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  Apparent Catastrophe

  Copyright © 2017 by Harebrained Schemes, LLC

  All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  Apparent Catastrophe is produced by Harebrained Schemes

  www.harebrained-schemes.com

  Cover art by Joel DuQue

  Licensing by Microsoft

  Chapter One

  Litzau Summer Home, Swindon

  Maldives

  15 November 3000

  Walter de Mesnil shaded his eyes with a hand. Brilliant silvery light ignited beneath the feet of the humanoid Wasp BattleMech pointing its medium laser at his truck. The brightness illuminated the handful of other ’Mechs pouring through the estate’s gates. Their black paint scheme, with reflective silver trim, identified all of them as belonging to the Rivergaard Rangers. A unit complicit in the coup d’état we’ve been escaping.

  As the ’Mech flew up, Walter nudged Sophia Litzau toward the truck’s passenger-side door. “Run. Go for the pump house. I’m right behind you.”

  “But . . .”

  “Just go!” Walter didn’t know why the Wasp had launched, but the truck made for one big target and he didn’t want to be in it when someone started shooting. He slid from behind the wheel and dashed around the front end. He caught up with Sophia quickly. He took her right hand in his left, then filled his right with a needle pistol. “Fast as we can.”

  Behind them gunfire erupted, not loud enough to be from anti-personnel machine guns on any of the ’Mechs. Maybe they’ve mistaken us for their Collective allies! He braced for the whooshing report of short-range missiles being launched. That would give him a two-second warning before the SRMs blasted the pair of them to atoms. “Ten more meters and we have shelter behind that little hill.”

  Halfway to their goal, the SRMs launched.

  Walter squeezed Sophia’s hand. “I’m sorry.”

  The blaze of the missile’s fuel made her face brighten, and Walter was pretty certain he’d never seen anyone so beautiful. Not the way I wanted to go, but . . .

  Then her visage dimmed. The rockets’ roar diminished. The two runners reached the hill and ducked down behind it just as the pair of missiles detonated. The hill’s shadow cloaked Walter and Sophia, but the pressure wave bounced them off the ground. Walter’s ears rang, but not nearly as loudly as they would have had the explosions been close.

  He looked up over the crest of the small hill. The Rangers ’Mech had ignored Sophia and him and instead turned south, toward the house and gardens. There the Collective had opened mass graves in what had been the Chairman’s garden, and forced members of the First Families and corporate elite to serve as burial attendants. Walter had just rescued Sophia from the Collective’s work detail.

  Sporadic small-arms fire crackled in the darkness. The muzzle flashes revealed a host of people on the ground—many unmoving—but little more about them. It didn’t make any sense to Walter that the Rangers would fight with other Collective troops. Mistakes do happen, but . . .

  Then another BattleMech, a Stinger, in a red-and-yellow paint scheme, came around the south side of the main building. The Stinger could have been easily mistaken for the Rangers Wasp, save that the Stinger carried its medium laser like a gun in its right hand, whereas the Wasp’s medium laser replaced the right forearm. The Stinger fired as it came. The laser’s scarlet beam bubbled the armor off the Wasp’s left leg, exposing ferro-titanium bones, myomer muscles, and the SRM launching mechanism.

  The Wasp’s torso twisted to the left. Fire blossomed in the left leg, launching two short-range missiles at the Stinger. They hammered the right side of the ’Mech’s chest, powdering armor, but failing to fully breach it. Then the medium laser drilled straight into the Stinger’s other flank, carving molten scars through ferro-ceramic armor.

  The Stinger fired again with its medium laser. The burning red beam impaled the other ’Mech’s left arm. Liquified armor gushed down to ignite the grass, and the exposed structural members glowed a dull red.

  To Walter’s eye, the ’Mechs looked evenly matched, from hardware and damage to pilot skill. The Stinger’s pilot clearly had a screw loose, however. Even before he’d opened up on the Wasp, he couldn’t have missed the presence of the other Rangers ’Mechs. His attack is just suicide by lance.

