TEXT: BattleCorps
  THE GAUNTLET
  Ilsa J. Bick
  
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  Gauntlet: Crucible • Page 
  IX
  Where does one go from a world of insanity? 
  Somewhere on the other side of despair.
  – T.S. Eliot, “The Family Reunion”
  
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  Rome, Terra 
  8 August 3028 
  0330 hours
  So, the big question was: what now?
  It took both Nick and Sortek to get Davion—or whoever he 
  was—to the surface. By that time the big man had regained con-
  sciousness, but he was unsteady and a little, well, depleted. That 
  was the best word to describe it. Emma had Nick’s flashlight and 
  she watched as Nick and Sortek eased the man against the base 
  of the Kerensky memorial. Davion’s almost impossibly blue eyes 
  were a little glassy, and sweat matted his hair and the tatters of 
  a filthy, blood-spattered cassock. (Answering that question about 
  whom Sister Margaret had really seen: The nun had been right.) 
  His face was streaked with drying blood and mud. But his eyes 
  didn’t hold the vacancy of insanity that Emma remembered from 
  her days as a uniform: that kind of sustained, inward focus of the 
  catatonic. Instead, he was like a man from whom some evil had 
  been purged, or one at the end of a long illness endured without 
  complaint. That moment when a fever breaks, and you sweat it 
  out, and then, finally, sleep a dreamless sleep that’s truly restor-
  ative.
  “Oh, God, look at his hands,” Emma said. She shrugged out of 
  her linen jacket and pulled at the seam stitched round the shoul-
  der until the cloth gave way. Handing her flashlight to Nick, she 
  squatted alongside Davion and began wrapping his torn left palm. 
  When Davion winced, she said, “Sorry. Just let me wrap this, and 
  we’ll get you some help.” 
  “It’s all right.” Davion gave her a tired smile. “Thank you.”
  “Don’t mention it,” she said but not brusquely. She looked over 
  at Sortek who’d ripped another length of cloth from her jacket and 
  was, very gently, tending to the man’s right hand. “We need to get 
  him to a doctor.”
  Sortek shook his head. “We can’t do that. You know we can’t. My 
  people can care for him. The problem is getting him out of Rome 
  without anyone seeing. I can do that, but I need your help, and we 
  can’t tell anyone what’s happened here.”
  She didn’t look up from her work. “Sortek, there are two dead 
  people down in a tunnel no one knows about, an injured man 
  here, and three corpses at the Vatican. Landscape’s getting pretty 
  
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  crowded here. Just how the hell do you expect me to finesse this? 
  I can’t pretend this didn’t happen.”
  Before Sortek could answer, Conley said, “But he’s right.” Conley 
  had taken the child from Emma almost immediately, and now he 
  held the baby in the crook of his left arm. Exhausted, the baby 
  had leaned his head against Conley’s chest and fallen asleep with 
  the two middle fingers of his right hand still firmly screwed in 
  his mouth. Conley cupped the back of the child’s head. “Think, 
  Detective. How can we explain all this? More, what damage will 
  follow if we do?”
  “Not my problem.” Emma sat back on her haunches. “I don’t 
  have to worry about explaining anything. That’s not my job. My 
  job is justice.”
  “No, Emma.” Nick, arming sweat from his forehead. “Our job is to 
  catch the bad guys. Justice is different, and you know it. Besides, 
  we’ve already stepped way across the line. We chose which side 
  we were gonna be on. Now we’re here, and it’s a little late for 
  you to start spouting crap about duty. If we were really interested, 
  we’d have called for back-up. We’d have taken Sortek and Father 
  Conley down to headquarters. Now if Sortek thinks he can get him 
  taken care of, I say we let him do that.”
  Emma blinked. She opened her mouth, closed it. Nick was the 
  voice of conscience—no, no, strike that. Nick was, sometimes, the 
  face of a reality she didn’t like, or didn’t know how to negotiate.
  Under her hands, Davion stirred. “Do I get some say in this?” 
  His voice rasped, but he sounded stronger, as if he were pulling 
  himself out of his exhaustion. “Ardan is right. I’ve been used as a 
  pawn in some game I didn’t even know I was playing.”
  Emma’s eyes raked over his features. “Who are you, exactly?”
  “Detective,” Sortek warned.
  “No, Ardan, it’s all right.” The man with Davion’s face held her gaze, 
  and though she couldn’t see his eyes well, she felt an intensity from 
  which she could not look away. “I would swear to you with every fi-
  ber of my being that I am Hanse Davion. Everything he is, I am. But I 
  can remember days, and not very long ago either, that who and what 
  I really am is on the tip of my tongue, or like a faraway star you see 
  much more clearly when you’re not looking right at it. That’s who I 
  am: something out of the corner of your eye. But, for the moment,” 
  his lips twitched into a semblance of a grin, “Davion will do.”
  
