“Regiment,” he barked out. “Dismissed!”
THE BACK ROAD
by Louisa M. Swann
Lucas Farm
Outside Nagoshima, Buckminster
Benjamin Military District
Draconis Combine
17 August 3057
Sometimes you have to take the back road to get where you want to go. Not the most direct route, perhaps. But when you’re running from the law, you learn to improvise or you end up dead. Somehow those winding twists and turns led me to where I’m standing now—a field away from my old home and twenty feet away from where I just buried my Special Forces uniform.
“Hey, mister. There’s a dead guy in my daddy’s field. You know anything about that?” The question comes from a pitchfork-wielding mini person who somehow managed to get behind me.
Smart on his part, not smart on mine.
I study the youngster with interest. He looks to be about ten, yet I get the distinct impression he’s much older. He’s wearing a floppy brimmed hat so his eyes are in shadow. His work shirt and jeans are a bit on the big side, as if he’s wearing an older brother’s clothes.
The boy’s accent is pure country, a breath of fresh air to my Dragon-stained lungs, and a reminder of just how provincial my childhood home has remained, in spite of being a prefecture capital. Buckminster always has been a place where people bow to the demands of life, not to the presumed authority of a conquering force, no matter how many years have passed.
“What’s your name?” I ask, purposefully avoiding his question. I flex my calf, feel the knife sheath hard against my skin. Remember how effortlessly that knife slid into the cabby’s gut. Instinct—born from years of special forces training—rears its long-toothed head, makes my hand itch to pull that same knife, to excise the threat now facing me.
No use wondering how killing got so easy. All it takes is time and experience.
“I said—you know anything about that dead man back there?” The boy shifts the pitchfork in his hand, angles the tines so they catch the sunlight oozing through overcast skies.
There are two reasons I came back to this farm on Buckminster: One—to find my roots. Two—to find my soul. I did not come back to kill boys who pretend to be men.
Sometimes the best way to bluff is to tell the honest truth. What makes the bluff work is the part you choose to tell. I jerk my chin in the general direction of the cab driver’s body. “He tried to rob me. Brought me all the way out here and then came after me with a gun.”
The boy licks his lower lip, turns the thought over in his mind. He keeps his eye on me, starts to lower the pitchfork—an opening I let pass—then stops, pitchfork still threatening.
“Why don’t you tell that story to my pa?” He lifts his head and I get a good look at his eyes—dark brown, direct—Lucas eyes. Just like his daddy’s.
The air smells of late summer—earth baked into laziness like a mother about to give birth. I glance around, check the area for anyone else who might be hiding in the hip-high grasses. A wheat hybrid, from the looks of it. I pull a stalk between my fingers, stripping chaff and grain into my hand. Smell the rich, nutty scent. Harvest was the one time my daddy and I could work together without fighting. “About time to get some AgroMechs working, isn’t it?”
The question hangs in the air as I watch the boy’s face charge with emotion—anger?—and go flat.
“Pa don’t hold with ’Mechs of any kind,” he says.
A breeze ripples across the field, takes me back down memory lane and it’s me standing in this harvest-ready field watching a MechWarrior stride down the road. Taller than the barn I’d grown up playing in. Aligned crystal steel armor on the outside, human heart and brain inside. Proud and ready to fight. I’d known then I was going to be a warrior. Not just any warrior. A warrior who could prove to my father just how wrong his simple beliefs were. I would become a member of the Draconis Elite Strike Teams—a dream I’d long ago realized.
A dream that would take away my ability to touch my emotions, that would tear my family apart.
“You’re Phelan Lucas’s boy, aren’t you? I heard your daddy bought this place. This used to be my home. I grew up here.” I hold my hands to the side, put on my best good-old-boy smile, but the boy’s still suspicious. He isn’t buying what I have to sell. “Come on now, put down the fork. Then we can have a nice, civilized conversation.”
“How ‘bout I keep my ‘fork’ and you start moving.”
The kid is young, but that pitchfork is full grown, with three nasty looking tines it would definitely hurt to run into. I glance over my shoulder. Stare across the field on the other side of the road where the boy’s gaze keeps drifting.
Nagoshima is a distant smudge against the slate gray sky. It’s not the city that draws the boy’s attention, though. The sounds of mock battle drift toward us on a slight breeze that ruffles the grass and tugs the boy’s hat brim. Familiar sounds. Even though they’re too far away to see, I know what I’m hearing as well as I know the lines on my face.
BattleMechs. Engaged in a live-fire training exercise.
My own gaze follows the boy’s and suddenly I’m back in the
