TEXT: ATTENTION: This story contains some mature content.
  BATTLECORPS
  THE GAUNTLET
  By Ilsa J. Bick
  Hell is oneself, 
  Hell is alone, the other figures in it 
  Merely projections.
  – T.S. Eliot, “The Cocktail Party”
  They think I’m crazy, but I’m not. 
  Ardan says he’s my friend. He says the doctors are for my own 
  good. He says he wants only the best for me, that he’d follow me 
  straight to Hell down that twisting dark tunnel of bones and dry 
  dust and ruby fire.
  But he’s not my friend; this isn’t doing me any good, and he can’t 
  possibly know about Hell because I live it. I’m there. It’s me.
  They think they can keep me here, with their judging Eyes. They 
  think I don’t know what they’re planning, what they’ll do to Melissa 
  and Katrina…
  But I know. And they won’t.
  Because I will stop them, no matter what.
  
  BATTLECORPS
  Prologue
  The world turns and the world changes, but one thing 
  does not change.  
  However you disguise it, this thing does not change:  
  The perpetual struggle between Good and Evil.
  --T.S. Eliot, “The Rock”
  
  BATTLECORPS
  Gauntlet: Prologue • Page 3
  Vatican City, Terra 
  8 August 3028 
  2350 hours
  A steamy night in Rome: a Sunday, the sky clotted with clouds, 
  and much too hot even for the drunks and dusters normally litter-
  ing the pavement around Termini Station. The air was liquid with 
  humidity, and the faint tug of a freakish east wind off the Tiber 
  River carried the fetid aroma of spent DropShip fuel, rancid gar-
  bage, and methane that seeped up in thick fingers from the city’s 
  guts. The stench was so heavy it left a bad taste in the killer’s 
  mouth—like oily, rotted meat—and if he brought his ear close to a 
  grate, he could hear the endless trickle of water bleeding through 
  caves honeycombing the underbelly of the city. Like another world 
  down there: ancient, vast. Dark as the Pit. 
  Dark, dark, dark. They all go into the dark…
  Wraith-like, the killer slipped in and out of shadows along the an-
  cient Vatican wall hemming Via de Porta Angelica. As he walked, 
  the folds of his cassock flowed round his legs like black water. He 
  clutched a heavy rosary of onyx beads strung on tough wire and 
  capped with a silver crucifix in his left hand. He liked the weight. 
  The fingers of his right hand wrapped around a garrote secreted 
  in his pocket. There was a pistol in his right pocket, too, and the 
  metal was cool against his knuckles, but he didn’t need the pistol, 
  not quite yet.  
  When the killer made planetfall a week ago, no one looked twice. 
  His matched set of purple-black shiners was gone. Before leaving 
  Milton, he’d dyed his hair muddy brown: a quick rinse job, just 
  enough to hide his natural red. He’d scanned the daily newsfeeds 
  but saw nothing. (And, yes, they would be careful; no use tip-
  ping him they were on his trail. Ah, but he knew his enemy, the 
  thoughts behind those smiling masks.) On a recharging layover 
  off Alula Australis, he worked up the nerve to mingle and even 
  bought drinks for a skinny blonde with cords of knotty muscles 
  and bad skin. The booze was cheap, and the blonde was efficient, 
  if not inspired. 
  But no one recognized him. No one cared. 
  Once in Rome, he rented a cheap flat that went week to week. The 
  disguise—the cassock and rosary—was easy. Then he’d shaved 
  the beard. (He hadn’t wanted to. The beard was nearly as good as 
  