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  “And the baby?”
  Something like pain arrowed across Davion’s features. “A child 
  I wish I could call mine because I could not love him more. I’m 
  supposed to protect him. That’s all in me, too, like my heart which 
  I can’t see but know is there. So I tell you now, on my life: if you 
  speak, that child will never know peace, ever. They will use him, or 
  they’ll kill him, and it will amount to the same thing.”
  Emma said nothing. Damn him, he was right, and she knew it. 
  She pulled in a long breath, held it. Let it out and looked up at the 
  sleeping child in Conley’s protective embrace, and then at Conley.
  “All right, Father,” she said. “What can you and your people make 
  go away?”
   The bob of lights and movement at those huge double doors that 
  were, the assassin had now surmised, metal. About fraccing time, 
  too; her left thigh was beginning to cramp, and she’d had to move 
  her head back a couple dozen times so the glass on the night vision 
  scope wouldn’t steam up. Now she watched, her right eye glued 
  to the images in her scope as the figures—green, glowing, with 
  slashes of black and grey that marked eyes, hair, mouth—began to 
  resolve. Her scope was very good, and so she recognized the faces 
  immediately: that woman detective in the lead followed by her part-
  ner, the good-looker. Both held flashlights that they’d switched off 
  and a good thing for her. There was enough backwash glare from 
  the fountain’s spots as it was. Then, Conley with…yes, that was a 
  baby in his arms. Her teeth showed in a tight, feral grin that quickly 
  faded as she really registered what she was seeing. 
  Damn it. The small muscles of her jaw bunched in frustration. 
  Damn that Conley! Dropping him was going to present a major 
  problem because he’d hoisted the baby up high, so the child’s head 
  rested on his left shoulder. She could probably take him with a head 
  shot just so long as the baby didn’t wake up, or Conley didn’t shift 
  the kid from one shoulder to the next. As it was, he’d have to be 
  stationary, or else she wouldn’t risk the shot. Probably tag the kid, 
  and then she might as well hang it up because she couldn’t go back 
  and report that: Gee, sorry, wasted the kid, too. But get Conley to 
  stand still, things’d be fine, more or less. She worried, only margin-
  ally, that the baby would be hurt in the fall, but she didn’t think that 
  would kill him. Couldn’t make everything turn out rosy. 
  
