TEXT: BattleCorps
  BE GOOD
  Jason M. Hardy
  
  BattleCorps
  Be Good • Page 
  Port Howard, Towne 
  Terran Hegemony 
  14 June 2785
  “The important thing to remember is that we’re the good guys.”
  Toku Hisagawa scratched his temple with his right hand. The left 
  hand, towed by the short manacle, dangled as he scratched.
  “Is that a fact,” Hisagawa said dryly.
  “Don’t take that tone with me,” the man in the green-brown 
  camouflage said affably. “I don’t expect you to believe me. It’s a 
  difficult thing for you to hear, I’m sure. But it’s the way it is.”
  “May I ask how you arrived at that conclusion?”
  “Simple logic,” the man said. He idly rubbed the sword-and-sun 
  symbol on the helmet resting by his right leg. “Our realm is based 
  on freedom. Not on furthering the glory of some megalomaniac 
  emperor. Not on proving our superiority by conquering and en-
  slaving races and nations we think are inferior to us. Simply on 
  spreading freedom throughout the Inner Sphere. That makes us 
  the good guys.”
  Hisagawa glanced at the blank wall to his right. It was metal. 
  There was more metal on the other side of it. Then armor on top of 
  it. Then, beyond that, the outside world, passing slowly by as the 
  hulking prison vehicle trundled across the rocky ground. 
  “You’re not going to win,” Hisagawa said, trying to keep his defi-
  ance from sounding rote.
  The man outside of Hisagawa’s cage straightened in his chair. 
  “Sure we will.”
  “Not this time,” Hisagawa said, on the verge of detailing just 
  how many Combine forces were on the way, and which units they 
  represented, when he remembered that sharing such information 
  with the enemy was generally frowned upon. So all he could do 
  was repeat himself. “Not this time.”
  The guard didn’t seem concerned. “Whatever you say, partner,” 
  he said, then stood up and donned his helmet. “Sit tight,” he said. 
  “I’ll be checking on you soon.”
  
  BattleCorps
  Be Good • Page 
  There was a bump. Then a lurch. All of the furniture (meaning a 
  metal chair, a table, and a bunk with a wafer-thin mattress) was 
  bolted to the walls and floor. Hisagawa, however, was not. He 
  had been pacing in his cell when the disruptions came, and he 
  stumbled into the chair. He had almost regained his balance when 
  another bump and lurch sent him sprawling onto the floor. His 
  head missed the bunk’s corner by mere millimeters.
  The bumping continued, and Hisagawa decided it would be best 
  to stay on the floor. The sound of explosions carried through the 
  thick armor, and he was pretty sure he’d heard a round or two 
  thud into the walls. Some of the vehicle’s rocking came from the 
  ground, but a lot of it felt like it originated from the top. The ve-
  hicle was under heavy fire.
  Hisagawa had a brief hope that it was Combine forces coming to 
  rescue him, but he threw that notion aside quickly. His people were 
  not fools. They were not Davions. They would not put a larger strat-
  egy at risk to save a few individuals. If they were attacking the vehicle, 
  it was for strategic reasons. Freeing him—or not—was incidental.
  He heard the door to the small cellblock open. Someone took a 
  few steps into the narrow corridor, then stopped. Another set of 
  footsteps, this one running, passed nearby.
  A voice called out. “Ryerson! Lock off the cellblock and leave the 
  prisoners! Now!”
  “Yes sir,” a closer voice said, and Hisagawa recognized the voice 
  of the soldier that had been guarding him. The footsteps receded 
  and the door to the cellblock closed.
  So the “good guys” were going to leave him to die. Hisagawa 
  couldn’t blame them—he would certainly do the same in their 
  shoes. He just hoped he’d be taken out with a direct shot, in a big 
  explosion, rather than being crushed under pieces of the vehicle 
  as it shattered while waiting to slowly bleed to death.
  A line of shots rattled across the outside wall of the vehicle. It 
  didn’t sound like large rounds—probably infantry shots, not 
  ‘Mechs—but if enough of them hit, they’d do plenty of damage. 
  And by the increasing rate of the incoming shots, Hisagawa 
  thought there would be enough.
  