  BATTLECORPS
  Gauntlet: Prologue • Page 4
  a face job. Except most Roman Catholic priests didn’t have beards, 
  and he needed to be a priest for this to work. No choice.) Now 
  his cheeks felt naked, the damp air dragging across his face like 
  clammy fingers.
  He’d had time to think between Milton and now, time to plan. 
  He knew what was coming and where he must go. He wasn’t 
  sure how he knew, but the thoughts welled up, under pressure, 
  spewing from the bedrock of his mind the way oil spurted from 
  a subterranean pocket. Maybe he’d absorbed more on that trip 
  to Rome—when he was a teenager and yet how cleanly etched 
  the memories, as if scrawled with a diamond stylus—than he sus-
  pected. 
  So long ago, the dancers all gone under the hill, walking the 
  vaults of the dead, all those dry bones in tunnels of dust winding 
  into the dark, twisting toward the ladder to Heaven beneath an 
  unblinking Eye… 
  Ahead, the barest suggestion of the great basilica: first its gold-
  en glow that turned the night amber, and then the illuminated 
  double-brick of the actual dome. Peeping just above a crenellated 
  brick wall running away due west along the Via della Conciliazione 
  and through the Borgo District, he glimpsed the entablature grip-
  ping the capitals of the right colonnade of Doric pillars, four deep, 
  marking St. Peter’s Square. A few seconds later, he made out his 
  goal: the double, brick fornices of St. Anne’s Gate.
  Two and a half minute delay after key-in before the alarms trip 
  when the guard doesn’t re-key; a full three minutes quarter before 
  the nearest guard gets there; four minutes until automatic lock-
  down, and then I’ll be shut in tight, no way to get out, so I have to 
  be fast, I have to be efficient. 
  A light speared from the gloom to his right. The gate’s halberdi-
  er—a boy, really, no more than twenty from the looks of it—played 
  his torch over the killer and said, “Ciao, Padre, io devono vedere la 
  vostra identificazione, per favore.”
  “Si, si, of course.” He was ready for this, a request for his iden-
  tification. That, actually, was the trickiest part. Dipping his left 
  hand into his pocket, he retrieved an identi-tag and handed it 
  over for scan. He waited, patiently, as he imagined priests must 
  as the Swiss Guard propped his halberd (a ridiculous, outlandish 
  weapon) against a near wall and slid the identi-tag through an 
  electromagnetic reader. There was a soft bleep as the computer 
  toggled through the codes, and then the reader winked green.
  
  BATTLECORPS
  Gauntlet: Prologue • Page 5
  Nodding, the guard returned the identi-tag. “Grazie, Padre 
  Gambino,” he said, as he clamped his flashlight to his side with 
  his left arm, keyed the gate with his right hand, and then used both 
  hands to pull open the heavy wrought-iron. “Così, abbastanza cal-
  do per voi?” 
  Well, that was a good question. The killer wondered if Father 
  Gambino would have found it hot enough for him. But, consider-
  ing that he’d shoved Gambino, plastic bag still knotted around his 
  neck, beneath stinking garbage bags bloated with rot that bulged 
  from an oversized dustbin—well, he couldn’t very well ask. So, he 
  improvised: made a show of blotting away sweat, making certain 
  that the boy’s attention was caught by the flash of the crucifix in 
  his left hand while he eased the rope from his pocket with his right. 
  Ducking his head, he kept his face canted slightly to the left—the 
  Eye, remember the Eye—and slid by, passing close. “Hot enough 
  for the damned,” he said, “non pensate, heh?” 
  He caught the boy’s flinch and realized a misstep. (Probably real 
  priests never said damned except in a sermon.) No help for that 
  now because he was through, the trap set. 
  Whipping round, he snapped the garrote around the sentry’s 
  throat, yanked it tight as a noose, and kicked the boy’s legs out from 
  under. The boy’s hands flew to his throat, his torch clattering to the 
  cobblestones, a spear of light lancing off an iron bar, and he began 
  to flail as the killer dragged his body into thick shadows blanketing 
  the base of the walls—away from the cams. Away from the Eyes. 
  Two seconds… five seconds… ten… 
  The killer bent to his work with a will, using his knee as a ful-
  crum and levering the boy’s writhing, heaving body so the head 
  and chest hung a bare five centimeters above gray cobblestones 
  slicked with moisture. Silently, desperately, the boy fought for his 
  life, thrashing, the fingers of his left hand snagging the rosary. The 
  chaplet ripped free of the killer’s hand, the beads pattering against 
  the stones like tiny marbles. But the killer hung on.
  Thirty, thirty-one…
  The boy’s struggles grew weaker as his weight strangled him, 
  and then the killer felt the first tremors shudder up the rope and 
  into his very bones as the boy’s brain, deprived of oxygen, began 
  to die, the cells fizzling one by one, like comets screaming to earth. 
  The killer yanked back harder, his shoulders burning, sweat pour-
  ing down his face. 
  
