Part 428: Political Vote 16

Political Vote 16

“This is outrageous,” Khan Asa Taney’s visage flickered as the holotank updated. “The Smoke Jaguars have destroyed one of our colonies on Huntress! Every laborer, technician, merchant, and scientist have vanished; and the Smoke Jaguars deny our call for Refusal! Will the Council stand for this?”

“We will not stand for it at all,” Khan Adrian Devalis of Clan Nova Cat replied wryly. “We will sit for it. The victories of Clan Smoke Jaguar are hardly call to convene a Grand Council. This is not our concern.”

“They deny our right to a trial of refusal!”

“We do no such thing,” Khan Leo Showers stood slowly, his dark features curled wrathfully. His thick hair was braided in alternating rows patterned to make his hair looked like bundled myomer. His thin beard was sharp and pointed, his posture menacing, and his dark brown eyes looked almost maroon as they glittered with rage.

“Clan Smoke Jaguar does not accept refusals from Solamha trash and freebirths. If you wish to challenge our victory, come do so. With real troops.”

Taney slammed his holographic fists on the stone desktop. “Unbelievable!”

“What’s unbelievable,” Khan of the Coyotes Robin Steele interjected, “is your belief that you can act as you wish with impunity. Or did you really believe your illegal sortie into the Inner Sphere would come without a price?”

“This is not an inquest into my Clan’s lawful assault on—”

“Perhaps it should be, Quiaff?” Leo Showers interrupted. His biceps bulged imperceptibly as the Smoke Jaguar spoke, as though he longed to wring the life from Asa Taney with his bare hands. “If your endeavor is truly “lawful” why have you avoided our council summons until now, when it suits you to complain about a fait accompli?”

The still image of Natasha Kerensky, a still image before now, sprang to life with a suddenness that gave even Leo Showers pause. He had grown increasingly convinced that the Khan of Khans had simply been broadcasting a still image for the past few months; her interaction with the council had grown slight in the face of continued pressure from the Goliath Scorpions.

“It strikes me,” Kerensky’s voice was cruel, “that Khan Taney believes himself to be ilKhan Taney, quineg?”

“You did not speak out against our arrival in the Inner Sphere,” Taney countered. “We took that to be consent enough.”

Natasha inclined her head, “I had wished time to seek proof that your cancerous rebellion had not infected the whole of your Clan, but it is far worse than I feared. My friends—my fellow Khans—Khan Asa Taney and all of Clan Ice Hellion are clearly traitors, their presence poisons the will of true warriors to fight and in their arrogance they seek to lead us all to ruin. Such rampant insubordination cannot—must not—go unpunished.”

“I call for a vote,” Leo Showers roared, venting his pent-up frustrations in an instant. The anger hadn’t fled his posture completely, but what little remained was completely masked by the fearsome glee which twisted his features into an almost manic smile. “I call for a vote: for the Abjuration of Clan Ice Hellion!”



************************************************************



An explosion shattered the peaceful calm of Benjamin’s early morning, washing out even the light of the massive orbiting solar reflectors that utilized the world’s distant, dim sun to warm the planet to habitable temperatures. A fiery cloud mushroomed and ascended into the heavens like a dog escaping a tight kennel. A dozen blocks away onlookers staggered in a daze over sheets of broken glass, blood dripping from their punctured eardrums. The unlucky ones were closer, the shockwaves had burst internal organs and left them moaning and half-conscious for the few minutes before they died.

The luckiest of all were those near ground zero, they’d died instantly as the compression waves simply liquefied them.

The Ten Dawns Hotel crumbled, its front façade peeled away like the rind of a naranji. Chips of stone the size of a man’s head tumbled in relative silence and shattered as they struck the street below. If they’d survived to see it, the bomb would have been far beyond the conspirator’s expectations: the heat and flame had detonated a nearby grain elevator in an instant, turning one-ton car bomb into a fireball rarely matched by conventional arms.

The command staff of the Robinson Draconis March Militia probably would’ve survived the initial bombing, but nothing was unscathed by the second. Major General Cunningham’s Crusader lay like a broken child’s toy, its arms and legs bent at impossible angles and its chest buried to the hips in rubble from the Hotel’s lobby. Its durable fusion engine still purred faintly as armor plating absorbed the worst of the damage, but it would be months before the machine would be fit to walk again.

Half-way across the planet, a man in a dark suit and glasses tipped back a shot. Benjamin Inagawa was sharply-dressed for a businessman, but the locals knew at a glance he was not to be trifled with. His carefully-cultivated image was a mask behind which he hid his irizumi, but his name alone was proof of his ties to the Inagawa-kai. Benjamin would be the next Oyabun, upon the demise of the Yakuza gang’s current leader.

Without a word he pulled a handkerchief emblazoned with a rising sun and mopped his sweating forehead. The Federated Suns’s crackdown on the Yakuza was maddening; as though Hanse Davion was too blind to see that all the Yakuza wanted was prosperity. As Benjamin Inagawa shoved his handkerchief back in his pocket, he fished out a solid gold pocketwatch and checked the time. With a nod, he turned and departed, leaving his bodyguard to “pay” for the drink. It was five minutes past detonation time.

Surely, his return to the mansion would be greeted with news of his plan’s success.





Grand Council Vote
1) Abjure Clan Ice Hellion
2) Do not Abjure Clan Ice Hellion
3) Support Clan Ice Hellion’s right to invade the Inner Sphere