“A Phoenix Hawk,” Sao-wei Cho
