Battletech, p.1
BattleTech, page 1
BATTLETECH: A SKULK OF FOXES
FORTUNES OF WAR, #3
JASON HANSA
CONTENTS
Part I
Part II
Part III
Notable BattleMechs
Battletech Glossary
BattleTech Eras
The BattleTech Fiction Series
PART ONE
XIANG
SON HOA
THE PERIPHERY
3 AUGUST 3151
Watch Agent Aden nursed his drink near the end of a long wooden bar, wondering where he’d screwed up.
He sighed internally. The list is probably too long to measure, he admitted as he flagged the bartender for another drink. The bar was a dive, one on the lower end of Xiang’s socioeconomic scale, and populated by local drunks and their friends. It was dingy and poorly lit, dim lights highlighting a smoke cloud of every legal substance, and probably a few illegal ones as well.
Twenty-eight years old, Aden had lost a Trial of Position and his MechWarrior status two years ago to a young MechWarrior just shy of his twenty-first birthday. Given the option of testing down into a lower caste, Aden decided to take the stream less swum and volunteered to enter the Watch, the Clan’s name for their intelligence branch. Every Watch field agent was a warrior, which would allow Aden to maintain his status at least in some way. With the arrogance of a MechWarrior, he assumed he would quickly master all the intricacies of spycraft and easily accomplish any mission assigned to him.
That optimism had been washed out of him within days of his arrival on-planet a month ago. Receiving a cover identity—his real name was at the other end of the alphabet—Aden was unremarkable in height and appearance. Even after regularly hitting the gyms to stay in fighting trim, he didn’t stand out—but he also didn’t blend in. His Clan mannerisms quickly undermining any attempt at undercover work, he’d pivoted to building a network of informants that could do it for him. So far, he’d had no better luck at completing his mission, but at least felt like he was making progress.
Xiang was the capital of Son Hoa, a former Lyran Commonwealth world that had declared independence in 3101. While there may have been talk early on to reclaim it, they’d left it alone over the intervening decades. It was simply cheaper and easier for the Lyrans to remain the biggest buyer of the planet’s main export—BattleMechs built by StarCorps Industries—and let the world defend itself. Left to their own devices for almost half a century, most worlds would suffer: Son Hoa, on the other hand, thrived.
The main reason for its continued independence was the StarCorps Industries BattleMech production facility. BattleMechs were eight-to-twelve-meter-tall weapons of war, piloted by talented individuals known as MechWarriors. Usually humanoid in shape, two of StarCorps Son Hoa’s most popular products were the 85-ton Longbow and the rugged 25-ton Hermit Crab. StarCorps Son Hoa made a fortune selling their wares to buyers across the Inner Sphere, allowing them to hire a large enough force to defend the plant and the rest of Son Hoa by extension.
For fifty years, Son Hoa had been a world moving forward in the universe, but as so often happened, where there was money and BattleMechs, outside actors decided they wanted both.
Over the past year, pirate raids were becoming more and more common on adjacent worlds, and even Son Hoa itself. So far, none had delayed deliveries of BattleMechs to the Clan Sea Foxes merchants—or others—who’d come here for merchandise, but his Clan leaders figured it was only a matter of time.
Identifying the bad actors was why Aden had been sent to Son Hoa and, he was beginning to admit, he was no closer than when he’d first landed. He’d originally been slated to shadow a senior agent on a different world, but as things continued to get hotter on Son Hoa, it rose in priority. Sensing an opportunity to make a name for himself, he’d volunteered to be the first agent on the ground.
He watched the monitors above the bar. One was showing a gridiron football game, another was showing a BattleMech gladiatorial match from the Son Hoa arenas out in Yen Bai, on the southern continent of Lao Qi. Aden found himself judging the MechWarriors, their approaches and their attack strategies. While he was self-aware enough to know he’d never been a great MechWarrior—at least by Clan standards—he’d been raised as one from his entry into a creche at ten, and every so often he found himself missing it.