  BattleCorps
  Be Good • Page 
  He remained on the floor. There wasn’t much to do besides brace 
  himself and wait for freedom or death. Whichever came first.
  There was a loud explosion, horrendously loud, ripping through 
  Hisagawa’s skull. Orange flashed all around him. Metal screamed, 
  shredded. The floor lurched, heaving him into the wall. He tucked 
  his head behind his arms, cushioning the blow, but then he fell 
  back to the floor, which caught him squarely on the forehead. He 
  saw and heard nothing.
  Something dug into his wrists. Sharp, cold, rubbing spots that 
  were already raw. His hands were being pulled away from him. 
  For a meter or two, it felt like he was being dragged by his hands. 
  Something on the ground was sharp, cutting into his legs. The pain 
  in his wrists was worse, so he yanked his arms back. Something 
  resisted, though, and kept pulling on him.
  Hisagawa opened his eyes. Then he blinked, and blinked again. 
  It wasn’t immediately clear what the difference was between hav-
  ing his eyes open and having them closed.
  But then a few things started to come into view. There was 
  smoke drifting by, a lot of it, draining color and light from ev-
  erything in view. Occasional flashes lit up the smoke like distant 
  lightning on summer nights. The ground below him was a mess, 
  shards of rock, metal shrapnel, bits of the tread of the vehicle 
  he’d recently been riding in, and other debris. They’d gotten the 
  prison vehicle good, he thought, and he hadn’t yet moved too far 
  from wherever it fell.
  “Stand up,” a voice said. It was hoarse and choked with smoke, al-
  most inaudible as the sounds of battle crashed around it. Hisagawa 
  reflexively spun his legs, trying to get them to support his body, 
  but they were not yet ready to bear any weight. He couldn’t get 
  any balance and he ended up sprawled on his stomach, his arms 
  still in the air because whoever had a grasp on the bar linking his 
  wrists together hadn’t let go yet.
  “Stand up!” the voice said again.
  
  BattleCorps
  Be Good • Page 
  “I’m trying, I’m trying,” Hisagawa tried to say, but what came out 
  was nothing more than grunts. But he was at least able to get his 
  legs under him and start moving.
  He could hear engines now. Vehicle after vehicle roaring by. All 
  from the Federated Suns. Ambulances, reconnaissance vehicles, 
  mobile tech labs, some on tracks, some on wheels, all of them 
  fleeing. If the battle had been going according to plan, they would 
  have been in the back of the fight, moving around the rear and giv-
  ing support where they could. But Combine reinforcements had 
  outflanked the Davion troops and shattered their side, breaking 
  through to the back of the lines, putting the vehicles on the run.
  Hisagawa blinked several times per second, trying to focus on 
  the surroundings, but the haze, smoke, bright flashes and darting 
  vehicles made it tough. And the spike of pain behind his right eye 
  didn’t help any.
  But he was finally able to see who was dragging him around. It 
  was the guard from the prison vehicle, Ryerson. The Davion troop-
  er was waving at every vehicle passing by, trying to get them to 
  stop. But the tall silhouettes in the distance, the walking shapes 
  firing lasers and PPCs that could break apart the smaller vehicles 
  with a single hit, were incentive enough to keep the vehicles flying 
  ahead, ignoring Ryerson.
  There were only a few vehicles left between them and the 
  Combine forces, larger tracked vehicles with square bodies and 
  all the aerodynamics of a crate. Troop carriers, Hisagawa guessed. 
  Probably filled with as many troops as could get on board during 
  the rout, while others were left to run for their lives and most likely 
  be trampled by the approaching ‘Mechs.
  Ryerson pulled harder on Hisagawa’s manacles. “Get moving,” 
  Ryerson said.
  “Just leave me behind,” Hisagawa said.
  Ryerson snorted. “Let a prisoner go so his troops can just pick 
  him up?”
  “Then put a bullet in my head!” Hisagawa snapped. He was limp-
  ing, favoring his right leg. Something in the knee felt wrong. “I 
  can’t move any faster!”
  “You’re insurance,” Ryerson said, giving the manacles another 
  pull. “You’re not getting left behind, dead or alive. You’ll keep up. 
  I’ll help.”
  