  BATTLECORPS
  Gauntlet: Prologue • Page 6
  Forty-five, forty-six, forty-seven, come on, come on, die, can’t 
  you; die, come on, die… 
  The boy gave a terrific jerk, as if jolted with a PPC. His limbs be-
  gan to quake in a terminal, awful seizure, and the full ripe stink of 
  feces bloomed as his bowels let go. And then, mercifully, he died. 
  Sixty, sixty-one…
  The killer hunkered on his haunches a moment, panting. Then he 
  rolled the boy over…
  A tiny voice, a faint whisper in his mind: Why? You know he’s 
  dead. Why do you need to see this? Unless they’re right and you 
  are mad.
  …and in watery silver light that sprayed from a halogen above 
  the gate, he saw that the boy’s bulging eyes were going glassy; his 
  mouth gaped; and an inky blotch smeared the boy’s chin from a 
  gush of blood when he’d nearly bitten his tongue in two.
  Seventy seconds…
  No time for this. Go! The killer patted around until he found the 
  chaplet: all the beads still intact, thank heavens, the heavy wire 
  unbroken. He dropped the rosary into the left pocket of the cas-
  sock. Stretching for the gate but careful not to leave the safety of 
  these dense shadows, he retrieved the guard’s torch, clicked it off, 
  dropped it into his left pocket. Then, he listened. He didn’t want to 
  wait. But he clamped down on the urge to run, and concentrated, 
  focusing his senses to a point, bright as a laser. 
  The distant blat of a cab. The groan of that wretched, evil wind. 
  The wild thud of his heart in his ears and, beyond… was that… oh, 
  dear God, no, not now… there, yes, he heard it: that soft sigh only 
  a hovercar makes. Getting louder, coming this way, and precious 
  seconds drizzling away like sand through an hourglass.
  Go, go, go!
  To his right was St. Anne’s Church; to his left the northwest en-
  trance to the Guards’ barracks. He went left, ducking through an 
  archway into a courtyard that was nearly pitch black, with only 
  the very faintest silver-blue glow from the spots beyond that il-
  luminated St. Peter’s Square. The barracks were dark, the guards 
  and few nuns who lived there asleep… save for a trio of curtained 
  windows fired with light at the far left corner of the barracks’ sec-
  ond floor. 
  
  BATTLECORPS
  Gauntlet: Prologue • Page 7
  That made him pause. Still up? At this hour? He watched the cur-
  tains, straining to detect the faintest movement or trace of shadow. 
  But… nothing. 
  Go, just go, find him!
  Faster now: gliding through the courtyard on a diagonal toward 
  the Square, turning for the marble steps that led to the com-
  mander’s apartment… and then, something off to his right. What? 
  Tensing, his gaze skipped right to peer through an iron latticework 
  bolted over a leaded glass panel. Beyond, he made out the pillars 
  closest to the Guards’ barracks and the sheer cliff of the brooding 
  Apostolic Palace, the windows dark and black as empty sockets. 
  But there was something there, out by the pillars; he could have 
  sworn… 
  A starburst of birds exploded in a tangle of wings. He let go of a 
  breath. Pigeons, roosting round the colonnade. Nothing to worry 
  about. No one around to recognize him. And no Eyes, not under 
  the Guards’ noses. 
  Turning, Hanse Davion bounded up the stairs, his black cassock 
  swirling, its hem fraying a bit, like his mind: a chaplet to count 
  prayers he’d never learned in his left pocket, and a pistol in his 
  right.
  
