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All of them laughed, including McCall, but Grayson could hear the tension behind their levity.
"But why you,Gray?" Lori said as the laughter died. Her anger had receded since the morning, but she still felt irritated at his stubbor
That again."For one thing, I know some people here ... as so does King. We've been over this before."
His voice carried warning, but Lori's answering expression said, Don't give me that.He turned away and climbed into the skimmer beside Alard King.
During staff discussions of the plan, King had mentioned that he knew several people who might be able to help them, besides the Steiner and Davion contacts that Grayson had in mind. He had been insistent—as insistent in his own way as Lori, and Grayson had finally agreed to his argument that two of them together had a better chance of finding someone who could help them.
Grayson smiled at Lori. "Hey, look! There shouldn't be any danger. We're just a couple of farmers, in from the boonies for some sightseeing. Right, Alard?"
"You got it, Colonel."
"You'd better lay off that 'Colonel' stuff," Lori said, looking straight past Grayson at the senior Tech. "You get this guy killed and you'll answer to me!"
King looked as though he were going to make a joke of it, then changed his mind. "We'll be back, Lieutenant. Both of us. I promise."
She turned to Grayson. "Gray, what do you hope to find out?"
"I'd like to know what's going on, mostly. What we've found so far just doesn't make any sense." . . . House Marik line BattleMechs operating under the assumption that the Gray Death Legion was a renegade unit—outlaws, pirates, or worse.
"Well, it doesn't make sense for you to get yourself killed."
"Lori's right," Delmar Clay said. "If you two get captured ..."
"If we get captured, we might learn what this insanity is all about!" Grayson said. "But we won'tbe captured. Even if this is a full-fledged invasion, they're not going to be rounding up farmers. Even invaders have to eat, right?"
"The Conventions again, Gray?" Lori's eyes were bleak. It looked as though she'd been crying.
Grayson was certain that the Marik troops would not bother a pair of farmers if their commanders had taken it into their heads to invade one of their own planets. By the conventions of warfare that had held throughout the past century—with isolated and instantly condemned exceptions—civilians were safe from attack by soldiers, so long as they stayed out of the fighting.
That had not always been the case, Grayson knew. Once, whole civilian populations, whole countries, even whole worlds had been held hostage, subject to a
The horrors of the First and Second Succession Wars had reintroduced the nightmare of blood-soaked, unrestricted warfare, with whole worlds laid waste and genocide occurring on a planetary scale. The Kentares Massacre was perhaps the most infamous of these atrocities, but there had been others.
So far, though, in this third round of struggles for supremacy among the five Successor Houses, something akin to the old Ares Conventions was once more in force. It was as though a war-exhausted humanity had now tacitly agreed, for perhaps the first time in its bloody history, that the proper occupation of warriors was to fight other warriors, and that civilians should be spared whenever possible. The practical reason behind this was the brutal fact that if all the cities and trained mechanics and 'tronicists were dead, if all the BattleMechs and vehicles and DropShips and JumpShips were destroyed or broken down from lack of trained hands to repair them, there would, quite simply, be nothing left to fight over.
The neo-feudalism that was rising throughout the worlds occupied by humanity was, like the feudalism of 2,000 years earlier, based on ownership of the land—in this case, whole worlds. Even a green and verdant world, one with clean, breathable air, and plenty of fresh water—even such a paradise was worthless to the Duke who controlled it unless there was a population to make it productive. Throughout the Successor States, it was the MechWarriors who bore the mantle of honor and glory, like modern knights who fought for their Lord's cause. It was the Techs who worked the magic by which technic civilization survived, piecing together the bits and pieces of an earlier, more advanced science in a struggle to keep the machines—and the culture—alive. But it was the peasant farmer, the laborer, the astech, and the craftsman who made civilization possible at all.
As Grayson had reminded Lori, even soldiers had to eat. Few MechWarriors knew much about planting crops or harvesting them. Fewer still were in a position to transport those goods, or to see that they were distributed on a planetary—on an interplanetary scale. No duke, no army, however greedy for land or worlds or power, would destroy the population on which that power rested.
"Believe me, Lori," Grayson said gently. "We'll be safe. We'll be careful not to attract attention to ourselves."
King grasped the skimmer's tiller. When he switched on the turbines, the little hovercraft's engine keened into life, spilling clouds of dust from the scarred plenum shrouds. The vehicle shifted, skittered to the right until King could bring it under control, then dipped its nose and accelerated out from under the dappled sunlight and shade of the woods.
Considerable thought had gone into their disguises. Helm had no export industry to speak of, and little in the way of textile manufacturing. Though there were a number of mechanics and machine workers who kept those pieces of machinery native to the planet functioning, the majority of Helmans were farmers. An AgroMech plant outside the capital of Helmdown turned out small, four-legged Harvester and Planter 'Mechs that were used locally, and hovercraft similar to the disguised skimmer were still manufactured in small numbers in Glovis, south of the Nagayan Mountains. Production of this equipment was fairly limited, however, and provided machines only for local use. The Kurita raid that had smashed Helm over two centuries before had so thoroughly leveled local Helman industry that only now was it struggling back to a shadow of its former life. To look the part of native Helmans, Grayson and King had decided on the disguise of peasant farmers come to town in their centuries-old hovercraft to buy supplies.
The trip took almost two hours.
Helmdown, an untidy sprawl 400 kilometers northwest of Durandel, was more village than city, but it functioned as both principal starport and capital for the planet. What little industry did exist on the world was centered here, and it was where trader DropShips came infrequently to barter offworld manufactured goods for wheat, ice plums, and ferris grass from the Highland Plateau. The population numbered 50,000, if the census included the farmers who lived in the rural communities within fifty kilometers of the town's dusty streets and whitewashed ferrocrete block buildings. The AgroMech factory on the outskirts of town provided work for perhaps a quarter of the citizens of Helmdown proper. The lives of the rest revolved around the spaceport and the freighter Drop-Ships that made their infrequent calls there.