  BattleCorps
  Be Good • Page 
  Hisagawa tried to laugh, but some blood caught in his throat. His 
  spat it out. 
  “Holding me hostage?” he said. “That will get you nothing. If the 
  forces of the Dragon want to kill you, they will. It will not matter if 
  they kill me too.”
  “You see?” Ryerson said as he continued pulling Hisagawa along. 
  “You see? That’s what I’m talking about. That’s why we’re the good 
  guys. We actually care about each other. We don’t go around kill-
  ing each other like that.”
  “That is not a demonstration of virtue,” Hisagawa said, though 
  he felt as if his voice wasn’t rising above a mutter. “It’s weakness. 
  Lack of conviction.”
  Ryerson opened his mouth to respond, but any words he said 
  were lost in a horrible screech of twisting metal and scratched rock. 
  Hisagawa turned, looking for the sound, and saw it immediately. A 
  cloud of dust billowed toward them, and somewhere inside a criti-
  cally damaged vehicle skidded across the bare ground.
  Ryerson saw it too. “Come on,” he said. “Our ride’s here.”
  The dust was settling when Ryerson, with Hisagawa in tow, 
  jogged up to the broken hulk. It looked like a large oblong pill that 
  had been snapped in two. The broad ferroglass windshield in 
  front was shattered, and Hisagawa thought he saw a few human 
  shapes lying motionless in the cockpit. He noticed that Ryerson 
  didn’t so much as glance at them.
  Ryerson pulled him around to the rear of the vehicle. It was quite 
  large, probably as long as twenty meters, and a good four me-
  ters high in the spots that hadn’t been squished by rolling on the 
  ground. Smoke and a few flames came from the front of the ve-
  hicle, but the back looked safe.
  Twin doors at the vehicle’s rear were hanging open, showing 
  what Hisagawa guessed Ryerson was looking for—two monocy-
  cles. Normally they would serve as ground-based escape pods for 
  the vehicle’s drivers in case they needed to abandon the ungainly 
  hulk, which they probably should have done about ten minutes 
  
  BattleCorps
  Be Good • Page 
  ago. Now the crew wouldn’t be fleeing from anything, ever. Their 
  delay had worked out for Ryerson, though, who now had access 
  to something faster than his feet.
  Ryerson pulled Hisagawa’s manacles toward one of the doors. In 
  a swift motion, he undid the shackles, slid a piece of them through 
  the door’s handle, then relocked it. 
  “Stay here,” Ryerson said and disappeared inside the metal hulk.
  Hisagawa immediately set to work trying to pry the handle out 
  of the door. He braced his feet against the doorframe and pushed, 
  shaking his hands back and forth, hoping to pull or wriggle the 
  handle loose before Ryerson came back.
  He failed. Ryerson returned in a matter of minutes, carrying a 
  cellophane-wrapped package. He saw what Hisagawa was doing 
  and shook his head.
  “Good strong Davion design,” he said. “Won’t come apart that 
  easily.” He went back in, freed one of the monocycles from its 
  mooring and wheeled it out. Hisagawa still hadn’t gotten the door 
  handle off.
  Ryerson undid the manacles to set Hisagawa loose from the door 
  handle, and Hisagawa reacted. As soon as his hands were free, he 
  pulled one back while using the other to hold Ryerson away. Then 
  he swung a quick punch.
  But he was too tired, too slow. Ryerson dropped his package 
  and caught the punch easily, twisting Hisagawa’s arm so that he 
  dropped to his knees as pain exploded in his shoulder. The pain 
  didn’t start to ease until Hisagawa was shackled once again.
  “Pretty weak effort,” Ryerson said, then shook his package in 
  Hisagawa’s face. “You keep acting like that, I won’t share any of 
  my dinner with you.”
  So that’s what he’d gone in to get, Hisagawa thought. The vehi-
  cle must have been a mobile kitchen before it became scrap metal. 
  They’d gotten wheels and a meal in one swoop.
  Ryerson pointed to the monocycle. “Get on,” he said. “You’re 
  steering.”
  “Come again?”
  “I can’t have you in back of me now, can I? Too easy to choke me 
  with the damn manacles. You’ll steer—the manacles should give 
  
  BattleCorps
  Be Good • Page 
  you at least that much movement. And if you go somewhere I 
  don’t want you to, I’ll put a bullet in your brain.”
  “That won’t work out for you,” Hisagawa said, “having your driv-
  er slump over dead while you’re moving.”
  “I just shove your body off and take the controls myself,” Ryerson 
  said, grinning toothily. “Done it plenty of times.”
  Ryerson already had the engine running. All Hisagawa had to do 
  was climb on and hit the throttle. He tried to speed away before 
  Ryerson got on, but the FedSuns trooper was too fast—he was al-
  ready on before the monocycle leaped forward, and he didn’t say 
  anything about the fast start. As far as Hisagawa knew, Ryerson 
  hadn’t even noticed anything.
  The monocycle had pretty good speed, but it wasn’t as steady 
  over ground as the large Combine ‘Mechs behind them. Still, 
  the ‘Mechs had to worry about shooting their Davion enemies, 
  while all Hisagawa and Ryerson had to worry about was run-
  ning forward. They opened up a gap between them and the 
  approaching Kurita troops. They even passed some of the sup-
  port vehicles that had whizzed by them when they were on 
  foot.
  “Slow it down!” Ryerson yelled over the rushing air. “We want to 
  stay in the middle of the vehicles.”
  Hisagawa obeyed. Slowing down would give him the chance to 
  look for what he needed.
  His opportunity came five minutes later. He steered the mono-
  cycle past a light tank, a low-slung, wheeled vehicle with a long, 
  turreted barrel on top. Hisagawa had no desire to see what would 
  emerge from that barrel when it fired.
  As he left the tank behind, he saw the rock. It was the right size—
  big enough to throw off the monocycle’s balance, not big enough 
  to completely destroy it. It would do.
  He waited until the last possible moment, making sure Ryerson 
  wouldn’t be able to pull the trigger of his handgun when he made 
  his move, then lunged to his right and steered the cycle into the 
  rock. The cycle flipped into the air, sending Hisagawa and Ryerson 
  flying. Hisagawa thought he heard a report behind him—apparent-
  ly Ryerson had managed to get a shot off after all, but not before 
  the crash robbed him of his aim.
  