  BATTLECORPS
  BOOK ONE:
  Descent
  
  BATTLECORPS
  I
  April is the cruelest month, breeding 
  Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing 
  Memory and desire… 
  – T.S. Eliot, “The Wasteland”
  
  BATTLECORPS
  Gauntlet: Descent • Page 10
  ComStar First Circuit Compound 
  Hilton Head, Terra 
  20 April 3022
  Sunset along the beach, a cool evening in late spring: the kind 
  when couples walk the beach hand-in-hand and marvel at splash-
  es of deep pink and fiery orange spilling west from the eye of 
  heaven toward a sea darkling to indigo. Seagulls wheeled around 
  invisible axes on a light breeze that skimmed a chill from the wa-
  ter, and Hanse Davion was grateful for the light jacket a grade II 
  acolyte had, with all humility, suggested he put on before leav-
  ing the ComStar compound. Hanse had seen Terra’s Cape Cod, a 
  coast that was by degrees rougher and wilder, with dense thickets 
  of jade-green sea grasses over humps of white sand dunes and 
  beaches that dropped away to a floor pitted with troughs and in-
  numerable smooth, multicolored pebbles. He didn’t recall seeing 
  many shells along the Cape, but Hilton Head’s beach was flat, lev-
  el, hard-packed, dark sand and there were shells here, mainly sand 
  dollars, living and dead. The smell was different, too. Hilton Head 
  was brinier than the Cape, where the sea was colder and laced the 
  air with a scent of aluminum.
  The breeze shifted, and then he picked up the aroma of some-
  thing that was not the sea or sand—the slightly sweet scent of a 
  woman who was unlike any he’d ever met. 
  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Katrina Steiner said. She stood less than a 
  half meter away, the setting sun touching her golden hair with 
  spun fire.  Her gray eyes, dense as thick smoke, sought out Hanse’s. 
  “A fitting end to a momentous day, don’t you think?”
  “Yes. We did a good thing today. Yet…” He let the sentence die, 
  unsure if he wanted to reveal that much.
  “What?” A wisp of hair dragged across her face, and she tucked 
  it behind her ear, in a way that made her look surprisingly young. 
  “It’s ComStar, isn’t it?”
  He didn’t allow his surprise—and pleasure—flood into his face. 
  “What bothers you about it?”
  “Oh, I’m not sure it’s bothersome as much as interesting. ComStar 
  advertises its neutrality yet brokers our alliance. How long before 
  ComStar starts insinuating its tentacles into other realms, broker-
  ing other deals and alliances? Because make no mistake, with a 
  foothold in every realm won through treaty, ComStar has designs 
  
  BATTLECORPS
  Gauntlet: Descent • Page 11
  on more than simple stability. A precentor is a political animal, and 
  while ComStar may be the religion, a precentor has roots.”
  “Are you suggesting that a precentor would turn against 
  ComStar?”
  The Archon thought. “I can’t say that such a thing’s impossible. 
  Whatever the religion, there is the individual, and the individual 
  has ambitions and desires. I can see a primus, perhaps wedded to 
  a particular concern or just simply convinced that Toyama’s way 
  was better than ComStar’s current incarnation, turning districts 
  against one another to serve ComStar. How else can they con-
  quer? ComStar’s not neutral, as much as they pretend otherwise.” 
  Katrina narrowed her eyes and then put a finger to the side of her 
  nose and nodded. “I spy with my little eye.  We need to keep a 
  close watch on ComStar, Fox, if for nothing else than by tradition 
  and doctrine, they have no love for you. You’re as cursed now as 
  John Davion was then, and don’t ever forget it.”
  He was struck again by the Archon’s perspicacity. The more time 
  he spent with Katrina Steiner, the more he envied her long-dead 
  husband even as a portion of his mind whispered a warning: This 
  far, and no further. Remember what is at stake. 
  Yet, as much as he understood that voice of caution, he also 
  knew what he could never acknowledge aloud. He desired this 
  mature, worldly woman, who tugged at him with a smoldering 
  sexuality that was his equal, as formidable as his own iron will. 
  My God, what am I thinking? Don’t be a fool. 
  “Do you think Melissa will come round to the idea?” he said, in-
  jecting a lightness he didn’t feel. Yes, safer to think of Melissa. 
  She’s a child, and I can’t possibly conceive of doing anything to 
  harm a child. Think of the child, and then you’re safe because you 
  will protect a child, whatever the cost. 
  Katrina’s eyebrows knit at the abrupt change in subject. “To the 
  marriage?” 
  “Yes.” He forced a laugh. “Just think what a number of tongues 
  we’ll start wagging! Not only our ages, but the religions, too! It 
  hurts my head to think about it. I’m certain that your pope will 
  have something to say about it.”
  Now Katrina looked amused. “Fox, you’re such a heretic, I 
  wouldn’t have imagined you’d care. If anyone can understand 
  bargains with the devil, it should be the Church. Popes are more 
  