As he sipped his whiskey, he noticed a middle-aged man talking close to a waitress down the bar. His eyes narrowed as she tilted her head toward Aden in a that-guy-over-there way, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw the man glance at him via the mirror behind the bar. The man casually slid his hand over the woman’s, and only someone watching for it would have caught the slightest flutter indicating money exchanged hands.
Aden internally sighed again. Very well done. I wish I could do that as well as he did. He’d been trying to build an intelligence network by passing money in bars across town for weeks. Apparently, he wasn’t the only one.
The man got up to leave—bald, dark skinned, with a salt-and-pepper goatee and wearing a beat-up, dark gray duster that could be from anywhere. Which is probably the point. Tucking a small sheaf of bills under his glass to cover the drink, he got up to follow.
The streets were dark and randomly lit in this part of town, with few pedestrians. Taxis sped by, and he could hear distant sirens as he followed the man for about two blocks before he made a right-hand turn.
This area of Xiang was solid ferrocrete blocks, built during the worst of the world’s nuclear winter years. As the world thawed, the rest of the capital grew up around it, like fresh shoots surrounding tainted ground. Skyscrapers lit the night a kilometer away, the wealthy residents of new downtown able to literally look down on the residents of the old. A wealthy, industrialized world with a functioning BattleMech plant brought in tremendous amounts of money: unevenly, as it so often did.
The wealthy of Son Hoa, the executives at StarCorps, the CEOs of their chief suppliers—they lived a life of unimaginable luxury. The three billion residents of Son Hoa were located mostly in densely populated cities, leaving thousands of square kilometers of untouched boreal forests covering craggy mountain ranges. Outside Xiang were numerous resorts, catering to the well-to-do.
But the vast majority of Son Hoa citizens might see those resorts once in their lives, if they were lucky: there was an insatiable demand for consumer goods on-planet, and nearly everyone worked to feed it. StarCorps sold BattleMechs, with a spiderweb of subcontractors providing components; those employees needed appliances and furniture and any number of goods; hundreds of companies had been created to meet those needs, and thousands of companies supported them.
It was a web that worked, a world where almost everyone had at least some food in their belly and money in their wallet. It was a world of the absurdly wealthy and the working stiffs who supported them, a world of immaculate resorts to feed the daylight appetites and a seedy, unchecked underbelly that fed the most carnal of demands at night. It was into this plurality of capitalism and hedonism that Aden had volunteered to swim, submerged in the murkiest of waters among predators unknown.
Aden sped up to keep his mystery man in sight, but once he made the turn, he was gone. The summer night was clear and unseasonably pleasant, so while the city rang with distant traffic and music, this street was empty.
Aden started walking down the street again, trying to find the man. A hand reached out from an alley and snatched him, and Aden realized he’d been found first.
“Why you following me, kid?” the older man asked gruffly, the two of them only a half meter apart in the narrow passage between two brick tenements. Aden noticed the needler pistol aimed right at his belly, and looked at the man.
“I am not following you—” he started.
The man sighed loudly and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Are you kidding me? A Clanner?”
“What?” Aden said, then tried to laugh—an attempt that sounded false, even to him. “No I a—’m not!”
“You say, tripping over the contraction,” the man said. He glanced over to the side. “Okay, so if you’re Clan, then who the hell’s following you?”
“I am being followed?” Aden exclaimed, and turned to look out of the alley. The man snatched him before he did so, shaking his head.
“My God, you really are new at this, aren’t you?” he said quietly. In the silence after his rhetorical query, Aden could hear approaching footsteps. The man put a finger to his lips and swung the needler toward the entrance.
Two large men wearing dark jackets quickly walked past, one of them muttering. After a few seconds, the man nodded toward the far end of the alleyway, and started sliding along the wall. He turned around, and when he noticed Aden wasn’t following, he rolled his eyes.