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  The Davion commander appeared last of all, helping out some-
  one…She swore, softly. Not Reinhardt but…Hanse Davion? Here, 
  in Rome? The prince looked bad, roughed up and bloody, his 
  hands bandaged, and what the…was that a cassock? 
  “This is getting nuts,” she breathed out in an undertone that was 
  so soft she barely heard. Where the hell had Davion come from? He 
  hadn’t been in the group. Waiting in the building? Or maybe he’d got-
  ten in a back way, but she’d scouted round and she was sure there 
  was no other way in or out. And where the hell was Reinhardt?
  One thing at a time. She watched the group knot at the base of 
  the steps. Let’s go, let’s go. As if on cue, they started up again, 
  crossing right to left in her field of vision, heading for that hov-
  er they’d left parked to the extreme left of the fountain. As they 
  walked, they strung out a bit, like beads on a lengthening string, 
  the woman in the lead, her partner…and Conley, with the kid, all 
  by his lonesome. The Davion commander and the prince much 
  further behind: Davion was walking without help now, and the 
  commander was talking into a bud.
  “No time like the present,” she murmured. Conley was standing 
  now, in profile, his left shoulder—the one with the kid—facing her. 
  Her scope’s resolution was so good, she could tell which fingers 
  the kid was sucking: the middle two, just like she’d done when she 
  was a baby. At least, that’s what her mom said.
  And you just keep on dreaming, baby. She dropped the targeting 
  crosshairs on Conley’s head, a little above his left ear, compen-
  sating for gravity and thanking Christ there wasn’t a breeze. Felt 
  her heart slow. Thought: First Conley, then the woman. Then the 
  Davion commander and then the drop-dead gorgeous guy, save 
  him for last—she watched as the guy caught up with the woman 
  detective who’d already popped the door of the hover—save him 
  for last and maybe he’ll get lucky, maybe only tag him; be a shame 
  to waste all that good material…
  Let out a tiny breath. 
  And squeezed.
  Me and my people. Conley followed after Fusco and Rossi. His 
  senses were suddenly sharper, and more crisply aware, as if 
  something had passed from his eyes, and again he had that eerie 
  
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  sensation that he’d passed through some trial of which he’d only 
  been half-conscious. 
  He felt and saw everything: the clap of his shoes against stone; 
  the fingers of the humid air dragging across his forehead; orange 
  light dancing along the underbellies of stone dolphins around the 
  fountain. The beat of his heart, slow and steady now, and the child 
  in his arms; the child, most of all: the child’s weight in his arms and 
  against his breast, the slightly sweet smell of his still-damp curls, 
  and that little intermittent mewl, a tiny whimper followed by a sort 
  of sigh as the child dreamt. He was so close to Conley’s ear that 
  Conley picked up the moist sound of the child sucking his fingers.  
  So small and defenseless. Conley tightened his grip. Davion’s 
  right. My people must never find you. He had no doubts that the 
  Cardinal Protector could make this go away. Fusco was right about 
  that. But he would have to come up with some very imaginative 
  reason why he’d not checked in before going with Sortek and the 
  detectives. Or…he chewed his lower lip. Maybe not. If Sortek could 
  make Davion go away…if the child disappeared… 
  His thoughts spiraled back to the thread of logic he’d followed 
  earlier. Indeed, his reasoning felt like one of those recursive algo-
  rithms: feeding on itself and never quite breaking free.
  The Cardinal Protector must know about Davion and the child, 
  or at the very least, the child. He had to know about Reinhardt be-
  cause the colonel commander could never have engineered this 
  on his own. So he will never rest until he has the child, but he will 
  never allow the Church to be exposed in any way. Then, some-
  thing like grim humor: Maybe that’s why they call him a Cardinal 
  Protector…
  “Now I will protect you,” he murmured, a little startled to hear his 
  own voice. “I won’t let anything happen to you, I swear.” Maybe I 
  can persuade Sortek…
  Suddenly, the child flinched in his arms and pushed up until they 
  were nose to nose. His eyes were open, but the light was far too 
  dim for Conley to make out the blue.
  “Hello, bright eyes,” Conley said. His right hand came round to 
  cup the child’s soft curls. “How…?”
  Something feathered his hair, hot and fast, and then there was 
  the high ping of metal ricocheting off rock and the whip-crack of 
  a shot splitting the air. Conley jerked right, saw Fusco spinning, 
  