  A Whitworth, the heaviest of the Rangers ’Mechs, swung around and oriented on the Stinger. Humanoid in design, with a boxy torso and forearms that ended in medium lasers, the Whitworth grossly outclassed and outgunned the Stinger. The larger ’Mech fired all three of its medium lasers. The two mounted in its arms disintegrated the armor on the Stinger’s right arm, then melted the limb clean off. Fire burned deeper within the ’Mech, and the beam from the medium laser mounted in the ’Mech’s head slagged what little armor remained on the Stinger’s right flank.

  Launch compartments opened on the Whitworth’s torso, and two salvos of long-range missiles burned into the night. They peppered the smaller ’Mech’s torso. Detonations sent armor shards whirling through the darkness. The Stinger staggered, then sagged to the right as the war machine’s metal bones ablated to nothing.

  Walter tugged Sophia to her feet. “Quick, to the pump house.”

  Hand in hand they ran, keeping the hill behind them and cutting down into the ravine that hid the cinderblock pump house that served the Litzau mansion. Walter opened the chain-link fence gate for Sophia, then shut it behind her. She returned the favor with the blockhouse’s door, then locked it.

  Sophia, her blonde hair loose and ragged, reached out and embraced him tightly. She trembled—less from fear than a flood of adrenaline. Walter wrapped his arms around her and hung on, too. The warmth of her, the scent of sweat, and the press of her cheek against his brought him a welcome bit of sanctuary. “We made it this far, but this still isn’t the rescue I owe you.”

  She squeezed him harder. “You were dead. Ivan was dead. How . . . ?”

  Before Walter could even begin to answer, a metallic click and scrape interrupted their conversation. He turned, only slightly loosening his grasp upon her. The control console built into the opposite wall slid back, and a slender young man with a scraggly beard emerged from the dark hole behind it.

  He smiled. “Sophia!”

  “Ivan!”

  Sophia released Walter and embraced her brother tightly. The two siblings clung to each other, gasping and laughing with relief. Sophia took a half-step back to study her brother, then hugged him again. “Ivan, you look quite the sight with that beard.”

  “And you, Sophia, are you okay?”

  She nodded briefly. “They’re doing horrible things. Horrible.”

  Walter’s eyes narrowed. “Did the Collective discover who you are?”

  “No.” She raised a hand to her cheek. “The swelling interfered with facial recognition, and I suppose they think I am dead. They didn’t try too hard to figure things out.”

  Walter glanced at Ivan. “Spurs, what’s the status on the computers?”

  “I’ve altered our identifications—including yours, Sophia. You’re now Felicia Fisher, of Swindon, and you were down in Rivergaard for the Investiture. You work doing gardening for estates up here, all off the books.” Ivan smiled. “I’m Spurs Spurling, and this is Wall-eye Wilson. I’m his half-wit nephew. We’re poachers.”

  Sophia arched an eyebrow. “Wall-eye?”

  “It’s for my great peripheral vision.”

  A f
ist pounded on the blockhouse door from outside. “Open up, or we’re melting this building.”

  Walter pointed Ivan at the console, and Ivan hit the studs that slid it back into the wall.

  I actually hoped you’d hide, but . . . As the fist hammered the door again, Walter opened it slowly. Four soldiers with laser carbines had arrayed themselves around the door, and the Whitworth stood back another hundred meters. The soldiers wore standard camouflage battle dress uniforms, but had patches bearing the Rivergaard Rangers’ insignia on them.

  Walter sank to his knees, raising his hands. “We didn’t do nothing.”

  The sergeant leading the recon team waved Spurs out and patted him down. Sophia went next and was pronounced clean. Walter heard nothing in the soldier’s voice that suggested he had any idea who they were. “Now you, pal.”

  Walter kept his hands high. “I have a needle pistol at the small of my back, knife in each boot, another on my belt.”