“You can take your chances with me or with them, kid. Your call,” the man said before continuing. Aden weighed the odds of escaping the other two versus where following the man might lead—both physically and in his investigation—and started following the man once again.
The passage abruptly turned left about fifteen meters in, which opened into a wider alley surrounded by apartments. At the end of the alley was a black steel door with a red light overhead.
“C’mon,” the man said, “it won’t take ’em long to realize we went this way.” They jogged up to the door. The man looked up at a camera overhead, and Aden heard the door buzz.
He followed the man into a warm entryway with subdued lighting and red, velvety walls. It was a round room, with a pair of massive security guards—one man, one woma n, on each side of the entrance—and numerous small couches with large pillows that each held a scantily clad person. Mostly half-naked women, there were also a few mostly nude men, all turning to look at them when they walked in. Through a doorway to the left was a bar where numerous people in nice clothes were wrapped up with nearly naked escorts; behind the half-circle welcome desk to the right were two wooden stairways, each leading to a separate passage upstairs.
Aden blinked in surprise once he realized what this establishment was selling—he’d learned of such places, but since they didn’t exist in the Clans, he’d never been inside of one—and he put a slight smile onto his face to stay in character. The Clans had no nudity taboos among warriors, and considered coupling a simple physical act to release stress and tension. The Watch instructors had given the trainees hours of classes on the major sexual mores and traditions of the Inner Sphere, but emphasized they couldn’t cover everything. Do your best to fit in, one class ended with, and when in doubt, do or say the exact opposite of what you normally would.
“Welcome back, my friend,” said a genial man wearing a fine suit at the front desk. “You brought a newcomer?”
“I have,” said the older man, a wide smile on his face. “This is his first time here, so I thought I’d introduce him to the girls from Nosiel.”
The clerk flicked his eyes between the two of them and, smiling, said, “Of course, sir, you remember the way?”
The man nodded and led Aden up the left-hand stairway, which switch-backed into to a passage Aden believed ran back over the bar. Three doors down, the man knocked and went into a room, where two women in sheer lingerie sat on a couch watching a football match. They waved casually at the man while relaxing with a bottle of wine next to an unoccupied large bed featuring a solid wooden headboard festooned with leather tie-downs.
Nodding to both, the man led Aden to the refresher and, reaching along the tiled back wall, pushed two tiles simultaneously. The tiled wall swung inwards, and beyond it, Aden could see another room appearing to be an apartment.
“Go,” the man said, and Aden did, passing from the refresher into a living room where a skinny, pale man pointed a needler at him from behind the noteputer workstation he was sitting at. Aden immediately put his hands up to show they were empty as he moved out of the way to let his companion through. As he did so, he deliberately shifted, so if he was being betrayed, the older man would be in the line of fire.
“He’s with me,” said the man. “He’s Clan Watch.”
“So we’re taking in strays now?” the computer man complained, but lowered the needler.
“Let’s wait for Mika. Beer?” the man asked Aden as he walked to the fridge.
“Yes, please,” Aden replied.
The man grabbed two bottles of pale lager from the fridge and twisted off the caps.
By the time he’d walked back to Aden, a slim young brunette had come through the tiled hatchway and closed it behind her. Slightly taller than him due to her black high heels, her raven-black hair brushed her shoulders, and she wore a black bow tie, white bustier, and black panties, the wide expanses of skin showing off toned muscles taut as steel.
She nodded at the man. “I’ll take one too, Wayne,” she said in a neutral, almost androgynous voice. “Is there a reason why a pair of Hegemony thugs were chasing the Clanner?”
The man—Wayne—passed the woman his untouched beer and went back to the fridge for another. “Not sure, but it probably has to do with him throwing money around like it was going out of style the past few weeks. Kid, you have to be subtler than that in this business.”
“I am Aden,” Aden said, “of Clan Sea Fox. I am not a kid, I am twenty-eight.”
Wayne laughed.
“So’s my oldest, you’re all kids to me. Mika,” Wayne introduced the woman, waving his beer at her, “and Daniel’s on the computer. Wanna tell us what you’re doing on Son Hoa?”