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  on the alert, her mouth open, screaming, and he heard his name 
  being shouted, except by a man, not Fusco, and then someone 
  smashed into his back and Conley was falling…
  Squeezed at the same moment the baby’s head bobbed up.
  “Shit!” the assassin hissed and jerked the instant before the 
  rifle discharged. A yellow-orange streamer of muzzle flash spit-
  ting through the air, the crack of the shot at the same instant, the 
  butt jamming into her shoulder. Her ears were ringing, and she 
  couldn’t hear her heart but felt it pounding in her temples. Christ, 
  Christ, had she been in time; Conley was down; oh, shit, shit, what 
  about the kid, where was the kid? Had she—?
  Davion was a little ahead of Sortek. He felt better, physically, 
  even mentally. Some poison gone from his system, he knew that 
  now. Like a demon bottled up and uncorked but cleansed in pain 
  and blood. This was right, and he had to trust Ardan to—
  A loud crack, like a branch breaking, with the near-simultaneous shrill 
  of a bullet striking rock ahead to his right, and Davion knew instantly.
  “CONLEY!” Davion launched himself into the priest, caught him 
  in the small of the back and wrapped him up, bearing him and 
  the child to the ground. The hit was solid, and he heard the priest 
  grunt, and then they tumbled to the ground: Conley hunched over 
  the child and Davion swarming up now, shielding them both. He 
  heard Fusco shouting at her partner, but he focused on the priest 
  and the child. “Are you hurt, are you hit? What about the baby?”
  “What, what?” The priest was gasping, yet the child was miracu-
  lously silent. “He’s fine, but what…?”
  Out the corner of his left eye, Davion saw Fusco coming for 
  them, her partner a step behind, their pistols drawn. “Rifle, shoot-
  er, building across the square!” he shouted.
  But the detective kept coming, shouting: “Davion, the fountain, 
  get behind the fountain!” Then her partner straightened, looked 
  right and high, then hurled himself after the woman just as the 
  rifle went CRACK. 
  
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  And now a scream, Fusco: “Nick, God, no!”
  She was so stunned by how close she’d come that the assassin 
  wasted a precious three seconds she would never get back. Her 
  brain raced, figuring out the angles. Conley was down and now 
  Davion was in the way! No shot to take there, and Christ, she’d 
  been this close to killing the kid…
  Come on, come on, too much time, drop them! She pivoted, 
  rounding on Fusco who was already crouching, spinning, pulling 
  out a weapon, and moving to close the distance between her and 
  the fallen priest. Christ, she was fast! The assassin tried getting a 
  good lock, but the woman was bouncing around and then as she 
  pulled up, the assassin sighted and squeezed off another shot…
  Just as the other detective, the drop-dead gorgeous guy, crowd-
  ed behind, and pushed her to the ground.
  Emma heard the first crack, didn’t even pause to think much 
  but knew: Rifle, shooter, high. Instinct and training kicked in, and 
  she was dropping, pivoting, pulling her weapon, heading for the 
  priest. Going after the baby, Conley! Then she saw the priest drop, 
  had a heart-stopping moment when she thought he’d been hit but 
  then recognized Davion, and Davion was shouting at her, “Rifle! 
  Building across the square!”
  “Nick!” Emma screamed without turning around. She dashed to-
  ward Conley and Davion. Had to get them closer to the fountain, 
  the fountain! “Building to the right! Shooter, there’s—!”
  And that’s as far as she got. She heard Nick scream once: “Emma!” 
  And then, before she could turn, Nick crashed into her back, push-
  ing her out of the way, and she was falling, looking back…
  Just in time to see Nick take the shot that was meant for her. 
  The rifle CRACKED.
  