  BATTLECORPS
  Gauntlet: Descent • Page 12
  political than you think. Pope Victor XXVII insists upon his Swiss 
  Guard, and your Pope Benedict XIII has his Palatines. Both know 
  that to exercise force, they must be prepared to display and per-
  haps use it. So I suspect that both will feel each other out and see 
  this as a kind of, I don’t know… an alliance of convenience, some-
  thing that will reflect well on both. But…”
  “What?” he prompted when she didn’t continue.
  “Well, you know all this talk about the popes and their little 
  armies… I don’t know why, but ComStar popped into my head 
  again.”
  “They don’t have an army.”
  “I know that. But every religion needs its army, its zealots—or it 
  can’t survive.”
  “Don’t forget money and influence.” Hanse shrugged. “Maybe 
  it’s like onward Christian soldiers, or something. You know, the 
  more people are besieged, the more stubbornly they cling to a 
  faith. ComStar’s got to be like that at some level, what with the 
  adepts, the acolytes, the way they pray to their machines.” He 
  did not add that he thought the Kuritans as much a danger as 
  the Capellans. And I’d watch that Waterly if I were Primus; she’s a 
  deep one.
  “You’re probably right.” Then Katrina inhaled and blew out a 
  cleansing breath. “So much bloodshed over God, or gods, and 
  each sect thinking they have a monopoly, a lock on the truth. And 
  what does it really matter?”
  “A lot to the people who share the beliefs?”
  “Probably.” Katrina gave a thin smile. “I remember visiting Rome 
  a long time ago and touring the Vatican. My father had arranged 
  a private audience with the Pope and it was… magical. He was a 
  very calm, centered man, and I could feel the pull toward that kind 
  of self-containment. You’d think that the Vatican would do away 
  with anything martial, especially after Amaris. But they haven’t. 
  The Guards are still there; the factional in-fighting between New 
  Avalon and Rome won’t ever end; and the thing that the Vatican’s 
  chosen to retain after Amaris? The Desecration, the absolute 
  embodiment of all the Vatican’s lost. Now what sense does that 
  make?”
  “You know, I wondered the same thing. Ian, my eldest brother, 
  once took me to Rome when I was fourteen, fifteen, something 
  
  BATTLECORPS
  Gauntlet: Descent • Page 13
  like that. He was always the bookish one, very knowledgeable 
  about ancient history. We visited the Vatican, though I guarantee 
  you we did not have a private audience with the pope. You’re right 
  about popes being political animals, with the same need for armies 
  and well-planned routes of defense and escape as the next man. 
  I think more than one pope needed that escape route to Castle 
  Stant’Angelo northeast of the plaza.  But what I couldn’t figure 
  out then was why the Vatican kept the Desecration, never repair-
  ing the damage Amaris’s men did to crypts, what with knocking 
  open tombs and disinterring the bodies, then breaking through the 
  crypts’ walls to flood the chambers. That was sacrilege no matter 
  what your faith. Seemed to me then that you’d want to get rid of 
  that, not glorify it by keeping it around, something for everyone to 
  gawk at through a ferroglass barrier. But I understand now.”
  “And that is?”
  “The Vatican wants to make sure that you see what’s gone and 
  irretrievably shattered. We need relics of the past to remind us 
  of how bad we really can be. The veneer of civilization is very 
  tenuous, very thin, almost fragile. Take away our technology and 
  government and any semblance of civil order, and we’re animals. 
  I’ve seen it happen in battle when good men turn savage. In the 
  end, man or beast, there’s nothing but dust and bones for all of 
  us—like those ossuaries stretching away into darkness beyond. 
  Rome’s like the Sphere: built upon a necropolis, with their dead in 
  a darkness not much farther away than a spadeful of earth.”
  “Or the darkness beyond the skin of a DropShip,” Katrina said. 
  Her voice was dreamy. “Dark, they all go into the dark, the vacant 
  interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.” She caught his 
  look. “Something an ancient poet wrote a long time ago.”
  “It sounds a little sad, almost”—he searched for the word—“hope-
  less.”
  “That’s because it is. For all our aspirations, we’re very small, 
  Fox, and we all come to dust in the end.”
  “Well, then, we’ll have to make sure that comes much later than 
  sooner.”
  “If we have the power,” Katrina said, and she touched his sleeve, 
  lightly, but he still felt the charge. Yet if she picked up on his welter 
  of emotions, she gave no indication. “If we can muster the will. 
  Part of me wants to believe that we can prepare. Another part 
  feels as if, despite our alliance, war’s inevitable, or maybe we’ll 
  