  The soldier disarmed him with cold efficiency. “Judging by her clothes, she was with the work detail. You don’t look to be Collective. What’s your story?”

  The man’s comment about Sophia and the Collective didn’t come with the right delivery. Pity for her, contempt for the Collective. “My nephew and me have been living rough. Saw the lights. Saw her. She asked for help so I tried to steal that truck.”

  Sophia nodded and swiped at tears.

  “That story will stand for now—unless you want to tell me why there’s blood on you.”

  Walter shrugged. “Blood on the knife, too. Stealing trucks ain’t always easy.”

  “Kinnet, keep an eye on him.” The sergeant waved generally back toward the house. “Get moving, folks.”

  Walter fell into line silently. He could feel Kinnet’s laser carbine centered on his spine. Walter worked his way up the hill, reaching back to help both Spurs and Felicia. He moved slowly enough to keep Kinnet’s mind at ease. He couldn’t see any advantage to even attempting an escape, at least not yet. Even if he could neutralize the four soldiers, he couldn’t escape the Whitworth’s wrath. And Ivan and Sophia will pay the price for anything I do.

  The group came up out of the ravine and headed toward the gardens. While escaping from the Collective, it had seemed to Walter that he’d covered a lot of ground. Barely two hundred meters separated the truck—which remained idling and in good shape—from the top of the ravine. The gardens appeared to be nearly that far from the truck themselves. That was the longest four hundred meters of my life.

  The occasional flash of a crimson beam, or the sporadic crack of a pistol, were all that spoiled the peace of the gardens. As they drew closer, the moaning of the wounded and sobbing of others began to build. Two of the Rangers ’Mechs flanked the gardens, using their external lights to replace the shorted spotlights. As Walter moved into the illuminated area, he got his first good look at the gardens.

  Four shallow pits, roughly one meter deep, three wide, and twenty long had been gouged through the gardens in parallel rows. Their excavation had cut across flower beds and through walkways, toppling statues and uprooting trees. Bodies, scores of them, had been laid into the trenches—feet toward the center, heads at the edges. Men, women, and children, if clad at all only in filthy rags, lay on their backs; sightless eyes staring at the stars. Most had their mouths open, a few their eyes, and all showed the violence of their passing. Misshapen skulls, gashed throats, or ridiculously trivial-appearing entry wounds marked them.

  More Rangers stood in the middle of the garden, between the two centermost trenches. Collective agents—the half-trained civilians as well as a variety of mercenaries—knelt by the pit edges. They clasped their hands behind their heads. Most appeared stoic, but a few sobbed and dark stains suggested the most timorous had soiled themselves.

  Back away from the pits sat others dressed the same as Sophia. They hugged each other, turning their faces from the pits. A few had been wounded, and others tended them. Most stared distantly at nothing at all.

  A lieutenant with the Rangers drew a needle pistol and approached the kneeling Collective agents. “Take a good look, a good long look at what you’ve done.”

  “It’s what the First Families have done to us for generations.” The woman glanced back over her shoulder at the Ranger. “We’ve shed our blood for you for ages.”

  “And now you do again.” He pressed the gun to the back of her head and pulled the trigger.

  Her body jerked forward, then slithered lifelessly into the pit.

  The lieutenant looked left and right. “Kill the rest of them.”

  Without hesitation, the other Rangers soldiers efficiently executed the Collective agents. A couple of the agents fainted at the prospect of death. They fell into the mass grave even before being shot. The soldiers shot those people twice. The Rangers’ faces betrayed neither joy nor remorse.

  Walter purposely hid his expression. Not fifteen minutes earlier he had planned and executed a rescue that required him to stab a woman to death, and then shoot her companion in the face. He hadn’t hesitated, nor had he regretted a nanosecond of what he did. But that was necessary to rescue Sophia.

  This, however, is something else. The Rangers had simply murdered Collective agents. Even if the lieutenant had taken the time to cite some regulation against espionage or human trafficking—each of which might warrant execution—it wouldn’t have changed the fact that this was an extrajudicial act of murder. At the very least, the soldiers and mercenaries Walter knew tended to refrain from such things because if battle fortunes shifted, they’d quite likely be the next round of guys on their knees at a pit’s edge.