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  Ardan saw a puff of pink mist and then Rossi’s body go straight 
  down, right behind Fusco who was screaming: “Nick, God, no!” 
  He didn’t know if Rossi was alive or not, and it didn’t matter. There 
  was nothing he could do for Rossi at the moment, anyway. 
  Davion was screaming at him now: “Ardan, for God’s sake, 
  across the square, across the square!”
  Ardan was the furthest back, and so he had the most time. In 
  three bounds and that many seconds, he crossed to the fountain 
  and dove for the stones just as another shot rang out. A geyser 
  of water spurted from the fountain. Ardan ducked, pulled out his 
  laser pistol. He was close enough to Davion so he could see that 
  the priest and the baby were unharmed. Sitting ducks out here, 
  but whoever was after them was going for him and the detectives, 
  maybe Conley, too; but not the child and not Davion, or else he’d 
  have finished Davion by now. If he could just…
  Suddenly, he heard a high whine and the unmistakable whoosh 
  of a hover. He looked right. Fusco’s hover was on the move, cir-
  cling round… My God, what was she doing?
  Nick went down, and at the same moment, Emma was awash in 
  a spray of warm blood and hair and bone. “Nick!” she screamed, 
  and then he was on the ground, and she was crawling for him, 
  frantic. “Nick, God, no!”
  She heard Ardan shouting, and she realized that Nick had given 
  her this chance, and she had no time to waste now, no time! If Nick 
  was dead, she couldn’t help him, and if she died and he was still 
  alive, that wouldn’t do him any good either. Or any of them.
  The calculus flashed in her mind, the equation falling into place: 
  No chance against a sniper; weapons don’t have the range, and 
  the shooter has night vision, missing only because we’re moving, 
  and that first shot meant for Conley, doesn’t want to hurt the baby, 
  and the only way to beat him . . . 
  She pushed up, legs pumping, going as fast as she could for 
  the hover. The doors were already open, and she flung herself in, 
  thumbed the auto-lock and even as the doors swung shut, she’d 
  released the stand and the hover was moving. She felt the impact 
  of bullets on the hover’s windscreen, but the windscreen was fer-
  roglass for this precise reason, and all police hovers were armored. 
  
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  Last time I ever complain about a city car. She brought the 
  hover round fast, banging on the flashers, bringing the beams 
  up to high, and then swinging round and powering up her best, 
  her most lethal weapon…
  The assassin saw the male detective go down, swore, and 
  then decided that, fuck it, she’d better take them down fast. 
  The rifle was an autoloader and so she didn’t have to worry 
  about throwing a bolt, but her aim was off now, and she had 
  the yips and a damn bad feeling about this. 
  Missing the priest had been a godsend. She had her orders 
  and so she couldn’t shoot Davion. But then she’d missed with 
  the woman because her partner had pushed her out of the way, 
  and now she’d ducked down behind her partner—what kind 
  of crap coward was that, hunh?—and so the assassin swung 
  right instead of left and fired at the Davion commander just as 
  he dove for the fountain, and she squinted against the wash 
  of fountain glare glinting off the water. Another goddamned 
  miss!
  Now, in tracking the commander, she’d lost the woman and 
  then by the time the hover was moving, she thought, again: 
  Fuck-ass coward…
  The hover didn’t speed away but veered for the building 
  where she perched, and that’s when the assassin made her 
  first real, honest mistake. (Yeah, okay, she’d killed the blonde 
  before the lady dick, but that was a technicality, and Ardan 
  was on the move.) She drew a bead on the hover and began 
  to fire.
  “FUSCO!” Ardan roared, but the woman was already darting for 
  the hover and in less than five seconds, she was in and the hover 
  was moving. 
  My God, she was leaving them! He couldn’t believe it. His 
  thoughts boiled like water over rapids. Leaving them, her part-
  ner; is she calling for help, what can I do to get us out… 
  