  BattleCorps
  Be Good • Page 
  Hisagawa buried his face in his manacled arms as the ground 
  closed in. The impact ripped apart the sleeves of his uniform and 
  a fair amount of the skin on his forearms. The clasps of the mana-
  cles cut into his wrists, but the shackles didn’t break.
  Hisagawa’s legs were moving before he hit the ground, and 
  as soon as he got them under him he was running back toward 
  Combine troops. His knee still wasn’t right, but this was his only 
  chance. He could ignore the pain. He glanced once over his shoul-
  der to see Ryerson immobile on the ground, then looked ahead 
  and kept running. His arms wiggled awkwardly in front of him as 
  he ran.
  It was a repeat of the scene a few minutes earlier, as vehicles 
  whizzed uncaring past him, only this time he was headed toward 
  his troops, not away. If he could avoid being stepped on or blown 
  away by the large front-line units that often had trouble seeing 
  anything less than two meters tall, he’d be safe in no time at all.
  He didn’t hear the monocycle until it was practically on top of 
  him. Reflex told him to jump before he knew what he was jump-
  ing from, and fortune pushed him in the right direction. Had he 
  jumped to his left, the cycle would have caught him squarely in 
  the torso and crushed his insides. But instead he went right, and 
  the monocycle only caught him in the leg.
  It was enough, though. He spun to the ground and pain speared 
  all the way through his leg. He looked down and saw his left ankle 
  hanging limp, useless. The monocyle that had hit him stopped to 
  turn, and Hisagawa saw Ryerson perched on top, smiling. 
  Hisagawa tried to scramble on the ground, but with manacled 
  hands and a shattered ankle he couldn’t make any progress. He 
  certainly couldn’t evade Ryerson.
  So rather than crawl in the dust, he sat up. He stiffened his spine. 
  And he waited.
  Ryerson sat ahead of him, motionless, engine puttering. Then 
  he pushed the cycle forward slowly, until he was a mere five me-
  ters away from Hisagawa. He grinned again.
  “This will be a fine victory for you!” Hisagawa yelled defiantly. 
  “Running over a shackled prisoner! Much honor!”
  Ryerson shrugged. “My job is to keep prisoners from escaping,” 
  he called back. “You’re making it difficult to hold on to you, so I 
  don’t have much choice.”
  
  BattleCorps
  Be Good • Page 10
  “Then at least shoot me! Allow me that death.”
  Ryerson made a show of thinking. “No,” he said.
  “Is this the right thing?” Hisagawa said mockingly. “Is this what 
  you ‘good guys’ do? Run over defenseless, unarmed prisoners?”
  Ryerson gunned the engine, then let it settle again. He looked 
  thoughtful. “When you’re good,” he said, “you do the right thing. 
  You worry about what people will think about what you’re doing, 
  how society might judge you. That sort of thing.
  “But when you’re really good,” Ryerson said, his smile returning, 
  “you win.”
  The engine roared to life again, the cycle leaped forward, cover-
  ing the short distance between Ryerson and Hisagawa in mere 
  seconds. But the cycle passed to Hisagawa’s left.
  Hisagawa knew better, though, then to feel relief. He stayed 
  still and waited. Sure enough, Ryerson circled around again, and 
  when he was thirty meters in front of Hisagawa, he bulled ahead 
  full speed. Hisagawa called on all his strength to keep his body 
  still and his spine stiff, and he stared straight at Ryerson until the 
  moment came that the monocyle smashed brutally into him and 
  took everything away.
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/BattleTech [multi]/EXTRA/Novels/Battlecorps Novels/Be Good - Jason M. Hardy.pdf