  BATTLECORPS
  Gauntlet: Descent • Page 14
  make it ourselves in order to sweep away corruption or simply to 
  protect ourselves, and those we hold dear.” Now she threaded her 
  arm through the crook of his elbow, so close he felt her warmth. 
  “At least when it comes, we’ll run the gauntlet together, our two 
  realms.” 
  He couldn’t help thinking of his own Gauntlet back on New Avalon: 
  a twisting half-klick of canyon maze; a dark tunnel of death with 
  hidden passages and weapons blisters along the floor and walls 
  designed to test and hone a MechWarrior’s skills. More than a few 
  MechWarriors were entombed there—figuratively, of course.
  Like Rome, in a way—a civilization constructed on ruins that 
  crumbled to bones and dry dust even under the eyes of all the 
  gods. No different from our Houses, constructed upon myomer 
  and titanium and human blood. 
  “Together,” he said, aware of how his emotions spilled over into a 
  single word, trying to tell himself that he couldn’t help it but knowing 
  that he could, if he’d wanted. But this was as close to a declaration—
  a private dare?—as he could manage. “Always together, Katrina.”
  Wordless, she stared at him for a long moment, the color spilling 
  across her throat, and he cursed himself for a fool. What, he would 
  destroy a hard-won treaty because of an attraction he couldn’t—
  wouldn’t—act on? 
  “Prince,” she said, her voice thrumming with emotion. She un-
  linked her arm but did not move away. Her energy rolled off her 
  body in waves, and still, she faced him, a hand’s-breadth away 
  and so close, he saw the pulse bounding in her throat. “Hanse 
  Davion, what are we playing at?”
  “I never play.” His own throat was dry as sand, his voice husky. 
  With exquisite gentleness, the kind he might use with a fragile 
  shell he feared might break, he took both her hands and raised 
  them to his lips. Her skin was warm and soft and tasted a little of 
  salt.
  “Not play,” he said, his heart beating against his caging ribs. “I 
  would never play, Katrina. Not with you. Not ever.”
  The Archon had a corner suite with a span of windows looking 
  east, so the vantage point provided to the acolyte was excellent. 
  
  BATTLECORPS
  Gauntlet: Descent • Page 15
  The sun was so low in the west that ComStar’s airy compound of 
  glass and metal glowed bronze, and the sand and sea blazed with 
  flame. So there was no mistaking Hanse Davion’s cap of copper 
  hair, or Katrina Steiner’s swirling honeyed mane. Pausing in her 
  work, the acolyte saw when the prince turned, faced the Archon, 
  said something and then raised her hands to his lips and then…
  “By Blake, aren’t you done yet?” A querulous woman’s voice be-
  hind her right shoulder, and if she had not been well-disciplined, 
  the acolyte might have flinched with surprise. “The reception’s 
  two hours away, and the Archon’s going to want the use of her 
  rooms, and here you are, wool-gathering.”
  Turning, the acolyte fingered a lock of her rust-colored hair back 
  into the folds of her cowl and dropped her eyes. She was a freshly-
  minted grade I acolyte and so not only was she mostly invisible, 
  nearly everyone in the compound outranked her. Adept Bluma, a 
  prune of a woman, was three grades her senior and never let her 
  forget it. “Forgive me,” the acolyte said as she stepped away from 
  the windows and turned to gather together her cleaning supplies. 
  “The evening was so beautiful I lost track of time.”
  “Lost track of time.” Bluma’s lips puckered into a rosebud of dis-
  approval. “You spend as much time keeping track as you do losing 
  it, you’d be done a shade faster…”
  Bluma was still prattling, but the acolyte was no longer listening. 
  Instead, she wheeled her work cart laden with cleaning supplies 
  and linens out of the Archon’s bedroom under the watchful eye 
  of a guard and turned left, heading down a short corridor for the 
  Archon’s sitting room. And as she walked, the acolyte thought of 
  a slim packet secreted in her light gray jumpsuit and considered 
  that her masters would be pleased indeed. 
  