Aden took a long pull on his beer, thinking. While he was no longer a MechWarrior, and brand-new at intelligence work, he was still a Sea Fox: the Clan was known as putting their mercantile interests up alongside their military ones, often even ahead of them. Every Sea Fox grew up negotiating, bartering, reading the room and making the best deals they could in any situation.
They need something from me, he realized, perhaps a partnership?
“As I said, I am Aden,” he began, and then nodded to Wayne, “and yes, I am Clan. Clan Sea Fox, in fact.”
“Clan Sea Fox Watch?” asked Daniel.
“Yes,” said Aden. Wayne turned and headed into the room toward a pair of couches facing each other, with a coffee table in between. Wayne sat and, with a wave of his beer, invited Aden to sit in the other, which he did.
“Just so you know, Aden,” said Daniel, “we have a vat of acid in the next room to tuck your body into if necessary.”
Mika laughed. “A blatant exaggeration.”
She plopped down onto the same couch as Aden, sitting facing him on the other end. She was about to tuck one of her feet under her thigh when Daniel yelled, “No shoes on the couch!” Mika rolled her eyes, kicked off her heels, and then crisscrossed her legs.
“As I was saying, Daniel’s exaggerating,” Mika said, then smiled. “It’s barely a large tub, we keep our vats of acid elsewhere.”
Aden smiled slightly, thinking she was joking, and turned to Wayne, who wasn’t smiling. “I’m extending you a lot of trust right now, Aden, and if you betray that trust down the road, your Clan will never find your body.” When Aden nodded, he continued, “Now that we understand one another, why don’t you start at the beginning? I’ve seen Watch agents before, and normally they’re only interested in business competitors or the local garrisons. You, on the other hand, are actually trying to conduct operations: why?”
Aden took a long pull off the beer, and then looked at Wayne. “To begin, I need to ask you a question, and hopefully you will give an honest answer.”
Wayne shrugged. “I will if I can.”
“Are you behind the bandit attacks on or near Son Hoa?” Aden asked, leaning forward to watch Wayne’s reaction.
“That’s what you’re investigating?” asked Wayne.
“That is not an answer,” noted Aden.
Wayne nodded. “Just so.” He shook his head. “No, we, and the agency we work for,” he said, waving a beer to include Mika and Daniel, “are not behind the attacks. As a freebie, I’ll also add we’re trying to find that out, too.”
“Who do you work for?” Aden asked.
“Answer mine first,” Wayne said with a slight smile. “Fair is fair.”
Aden smiled in return, and took another drink. This may be intelligence work, but it is exactly like a business negotiation. He quickly summarized his mission: bandit attacks on or on worlds nearby Son Hoa were on the rise, starting to delay shipments of BattleMechs off-world. It wasn’t enough of a problem for the Sea Foxes to warrant a full-scale intrusion yet, but they’d sent him to investigate.
“So, here I am,” he finished, pulling on his second beer. Daniel had also moved to sit next to Wayne by then, and Mika had taken off her tie, stretched out, and thrown her legs onto the coffee table. He waved the bottle around at the room. “Wherever ‘here’ is?”
Wayne smiled. “Madame Pascal’s abuts three different apartment complexes, so there’s a half-dozen ways out of there that I know of. The brothel is just the legitimate front for any number of other operations, from safehouses like ours down to debauchery outlawed in every Great House and questionable in the Magistrate.”
Aden took another drink, and looked around the room. In every deal, you have to know when to open negotiations, he thought. I think it is time.
“It seems that both our interests align. Assuming Daniel can hold off from throwing me straight into the acid,” he said, throwing a smile on his face and some humor into his tone to show he was kidding, “perhaps we can come to an agreement? A data-sharing partnership, maybe?”
Aden tried not to hold his breath as he waited for Wayne’s response. Have I misjudged this? Did I read them wrong?