  Maybe they’ve already run into that. Maybe this is payback. While that motivation made sense, Walter had seen holovid of the Rangers ’Mechs patrolling Rivergaard after the coup d’état. He supposed it was possible that in the week and a half since the Collective had tried to assassinate Ivan and him as part of the coup, that the Rangers could have already revolted, but that didn’t seem right.

  None of this makes sense.

  The lieutenant, his pistol again holstered, spoke briefly with the sergeant, then headed over to the three of them. “I’m Lieutenant Calvin Galarza of the Rivergaard Rangers. We’re taking you with the rest of the workers to one of our refugee camps.”

  Walter’s eyes tightened. “Are we refugees, or suspected Collective agents?”

  Galarza, who appeared to be a lot younger than Walter would have imagined given the ease of his executing the woman, drew closer. “We’ll take precautions, but if you’re not Collective, you’ve got nothing to worry about. Fit guy like you, we might even find a place for you, if you’ve got the stomach for the sort of work needs doing.”

  Walter raised his hands. “I ain’t afraid a killing, but ain’t much on murder.”

  “The hard cases were mercs hired to overthrow the planet. The others, the ones with the clubs, they earned their place in the Collective by betraying family, friends and benefactors. Blood on all their hands.” The lieutenant shrugged. “We declared martial law. We warned them. Summary execution is more than they deserve.”

  “Might could be.” Walter shook his head. “Guess I hope everyone got the warning.”

  Galarza looked back at the pit, then raised a hand and quickly gestured down. The ’Mechs at the edges fired their lasers, playing the beams back and forth across the pits. The bodies instantly burst into flame. Sickly sweet smoke curled up in greasy, gray tendrils. The heat of hellfire washed over the survivors in waves and drove them back from the pits.

  “They got the warning.” Galarza smiled. “And there, we’ve delivered it again.”

  Chapter Two

  Every revolution evaporates, leaving behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

  —Franz Kafka

  Processing Center, Prism Energy Solutions

&nb
sp; Maldives

  16 November 3000

  Sophia didn’t mind being alone, in the dark, with the damp cold seeping into her bones. She’d not been alone since the Collective had launched their coup d’état. The darkness didn’t bother her—never really had. The cold hadn’t become uncomfortable yet. But the rhythmic pat-pat-pat of fat waterdrops falling to the floor somewhere behind her was set to drive her insane.

  She’d been handcuffed to the metal chair only by her right wrist. She could have easily gotten up and reached out her left hand to interrupt the flow. She might have done that, too, under ordinary circumstances, and not just to stop the sound. As a scientist she’d want to learn the water’s temperature. She’d want to see if it felt oily. The scent could tell her a great deal. Any and all of those things might reveal where she’d been taken.

  At August House the Rangers had segregated their “guests” by gender and loaded them into hovertrucks with canvas covers. They’d raced off into the night. Sophia had made a halfhearted attempt to track turns and time the trip, but one of the wounded cried out, and she did what she could for the woman. Once they arrived at their destination, they were offloaded within a warehouse, questioned about their identities, then sorted. The wounded, Sophia hoped, went off for medical treatment. She didn’t know what happened to the others because once the wounded wandered away, the Rangers put a hood over her head, led her deeper into the facility, and cuffed her to a chair bolted to the floor. Once the metal door rattled shut behind her, Sophia pulled the hood off and missed in her attempt to toss it where it could absorb the water droplets from the ceiling.

  Something crackled in the darkness, then a disembodied voice spoke in tinny tones. “You are not Felicia Fisher.” It came as a statement of fact, neither a question nor an accusation.

  “I am.”

  “There is no record of a Felicia Fisher.”

  Even though darkness concealed her, Sophia kept her expression slack. “Not my fault you can’t find the record.”