  BATTLECORPS
  Gauntlet: Descent • Page 16
  Rome, Terra 
  10 May 3027
  My God, I’ll die yet. 
  Damien Tull closed his eyes, shivering as his lover’s tongue 
  teased his nipples and flirted with the sensitive flesh of Tull’s but-
  tocks, his thighs. Tull was so aroused, so hard, it hurt, and he felt 
  ready to burst, his skin prickling with hot needles of desire. His 
  head was light, and he felt a little drunk, though he’d had abso-
  lutely nothing stronger than a few glasses of a good, spicy red 
  wine he could still taste in his mouth, and on his lover’s tongue. 
  The rumble of traffic flowing far below this attic garret receded 
  as his knees trembled, and his consciousness grayed in a giddy, 
  vertiginous swirl of lust. 
  When his lover paused, Tull gave a small cry of loss. “No, please, 
  don’t stop.” Tull’s voice was thick with need, and he swallowed, 
  the rope chafing a little as it rode the hump of his Adam’s apple. 
  The rope looped over an exposed joist in the ceiling and the end 
  was twined round a brass bedpost. Tight, but not too tight: just 
  enough to reduce the supply of oxygen to his brain, so that every 
  sensation was magnified a hundredfold, and his consciousness 
  dissolved into a sea of sensation. He had to focus to keep from 
  slipping off the low wooden stool upon which he perched. “Please, 
  for God’s sake, please.”
  “Not so fast. I want to make you last.” His lover laughed, very 
  softly, and his breath smelled a little of smoky char and spiced 
  wine layered over an earthy scent of musk and a man’s sex. But 
  he complied, his tongue skimming Tull’s neck in a feathery ca-
  ress, probing round Tull’s ear while his busy fingers stroked and 
  pinched and squeezed. “You like that, do you? You want more?”
  “God, yes,” Tull gasped. His fingers twitched, but, of course, 
  he couldn’t use his hands, not with his wrists bound behind his 
  back. But that was what he wanted: to be utterly ravaged, to 
  be enslaved and die in a swirl of sex. There was time later for 
  repentance, for prayer and self-recrimination in the comforting 
  darkness and anonymity of a confessional under the invisible 
  eye of a merciful god.  
  But that was for later, and this was now, and he had to look; he 
  had to see, to stamp the moment on his consciousness so when 
  he’d slipped behind the mask of his uniform within the cloistered 
  shell of Vatican rules and regulations, he still could find pleasure 
  
  BATTLECORPS
  Gauntlet: Descent • Page 17
  in fantasies—until the next time that couldn’t come soon enough 
  when he would die all over again. 
  An oval, free-standing attic cheval mirror framed in cherry wood 
  stood directly across, and so he could see everything: the rope 
  around his neck, and his lover standing just behind; his lover’s 
  hands sneaking around Tull’s waist, playing over the line of his 
  hips, the swell of his thighs. His lover’s body excited him; he was 
  like some cruel god, taking what he wanted, dispensing pleasure 
  only when it suited him. It was the spectacle of his helplessness 
  and arousal that mesmerized Tull, just as the danger—his life 
  hanging in the balance as it were—was a potent aphrodisiac that 
  kept him coming back like an addict, begging for more, and even 
  more. 
  “God, you’re going to kill me,” Tull said, and then he gave a 
  breathy, delighted laugh that ended in a groan as his lover found 
  him and squeezed. “You know that? You’ll be the death of me.”
  A pause. 
  “Well,” his lover said, “now that you bring it up.”
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/BattleTech [multi]/EXTRA/Novels/Battlecorps Novels/The Gauntlet Bk1 Chap1 - Ilsa J. Bick.pdf