BattleTech: Truth and Shadows: The Proving Grounds Trilogy, Book Two by Martin Delrio

Author:Martin Delrio [Delrio, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi

“No,” he said. “No…”

Letting the inner envelope fall unopened from suddenly nerveless fingers, he sank into the chair and buried his face in his hands.

26

JASMINE FLOWER WINE SHOP

CHANG-AN

LIAO

PREFECTURE V

19 OCTOBER 3111

He sat at a table in the corner back with his head in his hands. A bottle, not the first of the evening, stood at his elbow, and next to the bottle, a wineglass. He was trying his best to drink himself into oblivion, and oblivion was not cooperating.

The Jasmine Flower Wine Shop was on the outskirts of Chang-An—far away from the current fighting, and even farther away from the burnt-out shell of the urban center. Any resistance going on inside the city came from desperate civilians. The local military units had been crushed during the first days of the fighting, wiped out as an effective force for the crime of daring to resist when the Capellan Confederation landed a DropShip and started disembarking soldiers.

The CapCons had double-berthed—maybe even triple-berthed—their DropShip. They’d packed it with two or three times the number of soldiers it should have carried; they’d overstuffed its cargo holds with armored vehicles, with heavy weapons, and with BattleMechs. A single DropShip of that class was not rated to carry so much; it should not have been able to carry more than the local defenses in Chang-An could have dealt with handily.

He had worked the numbers out carefully—he was good at such exercises—before he had even considered…but he had not considered the Capellans would lie, or that they would put a DropShip at such risk. That was the first betrayal.

No, he thought. Be honest with yourself, at least. It was the second.

He poured himself another glass of wine. His hands were shaking so that he had to steady the neck of the bottle against the lip of the glass. He managed to still the trembling long enough to pick up the wineglass and drain it without spilling. The wine was a heavy red from the dry temperate coast, harsh and tannic; his head was full of its fumes. They didn’t help to get the smell of burning out of his nostrils, or out of his memories.

Chang-An’s public health services had dug common graves for the city’s innumerable dead—drivers of earthmovers and IndustrialMechs risking their lives to furrow up ground out of the way of the fighting, then laying the bodies out in rows like seed for an obscene crop someday to come. He had brought his parents’ bodies there himself and put them in; they had no other friends or family left alive to do it. And the earthmovers had covered them up again.

That had been the first night he’d tried to get drunk. But he hadn’t been able to get drunk enough.

Three more DropShips had come down at the port today; more soldiers poured out of them into the city and the surrounding countryside. He had seen them, had gone back and hidden in the shadows to watch.

He’d seen transport aircraft, too, and heavy gear—Saxon APCs, Maxim

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