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  And then when the hover’s flashers came on, Ardan realized 
  what Fusco was going to do an instant before she did it.
  It had taken all of ten seconds for Emma to get to the hover, crank 
  it and maneuver round, and as she did, listening to the bullets 
  bouncing off the armored vehicle, her lips curled back in a savage 
  grin of triumph.
  That’s right, you keep firing at me, you bastard, look at me—her 
  left thumb hovered over a control—look at me, keep looking!
  Her magazine held ten rounds, and after the fourth discharged 
  at the hover, the assassin realized she would never punch through. 
  She also realized a mistake that wouldn’t have been one if things 
  had worked out differently. She couldn’t go over the building via 
  the roof because the fire escape didn’t extend far enough. Her 
  only choice was to go down, and she weighed the odds. She 
  could hang up here, but that would be risky because if the cop 
  didn’t go away; if she started shooting from the base of the build-
  ing, she stood a much better chance of actually getting hit. Plus, 
  while she was busy with the cop, that Davion commander could 
  swing around and take a couple shots. Or—she tracked the hover 
  through her scope—she could let the cop get in close, forget the 
  rifle, squeeze off a couple bursts from her laser and fry the bitch 
  and then… 
  Suddenly, a ball of white light burst inside her head. 
  Emma hit the spot, full. Bright white light punched a hole into 
  the semi-darkness, illuminating the shooter on the fire escape. 
  The shooter—a woman, who the hell is she working for—sprang 
  back as if she’d been burned, and Emma’s heart leapt. Yes! She’d 
  guessed right! There was no way for the shooter to be that accu-
  rate unless she had night vision, and now with the full, bright spot 
  on her, she’d be blind for a few seconds, the scope and goggles 
  perched on top her head useless.
  
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  “And the odds just got a little more even, you bitch!” Even as the 
  hover hissed to a stop, Emma had popped the door and then she 
  was rolling out of the car. She caught movement to her left and 
  saw Sortek closing, coming up behind, his laser pistol out and 
  ready.
  Above, she heard a clatter of metal against metal; she looked 
  up, saw the shooter stick out her fist. Emma didn’t even wait. She 
  dove for the fire escape.
  A lancet of ruby light needled the rock where Fusco had been 
  standing just a split second before. The beam punched a trough 
  in the rock, blowing out a small mushroom cloud of smoke and 
  chunked stone. Ardan’s angle was bad, and he couldn’t see where 
  Fusco was and then there were two quick shots arcing up from 
  beneath the fire escape: bap-bap! The sound of bullets pinging off 
  metal and then streamers of sparks.
  Fusco, under the fire escape; bad angle; she’ll never hit her like 
  that, but maybe I…  
  But the shooter saw him now, and that laser was pivoting, lock-
  ing on…
  Ardan fired, on full.
  The laser caught the assassin in the right shoulder, and she went 
  down with a shriek. He’d caught her in the ball of the joint, and she 
  gagged on the sickening reek of burned meat and charred bone. 
  The pain was so bad, she felt physically sick and when she was 
  able to kick back from the landing’s edge, a wave of nausea left her 
  stomach pushing at the back of her throat, and a sheen of sweat 
  bathing her face. Wound was bad; she had to get out of here!
  Struggling to her feet, she switched her laser from her right to 
  her left hand. Not as good with her aim, but she was hoping that 
  wasn’t going to matter. She was pushing down on her pain, trying 
  to wall it off, trying not to stop using her head.
  Keep close to the building so he can’t tag me again—fifth landing, 
  coming down the steps fast, squeezing off shots at that com-
  
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  mander who was holed up, hunkering down behind the open door 
  of the hover—good, keep him pinned down; that cop won’t be able 
  to hit me, not with a slugthrower, not with the fire escape in the 
  way—fourth landing, rounding to the third, touching off bursts at 
  the commander, scoring rock; taking a quick peek at the huddled 
  group still on the other side of the fountain—good, no one getting 
  all heroic, good; now if I can just get down a little further, I can take 
  out the cop, thread the needle with the laser and burn a hole right 
  through that little bitch’s… 
  She hit the third landing, turned, and—
  “Hi,” Emma said, and fired.
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/BattleTech [multi]/EXTRA/Novels/Battlecorps Novels/The Gauntlet Bk2 Chap4 - Ilsa J. Bick.pdf